Gaming General Chat Thread

[Kapol]

At least that game actually has some precedent for the choice. FC3 is completely linear until the end. Then it just yells "CHOOSE NOW!" at the very last moment. Not to mention that one of the choices really goes against the entire point of the rest of the game.

[LogicSword]

I'm replaying Dishonored... It's not holding up this time through. Ugh.

[Geoff_B]

Fire Emblem Awakening ain't all that bad...

No I am not playing in Classic mode...

[cuddlyblade]

Fire Emblem Awakening ain't all that bad...

No I am not playing in Classic mode...

If your not playing in classic and tearing your hair out when you spend 30 min on a map and a character dies one turn before the end to a lucky crit then your not really playing fire emblem.

[Geoff_B]

It's bad enough having a pegasus shot down by a single arrow mere moments after acquiring her without having to worry about her not coming back

And the story's pretty good as well.

[Kapol]

My thoughts on the Xbox One:

-The fact it's not always-online is good, but the fact it sounds like they're going to be pushing devs towards this ideal makes me a bit uncertain. We'll have to see when more information is released.
-No backwards compatibility is a shot in the foot honestly. I was hoping Microsoft wouldn't screw that up like Sony did. Even if there are reasons, perhaps even GOOD reasons, why they're not, the lack of backwards compatibility means I won't be adopting an Xbox One in the near future. Why is it that Nintendo seems to be the only company left that realizes people might want to play their old games?
-The pre-owned thing is actually very interesting in my opinion. First look makes me think it's not good, but it sounds more like it couldn't be too bad. What it would mean is that you can buy a game and sell/trade it right away (since it can still be played without the disk). Even if you're getting less, you'll be getting more money back right away and someone else can get the full game for (hopefully) less. It all depends on what the cost of the game is to download on another account. This seems more like it could be the beginning of a PC-like service (such as Steam) where you get the download for yourself more than anything. And if they can shift price where the games become cheaper overall for it, then I can see it working. But I'll want to see more first.
-The Xbox One is a weird name. But, to be perfectly honest, I kinda like it. It's not as bulky as the 'Xbox 720.'
-The design of the system is weird to me. This is one of the least important aspects mind you, but it just makes me wonder why they're throwing out the elegance that the 360 Slim has for a box.
-I want to feel the controller in my hands before I make any real judgment on it. It could be too bulky, but I think it looks like it'll be fine.
-I want to know if the many features that the Xbox totes are still going to require a gold membership. That's what always held the 360 back in my opinion. If they fix that, then I'm sure they'll get a lot of good will back. Hell, if they made online overall free, I'm sure a lot of people would forgive the lack of backwards compatibility.
-I'm actually a fan of 'the cloud' for lack of a better word. Being able to have all my save games and that kind of thing on another server in case I need to access it elsewhere has always been something I've liked. it's one of the reasons I like Steam. We'll have to see what they do with it though.

Overall I just don't think we've been given enough info to make a full call on the system. It seems like more of what they have revealed isn't good though. We'll see what happens as things develop.

[Jamfalcon]

I didn't watch the announcement, but my only thought on it is that since it's not backwards compatible, I know I won't be buying one. I don't own a 360, so the ability to play the older exclusives would be one of the big draws for me. Without that, I doubt it'll be worth it for me to buy one anytime in the foreseeable future.

[LogicSword]

I enjoyed being snarky, because I'm me. It wasn't a good presentation for people who don't enjoy COD/Sports games etc, but it was only meant to be a hardware reveal so there we go.

Will have to make a proper judgement at E3 when they announce some games.

[cuddlyblade]

It's bad enough having a pegasus shot down by a single arrow mere moments after acquiring her without having to worry about her not coming back

But that's the whole point of fire emblem!

[empath]

Sorry for the non sequitur, but I just had something...odd happen to me.

I was busy having Star Trek Online patch itself (slowly, IIRC that big 'Romulan Legacy' update goes live?), so my computer was pretty much busy unless I wanted to throttle the rate of progress by doing other things while that worked in the background.

So I fired up the PS3 and played another round of Journey. And then I fiddled with a few things, and got off my butt and d/l'ed DUST 514 (that 'partner FPS' to EVE's MMO); waited as the compy and console seemed to switch back and forth with download priority, and then started the game up, read through the tooltips and in-game help, and played a few matches. And had a decent enough time; got a 3:7 KD ratio, and got enough earnings to get all the basic skills trained and started to see a tiny improvement in things like shield capacity, loadout capacity, weapon accuracy, etc.

...and this got me thinking about EVE Online again; if I were to play it, I'd be a total carebear loner and eschew any significant trust or reliance on others. But I can't really swing a monthly fee.

Which got me wondering about PLEX (the ingame item of a 30day game code - you can convert a R/W time card you buy into the PLEX, and then sell that for in-game currency; if you've got more $$$ than time to grind and earn 'ISK', this is your solution), and how far along I'd have to develop a character to the point where its in-game earnings could pay for the subscription fee and 'I'd play for free' essentially.

That boiled down to a simple question: "So how much are PLEX going for right now?"

So I checked...510 / 580 million ISK, so I got thinking, and stared vacantly at the screen as the market ticker updated itself...and then the asking price nosedived(!)

At that moment someone (or a group of people) unloaded eighteen THOUSAND Pilot's License EXtensions onto the market (where there was only a total of 5400 buy orders and eighteen-hundred sell orders), and dropped their asking prices from between one-hundred-eighty to three-hundred...

THOUSAND, not million! Someone dumped three times the number of items that the market wanted and ten times the number being offered, and at an average of TWO THOUSAND TIMES LESS than the highest buy order!

...as I was watching, an in-game market had a huge hiccup. It was kinda cool; within an hour of that (which was another hour ago) they'd all been bought up, and the lowest sell order is 528mil, but the median price is still suffering (429mil down from 560mil).

Think about it; all 18k items were posted in the same system - the same place, so some player corporation likely gathered these up (at no small expense - fair market value would have put that purchase at over nine TRILLION ISK, or $270,000usd if bought IRW...or maybe a mix of the two), and then dumped them at a FRACTION of what they paid for them; only 540 billion ISK.

Essentially they created a eight-and-a-half-trillion 'gold sink' of taking in-game currency out of the game's economy...

...it's kinda thrilling to see that happen real-time...

[Geoff_B]

I read these stories about EVE and it makes me interested, but again yeah monthly fees and I probably wouldn't stick at it very long.

[Mara Kalat]

I'm not sure what the stories you heard were, but it's definitely not for everyone.
Not many experiences quite like it though.

Mara.

[Geoff_B]

There was one about a huge titan battle where some of the players were trying to find out where the guy lived so they could go and cut his telephone cable, and another where a player from one coalition signed on as a freight pilot with another faction and spent the next few months stealing all their stuff before they caught on.

And another one that made it into PC gamer was the story of a huge war led by GoonSwarm against Band of Brothers.

[empath]

Heck, that's all relatively recent stuff; EVE's had 'emergent gameplay' for years and years; go dig through Google's archives or the Wayback Machine for "Guiding Hand Social Club" operations in EVE - one agent was hired by someone who simply hated the I/C persona of a guild leader (in-game racism that annoyed a lotta people), so the GHSC agent joined the target guild, worked his way up through the ranks to the number two position, got a handful of other agents into the guild, and organized an elaborate backstab: persuaded the guild leader to fly here extremely rare can-only-acquire-by-awarded-from-the-devs-themselves battleship, and be escorted by him in the guild's slightly less rare variant of the same model battleship, then he attacked her, destroyed her irreplaceable BB, destroyed her escape pod, and his minions cleaned out every player-owned base of the guild of all available cash.

...and the thing to remember about EVE is that this sort of 'epic griefing' is not just condoned by CCP, it's tacitly encouraged.

So yeah, not for everyone, but if you don't take it too seriously, it can be amazingly awesome (the economy is at least as elaborate as real life; some economists study it for insight and different perspective. )

[Kapol]

To stop myself from getting all angry and annoyed, I'm going to mention that I'm looking forward to the new Animal Crossing game. Don't get me wrong, it's going to be the same thing as always. But that's not necessarily a bad thing either. I've always liked the series. Even if it does seem a bit... eh.

[empath]

To stop myself from getting all angry and annoyed, I'm going to mention that I'm looking forward to the new Animal Crossing game. Don't get me wrong, it's going to be the same thing as always. But that's not necessarily a bad thing either. I've always liked the series. Even if it does seem a bit... eh.

But-but...this time, you're the mayor! That HAS to be better, right?

[Kapol]

Oh you.

The mayor thing doesn't phase me since I don't know much about it though. It does seem... odd I will say. I can't wait to be hundreds of thousands of bells in debt as the mayor.

[empath]

Yeah, and again I defer to Mr. Hobbs:

Animal Crossing is an awesome game for those times when you just want to be a regular guy. The everyday simple joys.

So if that appeals, you ARE gonna have a good time.

[Jamfalcon]

So, today I took a proper day off for the first time in weeks (months, maybe), and decided to actually put some serious time into a game, which I haven't wanted to do recently. I've had a hankering for something old-school recently, so I decided to play Willow for the NES (a Zelda clone, based off the film of the same name), which I bought years ago at a second—hand store close to a decade ago. I never really gave it much time then, since my NES was dying, and I was transitioning from playing mostly NES to Genesis and PC (I was always a bit behind the times, console-wise).

So I downloaded a ROM of the game, due to the aforementioned dying NES, and sat down to give it a serious go. Seven hours later, and with minimal walkthrough referencing, I beat it. I'd only ever played the first ten or twenty minutes before, so it was nice to see that there was actually a pretty good game past that. Might have to try the real version of it sometime, if I can get the NES working. Next time I get a free day though, I think I'm going to give Crystalis another go, since I had a similar situation with that.

[Kapol]

I just want to mention that Kirby 3 for Super Nintendo is freaking adorable. A giant cat is currently rolling Kirby around like a ball. I don't need to say anymore.

[empath]

Oh my - William Morgan Sheppard...his narration may just tip the scales and persuade me to get Civ V...

[Darkobra]

Deadpool game! Hurry up and come out!

[ElFuzzy]

Bang bang! BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG! THIS IS THE BEST RIDE EVERRRRR

[Darkobra]

Bouncy!

[Geoff_B]

Deadpool game! Hurry up and come out!

+1'd! In the meantime I'm on Penny Arcade: On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness: Episode 4 - or, as I call it Pokemon with Tycho and Gabe.