Bjorn

That long term balance has been one of my concerns about getting deep into the game, or feeling that you need to rebuild your base on a semi-regular basis for ease of access. I put a ridiculous ton of work into my original house in Terraria and loved it. I'd hate to feel that I have to abandon a base for no other reason than it is inconvenient. Are you thinking of Edge of Space? Seems to match that description. And Starbound's lead dev was the main artist on Terraria. The main programmer of Terraria is working on T2.

I'm giving away my second copy out of guilt, even though I would normally use it to trade for something else that I wanted. I don't feel right profiting from store glitch. If I didn't already own every other Klei game, I would just buy one of those.

Nice, that was quick! Idle Thumbs Rapid Response Team for the win!

7 PMs in 10 minutes from this leecher.

I'm going to have to download and try this, I would never have guessed it would get such glowing recommendations from so many thumbs.

The store was the worst part of MP. You didn't really need to pay to win, just get good enough to run Gold level missions most of the time. I usually spent $6 each time they released a new content pack. Not because I felt that I needed to, but because each of the content packs was awesome and I would have paid double that had they charged for them. I eventually got good enough that I routinely ran 2 and 3 people squads on Gold. It was actually a lot of fun that way. It was about a 50/50 chance for my wife and I to extract on Gold with just the two of us, whereas we almost never failed with 4 people. So it added a nice challenge. And we'd do themed role playing matches like having two Quarians, or a Krogan and Salarian who had been marooned together and had to depend on one another to live.

I got the 2-pack at the price, just thought it was an awesome deal, and then looked again a few minutes later and it had jumped up in price. I actually feel a little bad, I really like the developer of Don't Starve and didn't mean to take advantage of a glitch.

I've got a Steam giftable copy of Don't Starve if any of the regulars want it (completely agree with the new rules). Edit: So I'm getting hit with PMs as well from leechers. This will blow if they kill this thread.

I actually did a little bit of speculative buying and selling right when cards first came out, but it didn't take very long before I realized that my time was just not worth it.

I just got past the base assault in a NI playthrough with the new content, wishing I had started on Classic now. But I went Normal first as I wanted a chance to experiment and learn without being punished too bad. I'm loving all the new stuff, particularly the new scripted missions, but the endgame of a Normal playthrough is going to be a cakewalk. Mimetic Skin is nuts, as are Mechs who can punch anything to death and sprint halfway across a map.

That stuff was going on almost immediately. People had servers up running automated buying programs, and even less hardcore guys were sharing Greasemonkey scripts to do it in a browser window. If you look at card history graphs, every once in awhile you'll see a $0.10 card that sold a single unit for $10.00. I often wonder if that's some automated buying program that glitched out.

Don't know about games, but this is how real Demo Derbies work. Your car will last a lot longer if you're ramming people with your trunk rather than your engine. Most drivers will only ram with their front if they are desperate.

It's on sale on the Flash Sale for $5.09 starting right now, going to buy it after all the recommendations it's got.

I've got a friend who is nuts about bitcoins and other crypto currencies. The more he tells me, the more I become convinced it's all just an elaborate form of gambling.

My daughter had one of those moments to restore your faith in humanity today. She works at a UPS Store, and a little girl came in this afternoon to give her a friendship bracelet to thank her for helping her and her mom ship gifts to the rest of their family.

On the 360. I thought about moving over to the PC at one point, but the way you progress is by earning credits playing matches, which you then spend on booster packs that unlock and upgrade guns/equipment/characters. You have to start over if you start playing on a new platform, and I couldn't imagine starting over after having almost everything unlocked on the 360. When you're starting out, it sucks if you want to unlock one specific gun/character, but it's not bad if you just accept that everything can be fun and enjoy what you are unlocking.

I think I'll just buy one copy today and see what I think of it. Will buy a second one if I really dig it, or maybe just hope that they add in local co-op down the road. Just went reading through some of the developer comments on it. They just added actual controller support, which was one of the limiting factors to having local co-op. Without having official controller support built in, they couldn't figure out a way for two people to share one keyboard due to the number of buttons used. So maybe local will get patched in now.

Well that's awesome that Brothers is coming to the PS3. I won't bother buying it on Steam now.

Well, the camera is no better in MP, as it's still a third person shooter. But the mechanics of shooting were much better. Guns had the right "feel" to them, in that heavy shotguns had a satisfying weight to them while light energy weapons felt right too. With up to four people per match, you could really design a character to fit with a squad if you were playing with people you knew. ME3 added an explosion mechanic as well. Certain powers and ammo types would "prime" an enemy. Then other powers would detonate if they hit the same enemy within a certain amount of time. Tech powers would cause a lightning explosion, fire powers a fireball and biotic powers a biotic explosion. Each type of explosion caused varying damage amounts based on if it was hitting shields, health or armor. Which meant that building teams to capitalize on that mechanic was always fun. Then there were new powers that were unique only to MP, like the Krogan Warlord with a warhammer you could prime with different effects, an engineer with a resupply pylon, a crossbow, grenades that recharged your shields. an electic net that pinned enemies down, a wrist mounted blade cannon and more. Some were definitely better than others, but all of them were fun and had a useful role to play. Oh, and melee builds were fantastic. The Batarians had the most satisfying heavy melee in the entire ME series. With the Batarian Vangaurd you could Biotic Charge a group of enemies, stun them, blast one with a shotgun and then punch another one to death, then charge into another group of enemies. There were a bunch of other great melee builds as well. The EDI bot got a Mike Tyson upper cut that was insane when used coming out of Tactical Cloak. The Geth have an AoE electric pulse that was surprisingly useful for as slow as it was. Oh, and they added in the Volus as a playable race. Which was either the best or the worst thing to ever happen, depending on who you talk to. The little guys were hilarious, and surprisingly useful. They have a power that lets them recharge the team's shields once every so often, but were very squishy themselves and were too short to hop over all the cover that normal races could vault over. During the height of its popularity, they ran weekend events that had some story elements that tied back to the SP story. They had one where the reapers had dispatched thousands of Banshees across the galaxy to terrorize troops, which meant that Banshees had a chance to randomly spawn in any match, regardless of the faction you were playing. Stuff like that is what kept me coming back to it. There were so many different builds that were just fun to play. If I just wanted to kill and hour or two having fun with someone, ME3 was there and waiting.

To avoid derailing this thread with any more ME talk, I replied over in the ME3 MP thread with my thoughts on why their horde mode was awesome: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/7819-mass-effect-3/

I'm posting here so as not to derail a non-related thread with ME3 talk with Twig. So it turns out that combat was actually really fun and interesting in ME3, but you would have been hard pressed to figure that out in SP. SP discouraged experimenting, since you had to pick your power/weapon loadouts before leaving for a lengthy mission. But MP rewarded experimenting, as you could radically change character, race, class, weapons and powers each mission. The mechanics of weapons, powers, ammo and the interactions of them all really shined in co-op when you could have much longer running battles with more enemies. And being able to play as all the different races, with their variations in health and mobility, added a ton of diversity. The difference between being a squishy, but lighting fast, Drell versus playing a slow, non-cover using mountain of a Krogan warlord was dramatic. It really was the best thing to come out of ME3. I sank well over 100 hours into it BEFORE I talked my wife into getting into it, and then together we played another 100+ hours. Plus it had just enough RPG hooks with leveling up each of the classes and leveling up guns/equipment to scratch that itch. The random reward store did get very, very, very old though. Yeah, I could gush about ME3 MP for awhile. All I want them to make is a co-op squad game built around it, forget the SP stuff.

This is currently on the Steam Flash sale. Anyone tried the co-op? I'd buy two copies of it if the co-op was worthwhile.

I've only played it in co-op, and that's been fun, certainly one evening of it justified the $1.49 it cost. I can see it wearing thin very fast by yourself though. I thought that Guacamelee! was a Smash Bros style fighting game based on the name and a couple of screenshots I had seen, so never had any interest in it. Until I actually bothered to read its description this morning and learned that it's a Metroidvania game with heavy Day of the Dead elements that has local co-op! I would have bought it at full price at that point, good thing it was on the Flash sale.

The redeeming value of ME3 was the co-op horde mode. Without that, it would have been a massive disappointment, in part because of the lack Drell, Salarian and Krogan characters. But we got to have 3 sexy pinup models to run around with (that is not a compliment, in case the sarcasm is missed).

I've been relatively reserved this sale, and I still feel like I've bought to much. But these at least are all games that I have really wanted and fully intend on playing (unlike any number of previous Steam sale purchases). Guacamelee! Gold Edition LEGO Marvel Super Heroes La-Mulana Legend of Dungeon XCOM: Enemy Unknown: Slingshot DLC XCOM: Enemy Within Papers, Please Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut The Stanley Parable Enemy Within is the real gem of the sale so far, I'm blown away by how good that is. Had Xcom shipped like it is with EW, it may well have been declared the best game of the decade.