The "What Are You Playing Now?" Thread

[Goladus]

it's almost like they put stuff in the game they knew wouldn't get aired on TV.

I don't know... http://southpark.wikia.com/wiki/Pee

Meanwhile, a scientist urges the owner Mr. Pi-Pi to shut down the water park, explaining the water in the park is 98% urine and 2% water, where the safe levels are below 83% urine and if he doesn't shut it down, the park will fall victim to a huge event. Inevitably, Pi-Pi's assumed lawyer refuses to shut the park down. It doesn't take long for the pool to get to 100% urine, and when it does, a large tidal wave of urine sweeps across the park, destroying all in its path. Cartman manages to stay afloat in the pee, Kyle climbs up a high water slide, and Stan, Butters, and Jimmy get to higher ground atop the Mount Everest ride. Unsurprisingly, Kenny doesn't make it.

[snip]

Kyle is forced to drink three cups of urine, so he can safely travel down into the depths without his body having to endure the effects of fluid pressure. A now incredibly irritated Kyle insists that he will not, despite that if he doesn't, they will all die. Another vaccine is formed, which turns out to be a simple banana (once again demonstrating the military's stupidity), they test the cure out on Stan's father who, while very annoyed that they were peeing on him, doesn't mutate as everyone believed he would. As Kyle finishes his third cup, a helicopter flies in and saves them, much to his anger having drank pee for nothing.

Then there's the tale of Lemmiwinks

Spoiler for Lemmiwinks:

a great adventure is waiting for you ahead
hurry onward Lemmiwinks or you will soon be dead
the journey before you may be long and filled with woes
but you must escape the gay man's ass or your tale cant be told

Lemmiwinks (x4)

Lemmiwinks journey a distance far and fast
to find his way out of a gay man's ass
the road ahead is filled with danger and fright
but push onward Lemmiwinks with all of you might

TALKING:
Lemmiwinks you are coming to the entrance of the small intestine
there you must seek out the sparrow prince

the sparrow prince lies somewhere way up ahead
dont look back Lemmiwinks or you'll soon be dead
Lemmiwinks Lemmiwinks the time is growing late
slow down now and seal your fate

SPARROW PRINCE:
I am the sparrow prince
long has my spirit been trapped in this place
before you lies the maze of the small intestine
one path leads to the stomach the other to certain doom
take with you this helmet and torch
let them be your guide

take the magic helmet torch to help you light the way
there's still a lot of ground to cross inside the man so gay
ahead of you lies adventure and your strength still lies within
freedom from the ass of doom is the treasure you will win

Lemmiwinks came to the stomach god
beneath the depths of the lungs and heart

CATATAFISH:
you chose your path wisely Lemmiwinks
i am the catatafish

Catatafish of the stomach's cove

CATATAFISH:
if you answer this riddle the esophagas will let you pass

catatafish's riddle will soon be told

TALKING:
hang on Lemmiwinks
you solved the catatafish's riddle
now your trials are nearly through

Lemmiwinks has made it out
the tale is nearly through

great job Lemmiwinks

thanks to you we are all free

but your adventures are just beginning
for you are no ordinary gerbil Lemmiwinks
you are the gerbil king

ALL HAIL THE GERBIL KING

Now the ger the gerbil king has more adventures to go on
fly away to faraway lands into the setting sun
there's still so many enemies and battles yet to fight
for Lemmiwinks the gerbil king is to be told another night

le-lemmiwinks le-le-lemmiwins le-lemmiwinks
lemmiwinks lemmiwinks lemmiwinks (x2)

gerbil king

Then, of course, there's the Cartoon Wars episode with the censored Muhammed and the satirical speech that I still haven't been able to find though I've heard you can get it with bittorrent.

KYLE: That's because there is no goo, Mr. Cruise. You see, I learned something today. Throughout this whole ordeal, we've all wanted to show things that we weren't allowed to show, but it wasn't because of some magic goo. It was because of the magical power of threatening people with violence. That's obviously the only true power. If there's anything we've all learned, it's that terrorizing people works.

JESUS: That's right. Don't you see, gingers, if you don't want to be made fun of anymore, all you need are guns and bombs to get people to stop.

SANTA: That's right, friends. All you need to do is instill fear and be willing to hurt people and you can get whatever you want. The only true power is violence.

[Wool]

I do vaguely remember an episode with Lemmiwinks in it, but I definitely do not remember

Spoiler for South Park Game ending:

the cast actually crawling into a man's anus and walking past all the crazy things he has shoved in there.

Anyway, I want to briefly talk about the first Witcher game, but I don't want to muck up the Witcher 3 thread with it. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, from the way people talked about it when it came out. Aside from some jank, it was pretty solid and very reminiscent of Bioware games of that era. I do want to note that the things people didn't like about it (the combat) didn't bother me so much, and the things people raved about didn't impress me much.

Specifically the choices and the world. Maybe this, too, is a sign of that era, but going back and reading all the praise for the hard/gritty/grey choices with no clear right or wrong and blah blah blah, I'm just not feeling it. It usually wasn't a matter of choosing between two hard sides with clear good and bad points (what they were going for), but more a matter of being forced to choose between two different equally bad piles of shit. The only right choice would be to not make one at all, but they don't let you do that (not really). I mean, who has a bank robbery and thinks "quick, go get someone whose sole existence is to slay monsters!" It was dumb. In the end it isn't that big a deal, I just wasn't feeling the hype. I understand the sequel has much more gameplay oriented consequences which I will look forward to.

More than that though, I didn't like the world that everyone talks up so much. I keep hearing how real it feels for example, but there's really no rhyme or reason to the ecology of this world. There is a ton of hand waving magic bullshit. It's like a world of nursery rhymes pretending to be more than what they are, rather than a world simply inspired by nursery rhymes. I'm doing a real bad job of explaining this, and I apologize.

Specifically I really do not like this weird non-fiction cross-world pollination going on. I don't know the proper term for it. The constant pulling in of real world history and fiction and just renaming it and pretending it's a fantasyland version instead. So the one example I remember from very early on was when a character casually mentioned that a gnome named Alfred Nabel invented what is basically dynamite. There is a ton of this and it feels lazy. Another npc goes on this protracted rant/critique of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". It's out of place.

So far the only thing I like about the world is the concept of a witcher itself. Humans that undergo mutation in order to protect other humans from monsters that may or may not actually belong in this world. These mutants are then ostracized for being freaks, despite the sacrifice and service they provide. That's a fun story premise.


The story itself seemed okay. I didn't like it for a long time, but the final area was pretty fun. The gameplay was clunky in the way a first game often is but was okay otherwise. I'll wait and see if the more original aspects of the world appeal more to me over time, but I haven't really seen anything to get that excited by yet. Characters seem okay. Overall I liked it, just not for the reasons other people did (apparently).

[Wool]

I went ahead and jumped right into the second Witcher game. I can see why people went crazy for it. Massive improvement over the previous game, and even taken by itself, it holds up compared to anything released today. There are only a couple of changes I don't like so far. The potion buff durations suck, for example. Dialogue is leagues better though.

[Nadiar]

Just played through Talos Principle. It was worth what I paid for it ($13.59 current sale price), but I think their normal price is a bit outrageous. If you like Puzzle games, pick this up, but I wouldn't go over ~$20.

1) 80% of the puzzles are incredibly easy. Difficulty either comes from monotony, or because they'll introduce a new concept in the middle of a puzzle. Portal did a really good job of showing you how mechanics work, and a few minor changes in this game would have helped considerably.

There was one puzzle I failed at over and over and over again, it was the only puzzle sigil I had left to finish the game, so I eventually pulled up a walkthrough video. Turned out it was one of those "Stand on exactly this pixel" situations that dealt with something it had always subtly punished you for trying on any other level in the entire game.

2) The monotony of some of the puzzles is mind numbing. It isn't too bad until you get the replay ability. This basically lets you record everything you're doing, then play it back later. All items you interact with or could interact with get duplicated. So there is a lot of the following puzzles: hit record, stand on switch. wait, go back hit play, run through obstacle, grab item, run back through obstacle. Repeat, but make it one step further. These puzzles are monotonous, because while you can clearly see the immediate objective, you often can't see the later objectives until you're pretty far in. Which means sometimes you just spent 10 minutes working on a puzzle, and have to scrap it all and restart, and then you spend the first 5 minutes of that repeating the same actions you did before. The "Reset" option should have just been a "rewind" option similar to the newer Prince of Persia games.

3) These to problems combined make it kind of like playing Portal while inside of a labyrinth. The worst situations usually occur when you're on a level with a Star. These are often items that require you to place items on one level to use on another level (such as firing a red laser out of the level and into another one that only has blue lasers). But meanwhile you're trying to get somewhere to solve the puzzle that you can't actually reach without additional assistance.

4) On top of that, besides the Stars and silver sigils, you basically have to complete every single puzzle in the game. 105 Puzzles, each rewarding you a Tetris shape. They should have made 105 Puzzles, and required 91 of them, allowing you to skip up to 2 of each red sigil piece.

It's a fun game, It took me ~13 hours, and I feel like the last 3-4 hours were the frustrating parts. Thats when I started powering through the puzzles I had skipped due to how obnoxious they were.

As for the story, I know it was philosophy, and I tend to hate that in games because they try to do "tell" instead of "show" but I think this game handled it correctly. The only problem with it was much like my problem with the rest of the game: it was about 20% too much. You reach a point where you've covered the philosophy they're showing you, and then it keeps going. The Meta Story of religion and the audio logs did a lot better.

[Wool]

After half a year of saying I would do it, I finally went back and finished the last of my PS3 games. Lightning Returns and Tales of Xillia 2, in particular being the ones requiring a legitimate time investment to complete.


When Lightning Returns came out, I remember a couple of you giving it a shot and talking about it. I vaguely recall at least one person finding themselves incredibly pressured because of the time mechanic, never feeling like you had a proper opportunity to explore. I think reviews mentioned this as well, but I found I had the opposite reaction. I took a methodical approach and made use of the time stopping ability and ended up completing every required story quest and most of the sidequests long before the final day.

All that was left for me to do was grind monsters, so I spent the last 4 or 5 days resting in an inn to pass time faster. When you forget it's a game, that's kind of an amusing way to treat the end of the world. Anyway, I liked it more than I thought I would, but not enough to call it great. Also, I want to mention the steep learning curve. It was not kind to new players.


On the other hand, I liked Xillia 2, but perhaps not as much as I thought I would. Still a good game, but it had a few flaws. The combat tried to be more challenging and ended up annoying as a result, and while it isn't unusual for a sequel of this type, I think they leaned on previous content a little too heavily. Xillia was a long game, and I didn't really feel a need to revisit every area in a followup with a shorter story. The characters were still good though, and I liked the new ones in particular. The story is surprisingly bittersweet and melancholic.


I've also played a few of my 3DS games, and finished up the stuff I got during the Steam Sale, how much of it I am not sure I mentioned elsewhere.


I played Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward (the sorta sequel to 9 Persons 9 Hours 9 Doors) because the next game in the series has finally been announced. It was good but not as good as 999. This is a visual novel with choices that affect the path of the story, with many of the choices being whether or not you "ally" or "betray" with another character. I had a few frustrations as a result of this mechanic, but on the whole, it's a decently enjoyable science fiction puzzle adventure. It leans a little closer to pseudoscience than philosophy, but covers some of the same ground.


Since I played that, I also started Kid Icarus: Uprising. It's pretty good as a rails shooter, though the controls are awkward and the levels go on for far too long. The dialogue is also pretty amusing, but it's hard to pay attention to it and the stuff trying to kill you at the same time.


Finally, quick rundown of the PC games I played.

Homeworld: First one actually kind of annoyed me a little. Second one was a good improvement, but was also much harder.
Wolfenstein: Thought the shooting was great, everything else notsomuch.
DmC: It was good, though perhaps not as good as I was hoping. Controls were a little awkward.
Ori and the Blind Forest: Almost my perfect kind of game.

Not sure what next. I'm looking forward to MGS5 in about 2 weeks, so won't play anything that takes longer than that before then.

[Silke]

I think I was the one who felt pressured. That was true early on when you're staring at a wall of 40 quests and have no idea how to go about finishing them all. The more I played the more that feeling went away though. I remember you could abuse an ability that essentially kept the clock frozen the whole game and then it just became a matter of doing stuff efficiently and then advancing the clock again to do the next batch of time sensitive quests.

Ultimately my biggest problem with Lightning Returns was that it was using a similar combat system designed for 3 characters and they made the focus on Lightning. Lightning isn't particularly likable and it was asking a lot to have her carry the whole game on her shoulders. It also doesn't help that Final Fantasy plots can get convoluted enough when it's just one game. But having 3 games of plot (and time travel!) just turn things into a mess. Despite that I did finish and even platinum the game.

I also finished Xillia 2 recently. I liked the first better. I hate the silent protagonist gimmick and everything just felt so much smaller. I also hate when bosses level with you. Bosses were stupidly and artificially hard because of that.

[Wool]

That makes sense. The beginning was really harsh to get through. I remembered that initial impression and compared it to that first hurdle, which is why the relief of eventually not having the problem stuck with me.

I didn't mind Lightning as much as most people did, but I also didn't think the story was worth investing much in either. It was a cool idea that they didn't do anything that interesting with. The world is ending and you constantly get sidequests that seem to ignore this, with characters acting like they would in any other rpg. Complete wasted opportunity to not instead explore the psychology behind what matters to people. The production values of the main story beats were probably what kept my attention more than anything else.

As for three games of plot go, even though they are technically sequels, I don't really treat them as such. Each successive game "loses the plot" just a little bit more as they retroactively add more nonsense. While 2 and 3's stories clearly weren't in mind when 13 ended, even the jump between 2 and 3 feels weird and contrived, like they are just making it up as they go. They are easier to digest if you don't worry about the whole, and just accept whatever weird Twilight Zone fan fiction story they want to tell.

I also finished Xillia 2 recently. I liked the first better. I hate the silent protagonist gimmick and everything just felt so much smaller.

I forgot about that part. I don't mind silent protagonists in certain games, but it definitely doesn't work in a Tales game. Here you have a very specifically designed character surrounded by characters that never stop talking, and all he ever does is grunt at them. It was super weird. There is no point at which the player feels like they are that character, which is half the point to a silent protagonist.

As for bosses, my main problem was that the game was apparently designed to have you exploit an enemy weakness and then combo into another one, but the dang bosses never stay vulnerable for longer than half a second. It was stupid. To win you end up having to spam the super attacks from pairing and chronowhatever.

[Melcar]

I've been playing 7 Days to Die lately.

It's an Alpha build - steam early access (I grabbed it on sale a while back). Voxel based crafting/zomebie horde survival game. While it's an Alpha build it's quite playable. (though there are weird glitches here and there).

[Nerkahia]

I just picked up Witcher for $1.50 and Witcher II for $2.99 on Steam lol, couldn't pass those up; I've never played them. Just goofing around waiting for the new Deus Ex and Mass Effect.

[Wool]

After I finally tore myself away from MGS5 I played two things last month: Steins;Gate and Borderlands 2.

In the case of Borderlands 2, I got the Telltale series for cheap in a Humble promotion and need to play 2 first. I had been putting it off because of how much of a time commitment I perceived it to be. They are fun games but they are kind of bloated with regards to content.

Anyway I was pretty happy with it. Almost everything about it was a large improvement over the first game. I know this because before I committed to playing it I played the DLC from the first game instead. I just needed a short distraction but ultimately ended up deciding to play the entire set, all the way up to the last of the Borderlands 2 DLC as well.

I only had two complaints. One: crappy audio mixing. Specifically, there were numerous times when I could not hear important npc quest dialogue because there were psychos nearby screaming their heads off, which for some reason took priority instead of being dampened like in any other game. I often just followed the quest markers without knowing what I was supposed to be doing, or why. And unlike the first game, you can't replay old audio tapes. Really annoying.

Two: The first game had issues with light scaling in which very little change seemed to occur. This made the game easy and provided little reason to upgrade weapons once you found something you liked. The second game fixes this, but goes way overboard and actually makes most gear feel expendable and useless, no matter how good it is. The scaling in general was just way way off.

So I kept dying even with good equipment. A single shot would take out my shields and leave me with a few hundred hitpoints left. I took a look at the numbers and discovered that instead of having a smooth curve, they were inflating at ridiculous rates every level. At level 33, a common junk shield had twice the hitpoints of my rare level 30 shield. Guns behaved in the same way. Unfortunately, whether it's by taste or design, a lot of the guns in the game are junk, and I often found times when the stuff I liked wasn't able to compete against the insane scaling of the enemies.

Anyway, I got carried away there, but in conclusion Borderlands 2 is good. Tiny Tina's D&D DLC is fantastic. Pirate DLC is decent, Arena DLC is okay, Hunt DLC is obnoxious and annoying. Though I did like how the badguy dies in that one. Oh, and the DLCs have more loot as a reward than the rest of the game combined. Very strange.


Not done yet, the reason why I needed a distraction was because of Steins;Gate. I played it because I was in the mood for something with a heavy story, but didn't quite get what I bargained for.

It wasn't what I expected it to be. Steins;Gate is a story about some college students who discover a way to send text messages back through time. I found this to be a fascinating take on time travel, and was expecting a pretty hard-boiled science fiction story about the consequences of messing with the past. It ended up being a lot more anime drama than serious science fiction, with some impossible to take seriously conspiracy plotlines thrown in for good measure.

But the goofy anime shenanigans provided a lot of character development, so that when the story finally turns about 75% through, it turns hard, and ended up being one of the saddest things I've ever played. It wasn't what I was expecting, but it was very good for what it was, and I sort of decided to stick to light stuff for awhile after playing it, hence the Borderlands binge.

I just picked up Witcher for $1.50 and Witcher II for $2.99 on Steam lol, couldn't pass those up; I've never played them. Just goofing around waiting for the new Deus Ex and Mass Effect.

Those prices are almost criminal with how good those games are. Even the first one was a lot better than I was expecting.


P.S. I've seen a little 7 Days to Die. It kind of reminds me of Wurm. Which is. amusingly enough, getting a Steam release this month.

[Wool]

I played Daikatana. It was only a dollar and I was curious.

Don't play Daikatana.

[Balthis]

So I kept dying even with good equipment. A single shot would take out my shields and leave me with a few hundred hitpoints left. I took a look at the numbers and discovered that instead of having a smooth curve, they were inflating at ridiculous rates every level. At level 33, a common junk shield had twice the hitpoints of my rare level 30 shield. Guns behaved in the same way. Unfortunately, whether it's by taste or design, a lot of the guns in the game are junk, and I often found times when the stuff I liked wasn't able to compete against the insane scaling of the enemies.

Anyway, I got carried away there, but in conclusion Borderlands 2 is good. Tiny Tina's D&D DLC is fantastic. Pirate DLC is decent, Arena DLC is okay, Hunt DLC is obnoxious and annoying. Though I did like how the badguy dies in that one. Oh, and the DLCs have more loot as a reward than the rest of the game combined. Very strange.

I agree Tiny Tina's D&D was a lot of fun. Not very difficult, but I enjoyed it a lot. It's worth picking up some of those DLC's but I wish they would take it easy on the skin packs. I don't care enough about how my toon looks to use the skins I pick up, much less buy a skin pack for them.

[Daxil Solshok]

Finishing up on Far Cry 4. 9/10. Only issues are it's a little buggy , but nothing like 3, and there's almost too much action. Hard to accomplish missions when random events constantly get in your way. Also, it4's a bit PG-13ish, I'm finding I like more mature content at this point. Next up if I have the time GTA5 (PC), then I guess I'll have to try Fallout.

[Wool]

I forgot to post about it, but Batman Arkham Knight on PC is about as fixed as it's likely to get at this point, so I played it before Legacy of the Void came out.

I was lucky and it performed just fine on my machine. I remember hearing that it was probably the weakest Batman game, but I actually found it to probably be the best. It's hard to compare it to Asylum, with how much older and tightly designed that one is, but I liked it much, much more than Arkham City. For one, I actually liked the story this time. It did some really cool things and managed to avoid doing some really dumb things that the previous two games did.

I have to say though, the riddler trophies went full on stupid in this one. It wasn't as offensively bad as much as much as it was needless. I was tempted to skip them, but the game encourages you to complete them with something you should get with much less effort. They aren't hard to get, but took me a couple of days of just mindlessly running around to complete.

Spoiler for what you get for 100% completion:

The full ending. It isn't that much longer, but you don't even get a credits sequence until you do this. It makes the end feel kind of disjointed and weird.

[Wool]

I recommended two of the games I got during the Steam Sale in the PC Recommendation thread, but I also got (and played) Shadowrun Hong Kong and Her Story.

Her Story is a game where you search for keywords in a police database to find video of a woman being interviewed about the death of her husband. It was a cool idea but I found it to be kind of disappointing, as a relatively benign word choice on my part in the first five minutes brought up a video that essentially spoiled the mystery I was hoping to investigate.


Shadowrun Hong Kong was fun, but I'm not sure if it was better than Dragonfall. I think I partly benefited from not playing Dragonfall until it got re-released with extra content, as Hong Kong seemed significantly buggier in my experience. I also did not like the redesigned decking. I didn't like decking much in the first place, but at least in Dragonfall you got some cool missions where it felt like "meatspace" and matrix sequences were integrated fairly well. In Hong Kong those sequences just felt belabored and tedious.

There were also some issues with level design in general that I didn't like, but I did like the characters and the story, so it was still good overall. Story might have been better in this one actually.


Oh right, and I also finally got around to playing the Metro games. I chose to play the original 2033 and the Redux version of Last Light, to get a fair glimpse at how much the series changed. I played them both on hard mode, as fans seemed to think this enhanced the tense atmosphere, but I didn't much care for it in retrospect.


I did not like Metro 2033 much at all. Enemies were clairvoyant and had immediate pinpoint accuracy once combat gets initiated. If I didn't make sure I was in pitch darkness, enemies would see me through walls. It was a little ridiculous. I also thought the story and dialogue would be better since it was based on a book. The one thing I really liked about this game was the atmosphere. Fog, light, etc was used to amazing effect.

Metro Last Light was a huge upgrade in my opinion, though I still had a few problems with it. It made a great first impression, with some amazing visuals, though the last part of the game didn't do much for me. Fans that complain they did a 180 and made the game too easy are also correct. Story is a mixed bag. In some ways it did a better job than 2033, but in some ways it actually seemed worse. I wasn't impressed by the attempts at moralizing in this game. I still liked it overall though.

Didn't really feel like either game really fulfilled the promise set forth by the concept. The idea of surviving and having to choose between using ammo to kill or as currency for example. I never knew what to spend it on, so by the end of both games I had a small fortune in special ammo that I just wasted on enemies in the final levels.

[Wool]

Was looking over my list trying to find something new (old) to play, and realized I had a Steam Sale game that I forgot about. I wasn't sure if I should recommend it in the PC game thread, so I'll talk about it here instead.

Divinity: Dragon Commander is a spinoff of the series of the same name. But instead of being an rpg, it's a multi-layered strategy game. The first round is strategic (Risk) in which you control territories and manage armies. The second round is an RTS that is initiated when two armies share the same region. There have been a few other games in the past like this, but this isn't what makes the game interesting. There is a third phase that takes place in between rounds on your flagship, in which you must manage the political needs and wants of the various fantasy races that serve under your banner as you conquer the world.

The issues you are presented with are parodies of real world issues (gun control, legalization, immigration), and each fantasy race represents an extreme political view. Dwarves are capitalists and conservatives, Elves are socialists and liberal, Imps favor science, while Undead favor religion. You are presented with an issue and you have to choose which faction to support, as they will not all see eye to eye. You as the player have the choice to follow your own real life convictions, try to compromise and stabilize the various factions, or choose on the merit of practicality. That is to say, the benefits or drawbacks to enacting the policy. Government Healthcare would make your citizens happier, but would enact a gold penalty that you could be using on your armies. How much each faction likes you also determines their performance in the various regions you can control.

While it is not a fully dynamic campaign, these choices were still fun and interesting to explore. There are also various character storylines to also explore, and the writing and voice acting in general is thoroughly excellent. The characters have great personality, even when that personality is specifically designed to get under your skin. There are a couple of grade A assholes that are hilarious in the contempt they generate, and the devs know this too. They will manipulate the player by having someone say something right in the wrong way, seeing if the player will rule with their emotions and say no just because their pride was offended.

Conversely, the RTS combat was the weak link in the experience. It wasn't bad, and was designed to be fast and of minimal hassle, but it wasn't that compelling either. There weren't many units, and so they all end up being hard counters to each other. Winning feels like a matter of massing the largest blob and outmaneuvering the AI when their blob is bigger than yours.

It was also fairly funny. I've never played a Divinity game before, so didn't take much stalk in what others said about them. Maybe I'll pay more attention in the future.

[Nadiar]

I played Daikatana. It was only a dollar and I was curious.

Don't play Daikatana.

Do you feel like John Romero's bitch now?

[Daxil Solshok]

I don't really like the RTS/strategic games like Total War. I think it's mainly because I don't like RTS anymore. Too twitch for me. Still love grand strategy war games, though, and probably always will.

[Nadiar]

I don't really like the RTS/strategic games like Total War. I think it's mainly because I don't like RTS anymore. Too twitch for me. Still love grand strategy war games, though, and probably always will.

This is my problem with RTS games too. They have almost nothing to do with strategy, but mindlessly clicking a specific build order faster or more efficiently than your opponent isn't a strategy. Coming up with that order is strategy. Copying it from a guide isn't.

[Wool]

This is my problem with RTS games too. They have almost nothing to do with strategy, but mindlessly clicking a specific build order faster or more efficiently than your opponent isn't a strategy. Coming up with that order is strategy. Copying it from a guide isn't.

I don't think this is exactly true. What you are describing comes from human nature always trying to min/max any challenge until it boils down to a path of least resistance, especially in a competitive context. It's going to happen in every game, regardless of genre.

At the very most basic level, strategy is very important, all other things being equal (balance). You need to be aware what your enemy is doing, and you need to know what the proper counter to it is. In battle, you need to know how to organize your units efficiently, and you need to be able to make decisions about your economy to not fall behind.

Regardless, these problems are only apparent if you play competitively. I like the genre vs AI because I like managing armies and poking holes in defenses.

I don't really like the RTS/strategic games like Total War. I think it's mainly because I don't like RTS anymore. Too twitch for me. Still love grand strategy war games, though, and probably always will.

For what it's worth, you don't actually have to play the RTS bit; if your strategic mode army is strong enough you can win with autobattles. Furthermore, one of the things I don't like about the RTS portion, the imprecise controls, make twitchy strategies somewhat ineffective, hence the blob tactics I used.

Do you feel like John Romero's bitch now?

I'm going to say no. I don't think his ultimate plan was to ruin his career and company so that in twenty years someone would play a bad game and wish they hadn't.

That ad campaign was such a disaster. Can you imagine if someone tried it today? You would have to move to the moon to get away from the disdain you would earn.