What Video Games Are You Playing?

[Umaril The Unfeathered]

Been playing Dead Island for the last two evenings.  Pretty fun game.  A tropical island paradise, except for those darned zombies     Big open world, tons of sidequests - must have picked up 10 of them in 5 minutes last night, that should keep me busy for a while.  I was driving around in a pickup running over the undead;  got 50 of them so far.  There's tons of different weapons you can pick up, and they degrade with use, so there's benches where you can repair, upgrade or fashion new weapons.  There's also money and various items you can pick up all over the place.  Weapons repairs and upgrades cost money.  I especially enjoy the cutting weapons as you can chop off limbs.  Kicking is a very useful skill as well, especially for when several zombies come after you simultaneously.  There are also guns (I haven't got one yet), and you can throw weapons too.  Once I get farther into it I think combat will become a lot more varied and fun.

Only complaint is that some stuff just isn't explained very well at all - like the weapons menu.  There's three rows that you can put weapons in...I have no idea what that's for.  And last night I tried to pick up an item, but I guess my inventory was full, so for some reason it dropped my prized meat cleaver (which I'd just spent a good bit of money upgrading) so I could pick the other item up.  Then my cleaver completely disappeared from the game.  WTF?  Oh well.

Oh man, your weapons disappear when you pick up others? That's not cool...

There too, Deep Silver, the company behind the XBox 360 version of their PC hit Risen, seem committed to things like this-even the bugs of the PC version were ported to the '360 version-the final end boss was a b***h to kill because of it..if Deep SIlver keeps doing stuff this bad, they're gonna' be in Deep S*it..

I wonder if the trailer for the game is a nod to Fulci's Zombie 2? I say so because the one scene shows the lone zombie shambling down the street amid the backdrop of an abandoned village (remember the woman in Zombie who had the hallucination before she died in the hospital.) Just a thought.

[Jack]

Oh man, your weapons disappear when you pick up others? That's not cool...

There too, Deep Silver, the company behind the XBox 360 version of their PC hit Risen, seem committed to things like this-even the bugs of the PC version were ported to the '360 version-the final end boss was a b***h to kill because of it..if Deep SIlver keeps doing stuff this bad, they're gonna' be in Deep S*it..

I wonder if the trailer for the game is a nod to Fulci's Zombie 2? I say so because the one scene shows the lone zombie shambling down the street amid the backdrop of an abandoned village (remember the woman in Zombie who had the hallucination before she died in the hospital.) Just a thought.

I'm pretty sure it was just because my weapons inventory was full.  And I didn't notice it right away, so maybe after I walked off a ways and came back, the weapon had disappeared or something.  I make REAL sure to always drop some crummy weapon to open up an inventory slot before picking up another one now.

They're having some problems with this game.  They apparently released the Xbox 360 dev kit on Steam as the PC version, then when they issued a patch for it, it wiped out everyone's game saves.  The console version seems to have some major glitches if you go online.  It defaults to a LAN connection and is therefore offline as far as the internet is concerned, but if you change it - which of course you need to do if you want to play it online - then it quits autosaving.  And there's no manual save option.  People are losing hours and hours of progress.  They issued a patch, but people are complaining that it resets all the stat's to zero.  So if you're 90% of the way to getting a trophy, well, now you're back where you were at the beginning of the game.

Luckily I've been playing offline exclusively and haven't set that LAN thing to online, so I haven't experienced any problems. 

[Umaril The Unfeathered]

Damn, Jack...I'm glad I don't play online in some cases. Online has seen it's share of problems as of lately and in general.  That too, and the ever-shrinking role of the offline single player. 

Seems as if the most exclusive stuff is for online-er's today, while the basic stuff is for the single player folks. I hope we don't see the day single player is eliminated altogether..

[Cthulhu]

Hey Jack, here's a little something for you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoLadZotBuE&feature=player_embedded

[Jack]

^ LOL, I think I need to level up my character about 500 more times before I can do that   

[Leah]

this game:

It's fun, but I still maintain that the original is still the best.

[InformationGeek]

this game:

It's fun, but I still maintain that the original is still the best.

I personally say the third game was the best of the series.  The first game was good, but the health system made the game very difficult. The second game was defenitely solid, but the space sequences were annoying and very difficult to manage.  The third was probably the best, where it improved upon everything the series had built up to at that point and left a near perfect game (those Captain Quartz or what not levels were frustrating).


Currently, I am playing Trauma Center: Under the Knife for the Nintendo DS.  Frankly, I have just determine that I'm not cut out (no pun intended) to be a surgeon.  The guy I was working on in the first level now has a lot of scars all over his arm due to me failing to stich up his wound properly.  However, he didn't die and that is the most important thing in the end.

[Jack]

Finished up Dragon Age Origins last night.  A year ago I played through about three-quarters of it, so that was kind of nice to finally finish it.  The ending was pretty darned good.  I suppose I'll putz around with that for the next couple of weeks, doing some trophy hunting, until Rage comes out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3G5b26w46I4

[Couchtr26]

Gears 3 like the Horde mode better then from Gears 2.  However, haven't tried Beast mode yet and am curious on the actual campaign. 

[Jack]

Been playing Rage for a week or so now.  Meh, it's okay.  I was really hoping it would be an action/RPG type game, but it's very much a shooter.  No story at all that I've encountered yet - you start out in a little post-apocalyptic settlement, do some errands for some guy (voiced by John Goodman), solely to level up your weapons.  Then you go to a nearby town and putz around over there, solely to level up your vehicle.  You can do a bit of racing, which is okay.  On medium difficulty, I finished 2nd in my first race and have won every single race since then.  You go around and talk to a bunch of people - they send you to shoot some guys and run some more errands.  

Maybe it will develop some story later on, I dunno.  It's kind of the same as Dead Island in that there doesn't seem to be any point to anything except to level up your stuff.  Going around shooting guys just for the sake of shooting guys...even PS2 shooters were a hell of a lot better than that.  What's happening to the gaming industry these days?  Appealing to the lowest common denominator I guess.  I think I should just go back to playing games that came out a few years ago when they used to have stories and some freaking depth to them.

I canceled my Skyrim pre-order too - probably need 5 or 6 patches before it's actually finished;  that's the way games are made these days.  I'll just play God of War 3 and Uncharted 2 (both of which I've already got), and then maybe get Mass Effect 2 when I need something new.  I'm sick of paying full price for games that just don't live up to my expectations any more.

[Couchtr26]

Been playing Rage for a week or so now.  Meh, it's okay.  

Been playing as well.  I like the quasi Borderlands feel but it seems lacking, too many fetch and deliver quests with little exploration time.  Too straightforward, would have preferred more open ended and leveling up. 

[Rev. Powell]

Finished up Dragon Age Origins last night.  A year ago I played through about three-quarters of it, so that was kind of nice to finally finish it.  The ending was pretty darned good.  I suppose I'll putz around with that for the next couple of weeks, doing some trophy hunting, until Rage comes out.

What a coincidence---I just finished DAO myself.  It's really impressive but I have a few minor quibbles.  One being, I didn't realize I'd be locked out of the game after completing the main quest.  I had hoped to go back and do all the side quests I skipped because they weren't of pressing importance.  Now I'll have to start a whole new game and play through focusing solely on doing every side quest.  I guess there are worse things.

[Jack]

Still playing Rage.  Now that I'm about 8 hours into it, it's gotten more fun.  Still just a very average shooter though.  Go into some crummy building, shoot everybody in there, get the item, return to the quest giver.  Get another mission where you go into some crummy building, etc.  And there are also sidequests where you can go into the same crummy building you were just in, shoot all the same guys, but retrieve a different item. 

Still only the vaguest hint of a story.  From what everyone on the video game forums are saying, the last hour where the "story" wraps up is really disappointing.

Oh well.  I thought it was going to more of an action/RPG type thing.  Guess I should have researched it a bit better before plunking down sixty bucks for it.

[Leah]

When my sister brings her PS3 down from college, I'm playing Midnight Club: Los Angeles The Complete Edition.

[Jack]

Been playing Uncharted 2 for a few evenings now.  Finally, something with a story and characters!  Gameplay's great too, nice smooth controls, a good variety of environments and a bit of puzzle solving.

Ordered Resident Evil 5 just now.  I had a $10 credit for pre-ordering something and they gave me free shipping for some reason too, so it was only $6.50.  I guess this is more action/adventure and less horror, but I watched a bit of a video review and it looked pretty cool.

Picked up Mass Effect 2 as well.  I really liked the demo and from what the reviewers say, it should be right up my alley.  Now watch me hate it.