OT: What's your 2011 game "Must Have" list?

[Von Paulus 8]

I'm afraid it's not exclusive of Javito.

In this moment I'm playing Baldur's Gate, Eschalon Book I, Arcania Gothic 4 (who would believe that), Dragon Knight Saga and Precursors.

I just finished yesterday Geneforge 5. In February will come E.Y.E. In March Dragon Age II. In May Panzer Corps, The Witcher 2 and probably the most expected Deus Ex 3. From March on I'll have a serious problem.

[Javito1986 14]

See? Von Paulus understands. Gaming is hard work! I get home from work or Uni, tend to the wife and make sure she's taken care of, and settle in on the Nintendo. Takes commitment I tell you!

[Von Paulus 8]

I get home from work or Uni, tend to the wife and make sure she's taken care of, and settle in on the Nintendo. Takes commitment I tell you!

:rofl:

 

By the way are you playing BG2 vanilla? Have you installed the widescreen mod?

I'm trying BGT. I'm installing it in this moment. I'll have to start again.

[Javito1986 14]

I played BGT with widescreen at 1680x1050 resolution. It's fulfilling to take the same character all the way through BG1 and into BG2, and BG1 vanilla for me was almost unplayable having experienced BG2 before some time ago, so it was much better to just play BG1 using the BG2 engine. I spent basically all December and most of January on Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, left off a few weeks ago in BG2 chapter 4 I think.

 

I just needed a bit of a break I think, try out some new genres after all those weeks of straight Infinity Engine RPGing. Have every intention of returning to BG2 and finishing it in the near future. In addition to BG2 and Planescape I also own Arcanum, and the Icewind Dale games and Neverwinter Nights on GoG, which I've heard GREAT things about. Though I'm thinking it'll be at least a year before I start any of them, they're quite fun to look at on my virtual shelf and think of the good times that will be had someday ;-)

Edited February 10, 2011 by Javito1986

[Wodin 0]

Battlefield Academy has a WW1 mod ready. This game engine is perfect for WW1.

 

A great simple turn based game.

[Morris 2]

I just finished Dead Space 2 - WOW it was scary as hell..

 

m

[shredward 12]

I see they just pulled the pin on Guitar Hero.

[Javito1986 14]

I just finished Dead Space 2 - WOW it was scary as hell..

 

m

 

 

 

 

I've never liked scary games. Could never play Resident Evil, Silent Hill, F.E.A.R... I'm actually impressed with myself I made it through the first level of Bioshock!

[Von Paulus 8]

I've never liked scary games. Could never play Resident Evil, Silent Hill, F.E.A.R... I'm actually impressed with myself I made it through the first level of Bioshock!

Try System Shock 1 and 2. Or Penumbra series. These are the real ones.

However don't try it with the light off and phones on.

After that I too refuse to play more survival horrors.

 

I see they just pulled the pin on Guitar Hero.

They have used/abused the IP until it was completely exhausted. They will do it the same with the CoD series.

Edited February 10, 2011 by Von Paulus

[Hasse Wind 46]

Amnesia, the latest game by the Penumbra developers, is the ultimate in computer horror games.

 

I've been doing some reading about Shogun 2, and it's really made me interested in the game. I skipped a couple of the Total War games, but Shogun 2 sounds like a step back in the right direction. I greatly enjoyed the first Shogun and the first Medieval, but after them the series went downhill (in my opinion). Looks like this will be a busy spring. Soon I'll be in the same situation with new games as I'm already with my unread books!

[Javito1986 14]

Shogun 2 looks fun but I fear it's well beyond my system, at least for now. I could run Empire at full settings with 1920x1080 res, but not Napoleon, and certainly not Shogun. And I dunno, if I'm going to play a game on PC I like to see it for all its worth, so I don't like playing games on medium graphics or whatever.

[Hellshade 110]

Well Blizzard just released that they will likely not be releasing any games in 2011, since they didn't include any in their earnings forcast for this year. Might as well take Diablo III and the next Starcraft box off your Christmas list if it was there.

 

http://pc.ign.com/articles/114/1148703p1.html

[Von Paulus 8]

I just love this corporate crap:

These decisions are based on the desire to focus on the greatest opportunities that the company currently has to create the world’s best interactive entertainment experiences.”

Not that I really care about Guitar Hero.

GI also claims that the publisher will now focus on three of its key brands: Call of Duty, StarCraft and World of Warcraft.

http://www.vg247.com/2011/02/09/report-activision-kills-guitar-hero-cans-true-crime-hong-kong-lay-offs-at-freestyle/

[Javito1986 14]

Y'know I'm really not that surprised. People forget that back before Blizzard scored OMFG BIG with World of Warcraft, they were considered one of the best game companies in the business after scoring BIG with Warcraft 2 and BIGGER with StarCraft. We always praised Blizzard, said they could do no wrong... except for the constant delays. Blizzard was always delaying and delaying its games, it's part of what they were known for. So I've never really expected to see Heart of the Swarm within a year of Liberty's release.

 

Wings of Liberty is still perfectly viable though. More than viable, it's a master RTS game. I don't play it competitively anymore because it's an E-Sport more than a game and is therefore way too stressful, and I use games as a relaxant dagnabbit. That said I do frequently watch StarCraft 2 matches on youtube and the Day9 Daily analysis show, because it -is- very fun to watch. I didn't watch the Superbowl (and I -live- in Wisconsin) but I sure did watch Huk vs QXC at the Major League Gaming tournament.

Edited February 10, 2011 by Javito1986

[Bullethead 12]

Y'know I'm really not that surprised. People forget that back before Blizzard scored OMFG BIG with World of Warcraft, they were considered one of the best game companies in the business after scoring BIG with Warcraft 2 and BIGGER with StarCraft.

 

But what really put Blizzard on the map was first of all the original Diablo. EVERYBODY had that game, released in 1996, and IMHO they never should have made later versions because they've all sucked compared to the original. After Diablo I, the word "Blizzard" was what "Mircroprose" had been some years before--everybody wanted their stuff. And about this time, the abonimable RTS craze had begun with Command & Conquer, Blizzard made a fantasy version called Warcraft, which was also immensely successful. And that's where WC2, SC et seq, and WoW came from.

 

Blizzard wasn't the first in any genre, not MP RPG, not RTS, not MMORPG, but they knew how to make the best games in those genres and put them out while they were still fresh. Kudos to them.

 

But I shall always Hate Blizzard for one thing: instituting the current and (IMHO) new-fangled intolerance of online cheating, exploiting, PKing, etc. That came from the immense succes of Diablo, which originally had all kinds of hilarious ways to ruin noobs' fun and, afterwards, to bask in the warm glow of their Hate as they whined on the forums. And Blizzard caved in to the whiners, instead of doing what the industry had always done before and told them to man up or shut up. The only folks lower in Hell than Blizzard are the bastards who set up AOL and instituted the equally new-fangled intolerance for "flames" and "personal attacks" in forums (which was ALL they originally contained), which put a stop to the gaming community policing itself. Between AOL and Blizzard, the internet went from an enjoyable place of Wild West anarchy to a limp-wristed Orwellian world of moderated faux-civility, cussword filters, bannings, and leet-speak.

 

I pray to the Dark Gods that those responsible get chained to the same rock as Prometheus. May vultures tear out their livers repeatedly for all eternity.

[Morris 2]

Bullethead,

I'm sure you feel much better after all of that but if you still need to blow some steam i will read it.

 

Thank you

 

m

 

[Javito1986 14]

I forgot about Diablo. Mainly since I never played it and wasn't very old in 1996. I remember the first I heard of Blizzard was when they released WarCraft 2 and all my friends were playing it.

 

Bullethead, you sound like you'd enjoy EVE Online. If there was ever a game that shows NO mercy to noobs it's EVE. That's seriously the most unforgiving and cutthroat virtual environment I've ever heard of.

[Bullethead 12]

Bullethead, you sound like you'd enjoy EVE Online. If there was ever a game that shows NO mercy to noobs it's EVE. That's seriously the most unforgiving and cutthroat virtual environment I've ever heard of.

 

Oh man, I can't imagine any tougher MP rookery than DOS Air Warrior. This was back when the Internet was what Gawd intended it to be, a place inhabited only by the geekiest of rather intelligent, reasonably affluent, full-grown adult sociopaths. This was because the Internet was hideously expensive (not only in hardware but in online time) and using a computer at all required some knowledge of how they actually work inside. You hat to be able to write your own programs to get online at all, not to mention printer drivers. It was thus the exclusive hunting reserve of burnt-out, computer-savvy Yuppies with mortgages, kids, and serious cocaine and/or drinking problems. There were a very few women (but those few fit right in) but absolutely no kids at all. Thus, there was no need for content filters, ESRB ratings, or moderation. Everything online was R-rated. It would have been X-rated had that been possible, but unfortunately in that archaic semi-digital age (our joysticks were still analog) we hadn't yet invented graphical browsers, nor a "World Wide Web" to use them on, nor the bandwidth to diownload erotic images larger than today's thumbnails in less than a week, so the whole internet porn industry was still a wet dream.

 

Given that games in those days were fairly primitive in mechanics and utterly (but knowingly) without anti-hacking measures, the generally well-educated players could easily spot their flaws. Because these players were all at least part-time hackers (in those days, "hacker" and "programmer" were synonymous). they could write up ways to exploit those flaws that weren't accessible (as many were) from just playing the game.. Because they were all sociopaths, both player and game developer alike (normal people back then still went out on the town for fun), nobody cared about the hacking/cheating/exploiting. After all, back then Internet was Geek Heaven, so you had to play by geek rules, which meant such things were all part of the game. If you were so gauche as to whine about such treatment in the forums, you got mercilessly flamed in highly imaginative and creative ways, not only by the perpetrator of your woes but also by most bystanders and even the game's developers. After all, whining was proof positive that you were a poser who'd only gotten online at all due to cribbing off a geek friend, because real geeks knew what to expect and relished it. Ah, those were the days! ,

 

But sadly, those times haven't been seen since complete idiots started giving computers to kids who were raised without firm masculine guidance. I mean, computers are weapons of mass destriuction, giving the user the power to commit international fraud and robbery on truly massive scales, and even able to topple governments. Kids should only be allowed to have computers after they've already proved themselves capable of handling relatively benign things like guns and cars, with which they can only kill a few folks at once.

 

So, that was the background community of DOS Air Warrior. Then there was the game itself. Noobs suddenly had to grock all the intricacies of ACM in a shark tank filled with guys who'd been doing it for years and who all were positively anxious to make noobs quit the game out of sheer humiliation. Those few noobs who didn't quit gained respect and found the vets quite willing to share their knowledge, mostly out of egoism. But noobs had to take a serious beating first, and keep coming back despite paying like $5/hour for it.

[Hellshade 110]

I have to agree with Javito on this one. EVE is said to be utterly ruthless and cut throat in every way. Not only in PvP combat, but with people stealing from their own corporations, etc. It's a true - no rules - environment.

 

Hellshade

[Javito1986 14]

EVE is basically one huge virtual society where capitalism is allowed to run rampant. I'm on hiatus from EVE Online right now, but for a few months I was there as a squad leader in the Ivy League Navy, the military branch of EVE University, the game's premier teaching school (and one of the few altruistic corporations in New Eden). Our job was SPECIFICALLY to protect the students (newbs) from the playerbase seeking to take advantage of them.

 

Between May and September I think there was somewhere along the order of 15 declarations of war against us? During that brief span of time I was with the ILN I saw a guy carrying cargo worth $1,000 of -real world- money get attacked, robbed, and killed in High Security space (the safest it gets in EVE). Saw pirates set up ambush sites along key trade routes to prey on merchants. One alliance declared war on us, and our intelligence chaps infiltrated it and assassinated their leader. Killed his clone, took all his assets (stuff that it takes months and months to work for). Our intel guys were SO good, we would monitor each and every individual hostile in any given alliance, track all his movements, and pick them off when they were alone and kill them. At one point we even knew that one of our enemies' hamsters' had just died and so we expected him to be in an emotionally reduced state.

 

When I say "killed" I mean destroy their ship and kill their clone. Which costs them lots of money and experience, and since experience is earned in real time you can potentially lose weeks/months worth of progress if you fail to keep the insurance on your clone up to date (which gets to be exceedingly expensive). For that reason people on EVE have a rather acute sense of self preservation.

 

In November there was a fleet battle in which 3500 pilots participated in total. The really neat thing about it is when you consider that the commander of one of the fleets was in command of some 1600 pilots, divided up into battlegroups and so on all the way down to individual squadron commanders. Wars there can get downright Napoleonic.

 

I really enjoy EVE a lot. I don't play it so much though because, frankly, I'm just too busy and it really is an alternate life set in space that you access through your computer.

[Hasse Wind 46]

Ah, the early 1990's world of computers. There are very few things I miss from those days. EVERYTHING was so utterly primitive and unsophisticated back then that it's amazing people were at all willing to jump through all the hoops in order to make anything work. And the overwhelming majority of games from that period are complete crap, especially simulators, which were really too much for the stone age PC's to handle. I've come to the conclusion that it's a bad idea to play many of those old 'classics' with the help of Dosbox. It just ruins the good memories. The games that actually have resisted the ravages of time and are true classics are few and far between. None of them are simulators, in my opinion.

 

But I was never part of any early online community, so maybe that is something I would miss if I had been there and done the things all those nerds did. In the backwoods where I used to live back then there was no such thing as the Internet until the late 1990's. Even personal computers were quite rare, and admitting that you're one of those weirdos who spent time with computers and play some childish games was a good way to get beaten by the grunting hunter-gatherers of the local bar.

[Javito1986 14]

Good sir! The classics never get old. Why, just in the last year I've gone back to replay Wing Commander, X-Wing, and Gabriel Knight... all early 90s games and all quite lovely! In fact, Gabriel Knight in particular made me lament the dearth of writing quality in modern gaming. Wing Commander too. They literally do not make games like Wing Commander anymore, where you fly with a squadron of likeable pilots whom you gradually befriend, any of whom can die permanently and their funerals will make you sad, and the ending of the game can either be you attacking and destroying the enemy HQ or you fighting a desperate rearguard action to cover your carrier's retreat, depending how well you fly.

 

Hell I wish they'd make games like that these days. Mass Effect is really well written and I love it for that, and there's a few other modern examples... but really, the majority of games these days are McShooters with outrageous production values but lacking literary value. Most companies don't even employ full time writers. I know, "If I want story I'll read a book" says people, but since I was a wee lad I've seen games as a storytelling medium. My favorite games are always ones that have made me think, and get myself really involved in their stories.

 

Also, space sims don't even exist anymore and that sucks. Thank god for Freespace 2, keeps me sane. Link to a FS2 video of a user-made mod I made last year for anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about.

 

 

Edited February 12, 2011 by Javito1986

[Hasse Wind 46]

All the games you mentioned are true classics. But for every such game there are many others that were acceptable at best back then but are absolutely horrible by modern standards.

 

You youngsters (no offence meant) are in the enviable position of being able to benefit from the best of the best without having had to deal with the bad apples of the Dos Age.

[Von Paulus 8]

Also, space sims don't even exist anymore and that sucks. Thank god for Freespace 2, keeps me sane.

Have you tried Evochron Mercenary? Actually has a space sim, Newtonian physics, works well.

Have you seen also Starpoint Gemini?

[Javito1986 14]

That's fair enough. I really was WAY too young to experience the DOS age. By the time I discovered Wing Commander it was already 1996,and I played it on my SNES anyhow. I never actually owned any PC games until I got Windows 98 for Christmas '99. I have tinkered quite a bit with DOSBox though to get the previously mentioned games running on it. DOS to me has always been a bit of a mystifying interface.

 

And no Von Paulus, I haven't actually heard of either of those titles until just this moment. I did look them up though and they look brilliant. Particularly Evochron Mercenary, there's gameplay footage on its website that just looks bloody marvelous. I take it they're indie space sims?