What video game are you playing?

[Terrell]

IGN says that Bethesda Game Studios won't be giving new information on TES 6 & Starfield at E3 this year. They do say that "Skyrim Grandma" Shirley Curry will be a character in TES6. Both games are a ways off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMV-Tw8NwXQ

I haven't watched this one yet, but it may be useful to BGS fans.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

They're doing the beta test for MK11 this weekend for people who preordered the game (like me). It's pretty fun and I'm really enjoying it.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Yoshi's Crafted World - Yeah, I'm a hardcore gamer! The cutesy game with a crafted Yoshi running around relatively compact crafted worlds with a quasi 3-D effect. Concept is interesting. Play through a level, then play it backwards to find pups and other hidden things. I was able to snag this game as a gift and can't say how happy I'd be with paying $60 for this. Concept is well executed with all the frilly bows, but seems a little too simplistic and grinding after a while.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

This War Of Mine

Compelling. Depressing. Frustrating.

I played this and agree. Very good game though.

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My long time games I just can't stop playing:

Civilization 4: Colonization (with Religion and Revolution mod). I wish they would remake this in Civ 6. I enjoy the economy part way more than the war part. There's something cool about actually being able to work the land and produce goods.

Don't Starve (with expansions). I love the art style and survival mechanics. I come back to this game again and again. Give it up for a while and then play it again.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Railroad Tycoon II. Love this game, though it seems a bit easy, granted, I've been Tycooning it since the original was out way back in the Tandy 1000 RL days.

I've connected Baltimore to Philly.

I built the Lake Shore Limited line, by the way to easiest way to connect Chicago to Albany is to connect NYC to Philly. It seems like the wrong direction, but it gets you the capital to build out.

I just finished connecting St. Paul with Seattle for gold. The irony was I picked the northern pass... yet ended up going central because there was crap to connect with up north as most of the resources were between Boise and Denver. *sigh* First world problems. The board of my company were a bunch of asshats. I connect the Midwest to the West Coast super quick and they are pissed my revenues aren't higher. Well yeah, I could have used capital to buy industry, but then I'm not connecting the West Coast to the Midwest you wankers! I do like how you can buy and influence how well an industry does. I don't like how all of a sudden after connecting produce to Des Moines for a $150,000, I get a message saying cities no longer accepting produce, go find a cannery or fuck yourself.

Southwest is next.

Minneapolis to Seattle, St. Louis to Sacramento, New Orleans to LA ... meh, that's the easy bit. Did it on my first attempt, moved on to the next scenario. As we say in Scotland, "a piece of piss".

No, what's bothering me these days is connecting Paris to Constantinople. By which I don't mean connecting Paris to Constantinople as such, but rather connecting Paris to Constantinople and carrying 24 loads between the two. And before 1889, of you please. I just can't do it! I had my fourth attempt at it this afternoon, and somehow I still can't get it right. Oh, well, if at first you don't succeed ... be a bit quicker about laying track between Bucharest and Belgrade, I suppose ...

So I ripped this game out again, and absolutely trashed Paris to Constantinople, gold with 4 or 5 years to spare, had over $20 million cash by the end. Got a couple cities lined up in France, people and goods (not Paris). Got the credit rating up, and then pretty much deficit spent with bonds to keep progress going, don't stop expanding, once you let the elevated new revenue drop, I think you become doomed. I also set up places independently before connecting them. Western France, Dijon/Lyon/Marseilles, Northern Italy, Romania. Once connected, get trains to run long distances. Also aggressive with buying industries.

Still got silver in Trans-Canada when I did that again.

 

[Politesse]

A mod, not a game as such, but I've been enjoying the Vigilants mod in Skyrim. It's somewhere between a questline and an expansion, set around an underdeveloped faction in the original game. It has been integrated well with one of my favorite new follower mods, Gore, which is what got me started on it. I've also been using Ordinator, which adds a ton to the perk tree and makes playthroughs feel a bit more distinguished from one another as without cheat mods there's now not enough perks to pick up everything useful.

 

[rousseau]

Really weird one but I can't remember it's name. Players are in this unfathomably large universe whose origin no one knows, and my character has to wake up every day and sit at a computer so he doesn't die.

Sometimes my character drinks beer to pass the time.

Still not finished this one yet.. (counts), 6 years later.

I now drink non-alcoholic beer to pass the time.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I think I finally got No Man Sky out of my system. 600 or so hours of that. Looks and plays much nicer on PC than the switch.

 

[Old Woman in Purple]

I'm still playing Grim Dawn. The third expansion is due to come out later this year.

 

[Emily Lake]

I'm... about 100 hours into Starfield.

So far I'm enjoying it. True to Bethesda form, there's a lot of options for variety. Due to company over the holidays, I've played extremely little of the main questline, virtually none of the factions lines (I did two Ryujin quests before I even realized it was a faction), and only a handful of side quests or activities. On the other hand... I'm level 40 almost entirely from exploring and surveying planets. I've got a main outpost set up, along with about 7 other outposts across two star systems so I can get the resources needed to upgrade stuff. Just this morning I started doing Constellation quests again. I'm currently in Akila City and got involved in a bank robbery gone wrong. Pretty sure I've got thousands of hours worth of play to go. This is going to keep me occupied for a nice long time.

My only frustration so far has been with two things: outpost building & management and research.

The research is more of an annoyance, as all they've really done is introduce some extra steps into the game to slow down leveling and advancement. There's no real value to it, except that if you *don't* do research, you can't upgrade your weapons or spacesuit or anything else, even though you've invested in those skills. So it's an unnecessary barrier that requires you to go farm to get the resources to do the research to upgrade the weapon that you just spent a skill point investing in. Bleh. On the other hand, it hasn't been as difficult to find the resources as I anticipated - between planet scanning from space and the hand-held scanner on the surface, it hasn't been too horrible. I've still had to go buy a couple of things, but it's moderately tolerable.

The outposts are... unintuitive. Getting a basic outpost set up is easy enough, but the instructions for how to do stuff are sorely lacking. I had to go to the internet to figure out how to get inside my habitat because, silly me, I didn't think I needed an airlock on a planet with a breathable atmosphere! But nope... there are no other doors, so you MUST have an airlock or you can't get in. Sheesh. The biggest problem has been supply links between resource extractors, transfer pads, storage units, etc. Those things are a pain, and there's a lot of ways to get them wrong. I ultimately ended up completely removing a few outposts and just starting over from scratch. But now that I've figured those bits out, it seems to be working alright.

I'm also a bit peeved by the lack of local maps. Some areas, like Neon Core, aren't a problem - nearly everything you need is on the main drag. If you have to go down to Ebbside, however, navigation is borderline nightmarish. It's like they intentionally tried to make it as confusing as possible. New Atlantis isn't a whole lot better - I've nearly given up on shopping there except for the Trade Authority Kiosk at the landing pad and Jemison Mercantile. Trying to find the other main stores usually just gets me lost. I'm sure this is on me and my inability to navigate well... but still.

All in all, however, even with those complaints, I'm having a fantastic time. Good complex stories, lots of side quests that are actually quests (not all just fetch & return rote stuff), and lots of free exploration as well.

 

[Patooka]

Starfield just struck me as unoptimised Fallout 4 with unjustifiably high system requirements. If you need an SSD just to run it then you can fuck right off with loading screens and unskippable cut scenes.

 

[Jarhyn]

Lots of Noita. Noita is a destructible-terrain platformer a bit like Terraria, whose primary gameplay is both rogue like and centered around deck building in wands.

The developers have managed to make the game most interesting by creating semi-broken mechanics which drive the player to experiment with just how much they can break the game. Most of the interesting parts of the game and more difficult challenges require as much, in fact.

Even to this day there are unsolved puzzles and new mysteries to solve amid the normal challenges of the game, and killing the final boss and beating the game are commonly considered "the tutorial level".