Canon Fodder
General Discussion => General => Topic started by: Felblood on March 17, 2011, 04:48:42 AM
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I recently bought and completed Guilty Gear 2: Overture.
Unlike other GG titles, Overture is a 3D tactical brawler, similar to Brutal Legend, Samurai Warriors and Bladestorm.
The single player campaign is short, but felt about the right difficulty, such that only a couple of challenges overstayed their welcome.
The characters felt well differentiated, and I found myself wishing I got to play as some of them more. Ky get's particularly short shrift, he becomes an NPC that you must escort and protect, rather than a playable character, when he gains his most potent abilities. You never really get to play as Valentine or Paradigm, but they're lame, so I don't care.
Positioning troops and then supporting them with your own might is paramount on some levels, but other times it's just you against the hordes, with nothing but your own skills to keep you alive.
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Gone through a few games since the last post.
Spiral Knights: Zelda: Four Swords meets World of Warcraft's instanced dungeons.
Solid gameplay, reasonable F2P balance for Co-Op and PvE. Sells PvP power, but it's tradable. Lots of cool weapons that actually play different. Crafting system has serious flaw in that energy used to play is consumed by crafting, so players often have to decide between playing today, or crafting a better weapon to use tomorrow. Regular content patches keep the random dungeons fresh.
Terraria: Minecraft meets Diablo II.
Cool game if you have enough people to play with. Not really enough content to keep the gang engrossed, and you tend to run out of new bosses to fight before you maax out your gear. What am I supposed to do with my uber gear, since I killed all the bosses to get it?
PvP might add some longevity, and Hamachi lets me build with friends who have moved away, but the game feels played out after just a week or so. Glad I bought it on sale.
Dragon Nest: Clan favorite Dungeon Lords meets tragically flawed Nexon Classic Dungeon Fighter.
This sounds like recipe for joy, but only in the same way that you might put puppies and birthday cake in a blender and expect liquid friendship to come out. The reality isn't quite so pleasant.
It should work, but it just doesn't seem to. The deal breaker stamina system that drove us away from Dungeon Fighter is gone (the replacement is nearly invisible and perfectly harmless), and the combat is smooth, tactically rich and largely unaffected by normal ping times. Nobody ever wants to play this game with me.
I haven't got far in this one, but I'm not sure I'll make it much further. An MMO where PCs come with a story and a little personality is nice and all, but the character who I like most mechanically (the sorceress) is thoroughly unlikable. Her motives are almost designed to be at odds with those of the player. No matter how badly you want to get into the dungeons and kill some mobs, she has to talk to every person in town twice, in the right order, before she'll shift her lazy bones and do some adventuring. I hate her so much, I hope her story line ends with painful come-uppance.
Killing mooks is a load of fun, and I wish she would let me get on with it.
Also the game is too easy by default, and you have to clear easy mode, to unlock normal mode, to unlock hard mode, to unlock even more difficulty levels that will still feel to gentle to veteran gamers. It's like the designers have no conception of what a difficulty selector is actually for so I don't have to play games that are too easy!
This isn't rocket science, or even puppy based alchemy, it's games design 101. Relatable characters + customizable challenge + existing good game mechanics = winner.
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Oh man...Puppy Based alchemy sounds both awesome and horrible. :P
I've basically been playing the same things as Blood has.
Thus far, I've actually enjoyed Dragon Nest. I admit, though, that having played one character through each starting town, I'm already tired of both of them. That said, the combat is awesome.
I haven't tried the sorceress yet, though. I might like her, mechanically, but I haven't been able to get past the personality to actually play.
Spiral Knights is fun, but I never seem to be on when anybody else feels like playing.
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With the latest patch, UFO: Afterlight runs on my new machine like a dream, but that game exhausts me.
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That game looks fun, but I haven't the patience for it, I'm afraid.
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Crackdown 2.
I never played the first one, so I can't speak to how it stacks up, but the freedom that made the franchise so famous seems pretty absent to me. There just isn't that much to do and accomplishing a mission objective often makes nearby mini-games unplayable and detrimental to your character's growth.
That's not the real issue I have with this game.
I hate the narrator.
I hate him in so many ways.
I wish I could hate him to death.
"The Voice of The Agency" is your character's father figure and mission control. He's constantly barking irrational orders and deriding you for not being as perfect as your older brothers. The constant barrage of verbal and emotional abuse he heaps on your Agent is sickening on so many levels.
One main object of the game is to get him to give you the keys to the Agency Tank. To do this, you need to prove you can drive around town without running over any of the countless civilians who literally throw themselves under your wheels at every turn. Completing mission objectives makes the city safer, which means more civilians and less enemies in the streets.
Each civilian death evokes one of a small number of canned lectures from the pompous noise-spout. The more you play, the less fun the game gets. Brilliant!
I paid $20 for this game and played about six hours into it. I didn't get my money's worth, but I think it's time to stop chasing a sunk cost. The fun supply here is pretty low.
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.....I've been on a Pokemon kick, lately. I get Pokemon White, back in March....then decided I had to get Heart Gold, Pearl, and Fire Red.
My favorite thing? The Action Replay I got, to go with it. Now all of my Pokemon are shiny. :U
*EDIT*
I do not remember posting this. At all.
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I hate it when that happens.
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Doesn't help that it was the day after surgery. Now I need to go through other forums, and find out what else I did....
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There are worse things to do while on psycho-active medication than to add cosmetic cheats to your games.
I've got this allergy medication that makes me crazy in scary ways.
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Terraria 1.1 patch is out.
;D ;D ;D ;D
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Hahaha. It'll probably be okay... but if you said anything particularly great, feel free to share in crazy quotes. XD
Blood, I heard that it made you crazy, but have had yet to hear exactly what you/your medication did... too crazy to say? :P
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It wasn't so much things that I said as driving at 100 miles and hour and having baseless thoughts of suicide and violence.
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I'm like that, on a normal, non-medicated day...
It's mostly the not remembering things, that bothers me. Thankfully, I do not need to be medicated, when they put the permanent dentures/bridges/whatever, in. (though I need sedatives just to get a cleaning, so you never know...)
This topic has been derailed, by crazy medication. Crash Team Racing will fix that. 'Cause that's what I've been playing. Oh, man. Talk about nostalgia bomb...
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Alas, I never got into the Crash Bandicoot games, even when I had a PS1, it was for Final Fantasy (I, II. 5, Tactics) and Mega Man (Legends, Legends 2, X4).
Terraria and Skyrim be eating all my free time.
How am I supposed to teach myself more video editing techniques, like this?
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How am I supposed to teach myself more video editing techniques, like this?
You must give into the dark side. You have been given the necessary ingredients.
You Know What Must Be Done.
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... O.o
I feel mildly responsible for this terribly depressing tangent. XP
Yeah, it stinks to be like that in a non-medicated way, too... but then you giggle at something stupid and the world seems slightly better for just a moment.
:P
(Secret to happiness: slap on an idiotic grin and giggle dumbly at EVERYTHING. Or, ya' know... that cheesy saying that they stick on every conceivable surface these days. Live, laugh, leprechauns... or something like that. I think I like my version better. But I don't know... there's just something about those leprechauns... O.o Okay, well, whatever works for you... but you'd better be laughing hysterically/stupidly/manically, or whatever works for you, when you go!)
And hey, we're actually talking about something I'll know a tiny portion about!!! :D
I've been sort of playing Skyrim... sometimes. Mostly when I get home and no one else is here and I don't feel like being productive.
In the last week or so, I think I traveled to one or two other cities. And I took everything they would let me have. XD XP
This sounds scoffable, I know, but in the two times I did this (someone deleted my first character... *cough cough, Dragyn...* O.< ) I learned how to walk in straight lines, which was NO LAUGHING MATTER.
(Only that contradicts my secret to happiness. D: Perhaps you should laugh, just to be safe. You would have, anyway, if you were there. XP )
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Remember, mugging leprechauns is totally legal.
(That's a pretty good book, by the way.)
Yeah, Skyrim is a fascinating game. I've already beaten the main plotline, but I keep going back and playing it more, anyway.
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I misspelled maniacally... :P
AND you keep laughing at my failures in coordination. XP
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I'm playing NetHack again.
I become obsessed with this game for a few weeks every year or so, but this year it hooked me deep.
I started work on a roguelike engine of my own.
I have no idea what AI or LOS system I'm going to use, but the interface will probably be noun>verb and projectiles are planned to be octodirectional. The turn scheduler will be cyclic.
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Hmm...you'll have to keep me posted on that, Blood.
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When I announced this project, I was overrun by an angry horde demanding "What about that new D&D campaign you promised us!"
So now my project is on slow burn while I prepare to TPK some PCs in a house haunted by the things their players fear most.
Restrict my creative impulse at your own peril.
Not that this means that I don't have a part of my brain that thinks about turn scheduler architecture all day, while I'm at work.
It's a decision I'll have to make fairly early, once I have the rest of the data structures and the dummy interface implemented, but it has far reaching impacts I can't hope to fully anticipate.
How many ticks should be on each rotation, and how many ticks delay should be the base?
Too many and time uses memeory inefficiently, and small delay adjustments have no real impact. Too little and time uses the CPU inefficiently and I even small boni or penalties can have excessive impact.
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Haha, we weren't trying to prevent you from accomplishing anything else, we were just making sure you remembered/were trying... XD XP
Haha, hope you figure that one out. I'm afraid I'mpersonally no help in problems that must be referred to in your game speak. :P
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Saints Row III (Gonzo fun, but not for the easily offended)
Nethack (respect the classics philistine!)
Slashem (gotta keep it fresh)
Darksiders (been meaning to try this)
Legend of Grimrock (A clear spiritual successor to Wizardry and Eye of the Beholder with a modernized GUI and sleek puzzle mechanics)
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My latest obsession was Borderlands 2. It somehow didn't feel as smooth as its predecessor, but wasn't a bad game, just not one that was impressing me as much as I thought it should. Between that and Castle Crashers, I haven't really played many other games lately.
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I really want to change my Slash'em tileset, but the syntax for regular nethack doesn't seem to work (or maybe I can't use that setting with PNG tiles?)
Looking up how to make this simple settings change would be easy for any other game, but nethack related websearches literally return over 40 years of outdated documentation and internet memes, archived in old formats I was glad I could forget how to read.
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i feel like a n00b in MW3 'cause I don't have any good gun classes yet.
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Player has been playing Guild Wars 2. ...a lot. I'm his main at level 80, and he has three other 80s, working on a fifth. He still needs to complete the story, but he'll get around to it eventually.
He'd recommend the game to everyone. So if you are considering an MMO you only need to pay the price of your standard computer game to play, go ahead and ask him some questions.
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i'll check it out when I have some time, sounds like fun.
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I often consider Guild Wars, but have never actually seen fit to play it. I've been hearing a lot about it lately, but...I probably shouldn't give myself any other timesinks with which to distract myself. :P
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seems like the last thing to have on your mind. ;)
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Do you want him to never get any pages done?
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Hahaha! o.k... It seems like you need to focus on the pages more.