What games are you playing?

[Daddy Darth]

Playing Elder Scrolls Online - been about 6 months now. Don't have tons of play time so I have not played anything else. But, it keeps me pretty busy. Love it!

 

[Edward M. Grant]

Played Goat MMO Simulator, the Goat Simulator DLC, for a few hours. It's literally an MMO Simulator, rather than a real MMO, but was more fun than some MMOs I've played.

Did another couple of levels in Tera, but it's so long since I played that I've completely forgotten what was going on in the storyline. Was mostly trying to clear up old quests and try to find the next dungeon.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

Been playing The Secret World after buying it cheap in a Steam sale. It's an interesting MMO, based on occult conspiracies (Illuminati, Templars, etc), though the first area is mostly fighting zombies. The system reminds me somewhat of Guild Wars, in that you get to pick seven abilities that you can use in combat, and 'levelling up' just gains you extra abilities to choose from. There are also a bunch of 'investigation' missions which mostly don't involve combat, but can get pretty complex and arcane; I was about ready to give up today on the one which requires you to translate latin into some kind of occult runs and click the right ones to spell out words.

Started out as a subscription game, but now it's optional; as I understand it, access to expansions is included if you subscribe, but you have to buy them if you don't. There's also an in-game store, but mostly just cosmetic stuff, since what you wear has no impact on the game.

 

[Avi_stetto]

I've been running through Bioshock for the first time. It's fairly enjoyable, but I can't play it for long periods of time. Too much sensory overload.

More often than not, I play more tabletop games. I've been playing a lot of Pandemic and Ticket to Ride with my girlfriend. We've been playing Red Dragon Inn and Boss Monster at various holiday parties. Good times!

 

[Erfael]

I'm playing through Bioshock slowly now, too. My issue is that I missed the FPS bandwagon when it went through a few decades back, so now I suck at them. I take things really slowly, so it goes okay. But it ends up being more a survival horror game for me than an FPS, which is slow-going.

Also dabbling in some classic Mega Man, a few RPGs here and there, and whatever tickles my fancy at the time.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

I tried Bioshock again over Christmas, but still can't really get into it. The whole thing just felt too 1990s to me, with no real interaction with any of the bad guys, who mostly just charge at you and wait to be killed.

Played some of the Carmageddon: Reincarnation pre-alpha version, and it's definitely got the feel of that game much better than any of the sequels, but still needs a ton of work before it's ready for release. I really only bought it to help fund them to that point.

Started on an Indonesian horror game called, I think, Dreadout, which mostly involves sneaking around in the dark and scaring ghosts and monsters away by taking pictures of them with a cell phone. It's a rather bizarre idea, and the graphics are dated, but quite interesting so far.

Also got to the second zone in The Secret World, where the difficulty level increases massively. The main story quest sent me to an area where clicking on any of the beasties tells me they'll massacre me if I get anywhere near them, and I can't see any way to upgrade my weapons to do any better.

 

[Balthagor]

Thanks to market research for work, I ran across Godus, the new game by Peter Molyneux. I'm playing it on Android and finding it visually great but the load times are brutal. Also doing some World of Tanks in my spare time. When my schedule slows down, I think I'm going to go back to Dawn of Discovery (Anno 1440 for European users).

For board games, Lords of Waterdeep currently tops my list.

 

[Black Arrow]

Going back in time a little to the PS2:
Just finished Mark of The Kri (for about the 3rd time.)
Rise of the Kasai

LOTR The Two Towers.

Mark of the Kri is one of the best games out there in my opinion. But I am old school.

 

[txshusker]

For Xmas, my wife got me an Intellivision console - the new ones that have 60 games embedded and no cartridges. I've been playing the you know what out of it.... ah, the memories...

 

[Andrew LH]

For my sins, I've become addicted to Euro Truck Simulator II - please, let's move on... to...

Papo Y Yo - it's a brilliant full 3D platform puzzler, brilliant for its style (you're a Brazilian kid running through a city with the power to rearrange the buildings around you in a way occasionally reminiscent of Inception) and its message (it's "about" dealing with a traumatic childhood, in which an alcoholic father is replaced by a huge, lumbering monster obsessed with drinking coconuts and eating giant frogs - symbolising what, exactly, is part of the joy of discovery). I played it to completion in a matter of days - very rare for me - and loved it, I've already started a second play though.

The Long Dark - it's only in Beta but already pretty cool (pardon the joke), a First Person survival sim where the principle enemy is the weather: it's post-apocalyptic, and cold. You start out wearing thin clothes and with not a lot of provisions, in a remote landscape blanketed in snow and populated only with deer, wolves, and maybe a few other small critters - no people, or monsters, which makes a nice change. It's resource-and-time-management on the one hand: activities like cooking, eating, skinning a kill or making tools all eat away at your day, and your calorie count; thirst and hunger need to be watched; and, of course, there's cold - real temperature and wind-chill are factored against your clothes, and dropping temp means calorie burn...

I've survived through my first night (even sleeping costs calories, you know...), repeatedly fumbling around my shelter in actual pitch blackness to avoid wasting matches or precious lamp fuel, breakfasting on a can of old beans at 6am only to go outside to find a storm raging and the temperature down to -26 Celsius, running back inside so as not to freeze to death in minutes rather than hours. It's sandbox mode only at this stage, with two environments in which to survive as long as you can, but the final version will have a story mode as well.

 

[Prescottfry]

You guys Go hard on gaming cuz I don't even know half of the titles you're naming off

 

[Edward M. Grant]

For my sins, I've become addicted to Euro Truck Simulator II

I played that for a while, but quit when they added fines for hitting other vehicles. The other vehicles drive so stupidly that it's really hard not to hit them.

I stared playing Oblivion again recently after not touching it for a couple of years. It's a lot more fun with a ton of mods installed, though it crashed quite a bit until I installed the Stutter Remover mod that hooks into the code and replaces the heap manager and a few other odds and ends. Once I've finished that in a couple of years, I can try Skyrim.

 

[greymouse]

I'm still in retro-classics mode. Having played through the original N64 Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie, I'm now working Banjo Tooie, and beginning to understand why the sticks on the old N64 controllers often require replacement. Anyway, for anyone who might be interested, here's a map I worked up of a very confusing imaginary place. The only other I could find online seemed to have a few problems. It's the Ordnance Storage area of Glitter Gulch Mine, which I gather has a history of driving some players crazy. I posted it to my Facebook page for want of a better place. The link seems to work.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

Was playing the new Beta of Carmageddon: Reincarnation last night. It's recreating the original game pretty well with modern graphics and new game modes, but some of those modes aren't implemented yet. Performance is significantly better than the Alpha version once you're in game, but it still takes an age to load levels; I hope they're going to fix that before it's released!

I'd previously had to make do with running the original in 1920x1080 with a 3dfx emulator, and it definitely looks a lot better than that did!

 

[Edward M. Grant]

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. Bought it for a couple of bucks in a Steam sale quite a while back, and only just got around to trying it out.

Arcade mode is fun, but the actual single-player campaign is annoying. It's basically the same maps as arcade mode, but they keep interrupting the fun shooting stuff with some guy yattering about story stuff that just gets in the way; I mean, literally interrupting, in that you'll be turning to shoot someone and the game stops while you have to listen to him yack for two minutes about how he shot some famous outlaw, or takes away all your ammunition and forces you to run away, or says 'actually, it wasn't like that' and makes you start the same sequence again with different bad guys. Oh, and when there's actually any difficult shooting required, they don't let you do it, they just make you press whatever WASD key flashes on the screen.

Worth a couple of bucks for the arcade mode, not so sure about the rest.

 

[DeckardLee]

Playing Ori and the Blind Forest at the moment. Great gameplay, emotional soundtrack, and great artwork make it a very enjoyable game. I do tend to enjoy these 'Metroidvania' type games, though, so I'm easily impressed.

Also looking forward to Pillars of Eternity. As an isometric RPG fan who hasn't played one in years, I've anticipating this game and hoping it will live up to the hype.

 

[Starwind]

I just finished playing Hotline Miami 2.

Dear goodness, was that ending ever nihilistic. There was heavy foreshadowing throughout the game of what would happen but it was gut wrenching and a bit maddening to see what happened (which felt sudden though not unprecedented).

All said I didn't mind the difficulty spike in the levels. Pardo was incredibly fun to play as, as was Martin/Pig Butcher.

 

[Jop]

The Long Dark - it's only in Beta but already pretty cool (pardon the joke), a First Person survival sim where the principle enemy is the weather: it's post-apocalyptic, and cold.

I read about this on another blog site! What are you playing it on? I read that it was made by a Canadian developer, and is supposedly modeled on weather conditions in Canada...After reading the descriptor, it doesn't seem too far off the standard winter in Labrador!

Personally, I'm currently playing Destiny on the PS3; I've finished the original story mode and am half way through the DLC story; its the typical grinder type game; very mindless taking not much thought process to play...IMO it doesn't compete with Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout, etc., but its fun.

 

[Blog_the_troll]

Just finished Red Dead Redemption, excellent game.

Started Bioshock 1, good so far.

Still playing Skyrim off and on, 288 hrs so far

 

[Erfael]

I just started playing Pillars of Eternity, the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate and Planescape. I'm only about two hours in, but so far I'm pretty happy. Very nice writing, entertaining gameplay, good lore. I'll see what I think as things go on, but so far, no compaints.