Gormongous
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Posts posted by Gormongous
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FTL
in Video Gaming
Played an engi game using mainly drones. I'm not sure how drones are viable without the recovery augmentation that essentially makes them free. Fell at the last boss stage because my paltry crew couldn't handle the invasions (and I forgot to flush them out the airlocks in time). Otherwise, A++ would engi again.
You should try the Layout B for Engi. One Engi alone in a ship with no sensors, one boarding drone, and two repair drones. It smacks of drone hard-more, as if that weren't already a tautology.
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Well, there's also the fact that Islam considers any visual depiction of God or His prophet to be blasphemy of the worst kind. As much as I hate to see the Muslim response be violence and hatred, I wonder why many in the West haven't picked up that pictures of Mohammad don't really make you that popular out east.
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FTL
in Video Gaming
YESSS, I just beat the rebel cruiser for the first time. Yes, it was on easy, but it was still a remarkably epic fight. After getting my ass kicked three times I changed my weapons load-out (mostly based on luck of course, you never know what you'll get, but I did make some informed decisions) and in the end I tackled it with the standard Kestrel weapons (Artemis missiles and Burst Laser II) augmented with the powerful Halberd Beam and the Ion Bomb weapon. Especially that last one proved invaluable in getting past those damned four shields. The three times I tried it with missiles I couldn't even scratch the thing, the missiles all missed no matter what I did. Bombs seem more reliable.
Hot tip: if you can destroy their helm, the ship is unable to dodge until it's repaired.
I remember Tom Chick complaining a few days ago that the combat in this game was boring, since there's no reason to target anything but weapons or maybe shields. I thought the same for my first half-dozen games, but now I see the depth there. I'll target the O2 room with breach missiles to suffocate the ship, target the helm to keep them from dodging or jumping, target the medbay before I send a boarding party over... Yeah, I'm really taken with this too.
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This sort of exercises provide another layer of understanding of an oeuvre but, I feel, can never negate the author intent.
That's a really interesting analysis, but wouldn't you say it's possible for an author to misinterpret their own work? Say, their use of elements and motifs were intended to produce one meaning, but they are ineffective in this and much more effective in producing another?
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Hmm, is this something only people who have submitted games can see? Right now I can't even see the voting percentage. Maybe they are changing that part because they are fed up of people like me whining that no game has gone over 15% of votes. XP
Well, Valve has only themselves to blame on that count, since it's fifteen percent of a number that apparently means nothing.
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The structure of the chapters breaks down in the middle. Up until that point each subsequent viewpoint has a character which experiences the previous viewpoint in 2 parts. But when we get to Zachry, he doesn't understand Sonmi's language, and on top of that he doesn't hear her story in 2 parts.
This has repercussions to the Sonmi section as well, because no-one in the higher section experiences her story in 2 parts, the split in her story is artificial instead of based on the next piece of narrative. For example, the split in the Cavendish story is due to Sonmi seeing only part of the movie, and being interrupted, then seeing the rest before she dies. Whereas the split in the Sonmi story is not explained as Zachry or Meronym experiencing her story in 2 parts.
This isn't really a criticism, I'm just trying to work through for myself whether this matters in some way. I guess the way I see it, this hints that splitting each story into 2 parts is just a storytelling device used by Mitchell and isn't meant to actually convey any meaning to the world.
Maybe because the chain is broken? The interconnected series of narratives reaches someone who is unable to understand them and pass them on, despite having heard the whole thing, so we devolve back to the beginning.
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Hemingway insisted up to his death that his novels were just stories, with no greater meaning. Does that mean we should stop studying them, since the author's had his say?
I can understand a viewpoint that accords a sort of primus inter pares status to the author's opinions of their own work, but overall I find it a shockingly narrow definition of art that confines itself to the conscious intentions of a single individual, however central to the process of composition. The audience is a participant in any work, though more obviously in certain mediums like video games, and if I find a work inspiring or meaningful in a certain way, who is the author to tell me that I'm wrong? I'm the one experiencing their work, an event totally removed from whatever the author might have had in mind when creating it.
You'd think that George Lucas and Ridley Scott would have taught people by now that the author, however influential or learned, is just one among many in the collaborative effort that is the creation and interpretation of a work. The merit and meaning of the latter exist outside and separate from them, at least in part. Even more authoritative figures like Thucydides, Aristophanes, Virgil, and Livy can be analyzed in ways they would have found foreign and even abhorrent, yet give us crucial insight into them and their culture, of which they appear to have been more or less unaware.
Sorry, I hate people going off on Barthes like he's proposing intellectual anarchy. If the Thumbs crew wants to spend their time rolling into walls in Army of Two or laughing at out-of-date technofetishism in The Wizard, their enjoyment isn't somehow less valid because it wasn't the creator's intention. There's no "right" way to read a book, watch a movie, or play a game.
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I actually found the first Borderlands really off-putting. There's always a razor's edge of enjoyment for me with FPS games, and Borderlands was simply doing too much to walk it straight. I also wasn't crazy about Torchlight either, but the beta for its sequel really really impressed me right after Diablo III left me cold, so I feel good preordering. The question is, Embermage or Engineer?
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I was this close to beating FTL on easy mode but I was screwed over by the totally bogus endgame. In my last move I put myself directly between the flagship and the HQ but instead of fighting it I got a screen telling me that the flagship had reached the HQ and that all was lost. The flagship was at a minimum two jumps away from the HQ, and the route the game said it would take was not a direct one to the HQ. I'd say it's a bug but the instructions they give you for the end are poorly written and don't match up with what actually plays out, so I can't claim to know how the endgame actually works.
I won't go into the details of my ship but suffice it to say it was totally god-like; in the final area I defeated four ships without taking any hull damage. If you can synchronize your other weapons to support them, beam weapons are totally where it's at. A hull laser can be awesome in the beginning to just annihilate ships in one or two volleys, but more than half the ships in the endgame don't have any system-less rooms so they just become less efficient burst lasers.
Does anyone else find that stores selling droids show up twice as much as stores selling weapons? Defensive droids can be useful but it's hard to justify an offensive one when it can't be aimed a specific system and doesn't have a cool-down bar telling you when it's going to fire. I find weapons to be much more efficient and fun to use and there a lot of cool combinations, but it's down to luck as to which ones you have the opportunity to get.
The game ends when it's one jump away, not when it actually arrives. I agree that it's silly.
Beam weapons are great, but unless I'm careful I fall into a rut that makes it impossible to beat the final boss. It's really easy to rely on a single missile launcher and a beam weapon to make do, but if I don't upgrade I invariably A) run out of missiles randomly and get stranded, or
reach the final boss, whose second-stage defense drone makes him impossible to kill. Sometimes this happens even if I am careful, simply because, as FesteDaFool says, shops seem to carry drone parts twice as often as crew or weapons.In any case, there's this weird balancing act between kitting your ship out for the little fights and keeping an eye on the endgame boss, who often requires completely different strategies.
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One criticism I have with the book's structure
I always interpreted it that each character was just tied through chance to the others, not that they were reincarnations. That's just how I read it, and it makes the ending a bit more poignant - that it's every human's ability and responsibility to do well by themselves and others. Otherwise, it just pertains to the one soul who is being reincarnated.
However, this is completely wrong as Mitchell has explicitly stated "Literally all of the main characters, except one, are reincarnations of the same soul in different bodies throughout the novel identified by a birthmark'.
Oh well.
Agreed.
Resorting to mysticism and the supernatural undermines so much of what makes that theme otherwise compelling.
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I stumbled on a picture of Tom Hanks as Dermot Hoggins a few days ago, man does he look silly.
I just have so many misgivings about the movie myself. It seems like it's going to prefer literal over thematic interconnections, probably because film does those better, but what film doesn't do well is convey intertextuality and the unreliability of narrative. If it happens onscreen in a movie, it's assumed to have happened in reality, unless the audience is given wavy lines or or a blurry lens to inform otherwise. There's less consciousness of a story being a story first and anything else second.
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Die forty times and I'll think about it.
It tracks that in the stats screen! I've repaired 247 systems, 41 of which were by one poor Engi named Jeff. Nick Breckon is always a Rockman for me.
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So, I have an idea for an "alchemic" skill tree system that I'm sure isn't exactly original, but I'm perplexed as to why it hasn't been used more often in games. Well, I can imagine it could be rife with imbalances and unforeseeable problems, but it still seems worth a try.
Basically, I'm disattisfied with how RPGs typically put you into a "class" than give you a bunch of linear paths to travel, all based on simply dumping points into confined categories.
I would propose a system where players choose from different descriptors to further color a base class. Instead, or perhaps in addition to, simply leveling up certain skills they'd instead choose ideas like "fire," "rage" or "bardsong" to modify the entire class. Hence, "alchemic," since you could choose different descriptors to end up with entirely different sorts of characters, not just distinguished by different skill-point allocations.
Sounds a lot like the way races in the Smallworld board games are built, in addition to Binding of Isaac like you mentioned. I'd love to see it implemented, but wouldn't it be incredibly design-intensive, since it requires devs to anticipate all the permutations? Or are you think of something like a slightly less restricted version of skill runes from Diablo III?
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Did anyone ever get the video the Thumbs mentioned in a podcast long ago, with the creepy black-and-white Mario?
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In general I think Mitchell's biggest strength is his ability to inhabit a character and give it a voice. That's definitely the biggest joy of Cloud Atlas for me.
It's definitely true that, especially being such a sprawling novel, Cloud Atlas doesn't have such particular questions to raise as The Sense of an ending; but in the aggregate I think it does meditate considerably on the nature of humanity. It just does it more through the totality of the thing (particularly in the second half) than through the close interrogation of individual memories.
Yeah, the strong sense of intertextuality between the different vignettes of the novel, literally as well as thematically, to give a fairly stirring picture about the freedom and resilience of knowledge against the caprices of the humans that create it. I was reading this during my medieval exams, as well as while playing through the unbelievably excellent Analogue: A Hate Story, both of which Mitchell's implicit and explicit commentary on information culture resonated with.
Does anyone want to talk about the comet-birthmark thing? I personally found that the most fictional of the various little touches.
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Oh man, I found the stasis pod again (for what it's worth, it wasn't in the Rock homeworlds this time, just a Rock-controlled sector -- so I guess I need to take it to the homeworlds?), and also stumbled onto the stealth ship while I was at it! This game is really good.
(It's kind of a shame that the "roguelikes" thread has basically become the FTL thread, but whatever.)
I ran across it again myself and totally blew it. Looks like you have a chance to find the pod in a Rock sector, with the Rock Homeworld giving a 100% chance; take it to a science center in a Zoltan sector, or maybe just the Zoltan Homeworld, to get a Crystal dude out of it; then finally take it to another Rock sector, presumably so that he can find you his fancy ship (this is conjecture, the only sector between the Zoltan Homeworld and The Last Stand was a Rock sector). Of course, I missed that last stage. Looking on the half-completed wiki, it seems like a pretty nice ship.
And yeah, right now FTL has hijacked everything, but it'll blow over once Torchlight 2 comes out, for me at least.
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All the racial ships are found by quests at their respective homeworlds (I think. I've yet to encounter a friendly slug-person). Each one of them plays totally different, which gives the game a lot of variety I was deathly afraid it'd be missing.
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I just beat the boss's first form (on easy), but then lost the game because I jumped to the wrong place and he reached the base before I could get to him again. So that kind of sucked. I also found a mysterious damaged stasis pod somewhere in the Rock homeworlds, but I never managed to figure out what to do with it.
Regarding the giant spiders encounter, I'm pretty sure I fought them successfully, but I don't think the reward was anything special. Probably just some combination of fuel, missiles, drone parts, and scrap.
Ooh, I think the mysterious crystal pod has a chance of starting a quest to unlock the last and rarest ship. I passed that up stupidly the one time I encountered it, thinking it was just another crewman.
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I'm unlocking as many of the ships and layouts as I can on Easy first. Jumping into a sun with a Mantis ship lying in wait is hard enough without having all the tools available and a clear mind to boot.
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I don't know why I wasn't expecting Robocop to actually look different. Like a Crytek soldier rather than, y'know, Robocop.
Half Crytek soldier, half cybernetic pervert in my eyes.
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What do you need to do to get the Zoltan cruiser? So far I've unlocked the Engi ship and the stealth ship.
The stealth ship is actually kind of great but is also sort of hard mode because you literally start with no shield module.
You'll get a quest in the Zoltan homeworld sector, provided you have a Zoltan aboard. You have to chase this Rebel ship, which is really aggravating to catch, and then choose to negotiate instead. You start out with the great weapon setup and the fancy "super" shield thing that has to be depleted before anything can be hit. The only drawback is that you don't have enough power to run everything from the start, but that's fixed after maybe one fight.
I will be humble and admit that it took me three jumps and fifty percent hull damage to realize that the stealth ship didn't start with shields. It's a cool ship in some ways, but it doesn't suit my playstyle at all. Neither do the Engi or Rock cruisers, really. Finite weapons systems like drones and missiles make me nervous. The game makes me nervous.
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Playing FTL the past few hours, the Zoltan cruiser has rapidly become my hands-down favorite. You start out with the Halberd, a disgustingly effective beam weapon, and a light missile launcher. Get a better launcher to knock out the shields of bigger ships later on and you'll carve a bloody path of death from day one. I only started upgrading shields and engines as an afterthought, since most enemies weren't even getting one shot off. I can't even imagine what would've happened if I'd had a pre-ignition charger...
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I was (?) like this as well. Save, look the one way, load, look the other way, load again, first way was better, should have saved that try. And keeping all the shit, later somebody might need 5 pieces of broken furniture.
Now I learned/force myself to roll with my decisions - and look up stuff like 'do I need those 20 trinkets that clutter up my inventory in a later quest?' while playing.
Witcher 2 did this so hard. "Hey, remember that vendor trash back in the first act? Guess what, they're components for the best items in the game! What, you sold them when they didn't prove useful during the first twenty hours of gameplay? Didn't you notice they were marked 'quest', like half the junk in the game?"
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What's a good source to get Mask of the Betrayer? It does not appear to be on Steam or GOG, my usual stops.
Atari's a little suspicious of digital distribution, I hear. You might be even further up the creek, since the whole NWN2 package doesn't appear to play too nice with Windows 7.
FTL
in Video Gaming
Posted
I think it's really just that the boss requires you to have been prepping since maybe the fourth or fifth sector to beat him and him specifically, if only because he has three different incarnations that each foil certain specialized builds. If I had a dollar for every time I got to the Last Stand and realized A) I won't last long enough for my boarding parties to disable his weapons,
I've relied too heavily on a beam-cum-missile build that has no hope of getting through his second, drone-heavy form, or C) his shields are recharging too fast for my laser build to punch through -- and therefore have to quit or just let myself get destroyed -- I'd be able to fund every gaming kickstarter out there.
Honestly, the boss is playing by different rules than you, unlike every other enemy. You're not allowed to upgrade your weapons, drones, and reactor to sport the kind of weaponry he has available, which is why I've only been able to beat him through cheese (either cloak-and-teleport or, once, a perfect storm: two dual-missile lauchers with a beam weapon and pre-igniter that barely overwhelmed his defenses every time, before he could kick my ass). You've just got to avoid being tempted to invest in upgrades beyond what is absolutely necessary, so that you'll be able to have the cloak and teleporter that can kill the boss.
As a side note, I feel very very strongly that this game will have only an occasional presence in my life after I unlock all the ships. I really enjoy the structure there, even if it's largely random in execution (have W system at X level in Y system and win Z encounter), but once that's gone I have no clue what will motivate me.