What video games have you been playing? 4

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Lohrenswald

世界的 bottom ranked physicist
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Old threads:
What Video Games have you been playing I: My Muffintop Expands!
What Video Games have you been playing II: Have you finished that backlog?
What Video Games have you been playing III: You're gonna need a bigger boat.

I have the last week borrowed a laptop which turns out to be the most powerful computer I've ever used. For the first time ever I have experienced proper speed 5 in Europa Universalis. Previously when I have put it on speed 5 it's been like what is supposed to be speed 3 maybe.
I've also been able to play cities skylines with this laptop. I don't want to return it :(
 
Claim that you lost it or that you watched "adult" material on it. :evil:
 
boo to the new thread

I really want to play victoria 2 right now, because I had a random scenario generated yesterday with quite possibly the greatest party names in history - the Best Thing, the Tea Thing, the National People and, of course, the Genocide Guild.
 
I've been Batmaning pretty hard lately. Gameplay wise it's not terribly stimulating or challenging but it's the best Batman simulator.
 
No custom thread title? Boo!

Started Far Cry 3 yesterday. Seems pretty fun. But the protagonist and specially his brother are douches I care nothing about. I hope the brother died in the opening chapter of the game, and not somehow survives. Luckily the antagonist is also a major d-bag so my motivation is sorted.
 
I played some Rocket League with a friend over the weekend. It's pretty fun; like how quick and straightforward it is, dislike how the servers are still in questionable shape right now.

Also got into Trine 2 co-op again with some friends and we're finally almost finished with beating the game on hardcore mode. Excellent game to play while drinking, as there are always hilarious deaths.
 
More thoughts on Cities: Skylines:

  • Mods galore, which I'm not sure is true for all city-building games.
  • In a game where the gameplay isn't meant to be a challenge, the graphics become relevant again, and I like dropping down to street level and exploring my town while I rake in some money for my next round of new construction.
  • Traffic management is the one thing that's been a real challenge for me so far. Good gravy. There aren't even 10,000 people trying to get to work and my central boulevard is already bumper to bumper.
  • The game has a hard cap of 1,000,000 population, so the bustling metropolises you can build in this game are about the population of Quebec City, Glasgow, or Albuquerque. Given my traffic problems, maybe that's a blessing. The citizens of Los Angeles, Delhi, and Toronto are surely cheering the fact that I can't make their commutes any worse (although some might say that I couldn't make it any worse, so might as well have a go... :lol: ).

Started Far Cry 3 yesterday. Seems pretty fun. But the protagonist and specially his brother are douches I care nothing about. I hope the brother died in the opening chapter of the game, and not somehow survives. Luckily the antagonist is also a major d-bag so my motivation is sorted.
Yeah, the protagonist was dull as rice cakes. For me, though, the main character of a video game isn't really a character, he's a proxy for myself, so it's just as well when they have no character of their own (and as you say, when this guy did, he was kind of annoying).
 
A friend bought me Plague Inc Evolved. I've played it more than I thought I was going to, as it's not the sort of game I'd ever buy for myself.
 
A friend bought me Plague Inc Evolved. I've played it more than I thought I was going to, as it's not the sort of game I'd ever buy for myself.
That's been on my radar. It was on sale over the weekend, but I went with Cities instead. I played the free, browser-game version a while back, and it was sorta fun, in a lunch-break, browser-game kind of way. I assume this new version has more meat on the bone..?
 
There's various scenarios, modding support and so on. I would certainly expect it to be better than the browser version.
 
That's the hardest game I've ever played. It was impossible not to go bankrupt.
The original Sim City required you to be extremely careful at first and make lots of backups so you could restart just before things started to go really badly. But it was a great feeling of accomplishment when you finally managed to pull it off.

The later versions were intentionally made far easier so people wouldn't get so frustrated.

Sim City 4 finally made the game more difficult to play so it was at least somewhat of a challenge again. But it lost a lot of what made the original game so great.

And now Maxis seems to have gone off the deep end again with their collaboration with EA Sports.
 
After going to see Jurassic World, I dug out my old copy of Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis and spending all my time creating various types of dinosaur parks for people to enjoy.

Of course I'm thinking of selling it because I found that copies of this game are going for anywhere between $100-$200 on account of its rarity since the developer went out of business and apparently lost all the code to the game so no new copies can be produced.
 
I've put 60 hours into Skyrim in the past month and I've only covered maybe 40% of the available vanilla content. Too bad I've maxed out my primary skills already, so leveling is awfully slow.

Side note: Does completing The Forsworn Conspiracy on the side of Madanach prevent you from becoming Markarth's thane? I'm trying to decide if I should complete all the other Markarth quests first before seeing that one through.
 
I found Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis second hand a few years ago for £2.

Whoever you bought it from must not have known what they had since I have regularly seen the game on both eBay and Amazon for a lot more than that. Checking it today, the cheapest I found there (with everything like the box and instruction manual included) was $71.99 (scratches on the disc) and the most expensive I saw was for $199.99 (mint condition).

Plus I'm sure the price has gone up recently with the release of the movie Jurassic World reigniting interest for all things Jurassic Park related.
 
I've put 60 hours into Skyrim in the past month and I've only covered maybe 40% of the available vanilla content. Too bad I've maxed out my primary skills already, so leveling is awfully slow.

If you're using Dragonborn (I think it is), you should have the possibility to use Legendary skills, resetting your skill level to 15 and refunding your perks so that you can continue to level.
 
In a game where the gameplay isn't meant to be a challenge, the graphics become relevant again, and I like dropping down to street level and exploring my town while I rake in some money for my next round of new construction.

I like using the first person mod and stalking people basically from their viewpoint, it really brings the city to life.

Traffic management is the one thing that's been a real challenge for me so far. Good gravy. There aren't even 10,000 people trying to get to work and my central boulevard is already bumper to bumper.

If you're having trouble with traffic see this guide here made by a real traffic engineer. It looks like a lot of information but there's only a few things you need to keep in mind (and I'll be copypasta'ing from an older post of mine here):

1. Have traffic from smaller roads flow into larger roads, which flow into even larger roads/highways, and so on.
2. If possible don't clog your traffic into a few areas, try to spread them out.
3. Major mass transit systems are most effective when they follow major roads/highways.
4. Bus/metro/etc. routes shouldn't go long distances, generally speaking, and should be more like crisscrossing circuits - your citizens can, will, and should be switching bus lanes if necessary. This prevents buses from clogging up areas.
5. Sometimes traffic is caused by having too much of one type of RCI in an area - you might just have to delete a few buildings to fix things up.

Thanks to this I've pretty much never encountered any serious traffic problems. Just remember and be prepared to delete large sections of your city as needed to rebuild things as necessary.

The game has a hard cap of 1,000,000 population, so the bustling metropolises you can build in this game are about the population of Quebec City, Glasgow, or Albuquerque. Given my traffic problems, maybe that's a blessing. The citizens of Los Angeles, Delhi, and Toronto are surely cheering the fact that I can't make their commutes any worse (although some might say that I couldn't make it any worse, so might as well have a go... :lol: ).

Apparently what happens is that the taller buildings tend to have less people than they would in real life (so for instance a big skyscraper might only have 15 families living in it). This way unlike SimCity 2013 where you had the illusion of more people with less buildings, here you have the illusion of more buildings with less people. Or someting like that.

The original Sim City required you to be extremely careful at first and make lots of backups so you could restart just before things started to go really badly. But it was a great feeling of accomplishment when you finally managed to pull it off.

The later versions were intentionally made far easier so people wouldn't get so frustrated.

Sim City 4 finally made the game more difficult to play so it was at least somewhat of a challenge again. But it lost a lot of what made the original game so great.

And now Maxis seems to have gone off the deep end again with their collaboration with EA Sports.

On Cities Skylines, I will mention that on the challenge vs. sandbox scale, it leans towards the latter more than SimCity, so if the challenge aspect is really important to you Cities Skylines might seem a bit too easy (though that's only if you manage to master the traffic aspect, which some people have a really tough time with).

I've put 60 hours into Skyrim in the past month and I've only covered maybe 40% of the available vanilla content. Too bad I've maxed out my primary skills already, so leveling is awfully slow.

You're going through the game faster than me! D:
 
Time to fix a great injustice (and an even greater shame) for me, by going and playing the first Fallouts.
 
Oh, utterly shameful, Tolni! How could you??
 
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