Random gaming thoughts and questions.

Stop blundering around and getting seen first. Clearly you haven't cranked the difficulty high enough to punish you enough to stop repeating your mistake.

Does firing a shot not alert the whole camp to your presence?

Get a silenced weapon.

To your location, yes. But they don't have x-ray vision, if you keep moving you can keep flanking them. It's awesome watching them flail about while you keep popping up where they don't expect it like some kind of unstoppable monster.

• A turn-based strategy game where you conquer space cities using science.

Yes.

Is the new GTA going to be first person?


"An adventure game where you hide from giant monsters while upgrading your gear."
That's not a full game, but it's a pretty apt description of a lot of RPGs.

One of my favorite moments in Far Cry 2 was when I realized I could sprint away from an engagement, duck behind an object, and my pursuer would go barreling along past me on my assumed escape route. So much of the awesome in FC2 is in little things like this, or ammo catching fire, or when those relentless assholes in the vehicles hit a large rock and the car goes airborne, spinning through the air over your head. It does have some flaws (what game doesn't?) but overall I think whomever designed and programmed the gameplay is brilliant and I'd love to buy them a beer.

I need to reread Creole Ned's Sims 3 LP, because I'm not sure I remember him belaboring the fact it apparently takes four and a half hours to pee and eat a bowl of cereal before work in the morning.

It might be nerdy, but I'm pretty proud of myself that I could tell that the start of Skyfall* took place in Istanbul by recognizing landmarks from Assassin's Creed Revelations.

*They may have had a title card that indicated it was Istanbul, but we came in late.

In the credits for SMAX there is a line "But not including" Binky. Wjat is the story behind this line?

I did the same thing. They were riding motorcycles over the roofs and I was like, "Hey, those are the roofs on the Grand Bazaar! I've been there!"

Oh, I remember. Time in the Sims universe is a thing that would confound both Hawking and Einstein.

That's why I always use a time mod!

After playing through the walking dead yesterday, and having watched stakeland fairly recently (vampire apocalypse), I'm wondering if a werewolf apocalypse scenario would be possible. A lot of the same tropes, take away the moon cycle thing, and anyone who gets bitten/scratched gets turned into a monster, so the same mass spread of the infection arises. And large numbers of werewolves would be really scary.

I think it would be too scary. They'd take over fast and aren't mindless.

Why remove the lunar cycle? The fear of otherwise seemingly normal people becoming monsters at night presents an additional element of horror.

I would think because it significantly reduces the infection rate as infections can only occur for roughly 12 hours out of every 29.5 days.

I think if there is the lunar cycle, than you only have to worry about it every full moon, it's not a pervasive, ever present threat. One can just stroll about town or whatever most of the time without worry about running into a lycanthrope. I could see keeping the lunar cycle for the first (and only) transformation, like someone who gets a scratch doesn't immediately change. But then the outbreak wouldn't spread quite so fast, so you don't quite get that 'normal folks like you and me' thrust into a suddenly dangerous world, that you do with traditional zombie apocalypses.

Whoops, thought nightly instead of full moon. Maybe a scenario where the bitten become more wolfish closer to the full moon?

Agreed, I'd definitely toss out the 'immune to everything but silver', maybe toss out the massive size boost that most movies tend to give them, perhaps even having them shrink instead, to a more wolfbeast like state, and not give them hands / thumbs. Not mindless, but not able to open doors, and not of human intelligence should make them capable of pervasively spreading and bringing down society, but not wiping out humanity either.

With standard werewolves, you would get some pretty good hysteria going during the month as people accuse everyone of being werewolves and turn on each other. Werewolves turn human when they die but if they're already in human form you don't have a way to tell, right?

I'm now envisioning werewolf pack hunting behavior. I'm getting shivers just thinking about it.

Good, that's what would make it interesting. They could be anywhere, moving among you, no one knows. You have a month to dread what you know is coming and prepare, and every cycle a little more of civilisation is lost.[/quote]

Occasionally decorating the walls in Borderlands 2 are pin-ups of a bikini clad Claptrap posing on a beach. Why aren't there wallpaper versions of each of these? Or does my google fu just suck?

People voting to stake one another. Circles of trust forming as Rimbos claim to be the seer.

It'd be madness!

It could work in an isolated setting (stuck on an island, or a remote cabin in the winter, etc), which may work just fine, I just don't see a nation destroying apocalyptic and oppressively bleak scenario in which you only have to worry about the bad guys for ~12 hours, once a month.

Which, as people have stated, would basically turn it from post-apoc, to your standard forum game of "stake the X", which might not be a terrible thing to implement in a singleplayer, telltale kind of way, but just wasn't what I was thinking of.

It's kind of like a tower defense game, except with the possibility of not knowing if your friends are infected. You'd have to play with the timescale a little bit, maybe have a strategic RTS or TBS interface for securing your fortress throughout the month, and then a realtime fighting stage. I dunno, could be fun.

I had spent over an hour typing up a dark souls lp, and when I was two sentences from being done, the power went out and I lost a decent chunk of it. It felt very similar to actually playing dark souls.

So on a whim I picked up Civ V during the steam sale. Turns out I like civ games, who knew?

I'm torn between happiness at you joining the club and sadness that you missed out on the previous 20 years of Civ gaming.

Regardless, yay! Welcome to the world of "Just One More Turn..."

Balthier shot first.

So random thought after visiting the Xcom thread after recently reading the Urquan Masters Lets play.

Mashing them into one game! Encountering a Spathi on the ground and researching it gives you access to the dreaded Butt-Missile. Also, I have no idea what the Chryssalid ship would look like, but I'm sure it would be terrifying to encounter.

So something like this?

Dear Playdom,

I enjoy your Facebook game Marvel: Avengers Alliance. It is pretty okay for a Facebook game. However, I am tired of fighting the U-Foes and Madame Masque over and over and over. Have you guys never heard of Ultron? He's a pretty okay villain that does not yet exist in your game. For some reason you stuck Juggernaut with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants despite the fact that he has never been associated with them, what with his not being a mutant, but where's Pyro? Mastermind? For other X-Men villains, there's Omega Red and Lady Deathstrike. Hell, what about Apocalypse, Mister Sinister and the Marauders other than Sabertooth? Silver Samurai? Vulcan? Unus the Untouchable?! And that's just X-Men villains. For the Fantastic Four we have the Mole-Man and his Moloids, Super Skrull, Annihilus and, uh, Galactus? Okay, maybe not Galactus. You want New York organized crime? How about the Hellfire Club? How about the goddam Kingpin?! You don't have to dip so deep as to bring us Stilt-Man or something, but you've barely touched Spidey's rogues' gallery. Venom. Beetle. Lizard. Electro. Rhino. Mysterio. Scorpion. Shocker. The Sinister Smythe and his Spider Slayers. Hobgoblin. What? I forgot Carnage? No, I did not forget Carnage. So many more! Taskmaster! The Red Skull! Sin and her Serpent Squad! Baron Mordo! You know what weirdo Marvel villain gets randomly thrown into video games? Shuma Gorath. Sauron. Not the spooky eye tower, but the stupid guy that wants to turn people into dinosaurs. The High Evolutionary. I've fought the Wrecking Crew more times than I can count, but what about the Absorbing Man or the Radioactive Man or Kurse or Ulik? Maybe less teasing us that the Mandarin and Laufey will eventually show up and just let me fight them? And this isn't even touching the villains involved with the Inhumans or the Eternals whose members I constantly confuse because they're actually way too similar to be in the same universe! Thanos! The Deviants! The Kree! Those dudes! That one guy!

Argh!

Love,
Me

PS No one else but me cares. :(

Because if they have Ultron as a villain and you can beat him, the game is obviously broken.

Especially now that Hostess is gone and there are no more moist, flaky fruit pies with which to distract him.

To be fair, most of the time it's usually a licensing issue, I assure you that there is always at least one developer on a marvel game that has encyclopedic knowledge of all the characters.

No. There's no licensing issue here. It's an official Disney venture. They're all over the place with heroes. They're just being very restrained with villains. Some of the above wouldn't easily fit into the story they're telling, but it wouldn't be hard to cram most of them in there. After all, they did it with Magneto.

Edit: It's very likely they're holding them back for season two whenever they decide to do that. It's just that for now I'm getting tired of seeing goddam Madame Masque over and over and over. And over. And the U-Foes. Jesus. The fucking U-Foes.

Amazon has an ad asking me to preorder the hottest titles of 2013. The titles shown are Tomb Raider, Starcraft 2 episode 2, The Last of Us, and Dead Space 3. Amazon thinks 2013 is going to SUCK.