Let's Play Some Motherf*$&ing Games: 2010!!!!!!

[Hunter Sopko]

$20 on Knife to Wrist. Across the Street, not Down the Road. Fudo seems like he'd be more into the theatrics of it than efficiency.

[VySaika]

I'll put $10 on "plays MMX7 next and starts on Flame Hyenard" myself.

[Fudozukushi]

I don't have X7 unfortunately.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Overall, those are good research options (and mostly what I took).  I took Science Vessel for the repair, and Hercules in place of the Predator, and...improved Vespene mining.  Works well with the refinery automation.  Vanadium plating works great in combination with Regenerative Biosteel.

Oh yeah, the Hercules, forgot about that. That thing is nice for hot-dropping tanks, but I generally prefer the medivac, for utility's sake (and you can upgrade the medivac to hot-drop just like the Herc does).

[Grefter]

Pokemans - Got a Golem and Zam now.  Going to get a Machamp as well because I got lazy and figured I would just hack the fuck out of him.  Gave it a Focus Blast TM that I learned on the Zam (I am about to hit Mt Coronet, so checking it, I am not getting it much earlier than I could have done that anyway), gave him a not shitty nature and that is about it.  Exp Share this early is gooooood.  Exp share in team battles is mean, you did no work!  Have twice the exp of other mans!

The lack of info during battles continues to be disappoint.  My Zam learnt Mind's Eye or some shit naturally from levelling, had space so it auto learns it.  GG you have to go to the summary menu to find out what it does.  I forgot to do that for like half an hour "ooooh yeah what does that do?"  Fight over, forgotten.  At least when you fill out all the slots you can read stuff when forgetting things.  Still annoying interfacing fail.

[TranceHime]

Pokemon White

Team:

Koromori (Heartbat) Arcana Lv33
Jaroda (Smugsnake 2) Ragna Lv36
Gantoru (Graveler Expy) Shichiren Lv39
Baniricchi (Icecream 1) Choco Lv35
Swanna (Swan) Mizuhashi Lv36
Victini (Event poke) Ryougi Lv35

currently at the Tower of Heaven, fightin' some mons

[AndrewRogue]

Starcraft 2: Beat. End was a bit disappointing and last mission was a serious cakewalk. Even on Normal, WC3:FT at least forced me to cheat out of frustration.

[OblivionKnight]

Final mission is a lot of fun.  It is kind of easy with research, especially on normal.  Did you do Shatter the Sky or Belly of the Beast first?  I find fighting Nydus Worms far easier than fighting Brood Lords on that map.  Banshees kill them fast enough that you can mass siege tanks and demolish everything (even on Hard, mass siege tanks demolished everything - I assume it works on Brutal as well).  The only hard part is Kerrigan's first attack and the 80-90% wave that includes Kerrigan, Nydus Worms, and a shitload of units on an attack.  Thank god for the artifact!

[AndrewRogue]

Shatter the Sky. Yeah, I did a similar thing. Massed Siege Tanks at the chokes and put bio units at the front (which were later upgraded to thors). Spent most of the battle at 200/200 supply. There was never a real threat at any point. Even Mrs. Kerrigan ate massed siege tank attacks and did not enjoy it.

[Yoshiken]

FF7 Half-Day-In-No-Saves: Yes, more HDINS. Had a relatively slow but decently easy and powerful run - didn't struggle at all on Jenova-BIRTH, who has killed me 4 times on these challenges in the past. Then, power cut at the end of the Dyne fight. DAMMIT. >.<
So, naturally, I've started again. On the way towards Airbuster now, haven't even done a single time-check yet.

[Captain K.]

Played my first (solo) game of Arkham Horror.  Plucky psychologist Carolyn Fern sets out to destroy the interdimensional menace of Yog-sothoth.

Things start out well enough.  Carolyn is armed with a magical knife and several tomes of forgotten lore leading her to clues about the impending danger.  She roots out a gateway to Another Dimension (TM), easily dispatching its monstrous guard with her fine Marksmanship skills.

But she becomes disoriented in the other dimension, costing her valuable time.  Upon her return to Arkham she manages to permanently seal the gate using her formidable background in Lore.  Unfortunately several other gates have opened during her absence, and to top things off, she seems to have contracted a painful curse while traipsing around the other dimension!

While traveling through the streets, Carolyn encounters a Dark Young.  She is unable to evade the thing, and decides it will be easier to just stab it with her knife.  But the Curse wracks her with pain, making her every attack flail wildly.  Carolyn casts an ancient Flesh Ward spell to absorb the blows of the monster, but try as she might she can't kill the thing.  Her Enchanted Jewelry saves her life, shattering in the process.  Carolyn is in bad shape now.  She somehow fights through the pain to score two hits on the beast - and uses knowledge from two of the clues she has unearthed to land a final blow.

Carolyn has decided that curses really suck, so she runs toward the Church to have it exorcised.  Well, not runs so much as slogs, because icy weather conditions have set in.  Father Mulrooney offers to remove Carolyn's curse - if she'll give him the fragment from the gate that she closed.  Carolyn finds this suspicious, but doesn't care at this point so long as the curse is gone.

The weather clears up and Carolyn begins clearing the streets of monsters.  But they seem to spawn faster than she can kill them.  She is eventually Deputized because of her ass-kickery, but her efforts are all in vain, as Yog-Sothoth bursts out of Hibb's Roadhouse.  Since Carolyn no longer has a Gate Token to protect her, she is instantly devoured.  Damn, that church must have been a front for Yog cultists!

Anyway, fun game.  Psychologist is pretty good because of the free sanity recharge.  But I lost too much time in the earlygame to keep up with things.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

VC2 - *Gnaws on Pyro.*

[Crystalgate]

Final Fantasy Legend 3: Beat it.

The game started out rather strong, but became less interesting later. Traveling trough time is fun, traveling trough pureland is not. Pureland had a mysterious feel, but that mysterious feel gets lost if you spend more time there than anywhere else. I think it would have served the game much better had it made the past, present and future maps bigger and downsized pureland and underworld instead. Heck, was there any point to underworld period?

The difficulty came in wave. Bosses went easy->hard->easy->hard->easy where the last couple of bossed rode the easy wave. The first hard->easy change came when I got Cure 2 and the second when I got Cure A and shortly thereafter Cure B as well.

The transformation system was fun, albeit broken. Monsters seem near useless, I could not see what they have over beasts, but I could definitely see what they lacked. Robots are extremely overpowered as soon as you can afford to buy 135 or so capsules, which happens earlier than midgame, and will then gradually sink to only being a little overpowered as the game progress. Cyborgs and Beasts loses any disadvantage they may to humans once you get a mystic weapon and Beasts will do so even earlies when their martial arts catches up with human weapons. I think the gameboy wasn't ready for that challenge. Heck, from what I've heard the SaGa Frontier didn't really manage to balance having characters with different growth methods correctly, so I can't expect an earlier game in the series to do anything but worse.

[DomaDragoon]

DQIX: Yay Sage! Finally got the class, and now I can change classes from the comfort of anywhere. At the most likely final dungeon.

[Glen Veil]

Beat Ratchet: Deadlocked, always a fun series to play.

Started DQ8 the other day since I don't remember much of it from the only other time I played it.  Had one reset on the first boss because I'm stupid and used that time to try and remember all the kinks to using tension instead of some random encounter.  Game went generally smooth from then until I got to Khalimari.  I may have been under leveled for this, but I had something like five resets here, I blame most of them on the turn order being pretty much random in the early game, since several of the resets were basically due to the boss flame breathing last one turn and then finishing off the hero before either characters could go the next and me just resetting even though I could probably have soloed the boss with Yangus from there because boss experience or something.

Got the Alchemy pot, decided that I would be a whore and use it to break the game as I go, did some chest exploring, had a random reset because MT SLEEP WOOOO, and then got the team decked out in armor and weapons of the equivalent from Pickham by the time I actually entered the Old Abbey, boss there died to two Yangus untensioned defense lowering axe move, one 50 tension boomerang from the Hero, and one half of a 50 tension Twin dragon Lance, to which I gawk at how well knowing alchemy recipes makes the game easier >.>.

Did the castle place, arrived at Pickham, decided to do the casino and make more overpower alchemy stuffs for that point in the game because I'm addicted to gambling anyways, ended up face palming at myself because I started this when I saved after Medea got horsenapped, and therefore do not actually have the Alchemy pot to mix half the stuff I've been gambling for.  Continuing to gamble still though because I only got about half the things I wanted in the last session before I payed too much attention to a bingo game and got trolled by the game lining up three numbers with the freespace and proceed to not only miss the 400x coin return number but also just lose flat out in the end, at which point I figured it would be a good stopping point.

Liking the game alot more then the first time I played it, so far the only things that have really erked me ar eearly game random speed happenings, and magic names generally telling me nothing, which ends up being minor since they at least come with descriptions.  Game also badly needs sceneskip and fast text but whatever.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Final Fantasy Legend 3: Beat it.

The transformation system was fun, albeit broken.

 I think the gameboy wasn't ready for that challenge. Heck, from what I've heard the SaGa Frontier didn't really manage to balance having characters with different growth methods correctly, so I can't expect an earlier game in the series to do anything but worse.

Actually, SaGa Frontier mostly just tweaks SaGa2's (Final Fantasy Legend 2's) Race system. And it is definitely -more- balanced than FFL3's, albeit not by much. They share a lot of the same problems, but SaGa2 and SaGaF do a much better job of making the different races each have a niche or a point in the game where they really shine... and more competent challenges help, too. Still unpolished, and can have wonky balance in some places, and marred by translation- and accessability- issues like not properly explaining how the different Races actually -work- in-game, but that's the hallmark of the SaGa series! ...>.>;;

[NotMiki]

Broke down and ebay'd most of the PS2 games I still wanted, principally GODHAND!!! (and also Soul Nomad, DDR:X2, MMXCM, and Wizardry: tale of the forsaken land.)

Now all I need is time to play them, ha ha ha.

[Grefter]

Lost Odyssey - Just beat Disc 3.  Fuck you game, fuck you game, fuck you game, fuck you game, fuck you game, fuck you game, fuck you game, fuck you game, fuck you game.  The last 4... 5 hours?  Maybe more?  They all sucked.  Splitting up your party sucks.  Splitting your party up sucks even more in this game than usual.  They make you run around with a party of fucking mages.  In a game where mages run like half the HP of fighters and defense to match.  Final dungeon of the disc you can face mobs in packs of 6 or so.  They can just burst down and kill someone if they want, nothing you can do about it, no fancy application of spells will do it.  Level scales Suikoden style so you can't really just grind to surpass it.  So much hate for this dungeon.  OH and the enemies can have packs that cast status.  There was a pack of 5 that I fought that could burst someone down, 3 of the mobs could cast Sleep and one could cast MT Silence.  You can block one status at a time at best for 3/4 of the party and nothing else in the dungeon uses status.  So you are not going to be setup to handle this.  The worst part?  You get to the boss and he has autoreflect.  You cannot dispel reflect.  The boss can cast innitiative ST non-elemental spell (no resistance possible) that hits you for about 1000 damage.  Capable of one shotting one character, like 90% damage on the others, goes before items which until this point as far as I know have always gone first.  Has MT freeze and can hit a whole row with a status that I think is a slow effect (chill?). FUCK YOU GAME FUCK YOU GAME FUCK YOU GAME FUCK YOU GAME.

Thankfully FAQbait bullshit lets you know before hand to stock up on attack items and I guess his HP pool isn't insanely huge (it is ... big for what it is).  Has relatively low damage, but it shuts you out from attacking and kills you slowly.  It is all manageable but it is incredibly boring, the whole dungeon is a boring pointless slog and it is after along series of long boring pointless slog dungeons (3 of them are because the 2 kids in the party decided to steal a train and run off without telling any one else what they were doing... Serously fuck you game, most of Disc 3 is taken up with that crap).

The game is still pretty good I guess?  It is starting to out stay its welcome, mostly because they have decided to shake things up a bit when the game needed no shaking.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Games games games

LFT - Summoner SCC, woot. I should actually post detailed updates or something but I'm lazy. I've almost finished Chapter 3 (just the roof left). It is harder than in vanilla due to the weaker skillset and better enemies, but still not an overly deadly SCC even by vanilla standards. Nothing too surprising. Hardest fights so far are Fort Zeakden and the Execution Site. Also Dorter Slums but only because I insisted on not doing any extra fights before it and thus having nothing but Moogle, Oak Staff beatdowns, and crappy stats. Also Knight Algus with 5 move to be the perfect punching bag to sap Wizard MP.


Suikoden Tierkreis - Digging this. Gameplay is blah, but not notably worse than past non-3 Suikodens except that it's too easy. Encounter rate is too high, which I only complain about in games that have crappy combat. Overall similar enough to 4-5 in this department I guess. Plot is good stuff, much better constructed than most RPGs. Detailed comments probably need to wait, but for now I'll say that this game explores its fatalistic theocracy a lot better than a certain Tales game, and the political interplay has been pretty good times. Also talking main does plot games so many favours it's not funny. I highly doubt it'll reach the upper echelons of Suikoden plot, but it's different enough to attract attention, and I'm glad I got around to playing it. More Suikoden fans need to. For my part, I'm some 14 or so hours in, just got the tablet of stars and NotZerase.

Oh yeah, and the game lacks war battles and duels. I'm... undecided if I care.


Saga Frontier - The game doesn't exactly believe in polish, does it? Sorta the opposite of Tierkreis, polish of "what" and meh plot (good ideas at least, just no writing), but hey, it has gameplay! Not amazing gameplay, the flaws are obvious enough, but entertaining enough to hold my attention. Playing as Asellus, other PCs are my girlfriend, some French mage, a girl in a bunny suit, and a fist-using drunk. Aww yeah. I just beat some girl who thinks she's a lion and have done three of the tarot quests, PCs are hovering around Level um... HP in the 500's generally.

[OblivionKnight]

Finally, Elf plays the game.  Now to see his opinions on it and DL stuff! 

[Captain K.]

Got my new toy today.  Took some time to find button configurations that make sense/feel natural, and am relearning things.  Ironically enough, the game it's designed for (TvsC) can't utilize the two far-right buttons, but other games like Samurai Shodown Anthology can.

[NotMiki]

God power keeps my pimp hand strong.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

If you don't already have L4D or L4D2, they are like six bucks a piece on Steam until Thursday at 4 PM, in celebration of the new campaign (that is free!). Or you can get the bundle for 11 dollars, which is both games.

If you have it on console, know that this free campaign costs more on Live than the game itself does on Steam, because apparently you are not ALLOWED to have free content on Live.

[Yoshiken]

Etrian Odyssey 3: So, this game isn't out over here, but one of my friends got me an import copy for my birthday. OH DEAR GOD I KEEP DYING. Yeah, this is typical Atlus. That said, having not played EO2, this is a huuuuge jump up for me. Limits, the Port and actually having some early character interaction makes this much, MUCH better than EO1, and I like the vaguely different classes, for all that I'm not using most of the original ones.

Team is:
Prince Cosmos
Monk Katylin
Arbalist Leodil
Zodiac Isolde
Farmer Wololo

First two are front row, other three in the back. The Farmer is surprisingly good at surviving, which is good for my Exp. Taken so many Exp boosters, it's kinda ridiculous. Fun game is fun, although I don't like griiiiiiind.

[Meeplelard]

Dead Rising: Beat 72 Hour Mode.  Fun little game if hard to play in long instances, and easy to futz up little things.  Would have probably preferred i the game was 96 hour mode instead of 72 hours, with the same amount of plot content, only to let you actually have time to do some of optional things.  So many points where you finish one case and its like "2 hours til the next" such that you pretty much have to bee-line to the next case and don't really have time to save someone or deal with a Psycho-path.

The plot...honestly, its not that bad!  No, its not good, but it keeps things simple and easy.  There's a zombie invasion in the mall, survive for 72 hours while trying to uncover truth.  Sure, the whole "Zombie Cattle" thing is silly, but whatever; outside of that, its pretty sensible.  Guy is a terrorist who got hands on it, tries to use Zombie Apocalypse for revenge, what have you.  The game was able to keep a straight face cause the plot is pretty simplistic and typical Zombie Apocalypse stuff.

None of this batshit insane nonsense Resident Evil comes up with "A corporation tried to make super bio-weapons through usage of the Ebola virus, they got zombies instead.  They try to use this still even though it keeps killing half their staff!"


Ultimate Ghouls and Ghosts:  Found this rare game for a cheap price and I couldn't pass up the opportunity.  After reading about how the game is more lenient in regards to taking hits, how many lives you have, power ups you get, spawn points, etc, I was questionable how this game could live up to previous entries...

...no, its very much likes its older brothers.  The game kicks your ass, pisses on you, kicks you in the balls a few times, then drops a tank cruiser on you, all while feeding your young to hungry crocodiles.  I'm not even completely through the second stage and I've already had like 14 continues.