I thought I'd post an update on the games I'm playing and my impressions. Perhaps you guys could do the same. With any luck, I'll play my backlog of games in the next 6 months or so, barring any more sales.

Star Wars: The Old Republic : I've taken a break from this. It started to get repetitive. I've maxed out 12 (!) characters with a 13th getting close to the end. Doing the same Ops (dungeons) over and over every week was getting old. Grinding dailies for cash gets old. PVP gets old. So, I've taken a break. I plan on returning mid August (and occasionally when I feel like it) when player housing comes out.

Space Pirates and Zombies: Surprisingly fun, if a bit of a one trick pony. You fly around and blow shit up in a top down game in spaceships. You upgrade your tech trees, build your ships, kit them out with gear, learn new recipes for gear and ships by buying or killing people for them... pretty fun. Still, gets repetitive. Right now I'm just flying around pwning ship to get levels so I can upgrade all my skills as much as possible before heading into the end game.

GTA IV: Pretty fun, but also gets a bit repetitive. I'm surprised how limited the game is, compared to GTA:SA and Vice City and stuff. No owning businesses. No buying housing. There are taxi and police missions, but meh. Anyway, I'm playing this occasionally in an effort to finish it. The story is pretty good, actually, but with the friendship stuff (if you care about it), you end up doing stupid crap (like going to restaurants) trying to keep your relationships up. I've started to ignore all my friends.

Shadow Warrior: Why had I never heard of this game? First person "shooter" with a Katana and magical ninja powers. And a ridiculous number of easter eggs and secrets. Actually really a good game, despite the Wang jokes. I've been playing this a lot and am close to the end game.

Metro: Last Light: I'm only maybe 5-10 levels into this, but it's fun so far. I'm not sure what I think of games that have all kinds of esoteric buttons to use (G to change the filter on your gas mask.... damnit, what's the button to wipe the blood off your mask?) but overall it's quite pretty and an interesting (if bizarre) story.

Kerbal Space Program: Even in the career mode, this is more a sandbox than anything. Also, the physics aren't quite right and there's some stuff kinda missing, but it's also a pre-release game. Having said that... it's REALLY fun. Building a space ship, throwing a Kerbal into it, then attempting to blindly figure out orbital mechanics so you can land on the Mun... pretty awesome. A bit of a learning curve, but it's not as bad as you might originally think. Pro tip - if you're about to crash your ship into Kerbin (Earth) and you don't want to lose your Kerbal's life, have him do an EVA. He'll get blown off the ship and fall to Earth and, amazingly, he won't die. However, if he's inside the ship when it blows up, he'll die. However, make sure he doesn't land in water. Apparently impact with water will kill.

Those are the main ones. What are you guys playing?

Rogue Legacy:
Action game where you play as a hero that enters a dungeon, smashes things, unlocks new items and skills and inevitably dies.
Then you choose your heir and can either play the same dungeon, or start a new one. With the gold you gather you buy upgrades and grow stronger, so you can go deeper and find more stuff.

Pretty fun and pretty hard imho.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Refused to launch. After a week of trying I just gave up.

Space Pirates and Zombies: Played this some time ago, reached about half way through then got bored and gave up.

GTA IV: Was ok.

Shadow Warrior: Haven't played it. Glad you like it.

Metro: Last Light: on the "to play" list.

Divinity: Original Sin - Finished it in one go. Took about 90hours and I got most of it done. In that time only one quest refused to work and experienced maybe one or two crashes only. By the looks of it one of the more successful kickstarter games. Look in the rpg section for more on this game. Ok this is not entirely correct. I remember crashing many times on quickloads in certain areas.

Company of Heroes 2 - Liked it. Took a pause in it to play divinity so definitely not as good as the afore mentioned game.

X Rebirth - Its playable/completable in its current state. Was a bit off balance when i played it. My personal armada had enough firepower to quite literally kill my computer. I had a ridiculous amount of warships of different sizes. Was balance patched right after i finished it. Still its in a much better shape than when it released. And you need a 64bit OS to play it.

Bioshock infinite - Played it, liked it, still like the original more. I think for me they peaked with the underwater world of Rapture.

Far Cry 3 - Totally forgettable adventure. I vaguely remember some sadistical asshole being the bad guy. How and when it ended i can no longer recall.

Skyrim - boooooooring. next.

Batman Arkham City - was ok. Got the next installment for cheapz on summer sale.

Saints Row 4 - Average. The over the top formula no longer charms me. Although some of the dialogue of the main quest line is just awesome. Got a few good laughs out of it.

State of Decay - If you haven't already played it consider seeing a doctor. There's something wrong with you. .

Carrier Command - Avoid. Broken tech demo.

Fallen Enchantress Legendary Heroes - A good mix of RPG and Civ. Starts out as a light rpg and then turns into some weird Civ game. Where you can erupt Volcanoes. Friggin Volcanoes man. Just make sure you get the Legendary Heroes one, the prequels to that are broken crap.

Xenonauts - Was ok. While each part of the game is definitely above average, the low budget feel leaves the overall experience lacking. From a technical standpoint, there's nothing wrong with, I had hardly any crashes and the turns passed quickly but its missing that something something. You know? no? .

Antisquad - Better just avoid.

I'm amused we have such similar ideas about some games, but such immensely differing ones on others. I loved State of Decay, though it started getting stale. But I liked Skyrim (a lot), and Far Cry 3 was ok. BTW, did you see the live action Far Cry stuff? It's surprisingly good. It was released as a series of episodes teasing up to the FC3 release, I believe.



It's about 30 minutes total, but works fine in bite sized pieces, since it's really a whole bunch of small episodes. If the first two episodes turn you off, I recommend you stick with it until the crazy guy shows up. He makes the whole thing worth it.

Games I have been playing lately...

- Divinity: Dragon Commander: Surprisingly solid and fun. It's definitely not going to blow your mind on any level, but the mix of genre elements and just generally fun atmosphere made it very enjoyable to play. To summarize, you are a half-dragon, half-human bastard prince who has to save the empire by defeating all of your sadistic siblings. The game is a bit like a Total War light in that it has a TBS strategic map + RTS battlefields where you can take control of the armies yourself. Both elements are not very deep though, especially the RTS phase. You could literally win almost any mission against impossible odds if you played it tight in the first 10 minutes of the mission. Anyway, where the game distinguishes itself is the added level of politics. Advisors of every race will come up with issues (like laws on abortion, taxes, unions, what have you) for you to decide on, and your decisions impact the war efforts. The undead are religious zealots, Elves left-wing treelovers, Dwarves pragmatuic capitalists, etc. You even have to deal with issues between your commanders and can marry a princess. So yeah, all of this comes together in a rather enjoyable mix. I almost forgot, you can participate in the battles. As a dragon. With a jetpack. A DRAGON WITH A JETPACK.

- Poker Night at the Inventory 2: Light entertainment after coming home from work and not wanting to start a game that requires more of an investment from me. Occasionally funny, but I liked the characters from the 1st game better.

- The Wolf Among Us : a choose-your-own-adventure ish game from Telltale, similar to the The Walking Dead game they made. It's based on the comic series Fables that I enjoy too. In case you don't know what they are about; a whole bunch of persons/creatures from fairy tales fed their own dimension because of a great war that went on there. They set up shop in NYC, obviously disguised as humans if they don't already have a human form. A murder occurs in the Fables community, and you are tasked to investigate as Sherrif Bigby Wolf (aka the Big Bad Wolf from the tales). Very well made, good story. I like it a lot, but like the first season of the walking dead better so far. Not finished it yet.

- Played some tf2 on and off. Still fun one in a while.

- Bought Men of War Assault Squad 2, and played a session with Derf. Pretty glorious destruction still!

- Shadowrun Returns & Dragonfall: played both of these a while back, and they were pretty good. Shadowrun Returns is just good, but Dragonfall is excellent. It's like they were still trying to find their footing with the first result of the kickstarter, then took everything they learned and all the feedback and made the game the wanted to make. I would recommend them, but I have a feeling that they are merely turn out to be ok in the slew of upcoming old school RPGs.

- When I was in Mauritius with nothing but a crappy work laptop, I mostly played Spelunky. Really hard and frustrating at times, but so well made. One of the few games I actually like but didn't finish.

- I started playing Arkham City a while ago and just couldn't get into it...it's like they made all the frustating parts of the (otherwise great) Arkham Asylum worse. Wtf.

Oh and I played a lot of Hero Academy, but that's mostly just running in a window in the background. It's a turn-based chess-like strategy game.

Feels like the more time goes on, the less I play.

- Men of War Assault Squad 2: Mainly playing community-created SP missions with big maps. Still love this game, although my taste in gamestyle is very limited.
- Age of Empires 2: Play a little bit vs CPU. Nostalgic and straightforward RTS.
- Minecraft: Playing little 30 minute bouts with my bros stepson. Mostly for him.
- Fistful of Frags: May not play any more, but recently been playing MP with O'cram. It's a free Source engine cowboy MP FPS. Pretty funny at time.
- Counterstrike GO: Recently reinstalled for quick MP sessions with O'cram and Rinox.

Broke up with my gf so suddenly had a lot of free time...

- Bioshock Infinite: Great game, much better than I expected even. Got the DLC from a friend, will start those soon as well. 9/10

- Amnesia, A Machine for Pigs : wasn't as good as The Dark Descent in overall gameplay, but the storytelling was still great. Enjoyed it a lot. 8/10

- Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons : good (but short) game, with a rather unexpected story twist. It felt like something was missing, hard to tell what, but it was definitely worth playing it. 7/10

- Brütal Legend : the game has a lot of style and as at times really funny (it's Jack Black + Tim Schafer + metal culture after all), but the gameplay is not always up to standard due to consolitis and fiddly unit management. I enjoyed it, but if it had been harder or longer I probably wouldn't have made it to the end. 7/10

- Hard Reset : How did it take me so long to play this game? GLORIOUS old school FPS with great weapons, non-stop adrenaline rush killing and some style to boot. These are the guys who went on to make the Shadow Warrior reboot which was great as well, and it shows. 9/10

- Homefront : yeah...got this game in a publisher pack a while back and started to give this a go. It's got style, I'll give it that, but other than that...I don't even mind that the basic premise is insane (North Korea occupies the US), it's just that the story is predictable, the characters are cardboard cutouts, the animations are slow and cumbersome and it suffers from massive CoD consolitis. Lots of exposition, bad checkpoints, waiting for characters to open doors/climb ladders, and the gunplay is the typical console shooter popamole duck-shoot stuff. Maybe it's because I played it right after Hard Reset but still, jeez. Made it a few chapters in but already decided that I'm not gonna continue. Provisional 4/10. Satis; you played this right? Does the game somehow get a massive boost in awesomeness towards the end or is it pretty much the same stuff all the way through? Because if it turns out the Koreans are actually aliens and you are the chosen one half-breed son of an alien and a human and the only one capable of saving the world, I might stick around for that insanity.

I saw Satis is still playing Kerbal Space Program, and had to think of him when I saw this video.

It's...strange. I know it's awful, but I can't look away. It has KSP, dubstep (of course), shit-tons of memes, ganja, FPS and illuminati references and mad swagger. It's also completely retarded. And awesome.

I think you'll have to see it for yourself to know what I mean.

Holy crap, what a great video. Makes me want to play more KSP. I love that game. I have a goddamned space station. You know how hard it is to make a space station? I may be addicted. I even looked for books on orbital mechanics.

Hahaha! I need pics now. Of that space station.

I gotta say I love your steam pics of your ongoing projects in KSP. I could have asked you on Steam I guess, but I'm here anyway so...you said you might want to add big refueling tanks to your space station (I'm guessing it's in orbit of 'earth') for long distance space travel.

So is the idea to fuel up the tanks with 'ferries' first, and then after a long range spacecraft breaks through the atmosphere (I'm assuming that uses a lot of fuel) you can refuel it almost fully for the rest of the journey? Cause that's pretty neat.

Yea, exactly. When you're building really large, interplanetary ships, they end up getting bigger and bigger,mostly just to get off Kerbin's (Earth's) surface and into orbit. If you put up a large space station with fuel tanks, you can lift a relatively light interplanetary orbiter/lander off Kerbin, fuel i up in orbit, then head off without burning all that extra fuel and dealing with all that extra complexity.

I recently played around with a maximum thrust to weight ratio ship for the hell of it. Put a probe on a fairly small gas tank and a really big engine to see how fast and far I could go. Then expanded it to more engines and small tanks. And again, and again. I took pics but haven't posted them to Steam yet. It was fun, if kinda pointless. Man, I really love that game.

Keep me posted on when the probes leave the solar system.

Pretty sure they will just disappear, but I'm just curious.

I think i've given up on games in general now. I dont have steam anymore (and dont miss it) and thats a good indicator that i think ive had enough of games. theres nothing I can get into anymore, and there hasn't been for a long while. my last straw was the Jagged Alliance Flashback kickstarter (which i pledged toward) and it totally fucking bombed. The power of the jade is too much. besides, porn is way more entertaining.

lol. Well, to each their own. I certainly waste a lot of time playing Star Wars. I'm still enjoy Kerbal Space Program, but running into issues that are making life difficult. Building multi-stage interplanetary exploration ships is difficult, time consuming, and a bit buggy. Ah well. The game's still not even into beta yet. Considering I've put more than 100 hours into it, I think it's paid for itself.