Favourite computer games of all time. [2]

Well you do make it sound enticing.- Bilbo

{{best thing its relatively cheap these days, and quickly given its still new tech. I've got an oculus rift which arent even made any more (though fortunately still supported) and all in for headset, controllers, sensors, cost me over a grand and a lot of overtime and scrimping and saving. Now you can get the Quest 2 with controllers ready out the box for just under £300 with superior screen resolution over the original rift and no need for external sensors (though not as good quality a build, guess they had to save cash somewhere and the head strap and headphones seem to be where they did, but then you can just use your own headphones).


Lance- the Command and Conquer series were great fun, and so was the deliberately hammy fmv scenes, was Red Alert the one with Tim Curry? }}

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Well you do make it sound enticing.- Bilbo

{{best thing its relatively cheap these days, and quickly given its still new tech. I've got an oculus rift which arent even made any more (though fortunately still supported) and all in for headset, controllers, sensors, cost me over a grand and a lot of overtime and scrimping and saving. Now you can get the Quest 2 with controllers ready out the box for just under £300 with superior screen resolution over the original rift and no need for external sensors (though not as good quality a build, guess they had to save cash somewhere and the head strap and headphones seem to be where they did, but then you can just use your own headphones).


Lance- the Command and Conquer series were great fun, and so was the deliberately hammy fmv scenes, was Red Alert the one with Tim Curry? }}

well that is great to hear. as it becomes more popular and more people invest the price will come down more. I honestly have not been following close enough but it seems like it needs the impact of a VR version of Mario. Mario made Nintendo famous, VR needs its Mario.

{{ It's always same issue with new tech. Early on there just isn't the customer base for game companies to spend millions developing AAA games for it, and folk dont buy the new tech because there isnt a killer app for it. Catch 22.

One of the still persistent problems with VR at this time is the lack of 'full games'- there's a ton of 'experiences' and a ton of games that are shorter, a few hours or so. But not so many that are real full length AAA quality- in fact Half Life Alyx is one of the only AAA games made solely for VR. Most of the rest are conversions of flatscreen like Skyrim, or Fallout 4. As usual modders have pretty much saved VR rather than official companies by modding lots of AAA flatscreen games to function in VR. When you can play GTAV in VR just going for a walk down the street is an amazing experience as there are so many tiny details you just miss in flatscreen.

But if I had to recommend two games to try in Vr that give an immediate sense of whats on offer it'd be Beatsaber (as its so simple to play and so devilish to master)



and Half Life Alyx which is just impressive and is the game closest to a 'killer' must have VR game that has driven sales.



The Quest 2 so far has sold 10 million units, which isnt bad at all for something that costs as much as some consoles afterall.}}

That's nuts. Whole lot of potential here.

Petty - Yes, Tim Curry was in one of the games. I think Red Alert 2 as the Russian dude.

{{ yup and were just at the start of it really. Of course what watching someone play on youtube cant give you is the sense of being there, that the game world is all around you whatever way you turn to look, and the single best thing about Vr is sense of scale- you get such a fantastic sense of scale to everything. When you see a Strider in HL you are literally craning your head back to look up to see the bloody thing as it stomps towards you. The mountains of Skyrim suddenly seem like actual huge mountains and when you fall ftom a height youll get the whole sensation of falling in the pit of your stomach. And as for being stalked by an Alien- put simply its fucking terrifying. You dont realise how big those things are till one is about to rip your face off. In fact most horror games are incredibly effective in VR. Jump scares are cheap in most mediums, but when they happen to you in VR you really might need some bog roll to hand as you will be shitting yourself! Just stuff you dont experience flatscreen. }}

Lancebloke wrote:Petty - Yes, Tim Curry was in one of the games. I think Red Alert 2 as the Russian dude.

{{ Thought so. I remember it being a ton of silly fun and he was really enjoying himself you could tell. }}

If you ever get a chance to play Supreme Commander, please do.

In my opinion it is the best RTS game ever made purely from a gameplay perspective.

{{ Had a nosey on the steam store Lance, theres three- Supreme Commander 1 & 2 and Forged Alliance. They all have positive or overwhelmingly positive reviews and they are £8.99 each (there is also a bundle pack of the whole lot for £21.66 ) any recommendations for which one?


edit update- better price on GoG they are on sale - Supreme Commander Gold (includes the Forged Alliance dlc)for only £3 and Supreme Commander 2 is only £2.99. }}

{{ Just played a short but incredibly intense VR shooter. Propagation. Lots of good things for a game that only takes about 20-30 mins to complete. First it's free, second the shooting controls and graphics are excellent, and the sound design works perfectly (you can pinpoint where the enemies are coming from just from sound- and you'll need to).
It's basically a zombie style wave shooter, of which there are a few in VR, but this is one of the more intense I've played.
It's entirely set in one location, a subway station, and you can't move. What you can do is shoot with your one-handed pistol, or switch to your two-handed shotgun, or alternatively if they get too close punch the fuckers in the face till their head explodes, and you will, usually in a blind panic because the atmosphere in this one drips off the walls. Zombies start the usual slow shuffley kind, and there are larger ones and even ex-cop zombies that erratically fire a gun as they come, then there are ones which run at you, ones that crawl at you at speed which is particularly unnerving. And then there are the spiders. Now I'm not what I'd call an arachnophobe, but I ain't keen on the buggers either and when the big one made its appearance here I am somewhat embarrassed to say I actually said out loud in a room consisting solely of me (and my cats who have wisely learned, to avoid being accidentally catapulted across the room, to just lie in a corner and watch the mad human flail when I'm playing VR) the clichéd line "you have to be fucking kidding me" when the huge spider appeared, and I meant it.
Its fun, panic inducing, high adrenalin and not a little terrifying to play. Therefore, recommended! }}

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{ Had a nosey on the steam store Lance, theres three- Supreme Commander 1 & 2 and Forged Alliance. They all have positive or overwhelmingly positive reviews and they are £8.99 each (there is also a bundle pack of the whole lot for £21.66 ) any recommendations for which one?


edit update- better price on GoG they are on sale - Supreme Commander Gold (includes the Forged Alliance dlc)for only £3 and Supreme Commander 2 is only £2.99. }}

Supreme Commander 1 with Forged Alliance!

SC2 was built with the console market in mind and made a lot of compromise, which was a shame.

{{ As those who have read my ramblings on games here will know I am a life long Jeff Minter fanboy- theres a documentary on him Im trying to track down- not sure if its even finished yet, but heres a clip from the master of all things arcade and llama. }}

{{ Nice this, an open source version of the original Tomb Raider you can play in your browser. Enjoy a classic and go back to where it all started. }}

http://xproger.info/projects/OpenLara/

{{ The latest free playable demo for Titanic: Honor and Glory is out and you can download it here (you need a decent pc, I cant run it on full specs but its still very nice even when you have to tone things down a bit for smoothness)-

https://titanichg.com/demo-401.html

And theres a nice vid showing the new engines all functioning, no sound in this but love seeing that classic engine going with all that Victorian metal work on show, lovely- }}

{{ Amazing tech demo from nvidea, whats really impressive here is physics, lighting, ray tracing its all being done in real time not prebaked and rendered. Change the path of one of these cars slightly so it hits objects a different way and everything would react as it should and fall differently. Its creeping ever closer to photrealism. }}

That CGI including the Titanic is incredible. Is it time to go back to Rogue One and fix Leia?

{{ They could definently do it better- theres even been some decent attempts to improve it using deepfake tech-



But the titanic stuff you can run now, at home on your pc, its not some massive budget hollywood production its a small indie dev team trying to raise their own funds and making a passion project. It just blows my mind, the first game outside of likes of pong that really got me hooked and started me off as a gamer was Manic Miner on the ZX Spectrum-



Now Im wandering about damn near photorealistic recreations of the Titanic in VR! 10 year old me's head would have exploded. That was Star Trek level shit back then. }}

Yeah pretty wild for what it is.

{{ So I finally got round to playing resident evil 7 in VR. It was originally released for playstation as one of its big VR launch titles, but when it came to pc it was missing the VR option and was flat screen only.
Several years later and the modders have stepped in to make a VR mod that gives full hand tracking which the original ps version did not have (you had to use a standard controller to play).
So given better graphics on pc, better tracking on pc I had high hopes for this. And indeed first impressions are generally good – wandering about the woods, finding the spooky abandoned house and exploring its creepy interior are all really good, atmospheric and build up the scares and tension.
This initial half hourish segment of the game, exploring, finding the videotape of the tv show that investigated there before going missing in creepy Blair Witch fashion all works really well in VR.

And thats where the good ends unfortunately. Once you actually meet Mia, your missing girlfriend whose got a bit murdery in the meantime, and the Family of Hills Have Eyes/Texas Chain Massacre types that live in the house the weak and forced gameplay loops become prevalent. And I suspect are made much worse by being in VR where you expect a certain amount of freedom that is not present here.

The main problem for a VR game is it breaks the golden rule of VR- its constantly taking control away from the player. A good example of this is when Mia first turns and attacks you, all you can do is block by pressing the trigger button when prompted, everything else going on- your character grabbing the knife she attacks with or hitting back- is all pre-scripted. Whereas as a VR player while the game is taking my hands away from me to do stuff I'm wanting to repeatedly punch her possessed demon face which would be much more sensible than trying to grab her knife by the blade which the game is making me do. Similarly when she pins your hand to the wall with a screwdriver and you have to pull the screwdriver out its scripted- no matter what you do you cant take it out till the game wants you to and the scripted attack happens- you cant avoid it. I find this sort of gameplay, if you can call it that, annoying enough in flatscreen, but in VR when you feel like you're there its much worse.

Again when you finally get a weapon, a small handaxe and use it to down Mia the first time as a player I am thinking 'I'll just grab that axe thats stuck in her neck to I'm armed and I'm going to chop her up into little pieces so she doesn't come back'- but the game doesn't want me to do that- so the axe despite being right there in front of me ready to be grabbed, cant be, and doesn't even register as a solid object and my hands pass right through it. Instead I have to leave the room and come back to find her gone and now I can get the axe left behind and she can attack me again later as the game wants her too. And I hate this- the game makes you act like a stupid idiot because it needs you to be stupid so its story can happen.
This is really bad in an immersive VR game.

And this not really having any choices makes up a lot of the gameplay, with Mia you have to run away from her, defend yourself from her attacks and just wait till it gets to the bit where the game says 'yeah now you can kill her'- complete that section and you get captured by the family escape them in another pre-scripted scene and then you get chased by the Father of the family, and just like Mia you cant do anything but run away from him as he is undefeatable until you get to the point in the story where the game decides now you are allowed to kill him.

For me its completely game breaking, completely immersion breaking and made me hate the character I was supposed to be playing just because he is so unbelievably mind-numbingly stupid. And I dont want to be a mind-numbingly stupid person in a horror film, I want to be me in a horror film trying to think how Id survive or get out of the situation. This does not allow for that- its all completely on-rails and painfully forced, do as the game wants, when the game wants and that's all you can do. And worse the game will simply take away your control when it wants to force you do what it wants.

So I cant recommend this as a VR game. Its way to frustrating to have control taken away from you all the time, especially just so your character can do the exact opposite of what you want them to do, and whilst the setting and atmosphere are its strongest features they dont sustain the whole game.
It'd make a great 20-30minute demo playing the first opening section up till you meet Mia, after that its just a painful annoyance of poor gameplay loops. Avoid is my recommendation. I'm very glad I waited till it was on sale, Id be pretty pissed had I paid anything like full price for this- for a fiver is maybe worth the experience, especially the opening -but the main meat of the game, yeah its terrible.

Oh and added warning- on steam this is listed as a vr game- but its not, not out the box anyway it requires a third party vr mod to work as the pc version doesnt support vr- so bit of a false advertising thing going on there too. }}

{{ This is rather genius if you know your Fallout factions, the way they align each Presidents political views and termsin office with the most suitable faction for them is really well done, as are the voices for most part}}

Petty - I missed your earlier commentary on RE7. I had it on PSVR and thoughts similar to yours... once the novelty wears off (which was because PSVR was new) it not a very good game. It is definitely not a Resident Evil game either!!

I haven't really had time for much gaming recently. I am still playing Destiny as I want to see the main story through to completion (final release should be this time next year) but that is really enough to take up my only spare time.

Need to win the lottery or retire i think!!

{{ Yeah, for all the praise it got for restoring Resi games to their original horror roots it never felt like Resi to me at all. Take out some references to earlier games and call this game "The Swamp Has Eyes" and Ive never have even connected it to Resi as part of the franchise.
From what Ive seen of the next game (which Ive not played) its more of the same.}}

{{ Um, a few liberties being taken I think!}}

{{ Have a good laugh with the very Scottish Laughing Simon in Skyrim VR. Chaos and banter wherever he goes.



Though my favourite stuff of his is the adventures of skeleton pirate Captain Fannybones and his Laughing Crew }}

{{ Unreal Engine 5's metahuman plugin is rather amazing looking!



and all you need is a smart phone to do it!