TurboPubx-16

Thank you for clarifying.

I want to engage in a discussion here but you'll have to elaborate more in your posts. Brevity is cool and all but after this back as forth I am not confident that we understand each other at all.

Maybe I'm taking this the wrong way, but in case my words were not clear, I was referring to the prevelant attitude among males that women are not worth respecting until they go the extra mile to prove themselves, and that a woman's worth is determined by what men think of her. Read the post I was replying to and tell me that it that's not what we're dealing with here. A guilty verdict is rendered unto a woman based on scuttlebutt and then someone holds their respect for that woman hostage as if to say, baby, you gotta try harder to get my approval. It's fucking gross!

With all due respect, why should anyone give a shit who is OK in your book? Just like someone said before, what I'm reading is "she deserves it," but now with the caveat, "here are some demeaning and impossible standards by which she could be redeemed." Alternatively, your next post could be genuinely fabulous, 100% well thought out and it could guarantee success for this forum and all of its posters.

Hearing this from multiple people is a real bummer. As a fan of isometric CRPGs I have to admit that I always have to push myself to finish them. Baldur's Gate's penultimate area looks like this (after the fog of war has been cleared): The passageways are only wide enough to fit one person. The passageways are filled with mindless skeletons that are very hard to hit. Pathing in Baldur's Gate sucks really hard so your party will pace back and forth across the same couple of meters. This is my favourite game of all time.

Just to give people a taste, and maybe lighten the mood here a bit . Just watch it for ten seconds, starting from where I've linked (NSFL - one F-bomb) http://youtu.be/5Ub8n1H6tYk?t=3h50m57s

Well dang, I guess we're all in agreement then: Civ V sucks. I'd still like to share a game save from turn one with anyone who's willing, so we can compare our styles. Maybe I'll just use this spot to tell Civ stories with screenshots, that's something I've always enjoyed reading. Soft caps are the devil because I don't know the exact formulas behind the punishments being rendered unto me. I would rather the game had hard caps that were easy to remember. It's not that Civ V is obsessed with penalties, it's that its obsessed with arbitrary and arcane penalties.

One of my favorite speed runners was doing a God of War 3 run, and during that section the otherwise cool chat got really ugly. I don't have the vocabulary to describe the phenomenon. That scene is pure exploitation and these guys were drooling over it, wallowing in their own spittle. I wonder if the people who developed the game knew what they were doing when they made that. It's like they wanted a part of the game to prompt their audience to tell rape jokes and have a good laugh. She mentioned on Twitter that she played a game for eight hours only to miss an opportunity, or lost the footage, and had to do it all again. She loves games a lot more than I do!

Thank you for reading my rant! I want to like Civ V and trying to have fun with it has captured my attention for reasons I can't explain, other than to say that it's still Civ, and I've played probably over a thousand hours of Civ in my life and enjoyed it a lot. More ranting: My current game as Germany has me thinking that I should have razed most of the cities I conquered, if not all of them. I love the series because of the challenge of taking the random and raw land and transforming it, but sometimes the world you get just doesn't deliver. Since the game favors verticality as you say, every city in a large empire that isn't awesome is to your great detriment. This fractured empire I have now is ugly and not fun. (Just as an aside, why can't I trade maps in this game? That's one decision from Firaxes that I have not figured out in the last four years) That's Berlin in the north-west (not the tiny one, I just founded that as an attempt to make a port). To the south of my capital is desert, to the north tundra, and to the east river-less plains, hence its isolation. If ever there was a start that encouraged conquering neighbors this was it. Look at all of that unsettled land, all the riches I am unable to exploit. In another Civ game all those empty spots wouldn't make great places for cities, but it would still be worth it, especially along the coast. The X'd out cities are probably not worth having, I wish I had razed them. The city in the yellow circle was the closest source of iron available to me. Founding a city just to get one important resource was typical in past games, but at this point this little turd is not doing me any favors. I took the city in the pink circle from Hiawatha. He was stupid enough to place it one spot away from the coast! I wish I had razed it and resettled one tile east. I think I might abandon this game and try again with more a more destructive attitude. There will be gardens, opera houses and aqueducts in a chosen few places; the rest of the earth will be like it was in 4000 BC.

As a life-long fan of the series, basically every strategy I used in the previous games came with heavy penalties in V ( :( ). After a few years and a couple of expansions I think the game is much better, and for something I supposedly don't like that much I have over a hundred hours in Civ V. I just picked up Brave New World and it seems like Firaxis has continued to change how Civilization works at every turn. Rivers don't give +1 gold anymore, is nothing sacred ? Civ V is inscrutable to me. I feel totally ignorant about the game's nuances and what the developers were thinking about the moment-to-moment gameplay when they thought this was fun. For example, what kind of goddamn message are they sending when the penalize your science for being a bigger civ? This not something representative in the real world, nor does it make sense in the game's own rules (higher population = more science but another city makes you stupider?) In my first game of BNW I was the Persians on Prince difficulty. I decided to devote the game to solving the problem of happiness. Well, I broke the game wide open: I pretty much had a golden age that lasted from 1000 BC to 2020; I had 150 happiness which trickled down into every other system in one way or another; I had forty delegates but ultimately won a culture victory. So the lesson was, build a big army and line them around your borders, don't get involved with the outside world, just build four cities and get fat. Not very exciting. In Civ IV I would fall behind in tech, my borders would be harassed by the neighbors who coveted my lands and I would be the pariah for not going with the mainstream religion and making friends. In my second game of BNW I'm the warful Germans and boy does everyone hate me. Pushing through these insane penalties to be a conqueror is painful. The part where I fight armies is a cakewalk (Prince difficulty) but the part where I transition to an efficient, solvent, happy nation seems insurmountable. I feel like from the time declared war on my neighbor I was locked into conquering the whole world. Shaka dislikes warmongers, does he now? What has Civ become. In Civ IV religion made strong alliances from early on, which lead to a game full of conflicts with multiple people on either side. In V a lone civ utterly steam rolls its neighbor, then lone civ is evil pariah and everyone else declares war on it. It's lame and predictable to have the AI hate you nonstop. It used to be you could make a few friends. The AI in Civ V is whiny, petty, stupid, terrible at placing cities, sucks at war, goes from hostile to friendly to hostile again in fifteen turns, doesn't trade luxuries at all if they dislike you, doesn't warm up to you when you shower them with gifts, either has 1000 gold and 100 gpt or 0 gold and -20 gpt, it goes on and on. Civ V's difficulty is stupid because it penalizes me to the point where the AIs are worse off for it. As an example. I would gladly trade luxuries 4:1 if the game would let me, or if I was allowed to build up my cities then caravans would bring my rivals a lot of money. The worst part is that the AI can't even get along with itself! The whole world is a pile of uncooperative and isolationist countries fighting over benign little city states. The game even has a feature where a rival leader will pop up on your screen solely to insult your for the sake of it. Would you guys be interested in doing a Game of the Month type of thing, where we share a first-turn save and compare each other's progress? I want to figure out this stupid dumb game for peacenik builder babies.

I regret bitching so much in this thread previously. With the new additions (especially hacking) I think the developers have made the game winnable in almost all situations. I've been watching hard mode no pause challenge runs on Twitch and now I feel like if I sit down and take my time I can win the game most of the time and have a lot of fun doing it. I no longer feel like I am at the mercy of the game's whims. An amazing thing about FTL is that in any interesting playthrough of the game at least twice there will be a situation where everything seems totally fucked, but if you persevere and play smart and you can make it through almost anything. Except maybe suicide Zoltan boarders.

I calmed my ass down and finished the game last night on normal. I credit my victory to a few things: - Long ranged scanners is a very useful and very cheap augment. I think I'm going to start paying the mercs to scout the area for me if I lack scanners. - Early on I got the +10% scrap augment - I relinquished and went back to my old standby, stealth. - I found three Burst Laser IIs, on top of the starting one. Yeah. The fourth one would have cost something like 250 scrap to equip so the last slot was taken up by a heavy laser instead. - I had Remo piloting, Scoops on weapons and Breckon on shields. Breckon died literally three seconds before victory . It was a lucky run but I had a victory coming. I've relearned the stages at which enemy ships start getting another shield, another weapon etc. and what the player ship needs to have in order to be untouchable in most encounters.

I beat the original release eight times on normal, is the expansion supposed to be harder? I'm still stuck on the Kestral A. The charge weapons make sense to me, but I haven't found a good justification for the chain weapons. Seems like if you got three chain weapons and stealth to counteract that initial wait you could be very powerful, but just having one means (using the laser as an example): volley 1 takes longer than it would with the normal equivalent; volley 2 is easily synchronized; volley 3+ the chain weapon is wasting half of its charges. Am I doing something wrong? Edit: I just died in sector five. I jumped into an asteroid field where an automated ship had a pair of anti-ship drones, MKs I and II. This game refuses to play fair. I think I'm done. Stealth was never offered to me, nor were the sensors that would have warned me that it was an asteroid field. I am not getting the sense that I can plan ahead unless I learn every system and every relationship between them, which I don't have the time or inclination to do. One thing in particular that irks me is the travel time of projectiles once they have been fired. I cannot possibly keep in my head the speed of a laser vs a flak shot vs an ion etc. Weapons look like they will synchronize well on paper but in practice it takes a lot of trial and error to get it right.

I was lost one afternoon when I ever-so-slightly caught a glimpse of something smooth and yellow against the jagged gray rocks that surrounded me. I turned to and peaked around the corner to face a beautiful and gigantic dwemer ruin, hidden in the wastes by a semi-ring of mountains. Without the "content radar" of the later games, finding something like that in Morrowind was so thrilling! According to Steam I only have 20 hours in Morrowind, but compared to ES IV and V I have so many more specific memories of III. Unfortunately, I was so concerned that I would screw myself over by leveling incorrectly that I ruined my character the other way. Am I right to assume that those boots make you blind for technical reasons, ie, the developers didn't think anyone's computer at the time could handle you running at that speed?

I lost to the second phase of the boss, in what can be described as a run blessed by the laser gods. I sold four Burst Laser 1's! I discovered the greatness of the Charge Laser 2, as well as the flack (flak?) cannon. I tried out the Beam Drone 2 for a bit only to discover that synchronizing it with my weapons was not possible. All in all it was a very fun run. I've discovered that the way for me to enjoy FTL is to take my time. Reading all of the text helps me relax and play the whole game much more methodically.

I very much wanted to play the game on day one for the community discovery aspect, plus I spend more than a few hours a week watching Dark Souls speed runs, so waiting for the PC version was out of the question. But after seeing how much better the frame rate is I think I'm going to save new game + for another time, when the PC version drops in price. I have zero regrets playing the game on console but I am hesitant to tackle this game's "hard mode" without that steady performance. There is a theory going around that all those terrible, terrible hit boxes will be fixed when the game is at 60 fps.

Just to let everyone know, Chris Dan Owens has released a sequel to his masterpiece music video, Shine on Me: . I think it goes without saying that Owens is major influence on From Software and that large parts of the Souls series are direct lifts from the seminal work of this genius.

This is the hate-one thread, right? I have permission say I dislike a game and be a dick about it, right? I am done after 64 minutes. If you want to know what the guys on the podcast mean when they say "references are not humor, they are the death of comedy" then play Guacamelee. Oh look, a poster that says "EL GATO GRUMPITO", that is so fucking funny. Oh, there are Chozo statues in this game, wow, these developers are really true to their roots. No need to massage that in there guys, in fact, you should have a character frequently mention them by name.

I just wish I wasn't always forced to try out new strategies. I just died in the second-to-last sector and didn't get a single laser weapon in any of the stores. I'm not saying that I dogmatically buy lasers no matter the situation, I just happen to have preferences. A burst laser 2, pike beam and the starting missile launcher got me through the bulk of the game just fine, until the game does what it always does: pairs the next tier of ship with an event that cripples a part of your ship or starts the fight off with four intruders. This time my engines were reduced from level 7 to level 1 (good luck trying to escape quickly) and I was facing a Zoltan ship with more weapons than I'd ever seen. I had just bought cloaking and I guess I probably didn't use it as much as I could have. And I guess there was a flak cannon back in sector 2 that I could have sold an arm and a leg to get. Yeah, I'm salty .

I forget how to play this game. I ran out of fuel and spent most of a sector fighting the pursuing fleet. The rebels get a new off-screen artillery which is some serious bullshit. Either I will play this game for a couple more hours or another hundred, hard to say right now. Almost forgot: I lost a crew person to an event, and when the event was over this crew person came back with every stat maxed. I couldn't believe it.

I really enjoyed that area, and I was surprised to hear how many people hated it. It was the perfect setting for that part of the game, I wasn't expecting anything so beautiful and mysterious. I also enjoyed getting my butt kicked by three simple enemy types working in concert. There's quite a few interactions going on there, with the singing of the dryads keeping the little brown demons asleep, the hammer guys only showing up when your own hammer is about to whack a wizard, the priest at the end who heals everyone... I wish every part of the game was this tough and nuanced.

For my second play through I'm trying to do things very differently, which means no fist weapons, even though I have a strength character this time . I'm alternating between a couple of great shields made from boss souls. I lasted about five hours with five adaptability, had to put that up to 12 to alleviate the rage (there's only so many times I can hear myself groan, "I fucking rolled!"). The standard mace is one of the best weapons in the game, along with the basic version of the club. I've reinforced a great axe and a large club to the same level and I'm somewhat disappointed to say that so far the humble little mace does much better then its big brothers. I still use the big weapons occasionally to feel like a bad ass. That's one difference between DS1 and this game: you are allowed to sacrifice efficiency for a little style due to the reduced difficulty.

I'm not able to fully articulate how I feel about Dark Souls 2 in comparison to the previous game, but I do know a couple of things: (1) I love it, and (2) it doesn't make Dark Souls 1 obsolete, which makes me love it even more Hopefully one day I can make an intelligent post about why I feel that Dark Souls 2 is the better video game and Dark Souls 1 is the more beautiful and more important piece of art.

I had the opposite reaction to the same thing. Every time I picked up a new dexterity weapon I was excited to try it out and in many cases I would use that weapon for the next couple of areas. My arsenal of fully upgraded weapons stands at: - rapier +10 - two Ricard's Rapiers +10 - two Bleeding Falchions +10 and +8 - two Caestuses +10 - Blacksteel Katana +10 - Dark Warped Sword +5 (boss weapon), at one point it was lightning. This turned out to be the most balanced weapon in terms of damage, speed and moveset. It was also totally boss at killing crystal lizards. - Poison Black Scorpion Stinger +5 (twinkling titanite weapon, already has poison when you get it, and I was able to infuse it with even more!) - Fire Long Bow +10 - Hunter's Blackbow +10 I love each and every one of these weapons. Except for the rapier that I started with, they all have their place in slaying the multitude of different enemy types in the game. I finished the game last night after 64 hours at level 143. DS2 saved some its best areas and fights until the very end, I am very happy to say. Apparently new game plus has new enemies, new bosses, new drops, new multiplayer content: I can't decide if I want to roll a strength character or start NG+ with my dexterity guy. There's also magic, which seems ridiculous. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface! There's quite a few things I haven't killed yet, including

Could you elaborate why? I'm near the end myself and I have to say that the game doesn't reach the highs, or sink to the lows, of Dark Souls 1. It is a very consistent experience, perhaps too consistent.