[Tulpa]

Preparations do work, but the game doesn't tell you the effect it has; it isn't random chance. The factors in tribal election are your leader's leadership and magic qualities along with a combined sacrifice of 40 to 50 goods and cows.

Only when experimenting With poor leaders did I fail in a tribal election
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[tiburon]

beat COD4 modern warfare over yesterday and today

real fun game! immersive as hell. only real knock i have against it are the infinite respawn enemies and monster closets. not so bad in this one, though i seem to remember it being a lot worse in the sequels. i wonder if there was a way to maintain the immersion without them. in halo, you have a sort of lull after you kill all the enemies in a given location, but those are entirely intended and built into the game. this isn't that sort of game!

also kind of sad that it's so terrible for speedrunning. but it is a solid ++
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stream - steam - tweets

[tacotaskforce]

I completed MW2 on the highest difficulty by very carefully wiping out every hostile intent before me. I don't believe it has unlimited spawns.
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[Rud31]

I wish Activision sold the Spec-Ops seperately.
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My Hawt Blog Vita Games

THERE ARE DEFINITELY WORSE VIDEO GAME PODCASTS

[Mikey]

[Seldon]

Assassin's Creed 2.

This game was obviously optimized for consoles. There's snap-to-everything mechanics, and the movement feels like it was meant to be played on a dual-stick controller. Also, in the beginning it didn't explain what the "high profile", "unarmed hand", "head", and other buttons were right away. Confusing, but not much of a learning curve since most actions only require 3 or 4 buttons anyway.

It's a beautiful game, but it feels so awfully contrived at times. Obstacle courses follow one predetermined path. Every so often when you explore a Templar dungeon you end up chasing a dude as he closes gates behind you, presumably to kill him before he alerts the rest of his buddies, but he always manages to get to the end anyway. (The game actually disables ranged weapons during this sequence, too.) Wanted posters of you are affixed to the wall using arrows and are on rooftops. Also, the game likes to make it clear that the Templars are Unambiguously Bad Dudes. The people you hunt down are liars, cheats, traitors, murderers, psychopaths, etc. There is no control/free will dichotomy or anything like that, it's classic good vs. evil; hell, some of them are even marked in red shirts for you just in case you start thinking about it.

The story so far, as I can tell, is that The Templars Are Planning Bad Things. Every major player in history is either on the side of the Assassins or the Templars and they've been fighting a war ever since way back when. Or something like that. Hell, I'm not even sure where anything begins or ends; maybe that's the point, or maybe it just provides enough fodder for missions.

Overall, it's enjoyable but I'm not particularly impressed with it. Reconstructing past worlds is great and all, but reframing every historical event as the manifestation of an age-old dialectical conflict cheapens the experience.

[Rud31]

[CubaLibre]

[tiburon]

[special blend]

4 heroes of light is the shit

alternate universe final fantasy iv for nes gets a ds remake

best new old school game since smt nocturne
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http://portuguesefoodbank.blogspot.ca/
3DS FRIEND CODE 3754-7276-2693

[Rud31]

[luvcraft]

[dinopoke]

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

[Tulpa]

oh you're talking about the heroquests, it's still not entirely random but stat based. Usually it is because you sent a heroquester that had the wrong stats or worshipped the wrong god for the quest. Learn to Make a Tribe pretty much requires an Orlanth or Vinga worshipper in order to succeed

There's also secret knowledge you might have missed. It's mentioned in the manual but isn't obvious enough in play that a few of the heroquests have secret optimal paths, sacrifice more to the relevant gods mysteries if you don't have all the lore unlocked. You should also sacrifice maximum in questing and a point or two in mysteries before you consider doing a quest. Failure shouldn't be so common that you should have to save scum through a quest in order to succeed at it.
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[Tulpa]

also it should be noted that you can fail parts of a heroquest and still succeed in the end, or only partially succeed (meaning you get the reward but your quester gets injured) so there's no real point in quitting a heroquest if you fail to achieve one of the mythic goals of the quest.
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[CubaLibre]

[luvcraft]

[Swarm]

I've been playing Winback 64. After years of waiting for emulation for the game to not be glitchy, I finally decided to just go ahead and play it. The glitchyness in question is a gray square that floats across screen every few minutes or so, but it turns out it's really easy to ignore, and only appears in outside stages.

Anyway, man this game is pretty awesome, it's everything you'd imagine a late 90s Japanese cover-based shooter would be. I'd go so far as to call it Souls-esque (especially in that it becomes easier as you master the game's mechanics + it has rolling). All the encounters with enemies feel deadly and the game won't forgive you if you play sloppy. Every part of the level and the gunfights in them feels deliberate, every one of your movements seem to have weight and purpose, you need to approach every situation carefully. Checkpoints are sparce, so you actually start getting reckless after a while, using your good ammo etc; because you don't want to be mess up holding just a pistol, and when the ammo runs out you start going through the level inch-by-inch. I'm not gonna say there isn't any bad/goofy shit in this game (there is (like backtracking)) and sometimes you have to wrestle with the aiming system a lil bit, but it's totally worth checking out. The female squadmate in your team is cool, too.

[Teflon]

[Tulpa]

[The King]

Doom 64 EX.
It's a really good port. It adds all the PC Doom trappings like mouseaim while feeling faithful to the original cart.

as an aside, part of me is wierded out that in 201X I rarely seem to play anything that was released post-Dreamcast.
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[Ymer]

PS1 version of Mega Man Legends on PSP

This game up there with Earthbound and Persona 4 as "Biggest grin on face while playing"

[The King]

Played a little further in Megaman Legends 2.

Tron and Roll are pretty funny in the bit just before the fight with the giant reaverbot in the lava room. :3
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[The King]

Oh my god: Letters from Servbots. :3
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[tiburon]

[Mikey]

[Relevant]

[tiburon]

now i am playing far cry 2

the parts that i get to play are pretty alright. the parts where i irritatedly skip through tutorial pop-ups not so much
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stream - steam - tweets

[The Blueberry Hill]

[The King]

Nearing the end of Legends 2
The ancients are back, oh man these characters are unbearably animu: 'Fate of the world blah blah blah'.
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[bza]

I've gotten back into the Void, might resurrect my old thread on it with some new observations
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[The King]

finished Megaman Legends 2
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[Teflon]

[RobotRocker]

Spent new years eve yelling at Binary Domain to recognize my accent (It still doesn't) and wishing there was a fist bump option with Big Bo. Then playing WWE '13 with my brother and laughing (that game has problems but great for screwing around in)

Then drunkenly playing the demo of Euro Truck Simulator 2 and lugging a haul of yogurt to Paris from Southampton in the rain while listening to French pop radio. That game is zen personified.

I love videogames.
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[luvcraft]

[BotageL]

The voice recognition feature's in the PC version of Binary Domain, too. I couldn't get it to work with my fairly neutral American accent -- but I was also hella sick the weekend I played it, so my throat wasn't really capable of making human sounds.
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[tacotaskforce]

I spent a good four minutes repeating "fuck" to my PS3 to no avail. The game can not recognize words if they are said with any emotion, and even as an emotionless robot it's difficult.

I still don't understand why voice recognition games come with their own profiles. They should have the user create their own voice profile, and then test against that to work out the variance.
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[tiburon]

here are some things i wrote down about far cry 2:

I have just shot some dudes outside a building. I am told this "unlocks" a "safehouse." I go inside and spy some crates. I try to put a gun in the crate. A pop-up summarily notifies me that crates must be purchased. From whom, I'm not sure; I've killed everyone in the vicinity. In any case, this seems to be a weird time to be following the rules.

Why do I have to go and shoot these guys, anyway? Some dude with a gun told me to. Then again, he promptly gave me access to an assault rifle (which Ubisoft, like a watchful kindergarten teacher, only allows me to use outside). Surely I could have just shot him, and then left to complete my mission?

cab driver = Captain Exposition. "Oh this country's really going down the tubes, on your left you'll see some sporadic violence, on your right some rich civilians evacuating, be sure to catch the random brushfire directly ahead." Like someone saw the intro to Half-Life and thought "all this needs is more talking."

possible bottom line: Far Cry 2 is "the Flight Simulator part of Microsoft Excel"
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stream - steam - tweets

[notbov]

Nthing that Binary Domain just doesn't understand language most of the time and you should just play it with the predefined voice options that pop up. I actually beat it again recently on No Mercy and now I have to play through it again now that I know there's multiple endings based on your bro ratings with everyone because I want the best ending dammit.

I picked up Fortune Summoners again now that it doesn't crash randomly and I'm enjoying it except for the part where it won't let me use my 360 controller's d-pad, because that would be too easy and makes too much sense.
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[:cryface:]

I played about a couple hours worth of Ass Creed 3 and didn't think it was that bad. Yeah, it's super dumb, but I can be a tree warrior and ambush British soldiers on the road. That's chill. Then you can kill bears with QTE.

Wonder when Ubisoft will bridge the gap between the Assassin's and Far Cry to make the perfect Ubisoft Game Factory interactive extravaganza.

Natural Selection 2 is great. 1 cup AVP. 1/2 cup Starcraft. 3/4 TBsp Battlefield 2. Crazy, hectic fun with a lot of good people online who are willing to be patient with newcomers. An entire team spent a round teaching me the ropes and that was just an insane experience. Doing bad on the internet and someone responding thoughtfully and positively is jarring. I can see the bar for strategy being pretty low with build orders being dependent on how your team can function, which means you need a team to begin with. Then you need someone who finds simplified RTS elements engaging enough to last them a potentially hour long match.

Very cool game at the moment, will probably be tired of it in a month.