The NEW Game Journal

[John]

Is the New Vegas DLC really not good? I've been waiting for years to get that game, but I wanted the DLC because FO3 had really good DLC. Man...I can get for, like, under $10 without the DLC now...And I got the Ultimate Edition sitting in my Amazon cart, waiting for me to finally have the opportunity to get it...

Anyways...I just got Ni no Kuni, and all of a sudden I have a powerful urge to play a grid-based RPG with explorable levels...which Ni no Kuni most definitely is not. Why do I always have these stupid urges at the worst times? Might just grab a demo and get it out of me. Anybody know if any of the Heroes of Magic games, Rainbow Moon, or, Wakfu play like RPG adventures with grid-based movement and gameplay? I suppose there's also Fallout, which I already bought...but that game raped the hell outta me when I last attempted it...

Old World Blues is amazing.  Worth the price alone.

[MeshGearFox]

Iiiii totally cannot get a handle on A-Train 9. I guess it's more a train management game than a city builder, which is fine, but I can't get a feel for what I should be doing with that. Don't see much difference in the trains (there's like, minute differences in the number of passengers they can carry and their speeds and prices), but I don't see how this translates into operating cost. Doesn't feel like there's much room to experiment with establishing transit networks either -- you have buses and trains, and I don't think things like pedestrian/individual vehicle traffic are modeled, and weather doesn't appear to affect transit time.

Unrelated to A-Train, because it actually does do this, but I think the thing that annoys me most about city builders is when it doesn't matter where buildings are located, as long as their present. SimCity models traffic and area of coverage; the Caesar/Pharaoh/etc games model this in terms of... how well/often civs and maintenance guys can access/pass by certain structures; Afterlife has various rules for transit time between soul housing sites and punishments/rewards.

On the other hand, Stronghold (SSI) doesn't really concern itself with where you put what, as long as mines are in hilly provinces and farms are by water. Fragile Allegiance, in terms of building stuff on your asteroids, doesn't either. Nominally these two were more of an RTS and 4X than city builders proper, and in FA's case you could argue that the building placement stuff is just a slightly less abstract form of what you get for colony management in a 4X game, and it's really fine in that sense, but... I don't know, I guess this applies to RTSes too -- I'vep layed way too many where it doesn't really matter where you put stuff. Resource units move between extraction points and stockpiles really fast for the most part, and there's not usually a lot of concern about getting raw materials to building sites.

That's why I liked Outpost 2 and Knights and Merchants so much, though -- there's a huge emphasis on logistics.

I wonder if SimIsle modeled anything wrt distance from resource extraction facilities and factories. I'm thinking you paid more for hauling stuff around, and possibly had more air polution.

Dark Souls - I have butterfly problems. Namely I don't like waiting on bosses to go vulnerable because I am very impatient.

How is Dead Space? Gamersgate has it cheap for the rest of the night.

[Bytor]

Dead Space is amazing.

[Esper_Crusader]

I got a new video card for the computer this weekend so I've been playing a ton of PC games. GW2, D3, Planetside2, Dream fall: Longest Journey and Hawken. I also signed up for the Elder Scrolls mmo and have an "above average". We'll see..

[DPB]

Dark Souls - I have butterfly problems. Namely I don't like waiting on bosses to go vulnerable because I am very impatient.

Turn human, and there's a summon sign for a sorcerer NPC hidden in the bush before you go up the stairs. It's not a difficult boss fight anyway, but you don't even have to attack it once with her along, just block/dodge the attacks, she'll continue casting spells even when the butterfly is in the air.

It's a good idea to summon her for this fight even if you're going to attack the butterfly yourself. Doing so makes her show up again before one of the hardest bosses in the game.

[Ranadiel]

I'm jealous.... I always wanted to make my way through WK to get WK2.... looked very appealing to me... but alas, it still sits on my shelf untouched... I made the mistake of buying that the same time I bought Xenoblade.... popped in Xeno first... you can imagine what happened...

Honestly you aren't missing much. >.> I was anticipating White KNight Chronicles from the moment I saw the first trailer.....and the series really has been a diappointment the entire time. The original trailers and such implied a world with giant scope and fast paced action. The world you get is still giant in scope, but the game play is so miserable. And considering the scope of the world, the actual storyline feels....small. I don't know how it feels small considering it is about a war engulfing the entire world, but somehow it does. For 2 this is probably because the entire game is basically just repeating the areas from 1, but I don't remember why things seemed small in 1. There really was only one time in both games where I really felt the scope that the trailers gave me was in one of the final battles of 2 where you have all five knights fighting and somehow it actually felt dynamic and epic to me despite it just being another fight.

[Aeolus]

I'm jealous.... I always wanted to make my way through WK to get WK2.... looked very appealing to me... but alas, it still sits on my shelf untouched... I made the mistake of buying that the same time I bought Xenoblade.... popped in Xeno first... you can imagine what happened...

Honestly you aren't missing much. >.> I was anticipating White KNight Chronicles from the moment I saw the first trailer.....and the series really has been a diappointment the entire time. The original trailers and such implied a world with giant scope and fast paced action. The world you get is still giant in scope, but the game play is so miserable. And considering the scope of the world, the actual storyline feels....small. I don't know how it feels small considering it is about a war engulfing the entire world, but somehow it does. For 2 this is probably because the entire game is basically just repeating the areas from 1, but I don't remember why things seemed small in 1. There really was only one time in both games where I really felt the scope that the trailers gave me was in one of the final battles of 2 where you have all five knights fighting and somehow it actually felt dynamic and epic to me despite it just being another fight.

That's because the scope was filled in with the blandest, lifeless, most cliched version of the monomyth imaginable. The custom character and the sentai knights would've been an interesting fold to an otherwise bland JRPG, but like everything else in those games, they were handled terribly, and the rest of the game was built around grinding for the MMO portion (which required an insane amount of grinding to accomplish anything worthwhile). I'm not kidding when I said that those games were what ended my faith in Level 5.

[GrimReality]

Trucking along in Xenoblade. Kind of a boring weekend, so I made some progress. The boss battles are major intense! I love it. I find myself relaxing my body a bit when I finally win. I'm totally getting the hang of this battle system. Very fun.
I'm now in Colony 6. I do NOT like that the Mechons have started talking. Completely takes away the feel of menace they had before. Oh, well.

Also picked up 999. Tried it out last night, and couldn't even figure out the first room! I found all the necessary pieces to the puzzle, but can't work out the 4 # combinations. Maybe I need to use the mirror? Anyone willing to offer a hint without spoiling? I don't want to gamefaqs it.

[Starmongoose]

Check out the back of the picture of the cruise liner. Use it to crack the code on the pieces of paper.

[GrimReality]

Check out the back of the picture of the cruise liner. Use it to crack the code on the pieces of paper.

I did that! You have the 10 symbols, then the paper with the red and blue symbols. But there's only 2 red and 2 blue! I can't figure out how to get 4 #'s for each. I was thinking about the mirror, but not sure if that would work.

[Starmongoose]

The colour of the shapes matter. On one peice of paper the first two shapes are blue, giving you the first 2 numbers for the combination. The second peice of paper has the last two shapes as blue, giving you the last two numbers. The same, but in reverse for the red key. The fist two shapes on the second peice of paper are red, giving you the first two numbers, and the last two shapes on the first peice of paper are red, giving you the last two numbers.

EDIT: I just realised you said you only had one peice of paper. You don't have all the clues yet. That'll be your problem. Haha.

[Klyde Chroma]

I'm jealous.... I always wanted to make my way through WK to get WK2.... looked very appealing to me... but alas, it still sits on my shelf untouched... I made the mistake of buying that the same time I bought Xenoblade.... popped in Xeno first... you can imagine what happened...

Honestly you aren't missing much. >.> I was anticipating White KNight Chronicles from the moment I saw the first trailer.....and the series really has been a diappointment the entire time. The original trailers and such implied a world with giant scope and fast paced action. The world you get is still giant in scope, but the game play is so miserable. And considering the scope of the world, the actual storyline feels....small. I don't know how it feels small considering it is about a war engulfing the entire world, but somehow it does. For 2 this is probably because the entire game is basically just repeating the areas from 1, but I don't remember why things seemed small in 1. There really was only one time in both games where I really felt the scope that the trailers gave me was in one of the final battles of 2 where you have all five knights fighting and somehow it actually felt dynamic and epic to me despite it just being another fight.

Am I to take it then, that I should  jump right into 2 should I choose to indulge the series in the future...? 2 other individuals were trying to tell me to skip part 1 but I'm a big "start at the beginning" type of guy.... Learned my lesson though... when you guys here tell me to skip something its worth skipping....

NOTE: Yes, I am once again referencing my delinquent decision to not heed the wisdom offered to me here about Atelier Rorona... And now with Ayesha around the bend, the chances of my ever desiring to return to Arland is becoming slimmer and slimmer.....

[John]

Is the New Vegas DLC really not good? I've been waiting for years to get that game, but I wanted the DLC because FO3 had really good DLC. Man...I can get for, like, under $10 without the DLC now...And I got the Ultimate Edition sitting in my Amazon cart, waiting for me to finally have the opportunity to get it...

Anyways...I just got Ni no Kuni, and all of a sudden I have a powerful urge to play a grid-based RPG with explorable levels...which Ni no Kuni most definitely is not. Why do I always have these stupid urges at the worst times? Might just grab a demo and get it out of me. Anybody know if any of the Heroes of Magic games, Rainbow Moon, or, Wakfu play like RPG adventures with grid-based movement and gameplay? I suppose there's also Fallout, which I already bought...but that game raped the hell outta me when I last attempted it...

Old World Blues is amazing.  Worth the price alone.

Since I have more time to flesh out this opinion... New Vegas has a really mixed bag of DLC.  Dead Money is pretty bad.  Honest Hearts is pretty easy, but is a good, fun romp if you just want to destroy something.  Plus it gives you some pretty good weaponry for... Old World Blues, which is pretty much the best piece of DLC I've ever played in an RPG. It's got the great 50s sci fi aesthetic, totally crazy and lovable characters, but it is TOUGH.  Lots of mechanical enemies with high armor and you will die a lot.  It's worth it, though.  I didn't play Lonesome Road, but I've heard good things about it.

[DPB]

I agree with pretty much all of that, I'd rank them:

1. Old World Blues (by some considerable distance)
2. Lonesome Road
3. Honest Hearts
4. Dead Money

I despised Dead Money, I liked the idea but the execution was horrible. The ground being littered with crippling bear traps everywhere combined with the exploding collar turned into a trial-and-error reload fest. If you must play it, make sure you take the Light Step perk since at least you won't set off the bear traps then.

[GrimReality]

The colour of the shapes matter. On one peice of paper the first two shapes are blue, giving you the first 2 numbers for the combination. The second peice of paper has the last two shapes as blue, giving you the last two numbers. The same, but in reverse for the red key. The fist two shapes on the second peice of paper are red, giving you the first two numbers, and the last two shapes on the first peice of paper are red, giving you the last two numbers.

EDIT: I just realised you said you only had one peice of paper. You don't have all the clues yet. That'll be your problem. Haha.

I've looked everywhere and touched everything! How could I be missing a clue? Oh, what the hell. I have the picture of the boat, and the one ticket like I explained. I guess I'll have to do some more searching.
I can see this game is going to drive me crazy.
Thanks for the help.