the be all end all video game thread

Yea I got promoted into diamond this weekend while sober. Last night I hop on after like 5 drinks, and didnt win a game. Shit.

 

I really dont play many games other than 1v1 but I found the best way to go is this. Scout well and repel the early rush... One player expand and stick to lower tier units, the other tech high. Then trasfer resources and have the teched player roll while the econ player harass. Light muta/ling/baneline for the econ player and BC for the tech player works well.

 

I've heard horror stories of Gamestop from other people but I've never had a problem with them myself. I went to the midnight release for Reach. I was near the end of a line of about 100 people and I got my copy at right around 12:15 and everyone got a copy to my recollection. I will say, I will NEVER trade in games at Gamestop though. You could walk in with 100 brand new never opened games and the guy behind the counter will scrape the shit off of the bottom of his shoe and tell you that's all you can get for them.

The only glitches that required time to learn were the double and quad shots. Many super jumps, the BXR, and BXB glitches could be literally learned enough to be effective with over the span of a few match made games. I spent the majority of my time on Halo 3 in the MLG playlist. The field of view in Halo 3 kind of played a trick on players and made it seem like players move slower than they actually are.

Hah, no, I'm not bad at them. Close combat wasn't exactly very diverse in Halo 3, most of the time it seemed to end in people just getting neutral beatdowns and both players involved dying. There were plenty of close combat weapons, but they were all pretty bland in my opinion, they all were just lumped into the same little niche. Granted, default Team Slayer is vetoed most of the time at higher levels, according the Shishka (the previous head of the matchmaking team) when you look at the veto stats it would appear that AR starts are actually the more popular gametype, hence them being weighted at 75% in Team Slayer.

The spawn system isn't unpredictable in the least. People have written some very comprehensive guides on how the spawn system works and what you can do as a player to manipulate it to your or your team's advantage. Example. In every good players arsenal should be the ability to at least accurately guess where the other team is going to spawn. I might not be able to tell the exact spawn point that an enemy will appear on, but I can come pretty close on most of the maps that are in Team Slayer and MLG.

You pick up duals at the cost of you're ability to throw grenades, help out your team at long distances (because no dual wieldable weapon is meant to be used outside of close quarters) and in order to melee you have to drop one of the weapons you are wielding. I'd rather have a battle rifle or carbine and be able to react to the majority of the situations I will be presented with in the long run than pick up some spikers just to have to drop them after one kill. I rarely picked up or used the spikers, magnum, plasma rifle, SMG's, or the needler over the course of 3 years of Halo 3.

I'm pretty sure all maps are weighted equally, at least in team slayer. Those maps just show up more often than a lot of other ones because in order to play any of the DLC maps everyone in the game has to have downloaded the DLC or be playing on the ODST disk. If one person just has the Halo 3 disk everyone in the game is limited to the maps that that one person can play.

Aside from Narrows those maps can play EXTREMELY slow, especially at high level match making. Once one team gets control of certain areas of the map or gains a significant lead in points the game comes to a crawl while players wait for power ups and weapons to respawn. There isn't any need to cycle around those maps once you control certain power positions. Guardian is by far the worst though, right off the spawn the team that spawns in the blue room area is put at a massive disadvantage. The team that spawns by the sniper tower is guarenteed to get the overshield and the sniper rifle, and they have a chance at getting the active camo and grav hammer as well. All the other team gets is a guarenteed shotgun and the chance to fight over the camo.

Over 10,000 games.

Feels like a mix of Combat Evolved and Shadowrun from what I've played so far. I like it so far.

Perhaps this discussion would be better continued via PM?

 

Yeah man, I find myself agreeing to a certain extent with a lot of what you have posted, and also recognize that my experience is shaped by having a 50 in most playlists which is very challenging and always kept things fresh for me. I still watch MLG tournies on live feed obsessively and will always find Halo 3 perfect for a lot of what others perceive as flaws. Thank you very much for the well reasoned response and anything else I will take to PM.

 

Who has heard of Borderlands? Can you summarize it for me real quick? The girl is coming over early tomorrow and expects me to know the game...

 

He's Terran I'm Protoss.
Well part of it is my partners problem, he plays 1v1 diamond all day, then I jump on later and he doesn't play with a 2v2 mindset until after I've yelled at him for 3 matches. He'll go attack without telling me while I'm trying to get my shit established, and he'll get 2v1'd and wonder why we lost. We've noticed some new things about one of us needing to tech up, I need to do it. He loves his Ms and Ms and when we get late game he doesn't tech up. It seems like everyone else double techs on us. We've learned to rush the shit out of Zerg because Mutas constantly rape our shit. He also has been playing with the new nerf in mind, which leaves us open for Terran players that are not to still rape us with tanks.

 

Thank God this is finally confirmed as actually being released, I cannot wait to get ahold of it.

Shadow of the Colossus was one of the coolest games I ever played on the PS2, but I never finished it since it was just a rental and I ended up with a scratched disc.

ICO I never played, but I'm looking forward to getting the chance to do so.

And I have to talk about Halo: Reach too, since it is the main thing on my mind today, and so far I am loving it. Only played the campaign so far, I'm giving solo legendary a go right off the bat, and its been great fun. Can't wait to get some firefight matches in with friends.

One of the best things about Halo, ever since Halo 3, is the amount of information available on bungie.net. You can go online and view your entire career on there, for Halo 3 and ODST as well as reach, including campaign, firefight, multiplayer, everything. Game histories, heat maps...its pretty impressive. I just wish more games would do this.

 

It's like a cartoony version of Fallout 3, and you can customize your weapons. That's about all I know about it.

 

I know I repped you that I found SOTC to be monotonous, but the fact that they're remastering it in HD makes it worth it for me to buy it. That game had some of the best backgrounds ever and it was extremely fun just riding your horse through the game.

Also, I hope you have a PS3 because it looks like it's not available to Xbox players.

 

Borderlands is basically an FPS crossed with an RPG. The gameplay is FPS, but when you start the game you pick 1 of 4 character classes, each of which have different specialties: the Hunter specializes in sniper rifles and pistols while the Brick specializes in rocket launchers and hand-to-hand fighting. There's a leveling system in the game, you start at level 1 with a max of lvl 50 for the basic game, and as you level you get more health and skill points you use to increase your class's skills; each class has it's own unique set of skills which is how they each specialize in different weapons/playstyles.

The weapons aren't customizable but instead they drop from enemies or vending machines with randomly generated stats that affect stuff like damage, ammo capacity, rate of fire, recoil, and so forth.

Also like an RPG the game takes place in large maps that open up as you progress through the game, there are no stages that you move through.

Personally I really enjoyed the game.

 

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1448-Borderlands" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... orderlands</a>

Just because.

 

Anyone want to get some games going for Reach? My tag is MOBKAH20. For some reason I've been legitimately better in Reach than I ever was in Halo 3, but I still can't quite figure out the sprinting system. Sometimes I'll tap LB and I'll sprint ahead then stop, but other times the only way I'd be able to stop running is to hit the LB again. Sometimes it takes two pushes to sprint. Anyone else having a problem?

 

So I just saw that they are 'rebooting' the Devil May Cry franchise with a new title called dmc.

Now, I really enjoyed the first and third games in this series. The second game was kind of a mess, and probably best forgotten. The 4th game was okay, at best, but there are certainly better action titles. I've played through DMC1 and 3 on multiple occasions, however, and always find them enjoyable.

Looking at this trailer, though, I just think "what the fuck?" I honestly don't know what to think. I really don't know where they're going, except that they apparently looked at the old games and thought "let's go in the complete OPPOSITE direction with the main character this time." He looks all emo and fucked up... just, what the fuck.

 

On Reach:

The Banshee, from what I've seen, is often incorrectly utilized in multiplayer. Why?
1) People are not yet adjusting to the maneuverability of this Banshee. In Halo 3, it had limits as to how steep it could dive or respond. 3's Banshee is a crippled fish in the water compared to this rendition's shark.

1a) Most people seem to just fly around at high altitudes looking for targets and then try to smash them. Stupid, although reasonable, given the ceilings this game has compared to its predecessors.

2) Furthermore, most people are still idiots and try to ram people when all you need is a quick spray of the cannons and then unleash a banshee bomb. Guaranteed at least one kill as you fly off to your next victim. The speed at which one can spritz the enemy with guns, leave them wondering why they just got shit on by green logs and then strafe another target with guns is uncanny.

3) The barrel roll and loop-de-loop are still available in multiplayer, even given this increased maneuverability. You just have to use LB instead of A on the default schemes (I believe Recon is the Halo 3 style scheme, so it's probably the same as 3). This is awesome for avoiding overcharged Plasma shots and grenades. Granted, the dodges don't go as far as you want and isn't nearly as smooth as 3's.

As far as trying to disable it, as the Covenant, grab a plasma pistol ready class and wait for them to go on a Strafing run. If you want to jack it, you CAN keep disabling the banshee by maintaining bursts of overcharged blasts. For gametypes such as invasion, do NOT try to use a Concussion Rifle; it doesn't do shit since it doesn't have the EMP effect like the grenade launcher. As a Spartan... I just gave you the answer.

On other maps, rocket launchers, plasma launchers and Spartan Lasers are effective at destroying them.

Try it. I haven't gotten anything less than a killing spree with this beast. I'll take this over the Scorpion any day of the week.

If anyone wants to hit me up, my GT is Cap C.

 

Final Fantasy 14 Trailer in English. Looks pretty awesome graphically, watch in HD if you can.

 

So, Halo Reach is fun. I played pretty much every day of the multiplayer beta during the summer so I knew it would be the best Halo yet. I won't go into all the awesomeness about it because that'd take too long and everyone else already talked about it. Instead, I'll list my complaints. Fuck Bungie for remaking shitty Halo 2 maps and forcing them on us in Team Arena. Reflection wasn't a good map in Halo 2 and it isn't any damn better in Reach. Why is it that matchmaking must put me in the maps I despise 8 times in a row and NEVER allow me to play on maps I enjoy? Maybe it's just me, but I hated almost everything about Halo 2, so it just pisses me off that they manage to make it feel like I'm still playing it on a quarter of the maps available.

As for the campaign, I think it's good. I'm about halfway through and it's pretty much on par with previous Halo campaigns. Perhaps the latter half will blow my mind. My only problems with it lay in the checkpoint system and computer AI. The allied AI is still laughably worthless and that makes doing anything with a warthog impossible. On Legendary, I think they went slightly too far with how powerful the Covenant is. Four plasma pistol shots and you die. Elites survive stickies to the face, as well as two sniper headshots (takes three). I think I may have made a mistake in playing on Legendary first because it is becoming difficult to enjoy the campaign when it feels like I'm playing Halo 3 with every skull turned on. Oh well, achievements > fun, right? Right??

 

Looks like it has a lot of potential. Do you know if they're going to have a subscription fee for the online part? I didn't see any info about it but I hate monthly payments and that could be a deal breaker.

 

Pretty sure they are. No way they can get that production value and make a dent in the WoW empire without the 14.99 a month, it is simply impossible.

 

Fuck, "monthly payment" is pretty much a swear word to me, but this will probably be too good to pass up. I'll just have to hope this game doesn't come out anywhere near an exam.