What games are you playing and why?

I've also not been playing anything unusual lately, mostly a little bit of Dredmor (doing well with a highly modded pure crafter build down and I'm on level 8 now). Also a little bit of Master of Magic.

I haven't totally given up on Shadowrun Returns, but it's the type of game that I don't feel particularly motivated to play, and I can't pinpoint why. The combat isn't very compelling to me, nor is the story or the world itself. I did play until I got a chance to see cyberspace, or whatever they call it in the game, and it's also not particularly exciting.

/edit And I meant to mention Space Hulk -- it's based on a board game which I never played, but I'd always see someone playing it at gaming conventions years ago, and was curious enough about it to give it a shot. It also isn't particularly compelling.

I've been in a mood today anyway, so I'm not sure if that's coloring my opinion -- spent all day with my mom at the hospital because she fell and hit her head, and is a a bit bruised with a nice big bump. Everything's ok, nothing's broken, but it was just a miserable day.

 

Shadowrun Returns is hard to place. It has amazing potential, but I get the feeling it needs another year or two worth of User Generated Content to be worthwhile.

The sad fact is that Guns always win against Caster builds. It is largely a balance issue.

 

I think casting is actually bugged, which may contribute to that -- casters on my team are often unable to cast anything in combat -- even if they don' t move and are not being penalized due to a hit, and haven't used that skill on a previous turn, I get messages saying that they don't have sufficient AP.

But you are correct in that they are underpowered -- even when casting works, it's pretty much underwhelming.

 

Yeah, I tried a Mage first, but quickly learned my pistol was better than bothering to cast.

I am confidant this will be resolved in time, but why the game was released like this is a bad omen for the game.

I do not think HBS actually has a working model of what they wanted spells to be in the game. If they did, I cannot imagine we would have patch 1.04 and still massively nerfed casters.

 

According to the RPS review I read, Space Hulk isn't particularly great. As someone who's grown up with the Warhammer 40k franchise, this is quite disappointing.

But the £23 price tag was seriously worrying anyway.

 

For playing "casually" with friends it's actually pretty fun. But then again, if you do that with friends then you want the board game and not the video game.

And I agree that £23 seems like quite much for a video game of this sort.

 

:foreveralone:

But £23 was ridiculous. Not just because it was an adaptation (a fairly poor one, it sounds like) of a board game, but... it just isn't a game that can command that sort of price. It's like Bejewelled - you'd never pay more than a few pounds/dollars because it's not the sort of game that can command a high price tag.

 

Mhm, pretty much what you wrote. I wouldn't pay that much for a board game adaptation unless it was something really, really good.

 

I just picked up Divekick. It's basically the distillation of a fighting game. You control your character with two buttons, one which jumps into the air and the other makes you divekick. Both players die in one hit.
The game ends up being all about positioning, reflexes, and mindgames, and quite good fun. Unfortunately the lobbies for online play are dead, and unless you have a human to play against you won't find an interesting fight.

 

Been Playing some Unepic of late. It is an Indie game made by a single person. MetroidVania style game that has adult humor. I have found the control and combat to be excellent. That is all single player. Haven't played Multiplayer at all. May never get around it. The steam early access is worth it, and you can download a healthy chunk (1/8) of the game in Demo form right off his website.

http://unepicgame.com/en/game.html

 

My most successful build has been dwarf mage/rigger/decker. Rigger/decker takes all his weapon slots, but he can still attack with spells(with the 1 AP he usually has left after controlling drone(s)). Heal is a nearly essential spell, though you can kinda/sorta replace it with a bear totem.

Btw some spells cost 2 or even 3 AP... also they have range limitations, so if you can't cast it despite having full AP, chances are your target is too far away and your character also needs to use AP to move into range.

 

That's still a problem -- maybe not a bug because it's intentional, but a bad design decision at least. It would be better if it told me that I was out of range instead of saying I had insufficient AP. That would have made a lot more sense to me.

But still, that contributes to the problem that Omni pointed out with casters.

 

Been playing some XCOM this week (the reboot, not the original). I really don't know how this got such good reviews. It's not bad, it's certainly engaging, but it's shocking in its design.

1. The mission UI is fine, except you can't find your objective screen.
2. The base UI is godawful on every level for every aspect of everything.
3. The game does a terrible job of explaining most of the mechanics.
4. The enemy AI is broken as heck.
5. That 'free' turn the enemy AI gets is just cripplingly bad.
6. The hit % makes no sense. Somehow ended up with under 50% hit chance WHEN MY GUY WAS RIGHT NEXT TO A MUTON.
7. You. Can. Shoot. Through. Scenery.
8. I repeat #7
9. The game doesn't respond to the AI. Was told once they were fleeing. The enemy ran towards me.
10. The difficulty curve doesn't exist. You start on a hill, it climbs, dips, then balances out, then turns into a seismograph recording a mild earthquake. It's up and down like a kid on a bouncy castle, stopping occasionally to throw up.
11. SO MANY REUSED MAPSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
12. That totally wasn't England. Don't tell me it was England. I live in England and England looks nothing like that map you gave me, XCOM. Except the pigeons, of course.
13. BLLLLLLLARGHGHGHGHGH *foams at the mouth*

 

I agree, the original Xcom was epic and replayable. This new abomination is supposedly better in every way. But that is a bold lie.

The only real difference that anyone could argue is an improvement is that there is no need to use a VM or DOSbox to run the new one.

Plus, in the old one you could load a few characters backpacks with dozens of grenades and magazines for every weapon. In this, you may as well not bother trying to resupply your guys. They get exactly one grenade unless they spend a point of the character development to carry a second, and that can be done only once.

 

Grenades were worthless against enemies anyway. 3 Damage? Might as well save it to blow a hole in a wall or something.

 

In the original grenades were very useful. You could demolish an entire level with them if you gave enough to your guys, and you could throw them farther than you could shoot in the right situations. (Also, I kept at least one good grenade on every character to drop a turn before they died. Sometimes it paid off.)

 

I agree with many of your complaints, but I don't agree that it's 'shocking' in its design. It's more of a case of not living up to its potential than actually being 'shocking', imho. It was a fun game, just not one with a lot of replayablity. It could certainly have been a lot better. I'll comment on some of the specific complaints:
1. Don't remember that, and don't remember it being an issue, but because I can't actually picture it in my mind, I won't comment.
2&3. Agree that it's a bit clicky, and some things are easy to miss. Overall, I think it's not that bad, but that's no glowing review. A lot of the game you are supposed to figure out on your own and make mistakes -- but mistakes caused by missing features of the UI should not happen so easily. Certainly, reading a manual would have helped, but most people don't expect, nowadays at least, to have to read a manual to understand a game (especially the UI in a game). So I kind of agree with you. But overall, the mechanics are simple enough that I forgave them for that part of it (especially since I tend to be a forums lurker and gather lots of good info there so that I let others make some of those mistakes for me).
4. Broken AI? I can't say that that's true (or false), and I really don't know if it varies with difficulty level. Keep in mind that the AI also has a limited view of where YOU are, and that creating a good AI for a strategy game is problematic at best. It took MANY years and variations and iterations, for example, to get a good chess AI, and chess is a lot easier to create an AI for because of its deterministic nature. Let's just say that programming even a halfway acceptable AI is hard, much less one that acts like how you'd expect a human player to act (which would be a pretty feat in itself).
5. The free turn is not as bad as you make it out to be because they won't attack you on their free turn, and mostly scramble for cover or positioning. But it is an unusual design decision, no doubt.
6. I can't say if what you are seeing is a bug or not. Was that a sniper rifle? I do know that it took me a bit to get used to the fact that some weapons just suck at certain ranges, and I would forget who had which kinds of weapons and which weapons were which (hey, I'm not a gun guy). There are all sorts of things that affect hit chance BESIDES range and skill and the kind of weapon, such as cover, wounds, and so on. So I'll abstain on that one also.
7. I've never had that particular problem. Are you sure that the scenery was solid and filled the square and was at the same elevation as both you and your target? Some things you can shoot through, you'd want to be able to shoot through (such as storefront windows). I have had aliens do something similar though, and that is a bug. If that still happens, I'm surprised that it hasn't been fixed yet. But elevation does play havok with trying to figure out line of sight.
8. I repeat 7 as well lol
9. Yep, noticed that, and it's damned odd.
10. It definitely has some jumps in difficulty but once you know about them, you can handle it.
11. Agreed. I was really disappointed that the first DLC didn't add a whole bunch of new maps and/or map types. Randomized maps would help as well (although even those can end up feeling repetitive -- I call attention to City of Heroes as proof of that).
12. lol. You absolutely certain that's not exactly like a neighborhood 3 towns away from you which you've never visited? Just kidding. The maps don't represent any kind of reality. But wouldn't it be cool if they did? I'd love to see REAL parts of NYC or London or Tokyo depicted. Let's just agree that besides there not being enough different maps, that there's not enough actually INTERESTING maps.

I agree that the game did not reach it's potential, but overall I did enjoy the time I spent with it.

 

It was shocking because Firaxis are one of the premier strategy studios in the world. As in they have (perhaps behind Creative Assembly) the best talent and access to funding. There was no way the game should have shipped with things like you/aliens being able to shoot through cover.

As for that range thing? Concrete barrier, waist-high. Soldier on one side, Muton on the other. Had a small-ish hit chance, and he missed. That was complete rubbish.

It's not that I don't like XCOM, it's more XCOM is severely broken on a gameplay level. It can be played, it can be finished, but that doesn't change that a lot of the game either doesn't make sense or is broken beyond belief.