What Games ya Playin' 2012 - Suplex a Train Edition

[AndrewRogue]

XCOM: Restarted this, since my previous playthrough was pretty FUBAR.

I decided to actually enable Ironman this time through since I was pretty much playing that way anyway.

Going decently and just passed through the first Terror mission. I'm lagging way behind on my objectives (capturing live aliens, etc) this time, instead focusing on getting some satellites into the air (for cash flow) and troop upgrades, then armor, followed by some improved weapons (already having trouble with that).

My main squad is ranking up well (two Captains!) Lost CT due to her panicking in her first mission out, but otherwise no casualties despite some bad maps (fuck indoor, multi-story maps).

[Cotigo]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Got to Montreal.  Still managing to get every Ghost and smooth operator bonus (unless there is a better silver tongue bonus available).  Also, it's hard to say since there's no stats on it, but I'm pretty sure I'm still eligible for the Pacifist achievement.  Game continues to be a better Deus Ex gameplay wise but much worse plot wise.  I have gotten to the point where none of the augments seem immediately beneficial, but knowing that I have a few bosses coming up have opted to get a couple points in Dermal armor.  It hasn't been difficult enough yet to require a radar boost or smart vision, though.  Maybe if I wasn't save scumming the Ghost bonuses. 

[Grefter]

Radar Boost and Smart Vision are not that useful at all.  If you have a feel for the stealth system then they don't really give you much information you haven't already internalised.

Front Mission 3 - So the script keeps being mongo.

Kawada:       Regroup at the connection bridge!  Don't let them into Okinawa!
              ...Too bad we can't give much of a backup though.
Ryogo:        Can't they settle down?
Pham:         They're fighting the Imaginary Numbers!  Of course they can't.
Ryogo:        They gotta be more laid back!  They can't win like this.
Mayer:        You're a different story all together, Ryogo.

Ryogo = RICHARD continues to be facttruth proven by science.

MACHO MAN RANDY SAVAVE:       How is the situation in Okinawa!?
Kawada:       You must be MACHO MAN.  The situation is terrible.

Even the game knows that Macho Man ruins everything.

Kawada:       This is the civilian residential area of Ocean City.
Pham:         What a fortress...
Kawada:       MIDAS is on the lowest level.
MACHO MAN RANDY SAVAGE:       Wait, MIDAS is buried directly under the city!?
Kawada:       That is correct.  MIDAS is set in the city's power source.
                     If it's removed incorrectly, the city will collapse into the sea.


That... that is not what buried means Macho Man.  What is wrong with you?

Also nice Bane plot there Lukav.  If only you had Bane Voice to go with it.  "Ohmigosh its a cruise missile!" "And you think this gives you power over me?"

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

<Grefter> This game makes me angry, confused, disillusioned and possibly slightly erotic.

[Cotigo]

Radar Boost and Smart Vision are not that useful at all.  If you have a feel for the stealth system then they don't really give you much information you haven't already internalised.

Yeah, didn't think so.  Honestly at this point my best option is looking to be filling out silent running, my inventory size, and then wondering why I continue to try to DTD every enemy when in reality I already have all the augments I'd actually want.  heck, it's not even worth filling out the hacking skills since I have 60 viruses each and maxed out stealth.  And I'm only halfway through the game. 

I guess they were balancing the game for stealth players who weren't taking down every enemy and weren't hacking every single panel.  Still, it feels a little ridiculous that only halfway through the game there's no more Augments I actually want to build towards.

[MC50]

Fire Emblem: Heroes of Light and Shadow

 - Finished. On Hard Mode. The difficulty was... It's tough to say. It picked up for damn sure. Ninja reinforcements are still the worst thing ever, though I actually feel like they worked really well in chapter 10X, as you KNEW they were coming and from where. Whole team was strong. Ended up using

 - Marth
 - My Unit
 - Ogma
 - Yumina
 - Minerva
 - Sirius
 - Belf
 - Jeorge
 - Katarina
 - Horace
 - Palla

- Tried out a couple others, though they were dropped. Pretty much everyone here was solid, though they required varying amounts of help. Chapter 19 was absolutely ridiculous. Warp and Rescue helped a lot.

I dunno, I feel like the difficulty was good, if maybe a little on the hard side for my first playthrough, but it was satisfying. The in battle save points help a LOT.

Overall, good game. Better than Shadow Dragon for sure.

Also played and beat FF9 for the first time. Had an incredibly epic last boss fight against Necron, where Steiner ended up being the last one standing, condemned, then he entered Trance, got hit with Necron's HP-1 attack, and swung at him for 9999 for the kill. Reminds me of my similarly epic final fight against Sephiroth, where I ended up taking a non materia equipped Vincent into the fight, as I had to split my party into two to fight Jenova and had only been using three characters.

Barely did any sidequests, and felt fairly underleveled at 46, but it was a lot of fun.

I dunno if any of you guys saw this before, but I was looking for videos of my FF Hack on youtube, and found a guy doing a low level game of it! He's also done videos of Eviltype that are quite interesting. Beastly242.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Beastly242?feature=g-user-u    Is his channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1n3h3xjKnI     Is a link to his fight Vs. Poltergeist in my hack, which is his most recent video.

The video's aren't commentated, but he usually has good dialogue in the description.

[Shale]

Started Infamous 2. Holy crap, the game has actual cutscenes now! And Cole doesn't sound like Christian Bale! Madness and insanity, I tells you.

Looking over the powers...man, good side sucks in this one, at least for inherent boosts.

Good gives you: A damage reduction when you hit civilians (killing civilians drops your karma, so this lets you build to higher karma levels faster); a minor energy recharge when you shoot somebody; and the ability to heal multiple civilians at once (what the hell why does that even matter)

Evil gives you: The ability to kill civilians for free XP; basic lightning that hits multiple enemies; and temporary infinite energy when you drain somebody. 

Gee I wonder which one is better.

[Bobbin Cranbud]

I personally think recharge on hit is the best of those. Any time you're in a fight you might actually lose, you won't have anyone to drain.

[Just Another Day]

Agreed. It's actually sorta neat, I think, how they lead to different overall play styles. Good gets you a constant trickle of energy, but you have to be somewhat careful with your expensive powers, evil you run out of juice and need to recharge more often regardless (and you can be knocked off an enemy you're draining, so it can be tricky in tougher fights), but you get these bursts of unlimited power for hilarious mayhem.

Goes beyond just the inherent boosts, but I'd call it a wash until about halfway through the game, give or take, where you get the tier three powers on your basic attack. Good gives you a full-auto bolt, evil gives you a big burst. Really no comparing them, boltstream, the good power, is hax and meshes very well with the recharge. Good also gets a much, much better mobility ability.

[Shale]

I may be filtering my impressions through my experience with the first game, where the recharge-on-hit was so tiny as to be useless, especially given how high your max energy is by the time you get the second tier of karma abilities (which is where you get it in inFamous 2). Plus it's not like cars/lamps/AC units were hard to find, even in major battleground (and they heal you, which is more important anyway given the enemies' hax accuracy)

[Hunter Sopko]

I found Good better than Evil in Infamous 2. Good's powers are better at killing human enemies, Evil powers are better at killing large monster enemies. 

Why? For Good side, Ice Rockets. DEAR FUCKING LORD Ice Rockets. Instant OHKO to any human sized enemy- even freezes the freaking Ice Soldiers. So fucking useful. And they're reasonably effective against large enemies, just not nearly as good as...

Evil side- Napalm Grenades make taking down large monsters a snap. Not entirely sure if they do bonus damage or whathaveyou, but they definately do the most damage to large foes.

You tend to fight more human enemies than large ones, and for the final battle neither is really better than the other.

[Clear Tranquil]

Tales of Graces F- Zhonecage ... sixth floor? So new type of random enemy. It is called Bedwang. I am not kidding. Dunno if any other DLrs who played the game ever ran into it but I am kinda scared to go to sleep now =P

[Grefter]

I assure you that Djinn has run into Bedwang many times.

[Cotigo]

DE:HR: lol montreal twist.

Weren't Daedalus, Icarus, and Morpheus supposed to be big deals because they were AI programs? Sooooo since DE:HR takes place 25 years earlier, and Eliza Cassan is an AI program, then....? Consistency!  Additionally, there's no real subtlety to Picus at all.  They could at least be less blatantly Bond Villany in their own internal memos. Last bitching point about the plot... at least in Deus Ex the handful of forced encounters were built up to.  Navarre, Gunter, and Simons all played a role in the story other than shadowy merc before you had to fight them (or find ways to avoid fighting them).  So far neither boss really has had that buildup, and it's starting to look like none of them will.  Come on, game, you can do better than that. At least had I had to fight Eliza Cassan that would have been interesting.  Nope she's just a tin can with a conscience have some shadowy noncharacter to fight instead.

2nd boss went down a lot smoother than the first thanks to two ranks in Typhoon.  Didn't even go through a single stack of Typhoon ammo.  I'm officially done carrying all these non-EMP lethal grenades around and clogging up my inventory.  Apparently I won't need them. 

When I got back to Detroit I found Wayne Haas waiting to shoot me, which is odd because I completed the mission the "good" way, without using the social enhancer to blackmail him.  I did however replay the scene multiple times to see all the dialogue, so either I reloaded the wrong save way back when or the game's save files got messed up and flagged the wrong event.  No big deal, though this makes me wonder if one of the times I killed someone and reloaded screwed up in a similar way locking me out of the Pacifist achievement.  I hope not, that'd be some fucking bullshit.

In any case, I think I'm going to stop obsessively going for the ghost bonuses and maximizing my EXP because I can count on one hand the number of augments I actually want anymore, and all of them are a "well I'm not doing anything else with these points" kind of thing.  Seriously not a game that needs to be grinded at all; no matter what playstyle you're going for a good 10-15 praxis points worth of augments are going to be totally useless.  Oh well, something to keep in mind for replays.

[SnowFire]

Zenny: Haas will always get pissy at you even if you were nice to him, which is fair enough, since getting fired for someone who was desperate enough to keep their job they shot kids before is probably a big blow.  As for Eliza...  yeah I dunno, I have to agree with Adam when he said "No, this is impossible, people would know."  It is really not that hard to find out!  (She needs maintenance, right?  How the hell do you keep the janitor quiet?  And her hologram generation can't actually touch people?  Must make for awkward interviews...)  The over-the-top Picus conspiracy BS is over-the-top conspiracy BS, so yes it makes no sense especially now that it's 10+ years after Deus Ex in real life and YouTube exists, but hey it's loyal to 90s conspiracy thinking.  (If nothing else, Fox News proves that at worst, there would be several different highly polarized lying media outlets each of which told its adherents what they wanted to hear, but noooo the Iluminati need the One Big News Network everyone watches.)  Also agree that Eliza's plot doesn't really jibe well with Deus Ex, but I'll give them something of a pass, it's clearly something they felt was obligatory to include for a Deus Ex game and they do try and work it in later, you'll see.

2nd boss was the toughest fight in the game for me, no Typhoon, just shotgun & paying careful attention to the water (WTF is water doing in the server room - oh wait to make the fight more sane, carry on).  I do agree that as far as character build-up, I'd have far preferred an awesome boss fight against Eliza, but I'll take it, I guess.  It's an interesting fight anyway on a gameplay level, but give us 2 boss fights then.

I found the improved radar quite useful myself and that was literally the first augment I bought.  The default radar is good but I must have the best.  Save-scumming or just playing carefully can certainly help overcome that, of course.  And yeah, don't bother hacking everything just for the sake of hacking it & getting XP, I got that bug a little but realized it's not really needed too.  (That said, seeing through walls at the cost of energy?!  Tagging enemies to track them?  lolno.  Silent running isn't even that useful because it competes with invisibility.  Not so much you need for the stealthy playthrough.)

[Nitori]

Ass Creed Bro: Excellent, assassin economic investing remains, the best part of the game. Now I can put all my money into horse stables when I can call a horse to me infinitely already

[Idun]

XB: Doing some sidequests, trying to get used to the menu and controls (yeah, thanks for helping me find that Heart2Heart thing, Tide! IT WAS IN THE MENU, lulz).

FFTR: I didn't know you could SS stuff. Actually, I don't know much about the game or what to fucking do other than play the songs, but I decided to go with an entirely new troop: Onion Knight, Bartz (Bart? Barts?), Tidus and Cecil. You get an all-male bonus.



I see. So yeah, I've just been SSing shit.

[Idun]

Xenoblade: 30 quests completed. Shulk & Reyn L16.

Shulk:
Slit Edge 2
Black Slash 3
Light Heal 3
Air Slash 2
Shadow Eye 2
Stream Edge 3

Reyn:
Hammer Beat 3
Wild Down 2
Guard Shift 2
War Swing 2
Sword Drive 2
Engage 2
Rage 2
Bone Upper 3
Aura Burst 2 

Now @ the refugee camp. I like all of the carnal wreckage in this game, and I like the awesome fucking wreckage a couple mechons have been doing. Plot is interesting, to say the least. I have some guesses about what's going to happen. Good enough characters that have realistic responses to things. Not sure how "future" and "destiny" come in to play yet, except I'm just thinking it's a very Japanese thing to put in... Japanese game thing to put in. Anyway. Hmmm, really liking the game so far. Questing gets exhausting, but man that's a fast ass way to make money. Only 30 quests out of what, four hundred or so?

Fiora- liked her character despite plot twists and young adult female annoyances.
Shulk- smart guy, sort of enigmatic now, unusually not sharing enough with his prime partner Reyn.
Reyn- I like him. He is so sweet! I wish I had a cuddly, big man with pecks to fuckin' guard me all the time. Getting used to his current imbalance of awesomeness right now, though it's just L16 and Shulk's doing more damage at this moment.
Dunban- not really a fan, heroic dude that doesn't seem to add anything to the plot except the Monado. But he seems like an Uzuki kinda guy, so we'll see. Even during a certain plot scene, he was damaging mechon with a regular sword not dazed or toppled. WAT.
Captain: Aw. Poor guy.
Crew: Ouch.

Music is doing pretty well, especially since new environs pace out plots cenes pretty well. So far, no mammoth-sized area besides Gaur. Actually going to navigate that place a bit more cautiously since BIG APE MONKEY -- SURPRISE!!

Taking a break to put in some hours on FF13. So I've been gaming for six hours, hory shit.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Not!GF bought me Borderlands 2 for Alvistide.  So I've been playing that.  The world seems put together a lot better than in 1.  Less running around in big circles.  It's like the jump from Vanilla/TBC to Wrath and onward in terms of objectives and their placement.  Which is nice.  Also, environments get some variety a lot earlier.

[Twilkitri]

Duke Nukem 1 - played through

Still fairly dandy.

Dr. Proton is a joke in episodes 1 and 2, especially 2 where you can shoot him from outside his room when he swings down and he can't get at you. Managed to die several times to him (and his room, technically) in episode 3 though.

A bit dismaying to get so few extra shot powerups in episode 3 (or at least not finding many) after they were so frontloaded in episode 2.



Dragon Quest IX - played through maingame, halting

Pretty enjoyable as I said previously.

16 hours into doing postgame things, I looked some things up and discovered just how bad some things can get. The most notable being when I looked up where to find Reckless Necklaces as there were a lot of things which are ultimately alchemised from them, only to find that outside the one given one they need to be randomly found in random chests. Others include finding out that the only 'Story' quests outside of 39 and 46 require DLC (I don't care whether it's free or not, didn't bother to check) (I don't even understand why 46 is considered a story quest anyway), and numerous references to needing to have sent your characters through multiple revocations for them to be able to handle various things (after 120 hours, my highest-levelled character is level 62. It's debatable whether I could stand grottoing long enough for one revocation, let alone multiple).

Also Stella is constantly whining currently about how I haven't had any game overs and it's getting on my goat. So I'm stopping bothering with it.

I didn't personally care too much for the job system (see earlier note about not having finished a single job yet after 120 hours), but I guess it's fine for those mad people that apparently play for 1000+ hours. Whatever.

[Captain K.]

DQ9 drops are kind of weird, you go from needing a billion Reckless Necklaces to having way more than you'll ever need.  The downloaded stuff is all available in one shot now so you should be able to hook up to wifi a single time and get everything.

Revocations aren't important in and of themselves (although you do get some nifty items the first time you revocate each class).  You will want to swap jobs for extra points/inherent stats though.

[Fudozukushi]

Not!GF bought me Borderlands 2 for Alvistide.  So I've been playing that.  The world seems put together a lot better than in 1.  Less running around in big circles.  It's like the jump from Vanilla/TBC to Wrath and onward in terms of objectives and their placement.  Which is nice.  Also, environments get some variety a lot earlier.

And in even more similarities you'll be getting a lot of face-time with your main villain.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Every time I think that he's a pretty cool cat, though, I think to myself "but he'd be even awesomer if he was HALLOWEEN Jack."  Then the last level could be his home on top of Manhattan Chase.  When you walk in, the elevator would be broke, so he'd slide down a rope and then it would be GAME ON.  He could rake you up and paralyze you and then he'd throw you into the fog, where you would catch your death. 

Also?  Handsome Jack has a diamond pet but it's not a dog.  The fuck. 

[Idun]

Recoil time in Borderlands 2 is about the only thing I didn't like about it. Also, Siren. ): And you can port over your B1 profile to get those outfit changes, but no Siren face.

[dude789]

Pokemon Blue Terrible Edition:
I've beaten all of the gym leaders and I'm about to enter Victory Road. Levels are around the 43-44 range. Sabrina was easier than expected. Her Alakazam will fall into a sort of reverse version of Lance's Dragonite AI trap. For those who aren't familiar with some of the silliness behind gen 1 Pokemon's AI, in the first gen if you sent out a Poison or Fighting type against Lance's Dragonite, it would spam Agility and Barrier endlessly because Agility and Barrier are psychic type despite being buffs and therefore would register as being "Super effective" despite not doing any damage. Similarly if you send out a psychic type against Sabrina's Alakazam, it will spam Recover repeatedly because Recover is the only move that isn't "not very effective" against other psychic types (I believe Sabrina's Alakazam's moveset is Psybeam, Reflect, Recover, Psywave). As a result Hypno was able to stall it and debuff it so another pokemon could get the kill. Blaine and Giovanni were fairly easy. Most water and ground types have an easy time against them even if they're terrible. Interestingly enough, Gary's Alakazam despite having a similar moveset to Sabrina's Alakazam will not fall in the same AI trap (I think he replaces Psywave with Psychic). He was perfectly happy to spam Psychic against my Hypno and was able to outslug him. Of course my other pokemon were able to pick up the slack, and Gary was still pretty easy since Rhyhorn, Exeggcute, and Growlithe all were defeated in a single attack.