Ask Slashdot: What Games Are You Playing?

An anonymous reader writes "We haven't had this discussion in a while: what games are Slashdotters playing these days? We've recently seen the latest generation of consoles arrive on the scene. Almost exactly a year ago, Valve brought Steam to Linux, and they've been pushing for stronger Linux adoption among game publishers ever since. Mobile gaming continues to rise (for better or worse), MMOs are still sprouting like weeds, and Kickstarted indie games are becoming commonplace. For those of you who play games, what ones have struck your fancy recently? What older games do you keep coming back to? What upcoming releases are you looking forward to?"

Comments

FTL Faster Than Light

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't recommend FTL enough. You're basically trying to pilot a ship crew through space, from one side of a universe to another, while being chased by enemies. It's fantastic! It runs on old and inexpensive hardware, and it's coming out with a big-time free update soon. It's a great game with lots of varying gameplay depending on your ship, luck, etc. and has lots of achievements and unlockable ships to keep you replaying it over and over. http://www.ftlgame.com

Re:FTL Faster Than Light

[allcoolnameswheretak]

I like the game, it's a great concept, but sometimes I wish it were a little less random. You often get into a bad luck situation that you have no hope of winning, abruptly ending a session in which you felt you were doing quite well.
But I suppose some people enjoy this unpredictable "rougelike element in the game.

Re:FTL Faster Than Light

[vux984]

FTL choices remind me of this classic riddle:

You are in a room, the exit by which you came in is blocked, and the roof is slowly closing down on you. You cannot leave the way you came, and you cannot stay here. The far wall has two doors on it. In between the doors is a table with a frog on it. A sign above the frog says this:

"One door leads to certain destruction, the other to Riches and Power. You can ask the frog one question, but it will always lie."

You look at the frog, with a smirk, you know this riddle and how to solve it, but your face falls. The frog has been dead for some time. Someone should have fed it it from time to time. In any case, it won't be answering any questions today.

Choose your door.

This is too often how I feel when I play FTL. :)

There are several good indie titles

[vidnet]

There are some good indie games these days, like Gone Home; Papers, Please and Sir, You Are Being Hunted.

Gone Home does a very fine job of interactively telling a story by searching through an abandoned house.

Papers, Please is a puzzle game about ethics and paperwork, which is much more interesting than it sounds.

Sir, You Are Being hunted is a procedurally generated stealth/survival game, in which you're trying to sneak under the noses of armed gentlemen robots.

Re:There are several good indie titles

[stms]

Check out Rogue Legacy it's one of the best games I've played recently.

If multiplayer is more your thing I've been playing Loadout it's one of the first free-to-play games I've actually enjoyed.

I had access to the Titanfall beta if Call of Duty with Mechs sounds cool to you then you'll probably like it. The whole game is much better implemented than COD.

The Dolphin Emulator Devs finally fixed some major problems with Wind Waker in the latest snapshot so I've been going back to that.

For upcoming games the two I'm most anticipating are The Witness and No Man's Sky. Though I'm highly skeptical of No Man's Sky. It's incredibly ambitious for the small team working on it.

Re:There are several good indie titles

[glavenoid]

My pc can't handle Gone Home so I watched a let's play video to check it out, and damn, that was one touching story. Major nostalgia trip for me. I'd say it's more of an "interactive nostalgia storytelling" than a game though.

MechWarrior Online, while waiting for Star Citizen

[WilliamGeorge]

Apparently I'm nostalgic for my childhood in the 90s - I loved both the MechWarrior / BattleTech and Wing Commander / Freelancer franchises. MWO has been somewhat disappointing, but still fun enough, while Star Citizen looks to be coming along very well.

http://mwomercs.com/

https://robertsspaceindustries...

MMOs take the main part

[Neva]

Tablet, stationary: Clash of Clans
Tablet, mobile: Ingress
With friends in Steam: Killing Floor (Linux), Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Alien Swarm
Solo in Steam: Star Conflict, War Thunder
Would play if had more time: Sid Meier's Civilization IV (Linux)

I have loads of Humble bundles bought, waiting to be discovered. They have been a great catalyst to release more games on Linux.

Game types are mostly co-operative FPS shooters with friends, tower defence with tablet, flying with planes or full 6 degrees freedom when solo. A mouse is a pretty essential controller in most games.

2 Regulars For Me

[Scarletdown]

Currently, I am splitting my gaming time between EverQuest Next Landmark Alpha and Guild Wars 2 (still trying to recruit for the Skrittsburg Foreign Legion, because... Shinies!)

Fez

[deek]

Just started playing Fez. On a Steam Linux client. Nice game, and very clever. I like the twist it gives to 2D platforming.

Also, playing Sine Mora on my Vita, when I'm travelling on the train to/from work. Tough side-scrolling shooter! Only a few chapters in.

Nethack

[red_erik]

Nethack - 10 years from the last release, and still the best :)

Re:Nethack

[Zimluura]

My best NetHack story: had a cat that got polymorphed into a succubus. Since my character was chaotic (elf class from old version) i could gain alignment points by sleeping with her. also got to walk her around on a leash. It's great when B&D comes from emergent gameplay.

Dwarf Fortress is one to check out too. City building and Adventure modes. the next version looks like it's almost ready. Should be a _big_ feature update in a month or two.

Very old games

[Sique]

I'm still playing Alpha Centauri, the successor of the original Civilisation. And I am playing Simutrans, a free transport simulator. Call me whatever you want, but I never got the hang of the more recent games.

Kerbal Space Program!

[Hackysack]

KSP, which is quite fun.

Civ V, which I just can't seem to take the needle from my arm.

EQNext, which I just started; and very looking forward to.

I don't

[roc97007]

At all. Ever. I had a bad experience with Warcraft, forgot to bathe, was missing appointments, people thought I had died. I finally gave the disk to daughter and told her to hide it. I still don't know where it is.

Re:I don't

[roc97007]

Well, no but... waaaaaait a minute!

Starbound

[ArcadeMan]

It's like Terraria, but much better and available on all three platforms*.

* Linux, Mac OS X, Windows. Were you thinking about something else?

My WoW replacement

[Zynder]

Since the stupid panda crap pissed me off, I dumped World of Warcraft and switched to Rift Now before I hear the F2P hate, be aware that this game is absolutely NOT pay to win. I am very conscious of such things and I've seen no aspect of it that you just had to shell out real money for. I have spent some real money, but just on stupid shit like a giant squirrel mount and of course "Patron" time which is what the monthly sub turned into (still $15). I'm fairly happy with it and the graphics blow WoW out of the water.

Re:My WoW replacement

[seebs]

Why I like Rift:

Rift has had some issues with chat and ability lag. So they've overhauled their chat server. Predictably, it's been broken a lot. But Trion being Trion, this meant that we had actual devs (not "community reps", actual people who work on code) posting on the forums saying what was wrong, what they had fixed internally, and that they might try that if they had another crash, then putting that live, then reverting when it had problems... Actual information about what was wrong.. They seem to have fixed the worst of it now, so of course they are sending out freebies to all the players. Note: Not all the paying players. All the players, period. They are pretty good about compensation for problems.

Also this patch, they decided to make some mounts account-wide; if you get them on any character, all your characters get them. This will, of course, be retroactive, although it'll take a day or so for the updates. And of course, people asked what happens if you already bought one of these for two characters. Answer: They already thought about this, they checked the logs, this will affect very few players, but if you're one of them, file a ticket and customer support will make things right.

Basically, they are a company whose devs are active and engaged, who talk to people, and who try to make things right and are not afraid to admit their errors. They have consistently gone far above and beyond what you'd expect if you were familiar with more traditional MMO customer service. Excellent company in general. And they do make mistakes, but because they're willing to fix them, I am okay with that -- and I find I actually prefer it a lot to companies that refuse to take risks, and then don't fix things that were just bad ideas to begin with.

The Witcher 3

[loufoque]

is the only game I'm really waiting for.

Superhero MMOs

[Chas]

Played City of Heroes till shutdown (still angry at NCSoft).
Barely playing Champions Online. Cryptic and its various owners have pretty much screwed the pooch there.
Kickstarted City of Titans. But probably won't really see anything for 3 years there. Keeping my expectations there realistic.

Recently?

[RogueyWon]

I own pretty much every gaming platform around (other than an Android platform, I suppose) and tend to manage to play a fairly good selection of releases.

The big pattern over much of 2013 for me was my declining use of the old "home" consoles, edged out by the PC and Vita. The PS3 still got some occasional use, spurred by a few decent late-cycle exclusives (Ni No Kuni, Disgaea 2 and so on), but the last game I put any serious time into on the 360 was Forza Horizon, way back at the end of 2012. MS really let the 360 twist in the wind for the final 12 months before it got replaced. I probably used the 360 more than the PS3 for most of its cycle (it was generally better for multiplatform games), but I felt few regrets when I traded it in against a new Xbox One the other week, while I couldn't yet imagine trading in my PS3.

The growth of importance of PC gaming has been a real trend recently. For much of the last console cycle, "multi-platform" meant "360 and PS3". These days, it's a brave developer who doesn't include the PC in their line-up. This was also, I suppose, a big part of the reason behind the decline in my use of the 360. It may have been better than the PS3 for most multiplatform games, but it had no chance against a modern gaming PC. On the PC, I've mostly been playing Borderlands 2, Final Fantasy 14 and I still go back for the odd blast of the superb Rayman Legends.

The Vita, for me, is the best little console that nobody owns and I regard its lack of success as a great shame. There are some fantastic games on it and I've put a lot of time into Persona 4: The Golden, Dragon's Crown, Soul Sacrifice and the many, many smaller and indie titles on the platform. The 3DS, meanwhile, I still find a hard platform to love, though I did quite enjoy Bravely Default until its later sections.

I now own both a PS4 and Xbox One. Neither has really produced a game to wow me yet - but then, that goes with the territory for early adopters. Killzone: Shadow Fall on the PS4 is much better than I had expected from previous Killzone games (having some fairly open levels and a better graphical style). I've also been enjoying Assassin's Creed 4 on the PS4 (more games need sea shanties). On the Xbox One, Dead Rising 3 is fairly good and Forza 5 has mostly been fixed after a disaster of a launch. Other than that, both platforms are currently fairly barren for traditional games - though Xbox Fitness is really impressive if you like that kind of thing (I do).

At least the PS4 and the Xbox One have the excuse of being new. The Wii-U remains a crushingly poor platform, with tired Nintendo exclusives being the only real releases of note. Zelda: Wind Waker looks fine at first - but then I remembered just how tedious I found it the first time around. Super Mario World 3d has some good moments, but is spoiled by poor 3d controls and level design that gets quite repetitive in the later stages.

And on iOS... ugh. I've almost entirely stopped using the iPad for gaming. I still fire it up for the odd session on a plane or train, but its games these days seem to split between paywalled crudware (generally not even games by any reasonable definition) and worthy-but-slightly-lacking ports of games better played on PC, like XCom and Baldur's Gate.

Spelunky

[kav2k]

Nobody mentioned Spelunky so far.

Procedurally generated, "roguelite" platformer requring skill and metagame knowledge to succeed in.

Contains "daily challenges" (a one shot at playing s specific seed) for those playing it on Steam, which brings highly competitive elements to the game.
Also, recently a tool for it emerged that allows to lock seed generation to a particular value, enabling competition outside dailies.

Website: http://spelunkyworld.com/ and gameplay videos are aplenty on YouTube.
Has a free "original" version with low-res graphics to get a taste of the gameplay.

It is payday

[simplypeachy]

Dungeon Keeper, which GOG.com gave away free the other day. How did this ever manage to fly under my radar? Love it!

Old N new.

[sjwt]

Of my new games, the ones I play the most at the moment are both in paid working status (with free options)

Kerbal Space Program $27 (Free Demo link) (now teaming up with NASA officially)
        A fantastic rocket sim builder/sandbox, now working on the career mode side of things, if for some reason you haven't herd of this then give it a shot, learn about orbital mechanics and have fun at the same time, or just see how many Kerbals you can crash into the moon in an hour.. This game will remind you just how hard real physics for your tiny CPU to crunch.

Factorio $13 (Free Demo link)
        You have been sent to a new world to establish a colony and start industrializing it for settlement.. unfortunately your ship crashes and you are isolated from any other survivors, using you ''advanced'' technology you will be mining resources, researching technologies, building infrastructure, automating production and fighting enemies so that you can reach the final goal of building a defensive space port. An ever improving 2d world with 3d models for a fantastic effect.

Older games, warning these are older games.. If you cant stand to do retro games, don't bother.

Master of Magic $6 @ GOG
          Fantasy 4X game, that once some of the bugs where sorted became one of the best fantasy 4X's ever.. Others have tried to copy, non have succeeded. All Green magic FTW!!

Master of Orion 2 $6 @ GOG comes with number 1 as well
          Space based 4X, AI is unfortunately lacking a bit, but still quite engaging, Silicods FTW!!!

Populous $6 @ GOG
            How the Sequels for Populous missed the mark so much is anyone's guess.. Damn it, update graphics, tweek sound a bit, keep the game play/spells the same.. pure win for all!! And I shall put this out there for all, the DOS Roland theme music is the best of the old school versions :P

Evil Genius $10 @ GOG
          Build your evil lair, send your minions out into the world to plot, teal money and recover cool artifacts, and finally take over the WORLD!! Why Despicable Me has not cloned this is totally beyond me..

Re:Old N new.

[DNS-and-BIND]

Unfortunately GoG doesn't offer the Master of Magic 1.4 patch. The last patch released by Simtex, 1.31, still had a ton of bugs. A man went through the .exe with a debugger, into the machine code, and fixed a ton of bugs. The computer opponent doesn't make nearly as many stupid mistakes now. It will now make and use magic items. Plus, there were a couple of huge bugs that never worked the way the designers intended, and now do. Plus, it adds a new difficulty level between Hard (too easy) and Impossible (so hard it's no fun).

Download the Master of Magic patch here. Unzip it over the files in your MoM directory.

Xonotic

[future assassin]

And thats all everyone should play http://www.xonotic.org/

I also run several modified Xonotic servers

Freeze Mofo (Camping Rifle Feeze Tag)
Drive Mofo (Vehicle CTF)
Mofo With A Shotgun (Shotgun only mod)

Here's a list of the most active servers http://stats.xonotic.org/topse...

Phoronix also uses Xonotic in their testing.

I have Steam with severral games but with them reading my DNS cache they can have the game back (ohh heh)

I also play these console

3DO
AtarI Jaguar
Dreamcast
Saturn
TG 16
N64
Game Cube

Re:Meh

[Warma]

Seconded. Planetside 2 is the most fun multiplayer game on the market right now.

As the scale is truly massive, this is the place to go for both good, organized clan/outfit action and chaotic screamfests in TeamSpeak. If you want, you can really work as a part of or lead a whole platoon of people. I really enjoy it.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

[heypete]

Over the last month or so I've really been into Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I've been a huge fan of the original Deus Ex (and, to a lesser extent, Deus Ex: Invisible War) and still go back and play it about once a year.

DX:HR is a worthy successor to the original.

I'm also a big fan of the Mass Effect and Fallout series. I'm working my way through the Fallout:New Vegas DLC (in the middle of Old World Blues, having finished Lonesome Road and the main game itself), though I really prefer Fallout 3 over NV.

After finished the NV DLC I'm looking at Skyrim, though the fact that I'm working on a PhD and my wife and I are expecting a daughter in mid-June might cut into my Copious Free Time.

Re:The only one for me... (the real new Elite)

[MeerCat]

Have you seen the new Elite from David Braben?
It's in Alpha at the moment (testing of limited scenarios), Beta is expected after another 2 Alpha rounds (6-8 weeks?) and a launch later this year.

http://elite.frontier.co.uk/

Videos etc of real gameplay are up on the site.
Personally, it's enough that I've actually bought and installed Windows for the first time in 15 years...

Re:EVE Online and some other F2p MMO's

[cbhacking]

Eve never had a "native" Linux port. For a while, you could download from them a copy of the Windows client custom-wrapped in Cedega (which you were supposed to only use for Eve, since CCP had to pay them for it). The Cedega wrapper was big, the performance and graphics were nothing special, and there weren't that many people using it. The real reason they dropped it, though, is that Wine (that thing Cedega was forked from to poduce a gaming-focused version, ha!) was actually doing better than Cedega at running the Windows client. For example, Wine could run the DX9 graphics update on Linux before the official Cedega-based client could.

Plenty of people still play Eve on Wine, and CCP has a semi-official guide to setting it up. They may no longer officially provide a Linux client, but Eve is still playable on Linux.

Cribbage

[Rufty]

And get off my lawn.