Last game played...

[Emp]

Sword of the Stars....which is a bit shit, but an impulse buy cus it was the cheapest of the 4 games i had in my hand at the time.

My main concern is that once it is installed it starts with a message saying that Gamespy can no longer aloow the game to be played online as they have been bought out by a third party who are demanding thousnds of dollars a month to open the servers. Bastards!....It also smacks of being, if not illegal, at least fucking wankerish.

[Professor Bear]

Big GTA fan, but for me 4 was the clincher

Hey, don't get me wrong, I was a huge GTA fan to the point that Vice City was pretty much the only game I played until San Andreas came out.  By the time 4 landed I was super-psyched up until about the time I was buying the main character a hat and realised that - barring aerial vehicles - I had seen all the game mechanics had to offer.  My character wouldn't get stronger, he wouldn't get better at shooting, learn a different fighting style depending what dojo I train in or become a better driver the more I played and practiced by doing side missions and exploring the map... and I just thought: why bother?  I still have San Andreas and the motorbikes are at least playable in that.  And I still play SA to this very day.

Although I have a theory that I am secretly pissed that GTA4 did not feature skateboards.

[NorthVox]

I agree. Losing the lunacy for a more serious tone seemed fitting, but I did miss a lot of the extras.

[ThryllSeekyr]

Last night I nearly completeed the Slaine: Tomb of Terror adventure. Playing from the back of the graphic novel Slaine the King( latest version.). The last page with the solution to a riddle is missing so I can't complete the game.

I also just got the Angry Birds, Angry Birds Star Wars, and Bad Piggies games for the pc. So far I have just tried out the first one, good times.

[Keef Monkey]

Been playing Aliens: Colonial Marines, a game that's proven a bit controversial!

I have to say I like it, quite a lot actually. Visually it's poor, and the fact that it falls well short of the target footage released during development seem to be the main reason it's being torn to shreds. I found that once I was dashing through the Sulaco with Xenos crawling along the walls after me I got over that in a big way, and found the atmosphere pretty gripping.

In that regard it reminded me a little of playing games as a kid, looking at '80s games it's hard to imagine they were ever immersive, but because your imagination filled in the gaps you still got totally absorbed in them. Despite it looking pretty lo-res I did get really excited at some of the locations (especially on Hadley's Hope) that you get to fight through. A lot of reviews claim it's completely broken, but I didn't hit any major issues (and looking at the day one patch notes they fixed a looooooot of stuff).

It's a shame it's getting such a hostile reaction, because while it's not an incredible game and has the air of something that still needs 6 months of polish, it's good enough that all the complaints and abuse to Gearbox devs is massively disproportionate and and also a bit sad. It's like the ME3 ending fiasco all over again, gamers seem to reach for the torches and pitchforks pretty quick when they don't like something these days and it shows gamers in a bad light.

[Professor Bear]

The ME3 ending came from a reasonable criticism that what ending there originally was was anti-climatic compared to the build-up.  Of course, a cynical person might point to how quickly they rustled up a new ending complete with performances from in-demand VO artists and then point to a past history of western RPGs having their original endings patched (Fallout 3 being a good example) as was planned from quite early in development and suggest the longer ME3 ending was in the can already and the "because the fans demanded it" angle is PR flim-flam.

Likewise Colonial Marines has received hostility because the original footage doesn't match what has been released to the market.  I cannot speak of the accusations flying around about impropriety upon the developers' part, but there's no denying it looks underwhelming.

[Charlie boy]

Got my xbox back after playing a Wii for quite some time (didn't think it had many games I'd enjoy and the whole movement novelty soon wore off). Bought LA Noire but grew tired of it; it's the same thing over and over and as soon as I realised it was spread over 3 discs I stopped playing. It wouldn't even let me do what I occasionally enjoy doing on games like GTA/ Red Dead, e.g. going on a bit of a homicidal rampage to see how many law enforcers I can have chasing me to see how long I can survive.
Recently purchased Rocksmith, which is the most addictive thing I've played in a long time. Basically it's like Guitar Hero, only you plug a real guitar or bass into your console. I went to bed recently with false beliefs of being something of an accomplished bass player until I put the game on the next day and bloody notes had been added. I'm currently stuck on Nirvana's "In Bloom" which surprised me because I had immediately thought music from the whole 'grunge' scene would be pretty simple.

[Professor Bear]

Red Faction: Guerrilla - top game.  I'd like to see Martian Chronicles remade with this kind of prefab colony look to it, as the sparse aesthetics of the environment are fantastic and serve the limitations of the game world very well (compared to almost every other open world drivey-shooty outing, this is a very desolate and stripped-down gaming experience), and the way damage to buildings you cause by careless driving (or because you figured that the best way to kill someone was to drive a three-story tractor through their house) actually made me feel a bit guilty - "it's just us out here on our own with limited resources against an angry Mars" - so I played the game trying to limit my carnage to legitimate targets.  Likewise it is a hoot to be in a shootout with Martian stormtroopers and be on just the wrong side of outnumbered, and then the traffic on nearby roads screeches to a halt and drivers hop out and back you up and suddenly your death has been postponed and SHIT IS ON.
Story maybe isn't up to much, but the rest is great fun.

[shaolin_monkey]

I played Battlefield 1943 last night, first time for a while.  The land based maps, Iwo Jima etc, are still great fun.  However, I couldn't get a game on my fave map, Coral Sea, the strictly airborne one. It was a shame, as I love the simple dogfighting action.  I guess it's not popular enough for games to be set up regularly.

[Professor Bear]

WWE 12 is a terminally broken game that requires you to have some sort of degree to play it, or at least an encyclopedic knowledge of the previous games' mechanics, and then a healthy dollop of psychic ability to glean from other players how to use the new game mechanics implemented that are at odds with what was in the last few games.
Fighting has been changed from button mashing to a variation on QTE where instead of watching your opponents or your own character, you have to keep your eyes glued to just above your character's head waiting for a prompt to appear for roughly a third of a second, but you can only press the button if the prompt is highlighted, otherwise your character is grappled in a lengthy animation you can't counter or stop.  Your block button doesn't function as a block button as you can only block if prompted (see above), which doesn't happen for every attack so you take damage and get staggered and become unable to block anyway, while strikes are lengthy animations that require your character to wind up a bit before attacking, and in the meantime you opponent has stepped to one side so your character is punching the air as they go through the entire animation, probably more than once as you'll have likely have hit the attack button more than once because you not-unreasonably assume your character can hit someone who is right in front of their face.
There's no in-game tutorial, no in-game manual, and no means of seeing the control mapping while fighting which you will guaranteed want to do because you will not believe you are pushing the correct buttons.

Basically it is a fighting game where you don't do any fighting, and is so unplayable it is actually amazing.  I assume there is a really, really specific audience for this game that it can afford to pursue to the point of excluding all other possible players, though just as likely this is one of many reasons THQ went spectacularly tits-up.

[qtwerk]

Finished a second run through of the fantastic Halo 4 and decided to give The Witcher 2 my full and undivided attention. But got distracted by the cheap thrills of a blood-drenched FPS so fired up FEAR 3, which I got about half way through a few months ago. Nowhere near as good as the first two, but still fun.

I can't see much else exciting me in the last throes of this generation. Apart from Bioshock Infnite obviously.

[Rog69]

I picked up a used copy of Uncharted 3 for a tenner last week and I've been ploughing my way through it at a fair old rate over the last few days. There's nothing new to see really when it comes to the gameplay, it follows the same formula of the previous titles (including the slightly tedious combat sections) but it's a beautifully put together game.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

Dark Forces, a Star Wars FPS from the days before the prequels, when Lucasarts made some damn fine games.

[rosetintedglasses]
It was a simpler time, back when Doom was all the rage. It ran on an engine wot wuz called ID. Lucasarts reverse engineered it (DI) and added some stuff of their own (JE), and created the JEDI engine (aren't programmers hilarious?). I played  the shit out of this on my first ever PC, it's one of my all time favourites, and now it's available on Steam. There's a bit where you get captured by Jabba the Hutt, and he takes all your weapons, so you have to punch a dinosaur to death in order to escape! And the soundtrack! You haven't heard John Williams' score until you've heard it in 16bit midi format!
[/rosetintedglasses]

I enjoyed playing it again.

[Professor Bear]

I played the PSX version quite recently and that soundtrack is something else.

No lightsabers, though - booooo!

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side kid