Bjorn

If you just want cash, I'd say go with Craigslist. You'll get more than any pawnshop or Gamestop will offer. If you're worried about having someone come to your house or meeting a stranger, just insist on meeting at a convenience store during the day.

It fucking smells like human flesh as well?! Da fuq?

I watched my kid play this some last night. Looked like an MMO shooter. It's really pretty. She loved it, thought it was the most fun she's had with a shooter since ODST.

Keith Olbermann is made from refined indignation.

ARG aaargh

Knock your wife out, two game NFL suspension, plus ample praise from around the league for what a wonderful young man you really are, at heart. Knock your wife up, four game suspension and not a word from the NFL. Smoke pot, and you could be looking at year long or even lifetime bans. Fucking hell NFL.

"Relax," soothed Allard, "We all know who farted, but it's rude to blame gas on the dearly departed." I'm crying over here, this is so good.

Ooooo, Bahamutman has a yet to be revealed backstory. I hope its a glorious as the design. Also, he was originally designed for a game that was canceled.

No worries about drawing it out, I would often rather talk about a flawed, but interesting, game than a great game. There's more to say. The other thought I had about this is that for Xcom as a franchise, these narrative driven side stories make sense. The tent pole strategy game holds up the franchise, and then devs can explore some interesting stuff that just doesn't thematically fit in the strategy game. Imagine a survival horror game where a group of civilians has to survive long enough to be extracted by Xcom soldiers during a Terror mission. Which, I would love to see a game explore the nature of being a civilian in a war torn area. But no major publisher is ever going to greenlight that scenario if it is too close thematically to actual modern conflicts. But maybe you could get away with it in a sci-fi game. It's a shame that this game was such a mess that we'll probably never see other ideas or stories explored.

THE THREAD IS ALMOST 3 PAGES LONG, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT OF US?!

I don't know what culture leads to that, but I know if I saw a GTA: Spartacus game, I'd buy it.

I'm super curious if anyone tries co-op, I'll buy the dual pack at some point if it's really good.

I'll definitely stick with it then. Did you use camp tokens to set up checkpoints, or did you make it straight through without that? I was trying to figure out the best ways to spend my money last night, and it was looking like just saving it for tokens and to buy enemy essence was the best, at least for now. Oh, I forgot to mention last night, so in co-op the default mode is to have friendly fire turned on. If you turn it off, your progress doesn't count towards the global count. But good lord, I don't think we'd ever be able to get through the game with it turned on. Just way to easy to accidently tag someone with a fireball even when you're trying to stay well away from one another.

Yeah, the biggest complaint I remember reading about it as that you could just button mash your way through it hammering two buttons. Which is technically true, but I don't know why you would play that way. Most of the attacks can be chained into one another for different moves, and that was where the fun was for me, finding and deriving glee from murdering dudes in flamboyant ways. I meant to ask about this last night and forgot. I've never seen anyone speak positively about SC3, but then everyone I've talked to about it all loved SC2. Do you remember what you loved about it?

It's not bad, it's just not great. I'm pretty sure I got it in a Klei bundle a couple of years ago. If you see it bundled or dirt cheap, I'd say it's worth trying. The combat isn't deep, but it is surprisingly entertaining in a grindhousy-violent way. Driving a chainsaw into a dude, then flipping him in the air, suspending him there for a couple of seconds with dual pistols, then grabbing his buddy and body slamming them together to kill the first guy never really got old. If that sounds fun (it is really violent, fair warning), then the animations alone are worth a buck or two.

The steam reviews are just crushing this, almost universally negative. But reading them I can't honestly tell if its bad, or if its just a bunch of dumb people leaving reviews.

I'm not typically the type to think of Top X lists, but Star Control 2 would be somewhere on my Top X list if I ever made one. Like really high. The first time I played it as a kid, I remember realizing that there must be some pattern to the rainbow planets and sticking that tacky poster stuff onto my CRT monitor screen to see it. Tracking them down ultimately ended up costing that game because I spent so much time off faffing about looking for rainbows rather than preparing. But totally worth it. There are actually some mods that can change the time limit. I don't know how well they work though, the time limit is really baked into the story and plays out in stages. There are some question solutions that are only available after the time limit event has been initiated. It's funny, devs are kind of in a damned if they do, damned if they don't place with time limits. Lots of players, quite legitimately, hate them. But then we almost universally mock games where someone is screaming about how the end of the world is coming, but the hero has all the time in the world to go fuck off doing whatever he want. Anyways, I finished Shank's single and co-op storylines. It's fascinating to see the evolution of Klei, to go from Eets -> Shank -> Mark of the Ninja -> Don't Starve. Shank isn't a great game, but its fun, particularly in co-op. And it's fairly short, which is good. The mechanics really don't justify having extra padding.

I played the female character, and every helicopter scene required her breasts to bounce the whole time. FFS.

I played in co-op one night for a couple of hours and thought, "This is great!" Then I played the next night for a couple of more hours and thought, "Dear god, does it ever change...or end?" Seems well made, but there's just way to much mandatory repetition (limited levels and enemy types) and grind in the missions.

I feel really spoiled about co-op. For years I lived with the same group of guys, we were all gamers, so there was almost always someone around willing to game anytime you were in the mood. And then I moved straight in with my wife and her daughter, both of whom are gamers. I really can't imagine getting in any co-op if I didn't have people I lived with who gamed. As everyone above has stated, it's a pain in the ass most of the time. Even with my old buddies, we are more likely to play a game together if we visit each other's houses than we are to ever plan something online. That's one of the reasons I've loved the renaissance of couch co-op games that are popping up on Steam over the last few years.

Gah, yeah, being marginalized in a game is worse than being eliminated. At least if you are eliminated, you can go do something else, particularly if their other people out of the game or just hanging out. But being marginalized means that you have a social obligation to remain in the game even though there is little you can do to derive any enjoyment from it. It's just bad for everyone. Games that can do that bug me even when I'm still in the game, as seeing someone else clearly being frustrated saps my enjoyment. I love it when a tabletop game gets its hooks into me deep. Hasn't happened in a long while. Arkham Horror, as broken as it can be, is probably one of the last ones. And a lot of that had to do with the group I played with and their willingness to roleplay characters, even (or especially) if that roleplay created chaos.

Clyde posted this link in last week's podcast forum, and it deserves to be seen by more people, so I'm crossposting it here. Click that link people, you need to.

Everyone on this forum must click that link. If you don't believe me, just look at this:

First, I know that for some of these, the reason they aren't more fleshed out in the game is purely a case of money and time. Some of these would take significant resources, but I think at some point they must have been considered, or they are a natural extension of one of the ideas present in the game. The original black ops parts are the biggest thing, particularly imagining a game where your missions vary between recon, action and coverup. Mechanically, I like the Mass Effect style third person squad commander, and this is the only non-ME game I can think of that uses it. But instead of focusing on giving you abilities and weapons that would have made sense for 1960s era technology, they just jump straight into rayguns and magic space powers after the tutorial. The preponderance of regular ammo throughout the game and a few of the powers indicate that there was an interest in trying to thematically match weapons/powers to the era, but they just gave up and went the easier route. I think maintaining the original design goal of having a major technology imbalance would have resulted in a more interesting game. I enjoy the idea of being able to deploy baby agents on their own missions, like Assassin's Creed has done. But in The Bureau, there is no risk vs. reward element. It's functionally just a checkbox asking if you would like a reward. Even if it was just a simple logic puzzle of figuring out the right class combination based on the mission description to ensure success would be more interesting. Or if you had to make choices about what missions to pursue, like deciding between acquiring a new technology or bailing out agents who had got themselves in a bad place. Agent permadeath is completely wasted, losing an agent in the middle of a battle is just too crippling, retreat isn't an option, so you always reload. But I like the idea of having fragile humans who are losable due to your decisions, it's not a feature that shows up in action games much. Instead of combat permadeath though, I think they could have accomplished something similar by letting your agents contract the alien disease, or suffer injuries that they would need to recuperate from. So they might be less valuable (longer power cooldowns, less accurate, something) in a mission once they are injured or sick, but they wouldn't be gone, allowing you to finish the mission, but with a disadvantage. It achieves the mechanic/narrative goal of having repurcussions for your battlefield decisions without usually creating an unwinnable state as soon as an agent dies. Story wise, it does that thing where it is so dedicated to its twist ending, that all the interesting stuff the story could have done is withheld until the final mission. I tend to think that dramatic twists are far more satisfying to creators than they are audiences except in a few rare cases. I think it is always interesting to ask the question, "What would our story be if we revealed the twist at the start of the game?" Spoilering the rest of this thought.

Okay, that completely sold me on the game. I'll have to see if I can find it locally today or tomorrow. Hopefully going to get in some tabletop time on Saturday (though half the times the plans for these fall through, so I never fully bank on it). One of the design elements I despise in tabletop games is when the game drives a player out of action for too long (either by elimination, taking action from them, losing turns, whatever). It's the biggest drawback in some of the hidden traitor games I've played. I don't even care about winning or losing tabletop games, as long as there are interesting or entertaining actions I can continue to take even if it becomes clear that I'm reaching an unwinnable state.