What have you been playing recently and how is it?

Space Empires IV (wine) - The closest I can get to playing/comprehending Aurora. I really love the ship design system and the need for an actual cohesive fleet - Although Its clearly leaning toward Micro-Management-Hell as the game progresses

Dominions 4 - I've done a few random Early Age games - so much fun. Less micro than the above to the point where you feel you really are running a nation/religion

Homeworld (wine) - Works great and I love the story so far - I'm just too much of a perfectionist to stand loosing a bunch of big ships and I keep replaying the missions over and over.

I'd love to get my some of my friends into Dominions as I think PBEM with a few of them would be a blast (I'm generally not into multiplayer at all, but we all like board games and Dominions feels more board-game than computer sim - in a good way)

Quoting: HalifaxI don't know how much money HL:Ep2 made, but it probably wasn't an ongoing continuous stream of .7 billion, year after year. :-) Valve is just highly distracted from their own original franchise that got them here, by succeeding too well in other areas - not a bad thing for them though.

VR Portal is definitely a game Valve is thinking about making, and probably already devoting a lot of internal development time to. The Labs, Robot Repair is basically a pretty compelling official teaser from Valve themselves it's coming.

Well, yeah I hardly think Valve is making money directly from HL2:E2, I guess I am the only fool who buys HL and and its expansions separately (purchased Valve Complete Pack afterwards though). But the episodic structure of HL2 lets people buy bundles instead of single episodes. As I recently checked Steam and Mod DB, there are dozens of HL2 mods which require HL2 to run. Of course you can make them standlone source mods by editing some config files if you are nerd enough but majority of players would prefer having the base game instead. So Valve is still making money from HL2 series.

Yeah, Portal is a natural candidate for VR but Valve needs to address movement issues and motion sickness problems. Motion sickness might be overcomed by increasing FOV and FPS but lacking movement is a significant problem which cannot be solved without investing tons of money.

Knowing that there are plenty of single player mods for HL series, I do not bother with HL2 sequel too much... :-) My only wishes regarding HL3 are GNU/Linux support and being able to play it without VR. I cannot care less about having VR... B-)


Last edited by rea987 on 14 August 2016 at 8:58 am UTC

Have just finished Life is Strange and thought it was great; rather different to my usual choice of games. I chose the selfish ending :-)

Currently playing Broforce (great fun) and Risk of Rain (horrible controls). Have also been playing the original Serious Sam via Wine. This will keep me going until I can play Doom :-)

[quote=rea987]

Quoting: HalifaxYeah, Portal is a natural candidate for VR but Valve needs to address movement issues and motion sickness problems. Motion sickness might be overcomed by increasing FOV and FPS but lacking movement is a significant problem which cannot be solved without investing tons of money.

Knowing that there are plenty of single player mods for HL series, I do not bother with HL2 sequel too much... :-) My only wishes regarding HL3 are GNU/Linux support and being able to play it without VR. I cannot care less about having VR... B-)

I bought the HTC Vive and have played The Lab and several other VR Steam games. There is a new teleport paradigm being used by many VR games to solve the locomotion problem. You literally stand and move around in your "holodeck" room (with the chaperone system superimposing the real life wall boundaries when you get too close), and then use one of the hand controllers to point to a spot in the VR world to teleport immediately. It causes much less motion sickness than standard FPS WASD locamotion in VR while you yourself are not moving in real life.

IOW: Valve has indeed already invested tons of money into solving this problem - there's many other things valve has engineered into the whole Vive system for comfort, too.

After getting used to it, I go back to real life and am kind of bummed I can't simply teleport around instantly to any place nearby I can see :-)

I know you don't think you care for VR, but I personally think that's a bit of bunk when people say that :-) They are really saying Gen 1 VR is still non-compelling - that I'll agree to, for sure! I'm an early adopter/enthusiast who just spent a lot of money on early hardware and tech that will look comically primitive in the future - just like gaming on old VGA displays looks to us now.

VR still has a long way to go before it gets to more realistic virtual reality. Right now, it's still too low res and like you are looking out of a diver's mask.

The VR Robot Repair demo is good, and quite compelling - Gladys makes a cameo at the end.