Gormongous

Yeah, the mouse is much more responsive now. The stupid interface oversights, like a row of selectable unit portraits with statuses along the top of the screen or the ability to pull up a context-sensitive menu of actions by holding left click on a target, still remain, though. Also, I have a new winner for "best random name generation". William "Duke" King, come on down!

On a side note, I love neo-Latin slogans like the motto for the fictional XCOM organization. I know they'd rather I translate VIGILO - CONFIDO as "I watch, I believe," but I'd much prefer to translate it as "I'm awake, I'm confident." Latin's fun like that. If you asked me, I'd phrase it TUEMUR QUIA CREDAMUS but that's why no one's hiring classicists these days.

I hate responding to the posts line by line, it makes me feel like a belligerent asshole, but you wrote a monster, so here goes. I think we're agreeing, maybe? For me, the purpose of well-tuned difficulty in games is to force a player to explore the game's systems in full as they seek out an optimal strategy. Otherwise, you get Bioshock, as mentioned earlier, where the first weapon you are given remains effective for 95% of combat encounters and can brute-force the other 5%. With Torchlight II, the skill system was maybe too balanced for to encourage experimentation? My starting skill combo never became ineffectual enough to write off all the points I'd invested in it, and brief forays into other combos just made me feel like I was wasting my time. Respec systems leave me of such mixed mind. I've never found one that kept me from thinking, "This is bullshit, none of my choices mean anything," without making me think, "This is bullshit, I can't undo any of my mistakes." I don't have a solution. And yet my Halo-playing friends in high school screamed bloody murder at Bungie for "dumbing down" the multiplayer balance when they fixed the pistol in the sequel. Player (especially fan) perception of balance and difficulty is perhaps the most unreliable epistemology in the universe. If I were to guess, I'd say it's just a blind holdover from the first Diablo, which got it from the harsher roguelike model it adapted. Even then, I was more afraid of the item durability loss, which was expensive, than the health loss, which was trivial, so good on the Torchlight devs for giving traps some bite and giving back the anticipation/tension loop some more thematic teeth. God, remember how item durability worked in Diablo? It dropped so rapidly and if it hit zero the item was just gone, poof. Talk about a failure spiral.

The power of the human brain to form emotional connections to hard-won achievements is really stunning. I love -- I mean deeply love -- my first four squaddies in the new XCOM: "Congo" Lebedev, "Echo" Rosetti, "Rampage" Eriksen, "Smokey" Ramirez... Their randomly generated names and faces are so much more meaningful to me than the achievement that popped up when they earned those nicknames. But it takes real design talent to implement the kind of rewarding balance in difficulty. I don't know whether it's cost-effective over the long run for companies to invest in it.

Not even "optimal". Often it's simply "sufficiently effective to discourage experimentation". I'll never know how many awesome Torchlight II builds I'm missing out on because I wasted points in a few skills that didn't compare well to my current tactics, but may have paid off enormously later. Say what you will about Diablo 3, and I do, but Blizzard made sure to put the lowest possible barrier on experimentation. Which is probably why it's so widely regarded as being ridiculously easy for the first twenty hours.

I mean that if you're getting fired at from an angle of eight-nine degrees from the cover's facing, the cover is still effective, with no degradation of performance. Only once the cover could be said to block not a single part of the target does the target count as "flanked".

It's a really cool thing when singleplayer games allow themselves to be broken like that. It's the pinnacle of the system mastery loop a lot of gamers feed off of.

I think, from the two times it's happened to my squad, they'll shoot their own teammates if A) they elect to shoot but the object of their freak-out isn't in sight, or they elect to flee but the cover they've decided on is occupied by a teammate. That may just be apophenia on my part.

It took me like six hours of gameplay before I realized that protection from cover was not strictly directional and that it'll let you know when flanking has compromised it by turning yellow or red. It took me about the same amount of time to realize that cover doesn't block line-of-sight, or rather only blocks it sometimes in weird ways. There's no advantage to posting your guy at the end of that car rather than the middle, since only walls block line-of-sight. I do hate that sometimes the miss animations involve my dude unloading three shots in the back of his teammate up ahead. If they're not going to model accidental hits beyond a little geometry destruction, I wish they'd at least tweak the animations to avoid such situations. It's a game system, which just means needing to get comfortable inside those little quirks. I'm sure I'll be set by my next campaign, but I'm having too much fun owning the battlefield with plasma rifles and stealth armor. I probably use the grappling hook way too much, in situations where it's actually detrimental.

I've had trouble like Lork talked about, where the camera snaps back to a ground-floor view sometimes when I try to scroll up, and on occasion the cursor will flip out when I try to select a space on certain elevated surfaces, but I don't think I'm having any issues like you speak of. Most of my problems have been with the free-look aiming, namely that if I try to select anything but an enemy the camera freaks out and flings me all over the map. I'm trying not to hate this game for the obvious compromises it's made, particularly because almost every other part of it is incredibly fun, but I really really wonder if the seven people who'll play this on consoles were worth it. Speaking of things I do like, this may have the best random (code)name generation of any game ever. One of my starting dudes was Leif Eriksen, who got the moniker "Rampage" when he became my all-star Assault point man. He was recently promoted to colonel after Operation Blinding Tears. Yes. Now if only he didn't sound like he hailed from Middle America...

This is officially the slowest install from disc that I've ever sat through. Baldur's Gate II was loaded into the ancient recesses of my first PC faster than this. Going on an hour and change now...

Those are my thoughts exactly. It's an arbitrary decision, but it forces the player to experience the consequences of standing and fighting for at least one turn, instead of taking an ill-considered shot and then bugging out, no consequences.

Hah, I remember playing that game in beta a long time ago. I was impressed by the granularity of simulation, but the interface just wasn't up to the task of communicating everything going on. My best playthrough, where I actually made it to a proper city and glimpsed some of the plot, I suddenly started getting cold and becoming dehydrated for no reason. I chugged all my water and piled on clothes like a madman, but it wasn't enough and I died. Combing through the logs after the fact, I think I ate some spoiled food or had an allergic reaction, but the game didn't tell me this one simple thing, which would have been stunningly obvious to a real person in that situation, and so I couldn't take appropriate measures. So yeah, NEO Scavenger. Cool game, but fuck it.

It's a dead heat between Europa Universalis III, which is most relatable in terms of abstract strategy game concepts, and Crusader Kings II, which is most relatable in terms of affective RPG concepts. If made to choose, I'd probably give preference to the latter, if only because of Paradox's increasing skill at interface design and the extent to which RPG mechanics have infected so many other genres. We'll see how Europa Universalis IV shifts that balance, especially since it sounds like it's incorporating a few CK2 mechanics itself.

I thought about getting a copy today (there's a Best Buy in the nicer part of town that can easily be tricked into breaking release dates if you order online and choose the "pick up in store" option), but the game's Steamworks, right? So I'd go through all that trouble and then have to wait until Steam unlocked it at midnight. Not worth it, I'll save it for the weekend or next.

I can't come up with any specific examples, but I'm thinking of the incredibly large and stark pebbling textures used for stones that scream "THIS IS A STONE LIKE GRANITE" from half a mile away, or the kind of video game grass that comes up to the player avatar's eyes in most games.

This is just a guess on what constitutes a small part of your complaint, but I imagine that they don't comment even when a game's good because then the absence of a comment would only indicate a bad game.

Very well put. It's funny when you think how art, particularly narrative in form, is this one area of human activity where intent is still king.

I understand that the ASUS P8Z77-V LK is probably a good bet. It seems pretty full-featured and has good fan controls. The only caveat is if you're planning to use Crossfire or SLI, the PCI-E bandwidth is only 8x for each card, but it's 16x for a single card, which it looks like you have.

I loved the brief discussion on Oregon Trail and its educational potential. The benefit to be gained from allowing students to learn by interacting with authentically constructed systems, rather than just by flinging facts at them, is enormous in my opinion. Of course, it gets more difficult when history retreats into the increasingly undocumented swaths of time before the Renaissance, but that makes the few successful attempts really stand out. Case in point: King of Dragon Pass. Yeah, I know it has duck people and the like, but playing that for a few nights accurately recreated a variety of things I'd spent months wrapping my head around from high-level scholarly monographs on early Germanic culture by names like Wolfram and Thompson. The cherry on the cake came when I realized my tribes had been self-destructing because my secular twenty-first century ass was ignoring sacrifices and magical spells in favor of concrete things like agricultural development and cattle-raiding, which would naturally have horrified almost any member of Western society prior to the seventeenth century. Really, there are far too many historical games, most of all Paradox's grand strategy games, that fail to model properly the utter irrelevancy of the rational actor in history and politics, if only through systems working at cross purposes. Myself, I would love a game that had you manage a medieval monastery, taking in oblates and electing abbots, acquiring land and giving out benefices, playing the local bishop off the local lord, trying all the while to balance economic imperatives with personal and spiritual goals. It's one of many underappreciated yet crucial aspects of history, and games have the most apt tools to address it. Edit: I don't mean to make King of Dragon Pass sound like a boring exercise in academics. It's got this awesome sense of organic and intuitive discovery that strongly encourages roleplaying on a level few games manage. It's just that said roleplaying also happens to have a great deal of verisimilitude with Bronze- and Iron-Age European culture, which gives my nerd heart thrills and chills.

Preferably a K model, but yeah. Sandy and Ivy Bridge perform just fine as i5s. If you're going to get a new motherboard, I strongly recommend looking for PCI-E 3.0 and native USB 3.0 compatibility. Both of those things I stinted on and they gave me a headache later. You'll also need DDR3 RAM, but that's hardly a huge expenditure.

Actually, a upgraded medbay occasionally allows you to avoid those random scenarios where part of your ship's capabilities are disabled by rerouting the damage to the medbay. Most of the time it really doesn't matter whether my engines are temporarily disabled or not, but at least they recognize the medbay needs more uses than just healing.

I think there's a lot to be said about the design gulf between a game that offers you all possible choices and a game that offers you only useful choices. I've seen vocal advocates for both, though I tend towards the latter.

I have to say that the Mantis, Slug, and Crystal are by an order of magnitude the hardest ships to unlock. They all rely on the player making upgrades and choices counter to received knowledge, which would otherwise lose you the game. I unlocked the Engi, Stealth, and Zoltan cruisers all in my second run ever. The Rock and Federation ships followed right after, when I gave the Zoltan ship a test drive. It's now been like forty games and only once I decided to cheat did I get the Mantis and Slug ships. I don't know how I was supposed to guess some of these unlock conditions.

If you kept the tone light, I could certainly see 1960 working. I'm also going to recommend Pandemic, if only because it's a great game to recommend to newbies, whatever the situation.