What game are you playing at the moment?

Another run through of DX:HE, really wanted to see this thing on a quad-core and a more modern GPU. (It was hella chunky on an i3/460). Much better. Trying to ghost as much as I can.

Playing some Warlock MOTA after chewing on Civ V with the GK expansion. Warlock reminds me how much more fun Civ is when it's fast.

Contemplating actually booting up Medieval II with the LOTR mod. Holding back on yet another Skyrim run until the Solstheim DLC comes out on PC.

My RPG du jour is M&M VI. But for strategy I'm taking a break from Distant Worlds and staring at the backlog, wanting to play them all.

Civ V G&K (my only holiday sale purchase)
CK2 (tried a time or two, got flummoxed, need to try it again)
EU3 (gifted to me recently, thanks)
Drox Operative (haven't touched much since it went to 1.0)
SoTS (the first, bought recently)
Conquest of Elysium (gave up on a while back, but saw it got some GoTY votes here and there)
Alpha Centauri (now that GoG added the expansion for free)
Eador: Genesis (yea, this is deep, the BK thread on Eador has my head spinning)

I sit frozen in indecision.

Hey, guys and gals, there seem to be a few of us who want to like CK2, own it, but just can't get into it. Every time I sit down to play a game, I'm reminded that yes, I do need to "study up" on CK2, but that ruins the fun of it. I'm wondering if we can try a n00bie mp game with a veteran? My inability to enjoy a game that was practically made for me is giving me fits.

I'm being a lecherous wastrel in Way of the Samurai 4.

I assume you're having fun? I rather enjoyed WotS 4 despite some odd translation choices, and should really get around to playing more.

In my gaming news, I've been splitting my time between a moderately modded Oblivion playthrough and Folklore.

I can't really speak much of it because I just barely started but yeah, it's a ghetto-ass low rent Yakuza with interesting combat and a not-taking-itself-too-seriously vibe. Some pretty atrocious tearing for such an ugly game though.

Meh, it doesn't look that bad for a budget title... but I agree the tearing sucks. Thankfully, it's fixable. All you need to do is save your game, leave Amihama via the guy who brought you there, then when the game ends and tallies your score, do not save. When you reload your old save from the title screen, the tearing should stop.

That has to be the weirdest fix ever but uh thanks!

It looks fine for me, I'm just saying that it looks like an upressed PS2 title. Graphics ain't why I'm playing it though, I need a Yakuza like fix before the lack of Yakuza 5 in the U.S. kills me. Also I was always curious about the series but never got around to buying 3 and this one looks a hell of a lot better than that.

The WotS series has a history of odd glitches, to be honest. Acquire's a small company though, which may explain the spotty QA work.

Yeah, 3's kind of the black sheep of the series. While it added some nifty features (like Sword Crafting), the storylines (all 22 of them) are a bit dull... though, the true ending path's still pretty good.

The music in every title's top notch though; it's from the composer Noriyuki Asakura, who you may recognize as the composer for Acquire's other flagship series Tenchu, as well as Ruroni Kenshin. Not gonna lie, the music's part of the reason I keep coming back to the series.

So far the music seems to loop a bit too quickly but it's okay. I'll play more tomorrow when I'm not zonked out on cold meds. Or when even more so. It'll work either way. I do like how you can interject while people are talking Mass Effect style.

I'm playing Crimson Shroud on the 3DS and it's awesome. It's a donwloadable dungeon crawler made by Yasumi Matsuno (Vagrant Story, FF12) for Level 5 (DQ 9). The game definitely is low budget, the fights don't even have animation.


But it's okay because the game is presented as if we were playing a table RPG. The characters are miniatures complete with a base, and you can use dices to enhance certain powers. Your party of three (a warrior, an archer and an almost nude magician girl) moves on a dungeon map, and in each room you can have an encounter with monsters.

As always with Matsuno the combat system is pretty intricate. Even if the game is only like 10 $ there seems to be a lot to figure out. each character can use an attack and a skill each turn, each power is linked with an element, and if you use different elements you get up a combo meter which allows you to use more dices for your next attacks.



The game is not especially tough for the moment, but the fights can get really tense because the enemies have quite a lot of HP. I haven't died yet, but I had to think quite a bit in some tough spots.

The first boss fight got me both anxious and excited like I haven't been for quite some time with a jRPG : it was epic, clever, tactic.

I'm surprised brokenites aren't all over it to be honest.

That looks really cool!

I'd wager the problem is that relatively few of us own a 3DS. FFT and Tactics Ogre are amongst my all-time favourite games and Matsuno is up there with Sid Meier in my gaming pantheon, but even I won't buy a 3DS just for one Matsuno game. :(

For myself, I'm playing the seriously underrated RPG Game of Thrones on the PC and skimming between several Wii games -- Xenoblade, Twilight Princess, and the unforgiving tactical RPG Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. Radiant Dawn takes my Classic Ironman XCOM-fu, laughs at it, and tramples its corpse. I must have reloaded or Game Overed at least 10-15 times so far, and I'm only up to like the fifth map...

I vaguely recall someone on Broken Forum offering to do exactly this. But I'm not sure who, or what thread. I would be up for this. Supposedly the guy could teach CK2 in 20 min.

Playing Deadlight after playing Mark of the Ninja might not have been the best choice, although I wanted a bit of reprieve from the undead. After Mark of the Ninja's well-executed mechanics, Deadlight's feels a bit clunky. That the sound dies mid-cutscene also irks me.

It's not a space game, but Skyrim. Lots and lots of Skyrim. Just got it a couple of weeks ago and it totally has me by the short and curlies.

Other than that, some Civ V using GMR, and some Diaspora, which is hard as HELL.

Recently I picked up Prototype 2 for the 360 on sale so my total for it came to ~$7, and aside from catching up on Breaking Bad, I ran through the entire game in less than a week. It was a fantastic game for offering gameplay that gave you god-like powers and the ability to wreak havok at any given moment, and the story was fairly well structured too. I got most of the achievements, and I'm thinking of grabbing a few more before I get back to playing Saints Row: The Third, thanks to the Humble THQ Bundle.

I feel like I'm losing my edge because I tried jumping onto Halo 4 and had to put it down after 4 matches of multiplayer. It doesn't feel right.

I need to seriously sit down to my backlog. I have quite a few started-and-enjoyed-but-did-not-finish game in the queue, mainly due to the ridiculous amount of influx of new shinies (well and Dark Souls) pretty much all this year. I should forbid myself from buying anything until I finish:

Driver San Fran
Sleeping Dogs
Witcher 2
Dragon Age II
Hitman Blood Money
Prototype 2

and a few others, but those will do for start. So first up, Driver San Francisco.

I've been trying to push myself through Darksiders 2 after getting it off the amazon sale last month. I enjoyed the first one, but this one feels even more derivative and the combat was actually putting me to sleep at one point.

Finished Chapter 2 of The Walking Dead today. Steam says I played the game for 14 hours, but a lot of that was sitting there paused because I'm not sure how it saves thing and, given the nature of the game, I don't really want to repeat things.

Also played more Persona 3 Portable. I finally got to the end of the second tier, and the boss there was a chump. I took it down without really taking any damage. It's funny, because it's such a grind to get to that final level, and I'm always concerned because I have very little SP by the time I get there, but then there's a teleport so I can go back to the lobby, heal, and then come back and kill the boss while at full strength. So I probably shouldn't make such a big deal out of it in my head.

Maybe it was because I had just finished LPing Lone Survivor. Maybe it was because I just finished playing Mark of the Ninja.

But I don't feel particularly moved having finished Deadlight.

Lone Survivor didn't break the mold when it came to gameplay mechanics, but I became immersed in the main character's plight. Mark of the Ninja followed a more or less stereotypical "final mission" storyline that dragged at some parts, but had excellent, fluid gameplay.

Deadlight doesn't succeed like the other two do. The story's solid enough, although the history and relevant details of The Rat and The New Law seemed somewhat lacking. More problematic was the gameplay: a little awkward to crouch or roll (especially important for some puzzles) and a bit difficult to identify what could be interacted with and what simply functioned as scenery. Several times I gritted my teeth because of some fickle puzzle (either a non-intuitive solution or ultra-precise timing) or a bizarre forced-combat scenario in a platformer that otherwise discourages combat.

Yet, what it boils down to, is that despite having unlocked Nightmare Mode for completion, I don't want to replay the game. I started up a new game of Lone Survivor and Mark of the Ninja as soon as I completed them. Not so with Deadlight. I had moments I enjoyed and I am glad I played it through, but I can't imagine myself ever loading the game up again. For me, Deadlight's a dead game. I choose to move on and not look back.

Really enjoying Way of the Samurai 4 after putting some more time into it. Got my first ending unexpectedly but I'm going to roll with it like the game wants you to, at least I picked up some nice gear from that path. $40 is a lot for such an ugly game but it's so damned silly that it's hard not to love it.

Interestingly, it appears that the Ubi servers are slammed after the sale. SURPRISE. Can't play Driver at all, but I think there's a way to make it go offline and more importantly STAY offline physically (well, digitally - tell my PC to drop the connection). What atrocious DRM - it really does try to make that connection approximately every 10 seconds (IN OFFLINE MODE FFS), leading to hitches in gameplay where there should be none. I'm pretty sure when I tried this last time and finally forced the PC to drop the connection all framerate issues went away.

I really hate Ubisoft. I think I'm done with them. Pity, I kinda wanted to play Far Cry 3. :/

No offense, but you're making me incredibly happy I didn't purchase any Ubisoft titles this holiday season.

Dishonored, I will finish it this month!!!!!!! maybe!

You know you have a "save game" addiction when you run out of slots half way through the game.

Way of the Samurai 4 you have stolen my heart.

I am absolutely OCD about saving in new slots. By the time I finish a typical RPG with limited save slots, I tend to be on my third cycle of overwriting previous saves. :(

I forget... which restaurant is that?

Also, have you opened the Language School yet, Adree? Some of the British NPC dialog that you can read once you open it is absolutely hilarious.

Finally, as you mentioned you got an ending, what ending did you get your first time around?

I "won" the fighting tournament.

That's the Soba shop.

I actually just intentionally failed the english test because this run is xenophobic babyface bastard, or well just babyface bastard so far. I was having too much fun killing the faction I want to join with single strikes and the english teacher got murdered. *shrug* Next round I'll try being heroic again but right now it's too much fun being rude.

Ahh... I figured you got Boiled Samurai. I'm guessing you figured this out, but for future reference, leave the tournament grounds after you win to avoid being turned into samurai soup. Though, there's a different ending if you enter as an independent (just do odd jobs or sleep till the tourney). Finally, there's a neat thing that happens if you forfeit a match from the in-battle conversation menu... I won't spoil too much, but it will short-circut the storyline, and doing this will allow you to - eventually - unlock more items for purchase in the points shop.

I assume you're partnering with the Disciples of Prajna, then? I quite liked their endings, though the good ending's a pain to unlock without a guide. On that note, don't be afraid to consult a guide (or ask me, though the guide will likely get you answers quicker) if you get stuck. WotS 4 has far fewer Guide Dang It moments than the previous titles, but there's still a few bits that can be confusing.

Yeah well I did signal to them that I wanted to at the start but we'll see how that goes. I might just swing my allegiance back and forth until I get some horrible ending. I do have a question for you: where the hell is my weapon chest located?

In the dojo, which is located in the same part of town as the smithy (on that note, you'll want to look up how to hire Dojima, as he's better at his job as a smith... more importantly, the starting smith leaves after Day 3).

You do not have to own the Dojo to access the chest... that chest also holds your extra items, gold, and accumulated styles. Styles, in particular, need a mention... You can only hold a maximum of 30 styles on your person at one time. However, this includes the styles you have equipped, and unlike swords, you cannot drop a stylebook in the field to make room for a new one. There are few things more disheartening than killing one of the main NPCs and having them drop their style, only to be unable to pick it up. This has happened to me more times than I care to admit.

Ah I got Dojima on this run so that's settled. Good to know about the styles, thanks. Quite a lot packed in a small area in this game, reminds me of Nier.

Indeed! (and it's great to hear of someone else who has played Nier... game's rather underrated in my view)

One thing, though, the starting smith does have a unique style that he can drop, so you'll want to kill him at some point... Dojima also has a unique style, and several unique weapons (which one he'll use is dependent on a difficulty-adjusted random roll, which is rerolled each time you enter the area)... basically, if you want to collect all of the styles and weapons ingame, you'll need to murder the populous several times over... which with the combat system, can actually be quite fun!

Yeah I guessed as much. I figure by my 3rd run I'll be happy to murder just about everyone.

None taken. I keep being suckered by the 5 buck sales and then spend way more than that in rage dollars.

Fortunately going fully offline removes the hitching entirely. Poor crippled game doesn't believe you when you just put uplay into offline and keeps polling every few seconds. Terrible. Still not as bad as silent hunter V though. :-\

After wrapping up Dishonored over the holidays I played a few things to try and get into something as my next game. I finally settled on Hitman Absolution, which is similar enough to Dishonored for me to constantly compare the two as I go through Hitman. So far I'm enjoying Hitman despite the super crappy checkpoint/save system it has. After being able to save anywhere in Dishonored it feels even more restrictive. That said, the environments are small enough and checkpoints easy enough to find that it's usually only an annoyance. Certainly nothing that ruins what is otherwise a very fun game.

Tried out Civ V today and 4 hours passed before I knew it... I'm usually not big on strategy games, but this one is really fun!