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[Türbo Bröther]

Let's compare

with the

shall we.

[Nillo]

Dead of Winter with my local gaming group. We were doing extremely well. Morale was high, and we had enough samples to solve the main objective at the end of the current round. We draw a crisis card that says "blah blah, something, if you don't do that then the morale drops". We collectively decide it's not an issue because our morale is looking very good, and decide to focus on other concerns.

I'm the first to do my turn, and I double check that I've completed my goals. Yep. Got all the cards I needed, so I just pick off a few zombies with my guns and pass. I mention that the waste pile is getting big and someone should probably clean it up. The next guy decides that he should go to the grocery store and pick up some items. His character contracts frostbite on the way to the store and dies, morale drops by one, ok. No big deal. Next turn, this guy glances at his hidden objective card, and I can see the sweat drops on his face. He starts rummaging through different locations with his small army of survivors, making a huge amount of noise in the process. Finally, it's the last guy's turn. He immediately leaves the colony with his survivors, searches a location, and then passes with two unused dice, WITHOUT cleaning up the waste in the colony. He's gotta be a traitor, right?

End of round. We check the waste pile, and reduce morale by 1 due to the excess waste. Time to add zombies. Because guy number 2 made so much noise, a bunch of zombies show up and slaughter two of his characters, reducing morale again by 2. Finally, we fail the crisis as expected. Morale drops by 1, morale hits zero, and the game ends. I'm still in disbelief that things could have gotten this bad so quickly, so I ask guy number 3 if he is the traitor since he didn't clean up the waste. Nope, he was loyal. There was no traitor in the group. We just played so embarrassingly bad while trying to solve our hidden objectives that we ended up losing. And it was the most amazing board game experience I've had this year.

[Tanner]

Hopefully I won't have to spend hundreds of dollars to play it sometime soon.

[vinheim3]

Sounds incredible for a board game

[ProgramGamer]

We played D&D last weekend and a guy in our party kept trying to find ways to kill the king and take over the kingdom in order to dig up useless artifacts. He succeeded in stealing a necklace of charm from the king (who provided us with goods btw) and about 1400 Gold from the local bank.

[SirNiko]

I'm on the third continent of Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, and now I'm convinced it is a fantastic game. It feels a bit odd at the first, but sometime around the second dungeon when you get comfortable with the rupees-are-everything mechanics it comes together perfectly. The art is top-notch, with every character getting a wide variety of unique expressions, poses, and up-close detailed faces. Every map is full of strange creatures and landmarks to find, and they're gated at just the right pace that you have time to explore each map before you can progress, but you move on before you can get bored. And, while none of their stories are particularly deep, you wind up exploring the personalities and backgrounds of all the inhabitants of the village. There are a couple of poignant, though brief, exchanges, like the arc with Aba and Junglo or the town guard and his wife, that are sharply contrasted to the rest of the game's goofiness. There's also a lot of collectable sidequests like accumulating recipes, finding the Rupee Items, or filling up your bodyguard roster. It's really robust mechanically and thematically.

The hardest part in the early game is overcoming the fear of running out of money. The game gives lots of little hints, but it takes a while to get a feel for the relative value of things and you waste money making low bids or bidding much too high. NPC dialogue changes to indicate if you're too high, too low, way too high or low, or pretty much spot on. Of course, you lose money on the bad guesses, but since the game tends to scale at a consistent rate you start to get a good feel for about where you should be guessing for a particular point in the game. Frequently the game goes easy on you, such as giving hints on how many digits to bid or limiting your losses to a static fee (like when hiring body guards). When NPCs offer you a reward, you get 3 or 4 tries to pick a valid amount, and if you're receptive to the verbal cues you frequently can get within 25% of the maximum reward within those guesses, which is good.

I was picking away at it slowly at first but now it's really sucking me in. It's one of those games that you want to play just because you want to see where you'll go next, and what you'll find at the end.

Bayonetta 2 was very good, but I just don't feel like it tops the first one. The vehicle scenes aren't as much fun (although the Starfox easter egg is cute) and the lumen sage fights all feel pretty much the same. Contrast that to the fights with Jeanne, which took place on airplane wings and riding missiles. Platinum was smart to make the bonus characters share a save file so you don't have to start from scratch to play one, so at least they're learning from prior mistakes. The final boss is just uninteresting and doesn't feel a lot different from the boss before him. Flying a jetfighter just can't possibly compare to riding a motorcycle up a multi-stage rocket and punching God into the sun. At least the angelic bosses were cool - the one you fight while falling down the tower feels really good and makes a good climax to the previous chapters.

The new weapons are fun, though, and the hints for Muspelheim locations make them a lot less obnoxious to hunt down. Double chainsaws is my new favorite weapon, topping even rocket launcher boots.

I also picked up Vanquish and Metal Gear Rising just so I could sample all of Platinum's goods. They keep dancing around perfection but missing the mark for odd reasons.

[quantumpotato]

We played D&D last weekend and a guy in our party kept trying to find ways to kill the king and take over the kingdom in order to dig up useless artifacts. He succeeded in stealing a necklace of charm from the king (who provided us with goods btw) and about 1400 Gold from the local bank.

Was the king killed repeatedly?

[Tanner]

I also picked up Vanquish and Metal Gear Rising just so I could sample all of Platinum's goods. They keep dancing around perfection but missing the mark for odd reasons.

Vanquish is their best game imo, and maybe the best third person shooter?

[Alevice]

I can vouch to vanquish being one of the best 3rd person shooters i have played.

[baconman]

I think it's because they don't know how to end/conclude a game. That's the only complaint I've had about Vanquish - it's short and ends unclimatically. But DAMN is it FUN!


Lately:

Stardust Vanguards + Crawl = GREAT local multiplayer shit.

Catacomb Kids = I finally caved and dived in.

Bejeweled Blitz/Subway Surfers = I've had lots of spurts of short time, to not play anything too substancial but still fun and twitchy. Plus, even though they're facebook/droid games for quick high-score stuff, at least they HAVE substance to them. LOVING the new BJBlitz powerups and "Daily Challenge" mode, too. I'd suggest a revisit if it's been awhile.

Galaga = Pretty much for the same reason. The shmup that JUST. WON'T. DIE. Arguably "design perfection."

Metroid 2 = When I HAVE had the occasional more-than-fifteen-minutes (but not enough to sit down and squish code), I've been plowing through chapters of this (see related Game Club thread).

[ThemsAllTook]

I tried a few rounds of Catacomb Kids, but I couldn't make any sense of it. There are so many mechanics thrown at me right at the start of the game that I couldn't even begin to keep track of what does what, or form any kind of coherent strategy. Is it one of those games where everyone expects players to study a wiki to understand what's happening, or am I just too dumb/not persistent enough to get it?

[surt]

I haven't had a chance to play it much yet, but I'm pretty sure the idea is to learn through playing/dying over and over again Spelunky-style.

[baconman]

I did find out that many items (including opening chests) require holding a button, rather than pressing it. Learning the controls is one clutch, but once you're past that, it looks like a very deep experience, like Spelunky meets Dark Souls meets 1001 Spikes.

[Praying Mantis]

I've been playing Ocarina of Time 3D.

There's quite a lot about this game that I never noticed before, despite having played the game 5 or 6 times before. Stuff like fairies hidden in gossip stones, being able to summon hookshot shortcuts using the scarecrow song, being able to hookshot onto climbable surfaces, being able to hookshot heart-pieces towards you, finding secret holes using the stone of agony, walking backwards with z-targeting as the fastest movement option, using z-targetting jumps/backflips and hover boots to sequence break and get to places you shouldn't, the blue tunic not being necessary for the water temple, reflecting Ganon's projectiles with a bottle, how damn useful deku nuts and spells are, being able to do the last 2 dungeons in whatever order you want, etc.

The game is fun, but it's so easy it hurts. I'm really looking forward to completing the game so I can play again, this time on Master-quest, 3 hearts only, no fairies, no shields, broken giant's knife only. Should be fun.

Also I don't like how empty the game feels, especially as adult link. As child link there are quite a few sidequests, minigames, secrets, etc, whereas as adult link there's practically nothing to do besides the main dungeons.

[gimymblert]

Also if you get butterfly to land on a deku stick ... try it out

[Praying Mantis]

Oh man wow. It's just like in Mario 64. In fact I've also realised how similar Mario 64 and OOT of time are in some aspects. You can see where the two games shared design philosophies and where they diverged.

[SirNiko]

The games were developed in the same timeframe, and Miyamoto liberally swapped ideas between the two.

[s0]

the entering paintings stuff was originally planned for zelda for instance. well actually it was just their plan B in case the n64's hardware couldnt render an overworld.

[gimymblert]

Also both game are truly having 3Dgasm in their level design, pushing blocks from across multiple height puzzle having to remind the spatial relationship? an entire dungeon wwith intricate vertical relationship (water temple) follow up zelda feel so flat (tp) in their design even vertical level (ww) feel like showing off graphically rather than gamelay.

Thing that blew my mind in mario 64 running around log you can ground pound make coins appear ...
SO FULL of little secret

Those moments where you have a crazy idea and you are like can I? and it's like YOU CAN and there is MORE TO IT!

[Praying Mantis]

Yeah I remember watching a video explaining the development processes, but it's cool to see those similarities in action. Apparently ideas were swapped with Star Fox 64, as well. I just found out the animation of Star Fox entering Andross' lair is the same animation used for Volvagia in OOT, because the programmer got lazy, haha.