I'm far from a PC gamer, but since I don't have a game platform at home, I satisfy my video game desires on my desktop. So, let's have a place to discuss PC games we are playing, what genre's we like, what games can result in 5 hour gamefests if you don't watch the clock, all-time favorites, etc.
Me? I'm not really into the MMPORG (massive multi-player online roleplaying games) like World of Warcraft or Dungeons and Dragons online, but maybe that is my own preconceived notions about the gameplay. Since you complete quests in groups, it would seem you are reliant upon and subsequently are relied on to be there for the duration of the mission / success of the group. I'm not sure I'm interested in schedule being a peripheral aspect of my gaming.
I do like RPG's, and I tend to lean toward the space genre. When it comes to strategy, I prefer turn based strategy over real-time. I do like FPS games, but most of them are linear, which I don't find too interesting.
What's the best game I've ever played? About 6 months ago I was at Target with my family and just browsing around the PC software section. They had all the new releases from the big producers / publishing companies. They also had a $10 rack. I'm no game snob, so I figured why not pick up 4 games for the price of 1? Three of them sucked, but the 4th is pure genius.
The game is called
Space Rangers 2 - Rise of the Dominators. It's a role-playing game. You are a member of the Space Ranger Corps, and your job is to defend / rid the galaxy of the Dominators, an AI robot race intent on taking over the galaxy that contains 5 species that have formed a coalition (Human, Gaalian, Faeyan, Peleng, Maloq). Here's what make the game great:
1. It's a huge galaxy, and you can go wherever you want. No really, huge. There are over 50 stars, with at least 3 planets in orbit at each (usually 5). About 1/2 of the planets are inhabited, the other half uninhabited (but those can be explored for materials from crashed space craft).
2. You can do whatever you want. There are tranports involved in trade, so you can be a pirate and demand money / cargo. You can fight the Doms. You can go to the planet gov't building and take missions for $ (some FedEx deliveries, some assassinations, some mini-games). You can hunt pirates. You can hire partners. You can join missions to free Dom controlled systems.
3. There are multiple genre's covered, and the depth is amazing. Some of the government missions are to rid a planet of Dom mech ground robots. Here the mini-game turns into a real-time strategy game (like the original warcraft) and you can even hop into a robot and take control, turning it into a First Person Shooter. When I say mini-game, don't be misled, just the quest can take up to an hour. Other missions are text based, choose your adventure type quests where you have to either solve a puzzle, win a contest, or survive prison (this is not a mission, but what happens if you piss a planet off and land there).
4. The learning curve is steep. If you play the game without reading a tip sheet first, you will die in the beginer tutorial. Seriously. It autosaves every time you leave a planet or station, so it's no big thing to quickly retry it, but it's tough at first.
There's just so much to do an learn that you will change your early-game strategy multiple times. For instance, I'm on my 7th or 8th game and I did things totally different each time as I learned something new.
The reason I'm bringing it up now is that they just released the first US expansion pack for it. The game was developed in Russia (this explains the humorous gramatical errors on the text quests and in game dialog with other ships) and there have been multiple patches released there (in Russian).
Here's an English forum dedicated to SR2 -
link *
Newb FAQ -
link
I've lost hours and hours playing this game. It's nothing for me to start playing on Friday evening after the Sox game, look up at the clock, and see it's 4:00 am. Seriously. It's a must play game.
If any of you decide to try it out and are getting frustrated, I can help you get through the initial bumps of the difficulty for beginers, but trust me, mid-game and end-game are a blast.
You probably won't find this in stores on CD like I did. The original US release was on DVD, but it included a rather aggressive copyright protection software called Starforce that can cause system problems. And, you have to have SR2 to get the expansion pack (the exp pack is worth the extra money, many improvements). You can download both from totalgaming.net for about $40 ($20 for SR2, $20 for the exp pack). The download does not come with Starforce.
*Yeszir - I can remove the link if you want.
PC Games
Linear Mode
