http://www.amazon.com/Paranoia-RPG-Rulebook-Allen-Varney/dp/1904854265 I do know that Paranoia changed a whole lot over the years, including the general concept. I don't know where it is right now as a game, but I do know that game conventions still schedule many Paranoia events, so it still must have a following (I haven't been to a convention myself in a number of years though so I can't speak about them). The original, basic concept involved the following (sometimes with variations): 1. The players each had 6 clones. So you start with clone 1, and if he dies, the GM comes up with a way to bring in clone 2, who has most or all of the memories of clone 1. 2. The game primarily takes place in an underground, multi-level game world known as Alpha Complex (though some adventures can bring the players above ground, etc.) 3. Alpha Complex is rules by an extremely powerful, and extremely incompetent, intelligent, yet insane computer. 4. Almost everyone knows that the computer is both incompetent and insane, but also knows that admitting that knowledge would be treasonous. Thus, no matter how stupid the decisions that the computer comes to, players are invariably going to agree with them, because otherwise the computer would probably kill them. 5. Because of the insanity of the world, everyone follows their own agendas, which are often guided by secret societies that they belong to, each with different goals. Those societies are sometimes as insane and inept as the computer. So on any different mission/adventure that the players go on, every one may be guided by different goals that they will not reveal to the other players. 6. The most treasonous of the secret socieites are the Commies (only superficial relationship to communists of our day) who strive to completely overthrow the computer. Invariably, one or all members of the team, unknown to each other, will be a communist (yes, a truly sadistic GM will make every member a secret communist, or even worse, every member but one). 7. Another thing that the computer worries about are mutations. After the big woops that drove everyone underground and created the society, mutations have been rampant. The players, as servants (aka Troubleshooters) of the computer are dedicated to killing all mutants. Unfortunately for them, every player is, himself, a mutant with a different mutant ability. If you see another player use that ability, it is your responsibility to kill that player. There's more to it than that, but that's the basic premise.
Yeah remember that one, had fun with it (Paranoia I mean). Btw, with all the talk of it: tempted... http://store.steampowered.com/app/7500/
If the entire UFO:After* series were a penny it would be too much. They were horrible. But your call. Try them if you like. They may have been patched into a reasonable series by now. They sucked badly a few years back though. All of them...
Yeah I'll wait for Firaxis's version, try one of the open source games, or wait for UFO:Extraterrestrials 2. Was tempted, but didn't give in
As I said in post #79 of this thread: http://ufoai.org/wiki/index.php/News Freeware and open source. This is a good one. I played the 2.31 version a while back, but this 2.4 version is greatly improved.
The big castles do, after you finish a few main quests. They either get a fixed amount of new purchasable troops, or just become unlimited (horde). For example in the first game, after first few quests you can purchase unlimited amount of archers and guardsmen (limited with your leadership, of course).
Thanks for Ufo AI ! Its pretty cool. Taking the time to say that as the game just crashed and its almost 4am.
Crashed? Oh no... Is it buggy? Or had it ran fine for hours before the crash? The development continues no doubt. It will get the bugs ironed out. When I last played it was either 2.31 or perhaps even 2.2* and it was good, and fairly stable. It would eventually crash, but it was certainly stable enough to play through. I hope you enjoy it.
Its stable, it crashed once when I think one of my guy had an auto reaction during the Alien's turn and killed the last alien of the map. The game is great but I found one issue might prevent me from playing too much: The maps arent random !!! Argh. The rest is awesomely true to the original UFO (with the research being a bit too slow, but it seems to be known already !)
There are so many great games out there it is hard to say which ones are my favorite, so I will just talk out about my most memorable games. Battle Tanx - N64 Castlevainia: Aria of sorrows - PC Battlefield: Bad company 2 Minecraft Dungeons Of Dredmor WoW TES IV - Oblivion Donkey Kong 64 Zelda Orcarina of time - N64 Fallout New Vegas StarWars Old republic 1-2 Empire Earth - Best Rts ever WAAAAAY to many games to name, way to many. This has just been a small look of what I remembered off the top of my head. I have owned and played more than 300 games... I could go on for days lol
Soooo hard! So many great games I've loved through the years... If we ignore that games age, and become less fun to play when we're used to more modern game design and graphics: Frontier: Elite 2 was one of my favorite games of that era, and one of the most accomplished coding feats of all time. It fit on a double density floppy disc and had an accurate starmap of the entire galaxy(so accurate that for a time, NASA used it! Having Amiga computers with the game for that purpose. Because it was at the time the fastest way to get the distances between other stars, down to one decimal point, in light years). The entire graphical content of the game, down to the posters on the walls of the space ports was contained in a single block of data that only took up 64 kilobytes. Everything was procedurally generated. Awesome sandbox game. XCOM(Aka UFO: Enemy unknown): Another game from that era that is an all time favorite. It practically created a genre on its own. Jagged Alliance 2(especially with the patch 1.3, which is a community mod). A fine example of the genre xcom created. Fallout 2. Obviously... Gothic 1. I liked it more than the second one because the second one was tarnished by my play of the first. The first game required more skill, and I was disappointed in the dumbing down when I proceeded to the second(I'm specifically thinking of the delicate combo timings, something I otherwise usually hate in most games, paradoxically enough). I even enjoyed the third game somewhat despite its glaring faults. Baldurs Gate II. Quite possibly the best RPG of its type ever made. Nuff said. System Shock 2: Probably the best of the early RPG/FPS hybrids, great atmosphere. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Loved the atmosphere, loved the dialogue, especially as a completely deranged malkavian! Counter-strike. Yeah yeah boo hiss, I get it, but it was the best multiplayer FPS for a LONG time, and sucked up years of my free time. I guess what made it really appealing to me over every other FPS of the time was the tactical element, it wasn't just unthinking action, it wasn't just kill or be killed. I ended up getting up to division 2 of national league play... as the team strategist and sharpshooter(and later sniper when our old sniper expert left). Silent Storm: Because I love TBS, I loved the destructible enviroments, I loved the character comments, some of them bent me over double from laughing so hard when uttered at precisely the right time(Like accidentally blowing up a building too early, with half the squad still inside, and the engineer going "6 points from russian judge!", or stupidly missclicking and having my sniper shoot a squadmate in the head and hearing her go "It was hunting accident, da", in a matter of fact tone). Boo for panzerkleins though. Space Rangers 2. Has to be mentioned because its one of the few games that sucked me in so hard that the first time I sat down to play it, I didn't stop for 28 hours, and it was late afternoon when I started! Excellent blend of genres. Of course if you look at my favorites its easy to see why I liked it so much, being a mix of space trader(Frontier) and TBS at its core. Borderlands: It's a shooter, it's an RPG, it's a loot hunting game with millions of possible guns, it's funny, it's absolutely brilliant.
You know, I really have played thousands of games. And if you count variations of the same games, then make that tens of thousands. Every other post makes me want to jump in and say "Oh yeah! That was a favorite too" but I really would be saying that every other post. DoD is getting more attention than any game I have played in the last five years or so, so it is quickly climbing the ranks of my favorites. Suffice it to say, I have played so many games that I honestly have no idea if I played half the games mentioned. The good ones I remember, but the bad ones are all a blur. I have played four dozen different *Band games. Probably ten or more FuryBand revisions, probably 50 or more Chengband revisions. I have played few MMORPGs, and fewer still multiplayer games at all. But if a game says it is an RPG you can bet I either played it or examined it and decided. I think this sort of thing is pretty common for most here. PC and console video games are revolutionary. A hundred years ago I would spend half my time reading. But today I spend the average day reading forums, and checking on what new games there are, then playing the games until I cannot keep my eyes open. I have had 40 hour gaming marathons in one single game. I took a break every ten hours or so to quickly eat, take my medications, and use the bathroom before returning. I rather doubt any of this is unique to me either. We game because it is our way of life. It is what we enjoy. It is how we express ourselves and what we pass otherwise meaningless time with. Without video games we would be bored beyond our ability to understand.
My record is 72 hours. Not only that, it was 72 hours of skill grinding... I dunno how I didn't get bored and distracted.
I sort of live in a dark room 24/7 and just play games... Played well over a thousand, Love all genre's. I highly rate games that can take over your life for long periods of time. Great & interesting music seems to be prevalent in most of my favourites which probably has a big impact on my immersion in games. I don't own a ps2,3, psp, XBox, or the various Sega's. My favourites (that I can remmember right now) are: PC Castle of the winds Classic (though aged) roguelike, and among the only one's I've really enjoyed until Dredmore. Not as spartan as all the roguelike's people name nowadays, and it's free to download) Desktop Dungeons Beta (free to download the beta version, short but sweet) Everquest (Most consuming game I've ever played. The game is nowhere near as fun as it once was though, the full experience requires a time machine) Diablo 1 (Diablo 2 is nice as well) Might & Magic 6 Joust Lemmings (Various) Doom saga C&C: Red Alert 1 Heroes of Might & Magic 3 Little Big Adventure Alone In The Dark 1,2,3 & New Nightmare Pro Evolution Soccer 5 (perhaps it's gameplay has finally been trumped, but I haven't been looking) Half-Life 1 & 2, Counter-Strike & Source & Mods Fallout 2 (I find it hard to enjoy these days. As with Baldur's Gate & the like. They're slow games, and I'm rarely in the right mood for long enough to properly enjoy them) Far Cry 1 Lands of Lore 3 Driver 1 (Particularly like playing 'go for a ride' mode, with 'fast cars' and 'damage immunity' on. Still easy to die, faster action, fun to try and make good replays to save) Deus Ex Minecraft (Great til you learn too much, and the wonder & challenge is gone) King's Quest saga Gabriel Knight Grim Fandango Age of Empires 2 Super Meat Boy Warcraft 3 (Custom maps specifically, though nowadays there's poor diversity in maps) Commando's 1 & 2 Cannon Fodder n64 Resident Evil 1 Super Mario 64 (The revolutionary 3d platformer) Banjo Kazooie (The successor of SM64) Perfect Dark Mario Tennis Holy Magic Century Goemon 1 Mario Kart 64 Diddy Kong Racing Ocarina of Time (3DS remake my favoured version) Gamecube Metroid Eternal Darkness Super Smash Bros. Melee Gameboy Pokemon Trading Card Game Wario Lands & Mario Land's Mario Golf (The one on the gameboy colour specifically) Advance Wars: Dual Strike Pokemon Red/Blue (Similar to a roguelike in ways) Donkey Kong Land 2 Link's Awakening DX A Link to the Past NES & SNES Various Castlevania's, Megaman, Mario's, Final Fantasies, Donkey Kong Countries back in the day. Metal Gear I can't remmember. Playstation 1 Vagrant Story (Dungeon Crawler) Metal Gear Solid Other's on system I forget.
It's nice to spot some others that have played a ridiculous amount of games. Can start to feel like you're the only one, since us cavemen don't step out to meet up a watering hole somewhere.
Talking about marathon gaming sessions... there are primarily two games that have done that to me, for different reasons: Civilization (the first one) did that but it was so long ago that I cannot tell you how long that session was. Let's just say that I called in sick to work the next day. The other was Everquest, but for different reasons. And if you haven't played any MMOs or Everquest itself, you may not completely grasp this, but I'll tell the story anyway. I played the game for years, and eventually discovered that the guild I was in had become a high-end raiding guild. And I was a top-tier cleric with an epic rez stick (which was a nightmare to obtain, let me tell you -- anyone who hasn't played EQ, and who's MMO experience comes from WoW, or any other recent MMO games has literally no idea what hard-core MMO means). In any case, in EQ, when a raid 'wiped', (And that happens a lot while you are learning a dungeon) it can take HOURS just to recover corpses and rez and recover from that wipe, let alone get organized to try again. A major raid could take a couple of hours just to get to the raid site, make sure everyone was sufficiently buffed (and raids could involve hundreds of people, so that's no easy task), had the proper resist gear equipped (we had to have lots of different gear sets), that everyone knew what their job was, step by step, and for the clerics, I often was the one who had to organize and rehearse the 'healing rotation', a simple, yet nuanced routine for keeping your main tank healthy for as long as possible. Once you were at the raid site, if the encounter you had prepared for was deep inside a dungeon, it could take another hour just to get to that site. Then there would be further preparation and rebuffs. The encounter itself could take anywhere from 15 minutes and up. If you were successful, there wasn't a lot more to it other than taking care of the dead which could take an hour or so, and divvying up the loot, and if you are either in a guild raid, or a raid with people who are not complete a*holes, clerics and Necros and others involved, are reimbursed for the cost of their buffs (because each buff could cost the caster SIGNIFICANT in-game money due to the required spell components, and in the case of a major raid, that could easily bankrupt the average cleric -- and it did a few times) If the raid was unsuccessful, it would probably end up as a 'wipe'. What happens when a raid wipes is that your corpse and all of its valuable gear could wind up deep in a really horribly, impossible to get to, part of a dungeon, and you would be stuck somewhere else at whereever your bind point was (which HOPEFULLY was a reasonably safe location... or you could end up losing lots of levels and having lots of corpses needing rezzing, as you repeatedly died and were reborn into danger). So you'd need Necros with their incredibly expensive summon corpse ability to retrieve the player's corpses, and clerics with their rez ability and preferably, their, epic 'clck-rez' stick. getting those corpses rezzed, so as to minimize level loss. This alone could take all night to complete, for a major raid. So I don't know what the record is with EQ, but lets just say that whenever I hit, or got close to my record, it was not out of love for the game.