What games are you playing right now?

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Liriodendron_fagotti
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Liriodendron_fagotti »

WHO ARE YOU
Continual disappointment is the spice of life.

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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by GUTCHUCKER »

I WOKE UP IN A SOHO DOORWAY, THE POLICEMAN KNEW MY NAME
HE SAID, "YOU CAN GO HOME AND SLEEP TONIGHT IF YOU CAN GET UP AND WALK AWAY!"
I STAGGERED BACK TO THE UNDERGROUND
THE BREEZE BLEW BACK MY HAIR
I REMEMBER THROWIN' PUNCHES AROUND AND PREACHIN' FROM MY CHAIR
WELL WHO ARE YOU?
I REALLY WANNA KNOW.
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Felstaff
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Felstaff »

I searched high and low for my CD of Soldier of Fortune. I still have the CD case, undamaged, but I bet one of my school friends 'alf-inched the creamy circular ROM inside many years ago. Like, 14 years ago. I had a sudden urge to revisit it, and I spent hours poring through my leaning tower of CDs in the futile hope it would be in there (hey, this CD-R has about 10 games I downloaded from KaZaA! I bet there are so many viruses under the shiny skin of this disc. I'm still going to install Episode I: Pod Racer, though). But alas SoF wasn't in there.

So I did what any right-thinking citizen would do and bought a physical copy for £2.00 from eBay [which probably won't install on a modern machine because early-2000s 32-bit games used primarily 16-bit installers, which don't run on 64-bit OSs], and definitely did not torrent a working 64-bit fan-treated Windows version from The Corsair Cove in the meantime.

Anyway, the script is laughable. They have names like SABER and HAWK and JOHN FORTUNE, which I think are names for G.I. Joe dolls. The bad guys, as a matter of course, have cod Russian accents and ridiculous tattoos (they are often shirtless and unrealistically muscular). The good guys have Selleck-level moustaches and voices with enough gravel to skin your knees. The gore is highly explicit and inappropriate, and even though the characters suffer from early-3D-polygon-blockery (cubed hands, weirdly detached shoulders, literally square jaws, etc.) it's still quite uncomfortable being able to blow off limbs with an uber-shotgun, or shoot people direct in the neck and watch the life ebb away from them as they collectively clutch futilely at their eviscerated oesophagi. (It's amazing how this didn't affect me as a teenager; I was completely desensitized to video game violence--I actively enjoyed it--but now even rudimentary 5th-gen graphics makes me squick out). It's a real 80s-machismo guns-n-'taches, "ain't-got-time-to-bleed", overcompensatory-weaponry, merciless-foreigners-decapitating-whiny-American-hostages all-out sausage-fest.


...and it's fucken awesome. I'm gonna play it 'til I'm in the Bosnia levels at least. That's how far I think I got, anyway.
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Felstaff »

Straight back in with the retrogaming, I managed to finally boot up my old, scratched copy of Wargasm.

The CD doesn't work (natch) and the bin 'n' cue files I have loaded up into Damon Tools no problem, but the only way I can get the game to launch is to mount the disc, start the installer, remount the disc (which makes the installer window come up), remount the disc (which makes the installation programme start running) and then finally remount the disc (which brings up a window saying 'Wargasm already installed. Play now?'). Then I can click yes and the game launches.

Yet clicking on the EXE file doesn't work ever, even with all the compatibility mode options flippety-switched ev'ry which way but NT. So I have to attempt reinstall and mount three times in order to run the game. Which is... inconvenient, but not a show-stopper.

What is a show stopper is the lack of controls description. In-game only controls are toggleable. I honestly can't remember how to even play this. I can manoeuvre the tanks okay, but why does the camera suddenly switch to SMART-CAM and start 360-ing around an enemy tank some five kilometres away?

A quick LMGTFM later, and I find out it's because I pressed F8 which changed the camera. I couldn't quit the game, because ESC does nothing. To quit would be Shift + Q. Of course ! That's what you needed to press to exit Prince of Persia back to DOS. C:/DOCUMEN~1/PRINCE.EXE
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Apocalyptus »

I'm doing some retro gaming at the moment, too. GOG.com had a special on the entire existing Heroes of Might and Magic franchise (of which I played the first and third as a young person), so I thought I may as well go for it. Buying it from GOG also meant I haven't had to deal with any compatibility problems, as they provide you with .exe files which work perfectlyon modern systems.

I'm playing the first one at the moment, and it sure has hit me in the nostalgia feels. Surprisingly for a 20 year old game, the graphics hold up pretty darn well.
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Felstaff »

I got Parappa the Rapper for Christmas.

It's still as ballsmashingly hard as it was in 1996. Though I finally made it past the chicken stage!
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Kaharz
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Kaharz »

I finally beat the android version of final fantasy 3. I've been playing it on and off on my phones for three years. The problem is that you can only copy your saves if you root your phone, so if your phone dies, you have to start over. That happened to me three times, twice while I was grinding levels for the very last dungeon and end game bosses. I'm still playing it because there is a "mega-boss" that requires a much higher level to beat than main story. But if my phone craps out before I grind enough levels to kill him, I don't think I'll try a fifth time.
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Liriodendron_fagotti »

Continual disappointment is the spice of life.

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Sahan
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Sahan »

I got 25/40.
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Edminster »

Christ, what a difficult game. 26/40
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Edminster »

Apparently Rockstar updated the Steam version of GTA:SA to cut out 17 songs and completely fuck up any screen setting that isn't 800x600, breaking saves in the process

also this was completely automatic and there is no choice to not do it

so now i have to either track down my original install dvd from when i bought it in real life, or download a shitload of patches to get it back how it was

wheeeeee
ol qwerty bastard wrote:bitcoin is backed by math, and math is intrinsically perfect and logically consistent always

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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Liriodendron_fagotti »

I got 25/40 the first time I played it. Then I went through randomly pressing p and c and got 23/40, so I'm slightly better than dumb luck. There were a good MAYBE three composers that I actually recognized.
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Felstaff »

I purchased Morrowind and all its accoutrements for a mere shilling and a few ha'pennies on Steam last week, and it served only to remind me of how decidedly dull the combat system is, how polygonal 2002 really was, and just how buggy Bethesda games continue to be many years after their release. Now I have Elder Scrolls 3, 4, 5 in neat rows on The Steamlist, I'm having somewhat of a renaissance in FantaRPGs. As such, I've had a re-go at Skyrim, (skipping my level 7ish character in Oblivion) some three years after purchasing it. Aside from Bethesda's clockwork-like suspension-disbelief interrupters--a single bug that makes things go haywire on the hour, every hour--I'm enjoying it far more than my last attempt. Morrowind helped me to remember that BethesdRPGs are far more simple than I give them credit for, and as such Skyrim is an easy game, with many intricate parts that if you're an obsessive completionist like me, can swiftly overwhelm the senses, making me not want to click the launch button with such haste the next time I open the Steamworks.

Also I don't care about the lore one jot. Morrowind made me snore/snort in derision the moment you arrive at "tiny fishing village" and everyone wants to tell you the damn history of the world in between bouts of insulting you as an out-of-towner. If I went to Margate-upon-Stythlewich (in the Eastwolds under Ashtonby), and just spoke to a random person, I highly doubt they'd tell me "there's been trouble brewing in Ballicester since magistrate Eran Millwendle disappeared mysteriously, but I'm just a commoner who hunts squirrels and mends teapots, so don't go pokin' yer nose in where it don't belong!"

Anyway, I found myself hooked on Skyrim. And it's about time: it's one of the few games I've purchased for greater-than-half-price (the previous game with this dubious honour, Portal 2, I pur-chased at full RRP! £39.99!) The only other Bethesda game I've ever played to its natural conclusion is Fallout 3 (I gave up on New Vegas pretty much the first time I was overpowered by an angry mob of dudes dressed like Caesar, some two-and-a-half hours into the game).

So anyway, I've only done the one dungeon-run (rungeon?) so far, the first one I suppose every tenderfoot tries out, and I've been exploring the area around Whiterun, and levelling up my character's sneaking skill, whilst paying lip-service to smithing and alchemy.

Much as I want a purely magicka-based character, I just bloody love sneaking around with a bo-an'-arrah, taking out bandits with a deft shot to the back of the head from the shadows. I have been this way for every rungeon-crawler and sandbox game I have ever played: pile on the stealth points first, sneak around, kill small gophers until I tool up proper and can move to bigger things, like badgers; everything else is an afterthought. Perhaps it's because in the heat of battle I tend to lose my head and die a swift death. So instead I stay out of sight until the opportune moment and plan my kill neatly. This method of playing invokes a liberal casting of a spell I call "F9", as I can't clear out a room of baddies unless I manage it without a single one seeing me*.

*seriously, trying to complete the "Surface Tension" chapter in Half-Life is a mahoosive ballache for a perfectionist.**
**and when taking the stealth route in Crysis 2***.
***and pretty much every part of every Splinter Cell game.
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Kaharz »

Morrowind was good, but too damn big. I never got anywhere because I was regularly overwhelmed. If I stopped playing for more than a day or two, which I did every week because I don't have that kind of time for video games, I'd forget what the hell I was doing and I'd have to play for several hours to just get back on track. It got real old and I never got anywhere.

Oblivion was decent except for the main quest line, which was total crap. Everything about that story was bad.

Skyrim has definitely been my favorite. I played it through twice, probably with around 85% total completion without any mods. I'm currently on my second play through with mods. I play in bursts though. Skyrim is small enough to allow that. I won't touch it for months and then put a bunch of hours in a few weeks then take a break again. The only thing I don't really like about Skyrim is the paced difficulty leveling. I hate grinding gaps in RPGs, but it is a cheap fix for that. Being able to do almost anything at any level takes a bit of the challenge out of it. But there are several mods that fix that. I haven't used that one yet though. Of all the mods, I highly recommend Rebuilding Helgen. Some of the voice acting is a bit cheesy, but it is better done that many video games.

I also don't care about the lore, but I like that they put the effort for the people who do.
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Re: What games are you playing right now?

Post by Lethal Interjection »

Kaharz wrote:Morrowind was good, but too damn big. I never got anywhere because I was regularly overwhelmed. If I stopped playing for more than a day or two, which I did every week because I don't have that kind of time for video games, I'd forget what the hell I was doing and I'd have to play for several hours to just get back on track. It got real old and I never got anywhere.

Oblivion was decent except for the main quest line, which was total crap. Everything about that story was bad.

Skyrim has definitely been my favorite. I played it through twice, probably with around 85% total completion without any mods. I'm currently on my second play through with mods. I play in bursts though. Skyrim is small enough to allow that. I won't touch it for months and then put a bunch of hours in a few weeks then take a break again. The only thing I don't really like about Skyrim is the paced difficulty leveling. I hate grinding gaps in RPGs, but it is a cheap fix for that. Being able to do almost anything at any level takes a bit of the challenge out of it. But there are several mods that fix that. I haven't used that one yet though. Of all the mods, I highly recommend Rebuilding Helgen. Some of the voice acting is a bit cheesy, but it is better done that many video games.

I also don't care about the lore, but I like that they put the effort for the people who do.
Meh.
With both Oblivion and Skyrim I lost interest.
Ultimately I found there were too many side quests/storylines for a completionist like me. I'd try to clear my mission-cache but simply arriving at a place would have NPCs trying to start shit with me, and I simply couldn't resist their pleas. Both games were too large of worlds for me to feel like I was anywhere near even a modicum of completion.

Arkham City, though, was kind of perfect. While I was disappointed that the end of the Riddler campaign only required something like 80% of the trophies, I still felt like I ambled along in the game while adequately forwarding both side- and main-quests. With the exception of the stupidly difficult higher-level AR training (which I occasionally attempted but never felt like I needed them for completing anything else) I pretty much finished the game.

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