What game do you play the most?

The only discussion of video games I ever hear anymore are about brand new and upcoming games.
Instead, what game/s have you played most consistently over the past 6-12 months or longer?

For me it's usually some sort of MMO. Since summer of 2011 I've been playing APB:Reloaded probably more consistently than any other game during this half-year period. I think the most attractive part of the gameplay is that I can stop playing whenever I want to without some sort drastic penalty to fellow players or my own character's progression. This is because most missions take anywhere from 10-30 minutes and the game's actual story progression is nearly non-existent.

The actual gameplay is rather wonky at first and took quite a bit of time to learn and get used to. For example: how all weapons only shoot at a max range of 100 meters (even snipers) or how car physics are usually hilarious to observe. There are so many unbalanced and glitchy things to watch out for that it always manages to add a dash of unexpected challenges, as well as solutions, to the gameplay.

I think, the most enjoyable features of the game are the small groups of friends I make. I'll often run into at least one or two new gameplay partners every now and then whom I can team up with and both play and converse with for several days or weeks at least, making for the most enjoyable game sessions. The second most enjoyable thing is to just drive around the city in fast sport cars or troll other players with garbage trucks. :3

So, do you have any game/s you find yourself often returning to and playing consistently? Share it with turt.me, we would love to hear about it.

Well, since you mentioned a couple, I'll go ahead and mention the other game I play a lot.

Red Eclipse is an open source fps game built on Open GL and is cross platform. I originally came across it while looking for Linux games built with the Cube 2 engine and came to really enjoy its in-persistent gameplay. You make friends by playing and talking in chat. No achievements, no buddy lists, no social networks. The in game server daemon is pretty configurable, for instance, the chat room can be configured on server side to incorporate an IRC channel. For example #wazu on irc.freenode.net is accessible both in the clan's game server as well as outside as normal IRC (I hope the clan won't mind the free-advert, I used to hang inside the clan IRC despite not being much of a clan-type player or even good enough to join their clan, they were just some cool people to talk to ). The game revolves around a futuresque robot and lasers theme and the gameplay is supposed to be an "ego" shooter, referring to a very fast paced action game that incorporates things like wall running, double jumping and flying around with a jetpack. It is very fun and I insist EVERYONE try this game as it is open source and cross platform, you have no excuse not to try it! 8D

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APB: Reloaded is free to play (as opposed to the original APB that failed in marketing), meaning the publishers make their money from cash shops and subscriptions, neither of which are necessary to enjoy about 90+% the game. It runs with Direct X so you won't be playing it within Macintosh OS (directly at least, you could try some hacky work around I bet). To get the game, you need to go here and then you just need to make a GamersFirst account and download the client. It is also available on Steam if you have it.

The game play is pretty much the same for both enforcers and criminals, but both have little perks that set them apart. I have an enforcer character for example, and I can use stun weapons to make arrests instead of killing other players (which adds an element of challenge but also an advantage as it takes less bullets).

There are 5 maps:
- 1 is a social location where you can buy, sell and customize (as well as read district spammed chatroom)
-2 are normal mission maps that are relatively large in size and hold up to 100 connected players (50 crims, 50 enfs) per server with about a dozen servers hosting all the maps (yes there are multiple servers for most of the district maps)
-2 more maps are small chunks of the bigger maps set up for faction team death-match which lacks any vehicles or missions and is pretty much like any other death-match game.

From the login server, you can directly communicate with anyone as well as switch between servers (it's all interconnected). Groups have some options to either place you with random players or close a group off to only people you invite (such as friends). Groups are limited to 4 players, but groups can be called in as backup during a mission when one team is disadvantaged to the other (this can wind up into 12 or even 16 players per team all in the same mission). It is like GTA in that you all are a bunch of vigilante players terrorising all the poor NPCs to death as everyone runs around the city doing their own thing.

I typed a lot :X
There are a ton of videos on youtube depicting the actual gameplay as it is in APB: Reloaded, so you might be better of just looking at some of that instead.
Like GTA, I think you will find it more entertaining if you just remember to never take it too seriously. There are a lot of very serious players in APB:R that have a high likeliness of knowing every advantage and glitch in the game, so losing while playing seriously will only be frustrating and un-enjoyable.

Oh, and as one last note, the pedestrians curse... a lot... in many languages XD

Edit: Here is a picture of my car in the Customization Designer.

The Reloaded edition was published by GamersFirst in summer of 2011. I joined in right after Closed Beta. The game is still considered to be in some form of Beta, iirc, and a lot of content is still to be expected (such as new districts and a Racing instance) however G1 is moving pretty briskly along commercializing this game (majority of the player base seems to be paying for lil perks already). I am under the impression that all of the servers are located in North America. I'd render a guess that they are primarily (if not all) located somewhere near the center as I've taken notice that Central players tend to have slightly lower latencies than East and West coast players. I'm sure if I did some research I could know for sure, but it wouldn't mean much in your case. Assuming you can even get in to the game server without a proxy server (which I also assume is unnecessary by all the foreign players I've met in the game [Brazil, Russia, Germany]) your primary cause of lag would be all the node jumping to reach the server from across the planet. I suggest to players who complain about lag in game to try the Leatrix Latency Fix which is a small driver modification for Windows OS which increases the amount of TCP packets sent over the network card and in turn decreases latencies when communicating with servers. It won't help you with your node jumping problem, but it might help just enough to make the game playable.

If you are lucky enough to get logged in to the game, there is a monitoring tool you can bring up by typing /fps in the chat box. That's mine from from my East Coast, US connection with Leatrix Latency Fix in one of the busy Social Districts (no missions in this district, but a lot of players). You won't know for certain if the game is playable or not until you get this far, I think.

That's quite true- since I'm not a regular gamer and don't keep up with the latest games, I often skip gaming threads/discussions. Personally, I love games and there are SO MANY games I'd love to play, but I have a feeling that if I start playing one game, I won't be able to stop... And besides- I don't currently own current generation consoles nor do I own a high end computer, so I won't be able to play anyway.

APB seems quite interesting- I'll probably check it out over the summer. As for GTA, I've played it a couple of times elsewhere, but never got the games for myself. Seeing as original Xbox games are quite cheap now, I might pick up a few of the GTA titles for the Xbox in the near future. I tried SC2 on my desktop, but it was too slow, so it was impossible play. And I thought it was a bit too difficult for me- I couldn't even make it through the tutorials! I probably could if I gave it enough time, but since my computer was too slow, I didn't bother trying again.

Which brings me to the game I play the most-- if I play at all, that is. It's an RTS like SC, called Rise of Nations. Personally, I love RTS games, so RoN works great for me. I've tried many RTS games, but for some reason I fell in love with RoN. It's a decade old now, so it doesn't have the latest and greatest features, but it's still as enjoyable as ever. Time to time I find myself re-installing it just so I could play a game or two. Now that my laptop has an HDMI port, I might even enjoy it on my TV!

If you guys haven't played RoN before, you should definitely try it. There are a couple of trial versions that are fairly playable- no time limits. One is the original, the other is its standalone expansion. There was also a sequel called RoN: Rise of Legends, which is also pretty cool, but that too was quite demanding hardware-wise, so I never enjoyed it much.

I am a really casual gamer, but I've had a history of game addiction several times before. I fret about starting a new game and losing control of my time. In fact, I've been quite harsh on myself regarding my gaming sessions over the past several months in attempt to better control how long I play a game (without removing the gaming entirely) and to what extent I play games at all anymore.

The latest consoles I've owned are a Nintendo Gamecube and a fat, original Nintendo DS. I've not played a game on either in years and I now use the DS with an R4 card to run a homebrew alarm clock application with the most obnoxious and amplified alarm sound I've ever heard (it is absolutely amazing how loud you can amplify those tiny DS speakers and how many years you can do it without them breaking >_<). I mostly play games on my computer and am always looking for new Open-Source game projects as I have several feelings regarding a connection between that area of development and Linux competing with most commercial desktop OSes.

I'll have to try RoN. I've never been big with RTS, but I've played a couple for several hours straight. Sadly, I can't remember the names of any of those which I did play, but they were all shorter lived titles than the bigger names like Warcraft or Starcraft or Civilization or Age of Empires. Also since I am an advocate for Open-Source, I am going to have to share with you 0 A.D. which is a developmental, open source RTS game engine. It wasn't very hardware intensive when I tried it awhile back, but I don't recall there being too much content at the time either (which seems a bit different from how the website is depicted now).