What are you playing?

[bhamv3]

So I'm doing one last playthrough of Mass Effect 2 again.

Because I'm so very experienced at the game now, I'm doing in on the Insanity difficulty level.

Because I hate myself, I'm doing it as an Adept.

I feel like I deserve an achievement just for making it through Freedom's Progress. Seriously, "brutal" doesn't even begin to describe Insanity.

 

[Hailey Knight]

Getting pretty... not far in Mass Effect. Having a lot of fun just wandering a bit.

Right now I'm drawing while watching my wife play Oblivion. That speech mini-game has to be one of the worst things ever.

 

[Bowielee]

Man I hated that part of oblivion.

 

[Shegokigo]

That part was ridiculously overpowered. One charm spell then speech game and you could get anything from anyone. Glad it wasn't a part of Skyrim, would have ruined it.

 

[AshburnerX]

It was basically necessary in Morrowind, which is why it was carried over I think.

 

[Frank]

Played a bunch of Mario Kart with a friend. Any Mario Karts beyond the SNES version are fucking awful. Blue shells ruined that game.

 

[LordRendar]

Just spend a greater part of my sunday playing Sins of a Solar Empire. It is the only kind of X4 game,besides Civ,that can hold my interest for that long.

 

[Terrik]

Just spend a greater part of my sunday playing Sins of a Solar Empire. It is the only kind of X4 game,besides Civ,that can hold my interest for that long.

I keep playing it and stopping...playing and stopping...playing and stopping.

I think part of it that pisses me off is the overpowered-ness of a some of the frigate class ships, such as the friggin laserbeam WTF POW frigate. All you need is about 50 or so and we're good.

 

[Terrik]

Played a bunch of Mario Kart with a friend. Any Mario Karts beyond the SNES version are fucking awful. Blue shells ruined that game.

I liked the 64 and wii version. At least, I liked the tracks.

 

[Terrik]

I never liked using anything but an Infiltrator, though in ME2 the stealth thing never did me any good. Haven't picked up ME3 yet, I'll get to that one of these days.

I heard some people bitched about the ME3 infiltrator because anyone can equip any weapon now, but I've always played an infiltrator for my renegade runs. Personally the stealth sells it for me. I like the burst damage and nothing saves my ass more than an emergency stealth and pull back. Engineer drones can be useful for this too but I always found cloak to be more useful.

 

[Bowielee]

It was basically necessary in Morrowind, which is why it was carried over I think.

Morrowwind just had a speech craft skill, didn't it? It's been so long since I've played it, I can't remember.

 

[LordRendar]

I keep playing it and stopping...playing and stopping...playing and stopping.

I think part of it that pisses me off is the overpowered-ness of a some of the frigate class ships, such as the friggin laserbeam WTF POW frigate. All you need is about 50 or so and we're good.

Yeah,but now you just need a fully upgraded starbase and those 50 will be down to 25 before they take down that thing.and after the Diplomacy addon,pirates got annoyingly strong.

 

[AshburnerX]

Morrowwind just had a speech craft skill, didn't it? It's been so long since I've played it, I can't remember.

It did, but you still had the Admire/Bribe/Insult commands. Basically, what you'd do with them is goad someone into attacking you, which meant you could kill them in self defense and take their stuff legally. This was the only way to get some items in the game, as NPCs had the tendency to have really great stuff but the guards would take it from you if they every caught you.

 

[Hailey Knight]

It did, but you still had the Admire/Bribe/Insult commands. Basically, what you'd do with them is goad someone into attacking you, which meant you could kill them in self defense and take their stuff legally. This was the only way to get some items in the game, as NPCs had the tendency to have really great stuff but the guards would take it from you if they every caught you.

That sort of makes Morrowind sound worth playing even though it's graphics must be eye-bleeding by now.

 

[Bowielee]

Oh, the part I thought was ass in Oblivion was the extremely stupid minigame.

 

[Bowielee]

That sort of makes Morrowind sound worth playing even though it's graphics must be eye-bleeding by now.

Graphics aside, Morrowwind, especially with the expansions, is way more of a fleshed out world than either Oblivion or Skyrim.

 

[Covar]

Diablo III beta. An afternoon of playing the game has turned it into a must buy for me.

 

[GasBandit]

I like Sins of a Solar Empire. I wish it didn't take 90 years to play one round.

 

[LordRendar]

Play on smaller maps?

Plus playing TEC is almost cheating.Once you get the Novalith Cannon,conquering planets is a cinch. Two bullets from the cannon and the planet is razed,swoop in with your fleet,colonize and build defenses,deploy starbase.rinse and repeat.

 

[Adam]

Capitalism 2. Annual profit of $220M, 52 firms with several retail outlets, a couple dozen apartment and commercial buildings, 1 tv station, 2 newspapers and one radio station where I employee a right-wing Ewok named BasGandit.

 

[GasBandit]

Play on smaller maps?

Plus playing TEC is almost cheating.Once you get the Novalith Cannon,conquering planets is a cinch. Two bullets from the cannon and the planet is razed,swoop in with your fleet,colonize and build defenses,deploy starbase.rinse and repeat.

This weekend I played on Triad, the smallest 3-player map there is. Took 6 hours. Maybe I'm just rusty.

Plus, now (or maybe they always did, I dunno), the other factions get interplanetary cannons as well.

 

[Bowielee]

I love strategy games, but I agree with Gas... Sins of a Solar Empire games take forever. Same with Supreme Commander. Sure it's great having these humungous armies, but they usually end up as huge stalemates until someone makes a stupid mistake.

 

[GasBandit]

I love strategy games, but I agree with Gas... Sins of a Solar Empire games take forever. Same with Supreme Commander. Sure it's great having these humungous armies, but they usually end up as huge stalemates until someone makes a stupid mistake.

I find, unlike SOSE, SupCom games go faster the smaller the map. On a 10k map, even if everybody turtles, first guy to build tech 3 artillery wins. It's rare I have a game go more than 2.5 hours. It's rare I have a game of SOSE go UNDER 6.

 

[Bowielee]

2 1/2 hours too long, imo. I like a good C&C or Starcraft game. 30-45 min is just about right for one match on an RTS.

 

[GasBandit]

2 1/2 hours too long, imo. I like a good C&C or Starcraft game. 30-45 min is just about right for one match on an RTS.

2 hours is the perfect length to me. If an RTS match is over in less than an hour, it was a shallow experience, to me.

I'm also of the opinion that C&C hasn't put the S in RTS since Generals: Zero hour. And starcraft gets more and more like Baldur's gate the more I think about it.

 

[Bowielee]

I haven't even played C&C 4, but I liked Tiberium wars. There is a bit too much of a race up the tech tree though, so I get that.

but, Starcraft and Baldur's Gate? I have no idea what you mean there.

 

[GasBandit]

I haven't even played C&C 4, but I liked Tiberium wars. There is a bit too much of a race up the tech tree though, so I get that.

but, Starcraft and Baldur's Gate? I have no idea what you mean there.

Isometric view multicharacter micromanaged tactical combat simulations with looooots of cutscenes/dialog.

All the C&Cs since (and really, even most of the ones before) were all just about racing to build the most of your most overpowered unit and swarm your enemy as fast as possible. The vast majority of times I won in C&C I just built 50 of my best unit, assigned them a keyboard number shortcut, and started right clicking.

 

[Bowielee]

Do you maybe mean Warcraft? Because you aren't describing Starcraft at all.

 

[GasBandit]

Do you maybe mean Warcraft? Because you aren't describing Starcraft at all.

Well, perhaps I should be more specific - I'm describing the starcraft single player campaign.

 

[Bowielee]

The meat of any RTS is not the single player component, so it's kind of apples and oranges. Until C&C 3 there was a long stretch where the only single player campaigns any RTSs had were tutorials, unless you count bot matches.

 

[Frank]

What? All the Command and Conquers had single player campaigns. Or do you mean inbetween C&C3 and all the prior games?

 

[GasBandit]

The meat of any RTS is not the single player component, so it's kind of apples and oranges. Until C&C 3 there was a long stretch where the only single player campaigns any RTSs had were tutorials, unless you count bot matches.

Yeah, looking back it wasn't a fair comparison. I didn't play very much multiplayer starcraft, though I did play the old one in skirmish mode vs the computer. There was strategy to that to be sure, even if that strategy was 24 BATTLECRUISERS BEAT EVERYTHING MUAHAHAHA.

But what do you mean "until C&C3 there were only tutorials for single player?" All the C&C games, Including 1, generals, and especially the red alert series had very large non-tutorial single player campaigns. Also the dawn of war series predates it by 3 years, and Company of Heroes by 1. Did you mean something else I wasn't able to infer?

Also I hated the kanes's wrath expansion for C&C 3.

 

[Bowielee]

I said there was a long stretch where there were no real single player campaigns. The Dawn of War games had weird board-game land skirmishes, not actual story campaigns. I never played Company of Heroes because I hate the new capture the flag brand of RTS's.

 

[GasBandit]

I said there was a long stretch where there were no real single player campaigns. The Dawn of War games had weird board-game land skirmishes, not actual story campaigns. I never played Company of Heroes because I hate the new capture the flag brand of RTS's.

Well, rest assured Company of Heroes had a very robust single player campaign (and the flag capturing was just vespene gas by another name). But yeah, apart from DOW and COH, there wasn't much going on in the way of RTS games at all between 03 and 07.

Of course, then in 07 Supreme Commander came out, and all else became moot.

 

[Terrik]

I said there was a long stretch where there were no real single player campaigns. The Dawn of War games had weird board-game land skirmishes, not actual story campaigns. I never played Company of Heroes because I hate the new capture the flag brand of RTS's.

Well DOW 1 and it's expansion Winter Assault focused on story campaigns. You could argue Dark Crusade had a kickass story for each of its sides since the stronghold missions gave different endings depending on what race you were playing and character interactions were different.

Of course, then in 07 Supreme Commander came out, and all else became moot.

By the way, what's your take on Supreme Commander 2? I never really played through 1, mostly because at the time my computer couldnt handle it. I eventually played all of Supreme Commander 2, believe it or not, on Xbox 360 and I enjoyed it. I was also always a big fan of Total Annihilation. I heard a lot of people put down SC2 as inferior to SC1 citing less units or certain changes in gameplay.