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Game Recommendation Thread
  • I thought it would be cool/useful to have a thread where we can post games we recommend. There are so many out there!

    This might be an unorthodox choice, but looking at my Steam library, the game I've played the most, by far, is Cities in Motion (147 hours)! It's a really beautiful game about building a transit city in various European cities.
  • Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days. I'll limit myself to two examples, but there's a lot of seemingly awful design decisions which make the game secretly brilliant. The guns, in the beginning, are mostly inaccurate and bullet spammy. Thankfully, there's a reckless abundance of ammo, meaning that you can recklessly spend ammo, leading to very chaotic and uncontrolled fights that often catch civilians in the crossfire; in the end, you're not always sure if they were actually civilians, or if it was you or the enemy who shot them. And, though several reviewers have noted the absence of "freak-out" scenes that were in the prior game, they failed to notice that these scenes weren't removed, but simply made more subtle, more difficult to notice, and more likely to momentarily turn the player into an amoral and self-centered murderer.

    Also, its multiplayer, if you actually manage to find someone to play with, is brief and chaotic and punchy, with lots of betrayal, roleplay, tension, and unpredictability. It's the Prisoner's Dilemna meets Neptune's Pride in 15 minute sessions.

    Advance Wars. It's a great pick-up-and-play multiplayer game, which is made all the better with its mobility on the DS/Gameboy, and the ability to make custom maps (I've had success making "tutorial" co-op missions that help a new player learn while still being a multiplayer experience)

    Project Reality: It's a Battlefield 2 mod that has a very, very strong co-op element. Expect lots of jokes and conversations that get cut off by sudden ambushes.
  • I'll give Advance Wars a shot! I bought a 3DS recently because I lost my mind, so I need some games for it. Right now I just have the latest Ace Attorney game and the Link to the Past sequel.
  • Wtf is a 3DS is that a pc upgrade
  • It's a handheld gaming system, Joel. Like a Game Boy. You know.
  • Man, I loved my Game Boy when I was a kid. Super Mario Land was the shit.
  • Sorry I was making a bad joke on a forum attached to a PC gaming site
  • I'm not sure if I should recommend getting "Days of Ruin" -which is the latest in the series- or Advance Wars 2, which I'm sure you can emulate on your phone, and probably buy off the DS's digital store. Days of Ruin has weird units that take a lot of explanation, but it's also prettier and comes with a more robust map editor (you can edit the computer's AI on a per-unit basis! You only get simple control like "attack" or "don't move", but that's still totally awesome).

    But, yeah, Advance Wars is solid at being a time waster -as all turn-based strategy games become when they end up on the DS- but it's definitely better at being a social game; just be sure to take a handicap with first-time players.

    Edit: Super Mario Land will always be the shit.
    Post edited by mwm at 2014-02-10 16:11:59
  • WII U WII U WII U WII U
  • Richard, those are exactly the noises my kids make when they're pretending to be sirens.
  • Hello! I was sent to this thread by Eric Brasure! I would like to recommend the Blood of the Where-Wolf to you!
  • 7 Grand Steps is now in the IndieCade themed Humble Sale (along with And Yet It Moves, what's up Gregg B?) it was one of the best games I played last year. If anyone wants my code-/I just bought the bundle an have an extra copy--lemme know!
  • 7 Grand Steps sound fun, but I've gotten to the point where I'm not sure I want to spend $6 on more games, because I just can't find the enthusiasm. :/
    Post edited by JonasKyratzes at 2014-02-14 01:07:13
  • I hear a lot of twines are gonna be released in less than 12 hours.
  • Twines are pretentious.
  • Oh hell yes they are.
  • Hahaha. I just looked up my most-played games on Steam:

    1 - Fallout New Vegas, 130 hours
    2 - Civ 5, 127 hours
    3 - Skyrim, 77 hours
    4 - XCOM (nu), 68 hours
    5 - Call of Pripyat, 42 hours

    I would recommend all of those, except probably Skyrim, and I'd have Things to Mention about New Vegas and Civ 5 too.

    Anyone else never played I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream before? Doing little sessions in lunch times. It's interesting. And when Harlan Ellison narrates I get to imagine him frothing at his keyboard because someone told him public groping is a no-no.
  • I really wish there was something modern in the spirit of Master of Orion II, but I've yet to find a game that can match it in that genre. They're all too streamlined these days, and too focused on war. I just want to build colonies in outer space.
  • I tend to play the Greeks and go for cultural victory, mainly because it seems funny.

    It's weird. I love strategy games. Many of my favourite games (Master of Orion, Master of Magic, X-Com Apocalypse) are strategy games. But almost all modern strategy games leave me cold, and I enjoy casual games more than supposedly "hardcore" strategy games.
  • I played Master of Orion 3 once.
  • Master of Orion 3 is an abomination that has nothing in common with the previous games. MOO2 is my favourite; I haven't played MOO1 as much, though I often mean to. MOO2 is smooth, has a very nice interface, plenty of complexity, great music... it's just a really polished, well-made game.
  • My favorite part of Master of Orion 3 was where you saved the file and sent it to your boss and they presented it at the big meeting.

    I'm saying it was a MOTHERFUCKING SPREADSHEET.

    I bought it at Five Below for five.
  • I actually found Civ5 more conducive to a peaceful playstyle than Civ4, if only because the AI isn't very good with the hex layout and can therefore be easily beaten with an inferior army. I.e. I can focus on building up my cities. War is declared on me a lot, but I can deal with it easily enough. In Civ4 the same approach led to annihilation. Also, I hated the stacks of doom. But in many ways Civ4 is the better game, and I sank a lot of hours into that too.

    MOO2 is the best of the series. Jonas, you may enjoy Endless Space. I've only played a little of it so far but it was a mostly peaceful experience, bar a few pirates. I think I was lucky enough to have friendly/pacifistic opponents in my game, though. I also have to give a little shout-out to GalCiv2 with expansions, as although it's flawed it's a wonderfully broad and deep game. AR's Walker assures me that the second expansion addresses my main criticism - a lack of story and flavour - through the introduction of random and galactic events.
  • I'm quite enjoying Banished. It's a pretty simple city builder, but it was made by one person and it's pretty challenging. Well worth the 20 bucks.
  • I'm playing Kingdoms of Amalur. I'd heard so many negative things about it, and dismissed it as essentially being a single-player MMO, but it's actually quite pleasant. Not brilliant, but a much better RPG than Skyrim. It's open, it's huge, there's plenty to do, the combat is fun, the graphics are very pretty, and the voice acting is consistent, if not brilliant. I'm enjoying it.
  • I enjoyed a lot about Amalur, and it's almost universally regarded as a great shame that the studio folded after its release--many of the problems are considered to be missteps from a new team, and Amalur II is a mythical game that would have been more confident, better. I really loved how the game encourages respeccing--by the time you hit the level cap, you can max out only one of the Mage/thief/fighter type classes, or you can balance it out however you want--and there's a shop in most towns that lets you respec all your skills. There's no penalty for thinking a useless skill is interesting, and it encourages interesting and experimental builds. And yeah, it's super pretty, and I love that there's monsters. A thing I hated about skyrim was in every single dungeon you're fighting either generic bandits or the same basic, uninteresting creatures--or fucking wildlife.

    (That's a theme I wanted to put into TWEEZER but couldn't quite do: You are, in a large portion of Skyrim, going into wild animals' homes and slaughtering them for no reason.)

    What I didn't love about Amalur was, like so many Games These Days, is that there isn't really any sense of level design. It's so large--I saw maybe a quarter of the game before running out of steam, and that was a good 40-50 hours, and every dungeon and outdoor area was so samey.

    Right now I'm playing Might and Magic vi--I skipped ahead some (II isn't quite as good as I, the dungeons aren't as interesting, and I needed a break.) It's wonderful because all of the outdoor areas and the dungeons are all distinct. The dungeons in particular are wonderful. One of the interesting things that taking into full 3d and getting out of the grid is that a lot of the dungeons end up becoming a lot larger and more sprawling than they first appear because the boundaries aren't as strict.

    More than anything that's what I am loving about the might and magic series--this sense that you are charting and exploring a land at your own pace. For all of the quests so far I know what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, where I'm doing it, and who I'm doing it for. And I really like how each "generation" of the franchise changes things a lot but it's still the same underlying game underneath.

    Seriously I'm going to get SOMEONE to play a Might and Magic game with me someday.
    Post edited by rgoodness at 2014-03-05 02:28:21
  • Might & Magic VI is brilliant. I've played it to completion three whole times. VII is also a lot of fun (and has some great ideas), though I prefer Enroth to Erathia as a setting.

    Silly as the graphics may be, once you've played these games, modern RPGs look very limiting.
  • I love the mid-90s goofiness to it a lot actually! It gives a charm to it that excuses a lot--this weird blend of sprites and rotoscoping and 3d and photographs of people in awful costumes making funny faces--it ends up becoming extremely campy in a way. I was a kid in this era, even though I didn't play mmvi when it came out, and so there's a degree where this is as much nostalgia as pixel art--and why don't we have indie games where the developer's friends all act poorly in front of a green screen, that can't be hard to make these days.
  • I played it when it came out. I remember thinking the graphics were too goofy, but then I got used to them, and now I'm kind of fond of them.

    In a way, the game seems innocent, driven by enthusiasm for RPGs.
  • I still have fond memories of the advisors in CivII.
  • I read a post about Civ and how Ghandi apparently goes for nuclear war the second he can. This, it turned out, was due to a bug in the original Civilization, where his "aggression" score was set at 0, but any event which would lower the aggression would, because of the way the game was coded, loop the variable to the maximum of 255 and increase his aggression to much more than any other character possible. And then they kept that as a sort of in-joke!

    Bet you didn't know THAT!
  • So... The Indians are a real-world analog to the Ilwrath? Awesome.
  • We call them "Native Americans" now.
  • Lords of Thunder. You can play it on the Wii/Wii U Virtual Console (or I guess you could emulate it). It's a TurboGrafx16 horizontal shooter. To be honest, I prefer vertical shooters because they create a better illusion of flight, but Lords of Thunder takes the ship out of the equation -- you're a guy who wears magical armor (you can choose from four types). The game is extremely nerdy, and its soundtrack brings to mind 1980s hair, thrash, and progressive metal. The gameplay is super intense. You're carving out space with projectiles and sometimes, when things get up close and personal, your sword. You have to balance staying out of harm's way and flying into harm's way to pick up jewels that let you buy health, different power ups, and extra continues. It almost feels like a shooter within an RPG world.
  • I beat Might and Magic VI last night. The pacing is odd--the initial arc is very long but satisfyingly so, then you're put through some fetch quests that aren't quite tedious because the dungeons are wonderful but that part of the mid game feels like it goes on for longer than it should, and then the last two dungeons pass REALLY quickly and then the game is over. It was wonderful and I would say it's not a bad introduction to the series--in fact it might even be a great one because it's fairly player-friendly.

    I've now begun MMIX, which is one of the black sheeps of the series--THE black sheep, really. It was said to be released in a "pre-alpha state" by one of the people who worked on it--there wasn't time and money to do it properly. It's a little heartbreaking-- you can see a wonderful game underneath there. It's going to be interesting to go through. Then I suppose I gotta double back, finish II, and then go from there!
  • Amalur is definitely getting to that Oblivion-esque point of "too many quests!" I think games like these would benefit from having a much larger percentage of quests show up as result of advancing the main plot. It would make the world feel more alive, too. You'd still need the same number of resources, but you'd space out the quests in a more interesting way.
  • I am enjoying Waking Mars a *lot*.
  • I have a copy of this! I've had it a loooong time as with many games. *sigh* Just like SpaceChem!
  • Waking mars is awesome! I never beat it though. Some day.
  • I just did. It's not that hard! I wish the ending was a little longer and more detailed, but I had a very good time overall. (Took me 8 hours, and I was quite thorough.)
  • 8 hours is a perfect length for this kind of game! Not too long, not too short, could probably beat in 6 if you rush!
  • Has anyone played The Last Federation?
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