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Jake

BlizzCon Blowout: Idle Thumbs 40: Idle Thumbs 40,000 (Nobody Beats the Blizz)

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The talk of Trials HD and Across reminded me of an old spectrum game I loved as a kid called Wheelie. Gotta love a game where you can jump 2 red buses then run into a giant hedgehog.

http://www.tzxvault.org/Spectrum/Screens/Wheelie.png

Good episode. I'm really looking forward to Diablo 3 despite having missed out on the first 2 somehow. I don't know how that happened.

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I trialed the trials 2 trial, and decided it wasn't for me. Too much frustration.

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You can drag-select in Warcraft 1 when you hold down the Ctrl-Key.

A whopping four units at a time!

Trials, and the parts of Trials HD I've played are a linear race from left to right, and is about judging jumps and more actual trial biking stuff.

What, no crazy loop-de-loops and hanging from platforms by your front wheel alone, desperately trying to avoid bashing your head on the bottom of it? Consider me de-interested. Unterested.

Yeah, Trials HD guys are completely different to the guy that made Action Supercross/Elastomania-- redlynx is a small finnish team (they used to make terrible tv and mobile phone games), while Balasz Rozsa is.. a hungarian guy.

OK, thanks. Toblix's above quote suggests the two are not as similar as I'd thought.

I'm feeling a weird sort of camaraderie with you guys. This is like when I first realized that a lot of the games I played in my childhood were actually quite popular and other people played them too. At the time I don't think I was really aware of how popular things were, other than the really big names like Sonic and Mario and Doom. Other people played that game! Awesome!

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During the pod someone said something would be posted on the forum. Two pics of something? I forgot. But erm yeah, WHERE ARE THEY?

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Hi all, just like to flesh out how PLEXs work in EVE.

They are basically a way to make cash poor, time rich (CP,TR) folk able to continue playing EVE without it actually costing them anything, or alternatively cash rich, time poor (CR,TP) folk get wodges of ISK for very little effort.

So, a CR,TP players buys a PLEX from CCP (60 days, but they are broken into 30 day blocks) and puts them up for sale on the EVE markets. A CP,TR player with loads of ISK will buy the PLEX. They then redeem the PLEX code against their active account and they are credited with 30 days of play time. The CR,TP player then gets the hard won ISK from the CP,TR player, effectively purchasing ISK for real money, and the CP,TR player gets another 'free' month of play.

Quite an innovative solution to the problem of ISK sellers. A PLEX is worth about 300 million ISK or so at the moment, but it depends on market forces. 300 million will buy you two fully fitted Vagabonds (awesome PvP ships).

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During the pod someone said something would be posted on the forum. Two pics of something? I forgot. But erm yeah, WHERE ARE THEY?

Downloadable content thread in this subforum

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But in the end, it doesn't matter anyway,

cause this is the dawning of a brand new day,

and it doesn't matter what you've heard,

cause I'm the motherfucking monk.

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Downloadable content thread in this subforum

Doh! I looked at the third page of that thread instead of looking at the first post that gets updated every time. :getmecoat

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Also, since Remo et al. are constantly banging on about Diablo II and Starcraft I, and since at the time they came out I was too poor to afford a machine to play these games... I've just created a battle.net account and purchased them for digital download. Will they run on my Asus EEEPC 1000?

That's right, I've NEVER played either of them. This will be rectified! :)

Edited by Scrobbs

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Starcraft should run on just about anything. Diablo 2, I remember, was quite the beast when it came out, but should run just fine now on everything as well. Awesome that you bought them though. Both games feature really involving stories with excellent voice acting and dialogue. Man, I once cheated through Starcraft just to hear all the intro cutscene dialogue again.

Come to think of it, I've never finished Starcraft without cheating at all! Apart from the difficulty being ramped up, I'd always get so bored with building up an entire base again that, after about halfway Zerg campaign (that's around 15 levels), I'd just start cheating to spare me the effort and get on with the story. I'm not much of a realtime strategy player, though I adore the genre. I expect things to be quite different with Starcraft 2 though, since they're actively making sure all the levels are different and do not revolve around repeating mechanics, rather taking the 'minigames' approach, which I think is an excellent move.

Also, I don't know if this was featuerd in the current podcast or a previous one about Starcraft, but I kind of liked the idea of there being persistent quests that you could perform for boons during the game. I hope they've replaced it with something that retains that feeling of additional, optional quests, and not cut it out entirely. Zergling wings!

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I will freely admit, that I was introduced to RTS with Dune 2. Loved it. Then came C&C. Loved that too. Played a few others...got bored of the lack of real strategy (Build up an army, send it across, rinse, repeat). Didn't like any other RTS until Company of Heroes came along. Which was awesome. For this reason, I was pretty non-plussed by SC2. Hearing you guys talk about it, and reading Nick's tweets, it has certainly piqued my interest. Hence I thought I'd better grab SC1 just to see what all the fuss was about.

Blizzard store is pretty well organised as well, and the infinite download thing once you've added the game to your account sealed it. Will I be able to play it on two different machines?

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I will freely admit, that I was introduced to RTS with Dune 2. Loved it. Then came C&C. Loved that too. Played a few others...got bored of the lack of real strategy (Build up an army, send it across, rinse, repeat). Didn't like any other RTS until Company of Heroes came along. Which was awesome. For this reason, I was pretty non-plussed by SC2. Hearing you guys talk about it, and reading Nick's tweets, it has certainly piqued my interest. Hence I thought I'd better grab SC1 just to see what all the fuss was about.

Blizzard store is pretty well organised as well, and the infinite download thing once you've added the game to your account sealed it. Will I be able to play it on two different machines?

You should be able to play it on as many machines as you like, as long as you're only signed in with the account tied to it on one machine at a time.

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got bored of the lack of real strategy (Build up an army, send it across, rinse, repeat).
That's why I rarely play RTS-s. I think there's even conflict built into the term: Real Time Strategy. Does strategy happen in real time? More like real time tactics.

Should play Company of Heroes, I got it for free with my video card and started playing it but I think I had too many other games to play at the time.

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Erkki - CoH was one of my favourite games of the last two years. So much depth and thrill. Fast moving, unforgiving, and fun! I knew I'd found something special when I played the demo and finished a match and my heart was beating very fast and hard, and I was sweating. Unfortunately, Relic kind of fucked it when they consistently failed to sort out the network matching issues; they'd also nearly got it balanced when they brought out Opposing Fronts - the balance has only nearly returned with the most recent patch. Still, 2 years worth of gaming for 60 pounds. Can't be bad.

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That's why I rarely play RTS-s. I think there's even conflict built into the term: Real Time Strategy. Does strategy happen in real time? More like real time tactics.

Tactics would just be the use of given forces to meet combat objectives. Strategy involves the procurement and management of combat resources. In real life strategies take weeks, however in video games real time doesn't mean real time, it just means that players don't take turns.

So the term real time strategy still applies to a game like Starcraft. Whereas real time tactics would apply to something like the battles in the Total War series (the rest of the game would of course be turn-based strategy)

Should play Company of Heroes, I got it for free with my video card and started playing it but I think I had too many other games to play at the time.

Maybe,

On the plus side Company of Heroes is the most fun I've ever had with an RTS.

On the minus side, I'm afraid it may have ruined me for Starcraft 2.

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Strategy involves the procurement and management of combat resources.

Yeah, but in most RTS-s, are there really many strategic decisions to make there? More likely you may win by being really fast at micro. At least that's the impression they have left me.

On the minus side, I'm afraid it may have ruined me for Starcraft 2.

Why is that?

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Yeah, but in most RTS-s, are there really many strategic decisions to make there? More likely you may win by being really fast at micro. At least that's the impression they have left me.

In most RTSs you decide which units to acquire, how to upgrade them, and build a supply chain that allows you to acquire and upgrade more units, that's a pretty important strategic element.

Not that it matters, genre names have a tendency to drift away from the words that would seem to define them. For example Japanese role playing games very often involve no role playing whatsoever.

Why is that?

Because the cover mechanic and the squad AI have spoiled me to the point where I can't stand how much less autonomous units in other RTSs are.

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In most RTSs you decide which units to acquire, how to upgrade them, and build a supply chain that allows you to acquire and upgrade more units, that's a pretty important strategic element.

Maybe, I can't argue very well about this as I haven't played a lot of the recent games. But personally, micro-management in RTS-s usually doesn't make me feel like strategizing.

But yeah, I guess genre names shouldn't be taken too literally. The "Adventure" genre name for example. An "adventure" in context of a movie is about the theme of a movie, the game genre is only about gameplay and not at all about the theme (although sometimes other kinds of games get labeled as adventure).

Because the cover mechanic and the squad AI have spoiled me to the point where I can't stand how much less autonomous units in other RTSs are.

I guess it's perfect for me then because I can well stand being spoiled by that and not play another RTS for 10 years (incl. Starcraft 2)

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They both seem to run fine! Ace.

...and from inauspicious beginnings, Frank the Necromancer journeys into the badlands.

Edited by Scrobbs

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People forget Z, the true innovator of RTSs. Dawn of War is creditted with trying something new but really that falls to a game that came out in the mid nineties that most people forgot to play.

Norfolk n'Clue try it or its sequel Z:Steel Warriors (I think the sequel is actually more dated due to its early 3-D visuals) to see where CoH and its ilk must have taken nods from.

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