House Party! Curiosity got the better of me when I seen it going for a fiver on GMG. It is essentially a puzzle game only with some pretty special incentives / rewards for figuring said puzzles out. Not made any significant progress yet in the hour or so I've played but it's actually really good fun.

Dungeon Keeper 2. I forgot how much I loved that game as a kid. It's one of the rare games that doesn't age as time passes. The only quirk I have with it is that your minions are kinda dumb.

Deus Ex. Complementary replay at the end of every year. Going for a non-lethal run is way harder than it might seem.

Also this is my first time posting here. Here's hoping I don't horribly screw everything up.

Morrowind: I like the game but somehow it feel a bit "static". No matter what I do it seems like I can't change the dialogue of the NPCs or even influence them. Might be because of the dialogue mod I'm using that's not working...

Botanicula: Excellent game! I just wish there were more like it after having played Samorost, Machinarium, BaSS, and Primordia. Don't really like PnC like Resonance (UI and selection is horrible).

Forgot Red Alert. There's something about the snow and the christmas feeling that makes me want to break out RA.

The house of the Dead: Overkill. Unlimited credits, upgradable guns, silly kitch dialogue, scenes and bosses... Feels like my Dreamcast days are back.

Was playing X-Rebirth but now I'm rage quitting because I've encountered a game breaking bug and can no longer advance the plot. This game had so much promise and so many things to like about it..................if only the game was in a finished state. :(

What should I do today?

Race Cars?
Kill Orcs?
Become a crime lord?
Look for my Homeworld?
or run around, kill monsters, and pick shit up?

This has nothing to do with gaming. :D

Warcraft 2
GTA 4

Started playing Ultima 3 (Amiga version). A few thoughts:

My party is Thief, Ranger, Wizard, Cleric. I just got Ambrosia access and raised my Cleric's WIS to 70 so that they (I chose the "Other" option for sex) can actually get some XP. This is needed so that I can last longer in the dungeon gathering gold, so that I can get money faster. Next, I think, is my Thief's dexterity, so that I don't hit as many traps, and so that their attacks stop missing (though my Thief is my highest level character right now).

One quirk of this version: Rangers regenerate MP faster in a manner similar to Druids (not exactly the same; the stats are checked in the reverse order). This makes the Druid rather pointless, as Ranger is now better in every single way. (It also makes Alchemist and Illusionist pointless, but those two classes were never really good; they really should have been given the ability to use slings.) Wondering why they did that? This also means that a Ranger only needs to raise one stat to cast stronger spells.

I have encountered times when there would be a lot of enemies on the overworld in an area, which gets quite annoying, especially when enemy thieves steal my items (which, of course, I can't always prevent because my attacks miss too often; that's the reason I like to prioritize DEX in this game).

Some other annoyances:
* Poison, if not cured, slows things down. The damage it does is miniscule, but the graphical and sound effects take time. This is especially apparent after hitting a poison gas trap.
* You can only transfer 99 food or gold at a time. Fortunately, there is a command to give everyone's gold to one character, but there's no command to divide up food (the NES version actually has a command to divide up food, and it's the one thing from that version I wish other versions had).
* It is necessary to use the mouse when creating characters, and to leave the screen when checking your stats; hence, this version of the game can't be played with just a keyboard. On the other hand, it is nice to see all your stats on one screen, and to be able to equip weapons and armor from that screen.
* Unlike the DOS version, you can't use lowercase letters in character names.

One other thing: Even with disk speed at 800%, load times can be annoying. Supposedly, one can install the game on a (emulated or real) hard drive and play it from there, but I don't feel like doing so.

Not really encouraging, to be honest...
This games stands between me and Ultima IV. I've finished U1 and U2, but perspective of 23 hours sth like you've just described stops me for now ;)

Keep in mind that I am talking about the Amiga version specifically in my post. The DOS version (assuming modern hardware) runs a lot faster. There's also the fact that the DOS version seems to have the opposite problem with overworld encounters; there aren't enough of them!

Also, Ultima 3 isn't that long, and the world is actually quite small.

One thing I like about Ultima 3 is that you get regenerating MP, but you don't have to worry about reagents, so you are free to use your spells whenever you have the MP handy. (The need for reagents to cast spells is probably my most hated aspect of the later games in the series, and it was introduced in Ultima 4.)

More Ultima 3:

Had an unintentional death warp.

You see, in Ultima 3, if somebody dies, the game will automatically save. While this would be seen as a bad thing, there is one interesting aspect of this rule; you can't normally save outside of the world map. So, if somebody dies and you are in a dungeon or Ambrosia, the game will save anyway, and when you reload, you will be on the world map. While you have one dead character, everything else was saved; in particular, the 30 points of Dexterity that I gave my Thief were saved, and I could just reboot the game without having to finish leaving Ambrosia.

My Cleric is able to cast the revive spell, and it fortunately did work (not sure if the game autosaves on failure), so I did not have to pay for resurrection.

Edit: The auto-save is most obvious if you are playing the game from a floppy drive (real or emulated, but emulated will only be noticeable if the emulator actually emulates disk access times in some way). If you are playing the GOG version (DOS version, but installed to a hard drive), the auto-save is pretty much silent. Note that the Ultima 3 Upgrade Patch has an option to disable the auto-save if you happen to dislike that mechanic.

Still playing Dungeon Siege - Legends of Aranna expansion. Now in chapter 4, I think it has 5 chapters (the base game had 9, IIRC).

I keep saying there are lots of things to like in Dungeon Siege, the user interface and game engine are really slick and well thought out etc... but I admit it is very repetitive, and tends to become boring. I've noticed I grow tried of it when, after an hour or two of fighting in the wilderness and gathering loot, I reach a store. Then I am supposed to go through all my loot to see if there are better weapons and armor than what my party is currently wielding/wearing, and sell all the rest.

I always become kinda exhausted at that point, not really wanting to go through all the loot yet again. I usually stop playing the game when reaching a store, and do that loot checking the next time I run the game.

I think they did go a bit overboard with the loot in this game. It seems you CONSTANTLY see some crates or pots lying around, having to destroy them in order to see if they contain loot, and then you'll be carrying a couple dozen pairs of leather gloves and boots around... Then again you don't want to leave loot lying around either in case there is some extra-good weapon or armor there, you have to pick everything up to see if there is any good stuff in there.

I don't think I've seen any other (action) RPG with such an insane amount of loot everywhere, with hundreds of variations of items. The silver lining is that as long as you keep picking loot and selling it, you'll never run out of money in the game. In fact in the base game I reached the max amount of money in the later chapters (999999 gold coins or something like that) and after that I couldn't pick any money anymore.

Some specific reason for choosing the Amiga version?

Team Fortress 2: yesterday I saw someone using a cheat I don't recall seeing before. An enemy was playing a heavy weapons guy, and he seemed practically invisible. He didn't seem to mostly fight back (playing "friendly" as they are called, not fighting back), so he advanced crouching in front of our team's ammo room door.

It was kind of a funny sight, everyone shooting at him at the same time (I was playing a soldier, shooting rockets at him), and he just wouldn't die even though he seemed to be taking damage. THEN finally some sniper got a headshot on him, and he went down, so it didn't seem he was completely invisible, but very hard to kill anyway. EDIT: I am also wondering whether a spy could have backstabbed him successfully? (a successful backstab by a spy is supposed to give a guaranteed one hit kill, unless it is a sniper using protection against backstabs, or maybe if a medic is using uber-protection on someone, not sure about this...)

He explained it is some cheat using a known glitch in the game. Damn, can't Valve just fix such glitches?

Usually the cheats I see are aimbots, ie. snipers and spies getting clear headshots all the time, even to moving and jumping targets from across the map. Also sometimes (but rarely) some pyro appears to using the airblast cheat where he can always deflect a rocket back at you, even if it is a fast Direct Hit rocket which is supposed to be very hard to deflect especially at close ranges.

And yeah, some spy players seem awfully quick (being able to switch between backstabs and sentry sapping back and forth like within in millisecond, repeatedly), leaning me to believe those guys are also using some kind of script that saps and backstabs for them.

And what is with some of those soldiers which are able to repeatedly make insane rocket jumps (like several within a second), going across the map with them (also doing wall-rocket jumps and such)? Is that some kind of script too? I have hard time understanding how they could do those manually because the timing seems so precise and the rocket jumps so overly perfect, giving them maximum push towards (not just up).

Damn cheaters... time to time I see some getting VAC banned, but even when TF2 receives an update, it doesn't seem to take long before the cheat programs have been updated and cheaters are back again with new accounts. Fortunately they are quite often also user-voted out of games, as long as the team detects one of their own is cheating (not necessarily so easy as you don't usually keep looking how others in your team are playing, you mostly notice how enemies are playing).

Mainly because I'm curious about this version, and I have already played the DOS version through many times (and I have some experience with the NES version as a child, but never beat it).

Also, I read that Rangers regenerate MP quickly like Druids do in the Amiga version, and I wanted to verify that. Turns out that it's *almost* true; the game checks Wisdom before Intelligence for Rangers, which is the opposite order that the stats are checked for Druids. This means that, while a Druid's MP regen is marginally better if WIS > INT, a Amiga version Ranger's is marginally better if INT > WIS. (By marginally, I mean that, at one specific current MP ((half the lower stat) - 1), the character will regain 2 MP instead of 1; below that, both classes regain 2, while above that, both only regain 1 (up to half the higher stat).)

Yes, I do notice tiny details like that, although in practice, it doesn't really matter. In any case, in the Amiga version, Ranger > Druid. (In the NES version, Druids don't get fast MP regen, so while technically not outclassed (since they only have to raise one stat, unlike non-Amiga Rangers who have to raise both casting stats to get more MP.)

At some point, I may want to try the Apple 2 version, which was the original version, and apparently has bugs. Plus, I can see what happens if I import Ultima 3 characters into Bard's Tale (which has completely different mechanics, including a different scale for stats; you can start with higher stats in Ultima 3 than you can ever get in Bard's Tale, plus the stats don't all neatly map between the games).