Video Games: You Game Like a Young Man, With Nothing Held Back. Admirable, But Mistaken.

[ShowOverBooks]

Germany has one of the strictest censor laws when it comes to games. Didn't C&C have to change the colour of blood to green (or replace the soldiers with robots) or something, years and years ago?

Glad I don't live there from a gaming point of view.

I wonder what their youth crime rate is like.

[Jon AS]

Germany has one of the strictest censor laws when it comes to games. Didn't C&C have to change the colour of blood to green (or replace the soldiers with robots) or something, years and years ago?

They changed it to black, and pretended the little soldiers were robots (I think they also changed death cries to the sound of breaking machinery).

I think it was the German version of System Shock 2 where changing the blood from red to green somehow allowed it to be sold as a 16+ game. The whole thing is just deeply stupid.

[Inigima]

I wouldn't. I bought it at release. It wasn't good.

Adding a bunch of freebie players and putting in cash roadblocks won't improve it.

I bought it at release too and I loved it to bits and I still do. Game of the Year for me hands down. Different strokes, I guess. Except your strokes are wrong.

[ShowOverBooks]

I bought it at release too and I loved it to bits and I still do. Game of the Year for me hands down. Different strokes, I guess. Except your strokes are wrong.

What did you love about it?

[Ran]

For those playing TSW, any good guides for starting out that you could point to? Something that, ideally, assumed you've never played an MMO before would be best. Need to help get Linda to wrap her head around the rather dizzying number of new concepts.

[Scipio Africanus]

They changed it to black, and pretended the little soldiers were robots (I think they also changed death cries to the sound of breaking machinery).

I think it was the German version of System Shock 2 where changing the blood from red to green somehow allowed it to be sold as a 16+ game. The whole thing is just deeply stupid.

There is no proven link between violence and video games. But video games have taken the niche that radio and tv once had early in the 20th century. Some people think we all are sponges simply absorbing everything we see but life is more then that. You'd have to be pretty sick in the head in the first place if you can't distinguish fiction from reality.

For those playing TSW, any good guides for starting out that you could point to? Something that, ideally, assumed you've never played an MMO before would be best. Need to help get Linda to wrap her head around the rather dizzying number of new concepts.

I saw one on PA for WoW:

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/12/05

[Fez]

It was a huge selling point. They mentioned it all the damn time.

It was part and parcel of the whole "big choices that echo across an epic trilogy" thing that was what they were selling the trilogy as.

ME1 and ME2 were designed with sequels in mind, thus the choices aren't as big. The end of ME3 is pretty much exactly like the end of Deus Ex. Both give you absolute huge choices about drastically changing the face of the future. They do this because it's the end of the game and you don't have to deal with the consequences, so they go all out. They are not designed with sequels in mind.

But there was a DE2. And people complained about it fudging over the ending(s) of the first game. (though it failed for completely different reasons) The same way people complain about how little your actions from previous games end up mattering in ME2 or ME3. Or they complain about how the open ended nature of who survives the end of ME2 means ME3's team is pathetic.

These things you talk about, glossing over choices you make and the like, these are fault. They are things people complain about and they are most definitely things Bioware is forced to do because playing out the consequences of big choices is expensive and hard, not undesirable.

Could they do it anyway? Sure. They could do anything they fucking want. They can retcon Commander Sheppard into a biomechanically-enchanced catfish with a lisp. Doesn't make it a good idea and doesn't make it line up with the games that came before or what they wanted to do at the time.

My point though is that I don't like glossing over choices. But since it is going to happen in order for there to be sequels, I wish the situation hadn't arisen in the first place. Instead I'd rather have choices that don't need to be glossed over that still feel big. For instance, just spitballing here, but on Tuchanka, they could've set it up in a way so that if you try to stop the cure, it still happens, but the Krogan are angry and don't help you and the Salarians do. Okay, so you're taking away part of the impact of that choice (since the cure would happen regardless), but it still allows you to say a great deal about who your Shepard is. That's still a big deal.

And frankly while the initial impact of that choice the way I describe it would be diluted compared to how it is now. Long term people would prefer it once they see whatever Bioware chooses as canon for the sequel, because once that happens it completely negates the choice that existed. Whereas in my example, nothing is being glossed over since the result was known, the choice was more about who Shepard is as a person than anything else.

And here it is.

http://www.joystiq.c...w-through-2015/

Well alright then. Doesn't seem like there's any word yet on if its going to be prequel, sequel, or (and this may be the best option considering the issues with the other options) taking place at the same time but elsewhere and with different people doing different things (like the most recent Bourne movie). It'd be silly for there to be another galaxy-threatening baddie at the same time as the Reapers though, so it would need to be more focused; like DA2 (which I always thought had some really good ideas; just poorly executed).

[Inigima]

What did you love about it?

I've talked about this at length before, but some highlights:

• Quests feel like they matter. You're essentially finding/killing/gathering etc. still, but it feels like I have a good reason for doing those things -- I'm not gathering Extra-Large Roc Eggs so Blastwhistle Fizzlegig can have breakfast, I'm scavenging cameras and putting them up around town to monitor the zombie threat.
  
  
• When I finish a quest, I don't run across two fucking continents to tell someone, I pick up the goddamned phone.
  
  
• No need for alts, every character can do everything.
  
  
• Story and lore are terrific and amazingly well done. Atmosphere extraordinary at times as well (see: The Black House).
  
  
• Dungeons are extremely streamlined and do not waste your time with tedious trash. They have almost no trash, and usually that trash is training for upcoming boss fights. The dungeons themselves are fun and creative and have some of the game's most memorable characters (e.g., Doctor Klein).
  
  
• In addition to combat missions, there are investigation missions that will require you to solve puzzles, sometimes requiring research on the real-life Internet.

For those playing TSW, any good guides for starting out that you could point to? Something that, ideally, assumed you've never played an MMO before would be best. Need to help get Linda to wrap her head around the rather dizzying number of new concepts.

Dulfy.net and Unfair.co are the two I'd look at; Unfair.co is much more complete and actively maintained, but Dulfy might be a little more accessible. That said, I'll try to cover some of that stuff here for her to read since TSW does a lot differently and those sites tend to be aimed at people who have played other MMOs before. There's SO MUCH to know, though, that it's best to play with an experienced friend for a little while. Voice chat (Mumble, most frequently) is helpful if they aren't in the same room.

- IN MMOS GENERALLY, questing is a solo or small-group affair. You can use whatever you want that works for you to get the job done. You pick up quests from a questgiver, whether it's a person or an object, and that will give you a job to do. Do it and turn it in (in TSW this just means clicking Send Report) to get XP and rewards (money, items). IN TSW SPECIFICALLY, you aren't meant to clear out quest hubs all at once, unlike other MMOs -- when you finish a quest you should be no more than 50 feet or so from another quest pickup.

- Dungeons are five-person affairs. They usually, though not always, will need the standard MMO trinity: one "tank" (very hard to kill, makes monsters attack them instead of other group members), one "healer" (just like it sounds, keeps everyone alive), and three "DPS" (short for "Damage Per Second," responsible for maximizing damage output). The main highlight of dungeons is the boss fights, which generally have specific mechanics to be observed. You can go into normal dungeons blind if you're on the ball, but for elites and nightmares you will be expected to know the fight mechanics already. Failure to observe fight mechanics can result in deaths -- yours, others, whole group.

- Related: This isn't a huge deal in normal dungeons, but in general you will be expected to have gear and abilities equipped to maximize your effectiveness in your role. If you are a DPS with 8,000 HP health, people are going to be upset with you, because your failure to gear yourself properly is wasting the group's time. It's important to remember that this is a social game played with other real people. At the endgame level there is some nerdery about how to balance your stats, but for most of the game, just wear gear with damage stats if you're going to be DPS, survivability stats if you're tanking, heal rating gear if you're healing. It's pretty clear.

- Gear quality in TSW is based on Quality Level (QL), 0 through 10, and color (Green < Blue < Purple, as is now standard in MMOs). Better gear has more stat points allocated to it. You'll want to be wearing gear appropriately good for the content you're doing. If you don't and you're questing, you'll die. If you don't and you're in a group people will be upset with you. Gear comes from random drops occasionally, and quests and dungeons frequently. Dungeons will typically drop the best gear available in the zone it's in, so the typical path is to do the quests and then do the dungeons before you leave the area. You can also buy gear with Sequins in TSW, but that's fairly specific and I almost never used mine.

- IN TSW SPECIFICALLY, you use two weapons. They can be any two, but for group play some combinations work better than others. Ranged is pretty much always advantageous if you're DPSing because there's a lot you don't have to watch out for if you're not next to enemies. You MUST use two weapons because of how TSW's mechanics work. There are two basic types: resource builders and resource consumers (exceptions do exist), and using weapon builders gives you resources. Most offensive builders give you resources for BOTH equipped weapons, up to 5, so if you use a builder five times, you can then use resource consumers for each weapon. (You can use them before five, but it will be weaker, most of the time.) If you don't use two weapons, then you are "wasting" a five-resource consumer every cycle and thus leaving SIGNIFICANT damage on the table.

- IN TSW SPECIFICALLY, there are no levels, but that doesn't mean advanced characters aren't stronger. As you kill things and complete quests, you'll gain experience points (XP), and you'll gain Ability Points (AP) every 40k XP and Skill Points (SP) every 120k XP. SP are used to buy skill levels in weapon types and talismans (more on this later), and AP are used to buy abilities (same).

- SP: you can use gear of QL equal to your rank in that skill + 1 I think? Might be exactly your skill. So you'll want to level your two primary weapons equally until they're level 10, and keep pace with them in Talisman skill (all non-weapon gear is talismans. Cosmetic stuff is clothing and doesn't affect your gameplay, other than weapons). There are two "tracks" for each weapon (e.g., Damage/Support) and each gives bonuses. Those bonuses are almost entirely worthless and you only have to level one track to be able to use better gear, so just pick the one that sounds best to you and ignore the other until you've leveled all weapons and talismans to skill 10.

- AP: The ability wheel has both inner and outer rings for each weapon type. You must fill out the inner ring abilities for a weapon before you can move into the outer ring for it. You must buy abilities in each tree in order. While it may feel slow at first, XP gain ratchets up dramatically as the game moves on, to the point where endgame quests can give ~200 AP in an hour, so don't worry about mis-spending points in the inner rings, and don't worry if early on you decide you want to change weapons. Every character can eventually do everything and have every ability.

- THIS IS IMPORTANT: Active abilities must be from your two equipped weapon types. Passive abilities can come from any weapon type. A good deck will nearly always have passives from other weapons. Yes, this will take a while to unlock. There are premade example decks on the left side of the ability wheel; these are typically shit precisely BECAUSE they don't do that (and also because they often have very expensive and very shitty abilities in them), so don't bother with them for now. You'll waste a lot of AP for little benefit. That said, they do give clothing rewards, so once you don't really need other abilities, go nuts.

- You will build your deck (i.e., the set of active and passive abilities you choose to equip) from seven active abilities and seven passive abilities. One of each type may be "Elite" (usually powerful, always at the end of a tree). There are some super stupid good elites (Live Wire, Empowerment), some really godawfully terrible ones (Whiteout, Born Leader), and some that are situationally amazing/important (Slow The Advance, Cleanup). These are just examples, there are others of both.

- In TSW you can only have one active main mission (Combat [red], Sabotage [yellow, typically involves being sneaky], investigation [light green]), one dungeon mission (purple), and three side missions (dark green, generally come from items instead of people). You can't drop a mission, but you can replace it in your log. If you pick up a mission while you already have too many of that type, it will pause the first mission. You can resume it by returning to the place you got it, and you will restart at the beginning of whatever tier you paused it on. You automatically get dungeon missions when you enter the dungeon.

Now that I've overloaded you, I'll leave it at that for now. There's lots more to know and I'll post it if I think of it.

[Francis Buck]

So, after hearing so much about it and despite not really liking adventure games, I picked up The Walking Dead. It is indeed quite awesome.

I'm currently in the beginning-ish of episode three. So far the only people left alive are Clem, Kenny, Katjaa, Duck, and the teenager. I left Lilly behind after she shot Carly, which pissed me off because she was really the only character aside from Clem that wasn't kind of annoying at times, and I was curious to see how the possible romantic sub-plot was handled. The game definitely does the "big, life-altering decisions" thing a lot better than pretty much any game I've played. You really do feel pressure when it comes to making choices, and there are several times when I've immediately regretted the decisions I've made (like killing Lilly's dad in the freezer). And I seriously almost lost my shit when they did the fake-out zombie-Clem nightmare. That would've just been over-the-top. Out of curiosity, is this series supposed to continue after these five episodes, and if so do we still play as Lee?).

[PhoenixFlame]

My point though is that I don't like glossing over choices. But since it is going to happen in order for there to be sequels, I wish the situation hadn't arisen in the first place. Instead I'd rather have choices that don't need to be glossed over that still feel big. For instance, just spitballing here, but on Tuchanka, they could've set it up in a way so that if you try to stop the cure, it still happens, but the Krogan are angry and don't help you and the Salarians do. Okay, so you're taking away part of the impact of that choice (since the cure would happen regardless), but it still allows you to say a great deal about who your Shepard is. That's still a big deal.

And frankly while the initial impact of that choice the way I describe it would be diluted compared to how it is now. Long term people would prefer it once they see whatever Bioware chooses as canon for the sequel, because once that happens it completely negates the choice that existed. Whereas in my example, nothing is being glossed over since the result was known, the choice was more about who Shepard is as a person than anything else.

My favorite aspect of "choice" in games is how other characters/parties will react to them. I care less about a different path, and more about certain characters suddenly hating you. Like, Wrex showing up in a bloodrage if you wrecked the cure had me giddy. Or, when Alistair loses his shit if you spare a certain character or kill another. Did NOT expect to lose him due to one decision, since he stuck with you even if you went down the evil overlord route. As much as I disliked Sebastian ("Maker NOOOOOO!!!"), I loved that there was at least one guy who would flat out leave if you spared terrorist!Anders. If they'd made Exalted March, I would've laughed like a maniac if you had to potentially deal with Sebastian making good on his threat.

I guess, then, I don't mind if they make one or two of the endings canon (like the Reapers disappearing could fit two of the choices). As long as it's not that stupid(er) green ending.

I must admit something very cringe-worthy. I liked Haytham from Assassin's Creed 3 so much that I bought the tie-in novel. It's his journal. The writing's not the best, but it's still fun to get inside his head. Isn't the King George Washington DLC supposed to come out this month? I hope they don't pull a Dawnguard.

[Reposado]

so not sure if anyone has seen this, but apparently this is happening,

version of mega man, looks like 2 but could be 3, new stages, with the street fighter characters as the bosses, and their special moves available as the gained weapons from beating them.

looks like it's free on capcoms site in a few days.

[mjgambino]

For anyone that has an Ipad/Iphone/Ipod: Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer is currently free. It's a card game and it's awesome. If you have any interest in board games or card games, you should have played this already.

Again. Awesome game. Free.

[Derfel Cadarn]

For those playing TSW, any good guides for starting out that you could point to? Something that, ideally, assumed you've never played an MMO before would be best. Need to help get Linda to wrap her head around the rather dizzying number of new concepts.

Don't rush through the game. There are lots of quests scattered all round Kingsmouth in remote areas so explore. You can also re-do most of the quests apart from the explorative missions. Quests you've done at least one will be ticked.

The barber in London lets you customise hair, the plastic surgeon in New ork lets you customise the face. He's fecking nuts, claiming Mary Shelley was a hack who based Frankenstein on interviews with his ancester. I half-expected him to turn my character into some horror.

And Daniel Bach, the fucked-up investigative journalist from The Savage Coast is awesome.

[Inigima]

I have now saved this image so that when I have a bad day and am feeling bad, I can look at it for a quick pick-me-up.

EDIT: Feel free to IM me with questions, Ran. Or whisper me in game, nickname Raiser.

[devotee]

so not sure if anyone has seen this, but apparently this is happening,

version of mega man, looks like 2 but could be 3, new stages, with the street fighter characters as the bosses, and their special moves available as the gained weapons from beating them.

looks like it's free on capcoms site in a few days.

This looks very cool. Played through megaman 1-6 countless times, and especially 2-3.. If it's nothing more than a good mod/clone, it will be much fun. Thanks for sharing

[Francis Buck]

Out of curiosity, has anyone tried DayZ yet? It's an MMO America's Army mod with zombies, where you only have one life and every other human player can you kill at any time and steal your equipment (or, conversely, you can team up with other people for increasing your chances of survival). You have to eat food and drink water to survive and supplies are super limited. It sounds pretty damn intriguing, but I don't know if I feel like going through the effort of downloading all the different shit and installing it.

I'm in the mood for a slightly more actiony zombie game after playing The Walking Dead though.

[Inigima]

Chef plays it a lot. General response: fun, unpolished, wait for standalone release unless you already have ARMA II: Combined Operations.

[Leviathan I]

DayZ is one of the best games I've ever played. If standalone was coming out tomorrow I'd still recommend buying it now. It's fucking amazing. Buy it, buy it now. 50% off at GOG http://www.gog.com/gamecard/arma_2_combined_operations

[MercenaryChef]

Out of curiosity, has anyone tried DayZ yet? It's an MMO America's Army mod with zombies, where you only have one life and every other human player can you kill at any time and steal your equipment (or, conversely, you can team up with other people for increasing your chances of survival). You have to eat food and drink water to survive and supplies are super limited. It sounds pretty damn intriguing, but I don't know if I feel like going through the effort of downloading all the different shit and installing it.

I'm in the mood for a slightly more actiony zombie game after playing The Walking Dead though.

it is a really fun mod. however, the zombies themselves often time are little more than a nuisance. you can avoid them, outrun them, lure them into ambushes, etc. the game really is at it's best when you are taking on other players.

the mod has a long ways to go before the true fun the game could be capable of comes to light.

you can search these game threads for some of my antics in the game. and should you pick it up let me know. i am willing to run with others.

Chef plays it a lot. General response: fun, unpolished, wait for standalone release unless you already have ARMA II: Combined Operations.

he does play if a lot. and he does find it to be unpolished. he eagerly awaits the standalone.

DayZ is one of the best games I've ever played. If standalone was coming out tomorrow I'd still recommend buying it now. It's fucking amazing. Buy it, buy it now. 50% off at GOG http://www.gog.com/g...ined_operations

i think what makes it fun a lot is the fun one makes for themselves. when i play it i make my own fun. and i have played with plenty of aussie players. i think we could meet up on a euro server sometime.

[Leviathan I]

i think what makes it fun a lot is the fun one makes for themselves. when i play it i make my own fun. and i have played with plenty of aussie players. i think we could meet up on a euro server sometime.

Yeah I actually play on US servers a lot more than I originally thought I would. Because US servers have a lot more people and variety of things like extra vehicle spawns and generally stuff that isn't in vanilla DayZ. Also 200 ping isn't that bad in DayZ. We should definitely play sometime.