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Yeah, there are two things you cannot do and hope to live for very long: declare war with a high infamy, and declare war with a low stability and a lot of colonies/conquered territories/religious strife. you will just get rolled no matter how good you look.

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I just read that thread and DAIS was like I hate Halo because you can't stack things

first thought: DAIS didn't like a video game?

second thought: hey man I remember this one time in multiplayer me and my bros stacked ourselves to the ceiling of hang 'em high it was awesome

and then I keep reading and it turned out 2005 me thought the same thing

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no that's just what happens with cave games sometimes

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other places you hear about this sort of thing a lot:

Basketball

Tennis

I'm almost certain there's a body of literature around the effect in those two sports

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you should at least play a couple of hours of Chrono Cross--it'll tell you enough to let you determine whether or nor you'll want to stick with it. the game just magnifies itself from there on: more and more beautiful, more and more retarded; the battle system and advancement systems become more and more unmanageable, but more and more interesting; the story takes up more and more of your time, with less and less payoff; the world gorges itself on more and more inventive and memorable scenes and areas, with less and less cohesiveness. the game is almost like a twin to vagrant story, but where the downside of that game is that all the idiocy is confined to things that make the game impossible to play but yet somehow still cohesive and purposeful, the idiocy here is sprawling and unthinking and amateur, and yet the game remains utterly comprehensible.

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I have only an amount of time to play video games these days exactly equal to the amount of time I can purposefully (rather than aimlessly; accidentally) waste in order to scare or trick myself into not wasting any further in the face of mounting deadlines buttressed by work the quality of which I cannot possibly hope to create. which means: though the game I want to tackle is Dark Souls, followed, possibly, by Xenoblade, I can really only play things that don't require a commitment of time or a definite sense of progress. and so I played some Defcon today and yesterday, and some more Frozen Synapse before it.

these games are kind of similar to one another. really similar, actually. they're good! simple, pretty, intuitive strategy that I still nevertheless suck at. and feel satisfied with my sucking.

so there's that steam sale. I did not even know, until today, that steam even offered Rainbow Six 3, which I have at various times been interested in enough to pine for, and yet, apparently, not interested in enough to type its name into steam. but now I have it, and it looks like exactly what I want to play right now (but can't). so hopefully I dive into that in about a month (assuming there is no--surprise!--tangled, insurmountable mess of hurdles and blocks to properly playing it on modern systems, which is the case for an alarming amount of older games that steam still decides to charge for, and say nothing of the charging.)

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Ultima Underworld is pretty cool

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silhouette mirage is awesome don't listen to rudie he's of texas nee japan nee texas

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I finally started playing dark souls again yay

I tried to pick some shiny up off a corpse in the sewers but a giant slime thing fell on my head and ate me

also I got cursed but baaaarrreeeely. almost made it through all of those things without it happening. and I only failed because I missed the fall-off-a-ledge attack because I hit the wrong button :(

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there is just too much screen real estate in jamestown for me

I mean yeah the way its scoring system works it would be stupid easy if that wasn't the case but still I like my vertical shmups tight

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man, a page of "best RPGs of the last decade?" and not a single mention of Dragon Quarter

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as a stealth game, tenchu is definitely more advanced than MGS. but thief is more advanced than either of them.

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isn't that the curt schilling game

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I don't think it's true either--from what I recall, they've always planned an MMO after this particular game. I'm sure the mechanics will be similar, etc., etc., but SB has a pretty annoying tendency lately of clumsily reading boogeymen and idols into everything in some attempt to support a thesis that doesn't quite exist. You know something is wrong if I'm agreeing with DAIS

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every sound effect and voice clip from that game is hypnotic. everyone that played the thing with any frequency cannot get away. we will, in fact, not be the ones escaping. get it.

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Has anyone here been playing Crusader Kings II? I want to like read stuff about it.

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not many games leave you desperately hoping for teenage pregnancy.

A+

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I feel like no one is talking about Them New Games. Didn't Journey come out? Is it any good? What about that Ubi Apocalypse game?

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I'll definitely buy CK2 at some point and dump stuff in that thread. But because I'm cheap it won't be until a steam sale.

Fate of the World always looked cool but everyone said it was impossible so I got scared.

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guys I am playing RAVEN SHIELD (with raven shield 2.0) this game is great I am awful how do you make plans that sometimes work

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Is anyone playing Guild Wars 2? I don't see a thread or anything.

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so just how blindingly obvious is it that mr. assassin creed will turn on the americans and establish his own ambiguous FREEDOM FIGHTER cause with entirely not veiled allusions to the plights of the native americans and TROUBLING QUESTIONS WILL BE RAISED but then he will solve them with an axe and there will be a cliff hanger as a REAL BAD GUY EMERGES and then we will get ASS CREED III-2: LOUISIANA PURCHASE next year

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why is the bear radioactive