what else are you playing?

Dragon Age: Origins
Payday 2 (surprising addicting given that I don't really like FPS games, but this focuses on co-op and does it very well)
Dark Souls 2 (although haven't played since early June, waiting on the DLC to launch)
Civ 5 (might be the single best game I've ever played, besides Card Hunter of course!)

Anyone play Shovel Knights yet?

 

I churned through some of my Steam backlog:

10000000 - essentially a huge match-3 puzzle... worth a couple hours
Guacamelee - superb platforming / beat em' up, with humor and Mexican flair; they got the difficulty ramp just right.
SW:KOTOR - I figured out crashing, and remembered plot, and then very quickly arrived at the Star Forge and ragequit because battling through endlessly repetitive hordes is dumb, and I can just watch the cutscenes on youtube
Antichamber - the stanley parable, except instead of a "story" you do lots of "crazy virtual world" puzzling
Another World - played mostly for the historical significance, it's probably worth playing with a guide as the puzzles and checkpointing are dumb
140 - tightly-executed music/beat platforming, it was too short
Ballpoint Universe - middling bullet hell on rails flying thingamajig, with a weird platforming /exploration hub world thrown in
Hexcells / Plus - superb logical puzzling, and cheap to boot

I also tried Cave Story + and Risk of Rain, but gave them up very quickly after getting frustrated.

 

Cave Story is great! Haven't played that in far too long

It's not a computer or video game, but I'm trying to get back into go.

 

I just started playing Hearthstone myself. Not only am I really out of practice with traditional deckbuilding (and I was never very good at it), but I also seem to be getting worse the more I play it. My Mage was undefeated in the Inn but lost a casual game. My Shaman was undefeated in Ranked games (3), but later had a loss going through the Inn. My Hunter had about 4 losses in the Inn and my Druid is losing more than he is winning. I suspect I'm not ready for the expansion yet.

 

i have a very cheap deck that beats hc maexxna in naxx ezmode if anyone wants protips. feel free to add me on eu Will#2423

 

Beat Contra recently, still stuck on the penultimate boss in Ninja Gaiden. Recently found NationStates, which seems like it has quite a lot of potential.

 

I started also, like 1 week ago. i dont care much for ranked play..since i have almost no cards... but the arena is what sold it for me, its fun. pity it requires a lot of grinding and/or money

 

I stopped playing Hearthstone because I was too lazy to build up my collection there. Haven't tried Arena though after that one free run.

Edit: I also tried Smite for few days. Looks good but I don't see why should I learn a new MOBA if I'm playing LoL anyway.

 

you can get to legend rank the first month if you know what you're doing i'd say the lowest legend ranks are equal to 1600 rating in card hunter so i wouldn't say hearthstone is P2W it is more P2 get the fun cards fast i havent spent a penny and have all the cards i want and enough dust to buy any 4 legendaries. hearthstone has the best F2P model ive ever seen and the expansion was a lot cheaper than i expected.

 

Yeah, but I'm not ready to play a month to get there

 

I get it now. As CH is a way better game, Thrun has been paid by Blizzard to troll in CH in order to scare players there and bring them to Heartstone

 

better game? i'll remain impartial better F2P model? i don't think anyone can disagree. i also wish you could turn 4 junk legendaries into a vibrant pain

 

Well, here's one I'm NOT playing. Oh, I want to play it alright: but it doesn't seem to exist.

The original X-COM. See, I loved X-COM and got to play it on two different computers that could run the original incarnation. Then years passed and it had to be "emulated" or "adapted" or whatever the word is. So I played a fan-updated version that ran on a modern computer, and it was almost perfect. Biggest problem: the sound effects were scrambled. The Sectoid, being the smallest bipedal enemy in the game, somehow had the deepest-sounding death cry (taken from the original Muton, I believe). The Mind Probe no longer made a "psychic" noise when used: instead it ALSO made a death cry (possibly even the Sectoid one). What was up with all the death cries?

Dunno. But it's all I had to play.

Until recently, when our friend Humble offered the "official 2K Games version" of X-COM (bundled with all the others, including the contemporary stuff). Woohoo, another shot! Maybe they fixed the sound effects! Nope. You used to be able to identify most aliens by their voice, but I've got active saves here where the Sectoids and the Floaters sound exactly the same. Oh, and they both sound like Mutons.

The only thing left for me to do is research the Mind Probe and see if it still screams like an alien. If it DOESN'T, then technically the matter with Sectoids could be my memory at fault. That strikes me as unlikely since mismatching what "sounds right" is a design flaw, and that would have annoyed me in the original too.

If it's still scrambled, then I guess I'm NOT playing X-COM. At least not the version that earned a place in history. 'Cause it's history.

 

Some League of Legends again even though the game is meh. Just trying to get back to Gold ranking for the end of season rewards.

Been playing a lot of Battleblock Theater, which is fun. Also Plants vs Zombies 2 and Dungeon Keeper Mobile but both reek of horrible mobile monetization methods... =/ Good learning experience though from studying them.

 

I've been playing Wildstar recently.

I'm usually playing board games. Just went to GenCon and picked up quite a few.
Legendary: Villains
Galaxy Defenders
Epic Resort
Shadows of Malice

I will be playing all of these in the near future.

 

I've started playing Pokemon yellow to compete with a friend who's started it recently, but every time I try to do that, I always end up horribly overshooting them, due to the fact I'm an awful powergamer in RPGs I've played before. At least it's not as bad as the time I restarted and rebeat EarthBound in the time it took my friend to go through the first three towns.

 

In regards to:

I don't know how many fans of the classic X-COM there are here, and certainly have no clue if anyone's played it on the original-era computers, but just in case someone cares, I got the answer.

It looks like they redid the sound effects from scratch. The Mind Probe sound effect is appropriately "psychic" and doesn't sound like an alien death scream, so that's a relief. But everything is just a bit weird. It's most noticeable in the intro movie, where all the alien noises cut out in a funny way, and the one human voice is a jarring bit of voice acting that doesn't mesh.

The rest of the game also has agonizing slowdown AND frame skipping issues, with every single sound effect playing a half-second after it's supposed to. I've adjusted every setting possible and it's still unplayable.

My conclusion remains: you can't play the original X-COM anymore. At least without an original computer.

But that's okay, I'm enjoying myself playing my back catalogue of mid-to-classic games that I couldn't finish at the time. Recently I've played American McGee's Alice and just now I finished Max Payne. Both with flaws, but both with an astounding level of intelligence that I hadn't seen in awhile.

 

Haven't tried that, but the Steam version using DOSBOX runs fine.

 

I'm unsure about "Steam version using DOSBox." Does that mean, literally, that the Steam program runs the DOSBox program and then DOSBox runs X-COM? Because I'm using DOSBox directly. Or at least the version provided with my download.