What game are you playing?

[Diletante]

I've just finished Okami in its Wii version. What a great game! The music was nice (still humming some of the most memorable tunes), the whole art was awesome, the gameplay was great, it was funny and it kept me interested from beginning to end. Obviously a lot of work was put into this.

[greg]

I always thought Okami looked cool. It's considered a great game, anyway...

[Lethevich]

I finally understand what the South Koreans get from e-sports. This Youtube channel has some fun Starcraft 2 matches, and unlike real sport, they tend to be over in 10-20 minutes.

This one should appeal to anyone who has played games online and is familiar with how a fast-paced and fun game, if something statistically unlikely occurs, can become so drawn out and the game mechanics are almost unable to deal with it to allow the match to be resolved. What makes this worth watching is not just the stalemate in the second half, but the funny twist at the end of part 4 (I won't embed them all because apparently some people's PCs don't like many Youtube clips in a browser window):

http://www.youtube.com/v/qEV9niTmeOU Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

This is a more conventional match. I really like the way that the best SC players are able to fully manage up to five areas of the map simultaneously during combined attack/offense runs - sometimes the commentator misses major bits and he's only having to follow units around rather than plan and execute everything:

http://www.youtube.com/v/xRY9yflKTeY http://www.youtube.com/v/InG1qXJORBs

Edit: Also, I spy something potentially significant:

[Josquin des Prez]

Starcraft 2 is serious decline, and the new Battle.net is an abomination. Personally, i would wait at least until they fix the latter, if they ever do. Blizzard really dropped the ball on this one.

[Lethevich]

Their employees aren't happy with BN2, but it's the companies own fault for selling out to a bigger publisher because this has been forced onto them. Especially silly because I think the sellout occured after WoW came out, and WoW is essentially a licence to print money.

[greg]

aha so Karl secretly plays Starcraft.... 

[MN Dave]

I used to play Civilization all the time but it turns out games are a great time-sucker, just like the Internet. 

I wasn't that good at Civ, but I loved playing it.

[Lethevich]

Civ is one of those games that I just don't understand. I loved Alpha Centauri, but for some reason with Civ4 I got really tired of the inevitable point where if I go military the process of mopping up the enemies is so time-consuming for such an inevitable result that it is no fun. The non-military goals are faster, but feel more pointless.

I guess I should try on max difficulty before I complain about easiness, though, but I fear that my inability to fully understand the micromanaging of teraforming and building will get me mauled

[MN Dave]

If I do play a game now, it's on my iPhone. 

[karlhenning]

I won't play games on my Droid. Browsing the Internet is game enough ; )

[MN Dave]

I won't play games on my Droid. Browsing the Internet is game enough ; )

Pretty much.

[lisa needs braces]

I recently discovered the "Civilization" series. I've been playing Civilization III on the PC. Picked it up for $5 off of steam.

Fun...but I haven't even completed a single game yet! Either things get hopeless too quickly or I simply despair of warfare and quit when invaded.

[lisa needs braces]

"Gameplay is a psychological experience: it's all in your head. The vagaries of human psychology define your game more than the laws of physics or algebra. Egomania, Paranoia, Delusion - these are tools to be wielded with precision and care. For the player, perception is reality and the center of the universe is right here. As we follow this reasoning to its logical conclusion we discover a number of amazing things, among them: everyone is above average, 2/1 is not equal to 20/10, and the player is his/her own worst enemy."

--Sid Meier

[Lethevich]

A friend convinced me to try Ultima 7. I had avoided all old RPGs until now fearing that they will offer nothing of value when contrasted with their many primitive qualities, and this one was right on the edge of being too ugly to play, but fortunately the environments are detailed enough to immerse you - the engine has more interactivity than the later Infinity Engine games, for example.

The graphics are of course pixel-art created 256 colour VGA unlike later 2D RPGs which used 3D generated or painted locations presented as 2D maps, and they do look completely amateurish by modern standards, but in terms of gameplay this has one of the better starts I've encountered in an RPG. No starting dungeon, you get dropped into the game trying to solve a murder. Quite neat.

It's abandonware, so free to download (episode 1 is 10mb, the standalone episode 2 is the same), and it worked fine on Windows 7 for me with the Exult mod (dl the binary, not source), which was fan-made to provide a better emulator than DOSbox specifically for Ultima 7. Download both here, unzip Ultima first, then point Exult towards the game's directory during its install. After that, running Exult should play the games perfectly without any further hassle.

Also check the Keyboard Commands section on this page to find a list of shortcuts (this stuff would've been in the manual for a game this old, but nowadays games are expected to be "intuitive" enough so that manuals are not neccessary).

[mc ukrneal]

I recently discovered the "Civilization" series. I've been playing Civilization III on the PC. Picked it up for $5 off of steam.

Fun...but I haven't even completed a single game yet! Either things get hopeless too quickly or I simply despair of warfare and quit when invaded.

You are probably not building enough units early on. I love the CIV series. One of the best thinking strategy games out there.

[Guido]

I don't play many games these days, but the last one I did play was Machinarium, which is quite simply one of the finest and most beautiful games I've ever played. It's a point and click adventure a la Monkey Island, but the art work and characterisation is just wonderful. Music also amongst the best I've ever heard in a game. I cannot recommend it highly enough... it's not that expensive either.

Other than that I am just patiently waiting for Diablo 3.

[bwv 1080]

getting my ass kicked by the French at Ligny

[greg]

A friend convinced me to try Ultima 7. I had avoided all old RPGs until now fearing that they will offer nothing of value when contrasted with their many primitive qualities,

Really? But old RPGs have soul! 

[Lethevich]

I just bought a 1gb HD 5770 graphics card which should keep me reasonably up to pace for the next year or two (the similarly-priced but more powerful 4670 lacks directx11 support, so in the long-term will actually be slower).

It will be nice to get back into online shooters. Most women are missing a trick when they only play stuff like Farmville and Wii - blowing up online people is both satisfying and theraputic.

[Philoctetes]

Currently playing through Beyond Good and Evil on the Xbox. It's a truly quality game. Wonderful plot, but it's not really an intuitive game. It suffers from 'Myst' syndrome, where things really aren't clear, in which order they should be done, where the clue is, the importance of the clue, etc. The camera is also a bit annoying, but the writing is so good that one can easily overlook all of those quibbles.