What games are you playing and why?

Let's see...
I've started another Saints Row the Third playthrough ready to import into Saints Row 4 later this year. That should be fun, I guess.

Finished the story mode of Toy Story 3, was rather underwhelmed, but also perplexed at the difficulty/frustrating-ness of the later levels. But wow. What a hack-job of the story.

And this evening I finally got around to 100%-ing my Tomb Raider playthrough. Should really do a second playthrough at some point, I guess, though it doesn't seem like there'd be too much point.

 

been having a lot of fun with dont starve,one of the best indie games of 2013.

my current game is on day 120,its biggest weak point is the lack of endgame content,after you learn all the tricks and quirks of the game you could in theory survive until day 1000000.

but at 40+ hours played i already got my money's worth so i cant complain,the free DLC for 6 months is cool too,hoping they dont abandon this game too soon like the Terraria devs did.

 

Terraria's dev broke off for personal reasons, I believe. He passed development onto others. But Terraria - IMHO - is beyond saving anyway.

 

Oh. Well, admittedly, I haven't been paying attention.

 

I finally started playing Dark Souls this week and it's awesome. I'm slightly spoiled because I've watched a let's play back when it was console only but I don't remember much at all after early game. It's also pretty much the first time I'm using a controller so this is like double the difficulty. After two days I'm at

Spoiler

the boar, will try to kill him today. Some shopping before that would be wise I think...

 

I watched a "Let's Play" of "Skyward Collapse" and it looked sufficiently interesting so I just picked it up. I've been playing the tutorial and it has potential. I'll probably be spending a bit more time with it.

It's a turn-based God game, with one or two very different sort of ideas to it than I've seen before. There are two sides and you get points for all the death and destruction that each side inflicts on the other. The problem is that if one side wipes the other side out, you lose. So the goal is more of a balancing act where you are simultaneously building each side up while having them each fight each other, and throwing your weight to support whichever side is losing when things get out of balance. Each side has different troops that they can build, and creatures they can summon, and magical effects that they can create, so it's not a symmetrical game. Furthermore, bandit camps pop up that will spawn bandits that can cause further chaos, and there are random events (called 'Woe's) that I have not actually experienced yet, but can drastically change things.

Furthermore, you can't just sit back and wait everything out because you have point quotas that you have to reach at the start of each age, which if you don't achieve, you'll lose. So you really do have to encourage fighting, and destruction, just enough to meet your quota, but not enough to cause a death-spiral by one side or the other. At one point I just wanted to see what would happen, so I unleashed a whole bunch of minotaurs to create widespread chaos. I'm still alive, but if I don't slow down the destruction, I may lose. But it actually was fun to do that anyway.

I guess it's another game where dying (well, losing) can be fun lol.

 

Been playing through the Underrail alpha(0.1.8.0) several times, with different builds. It's very playable but the story just stops when you reach the end of what's finished. A few rough edges, a memory leak that surfaces after a few hours of continuous play and necessitates a game restart, but no major problems. It's very Fallout-esque, but the world is less open, and the story more on rails(finish X and Y to proceed to Z and Q).Character building is of the always short on points, hard choices variety, especially if you want to craft.

It's good and I can't wait to see the finished product... I got the desura code in some bundle a ways back.

 

I too own a copy of Underrail. It is still progressing well and the Developer seems to be doing a great job. But due to the size of the development team, it may still be another year or more before it is done. (There is an inside joke there, but it is not funny. It is sad. )

 

I don't know if I mentioned it already or not, but I managed to finally managed to get Civ 5 to work (YAY ME!). it was a really strange thing that I did which fixed it -- I turned the Steam cloud back on, and then turned it off again. No Joke. That's what did it. NO ONE, not the 2K tech support, not the 2K community, not the Steam community could figure out my problem, and I wasn't the only person with the same exact issue. And after over a month, I try something completely and utterly random, and it fixes it. What made me think that of turning the Steam cloud back on was someone's comment to make sure I turned it off (I already had it off because of Dredmor).

So, I've been dabbling with Civ 5 again. Finally. Among other things that I may talk about once I've made up my mind one way or the other about them (so many mixed feelings).

In any case, the original reason for this post is that Civ 5 is free to play (on Steam, at least) until Sunday afternoon, so if you don't own the game, and was considering it, now's the time to play. This is clearly a promotion for the new expansion to the game "Brave New World", which I was getting really pessimistic that I wouldn't be able to play due to the save game issues I was having. Don't take anyone's word for it -- try it and see if you like it. Some people love it, some people hate it (possibly because it's not Civ 4). Either way, you should make up your own mind.

 

Civ V > Civ IV

 

Lol, I tried to be incredibly democratic about talking about Civ V. But now that pandora's box has been opened... Well I will say this:
When I played Civ IV, I loved Civ IV. I thought it was the best Civ game since Civ II (which was, of course, the best since Civ I). I think that most of us will agree that Civ III was inferior though... still worth playing, but not as good as the others.

Anyway, When I played Civ IV, I loved it. When I played Civ V, I loved it also. But when I couldn't get Civ V to run, I tried to go back to playing Civ IV... and for some reason, I could not get into it again. The biggest problem was that I could not get re-used to the interface, and I could not remember all the differences and so on.

In some ways, I see the differences between Civ IV and Civ V to be a parallel with the differences between the old and new XComs. I loved the original, and I love the new one. But I don't want to play the old one any more, so the new one it is. (That said, the new XCom lacks some replayability... That's all I have to say on that matter).

 

I have no problem with whatever you prefer. It's a very common attitude. They really are very different, and yet at their core, still Civilization games.

I have been trying out a new Civ V mod which is really cool (unfortunately, it's also a bit buggy) -- it's "Civilization Enhanced", which is a kind of compilation/overhaul mod that adds all sorts of new improvements, units, techs, enhancements to the UI, and so on.

Unfortunately, it breaks when Aluminum appears on the map. The guy in charge of the compilation claims that it's only the steam version that's broken, that his version is working. But we'll see. I'm skeptical, since his version has the same exact version number as the one I'm running. But keep an eye on it, because it's a fun mod (it also requires that you install the unofficial patch).

 

I'm thinking I might get Civ 5, have to play it a bit more before deciding as Civ 4's pretty tempting with things like FfH2 for it and the only copy I have is a windows disc that I sadly can't use. It's seaming like Civ 5 is still good though even if it's radically changed, have to see how annoying late game resource management is with the new system first.

 

Civ V doesn't look like the alpha of a strategy title, which IV perpetually does. Perhaps it's because I've played V on-and-off since release, but I find the way it handles religion and espionage to be far superior to IV, too. The hex grid is a little limiting at times, I'll admit, as is the inability to stack your units, but I'm pretty bad at the military side of Civ. I tend to just go for the research/culture victory.

I'll admit it's tempting to buy Civ IV Complete on Steam, though. I kinda prefer IV's designs for Boudica (Celts) and Catherine (Russia).

Edit: Really want GOG to get Civ II, though. Joan of Arc, bishies.

 

I find that Civ V's stacking limit adds to the combat tactics, so I kind of like it.

One thing that I'd like to see added to Civ V are the alternate leaders for different civs that were in the game previously. So for example, for the U.S., you could have Roosevelt or Washington, each with different advantages. For Russia, you could have Stalin vs. Catherine. It wouldn't be practical for all the civilizations, but the ones that have had more than one notable leader, each in significantly different time periods.

 

so far im liking what ive played of Civ 5 and my PC can handle it just fine (still early game),but i hear rumours about modern GPUs overheating.

my biggest WTF was the lack of science/commerce slider,had to search google to see if it was a buggy or hidden somewhere,but there really isnt a slider there =O

what i like the most was getting rid of "stack of doom" tactics,what you see is what you get.

still on the fence on buying this now or waiting until the "Civ 5 for realz complete version this time" pops up.

 

For laptops, yes. But if you have a desktop PC with a GPU that has good cooling (meaning: a working cooler appropriate for the GPU which was installed correctly) then you are unlikely to experience things like that. Very unlikely.

But well, the one about laptops having this sort of problem isn't anything new - most modern games have this problem if you play with graphic settings above the minimal (which some games sadly require in order to be playable, like Supreme Commander due to low-resolution textures making it hard to distinguish some parts of the terrain and some units from the terrain; this game isn't all that new, though, but at the time when it was released there were the same rumours) without the inside fan receiving proper maintenance regularly and without a really good cooling pad (which doesn't cost much, but some people still perceive them as too expensive for the benefit) under it.