juv3nal

I remember these and I loved 'em. There's a freely available remake of the second one, but the maze-like city navigation was just too much for me to handle despite my somehow being okay with it when I played the original. But it's free, so you might as well give it a try. Maybe you'll find your tolerance for that kind of thing to be higher than mine. I think you can still find the original games on amazon. If I were to buy them, I would probably go for the collection of 1-4 as it comes pre-patched and hopefully(?) is more likely to run ok on a modern system? Otherwise you might find yourself having to fiddle around with dosbox a lot to get anything going. If you buy them individually be warned that 4 has a lot of gamebreaking bugs that need to be patched up and 3 is disappointingly short. Post-patching, 4 is probably my favorite of the lot.

Just beat it. Bravo. Without question the best series yet.

So I just got an iphone4 (yay me!). It's my first smartphone (read: any phone where I pay for a data plan and checking email isn't some ridiculously hard pay-by-the-byte thing you do). I also had a $50 itunes gift card burning a hole in my wallet, so anyways, I like these: Plants vs. Zombies Helsing's Fire Defender Chronicles Geo Defense Swarm Spider: Secret of Bryce Manor Clue 1) Are any of the adventure games super amazing? I'm not especially keen on the idea as I'm pretty sure I have beaten all of them on PC and they tend to be among the more expensive iapps. 2) Is there a decent 2d turn based rpg for the iphone that doesn't use some stupid virtual controller? Also, have y'all seen the Epic Games tech demo citadel thingy? It's super impressive: tHX7htYsVDQ http://toucharcade.com/2010/09/01/unreal-engine-3-tech-demo-epic-citadel-available-for-free/

I certainly can't defend any of the individual aspects of the game and even if I were willing to try, I doubt I could convince you, but I'll just share what I liked so much about Syberia: the way the story mapped onto a metaphor of the actual act of playing adventure games. Here is this thing you do, fiddling around with puzzles, that does you no good in real life and yet you go on doing it because you get to see some neat pictures and feel clever. Which is exactly what the girl in Syberia does. She gets all these reminders by cell phone of the "real life" which exists, on hold, waiting for her to stop messing around and get back to work and by the end she's basically saying: Fuck that noise. Puzzles are cool. Woolly mammoths and automatons are cool. It's not a complicated story or metaphor or anything, but it's just really cool in the way that it validates the time you've been spending sitting in front of the computer not getting anything productive done.

You shut up. I loved the first Syberia although I couldn't really get into the 2nd one. The first one is explicitly fraught with this tension of her saying to herself "what the heck am I doing here, why don't I go home?" etc. It's very much "the point" of the game that her motives are unpersuasive because she's trying to persuade herself throughout the game.

What? MAX is evolving! Congratulations! Your MAX evolved into MAXTHULHU!

Seventh Sense By: David Olsen, Project Aon, & Joe Dever. Available: Free download (windows, mac, & linux) Synopsis: A client for playing the digitized Lone Wolf adventure gamebooks. Automates random number generation, tracks inventory/stats for you etc. More: Official Forum Rock Paper Shotgun

Thanks for the great cast guys.

They're not horrible, though not in any way objectively good either, but I've played all the Adventure Company non-hidden object Poirot (Evil Under the Sun, And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express) games because I'm a bit of an Agatha Christie fan. Oh I also played Crime Stories which falls into that same category of not horrible, but not good either. Looking over the titles on the dreamcatcher site, I'm tempted by some of those them even knowing full well that they're probably not good games. Guess I'm just a sucker for a mystery adventure game. Holmes versus Jack the Ripper has a decent metacritic score and it's available on Steam? Is that the one that has the hilarious teleporting Watson?

It's the Master of Magic inspired thing by Stardock. Apparently retailers were breaking street date, so he opened up the direct download for "pre-orders" ("pre-order" in quotes because I bought today and was able to start downloading this evening. There was some delay though so if you buy right now you may not be able to download right away) Anyone tried it?

Powered my way through the single player campaign which is more or less an rpg-lite tutorial variant on the actual game. It's weird. You do build some cities, but no one ever attacks them, it's all about you dragging a bunch of troops all over a map. The cities in the sp campaign are just there for you to get reinforcements it seems. I get the feeling that the sp campaign doesn't really prepare you sufficiently for a proper game. Research doesn't happen and you never get attacked. It's just monsters sitting around waiting for you to gather enough troops to dust them. I felt really silly about wasting time training up garrison troop once I figured that out. Still, I had a pretty fun time of it once I got the hang of the UI. It's not going to hold a candle to Civ5 I imagine, but it's not near as bad as the reviews make it out to be. I haven't had a single crash, for instance.

Oh also, like civ there's "areas of influence" around each town. There's no cultural victory as far as I can tell, but the area of influence I think determines where you can build improvements and how far away a resource thingy you can exploit. I read somewhere that random bandits/monsters can't spawn within an area of influence so it's to your benefit to sort of tightly nit your cities so there aren't any gaps in between the areas of influence. But I only have one town and haven't seen a random spawn at all, so I don't know that from experience or anything.

Mostly my experience of it is frustration with the UI so far, but from the single player, it's more on the Civ end of things than King's Bounty. You start out controlling an individual dude, you meet and pick up some followers and found a town. The town has improvements that can be built and it can build units which you can "design" by picking out equipment loadouts. This includes settler units to found more towns. There are map resources which benefit your cities. The city makes money which can be spent on stuff (more equipment bits to build more advanced units for instance). There's tactical combat, but my limited experience of that has been a real drag because my dudes could only move 1 square at a time and the enemy had a ranged attack (none of my guys did) so I said screw that and just ended up auto-resolving. I'm going to guess it becomes more interesting when you have some better units and/or spells, but I'm still very much figuring out how to control the game and at that point just wanted to move on to figure out how to do something else. As the title implies, there's spells but I haven't really delved into that yet other than flipping through some menus to see what options I had for research. I know you research spells. I've read on various forums that you research other stuff too, but can I just say yet again the UI seems to hide parts of itself for seemingly no good reason? I'm sure I'll get used to it/figure it out eventually, but right now figuring out the UI is like it's own little puzzle minigame.

That sounds like an amazing feature, not a bug. Getting dissed on pcgamer as well. As for what I like about it, I'm still wrapping my head around the UI, so I can't really say (there's these weird modal menus so that menu x might only appear if you have thing y selected but if you just want to do thing z without knowing what menu it's on or what thing you need selected to get that menu to show up, you can end up fruitlessly trying to click or rightclick any and everything on screen to find it). I can say that the notion of a turn based strat game in a fantasy setting appeals to me in general and I like GalCiv & GalCiv2 which is why I'm giving it a go. Again, to reiterate, I personally haven't had any issues with bugs, but I'm only playing the single player and one of the crash inducing bugs is caused by alt-tabbing which I haven't really felt the need to do. Unless one of the bugs being that menus disappear and can't be found/opened again. If that were a bug it would explain a lot of my difficulties with the UI.

So it's getting skewered over on Rock Paper Shotgun. But having put about an hour and a half into it, I can't say I've personally run into any bugs or unfinished-ness. The UI is completely impenetrable though and there really isn't anywhere near enough tutorial and/or help. Strange that no one here has taken a chance on it though. I would have thought turn-based strategy would be in the idlethumbs wheelhouse.

"developed in parallel" sequel on the way.

IIRC that character is a reference to Borges, just to add another layer of potential "inaccessibility" to the stack (i.e. you'd need to have read some Borges or know something about him for that reference to mean anything). Which is great/fine IMO. I think accessibility is overrated in telling stories. Take the case of fantasy or sci fi stories set in worlds or futures that are very different than our own present day. Far too often authors end up with exposition instead of trusting the readers to figure out what's going on from context. It either: 1) forces you down some pretty narrow narrative tracks (one of the characters is either a child, foreigner or amnesiac so everyone else has an excuse to explain shit to them) or 2) it throws verisimilitude out the window. Even when the narrator is 3rd person omniscient, being situated in that milieu, they should only be remarking on the remarkable: you wouldn't expect someone writing a contemporary novel today to explain what a cell phone is and how it works, so why should sci fi tech things get different treatment?

Oh hey another poet! I have 4 things here.

(from) Applies to so many things. In other words, Gravity's Rainbow is incomprehensible only if you are incomprehensible... er...or something.

Another victim to your insidious machinations, Kroms.

from the RPS piece: Anyone else look at the logo and think there's maybe another word hidden there under the red and white fabric? I mean inifinite can be a noun, but "infinity" or "the infinite" is much more usual for that. Commonly, infinite is an adjective, so infinite...what?

Grr. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say it ends on a cliffhanger. Which is annoying as fuck if I'm going to have to wait a whole year.

This? New Yorker, not NY Times.

I didn't know about it until you mentioned it and then I watched what few episodes there are. That ending. Agh. I hate you. There had better be more of them and soon.

Is this a real screenshot or just a mock up? I don't hate the art style, but some of the UI elements look really rough like they were just photoshopped in. The white background area behind the "run away" instructions especially sticks out like a sore thumb.