TurboPubx-16

Congrats guys! Here's just a taste of the wealth of tragedies you will find in normal mode:

Clint Hocking's Far Cry 2 II: Half Life 2 Episode 3: Half Life 3

I take it that it is okay to rant in here. The music, voice work and writing are incredibly dry, to the point where I have no interest in playing the demo further. When the tutorial guy or the scientist is talking it's like they put a Microsoft Sam program in a mannequin: "Hell-o Co-mman-der. Wel-come to X-COM. I have ta-ken the lib-er-ty of lo-bot-i-miz-ing my-self and the crew." The character models and animation all feel like knock-offs from what was cool in mainstream games five years ago. The roady-run camera, at this point, is what Dragula was to games circa 2000. To echo what you guys are saying above, I think it is way cooler to simulate bullets flying through the air and just seeing where they land to determine whether or not someone got hit. Is it possible to hit an alien that wasn't your intended target, or do bullets that miss just disappear in midair? In this game will you ever fire a rocket, miss, and have it hit a gas station that you didn't even know was there, causing a chain of explosions that blows up a fifth of the level's total geometry? For me, the original game wasn't about the strategy so much as it was about the potential for the systems in the game to interact in ways that were hilarious, tragic, and always chaotic. If this is a straight-up strategy game, a Starcraft as opposed to a Company of Heroes, then count me out. One last thing: why does this tutorial teach me how to move my guys to cover like ten times but fails to mention that my sniper can't move and shoot in the same turn?

I favor Rocks slightly above Mantis when it comes to boarding, but obviously I take what I can get. Rocks require less micromanagement and they are immune fire so you are free to set the whole ship ablaze if need be. The same thing happened to me. Since boarding is easily the most reliable way to beat the game I don't think I will ever use the Osprey. I also don't have much faith in the artillery's intended use, as a slow but reliable super weapon: one time it was stupid enough to aim at a single room.

Finally won on normal mode with the Kestral. I got the second laser burst II and an ion bomb, which at a total of five power must be the most efficient weapon setup in the game. I also had a four person boarding crew, three of whom were men of the geological persuasion. It was so tempting to use my weapons on enemy ships but then I discovered that I made the most of my arsenal and utterly destroyed the boss... except when the second-stringer boarders died when I forgot to take out the stealth system. That was embarrassing. In the second stage I was wrecking the shields so hard that four rebels were in there trying to fix it. You know what they say, never put all your eggs in one basket, especially when that basket is on fire. When the third stage started the rebel flagship was manned by a single crewmember;

Unfortunately the prevailing strategies for many of the ships seem to be "roll twenties". I've given up on the stealth ships for now since they rely way too much on luck to get out of just the first sector or two. There is literally nothing you can do to win against an early Zoltan with a beam drone. I'm trying to beat normal mode as the Kestral but I always end up in sector six with no better ordnance than what I started with, plus a weak drone I purchased out of desperation. From what I gather most people cite finding another burst laser as key to their success; I just need to find a single store than even sells weapons before sector five and I'll be happy. Edit: Just lost the best chance I've had in a while. I decided to skip the shops in the first sector and just rush for the second layer of shields. I entered sector four with three shields, 45% evade and six laser shots per salvo. I thought I was hot stuff until I ran into an AI ships with three shields, two attack drones, a burst laser and a missile launcher in an asteroid field. All of my shots missed, everything coming at me connected, and of course the first thing they hit was my weapons.

There are situations where I have augmented an already pleasurable experience by doing something differently. Examples of that would be reading all the text in games like Icewind Dale or Morrowind even though my instinct is to hastily click through it, or upping the difficulty in a game like Fallout 3 to better reinforce the atmosphere. But I can't think of an example of a game that I hated at first but grew to love after changing something on my side of the interaction. Why would I care to in the first place? The most common reason I will tend to dislike a game is precisely because it is too restrictive about what I am and am not allowed to do. Situations like this are much more common for me: I enjoyed a certain game for the most part but lost interest after only a few hours. After discovering Idle Thumbs something had been injected in my brain and when I returned to that special game I enjoyed it a lot more. In that case I didn't actively make any changes other than choosing to play the game again, but the effect I think you are talking about was certainly achieved since I ended up playing the game differently and enjoying it a lot more. With your Assassin's Creed example you seem to be referring to people who played through the entire game and came away with a negative experience; this concept of disliking a game and yet playing it to completion is totally alien to me and I humbly suggest that you ignore the lunatics who do stuff like that, game reviewers included . I've finished something like 100 games; if I don't understand what you want me to do, and the Internet doesn't help me any, then I probably think your game sucks. Blaming the gamer is summed up in a phrase that is as ridiculous as it is common, directed at critics of any game someone happens to like: "you played it wrong."

This is great:

I love how hull repair bot gets top billing in your arsenal. He is the secret best thing in the game.

I tried the Engi ship again and picked up an anti-ship drone mark II early on. That sounds awesome, right? Unfortunately it refused to sync up with the starting ion gun despite how much I tried to micromanage it. Enemies with three shields showed up right after that and they were impossible to defeat. At the time I thought it was a crazy risk to give up my last damage-dealing weapon for a third ion gun, but I knew that the boss would have five shields and that all you need to do is two damage per salvo if your salvos go in quick enough. I feel like the non-boss battles in the game are all about being aggressive ending things as quickly as possible, where as the boss battles are about developing a longer term plan for taking him down. Both times I won I had a hull repair droid with me as well so that I went into each battle with full health. I've got one pet peeve with the game at this point: after you're out of danger stealth systems don't automatically end their cool down. I don't know why this is the case, since after battle you can teleport as much as you want and your engines are ready to jump instantly. I keep forgetting to sit and wait for the stealth to come back online before I jump to the next area

Holy crap, I just finished the game on normal mode! I can't believe I got my first win on easy and my first win on normal back-to-back. Word's cannot express how great it feels to no longer be this game's bitch. I went with the Engi ship and kitted it out with three ion guns constantly set to autofire while my offensive drones did the damage. In the last battle the entire enemy crew boarded my ship in a gambit to destroy my droid system. At one point there were six dudes wrestling in a burning droid room in a match to decide the fate of the galaxy. Luckily I had a mantis and a rock to deal with them, supported by the special ability of the Engi medbay. I also had a repair engi that I had been skill boosting from the very first sector so by the end he could repair a damaged system bar in about two seconds. In this run I picked up the the damaged stasis pod and wasted a ton of fuel trying to complete that quest. After I had failed to find the right Zoltans I had some great misadventures as fuel-less ship. The first time I turned on my distress beacon a refueling ship found me. He was happy to sell me fuel and also Later on, with no scrap and one barrel of fuel I visited a distress beacon, only to find another stupid loser like me who was also out of fuel. Another refueling ship came by and I was actually forced to beg for a single barrel of fuel. Somehow I pulled through and ended up winning! Fuck you game! I wonder if my fellow hobo friend made it out okay... Yes! This is what I was trying to say earlier but you did a much better job. When you're in sector seven and that one item that completes your setup that you've been looking for the whole game doesn't show up, you have to rework things to fit what you do have. I think that's probably the game's biggest strength, that each weapon and system is simple enough to master on it's own but the possibilities for combining them seem endless. Do you have any tips for the early game? This one and the layout B stealth ship are total glass cannons at the start.

This is exactly what happened to me and I finally beat the game on easy. Half way through the game I had weak shields and lousy weapons but with stealth, a fully upgraded teleporter and four mantis boarders the game was a cake walk. The second form boss only did two points of damage to me, which I eagerly repaired with a hull repair drone. Thank you for the tips everyone! And sorry to Bruce Geryk, trusty, hardworking second-string boarder who got kicked out the airlock the second a mantis showed up to replace him.

What I need is a strategy for his second form; in this last run he took off 85% of my hull and there were no repair nodes to help me out afterwards. Not only do you have to build specifically against his builds, you also must be an expert in a wide range of weapons and strategies in order to accommodate what the game gives you. What I've just come to realize is that if I see a weapon or droid I like, I have to buy it then and there, even if I won't be able to use it for another three sectors. Top-tier items only seem to show up once per run. I have a few questions if the ace pilots would be so kind: 1. On average how much scrap do you float? 2. Assuming you have a ship that can handle it, will you make more scrap going through a red sector than a green one? Are green sectors only for a ship that's struggling a bit, or should they always be taken? 3. What is your strategy for the boss's second form? Is it possible to disable his drone system and thus the power surge ability he gets with it? 4. Can you beat the game consistently?

Could anyone who is hot stuff at this game please make a video of one of your playthroughs and give a bit of commentary? I had the third stage boss down to three hull points with his shields reduced to blazing ruin and I still lost. I also find easy mode to be totally cheesy now, in fact at this point 90% of the battles are [Mortal Kombat voice] flawless victories. Maybe I just get bad rolls on the boss. I still feel like when I trip up in the slightest, the game pushes me over and stomps on my balls for good measure.

The boss is bullshit. You can't see his power usage even with level three sensors, which leads me to believe that he just cheats anyway. I hit his droid control with a bomb dealing four ion damage and yet he still had the bots left to shoot down my Pegasus missiles. That meant I couldn't penetrate his shields past two, which meant my awesome beam weapon was totally useless and never fired once. My plan was to stock up on missiles and just unleash righteous fury in the final area but as it turned out the boss was totally immune to my setup. I used to think the stealth ship was awesome but now I think it's totally gimped since it can only support three weapons. I could have pulled it off if I could have found some burst lasers but they never show up. What do show up are droids. Lots and lots of driods. I hate this game so much. Not since I was seven years old could I not beat a video game on easy mode. Maybe that's because I've never played a space combat/ship management game before. It's an awesome game but seriously it can go to fucking hell. That's actually one of major criticisms of the game; it's too much like Organ Trail in the sense that you can enter a new area and based purely on die rolls someone gets measles/flies out the window.

I feel like contemporaries of P.B. Winter Bottom, like Portal, Braid, and World of Goo are totally in a different league in this respect. I never left a level in one of those game not feeling like I had learned a new technique.

Dude, don't feel bad if you can't get through P.B. Wintetbottom. I got stuck in that game a decided to look at some video walkthroughs. What I found out was that was using almost twice as many P.B.'s as necessary to finish the last five levels. I don't think that game really leads the player to develop the proper techniques as much as it just makes things harder and harder.

I already liked the main story in Morrowind more than the other Elder Scrolls games, but after reading the article and some wiki's I've found a much bigger appreciation for it. There are so many hurdles to executing on a story based on a major conspiracies. If the secrets are too easy to find then it never feels like a secret in the first place. It seems like four-fifths of the information you can get in Morrowind is a lie perpetrated by a character in the game; the other fifth is the truth but it's hidden in some inscrutable book or in the head of a dying man hiding deep in a clandestine dungeon. I really commend Bethesda for sticking to its guns and making something that only a few would find incredible, knowing full well that most people would probably say, "the main story is kinda boring." I think I have to go back and play the game from beginning to end. Imagine a game where your path takes you to a sheer wall that cannot be breached. You seek out a mysterious recluse who gives you an ancient artifact of great power: the map editor. But he warns you, do not abuse this power or there will be dire consequences...

I was this close to beating FTL on easy mode but I was screwed over by the totally bogus endgame. In my last move I put myself directly between the flagship and the HQ but instead of fighting it I got a screen telling me that the flagship had reached the HQ and that all was lost. The flagship was at a minimum two jumps away from the HQ, and the route the game said it would take was not a direct one to the HQ. I'd say it's a bug but the instructions they give you for the end are poorly written and don't match up with what actually plays out, so I can't claim to know how the endgame actually works. I won't go into the details of my ship but suffice it to say it was totally god-like; in the final area I defeated four ships without taking any hull damage. If you can synchronize your other weapons to support them, beam weapons are totally where it's at. A hull laser can be awesome in the beginning to just annihilate ships in one or two volleys, but more than half the ships in the endgame don't have any system-less rooms so they just become less efficient burst lasers. Does anyone else find that stores selling droids show up twice as much as stores selling weapons? Defensive droids can be useful but it's hard to justify an offensive one when it can't be aimed a specific system and doesn't have a cool-down bar telling you when it's going to fire. I find weapons to be much more efficient and fun to use and there a lot of cool combinations, but it's down to luck as to which ones you have the opportunity to get.

This is equal parts creepy, cool and hilarious.

The story is so obviously written by the same person who "designed" the mod I couldn't get into it.

I got through the first phase of the boss on easy, but in the process I lost half my crew. A stray shot hit my teleporter but it looked like I was going to repair it just in time and rescue my veteran boarding party before they died. Instead, I hit the wrong button and teleported the repair crew on to the boss ship and all four dudes died. As if that wasn't bad enough, I overextend myself getting to the boss, so much so that I was too far from the repair crews. In the end my ship was blown up by an elite rebel ship in two volleys of extremely accurate laser fire.

Yeah, but easy mode also gives you the opportunity to try things out and find good synergies, which is the only way you can hope to succeed in FTL. Two questions: has anyone had a positive outcome of fighting the giant spiders, and if so, what was the reward? It's always disastrous for me. Also, has anyone here finished the game on normal?

The farthest I got in Nethack was the room with the unicorn (floor five?). My cat had rabies and attacked the unicorn and that was the end of that game for me.

Hey mods! Can we please title the thread "The Walking Dead UNMARKED SPOILERS INSIDE" or something like that so that reading posts isn't so ridiculous?