Game of the Month!

quarryman

Found myself playing some older games recently. Well, more than a year old.

This month:

Titan Quest: Immortal Throne.

Found myself bored with Spore so grabbed this with the expansion. Hack n slash fun and total Diablo clone. This will keep you going until Diablo 3 comes out.

Original game plus expansion is €15 on play.com. Well worth a punt.



have fun!

Is this worth stickying? I was thinking a few criteria: the game has to be at least a year old and playable on most machines (most likely a PC game). Also it has to have an element of hidden gem about it. No use recommending Oblivion, it has to be something that most have not played but should have!

Stev_o

Never got round to Titan Quest. Managed to get Diablo 2 (plus expansion) and convinced a friend to get it aswell. Probably the best coop experince's iv ever had was such a good game. Sadly we got Hell and then stopped playing shame really:(

Gummy Panda

Never played Titan Quest. Heard it about it ages of it was launched and seen it a few times on Steam.

Is there a decent single player or would i have to convince a friend to buy to do some co-op with me?

ToughyIRE

god, old game! but its really good, got addicting for a little while, until i finished it then i lost interest [snip]

Zillah

Frog people. Awesome. Never enough axe wielding frog people in computer games.

humanji

Titan Quest was a good game, but it was fairly repetative. When playing Diablo and Diablo 2, even though they were repetative too, I didn't mind as I was really enjoying it, but with Titan Quest, I jsut got bored of doing the same thing over and over. It's still fun, but there are too many better games to even consider this for Game of The Month (maybe in a years time when nobody can think of anything else )

quarryman

I should have added its MY game of the month

How about creating a vote system similar to album of the month in Alternative/Indie?

Criteria are:
Must be at least 1-2 years old.
Modest requirements - will play on most PCs
Easily accessible, can be bought on Steam/play.com cheaply
Avoided mainstream attention (sort of a hidden gem).

Fanny Cradock

ToughyIRE wrote: »

torrent my friends!

Careful now!

hoppo254

Zillah wrote: »

Frog people. Awesome. Never enough axe wielding frog people in computer games.

Bring back Battletoads !

Retr0gamer

hoppo254 wrote: »

Bring back Battletoads !

Funnily enough was just playing that there for the first time yesterday. I wanted to see if all the moaning about the speeder scenes was warranted and it was. Bring back battletoads but rare you can shove your ****ty impossible speeder parts right up your ass!

tba

STARTOPIA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startopia

quarryman

yes! that's the type of game I'm talking about. That was a great game even though my poor spatial relations skills did not lend to me being any good at it.

tman

humanji wrote: »

Titan Quest was a good game, but it was fairly repetative. When playing Diablo and Diablo 2, even though they were repetative too, I didn't mind as I was really enjoying it, but with Titan Quest, I jsut got bored of doing the same thing over and over. It's still fun, but there are too many better games to even consider this for Game of The Month (maybe in a years time when nobody can think of anything else )

Felt the exact same about TQ... Played for a couple of hours but just got sick of the repetition and it soon wound up at the bottom of my list of games that I'll get back to.
Great idea for a thread, but needs a bit more planning. FotW's new system seems like a good idea (pick a random poster each month and get them to choose a game), but opening up the vote for everybody could work if somebody feels like organising it all...

quarryman

FotW?

tman

Film of the week:o

magick

If you like to be scared outt ur pants then Clive Barkers Unding

play it at night, all the lights off, and no other scary game cant touch this

Retr0gamer

Don't think a voting system would work for a game of the week. I for one wouldn't like to be discussing commercial dross and popular games. I'd rather some one came up with a game of the week I didn't know anything about or had forgotten about. The current film of the week method would work a hell of a lot better.

tman

Aye, one different person picking each week seems like the better option.
Waiting a month for the next one seems a little extreme though, might as well make it a weekly thing

quarryman

Yep, a random poster is a great idea. I couldn't decide between suggesting making it weekly or monthly but a monthly game might get more attention but then again a bad choice might linger too long.

@Retro; i agree, I don't want to be playing the popular choice, that's why we need to make it a hidden gem. But it also can't be so hidden that we get can't get a copy of it to play.

Also my preference is to keep it to PC format, I only have a laptop and an xbox 360 but have access to a LOT of pc games.

Retr0gamer

quarryman wrote: »

Also my preference is to keep it to PC format, I only have a laptop and an xbox 360 but have access to a LOT of pc games.

Then again a lot of people don't use PC's to play games and it's not really fair on them either. It should be open to any format but the game should be sensibly choosen. Honestly I don't think people are going to go out and buy a game just so that they can talk about it. I wouldn't nominate something really obscure that nobody has played (as much as I'd like to ) and the games club in the emulation forum fell apart when people started nominating games for consoles that people had major trouble with trying to get up and running.

Obscure games are fine to nominate, something like Okami and Katamari which a lot of people have played but not something like Radiant Silvergun which would require obscure hardware to run. Even an obscure mame game would be fine if the emulator is easy to set up and the rom is easy to find.

vic19

I agree it should open in any format.

quarryman

ok, who's stickying it and setting the rules etc?

L31mr0d

aye I think the method currently employed in the Film forum would work best (i.e. the moderator of this forum picks a regular here to write up a review of a game and it becomes the Gotw)

This way it filters out annoying fanboys who will create multiple accounts to get their favorite games to the top of the list (as what happened on the previous FotW voting system)

Maximilian

I thoroughly recommend Shadowgrounds & its improved, but shorter sequel. Great fun top down Alien Breed type shooty-rpg with a great lighting system. Sequel has great explodey physics. The game the recent Space Siege should have been. Has co-op too.

It's going cheap on Steam too. There's demos for both also. No-brainer guys. The kind of game this thread was made for.

http://shadowgroundsgame.com/new/index.php?page=popup_screenshot&image=shadowgrounds_screenshot_2006_04_06_01_800.jpg
http://shadowgroundsgame.com/new/index.php?page=popup_screenshot&image=shadowgrounds_screenshot_2006_04_28_01_800.jpg

elekid

I think this is a great idea and agree that all formats should be allowed.

Are people planning to actually play the nominated Game of the Month or just discuss it?

tman

elekid wrote: »

I think this is a great idea and agree that all formats should be allowed.

Are people planning to actually play the nominated Game of the Month or just discuss it?

If I haven't played it yet, I'll definitely be making an effort to do so now...
Shadowgrounds looks awesome, thanks for bringing it to my attention Maximilian. Grabbing the demos now:)

MooseJam

have titan quest though never played it, will give it a go tomorrow

Dont be at yourself

OK guys, my thoughts on this topic...

There's not a lot of deep discussion on the games board when it comes to critically analyzing, picking apart and enthusing about games. I'm not really sure why that is - there are plenty of keen, intelligent, well-informed posters on here. Perhaps its partly due to the segmentation of the games category.

Anyway, I'm a huge film buff, and I enjoy writing about movies. I post regularly on the film board, as do many other cinephiles. However, I don't think FotW has really proven to be a worthy exercise. Certainly, its original incarnation was little more than an attempt to recreate the IMDB Top 250, with next to no actual discussion taking place. A popular, mainstream 'cult' movie would be voted in, and the resulting thread would be a cacophony of "Great film, I love the DVD" or "Johnny Depp was excellent in this", "The direction and editing were great". It was by-in-large sycophantic, puddle-deep twaddle and provoked no real discussion. Questions like Why a movie is great, why Johnny Depp was excellent, or why the direction was great were left completely unanswered.

The new FotW format is in some ways better, in other ways worse. By one poster having the choice, there is at least one poster who is genuinely enthusiastic and passionate about the film, so the initial post tends to be a lot more in-depth. However, the resulting replies again tended towards the sycophantic, and it was rare that a real back-and-forth discussion got going. People also tend to choose more offbeat, leftfield films, which immediately narrows the possible audience.

I'm not necessarily against the idea of a Game of the Week/Month system, but I'd rather we kick it around a while to see if it cant be improved to provoke real, intelligent discussion.

There used to be a really good gaming forum called State. They had a regular series of threads under the title Kill Your Darlings, wherein one popular game (Halo, GTA, etc) was named with the intention to tear it apart and highlight its flaws and shortcomings. By immediately focusing on the little-discussed negatives of popular titles, it led to interesting discussions - and indeed, outright arguments!

Could that be a possible way forward? Lets hear it.

quarryman

great post.

NekkidBibleMan wrote: »

There's not a lot of deep discussion on the games board when it comes to critically analyzing, picking apart and enthusing about games. I'm not really sure why that is - there are plenty of keen, intelligent, well-informed posters on here. Perhaps its partly due to the segmentation of the games category.

Agreed. I miss the un-segmented way. I thought this idea might be a way to kick-start it again.

NekkidBibleMan wrote:

It was by-in-large sycophantic, puddle-deep twaddle and provoked no real discussion. Questions like Why a movie is great, why Johnny Depp was excellent, or why the direction was great were left completely unanswered.

noticed that.

NekkidBibleMan wrote:

There used to be a really good gaming forum called State. They had a regular series of threads under the title Kill Your Darlings, wherein one popular game (Halo, GTA, etc) was named with the intention to tear it apart and highlight its flaws and shortcomings. By immediately focusing on the little-discussed negatives of popular titles, it led to interesting discussions - and indeed, outright arguments!

*googles* *finds nothing* what happened to it?

Dont be at yourself

I think the guy who ran it stroke it rich after inventing a boardgame in Norway or something. The only mention of the site that I could find was on the triforce.com forum.

But anyway, there's no reason why this games forum can't beat a now extinct forum like state in the snobby intellectual discussion stakes - I mean, I wrote a dissertation on videogames ferchristssake!

Retr0gamer

Hmm interesting idea. I'd be for it as long as I get to tear into FFVII, GTA and Halo. (altohugh I think people might be sick of the FFVII discussions that me and noodler keep having )

tba

im all for critically knocking down a few games, but pure negativity can be very distressing for people not used to it, it could appear from the outside that everybody in the forum does not in fact actually like games.

johnny_ultimate

Discussion is the best way foward, for sure. As said, FotW has a more varied selection now but at the cost of discussion (only a few of the more unexpected choices have created any sort of debate, alot of the time its just the few people who've seen it +1ing the choice). I still think its an enjoyable weekly choice, but it is disapointing the lack of debate.

I think if people were willing to discuss in depth the strengths and negatives of a game the system will work. Its the kind of think were decent analysis would make for an interesting thread. If the first post was a long, well thought out one followed by ten "great choice" posts, its a shame.

A lot of good suggestions in the thread though (like the idea of picking a loved/hated 'classic' and just giving a forum for peoples praise and misgivings). Theres rarely a lot of in depth discussion on games forums as Nekkidbibleman points out (despite the presence of a lot of great,passionate posters), and it would be great to create a weekly thread as a place for intelligent discussion about a specific game.

Bubs101

I think it's a good idea, I suggested a GotW thread a few months back but the timing was bad. Despite support the FotW "scandal" happened and then it became impossible to implement at the time.

Just one suggestion if it does go through, considering this is for in depth discussion of the game in question, could we ban the games that have their own forum because there's plenty of discussion going on in their forums already

Dont be at yourself

Perhaps the key thing to keep in mind is that 'Game of the Week' is not an award, and the thread isn't a platform to exclusively wax lyrically about it. The title, as with FotW, is perhaps misleading, encouraging people to extoll the virtues while ignoring the negatives, and thus any real debate.

'Kill Your Darlings' might swing too far in the other direction, but I think posters are more likely to defend a game than slate it, and maybe some real debate could develop.

Another idea is to stay away from the obviously great games. If a game is almost universally well regarded, it's probably not going to foster discussion. If we can get away from nominating the Halos, GTAs etc and focus on the uglier games, it may provide a more balanced argument.

Any other ideas?

Retr0gamer

NekkidBibleMan wrote: »

Another idea is to stay away from the obviously great games. If a game is almost universally well regarded, it's probably not going to foster discussion. If we can get away from nominating the Halos, GTAs etc and focus on the uglier games, it may provide a more balanced argument.

To be honest I've a whole heap of criticism to throw at the GTA and Halo games. Nominate away!

noodler

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Hmm interesting idea. I'd be for it as long as I get to tear into FFVII, GTA and Halo. (altohugh I think people might be sick of the FFVII discussions that me and noodler keep having )

I have never played a FF I wouldn't give 90%+ too. Just in case you thought I didn't like 6, great game just felt it suffered in what it could bring to the table dramatically.

I would even give FFX-2 a contreversial 90%. I know the 3 main characters were gay as you like but their 3 male counterparts (the leaders fo the 3 organisations) had fascinating back stories. Also

the whole Sphere flashbacks of who we all though twas 'him' were remarkably well done.

Battle system wasn't bad either!

I certainly didn't enjoy GTA:SA as much as some did. I preferred GTA3, seemed more polished, condensed....playable. I really had to force myself to get as far as I did (Just got some Rapper's house I believe).

Halo, and Halo2 are in the House but I wouldn't go near them unless it was for some multiplayer action.

Id sy you hate Pro Evo games Retro? I imagine its between them and FF as to what has taken up most of my PS2's time since I got it 6 years ago!

I have written two dissertations, neither on videogames! But Id be up for that as well.

Retr0gamer

It's not that I hate sports games they just don't interest me. Other than golf games and NHL games which are always surprisingly brilliant I wouldn't play a sports game although if I had to play a footie game it would be pro evo and when I do I usually get my ass kicked. I'm also not that fond of games that don't have a true ending for some reason. Since I don't play them much I really wouldn't be right for me to comment on them.

Maximilian

quarryman wrote: »

Found myself playing some older games recently. Well, more than a year old.

This month:

Titan Quest: Immortal Throne.

Found myself bored with Spore so grabbed this with the expansion. Hack n slash fun and total Diablo clone. This will keep you going until Diablo 3 comes out.

Original game plus expansion is €15 on play.com. Well worth a punt.



have fun!

Is this worth stickying? I was thinking a few criteria: the game has to be at least a year old and playable on most machines (most likely a PC game). Also it has to have an element of hidden gem about it. No use recommending Oblivion, it has to be something that most have not played but should have!

Picked up Titan Quest from Steam over the weekend. Great game. Very addictive. Nice graphics too.

Maximilian

I'm not sure if anyone actually took my recommendation about Shadowgrounds or not but if you like this sort of game, it might interest you to know that Team17 are apparently at work on a new Alien Breed game. Due in about 12 months they say.