What Games ya Playin' 2012 - Suplex a Train Edition

[DjinnAndTonic]

I would totally play XCOM: Animu Princess edition. At least if they were wearing white dresses I could see where my fucking characters are.

[Grefter]

You can see where your dudes are because they have big blue boxes around them.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Or because your entire squad's armor is day-glow orange and they have fire truck red Guile hair. Either way you'd still be confused because there aren't any obnoxious animal sidekicks or sexualized children.

[DjinnAndTonic]

So much orange there~

Also, I'm kinda offended that you think just because I like JRPGs that I in any way advocate either animal sidekicks or sexualized children. Trust me, I'm just as opposed to that shit as you are.

[Grefter]

That camera angle is amazingly terrible.

Also you can customise the colour of your dudes.  Most of the press stuff out there is the default greens.

Our main Assault unit is called Move Biktch (because we can't type) and has a nickname of Bitch.  She wears bright blue and hot pink.

Edit - Not justification of art style, just information about in game options and stuffs.

[Fenrir]

Snow's right.
Mechanics don't matter if the map design doesn't care. Deus Ex could have become a 3D platformer but the level design never exploited this. So it isn't one.

FE is having your army march across a battlefield and covering all its weak points to make sure no one dies. Impenetrable tiles are everywhere, you can have two Oswins in the front protecting archers and mages behind. It also has the rescue command, which is needed on harder difficulties. It's a game about formation.
FFT is killing each enemy as efficiently as possible. It's not about formation.

Case in point nobody really cares about Worker 8 (hyperbole) because his defense doesn't matter as much as, say, Oswin's or Hector's.



Deus Ex HR: I had to check who that Manderley guy everybody was talking about was.
I just played Original Deus Ex, yet every Original Deus Ex reference is probably lost on me.
While the missions and level building are fun, the combat is still too boring. I just don't know how cover based shooters became the new sensation. One or two games like that would have been enough. I needed something with more meat.


Dark Souls: My new, 7th character, Miralda, turned hollow in the undead burg.
Not regular "turned hollow", but NPC "turned hollow". When one of your dearest friends attacks you on sight without saying a word because something corrupted him.
Rules of the challenge:
- Can't buy anything more than the Bottomless box
- Must try killing every NPC. Fleeing is allowed.

Weapon upgrades, miracles, covenants, magic, pyromancy, unlimited arrows, and Dark Wood Grain Ring are pretty much all out.
I'm right after Caora Demon. I'd have had challenge, but: Astoria's Straight Sword. That thing's dual handed R2 is beautiful.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I didn't do much shooting in HR except in places like the hotel raid. Generally it was more of a first-person neck snapping simulator.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Honestly, it's pretty difficult to make a game about defensive positioning and covering allies with only 5 PCs. Doable I'm sure, but it certainly occurs much less naturally.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I would say the prevalence of melee classes in FFT, rather than party size, is the main culprit. 4-6 is kind of the standard group size for an XCOM/JA style game, and they pull it off.

[Grefter]

Some of it is the core systems as well.  This X-COM game especially focuses on cover fire and support roles.  FFT on the other hand has units largely functioning as their own entities once you have wound them up and let them go (there is definite party balance stuff with Zodiac comp and Faith levels etc), only really Healing and buffs impact the other characters and those are all on their own turns.

Not that this is a bad thing, we all agree FFT is pretty rad and LFT does gangbusters on making improvements on an already good game within those paradigms.

If FFT had more maps like TO I would say it covered off positioning and cover as well (to varying degrees of success).

[Dark Holy Elf]

Notably, the few maps in TO where you have way less than the normal 10-12 units tend to not be about positioning much compared to normal TO. I definitely think party size is a factor. (Of course, compared with FFT, TO also has a larger durability spread... high-offence classes like mages and ninjas just aren't that fragile in FFT, so you don't really worry about protecting them. And the best way to protect them is with reaction abilities and evasion, not with tanks.)

[Grefter]

I am thinking more specifically of maps in TO that force choke points and have nearly functional parapets for archers to snipe from and maps where you are forces through choke points created by having to actually use Jump (!!!!!!) to get between platforms by traversing pillars or water (because no one in TO can swim unlike FFT).  Party size and durability spread certainly promote it, but there is definitely maps that make it easier.

Even with maps like that it certainly wouldn't be a focus of FFT by any stretch of the imagination, I just might credit it for being there at all >_>. As is walls and cliffs outside of a few maps are solid barriers.  The ones I can think of where they aren't they try to function like gauntlets more (that one with the big cliff parallel to your starting position springs to mind).

FFT will in fact be just fine without this kind of gameplay though.

[hinode]

TO remake also has Rampart Aura, which lets your tanks block off large segments of the map in addition to the one tile that they physically occupy. Two Knights (or White Knights/Dragons/Lord/Knight Commander/etc.) with can use Rampart Aura to either create huge temporary perimeters or overlap at a choke point to create a completely unpenetrable barrier to keep your squishy units safe.

I should also mention that TO gameplay gets progressively more FFT-like in the postgame as your offense gets continuously better and better. Killing as many opponents before they get a chance to attack you is ultimately a far better defensive tactic than anything else once you get the damage output to manage it. After a while I barely even use healing magic for anything except levelling up augments on spare turns when the map is already under control (so the turn inefficiency doesn't matter).

Well, except in that one Divine General fight that has a half dozen Archers (including a boss with souped up stats) and three Urchin Bola lobbers starting off with a huge height advantage. That fight got rough.

[Tide]

Is this where I comment how WA4 somehow manages to make positioning matter despite there being only 7 spaces and 4 characters? <3 WA4

[Lord Ephraim]

In my only experience with X-com (the new one anyways), it's a lot more than just cover-to-cover combat.  It's more about flanking and using explosives to destroy the alien's cover to gain favorable shots. Shooting something with any sort of cover at most yields a 60% hitrate and my luck with the RNG that's about close to 0% you can get.  Half-cover for your troops does absolutely nothing in dodging fire and full cover gets destroyed after 1-2 shots.  Playing turtle style isn't going to cut it.  I have to have one or two guys charge behind enemy lines and take out the most dangerous threat while praying they don't take critical attacks on the enemy turn.  I have a high body count with only one or two majors (who were snipers than never get shot at ever.)

I'm pretty bad at the game.  I got a gameover 4 months in when 8 countries had max panic levels and withdrawn.  I didn't realize the absolute importance of constructing satellites at the beginning of each month and making sure you have enough uplink slots.  I got fucked over with alien abduction missions constantly going after North America and Asia causing the panic levels to rise faster than I can lower them.  It's the only difficult part of the beginning: I rushed the ability to capture aliens instead of building satellites and uplink facilities.  On my restart, I got that established early and only lost South America to panic.  Eventually the difficultly swings back over to ground missions when I had Mutons and Heavy Floaters appear all the time.  I actually only encountered one cyberdisc and it got destroyed before it did anything.  Were they suppose to be scary or something?

Overall I'm enjoying the game.  I was put off on the old X-Com games because they required too much menu micromanagement and the UI looked awful.   

[Shale]

Alpha Protocol: Picked this up on the Steam daily special. Yay, more Obsidian games. Still in the tutorial breakout section, playing as a Recruit.

[SnowFire]

Protip: Get the engineering "solve puzzles easier" upgrade immediately (then stop there, that branch kinda sucks).  When I first played through AP, I literally spent 20 minutes stuck on hacking the computer in the intro mission with no save point that I could not freaking get the thing to work.  Then I got the puzzle upgrade and suddenly it was trivial for most of the rest of the game.

[Kilgamayan]

RosenKreuzStilette Freudenstachel, and I've been waiting years to post that name in this thread.

Game's bizarrely buggy - I expect bugs in a 1.00 release, but passwords sometimes not functioning properly and the game crashing when you try to Continue in the fortress seem like things that beta testing really should have caught - but it's a hell of a lot of fun when it actually works. Made it to the fortress refights before the game crashed on me a second time and I decided to do some housework instead.

Schwer's stage is more fantastic than I had hoped.

[Grefter]

I am enjoying the two games of X-Com I am playing immensely.  Hot seat multiplayer wih brothers is up to the point Eph describes with Heavy Floaters and Mutons.  We need to get Plasma upgrades to handle outgoing damage better.

What difficulty are you playing on Eph?  I play fairly defensively and don't notice that level of losses (we load on character death to be fair, but we don't have to do it much.)

Do you get much use out of over watch?  I pair that with run and gun to get a good defensive position then leapfrog around the map between defensive positions.  I found being more aggressive pulls in more aliens quickly and presses you much harder.  We don't use explosives much either (though may have to start because damn do heavy versions of units have a ton of hp).

Normal is rough but feels like you are close to a zero sum game with panic.  It is controllable.  I assume harder ones ramp that up to higher amounts.  That said satellites are king for controlling it and the game does not let you know.  It comes at a trade off of ability to gear your squad though and to advance building tech.

What I do want to know is if the aliens keep in step with your research and advancement if the plot or if you have to try and keep up (everyone I know seems to keep up...)

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I use overwatch pretty extensively, but part of that is that I use two snipers.  A lot of the time it's a better move to stay put and use overwatch than waste a turn of not shooting finding a new position.  For other classes it's a bit more limited in terms of how you can ambush, but a sniper with Teamsight can shoot a target at any range as long as SOMEONE can see it and they themselves can draw a line of fire.

[Sierra]

Dark Souls: My new, 7th character, Miralda, turned hollow in the undead burg.
Not regular "turned hollow", but NPC "turned hollow". When one of your dearest friends attacks you on sight without saying a word because something corrupted him.
Rules of the challenge:
- Can't buy anything more than the Bottomless box
- Must try killing every NPC. Fleeing is allowed.

I'd say you're crazy, but we already knew that.

I still pretty much never kill NPCs. I kill Petrus because he's a dick, but that's about it. I've only ever killed a merchant once (wanted the Uchigatana early, too lazy to wait for Shiva's shop) and immediately felt like a horrible person for doing so ("Little Yulia...") The ninja is safe from now on because of his ring (presumably) getting nerfed when the DLC hits, and I stopped having to kill Crestfallen when I noticed that not talking to him prevents him from going hollow. It's amazing how many NPCs this applies to. The chosen undead really is some kind of Typhoid Mary for going hollow.

In related news, I just killed NG+ Four Kings without taking damage. Sorcery: still broken as fuck even when you take no more levels during the second cycle.

[Lord Ephraim]

I'm playing on Normal difficulty.  I use 1 Sniper, 1 Assault and 4 Supports.  I don't find the Heavy class that good at all, and it's easy to capture Plasma Rifles that only Assaults and Supports can use.  Overall I think Support is too good.  3 extra movement, one extra inventory slot, and smoke grenades are great.  It costs too much to manufacture Heavy and Sniper Plasma equivalent and I haven't seen any aliens that carry them.  I made one Alloy Cannon to make quick work of chryssalids and Beserkers.  It was helpful to know that invading an alien base mission globally reduces panic and you can do it whenever you want.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I found support to be kind of unremarkable.  Extra inventory and medkits is nice, but it doesn't compare to assaults getting to sprint and attack and auto-evading the first reaction shot, or heavies being able to shoot twice/add a bonus to hit for your entire squad or snipers being able to fire twice in one turn from all the way across the map.  And of course, regular rifles do less damage than every other type of gun, so they got that going against them.

How far are you through the game?  Heavy plasma is carried by Mutons.  I have a fuckton of them.

[Lord Ephraim]

Assault would be more appealing to use if I could get easier access to laser/plasma shotguns.   Supports only shine with Deep pockets which is fairly late promotion.  I'd deploy more Heavies if I actually encounter a Cyberdisc.

I'm about to hit the first alien base.  I've been putting it off for a while to tech and use the reduction in global panic when I need it the most.  Most of my ground operations consists of Mutons (they don't carry heavy plasma as far I can see), Beserkers, and sometimes Heavy Floaters.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Maybe it's just Muton elites then.  Either way, you can get them off dudes.  Shotguns you are kind of on your own for, but I never really had trouble springing for two of them.