The Gamer's Quarter

[Shapermc]

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Gradius IV via MAME, at 8fps.
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[dessgeega]

in crawl i recently became so esteemed in trog's eyes that trog saw fit to bestow upon me the quarterstaff of monotheism. the quarterstaff gets +5 to hit and +6 damage. monotheism is a powerful weapon. and i am trog's favored daughter.

in addition to the actual game i've been playing around with the player doll editor, which is almost as good, since i love digital paper dolls and will tinker with them at length whenever i'm allowed. some results:



on the left is my leatherdyke warrior, ready for a romp in the dungeon. i don't actually use her, though, because i prefer my avatar to reflect the equipment i'm actually wearing. in the middle is how my character (a hill dwarf berserker) looks at the start of a game. on the right is how she looks later in a game, wearing better armor and weilding a +6,+2 vampiric scythe. this particular character had her mind eaten by an enchanted statue, earning the epitaph "died of stupidity".

i've also been playing the konami arcade title jungler, which might be the most balanced game ever. in jungler, you and the enemies are long, segmented snakes in a maze. if you and another snake collide head-on, whichever snake is shorter will be eaten. snakes can shoot bullets, from their heads, but only the hindmost segment of a snake is vulnerable. if a tail segment is shot it is destroyed, and the snake becomes shorter and possibly susceptible to being eaten - but it also becomes faster. so shorter snakes and up chasing their opponents' tails, trying to whittle them down until they're no longer in danger of being eaten, while longer snakes are trying to manuever to catch the shorter, faster snakes in a head-on collision. it is an utterly fantastic game.
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[silentmatt]

All I can say was that I was excited about the Wii and playing it everyday until....

The Guitar Hero 2 bundle arrived.

Now, my house is a constant party, with people dropping in at all hours to lay down dastardly licks and rock the hell out. It is one fantastically put together game.

I am almost afraid of the second guitar that is currently en route.
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PSN: Twitch_City ||| Wii: 8083 5371 5767 6700
"Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les coeurs, où tous les vins coulaient."

[internisus]

Dess, you came close to selling me on this crawl thing with that post.

[dessgeega]

aren't you the person who won't play nethack because it's not about hacking the internet?

anyway, i just saved laguna beach.

i'm playing the pc version of mdk. and i'm liking it. it doesn't have the camera issues that make so many 3d games frustrating, mostly because the camera is fixed behind your character, who moves smoothly and reliably. also that suit's pretty hot.*

* also that chute's pretty hot.
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

MDK's pretty sweet, to this day I've found it has the best sniping action out of all the games I've ever played.

I've given Golvellius a whirl after many years of avoding it. I could never get into it when I was a wee lad because of the constantly spawning enemies but I don't seem to have a problem with that these days. Maybe save states help this along a bit too. I'm just after the third boss and still wondering why I didn't go back to this game earlier, it's really quite good.
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[Harveyjames]

Also the music video at the end is pretty hott. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVvlkNrBT4k

When it starts it doesn't look like a pop video, it just looks like a typical game ending sequence. When this mysterious girl pops up and starts singing in French, it's a genuine surprise.

Remember this was in 1997, so the idea that I could be playing a videogame and then suddenly be watching an amazing pop video from another country was out of this world at the time. Even if it looks a bit sucks now, it was revelatory to my 14-year-old self. We didn't even have MTV back then.

(needless to say I instantly fell in love with the lead singer).

I just read that the song is a cover of a song by a 70's band called 'Les Poppys', who were a boy's choir: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQKp8qJjKbE

I loved MDK 1. Every level had something cool about it. I really warmed to the characters, too. I wish I still had it :|

[dessgeega]

it's actually the music video that got me interested in the game in the first place.
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[Harveyjames]

Is the game easy to get hold of these days?

[dessgeega]

incredibly. just google it.
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[Harveyjames]

Abandonware. Huh!

I've been watching some videos of Um Jammer Lammy. Man that game was cool. I wish I was friends with Lammy and Milkcan.

[Dracko]

[url=http://www.abandonia.com/games/en/346/MDK(MurderDeathKill).htm]Abandonia have it.[/url]
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[SuperWes]

MDK has a lot of pretty great concepts. Shame about the character and visual design though.

I'm still playing Final Fantasy XII with a fervor. I'm like 15 hours in and I'm loving it more every hour. It may just be one of the most perfect video games I've ever played. My biggest disappointments with the game are more with myself. I'm taking my characters in almost the exact same direction I did the first time. In theory I'd want to try new stuff with them, but for some reason I always stick with the basics. I'm boring like that.

-Wes
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[internisus]

It's your second time through? I can't imagine playing it a second time, and I really have enjoyed it.

[Scratchmonkey]

I'm playing through Twilight Princess. I'm not reading the Zelda threads because I'm not terribly far (still dealing with the third initial twilight area).

It's pretty frustrating so far because it's a pretty good game, I'm just not as enamored of the Zelda formula as I used to be and I'm constantly critiquing the design as I play, so I haven't really managed to get into the game properly yet. Really my problem is that I've realized that nobody's really made a game that's like the first Zelda* and that's really what I want out of an action-adventure game and not the Link to the Past structure that dominates all the Zeldas that came afterwards.

* - This is a bit of a lie because the more I think about it, Morrowind is actually not that far off.

[Harveyjames]

Hey you know if they make the simpler, back to basics exploration-based Zelda we all wish they would, they could do worse than to use the Just Cause engine. That's a beautiful game to just walk around and admire. The way it render dense foliage, countryside, beaches and seas is second to none.

Things start to unravel as soon as you meet another human being, though.

[SuperWes]

[Harveyjames]

[internisus]

Pyramid Head?

Wes: Ah, I see. That must be a cool experience.

[Scratchmonkey]

[dark steve]

don't we all!
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[dessgeega]

speaking of roguelikes!

i've been experimenting with playing spellcasters in crawl. deep elf conjurers, probably the easiest spellcasting class, as conjuration is primarily concerned with direct-damage magic. as a conjurer, most of your attacks can be thrown from a distance, but if you let an enemy get near you you could be in trouble. this makes the opening of the game pretty tricky, since you start with only four magic points, each one granted a single magic missile. once you've leveled up and gotten a few more magic points and expanded your spell repertoire you become much more formidable.

i try not to wear anything heavier than ring-mail, since heavy armor has a negative effect on the success rate of spells, but robes give next to no protection. also i've started worshiping sif muna the lorekeeper. trog hates spellcasters.

i met a tricky situation running into a band of orcs in an open space. i used a wand of enslavement to charm the orc priests, who have a deadly long-distance smite attack, finished up the vanilla orcs with their help, and ran away before they could come to their senses.
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[simplicio]

Dess, is this Linley's Dungeon Crawl you keep talking about? If so where'd you find the graphics to it your posted above? If not what is it and can you link it please?

I've only been playing a little bit of Raving Rabbits lately. It feels like a colossal waste of time, and I'm really glad I only rented it instead of buying. Should I feel guilty about sending it back incomplete? Every minute I spend with it I feel I should be playing Excite Truck or maybe even Zelda instead. Excite Truck being my zen video game experience of the year.

Also, can someone tell me what the good mini-games in Wii Monkey Ball are so I don't have to try out all the terrible ones myself?

Short on time and patience these days, it seems.

[dessgeega]

dungeon crawl tile version for windows and linux. graphics by these folks. the graphics are used to convey a lot more information than would be possible in text-mode, and they're quite lovely, too. plus there are mouse shortcuts, including mouseover far-look. press the - key to get at the doll editor.
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[simplicio]

Thanks. Seeing those sprites just reminded me for some reason of my old old flame, Realmz. God was that a fantastic discovery!

[Shapermc]

So, uhh, is there a DS homebrew (flash) cart that is easy to use yet? By this I mean no hardware tampering needed and less than a 2 hour learning curve to get things working on it? Being able to play GBA games would be a bonus as well as emulation (like Shiren SNES in english).
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“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!"

[Cycle]

[dessgeega]

[simplicio]

[Harveyjames]

I want to play Exile. What's the best way to do it?

[Cycle]

All three games, plus an all new chapter, were re-made into a series called Avernum which uses the geneforge engine, a more powerful and enhanced engine than the Exile one. It's isometric 3D and features hills and stuff which adds to the strategy and what not.

Personally, I prefer the original overhead games, but that may just be a nostalga thing. I just never liked the isometric view and prefered the simplen, stripped down strategy of the original games. The remakes are much more consistent, and both trilogies get better with each installment. I started with the final game and played them backwards but it's probably best to play them in order to truly appreciate the later ones (especially the third).

Anyway, all the games have windows ports and you get (rather huge) demos here:

http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/products.html
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[Harveyjames]

I just realised we're talking about different Exiles.

[Cycle]

Oh, THAT thing.
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[Harveyjames]

I'm going to ask Yahoo! Answers. This thing is my new favorite toy. Some people ask it dumb questions like 'How old is Billy Idol?' which is bound to be written on Wikipedia somewhere. What it's really useful for is gauging public opinion, such as 'Why do people hate Lily Allen so much?' or 'Is Lenny Henry funny?' or 'what, to you, constitutes good animation?' The Indian Prime Minister asked it 'what should be done to combat global terrorism?'

Providing they can get a good cross section of people using it, I can see it being an invaluable tool for market researchers. I haven't tried it on straight-up rom haxxoring advice yet, but here goes nothing.

...Someone should set up a joke account on yahoo! answers calling themselves 'Jerry Seinfeld' and ask it 'what's the deal with airplane food?'

[dessgeega]

r.i.p. fable the level 11 deep elf conjurer, mangled by a five-headed hydra (and it started out with that many heads, thank you very much) on level 14 of the dungeon, with a score of 9082 after 13,805 turns. an elder of sif muna, she had a maximum of 53 hitpoints and 39 magic points, wielded a +3 long sword of freezing and wore +3 chain mail, a +1 pair of boots, a +2,+3 ring of slaying, a ring of magical power, and an amulet of conservation.

she had attained experience level 10 in spellcasting, 14 in conjurations, 9 in fire magic, and 4 in earth magic. she knew the spells magic dart, throw flame, stone arrow, conjure flame, swiftness and repel missiles. she vanquished 283 creatures, including psyche, edmund, blork the orc, a griffon, three hill giants, three trolls, a cyclops, a manticore, and two very ornery yaks.

r.i.p. fable the deep elf conjurer, my most successful crawl character to date.
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[dessgeega]

nana showed me yahoo! questions once. it was ridiculous! i found a question to the effect of "to all the butches: what is it about femmes that attracts you the most?" i was going to write back "nothing" but you needed to register.

mdk is really great, by the way. they pull a lot of clever tricks with low-res polygons that you'd never see today. i got stuck in the third stage, though, and it was very disappointing. i couldn't figure out how to advance, so i quit rather than let the city get destroyed. maybe someone can help? i was riding a fan up through a window into this round chamber with enemies perched in holes in the walls and a couple rocket-pack enemies flying around. i killed all of them, leaving a bunch of empty windows, all of them barred except one, and some columns sticking out of the ground. i could climb one column and hop to the other, and then there was a third near the unbarred window, but i couldn't reach it. if anyone has any idea what i missed, please let me know!
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[Harveyjames]

Yeah, people will ask dumb questions. So far it's not so great for specialist knowledge, either- no-one knew the best way to play Exile on a PC.

On the other hand my question 'are there any gay characters in the Harry Potter universe' was answered satisfactorally and more! You didn't hear this from me, but... Peeves the Poltergeist. Who knew??

[Nana Komatsu]

Yahoo! Answers is not really a good place to go hang out and spend time answering questions, but I've found more often than not if I have a specific question that I can't google an answer for, it sometimes work. Plus it's free.

[Cycle]

I really wanted to play MDK for so long when I was younger, but when I finally played it on Playstation, I was pretty dissapointed. Maybe it's better on pc, because it just didn't look and feel right on the PSX...

I loved MDK 2 though. Good old fashioned, hard as nails game. And some of the humour is actually funny.
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[Harveyjames]

MDK2 turned me off because you spent too much time not being Kurt, which was what I loved about MDK1- it did one thing and did it well. It's true that MDK1 does leave you wondering about the wacky adventures the three guys have together in the spaceship, but MDK2 gives you too much. Being the professor trying to find what stupid object you have to jam with what isn't my idea of a good time.

[Cycle]

Yeah, the professor could be a pain in the ass, though I didn't have problems with combining items (it was pretty simple I thought), but rather his huge crazy mazes but I loved the balls-out action of Max. It was a nice change from Kurt.

I think my biggest problem with the first game was that I couldn't see shit because everything was brown and I found most of the actiony bits really boring.
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

MDK, the game that was more brown than Quake.
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[Six]

Was it browner than Faxanadu? We need a brown scale here.

[Harveyjames]

MDK was not brown!



Blue skies!



Look at all this shit!



Beautiful???!



Ok so there's a lot of stuff like the above, which is all from one earthy colour palette. But it's still a world away from



To say it's more brown than Quake is just crazy. Someone should post a picture of the black and white room with all the paint splatters everywhere, it's the least brown games have ever been. MDK is colourful!

I tried downloading MDK from abandonia but it was incredibly slow going; the download from www.classic-pc-games.com/ is storming the fuck on down, however. I had to fill in a sponsor's survey and then tell the site what the message at the end of the survey was to get the download to work. If you want to download MDK but don't want to have to fill in a survey, the message is 'companies are working with us'.

UPDATE: Ok, I've played it. It's kind of fun. You can tell it's by the same people as Earthworm Jim, anyway.

This would have been in development at the same time as Mario 64, so it's a good reminder of what 3D platform games were like before Mario 64 came along.

[Shapermc]

The "brown scale"

> >
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“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!"

[dessgeega]

i finished hatena satena's story mode (all four characters) and unlocked a couple of bonus modes. though i like the game, uncovering an image doesn't seem as satisfying as in picross, probably because the image you uncover is just a placeholder for some boring lover's house rendering. i'm also replaying guru logic champ (i never finished it, but i have yet to reach where i was). in that game, by contrast, uncovering a picture is satisfying even though the image you create is not the final image (color gets added), most likely because the final image uses the same pixels/blocks you were working with (whereas hatena satena discards them). some of the colorations play off the originals in clever ways, too, like an apparent image of a weightlifter that (once colored) turns out to be the face of a clown.

i've also been playing some doujin games at sir stotelheim's suggestion. megamari he (aptly) described as a bullet hell rockman. like the original games, what makes it work is very crafty level design. i've only cleared one stage so far, but i'll probably have to do it again because the game uses ridiculous rockman-esque grid passwords instead of a save feature, and i can't be bothered jotting those down. but stotelheim and i agreed that it's neater that way.

and lilian fourhand, which is a pretty fantastic scrolling platformy shooter. the control scheme seems like it might be too complex for a twitchy shooter (two fire buttons, one left and one right, and a jump button) but i'm getting used to it. it's just appalling that girl-children in japan have to spend so much of their time shooting enemies.
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

[dessgeega]

sort of! except with lock-on lasers and sapphic couplings.

anyway, crawl: previously i've played a hill dwarf berserker, which is a very focused melee fighter, and a deep elf conjurer, which is a very focused magic-user. now i've been experimenting with classes that combine melee combat and magic. the one i've settled on is a minotaur chaos knight in the service of mahkleb the destroyer.

chaos knights don't use spell magic; rather, by killing in mahkleb's name a chaos knight gains terrible and chaotic abilities, like the ability to make her enemies convulse with pain at a gesture, to summon demons that turn her foes into newts, and to fling explosions. unlike more conventional forms of magic, wearing heavy armor has no effect on the ability to invoke these abilities. and (unlike the abilities trog grants) neither does hunger, meaning i sacrifice most corpses rather than butchering them.

minotaurs are neat because they occasionally get an extra unarmed combat attack (headbutt). they can't wear hats, though.



pictured: a legion of demons defend fable the chaos knight from a wyvern.
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[SuperWes]

I finished Elite Beat Agents and Lost Planet this weekend. Good shit, both of them. Phoenix Wright and Warioware come out this week, so I'll probably start playing those and continue on my quest through Final Fantasy XII. Woo hoo!

-Wes
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