Who likes video games?

[Wesker1982]

Battlefield 3 is pretty fun, but I suck at FPS games overall. Can't wait for Skyrim to come out!

BF3 is awesome. Skyrim looks awesome too. The only problem will be having both of these games at the same time and trying to figure out which one to play.

 

[Kludge]

Lol... Starcraft 2 is still $60. At this rate, I won't have a copy until it's public domain. I've read there are mostly-functional LAN hacks now, at least. The most prominent is called StarFriend.

Arkham City came out on the 1st, I guess. Sounds pretty much the same as Arkham Asylum, which was interesting, but I only played up till the fight with Scarecrow due to some pretty clever anti-piracy features by the devs (which did absolutely nothing to push me toward buying the game before playing it). Think I'll skip it.

All hope's on Skyrim.... and Saints Row 3 out just four days later.

 

[brandon]

I doubt starcraft's price will ever be reduced. Blizzard will likely put out a series of $20-$30 expansions and over time bundle them for free with the base game, without changing it's price. Same thing they do with WOW.

IMO the game definitely is worth $60 though.

 

[ClayTrainor]

I doubt starcraft's price will ever be reduced. Blizzard will likely put out a series of $20-$30 expansions and over time bundle them for free with the base game, without changing it's price. Same thing they do with WOW.

IMO the game definitely is worth $60 though.

Blizzards ROI% must be off the charts.

 

[Kludge]

If I play Skyrim now, it'll be tainted with near-unplayable framerates on minimum quality in 1280x1024 since all my "serious" computers are packed up and out-of-state.

... But, if I play Skyrim later.... well, I wouldn't be playing it now.

But, if I play it now, I'll be distracted and rushing stuff so I can play Skyrim.

... But if I play Skyrim later.... well, I wouldn't be playing it now.


.... Well. Hopefully, it won't run on this PC.

 

[brandon]

I played for about 45 minutes before work today. It was mostly all cut scenes and backstory, as is tradition in the start of elder scrolls games, but it pissed me off I couldn't *really* play! Everything did look really cool (ultra-high settings) though and I'm excited to get back to it tonight.

This is my first time playing an elder scrolls game on PC (morrowind and oblivion were on xbox for me) and the keyboard controls do kinda suck. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to stop viewing the contents of an empty chest. I think I'll hook up an xbox controller tonight. (I can do that, right?)

 

[Kludge]

I played for about 45 minutes before work today. It was mostly all cut scenes and backstory, as is tradition in the start of elder scrolls games, but it pissed me off I couldn't *really* play! Everything did look really cool (ultra-high settings) though and I'm excited to get back to it tonight.

This is my first time playing an elder scrolls game on PC (morrowind and oblivion were on xbox for me) and the keyboard controls do kinda suck. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to stop viewing the contents of an empty chest. I think I'll hook up an xbox controller tonight. (I can do that, right?)

I played about 1h this morning, too, and agree, especially about the controls -- sometimes you can use mouse, but sometimes you have to use arrow keys for the GUI, which doesn't make sense because it's on the opposite end of the keyboard from WASD controls and you have to take your mouse-hand off the mouse, breaking flow (edit: oooooh... no, nevermind. There's a tiny bit of time between when the GUI appears and when you can use keys, which's why I kept thinking I had to use the arrow keys. "e" can take the place of "enter," and WASD controls can be used in the GUI, so there's no need to use keys on the right of the keyboard). The intro isn't too bad (less the voice-acting [edit: which's generally pretty good for a video game after that one guy in the intro... I don't think I've ever heard anyone convincingly convey fear in a video game...), because immediately after, they toss you out into the wilderness. I was really amazed I got a decent frame-rate on a video card I bought used for $30 over a year ago. Even turned a couple options up like view distance so I could see what's happening. That's some amazing optimization, and definitely not something I remember the Elder Scrolls series for.

The few places I've been seem pretty content-laden. Lots to do, and you start out around a bunch of Nords!

My first off-script (... which is actually scripted, so....) adventure came around Whiterun which was a bit of a bungle. There was a group of bandits I decided to engage with my friend Sven who started following me from a small village because...... actually, I have no idea why Sven is risking his life to follow me. I already told some Jarl (who doesn't appear able to hurl boulders) that Sven's town was in danger - but I honestly have no idea if that's why he's following me, and if it was just to talk to the Jarl, he should probably be heading back right about now. -- Anyway, bandits... - There are three. I kill two. As the second goes down, I'm forced out of control of my character for a mandatory dialogue with "a fugitive" who's interrupting me from combat to give me a stolen item and telling me (more loudly than the fellows exchanging blows) not to tell anyone about what he'd just given me or I'd regret it. At this point, the whole situation gets clusterfucked because since I'm fighting a bandit, the bandits following the fugitive engage me. Making matters worse, the poor fellow who had his item stolen forces me out of combat after the first or second bandit goes down, but is killed before we can talk about anything.

Eventually, everyone's dead but the original fugitive, who's hiding behind rocks and then I guess his brain just shuts down out of fear, because he doesn't care if you're standing right next to him. Once he's found a spot, he's playing dead till the end. So, we kill him, and that's that. Loot the bodies, still none the wiser to what led to this, and admire how a scripted event can go so wrong.


-- and yeah, I saw an option for using xbox controller in options.



edit: some other things I noticed after a few more hours of play... A lot of the issues Oblivion had with being "sandbox" are in Skyrim, too. A lot of the way things like bounty work just don't make sense sometimes. Sometimes, you kill everyone in a room, and there's no bounty, but sometimes there is for no obvious reason. Some "plot-necessary" NPCs can't be killed, even if you're given no indication they're essential to the game's main plot - but being unable to kill them kind of gives it away and breaks immersion. Whoever developed the conditional dialogue went way overboard, and NPCs will repeat the same line of text over and over, and over - if you meet some condition like being infected with vampirism or carrying a lot of lockpicks.

The obvious problem of never having enough dialogue options and choices takes away from immersion in a choice-driven game... for instance, a man wanted me to find his woman who he thought was taken prisoner. Turns out, the woman was a famous outlaw (with no bounty, I guess...) who wanted nothing to do with her husband anymore, so I decided to kill her and tell the fellow what happened. Instead, when I get back to the husband, my only option is to claim she attacked me and I had to kill her, giving no explanation why beyond that. Of course, he actually does attack me first, and I have to kill him.

I was sent into a particular cavernous sanctuary, and I hear a kind of desolate, foreboding music, and I wonder "why can't these beautiful environments ever be free of repulsive monsters? Why don't people just inhabit the place? Well... I guess they'd probably turn it into some type of asinine resort or something." Soon as I finish that thought, I notice construction in the area, and there're a couple people who apparently just sit around in the cave and admire the environment. "Ha. Nice touch!" So anyway, I had to collect some sap from the primary tree in their sanctuary, and when I do, some tree folk reveal themselves and kill the enviro-tourists. Gives my action a nice kind of "Shadow of the Colossus" depth to it. I return the sap to some woman for a reason I no longer recall, she gives me nothing, I'm unable to tell her what that sap cost, and that's the end of that. -And for some reason, that Sven guy's still following me everywhere.

 

[Agorism]

These games suck. There is only one game worth buying, and since it's free you don't have to buy it: Defrag.

Been out for nearly 10 years and it's still the best game by far.



Only thing is the skill level is so high in this game it might take 2-3 years just to get to average level let alone good.

 

[Kludge]

Pshhh. Everyone knows Nethack is the best game ever. Free, out for over TWENTY years, and might take 4-6 years to get to average level.... probably because so many've been playing since it came out.

 

[James Madison]

I'm looking into starting my own video game programming company.

Anyone have similar aspirations?

 

[Kludge]

I doubt starcraft's price will ever be reduced. Blizzard will likely put out a series of $20-$30 expansions and over time bundle them for free with the base game, without changing it's price. Same thing they do with WOW.

IMO the game definitely is worth $60 though.

I've been thinking about it more. If I can get a LAN hack to work, I'll very grudgingly purchase ONE copy of SC2. It's stupid, though, because to play LAN, I have to use cracked, very old versions of SC2 for the "spawn installs" (a feature of SC which allowed LAN play [on top of a couple other benefits] on diff. computers using one license which was taken out of SC2 as part of their hyper-aggressive DRM plan) - and that means the primary computer I'd otherwise be playing the legit online copy needs the old cracked version, too. Just going from having the .iso to having a functional offline copy of SC2 (minus Battle.net access) takes 15+ steps and two different cracks (that's not including the additional work to get offline skirmish access). If I didn't go that route, I'd be paying $180 for three copies so I could play with family, which is really offensive bullshit, because it's hard to imagine SC2 didn't have LAN functionality stripped from it after it was implemented, especially because it took such a short amount of time for hackers to kludge together LAN functionality.

 

[Kludge]

Third Saints Row is out today. Promises large weaponized dildos.

GTA V rumored not to be out until 2013 after Take Two failed to mention GTA V while talking of 2012 releases in a financial report. It was previously rumored to be out in Q3-Q4 2012.

 

[Kludge]

Third Saints Row is out today.

I wholly endorse this product. Plot's pretty similar to the second. New mini-games are fantastic. Not very buggy unless an NPC drives. I've played it around 4 hours and have been laughing just about the whole way through.

If you want a challenge and are decent at FPS, you'll have to play on hard. Saints Row is pretty much "the other direction" you could go with GTA gameplay since GTA IV. Fun, wacky aesthetic style, and absurdity over narrative, "realistic" graphics, and realism.

 

[brandon]

I've been playing a whole lot of League of Legends over the past couple months. It's a free, fun, team based strategy action game. I highly recommend it. The only downfall (or it may be a plus) is that their is a steep learning curve if you want to get good, and single games generally take about 45 minutes. I think I may have posted about this earlier in the thread but oh well.

 

[Ronulus]

I've been playing a whole lot of League of Legends over the past couple months. It's a free, fun, team based strategy action game. I highly recommend it. The only downfall (or it may be a plus) is that their is a steep learning curve if you want to get good, and single games generally take about 45 minutes. I think I may have posted about this earlier in the thread but oh well.

Whats your name? I haven't played much lately, been too distracted with Skyrim and Battlefield 3.

 

[2young2vote]

I've clocked 31 hours into Skyrim and beat the main story at about 23 hours. I have to say this is easily in my top 5 games of all time (only behind HL2 and its episodes). i'm playing at the lowest graphics settings possible and i get around 20-30 fps constantly with stuttering into the single digits for several seconds every minute or so. This is better than I expected from my laptop, so i'm happy with it.

The story is excellent, I could actually understand what was happening which is rare for most video games that i play. The UI is pretty good except for when i read books because when i get out of reading one my mouse stops working on the UI and i have to either exit or use the arrow keys, but this may be fixed in a patch in the future. The voice acting is excellent.

I haven't felt this thrill of discovery since I played Pokemon Ruby, and thats saying something because I love that game.

If you were only considering it, stop considering and just get it. It doesn't really matter which platform you get it on, but if you have a powerful PC then get it for that because it will have lots of mod support in the future.

9.7/10 I'm only rating it down because.....never mind 10/10. Only the perfection that is Half Life 2 can beat the fun factor of Skyrim.

 

[kylejack]

I play imperialist bideogames like MW3.

 

[Zap!]

There's a new Zelda game coming out on November 20th, the first console Zelda game in five years. Wii or not, this should be all anyone is talking about right now.

 

[HiddenSanity]

There's a new Zelda game coming out on November 20th, the first console Zelda game in five years. Wii or not, this should be all anyone is talking about right now.

It's about time. I've been experiencing Zelda withdrawal symptoms these past few years, so I'm glad this is finally coming out. Hope that it gets out as scheduled and won't get delayed, or else I'll throw a fit. Lol...

 

[V3n]

I'm playing MW3 on the 360.. I set my clan tag to [RP12] -Ron Paul '12-