I swithced back to Rage for a bit. Once I got through the one DLC mission that was pissing me off (I had to reload a previous save and buy a fuckton of shotgun ammo), it's been decent. Too many invisible walls though. Why can't I jump up onto some of these platforms to get a better view of things? Because there is an invisible wall that says so. So trite and unneeded...

*running to catch the school bus* I got Torchlight 2 guys!

In Reply To #212

So do I, but, I've only played about 10 mins of it.

In Reply To #213

You win. Mine isn't installed. Sunny Muffins saw it on sale and so bought it for me...then needed the computer for work the rest of the day. Typical. But he's back to work and I'm off until Monday. Hooray.

I finished up Rage last night after just over 19 hours. It was fun for the most part, but too many invisible walls, too many missions acted like this was the first time I had seen mutants in the game, the second city hub was too small of an area, and not enough missions out of, the ending came out of nowhere, and the game seemed like it was missing a final act...

I will probably be starting up Call of Pripyat tonight or tomorrow.

I still don't have my 'good' machine fixed, so I decided to install some old games on the old one. I picked up the GOG release of Terminal Velocity, since I played the demo to death about a decade or so back. I love the game and the music so much, that when I started playing I actually blushed, and was grinning like an idiot too. It was just a total "WHEEE!" moment.

In Reply To #1

Currently playing a lot of League of Legends, anyone else play this? The whole grinding scheme has me thinking I should jump over to Dota2.

In Reply To #213

Same, I played like 10 mins and I got sleepy. Got to the first quest objective of finding the army at that temple or whatever and I went "ohhh man, more of this point and click killing stuff" and I was so burned out on that from Diablo 3.

Not really fair, I've heard TL2 is better.

Been playing some Sins of Solar Empire: Rebellion. Utterly pointless expansion. Still no single player story, just basically a rehashed research tree and some new ships. Changes absolutely nothing. Rubish.

Another expansion pack: CIV V: Gods and Kings. Not sure how I feel about this one. Slightly more to it than the above, not sure if I like it all that much. Feels a bit too much "tacked on" for my taste, especially the whole religion thing. Sometimes it's like a nuisance that keeps you from playing Civ V like you used to and sometimes it makes so little difference that you hardly notice it's there. However, together with some new units, researches and factions it makes it worth firing it up again and keeping my attention a wee bit longer than it would if I had fired it up only because, well, it's Civilisation and I need to pick it up from time to time because, well, it's Civilisation.

[color=white]Yes, I know I repeated myself there. It's because, well, it's Civilisation. And that's reason enough to play a game.[/white]

*edit* shame you can't use white anymore. Where noone notices the contrast of white on white. Bonus points for he/she who can tell me where that phrase comes from.

In Reply To #219

You can use white. There needs to be [/color] at the end there, not [/white].

Anyway, having both Sins and Civ5 and all of their respective expansions, I'll bite.

Rebellion introduced proper Steam support. With Impulse going off to GameStop, that was a pretty big benefit. It's a shame they didn't quite integrate it properly though, with Steam pop-ups covering your HUD stats when you highlight units... should've made the popups come in from the top of the screen like in Total War.

It also updated the graphics which was a nice update, and the core engine optimisations have helped performance considerably. I know you might not care about that but for someone with a laptop that has heating issues, being able to run it smoothly at a lower clockspeed has helped tremendously. That said, all of these things could have just been patched in to Diplomacy.

At the end of the day though, I hate Titans, and I find the factions within the races to be silly. The new capital ship for each race sucks, not that it matters, since capital ships aren't all that special now Titans are in there anyway. The new technologies are a mix of good and bad, and the AI actually seems worse than before. The new victory conditions don't take my fancy either.

I get around it by playing how I want to play. I don't build the ships I hate, I don't use silly victory conditions, and I try and play with humans now instead of the AI. As a standalone game it is able to hold its own, but I agree with you - it's the expansion pack that didn't really need to happen. I'd prefer them to be working on Sins 2, making sure there is a SP campaign, and proper multicore support in the engine.

On to Gods & Kings, I had a good rant about this not so long ago. Civ5's lead designer, Jon Schafer, made some interesting decisions with Civ5 but overall saw the release of an unpolished and unfinished game. Schafer since left to go to... Stardock. Ed Beach took the lead designer role since then and for Gods & Kinds inserted a few things that players thought were missing, which they had in Civ4. I agree they seem a bit tacked on in some cases, but I think they generally work well. More improvements are still ongoing, the last patch was huge and made some great improvements (in many cases making things more Civ4-like, such as diplomacy modifiers), and there is apparently another big patch still in the pipeline.

Schafer had some great ideas with Civ5 but some really bad ones as well, and now Firaxis has been working pretty hard (albeit pretty slow, it seems) on fixing up the latter. I couldn't say they were a AAA-title developer though, the whole Civ5 saga has been a bit of a farce. The game shouldn't need such core components of it being "fixed up" so many years after release.

I didn't play any Call Of Pripyat today. I am now thinking that I want to play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City instead...

In Reply To #220

Multiplayer on Sins devolved into which team got the one person who has no real threat to them feeding cash to the guy who spams corvettes early game. You can defeat the corvette spam but you'll have to build a bunch of otherwise useless ships, the flak frigates. If you play TEC you don't have to do the flak frigate counter, you just need to upgrade the hanger bays with flak cannons and nest them around something important like a frigate factory/capital factory.

Oh and no one lets either Vasari faction to be played in MP...not that it matters as MP scene has died down way too much to the point where you're lucky if you can even get a match going that is larger than 2v2.

As for the victory conditions...Diplomacy was way too complicated to getting the points needed and no one likes playing King of the Hill or Find The Pin Under The Space Couch Planet.

In Reply To #222

I wouldn't have even thought of those strategies, as they sound decidedly unfun. I forgot to mention I also never build corvettes, as I don't like them.

Vasari bans are no surprise though... it's not a balanced game.

Amalur... So much fun.

I feel bad about the fact that I still have to finish AC:Revelations and start ACIII.

I've only recently started Revelations so that at some point in the distant future I'll be able to play AC3.

I'm mostly just running around getting viewpoints, though. That's the best bit.