The Gamer's Quarter

[Lackey]

[jjsimpso]

DOSBox is so great because it makes that era accessible to almost everyone. Now if only I could find most of my save games from those days, I could finish off all those games I never had the chance to complete. Sadly, the prospect of starting Bard's Tale II from scratch is just too daunting

[Lackey]

I am currently celebrating Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures. Although I have no patience for playing actual modules made with it.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[dhex]

bards tale man...i loved 3...waaaay back when.

now? oh fuck no. i've got bills to pay and graph paper don't grow on trees.
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[jjsimpso]

Yeah, Bard's Tale takes a commitment. When kids today talk about hard RPGs they are usually just referring to required grinding. They have no idea what it feels like to be teleported and spun so that they're facing a different direction, all while trying to draw a map while in magical darkness, with no indication that anything happened other than a slight on screen blink.

Played some more Orcs and Elves and it continues to impress. I now have a FLAMING SWORD.

[Scratchmonkey]

Wizardry, son. Bard's Tale, y'all. I'm talkin' about Ultima, dawg.

I got nothin'.

[Cossix]

Man Ultima was a pretty awesome series that ended so poorly. 8 and 9 were one of the most depressing things in computer RPG history.

[Scratchmonkey]

Quest of the Avatar is probably the best old-school PC-style RPG. Lordy I played the crap out of it. The NES port wasn't bad either.

[daphaknee]

cant beat dracula
cant BEAT dracula? i cant even get TO dracula

[extrabastardformula]

Man, the unlocking in R-type Final sure got to be a joyless slog. I was determined to unlock all the ships, but looking at gamefaqs and seeing the insane requirements is making me not want to anymore. And tonight I got the ship with the Cyclone Force from III, which was my favorite R-type thing ever, so I'm going to play with that for a while.

I notice that I get into this pattern with lots of games that have unlockables, most notable Marvel vs Capcom 2 on Xbox. Maybe I'm just getting older. In any case it's a lot less frustrating in a single player game like Final.
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[ryan]

The Supreme Commander expansion is beating the crap out of me. Holy hell - the first mission has taken me 3 hours thus far! The giant battlefield is cool and all, but this is taking way too long. I guess it would help if the tutorial wasn't worthless and the manual wasn't just a giant printed out tech tree.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[aderack]

That Carcassonne game is kind of brilliant, now that its being free has caused me to play it. I just wish there were a variable number of tiles. There's so much space on the board! And it always seems the layout is just getting interesting when the game ends.
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[player 2]

I played Medal of Honor Heroes 2 online because I don't have anything to let me play Call of Duty 4. It's not bad, really.
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Wii #: 8749 9109 9732 3653

"It is a peaceful way of understanding life, to play"
_Marcel Duchamp

[daphaknee]

[helicopterp]

[Scratchmonkey]

The physical game of Carcassonne is good fun. I remember the actual tiles being much nicer art-wise than the art in the XBLA game, which can be a bit of a disadvantage because I start getting interested in doing medieval city-planning rather than playing for points.

For the latter, it did seem that the key to the game is to try and be clever with your farmer placements and then defending the fields through proper tile placement was the most reliable strategy.

[aderack]

[dessgeega]

i finished orcs and elves. it's short and fairly easy: admittedly i was playing on "normal", the easiest of three difficulty levels, but there doesn't seem to be much strategy to the game besides keeping enemies' weaknesses in mind and using health potions (amply available) when one's health gets low. i found plenty of other useful potions, too. maybe on higher difficulties these things are in scarcer supply, forcing the player to play smarter and conserve resources. this is an id game, after all. (the hardest difficulty is called "nightmare", too.)

although john carmack, the programmer, seems to be the only member of the doom team to have contributed to this game, there's a lot in the level design that reminds me of doom. mostly the numerous secret passages, betrayed by a slightly different wall texture and the conspicuous layout of a room. the secret doors are in fact slide walls like in wolfenstein, and hunting them out feels a lot like searching phobos base. there are other little nods, too: one of the numbers presented upon completing the game, for example, is "corpses gibbed" (478).

i finished the game at level 9 in four and a half hours, with six deaths. my score was 37,516, which is apparently no great shakes. i spent 122 turns of the game drunk. this is a number the game tracks.
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[Cycle]

i think i'm going to try this game.
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[Dracko]

Was that on the DS, dess?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dessgeega]

they were apparently originally developing it for cell phones, but it ended up on the ds. i remember hearing that they only had a few months to transfer the game from one platform to the other.
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[Dracko]

Ah, I thought it was both platforms. Wonder if that does it any favours shelf life-wise.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[jjsimpso]

Orcs and Elves was a cell phone game first, but is now available on the DS in an enhanced version. Orcs and Elves 2 is coming for mobile phones fairly soon I think. I think the Orcs and Elves mobile game uses the same engine as Doom RPG.

I'm close to finishing it as well. I was hoping to be the first one

Like Dess said, it is a bit easy on Normal. I should've played through on the next hardest difficulty. As it stands, I have tons of potions stockpiled and I haven't even been that stingy with using them.

[Cycle]

i wish my phone could run doomrpg
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[daphaknee]

doomrpg and orcs and elves were both painful to play on a cellphone
i wish doomrpg would come out for the ds

[Cycle]

that would also be good
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[ryan]

I'm still waiting to play Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. It's been about an hour now, and I'm still downloading patches. And that process began after it uninstalled my original Company of Heroes, informing me that I'll need the CD key to access content from it later, and going through an incredibly long initial install. ARRGGHH! I loved the original, but this shit is driving me nuts!
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[jjsimpso]

I finished Orcs and Elves. It took me 6:59 and my final score was 46,264, which qualifies me as a "Squire". This was on Normal. I guess I should've played on Difficult or finished faster, because I found almost all the secrets and I think I killed every single enemy.

In my first impressions I described the game as capturing the spirit of the Golden Era of PC RPGs. I still think that is true, but with the caveat that Orcs and Elves is a pretty simplistic game compared to the classics. But, being so short, it isn't a crippling defect and I still enjoyed the game quite a bit. I do think they could've done more with puzzles and environmental interaction. The game is pure hack and slash by the end, and although you have a lot of weapons by that point, the simple mechanics detract a little from the endless waves of monsters. It probably would've been more fun and tense had I played on the Difficult setting though.

Still, a really good game for people like me.

[Cycle]

started reading the first few dozen pages of masters of doom, man is this a chore. he keeps going off track to talk about general videogame history, like i don't know all this shit already, and it makes the narrative lose all it's direction and focus, i hope he cuts this shit out soon.
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

[dessgeega]

david kushner's a hack. it's a fascinating story but told in the most artless way.
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[daphaknee]

playing jumping flash on the ps3 downloadable network! it is an amazing platformer where you are a robot bunny! bunny games are awesome! this game is awesome! collecting carrots!

[Cycle]

I AGREE WITH ALL OF THE ABOVE.

The sequel is awesome too, even though it's basically more of the same with a little more "out there" level designs.

They still kept the crappy corridor levels though, for some crazy reason.
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[daphaknee]

yeah whats up with those crappy cooridors
cycle sometimes you have pretty good taste in games

[Cycle]

what are you talkign about, i have consistently good taste in games
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[ryan]

I have had a thing for Jumping Flash for a while. I own the original in all box variations (3) with a fourth I use to play. It's taken everything in my power not to download it for the PS3, aside from already owning it and only having a 32MB card for my PSP.


Damn you, floating rainbow escalators and giant whales! Leave me alone!


Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is a massive game. I've spent 4-5 hours on each level so far, and on this last one I met the business end of the computer's bashing stick after scraping past a point only to be met by about a thousand enemy troops. Anyone here have it? I never played the original Supreme Commander, so I don't have a solid foundation. I need a quick Tips for Success seminar.

Virtua Fighter 5 Online has been played. I only had a few minutes today, but I was able to go on a 10 win streak with Lion (of course). I would love to play someone else over Live with this. I've been playing the series since its release and have played against someone else only a handful of times.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[daphaknee]

i gave away the big box version as part of a valentines present to an ex that used to play jumping flash and cookie and cream a lot with me

NOW WE'RE NOT TOGETHER AND I WANT IT BACK

/vindictive bitch

[ryan]

Yeah, my open copy is so worn that it has a bunch of problems, the least of which is a show stopping freeze on the last boss. I can't bring myself to get rid of it though. It's definitely one of my comfort games. No matter what is going on, or how long it's been since I played it last, I can pop it in and kill a few hours, lost among floating frying pans and snowcapped houses hanging out in between levitating trees.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[Lasa]

Dementium is really pissing me off with its backtracking, cut & paste levels and absurd amount of repetition.
I suppose it's still an impressive technical achievement though.

[Cycle]

so i finally got queers of war! initial impressions: what a piece of shit!

EDIT: updated impressions!

no, really, what a piece of shit!
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[ryan]

[Pink Teddy Bear]

Yeah, Dementium was really damn confusing for a long while. But once I realized that all you needed to make sense of the world was a map, then things were smooth sailing thereafter.

[bleak]

what the hell Cycle
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[dessgeega]

ds games i've been playing:

big brain academy. i like this a lot. it's more colorful and videogamey than brain age, but it also doesn't have the gradual pace. the difficulty adjusts to how well you perform, but not in as overt a way as flash focus. i like all the little challenges, and the way the game mixes them together; i guess it's a step closer to warioware.

donkey kong swingy thingy. seems like a pretty interesting vertical platformer. i remember giving up on the gameboy advance version pretty quickly, but not enough about it to make a comparison. i can probably conclude the ds version is more sensibly put together, though.

neves. i'm still playing this, and it's still charming. (and the music from "the room" is incredibly catchy.) i'm almost halfway through the puzzles on the normal game mode, which has no timer or limitations. there's also a timed mode and a mode that requires you to be perfect, but the puzzles are apparently the same, so i don't know if i'll end up playing through them.
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[daphaknee]

i totally broke big brain academy with my score of 1980, they call me pythagorus now and the worm is like YOU'VE DONE BETTER THAN ME? THIS IS MY GAME!

i promised myself i would beat phoenix wright 3 by sunday (by 12am monday morning is what that means) and god i dont know if i can do it, for some reason i cant play games for more than 20 minutes lately

[Dracko]

[Cycle]

maybe i'm just not used to it yet, but this game pisses me off to NO END.


* there is sometimes an annoying delay between pressing a and the guy taking cover/start running, sometimes long enough to get killed
* why the hell is running and cover assigned to the same button? quick, take cover LOL NO I THINK I'LL JUST RUN OVER HERE LOL
* they dont highlight which thing he will run to cover, so often he'll go to somewhere completely different to what i wanted, right across enemy fire and one time the jackass took cover on the side of an object COMPLETELY OPEN TO ENEMY FIRE
*the jackass will often do shit i don't tell him to, like suddenly get up from behind the cover WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING DIPSHIT and then it takes forever to get the dick back behind there, all the time i'm getting bullets jammed down my throat
* some enemys are the same shape, size and colour of your teammates, making it harder to tell who's who
*this chainsaw crap is annoying, i keep forgetting it's on that one weapon, look fucktards, if someone is in my face i want to beat their skull right there and then, not wait for my chainsaw to rev up JUST KNOCK THE FUCKER DOWN
* throwing grenads accurately seems to be a total joke
* the only way to skip their shitty cutscenes seems to be mashing buttons furiously?
* the camera angles are all rather annoying, its like it's on a pogostick
* this "emergence hole" crap is cheap enemy placement and just a way to re-use areas and spawn enemies behind
* the way cover is all over the place is often so transparent and makes the game feel so gamey and ruins the illusion the lovely graphics create

AND PROBABLY MORE
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[bleak]

[helicopterp]

Cycle, I think we could get some pretty interesting point-counterpoint going here. I just got an xbox 360 today with gears of war and the orange box.


I played Portal in one sitting. It was a four-hour sitting, but it was great. Most of the puzzles were delightful, and GlaDOS's song rules.



I've also put two or three hours into Half-Life 2. I, um, don't like it very much so far. The environment is so saturated with detail--but it all feels like it was just put there to be watched because Gordon's level of interaction with it is so...I don't know...deficient. He either gets through things with way too much ease or way too much difficulty. Why does he run so quickly over every kind of surface only to be stopped completely by a shin-high object out of his range of vision? Why can he hop up and down on the surface of water (ultra-dog-paddling, i guess?) but then take so much time to transition from water to land. So many things present an obstacle to him that shouldn't--because so far the enemies and puzzles--not that they're really have been any real puzzles yet, just a see-saw and a turn-the-water-level-raising-valve--don't. He flies up and down ladders, but almost never makes a jump the first time around. For a game with such a highly-touted physics engine (and to be fair, I've just finished slogging my way through the canals), the lead character has no real weight to him. It feels much more like I'm piloting a hovering camera.


Dracko, remember when you didn't like Mario 64 immediately because of Invisible Walls? I never thought that was much of a point until I sat down with Half-Life 2 today.


(And beyond the layers of mis-en-scene, is the storytelling really that sophisticated? I mean, just because I can walk around while people talk at me in stilted videogame dialogue doesn't mean that it isn't still people just talking at me in stilted videogame dialogue. Oh, City 17 is gorgeous. I wish I didn't have to see it from the sewers. I hope that changes.)


I'm about to go brush up on Gears now.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[helicopterp]