The Gamer's Quarter

[Cycle]

what

that's not what i read
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[Dracko]

Link to the video or it didn't happen.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Ethoscapade]

guys, are you kidding? faithless doesn't work for bioware, she writes for play and does some standup comedy.

is there really that much ill will towards SB here?

[SuperWes]

Hey, fuck you guys. Faithless is awesome. She's a writer for the Gamer's Quarter first and a writer for Play second.

So I ended up buying this. It'll arrive on Mon or Tues and I'll post impressions at some point later. Why did I buy it? Not sure. I think seeing magazines give games "10s" makes me think there must be something to them. Also the videos of the fighting make it look like fun. And I'm weak

-Wes
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[dhex]

[ApM]

Harvey, Cycle, I love you guys and all, but this level of spamming is very irritating, and passive-aggressively insulting people on other boards is really out of line (regardless of whether or not they also happen to write for us). Please scale back the level of dickery of your late night forum escapades in the future.

[Dracko]

[SuperWes]

[Dracko]

[Harveyjames]

[dessgeega]

stop being pricks or you're disinvited from my birthday party, okay
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[Harveyjames]

[Cycle]

harvey i think we should spam more hate posts, it gets people posting!
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[Dracko]

Cycle, I addressed a thread to your attention. Turn it into a hate thread!
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[SuperWes]

[DaleNixon]

The Official Dreamcast Magazine provided a key that showed what each number on the scale of 1 to 10 stood for. I think 10 was something like "Instant Classic". I always thought they should just use those phrases to rate games or at least indicate them next to the number.

If they gave a game the "Dream Game" award, it meant that it was an essential purchase. Even if you hate games in the same genre, you will love this game.
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[Lackey]

All 10 stars really means is a certain level of craftsmanship and a fulfillment of that genre's established norms so obviously you just use your own judgment whether that means its worthwhile or not.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[dhex]

[Harveyjames]

[dmauro]

My roommate picked this up. I think he just got it because the local electronics store didn't have Assassins' Creed. I started up a game and was immediately bored to death with everything except for the dialogue response system. The terrible pop-in and framerate drops didn't do anything to sweeten the deal. It only took two dirty disc errors (this is one of those games that is more prone to them than others) to get me to quit about an hour into the game.

But I've also been watching my roommate play a little bit. That is, I watched him try over and over again at this boss encounter that he was having so much trouble with because he couldn't find any way to keep his squadmates from getting themselves killed (he needed the one with tech/hacking skills to stay alive and help fight the giant robot). So I sat there and watched the unskippable boss intro cutscene over and over again with his custom-made character's hair flash on his forehead as it clipped in and out. After I left, he continued. I'm not sure if he was really bored (he was also formatting his hard drive at the same time) or if the game had done something to hook him earlier on. There certainly wasn't any sort of a human connection since all the human models look like shit and the default protagonist model is the only decent looking human model that you can possibly make with their system (all the human NPCs look pretty bad too, it's not just the custom made characters).

I think I got further with KotOR 2 than I did with this one.

[Harveyjames]

It wasn't the 'most moving piece of fiction you ever witnessed in your lifetime', then?

[dmauro]

I don't work for Bioware, so no.

[Lackey]

The TV Spot for Mass Effect shows a crew of sci-fi people denying a distress call on Novaria Prime to go dune-buggying on Mars and then a line about difficult decisions to be made. This is the extent of my knowledge about the game.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Dracko]

So, anyone think of any games where sexual topics are handled well? I'd settle even for a good mention, I don't think there's anything out there, not even in IF, that deals with sexuality as a theme, though I'd love to be proven otherwise.

I'd say killer7 or the Silent Hill series but they're still very fantastical about it and no doubt controversial.

Oh, Masq!
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[sediment]

...Phantasmagoria.

Ultima 7.5 and the Gabriel Knight games also have sexual encounters - as plot points, though, not sexuality as a theme.

Actually, my initial joke aside, Phantasmagoria 2 does touch on a forced reversal of gender roles as abuse. And I suppose Phantasmagoria is as good a tale of a male sexual predator slash psycho killer as you'll get.

And there's always Leisure Suit Larry!
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[Scratchmonkey]

Fallout?

[Harveyjames]

Harvest Moon!

[sediment]

oh, and God of War.
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[Dracko]

Seriously, guys. God of War is about as hiskoo you can get.

Fallout may apply, though its setting would say otherwise. Arcanum may do it better, as far as acknowledging it as a reality with no petulant or childish value judgement goes.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

hiskoo = high school?

arcanum was fairly innocuous in that sense. which is probably how it should be. glaring issues tend to be bad things people pick up on.

not totally into the gameplay. i might go and beat it someday though. i'm pretty close to the end.
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[Dracko]

Correct, sir!
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Cycle]

oh hey, we're talking about sex scenes now?

oh just sexual themes. hmm.

i'm beat!
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[Dracko]

It can be both! I'm just trying to think of games that tackle the subject well.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Cycle]

well the love scene in omikron didn't feel too sleazy

i mean, apart from the fact that you are in some other guys body and using it to sleep with his wife.

but if you didn't it could have compromised your situation??
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[sediment]

vampire: bloodlines is fairly well sexualized.

this could be observed from two angles: 1) wry commentary on the part of troika staff on the sexualization of the vampire as it exists in classical literary and modern media, or 2) oversexualization of damn near everything in advertising and media in modern world, leading to vampires being, well, vamps. in either circumstance, it ends up being somewhat trampy.

i had a thought, but it was also fairly hiskoo.

oh, age of conan will apparently be featuring some sexual content. this is to stay true to conan in general. i'm not in the beta so i can't really say anything regarding it, though.
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[SuperWes]

I played this last night!

I like parts of it a lot and others not so much. The character creation is so bad I went with the standard default dude despite buying the game partially because I knew I wouldn't have to play with default ultra-generic dude. I did this because every character I created ended up looking like a stoned half-asian dude who gets into a lot of fights (and the female character creation doesn't allow you to make an attractive protagonist).

The conversations aren't bad, but they're kind of boring. It seems kind of silly to make a choice and see the outcome when I know I'll never know what the other choices may have led to. I mean, why am I even making choices?

I also don't really like how most of the game thus far has consisted of going back and forth between people relaying messages back and forth. Actually, this wouldn't bother me if I could find stuff easily, but you can only look at and place waypoints on a map of the immediate area rather than the whole section. Navigating the city is convoluted, with elevators, stairs, and taxis that can take you pretty much anywhere, but knowing which one to take requires you to memorize the city's section names.

I like the universe more than I thought I would though, and I'm intrigued at the notion of fightin' more stuff and learnin' more abilities. There's also some foreshadowing that I might go through spectre training, and that could be fun.

So yeah, not too shabby, but definately not a 10.0.

-Wes
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[seryogin]

Final Fantasy

EDIT: Bashing, Heather is not nice. Neither is bashing Heathers. Anyway, Harvey James has stopped being cool... and he's also a damn louse who stopped updating Sunday morning comics club, which was the only good thing about him, as well no more image blogging. You,sir, are indeed washed-up!
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[bleak]

Guys there are parts of this thread that are really shitty. Let's keep it clean fellas!

Anyway, Mass Effect. I haven't had the opportunity to play it yet. I've watched my friends play it extensively however, and I have to say that as per Wes' analysis, the game definitely isn't too shabby! I think I played Kotor 2 one time but I didn't get to play it all the way through because of some bull death that I lost tons of progress on because I forgot to save yadda yadda yadda. Enough about that.

First impressions about different aspects of the game!

Character generation has always been a somewhat important aspect of the game for me. I really want to call this game's character generation weak, but you really have to make sure that the person fits within the universe of Mass Effect. So, you can't change clothes or anything, but you can have any range of sweet ethnic minorities, mongoloid-looking motherfuckers, or even Johnathan LaPaglia.

So, in light of the restriction that the character generation has to tackle I think that it is good! My only gripe about it is that you really aren't limited by what I mentioned before, but it's really the fact that your protagonist only has one male and one female voice, so if you make them, and if they don't look like they fit the voice the whole game is pretty much ruined. I can't expect there to be more than one voice set for each gender though, since there's a shiiiiiiiitloooooooad of dialogue in the game. What's a guy to do?

It feels like the choices that you can make during the game are somewhat insignificant. Sure, you can go through the game treating everyone amicably or you can go through punching everyone in the face, but in the end does it really affect anything? You get renegade or paragon points for doing jerk or nice things to people respectively, but as in previous Bioware games it basically amounts to creating a blue or red mist around your character while you're looking at the statistics screen. Sometimes they have neat touches like your party members might leave because they don't agree with you being such a huge dick, and sometimes dialogue is different if you are a huge dick, which I think is kind of neat, but again it's merely the illusion of choice.

One thing that I think is actually pretty neat about the game is the combat. It might actually be a tad slowish for my tastes, but it looks like there's not one absolute build that you have to go otherwise the game is incredibly hard like I heard happens in previous Bioware games. Someone else said that it is the logical progression in evolution of combat, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. It requires some thinking, which is nice, and it also provides a lot of neat opportunities to discover new combat strategies on the fly, which oftentimes games can feel hamfisted when making an attempt at such a task. The vehicle combat, while more seldom than foot combat, is highly amusing and also lends itself to the same set of positive attributes I listed for the foot combat.

The story is actually pretty engaging, which I found surprising since I usually tend not to give a rat's ass about what happens during the games I play, unless they are particularly well-written. But what is it about the story that makes it so interesting? Well, it's partly because of the voice acting. It's well above average with some very talented people on board. The dialogue also feels pretty natural for the most part, and the fact that they just made their entire own original setting to do whatever they wished with made it hard for me to discern what exactly was going to happen in the plot at any given moment. Not to say though that the plot isn't completely unpredictable, natch. I'm pretty sure that you end up saving the galaxy at the end whether or not you're a huge dick. I don't know, I haven't gotten that far yet.

There are seemingly endless tiny little touches in the game that make it a joy to play and I enjoy each and every one that arrives to my eyes and ears. Most of the races are original and enjoyable, and you can really get behind the interracial dynamic which you can tell the Mass Effect team put a ton of work into. It's admirable, really. The economy, government, and society of the whole place, along with all the new technology, and sweet environments to explore, awesome vehicles to drive and fearsome foes to vanquish. It really feels like they nailed the kind of grand scale of RPG that they were going for.going for.

So far my only complaints for this game are that, well, some of the dialogue is just really fucking stupid. "This door is closed." Really, you stupid bitch? Thanks for the tip! There's a lot of texture pop-in also, that tends to be very noticeable only when you're wandering around the Citadel, and I don't really care about that all that much, but it can be really distracting. Some parts of the game were shoddily designed, like any point where you can get instantly killed for example during a mission, and there are parts where you can't save, and the instant death zones are marvelously way too large. Oh, and you can't skip cutscenes. Which is really fucking annoying when you die a lot due to the aforementioned shoddy design/implementation. Also, the AI seems to be painfully retarded at all times. Where your enemy's AI is incredibly easy to exploit at times, your teammates will run out into the line of fire, stand right next to you exposed to rockets and other explosions, and cause all three of you to die. It's not really pretty especially since some of the missions are rather lengthy and you still can't skip cutscenes.

All in all, the game feels good. Combat is solid, character interaction is smooth and natural, and the skills system is very sensible and freeform. I enjoy the game very much, and while it isn't as good as some of the other releases we've seen this year, it's definitely much better than a ton of other games I've played, and it's definitely in the upper spectrum of quality relative to other games released this year. That's pretty impressive seeing as how 2007 has been an amazing year for gaming. If nothing else comes out in December this game is probably getting a spot in my top 10 games of 2007 list. This game gets 4 out of 4 stars from me!
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[dhex]

[Harveyjames]

[RadarScope1]

I'm getting this game, no question. It looks pretty good to me. I've watched a ton of vids and it seems up my alley, plus the folks on 1Up Yours had a lot of good stuff to say about it.

Also, on faithless - the article she wrote about Secret of Mana in TGQ #8 is hands down one of the best pieces of writing about video games that I've ever read.

[Harveyjames]

Oh man no-one's attacking Faithless

[Cycle]

god harvey you are such a damn jerk, how dare you?!
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[Intentionally Wrong]

Played a couple hours of this last night.

I'm really, really, really sick of saving the world. I'm tempted to get into those pokemon roguelikes just because they seem to have such a narrow scope.

As a general rule of thumb, the more player-directed you make your combat, the less effective statistical manipulation is going to become. I got a strong sense of aimless flailing whenever I assigned my points during level-up.

Getting pretty sick of the bog-standard NPC romances, as well. I'm all for an increased emphasis on human PCs and NPCs, but somehow the first few characters in this are all Johnny Generic and Jane Plain.

The dialog sounds like somebody picked over Stephen Gagne's NWN modwork and internalized all the basic structures, then fed it through a sci fi filter and cut out about half the options to save space for audio.

It's not terrible, really; I just think I'd enjoy it a lot more if I hadn't played most of BioWare's other games.

[Cycle]

I have a couple friends who are trying to convinve me to play this game, but it just looks so boring. I've played BIOWARE games before and never really enjoyed them that much, and really, this game doesn't look any different.

I mean, I can understand other people loving it, but it really looks like it's not for me.
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[bleak]

It certainly seems better than the previous Bioware games thus far.
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

[Cycle]

MDK 2 was good but not as good as MDK 1.
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[Harveyjames]

[Cycle]

Let your heart guide you.
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