So the title says it all. As I am a working man (and now father of a newborn) gaming time is more limited than I would like. I have a festive tradition of sorts where I hoard a few games in anticipation of a couple of weeks vacation come the back end of December. (I am in Europe so no thanksgiving weekend for us…) I will travel back to South Africa to visit the family for a couple of weeks hauling a beast of a laptop (overclocked i7700K and two Nvidia 1080 GTX’s) and hunker down for some good gaming over the Xmas period.
My games hoarded for Xmas are:
XCOM 2: WOC
Wolfenstein 2
Dishonored DOTO
Deus X MD (my previous laptop couldn’t run this well last year)
Total War WH2
Assassins Creed Origins
(edit - forgot I bought Super Mario Odyssey on the switch…)
This probably reflects a deeply pathological hoarding mentality / OCD issue as clearly there is no way I can play all these games over Xmas. I will usually find a favorite from “the hoard” and complete it - last year it was vanilla XCOM 2, the year before it was Fallout 4. So really this is just a way of exponentially extending my backlog. 😂
Are there any games you guys have hoarded to play over the festive season? Alternatively, if you are a “normal” person what are are your festive “rituals” you look forward to every year (gaming related or not)?
If you have your HOTAS all set up and are flying the heck out of DCS it’s too early. In my case I kind of got tired of remapping my HOTAS and the fact that I really need to have the muscle memory to operate the HOTAS while wearing the rift. And then sometimes I find the text hard to read.
VTOL VR is built from the ground up for VR. From that perspective, everything is legible and the touch controllers work really well and organically with it. It’s worth it for the feeling of using the touch controllers alone - but that is my humble opinion. The aircraft are also fictional and flight models are kind of “lite” although being steadily improved. It’s analogous to Flaming Cliffs 3 level of fidelity at this stage in terms of weapons systems and flight model. Regarding the content, it’s still pretty slim. I should say though that for simple set up and trouble free flying after work where you don’t have to squint to see everything or have Chuck Yeager like muscle memory for your HOTAS mapping it takes some beating. I have got my money’s worth out of it, whereas I haven’t flown DCS for some time as it just seems like a world of effort after having my brain crushed by a day of work.
There is a free flight “sandbox” mode with hostile forces - although I suspect its currently the same forces, in the same places each time. And I think there are about 5 / 6 campaign missions. I mainly fly free flight to chill out with the Top Gun soundtrack blaring in the background. VTOL VR can be my wingman anytime!
Excellent idea for a thread, and an excellent question. My wife plays in a local orchestra’s production of The Nutcracker around Thanksgiving for a couple of weeks, so between that and Christmas break, I’ll have a lot of time to myself. I see myself basically investing a lot of time in:
LOGistICAL
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut
The Lord of the Rings Online
DOOM
Starpoint Gemini Warlords
Graviteam Tactics: Mius-Front
I’ll likely dabble with a ton of other games, but those half dozen will likely take up the bulk of my free, non-blog gaming time. Really looking forward to it.
My one for sure gaming effort is going to be jumping back into Witcher 3 once I get my Xbone X. Imagine that will take a while to navigate, including DLC. Other than that, probably be a moment to moment decision. Not much of a planner, me.
I plan to play a few games I have on my wishlist that I will pick up at the Thanksgiving or Winter sales. I like to save them up, then knock them out right away so they don’t languish in a backlog.
Of course tastes and needs vary. I’m a stay-at-home dad so I can use the intellectual stimulation that studying hard for a sim brings. ( I also read Marcus Aurelius in the gym). As for reference while in flight; serious reading I do beforehand, but as we’re not 18 anymore, flying ten different aircraft with ten different hotas mappings is impossible. So here’s my trick:
My rift has a widmo faceplate. Not only does this greatly enhance it’s comfort on my face, it also enhances the rifts’ built in PTRW* feature. This allows the use of printed button map references and even the keyboard if the HOTAS turns out to be insufficient (even a warthog has not enough buttons).
The ‘other’ serious sim, Il-2 BoX (moscow, stalingrad, kuban) does not need referencing. I play it at relaxed realism (no engine management) so it’s stick and rudder, throttle and a good look around for me.
So good. I flew one the other day that had a scripted briefing. It talked about the despair the pilot faced having to go up again in his il2 to face the hun hordes in their superior messers. The horror of having to take three bright eyed rookies into that meat grinder. And then the flight itself. It was mostly overcast, grey skies. Autumn leaves and dust colors the world brown and in the distance the great city of Stalingrad burned and suffered while a desperate fight was going on in her outskirts. As we overflew the river, the clouds parted and a great curtain of sunshine turned the rivulets in the swamps east of the river into glittering gold. The scene became almost churchlike, a hallowed visualisation of Shostakovich’ eighth.
Yeah that good.
Also none of the rookies made it back.
Anyway. They are currently at version 2.12 but are gearing up and hyping up for 3.1. That’s gonna be a big one. New single player career system ripped out of Rise of Flight. Tripled draw distance for land and sky detail. Rain and oil rendered as fluids on the windscreen. improved graphics for bare metal parts. all very sweet and probably delivered in a timely manner.
*PTRW == Peek To Real World. Peek down the opening at my nose at the things on my desk or even the screen.
Humm. I haven’t thought that far yet, and I don’t know if I could hold off a game that I would really love to play that long. But I’ll be spending some time with my sister who also loves gaming and I promised to bring my PS4 to my mom’s place.
So I’m thinking I’ll get L.A. Noir (remaster releases Nov 14) and Hidden Agenda (release Nov 22) as we both love a mystery to solve.
We’ll probably have to throw in some Borderlands since she loves it, (I don’t, yet).
What I’ll be playing when I get back home again, I’ll just have to wait and see. Plus the christmas sale at the PS-Store will probably offer me a lot more to choose from.
I will, though, play one or other Assassins Creed game. And maybe Hitman.
I will be off work for 10 days total at the end of the year and was supposed to travel but that’s not happening so I am (thankfully) going to be relaxing at home for that time and digging into my ridiculous back log.
These are some of my target games (and some of these I have been playing on and off for well over two (four?) years):
Assassin’s Creed II: Have played this about 3/4 of the way twice already and with all the AC talk around here thought I’d have another go and finish it up so I can finally get to AC 4 and Unity which I also own before picking up Origins which I am dying to try.
Red Dead Redemption: Yeah, another oldie, I’ve had this since release and got pretty far at some point but then put the 360 away when I got the One. This is back-compat now so I am playing through it again in anticipation of its sequel.
Mass Effect 3: Have owned this a while but haven’t had a chance to play it. It’s also back-compat so will finally give it a go and finish the trilogy.
Mixing these up with some current-gen titles:
Divinity: Original Sin: Was having a lot of fun with this one last year but don’t remember much about the progress I’d made so may have to start a new game.
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition: Technically, last-gen but remastered for the One. Got pretty close to the end - short game so may start anew so I can pick up the sequel and finish that in a few years.
Final Fantasy XV: Hated the combat for the first couple of hours - it was too damn frantic and never had any idea what was going on - until I discovered Wait Mode and the combat became more enjoyable (though I am still not thrilled about it, FF combat was done best in X and XII), but still have only played this a little. Not sure it’s even worth going back to. Maybe I will replay FF IX.
I may also want to play Knights of The Old Republic on the One; been meaning to replay that and the GOG version will play on my five year old laptop which the wife currently uses but not on my one year old one and can’t figure it out.
My New Year’s Resolution is to NOT PLAY ANY NEW GAMES until I finish at least 90% of my backlog. Ok, maybe 70%. Definitely 50% for sure.
