And I only played the second, but concur. Great little game. More games should follow the “short, but 100% of choices are impactful” route. I also wish more games had one path where you completely miss the plot at all :).
[QUOTE=Johnny Angel]
But replaying it before Inquisition came out, I was reminded how much I loved the characters.
[/QUOTE]
Oooh, ooh, which was was your favourite ?! The subtle seductress who can’t utter a single fucking line without shoving some cock-and-balls innuendo in there ? The brooding elf slash giraffe who’s angry at everything because MY PAIN ! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND ? The uguu kawaiiiii witch who’s sooo clumsy and does not understand anything for hilarious comedy purposes ? Or maybe Anders, he of “argh, yargh, Templars are bad, kill 'em all !” “but Anders, this one saved a basket of kittens” “Then burn them too, what are you waiting for Hawke !!” ?
The only tolerable one was Varric. Oh, and Aveline… existed, I guess. About as much personality as a bag of old socks, but at least she didn’t make me want to shake her every time she opened her mouth.
So what you’re all saying is that once I’m done slogging through Dragon Age Origins (which I am not enjoying because the game is both controlled terribly and impossible as a mage) I have even LESS to look forward to in DA 2? Aw man…
DA2 combat is completely different at least. I hated the game but I did enjoy the combat most of the time, and the additional waves of enemies warping in from hyperspace didn’t bother me. Boss fights all were horrible crap (like herding WoW pug people so they don’t stand in the fire, or quad-boxing four characters) but they were easy to bypass by setting the game on Easy for those fights and they were a small portion of the combat all in all.
If the ending hadn’t been so utterly idiotic and infuriating and a giant insult to the player, DA2 would’ve been a solid three-star game for me where the biggest disappointment would have been the fact it didn’t live up to DA:O.
Sure, it wasn’t done by the guys who did SC 1 and 2, and sure the decision to go full 3D was a bit of a travesty (everything looked too grey and washed out, 3D combat was rarely used because it was hard to tell how far you were and hard to control, and it made the Syreen look scary instead of sexy), and sure a lot of it seem like a rehash of SC2, and yes the 3D map was confusing and hard to navigate…
BUT the story took the plot in an interesting direction, I liked how they answered some things and brought back the Precursor legends. Once I stayed permanently with the 2D battles, the ship to ship combat was fun again, and the plot twists with the VUX and some of the other races like the K’Tang was very well done. I still hope for a future real SC3 done by the original creators, I think they mentioned that SC3 is dead to them and does not count the story as canon (which most fans seem to agree with), but in the meantime I’m satisfied with SC3.
They were fully-fleshed three-dimensional characters who gave emotional heft to the adventure by experiencing it along with you. Aveline and Captain Tits-and-ass are strong female characters at odds because their means of being strong and female are mutually incompatible and they needle each other’s vulnerabilities. Aveline struggles between loyalty to friends and loyalty to the law and order she cherishes, and she quails to find herself falling in love after having lost the love of a lifetime. Isabella struggles not to form loyalty, desiring deeper human connection against her own defensive selfishness. Varric the pulp writer exploits his friends for material while struggling against the crumbling of his family and city, but he still finds time to comb his chest hair. Merideth the mousy elf turns feline at anything which hints that her personal sacrifices for the sake of her people were hubristic and dangerous. Clarity comes for her when she knows at last that other people will pay the true price of her demonic pact. Anders presents himself to the world as a beatific saint who seems all the more saintly for never forgiving his own sins, yet in the end we know that he has had all along, for all his ostensible compassion, the vicious resolve of a suicide bomber. Emo elf I left sulking in his mansion. Probably he had a deeper story too.
And it’s not just the plot points of these individual stories that builds up the game, who these people are and what is eating away at them plays out in the things they say to each other when you’re running around trying to see if anybody is selling a backpack expansion. That part of the game was excellently well done.
I liked Fallout 3 more than Fallout New Vegas (the New Vegas map seemed smaller, with fewer places to explore) and I liked Baldur’s Gate more than Baldur’s Gate 2 (I particularly disliked fighting wizards in BG2 where you have to spend several rounds dispelling various defenses before you can actually do anything).
Call me an idiot, but since I’m just getting through the game so I can get through the next one so I can play inquisition, why the hell am I NOT playing it on easy mode? I don’t lose any story or missions do I?
I guess I always thought to just play it on normal, but I don’t care for the game, what do I give a shit?
New Vegas is a masterpiece and way better than 3. I would rank the main series NV > 2 > 3 > 1. 3 is fine just in retrospect not as great. The main advantage of it was that you could kill super mutants with Lincoln’s rifle while wearing his hat. I suppose there’s NV mods for that though.
I only played the first 4 “Hitmen.” Contracts seemed like a ripoff, especially since I played it soon after 1 (Contracts involves 47 flashing back to his old missions and many are retreads).
Which one? It looks like the computer and SNES versions are completely different. SNES was flawed as hell but I was a LOTR fanboy then so I liked it. Never beat it though.
It was interesting. Replaying so many times became a little tedious but. I. needed. all. those. swords!
At least you got it. It was never released in the US! I liked the world building part, and how the focus changed drastically at times, though kind of lame if you made the wrong fantasy-French guy the mayor as it screwed everything up. I liked the plot of its spiritual predecessor, Illusion of Gaia at times (depressing!), but the gameplay was a weak point.
There’s no story or plot differences to play it on easy. I was saying that mage is by far the easiest class to play. Beyond your own abilities, you also can have three mages (You, Morrigan, Wynne) dropping AoE hell on the enemies in fights making most stuff trivial.
Arcane Warrior is a mage specialization you pick up along the way which allows you to wear heavy armors by substituting your Magic state for the required Strength stat and Spellpower to determine your melee damage (you also get various shields, etc). So now you’re a mage tromping around in plate armor and swinging a sword and kicking ass with both because neither is hurt by your low physical stats. All while still raining AoE hell on your foes. Combine it with Blood Magic so you can use your health as mana, drain your companions for healing, etc and you’re pretty much unstoppable.
Normally I just have me, one of the other mages, and some combination of warriors. Usually works for me, but as much as I get annoyed with the game, I got to a point of impossibility when I ahve to kill some dwarf chick and her goddamned invincible golems. I’m putting it on easy from now on
Clive Barker’s Undying. I don’t know what the problem is (maybe it’s Clive Barker? I’ve never read anything of his, so I can’t comment on that), but I’m almost the only person I know who’s played it. It’s atmospheric and very creepy. Plus, in places you can set cavemen on fire. What’s not to like?
Also, Betrayal In Antara. This was just overlooked, standing as it did in the shadow of its admittedly superior older brother. Betrayal at Krondor was fantastic, but since they couldn’t get the rights to make a sequel, they had to make and build a whole new world, which was detailed and explained throughout the game itself, making the world feel much more detailed and alive. And I still have the tavern songs saved in my music collection today. To give a firmer idea: the game had a bug where, after the intro cinematic for the final chapter, the game would crash. I had this bug. I tried everything- restarting, reinstalling, even reformatting the hard drive and starting with a clean everything. Nothing helped. Sierra released a patch specifically to correct this problem- it didn’t help me. Finally, I gave up. Eleven years later, I found the game going for a dollar in a used bookstore, picked it up, rigged up a machine as slowed down as I could make it, played through and finally finished the game, which ended on a not-quite-cliffhanger for a sequel that never actually happened. All that, and I still love this game.
Here’s a fact you may have forgotten (elaborated for those unfamiliar with the game): the quadrant of the galaxy wherein the game takes place contains nine “rainbow” worlds, which are special for a number of important plot reasons. Their locations are scattered throughout the sector, but each of the worlds are functionally identical- with one important exception. Each of them is guarded by a small group of ships belonging to the Owa race. These ships stand guard and protect the planet from unwanted visitors. Their orders are to not let you through, and they won’t, unless you travel to their homeworld to get their orders changed. But they won’t tell you where their homeworld is. You can fight them and go down anyway, or you can turn around and leave. Eventually, you discover the Owa homeworld and travel there. If you tell their leader that you met and destroyed a guard force above one of the rainbow worlds, he’ll be impressed by their courage and your honesty, and give you an item you’ll need to complete the game- but only if 1. you followed the precise conversation path required and 2. it was around the correct rainbow world (Alula 1). Follow the correct path around the wrong world? Not good enough. Conclude that that’s not the right course of action and follow the wrong path at Alula? You’ve just made the game unwinnable. And the best part is, you don’t know that until several hours later, when you don’t have a certain item and have no idea where or how to get it. It’s a puzzle straight out of the worst of the old Sierra adventure games, and it spoiled any goodwill I might’ve had for SC3.
And that would absolutely matter if the purpose of the thread was to amuse or entertain you. It’s not; it’s to solicit opinions and (indirectly) experiences. The value of a discussion, or indeed of any experience, is not decreased simply because others have had the discussion before. The equivalent would be me interrupting your conversation to say “Oh, you breathe oxygen? That is so cliche!”
I musta been playing a hacked version where all the text was maliciously replaced by somebody’s 12-year-old cousin bad fanfiction-level writing, then :). Let’s agree to strenuously disagree.
Ah, the Amiga. A friend of mine had one, and we used to play the everloving shit out of Phantasie III. He was the only person I ever knew that had an Amiga.
LittleBigPlanet. People complain about the “floaty” controls, but only because they insist a platform has to be Super Meat Boy in tightness. Those are also the same people that can’t get past the Giant Wheel of Death and ragequit it before they got over the learning curve. I found it charming as hell, extremely immersive for a platformer, and had high replayability. The 2nd was just as good, if not better.
Of course, it was 1982, I was like 5, I hadn’t seen the movie (in fact, I’ve still never seen it), and I couldn’t read, so I literally had no clue what I was supposed to be doing, even in the abstract. I would just walk E.T. around, stay away from the man, collect dots (M&Ms?), fall in holes, and float around. It was plenty fun at the time.
The main problem with New Vegas is that it was totally in-world, in that you were just some chump courier who got wound into all that NCR/Legion/New Vegas business. That seemed kind of… lame to me. In the previous games, you were the Vault Dweller, Chosen One or Lone Wanderer, and an outsider of sorts, and you had more or less noble and important missions to complete. In F:NV, you were just some guy who was wound up in some shit that you couldn’t even remember, and no real stake in it.
LBP and LBP2 get an awful lot of play in our house. There’s an awful lot of community made levels of varying quality as well, but everything’s hilarious when you’re 5.