SC2Mapster

Online Chess. You said earlier that you wanted to play WoW; one of the best parts of that game was the auction house, and speculation (eg, buying items that you think are under priced and reselling them at a higher price), if you like that, and have always wanted to get into the stock market at some later point in your life, you can get a scottrade account and speculate/day trade (it is actually pretty addicting, and you can make yourself some great money....you can also loose yourself some money.)

MEII: It is about 30-40 hours long, if I recall, has a solid story, and is pretty fun. It is more seemless than MEII, but I doubt it is anymore of a shooter than RDR.

Online Go: Go takes abit to learn, but is a really interesting strategy game.

Baldur's Gate: You said you wanted to have something modernish, but hell, I will suggest this anyways: This is /the/ rpg. It will be cheap now, it packs alot of playing time, and has a sequel and expansions. Don't listen to that bullcrap about DAO and DA2 being "the next baldur's gate"; while DAO was a good game (I haven't played DAO), Baldur's Gate is in a league of its own (I still play it!). It will consume alot of spare time, and the lore is Forgotten Realms, which is a really rich lore.

If you liked the GTA games, you will like RDR. Almost everyone liked the GTA games, so, uh, yea!

Quote from zeldarules28: Go

Anybody here own red dead or la noire? I'd love to hear your opinions on them. I'm really trying to decide between them.

Red Dead Redemption and LA Noire. Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation is pretty much always exactly spot on in all his reviews, so to round up his opinion: Red Dead Redemption is a well atmosphered time sink with no real effort involved while LA Noire is somewhat refreshing in its approach of modern adventure gaming but fails at a lot of levels, mostly in regard to bugs.

@zeldarules28: Go

Starcraft? :P

Quote from zeldarules28: Go

@grenegg: Go

Whats that?

Nothing. Not worth your time. Don't bother.

Quote from Mozared: Go

Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation is pretty much always exactly spot on in all his reviews

The thing he does are rants, not reviews. They're entertaining, but not very informative.

I personally do not give a crap about anything the escapist writes anymore since they gave Dragon Age 2 a perfect 5/5 and then a 3.5/5 to The Witcher 2 (given by the same reviewer, who was butthurt because he couldn't handle the witchers prolog and didn't bother reading the manual).

@Tolkfan: Go

It's true that Yahtzee is always a cynist, but that doesn't make his stuff not informative? Literally every game I've played that he has reviewed was spot on. He also tends to point out exactly what's good and bad about specific games. If you really consider his reviews not to be informative, you're not reading through the initial humor.

Zelda, since you haven't played any GTAs, you can also get GTA4, it's recent, and very fun. It is probably about 60ish hours of game play, maybe more, though I recall there being an xbox achievement for beating the main plot in under 35 hours. One thing that really struck me about that game were the characters, several of whom stand out in my favorite NPCs list (along with Deekin Scalesong and HK47). It's probably cheap now, too, and, if I recall, there are two DLCs for it.

@Mozared: Go

His "reviews" are not informative because they're not reviews, they're just crude entertainment. He just "reviewed" witcher 2 and the only information I got out of it is this:

• he didn't read the manual (a trend among escapist authors it seems)
• didn't even glance at the tutorial popups
• didn't bother to check the in-game help
• he can't figure out how to skip a cinematic, even whe the game flashes a "press this button to skip"
• he mentioned the story, the most important element of an RPG game, for about 3 seconds
• he finds it a bad thing that the AI flanks the player and doesn't attack one at a time

I am now informed and can state that he expected another assassins creed. He did the same for witcher 1 and dragon age 2, so it seems he doesn't like RPG games (or isn't any good at them).

Can't wait for his review of Deus Ex 3 where he'll just focus on the unskippable walk sequence and that there's too much talking and reading for a shooter :/

@Tolkfan: Go

Now, I haven't played Witcher 2, so obviously I can't comment on that, but... no.

Aside from the fact that you're judging his credibility by just one review (and one of his worst too, if you ask me), all the points you mentioned are some he actually occasionally adresses in his reviews. One of his last sentences actually rounds up his main problem with the whole game too - sure, you can check the manual, read tutorials and all that, but in the end, if you're not having fun, why bother with that in the first place. Indirectly, he's saying that the game is too complicated to get into quickly, which is something I'd call informative.

Comparing his reviews of games I've played to my experiences, he's actually right pretty much all the time. In Portal 2, he compares Portal and Portal 2 and states that "Portal is like eating a basket with two cherries while Portal 2 is like eating a basket with multiple cherries and a layer of sand at the bottom - Portal one is more pure but it'll leave you annoyed and wanting for more while Portal 2 satisfies that particular urge but has a few unrefined edges to it". That spells out pretty much literally how I felt about the games.

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is what he calls something that seems more like a weird rehashed version of Assassin's Creed 2 and more of an expansion pack rather than a new game, and that's exactly how it feels to me. He rates Assassin's Creed 1 as decent but with some bugs - he mentions one which is incorrect (long travel time, which is later taken care off by introducing 'teleports'), but aside from that, it's also spot on, up to small little details like annoying beggars getting in your way and the long monologues after a character is killed.

Amnesia he praises for doing horror the 'right' way ("Amnesia understands that a monster stays scarier the less you see of it so if you ever hang around long enough to get a good look at the ugly cenobyte reject then your face will be torn off and repurposed as a tea cosey before you can say cthulhu f'targim"), but also points out some of the bugs and oddnesses that drag the game down.

I could go on, but my point is that he does actually manage to point out, be it not as transparant as people might be used to, what a game is like and what its strong or weak points are. Sure, if you don't look into it it looks like pointless ranting, but that is because he compares all games to the standard of perfection and measures them on that scale rather than saying "this game is good, but only because there's nothing better out right now". If you can manage to look through the layer of mostly humor you'll find that he does give good representations of most games. Whether his way of reviewing is good or bad is something I'll leave in the middle, but calling him 'just crude entertainment' really is as rude as it is ignorant.

@zeldarules28: Go

pc games that are cheap but fun:

civ 3, 4 or 5 (5 is not cheap)

sim city 4