hugh_jazz

Rune: Halls of Valhalla

Arena mode anyone?

I have a 27-inch 1440p rotatable monitor, so if you can still play this in portrait mode on PC, I'm gonna be all over it.

GO GO GADGET NECRO THREAD

So me and some friends have been thinking about doing this type of Game Club thing, but knowing nothing about the game makes it hard to know if there are good logical stops - like chapter breaks - where we could agree to stop and let the others catch up before having a discussion or whatnot.

Does this game have anything like that, and in that case what are they? If not, could someone suggest a few other types of milestones at a reasonable distance apart? Something like "Play until you get the rusted key" or "Play until you get to this very specific and hard to miss piece of plot." Otherwise I guess we're just going to have to wing it.

@rethla: The Steam Controller should be fine, being able to use it like a touchpad but with extra buttons and sticks and whatnot. There was a quick throwaway thing IGN did with Josh Sawyer at Gamescom where he said no to consoles but that the Steam Controller seemed promising, so I'm hoping for official support from them on that. Either way button and mousemapping sould be pretty straighforward.

I actually enjoy reading the text, at around 120% scaling, on the TV. It's a laid-back, relaxed experience. My computer is at a work desk with an uncomfortable ergonomic chair, as that's generally the place where I do productivity things.

I've gotten about or not quite half-way through PoE proper before I realized I wasn't really agreeing with the character I made, a ranger. So now I'm at the point where I'd buy this expansion in order to be able respec if it meant changing class(which I believe it doesn't), but more likely I'll buy both expansions at once and roll a new character, rogue or cipher probably. At the point when part 2 comes out I'll be able to play with a Steam Controller on the couch(since I just got a GTX 960, and am not at all interested in playing in front of the computer monitor).

I'm not sure exactly what the episode structure would entail, but I'm sure gonna be happy about playing the game being able to modify the party AI instead of microing every little thing. It'll make me enjoy the base game a lot more, I'm sure of it.

My old stand-by is Planescape Torment(but only if I can start when you get out of the sewers). But of more modern, actually well-playing games, I'd have to go with Guild Wars. Man, I loved every damn thing about that game. Even the memory of the early beta events fills me with such sharp nostalgia for the time and the place.

What the hell is up with that online mode? I guess it's intriguing, but even the best of games don't try that type of stuff in their online modes. Hope it's fantastic, but I fear it's just wasted development time.

I'd be okay with a new action game, but if I didn't play Bayonetta, I'm pretty sure I won't play this.

And it's pretty rad so far! I wanted to give it a shot after Jeff and Brad had some stuff to say about it, and I'm glad I did. After a good long bit of wandering about and reading only the most barebones of outlines of the progression(getting magic in each town after doing a quest, level progression being saved, etc.) I finally got to what I assumed was the first "palace" and started going through it. Even though I wanted a pretty pure experience I did use a bit of "save scumming" since the Virtual Console gives that opportunity.

The palace was pretty basic in its challenges, though I did get pretty blown away by the sword and shield enemies that surprised me by blocking high and low and then slashing high and low. It was a reflex challenge I wasn't expecting from a NES game. Actually super impressive.

After finishing the dungeon and going back to wandering, I looked up the location of the first spell and where to get the Candle. Turns out it was in the palace I'd already gone to, which I couldn't know since I didn't see its name anywhere and I'm pretty sure an NPC told me that place was in another direction. Anyway, now I've got magic, can see in caves, and the entire world is in front of me.

Zelda 2 is pretty cool, you guys.

@captain_insano: Love Letter is only a 10€ thing so maybe you'd be able to squeeze it in somewhere. It's perfect for when you're somewhere out of the house and want to spend some low-impact time playing a game. It takes up almost no space and is easy to focus on.

I've thought about this as well recently, how old board games tend to be extremely luck-based and not very balanced, maybe even by design. Of all the old board games we have in my parents' house, Scotland Yard is the one we've gone back to, mostly because it has an interesting metagame with plenty of discussions as well as being asynchronously competitive/cooperative. When I bought my first board game in around 2011, it was after having played Arkham Horror and wanting something cooperative that didn't suck(sorry). So I got Shadows over Camelot, and that has been the most fun I've had playing a board game, because it has that same mix of cooperative play with the added tension of a possible traitor that needs to be managed. If you're into Pandemic, I'd say this needs looking into.

Since then I've bought quite a few games, first and foremost being the number one game on BGG, Twilight Struggle. I actually bought this game when visiting my at the time very new girlfriend for the first time, and it was her first experience of a board game(maybe not the best idea ever). If you're interested in a two-player epic conflict game, look this up. It's also fantastic if you're a history buff, since it gives a lot of concrete and practical understanding of the dynamics of the Cold War.

I'll mention the Tempest games, of which Love Letter might be the most well known, but we also have Courtier(small-scale court intrigue, fast and interesting) and Dominare(large-scale city conquest, maybe a bit bloated in rule-set, but could be enjoyable). These have a nice consistent art-style with some flavour-story to tie all the games together since they follow a chronological story in the world.

In no other particular order:

• Eclipse
• Splendor
• Tsuro
• Qin(Reiner Knizia fuck yeah)
• Fresco
• Eminent Domain