Teslagrad: At least for quite some time. There's too much wandering about with no idea wtf or even why I'm just roaming the same zones & back tracking.

Saints Row 2: (oddly, DL'd Third today before second went up for free ). The super increased frame rate. Sheesh, terribad! Had to "patch" & edit .Ini file to get it even near to standard.

The frame rate though, that's screwed for AMD cards apparently. I can't find anyway to make it even half decent.

Drawn to Death (PS4)

In a world full of multiplayer shooters, this is another one. It (and Sony) tells you at every opportunity that's it's by the people who brought us Gods of War. I'm always suspicious of that type of marketing.

The most unique thing about this game is...well you know the problem with MP online shooters right? Getting abused by 12 year olds constantly? Well this game takes the unique approach of getting in and abusing you even before the 12 year olds get their turn! 10 minutes in and I'm sick of being called a fucking idiot by the game itself.

It DOES have a nice hand drawn art style. But otherwise I don't see any reason to play this over any number of already well established shooters- unless you're actually 12 and think it's actually funny.

But it is from the makers of Gods of War. Did I mention that already?

Saints Row 2 (GOG)

One of my favorite GTA style games in it's Xbox 360 form. I really appreciate GOG's efforts to do a port and Deep Silver/GOG for making it free just now. I thought I'd give it a play on PC with improved graphics etc. But no, unfortunately this is the worst port I've ever experienced. Despite my PC being well above recommended specs at 1920x1200 it's running at feels like 10 fps! The higher resolution makes the jagged edges wonderful and crisp, but switching over to the 720p 360 version I've decided I prefer my jagged edges more blurred and indistinct thanks. The 360 version not only runs better it looks better.

Of course I tried AA on, but that drops the fps to about 5. So no go on this one then. Deep Silver please get MS to make the 360 version backward compatible on Xbone. Thanks.

<span class="bold">SPACECOM</span> (Steam)

(*Although multiplayer is available, I only played single-player*)

This game is a simple game of strategic space battles, involving producing ships and capturing planets.

I found it to be quite fun, but there is a bug on OSX and Linux which sometimes erases all progress! After I encountered the bug I did some research and discovered that it is over 2 years old and has not been fixed!!
https://steamcommunity.com/app/263860/discussions/0/619568793793968915/

Needless to say, this soured my whole attitude about the game :(. And I was so close to putting it in the "games completed" thread, I had finished 12/13 missions...

Dirt Rally.

Despite talking up the game on GOG, I've ended up feeling rather disappointed with it. I just can't play it anymore.

The thing is, what Dirt Rally does well it does extremely well, namely the graphics and the dirt racing. Visually it is probably the most photorealistic racing game I ever seen, and I've seen all of them. Sound is another thing they've done superbly well, which together with the graphics create a truly luxurious racing experience at times.

However, I find myself only enjoying some 30% of the content in the game. I don't give a crap about multiplayer, I've never liked rallycross racing, and the way the physics handles on tarmac is plain bad. That leaves me with only the gravel rally to enjoy.

And what's bad about the gravel rally ? That there's so little of it. In the Career/Championship mode the game simply reuses the same stages over and over to disguise the fact that there is actually not much there.

I've found myself going back to Loeb Rally and WRC 6 instead.

Loeb Rally also features rallycross, which I don't like in this game either, however it has a tonne of content that I do enjoy. The tarmac physics is not significantly better than in Dirt Rally, so they're even on this part. Yet, here's the thing: even if I ignore the rallycross events in the Career mode there's still so much else to do. Not only do you have a lengthy personal Career mode, you also have a Sebastien Loeb Career mode. The feeling of luxury that Dirt Rally offers in terms of graphics, Loeb Rally offers in terms of content.

While WRC 6 is not a "hardcore" rally sim to the extent of Dirt Rally or RBR, it does offer what I like the most in a rally game: plain rally, no rallycross. The WRC titles, going back some 17 years now, have never been the most sim-like of rally games, and my expectations match this history. When I buy these games I'm not looking for the most sim-like experience, instead I want to experience rally racing across many different countries and settings, and only pay for content I actually want.

Thanks for that, most reviews don't mention the ratio of Rally Cross to true point to point rally stages. I was hoping it was more of a pure stage race rally game. So it's like Dirt 3 without the Gymkhana events then. I don't like Rally Cross either, but it's better than Gymkhana and Drifting! Driveclub on PS4 was ruined for me as well, by half the events being drift events.

I think Codemasters are great at making graphics engines for race games, but are still using the same AI from the original TOCA, which wasn't very good even in 1998. That's why they really need to stick to open point to point Rally stages, as it's the only thing they have ever done well IMHO. Or license out their engine to someone else to make the actual game itself, that might just work.

Probably just temporary, but quitting Titan Quest

Sacrilege, I know. Great story, but if you just play through, you'll probably reach the final boss (as I did) around lvl 32-33.

And you'll ascend to the top of Mount Olympus...to find the last boss is a lvl 42 champion.


Beating the last boss while underleveled is possible, based on some reading, but requires decent gear (I'm still wearing the same blues/greens I had on at lvl 20), as well as some solid fire & vitality resistance, and I have literally 0 of the latter.

It's a common beef I have with ARPGs...make them too gear reliant, and you force people to grind whether or not they want to. The leveling is too slow, so as much as anything you're grinding for drops moreso than xp.

That's...just not that interesting to me, esp. in a game whose strongest selling point is the story line and the build variety. The first 2+ Acts are quite enjoyable. In Act 3, the story remains strong, but the leveling slows down significantly, even as the difficulty still tends to grow at about the same rate. Going from level 31-32 took almost 90 minutes of straight playtime with maybe 1-2 quest turn-ins.

Do I really want to commit 2-5 hours of grinding just to come back to fight one last boss?

And yeah, I'll likely come back to it, but honestly probably not until I'm ready to commit to leveling up a completely different character through the story and hope that one gets drops this one can use.

On the whole it's a good game, they just didn't really balance the leveling curve against the mob curve for the last 10-15% of the game, else they were balancing it for twinks. Which is possible. This toon wasn't originally my main, and coasted through lvl 10-24 or so in pretty sweet gear.

Which is now, still on at 32, pretty underpowered gear.

I quit The Witcher 2 after a few hours and started Heart of the Swarm (now Legacy of the Void). Prior to this, I had just finished TW1 (awesome!), but then the "on rails" part in the beginning of TW2 happened... I'm sure the game is great anyway so I'll start again after SCII.

It only takes about 20 hours to experience everything in Dirt Rally for the first time, which is very poor compared to every other racing sim around, from Assetto Corsa and Project Cars, to MotoGP 16 and Formula Truck.

It's also a rather grindy game, where you need to grind in order to unlock new cars and content. It's quite important for progression. This is contrary to what a sim game should be like, and adds an arcade-like feel that contradicts the sim experience.

I find it amusing that Codemasters made a sneering comment some time ago at Gran Turismo, about how boring it was because of the grinding ... yet here they are making an even grindier game in my opinion.

It's no wonder you didn't know this about the rallycross, since almost every video on YouTube of Dirt Rally is about the rally racing, not the rally cross or hill climbs. It makes that particular content of the game look much bigger than it actually is. In many ways I can understand this, since the gravel rally is very much the highlight of the game.

Yes, I agree,, it's very hard to beat what Codemasters can squeeze out from their engines.
Whenever I've seen people complain about their games it has rarely been about the graphics.

I don't know. I've changed in what I look for in a rally game. Before it was mostly about getting a really technical sim. What I want these days though is fast, fun racing where I can really fling the car around. I also want lots and lots of different settings to race in. So I find myself enjoying the less sim-like titles more.

<span class="bold">Endless Space</span> (Steam)

This is 4X game of galactic empires.

I played it for several hours, but I just found it boring. It didn’t have that “just one more turn” feeling for me. I think it was mainly due to the fact that the travel options are restricted: it seems whenever I start I’m limited to a half-dozen or so stars around my initial position. I can see other stars farther out, but I cannot get to them (probably I’d need to research some sort of technology to do so). But the end result is just that it made the game feel stale for me, there wasn’t enough to explore and things to do.

Alpha Protocol (360)



Edit: This one was really nagging at me. I went back to it. And ended up finishing it. So please disregard.

Call of Duty:

Often with the Call of Duty series, older PC gamers look back with nostalgia to the first Call of Duty game, but I quited just now (having bought the Call of Duty World War II Bundle on Humble Bundle this year) for the same reason I quited the game many years ago when I had it on disc but didn't get past the first mission:

There's way too much noise. I've played more old world war 2 shooters, like Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honour Vanguard (on the PS2), Call of Duty World at War, but the original Call of Duty stands out for the jagging effect the gun sounds, especially the constantly pounding AA guns, has on my senses. I have a disorder in the autistic spectrum and am over-sensitive to sounds and even though that over-sensitivity only hinders me on the street normally (with cars, dogs, machinery frightening me) and not in games, in this CoD game the sound prohibits me to think and act properly. I de-install this one and hope I have more fun with the other games in the CoD World War II Bundle.

When I played TItan Quest I started the game four times, because I liked it that much. My first hero however failed to defeat the final boss. The success is indeed very much dependent on successful gear. I also find some builds are much more efficient against certain times of enemies than others. Even after switching gear between characters, my first character Anaximander, a Conjuror lvl 33 (Spirit+Earth) failed to do what Apollo, a Ritualist lvl 34 (Dream+Nature) and Artemis a Ranger lvl 32 (Nature+Hunter) did.

I had two other reasons for quiting though: when going forward into the Immortal Throne expansion, I found the game too much of a grind. After defeating a Titan at Mount Olympus, my character again struggled to stay alive against crabs on the beach, because even the ordinary critters in the expansion are much tougher, ripping me of the feeling I have a mighty hero who can swathe his path through hordes of enemies. I got tired at that point of having as much trouble staying alive again as against the centaurs in the beginning. I want to feel mighty, not feeble by the time I made it that far.

When the game appeared on GOG, I wanted to buy it again DRM-free of course and started up the game with a new character back from the beginning, but I found that the game gave me RSI-like symptoms quickly from fast clicking (I always forget you can just hold the left mouse button for continued attacks against a single target) and I stopped to save my hand from getting chronic pain.

Stardew Valley

Yet again after year 1. I finish the greenhouse by the end of autumn, reach the bottom of the mines, max most relationships and the game becomes sparser than a tfidf matrix. At least I didn't miss a single recipe on tv this time, so I might yet continue this run.

Dark Souls. I just keep getting killed too often. I can see the quality in the game, but it is just not for me.

Definitely agree that some builds have it easier than others in specific boss fights. My earth character is rolling, and would be well suited to the final boss (high ranged damage, resistance to fire - just need the vitality) but the middle part of the game is (gasp) just too long and not interesting that I'm not sure I am willing to sit down and plug in the 10-15 hours it would take to get through the last world and a half - just so I can say I beat it.

But I got every class to at least lvl 10 and had a lot of fun doing that. The Greek campaign is definitely the best part of the game imo.

Also hadn't noticed til Drealmer pointed it out, but even if you can save your LMB a bit by holding it down, a lot of builds are VEEERY reliant on LMB, and other talents get used somewhat sparingly. But once I noticed, it was hard to un-notice that like 6 of 9 characters get 90% of their damage just out of one button.

I suspect it has to do with the pace of the game and the design of the skill tree. While Grim Dawn/TQ have similar talent tree structures, Grim Dawn you generally finish around lvl 50 (in maybe 20 hours?), whereas TQ took me about 24 to get to the final boss at lvl 32. That's a difference of roughly 54 skill points for the same time investment.

Once you factor in the points you have to advance in your class to unlock higher level skills, passives, main attack, there just aren't that many points in TQ to spread around for multiple active skills of any use in most builds.

Which I think is the other thing that makes Earth fairly strong - you don't need to invest a lot of points for some of those active spells to be pretty good bang for the buck.

Full Throttle

That section where you have to fight a whole bunch of bikers in order to get their gear. I tried for over two hours but I just can't get the timing right at all; sometimes when I click the 'fight' button he actually does what I instruct him to do, other times he does absolutely nothing, So whenever I click the 'fight' button it feels like there's only a 50% chance that anything will happen.