What are you playing right now?

[Fenixp]

Homeworld came in at a far second place. It reminded me that I'd played it before, either a demo or a pirated copy in my less upright college days. The game's controls were the big hurdle causing it to fall behind. I'd forgotten vertical movement within minnutes! And building and launching seem a hassle when you're trying to keep other ships docked, like your harvesters. I'll come back to it, but play just wasn't smooth.

It's mostly a matter of getting used to the controls, really. I mean, vertical movement is literally Shift, it's not a huge amount of information to process :-P Still, you'll mostly not use it particularly often - objects in space tend to be conveniently in a similar "depth" and since I learned to scout ahead anyway, I have a tendency of only using the 3 dimensional controls to send out scouts around enemy positions and then use those scouts as an "anchor" for my other forces (when you select units and right-click a friendly unit, all your other units will be sent near it.)

 

Similarly, instead of micromanaging resource controllers, I just tell my harvesters to 'harvest' using the harvest button which'll make them find nearest resource and go grab it and then I tell resource controllers to follow two different harvesters. It's certainly not optimized, but it works well enough and is entirely hassle-free.

 

After some time you learn to appreciate the complexity added by the little shift key, tho. There are several missions with targets that have good coverage on certain sides, but not so great on others - finding and abusing these holes with your annoying little bombers is good fun. Oh and don't worry about harvesters, aside from one mission which tells you they're prioritized, enemies have a tendency of mostly focusing on military units.

 

Still, it's pretty damn hard to beat XCOM: Enemy Within at the best of times. That damn game cost me hundreds of hours of my life...

[Tale]

I mean, vertical movement is literally Shift

Actually, it's M then shift. If you're used to moving by just clicking, doing shift then click does a whole other thing. Which is where the confusion set in. There was combat against something on another plane in like the second mission. Which caused all sorts of flailing about by me until it came into sensor range on its own.

[Fenixp]

If you're playing the remastered version as opposed to Classic, you only need to right click into open space to open the movement interface as opposed to pressing 'M'. Also, once you start noticing the vertical 'lines' which indicate depth in sensors display, gauging it becomes very intuitive (if you need to send ships somewhere in the z direction, make sure to do it trough sensor display - it's much easier) You just need to make sure camera is panned at about 45 degrees towards all 3 axes so that you can accurately see all three dimensions. As I said, it takes practice - but I've not seen a more intuitive and precise way to control space ships in 3 dimensions.

Edited June 13, 2016 by Fenixp

[Wrath of Dagon]

I'm planning to play most of the above mentioned games, but where the hell do I find the time?

[Hurlshort]

I picked up Dark Souls 1 for $5 yesterday.  I've never tried it, so I'm a bit nervous.  I also picked up Dirt 3, which was kinda cool for a bit, but I think I like Grid better.

[DreamWayfarer]

I picked up Dark Souls 1 for $5 yesterday. I've never tried it, so I'm a bit nervous. I also picked up Dirt 3, which was kinda cool for a bit, but I think I like Grid better.

No need to be afraid of Dark Souls, just remember:

 

Rule One: in face of death, keep calm and carry on.

 

Rule Zero: If you feel the game is cheating, cheat back.

 

Rule Minus One: Hit. Every. Damn. Wall.

[213374U]

 

Finally got around to trying Dead State. Looks like crap and runs like crap. Wow. Good thing I'm not a graphics whore, I hope the gameplay is interesting at least; the setting is fairly generic.

 

I got pretty addicted to it, but it took a couple attempts.  What helped me was looking at the list of characters available to recruit (save) and then just focusing on finding as many as possible.  That was obviously a bit spoilerish, but it kept me interested until the end.  

 

Also that biker gang was a bunch of jerks.

 

You have a much higher tolerance than me to bad games. Combat is boring. The constant salvage runs are tedious and repetitive. Characters repeat the same 5-6 lines all the time. Resource management is an exercise in frustration. No stealth option although the game warns you "not to let them hear you". No minimap.

 

I decided to give up after raiding an armory that had the toughest locked doors and most zombies guarding it so far, and coming out with a grand total of four (4) bullets.

 

This game is just terrible.

 

Anyway, on to Age of Decadence.

[Hurlshort]

Heh, I was oddly compelled to grind through Dead State, but Age of Decadence always loses me about an hour in.  

[Orogun01]

Heh, I was oddly compelled to grind through Dead State, but Age of Decadence always loses me about an hour in.  

I hated both, compelling concepts but very flawed execution. 

Both games demanded different mechanics than what actually made into the game and in the end they both turned out to be bad CRPGs  with a gimmick. 

[Tale]

I lost my game of XCOM: Enemy Within on Normal so badly that I just want to get colorful.

 

It all started when I got my first Exalt mission. I've barely got lasers, and not many at that, and there's all these swarms of guys who take 2-3 hits to kill. My sniper died and when I saw they were still coming, I evacced the rest out.

 

Then I got to a mission with a mechtoid. May have blown up two of my veterans fighting that. Cars for cover turns out to be a terrible idea when you're using rocket launchers and MEC punches. Then a third died, I saw those little saucer things, Muton I already hate where there, so I evacced the remaining two.

 

So now nations are panicing. I get a mission to stop the panic, which turns out to be like three saucers and a bunch of those zombie creating guys. Yeah, everyone died. My last one died to a surprise overwatch around a corner that I thought was clear because a civilian was just there safe and sound.

 

Then a mission with more zombie thingies. They pop out of nowhere and kill one of my dudes in two attacks. My sniper grenades them, but dies to the new zombie. The remaining three I just let die.

 

And that's all I could put up with.

[Humanoid]

The most important strategy to learn in XCOM is the overwatch crawl. It's a bit boring, unfortunately, but is pretty much the key to success at higher difficulties. In essence, the idea is that only the first soldier to move every turn is allowed to reveal any fog-of-war, and may only do so on their blue move. If there's no contact, then move up the rest of your soldiers in a conga line, right behind the first soldier, no cover required, and put everyone on overwatch. If there is contact, then your point man can use their orange move to find good cover *behind* where they are, ideally breaking line-of-sight altogether. The rest of the squad can then move up and attack (if the point-man is exposed to fire) or stay back and lay an overwatch trap.

 

Breaking LoS completely is usually a good idea in general because the AI has a tendency to become a drooling imbecile anytime none of their active units can see any of their units, and they will often take up suicidal positions while they search for you.

 

Another thing that you can use in your favour is the fact that the enemy count is soft-capped in both Easy and Normal difficulties. No matter how many aliens are active, only five of them will engage you at any given time, the extras will just run away out of sight until some of the ones engaging you die. It's also worth looking up the rest of the specifics of each difficulty level here, particularly the section showing how many aliens to expect on each given map type.

 

For Exalt missions, ideally you will have an Assault as the operative. They're so much better at the job than everyone else that they should have the job exclusively. Run and Gun works for activating the relays, so you can often chain together multiple turns where Exalt cannot fire at you, excluding explosives. Exalt Heavies have the rocket launchers and Exalt Operatives have grenades so prioritise killing them in that order.

 

For the Extraction missions, the enemy reinforcements are triggered when you stand next to a relay with your operative. Use this to your advantage by *not* activating the relay immediately: assuming you're not in immediate danger of being shot, just stand there and overwatch, then activate the relay after the reinforcements arrive. For Data Recovery missions, you have a lot more relays and often the most effective strategy is to stand a couple of Close Combat Specialist assaults in the capture zone and watch as the enemy idiotically bum-rushes you, because the AI has a fetish for occupying that zone if none of their units are in it, and will prioritise doing so above all else.

[Hurlshort]

Xcom 2 does do a few things to:

 

1.  Force you to move fast and abandon the overwatch crawl.

 

2. Give you some new abilities to make it interesting and give you a shot at survival.

[melkathi]

Started playing AdvertCity.

It made me feel young again. I am squinting at the screen full of Syndicate era cyber-city-scape, trying to figure out what the hell I am doing and why.

[the_dog_days]

I bought and played Oxenfree (GOG summer sale). I'm not a big point and click fan, but I loved this game. My only complaint is

I wish there was a true ending even if you can only get it in NG+, because while I liked the ending, it doesn't lend itself well to replaying

.

[redneckdevil]

Welp, the final dlc for witcher has come out. Time to invest my time into that game fresh start and hopefully something from the summer steam sale doesn't get my focus off it.

[GhostofAnakin]

Finally got around to starting Uncharted 4.  Way too early in the game to comment on it at this point, but the visuals at least look really nice.

[marelooke]

Played through most of Hard Reset (the regular version, not Redux), only noticed I finished the base game when the loading screens were no longer animated comics. Heh. Story is only there as an excuse to shoot things as far as I can tell (for this game that works for me) which is probably why they didn't even bother putting something resembling an ending in place (which was...weird). With only a few missions to go in the DLC I don't think much of anything that happened will be explained.

 

Fun game all in all and I'm guessing that it'll clock in somewhere between 8 and 10 hours (playing on "Normal" difficulty). Can be frustrating when the game cheats though, eg. by spawning new enemies right on top of you (happened a few times, but not often enough to be a major nuisance) and an extra savepoint between some of the tougher waves wouldn't have hurt...

Edited June 15, 2016 by marelooke

[Tale]

More XCOM: Enemy Within, Ironman Normal.

 

Much better this time around. I'm about as far as when I failed hard last time, though I held off doing EXALT. I haven't lost a single soldier yet! Very exciting, I know. Having succeeded at a satellite gambit and using the recommended overwatch crawl helped a bunch.

 

Edit: My flawless streak is over. My first exalt mission, the one that was less than a day away from where I started up today, saw three soldiers die, including my operative.

 

I was flawlessly kicking the mission's butt up until a tank spontaneously exploded WITH NO WARNING that they were using as cover. Thankfully they weren't my veterans. They had 3, 4, and 5 missions in their belts, where my true veterans had 17.

 

Edit 2: I lost another two soldiers in another Exalt mission, this time to standard "getting shot." I lost a heavy (of which I have like 4 left) to lots of bad luck. He got shot up from the ground while taking cover near a rail, revived, hit with a rocket later that destroyed his cover, and then shot by a dude who barely showed up. And I lost my MEC Trooper because it was a vertical map and I couldn't get it up with the rest of the team without running through enemies. I tried skirmishing with it when I thought the mission was almost over, but it got torn up by Overwatch.

 

Due to various injuries, I am forced to do my next mission with only 5 guys.

[Katphood]

Played the new RESIDENT EVIll demo. Pretty damn awesome I must say, sort of reminded me of Condemned: Criminal Origins.

Edited June 16, 2016 by Katphood

[teknoman2]

i just finished a star wars marathon.

dark forces

jedi knight

jedi outcast

jedi academy

[Fenixp]

dark forces

jedi knight

jedi outcast

jedi academy

Oh yeah, did that a while back. In spite of its jankyness, I think I have enjoyed Jedi Knight the most out of all of these - nice and open level design, the courtyard around Imperial base and collapsing space ships being my personal highlights. I found Dark Forces next to unplayable, in spite of routinely playing original Doom.

[melkathi]

I am not much good at shooters. But there are times when even I despair with my team mates.

We fail the mission and he comments "bg"

Oh, really. I wonder who messed it up...

 

And the infuriating thing, he has a character unlocked that requires him to have beaten all missions with a Silver Medal on Advanced.

[teknoman2]

 

dark forces

jedi knight

jedi outcast

jedi academy

Oh yeah, did that a while back. In spite of its jankyness, I think I have enjoyed Jedi Knight the most out of all of these - nice and open level design, the courtyard around Imperial base and collapsing space ships being my personal highlights. I found Dark Forces next to unplayable, in spite of routinely playing original Doom.

 

the dirst dark forces' problem is that the controls are all over the place.

arrow keys to move forward and backward and turn right or left

<> keys to strafe

C to crouch

X to jump

space to activate things

mouse moves you forward/backward and turns you left/right but it overrides the keys for movement making you crawl slowly

page up and down for looking up and down

the original did not allow the controls to be changed but the gog version has a file that allowes to configure the controls so i could put the classic WASD and remove movement from the mouse, keeping only camera tunring

you know the funny thing is that while both dark forces games use the same engine, the first ran fine while the second needed me to download a 3dfx graphics card emulator because apparently my graphics card doesn't have enough memory for hardware 3D acceleration

Edited June 17, 2016 by teknoman2

[Tale]

I lost my favorite soldier last night, my first Colonel, my last remaining assault. Yeah, it was another EXALT mission. Those things have been the bane of my existence. And I lost my best support in the assault the alien base mission.

 

I've been stuck running 3 snipers for a while, since they never get injured or killed, while trying to train up rookies to an assault. My third Colonel was one of those snipers and my second Colonel is another heavy. The heavy is the one who cleaned up the mess that killed the assault, I like him. Thankfully I just got the Operation Progeny soldier as an assault and stuck her in the psi lab with both of the Colonels.

 

Lets see what happens.

 

I'm kind of concerned, though. I thought I'd stabilized the assault Colonel, but couldn't find it after the mission. Maybe because I failed it anyway. So I checked the memorial wall and sure enough, there she was, dead of major trauma. But the interesting thing was my first three deaths, the ones that died to a randomly exploding tank. The memorial wall says they all died to a Major using a Sniper Rifle.

 

A certain Major that's now a Colonel. I have to keep my eye on him.

[GhostofAnakin]

More Uncharted 4.  Probably about halfway through.  I like it better than UC3.  Seems to be more climbing/problem solving this time around.