So, what're you playing?

[Thrawn]

If you need something to kill a few minutes, Audiosurf and Beat Hazard are quick little time wasters.

Ah ha, I lied.  Looking at Beat Hazard I realized I played it a fair bit, I think it was one of the games for one of the summer contest achievements or something and now I remember putting at least a good hour into it.  Removed it from the list.    Installing Audiosurf now though.

[ezrast]

Altitude, Magicka, or X-Com.

[Quinton]

Minecraft (the F13 1.8 server with monsters on has my attention right now) and SoTC on PS3.

[HaemishM]

So FIFA 12 came on release day like Amazon said it would. This will likely be consuming my soul for the next little while in between bouts of LoL and Madden 12. If anyone sees me on XBox Live (HaemishMcLennan) and wants a game, hit me up.

[WayAbvPar]

Bought Red Orchestra 2, played for a couple of hours, got stabbed in the face by bugs, quit. Will check it out in a month or two.

360 finally back from repairs, so it is all NHL 12 and FIFA 12, all the time. I hope I recognize my family come Thanksgiving. My son wanted to play Angry Birds on my phone last night, so I gave it to him while I watched a soccer game and then played hockey. He in turn gave it to my wife, who ended up playing until my battery was dead 

[Sky]

Just Cause 2

Great for a quick fix and still fun for longer sessions (longer for me is an hour or two).

I'm currently playing Minecraft (solo and f13) and trying to power through to 50 in Rift, though I doubt I can stomach it.

[lamaros]

So I just played and finished Portal for the first time. Was fun, but repetitive and a bit boring by the end.

Steam is telling me Game of Thrones: Genesis is out. It looks, umm, not great.

[Ingmar]

Well you did see the developer, right? 

[bhodi]

Been playing the SotC remaster. It's as awesome as I remember. One of my favorite games of all time. But I was glancing at the 5 page "manual" to see what 'full pixel mode' meant in the options (no idea why it isn't on by default, turn that shit on!) and I discovered something.

Did you know that there are geckos and fruit in the world to kill/eat to gain health and stamina?

What the fuck!? I didn't. Last time I played, I beat the game on hard without it. WOW. How could I have missed this?!

[Hawkbit]

I was disappointed they actually put that in the manual.  It was always a super-secret.  I never found them in my first play, either.  Didn't know about them until a few years after I played it!

[Rasix]

Yah, I missed those the first time I played the game.  That time I only did like 7 colossi.   I went back and beat it start to finish about a year ago.  I saw that stuff mentioned in a gamefaq guide and kept an eye out for it on the way to different fights.  While the game is amazing and a huge accomplishment, it wasn't one of my favorite games in retrospect.  I can't remember exactly why, but I felt like I was annoyed half of the time playing (some colossi were just chores), and that I was fighting with the controls more often than not.

Plus, I had one of my worst game rage inducing moments of all time playing.  I was about to deliver the killing blow on the last boss and my controller ran out of batteries.  FUFUFUFUFUFFUFUUFUFU.


Still hooked on playing LoL right now.  Second week playing actual people (spent a few days trying to learn how to moba in against bots).  While it may be stale for some, summoner's rift is a completely new style of gaming for me.  I'd never played DOTA and the communities of all subsequent mobas had scared me off until now.  

I think I've only been called a fag a few times now.  I get called a noob about 75% of the time my team loses.  


Is Ico worth shelling out the money for the remakes?

[Hawkbit]

SotC is a better game than Ico.  Ico is more "puzzle-platformer with occasional crude fighting".  It is essentially one big escort quest, and the girl can be finicky at times. 

That said, it's one of the a very short list of games I beat on my PS2, and one of the few games in my life for which I refused to look up answers.  I wouldn't call it my favorite game on the PS2, but it is in my top 5.  Both games do an excellent job of putting me in a different world for the time I play them.

[Thrawn]

Of what I've played of your list:

AC2 (if you liked AC1)

Trying to get into AC2 and holy-consolitis Batman.  The tutorial missions don't even tell me what key to hit on the keyboard.  They just show a picture of an action and I have to go lookup what key it is in the control options. 

[Stormwaltz]

Trying to get into AC2 and holy-consolitis Batman.  The tutorial missions don't even tell me what key to hit on the keyboard.  They just show a picture of an action and I have to go lookup what key it is in the control options. 

I've seen sloppier console-to-PC ports. In the PC version of Akella's Pirates of the Caribbean, when it was time to name my (character? ship?), they put up a keyboard interface on the screen that I was expected to point and click on the keys. The actual keyboard did nothing. At that point I uninstalled and returned it to the store.

I tried GTA4 for a few weeks, but found it to be heavily oversold. To reiterate what I said before, I didn't go into it expecting a branching or BioWare style story - I expected something like a crime-oriented Oblivion set in New York, where I could wander around and find chains or one-off preset quests. What I got was a lockstep mission progression and content that appeared to be gated by completion of said missions, with surprisingly little reward for exploring the world. I haven't gone back to it for about three week, and didn't really notice.

Now I've been playing a bit of Mount & Blade Warband while choosing and installing mods for another go at Oblivion. Apparently I'm excited about Skyrim.

[Sky]

I expected something like a crime-oriented Oblivion set in New York, where I could wander around and find chains or one-off preset quests.

Have you ever played a GTA game before?

[Gunzwei]

Been playing Shogun 2 a lot last week and Demon's Souls on to refresh myself for when Dark Souls comes out Tuesday.

[Minvaren]

Of what I've played of your list:

AC2 (if you liked AC1)

Trying to get into AC2 and holy-consolitis Batman.  The tutorial missions don't even tell me what key to hit on the keyboard.  They just show a picture of an action and I have to go lookup what key it is in the control options.  

On reflection, I played AC2 right after AC1 and the controls only changed slightly, so it didn't throw me much.  Coming into it cold, that would be pretty annoying.

[Stormwaltz]

Have you ever played a GTA game before?

Nope.

[Thrawn]

On reflection, I played AC2 right after AC1 and the controls only changed slightly, so it didn't throw me much.  Coming into it cold, that would be pretty annoying.

I'm already getting used to it and barely notice, except for when an icon comes up during a cut scene HIT HAND WITH RED BACKGROUND, and I have to panic and remember what key that is.

[Sky]

Have you ever played a GTA game before?

Nope.

Well, that explains a lot. 4 is not really the best entry into the series, though it's easiest on the eyes. Pick up SA cheap if you want the pinnacle of the series. There is some reward for exploration, mostly finding gun/armor spawns, but I usually just buy those from the gun shop. It's more about finding unique jumps, that kind of thing. There are a few side quests from npcs that show up on the mini-map as green (cyan?) dots.

I'm also a sucker for just cruising around finding jumps and causing mayhem while listening to the radio. There's some pretty good stuff from Jason Sedakis on the consevative radio, Bill Hader also does some of the radio work. Weakest music selection of the last few, though.

I'm tempted to fire it up just talking about it, I've got well over a hundred hours, 36 on Steam alone where I've just dipped toe a bit...and somehow encountered a bug that doesn't let me have my favorite safehouse (around the corner from the sports car showroom).

[tgr]

I thought the main problem with GTA4 on windows was the windows live bullshit, and shitty mcfailerson performance issues.

[Malakili]

My only regret with League of Legends is that I didn't start sooner 0_0

[Sky]

I thought the main problem with GTA4 on windows was the windows live bullshit, and shitty mcfailerson performance issues.

1. I'm surprised to hear you feel that way.

2. It's one of those games that allowed sliders beyond what hardware at the time could handle. If you found the settings that made it like a 360, you could basically double those (with better resolution, obviously) and have great performance. People got pissed because you couldn't max all the sliders when it released. Runs great for me, always has.

[tgr]

Why?

To be fair, I never bought it for the PC specifically because of the live bullshit, but a friend of mine did. He was much more on the ball wrt being on the cutting edge when it came to hardware, and he was still getting poor performance compared to what he was expecting, especially compared to other games which were actually known for being heavy graphically.

Then again, he was running it at 2560x1600, same as me. The difference is, I gladly turn off graphical features, whereas he turns them on.

[trias_e]

planescape: torment.  So damn good.  I just wan to reach out to every introspective person I know and force them to play this game.

Temple of Elemental Evil.  Excellent dungeon crawling fun.  I quite enjoy rolling natural characters (no picking where the stats go, they land where they land) and forming ramshackle parties.  Most fail horribly, but it's quite
 interesting having the fighter with 16 charisma, or the druid with 4 dex.

[Minvaren]

Damn, SMAC is just as crack-like as it was a dozen years ago.

[Thrawn]

Starting to get into AC2 (used to controls and stuff again) and really enjoying it now.

Thanks for the suggestion Minvaren. 

[Rasix]

Starting to regret agreeing to be part of a work SC2 league.  I don't play anymore.  I don't really want to practice (I'd rather play LoL).  So, I show up once a week to get stomped.  Dumb.

[MisterNoisy]

A fair bit of Gears of War 3.  Campaign actually has a semi-worthwhile story with some interesting turns this time, and Horde mode is even more awesome than 2's (and where most of my time has been spent).  I'm a little surprised that we have 4+ pages of talking about the giant abortion that is Rage, but not a peep about this title.

[Rendakor]

I mentioned buying it (Gears) when it first came out but was met with silence. I still need to finish the campaign on it, and I'm trying to get together with my friends for a night of Horde.

[Rasix]

Console shooters don't get a lot of play here.  I've only ever played like five minutes of the first one (Gears).

I think the only console shooter I've ever bought was Halo 2 and that felt like a waste of money.  

[MisterNoisy]

I mentioned buying it (Gears) when it first came out but was met with silence. I still need to finish the campaign on it, and I'm trying to get together with my friends for a night of Horde.

Feel free to join us for Horde - we could use a new fifth, as one of our group is flaky as hell and she's pretty terrible even when she shows up.  :)

[Azazel]

I also picked up Gears on release, but haven't been on it much in the last week - feel free to hit me up for a group if you see me on XBL. Even if I'm playing something else (except for L4D, Borderlands or Rock Band - those mean I'm on with the wife)

I'm holding off on the campaign as I haven't finished the first two yet. 


In the last couple of weeks I've played through 007 BloodStone on Xbox (not brilliant, but not bad, actually), finished Red Faction: Guerrilla after starting it on release, and now I've picked up Just Cause again after a lengthy break to try and finish it - then I can play Just Cause 2!

Bits and pieces of LotRO, and that's near enough it.

[Kageru]

Played Elven legacy. It's a pretty claissic turn based war-game with nice graphics and a RPG-like unit progression. The story and voice-overs are awful and it adds challenge by way of extremely punitive turn limits in each game. On one map there's barely enough turns to rush your units to the goal even if there weren't hordes of enemy units to kill you. And the solutions to that challenge involve cheese like getting line of sight to the target and nuking it using unlimited range spells. Thus cleverly side-stepping anything that is remotely fun in these kind of games. But at least you can use the map-editor to set it to something more sane.

Also Alpha-Protocol. It's pretty flashy but I think I'm going to go back and just make a soldier. The temptation to stealth it up is there but the in-frequent save points and mechanics just make it look like the path to frustration. The hacking mini-game on M+KB is cruelty incarnate even if all that movement didn't give me a headache.

[Sky]

I kinda gave up on Alpha Protocol. The save system was garbage and their "James Bond" is not any James Bond I remember. Suave apparently means 'douchebag' at Obsidian. It does play much better with a controller, but then the shooter parts are  So...glad I got it at bargain bin pricing.