Games I've been playing recently

[chaos_defrost]

My participation on this board has been a bit lax as of recent, and I'm blaming http://www.apterous.org/index.php" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">Apterous for this. Apterous is a game that is a mimic of the English game show "Countdown". It unfortunately has a 15 pound/year subscription rate (About $23 when I subscribed, might be more now because the dollar is sucking hardcore), but you can play trial games before subscribing. I'd be more than up for a game or two with anyone here if they want.

Also I found a site called http://www.puzzgrid.com/" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">http://www.puzzgrid.com that has a different game on it. You get 16 words or phrases and you have to make four groups of 4 with them. The catch is that there may be maybe possible groups, and more than 4 things that can fit in a group, but there's just one solution. I made one so far, but it's admittedly obscenely hard -- I'm going to try making a couple more manageable ones tonight.

Anyone here found some awesome obscure non-Lemmings games to play?

[mobius]

I've been playing The Longest Journey; a really well done 3D modeled adventure game on Steam. It has some very tough puzzles as well. One particularly obscure and unusual but funny puzzle. The voice acting is really well done and hilarious at parts.

any of you every play Jewels of the Oracle? an obscure game from the early 90's. Some very tough puzzle in that one of a variety.

as to more obscure games; here is a game I never played but want to really badly;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmTXXZW8PYU" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmTXXZW8PYU
I found it while searching for that Herbie Hancock song
(next time I'm in the IRC somebody who reads this let me know if this link displays as a regular link or a video because it displays just as a link for me)

[Mr. K]

I have been knocking my way through a lot of games.  College just got done for the summer, and I used a few spare days I had before I could head home just to start finishing things... since I own around 700 games and have probably only finished around 30% of them.

Right now my primary focus is Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii, since I never actually finish RPGs most of the time.  I'm mostly liking it.  Looks great for a Wii game and the music is phenomenal.  The gameplay is mostly interesting, though sometimes it gets repetitive and sometimes it gets extremely unfair (I've found it very easy to end up under-leveled for larger battles-- so grinding is somewhat of a necessity)

[mobius]

I have been knocking my way through a lot of games.  College just got done for the summer, and I used a few spare days I had before I could head home just to start finishing things... since I own around 700 games and have probably only finished around 30% of them.

Right now my primary focus is Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii, since I never actually finish RPGs most of the time.  I'm mostly liking it.  Looks great for a Wii game and the music is phenomenal.  The gameplay is mostly interesting, though sometimes it gets repetitive and sometimes it gets extremely unfair (I've found it very easy to end up under-leveled for larger battles-- so grinding is somewhat of a necessity)

700 games?  http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/shocked.gif" alt=":o" title="Shocked" class="smiley" /> are you like the angry video game nerd or something? http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/winktounge.gif" alt=";P" title="Wink-Tongue" class="smiley" />

I don't finish RPG games either usually. Why is that? but Final Fantasy 1 (the very first, NES version), is one of my favorite games of all time, though I still don't always finish it.  You have to grind a little but too much imo.

[Simon]

Haha, role playing games... I enjoy games of the exact opposite type *grin*

Most people already know I enjoy puzzle games of the DOS aera, like Lemmings, One Step Beyond, Pushover, Avish, Stoneage... won't discuss those.

I played a lot of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-o1nVjKejg" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">Garden Gnome Carnage (link to Youtube), an arcade scoring game from 2007 describable with "so, you're this appartment building, and...", in both the old Gamemaker version and the newer Flash version. It may look stupid, but it can be played with skill. Despite not playing for over a year, I'm still in the http://www.gimme5games.com/hi-scores/garden-gnome-carnage" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">GGC global highscores with at most two people legitly above me (scores not divisible by 10 must be phoney), I used the nicknames Eiderdaus, Rodent from Hell, Nagetier, and Schlagetier. Maybe there are more strong players on the game console version.

These months, I've played a lot of http://www.martinmagnusson.com/games/quadnet/" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">Quadnet (screenshots and a video), an arcade DOS game, from the later 1990's. It's one of the purest games in this genre, you're a spaceship in a rectangular play area, and avoid/shoot metal spheres flying around, their number increasing over time. The player has the normal 4 keys to move in eight directions, and then 4 more keys to shoot in four directions independently from his motion. There are youtube videos with people scoring over 2 million points, I'm way below these with a highscore of 650,000.

Since a few days ago, I'm experimenting with a new key layout in Quadnet (it allows you to remap inside the game): two rows of four keys à la < v ^ > instead of the default two inverted-T layouts. This uses 8 fingers instead of 6, omitting the middle fingers' need to jump between keys. At first, this is extremely confusing in such a fast game, and I haven't even gotten half of the old highscore yet. I've been using the new layout for a week now, and have just beaten the old-layout highscore with 720,000.

geoo has suggested alternative 8-finger layouts. I probably won't use them, but new players might consider them as serious alternatives to dual < v ^ >; they seem easier to learn. One suggestion: keep inverted-T except for the up direction, which is moved to the pinky finger. Second: keep inverted-T except for the down direction, which is moved to the thumb. The whole inverted-T should be moved up in that case, e.g. qwerty Caps, Q, S, LeftAlt, and something similar for the right hand. Both of these ideas have the hands mirror each other, unlike my layout, which is not symmetric.

Screenshot of the current highscore table:

http://asdfasdf.ethz.ch/~simon/etc/quadnet.png" alt="" class="bbc_img" />

-- Simon

[Mr. K]

700 games?  http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/shocked.gif" alt=":o" title="Shocked" class="smiley" /> are you like the angry video game nerd or something? http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/winktounge.gif" alt=";P" title="Wink-Tongue" class="smiley" />

I turned into a collector at some point, so I've made lists of all the games I want to play for a given console and have dedicated myself to getting all of them.  Unfortunately, that has created a massive backlog of stuff to play!

[mobius]

hey does anyone on here play Portal? or Portal2. I highly recommend it-- one of the best puzzle games I ever played (besides lemmings of course http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/winktounge.gif" alt=";P" title="Wink-Tongue" class="smiley" />) and one of the best games of all time considered by many. Portal 2 recently released an update so that you can now create your own levels!
Portal 1 cost 9 US dollars on Steam and 2 costs 19. (plus there's sales very often on steam if your poor http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/smiley.gif" alt=":)" title="Smiley" class="smiley" />)
Sometime soon I'm gonna see if I can create some levels of my own (I have to finish the game first though.. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/embarrassed.gif" alt=":-[" title="Embarrassed" class="smiley" />)

[Mr. K]

Portal is amazing.  One of my favorite games from recent years.  I still haven't reinstalled Portal 2 on my gaming rig yet, but I probably will thanks to the new level creation DLC.  Funny, I'm just excited to check out other puzzles.  While I can solve them, I'm terrible at making puzzles (exactly why I haven't made any Lemmings levels)

[Simon]

geoo and me have tried out http://netkeen.nfshost.com/index.html" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">Netkeen (link to homepage) in the past weeks. This is a modification of the Commander Keen episodes 4-6 with networked multiplayer mode via Dosbox. You run around the same map as different characters from the game -- you can even pick the full-bearded oracle sage from Keen 4 :-D -- and use shots or bombs to frag each other.

There are a couple of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8VIqcdiZ7k" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">videos of Netkeen matches on Youtube. This one's on a favorite map of both geoo and mine. We aren't the players in this vid, however.

If you would like to give it a try, ask either of us on IRC. Usually, geoo can't host an internet game himself, but I can (one needs a forwarded port). Of course, you can also visit the game's own IRC channel directly, see their homepage for details.

Unrelated: 997,000 points in Quadnet, the million isn't far anymore. ;-)

-- Simon