baekgom84

Can you elaborate a little bit (without spoilers, if possible) on how exactly the encounters improve? I'm still debating whether or not to marathon this thing over the weekend before I have to give my borrowed PS3 back. If I feel like the gameplay is going to improve a lot from this point onwards, I'll be much more inclined to give it a shot.

Like others have said, I think it often depends on the person. My wife has slowly become more and more interested in gaming as she watches me play, but anything that is even slightly mechanically challenging is off-limits for her (this includes games with QTEs like The Walking Dead, and FPS perspective is hard for her to navigate, so Gone Home is also out). On the other hand, she quickly gets bored with the sort of games that are often recommended for young kids, and as a non-native speaker of English, she can find wordy adventure games a little off-putting. The one game that I got her somewhat invested in was - somewhat absurdly - XCOM. When set to easy, it was a good balance of letting her take her time with decisions, while also not being too wordy, patronizing, or very clearly for children.

I don't really want to see a sequel to SMAC, either an official one or just 'in spirit'; I want the same game with updated graphics and rebalanced/tweaked gameplay mechanics. I would be too afraid that a true sequel wouldn't be able to capture the quality of either the writing or character of the original, so I would rather all of that content just be imported wholesale, with only aesthetic and gameplay elements updated. Ditch the unit workshop, or at least make it more useful. It's either amazing or absurd, or both, that SMAC still has arguably the best and most mature writing of any video game to date.

This is something I just started thinking about, but you know what else I hate? And this isn't just exclusive to The Last of Us, plenty of other games do it as well (Tomb Raider comes to mind). It's the absurdly gruesome death scenes that play whenever you fail. It's like the game is rubbing it in my face every time I screw up. "Good job, loser! Now Joel is DEAD!" I mean, I feel bad enough for failing, did you really have to show me a scene of a bloater tearing off his face? I was similarly disturbed in Tomb Raider whenever I mistimed a QTE and was witness to a very detailed scene which involved Lara being violently impaled on a sharp metal object.. I actually think I try as hard as possible to avoid dying almost exclusively because of this reason. It didn't bother me as much in Uncharted or Tomb Raider, because in Uncharted the death scenes were nowhere near as explicit, and in Tomb Raider I just... didn't really feel very attached to Lara. But I like Joel, and I don't like feeling responsible for getting him savagely murdered. It doesn't help that TLOU is a game that is deliberately unforgiving. I'm now starting to wonder if anyone else has this issue.

I can't say I really hate the roaming aspect, I just find it a little frustrating at times in a game where I'm mostly just trying to make progress and hit the next story beat. It's really the combat that gets me. I mean, I like that they've gone for a brutal and desperate approach - really compliments the whole theme of the game, which is cool - but I thought the melee combat mechanics were garbage; possibly even worse than they were in Uncharted 3 (and that's saying something!) It's mind-bendingly frustrating when you get swarmed by runners, and then a clicker moves in and chews your neck off. Maybe I'm just not playing it correctly? A lot of these issues would be more or less irrelevant to me if you could just save wherever you wanted. What I wouldn't give for this game to be on PC, with quicksaves and mouse/keyboard controls... (not to mention the graphics!) Anyway, like I said before, I'm currently in the hotel, I think maybe 1/3 or so through the game? I'll probably only have access to this Playstation for the remainder of this weekend, and I'm debating whether or not to put in a shift and try to finish the game in a marathon session over 2-3 days. I really want to give this game another chance, but at the same time I feel like forcing myself to push through the game as quickly as possible will end up making me hate it, even though I think it's really incredible in a lot of ways.

So I'm a few hours into this game (around the hotel area). I only really own a PC but I wanted to play this badly enough that I borrowed a PS3 from a friend of my brother-in-law and had my sister mail the game to me (she's in Australia and I'm in Korea). The level of detail is incredible and the voice acting and dialogue are probably the best I've ever heard... but I just cannot get into the gameplay at all. In fact, I think I hate it. This is coming from someone who really enjoyed the Uncharted games (well, the first two at least) and even enjoys the occasional stealth games. I just feel like the controls are really sluggish and unintuitive. I think the melee combat mechanics are clunky, and the stealth mechanics can be really frustrating considering they have a checkpoint save system which is very frustrating when you have spent the last five minutes silently taking down a room, only to be one-shotted by a damn clicker. I also don't like the sprawling level design; it seems like half of my game time is spent either roaming around looking for gear, or trying to work out where the exit is. I actually feel really depressed by all of this. Maybe I hyped myself up too much or something. Am I the only one who feels this way? In any case, I have to return the PS3 by this weekend-ish, so I doubt I'll be able to finish in time. I might just end up watching gameplay videos online to get the rest of the story, although the lack of agency might frustrate me in parts. I don't think I've ever felt this conflicted about a game before.

I saw this as a poll on gamespolitics.com and, knowing that I had quite a few games which fit this description, decided to do a quick count. I included sequels but not expansion packs. Out of just over 200 games I own on both Steam and GoG.com, I counted 76 games that I've never actually played. 76. And that's not even including the games that I installed once, played through the tutorial and maybe the first level/mission, and never touched again. That's probably more games than I owned by the time I was 20, and I'm not even 30 yet. Can anyone else boast a similarly large and depressing figure?

Hey guys, just finished listening to the podcast and it was great, I really enjoyed it. I thought your criticism of the trailer was pretty harsh though! I haven't seen the film, so for all I know it could be utter garbage, but I thought the trailer was great. It seemed to me like they were adapting the material as a reasonably loose base with which to build an epic Hollywood blockbuster. It's probably impossible to film a faithful adaptation of the source material anyway, so I have no problem with them making a film which adapts the book on its own terms (and all adaptations should be on their own terms anyway). I've no doubt it will lack much of the book's subtlety, but I think it has the potential to be not only very entertaining, but also emotionally engaging and thought-provoking. I haven't seen it yet so it could be utter garbage, who knows.

I'm not asking because I'm looking for advice about which one to pick up, but rather to see if there's a general consensus or whether opinions are divided. For me, I found Crusader Kings II to be far more intuitive than either EU3 or HoI3 (I still haven't been able to crack either game, although I think if I gave EU3 another shot I might get it), due to the reduced economic complexity, and also perhaps because I was more easily able to relate to playing as an actual, literal ruler than as a sort of abstract, omniscient one. I assumed this would be the case for everyone, but I've seen forum posts in which people say that EU3 or HoI3 was their natural entry point to Paradox games, and that they found Crusader Kings II baffling. So I'm wondering which Paradox game you found the easiest to get into, and whether or not you think that says something about your personality. I can definitely say that I'm not really a fan of number-crunching, which is why the focus on political intrigue in CK2 appeals to me a lot more than fine-tuning taxation sliders or re-assigning division commanders. But maybe there are people who feel a little bit lost when there is no clear mathematically-optimal path to success?

I think the reason that Ironman is even a thing is because everyone knows that players don't have the willpower not to reload bad saves.

Maybe there should be an 'Ironman-lite' mode; IIRC the Ironman mode in Jagged Alliance 2 only prevents you from saving during combat, but you're free to save at any point in between. It means that you still have to exercise caution with your tactical decisions, but a squad wipe based on a bad roll or button mis-press won't write-off your entire campaign.

Ahhhhhh I want to play... but I promised myself I'd finish my minor thesis first which is due in mid-November. Hopefully by then any important bugs will be ironed out, and maybe someone will have smoothed over the mouse & keyboard interface. But in any case, I'm weirdly looking forward to sitting on the couch and playing this one with the gamepad.

It definitely seems like most people would recommend Crusader Kings II as the entry point to Paradox grand strategy games, but I'm wondering if this is reflective of your personal experience - i.e. did you have an easier or harder time grasping the core mechanics of EU3, HoI3, or CK2? I have actually read forum posts where people said they found HoI3 the easiest of the three games to grasp, which I found somewhat bewildering as it seems so much more dense than the other two games. But then maybe the same sort of people who love tweaking unit statistics feel a bit lost when asked if they want to indulge in a statistically-meaningless love affair with one of their courtiers?

Thanks! I'm actually an Aussie teaching English here. Based on anecdotal evidence, it's pretty much LoL-city over here right now. I occasionally see MMOs getting played, especially WoW and Aion, and sometimes WC3 as well, though it's almost exclusively some kind of mod. There's also a string of Korean-only games, almost all free-to-play, which are mostly either incarnations of Counter-strike or some kind of sports game.

Awesome!

Hi everyone. Relatively recent listener, very recent forum-goer. I figured that since I'm a cool guy, and I like the podcast, everyone else who listens to the podcast must be cool guys (or girls) too. Also I live in Korea, and it's hard to meet people who are: a) interested in games, not interested in games to the exclusion of everything else, or c) children. I'd really like to join a gaming group for something that plays nice with my time-zone concerns - something like Friday and Saturday nights EST would be my Saturday and Sunday mornings, so that would be great.

I think some of the criticism against Bruce here is a little unfair. Jake Solomon seems like a really nice guy and has obviously put a lot of work and love into the game, but in reviving a hallowed series like X-COM, he was always going to deal with some hard questions from X-COM veterans, which is what I assume Bruce was brought into do. To be honest, I actually felt that Bruce was a little reserved in his criticisms, probably out of respect for Jake who obviously struggled with some difficult decisions in modernizing X-COM. The 'X-Cover' crack... well, I've only listened to TMA for just under a year, but it seemed to me a case of Bruce being Bruce. I think if Jake is also a listener of TMA as he implied he was, then he would get that as well. One question though: are the tutorial missions skippable? They are fairly dull, and since I am a serial campaign re-starter, I'm hoping that I can do away with them once I have a handle on the controls.