Video Games

[Cynic]

Elephant Quest is a pretty awesome and nicely made rpg game. The leveling system is interesting. It reminds me a little of FF-12. But it's pretty original on its own.

[Roy]

Oh wow, that defense combo is amazing.

On metal slimes etc: I'm not sure why they were made so much easier than in previous games. Not only are they more easily killed with all the awesome abilities, but they don't run away nearly as much as in previous games. Like, in DW III I remember specifically needing to one turn the metal slimes and metababbles before they got a chance to run. In comparison, early on even when fighting metal slimes they stuck around for one turn to attack or cast kafrizz or whatever. It makes leveling classes pretty easy though, as you said.

Just got DQ IX.

I disagree on your slime assessment. The little bastards always get to go first and always run. I can't even get one attack off before they are running off.

Any way to stop that?

They actually do run less. Like in 3, it's 3/8 chance to run every turn for Metal Slimes, 5/8 for Metabbles, other types don't exist. In 9, they don't run often unless at low HP. You just have bad luck. But outspeed them and use Metal Slash with everyone, preferably with Falcon Blades at the low end, and crit or miss skills at the high end.

Anyways, they were made easier because you need to kill a lot more of them. After all, a maxed out character literally has hundreds, if not thousands of levels. Even if you have a MKS map, and can 1-99 in an hour, that honestly isn't that big of a deal.

[Prak]

Doing the open beta for Darkspore, which, near as I can tell without looking at any of the hype, is a spore engine based MMORPG. Should be interesting.

[Maxus]

I'm playing catch-up on some games I need to finish.

I beat Prototype the other day.

Need to pick Dead Space back up. I'm on the beginning of Chapter 7.

Others on the TBP list:

BlazBlue
Bioshock 2
Dragon Age
Fallout 3

[Prak]

So Darkspore seems to be a follow up to Galactic Heroes. Not having played that, I don't know how it's different. It was interesting, just beyond my video card's capacities.

[name_here]

Well, I've now beaten the Dawn Of War II (not chaos rising) campaign a second time.

Thoughts on mechanics: I had thought that a ranged force commander was a really shitty idea, and I was right. With a ranged force commander, you don't have an effective melee combatant until the dreadnought (see: Thaddeus' mention on the previous page). How much that matters depends on the mission, with a high risk of getting swarmed by hormagaunts on some of them and having to do something stupidly risky to manage to kill them. Also, commander equipment can't be used with a heavy bolter, missile launcher, or plasma cannon. Why? Because fuck you, that's why.

It's annoying how you keep getting massive piles of shitty armor and weapons with no special effects but can easily go through the entire game without getting a single terminator assault cannon.

Synapse is really screwy. It seems it works like this: Being within range of a synapse creature gives Tyranids a bonus to health and some other special bonus depending on the type. Or at least it works that way in multiplayer. In singleplayer, when a synapse creature dies, nearby tyranids are knocked over and then will attack other tyranids for a brief period if no enemies are in sight, and the bonuses might also be present. Notably, this applies regardless of whether or not they're still in synapse after one of the synapse creatures dies. It even berserks synapse creatures.

It's kind of annoying because I'd been expecting more out of it. I'd have preferred it if being out of synapse made tyranids really rout-prone or something like that. I guess it's partly due to the Dawn of War philosophy that RTS player hate losing control of their units (which we do) but it's still irritating.

Plot: This is kind of a running theme around here, but once again, fuck eldar.

Basically, their plan is to lure the hive fleet to a sub-sector capital hiveworld and two blood ravens recruiting worlds, one of which is apparently the blood raven high command, then blow them the fuck up to stop the fleet from threatening Craftworld Ulthwe (apparently via the webway). Honestly, if they weren't recruiting worlds, Typhon and Caldaris for a splinter fleet would be a pretty good trade and I'd totally be with them on that. I mean, they were both pretty much shitholes, with like 10,000 people and 10 billion orks. Being shitholes is an active requirement for chapter recruiting worlds. However, their actions on Meridian are asshole moves of the highest order.

Firstly, for some reason they fuck with all the sensors in the system to make them unable to detect Tyranids. Why? It's never really explained how hiding the extent of the problem helps them. All it does is get a whole bunch of humans assassinated by Tyranids and slow the blood ravens' quite decent plan.

Secondly, they launch a whole bunch of attacks on various spires to undermine general human defenses because... because... you know, I don't have the slightest idea. Now, their plan does require gaining access to an excessively fortified industrial complex, but a bunch of attacks occur on completely different spires. Here they're actually undermining their own plan, because they're reducing the forces the hive fleet needs to commit to overwhelm the defenders.

Thirdly, the Eldar bring over a whole bunch of orks to undermine the defenses. I'm not entirely clear how they managed this without the orks getting shot by the defensive fleet, but they somehow did. If it weren't for the heroic intervention of Force Commander whatshisname and his strike force, this would have completely totaled their own plan by destroying the industrial center they wanted to overload in order to destroy the planet. Also, Meridian is going to have intermittent ork outbreaks for the rest of eternity now, moving it from "stupid" to "dick move"

Fourthly, Meridian is not a lightly populated jungle or desert world. It's a sub-sector capital, a major manufacturing center, and home to tens of billions of humans. If it couldn't be held, blowing it up to take a chunk of the hive fleet with it and deny the Tyranids biomass to swell their ranks would be reasonable, but again, it's a subsector capital hiveworld, and not exactly poorly defended. It's quite likely it could have stood off the Tyranids easily with the aid of the blood ravens.

Of course, to make things even worse, the blood ravens totally kill the shit out of the hive fleet after dealing with the Eldar. If the Eldar had been all "THE TYRANIDS ARE COMING" instead of setting off a massive WAAGGGHHHH and then bitching at the blood ravens, the Litany of Fury could have carried the entire third company over to reinforce, and maybe more companies would have been sent by the Chapter Master. Admittedly, well-founded Imperial distrust of Eldar would have interfered with full cooperation, but they could have managed something. It's not like this is a full Hive Fleet like Behemoth or Leviathan, though it is admittedly big enough to hit three planets at once and cast the Shadow In the Warp over an entire sector, and it webwaying into the center of a Craftworld would probably completely fuck said Craftworld up.

The Eldar also hit upon the idea of rousing the Orks to hold off the Tyranids. That's actually a pretty good plan, got implemented on a larger scale to lock down Leviathan, but they didn't need to feed the Orks valuable intel on exactly where to strike to do the most damage.

The very first Eldar commander you kill has some particularly irritating last words that basically consist of him bitching at you for interfering in their plans. Also, by the Emperor Farseers are shitty at their jobs. This is what, the fourth Farseer IN A ROW that has completely screwed up their predictions and gotten a whole pile of Eldar killed by the blood ravens? To make things even worse, the projections that convinced them that they needed to interfere in the first place were completely off-base.

The Orks and Tyranids act completely within expected bounds for their species, which is to say that the Orks are violent and just slightly smarter than their enemies expect, while the Tyranids try to eat everything and throw unending waves of troops at everything resembling a problem.

The Tyranids diverge somewhat from the way they're portrayed elsewhere, with a number of important targets for the Blood Ravens to strike at, most notably including the primary hive-ship, since apparently the Hivemind isn't distributed across a bunch of ships, or at least not anything close to evenly. Also, the Shadow In the Warp is portrayed rather differently, apparently being created by the hivemind getting into a telepathic knife-fight with any navigators or astropaths in the area instead of the sheer telepathic mass of the hive fleet bending the warp enough to mess with long-distance psychic stuff. Also, you can apparently force a message through it. Oh, and only the former Deathwatch member has heard of them, leading to no one understanding why he flips the fuck out about The Shadow In the Warp, which is made even stranger than it already is by the fact that the chapter archives contain enough information on Tyranids to positively confirm the percise identity of the splinter fleet. I guess most of the archives are "Write-Only".

As for non-blood ravens humans, they sure grow 'em stupid on Meridian. Administrator Delrosa, the contact point for the blood ravens, seriously says that they have no reason to believe that Meridian is in any real danger from the Tyranids. Also, getting access to a manufacturing center for vital war needs takes stupidly long, and during that period the place nearly gets overrun by the Tyranids. Admittedly, the expansion indicates some of that is HERSEY rather than stupidity.

Really, the reason why Eldar in particular piss me off is more the self-defeating nature of their actions than their actual goals. I mean, stuff like "Kill hive fleets" "Contain daemons" and "Destroy Necrons" is actually a pretty good set of goals. They're just so arrogant that they presume humans are too incompetent to assist in said goals and should be shot for interfering with their plans.

[Draco_Argentum]

I'm playing catch-up on some games I need to finish.

I beat Prototype the other day.

Need to pick Dead Space back up. I'm on the beginning of Chapter 7.

Others on the TBP list:

BlazBlue
Bioshock 2
Dragon Age
Fallout 3

I'm doing a catchup too now that WoW is raid only.

I just got through Bioshock 2. Its a better game but the plot lacks the punch of Would You Kindly.

Right now I'm on Mass Effect 2. The inventory and upgrades systems are much better and no silly physics Mako is a big plus.

Next up is Fallout 3.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

DK IX notes:

I can kill slimes pretty handily about half the time I run into them now. However, the quests to unlock the Armamentalist vocation eludes me. Considering that I have literally no issues with my current Martial Artist/Warrior/Priest/Mage setup, I have decided to not pursue the other vocations until endgame for stat maxing. (Although Gladiator and Paladin were both easy enough, I don't have the skill to unlock Ranger, Armamentalist eludes me due to just not having the agility to make it work right now, and I have not proceeded far enough in the game for Sage and Luminary, although I plan on changing my Mage to Sage when I can and swap out my priest for something else, possibly Gladiator.)

Fans are actually not bad. Especially if I am fighting something with both spells and breath weapons, I can use Reverse cycle with my martial artist, magic mirror with my warrior, and Bounce with my mage and end up doing more damage than I can on my own. Even if I don't deal that much damage, the damage mitigation on my own people is a huge factor.

[Manxome]

The quests in DQ9 give the distinct impression of being written by someone who hates the playerbase.

"OK, you need to kill this monster. But you need to do it using this specific tactic that has been chosen because it is amazingly tedious and ineffective and you would never in a million years consider doing it for actual tactical reasons. And you need to do it FIVE TIMES!"

"You need this rare event to happen under these specific circumstances. There are abilities in the game that produce the event deliberately, but don't use them--it only counts if it happens by dumb luck. TWICE!"

"I'm not even going to tell you what the actual requirements of this quest are, you need to guess based on these extremely vague clues!"

Oh, and you can only have 8 quests active at a time. Despite the fact that many require you to accumulate rare occurrences over a long time or interact with monsters you won't see until long after you can access the quest. You can drop them to make room (sometimes), but then it doesn't appear in your list at all--there's no log of where you found it, what it required, or even that it existed (and you can't make progress on it, of course). Because, naturally, they found space in your save file for stacks of 99 (more?) of thousands of items, equipment, and alchemy ingredients, customized names and appearances for all your characters, and a quicksave snapshot, but they can't possibly add one more value to the quest state enum. That might require as much as several dozen bytes of additional storage!

[Roy]

Lol. The quests are basically MMO style quests, so yeah.

Also, Fource skills are good. Like really good. So it's well worth the time to unlock.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I am not disputing that they're good, or that they're worth unlocking. I'm just saying right now erecting a wizard ward than having the character kill the slime takes up two more turns than I technically can count on.

I'll try it again later, but right now I'm just too slow and don't have the abilities that would let me do that.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

The quests in DQ9 give the distinct impression of being written by someone who hates the playerbase.

"OK, you need to kill this monster. But you need to do it using this specific tactic that has been chosen because it is amazingly tedious and ineffective and you would never in a million years consider doing it for actual tactical reasons. And you need to do it FIVE TIMES!"

"You need this rare event to happen under these specific circumstances. There are abilities in the game that produce the event deliberately, but don't use them--it only counts if it happens by dumb luck. TWICE!"

"I'm not even going to tell you what the actual requirements of this quest are, you need to guess based on these extremely vague clues!"

Oh, and you can only have 8 quests active at a time. Despite the fact that many require you to accumulate rare occurrences over a long time or interact with monsters you won't see until long after you can access the quest. You can drop them to make room (sometimes), but then it doesn't appear in your list at all--there's no log of where you found it, what it required, or even that it existed (and you can't make progress on it, of course). Because, naturally, they found space in your save file for stacks of 99 (more?) of thousands of items, equipment, and alchemy ingredients, customized names and appearances for all your characters, and a quicksave snapshot, but they can't possibly add one more value to the quest state enum. That might require as much as several dozen bytes of additional storage!

Yeah, I feel you on all those points. I tried to do the quest where you have to have a martial artist scare some scarewolves, then kill them itself. As far as I can tell, the quest is either bugged or there's something that it's not telling me that I have to do.

[Manxome]

Keep in mind that the person who erects the wizard's ward doesn't need to do all the damage to the slime, just the killing blow.

For the scarewolves, I don't think the person scaring them needs to do the killing blow, but I think you need to kill them while they are still scared. As in, before they spend their next action recovering.


And Roy, I don't know what MMOs you've played, but I've never seen an MMO quest nearly as sadistic as a typical quest in DQ9. Typical MMO fare I've seen is "kill 9 badgers", not "kill 9 badgers with this specific poison that inflicts <1% of their max HP per round". And even if it was, in most MMOs, you'd have a big advantage due to being able to see the monster's health bar.

And I wasn't particularly impressed with Fource skills.

[Roy]

The quests in DQ9 give the distinct impression of being written by someone who hates the playerbase.

"OK, you need to kill this monster. But you need to do it using this specific tactic that has been chosen because it is amazingly tedious and ineffective and you would never in a million years consider doing it for actual tactical reasons. And you need to do it FIVE TIMES!"

"You need this rare event to happen under these specific circumstances. There are abilities in the game that produce the event deliberately, but don't use them--it only counts if it happens by dumb luck. TWICE!"

"I'm not even going to tell you what the actual requirements of this quest are, you need to guess based on these extremely vague clues!"

Oh, and you can only have 8 quests active at a time. Despite the fact that many require you to accumulate rare occurrences over a long time or interact with monsters you won't see until long after you can access the quest. You can drop them to make room (sometimes), but then it doesn't appear in your list at all--there's no log of where you found it, what it required, or even that it existed (and you can't make progress on it, of course). Because, naturally, they found space in your save file for stacks of 99 (more?) of thousands of items, equipment, and alchemy ingredients, customized names and appearances for all your characters, and a quicksave snapshot, but they can't possibly add one more value to the quest state enum. That might require as much as several dozen bytes of additional storage!

Yeah, I feel you on all those points. I tried to do the quest where you have to have a martial artist scare some scarewolves, then kill them itself. As far as I can tell, the quest is either bugged or there's something that it's not telling me that I have to do.

You have to kill them while they are scared. Which basically means...

They act.
You go second, and scare them.

You go first, and kill them.

In other words, you need to be slow, but about the same speed they are. As for what speed they are, don't remember, but it's in the bestiary.

As for the slime thing, you could go get like 5 levels of wizard in a minute, to teach everyone Wizard Ward, and then kill them.

And for the MMO thing... yeah, these are MMO style quests. And there's skills that will never kill the target, but will reduce their HP. By the time you get to that quest, and it's postgame, you should have it.

Fource skills are fucking amazing. They have the following effects:

All damage is increased by 10%.
All damage becomes elemental, type depending on the skill.
All damage from that element is reduced by 50%, stacking with normal resistances additively.

Most enemies have a 150% weakness to an element. Sometimes higher. Proper use of Fource skills offensively increases all damage by 65% in most situations. That includes endgame level situations. That's more than Gritty Ditty. And it stacks with it. Now actually being an Armamentalist isn't worth it, but the Fource skills totally are.

Using it defensively is less common, mostly because enemies tend to resist their own element, and reducing your own damage to 55% of normal, to potentially become immune to one, and sometimes two elements with the right gear isn't worth it. If you don't attack physically, using it defensively has no drawback, but since the best parties are melee focused...

[Manxome]

There are tons of quests during the game where you need to kill an enemy with something that does ridiculously small amounts of damage (I think the Ranger unlock quest Arioch was complaining about is one of them). What's this attack that does damage but is guaranteed not to kill the target?

As far as Fource skills, I get the impression that you are once again silently assuming that the player only cares about the extreme post-game. Which is really disingenuous.

Fource skills aren't worth the activation time in most random encounters. In-game bosses you generally only fight once, so by the time you've spent several turns trying out all the elements to figure out which one works, I suspect you're barely better off than if you had simply not used them, let alone if you had spent that giant wad of skill points on something else. Especially considering it only affects one target until you get the scroll, which happens around the time the game ends if Armamentalist is one of your party's main classes.

[Roy]

There are tons of quests during the game where you need to kill an enemy with something that does ridiculously small amounts of damage (I think the Ranger unlock quest Arioch was complaining about is one of them). What's this attack that does damage but is guaranteed not to kill the target?

As far as Fource skills, I get the impression that you are once again silently assuming that the player only cares about the extreme post-game. Which is really disingenuous.

Fource skills aren't worth the activation time in most random encounters. In-game bosses you generally only fight once, so by the time you've spent several turns trying out all the elements to figure out which one works, I suspect you're barely better off than if you had simply not used them, let alone if you had spent that giant wad of skill points on something else. Especially considering it only affects one target until you get the scroll, which happens around the time the game ends if Armamentalist is one of your party's main classes.

Body Slam. Think it's a Warrior skill. Will reduce both your, and the targets HP by 80%. So use it and then get healed, repeat.

If it's just main game, the AI is actually good about exploiting elemental weaknesses. So even if you don't simply look it up, which by the way you can totally do, even for non post game stuff it doesn't waste all that much time.

The Ranger quest does involve killing enemies with poison. Weak, low level enemies. Not exactly hard to get poison on it, possibly stopspell or sleep it, and then just defend over and over now is it?

[Cynic]

I bought Fallout from gog.com a while ago. I keep trying to play it. I don't understand what the obsession with this game is. I have people who rave that it is most probably the best rpg on the planet. Something about how the plot makes everything pale beyond comparison. Part of the problem is I can't stand the battle mechanic. I enjoy turn-based games. I always have. But this one annoys the fuck out of me.

[Blicero]

Yeah, Fallout 1 and 2 both seem to have aged much more badly than, say, the Infinity Engine games. I never play'd either of them when they came out, and, despite having own'd both of them for several years now, I've been unable to get more than a couple of hours in either.


The fact that the combat takes so long while not necessarily being that deep is certainly one of the bigger problems they have. Add that to shoddy AI, and backgrounds and charactermodels that look like total shite...

The general consensus does seem to be, though, that, postpatch, Fallout 2 is a significantly better experience. You could try that one instead, I dunno.

[name_here]

Well, I got Dawn of War II: Retribution today and started playing through the Tyranid Campaign. So far, I'm disappointed. It seems like the campaign is set up for all the races, and each one just gets slightly different briefing text. In the case of the Tyranids, this is seriously three words with ellipsis between them and a stock transmission that I assume plays for everyone. Also, two missions had slightly different dialogue. This would be fine if the missions were good, but they really aren't that special. Also, the Tyranids don't seem Tyranidy enough for my taste, with my small numbers of vastly superior Space Marines Tyranids overwhelming far larger forces.

EDIT: Okay, it seems that, although I was correct about it being (pretty much) the same campaign for everyone, the Tyranids get extra-shafted because some most plot elements are completely nonsensical reasons for the Tyranids to go to a mission, so the devs just said, "Fuck it, they follow a fixed order of missions for no goddamn reason. Have the hivemind say 'Obstacles... Destroy... Consume...' at the start of the mission briefing. Oh, and everyone gets them confused with a race that GIVES A FUCK about whatever they're raving about, so we don't have to change the in-mission dialogue."

Also, the Eldar in this game are from a different Craftworld. I like their style! They've got the sort of arrogance that comes with actually knowing what the fuck you are doing. Oh, and the plot of the previous games is... kind of explained? I mean, it explains why they did something, because

There's a wrecked Craftworld with an intact infinity circuit on Typhon

It does not, however, explain why they didn't do something else that would, you know, get them closer to their actual goal.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Oh, and everyone gets them confused with a race that GIVES A FUCK about whatever they're raving about, so we don't have to change the in-mission dialogue."

Isn't that like the main schtick for Tyranids? It's like having the Tau hand out copies of Atlas Shrugged.


Oh, and in DQ9 I finally managed to unlock Armamentalist. Haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Is there a way in-game to determine elemental weakness other than trial and error? I am missing a scan spell in this game pretty hardcore.

[name_here]

Well, the Tyranids do little talking in their missions, but people talk to the Tyranids as though they have even the slightest reason to believe the Tyranids care about the centuries-old wheels-within-wheels plots, and are coming to this bullshit-tiny village for any reason other than because there's non-Tyranid organics in it.

[Username17]

GW is super confused about what the hell the Tyranids are supposed to do. On the one hand, they are supposed to be super-intelligent and have a hive mind made of trillions of trillions of human-brain equivalents analyzing every possibility and creating the greatest possible symbiosis of different genetic material collected from two galaxies to make the bestest most survivable and brilliantly super-intelligent whole that could ever be. On the other hand, they seriously seem to respond to all threats with the Leeroy Jenkins Maneuver. Even after that doesn't work two or three times in succession because the target is fortified and totally ready for that shit.

But there's still floating fluff about them having human cults and pawns and secret plans and shit. It's just that whenever the big plan is revealed it is apparently always LEEEROOOY JEEENKINNNS! Every. Single. Time.

-Username17

[Roy]

Oh, and in DQ9 I finally managed to unlock Armamentalist. Haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Is there a way in-game to determine elemental weakness other than trial and error? I am missing a scan spell in this game pretty hardcore.

The AI seems to automatically know. The in game bestiary tells you. And of course, strategy guides. Sometimes it's obvious though. Don't hit dragons with fire. Do hit ice monsters with fire. Undead are pretty much all weak to light. Etc.

[name_here]

I think they've only got loose control over the rippers, gaunts, gargoyles, and such even in Synapse range, enough to give them targets but not enough to tell them "Get back in cover, you fucking idiot", so LEERRROOYYY JEEENKINNNS! is literally the best tactical option that they can actually implement with those dudes. Why they don't make smarter dudes is a good question.

It's really not fair to say that's all they do, though. Sometimes they use Leroy as a distraction so a 7-foot tall dude with giant spikes on his back can sneak up behind people and stab them in the back. They also use the cults to make LEEEROOOY JEEENKINNNS! more effective by shooting important people and blowing shit up beforehand.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Oh, and in DQ9 I finally managed to unlock Armamentalist. Haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Is there a way in-game to determine elemental weakness other than trial and error? I am missing a scan spell in this game pretty hardcore.

The AI seems to automatically know. The in game bestiary tells you. And of course, strategy guides. Sometimes it's obvious though. Don't hit dragons with fire. Do hit ice monsters with fire. Undead are pretty much all weak to light. Etc.

I'll keep all that in mind. Although all I've heard was that Fource skills are awesome, but Armamentalists kind of suck and it's better to max out fource then do something else.