What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Better than the first Bioshock?? I was in some prolonged battles in the first one against Big Daddies where I'd try to outsmart them, lay traps, and do everything I could think of to win those battles. Never got less exciting. That first Big Daddy fight was so epic. The little sisters were awesome. Loved that game. That Brass Balls achievement was no picnic.

It's quite possible that the main reason I'm enjoying Infinite more is that I'm playing on PC. I suck at FPS on a console.

I can't use a controller for FPS's - I have to use a mouse and keyboard. Anytime I try to play on my daughter's XBox, it's just pure misery.

I used to be like that but I got used to controllers and that was that.

Bioshock 1 has the best story, Bioshock 2 has the best level design, and Bioshock 3 has the best “open world” feel and shooting control.

Love them all.

Ugh we’re probably two Gravol pills away from Barnes bursting in here with his fetish for Bioshock 2

Just before I left for Manila, Civilization VI went on sale on Steam, so I went ahead and took the plunge on the original game with no DLC. I've not even put in 20 hours total on it, but I'm running up against some persistent irritations.

First of all, I don't think I needed the level of micromanagement that pulling the districts out of the city gives. I feel like I'm juggling a lot more stuff that isn't translating to more enjoyment, or even necessarily more depth. I do like the districts system, just like I like the civics being turned into a second tech tree. But both of those things do make the game bog way down, especially in the late game. And I feel like the districts unnecessarily constrain a lot of things, like finding a place for your great works. And it's hard in the early game to manage both tech trees effectively without me just getting board.

The other beef I have is the AI, which is starting to actually make the game less enjoyable for me. It's not so much the lack of difficulty, a complaint I often see. Instead I feel like in an attempt to make the other civs more unique and give diplomacy more precise, they created a ton of stuff that passively determines your relationship with another civ. Tons of them want you to do specific things with your civ, like have a lot of cities or a big army or whatever. Lots of other ones want you to NOT have something that anyone who is playing to win will have. Sorry, but I'm not going to ignore City States just to have a good relationship with Greece, and I'm not going to quit building wonders to appease China. I tend to find myself at war with civs without really meaning to, because they all tend to have such a hair-trigger with war declarations. In one case, I had the same type of government as another civ, and then they changed governments, were unhappy that we were no longer the same, and they declared a war. I didn't do anything to actually antagonize them. It makes sense they would be angry with me for competing over different spots for cities, or because they know I'm winning. But as it stands now it feels way to easy to just passively make a ton of enemies because they have all these unrealistic demands that make it impossible to not go to war eventually. I'm one of those players who really appreciates not having to be at war in Civ, but Civ VI makes that basically impossible.

So I dunno, I'm a bit disappointed. A lot of the stuff I mentioned will probably be better with more play, particularly the complexity. But it's hard to justify the effort when I have Civ V sitting right there on my desktop. I see how someone who was kind of disappointed with V would like VI better, because to me it takes some of the improvements of V and adds them to a more complex base game, like IV. But I liked V precisely because it felt so much cleaner from IV, which didn't click with me in the same way. I'll put more effort into VI, but it's been a little letdown.

Has anyone here played Rise & Fall yet? Does it make the AI any less bellicose or streamline the management?

I felt the same about Civ VI.

I don't think the added complexity of districts, two different tech trees and so many different goverments add strategy to the game. The game is not more interesting, nor deeper, at least not enough to compensate the additional workload and +1/-1 optimization they introduce. I don't think it's fun to change your policies just to get a 10% bonus on producing settlers and then changing back to get a 5% elsewhere.

As for the AI, I content it's a problem inherent to SM Civilization if not video games as a whole: The game is not designed so the AI can play it. The game has all these diplomacy screns and personality values, but they are all moot because the AI doesn't understand winning, or board position or anything beyond "he has more troops than me". The AI is stupidly bellicose because it's the only way the designers have found for the AIs to matter.

By the way, I read on that "hidden mechanics" Twitter thread that the game seeds civilization's hidden goals in a way that are conflicting on purporse. That is, you must go to war because you can't appease them all.

I realized something recently: The SM Civilization AIs would be the kind of people I would refuse to play with at boardgame night. Irrational, willing to throw the game to gang on someone, incapable of understanding the game's win conditions and so on. And yet I play with them.

Ok, enough complaining. I think I've reached by SM Civ bashing quota on the forums.

This kind of thing didn't bother me in 5, but I think part of that is that the diplomacy in 5 is more opaque. But even then, the AI didn't just declare war when some invisible line is crossed. It at least feels like they like me or don't like me based on my decisions, not on some arbitrary thing that will trigger no matter what.

Black Barney wrote: Better than the first Bioshock??

For me, Bioshock is one of the most overrated games of all time. Aesthetically, it's a delight. But that's not enough to carry the game.

It was the first game I played, I think, that tried to make a virtue out of giving the player different tools to achieve their objectives. However, the majority of equipment, guns and plasmids felt largely like they replicated one another. Yes, I could burn someone to death with fire from my fingertips OR I could shoot them with a revolver but the process and the end product were the same: click to produce dead enemies.

Likewise with the supposed moral issues. IIRC it was always better to save the Little Sisters. There wasn't really much of an issue at all.

The level design and the light horror got me only so far. I eventually gave up on it when the respawn mechanic destroyed my suspension of disbelief. I know most games have "magic" respawns but that's so obviously a "reload" that you accept it as part of the parameters of play. Bioshock actually having a ludicrous in-game explanation with the booths made the stupidity of it far more obvious. My last point was when I used a booth to repeatedly respawn and slowly beat a Big Daddy to death with a wrench.

I came to dislike it so much that it actually put me off games with similar open-ended mechanics and morality for a long time because I presumed they were all just as bad. It took Dishonored to prove to me that the approach was worthwhile (and how!).

You did get more ADAM for harvesting vs rescuing little sisters

Bioshock failed for me because it presented me with a scenario in which a bunch of Randian libertarians were in an underwater bubble and assumed I'd do anything except let the water in faster.

san il defanso wrote: This kind of thing didn't bother me in 5, but I think part of that is that the diplomacy in 5 is more opaque. But even then, the AI didn't just declare war when some invisible line is crossed. It at least feels like they like me or don't like me based on my decisions, not on some arbitrary thing that will trigger no matter what.

In my experience, how much the AI likes or dislikes you isn't a huge factor in 5. It seems they decide to attack based mostly on the strenght of your cities/troops and how they are positioned. In fact, you can sometimes tell they are stacking units around the border and if you position yourself on the other side, they'll retreat without declaring war.

In other words, even the friendliest AI will attack you if it thinks it can get away with it. Similarly, a weak AI won't attack you no matter how much it hates you. They are spiteful, not suicidal. This is most easily seen in OCC, you can have reliable allies betray you and then go back to being super chummy once you wipe off their units.

It's rough, though. The AI vastly undersestimates how difficult it is to siege cities or how powerful ranged units are. I mean, I don't blame them, three archers shouldn't be able to destroy an army four times their size.

I'm told that people hated this, as they came from the docile diplomacy of Civilization IV. They certainly hated the fact that the AI ocasionally lies to the player and pretends to be friendlier than it actually is.

san il defanso wrote:

In my experience, how much the AI likes or dislikes you isn't a huge factor in 5. It seems they decide to attack based mostly on the strenght of your cities/troops and how they are positioned. In fact, you can sometimes tell they are stacking units around the border and if you position yourself on the other side, they'll retreat without declaring war.

In other words, even the friendliest AI will attack you if it thinks it can get away with it. Similarly, a weak AI won't attack you no matter how much it hates you. They are spiteful, not suicidal. This is most easily seen in OCC, you can have reliable allies betray you and then go back to being super chummy once you wipe off their units.

It's rough, though. The AI vastly undersestimates how difficult it is to siege cities or how powerful ranged units are. I mean, I don't blame them, three archers shouldn't be able to destroy an army four times their size.

I just finished a few weeks of playing yet more Civ V, and I would heartily second what he says. I never ever let other countries have open borders, so it's a dead giveaway when units start piling up on the border.

I haven't played on Emperor yet, but I know on King they make the exact mistake mentioned - they underestimate how hard it is to take a city.

Maybe I'm playing something wrong or suboptimally, but I never pay attention to being denounced. I usually think, "BFD. You'd take my shit if you could."

Finished Bioshock Infinite. The ending was underwhelming. Overall though, a good game. 7 / 10

Nothing but Monster Hunter World and MLB The Show exist for me for the foreseeable future lol. The new MLB is more of the same with a few tweaks. The new Monster Hunter is an improvement in most ways to 4U but with an extremely limited monster variety and lack of end-game material. Still, hard not recommending it, it's the best introduction to the series since Tri on the Wii.