What are you playing?

So, what kind of vidya games are people playing?

I’m currently playing Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition. Good updates to the old Infinity Engine games put out in the 90s: Modernized the interfaces a bit, added some new content, fixed bugs, etc. Some of the games in this series (Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale 1 & 2) have some interesting bits added to make them interesting, like the developers adding special dialog to every major NPC in case a Charm spell is used on them. I only played Icewind Dale when these games were first released, so they’re fun to try now, and probably run on nearly any computer.

Unturned, Zombie Survival Game, graphics more primitive than Minecraft. Fun crafting, scopes on rifles show zoomed views even when you are carrying it at port arms (NEat details) created and run by one man show of a 17 year old boy.

Endless Dungeons or something like that, Sci Fi roguelike. Prison ship crashes into a planet, using a pool of survivors, up to 4 at a time, you crawl your way out of the depths.

Sword of the Pit, Sci-Fi Rogue. Typical rogue game, pick a character, increase skills get new toys, add a crafting element and cooking and I have no idea how deep it is because I always die early.

Minecraft

Blood Bowl, fun times.

Mostly stuff I can pause and just walk away from since I have so much going on. Playing Bard’s Tale on my Kindle, but it’s rough because you have to have sound and I don’t regularly carry headphones.

Mostly just OpenTTD lately - it’s a freeware version of TransitTycoon and it’s terribly addictive. I can’t get enough of making trains do my bidding… plus all the mods. As with @Woodman, I’m in the same boat where I want to be able to walk away from the game when I have other crap to do.

When I have more uninterrupted time I’ve been playing Kerbal Space Program . It’s a steep learning curve, but when you manage to dock your spaceship with another or land on another planet without blowing up, the satisfaction is immense. Plus I’ve learned more about orbital mechanics than ever.

The new laptop, with the second monitor, gets kind of wonky at time with fullscreen games. Haven’t really done much gaming on it, other than the usual suspects on Kongregate.

Too much GTA V on the 360 for over a year now. I’m not sure why I enjoy the mayhem so much on GTA Online. I must be low brow but Los Santos and Blaine county has been so much fun.

I’m assuming you mean the PC version, but my friends and I just finished a ‘league’ of the sci-fi Blood Bowl-esque game ‘Dreadball’ recently. It’s a neat game, and fixes several ‘pain points’ of Blood Bowl:

  1. Scoring is more like Basketball or similar, in that there’s only rarely a ‘reset’ to the line of scrimmage, not even when scoring. The practical side of this if you over-commit to score, you might have no one on defense. There’s also goals ranging from 1-4 points, and it’s played as a spectrum of scores, with the single ‘score’ starting at 0 and each side trying to pull it to their 7.
  2. Turns end on loss of ball, or when a team uses up all of it’s actions (5 per turn) instead of when a player falls down. You still want to save your risky ball-handling and scoring for the end of your turn, but you don’t have to worry about a guy tripping over his shoelaces and ending a turn.
  3. Player stats are a bit ‘saner’ with less extremes. Rolls are d6-based dice pools counting successes, with most stats around a 4+ on 3 dice. These vary only 1 point in either direction for most skilled or unskilled players. You often get better by special rules to roll multiple dice, remove opponent’s dice, etc. instead of having ridiculously good stats.
  4. Background is more sci-fi, less fantasy. However, it’s the manufacturer’s (Mantic) larger-scale wargaming setting, which has a certain amount of 40k-style fanatsy-in-sci-fi like the Forgefathers (Short, bearded guys), the Astarians (thin, fragile, graceful types), and Veer-myn (rat-like humanoids) that are a bit fantasy-inspired.
  5. Hex-based, which works well with the theme and rules.
  6. Good ‘campaign’ rules. We had a few odd behaviors with these, but do plan to try again. There’s some fun balancing rules so a team that gets smashed up in the first game (like mine) has a chance to recover, even if it isn’t easy.

Definitely worth checking out if you have friends to try the tabletop-only game with.

I’ve played OpenTTD, loved Transport Tycoon, need to open that puppy back up.

Blood Bowl on PC. Dreadball sounds cool, but table top time is hard to get going, and Pathfinder eats it all.

WokStar on table top, along with Pandemic and Pathfinder. Running a campaign for two 7 year old girls and a 40 something dad of my daughter’s friend, fun times. I go high on camp, and low on gore, but still remove limbs of the bad guys with incredible frequency.

Oh lordy… it’s too good. I’m more than half-tempted to put in on my work computer to play with during breaks, but I’d be way too tempted to play for faaaaaar too long.

@Guido

It’s on Google Play! I can’t imagine it’s a good idea on my phone buy maybe I can get it on my Kindle.

1 Like

A friend was in town for the weekend a couple weeks ago. We played coop Halo 3 all weekend. It was great once I remembered that they switched the reload button on that one. I can kind of understand why, but my muscle memory didn’t.
I just unwrapped Halo: ODST last weekend. (Yeah, I’d been sitting on it for a while… I’m way behind.) I’ll probably spend most of my Thanksgiving break on that.

OMG!!!

Halo: Obliterate Daylight Savings Time!!! Seriously, I want to marry that game and have it’s love babies!!!

Squuueeeee!!! Do you like run around shooting golfers and ignorant legislators? All in order to save drive in movies and have some damned sunlight during hours you aren’t at your top secret 8-5 job?

LMAO, YES, yes and yes!!! I despise Daylight Saving Time! The guy that came up with it, then convinced most of the world that it was a great idea, should be raised from the dead and beaten to death. Rinse & repeat. OK, maybe that’s a bit extreme, but maybe not.

NeverWinter NIghts 1 (Yes, the original from ~10 years ago.)

I have installed Shadowrun Returns, BloodBowl and a few more but I never get around to playing them. Elite:Dangerous is on my OMFG I must buy this when it comes out (or I can be motivated to buy into the Beta before the game ships).

I did try Aliens: Isolation on a friend’s Occulus Rift last night. That is just way too cool for words.

1 Like

Hey, as I said I’m playing Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, which is a remake of a game from 2000! The Enhanced Edition is msotly cleanup and compatibility, like making it run properly in modern wide-screen monitors. I hope to pick up the BG1 and BG2 versions when they’re cheap on Steam.

I tried Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 when they were current but just didn’t get into them the same. The 3d characters and environments looked worse than sprites to me and the controls just aren’t as good.

I enjoyed Shadowrun Returns, at least the origional campaign, and I hear the 2nd campaign (Dragonfall?) is supposed to be better. The 3rd party add-ons were a real mixed bag at times, with some good ideas and some iffy execution. Not a perfect game, but pretty neat.

Aliens: Isolation on an Oculus Rift sounds like a recipe for nightmares!

Googled it… and now I want it.

The weirdest part was looking down and seeing I had boobs.

Yeah, fully immersed VR with directional audio. I didn’t get too far into the game, but it would be the stuff of mental trauma and nightmares.

That’s what I thought of it. I haven’t tried the second campaign. The crow sourced stuff seems ok.

The original NWN was fantastic. The core campaign was merely meh, but the user-created content was awesome, and the expansions (especially Hordes of the Underdark) were some of the best D&D computer gaming ever. I’ve been thinking about playing it again.

Working through Dragon Age: Origins again lately. Slowly.

Siglet Prime and I just finished playing co-op through the original Halo (on easy). Glad I didn’t get rid of the old XBox.

1 Like

My original launch unit from 2001 died on me about 6 months ago. I guess I’ll just have to pick up the Master Chief Collection for the Xbox One when I get around to buying that console.

For another old game that is similar to Neverwinter Nights, Iceland Dale, and Shadowrun Returns, Planescape: Torment is still totally worth playing and a game I missed when it was new. I hope they can get the rights to do that as an Extended Edition: it deserves it. Much less combat and more setting/puzzle oriented than Iceland Dale.

(Gog.com has it for something like $5, which is a plus.)