Was reminded in a PM of my love of Armadillo Run (http://www.armadillorun.com/) and again playing it obsessively.
grooowrrrr! [menace menace] rrrrowwwr!
Holy fuck, I just started playing Metal Gear Solid 2 tonight. From the time I hit "New Game" I had to wait, watching cut-scenes, fading to black, more cut-scenes, rinse, repeat... god, for a good 25 minutes before I actually discovered that, yes, there is a playable character in this game, and took control of him.
I have no patience for revisiting a decade-old stealth game. My Thievery days are history ... I just ran around a boat ninja-kicking dudes in the face, all whilst receiving calls from my eye in the sky/hacker friend telling me to remain unseen!
[Image Can Not Be Found]If being wrong's a crime I'm serving forever
Jarrod said:
I just downloaded Duels 2012 - but haven't had a chance to play it yet (thanks, New Vegas). I have the older Duels... Can you bring over your old decks to the new game?
No, is all new decks, but so far I've played 3 of them, and they are much better designed. Much tighter in concept.
Thanks Ravious.
I live in eternal hope that we'll be able to build our own decks in a Duels game, even if they limit construction by using only cards that you purchase in real life.
A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. – The Teachings of Don Juan
Playing SpaceChem obviously and also bought and am 1/2 through Alpha Protocol. Also 4 minutes into Singularity but I'm getting a little tired of the Unreal powered graphics and their weird lighting.
One of the level challenges in SpaceChem was to establish four reactors of various design with the outputs of some feeding the inputs of others. There was a goal of getting the number of steps required to fulfill the output requirements under 1000. My first effort was around 1550 and obviously the bottlenecks in the system had to be worked out. All stages have to be pretty optimal, and they have to be on the same pace as the systems feeding it and being fed by them. The pipelines feeding product from one reactor to another can buffer a little bit, but not a lot, and designing the system for output synchronicity (to keep the reactor internals from having collisions) makes everything a lot more difficult.
After about four hours I managed to get everything on the same wavelength, got my iteration count almost cut in half to 809 or something. A very rewarding experience.
I need to take a break for a while though. Alpha Protocol is just the thing.
My Dark Souls single player sensibilities are protected by a +10 GfWL Firewall of Ineptitude
I finished Half Life 1 earlier this week and just about finished with Half Life Opposing Force. I picked up the entire series for $15 on the Steam Sale.
Half Life 1 doesnt hold up very well...especially the final battle on Xen. I still had to finish it in god mode just like I did back in 1998. Opposing Force was a lot more fun....and I never played that when it originally came out. Both games are still very buggy. I keep getting clipped/stuck in walls and elevators. I've had to use the noclip command way too many times to dislodge myself from the environment.
I will re-start Amnesia once I'm done with Opposing Force and go back and finish Half Life Blue Shift (also never played) after that.
Oh yeah, picked up Mass Effect 1 & 2 as well as Mafia 1 & 2 today. [Image Can Not Be Found]
I was off work for three months and played most of Arcanum in amongst painting the inside of my house (the whole thing, ceilings included) and vacationing. I got it for $6 from GOG, and that was certainly money well spent. Probably about a penny an hour :p I'm maxed out on leveling (which sucks! whose stupid idea was that?!) and about to beat the entire game.
It's nice to see I'm not the only one who found Opposing Force more fun than Half-Life ^^
.. not so nice to see someone actually enjoyed Arcanum. That makes me feel like I missed something important. I tried hard several times to enjoy that game but it felt as blank, as shallow and as poorly designed as anything I've ever had the misfortune to play. How Troika could go from Fallout to Arcanum, then back to the heady wonderfullity of Bloodlines I do not know.
A succinct description - although I'd also point out that the world design is stunningly lazy, with each town functionally a carbon copy of the last with a subtly different art-style, nonetheless relying on masses of flat, sprawling, cubic single-floor structures due to the tile-based engine. In this respect it's very similar to The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion when compared to Morrowind - a soulless mass-production of repeated content versus a hand-crafted world filled with personality.
I quit after I reached my third town in a row with exactly the same NPC heirarchy and basic design principle. The sense of fun drained out quicker than I could find Alt and F4.
Arcanum was a terrible design with some great moments, like the industrial revolution/Bill Gates guy in the first city. Worth poking at but the good ideas got strangled by a terrible UI and other problems. Lots of potential, little pay off. Same as all the games Troika made. They're all worth poking at but they never made anything close to a good game. Every one was horrifically buggy and otherwise kneecapped.
grooowrrrr! [menace menace] rrrrowwwr!
Staff
OK, so "it" happened. New Vegas grabbed me by the balls. I was almost starting to think it would never happen, but it did.
I've just got to Novac. Went to the rocket station as required by Manny. I was prepared to help the gouls on their journey to the Far Beyond, until Bright told me doing so involved fighting those Nightskin things or whatever they are. So I took the easy route out and blew his brains out instead. That's a much quicker way to the Far Beyond if you ask me.
Love this game. It's prone to some really obscure behaviour but it's doing nothing to diminish my enjoyment of it.
New Vegas is as close to a real Fallout game as I think we may ever see again.
... Unless I get my funding ;>
Finkbug: Really? I wouldn't be that cruel. Temple of Elemental Evil was a geekish indulgence that I think most gamers would find very boring, and Arcanum was a failed attempt to copy Fallout's attitude, engine and gameplay without really *thinking* about how to do it (reminds me a bit of Bioshock versus System shock, that)..
.. but by the time they were finished, out of cash and had released a horrendously buggy Vampire: Bloodlines to the market, I think they had proven themselves. The game may not have -worked- but that aside, it was a fantastic first person RPG. About as clunky as Deus Ex, and with less interesting environments but an incomparably richer story and dialogue system. I have yet to be as moved by the NPCs of any game as I was, repeatedly, by the denizens of Bloodlines' Los Angeles.
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