What Game Are You Currently Playing?

I think it's very sad that Ron Gilbert and his team have received such levels of online abuse about the new art style used for the upcoming Return to Monkey Island that he has decided not to post about the game anymore. "The joy of sharing has been driven from me" he said. I get not liking something about a game, but to then take it out on the developers to such a degree beggars belief. If you don't like it, don't buy it, simple.

I think Ron should have adopted an Insult Sword-Fighting stance.

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Yeah, the level of abuse developers can receive can be pretty shocking. I remember reading about a CoD developer whose family got death threats because in a patch they altered reload times (to try and balance the game better) by tenths of a second. Some people are crackers.
 
All of the above comments are also the reason why I never partake in any form of multiplayer online. The place is riddled with nasty little arseholes. No wonder developers get such abuse - they’re dealing with infantile mentalities out there.

Meanwhile, I’m busy playing Valor and Victory.

I was one of the generation brought up on board wargames. I’ve got nothing against miniatures but maps and counters are where my heart lies. V&V is probably the closest I’ve come to playing a computer version of Advanced Squad Leader - and that includes the computer version of ASL, which bore no resemblance whatsoever to its boardgame big brother (except, obviously, for the name).

It’s a trip back down memory lane where I would storm the Dzerzhinskiy Tractor Works of Stalingrad and then whine about my miserable luck with the dice as my panzers and storm troopers would be cut down by my opponent‘s soviets heavily entrenched in the rubble.

It seems that history does indeed repeat itself…but this time, my whining over my miserable virtual dice rolls are met, not with a smug grin from a humanoid opponent but the irritating whoosh of PC coolings fans. Choose your window, Mr Computer, you may be exiting the building far sooner than you calculate…
 
I remember as a fifteen year old (many moons ago when the world was much colder) playing my first ever gig in my first ever band. We were all nervous wrecks. It went down okay. There was one person, however, who decided he was entitled to criticise (and he was right). This, however, quickly turned quite nasty and became an excuse to ridicule the band’s efforts. I handed him my guitar, told him there was the audience, there were the amplifiers, go and show us how it’s done.
‘But,’ he spluttered, ’I can’t play.’
I replied that he would have to learn just like I did. He never bothered us again.

The beauty of modern computing is that, in many instances, folk can quickly learn the skills (if they are so inclined) and develop their own games. There are even game creation kits out there. The types of games I play have a strong modding community and if fans don’t like something or think it can be improved then they get down to work and produce the goods. Most game designers not only support this but actively encourage it. There’s nothing more pitiful than a complainer who always thinks it‘s somebody else’s problem.
 
What particularly irks me about the Ron Gilbert situation is that the people who loved the original Monkey Island games, and are who getting abusive because the art style has been modernised, are likely somewhere near my age and therefore old enough to know better. The world seems to have become even nastier since the pandemic began. It's like all these people used their time during lockdown(s) to store up all this vitriol so they could spew it out as soon as the tiniest opportunity presented itself.
 
Personally, I’d have thought depth of plot and accompanying levels of humour would be far more important to a Monkey Island afficionado. Far more so than a modernised artistic style.
 
All of the above comments are also the reason why I never partake in any form of multiplayer online. The place is riddled with nasty little arseholes. No wonder developers get such abuse - they’re dealing with infantile mentalities out there.

Meanwhile, I’m busy playing Valor and Victory.
Right there with you on that, although I did get Deep Rock Galactic a while ago and thoroughly enjoy it. The games take half an hour tops, jumping in mid-level is easy, and I've yet to encounter more than one single, individual, solitary case of toxicity the entire time. It's also the only shooter I've played in years, as I mostly stick to the single-player strategy stuff.

I played V&V last year and it was pretty good... but I'm a child of the 90s and I expect at least some razzamatazz in my games :)

It's the sheer babyish entitlement of it that disgusts me. "You didn't draw the game in the way I like? You added some characters who make me angry? You made a game I wasn't going to go near anyway? Well now I'm going to shoot you!"
That's not just restricted to the gaming industry, but I will say that for established franchises it's understandable - though not excusable - that the original fans will want to speak their piece. People take things way too far though, and we'd have a lot less of it if those types were only allowed to mail letters about their annoyances instead.
 
All of the above comments are also the reason why I never partake in any form of multiplayer online. The place is riddled with nasty little arseholes. No wonder developers get such abuse - they’re dealing with infantile mentalities out there.

While I somewhat regret not playing Nosgoth while the beta was up, the whole thing about PVP is what scared me off. There was a short tutorial, but I would have rather gone around exploring the map and gotten more comfortable with the controls before going in. I wasn't at the Discord at the time, but I think I could have gotten a team together to be vampire tourists instead of attacking the humans like we were supposed to.
 
Assassin's Creed 2: This is an excellent game, probably one of the classics, despite its sub-Dan Brown plot and the completely uninteresting Desmond sections. However, some of the missions require a level of precision detail that the game can't really manage: it can end up asking you to do things that it can't quite handle. A few missions have a tendency to just arbitrarily fail. On the other hand, it is very good overall.
 
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I’m totally addicted, AE35Unit. Be warned that this game will try and claim all the time you have.
 
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After nearly 1000 hours of Days Gone, I've loaded up the Lego Skywalker Saga. I'll not play it for a while but looking forward to it as i hear the Lego games are fun.
 
I've been playing the Nukaworld add-on for Fallout 4. It's really good. I've been escorting a group of "Hubologists" through the theme park, and marvelling at the designers' willingness to make fun of two of the most litigious organisations in the world. Fallout 4 is just superb: a vast adventure full of things to see and do, both violent and funny. It's one of the best games I've ever seen.
 

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