Entriech

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Posts posted by Entriech


  1. I picked this up during a lull in my SolForge playing, and now I'm hooked on both games.  I didn't appreciate much about Hearthstone until I started really assimilating the importance of board control and card advantage.  That first time you skip playing something that you could because it makes more sense to hold it feels odd, but generally works in your favour.

     

    That Icy Veins site is great for strategy, and often contains some extremely cheap custom decks for each class.

     

    Another tip I have is to play Ranked instead of Casual.  Ranked will pit you against people of your own skill level and experience.  Casual will match you up against anyone, often experienced players testing out deck builds with rare cards that will punch you in the face.


  2. Working my way through Generation 5 or so, now.  Really glad they reduced the Gooser requirement to 5, from 50.  That might've ended my desire to regenerate at that point.  The game's still just a dumb amount of fun.  I've poured maybe 60 hours into it, and it's still not bland or boring, and I'm not even playing special game modes, just Attrition.

     

    Every round just feels like a custom-crafted missile aimed at my pleasure and adrenaline centers, and it hits every single damned time.  From that initial (now familiar) countdown and leap out of the shuttle to the mad scramble at the end of a match to kill/escape, it's just great.  And this is coming from someone who hasn't played a multiplayer shooter since the UT 2004 days.

     

    Really interested to see what they do with the map packs, and if they ever release additional modes.


  3. Expecting a kid in late September, and was happy to see this thread.  Really enjoyed a lot of the anecdotes you've shared.

     

    I'm hoping by the time the kid's old enough to be interested I'll have finished off my retro games room.  If I can just teach them to love Blast Corps the way I loved Blast Corps, then I'll feel I've succeeded.


  4. The radar seems to be a shared system amongst your team.  Not only will you be displayed when firing a weapon that doesn't have a suppressor equipped, you will also be displayed should anyone see you (including NPCs?).  It feels like an automated system they put into place to effectively communicate things like "There's a guy there." in absence of voice communication.


  5. I haven't used the smart pistol since the patch, although now I'm a bit concerned as that was my favorite go-top gun previously.  I'll be regenerating soon, and will probably swap back to it at that point.

     

    I've been trying to use the RC-101 carbine, but have found it equally ineffective.  It just doesn't feel punchy enough.  I think I may have to try switching up to the Hemlock's 3-round burst, or the G4A1's semi-auto nature.  Although my next round of regeneration achievements includes the R-97 submachine gun, so it'll be a while before I switch to anything else.

     

    One thing I can say about Titan Loadout.  I've been running with the Triple Threat (both grenade and mine variants) for a few days now, and I really don't like it.  A) You're quite likely to hurt or kill yourself in close combat.  B)  You're useless at long range combat.  C)  The ability to roll these into buildings or other places the titans can't go is overrated.  I haven't gotten that many pilot kills off of smoking out people in buildings.  So far I actually like the lightning cannon the most.  It does well at close and long ranges, and the charging mechanism isn't hard to manage.  A half charged shot will also jump and kill a pack of grunts easily.  And it can blow up rockets in mid-air (or so the tooltips say).


  6. So last night I finally had a reason to alter my Titan build to include the rail gun.  The enemy team was being very efficient and cagey with their titans.  This was on Lagoon, that map with the large spaceship landed in the middle of it, a prominent rock outcropping, and some village buildings.  Two or three of them would hang out in the remote corner of the map, in the water, where there wasn't much in the way of cover to approach.  They were using weapons suited to long range, and were quite good at backing off to regenerate if you managed to bust their shields.

     

    It was a blood bath, and my team just kept funneling themselves into it.  The next game, on Rise, I was able to bust up some of those tactics as a fully charged railgun shot will strip the shields off anything, but it was still ultra-annoying.  Probably one of the first times I saw really coordinated, concrete tactics being employed.

     

    So now I always keep a long range sniper titan build on my list, in case I need to swap to it for these scenarios.


  7. I'm hoping they ditch the intense gamification present in Far Cry 3.  Playing 2 and then 3 in quick succession practically gave me whiplash.  It's like they were afraid I was going to get bored walking through a minute of lush jungles, so they made sure to put as many flashing things to pick up/craft/use as possible.

     

    Weirdly, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was a much better game than Far Cry 3, removing aesthetic considerations.  The shorter, focused game made them pitch a bunch of the bullshit.


  8. Maaaan, these regeneration challenges are killing me.  So I regenerated on the weekend, on Generation 2 now.  After the first regeneration, it segregates out challenges in your challenges menu as Regeneration challenges, that need to be completed to regenerate again in the future.

     

    To go from Gen 2 to Gen 3?  40mm Cannon kills on Titan primary weapon, and EVA-8 Shotgun kills.  I'm terrrrrible with the Shotgun.

     

    So far the only solace I'm taking from this is that once I finish off the shotgun challenges I need, I can go back to my one, true love;  the smart pistol.

     

    The 40mm cannon isn't quite as terrible to use, but I still miss something more elegant like the railgun or the lightning weapon.

     

    Also I killed someone else's titan by dropping my titan on it.  I was so surprised I actually yelled out loud, surprising my wife.

     

    I'm a week into playing, and really not at all getting tired of the gameplay.  Attrition and CTF being my favorites.


  9. Amped smart pistol is civilization.

     

    There's a map I played the other night where the outer points of the map are connected by dangly cable to this big central tower.  By hopping on the lines, I could traverse the whole map in maybe 10 seconds.  It was exhilarating.

     

    I need to branch out.  I've mostly only been playing Attrition, but have seen enough good things about CTF that I feel I should give that a try.


  10. I finished the militia campaign last night, and I've also been playing since Sunday or so.  I like this game!  It is a fun game.

    Servers have seemed reasonably stable so far.  I'm on horrible Canadian rural internet, and am managing 70-80ish pings to servers on the Central North farm.

    It is definitely nice to play an MP shooter that's hosting their own servers, rather than using players as hosts.


  11. Greenmangaming's doing a 10$ off voucher on this using voucher XXYB8X-LHFV73-66QFG8.

     

    I'm sitting on the fence right now, watching some Giant Bomb video of the game.  I'm not usually first in on brand new games, and I've resisted an Origin Account until now (including not playing Mass Effect 3), but maaan.  Something about this game's really pushin' my buttons.


  12. I'm not sure what they can do with this series to make it any more interesting than Arkham City.  AC at least brought in some interesting combat refinements, and changed up the world exploration a bit from its predecessor.  But driving just feels like another analogue for swooping around in AC, and I wonder if having to make environments large enough to make a car feel worthwhile will also mean that traversing the world without the car feels slow or boring.

     

    In some ways I kind of wish that rather than infinite Batman sequels, they'd done one or two competent games, then applied the same design choices to a different superhero.  I suppose you could say they did that a bit in AC with the different playable characters, but they all felt a lot like Batmans.


  13. I actually quite like Tales of Arabian Nights.  I've found that our games with 4 people generally run for a reasonable 3 hours or so at the top end.  You definitely can't be in it to win, though.  A lot of times, the better course is to do what's fun.  Enter the lion?  Don't mind if I do!

     

    I'm not sure I'd recommend it for any more than 4 people though.  Part of what makes that game smart is it making other players part of your turn, so people stay engaged.  That mechanism doesn't scale up well, though, so I could see a 6 player game feeling very slow and ponderous.

     

    In a lot of ways it kind of feels like the board gaming equivalent of The Yawhg.

     

    I've got a copy of Netrunner showing up in the mail tomorrow, as well as a copy of Vlaada Chvatil's new game Tash-Kalar and Antoine Bauza's new game Rampage.


  14. Good new Bundlestars Bundle.

     

    http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/adrenaline-bundle/

     

    5$ gets you 12 Steam keys, totalling 13 games:

     

    • Ring Runner:Flight of the Sages
    • Etherlords 1 and 2
    • Master Reboot
    • Expeditions:Conquistador
    • Rock of Ages
    • POSTAL
    • Gun Monkeys (2 copies)
    • Heli heroes
    • Monday Night Combat
    • Axis Game Factory
    • Bang Bang Racing
    • Kaptain Brawe: A Brawe New World

     

    I can vouch for the Etherlords games, as well as Rock of Ages being quality.


  15. I finished off Enslaved:Odyssey to the West yesterday.  Overall I found it marginally enjoyable!  After thoroughly enjoying Ninja Theory's work on the DmC reboot, I was excited to come into this, but it's a very different game, and doesn't sport anything close to the highly technical, challenging combat system of DmC.  In fact, to be quite critical for a moment, most of it's gameplay systems felt pretty shallow.  The combat is fairly simple, and the platforming is context-sensitive.  It also does this annoying thing where it litters collectable items in nooks and crannies, items that you want because they'll provide currency to upgrade your character.  This is usually fine, but devolves into the stupid when they're still present during moments of high drama or time pressure in the storyline.  Your NPC companion yelling for help, and you're rooting around in a trash bin in an alley for upgrade currency.

     

    I'm also torn two ways on the context-sensitive jumping.  On the one hand, I'm not sure the gameplay would have been enhanced at all with the ability to fall to your death and then having to restart sections of the game.  On the other hand, as you go through yet another sequence of holding directions and tapping 'A', you sort of find yourself wondering what the payoff is.  Certainly it allows you to have more confidence in trying things, because you flat out aren't allowed to if it would mean your death, but it kind of neutralizes any sense of satisfaction about the successfully traversing the level.

     

    However its atypical plot, colourful, post-apocalyptic U.S. setting, and service-ably written/acted characters bring it up a bit.  Also it clocks in at a perfect six hours.  Surprisingly, the game was co-directed by Andy Serkis who provides both the voice and mo-cap for the main character, with excellent results.

     

    If you want a character action game that's a bit different from the rest, I recommend checking it out.


  16. I've owned this a while, and played it both just my wife and I, as well as in a group of four.  When we played, I was reading the between week scene text, and otherwise people were reading their own adventures out loud.  While you'll definitely see some repetition on multiple plays, there's a lot of content in there, and a lot of surprising stuff.  We saw things playing with four that my wife and I had never seen in the previous two or three games we'd played.

     

    I would advise not playing it by yourself.  I mean, you can, but part of the good vibe I got from it was commiserating with someone about the crazy thing that just happened.  At the very least don't play it with only one character.  Part of the fun are the ways that the independent characters can inadvertently interact with each other.

     

    Paid 10$ for it, and totally got my money's worth.  Local multi only, mind you.