The Miscellaneous PC & vidya Games Thread

[Solmyr]

I've played II and Rise of an Empire (6?) and liked them both.

[mongers]

I've played II and Rise of an Empire (6?) and liked them both.

Thanks to you and Syt for the recommendation, iirc I played 2 quite a bit, but I'll go with rise of empire as you suggest.

[Threviel]

2 and 3 are the ones I've played most, both are solid but 3 is perhaps a tad less buggish.

4 is very similar to 3 but I haven't played it much.

[Tamas]

I have the fondest memories of 1, I absolutely loved that as a kid, but objectively there's no reason to prefer it over 2.

[Threviel]

Yeah, 1 has the best atmosphere. I configured an emulated Amiga 4000 a few years back just to play Settlers and Centurion, 10/10, would do it again.

[The Brain]

I'm playing Subnautica and having a lot of fun. Great atmosphere. When I built my big submarine I named it Nautica (hey Cal wink wink).

[FunkMonk]

I played Subnautica for a few hours until I just freaked out inside a giant underwear cavern and never played again 

[The Brain]

I played Subnautica for a few hours until I just freaked out inside a giant underwear cavern and never played again 

What size exactly?

[FunkMonk]

I'm playing Pentiment on the Deck and it's an amazing little game. Pick it up only of you like reading though

[Sophie Scholl]

I'm playing Pentiment on the Deck and it's an amazing little game. Pick it up only of you like reading though

I nabbed that during the Steam Winter sale along with a few other titles. I haven't gotten to it yet though.

[Syt]

So it seems that Mechwarrior 5 with mods is basically the Battletech tactical game, but as action sim? 

At least based on Splattercat's video:

[The Brain]

I'm playing Subnautica and having a lot of fun. Great atmosphere. When I built my big submarine I named it Nautica (hey Cal wink wink).

Finished it. It's a great game. Recommended.

[FunkMonk]

I'm playing Subnautica and having a lot of fun. Great atmosphere. When I built my big submarine I named it Nautica (hey Cal wink wink).

Finished it. It's a great game. Recommended.

How big was the game?

[The Brain]

I'm playing Subnautica and having a lot of fun. Great atmosphere. When I built my big submarine I named it Nautica (hey Cal wink wink).

Finished it. It's a great game. Recommended.

How big was the game?

Well I've played 50 hours. I haven't discovered everything that can be discovered. But I haven't rushed things either. Size depends a bit on playstyle, if you laser focus rush the main storyline you can get it done a lot quicker than if you stop and smell the corals.

[The Brain]

Some thoughts on Subnautica [SPOILERS]:

The active playing area isn't that big, and you never go into the open deep ocean. You're always close to "land" (the bottom) as it were, and the deepest areas are in massive cave systems, which makes them very "indoors". With a name and theme like Subnautica it would make sense to do some travel into the open deep. The thought of miles of water in every direction, or at least above and around you as you reach the deep ocean floor, would be cool to experience in the game. Would be awesome to have a deep ocean bathyscaphe/bathysphere that could be carried by the big submarine like it carries the mecha suit or little pod vehicle, and go into the depths. The deepest the present vehicles can take you is 1700m, which won't even get you to the bottom of the Atlantic, and an alien world in a Sci-Fi setting should be able to at least match Earth when it comes to extreme environments. There could be interesting locations on the deep ocean floor, and also free floating deep ocean stuff.

I really like that you don't have to fight. The "enemies" are not demons or monsters, but animals, and if you keep a low profile and stick to stealth and decoys to get you out of trouble you'll be fine. You can build weapons but I never used them. A few times I used my mecha drilling arm to scare off animals that attacked me when mining. And a few times I used my knife on annoying little fish that bit me.

The main story involves curing a global, or at least regional, infection. The way to do this is to explore alien ruins. In the text material you discover/get it is hinted that doing your own research is possible, but AFAIK it really isn't. You can build alien containment modules (the only practical use to me was as fish ponds for food), and you can salvage lab equipment and build lab tables etc. But the lab equipment is all non-functional and AFAIK there's no way to get it functional. I think it would have been super cool if there had been two ways to finish the game, one by exploring ruins (the action style) and one by doing methodical research (the science way). Maybe there were early thoughts like this in development but they dropped it later?

Radiation works nothing like reality, which is standard for computer games and I had no real problem with it. In reality a few meters of water will shield you from the direct radiation from even an open running nuclear reactor. If there's contamination in the water you're diving in sure you will get some exposure, but the self-shielding is immense.

While it can be frustrating when you haven't fully discovered a tantalizing blueprint, finally discovering it is satisfying. And many things are not at all necessary to complete the game. I never discovered the full blueprint for the nuclear reactor (until I started googling stuff after I finished the game), but I used other power sources no problem. And there are things I never even knew existed. There are often many possible ways to do things.