What games are you playing and why?

Being the fangirl that I am, I pre-purchased Brave New World this morning. 10% off (so £18 from £20) with 250 bonus blue coins from GamersGate. Hurrah for me.

Yes, that would be quite good, though I'm not sure whether it's entirely necessary. I also think they really should kinda bring Cleopatra back - she's very much one of the 'faces' of Civilization, along with Napoleon.

No, it's one or the other now, but it's for each city. So you can have City A produce science whilst City B produces wealth, if you wish.

 

Me to (Except dollars instead of British pounds).

Of course it's not at all necessary -- just something I miss. I recently played a Washington just for the hell of it, and thought that while Minutemen seem quite appropriate for Washington, B1 Bombers do not. I also agree about Cleopatra (and if you bring back Stalin and Roosevelt, you really also need to bring back Churchill). And probably this could all be done with a mod.

 

So why is it like double that price on steam? Now choices get harder.

I'd forgotten how fun playing on the low difficulty levels was, hadn't played civ 5 before so I went settler. It was stupid how easy it was, and fairly fun in the ridiculousness. When I finally declared war on them I ended up fighting archers with modern armours, they hit renaissance while I was in modern, and for some unknown reason bribing them with 20k gold didn't get rid of hostile. Probably due to a bug but I also somehow got Kahn off Brussels, apparently the Mongolians are secretly European and they've just been lying to everyone.

I'm thinking I might get this but now I've got to look at gamers gate and figure out why it's half steam and is it worth it for not having steam.

 

The expansion is only 4 cents different in price ($26.99 vs. $26.95, at least in the U.S.)
Are you talking about the core game itself? Because I can't even find that on Gamers Gate, just the expansion. On Steam that's $7.49 or $12.49 including all the DLC.

 

I'm in aus so apparently steam games are on drugs here, anyway the prices for me. These are without the current discounts.
Gamersgate
Gold: 49.95
BNW: 29.99
Steam
Gold: 89.99
BNW: 49.99

So now I have to wonder why the difference is so extreme here at being pretty much double the price for not here. I knew we got higher tech prices but the companies can't seriously say it costs $40 extra to send the files. Does getting if off GamersGate give you a code for steam? because that's what it seems to be implying given the stuff I've read on their site but I haven't found a specific statement.

 

There's gotta be something wrong with that. But this is not the first time I've heard complaints from Australians about game pricing there, so it's not a complete surprise. Someone may have even tried to explain it, but if so, the explanation eludes me at the moment.

/edit Btw, I was actually really surprised by the price for the base game (or even game + expansions) in the U.S., since I would have expected it to be higher than that.

 

Steam is a US store. GamersGate is an EU one. They might work out the prices differently and/or not adjust for the market divide. I could be wrong on that.

And Civ V is Steamworks. You cannot play it without Steam. It says so on the page itself (where the rating, specs, etc. are)

 

But Steam isn't a US store, it's an international store which is why I get the aus prices and others get the US prices. Either way I got gold off gamersgate for $12.50 because of the sale and decided that's it good, likeable, and I hate it. Mod support is windows only, to get it running on mac you have to change an internal file which resets every patch to enable the mods option on the main menu, copy and uncompress all downloaded mods to a different directory to make them show up in the mod viewer, and it still doesn't always work. Consequently I hate that as one of the best parts of Civ is the mods, and Civ 4 at least supported some mods for mac. They seriously need to fix that for they're next update.

 

Steam is a US store. It doesn't give a dang about international laws if they can get away with it. And we don't get US prices in the UK. Deadpool is a staggering £40 here, which is more than the US store.

 

BTW, I also just found out that Steam is having a free Saint's Row the Third weekend as well. I've never played the game, I don't generally play shooters for a variety of reasons, but it's been strongly recommended, so with great skepticism, I'm about to give it a try (free is a good enough excuse to give it a shot).

I've also been dabbling with an RPG/Adventure/Strategy game called "Expeditions: Conquistador". In it, you play a Spanish Conquistador, and leader of men, as you explore and possibly conquer. Note that you make lots of choices in the game, some of them moral, some of them strategic, that may or may not be entirely PC. You don't have to follow the examples of the original conquistadors, but all your choices have consequences, and I appreciate the game for that. Combat is possibly one of the weakest parts of the game, and it can be brutal. Decisions that may seem good at one point, may have dire consequences later on (for example, I had two doctors on my expedition, I let one of them go off on a side quest thinking that I still had a spare. But that doctor got killed, and so when my men got injured, they eventually got worse and died due to untreated wounds. At that point I decided to restart the game from scratch, which is a pain.

I have mixed feelings about the game, and part of it is that maybe I'm just not good at it lol. But I haven't given up just yet. The first time through, I played trying to use diplomacy with the natives as much as possible, and while that turned out ok, it also didn't sit well with certain people on the expedition. So you have to pick people from the start that have characteristics that mesh well with the general strategy that you plan to pursue.

I finally decided to pick my crew myself, instead of having the game autopick them. And that's when I noticed that each crew member has like 3 basic characteristics, some of which are relatively positive, some of which are negative, and some of which can be either, depending on what strategy you plan to pursue. For example, Racists (yes, Racist, is one of the characteristics) might not fit in well if you plan on using diplomacy with the natives. Or Pious people might be great if you are working with the church, but might not be so great if you do what I did, which was allow a native tribe to complete their ritual at a temple and leave peacefully, instead of massacring them.

I do have mixed feelings -- allowing people to faithfully behave as the Spaniards did historically might be... educational, but it also is in bad taste. It's not a period in Mankind's history that we ought to applaud. And perhaps we should neither endeavor to reproduce it, even in game form. But then again... I have mixed feelings.

/edit ok Played about 30 minutes of the Saints game and it's not for me. I hate games that want to be movies.

 

Well, the half hour was about all I wanted to play of it. It wasn't as difficult as I thought it might be for me (I have problems with most action games), but also I really had no desire to go any further. I get that people like video game stories, and this certainly had a kind of a sense of humor. Just not something that I felt absorbed by. It wasn't a world that I wanted to explore or feel a part of, nor a story that I wanted anything to do with, either as a participant or an observer.

 

I played Saints Row 2 and 3 all the way through. (Saints Row, the original was console only, so I never played it.)

I loved them. They are a silly type of GTA sort of game. If you take anything serious, you will never enjoy them.

And the price for the full game with all mods is currently $12.49. Not bad for a game with 20-40 hours of gameplay. And yes, it gets much harder at points.

 

Some of the DLC permanently alters gameplay though (I think that Vampire pack is one).

 

I tried the game during the last free preview because I kept hearing how good it was. I never enjoyed the GTA series so I doubted I would like it. Well, I tried it and I hated it. I didn't like the controls and the story did nothing for me. I uninstalled it fairly quickly and have no wish to revisit the game.

I do like FPS game for the most part though. It was just this and GTA that I really don't care for.

 

But they're not FPS games. They're third-person action sandbox games. You make your own fun, and the stories are meant to really exist only as a progressive tool to get you familiar with the features and to unlock things as you go. In other words, it's an attempt to make the game last longer.

The closest FPS games have ever really had to a similar type of game is - from what I can recall - FarCry 2. Well, you could probably count TES and Fallout 3+NV in that, though they're more like FPS/RPG hybrid games.

 

I really enjoy the TES and Fallout games (though NV got me completely pissed off, not only because of the bugs making it unplayable in parts, but also just getting pissed off at the story (kind of like me getting pissed off in SR3).

BTW, I never said TPS, I always said Shooter in that you are spending most of the time shooting at people who are shooting at you. That's not the case for the Fallout games nor TES games. In those games, most of the time you are talking to people, and exploring, stumbling upon quests in the wilderness, and so on. And they have compelling worlds (for the most part) that you'd be willing to get lost in. The only time I've ever felt like I Was at a severe disadvantage because of my visual problems in a TES or Fallout game was in Skyrim fighting dragons.

 

SR3 biggest mistake was being there during the Civ 5 weekend,didnt even bother touching it cause i was more interested in my empire building.

gonna buy Civ 5 gold later and restart a game,the reworked happiness mechanic really kicked my ass,goes against your natural instincts to expand in every nook and cranny of the map.

since when does unhappiness cause people to stop procreating? explain that to me Sid Meier!

 

I didn't say you said FPS. LionsDen, however, did.