Games I'm playing at the moment with a few comments on each

[floppybootstomp]

I suppose a fair few people are turning to computer and console games having been forced into self isolation, including myself, so here’s what I’ve been playing lately plus a few comments on some titles I played last year or recently.

Borderlands 3: I bought the super duper deluxe version from Epic last year for £80 and so far have played 6 days worth which means I’ve played in excess of 144 hours so far. In my opinion this is an excellent and very enjoyable game. And as I bought the fullest version it’s possibly the most expensive game I’ve ever bought despite the fact I purchased it in a sale at the time.

I’ve almost finished the main campaign (currently having a boss fight with Troy) and have part-completed one of the two DLCs currently available. I’m on level 41. Now available on Steam for between £50 and £85 but I’ve seen it a lot cheaper than that at Green Man Gaming. The glitch I had with the game on the Epic Games Client where I had to start it twice to make it work has now been resolved and it’s working fine. Recommended.

The Outer Worlds: Basically this is Fallout 4 on other planets and it’s very good indeed. I bought this in a sale for £20 and so far I haven’t seen it cheaper than that anywhere. Currently only available from Epic. I’ve played 8 hours so far on normal difficulty level and it’s just become quite hard so I may switch to Easy difficulty level.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance: Bought this a couple of years ago and I think I paid £20 for it then plus I bought all but one of the DLCs for about £13 total. The introductory game sequence is long, easily a few hours play, but is fine, enjoyable, and not difficult to navigate through at which stage you find yourself confined to a castle from which you must escape.

To escape is made considerably easier by gaining a suit of armour which you have to steal from a chest and which involves lock-picking. And it was for me, at this stage, that the game fell down as the lock-picking is diabolicly difficult and you only have three lockpicks (3 attempts) to open the chest and nick the armour. And so I gave up and sat on the game for a long time but recently returned to it.

In the end I just left the castle without the armour and so far have spent a lot of time playing and enjoying the game. I have read that the lock-picking gets easier and you can take lock-picking lessons from one of the Millers in the game with unlimited lockpicks. I haven’t done that yet, I hated the lock-picking, but I will probably go there.

It’s a fabulous looking game, huge maps and exceptionaly well-rendered scenery. As well as the difficult lock-picking the game’s save system leaves a lot to be desired, there are only limited opportunities to save and auto-saves are rare but if you exit the game and re-start it you can choose to save the game.

This basic game was given away for free recently on the Epic Games Client and is on sale at various outlets for less than £20 and imo is worth it despite the unusual lock-picking engine and the iffy saves. I haven’t yet tried any of the DLC. Recommended with reservations.

A Plague Tale: Innocence A great game, stealth, puzzles, good story, good graphics and different from most. There are 17 levels and I’m stuck about half way through level 15 and being a sulky kind of fellow I got the hump and gave up. But it is a very good game, straight up guv. I’ll probably return and keep trying to complete the game, we shall see. Available at several sites it costs £15.99 at the moment at Steam and there’s a demo if you want to try before you buy.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus Finished this last year and loved it, old school style fps and right up my street. More like this please Currently only £6.60 at Green Man Gaming, game was released in 2017. Couple of DLCs available but I haven’t tried them yet.

Horizon Chase Turbo A nineties style retro arcade race game that’s curiously addictive. Basic, simplistic and fun. Currently selling for £15.49 I bought it a couple of weeks ago in a sale for about a fiver. There’s a free DLC and one that costs £1.99. Worth wishlisting then buying in a sale.

Black Mesa Now finished after years of waiting, free at Steam if you own the Half Life Games I think. It’s Half Life re-done and partly re-imagined and it’s very good indeed.

Necrovision: Lost Company An old fps with a style similar to that of Return To Castle Wolfenstein imo this is a little gem, albeit somewhat dated. £4.69 at GoG (Galaxy Games client).

 

[floppybootstomp]

And of the new games available I have my eye on Doom Eternal and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order but both a bit pricey atm.

 

[Ian]

We have similar tastes it seems!

I'm still intending to buy Borderlands 3 at some point, but I've had that on the backburner while it's so expensive. I enjoyed the other games in the series immensely, so it's only a matter of time .

Black Mesa

I think this will be the next game I play. I bought it a while back, but held off playing until they added Xen. Now that it's fully out, I'm going to fire it up. Maybe this weekend .

A Plague Tale: Innocence

I've heard so many good things about this one too - the graphics look excellent. Here's a trailer for anyone else interested:

Did you get the DLC for this one? Tempted to buy this game while it's 60% off!

 

[floppybootstomp]

The only DLC for A Plague Tale: Innocence, far as I can see, is 'Coats Of Arms' for £1.06 which is just more costume skins, never seen the point of those myself so no, I don't have the DLC.

It's well worth the sixteen quid it's going for atm and I really enjoyed the first 15.5 levels, just 1.5 levels to go I'm having problems with a combat sequence which is really rather fiddly.

If you do play the game be aware you'll die a lot and maybe get a little frustrated with some of the puzzles, I know I did.

I see Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order has been reduced from £55 to £33, I might go for that, plenty of time to get through stuck indoors atm.

 

[TriplexDread]

Currently playing COD: Warzone, Borderlands 3, The Outerworlds, Subnautica, Subnautic Below Zero (pre release) Half Life 2 Ep.2, Witch Hunt, Metro Exodus (although this on my small NAS and PSU has failed) Waiting for MosFET to fix. Oh and Fortnite on xbox getting my ass kicked by 12 - 13 year olds

 

[Abarbarian]

G.O.G. had a sale recently and I dove in and bought,

Shadow Tactics Blade of the Shogun

for a mere £8.59 which is quite a saving. Best of all you can download the game and install it and play offline. No internet connection needed to register or play which is a lot more friendly than the Steam version. The game download is not tied to the pc you used to download it so you are free to install it on any pc.

I thought it might be a pain to install and get running but it turned out all I needed were two cli commands and I was up and running. Mind you it did take me half a day to find the relevant information and the two extra files needed for the install. I did do quite a lot of reading around the subject though which took up some of the time.

Once I had the three necessary files, 3.5 GB in total, and cd'd into the game folder this was all I had to do,

Start the building process from the directory where you have the three files:

    $ sh ./play-shadow-tactics.sh

    Wait a couple minutes, the building will end by giving you the commands to launch as root to install the game. It should be something similar to:
        Arch Linux:

        # pacman -U /some/path/to/game_package.pkg.tar

        Debian:

        # dpkg -i /some/path/to/game_package.deb
        # apt-get install -f

The game runs very well nice and smooth, no lag or juddering. Graphics are luverly and you really do feel as though you are sneaking around a shoguns castle whilst a battle is in progress. Gameplay is at a gentle pace allowing you plenty of time to think and check out your surroundings. If the opposition spots you your as good as dead as they react and move pretty darn quick.

You have four characters to control but only one at a time, so far I have met two and they both have different skills so I guess the other two will have different skills too. I am looking forward to playing the rest of the game and it should fill in quite a lot of the time I am likely to spend in lockdown.

I can recommend this as a quality game which is easy to install and runs well on a penguin powered pc. An best of all it is yours to keep and do as you please with it.

I have two other G.O.G. games that install and run nicely on a penguin box one weighing in at 4 GB and one at 4.5 GB's. Thye are,

Full Throttle Remastered

Grim Fandango Remastered

Both of these games are gentle paced and fairly old with slightly improved graphics but give excellent quirky game play.

 

[floppybootstomp]

I have Shadow Tactics Blade Of The Shogun installed with GoG on a Windows 10 machine and it says I've played ten minutes which may mean I didn't think much of it.

I'll give it a revisit. I have Steam installed within Mint but not Galaxy/GoG as yet.

TriplexDread: Is Warzone any good? Been thinking about installing it and atm CoD Modern Warfare is fee to play multiplayer until 10:00 Monday. I really need to find something else to play online besides CoD4.

 

[Abarbarian]

I have Shadow Tactics Blade Of The Shogun installed with GoG on a Windows 10 machine and it says I've played ten minutes which may mean I didn't think much of it.

I'll give it a revisit. I have Steam installed within Mint but not Galaxy/GoG as yet.

TriplexDread: Is Warzone any good? Been thinking about installing it and atm CoD Modern Warfare is fee to play multiplayer until 10:00 Monday. I really need to find something else to play online besides CoD4.

ah ha the method I described above uses the "Offline Backup Game Installers" found on the download page for the game in question. This means that you do not need GOG Galaxy at all.

Nice to see you are still alive and fighting fit

STBS is becoming quite interesting , I can now control three characters individually or all together with something called Shadow Play which I have to figure out how to use fully yet.

 

[Abarbarian]

I bought and played this a couple of weeks ago. Works well on my Arch linuc set up.

Dishonored 2

Reprise your role as a supernatural assassin in Dishonored 2 – the follow up to Arkane Studio's first-person action blockbuster and winner of more than 100 'Game of the Year' awards, Dishonored. Play your way in a world where mysticism and industry collide. Will you choose to play as Empress Emily Kaldwin or the royal protector, Corvo Attano? Will you make your way through the game unseen, make full use of its brutal combat system, or use a blend of both? How will you combine your character’s unique set of powers, weapons and gadgets to eliminate your enemies? The story responds to your choices, leading to intriguing outcomes, as you play through each of the game’s hand-crafted missions.

I followed advice from the Proton site, where it gets a SILVER rating,

PROTON_NO_ESYNC on launch options. Disable VSync and Adaptive Resolution ingame to improve performance.

I did try at the start to go stealthily but have reverted to killing every thing that moves and taking great delight in doing so, maybe because I am playing as Emily.

 

[floppybootstomp]

I loved the first Dishonoured and all the DLCs that went with it but tried the demo of Dishonoured 2 and it didn't gel with me. Same for Prey which was released about the same time, I didn't care much for that either. It's telling, I think, that both of those titles are now reduced in price a great deal from their original asking price.

I finally nobbled Troy in Borderlands 3 and the storyline has taken an unexpected twist, I'm now on Level 42 (Hmm, that sounds familiar) and am probably near to finishing the main storyline.

 

[Abarbarian]

I loved the first Dishonoured and all the DLCs that went with it but tried the demo of Dishonoured 2 and it didn't gel with me. Same for Prey which was released about the same time, I didn't care much for that either. It's telling, I think, that both of those titles are now reduced in price a great deal from their original asking price.

I finally nobbled Troy in Borderlands 3 and the storyline has taken an unexpected twist, I'm now on Level 42 (Hmm, that sounds familiar) and am probably near to finishing the main storyline.

Yup I thought Dishonored and the DLC were enjoyable. Prey looks good and the story seems ok but game play is pants for a FPS. I thought D2 was pretty good not triple A but good solid fun, the witches were neat. I'll give it another go as the male character next time sometime in the distant future.
Would love to have a go at Borderlands 3 but it is too spensive for me at the moment.
Also I do not have a Windows box running at the moment. Have been dual booting Arch and W7 both installed at the same time. Arch has never let me down but W7 has crapped out totally on me three times. Last time was in Nov 2019 after doing the monthly update. No chance of repair as it tells me it can not find a partition with W7 on it. Funny that as when I boot to Arch I can access the W7 partition so it is there. All I used the W7 for was to install Steam and play Steam games, no surfing just Steam games.
I certainly will not go through all the trauma and reboots installing W7 again. An I go cold just thinking about trying W10 so I probably will never have a Windows set up again.
Yeah I know I should have made a W7 backup but it kept getting pushed into the to do pile as I had more important things to concentrate on this last couple of years.
It took me less than an hour to download and install MX-19 on me Tough Book and it works perfectly for my needs straight out of the box.If I was installing MX to my Skylake rig I recon I could have it downloaded and up and running with Steam and a decent sized game in a couple of hours. I have had quite a few of my Windows only games running sweetly with Steam Play, an have played most of my top picks already on W7. If I can not get the rest to play through Steam Play its no biggie as they were all bought dirt cheap in sales. So I recon it is bye bye MS for me.

 

[floppybootstomp]

How odd. I've used most Windows OS's but bypassed NT2000 (was that what is was called?) ME and 8/8.1 but have used all others from DoS 5.0 to Win 10.

Of all those Microsoft OSs Windows 7 is the only one that has never crashed on me and I'm still using it on one hard disk. And I have a backup of all the OS's I'm using including Linux Mint but not Win 98.

In fact of all the MS OS family imo Win 7 was easily the best.

I suspect your worship of all things Penguin and scorn of everything Microsoft must have spread bad vibes in the room and permeated your machine and nobbled Win 7. Spooky.

Check out Green Man Gaming for Borderlands 3, I don't know what it costs atm but worth a look.

 

[Abarbarian]

I suspect your worship of all things Penguin and scorn of everything Microsoft must have spread bad vibes in the room and permeated your machine and nobbled Win 7. Spooky.

Could be true. I noticed a strange tingling sensation in me fingers when playing on W7 last summer. Could be bad posture , playing for too long or cosmic interference leading me to the true path of penguin.

I have stated before that I thought W7 was the best of the MS offerings. It is just such a pain to do a fresh install that irks me.

Back in feudal Japan I now have four different characters and am enjoying the challenge.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Borderlands 3 basic/standard version currently selling for £22.50 at Green Man gaming on the Steam platform.

 

[Abarbarian]

Borderlands 3 basic/standard version currently selling for £22.50 at Green Man gaming on the Steam platform.

Thanks for the info. That is a heck of a lot to pay for a game most I have ever paid is £12. Mind you it looks to play well on linux,

I guess I could brush off the cobwebs and dig into the treasure vault and spend some of the shiny stuff. After all I may not be here for long, hmmm it is a big decision , I'll have a think.