My spring break is finally, praise Jesus, coming up, and I figure I’ve damned well earned a new game to play by now. I’ve got a fairly new PC that can run Bioshock on pretty high settings. I’ve been playing Orange Box obsessively since Christmas. I enjoy RPGs a lot, FPS a bit less. RTS is hit-or-miss with me: love Blizzard’s products, enjoyed Rise of Nations immensely, am not very fond of Age of Mythology or many other RTSs I’ve played. I have no problem playing a game five years out of date. I played WoW all that I’m gonna.
There’s going to be an avalanche telling you to buy Sins of a Solar Empire. I like Age of Empires 3 and the expansion packs.
That and some little game called Spore (when it comes out).
If you’re looking for a board game (and I guess you aren’t), our family loves Blokus, a great geometric game of strategy that’s won all kinds of awards: Blokus - Wikipedia
One of the better RPGs to come out lately for PC fans is The Witcher. An extremely serious video review can be found here.
Personally, I’d go for something like Civilization IV, if you haven’t played it, and especially the Beyond the Sword pack (which includes all the major revisions of Warlords). Turn-based strategy can be a whole different beast from RTS, which I always find too imprecise and speed-based. If I want speed-based, I’ll go play Call of Duty, or maybe Audiosurf.
I used to love turn-based strategy. I haven’t played Civ since CivII, which probably hurt my college homework pretty seriously. Damn, that was fun. (Okay, I also played Alpha Centauri, but that game left me pretty cold: the advanced techs weren’t intuitive the way CivII’s were). Civ IV is definitely an option, as is the Witcher (I remember hearing good things about it), and maybe NWNII, since I’ve heard good things about that as well.
If you haven’t played Oblivion, I would highly recommend it. Just be sure to check the SDMB Oblivion threads and install the mods linked therein to fix the shitty progression chart Oblivion uses.
I just read Gamespot’s review of The Witcher. Hmm: cheesy dialogue, truncated due to translation issues, lousy voice acting, “I got laid!” trading cards, and combat based on clicking at exactly the right instant during a sword-swing. Any of these would be enough to give me pause, but all of them together would drive me into a rage. Shame, too, since otherwise it sounds like a game I’d enjoy.
Civ 4 is an excellent way to kill a bunch of time, especially if you’re familiar with the civ mechanics from civ 2 and can just jump right in. They’ve REALLY improved the empire-building aspect of the game, but they’ve nearly killed the war-waging strategy aspect with severe penalties for going to war in the late game.
Of course, there’s no campaign mode for civ, which might turn you off.
Call of Duty 4 has a really, really good campaign mode. I was more impressed with that game than any other console release recently, but I haven’t played it online yet so I can’t comment there.
This is where I get persnickety: I don’t much like modern warfare games unless there’s a fantasy element to them. I’ve tried a few and they just feel too grim to me, unless they’re cartoonish a la Team Fortress 2.
Civ IV’s lack of a campaign feature would probably be all right with me: if it’s anything like previous iterations, each game is a frickin campaign.
I actually haven’t really enjoyed a modern warfare game before call of duty 4. I only played it because I was the middleman in getting it back to a friend who had loaned it to another friend. I fully expected it to be crap, but it’s worth a rental at least.
The game I’ve had the most fun playing is freeciv. (www.freeciv.org). It’s Civilisation 2, improved, and as an RTS. But be warned, some people in multiplayer are insanely skilled, compared to your standard civilisation 2 players.
Like you, I played thru Bioshock and into The Ornage Box. I just ordered Crysis from e-bay. It is down to about $25 (incl shipping). Can’t offer a review yet, but it should be up your alley (if you liked Bioshock/Orange Box), and you can’t beat the price.
I played Oblivion for a long time, but I get obsessive about side-quests, and I feel guilty about gaming game systems, and that’s damned near fatal in Oblivion. I gave up eventually, when my character had become too high-level to make the game winnable (if you’ve played the un-modded Oblivion, you know what I mean).
Crysis might be an option. The system reqs make it scary to me, especially since I only have an 8600 GT card.
The dialog isn’t all that bad, and it was truncated due to budget rather than translation, which is a shame. There is a real version out there in English that shows what it was before they butchered it to save on voice acting. The voice acting is pretty good for the most part, but there are parts where they’ve patched in a line at an obviously lower recording quality, which is really annoying. Getting laid is a very small part of the game that you can avoid if you want to, but I think it adds something to the main characters personality. It’s not as cheesy as it might sound on paper. The combat can be a little clunky though, I’ll give it that. Otherwise it’s a good game with good characters and an interesting mature story with some very interesting choices to make, where your options aren’t black and white, and that you get to see the consequences of later on.
There is a demo which isn’t that great, but if you like it, you’ll love the game. It skips out a big chunk of the story - it just seems to dump you out of the keep into the first town without explanation. The load times are much better in the patched up release version too. If you can stomach the combat from the demo, it does get better as you get more skills and potions.
There is a quite a big patch on the way, to the point where they’re selling it at retail as an Enhanced Edition. You can still patch the old version up to it of course. I hadn’t finished the game when I heard about it, so I stopped at that point since I had a big backlog of games at the time. When it does come out I’m going to start over on Hard.