[Kobrar44]

So I think I've seen enough of War for the Overworld to have an informed opinion[I've just beat the campaign].
Mechanically, this is Dungeon Keeper. It has improvements, they are good, etc etc. However, it has some serious problems with presentation. I can see three/five problems. One is sound design. Two is lack of any creature collision. Three is the fact, that there simply are more creatures. In the final mission I think I had a houndred, with the ghouls etc. and I could have even more if the game didn't lag so bad. Four is bugs, but that is another topic. And then there is the visual design.
So yeah. DK2 didn't really have creature collision, but the game tried really hard to space them out so they don't overlap. WFT doesn't even try. The result of this is pretty significant. I think the game somehow solves the issue of everyone attacking the same target? not sure? but presentation wise, this is just a mess. In DK2 you could often see each individual creature and each individual attack happen, and you could easily tell creature types. Each creature type also had very distinguishable and memorable sound pattern too, you always know the warlaugther is skeletons, farts are bile demos, calm incantation are warlocks, scream incantation are wizards, warcry incantation are dark angels etc. In WFTO sound design is very unimpactful and poor. Creatures simply speak human in a slightly monstery voices[indistinguishable from each other] and that doesn't work too well. "Who the hell is BRIAN?" is not a way to make me like, care or remember creatures. The fact that the game seems to go more of the macro way, with dozens of beasts and minions, makes me care even less. Finally, the design. There are beasts, that are weak do not even require a portal, and then there are proper creatures. Beast are actually cool and I tried to beat every level with them. Regular creatures are just a bunch of boring dudes. They have some detail to them, but most of it is pretty generic and lacks any character. but the beasts? Skarg is a bug, but a cool one. There is the beholder and  mutalisk, and there is the shadow, a creature, that is literally covered in shadow, can and will blink behind you and murder you, and actually looks like a proper monster. Now shadows are cool. I want more shadows. I want them to be better. Then there are titans, that kind of are there? There is no time spent on developing them, so they die in the crowd. Then there are vampires. There is that building, sanctuary, you can use to perform rituals. One of the rituals consists of sacrificing three souls to summon a vampire. That is really smart, it creates buildup, it makes me care, at least until the vampire also dies in the crowd. So yeah. I also didn't notice any soundtrack of any description, so overall, mechanically pretty good, severely lacking in presentation.
Also, apparently, there are cutscenes. Well, they lag as ****. I wasn't sure if the campaign ended or the game simply bugged out.
I wish DK2 worked properly on modern systems
Next: Dungeons 2

[Kobrar44]

So Evolve is free now. It is actually pretty well optimised and super fun. Go participate in the 25000% playerbase rise.
EDIT: I thought beaing a monster was only stressful and boring. Until I murdered them all.

[Scourge of Ages]

I dropped off my car at the auto shop yesterday, declined the shuttle service, and decided to walk about 11 km to get home. You can probably guess why.

[Blue Lion]

What did you get?

[Scourge of Ages]

What did you get?

Nothing too great, I'm still pretty low level. A venomoth, growlith, and a metric ton of rattattas and pidgeys.

[headdie]

Armored Warfare players (if any) here might be interested to know that as a Peacekeeper also in the MyCom Battallion I will be taking part in the Bounty Hunt event tonight on the EU server so killing me will net you the LAV 150 90 or if you already have one its equivalent in gold

[CP5670]

The Force Unleashed: Great force effects and physics that make you feel like a real Jedi, and the maps and environments are quite memorable. It's extremely console-oriented though, with a 30fps lock (thankfully removable with mods), no savegames and long sequences of quicktime events and keyboard combo moves that are hard to remember. The story fills in some key details in the Star Wars universe, but is otherwise lousy. I liked it a lot initially but found it increasingly tedious later on.

Republic Commando: A fairly generic SW themed shooter, although the squad action and commands work well. The FPSs from this era feel like a breath of fresh air compared to modern ones. You actually have a health meter, are strong enough to not have to take cover all the time, and can save whenever you like.

Table Top Racing World Tour: A slick arcade racing game with weapons, similar to Re-volt but based on micro machines. The tracks are cleverly designed but there are only 5 and they get repetitive. It can be finished in a few hours, which is just the right length for this kind of game.

[Turambar]

Finished the Witcher 3 and all the DLC.

I've gone from the books through the games to the end.  I kind of want to give it a hug and send it on it's way, but i'll be back later for New Game + on Death march with the enemy scaling turned on.

[Mongoose]

Going through a Half-Life 2 playthrough, because it's been at least a year since the last one and that's too long.

[NGTM-1R]

Armored Warfare players (if any) here might be interested to know that as a Peacekeeper also in the MyCom Battallion I will be taking part in the Bounty Hunt event tonight on the EU server so killing me will net you the LAV 150 90 or if you already have one its equivalent in gold

Hi.

Though I'm NA, so not much use.

[headdie]

Armored Warfare players (if any) here might be interested to know that as a Peacekeeper also in the MyCom Battallion I will be taking part in the Bounty Hunt event tonight on the EU server so killing me will net you the LAV 150 90 or if you already have one its equivalent in gold

Hi.

Though I'm NA, so not much use.

cool, put a few rounds into Billy Mays or Will this week for me

[Det. Bullock]

X-wing vs Tie Fighter: Balance of Power
Another sadistic mission of the rebel campaign that wouldn't be that bad if played coop, the raid on a dreadnought awfully near a Star Destroyer.
Essentially at first you have to turn off everything to intercept an imperial shuttle before it docks with said dreadnought by emptying your missile launchers at it, which means that once you intercept it you are swarmed with enemy fighters and in range of the ISD.
Even if you survive (you have three waves), after having inspected the dreadnought and the b-wings disable it a friendly corvette pops in to dock with the DREAD it and now the tricky part starts.
You need to fend off gunboats trying to disable the corvette and when the corvette is done it has to pass directly under the Star Destroyer to get away into hyperspace and the only way to avoid it being disabled is driving away fire from it by attacking the Star Destroyer and unfortunately for this missions said ISD has improved accuracy which means if you lost your first and second wave before the corvettes has to pass under it the mission is over.
The main problem is that the B-wing after disabling the DREAD should try to drive off or destroy the ISD while the X-wings think to the fighters, but this is possible only by having human players man at least one B-wing to order them around after their main task (disabling the DREAD) is accomplished.

It's not impossible mind you, but seeing B-wings not launching their remaining torpedoes at the ISD is really annoying.

[Det. Bullock]

Phantasy Star II on the Sega Mega Drive
The passage to the 16-bit era has improved more or less everything from what I can see, the NPCs are less copypasted and more verbose and the combat is a bit more tactical when it's required, also I like the Tron style background during combat.

I'm using the Everdrive MD v3 for this (it took a month for the thing to finally arrive from the Ukraine), it works flawlessly with everything I threw at it, being able to play Monster World IV in english and Streets of Rage 3 in english without the mostly stupid western changes is priceless.

[StarSlayer]

Skippering the Bucentaure

[0rph3u5]

Just beat the last ten chapters of the Fire Emblem-campaign I started last year while I was moving ... My plot sense was really of on that account as I though this game could not have more than 24 chapters (it has 31, not counting bonus missions). Like it a bunch, so on to the sequel!

I am also playing the Tales of Symphonia-PC port, previously I only knew that game from its so-and-so sequel on the Wii. It was pretty fond of the characters of the original, so was curious to check it out. (the pc port is as bad as they say, so I am glad to picked it up on the summer sale for only a few euros)

[Kobrar44]

Saints Row 3. Party Time is so ****ing glorious, but you can't replay it.
Also Empire Earth 2. It is essentially Rise of Nations, but it just lets me spam endless warplanes so it's better.

EDIT: I also bought Empire Earth 3. Hahahah, you steaming pile of ****!
No wonder golden age of RTS is long gone.
EDIT2: finished Saints Row. Party time was apparently a big chunk of what was good in the game, as well as actually the best moment.

[Det. Bullock]

X-wing vs Tie Fighter: Balance of Power
Last mission! Bring down a Super Star Destroyer, but unfortunately I think that this mission would have been much easier if all the B-wings and X-wing would just run past the first wave of Tie Fighters at full speed and unload all their payload at once (both are armed with heavy rockets). It's also the only mission in the campaign that features reinforcements in the form of A-wings but when I noticed it was too late and lost a couple of waves to the Avenger squadron.
I'll probably try again tomorrow, if it wasn't for the tendency of the game to give reprimands on easy in the campaign I'd be tempted to switch the difficulty to easy.

The second to last mission was a bit tedious, but after getting that leaving the destruction of the warhead transports to my squadmates only distracted them from the protection of the shuttles capturing the transports bearing conscripts it got straightforward enough if a bit repetitive due to the large number of the goddamn things and the Tie Fighters shooting at you, at least this time there weren't Tie Advanced and the B-wing can make short work of the classic bulk freighters even when out of torpedoes thanks to the weapon switch trick that allows to use lasers and ions together.
Another annoying thing is that the bulk freighters have missile launchers for some reason, fortunately only a single shot and unless you are really close it's easy to shoot them down with ion cannons.
Both this and the earlier inspection mission with the A-wing are quite an exercise in endurance, lots of targets to inspect then destroy and disable and a relatively short time window in which to do so with plenty of enemy fighters, but this one would be rather easier with human players manning the B-wings as the inspect, disable/destroy sequence would be faster by having two or three B-wings on it instead of one and the other players concentrating on the Tie Fighters.

[Klaustrophobia]

Crysis 2 is still being a bastard about crashing.  Reducing my CPU overclock I thought fixed it, but turns out it just reduced the frequency of crashing.  OC entirely disabled now and still happening.  GPU was never overclocked, and even tried increasing fan speed to no avail.  And now it's gone and deleted my profile.  Twice.  Attempting a fresh install.  The current install has been through a couple HDD clones, hopefully this will fix it.  But it really looked more hardware related.

[Det. Bullock]

Bare Knuckle III (japanese Streets of Rage 3) english fantranslation on Mega Drive
Thanks to the new gamepads finally arriving I got to finally beat it (last time my D-pad broke in stage 7), on easy it was an almost 1-credit run but the final boss is even worse that the goddamn jetpack guys.
I really like the tweaks to the gameplay compared to Streets of Rage 2, it uses the 6-button gamepad, your attacks get stronger if you stay alive enough time to rack up the points necessary, there is a dash move and I liked the special move bar a lot, I always hated having to spend health for specials, using power ups like in Golden Axe or having a timer like in this game is way better.
The enemies are also tougher, they can parry or hold you (the special can be used to free yourself), the story is a nice nonsensical action sci-fi romp about finding and disabling nuclear devices to prevent a war and fight the main baddy at the end.
In general the gameplay is faster and a bit more nuanced, there were point in which I thought that would have been nice to capture the footage because the better variety of moves made some fights seem almost coreographed.
I always heard complaints about the new music but there isn't that much of it and mostly it's appropriate, also the games concludes with the classic BK/SoR theme anyway so it's all good.

[Klaustrophobia]

I cannot ****ing stop the Crysis 2 crashing.  Thought I had it isolated a couple times but nope.  I've ruled out everything I can think of except rolling back drivers.