The Gaming Thread

[Geek King]

Don't know if it's been brought up but has anyone here played portal? I'm debating playing it and was wondering what you all had thought of it.

Play it. Now.


There will be cake later.

One of the best games I've played in a long while, even if it is short. Must have the audio up to hear GlaDOS. Going back through it with the creator's commentary on is neat too.

[Broomjockey]

Lemme put it this way.

Portal was worth the entire price of the Orange Box. The rest is like a treat to make up for it being short. PLAY! YOU MUST PLAY!

The cake is a lie! GLaDOS was awesome though

[RichS]

Third-ed. Get The Orange Box and play it immediately!

Short, yes, but oh so sweet. Like cake...

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction...

[gunsage]

Never tried Portal, but it certainly looks fun. I have tried the Flash version, but I don't have the link, sorry.

[Gravekeeper]

Get. Portal. Now.

-.-

[Shangri-laschild]

Hahaha. I've gotten portal as of this weekend and will be playing it very very soon.

[gunsage]

I don't believe Portal will run on my PC as it's about 4 years old, but yeah, I'll check it out. Well, as expected, Jak 2 is already giving me headaches even to get back to where I was before I had deleted my file. I do like the fact that there are infinite lives, but come on...throw me a checkpoint or something every now and then! The game is TERRIBLE about not giving you checkpoints. I guess I shouldn't complain...the GTA games are like that, too...of course...I haven't beaten any of those either.

VJ is awesome, as usual, but I gotta ask, just in case anyone knows...how do you access things in the background? For example...the first area I know of that does this is the underwater level. There are blocks in the background and I can't figure out how to get over there. Is it a matter of going into mach speed mode and eventually a "copy" will hit it? If I recall correctly, this is also how I got stuck later. I'll have to review the instructions just in case there's something I missed, but none of the tutorials show you how to do it, so yeah.

Beyond that, I started rifling through my MAME titles. There were a lot of them that I had no idea that didn't work. Then there's still others that need tweaking or just don't work right anyway in some fashion. For example, Point Blank has no sound AND there's two crosshairs. I'm assuming this is for two players, but when you're playing with just one player, having the other one floating in the middle of the screen with all the frenzied action going on gets a little annoying. I guess that's about it for now.

[Shangri-laschild]

I still need to finish the 1st Jak game. Years and years of not gaming and only recently being introduced to it means that I am not very good at it yet unless it's one of those easy hack them up games where there's not a lot of fine small movement. I had heard about the suckyness of the second one though save wise.

[gunsage]

And see, that's another reason the second one irritates me so bad. Perhaps it's a lot like what happened with Devil May Cry...I don't know.* The original Jak was EASY...at least, IMO. Now, this could be because I've trudged through such other platformers with no/little trouble (Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, Conker's BFD, etc.), but I found it to be fun, funny, a weeeee bit short, but yeah, pretty easy in most instances. Therefore, the absolute CRANK in difficulty came as a shock.

Now again, maybe it's just me...but yes, I think they definitely needed more checkpoints. Even Ratchet & Clank was better than that!** In any case, Jak 2 is still fun, but driving sucks, racing sucks worse, and an absolute lack of checkpoints makes the game so overly frustrating that I have to play it in small bursts for fear of turning into a hulk and smashing everything in sight. On a positive note, at least it helps me acknowledge and work on one of my New Year's resolutions (channel my anger more effectively).

*Sources say that Capcom was concerned about the difficulty being "too easy" for the third DMC and thus, HEAVILY increased it. This is another reason why you unlock easy mode by DYING vs. Cerberus.

**Ratchet & Clank, while not done by Naughty Dog (creators of Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter, etc.), has the exact same engine of Jak & Daxter and a lot of similarities as a result.

[gunsage]

All day yesterday, I prepared myself to trudge through more of Jak 2...then I decided against it. No, instead I did something quite different. I can't even list all the games I played because I went through SEVERAL Big Fish titles and a few other puzzle games. However, here are some key highlights of those and more...

- Puzzle Quest (PC)
- Bejeweled 2 Deluxe (PC)
- Online Sudoku Games (PC)
- Pizza Chef (PC)
- Metal Saga (PS2)

Now, a lot of these (especially sudoku) you guys have probably played. In fact, I used to do Sudoku all the time. I really hadn't been bringing my sudoku books to work, so I just recently started doing online sudoku. One thing I don't like is often a lot of cheaper ones don't offer a "pencil" mode where you put in a small number that COULD be in the square as part of your deduction process. Now, these sites could certainly counter with the fact that it makes you think more and remember, etc.

Problem here is often these sites also time you and try to make you feel inept by ranking you. Nice. Anyway, enough of that...if you've never done sudoku, DO IT. It helps you think more dexterously, you become more visual-spacially minded, and you think more about how things rely on each other within puzzles, tasks, etc. Puzzle Quest is much more addictive than I had originally given it credit. I'll probably play some of that tonight...assuming I can get my wife away from it!

Another important one here is Metal Saga. I think I provided the link before, but Metal Saga is a remake of a remake. I think the original title was Metal Max for the NES. The remake of that was Metal Max Returns for the SNES. Both of these titles were not released in English, however, AGTP, an online group, has made a translation patch for the SNES version. In any case, Metal Saga is a remake of THAT, so there you go.

So what's Metal Saga? It's a sandbox-style RPG set in a post-apocalyptic future that involves tanks, making money...and a silly sense of humor. Now granted, there are a couple of loading issues, a lot of repetition, not enough hand-holding (in my opinion), vanilla graphics, etc. But I'll say this...the enemies remind me of something straight out of Earthbound, the music is decent, the humor overall keeps things fun, sandbox-style keeps things at your pace, and also the sandbox-style enables you to beat the game pretty much anytime you want (multiple endings, most humorous).

That's about it.

[RichS]

Beyond that, I started rifling through my MAME titles. There were a lot of them that I had no idea that didn't work. Then there's still others that need tweaking or just don't work right anyway in some fashion. For example, Point Blank has no sound AND there's two crosshairs. I'm assuming this is for two players, but when you're playing with just one player, having the other one floating in the middle of the screen with all the frenzied action going on gets a little annoying.

Yeah, there's some games that either aren't perfectly running, or need a lot of horsepower to run. As far as the two crosshairs, I usually find the controls for Player 2 and move their crosshair off screen.

Unfortunately, I haven't been doing much gaming, except for the small MAME or Bejeweled 2 session - too much college work. I know that I'm going on a gaming binge when this semester is over.

Hopefully, Portal 2 will be out by then.

[gunsage]

Since we're all talking about Portal, I want to know if this is real or even possible. I didn't play much in the way of games last night because I was out taking tests at Tech Skills. I didn't even think about moving the second crosshair...oh well. The weird part is the ones I really want to get working are things like Die Hard Arcade, because I'd really rather not go through the hassle of finding a Saturn then the game. Screw that.

I also noticed something. Older fighting games are HARD. I mean, granted, Dead or Alive, Tekken, Virtua Fighter, etc. are tough in their own right, but I went back to play Fatal Fury and absolutely CANNOT get past Tung Fu Rue, even as a first challenger! Oddly, most other flavors of SNK fighters I can do relatively well on (Garou Mark of the Wolves, Art of Fighting 3, Waku Waku 7, etc.). I also started dabbling again in RPG Maker XP (not sure if I had mentioned that previously or not).

I'm starting to get my creative essences back. I really need to start developing at the very least to flesh out ideas and design plots. Fun stuff.

[RichS]

Die Hard Arcade plays - I just got done trying it. It's listed as imperfect, probably because they added speedups to it - still, it's one of those games where you need a lot of CPU horsepower. I'm getting between 95% - 100% frame rate on my 2.6 GHz. dual-core system (MAME can't utilize mutiple cores at the moment). Probably will need at least 3 GHz. to run 100% all the time.

I'm not a great fan of fighting games, it's just that I'm terrible at them. Give me the classics - Ms. Pac-Man, Pooyan, Frogger, any Donkey Kong except 3. etc...that's what I originally was drawn to MAME for. Then you find games you've never heard of or that you never got a chance to play...

Oh, yeah, you might want to check out MAWS - it's a good resource to see if a game works perfectly, imperfect but plays, or not at all.

[Chanlin]

I've been away for a bit (blame school and work on this one ), and I have to admit its really late (ie 4am) with my posting.

Why am I posting so late....

I've been up all night playing Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice.

I have got to say I was apprehensive at first about a new character but Capcom pulled this game off beautifully. The story itself is every bit as engaing as the previous installements, there are plenty of interesting plot twists and the new "perceive" system is really a cool new tool, not to mention the videos and visuals used during trials were quite well done over all. To put it mildly the used the unique platform of the DS to darn near its fullest potential.

I also have to say with just having finished it that Phoenix Wright is a cunning bastard and if you ever cross him consider your days numbered

[gunsage]

I wasn't even aware that the latest installment was out already! I know what I'll be getting with my paycheck this week! I really haven't been playing too much lately, but I think what I'm going to do is get back to grinding. In other words, I'm going to pick out a few games where my characters REALLY need to level up, but I know it's going to take a while to level them up and just wail away on them. Examples include...

- Dragonquest 8
- Shadow Hearts
- Digital Devil Saga
- SMT: Nocturne (hard mode)
- Metal Saga

And yes, obviously I highly recommend all of these titles.