The Gaming Den

Parthenon wrote:One Roguelike I quite like is Tales of Maj'Eyal. It has a graphical interface and uses the mouse for the most part so you don't have to memorise a keyboard layout. But the best thing for people like Lago is that by default you get multiple lives, gaining more lives as you level up and from some items.

It has the substantial choice and character development wanted, with the ease of multiple lives and an excellent interface.

Its pretty easy to get into (the complex and difficult to play options are locked to start with and get unlocked through play), is a complete game and has very few bugs.

I've never found the deprivation of options a good thing, and this is no exception. If you just label shit as easy or hard, that would be enough. But no, instead I have to level two characters to ten, and find a location, and do this one quest twice, before I can ever play a Yeek Mindflayer.

Additionally, I like that when I read the info, it said that archers can shoot at effectively half str when they run out of arrows, an important ability that every Roguelike needs to add to their game to not be a pile of shit, and then made an Archer, and apparently they managed to regress back to being retarded, because they removed that feature, because fuck archers, even if your class is called archer, you should have to run out of fucking arrows and die because our game has to pretend to be hard by preventing you from using any of your abilities.

Popped open UFO Aftermath yesterday, and was viciously reminded that is can occasionally be as meat-grindery as X-com.

I decided to send my squad on a recon mission after a high-casualty attack on a downed UFO, and it went roughly as follows:

Start moving around, figuring this should be pretty easy and I'll be able to pull out with a partial success if things look to be going south.

Round a corner. Encounter Deathbellows.

Get one soldier killed by thousands of angry bees taking it down.

Round another corner. It's a new Deathbellows.

Circle around to try grenading it. Fall short and destroy the car that had kept it from seeing my soldiers.

Thousands of angry bees.

Round another corner and encounter another Deathbellows.

Finally encounter something that does not shoot thousands of angry bees. Realize my mission objective is to see a total of four different enemy types.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/29/warha ... r-game-10/
On one hand: fuuuuuuuu!
On the other hand: yaay!

There's a new Monsters Den game out, for those who liked the first.

It's pretty cool - more challenging than the first (which, after a certain early point, practically becomes auto-win with no casualties, the only exception being things like the Minotaur fight where the round-1 Labyrinth ability can fuck you completely). There are also more options and tactics involved, and you will need to use these. Everyone has three "stances", and you should be changing them as you go, depending on what the highest priority is. You'll be getting good use out of the Rez potions, too.

Oh, and don't rely on the shrines. They're a lot rarer now. So yeah, fighting battles requires a bit of thought, doing some exploration so you can choose the order of your battles as need be, and so on. Interestingly, you can upload your own sprites for the characters if you are so inclined.

I hate the new game because all the durations are so fucking short.

I liked my battle long Nature's whatever, or holy light, this new thing where it lasts like one action if that is shit fuck terrible.

True, that's pretty sad, and does remind me of a shitty tabletop game, though at least the PC handles all those calculations I guess.

But yeah, setting up effects with durations eats up a lot of power because you need to keep reapplying them. I liked being able to start with a Holy Light and so on. But it's still kind of cool.

SON OF A BITCH.

I've been playing ME3 multiplayer since the game came out. It's an entertaining way to pass twenty minutes.

New character classes/guns/upgrades are unlocked by randomized booster packs. More expensive packs give guaranteed uncommons/rares. And every week, it seems like they'll have a new theme to a booster pack.

This week, it was double-rare items. Cost 99k in in-game currency (the next-most expensive pack is 60k).

So, hey, whatever. I played a couple matches whenever I didn't have much else going on. A basic Bronze gives about 15k for completing it. I saved up, bought one. It unlocked a new class for me, and gave me one I'd already gotten (which turns into an XP boost in that case).

Well, whatever. It happens. I got something new, not a total loss.

So I fucked around, saved up again.

This time, the rare items--the whole point of the exercise--were classes I've already unlocked and don't really play. Well, luck of the draw.

Third time, it was three rare items--two guns I already have (incremental upgrades, and one an ammo pack expansion. Yes, a refill of ammo. The other expansions are junk like an instant full-heal, or a self-revive, or a one-hit-kill rocket launcher. It gives me the LEAST useful one.

Just now, I did it for the last time. Two classes I already have. And don't play that much.

The best part is, after those five "Here's a new class!!!1!" things, there's STILL a damn class I have yet the unlock. I have the rest.

Jesus, I hate these booster packs.

Along the way, I -did- get an interesting gun, but from the 60k pack I bought when I needed some more inventory items.

If I thought it'd do any good, I'd complain to Bioware. Unfortunately, I think they have a rather good defense in "Luck of the draw, sorry about that."

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/le ... review.php

I preordered this game a day before it came out, and I am having lots of fun.

Got the "Good" ending in Yahtzee's Poacher. It was a good game, and entertaining while it lasted, but I'm not sure I'd call it truly great. There were a number of times I was frustrated at some of the design choices that had been made. Still, it was worth my time enough that I might try for the "secret" ending as well. I hear the boss is pretty challenging.

So, for those who have the (freeware) Python 2.7.2 (32 bit)
www.mediafire.com/?df2mtriqc8hwccf

Created by sofacoin, a friend on IRC. It's a Roguelike set in a ruined city. You are a guardsman living saint (or, in the current version in the link above, a Space Marine, Chaos Space Marine (or Dreadnought), Eldar or Ork). There are endless waves of tyranids. Good luck.

Quite a lot of fun, really. But get used to dying. A lot. And indeed, starting, seeing you're surrounded, and going "Okay, new map".

God damn it. I picked up Assasin's creed 2 from Gamestop as a used copy. Despite the fact that it doesn't have any scratches, every single time I try to first access Leonardo Da Vinci's quest to fix the blades, the game freezes up.

Download and use a burned copy?
If you have a legit key you don't need to circumvent the copy protection at all and it should, in theory, work . .

Xbox 360 violates Motorola patents
http://www.gamespot.com/news/xbox-360-v ... ge-6373198

The commission has the authority to issue an import ban on products that infringe patents, which would prevent Microsoft from bringing new Xbox 360s into the country.

cthulhu wrote:The last 15 minutes of ME3 are an irremediable pile of shit that completely wreck the game. If you're going to play it, get to the part with the beam of light, turn your console off, and insert your own ending

The ends are a direct cut paste from Deus Ex 1 (?!?!) that don't make any sense, and the ending has no closure for the series at all. Also the presentation is cloned directly from Deus Ex: HR where an AI makes a bunch of statements that are amazingly dumb (I kill you all with synethetic life to save you from being killed by synthetic life?) and then you have three buttons.

Also none of your choices you made in the series matter at all. Have fun!

It's amazingly shit. It's worse than DA2 shit. It's truely the worst writing in a video game I have ever seen and I have played Hopkins FBI.

Hi, I just finished ME3 so I'm going to quote things said a month ago and talk about them with no regard for whether anyone gives a fuck. Anyone else seen this video that tries to explain the ending? (Spoilers, obviously.)

The idea is that starting with the beam, the whole thing is happening in Shepard's head. The Reapers are trying to indoctrinate Shepard into trying to control the Reapers (like the Illusive Man) or merge with them (like Saren). The only ending where you get out with your mind intact is the one where you blow everything up, which is why if you play co-op to pump up your readiness rating use a hacked profile and firewall the game, you get the final scene that appears to be Shepard waking up back on Earth.

Besides all the stuff said in the video, that makes that dream kid / AI one hell of a callback to Neuromancer. AI brainwashes you by appearing as a little boy in your dreams to remind you of your dead loved ones, then gives you a choice at the end whether to accept the brainwashing.

That's not any less of a shit ending but at least it sort of makes sense. Ah well, supposedly they're putting out a DLC that expands the ending into something hopefully not stupid.

I know about that theory.

The problem is, indocrination has not previously seemed to have any elaborate hallucinations involved. People see random, unnatural shapes and hear a chorus of whispers, and start remembering stuff that happened to other people. And the stuff the Reapers want them to do slowly starts seeming like a good idea. Even if they were influencing Shepard, all the stuff on the Citadel would still actually have happened. Indoctrination is not an elaborate hallucination that tricks people into thinking they're doing what they want to while they're actually doing something else; it changes what people want to do while leaving their perceptions unchanged.

name_here wrote:I know about that theory.

The problem is, indocrination has not previously seemed to have any elaborate hallucinations involved. People see random, unnatural shapes and hear a chorus of whispers, and start remembering stuff that happened to other people. And the stuff the Reapers want them to do slowly starts seeming like a good idea. Even if they were influencing Shepard, all the stuff on the Citadel would still actually have happened. Indoctrination is not an elaborate hallucination that tricks people into thinking they're doing what they want to while they're actually doing something else; it changes what people want to do while leaving their perceptions unchanged.

One of the codex entries for indoctrination does mention "ghostly presences" or "ghostly figures" or something like that. The derelict reaper in ME2 I believe had the Cerberus scientists hallucinating things crawling out of the vents. They weren't specifically hallucinating Neuromancer kids, but still.

I don't know if the theory is real. It's pretty internally consistent and if it were true it would make a fuckton more sense than if that retarded ending really happened, but all the markers for indoctrination are also video game cliches. All the evidence could just be there because the writers wanted Max Payne dream sequences with a creepy kid and oily black shadow ghosts.

And you're right that it could be that only the magic ending button room is in Shepard's imagination. Well, and the writers suddenly forgot how to write things that were good, but that's pretty much true any way you look at it. The ending room seems the most deliberately unreal and Shepard gets there by passing the fuck out. It wouldn't be at all unexpected for a Reaper / Prothean deathmachine to interface with the user's mind.

Either way I spent way too much time reading about it yesterday and the only people more useless than Bioware fanboys are the journalists who get paid actual salaries to troll them. Fuck the internet, why did anyone ever think it was a good idea to make it easier for people to talk to each other.

I'm randomly fucking around with Oblivion for some reason. Does anyone know what's the formula for skill advancement? I mean how do you find out how many points you need to go from 49 to 50?

I have been playing Dragon Age 2 lately. This is probably old news to youse guys, but my x-box insisted on patching the game.

They nerfed items that boost blood magic (formerly +1 mana per HP, now +0.25 mana per HP).

Then again, my blood-force mage Hawke and Merril had so many of those items, their HP STILL doesn't move perceptively when they cast spells, so maybe I'm bitching for no reason. Still, I feel slightly annoyed.

I played the Diablo 3 beta a few weeks ago, it didn't do much for me.

On the other hand, I preordered Torchlight 2 and I'm so jazzed I'm re-playing Torchlight while I wait. I don't know why the one isn't doing anything while the other is when the games are so similar, but there you go.

How similar is Diablo 3 to the previous two? I'm assuming the basic play is about the same (click, kill, and collect)?

Yeah, that's pretty much the same, and still as fun as ever. The thing that bugs me about it is that they've stripped much of the customization out of the game, power-wise. Each class has a set progression of powers they get as they go, and while there's a little bit of wiggle room in terms of things like runes and the fact that you can only slot so many powers into your action bar, it still doesn't change the fact that every character of a given class can do the exact same things.

I'd sort of disagree about that, Desdan Marvolam. While you actually don't make any decisions whatsoever when you level up, there's still the potential for spending more time deciding which skills to use than in Diablo II, because you can change your mind. Playing a Meteor and Fireball Sorceress in Diablo II gets a little bit repetitive after a while; being able to switch to Lightning Bolts and Frost Novas would have been nice, I think.

The biggest problem with Diablo III that I see is that they took out hit recovery (getting ganked by ~10 enemies in melee in Diablo II can kill you anywhere), and didn't raise the damage of enemies in Normal setting to compensate (triple what it is would be good). As such, the entire beta was trivial, since it's almost impossible to make mistakes so bad that you are actually endangered. Instantaneous health potions exacerbate this situation, since if the going gets bad, you can immediately restore yourself to full health; then if you're patient, you can run away until the cooldown on health potions has reset, but you probably don't need to.

At least since there aren't any permanent level-up choices, you can hand the game off to a small child and have them beat the easy bits for you.

So, from what I understand, you end up with:

Skills that can change mid-game. Is this sort of like a caster preparing spells in D&D? You have a smaller set you can use from a larger set, but you can change it given time?

The game is easier so long as you pay attention. Nice for new people, I guess, but it could get boring otherwise.

Potions heal you instantly, but there's a cool-down after use? How long is the cool-down?