Prismata has no randomness (beyond setup) or hidden information as a core design goal; it's unlikely (at least in the core ranked mode) there will ever be any. There is actually a bit of asymmetry because black's seven drones makes some rushes possible white can't (and white going first makes some rushes possible black can't, of course). But yes, Prismata is great, play it!
Sounds interesting, but I really dislike games without hidden information as they become too AP (analysis paralysis) prone with calculations. Going with feel and gut instinct is something I very much enjoy.
My last weeks have consisted of: 1) Aura Kingdom Don't play it. It's a TERRIBLY buggy MMO, has too few players to work well and has no real competitive elemets. It simply looks amazing but that's it. I could go on ranting about it for a long time. 2) Torchlight II That's just an amazing game. Very much like Titan Quest but better in every single way. I started playing on veteran (and I'm so glad I didn't pick normal difficulty). Recently finished my first big boss fight - with a victory btw - and I don't remember feeling so good while playing a PC game for a very long time Try it out! On another note: It will soon be a year since I discovered CH and now for the first time I haven't read every new post in forums and am not planning to too any more. And since I'm not really playing CH either any more, it's a good bye, at least for now.
Torchlight was a... delight and i had the second on the radar for a while. I'll pick it up at the next best chance. Somehow i never felt like giving Diablo 3 a chance.
Plants versus Zombies 2 on my android tablet. I liked the original game, but all of the microtransactions that litter the sequel are a bit off-putting. Then again, it IS an EA game so it is to be expected.
I'm still waiting for the best chance to pick TLII. My experience with D3 was... mixed. As I guess has been the case with many of those who purchased it. It's a very well produced game, but with mediocre gameplay value. The new free-form skill system is interesting in its own way, and I didn't miss manually spending points on lvlups. But I found basically every other system to be fairly uninteresting. The itemization sucked big time (although I haven't kept up with all the latest balance patches, especially after the expansion came out). All in all, they managed to make Diablo into something much more about min-maxing and grinding (even more than the series already was, which is enough said). I guess that's not a problem for those who really enjoy that side of the game. The whole experience is much, much more streamlined than it ever was in previous iterations which, again, might or might not be what you're looking for in a dungeon crawler. I did enjoy my first playthroughs though, but couldn't for the life of me finish the game using every available class (yes, it bored me that much). In the end, I think I stopped playing after ~3 months after purchasing it. Since people keep saying it got much better with the expansion, I might be picking it up sometime in the future. Or not.
I just picked up Wizardry8 for the first time in years, on of my all-time favorite games. Think I'm going to go for a four-character/no NPC run!
I'd say don't get me started on PvZ2, but it's already too late for that. The original PvZ was a causal game in the best sense of the term. You could get yourself into trouble if you didn't pay attention to the mix of opponents and plants available, but failing that it never all that hard. And the game was clearly designed to be very forgiving. If the zombies did make it all the way to your end of a column, there was a lawnmower there to save you. I rarely, if ever, needed them. I'm a confirmed turn-based kind of guy, but the thing about zombies is that they shuffle really, really slowly, especially if you slow them down even more with snow peas. So the real-time-ness of it all never meant things were so frantic that I couldn't keep up with what was happening. So, beating PvZ wasn't very difficult. But that's OK. Sometimes you want a brain-burning intellectual challenge. Sometimes you want to be pushed to the limit of your reflexes in a hell of bullets. But sometimes you want to set up your defenses and then just sit back, listen to the nice music, watch the funny animations, and enjoy the goofy atmosphere as your plants mow down hordes of zombies without there being too much need for you to intervene. It was relaxing to play. Fun. It's not that the gameplay was weak; it was rock-solid, but what really put PvZ over the top was charm. Crazy Dave! The way wall-nuts would get a little tear as the zombies start to eat away at them. The digging to China easter egg. Etc. I played through the whole game a couple of times. I collected one of everything for my zen garden. I marveled at PopCap's generosity when they kept releasing updates with free minigames long after I felt like I had gotten my money's worth. A couple of years ago at PAX East, I stopped by the PopCap booth and showed them an adorable piece of PvZ fan art my daughter had drawn. They were nice enough to give me a pair of Wall-Nut hats for my girls. They still wear them. My pool of goodwill towards all things PvZ was wide and deep. I wish I could have paid a handsome sum of money up front for PvZ2 and have it be the same kind of game. But that's not how EA rolls. So I gritted my teeth and hoped for the best. I complained about the consumable powerups to a friend, but he told me to just pretend they weren't there and play like it was regular PvZ. And that worked, for a while. There was freemium crap, but you could overlook it and still play the game. In the most recent couple of updates, though, they have clearly tightened the screws. The game throws huge hordes of zombies at you now. I no longer have the luxury of watching the animations; trying to keep up is a struggle. It's possible that I have just gotten bad at PvZ2, but lawnmowers have become a resource, not a last resort. Pretty clearly, the hope is that by upping the difficulty, they will motivate me to use powerups to get past levels. I have hundreds of thousands of gold coins that I earned just by playing but never bothered to use. You could argue that I am crippling myself by not using all the resources at my disposal to progress. And I could burn through a lot of coins without it costing me a cent. But, while that would let me beat levels, it wouldn't be any fun. I don't wanna play Coins vs. Zombies. They brought back the Vasebreaker minigame "by popular demand". There's a powerup you can buy that lets you see what's in any given vase. You can buy as many as you want. It's hard to think of a clearer case of pay to win. Feh. Most zombie movies have a scene where one of the living confronts a zombie who wears the flesh of a friend or loved one. The survivor has to struggle to overcome the hope that the spark of humanity, the soul if you will, still lurks somewhere in that familiar body. But of course it doesn't. What confronts them now is a ravening automaton that seeks only to devour. That thing on your phone or tablet is no longer the jolly companion of old, with whom you and I shared so many good times. Cry if you must, but aim for the head.
While I was setting up my new computer today, I decided to keep my age old tradition of playing a game of Minesweeper on every computer I own alive. To my disgust however, this computer lacked the classic! I set to the internet, hoping to find a version to download, but I got much more than I expected in return. Minefield is a MMO version of Minesweeper, which in this case means nothing more than expanding the grid to infinite proportions and putting you with other players, removing any stimulus from the game to tell you it's time to stop playing. Even better, unlike other classics turned MMOs, Minefield was originally meant to be a solo game, meaning that the admittedly low player count doesn't hinder it in the least. I went in expecting the worst, and before I stopped I had defused 2,500 mines (The mine density is about that of an intermediate board in Minesweeper, meaning it was about equivalent to 63 complete regular games) and was undertaking a grand excavation project to map a rather large mined section of the board with two other people. The link in the post leads to the general area I was at, so if you think you're good at sweeping, check it out! The other game I've been playing a lot of recently has been Copy Kitty, which is on the complete opposite end of the gaming spectrum. With gameplay that can be best described as Kirby 64 on steroids and acid at the same time, you can combine up to three powers to create an absolutely absurd amount of ways to destroy the robots trying to tear into you. The bosses are hard, the music is amazing, the visuals do not stop, and the gameplay is extraordinarily smooth. All the particle effects may cause some slowdown on older computers as there's no way to turn them completely off (though there's a hidden cheat to triple them if you want a ad-lib slomo-mode), but if you're playing on a newer computer it shouldn't be a problem. With a mission mode for starters, an endless mode for mayhem without the already minimal plot, a level designer for creative people, and a hard mode that is one of the hardest difficulties I've seen in a while, there's something for every kind of platformer fan out there. This is one of my favorite games, so give it a try if you want a downloadable.
I took a little break from CH and been playing Theme Hospital and XCom: Enemy Within. Theme Hospital was free if you sign up for EA's Origin thingy. Fun game and good memories. XCom is just brilliant. I was a big fan of the first two (especially terror from the deep) and this new incarnation is good addition to the series. I hope they do another one in a few years.
I've spent the last week+ trying the other games in the Humble Bundle to decide if I'm going to buy it.
I got ahold of an extra pre-alpha key for Duelyst, another tactical CCG. Be warned that it's PvP-only, Chrome-only, takes up >1GB of RAM, tops out my i5-3210m (2.5-ghz dual core), and is a huge grind to get started (I have won a single match out of ~20; you get gold for new cards only by winning). Please post when you take the key: Spoiler: Duelyst pre-alpha key 4a58917f-762f-4243-8e6d-9dafc44f7519 Register at http://alpha.duelyst.com/. If the key is already taken, and you care enough to jump through hoops, maybe take a peek here.
Been loading for the past 5 minutes... After 10 minute I finally got in and signed up. Thanks! =) I'm at GDC right now but I'll check it out after the show.
Papa Louie 3: When Sundaes Attack I'm not very good at platformers, but this is easy enough at the early levels for me to eventually get through. I really like having lots of playable chars to unlock, and how each level has multiple goals to make replaying interesting.
Ever since my friend linked me to a Yahtzee video *shakes his fist at his friend* I've been playing Minecraft for the first time in many years. Spoiler: Some stuff made. Not pictured: Skylines to many different locations. A small village I made. A quartz fountain stands in the center. A village I made near one of my log houses in a different biome. Many things have been added since the 1.5 beta. The video that made me want to play it again. Spoiler
