Yeah, CS:GO kinda feels "right". The recoil of the guns feels tight and the hitboxes aren't monstrously huge. I like that they retuned the spray patterns for the lesser used guns to make them more viable. My favorite so far is the SG 553, which draws a "7" with a bias towards the tip of the shape for the last 15 rounds. Easy gun to use but a tad expensive.

It's $7.50 on Steam for the weekend...

Definitely a great game. I just started replaying the first Deus Ex yesterday actually. I haven't played it again since it came out, so that should be fun.


In other news, Borderlands 2 is coming out tomorrow night. One of my most anticipated games of the year; I loved the first one despite some flaws. According to the early IGN review, BL2 apparently improves on every aspect of the first game. Sounds good to me! Actually, if anyone's interested, I have an extra copy of a Steam BL2 pre-order to sell (from a 4-pack) - the pre-order gets you an extra class for free when it's released as DLC next month (like hell they couldn't just include it in the game ). $45 if you want it (instead of the regular $60), PM me.

Man, that's actually a good deal for DX. I gotta tight budget this month though unless someone hits me up to fix their computer.

I tried playing HR but it ran like ass on my pc

Is that the galil? I haven't used it much since the AK is so cheap.

Yeah, I played 1.6 competitively and never got into Source, but I'm getting into GO. I actually hate the recoil patterns as far as spraying is concerned, I absolutely can't spray for shit, but bursting works great and is usually more appropriate anyway. Spraying close up isn't too bad, I suppose. I'm just used to being able to spray someone from like 30 feet away in 1.6.

I was with CS since 1.5 and stuck with it through Source (played Source competitively and all that BS) and GO is really growing on me. It's such a breath of fresh air on the consoles (I know, I know...but I still rock Source on my PC) to generic "realistic" games like CoD. Just an absolute blast.

Yeah Borderlands 2 will be off the hook. Getting it for the 360 though, already got like two teams or something I'll probably be a part of. I loved the first one but this one indeed is sounding like it's just going to improve everything. Hopefully it's still decent fun solo too.

The entire world map/camping/survivalist thing I'm quite fond of. That was my favorite part of Realms of Arkania. I swear overland travel was almost as dangerous as anything in that game. You could starve, suffer from bad weather, get sick, have your boots wear out, get your feet wounded from walking barefooted, then those wounds get infected, then you die. Fantastic, I say! You really had to plan your journeys and that's something I miss a lot from RPGs these days. I think that game had different walking dispositions (ie, normal, forced march), which had its pros and cons. Camping was also of vital importance in that game - foraging for food and herbs (esp. if someone gets sick), having someone stand watch, etc. Darklands had a lot of cool things (studying, etc) to do as well.


Agreed. It also provides a lot of alternate ways of dealing with trash-mob encounters. Such encounters wouldn't be so bad if you had non-combat ways of dealing with them. Fate: Gates of Dawn appears to have a plethora of options dealing with monster & NPC groups (even being able to trade with them). Come to think of it, the Gold Box games had a decent interaction system too. It'd be neat to see an RPG that made fighting a last resort and undesirable - maybe make combat really hard, or don't reward combat as much (or at least reward other alternates as much, relative to what role the character is playing). Also, really wimpy monsters should run away or avoid powerful characters.


Yep, I read those 2 sites religiously (I don't have an account on either though). The RPGcodex forum is especially useful (that's where I heard of a lot of obscure Amiga titles from).


I read it from the developer's blog: http://www.chaos-chronicles.com

I check on that on a regular basis.


Indeed. Also, it'll be nice not having enemies run through your warriors to get at your wizard or archer (my biggest gripe with RTwP).


If there will be a lot of trash-mob encounters, I just hope there will be multiple approaches with dealing with enemies (as mentioned above). Endless amounts of fighting in older RPGs wasn't too bad because the combat was text-based (so it was lightning-fast). Graphic intensive ones... ehhhh, probably not so much. I don't think I'd want to be fighting waves of goblins, regardless of how good the combat system is. On another note, for weak monsters, they're going to be putting them in swarms or something (to speed things up a bit). It'll be interesting to see how that works out. To be honest, I couldn't handle Pool of Radiance's (1st one) combats with CC or ToEE's combat engine. Facing 60 goblins would take forever, but if it was 6/hex or something, 10 swarms... that's a bit more manageable.


Wizardry 8 used it was well (I can't think of any other blobber that used it for individual party members). Wizard's Crown was extremely complicated for its time (still hasn't been exceeded in many areas). I'm hoping CC will pick up where it left off. Hexes + facing is a good mix. I don't know if facing /w squares would work quite as well (squares in RPGs are more or less butchered octagons), and I don't know if 2 extra facing-directions would add anything. Apparently, one of their reasons for hexes/facings is for backstabbing. So I think playing a thief should be pretty fun.


Damn, that's too bad. The artwork/setting looked quite promising.


I finally got that one working - for some reason I initially had some severe mouse problems, but I think I fixed that. Apparently, this game punishes you for save-scumming - in the manual, it claims that it'll detect you saving/loading lots and will make the game more difficult. Now whether this is true or not... Also, the game supposedly will offer hints if you're lost or stumped (ie, if you're wandering around all clueless and whatnot). The copy protection scheme is pretty evil too: apparently, if you fail the random password check too many times, the game will subtly deteriorates over time (making the game impossible to finish).


I played Amberstar on via dosbox ages ago - never finished it, but I did enjoy it. Weird/unwieldy combat system, but oddly appealing (I like phased-based combat a lot). I also like the concept if your character starting off classless and having to join a guild. Unfortunately, the only real viable one for the main character was fighter. I guess if someone knew what they're doing, they could leave the first town and go to the paladin's guild and join that.

Ambermoon I dabbled with (via winUAE) awhile ago, but never got it to work properly. It looked fairly promising though. Unfortunately, the only commercially released version was the German one, The English one was a beta that was released posthumously. Not sure if any devoted fans tried fixing that one (it had a few brutal game-stopping bugs).

Black Crypt was a fairly popular Amiga-only Dungeon Master clone. I may give that one a go someday. Knightmare looks fairly promising too.

Indeed. I don't think it was the hardest part of the game, but it certainly had the steepest learning curve. You could pretty much understand combat after a couple of battles, but there was so much micromanagement and meticulous planning involved in travelling between locations that it took ages to get comfortable with. I also liked the events that could happen during your travels, such as coming across villages, characters and even alternative transportation like a boat. Darklands was also good at providing these events, but travelling between places in that game was far more straight forward due to the lower complexity.


Yes. Trading with enemies, recruiting enemies, getting information out of enemies, these are all concepts that I miss. Instead you tend to get a few designated enemy groups who talk to you before combat, without providing you with a uniform set of options. Pool of Radiance provided a decent amount of options to talk your way out of a fight, as did quite a few other early RPGs. But even without being able to avoid combat in this way there can still be ways to speed up dull encounters. Quite a few games had some sort of automatic combat option that would just compare statistics and perhaps some simulated dice rolls to determine the outcome. Realms of Arkania had this option with a neat little animation to go with it.

In fact, one of my favourite designs for speeding through trash combat is from a game I'm currently playing again: Phantasie. Each character, based on class and level, has a set number of attacks per turn. Most characters start with just 1, while I believe fighters may start with 2. These increase as the characters level up, but most classes will never reach the 4 attack limit. Characters with 1 attack can choose "thrust", while characters with 2 attacks can choose "attack" and characters with 3 or 4 attacks can choose "slash". Slash has such a low chance to hit that you won't be using it against anyone other than very low level enemies. Attack is probably the standard in that it'll hit most enemies of the same level as you, while thrust has to be used against fast opponents (like flying insects) or higher level opponents. On top of this, slash does less damage per hit than the others, while thrust does bonus damage. This results in fighters being able to destroy four low level enemies per turn each, making trash combat quick and painless. I guess Pool of Radiance's equivalent is providing fighters with sweep attacks.


Yes, this is a problem with not having a grid. You can't tell whether enemies can fit through gaps in your front line or not. But I think the problem goes far deeper than that. When there's a grid your movement decision making is all about which square/hex to move into, where as having a sort of continuous battlefield means that you're able to decide on the exact pixel positions of your characters even though you never consciously make a decision with this level of granularity. So the problem arises of moving a character to an intended general position but finding out that they are a pixel too far/close to perform the next intended action. The best example I've come up with is when you want your character to move, perform an action, then move behind cover again. If there's no grid and you move a couple of pixels too far before performing the action, you won't be able to move far enough to get fully behind cover afterwards. A grid, however, provides a countable set of possible positions, making it easy to plan out that particular move. In fact, I think having a grid is almost as important as having turn-based combat. Discrete time units and discrete spatial units go hand in hand, with many of the same benefits.


I remember some of the larger Pool of Radiance battles had around 50+ combatants in. Of course, by the time you face swarms of that size you should have fireball spells to wipe them out in a few rounds. You do make a valid point on the comparative length of battles in old versus new engines though. This is entirely to do with animation of course. When you move from tile to tile with no animation it's instant, where as when you move from tile to tile in a modern game you have to watch the character move, no matter how fast the animation speed is. It's exactly the same for exploration too. In tile-based first person RPGs you can travel from one side of a map to the other at the same speed you can press keys on your keyboard, where as in newer games (typically 3D) you're limited to the movement speed. It's one reason why Might and Magic VI seemed way bigger than the older ones.


I sort of see what you mean by calling squares butchered octagons, because you can move off each square in eight directions. But I don't think the "corner problem" is much of a problem at all. If you think about it, if moving off to the side is worth 1 point, moving off diagonally is worth √2 points. As this won't come to a nice whole number, you can take it as 1.5 (overvaluing it) and then double the movement points so that moving off to the side is worth 2 and moving diagonally is worth 3. Attack ranges can work the same way too so that they synchronise with movement. Working out which squares can be reached when facing in a diagonal direction might be a little bit trickier of course, but if you can hit the two diagonals next to the side you are facing, it's probably fair that you can hit the two sides next to the diagonal you are facing.


If I remember correctly, the deterioration is reversible if you start getting the copy protection tests right again. Though don't rely on this of course. There's a lot of progress to be lost if I'm wrong!

A pox on thee, European release date, I want to play Borderlands 2 now!

Yo computer rpg fanatics, how's the Temple of Elemental Evil, is it any good as other Infinity Engine games? I'm interested to maybe buy this from GOG sales, never played it, yet i love Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and such.
How about D&D: Dragonshard and FR: Demon Stone? They are on sale too, seems to be much newer games.

Not sure if I count as a cRPG fanatic, I certainly haven't played them as much as Shutdown and Perdition seem to have, though I did start out in the early 90s. However, I did play Temple of Elemental Evil and it is buggy as all hell. Now, you can get over that with community-created patches, but still, that will tell you something about how much the game was play-tested. Especially considering that the most serious bug - you can't pick up any items except during combat - wasn't fixed by the developers. As Shutdown (I think) mentioned, it has a pretty good combat system which I found very entertaining, but it is sometimes rather difficult to make sense of since there aren't any proper squares or meters on how long you can go before you lose one or both of your actions etc. Also, the whole game is kinda clumsy and a lot of the quests are rather boring. The game has potential - like all Troika games - unfortunately on this one it hasn't been harnessed properly.

DragonShard is an alright RTS, but alright doesn't really cut it. Unless you're really into D&D and/or Eberron.

Yeah like MacMoney said, ToEE was marred by bugs, which was too bad. It definitely had a lot of potential and is probably one of the closest reproductions of actual table top D&D combat. Im not sure if you misspoke satanic_neumann but it's not actually done with the Infinity Engine- it's turn based combat and has more tactical depth than Icewind Dale or BG.

In other CRPG news, I've been playing adventure mode in Dwarf Fortress recently. It's pretty entertaining, like an open world rougelike. It's a bit odd since the game is in it's alpha and some of the features are incredibly detailed while others are underdeveloped or missing completely. Crazy too that it's being developed by a single dude with help from his brother- he's estimated it will take him close to twenty years(!!!) to actually finish it.

Lilith is the clingy type, it seems.

Yeah my bad, for some reason i always had impression that its one of those IE games, apparently not, thanks for the info. Good to know about bugs too. Bad gameplay decisions is something i can easily forgive, bugs not so much.

Didn't think you'd like it somehow, Morrigan, what do you think about it? I'm going to grab it asap, I'd love to hear some MA feedback on it.

October 23rd and 24th. That's the date consoles will get "Artorias of the Abyss" DLC for Dark Souls.

http://www.shacknews.com/article/75833/ ... r-consoles


Speaking of Dark Souls, Resident Evil 6 is showing some promise cause they realize how much we like invading.

http://www.gamerevolution.com/news/resi ... ayer-14357

Agent Hunt mode sounds so awesome. Invading and being one of the zombies.

The demo is out now, but you can't see what Agent Hunt mode is like on the demo. But you can coop with others for fun. So far it's looking like Resident Evil Revelations as far as being a mix of survival horror and action. In the demo, playing as Leon is the horror part. Chris is the action stuff. In the 3DS version when you played as Jill that was classic survival horror (I mean there's even a part where you're completely weaponless) and Chris was mowing down enemies. There's a lot more mobility in RE6 and you can move around instead of being forced to stand and shoot.

I got the demo for Resi 6 yesterday and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. I can't stand the other Resident Evil games (Operation Raccon City being an exception), but I seriously like what I've played; Leon's campaign is my favourite hands down.

Thanks, I will definitely NOT go near it then.

(but seriously that post cracked me up).

After finding "XENOBLADE CHRONICLES" in the disc-drive of my new second hand wii I bought for $50 (the game would have fucking cost more than that) and loving the fuck out of it, I find myself wondering if other wii RPGs are worth the time...

Anyone play THE LAST STORY? Any good?

Right now I'm playing SUPER PAPER MARIO and am a little disappointed after how much I loved the 64 and GC PAPER MARIO games... : (

I've never owned a Resident Evil game, but I enjoyed the RE6 demo. I'll probably buy it.

I'm eager for the release of Sim City 5 because, well it's actually supposed to work with Windows 7. These unexplainable crashes in 4 are infuriating. Try to demolish an 'immortal' building on accident? Fuck you, crash. Try to place a landmark that's supposed to be on completely flat ground and isn't? Fuck you, crash. Is your plug-ins folder too large? Fuck you, crash. Missing a dependency for a mod? Fuck you, crash. Is it raining outside? Fuck you, crash. I see your wearing blue jeans again today. Fuck you, crash. Oh. I see you haven't saved yet and you just finished that sweet canal system. Fuck you, crash.

I haven't raged this hard since the last time I tried playing Battletoads.

Every couple years I go back and each time that bitch breaks my heart and grinds me into dust.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/09/20/skywi ... im-engine/

First the release of Black Mesa Source and now someone wants to remake Morrowind. How cool is that?
In Skyrim engine I mean. That's the new thing about it.

I don't know. Going off of the pictures shown in the link, I think I'd still prefer the original in terms of graphics (which is why I'm assuming people would be interested in this).

Well, and they already released a remake in Oblivion's engine so I guess on second thought waiting for that new project is more than unnecessary.

I think the original Morrowind has fine graphics, but I'd still play the shit out of this remake

I've been playing Black Mesa Source lately and just wanted to say it's really cool so far. Even though the Source engine is pretty old by now, it still feels quite up-to-date in most situations.

Seconding this. I love how they spiced everything up instead of just stoically updating the graphics.
The Source engine is old, true, but Valve is constantly improving it so naturally it now looks much better than back in 2004.

http://www.lazygamer.net/xbox-360/witho ... difficult/

Really interesting. Says a lot about gamers being conditioned after playing games where you bump into invisible walls and such when you don't follow the path.

Wow, that's horrific. I hope you can turn off those hints in the game.

I just finished playing To the Moon, which I'd definitely recommend. There wasn't a whole lot to it in terms of game play, but it was still very touching nonetheless.

It doesn't sound like anything to freak out about overall with the article. But yeah pretty hilarious and honestly still not surprising at all. If items/objects don't have a super thick outer glow exploding outwards, that's a plus (and yeah I know you could turn that off in HR, but still... it was there).



Thief logic: Distract or go around the area!

I didn't like The Last Story enough to finish it. The Wii was pretty light on RPG's, Rune Factory Frontier is meant to be good but is probably pretty rare now. The Wii being backwards compatible with Gamecube titles expands the selection somewhat, so I'd take advantage of that if you missed stuff like Skies of Arcadia and Tales of Symphonia (again both are maybe expensive now, I have no idea). And yeah, Super Paper Mario was a genuine disappointment.

The problem is it's people like that setting the bar for gamers everywhere, at least as far as major studios are concerned.

Both Red Orchestra parts are reduced on Steam right now and I'm somewhat interested. Can anyone tell me if these games are any good?

I really enjoyed RO1, it was a great blend of realism and arcade gameplay. Haven't played RO2, but I heard that a series of patches made the game MUCH better than it initially was. Everyone is happy with the game now.

Also, RO2 is getting an upcoming expansion set in the pacific.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27jXLqAuDfY

I can't even comprehend this. I like to explore every section off the main path of every game I play, as I'm sure most people here do as well. Uncovering secrets and alternate paths and options are some of the best parts of most games... I wonder how many people complained that the game wasn't holding their hands.

FTL - And I'm hooked.