CaptainFish

Yea, this is a bummer. I'm not a huge review reader, with the way games are covered now I usually know what I'm getting into. I do really like Brad Shoemaker's reviews over at GB. Even if I disagree with him I know I'm in for a well written review. Comparatively it's like the populist version of university level discourse compared to this IGN guy's middle school level discourse.

Ditto.

It would be really cool if they offered that Razer motion control stuff to PS Move owners. They probably won't, because I assume that's a special deal with Razer, but that would be extra functionality most PC users won't have. I wonder how this game will work on the used market. You must have to tie the copy to your steam account, but then what happens if you sell it? Do they only get the PS3 version, or does it not work at all? I only ask because I predict a lot of PC dudes going out and getting the PS3 version only to sell it back.

Just played the first mission of Chaos Rising, and there are some changes. 1. Supply pickups are now separated into healing, combat, tactical and explosive. This meant by the end of the mission I was out of grenades and had a tough time dealing with buildings and sentry guns. It won't be as big a deal later when I equip Avitus with Rockets or Plasma, but it didn't help me in the finale. 2. There's a big manual option next to the co-op button on the planetary map. It details all the weapons and concepts. Some of this stuff would show up at appropriate times in vanilla (you'd get a blurb about Rockets when you get your first rocket launcher), but a lot of stuff didn't have any info. It's really good. 3. At the end of the level there was no boss. Instead there was an impossibly large horde of Imperial Guard to fight that I had no chance of dealing with with my lack of explosives, abilities and cover. Luckily the timer ran out and they just ran away. It was still the same basic idea of combat that is unlike the general combat in a negative way, but at least it gives me hope that every stage won't end with a big bad boss. Also there was no difficulty select, so I'm either stuck on hard or there is no difficulty for this expansion.

I just finished vanilla Dawn of War II on hard. I really like the changes they made to the game, making it about a few units to avoid the clustered movement problems, and have every unit be meaningful. It really clicked for me in one of the Tyranid missions where I held a full building for about 10 minutes against a steady flow from a hive. I still have some issues though. Most of it revolves around the boss fights that this game is enamoured with. I thought that pretty much every boss fight in this game was horrible. Your unit abilities end up mattering a lot less, and the ones that do matter don't for very long because of the high damage output of the bosses, their tendency to summon minions to ruin your shit and their general unaffected nature. One example was a Ork machine boss that was weak against power weapons, meaning that my Commander had to stun him with power fists while everyone else piled on the damage. This only worked for a few seconds, because after 2 hits my commander was at blinking red health, and even using a medkit as soon as that occurred didn't stop him from dying. Once he went down it became a shit show as my scouts cloaked to stay alive and my tactical and devastator marines desperately tried to stay out of melee, only to get picked off whenever the game decided they were close enough. Pretty much every boss fight became double orbital strike, timed explosives and artillery strikes and retreating whenever they got close. It was tedious, not fun and not at all what I think they want you to do in those fights. I have no idea what the correct way is though. I thought the equipment stuff was cool, but the data they give you seemed a bit off. Giving Avitus a heavy bolter always gave him a ridiculously high damage score in comparison to Plasma Cannons or Rocket Launchers, but the latter weapons definitely seemed more damaging and effective. It also seemed like all the data was for the commander himself sans his backup, which doesn't give you the whole story. Overall I wish more final stats (by which I mean total stats after taking into account skills and accessories) like accuracy, damage against each unit type, total damage/supression resistance were surfaced. The game also never described how the mechanic of Armor works. Normally I'd assume it's a negative effect to the opponent's accuracy, but it seemed more like a damage reduction mechanic. I still experienced strange control stuff. There were some weird retreats where units would retreat into enemies along seemingly longer paths than an actual retreat. Melee units would stand still taking fire or attack weaker units while higher priority ones destroy them. Abilites I thought were targeted to enemies were targeted to spaces making them kinda useless against fast moving bosses. And as I said before the whole thing had this control latency where telling your commander to attack the rocket guy after he decided on his own to attack a regular infantry man meant waiting for him to start and finish his melee animation before running over, and meant that he would almost always die in transit. I don't mean to shit on the game. The story was great, and I loved the flow of the regular combat. I'm looking forward to the expansion. I'll probably just play it on normal to avoid more boss problems. tl;dr Dawn of War is fun, bosses are dumb.

This didn't really do much to stoke my desire to play DNF. Seems like Duke is still Duke and actually funny. I haven't seen enough of the combat yet though, and the pig cop face grabbing looked pretty weird.

Yea it's the most blatant case of what Nintendo does, but now other companies are also getting in on the fun. I'm interested in seeing how some of these games control. What I've seen of the fighting games seems completely terrible. Fighting games are about execution, not tapping combos to win the game. I'm not sure if the Resident Evil games have stylus shooting though.

OH MAN, seriously? That game is great! We should do that in here! I know there's like issues with the Text adventure stuff, but that would be sweet.

Swat 2 is one of my favorite strategy games ever. The procedural elements with the slightly randomized reactions of the perps made it really interesting. That screenshot brings back some good memories.

Developers sometimes don't release UMD versions at all because they're easier to pirate than downloadable releases. I don't think this is a case of different releases in different regions, but I don't know for sure.

It's worth noting that the amount of control over the passcodes in Alpha Protocol improves as you put skill points into hacking. Things that speed up hacking just end up making it control better.

Alright, good to know. Since I've already installed them, I'll play a little bit of the expansions. I'll definitely stop once I get bored though.

Just finished the campaign of Dawn of War 1. It's clearly very basic skirmishes with a few small alterations. I did like the story and voice over work, although I wish some of the cutscenes were done out of engine. Some of them came off pretty silly because of the animations not being meant for close up views. As for the gameplay, I wasn't super impressed. There's an issue with the basic control that is infuriating. Units who I've set to attack move across the map will fight one enemy and just stop, vehicles and infantry will get tied up together on scenery, squads will stop short so that not all units can fire. Nothing felt as responsive as I wanted it to feel. Luckily, with the way squads work it's never the end of the world. Losing one man isn't as impactful as it would be in other games. I did like the idea of squads as being the default number of units that you would find useful. It's like C&C's X of 5 infantry. I definitely had the most fun when there was open space and I had hotkeyed all my different weapon specialist marine groups and could choose the correct targets to minimize damage. I'm thinking about doing Winter Assault and Dark Crusade for the story, so I can finally play DoW2, but I'll gladly skip them if the plot isn't related. Could anyone let me know whether or not that's the case?

It was just luck I guess, because I just chose a faction randomly (maybe there should be an in-game random faction function). I think I kinda got lucky in having two outbreaks near me that just funneled into well defended bases. If it wasn't for twmacb's help though I would've been hurting for funds. The orc shaman spell is kinda ridiculous right now though. It's too good at taking out zombies. If they nerf it, they need to give Orcs a control style spell (like cyclops or ents). Next time I play, I'll definitely hold out on buying as many armies at the start, and try to just reinforce a lot and start taking back cites.

There's that Dead Space interactive comic that is just 4 hacking mini-games. Oh and Alpha Protocol had two hacking procedures. In one you had two passphrases whose movement was tied to each analog stick/keyboard and mouse. There's a grid of letters and numbers that are all changing, except for the squares that match the pass phrase. You have to line up the phrases to win. The other one was just a sequence of numbers connected to twisted paths and you had to choose the correct paths in order. I gotta say, for as much as I like Pipe Dream, and as much as it did fit the setting, I thought it was a bad choice. I liked it at the start, but you just do so much hacking throughout Bioshock that it became tedious. At some point you're just clicking as fast as you can to reveal all the parts and then making the same pipe path. As a puzzle it doesn't get that interesting, but it was always fairly time consuming.

I think I've figured out the goblin thing. They sacrifice 10 of their strength to avoid a fight they are going to lose. If they have less than 6-10, they are forced to fight. I'm not 100% clear on the mechanic but I believe 10 strength is a key number. Eldercourt and Eyebrow fort look like good places to attack, because the path of attack is the only way into your territories. Eldercourt is pretty nice because it has defenses, and you'll be able to build Wizards to weaken attacks. Worst case scenario, you see a large attack coming that you can't defend and you retreat, but you'll still reap the benefit of the reward money for taking the town.

I just saw the Quick Look over at Giant Bomb, and this game is really cool looking. Unlike the previous Echochrome where it was all perspective, in this one you play with light, and it acts like it should. At one point Ryan uses a really oblique light angle to turn the side of a block into a ramp and the character uses it just like he should. I love the music too.

I don't know how fair this is, because Virtua Fighter animated so much smoother than anything before it, and the gameplay was actually different than it's predecessors. With the set of goals in making the first Virtua Fighter (and other Virtua games) 2d art wouldn't have sufficed. That's a much different story than the Malcolm's Revenge situation, where the art became worse without any gameplay benefits. I also think there's an aesthetic quality to that type of 3d model, that is completely defined by wireframe and polygon colours, without any real texture work, that is somewhat appealing. It holds up IMO better than early textured work with better polycounts. For example, I'd rather look at untextured VF1 models over the textured versions, and I think the Interstate '76 cast looks nicer than that of Tomb Raider 1.

It's cool, I totally slept in and forgot to cast the fire spell, but that nymph force wasn't supposed to be that strong, and was too costly to reinforce anyway. I used the old orc ability to give half their strength to all nearby armies to make it much bigger than spellcaster forces should be, but regular reinforcements were still 8 coins for 2 units. It allowed me to cast Fire Winds on a unit my orcs were attacking and save casualties there. I had two of those blight surge provinces next to me a while back, and I just had to play defensively until the surge was over. They were both orc towns, and zombie orcs start at level 3, so it was tough to actually send out a unit and be sure it would actually overpower them. This goblin thing is still grinding my gears. This time the goblins actually passed by my unit to go to my defended province behind them. I thought retreat at least meant they had to go to undefended lands. Now I have to wait for that unit to hit my other province, and I'm not even sure if they'll die when that happens.

I stopped watching Zero Punctuation for two reasons. 1. I got bored of the constant negativity. I understand that's the schtick, and it's for comedy, but it seems more useful to have an outlet to actually compliment great games, rather than bash bad ones. 2. He usually has a part where he talks about the plot of the games, and I always had to remember to avoid that for spoilers on games I was actually going to play. That said, I did enjoy stuff like his limerick episode, his top whatever lists (I think he had some lists, I can't really remember) and positive reviews. I don't know if he's done anything outside of the norm since though.

I've only played the first 2 games, but i wouldn't say anything Kratos does is justified. It reminds me of how in greek mythology everything you do causes an ironic/terrible thing to happen despite your attempts to do the opposite. I don't think you're ever supposed to feel sorry for Kratos, as he mostly causes his problems through his anger, the interesting thing is watching how he gets his comeuppance. The moments I've come to appreciate are Kratos' defeats, because they are almost completely his fault. The endings of the first two games have been very Pyrrhic victories, if you can even call them victories at all. The thing I anticipate most about 3 is how he will get screwed by the Titans, this new supernatural force he's decided to trust after he's had such a terrible time with the Gods. My favorite part would have to be in 2, when he . Kratos just realizes that his life is terrible and although he blames the gods he also knows it's his fault. A huge boss appears to fight, but the controls change: Kratos' movement speed slows to a crawl as he walks around and all of the button presses cause him to just curse his existence while this huge monster attempts to kill him. Of course he snaps out of it, but that moment of realization and play subversion is great.

I think the weekly report thing is a good idea. I was really surprised to hear this. I guess it might be in reversed order when you're being attacked by zombies. Edit: I just went back and checked, and my attacking Fay force definitely fought the stronger orc force and then after casualties fought the centaur force. It must be skewed in the blights favour. At least now i know to not leave my spell casters to get murdered at frontlines. I had a similar surprise when a Zombie Goblin force attacked a well fortified base, and just ended up walking past it because of their ability. They're supposed to be hard to kill and retreat unless they are surrounded, but in this case they actually made headway into allied lands. The biggest bummer is, once it happened it was too late to do anything to stop it, because I didn't own the territory they were attacking and couldn't catch the goblins either. It's really a bummer to have to second guess your actions in a game that seems hard enough already.

Do they police gravity? In the gritty underbelly of the city of Los Newton gravity based crime is on the rise, but what comes up must come down. These members of the force enforce a force, using any and all force necessary. Coming this summer at 9.81 m/s^2... ...or else. Sorry.

I just beat Darksiders. I liked the Zelda-y parts a lot, but the combat kinda let me down. It was definitely going for a Devil May Cry (Stingers and Uppercut slashes) and God of War (Quick-Time monster kills) vibe, but the camera is so ridiculously close that any crowd control becomes an issue. Targeting one dude was a complete waste of time because enemies outside your view would charge up attacks outside your camera view. I know Ninja Gaiden also has controllable camera, but I kinda prefer a fixed view that shows the whole battlefield for this sort of game. There are also some set piece style moments where you're riding on a griffon and the game becomes Panzer Dragoon or you're given a huge gun and the game becomes Gears of War sans cover. The griffon part was amazing. The gun parts are less so, because you're just shooting regular enemies who try to run up on you. The camera for this part gets even closer, so that if enemies get behind you, you won't find out for a while. For what it's worth you don't have to use the guns for those sections, but that's clearly what it's designed for. Anyway, the actual dungeon puzzle stuff was really cool, with an interesting Portal-esque part that was interesting. Thinking about the plot and the setting just makes the game worse. It's a shame because work definitely went into creating backstory. War is one of the four horsemen along with Conquest Pestilence Strife, Fury and Death. So, it's basically 3 wars and death. There's this governing system of firey rock heads that everyone hates who oversee Heaven and Hell, with no real mention of where god is during the whole thing. War lost his left arm and now has a magical metal replacement deal (it looks like a gauntlet and doesn't do anything special, you have to read the comic to get that backstory). I dunno, I feel like there's probably enough in actual revelations that you don't have to go make up your own thing. Mark Hamill and Phil LaMarr deliver some good voice work though.

From experience I know you fight both armies separately, starting with the strongest first. This is really good for well fortified places, because you can cause a lot of casualties with just the defense buffs. I'm not sure if anyone knows this (I didn't), but taking blighted provinces gives you a decent gift of coins. I took Hog Ravine and received 7 Blue, 6 Green, 7 Yellow, 4 Orange, 19 Red, and 9 Purple. It seems to give a bonus to whatever color is the primary coin of the town.