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

[dude789]

Bah, if you guys want to play DS games, play fucking WIZARD OF OZ, DAMNIT.

Also this, I played it a bit recently and I'm currently up to the first Autumn area. The Lion's actually been pretty useful in this area which is a nice change of pace. He can consistently take out the wolves in addition to the hard type enemies in the area which is rather nice. Dorothy is rather solid although she has a tendency to die at inopportune times. Scarecrow has kind of been lagging behind recently which could be becuase I haven't really been messing around with his skillset that much. Tin Man is very good. The 3x ratio is unfortunate, but he does so much damage that he makes up for it. Tin Man and Dorothy is my favorite party for fighting bosses, but Dorothy can do a pretty good job of fighting by herself if you can figure out where you need to have her defend.

Mana Khemia 2: Got this for Christmas and haven't been able to play it till this week because the PS2 was in the dorm room. I really like the leveling system, it gives the player a great sense of progress and generally allows for a nice amount of customization. I started with Ulrika's route and have just started the second semester. The entire party is unbalanced.

I've also been replaying DQ8 because I was able to find a new $10 copy at a local Walmart to replace my old copy that was eaten by my old PS2. I'm about to go into a cave to find a jewel so we can get Medea back from Red. It's  an absolute joy to play. The graphics are still impressive despite being a console behind because they're so colorful and the designers made good decisions. I can see where the "DQ games plot = fairy tales" comes from especially since the game splits itself into sections so nicely. I can imagine a parent telling this story to their kids before bed and I can tell just where they would leave off the story for the next night.

[hinode]

Diablo 2: Finished. Did they nerf Baal's orange missle in 1.10? I didn't get hit for 800+ damage at any point like I'm used to seeing in Hell. Actually, thinking on it they might've just removed the -100% penalty to magic resist for Hell difficulty, which was dumb and inflated the already dangerous Oblivion Knight Bone Spirits more than needed.

That was probably a needed nerf given how close it came to instakill for a lot of non-Barb/Druid characters, but non of Baal's other attacks seemed to have improved much, so he was pretty feeble aside from the stupid inflated boss HP. Whatever, Static Field and Crushing Blow did their job, and my merc didn't even die (or come close).

Final stats and skills:

103 strength
184 dex
180 vitality
35 energy
(All of the above is after equips)

1023 HP, maxed block and resists
4551 AR, 2593 DR

20 Enchant
20 Warmth
20 Fire Mastery
20 Shiver Armor
1 Teleport, Static Field, prereqs

Every skill point beyond that was worth little, I was struggling to figure out what to do with them. I think I had a few in Cold Mastery and one more in Static Field, but they didn't do much.

My equipment was really nice for a no-twink, no-trade single player char, somewhat ironically since it was total crap at the start of Act 4 NM. Just got some really good luck afterwards, especially on drops. Also muled away stuff like Trang-oul's Claws, Sigon's Gage+Sabot (had better gloves by that point), Bartuc's Cutthroat, and a rare Cedar Bow with +379% enhanced damage and 2 sockets. Sadly I lost the latter two in an ATMA crash.

Lacerator (Unique Winged Axe) - dropped Act 4 Hell
Prismatic Tower Shield of Deflecting, socketed with two Perf. Diamonds - bought Act 1 Hell
Tal Rasha's Horadric Crest, socketed with Perf. Ruby - dropped Act 4 NM
Que-Hegan's Wisdom (unique Mage Plate) - dropped Act 1 Hell
Laying of Hands - dropped Act 5 NM
Ocher Belt of the Whale - bought Act 5 NM
Sapphire Light Plated Boots of Transportation - bought Act 2 Hell (replaced the nearly identical Sigon's Sabot I got much earlier)
Crafted Safety Amulet, +8% blocking, +46 poison resist, +9 other resists, +10 life - crafted Act 5 NM
Bul-Kathos' Wedding Band - dropped Act 5 NM
Rare Ring, +106 AR, +14 lightning resist, +26 poison resist, +2 life - dropped sometime in NM

Bunch of charms, mainly resists and +life with 1 poison damage charm and 1 cold damage charm

Enchant prebuff gear
+3 Enchant Leaf staff on weapon tab 2
+2 Fire skills Circlet
+1 Fire skills Amulet

Backup gear
Sureshrill Frost (unique Flanged Mace) - dropped Act 5 NM
Strength Knout - made Act 3 NM or so, replaced previous Strength weapon
Random stuff I never used - Anya gave me a tri-elemental rare Orb in Hell that was amusing enough for me to save

Sureshrill Frost is pretty much an ignored item in the general community, but it was really good for this character: the +3 freeze meant I could work my way slowly through packs of ressurectable enemies, instead of having to gun for the Shaman/Unraveller ASAP. It held up nicely up through Act 3 Hell, but was just hopelessly weak against Fire Immunes by Act 4. Luckily Lacerator dropped for me on the Plains of Despair. Strength was reserved for Act bosses, with their massively inflated HP.

I had a Lem rune stashed from NM Hellforge and hoped to upgrade Que-Hegan's for more defense, but no Ko Rune ever dropped for me. Oh well. I also could've used that Lem to make the Passion Runeword, but never got a good four socket weapon and probably wouldn't have used it anyways - it doesn't have much damage for fire immunes, I didn't have a lot of IAS gear to take advantage of Zeal, and it didn't have Freeze or Crushing Blow.

Holy Freeze Merc's gear
284% Cruel War Pike of Winter, socketed with Shael and Amn runes - bought Act 5 Hell
Rare Circlet with 5% life leech, -3 MDR, fire resist - gambled sometime in NM
Prudence Balrog Skin - made Act 2 NM

My merc was ridiculously fragile at first and died several times even on the Blood Moor, but his survivability got a lot better when I made that armor and maxed out his resists. Sources online are contradictory but I think they desucked MDR in 1.10 - the whopping 17 MDR on Prudence seemed to help him a lot when dealing with LEBs and Beetles.

My main takeaway from playing this character is that lagfree potion use and teleporting on a durable character is just insanely powerful, even in 1.10. There were dozens and dozens of moments where my life globe suddenly dropped to near empty, but I never failed to drink a rejuv in time. Teleport without lag or desynch worries is just flat out ridiculous - if I ever ran into a situation I couldn't handle, like a double Archer boss pack that refused to be lured out in the Underground Passage, I could just Teleport straight pass it. Constant Telekill made for a pretty entertaining gameplay experience, once I accepted the fact that my merc was going to outdamage me under any circumstance.

Static and Crushing Blow are reliable act boss killers, so even with less item luck than I had a melee Sorceress has no real stopping points in Hell except for the stupid Ancients, and b.net players can just party up to get past that nonsense.

Next up: Female-only SRWK replay! Not as insane as it sounds considering I have 24 million in cash carryover, though I expect some... interesting stages still, due to being severely undermanned early on.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn Wind/Heaven/Light Hard Mode - Beat. Endgame 4... even my weak team was able to overwhelm the spirits well enough, particular note goes to Lethe and Vika here. Just made sure Kyza and Ike were on Wardwood to avoid the blitz. Sephiran himself was rather bitchy as I only had two PCs who could reliably survive a round of combat with him due to his 35 crit and Corona: Nasir and Vika. So they took him down.

Final battle, well... I lost Sanaki because she was holding Meteor which let her get doubled. Otherwise I watched my positioning, rescued Rafiel on turn 1 to avoid the MT physical, and managed to survive the MT doom well enough. Micaiah in the furthest corner barely avoids a OHKO! I should have lost Kyza on turn 5 but Ashera decided to status me out that turn. The only PCs I had who could double spirits (without Nasir) or auras (even with Nasir) were Sothe (whose damage kinda sucked), Volke, Stefan, Vika, and Lethe, so my win wasn't all that speedy. Vika hit SS strike in the final battle, yay.

Overall kill leader was Sothe, which makes sense as the affinity playthrough focussed my efforts on to him, he's really good for Parts 1 and 3, and he's around forever, even though he fell off at the end. Most of my other top PCs were ones I didn't even take into the final dungeon like Haar, Edward (yay killfeeding him for the first 5 chapters!), Titania, Rolf, and Nephenee, no shock there. Ilyana (that being around forever thing...), Lethe, and Kieran were tops among PCs I did bring in, besides Sothe.

Game rules as always, probably won't play HM again any time soon even though higher enemy stats is cool, because the other changes are idiotic.

[Excal]

Haven't been playing much in the way of games recently.  In fact, my only game time has been travel time, so all of my usual stuff has been tossed aside for...  Metroid: Zero Mission.

Good fun all around, and packs up quick which is a plus.  Currently at the end of the Pirate Ship.

Have to say, the Zero Suit segment was fairly fun, and made for a nice change of pace from the exploration/combat of Metroid with a nice stealth/Ohshitohshitohshit! segment.  Also made exploring the ship right after that very satisfying.  Space Jumping Screw Attacks and Frosty Plasma Waves on the formerly invincible jerks?  Yes, please.  Mother Brain also made for an interesting fight, though Ridley was just annoying.

[DomaDragoon]

WA XF: Yay!
1.4: In Which The Instructions For The Mission Are Very Misleading, And I Win Through The Almighty Power of Sacrifice. Once I found out I didn't have to kill everyone, the battle was trivially easy.

Plot Interlude: In Which Dolores Umbridge, Trotsky, and Not!Janus Are Plotting. I also get generics of my own, yay! Everyone say hello to Auron, Luc, Ginny, and Nina1!

1.5: In Which I've Got Jells, They're Multiplying, And I'm Losing Self Control. So I nuke them. With lots of fire.

[AAA]

Strago: Mass Effect one is decent fun. It has the usual Bioware RPG tropes, but the story is decent sci-fi and I like their handling of the conversation system. The morality system has the usual "It's better if you're a total baby-eater or The Messiah" problems in video games but isn't bad beyond that. The combat is easy but fun and there's a lot of different builds to try out (don't go for straight Soldier, though, it's boring as hell). Characters aren't bad for the most part, and I liked a few of them. The only really bad part is that the exploration is exactly the same all the time and they reuse a lot of environments and enemies in them. Get used to fighting the same giant sandworm on every single fucking planet. The Mako sections aren't very good, either.

But I'd still say it's worth going through at least once. If you're not having fun by, say, the time you get Liara then I'd say you should just stop there.

[Rozalia]

Cross Edge - Games getting better though the unfriendliness of the combo system is still horrid. Just beat Lazarus and I'm liking him already, nice guy.
Current team is Morrigan, Raze, york and Aurica.

Oh yeah as for the Dlc I deleted it all except the extra dungeons and extra gold/ep/pp/tp sets.

SMT2 - At the castle and up to louy, but I haven't faced the lord of flies so I'm going to trek back down I think, anyone know where he is?
Anyway took a peek at Louy and he does like 20 damage per hit, are all the endgame bosses going to be this pathetic? I mean, I went into this game thinking it'd be pretty hard but at this point I'm not so sure as bosses are dealing out pathetic 50HKOs.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Strago: Mass Effect one is decent fun. It has the usual Bioware RPG tropes, but the story is decent sci-fi and I like their handling of the conversation system. The morality system has the usual "It's better if you're a total baby-eater or The Messiah" problems in video games but isn't bad beyond that.

I wouldn't go that far. I'd say it's more like "Captain America or the Punisher. THOSE ARE YOUR TWO OPTIONS."

[Meeplelard]

Okami: About to jump into a huge whirlpool of...galacticalness...to fight off Dragons...

Also, I still don't quite understand why there's an AZTEC ROCKET in Feudal Japan for Kaguya.  I mean, I looked up the folktale regarding her and what not, but somehow "People from the Moon" (which sounded like a euphemism for Gods) equated to implying that Aztecs went to Japan, built a rocket out of bamboo and...

...oh, right, its Okami, I shouldn't think about these things too hard <.<

[Strago]

Strago: Mass Effect one is decent fun. It has the usual Bioware RPG tropes, but the story is decent sci-fi and I like their handling of the conversation system. The morality system has the usual "It's better if you're a total baby-eater or The Messiah" problems in video games but isn't bad beyond that. The combat is easy but fun and there's a lot of different builds to try out (don't go for straight Soldier, though, it's boring as hell). Characters aren't bad for the most part, and I liked a few of them. The only really bad part is that the exploration is exactly the same all the time and they reuse a lot of environments and enemies in them. Get used to fighting the same giant sandworm on every single fucking planet. The Mako sections aren't very good, either.

But I'd still say it's worth going through at least once. If you're not having fun by, say, the time you get Liara then I'd say you should just stop there.

Fair enough. I started out as an Infiltrator, which seemed like a decently fun idea. Thoughts?

Oh, and anyone with any wisdom RE: will I be able to play ME2? should chime in as well.

[Talaysen]

Cross Edge - Games getting better though the unfriendliness of the combo system is still horrid. Just beat Lazarus and I'm liking him already, nice guy.
Current team is Morrigan, Raze, york and Aurica.

Actually, the combo system is very patterned and not so bad once you learn it (I have all the normal combos memorized by now).  And the Arcane Tome lists all skills you have that satisfy the requirements for a combo, and even shows moves you have/combos you can do with your current party/setup in different colors.  Not to mention the game tells you if a character can trigger a combo in battle.

And yeah, Lazarus is pretty cool.

---

Sands of Destruction: Going to some earth tower.  I think.  Game kind of breaks itself.

Honestly, I like the game overall, but... some of the mechanics decisions are quite bad.  Forcing a turn ending move once you get 6 BP even if you have more than one action left over?  Seriously?  No CP for newly joined characters?  No starting CP for not being in battle?  I... just don't really see how anyone could think these are good ideas.  Especially the first one.  That just makes me facepalm so hard.  CRITICALS CAN LOWER YOUR DAMAGE OUTPUT DUE TO GETTING TO 6 BP TOO FAST!  STARTING WITH MORE BP CAN LOWER YOUR DAMAGE OUTPUT DUE TO GETTING TO 6 BP TOO FAST!!  Come on.

I do like the characters (except Kyrie, he's boring), though the writing itself isn't the best.

[Rozalia]

Actually, the combo system is very patterned and not so bad once you learn it (I have all the normal combos memorized by now).  And the Arcane Tome lists all skills you have that satisfy the requirements for a combo, and even shows moves you have/combos you can do with your current party/setup in different colors.  Not to mention the game tells you if a character can trigger a combo in battle.

Thats not the problem I have with it. You can make a team which has say 1 or 2 solid combos which will last you for a while, however the game doesn't tell you what type characters mostly use so you'll be forced to get a new team.
Getting a new team coes with heavy doses of grinding off course.

Also a combo system of this style is absolutely retarded in a game like this.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Strago: Mass Effect one is decent fun. It has the usual Bioware RPG tropes, but the story is decent sci-fi and I like their handling of the conversation system. The morality system has the usual "It's better if you're a total baby-eater or The Messiah" problems in video games but isn't bad beyond that. The combat is easy but fun and there's a lot of different builds to try out (don't go for straight Soldier, though, it's boring as hell). Characters aren't bad for the most part, and I liked a few of them. The only really bad part is that the exploration is exactly the same all the time and they reuse a lot of environments and enemies in them. Get used to fighting the same giant sandworm on every single fucking planet. The Mako sections aren't very good, either.

But I'd still say it's worth going through at least once. If you're not having fun by, say, the time you get Liara then I'd say you should just stop there.

Fair enough. I started out as an Infiltrator, which seemed like a decently fun idea. Thoughts?

Oh, and anyone with any wisdom RE: will I be able to play ME2? should chime in as well.

Why WOULDN'T you be able to play Mass Effect 2?

[Talaysen]

Thats not the problem I have with it. You can make a team which has say 1 or 2 solid combos which will last you for a while, however the game doesn't tell you what type characters mostly use so you'll be forced to get a new team.
Getting a new team coes with heavy doses of grinding off course.

Also a combo system of this style is absolutely retarded in a game like this.

Generally the first few skills tell you what attack line they prefer.  Take Raze.  He starts with D Skills.  In fact, he ends up getting like four out of the five D Skills.  There are some characters that differ from this, but they tend to be "all around" characters and get skills of many types, used mostly for bridging gaps other characters miss.  It usually becomes pretty obvious a character is of this type pretty quickly, IIRC.

And I think the combo system worked BECAUSE of the way the game's set up.  It really wouldn't work well in any other game.

[Grefter]

I am going to go out on a limb and say that if you could run Dragon Age then you should absolutely be able to play ME2.  ME2 is still using the Unreal 3 engine I believe so shouldn't be a huge step up system req wise than ME1 really.  If it doesn't work you will just have to fly out to San Fransisco and get money off me when I am there.  Then we can have sexy San Fran style party time together.

And yeah what Rob said about the morality system in ME1, it is far far less RARRBABIES and teh jesus as two different reasons you are going to put a bullet in someone's braincase. 

Infiltrator is a fine choice.  I generally find tech based characters are more fun than Biotics.  Biotics are fine, but they have a longer start up time for goodness.  Barrier is strong and you can do a lot of things to stay alive.  As a Tech character though you just max out Electronics since it is probably the best attack skill to get and it gets you tons of shield straight up so you can just soak damage like it is nothing and shields regen way faster than Barrier comes off cooldown until later.

I am actually playing an Infiltrator now, but am throwing up whether or not to just go the full tech route instead after I unlock a combat weapon.

All this taken into account Soldier is the easiest way to play through the game and is probably ultimately stronger than both Biotic and Tech anything.  But that is just boring.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

DA:O and ME2 have the exact same system requirements, I think.

[Monkeyfinger]

Infiltrator is better than soldier. The strongest skill in the game is immunity, and both classes get it with about the same prereqs. Then Infiltrator gets some sweet tech abilities instead of crap like shotguns and assault training.

Basically you picked the god class. If you're not comfortable with that, skip the Fitness skill branch, since that what makes it broken.

In regards to "can I run X":

http://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/srtest/

It doesn't have every game ever but it will always have mainstream stuff like ME2.

[Niu]

Okay, I've got the damage formula this time. The last image was of how to determine effective attack/defense. This one shows the method from taking the base damage to the effective damage. And I'm hoping that accounts for enemy defenses.

Trance/Xer/Tai/Niu...? A little help?

I don't have time, KH BbS you know. EoE, EF2, AT3, LR are all this week too.

KH BbS- Aqua the pyro squashed uber Vanitas with her splendid mines like she should. Her level of brokeness continues to increase. Tried to tackle uber Vanitas with Ventus too; he didn't fair as well as Aqua, and it took me a while to figure out using Thunder Roll to fight in melee is the right tactic. The ice cream really help, allow me to constantly maintaining the Wing Sword mode, which makes up my lack of damage out put with just using Thunder Roll.

[Clear Tranquil]

Wild Arms XF-Storming the castle we go! A right pain in the 'royal' rear it is too. I'm thinking that next time I should just have Labby return to her usual Elementalist/Arcanist get up so she can nuke things ded once the cake gate opens and abuse Warp to make it to the gate in time. Having an entire team of Berserkers doesn't seem to be working despite having other class orginals equipped >.> I managed to actually get the gate open last time thanks to Levin respectfully denting things with Blast and then Ragnar poking things but then Clarissa died =(

Nice work Djinn =-)

Also Yoshi SO3 noaw? It has save points *and* skippable randoms! *flees*

[Bardiche]

Forcing a turn ending move once you get 6 BP even if you have more than one action left over?  Seriously?  No CP for newly joined characters?  No starting CP for not being in battle?  I... just don't really see how anyone could think these are good ideas.  Especially the first one.  That just makes me facepalm so hard.  CRITICALS CAN LOWER YOUR DAMAGE OUTPUT DUE TO GETTING TO 6 BP TOO FAST!  STARTING WITH MORE BP CAN LOWER YOUR DAMAGE OUTPUT DUE TO GETTING TO 6 BP TOO FAST!!

Otherwise, it'd be way too easy on that first one, and the CP issues can sortof be fixed by using Tomes/Books of Knowledge. The game balance sways heavily between bosses and randoms: bosses can be difficult and randoms are almost never threatening, excepting a brief stint before one of the bosses where you have obnoxious mages that throw Ice III at you twice in a row for 200 MT damage with a chance of Sleep and there's two of them.

As for me: probably at the end of the game. Can do Agan's character quest, wonder if there's others...

[Yoshiken]

Also Yoshi SO3 noaw? It has save points *and* skippable randoms! *flees*

Aren't the skippable randoms what screwed me over last time?

As it goes, still playing P3. Up to the Change Relic and getting completely raped by 2HKO Magaru when I'm resisting Wind spells. Need to be Lv 18 to fuse Ghoul to immune Wind completely, spent the last day training to reach Lv 15. Gonna keep training to beat Change Relic, grab the 2nd Document (assuming it's there) and then leave. It's 04/06 now, and I need to have got that by 06/06, so... dammit, Persona.

Will also start DQ5 (DS) later today, yaaay~

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Bah, if you guys want to play DS games, play fucking WIZARD OF OZ, DAMNIT.

Scarecrow has kind of been lagging behind recently which could be becuase I haven't really been messing around with his skillset that much.

Abuse Tomato Bomb. Abuse it -hard-. It's his money randomsmashing skill, and it also works beautifully in tandem with Dream Land.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

SRWK - Two resets on "Dude, Where's My Will?". Good thing those Gainer villains are so fucking frail.

[Ultradude]

ToS2: Been popping in for two-player intermittently while my little sister plays it, though it's gotten to the point where she's shy about fighting anything without me handling Marta. Such is the results of only one of us being very good at ARPGs, though discovering the joys of air-comboing and learning Phoenix Rush have combined to considerably improve the sis' effect in battle. Emil is, fortunately, kind of beastly, which helps her. Marta is very, very playable though, as was likely intended, so I've been having a fun enough time with her. Artes move either her or the enemy around a little too much for my taste, but are nice if I really need to make some room to get the hell out and heal. Marta's casting times are, unfortunately, pretty awful early on, especially for how little First Aid does against the reasonably tough early-game bosses. The giant whale... thing seemed tough at first, until we finally took advantage of the fact that HUGE bosses suck horrible ass against two human players who can pin them down for 80 or so hit combos.

The plot is... well I haven't caught all of it since I'm not the one playing the game, but it's inoffensive at least. On the one hand, I like the idea of expanding on the fact that combining two entirely separate worlds with different tech levels and ways of life would cause some bad shit to go down. On the other... probably added too many more big powerful god-things. Oh, and Emil is totally gonna be a REPLICAAA at this rate. Fortunately, character antics are entertaining, giving the three-man core party some good antics, and the guest characters get some nice scenes. Colette was a walking herp-derp moment, which was fun, and it's apparent that they weren't taking things as seriously with the writing here. Villains are not necessarily better at being villains, but are at least more entertaining than the usual Tales of fare, which is really all I ask for.

...should add that we just got to Iselia and are about to have the big scene with Raine I guess?

Oh, and people are importing the SRW DS games and not emulating them, right?

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

I'm pretty sure most everybody playing the DS SRWs here is R4'ing them. I know I am.