The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Brian]

Spend money now with the justification that I'll surely get enjoyment out of it later....

  have no PS2/3 or television.  While I can get these things, eh, sale or not, it's all wasted money at the moment, so better to save up for a new apartment.

[Anastasia]

Playing Jeanne D'Arc for the PSP. It's fun but light fluff, albeit shallow.

[Brian]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Gotta admit, the intro sequence with the voices and the credits ... excellent treatment of a older premise.  So far, really enjoying the game, though judging by Drac's comments, I can see why it might not work as well on the console.  I'll probably write up a review once I finish it. :)

[Jason_Miao]

I have been playing Prospector (that is, until my laptop fan died), a roguelike that takes place in outer space.

http://code.google.com/p/rlprospector/

It's a game where you are freelance explorer who discovers new planets, trades with aliens and/or exploits and/or fight off any hostiles, mine and collect natural resources, all of which are sold to megacorporations.  Your goal is to become rich enough to comfortably retire.  Players can also hunt pirate fleets (if you aren't playing as a pirate), find new alien civilizations and ancient artifacts, field a small army of away team members, and more.

It's also decidedly in alpha, so screwed up menus and unescapable loops are not unheard of.

[Dracos]

I am...not exactly happy with Arkham City.  I ended up getting flung sidequest to sidequest last night during play and pretty much didn't really make any storyline progress for it.  Certainly ignorable, but when the mission markers are literally popping up on screen on your way there, it's hard to not be distracted.  Ring Ring.

[Dracos]

Did a run of Ratchet All-For-One  last weekend.  It's serviceble 4 player co-op.   Very on rails, which I'm not sure I like and I'd kind of prefer a Shared bolts model so being badass didn't basically mean "Oh, I get the lion's resource share to buy advantages".

I beat Devil Survivor again.  Now on the 4th story path, and I probably won't do the 5th (He's kinda a punk, and really, doesn't seem different enough to merit).  Devil Survivor 2 can't come soon enough :P

[Jason_Miao]

Inspired by various martial-art stories and movies, I have attempted drunken Touhou (PoFV) to see if alcohol would increase my skill.  Curiously, it does not appear to differ from my typical attempts.

[Brian]

Inspired by various martial-art stories and movies, I have attempted drunken Touhou (PoFV) to see if alcohol would increase my skill.  Curiously, it does not appear to differ from my typical attempts.

I've found it's largely the same, but there's a breakpoint where your muscle-memory (if advanced) gains a slight advantage in games that are repetitious enough.  Try Katamari Damacy.

[Halbarad]

If anything, drunken Touhou helps in the sense that it kills adrenaline kicking in when you make mistakes, and can keep you calmer - in a lot of the games, a lot of what ends runs is that one mistake tends to knock you off your stride and you start making a lot more.

PoFV's kind of a bad example for that, though, since unlike most of the other games it's about 90% random in terms of dodging.

[Dracos]

Willow.

Thunderbolt.  *move ten squares*
Thunderbolt *move ten squares*
Thunderbolt.

[Yuthirin]

Skyrim! It's very pretty. @_@

[Anastasia]

GTA: SA:

Playing this again for the first time in years. It holds up well on all fronts and is still a lot of fun. I'm about half way through Los Santos, blazing through the early missions.

[Jon]

Mmmmm, Skyrims.

[Brian]

Mmmmm, Skyrims.

I'ma gettin teh hype-backlashes from all the "wooo!" going on about this game in #e (intentional, children (THAT WAS ACTING!  BRAVO FOR ME!)) and #sr (yeah, just lazy).

SRYS, honest thoughts on it?

[Ebiris]

Mmmmm, Skyrims.

I'ma gettin teh hype-backlashes from all the "wooo!" going on about this game in #e (intentional, children (THAT WAS ACTING!  BRAVO FOR ME!)) and #sr (yeah, just lazy).

SRYS, honest thoughts on it?

First off, if you liked Oblivion, you'll like this.

I know, Oblivion suffered hype backlash. I've bitched about it tons! I've also put in about 100 hours into it, so what I say and what I do are different.

So with Oblivion as our basepoint, what's better and what's worse?

The interface I think is worse. Mainly it's the lack of a paper doll inventory that bothers me. It's a chore to have to put an item on, come out, switch to external view, and rotate the camera around to decide if an item is too goofy to wear or not. Other than that, you can't tab between different pages in your stats, like from inventory to spells to skills. You can either bring one page up from the main game with a shortcut, or hit tab and choose one which you're stuck in until you come out.

Skills are a little bit streamlined, up to you if this is worse or bad. For all that I lament the lack of spears, it is quite nice that skill in 'one-handed' means I can seamlessly drop my icy waraxe in favour of any really cool sword or mace I find, barring a few weapon specific perks. You don't really pick 'class skills' either anymore. Early on you just choose one of Mage, Warrior, or Thief, and from then on you get a 20% bonus to learning those skills... and you can change your specialisation at any time. I'm undecided on whether that's good or bad, I've just picked warrior and stuck with it.

As to that, you choose a specialisation by means of three special runic stones you can revisit any time. And rather than choosing a birthsign as in previous games, there are stones hidden across Skyrim devoted to The Atronach, The Ritual, and all the others that you can find and invoke to gain that birthsigns benefit, again changable just by finding a different stone and overwriting it. I actually think this is really neat, it lets you change to suit different obstacles and adds another level of planning for hard battles - plus you have to find them first, which is a cool incentive.

You level just by getting 10 skill increases regardless of which they are. Personally I'm glad there's no more cheesing for strength/int/whatever multipliers, but some might miss that. I always hated it, and those stats don't even exist anymore. But what do are perks! Every skill has an associated perk tree of abilities and further specialisations you can travel down, which adds some cool variety to things and keeps levelling from being too standard an affair.

Weapons don't degrade any more... one one hand, this loses the tension of breaking your favourite weapon deep in a dungeon and having to improvise your way out. On the other hand, Armourer has been replaced with Smithing so you can forge your own weapons and armour right out the box, and charging around in awesome self-made gear is a pretty cool feeling. The whole enchanting mechanic is pretty unchanged, except rather than learning enchantments from your own spells, you have to examine an already enchanted item (destroying it) to have that enchantment available for putting on new stuff.

The overall aesthetic of Skyrim is gorgeous. Cyrodil was pretty, but so plain and generic. Where it was a pastoral English woodland, Skyrim's a rugged Celtic/Nordic highland... maybe I'm biased because I'm Scottish, but it's oh so pretty and just resonates with me. Just like Oblivion there are generic caves and dungeons as well as breathtaking ones, so that can be a draw.

I haven't played long enough for any voice acting to grate, but it supposedly has a ton more actors than Oblivion had and there hasn't been an obvious "We spent all our budget on Patrick Stewart for 5 minutes" moments, so I'm optimistic there.

Companions are well implemented into the world. Mercenaries hang about here and there offering their services for coin, you can befriend some people by doing them a favour or impressing them in some challenge so they'll join forces with you, or you can win them through others means - I got granted the position of Thane by the Jarl of the first big city and with the position came a Housecarl who I've had running around helping me bash heads since. She's been pretty sensible and helpful in combat, and if beaten she just gets KO'd for a bit so I don't have to babysit her - not that she's needed it.

I've only fought two dragons so there hasn't been time for them to get horrible like the Oblivion gates did, but they seem really cool. Other than the first plot-dragon you can see them flying around at a distance and when you get near them they'll start swooping down to breath fire on you or land for melee, and they make good use of terrain by landing on high rocks that are hard for you to reach so they can breathe fire with impunity (unless you're ranged specialised). So far they've been challenging and fun to fight (although I got horribly mauled by a sabertoothed tiger that objected to me dismissing it as a threat while I was battling my second dragon, so you have to be careful of other stuff at the same time!), and feel objectively more epic than wading through a red-tinted dungeon full of dudes to grab a doohickey. Not to mention you can't just kill dragons and get their power, you have to find the secret dragon-shouts hidden across the map to unlock that power... so I guess there is a dungeon-delving aspect as well, but the benefit is a lot more tangible than those oblivion stone things you could enchant stuff with.

Anyway, I hope all that's enough for you to decide one way or another, Brian. In short basically if you liked Oblivion you'll like this.