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?"

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/ [mwomercs.com]

https://robertsspaceindustries... [robertsspa...stries.com]

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?

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.

Xonotic

[future assassin]

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

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:MechWarrior Online, while waiting for Star Citi

[Warma]

I really, Really, REALLY wanted MWO to be good. I actually supported that game with more than a hundred euros.

But it wasn't.

Don't get me wrong, their art assets are really good, the stage design works and the mech movement and aiming physics feel good. It is not an arcade game and has the right, massive feel, which was missing from MW4. However, their balance and game design philosophy is really out of whack. Missile balance, missile tracking, impossibly high heat capacities which encourage boating, the retarded ghost heat to fix the aforementioned problem and the inclusion of a lot of completely useless weapons. I know it's narcissistic to assume that if I were there, the game would be better, but this time I really do. I had merely a day's worth of time to tinker with the configuration files, it'd be easy to improve the game considerably.

I still have hope that they realize where they are going and reverse the course, but not much. Haven't bothered to play for almost a year because of this, but I still visit occasionally and read the patch notes to see if they are going in the right direction. They never are.

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.

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.

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 [realmsbeyond.net]. Unzip it over the files in your MoM directory.