Running video games (and consoles) thread

I liked the gameplay of '11 a lot more than '12. Didn't have to do much adjustments to the AA sliders in '11. I downloaded the '13 demo today and have actually really liked the gameplay so far. Played a game as Alabama against LSU and it was almost too easy in the run department. First two running plays went for 40+ yards around the right end. Don't know what difficulty it's set at, but I couldn't find a way to change it.

The defensive mechanics seemed a lot better overall. Ran two receivers on fades and one on a deep post against cover 2 (like I talked about in my previous post), and threw to the open guy across the middle. The FS going deep broke after a slight delay, but made an animation like he had to regain his balance after having to break so quickly, which slowed him down. Good start, in my eyes.

 

Maybe someone here can help me.

Playing MLB 2K12 on 360. For some reason the game has taken to freezing up on the loading screen. It'll load all the files on my machine, and that's it. The music stops and I'm left staring at Justin Verlander till I reset the Xbox.

Anyone know anything -- short of saying hasta la vista to Microsoft and going back to PS -- I can do? I've even moved all my files from the hard drive to a memory card I have, and it still freezes.

 

And all my other games work. So I'm pretty sure it's not the machine going bad.

 

I hate 2K right now. I cleared the cache on my system, thinking that would work. Nope.

So I went through and deleted all my files -- I had a couple of dynasties going -- and hoped that would do the trick. Hell no. I know the 2K makers mailed it in with what hopefully is their last baseball game, but this just pisses me off. And I like I said, all my other games -- including NBA 2K12 -- work just fine.

 

that sucks dude. Sorry

 

Not even the 2K message boards were any help. I just can't figure out why one 2K game runs fine, but another doesn't.

 

So I just checked the 2K forums again and apparently this thing is affecting a lot more people than I thought. It started on PCs, then spread to the 360. According to someone on the forum, no fix/patch is coming anytime soon.

In other words, I'm screwed. I doubt I can take it back to GameStop and get another copy without paying for it again.

So I guess in the next few weeks, I'll be saying goodbye to Xbox and Microsoft and getting a PS3.

 

A PS3 isn't a bad purchase. (He said, even though most of the games he has are on both consoles anyway.) I was addicted to my PS2, and before that PSX, and given the similarities between the libraries I just stuck with what I was comfortable with. At this point though, most super-successful games eventually cross over to the other platform, with a few marquee FPS seemingly staying just on the 360 (Halo, Gears of War) and more super-Japanesey and RPG games on the PS3.

 

Folks on the 2K boards are speculating the freeze out has to do with the break. Like I said on there, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. But one guy said he changed the date on his 360 and it briefly worked before freezing again.

He then changed the date to sometime after the season and it happened again. Apparently 2K is freezing everyone out as soon as the season is over with, which is bullshit.

 

I hang out on the dorky indie section of the video game universe (mainstream games are fun, but also an insanely expensive hobby for the amount of fun you get).

Anyway, lately I've gotten really hooked on Dwarf Fortress, a game that is perpetually in free, stable alpha:

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html

The learning curve is incredibly steep, but I've never played a more in-depth game. First, it generates a large, in-depth fantasy world and simulates a history for it. You've got all your basics: humans, elves, dwarves, etc., and their civilizations fight it out for supremacy for awhile until a balance is more or less struck.

There are a couple of game modes to choose from once the world is complete, but the most common (and the only one I've tried) is Fortress mode. You get control of seven dwarves sent out to set up a colony at a location of your choosing. You pick out their starting skills and equipment from an insanely long and complete list of possibilities. Then you assign them jobs and orders and watch them go to work digging out or building a fortress colony. Eventually, migrants and births drive your population up to as many as a couple hundred.

The dwarves can learn a ton of different skills and build all kinds of different stuff. You can farm, craft, mine, etc., and either live off what you produce or trade with passing caravans. My current fortress was lucky enough to have a master carpenter migrate, so now I've got most of the population gathering wood to support his making of fine furniture, which I trade with passing humans and dwarves to get anything else I need.

Besides the depth and complexity, the two most fun things about the game are that there are no win conditions, and that the game is intentionally *not* play-balanced. There's a lot of ish in the world that can kill your dwarves, and if you happen to run into some of it, sucks to be you, you can start over. And because there's no win condition, odds are that eventually you will run into something that will kill your colony or collapse your economy (causing a spiral of bad moods and behavior so that everyone either leaves or goes insane and kills each other).

I'm not kidding when I say that it took me about five hours of reading and watching tutorial videos before I could get enough of a grasp of the basics to play an actual game. Totally worth it.

 

You've already said you think it's just the one game. Why would you ditch the Xbox because of just one game?

 

I've long thought about switching back to Sony, but the PS3 has always been more expensive than the 360. I don't know if that's still the case, but that was the only thing holding me back from switching consoles.