What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Started CASTLESTORM: Definitive Edition last night. The cut scenes are absolutely horrible but the gameplay seems decent enough. Two castles against each other, you can send over troops like a RTS game while manning the siege weapons the rest of the time to take out approaching troops or firing stuff to take down their castle. And you have a Hero that can spawn and do a ton of spring cleaning. You can upgrade all your projectile weapons, your spells, your castle rooms and...um...something else, I forget what. And you can change the build of your castle which is annoying to me but fun for creative players.

This should hold me over until Duels Origins comes out. I really need to get back to Guacamelee at some point too

Columbob wrote:

Black Barney wrote: The cool thing will be if I get shocked by major character deaths just like in good Game of Thrones fashion.

Well, you did say "Thematically it's bang on", so expect the unexpected.

Finished episode one last night, you were totally right, lol. I got totally shocked and didn't expect that at all.

I found an El Cheapo (Die Cheapo? Das Cheapo? Der Cheapo?) copy of Wolfenstein: The New Order, I couldn't resist.

Played for about two point five hours, and I love it! It's definitely an old fashioned ID-style shooter with LOTS of subtle and not-so-subtle callbacks to the original Wolfenstein 3D- it even starts with "GET PSYCHED!". And you do things like pick up random goblets and eat dog food, with only a health, armor and ammo stats at the bottom of the screen. No portrait of BJ Blazcowicz, but his ridiculous mug is all over the game otherwise. So far, no one has shouted "MEIN LEBEN" but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that happens soon.

It's utterly ludicrous- eeeeeevil Nazis with eye patches, killer dogs (another W3D trademark), dual-wielding assault rifles and so forth. Very refreshing in a day and age when games are so self-important and po-faced in trying to pass off their B-movie shtick as "important art" (see: Bioshock Infinite). But there is actually a story to frame all of the shooting including a twist that surprised the hell out of me because I didn't read the back-of-box copy before I started. And it's GOOD shooting with the way under-used leaning mechanic that I love so you can pop up over a piece of cover and then back down just by holding L1 and moving the stick. So shoot-outs feel actually like shoot-outs, not just strafing back and forth between cover.

Looks and sounds great and there have been a couple of really well-done sequences, including one where you're scaling up the wall of a castle while shit is falling on you and Nazis are shooting at you from the windows. The gore is excessive, too much head-stabbing for my tastes, but even W3D was kind of shocking back in its time. And they are subhuman Nazis, so there's that.

Definitely worth $10- looks like it's pretty long with 15 chapters. NO fucking tacked on multiplayer or "bro-op", every resource was spent making a solid one player adventure and it shows.

New Order was great. I haven't gotten the Old Blood yet, but I will.

I hate to burst your bubble, but no one says mein leben, ever. And that boss you are so wanting to run into... well he never shows either.

And you are correct, it's a pretty good-sized game.

Thief 360 version - It's a nice filler while I wait for the unfettered freedom of movement that Arkham Knight promises. Decent stealth and gadget, do all the puzzles, collect all the stuff game - I don't see a lot of replay as the power up system isn't really super different or game changing in the options you choose. Probably will finish the campaign and then delete it from the hard drive.

I've been playing This War of Mine and it's making me feel very uneasy because I feel it misrepresents the siege of Sarajevo and heavily. It looks the part, but the more I play it the more I feel I'm playing a zombie game with a war-time dressing than anything resembling the actual conflict. And not because mechanically it's identical to them, but because the game is full of ugly, ahistorical stuff that makes absolutely no sense in the context of the Bosnian War and are typical traits of a zombie flick:

- You can't go out during the day.
- "Scavenging" for food and materials. The infamous black market of the siege is not represented at all! People don't queue for supplies or smuggle goods, they take it from their environment or other people living under the siege.
- Yes, stealing from other people is a game mechanic. The game designers consider that stealing from other people and having to guard your house with guns to avoid your neighbours from taking your stuff was a defining part of the experience of the siege. This is brutally ahistorical if not downright offensive.
- The UN and the Serbs themselves aren't represented in the actual gamel! The threat is diffuse and nobody mentions it. The international side of the conflict, the arms embargo and the politization of the siege simply isn't given any importance in the game.
- Beyond that, people don't really exist in the game's world. Sometimes, someone wants to trade or asks for a favour, but you can't talk to them. There's no sense of community, no kids growing up during a war or hospitals getting shelled. You don't see people die on the streets, or your neighbours face in a newspaper. The sensation is of total solitude, of "every man for himself".

At first I thought I was being too hard on the game and probably reading it wrong, but no, it's clearly the intention. There's even an interview with the developers in which they cite an article they read as the influence that lead them to make the game and it's not a documentary about the lliving conditions of the people of Sarajevo during the war, but an article of a survivalist arguing you should get your own bunker, stockpile food and prepare yourself for the inevitable societal collapse.

Downloaded Rocket League for free as part of PS+. If you own a PS4 and haven't done this yet, do it now. This is the most fun I've had with my PS4. The game is immediately accessible yet has skill-related depth that you could plumb for months if not years.

For the uninitiated, it's basically soccer but the players are rocket-propelled cars. You tear across the field, run up walls, trigger nitrous boosts, and can even double jump your car, trying to hit a giant soccer ball into the other team's goal. It is WAY more fun than it has any right to be.

My kids and I had a blast competing against each other. Plus, you unlock hats for your car. So there's that.

I have mixed feelings about Rocket League...it seemed like a can't miss proposition but for some reason I'm having a hard time really getting into it. So far I've found it slightly more frustrating than fun. I get that it is a skill-based game and even after a couple of hours of play maybe I don't have the skills just yet. But something seems missing, not sure what it is. And there's this weird dissonance- the cars handle really well, I love how fun they are to drive and they have cool tricks you can do (like a barrel roll)- but the ball physics are so slow and floaty. Plus, it feels like there is no way to really predict what the ball is actually going to do when you hit it. Which makes using actual soccer tactics pretty much null and void. Forget about crosses to the striker and all that kind of stuff. But maybe I shouldn't even be thinking along those lines.

But with that said, I keep going back to it, playing online and in a season. There is definitely something good there, and I bet it's REALLY good split-screen co-op.

Split screen is the only way I've played it.

I picked up Ziggurat yesterday on PC. I've only played for just over an hour so far but I am really liking this one.

It's a roguelike (I know, I know, we're hitting a saturation point) but this thing herald back the FPS games of old, back before the genre boasted enemies with great AI and instead were hellbent on making you dead and threw all personal safety to the wind. I'm talking DOOM, Serious Sam, and more so than anything else, Hexen/Heretic. You're a mage, you collect different magic wands and artifacts to fight legions of monsters (which are some of the freshest designs I've seen in a long time), and look for the portal key to unlock the boss so that you can fight it and progress to the next floor. When you level up you're given two choices on how to tweak your character, both of which are random. The limited choices are actually nice here as it fits the fast, frantic pace of the game.

I can't get past the second floor since I suck. Still, really really liking it so far.

The sheer amount of stuff you end up unlocking as you keep playing Ziggurat is awesome. Tons of skills, classes, weapons etc.