kobr24

From Wikipedia:

Mafia (Russian: Ма́фия, also known as Werewolf, Assassin, Witch Hunt, Palermo Nights or Pirates) is a party game created in theUSSR by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986,^[3] modelling a battle between an informed minority (the mafia) and an uninformed majority (the townspeople). Players are secretly assigned roles: either mafia, who know each other; or townspeople, who know only the number of mafia amongst them. In the game's night phase the mafia covertly "murder" a townsperson. During the day phase, all of the surviving players debate the identities of the mafia and vote to eliminate a suspect. Play continues until all of the mafia have been eliminated, or until the mafia outnumber (or equal) the townspeople.

EXAMPLE - Analysis of a mafia game from TeamLiquid, not trying to promote TL mafia as I don't play there anymore. The thread in the link will show you an example game and a VERY good players analysis of the events in said game. The game in question was played by many experienced players and probably has a lot of jargon that will be unfamiliar but hopefully it will help you gain a general idea of what mafia is.

Mafia, although usually a party game, is a game that I think is best played through a message board format (realtime chat formats like epicmafia or irc are astoundingly bad and unbalanced). Similar in style to games like The Ship or Spy Party (or even Assassin's Creed multiplayer, to an extent), Mafia is a competitive game that focuses on analyzing the behavior of other players.

The town faction and mafia faction all communicate in the thread during the two phases of the game (a 48 hour day cycle and 24 hour night cycle). However, the mafia are the only faction allowed to communicate with each other outside of the game thread. Only careful behavioral analysis will reveal the identities of the mafia as they try their best to act like good townsfolk and disrupt the discussion to keep the heat off of themselves. The game is best played with 11-30 players.

Town must look for certain tells (evidence of players having outside communication, bad or empty accusations, wishiwashiness and many others) and are given the hard task of differentiating between bad town players and actual mafia. Mafia must try their best to remain unsuspicious and avoid incriminating their teammates. A good mafia disrupts the town and encourages the lynch mobs that form around falsely accused town players.

There are a lot of options a host has to make his game interesting: from unique flavor (themed games, based on movies/original settings/video games/whatever) to special roles and abilities that are granted to players. It's kind of hard to explain in such a short post but it really is a blast especially if you fancy yourself as an armchair detective (or psychologist). There is a ton of depth to the game, really only limited to the analysis skills and imagination of the players in it. I used to host/play games pretty often at TeamLiquid and now that I've drifted away from that community, I'd be interested to see if the game could flourish at GiantBomb as well. Hopefully I've explained it well, if I actually created a gamethread would anyone be interested in giving it a try? If you have any questions about the game, go ahead and ask because I've only given a very bare explanation of what it is. It's kind of like a pen and paper rpg in that it's hard to really convey what the experience is like without actually throwing someone into a game.

I personally loved the FFXII battle system. The problem, of course, was that you could break the game with the gambit system and set up gambits to auto-pilot yourself through some of the incredibly difficult boss fights like Omega and Yiazmat. There was still a fair bit of tension and a lot of depth to it, multiplied by x1000 if you chose to play the game without having the battle menu pause the gameplay.

I think that system could have been very interesting if it was tweaked a bit. Too bad about the license board thing though.

It's too easy to wave it off and say "Yeah it's a horrible thing but there's nothing I can do about it."

Chances are sweatshop labor will not cease to exist in my lifetime, but that absolutely does not mean something can be done about it. Major social chance is difficult and gradual and most activists do not live to see the day when their dreams are made reality. Not too long ago the majority of Americans were either for or totally complacent regarding slavery and now the majority of us view it as an unconscionable violation of human rights.

The argument that sweatshops are the best labor available to poor workers in the third world does not excuse privileged capitalists from engaging it. They are fully capable of providing better wages and conditions for workers but choose not to for the sake of the bottom line. I can't get behind the idea that large scale human suffering is somehow justified by what is best for a corporation.

The fact that companies would have no incentive to operate overseas factories if they had to treat them like human beings (why not just use American workers in that case) is probably true. At the very least, enforcing global standards for safety would not ruin that to the point that corporations would no longer bother. I'm not educated enough to offer any sort of real solution but surely the reality can't be so black and white.

That depends on the situation. I would report it if it was near home and obviously posing some sort of threat to my own safety or that of my neighbors. Local potheads don't hurt anybody though.

That works too. I just got my ass destroyed in the Tomb of the Giants after breezing through Sens Fortress onward. It's interesting to me how this game spikes in difficulty like that, I seem to mostly just cruise through the game until I hit a brick fucking wall instead of this feeling of gradual mounting difficulty like in most games. I think because the game makes no effort to guide you to the appropriate gear for any given area/battle your sense of difficulty is wildly dependent on whether or not you're lucky enough to find that stuff blindly or if you bother to go look it up online. I never really summon a lot for some reason, it makes things immensely easier but I'm too into the atmosphere of the game to feel like doing it all the time.

@Rhaknar:

There is a hidden blacksmith in the catacombs and another blacksmith in the new londo ruins. They upgrade weapons to fire, chaos and magic.

Ornstein and Smough is one of those fights that's either really really hard or really really easy depending on if you have the right gear or not. It's hard to tell how prepared you are without knowing what you have.

If you want to easymode this fight, get Quelaag's Furysword. Upgrade a curved sword to +10. (upgrade to +5, then buy a bunch of large titanite shards and bring them to andrei in undead parish). Then you can make the Furysword at the Giant Blacksmith. It does a ton of damage, enough that the fight should last around 5-6 minutes at the most if you're very very careful.

Make sure you have a strong shield like the Eagle Shield or Silver Knight's Shield. Black Iron Shield would be good too if you have enough STR.

If you still have trouble you can go fight Pinwheel (the catacombs is very easy at this point) and that will allow you to carry up to 20 estus flasks. Super Ornstein is pretty easy to dodge if you don't get nervous. Just remember you always want to stay close to him and roll towards him and never away. Playing too passively actually makes this fight harder. Same deal with Smough, you can roll towards him either head on or at an angle and he'll usually miss.

Whenever you hit a wall in this game it's a good idea to go farm, upgrade stuff, see if there are any secret areas/bosses you haven't beaten yet. You could probably do Great Hollow, Ash Lake, Darkroot Basin, Darkroot Garden (behind the crested door) and Ceaseless Discharge at this point if you haven't already.

For anyone still having difficulty with the Hellkite, there is a pretty easy method to beating him. You don't really need flame resistant armor, I'd prefer something with high physical defense like the Stone Set, upgraded Epic Knight Armor, Ornstein's Armor, Black Iron Armor, etc. If you can get between 25-50% equip load you're fine. Use a high damage lightning weapon if you have one. If you don't, grab the lightning spear from Sen's Fortress or use some Gold Pine Resin on your best unenchanted weapon for this fight. I used a +3 Lightning Zweihander and killed him in one combo.

You can ascend weapons to lightning at the Giant Blacksmith in Anor Londo and requires titanite chunks. To ascend a weapon to lightning you must first upgrade it to +10 which you can do with large titanite shards through Andrei the Blacksmith in the Undead Parish.

1. Start out under the bridge (just past the first bonfire in the Undead Burg). Run up the stairs to the top of the bridge to trigger the fire blast and run back down. This clears the bridge of all enemies.

2. Run back up the bridge and past the stairs. Stay behind the little wall in the alcove, do not go onto the main bridge. The wall will block the flame breath and you will not take any damage. Now just stand here and wait for him to fly down from his perch.

3. If he lands behind you, run back down the stairs and listen for him to return to his perch. Repeat step 2.

4. If he lands in front of you, run up quickly to his legs and hit him as much as you can. Then throw your shield up and when he either flies away or has a long pause, run back down the stairs.

You just have to repeat these and be very careful. He can do a jumping flame breath thing over your head that usually kills you instantly and can bite at you. To be on the safe side, I would just run away after successfully getting in a decent number of hits if your weapon isn't strong enough to kill him in 6-8 attacks.

Anything besides Charlie Tunoku just feels wrong to me. Sometimes I name my guy Dale Cooper but after the Endurance Run it's almost always Charlie for a silent MC in a game.

Reinstalling didn't work. I guess I'll try deleting all my ME1 saves except for the one right before the last fight and see if that works. I doubt it will though. This really sucks. Being about the only PS3 user who is having this problem post-patch doesn't help either. Google turns up nothing besides "install the patch".