Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[JustOnePixel]

Is Gametap really to be trusted, though?  It seems too good to be spyware-free.  Oh well.  Maybe I'll just use it on the free computers at my uni.

[SeaBee]

The X series annoys me. Mostly because, after you play for a long time, it starts feeling pointless. You own all the ships you could ever want, have billions on the bank, dozens of factory complexes, fleets of ships trading for you ...

... and you still can't actually "take over" anything. I guess I want too much. It would be pretty cool to invade a system, tax the natives, negotiate (hah!) with governments. But I'm dreaming.

That said, it's a lot of fun to play the X games. I have X2 and X3, and, strange as it sounds, I prefer X2. Something about it feels more involving to me. X3 is a bit prettier, but doesn't have the flavor or immersion or X2.

Of course, X-BTF and X-Tension (the first of the series and the expansion for it) are still fun if you can find those dinosaurs anywhere.

The Battlecruiser games should have been perfect for me. I love that sort of stuff. Sadly, they all seem ... utterly stale to me. Oh, and Derek Smart will arrive shortly. I hear that if you call his name in even the darkest corner of the Internet, he'll hunt down your threads and post. That would be entertaining.

Other deep learning curve games for me that have turned out very nice are Incursion (already mentioned on these boards, the Roguelike DnD game) and Dominions III for a cool strategy fix. Designing a god and conquering the world? Yes, please. It was like $60 when I bought it, though.

[Grek]

quote:Originally posted by SeaBee:
<STRONG>Dominions III</STRONG>

QFT.

[Floirt]

quote:Originally posted by Helmaroc:
<STRONG>Are there any free, nice open-ended space games...like all those trading games, but with more than trading</STRONG>

Frontier: Elite II.
(Find it here)

[Cthulhu]

quote:Originally posted by SeaBee:
<STRONG>  I hear that if you call his name in even the darkest corner of the Internet, he'll hunt down your threads and post.</STRONG>

It's quite true.  I think he googles his name.  He goes on and instead of addressing complaints he just tells you whatever's wrong with the game is part of his grandiose vision, and if you don't like it you're stupid and unworthy to lick his glorious boots.

[Vodalian]

quote:Originally posted by Helmaroc:
<STRONG>Are there any free, nice open-ended space games...like all those trading games, but with more than trading</STRONG>

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net

[McDoomhammer]

Derek Smart = Hastur.

[Cthulhu]

Oh no you're right!!!

[smeej]

www.the-underdogs.info.

This is the most important website on the internet, as far as I am concerned. Also, yes, Darklands is excellent.

Um, NetHack is a pretty obvious selection but I will include it because frankly I still don't really know how to play it, but I can polymorph myself into a cockatrice, lay eggs, and use those eggs as petrification bombs so.... Good game.

Wasteland is another obvious one. Fallout being the spiritual sequel to Wasteland, if that's any indication. It's like if Oregon Trail was based on Road Warrior. Which means it's awesome.

Essentially, any DOS games are hard for me to figure out, haha. I've been pampered by tutorials.

SimEarth is hardly a game but it is immensely clumsy to figure out what everything does as every action you take can lead to a mass extinction. The payoff is that you can have sentient carnivorous plants that run the world. Then blow them up when they reach the height of civilization and gather their nanomachines and make THOSE sentient too.

[Cthulhu]

Home of the Underdogs is awesome, but I can't use them to download anything.  I get a maximum of 10kbps on cable internet that can get over 1mbps on Filefront.

Attempting to download SimEarth now, Abandonia's been fighting me lately.

EDIT: Wow, this one's aggressive, I've never seen a DOS game fight this hard.

[Helmaroc]

Hey Cthulhu, I noticed something wrong in your sig. It should be 'give a DWARF a fish' and 'teach a DWARF to fish'.

[Kagus]

And I noticed something in YOUR sig, Helmaroc.  Or should I say, "Elmaroc"?

[Cthulhu]

It took off the first letter of just about everybody's sigs.

[Zemat]

Micro-rant ahead

The mayor failing of ambitious strategy games is the excessive micromanagement they push into the player. Most if the time in very awkward ways. Not even reality is as complex as some strategy games seem to be. You don't have nation or army leaders choosing or tweaking every aspect of everything that's below of them.

The way in which DF almost succeeds (and eventually will) to handle such obscene amount of complexity is by allowing dwarves some amount of self control and governance. Granted, they are still very stupid and the game still requires a great deal of micro. But if it where a standard RTS without pruning any of it's details, it would be impossible to play.

[Cthulhu]

The worst game for unneeded complexity is Battlecruiser.  Does Derek Smart honestly believe that thousands of years in the future we won't have developed a way to streamline these things?  I feel more like I'm flying a Vietnam era helicopter than a super-advanced spaceship.

In addition OH MY GOODNESS.  SimEarth may be one of the most ridiculously angry and rebellious games I have ever seen.  It confounds me at every turn.  First it wanted a disk.  I remedied this by putting the files into a folder called ADrive and mounting A: to it.  Then I went to install it and apparently none of my disks have enough room to install the twenty year old game, that's probably less than a megabyte.


EDIT: I got it to work, but it's late, so I didn't do much.  I started at 1990 with modern human civilization in full swing, and within fifty years multicellular life was extinct.  I turned off the sun, removed the clouds, and set continental drift on maximum overdrive.  Within fifty years the Earth was completely covered in ice, and the only humans left were a few scattered tribes of bronze age nomads.  Then life disappeared completely, and we went back to the geologic stage.  Oddly, despite the complete lack of sunlight and warmth, the ice melted, revealing an alien world where the aforementioned high continental drift had torn our familiar continents to shreds, leaving hundreds of tiny island, which quickly filled with jungles.  The heat continued to rise, and the jungles gave way to deserts.  The single-cells stuck it out until the end, and lasted all the way to the sun's engulfing of the Earth.

It's a very melancholy game when I play it.  I've always had the desire to watch a planet from a geologic scale, seeing species rise and fall.  In fourth grade I had to have read The Time Machine at least five times, and I especially read the part where The Time Traveller continues into the future, and it's all crazy.  I'd like to witness the twilight of a planet.  It was almost depressing watching the Earth slowly die like that.

i think simearth is a pretty cool guy. eh lets you wipe out civilization and doesnt afraid of anything.