What Video Games have you been playing I: My Muffintop Expands!

[bhsup]

I just finished my almost maximum losses run of Mass Effect 2 and I'm now starting ME 3.

Spoiler :

I've lost Jack, Tali and Thane before I docked with the Collector base (no ship upgrades). Once inside, my best candidate for the hacking job was Mordin (didn't buy Kasumi and sold Legion to Cerberus) who got shot in the head. I picked Zaeed as the fire team leader both times. He survived the first time around and then got shot in the chest. Jacob was my biotic of choice to get past the swarm. His eventual breakdown got Garrus killed. The survivors had to do without an escort and died on their way to the Normandy and Jacob died holding the line on his own. Miranda and Samara were in my squad most of the time and survived the suicide mission, so the black guy died last.
I have no idea what happened to Grunt. I never released him from his tank, and his last known location (to me) is the Normandy cargo hold, yet nobody in the Alliance has mentioned him. I have to assume that he was unceremoniously spaced between ME 2 and ME 3.

Were you intentionally trying to get them all whacked?!

 

[Zack]

Were you intentionally trying to get them all whacked?!

"maximum losses run"

 

[Takhisis]

This Fallout series is awesome.

Spoiler :

Gruthar

has just been killed. Poor little monster…

 

[Synobun]

Decided to finally play all the DLC for Fallout 3. Only have Broken Steel left. I hated The Pitt because my playthrough was with a bad guy and as it turns out there are no bad choices in The Pitt which struck me as odd. The alien ship was... okay... I guess? The rifle from the ship is awesome, so at least I got something out of it. The characters from it were useless and glitchy to the point that I just would not acknowledge their existence until the quest line specified that I would have to speak to that damn Sally. Point Lookout was pretty nice, but also pretty laggy on my laptop so I didn't stick around long, only did the Chinese agent and main quests.

I've played the Steam version of Kingdom Rush a fair bit. It's pretty fun, but I'm still desperately looking for a TD game where you can play however you want and you can grind for upgrades. As it so stands with Kingdom Rush there's really only one or two ways to finish a level and you don't get any more upgrade points unless you head to one of the special modes or the next level, which is kind of lame.

I got given a copy of NHL 14. Super fun! Also super frustrating because of the little mistakes here and there. Random unskippable stoppages of play, spelling errors in game events, the controls not responding properly, and the Live The Life events becoming a case of simply repeats after only 10 games all come together to break immersion and entertainment whenever it comes up. Nothing is more annoying, however, than the fact that you can't change the difficulty after you start a pro character so you're stuck with either the difficulty you're on or you need to 100% start over from scratch. This wouldn't be so bad if the default difficulty wasn't so temperamental. More often than not I end up winning 8-1, 7-2, 8-2, etc but out of the 20 games played so far there have been 4 games where the AI suddenly... doesn't suck? Two of those games I still managed to win in overtime but the other two I simply got bent over the table no matter what I did. Something's a bit wrong when Toronto shoots 15 shots and they have 9 goals (though I guess it's a bit funnily accurate to Toronto's success earlier this season). I just wish the AI difficulty wasn't either "really easy" or "really stupidly hard". I'd prefer a few more 5-4, 3-1, 2-0 games since right now as a rookie my player has over 50 points simply because of how many goals are being scored.

 

[bhsup]

"maximum losses run"

I just assumed he labeled it that after the fact. I wasn't aware it was a fixed title for a type of game play.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

I just assumed he labeled it that after the fact. I wasn't aware it was a fixed title for a type of game play.

It's not a fixed term that I'm aware of, it's just what I tried to achieve.
I only made Miranda and Samara loyal because without at least one loyal squad mate Shepard could have died and I wouldn't have been able to import the save file to ME 3.

 

[Zack]

Holy crap is Hearthstone addicting.

 

[caketastydelish]

Finally beat Killzone: Mercenary on my Vita. One of the few games on the Vita that are actually fun IMO.

 

[Antilogic]

Game Dev Tycoon is surprisingly addictive, although I'm disappointed by the failure of my military action-RPG MMO titled simply VIETNAM. The expansion packs VIETNAM: Agent Orange and VIETNAM: Linebacker did significantly better than the core game, though. Game ended before I could finish my other two planned expansions, Tonkin and PTSD.

 

[bhsup]

You should have titled it "Game Theory: Domino"

 

[Antilogic]

I had a military strategy series with a sequel named something along those lines, although it involved some prohibited language. Unfortunately, Murdersauce LLC has ended its run and now we are trying something different.

 

[Zack]

Game Dev Tycoon is surprisingly addictive, although I'm disappointed by the failure of my military action-RPG MMO titled simply VIETNAM. The expansion packs VIETNAM: Agent Orange and VIETNAM: Linebacker did significantly better than the core game, though. Game ended before I could finish my other two planned expansions, Tonkin and PTSD.

Would you recommend it? I'm interested, but I've heard mixed things about it.

 

[Arakhor]

I'd recommend it. It's good fun for 20 hours or so, definitely.

 

[Antilogic]

Would you recommend it? I'm interested, but I've heard mixed things about it.

If you like Tycoon games, I'd give it a try. Or watch one of the Let's Plays and see if you would enjoy it.

Fair warning: I basically abuse the wiki to figure out what good game combinations are, because if you pick badly-matched genres and topics then your company will bomb quickly. You can gut feeling some of the stuff but it helps to know for sure. One thing that gets better after a few playthroughs is that you can load up the hints on the game design you have accumulated from prior games, so the blindness in your first runs is offset later without the need of detailed notes.

 

[Farm Boy]

Holy crap is Hearthstone addicting.

It seems like it's pretty accessible. Played on it one night and spent too much time fussing over what cards there are. After spending some time figuring out how longish the grind is to get stuff(Blizzard is pretty upfront with letting you know what the grind is in their games), then taking a peek at high performing decks, I dunno. I think it's going to amuse me for a while but then sort of feel like Magic The Gathering for 5th graders. Do you get any of that feel or am I being weird?

 

[Zack]

It seems like it's pretty accessible. Played on it one night and spent too much time fussing over what cards there are. After spending some time figuring out how longish the grind is to get stuff(Blizzard is pretty upfront with letting you know what the grind is in their games), then taking a peek at high performing decks, I dunno. I think it's going to amuse me for a while but then sort of feel like Magic The Gathering for 5th graders. Do you get any of that feel or am I being weird?

You can make a good deck with just the basic cards. There are guides online. And arena mode is awesome.

I never played MTG, though.

 

[Farm Boy]

You can make a good deck with just the basic cards. There are guides online. And arena mode is awesome.

I never played MTG, though.

You could make a good deck in MTG out of all common cards too, but just like in this game, if you wanted a deck that was highly competitive, it was going to take a significant amount of rare cards mixed in with those commons.

My worries about the game are this: There really aren't that many cards. And some of those cards are largely non-competitive unless you are working a weird niche that itself isn't that effective. Given the limited selection of cards, the massive playerbase that Blizzard will inevitably pull in, and the online nature of that competition, I'm worried that the meta good decks will become pretty stale. Even people without all cards available are pretty likely to mimic those decks with stopgaps in their deck construction, since it's going to work. Now the meta growing stale was a concern with MTG as well, sometimes it got pretty bad, but with thousands upon thousands of cards to choose from, along with decks being 60 cards instead of 30, with creatures being sometimes an entirely optional component, and mana resources being something you had to build into the deck instead of being paced, and the ability to mix and match colors/classes within the same deck: it seemed like you had a lot more room to think, "I have no idea what deck I'm going to run into next." I won a couple dippy local tournaments with a deck that was all commons and in fact wasn't very good. It was just ran a mind game with unexpected pacing that the standard good decks weren't prepared to handle when played "properly."

I think you're right that arena draft-pick mode largely avoids my concerns with stagnation over constructed mode, but at $2 a pop every time you want to queue up for some games, I'm probably just not going to do it. Maybe you can convince me I'm wrong.

PM me some evening if you want to school my old tush around the screen some night. Like I said, only played 4 games so far, just totally dweebed out on reading about it for a while.

 

[Zack]

You could make a good deck in MTG out of all common cards too, but just like in this game, if you wanted a deck that was highly competitive, it was going to take a significant amount of rare cards mixed in with those commons.

My worries about the game are this: There really aren't that many cards. And some of those cards are largely non-competitive unless you are working a weird niche that itself isn't that effective. Given the limited selection of cards, the massive playerbase that Blizzard will inevitably pull in, and the online nature of that competition, I'm worried that the meta good decks will become pretty stale. Even people without all cards available are pretty likely to mimic those decks with stopgaps in their deck construction, since it's going to work. Now the meta growing stale was a concern with MTG as well, sometimes it got pretty bad, but with thousands upon thousands of cards to choose from, along with decks being 60 cards instead of 30, with creatures being sometimes an entirely optional component, and mana resources being something you had to build into the deck instead of being paced, and the ability to mix and match colors/classes within the same deck: it seemed like you had a lot more room to think, "I have no idea what deck I'm going to run into next." I won a couple dippy local tournaments with a deck that was all commons and in fact wasn't very good. It was just ran a mind game with unexpected pacing that the standard good decks weren't prepared to handle when played "properly."

Remember the game is still in beta. It's pretty much guaranteed that Blizzard will introduce a LOT more cards in the future, and continue to balance the cards that are currently out. And the point is to be a more accessible, streamlined card game than Magic, so of course it's not as complex. Personally, I found MTG to intimidating to every really get into. From my experience so far, it seems like Hearthstone fits the old trope of "easy to learn, hard to master."

I think you're right that arena draft-pick mode largely avoids my concerns with stagnation over constructed mode, but at $2 a pop every time you want to queue up for some games, I'm probably just not going to do it. Maybe you can convince me I'm wrong.

The first time is free, and you can use 150 gold instead (which you can get by winning games in constructed mode and completing quests, and even arena itself - in fact, if you're good enough, you can earn enough gold from playing arena to keep playing arena infinitely). I've played in arena a couple times without spending any money.

PM me some evening if you want to school my old tush around the screen some night. Like I said, only played 4 games so far, just totally dweebed out on reading about it for a while.

I'm the same. Finished the tutorial, then went out and read a bunch about the game.

EDIT: And of course I'll play you if you want!

 

[Zack]

EDIT: And of course I'll play you if you want!

Man, you whupped me.

 

[Farm Boy]

Something something about old age and treachery.

Nah, I think I got lucky on a lot of those draws. I'll have to get some Icy Hot ready for myself on the rematches.