What game are you playing right now? #3

Remove all ads!

Agreed. I've always though Jade Empire was BioWare's most underrated game. Everything works superbly well, from the gameplay to the writing. The setting is beautiful, a refreshing break from the fantasy norm and makes a much less cringe-worthy foundation for their moral choice system than either Star Wars or D&D.

Back OT, I have recently been playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Steam sale strikes again!

That said, it's a worthy successor to Wolf 3d which was bundled with it & I've been pining for a bit of old school shooter lately. And to quote Yahtzee (that slick internet paparazzi!):

It's always been fun
To stick the butt of a gun
Up the arse of a goose-stepping Nazi!

 

Been enjoying the Wasteland 2 Beta quite a bit, which I received as a perk due to supporting inXile's Torment Kickstarter. It's a truly awesome game, and destined to become a classic. It's a bit pricey during the beta (like $60 USD I think), but should come down to a much more reasonable price upon full release at the end of August (like $30 USD I think). Based on what I've seen (about 50% of the game) I highly recommend this one.

Currently downloading Divinity Original Sin. Somehow I managed to completely miss this Kickstarter and had no idea this game was in development, much less released. It seems to be another must have for a cRPG enthusiast.

 

I actually just played the Sims 3 *shies away*, but I am planning to have a go at Divinity:Original Sin. Or I might play Baldur's Gate Enhanced. But the latter is supposed to be worse than the selectively modded original. Hmm...

 

The whole better/worse thing is highly subjective and really depends on who you talk to. And last time I checked most mods were available for the enhanced edition, so you can have a selectively modded BGEE also.

So from that point it mostly comes down to some interface improvements, convenience tweaks, a bit of new content and new companion options in EE. That sort of moves you away from better/worse, and more to have/have not.

 

Played a bit of FTL - Faster Than Light. According to the description it's a rogue-like game. I don't know about that, I never played a game called Rogue; the closest I got to that is playing Thief.

But the game is pretty much about playing randomly generated maps with randomly generated encounters and unlocking more ships and layouts for ships. And hopefully during the unlocking you occasionally win the game as well. A single playthrough is pretty short, something like 1.5 to 2 hours, though the attraction is to do it multiple times with different ships and to unlock other ships and such.

The fact that you're supposed to play it multiple times never shines more clearly than when you've managed to get to the final sector and meet the end-boss, only to discover that your weapon layout might've cut it against everything else you've fought so far, but you just can't even touch the boss.

Or you don't have enough currency (loot is also randomly generated) to upgrade your weapons or power plant to give yourself enough power to actually use the weapons.

All in all, it's fun for a while. But not too long in a single sitting, the randomness gets to me after a while.

 

The Simpson: Tapped Out

 

Titan Quest - Immortal Throne. Picked it up in a Steam sale aeons ago, and couldn't get into it at first, but it's actually a really accomplished and enjoyable ARPG.

I love its class system. You can combine any two of the game's skill trees in the same character, which is a really good way of building a character you enjoy playing. Sure, there are still plenty of munchkin options, but I've been playing Ranger (Hunter+Nature) and having a blast. Really lovely graphics which bring the Classical setting to life also help. The ARPG paint-by-numbers plot and regulation dodgy voice acting don't, but the mechanics matter far, far more in these games.

 

Started Antichamber yesterday. It's a good brain workout.

 

Been playing through the Dragon Age series in preparation for Inquisition. Doing the 2nd game now.

 

Starting Wasteland 2. I can't wait.

 

I'm getting more mileage out of Torchlight 2 than I expected I would.

 

How do you like it so far? This is definitely on my to-get list.

 

I thought I'd seen a thread about Wasteland somewhere, but didn't look for it

 

Put everything on pause for a bit to focus on Guild Wars 2 and Firefall. It's pretty damn time consuming, but you know, jetpacks and big swords.

 

Have the next few days off. And only to myself.
Had planned initially to play some of the my newer acquisitions on steam.

But for some reason I can't stop playing the Rouglikes ADOM and TOME.

:/

Help

 

Dragon Age Inquistion....Bioware has stepped up and hit a home run with this one....

 

Been playing a bit of Saint's Row IV lately. Like the earlier Saint's Row games (I've only played the second one), it's a sandbox game. Saint's Row 2 was a GTA clone in all but name, but since I played it after GTA Vice City and San Andreas, I thought SR2 at least got what made sandbox games fun to play, unlike Rockstar.

Where Rockstar seems to still think that realism is the way to go in their sandbox games (like how they introduced food and physical training and such in their games), Saint's Row understands that it's all about having fun. And not dieing every time your bike crashes (which is realistic, but unpractical in a sandbox game).

Saint's Row IV ups the ante by giving you super powers as well as everything else. In my mind superpower sandbox games - like Prototype and Infamous, for instance - always held a different group than GTA like sandboxes. Mostly because when you have superpowers, the cars and bikes and planes and helicopters are no longer very useful as a mode of transportation. This is one of the problems that faces Saint's Row IV, all the vehicles are no longer really used, even though they are very important to the GTA like sandboxes.

Still, it's a lot of fun to jump over buildings, run so fast that you create a tornado in your wake, run up a building, dive bomb from the tallest building to wipe out everything in a city block, freeze enemies, burn enemies, explode enemies, pick up enemies with telekenesis and throw them into another enemy, the list just goes on. Or to use the normal weapons, which goes from the normal pistols, submachiguns and assault rifles to a dubstep gun, a black hole launcher, an alien abduction ray, a disintegrator and much more.

The beginning of the game is hilarious, showing how you, a gang leader, became the president and how you are subsequently abducted by aliens (along with the rest of the planet). Some of the story missions are just gold.

On the whole, I found it a lot of fun, even if the story missions seem to be a bit few in number and a large part of the side missions that are available to you are just-go-to-this-activity-and-do-it variety. If you already did the activities, then you can just auto-complete a lot of side missions.


Next up: Alpha Protocol, or maybe getting side tracked by some Jagged Alliance 2 again. Or maybe finish that run I started as a conjurer in NOX. Too many choices...

 

I'm currently playing Shadowrun Returns, Assassin's Creed 3, and Madden 06.

 

So, Alpha Protocol. Has a few issues, but overall I like it a lot. Like Deus Ex but with more detailed dailogue that has a lot more impact too. But with perhaps slightly worse stealth gameplay.

The gameplay is of the type I like. Your basically a spy, so the stealthy gameplay is quite appropriate, and it's perfectly possible to stealth a lot of the game, just like it was in Deus Ex. The reason I say the gameplay is not great is that it is often hard to tell just how visible you are and therefore hard to sneak by undetected - necesitating you to stealthily take everyone down. Gameplay like how it was in Deus Ex Human Revolution would've been ideal. As it is, it's more like the original Deus Ex, which is not that bad either, but not quite so good.

Of course it's also possible to go through guns blazing, but that's not really my preferred style in these type of games.

The dialogue is great, and best of all, a lot of what you say and do is actually referred to in the game. And there's no real wrong choice either. You can get benefits from being friendly or at least professional towards people, but if you totally piss them off all the time, you get benefits from that as well. Be a complete ponce or be reasonable, both are valid paths.

The game got a lot of flak for being buggy when it came out, but I guess they did a decent job of patching it, or at least it didn't give me much problems. Only problem I occasionally had was that enemies wouldn't spawn after loading a checkpoint.

Which brings me to another of the game's downsides, the checkpoints. No saving whenever, whereever, but only when the game autosaves. At least the checkpoints are usually not that far apart.

On the whole, I had a great time with the game. It really is amazing how much things get referenced to in dialogue. Putting on armour when being in a public place will usually get you a reaction, being non-lethal on a mission will get you a reaction (especially in the beginning), if you react mostly professional people will reference that, too. And no Bioware dialogue choice either, in which you have a lot of different options that change exactly nothing.