The Gamer's Quarter

dhex · Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 8:46 am Post subject:

but it skips the issue of bad voice acting entirely. surely that is worth something.

in other news, i discovered i am actually enjoying the crap out of titan quest. i must be sick or something. NUMBERS GO UP GAAH GAAH GAAH
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ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

Yeah, Titan Quest will really grow on you. By the end, you're just whipping the shit out of hundreds of demons, tossing fireballs around and spearing satyrs and shit. Just remember to not patch the game! Patching it makes the last boss invincible.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

dhex · Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 10:40 am Post subject:

oh poop. i hope i didn't patch!
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Harveyjames · the meteor kid Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 3636

Life is a video game where the last boss is invincible.

dhex · Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 10:55 am Post subject:

there is no last boss, anywhere.
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ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

I rolled it back. I just saved my character, uninstalled, then reinstalled without patching it. With the patch, you cannot destroy pillars that give the last boss its power, and eventually drains his life, which means you won't get his life down more than a slither before he wrecks you. I leveled up a good 5 times after my first attempt - and at that point it takes a loooong time to - and still couldn't, then read about all the fuss online.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

Scratchmonkey · . Joined: 02 Mar 2005 Posts: 1439

Does Steam auto-patch it?

ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

I'm not sure, I was using the retail box copy; and I'm assuming dhex is as well, since I tossed him my copy some time ago. I own quite a few items through Steam, but I've never checked to see if it did. I would assume so, since I've never seen it as an option to.

--

I just checked and apparently Steam offers the latest version of every game, so Titan Quest will most likely be the newest version, which is the one I had problems with. This thread talks about post patch Typhoon. You can still beat him, but their advice of 'use better gear and don't get hit' is fuck-all useful. I was a pretty high level and couldn't do a thing to him. He not only has a bunch of long-range attacks, but he can also leech your life. The most I ever took off of him was about 20%, and that was after draining every potion I had (over 100 each) and spending about half an hour running around and getting very lucky.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

dessgeega · Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 3:09 pm Post subject:

dessgeega · Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 12:13 am Post subject:

so the super famicom port of libble rabble apparently comes with a second d-pad disc you can slip over the face buttons to make a doubleplus snes pad. i may have to invest in this.
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Harveyjames · the meteor kid Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 3636

I don't like the colours in Libble Rabble, I prefer DISCO NO. 1

daphaknee · Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 6:56 am Post subject:

holy shit the world ends with you is really a never ending tutorial

Cycle · Mac daddy Joined: 08 Sep 2006 Posts: 2767

I've been playing Indy on my DS each night, but today I had a game day and played lots of Oblivion, thanks to my brother coming over and playing the hell out of it. I forgot how addictive this game is. I resumed my old character and have been trying to complete all my current quests, which is quite a laundry list, but I'm having a good time causing mischief and what not, but I really wish I had the PC version so I could change a few things I don't like and perhaps even develop my own mods. Also, I want to play Dess's mod even though she apparently hates me now, but I've been interested in seeing how she uses 3D space. I actually played a mission today that involved navigating by landmarks, which is what hers is about as I understand it. How hard is it to mod Oblivion anyway? But yeah, just ripe for modding. I also wish the world wasn't so bland, but hey.

I've been thinking about picking up the expansions, but I'm not sure. I don't need to be any more addicted to this game, and there is enough stuff to do without them. Anyone here played them? Should I look into them? I bought one of the DLC things (to make up for never paying for Bloodmoon even though the price difference is pretty big) and it was a bit underwhelming but oh well, it's still nice to have.

I also bought FEAR for the Xbox because I wanted to play a dumb shooter plus it was mega cheap and I liked the demo. It's unfortunately one of those FPS titles that is obviously much more at home on the PC, but it's still a decent time so far. I think I want to play STALKER again because when I was on a roof I saw all these other buildings and wanted to go out and explore them, before I forgot I couldn't do that. The game hasn't been very scary yet and the action has been a bit ordinary to be honest, but i'll see if it picks up. I don't think it will be creepier than Condemned though, something about the game terrifies me. I think it's seeing the gorgeous sunlight spill through the cracks of the boarded up windows, being able to see the buildings out there, but knowing you're trapped in this dank building with a bunch of crackheads. It was very clausterphobic and another word that escapes me right now. I only played the demo.

So yeah, game days are nice. I think I'll have a movie day the next time I want to do nothing, though.
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daphaknee · Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 7:24 am Post subject:

cycle the shivering isles expansion is so fucking awesome and pretty

kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

Winged Assassins (1984) · Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 5:06 pm Post subject:

dessgeega · Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 6:42 pm Post subject:

Harveyjames · the meteor kid Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 3636

:O I've seen you ignore Cycle on AIM, when we had a chat session with me, you, Cycle and Daphny and you refused to communicate with him except indirectly when you both talked about Sam and Max Hit The Road

It made me feel uncomfortable! I hope I never get that treatment

dessgeega · Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 7:55 pm Post subject:

someone tell harveyjames that i don't know what he's talking about.
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kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

harveyjames dess has no idea what you're talking about
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=/ \(<D)_/
==/\/ >_ kirkjerk.com

dessgeega · Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 10:08 pm Post subject:

thanks, kirk.
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daphaknee · Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 3:38 am Post subject:

i hope all of you get dr mario wii so you can feel my wrath

SuperWes · Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 6:27 am Post subject:

Matt was in town last weekend and I went on a budget game shopping spree with him using my magazine shipping refund. I bought
Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus
Street Fighter Alpha 3: Max for PSP
Full Metal Alchemist The Card Game for DS
Persona 3: FES

Honestly, other than the last one they were all terrible choices.

FFVII is like a shooter version of The Bouncer, with so many cutscenes you don't have time to know whether the game is any good. For some reason, Crisis Core being so good made me think this might not be terrible. Guess I was wrong!

SFA3 is great, but it's also the same as the other versions I own, minus a viable multiplayer option, making it pointless.

FMA might be decent, but the "tutorial" made no sense and I have no idea how to play it. Also the engine is total shit.

At least Persona 3 FES is good! I actually bought this because Matt and I had started the reviewable I got of Persona 3 the night before and really, really liked it, so I figured before I got too far I'd replace it with the more complete version. So yeah, now I've got a reviewable of Persona 3 to give out if anybody wants it. I offered it to staff a while ago but nobody requested it and it kind of sat around.

And finally, I've been playing Wii Fit. It's fucking awful! I should clarify: it's not bad for what it is, but it's really just an exercise machine hooked up to your TV. Oh god, why did I ever think I might want to exercise! Depite actually hating myself for buying it, I feel compelled to play it every day because otherwise I wasted $90. But I really, really just want to sell it so that I never have to work out again.

-Wes
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helicopterp · . Joined: 13 May 2006 Posts: 1435 Location: Philadelphia

wes maybe if you stop playing so much wii fit you'll get around to posting here again! lordy mercy, it's a wonder you updated the banners.

Team Fortress 2 is still really, really, really good. And there are rumors that the pc updates will hit xbl soon? word.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

SuperWes · Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 10:33 am Post subject:

kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

daphaknee · Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 12:12 pm Post subject:

wes wii fit is awesome so many fat videogame nerds are going to lose weight becasue it SCORES YOU

dhex · Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 12:30 pm Post subject:

or they'll by and large give up after three months, the general use cycle of health and fitness products, including gym memberships and personal training.
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daphaknee · Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 12:57 pm Post subject:

fitness products dont keep a score and gym memberships force you to leave your house!

people will give uup on it when they BEAT IT

dhex · Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 1:01 pm Post subject:

knee injuries?
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kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

Redeye · . Joined: 02 Oct 2006 Posts: 986 Location: filth

Perhaps an easy to put on/take off body frame thingy with thermocouples and peizocouples that converts your exercise into electricity to run your games machine?
Maybe even a hack resistant counter integrated into it that racks up bonus points for add-on content/etc.

Maybe this kind of thing would work best for parents to control a "locked" console system.
Like those timers you can buy for limiting computer/console time.
Combine that with an exercise bicycle with generator attachment so they can buy extra time by charging a battery. (My example would be the wearable exercise/generator bike).

Then the kids just go out and buy an extra power cord and circumvent the whole thing by using that.
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I felt sheer anarchic joy when I ran over my first pedestrian.

dhex · Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 2:54 pm Post subject:

the three months thing comes from a dude i know who used to be a market analyst for health and fitness products. that's basically the core buy-in you expect from your audience. the rest is keeping the 20% who are going to keep up happy so they come back for other products/services.

the system powered by human movement has been implemented in a few places, but i don't think it ever really took off.

btw, riding an exercise bike while playing dodonpachi, while possible, is kind of annoying after a while. i bet a recumbent bike would be better for that. rez was ok too.
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daphaknee · Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 3:14 pm Post subject:

riding an excersize bike while playing ff12 is perfect

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

helicopterp · . Joined: 13 May 2006 Posts: 1435 Location: Philadelphia

Well. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racoonus. What a condescending game.

I'm sick of platformers that are chock full of environmental pieces that have no interactive function. Or platformers that have one "do everything" button that you press whenever you're near one of the few environmental pieces that is interactive. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racoonus works this way.

Its levels progress along set paths, which imbues all actions with a canned sterility befitting a pleasantly-named retirement home.

If the game has a saving grace, Sly Cooper is it. He's a neat character, and his animations convey delicate cunning. It's a pity that his finest moments (twitching ears, alert crouching, standing stock-still and pencil-thin) all occur at idle moments when the game only seems to tolerate the player's desire to do more than what the environment offers.

The storyline about Sly Cooper tackling five evil thingamajigs to get his family's book back feels more like an excuse than anything, but they way his arch-nemesis sexy investigator woman dogs him (cleaning up the messes he leaves after fighting the thingamajigs) hot on his trail, motivated by a passionate vendetta--well, that provides the narrative with some momentum. (Kind of like No Country for Old Men? It's a chase story.)
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

Redeye · . Joined: 02 Oct 2006 Posts: 986 Location: filth

daphaknee · Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 8:50 am Post subject:

dhex · Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 7:15 pm Post subject:

i don't know if that would roll without some kind of direct payoff.
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ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

I was sent the SNK collection for PS2 and, holy hell, are any of these games playable? Well, I mean, they are all playable, but they all have such bad slowdown and laggy controls that they just aren't all that enjoyable.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

Oh, Shaper, do you have some free time?

Well, I guess I should email you this, but it's already written! Ahhh!

And I'm going to try the collection on the PS3 to see if maybe my hookup of the PS2 through an A/V Link to my PC is somehow making things worse, though I doubt it. I was pretty psyched for this. Someone had warned me - argh! can't view previous posts on this - a few posts above about it, and they were right. I wanted to put a bunch of my compilation titles in our back den, with some big leather recliners and an old but decent TV - the library/fall asleep while you play old games room.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

sure, send me an email. That post was... confusing on what you needed.
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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!"

ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

Ah, yeah, I didn't add an additional break. I was going to finish out the stuff to you but decided it would be best to do over Steam or in an email, but instead of erasing it I just went ahead with a general follow-up regarding the SNK collection. Frowning face! to me.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

Cycle · Mac daddy Joined: 08 Sep 2006 Posts: 2767

I should have been more careful.

I left so many people behind trying to achieve my own goals.

But in the end, I made it.

Good for me.

Finished LOVE with 17 out of 99 lives remaining.
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dessgeega · Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 11:45 pm Post subject:

i have been playing games from the early eighties. in particular:

kagirinaki tatakai (that was written by john szczepaniak!) for the sharp x1, on the xmillenium emulator. a very neat little shooting game. ohmygod, it scrolls DOWN. the nifty part is that your grenade weapons can be used to blow holes in the ground, and often the levels are designed to accomodate this sort of shortcut. but you have a limited stock of grenades, so there's a bit of trade-off and STRATEGY. there's also (as john points out) some really nice attention to detail.

rescue, a 1982 arcade game with AMAZING PARALLAX (there are a ridiculous amount of scrolling layers in this game and it actually manages to look really good. here's a video, but don't pay too much attention because the person who recorded it doesn't know how to play the game). you fly a helicopter; you have to rescue little stick people who parachute down into the water. what i like about the game is how much it manages to do with such a small cast of characters and verbs.

for example, you can crash by flying too low to the water while picking someone up. if you move too fast while the stick person is climbing the ladder to your helicopter (for example because you're dodging ENEMY FIRE), the person will fall off. if you shoot down an enemy helicopter, it can crash into you and take you down with it. if you fly too close to a parachuting stick person, you can kill the stick person with your helicopter blades. there are only about four to six moving actors on-screen at any given time!

and then there's lost tomb, another mame game. it has robotron's dual-joystick firing, gauntlet's monster dens, and just a huge amount of stuff going on. in between some stages the game is interrupted for "a special word from our sponsers," and an ad tries to sell you twenty-five wall-busting special items for a quarter (which you physically put in the machine). the game actually talks a lot; it reminds me, pleasantly, of a jeff minter game, where the author's voice reverberates from all over the game. in this case, it's the voice of dan lee.

each of these games was made by a single person! i think that's why they're so marvelously replete with little details and ideas. each was the product of a single person exploring the possibility space of his own game concept, in a time when it was still be established what videogames should look like and what they should do. each of these games was someone's own pet project, and it shows in the play.
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ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

SNK Vol. 1 ended up playing much smoother on the PS3, but I tend to get a little lag when playing PS2 games on the 3. The worst game in terms of control lag was Metal Slug: I could tap the button and move my thumb off the controller before there was any movement on the screen. In terms of awesomeness, Neo Turf Masters has been the biggest surprise.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Wait... you've never played Neo Turf Master's before? It's one of the best sports games ever made. The NGPC version was pretty great as well.
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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!"

ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

Never! I ended up playing it the most. I don't recall even hearing about the NGPC one, and I was/am a big fan of the system. I might've just skipped over it since it was a sports title. The game has some insane animation - some of the best I've seen. I wish I could fix the weird lag with PS2 games, otherwise I need to lug the 2 out of its nest.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.