Jump to content

Video Games - Legendary Edition


Rhom

Recommended Posts

I don't pretend that I'll ever get to my backlog, in fact I don't even call it a backlog anymore. I divide my Steam library into 3 categories: Beaten, Not Beaten-Good, Not Beaten-Waste. Meaning games I've beaten, games I haven't beaten but that I thought there was something good about them, and games I haven't beaten that were a waste of money. Every once in a while I comb through my Not Beaten-Good list to try to find a few games to pull up into a 4th category: Now Playing, which is also where my new purchases and regular standbys are. I don't consider Not Beaten-Good a backlog though, I know I'll never touch most of those games again. And often when I pull a game forward, I eventually drop it again without beating it. I will say, there's only 2 or 3 games in my Steam account that I've never played even once. I buy a lot of games, but I'm good about at least trying them out.

I do have dozens, if not hundreds at this point, of untouched free games in my Epic account. But that's also not a backlog, I just reflexively pick up all the free games; even if I already own them on another account.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Fez said:

I don't pretend that I'll ever get to my backlog, in fact I don't even call it a backlog anymore. I divide my Steam library into 3 categories: Beaten, Not Beaten-Good, Not Beaten-Waste. Meaning games I've beaten, games I haven't beaten but that I thought there was something good about them, and games I haven't beaten that were a waste of money. Every once in a while I comb through my Not Beaten-Good list to try to find a few games to pull up into a 4th category: Now Playing, which is also where my new purchases and regular standbys are. I don't consider Not Beaten-Good a backlog though, I know I'll never touch most of those games again. And often when I pull a game forward, I eventually drop it again without beating it. I will say, there's only 2 or 3 games in my Steam account that I've never played even once. I buy a lot of games, but I'm good about at least trying them out.

I do have dozens, if not hundreds at this point, of untouched free games in my Epic account. But that's also not a backlog, I just reflexively pick up all the free games; even if I already own them on another account.

I do something similar in that I have a Beaten, Active, and Trash category.  The rest of my uninstalled games that I haven't beaten are categorized by genre.  FPS, RPG, RTS, etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, briantw said:

I do something similar in that I have a Beaten, Active, and Trash category.  The rest of my uninstalled games that I haven't beaten are categorized by genre.  FPS, RPG, RTS, etc.

Yeah, as a secondary thing I also categorize all my games by genre. Plus I have a separate folder for free pack-in games I didn't want and old versions of games (e.g. when a free upgrade comes out in a different SKU, like Divinity Original Sin 2, the original SKU goes in this).

To give a sense of perspective to anyone worried about their backlogs, and I'm sure there's folks here with numbers even higher than me, my current Steam count is:

Beaten: 134 games

Not Beaten-Good: 83 games

Not Beaten-Waste: 127 games

Now Playing- 3 games

My Epic account has 121 games in it, of which I've only played 27 games for any amount of time. But I only bought 8 of the games, and all 8 are games I played. I beat 4 of the 8. If Epic let me to do categorizations, I'd put 2 of the other 4 into Not Beaten-Good and the other 2 into Not Beaten- Waste. A bunch of the Epic games I never played are ones that I already owned on Steam. Embarrassingly, there is one game I bought on Steam after already getting it for free on Epic, because I forgot I owned it (Kingdom Come: Deliverance; fortunately it was on sale for $15 at the time).

GOG has 3 games, I beat all three. Origin has 3 games, I also beat all three (assuming you can ever really beat Sims 4).

The thing that would really throw off my stats is itch.io. I bought that $20 BLM donation bundle through them last summer and it came with something like 1,500 games and I've never touched any of them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It would be too depressing to check once again how many games I have, and how many are unplayed (half of them at the very least); a few in Gamersgate, a lot in Steam, a lot in GOG, a growing backlog in Epic. This is the key reason why I reduced a lot my MMO playing habits. I play a bit of WOW and of LOTRO (a few weeks basically) every year, but that's it. Though I was really interested by Age of Conan (the setting, not the gameplay, which I never checked), SWTOR looked intriguing and set in an interesting era (basically some time after KOTOR 1-2), and TESO of course is always quite appealing: I liked a lot the open-world side of Morrowind, so when WOW was released, I thought of it as a basically the open-ended open-world loosely sandboxy aspect of Morrowind, but in a MMO shape, and of course thought that it would be awesome if the Elder Scrolls were ever to become a MMORPG (so to be honest I'm less appealed by the timeline, since it's the past and not in the future of the TES timeline). Having played a lot of WOW and a reasonable amount of LOTRO for extended periods of time has showed me that these were monstrous time-suckers and I couldn't realistically play MMOs and still be able to play all the other kinds of games on my limited free time; to be able to do that, I would have to inherit a few mio $$ or to have invested all my savings into Tesla, Apple and Amazon more than 10 years ago, so that I wouldn't even need to work anymore. I don't even go into the damning fact that playing MMOs in high frequency while working full time also meant that my reading time took a huge hit in the past, and I had to basically stopped WOW to go back into more reasonable reading habits.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One thing that's constantly amusing in BattleTech is a new set of missions (from one of the DLCs, I imagine) where you have to assign one of your mechwarriors to shepherd a bunch of greenhorns running around in low-tier light mechs. They're quite funny, and can result in some barmy outcomes. I just destroyed a Jenner with a Small Laser salvo from an Urbanmech, which is the BattleTech universe equivalent of Rickon Stark killing a grown Lannister guardsman in direct combat with a tuning fork.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Been playing a neat little indie game, Devil Slayer- Raksasi. It's a Binding of Issac-style rogue-lite, with some heavily Dark Souls-inspired combat. Some of the artwork is a bit... questionable, but in a "there sure are a lot of these stereotypical female characters in an MMO" way rather than something truly lewd. And the rest of the artwork is actually really cool looking; there's some good monster designs. It's also really hard so far. The UI could use some work, but the controls feel good.

Also been playing an RPGMaker game for the first time, Divided Reigns. It's absolutely a game where ambition outmatched budget, but what's there is neat.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, Toth said:

In utterly unrelated news I recently saw a video about the current status of X4: Foundations and felt oddly compelled to give it a try, but ultimately decided against it since even on sale it's still at 26€ and I just know I have absolutely no time for such a massive game, though in this I case I would love to support the developers either way. I mean by god, this is a 40 people team that has been churning out massive living and breathing space sims since 1999 and just casually did almost everything Star Citizen wants to be, just with Excel spreadsheets. I also have a strong suspicion the game would kill my CPU anyway.

Egosoft have made many janky games over the years but they've always continued to support, polish, and bring out new free content for them so long past when many developers would have bailed it's incredible, and that amount of free content in a world of DLC (looking at you Paradox, since we're also talking Stellaris and Crusader Kings in this thread) is something that earns them a ton of forbearance from me for varying levels of jank and performance, especially when combined with their enormous amounts of ambition.

I loved the original X:Beyond The Frontier waaay back when and played the crap out of it, X2, and both X3 games and thoroughly enjoyed them all, imperfect though each of them was and I don't think any other games ever really came close to filling that Elite-inspired niche, to creating such a living universe filled with possibilities.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Poobah said:

I loved the original X:Beyond The Frontier waaay back when and played the crap out of it, X2, and both X3 games and thoroughly enjoyed them all, imperfect though each of them was and I don't think any other games ever really came close to filling that Elite-inspired niche, to creating such a living universe filled with possibilities.

I feel you (and think to recognize your avatar XD). I still vividly remember starting out with X2 having my desk covered in post-it notes on which I kept track of all the prices I encountered while touring the galaxy to figure out which wares were profitable at which prices.

And yes, not even Elite offers that living, breathing atmosphere where you are just one guy in a completely simulated world where countless NPCs are doing their business and shape the galaxy. Heck, one of the things I keep reading about X4 is that all ships used by any of the factions have to be actually constructed from high tech wares instead of spawning for free, making the effects of a healthy economy even more apparent.

Have you managed to play X4?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

28 minutes ago, Werthead said:

One thing that's constantly amusing in BattleTech is a new set of missions (from one of the DLCs, I imagine) where you have to assign one of your mechwarriors to shepherd a bunch of greenhorns running around in low-tier light mechs. They're quite funny, and can result in some barmy outcomes. I just destroyed a Jenner with a Small Laser salvo from an Urbanmech, which is the BattleTech universe equivalent of Rickon Stark killing a grown Lannister guardsman in direct combat with a tuning fork.

Those missions are fun and very convenient to do whenever most of your 'mechs or pilots are out of commission.

Thanks to the map/mission design the Urbanmech is actually quite a bit more useful in the video game than it is on the table top. Small lasers, though... even on a melee 'mech I'd pick machine guns over small lasers in this game.

I've gotten a bit into my latest attempt at a career. About 150 days in I managed to pick a Star League Marauder from the black market run by the friendly neighbourhood pirates. It's probably the deadliest 'mech in the game. Once you've got a pilot up to Tactics 9, an alpha strike from a Marauder is likely to blow the head of any 'mech, and the SL version has double heat sinks and comes with ER PPCs, which also do more damage than standard PPCs in this game. Of course it is a relatively fragile machine, so the game's not hideously unbalanced just yet.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, Werthead said:

Jade Empire is from the same period and has some of the same issues, but is still very much worth playing (easily BioWare's most underrated game; I enjoyed if more than any of the Dragon Ages and probably more than the first Mass Effect).

I tried to play Jade Empire about two years ago via GoG and gave up due to constant graphical glitches and crashes to desktop. The glitches includes colour banding and missing assets such as eyes, which was *incredibly* creepy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, Jon AS said:

Those missions are fun and very convenient to do whenever most of your 'mechs or pilots are out of commission.

Thanks to the map/mission design the Urbanmech is actually quite a bit more useful in the video game than it is on the table top. Small lasers, though... even on a melee 'mech I'd pick machine guns over small lasers in this game.

I've gotten a bit into my latest attempt at a career. About 150 days in I managed to pick a Star League Marauder from the black market run by the friendly neighbourhood pirates. It's probably the deadliest 'mech in the game. Once you've got a pilot up to Tactics 9, an alpha strike from a Marauder is likely to blow the head of any 'mech, and the SL version has double heat sinks and comes with ER PPCs, which also do more damage than standard PPCs in this game. Of course it is a relatively fragile machine, so the game's not hideously unbalanced just yet.

I never rated Zentraedi Officer's Pods Marauders very much first time out but they're much better in MW5 and I think they've benefited from balance changes in BattleTech. They are quite nifty, which is handy considering they're the reason Harmony Gold tried to sue Catalyst in 2015 (and had to abandon the case in 2018).

I read that they'd nerfed PPCs in BattleTech, which is odd as they still seem as lethal as ever. Glitch core-shotting mechs with PPC sniper blasts is still her favourite thing. I am trying to find a better Heavy PPC platform for her. First time out I kept her in a Vindicator until swapping to an Assault late in the game because I couldn't find a Heavy mech suitable for her PPC-ing skills.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

52 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I never rated Zentraedi Officer's Pods Marauders very much first time out but they're much better in MW5 and I think they've benefited from balance changes in BattleTech.

It's not so much balance changes as that the developers gave all the classic 'mechs special abilities to make them stand out. The Phoenix Hawk gets to jump farther, the Warhammer does extra damage with lasers and PPCs, the Archer is more accurate with missiles and the Marauder is the ultimate sniper. With a pilot at Tactics 9 the chance of an aimed shot to hit the head is 1/3. Makes for plenty of salvage.

55 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I read that they'd nerfed PPCs in BattleTech, which is odd as they still seem as lethal as ever. Glitch core-shotting mechs with PPC sniper blasts is still her favourite thing. I am trying to find a better Heavy PPC platform for her. First time out I kept her in a Vindicator until swapping to an Assault late in the game because I couldn't find a Heavy mech suitable for her PPC-ing skills.

All the damage values are modified somewhat for the video game. AC/2s "should" do just as little damage as MGs, but are the equivalent to medium lasers. On the tabletop the PPC does as much damage as an AC/10, but in the video game the AC is more damaging etc.

For a PPC platform, ignoring the option to simply rip the guns out of any old chassis and replace them with as many PPCs as you can fit, you've got the choice between the aforementioned Marauder, the Warhammer, their scrawny little sibling the Catapult K2 or the Awesome 8Q. The Awesome was the ultimate PPC sniper in the basic 3025 setting, one of the most efficient 'mech designs in an era that didn't go in for efficiency all that much.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My PC headset broke on Friday and the new one won't be here until tomorrow or Wednesday, so I decided to try out the FFVII remake, which was a free PS+ game recently.  Color me a bit disappointed.  It's obviously gorgeous, but I hate what they've done with the combat.  It reminds me of Dragon Age Inquisition where you're almost a passive observer to combat, and mostly just spamming appropriate abilities when your meter fills up.  

The writing is pretty awful too.  Which is probably because it's based off an old game, but still.  It's not helped by the generally bad to terrible voice acting.  It feels very Japanese in that there are constant grunts and other similar noises from characters that seem very out of place in English conversations.  This would be a lot more forgiveable if it wasn't a modern AAA game, but it feels particularly jarring given the production values of the visuals.  So much of the acting is wildly over the top and characters change their moods on a dime mid-conversation.  

No idea if I'm going to finish this one or not yet.  Leaning toward no but I'll soldier through for at least another couple of hours of gameplay and see if my opinion changes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, briantw said:

My PC headset broke on Friday and the new one won't be here until tomorrow or Wednesday, so I decided to try out the FFVII remake, which was a free PS+ game recently.  Color me a bit disappointed.  It's obviously gorgeous, but I hate what they've done with the combat.  It reminds me of Dragon Age Inquisition where you're almost a passive observer to combat, and mostly just spamming appropriate abilities when your meter fills up.  

The writing is pretty awful too.  Which is probably because it's based off an old game, but still.  It's not helped by the generally bad to terrible voice acting.  It feels very Japanese in that there are constant grunts and other similar noises from characters that seem very out of place in English conversations.  This would be a lot more forgiveable if it wasn't a modern AAA game, but it feels particularly jarring given the production values of the visuals.  So much of the acting is wildly over the top and characters change their moods on a dime mid-conversation.  

No idea if I'm going to finish this one or not yet.  Leaning toward no but I'll soldier through for at least another couple of hours of gameplay and see if my opinion changes.

I'm generally in agreement with you on the combat and then what they do with the story veers off the rails as you progress.  I will say, the combat does get more involved as you go on.  On the Normal difficulty mode, the meter only really fills up when you are doing your regular attacks and such.  So in order to be efficient, you have to be constantly switching your actively controlled character between the three party members.  In the end, it just feels hap-hazard.  

I'm glad I played it through and I'm enough of a sheep that I will get part 2 when it comes out, but its definitely what I wanted to see.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 4/24/2021 at 3:14 PM, IlyaP said:

...Because they find some measure of delight or joy in the gameplay? 

By this same logic, sure, I could watch all of the videos of Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight. Or I could play the game and enjoy the interesting visuals, the fun gameplay, etc. The same applies here. 

Let people enjoy things. 

Except they haven't played them so " they find some measure of delight or joy in the gameplay?" is nonsense because they haven't, you know experienced the game play or enjoyed them.

And my earlier criticism of KOTOR isn't saying it isn't good, it just is the same as the rest of Bioware (Find 3-4 separate things at 3-4 different spots you can do in any order to either create/use/find the McGuffin.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

X4 looks gorgeous, but I must admit I'm not a fan of most of the new Terran ships. I looked through the lineup and they seem... odd. I miss the "Space Shuttle, but sleeker" design from Terran Conflict because I loved the visual irony that the most advanced faction in the galaxy is the one using retro tech. Apparently only the Tokyo carrier and the Yokohama corvette have made the jump from X3 to X4.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Jon AS said:

It's not so much balance changes as that the developers gave all the classic 'mechs special abilities to make them stand out. The Phoenix Hawk gets to jump farther, the Warhammer does extra damage with lasers and PPCs, the Archer is more accurate with missiles and the Marauder is the ultimate sniper. With a pilot at Tactics 9 the chance of an aimed shot to hit the head is 1/3. Makes for plenty of salvage.

All the damage values are modified somewhat for the video game. AC/2s "should" do just as little damage as MGs, but are the equivalent to medium lasers. On the tabletop the PPC does as much damage as an AC/10, but in the video game the AC is more damaging etc.

For a PPC platform, ignoring the option to simply rip the guns out of any old chassis and replace them with as many PPCs as you can fit, you've got the choice between the aforementioned Marauder, the Warhammer, their scrawny little sibling the Catapult K2 or the Awesome 8Q. The Awesome was the ultimate PPC sniper in the basic 3025 setting, one of the most efficient 'mech designs in an era that didn't go in for efficiency all that much.

I just got an Awesome with 3 sniper PPCs (I might pull one off and see if I can replace it with something else, though, as in most biomes the heat buildup is too crazy) and also upgraded Glitch to a Thunderbolt as a PPC platform, which is surprisingly effective (with enough LRMs to make it a good all-purpose long-range platform).

It was also funny reading they deliberately gave Yang a flaw in that he's obsessed with Medium Lasers and will stick tons of them on everything, so on almost every build it's worthwhile ripping out 50% of the Medium Lasers and replacing them with other things (like heat sinks for the other half). Often leaving his builds as is is pointless because you build up too much heat to actually use them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Slurktan said:

Except they haven't played them so " they find some measure of delight or joy in the gameplay?" is nonsense because they haven't, you know experienced the game play or enjoyed them.

That's not entirely accurate. Toth has played KOTOR - if you look at the list again, they said: "Knights of the Old Republic (got stuck when I kept hitting a brick wall on Tatooine)".

6 hours ago, Slurktan said:

And my earlier criticism of KOTOR isn't saying it isn't good, it just is the same as the rest of Bioware (Find 3-4 separate things at 3-4 different spots you can do in any order to either create/use/find the McGuffin.)

It's also a lot of wandering around and gawking at cool-looking Star Wars environments. Which was what appealed to me. Different players find joy in different things. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, IlyaP said:

That's not entirely accurate. Toth has played KOTOR - if you look at the list again, they said: "Knights of the Old Republic (got stuck when I kept hitting a brick wall on Tatooine)".

It's also a lot of wandering around and gawking at cool-looking Star Wars environments. Which was what appealed to me. Different players find joy in different things. 

Point being he isn't enjoying anything as he isn't playing them.  He is in fact having shame instead of joy hence my not understanding.  If you aren't enjoying things (as you put it) and are instead feeling shame over it, then why the fuck do it?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...