I've watched my brother play it and it's pretty easily one of my least favorite examples of modern gaming and pretty much videogaming's answer to the [genre] Movie series. I watch him playing it, pure God of War knockoff combat (maybe a bit of Devil May Cry too, but almost entirely GoW), then he goes into dungeons and the game becomes a gory Zelda knockoff with how the puzzles work. Then I turn to look a few hours later and he's solving puzzles with a gun that shoots blue and orange portals. Go fuck yourself Darksiders, you useless hack of a game. You couldn't exist in your own little microcosm because you didn't think of a single fucking idea on your own.

EDIT:

I wouldn't quite agree with that, but I do see your point. Barrett was a crazy good mage for me. He had a long range weapon so he was always in the back row anyway, had a high attack stat because of said long range weapons so he could be physical in a pinch, and his final weapon's power is determined by how much experience is on the materia he's equipped with, so load him up with all your best stuff and not only will his magic stat be through the roof as a result, but his physical attacks and limit breaks will obliterate everything too. For the most part the materia system does keep it balanced enough with your choices on who to make take on whichever role. Red XIII was good for it too if I remember correctly, and hell, maybe Cait Sith is too but I've literally never played as him past that part under the Gold Saucer when you first get him, aka the one part you're required to use him. I've beaten that game several times, I've gotten every item and beaten every optional boss, I've done literally everything there is to do in that game and yet I've never used that fucking useless character outside of that one instance where I'm required.

It probably doesn't bother me much because I typically play JRPGs full melee anyway, leaving magic for certain ridiculous enemies and the boss battles. It's quicker, easier, and saves a ton of money/items to not have to worry about your MP. I used it a bit more in FFVII than most others in the series, and FFX is the only one where I've ever kept a mage in my party at all times because it's worth it and incredibly useful in that one, but otherwise I'm a boring "mash the attack button" type player.

The FF's are just so freaking easy though. I think FFV is the only one where I had to really utilize some care and balance with my setups. You can still probably go at it with four Monks, Knights, or something but it'll be brutal in the long run. I usually had a main fighter, white/support magic, offensive magic, and a misc character. In all the other FF's you can really just about do whatever the heck you want and still easily get by. I remember my very first party for FFVII back when I first played it was Cloud, Red XIII, and Barret through the entire game lol.

Yeah the first time or two I beat FFVII, I had a varied party all the time, but on my last run (when I beat Emerald and Ruby Weapon finally) I just used Cloud, Barrett, and Tifa the whole time because you got them at the beginning so they were always the most leveled. Not to mention Tifa's limit break is tard-strength ridiculous if you amp up her stats enough.

American McGee's Alice is a pretty cool game. I'm getting nostalgic for the time when gameplay was that simple and self-explanatory. Also blasting various kinds of doomy metal instead of the ingame music is a good idea.

Ahh, all this classic FF talk reminds me I still haven't beaten VI. Fantastic game, but I got stuck in one of the towns. It had a bunch of towers in it...Z-something I think? I'll need to see if I can find my way onward, you guys are making me want to play it now.

Zozo I think it was called? Yeah that was a good place. I honestly haven't beaten VI either, but all I have left to do is the final dungeon, everything else I could possibly do is done. It's just so damn daunting, three separate parties? Twelve well leveled characters necessary to take on the last boss? Holy shit that's intimidating.

It's really not, the game is just that easy. I always had a bunch of under leveled characters I never used and it wasn't a problem so long as you spread your powerful characters across the 3 parties well enough. Terra or Celes can take down her part of the dungeon almost by herself, really.

Maybe I'll see if I can tackle it then, I'm sure I have a save file somewhere in the WoR with nothing left to do apart from Kefka's Tower. Basically if my party didn't have Terra, Sabin, Shadow, or Cyan in it, I was fucked entirely. Like I mentioned earlier, I pretty much melee'd my way through the game so Strago and Relm were pretty much uselessly underleveled, and I didn't touch Gau until endgame when the Veldt was full of crazy overpowered enemies.

The final dungeon can be quite hard if you don't take the time to do many of the sidequests and you aren't a veteran FF6 player. If you do most of the sidequests it does end up being fairly easy, though.

Did you get Gogo? He's a tad weak but being so versatile, he can do pretty well in one of the spread out parties.

I just beat the Painted World today in Dark Souls. Definitely one of the coolest levels I'd say.

I LOVE the Painted World. Has this very Legacy of Kain feel to it (snowed castle like Malek's Bastion, the impaled corpses everywhere, etc.). My favourite area in the game, I think. Too bad the boss is kinda weak, unless your bleed resist is really low then you can die fast if you're not careful but she's never killed me once I think.

Still, <3 that level. A lot of fun loot to get too. Dark ember, red soapstone, notched whip, black cleric robe (not too great but looks cool as hell)...

Yeah, the side quests make a big difference. Also, don't forget to get the Ultima esper. The choice between that and the sword is kind of ridiculous- a single sword or the esper for one of the most powerful offensive spells in the game? Really?

I was in the middle of FF6 and haven't touched it for a couple weeks. In WoR, have every character except for Locke. Still have a bunch of sidequests (riding Figaro underground and going to that blasted underground castle, killing 4 or 5 dragons, and getting to the top of the cult tower). I think that's about it... But I just haven't felt like going through Phoenix Cave yet, and actually started a game of FF7, which is also awesome.

Darksiders was a pretty good game surprisingly. Yeah, it ripped off practically everything going, but it managed to be quite fun. It tided me over for Zelda type games, considering when I played the game I was jaded about the Zelda franchise in general. I'd give it a chance, the first two or so hours aren't that great, but it really comes into its own after that. The only bit that fell flat was the Lylat Wars shoot 'em up part.

I'm playing Halo CE Anniversary at the moment. Now this is an example of a terrible campaign. Reused levels, copy and paste design, the fucking infinite wave of annoying badguys. So glad I appear to be on the last level, one of the few games to make me angry while playing it. IT'S JUST SO SHITTY. WHY IS THIS CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED?

On the plus side, I'm playing Radiant Silvergun and it is fucking sweet.

This came free with Alice Madness Returns so I had a chance to enjoy this. In terms of mood, atmosphere, music, artistic design, and just about everything except for gameplay and control it was superior to the newer Alice game. It was cool but movement felt way too slippery. Like playing a FPS with a 3rd person view. For Alice Madness Returns all they had to do was have an environment and story as good as American McGee but with Madness Returns's gameplay. That game would've been amazing if it took a note from American McGee's Alice.

Yeah falling into pits was a big problem until I realized you could just quicksave, which raises my tolerance for accidental-death laden gameplay. It's far less frustrating than the goddamn Prince Of Persia games I've played where you have (far too few and terribly positioned) fixed save points and die all the time. Or Splinter Cell Conviction where you are supposed to figure out what to do by trial and error but have time to make tea while waiting for savegames to load. Alice savegames load pretty much instantly on my PC.

Speaking of Prince Of Persia [rant warning]: How did they manage to fuck up in these proportions? How did people suffer through Sands Of Time's repetitive, frustrating fighting system (or am I just spoiled by the forgiving gameplay of modern games?) and how the hell is Warrior Within's narrative such a gigantic turd? These games got freaking 80s scores on Metacritic!

The only Prince of Persia worth its sand is the original on DOS

Something about the level just really felt a lot like Demon's Souls too. Hmm, maybe the goofy wheel skeletons in the lower dungeon, the armor/spear blob things again, and it being completely detached from the other levels/world made it just feel really cool. But yeah I'd say that big black sword knight was tougher than the boss. I've fought some of those knights before with the mace or something, but fuck that sword one was kind of intense on that tiny skinny bridge. I took out the dragon easily too, but then some blob was blocking the path... is there something beyond that?

So I need to know but is it worthwhile modifying equipment? Got the dark ember, I can do raw, magic, and enchanted. Or something like that.

I also joined the Forest Hunters and tried some PvP for it, but I just get destroyed. It's not even fun. Guess I need to give it some more levels, the stuff everyone had looked ridiculous compared to my equipment.

Neither are remotely as good as their predecessors, unfortunately. Both are decent (maybe a 70% rating at best) and Warlock may provide 30 hrs of gameplay and Endless Space around 50. Both are fairly stable (at least for me) and good looking, but are fairly devoid in depth/content.

Warlock looks and plays a lot like Civilization 5 (uses a different engine though), has terrible documentation/in-game help (it really needs an encyclopedia like what Civilization has), not as much customization of your wizard that MoM had, and there's only 3 factions to choose from (human, monster, undead). I'm sure with patches and expansions, this game could become good (it needs a lot of content and tweaking, which it has slowly been getting). Its still fairly fun, but I got bored of it after awhile. It may be worth getting if you can snag it from a Steam sale for cheap (it seems to appear on sale frequently), otherwise, you may want to hold off a year or so to see if they balance & flesh out the game (there's a major patch pending that adds a lot of stuff, so I may fire up the game again).

Endless Space reminds me of a cross between Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations 2. The game's empire management I like a lot (its more complex than the original MOO, but more manageable than MOO2 or GalCiv 2 - esp. on larger maps). You "exploit" planets (set a specialization which suits each planet type) and improvements are for the entire system. The government AI needs work, but once that's fixed, playing on a huge map shouldn't be too bad (the last 4X space game I could enjoy on the biggest map setting was the first MOO - MOO2 and GalCiv2 got too bogged down with colonial management for me).

Combat I don't like, but I tend to auto-resolve everything. I hope they allow for "stack" combat in the future, because going through each squadron vs squadron when there's 20+ fleets in a system is pretty tedious. It also uses the rock/paper/scissors mechanic that GalCiv2 used (not a fan of that at all).

The galaxy seems pretty lifeless compared to MOO2 and diplomacy is pretty bare-bones and your adversaries are completely devoid of personality (hell, the first MOO had far more character to it).

There's no espionage or ground combat, but they plan on putting those in later.

Apparently, Endless Space's designers are committed to supporting, improving, and expanding the title, so it may be one to keep an eye on (esp. after an expansion or two).

I don't regret either purchase (both can be pretty addictive and I got a moderate amount of enjoyment out of both of them), but both need a lot of work to rival their predecessors... It makes me wonder if 4X games are really hard to design, or maybe SimTex was that damn good. Both Master of Orion 2 and Master of Magic had a ton of features and content, yet most 4X games nowadays (at least at launch) are rather skeletal in comparison.

Legends of Pegasus is another one I'm keeping an eye on (its out in August), but I'm going to wait for reviews before buying it.

everyone who fights in the forest is an awful awful person.

The mod equipment you have doesn't sound all that useful, unless you've buffed faith/int?

But if I remember you're a dex/str build, you'd be better off using the large and very large embers just to accent the base properties of your favorite/most useful weapon.

That, or elemental if he hasn't leveled up dex or str all that much. Even in NG+ elemental weapons are pretty good, but eventually scaling weapons will outdamage them (especially if they can be buffed). Having 1 fire/chaos weapon and 1 lightning weapon on hand can be useful.

Yeah I'm still using a normal Iaito +10, then a Crest Crass Shield or something. Nothing too fancy.

Just hit level 60 today I think. My Vit is 29, End 25, Dex 26, those are somewhere around there. I found some ridiculous black greatsword with 220 damage at the start. It's kind of tempting to build up Str more but I don't know. I've got Attunement up a bit to 5 slots worth I think, digging pyromancy a lot. The two spells I found in the Painted World though seem kind of ... awful though? lol, fire and acid surge.

And wow, I better not have fucked up my game but looking over the wiki here... I was wondering where Laurentius went after I told him about the Great Chaos Fireball, and now he's going to be a hostile hollow in Blighttown. My Pyromancy Hand is +5, and it's saying you need +10 for Quelaana of Izalith to appear. Are you shitting me? Uh...

Yeah I've got all the characters and I think most of the special items and whatnot. Basically I was intimidated by the final dungeon and spent all my time doing literally everything else there was to do.

I've heard great things about this game, I'm probably gonna download it soon

So, for some silly reason I switched over to Dark Souls (with full intentions on returning to Demon's Souls) and I'm having a blast so far. I like the "feel" of the game more, can't really explain it beyond that. A few days ago I took on the Bell Gargoyles on my first try without getting hit. I threw my controller in the air in delight and yelled "Light work, you bitch ass niggas!" (yeah, I know) and I honestly can't believe I didn't wake the house up. Now the Capra Demon is giving me a run for my money. That's the thing about this game: No matter how badass you are or think you are in the moment, there's always something around the corner that's ready to kick the shit out of you and remind you that you're a small thing among giants.

Hahaha, if Quelana isn't appearing you're SOL with regards to the better pyromancy spells. Fret not about the pyro hand though, someone else can upgrade it, though he won't max it out. But you can go to at least +15 with him.

That said, I got her to appear with a +1 pyro glove, so I don't know about the +10 thing being true or not. She pretty much always appears to me unless I never ever use the pyro glove at all.

Isn't her spawning a bit glitchy I seem to recall having to wait until my New Game+ for her to appear.

Wow, thanks for that in-depth description. I really wasn't expecting anything that good. Probably will hold off on both for a while unless I'll be able to catch them on Steam summer sale for cheap. I played the Warlock demo back in May (or April?) and while it had me hooked at the time, it was pretty depressing to see that in the hour or two of playtime the demo gave you, I pretty much saw everything that there was to the game.

I did a level up exploit, over and over. I think it involved a certain island with high level monsters and using the vanish spell. Kefka went down first time with no real hassle. I regret it as it made the fight extremely trivial.

If you enjoyed Warlock's demo, chances are you'd probably still derive some enjoyment out of the game. I just found its mileage somewhat finite (its a pretty simple/entry-level game compared to MoM). Some things I do like (that I failed to mention):

1) Different improvements you can build on resources (and this varies with factions). As you saw in the demo, on a silver deposit, you can build a silver mine (money) or a silver forge (humans only - yields silver weapons and is quite powerful). A lot of resources feature this. Donkeys you can build either a trading post (lots of gold) or an improvement that gives you donkey-mounted knights (this game is pretty silly in places). The monster faction has the option of putting a butchery there (yields food). A dwarven settlement you can build either a dwarven forge (yields gold and dwarven weaponry - extremely useful) or you can build an improvement that yields dwarven units (never tried them, but they look pretty good). Etc etc etc

2) Holy grounds and temple building. Each faction and god combination can yield different units. Sadly this isn't documented in-game so you have to figure it out via trial and error. Humans can build temples to all gods (except the monster one), and undead/monster factions can build temples to 4 of them or something. Temple units are rather powerful too. I tend to go with human/lunord to get assassins. With proper spell buffs, they're rather devastating. There's weird combinations like picking Dauros with the undead faction (to yield paladins of death) - Dauros' spells are pretty much anti-undead, so you'd probably be crippling yourself early on taking this as opposed to Krypta (pro-undead spells - her and Dauros are polar opposites, thus mutually exclusive). Dauros could work though if you're surrounded by a lot of undead cities/enemies.

A few other things with Endless Space... one thing I liked with that is it uses strategic and luxury resources (ala Civilization 4-5). So, certain ship components require certain strategic elements to build. Pity they weren't in limited quantities to curb ship spamming though. Some planets have anomalies: positive ones with various modifiers and negative ones (that can be removed with appropriate techs).

Terraforming seems a bit weird - its not linear chain of improvement like MOO. Ice/tundra/ocean worlds are good for research, desert/lava/jungle are good for industry, and arid is good for dust (money unit in this game). Terran is best for food, but is good for dust too. Output for crappy planet-types are often offset by certain buildings. I guess scrapping those buildings after terraforming may save money, but by the time you can terraform planets to terran, you'll have tons of money. Terraforming planets to match an appropriate anomaly is a good idea (eg, terraform a planet to arid if it has a dust-bonus anomaly, etc). You also need certain strategic resources to terraform planets to specific types.

Dear Esther is absolutely gorgeous. Hell, the whole "game" is really something else.

After playing Skyrim for the past couple of months, I've been loving it, but I've decided to revisit Oblivion, realized how much I missed it. The Dark Brotherhood is definitely superior to Skyrim. Also, the Shivering Isles expansion is definitely worth it, it's like half a game's worth of Sheogorath's quest in Skyrim.

Also just picked up Fable 3...it's cool, I like it, but it just doesn't have the same fun vibe as the first Fable. I guess they were trying to make it more mature or realistic, but there's still too much silliness for that, but not enough to be as fun as the original. It's alright. Maybe it'll grow on me.

Your pyromancy has to be upgraded for her to show up. So maybe by NG+ you had a pyromancy hand that was upgraded enough for her to appear.



Vanish then doom was the trick. When an enemy is invisible no physical attacks hit them but magic is guaranteed to work. So vanish and then instant death on them was a useful trick.

Yup, definitely agree. Have you played the original as well?

No, though I watched some comparison videos, so from what I understand the only difference is that it's now a standalone game with improved graphics.

I was actually pretty skeptical at first, since the last artsy game I played was The Path and that left a really bad taste in my mouth, but this one pulled me in right from the start and even managed to move me somewhat by the end. Nigel Carrington's soothing voice, beautiful soundtrack and amazing graphics all fit so well together and I'd definitely be interested in seeing some other short stories presented in this way.

Then try "The Void". It has the "artsy fartsy" shtick as well, but unlike Dear Esther, it has actual gameplay and a non-bland experience.

The Void is a good game, but kinda buggy. There's one part where you have to mine for color (you'll understand when you play the game), but the veins are invisible if you have your anti-aliasing cranked up, so it's impossible to mine them. Very frustrating, ended up fucking my game over because I couldn't complete my assigned task on time. I only found out about the bug after it was too late. I ended up putting it down for a while until I feel like starting over again. It's very weird/intriguing, though. Not like any other game I've played.

Endless Space looks kinda cool, but I'm still tied up with SoaSE: Rebellion as far as space strategy goes.

Oh yeah I've played The Void. Great, surreal looking game (if a bit overly complicated) with some pretty cool boss designs.

The only thing that kinda bothered me was that, if I remember correctly, it's easy to mess up along the way if you're not really careful about where and which colors to grow, which colors to spend, which turns to take and all that. I'd just go around growing and harvesting colors and exploring the world thinking I'm doing good, and then suddenly one of the brothers comes along and completely wipes the floor with me cause I don't have enough colors or any powerful spells. Didn't mind it that much though, it's still a fun game. I also need to finally sit down and play Pathologic since I heard it's pretty good as well.

Yeah, it's a pretty punishing game, which can either be good or bad depending on your perspective. Pathologic interests me as well, though it's supposed to be very difficult too.