I’ve been playing The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. It’s kind of Diablo style but with more story.
Im about 60~70 hours in on it and it is interesting. I personally dont like a huge mechanic of the game play, but the story is fairly good and a for the most part i feel like my choices have a small effect on the world and story
Cracked 24 hours today, got to Skyhold, and now kind of feel like I’m into the actual game rather than the extended tutorial area. I like it, but it’s hard giving up the completionist mindset.
There is a frustrating amount of celectables that are actually needed. It kinda turned me off of the game. I have to go get xx amount of points before i can go on a story mission? Guuuuuhhhh.
SOMA. Just Google SOMA game. The sounds are done particularly well.
Another ten hours deeper into Dragon Age INquisition, and I’m starting to feel like I’m going to have to shift even further away from my Standard Bioware Behavior or I’m going to go insane. There are about a half-dozen areas now open on the map, and they’re all…I’m looking at them with dread. I mean, in Mass Effect games, I’d happily complete any new planet or side-quest as it became available, and the conventional wisdom was always to put off main quest missions as long as possible and max out on the sidequests.
But even though DA:I is absurdly vast, I’m reading the wiki entries on all these new areas and they’re just fetch quest arenas. Each one’s got some shard missions, some astrarium missions, some kill X number of Y mobs missions, some Bottles of Thedas missions, and so on and so on. I know all the areas are going to have their own flavor and it’s all part of the rich tapestry of the game, but…
…I’m really just not feeling the desire to go play them. Which is weird. In KOTOR 1-2 and Mass Effect 1-3, and even in Dragon Age Origins, I wanted to 100% every side quest in every area. Didn’t have to hunt for motivation—it was exciting and I wanted to do it! But now, I just kind of want to hit the next plot advancement mission and push on through.
Is that bad? It’s almost like I’ve gotten TOO MUCH HALLOWEEN CANDY and I just want to eat a sensible dinner and move on.
Stop adulting!!!
1 Like
Steam got Final Fantaxy IX and it was on sale, so I bought it. I haven’t started it yet since I’m still playing Van Helsing, though.
Been playing a bunch of games ever since we moved to our new house. Finished Borderlands 2 a couple of weeks ago, currently playing a long session against a single AI opponent in Sins of a Solar Empire, and lately I have also started playing Diablo 3, which I’m finding to be incredibly addicting.
“Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for THE EYES!”
2 Likes
On PC I’m playing Cities: Skylines. I’m a sucker for a good city simulator and while vanilla Skylines isn’t actually all that accurate simulation-wise, after piling on 39 mods and a whole bunch of assets from the Workshop it’s a bloody amazing game. The dev team expected the modding community to jump on it immediately so every time they update the core game they pick some of the better mods and bake them into the game proper, as well as making new parts more easily moddable.
I’m not going to lie though, it’s not perfect, but it is fun and it works. The dev team are slow to reply but friendly when they do, and since they’re a team of only eleven it’s amazing that they ever get time to actually communicate in the way that they do. How totally unlike EA. Yes, Skylines was a reactionary game created from the principle complaints of SimCity (2013). Online only? Nope. Tiny maps? Nope. Unmoddable despite that liar Ocean Quigley promising it repeatedly saying he’ll leave if it doesn’t happen? Nope. (He got fired, incidentally, way before Maxis was shut down.)
The other major competition in this field is CitiesXL (also known as CitiesXL 2011, CitiesXL 2012, CitiesXL Platinum and CitiesXXL – all of which are the same game, but with slightly different assets included as part of the base game). CitiesXL has a troubled history because of the unreliability of the game itself; the game engine was a RAM hog, it suffered from terrible trash handling, and was only available in single-thread, single-core, only-2GB-system-memory-readable 32bit mode. CXL 2012 fixed exactly one bug, and was a full-price release, or half-price if you owned 2011. CXL Platinum removed the 2GB RAM limit, which made the game last a little longer before it totally crashed out (approx 2h 30m as compared to 1h 45m on my machine). Platinum was also a full-price release. And now there’s CitiesXXL which is literally a copy of Platinum to the extent that the game refers to itself repeatedly as CitiesXL. Again, full price release.
TL;DR: EA (Maxis) and Focus Home Interactive can go eat a bag of dicks. They’ve both been upstaged by a dozen Scandinavians who up until now have only made games about trains.
On the PS4 I am playing Fallout 4.
I shall not go into detail about it, because I know you all know about it.
Suffice to say, my character Bernard Quatermass [five Internet Points to whoever knows that name] is awesome and the game is awesome and really all of it is awesome with just one problem: It’s not a Fallout game. It has the same critters, the same threats, but the overall feel isn’t Fallouty enough. This doesn’t stop it from being a good game. I bloody love it. But it’s sad that Bethesda kinda dropped the ball on the vibes thing. And stole the conversation wheel from Mass Effect.
This past weekend, I got back into Fallout 4 too. I stopped playing months ago because my game box kept crashing with it. But instead of spending lots of money on upgrading it, Gratch pointed out something I’d missed. I had my server which I was trying to turn into a virtual NAS (ESX system running FreeNAS among other things) that wasn’t working and was just sitting there. It was twice the specs of my game box so I just installed the HD and went with it. It’s working really nice and I actually got rid of a computer. Sort of… Gratch is using it in her forensics lab.
Still slogging away at Elite:Dangerous. About halfway from Sag-A* to home, so about 13k5LY to go…
i picked up mad max a few days ago, cant put it down! It is super fun and the driving feels great.
Anyone playing Stellaris? Grand Startegy in space from Paradox certainly sounds interesting. Some are annoyed that it’s not as detailed about characters as Crusader Kings II, but do you really need to know that your heir is left-handed?
Just listened to a review. Seems pretty cool, except sometimes the randomness creates a totally boring game. Which will happen in a randomized game, but hurts this one because it’s so long.
OTOH they also said most of their issues are already listed on the future patch notes.
Paradox is interesting with patches and DLC, if they follow the CKII model: Expect patches that range from amazing to mundane (Really, over in CKII there’s a patch that basically tweaks how characters ‘age’ to give some more crucial choices like setting a character’s focus (Do you want to have your current character work on seduction or running his/her business concerns?) then there’s patches that expand the time frame of the game or add entire new religious/cultural groups as playable entities.
The nice thing is that these often have DLC content that is gated, but you still get the ‘backbone’ as a patch. So the DLC that added Vikings also tweaked raiding mechanics and such.
I expect Stellaris to follow a similar path.
Been playing Deadbolt a lot lately. For such a simple game, it’s pretty fun although it does suck to go through levels a dozen times before you finally find the right method (or rather, the method that happens to work at that particular time).
And they’re not paying me a cent in royalties, either. 
3 Likes
I’ve [finally] started playing Undertale. As someone who cannot play bullet-hell games, I find the battle system grievously difficult, but the story and atmosphere are absolutely gorgeous.