The Gaming Den

If you have hl2 or any other source engine game, neotokyo is a fun mod.

Avoraciopoctules wrote:I started Tales of Symphonia 2 a while ago. It is hilarious. The main PC has multiple unskippable black-and-white flashbacks to conversation snippets that happened a single digit of seconds ago. The majority of the characters live up to the Tales tradition of filling the world with unintelligent bigots. The main PC's mentor has a theme song that draws hilarious parallels between him and Duke Devlin in Yugioh abridged

The game is also fun. I recommend playing it with others so that you can talk about the ridiculous parts.

You forgot that the flashbacks happen to go to the same conversation snippets over and over again. I think I have to elaborate on the "unintelligent bigots." Everyone in the village hates you. Because you live in the town that Lloyd and Co. rebuilt by farming that bugged dragon encounter sheer hard work, and Lloyd went on a blood purge rampage with the Church of Martel that saw your parents murdered. So people hate you because Lloyd killed your parents, and that means that they were asking for it. Also, around the time you arrived in town the lake dried up and monsters started to come closer to the town. This is your fault. Shopkeepers seriously will rant about how they can't be seen talking to you, or call you a thief. You have a super-powered evil side that involves your eyes turning red and your spine growing in. After the events of the first dungeon you come back to town just in time to see the Church of Martel begin another blood purge. Unfortunately you intervene and save the town. This gets the villagers attitudes to shift from hostile to slightly less hostile. Though a couple of them will thank you. Grudgingly.

My only real complaint is that the overland map has been replaced with a thing that you only have the option of moving from point A to point B on.

That sounds really annoying. Please tell me you get to prove them all right by slaughtering them mercilessly. That was the only thing I liked about Morrow Wind: teaching the citizens some goddamn manners and ensuring they would not insult me again. Permanently.

Well, Symphonia has you banished from your hometown after indirectly causing it to get attacked by the bad guys (it was really a misunderstanding, but it still got a few houses burned down and a few people dead).

On towards the end, you have to go back there...the Mayor's still a prejudiced dickhead, but the citizens all tell him to STFO.

Role reversal! The Mayor is the only person in the town who doesn't treat you like shit. The town was getting purged because the rebels were attacking the town to get to the female lead (this segment has an infinite encounter generator) because in the eyes of the church aiding some one and being killed by them is the same thing.

Wow.

The mayor of Iselia is a total dick in Symphonia.

Well, your aunt and uncle are both total dicks in DotNW. At the beginning of the first dungeon your uncle essentially threatens you not to go in. They aren't happy with you even after you save them.

You know, I played Ninja Gaiden I and II for the NES recently (thank you, Virtual Console) and you know what's weird? Even though Ninja Gaiden III is a magnitude harder than those games, the actual gameplay is significantly easier.

Enemies in Ninja Gaiden III do triple damage, there are limited continues, the value of the health powerup has been cut in half, there's a lot more of them onscreen and dying can set you back as many as four screens--the other two don't set you back more than two screens, with a very idiotic exception for the last level of NG2. So this makes the game very difficult in a bunch of fake ways. But the enemies themselves aren't much harder. No more eagles. Most of the mooks no longer have projectiles and those that do can only fire at 90' angles except for one foe. The sword powerup makes clearing the stages a joke. Except for a couple of spots in Castle Rock and the Fortress of Doom the melee portion isn't all that harder than the other games--despite the fact that this game spawns so many fucking enemies at times that they don't fit on the screen. This is very noticable in the waterfall cave and Castle Rock. Stuff like that.

I can get through the first four levels without taking a single hit from a non-boss enemy and I can get to the last level without dying... but only due to the bullshit time limit--9 screens with three bosses with a 250 time limit? Fuck you, More Yamasan. I can't replicate that feat in NG1 and 2, but I don't need to, because those games are a lot kinder for failure.

I mean, really, if you can beat a stage in Ninja Gaiden 3 you can beat it without losing a life because of how far it sets you back.

I love NG3 and playing it again has banished a lot of childhood demons (I just need to beat Battletoads now) but honestly it's not a very well put-together game.

I'm sorry, that was a bit harsh. It's actually a good game, they did a good job putting it together. The action is nice and the control is great. There's more of an emphasis on platforming than fighting in the other two NGs, which I enjoy, and the music just kicks ass.

Still, it's a very frustrating game, but for a lot of wrong reasons. They should've just made the health powerup not so weaksauce, punished you less for dying, and reduced the amount of damage enemies dealt. AND HAVE FUCKING UNLIMITED CONTINUES OR A PASSWORD SYSTEM YOU ASSHATS HOLY SHIT.

Battletoads...Ye gods. I liked that game. But I didn't ever get past the third stage, I think...

If you can get past the third level of Battletoads you can pretty much beat any level in the game beyond that aside from Terra Tubes, Clinger Winger, and Revolution (which are incidentally the LAST levels of the game).

There are still some blatantly bullshit spots in the game, though. Like the Snake Pit and Volkmyre's Inferno which have some 'memorize what's going to happen to you or die'. They're not tough memorization points but reflexes are not going to pull you through the first time you play with them.

Rat Race has about a third of the level where you have to play through it perfectly or you get killed. It's not long and if you've played the previous stages you do have the skills, but there's no room for error at that point.

I'm playing Starfy on the DS and there's a few spots where it's not entirely clear if you're supposed to jump or fall. Very annoying. And you have to restart the level (not the segment) if you run out of continues. Which isn't bad...

...But really, I played moon rover, and I didn't like that game. Why would you put that into a segment of the game required to continue the rest of the game, without some way around it? And to make it worse, it had exposition in front of it. I hate repeating exposition.

-Crissa

This is only tangentially game related, but does anyone know of anything in the history of the internets that allows you to take a keyboard and map the input into gamepad buttonpresses? All the searches I've done have pulled up people complaining that their gamepads aren't doing what they want, and people suggesting that they pay even more money to fix that problem.

I want something that does it the other way around because I want to play a game that is programmed retardedly so that it can only use gamepad input when you're ingame. Well, it's only a hypothesis (the null is that it's just borked), so I'm unwilling to really spend money.


(Before anyone asks: I don't have an XBawks or PS Triple)

It would be awesome if we could reprogram gamepads.

Technically, we can.

But the manufacturers spend lots of money making sure we don't.

-Crissa

And we thought we had rights.

Heath Robinson wrote:This is only tangentially game related, but does anyone know of anything in the history of the internets that allows you to take a keyboard and map the input into gamepad buttonpresses? All the searches I've done have pulled up people complaining that their gamepads aren't doing what they want, and people suggesting that they pay even more money to fix that problem.

I want something that does it the other way around because I want to play a game that is programmed retardedly so that it can only use gamepad input when you're ingame. Well, it's only a hypothesis (the null is that it's just borked), so I'm unwilling to really spend money.


(Before anyone asks: I don't have an XBawks or PS Triple)

Which gamepad?

Crissa wrote:But the manufacturers spend lots of money making sure we don't.

Only really the Xbox, this generation.

Surgo wrote:

Heath Robinson wrote:This is only tangentially game related, but does anyone know of anything in the history of the internets that allows you to take a keyboard and map the input into gamepad buttonpresses? All the searches I've done have pulled up people complaining that their gamepads aren't doing what they want, and people suggesting that they pay even more money to fix that problem.

I want something that does it the other way around because I want to play a game that is programmed retardedly so that it can only use gamepad input when you're ingame. Well, it's only a hypothesis (the null is that it's just borked), so I'm unwilling to really spend money.


(Before anyone asks: I don't have an XBawks or PS Triple)

Which gamepad?

I don't have a gamepad. It appears, however, that a game I want to play on my PC does not let you use a keyboard to play it (for some reason).

I do, however, have a keyboard. It appears that I need the impossible, though. I need something that will duplicate keyboard input and reinterpret it into gamepad input.

Err.... I don't understand. You want to convert the 100 something keyboard digital inputs into several analogue signals?

That sounds pretty much impossible. Its like trying to use a touchpad as a Wii remote.

Just about all control pads nowadays have all analogue buttons (even the face buttons have a couple of different levels of being pressed) whereas keyboards don't do analogue. The nearest I can think of offhand is to use several keys for each button. Which is retarded.

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I've been borrowing a Wii off one of my brothers friends. However I've mostly been playing a strategy game using the old Gamecube pad. Can anyone recommend good Wii games that use the remote well?

Metroid Prime 3 wasn't bad. I spent the first ten minutes floundering around and had achieved a certain grace by the end of 30. By the end of an hour, I was pretty much used to it.

Also, they now have Metroid Prime 1 and 2 on the Wii. Haven't played them on the Wii, though.

No More Heroes.

NMH has some very annoying sandbox city parts but the actual action rocks your socks off.

Wii sports and to a lesser extent, Wii play. Both of the "wiimote demos" are pretty fun and handle pretty tightly.

Parthenon wrote:Err.... I don't understand. You want to convert the 100 something keyboard digital inputs into several analogue signals?

That sounds pretty much impossible. Its like trying to use a touchpad as a Wii remote.

Just about all control pads nowadays have all analogue buttons (even the face buttons have a couple of different levels of being pressed) whereas keyboards don't do analogue. The nearest I can think of offhand is to use several keys for each button. Which is retarded.

The naturals are a subset of the rationals. Binary values can be trivially mapped into rational values. In short, it's not hard to do the underlying translation, but I'm not a production programmer and the UI would be the major part of the whole thing.

It's not like I want to use all of the keyboard. That's insane. Map one key to each aspect of the input (or, in the case of directionals, a combination of keys). I was just wondering if other people had come across such a piece of software.

It seems not, which is a crying shame. Oh, well, I can find a different game to play.

I've been playing Dokapon Kingdom, which I think makes a fun party game, but it suffers from a few flaws that make it not as fun as first appears...

1. Playing with Computer players to fill out the field? The boss monsters are then nerfed.
2. Each game is given a random seed. Not each session, or each time you press the button. Each game. Which makes the spinner to move and roulette to collect items superfluous.
3. The computer players have cheating as well as AI. You can't just choose smart or cheating.
4. The computer players are actually excepted from the random seed - 1/3rd of their rolls are pre-determined to be the best roll they could have. So they have a higher chance of catching you, winning battles, and getting phat loot from the random sources.
5. Level matters when fighting player-to-player, so high level players can come steal whatever loot low level players have gotten, keeping them in the dust.
6. The game needs four players to be random enough. While it lets you play two-player, then all the field spells just become revenge, and the game is long.
7. While is says you need to be 'balanced' to compete, you never actually need to boost Attack. Magic defends against Magic, while Attack goes against Defense. Choose Mage at beginning to win the game.
   
   -Crissa

Sorry to extend the topic further but

Heath wrote:Map one key to each aspect of the input (or, in the case of directionals, a combination of keys).

I'm curious as to what you mean. For example if you wanted to convert a trigger into keyboard inputs, how would you do so? If I remember correctly from having a quick look at XNA probably about a year ago, each trigger has a huge number of possible values, either 128 or 256 ( I could be thinking of the X and Y values of the analogue stick having that range). How can you recreate that with a keyboard?

And most pads have four triggers, four face buttons and two sticks, all of which are analogue and would need more than one key. How can you get access to enough keys to be able to control them all without getting easily confused?

Obviously I'm missing something here. Or my knowledge of programming is even worse than I think it is.

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I can easily get Metroid Prime 3 out of the library for a week so I might try that. However I did play some of Metroid Prime and got frustrated at the backtracking.

No More Heroes though, my brother is currently playing through. It looks pretty interesting in parts, but it seems like the game is punishing you for having the affront to want to enjoy a game. As in, in interviews with the main designer he actually states that he want to take the bits that people found irritating and make them worse and more irritating for the sequel. Just to be a dick it seems.

Metroid Prime 3 is softer than Metroid Prime 1/2.

I mean, really. Metroid Prime 1 and 2 can be ungodly hard sometimes (Boost Ball Guardian!)

But Metroid Prime 3 seemed to be testing the theory to see if it'd work. It was...easy. Sometimes disappointingly so.

The first two games were unholy hard in places, and had powerups and upgrades scattered around--some in plain sight, some hidden, and some in plain sight and requiring you to come back later and get them.

Prime 3 isn't as harsh. The environments aren't as complex, nor as roaming. Also, the game's quite a bit easier (Compare Meta-Ridley in Prime 1 with him in Prime 3).

Anyway, the backtracking is something I never exactly minded. I mean, usually, there's something new to be gotten when you have to go back through.

Also, each game has their own OMG AWESOME sections.

For me, I loved both the Space Pirate stations in Prime 1--The lab in Phendrana and the Phazon Mines. They were really tense and atmospheric.

In 2, the beginning and the Sanctuary Fortress were both awesome.

And 3 had the Skytown and the Valhalla.