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What are you playing?
Topic Started: Feb 20 2011, 11:04 PM (24,747 Views)
MrMarill
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DAT STORY TIEM

Didn't see this, whoops.

Super Metroid does an amazing job of steering the player in the right direction with no text boxes or anything. The example I always use is when you get the grappling hook, you're immediately put in a room with a large pool of water straight in front of you and a grapple along the top. Sound familiar if you've played it? That's because the room looks nearly identical to the next room needed to advance which is right back at the start. It's stuff like this which makes a game based on exploration and non-linearity not feel frustrating and cryptic.


I came here to talk a bit about Bioshock Infinite, so I'm gonna put this stuff in spoilers.

Bioshock Infinite
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CALJR_8760
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The Lonely One
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Not really what I'm playing, but I know a few people up here have built their own PC, I'm just wondering,
a) how much will it cost to make one more powerful than the PS4 or X1, and
b) is it hard to build one?

I'm so scared that I'll mess something up in the process. The problem is, I really am not digging getting a new console yet, they just don't entice me. I'd rather get a gaming PC that will play all the multiplat games, plus get games dirt cheap on Steam.
I just want something that will last as long the PS4 and X1. I also want a Blu-ray drive on it in case my Ps3 craps out
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Romanticide
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1) Around $800 will do the trick. Ghost's build is pretty good if you're looking for that to be your budget. If you're looking to play games on higher settings throughout the gen, I'd spend more and get a better card/processor at the least. Ghost's machine will likely get him through the gen, but towards the end I would not be surprised if he's playing on low/medium.

2) I'd have to say it's not as easy as PC gamers always make it out to be, but most of them have had multiple builds. The first one will be the hardest, but if you read the instructions and have Google handy on another device, that should be enough to see you through. It's not as easy to fuck up the build as it once was. If you've done something wrong, the machine should not even start up.
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Granskjegg
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Eg e husfar.
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I definitely would recommend that you read up on how to build one, and watch stuff on youtube. I haven't built myself a desktop yet, however I am planning to do so once I have the funds available (and I can convince the lady to let me get a desk and shit in our apartment).

As far as cards go, I think something like the Nvidia 760, 770 cards, or AMD R270X, and R280X are the best cards you can get for a lower price point, that are also the newest on the market.

As for the CPU, something like an i5-4670 should be more than enough for your gaming needs.

Your ram shouldn't be less than 8 gb, and that's pretty much the basics as far as components go.

I recommend reading around on the internet (or asking us to build a PC using PC-part picker to hit a certain price point).

And I always post this video series whenever someone is tentative about building a PC.

How to build a computer.

I realise the crap I wrote isn't exactly the most specific shit ever, but I'm a little tired and warm right now.
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Romanticide
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Yeah, double post. Now for the last game I played, which is conveniently one that was just talked about in the last game post.

Response to Marill's stuff


Ignoring the ending, which is admittedly a mess...

Elizabeth makes this game really, really easy. Running low on health/salts/ammo? Just stay away from enemies long enough and she'll eventually find you what you need. I guess this makes some level of sense, but it just means you can fire at will, which isn't really a good incentive to force players to play better. If I have anything positive to say about the original Bioshock (based on what I played, anyway), it's that you had to weigh the reward of firing versus the risk of not having enough ammo later. This game totally lacks that. That might be a reason you're limited to two weapons, though.

Handymen are the fucking worst. Agile, heavily armored bullet sponges that you can't stun, and can take away skyline strikes on top of THAT? Blargh. Seeing one often ruined my day. Outside of special enemies like that, I'd have to disagree with Marill's assessment that enemies were "bullet sponges". While I'm disagreeing with him, there was often (though not always) plenty of cover. Just because you don't use it in a TPS way doesn't mean it's not there.

I liked the gameplay well enough, I guess. My mind wasn't blown or anything, but it was fun to play.

Elizabeth is an awesome character. Unlike many, she's actually developed. She starts out as a sheltered milquetoast, which I guess is to be expected, but as the game progresses, she sees her role in things and is determined to set them right. It helps that she wasn't put there just to be eye candy/a romantic interest of the player's character. She's her own woman with her own motivations, which is quite frankly something gaming needs more of.

As for the story, it was all pretty good and made sense until the quantum mechanics stuff was brought to the forefront. It was always there, but once you get to the Good Time Club (I'd say a little over halfway through), it starts to take a more prominent role in the narrative, and that's where things start going to hell.

The game is gorgeous. I'm sure it looks good enough on consoles, but on PC with all the settings cranked up... Yeaaaaaaah boi. It's amazing. I'd say this is more so due to the artstyle than the graphics, because while they're *good*, I wouldn't say they're the most cutting-edge thing ever. A game like Tomb Raider or Metro: Last Light or something will have better graphics. Still, I put more emphasis on artstyle and I'd have to say this is one of the most beautiful games I've played. As far as music goes, doooooooon't caaaaaaaaaaare. Outside of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, it wasn't spectacular.

Awesome game. If you don't own it yet, I'd recommend that you pick it up.
Edited by Romanticide, Jan 21 2014, 10:35 PM.
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Granskjegg
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Eg e husfar.
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Eh, whatever, don't have much to do.

Here's a little suggestion for a bugdet build for CALJR:

~820 dollaz

That build would be pretty good for a while, and it wont rip a huge gaping hole in your wallet, which is always a good thing, switching to PC saves you about one bajillion kroners a year in game prices, so it's a good deal.

You'll obviously also need an OS, monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. So you're probably looking at around $1000-1100 if you went with that build.
Edited by Granskjegg, Jan 21 2014, 11:13 PM.
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MrMarill
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DAT STORY TIEM

I completely agree that the aesthetics look fantastic. I absolutely love how the game looks.

I don't think all the enemies are bullet sponges but walking on a corridor hitting the same enemies over and over gets pretty boring.

Bioshock Infinite
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cscrocker
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Ang tanging Pilipino sa forum na ito
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MrMarill
Jan 21 2014, 11:50 PM
Bioshock Infinite
I believe it's practically the reason why it's called BioShock Infinite. Originally, the game was supposed to emphasize on the infinite possibilities concept like in the original demo, the game was supposed to be open-ended (the original purpose of the skyway was for quick travel between locations) and you can combine two vigors to create one big powerful attack. Guess they have to remove those stuff due to a tight schedule and maybe to make space.
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MrMarill
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DAT STORY TIEM

Yeah, I guessed that much. It could have utterly amazing with those mechanics in place but it would have ramped up production time juuust a bit.
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Romanticide
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I thought about making this its own topic, but it'd be a fairly redundant topic since it'd be filled with posts that could work just as well in this thread. I figure posting this here but maybe using it as a reference if needed would work as well.


I noticed one of my friends is starting a 2014 Director Challenge so he can finally get around to watching films by certain directors he's not familiar with. I guess backlog problems aren't limited to people with huge Steam collections. But yeah, I'm totally jacking his shit. I guess the difference is this won't be a one year thing because there are too many games here. If I get even half through this list I'd consider it a success.

Numbers do not indicate the order I'll be playing them in. It'd be a simple way to answer the question, "what do I play next?", but I'll be going by feel/possibly recommendations.

I'll try to beat the campaign of any game that has one. Well, unless I don't like it for some reason or another. There are a lot of games here that you don't "beat", per se, and as for those I'll play until I feel comfortable and/or bored with them.

I will be starting with Etrian Odyssey IV.



Games I plan to buy this year


I'll probably buy Graces in April since as far as I know, there's nothing awesome coming out then. I'll wait until I actually have a Wii U to get the Donkey Kong and Mario Kart games, so around July or so. SimCity is getting an offline mode finally, so I'll grab that when update ten is out and it's on sale somewhere. Everything else is a day one buy, assuming it actually comes out in 2014. (I wouldn't be surprised to see X, SMT x FE, or both pushed back to next year.)

This list doesn't include the inevitable sales/bundles because it's impossible to know what's going to be in those and if I'll have money. That said, I'll likely try to get Saints Row IV, The Stanley Parable, Kentucky Route Zero, and Papers, Please if I see them at a reasonable price and I have money. It also doesn't factor in what I'll do with every cent I save up for a Wii U/HDD/games, because I don't know yet.



Games I've played


Not a lot to say here. I could have beat a few more games if I had started this on January... 2nd... but I'm not a resolutions guy. Both of these games were great, though.


Games I'll continue to play:
1) Pokemon Y

It's fucking Pokemon. We'll eventually get Pokebank and I still need to breed teams and shit. If nothing else, I can breed during the time I'm downloading the bigger games on the below list.



Games I need to play


I feel like Clannad should be on this list because Clannad, but then I'd add Fate/Stay Night and other visual novels that were adapted into awesome anime and I'd derail the whole fucking thing. And OF COURSE I'd have to get the true ending routes, so... Yeah.

This is by no means every game I own, especially on PC, but it's the ones I have some intention to play.
Edited by Romanticide, Mar 9 2014, 12:58 AM.
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Romanticide
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The Lightning Returns demo dropped today, so you know I was on that shit.

You're not given a lot of time with the demo. I suppose you could mess around until the in-game clock hits 6:00, which is when the demo is supposed to end, but if you're any good at all you'll be finished before the clock hits 3:00. I fought maybe ten battles and a boss, so my thoughts are obviously not going to be complete, but here goes anyway.

The new battle system is pretty interesting. The schemata system, like the paradigm system, will most likely reward pre-battle planning and being able to switch on the fly to the appropriate schemata for a given situation. The big difference here is that the schemata system doesn't take most control out of your hands; you'll be able to decide what actions you wish to undertake far more efficiently than you could in XIII/its sequel. You *could* manually battle in those games, but it's generally far faster to just mash auto-battle, which admittedly isn't the most fun thing in the world. This system puts you in full control of battle. The only thing I didn't like about battle was that there's no ability to dash or something similar. Moving with Lightning was painfully slow, though this might change in the actual game.

As far as I know, what you see in the demo is VERY early. It might even be the first stuff you do. Snow is the first person you'll "save", and he figures prominently in this demo. Maybe there are abilities that aren't in this demo because they wouldn't be relevant, idk.

I didn't customize my schemata, mostly because I wanted to fight things and shit. I'm sure I'll be messing with them in the actual game, though. The pre-set abilities are conveniently set so you can beat the boss with little trouble. Put the ice skills back on for the boss and you're golden.

I like what little we saw of Lumina. Her dialogue made me chuckle, at the least, which is always a trait I enjoy. I just hope they don't take the obvious route and say she's really *redacted because XIII-2 spoilers*.

The graphics are incredible, but by this point we expect this from the XIII series. I liked the artstyle of the cutscenes and such, and the in-game stuff didn't look too shabby either. I look forward to exploring this world, if only to see how pretty it is. I've listened to the soundtrack and it contains some really awesome songs, so I look forward to the music too.
Edited by Romanticide, Jan 22 2014, 07:55 AM.
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LightningBolt
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I've started playing Tales of Xillia, and it's pretty good so far. This will mostly be comparing it to Tales of Graces f, which I finished not long ago.

- The game looks a lot prettier than I was expecting. I guess the environments aren't mindblowingly gorgeous, but they're a lot nicer looking than the ones in Tales of Graces f, and a lot more unique-looking. I guess this has largely to do with Graces f being a remake of a Wii game, but still. I'm pleasantly surprised as far as visuals go.

- I like the characters a lot so far, individually. They're really fun and the skits and character interactions are as good as I was hoping they'd be. That said, at this point the group's dynamic doesn't feel as natural as it did in Graces. This can and probably will change as more characters join the party (I only have four so far), though.

- The battle system has a lot of tweaks from Graces. For starters, this game seems to expect you to just guard against attacks most of the time instead of trying to dodge each and every one of them. This is something I'm going to have to get used to. The battle system in Graces was a lot faster and you could rack up really big combos while dodging most attacks at the same time. Also, it's a LOT harder to dodge enemies you aren't locked in on in this game, and you pretty much have to rely on your linked partner to defend you, which they only do some of the time. The lack of a side-step makes it impossible to really try to dodge every attack without sacrificing a lot of focus into actually dodging. It became a sort of reflex in Graces and didn't require that much of your focus. So this is something I'm still adapting to.

- I'm not a fan of the TP system at all. This point is largely tied into another issue with the game, so I'll start there: the party AI in this game is really really dumb it seems like. Against a boss I had trouble with, my party members kept dropping like flies because they just refused to guard against this guy's attacks. And Tales is really hard when you don't have your party members. But yeah they're really bad at guarding when they should. And the dumb AI makes the TP system pretty terrible from my experience with it so far. This is because the AI is really fucking bad at replenishing their own TP. My player-controlled character always has a lot of TP even if I use a lot of artes because it's really easy to get TP (you just beat the shit out of enemies), and yet my party members always seem to have little of it. This wasn't a huge concern through most of the game because both Alvin and Milla are perfectly capable of being useful without it, but Elize was completely useless in a boss fight I had trouble with. She's the designated healer, so without TP (which is essentially this game's mana), she's useless. And she kept running out of TP really quickly, and she was just incapable of getting it back on her own. So basically I didn't have a healer past the first minute or so of this boss fight. Hopefully you wind up getting enough TP that it becomes borderline irrelevant later on in the game. Graces' "mana" system is just incomparably better.

- The game's difficulty is still all kinds of fucked up, which hasn't changed from Graces. There's a forest a little bit into the game (right after you meet Elize), and I was wrecking absolutely everything in that forest on hard mode without even the slightest bit of trouble. Then I fight the boss at the end of the forest and he's too hard to beat. After losing a few times, I hop down to moderate difficulty and absolutely annihilate him in seconds. This same problem existed in Graces. The jumps in the difficulty settings are too large (at least as far as it pertains to bosses; it's far less noticeable in regular battles). And nice to see the boss battles are still annoyingly difficult. This boss was difficult enough on his own, and when you add in his ability to summon regular enemies into the stage after you kill them off, it just enters bullshit territory. Again, this was definitely a thing in Graces, too.

Overall I don't like the battle system nearly as much as I liked Graces', but the quality of life changes are nice. The new store system where you have to upgrade the stores is a neat idea and I welcome the experiment trying something other than your typical "new town, new items" thing. And mentioned earlier, the game looks a lot prettier. Also, while I liked Graces' battle system more, that doesn't mean this one is bad. Graces just had one of the best battle systems I've ever used and it's pretty widely considered the best in the series, so this isn't necessarily putting down Xillia. It's still a really fun game. The only thing I can see getting legitimately frustrating is if this TP issue I'm having doesn't work itself out as my characters level up. Usually when your maximum mana capacity increases in RPG's, the cost increases with it so it tends to even out. I'm hoping as the mana capacity increases in this game (which it's doing much more slowly than I feel it should be, seriously each orb only giving +5 or 6 TP?), the cost stays relatively samey.
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Romanticide
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Yeah, the system puts more emphasis on blocking during boss fights, which was a shock to me since on normal in any Tales game it's not something you have to think about.

As far as dodging goes, I found Jude's Snap Pivot to be a nifty way to dodge attacks. Block and hit right/left to hop away from attacks. Time it right and you'll wind up behind the enemy, where you can just wail on them. There are two required fights (and one fight you can lose without consequence) I'd say are nearly impossible without knowing this technique. One of these fights is very early in the story, so get used to it now.

I'm pretty sure there's a later skill that allows you to sidestep with L1. I never used it, though, because I found the Snap Pivot good enough for my dodging needs.

Yeah, the AI is duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuumb when it comes to blocking. They just don't even bother very often, which is a gigantic pain in the ass. I think there's a later skill that allows you to taunt enemies and get them to focus on you, which might be smart if you're having trouble with the AI not blocking. Said skill also recovers 5% of TP, which is always nice. I do wonder if Tales games would benefit from having a character with skills that draw aggro. Reyn does this like a charm in Xenoblade and doesn't have the derpiest AI ever, too.


I'll say this as far as TP goes: Do not hesitate to throw down an Orange Gel in a boss fight, especially if it's for Elize so she can keep doing her thing. I suppose you're probably early enough in the game where resource management is still a thing, but Elize always gets priority for obvious reasons.

What sucks is that the AI seems to ignore auto-item, so you'll likely be commanding your character to throw down an item... At least until you get a later character's insta-use skill, then you'll always be commanding that character to do it. I wouldn't even bother setting it, really.

TP is pretty irrelevant late-game though. You'll get 3-4 TP per hit and you'll probably have 15 of all the TP-replenishing items outside of Specific Plus/the uber healing items.


Agreed on the difficulty curve. That said, the first Jiao fight is probably one of the hardest bosses in the game. I'd say he's definitely in the top three or four. If you don't go in with Earth Resist on everyone, you are going to have a bad time. I'd have recommended giving Elize the Earth Cape on top of that, if you didn't do so already. I didn't drop down to moderate, but I did require like five tries to win that battle. And yup, summoning enemies that early is pretty bullshit.

It does get a bit better after Brutaur, though I don't know if that's because my weapon/armor shops were overpowered, if I got better, or if it really got easier. It might be some combination thereof. The last two bosses have yet another difficulty spike and are arguably harder than anything else in the story.

Unknown can go fuck itself with a cactus; hard was plenty. Looking at the Unknown stats, bosses just seem to get 1.6x more HP than they had on hard because lol why not, along with higher attack/defense. Joy.
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Snowman
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Just finished The Walking Dead game (season one). Quite sad. The plot was better than I expected. It felt like they took scenarios people expected from reading the comics and watching the show, and then took the opposite of that and put it in the game's story, if that makes sense. Spoilery examples below. I thought that was good because I would have been bored with reading, watching, AND playing the same situations, but at the same time, they took the opposite of comic/show things often enough that by the end, I expected the opposite thing to happen. Now, to alleviate vagueness:

Opposites in TTG's TWD Game


For people who didn't click the spoiler, I'm not saying this makes it a bad story. I really did enjoy it a lot (except Ben). I loved that they had a lot of characters that the player actually got to know, too. The comic hasn't been great with introducing new characters lately (in my opinion, ever since the Alexandria stuff started, I guess). A lot just show up in the background throwing a sentence into a conversation every now and then. The show can't bring in or kick out characters a lot because people have silly contract things to worry about, only so much time per ep, so many eps per season. My only complaint other than the opposite stuff is that sometimes there were things I wanted to do/say, but there weren't options for them. It's impossible to account for everything a player might do, though, so it's understandable. And it didn't happen too much, anyway.

I'd recommend it to TWD fans and anyone who wants a good story about people dying horribly. I have not played 400 Days yet, but I have it, so I probably will later today.

And for the folks at home keeping score, I would say that Heavy Rain had more "gameplay" than this. However, TWD certainly had better dialogue options.
Edited by Snowman, Jan 29 2014, 05:31 PM.
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DucksFAN93
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I am also replaying Tales of Xillia. I've played many Tales games so my preference is:

Vesperia --> Xillia --> Abyss --> Symphonia --> Graces f
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