What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Burnout Paradise is great, and I don't care about car games at all. I probably still have an Origin code for it if anyone wants a copy.

jeb wrote: I've been playing KEEP TALKING AND NOBODY EXPLODES. Anyone else got this?

I do, it's a lot of fun. Haven't gotten to play it much lately though.

Spintires has been punishing my hubris. Something like five times now I've tipped over the truck and lost all the logs, three times within actual sight of the lumber yard objective. It's the world's slowest crash with no backing out when it reaches a certain point . Of course I could stop, and bring out the Kirovets tractor to winch it back, but this game keeps telling me I can make this happen if I just push a little more, and then laughing at me as I fail. I've hit the menu option to recover the truck (teleport it) back to a garage like some worthless game-playing scum, twice now. The only time that's truly necessary that I've found is when you've completely drowned a truck in deep water, and other time you can usually bring another truck to tow or drive back after recovery.

On the subject of racing games, Forza 4 on the XBox 360 was probably my overall favourite, for the sheer amount of nerdery available, and a really nice decal/painting aspect. I just installed DIRT Rally last night, and did a couple of rallies. It may show some weakness later but right now I'm really impressed with it. My favourite rally game of all time was Richard Burns Rally- Colin McRea Rally (DIRT Rally's great grandpa) had stages that looked like four lane highways and it left me feeling kind of sad when I played it, because these were not the country lane rallies I grew up watching. DIRT Rally stages look tight, and it's tougher than I expected, which is great. I miss the simulation/realism of games like iRacing since I tore my racing sim rig down, but for a joypad game this feels pretty great to play.

Burnout Revenge was incredible. I downloaded Paradise but haven't played it.
I hear that Forza Horizon 3 us supposed to be amazing

I actually like Burnout Revenge better than Paradise...the open world thing, eh. It's still really good because those guys did probably the best racing games ever.

Nier Automata demo is NUTS. It's SUPER DUPER. It is 100% Platinum Games, so fans of Bayonetta, MGS Revengence, Vanquish, etc. will feel right at home. I really liked the first Nier and think it is hugely underrated, but this is definitely going to be a superior design. It has some elements of it, the weird shooting/danmaku stuff in particular and odd mechanical designs, but it's also not as balls out crazy or bleak. So far. Anyway, I'm going to buy it day 1

Really in the mood for a fighting game...and in particular a Guilty Gear fighting game. Amazon has Revelator for $20, couldn't pass it up.

Kids are obsessed with Overcooked.

The little differences in X-Com are beginning to mess with me. I guess satellite coverage reduces panic in countries but, having never had to manage satellite coverage in the first one, it's not intuitive that I have to build Satellite Uplinks in my base to support satellites, and then you have to build the damn things and they take days whereas armor/weapon orders are instantaneous. At least I was able to get my shit together enough to build and equip laser cannons on my Interceptors.

My next unpleasant discovery was that I need certain kinds of alien corpses for manufacture/research only after I'd been selling them like crazy. So now I can't make Chitin Armor (from Chrysallid corpses) nor can I research better Medikits (Thin Man corpses required).

But all that stuff's part of the learning curve and I'm muddling my way through okay for a first attempt, but the damn game up and crashed while I was partway through the first Alien Base Assault. I'd taken out three Floaters with no casualties and had just encountered three Chrysallids by a doorway. I knew how fast those things can move so I had everyone hunker down in Overwatch behind cover and that was enough to take out one of them, and regular activations killed the second. The third retreated but it screwed up and was still in almost perfect line of sight so my guys were taking turns shooting at it when the game crashed.

Since I'm pseudo-Iron Manning the game my last save was back in the base so instead of starting the Alien Base Assault again I just goofed around for a bit and did some research and a few missions without saving.

Been getting back into The Witness. Definitely one of the best, if not THE best puzzle game I've ever played.

hotseatgames wrote: Been getting back into The Witness. Definitely one of the best, if not THE best puzzle game I've ever played.

I'l rez the thread. I still have some stuff going on there...

I just beat the Darkening of Tristram event in Diablo 3. That was pretty cool. You do a 16 level dungeon that is basically Diablo 1.

Darkening of Tristram was pretty fun. Looking forward to the new Necromancer class too.

I'm about 25 hours into Dark Souls 2. I'm enjoying it, as it is a Souls game, but I definitely feel that it is the lesser game compared to the first one. The world feels disjointed, so I'm constantly forgetting where things are. And I'm not a fan of all the mini-bosses, which seem pretty easy. I usually get them on my first attempt. Even the larger bosses only take me one or two attempts.

Like I said, I'm enjoying it, but I don't think I'll spend any more time with it after I beat it.

Edit - It would have been nice to know a bit earlier on that they changed how illusionary walls worked...

Had a chunk of unexpected free time yesterday and didn't feel like setting up a boardgame. So I played a game of Armageddon Empires for old times' sake. Since I was playing on my new/used computer with migrated data, I couldn't find any saved decks, so I just played the starter deck for Empire of Man, vs AI opponents for the Machine Empire, the Free Mutants, and the Xenos. For laughs, I also enabled the expansion, to get a random fourth opponent. I went with mid-level deck points and mid-sized map, with uncommon special resources.

I got a very lucky start, with 3 decent scouts showing up early. I scouted the hell out of nearly half the map, scooping up a couple of nifty weapons and some caches of resource points. I also located the homebase of the Xenos just one turn after a dustup with one of their scouts. A few turns later, I sent a mech over to stomp the Xeno base, which was very lightly defended. Mostly I was just stomping eggs. Their one decent stack of troops took up passive residence in an abandoned town nearby, since they couldn't get home fast enough to re-take their base. One down.

Then I started losing my scouts, eventually all of three of them, to encounters with a mysterious Fist of the Wastelands or somesuch, near the center of the map. They were tough infantry in powered armor, with chain guns, shock attacks, and a few tactical nukes. The shock effect is nasty, because a single hit causes the target unit to lose their attack for that round of battle. Even my mech got swarmed at one point, and had to retreat after three consecutive rounds lost to shock.

I suspected that I wasn't seeing any mutants or robots because they were fighting it out on the far side of the map. Eventually, some allies that I recruited got strafed a few times by flying bots, so I went actively looking for the Machine Empire. By this time, I had two mechs out, one of which was commanded by Vladimir something or other, a very aggressive military leader. Vlad's mech ran into more Fist guys, and they kept pursuing him when he retreated. My other mech found the Machine HQ and took after a series of moderately challenging fights with defending forces. Two down.

By this point, I ruled half the map, and I had located the Fist base. I harassed them with air strikes until I got a third mech up. That, plus a couple of nasty tanks combined into a serious army with my other two mechs. Though I nearly lost a mech, I completely stomped out the Fists. Three down, but the dying leader of the Fists did set off a nuke that seriously wounded all of my units in that fight, and killed Vladimir.

While repairing my mechs, my spy located the homebase of the Free Mutants. From the Fist HQ, it was a fairly short march for my mech squad. They made neat work of cleansing the mutant base, for the win.

The expansion material is nice, because it adds a random and initially secret opponent to the mix. Otherwise, I feel like AE is practically a solved game. Scout early and often. Retreat early from a losing battle, so your opponent at least wastes action points to finish your troops off. Buy the biggest units you can get and combine them into a vicious army. Take enemy bases whenever possible, to extend your supply range and also the range of your air strikes.

Even so, I highly recommend Armageddon Empires. It is a true 4x game with the fog of war and a neat setting. Although the main strategy seems straightforward, there are a lot of interesting angles to explore, like R&D, tactics, diplomacy with minor factions, espionage, assassination, and sabotage. You can play any of the four main factions, and each has distinct advantages and disadvantages. The worst that I can say about AE is that the combat could be streamlined a bit to cut down on mouseclicks, and there should have been an option to play live opponents.

I'm playing Stellaris again. It's not... it's not a good game for a competitive player, I feel like, but is a perfect game for me. I suspect I feel about it the same way Legomancer feels about No Man's Sky whenever he talks about it. I love Stellaris---there are many long periods where are you just choosing between different types of busy work to spend on first, exploring, reading event texts, etc but with just enough choices that it really tickles me. I even play it on normal speed, which is pretty slow, at all times with long periods of staring at the map. Very relaxing. I think the systems are still very cool in the game, (e.g. pops, other race POPs, changing citizen attitudes, deep tech tree) but they don't quite create enough friction in any of the games I've played to worry about beyond the international (interstellar) relations choices of outmaneuvering enemy empires and staying strong to combat enemy aggressors. There's also an RPG element to a certain extent---I generally start with a certain ethos in mind (current one is Trek federation-ish space snails) and then pick traits and attitudes to go with that. From there, I just act that way, and USUALLY the simulation supports my decisions by giving me Trek-ish options/advantages. So right now I just opened my borders to these fast breeding squid people I have a defense pact with and they're flooding my planets and cities... over time they're slowly changing their attitudes to reflect my people's.

It's a bit of shame because after 2-3 games you're seeing the same event chains. It's kind of unavoidable because it's SUCH a long involved game it's kind of a giant corpus of fiction even to create enough event chains to supply 1-2 games. The only way you could really create enough events to maintain the wonder, I think, is some sort of crowdsourcing/modding.

I remember playing Armageddon Empires a LONG time ago... that was a cool game. I think it was still in beta when I played it.

Armageddon Empires is very cool indeed, thanks for reminding about it. I think it was one of the first games that did the board-video games fusion that's becoming increasingly popular. If only it was on tablets and had multiplayer. The AI is very competent, but still just a toaster. I'd love to play it with a human being.
Actually, the follow-up, Solium Infernum was focused on multiplayer, intrigue and diplomacy. But sadly it is PBeM only, which is completely ridiculous (the game is only 4-5 years old, but feel like 20). Did anyone here play it?

Solium Infernum is wild.