What video games are you currently playing?

Must fix my desktop. Grrr. Having withdrawals.

 

Haven't been able to play any PC games for a couple of weeks because I need to do some things to my desktop, which is what I use for gaming. My laptop can play games but it really isn't ideal, especially for a game like Civ V.

 

My own laziness is getting in the way. I need to reformat/reinstall 7 and see if that helps some of the issues I've been having. If not, it's going to be a couple days waiting for parts. It doesn't help that my husband hacked my sweet, sweet ASUS monitor so he could set up dual monitors on his desk.

 

It's manufactured by Sapphire with the AMD GPU. I've got nothing but good things to say about Sapphire. I've got a PNY card right now (nVidia) but in the past, I've almost always had Sapphire Radeon. My husband is still rocking a Sapphire Radeon in his computer that we bought 4? years ago.

 

I decided to download one of the free MMOs, as they don't tend to be the time sinks that strategy games tend to be with me. I can do a quest or two and log out, usually.

I like MMOs because they offer me brief vacations from reality that don't require reading. The language parts of my brain get fried on occasion because of my job, and a simple MMO helps let that part relax as I exercise the spatial parts of my brain, which tend to get underused. It makes for a nice break indeed.

Anyway, I downloaded Vindictus, and it has left me with a good first impression. I was drawn to it for three reasons: 1) free, 2) fantasy MMORPG, and 3) it runs on Source.

The last item intrigued me. Source runs really well on my machine in part because of my quad-core CPU. It's why I can run the Left 4 Dead games quite well despite my aging hardware. Here's an MMO that was released in 2010 and actually recommends 1 GB of RAM instead of 2 or 4. (I have 2 GB). So here is a game that should run really well on my old machine. The graphics looked good. It's basically a WoW clone with action-based combat (so more like Age of Conan, really).

I gave it a go. It's pretty good. The Korean influences are obvious, and it's nothing groundbreaking, but the game looks well-executed so far. It runs quite well, while still looking good enough. The environments are pretty cool, and there is lots of area damage. The design is pretty sleek and the art is intriguing. I've only played it about 30 minutes or so, but I think I'll play it off and on for a while until I get bored with it.

I'd say it's worth a try if you want to get into a new MMO and not have to pay anything.

 

This clip demonstrates a lot of the combat gameplay. It gets pretty crazy.


View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnKJpXZxmyU

 

I think it might play well on a gamepad. I know there is a setup for it. But you might want to consider the keyboard/mouse setup for various reasons. I haven't tried the keyboard-only setup.

I think it's pretty loot-driven, but I don't know what the item system is like yet. I'm still really new to it.