What games are you playing and why?

I know some guys who took 10+ 100mg caffiene pills(13 pills for one IIRC, this was more than a decade ago, when we were in late teens), they ended up quite shaky, hence the parkinson quip. 10x100mg=1gram. But yes, doses like that can kill you.

 

FEZ is unlocking on Steam in a couple hours and I'm very excited to finally try it. I love riddles, puzzles and cryptography so I think I'll spend a lot of time with it. It's also on GoG.

 

I finished Bioshock Infinite. The story is good enough to mostly hide the fact that it's a generic shooter,at least for one playthrough.
I started playing the new Tomb Raider. It is not good so far. Quick time events are an abomination to gaming. Supposedly it gets better, so I will try to slog through the early parts.
Speaking of 4x games, I picked up the GalCiv2 ultimate edition on a Steam sale a couple of weeks ago. I'm liking it a lot. I kind of missed the boat on TBS games in the past, so I'm trying to make up for it. I may have to try some of those classic games mentioned on GOG.
I picked up an Indie Royale bundle and have been playing a couple games from it. I recommend Diehard Dungeon to the folks on this board. It's sort of Binding of Issac-ish, but with pixel graphics. Also Beast Boxing Turbo is a Punch-Out type game with some RPG elements which I'm finding pretty fun.

 

There was a story a couple of months (?) ago about some kid who drank himself to death with Red Bull. Although it's not really clear if he had a bad heart or some other condition that may also have contributed to his death.

Almost anything, if used irresponsibly, can kill ya if you are stupid or careless or just plain unlucky. Unfortunately teens are almost universally both stupid (certainly dumber than they think they are), AND careless, and can be just about as unlucky as anyone else in this world.

 

Couldn't find the Red Bull story, but I did find this from a year ago:
http://doubtfulnews.com/2012/03/high-caffeine-energy-drinks-linked-to-5-deaths/

 

Moving swiftly on...

Avadon: The Black FortressPicked this up on a GOG Daily. Not the worst purchase I've made. In fact, it's pretty easy to get into and I've enjoyed what I've played, though I'm kinda thinking I'll never, ever, ever finish it. But we'll see.

Law & Order: LegaciesI don't know why I bought this. Okay, I like Law & Order (though I don't really watch it) and I like to use my head to work out logic and stuff in these kinds of games, but I've never got on well with Telltale. In fact, anyone who saw my Twitter feed whilst I was downloading the game would probably have seen proof of that. But I took a chance, grabbing it from the Telltale store, and I've already done the first case. It swings a bit between being patronising and then really picky (i.e. the cases start off patronising but get harder as they progress), and the voice quality seems a bit crap at times (sometimes it'll pop/click or suddenly change loudness/quality), and nor are the graphics particularly stunning (plenty of low-res textures and no AA option), but I have to say I am enjoying it and getting kicks out of getting things right in it.

 

I picked up NWN2 complete over at gamer's gate. Haven't played storm of zehir or mysteries of westgate before.

 

Oh well, this one is similar to Avernum and Geneforge, in that the combat is rather slow-paced and not exactly the best, but it is fair and good enough to enjoy the more challenging fights, and the story is actually fairly interesting if you can get into it.

The other game you posted I know nothing about, but about Avadon I could say this.


Oh, and if it's about games we are playing, I started replaying Radiant Historia yesterday. A nice game, albeit a few sub-quests (all of which you need to get done in order to get the best ending) are "Argh"-worthy, and it's a nightmare for people who want to do perfectly in games since you have to "mail a fission" a few times in order to progress. Also, the music is very nice.

 

Playing Fez now. My mind is totally blown. Although the game is pretty unstable, the puzzles and secrets within are amazing. There goes my vacation... Need to get everything!

 

Fez is amazing! So happy I DIDN't watch a let's play of that! It starts out awesome. I am on my 3rd cube, so still very much at the start.

 

Law & Order: Legacies - Now over half-way through the cases, and shamelessly keeping a walkthrough open in the background for some of the more obscure things, especially the courtroom scenes. But one thing I like is you can replay smaller sections within the larger picture as you go, and each case is long enough to keep you going but short enough to never get particularly boring. Got to say this is, on the whole, my first really positive experience of a Telltale game. Only issues are frequent sound issues (always an issue I've had with Telltale) and some slightly iffy 'puzzles'.

L.A. Noire - My first impression was, if nothing else, sheer apathy. I'd seen the trailers, gameplay segments, funny videos (L.A. Noire Gamer Poop 1+2, BenBuja's BG&SS video, the Official Outtakes compilation), etc., but none of them really showed just how bland Noire can be. It runs poorly, it looks frigging ugly, and it has a logic system that's a cross between Adventure Game Logic and a Psychological Disorders book. The main issue comes through the interview system, in which you're presented with 3 choices - Truth, Doubt and Lie. Truth is a fairly gentle agreement, Doubt causes Phelps to essentially call the person in question a lying criminal, and Lie brings down the wrath of every culture's Hell-equivalent upon them. So, obviously, it doesn't quite work. You can't have a game that relies on such an intimate system if it works about as faithfully as a BioWare dialogue tree. But otherwise it's better than I initially thought, and it doesn't seem like it'll take too long to do. Longer than it needs to be, perhaps, but we'll see.

Super Sanctum TD - An isometric 2D tower defence game based on the Sanctum franchise. Gets hard very quickly, and could probably do with a patch or two... or even an Easy difficulty setting. But this should tide me over until Sanctum 2 next week rather easily. And, yes, I've bought Sanctum 2 and its season pass.

LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars - I've been after this for a while, but it almost never went on sale. Last week (I think) it went up on GameFly for £5, I used a coupon to get it down to £4. I've done a couple of levels on it, but it's pretty much Every LEGO Game Ever Made Yet Again. Funny cutscene, heaps of uncharacteristic (for LEGO) violence, frustrating levels with no clear direction, visual issues up the backside, etc., etc. But, for all its issues, I have had some fun out of it, I suppose. And it's not like I was ever going to get it much cheaper than I did.

 

I fooled around a little bit with the Marvel Heroes open beta. Whether it's a true MMO I guess is open to debate, but it did have some ok mindless fun. As I've said before, action games tend to bore me after a fairly short time, so I won't be purchasing it. But I did have fun for the short time I was playing with it. I tried Captain America, and had some good fun tossing my shield around. There's not much to the game from what I've seen, and the prices for all the extras (Different characters, etc.) seems a bit too much, especially for a mindless action game. But for free, it's a bargain while it lasts. I will say that it seemed really silly walking around and seeing all those Thors, fellow Captain Americas, Spidermen, Hulks, and so on looking exactly the same. If it were April first, I'd think it was a joke. But it isn't. One of these days, there may be a suitable replacement for CoH, one of my all-time favorite MMOs. But this isn't it.

Also, I've been playing quite a bit of Master of Magic, inspired by the Worlds of Magic Kickstarter, and a little bit of the usual (Endless Space).

 

Played more FEZ, haven't had any stability issue yet. Cool game

Also really back into APB actually. Still very fun to go out with a group of clan and teammates and own ^^ hehe

EDIT: I want to install Neverwinter soon and give that a spin... but... I am hesitant.

 

BTW, on a whim, I picked up one of the Pinball FX2 packs on steam, (the Marvel Avengers Assemble one), which as 4 different tables to play on. I grew up loving pinball. I even remember the first time I played, at Palisades Park (which no longer exists). I found out later that my dad loved pinball as well, and used to play occasionally on his lunch break with another lawyer who he shared office space with, at this dump (some ancient, decrepit, hole-in-the wall, not even sure what it was since it was so long ago).

We also had this one ancient pinball machine in college in our student house that if you dropped it in just the right way, you'd get free games (no joke). On some evenings, a group of us would play it for hours. Unfortunately, someone dropped it once too often and that was that (I managed to con/force some upperclassmen into assembling a pool table as a substitute, but that's a long story that would take some explanation -- still, as far as my non-academic college accomplishments that I'm most proud of, it's #2).

I hated when video games replaced pinball machines all over the place, and applauded when they started to make a come-back. I don't generally like twitch-gaming, but I make an exception for pinball.

So, in short, I've loved pinball, so even video pinball gives me a surge of nostalgia. I was never as good at it as some of my friends (except for certain tables, like the one at college). But love is love. If you like pinball, you can't go wrong with this game. Just know that the Star Wars pack is bugged for some people for now. You can play each table very briefly for now.

One thing I don't get -- they claim that they have 53 tables, but they are only selling 6 table packs on Steam, with 4 tables each in them.

 

I have really been playing a lot of Dungeon Defenders recently. It's a good game and I have just recently got one of my characters to level 41 while my lowest level character is 15 or 16. It has RPG elements to it and is a twitch game, i.e. an action game. I prefer to play it from a first person perspective except when placing my towers/traps. The only thing I hate is when I am trying to place a trap/tower and there is something above me and it blocks my view so getting the placement correct is not fun. You can control the zoom levels while placing them but too close and you can't see how far some of them reach so you can pinpoint them directly. They should really clear the air when in the building mode so that you can see what you are doing. That's my only real nitpick at the moment.

 

I like Pinball, and I like pinball vidcons. But still I don't like this. I tried out a few tables in the free mode, but the physics feel off. So many pinball games get it wrong (for my taste), that I believe it must be incredibly difficult.

The free pinball that's with windows got it right, and the 3D Ultra Pinball Thrill Ride game as well, and I think there are others, but pinball games that feel right to me are rare.

Anyway, FEZ is really awesome Enjoying that more than I'd think.

 

I didn't notice it feeling 'off'. But at least you can take each of the available tables for a test-drive before you purchase them. All I know is that I had fun playing them. Also, from what I've been reading, the different tables may be tuned differently, and I've also read that things like your fps can affect the speed of the game. So that may be an issue (not sure). Test it out before you purchase.

 

Yeah, it is a good game. Though you'll get somewhat less fun out of it unless you have friends who also play it whom you can coerce into playing with you. And it would be nice if any one of you actually had any idea about how to command the whole bunch in the earlier waves, but unless you are playing on nightmare survival it's still possible to get done with it even if nobody listens to anyone.