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Ah, the November gaming rush. Brilliant time of year. I'm going to give Modern Warfare 2 and the finally-released-for-PC Force Unlimited a pass for a while, opting instead for Dragon Age: Origins -- which I'm enjoying the hell out of so far. If you've read anything about it, odds are they've been raves, so let me just nod in assent: it's from BioWare, the people who brought us some of the best CRPGs out there, and the closest analogue one can find to describe this would be that it's a Baldur's Gate -- with all the story and gameplay and richness that implies -- for the modern gaming market. And if the idea with that fills you with joy (or just intrigue), get it now. Its mechanics and systems and conventions will all seem familiar, but pleasantly so, and that's what you need to know most.
On the other side of the killer-rig stick, I found myself playing Gratuitous Space Battles and...you know, this game snuck up on me and infiltrated my mind in a hurry. Simple premise: you build a fleet of ships to defend after waves of incoming attacks, you configure and allocate and deploy the ships, give them orders, then allow them to engage -- at which point you're powerless, forced to just sit back and watch the AI crews do the best they can with what you've given them. And as you watch you start bouncing between Serenity's Operative yelling "Somebody fire!" and Star Trek's Nero: "Fire everything!" It's a bit of the digital addictiveness of a tower-defense game and a ton of customizability and eye-candy, and with enough real strategy that I'm still...not as far along in the campaign as I'd like to be, let's just say that. (And the automatic ship names are customizable -- I've replaced them with a thousand names from the NaNoWriMo generator, so a good number of ships are named after Space Mutiny protagonists and theoretical members of the Wu-Tang Clan.) Like Dragon Age: Origins, if this is the sorta thing you think you might like, you'll probably love it (I'm looking at you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kansel01). But don't take my word for it. Try the demo.
In other news, today cannot end soon enough. And tomorrow can wait a while.
On the other side of the killer-rig stick, I found myself playing Gratuitous Space Battles and...you know, this game snuck up on me and infiltrated my mind in a hurry. Simple premise: you build a fleet of ships to defend after waves of incoming attacks, you configure and allocate and deploy the ships, give them orders, then allow them to engage -- at which point you're powerless, forced to just sit back and watch the AI crews do the best they can with what you've given them. And as you watch you start bouncing between Serenity's Operative yelling "Somebody fire!" and Star Trek's Nero: "Fire everything!" It's a bit of the digital addictiveness of a tower-defense game and a ton of customizability and eye-candy, and with enough real strategy that I'm still...not as far along in the campaign as I'd like to be, let's just say that. (And the automatic ship names are customizable -- I've replaced them with a thousand names from the NaNoWriMo generator, so a good number of ships are named after Space Mutiny protagonists and theoretical members of the Wu-Tang Clan.) Like Dragon Age: Origins, if this is the sorta thing you think you might like, you'll probably love it (I'm looking at you,
kansel01). But don't take my word for it. Try the demo.In other news, today cannot end soon enough. And tomorrow can wait a while.
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I actually had to build a 2nd killer rig over the summer because I got addicted to the Steam games which won't run (or even install properly) on my main rig. Very inexpensive AMD X2 2.5 (or .6?) with 2gb of good ram and a midsize 250gb hdd. The video courtesy of my main rig's inability to render more than 3' of real estate from Liberty City... so it'll play pretty much anything except for GTAIV.
Anything, as it turns out, is Torchlight. The problem with Steam is that after each play session it shows me all the cool new specials. Some at ridiculous prices. Some at ridiculously low prices (DS1 and pretty much all the indie games out there). Some with such a damned compelling demo that I just have to throw $20 at the monitor. Torchlight takes all the good of Diablo (and other action RPGs) and tosses almost all the bad away. WOW it's fun. Only three classes, but instant action and semi-random level generation, outstanding (though cartoonish) graphics, and sound by the maestro from Diablo. The sweet thing about Torchlight? It runs reasonably well on almost any modern hardware. They even included a 'netbook mode' (basically shuts down all the graphic bells and whistles).
It seems to be some kind of sequel to the Fate franchise. I never played Fate so I tracked down a demo and it refused to install on my laptop because apparently a newer version of Fate was already installed? Fate does share a lot of the same principles as Torchlight (or I guess that should be the other way round), though Fate feels more Rogue-like in its dungeon creation whereas Torchlight is more like Diablo.
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