Roderick

The Mantis ship continues to elude me, but I did scoop up the Rock ship. It's missile based, which should pose quite a challenge for the end of level boss.

Absolutely baffling. What is the actual game they're going to make? In what way is this going to scratch an 'old school RPG' itch that dozens or hundreds of other RPG's don't? Are they saying that within the deluge of big budget RPG's, western RPG's, Japanese RPG's, Roguelike RPG's, hybrid RPG's, etc, etc, there isn't a single one that comes close? I appreciate that they love making a type of game and they want to get onto the Kickstarter bandwagon. But, damn.

OK, so my strategy for obtaining the Mantis ship failed when I seemingly did everything right but still I failed. I looked it up.

A game that neither fails nor quite succeeds in the regard of pushing players to use all the mechanics is Arkham City. On the one hand there is a set of 'tricks' that generally always work (hiding in certain places, using certain weapons or moves). But there are a few times the game upends the tea table and forces you to adjust your tactics. Also, since all the game's moves fall under the same control system, i.e. it's just as easy to use the freeze pellet as it is to drop a bomb, it's a simple matter to spice up your own life to make things interesting. As for general difficulty level, the game did something really well: when things went my way Batman felt incredibly powerful, but making a few mistakes still meant going down. That's a balancing act Assassin's Creed never quite got right.

It's a tricky balance. I can't disagree with anything you've written; the few experiences I've had where I took the harder path were always the more rewarding ones. Thing is, I've conditioned myself for all my life to err on the easy side. I do this because I am generally not as interested in the gameplay mechanics as I am in exploring a world. I used to feel higher difficulties as an impediment to exploring a game. Nowadays, I'm not so sure. Case in point; Skyrim. I deliberately played that on the highest difficulty level because I wanted to emulate the great time I had in Morrowind just trying to survive the wilderness, in contrast to oblivion where you start out overpowered. My time in Skyrim was great because of that: for the longest time I had to make really careful decisions on which fights I could pick and was running away from a lot of fights. The immersion was so much higher than it would've been had I been able to whack every creature silly. So, a higher difficulty can also improve the exploratory aspect of a game, not just the mastery of systems. In contrast, there have been a few times I was disappointed taking the easy difficulty, where hard might have been more appropriate. I should've gone with the hard mode in Catherine, and could never get into Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey 2 because I was breezing through it. So I am choosing more and more to take the bigger challenge, because the past teaches me the rewarding experiences are there. My newfound interest in roguelikes are either a symptom or sign of this, or they have pushed the appreciation of brutal difficulty further than before.

Once you play through a part of the game once, you can fastwforward through it on a second playthrough. Which you will want to do to get the most out of the story. 999's successor, Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, is coming out really soon and I can't wait to play it. Good visual novel-style adventure games are a treat!

I echo that! If this had just been "RE5 reskinned" I wouldn't have really cared, but this roadside accident is something I'd like to play.

Inspired by this review of Key to the Kingdom, me and my friends bought and brought along the game to our vacation in France. The game was very pleasantly visual and exciting, but super broken and will require some serious house rules to make it playable a second time.

Kudos, elmuerte. Where in the Dutchlands have you settled? I just returned from a week of vacation in southern Brittany. What a stupidly gorgeous environment there, with thundering cliffs and wild forests and cathedrals and supreme bakeries and a positive dearth of fastfood chains. Instead of which there are creperies on every corner. Any way you shake it, I always love being in France. On a cultural note, I purchased a French copy of The Count of Monte Christo. It's probably a tad above my mastery of the language, but I reason that I'll only improve by a challenge.

We do these things not because they are easy

You had to remind of the Battlestar Galactica non-plan! Now I'm sad again.

Easy. I'm going to do easy first for a while to unlock the ships, then tackle normal when I have a favorite strategy to try. SInce one run can take up to two hours, I'd rather have a better chance of getting some good runs in on easy. It's perhaps cheesy but so far I really like it; it doesn't bother me that the first sectors are a cakewalk. I enjoy toying with enemy ships. Congrats at your good run! I only play on easy so far, so the glass cannon thing is less of a problem. I would say just start upgrading the shields as fast as you can, and get the autocannon charging time down. If you feel desperate, search for a cheap missile weapon for some extra early fire power. My run with the Engi ion cannon/drone setup was quite succesful until I got smashed by the boss' third form. Reading your post, maybe if I got a third ion cannon rather than a backup laser, I could manage it.

That's a great read, by the way. Read it last year and it gave me some new perspectives on Japan's turbulent history. Last chapter on modern politics is a bit drier than the rest, though.

A board game evening as a sort of vetting procedure. Man, I would not know how I'd react to that. The word schtupping is amazing and I always think about Bluth Sr. lamenting that his asshole brother is "schtupping my wife!"

On the subject of evasion, what is the difference between it and the dodge mechanic in the engines?

In space, no one can hear you accidentally depower the doors and med bay and commit yourself to a slow inexorable death. A really important moment in my career as a captain was when I figured out that upgrading doors and the camera system didn't require a bar of reactor power. Now they're easy picks when I upgrade. Also, does anyone ever upgrade the piloting gear? It seems useless to have an autopilot.

I just beat the boss with the very strong Federation Cruiser with the inbuilt artillery beam. Had a lot of luck getting good weapons: a fire beam, an ion cannon and a second burst laser II. I also managed to get a very strong boarding crew together! Two fully powered Mantis warriors (one of which was Remo, who once fought an enemy Scoops). Boarding is so much fun! I get the feeling you get a lot more scrap if you successfully eliminate the enemy rather than destroying their ship. As a result I was swimming in scrap and had everything fully upgraded. If you get lucky early on with a teleportation unit in shops and two mantis, you are pretty much set for riches. I had two ship-getting encounters (one for Mantis, the other Rock), but I blew them all. That was disappointing, but it only encourages me to try again and get ALL the ships.

That's a fantastic story! Oh man I'm taking the Torus for a spin (Jeremy Clarkson style) in a moment. Giddy.

And that while Nintendo gave a clear signal that the only way they could make the 3DS work was by cutting off their own leg and slash the price by a third. Of course, I've said it before, the only thing that makes or breaks a handheld (or console for that matter) is having great games. The first year of any new hardware is generally going to be shit. The 3DS has really picked up over the last half year, maybe the Vita will do so too. That Media Molecule game is coming, that should be good.

Good idea for a topic, Henroid. I sympathize with the people working at Zynga, but not with the company strategy or the rather loathsome, leaked comments of its brass. That company basically stands for everything wrong in games: copying content willy-nilly, pushing competitors out of business with unchecked aggression, exploiting systems, putting customers, including kids, into a treadmill where they're milked for money, ugh. It works, absolutely, and the people there are probably talented and deserving of success, but as a company what they do is not laudable. Microsoft sensor implants are cool though. Are we talking sensual sensor implants?

Man, that's devious! Whose toying with who now? I want to go to there too. Targeting helms and such. Mmmm.

Boarding parties are pretty easy to deal with. The only time I really had a problem was with the boarding drones. All the other times there are two strategies that work almost always: either open the airlocks and suffocate them, or open the airlocks to lure them to your team waiting in the med bay where they're constantly healed. After my earlier succes with a super balanced loud-out, my hands are itching to specialize. My first new build will be with the Engi Torus to create (and probably die trying) an ion cannon powerhouse with drones.

Well, Scott McCloud is having a boner right now.

I think this grew organically. This genre has a looooong tradition in Japan and the public arcades encourage mastering these and displaying Mad Skillz. The same goes for the insane bullet hell shooters; these games appeal to a specific crowd of people and they are very carefully tailored towards them with a super duper hard end game.

YESSS, I just beat the rebel cruiser for the first time. Yes, it was on easy, but it was still a remarkably epic fight. After getting my ass kicked three times I changed my weapons load-out (mostly based on luck of course, you never know what you'll get, but I did make some informed decisions) and in the end I tackled it with the standard Kestrel weapons (Artemis missiles and Burst Laser II) augmented with the powerful Halberd Beam and the Ion Bomb weapon. Especially that last one proved invaluable in getting past those damned four shields. The three times I tried it with missiles I couldn't even scratch the thing, the missiles all missed no matter what I did. Bombs seem more reliable. I had two drones in place to aid me; Defense I and Beam I, and I also had a cloak which was useful. Absolutely indispensible for maintaining order on my own ship were a few extra hands to shove around, and above all a ROCK GUY to help with the fires. Without my rock guy things would've been much harder. I shudder to think how this encounter will go on normal mode, when I have had much less scrap to spend, and therefore a less decked out ship, and facing a harder enemy... gulp. I'm super excited about the Federation Cruiser I just unlocked though. It has a SPECIAL BEAM! I can't breathe!