Joflar

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Posts posted by Joflar

  1. Posted

    They have Max Payne on sale, but... I don't think I could play an "older" game of this kind, I'm so used to modern controls, I'd get frustrated and quit playing the game... :blink:

    I don't like playing "action-y" games on PC that much anymore, they never seem to control as good as the console counterpart... ;(

    The input is all standard PC shooter controls, although it sounds like you're not quite comfortable with that either. Its a pretty PC-centric action game because the twitch shooting is harder to do on a gamepad. If you haven't played the series before I'd really recommend checking it out since the deal is 1+2 bundled and they are both a ton of fun.

  3. Posted

    Was playing Hardcore, and I saved some Space Rasta cats and hid them with their Cousin, Little Lion. The Ceridian Navy hated this and declared me an outlaw. On another planet I found Little Lion bleeding out due to gunfire. In his last moments he gave me a prototype fighter. I turned over his body and discovered a Ceridian Navy Police badge on his person. Feeling betrayed but mournful at this loss, I loaded up a battle with this new weapon:

    LittlelionShip2.png

    Here's a sense of how tiny this ship is. It can really book it.

    LittleLionShip.png

    This is the kind of ordinance the ship carries. Yeah.

    LittleLionShip1.png

    Unfortunately my heart exploded before I could conquer the galaxy with it.

  4. Posted

    Margraviate of Brandenburg

    My position wasn't a superb one when the game started so I just played quiet and defensive for most of the early game. For much of the early-mid game I was Tech trading & attempting to mutually assist Joflar against the giant that was Wurtzi. As I started to make headway in the far northern regions of Wurtzi's territory Joflar decided that would be an opportune time to attack my southern systems which forced me to withdraw forces from the Wurtzi front and redeploy for a slugfest with Joflar. This was prior to Wurtzi going AI so I figured I'd be dead soon enough but I wanted to make sure that The Betrayer went down with me. Since I didn't feel like bothering with RPing or anything in a game that I thought I'd soon be out of I stopped communicating with the other players to a great extent.

    The only communication I have done since then was with Dibs. Trading my speed tech for some weapon tech since it seemed that Joflar was getting weapon tech from some of his neighbors and I couldn't keep up.

    This is where we of the Margriaviate are at now. Determined to crush Joflar for his crimes against the honest & good people of Brandenburg. He shall pay. :( *cackles*

    I'd be interested in a new game if you need more players. :grin:

    What happened was Wurtzi had steamrolled me but left a few fleets alive. He then asked for help because Yellow had attacked him, and then asked me to attack you. Then Wurtzi went AI and I persisted, hoping that I could take you and then swallow up all of his abandoned territory. Instead I got stuck in a nasty drawn out war...

  6. Posted

    I beat Bioshock 2. Maybe this should go in the Bioshock 2 thread but whatever:shifty:

    I performed the Scoops maneuver of turning off all the exploration assists. It made me appreciate the richness of the environments as I hunted them for audio logs and ammo. In my opinion, the thematic elements are very intelligent. The game features a lot of killing but you defeat Sophia Lamb by competing with her ideals instead of using physical force.

    The atmosphere is foreboding but its not really a palpable amount of tenseness like in Bioshock 1. Its pretty incongruous to see a dead Splicer pop up and be like "GOT YOU NOW" and then you just kill them instantly with a drill dash. Hypnotize 3 was my favorite plasmid, I got one of the Brute Splicers to follow me around and in a really thick cockney accent he said "Dr. Lamb says I need to embrace the man in the mirror. Sounds faggy to me." Setting up traps was a lot of fun, I liked that gameplay element. I wish I could've paused the game to switch weapons but I got used to it.

    I feel like Bioshock 2 got a bad rap for being a sequel but its honestly one of the best games I've played this year. Listening to audio logs and admiring the setting is awesome. It kind of highlights something I didn't like about Mass Effect 2. The combat and noncombat sections didn't form a very cohesive link, it felt disjointed. In Bioshock you can be building up your knowledge of the world and then hear an enemy nearby, and you know that the world exists around you as a very realized setting.

  8. Posted

    Just finished Crysis Warhead, those games are sweet. I was still finding out new stuff with the suit right until the end.

    Now playing STALKER Shadows of Chernobyl.

    Just got the key from Borov, making my way to the lab.

    How far in am I?

    You've got a long way to go, if you open your PDA you can see all the game zones. You'll go through all of them.

  9. Posted

    I'm not sure I quoted Soren Johnson too accurately during the cast, but in reference to evolution and WoW, Soren specifically used the example of build trees. He started with a base Paladin and showed that over time, choices are made to become increasingly more specialized, where you've got upwards of eight different combined specs, from healer to tank and everywhere in between. He compared these specs to Darwin's finches and to then argue that WoW, in some ways, was more ABOUT evolution than Spore, despite Spore's theme (or "creative wrapper). I agreed with him at the time, and I think I still do. You guys have made the (intelligent) point that evolution is about natural selection, whereas your WoW spec is a conscious choice. I think it *could* (and that's a big could) be argued that perhaps a Paladin (or Druid or Hunter or whoever) makes the choices they do in WoW based on what will help them thrive moment to moment in the game. While some players certainly set out with the idea "I'm going to become a resto druid," it's not difficult to imagine the player who, based on the fact that they solo or that all of their friends are mages, start to make less conscious choices about their specialization and simply evolve into whatever makes the most sense for the types of situations they generally find themselves in during the game.

    Of course, you still have to click the little box to say "yeah, one point in feral please." So there's that. It's a loose connection, but I think if you look past the fine details, Soren makes a good point. It should also be said that this was about 90 seconds of a 60 minute talk, the whole of which is well worth tracking down on the GDC Vault if you're into such things.

    Sorry to resuscitate a dead topic but I recently read the article Sean was talking about: http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=237

    As I understand it, the conscious choice of designing a spec is heavily dependent on min/maxing according to the game rules. Game Patches cause some traits to lose desirability and others to gain desirability. Whereas in Spore, you can get the raptor claws or a jelly tentacle and the game environment doesn't encourage you into a certain route.

  10. Posted

    What order did you do things in? It may have helped that it was the last thing for me. I died a hell of a lot in the Circle of Mages tower, but since I had already been through hell learning how to play earlier in the game, the deep roads weren't too much for me. I may have just been overleveled, our you were underleveled, or something.

    I just finished the Landsmeet. What the fucking fuck? Is there a good way to resolve this? Specifically,

    is there a way to let Loghain live and have Alistair not desert you? I tried to show him some mercy, but anything short of slitting his throat made Alistair have a hissy fit. When he left my party, I freaked out, loaded an old save, and just killed Loghain. Now Anora is queen and Alistair is still trucking beside me, but I feel bad that I couldn't just banish the dude or something. Damn.

    Also, I noticed that I had a horn in my inventory that could supposedly summon a dragon, so I took it to the mountaintop and tested it out. The thing arrived and started chewing on my mage. Like, actually picked her up and started gnawing. I killed it, but it was probably the most intense fight I've had in the game. Afterwards, I felt pretty bad about the whole thing. It was just flying around doing dragon-y things, and would never have bothered me at all if I hadn't specifically gone to great lengths to piss it off and call it to me. Now this giant creature that had been living for centuries is dead, and all to give me an achievement and some bones that a dude made into armor for me. Oh well, what's done is done.

    I assume all I have left now is the endgame. Everyone is building it up as such, anyway. I bought the expansion today as it was on sale on Steam, so I'll be going straight into that, I think. Cool coolgame.

    Regarding the Landsmeet,

    You have to choose between Alistair or Loghain. Makes sense, considering Loghain screws over the two people that Alistair cares most about.

    Reading how you freaked out about that choice is pretty awesome, because in my playthrough my character was a completely self-centered human noble. Every time I could I called Alistair a crybaby whiner to get Morrigan's approval. When I got to the landsmeet,

    I spared Loghain, chose Anora as queen, and then Alistair was executed to prevent any more political uprisings.

    Man, that game has some really satisfying roleplaying in it.

  12. Posted

    Ah yes, I really like the look of this, but I was so disappointed with the crappy quality of the subtitles on my DVD that I never got further than 20 mins in. I might check out the looooooong version (the TV series that they condensed into the movie) eventually.

    Yeah I watched the loooooooong version. I had a couple hours to kill and wanted to get completely invested in something. The transition of the young crewmen into adults is subtle and really compelling to follow.

  13. Posted

    My favorite memory of the APB beta was running around the world doing some mission and then seeing a player-made car stenciled with the words "FUCK COPS" in Impact font. The car horn played La Cucaracha on loop.

  14. Posted

    Hey, I downloaded that, too! And I never played it!

    Did the environments of Firewalker feel expansive? That's the biggest loss from Mass Effect 1 to 2---no vehicles meant no big environments. There is nothing as breathtaking as the moon or Bring Down The Sky in Mass Effect 2.

    It is literally a single path track. I'm in the same boat where I really liked that aspect of Mass Effect 1. If they made a Mass Effect game about being a space realtor who landed on empty planets and then used the dialogue system to scare off squatters, sell land, and resolve disputes brought to the Homeowner's Association I would play the heck out of it.

  18. Posted · Edited by Joflar

    Wait, didn't someone already do that, like for a health meter? I think I might either be digging up a really bad joke or a repressed memory of a really dumb game...

    Oh yeah it was a dumb joke about Trespasser, a super ambitious Jurassic Park game that ended up being incredibly buggy and awkward. There's a good gamasutra post mortem here http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3339/postmortem_dreamworks_.php

    The plan was to set the game on a single level-less island. It had a ton of cool ideas; combat would take a backseat to exploration and survival, Dinosaurs would have AI routines beyond only acting aggressively, objects in the world would be affected by physics, and your character had a physical body and wasn't just a gun on a camera. The end result didn't pan out back in 1998 but its nice that modern games like STALKER or Far Cry 2 are testing out these concepts.

    HH7BlBb8Oxg

  20. Posted

    I love Red Dead Redemption to pieces, but that example doesn't sound amazing/emergent at all. It sounds like shoddy scripting.

    To clarify: the rules of the world should be consistent/make sense.

    Either

    1) the law comes after you no matter when you kill the guy because killing a man for committing a crime (or killing a man to prevent a crime) is the sheriff's job and they will brook no vigilante-ism.

    or

    2) the guy is a prostitute attacker therefore it's always ok to kill him because, hey, it's the wild west and the sheriff needs all the help he can get.

    3) Killing the bad guy leaves no witnesses, and therefore the law blames you for a crime you didn't commit?! :eek:

    (I have no idea if this is the case but that would be badass)

  23. Posted

    I feel like 12 players is pushing it, maybe the next time someone starts up they should try 8 instead. There is a lot of action happening on these big maps but it feels a little too open, I haven't interacted in any meaningful way with at least half of the players on the map.