General Gaming Megathread: What are you playing?

I downloaded Caveman2Cosmos, The Middle Earth Mod, and Realism Invictus for Civ IV.

Havin a blast.
 
Playing the remake of "Destroy All Humans"

It's good fun. They don't really make AA romps like this anymore.

Game does suffer badly from being combat centric and having only one combat song though.
 
Been playing Animal Crossing for a bit. Pretty fun, overall, very addicting which is probably why they put stuff behind timers so you stop playing for the day.

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After finishing Destroy All Humans, I'm now going to do a back to back marathon of the Dark Souls trilogy. First time I've played DS in 3+ years. I never played Scholar of the First Sin, the DS2 DLC or the DS3 DLC so there should be some new stuff in there for me.
 
Recently I have bought an old game called Outwars that was released in 1998 for the PC when it was recently re released on GOG.
More recently I decided to get the Halo Master Chief Collection for PC on Steam after being some divided on getting about as I would have to get a Xbox Live account in order to play it. (at one side I am quite paranoid about to whom I give my private information but on the other side I probably have given this information away because I wasn't careful about it, go figure)

Of the games I actually enjoy Outwars the most despite than in many ways it is an inferior game.

Storywise it is not any better than Halo. Most probably inferior because the story is actually mostly that of Starship Troopers but without the Terran Federation and the FMV is probably laughable and a bit hammy though it doesn't bother me as much.

Gameplay it is perhaps slightly more complex than that of Halo. You have some more options in general though Halo has somewhat similar elements in later entries and of course vehicles.
Outwars plays a little more tactical but that is mostly because the armor can be whittled down easily and supplies are more rare, but if these two had been altered it would be your standard shooter at the time.

I have been thinking about why I feel like this when I compare these different titles to each other and I think the answer is probably mostly because Outwars is a game I have never played before and I already have quite some experience with the Halo games.

Now I have played the Halo games years ago on the Xbox 360 which I actually had bought to play all the Halo games (I had some extra finances) that were released at the time. (Halo CE Anniversary, Halo 2 xbox version, Halo 3, Halo ODST, Halo Wars, Halo Reach, and then Halo 4)
I had already played Halo Combat Evolved on the PC but I could not play Halo 2 because Microsoft decided to make it Vista only, and we never got Halo 3 or any of the spin offs.

Even back then I wasn't really that impressed with the storyline like so many of the fandom are, I found a lot of pretty generic space military stuff that was clearly copied or inspired from other sources (a lot of the general Halo setting comes from the Starhammer/Vang books by Christopher Rowley. The Covenant are perhaps a bit more complex than the book Laowon but both are pretty fanatical and full of their own superiority and the Flood is basically the Vang) with some really overdramatic and even pretentious dribble.
But the games are in general okay to play, especially when I had already played most other sci fi shooters such as the Half Life games, the Jedi Knight games, Wolfenstein, etc.

Coming back I realized I never had such an attachment to the Halo universe. CE was fun and it was okay to go through 2, and 3. I never hated ODST. And Reach was in general went for the dramatic doomed to fail scenario.
I did not even hate Halo 4 that much. What I did hate however that as the franchise expanded into books, comics, podcasts, short videos, etc. that I was given the message that I had to read, watch, and follow all of these to get the complete story because the games did not making a big leap in time from one moment to another with a lot of developments having happened in between that are hinted at in the latest game.
Because I neither have the time or the money I decided to peruse though the Halo wiki instead to get up to date, and I skipped over a lot of filler in order to get through it in a decent time record.

Edit: oh before I forget to mention it I did like Halo Wars. Probably the one PC RTS game I actually enjoyed playing with a controller.
Storyline... it is not bad. It is just there, it has its connections to the other Halo games but it doesn't have that much of an impact.

I don't care that Halo 5 has not appeared on the PC and is not planned for release either. I read plenty of warnings about the storyline being pretty bad but that even the main campaign is primarily multiplayer instead of optional co-op because some enemies are a complete bitch to kill solo.

Halo 6/Infinite?
Some of the posters here on the forum have discussed in the past that they are not going to buy games any more on release day. It primarily has to do with costs but also patches and DLCs.
They prefer instead to wait until the complete final product is on sale later as they have enough of a backlog of other games, modifications and total conversions for existing games, other hobbies, and of course real life to keep them busy.
I am also going to try to wait with buying new games when they have just been released though I will probably fail when the latest Metroid game is released. I will simply wait until Halo 6 is on sale a year or two after its release.

A reason also is that I feel I kind of duped myself with buying the Master Chief Collection.
It is six games for the price of a single game but as I play them again I realize I don't have the interest and patience to finish them again a second or third or fourth time.
Even if the collection had been on sale I would probably have waited until it was even cheaper.
I don't think the Halo games are as good as some other story driven FPS games or its cousin; action-adventure games.
Perhaps things might have been different if I had never played a lot of the available Halo games before (sans the first). Still not brilliant but more my attention holding and perhaps I would have ignored Outwars instead until some rainy day that I want to play a game and not return to the old favorites that have already been completed too often.

Edit: I mostly bought the game in a moment of weakness. I felt frustrated about a lot of things and just wanted to have my mind off these subjects for a while. But common wisdom is that you really shouldn't buy stuff in order to distract yourself.
Usually you come to regret it.

At this point I prefer Outwars over Halo despite is mostly likely being an inferior game.

P.S. I realize that a lot of the FPS games that I have played in the past have not aged that very well or were perhaps never that good to begin with.
Perhaps it would be interesting if we had a topic in this sub forum to discuss which FPS games, perhaps split in the various types such as more arcade-y, tactical, etc. still hold up well.
I think there is one on the Codex I should check out as well.
 
Playing Total War: Warhammer 2 as high elves, One of the greatest strategy games ever, this game is absolutely amazing so it has extremely addicting gameplay and It's unbelievably well balanced considered the number of different races.
 
Finished all campaigns in Age of Empires 3 and i already said the following in another thread, this game has grown on me a lot, and i mean a lot. Doing Skirmish now to try out all civilizations, been using Portugal and gonna use Germany next.

I also heard that Age of Empires 3 is getting a definitive edition (i recall it's in beta at the moment) and i hope it gets expansions like Age of Empires 2 got. Specially to add civilizations that were cut from development like Italy and Sweden, and maybe add even more.

Also beat the main campaign of Age of Empires: Mythologies for the DS and this one is pretty damn great. Found out there's a scenarios section where you can unlock specific scenarios and been playing those.
 
Norzan said:
Finished all campaigns in Age of Empires 3 and i already said the following in another thread, this game has grown on me a lot, and i mean a lot. Doing Skirmish now to try out all civilizations, been using Portugal and gonna use Germany next.
Click to expand...
Once you get tired of the vanilla Skirmish mode, you should try out the massive total conversion mod called Wars of Liberty.

The only negative about Wars of Liberty is that it disables the game and expansions' campaigns. Because they had to alter and add so many stuff, that the campaigns wouldn't work properly anymore.

But it adds tons of new civilizations and content, I think they're making playable historical scenarios (kinda like an alternative to the campaigns). I haven't installed AoE3 on this laptop yet, since it's lacking an optical drive and I can't use my disks. So I don't know if they already made any scenarios or not though.

Here's the link to their site:
http://aoe3wol.com/
 
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I am done with the base game and expansions' campaigns anyway, so i might just install that mod.

Norzan said:
I also heard that Age of Empires 3 is getting a definitive edition (i recall it's in beta at the moment) and i hope it gets expansions like Age of Empires 2 got. Specially to add civilizations that were cut from development like Italy and Sweden, and maybe add even more.
Click to expand...
Definitive edition has the Swedes and Incas. Sucks no Italians, but Sweden sounds pretty cool and i know a lot of people were upset the War Chiefs didn't had Incas a playable civizilation.
 
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Norzan said:
Definitive edition has the Swedes and Incas. Sucks no Italians, but Sweden sounds pretty cool and i know a lot of people were upset the War Chiefs didn't had Incas a playable civizilation.
Click to expand...
To add to this, there are two new game modes: Historical Battles and Art of War Challenge Missions. It's 20 bucks, but there's a bundle with the original and the definitive edition and if i buy that bundle instead of the definitive edition directly, i only pay 15 bucks for the definitive edition. Which is weird as shit.

Age of Mythology definitive edition is still somehow 28 bucks (it used to be like 37), which is basically robbery.
 
Just finished the campaign for Halo: Reach (on PC) for the first time in basically 10 years after I've spent a year playing nothing but multiplayer. Ended up liking it more than I thought I would. I read Halsey's Journal beforehand which is a great bit of worldbuilding and actually set me on a different perspective for the game.

I think the campaign comes off a lot better when viewed as a story of a historical tragedy ala Titanic or the HBO Chernobyl series rather than trying to engage it normally. I guess they tried to front that by having the sequence with your Spartan's helmet on the glassed planet in the intro, but still. I noticed on this playthrough there's a specific very haunting choir chant motif that comes in whenever certain events happen that are setting in motion the tragedy, usually moments of strategy or optimism that the choir reminds you are doomed to fail.

It's more charitable when viewed that way because Noble Team itself are still extremely dry and boring, but when they're viewed moreso as random side-characters we're following to see this disaster unfold, they're a bit more likeable and it actually garnered more sympathy than trying to actually engage with them as characters like normal. First half of the campaign is pretty slow-going and feels more like boring skirmishes rather than a climatic war, but the second half and its apocalyptic atmosphere makes up for that.

Gameplay wise: Eh. It is a more sluggish and shittier Halo 3 but enemy variety, environment design and generally the mission structures are good and varied. In an ideal world it'd have been a game like Republic Commando with squad mechanics and a likeable ensemble, but it is what it is. Solid 7/10 game.

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Halo CE tomorrow.
 
I already completed Summoner for PS2 and I've got to say, it's a great game!
Despite it's gameplay and graphics being outdated, Summoner has a great story, characters, lore, and especially the summons.
It definitely has better writing than Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and of course the most obvious, The Last of Us 2.
Summoner is an underrated RPG Classic that has its own strengths when it comes to writing, (and its own weaknesses when it comes to graphics and gameplay).
All in all, it's an 8/10 and I recommend all of you to try it out. Whether it's on PS2 or on Steam, just play it in order to see it yourself!
 
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