Llyranor

Early hours of Market Garden as the Allies are heading towards freeing Eindhoven. It's go time!

Good reviews? It got horrible reviews. That should teach you not to rely on a single site to make a decision. In any case, what did you EXPECT S-E and Nintendo to tell you? HA HA HA HA HA HA I knew what I was getting into. I knew the game's pros and cons, and knew my tastes (I'm a sucker for Mana , I also enjoy Diablo multiplayer but HATE it singleplayer). So I brought two copies. Not best game ever material, but I got what I expected. I'm especially a sucker for coop, so it was well worth it. What could have also helped it quite a bit is online multiplayer.

Yes, that would be much more significant than actual choice and consequence. Long live Bethesda!

Did alanschu just threathen to kill RP? Is that against the forum rules?

Nick and me played in the beta. We haven't touched it since the first week that was released. That speaks for itself. Such high hopes.

Haha, I enjoyed Children of Mana quite a bit, if only for the coop. As a singleplayer game, yeah, stay away. If you like coop and are willing to tolerate a dungeon crawler with fairly simplistic mechanics, then it might be worth a try. It has nothing - NOTHING - on Secret of Mana.

Yes, killing off a franchise is the stuff of winners.

I'm sure deep down Hades and Gabs were hopeful.

In any case, this should give you some idea of how Phoenix Wright plays

That's giving the order to any artillery unit being part of the group receiving the order to only directly support that group in carrying out that order. Otherwise, any artillery on-call in that group would be able to support any other friendlies - however the AI deems it appropriate (or you can manually order it around, again).

I think that's an action/'strategy' hybrid, in which you can hop into planes and fly them in awesome cinematic mode. It's also coming out on 360 at the same time.

Yeah, Red Devils was the first game of the series, though it's not available anymore ('twas a different publisher).

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Or, you could import Ouendan instead, if you're more tolerant of Japanese pop that you've probably never heard before and therefore less likely to come in already hateful and enraged.

What that game called again? It's the Airborne Assault series. Published by http://www.matrixgames.com (same dudes publishing War in the Pacific, alanschu's latest fling). The two games available right now are Highway to the Reich (Operation Market Garden) and Conquest of the Aegean (invasion of Greece/Crete).

Despite how cool EBA sounds, I'm staying away for those reasons too. I liked the dual-character system in PoR. Being able to have two characters at once was a nice touch. A full-fledged coop would have been godly, but oh well. The extra mode is completely different than the main game, with stylus controls. I haven't played much of that to comment further, though. AWDS is probably just more of the same. It depends how much you enjoyed the GBA incarnations. I don't have the GBA ones, though, and only played very little of them. AoE apparently is good, but also buggy. I'm not sure the extent and severity of those bugs, though. People seem to think AW is the better game, though. Haven't played Snatcher, so I wouldn't be able to compare. You click on things and then you read text, yes, but I can't say there's really 'pixel' hunting. Given the linearity, you have to find particular clues before you can proceed on to certain parts of the story. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as you don't spend hours being lost and not knowing how to proceed while you try clicking over everything.

It's 'we're charging money for freaking horse armor and you will buy it anyway and love it' watered-down crap. Bethesda can't lose with that fanbase.

What games do you have? NSMB was enjoyable, but I didn't find it as awesome as the reviews make it out to be. Super Mario World was so much more awesome back in the day. Advance Wars Dual Strike is pretty nice for casual TB tactics. Self-explanatory. Dragon Quest Rocket Slime is bloody excellent. It's very cutesy, which may be a deterrent, but the gameplay is s(ub)lime. Part of the game can be Zelda-lite in its action-adventure exploration mode. The gist of the game, though, is awesome tank battles. Essentially, throughout exploration, you pick up ammo which you use to arm your tank. You do go about picking up ammo during tank battles and throwing them into cannons. The charm is that you can go completely nuts. You can infiltrate the enemy tank and then throw them into their own cannon and blast them off, you can actually jump into you own cannon and fly off to try to infiltrate the enemy tank, you can throw some of your teammates (or again, yourself) in a last-ditch effort to block off incoming artillery. Downsides is that it's easy and arguably short (10 hrs?). Castlevania Portrait of Ruin is nice, but it doesn't completely renew the Metroidvania formula. If you didn't like DoS too much, I don't think PoR will chance your mind. Megaman ZX is awesome if you like Megaman. Self-explanatory. Mario Kart is great if you like the series. Self-explanatory. Multiplayer is particularly nice. Phoenix Wright is an excellent (albeit linear) adventure game. The writing ranges from solid to great. It's very dialogue-heavy, which I find a good thing. You essentially play a defense attorney. The game is centered around 5 cases. Each case has an investigation phase where you go about looking around the crime scenes and pick up evidence. Then, there's the court phase where you go about cross-examining witnesses and presenting evidence (again, very linear, so things have to be in the right order). If you don't like anime, this may turn you off. If you expect a simulation of the law system, you will want to murder me for this recommendation. The sequel just came out recently. I'll pick it up this week. Hotel Dusk just got released over here. It'll be released in Europe in the coming months. I'll probably get it later this week and give impressions if you want. But general impressions seem to be overwhelming positive so far. The story/writing/characters are apparently the highlight of the game. It's a point-and-click adventure game. I'll let the intro make all the convincing. If you don't want this, you have no soul. Now, for stylus-based games, you should probably get screen protectors. Kirby Canvas Curse (I think it's Power Paintbrush over there in Loserland) is awesome and the first game that convinced me over touchscreen controls. You basically control a round ball (cutesy, may turn you off). With the stylus, you draw rainbows and lead the ball (Kirby) around, outmaneuvering obstacles and enemies. You can click on Kirby to activate some powers which you can obtain, or you can click on enemies to stun them (though, of course, you also have to maneuver Kirby around at the same time, so it's not as easy as it sounds). It's essentially a platformer, which a genuinely innovative control scheme. This is my favorite platformer game. Tons of lasting value with lots of things to unlock. Meteos is perhaps Tetris on crack. Puzzle game with a relatively simple scheme of putting blocks of the same color together to make them fly off the screen. With the stylus, you can slide blocks up and down. That's it. The draw of the game is how bloody frantic it can get. The stylus controls allow this to all happen at such a fast pace that wouldn't be much possible with the conventional dpad. Trauma Center is for all you surgeon-wannabes. It's not a surgery-simulation, as they're really cleverly-disguised puzzles oftentimes. This game is HARD. Some of the surgeries took me over 20 tries. You will either love it or hate it for that. I for one quite enjoyed the difficulty. The best part was really seeing your skills with the stylus improve as you progressed through the game. Each surgery can take from 2 to 10 min, so nice game for quick bursts.

Imagine, if you will, a game taking place entirely in real-time. Let's pretend it's a RTS. You have your units and stuff. Let's implement command and control on those units, and implement some sort of chain of command. So, you have your HQ, which has its own set of sub-HQ's, who each have their own subunits, and so on and so forth. In terms of how you issue commands, you can essentially select any unit along the chain and give it to them. If you give it to a unit, the order applies to all of its subunits (unless you've detached some of them and put them directly under 'your' control - meaning the lead HQ). The AI takes into consideration what units it has under its commands and then formulates a plan according to that. For example, if it has a good amount of units, it'll set aside some reserve troops, and set up multiple fronts, perhaps send off a few to cover the flanks, and so on. In terms of how much you have to click, it's pretty quick. There's no micromanaging every single thing the unit/s do/es. Just select the general pathway, give a bit of info on how you want to carry out the order (shortest route, fastest route, covered route, etc), and the AI will carry it out to the best of its abilities (again, utilizing its resources/units appropriatetely for covering flanks, artillery back-up on-call, etc). Here's a, say, example of what the command menu would look like. Simple, efficient, and effective. You set what you want, give the general waypoints, and off you go. Now, what's the point of all this? Now, again, this is an issue of command and control. Let's say you don't absolute perfect control over every single unit at any time you want (which, perhaps, is the reason why RTS may be clickfests in the first place). Let's implement something called order delays. For every order you give, there is a time delay before it gets executed. This is pretty much the simulation of the order going down the chain and being planned out. After all, getting hundreds of units from one position to the next isn't necessarily a walk in the park. It takes time. Each specific unit has a certain 'time delay' associated with it, and when you issue an order to it, it applies to all its subunits. Let's also say each HQ/unit has a certain capacity load. They can only command so many units at once (which may apply if you attach more units to them than their initial subunits), and the more units you add to their command, the longer the order delay may take (representating, again, the amount of resources it takes to command larger armies). Let's use this example. Here you see the max capacity of the unit at 16, and that it currently has 4 units under its *DIRECT* command (meaning that each of those 4 units could have their own subunits, but it wouldn't affect the load of THIS unit). It shows the unit delay of this specific unit, and also the total time delay for the whole force under this unit's command (going throughout the whole chain of command). You can, also, in specific situations, put units directly under 'your' command. In which case the unit is removed from its previous HQ's load and put under the lead HQ's. Since there's less of a chain of command, the time delay is less. I went too much into detail, but what's the point of all this? Essentially, you can't clickfest your way to victory. It's not even remotely possible. First off, the time delay means that you can click as quickly as you can, but it won't have any effect until, say, 30-60 min (in-game time) from now. Second, each time you click more and issue new orders, there's a NEW time delay, which means the less you CHANGE your initial plan, the less you screw up your logistics. This is where superior foresight and planning comes into play. The player who can better predict the enemy's move and creates a plan according to that is the one who has the edge. It doesn't matter who clicks faster. Given that no plan survives contact with the enemy, hehehehe. This is essentially a contest of actual decision-making, not clicking. Adding the capacity load system to the order delay system is pretty nice in the sense that micromanaging all your units could in fact be detrimental, since the lead HQ only has so much capacity load. You are essentially, the commanding officer. You deleguate orders. You do not specifically order every single soldier order. It happens at a higher level. Oh, and I guess you could pause the game and issue commands if you wanted to, too. There we go. Pure strategy/tactics (depending on the scope of the game). No clickfesting. Period. All in real-time. Heck, you couldn't even do this in TB (unless it were done very awkwardly). The whole point is that RT vs TB is moot. It all depends on game design. Will we ever see this in a maintream RTS, though? Hahahahaha.

Not really. If someone decides not to buy Bethesda's FO3 based on something he/she reads on the site, say a comparison between FO1's turn-based combat and FO3's (hypothetical) real-time combat, an accomplishment has been made. Why? Because if Bethesda makes a FO3 which doesn't appeal to some people who liked the past two games, and they refuse to buy it because of certain features that were altered, the resulting lack of sales would signal the developers that they lost a portion of their customers due to such design decisions. That's what I'm advocating here. Advocate as you must, but do you really think that the number of 'lost sales' will in any way compare to the number of new sales from mainstream gamers who actually like watered-down crap? It sounds trivial at best. This isn't FOPOS watered-down crap, it's 'lol 2+ yrs in the making' watered-down crap. There's somewhat of a difference.

RTS are meant to be mainstream, of course they'll cater to the playerbase who wants at least some frenetic action in their experience. Play wargames. The AI there is pretty good oftentimes, even in real-time engines.

Well, technically, he could go on a murderous rampage and wipe out the Bethesda studios, so he's actually pretty moderate.

Are you going to pretend Fallout MMORPG isn't being developed by Interplay as we speak?

What Castlevania really needs is bloody 2-player coop for the main game.

Well, they have some good reviews and I visited the newspage semi-regularly for the past year or so. Then again, it could be that I've simply fallen under the control of The Hivemind from lurking so much. If you stare long enough into an abyss... :ph34r: <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'd be wary about that. Some loser named Role-Player over there sent me some compromising pictures by PM. I was shocked and offended.