Seems like almost any weekend, there’s a good chance a game I want will be 70%+ off. I meant to buy Assassin’s Creed II last weekend but didn’t realize when the sale was going to end, so I missed it.
I’ve been playing a few games sporadically and could use a new one or need to invest in one I own and haven’t finished. Mostly 2048 (phone), Warlock: Master of the Arcane, and Civ V (I need to move up a difficulty but I’ve been putting it off). I’m a bit annoyed lately with how slow moving and repetitive many games are. I was playing Sniper Elite V2 but I’m not good at it and got frustrated.
Part of that might be the game’s fault. You go into it led to believe that you need to be a specter of death lurking in distant shadows but many of the sections are set up in a way that “Run & Gun with the SMG” is a much better solution. Once I got past feeling like I was a failure for not bringing silent death on each German soldier, the game became much more enjoyable and there’s still plenty of opportunities for those awesome long shots.
Playing Alien Isolation on my xbox 360, but when it gets too intense I put in Halo Reach for a bit. My husband got a ps3 for me to play The Last of Us and now I’m catching up on those fames. Playing the Uncharted series but it bores me to tears. Hate it. So I’m playing Skyrim there.
Bolding mine. I agree completely. That game is so amazingly dull. Drake is marginally funny, but still unsympathetic, and the gameplay is just dull as toast.
I just started playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Trine 2. The latter is hilariously fun with friends, as it’s practically a good-natured griefing engine.
Not too long ago I upgraded to a 1440p monitor on my PC but now my 4-year-old graphics card can’t keep up with a lot of recent games, short of gasp using a non-native resolution! So I’ve been playing mostly older games.
For a little while I was getting my WW2 flight sim on with IL2 1946, learning to fly a few particular planes with realism cranked up as high as possible. That was kind of fun for a while (I learned how to land on a carrier most of the time!) but I got pretty frustrated with the “realism” of long-ass missions to shoot down a defenseless transport, getting blown out of the sky by a random flak burst, being vastly outnumbered by enemy fighters, or just plain crash-landing when it’s dark and raining and you can’t even see the landing strip. Which is all pretty realistic, innit? Historically a huge number of pilots died in training accidents or on their first few combat missions…
Right now I’m playing Independence War 2 Edge Of Chaos, which is my all-time favorite space sim. Mostly 'cause it’s not the usual WW2 fighters in space, and instead you pilot lumbering warships with full newtonian physics. And you get to be a Space Pirate. (Now that I’ve played Kerbal Space Program, there’s a small part of my brain tallying Delta V. Just cruising around a station uses several km/s. A short battle could easily use up 10’s of km/s, and longer engagements must be in the 100 km/s !)
I also was just sucked in by Out There, an Android game I picked up in the current Humble Mobile Bundle. It’s a sort of space exploration roguelike, with an evocative style. It sort of invites comparisons to FTL, but it’s really not the same game. There’s no combat, just resource management: you need to mine fuel from gas giant planets, but doing so damages your ship. So you then need find a rocky planet to mine minerals to repair your ship (burning up fuel and oxygen along the way). And then you need to find oxygen-rich worlds to, y’know, have something to breath. Along the way you encounter Strange New Life, Galactic Mysteries, technologies to upgrade your ship. I find it strangely compelling.
Out There is indeed pretty fun. Very zen, with its calm soundtrack, smooth gameplay, and pretty visuals. I felt like it didn’t have as much staying power as FTL, but definitely a fun game.
I payed the money for it because I wanted to encourage the sort of creativity and awesomeness it has. Spent about 4 hours on it while recuperating from a blown out back. Did not get through every possible path, or anywhere near, but I feel its a unique experience and worth the money.
That’s true. FTL has so many different ships and types of equipment that interact to require completely different strategies. And there are all of the different achievements and difficulty levels… I honestly don’t want to know how much time I’ve spent playing it! But I just figured out how to reliably beat Hard Mode, so… yeah.
In contrast, I’ve played maybe 3 or 4 hours of Out There to get one of a handful (?) of endings. All the different kit you can find doesn’t change the gameplay much, it’s still mostly managing the same few resources.
Yes, I finally played Uncharted earlier this year for the first time, got bored with it quickly. It had all the ingredients of an excellent game, but just fell flat for me.
Lately I’ve been playing singleplayer and co-op Arma2 and Arma3. I used to play A2 a lot, but got out of date on patches and all. Getting caught up wasn’t bad.
Still playing Planetside 2, it’s an amazing massive FPS game, but I don’t love the direction the game is going. They work less on metagame/strategy and more on screwing up the UI and adding hats. Still impressive though and makes other online shooters like Battlefield or COD look tiny in comparison.
Started Deus Ex Human Revolution but it’s not holding my interest.
Been wanting to get back to Dishonored. I reached a critical point in the game where you lose all your equipment and I just lost interest at that point. I will try to play from that point or might start over to experience the game again, it really is good.
Finished FO: New Vegas the other night (go independent Vegas!) and think that, on balance, it was better than FO3. Perhaps not as large but better written and a better story. I was also amused that the Mojave was greener and more vegetated than the Potomac River Basin.
Played through Old World Blues since people always raved about it. Started funny, then it dragged, then it dragged some more, then it picked up a little towards the end. Didn’t help that I had assigned zero points to energy weapons (always preferred traditional guns). Played Honest Hearts as well which I enjoyed more. Saving Lonesome Road and Dead Money for another play through.
Dead Money gives some awesome rewards if you are a completionist. The fully upgraded Holorifle is arguably the best energy weapon available in the game. If you take the time to gamble at the casino sufficiently well to get banned, you are rewarded with an endless stream of vouchers that you can use to buy stuff from the vending machine in th abandoned BOS bunker where the episode begins and ends. What you can buy will depend pn what you find templates for the machine to produce. Drugs, ammunition, weapon repair kits, booze and other things are possibilities. This stuff can be used or sold. The weapon repair kits are particularly awesome, as you can have mountains of them. No more scavenging for scrap metal and all that grot. No more using one rare, expensive gun to repair another. The stream of income just from using them to fix up common guns to sell is tremendous.
OTOH, although I have grown to love Dead Money, many players find it a dreary, frustrating slog. Too much so to do any real searching for goodies. One thing that will make your life easier is if you make sure to have a high melee or unarmed skill before you go there. You get an awesome gun when you arrive and there are a couple more you can pick up, but ammunition is in very short supply. So are explosives.
Jury Rigging is truly a wonderful thing. There is only a tiny handful of weapons that you can’t repair that way. The ton o’ repair kits is still worth having though, because instead of starting with four junk guns and finishing with one good one to sell, you end up up with four good ones to sell. Or give to NPC’s or whatever. I frequently amuse myself in these games by reverse pickpocketing stuff to NPC’s. My Bigtown, in 3, has everybody wearing power armor and carrying heavy weapons. I like doing similar things with The Kings in NV.
As I said, I wanted to get to some games I’d bought and hadn’t played. Finished Mass Effect 3 last week and been playing Saints Row the Third this week. I replayed ME 2 but I don’t think I will replay ME 3. Too many unskippable cut scenes.
People at work mostly, they seem damn near obsessed with it.
I actually went to Gamestop to get it, but saw a bin of “games under 10 bucks” so I ended up spending my money on those instead. Got Fallout New Vegas (loved 3, figured for 5 bucks, why not?), I got LA Noire (another fun time- waster) and then I got Uncharted which I’ve heard good tings about!
Oh…um…damn
Wait what? Dammit
Aw c’mon! Dammit!!!
Oh well, it was only 6 bucks…let’s see how it goes as I’m playing it
My computer’s hard drive is dying, so until I pony up for a new one (and a new case and a new video card and maybe a new power supply because if you’re rebuilding, ya know, you might as well rebuild) my PS4 is it for gaming. So it’s been Shadow of Mordor. I’m nearly done with it - just have one more primary mission. I collected all the artifacts and runes and I think I’ll finish the sword and dagger missions before I complete the game. Not really worrying about hunting/survival challenges or outcast missions.
It’s a great game. Everything it tries to do, it does well. Its problem is that it doesn’t really try to do anything other than murdering orcs. It needs more stuff to break up the orc-killing. Still a great game, though, and the Nemesis system is one of the freshest new ideas to come out of a video game in a very long time.
After this, I still have Infamous: Second Son and Watchdogs to finish up, though I’m getting a bit tired of the open world genre. I really need somebody to put out a big, meaty, flashy RPG for the PS4, and I don’t mean the next Dragon Age.
I’ve played all three. ME 2 was quite good. They’re all good, just that 1 is primitive and many people had a problem with 3’s ending. Took me a while to get into all three. I particularly liked the combat, a nice mix of tactics and shooty bang bang.
The reviewers on Good Game mentioned that SoM was somewhat bleak and grindy up until you get to the Elf lands. Not sure how the gameplay changes, but the scenery is different.
Agreed. ME1’s combat was clunky, but the writing and story were great. ME2 has vastly improved combat, an improved story arc (IMO), and just hangs together the best as a game; definitely the best in the series. ME3 had some of the best moments in the entire series, and the same engaging combat as ME2, but many people (myself included) found the ending to be disappointing.
My recommendation: play the whole series, they’re all fantastic games, just at varying levels of fantastic.