It’s a fun enough FPS I suppose. The gunplay has a nice feel to it and the levels and physics are fun to play with. The plot’s pretty bland, but doesn’t get in the way of the action. The last couple of levels are lame though. Don’t let the the high hardware requirements scare you, even at medium settings the game looks very pretty. Sadly, even the Steam version uses Securom with a 5 machine activation limit. Never played the multiplayer. I’d be surprised if people are still playing it.
Sim City 4 Deluxe $5 (75%)
Section 8 $5 (75%)
Rush $1.69 (66%)
Mount & Blade Complete $10 (75%)
IL-2:1946 $5 (50%)
Lost Horizon $10 (50%)
Doom Complete Pack $8.74 (75%)
Global Agenda $7.50 (75%)
Dirt 2 $5 (75%)
King’s Bounty Platinum $8.75 (75%)
Crysis Maximum edition $10 (game+expansion, series 75% individually but buy the pack)
Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead $20
and indie: Protogalaxy $2.50
I’ve recommended dirt 2 around here about 800 times so if you don’t have it by now I’m going to stab you in the face anyway. IL-2:1946 is a huge amount of content and the definitive WW2 flight sim.
Crysis I’d recommend. It’s still the most beautiful game ever made (sadly, going on 4 years now), a lot of the criticisms directed at it were retarded (sure, this game runs fine on medium and looks better than anything I’ve ever played, but if I can’t max it out it sucks!). Not that there aren’t legitimate criticisms, the whole second half of the plot is meh, but it’s beautiful and fun and the suit provides some interesting gameplay. People generally seem to like warhead so grab the whole pack for $2.50 more
Arma 2 games never get good prices on steam, but I saw Arrowhead for half as much on Amazon (and a combined pack for $13) in their digital downloads section, so go for those deals if they’re still active.
From what I understand, there’s no reason to own Mount & Blade Complete - Warband has everything the original has plus improvements, so just grab warband.
One more thing about Crysis. The normal difficulty is boring. Delta, the hardest difficulty, is where it’s at. Makes the enemies a lot smarter requiring you to play more tactically. On normal the enemies are dumb as rocks.
I’m gonna give global agenda a try. The meta ratings are kinda meh but some of the complaints are about the subscription model and lack of content, both of which have improved since launch. The user score on metacritic is 8.3 which is pretty good.
Looks like it has enough variety to be interesting (borderlands style coop PVE missions, tf2/battlefield style class based objective based team vs team, guild wars style guild vs guild fighting over territory) but it’s sort of a hub-based mmo rather than one consistent huge world or anything. There’s persistent characters and loot and crafting and experience, but you go off into missions with 4 (coop) or 10v10 or whatever for the actual gameplay.
Anyway, this isn’t a recommendation, so don’t blame me if it sucks, just saying that if you’re interested in the game and are willing to say what the hell for $7.50, you’ll have some people to play with.
At least this year I deliberately held back $200 to buy games. So far i’ve picked up:
King’s Bounty: Collection
Star Wars: KOTOR
Machinarium
Lost Planet Colonies
Lost Planet 2
FlatOut2
X-SuperBox
Civilization V
Fallout: New Vegas
Overlord Complete Pack
Borderlands
Mass Effect 2
Assassin’s Creed II
Lara Croft GOL
Defense Grid: The Awakening
Bioshock 2
Poker Night
Metro 2033 All Languages
MI:SE Bundle
The Deus Ex Collection
Honestly I’ll probably get some more before it’s all over. What I’m interested in finding is another group friendly game for us to all play. While I LOVE the L4D franchise (where is 3?!?!!?!?) and Dirt 2 is pretty cool I feel like we all need some more games to put into the mix. I couldn’t get into Bloody Good Time and neither could Cinnamon. We both like Lead & Gold but not many people got it (and I haven’t seen on sale this season).
How about some suggestions on what we might all get into next?
No idea what to play next. I still say we do Counter Strike once in a while but you guys seem to be the only 10 people on the internet who don’t like that game.
Name USD$
Brothers in Arms games -75% $3-10
The Ball -75% $4.99
Swords and Soldiers HD -75% $2.50
Sniper: Ghost Warrior -75% $7.50
Amnesia: The Dark Descent -66% $6.80
QUAKE Collection -66% $10.20
Greed Corp -75% $2.50
Plants vs. Zombies GOTY -60% $4.00
Hearts of Iron III Complete -75% $14.10
City of Heroes Going Rogue Complete -75% $10.00
Dead Space -66% $6.80
Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days -75% $4.99
Plants v Zombies was fun if you’re into that sort of psuedo tower defense kind of thing. I wasn’t a fan of Dead Space, but it was well reviewed. I’ve only heard bad things about Sniper: Ghost Warrior. Take all that for what it’s worth.
Greed Corp for $2.50 is the only one that I’ll probably grab from this bunch. Looked interesting enough to try.
I freakin’ loved Plants vs. Zombies, but I can see how it’s not to all tastes; still, at $4, it’s worth a try if you have any patience at all for tower defense.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent has a bigger discount if you have any of the other Penumbra games so if you bought the Humble Bumble Pack and registered it on Steam you’re good to go.
I can see myself getting The Ball, Amnesia, and Greed corp but I’ve spent so much I can’t justify it. I think I’ve spent about £50 already if you include the Treasure Hunt sales.
Has anyone played Hearts of Iron III lately? I used to be a huge Paradox fanboy until they started releasing insanely broken games, more so than usual. I know HOI had a really bad release, but have the bugs been fixed yet?
I thought the Brothers in Arms series was pretty good. It’s not your regular WWII shooter, since you can’t just charge in with guns blazing. You need to position your men carefully, following regular US Army tactics, in order to stand a chance. I remember the first time I ordered my squad to assault a fixed enemy position, and it worked!
I thought it was kind of boring since all of the tactics necessary to win were pretty apparent. The bloom effects were out of control in the first game. I never played the others, so maybe they got better. Company of Heroes was way better and only $5 right now. It’s probably the best WW2 game out, despite its issues.
Yeah, I’d been trying to start to schedule and branch out into more games, but I’ve been sick for about a month with an irregular sleeping schedule and an inability to use my voice much so I haven’t been scheduling many games lately.
It’s tricky finding games that everyone likes there’s some skill parity to. Our l4d2 group has a pretty wide range of skills - l4d2 somewhat masks this because of the shooting involved is so casual without much skill required, but for a game like CS or any deathmatch game this would become more of a problem.
TF2 would be a good candidate because it’s fairly casual and fun. The main problem there is that most of the game is really designed for 10 on 10 or more - so either we need a ton of players, we play maps kinda shorthanded (which changes the balance between classes and general gameplay feel), or we dilute it with public players. I’d be willing to give it a try sometime though - almost everyone has tf2. We also don’t have a server we control, although we could just all join an empty public server together.
We had SDMB CSS games long ago and they were fairly fun I guess. Runs into the shooter skill imbalance issue, plus I don’t think anyone really likes CSS that much, but we could try it.
I still like lead and gold a lot, but the last few tries I gave at making a game didn’t carry many people.
I thought Defcon would take off when a bunch of people got it a few months ago, because it’s almost purely strategy based with no twitch type skills, but not many want to play it.
I want to try to start getting some multiplayer civ 5 games going, but it’s hard to coordinate the scheduling since you have to save/resume a game over several days. Plus it’s still $35+ and not many people have it.
Empire and Napoleon total war allow 1v1 through 4v4 matches, and I’d like to play those, but not many people have them either.
There’s Dirt 2, which we do play a lot and works well, and Flatout UC which we’ve had some good games with but there’s always some stupid GFWL-related problem with that game.
Borderlands should be good, except you need to coordinate being the exact same level with everyone else, or the game is either too easy or too hard. Same goes for Titan Quest.
Yeah, I guess I can just get back to trying random stuff and see who shows up. If anyone wants me to use the group scheduling feature to try to coordinate a game you want to try, just tell me. We’ve had 7 or 8 of us on a tf2 server recently and that was pretty fun, so I guess I could try starting there.