What game are you playing at the moment?

I would really love ME1 redone with the 2/3 combat systems. I love 1, but it's action sequences can be downright annoying.

Yeah, this. I'm planning a replay of all 3 soon, but I don't know how much I'll really enjoy the first one at this point.

Man I wish. Aveline is the BEST.

Got talking about Dark Souls at work again, which naturally meant that I had to go and play it, since my strength character is into the final stretch. Had a pretty good time, but after carefully making my way through Oolacile Township I felt the need for some ridiculousness and played some Prototype 2. Great game; I continue to maintain it has the best superhero fights - lots of aerial work, lots of crazy ridiculous moves, amazing collateral damage (both materiel and personnel) and lots of being flung around by the force of the hits.

They really added a lot of content to it, and focused on those awesome fights too - instead of just finding the person and devouring them to get their memories, adds are good they'll turn out to be mutated too, leading to a 180 from victim to someone that nearly thrashes you. They're even starting to show up in the racing side-missions - bonus. I keep forgetting to do the main story just because the sidequesting is so good. I'll be sorry when it's over. Fortunately, I think I'm only at about halfway there. :D

Just finished Home. Kinda feel like I wasted my time.

Psychonauts all over again.
I'm reveling in the nostalgia.

This expansion finally hit Steam yesterday (link), so I picked up a couple copies immediately for my wife and I.

One thing to note about the expansions for this game that Steam does not explain at all:
If you buy only the latest expansion it unlocks all prior expansions for free (you'll still need to buy the base game separately). And the latest expansion is the one called Gathering of Power. I already owned the other stuff, but for newcomers to the game I thought it'd be worth pointing out.

So if anybody wants the full experience, they'd buy the base game plus the Gathering of Power expansion. Once you unlock GoP from within the game (using the code listed in the Steam CD Key section) the other stuff unlocks automatically.

Everyone should really go and buy Spectromancer already. It's so good.

Is the single-player any good?

There's a single player campaign, but the campaign matches aren't the same as the skirmish matches (unlike games such as PuzzleQuest or Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, where most fights in the campaign were analogous of the stand alone PvAI skirmish experience, save for boss fights). In the campaign the cards can be upgraded from their default stats and effects based on who you fight and whether you win, and often you will have unique cards and other effects in play unique to the campaign that aren't available in skirmish matches.

The campaign AI is also pretty bad in that it doesn't always take a lot of the unique campaign cards and effects into consideration when making its play (as it seems the AI was specifically designed around the default skirmish type matches that are the game's centerpiece), and you'll have to bump up the difficulty to make up for that.

There are also single-player skirmish matches, and you can customize your decks for these matches if you wish (or play with the default random distribution of cards each match). But there's no deck customization for PvP, and none for the campaign itself beyond card upgrades and the like.

Of the 130ish hours I've put into the game about 115 of it has been 1v1 versus my wife and other players, but I know some people who avoid playing versus humans altogether and have spent a hundred or more hours just playing through single player skirmishes and campaign missions with the various classes etc.

Skirmish matches against the AI are more practice than anything, and the campaign is really just a whole bunch of single player matches with tons of different rules and cards. The campaign isn't a fleshed out experience like PuzzleQuest, and really the only reason to play it is to play around with all the different rules, cards and upgrades -- stuff you won't be doing in skirmishes.

Thanks, but is skirmish any good?

Try the demo, it allows you to try skirmish matches vs the AI, and also the campaign. I think the biggest limitation is that they restrict you to one class (of the 16 or so available). It's been a long time since I played the demo itself, but that sounds about right.

I've been playing Dead Space 2, and it's okay. It's mostly a soulless by-the-numbers affair. There's a body, good chance it'll pop up and go rawr when I get near it. Here's a corridor, something will come out of the wall near the end, plus more will come out of the wall behind me, I think. Then exactly that happens.

Then last night something or other triggered the thought that I also had Journey in my never-played backlog--I'd snapped it up shortly after it was available, but then think I'd got distracted with something else shiny and never looped back to it. Better late than never, as it was a beautiful little experience. There were at least three other people in the world playing, one of whom I played through a good chunk with before we got separated.

Back to Diablo 3. Right now grinding through normal (at start of Act 4) with a sorceress. Thanks to some gem twinking, a really lucky drop on a weapon, and the fact that sorceresses are OP in the first place, my character is basically giving hordes of monsters + elites gruff looks, which causes them to char and shrivel into smoking corpses on the spot. It's so unbelievable that SOMEBODY at Blizzard didn't go, "You know... maybe we should tweak Normal upwards just a little."

I swear to god though I am going to get some flight simming in here, though. Probably Strike Fighters 2, which is my go-to when I need to dunk my toes back in the water.

Are you aware of the new monster power feature? I think you can change it whenever you load a checkpoint. I'm playing with the maximum of ten, and the game is now actually entertaining.

Wrapped up my strength playthrough of Dark Souls, so now I'm in the short lull of the glow of satisfaction and looking around for something else to poke in before I inevitably succumb and start a third playthrough. :D

Fired up LOTRO and GW2 briefly yesterday, so maybe either of those? There are still Prototype 2 and Sleeping Dogs - both about halfway through the storyline - to finish. Oh, and XCom, which ticked me off with a stupidly high HP mech introduced at the same friggin' time as Power Mutons (or whatever). I guess XCom also has a bit of that OMFG DARK SOULS WHYYYY factor to it too! Except it kills most of your carefully cultivated team with no warning - it might actually be worse!

So yeah, decisions. Hmm. Hmmmmmm. /Siegmeyer

My copy of WRC3 3: FIA World Rally Championship arrived from the UK earlier in the week. I'm making it harder for myself by playing it on console but after a few hours last night it started to click into place. The driving model has improved over the previous Milestone efforts of 2010 and 2011 but let's be honest, nothing has gotten close to Richard Burns Rally, ever. The graphics are improved but that isn't saying much, there was a lot of room for improvement. The WRC games have always looked way too dark on my LCD TV and there's no way to really correct it in-game, which is a shame. They've also dropped any choice of co-driver voice which includes not having a female voice at all.

It's nice to be able to flick between a driving game like this and Forza Horizon, for whenever the mood strikes for something more or less difficult.

A very nice fellow gamer just showed me the Sins: Rebellion ropes , and now I see what all the fuss was about. I still don't quite understand the Pirates mechanic (sniping bids, really), but I'm happy to have a comp stomp anytime. I just need the same kind of help with CK2.

Other than that, it's been mostly Ascension, Race for the Galaxy AI, and Chess. How retro,

SimCity BETA

I bought Euro Truck Simulator 2 today. People kept saying it was fun and I watched some long videos on YouTube and decided to try it. It is fun, oddly enough for a game that looks good but doesn't offer realistic crash physics or anything like that.

I rather liked it, so I've gone and bought myself a copy. Currently only the base game, but once I've spent some time with that I'll add on the expansion.

Still Prototype 2, attempting to finish it. Gotta say the narrative makes a lot more sense this time around, and the dialogue is to match. In a way, they kinda redeemed the first game by:

- portraying Alex Mercer as the self-absorbed prick he was in the first game,
- focusing on Heller's narrative as a revenge-obsessed, then redemption-obsessed mutant,
- providing closure and a "how can anyone go back to normal now" ending.

Props to the writers for salvaging the wreck that was the first game's "story".

Oh right, just finished it. I didn't realize I was so close.

On to Sleeping Dogs!

Playing LotRO right now. Have a huge backlog that I'm neglecting. Should have picked up Ni no Kuni. Alas. So much stuff.

Finally got Wizardry 8 up and running on the new laptop so I can continue my Let's Play. Whee!

Zoo Tycoon 2, once I finally got it to install. Because in the wake of all the Sim City news, I wanted to play a builder that wasn't complete ass.

I started playing Dragon's Dogma again for some reason. Still good.

Another visit to Civ5 for a couple easy co-op games on Warlord, and my brother and I picked Saints Row 3 back up over the weekend. Oddly enough I completely stopped playing that game as soon as I finished the main story, and my brother only got about a third of the way through it before he wandered off so we're going back and finishing his campaign playthrough.

Still playing Dragon Age 2. It's kind of rote, in that I feel like I'm checking off boxes on my quest to-do list rather than having a thrilling adventure. I go to the main map, look at all the places I can go, see which ones have the most quests associated with it, then go there and start running to the markers to finish quests. Either I'm jaded, or there's something wrong with the structure here.

I've only been in one area now where I feel like I was out of my depth. I retreated and left that quest for later. I also switched my party around. Is it me or are my companions pretty mage heavy? I've only got the one rogue (the dwarf) so he's pretty much a must have in the party, and even then, he's now kind of useless for opening chests. Not enough points in Cunning, I guess. Then I take one fighter, either my bro or Aveline. Bro is kind of a dick, but Aveline is growing on me. Thing is, I think Bro is a better fighter at this point. Then its another mage or another warrior. Usually I go with another mage because their abilities are more interesting. I was taking elf girl because I want to romance her, but we started dying so I took the healer dude, and now I love being hasted.

And more Persona 3 Portable. I feel like I've been playing this thing forever and I'm still in early days of the game.

Dean, with respect to rogues, did you happen to come across a certain pirate wench yet?

Not yet. I've been to the coast, but haven't found any pirates. Actually my roster is kind of a sausage fest, with only Aveline and Merrill as the women.

I think maybe I've been doing a lot of side quests and character quests, because now the dwarf keeps saying, "Hey, you have enough money now, maybe we should go to the Deep Roads."

I don't want to go to the Deep Roads. I've got all this other shit to take care of.

IIRC, the encounter with her is weird and easily missed. I had a friend who completed the whole game without including her in his party, and somehow didn't even know it was an option. That said, I've completely forgotten how it happened because I've suppressed most of my memories of DA2.

So, yeah. Spent the weekend levelling my wizardess up to L46, and I am basically sleepwalking my way through most of Nightmare Act 4. Sure, there were a few close calls, and one really stupid death, but I think I'm done here.

Flew one mission in Strike Fighters with the community NATO Fighters 5 add-on (which is brilliant). Took my shite Hunter Mk.5 or whatever out against some Soviet Bombers and MiG-15s. Creaky lag turn sk1llz resulted in seven cannon kills in that mission for me. I scratched my head and wondered if I should turn those nobs up from "normal" just a tad.

Realized the only place I had Rome: Total War -- which I want to play every time I re-read Tom Holland's Rubicon -- was fucking Gamefly, so picked it up again at Amazon for like $9. Going to grab the appropriate addon (Darth Mod or Vanilla AI, or something, been awhile), and then turn loose my CENTURIONS OF ROME, YOU GAUL BITCHES.

I tried Halo:Reach, got bored in like five minutes. I think I'm still Halo'ed out. Maybe i'd like Halo 4 better since it actually attempts to further the story. Though they've always been terribly written.

My buddy got a computer that could actually play some of our co-op backlog, so we played Magicka. We gave up pretty quick, it has some interesting ideas, but overall, it's just not fun. I think it helps that the first boss is so lame to fight against.

Monster power. Do you use it.

Just go back to the tavern a few times and you'll run into her. If you only visit it once or twice other triggered events are happening IIRC, hers takes a while to show up.

I probably should, but to be honest it would be too little, too late, since my weekend marathon pretty much wearied me on D3. I'll probably bump up MP on the next playthrough if I have to start another noob alt on normal. Sigh. I wish I liked Torchlight 2 more, to keep feeding that ARPG addiction, but I just can't get into T2 at all.

AHA! Yes! That does ring a bell. My buddy went into the tavern just the once and never went back. At some point after he finished DA2 and I borrowed it from him to play, I asked if he thought Isabella was a decent character to have in your group. He says "uh...Isabella who?"

Well, no Bungie this time, so maybe the writing has improved.

Just finished up SpecOps , what a game, whew! :o

There goes my plan to gift you a copy of Ass Tycoon. :(

Apart from playing my cool-yet-kind-of-dopey imperial agent in Star Wars: The Old Republic, I have resumed playing Spore in order to finally finish off my Let's Play and achieve some sort of closure. I find the space stage absolutely maddening but have rolled past being infuriated with it to accepting it as a perverse challenge instead.

I am also planning on trying to fit in some time with my Seth Green look-alike in DARK SOULS. This game may need to wait until I have some vacation time to fully devote to it.