Freezerr

Just stumbled across GoG.com having a pretty awesome sale to celebrate their 1st birthday - Buy one Interplay game, get another free. Fallout, Freespace, and a bunch of other stuff is included. If, like me, you haven't bought the old Fallout games prior to this, it's a ridiculously great deal. http://www.gog.com/en/page/1year_promo

I went back to Mass Effect this week as a result of last week's podcast. It is really fun - probably my favorite RPG qua RPG that I've played on a console so far. I was also thinking to myself "Man, Remo is a baby; this game was super easy except for a few boss fights. I'll go to the ice planet first and show him." Of course, this time I tried to play a class besides a Soldier (Vanguard, maybe?) and holy crap, you were right! That security woman one-shot raped me 3 or 4 times in a row before I managed to figure out a way to clear the room. Also, I enjoyed the different dialogue that you get with Harkin in the bar when you are a female Shepard.

There's definitely a frame-rate drop when you fly close to a burning bomber in the IL-2 Sturmovik demo, but for me it was just a momentary stutter. That's a weird thing to rag on a demo for - usually you guys aren't graphics nuts. How'd you guys feel about gameplay?

The Dragon Age stuff was hilarious (also Chris's impressions made me much more interested in this game).

lol. edit - funny game. I like it!

Thanks for the advice. I think I'll pick it up sometime soon.

My GT is Freezerr. I'll try to catch one of the GTA4 sessions one of these days. I'm usually playing CoD 4, but I'm always down for playing a game of anything fun, especially Age of Booty or TF2.

So is this worth getting if I've never played Magic the Gathering before, but am kind of interested in it? Or should I pass? I was going to get this based on EDGE's review, but it sounds like making your own deck is a core part of the game.

The last 5 minutes had me laughing really hard!

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23276 Sounds awesome! I loved the exploration and atmosphere in Fallout 3, and if Obsidian can recapture that, I'll probably be putting another 150 hours into this game. (Assuming that it's a full $60 game and not a Lost & Damned style expansion.)

Fair enough. It is definitely frustrating that your download options are limited to multiples of 500, when there's absolutely no reason why it needs to be limited that way (except to get the consumer to spend more than he normally would). Games retailers try to do the same thing by pricing games at 59.99 or 39.99 to make the price tag artificially more palatable to the consumer. This is on a smaller scale and less objectionable, certainly, but there is the same mindset behind both pricing schemes. And in the end, neither of these cross the line for me and dissuade me from purchasing games.

Is this anything beyond a game of semantics?

Sorry if I got your hopes up; I think you can still only buy it with the MS money equivalent.

Anyone try out the Pitt DLC yet? There are still no reviews on metacritic and I'm hesitant to shell out another 10 bucks sight unseen.

That was amazing.

Incidentally, Rome: Total War has the option to enslave a city whenever you capture it. If you enslave the population, a pair of manacles appear on the map and act as a resource (IIRC). So, if you wanted to role-play as a racist Greek king, enslaving all the barbarians, R:TW doesn't stand in your way. It always struck me as a part of history that doesn't need to be replicated in games. I'm quite glad that they excluded slavery from E:TW.

I thoroughly enjoyed Appaloosa recently. It's a Western less concerned with an epic Good vs. Evil struggle (although, that is essentially the plot), and more with the characters and their interactions. All the main actors inhabit believable, fleshed-out characters.

I prefer running the campaign at a notch or two higher difficulty than the battles. I imagine Empire will be a different beast, but in Rome and Medieval, the basic strategy of putting all your infantry in a line and then using cavalry to flank about 15 seconds into engagement works 90% of the time (on Normal Difficulty at least).

I started Far Cry 2 and I'm about 3 or 4 hours in. I'm divided on whether to restart or to keep going. You see, I set the difficulty to Hardcore in the beginning, so that combat would be challenging. But without quicksaving available, I find that I have to repeat a lot of travelling when I die. This would be alright, but I am dying a good bit. Should I restart the game on normal difficulty, or will I stop sucking at combat later on in the game when I unlock more weapons? EDIT: Nevermind, I just discovered that you can change the difficulty as you please during the game. I feel like an idiot for posting this now.

Thanks for scanning the article! I really enjoyed reading it. Day 1 if I can fit it in the budget.

One of the weird things about Half-life 2 is that narratively, you're running for your life out of the city while the Combine is hunting you, but gameplay-wise, there are clear triggers for enemy spawns. It was immersion-breaking for me when I realized that I could stand around for as long as I liked and the Combine wouldn't come after me, unless I crossed that invisible line 5 yards ahead. As much as I hate the infinite respawn in the Call of Duty series, it probably would have worked well for that portion of Half-Life 2, short of putting the game on rails. (Perhaps I wouldn't have noticed this, or have minded it as much if Half-Life 2 wasn't only the 2nd shooter I ever played. Amusingly, I bought The Orange Box for TF2 and Portal and had no clue what Half-Life 2 was. After I played those two a lot, I decided to give this "Half-Life 2" a try, expecting some cheesy, mediocre game. Boy, was I surprised. And in the end, I think I agree with you guys that the most memorable parts were the adventure/puzzle parts, but the shooting parts were executed very well.)

I'm probably younger than most on this forum, but I won't hold it against y'all. Yes, I'm finding out that the Internets are terrible for evaluating console games. This was my first GTA game, and I had a list of (in hindsight) unreasonable expectations. BTW, for anyone interested, Too Human is $20 at Target.com right now. I kind of enjoyed the demo and happened to have an old gift card, so I'm ignoring all the bad press about this game, and grabbed a copy. If anyone on this forum is into the co-op, I'd be interested in trying it out (after I get the game and get used to the mechanics).

More like Hitman with VATS and bad AI, so far. You sneak around with a silenced 10mm pistol and headshot guys in VATS. Bodies can't be looted and you have no food. Apparently you can "go in guns blazing" with the Chinese Assault Rifle you find; I haven't really tried that yet.

The multiplayer looks like wacky fun; I was referencing the whole "Oscar-worthy script" hype that made me buy it in the first place. However, there are enough people shitting on GTA IV these days, so I'll refrain from making a long post about it. I just may have you join you guys in GTA IV sometime. Braid is very fun. However, some of the puzzle pieces stumped me and so I gave up for a bit. I felt like my (lack of) platforming skills and experience made the game very hard, especially on world 6 (with the time-bending ring).

There are anti-science themes in the game, certainly. But there is a major exception...