DosFreak wrote on 2025-02-16, 23:29:

Stalker 2. Play it.

I would if I could! I've been playing the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games for 10 months now. I started with the first one, Shadow of Chernobyl, in May 2024 and i've been slowly progressing through all of the games. I really like all of them! If I should pick a favorite I'd say Call of Pripyat. I think it combines the best elements of the previous games and is tons of fun. Too bad it feels so short. That's why I started playing the Call of Chernobyl mod (with the DoctorX questlines). I just started it a week ago, but it's been good so far.

Finished Thief (2014). The last couple of levels were a bit larger than the rest, especially the Baron's mansion. That was a well designed location, with a cool secret area which could be discovered by reading letters/diaries and overhearing certain conversations. What I didn't like was that this mission eventually forced you into a "cinematic" escape sequence, while everything was blowing up around you, which was clearly inspired by Tomb Raider (2013). In my view, that stuff doesn't belong in a stealth game.

Similarly unfitting was the encounter with a certain bad guy during the penultimate mission. It reminded me of the crappy Deus Ex: Human Revolution boss fights, since it was just as poorly designed. Technically, you can stealth through it, but that's more trouble than it's worth. To the Eidos Montreal devs: performing complex activities like lockpicking (or hacking in DX:HR) while under attack is *not* a fun stealth experience. Also, it's kinda weird that the bad guy could take multiple exploding arrows to the face, being a normal human and all. At least the bullet sponge DX:HR bosses had the flimsy justification of being augmented.

Anyway, the final mission and the ending were pretty underwhelming. The story went all over the place, and left many things unclear. Maybe the developers were trying to set up a sequel which never materialized, or something like that. After the credits roll, you are returned to Garrett's home and can continue playing. From what I gather, you can revisit all the previous missions that way, to collect any unique loot items that you may have missed.

Final thoughts. On its own, Thief (2014) is an ok stealth game. Not great, but still fairly serviceable. I played it for a week, and never felt the urge to drop it due to boredom or frustration, like some other games. On the flip side, it didn't exactly "wow" me either, nor did it leave me craving for more. The few interesting design elements were not enough to offset its overall mediocrity. Worth getting on a discount, I guess.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-02-18, 08:12:

Final thoughts. On its own, Thief (2014) is an ok stealth game. Not great, but still fairly serviceable. I played it for a week, and never felt the urge to drop it due to boredom or frustration, like some other games. On the flip side, it didn't exactly "wow" me either, nor did it leave me craving for more. The few interesting design elements were not enough to offset its overall mediocrity. Worth getting on a discount, I guess.

Alright, thanks for your review!

While I suppose it's good to know it's not a complete train wreck I think I'll probably still end up skipping it no matter how steep discount it gets. I do believe you mentioned the original trilogy gets a satisfying ending in the third game and I do value good endings quite a bit. Meanwhile the pile of franchises that used to be good that got diluted by mediocre and outright horrible follow-ups is starting to dwarf mount everest and I'm getting pretty tired of that.

Sombrero wrote on 2025-02-18, 09:22:

Alright, thanks for your review!

While I suppose it's good to know it's not a complete train wreck I think I'll probably still end up skipping it no matter how steep discount it gets. I do believe you mentioned the original trilogy gets a satisfying ending in the third game and I do value good endings quite a bit.

Cheers! And yeah, Thief 3 provides the perfect ending for Garrett's story. It does leave the door slightly open for a proper sequel, but all of the main plot points get fully resolved.

By the way, based on some documents and locations that you find in-game, and reading up on the lore via the relevant wiki pages, it looks like Thief (2014) takes place in the same world as the previous games, only a few hundred years into the future. So that Garrett is a completely different guy, he just happens to have the same name. This doesn't really help the game and its meandering plot, I just thought I'd mention it.

Fallout 3 - Game of the Year Edition
I've finally completed this one after years of attempts. I always found the game to be somewhat dreary and dull, and would usually lose steam 5-10 hours in, but soldiered on this time and was finally able to complete it along with the Broken Steel DLC. I ended up reaching level 20 of 30 with a character focusing on small guns.

The game became enjoyable once I finally got into the groove of developing my character, but the game has a lot of problems. Even though I tried to play the game as its own thing rather than a sequel to the previous two games, I ended up disappointed. Combat is a mess, the writing is poor, and quests are extremely simple and usually just have one or two solutions. Even the massive open world, which seems impressive at first, ends up disappointing since most of it consists of what would basically be "dungeons" in any other RPG. Dungeon crawling can be fun, but you need interesting encounters and cool loot for that to work, and Fallout 3 really doesn't have either, since everything is scaled to your level (though not to the awful extent of Oblivion).

Finally, the tone of the game is so different from the previous games that it's hard to consider Fallout 3 as an actual sequel to those games. That's neither good nor bad, but as a fan of the darker tone of Fallout (1997), it's very bizarre at the end of the Broken Steel DLC to be storming a base with your badass marine bros like something out of a Call of Duty game.

newtmonkey wrote on 2025-02-22, 02:49:

Fallout 3 - Game of the Year Edition (PC)

... I ended up disappointed. Combat is a mess, the writing is poor, and quests are extremely simple and usually just have one or two solutions. Even the massive open world, which seems impressive at first, ends up disappointing since most of it consists of what would basically be "dungeons" in any other RPG. Dungeon crawling can be fun, but you need interesting encounters and cool loot for that to work, and Fallout 3 really doesn't have either, since everything is scaled to your level (though not to the awful extent of Oblivion).

Finally, the tone of the game is so different from the previous games that it's hard to consider Fallout 3 as an actual sequel to those games. That's neither good nor bad, but as a fan of the darker tone of Fallout (1997), it's very bizarre at the end of the Broken Steel DLC to be storming a base with your badass marine bros like something out of a Call of Duty game.

I think fallout 3 appeals when the player likes the environment, characters and tone. I did. I agree regarding combat but i liked the quests, especially side quests, though would agree that they are often simple. The locations were good in my opinion, managing just enough variation - a notable improvement on oblivion where repetition of a few 'types' was more obvious. perhaps it just made more sense, subway stations would be alike after all.

While i enjoyed the encounters and tone of places like megaton and rivet city its necessary to do a lot of suspension of disbelief even within the setting, e.g. some small communities (of sometimes as little as 2 people!) in reality would not last. Also the world is "pristine" in the sense that, over the many decades, apparently no one took (everlasting!) food from dispensers in the subway or from hotel corridors - in fact no one touched anything much it seems! I didn't mind though, it was very much a game world and an interesting one.

i don't like level scaling of enemies either, it feels artificial. in fallout it also means that in later levels you may randomly conjure up a giant scorpion encounter suited to your level, but way overpowered for the group of NPCs you can see and wanted to talk, who are promptly wiped out without immediate rescue

I didn't find the DLCs all that great, there were some good parts - the slave one with its interesting end choice and the fun central character & plot in point lookout - but on the whole they're just ok

I've started to dabble with RollerCoaster Tycoon for the first time ever and thank goodness for that, had someone introduced me to this as a kid it would have been like giving a bag of coke to a recovering addict! I had 30min time to kill before I had to do something, hour and 15min later...

I have absolutely no idea what I am doing though but I'm not letting that get on my way, roller coasters and outrageous prices seem to be doing the trick.

gerry wrote on 2025-02-24, 10:37:

I think fallout 3 appeals when the player likes the environment, characters and tone. I did. I agree regarding combat but i l […]
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I think fallout 3 appeals when the player likes the environment, characters and tone. I did. I agree regarding combat but i liked the quests, especially side quests, though would agree that they are often simple. The locations were good in my opinion, managing just enough variation - a notable improvement on oblivion where repetition of a few 'types' was more obvious. perhaps it just made more sense, subway stations would be alike after all.

While i enjoyed the encounters and tone of places like megaton and rivet city its necessary to do a lot of suspension of disbelief even within the setting, e.g. some small communities (of sometimes as little as 2 people!) in reality would not last. Also the world is "pristine" in the sense that, over the many decades, apparently no one took (everlasting!) food from dispensers in the subway or from hotel corridors - in fact no one touched anything much it seems! I didn't mind though, it was very much a game world and an interesting one.

i don't like level scaling of enemies either, it feels artificial. in fallout it also means that in later levels you may randomly conjure up a giant scorpion encounter suited to your level, but way overpowered for the group of NPCs you can see and wanted to talk, who are promptly wiped out without immediate rescue

I didn't find the DLCs all that great, there were some good parts - the slave one with its interesting end choice and the fun central character & plot in point lookout - but on the whole they're just ok

Thanks for posting your thoughts! Those are some good points about some of the weird stuff in the game. I'm usually able to look that stuff over, but it just got worse and worse for me as the game went on. It feels like the game takes place a couple of weeks after the bombs fell, not 200 years later!

There were some good locations and quests (like you mentioned, some of the side quests are really good; several of them are better than anything in the main quest line imo), and I do have to praise Bethesda for releasing an actual RPG with a massive open world and multiple solutions to quests back in 2008, when it seemed like the RPG genre was mostly action games with stats or linear story-focused games.

Sombrero wrote on 2025-02-24, 15:21:

I've started to dabble with RollerCoaster Tycoon for the first time ever and thank goodness for that, had someone introduced me to this as a kid it would have been like giving a bag of coke to a recovering addict! I had 30min time to kill before I had to do something, hour and 15min later...

I have absolutely no idea what I am doing though but I'm not letting that get on my way, roller coasters and outrageous prices seem to be doing the trick.

It's also absolutely amazing how that game was written in assembly language. 🤯

digger wrote on 2025-02-24, 16:05:

It's also absolutely amazing how that game was written in assembly language. 🤯

Since all my knowledge and understanding of coding stems basically from hello world I'll just go ahead and assume that's a considerable feat 😁

Fallout: New Vegas
After completing Fallout 3, I figured I'd just start this game up, create a character, play for an hour or so just to compare, and then play something else... but I ended up liking the game so much that I couldn't stop playing!

What a pleasant surprise, and a huge step up from the disappointing Fallout 3! It makes some very sensible changes to the broken combat and leveling of Fallout 3, but more importantly has much better writing (both world/quest design and dialog). It's still weird and kind of corny, but at least some attempt was made at showing civilization clawing its way out of the rubble 200 years after global nuclear war, with settlements that actually look somewhat pleasant to live in and some basic forms of government (or at least some kind of law and order) getting established. Individual locations are far more memorable than the copy-pasted "dungeons" of Fallout 3, which makes exploration much more enjoyable, too.

I think my only complaint so far is that I've run into the annoying "infinite loading" bug many times already. I've tried all the fixes I could find, but nothing solves the problem. There is a workaround that's kind of annoying (start a new game, skip the opening cinema, and then access the menu to load your game), but it works 100% of the time and once you've done it you can play the game and save/load as much as you want without worrying about the bug happening again (until you actually exit the game anyway).

newtmonkey wrote on 2025-02-25, 03:15:

Fallout: New Vegas After completing Fallout 3, I figured I'd just start this game up, create a character, play for an hour or so […]
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Fallout: New Vegas
After completing Fallout 3, I figured I'd just start this game up, create a character, play for an hour or so just to compare, and then play something else... but I ended up liking the game so much that I couldn't stop playing!

What a pleasant surprise, and a huge step up from the disappointing Fallout 3! It makes some very sensible changes to the broken combat and leveling of Fallout 3, but more importantly has much better writing (both world/quest design and dialog). It's still weird and kind of corny, but at least some attempt was made at showing civilization clawing its way out of the rubble 200 years after global nuclear war, with settlements that actually look somewhat pleasant to live in and some basic forms of government (or at least some kind of law and order) getting established. Individual locations are far more memorable than the copy-pasted "dungeons" of Fallout 3, which makes exploration much more enjoyable, too.

I think my only complaint so far is that I've run into the annoying "infinite loading" bug many times already. I've tried all the fixes I could find, but nothing solves the problem. There is a workaround that's kind of annoying (start a new game, skip the opening cinema, and then access the menu to load your game), but it works 100% of the time and once you've done it you can play the game and save/load as much as you want without worrying about the bug happening again (until you actually exit the game anyway).

New Vegas is a seriously fun game. You should really give the mod Tale of two Wastelands a check. It's a big mod that more or less combines Fallout 3 and New Vegas into one big game and adds a ton of new areas and quest lines. It's worth looking into.

newtmonkey wrote on 2025-02-25, 03:15:

Fallout: New Vegas
After completing Fallout 3, I figured I'd just start this game up, create a character, play for an hour or so just to compare, and then play something else... but I ended up liking the game so much that I couldn't stop playing!

I'm glad you are liking it, while I dropped Fallout 3 maybe around half way through and never went back New Vegas on the other hand easily became one of my favorites of 2010's and I've replayed it several times. The engine is aging like milk and the DLC are pretty mediocre but otherwise it's great.

Especially if you tweak and mod things to your liking, hardcore mode + JSawyer Ultimate Edition + few other mods and personal tweaks are how I roll.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2025-02-25, 03:40:

New Vegas is a seriously fun game. You should really give the mod Tale of two Wastelands a check. It's a big mod that more or less combines Fallout 3 and New Vegas into one big game and adds a ton of new areas and quest lines. It's worth looking into.

Thanks for mentioning that! I'll give that a look if I ever decide to replay both games.

Sombrero wrote on 2025-02-25, 08:06:

I'm glad you are liking it, while I dropped Fallout 3 maybe around half way through and never went back New Vegas on the other hand easily became one of my favorites of 2010's and I've replayed it several times. The engine is aging like milk and the DLC are pretty mediocre but otherwise it's great.

Especially if you tweak and mod things to your liking, hardcore mode + JSawyer Ultimate Edition + few other mods and personal tweaks are how I roll.

Yeah, I've read that the DLC is not great. I'm actually playing the game with all the DLC disabled for now.
Thanks for mentioning the JSawyer mod, I'll have to give that a shot if I ever replay this one.

During last weeks I am playing SimCity 4 DeLuxe on IBM ThinkPad T42(Windows XP),I used Ursula K.LeGuin's planet Gethen(from the book The Left Hand of Darkness) for the Region map,I am building the cities mentioned in the book to match the description & location on the map,but set about a century after the end of the book's plot,thus I may expand suburbs or add new settlements in areas,which was empty "100 years ago",but letting development be consistent with the nature of fictive nations from the book,it is 1st time,I have several countries & thus borders on the SimCity region map...Karhide almost done...

Mass Effect
Another game I've tried to get through many times over the years. My first attempt was the (sort of broken?) port to the PS3, which was released after Mass Effect 2 if I remember correctly. Maybe even after Mass Effect 3. At any rate, I had completed its two sequels (on PS3) before playing it, and I had a lot of trouble getting into it, mostly due to how poor the port was. I then got the PC version and tried playing that a couple of times, but lost interest for various reasons.

I did get pretty far last time, though, but didn't like how I had built my character, so I decided to start over and put an hour or so into the game.

First, I have to praise the soundtrack. It's amazing, and especially that sinister synth-heavy track that plays during character creation. It really gives the game a completely different atmosphere compared with its sequels. I also think that the graphics have aged really well, though of course there's some awkward animation and stuff.

What I don't like is that you're the chosen one destined to lead the entire galaxy against the evil aliens/monsters. This is something Bioware really leaned on from this point onward (Dragon Age: Inquisition is even worse in this respect), and it annoys me. There is always some degree of wish fulfillment and power fantasy in any video game, but it's one thing to be some guy who just happens to save the world through skill and luck, and another to be a superhero with every single character in the game fawning over you. It's sort of embarrassing.

Mass Effect does at least give you the option to be a total psycho (Dragon Age: Inquisition would go on to soften this option to just be sarcastic and/or mean). It's fun to run around pulling your gun on people trying to get an extra credit or two out of them, in a game where you are clearly meant to be Space Jesus.

newtmonkey wrote on 2025-02-26, 18:47:

Mass Effect does at least give you the option to be a total psycho (Dragon Age: Inquisition would go on to soften this option to just be sarcastic and/or mean). It's fun to run around pulling your gun on people trying to get an extra credit or two out of them, in a game where you are clearly meant to be Space Jesus.

Yeah, picking all the "Renegade" conversation options is probably one of the single most amusing things about ME1. It gets even more brutal in the second game.

Sombrero wrote on 2025-02-25, 08:06:

I'm glad you are liking it, while I dropped Fallout 3 maybe around half way through and never went back New Vegas on the other hand easily became one of my favorites of 2010's and I've replayed it several times. The engine is aging like milk and the DLC are pretty mediocre but otherwise it's great.

Especially if you tweak and mod things to your liking, hardcore mode + JSawyer Ultimate Edition + few other mods and personal tweaks are how I roll.

i like both fallout 3 and nv, perhaps i just like the settings and NPCs and so on in both.

NV offers so many more branches to follow, especially adding factions and companion story arcs. I like to do almost everything in games like these and that turns NV into a very long game 😀

The engine is old but i dont mind, the DLCs are ok - maybe on average no better than the fallout 3 DLCs. Slightly outside of the norm i rate dead money highest, really liked honest hearts, found old world blues tiresome (and leaves player overpowered) and while lonesome road was fine the primary npc, Ulysses, was way too 'im14andthisisdeep' all the way through.

All in all though, NV can be a genuine 100+ hour game and a good one

i havent used any mods though, there's so much to do as it is

gerry wrote on 2025-02-14, 12:33:

I'm playing through Deus Ex again,

well i'm almost finished and among one thing i noted since playing 10+ years ago is just how sparse the environments are

when i played it first the environments seemed very 'full' and detailed and now the visual style makes it look sparse when compared to mode modern games

however where deus ex works is in the interaction - an office may consist only of a chair & desk, a computer, a drawer, a trophy, a flower pot and a newspaper - but, while many more objects are drawn in many modern games, in deus ex each can be either picked up, opened or read. I'm sure later games have even more interaction, i haven't played enough of them, a number are full of promise in the graphics but lacking in the gameplay.

some parts are silly though, you really can explode a giant robot while a guard has their back turned and not only wont he notice, when walking back towards the wreckage he'll be just fine, not put out at all. it's a kind of unintentionally funny limitation of the 'ai'