What video games are you currently playing?

Thanks for clarifying that for me, Martian. Can always count on you, man!

 

Today's Steam deals are really good...

I bought Dishonored. I really hope this game lives up to its hype, but at $10.00, it could meet half my expectations and I'd still feel like I got a deal.

Castle Crashers, Terraria, and Killing Floor are some pretty promising titles and all three can be picked up for just over $10.00 combined. I've played Castle Crashers and Terraria and can vouch for both of them as quality (though simple) games. I've never had much interest in Killing Floor myself, but I have many friends who rave about the game.

Has anybody played Dust or Reus? I'm pretty interested in both games, but I haven't heard anything about either game until today.

 

Been playing the new X-Com: Enemy Unknown for the last couple days. Fantastic reboot of the classic game.

I grew up on the gritty X-Com: UFO Defense and the murky X-Com: Terror from the Deep.

Couple of random nerdy nit pick thoughts:

- Everything about the game has been nerfed (when compared to X:UFOD and X:TFTD) to be much more graphic-y and much less micro manage-y as far as windows and stats in both the strategic and tactical games. Geared for today's kids, I guess.

- The X-Com single base nerfing means you have one central base and one Skyranger. At max, you're taking 6 squaddies into combat. This departs from the old game in a major way: you used to be able to have multiple troops on multiple drop aircraft at multiple bases and could respond with your local team, a special purpose team, etc.

- The Base screens are annoying and the beautiful facility animations are tedious and unnecessary. The fact that I have to click all over the place to jet over to different screens is a little too CSI-y for me. They should have stuck with keeping all the tabs at the top or side, keeping a data window at the top and the animation/infographic at the bottom. I waste more time clicking and waiting for zoom-y animation than I do actually assigning research, building new gizmos, etc.

- Interception aspect is way nerfed. One XCOM aircraft per interception, one weapon per aircraft, no choice of attack distance, bad guys don't speed off. It's a pointless mini-game.

- They didn't include the classic Interceptor Screen rock 'n roll music. I was majorly disappointed by this. They include a lot of the classic images (weapon range cutscenes) and sounds (terror attack noises) and left that crucial tune out? Unacceptable.

- Tactical animations and speech are well executed but woefully inaccurate from a military standpoint. The bolt-action rifle chambers itself, the squaddies say "Rack, tap, bang!" when doing a reload which is both incorrect (it's tap, rack, bang) and that is the meme for correcting a stoppage, not what you yell when reloading. Nobody shoots over cover when they can shoot around it.

- The tactical game activity buttons (bottom center) should be fixed and grayed out instead of random. Annoying as fuck, especially considering how often I use Overwatch and how it randomly shifts from 1-6 depending on the current trooper.

- The tactical cover system is simple and nifty but leaves a little to be desired. A soldier in the open basically stands there waiting to be shot in the face regardless of whether or not he has a movement left. One of the first things you learn as an infantryman is the utility of the prone position. The inability to go to the prone or move in different postures (standing, hunched, prone; seen in X-Com: Apocalypse) takes out your ability to realistically handle situations with no cover, set up your sniper in an awesome roof-top hide, etc. This was all likely done to simplify the game and speed up tactical combat.

- The random mandatory class system (rookie -> assault, support, heavy, sniper; each with their own specialized equipment) takes a lot of the role-playing aspect out of the game. The joy of the original X-Com series (UFOD, TFTD, Apoc) was creating your own team with whatever items you wanted and using a naming system and in-the-field training to create your special teams. If you wanted a guy to be your heavy weapons dude, you overloaded him with gear and had him run back and forth in the Skyranger for a couple of missions. If you wanted a scout with a rifle and smoke grenades you could do that. If you wanted a sniper that carried a back-up rocket launcher, you could do that, too.

- The other issue with the class system is how nerfed soldier stats are now. You've got a handful of vague stats now and basically the only thing that separates two soldiers of the same class is their rank, which is basically a canned way of furthering the mandatory class system's skill tree. Instead of creating your own classes based on stats like accuracy, throwing, strength, energy, etc. you now are stuck with what they give you. Lame.

- Tactical loadouts are horribly game-y. The "backpack" only holds one item? It's 2015 in the game, for fuck's sake. Every Joe should be carrying grenades, a medical aid kit, etc. This has to be a lame attempt at balancing the game.

- Tactical maps are very linear and thus create a lot of fatal funnels that you can exploit. This may limit replayability even if the puzzle piece zones are randomized. It may be a result of the smaller squad size.

- No proximity grenade? Totally ruined my plans for mining one side of the map and attacking from another, guys.

- What the hell is up with the exploding cars? Short of shooting a car with a rocket launcher, it shouldn't ever explode.

...

Major thumbs up for:

- The enemies: The bad guys are fantastic. Love the new Mutons and Sectopods. The Cyberdiscs are a real nightmare.

- Perk system: Mandatory class aside, I really like the perk system and it definitely adds flavor to the game.

- Run / dash measured movement system is simple and effective and really speeds up the game in a good way.

- Modding potential is there. Preliminary research has show that there are tools for modding this game extensively.

...

If you're on the fence about this game, you should buy it. If you played the original, you really need to give this a shot.

/nerdy Plan9

 

Military accuracy thing is a huge nerd nitpick but given how many hundreds of thousands of dudes out there are able to correct simple stuff like that it seems a little ridiculous. Hell, Google "tap, rack, bang." Many veterans would do it for free just to be a part of the process. I realize nobody else gives a shit but it just pisses me off that I'm going to play this game for hours and hours and have to listen to the same desk jockey mistakes. Be like every time somebody uses faux computer hacker lingo on TV.

Yeah, I think everybody agrees that the game is simplified but pretty dang intuitive. It's telling that I'm able to keep an overwhelming number of my Joes alive as long as they make out of the first two missions or so. Terror missions (on the linear maps) are simply a case of Overwatch camping coupled with some Whack-a-Mole runs.

Yeah, the hotkeys really piss me off. I cannot fathom how playtesters let that shit go. It was quite literally the first thing that pissed me off and inspired me to write this bit on here. The very buttons you use to make every single decision on the tactical screen are essentially randomized. Fuck that noise. I hope and pray somebody comes out with a mod to fix that.

Yeah, they took the destructible environment thing to Micheal Bay levels of retardedness. Kablooey! My sniper rifle--a precision weapon that is designed to put a dime-sized hole in a bad guy's head--blows an entire 10-foot section out of the wall of a grocery store. Fragmentation hand grenades set shit on fire, etc.

Yeah, the reduced scale always puts you at roughly a 2-1 ratio with the bad guys having your troops outnumbered in every battle. The bad guys go down pretty easy as a result of the balancing. Remember TFTD when one Lobsterman with a Sonic Cannon could take out a 4-man search team in a few turns? The new game's foes aren't really very clever and have two modes: not in combat or running right at you from the side. The whole flanking thing is so obvious that you can basically bait the clusters of enemies into attacking you and then realign yourself to bring the most guns down on their advance. A 1-to-1 ratio with balanced troopers/aliens would be much more interesting to me. I recall many original X-Com games where I went in with the 14/2 and came back with 6 and 0, like after a tough terror site mission, especially in TFTD where motherbitches would hide in corners and chuck grenades like bastards.

Certainly. It's a great game, especially by itself. The biggest gripes with the original series were loadouts, 80 item limit and the graphics. Honestly, I couldn't care less about !Extreme! graphics in my games. What made the original game great a kick-ass interface, was how it allowed you to micromanage everything and the tactical maps were big, square and randomized. You could handle business fast, you could play the game your own way and when you got into the Skyranger, you were headed off to something that you'd maybe done once before last year when you played the game. It was actually squad-level combat (roughly a dozen dudes w/ an assault element and a support element) and was at the right kinda technical zoom, I think.

Can you tell that I like the new game, yet?

 

Hah! The odds of me playing X-Com: UFO Defense in 2033 are significantly higher. Especially with all the mods and utilities that people are still making this day to that masterpiece.

 

World of Tanks. Pretty much the ONLY thing i've been playing actually.

 

Age of Empiiiiiiiiiiiiiires. II. w00t!



Has anyone played Evoland? It looks interesting, I might try that one out while it's only five bucks.


Edit: Ah, I see Punk.of.Ages has played. Rad.

 

Evoland is perhaps the best indie game I've played all year.

The high levels of nostalgia are what really make the game so good. The story is surprisingly decent for what seemed to be a gimmick game. However, it's very short. I only got about five hours of play out of it.

Totally worth $5.00 at any rate...
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I did buy Dust: An Elysian Tail (I probably should have posted about it prior to the daily sale ending) and I am very impressed...

The visuals are stunning, the gameplay is action packed and mechanically intriguing, and the story makes it hard to pull away. The only thing I dislike a bit is the art style. It's really been made a total non-issue by all the good this game has, though.

 

Currently waiting for Sim City 4 to finish installing. I bought Evoland, too, but I'm waiting until I get home and can give it my full attention.