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Whatcha Playing?

#41
May Cassidy said:
Lately I've been playing a bunch of Half Life and Portal. I've played either series enough that I'm looking at the commentary now.
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I got Half Life when it came out in the 90's, it was a complete game changer for everything. The way it went through the chapters from the lab to Xen and beyond was nothing I'd ever seen before it just totally redefined gaming. Even the opening scene where you went through Black Mesa on the monorail passing places (you didn't know you'd visit later in the game) was a masterpiece - though in the first playthrough you wouldn't know you were going to be there, subsequent playthroughs you'd chuckle to yourself when you went on the monorail journey.
Voice acting further immersed you in the game, the actor playing G-Man was peerless, the broken inconsistency of 'his' speech further added to the sense of foreboding. I still don't know whether he was the good guy or the bad guy.
Half life 2 gave us the Vornigaunts having the collars round their necks controlling them by turning them from enemies to friends when they found a way to break free, on a couple of occasions they saved the lives of Gordon and his friends, another nice touch in the HL lore I reckon.

Portal - What an excellent game, so much humour with the autoturrets getting so depressed when they can't kill you.

Never to this day will I understand why the mythical Half Life 3 wasn't developed, unless they were worried it would become a franchise that would lose quality as we've seen with so many other games.😕
 
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#43
TeeSee said:
Never to this day will I understand why the mythical Half Life 3 wasn't developed,
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I agree with every point about half life being a game changer. There are pretty solid rumors that 3 currently is in development at Valve.

Valve tends to wait for the tech to evolve in a way that supports new gameplay before they launch a sequel. HL 2 was one of the first titles to use GPU physics as gameplay. Half-Life: Alyx was a vr title.

Since HL2 , GPU tech has evolved ray tracing, geometry shaders and “compute” shaders. I’d be curious to see what Valve can do with this.
 
#44
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#46
I'm not much of a gamer, but my wife, son, and one of my grandsons is. I used to be really into RPGs, but I just don't have the time and energy to play them.

My wife and I play Words with Friends, and board games and cards.

We play chess quite a bit, and also Tiến lên, also known as VC.

I will occasionally play a classic arcade game like Galaga or Space Invaders, or Mattel Football or Basketball handhelds.
 
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#53
What very little free time I have that can be spent on video games, I usually go to Horizon Forbidden West. I think I'm on my third play through.

As far as board games, my wife and I like to do a game night about once a month and it's usually chess with my nice carved set or a classic like Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit.
 
#55
Safe to say I'm an avid gamer as my current desktop shows

Desktop.JPG


I'm such a gamer nerd i enjoy creating tools to assist in making characters and such. Take this Knights of the Old Republic character sheet. Yeah ....

KOTOR 1 Arishem.JPG


Someone mentioned the need to get Fallout New Vegas. I HIGHLY suggest they do. I think it is the best of the franchise even with it's bugs. I've created a character builder for that too :D

Just lately I've been retro gaming a lot. City of Heroes : Homecoming is now endorsed by it's creators and is fully legal and legit, with a fantastic community of mostly Gen X players and very active GMs and content creators.

Today the wife came into my man-cave, game room, practice space and remarked "WOW! I haven't seen you play that since before our youngest was born!" I was on a first gen XBox playing FlatOut Ultimate Carnage :D
 
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#58
mambo4 said:
That’s cool! His does your tool get the data into the game? Is it spitting out xml or something?
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Nothing as advanced as that. Simply character building tools done in excel with drop down menus and calculations pulled from the known data within the game itself.

For instance my Fallout New Vegas character planner was done in this manner with a printable(!) page so you could have a hard copy at hand whilst you played.

FONV pg1.JPG

FONV pg2.JPG

FONV pg3.JPG
 
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#59
Well, if we're doing board games... I've got a (usually) weekly board game night with a few buddies. We play all sorts of games, but not usually ones people have heard of. My favorite designer is Friedemann Friese. I've probably got 50 or so of his games. I had some time recently, so we've been getting some new ones to the table - and all of them are Friese games! This weekend we played FTW! (a relatively short card game) and Power Grid: Outpost (a longer economy building sort of game). Both were great for their genres.

Tuesdays are our usual nights, so tonight we'll be playing Findorff, to which I have a connection. Friedemann Friese is from the town of Bremen, Germany, which happens to be where I also studied abroad. (If only I knew of him and his games when I was there!) Findorff is a historical game where you are building the Findorff section of the town of Bremen throughout the 1800's to the early 1900s. You build the various historical buildings and connect the area to Hamburg. Sounds rather dry, but as with all of his games, I'm sure the mechanics will be great and it should be a fun game. Every one of his games I've played has been entertaining, and they range in tone from silly fun games to incredibly serious economic engine building, so I see no reason why this wouldn't be likewise.
 

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