What games are you playing and why?

I'd say yeah, stick with Valley 1 as long as you are enjoying it. Valley 2 is a lot different in the ways that Kazeto described, plus the world map portion of the game is more of a proper strategy game than the first one.

 

Well I finished the Dominions 3 tutorial and decided to start a game from scratch rather than finishing it. It seems like a very deep game. What I mean is that while completing the tutorial gave me the impression that I know how to play now, at the same time things happen in the game that leave me baffled (I'll get to the specifics in the Dominions 3 topic).

 

I'm back into playing Hearts of Iron 2. Germany make Italy sadface. Let me have some of the French Pie too, Germany.

 

Playing PS2 again, this time got immediately recruited into the server's largest outfit for my faction, more organized play than before, also my computer does not lag to bits this time.

 

Tomb Raider.
Almost halfway through.
Enjoying 80-90% of it.

 

Sim City was just released so it looks like I'll be playing it for a bit. I've only been through the tutorial, and even though i haven't played a Sim City game for about 2 decades, it does have a familiar feel to it. Don't get me wrong, there seems to be a lot of new stuff in it, but the one difference that seems to stand out is that you can share a world-space with other players, and trade/purchase/give services, and so on, and that cities can be specialized, as a consequence of that. I can, for example, mine coal in my city, and sell my surplus to my neighbors.

 

And from what I've read, there's nothing stopping the person who's selling electricity to his neighbors, from just bulldozing his power plants and blacking out the entire area. Hope you collect enough tax money from your empty buildings to build a power plant yourself!



(I think you can take out a loan or something if that happens, but a lot of previews have been concerned).

 

Since my city was the first one in my area (I created the region(?) myself), I'm pretty self-sufficient. I only imported oil for a short time, and only as a temporary measure. I now have my own oil wells and am looking to expand them. I specifically picked the city site because it was one of the few places that had an abundance of oil (thinking that's going to be my eventual specialty). So power (hopefully) is not going to be my big issue. But I'm sure something will lol).

 

...Realized I've been rather negative in my past few posts (and I've had even more Planetside bugs since then lol!) so here's some games I've been enjoying:

-League of Legends, still fun but I mostly play with friends nowadays.
-Dota2, despite the ragequitters. Working great for a beta!
-Path of Exile. Still in beta, ways to go before release (but less buggy than Planetside for me...).
-Real life M:tG. My local card shop closed but I've found a group of coworkers who meet several times a month.
-Real life DnD. Sometimes we do this instead of M:tG. The other night, the halfling's head exploded.

Thinking of getting Bloodbowl after watching Totalbiscuit and Wowcrendor; anyone here played that?

 

BTW, there is a (sort of) solution to that. It's not a great one, but I think it should work. You can claim any or all unclaimed city sites in a region. So if you lose your electrical supplier and you don't want to build power plants in that city, you can pause it, and claim another city, build it up so that it is supplying a surplus of power, and ship it off to your other city. That, of course, assumes that not all city sites in your region have been claimed. In theory, you could create a private game and do all of the cities in the region yourself.

BTW, I learned about that feature in a most unfortunate way. A tutorial message popped up and asked me if I wanted to learn about taking over other cities, so of course, I answered yes. It walked me through the steps, and finally I owned my very own neighbor to my main city. Unfortunately, it was not (as I thought it would be) a clean slate to build on. I didn't realize it because I was only paying attention to the tutorial, but as I'm sitting there watching and reading, that city i claimed was losing a whole lot of money, and at the same time, people were miserable because of high taxes and pollution. And I hadn't done anything except participate in a tutorial. Now I have a second city in my region under my name, totally screwed up, and I have no idea how to get rid of it. I posted something in the forums, but because of everyone trying to post stuff at the same time, it was on page two of the forums in a single second (no joke).

I'm really enjoying the game, with only minor problems (like the one I mentioned). It's sometimes tricky to figure out how to do some stuff, but I still have a functional city, am actually supplying waste disposal to my neighbors, and possibly selling clean water as well (we'll see).

 

Just finished Tomb Raider. 92% completion, 75% of Relics & Logs found (+ <75% GPS caches), most challenges done, all challenge tombs complete, 13hrs.

 

That's short

EDIT: as is my reaction to that, apparently

 

Longer than Homefront's 3-4 hours.

 

Well, most games tend to be like that nowadays, unless one goes for the "sandbox" ones.

 

EA has been having server issues which they are working on and I've been unable to play Sim City all this evening. So I'll probably do a bit of GW2 and I did play a little bit of Dominions 3 earlier (somehow ended up with a race of amphibians with now units capable of range combat, or so it appears).

 

I suppose. But I don't think Tomb Raider could have been much longer as it was, otherwise it would probably have outstayed its welcome and become much more annoying. However, it is absolutely perfect for an expansion pack (which won't happen, it'll be DEE ELL SEA).

 

I think it's about time companies started getting sued or something. These problems are ridiculous especially when they are requiring online connections just to play single player games. If they haven't gotten the bugs out, they should not be shipping especially when the bug makes the game unplayable. I don't have the game and have no interest in getting it but I am getting sick of people making excuses for the companies that sell products that don't work when you first purchase them.

I also know that many of the problems are network related but they should have tested them long before they released the game. If it was unprecedented number of connections they they had very poor planning in place. I don't think this crap is ever going to end until someone gets massively sued for their massively unplayable game. Just my $0.02, your mileage might vary.

 

I won't name what I'm playing, but it's pretty obvious.

 

The first day the game came out, I had only minor problems, none of them network-related. And I was enjoying myself.

Now, I can't even play the game, so yes, I'm in the same boat as a lot of others, pissed off, etc.

Did Maxis/EA do any stress testing? It's kinda mandatory with big online games nowadays. I have no idea if they did or not. These things do happen, and based on the lack of communication from Maxis, you'd have to assume that they were caught with their pants down, so shame on them.

An example of a company doing it right, imho, was Trion. They also had insufficient capacity when the game rolled out, but they let everyone know that they were on top of it, and they rolled out an absurd number of new servers (even knowing that after a while, they'd have to shut those new ones down). The big thing was that they knew of the possibility, and clearly already had a game plan to deal with it, and executed that game plan well, and communicated that game plan every step of the way. (And btw, people who could not connect to the Rift servers did NOT get error messages or crash or stupid things like that -- they merely went into a queue. Queues are annoying but at least you aren't left in the dark as to what the problem is.

But you are right, far too many game companies do the on-line thing now without suitable preparation for handling the numbers, and no plan for what to do when things inevitably go bad with their servers.

BTW, Amazon pulled the game from their online store because of all of the problems and complaints.

 

Well, the problem seems to lie within the fact that large game companies seem incapable of noticing that very thing. We had another sad example with Blizzard and their Battle.net not being able to keep up with the traffic after they released Diablo 3. And yet another example with Path of Exile, although in this case there is a minor justification in that the game is free and it happened right after it became an open beta.
I have no clue how much, if any, it improved for Blizzard's games, but presumably they did something about it. And, presumably, Maxim will do the same.