What kind of games are you playing today?

[koitsu]

Yep, a nice open-ended question.

I was thinking about this last night before bed, wondering what sorts of games people here are playing at present and on what systems (console vs. PC, etc.). We all share a common interest (classic consoles, particularly the NES/Famicom or its immediate relatives), sure, but I always wonder what sorts of things people play otherwise.

I haven't really been an "avid gamer" since the end of the PlayStation 1 era (I do own a GC and a couple XBox 360 systems, but those haven't been powered up in years / sit in their boxes (if anyone's interested in buying them let me know, I'd love to get rid of them and the games (except the limited-release Zelda compilation for the GC, no way I'm giving that up :-) )). If I "game", it's mostly PC games.

I tend to cycle through the same sorts of games over and over, usually re-visiting some MMO every year or so until I get tired of it (often within a few months). So here's a list of stuff I do tend to play recurringly, in no particular order:

• NES/Famicom stuff -- usually emulators, but sometimes on bare metal
• SNES/SFC stuff -- emulators, bare metal sits in boxes
• Genesis/Megadrive -- always emulators, bare metal sits in boxes, and I only play 2 games anyway: Herzog Zwei and Super Hydlide
• nethack -- pretty much all the time; haven't stopped playing since the 90s
• World of Warcraft -- hadn't played for 4-5 years, thought I'd give it a try again starting late last month
• EVE Online -- off and on, though the "miner bumping" debacle caused me to leave + left a very, very bad taste in my mouth, enough that I might not bother playing again ever
• Orcs Must Die! (1 and 2) -- enjoyed both, play the 2nd when a friend of mine feels up to it
• Minecraft -- fairly rarely, and on a private server (3-4 people); number of bugs is just fucking astounding; true fat Swedish man-child quality! ;-)

Keep in mind this is not a list of stuff "I've played recently" -- that would be utterly immense. Diablo 3, Torchlight (1 and 2), FFXI, FFIX, Batman: Arkham Asylum (fucking AWESOME by the way), Crackdown (1 and 2) (the 2nd one sucked) on the XBox 360, Fallout 3, Borderlands (1 and 2), Section 8, the Saints Row games (all are fucking horrid), Legend of Grimrock (quite good if you like the original Bard's Tale, but the puzzles are quite frustrating/hard), blah blah blah... I could blab for hours.

One final thing I thought I'd mention: you won't find many (or any) "classic RPGs" in that list. The last real RPGs I played were Beyond the Beyond (PS1), Final Fantasy 7 (PS1), and maybe Darkstone (if you can consider that an RPG) for the PC (I think the EU folks here will know the game I'm talking about). Why's that? Simple: I cannot stand "open-ended" RPGs, meaning the kinds where there are a zillion different endings or paths to choose from. I like linear RPGs, because otherwise I get/feel lost/confused/not sure if I missed something/"what the fuck am I doing?!?!" the entire time and that does nothing but make me shut the game off. Most RPGs these days are open-ended, and the few I've tried which aren't are either badly done (i.e. eye candy rather than actual gameplay) or are awful in some other regard. I like RPGs such as Final Fantasy 1 and 2 (US numbering scheme), Zelda 1/2/3, and god knows all the others. Linear, "simple" (per se), and despite that fact have great replay value.

[Dwedit]

I'm playing a ton of the Card Hunter beta. Wonderful game.

[mikejmoffitt]

I'm into fighters more recently, specifically Street Fighter Alpha 3. I keep up with Super Street Fighter 4 only because it's contemporary, but I really don't like the game much for any other reason. Alpha 3 and Third Strike brought me into playing fighting games, really only originally because of the very fluid pixel art animation. Alpha 3 I see as a great package of presentation, technical gameplay, depth, and art. It's really a great game. Third Strike's "parry" mechanic was also a very appealing hype-generator. I play online using Supercade or GGPO sometimes.

I also enjoy puzzle games. Tetris DX is my favorite tetris game, though recently I have liked competitive puzzle games a lot more, like Puzzle Fighter or Puyo Puyo Tsu. Puzzle Bobble is good fun too, though it's pretty limited compared to the previous two examples.

Of course platformers are fun; by far I still enjoy Gimmick! for Famicom the most (still so thankful I got the cartridge for $50). Castlevania 3 is also a good game to plod through, especially with the VRC6.

I am also a big fan of the Gradius series though, and have been playing a lot of the MSX games on the Konami Antiques MSX Collection for Saturn. The Parodius series is probably one of my all time favorite series, and I've been playing Sexy Parodius a bit recently as well. The MSX games are hard as balls, though, with terrible respawn points and that jerky MSX scrolling that only a true fanboy can pretend to like.

I'll play Mario Kart 64 with my roommate here and there, but honestly I see it as a pretty lame shallow racing game. Battle mode is alright, but the rubberbanding with items is unacceptable. The most fun is derived from exploiting bugs in the game. I am much more into the original Super Mario Kart, where technical prowess is greatly rewarded and items aren't shoved in your face all the time. It's not a great looking game and is very hard to approach if you don't have a feel for its physics, but it is a much more rewarding game once you get used to it.

There are a few things I've noticed in games I don't like, so I will list them profanely here:
-Fantasy shit like elves and warlocks
-Characters with belts and zippers and chains and shit
-That fucking idea that every character from the first gen 3D age needs to slowly heave/bounce up and down like some sort of "breathing" idle animation (I'm looking at Mario Party or King K Rool from DK64, that shithead)
-Whiny nutsquad characters that yell things like "Try this on for size!" before doing a super or some bullshit like that
-Brown realistic horseshit and bloody screen sodomotastic realism elements
-Games where I am "supposed to feel there" or totally immersed like my life is so shitty that I want to escape into my screen
-Anything that, when described, involves the word "lore" and has fake old-english pseudo-british accents speaking with archaic sentence structure that could just as easily come from a malfunctioning sentence generator

Rather than feeling "immersed" when playing a game, I much prefer to space out and be in "the zone" while playing. I find this happens with really fast paced hard puzzle games, where I am looking at the screen and doing the right actions but my mind has drifted off to unrelated thoughts, leaving the game to be mostly muscle memory. Having enjoyable music is key here. I find this is the most relaxing state for playing any game, and ironically it seems easiest to achieve with really tough fighting or puzzle games. Tetris, too, is mesmerizing in this way.

[lidnariq]

Beyond the Beyond and FF7 are what basically permanently killed my taste in JRPGs. I've been trying to go back and play through Chrono Trigger and the first two Star Ocean games but can't make myself sit through it. I find that even getting through "western" CRPGs is difficult.

Lately, the vast majority of games I've been playing lately have been from the humble bundles (so almost all PC, and specifically linux when it works). Slight preference for platformers, especially puzzle platformers and metroidvanias.

Occasionally I pick up an older game (mostly PC, except for the Zelda games) and play it through again. (MoO2, Tyrian, Magic Carpet 2—don't ask, &c)

[Bregalad]

To be honnest, since the start of year 2013, I felt my interest in games falling at a incredibly high speed. I think it's probably proportional to how my free time have fallen to a zero level for several months, but now I have free time again. It will take some time so I get used to actually be able to work less than 70h a week and have free time again but probably my interest in games and/or development will come back in the next few months.

[zzo38]

I find the games I play the most these days are ones I have written myself in QBASIC. These include SOLITAIR (a collection of card games), ELEMENTA (another card game, where the ranks are irrelevant and only the suits are used), BIGMAZE (the computer generates a random maze, you can see only part of it at a time, and there are diggers to dig walls (although there is always a path without digging, it can be very hard to find), ghosts are chasing you, and you have to reach the goal (there is a finder to tell you which direction it is in approximately)), KNAR (you are given an empty grid with differently shaped pipes in the row and column headings, and you must logically move them into the correct positions so that they are all connected properly), DOWN (fall down as much as possible), SKEDALS (use random teleports, controlled teleports, bombs, speed-up, traps, movement, and extra lives to destroy all opponent's pieces on each level), COLORSPI (your piece is the spider, you have to make a web to catch balls of the matching color) and others.

Other games I play are Pokemon de Panepon, some of the modern NES/Famicom games (Lawn Mower, Lan Master, Zooming Secretary, etc), and many Z-machine games.

-That fucking idea that every character from the first gen 3D age needs to slowly heave/bounce up and down like some sort of "breathing" idle animation (I'm looking at Mario Party or King K Rool from DK64, that shithead)

I hate this too. I like the games without 3D graphics, anyways; many of the computer games I like don't even have any graphics at all. I like to not overcomplicate the graphics and that stuff, so to result in a smaller and faster program.

[cpow]

I mostly "play" simulations, when/if I game at all. X-plane, Flight Simulator X, Train Simulator [though it gets boring fast...]. I used to really get into the puzzle game genre. Myst, Riven, etc. I really enjoy games with un-timed physical puzzle machinery...mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, etc. I'm not so much a fan of games involving "take this item to that person to make them happy so they'll give you this other item to give back to that person" games...but I'll tolerate that shit for Zelda for a while...barely.

[tepples]

I mostly "play" simulations, [...] I'm not so much a fan of games involving "take this item to that person to make them happy so they'll give you this other item to give back to that person" games

Such fetch quests were a big part of the original Animal Crossing for GameCube, and reviewers put that game in the "simulation" section. Go figure.

[James]

Mostly just NES games for me: Castlevania, SMB1, SMB2, Mega Man 2, and Tetris are the ones that I seem to play most frequently. Occasionally, I'll play through Metroid, Zelda 2, or Dragon Warrior. I do enjoy Pinball Arcade on my iPhone as well.

Other than that, my gaming days are largely behind me. I played a lot of NES and Genesis, then moved on to PC games (Sierra adventure games, Wing Commander, flight sims like Falcon 3.0, early RTS like Dune II, etc.). I think the last console game I played was Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Then, around that time, I got into emulator development and fell in love with the NES all over again.

[qbradq]

I mainly play retro games. Recently I've been playing Faxanadu, Mother, Mother 2 / Earthbound, Megaman 1-5 (playing them in order, will get to 6 soonish) and Metroid. On my soon pile are Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Zelda 1, Zelda 2 and the SNES Megaman games.

Honestly though I tend to watch videos of video games more than I actually play them. Speed Demos Archive and TAS Videos keep me pretty entertained. I tend to stay away from Let's Plays as 99.9% of them are of the form "Duh... I've never played this game before, uh... Dur so you gon watch me figure craps out and uh... tell you why this game I've never played sucks".

Unfortunately I've fallen into the ol' MMO addiction again over the past several months. I played Eve Online, Minecraft, Salem and UO:R-era Ultima Online. All I have to say about that is, if I value my career and family (and NES projects), I'm not playing MMOs again. I'm such a failure

[tepples]

I tend to stay away from Let's Plays as 99.9% of them are [blind and bland]

But you might like some videos that play with the Let's Play formula. For example, Chester gets laid off is sort of halfway between LP and machinima: the play is semi-blind (played previous games in the series), but the comments are fully in character, and it skips over a lot of the boring running from place to place.

[James]

Honestly though I tend to watch videos of video games more than I actually play them.

I just recently started watching the Chrontendo videos (reviews of every Famicom and NES game, in chronological order). Pretty good stuff, I think: http://www.youtube.com/user/Chrontendo

[qbradq]

Ohh yea James, I just caught up to Chrontendo myself. If you like it you might check out Clan of the Gray Wolf. He's got a lot of content, mostly targeted at the 16-bit era. And now I'm watching The Video Game Years here: http://www.youtube.com/user/RetrowareTV And there's always Angry Video Game Nerd.

[whicker]

I've been playing Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past most recently. One dungeon per night. Even though it's possible to go a lot faster, the point was to limit play time sessions and just enjoy the experience.

I've still been periodically playing through Super Mario 3D Land. It's getting tedious to always have to hit the highest point of the flagpole in every single level. This is one of the first Mario games where the special levels are actually too difficult for me. A similar experience to 100%-ing Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, although eventually I did get there, but that was 17 years ago when I was in my gaming prime.

I've been plodding around with Petit Computer on the 3DS. I've successfully used it at work to mock-up some concepts that can easy be shown using the stylus functionality and pixel graphics drawing. The software, even if it is early 80's BASIC, is incredibly powerful with most desirable statements just built-in, advanced things like wait for VSYNC. The QR code thing is a great idea and is "fast enough" considering the 3DS really doesn't have a download cable. Has anyone heard of Petit Computer, let alone used it?


On the PC side of things, Anno 2070 was a huge time sink for a while (150 hours). There still seems to be a smear campaign against it and its DRM (which was removed!). That being said, the game itself feels like a logical advancement from SimCity 2000, Caesar III and almost perversely, Total Annihilation. The battles aren't actually that great (two boats will just stop next to each other and just keep shooting), but... build a huge, beautiful city on an island, to build a city you need resources from other islands, you also need to trade and defend or fight for those resources. You need to balance taxes with expansion. Please, please play this game if you were bummed out by the SimCity relaunch. If you're familiar with SimCity, the whole hospital, police-station, fire station, power plant thing is second nature. What pushes it into new territory is that every bit of industrial resource is tracked and counted. The resource tree is immense, but understandable. You have to set up trade routes (by boat) to transfer goods between islands, though locally on the island the transport to any warehouse is just assumed when it's connected by road.

Okay, this deserves another paragraph about it. I love Anno 2070 dearly, it raises a lot of philosophical questions like who do you align with, the Eco or the Tycoon faction. It's actually a bit depressing for me to play as the Tycoon faction seeing the very visible effect they have on the local environment. It's hard to describe unless you go through it. I know there is a harsh, almost stereotypical, line drawn between the two factions, but there really is the sense that the capitalists and their consumption model will just keep on destroying planet earth, even though they've managed to raise the sea level so high so fast as to destroy the traditional boundaries of nations, hence the setting of the game. But when you go up the chain of command, all sides turn out to be corrupt/manipulative/politically-correct in their own unique ways. The tycoons want their booze, fast food, and pills. The ecos want their tea, smart phones, and service robots. Both sides would have you go to the edges of the planet to supply these needs. The scientists whom both sides rely on create as many problems and headaches as they solve. (Damn them and their very specific food needs, energy drinks, explosive laboratories, and nasally voices). A very fun and engrossing single player experience. Maps take hours to complete, it's completely normal to drop 6 hours on a map. There is a fast-forward key.

[koitsu]

whicker, your comments about Anno 2070 really caught my attention. That was one of the games (prior to launch) which I made note of to pick up/try, since I do like games of that sort, but the DRM situation immediately made me change my mind. I'm glad Ubisoft reverted their stance on that. I have all sorts of questions about it though, but I guess I'll just have to watch some Youtube videos. The learning curve looks higher than the usual construction/strategy games I tend to like (my favourite still to this day is Roller Coaster Tycoon 2).

Instead I gave some others a try: Cities in Motion and Cities XL 2011. Both were absolute technical clusterfucks. One of the two (I forget which) had performance problems up the ass (apparently the entire game, every part of it, was run in a single thread -- and the developers stated this was by design -- so within 15 minutes of play you were getting, at most, 30-35fps on a high-end quad-core system), while the others had bugs beyond belief. These were hasty purchases on my part (normally I visit a game's support forum to skim posts, seeing what kind of issues people complain about. If there's a major issue that's pretty much a deal breaker, I don't bother trying/buying the game), and I regret that. I even posted some actual bugs (again can't remember which of the two) on their forum, including running one with Visual Studio installed and trying to debug bits/pieces of it, and not a single employee/developer commented. It's like the companies that made them released a bunch of crap and then stuck their fingers in their ears.

I tend to like Civilization (1 and 2, as well as Freeciv) too, but 3 and 4 pissed me off to no end (again, technical problems). I've played 5 quite a bit too, but for whatever reason it doesn't have the same "construction appeal" as games like RCT2 and (presumably) Anno 2070. I play all of these things solo/single player, by the way, and have zero interest in multiplayer anything (has to do with my health).