sclpls

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Posts posted by sclpls

  2. Posted

    If you look at Brough's high score for Thunderbolt Jade he uses four philosopher's stones! I'm currently right behind him on the leaderboards with a high score of 191, and I used Choco_marsh's configuration with a philosopher stone in the top right-hand corner of the board, where it is difficult to accidentally level it up.

     

    I hear you about Oko the Gnome. Because of his weakness you actually need to move around the board differently compared to how you play any of the other characters so that means for experienced players your odds of screwing yourself because of ingrained movement habits are extremely high. That being said, I still prefer that as a challenge to characters like Susannah Holy Templar, Fey Sorceress Ixxthl and Johnny of the Birds whose disadvantages just make the game much more tedious to play.

     

    I think it is gonna take awhile before people discover truly abusive combos with the charge mechanic, although I think the flow of the game state will be somewhat constant where it makes the mid game a lot more challenging, but the late game considerably easier.

     

    868-HACK is neat, but there are some hidden mechanics in the game that once I found out about them put me off the game in a pretty big way. Still worth playing for a couple of bucks though.

  5. Posted

    On 4/3/2018 at 6:03 AM, twmac said:

    GTA Vice City had a mission with remote control planes attacking boats and that made me quit.

     

    Mafia II, I got to the mission where there was an extreme spike in difficulty in about chapter 13/14 and as much as I was sort of enjoying the story, I could not be bothered with that so I binned it.

     

     

    That GTA Vice City mission is what came to my mind when I saw this thread.

  6. Posted

    Into the Breach and Cinco Paus (where I am in a one sided competition with Chris Remo that unfortunately I've been on the losing end of for the last two weeks I think) are the games that have completely dominated my time lately. Really enjoying games that just have a really tight grid space so that even with all the random configuration elements end up having this puzzle-like quality to them. It is great when you have actions/effects that can cause chain effects because in that kind of densely designed space the opportunity for those crazy sequences to fire off is really high.

  7. Posted

    So far my favorite mech squads have been the Blitzkreigs and the Flame Behemoths. I especially like the Flame Behemoths. Setting the whole map on fire is so satisfying, although they do have a lot of trouble dealing with the burrowing monsters.

     

    Also personally the pilot dialog really works for me in terms of just doing some little things to bring out characters. I don't know why, but I never really developed any attachment to any of the crew members in FTL, they were just little mindless automatons to me. This isn't really a criticism of FTL since I know a lot of people did develop an attachment to them, imagining backstories, and stuff like that. Just interesting how these different approaches will work for some people and not others.

  10. Posted

    For me it is Prey. A lot of good games this year, but nothing in my mind comes close to it. I've waited so many years to play something that feels like a proper spiritual successor to System Shock, and I'm so grateful that Arkane made something this wonderful.

  11. Posted

    There is a lot of focus these days on the crypto-currencies themselves, but I think the governments need to pay more attention to the blockchain tech that makes the crypto-currencies possible. Right now there are multiple companies in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley that are working to create blockchains that would easily enable the packaging, slicing, and repackaging of opaque financial instruments without the sort of regulatory oversight those instruments would typically receive. For anyone familiar with the details of the last financial crisis, that should set off a ton of alarm bells. All of which is to say that since the U.S. federal government has been taken over by a clown show, there are a lot of very bad things approaching on the horizon.

  13. Posted

    There are a couple of units that are designed to deal with Tier 1 spam. Skunk, Boar, and Fox can all annihilate an opponent's army that has overcommitted to T1 spam. Most defensive structures help mitigate T1 spam as well. It's really hard for Tier 1 units to push efficiently into the enemy base with a well placed turret.

  14. Posted

    I've seen a lot of comparisons to Sacrifice too because of the commander unit, although I never played Sacrifice so I'll defer to others on the validity of those comparisons.

     

    I think it is a real shame that most of the panel didn't really engage with the multiplayer component of the game. Whatever happened to the 3MA attitude of "who are all these weirdos that play the single player campaign of RTS's?"? Because I think the multiplayer is where T&T really shines. Meanwhile the single player campaign felt like an awful slog to me.

     

    I didn't really pay much attention to the storyline, but in Tom Chick's interview with Andy he said the dark nature of the story was just because nature is cruel and violent. He used the aesthetics of the Russian Revolution as an obvious comparison, but I don't think he necessarily had some concrete political or historical argument he was advancing. That's probably why it came across as "muddled" to the panel.

     

    I think the multiplayer matches feel just as thrilling and exciting as watching a pro Starcraft 2 match, but obviously it doesn't demand nearly as much from the player to reach that level. The quickness of the matches means you learn similarly quickly. It also has an excellent replay system to facilitate learning. Got stomped by someone, and don't quite understand what happened? You can watch the replay and copy some stuff they did the next match.

     

    I'd also add that ranked matchmaking so far has felt pretty balanced to me, and most people I've spoken to. I gather that it gets weird once you get towards the top of the leaderboard, but when you're starting out everything is fine. T&T might have a smaller playerbase than some other games with bigger budgets behind them, but because of the brevity of the matches you can get into a match quickly, and the odds are you'll be playing against someone at a similar skill level to your own. The difficulty people have starting out is that new players don't really know how to defend their bases properly, so that's always going to be an issue. When I started playing ranked matches I was able to win the majority of games by just rushing lizards. As you rank up you start playing against people that know what they're doing, and that stops being effective, but you can go far when starting out while playing against people that don't scout properly, do weird things like rush T3 warrens, etc. The effectiveness of T1 rushes also got mitigated by the buff to the HP of warrens, although that doesn't do much good if players make bad choices about where to place their warrens.

     

    For people that want to check out the strategic depth of the game I recommend following chipfromouterspace and Zeno_Akoop on twitch. They are top tier players, and you can learn a lot from watching them play to understand how you should think about your approach to the game because they are really good at narrating their thought processes. They also play whatever compositions they feel like. So contra what someone on the panel was suggesting, the game actually has a ton of flexibility in terms of viable strats you can run.

     

    Anyway, I think anyone that ever thought pro SC matches were cool, but it's never something they thought they could get into should check out T&T. For years I thought the RTS genre was just not something I really could play anymore. It turns out I just needed to play one where being able to learn the strategy wasn't a complex task, and didn't have some crazy demands on the APM it expected out of the player.

     

     

  15. Posted

    My guesses:

     

    1. Dota 2

    2. XCOM: EU

    3. Dishonored 2

    4. Prey

    5. XCOM 2

    6. Spelunky

    7. Civ 5

    8. Thief

    9. Hitman

    10. EU4

     

    My actual list:

     

    MyBLPFy.jpg

     

    Pretty close! I hadn't realized I had spent that much time on Dark Souls 3 but I guess it makes sense since I got about mid way through the game, and then picked it back up at some point and started a new playthrough. I almost picked Rocket League but thought it was probably around no. 11. A lot of the recent immersive sims games are high up on my list because I'll play one, and then my wife will play it as well.

  17. Posted

    I don't care about VS because I could never be bothered to put in the time to learn how to play the different infected properly. And since I couldn't do that VS was never an interesting competitive experience for me.

     

    I've played a bunch of L4D, but it has been awhile for me, so I'd be happy to play with newcomers.

  19. Posted

    I liked whoever brought up the Orpheus & Eurydice myth. That's a great pull.

     

    One of my favorite twitter accounts at the moment is this guy: https://twitter.com/ramontorrente

     

    He likes to explore associative connections between particular camera shots in Season 3 and various paintings/other shots (sometimes from Lynch, sometimes from other artists) that have striking resemblances. For me at least, this is the great sort of activity of modern art: suggestive connotations, allusions, references, patterns etc. that form loose rather than concrete chains of meaning. Allow those to continually accumulate without any particular restrictions until you have a dense electrified network where the brain is spinning with activity, a nimble vortex that allows one to think in a less restrictive manner, that is, without the baggage of ordinary life, media.

     

    Some of my favorite tweets he's done (using spoiler tags for size):

    Spoiler

     

     

     

     

     

  21. Posted

    One of these days I'll commit to replaying Bioshock 2. The last time I tried replaying it I was in a situation where I had setup a fight vs a Big Daddy. I managed to take the Big Daddy out, but in the middle of that fight a 2nd Big Daddy showed up out of nowhere and took me out. And because of that both Big Daddies respawned which felt like such utter bullshit to me that I didn't feel like playing anymore.

     

    My suspicion is that the current conventional wisdom that Bioshock 2 is actually the best Bioshock way overstates things, but the game deserves more credit than it received when it first came out.

  22. Posted

    Thanks for the explanation. When the expansion was first announced I was super skeptical about what they were trying to do, but you've convinced me that its worth checking out at some point. Normally I'd just wait for the 3MA verdict but ahh... honestly I'd rather they just skip it hahaha.

  24. Posted

    I've been playing Deus Ex: HR so it is kind of funny to go back and see the criticisms that are leveled against Mankind Divided (which I purchased, but have yet to play). Not that the criticisms aren't warranted, but man is Deus Ex HR's plot dumb as bricks! When the game came out I never managed to get pass the 2nd boss because I had invested all my augmentations into a stealth/hacking build and got owned by the super combat heavy bosses even on easy difficulty. Playing now on easy difficulty modes, with a more balanced aug build, plus the developers going back and adding some baby's-first-win methods of dealing with the bosses means I can actually progress through the game (I'm still getting owned a lot though, I dunno why, but I find this game hard). The beginning of HR is amazing, but the game has taken a turn for the stupid:

     

    -I immediately get back to Detroit, and the boss dude is like, "oh btw the illuminati are totally real, guy".

    -The game pulls a time for you to lose all your cool shit and wander around a massively complex level of shipping crates (whhhhhyyyyyyyyyy)

    -The game keeps being like "trust no one" but provides no agency to like not actually trust anyone

    -Bad guy with a Southern accent does the "I'm going to rant at you over the intercom" move.

     

    ... And plenty of other things. I dunno, I think HR has aged very poorly, and I'm not impressed with the parts I never got to.

  25. Posted

    2 hours ago, Gormongous said:

    XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is really good. It improves every aspect of the game in an additive way, so the first few hours of a new campaign feel overfull and underexplained, but it settles into a great rhythm soon enough. I've stayed up way past my bedtime playing it for two nights running now, and I'm excited to do it tonight, too. I hope to have more thoughts once I've actually sunk my teeth further into the game, so stay tuned!

     

    For the first Firaxis XCOM I ended up not liking the expansion despite the intial excitement because the game ended up feeling very bloated to me, and I rarely felt like investing in the new gadgets was worth the expense over tried and tested strategies. Do you have a sense for whether the game feels rebalanced, or is it just XCOM 2 with more stuff?