Arma series.. The Editor. Thousands of hours in there, too many to bother counting. Its a great place to be and you can create a custom world of conflict.
Loved it ever since OFP, right up to the Eden update, which broke half my missions but also how i most enjoyed playing... so now i've gone back to OFP, since it nails the core gameplay and i'm not so bothered about having the latest graphics.
I like making 'survival mode' missions, where a whole map is enemy-controlled and i'll begin the mission crashing out of a plane or chopper in a random location. Or else, beech assaults with landing craft, but again, usually against near-insurmountable odds.
Or else just setting up a massive battlefield and then sitting back to spectate as a civilian, passively watching over my minions in their desperate life-or-death struggles, oblivious as they are that Odin himself walks amongst them, type stuff.
So i've basically only ever played the game in 'preview' mode whilst making missions. Don't play the campaign or single missions, no interest at all in multiplayer, but sunk thousands of hours into it over the years.
At least it's creative, so you have something to show for your time, and can go back and replay your meticulously-crafted missions any time.
Unlike, say, GTA, which is a total timetrap for me. I mean it just sucks you into that 'stream of consciousness' zombie-like state where you can
never be bored, where you can
always act on every impulse, where your objectives at any given moment are purely whimsical, transient and inconsequential... even without the fantastic modding resources it's the ultimate big kid's playground...
I also see both OFP/Arma and GTA a bit like 'virtual resorts' - if you can't afford a real holiday, at least you can still explore some exotic scenery and see some cool sights, go for a coastal cruise on a small boat, go parachuting or quad-biking or scuba-diving etc.
Biggest
lifetime time-sink for me tho is Elite (ie.
not ED). Just re-started Anisotropic's mod (AJ'sFFED3D) on Friday night... slept a few hours Saturday morning then straight back to it early afternoon, not even dressing till gone 9pm - sat there in me spanking robe (that's actually just a bath towel), occasionally fetching more coffee or alcohol, just stacking missions and knocking 'em out, getting my heinie handed to me on every jump, epic battles, mostly lost and reloaded umpteen times (using a single save file, so no going back if i make a bad decision - every mission must succeed! The mail
must get thru!), and so on it went into Sunday morning. Few hours sleep again then right back to it in the afternoon, and on into the small hours - finally went to bed around 4:30 this morning...
Properly shattered, ain't done jack all else all weekend, hardly ate, me neck's
killing me, but i've tenaciously ground my way up to a ship that's worse than the one i started out in, and a combat rank of 'competent'... and it
was a wet weekend..
The thing about Anisotropic's mod is that it's all-action - you're either permanently 'in the zone', or else you're dead. When you get into a ruck with a swarm of other ships, each battle can last half an hour or more, with hardly a moment's pause. Whoever Aniso is/was, i doff my cap to him/her as it's balanced in such a way as to really focus the core
Elite gameplay, and on your skills as a commander... for instance, you now need to really think about loadouts and which weapons will be effective against which enemy - there's no 'one size fits all' loadout. You have to specialise your choice of ship to how you intend to play / survive. To put it another way, try to fit out a Cobra mkIII as an average all-rounder and what you'll actually have is a sitting duck.. i'm currently using smaller, faster ships and relying on their superior thrusts to dodge laser fire and torpedos, and out-run whatever i can't kill. Minimal shielding, the trick is not to take any hits in the first place..
But no matter what ship or loadout you choose, there's no shortage of big-payout missions on offer, provided you're prepared to get attacked relentlessly and savagely on every single one of them.
Another technique this forces you to adopt is
not making a bee-line directly towards your destination, but rather first building up some velocity in an orthogonal vector - so position your target destination on your left or right, say, then accelerate to high speed whilst parallel to it.. before then heading in, radially... but
without scrubbing off that sideways-velocity. This causes you to spiral in to your destination, in ever-tightening curves, which is
incredibly wasteful of fuel, but sometimes the only way to throw off multiple packs of relentless pursuers when you're out-gunned. Hence stocking up on fuel can make for a more economical defensive resource than any weapon or shielding..
Another technique is heading over to an outer planet or gas giant system, in the hopes of causing pursuers to crash, or else just slowing them down enough to make a break for it..
So because of its hardcore difficulty, it forces you to think about your options and approach the game in new ways, innovating new strategies, where simply barreling head-on into the fray with 20 shields and a 4 MW beam is no longer gonna cut it. And all this takes
time. Lots and lots of it. Time well spent - tactically, intelligently,
successfully... small gains, but hard-won = satisfying gameplay.
Additionally, shields work a bit differently in Aniso's mod - they
reduce hull damage, but don't eliminate it. They recharge almost immediately, so there's no advantage to an energy-booster unit (indeed, they're a disadvantage owing to the wasted tonnage), unless you're in a big ship with oodles of shields. But it's no longer the case that some threshold number of shield gennies will perfectly insulate your hull from most damage, as in vanilla Frontier Elite - no matter how many you fit to a small or medium-sized vessel, if you get into a fight you're going to take damage... And so you
have to dodge incoming fire, you
need missiles, ECM's and chaff... and the only real difference shields make is how much of your hull remains when you finally scrape back into dock. Basically, shields help mitigate repair costs, but forget about any prospect of 'tanking up' to just barge-on through all comers..
Elite's 'timewarp zone' is in that epic heat of battle, when you're hanging on by the very threads of all your abilities, trying to split up packs of enemy so you can pick off the smaller ones first before settling in to dig chunks out of the larger ones. Chewing into a pair of Imp couriers at 0.5% hull damage per strike, dodging their 10 MW beams, getting right tangled up in it, spamming the ECM-spacebar without waiting for the warnings, seeing enemy inadvertently shooting one another in the maelstrom of crossfire, or taking missile hits meant for me, trying to finish them off even as the next pack edges into scanner range. Using Jousting simply as a means to allow your laser to cool down (small bursts when head-on, saving longer bursts for when you can get behind them or when they're turning around to head back at you. No more spray'n'pray; carefully-timed pulses are the key). And Aniso's mod grabs you by the collar, yanks you straight into that zone, and holds you there. It's
Elite redux; the 'suspended animation' zone, locking you into the meatgrinder for hours on end. The 'reload' key sequence becomes as automated and second-nature as the ship controls..
I suspect this mod is equally compelling for a trading career - i've gone for combat, but get the impression the fierceness of the AI scales according to mission types or what kind of cargo you're running, so i'm looking forward to kitting out a larger ship when i can afford it, if only to take on some of the more lucrative passenger runs on offer, but maybe also trying a few high-profit trade routes...
It's such a crying shame there's no more modern remake of Frontier Elite, but if you can see past the graphics, it's still possible to have a cracking traditional
Elite sesh on a modern PC environment. Pioneer and ED just do not come close. SweetFX helps jazz it up a bit, and one or two folks are still occasionally making new ship models, but FFED3D remains the most authentic version of
Elite available in modern format, and Anisotropic's mod cranks all the dials up to 11... it's
Elite, on steroids; grimy, focused,
raging and hopelessly addictive..