What are you playing now

[Serrano]

If you can find the other person on the planet who hasn't played Portal 2 yet then the multiplayer is just as good as the single player campaign. 

[melkathi]

Not playing Van Helsing II.

First I couldn't import my previous character.

Then, when I tried to start from scratch, the game crashes after the intro.

Yay

[Drowsy Emperor]

Got kicked off a TF2 server for..using an aimbot...that I wasn't using. Don't even know how to set one up.

 

My inner troll is frolicking in delight at the immensity of their rage.

 

s'all good.

[Drowsy Emperor]

Not playing Van Helsing II.

First I couldn't import my previous character.

Then, when I tried to start from scratch, the game crashes after the intro.

Yay

Pity, I was waiting for an opinion on the game

[melkathi]

Verifyed game cache. Plays fine now.

 

Didn't play long yet.

 

First impressions:

 

Gameplay so far is pretty much the same as the previous game. As that was working just fine, I am happy with it.

 

Lady Katarina is just as loveable as in the last game.

 

Getting all three classes to choose from is nice - I had played the first game before the dlc came out.

Import of old characters is probably going to get fixed tomorrow.

 

Played through the tutorial intro. Then was faced with a choice of two ways of how to proceed: accept the help from a stranger or proceed on my own? Katarina is very clear what she would do, but in the first game we saw how good her advice was

Couldn't decide so taking a break to write this

I like choices. Seeing a choice this early on in the game is nice.

[GhostofAnakin]

 

Replaying Mask of the Betrayer (after replaying NWN2). I think, for whatever reason, I had more fun with NWN2 than ever before on this playthrough. Play an evil Bard who I am now taking into MotB.

Could be the way you play the game, but I've also noticed I've become less critical towards certain games as time go by. Dragon Age for example, almost hated the damn thing when it came out but year or two later I actually liked it when I went back to it.

 

So it's kind of learning to take things as they are, at least in my case.

 

 

Felt the same way about Gears of War.  Back in the day, I wasn't too impressed with it.  Largely probably because of the hype surrounding it when it was first released.  I found it was okay, but not great, and combined with the hype, felt it was a letdown.  Now, after all this time has passed and I'm judging it more on its own merits and not what the hype suggested it would be, I found I enjoyed it a lot more.

[melkathi]

And Van Helsing II stopped working again. Re-verify installation. restart steam yada yada to get it to work again. Bug ridden mess at the moment it seems.

Good game if it decides to run. Forum full of people complaining about crashes.

So keep away until they patch it.

 

They gave a Steam achievement and extra goodies for NOT pre-ordering on Steam. The concept is boggling... Especially considering that on their own site they are stil selling Steam keys.

Edited May 23, 2014 by melkathi

[Humanoid]

If you can find the other person on the planet who hasn't played Portal 2 yet then the multiplayer is just as good as the single player campaign.

The only Source engine game I've played is Bloodlines.

 

I'm probably the odd man out because I didn't really care for The Banner Saga. I liked the combat but as I mentioned before I don't like completely pre-defined characters/parties and it has set characters and you bounce around controlling different groups of them. To me it was more of an adventure game with combat bits than a more traditional RPG if that helps any

I didn't even get that far. The requirement of metagaming combat by reducing enemy HP as much as possible without killing them completely put me off the game and I haven't been back since. It's nonsensical and makes me rather combat be excluded from the game altogether. I can't remember if there was a difficulty setting, but even if so it just makes it a chore rather than abjectly dumb.

 

 

Replaying Mask of the Betrayer (after replaying NWN2). I think, for whatever reason, I had more fun with NWN2 than ever before on this playthrough. Play an evil Bard who I am now taking into MotB.

Could be the way you play the game, but I've also noticed I've become less critical towards certain games as time go by. Dragon Age for example, almost hated the damn thing when it came out but year or two later I actually liked it when I went back to it.

 

So it's kind of learning to take things as they are, at least in my case.

 

And actually, the Banner Saga is just one of the games that show I have the complete opposite tendency. I become more critical of games with the passing of time, without actually having to play them. At the time I put it down initially my thoughts were along the lines of "this is a little silly, I'll come back to it later", which has been slowly evolving into "that was idiotic, I don't want to do that ever again". Dragon Age is probably another good example, went from initial impressions of thinking it a reasonable if sometimes overlong game, gradually boiling down to feeling that it's an earnest attempt (one thing that its sequel didn't have) that eventually fell completely flat on its face.

[Bartimaeus]

If you can find the other person on the planet who hasn't played Portal 2 yet then the multiplayer is just as good as the single player campaign. 

 

I've never played the Portal 2 multiplayer.

 

Beat Penumbra: Overture about a week ago. Fun game. I actually enjoyed it more than Amnesia, although I wish the combat had been made harder. Much too easy to simply smite most baddies if you learn how to use the "weapons" in the game.

 

Still working on Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. I'm about...15, maybe?...missions in. All Silent Assassin ratings so far. Weirdly, the first few missions were the hardest thus far, with that three stage snow mission being an outlier, while most everything else has been fairly easy. Eh.

Edited May 23, 2014 by Bartimaeus

[melkathi]

If you can find the other person on the planet who hasn't played Portal 2 yet then the multiplayer is just as good as the single player campaign. 

 

Installed it last week and tried it for a couple of hours to see what the fuss is about. Not too bad. Not that awesome either.

[Keyrock]

 

 

Beat Penumbra: Overture about a week ago. Fun game. I actually enjoyed it more than Amnesia, although I wish the combat had been made harder. Much too easy to simply smite most baddies if you learn how to use the "weapons" in the game.

 

 

Penumbra: Black Plague is significantly superior to Overture, IMHO, you should check that game out.  It, like Amnesia, doesn't have any weapons, though it is possible to kill enemies via environment.  Mostly, though, like Amnesia, it's about avoiding combat altogether.  There are some fantastic mind****s in Black Plague.

[Humanoid]

I've tried watching some gameplay video of Half-Life 2 a few times over the years. Each time it's swiftly given me a bout of motion sickness. Now that I think of it, Bloodlines may have induced some level of discomfort for me as well, but one nowhere nearly as bad. But this just suggests that I might have a problem with the Source engine specifically, since I don't recall any other video game ever having that effect on me.

 

On another note, resolved my crashing problem with Broken Sword 5, which is to say, have worked around it based on information provided by a kind soul on the GOG forums. Revolution themselves haven't been any help with the issue, because I can't even register on their forums, the activation email never comes through (and have tried a couple times, and it's not in the held queue for spam). It seems the backer portal on their site has vanished as well, not sure what's happening there.

 

As for the workaround - well, it's apparently based on the notion that there is a missing asset that causes the crash, but if you play the game at a lower resolution, a different, lower-detail version of said asset is loaded instead, and that works fine. For most people, simply setting the game to windowed mode was sufficient to do this, but the window is not dynamically resizable, it's set at a fixed proportion of your desktop resolution. I'd been playing on windowed mode all along, so at 2560x1440 desktop resolution, clearly my window was still too large. Dropping my desktop resolution then re-enabling windowed mode finally got me through.

[Bartimaeus]

 

 

 

Beat Penumbra: Overture about a week ago. Fun game. I actually enjoyed it more than Amnesia, although I wish the combat had been made harder. Much too easy to simply smite most baddies if you learn how to use the "weapons" in the game.

 

 

Penumbra: Black Plague is significantly superior to Overture, IMHO, you should check that game out.  It, like Amnesia, doesn't have any weapons, though it is possible to kill enemies via environment.  Mostly, though, like Amnesia, it's about avoiding combat altogether.  There are some fantastic mind****s in Black Plague.

 

 

I have all three on Steam...or actually, I have none on Steam, but I have a good friend who does who is Family Sharing the games (and about 300 others - thank you, Valve ) with me. Thanks - I'll probably try it out eventually. Want to finish Hitman 2 or Terranigma first before I begin any new games, though.

Edited May 23, 2014 by Bartimaeus

[Malcador]

Broken Sword 5 locked up just as I got into the shrine, and I don't think I saved in a while. Bah.

[Humanoid]

I relied on the autosave for the entire game and haven't been burnt.

[Calax]

So... Amazon is having murderous good deals on digital games right now..

 

Soz i've bought the punchy fighty pack thus far (arkham origins, Injustice, Mortal Wombat and War in the North for 25 bucks) and am debating picking up another pack for 10 bucks that'd net me an extra Space Marine.

[IndiraLightfoot]

And Van Helsing II stopped working again. Re-verify installation. restart steam yada yada to get it to work again. Bug ridden mess at the moment it seems.

Good game if it decides to run. Forum full of people complaining about crashes.

So keep away until they patch it.

 

They gave a Steam achievement and extra goodies for NOT pre-ordering on Steam. The concept is boggling... Especially considering that on their own site they are stil selling Steam keys.

Yeah! Tell me about it! My AV had all its bells and whistles go off as soon as I touched the play-button. I will try the game again later today, I reckon. It's been a few hotfixes now, it seems. I will not import my old save from TIAOVH1. This looks to be best treated as a new game altogether. And Katarina is adorable!

[BruceVC]

 

And Van Helsing II stopped working again. Re-verify installation. restart steam yada yada to get it to work again. Bug ridden mess at the moment it seems.

Good game if it decides to run. Forum full of people complaining about crashes.

So keep away until they patch it.

 

They gave a Steam achievement and extra goodies for NOT pre-ordering on Steam. The concept is boggling... Especially considering that on their own site they are stil selling Steam keys.

Yeah! Tell me about it! My AV had all its bells and whistles go off as soon as I touched the play-button. I will try the game again later today, I reckon. It's been a few hotfixes now, it seems. I will not import my old save from TIAOVH1. This looks to be best treated as a new game altogether. And Katarina is adorable!

 

 

I always admire people like you guys, you'll play a game as soon as its been released but accept the fact you may not be able to play it. I would be too annoyed by a game that you can basically purchase but keeps crashing. I would question the Q&A testing of the developers. That's why I always follow the 1 month rule before purchasing any game

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

 

 

I always admire people like you guys, you'll play a game as soon as its been released but accept the fact you may not be able to play it. I would be too annoyed by a game that you can basically purchase but keeps crashing. I would question the Q&A testing of the developers. That's why I always follow the 1 month rule before purchasing any game

 

We're just all too eager, I suppose. I love that rule of yours. It's clever and I commend you for your self-restraint. I suspect that many of us already know it's gonna be buggy as hell, so our expectations are just that - and that makes it much easier. Like Melkathi wrote, the Steam forums are full of people steaming over bugs in newly released games or delays or almost anything. I recall when you had to wiggle a mini-screwdriver in a tiny hole of a cassette tape player for an hour, watching flickering rainbow colours that caused epileptic seizures to unsuspecting kids, just to get the game running...or not!

 

EDIT: I have the exact same problem as Melkathi now. I create my character, watch the intro, then comes the load screen with the blood drops serving as a loading bar, and then *pop*, I crash to desktop. :/

Edited May 23, 2014 by IndiraLightfoot

[melkathi]

It is a Neocore game...

 

I like the games Neocore makes. King Arthur was absolutely amazing (even if combat was unbalanced like feth). I hadn't liked a strategy game as much as that in a long time. I don't deny though that a LOT of people couldn't get past the tutorial battle because it crashed the game.

King Arthur II was a lot of fun. A bit more linear than the first, but still had most of what made the first game great. Especially the Dead Legion prologue campaign was superb... and a bug ridden mess that most people couldn't complete until two patches in because a main quest was broken. And of course the main game crashed for certain people

Van Helsing 1 was unexpectedly fun. The story wasn't special, but somehow they made a simple story work just fine. And the voice acting wasn't special, but Katarina still is a very charming character even without being voiced by Claudia Black.

And even their Crusader games made for a fun playthrough.

 

So I pre-ordered knowing what I'd get: a game that is bound to have troubles and a far too large install size (seriously, compression must not be in their programmers' vocabulary). But I suspect that being able to tell Steam "Look we have fans who pre-order our games!" is important for these smaller dev teams, just as it is important for someone like Bioware to be able to show EA. And I kinda want them to keep making games.

Edited May 23, 2014 by melkathi

[Amentep]

 

If you can find the other person on the planet who hasn't played Portal 2 yet then the multiplayer is just as good as the single player campaign.

The only Source engine game I've played is Bloodlines.

 

Looks like Bloodlines and Left4Dead for me.

 

As a bonus, I never played the first Half-Life.

[Drowsy Emperor]

Still TF2.

 

If anyone has TF2 items they don't need (many of them come with Steam pre-orders and just sit in your inventory... if you don't play TF2) I'd be happy to take them off your hands.

[Drowsy Emperor]

 

 

And Van Helsing II stopped working again. Re-verify installation. restart steam yada yada to get it to work again. Bug ridden mess at the moment it seems.

Good game if it decides to run. Forum full of people complaining about crashes.

So keep away until they patch it.

 

They gave a Steam achievement and extra goodies for NOT pre-ordering on Steam. The concept is boggling... Especially considering that on their own site they are stil selling Steam keys.

Yeah! Tell me about it! My AV had all its bells and whistles go off as soon as I touched the play-button. I will try the game again later today, I reckon. It's been a few hotfixes now, it seems. I will not import my old save from TIAOVH1. This looks to be best treated as a new game altogether. And Katarina is adorable!

 

 

I always admire people like you guys, you'll play a game as soon as its been released but accept the fact you may not be able to play it. I would be too annoyed by a game that you can basically purchase but keeps crashing. I would question the Q&A testing of the developers. That's why I always follow the 1 month rule before purchasing any game

 

 

I generally follow the 1+ year rule, so I must qualify for Dalai Lama status by this forum's standards 

[melkathi]

More like Drowsy Lama

[Bartimaeus]

I generally follow the 1+ year rule, so I must qualify for Dalai Lama status by this forum's standards  

 

 

Yep. 6-12 months here, generally, depending on the game in question. I haven't pre-ordered or bought at release an AAA game in many years.