What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Gary Sax wrote: Playing more of the Witcher. One thing I like about what the Witcher does is that it doesn't give you a moral blank slate with your dialogue choices. It's not like "shoot this innocent man and be a monster!" or "Give him 1000 dollars out of your own pocket!" It does enough of this for your choices to matter but a lot of situations the Witcher knows what he's going to do. But a notable angle is that you *do* get to craft his approach in a number of other ways almost completely. So I'm playing my Witcher as a relic of a bygone age who has great sympathy for the remaining non-murderous elements of the supernatural. I just did a quest where a troll accidentally killed a bunch of people on an island. My Witcher has great sympathy for that because he only vaguely knew what he was doing and he's sort of a dying breed, so I helped him draw a painting on a wooden plank and left him be. I could have murdered him, which would have also been a moral thing to do in response to the human lives, but this fit more with my conception of the character.

I also let him live. He seemed like a nice enough troll.
I let loose the spirit in the tree and was surprised at the repercussions I came across later.
There was a good side quest where a village sends their children into the forest to satisfy a leshen. A bit of a 'how much do I interfere in their culture' type thing.

Also, Breath of the Wild has become a bit like work now and I am not as eager to go back to it.

Black Barney wrote: I played the trial versions of INSIDE and EVERSPACE last night.

The game has lots of potential and I hope they improve the tutorial to give general guidelines on entering new sector. Something like:

Use scanner
Loot
If looting from corp, use cloaking device or attack support ships but only if heavily armed

Anyway I'm looking forward to someone doing the perfect space sim one day

Everspace I think is one of those "die but level up and come back stronger" games, not sure if that's a genre. I played it for a few days a while back because I'm a sucker for space stuff but I found the same issues- running out of scanners, or being mugged by super-acurate swarming drones etc. Also I suck at these kinds of games.

Since I built a new PC I remembered I backed Star Citizen all those years ago, and installed that. Never mind starting in the hangar, in Star Citizen, you start in the bunk and then you have to find the hangar, after requesting your ship be prepped at the dock computer. I was able to explore the station a bit, look in Space Target clothing store, and get into my ship, which I flew to some asteroids, and a satellite, and then I think some other player killed me. I also fell into a space-wormhole trying to go to the bathroom. It might be good in another 10 years!

Elite:Dangerous got the new update, so I jumped in that with the VR goggles on. The avatar creator is cool, though I guess there isn't much use for them now besides multi-crew ships. I did a couple of data missions, because that's all I'm good for, and just basked in looking around the cockpit with HUDs popping up like I live in the future.

I also started to poke EVE Valkyrie in VR, but had to stop before the tutorial missions were done. Side note about annoying multi-level tutorials with no save-out. I think the last one so annoying was Fire Emblem Heroes on the phone. Something like 30 minutes of tutorials with no save out.

Mostly I have been working through Mass Effect 3. Still enjoying it a lot, bracing for impact when it comes to the ending.

awesome post Jem. You know your space sims. Keep us posted on Star Citizen if it ever comes back to life. Sounds like the real deal of experiences

Yeah, EVERSPACE is the first I've ever seen of these "die but come back stronger" things. I died and went to a shop where they told me I needed to spend all my money cuz I couldn't save it. I then went back to the same mission and had better gear. Pretty nifty.

For those super-accurate swarming drones, i saw there was some weapon like the deathblossom from The Last Starfighter which hits anything within half a click with decent damage (400 or so). So i think it's designed to handle that exact situation. Did you get your hands on one of those hailmary nuclear missles? You fire it and it kills everything within range for 4.000 damage but you only get one? I had three bandits coming right at me, fired it, did a 180 and got the heck out of dodge. All that was left was loot. lol.

yeah, the cockpit HUDs in Elite Dangerous are gorgeous.

I really need another Wing Commander experience at some point.

I didn't find that weapon in the game. I was tying to grind out the upgrade research (and from my memory I was able to save my pennies). I think I'm just bad at the dog-fighting.

Star Citizen looks like it might be amazing, but it seems like progress is slow. With a 7700K and 1060GTX it still wasn't exactly the slickest thing. I have a bunch of other "space" games sat in Steam that I haven't even looked at yet (usually grabbed them in bundles).

Yeah the trick to dog fighting in space is to stay mobile. People tend to stay stationary and rotate like a gun turret. There's a reason the turrets on the bases are easy to beat. They can't move. Even if u don't use throttle much, you have thrusters which let you strafe, that makes a big difference. Think Mohammed Ali, dance like a butterfly... I tend to do strafing runs. Thrust away, turn around, do a frontal attack while strafing (dashing in shooters). You'll get the hang of it. I use missiles liberally as well since they're easy to craft

I like golf video games. Especially novel examples. Been playing them for years when I actually do play video games.

I saw an episode of game grumps where they are playing 100ft. Robot Golf and it looked pretty fun.

Gave it a shot, and I like it a lot. The concept alone is worth it, but each robot plays differently and its a wrestling match while you try to get your ball in the whole. Its excellent trashy fun when playing with a friend. It could be better, but for a first attempt, its kinda awesome. I hope they do a sequel with better commentary, and a bit better gameplay for both golf and wrastlin', because it deserves more.

But it costs $20, and while it is interesting, its not worth $20. Wait for a sale.

OVERWATCH has a PvE promotion going that's pretty fun. It's a little backstory on the characters, with Reinhardt, Mercy, Torbjorn, and Tracer taking on some Omnic hordes in King's Row. Compels teamwork, which is nice. And you are mobile, unlike Junkenstein. You need to capture three waypoints, then defend a payload and then advance and take out some tough guys. Good times, and cool loot.

Been playing DREAM QUEST on the Mac. Tough nut to crack, only one win so far, but that's a Rogue-like for you.

I finished up Mass Effect 1 after playing Mass Effect 2. Both were awesome. I found that the UI was tedious in ME1 compared to ME2. I also hated all of the exploration required in ME1. But, the story in ME1 was worth it.

I'm now onto ME3...

Really glad you appreciated the story so much in ME1. After ME2 you are taxing yourself on the drop in gameplay but it's cool that it didn't drive you nuts. The Mako in ME1 used to give people fits.

ME3 is going to be a huge pick up after ME1 but the jump in epicness of the struggle might be jarring. In ME1 Sovereign is very cloak and dagger, not really revealing himself until the end. In ME3, it's just all out extermination.

Have fun!

hotseatgames wrote: Just played the recently out of early access, Crawl. I have owned this game for 2 1/2 years, and it has come a LONG way.

I just watched the Giant Bomb guys play this on UPF. It looks MUCH better than the last time I saw it. The game moves a lot faster, humanity changes hands much quicker, the monsters have many more options to attack. Looks pretty good. I'll probably pick it up.

stoic wrote: I finished up Mass Effect 1 after playing Mass Effect 2. Both were awesome. I found that the UI was tedious in ME1 compared to ME2. I also hated all of the exploration required in ME1. But, the story in ME1 was worth it.

I'm now onto ME3...

I started playing ME1 this weekend. I went with an adept, because it's totally different from my usual style (stay back and snipe everything). I found the controller patch and threw in the high res texture patch. I'm trying to play as renegade also, though the dialogue options seem to come off more Kylo Ren than Darth Vader so I had no qualms in pulling up the console and dropping some renegade points there. I'll choose whatever dialogue feels thematic, and I'm only in it for the story, not for game-play challenge. The UI made me really appreciate the changes they made for ME2, and I remember being frustrated by those same changes when I played these originally on the 360 years ago. I really like the continuity of interface from 2 to 3.

I'm still playing through ME3, having just done the Citadel DLC, which was a lot of fun. So I'm now in an overlap loop of Mass Effect. It might be possible to play these games on an endless, seamless loop forever.

Picked up Inside today, and completed it in 3 1/2 hours. You really want to do this one in one sitting. It's fantastic, with only a couple annoying parts. From the same people who made Limbo, which I did not finish and wasn't crazy about. This one is much better.

Limbo is awesome. Your opinion is invalid.


....but yeah Inside is great.

Finally got some XBOX1 time in again. It's been State of Decay Y1 solo, and How To Survive 2 with mama.

She loves grindy/looty crafting games like Diablo 3 and this, so we literally did the same mission 9 times today to get the resources she wanted to build what I can only describe as "the granddaddy of all defensive walls" around our encampment. At level 45 the zombies come hard and fast for 3 solid minutes and they never even made it past the first trap series she built. If the zombie apocalypse happens, she's in charge of defenses.

State of Decay is a guilty pleasure for me but the game has some way unfair enemies and that kind of takes the shine off of an otherwise remarkable survival game. There's these giant bubba dudes that you can literally need to hit ten times, SQUARE IN THE CHOPS, with a speeding F-150 crew cab. The truck is fucked afterward. The biggest flaw in the game is that it doesn't have difficulty sliders to control zombie strength, spawn rates, and "super" baddie spawn rates.

I finished ME:3, and because I wasn't paying attention I missed which options I could take so I took the middle one . After realizing I redid it to look at the other endings. I think might be my favourite, and canon in my game until they realize they need to make ME:4.

I have the version with the Extended Cut, so I had to look on youtube to see what the problem was with the original ending and yeah, that was pretty short shrift.

Mass Effect original re-play has been put on hold because I'm now 20 hours into Fallout 4. I had Fallout 3 on the XBox 360 but kind of hated it, but I've been watching a lot of mXr's mod videos for Skyrim and Fallout 4. I've yet to mess with any mods, just working through the game. I probably should have gone to Diamond City sooner, as I got roped into Minutemen stuff out in the boonies for a while. I had some fun hours messing with the settlement workshop stuff but the resource management is kind of a bear, and not my style of game at all. I have two sets of power armour and don't like using either because I'm stressed about running the power cores down all the time. I've also found they're not always great in fights. I mostly hate VATS and don't use it, because I'm a better shot.

There's a lot of fun stuff in there, but it takes a long time to make progress compared to a story-driven game like Mass Effect. I know Fallout 4 is more of a lifestyle game people throw themselves into and the building stuff appeals to me a lot, but I'll see how I feel after playing through the story.