Video Games - Watcha playin'?

[Qingdai]

But do you play the hard Chinese lady betting mahjong or that easy Jewish style?

[livius drusus]

Neither. I prefer the stingy Yankee no-betting style.

[Qingdai]

Well I can't play at all, but the tiles look pretty.

[Ensign Steve]

Mah jong is a meditative experience. You're not supposed to do it quickly. I'll spend an afternoon unraveling one, in between cups of tea.

[Adam]

This seems as good a place to put this as any.

Review of Duke Nukem Forever

[Malloch]

Now trying to beat Neverwinter Nights 2. I have a paladin at 6, and a ranger I just got to 6. Too many options in the this game to stick to just one character...

[kazza3]

Crysis Warhead. It's actually got an interesting storyline and has awesome graphics.

[MonCapitan2002]

I just bought Crimson Gem Saga for the PSP. I'll be getting into the game in the near future.

[BracesForImpact]

After trying to ignore it for a few months, I finally gave in and started playing Mafia Wars on Facebook. I've only been playing for a few days, and now I'm also playing Space Wars and Special Forces, which are pretty much the same game but with a slightly different theme. So like, if you're on FB and you play you can add me and feed my Facebook App addiction.

[Deadlokd]

Excellent. Are you a member of the FB group? Do you play Farm Town?

[BracesForImpact]

I didn't know there was an FF Facebook group. I've never played Farmtown. Should I be?

[Megatron]

Shin Megami Tensei games for the PS2 - Nocturne, Persona 3 and 4, and Digital Devil Saga. Whenever I go to the game room I pick whichever one I haven't played in a while and throw it in. At this rate I'll probably finish them in 2011.

[Crumb]

I started playing TopSpin 2 again on the 360. That game is even more fun than I remembered it to be. I am currently in the middle of the Australian Open and doing damn good. I knocked off the 2nd and 3rd ranked players, and have a match against the 5th ranked player next. I was ranked 29th going into the open. What fun!

[MonCapitan2002]

I am currently playing Crimsom Gem Saga for the PSP. I have to say that after playing it for a while, I happen to think the game is quite fun.

[Kael]

I picked Mount & Blade back up after leaving it sitting for some months. Intense medieval combat, good times with weapons. and armor.

[Adam]

I picked up inFamous recently (yes, the stupid capitalization is the "official" way to type the title). Thnk Grand Theft Auto, but with electricity-based superpowers and Assassin's Creed/le Parkour style wall crawling and acrobatics. I'm mostly enjoying it. The powers are fun to play with, the controls are intuitive, the open city has personality, and the characters are cheesy and entertaining. I do sort of wish there were more variety to the side missions. There are maybe 6 to 8 different templates for side missions, and you do them over and over.

My biggest gripe is that the game features yet another overhyped morality system that amounts to a series of starkly black and white decision points that move your karma meter towards good or evil. I'm told that the plot unfolds differently depending on the position of your karma meter, certain powers follow different upgrade paths depending on your karma, and citizens on the street will either cheer for you and snap photos or else throw (harmless, afaik) rocks at you based on your choices. All typical elements of a karma game, and the execution is as good as any I've seen but, as always, it just feels flat. I want to play a game where the choice to be good or evil isn't essentially arbitrary. I want a game where my character turns to the dark side, if he or she does, not because oh, well, I've already beaten the game as a good guy, let's try it as a psychopath, but because there is a temptation to do so. It should be easier to be an asshole, but the rewards should be correspondingly smaller. inFamous could have been that game. You take a karma hit if you injure civilians, and the idiots don't seem to grasp the idea of not milling about in the middle of a fight between a dozen goons with assault rifles and a guy who shoots lightning from his ass. If the consequences for hurting an innocent were more severe, and the rewards for not doing so were greater, then karma decisions would be interesting choices. As it is, if I accidentally electrocute a couple of passers by while I'm taking down a group of thugs, I can get the karma back just by wandering around healing (one of your abilities involves using your charged up hands like a sort of defibrillator) random injured people for a minute or two.

Also, although this is not a problem with inFamous, it's the first game I've ever played on my Blu-Ray player PS3 and, much as I love the system for what I bought it for, I'm not impressed with it as a platform for gaming. My damned controller desyncs all the time, requiring a hard system reset before it will resync, and, from what I can find on the tubes, it's apparently a fairly widespread problem. The suggested fix? Don't use any wireless devices, other than the controller, near the console, including the wifi adapter that's built in to the frickin console. I've also seen at least one person suggest that you can fix the issue by popping the unit open and blowing dust off of the bluetooth antenna, so maybe I'll try that.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Kael

I picked Mount & Blade back up after leaving it sitting for some months. Intense medieval combat, good times with weapons. and armor.

I really wanted to play this when it cam out, but then I sort of forgot that it existed.

[Kael]

Main page is here, for the lazy. Trial version is free, but kicks you out of the game when you reach lvl 7, which takes about 20 minutes unless you're trying really hard not to gain experience. I bought the full version because I had money at the time and liked the idea of supporting them, but a friend of mine got a serial crack, so I know those are out there too.

[mulebear]

I'm really lame. My favorite game is Brickshooter Egypt. Not the suck ass online version, but the full pay version. I can't stop playing it.

[Jerome]

Gears of War




Where else can one have a chainsaw duel but on the internet!

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Adam

...inFamous...

So, there's this awesome mission towards the end of the game where there are four hot air balloons circling the city, spraying magic insanity toxin that turns everyone in the city into murderous psychos, and the protagonist has to chase them down, take out the missile firing UAVs protecting them, disrupt the forcefields protecting them, disable the machine guns mounted on them, then leap onto them and decouple the gas sprayer from the balloon do it falls and goes boom (while avoiding civilians who want to punch you to death and, of course, the occasional group of armed thugs). It's fun, it's challenging, great job, game designers! One problem: as soon as I take out balloon #3 the game locks up. Every time. Not happy.

[Wonderbread Leotard]

[Ensign Steve]

Right now beyelzu and I are playing Gauntlet: Dark Legacy on the PlayStation2. Cheezy. Diverting. Good times.

[slimshady2357]

Originally Posted by Crumb

I started playing TopSpin 2 again on the 360. That game is even more fun than I remembered it to be. I am currently in the middle of the Australian Open and doing damn good. I knocked off the 2nd and 3rd ranked players, and have a match against the 5th ranked player next. I was ranked 29th going into the open. What fun!

How can you be in the middle of the tournament and have played the 2nd and 3rd ranked players already?



Also, I am currently playing Bejewled Deluxe 2.

[Zehava]

Red Faction: Guerrilla for my 360. Looks amazing on the new TV,