Other games?

[aeneas]

By the way, for anybody who enjoyed the oldschool Warhammer games, the Warhammer Online open beta starts Sept 8 for 10 days before their release date of Sept 18. [/url]

I got a bit excited there until I realized that it was a Warhammer themed MMORPG. I'd pay for an online version of WH40k with a lot of users and modern glitter. I guess there's not a large enough audience to make that a paying proposition though.

[Dragonboneman]

Well, the Blood Bowl game currently being developed promises to be a faithful adaptation of the board game, so I definitely want that, and 40K is a lot more popular so you never know.

[Dragonboneman]

Concerning Elite... Did you ever encounter the Pseudo 'Tribbbles'. The rapid-breeding fuzz-balls that would eventually conceal you view screen and clog your cargo hold, eating any edibles. If so, did you ever get rid of them? If so, how?

I used to take the escape pod which would reduce their numbers remaining to 2 or 3, but then they would start breeding again. I eventually stopped playing because of them.

I've never actually got far enough in Elite to encounter them, but think I read that you can kill them by flying close enough to a star to cook them.

[will_asher]

Anyone play Munchkin? That's recently become one of my favorite games.

[aeneas]

Well, the Blood Bowl game currently being developed promises to be a faithful adaptation of the board game, so I definitely want that, and 40K is a lot more popular so you never know.

Hmm- interesting. I never played Blood Bowl actually. My impression is that it's... Dwarves and Orks playing football with weapons? I can see that being good for some chuckles.

Anyway, truth be told I have a hard time seeing either 40k or trad Warhammer given the full treatment. I love true wargames, and I used to play a couple rabidly via PBEM, but I have a hard time imagining that there is the audience to support a cutting edge online wargame. They are fatiguing, and it seems to me that not many people are looking for a game that is more tasking than their job, as a pastime.

EDIT: and beyond that there are some difficulties with online turn-based games... at least with chess and go you can calculate while your opponent is thinking, and he only has to make _one_ move. Even there the game tends to devolve into a click-fest as the clocks run down. Waiting for your opponent to move in a wargame can be excruciating if both players have to be present. Even very simple games (like Wesnoth) suffer from this.

[Narvius]

4X games are awesome. You know, like Civilization or Space Empires.
But they are indeed very, very exhausting. I just can't imagine how people do that - over a thousand entites to micromanage...

[ekolis]

Yay, someone who's heard of Space Empires!

*summons a horde of floating Eee!*
The floating Eee zaps you with a Lv. 12 Large-Mount Anti-Proton Beam!
You take 65 points of damage!
The floating Eee blasts you with Lv. 3 Phased Polaron Beam!
Your shield arm feels crippled temporarily and you take 30 points of damage...
The floating Eee scorches you with a Lv. 4 Wave Motion Gun!
You get the feeling you are playing Animeband and take 750 points of damage!

[Narvius]

Uhm, lol.

I've actually played only one 'bigger' games of SEIV, at the pace of 1 turn a day, which was really slow in the beginning. Simulaneous turns, performed at midnight. Arounds 18-22 players, but I'm not sure... it was huge. I played as customized Eees... ^.^

[aeneas]

4X games are awesome. You know, like Civilization or Space Empires.
But they are indeed very, very exhausting.

True wargames are, in some cases, 9000x as exhausting. 4x games are fun, but tend to have big loopholes. True wargames try to avoid that and, generally, instead concentrate on either combined arms or logistics (though there have been a few interesting games that concentrated on theater-wide strategy). Basically, if you can build a super-science-city, you are not playing a wargame.

[darkdrone]

Actually, the game that introduced me to the roguelike genre (before I even knew there was such a genre) was Castle of the Winds. Windows 3.11 shareware game back from 1989. Trivia page.

Did anybody else played this?

Castle of the Winds , i loved that!

Anyone play EXILE ?

[Narvius]

Actually Castle of the Winds was the first Roguelike I ever player, too, but I did not only not know what roguelikes are, I didn't really know what RPG's are. And I basically didn't understand anything, as back there I couldn't understand english. Needless to say, I didn't like it back then. And I still don't like it, but only because there are better roguelikes...

@aeneas
Yeah, but I didn't claim that 4X games are wargames. I couldn't even categorize any game as wargame, as I never have played one... and I won't, if it that exhausting =P

Super-Science-Cities are awesome! *g* All technologies while the other's are in the Stone Age!

[Dragonboneman]

Hmm- interesting. I never played Blood Bowl actually. My impression is that it's... Dwarves and Orks playing football with weapons? I can see that being good for some chuckles.

Assuming you mean football of the gridiron variety, that's a more-or-less accurate description. Most of the Warhammer races will be present, and although weapons are not the core of the game things like chainsaws and bombs do appear.
Pics and a few videos can be found here: http://www.bloodbowldigital.com
The game won't be out til next year though, but I'm hoping it will be worth the wait.

[pav]

Castle of the Winds rocks! First roguelike that I played, yeah, well before I knew what a roguelike is. But I totally loved it.

[aeneas]

Though I suppose it's not entirely in the spirit of this thread, I have to say that I like Go a lot. When I was a kid I played Chess, but I eventually got to a point where opening preparation really started to matter (at the time I was rated close to, but not quite, 2200 USCF, though I think that would likely translate to strong class A these days- I played a bit at the Marshall a few years ago, and got soundly spanked by some of their resident Experts, though I tended to win the post-mortems

Anyway, if you're looking for a game that is enormously mentally taxing, but is less dependent on memorization than Chess, Go is a great candidate. I have to admit that a little bit of Go goes a long way for me at this point. It simply requires too much thinking for me to want to get much better. I'm about a 1 dan (amateur, obviously) in Japan, and around 3k on KGS. I really enjoyed getting to that point though .

[starstealer]

My gaming time on the computer is split between Megamek and Angband. Megamek is a computerized version of turn-based table-top battletech (and a very good implementation of it I might add!). The version I play, actually uses a campaign server and is kind of a mini-MMORPG.

Of course, the days of spending an entire day setting up and playing a single match of Battletech has been reduced to 1-2 hours or less.