Discussion What's your favourite video game you've been playing?

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Interesting and nice to hear that Rafael. Max Payne 3 is still one of my fave modern day video games of all time. There was a guy from Sao Paulo on one of the forums that was really upset about the way they portrayed his city, even saying the river segment was very unrealistic as far as the layout of the map. I tried to console him by saying most video games based on certain real life areas are a heavy exaggeration of reality, but he didn't want to hear it.

That said, I found it was a disgrace that Rio was not portrayed as well as it could have been by that jerk Ryan Lochte in the summer Olympics. It hit me especially hard since I'm half Portuguese by heritage.

 

Mobomonkey

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I'm putting in a plug for Prey. Not only is it a great mix of sci-fi shooter/crafting/puzzle games, it has good atmosphere too & various possible endings. It's an extremely well crafted story with lots of clues, if you take your time, read ALL books/notes/e-mails & listen carefully to the whispers! I've done one run through (which can take many hours if you pick up on all the side quests) & am currently doing my second trip, using a different skills build, it's that instantly re-playable! Currently £30 on Steam, which is a bargain as I'm at 137hrs (some of that is 2nd run) & counting!
Couple of tips if you get it, 1, make manual saves wisely, you only get 20max 2, there seems to be a weird graphics thing, whereby, if you try to select max settings, you lose detail on panels/doors etc. Low or Med settings don't do that. Personally I couldn't see any difference between Low or Med settings, so Low is fine.
 

Rafael Mestdag

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That's very interesting, the river part of Max Payne 3 is indeed very exaggerated in relation to real life, there is in fact a famous, poluted river that goes across São Paulo, but of course all those boats full of bad guys with guns was all only real in Max Payne 3.

I found the favela part the most interesting bit of the game, it was very accurate although I've never been inside a favela despite living in Rio de janeiro, where there are a lot of favelas. I guess I've seen enough of them on the tv news to be able to tell.
The beginning of the game where they show those rich people living in a very expensive apartment overlooking the favelas was for me, basically a summary of Brazil. To me, of all the games that portrayed Brazil or part of it, Max Payne 3 remains the one that came the closest.

 

You can overwrite over those. There's only 20 slots but you can delete the older ones or just simply choose to overwrite them.
Prey was a brilliant game. Looking back I can only say good things about it.

 
Prey is a mixed bag for me. While it DOES have some decent gameplay and story content, it also misses the mark in some key ways IMO.

I found the GLOO gun to be very awkward for both stopping the fast moving Mimics, and spraying steps on walls to quickly escape. I had to laugh at the video example they gave where you see a crew member quickly escape with one.

I also feel they very poorly structured the progression of the game. Early on you will encounter very tough enemies and logs to search for people or items in areas you are not at all equipped to handle.

@ Rafael,
I also enjoyed the favelas in Max Payne 3, and in the Takedown mission of CoD: Modern Warfare 2 as well. It was done far better in Max Payne 3 though.
 
Just started Shadow of War last night. I can't use the HD textures or 4k cinematics on my current spec, but so far it runs better than I expected and looks pretty good.

I also like that they have a lot more settings to adjust mouse control, because in the last game it was too geared toward gamepads, which made the mouse look very squirrely and hard to control.
 
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Well, I'm an old man, relatively speaking. I'm almost 30 whereas most people here are probably under 20!

I belong to the world where The Pentium 3 1400S with 512MBs of RAM was a thing to lust for and The Nvidia Geforce Ti 500 was the best GPU money could buy. A world where The Half Life Trilogy was considered the 'smartest' game on the planet! A time when the gaming industry was in shock by the cinematics of Call of Duty!

Anyhow, If someone put a gun on my head and ask me to choose one video game to play for the rest of my life that would be:

Hitman (2016)!

Each mission has quite literally dozens (if not HUNDREDS) of approaches one can take to execute the target. I'm sure one can play that thing for YEARS without getting bored!

I mean, heck, I still play Hitman: Blood Money (True Classic!) sometimes and it's been out for almost a decade now!

Good Day!
 

Rafael Mestdag

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I've been playing Evil Within for about a month now and although, as usual, I've been taking it one step at a time, I'm now stuck at the first boss. It's a wonderful game though, I haven't been this scared with a game since The Blair Witch game back in the 90's!!
 
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Guess I'm finally buying a console. Whew.

[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzdNECcio54"][/video]
 
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I'm playing it as well. It's got some quirks that keep me from loving it but all in all it's a pretty good game.
 
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You mean over 40 right? :p Scroll up on this page. Many of us are older than you'd expect.
 
LOL, muhammadsamimhassan, you're just making me feel ancient saying that, I'm 59.

Anyways, after a few hassles dropping my CenturyLink ISP for cable, and formatting over some strange Windows Defender problems, I'm now up and running again, and at a whopping 105 down, 7 up, (vs the 15 down, .75 up I had before.

Since I stepped in here last I've been playing The Evil Within 2, and Wolfenstien II: The New Colossus.

The Evil Within 2 I can run at pretty much max settings, but I'm not getting why most seem to like this game more than the first one. I'm with those whom miss the challenge of the first one. Plus this one doesn't have as much monster variety, and it's open world design reuses the same maps too much. It's also got a cover system now, and if you get the upgrade to takedown from cover, stealth is way too easy. Worse yet, the key for sticking and unsticking to cover often does not work to free you from it, which can cause you to get attacked sometimes. Fortunately you can alternatively just move away from it.

Even without auto takedowns, it's too easy to just run out of sight of an enemy and lose them. They will not pursue you like enemies in the last game. They will not keep running to the last spot you stopped running via hearing your footsteps. This is just a watered down TEW based on a lot of whining people did about the first game, whom didn't have the patience to learn how to play it.

Wolf: TNC I've only played a little ways into so far. DO NOT trust auto detect if you are running a GPU that is not fairly powerful. Most of the main graphics settings it gets right, but not the AA. By default that is set to the max TSSAA (8TX). Some games can easily handle that setting even on midrange GPUs, but it's not as well optimized here. If you have a 1060 6GB or better you won't probably have a problem with it, but my 7970 can't handle it, despite playing Doom 2016 easily at max settings (Same engine). If I bump it down to TAA (1X), I can maintain around 75 FPS on the High preset, which looks pretty good. Some textures like NPC hands are worse than the last game though.
 
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HaHa! Thanks, mate! And yes, I get the idea, although I prefer to treat myself as an 'old' man. You know, responsible, no nonsense type of fellow who hates everything that screams 'teenager'!

It's strange that when we are young, we couldn't wait to grow up and when we do grow up, we just couldn't wait to go back... Nothing frightens me more than aging.

Anyhow, If you don't mind, may I ask how you got so much into gaming?! I'm very VERY curious!

The game that brought the gamer out of me was Quake 2! Played it when I was about 14 (I think) on my ancient Pentium 2 233Mhz with 64MBs of RAM (RIP) and it was more frightening then even the scariest movies I'd seen but also addicting! It literally gave me nightmares!

And that's how it started! What about you?

 
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For me it was, Pong - around 1980, Atari 2600 - early 80s to the late 80s, Nintendo - late 80s to the early 90s, Super Nintendo - early 90s to the mid 90s then PC since 1996. Other than a few games on the Wii I bought for the kid about 10 years ago I've been gaming on the PC since 1996.

The only console game I've played all the way through since then was The Last of Us while I was house sitting for my cousin a few years ago. I may very well buy a Playstation for The Last of Us 2 and to play The Last of Us again though.

The first computer I bought was an IBM with a 233Mhz Pentium w/MMX, 48MB of RAM, a 6.4GB HDD and a 2MB Ati Rage II+ graphics card. It came with a 15" 640 x 480 monitor. :p

Mechwarrior 2 came in an optimized edition for the Rage II+ with that computer. I'd played computer games with friends before that notably Silent Service and Starflight but the Mechwarrior games are what made me really love PC gaming.
 
The funny thing is, though I'm older than you guys, you've been gaming longer than I have. I got started late, in my early to mid 40s. For me it was games like Deus Ex, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Medal Of Honor Allied assault. Those were the ones I got started on. I also used to play the MoH: Spearhead MP demo endlessly. They had a good 12-16 map rotation on some servers. When it started getting riddled with God Mode cheaters, I lost interest and dove deeper into SP.

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Update on my initial thoughts of Wolf 2 performance.When I got a little ways into the game (level 5 of 17), suddenly the FPS plummeted to what it was before turning down AA. It dropped all the way from about 75 FPS to 25.

That's about the same time I noticed the Async Compute setting disappeared from the Advanced Graphics menu. Upon searching for it I found many others have had the same problem. https://steamcommunity.com/app/612880/discussions/0/1479856439030363928/?ctp=1 After checking the config file for the game though, I found the corresponding command string still has a 0 value to indicate it's disabled as I set it. (r_enableAsyncCompute "0")

However I also noticed in readjusting settings to account for the drop in performance, the AA setting kept reverting to the max. I was actually hopeful at that point that that's all it was, but unfortunately once I was able to turn AA back to where it was, the performance was still terrible. It was so bad I had to drop graphics to the Low preset.

That said, the next level I was able to play at High no problem with the lower AA setting I was using, and the next one I just started seems to handle it fine as well. So far it's just the 5th level where you're in the ruins of Manhattan that was terribly laggy. I'm hopping it was just the game dropping the Async Compute setting from the menu causing a weird side effect on performance.

I'll try replaying that level after I finish the game to see.
 

richannel

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I have been playing Minecraft,take advantage of limitless supplies and create anything I can imagine,it's very interesting.
 
I finished Observer. That took a lot more time than I wanted. The game is only about 6-7 hours long. I've just been playing way too much online these days. I miss single player.
Observer was amazing. It's what you'd call a walking simulator but it's pretty engaging. There are several mind sequences - which I had mentioned quite a few posts back - they are really well executed. Story was nice but I admit I had to read the endings elsewhere to fully understand what was going on. It may have been because I took long breaks between sessions that I forgot most of the story but I still had the big picture in mind. It was a nice experience overall.

I've been playing Call of Duty Infinite Warfare after beating Observer. I encountered some performance issues which went away after a driver update. I'm still really early in it though. I gotta play Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice too, on the side.
 
Been taking a stab at CoD WWII. It's OK but not their usual run easily on any spec coding. It's OK once you know what settings to turn down if you're on older spec though.

However I really don't like how scripted it is. WAY too many forced cinematics and QTEs for my taste. Plus you have to restock ammo by getting it from your squad, which I don't mind but often times it's also the same person you have to report to after a battle, so you get sucked into a cutscene instead of getting your ammo.

For the most part the story, characters and gameplay are OK, and I like that they included resistance fighters. The brief segment where you pilot an aircraft is absolutely horrible though. The flight controls all work through the mouse, and have slow repsonse.
 
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Finished The Evil Within. Overall a decent game but it had some issues that kept it from being great.

Started the Dead Space games again. Finished the first one ( Steam this time but I own it on both Steam and Origin ) and started Dead Space 2 ( on Origin ) and even though Origin gets a lot of hate there's my saved games from December 2012 when I last played Dead Space 2.

Dead Space > The Evil Within.
 
Would like to know what issues with TEW you're referring to? Could be something I might be able to help with, whether it's performance, visuals, or gameplay.

I agree on Dead Space wins over TEW as a franchise at this point, but TEW 1 really wins over any Dead Space game on replay value if you ask me. Just the fact that bumping up difficulty level adds more traps and tougher monsters keeps it fresh.

Honestly I'm still so bummed over EA canning Visceral Games and Dead Space that it's hard to even talk about it. My only hope now is a publisher with a competent dev team will buy the rights of it from them and continue it. Even better if Steve Papoutsis spearheads that team, now that he no longer works for EA.