The Gamer's Quarter

[SuperWes]

32 hours. 7 badges.

-Wes
_________________

[SuperWes]

37 hours. 8 badges. 3 Legendary Pokemon. On the road to the Elite 4.

-Wes
_________________

[aerisdead]

Wes, are you dreaming about Pokemon by now?

I played LeafGreen and Diamond a combined total of about 25 hours last week, and by the end of it I was waking up, delirious, seeing my Piplup casting bubbles right before my eyes.

I'm taking a break from the titles right now...
_________________
aerisdead

[aerisdead]

Don't buy Catan unless you have a HDTV, guys. It's JUST playable on my widescreen SD set but only just. It gives me a headache, even though I can just about read the text.

SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK WERE THE DEVELOPERS THINKING

IT'S NOT LIKE PEOPLE DON'T COMPLAIN ABOUT SMALL TEXT ALL THE FUCKING TIME
_________________
aerisdead

[Shapermc]

You have a widescreen SD tv? Weird!

Anyways, I'm a bit curious as to how hard it is to learn Catan. I know a lot of people who are psyched about this game but is seems confusing as hell.
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[aerisdead]

Widescreen SD TVs were all the rage in the UK for, like, the last 10 years.

For some reason there was no penetration in North America, which is why in the UK 90% of shows are anamorphic widescreen, but here basically nothing is.

When I got a digital cable box, I thought it would all be anamorphic, but it's not. It's freaking retarded.
_________________
aerisdead

[JasonMoses]

I finished God Hand last Thursday! Good game.

Since Monday I've been playing Raiden III, which is... pretty good. Very intentionally regressive in design. Slow ship, fast bullets, simple scoring system. Thank god that they at least made bombs come out immediately as opposed to in Raiden II. It also has a stage practice mode, which is a godsend after playing shooting game ports on the Saturn for the past month.

[dessgeega]

i hear weapons are accumulative even if they're of the wrong color too. that would be swell.
_________________

[Cycle]

[dessgeega]

the first one! i can't figure out the bit with the barrels at the beginning.

so i've been playing gunstar super heroes. specifically, i've been playing a copy that used to belong to mikey from the select button forums - which the post office dropped a crate of hammers on, so it's a bit damaged, but i can get it to work.

while i was playing alien soldier, it occured to me that i had yet to attempt hard mode on gunstar super heroes; i'd been preoccupied with improving my times on normal mode. so this is the first time i'm playing hard mode; it's also the first time i'm playing the game on a micro. it works surprisingly well, but it took some getting used to.

the helicopter stage is too hard for its own good. i know there must be some trick i havn't figured out. everything else is perfectly manageable.

so far i've completed hard mode with red. next: blue!
_________________

[ApM]

Lately I have been burning and playing terrible games for my brand new 3DO, which I picked up at the local thrift store for $25.

Worst game thus far encountered: Virtuoso, a third-person shooter where a leather-jacket wearing, mullet-sporting rock star plugs himself into virtual reality to do battle with giant bugs and stuff. Most of the enemies are animals, but ALL of them explode in giant fireballs when you shoot them. The music, of course, is 8-bit recordings of some lame-ass unsigned local band.

Weirdest game thus far encountered: Sid Meier's CPU Bach, which is not so much a game as just a program that algorithmically generates classical music, which it plays alongside random visualizations. There's your standard "kaleidoscope" view, and your standard "randomly scrolling stock photographs" view, but my favourite is the animated, 3D rendered flute-playing Bach standing next to a self-playing harpsichord. (Actually, my real favourite is the view where you see the notes scroll by on a staff and it explains to you the decisions that the algorithm made.)

[Swimmy]

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

yeah, the sprites are huge on a television and perfect on a micro, but playing the game on a hori pad was easier to adjust to than playing it on a micro, with its clicky little R button. at any rate, i'm fine at it now.

finished hard mode with blue. huzzah!

it's really unfortunate that the unblinking city stage is such a stumbling block. hugging the right side of the screen and waiting for enemies to move away seems to be the way to reach the boss without taking more than a couple hits (one of the sub bosses doesn't appear at all if you do this, for some reason!), then the strategy seems to be to ram yourself into the boss's face, so that most of the bullets from the sides are blocked by its arms, and just have enough energy left that you can survive the barrage until the boss is dead.

the seven force battle is the real hilight of the game, much like in the original. (although the original's dice palace is probably the most convincing showreel the young treasure could have put together.)
_________________

[Ethoscapade]

honestly, i'd argue that the dice palace is the best part of the original, which strikes me as odd given that i've never quite been able to rationalize superheroes as a single-player game. i mean, if you want proof that it plays better than a thirteen year old game (which was, lest we forget, treasure's intent plain and simple), try playing the original alone; you'll be bored to tears.

the other thing, too, is that superheroes really wants to be taken as an homage to both treasure and MD-era sega, and.. god why is the thunderblade stage so terrible!

also, dess - you should be getting something in the mail today (sorry i didn't get around to it for so long), and i'm going to be trying this brand-new copy of kororinpa in twenty minutes!

[captaincabinets]

Tonight I played all of 10 minutes of Clock Tower on an emulator WITH THE LIGHTS ON, before having to quit it and reassess my manhood. I may have the guts to give it a decent run sometime.
_________________
Why am I being boiled into a bright red lobster by this little kid?

[aerisdead]

[dessgeega]

the dice palace is, more than anything, a showcase for the all the boss ideas treasure couldn't work into the main game. some of them are very hard. some of them are jokes. there's a boss you fight using only the martial arts moves the game gives you. there's a scene were you destroy a car before time runs out for bonus points. the whole area has maybe the best energy out of the entire game.

anyway, i've been playing a lot of super mario hacks lately.

currently, the one that is getting most of my time is old pond, diving frog, water sound by u1 (the author of air). themed after the old basho poem, which appears on the title screen (one possible english translation thereof, anyway), the new game is an exploration of the underwater physics of mario. that means no power-ups and no attacking enemies, and you spend most of the game trying to dodge enemies and escape the undertow by swimming. mario is painted green to suit the theme, and most of the game's sprites have been changed to allow for a more diverse underwater landscape. the enemy sprites have been changed, too - mostly to look like fish (and piranha plants have been changed to eels poking their heads out of pipes).

there's a clever inversion of a mario trope: one stage begins with mario walking into a pipe that takes him up, to an out-of-the-water stage. as a frog, mario is much more limited outside of the water than in, making the out-of-the-water stages somewhat like puzzles. so far i've made it as far as stage 1-4. don't be scared off by air - this game isn't based around glitches. it is elegant and smart. if i ever commission a nes cartridge of a hack, it may very well be this one.
_________________

[elvis.shrugged]

My favorite parts of Gunstar Heroes are the Dice Palace and level 5. Dess is right regarding the palace--it holds the heart of the game and Treasure itself, in many ways--and level 5 has some intense energy. It's one of the most balls-to-the-wall action moments ever. And hey, videogame sunsets.

[aerisdead]

[dessgeega]

well sorry, sassmaster general!

the range of encounters in the dice palace just seems too diverse for it to all fit easily into any context other than "here is a whimsical maze of tricks and surprises!" the die-rolling keeps you from having to fight twenty bosses in a row, so i don't think it's so bad.
_________________

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

The same thing could be said of all boss parades, really.
_________________

[dessgeega]

i finally finished emily short's bronze (and by "finished" i mean i found one of the optimal endings - i also found several that were less satisfying). bronze is a piece of interactive fiction based on the beauty and the beast - unlike most of emily short's work, it takes place on a huge map with a minimally-implemented handful of objects. the lack of responses to many commands (mostly ones involving interacting with or examining the background) is sometimes frustrating, but i was able to complete the game with only a little bit of help from the (sometimes cryptic) in-game contextual hint system (mostly to do with one puzzle i just could not figure out).

i've also been off and on working on wishbringer, from infocom, which is a kind of modern fairy tale. this has required a lot of replaying from the start - it's easy to screw things up, and there's quite a bit of randomness (though of the sort that you can work around, usually). it's also really easy to replay from the beginning, if you know what you're doing (and the game map is pretty small). i'm still not making much progress, though. i've gathered a bunch of (potentially) magical objects, but not the titular object that makes them magic.

i also played through the first chapter of border zone a week or so ago. border zone is another infocom text adventure, but this one set to a real-time clock. the game is about espionage; in chapter one, a wounded spy shows up in your train car and hands you a document that must be delivered to a contact when you reach the border. they're searching the train. you're on a constant deadline, but the solutions are completely logical. the only sticking point was that i didn't realize you have to put "quotes" around anything you want to SAY. overall i was impressed with chapter one and might proceed to chapter two - where you play the spy.
_________________

[elvis.shrugged]

Have you played Outrun 2006 yet, Dess?

I bowled a 213 in Wii Bowling yesterday. That was so much fun! Five strikes in a row is my new record.

[dessgeega]

after a couple weeks of ordering my copy, i got a refund from the seller, who apparently couldn't ship it.

i used to money to buy the game from someone else. hopefully this one arrives.
_________________

[Shapermc]

[dhex]

i'm about 3/4 the way through a replay of planescape. why? i can't really tell you.
_________________

[aerisdead]

Still haven't played that, though I have a copy.

PC gaming used to be my main "thing" but now I'm so disinterested in it. I've got bored of Half Life 2, for example.
_________________
aerisdead

[dhex]

i weep for your dead soul.

don't get me wrong, it has the best storyline in any role playing game ever. period. and some of the best characterization. it's a great mystery wrapped in the shell of an old text adventure and filled with (sometimes painful) combat. i really do love the crap out of it. it has memorable moments out the asshole, it's deeply confusing/infuriating in parts (combat: i.e. magicians probably have it easier than most, at least according to many though i've always played a straight fighter myself) but largely coherent and ultimately, just about where games should have gone. when i start losing my patience about the whole LOLZ CONSOLE KIDDIEZ UR GHEY thing at pc-dominated forums i sometimes think of PST and go "oh, yeah, they're basically right."

but in all fairness, that applies to most games, pc or console or handheld or whatever.

but what i meant was i really should have finished my project first. it's just been that kinda week/month/year.

PST gets my non-soul cancer seal of approval. hell, i don't think there's anyone under 20 in the entire game. it may be the best game you'll ever read, or not, depending on your tolerance for reading and the infinity engine games in general.
_________________

[ryan]

Thanks to goozex, I got my hands on Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Gold Edition. The Gold Edition has Winter Assault, which is a treat because Dawn of War is very short. I'm pretty excited to finally have it after trying to find someone to trade for months, and I'm really enjoying it, even though I've never really read much about the Warhammer universe(s) and it's initially a fairly simple title. The focus on gathering points, later refined in Company of Heroes, is a good change of pace. I only have about 5 missions to go in the main campaign - weeeeeeee!
_________________
Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[SuperWes]

[ryan]

[aerisdead]

I thought Card Fighters DS had a game breaking bug, meaning it's not worth purchasing until they reissue it?
_________________
aerisdead

[SuperWes]

[Shapermc]

[aerisdead]

[dessgeega]

[Cycle]

I finished Manic Miner.

The last four levels really make you work for it. Actually, the final level was pretty damn easy.

There is a short ending FMV.

Anyway, I can cross this game off my list now!
_________________

[helicopterp]

I spent Saturday and Sunday playing through Luigi's Mansion (sort of for the second time). It's pretty jarring after having spent so much time on Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine.

L's Mansion is kind of an anti-mario. There's no freewheeling camera. This is because Luigi can't jump, and he can almost run, and because the environments, rather than expansive playgrounds, are mostly tiny compartments that fit nicely in the impersonal camera's limited range of motion. Also, the basic plotline of the game, Mario being trapped in a painting, subtly inverts the basic interface that drives Mario 64.

Luigi's Mansion features memorable moments in spades, though, most of which have to do with fucking with the environment enough to make some of the ghosts appear.

A rundown of a few of the coolest:
-Firing a meteorite at the moon in the distance to break it in half.
-Knocking a punching bag into a ghost while he works out
-Sucking up a skeleton, who crumbles to bones, which encourages a dog to come out of his doghouse after said bones
-Discovering via a mirror on the back wall a tiny red button on the fore-wall (fore-walls are never visible at any point in the game due to the nearly-fixed camera perspective.

Playing around with things with the vacuum cleaner (or, if you must, "Poltergust 3000") is the most fun part of the play mechanics, because everything responds so approvingly. I sucked away every tablecloth in the game. It's also the best way to find spare cash.

Another great touch in the game is that each room is specific unto itself. The coolest rooms are the observatory, the projection room, and the music room. The clockwork room and cold storage are just weird.

It's a shame that the game degenerates into a boring lock-and-key quest in its final act.

I'm on the last boss now. No one warned me it would be this hard. It's mostly unfair, I think.
_________________
Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[dessgeega]

luigi's mansion is fantastic around the middle, though boo-hunting is pretty boring. when the lights go out is pretty harrowing, though. the end boss is a brick wall when you first hit it, but it's also amazing in its own way. the boss before it is much more tedious.

so my copy of outrun 2006 is here! it's probably the most gorgeous ps2 game i've played. the text is tiny on my television!

i've been playing outrun mode exclusively - i was able to reach the two leftmost endings. is there any reason to play the other modes? and what's the difference between outrun2 and outrun2sp? and why do i have to unlock things?? i unlocked radiation, which sounds pretty hot. i may unlock the original versions of the outrun tunes, or i might not bother.

my "girlfriend" says "i want to go far away!" i want to go far away from this heterosexism. i get through it by imagining my driver is stone butch. is there a cheat code that lets you not roll your eyes when ladyfriend says "how far you gonna take me?" though. cause that would be of interest to me.
_________________

[Redeye]

After the NWN2 disappointment, I haven't been playing much of anything.

Just replaying some bits of old things- retaking gang territory in GTA:SA with jetpack and tank.

Replaying the tenement fight in V:TM-B.

Virtually mindless two and a half minute matches of CS:S.

Then I found a little gem. Hide and Seek CS:S.

The HS-mod (hide and seek) lets the Terrorists change into various objects- furniture, potted plants, telephones, file cabinets, etc. Then you hide. You can move around and change shapes during the game to evade the CTs.

As a CT you are frozen and blinded for 30 seconds at the start, then you go hunting for the shapechanging terrorists.

Terrorists get no weapons. This is skill and wits, not twitch gaming.


Here is the address: 69.9.41.17:27015


The only problem is not enough maps, and radar hackers.

And glitchers.

There are probably more servers and maps I don't know about.

The one place I know is at least good fun for a few days.

PS: type "hideexec" (no quotes) into chat to get the shapechange menu.

I hope this will give at least one other person here a little joy.


_________________
I felt sheer anarchic joy when I ran over my first pedestrian.

[Cycle]

That sounds awsome.

It reminds me of a level in Avara, where the room is filled with bouncing boxes, and each player is also disguised as one, so you have to try and find the odd ones out and kill them.

I also made a level with HECTOR statues (the robots the player uses) so that players could hide amongst them. I wanted to do more with it, like make the statues appear in random places, but never got aroudn to it.

Anyway, I should try this mod.

Also, which fight was the tenement fight?

I re-installed DooM 3 after realising I could play it with everything turned up on my new computer. It got old pretty quick. Then I added the duct tape mod and put in the Trent Reznor sounds which made it a bit more entertaining, but it's still getting old pretty quick. I can't beleive I played through the whole thing at like two frames per second on my old computer.
_________________

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Why on earth are you playing DooM 3 when you could install DooM II and RTC-3057?
_________________

[Cycle]

I assume you mean 2. And because, eye candy!

We already talked about this WAD, anyway. I said I was impressed with all the tricks and life it got out of the engine, but found the actual design pretty lacking.

Kinda like Doom 3, I guess. LOL!

EDIT: I see you corrected yourself!
_________________

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

It's more DooM 3 than DooM 3 was.

Didn't I also say that before?
_________________

[Redeye]

[Cycle]

Yes you did, Rero!

So, what are peoples thoughts on Raven? I hate them, myself. Keep getting decent/good franchies and making incredibly medicore games out of them.
_________________

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Their salad days are long passed...
_________________

[helicopterp]

[helicopterp]

So I beat the last boss. Dess, you were right, it just took a little teaching.

My play rank was a B, though! I sure felt like an A-level player.

And I forgot to mention something in my first post about it: I love that one of the rooms in the mansion is the "Ceramics Studio". That's wild stuff.
_________________
Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.