Harpseal wrote:Eh:?: this may sound sad, but why would anyone stop posting? I get stuck so often, i would never really stop posting unless i stopped origami, because i get stuck so much. Maybe it's different for you leafpiece. (Me in my own little world, busy getting stuck)
I diappeared from this forum for about 2 years myself, so I can offer some insight as to why someone might do that.
I stopped visiting for a combination of reasons. The main two being that this forum is pretty slow, there just wasn't enough new content being posted to keep me checking back daily, and my own dedication to origami tends to wax and wane as the years go by. I never really stop folding, but sometimes it takes a back seat to other activities in my life. Things like video games, music, painting and so on.
Which leads us nicely into the topic at hand.
Favourite video games, man, I've got quite a few of those.
There was a fair bit of talk about Minecraft recently in this thread. I never really got into Minecraft, but there's another game with many similar gameplay elements that I love and have put a LOT of hours into. That's Terraria.
Minecraft is presented in a 3D first person perspective, while Terraria looks more like a classic 16-bit era 2D platformer.
Both games start by generating a big environment made out of blocks, then dump the player into the middle of it and leave them to fend for themselves.
In Terraria, you generally start off with standing on some grassy ground among some trees.
In your inventory you've got a few tools. A pickaxe for digging through the ground, an axe for chopping down trees, and a sword to defend yourself from wild animals.
What you do after that is all up to you.
You can wander around and explore the environment, dig down into the ground in search of treasure and precious metals, chop down some trees and build a house, the choice is yours.
The game features a day and night cycle, with in-game minutes passing in time with real-world seconds, so it isn't too long after you start playing that night falls for the first time.
At night the monsters come out. If you haven't spent some of the day building yourself a house or at least digging a hole to hide in, then you'll soon come up against zombies and evil flying eyeballs that want to kill you.
You can defend yourself with your sword, or even your pickaxe, but the night tends to drag on when you're constantly being assaulted by the forces of darkness, so it's generally a better idea to find somewhere to hide away until morning.
Every time you dig up a block of dirt, or chop down a tree, the block that you removed ends up in your inventory. From there, you can place them back into the world in whatever configuration you desire, and so build yourself a house, set up defensive walls, or whatever you want to do.
Another important aspect of the game is crafting. Once you've got some resources in your inventory, you can start combining them in different ways to produce objects. With wood you can make chairs, tables, walls, doors, and so on.
Wood plus gel (a resource aquired by killing slime monsters) can be used to make a torch, and torches plus stone can build you a forge. On and on the process goes until you're constructing improved tools and weapons, clothing, armour, chests to store your treasures in, chandeliers, thrones, jetpacks, laser guns and so on.
Digging deeper into the ground tends to uncover better and better resources, but you also run into more powerful monsters, and depending on where you explore, there are even boss monsters to overcome.
It's the kind of game that it's easy to sink a lot of hours into. You can sit down intending to just try it out, or spend a few minutes making some renovations to your house and before you know it five hours have passed and there's still that bit more that you want to do.
I've spent over 190 hours playing this game. It's at the top of my most-played games list on Steam.
The next item on the list is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which I've spent 150 hours in.
The Elder Scrolls series of games are another favourite of mine.
Another set of favourites for me are music games.
There are a few games that use your own music collection to generate the levels for you to play.
Audiosurf and Beat Hazard are my two favourite examples of this kind of game.
Audiosurf reads an MP3 file, and generates a sort of rollercoaster track from it.
You control a little spaceship shaped thing that rides along the track while your music plays. The parts when the music is slow and peaceful become slow uphill climbs, while the farster and more frantic sections are turned into fast downhill plunges. The gameplay aspect of Audiosurf is achieved through coloured blocks arranged on the track. Depending on the game mode you have to hit certain ones and avoid others.
Beat Hazard is a twin-stick shooter. Similar in gameplay to things like Geometry Wars or Super Stardust.
The musical twist is that the game reads your MP3 file and controls the speed, density and variety of enemies according to the music.
Another music game that I've really been getting into in the last 7 months or so is Rocksmith.
Rocksmith is similar to the famous Guitar Hero and Rock Band games, but instead of using a plastic controller shaped like a guitar,
you use an actual guitar.
I've tried to learn guitar a couple of times before, but never got very far with it.
Now though, with the help of this game, I'm really getting the hang of it and improving a lot.
The game came with a decent selection of songs in it, but what's really great is that the company that made it keep releasing new songs for it. They tend to release a new song pack every two weeks, so there's never a lack of new songs for me to work on.