They’re giant ants and “industrious” if that’s what you mean. They get a bonus to their building period but as I recall their units are particularly awful.
I’ve heard of OCC from surfing the Civfanatics board, but I’ve never tried because I thought it would be too much of a switch from my style of playing (build massive cities, build massive armies, move in and crush my enemies). How hard is OCC on chieftain?
I’d be fairly confident I could beat anyone else on here at Puyo Puyo.
In World of Warcraft
With no raid epics except rhok delar, and only PUG groups, I got my full tier 0.5 beastmaster set at level 60, a few months before the expansion. Valthalak was an absolute bitch with pug groups. It took literally 9 attempts before I finally just stopped telling people what to do and just took care of the ghosts myself.
Also, I soloed both scholomance and baron strat at level 60. Surprisingly, this was less frustrating and much easier than getting my tier 0.5 set. I handled baron’s skeletons with a combination of owl AOE aggro, engineering bombs, +damage and healing gear (back when mend pet was affected by + healing) and explosive traps. It took two cycles of bestial wrath to bring down baron.
Scholo was easier than baron. Most people would assume that gandling would be a problem solo, but he’s a COMPLETE pushover if your tank has 120 shadow resist and you use viper sting. He has hardly any mana, and 3 full cycles of viper sting completely drains him. He will never teleport the target he has aggro on, so the pet just sits there holding him still while gandling whacks away for 18, 23, 11 damage with his stupid staff, unable to do any real damage. When you get teleported, you can easily aimed + multi one of the mobs to death, autoshot a second one, and raptor strike the third for an exceptionally fast triple kill. You’re back in gandlings room shooting away and healing your pet in no time.
The doctor is by far the hardest boss to solo in scholo. I had to do some serious aggro-dumping shenanigans to get past him, cheetah-kiting him around the top level of the staircase. He runs just a tiny bit faster than cheetah, though, so you have to wait til he chases you to the opposite side of the staircase, hop the ledge, run up the stairs on the opposite side as he runs all around the railing trying to catch up to you to get back ahead of him. It took a dozen tries at least, because I would always just BARELY miss the timing and he’d daze me. The time I beat him, he dazed me twice, but I feigned death, told the owl to stay put and take the beating while I got far enough away, then used dive to have the owl catch back up to me faster than he could finish it off.
Clearing through trash was easy. Send in owl, get aoe aggro with screech, bestial wrath, nuke one of the mobs, maybe nuke a second mob before pet dies. Feign death, revive and feed pet, rinse and repeat. It felt like cheating.
There is a level in Homeworld where you have to blow up a hyperspace inhibitor guarded by about 120 ion frigates (a small ship armed with a single large cannon). I captured every single one and used them to destroy what they were guarding.
I broke a million points on one level of Peggle, and over 990,000 on three or four others.
Contra is NOT that hard of a game. I’ve had friends say I was a liar when I tell them I can beat it on 3 lives, and then I demonstrate (sometimes after having not played the game in a year) and then they never doubt me again. I agree that the only people who find it hard are those who are used to having 30 lives.
My proudest achievement is beating Final Fantasy with 4 White Wizards. I’ve yet to do it with 4 White MAGES (without Fade, how is defeating Chaos even possible?) but it was still a great accomplishment, especially considering all the trial and error (and failed boss fights and leveling up) that went into it.
I got up to Ganon in Zelda 1 without ever picking up a sword…this was YEARS before the idea or videos were floating around the internet. I didn’t know it at the time, but you can still beat Ganon without a sword, by using a red potion right after entering his room (which kills him instantly due to a bug).
I also used to be proud of being able to beat Shadowgate in 15 minutes without dying…that was way before tasvideos.org was around too.
I also beat Final Fantasy 8. Which is an accomplishment because I don’t know even one other person who beat it. Trust me, the storyline and gameplay gets WAY better once you get to disc 3.
Yep. Many moons ago. It’s old hat.
My brag:
Super Mario Galaxy: got all of Mario’s 120 stars (still working on Luigi’s - his ghost races are next to impossible)
Rehashing the ones already mentioned:
Final Fantasy X: Did the Chocobo Race & 100 Ligthning dodge twice (once for me, and once for a friend)
Contra: no deaths
Battletoads: beat it. I always thought level 3 was fun. The music was just right to get your heart racing all the way through. Of course playing it a lot allowed me to memorize the track.
Final Fantasy 8: beat it. I actually enjoyed the game a lot. It’s not my favorite, but it was engaging and the cinematics kept me interested the whole way.
Final Fatasy: I started a 4 white mage party and made it just past the Swamp Cave, but then the game got erased and I didn’t have the heart to start over
Wow, Forbidden Forest. I completely forgot about that game until reading about it in this thread. I must have finished it because I remember the “exploding into sparks” thing, but it’s fuzzy.
Bionic Commando and Contra weren’t that hard. Although I kind of cheated on BC since I would spend time in the beginning building up my energy bar so I could take more damage. So maybe it was hard if you didn’t take the 30-45 minutes it took to get a longer life bar. The thing I loved about Bionic Commando was some of the dialog:
Captain: Blow up! We want to blow up this area!
Soldier: But we have no bombs.
For some reason I thought that was hysterical.
My real accomplishment was finishing Section-Z for NES. It was basically a side scrolling shooter, with numbered stages, and at the end of each stage you’d take one of two paths (or sometimes just one) and in some cases a path would be locked (requiring you to complete a different stage first) and in other cases the path would take you backwards. I spent a lot of time mapping out the whole game (this was before GameFAQs) and eventually worked out how to get through it. I guess the game wasn’t that hard, but putting that much effort into it sure was an accomplishment for me.
I did it. Some of the concepts were cool, and the story did get “better”, but that’s not saying much, is it? That storyline was just weird.
I’ve beaten FF8 as well. The story lost my support after the orphanage scene and never quite gained it back.
One of my other accomplishments was beating my wife at a two player game of Ms. Pacman.
Seriously, man. Everybody knew everybody? All of these people grew up in the same orphanage and nobody remembered? What. The. Fuck.
I started playing LAN games with the original Quake. We play used to play Quake, Quake 2, Duke Nukem. . .I liked Day Of Defeat (DoD) a LOT. Didn’t care for the Source version, for some reason. Loved Unreal Tournament (UT) as well. Several years back, I went to a LAN with about 20 ppl that were friends with my nephew. We played UT to 100 frags. I won by over 40 kills. My nephew took second place. That counts as one of my favorite gaming moments. I thought it was pretty cool to go somewhere and kick the ass of 20 ppl I didn’t know. 
Let’s see. . .my bragging rights.
I beat the world record for Wizard of Wor on the 2600. I turned over the score counter. I don’t know if it was the world record when I set it or if it would be a record now. . .I can’t remember the score, and we didn’t have the internet back then, but one of the old magazines I had back then listed a record, and I beat it. Better to say I beat A world record, I suppose. No record of the event exists, of course. There goes my fame and fortune.
A year or so back, I was rated in the top 100 in the world with the Anti-Tank weapon in Battlefield 2. I was rated eleven-hundred and something in the world with the shotgun. Not bad I thought, since I wasn’t a pro, laddering, a kid, or even trying to do it. I just liked that kit. Out of over two million copies sold, I thought that wasn’t so bad.
They also have the drawback they have in the MoO games - it takes them a long time to assimilate conquered populations. You’ll have huge unrest problems unless you build an all-Klackon empire.
How did you manage Rattlegore and the Barov in the bottom middle room? Did you somehow kill Jandice as well?
I never attempted Jandice solo. From what I remember of the fight from groups (I only did the encounter a few times) the macro /target Jandice will ignore the ghost duplicates and go back to her. The owl had buffs giving him a total of 10.5k armor, and screech would be more than enough to keep the ghost duplicates focused on him. I assume that it would be possible, with improved mend pet removing the +physical damage curse, to just wear her out faster than the ghosts could overwhelm the owl. I don’t know for sure, though.
Rattlegore was a much easier version of the Doctor in the final room. With enough +healing gear, the pet could solo him while you constantly mend pet. The most difficult fight was actually the chick who mind controls you, but for her I would put a trap at my own feet so that when she used mind control it would trigger and stop me from killing the pet or wasting my cooldowns.
For Alexi Barov, it was possible for the owl to solo one of the elite mobs. I would send in the owl with screech off (so he didn’t accidentally get aoe aggro on the others) and growl on. Before the owl got there, I would multi-shot pull all 3 mobs, use bestial wrath and get off an autoshot or two on the owl’s target, and then kite Alexi and the 2nd mob out the door and to the staircase. The owl would finish off the first mob (and be really hurt himself) while I kited Alexi and the 2nd mob around the staircase. During this time, spirit bond would be passively healing the pet (who has been commanded to “stay” in Alexi’s room), and after a few minutes he would be healthy enough to fight again.
At that point I would feign death, sending Alexi and the mob down the staircase to attack the owl. I would command the owl to attack the 2nd mob, distracting shot Alexi away before he could attack the pet, and shoot the mob a few times from the top of the stairs until Alexi was close enough for me to worry about. The owl would finish off the 2nd mob, spirit bond would start kicking in again, and the rest of the battle was just simply kiting Alexi around the balcony for a few minutes until spirit bond made the owl healthy enough to fight again and bestial wrath cooled down, then sending the owl in, feigning death to get aggro on him, shooting Alexi until the owl was critical, then pulling the owl to safety with cheetah and dive and starting the kite/heal/cooldown timer all over again. It was slow work, but Alexi is much slower than cheetah, and his shadow damage aura has a smaller radius than my shoot range.
I thought of another one. I defeated the Master in Fallout by picking the lock to the room with the nuke and setting it off. This required a very high skill in Lockpicking, and I think Computer also.
I beat Captain Goodnight and the Islands of Fear (for the AppleIIe)…
…without having the decoder.
That’s right - whenever I got to the bits where you had to use the decoder, I just randomly entered a code on my keyboard. From memory the code was only two keys long, but still, can you imagine how many times I had to play it just for the odd occasion when I would fluke the correct code?
I’m pretty sure that I have the highest Gamerscore on the AAA SDMB list on Xbox Live. 20,320 and rising!