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The Core RPGC Main Forum
61

Yeah, I already felt like just having the Dragon in general was not a very good thing, but then they made the advantages for killing the dragon and the baron like a million times better. That, combined with basically making every jungle camp an objective (having two was already stupid imo), and now League has taken a bit of a nosedive.

Orak…DOTA is way worse than league in its emphasis on CS. For one, basic attacks just do way less damage at low levels, so you have an extremely narrow window to last-hit; AND characters have different startup speeds for their basic attacks, so you need to specifically know the timing with the champ you’re using, along with knowing about how much damage they’re going to do. You can also CS your own creeps after they fall below a certain threshold of health. If you last-hit your own creep, it’s called a “deny” and your opponent gets no experience for denied creeps. Also, the mid lane has ramps into the river, and your chance to hit anything on the ramps is decreased by 25%. It creates this ridiculous game where you try to out CS and deny your opponent, and you also try to kill the creeps in such a way that when the opposing creeps deadlock, YOURS are on a ramp. It’s really complicated, and while I appreciate being able to “pull” the lane in DOTA (I’ve never liked that you can basically only move a lane forward or nowhere in League), I think it’s really unintuitive and the high amount of gold you get for CS in that game makes your ability to CS as a carry almost more important than anything related to PvP.

62

Right now I’m playing Alpha Centauri for the first time. It’s amazing and I’m so glad it was on GOG, it’s got almost all the things I loved about Civ II combined with some new mechanics/approaches and an interesting, evolving story for me to get into. It took me a while to really start enjoying it (I started on too low a difficulty the first time and just wrecked everyone’s shit, which may be part of it), but in my second playthrough I’m absolutely loving it. There seems to be a good resistance to my attempts to crush another nation.

Of course, I did forget the first rule of Civ II (vs computers at least) - expand like hell! Of course, it’s a bit annoying you have to build a separate unit for that and for improving the landscape. I also haven’t figured out how that works - sometimes farms seem useless, other times not. Also space farms?? Okay, cool! I’m really looking forward to playing it.

I played through Dragon Age: Inquisition when it came out. It went on for about 50 hours too long, and the last fight was a crushing letdown after how good the last mission/fight of Dragon Age: Origins was. Still, I really admired the ambition it showed and I enjoyed a lot of elements of it.

Not the AI though. Christ.

Sorc mentioned Dark Souls - and he’s right about it being absolutely amazing. It’s up there as one of my favourite games ever. I’d love if they could go back and redo the sections post Anor-Londo though…especially Lost Izalith. It had so much potential but it wasn’t as great as the rest of the game. I don’t think they should change Bed of Chaos though. I hate that guy, and that makes me love him. Unfortunately I got the DLC on my NG+, which made fighting Manus an absolute pain. I felt amazing once I did get him though! I wasn’t able to beat Kalameet before the guy who owns the 360 deleted the game from its tiny harddrive. :frowning: I got it on Steam and I’ll play it again at some point, once things are less busy for me.

My favourite thing about my first playthrough was missing the door down to Lower Undeadburg and going all the way through Oolacile gardens and that place, killing the hydra, the crystal golems, those Cheshire-cat motherfuckers and then having to [spoiler]put Sif out of his misery, which was a serious downer[/spoier]…only to find out I had essentially just bypassed a large part of the game and had to go back through it.

Oh. That and getting to the gold-fog in front of Nito before I had unlocked it. Running the whole way back from that was terrifying and awesome and I’m really glad I had such a crazy experience before I finally found the ‘correct’ path. Of course, Blighttown and the Capra Demon and all that passage was then kind of easy, so I was amused to find out Capra is some people’s least favourite boss.

63

So I finally finished Earthbound… I stick by my original opinion and can’t see why the game garnered so much hype. It’s a good game, unique story with a lot of satire, and charming overall, but seriously not as great as many people made it out to be. I can understand why people wanted Mother 3 to come to the states though since this game leaves you on a cliffhanger, but other than that, the game isn’t anything THAT special, even for its time IMO.

now debating whether to finish Xenoblade Chronicles or Bayonetta 2 next.

64

Immediately after wrecking my test, getting more letters after my name, and shoveling snow for 4 hours straight the next day in New York, I caught the kind of cold where Satan himself squeezes your lungs every time you move. To combat evil, I borrowed a friend’s PS3 and bought Tales of Xilia. Not bad. I haven’t played a Tales game since Symphonia. The characters are just shy of being great, with Millia and Alvin dominating. Wet blanket Jude is cast as incredibly intelligent but comes across as awful dumb sometimes and blah more often. That kind with the stuffed animal is just goddamnit Japan, if a kid’s that meek they need to see a psychologist. I really hope the annoying stuffed animal ends up being the incarnation of a suppressed open and joyful personality. Give me a sociopath over demure anime stereotypes any day of the week.

65

Man, I have not heard good things about Xillia 1 or 2 from series regulars. But then again, they’re Tales of Fans and are probably up in arms about something stupid. Also, I really haven’t given the series much of a chance since Symphonia either (and despite my prowess of recollection, I, for the life of me, couldn’t tell you what Symphonia was actually about).

66

I haven’t played a Tales game since Destiny, which I sold to VE a couple years ago. I kinda miss it, but at the same time I know I wouldn’t have the patience to play it all the way through again.

That said I also picked up Xillia, though haven’t had a chance to play it yet.

I’m currently on a massive Slayers kick, and just got the SNES Slayers RPG. What do you guys think I’m gonna play next? :V

67

Xillia was fun. The characters grow and improve as you go, they set Jude as kind of a weenie so he could BECOME A MAN or at least as close as it can be by Japanese standards. Elize grows too as time goes on.

I got Xillia 2 myself, but I didn’t get uber-far in it yet.

68

So wait. Does he really gain the ability to move like a raging river or the strength of a great typhoon? That would be kinda awesome if he did. :V

69

Well, one of his better moves is - if you backstep as the enemy is about to hit you, he instant-transmissions behind the enemy, or whatever that teleport step is (flash step?).

His mystic art certainly has the oomph of a great typhoon. But really, Jude is a solid fighter, and he’s not the boring sword-wielding main character trope.

70

Symphonia 2 was the last one of that series I played. Not as good as the original, but a decent sequel nonetheless. Haven’t played Xillia yet, not sure if I play to. Then again, got a huge backlog I still need to go through. Writer’s block kinda means that I’m back to playing games until I get that writing spark back.

Decided to try to finish Xenoblade Chronicles next, though the wife was off school today early, so she convinced me to try a new game with her, so we downloaded BattleBlock Theater. That’s a pretty fun game itself.

71

Battleblock Theater is too much badass. Super fun, super funny.

72

Buckle your pants!

73

BBT is freakin’ awesome. I’m waiting to beat it so that my wife and I can watch the AGDQ speedrun of two people beating the game 100% in 2 hours and 45 minutes. then we’ll see just how bad we really are :smiley:

the game reminds me of Little Big Planet, only a bit more fun… though the user-created levels still lack anything good. I might have to try my hand at that sometime.

74

So I’m pretty excited about Cities: Skylines. I love city builder games…played all of the Simcity games except the most recent one…heard about that fiasco. Ironically enough, with Cities Skylines coming out next week…EA finally shuttered Maxis [well, at least the main part of the studio…but it’s long been dead in spirit anyway]: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/03/ea-closes-simcity-studio-maxis-emeryville/

Another aspect of my youth chewed up and spit out EA’s blistery, wart-infested, hemmoroid covered asshole.

75

And EA continues to be the Fox News Corp of gaming.

Welp. So much for SimAnt 2.

76

Yay! Somebody else to preach the gospel and praise the sun!

I had a unique experience with the game. I hadn’t played Demon Souls, so I just knew it was hard. It took me maybe three days before I found the path up the hill to the Undead Burg. I spent days throwing myself at the Skeleton’ in the Graveyard…

Then I spent like three weeks ringing the first two bells. I made character after character trying to figure out the game, and eventually I had the entire first part memorized. I figured I’d ring the bells and then that would be pretty much it. Nope. I took a few stabs at Sen’s Funhouse and decided that this game was insane.

Fast foward a few years and the second game comes out and I play nothing else for eight months. Then the first game comes out for free on Xbox 360 (which I mentioned to you fine people) and I got to give it another go. I was still pretty blind, I never went out of my way to find anything out about what I’d missed, and when I got to Anor Londo I was just like… whoa, damn. Here we go, this is the only place I’ve ever heard about. I was genuinely excited about a game for maybe the first time in a long time.

Dark Souls literally ruined games for me. I simply don’t really play anything else, nothing else compares.

77

I played a little bit of Dark Souls 2. I like it, but I feel like somehow I fell squarely in the middle. People either seem to love Dark Souls, or they tend to absolutely hate Dark Souls, because of its difficulty. I think difficult is perhaps the wrong word for it (my friend explained it as, “these games actually have a learning curve” lol), but while I enjoy the challenge and appreciate it, and I’d be happy to continue playing it, I’m just not enraptured by the game like other people are.

78

To become as enamored with it as others you have to fail magnificently, repeatedly, before you just get it. Then you win and you get this feeling that’s half excitement over your accomplishment and half dread for what lies beyond.

79

Plus I think DS1 is just one of the tightest game designs of any I’ve ever played. The amount of different ways you can play the game from a mechanics point of view is one thing, but the connected level design means that you can actually experience almost all the parts of the game in whatever order you want if you’re good enough at the gameplay. And that’s without even doing cool things like a SL1 run, or speedrunning.

My flamate chose the master key as his gift, so he actually had almost the opposite experience to me - he bypassed a lot of the annoying key based things and just went the “right” way, so for him the game was revealed in a completely different way.

My absolute favourite thing about is that if you see an awesome looking castle/tower/ominous looking dark spot and you’re like “man, I’d love to go there!” you do, and it’s just as awesome when you’re there as when you’re looking at it. By the time you get fast-travel you feel like you’ve earned it, and you still have to go to a location at least once, if you haven’t already.

80

I took the master key several times when I was experimenting with the game. I learned the path through the Valley of the Drakes well before I got to the Depths. It was pretty scary at first - this way, we have massive and atrocious club wielding sumo wrestler types so nope nope nope… oh look, a path to… a slumbering dragon. Well I’ll just sneak right by and… nope, now it’s an angry and awake undead poison dragon. Got it.