The Gaming Den

So, I found a copy of Silent Hill 2 and bought it because Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation actually has nice things to say about it (and it was 10 bucks).

I can see why it gets the praise, now.

This is one of the most well-done games I've ever seen. The individual pieces of the game just...fit together.

Take the town itself. Silent Hill. A very small vacation town by a lake. I worked this out from the town's layout--a teeny little town with five or eight (different kinds of) restaurants and other touristy spots.

It's so nice to be shown something rather than told.

Gameplay took some getting used it. The default is tank controls, which I haven't used in years and experimented with the options before finding out a Zelda-style movement is available.

So, once that settled, I was running around freely. This turns out to be handy, because the enemies are slow.

The game compensates for this by filling the town streets with fog. Serious, 30-foot-visibility fog. So you can't see enemies until they're near you.

To compensate for its compensation, it gives you a small portable radio which hisses and makes static when monsters are nearby.

You have a long session of running around the city streets, getting more and more used to the controls and combat and getting used to keeping an ear out for the change in sounds.

The entire point of this exercise is to train you to depend on your hearing more than your vision, and get a routine up for fighting the enemies.

The point? The SECOND area is inside an apartment building with narrow hallways, small rooms, erratic lightning, and creepy-as-fuck sounds everywhere.

So I couldn't use my usual methods of fighting enemies, thanks to the cramped hallways. The lightning creeped me out, and every weird sound wound me up a little tighter until I jumped when my sister's Pokemon game did the small bell-ring before starting an evolution animation, and immediately started switching the camera to see what the hell could be making that sound.

I tried to play SH 2, after hearing things like the Zero Punctuation review, and one of my friends raving about it like mad, when she normally doesn't really go for videogames, but I was just unable to get into it, for some reason. I honestly don't know why-I mean, I played it late at night with all the lights off, that sort of thing, an atmosphere as conducive to horror as possible, but it just never happened. I was never truly frightened. I even had a hard time admiring the atmosphere from a clinical perspective. I think I got to the bowling alley or something before I was totally unable to muster the gumption necessary for further progress.

For whatever reason, I have just found games like System Shock 2 or even the Half-Life series to be much scarier, or, at the very least, possessing of a better atmosphere.

As such, Silent Hill 2 remains one of the few games, along with Galactic Civilizations 2 and Gothic 2, that I've desperately wished I could get into but have always been unable to immerse myself in.

The apartment building is something that really sold me on the game. It clicked that wandering the city streets for random stuff was really just conditioning me to depend on my sense of hearing to alert me to nearby baddies.

Then, in the apartment, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Constantly expecting something bad to pop out until I was actually getting worn out from the tension.

And then I realized that was all deliberate.

And I have to hand it to the makers for how well they made it work.

Dead Rising is made of rage fuel. I have never wanted to hurl a controller so badly in my entire life.

Are you trying to save everyone, PR? I can see that being Hulk-out frustrating. Have you leveled to 50 and gotten the Mega Buster? That makes it significantly easier. Easiest way to get Zombie Genocide is to cruise through the maintenance tunnels for a few hours. Running over zombies never gets old for me, YMMV.

TOZ wrote:Have you leveled to 50 and gotten the Mega Buster? That makes it significantly easier. Easiest way to get Zombie Genocide is to cruise through the maintenance tunnels for a few hours.

Damn, I saw this and I thought "Wait, Mega Man with Zombies? Where do I sign???"

Disappointed.

TOZ wrote:Are you trying to save everyone, PR?

Yes. I have the game saved in a position where it's virtually impossible to do so and clear all the case files, unfortunately. And no, I'm level 15-ish. I'm probably going to say "screw it" for this playthrough and try again on my next run.

Yeah, buffing up to level 50 is pretty easy while you're doing other endings, and it makes a world of difference on the difficulty. Even then, saving all the survivors is a serious test of patience. I've never hated myself enough to try.

Quantum: You can actually get a full Mega Man costume, and the Real Mega Buster, and run around zapping zombies to your hearts content.

TOZ wrote:Quantum: You can actually get a full Mega Man costume, and the Real Mega Buster, and run around zapping zombies to your hearts content.

The disappointment is now reversed.

Hey, anyone want to play some Starcraft II? The beta's up until Monday, I'm free most evenings after 5 EST.

I took my sister's Pokewalker (pedometer that came with Soul Silver) with me to work today, because she asked me too.

And I got home, and she was excited because it apparently had 17 watts when I took it with me, and I brought it back with 717.

Apparently, I do a lot of walking at work.

Apparently if you forget to take it out of your pocket when you put your clothes in the washing machine, one of two things will happen:
1. LEVEL 100, FUCK YEAH!
2. It stops working

WORTH THE GAMBLE!

Hmm. My Pikachu2 never recorded any steps while in the washer.

-Crissa

I got Tales of the Abyss. I'm liking it enough I'm avoiding finding out anything about the plot outside of the game itself. No spoilers, please!

HOWEVER, I have to crow about this.

I played Tales of Symphonia. I loved that game. Still do, really, despite its flaws. I spent two weeks of summer vacation burning through it.

I picked up a few things from it, so when I'm in a dungeon and I see a giant sword planted into the middle of the hallway, and I check it and it challenges me to a fight, I think "Sword Dancer!"

So I saved it. In Symphonia, the Sword Dancer was a hell of an optional boss who ended up giving you some sweet loot. It's also a hell of a fight when you first encounter it.

So, to put it in perspective, I had just beaten a boss fight. Three enemies, each one at about 3,000 HP each. They were fairly tough.

The Sword Dancer turned out to have 17,000 HP. He was insane.

But I'm proud of myself for beating it on the first time by using bits of strategy the game told me and taking advantage of the game's battle ssytem. First, the Sword Dancer moved extremely slowly. Thankfully, this is a real-time battle system where you can run around some. I kept out of range, and had all my party members keep casting magic at him from a distance.

He still almost TPK'd me. I ran out of Life Bottles and a couple of people were in single-digit HP (out of a max HP of 1200 or so), when I finished it.

Edit: This also gave me an appreciation for how well-made the battle system is. http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rsov6USKEQ0/0.jpg There's a picture. The red arrow at the top is over the Sword Dancer's head; it looks like a skeleton where partial Samurai armor and carrying a giant sword over its back. And the hit detection is such that his reach really is an advantage for him.

I like a game which requires me to think in order to win.

Anyone else looking forward to the new Monster Rancher DS game?

Ganbare Gincun wrote:Anyone else looking forward to the new Monster Rancher DS game?

Monster Rancher? Well I am now!

Jilocasin wrote:Monster Rancher? Well I am now!

Monster Rancher DS Wikipedia Page

Official Monster Rancher DS North American Site

Monster Rancher Metropolis - Monster Farm DS 2 Discussion Page

Keep in mind that they're porting over Monster Farm DS 2 to the US - they actually released two Monster Farm games for the DS already. I'm hoping that it will be good; Monster Rancher games can be somewhat... inconsistent in their quality levels.

I played Monster Rancher for the Playstation. I remember thinking to myself about how sexualized pixies were and the moral ramifications of owning and training a sentient creature as a fighting dog.

Then I got one of those eye things.

Psychic Robot wrote:
Then I got one of those eye things.

Ah Suezo, one of my favorites. Well that and Durahan.

Psychic Robot wrote:I played Monster Rancher for the Playstation. I remember thinking to myself about how sexualized pixies were

It's a video game - and a Japanese one at that - so over-sexualized Pixies are pretty much par for the course.

That being said, Pixies make for some pretty good INT-based strikers in most of the MR games. You just have to make sure that you get one with a subtype that emphasizes gains in INT, SKI, and SPD, and you'll be good to go.

Psychic Robot wrote:and the moral ramifications of owning and training a sentient creature as a fighting dog.

The moral ramifications in Monster Rancher are slightly different from those that are presented in Pokemon, but they still exist. In Pokemon, you're catching wild animals, befriending them, training them, and then pitting them against each other in duels to the death for fun and profit. In Monster Rancher, you're using barely-understood precursor technology left over from an ancient cataclysm to manufacture biological weapons with various levels of sentience and a natural penchant for bloodlust and pitting them against each other in duels to the death for fun and profit. Mind you, the monsters in Monster Rancher LOVE to fight - a big chunk of the game is placating their aggressive tendencies with food and items during their training - but I do wonder why the folks in Monster Rancher land don't just play soccer or something instead of watching bioweapons fight?

Psychic Robot wrote:Then I got one of those eye things.

That's a Suezo. Not as solid as a Pixie or a Tiger, but still a pretty good breed, especially if you give them a "well-behaved" subtype like a Gali or a Tiger. Unfortunately, they are a little more "well-rounded" then most INT-based strikers, which ends up being a detriment in a game where specialization is the key to success.

Leress wrote:

Ah Suezo, one of my favorites. Well that and Durahan.

Durahan is always a good choice for a POW-striker, but its artwork seems to wildly fluctuate between "awesome" and "craptastic". Alas, it looks like they're going to be "craptastic" in Monster Rancher DS. That being said, no one is sure how to unlock it yet - not even at Monster Rancher Metropolis - so it's probably going to be one of the very best monsters in the game.

Picked up Punch-Out Wii again. I had gotten to a point where I couldn't proceed and quit in disgust a while back. After picking it back up, I realize that all you need to to is hit the practice mode a couple of times to learn the patterns in a consequence-free environment, then fighting for realz is easy.

Gotta love how every character in the game is an ethnic stereotype of some sort.

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Picked up Punch-Out Wii again. I had gotten to a point where I couldn't proceed and quit in disgust a while back. After picking it back up, I realize that all you need to to is hit the practice mode a couple of times to learn the patterns in a consequence-free environment, then fighting for realz is easy.

Gotta love how every character in the game is an ethnic stereotype of some sort.

In the tradition of both Punch-Outs, I believe.

The SNES punch-out had a Jamaican boxer named Bob Charley who went on about rhythm a lot. The NES had Soda Popski, the pink Russian boxer.

The Japanese name of the Russian boxer was Vodka Drunkinski. Nintendo made them change the name for the US, but in the NES version he still made references to being drunk.

When the game was released, it was considered a huge point of contention that all the characters are speaking the correct language. (The French guy is speaking French, the German guy speaks German, etc. And it's all correct, they got native speakers to record the vocals.)

It probably doesn't stand up well if you aren't a fan of the old franchise. It is very far from a boxing simulator (although as was pointed out on Gamefaqs in reference to the guy from India that teleports around the ring, there isn't a rule against using Magic in actual boxing either). But I enjoy it.

I've never played Pokemon at all since playing P-Red like... 12 years ago, so I came across a picture of Exeggutor and I was all 'HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THAT'S FUCKING SCARY'.

So. Anyone have pictures of scary-looking Pokemon from future generations?