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Post by Wolfgang on Mar 16, 2017 16:20:58 GMT -5
All the simulator games are great. I got into Sim City and Civilization when they were new in the early 1990s on the PC. Haven't played them since then because they took me away from real life responsibilities. (I'm sure both have improved by leaps and bounds over the years.) Now that I no longer have real life responsibilities, I'm hunting down all the video games I missed over the years, like the first person shooter games. Holy cannoli! There are a lot of good ones out there.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 16, 2017 16:24:10 GMT -5
Over the weekend I felt the call of XCOM again. While there are many things I like about XCOM2, it still doesn't match Long War (a mod for the 2012 XCOM) in terms of deep strategic play. I've already had to make some fairly agonizing decisions about not responding to certain alien attacks simply because too many members of my roster were injured or fatigued. And I had one mission I really couldn't afford to decline where I sent almost a whole squad of fatigued soldiers, even though that's an automatic injury when they come back (with injured soldiers unavailable for use until they heal).
And I'm losing. The aliens are researching faster than I am right now, which means I'm falling behind.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 16, 2017 16:31:08 GMT -5
All the simulator games are great. I got into Sim City and Civilization when they were new in the early 1990s on the PC. Haven't played them since then because they took me away from real life responsibilities. (I'm sure both have improved by leaps and bounds over the years.) Now that I no longer have real life responsibilities, I'm hunting down all the video games I missed over the years, like the first person shooter games. Holy cannoli! There are a lot of good ones out there. Civ 5 ended up being a really good game once they finished improving it. The final upgrade ("Brave New World") really increased the interest level. I'm still not sure about Civ 6. They added a lot of focus on the cities (now you have to expand them out over the map rather than just building them all on one tile). But they simplified the diversity of units too much, I think. (And the AI for Civ 6 is terrible. It's not great for Civ 5, but it's really stupid for Civ 6.) And Gandhi still claims to love peace but still launches wars (and nukes) like crazy -- this is a long-running Civilization joke, based on a programming error in one of the early Civ games. (In Civ 6, when Gandhi declares war against you he piously claims that he can do this without sacrificing his morals, and that he won't explain why because you wouldn't understand.)
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Post by Wolfgang on Mar 16, 2017 16:34:04 GMT -5
All the simulator games are great. I got into Sim City and Civilization when they were new in the early 1990s on the PC. Haven't played them since then because they took me away from real life responsibilities. (I'm sure both have improved by leaps and bounds over the years.) Now that I no longer have real life responsibilities, I'm hunting down all the video games I missed over the years, like the first person shooter games. Holy cannoli! There are a lot of good ones out there. Civ 5 ended up being a really good game once they finished improving it. The final upgrade ("Brave New World") really increased the interest level. I'm still not sure about Civ 6. They added a lot of focus on the cities (now you have to expand them out over the map rather than just building them all on one tile). But they simplified the diversity of units too much, I think. (And the AI for Civ 6 is terrible. It's not great for Civ 5, but it's really stupid for Civ 6.) And Gandhi still claims to love peace but still launches wars (and nukes) like crazy -- this is a long-running Civilization joke, based on a programming error in one of the early Civ games. "Through war, one achieves peace." -- Wolfgang
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Post by Wolfgang on Mar 16, 2017 16:35:19 GMT -5
All the simulator games are great. I got into Sim City and Civilization when they were new in the early 1990s on the PC. Haven't played them since then because they took me away from real life responsibilities. (I'm sure both have improved by leaps and bounds over the years.) Now that I no longer have real life responsibilities, I'm hunting down all the video games I missed over the years, like the first person shooter games. Holy cannoli! There are a lot of good ones out there. Civ 5 ended up being a really good game once they finished improving it. The final upgrade ("Brave New World") really increased the interest level. I'm still not sure about Civ 6. They added a lot of focus on the cities (now you have to expand them out over the map rather than just building them all on one tile). But they simplified the diversity of units too much, I think. (And the AI for Civ 6 is terrible. It's not great for Civ 5, but it's really stupid for Civ 6.) And Gandhi still claims to love peace but still launches wars (and nukes) like crazy -- this is a long-running Civilization joke, based on a programming error in one of the early Civ games. I believe I saw that they were also available on the Mac. But does it play the same? (I don't have a PC.)
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 16, 2017 16:38:25 GMT -5
Civ 5 ended up being a really good game once they finished improving it. The final upgrade ("Brave New World") really increased the interest level. I'm still not sure about Civ 6. They added a lot of focus on the cities (now you have to expand them out over the map rather than just building them all on one tile). But they simplified the diversity of units too much, I think. (And the AI for Civ 6 is terrible. It's not great for Civ 5, but it's really stupid for Civ 6.) And Gandhi still claims to love peace but still launches wars (and nukes) like crazy -- this is a long-running Civilization joke, based on a programming error in one of the early Civ games. I believe I saw that they were also available on the Mac. But does it play the same? (I don't have a PC.) I assume it does. If I were only going to buy one, I would definitely buy Civ 5. You can get the "gold" or "complete" or whatever it's called version with all the upgrades in one package, and it will be less expensive than Civ 6. Maybe Civ 6 will end up being a better game once it's been upgraded a few times, but we'll have to see.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 16, 2017 16:40:01 GMT -5
PS. Kerbal Space Progam.
If you like sandbox simulation games, it's the best.
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Post by Wolfgang on Mar 16, 2017 18:45:26 GMT -5
Over the weekend I felt the call of XCOM again. While there are many things I like about XCOM2, it still doesn't match Long War (a mod for the 2012 XCOM) in terms of deep strategic play. I've already had to make some fairly agonizing decisions about not responding to certain alien attacks simply because too many members of my roster were injured or fatigued. And I had one mission I really couldn't afford to decline where I sent almost a whole squad of fatigued soldiers, even though that's an automatic injury when they come back (with injured soldiers unavailable for use until they heal). And I'm losing. The aliens are researching faster than I am right now, which means I'm falling behind. There are so many XCOM games that it's kinda laughably confusing. There's a bunch of XCOM: _______________ (fill in the blank) titles, followed by XCOM 2. LOL!
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 16, 2017 18:49:34 GMT -5
Over the weekend I felt the call of XCOM again. While there are many things I like about XCOM2, it still doesn't match Long War (a mod for the 2012 XCOM) in terms of deep strategic play. I've already had to make some fairly agonizing decisions about not responding to certain alien attacks simply because too many members of my roster were injured or fatigued. And I had one mission I really couldn't afford to decline where I sent almost a whole squad of fatigued soldiers, even though that's an automatic injury when they come back (with injured soldiers unavailable for use until they heal). And I'm losing. The aliens are researching faster than I am right now, which means I'm falling behind. There are so many XCOM games that it's kinda laughable. There's a bunch of XCOM: _______________ (fill in the blank) titles, followed by XCOM 2. LOL! All those are the first-gen X-Com games. The whole thing was rebooted/re-imagined in 2012. And XCOM2 is not actually a sequel to the 2012 XCOM. Instead, it's like an alternate history version where you lose XCOM, and then 20 years later XCOM2 forms as a guerilla resistance movement instead of a government-funded military operation.
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Post by Wolfgang on Mar 16, 2017 18:56:13 GMT -5
So, XCOM: Enemy Unknown?
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 16, 2017 19:11:22 GMT -5
Yeah, but what you want is XCOM: Enemy Within. It's the upgraded version of Enemy Unknown. Almost certainly the two will be bundled together anyway, if you try to buy them. And then when you have won a campaign with that, you want to download the (free!) mod called "Long War". But Long War is best after you have learned how to play the base game first. Long War is a lot more complicated (in a good way), and so it helps to play through the base version as kind of like an extended tutorial for playing Long War. What I did was buy EU/EW, then I played EU. Once I finished a campaign on that, I played EW. (I've never played EU again, because EW is more fun.) When I found out about Long War, I installed the mod. (And I've never played the base vanilla version of XCOM EU/EW again, because Long War is more fun.) But you could just skip playing EU entirely, and start with EW.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 16, 2017 20:30:23 GMT -5
You can find a lot more info on the web if you want, but here's a quick summary:
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
You start out with soldiers that use assault rifles. There are four classes of soldiers (sniper, assault, support, and gunner). You have to advance your technology (laser weapons, then plasma weapons) and play through certain scripted events (capture an alien base, capture certain kinds of aliens, develop a psionic soldier). Then you assault the final alien ship for the win. You have to do this before the aliens take over too much of the world (which they take from you one country at a time). You start by sending four soldiers on a mission, but that can be expanded to six. If your soldiers get wounded on a mission they are unavailable for a few days, which can mean missing a mission. So you really need to spread the experience around among 10-12 soldiers in your barracks, in case some get wounded or killed. Late in the game if you try to use rookie soldiers, they will be massacred.
XCOM: Enemy Within
Same thing, but it adds a secondary (timed) goal on each of the missions to recover stuff called "meld". You can use the meld to create cyborg soldiers called MECs. All MECs are basically the same class. Also, the aliens will assault your XCOM headquarters in the middle of the campaign, and if you lose that battle, you lose the game. Plus, there is a faction of humanity that is fighting against XCOM. You have some new missions called "covert ops", and once you win enough of them you can assault the headquarters of the human traitors.
Long War
Now you have eight classes of soldiers (scout, sniper, infantry, assault, engineer, medic, gunner, rocketeer). You start by sending six soldiers on a mission, but that can be expanded to eight. You have five steps in weapons technology you can go through, instead of three. And now MECs come in eight different classes too. When you turn a soldier into a MEC, it becomes a MEC version of its original class. MECS have full tree of skills to develop, too. And with all your soldiers, at each stage of promotion you choose between three different new skills instead of two for the base game, so your available army can be much more specialized. But soldiers are fatigued by every mission, so you can't usually use the same soldiers in one mission after another like you can in the base game. And wounds can take a long time to heal. And there are more missions, that come more often. So really you end up needing to have a roster of as many soldiers as you can. 50+ is not too many! You probably can use more like 75 by the end of the campaign. It can take 40+ days for a soldier to heal from wounds, but only 10 days or so to convert a soldier into a MEC cyborg. So if one of your soldiers gets seriously wounded, it becomes very tempting to give them the "Six Million Dollar Man" treatment.
The aliens start about as strong as in the base game, but they harvest resources and research humanity and get stronger and stronger as they do it. As they build up resources, they take over countries one by one. That just lets them build up more resources! But instead of doing one alien base attack, XCOM can now do multiple alien base attacks. And every time you successfully take over an alien base, that country comes back to XCOM control. So you have a way of reversing the alien progress. On the other hand, the aliens can assault the XCOM headquarters more than once, and it's now a tougher fight. You also have to do a lot more covert ops missions in order to find the headquarters of the human traitors and take them out of the game. And some of the covert ops missions are now set up so that you have only a few soldiers and the traitors have 10x as many as you, so you really do have to play them more as stealth missions than just "kill everything on the map" missions.
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Post by Wolfgang on Mar 16, 2017 21:27:38 GMT -5
Yeah, but what you want is XCOM: Enemy Within. It's the upgraded version of Enemy Unknown. Almost certainly the two will be bundled together anyway, if you try to buy them. And then when you have won a campaign with that, you want to download the (free!) mod called "Long War". But Long War is best after you have learned how to play the base game first. Long War is a lot more complicated (in a good way), and so it helps to play through the base version as kind of like an extended tutorial for playing Long War. What I did was buy EU/EW, then I played EU. Once I finished a campaign on that, I played EW. (I've never played EU again, because EW is more fun.) When I found out about Long War, I installed the mod. (And I've never played the base vanilla version of XCOM EU/EW again, because Long War is more fun.) But you could just skip playing EU entirely, and start with EW. Why do I need to download Long War AFTER playing EW? Can't I just download it now and play it whenever I want (usually after EW)? I ask because if I get EW and insert the disc into my PS3, it may tell me that there's an update to download. Usually, that update is just a game patch. I'm wondering if that update may actually include Long War.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 16, 2017 21:42:18 GMT -5
Yeah, but what you want is XCOM: Enemy Within. It's the upgraded version of Enemy Unknown. Almost certainly the two will be bundled together anyway, if you try to buy them. And then when you have won a campaign with that, you want to download the (free!) mod called "Long War". But Long War is best after you have learned how to play the base game first. Long War is a lot more complicated (in a good way), and so it helps to play through the base version as kind of like an extended tutorial for playing Long War. What I did was buy EU/EW, then I played EU. Once I finished a campaign on that, I played EW. (I've never played EU again, because EW is more fun.) When I found out about Long War, I installed the mod. (And I've never played the base vanilla version of XCOM EU/EW again, because Long War is more fun.) But you could just skip playing EU entirely, and start with EW. Why do I need to download Long War AFTER playing EW? Can't I just download it now and play it whenever I want (usually after EW)? I ask because if I get EW and insert the disc into my PS3, it may tell me that there's an update to download. Usually, that update is just a game patch. I'm wondering if that update may actually include Long War. No, Long War won't be on any official patch. It's a mod, made by completely different people. Here is a link to their website. It says it is available for PC, Mac, and Linux. www.pavonisinteractive.com/games.htm I strongly doubt it would be available for any game platform. The game platforms tend to be very mod-unfriendly. Also it says they have released a Long War 2 for XCOM2. I'm gonna have to check that out! These guys did such a good job with Long War that the official XCOM studio, Firaxis, actually hired them as consultants when developing XCOM2. And yeah, you could start with Long War first, but that could be discouraging. It's harder, and it also disables the tutorial missions from the base XCOM. It's really intended for people who already know how to play XCOM to have a more interesting challenge. I would at least play the tutorial missions and a few other from the base game before switching to Long War, but you probably don't really need to play the whole base game before you are ready to try Long War. If you do play Long War first, don't come back to me and complain that it was too hard/complicated!
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Post by Wolfgang on Mar 17, 2017 18:17:55 GMT -5
Completed Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Uncharted 3. Whew! Both are great games.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare -- If you like shoot 'em ups, this is the game for you. The game mostly requires you to accomplish certain tasks (e.g., take out snipers, plant explosives, infiltrate a location) without getting killed. The saves are very frequent -- even between checkpoints -- so if you finish a major battle, the chances are that you won't have to redo it. I think it took me 4-5 missions before I knew what I was doing. LOL!
Uncharted 3: Indiana Jones-type adventure game with over-the-top action sequences, spectacular scenery, and a story (with just the right amount of down time at the right places to allow you to catch your breath). There's a lot of walking, climbing (lots and lots of climbing), and shooting. Some puzzles that aren't difficult at all.
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