Portal was fantastic. The jokes didn’t work twice, the gameplay wasn’t really unique enough to be more than new levels slightly different. and they beat it into the ground.
Sadly, I never cared for HL. Banging a crowbar on every surface in the game also put me to sleep. I was still running quite a few quake servers back then and playing a lot of CTF and Team Fortress. When Quake passed, I think it was Starcraft and Diablo until Halo came around.
My “gaming” consists of computer card games, Sudoku, bejeweled-ish, tetris-ish, physics “games”, and sometimes (for shits-n-giggles) an ancient text adventure game (and my all-time fave, Vib-Ribbon, if I get the old playstation fired up)
(long-haired ethics people need not apply)
Thank god I just got a haircut. Sorry, DFW fetishizers!
Holy shit, don’t even get me started. Well, too late. Destiny, O Mother of Dinklage, Destiny. God, am I mad at that futhermuckin’ game. I have been stuck like a dragonfly in amber at light level 27 for, like, two months now. I am completely outta shits to give anymore, that game just took 'em all, belched in my face, and sat there fat and happy and utterly content to give me no satisfaction whatsoever.
Been a loyal Bungie/Halo fan since 2003, played and finished all six FPS Halos on Heroic (even the disappointingly crapulent Halo 4), and at first I was delighted at Destiny’s gameplay mechanics, honed to FPS perfection as they were by Bungie’s long years of fine-tuning the Halo experience. I could even forgive the non-story (though I am really suspicious about the circumstances under which Joe Staten and Marty O’Donnell left the company… those guys were too important to Bungie games to leave anything but crater-sized holes in their wake that simply cannot be satisfactorily filled by anyone else) to an extent, and the slapdash nature of all the narrative and lore presentation, such as it was.
But the game has become unplayable by solo-playing me. I’ll never get to do one of the raids, since I have no Destiny-playing pals (especially on my Xbox 360 platform), nor can I hope to solo a Nightfall Strike, I’m uninterested in co-op play with people I don’t know, and I really have no use for PvP in the Crucible. I tried a single Control match the first week the game was out, got my ass handed to me, never went back.
But the unbelievably stoopid and cruel MMO-style loot system is really what’s killing me. I can spend all day on patrol, having fun flying my sparrow and shooting at mobs, but the stuff actually required to get the Strange Coins and Ascendant Materials I need to advance? I fall flat on my face. And it’s not because the game got more challenging with interesting strategies or new enemies. Nope, there are just more of them, and they’re bullet sponges who can one-shot me in an eyeblink.
The fun is completely gone. I’m on my third mission for Eris Moran, and I simply can’t be bothered anymore, because it feels like a mission I’ve done several times months ago, but with enemies who, while looking almost exactly like they did when I was at Level 2, laugh in the face of my purple “legendary” weapons, which currently feel like they might as well be green. Or white. Christ, why does anyone like anything about this grindy MMO horseshit?
So yeah. Destiny started out fun, if fundamentally broken in a story sense. But I’ve given up on the damned thing, since it has become obvious to me that I can’t progress any further in the DLC by myself, and grinding to incrementally improve my guns and threads only to have them be insufficiently badass within hours… well, that holds zero attraction for me.
I’d be looking forward to Halo 5 if Halo 4 had been any good. Currently, the only reason I’d want an Xbone is to play Halo 2 Anniversary. I’m much more likely to get a PS4 at this point, but it hasn’t given me any compelling reasons to upgrade yet. I doubt I’ll upgrade to current generation before Fallout 4 comes out.
And yeah, I’m a console gamer. Never done any PC gaming, largely because my PCs have always been (until recently) quite outdated.
Gotta disagree. The co-op Portal 2 alone is a revelation. Sitting next to a buddy and figuring out how to progress (since you really can’t do it alone) is great fun, and both games were great for my kids. At six and four years of age, they were solving those puzzles cooperatively, and it was amazing to watch.
And I could listen to Cave Johnson all the livelong day. My daughter prefers the first Portal now, but I never get bored of the second, and can’t wait for a third.
Quake will never die. I hope.
I checked my ranking in QL recently and after nearly 2 years away I’d fallen to some ungodly ranking but I used to be able to hang with some of the guys that are now in the top 10 for FFA. Wish I’d stuck at it but 3+ hours a day to stay sharp was eating a big hole in my time.
I am currently playing:
I donated the domain name we used for hosting quake servers to the Wiesenthal center for tolerance to ensure the white supremacists and other jerks who wanted to buy “hating.com” never ever got it.
I miss the grappling hook.
I backed Shards Online. I had to. The design is all about facilitating the creation of multi-player role-playing worlds, small and easy to customize, on the model of Neverwinter Nights persistent worlds. It’s still in pre-alpha, and so far most of what they’ve designed seems to be a pretty much bog-standard high fantasy setting – but that’s a good enough starting point. I’ve got to get up the nerve to try to pull together a team around implementing some of my crazy ideas about online role-playing. At least maybe I’ll get an excuse to do some real scripting.
Lately, I’ve been playing too much Star Trek Online. I’m slightly embarrassed, as the gameplay is kind of mediocre, the writing is uneven, there’s way too much emphasis on combat, and there’s no role-playing to speak of. On the other hand, the ships are pretty, and I’m very fond of my fleet reconnaissance science vessel, the USS Caravaggio.
I’m also trying to get to my backlog of indie games, but my kids just got me Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel for my birthday.
I am still pretty early into my DA:I game, but I dunno if it’s ever gonna grab me. It really looks awful and it’s pretty buggy on the Xbox 360, which is disappointing. I didn’t play the other DA games, but I loved Mass Effect (all the way up to the last 10 minutes, like everyone else), so I had high hopes for DA:I. I wish it looked as good as any of the ME games, but it just looks so, so bad. Which I guess is the price you pay for squeezing such a huge game into Xbox 360 specs, but still. Destiny looks as lovely as any Xbox 360 game ever did, and doesn’t feel compromised in the least in any technical sense.
But anyway. I gotta get my shit together and get out of the Hinterlands before I can have any real opinion, I know.
[quote=“gwwar, post:26, topic:50828”]
You will die from such things as: not eating enough, lack of water, eating things you are not supposed to eat, drinking water you are not supposed to drink, freezing to death, wild packs of dogs, random monsters, or someone else that pokes you to death to steal your shoes.
[/quote]Sounds a whole lot like Fallout: New Vegas on hardcore mode. Man, that was fun. I can’t wait for Fallout 4.
I loved Elite when it came out on the C64 and spent hours playing. I got to within a handful of kills of Elite and the tape drive ate my commander … 
Currently I tinker with Kerbal Space Program.
Currently I tinker with Kerbal Space Program.
Yeah, I keep looking at that. Not sure how well it would run on my Box-O’-Crap ™ computer, but it looks fun.
KSP is more limited by CPU speed than GPU, so it depends. But you can get mods to reduce the load on the GPU. If you keep your rockets small it will run on relatively modest hardware and small and efficient is a neat way to play. It is fun and surprisingly educational as well. Plus the cute green aliens look so scared when their stuff is blowing up around them …
I haven’t had a computer for gaming for quite some time, although I always liked the Civilization and Final Fantasy series and the various Lucasarts games. A remastered version of [Grim Fandango][1] came out yesterday, and I am very tempted. The main drawback for me at the time was that the movement was kind of glitchy, so hopefully they’ve fixed that.
Yeah, that could be an issue…
Still, next time something buggers up, it’ll be a mobo, ram and CPU upgrade as they’re all long obsolete now.
But if you buy KSP now while it’s still in beta it’ll be cheaper than when it releases …
LOL. Not helping. 
Hmmm…a beta worked out OK for Minecraft. And it’s on Steam, too…
Breaking strain of a Kit-Kat, I have.
Ooooo! I really enjoyed Grim Fandango, lo, so many years ago. I never did a lot of PC gaming, but always build/buy gaming rigs anyway. Once in a while, I still play Afterlife (ancient Lucas Arts god sim). I’m not the biggest fan of FPS or RPG, I like puzzlers and stuff that’s story-driven.
Currently playing Little Big Planet 3, helping my son play Lego Marvel Heros and Batman 3 (all on PS4). Tried playing Assasin’s Creed whatevernumber (came with our new XBone) and died in about a minute. I might try that one again having watched my SO play for a while. There are puzzles mixed in with the murderin’, I might like it once I get used to the game mechanics. Still playing Portal 2 on occasion. Sadly, I was given the game and it’s for the 360 instead of my favored PS (the controllers are better suited to my hand size). Still need to finish Walking Dead Season 1, Last of Us and Lego Batman 2.
That’s disappointing, the PC version looks quite nice.
I would have to say that Mass Effect is the more gripping tale and it helps that you follow the same main character in all three games. Dragon Age lore is rather generic. There’s some oppressed elves, dwarves, boring humans, quinari, and blah blah something about an approaching evil, and oh yes, please kill some dragons too. DA:I is pretty huge, but beyond the main quests the stuff they fill it in isn’t compelling. Generic fetch quests, too many jump puzzles, and lots of resource-gathering… It’s like they were trying to add in MMO mechanics to the game even though you’re playing solo.
Yes, advance the story. You can always go back to the Hinterlands later.
I just finished ME3 (because I didn’t want to give EA full price because Origin is dumb and EA is dumb), and I was really disappointed in the writing. All of the dialogue and plot felt like they were written by a different team than ME1/2. It kept breaking my immersion.
Yeah, and that ending. Hours and hours spent over three full games, where every action you do, everything you say, and every choice you make has repercussions down the road, but no matter what you’ve done in those three games, it all comes down to “Pick a color.” There was some serious narrative laziness at work there.
