PC Gaming = World of Suck

[Sol]

I did enjoy raven-shield, although I didn't like any of the rainbow six games prior to it and haven't played any after it. I couldn't play it for more than an hour or two at a LAN though. Eventually the slowness just started to get to people and inevitably someone would either start gassing/flash banging the spawn or would wake up all the terrorists by "opening" a door with an M60 (Not that this wasn't fun in it's own way but it was a herald of the end).
But the time before that, skulking around with a silenced assault-rifle or a .50cal with a thermal scope taking guys out through walls was undeniably cool...

 

[ddrueding]

Yup, after Raven Shield, we would always go to either Call of Duty deathmatch or Quake 3 Arena deathmatch...those were fast enough.

 

[Chewy509]

Yup, after Raven Shield, we would always go to either Call of Duty deathmatch or Quake 3 Arena deathmatch...those were fast enough.

Actually that sounds like the last LAN I was at, played RvS for roughly 3 hours, then fired up Quake3 for deathmatch action for the final 3-4 hours of game play. The last Q3 round went for 90minutes! (Tourney3 Map, Max bots to make additional players, no time limit, and first to 999 frags! Try it, you won't regret it! )

 

[Mercutio]

Article about the "World of Whorecraft" web site. (PROBABLY safe for work unless chain mail bikinis are bad and if they are I do not want to live in your world).

WoW players frighten me.
Porn is pretty cool though.

 

[sechs]

Do you not know any Evercrack players?

 

[Chewy509]

Craziness in Q3!



PS. That's me, in 2nd place.

 

[Chewy509]

Battlefield 2 Australian Forces Mod.

http://www.users.on.net/~arkanis/bf2/

Updates BF2 with Australian armour, vehicles and weapons.

 

[Chewy509]

Do you not know any Evercrack players?

Only 1, and unfortunately haven't heard from them in over 12months...

 

[Mercutio]

As I suspected, the 10th Anniversary Command and Conquer set is gobs and gobs of fun to have. Even the old school FMV sequences are awesome.

Wish they would update more old games for modern PCs.

 

[ddrueding]

I was playing CNC:Generals:Zero Hour until a few weeks ago. Now I'm buried in Supreme Commander; trying to get dual screen mode working. It's a great game.

 

[sechs]

As I suspected, the 10th Anniversary Command and Conquer set is gobs and gobs of fun to have. Even the old school FMV sequences are awesome.

Isn't the latest installment of CnC supposed to go back to that. I recall reading something about Kane being played by the same guy.

 

[Sol]

I was a little unimpressed with Supreme Commander. Single player is incredibly slow, and it's far more easy to lose because you happened to have your commander in the wrong place (possibly out of boredom) than because the opponent actually makes a dent in your forces.

Actually my number one complaint in single player and skirmish is that I tend to win or lose for entirely silly reasons.
For example in one skirmish match I launched a hit an run type attack on my enemies power generation facilities to weaken him for a frontal strike. The resultant nuclear explosion took out the commander unit he'd hidden at the back of his base and I won without much of a fight at all.
In another game my objective was to get my commander to a drop off point and kill the enemy commanders. I'd killed one of them and was having trouble finding the other so I sent my commander to the drop point under guard whilst clearing out the last of the map. Commander gets to the point, an enemy dropship drops the enemy commander right next to him, my troops promptly annihilate it and my commander dies in the resultant nuke, mission failure. I'm fairly certain it wasn't even deliberate, they just didn't have anything else to send against me, but given that it was the last part of a huge multi part mission taking a couple of hours it seemed like kind of a crappy reason to start again.

There is a lot to like about the game but when winning or losing a battle seems to be ultimately more about coincidence and luck than strategy and skill it's kind of not worth playing.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm only on the second mission, but I see your point. What I'm doing is trying to optimize for time. If I were willing to make each mission last for hours, victory would be easy. I think they need to do something to "force" the game forward.

 

[LiamC]

There is a lot to like about the game but when winning or losing a battle seems to be ultimately more about coincidence and luck than strategy and skill it's kind of not worth playing.

Fog of war? You'd be surprised how many battles have turned on some quirk.

Still, I see you point, it does seem to be a pointless and trivial way to lose.

Can anybody recommend a good (preferably WWII) strategy game? I'm rather over Hearts of Iron II and Panzer General 2, was probably the one I liked a lot previously.

 

[Sol]

Company of Heroes is actually pretty good... I don't generally go in for turn based strategy except for Civilisation/Alpha-Centauri and the UFO series so my WWII strategy experience has been pretty much exclusively real time. IMHO CoH works, none of the others I've played have actually been all that much fun.

I'm currently of two minds about C&C3. It kind of goes back to the old school C&C, which is nostalgic, but as someone who thought Generals was a huge step forward for the RTS genre (Which sadly no one has gone out of their way to follow, except for the Lord of the Rings RTS games) taking it back a step just doesn't seem like the best play. But as I play the demo a little more I'm starting to see that there may be a little of what made generals a great game still in there. I hope they fix the AI up a bit though. Today a medium balanced AI sold all of it's unit production facilities when I choked off it's secondary cash-flow and build about 10 tiberium refineries... There's suicidally stupid, and then there's that.

 

[Mercutio]

I do not like Generals as much as Red Alert/RA2. I think it has to do with the limits of what can be displayed on-screen. I just tried it for the first time a few night ago and it was not as nifty as I might've hoped.

On the other hand, in the older games, I find myself wishing the screen resolution could be vastly increased. But there's more going on, on-screen, in the older games than in Generals.

Maybe I should dig on Total Annihilation. That didn't have any arbitrary limits that I can recall...

 

[ddrueding]

Supreme Commander has unlimited zooming, from a single unit to the entire (huge) theater.

 

[Handruin]

Has anyone tried Elder scrolls Oblivion? I picked that up over a week ago and I'm finding it to be very good.

 

[CougTek]

Oblivion has been one of the reasons why I've sold many expensive boxes during the last year or so. It is one of the most demanding games available when you turn everything up.

I've only seen it on the X-Box 360 (briefly ; I didn't play). It looked very good, but less than the most impressive game for the X-Box 360 : Gears of War.

 

[Handruin]

Oblivion certainly is demanding. It stutters even a little bit on my 1900XTX at 1600x1200 with HDR and everything else nice turned on. I have a couple complaints about it, but otherwise found it to be fun and entertaining. The game is huge as far as I can tell.

I've played and finished Gears Of War and it was a fun game. The graphics and game play kept me coming back for more. The downside...extremely short even on the hardest game play level. I don't own an xbox 360 or even that game, but I finished it at my sisters house (me and her boyfriend). We played CoOp through the whole game in about two weekends-time.

 

[Sol]

Generals is a bit of a pain with it's fixed display. You really have to get used to clicking on the mini map and using space to look at what you want to see.

For strategy though I still believe it to be the best RTS ever. A well executed tactical strike can turn the tide of battle far more than in any other RTS I've played so a solid wall of enemy tanks rolling towards your base isn't the end as long as you can think up some way to stop it and you end up using just about every unit at your disposal rather than concentrating on one or two really powerful or cheap ones.

 

[ddrueding]

Generals is a really good RTS as far as balance, tactics, and level design go. But after playing Supreme Commander, I'm going to be really spoiled; this is the best UI I've seen in an RTS. There are a few small points of suckyness, but they are few and far between.

 

[Sol]

I've been playing the PC port of Jade Empire the last few days. It's an action RPG with a nice combat system involving a whole heap of different martial arts styles and a pretty good if somewhat predictable plot.

If I hadn't known it started life as an XBox game then I would never have guessed it, the port has taken ages but the attention to detail was worth it. It's another instance of Bioware doing everything right, or at least very nearly so.

 

[LiamC]

Sid Meier (Firaxis—Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Pirates!) has released Railroads! This (the gameplay) is just like Railroad Tycoon (the original) with funky 3D graphics. No complicated business models. It's just fun. Likeable.

Now if someone would do the same for Master of Magic...

 

[ddrueding]

Sid Meier is awesome. Despite the subject, SimGolf was great fun.

 

[sechs]

And SimGolf is an EA game!

 

[ddrueding]

?

http://www.fileshack.com/file.x/832

 

[Sol]

As much as trains seem like a bizarre subject for a game that's not aimed at people with Asperger's syndrome I found the original transport tycoon to be one of the most enjoyable games of it's time. It was very open ended and re playable.

It's like their slogan says...
EA Games... Buy, everyone!...
Or something like that...

 

[ddrueding]

Transport tycoon is a great game, and there is still an active community around it, doing new graphics and hacks to allow more flexibility.

 

[sechs]

?

http://www.fileshack.com/file.x/832

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxis

Maxis was purchased by Electronic Arts in 1997. In 2004, they were finally forced to move their studios from Walnut Creek to EA's headquarters in Redwood Shores, CA.

SimGolf was what Sid Meier was working on while the rest of Firaxis was doing Civilization III.

 

[ddrueding]

Thanks sechs.

 

[LiamC]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxis

Maxis was purchased by Electronic Arts in 1997. In 2004, they were finally forced to move their studios from Walnut Creek to EA's headquarters in Redwood Shores, CA.

SimGolf was what Sid Meier was working on while the rest of Firaxis was doing Civilization III.

Funnily enough, the city graphics in Railroads! reminds me (a lot) of the city graphics in Maxis' Sim City 2000...

 

[sechs]

Funnily enough, the city graphics in Railroads! reminds me (a lot) of the city graphics in Maxis' Sim City 2000...

While I highly doubt that that the graphics were taken from SC2k, I'm sure that there was some influence there.

From what I gather from talking to folks who, theoretically, should be in the know, Sid Meier and Will Wright communicate often and are fans of one another's work. I wouldn't be surprised if the Firaxis directed that the art look like that of SC2k.

 

[sechs]

Isn't the latest installment of CnC supposed to go back to that. I recall reading something about Kane being played by the same guy.

And speaking of that, I downloaded the Tiberium Wars demo yesterday. The trailer that runs at the beginning included FMVs with Michael Ironside and Billie Dee Williams.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0848263/

I only got a little ways into the tutorial, but it feels a lot like Generals. Obviously, I have no idea how the game actually plays out, however.

 

[Mercutio]

Lando!

 

[Sol]

When playing the C&C3 demo in skirmish mode click on the side selection box (the box not the arrow) and hit "n" on the keyboard, then click again to select and play Nod. This works for you and the AI. You can set the AI type in the same way.

I'm not sure if the GDI AI just sucks but NOD seems way easier. The ability to place turrets but have the turret hub (which is the bit enemies have to destroy) behind terrain makes defences much easier with NOD, which given the speed is a huge plus.

The AI seems to just rush unless you set it to turtle... But then it sells off it's unit facilities and buys refineries when you take out it's secondary resource points. I guess that just means it needs some work though...

 

[sechs]

As most demos are, it's based on alpha code. I don't think that you're supposed to be able to play Nod, so it wouldn't be surprising if the GDI AI isn't done there.

 

[Mercutio]

Fark.com Photoshop thread on upcoming Wii games.
Some of them are pretty damned funny.

 

[Mercutio]

I have a PC that, if I lowered myself to install the 8800GTX I have, literally could not be made faster with any commodity part. It is as top of the line as things get. 4GB RAM, 3.6GHz+ CPUs etc.

And there's not a damned thing I actually want to play. Nothing.
Again.

I have a whole month of no contracting work coming up and therefore free weekends, and I can't even find a good way to waste time.

 

[ddrueding]

I really enjoyed Supreme Commander. Test Drive Unlimited is a very fun way to waste massive amounts of time, and Rainbow Six: Vegas was also quite pleasing.

Though I suspect I'll be going back to SimGolf soon; it is just so peaceful.