Gamers Thread

[Vegard Pompey]

I like both 4 and 5 a lot. I have more experience with 5 (400+ hours logged on steam) but I think 4 is the purer Civ experience in a lot of ways.

The "one unit per tile" system of Civ 5 was a mistake, for one reason; it makes defensive play too easy. Put an archer behind a warrior in a mountain pass and you can hold it forever. Thermopylae-situations aren't unusual, they're the norm. People complain about the "stacks of doom" of Civs 1-4, but they are a better fit for a macro-strategy game like Civ. In Civ 5, I'm never worried about a disparity in military strength between me and my neighbors, even on higher difficulties. In Civ 4, when my neighbors have military superiority, I'm seriously worried.

Civ 4 is also a lot more moddable; although Civ 5 has an active modding scene, modders are comparatively limited in what they can do and the game becomes unstable quickly if you add too many mods. Though the Civ 4 modding scene is mostly dead today, there are several total-conversion mods for the game that are massive in scope and fully complete, most notably Fall From Heaven 2, which remains to date my favorite fantasy-themed strategy game.

Civ 5 does have some advantages. The unique traits of each civilization are far more impactful, which adds a lot of variety to the game. It's a lot prettier, the interface is much more elegant and it's got a lot of flair across the board that the predecessor lacks, like the fully voiced and animated leaderscreens which, though an entirely superficial feature, was the thing that made me fall in love with the game.

 

[Dak]

I could understand putting an upper limit on the stacks in Civ4, but make it make sense in terms of land scale. 1 unit per tile is ridiculous.

 

[rms]

War in civ5 is pretty devastating though, not sure I agree with Vegard on the 1 unit per tile problem. If you have an inferior military without walls on your cities you're going to be slowed down/lose everything

 

[~Neurotica]

Finished Narcosis yesterday. Pretty decent thing, - really reminded me Soma at some point, which I loved.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

Slain is fun, just booted it up (PC) the other day. Very campy.

I purchased it back then but still haven't played it. I've heard its crushingly hard.... which i LOVE.

 

[CiG]

KEEN.

 

[AllShallFall]

Been playing a lot of Insurgency lately. Pretty fun.

 

[Krow]

Been playing the Stranger Things app game for a couple days. It's kinda fun. Basically it's a Zelda rip off that when you get a new weapon, you switch characters to use it instead of equipping. It also is a complete game and is free.

Fun little app game, if you're like me and not really into the big stuff any more.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Who cares about the Civ games when Alpha Centauri > *.

 

[Vegard Pompey]

Been playing through the Mass Effect trilogy lately. I just made it through the second game. I had fun but it also pissed me off and disappointed me in a lot of ways. I'm very perturbed that this is considered the best game of the trilogy, and I seriously hope the third game can do better than this although the consensus opinion seems to be that it's worse. So here are my thoughts in bullet points;

• For a franchise lauded for its strong story, this game had almost none. Really. Most of the game is a bunch of disconnected vignettes in which you recruit party members in preparation for a single climactic mission, and even that didn't really have any major plot developments. What seemed to me the big driving question of the game (Who is the Illusive Man and what are his motivations?) wasn't even addressed! At the end, I was reminded of Pirates of the Caribbean 2, another second installment which ended up feeling like nothing but connective tissue between 1 and 3. Here's hoping ME3 turns out better than PotC3.
• One of the most famous aspects of this series is that your choices carry over from game to game, but I didn't notice many of my choices in ME1 having a meaningful effect. The game felt very disconnected from ME1 due to Shepard working for a different organization and most of the action being on different planets. The characters whose lives I saved in ME1 ended up having minimal roles.
  
• I thought the RPG elements in ME1 were clunky, but they at least added a sense of progression to the repetitive gunfights. Each level-up made your characters better, and you frequently found better weapons. My vanguard started out unable to use shotguns because 1) they would overheat too quickly and 2) he would die quickly whenever he tried to get into close range. But by the end of the game I was only using shotguns because high-tier shotguns didn't overheat quickly and the barrier skill + better armor enabled me to charge out of cover without dying. So there was an 'arc' to my character's strength development that made the repetitive combat endurable. No such thing in ME2. The new skill system gives your characters immediate access to all their skills, and made level-ups unsatisfying because skill upgrades often cost more than the 2 points you were given each level. Weapon/armor upgrades were rarely found and their effects negligible. Another +10% damage upgrade to my heavy pistols? Great, I'm sure I'll notice. Oh wait, I won't.
• The combat. There's too damn much of it, and it's all the same. Due to the above point, the game plays much the same at hour 3 as it does at hour 30. And it seems every damn quest boils down to a combat situation. I'm not big on shooters but I don't think this is good even by shooter standards. Most missions seem to involve the exact same damn configuration of enemies being thrown at you several times and they usually weren't that interesting the first time around. A lot of the enemies were spongy as fuck, too. I'd enjoy this game a lot more if there was a mod that cut out 2/3rds of the fights.
• One of the things I'd heard about this series that made me want to give it a shot was that there was a climactic suicide mission at the end of ME2 in which all your characters' lives were at risk. I'm disappointed that my mission turned out entirely casualty-less, despite me playing the game as blind as possible, because it turns out you have to make deliberately stupid decisions to lose anyone at all. I feel like the entire game was all build-up to this mission, since most of it is about recruiting characters and building rapport with them, so I wish they would've made your survival rate in the mission dependent on more unpredictable factors.

[/rant]
I did like much of the game. The final mission was hype as fuck even if no one died. The cast was great. Mordin is my favorite character, I hope he's in ME3. Don't tell me. I had a lot of fun when I was talking to characters, a lot less fun when I was shooting things. But on the whole it fell pretty far short of my expectations.
I own the entire trilogy so I will move on to ME3 next.

 

[no country for old wainds]

i probably mentioned him before but avery on glitchwave is an incredible resource for people with tastes like yours (@Vegard Pompey) and mine. nearly all his positive reviews make me wanna play the game in question so bad. actually i forget if you can even access glitchwave yet, but still

 

[Vegard Pompey]

You haven't mentioned him no, and I do have access to glitchwave. That said I am having trouble figuring out how to view someone's reviews on it.

 

[CiG]

Looks fun.

Probably buying Shadow of Mordor today.

 

[no country for old wainds]

You haven't mentioned him no, and I do have access to glitchwave. That said I am having trouble figuring out how to view someone's reviews on it.

same, that's why i linked his 5s instead lol. you can view them on the game pages

 

[SweptbackFlame]

Been playing through the Mass Effect trilogy lately. I just made it through the second game. I had fun but it also pissed me off and disappointed me in a lot of ways. I'm very perturbed that this is considered the best game of the trilogy, and I seriously hope the third game can do better than this although the consensus opinion seems to be that it's worse. So here are my thoughts in bullet points;

• For a franchise lauded for its strong story, this game had almost none. Really. Most of the game is a bunch of disconnected vignettes in which you recruit party members in preparation for a single climactic mission, and even that didn't really have any major plot developments. What seemed to me the big driving question of the game (Who is the Illusive Man and what are his motivations?) wasn't even addressed! At the end, I was reminded of Pirates of the Caribbean 2, another second installment which ended up feeling like nothing but connective tissue between 1 and 3. Here's hoping ME3 turns out better than PotC3.
• One of the most famous aspects of this series is that your choices carry over from game to game, but I didn't notice many of my choices in ME1 having a meaningful effect. The game felt very disconnected from ME1 due to Shepard working for a different organization and most of the action being on different planets. The characters whose lives I saved in ME1 ended up having minimal roles.
  
• I thought the RPG elements in ME1 were clunky, but they at least added a sense of progression to the repetitive gunfights. Each level-up made your characters better, and you frequently found better weapons. My vanguard started out unable to use shotguns because 1) they would overheat too quickly and 2) he would die quickly whenever he tried to get into close range. But by the end of the game I was only using shotguns because high-tier shotguns didn't overheat quickly and the barrier skill + better armor enabled me to charge out of cover without dying. So there was an 'arc' to my character's strength development that made the repetitive combat endurable. No such thing in ME2. The new skill system gives your characters immediate access to all their skills, and made level-ups unsatisfying because skill upgrades often cost more than the 2 points you were given each level. Weapon/armor upgrades were rarely found and their effects negligible. Another +10% damage upgrade to my heavy pistols? Great, I'm sure I'll notice. Oh wait, I won't.
• The combat. There's too damn much of it, and it's all the same. Due to the above point, the game plays much the same at hour 3 as it does at hour 30. And it seems every damn quest boils down to a combat situation. I'm not big on shooters but I don't think this is good even by shooter standards. Most missions seem to involve the exact same damn configuration of enemies being thrown at you several times and they usually weren't that interesting the first time around. A lot of the enemies were spongy as fuck, too. I'd enjoy this game a lot more if there was a mod that cut out 2/3rds of the fights.
• One of the things I'd heard about this series that made me want to give it a shot was that there was a climactic suicide mission at the end of ME2 in which all your characters' lives were at risk. I'm disappointed that my mission turned out entirely casualty-less, despite me playing the game as blind as possible, because it turns out you have to make deliberately stupid decisions to lose anyone at all. I feel like the entire game was all build-up to this mission, since most of it is about recruiting characters and building rapport with them, so I wish they would've made your survival rate in the mission dependent on more unpredictable factors.

[/rant]
I did like much of the game. The final mission was hype as fuck even if no one died. The cast was great. Mordin is my favorite character, I hope he's in ME3. Don't tell me. I had a lot of fun when I was talking to characters, a lot less fun when I was shooting things. But on the whole it fell pretty far short of my expectations.
I own the entire trilogy so I will move on to ME3 next.

Honestly, I get your side of things on combat. But story wise I don't, because all your mass effect choices will culminate in the 3rd game and trust me, there are some tough choices to be made.

Also the reason why no one died on the suicide mission is because you did all their loyalty quests and you picked the right people to do the job on each section.

I haven't played them in so long, but the lore from the game makes the story telling that much greater if you dive into it.

 

[Vegard Pompey]

Well of course I was going to do all the loyalty quests, they were basically the meat of the game with how much work was put into them and I didn't want to deliberately pass up on content. If I had only done the loyalty quests for the characters I planned on using, I wouldn't have done Samara's quest which ended up being one of my favorite missions in the series.

Maybe sometime in the future I will replay this game and skip most of the loyalty quests and ship upgrades and see how badly the final mission can go.

And I agree on the lore being fantastic; one of the things I find so baffling about this series is that they would put so much thought into the world-building but make the gameplay and writing so much dumber by comparison. Yes, I do mean the writing too. For an example; take the dialogues with the alien squadmates in ME1; they feel very much like infodumps, and moreover they spend a lot of time talking about their culture, information that is already in the codex, as if the designers didn't trust the players to read it. ME2 was a bit better in that regard, maybe because they're expecting the player to have developed a familiarity with this world by then.

Anyway I started ME3 and I have a good feeling about it. The combat feels immediately better. I appreciate that they let me carry whatever weapons I want now instead of having that determined by class. It's nice to be back in the alliance and to have Kaidan back.

 

[CiG]

Shelob becoming a humanoid avatar aside, pretty keen to crack this open.

 

[AllShallFall]

Well of course I was going to do all the loyalty quests, they were basically the meat of the game with how much work was put into them and I didn't want to deliberately pass up on content. If I had only done the loyalty quests for the characters I planned on using, I wouldn't have done Samara's quest which ended up being one of my favorite missions in the series.

Maybe sometime in the future I will replay this game and skip most of the loyalty quests and ship upgrades and see how badly the final mission can go.

And I agree on the lore being fantastic; one of the things I find so baffling about this series is that they would put so much thought into the world-building but make the gameplay and writing so much dumber by comparison. Yes, I do mean the writing too. For an example; take the dialogues with the alien squadmates in ME1; they feel very much like infodumps, and moreover they spend a lot of time talking about their culture, information that is already in the codex, as if the designers didn't trust the players to read it. ME2 was a bit better in that regard, maybe because they're expecting the player to have developed a familiarity with this world by then.

Anyway I started ME3 and I have a good feeling about it. The combat feels immediately better. I appreciate that they let me carry whatever weapons I want now instead of having that determined by class. It's nice to be back in the alliance and to have Kaidan back.

I hope you have all the DLC for the games, because it adds to the story even more. Did you get Arrival for 2? It totally bridges 2 and 3 together.

 

[Vegard Pompey]

For 2 I had Arrival, Lair of the Shadow Broker and the Kasumi and Zaeed DLCs.

 

[AllShallFall]

If you ever play through them again, also get Overlord.