What video game are you playing?

[Underseer]

I just downloaded and started paying my first ever cell phone video game. True Fear: Forsaken Souls.

I'm very picky so I'm pleasantly surprised that I like it, the music, the artwork, the atmosphere and even what little voice acting there is. The style is horror/puzzle and they seem easy, but then I chose easy in level cuz I'm rusty I think.

I don't know what I rate it yet cuz I've only just started but I like it a lot.

If you like JRPGs, the 3DS version of Final Fantasy 3 & 4 have been ported to Android and iOS, and we're talking full versions of the games updated with 3D models and everything.

 

[braces_for_impact]

OK. I picked up Battletech on Steam, and damn, so far this is the only thing that could tear me away from Civ6. A seriously fun game and I've only been playing for a week or so. I'm following missions, trying to take some that are convenient for where I'm at, then using travel time to other missions while my pilots rest up and my mechs get repaired. I'm staying somewhat ahead financially, but I'm by no means rich. I think I suck at the salvage thing, and when do the really cool mechs start getting introduced? I want a variety to play, so far the heaviest I have is a Centurion, and I have a few medium and light mechs too. 7 or 8 total, but I rarely use the spiders or Cicadas.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Dead Cells. Not for everyone due to the difficulty, but I've been greatly enjoying it.

 

[Underseer]

OK. I picked up Battletech on Steam, and damn, so far this is the only thing that could tear me away from Civ6. A seriously fun game and I've only been playing for a week or so. I'm following missions, trying to take some that are convenient for where I'm at, then using travel time to other missions while my pilots rest up and my mechs get repaired. I'm staying somewhat ahead financially, but I'm by no means rich. I think I suck at the salvage thing, and when do the really cool mechs start getting introduced? I want a variety to play, so far the heaviest I have is a Centurion, and I have a few medium and light mechs too. 7 or 8 total, but I rarely use the spiders or Cicadas.

I exploited the bejeebus out of the original Mechwarrior DOS game (1989).

In the late game, you faced almost nothing but giant mechs, and I figured out that if you piloted one of the smallest mechs, you could run right up to the ankles of the big mechs and circle strafe their ankles. They were unable to shoot their own ankles, and so you were safe and could whittle them down at your leisure.

I would have one hireling in a giant mech and have him draw all the fire, leaving me free to use the exploit.

Poink. Poink.

 

[KeepTalking]

OK. I picked up Battletech on Steam, and damn, so far this is the only thing that could tear me away from Civ6. A seriously fun game and I've only been playing for a week or so. I'm following missions, trying to take some that are convenient for where I'm at, then using travel time to other missions while my pilots rest up and my mechs get repaired. I'm staying somewhat ahead financially, but I'm by no means rich. I think I suck at the salvage thing, and when do the really cool mechs start getting introduced? I want a variety to play, so far the heaviest I have is a Centurion, and I have a few medium and light mechs too. 7 or 8 total, but I rarely use the spiders or Cicadas.

You can get a couple of Heavy Mechs fairly early on, but I think the Assault Mechs are unlocked by a story driven mission. It is a mission to obtain lost tech from a system fairly far away from the initial missions. I forget what the mission is called, but you will know it when it pops up. Whether you head for that mission straight off after getting it is up to you. The first part of the mission is pretty tough, and your mechs might get beat up quite a bit, but in the second part you aren't even using your own mechs, so it isn't too much to worry about. Just make sure you have an extra pilot or two that are leveled up, just in case you lose one in the first part. Of course the higher level your pilots, the better you will do.

As far as early missions go, once you have a decent assortment of mechs, you can pretty much dial salvage all the way down, and just go for cash on your missions. In those early missions, a good lance to take is one light mech for sensor locks, and 3 medium or heavy mechs. I would generally have one mech on the mission with a crapload of missile launchers and heat sinks (kit that centurion out with as many missile launchers, missiles, and heat sinks as it can hold), one melee mech (usually your heaviest mech), and one with good medium range firepower. In your mech bay you will probably want to shoot for a couple each of the first three (sensor lock, missile, and melee) so that you don't spend too much time waiting on repairs, and 3 or 4 of the medium range mechs with different weapon configurations so you can swap them out depending on the mission environment. Take care though, the enemy tonnage is dependent on the tonnage you select for your lance, so taking all heavy mechs will ensure that you are facing the toughest mechs in return. Missions against pirates are generally the easiest missions, with the mechs you are facing already beat up, so you can target those missions in the early game while you level up your pilots.

 

[Emily Lake]

I finished up routes A, B, and C of Nier Automata. It was fun... and very Japanese. There’s definitely a bit of a cultural gap for me but that didn’t make it any less enjoyable, just a bit less understandable.

Just started Shadow of the Tomb Raider a couple days ago. So far it’s perfectly Tomb Raiderish. I’m just not sure why they made Lara less attractive. She always looks like she’s stuck between a pout and a bad smell.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Well someone has to be playing the kiddie games, I beat Lego City Undercover. Now the question is how OCD will I be about finding stuff. You beat the game and you are something like 0.0184% complete with the game.

You found an off-green pixel! Just 1736 more of them to find.

Yipes!

 

[Mumbles]

Well someone has to be playing the kiddie games, I beat Lego City Undercover. Now the question is how OCD will I be about finding stuff. You beat the game and you are something like 0.0184% complete with the game.

You found an off-green pixel! Just 1736 more of them to find.

Yipes!

The Lego games tend to be like this. They're easygoing action/collectathons. How much you do, depending on what platform you're on, depends on how much you want to collect trophies/achievements/whatever. I've found the ones I've played to be fun enough - not a major challenge but something to do, often based on a familiar movie or series with some extra humor thrown in, but not something I'd need to play too often.

Anyway, I've had *some* time with PS4 Spiderman, and from what little I've played, it's a lot of fun, much like the Arkham trilogy if anyone remembers those. I like the idea that you can buy upgrades based on non-story combats, old backpacks Parker has laid around, and story progression. Admittedly, between Splatoon 2, and Octopath Traveller, I haven't gotten very far at all. One enourmous benefit is being able to adjust difficulty, adjust things to make them easier to see, turn off quicktime events, and so forth.

 

[Patooka]

Ugh, quicktime events.

 

[KeepTalking]

Pathfinder: Kingmaker

If you don't know, Pathfinder is a pencil and paper roll playing game, based on the 3.5 edition of Dungeons & Dragons. When it was first introduced it was often referred to as D&D 3.75, so now you know.

Kingmaker is a computer RPG in the mold of Baldur's Gate. You assemble a party of characters, and head off to explore untamed lands, exploring 2D maps from an isometric perspective, encountering monsters, NPCs, and the like to kill, befriend or extract information, depending on the situation. At least that is the way Kingmaker starts out, though you start out alone, as a single character, and gradually assemble your party from characters you meet along the way. It can actually take a bit of time to find a full party of 6 characters, and you will spend 2 or 3 levels with a party of just 3 to 4 characters, depending on the choices you make. After a certain point in the game, however, you are gifted with a Barony, and this is where Kingmaker diverges from a fairly straightforward clone of Baldur's Gate.

As a Baron, you must now actually guide the growth and governance of your Barony, while still sallying forth from your stronghold to find adventure and fortune. For your Barony to thrive, and eventually become a Kingdom (hence the name 'Kingmaker'), you will need to choose advisors, build towns and cities, expand your territory, fight off threats, and make a variety of other decisions. It adds a level of complexity that can be daunting when you first become a Baron, but you can actually set your Barony to automatic governance and avoid pretty much all of that extra overhead.

In my play through so far, I have just gotten my Barony going, and expanded into one nearby territory. The basic exploration and combat gameplay is just about what you would expect from a game using Baldur's Gate as its main inspiration. The combat is real time, but it allow you to pause at any time to issue orders to your party. Underlying the real time combat, however, is the Pathfinder turn-based combat system. Any action taken is shown in a console, and that action can be left clicked to see the dice rolls that were made to determine the result. For a fan of the tabletop RPG, it is a neat little option that allows you gain more insight into the game mechanics, and can provide a lot of good information to make decisions like "should I run, or fight?"

The game provides tutorials throughout the beginning, and actually quite a way into the game. Unfortunately, the tutorials are just okay, and it will take a bit to get used to controlling your party in combat. There are a lot of options that aren't even covered in the tutorials, and the tutorials themselves are fairly bare bones, consisting of pop-up dialogs that simply provide information as you play through the game. Fortunately, you can revisit all of that information in the encyclopedia tab of the interface (this actually took me a bit to figure out, and should have been covered in the very first tutorial). The fact that the game starts you out with a small party, and gradually builds up from there helps to get used to the combat controls, but there were a few things that it took entirely too long for me to figure out, and which should have really been included in the tutorials, like how to change your memorized spells for the day. For someone with a good amount of experience with this kind of RPG, it's not that big of a deal, but I could see it becoming a problem for someone who is new to the genre.

As noted previously, things get a bit daunting, even for the experience Baldur's Gate player, once the Barony management comes into play. The tutorials are even more lacking in this phase of the game, and you will have to glean some of the necessary information from quests you are given. Even at that, it doesn't take too long to get the feel for how to manage your Barony, but I feel that I might have lost a bit of time here and there because I was not sure how to accomplish certain things.

It is very open ended when it comes to exploration, which can lead to blundering into some impossible to beat set piece encounters. There are also random encounters as you explore, and initially there were some balance issues with these encounters, making them too tough. This was often magnified by your party being fairly beat up and heading back to town to heal up when hitting a random. At low level you will seldom be able to avoid those random encounters, and this led to a total party kill on a couple of occasions for me. The devs have patched things to make the random encounters more balanced, and as you level up you should be able to avoid the encounters most of the time.

I am enjoying the game immensely, and it has supplanted all other games for the time being, and probably for some time to come. It seems that there is a lot of content, and I have barely scratched the surface. If you are a fan of Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Planescape: Torment, or any of the similar D&D CRPGs in that mold, you should enjoy Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

 

[Emily Lake]

Ugh, quicktime events.

Double ugh.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Mumbles]

Ugh, quicktime events.

I hate them, too. That's why being able to just opt out, as a preference, is a great idea. "Just assume that I succeed all of them, thanks, I like actual gameplay."

Also, I don't care what Sony or Marvel say, Spidey's a mass murderer in his game.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Well someone has to be playing the kiddie games, I beat Lego City Undercover. Now the question is how OCD will I be about finding stuff. You beat the game and you are something like 0.0184% complete with the game.

You found an off-green pixel! Just 1736 more of them to find.

Yipes!

The Lego games tend to be like this. They're easygoing action/collectathons. How much you do, depending on what platform you're on, depends on how much you want to collect trophies/achievements/whatever. I've found the ones I've played to be fun enough - not a major challenge but something to do, often based on a familiar movie or series with some extra humor thrown in, but not something I'd need to play too often.

Anyway, I've had *some* time with PS4 Spiderman, and from what little I've played, it's a lot of fun, much like the Arkham trilogy if anyone remembers those. I like the idea that you can buy upgrades based on non-story combats, old backpacks Parker has laid around, and story progression. Admittedly, between Splatoon 2, and Octopath Traveller, I haven't gotten very far at all. One enourmous benefit is being able to adjust difficulty, adjust things to make them easier to see, turn off quicktime events, and so forth.

Seriously, how valuable can a gold brick be worth if there are over 400 of them? There are 10% of that number of regular old red bricks!

 

[Patooka]

Just started playing XCOM: Tactical Legacy Pack. It's a great homage to the XCOM franchise. It's free and the UFO: Enemy Unknown music is very reminiscent and also a bit John Carpenter-ish, which is highly appropriate. I'k going to lose many hours on this DLC.

 

[Patooka]

Well, that's a disappointment. A HUUUUUUUGGGGGEEEEE disappointment. Fallout 76 turns out to be an online multiplayer thing. Thanks but no thanks.

On the topic of Fallout 76:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h14txWvqL5w[/youtube]

Long story short, it looks as though it will be as popular and successful as Mass Effect: Andromeda. Multiplayer games don't interest me, but I think the negativity of this game will cripple the Fallout franchise as a whole. A shame.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Just revisited "The Stanley Parable" and "Thomas was Alone". Both are small Indy games that are... I guess philosophical would be the word? Highly recommend them.

PS - though now banned from half the forum (for saying "smile"), it is nice to see I can still post here.

 

[Underseer]

Normally when I get a new Civ game, I obsessively read multiple message boards to learn every possible tip. Not this time. With Civilization 6, I've studiously avoided learning things about the game mechanics, and so I'm bumbling and clueless.

Anyway, stuff it took me far too long to learn:

• Loyalty spreads like religion, that is to say, pay attention to city spacing. Normally, you want cities to be 5 tiles apart so that each city gets more tiles that can be worked, but at certain locations, you want cities to be the minimum 4 tiles apart so that you get greater "loyalty pressure" or "religious pressure" at those points. I learned that about religion in past civ games, but it took me too long to apply that to loyalty in Civ 6.
• In the previous Civ 5, it was reasonable to avoid conquering other civilizations entirely given the whole "tall vs wide" thing. Having more cities came with certain advantages, but it also came with disadvantages, so if you wanted a science victory, you need to expand in the early game as rapidly as possible until you encountered other civilizations, then hunker down and build up your existing cities as rapidly as possible for both science and production, with just enough defense to stave off any invasions by other countries. Since players complained about the penalties incurred by large civilizations, this time there are none (to speak of). Thus, you want as many cities as possible and you want those cities to be as populous as possible to maximize your science output. That means at minimum you want to conquer every civilization on your continent (if you're playing on a huge map with continents).
• At first, I wasn't going on a mad conquest/expansion mission early to mid-game. This means that I got quickly annoyed with religion entirely, because leaving other civs to develop on your own continent eventually means that one of them will go for a religious victory and send herds of apostles to convert all your holy districts and make it impossible for you to spread your religion. This annoyed me, so I ignored religion entirely as I felt it took too much effort away from conquering cities and developing science/production. It took me far to long to figure out that if you are militarily aggressive and steadily wipe out all the other civilizations on your continent, you never really have to deal with giant herds of apostles, and it's more than reasonable to develop a religion so you can benefit from certain religious bonuses.
• Playing Trajan all the time has made me extremely lazy about developing proper trade networks.

 

[Underseer]

Well, that's a disappointment. A HUUUUUUUGGGGGEEEEE disappointment. Fallout 76 turns out to be an online multiplayer thing. Thanks but no thanks.

On the topic of Fallout 76:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h14txWvqL5w[/youtube]

Long story short, it looks as though it will be as popular and successful as Mass Effect: Andromeda. Multiplayer games don't interest me, but I think the negativity of this game will cripple the Fallout franchise as a whole. A shame.

It's funny. Back when Fallout 1 and 2 were out and the 1^st generation of MMORPGs were out, I begged for a MMORPG version of Fallout.

Now that I'm familiar with the sleazy Skinner box design elements used in MMORPGs to addict people (to which I'm particularly vulnerable), and since the entire games industry has fallen to various levels of sleazy monetization tactics, the idea of any kind of multiplayer Fallout has soured on me considerably.

Of course, I didn't finish Fallout 3 and never bought Fallout 4 because I just don't like these modern no-party solo RPG games. It's just not as fun.

 

[Emily Lake]

I don't think calling games skinner boxes in a pejorative sense is really apt. Yes, many games use randomized reward systems... because a great many humans enjoy and like that sort of thing. I don't think it's limited to video games anyway. Part of what makes operant conditioning so powerful is that it is how we learn - it's how our brains are wired. It's why so many people enjoy sports, or card games, or rock climbing, or having pointless arguments with assholes on the internet . When it works well, when you get it right, when you best your opponent, when you finally see that elusive Stellar's Jay, when you hit the sweet spot on your golf swing, when you exactly the right stride while running and it feels effortless... all of those experiences are how we learn, and the dopamine reward for successful learning is probably a large part of why we've evolved to the level of sophistication and complexity that we have.

Operant conditioning isn't addiction. It might be that you don't care for those sorts of games - I definitely don't, but not because of the randomized reward element, I just don't like interacting with all those other people and would much rather explore solo. But you not clicking with it doesn't mean that they're somehow nefarious. Even being particularly susceptible to the multi-player paradigm in terms of obsessiveness or a feeling of obligation* doesn't make them nefarious (I nearly flunked out of a semester of college playing a MUDD, way back before they even had graphics, so i feel that one pretty closely). [*And it might also be that you personally, are very susceptible to dopamine dosing in your own brain, in a way that negatively affects your life.]

The pay-to-play monetization of games does piss me off. Lots of people don't seem to mind, but I don't like it. And that's okay - just because I don't like something doesn't mean that nobody else should like it either or that it's somehow bad. For me, the monetization interrupts my immersion... but I also know that a great many people find it perfectly acceptable. I don't generally like the kinds of games that employ a lot of monetization, even without the added element of pay-to-play - I've never liked gambling and especially not slot machines.

A lot of games monetize specific elements that make the gameplay easier... and I usually dislike that as well. I soured on Elder Scrolls Online in very, very short order in part because of that. In order to craft items you need a LOT of supplies, and you need to go through many many layers of crafting to get from the basic element that you collected to the refined version that you need to actually upgrade the sword. And storage is limited, and if you want more storage you have to buy it, and so on. To me, it distracts from the game play by being overly complex. But for a lot of people, it's more realistic. Hell, if you want to drive your car, you can't just go dig a hole and collect some crude oil from the ground and be on your merry way - the degree of refinement and processing involved in almost everything in the real world is complicated, and this particular game mechanic mimics that.

The same mechanic exists in Witcher 3, where to upgrade to the best armor and weapons takes a crap-ton of materials, gold, and time. For me, the difference was that collecting the materials was in-stream with the game, and on the few occasions where I needed a specific item to complete an upgrade, I could flag it as a 'quest' of its own. Plus, unlimited storage. So for me, ESO fell down partly because of the storage limitations... but mostly because of all the other goddamned people in my way running through my screen while I'm trying to play a fucking game!!!!111!1

Anyway... That's a very long-winded way of saying that writing off an entire genre of games by applying a derisive technical label to them just because you don't like them is rather presumptuous, and is wholly unnecessary. It's right up there with insisting that anyone who disagrees with (the general) you is doing so because it's Dunning-Kruger... Because of course if they were only smarter and knew what they were talking about, then of course they'd agree

***Note that the last bit is NOT directed at you personally, I don't believe I've seen you do this. But I've run across it so many times on the internet that it's almost become a meme of its own.

Yes, I am saying that most people abuse the term 'Dunning-Kruger' and misapply it in their zeal to sound intelligent and educated. And yes, in case there was any confusion, I'm also saying that when it comes to video games, a lot of people are also abusing and misapplying the term 'Skinner Box' for pretty much the same reason.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Now that I have a new computer, I've been playing more CS: GO.