The Video Game Thread: What are you Playing?

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It seems Control Ultimate Edition is on the PsPlus for february. Meaning, free for PS4/PS5 owners. :happy:
 
Found Control pretty disappointing and ended up dropping it. Gameplay is too repetitive and the story/atmosphere isn't good enough to compensate. Feels like a watered down system shock/half life for me.

Oh well.. :sad:
 
I've been playing Gordian Quest. Nice art if you like comic book East meets West style for fantasy. It's challenging and a lot of fun but being in Early Access prevents me from wholeheartedly endorsing it on the Pub.
 
I've just bought an Oppressor Mk2 in GTA Online and found it a gamechanger.
It pretty much overpowers most players, especially if your the only one using one on the map.
I'm not really a fan of the militarisation of GTA Online but in terms of completing most missions it takes a lot of the grind out of them.
 
I've been deep into Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. What an extraordinary game.
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P.S: nuke Sister Miriam for me.
 
I'll try bb. I'm playing Peacekeepers and Miriam is being too aggro at the moment.
There's a high-resolution patch around. I always use it.

If it's your first time, the Peacekeepers is a good choice indeed. And forests, build forests everywhere.

After you get the basics, the other factions present different variations and focus that are interesting to explore (like Gaians use of fungus and worms). And the expansion (Alien Crossfire) add even more, though I prefer the original game factional setup.

I usually play Iron-man mode in the second-hardest difficulty (Thinker?), as I find the hardest one too stressful, and everything below kinda easy.

If you have any questions, lemme know!
 
Finished Hitman 3, probably the best of the series so far. The level design was so intricate that it was the first time I played every level properly the first time through rather than just shooting the target after ten minutes.
 
Still occasionally playing The Witcher: Wild Hunt, and recently picked up Assasins Creed: Origins on a Steam special.
Plus a few of my friends still goof around with me in LOTRO or SWTOR once a week, so that will do me for some time.

My lads have Assasins Creed: Odyssey and Assasins Creed: Valhalla on their console, so I can live vicariously thru them now :thumbsup:
 
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I recently finished playing a game called "Do Not Feed The Monkeys". It's a kind of management/puzzle/political satire game where you're a member of a secret club that installs hidden camera's to spy on people for various benign and malicious purposes. You have to balance hunger, sleep and rent money, all while observing the hidden camera feeds called "Cages". Some of the cages are interactive and via a notebook/faux-google system you can find out information and manipulate them.
For example, one cage is an attic where a limo driver goes to sneak nude photos of one of her clients to sell. Based on what the driver says, you can learn enough information to either blackmail the driver or get her arrested.
Over the course of the game you need to buy a certain amount of cages or you'll be expelled from the club. To earn money you can either spend time working jobs, which means you can't be watching the cages, or do special observation studies for the club that involve finding out specific information like an address or phone number. Usually these Special Observation Studies have no effect on the cage, but a couple do. For example, one cage is of a political activist who is in hiding. If you find out his address, and send it to the club, he'll be disappeared the next day.
Overall it has a lot of replayablility, and I think it's a neat, albeit depressing, concept. My only real gripe is that some of the interactive cages a bit too easy/short and could have had something more added to them.
 
Picked up Civ VI. I've played every Civilization since 2. This one feels like a bit more of a change than previous iterations. Only have a few hours in, so can't say if that's a good or bad thing.
Barbarians seem pretty crazy in it. I was about 20 turns in when they started attacking en masse. Two warriors, a slinger, a mounted archer, and a horseman all showed up at once, while I only had my starting warrior and one slinger to defend. And this was on Prince difficulty. Weird.
 
There's a high-resolution patch around. I always use it.

Same! Though, I'm playing the game on a Mac using CrossOver. The high-resolution patch -- nor any patch that requires an executable -- doesn't work, so I'm stuck playing at the native resolution, which is fine. That's definitely not the case on my desktop.

And the expansion (Alien Crossfire) add even more, though I prefer the original game factional setup.

I've been playing Alien Crossfire, but with the original factions only.

If you have any questions, lemme know!

I do actually: I'm a little confused as to what things I should build at each of my base and how many bases I should make. Additionally, I'm a little confused as what I should build around my bases. Should I spam forests? Build a ton of mines? Be sparing with farms? That kind of thing.
 
Picked up Civ VI. I've played every Civilization since 2. This one feels like a bit more of a change than previous iterations. Only have a few hours in, so can't say if that's a good or bad thing.
Barbarians seem pretty crazy in it. I was about 20 turns in when they started attacking en masse. Two warriors, a slinger, a mounted archer, and a horseman all showed up at once, while I only had my starting warrior and one slinger to defend. And this was on Prince difficulty. Weird.
I think is to compensate that since they moved the game to one unit per tile in CIV V, the AI has absolutely no idea how use the new tactical options it creates. They need to swarm you.

I feel nowadays a lot of strategy games have developers test things by doing big multiplayer games, with single player being an afterthought. Of course, even in an age where it is easy to play online with friends, it is still hard to get seven people together for the length of a CIV VI game.
 
I've been playing Alien Crossfire, but with the original factions only.
Yep, this is how I prefer too, the expansion engine with the original factions. :thumbsup: That or some "what if" scenarios where I swap half the original factions for expansion ones in some random map to represent a near future where the newcomers took places from the old ones.

I do actually: I'm a little confused as to what things I should build at each of my base and how many bases I should make. Additionally, I'm a little confused as what I should build around my bases. Should I spam forests? Build a ton of mines? Be sparing with farms? That kind of thing.
- How many bases: this depends on map size and your willing to micro-manage. Each map size has a threshold where each new base over it generates inefficiency. I usually play on normal size, which threshold is 7, because I don't like to micromanage many bases. I think the Huge map has threshold 11. It's usually desirable to go over this threshold, but how much depends on your economy. Morgan is usually fine because he's always rich but everybody else must consider this more carefully. I think Chairman Yang ignores inefficiency so he's free to build as much as he wants too (and watch out if you start in the same landmass as him).

- What to build on bases: there's various approaches, really. The simplest one is building everything you judge worthy on all bases equally. The advanced one is specializing bases, so you have pure economy bases, pure research bases, pure defensive bases at the rims, etc. which can be made viable by smart use of specialists. Whatever you do always keep your Secret Projects at central and well-defended bases, preferentially with a probe team guarding it.

- How to Terraform: forests, forests, forests. Build forests over everything. Wheh you learn the basics you can start building more specific improvements like condensor boreholes and echelon mirrors, but for the first dozen games, go with forests. Also, build terraformers as soon as you can, and order them to build roads and sensors. This facilitates defense and movement of troops between bases in case of being attacked.

Advanced tips:

- Try to get these techs ahead of the opposition: Secrets of Human Brain, Industrial Automation, Tree Farm and Mind-Machine Interface. Secrets give you a free tech which may be huge in the early game; Automation gives you robotic "crawlers" which allows you to harvest squares without using population and speed up secret projects (the later is so overpowered that some people consider it cheating); Tree Farm makes gives a huge bonus to forest squares, and Mind-Machine interface allows you to build choppers (a war game changer) and give military units two specialties.

- Try to get techs that leverages your own advantages or mitigate your disadvantages: as Academician Zakharov zip for the Hunter-Seeker algorythm, as Brother Lal go for the one the Empathy Guild, as Morgan Industries go for the one which doubles the economy of one of your bases, etc.

- Be political: if an agressive neighbour is theratening war, take a look at it's profile and see if he opposes some of your ideologies. If so, consider changing it temporarily just to avoid that war at that time, and postpone the conflict for a more opportune moment (or maybe even avoid it altogether). Eg: if you're Morgan you will want to adopt Free Market or Values: Economy because it's super advantageous for you, but if, say, Lady Deirdre of the Gaians is right beside you chances are she will become hostile to your if you do that.

- Be traitorous: don't ignore probe teams! Always use them defensively so nobody steals your precious projects. And consider using them offensively so you steal the opponents projects and, more important (which feeds the political game): use them to throw factions against each other! That means if the Deirdre neighbour from the example above is threatening you, and you use a probe team to steal their research and blame another neighbour, they will ignore you for the time being.

This is what I remember now. Any more question, send them!
 
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I think is to compensate that since they moved the game to one unit per tile in CIV V, the AI has absolutely no idea how use the new tactical options it creates. They need to swarm you.

I feel nowadays a lot of strategy games have developers test things by doing big multiplayer games, with single player being an afterthought. Of course, even in an age where it is easy to play online with friends, it is still hard to get seven people together for the length of a CIV VI game.
You're probably right about that. I've actually never played a Civ game multiplayer. It just never even occurs to me to think of it as a multiplayer experience.
 
I've played s bunch of Alpha Centauri multiplayer games, if that counts. All them hotseat back in my youth with 2 or 3 other friends.
 
I've played s bunch of Alpha Centauri multiplayer games, if that counts. All them hotseat back in my youth with 2 or 3 other friends.
Yeah, I can easily see doing things like that over summer vacation when I was a kid. Sadly, not even Civilization I was out before I graduated. I did get in some brutal hot seat games of Reach for the Stars though.
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Even though it is in early access, I have played enough Gordian Quest to feel comfortable recommending it to others. I restarted Chapter 1 on normal difficulty a few times trying out different things until I figured out an effective strategy for a warrior MC.

DEX swordsman warrior "duellist"
INT divine cleric "reverend"
INT glamor bard "sonneteer"

Honestly the warrior does all the heavy lifting, he frequently clears the battlefield in a single turn without even using all of his actions. The foundation of this deck is En Garde, Flash Cut, and Keen Strike. I use the other two solely because they happen to be the prettiest female characters. The Glamor bard is pretty decent, she buffs the other characters to godly levels and can clear the battlefield in a single turn by herself once in a while. Jack of all trades + Bardic Expertise at max Inspiration is a sweet combo.
 
Yeah, I can easily see doing things like that over summer vacation when I was a kid. Sadly, not even Civilization I was out before I graduated. I did get in some brutal hot seat games of Reach for the Stars though.
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Wow. That game looks comfy.

Any more question, send them!
Thank you for the response. There's much to think about.

I'm also struggling to understand inefficiency.

In my current game, I'm using 18/19 of my available energy in one base, and that base is throwing red INEFFICIENCY warnings. I'm building solar panels around it, but that doesn't seem to fix the issue. Am I missing something?
 
I'm also struggling to understand inefficiency.

In my current game, I'm using 18/19 of my available energy in one base, and that base is throwing red INEFFICIENCY warnings. I'm building solar panels around it, but that doesn't seem to fix the issue. Am I missing something?
Solar panels won't resolve the problem if the base is already inefficient. Inneficiency is corruption. It's also dependent on distance to your capital, so the more distant some cities are the more inefficient they will be. Try relocating your capital to a more central position or avoid building bases too distant altogether.

Also, you said you're playing Brother Lal right? He gets a -1 Efficiency stat in the faction sheet as part of the faction ("UN style bureaucracy") so have in mind that he will never be super efficient.

To mitigate that you can A. Build base facilities that helpt with it (ie: Childrens Creche) or B. Choose social engineering options that increase your Efficiency stat. Press "E" and see if you have good ones available (these are unlocked through research). I remember Democracy and Green Economy increase Efficiency, but there could be more that I'm not remembering now.

EDIT: Found this little wiki here. See if It helps!

 
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By the way, something I really love in Alpha Centauri are the secret projects movies. This one by Chairman Yang is among my favorite..

"Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone, for they warp the matrix through which we perceive the world. Extend your awareness outward, beyond the self of body, to embrace the self of group and the self of humanity. The goals of the group and the greater race are transcendent, and to embrace them is to achieve enlightenment."

— Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Essays on Mind and Matter”




Another from Yang..

“Why do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output.”

— Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Essays on Mind and Matter”

 
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I'll get back to the AC thread at some point silva just to say. Writing those posts took a while. :sweat:

For anybody interested in the new Werewolf the Apocalypse game I would suggest not getting it. It's a fairly generic 3rd person action game. There's some fun to be had in the Garou form, but that's about it.
 
I'll get back to the AC thread at some point silva just to say. Writing those posts took a while. :sweat:

For anybody interested in the new Werewolf the Apocalypse game I would suggest not getting it. It's a fairly generic 3rd person action game. There's some fun to be had in the Garou form, but that's about it.
Yeah, I got a few reviews panning it... too bad.
 
I'll get back to the AC thread at some point silva just to say. Writing those posts took a while. :sweat:

For anybody interested in the new Werewolf the Apocalypse game I would suggest not getting it. It's a fairly generic 3rd person action game. There's some fun to be had in the Garou form, but that's about it.
Yeah, I got a few reviews panning it... too bad.
Oh God Dammit. I was hoping for a werewolf version of Redemption or Bloodlines. There’s so many designers who have made good games out there, and they’re not dead. The only reason I can think of as to why we get so many suckfest games is that the companies just won’t let them make good ones.
 
Oh God Dammit. I was hoping for a werewolf version of Redemption or Bloodlines. There’s so many designers who have made good games out there, and they’re not dead. The only reason I can think of as to why we get so many suckfest games is that the companies just won’t let them make good ones.

Same as movies — once you’ve made it into the “billion dollar industry” bracket, you’re plagued with risk-averse suits and their focus group, lowest-common-denominator bullshit.
 
Field of Glory II: Medieval came out today. I've played the previous game (Field of Glory II, and despite the naming, Medieval is a standalone game) and enjoyed it, but I'm much less knowledgeable of the ancient era. It was hard to learn and distinguish the various troops and cultures and figure out tactics. Medieval, to me, feels much more approachable.
The game allows endless 'what-if' match-ups with 19 nations to start, and sandbox campaigns that allow some progression of your army through a set number of battles, and a dozen historical scenarios, starting with the battle of Hastings.
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The game has a play by email multiplayer system, so if anyone else here is into wargaming, let me know.
 
Field of Glory II: Medieval came out today. I've played the previous game (Field of Glory II, and despite the naming, Medieval is a standalone game) and enjoyed it, but I'm much less knowledgeable of the ancient era. It was hard to learn and distinguish the various troops and cultures and figure out tactics. Medieval, to me, feels much more approachable.
The game allows endless 'what-if' match-ups with 19 nations to start, and sandbox campaigns that allow some progression of your army through a set number of battles, and a dozen historical scenarios, starting with the battle of Hastings.
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The game has a play by email multiplayer system, so if anyone else here is into wargaming, let me know.
I had a lot of fun with the Fields of Glory II and picked this up as soon as I got the notification. I'll want to spend a little time getting familiar with the system again, but PBEM sounds good to me.
 
I had a lot of fun with the Fields of Glory II and picked this up as soon as I got the notification. I'll want to spend a little time getting familiar with the system again, but PBEM sounds good to me.
Yeah, I've only run through the tutorial battles so far (and loaded up Hastings to get a look at the field). It's gonna be a snowy weekend here, so I'll probably spend most of it running quick battles against the AI to get comfortable with the basics.
 
Yeah, I've only run through the tutorial battles so far (and loaded up Hastings to get a look at the field). It's gonna be a snowy weekend here, so I'll probably spend most of it running quick battles against the AI to get comfortable with the basics.
I've got a wall-to-wall weekend coming up, but I should be able to carve out some time to learn it next week.
 
Oh God Dammit. I was hoping for a werewolf version of Redemption or Bloodlines. There’s so many designers who have made good games out there, and they’re not dead. The only reason I can think of as to why we get so many suckfest games is that the companies just won’t let them make good ones.
Nah you're letting your frustration cloud your judgement. There are a lot of great games these days from both new and old designers alike, from indie to AAA level and everything between. We are in a damn good era for gaming.
 
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Nah you're letting your frustration cloud your judgement. There are a lot of great games these days from both new and old designers alike, from indie to AAA level and everything between. We are in a damn good era for gaming.

I'd agree, Outer Wilds, Gris, The Return of Obra Din are all recent games that have blown me away. To me right now the gold standard in video games is Devolver Digital, they consistently release some of the best games for my taste.

 
Nah you're letting your frustration cloud your judgement. There are a lot of great games these days from both new and old designers alike, from indie to AAA level and everything between. We are in a damn good era for gaming.
Oddly enough, it's the AAA titles that disappoint me the most.
 
I'd agree, Outer Wilds, Gris, The Return of Obra Din are all recent games that have blown me away. To me right now the gold standard in video games is Devolver Digital, they consistently release some of the best games for my taste.


Outer Wilds is amazing. Gris and Obra Dinn are on my queue. Never heard of this Olija, are you playing it yet? Is it good?

And about Devolver, have you played Hotline Miami 1 and 2? It stills amazes me with how a game with 8-bit graphics can be so good in this day. EDIT: see Undertale too.

Oddly enough, it's the AAA titles that disappoint me the most.
Well, these tend to be more conservative, but even them have been kicking ass in recent years. God of War, Spider Man, Horizon Zero Dawn, Total War: Three Kingdoms and TW: Warhammer, Zelda Breath of the Wild, Doom Eternal, Final Fantasy 7 remake, GTA V, X-Com 1/2, etc.

I would argue the quality and diversity of AAA titles is much better now than 10 or 15 years ago when the industry was taken by Call of Duty and its clones. I think the indie-boom of the 2010s raised the bar for everyone, forcing the big devs to deliver more than just pretty GFX and production values.

Edit: That said, I also lament this Werewolf game flop. I'm confident both new Vampire games coming (Bloodlines 2 and the one from The Council devs) will be better.
 
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My wife just started playing the newly received Ys IX: Monstrum Nox. She's a big fan of the Ys series.

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Backslid into the comfort food of Master of Orion 2 and XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. Damn it, I really want to get started on some of the strategy games I've gotten in the last year; as it is the only one I've played any real amount of is Phoenix Point...
 
Backslid into the comfort food of Master of Orion 2 and XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. Damn it, I really want to get started on some of the strategy games I've gotten in the last year; as it is the only one I've played any real amount of is Phoenix Point...
Comfort food is good. There are games I used to always run at least 1 game per year: Master of Orion 2, Sid Meier Alpha Centauri, and King of Dragon Pass (sometimes I swap this one for a Paradox game, like Victoria or Crusader Kings).

These days job and a regularly problematic PC don't allow me to do it anymore but as soon as estabilize the situation I'll go back to my comfort food. Haha
 
By the way, good news for fans of Planescape Torment -like text-heavy RPGs on consoles: Disco Elysium is coming to PS4/PS5 this year.

 
Comfort food is good. There are games I used to always run at least 1 game per year: Master of Orion 2, Sid Meier Alpha Centauri, and King of Dragon Pass (sometimes I swap this one for a Paradox game, like Victoria or Crusader Kings).

These days job and a regularly problematic PC don't allow me to do it anymore but as soon as estabilize the situation I'll go back to my comfort food. Haha

Well, I've been dealing with the low level stresses a lot of people have the last year, and one of the things depression tends to do is enervate me; and when that's the case I don't want to deal with something new. And gods alone knows how much I've played of those two games, but I can get into them almost on autopilot (even if I get my ass kicked somewhat regularly when I'm like that).
 
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