Welcome!

I mostly have IOS games on my Ipad, but I do have a few on my Samsung Galaxy phone (android) so here goes (I don't own all of them, but have played most):

Angry Birds, Rio, Seasons, etc.

Plague Inc

Temple Run 1/2

Dead Trigger 1/2

Galaxy on Fire 2 HD (core game is now free!!)

Hill Climb Racing (the red Jeep one! not the lame clones)

SAS3 (SAS Zombie Assault 3)

Zombie Defense

Clash of Clans

Deep Dungeons of Dreadmore (or Doom?)

Drag Racing 4x4 (or no 4x4 if you like)

Pixel Dungeon

Space RPG

Space Traders

Templar Assault

Minecraft Pocket Edition*

Out There* (space/ship survival game like FTL)

I've deleted way more but can't remember at the time.

Most are free, some I wrote in that you may prefer but are paid* which I haven't got (Mine Craft, Out There).

"intellectually" lol lol lol lol

I agree with you on that part!

Hah, "intellectually" as in, lately I'm incapable of writing something as clearly as what I set out to do with the OP, and this was more of a fun exercise in writing more than some life changing advice. Though perhaps there is some intellectual ideas being discussed -- perhaps on a more vain level or something like that relative to everyday problems. However, if you were in my place a few years ago, this sort of obvious stuff was not so obvious to me, and I'm sure many more people.

Of course, one has to remember that your perception of intellectual discourse starts with 'hay' and ends with 'horse.'

Wow, I can't believe I wrote that 3 years ago. And to think that now I'm a mere shell of what I was back then, intellectually (which wasn't that great to begin with).

Life can be grrreat.

Well, others go bonkers with their cars and drop cash on turboz and manual-trans swaps, while some of us with less access to cash go bonkers with a PC power supply. Hah

Well according to Andy and Blaine they've gotten used to it, or was it just Blaine? Hah. Yeah definitely gonna go the same route I did with WinXP and stay with Win7 for as long as I can possibly do so, until the usual 'the 2nd iteration that works,' Windows9 or Whine or Touch These Square Tiles and Boxes is released haha.

Hah, for me, probably is. The old one I replaced was 650w or so, and I couldn't find anything that seemed decent for the price, so why not 700w?

Thread revival #2.

It's been almost 4.5 years since I've been using Windows 7, and I have to say, I'm generally very satisfied. There have been no annoying re-installs necessary like I mentioned with WinXP in my older post, except for system upgrades as far as I recall. I've even had it pull through (so far) from random freezes that required hard restarts (and I almost always skipped the 'check window/repair windows startup blah blah' screen.. badd I know).

The only downside I can see is that the damn thing creeps up in harddrive space after the periodic updates. I had partitioned 50 gigs for Win7 and thought that would be more than enough (and I always install programs/games as much as I can on another partition to save space on that 50 gig). After the initial install which had over 30 gigs free, I'm down to 10-11 gigs of free space on the Win7 partition. Some of it MAY just be crap I accidentally installed in the default C:\Programs etc. but even then I think I'm going to need to repart soon or just get a separate HDD for Windows 7 and start from scratch. Even emptying out the temp folders and install cabs doesn't seem to free up much.

Well the random freezing issue seems to have gone for now. I replaced the PSU with a new 700w unit and so far so good!

There are some really great games on there, it's just that if you recall my old article about the tons of crap that exists on IOS, it really gets depressing trying to filter out good games when there is no real easy way without specific names in mind. Sometimes I google search for random 'top IOS games' or some genre specifically; that helps.

Tower defense games are plentiful-- problem being sifting through the trash and cash schemes to find the 'true' playable ones. However if you don't mind paying for a good game, Kingdom Rush is actually a really refined, quality TD game. There's a browser version of it too if you google it, to get an idea of what it's like. The IOS version MIGHT be different but for $0.99-1.99 I would certainly hope they haven't gone 'iap' mode.

Another good RTS game I hear is something of a clone of StarCraft -- it's 3D style like SC2 -- called Starfront Collision. Yup, nevermind the name (Chinese or something clone). It's been up there in price but for a good reason I understand.

So I figured I'll start a thread on Mobile device games and people's favorite *legit* games that they find themselves playing or going back to often when they're not on their console/PC.

*By legit games I mean not one of those millions of money grabbing "strategy" or flavor of the month cloned crap games (Flappy bird) with over the top b.s. in-app purchases.

I'll start with the handful that I've found to be fun (with $ amount if they were not free), in no particular order:

IOS/Ipad 2:

1. Infinity Blade II ($6) - Great graphics, fun sword/axe slashing gesture gameplay (Unreal 3 engine!)

2. Hill Climb Racing -- The one and only!

3. SAS Zombie Assault 3 (I actually prefer the PC browser version)

4. Strike Fleet

5. Deep Dungeons of Doom (Roguelike)

Android:

1. Hill Climb Racing -- Haha yyyyup. This will be on every device that I can find available!

2. Drag Racing 4x4 (last year's vesion anyway)

3. Deep Dungeons of Doom - Great fun take on Roguelikes

4. Pixel Dungeon - Another graphically 'neat' Roguelike

5. SAS Zombie Assault 3

6. Hero Siege - Top view realtime hack 'n' slash RPG/Roguelike

7. FrozenFront - Turn Based WW2 tactics game.

Right, most of these are so called "free" apps, and DO have in-app purchases, BUT they are not overly difficult to play as a 'free' game and I did not find myself needing to dish out cash to 'pay to win' in order to enjoy them at all, at least when I first got them or last played them.

That would be more KevinFACE!'s forte.

Wow, my ATI 6950 is older than I thought; looks like I've had it for 3 years now! That's the longest I've probably ever had a videocard stay and not be replaced. I guess that was $300 well spent. (Tomorrow I will probably be posting on how it fizzled when I booted my PC up). 

Just to update on my original thread, where I ramble too damn much, I've updated the setup two times now, thanks to the bad MSI motherboard (or another one after it, can't recall). Now after barely a year of the recent upgrade, the Asus mobo or the power supply is going out and will cause the computer to randomly freeze on the spot (no BSOD). Thank goodness I have my spare "LAN box" that can play all the games I have for now.

The AMD Radeon 6950 2GB card is going to stay, but I'm most likely going to get a new 600-700w PSU and if that doesn't fix this random freeze issue, a new Mobo. Oh and my latest purchase with this Asus mobo a year ago was an AMD FX quad core processor, and 8GB of DDR3 RAM. Life's good (when it gets running again).

The Walking Dead.

Since I don't have cable right now and don't care for much of what's on locally, this is the only show I can sit down and watch, when I can.

Welcome GZU Nooblette!

I had the Sega Genesis too, the one that is pictured first with red buttons -- except I got it in '95 and it was all black (no red buttons).. ??

Anyway, I bought it with a copy of Primal Rage ($50 too, ouch) -- I must have burned out the resistors in that cart but I'll be damned if I can't play it today -- hmm now I must go search for it...That and it came with Sonic 2 as I recall, those two games were well used in the last 19 years!

I tried getting into the game. For whatever reason it just didn't click with me. The controls were fine, the shooting worked great, the semi-destructive environment are nice. I found it all quite underwhelming. I felt like the game does a good job of letting you figure things out for yourself. I sometimes get frustrated with such "hand-holding" tutorials. I can see the appeal of the game, it's just not my cup of tea.

 

Thanks for coming back, 3 years later, but back none-the-less.

 

High Five!

Funny you mention the tutorials -- they weren't added until I believe sometime in 2013 in the state they're in now (they were tested in some form before and removed as I understand). Since I never had the 'luxury' of tutorials to get started back in '11, I spent most of my time with trials and errors and supplementing it with their wiki site and of course, forums (wealth of info and discussion aside from the typical trolls).

The game will always be on my PC's and I find myself enjoying a handful of games every week (when I get the chance). As it is definitely a niche game I can see that it might not have struck any chords for you, however I have to say, the game does get a lot more 'interesting/frustrating' once you get up into the higher tiers WITH time spent playing and understanding the mechanics (which granted probably 80% of the players have no proper grasp of).

I think once you understand how and what affects your actions have in terms of fundamentals, you can then concentrate on the bigger picture -- that of trying to formulate a play style with each tank that will help the team toward victory (something I'm terrible at on higher tiers and with certain tanks, despite my average win/loss rate). At the lower levels when most new players start, you're hampered by 2 things -- crap tanks + crap crew skills, and newbiness. Once you get both yourself personally informed and practice the game, and your crews start to level up in better tanks (well, better as in you find one that you like -- I still keep my tier 2-3 tanks) things start to become more fun.

As for WoWP, I prefer Gaijin's WarThunder airplane game -- better graphics, too, and arcade + realistic battle choices, PLUS they actually have their tank (Ground Forces-- offering more realism than WoT) version of the game in beta now which will eventually also feature air/ground combined arms matches!

See you around!

I have a feeling I'll be making more 'fond' memories this coming weekend.

Wow, almost 3 years later....

Well I made a few mistakes unknown to me at the time about the game: It's made by a company in Belarus, not Russia, although it IS still wildly popular in Russia  at almost half a million(?) active players vs. about 30-50k (vs. 12k in 2011) on a busy weekend here in the States.

It's got several new nations (armored fighting vehicles) and various upgrades added over the last 3 years. The game has definitely progressed in many ways with new rendering engine, a proper physics engine implementation (a major new addition to the physics will be coming in the form of the Havok engine!) and a handful of new game modes. However the core of the gameplay remains the same -- capture the flag or destroy all the enemy team's tanks.

The game's battle tiers ('level' of tanks composition of the 2 teams) has been tightened down to +/- 2 tiers as opposed to +/- 3 tiers upon release, which most players were asking for and was well received. The wider tier spread in a match was a large source of complaints as it caused many new players to face off against tougher higher tier opponents with no knowledge or firepower to deal with them, resulting in frustration. It's better now but the inherent tier spread is still somewhat misunderstood or complained about to this day (some folks are never happy!).

One great 'balancing' act they did to WoT with regard to its F2P model is allowing non-paying users to actually purchase 'premium' ammo with in-game credits -- they cost the 'Silver' equivalent of what it would cost in 'gold' if you were to exchange Gold into Silver currency. For the longest time premium or "gold" ammo was considered by some to be a pay-to-win advantage, although detractors of this argument always pointed out that due to the in-game armor vs. ammunition mechanics, it never did guarantee an 'insta' win option.

Oh, I left one little thing out.. WoT is now out for the XBOX crowd! While it's still much in its infancy on that platform I believe that's a great way for Wargaming to increase its market share and hopefully bring in new players and interest into the game which will result in further progress. While the PC and XBox versions are not yet slated to be 'cross platform' for obvious (or perhaps not so obvious reasons) you can bet being a free to play game, it'll get lots of buzz going over the coming months, assuming they market this game just right and if there is a large enough niche customer who enjoys this type of 'realistic arcade' game (definitely not a sim). I believe the XBOX version gets a few tweaked visual fx and has its own dev team, both should remain similar in terms of updates/content with the PC version possibly being a step ahead.

So what's my tally for this game after nearly 3 years?

~ Almost 10,000 battles (compared to almost 20-30,000 for many active players).

~About 40 or more different tanks unlocked or accessed (some were anniversary/holiday/tech tree realignment freebies-- the best kind!)

~$150 spent on 'gold' in-game purchases -- All strictly used for convenience (upgrades/unlocking next tank) which I bought from 2011 to 2012.

~51% win rate (meaning of the battles I fought in, my random player teams and I won 51% of the time). I'm about as average as they get!

I would like to point out that I took most of 2013 off from WoT and gaming in general due to the birth of my now year old son! Although I did experience a bit of a burnout from WoT after 2 strong years, I would have probably surpassed 15k battles by now and maybe dropped no more than $10 in gold purchases (realizing I can just be 'patient' and get what I want).

I only recently started to get back into playing WoT but that's mostly reserved to a handful of matches a week thanks to a busy work schedule and, of course, family life!

If you haven't checked World of Tanks out yet, now is as great a time to get into this great multiplayer game as any, either on the XBOX or PC platforms!

I guess the 'best' one was this one time I went over to a weird friend's place with a few of us who also like cars. We ended up crashing C&C:ZH every time with an 8th player join-in and spent about 3 hours messing with that while I decided to play WoT. Then we had 1 game and it was all peaceful again. Then we watched a movie into the AM hours.

And then my wife got mad.