What games are you playing and why?

Very good, very addictive. Of note however the difficulty ramps up very quickly and stays high. I'm talking rogue-like levels here, and not dungeons of dredmor roguelike, more like tales of maj'eyal roguelike. Mind you the worst contenders are a few specific battles(that are going to wipe you a few times before you can lucky enough to them, or just overgeared enough).
Or perhaps XCOM on insane hardcore would be a more apt comparison. Tactics matter, but you can still get RNG screwed.

 

Currently I'm really addicted to ClaDun X2 PC/Steam edition. It's a dungeon crawling action-RPG with retro-style graphics, which also allows you to create and design your hero characters, equipment, even the music soundtrack all in-game! It does get a bit tedious level-grinding in the Ran-geon after awhile, and there are some issues where the graphics flicker from time to time (particularly whenever you're on the Magic Circle menu), but apart from those flaws it's a fine little game.

I've also been hitting up The Sims 3 a couple brief times, and I've been meaning to get back into Skyrim after having bought the Dawnguard and Hearthfire addons during the Steam Holiday sale...

 

Talking about rogue-like difficulty, the newest beta version of "Sword of the Stars : The Pit" was just released and they are slowly tuning the difficulty down. It is SO easy to simply die of starvation. Hell, it's so easy to ruin or lose all your weapons, and have to run around starving to death trying to punch things into submission with your bare hands (my last game was like that -- I ran out of food, weapons, healing, etc. It wasn't pretty. On the plus side, it did take a while for me to starve to death lol. Except that when I did, I felt it was more of a relief than anything, because trying to kill stuff with your bare hands is simply torturously slow (at least it is playing as an engineer -- playing as a marine may be a bit easier).

 

Taking a day or two off The Secret World, and I've played two or so games today.

Firstly, I picked Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes (HD) back up for a short while, finally getting past the final boss for Fiona (which I did on the first try!) after being stuck there. But I couldn't really be fussed continuing with it beyond that, so it's waiting for me at the start of the fourth character, Aidan.

And then I've spent most of the afternoon & evening playing more of The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, which is an okay game if you forgive it for being a shit port with a bad UI. But it does definitely hook me for a few hours at a time. It just looks like it's going to be like Dragon Age: Origins in that it overstays its welcome in terms of length.

 

I picked up KotOR 1&2 on Steam over the holidays when they were cheap out of nostalgia, and surprisingly I think I'm enjoying it more than I did the first time I played them. I'm about halfway through KotOR2 now, which is a significant step up in difficulty. I've heard there's a restored content mod for the PC version that I'll probably look into once I've finished a vanilla run.

 

Yeah, and a whole bunch of bug fixes. I'd - honestly - recommend adding the restored content mod before playing KotOR2, even for the first time, but I'm sure it'll be fine without it.

 

Torchlight 2, because unlike Diablo3 I can play it for more than five minutes without sighing and quitting back to Dredmor.

 

I played T2 all the way to the end (more than I can say about Torchlight 1). I did a little bit of post-completion stuff, tried to start again with a new character, tried to go through a second time with the same character, but I got bored out of my head.

But all action rpgs seem to have that affect on me. It's saying something that I could actually get through an entire run from beginning to end, because I don't do that with most action rpgs.

 

Seven years too late for that anyway.

 

Still playing ToME.

 

ToME 2.35 was my personal favorite. But after giving ToME 4.* a chance, it turns out to be superior in every way. Be sure to check out the addons for it. They really, really help make it stay fun after you do everything. (And that will take ages.)

If you, like myself find it annoying that most of the classes and races are locked, search the forums and you can unlock it all from the start. Otherwise nothing but grinding for ages will unlock them. (Some are really difficult though.)

 

BTW, I didn't mention it before, but I completed all of Talisman Prologue, and unlocked everything -- quests and characters. If I wanted to be obsessive, I suppose I could try to get a perfect score... On the other hand, I feel like I finished the game. So I may just wait for the muti-player version now.

I did buy and play a bit of 10,000,000. I bought it because it was cheap and it's been compared with Puzzle Quest and Puzzle Quest 2, both of which I really enjoyed. Unfortunately, I haven't found the game to be nearly as fun. Plus it's FAR, FAR too fast for my taste. So I can't recommend it. But I do still recommend Puzzle Quest 1 and 2, particularly if you like match-3 type puzzles/games (as I do).

 

I agree that it sometimes felt that way. But also, when I lost a battle in Puzzle Quest, I still knew I could go back and eventually beat it. I don't feel that way in 10,000,000.

 

Oof, Planetside 2. Seems like it could be a good game, but my initial experiences have been...frustrating. I'm really hoping the mythical January Patch fixes some of these.

*I start playing. There's a voice talking about the history of nanite warfare or something...with no subtitles. Minor pet peeve of mine, I know some people find it breaks their immersion so it usually defaults off. [I don't think there option for this though?]

*So I fall to a battlefield. This is the tutorial? No popups saying what to do, alright. WASD Leftclick R, seems standard. I'll press Escape to learn the rest of the keys...Escape removes the GUI. And brings it back. Hookay I'll learn the other keys later.

*Hey there's a dude. I think he's not on my team? *shoot* *XP! HEADSHOT!* Sweet! *gets shot* Eh, happens. 1/1 K/D ratio woohoo.

*Um there's a bunch of flashy stuff in that map, dunno what it means. I'll click respawn.

*Aaand I appear to be in Space Orgrimar? Dozens of people of the same color standing around and jumping in circles spamming "HAVE/WANT GALAXY!!111"

[At this point a friend who has been playing this for months logs on Teamspeak and helps me through the rest]

*K found keybindings, and lowered graphics settings to increase FPS to over 11. And apparently you don't respawn with grenades for free, you have to spend these free regenerating infantry points on them. The only other thing you can spend them on is the Max (which I have no Station Cash to unlock weapons for) or Mines (which I have no Station Cash to unlock), so sure, I'll buy 14 or so.

[rides Galaxy, learns how to respawn near where you died instead of in Space Orgrimar]

*Well I died again, got an assist with a grenade. Respawn...and I have zero grenades. What. The. ****?!?

*Died, respawned with zero grenades.

*Died, bought a 16th grenade, respawn with a Grenade! And proceed to respawn with grenades for my next 10 deaths. Yay?

[log off, log back on later in the day]

*Well my 4 grenades deleted themselves, so I'll buy another 14.

[plays for a while, starts actually having fun! FPS is tolerable, grenades work every time, getting lots of assists]

[dies while dropping an Engineer ammo pack]

*...I can no longer switch to Ammo Pack. It just makes a "bwah!" error noise when I press 4 or scrollwheel to it. [die, respawn] yep still stuck. Wow.

[switches to Medic. Plays a while...]

*...MY MEDKIT IS DOING THE SAME THING. [die, respawn] This game left beta 2 months ago? And they're charging real money for this? Seriously?

[logs out, logs back in]

*Yep both still BWAH'ing at me.

[log out, check forums, it appears to be a rare glitch no one knows how to recreate/fix]

[logs in 18 hours later or so]

*Hey they're both working now! Guess the server had to clear its cache or something because my logout yesterday didn't fix it.

[plays, has some fun...]

*Aw internet disconnect [According to my laptop I lost connection for less than 5 seconds]. "You have disconnected from server" yeah yeah click ok, take me back to character select or wherever you...oh. You sent me to desktop. I. Uh. Seriously? I have to launch the .exe, click through the launcher, load title screen, login, and THEN finally reach the character select? WoW, Unreal Tournament, Guild Wars, League of Legends...I can't think of a single MMO or FPS that sends you that far back for losing connection.

[logs in next day]

*K time to pay the "click buy grenade button 14 times when you log in" fun tax. Oh. I still have 8 unspent grenades from yesterday. This is the first time it hasn't deleted those...so which is the glitch? Are you *supposed* to keep grenades and it's just been glitching the past two days and deleting them accidentally, or did it glitch today and *fail* to delete them? Depending on which is intended behavior, you could log on before leaving for work to spend your free regenerating infantry points on a stack, then have full grenades and full free regenerating points when you get back from work. But again, I can't tell which mode is the accident.

[plays more. Having less fun. Getting teamkilled A LOT. Some are obviously not accidents. After 2 such deaths...]

*K in a tank with another guy, try running me over now jerks. Ooh there's an enemy tank, Q, shoot shoot shoot...Um we just died at full health. "You have died for standing too close to the vehicle pad." WHAT!?! Yes I've done that on foot, but we are DRIVING through a building, the pad is way the heck over there, we are not parked on it AT ALL...oh and the game froze. Yep. Bye.


...So that's my experience so far.