Kevin's Watch

Gog Summer Sale on. Picked up Tropico 4 and the full DLC, so started my island dictatorship last night. Only played a few hours of the first Tropico, the mechanics are much the same here, but it looks a lot better and feels a lot smoother.

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+JMJ+

Mighty No. 9 (Wii U)

Steam Summer Sale starts today apparently. (Still not officially confirmed, but leaked by PayPal as is traditional. )

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The Witcher III

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Titan Quest

Yes, playing it yet again. This time I seem to be doing something right. My hero has been finding more quality items (rare blue ones rather than green) than I've ever seen before. He found a Ram Bow in the very first level. A powerful weapon that might easily last through till the end of the game.

At the beginning of the Quest, once I had wiped out all the demons and the demon wizard from the fields next to the first village, the elder asks if I may go to Sparta and ask the general there if he would send a few soldiers to help protect the farmer's fields. At Sparta the general agrees only if I rid the next pass of a very powerful demon Centaur.

If you were to return to the first village after the game has been reset you'll find that the fields are once again swarming with demons. This all seemed kinda stupid really. Just hack and slash, hack and slash, hack and slash. However, it's possible that the soldiers General Sparta sends is actually my hero. So I tried ridding the farmer's fields of demons a second time ... and magically it seemed to me I later found a Heartspiece - a very fast shortsword with lots of mean attributes.

I think I'm beginning to like this game.

I always give mobile games no attention in here, even though these days it is what I am primarily playing. So I must admit I've been playing the game Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes a lot of my time. And I accidentally got another employee that I work with into it as well. So consider yourself warned - it's addictive. It's also free (with the option to pay real money to up things, but I've not spent a cent on it because I'm a freeloading bastard).

That's how they get you...for every free-loading (and patient) bastard, there's 20 who'll get suckered into paying.

--A

+JMJ+

Monochroma (Xbox One)

Picked up the expansions for Witcher 3.

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Avatar wrote:Picked up the expansions for Witcher 3.

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What a game! I played almost 100 hours doing the base game, then came back to it a little while later when Blood and Wine came out. I played both expansions back-to-back and had such an amazing time.

Witcher III was one of those special games that comes along so rarely... It sucked me in and didn't let go until it was finished with me. It had such strong characters and storytelling that I just couldn't leave it alone, and I had a sense of sadness and loss when I was finished. What a ride.

In other news Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is out today, but since I'm playing on PC in Europe I get shafted and (unlike the console players who get midnight releases) have to wait until 5pm(!) to play.

Yeah, I did enjoy it. Busy on Fallout 4 at the moment. FONV was a better game, still enjoying it though.

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I was both impressed and disappointed with Fallout 4 myself.

I thought the gameplay was a huge upgrade. The weapon and armour upgrade system are fantastic and the settlement system has a lot going for it. The basic fallout formula is there, going through an apocalyptic wasteland exploring and killing things.

However, the whole thing seemed like it lacked a motivational force or hook. The basic premise that you're desperately searching for your son breaks down the moment you head off on any tangents, and the game gives you no reason to be emotionally invested either. Fallout 3 had you grow up with your father in the vault, he even gives you a BB gun for your birthday, which you can carry through the whole game. Shaun, by comparison, is just a baby you've never really met. Maybe the "character" you're playing would have a strong emotional connection with him but this isn't felt by the player and nor is it really conveyed in the game.

There is also the problem that you could be a member of all the factions and do all their missions, which didn't make sense, the lack of choices in quests (these problems shared by Skyrim).

The conversation system was terrible too - who thought it would be a good idea to give four vague words like "agree" and "sarcastic" as dialogue options? You pick one and then your character (badly voice acted) spews a line which is completely at odds with what you thought he might say.

New Vegas was very much the opposite of this. You were given a real reason to want to track down Benny - he shot you in the damn head - and you got sucked into the conflict surrounding New Vegas in a very organic way during your journey. Once sucked in you even had the opportunity to make choices that affected the game world in many ways. Almost every character in the game (even the main ones, faction leaders etc.) could just be murdered if the player chose to. What better way to break immersion than to have unkillable characters just because they're needed for a bit of story later?

If you don't want to read all that, here's a summary:

New Vegas Best Fallout Game.

Mods man. I'm running nearly 30 mods on it, straight out of the box.

One of which shows you the full dialogue options instead of the dumbed down console version.

Another one lets you craft ammo like in New Vegas.

Most of the others are random tweaks, like improved maps and better settlers and better item sorting.

I don't like the paucity of factions, only 4, but I don't think you can do all of them...I haven't finished yet, but I know the quests for some factions bring you into direct conflict with others.

I'm refusing to join the BoS for example (never liked them) and although I haven't done it yet, I know that

Spoiler

the Railroad quest line ends up making you destroy the BoS

.

Yes...FONV=best Fallout game.

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Oh man... Lately I got into Dwarf Fortress... again. There are more tools out for it this time, though, so things are bit easier to manage before all your dwarves die

Never played it. Sorta like a Rimworld type thing, right?

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Avatar wrote:Never played it. Sorta like a Rimworld type thing, right?

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More like The Sims, in an area as large as a plot in Sim City, but with Rogue-like graphics, and mechanics & crafting that surpasses Minecraft.

And your dwarves die. A LOT. The tagline for the game is:
"Losing is FUN!"

I definitely usually consider myself the opposite of a graphics snob (I still play Star Control II) but rogue-like might be going a bit far.

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Avatar wrote:I definitely usually consider myself the opposite of a graphics snob (I still play Star Control II) but rogue-like might be going a bit far.

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If you can't interpret a screen full of ASCII characters, then Dwarf Fortress isn't for you!

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Jade Empire, an oldish BioWare game that's almost exactly like KotR, if KotR was set in 9th Century China.

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