The Gaming Den

So yeah, I discovered that I can't stand oldschool RPGs anymore. I was playing Earthbound for the first time, and it's simultaneously too easy even for my limited skills and boring when it comes to the fighty parts. Every battle so far (just finished Threed and Saturn Valley) is won exactly the same: grind until the numbers in your database are bigger than the numbers in the bad guys' database then stomp them in the dirt. I don't feel like there's any strategy involved. Compared to a Let's Play I read for a bit I'm about 10 levels underleveled for this point and it's still not giving me any problems.

Note: I am aware I could simply not gain levels and do a low-level run. I can also play a different game too, and that seems like a more productive use of my time then adding artificial difficulty to the game.

Story is decent. I might continue to push through it. But so far I am disappointed.

For me at least, I've found that if a game has bad mechanics but a good enough story, I can generally get through it.

I've finished Earthbound recently and have been disappointed by the story. It's wacky, but that's it. There's nothing much behind the wackyness. For the battles, it does get a bit more tactical in some cases, but yeah most of the time it's boring.

I've played the last third of the game at 1.5/2 times the normal speed (thanks emulation) and it made it less of a hassle.

On the other hand, I've started playing Mother 3 and it feels much better. Combat is still boring, but the story feels more personal and touching.

Earthbound is a charming game, you get money from your dad (and he saves your game) then you go to an ATM to withdraw it.

The combat is simple and goes by quickly, kind of like Arkham Asylum. But lines like "the rat utters dirty words" to lower your defense keeps it funny.

I'm enjoying the hell out of it, personally. It's so different from your typical JRPG.

They're remaking Dragon Quest VIII for the 3DS!

Bets on whether Squenix will localize it. I'm going with "No" because God is cruel.

So, World of Warships has gone into open beta.
I find myself enjoying it somewhat.
I find myself also sucking at using torpedoes.
So much so, that i have taken to calling them torpenoes <.<

Another (spinoff) Dragon Quest game! For the Playstation! This time it's MINECRAFT! Woo.

At this point, I feel as though Squenix is cockteasing us about DQXI.

edit: And now this!

My ovaries are quivering with excitement with this.

So an article has come out that has a Firaxis dev stating that X-com 2 is based on the assumption that you failed Enemy Within during the first 1/3rd of the game.

What's the definition of the 1/3 mark? 'Cause if it's when you storm that alien base, I got that far even on my very first try (every game I've played is in Iron Man mode), so I think I get to feel legitimately slighted by this.

Chamomile wrote:What's the definition of the 1/3 mark? 'Cause if it's when you storm that alien base, I got that far even on my very first try (every game I've played is in Iron Man mode), so I think I get to feel legitimately slighted by this.

The definition is "before you even researched lasers or carapace armor". That's why you're forced to fight with basic guns and armor at game start. And machetes.

"Airdrop me closer, I want to hit them with my sword!"

Also Enemy Whitin never happened as far as X-com 2 is concerned.

maglag wrote:
"Airdrop me closer, I want to hit them with my sword!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LVN3gz-394

Here is a video demo of gameplay, it looks like they put in Riggers and "female" snakemen fan nicknamed "Snek"

Today in Crusader Kings 2 I was playing as the Doge of Venice.

I built an observatory, and after years of feverent studies discovered heliocentricity. Of course, hoarding such revelation to myself would have been unfair, so there was only one choice. Doge Alexander the Just published a book. This, understandably, pissed off the Pope. I was labeled a heretic, and a personal enemy of the Pope. And as the Pope was a rather likable fellow, the heretic status meant that my church vassals stopped paying me taxes. There was only one solution. It's simple. Kill the Pope. I've sent the spymaster, found allies in Vatican, and, months later, set the plan in motion. As the Doge plunged a dagger into the neck of a peacefuly sleeping Pope, he saw the horrible truth... The Pope was his Court Chaplain all along.

True story. Today I saw the Pope die, and a message "Pope XXX is no longer Court Chaplain of Venice" popped up. I never noticed before that my court chaplain was the Pope.

Longes wrote:Today in Crusader Kings 2 I was playing as the Doge of Venice.

I built an observatory, and after years of feverent studies discovered heliocentricity. Of course, hoarding such revelation to myself would have been unfair, so there was only one choice. Doge Alexander the Just published a book. This, understandably, pissed off the Pope. I was labeled a heretic, and a personal enemy of the Pope. And as the Pope was a rather likable fellow, the heretic status meant that my church vassals stopped paying me taxes. There was only one solution. It's simple. Kill the Pope. I've sent the spymaster, found allies in Vatican, and, months later, set the plan in motion. As the Doge plunged a dagger into the neck of a peacefuly sleeping Pope, he saw the horrible truth... The Pope was his Court Chaplain all along.

True story. Today I saw the Pope die, and a message "Pope XXX is no longer Court Chaplain of Venice" popped up. I never noticed before that my court chaplain was the Pope.

Huh, I'm pretty sure that's a bug. There are only three ways that's supposed to be possible:

1. You're playing as an Emperor-level ruler and have managed to vassalize the Catholic Pope, which can only happen via a war because he's king-level and thus refuses requests automatically
2. You make someone an antipope, and they'll use the title of Pope but retain whatever rank their holdings give them.
3. Someone has installed the Fratricelli Papacy, which is duke-level and can be vassalized by a king. This is incidentally the only way to get crusades as a Catholic heresy.

(I have done all of these things)

I guess your court chaplain managed to get elected to the College Of Cardinals and it failed to properly wipe his councilor status when he became Pope. You'd tend to notice the other things happen.

Been playing Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus. Basically, in both of them you're reading through the logs of a generation ship which went ultra-aggressively misogynist and then had everyone die, with the ship's AIs providing commentary. Hate Plus covers how the first part of that happens, and it turns out the ship had been run by an aristocracy from the beginning.

You get to pick the order in which you extract logs in Hate Plus, and I decided to extract the gigantic block of minutes of council meetings on irrelevant bullshit all at once.

*Hyun-ae, ship's AI wrote:This is... really boring

The one saving grace is that the other ship AI, *Mute, was Councilor Of Security, and realized that since she's immortal, cannot be fired, and has veto power, she has no incentive to not be a hilarious jackass.

Councillor *Mute (Security): Okay, but here's my problem: if you increase taxes on the lower class by 15%, there will be riots. Like, my office will be on fire within a week, and it turns out that costs even more of the money that's already tight to put out. We're talking actual straight-out riots. It's a security problem.
Chief Councillor Ryu (Captaincy): But the benefit would be-
Councillor *Mute (Security): I get what the benefit would be. Um, it just doesn't offset the cost of, you know, offices on fire.

name_here wrote: Been playing Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus. Basically, in both of them you're reading through the logs of a generation ship which went ultra-aggressively misogynist and then had everyone die, with the ship's AIs providing commentary. Hate Plus covers how the first part of that happens, and it turns out the ship had been run by an aristocracy from the beginning.

Hmmm, no, there was an aristrocacy with money and power and shit, but originally that ship's government was still made from elected officials that had to go through tests and shit to get their positions, with dirty peasants also allowed a chance to join.

Hate Plus is how the aristrocacy takes total control.

name_here wrote: The one saving grace is that the other ship AI, *Mute, was Councilor Of Security, and realized that since she's immortal, cannot be fired, and has veto power, she has no incentive to not be a hilarious jackass.

Correction, that's what she thought.

From the first game, you know something went horribly wrong with *Mute, as she clearly epic failed at her job of keeping the ship's population alive. Not wanting to get on a bit of spoilers, but if *Mute hadn't been such a dick to the meat bags at every opportunity then everything probably would have gone better than expected.

It's a pretty nice story though. You also have to metagame to get the harem ending.

maglag wrote:Hmmm, no, there was an aristrocacy with money and power and shit, but originally that ship's government was still made from elected officials that had to go through tests and shit to get their positions, with dirty peasants also allowed a chance to join.

Hate Plus is how the aristrocacy takes total control.

Um, not exactly.

The complicated political maneuvering in the council meetings included a bit where the council technically became a meritocracy, which had not previously been the case. There was an elected president, but the council was unelected and made all the decisions; the president's only known power was overriding the security veto, which I gather hardly ever mattered because *Mute almost always invoked it to block things the president wouldn't like either. Well, and he knew the root password for the ship's computer, which evidence from the first game suggests is less useful than you might expect because the AIs can turn off being able to log in as root.

Well, seems like that was a bit of a retcon, as the reason why *Mute doesn't even remember those events (plus her clear change of personality) is because the wrong meat bag got their hands in the root password.

Also I could swear the council elements weren't all members of the aristrocacy even before the new laws were passed.

First game

Plus, wasn't the reason everybody died in the first place that another meat bag got their hands on the root password and turned off the oxygen supplies while *Mute could only watch?

Nope, the council was always all nobles. Even after the meritocracy rules were instituted; for some reason commoners in a society without publicly-funded education* found it very difficult to get a top score on the exam, and in between insulting people and vetoing things *Mute spent her time instructing the council on ways to appease the commoners without changing anything that mattered (to her). Mind, there were rather a lot of nobles.

*In the session where they're discussing the meritocracy bill, it's mentioned that they'd previously rejected a proposal for an education credit for the lower classes.

As for the root password thing, the AIs may not be able to forcibly log a local root user off, which would be consistent with those events. It's also possible that they couldn't originally disable the su command on account of that being the stupidest design decision imaginable, and the system got reprogrammed.

I wasn't sure if I should put this here or in the Non-political thread, but...

Satoru Iwata has passed away.

Wow, that was kinda out of nowhere. He was still only 55 years old and all cheery in a Nintendo Direct just a month ago... Very sad news.

Cancer is a bitch.

At least he lived to see Splatoon.

In potentially better news, there are signs that Sega have gained the rights and started work on Dawn of War 3. Now there's a lot of time for that to fall through and not happen, and it could very well be shit. Or we could get more of DoW1:Soulstorm, with big multi-world spanning campaigns with multiple armies, huge forces and ridiculous voice acting.

Koumei wrote:At least he lived to see Splatoon.

In potentially better news, there are signs that Sega have gained the rights and started work on Dawn of War 3. Now there's a lot of time for that to fall through and not happen, and it could very well be shit. Or we could get more of DoW1:Soulstorm, with big multi-world spanning campaigns with multiple armies, huge forces and ridiculous voice acting.

I could see that being entertaining if they put the effort in to make the gameplay not ass.

As it was, I scummed the Soulstorm campaign with Necron deep strikes after playing Chaos long enough to see the memes (and Dark Eldar long enough to decide "Vect's hairy bollocks this campaign is godawful").

It kind of made sense that each race had to basically do the same campaign, because in the end they needed to conquer the same provinces/ do the same things to win . . but it still made for more than enough tedium <.<