What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

My newest PC addiction is Football Tactics. It is a turn-based, player skill progression version of FIFA. Games are short, so you can play a few in a row very easily. You start in the amateur beer league and try to build your club to get to the Premier League. There is multiplayer, but I have not tried that yet.

It is still early access, but worth it at $12.

Still enjoying Uncharted 2, but I have to say, Nathan Not-Quite-Fillion is getting on my nerves. Is there a reason I need to have Captain Firefly in all of my video games?

Mr. White wrote: I'm considering Shadowrun Returns for my Kindle Fire. How many hours is it to completion and is it similar to the amazing SNES game?

About 15-20 if you whiz through and avoid side-work. 40 if you really take your time. Maybe a hair more.

LOVE IT. It's phenomenal.

It's not like the SNES game, it's far better.

Finished VALIANT HEARTS: THE GREAT WAR. Really great. That ending.... wow.

Playing a little BATTLE ISLANDS each day, it's an awful WWII ripoff of Clash of Clans. I'll grind it out for a bit but when I 100% it, i'm done.

Play 2-3 games of MAGIC DUELS each day still. Love that game and i need to grind gold because they are going to release two expansions at once in April.

I think I'll go back and play a little CASTLESTORM since I've been meaning to finish that off.

Still neck-deep in XCOM2 3 weeks on from release. On my fourth Veteran/Iron Man playthrough, and after something like 5 "flawless" missions, I feel like I have a shot. Such a fantastic game in so many ways. They really raised the bar -- every other SRPG on the PC has been left in the dust.

The kids and I have been soldiering on with Earthbound. We just hit Saturn Valley, where we drink an apparently potent cup of Joe that throws up a psychedelic message about our journey and that we're only about half way there. Half way?! How long is this title? How many towns after Fourside?

Xcom 2 released, huh? Well, there went the next month of my life!

I decided to put together a retro game night. Got a couple dudes to come over last night, here's what we played:


-Blades of Steel
-Joust (NES version, this didn't last long)
-Pro Wrestling
-Excitebike
-Mario Kart 8 (which was only to show off the Excitebike course)
-Batman (NES, wanted to see how far we could get as a group. Guess what, not far. Game is brutal and awesome)
-River Raid (Atari 2600)
-Combat
-Empire Strikes Back (2600)

Hits of the evening: Blades of Steel and Combat. I had just picked up Blades of Steel and I'd never been able to get people over for Combat, both games blew our goddamned minds. We had fun with everything we played though. I had thought we'd do it monthly or every other week, but everyone is already wanting to come back next Wednesday.

IT'S A PASS

Josh Look wrote: I decided to put together a retro game night. Got a couple dudes to come over last night, here's what we played:
-Blades of Steel

That's all you need, man. Break it up with some Double Dribble if someone gets salty.

The sound effect when a dude falls down is priceless.

I actually picked up Double Dribble with Blades of Steel.

Combat rules man, the tension of moving that little tank slowly around the corner...and then BOOM, your opponent ricochets and blasts you. All of those little games were fun to play...all the variants and so on, that was fun stuff.

Warlords is another one that is still really fun to play with a group...if you have four paddles that aren't broken.

River and Scarlett were digging around in the basement right after Christmas and they found one of those "Retro" game console things I got as a gift years ago, it has 2600/5200/7800 games on it. So I hooked it up (RCA cables!) and they had a ball with it. Adventure was just hilarious- "why is that duck chasing me?" They laughed a lot at some of the games...they thought Crystal Castles was really funny for some reason. They LOVED Food Fight. But it doesn't have Combat on it, which stinks.

I played that Empire Strikes Back game SO FREAKING MUCH when I was like six or seven.

I played River Raid not that long ago at a retro video games convention...it holds up pretty well...I remember back in the day it felt like a major innovation that you had to refuel. Fun fact, that game was designed by a woman.

Blades of Steel is just a masterpiece...you don't even have to like hockey to have a blast with that one. Double Dribble was great too. Oh, Konami...

I spent so many hours on Blades of Steel. One of my all-time favorite games, and I played it so much I got pretty awesome at it.

I never played fighting games enough to ever reach the point where knowing exactly where the edges of a hitbox are which animations break into which combos on which frames or anything like that, but I feel like I got close that with Blades of Steel. The sound effects, graphics, and music from that game are burned into my memory.

River Raid brought me one of my very few throwing the controller moments. Many levels deep, always a pixel away from death, levels I'd never seen before, grinding my teeth, and completely tense. The Atari had a weak connection or something because the system froze up in that way that Ataris did: An image of the furthest I'd ever gotten in a video game, semi-scrambled and color-warped and taunting me there on the screen. Now that I think about it that might be the first time I swore and really meant it too.

Yeah, Combat was something of a revelation to all three of us there last night. It was like each game mode kept getting cooler than the last. We had a lot of laughs curving our shots around in the early tank games. Then stealth tanks! Then stealth tanks with ricochet shots! The jets were you can confuse the other player and hide duck into a cloud! Had so much fun with that one.

I have a copy of Warlords, I just don't have paddles. They're kind of pricey.

I picked up Atlantis and Bezerk yesterday, played them both a whole lot today. Atlantis is really fantastic, reminds me of the arcade version of Missile Command.

Atlantis was awesome! Such a strange game...man, that "frontier" period when games were just allowed to be weird and you rolled with it. You know Atlantis is somehow the sequel to Cosmic Ark (or it may be the other way around) and I think Demon Attack is somehow connected. Imagic, FTW! I think some of those stranger "second tier" Atari games are actually more interesting to revisit than the marquee titles- Pitfall, etc...

Berzerk is iconic...man, I loved that one too. So tense. Those old games had a way of really ratcheting up the drama of a fucking BLOCK moving across the screen.

If you can find it, Reactor is a really cool, more obscure one. I seem to remember that it had a good two player game.

And OUTLAW. It's STUPID AS HELL but it's FUN. Shoot through the cactus!

Now I'm wanting to get some of these games, some of this stuff I haven't seen in 30 years. Remember the GI Joe game where you had run various Joes across the bottom of the screen while a giant cobra shot laser eyes at you?

Still, my favorite 2600 memory is when Donkey Kong came out...I remember my mom taking me to Zayre on a sunday morning to buy it. And there was a LINE. Everybody lined up for Donkey Kong. It's back when they kept games in the case and you had to ask for them. I walked up and said "Donkey Kong!" like I even needed to. I remember that was the first day I ever played a video game so long that my hands hurt and I had a blister.

Then there was the day Pac-Man came out and that crushing realization when you got home that...it wasn't really much like Pac-Man. BANK BANK BANK BANK BLEEP