video game

I'm buying myself a new video game for Christmas. what should it be?

What kind of games do you like?

I almost have the wife convinced to get an Xbox 360 with a kinect. She likes the exercise games they have for it.

RTS. I really like Age of Empire but no one plays it any more.

poseysail Sailing Tactics Simulator?

Mass Effect. Pick up the first one for a song, get the DLC for free, then roll right into Mass Effect 2. The final chapter is due out next year. Great game.

I read the wiki, doesn't seem like my thing. I really like the problem solving aspects of AoE. It's a lot like chess.

ME 1 and 2 have lots of exploration and problem solving, along with resource management and research... and then there's the FPS aspect. I got it because it is a very good space sim with some shooting.

You should check out Civilization 5, saw a review about it a while ago and it is supposed to be really good.

If you like RTS's then there's always Dawn of War 2 and Starcraft 2 which are both solid RTS's.

Yeh, they have promise. U know, I think what I really want is a Cat Sailor virtual paint ball arena.

When anyone says something anyone else disagrees with, we should be able to pull up their avatar and splat them. I would find that very entertaining and more than a tad satisfying. Pun intended.

Thats hurtful

OH PLEASE! I thought you were a paint baller from way back! How many innocents did you splat?

This could (should) be fun!

Weapon Closet: http://www.goldfiles.com/portal.php?fileid=93

pgp: I played at a semi-pro level... as much as any paintball at the time could be labelled "pro".

I didn't shoot "innocents" since doing that jeopardized the ability of responsible paintball players to own and operate their markers.

What's a paint ball marker?

Fortunately paint ball did not exist when I was kid or I'd still be in detention.

paintball markers are the same things as paintball guns. Its just that at the time I was playing it, the anti-gun lobby was trying to ban paintball for the actions of a few irresponsible youths who were buying plastic guns at walmart then lighting up their neighbor's house.

So we started calling them markers instead of guns :P

Guns don't paint, painters paint.

Is there a paint baller's NRA?

This is great! How do you put the flame thrower inside this thread?

1. robotower
2. angry birds

both very addictive and require next to no thought

I'm actually looking for something a little more engaging, like chess and perhaps with an accurate historical motif.

Something in this genre http://www.strategypage.com/militaryforums/410-489.aspxbut without the "cartoon" graphics. I think the U.S. War colleges produce what I'm looking for but I've had no luck on their website.

Civilization 5 is awesome. Very engaging, strategic, with some historical basis, and some battle tactics. You will be up to 5 am wanting to play just one more turn. If you have never played a Civ game, you might try out Civ 4 or Alpha Centauri for cheap. Alpha Centauri is the most polished, but Civ 5 is the more interesting game.

Since you are a sailor, I also recommend Sid Meier's Pirates! It's not very new, but you sail around in the Caribbean firing cannons at the French, British etc. and taking their loot. It's a simple game (there is tacking and wind shifts though), but it's very fun. There are even some turn based battle mini games that you play while raiding a port.

For a unique and shorter game, I like Braid. It is something like $5 on Steam and you can go through the game in a day. It has some unique puzzles and is supposed to be set in a painting.

Of course all of these games are played in your momma's basement.

Feel free to flame yourself. http://www.goldfiles.com/portal.php?fileid=93

(God I wish I could get this thing to open on CS! )

Angry Birds is ruining my life.

yeah... I obsess about these little games for a week then finish them and don't worry about it anymore. of course I tried for a bit to get all three stars but gave up.
I get too involved in video games so i try to avoid them.
Last one I was really addicted to was Rome: Total War. That was cool but I didn't even play it in the manner you were supposed to (never paid much attn to the "technology trees")

I'm so glad I didn't have to pay for Angry Birds :P

Nor any of the expansions :P

Pigs Rule!

those bastards...

Since I just have to plug the game I spend most of my time in,

Latest expansion:


Expansion previous (all in game shots btw):


And previous to that, probably the best trailer that depicts actually what happens during a big battle with thousands of players at the same time. The voice overs don't sound too different than what the command channels sound like:

I had no idea! Graphics are incredible! If I'd had that as a kid I'd still be trying to graduate high school!

Still I'm looking for something that will actually teach some part of military history.

A few months ago, on the History Channel, I saw a simulation of what the battle of Troy might have been. The players were West Point cadets and the graphics were just red or blue triangles on a topographic map. I think it would be very cool to watch re-enactments of actual historic battles in a similar program.

Does anyone know if those programs are available from any of the academies? Or even from a source outside the academies?


Uh...just out of curiosity, can you play that game online with just a mouse and key board or do you have to get "involved"?

The game is a mouse and keyboard game. You don't have to go all in on the voip headset but most multiplayer games these days - where teamwork is required in order to succeed - will use them.

EVE isn't for everyone. Its not World Of Warcraft by a long shot. Its whats described as a "Sandbox" where the game developers create a world, and then leave it up to the players to determine what happens in it. Right now, over 40,000 people are playing simultaneously, on the same server. Some are in whats called "high security space" where the space police will catch and kill evil-doers. People like me, are in null-security space. Meaning, the only safety I have is the guns mounted on the hull of my ships, and my space stations.

There are approximately 10,000 solar systems in the game, 3/4ths of them are conquerable by the players. The more systems you control, the more resources you control, the more money you make, the more ships you can build, the more pewpew you can cause. The economy is real - meaning that its completely player driven with very little NPC seeding. Some toons never undock from the "Wall Street" station in the Jita system - they are effectively stock brokers who buy and sell. There are player run banks, politics (I just got through with helping to negotiate a non-aggression pact between my alliance and another).

Its a completely engulfing universe - but its also very unforgiving to solo players. The "PVE" (playing against the computer per sae) is not very strong, and Player Vs. Player combat heavily favors working as a team (not always numbers) So if you don't have buddies to play with and get to know, it can be quite off-putting which is why it'll always play second fiddle to WoW which any dweeb can play in a pointless, never-ending quest to acquire "stuff". EVE is so much more about the interactions with people and what happens when interacting with others.

(Don't f*ck with the Russians in EVE btw, they're aggressive and don't take well to being provoked)

Here's a video they put together about what they think the sandbox is all about:


Here's another one - which is based on a true story about how a single person brought down one of the biggest alliances in the whole game - Band of Brothers. It was such a story that it made "real life" newspapers. (They've since modified the mechanic by which the guy did this - which was allowed to stand because he never exploited anything. He just used the rights and roles that the alliance had given him to screw them over)

Yep Eve FTW. I am going to hit my 1st birthday in EVE.

Are there any smugglers in Eve? I could see me doing that.

Yep, I have a pilot who does it all the time.

There are contraband items. You could be a drug runner if you'd like.

Nah! How about a sniper or assassin?

This thing sounds obsessive and I already spend too much time online. I'm considering a "cyber diet" as a New Years resolution. Of course the expectation is that I'd be as disciplined with that as with all my other diets!

I just finished up Assassin's Creed 2 on PS3. The first one was fun, but became real repetitive, and I beat it in a couple of sittings. The second one took me almost two weeks, and was a lot of fun. Puzzles, killin' folk, some Italian history, a whole mess of things that I enjoy.

Uhm, well ... you're in a ship all the time - so your combat role is dictated by a couple things, first of all is your ship.

You can fly a battleships or heavy assault cruiser that is kitted out for long range alpha strikes - known as "sniping".

In the same vein, there are a whole slew of covert ops ships that you can fly, from your basic cloaked reconnaissance vessel - to a stealth bomber, to a force recon cruiser.

Being a loner in EVE is a good way to die though.

Is eve a one time payment of $14.95 or is it monthly?

Monthly, but a lot of players including myself pay with ingame earnings called ISK. You can pay for your subscription with roughly 380 million isk monthly, which isnt really hard to achieve.

A funny fact that EVE accounted for like 33% of Iceland's total GDP last year.

if you want the war-strategy thing, doesn't the US army have an RTS game out there? I think you even have to do boot-camp and weapons training course in that one...

Its not an RTS - its a FPS.

Its called Americas Army, its a free download actually...
http://www.americasarmy.com/

Pete,

try Empire Earth or Age of Mythology. I don't consider them historically accurate, but they do utilize a rudimentary strategy. And you can single-player those.

My favorite was the Command & Conquer series, but I'm too old to get into those new RTS or massive multi-player online games...

No,no,no! I don't do grunt stuff. If they had an armor section, maybe!

I think I'm going to give the Total War games a look. There seem to be some historical monographs that look interesting.

I've defeated Hannibal at Lake Trasimene.

Nobody into MMORPG list on www.live4mmo.com, like WoW, Diablo 3?

back to epic time-wasters (aka video games)... How much time (Tad) would you estimate you spend in front of the screen playing these MMORPGs?

Has this average time changed since your nuptuals?