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"Chess has shitty class balance. The Queen is flat out overpowered while your actual front line units, the Pawn, can't do shit. I think the developers were afraid that no one would use the female character so they buffed up her abilities really high but now there's no point in using any other unit. The rest of the units suck. Rooks can only move in 4 directions, same with Biships. Boring. Also, whats up with the Knight? It has the most bizarre combat abilities of all the units. They are retardly hard to use cause they jump around like retards to move and attack. The devs should have named this unit Ninja, since Knights didn't jump around like that in real life. Worst part is the King. You see, the devs decided if your King gets captured, you instantly lose the game. W-T-F? This wouldn't be a problem, except that he can't move for crap. Seriously, the most important unit in the game can only move 1 space a turn? Good luck keeping him alive while every other unit in the game dances around him. Unbalanced classes, lackluster gameplay, and not to mention repetitive 1 hour+ games. Chess is not worth the time or money. 3 out of 10." (from /v/, apparently) --- Hachi-Roku> why did they register www.goodmorningcrono.com if that line isn't even in the game Tags: games
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Left4Dead? One of the greatest co-op games. Let's break it down for those not in the know: four people surviving in the zombie apocolypse. Four campaigns with five levels each. Friendly fire on at all times (barring easy mode). IS THIS AWESOME? ANSWER: YES I preordered Left4Dead three weeks ago because doing so meant that you got in on the demo early. The demo was the first two levels of No Mercy, though we later found out that the 2nd level in the demo was cut short for the demo - the full version has a bit more to it. In my group I played the demo the least, yet still clocked in about 10 hours on it. Now that the full game has been released, I've played it with friends for nearly 24 hours total and still haven't beaten all of the game, much less gotten all the achievements. So what's the deal?! Hell yeah it's fun, the randomization of enemy spawns along with the volitile nature of friendships being tested (not really) in a cooperative environment means we keep attacking L4D with full force. We've cleared 3 of the 4 campaigns now, and will probably start work on the 4th tonight. ( HERE'S SOME STUFF ABOUT MECHANICS )ENOUGH ABOUT THE MECHANICS, WHY DON'T PEOPLE LIKE THIS GAME AND WHY YOU SHOULD CARE There's two big complaints seen often levied against L4D: namely that it's too short and no fun. The latter problem can be addressed by playing with actual friends, people you know. I can't fathom playing through the campaigns seriously with randoms, I'd end up killing them all either for laughs or out of anger/frustration/boredom. The too short complaint has a small amount of merit that, if played through on the Normal difficulty level, all of the campaigns can be cleared in 5 hours, maybe 6 maximum. The key phrase here is "Normal difficulty level." After playing and clearing the demo on Normal, my group figured that while exciting, we didn't really have all that much trouble, and decided to bump up the difficulty to Advanced. Clearing that faster than we did Normal (probably due to familiarity of the layout), we decided to spring for Expert. This is where the game got interesting. Normal difficulty vanilla zombies normally deal 1-3 damage per hit. On Expert, this is bumped up to 20 damage. Hordes of vanilla zombies are now wince-worthy. Multiple special zombies spawn at the same time, whereas before they only came one at a time. Tanks can outrun players with full health and incapacitate with a hit. Witches kill instantly. Friendly fire becomes a huge problem. Normally I don't advocate playing on Hard modes in games because I find that they don't encourage changes in tactics, instead opting for the endurance mode of difficulty. Left 4 Dead's lethality increase without a corresponding defensive increase helps promote the core strategy of "you should really stick together in case someone gets incapacitated" because being incapacitated becomes a lot easier to do. (sidenote: the lethality increase has indirectly caused the creation of, what our group will call, an unofficial sixth special zombie: "The Single Zombie." For whatever reason, we'll fight off hordes with no problem, but if there's just one zombie charging someone, we'll find ourselves woefully incompetent to deal with the threat either as a group or individually. don't ask why this happens, we don't know either). The only way to play this game is on Expert, it's that simple. Everything else is just far too easy, which becomes obvious in... VERSUS MODE (READ THIS EVEN IF YOU HAVEN'T READ ANYTHING ELSE) In addition to co-op, there's a mode where two teams of survivors can play against each other in a points war. What happens is this: each team takes turns as playing the group of survivors, while the other team...GETS TO PLAY AS THE SPECIAL INFECTED!! This is exactly as awesome as it sounds. You take control of a random special infected (boomer/hunter/smoker). You can choose, in real-time, where you spawn in the level. You can't spawn in saferooms, in a player's line of sight, or right in the middle of players (too close). You can, however, do something like spawn right around a corner or behind a fake wall which only special zombies can see and break down. Every now and then, the Director will randomly let a zombie player play as the Tank, which is, again, exactly as awesome as it sounds. Players only earn points when they are survivors, and the amount of points they get is based off of how far they got in the level, how much health they had at the end (if they made it to the end), how many actual players were alive at the end, and an overall multiplier for the difficulty of the level itself. The areas for multiplayer are the two campaigns No Mercy and Blood Harvest; why Dead Air and Death Toll aren't included, I have no idea. Hopefully there'll be a patch that fixes that. In any case, after a group of players plays at the survivors in a level, then the other group becomes the survivors, and you keep trading off until all the levels are cleared. The reason I said that playing on Expert makes everything far too easy is that on Versus, the difficulty is tuned to "normal." This means that the zombie damage output is a lot lower, but if you manage to kill a player-survivor, they won't respawn (special zombies respawn every 30 seconds or faster if there's less players as zombies). In any case, all of my team's training on Expert makes us feel invincible in Versus mode, since we can breeze through packs of zombies with little effort and worry. Of course, it's always the special zombies you have to watch out for... Left 4 Dead, one fun game. Shame that we've almost beat it, but Versus mode is going to continue providing co-op entertainment for hours on end. Get some friends and kick some ass. (and in case you didn't click the LJ cut: check out these posters) Tags: games, left4dead
Current Location: No Mercy hospital
Current Mood:  happy
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A while back when Braid was hitting the preview scene before its launch onto Xbox Live, I watched a video of it being presented. "Presented" is the keyword here, as I found the presentation to be really not-good, and as such lampooned the whole shebang on IRC. Last night, I'm downloading demos for several games and decide to throw Braid into the mix, thinking that I should probably give it its fair shake before I wash my hands of the whole ordeal. ...(comedic pause) (wide-eyed, looking diagonally down and to the right) So now I'm going to buy Braid, and (pause for laughter to die down) say that the videos don't really do it justice. Graphically, gameplay-wise, music-wise, nah, none of them are accurately conveyed. If you've got the opportunity to play the demo, do so. I think my turning point was where I got to an area where the whole stage would not move until you did. If you stopped, all enemies, platforms and the like, stopped. If you moved to the right, everything animated and moved as normal. Moving to the left, however, caused everything to go in reverse. This is independent from your player-controlled time-wonkery. Anyway, yeah. Braid. Check it out. Current Mood:  ...
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SF4 has been my obsession lately so now I'm going to talk about it. Rolling roster count along with any thoughts I may have. The eight World Warriors. (Ryu, E. Honda, Blanka, Guile, Ken, Chun-Li, Zangief, Dhalsim) Nothing really new to say here. Guile still has two moves and his super may or may not require that funky diagonal-down-back->diagonal-down-forwar d->diagonal-down-back->diagonal-up-forwa rd mess. The four bosses. (Balrog, Vega, Sagat, M. Bison) Vega's mask can now be knocked off, in addition to his claw. I wonder if the mask has any in-game properties to it, and if so, does he have any sort of benefit while wearing said items? His rolling attack combos with itself (thankfully) and he seems to have a new anti-air (flash kick variant, it seems). Bison has the Psycho Crusher as a standard special move (it was a super for him in the alpha series). Akuma.Looks like the Shun Goku Satsu has two forms (super and ultra). Air Hadokens now point their noses along their angle of decent. The new fighters.C. ViperC. Viper has reminded me of an KoF-ish character since debut. In fact she's almost like Terry Bogard: ground wave attack, lightning form of Burn Knuckle, Crackshot Kick with fire...jury's still out. RufusWhen I see this guy fight, it looks like a beachball fighting. And I don't mean a beachball with arms and legs, I mean just the ball itself starts contorting in order to give the appearance of limbs. His moves include a lot of spinning, which is throwing me off (which is probably the point). El FuerteNot sure if he's actually a grappler or not. Appears to be an incredibly twitchy fighter. I'm unsure as to of his moveset right now, seems to be 1) a running attack where you push a button and it cancels into a jumping body splash, 2) a command throw, 3) either an air-throw or a ground-to-jumping throw, 4) a shallow angle rising kick. AbelOverall favorite of the new characters, his moves seem to flow well and he's got that SF3 Alex feel. And then as a secret boss, there's Sheng LongGouken. Haven't seen much of him outside of the video under the LJ-cut. Home-console only characters which haven't been seen in action yet: Dan, Fei Long, and Cammy. The new mechanic in the game is the Focus Attack, which has two layers of complexity. To use a focus attack you push MP+MK. Hold MP+MK to go into a winding up stance which doubles as a countering stance. When you're hit in this stance, two things happen: 1) you take the damage (though shortly thereafter you regain that lost of health back, albeit slowly. See the C. Viper VS Ken video under the cut to see a player do this to Hadokens early on in the fight. The reason why for this, I'm estimating, is so that when low on health, a player can't just focus attack everything that comes their way - taking the damage first and then recovering it afterward means if they're low enough to die from the attack normally, they will), and 2) you counterattack with an attack that is stronger the longer you've been holding MP+MK. I don't know if MP+MK can be released early so that you can break stance should the opponent go for a cross-up or something. The above is the basic use. The advanced use is doing a focus attack while in the animation of a special attack. Doing so (apparently) consumes half a super meter, but it stops the special attack animation and allows you to go right into the focus attack or a dash maneuver. The Abel VS M. Bison vid below does this a lot, and in C. Viper VS Ken, Ken cancels a fierce Shoryuken near the end. Am I pumped? Hell yeah you know it. ( Since there's multiple vids, I'm putting them under a cut because I'm nice like that. )Tags: street fighter
Current Music: yup yup yup
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So I was watching a speedrun of Battletoads... [Hachi-Roku> you know I think battletoads is really strangely designed compared to today, and I don't mean difficulty wise, I mean like [Hachi-Roku> if the idea had never been done before and today someone got the idea of a game where you climb on snakes to avoid spike pits and get to the end of a level [Hachi-Roku> that would be an entire game [Hachi-Roku> put like 100 levels and a level editor, sell it for $10 on popcap [Hachi-Roku> but battletoads, fuck it, there's 1 level like that with 4 areas and then the climbing mechanic is never used again [Hachi-Roku> same with level 2's rappelling [Hachi-Roku> level 9's swimming maybe not so much but it's another example of a mechanic being used once and only once In any case, if you've never seen level 10, Rat Race, you should. Tags: games
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Talking with a friend about how the 360 just kind of crept up on me all of a sudden. This list of what I've mentioned interest in playing was relayed to me: "You still have the whole DMC4, RE5, GTA4, Rock Band, GH3, Eternal Sonata, Fable 2, DW6, Assasin's Creed, Lost Planet, Lost Odyssey, AC6, and Bioshock... thing" I tried Gamefly a while ago and remember it as being a pleasant experience. That seems like the way to go in this $60 era. Not Brawl though. That goes straight into the "buy" bin. Tags: games, xbox 360
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I'll admit to not really paying attention to the world around me to an extent (still not so bad that I didn't know when Halo 3 was being released), but somewhere along the line I think that the channel 2 news for Houston thought it was in some movie set in an almost- Transmetropolitan era. In case that didn't make any sense, I'll explain just what happened. Passing by the kitchen, my grandmother's watching the news. There's some story on about how a guy dropped a gun, which then fired and killed a woman, so now the guy's on the lam. This is the "Crimestoppers" segment of the news, so I figure they're just putting out an alert for this guy. The camera then cuts to a shot of the two newspeople who were, I guess, hosting the segment, and they're dressed fairly casually (polo, slacks). What I really noticed, though, is what was situated behind them. There was the picture of the suspect we just talked about, but it was pasted onto a circular board. The circular board was segmented into 4 equal parts, and in each part was a picture of a different person. Essentially, like a big...wheel. A second later, the caption "WHEEL OF JUSTICE" displayed on the bottom half of the screen, and it was only then that I noticed the top of the wheel had a plastic "clacker" affixed to it. Without removing my gaze, I spoke. "Grandmother, that piece, it's called Wheel of Justice?" "Yes it is." "Did they...spin the wheel? "The what?" "The wheel in the back, did they spin it, and if so, was that the deciding factor in who got showcased on the news?" "Yeah, yeah they did." "Did that not freak you out?!"Tags: society, wtf
Current Mood:  blank
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Alright guys, I've been nice for a while now. I know that there's a few of you out there who haven't played Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, and that's really kind of a shame. See, it's really a great PS2 RPG, one of the best on the system, but it being released early in the system's life when not everyone had a PS2 along with possibly the BoF name might have scared a few of you off. But it's alright, you're getting a second chance. Not at BoF:DQ (though if you've got $10 and a GameStop handy, there's still a chance at that), but at something that seems to be just as awesome. Soul Nomad & the World Eaters. From the wikipedia entry: "At the very beginning of the game the main character is powerful enough to destroy even the final boss, but relying on Gig too much will be the equivalent of just letting the world be destroyed. Instead, the player is expected to build and train an army of units capable of handling whatever comes his way, relying on Gig's powers as little as possible."There are other interesting things ( "Tedious tasks like visiting the same area over and over in order to level new characters (a staple of older Nippon Ichi titles) are no longer necessary as any character's level can be set to that of the main character.") but give me something like a death timer, a D-Counter, and you've got my interest. Tags: games, soul cradle
Current Mood: intrigued
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MGT 3307 - EQUAL OPPORTUNITY MANAGEMENT DIFFICULTY: * MGT 4314 - SEMINAR IN QUALITY MANAGEMENT DIFFICULTY: **1/2 MGT 4330 - PROJECT MANAGEMENT DIFFICULTY: ***** MGT 4302 - BUSINESS STRATEGY DIFFICULTY: **** (-1 FAMILIAR PROFESSOR) PRIZE: DIPLOMA THIS IS IT! THE FINAL LAP! Tags: class
Current Mood:  let's rock
Current Music: F-Zero X - Dream Chaser (Silence)
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