What games are you playing and why?

I have played the first Mass Effect through to the end and it was a good game. I have only played Mass Effect 2 part way through so far. I need to go back and finish it some time but I have so many games that I'm having fun with that it's difficult to find the time. I don't have Mass Effect 3 at all so I can't say anything about how good that one is.

 

I liked all three but for different reasons. The first I think had the best story, it got really up its own arse later on. But I prefer the visuals of Mass Effect 3. The games actually have a huge shift in tone between 1 and 2-3, and it's in more than just the graphics and the game play mechanics.

 

I hope the combat improves in the later games, it's very clunky.

 

In ME1, yes. ME2/3 is a lot smoother and simpler and whilst it works well, you kinda wish they'd just improved things from ME1 rather than scrapping them.

 

I've been typing my little fingers off trying to meet a contest deadline (15k+ words in 7 days, ouch, my carpal tunnel!) but when taking breaks I have been playing the heck out of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag. This is actually my first AC game and I'm rather enjoying the heck out of it. It's not as deep as I would like, and I've got a few quibbles, but I do rather enjoy flying the ol' Jolly Roger and taking on Men o' War.

Also, I've been playtesting my board game. Man I've been busy...

 

I'm trying out a game called "Banner Saga". It's an adventure/rpg set in a norse mythology-inspired fantasy world with turn-based combat. The combat so far has been fun but so far it seems really linear with some multiple choice options that may lead to different possible branches (at least it's supposed to). It's supposed to be an rpg, but it lacks the rpg feel that I usually like (partly because of its linearity and dialog structure). So I'm not sure how long it will be until I get bored with it (that tends to happen to me with story-driven games).

 

The Last of Us - Basically one of three major reasons I finally caved and got a PS3. I liked it at first, but then struggled with it, but I've picked it back up and over the past week or so I've slowly moved forward in it. It's not gripping me like I'd hoped, but I do enjoy it when I get into it and find the 'groove'. My only main problem is that the special infected types are SERIOUSLY dangerous, even on easy, and most of my deaths tend to be from when they get hold of me because I've either fluffed up the controls or struggling to aim or the game just feels like a dick and gets them to run up behind me. But it is satisfying to sneak up behind a clicker and just bury a shiv in its neck.

 

I pre-ordered it last year, fnarrrrrrr.

 

Picked up Titan Quest during the holiday sale, tried it out for a while this afternoon. Rant time!

Good:

*Greek theme!

*Lootfest!

*Skill system looks pretty good. Providing a few early, core skills, then then get upgraded later in the tree, means points are less likely to be wasted (although for some builds, 1 point then rush masteries might be the correct choice, same as many d2 builds). And there's a Respec npc later according to Gamefaqs, so that's cool too!

*Graphics are solid for a 7+ year old game.

Bad:

*The first cutscene freezes until I alt-tab. Twice. And is unskippable at first, thankfully skippable after restarting the game with new resolution settings.

*Sooo many hidden numbers. You can't see the damage of attacks/spells that aren't crits...EVEN ON TARGET DUMMIES IN TOWN. WHY DO THEY EVEN EXIST THEN. And spells can't crit (thanks Gamefaqs!). And I don't see where it tells you your crit chance or crit multiplier are (even Gamefaqs doesn't seem to know what % you get from Dex etc). Your health/energy are hidden unless you mouse over your bars. Your regen is hidden unless you mouse over your bars and have a stopwatch (would be nice to know if +1 energy per second is better than +27% energy regen!).

*The "This npc has new dialog!" icon fires up every time you use a portal, load the game, talk to someone else, or scratch your nose. "Thank you for saving our farms!" "Please save our farms!" "Thank you for saving our farms!" "Please save our farms!" /squelchall

*Skills can apparently be respec'd, but stat points apparently can't. Stats are required for equipment, and give bonuses like "melee damage" (actually 0.2% + 0.04 damage), "offensive and defensive capabilities" (actually 0.153% + 0.03 piercing damage and unknown bonuses to your super secret crit/dodge/block formulas), and "elemental damage and energy regen" (actually 0.153% + 0.025 damage [but 0.2% + 0.0 to DOT's] and an unknown amount of super-secret-but-possible-to-calculate regen). Sigh.

*The game helpfully provides a DPS number, but only if you equip/unequip items rather than hover. Does this DPS include your supersecret crit chance I wonder?

*Invisible walls, walls you can walk through, walls you can walk around, pets you can sometimes attack through and sometimes stand there swinging your axe at its butt for zero damage...

*Not seeing a "cast heal on self instead of the pet standing inside of you" hotkey. Also if you click yourself, sometimes the game thought you wanted to move one pixel and stand there, instead of casting, because reasons.

*Pets sometimes ignore enemies until after you've already attacked it twice, and sometimes charge offscreen to aggro monsters you haven't even seen yet.

*The Plague spell "spreads quickly to nearby enemies". Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't. It *definitely* doesn't if you kill the monster it was *planning* to spread to next, but even if you cast it and afk while surrounding by 6 monsters, *sometimes* it doesn't spread at all.

*The intro movie volumes ignore the Audio Options. Sound Mixer here we come...


I've read there's some good mods for the game, not sure how many of them fix the above issues though.

In less ranty news, went through Borderlands 2: Dragon Keep dlc with two friends over the past week, and that was an absolute blast. League of Legends: ARAM continues to be worth logging on for. Still watching that Dust: an Elysian Tail Lets Play, and Hearthstone streams.

 

Guacamelee looks very good, I grabbed that too after watching the YoVideogames playthrough. Haven't started it yet.

Skullgirls is pretty fun to watch (Peacock mirrors yikes!), but not something I plan on purchasing after seeing some of the execution requirements. 623AB buffered into 2CCA cancelled into charged 4619BC in a 12 frame window...yeah, no. I have enough trouble wavedashing in Smash Bros lol! Casual Smash Bros/Soul Calibur/Yomi are better suited to my thumb dexterity. As is Divekick, but I haven't actually played that yet.

And also, I should probably say that one of the reasons that I rant so much about (sometimes very minor) things in games, is that I know there are game developers and aspiring game developers (shoutout to the mod-makers!) reading these forums. If just ONE of those people are ever in a position where they're coding in tooltips and wondering if they should show crit% ingame or just leave it for the players to brute-force and post on a fanmade wiki...or make backpack upgrades permanently skippable...or let the players spend 40 hours upgrading a "fake" item...or make some spells secretly not benefit from spellvamp...or make taking damage not count as taking damage... If they remember my rants and make a more informed decision, then it will have been worth it (some of the bugs and deep-rooted design elements are harder to cure, but some of these are super simple fixes that I can't imagine what playtest group would have said "oh yeah we prefer it this way, ship it!" ) Even games I really like, I subconsciously catalog any disliked feature I encounter, and keep them in mind when considering any sequels/DLC purchases. And if I ever somehow live the dream and make games myself (a dream that died 11 years ago...), you can be sure I'll pay attention to ANY complaint like that.

It's also a "buyer beware" for anyone as OCD as me, but I'm not sure what % of the market we make up

 

I have Guacamelée on my PS3 (PS+ lets me have it free - yus!), but I've not tried it yet.

 

The same here. I don't mind having to combo a bit in the so-called action games (I had quite some fun with that in Fortune Summoners), but the best I can do in fighting games of this sort is a quarter-spin (236 or 214).

Well, not really, sometimes I manage to do a bit more. But seriously, most fighting games are way too complicated for me nowadays.

 

Mortal Kombat was the last fighting game I ever played. And yes, I mean the original.

I have no desire to ever play another one. The only appeal they have is for those with superhuman reflexes and coordination. I would much prefer to have to think for a long time before acting than to mash a bunch of buttons in a particular pattern with no time to think.

But to each their own.

 

Well, I do play some Soul Calibur 3 with my friends from time to time. Then again, most of us are on my level (we all suck, to put it bluntly) and the one who is really good at it isn't good at resisting pain. And you see where I am going with that, don't you?

But then again, we are like that regardless of the genre—if one of us is much better than everyone else in something, woe is that person if they decide to curb-stomp the rest.

 

I guess the last fighting game I really got into was Tekken 3, for the original playstation. It didn't have much of that circular motion stuff, mainly one direction + key combo.

 

I used to have Rock'em Sock'em robots when I was a kid. That's the last fighting game I've played or ever wanted to play lol.

 

Strongly suspect my video card is failing at this point, yeah. The game has some instability issues, but I'm playing vanilla and experiencing the same issue with several other games.
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Picked up Darksiders II on sale, pleasantly surprised by the game. Granted, it's not a DEEP game, but the combat is serviceable, the environments are generally quite pretty, and... well, it's a long game. 22 hours in and I don't think I'm near the end, and if I'm not completely sick of the game by the time I'm done I want to restart it on a higher difficulty, things became a bit easy/monotonous after finding a Possessed Hammer and basically stunlocking every boss and enemy to death.