What Game Are You Currently Playing?

[Foxbat]

I was really struggling with Wasteland 2 so I did a bit of nosing around and found out that I could hack the game save files (XML format). Gave myself a load of med-packs and it helped a bit. I know it's cheating but I still feel like finding a way (just like Kirk did with the the Kobayashi Maru) should earn me some brownie points.

Incidentally, for anybody that's interested, this hack won't work with Libre Office (and maybe Word...I'm not sure). It does something to the file that makes it unusable to the game. I found the best thing to use was Notepad. Look for the item (usually identified in the string as 'Item Data')you want to modify and scroll along until you see quantity<1> and just change the number, save and exit. It's quite laborious because there's a lot of stuff in the file but near the end of the file are your characters and their inventories.

 

[Toby Frost]

I played Knights of the Old Republic 2 again. So far, it's not quite as much fun as the first game, and it seems determined to prevent me from getting hold of my spaceship and flying between planets, which was one of the great appeals of the first KOTOR. But it's still pretty entertaining. I don't think it's quite got going yet.

 

[Rodders]

Going to give Metro 2033 another go. I enjoyed what i played, but stopped and never fancied to pick it up again.



Also, a game called Redfall came on Steam. An open world first person shooter in which you're trapped on an island, under siege from Vampires. Jury's out for me, but it sounds like it could be a lot of fun.



Has anyone heard of this?

 

[Toby Frost]

Knights of the Old Republic 2 is far, far harder than the previous game, for no good reason. It's approaching the point of being unenjoyable, when I'll just give up. Life's too short etc.

 

[Foxbat]

Knights of the Old Republic 2 is far, far harder than the previous game, for no good reason. It's approaching the point of being unenjoyable, when I'll just give up. Life's too short etc.

I'm about at that point with Wasteland 2.

I bought Rebel Galaxy yesterday from GOG for only £1.49. It seems to have generated a fairly positive critical response from players so I might give that a try instead.

 

[Toby Frost]

I quite liked Rebel Galaxy. I think some might find it a bit simplistic, but it does the whole space-trading thing without you having to read a Bible-sized manual first. Putting big guns on your spaceship is fun.

I finished the Dark Brotherhood story in Oblivion. It's very good, and is the nastiest thing I've encountered in the game, including the trips to Hell. Oblivion always has a slightly comfortable feel to me, but the Dark Brotherhood quests get genuinely sinister.

 

[.matthew.]

I finally bought Starsector. Figure I'll get a few days out of it, but despite how deep it is, it somehow feels a little shallow. That might just be me not understanding all the mechanics yet, so fingers crossed.

Either way, spaceships, battles, fleets, trading, etc. Doesn't hurt that it looks pretty nice too.

 

[Foxbat]

Has anybody tried Rimworld? Thinking of buying. I get the impression that it might be a bit like Dwarf Fortress but I’ve never played either so might be wrong.

 

[.matthew.]

Has anybody tried Rimworld? Thinking of buying. I get the impression that it might be a bit like Dwarf Fortress but I’ve never played either so might be wrong.

Join the dark side!

You can think of it like Dwarf Fortress on a smaller scale and with more character development.

Possibly my favourite game of all time. The base game has a lot to offer, so you don't need the expansions to enjoy it, but there are a lot of mods (the game is designed to be easily moddable) that make it even better.

If you decide to jump in, let me know and I'll make up a little list of essentials for you.

 

[Rodders]

I'mat a bit of a loose end when it comes to games and have no interest. I struggled to get into Metro 2033 and have now re-loaded Red Dead: Redemption 2.

I'll get the Dead Space re-released on pay day.

 

[Toby Frost]

I've loaded up Mass Effect 2 again. It's got a feeling of sleek competence: it's all rather dour but it's very polished and slick.

 

[Foxbat]

I've finally given up on Wasteland 2. It's just too difficult (and I'm playing it on the easiest level). I'm about hitting 100 hit points with my characters and I'm up against killer robots with 500 hit points. They also seem to have a huge number of action points. My tactic was to hit them from long range with snipers but, one turn later, they've marched across the whole range of my sniper rifles and are up close and personal slicing and dicing.

The makers of this game need to understand how to make something challenging on different difficulty levels without using it as a crutch just to prolong the game. It's no fun being constantly overwhelmed. I definitely won't be buying Wasteland 3. Instead, I'm firing up Shadowrun Returns.

 

[Toby Frost]

I'm replaying Mass Effect 2. It's very good, with a well thought-out setting and lots of things to see and do. The missions, characters and overall story are interesting. Under the command of the mysterious - if uninspiringly named - Elusive Man, Commander Shepherd must stop an alien threat, whilst killing or flirting with every living creature she meets along the way. It's got a kind of sci-fi slickness that works really well.

But there's something slightly uninspiring about it all. Part of it's the combat (shooting over chest-high walls), and some of the dull obligations (scanning random planets for sellable minerals). There's also a po-faced quality to it. Shepherd talks like a cop from a 1950s drama ("Just the facts, ma'am"), and there's much less humour than you'd get from a lot of similar games. Which is a shame because when it decides to be amusing, it is quite good. My main objective is to get the insect-man to sing Gilbert and Sullivan.

 

[Foxbat]

Finally took the plunge and bought Rimworld. I think I’ll be pottering around a number of times with the tutorial before I jump in with both feet. I laughed almost immediately when I started the tutorial for the first time, One of my characters was a woman who liked to torture people and I thought ‘this could be interesting’

 

[.matthew.]

@Foxbat I'd check out Francis John on YouTube for some great starter guides. He'll definitely help you make the most of the game and avoid some initial frustration.

Then again, sometimes, losing is fun.

 

[Foxbat]

Will check him out very soon.

 

[.matthew.]

And definitely don't be afraid of modding. I know some people consider it 'cheating' and some mods do mess with the balance, but there are a hell of a lot of UI/QoL mods available that I just couldn't play without.

Assuming you've bought it from GoG (or even if you are using Steam), I'd recommend downloading RimPy. It's basically a mod sorter application that auto-resolves conflicts, but for GoG users, it has a tab labelled 'Downloader' that lets you search the Steam Workshop and download the mod for GoG.

I'd recommend the following basic mods that don't change game balance to start with;

• BetterInfoCard --- Basically allows multiple windows to open to help compare stats - very useful, especially before you know what everything does.
• Achtung! --- AMAZINGLY ESSENTIAL! Adds things like drag lines/formation movement for combat, and MOST importantly, gives a little Force Work '!' option to tell your pawns to do the damn job you've told them to, basically until they have a breakdown, which is INSANELY useful.
• Allow Tool --- Adds Haul Urgently to the options to quickly prioritise hauling things you want moving quickly. Requires HugsLib dependency.
• Pharmacist --- Removes the need to micromanage every scratch, and preserves your valuable better medicine for serious injuries.
• RimHUD --- Vastly improves the info you see when clicking on pawns without having to dig through menus, very customisable.
• Work Tab --- Improves the work tab, making it easier to set up what your pawns do on their own.
• Quick Stockpile Creation --- So so so good. Lets you make a stockpile for a specific thing without having to mess around with storage settings on new ones.

And these are a couple of more cosmetic mods that I couldn't live without;

• Wall Light --- Stupid but so damn good. Default lighting in Rimworld is just lamps, and this adds wall-mounted lights.
• Underground Power Conduits --- Personally I just hate how the cables are visible, this adds some that are invisible, and this doesn't affect balance in any way.

There are literally hundreds more - my mod list is 248 at the moment - but I don't want to totally overwhelm you...

But yea, if you're interested in modding but can't figure it out for whatever reason, feel free to let me know and I can put together a little mod pack that includes the main ones and send it to you to stick in the mod folder.

 

[Foxbat]

So far I'm unimpressed with Rimworld. It has so many faults. For instance, I wanted to build up a stockpile of food and, although I had a rice patch up and growing it was going to take a while before harvesting. In the meantime, I thought I'd send one of my crew out hunting. So far so good. He managed to shoot a wild boar (after wounding it several times so it went around squealing in agony). But, try as I might, I couldn't find a way to get him to take it back with him to the camp and use for food. Silly me! Why didn't I realise that before I could take the meat I needed to build a butcher's table? Not only that, after building it I find that it's not the hunter that walks miles to retrieve the meat but the cook. The worst thing was that I couldn't find this through the game or tutorial (there is no manual as usual). I had to go on the internet to find the answer.

This absolutely infuriates me. I don't understand game creators who seem to think they can throw a game out there and expect people to just suck it up. Not good enough! If you're going to make a game, tell me the rules or don't bother expecting me to pay money for it. And saying 'oh but it's a small independent creator, they don't have the resources' just doesn't wash. I paid full price (almost £30) and I expect better than this.

It just doesn't make any sense and if it's mostly of this kind of illogical logic then I can't see me sticking with it.

 

[Foxbat]

Rimworld update: Just lost my whole crew when trying to hunt a megasloth for some badly needed food supplies. The wounded and irate animal went on a rampage. Not exactly a horror tale of Alien proportions but the result was the same.

 

[Toby Frost]

He managed to shoot a wild boar (after wounding it several times so it went around squealing in agony). But, try as I might, I couldn't find a way to get him to take it back with him to the camp and use for food. Silly me! Why didn't I realise that before I could take the meat I needed to build a butcher's table? Not only that, after building it I find that it's not the hunter that walks miles to retrieve the meat but the cook.

This basically sums up my experience with No Man's Sky, a crafting game thinly disguised as a space exploring game. Very frustrating.

I've been playing a bit more of The Last of Us, which is still entertaining. When Joel murders someone - which happens often, usually by beating them with a length of 2 by 4 - Ellie quite often exclaims something like "Oh, man! You really messed him up!". I'm not sure if she's impressed or horrified, but it always amuses me. In a game like this, I expect it was very deliberately placed to ease the tension.