Pidesco

I have NEVER played FF VIII and so far am enjoying it. I am NOT that far into it yet. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the card game (After I spent.... more hours than I will admit to on learning it.) The Junction system is.... interesting so far. Plot wise I've been enjoying the card game too much... perhaps tomorrow I shall advance with the story. I am honestly just playing this and looking at RPG mechanics in it that (from a game made in 1999) that are actually better than our "New S*^&" AAA RPG's, out now. The sheer fact you can COMPLETELY avoid all random encounters by walking on the road (In the beginning area) is..... mind boggling. A jRPG... with a no levelling area. *GASP*. If you love the card game, then use it to get spells to junction and try to get in fights as rarely as possible. You'll get a lot more enjoyment out of the game, that way. The one thing to be said for FFVIII is that its game systems allow for various ways to approach the gameplay. It's the only FF game that I've played that allows the player to avoid fighting and still have an effective party for the boss fights. It's very metagamey, though.

61GB. Like Enoch, I generally prefer to buy retail, as it is usually cheaper, but a some games went into the Steam folder, anyway. The Last Remnant and Empire are two of those.

Hey people, keep to the topic at hand.

Precisely my point.

I think Morgie was broken by Bioshock.

MoTB, VTM:B. Ignore the plot and characters and you'll find an awesome game.

5.7

Shale is a much, much better tank than Alistair and my PC deals a lot more damage than Alistair.

WAI Edit: And it was a 6.0 according to the Portuguese Meteorology Institute.

Blazblue is coming to the PC??? Awesome!

Earthquake!

Lots of flexibility and depth to the gameplay, innovative in good ways and it's a JRPG where you can actually skip the whole plot, because there's a skip button for every single annoying cutscene. Technically, it's great: gorgeous at times, very stable, good performance, highly customizable, supports keyboard, mouse and various gamepads, and has the option for Japanese or English voice overs. It does have a couple of problems, however. Firstly, the combat only really shines with a full army, which is a real issue as it takes quite some time before you can control a full army. Also, the fact that the gameplay is a bit unlike anything else out there may mean that you will take a while before you've mastered the system. Finally, artistically the game follows the JRPG school of style which means its art design makes rococo seem somewhat muted. The combat is unusual because you don't control the characters directly in battle, instead picking from a random list of possible orders for each unit, that you then see being carried out. To influence your army's success in battle you have to pick warriors from a huge pool of unique characters, organize them in units of 5 or less soldiers, pick the units' formations, upgrade their equipment, and direct their character growth. The way the characters level up is determined by what they do in battle and by what areas you tell them to study outside of combat. This is a fairly well balanced review of the console version of the game. Here is a list of differences between the PC and and the 360 versions. All in all this is one of the games I enjoyed most this year, and it's the first game in a long time to make me feel like I was playing something really new.

I'm not talking about the extreme lines of dialogue in ME. Those were ok by RPG standards, at least with Hale voicing them. I'm talking about all the mind numbing exposition, wihch invariably follows this template: Shepard: "Tell me about Whatever." Mindless NPC:"Never ending, wooden encyclopedia entry on Whatever." Also, apart from this, Earth's representative on Citadel acted like a ranting, spoiled teenager the whole time, instead of an experienced, hardened diplomat who's given the most important diplomatic position in humanity's history.

On the subject of VO cost, I thought most Mass Effect dialogues (especially the exposition ones) were ruined by the writers having to write around the budget. Really, if due to cost reasons the end product turns out like Mass Effect, I'd rather not have any VO whatsoever. I like reading good dialogue a lot more than listening to bad dialogue.

Disciples III is out in Russia: Google translation: http://translate.google.pt/translate?js=y&...sl=ru&tl=en "In reverie scratching turnips and stamped on the map." "Since the elements of chess, his mother."

Harry Potter and Twilight: Relevant literature, eh? I rather wanna see kids reading real books than this rubbish. Gateway drugs, man!

Like I said before, I read the third one, and found it like I described a few minutes ago. :shudder:

I'm not criticizing that! That's a positive, of course. What I could criticize is the way a lot of adults seem to fawn over Harry Potter, for example. Or the way Rowling's prose seems to deliberately treat the reader like someone mentally handicapped. Her books feel like the written equivalent of the condescending tone some adults use when speaking with very young children.

I generally think Harry Potter is a huge bucket of awfulness directed at not very bright kids. But the third movie was good enough to make me buy the third book, which I found atrocious. This book/movie relationship is similar to certain Tom Clancy works, like Hunt for the Red October.

Bioshock had an inventory?? Not the inventory, but the hacking minigame thingie. Same principle.

Funny how he complains about no inventory pausing in Demon's Souls when he complained about the exact opposite feature in Bioshock. Is there some sort of middle ground between paused and unpaused that I'm unaware of?

I think Prisoner of Azkaban(the third one, I believe) is far and away the best of the lot. Mostly because it seems like the only that can stand on its own as far as the plot is concerned, and it has the best editing and camerawork. Cuar

While it did require Windows Live, I don't recall having to activate it online.

What does that even mean? I'm not sure. If we are making the argument that God directs our history, then I'm not sure how the collapse of the Roman Empire would fit into that flowing statement. Sure, the church survived, but it took hundreds of years to re-establish itself. The Roman empire was extremely evil.

No, the Conservative party ruled for 10 years about 15 years ago. Besides those two big parties need the support of at least 2-3 smaller parties each in order to have a chance at winning, if they don't have that, the other side gets more votes.. Which makes things interesting, because a leftwing party could technically get smaller rightwing parties to support them and vice versa. Does that mean the bigger parties never get absolute majorities on their own? Nice.