So, what're you playing?

[Margalis]

On this subject, btw, this? Is the fucking lamest thing I have ever seen any developer try to say to dig himself out from a deep hole of his own making. "Oh, see, my story and setting and characterization only seems dumb, because it's all meta, you know, I'm like meaning to meta-commentary on my own story's total dumbness". http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-12-18-far-cry-3s-writer-argues-critics-largely-missed-the-point-of-the-game

This sort of "commentary" in games is the absolute worst. If games are dumb instead of illustrating that by making another dumb game make a good game instead. It's also hilarious to hear developers talk about making the players question their own actions blah blah blah - you made a game with a completely linear narrative, the player has absolutely no agency beyond refusing to move forward. (And wasting their money)

[rk47]

It's like it's giving me just enough sandbox heroin to keep me going. I enjoy cleaning out outposts and dead-guy bounty missions (no wallhack drug, that's too easy). If I could be a character who chose missions and some sense of personal path in an RPG style I might go with it. But instead I'm chained like in a prison gang to some fucking whiteboy chowderhead who deserves to have everything bad in the universe happen to him and all his dumbass friends.

Turned off skull marker over enemies.
And they still display these assholes on the mini map once spotted.
Wtf.
What sort of Apple Sorcery allows Jason to do this?
It seems they only highlight human enemies too, but not animals.

[Minvaren]

Finished AC3.  Meh.

Started SR3 tonight.  Heh.  Hehehe.   

[Bzalthek]

Oh yeah, SR3 is still the most fun I've had playing a game since High School.  Just Balls to the Wall fun.

[Cyrrex]

I have been playing a good bit of Final Fantasy 4 on Ipad.  We talked about this game quite positively a couple years ago when it got a relaunch on the DS...but ultimately, to low res graphics and tiny screen made me give it up.

On the Ipad, OTOH, it is absolutely perfect.  Still the same graphics engine, but now high resolution and a big ass screen.  Looks good, and sounds good.  The touch interface works very well for FF games.  Easily the best Ipad game I have played.

[Selby]

I have been playing a good bit of Final Fantasy 4 on Ipad.

I was curious about this when I saw it the other day.  Very clever idea and I would totally enjoy playing those older games on my tablet vs. having to dig out the NES\SNES\PS1-2 to do it.  Then I noticed Square-Enix still hasn't released any of the old Dragon Quest games for the same platform and get cranky.

Does it play with the proper speed and no ridiculous load times or stuttering?

[Rasix]

Been playing a lot of Bastion on the iphone.  It didn't catch on for me playing on the PC, but it's plenty fun in small chunks on the phone.  The music in this game is so great.

I'd like to get FF4 for the phone as well, but $18 for a game on my phone kind of crosses a sanity threshold. I just can't do it.  Buying Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 1 at $9 was hard enough.

Still struggling with what to do on the PC.  A lot of options to go along with LoL and SWTOR (haven't played in a while), but just not enough time.

[Llyse]

Civ5 multi, The Secret World for my mmo/grind hit and Blood Bowl for my competitive turn based

[Cyrrex]

I have been playing a good bit of Final Fantasy 4 on Ipad.

I was curious about this when I saw it the other day.  Very clever idea and I would totally enjoy playing those older games on my tablet vs. having to dig out the NES\SNES\PS1-2 to do it.  Then I noticed Square-Enix still hasn't released any of the old Dragon Quest games for the same platform and get cranky.

Does it play with the proper speed and no ridiculous load times or stuttering?

I haven't noticed any slowdowns or loading times at all.  Seems more or less perfect on that front.

[Draegan]

Has anyone played Endless Space?

[Paelos]

Skyrim. Loads of it. The Hearthfire stuff sounded ridiculous, until you get into the fact that it's geared right at crafting whores like me. You get to gather mats to build a house and decorate it with animals trophies. I mean, it's a pretty brilliant addition for $2.50, and I'm totally sidetracked from whatever the hell I was doing before.

[Ard]

Has anyone played Endless Space?

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22368.0

[HaemishM]

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to finish Alan Wake. I FUCKING HATE the protagonist, so the story is a bit... iffy. The mechanics are just fucking awful. I feel like I'm walking through molasses most of the time. Playing with mouse and keyboard means when I get flares or flashbang grenades (which just inexplicably happen to be EVERYWHERE after a certain point in the story), I have to CLICK the middle mouse button to throw them. Which works about half the time because the middle mouse click is sketchy as hell on every mouse I've ever owned. I'm just as likely to roll the damn thing as click it. I may go back to playing with the XBox controller to see if that helps. I'm only about 4.5 hours into it and I can feel the tube effect all around me. The scenery and cinematic nature of the thing is fantastic minus the main voice actors.

Shogun 2 - I just got the Shogunate on a short campaign and shortly thereafter performance on the campaign map and load times went utter shit. I was playing the other night and every few minutes the game would just freeze for about 1 minute when I click on an army or a town. The game doesn't crash, it just freezes before moving on and it's starting to do that too often. I don't know if it's a memory leak after playing more than an hour or what, but it's going to make the last 2-3 years of turns really hard to finish. I'm also kind of disappointed in the battles. They seem to be over way too fast, almost like the lethality and morale effects have been amped up to make multiplayer battles finish in less than 15 minutes. The campaign part is excellent but I'm really bothered by the speed of the battles. Is this just because I'm playing a short campaign or is this the new Total War normal? It's part of the reason I didn't grab the Fall of the Samurai expansion on the Christmas sale.

Football Manager 2013 is fantastic, if I could ever get Blackpool's defense to not suck.

[Paelos]

Shogun 2 is a technical nightmare. It's not just you. They totally fucked up the peformance on that game. Memory leaks have become a feature.

[Ingmar]

Shorter battles feels like a plus to me, it means I can actually make real progress in a single session.

[HaemishM]

The battles are really what I play for and it just feels like I'm getting short-changed with battle lines more brittle than a celebutard's self-image.

[ezrast]

Dustforce is pretty much the perfect game to play at work; I'm sad that I only found out about it recently (from Aphromoo's LoL stream) even though it's been out for a year. You watch a gameplay video and think it can't possibly be hard because you're an invincible flying ninja, and then you play it and die repeatedly to inanimate objects, and then you beat the level and the game taunts you with online replays from people who did it three times faster than you. It's exacting but rewarding and playable in 30-second intervals, and I feel like I am going to spend the rest of my life chasing the top time on Dusk Run.

[Bzalthek]

Yeah, I learned about it from Aphromoo's stream too.  I won't touch it.  I already know the hand eye coordination needed for that shit is well out of my reach.  I get rage inducing frustration watching Aphro play it, I can only imagine blowing my computer up out of spite.

[voodoolily]

I fought Bowser for an hour in Sticker Star and then, with only 100HP left on him, I ran out of stickers.

[Threash]

Has anyone played Endless Space?

Played the shit out of it during its free weekend, then i kinda lost the desire to keep going after. 

[murdoc]

Dark Souls for PC. Only played about 2 hrs last night, but I'm hooked. Hooked enough that I'll be buying a controller today after work.

[ezrast]

You're playing it without a controller? 

[JWIV]

Skyrim. Loads of it. The Hearthfire stuff sounded ridiculous, until you get into the fact that it's geared right at crafting whores like me. You get to gather mats to build a house and decorate it with animals trophies. I mean, it's a pretty brilliant addition for $2.50, and I'm totally sidetracked from whatever the hell I was doing before.

It's also a trap for parents. Seriously - I was walking around figuring on ignoring the adoption shit and then I ran into some little girl begging in Whiterun and the next thing I knew, I dropped 10K on a child's room in Solitude and my housecarl was a nanny.

[Soukyan]

You're playing it without a controller? 

I do, too, and it definitely is a challenge with the mouse/keyboard controls, but far more addicting than I had anticipated. I play for a while and then take a long break from it. So good and so crazy difficult.

[Rasix]

Fucking hell there's a lot of stuff in Skyrim. 

[cironian]

They should put that up as a box quote.

[Paelos]

Fucking hell there's a lot of stuff in Skyrim. 

Tell me about it. At some point I've started a de facto orphanage, and I didn't realize it until I come home. Damn kids always wanting stuff. Daddy's a thief, ok. Go be good kids and form a gang of pickpockets so we can afford that new wing on the house.

[Yegolev]

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to finish Alan Wake. I FUCKING HATE the protagonist, so the story is a bit... iffy. The mechanics are just fucking awful. I feel like I'm walking through molasses most of the time.
...
I may go back to playing with the XBox controller to see if that helps.

No, it's even stupid on an actual Xbox.  Cut your losses.

Last night I played a few hours of Atelier Iris 3.

[HaemishM]

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to finish Alan Wake. I FUCKING HATE the protagonist, so the story is a bit... iffy. The mechanics are just fucking awful. I feel like I'm walking through molasses most of the time.
...
I may go back to playing with the XBox controller to see if that helps.

No, it's even stupid on an actual Xbox.  Cut your losses.

Actually, I did try it with the controller and that at least helped with the grenades/flare throwing thing. I can now reliably throw grenades. But fuck me... this game really is supremely frustrating. I played for about 2 hours on Satruday because I was in episode 3 and could feel some sort of ending coming up. I kept thinking, "I fucking hate this game and just want to be done with it, surely it's got to end soon." Ended Episode 3 and Episode 4 started and reset the status quo AGAIN. Then I find out there's SIX episodes and the 2 DLC episodes and American Nightmare and my heart just sunk. You could tell, they spent so much money on the voice acting and the scenery and the whole cinematic experience but in the end, it's just an adventure game with a really bad 3rd person action interface instead of point and click. I don't think I can make 8 episodes. Did anyone play American Nightmare and if so, did it improve?

I also gave up on Shogun 2 this weekend. Tried twice to continue my campaign game, it crashed both times. Then I tried multiplayer and it crashed coming out of the first idiotic tutorial multiplayer mission against the AI. Empire was not this crashy on me, so WTF Creative Assembly? I suddenly don't have a lot of hope for Rome 2.

I decided to start on Crusader Kings II in between matches of Football Manager 2013 and LOL.

[Sky]

Rocksmith, Sleeping Dogs.

[Chimpy]

Been playing Forza 4 on the Xbox. Am up to the point where every race is like 5 laps on a 4 mile track so it takes like 15 minutes to complete a race instead of the 5-6 I got used to earlier on. But I get to drive the really cool cars now so it evens out.

[Lantyssa]

Drive faster and they'll be shorter.

[Lucas]

I own all three, but currently I can't choose between Saints Row 3, Just Cause 2 and Sleeping Dogs. Decisions, decisions 

[proudft]

I stopped doing the World Tour thingie in Forza 4 on the 2nd or 3rd time through it and just started in on the Event List.  I'm 33% done!  And it only has taken 18 months!  God, I love the 1969 Dodge Challenger bumped up to B.  I am pretty much out of B events unfortunately.

I finally am giving EUIII a try after having gotten it on sale a while back.  Since I didn't want things to be too complicated, I picked the Inca to figure out everything in nice easy solitude.  And I think I'm getting the gist of it, but holy crap, it is boring.  I need the Spanish to show up and put me out of my misery.  I will have Government somethingsomething level 4 in about 1650, then I can go find them if they haven't found me first.

Also it is nothing like CK2 at all.  I hope EUIV has more of CK2's people-type stuff and less slider fiddling.

[Sky]

I own all three, but currently I can't choose between Saints Row 3, Just Cause 2 and Sleeping Dogs. Decisions, decisions 

All great games in their own way. Just roll a d3.