What games are you playing?

Inside The Temple of TIme. This is a demo of a setting from the Nintendo 64 classic The Legend of Zelda: the Ocarina of Time, with graphics updated using Unreal Engine 4. View it in full screen HD mode on YouTube to see what's so impressive about the results. The audio doesn't kick in until the 0:15 mark.


I'm currently playing the N64 version using Project64 with updated texture packages. (It looks good, but nothing like the demo above.) My thought for the first hour or so was that the game was falling far short of its very high reputation. That was days ago. I now understand why so many players hold the opinion that Ocarina of Time is one of the best platform fantasy games ever created.
 
I recently started playing Dragon Age: Inquisition again after a year away from it. Origins is still my favorite––not to mention one of my favorite games all time––but I really enjoy Inquisition. Personally I think the combat is kind of boring and the loot a little lackluster but I enjoy the story, the characters are great (most of them) and some of the regions like The Western Approach and the Storm Coast are visually arresting. I did not at all like DA2 so I feel that Bioware has largely righted the franchise with the third installment. Lookin' forward to 4.
 
Got burned out on Skyrim. Over 100 hours according to Steam, and I'm still only a few quests into the game as I keep installing new mods and restarting when my old saves crash as a result.

Started Life is Strange last night, as the desktop icon had been staring at me for a while since I bought it cheap in a Steam sale. It is a strange kind of third-person 3D adventure game, but an interesting one. I'm not a fan of imposing 'story' on a game, but with an adventure game, that's kind of the point, and interesting things have been happening so far.

Big downside is the really clunky control system, where you have to move close to an object to make it clickable, then click on it to bring up a list of things you can do, then select the thing to do. I presume it's a console interface that's been ported to the PC... badly.

Normally it's just clunky, but sometimes you have to do something with a limited amount of time, so it's 'OK, get to the object. Click on it. Select Use. Oh, I can't see Use because it's hidden behind my character. Release the mouse button and wiggle the mouse to try to make it selectable. Oh, damn, too late. Try again.'

Also, I'm getting tired of the continual 'This action will have consequences' messages coming up whenever you make a choice in the game. Talk about dumbing games down... I've been playing adventure games since I was a kid. I know already. Shut up.
 
Even though I am very tired of dystopian fiction and zombie fiction and all the other over done tropes (see my post where I say how much I enjoyed the fresh take that was the movie Tomorrowland ) I am still enjoying Fallout 4 and I am mostly exploring and building and not following past the first 10 or 15 quests. I look forward to playing with the PC mod tools in a few months
 
I'm currently playing Majora's Mask. Old Nintendo 64 video games seem harmless enough, as a general rule, but I've gradually come to realize there are some very deep waters in this particular pond. I'm not certain whether The Ocarina of Time should be considered to be a prerequisite. It certainly provides context, but mainly as a point of departure. Majora is something else entirely. This is the first example I've run into of a game that's capable of altering the player. That's probably so by design.

majora_s_mask___wooden_replica_by_supermariio-d6kubcn.jpg


Majora’s Mask Should Terrify You, and This is Why is one of a series of essays about the game by Aaron Suduiko, collectively titled With a Terrible Fate. That title comes from a line that occurs very early on in the game: "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?" What that observation refers to may be far more than is initially understood. It reminds me of a bit of dialogue from the English version of Hayao Miyazaki's classic fantasy, Princess Mononoke: "So, you say you're under a curse? So what? So's the whole damn world."
 
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I managed to beat Ocarina of Time as a kid (although it took me forever, I got stuck and gave up on it for about a year before going back and finishing it.) But I never got around to finishing Majora's Mask unfortunately. It was a great game, but it was quite difficult. I only ever managed to get about half way through it, then I got completely stumped by the water temple and gave up.
 
norm said:
I managed to beat Ocarina of Time as a kid...
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Ocarina was challenging. Truth be told, I had to enable a couple of critical cheats to survive Ganon at the end. That didn't really bother me. For me a game is about the journey, or the story or whatever, and Ocarina's characters, story lines, and interlocking worlds and time streams really made that trip interesting and worthwhile.

I'm not sure Majora's Mask really is a game for kids. On one level it's exactly that, of course, but there's something deeper and darker going on with this one that gradually sets in with the repetition of the 3-day game-time cycle. Doom looms over the entire setting--almost comically, at first--drawing closer with every moment, as the characters you gradually come to care about go about the repeating patterns of lives that they're totally locked into. Only the player has freedom to make the changes that need to be made to somehow help or save each of them, and the ability to time-warp back to the beginning of the first day to try again as the apocalypse inevitably unfolds, right on schedule. But this is where it gets weird. At some point during the repeated jumping back for another try, the player begins to realize that he or she has also become part of a repeating pattern, and that the thing looming over all of the characters trapped in the world of the game is a metaphor for the player and the greater world that he or she is also trapped in. The game turns into something having to do with questions involving free will vs. determinism, and with meaning and purpose in the face of inevitable death. It isn't being discussed as some dry abstraction, it's being demonstrated as a sort of participatory thought experiment. The apparent limitations of the game world have suddenly become a mechanism for doing that. This might sound dull as dirt, but it's actually engaging as hell. It's like you've been pulled into this place where the game world and the real world overlap.

Shigeru Miyamoto took risks with this one. In my opinion, they really paid off.
 
I know most of you are talking about video games, but...

I'm playing Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition tabletop RPG, homebrew solo adventure. It's based on something we're creating together. We've co-written one rough draft of a short story and I did a single 4 panel comic using the characters in a cartooning class a few years back.

Anyway, I'm GMing. The wife is the only player. She's never done this before and I rarely GMed so it's a little new for both of us.

It's inspired by an indie comic - The Amazing Joy Buzzards.

A.K.A.:
We only did one little session so far, I hope to do the next one soon.
 
I have exclusively used my PS4 for watching Netflix for a while now. Still have a sealed copy of Risen 3 sitting here which I might start soon.
My gaming plans for 2016 include to catch up on Fallout 4 and maybe 1 or 2 older games.

The biggest Highlight by far is Dark Souls 3. I expect nothing less than the best game of all time.
Other titles I have planned to Play are Uncharted 4, Tomb Raider, Mafia 3 and maybe Dishonored 2 and the new Deus Ex.
 
Got fed up with Life Is Strange when they did the whole 'but Captain, the transporter is broken... again!' thing in the second episode. May go back and finish it one day, but removing the character's abilities just when they would actually be useful was so ham-fisted that I don't feel any great urge.

Played some Dirt 3, but it's too easy on casual, and not easy to play with a keyboard and mouse on more difficult settings. Tried Dirt Rally, but it's more of a driving simulator, and brutal with a keyboard and mouse. Waiting for a steering wheel to turn up in the mail before i play them any more.
 
The Banner Saga 2 is absolutely gorgeous. If you're into fantasy art with a Norse-inflection, it's peerless. It's also the best leadership sim I've encountered: if you enjoyed Battlestar for the moral quandries it raised, TBS2 basically puts you in the shoes of the guy who has to decide. Just brilliant storytelling.
 
Edward M. Grant said:
Played some Dirt 3, but it's too easy on casual, and not easy to play with a keyboard and mouse on more difficult settings. Tried Dirt Rally, but it's more of a driving simulator, and brutal with a keyboard and mouse. Waiting for a steering wheel to turn up in the mail before i play them any more.
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Wow, way to reawaken a thread!! :D Had to comment after catching your Dirt mention above. I bought the new Dirt a couple of weeks ago and took it back later the same day. It's no fun anymore. It's a pure driving simulation. I'm sure many will enjoy it but it's done for me now.

I play the hell out of Rocket League though! :)
 
Solaar said:
Wow, way to reawaken a thread!! :D Had to comment after catching your Dirt mention above. I bought the new Dirt a couple of weeks ago and took it back later the same day. It's no fun anymore. It's a pure driving simulation. I'm sure many will enjoy it but it's done for me now.
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Yeah, definitely! I took a rally driving course a few years ago, so I have a vague idea of what I'm doing, but the slightest mistake in Dirt Rally will send you flying into a tree. It's a lot easier with the steering wheel, but now I'm waiting for a VR headset before I play any more.

The other thing is that the default setups for the cars I've tried seem completely hopeless, so they need a lot of tweaking before they drive well.
 
I'm also massively into Street Fighter 5 as well. Always loved that game. Shame I'm no good! :)
 
Was able to play a while with an HTC VR headset last week. Should have a chance to do some more this weekend.

A lot of the VR-only software right now is really just a tech demo or an 'experience', but there's some good stuff out already, and many of the games are receiving regular updates with new content. H3VR, for example, is a decent shooting range simulator that keeps getting extra guns and shooting modes. Vanishing Realms is a fun but short (2-3 hours) dungeon crawl, but I had to stop part-way through because sword-fighting is hard work even when you're only swinging a plastic thing in your hand and not a real sword. TheBlu is just an 'experience' of standing on the seabed while fish, whales and other creatures swim around you, but a very pretty one. Some of the 360-degree 3D videos on the web look good, but the frame rate is too low to be really immersive.

Elite Dangerous now has VR support, but it didn't work very well when I tried it. Apparently they've fixed many of the performance problems with the new patch.

I was able to walk around Rorikstead and Whiterun in Skyrim in VR, but the PC wasn't up to generating a non-stuttery (i.e. 45+fps) framerate with graphics settings that don't make it look like an 8-bit game. Will probably need one of the new cards that are just coming out to make it really playable.
 
Finally picked up Legend of Zelda: A link between worlds. It's a remake of the classic one for SNES which I've played about a hundred times, honestly. This new version is completely different from the old game. You have access to items from the start of the game, there are new powers, new dungeons, and completely new bosses. They definitely took inspiration from the original game, but brought it to new heights with this one. At first I was a little upset at the changes, but they truly don't take away from the game in anyway. They only enhance it. The music is a glorious rendition, as well. A perfect mix of the old tunes with slightly new tones here and there. Awesome game. Probably going to grab the 3D of Major's Mask next, since I've never gone through that one.
 
playing the Far Harbor DLC of Fallout 4 and enjoying it a lot though the voice acting while up to the high standards of the game series{ (War.... War Never Changes,,, )voiced by Ron Perlman is iconic. } could have used a few down east accents... they have said in some interviews that as regional accents are fading away under the influence of mass media the by the time of the game they will have all but vanished... i think its a cop out in part I think its to make the games more universally accessible (imagine someone from Glasgow trying to have a conversation with someone from Atlanta 100 years ago... i think there would be little communication but today they would i think understand each other if they spoke slowly... thats the influence of mass medias .... and Rab Nesbit and Boss Hogg of course.
 
Finished the Witcher recently which I thought was the best game since Skyrim, then I got Farcry 4, this seriously runs them both close, Uncharted next hopefully, you can get the box set of the first 3 for PS4 for around £20
 
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