The Gaming Den

Lost Chapters.

360 Kinect V. Wii motion == 360 Kinect.


It takes a little getting used to having your arms in front of you all the time but this is a precursor to Minority report tech.

I just got to the after game part. Strangely, I don't remember it from my last play through, but it's possible that you only get it if you refuse the Sword of Aeons.

no you just have to wait through the credits. you can refuse the sword of gayons if you want, but it has no longterm ramifications, and since you're going to be killing guards everywhere anyway, it's not a big deal

Avoraciopoctules wrote:I'm looking for a good action-RPG or platformer.

You don't mention what system. I've been playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance on PS 2 since 2007 (?), and I haven't stopped yet. Got it for Xbox 360 the other day for about $25. The sequel is completely terrible.

Super Mario Brothers on the Wii seemed like SMB 3 with cleaner graphics, as long as you don't have all four playing at once.

Sir Neil wrote:

Avoraciopoctules wrote:I'm looking for a good action-RPG or platformer.

You don't mention what system. I've been playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance on PS 2 since 2007 (?), and I haven't stopped yet. Got it for Xbox 360 the other day for about $25. The sequel is completely terrible.

Super Mario Brothers on the Wii seemed like SMB 3 with cleaner graphics, as long as you don't have all four playing at once.

X-Men Legends games of the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube play like the Ultimate Alliance games.

I can highly recommend Odin Sphere for the PS2.

Assassin's Creed has some killer platforming segments--but the first game is kinda tedious, so Assassin's Creed 2 is good for a quick fix. AC 1 is, what, ten dollars or less now? I think Gamestop was giving them out as party favors once.

I am feeling very sand-boxy at the moment, and am not sure how to satisfy this urge. The more things you can do in this sand-box the better. Having free reign to run around and shoot people in the face is fun and all, but being able to set personal goals broader than "kill people" and accomplish them would be nice. All genres welcome. Any suggestions?

Fallout3/Fallout NewVegas?

I've sunk a lot of hours into both, and I kind of regret it. If I could breed the shootery-ness and feel of STALKER with the size and dynamic-ness of Fallout3/NV, I would play it until the day I died.

Minecraft? *grins*

DSMatticus wrote:I am feeling very sand-boxy at the moment, and am not sure how to satisfy this urge. The more things you can do in this sand-box the better. Having free reign to run around and shoot people in the face is fun and all, but being able to set personal goals broader than "kill people" and accomplish them would be nice. All genres welcome. Any suggestions?

Prototype...Infamous, I guess (haven't played it).

Assassin's Creed 2 and Brotherhood gets more and more sandboxy. I sort of liked Brotherhood and how you basically pay to rebuild Rome.

Red Dead Redemption is pretty damn good. And provides ample reasons to go screw around and some pretty things to look at along the way. Can't say much for personal goals, though.

Planescape: Torment can be a good sandbox if you make the object to choose the exact opposite of kill people. Try to make it through the game by *not* killing a single thing.

This is the greatest game ever made: http://cinemassacre.com/2011/07/29/ninj ... ll-batman/

I got Dawn Of War: Soulstorm for free. So far I've started up two campaigns: one as the Sisters of Battle and one as the Tau. I don't really like the Stronghold missions as much as in Dark Crusade for the following reasons:

1) The dialogue is much worse. The opening cutscenes consist mainly of the defenders talking about their defensive preperations and no pre-battle trash talking. There's also no back-and-forth dialogue in any of the strongholds I've hit so far.

2) There's really very little clear space not filled with defensive fortifications, so fighting through the defenses is much more of a slog than in the previous game.

3) The Strongholds are clearly all based off of the same template: There's a main base with a building you need to blow up, there's a bunch of not-especially noteworthy satellite bases where the developers realized they had more space on the map than ideas, there's an aircraft satellite base, a vehicle satellite base that primarily makes just one vehicle type, and possibly a couple other bases dedicated to a specific unit along the outer edge of the map, and then there's one or two gimmicks, e.g. devestating defensive deep strikes. Granted, the ones in Dark Crusade were all sort of like that, but they had more interesting gimmicks and a more varied layout. Here the gimmicks boil down to "You must destroy these buildings to stop the enemy from getting special reinforcements/using super-artillery/having a relic unit who is FUCKING INVINCIBLE (admittedly I've yet to attack the Battle Sisters stronghold, but it's internet famous)"

Playing as the Battle Sisters gave me a perfect excuse to employ an excessively large quantity of fire-based weapons, which were visually impressive and really useful against the famously terrible IG morale. Also, it led to me being reminded that Relic did implement the mob morale bonus rules when I used them against the orcs.

The new aircraft feel incredibly poorly implemented, possibly because they are.

Yeah, Soulstorm was . . Terribad, sadly . .
And the Sisters Relic Unit is only invincible in that one mission, when you fight against it.
You can outmaneuvre it though. Keep shooting one shrine, attack other shrine while it's distracted. Basically, as long as you have a 2 more more pronged attack going on, it's going down.

Dawn of war 2 plays less like an RTS and more like some kind of Action RPG.

I picked up Vampire: Bloodlines when it was on sale on Steam this weekend.

I'm not especially far into it, but I have to say that, so far, the atmosphere and writing are basically perfect. I'm easily willing to overlook that the animations are kind of shit, and my character sheet keeps popping up randomly every few minutes just to experience the world Troika is portraying.

Stahlseele wrote:Yeah, Soulstorm was . . Terribad, sadly . .
And the Sisters Relic Unit is only invincible in that one mission, when you fight against it.
You can outmaneuvre it though. Keep shooting one shrine, attack other shrine while it's distracted. Basically, as long as you have a 2 more more pronged attack going on, it's going down.

Dawn of war 2 plays less like an RTS and more like some kind of Action RPG.

Necrons do this extra easy. Get the thing that cloaks your dudes and be vigilant about detectors. Teleport your lord around so that the saint had to take a long route. It takes a while, but it's not hard.
You can do similar things with Tau, but it takes longer. Probably also with chaos, though I don't remember trying.

So, Red Dead Redemption's multiplayer lets you roll your levels back to 1 mutliple times to unlock different characters/unusual mounts and make you spend your precious finite time on Xbox Live. At first it's a bull, then a buffalo, then an albino buffalo, then another bull, then a zebra donkey.

I hit the buffalo (max level is fifty, so I've hit it twice now. Usually by playing twenty-and-thirty-minutes at a time) and, while it was amusing, I realized something.

These make you really noticeable. Although I did ride around on a buffalo tomahawking people in the face and claimed I was getting revenge on the white devils, which left an impression on some people, I'm given to understand.

That said, I went on and hit the reset again. Figure I might as well do it and fuck around. It's nice having the biggest and best guns and some of the fastest rides, some of which have unusual quirks, but when you jump into a game, everyone's alternately and randomly shooting you or wanting you to join their group or begging for you to whistle up a buffalo for them to ride, too. Often all three at once.

And hard to play the game when you get hounded by three guys who wanted you in their posse and got pissed when you said "Sorry, dudes, just on for ten minutes. I'll call up mounts if you if you want, though"

I got around to hitting the Battle Sister's Stronghold as the Tau.

That is some quality bullshit. I managed it through using a trio of flyers to provide one prong and a massive doom army as the other prong.

I also did the Eldar stronghold playing Necrons, which contained its own impressive quantity of bullshit. Not content with cloaking their bases and teleporting around, they revealed that their first three bases were a distraction and the real base was hidden behind holographic cliffs generated by a thingy hidden behind another cliff that was itself generated by something behind a holographic cliff. All the generators were also invisible.

But I realized that Necron infantry can teleport to friendly buildings, and a fully-activated Monolith counts as a building and can teleport, so I skipped two generators and teleported a Monolith into the eldar base, followed by a shitload of warriors, immortals, and flayed ones, plus the Necron Lord. It was satisfying to refuse to put up with their bullshit.

And I've now beaten Soulstorm as the Tau. Opinions on the various strongholds:

SPESS MAHRINES: This one was kind of easy. I guess if I'd been less aggressive about destroying beacons, it could have been a real pain, but they weren't terribly well-guarded, and my Fire Warriors chewed up their infantry with ease.

Orks: The sheer number of bases on the map made the Tau hatred of fixed defenses even more irksome than normal, because they kept trying to take back the strategic points I captured. The map also lacked any interesting gimmick.

Imperial Guard: The Baneblade convoy idea is a cool concept, but they ended up not making ANY baneblades due to careful deployment of Barracuda heavy fighters and stealth teams. The parked vehicles gimmick was pretty neat. There's a lot of bases on this map too, but they have a laserlike focus on charging over the killing ground in front of the main base, so I just left some fire warriors and pathfinders hiding in the crater.

Sisters of Battle: Aside from the incredibly irritating invincibility aura bullshit, this mission was actually decently cool. It was a bit of a maze, though. Also, the Exocit MLRS spam was distinctly not cool. Fortunately, Barracudas and fire warriors came through for me again.

Eldar: Did I mention that Tau hate fixed defenses? It was even more painful than normal here, because there were webway gates scattered all over the map. Because Tau can't mass-teleport, I had to do it the hard way this time.

Necrons: The key gimmick here is that there's four critical locations tied to four Monoliths. The Monoliths tier up on 15 minute timers that only run when you don't hold the critical locations. It's kind of cool, but also painful when you're playing as Tau and they summon two squads of Flayed Ones onto the critical locations.

Chaos: Fuck obliterators. The gimmick here is that the main base is in the center, but until you destroy five statues you can't attack it. Also they have an outlandish number of obliterators.

Dark Eldar: By this point, I could pretty much completely trivialize this mission with my Honor Guard. You spend a while running around rescuing elite dudes, then you establish a base and kill their relic unit.

This campaign was made annoyingly more difficult because fire warriors have both a setup time and an inconvenient tendency to walk around for no good reason. It got a lot less painful when I finally set them to "do not chase dudes" and made a point of assembling them into a firing line before charging the enemy base with my other dudes. Then they provided a nice wall of plasma-spewing death. It was kind of hilarious to realize I was countering WWI tactics with Napoleonic tactics.

I finally got around to beating Portal 2.

I loved:

STEP 5: BOOBY TRAP THE BUTTON!

The spheres

Okay, seriously, you win the game by shooting the moon. That is not a joke. It actually happens.

Yeah, that was a nice WTF Moment.
Also the ending was worth several double/spit takes ^^

Furthermore, if you ain't tired of WH40k, try DOW2. It's less of a grind really . .
Well, mostly.

I am currently trying to re-teach myself how to play Mortal Kombat on a more competitive level. At the moment, I'm trying to break my old twitchy habits and replace them with reflexes.

Some notes:

1. I'm at the point where my twitch instincts have somewhat atrophied, but my reflexes haven't grown in, so I'm worse now than I was previously.

2. That being said, I can hit 20-30% kombo with Sheeve with great precision, but I have to close my eyes first. I need to break that habit and find other says to reduce my twitchiness.

3. The big 35-40% kombos elude me. Anything with a dash or a cancel in the kombo eludes me. I can air grab someone out of a popup but I can't use one to punish people who jump in.

4. I didn't notice casually playing, but my god, Sheeva is gigantic. I didn't realize how much taller she was than everyone else...

if you're going to get tortured and murdered by a woman there are worse options than sheeva

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I am currently trying to re-teach myself how to play Mortal Kombat...

I need to get ahold of this. From what I've heard, the new one sounds like a lot of fun. I grew up playing MK I and II (and to a lesser extent, Ultimate III), so I think I could enjoy this. The two biggest obstacles I'd have to overcome are:

1) getting my reflexes back

2) getting used to MK style controls opposed to Tekken, which is about the only fighting game I played for well over five years. It's annoying to react in time to an attack only to push backward instead of block.