syntheticgerbil

I hated Boyscouts because all I did was fight with everyone. I left after two years. I did get a badge once for drawing a comic book jacket around my Scout guide. I would have totally went in for this video game one.

Thanks Thunderpeel! Yeah definitely. I don't like how in later key cutscenes Eddie assumes the knowledge from the Legends whether you have been finding them up to that point or not. You might actually have an easier time finding a wider variety of players on the 360. I think the most interesting matches are the ones you still don't know if you are going to win or lose halfway through. I'm comfortable with people who play sort of similar to the "normal" AI. But, I think the best guides are these three: http://kotaku.com/5382233/tim-schafer-explains-how-to-play-brutal-legend http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?p=2709461 http://roosterteethcomics.com/forum/viewTopic.php?id=2224654&page=2 I think you linked to the first one earlier in this thread, but almost all of the tips Erik Robson speaks of for each faction are nearly essential to follow. The second one I found on Penny Arcade first, but I couldn't find the direct link to that, so the LucasForums one is a copy and paste type deal. It's really comprehensive on breaking everything down but doesn't necessarily give good strategies. The third one has some helpful strategies to use for specific factions or areas in the initial few posts before Cantido reposts his guide afterwards. On Tim Schafer's part in the first link he says he likes to keep his army together and not split up, but I either almost always get screwed by someone splitting up their units into two or I screw someone that way myself. I'm not sure why he recommends that. Even splitting off some units to go harass someone's stage early on can be really distracting to the opposing player, since it forces them to have to do something about it. I found it's good to get in the habit of using the healing or strengthening solos early on when capturing initial geysers that you know the enemy is also going to go well. The main game never even really explained the point of these solos outside of freeing guys from the mine. Sometimes having the Battle Cry attack multiplier going on or some kind of healing multiplier will make all the difference when you are fighting over the same geyser with an enemy team with roughly the same units. I'm terrible at stages where there's only one geyser that's not at your base to fight over, I tend to panic too much and screw it up. The only one I'm okay at is the feeding pit where the other two geysers are hard to get to because of the big worm. If I'm playing a team with motorcycle type guys, at least one, it not all, will easily get past the worm. I don't know what to do with Drowning Doom on that level because no one on their team seems fast enough to get to the geysers without dying except the crawling head and if she dies you have to make a whole new one. Some people online are also great at doing the harm the "handicap the other avatar solo" *while* I'm in the middle of fighting them one on one and just end up killing me and my major units. I have no idea how to learn how to multitask that well.

What in hell?!

Merge, make deals, and fuck your sister, the wonderful American way. EDIT REAL RESPONSE: I don't see how giving one huge company the guaranteed publishing rights to all of your games is good business sense outside of a safety net, since now Activision must do everything in it's power to make sure each game is successful. The cynic in me sees that it would give the publisher free reign to make demands to ensure profitability under contract while the optimist in me (that does not exist) would say that it means Activision will be backing Bungie's needs every step of the way. Also it's weird it's a timed deal and not develop x amount of games for us deal. Does that mean Bungie could make their own Duke Nukem Forever situation if they felt like it? I'm glad it's not a developer I really care about making this deal either way.

Oh god... IMA STONE COLD CUT YO FACE

Yeah, I hate that too. It really could have been great if just given more polish or length. I don't think the RTS stuff is broken at all as some people claim. That seems to be the main reason everyone loathes it on the internet. I thought it was just supposed to be an overrun shrine to Ormagoden, like the druids were there to fetch the axe, but I could be wrong. In all of the cutscenes with Doviculus later on it seems to be taking place in the first area of the game. If that's so, it's a very weird placement on the map for The Tainted Coil to be so close to Bladehenge, which initially seems to be a very well kept safe haven.

Yeah the Game Developer postmortem seemed to hint that maybe a lot of the unfinished parts of the game were cut out because of the headache of the lawsuit, but I could be wrong for thinking this. I can't double check since it's no longer available online without paying. I was hoping the Art of Brutal Legend book that was supposed to come out might have illuminated ideas for unfinished or unmade parts, but I guess I'll never know now since it was canceled and all.

Alright, so I meant to write what I thought of the game a lot sooner then put it off since it was going to be a long wall of text, but I guess I'd better do it now that I ended up getting all of the trophies last weekend (sort of got lucky... you'll see) or I'll never do it. The load game bug sucks and I still can't currently get back into my game until the promised patch is finally released, but apparently this has been promised for nearly four months now. I had to reload an earlier chapter before the game quit loading and just play the game until I finally had 100%. Luckily after playing some multiplayer, this went by really quickly the second time around, taking maybe only an hour or two to finish the last 15% of the game. In the single player mode, this game was definitely cut short. I was left wanting more in a bad way. It seems like whatever was planned was just never fleshed out in terms of both gameplay and story. For instance, I found it really bizarre that I enjoyed the story and it's little twists even if it felt like there were chunks missing. I was under the impression from this thread that Ophelia That's what I get for reading everyone's spoilers before actually playing the game itself. That ridiculous was pretty lame as well. The gameplay seemed all sorts of disjointed though. I recommend anyone playing to just go ahead and use this map as they go: http://images.roosterteeth.com/images/4ad6590960ef2_bighugemap.jpg I like to try to collect all the shit in games like this. In Zelda games I always try to accomplish everything possible in the Overworld until I hit a standstill and then go to the next dungeon. I was trying to explore the Brutal Legend map myself in the first third and find what I could on my own, but I was just getting incredibly stressed out. Over and over I was just driving off cliffs on accident or dying somehow by just exploring and hitting a dead end or a bottomless pit. My car kept getting stuck between trees. It was just no fun to try to find things without some sort of beacon or radar. I know you can get that particular car add-on after you beat the game AND buy the DLC, but that's pretty cheap if you ask me, since the major reason for getting the serpents is to just have some boosts during the battles, without the legends it's very hard to understand the story, and some of the solos are just too cool to miss. My major gripes with the game used to be just how repetitive the side missions were and how difficult the RTS stuff was, but at least the latter I found out was not so bad at all. I was playing fine on Brutal mode, but once I spent like four hours trying to defeat Lionwhyte in his pleasure palace, I realized I was doing something wrong. I am also very inexperienced with RTS. Looking up Tim Schafer's article on using double teams to your advantage helped me get to the end of the game, but really my major problems were just being way too slow with the solos and commands, not knowing what I could do that was the most powerful for my army, choosing to spawn my troops at random, and spending too much time trying to capture geysers instead of making my main focus the enemy's stage. After starting the multiplayer where nearly everyone either an aggressive asshole or just plain expert and losing a bunch of times, I checked out some guides and started aping what these assholes did to win. So when I had to replay the last section of the game, especially parts I had trouble on against the Drowning Doom, I suddenly found it all to be a breeze and everything clicked. Part of the game's problem is that the campaign mode is supposed to be a tutorial for multiplayer. In the meantime, nothing in game really holds your hand and lets you know what are good strategies to use or when the best time to use certain solos are. There's so many other modes of play that the game has to focus on as well even though the meat sort of should have been the RTS stuff. So I had to read the statement initially where Schafer says the double teams are extremely important? Well yeah, that's true, but why didn't the game ever make this clear? I think Brutal Legend just needed to be longer and more repetitive (I can't believe I'm asking for this) in terms of the RTS stuff instead of just giving you one off battles to try out new members of your team each time your army gets bigger. I never once felt prepared or like I had much of a clue what I was doing while playing campaign mode with the RTS stuff and it really doesn't help that there's no way in game to actually practice. You could practice ambushes everywhere, but no dice on just messing with geysers. I guess I could have went over to the AI stage battles on retrospect, but it didn't cross my mind since I usually see multiplayer as something to hit once you are done with single player. So all that complaining aside, I think once you get the hang of all the RTS stuff in multiplayer, you start seeing how fun it actually is and how well it truly works. The game makes it such a hard shell to crack to get to that point, though. Once I started playing alright online and getting in the thick of all of my units and destroying the other player, I could see how awesome it felt to command all of these characters successfully. It's really too bad that a lot of this fun is confined to multiplayer. I would love to play a co-op game as well against another two other players if I ever get around to it. The only major gripe I have with the multiplayer is just the matchmaking. I've heard there are more players on the 360 version, so maybe all of this is alleviated there, but it seems like the only people I usually get to play against are just assholes who are complete experts on the game and have something like 75% wins or more. Hardly ever have I gotten matched up with players who are at the same skill level as me or below me. I think this scares a lot of new players off because how do you successfully get better if every player currently available demolishes you online? If I surrender a game I already know I'm going to lose because the guy's avatar is at my stage first thing in the game comboing and soloing efficiently and completely killing me and everyone coming off my stage, I'll get paired with the same guy the next game since no one else is online. Then there are times when clearly no one is online at all. I never figured out how to play Drowning Doom well, so I usually use Tainted Coil since they seem to fit my play style the best and are actually relatively simple to command even though they seem more complicated. Only problem is my initial Battle Nun that needs to give birth is always a major weak point so that winning or losing seems to balance on them living very early on in the game. If I'm not able to defend my initial one or two nuns well, I'm almost always guaranteed a loss. Again, this is usually not a problem unless playing a super aggressive asshole, but even if I switch to Ironheade, who does not have that major weakpoint, the next match I'll still be demolished by the same guy more often than not. I was stuck once a few times with this crazy mother fucker who would just use his car first thing in a match and was just an expert at maneuvering it to completely run me and everyone on my team over without a hitch. He was too fast for me or my team to destroy his car. But yeah, full disclosure I got most of my online wins by getting stuck between these two goofballs surrendering to eachother online one night. No one else was on and I kept getting paired with one of them and they kept surrendering. EDIT: When I was planning to type this a couple of weeks ago, I was going to say how useless it was to put defenses on your stage when they do nothing to prevent you from losing, but then I realized this is more for online when people rush your stage early on and you can kill their low level troops by yourself with your stage components without ever having to summon any of your guys. This is not useful in the single player game because the AI never pulls any kind of trickery like that and only seems to storm your stage when they have gotten powerful enough to win.

Fresh, eh? That somehow doesn't settle with me right.

I thought when you find someone's lost phone the point was to start making all of those international calls you always wanted to make.

Actually I remember taking peoples lost floppies from the computer lab in high school and loading them up the word documents inside at home just because I liked reading people's badly written reports on things. Always good for a laugh. Is that evil of me? I figured no one wanted their badly written reports.

So were these like an album's worth of songs of music files compressed to 150kb each?

Argh, there's this artist guy I work with who was hired about 6 months ago after my company split and he pisses me off so much. I just handed off a 3D model to him for this papercraft stuff my boss wants to get into for our website and sure enough, the bastard is dissecting the 3D model I made a messing up all of the textures when all he was supposed to do was just figure it out in the papercraft program since I didn't have time and he sort of sits around like a bump on a log doing nothing since his only skills are 3D skills. I have no doubt in my mind he's going to fuck it up completely because he's a terrible artist who can't draw, can't form ideas correctly, and has this weird attachment to doing everything in 3D first. He can't draw anything or create vector graphics without making a bland 3D model first. He needs this as reference for everything, so everything takes him forever to do. A few months back I had to talk to my boss about him because we all had to tackle this shitty flash game about huffing paint, where I ended up doing about 75% of the art and animation, ridiculous needs of our client aside. So I hardly have to work with him anymore and I made it clear to my boss that never again am I just going to go along with taking on the full workload like that. I try to never talk to him, but I hate even interacting with him on little things like this. He's almost double my age so he feels like he has to inform me how to do everything in any art program when he knows very little and is absolutely slow at finishing anything that is asked of him. I think this is how I end up with 3 or 4 projects to go between while the other dude gets like one thing for his peanut brain to concentrate on for a while. What I don't understand is how no one notices this except me (there was a programmer who said something, but no one notices a programmer on the art side I guess). I've repeatedly told my bosses he doesn't really do his work and they say he's still new give him time, etc. Nothing but excuses for the guy. So anyway, I bet he'll be spending about 3 weeks redoing my simple 3D model and messing up the texture map I already made while I'll be juggling 3 other projects in the meantime. Then we can all sit at the meeting then and he can spin it how I did everything wrong in his passive aggressive manner. I shouldn't even care about this shit since I'm so late on getting all my new personal work in a revamped portfolio/website since I've been planning to leave this company to somewhere in Austin for over a year. I can't help but fret over it when I should really be practicing distancing myself from all this crap. Arghgghhfdhg.

There are really short songs that will fit in mp3 format.

Probably all to my dad. He still buys them because he is a backwards old man. He recently complained that the floppy that he used to back up this years tax forms went bad, but thinks backing things up on more sensible and new data forms is unreliable. He has been known to make a CD-R now and then, but will never go without his trusty floppies. Because of this he also insists to install a floppy drive in any new PC I get. I guess it's convenient for me now because I'm such a lazy ass that when I buy old software off of Ebay, I just download the game from abandonware sites instead of taking the time to actually check and see if I could get a legit floppy rip of my game. Sometimes the abandonware files don't work and I've been saved by having a way to read off the real game floppy. I doubt most of them still work though.

Shit, I've never once knew there was this kind of depth to meat slices. I get the little deli HEB tubbed turkey. I know that doesn't count at all and it tastes cheap (which it is).

I thought that was Grim Fandango? I nominate a skeleton Jesus.

But... tickling is painful, not arousing! At least to me. Anyways I don't believe this story one bit and think it's a bunch of sensationalist tripe. Yufster would probably have the final word on these publications if she still posted here.

I just meant on the forum. Their reviews are sort of all over the place. I don't usually agree with any of them but the newly reviewed retro ones, where they tend to be harder on the older games that weren't really designed all that well in the first place. Not that those games are for sale now and a review would matter to much of anyone who's not browsing Ebay or an Abandonware site.

AdventureGamers completely loved it from what I saw, but they love everything.

It confusing why they wouldn't want to put a ton of effort in the game the first time. I think it only got by just for simple being The Secret of Monkey Island available again, not that the eyesore of the first SE did much in the way of meriting more art like that or an initial purchase for that matter.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27964/Interview_Prince_Of_Persias_Mechner_On_Working_With_Bruckheimer_Future_Plans.php This interview is up now. I would be interested in seeing what Mechner has in store for a new possible Karateka game. Somehow I think a small team would suit it as maybe a digital download type release instead of something on the scale and budget of the previous few Prince of Persias. I don't even know if it would have to be Ubisoft produced. I'm glad he seems to hint that he may be get back into helping with more Prince of Persia games, because things have been somewhat disappointing since. It's funny he doesn't mention that he left Warrior Within out of anger of what Ubisoft was wanting to make (Although this may have been heresay, it's been so long I can't remember all of the facts and Wikipedia doesn't enlighten all that much). My biggest fear is not that this new movie will be lame, but that it may encourage more things to get made in the Prince of Persia world that is also light and Hollywood fare without Mechner's direction. I'm glad he was allowed to write the new Prince of Persia comic collection all by himself even if it has a Todd McFarlane cover (shudder). What I've seen so far of the inside art looks good though. Anyway, I'm glad when Chris Remo interviews his heroes. He knows the right questions to ask.

Haha, I didn't even both reading the Bruckheimer interview. I just liked the sum up of it on the podcast and stuck to that.

Usually I only give in to Special Editions if they have some kind of exclusive making of content not found elsewhere. I don't often see a ton of games I'm into with this sort of treatment, so the only recent games like this I've bought are Prince of Persia PS3, Infamous, and Metal Gear Solid 4. I don't go for the physical junk or steelbook type cases at all. I don't even care about artbooks unless it's an artist I really like or follow, but that hardly ever happens with games. The only game soundtrack maker I follow, Peter McConnell, hardly ever has physical CDs available either, although that would be nice. Does a game have to be marked limited or special edition for it to be considered one, though? Nowadays it just seems to be an upsell of superficial add-ons. I have gotten certain pre-order bonuses from Game Stop in the past, but I don't think those are really special edition type things. The earliest I can remember of this sort of thing is when you had multiple copies you could buy of Grim Fandango that had different things inside of them each. One was a mini-walkthrough, but I opted for the one with the Sountrack CD.

HOW DO YOU POST THUMBS?! :tup::tmeh::tdown: NOT THOSE THUMBS!