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Nov. 6, 2009
  • It's in your inventory. The best thing to do is just equip it on your hotbar, pause when he starts summoning a mage (i believe it's a green spell effect) and use the item. You end up using it 4-5 times through the fight so don't worry about using it too much. It's an instant cast item.
    1 day ago
  • @punkxblaze: That revanant is the first difficult fight I had in the game. One thing to check is to make sure your mage doesn't have the acid damage (or whatever those revanent are immune to) staves equipped. I ended up having to run out to buy a different staff because mine just wasn't hitting.
    1 day, 14 hours ago
Nov. 5, 2009
Nov. 3, 2009
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Nov. 1, 2009
Added by Dave Snider on May 8, 2009

SPOILERS 5 MINUTES IN!!!!


Dunno what happened to the aspect ratio, but here's Tony (from comicvine) and I discussing the star trek movie.

  

Related to: Star Trek


Added by Dave Snider on March 1, 2009

Games like Silent Storm were always my kind of Strategy
Games like Silent Storm were always my kind of Strategy
With few exceptions, I've never really enjoyed RTS games. The amount of frantic key pressing and learn by repetition strategy always put me off immediately. The times I did manage to slog through the first half of any RTS game I was rewarded with 2 hour missions where I spent a good portion of my time building up a base. While that seems fun for some, the RPG nerd in me liked my battles a little more confined and slow paced. I liked being attached to my "units" and caring about their deaths rather then pumping a new set out of my barracks. Turn-based strategy like Fallout Tactics, Silent  Storm and X-Com were always more my speed.

Imagine then my surprise that I've been totally addicted to Dawn of War 2 the past week. I had played through the first one and although I loved the setting and the steps they made to make it less twitchy the game was soon easily forgotten in the large pile of games I gave up playing after a week. The recent sequel I haven't put down and it's easy to tell you why.
  1. I have built nary a base in the entire campaign.
  2. I control only 4 units the entire game. Although each unit is made up of several marines, I can only control them together as a group.
  3. I level up these units across the campaign and can tailor them to my playstyle.
  4. I can equip these units with dropped loot, further cementing them into the class of marine I want them to be (melee vs. ranged...etc)
Did I mention I haven't built a base? While some may be thinking... well, it doesn't sound much like an RTS to me, I can only reply... thank you Relic for removing the tedium out of this genre. I start every 20 minute mission with the same troops, who are now slightly stronger from the last mission, and use tactics, cover and the ever rare retreat to beat my enemy instead of amassing troops for 30 minutes so that I feel confident I can take out the other side. Relic didn't stop pleasing me there though, because they added boss fights to almost every mission and alleviated my other harp against the genre -- that defeating the enemy should be more involved then blowing up some buildings after the enemies are dead.

The battles in Dawn of War 2 are intense but confined
The battles in Dawn of War 2 are intense but confined
I can't tell you how freeing this feels. Finally I can enjoy this genre. While I'm still a little slow when it comes to all the key commands, the focus on tactics over units really has me hooked. So much so that I'm going to give World in Conflict a go, which I hear has a similar quick to fight feel.

Now remember when I said there were a few exceptions to my RTS hate? The exceptions all come from Blizzard, specifically Warcraft III and Starcraft, which I spent many of my younger years wasting my days on. Having played through DoW2 I can now only wonder if my experience with Starcraft II will be sullied by this experience. While I know Blizzard will have a great story waiting for me, I don't know if I can suffer building up a base or dealing with 100 units on the screen again. While I hope that's not the case, I also can't imagine how it could be a Starcraft game without those kinds of amassing of units.

In any case, suddenly I'm really excited by RTS games again. If you have any recommendations leave me a comment. I've got World in Conflict and Company of Heroes all queued up.


Added by Dave Snider on Feb. 17, 2009

Still working on little things, and you'll notice my screen cap program doesn't grab flash vids, hence the large gaps in my blog. Right click and pick open link in new tab to see the full versions. T-minus 1 weekish. Yes, we are that fast / obsessed with our jobs.






Added by Dave Snider on Feb. 2, 2009

An example of a mock I give to our engineers to dread over.
An example of a mock I give to our engineers to dread over.
So I'm starting week 2 of actual CSS work on redesigning Giant Bomb. It's going amazingly well. You know you're digging the style when you get bummed out when you have to use the live site. The first steps were reworking all the core CSS (buttons, major layout classes...etc). If you've checked out the mocks you can imagine that this had me making lots and lots of rounded corners for various layout sections of GB. Using rounded corners, while better looking, drastically increase the complexity of a site's frontend code. For this reason I had sworn off the look a couple years ago, but like a lost lover, have embraced them again recently.

This week I'm mostly taking those core CSS changes and implementing them throughout the actual HTML on the site. That means I basically go through each and every page on the site and massage the new style into the old templates. It's pretty tedious work, but after having thrown together the original Giant Bomb in only 6 weeks it's nice to have time to spend fully on making the site prettier, instead of worry about functionality. Coonce is helping out as well, helping me out with the backend stuff that I can't do on my own. I'm very excited about everything, so much so that I've been regularly showing up back at the office after dinner to attack more templates. Right now I'm waiting on my local database to rebuild so I figured it'd be a good time for an update.

While I'm doing this Ethan is working on a MAJOR gallery/image management redo. The new stuff is all drag and drop and well... impressive. Basically we're banishing checkboxes from image management and trying to better define galleries and in turn fix a lot of those tools. Those changes will likely make it into the site before mine and will come in handy to some of our bigger image uploaders. Andy is working on some additions to our search functionality and working on requests from the API forums.

Mostly the things I'm most excited about is showcasing the crew downstairs content a little better. I think if you don't check the site everyday you can miss a lot of the funny vids they add to the site daily. Right now we do a pretty poor job at promoting vids, news, guides and user reviews on the game pages. I've reworked those pages the most and it's nice to see VInny's stuff float up better. In general I'm just happy with the way things are actually looking from a cleanliness perspective. I've tried to cut down the length of our pages without losing content. It's not the easiest thing to do, but I've spent a lot more time on font sizing and line heights this time to make things in general more readable.

In any case, that's what I'm up to. I'll likely add some screenshots to this post in a half hour or so when my local database is finished rebuilding. I guess that just leaves me raiding the vinyl collection at the office till the db is built. Right now Jackson Browne's Running on Empty is on. 


Added by Dave Snider on Jan. 15, 2009

Anyone recognize the "Glaciators"?

  


Snide's Reviews
My Favorite Combat RPG of All Time (PC)
Rambling on about one of my favorite games. Nerd alert.It's funny you know, I have this amazing gaming PC at home (my work machine on the other hand is a Mac) and despite it being able to put my xbox 360 to shame I find myself regularly loading up a ...
Reviewed by snide on July 20, 2008

8 out of 8 found this review helpful.


Date Joined: May 12, 2008
City: San Francisco
Gender: Male
Alignment: PC
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SaucySala 28 minutes ago
SaucySala is thinking more people should join Citizengame.co.uk
ZombiePie 39 minutes ago
Remember to sign up for the GB Modern Warfare Community if you are planning on getting the game! http://www.giantbomb.com/modern-warfare-2/61-24713/join-the-giantbomb-modern-warfare-2-community/35-264142/?
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Time Gentlemen, Please!
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AjayRaz is hungry as f*ck, anyone have any food?
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Wheelman is a nice surprise.
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Trilogy is enjoying Dragon Age Origins
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ZeroCast is looking for a place to hide...
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jakob187 would like to remind folks that he's pissed about the PC version of MW2. Doesn't mean he won't be rockin' the fuck out of the console version!