What are you guys playing now?

As it happens I'm literally just about to start the game, probably as Rohan. Hope it's as good as you say!

civvver said:

How is space hulk? It got pretty poor reviews.

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As with a lot of games, it had a poor release. It's now a fairly faithful translation of the board game's 3rd (most recent) edition. The one glaring issue is the automation of Terminator actions in the Genestealer turn - in the board game you can choose which weapons to unjam, how many (if any) psi points to spend on the force weapon, and indeed how to use any remaining CP points (which can be used for normal move and shoot options). In the computer game it's fully automated; as long as you have CP points, the first time a Marine gets a jam he'll automatically unjam his weapon, and the next, and the next until you run out of CP points, even if he's a Terminator you'd rather sacrifice and save CP points to unjam somewhere else, and even where unjamming is wasted because there are no more 'Stealers left there.

I won't understate this: it does make the game more tactically limiting than the original. But the core of the game is still Space Hulk enough to play well - it's still a good game of tactical positioning and area denial. Either the AI has improved significantly since release or it scales with the level of missions in the campaign, but in the later missions I've played it's fairly capable (not great - 'Stealers will still lurk when they shouldn't and aren't great at identifying choke points to block), and no longer rushes down long corridors that have Terminators waiting at the end ad infinitum. And there's always multiplayer.

The interface is a bit clunky, particularly where turning your Terminators is concerned - even after playing quite a bit, I still find I misclick quite often and send the Terminator turning round to face the wall, or turning to move backwards instead of just stepping back. The Undo Move command is useful more than it should be - not because I make bad moves, but just to ensure I make the moves I intended to in the first place.

The DLC looks a bit underwhelming (haven't bought any) - the new campaigns are each small, and some missions are duplicated between them. I'm mildly interested in the Space Wolves one, but I don't know if this amounts to much more than a skin pack or if the Space Wolf rules differ substantially.

There is also now a co-op mode; no idea how this plays since I haven't tried it, it seems to be a tower defence type thing where each player gets one Terminator.

I fired up Spelunky last night. Let's just say I was not impressed. Mainly because the reviews all praise this game, but to me it felt like a mario clone with random levels. Not that it's awful, but it's way too hard and everyone said it's roguelike but it's not at all. The only roguelike aspect is the random levels and a shop.

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I never played Rogue, but as far as I can tell the word 'roguelike' is now used generically as a synonym for 'difficult', generally with some form of procedural generation, not as a unitary genre.

Scarlet_King said:

Could've fooled me. Most companies don't confidently pump out DLC for broken games like CA is.

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Rome 2's probably as good as it's going to get minus minor changes given the fundamentally poor decisions made with the design. It's unfair to call it broken or "a mess", it's just mediocre. For all the hopes of TW fans, it never had the potential to be among the better TW games and it's not just a major patch or two away from being one of the best in the series, as was once claimed. Even such a fundamental feature as the game's scale is a complete mismatch for the TW engine (the campaign pack DLCs are actually probably the best approach CA could adopt to fixing this problem). Plenty of mediocre games get DLC thrown at them.

PhilBowles said:

I never played Rogue, but as far as I can tell the word 'roguelike' is now used generically as a synonym for 'difficult', generally with some form of procedural generation, not as a unitary genre.

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Actually I think my perception of roguelike was off and Spelunky fits. Looking on wikipedia at roguelike definition and the description of the original game Rogue it does seem similar. In Rogue you descend through a variety of procedurally generated levels to the bottom of this dungeon. Just like Spelunky I guess lol. The main features seem to be the random generated levels and permadeath. There is no mention of rpg aspects like loot, levels, skills etc.

When I hear roguelike I think of an rpg or at least rpg aspects with procedurally generated levels. Like FTL, you collect crew members like loot, they level up skills, you collect scrap like exp to upgrade/level up your ship.

I also fired up Capsized. I'm basically going through all my casual action games from humble bundles I guess. It's pretty fun but not really complicated or super engaging, it's basically just a shoot em up sidescroller with cool gravity. The music and graphics are excellent though.

Been putting a lot of time into STALKER again, this time with the Black Road start (surrounded by zombies with nothing but a knife, a smoke, and a snack)

All of the Opposing Force I've been playing has made it so that whenever I see a circuit breaker or other powerful electric machine with an on/off lever, I want to pull the lever to turn it off and avoid being electrocuted. Not so much that I actually have pulled such a lever, but I notice them now.

Nearly finished with Opposing Force, but might take a break before Blue Shift. Recently I've shifted back more towards strategy, particularly EUIV, where I now have three in-progress games.

Still Dota2 though I'm trying other games now. Kinda like FPS games.

Dota2 is like smack- not everyone will try it but everyone who does gets hooked.

Almost done with Capsized. Maybe I'll do a review after. Music is awesome, gameplay, not so much.

When I've the time to kill, I often play Hex Empire.
It is a simple but addicting war game, even if I always manage to
win at the normal difficulty in 20 to 50 turns without any planned-
out strategy.

Whenever my "good" laptop returns from repairs, ill be playing
Starcraft 2
EU4
Rome 2
XCOM Enemy Within
and Hopefully some Banished and Civ V.

Most summers i usually get into a routine of replaying mass effect, as much as i love that series, ill try and mix it up a bit this summer

I'm done with capsized, on to Sang Froid, Tales of Werewolves!

Wildstar. It's nothing completely revolutionary, so if you don't like Everquest-style MMOs, it ain't gonna change your mind, but so far it's the most fun I've had in that genre since CoH was killed.

I'm half-way through X-Com Enemy Within. Reload every time a soldier dies. Makes it easy and fun

Bought the South Park game too, but it will have to wait a while.

i_imperator said:

Most summers i usually get into a routine of replaying mass effect, as much as i love that series, ill try and mix it up a bit this summer

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Do you play a single character all the way through 1-3? That's impressive, I never had the fortitude to get through all three with one guy.

scheva007 said:

the game works, i installed it easily (partly reason why i bought it on disc is because i would know the servers would be shaky and i didnt fancy downloading 30GB), and if the server is down i play offline. I just havent got the time to play it extensivly because of exams and papers.

And even if its dissapointing, why would i ask for a refund? i bought it on my free will, nobody forced me. I could have waited for reviews if i wanted. 80% of the complainers that claim the game doesnt work, bought their pc at wallmart 3y ago for a fiver probably

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Holy crap, I just checked the min specs on Watch Dogs and I don't think I could even run it. Minimum ram: 6GB! I only have 4. Minimum gpu: GTX 460, which is what I have coincidentally. I think this might be more cus it's dx11 though and 460 and amd's 5770 were the first gen to support dx11 I believe.

But wow, recommended is an 8 core processor! Here's hoping I scrape another 3 years out of my quad core intel i5. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to upgrade the gpu and ram this fall. Or maybe I will just play less demanding games, plenty to choose from, I'll be a civ and dota player rest of my life lol.

Doesn't seem like *the* game worth upgrading for... My computer could run it well enough, but screw that game. Plus it's seemingly optimized like crap, people with the best computers out there still can't run it with all its settings to the max and get a frame-per-second.

For what it's worth, I've heard the PS4 version of Watch Dogs is better than the PC version, in part because the PC port is poorly optimized. I'm not particularly interested in it myself, but it sounds like if you really want that game, you might be better off going the console route than upgrading your PC just for it. If you don't care about great graphics, you could even buy a used 360, play it on that, and then sell the game and the 360 afterwards. You ought to come close to break even on the 360 and just lose a bit on reselling the game - may well wind up being cheaper than just buying the game digitally.

The Radeon 5000's were the first AMD GPUs to support DX11; I'm not sure if the 400s were the first on the nVIDIA side.

So far EU4 is the only game I've played this week, but I've been playing a lot of it.

Oh heck no, I'm not upgrading for Watch Dogs and I'm certainly not buying watch dogs for more than $10-15, so it'll be 6-12 months before it's discounted to my liking. By that time, upgrading my ram from 4gb -> 8gb will cost me about $75 and a new gpu for about $175, if I even decide to do it then, and I should be able to ebay my old gpu for $75 though that price might drop in a year. My mobo, cpu, psu, hard drives are all still just fine. My cpu is an older one (i5-760) but it's still quite powerful, especially overclocked, cpu's have been far out pacing games for a while.

My current pc I built specifically for civ5 and cus my 25 man raid fps was dropping to 10 in world of warcraft. I doubt another game like that will come along for a while, one that I've got to have, as I really doubt civ6 will have the performance jump requirements like civ5 did.

there is no upgrading for watch dogs

it doesn't even use the gpu

in' console developers -.-

Sniper Elite V2 since it was free yesterday. The sniping is pretty fun, playing it on Sniper Elite difficulty. The game doesn't really have any replayability or much choice though. You can be a bit sneaky in a few parts, but it is pretty much kill the Germans and Russians on your way to the objective, snipe a guy or explosives, shoot more nazis/commies, finish mission.

Tripwires and land mines are fun although unlike in the tutorial you don't actually usually retrace your steps so they are of limited usefulness. Mostly I either plant them and lure enemies into them or if it seems like an area where I will be at a sniping nest for a bit I'll plant a few by the closest couple of doorways or so. I planted some all the way up a staircase in a museum but I don't think the AI even used it at all... and in the next mission they did use the staircase I booby trapped but half my traps were still protecting a further location upstairs that they never went to. So it is hard to know where to plant stuff.

The xray vision that (sometimes) shows up when you shoot someone is awesome though.

EDIT: AI seems to have two settings on the highest difficulty. ******ed, and omniscient crack shots. Sometimes alternating between the two.