Video Games

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Sat Nov 07, 2009 12:18 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If you've never played Kirby's Super Star for the SNES I strenuously recommend you pick it up for the DS. It's seriously one of the best platformer/variety games ever. It's as good as Super Mario 64, that's how good it is. The DS re-release assumes that you played the SNES version to 100% completion so there's about, oh, 30% new content. It's also several degrees more difficult than the regular quest, but the regular quest is easy enough to be beaten by even beginners to platformers.

It should be noted that the SNES version is available on virtual console (Wii) for about a third of the price. Yes, you miss out on the bonus content, but that's a pretty big price differential.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a nice little edutainment/mystery game, more emphasis on the edutainment part. How important are matchstick and gallon jug problems? Very important, as you'll find out. I have the second one, haven't played it and don't plan to until I beat the first game.

I rented this title and returned it after about two hours of play. In my not-so-humble opinion, the puzzles are really, amazingly terrible.

You've got a bunch that are just simple reading comprehension and spatial reasoning. "Look at this map and tell me which road only connects to one town." "If I put a dot on this paper, flip it over, rotate it this amount, and flip it back, where will the dot be?" "I walk out my front door and turn left once, and right twice, and end up facing east. Which way does my house face?" No tricks, no analytical thought, pretty much just following simple directions.

Then you've got some that look like the former category, except they're trick questions, and there's some subtlety in the wording that changes the answer. It would be obvious that there must be a trick from the inane simplicity, except that a bunch of the puzzles are inanely simple. And they're really vague and sloppy with the wording; in many cases, the puzzle could seriously be read either straight or as a trick, and you just have to guess which they want. In one puzzle I did, they gave me a bunch of abstract, idealized rules, and then wanted me to give them a trick answer based on real-world biology, even though it actually contradicted the problem statement.

Then there's some classic puzzles from around the world. They're good puzzles, but they're also older than dirt and you've seen them a hundred times before.

Out of over 30 puzzles I did before I lost all hope for the game, there were maybe 1 or 2 that were moderately good and new to me. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that those were actually classic puzzles that I just happened to not be familiar with.

A couple of particularly loathsome examples:

"Which of these hats has a brim whose length is equal to the hat's height?"
You're seriously supposed to look at the graphics and measure. There's no clue in the puzzle, no trick of wording, you're actually supposed to get out a measuring tape.

"Here's matchsticks in the shape of a dog. Move 2 to show the dog after he's run over."
IMO, it doesn't look like a dog in the first place, and this is a stupid "puzzle" (at least for a video game) on general principle because it's based entirely on subjective appearance (not to mention the fact that a dead dog probably looks exactly like a live one to the degree of detail being portrayed). But after pondering for some time all the available moves, I decide my best bet at guessing the "correct" solution is to move two legs from the bottom to the top to give a top-down view of a cartoon-like flattened dog. The game tells me I'm wrong--no explanation, just "wrong."

With no particular idea what else they might be looking for, I spend a clue coin for some help. Their idea of a "clue" is apparently a re-wording of the problem. Second clue is also a rewording of the problem. The third "clue" is step-by-step instructions on exactly how to solve it. The answer? Move two legs to the top. But I moved the wrong two legs, apparently.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Sat Nov 07, 2009 12:39 am

Gelare wrote:
Lago PARANOIA wrote:The Let's Play for Godhand is also pure awesome.

But then again, Let's Plays in general are awesome.
Which LP have you been watching, there's a couple of them.

I am going out on a limb here and say that it was probably the Kung Fu Jesus one.

http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/GodHand/

TOZ · Post by **TOZ** » Sat Nov 07, 2009 4:39 am

shadzar wrote:So that means you couldn't have that Grand Theft Auto because of the hot-coffee thing, and you couldn't have God of War games because the sex scenes.

There are a LOT of games with porn in them....which means you can only have things like Mario? I would kill myself if only stuck with kiddie games.

That's the thing, they don't look into it that closely. Unless you've got magazines and DVDs laying around for some uptight prig to find, no one will ever know. That's why we keep it on digital media, hard drives and the like.

Plus, that's a very wide definition of porn. God of War is more innuendo with a bit of nudity. GTA doesn't even count with how it's not accessible without cracking the game. If we're going to count exposed nipples as porn, we're backsliding into prudes.

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Sat Nov 07, 2009 4:47 am

Well that ESRB just barely called Kratos and those women NOT porn, but still M for mature, so I can only go by what they say.

To me porn is Ooh, Ahh, Baby, baby! and sex with no plot....boring crap.

Well if you ever miss any rubber gloves and a roll of TP, then you know someone needed a "stress relief" for a poor man...well you know. And with all the war and such being fought, then you need some kind of stress release. Heaven forbid they ban cigarettes.

Just don't stick porn in the game case I guess. Gald they aren't uptight about God of War. It is a pretty good fame to get some anger out on vicariously through Kratos. Then again the Colossus of Rhodes can make you get angry so.....many a few shooters for late night/downtime practice?

TOZ · Post by **TOZ** » Sat Nov 07, 2009 5:12 am

I haven't read anything on the ESRB's rating of God of War, but I kinda figured the widespread murder of dudes is what got it the M for mature. XD Something about being able to rip bodies in half and twist heads off. It certainly is a nice stress reliever after a long day.

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Sat Nov 07, 2009 5:23 am

Maybe they forgot about the boob fondling after all the bloodshed.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Nov 08, 2009 4:45 am

I'm in the mood for some non-Warhammer/WH40K Grim-Dark.

By GrimDark I mean that the darkness and grimness in the setting is taken to such a ridiculous absurdity that you can't take it seriously; slapping more edgy and violence and hopelessness only makes the setting more humorous.

TOZ · Post by **TOZ** » Sun Nov 08, 2009 6:10 am

You mean the point where anything show to be innocent and pure spontaneously explodes in a shower of gore within two minutes of being introduced?

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Nov 09, 2009 1:52 am

By the time I got to the Blockbuster, it'd been picked over pretty hard. I didn't get anything. Still, I appreciate the suggestions everyone put forth.

I spent a lot of this weekend working on Smash Bros. Melee. I have everyone unlocked except Game&Watch.

I might have more time now, since my glasses broke today and if they're not fixed by the time I'd normally head in for work tomorrow, I'm calling in. I'm getting by with an older pair I had, but my prescription's changed a lot and the difference is slowly driving me up the wall.

Caedrus · Post by **Caedrus** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 1:07 am

Just finished Bowser's Inside Story. I am completely blown away. I've loved all the Mario RPGs, but this one just took it up several notches. Freakin' epic. Go buy it now.

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 8:18 am

Eh, I still like Thousand-Year Door better. Though that's probably mostly because I'm a sucker for any sort of ability customization, and Bowser's Inside Story has nothing equivalent to the badges in the Paper Mario games.

Vnonymous · Post by **Vnonymous** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 3:59 pm

I've been playing Dragon Age.

I haven't finished it yet, but there are a few things that bug me.

The first: WoW combat - build up threat with the warriors so the mages don't draw aggro
The second: entirely uninteresting classes - you get maybe 17 abilities in the whole game with a system that was taken straight from Diablo II.
The third: ai that is so dumb that the "tactics" system they stole from Final Fantasy XII is useless. My party members like attacking the person in the otiluke's resilient sphere for some reason, and I just turned the ai off completely on my main character because whenever I went to change something on another character, he'd throw out a long cooldown spell completely inappropriately.

This really works against the game, because you're meant to think that the npcs are really smart and people and then they will run straight through gigantic aoe damage over time spells. One "amusing" moment I had was when some party members got stuck on a repeatable trap. When they got back up, they would trigger the trap, die, repeat.

Finally, the complete segregation of game and story. I was doing a quest involving Blood Mages, the evil people who use magic that can control people and so on and so forth. Everyone in the party and the npcs were talking about how terrible and evil blood mages were, even though I myself was actually a blood mage. Nobody seemed to particularly care, even when I openly used blood magic against our opponents, even other blood mages, and then got a lecture about how terrible and evil blood magic is and all blood mages need to die.

Magic in Dragon Age is pretty fucking useless for the player, too. There's tons of interesting things that you see getting done, but you never got to use them. You get a bunch of shitty abilities and that's it.

I'm still going to finish it though. The characters are amusing, the story is nice, but I'm not sure if its' actually AS GOOD AS Baldur's Gate II.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sun Nov 15, 2009 8:42 am

Dragon Age failed to make the sale on me.

I dislike, well, everything those guys have ever done really.

But hey they talked really big about exciting sounding "revolutionary" features.

So I was like "It bears looking into"

Then I see the box and notice they are especially pushing Dragon Age by proudly trumpeting themselves as the authors of Mass Effect.

Which reminded me that yeah, the most RECENT game these dumb asses made was fucking Mass Effect.

And when they released it they happened to proclaim how revolutionary and fantastic IT was.

At which point I put the box down, refused to pay the 109+ Australian dollars they DARE to charge for it.

And thought "will I download it illegally to try out such a risky and overpriced title?".

...

"...Hell No."

So yeah.

They went from "I might buy it" to "Not even if it only cost me bandwidth" on the basis of their brilliant advertising team reminding me of their most recent history.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sun Nov 15, 2009 5:24 pm

I liked the few hours I played of Mass Effect (the beginning). Once I got to that space station, it led me to much running around and talking to everything. I was impressed that doing this did earn a little bit of experience with any new entries I picked up in the Space Encyclopedia of Science! It's not a bad system for rewarding explanation.

Other than that, I can't speak much much about the game.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 5:38 am

Dragon Age is pretty decent fun. The class balance is a bit unbalanced (multiple mages is good), but yeah it's not bad. I mean if thought BGII was bad don't get it, but if you liked BGII it's probably a good pick up.

If you're australian it's less than 60 bucks on steam.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 5:58 am

cthulhu wrote:If you're australian it's less than 60 bucks on steam.

Considering Australian bandwidth issues that's like telling us its less than 60 bucks by psychic alien telepathy.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 8:07 am

I like DAO so far but I also liked Mass Effect. The facial expressions in DAO are inexplicably less well done than ME though. On the plus side Claudia Black does voice acting for one of the partiable NPCs.

In other game news Borderlands is really fun. Assuming you find charging about shooting fools, looting stuff then finding the next lot of fools to kill fun, which I do. The coop makes the game.

Also, I bought CoD6, I wasn't going to since they screwed up the networking and tried to charge us 90USD on steam. But a bunch of my friends have it and say the networking is fine, that and one of them told me how to get it for 45USD, cheaper than US retail even. Haven't played yet though.

Caedrus · Post by **Caedrus** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 8:31 am

Manxome wrote:Eh, I still like Thousand-Year Door better. Though that's probably mostly because I'm a sucker for any sort of ability customization, and Bowser's Inside Story has nothing equivalent to the badges in the Paper Mario games.

And Thousand Year Door has nothing that compares to the action in Bowser's Inside Story. There is just nothing in there that plays like the boss battles in BIS, especially the later ones.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 9:23 am

I really fail to grasp why anyone would like Mass Effect.

It's like some sort of condensed personification of everything that's wrong with modern PC/X-Box RPG games.

I mean the loading in the elevators alone...

But also every single other thing. It is serious "nothing good about it whatsoever" territory.

Even the really vague "Very poorly ripped off from David Brin's Uplift Universe" feel that they'd painted over a last minute reskinning of a bullshit Knights of the Old Republic 3 game just made me angry that they hadn't instead gone and made an actual poor representation of the Uplift Universe itself.

Oh and about that knights of the old republic thing. Look at the plot line, the "special organization" you are in, the empire you are a part of.

Look at the direction the "mystery threat from outside" that the knights of old republic series was going in. Consider the foreshadowing in KOTOR 2.

Note the incredible similarities in engine, game play, even graphical style.

Mass Effect is rather obviously a shoddy salvaging of a canned KOTOR 3 isn't it?

Someone somewhere was working on KOTOR 3, the project changed direction into some sort of MMO vapor ware, and they reskinned the lot into "Mass Effect".

And also added every thing they could think of to make it suck.

As some sort of cruel prank on their fanboys. And I don't think they've stopped laughing about it over at bioware yet.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 7:12 pm

You apparently do. Maybe because other people look for different things in video games other than you do? And things you dislike, other people are okay with, or even like?

The plot line and setting honestly reminded me of Mega Man Legends from back in the day, only with space instead of ocean. Little bits of 'modern' civilization which are only possible because of using ancient technology to keep it running. Even what I've heard of the ending reminds me of a scaled-up editions of the ending of MML. However, I'm fine with that.

Even the characters and how things looked weren't anything special, but they worked. Running around the Citadel, I got the feeling this was normal life, even though I was talking with little round men in full body-suits and big lumbering people who announced the tone of their statement before saying it. It had some pretty nice immersion going on (for me, anyway. I can't speak for you.) I did indeed lose about an hour just running around, talking to people, and finding out/doing things for them.

It comes down like this: No accounting for taste. I like Terry Pratchett, but not many people I know do. I'd be able to put forth a well-reasoned argument as to why I like Pratchett, and it wouldn't make a difference. His brand of humor and writing style isn't to their liking. While I'm a little disappointed, that doesn't mean I believe them to all tasteless idiots who obviously are incapable of seeing Pratchett's enormous and shiningly obvious appeal.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 8:25 pm

How could you find the tiny, clunky, star wars rip off immersive?

How could running around on the usual tedious talky quests in a "tiny town" space station full of star wars rip off races (hint the "sexy" girly aliens are twilek replacements, the warrior dudes are those pig men etc...), how could that be immersion?

Anyone with a hint of critical observation skills should be screaming "not immersive NOT IMMERSIVE!" as they are constantly jarred by the tiny scale of the population and rooms in the "mega giant super space station", the short walks to the next loading point, the endless elevator wait to get to the next tiny area, the various god damn dead ends that you magically could not pass, the bizarre surreal CRPG architecture where guys just hang around (endlessly and stationary) in funny dead end rooms with no actual facitlities or private chambers or indeed ANYTHING attached, except a random store room or computer room for barrel looting or quest hacking points or something.

And the "characters" you meet, a bunch of lame reskinned star wars rip offs, with utterly lame agendas and crap character. Predictable demands and story lines, and that same stupid stupid star wars dark and light "morality choice" bull shit foisted wholesale onto a new game.

Anyway you didn't finish it. Care to consider why you didn't finish it?

I played far more than an "hour or two" of this game. And if you think my criticisms end at "typical boring crap in the space station" you'd be thinking wrong. This game got FAR worse as you got into the rest of it.

Far worse.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 8:30 pm

Just out of curiousity, what is your (TGD's) most hated game of all time?

You guys already know what mine is. I've whined about it on two separate occasions. But now I want to hear yours.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 8:35 pm

Probably World Of Warcraft.

Simply for being a game so bad it frequently inconveniences me even though I don't even play it.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 8:41 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Just out of curiousity, what is your (TGD's) most hated game of all time?

Well, there are a great deal of bad games out there, but I think I'm going to go with games that are most disappointing. And I'm going to start with one I feel is really overhyped.

Halo: Seriously, I don't see why this series of FPS is so popular. It's pretty much as vanilla as they come, you move slow as shit and in deathmatch, there's no way you can cross an open space without getting assfucked, because you run so damn slow. I never saw what the appeal of the Halo games. They seem like vanilla boring FPS to me.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 9:09 pm

I will always bear an undying hatred for the Dynasty Warriors (and that random japanese version) games. A lot of my friends love them, but I find them all incredibly pointless and tedious.

Concerning Halo, I have the first one for PC and it's pretty good. Not as good as, say, Half-life 1 or 2 or Shogo or Serious Sam or whatever, but it's far from horrible. The only experience I have with the sequels is from multiplayer played at other people's houses. I found that if you're playing splitscreen online and aren't really trying to be the best, it's not a bad experience.