Serrano

I've only played the first Age of Wonders but it was really good, it's like a fantasy version of civilaztion with a seperate turn-based statergy system when your units fight.

That’s going too far in the other direction, it deserves low scores (by that I mean around 5/10) and criticism but people are going way overboard. It has genuine problems and it’s not going to last very long, the campaign took me 8 hours at most in co-op (But I plan to replay it today for whatever that’s worth to you). I tried the campaign solo briefly but didn’t get far enough to get a sense of how that feels in comparison to co-op. From what I hear the AI companions (usually there’s just one tagging along but sometimes there are as many as four running around with you and more marines for the big crescendo events) are not a great help and can cause a lot of frustration, especially when you have to expose yourself to weld a door or hack a pannel and they aren’t up to protecting you. The enemy AI isn’t entirely braindead, the aliens will flank you through vents and broken windows and by climbing under catwalks, the ceiling, behind stacked shelves ect. (Though not to mislead you, most encounters will have the swarm going for a direct approach and it’s only the only the odd few at a time that sneak up to cause interference. They’ll also pounce on you and you have to button mash to escape, leaving you vulnerable to everything else around you), and the enemy soldiers will take cover behind things and occasionally throw/fire grenades that can one-shot you. They’re not terrifically intelligent and in both cases it’s numbers not tactics that make them dangerous, but at the hardest setting most enemies have a high damage output and my entire team went down more than a few times. One of the reasons I may have had a better time than people playing single player was that in co-op if you lose all your health you are incapacitated and need to be rescued by a team-mate before a final life-bar runs out. You can still be hurt while incapacitated which makes your life-bar run out faster but if you do die you will just respawn at the next checkpoint. Having co-op partners could have saved me from having to replay sections that I may have been stuck on, possibly sparing me some frustration. There is a very short stealth section (5-10mins tops) without weapons where you have to navigate what is basically a sewer with blind, shuffling suicide bomber aliens that are attracted to sound. They’re the ones in the video Morgoth posted and it’s the only time you see them (which is kind of a shame because they do monstrous damage and would have been quite deadly thrown into a battle with other alien types supporting). It was the only time I was actually bored playing A:CM but it was over so quickly that it’s barely worth mentioning. You spend a lot of time fighting humans as well as aliens which people seem to be really annoyed about, which is fair enough, it’s an aliens game so you want aliens, especially if the game is short (I’m not sure what the ratio is for human/alien encounters but I’d guess around 50:50?). That said, I personally didn’t mind and think it works well enough. It changes up the pace, it allows for three way battles, gives you an excuse to use other weapons, provides opportunities for cinematic moments and it’s just fun to have firefights on Aliens’ backdrops like the Sulaco with enemies also weilding weapons from the aliens movies (Even if you feel it was executed badly here, you can’t tell me that seeing or playing Colonial Marines fighting other armies isn’t a fun concept). The story is passable for an action game but it’s wafer thin and the characters are all shallow marine stereotypes. The returning characters don’t sound like themselves and the story twists as mentioned in reviews are obvious. I should also mention that the co-op campaign tells the story as if it were a single player game and only the host is ever acknowledged, the other players are just there. That’s not a problem in itself but it relates to game design choices that are a little jarring sometimes like how they handle checkpoints, when one person reaches a checkpoint everyone else is teleported there. Any notion given in interviews that A:CM was a worthy story sequel to the film was false advertising frankly, but it wasn’t that bad. But one good thing that may come of it is a decent movie sequel if there actually were meetings with Scott or Cameron about the game and it’s place in the continuity, fingers crossed. Some bugs and gameplay issues; * You can equip two main weapons, a pistol and a grenade/claymore. Unfortunately when you pick up one of the legendry weapons in the campaign it goes to the slot that your equipped weapon was assigned to, the original weapon disappears and as far as I can tell, can’t be re-equipped for the campaign, at all, even by starting a new game . I found myself with two shotguns for quite a time and lots of long-ranged ranged combat encounters where I was at a disadvantage because enemy soldiers do a lot of damage, especially when a bunch are firing at you making it difficult to close large open gaps and corridors. To add insult to injury you can’t even pick up pulse rifles from dead enemies, I had to wait a couple of chapters until I could pick up Hudson’s three-shot burst pulse rifle and frankly the fully automatic Pulse Rifle you begin with seemed superior to me. It’s also worth noting that you can customise the two original weapons with different sights and attachments (like an under slung shotgun for the pulse rifle instead of a grenade launcher) but the legendary weapons are not tweakable. * It’s not entirely clear how matchmaking works but if you’re assigned to be the host, you can’t start a co-op campaign until four people are in the lobby (and drop-in co-op is not an option for the singleplayer campaign), that can take some time as not many people are playing at the moment, and it can take longer if not be impossible if you want to play a certain chapter. Once four people join, even if someone then leaves the game can start and people can join a game already in progress. If you are another person are in a lobby but the other two slots are empty then you can be waiting forever before being allowed to start the game. I assume that everyone so far who has joined a session in-progress is doing it through their Steam Friends lists because I have always joined co-op sessions from the start of a chapter, but I may be wrong. * You can only mute people in the lobby and I don’t think you can kick people at all. If someone joins a match in progress and starts yelling, swearing and generally being really annoying there’s nothing you can do about it until the chapter/match ends and you are all taken back to the lobby. * The game uses the COD Door System where you frequently (but not all the time) have to wait for an NPC to reach and open a door for you before you can progress. The NPCs can be slow and while I and my group were never waiting long, we did have to wait sometimes. * In sections without the COD Door System you can run past enemies to the checkpoints and they will all disappear as the new set are loaded. This is poor design, I was lucky in that my group all actually wanted to play the game and didn’t take advantage of the exploit but if one person decides to sprint through the campaign it’s going to ruin the session for people. You can customise weapons, alien attacks and appearances with points you earn from playing the campaign and adversarial modes. The COD style weapon mods may sound like pointless fanservice but there are only a few options for each gun and almost all of them make a real tangible difference to the weapon. The pulse rifle for example has an under slung grenade launcher by default, that can be replaced with a shotgun or a incindiary grenade launcher. The magazine can be increased at the cost of a longer reload time and you can choose between a better scope for longshots or a red-dot laser sight which is more accurate that the aiming crosshair (which is also disabled on the harder campaign settings). I’ve mostly been playing campaign so I only have a sketchy view of the alien unlocks they look like they add some significant veriety too. You can choose between quick or heavy strikes, a tail spearing attack or a lower powered 360 degree attack, ect. with the warrior, different acid spit attacks with the ranged class and so on. You can also add traits like being able to move faster or being able to shug off some fatal damage. I’ve found the adversarial multiplayer to be fun, fast but small scale (6 players per team max, depending on the mode and the maps are sized accordingly) , the sides seem pretty balanced at the moment and both teams have a turn at playing marines and aliens in all the modes, but this is before people unlock everything and figure out how to use all the attacks and equipment. There are a number of modes including Team Deathmatch, Extermination - which is where marines basically need to capture as many areas as possible before a timer runs out, Escape- which is like a mini-Left 4 Dead mode, there are a series of checkpoint doors along linear levels that the marines need to reach and are scored based on how far the get. It’s my favourite so far. And Survivor - which is where 4 marines have to surive until a time limit expires, and fallen marines come back as aliens. There are no AI controlled aliensin any of the adversarial modes, it’s always 4v4-6v6. I enjoy the adversarial modes but I think that given how few maps there are for each and how limited it feels in terms of variety, the replayability just isn’t there. And there is already some waiting involved in getting a lobby together for matches so I’m not sure how long it will be possible to play CM online with random people. Personally I enjoy how the alien controls in this game feel, there are visual representations to help you judge acid spits and pounces,transitioning from surface to surface is easier in A:CM than it was in AVP2010 but you aren’t as fast so you have to rely on ambushes more than blitzing around like a muderous roadrunner. I’ve left some things out but I’ve written way too much here already, sorry about that. The reviews make it sound like there is nothing good about the game at all, and that’s just not true, I enjoyed it. But there are so many better FPS and action/horror games out there with a lot more content that it’s not worth buying A:CM at full price, especially when it’s been released within a week of Dead Space 3.

As someone who's played Colonial Marines I have to say it's not as bad as the reviews are making out. It's only an average game sure, but I'm having fun with both the co-op campaign and adversarial multiplayer and I think it is certainly better than AVP2010 in both areas. I can't see it having a lot of longevity (In fact, given how long it already takes to get matches started I expect the game may be pretty dead soon) and I'd definitely advise people not to buy it at full price but this is not the worst game ever made and I believe there is a certain level of bandwagoning going on in addition to valid complaints.

Ouch!

This is old news but Wasteland 2 backers can download a free copy of The Bard's Taie from steam (also includes original trilogy). http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3113

I think for most people the novelty would soon wear off and they'd wish they spent the money on something else.

The system is basically a dialog box that appears in the bottom centre of the screen when a conversation is initiated where you read what the NPC(s) is saying, for example: And then to the left of that there is a box with keyword response buttons that apply to that specific character/conversation like "Killer tomatoes" and to the right there is a box for more general keyword options like "Rangers" and "Raiders" which you can ask a lot of people.

I don't think they're doing sign ups for beta testers. Early access beta keys were one of the reward tiers for kickstarter backers. The release date was originally estimated to be spring 2014 but since they added those large stretch goals like two baldur's gate sized cities and a thirteen level mega dungeon the game may come out later than that.

This thread used to be about beautiful women, now it's about exploited animals. Where did we go so wrong?

It's good news but it's mired by the fact that 135 of those votes against came from the party in power at the moment.

Shame we don't get to see Pete Travis and Alex Garland's take on Death and the Dark Judges. I really liked it, wouldn't even call it a B-movie, it was a top notch action film that was more enjoyable than Expendables 2.

I was refering to this, but didn't mean anything by it. Sorry if it came across badly. Hee. For the last seven months, I've been playing a low level DnD campaign with friends. I don't have any single-target spells, and my wizard has burned and blasted the other PCs to 0 HP about a dozen times now. It's really the best part of playing the wizard. I get what you mean about mystery and danger making the characters more interesting, although I still liked the ME3 cast very much. I think if the game had been longer it would have helped, you don't get to spend long with anyone if you're trying to mix up your squad every mission and even if you keep them with you start-to-finish everyone has such a short personal mission compared to the ones in ME2 which probably spoiled us.

If that's what you're looking for in RPG companions then perhaps you should ask Maria if you could join her D&D group?

Battlefield 3's last DLC 'End Game' will feature a new mode called Air Superiority, a mode dedicated to large scale jet dogfights http://youtu.be/KYcAusACxFc

This may be old but I am not sure why more people aren't commenting on this impending MMO. It looks like it will offer a real D&D experience, also Perfect World is releasing the Foundry which will allow players to create there own modules and adventures in the game for other people. I am obviously missing something that explains the lackluster excitement from these forums? MMOs are no longer hip. There are numerous free-to-play ones and both the free and subscription based games are high quality, fun products. I do like the look of Neverwinter but I'm not excited about it because despite being beautiful and having some nice features it doesn't actually look very different at it's core from other MMOs I've played already.

The Neverwinter mmo was announced ages ago. It could be fun, I'm hoping it will recapture the same kind of feeling that D&D: Stormreach did. Here's some gameplay from August 2012 They will not drop 4e though, look how much work they've already done. I doubt 4e and 3.5e will make much difference anyway, it's still going to play like an MMO not a table-top game.

Can you guys stop defiling my favourite food please.

It was confirmed a few times although lots of people have asked for Shep to come back so perhaps they'll reconsider.

Maybe his character is just super lazy. Did you ever think of that?

http://youtu.be/Hg4H8g81ZbU http://youtu.be/kQW50wznP2g

I think it's more of a pop culture thing and where they wanted to go with the character. After all those years of watching MASH a Lieutenant Commander is going to be perceived as lovably incompetent whereas a Major is going to come across as either whiney or a potential love interest. The real question is how humanity ever got anything done without a Captain or a Corporal as part of the main cast and perhaps explains why the alliance and council races do very little throughout the series. And before anyone says it, yes I know the flaw in my argument I'm just hoping that nobody will point it out.

What he said.