Man for as much as I avoided FPS games in the past, when I finally tried Team Fortress 2 a few years ago I found it to be lots of fun and amusing enough that I didn’t mind sucking at it while getting better and I buy the occasional crate key and what not during holidays as I figure it worth the fun I get out it and I know a few guys who work there so I feel good keeping them employed in a tiny way.
I have also been putting way too much time into Borderlands 2, curse you Steam and your free play weekend sale things. Just the perfect mix of scifi/weirdwest/darkhumor for me. Well worth the $15 sale price for the game of the year version and I ended up getting Borderlands on sale too when it was available.
I have so so so many games from humble bundles I need to at least try.
My only other addiction if you can call it as such has been ClickerHeroes which is mostly checking that once or twice a day and upgrading things and then let it go again and I have been bad at letting the kid know about that one so he is fiddling with that one as well.
I think I might be addicted again. Like riding a bike. A bike that shoots heroin into your brain an adrenaline/oxy-acetylene mix into your heart.
It probably helped that the arena was fulla noobies. Still tier 4 but that doesn’t seem to be saying much these days. Will have to go back at night when the real monsters come out.
Oooooh. That IS tempting, My favorite point-and-click, hands down - well, the Longest Journey does come very close, as does Sam & Max Hit The Road, but Grim Fandango is just superb in every way.
I’m playing Darksiders 2, Bastion and Catherine on X360 at the moment, as well as Borderlands on occassional crazy binges. On Steam, The Binding of Isaac is my current choice of drug (I literally have it on pause right now). I got it for 50 cents during a sale and have already played it 24 hours during the last two weeks. It’s crazy hard and crazy addictive and has so much fun to offer every single play session. I’ve been saying “just one last game” for the past 2 hours, but I can’t stop - I just got turned into a vampire!
To The Moon was the last game I finished, and it was… special. My brother praised it to high heavens so I bought it during a sale and it actually managed to surpass my expectations. It was beautiful, had fun (though a little too easy) puzzles and most importantly had a touching story that really resonated with me personally.
I’m waiting for my brother to move to a new apartment so we can start playing Halo 4, which he got me for Christmas. Halo co-op has been our thing since Halo 2, and aside from a few other co-ops like Perfect Dark Zero and the rare times my boyfriend wants to play something with me (which is not often, because he’s incredibly picky), it’s the only multiplayer I bother to play anymore,
I miss the good old days of playing Ultimate Tournament '99 in a sniper clan. Sure, women faced harassment online back then too, but now you can apparently catch hell for just implicating you think there might be some sexism in games or the surrounding culture. I don’t know what happened, I missed the point where the shit hit the fan but I think things just reached a boiling point - all I know is, I’ve recently been attacked for wishing to see richer, more diverse characters in video games (which is apparently “PC-bullshit”, and something about how women and minorities have their own things and should stop trying to censor men’s video games) and been called a fake nerd girl after listing video games as one of my favorite past times but then failing to properly provide proof, instead only briefly mentioning in the same post how I’m playing a game for the Nintendo DS (girly, so casual, duh!).
So, I’ve personally backed off and started pretending the rest of the gaming community doesn’t exist because it makes me feel ashed me to be a gamer. Games are my much needed escapism. My limited energy isn’t enough for feminist activism these days, so I certainly don’t want to be reminded of such personally hurtful issues like gender inequality whenever I want to play or talk about games. Ahh, I know I shouldn’t have even brought it up here, I promised myself not to think about this crap, I’m ruining the mood of the topic…
Well, how about that Goat Simulator? I’m loving it. I usually don’t care for pure sandbox games, but it’s a good way to let off steam and just fool around.
Yes, you can play with the old style tank controls (get a trophy for putting yourself through it as well ;)) or you can use new, relative to the camera controls.
That fucking sucks, I’m sorry that you’ve been the target of such bullshit.
There’s tremendous ugliness in online gaming (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.), and I agree it seems it’s gotten worse. Possibly due to the expansion of voice chat in games, which reduces the friction for someone to be viscerally hateful in-game.
The adulation that the racist and misogynistic jerks I meet online seem to imagine being heaped upon them is patently laughable. They are just cannon fodder to me, no matter how much they actually piss me off, I guarantee I irk them more.
But then, I’m not the target, so it’s a lot easier for me to mercilessly hound them into oblivion, which I greatly enjoy. I can’t imagine what the bullshit is like from out with my perspective but it’s obviously damaging to the culture of gaming as a whole.
Precious, naive, sensitive, stumbling, shallow, immature, repressed mental-midgets.
Did you ever play Lucasarts’ Full Throttle or The Dig? I love both of those point and click adventures, especially The Dig, my favourite of the genre (so far). The updated version of Grim Fandango might tempt me to finally play it past the first few scenes. I’ve also heard good things about Psychonauts, but never had the pleasure.
Damn! The Binding of Issac looks amazing, gonna go and get it now. Thanks for the tip, hadn’t even heard of it. To The Moon looks a little… emotional for me. I’ll take a look. I must admit I kinda just ignored Goat Simulator, is the point to just destroy everything or what?
The Binding Of Isaac is indeed awesome. My kid really enjoys Goat Simulator which I just recently figured out it is from the same studio that made Sanctum and Sanctum 2 which are a really fun mix of tower defense and FPS. I play Sanctum 2 with him on occasion now as I bought it for him on the last steam sale.
I just tried episode one of Life is Strange this weekend. Imagine if you sprinkled elements of Gone Home, Donnie Darko (with less rabbits), and liberally injected Telltale style gameplay. The writing can be a bit cringe worthy at times when it tries to include fresh dialog, but it’s well worth a look.
Bonus points to Square Enix for not wanting to change the story. In return, the devs did sneak in a line that suggested that FF: The Spirits Within was the best movie ever. Hilarious.
Square is basically the only publisher who didn’t want to change anything about the game. We had other publishers telling us to make it a male lead character, and Square didn’t even question that once.
Yeah at least I have found that the Valve tf2 servers tend to be quiet and people who do act that way get booted as well as even more so on some of the community servers I have played on. Mostly it is quiet and the voice chat seems to be younger kids who are told to shut the hell up. The one time I heard a woman on voice chat getting very badly hit on in voice chat everyone else was telling the guy to just shut the hell up and play. I think it helps a lot that I see groups of friends playing it together (heck it was seeing a bunch of people from a MUD I have been on for ages playing that made me try it in the first place). Can’t say it doesn’t exist there just that from my experience it isn’t the norm.
As far as with the in game stuff, this is why I have been kinda picky about what I buy/play. RAGE was fun but all the women in the game were eye candied up and honestly made me a bit eww about it (and being a hetero male I am not against eye candy per se, just you know it gets kinda pervy creepy when all the female NPCs are 17ish sexpot looking/acting characters) and apparently that was tame compared to some of the other examples I have seen. On the other hand Borderlands 2 has some strong women in lead characters while easy on the eyes are not over proportioned and fall more into the physically fit body type. The NPCs all vary from frumpy to big to cartoony sexy but they are all smart and the ones in control of who gets to do what with them. The regular background people all seem to be just people. Another plus is if you want to do multiplayer you can have it be invite only which is way nice.
This is a big and notable difference between PC multiplayer and console multiplayer for me. Most of the best of PC multiplayer games allowed you to pick the server (community) you wanted to play on. I’d been fortunate to find a number of decent and not-awful servers over the years for q3, q3tf, UT, navy seals, cs, natural selection, dod, tf2.
For me, community run servers tend to allow for more curation of the participation. As opposed to any given game of CoD or LoL, where you’re pretty much going to be forced to play with at least one asshole.
Lately, I like to play pixel dungeon, although lately, I’m really into shattered pixel dungeon instead. That’s about the extent of it lately. But I’m in the same boat as you, as far as gaming goes!
Yeah, it’s just exhausting. I know some games just have that sort of immature jerks and kids driving trollies everyone and calling people gay, but women definitely get “special treatment”. I’m sure it’s possible to find a safe place, a game or a server or a clan or some other kind of team to play with where everyone would act appropriately, but I can’t find it in me to actually find such a place.
I know exactly how you feel.
I wish I could just strongly take it on, but I don’t have the energy for that anymore. Back in the days of UT’99, when it became somewhat widely known in the server I always played in that I was a girl (I was underage back then, hence “girl”), I sometimes got slack for it (if I was playing badly, it was obviously related to my gender) and some players really took it personally if they got “owned by a girl” (something other players would say and joke about it, I never boasted about being special because of my gender) and would hunt me down relentlessly. I just ignored their comments and kept playing and doing what I do best; sniping like a motherfucker.
These days, in games like Halo where voice chat is multiplayer is the norm, I don’t want to either have to hide my gender (and never use voicechat) nor face the idiotic comments, because my shield is down, they do get to me,
I’ve played Full Throttle (awesome game), but never The Dig; I really need to. But seriously, play Grim Fandango, it’s a little slow to start but it’s just spectacular.
I own that game on PS2 and it is great. It’s a action/platformer with a crazy weird plot and characters and the twisted dream worlds and… it’s just really unique. Everyone should play it,
I’m a big Tim Schafer fan, if that wasn’t already very obvious.
Do buy The Binding of Isaac. To The Moon is all about the story, if that’s what you’re into. It’s an 8 hour emotional ride that left me in tears.
The point of Goat Simulator is to… do anything you can. Destroying things is just the start, soon you’ll find yourself having a party, sacrificing other goats, riding a bike, flying with a jetpack. Really it’s just a great physics simulator with so much to wreck, but there are also objectives (some quite challenings) and things to collect so it’s not all pointless. But a goat on a ferriswheel is not pointless.
That looks really interesting.
I’ve been wanting to get The Cat Lady, a dark indie adventure game about a woman who kills herself.
Is it much better than the first Borderlands? Because I already love Borderlands to death, and a game that’s an improved version of that sounds like a dream come true.
I stopped considering myself a gamer shortly after I started working in the video game industry. Watching game communities react to changes in the games I helped create soured me to the fan base.
I still game from time to time, but my tastes seem to have gravitated toward Indie titles (Nidhogg, FTL, TellTale’s awesome Walking Dead episodes) over AAA titles. Although I still peek in on COD and GTA from time to time, and any morsel Valve or Naughty Dog drops from their table to the rabid fan base below.
I had a great time with the first hour or two of Brutal Legend, but I eventually got frustrated with the RTS elements. Goddamn, was it funny, though. I still fire it up on occasion just to drive around and listen to the tape deck. That game was made for me and my high school buddies. I wish they’d been allowed to make a sequel.
I still haven’t got around to playing Brũtal Legend, even though I know I should. I’ve heard mixed responses, but a lot of it had to do with people not realizing that the game even had RTS elements. I think I’ll enjoy it, but we’ll see how much. I don’t feel like I have to love everything Schafer makes, even though he has made some of my favorite games.
Also, I just finally installed Steam on my own computer (I’ve been using it on my partner’s, which has Windows) and I’m surprised by how many of the games I own can be played on Linux.
FTL, Antichamber, Democracy 3, Monaco, Goat Simulator, Thomas Was Alone, Broken Sword 2… the list goes on. Yay!
