Hey let's catch up on some video gaming in the sandbox

space is not > dragons!

does anyone have an opinion on http://www.dinodday.com/? Tempted by THE AWESOMENESS OF NAZI!!! DINOSAURS!!! but the reviews are shitty.

@ ledge I can't play any new games since my Nethack + ADOM phase. Everything feels so sloow, "oh, I have to walk all the way over there?"

I got caught up in wandering and sidequests; I was level 19 before I met the frost troll and was unimpressed.

I did play and love RDR, galloping around, shooting wild beasts, sidequests, just dickin' around in the desert. it's more the statscock aspect of rpgs that puts me off. and the lifesuck.

I thought I might ask some recommendations here... I just finished playing Jade Empire, and I'm kinda looking for something similar to tackle next. It should be an action RPG (no turn-based stuff) or action adventure, with an intriguing plot and the ability to affect the storyline with your actions. Preferably fantasy, though sci-fi is okay too, but nothing too realistic. And it shouldn't be too nihilistic either, I like games where you can choose not to kill if you don't have to. Can you recommend anything along these lines? Oh, and it should preferably be something a few years old, I'm not sure if my computer can handle really recent games.

And it should obviously be on PC, I don't own any consoles.

Mass Effect?

Having never played any of the Bioware classic run of D&D RPGs (Baldur's Gate, Planescape, Icewind Dale), I bought the compilation DVD. I don't own a PC. I'm saving them for any future stretch of invalidity.

okay I haven't finished Mass Effect but somehow I am thinking it fails the "choose not to kill" and "not too nihilistic" criteria

Btw, I didn't mean you can go through the whole game without killing, I liked the fighting system in Jade Empire. But I also liked how you could solve many of the sidequests by either fighting, or with your wits/empathy.

i don't think Mass Effect is too nihilistic. there's obviously mandatory combat sections but there are some pretty serious moral choices you are given the opportunity to make.

Maybe try Deus Ex, Toumas? (The original, not the new one.) I think you can play most of that game without killing anyone?

Also maybe Morrowind which also has very limited killing and is of course a classic.

If you don't mind dated graphics, Bethesda released Daggerfall for free online and it is still a total classic. Betrayal of Krondor is also free floating out there.

try SPACE MARINE for its touching story of friendship through adversity and chainsaw swords

http://images.wikia.com/gearsofwar/images/9/97/30nkw02.jpg

as far as antinihilism goes i've been playing a lot of ultima 7, where if you steal stuff the other people in your party get mad at you and leave

betrayal at krondor is a straight masterpiece for at least half of its duration (especially CHAPTER 3: THE SPYGLASS AND THE SPIDER) but the combat is turn-based.

but yeah if you've never played deus ex the answer is deus ex because there almost aren't any better games than deus ex.

you only have to kill one person in deus ex and don't worry you'll want to.

do I buy CoD MW3 or BF3?

I fucking love bf3 but playing with friends makes it so much more satisfying. If youre more of a lone wolf mw3 might be better..

I'm playing mass effect now, it's great. Excited that I'll be able to import my character into Mass Effect 2.

mw3 kind of sucks. ive not played it in about a week. the maps are shitty. the singeplayer, if you care about that, lasts something like 4 or 5 hours.

maybe the most obvious answer if u really liked jade empire is kotor

^^^

^^^

plus, kotor is better than jade, imo

i've been playing a lot of ultima 7

hats off. although i keep trying to play it i just can't get the blasted thing to load. not even on the dos box.

oh yeah it would be totally impossible if not for http://exult.sourceforge.net/

which means i'm playing the game natively in linux which is a rare treat

Playing Lemonade Tycoon on the phone. Once you figure out the recipe, everything else is easy.

hey so i wanna add ppl to my gaming center on iphone so i can compete in temple run against you guys -- friend me, my nick is "mordys"

Ticket To Ride! On IPAD. It is the best.

Somehow stumbled back into playing Tiny Wings on my new phone, it really does tread the fine line between "just one more go" and "DIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE YOU FUCKING CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNTTTT"

Seconding Deus Ex for Tuomas. Also, I remember quite enjoying Outcast many years ago.

Played all three Gears of War over a month, way too much murdery fun. Didn't even notice I was essentially killing the same dude over and over again. Now I am playing through Half Life 2 and the HL2 Episodes again for some reason.

deus ex deus ex deus ex

If you can get past the slightly frustrating first mission it's great. And if you're doing a no kill run the first mission is good for practicing that anyway. It's a less than 10 minute download from Steam and works with no problems on my Win7/64 PC with crappy integrated graphics. Just get the original by itself and don't bother with Invisibubble War as it's crap.

Non stop skyrim for me too, according to raptr I've clocked up 43 hours now (somehow! Lots has been 10 minute blasts snatched here and there) and I'm up to I think level 22? The fact levelling only happens when you're actively DOING STUFF means it can be pretty easy to spend a lot of time just wandering or exploring or doing fetch quests without seeing any level increase at all (but then clearing a couple of dungeons or spending 20 minutes forging and enchanting can bump it up by 2 or 3 pretty quickly). Patch today but it sounds like the things it breaks are more major than the things it's fixed.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-11-30-skyrim-patch-1-2-has-resistance-breaking-bug

skyrim u eating my soul.

its great though, love the fact that you cant just cruise in it ever but there is still a decided progression (ie i no longer run like a child from bears when they pop up). but man even now every so often some novice conjourer will give me a smackdown because im not paying attention, so it never feels easy. way better balanced than fo3 or nv, where at a certain point you are just unstoppable. lockpicking in this is also way way more challenging. speaking of which i need to figure out where to buy a ton of lockpicks.

i am level 18 and in the labyrinthine or whatever and holy shit lol dungeon is hueg

i have like a million things to say about skyrim but i don't want my pearls lost to the sandbox of time.

it rules but as always minor things are bugging me. why you can't DEFEND while dual-wielding is just criminal

can i just say re skyrim that tom bissell is kinda a moron?

the grantland piece u mean? yeah seems like a lot of legwork to say "the dialogue is pretty bad"

the "no defending while dual-wielding" thing got me killed multiple times as I was running around with an axe in one hand and balls of flames in the other

~ remap shouts to the d-pad or R3
~ RB is defend in all cases

bethesda do you hear me

re: badness of dialogue, i do kind of wonder when this will improve. even top-tier character driven games like rockstar's have woeful speechifying by any standard. post-writers' strike you'd think there'd be resources enough to bring in some "real" writers to polish things up or give things a little zip. as i understand it, the writing is up to the directors (right?). i wonder if any division of labor in this will ever happen. if the audience doesn't measurably care then probably not, i guess.

I thought the dialog in both Arkham games was outstanding

reading that thing made me imagine a huge open-world game like skyrim where you're a ghost and so can't directly interact with other characters and it's all about exploration and maybe you can move objects which can become an indirect mode of communication/influence. i would play it, talking in video games does pretty much always suck.

it ought to be convention to make your selections indicative and not quotation i.e. [ask to buy something] and not "hey, what do you have?"

a lot of games have a problem where you're given sarcastic options and it turns out they weren't meant that way (or v - v)

it ought to be convention to make your selections indicative and not quotation i.e. [ask to buy something] and not "hey, what do you have?"

this is why conversation in Mass Effect is so good

a lot of games have a problem where you're given sarcastic options and it turns out they weren't meant that way (or v - v)

sometimes i wonder if this is a social skills issue where ppl writing the dialogue aren't very attuned to the way ppl talk + how things sound. i can't think of a specific example off-hand, but numerous times I've been playing a game and heard or said a piece of dialogue that was just totally aspie.

i.e. HIRE A WRITER

ha the best bit i had in the bastion demo was the so-epic narration of my hero getting up and noticing the changes wrought in the world around him being interrupted by "... and then he fell to his death" because i was looking to see if there were invisible walls

but it didn't really bring me any joy beyond that. how long is it? does anything particularly nifty happen? it was one of kieron gillen's games of the year so i'd have thought it did something or other, at some point

i think about 3 hours for your first playthrough. then there are challenge rooms + a new game plus feature

oh, it's short? that makes me about three to four times as likely to actually buy it, i think

yeah, i think i beat it in a night or two

Fucking Terraria, just give me the damn ore.

at any rate, Terraria is certainly worth the 75% knocked-off price it's currently running.

Finally tried out Portal 2. Finally seeing what everyone was yammering about this year. Curious how much britishness was written into Merchant's lines and how much he brought to it. Cool that Jay Pinkerton had a hand in writing the jokes.