What games are you playing and why?

M&M X has been on my wish list -- maybe I'll wait for a sale. I did try Horizons a while ago -- I wasn't that impressed with it, though that was a VERY early version. It's probably been updated a whole lot since then so I probably should give it another chance.

 

Sat down with my PS3 earlier and intended to only start Journey, but I finished it (it's only about an hour and a half long). Wow. It's utterly brilliant. It's beautiful, when it flows it's stunning, and the music is amazing. Easily one of the better games I've played, even if it's not so much a game.

 

Well, just finished Mass Effect, the story's pretty good, even if the combat is bad. Going to start up Mass Effect 2 next.

Also cautiously started up vanilla skyrim... but it took me over an hour to find and implement a fix for the Talos-damned mouse accelleration. Seriously the PC version of a traditionally PC franchise is a BAD PORT. This is unexcusable!

 

Heaten! Mass Effect 1's combat is probably my favourite of the lot. The drastic change for ME2 does throw you a bit.

Not sure I'd call it a bad port - I don't even know if they ported it - but it does have issues with mice. Which is odd.

 

Definitely a bad port, it's abundantly obvious that the default platform for the title was consoles, specifically xbox 360(you can tell because of certain UI bits that mimic the xbox 360 UI, like the skill menu), the UI, and the horrendous mouse issues are telltale symptom of a bad port. Really shoddy work.

I'm not the only one who noticed:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EricSchwarz/20111111/8866/Skyrim_or_How_Not_to_Make_a_PC_Game.php
http://www.gamefront.com/skyrim-pc-review-just-a-console-port/3/

Oh and Skyrim's lead producer Craig Lafferty even came out and said the PC version is a port.

End result: I'm going to have to spend hours finding and setting up the right set of mods to fix the UI as much as can be in order to play this game with any enjoyment and without screaming in frustration. I've already had to download some files to fix the mouse(including a d3dx##.dll), and it's not perfect even then, I'm going to have to tweak it more because it's about 3 times too sensitive in the menus.

 

Easy way to work around the menu: Use the keyboard. Seriously.

 

Well I know the first mod I'm going to install after getting a mod manager is this: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/3863/?

 

Eugh. I wanted to but the required things for it really seem... I dunno. Like a lot of hassle and stuff, and I just can't be bothered.

 

I really recommend Cloaks of Skyrim for any playthrough. Also the unofficial patches fix lots of things.

 

I haven't played in a while but my favorite mods included "Deadly Dragons", and "Warzones". I also used SkyUI, and the unofficial patch, and a few others. I dabbled with one or two magic overhauls as well as one or two graphic overhauls.

 

I'm downloading mods now... that one is tame in its requirements/hassle compared to some...

Oh and I decided to go with Mod Organizer instead of NMM, and many mods have install instructions for NMM but not MO. *headdesk*

UPDATE: Installing with MO is a breeze. Yay! Some of the mods however are "special", like fake fullscreen is an exe and requires you to set it up to load on windows start in task scheduler.

 

I too had a boatload of trouble due to lazy modders making instructions exclusively for NMM. I was playing Fallout New Vegas and had to make a lot of guesses and manual installs and backups upon backups to get things working. But it all worked out in the end.

NMM is the AOL of mod tools. No one really wants it, yet everyone seems to have it. But that is not a good reason to use it. The difficulty of learning to do without NMM is nothing compared to the joy of giving it the finger and not using it.

 

Yeah I didn't use it for FO:NV either, I used FOMOD.

 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH

Just started the game up again and the ini settings reverted themselves! F YOU BETHESDA!

 

Can you mark it read only? Or would that make it crash due to Bethesda?

 

It's a bad idea to mark it read only, but it was partially my bad. I forgot to use mod organizer to run the game, ran it through steam. Still really annoying.

 

I highly recommend anyway playing through Skyrim again to take a look at Skyrim Gems, and if you're up to a bit of a complicated installation process, STEP. The latter is a way of installing various graphics and patch mods to get them to all work nice together and it really does end up being extremely pretty, but again, a huge warning that it can be a complicated process.

Gems, on the other hand, is a list of mods that work well with the STEP process and also on their own. I like the Frostfall hypothermia mod from the realism section, as well as various eating/drinking/sleeping and camping mods. What can I say, Skyrim modded is one of the best hunting/camping simulators out there. It's rather fun to just ignore main stories and lose yourself in the world, hunting for survival, trying to find a good campsite before nightfall, passing the hours in front of a fire...

....I need to go camping again.