What video games are you playing?

[khisanth]

I've been having fun with an old-school RPG called Avernum: Escape From the Pit. It was on discount through Steam. The graphics are pretty basic (wikipedia shows it accurately), but the storyline has been engaging. I was quite amused to see that they had Phil Foglio sketches to represent the different skills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avernum_series

[Lost_Cavalier]

There's another Mass Effect 3 multiplayer expansion launching next week, with several new maps set on Earth (Vancouver, B.C. and London) and new characters based on the Alliance's N7 special operations command, with an N7 operator for every character class.

[Lachrymose]

I started playing Alan Wake last night.

I r skirred.

[khisanth]

Now have Civilization V and Divine Divinity due to the Steam sale.

[Cure the Blues]

I'm playing the beta of FTL, a space roguelike game. So far, it's been a lot of fun although I'm not very good at roguelikes so all of my ships may as well be crewed with redshirts galore. I feel bad when Captain Mal dies in every game. My current game ended up with two of my guys getting wiped out and now there's just the intrepid Willow running around piloting and patching stuff up. Unless I luck out and pick up another crewmember, she'll be so dead, so fast. All it would take is one boarding party or a fire in the oxygen chamber and it seems like the enemy ships just adore shooting up my oxygen generating equipment.

I've also been playing the Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings 2. It's very good with the one caveat that the AI isn't scripted so everything goes to Crazytown tout suite. I started out the Robert's Rebellion scenario as Lord Wyman Manderly and almost immediately Eddard gets himself killed by Lewyn Martell. Jaime also got knocked off while Robert seizes the throne. Since Lyanna is still alive, she's married to Robert while Cersei gets married to Hoster Tully (!!!). Uh, OK, then. Tywin then rebels in the War of Westerlands Independence. Then he dies and the child Tyrion inherits and ends up in charge of running the rebellion. He doesn't do so well, gets captured and put under house arrest, then dies and Cersei inherits all of the Lannister lands. I don't know what happened to the Targs, but since I don't see any running around I assume the entire dynasty has been destroyed. In the meantime, up North, everyone decides they don't want a kid ruling them so they rebel against Robb with the specific aim of putting Benjen in charge. I initially had had Wyman stay loyal to Robb, then I saw that my land was crawling with Bolton invasion troops and decided to declare White Harbor as an independent region. After I got the invasion off my back I was doing pretty well as the money rolled in. Wyman's son Wylis inherited and tried to press his claim on Moat Cailin to the south. He got captured in battle and Howland Reed threw him into the deepest dungeon of the Neck, where he finally died (guess I shouldn't have provoked him by asking for nicer prison quarters; Howland holds a helluva grudge). Wylis' son Hugo was trying to repair the damage since White Harbor was broke when Cheyk of the Black Ears blasted out of the Vale demanding all of his lands. I tried fighting him off but my feudal levies were ravaged and I didn't have enough in the bank to afford decent mercs. I finally ended up surrendering and now Hugo is vassalized to one of the Mountain Clans while planning his revenge.

[Richard W]

Originally Posted by Cure the Blues

I've also been playing the Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings 2. It's very good with the one caveat that the AI isn't scripted so everything goes to Crazytown tout suite. I started out the Robert's Rebellion scenario as Lord Wyman Manderly and almost immediately Eddard gets himself killed by Lewyn Martell. Jaime also got knocked off while Robert seizes the throne. Since Lyanna is still alive, she's married to Robert while Cersei gets married to Hoster Tully (!!!). Uh, OK, then. Tywin then rebels in the War of Westerlands Independence. Then he dies and the child Tyrion inherits and ends up in charge of running the rebellion.

No spoilers!!!

[Gavida]

After canceling my Secret World account I only spend little time there now. I guess I will do some more monster slaying every now and then until the game time is up and give the game another look in some months (although, with Funcom's history it might be F2P by then )

I reactivated my SWTOR account although there still are no additional character slots, but they at least announced them coming "soon"™
So I might as well level up my twinks until then.

Wednesday turned into a Company of Heroes multiplayer feast with several friends.

When I play solo, I spend my time in Deus Ex: HR at the moment, after grabbing it cheap on steam. And Max Payne 3 from the summer sale is already waiting on my hard drive

[Richard W]

This might be a stupid question, but what genre of game is Max Payne 3? It looks interesting (and from Joe's description) but if it's a shooter / FPS I'm probably less keen.

[chillas]

It's a third-person shooter.

[firefighter_raven]

Recently started playing Assassin's Creed again (brotherhood and currently playing revelations) after several months off due to treatment. Just about finished with revelations and finding the tripwire mines with pyerite coins amusing. Setting them off and starting a riot is way to much fun.

[JoeBentley]

Playing the indie retro JRPG Cthulhu Saves the World. on my Kindle Fire.

Quirky, funny, and 4th wall breaking enough for me to get over my general disdain for JRPG games. You play as, obviously, the Lovecraftian horror Cthulhu who learns that the only way to break free of his eternal slumber is to become a hero and save the world. Retro 16 bit graphics, hilarious writing, great enemy monster design.

If the idea of playing an NES/SNES area FF game as Cthulhu with all the self referential humor that implies appeals to you, please get this game. It's only 3 bucks on Steam for PC, XBLA, iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire. Oh and play it with the "Director's Commentary" option on. This will give you little non-intrusive text nodes you can click on throughout the game that will give you insight into the game design.

Desperately needs a overworld/world map though. It's 2012 I shouldn't be haven to draw maps to find my way out of an area.

[Morrigan]

I'm playing through both Dragon Age 2 (just got Mark of the Assassin for it) and Fallout New Vegas again. 4th time for DA2, 2nd time for FONV.

[Richard W]

I finished the main plot in Skyrim. I've not started on the Dawnguard plotlines yet but I like the werewolf perks the expansion pack has added - it means there's actually some point in using the werewolf ability. Mostly only to get the achievement for completing them though - I'm curing myself as soon as possible after that! I reckon one more good killing spree will do it.

I was going for one of the later Thieves Guild missions in which I'm meant to be getting somebody's translation notes from a museum, but for some reason the lab part where the notes are is full of guards that attack on sight, and I didn't really want to just kill all the researchers / guards for no good reason (my stealth skills aren't good enough to get past all of them without being spotted and I don't have enough invisibility potions).

So I stopped for a bit, and thought I would see if FFXIII has got any more interesting. Not really, but I've been level grinding by killing marks and I've unlocked the chocobos which are a bit more fun. I might continue with the "plot", such as it is, shortly. (The plot grinds to a halt when the vague threat that you're trying to save the world from turns out to be your party itself, and in a rare moment of sense and coherence they realise that if they simply stop doing anything, they can save the world through inaction just by not destroying it... I would mark that as a spoiler if I thought it was interesting enough).

[GenYus234]

If the mission you refer to is in the Markarth keep, I never found a way to get past without killing the guards. The odd thing is, those guards do not make you wanted in the city itself. My guess is they are supposed to be rogue guards who are illegally hiring themselves out to private citizens. So killing them doesn't count as killing a regular guard.

[Errata]

Originally Posted by Darth Credence

Gods and Kings is great.

I've been playing a lot of that this past week, and staying up way too late, because "one more turn".

Faith is fun. In one of my games I managed to make mine the majority religion in every city, including the holy sites of the other religions. In another, the first time I tried to spread it to another civilization, they declared war on me and stole a great prophet and used that great prophet to found their own competing religion. But their other neighbor decided to gang up on them and I ended up getting sweet concessions for their surrender once I had units surrounding their capitol (even though I doubted I could actually take it), and they never fully recovered.

The spies are just hugely annoying. I usually rush technology, so the spies just mean everyone can steal from me and I can never steal from anyone. They can be moderately useful against city states, I suppose, but I need most of mine for counter-intelligence, so I'm far more likely to be losing influence with city states through espionage than gaining it. It's a big relief when I can build the great firewall in my capitol, but that's fairly late game.

[Richard W]

Originally Posted by GenYus234

If the mission you refer to is in the Markarth keep, I never found a way to get past without killing the guards. The odd thing is, those guards do not make you wanted in the city itself.

Yeah, I think they're called "Magician's guards" or something, and they use the same character type as all the rogue magic users around, so I wasn't worried so much about my wanted level (although it did occur to me). It just seemed a bit unnecessary at that point... as you say, you're in the middle of a castle in somebody's research laboratory and next to a museum, so why is it suddenly full of bad guys? Especially when the guy whose stuff they're guarding is essentially a friend of yours - I've helped him in several missions already. I don't mind sneaking a look at his research, but killing all his employees?

[Richard W]

It's one of these flipping eidolons in Final Fantasy XIII that's annoying me again. I had gone away to level up a bit before facing it, but that doesn't actually help - what I need is to add about 15 or 20 seconds to the timer (or gain the ability to cast Haste with either of these two characters - which would have involved starting to deliberately mess up the best development path half the game ago), and it would be easy enough.

But as it is, you can sit there doing the things that fill the Gestalt meter for the entire fight, and still run out of time when it's a couple of millimetres from the end, and there's no real way to make anything go faster. I think you may just have to rely on luck to get the meter to fill fast enough. Occasionally I actually die before the timer runs out, but that seems to be (bad) luck as well.

[Darth Credence]

Originally Posted by Errata

The spies are just hugely annoying. I usually rush technology, so the spies just mean everyone can steal from me and I can never steal from anyone. They can be moderately useful against city states, I suppose, but I need most of mine for counter-intelligence, so I'm far more likely to be losing influence with city states through espionage than gaining it. It's a big relief when I can build the great firewall in my capitol, but that's fairly late game.

I couldn't agree more. I think I have stolen a technology exactly once with a spy, but I've had tech stolen from me a lot. It is probably my play style, and if I played differently I may love spies because it could allow me to catch up in tech, but that has never been an issue.

[GenYus234]

You need to concentrate your tech on an unbeatable lie detector, then your problems would be over.

"Are you a spy?"
"No."
BZZZZT!

[Richard W]

I got past the FFXIII eidolon that was annoying me by giving the second character a low level ravager ability to double the chain bonus, but I've now found a mark that's being very annoying. I found a strategy that worked, which involves always having a sentinel, and using ravagers.

It was working fine, with my sentinel at more-or-less full health most of the time, being able to recover easily enough with medics and do some damage between times. As is often the case it was a battle of attrition, so it takes ages sitting there to get the thing down to low health. It seemed to rally and started using poison and other debuffs more at the end, but everything was still OK and my sentinel (lead character) was still at full health.

Suddenly, after about ten minutes or so of everything going fine albeit slowly, the thing abruptly one-hit killed me when it had about a millimetre of health left. I have no idea why because I wasn't doing anything different from the previous ten minutes, but now I'm going to have to spend another ten minutes getting back to that state, and it might well do it again. Bah. It's a very annoying game at times.

Why would they design it to do that? It's not like you can learn from it and adjust your strategy - I'd already done that and found one that worked. It was one-hit killing me at the beginning before I did so. Why wait ten minutes if it's still going to do that? Grrr.