Pictures of your games Part 4

[IndiraLightfoot]

On our PS3 here, Skylander became a great family game for us! We have played most content, but we stopped buying figurines when Skylander hybrids came out. The giants were great fun, though.

[Humanoid]

I have no idea what Skylanders is, but it appears to be next to impossible for me to buy a Wii U without getting it bundled, so I guess I'll find out soon enough.

 

($279AUD for basic console + Skylanders + Mario Kart 8, time for me to bite)

[melkathi]

I only bought Spyro's Adventure recently for the PC (I never knew they ahd released it on the PC!). As the old game is pretty much discontinued, they are clearing warehouse space and it went really cheap.

So I play it a bit to keep in touch with what is out there for kids today. Something that seems to pay off - after my book presentation the comment I got was that kids accept me as "one of their own". Best compliment ever. You grown-ups can keep being grown-up for yourseves. I want nothing to do with it.

 

Humanoid, I don't know how good Skylanders is on the Wii. The fun about the other platforms is that you have this USB device - the portal of power - on which you place figurines that are then recognized by the game and are your ingame character. You can swap figurines at any time and change character. You can place two of them on the portal and play co-op. And they are cross-platform compatible. So if your best friend has an xbox while you have a playstation, that doesn't stop you from taking your fire skylander over to their place after school to open those fire elemental gates for them.

Progress of a character is saved on the figurine.

And as long as a version of a character exists in the game, figurines of that character from other skylander games work for it as well. So even though Giants didn't make it onto the PC, I bought a Giants version of Stealth Elf and use her on my PC version of Spyro's Adventure.

 

It is a kids' game though. Very easy for old gamers like us. But it is an amazing kids' game. The whole figurine idea was brilliant.

[Humanoid]

I have no friends (in a literal sense, I have no gamer friends at all in the city I currently live in) so that's probably not going to be an advantage.

 

 

A year or so back I tried Disney Infinity which appears to have a similar figure-based system when I was visiting my sister. It was completely terrible, so it's a low hurdle for Skylanders to beat. (My read on the situation is that the Disney game is a knockoff of the whole Skylanders thing?)

[melkathi]

It is indeed

I prefer Skylanders as it is an original setting and thus doesn't need to manage expectations of characters and tie into movies.

 

I have too few gaming friends myself now. Something to do with getting older perhaps.

 

But we played some Arena matches with my nephew when he came around. He agrees with me: it would have been awesome if we had this when we were 8 or so.

[Hurlshort]

My 3 year old son clears levels on Skylanders Giants, so it's definitely not the most challenging game.  :D

 

It's a fantastic technology, the idea that you have these figurines and you can then portal them into the game really captures the imagination.  I steer them away from the Disney Infinity stuff, I'm sure they are fine, but they aren't the originals and I'm not going to buy two different systems.  

[melkathi]

Skylanders hanging out on a shelf in a break during the action.

Didn't move the various stuff, as I wanted to show their usual hangout as is

[Amentep]

I think the Skylander game and Infinity has some differences (of course Skylanders has had longer to perfect their approach); IIRC in Skylanders the figures open up new areas of a singular game whereas Infinity is really about a bunch of minigames (some just fairly long minigames).

 

I've enjoyed Infinity for what it is, but will admit that particularly this iteration is very basic (and yet I still enjoy playing it and building levels).

 

That said, a lot of what has been announced about Disney Infinity 2 is moving the game in a direction that I really think will improve the experience overall (including making the playsets bigger with Marvel Manhatten and flight for characters).

[sorophx]

the usual suspects: Arma and DCS

 

on our way to the LZ

 

LZ turned out to be hot, spot a difference between the two pics

 

getting ready for a mission with 2 of my buddies

 

 

 

 

[melkathi]

Not a picture of a game per se, but Hassat Hunter asked me to name a RPG game that released without bugs. And I wanted to say "Any game before the internet made us lazy / rush releases"

 

Then I remembered this:

Edited May 24, 2014 by melkathi

[Rosbjerg]

Made me remember how in the 90s you basically had to buy gaming magazines which had these CDs with patches, demos etc because the web was too slow. Most games had to be patched because of issues of course, but I do agree that there are a lot more release issues today.

[Keyrock]

Made me remember how in the 90s you basically had to buy gaming magazines which had these CDs with patches, demos etc because the web was too slow. Most games had to be patched because of issues of course, but I do agree that there are a lot more release issues today.

I remember getting magazines with a disc, or just having someone come up to me in a store and hand me a disc with either America Online or Netzero on it (happened multiple times).  Dial up...

 

[Agiel]

@sorophx:

 

Some news from Belsimtek, who helped Eagle Dynamics with the F-15C AFM, regarding additional updates to the Eagle:

 

 

 

We are considering the possibility of creating a complete avionics model with clickable ****pit and accurate systems modeling. This would be a major development however, so a final decision has not yet been made.

 

Second sentence from the bottom:

 

http://www.belsimtek.com/news/217/

[IndiraLightfoot]

I've finally been able to play The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II for a few hours, and it's a very nice-looking and atmospheric ARPG!

So far, it outshines Torchlight 2 and Path of Exile - I have plenty of hours in both. It probably beats vanilla D3 too. But I have a soft spot for Titan Quest and D3 RoS, so I'd say those two are better. There are lots of small quests and RPG choices (which is rare for this kind of game), and the humour hits the right note, I think.

 

Here's my engineer Indictus with a hairdo just like Frankenstein's brain-digging servant Igor!

One quest was saving private Bryan, whose delicious chocolate cakes seem to have saved his life.

And the game's rife with approaching steam-punk armies that need torching, bad!

And this character likes to blow stuff up.

What can I say? I have a weak spot for grenadiers and engineers with flame throwers after Company of Heroes 2!

[sorophx]

@sorophx:

 

Some news from Belsimtek, who helped Eagle Dynamics with the F-15C AFM, regarding additional updates to the Eagle:

 

 

 

We are considering the possibility of creating a complete avionics model with clickable ****pit and accurate systems modeling. This would be a major development however, so a final decision has not yet been made.

 

Second sentence from the bottom:

 

http://www.belsimtek.com/news/217/

hmmm, I  was under the impression that was already set in stone, not "considered as a possibility" 

[melkathi]

One quest was saving private Bryan, whose delicious chocolate cakes seem to have saved his life.

 

 

That quest seems to be one of those certain people are angry about on the forum due to "Terribly out-dated references" 

I simply agree with Katarina: "He better have a lightning scar on his forehead"

[melkathi]

Forgot to add screenshots!

Sorry...

 

 

Another shot of the steampunky army:

 

 

Katarina's opinion on saving Private Bryan

 

 

Katarina also has opinions about Vlados:

 

And about the way problems are traditionaly solved in Borgovia

 

Also, Van Helsing the CCG:

 

And General Harker is searching:

 

Yes I absolutely love these maps instead of cutscenes.

[mkreku]

Hmm.. The first Van Helsing was decent. Getting a slight urge to try Helsing 2 now. Staahp!

[melkathi]

Hmm.. The first Van Helsing was decent. Getting a slight urge to try Helsing 2 now. Staahp!

 

It is more of the same with some improvements gameplay wise. You now can add some more skills to hotkeys for example; instead of having left and right click and two tricks bound to Q and A, you now have Left/Right (obviously), two tricks are bound to  keys 1 and 2 and you have slots for keys 3-6 to add more skills and tricks.

They added more stuff to item forging, upgrading, enchanting.

But mostly it is the same game: same music, same graphics, same engine, same bugs...

It still has some problems though that need to be ironed out. Doesn't run for everyone it seems (though some people are just unable to understand the fixes explained to them).

[ShadySands]

I bought the second Van Helsing but I want to get around to finishing the first one before I start it. Problem is that it locks up on me constantly so I may just jump right to 2 and hope I don't have the same issue

[melkathi]

The resistance management screen:

 

And some more Katarina being Katarina:

[Keyrock]

I got an itch to play Sleeping Dogs again.  Man, I love that game.  Regardless of how anyone feels about the game, you gotta admit it's a superbly optimized game.  These are the best settings I could come up with, with my baseline being minimum FPS of 30 or higher.  These are fairly high settings on a moderately modest laptop.

 

 

And it's not like it's an ugly game, Sleeping Dogs is very good looking.

 

 

 

 

Hopefully United Front Games gets to make a proper sequel.  I know something called Triad Wars was announced, but very little is known.  For all we know, it could be a F2P mobile game.  Hopefully it's a proper PC/console sequel.

[HoonDing]

It was good, but took itself too seriously. They should've gone full Police Story.

 

And make Inspector Teng (Zheng? Ping? Peng?) a date.

 

The Saboteur still best GTA clone of all time.

[marelooke]

It was good, but took itself too seriously. They should've gone full Police Story.

 

And make Inspector Teng (Zheng? Ping? Peng?) a date.

 

The Saboteur still best GTA clone of all time.

Too bad the devs went bancrupt and the map was never properly fixed for the PC version (running it on a way lower res is not an acceptable workaround for me). But yeah, I enjoyed The Saboteur more than just about every other GTA style game, until I got fed up with the map issue. Shame really.

[Humanoid]

All in all it was a bit too grim and oppressive for me to enjoy the story, but I had a blast just doing the random things around the city. There's a bit of a dissonance there between the rather severe player character and the ridiculous hijinks you can get up to, which is obviously not a problem Saints Row suffers from. Heck, they should just licence out their Hong Kong map for other developers to build games in. It's always a shame to make something like this and to only get to use it once before discarding it.