Marlowe Lawbringer

[quote who="Tridus" reply="24" id="2318973"] Quoting Marlowe Lawbringer, reply 20 I still advocate the original hardcore EQ model of death penalties, forced grouping, and relatively long leveling time, I though it was absurdly ridiculous that I could hit max level in Warhammer in under a month of PvE solo play. I doubt its going to have that. Very few people still want to make games with that design after Vanguard crashed and burned so badly

As someone still looking for a worthy replacement for EQ1 and has been casually following Aion, are beta testers permitted to discuss just how integral PVP is to Aion? Personally, I just hate PVP, but in games like WoW you can play perfectly well on a PvE server and ignore consensual PvP (though I ended up hating WoW for other reasons). However, I tried Warhammer earlier this year and, though I liked many aspects of the game, quit after a couple of months since there was l

[quote who="ZehDon" reply="5" id="2315983"]I know they're working on an Xbox 360 version of the Enhanced Edition, [/quote] The console version, both P3 and XBox, was cancelled a couple of months ago.

[quote who="JuleTron" reply="9" id="2265018"] So how do you win a battle? Is it based on chance , numbers, technology level etc. ? (I've looked for info on other sites, but they aren't very helpful when it comes to gameplay) [/quote] Obviously, I have not played HOI III yet, but I expect it to play much like other Paradox games. Although details differ a bit between the games because of different historical eras, in a very general way, combat in thes games play out as follow

[quote who="JuleTron" reply="4" id="2263528"] Hearts of Iron III looks cool. Is it a TBS game? does it have real-time combat? [/quote] Hearts of Iron III is like all Paradox strategy games (i.e., the Europa Universalis games, Rome, Victoria, the earlier HOI games) and, I believe, uses the current EUIII engine. Technically, it is not a TBS game since there are no turns per se and time moves on as you issue your commands and wait for the consequences to play out (you can vary

[quote who="FrostMage" reply="25" id="2263105"] Mass effect has a pause feature that allows you to think through your strategy. You just have to hold down the space bar and use the right mouse button to look around. It isn't always effective, but I found it most usefull in alot of combat situations. Just letting you know as a fellow 'old' gamer. (but not quite as old... I'm 40) [/quote] I was quite aware of the pause feature. But unlike a simil

Dragon Age, Hearts of Iron III, Majesty II, Elemental. I'm up in the air on Bioshock II--I loved the first game (even though I am not usually a shooter fan), but am ambivalent at best about playing as a Big Daddy. The Star Wars MMO looks interesting, but I've tried virtually every major MMO and none have come close to living up to original EverQuest, which I played compulsively for five years. Basically, they have all followed WoW in dumbing down and watering down the old EQ expe

Some players and reviewers have agreed with you, though in fairness not all; some have praised the devloper for retaining the difficulty of the earlier Fantasy Wars. (Although not advertised as such, EL is really just an additional campaign pack for that earlier game.) It's certainly a matter of taste. For me, like the OP, the turn requirement sucked the fun out of this game. I posted this on these forums a couple of weeks ago (the thread has fallen off the first page):</p

[quote who="Charvel1" reply="19" id="2209759"]If I remember right 1.65 is the latest you can get for the English (Atari) version. Which is what Impulse has. If you have the Russian version (I think it's Russian, then you can patch up to 1.7). 1.7 does not add anything as far as gameplay that I know of. [/quote] This is inaccurate. The 1.7 patch is not limited to the Russian version, but has long been available on GamersGate for the English version. (However, even if this pat

[quote who="Facelord" reply="4" id="2197104"]I actually watched a friend play Duke Nukem 3D on his 360(he got the game off the XBOX Live Marketplace), and I wasn't too impressed, either. [/quote] Impressed compared to what? You weren't impressed by a PC game released in 1996 compared to modern games and graphics? I'm not a huge FPS fan, but rest assured that Duke Nukem was one impressive game when released in comparison to other games of the period. While the basic gam

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="2" id="2183636"]You should try th emultiplayer. The gameplay is just excellent, but you're right about the solo experience. But in multiplayer it's really different. [/quote] This won't change my opinion since I never, ever play games online (except MMOs, which are a different kettle of fish and which I almost exclusively play PvE). I've discussed this many times, often on these forums, and have no desire to revisit my arguments, so will just state t

I've played several missions and my thoughts are not far from yours. It's a good game overall, but its appeal may be limited by some of the design decisions. You probably hit the largest problem squarely on the head: while the game is a lot of fun to look at and play, and has an excellent UI, that fun gets decreased by the puzzle-like nature of the maps coupled with the tight turn requirements to achieve victory. This sort of precludes general exploration of the otherwise inviting lookin

For those interested, the first (of supposedly several) major patches to E:TW was released a few days ago. I haven't really played with it yet, but I've seen reports on the forums that many CTD issues have been fixed. (Of course, some of the gameplay changes are proving controversial.) BTW, I don't really have an opinion on the sieges. I appreciate the graphics in Total War, but as far more of a TBS 4X fan than a RTS fan, after admiring the graphics a few times,

[quote who="psychoak" reply="20" id="2167739"]What's great is that when Starcrap 2 comes out, they'll have connection problems there too. You just can't cure stupid from the back end... Playing PC games come with a minimal cost factor regarding knowledge. Every console game is working on a uniform hardware system with very few inconsistencies to work around. Every PC is not. It's all but impossible to code high performance networking system

Planescape: Torment is an absolutely terrific game, still quite playable despite the old graphics (there's so much to read, it's almost a text adventure anyway, LOL). Unfortunately, I admit that I have never finished it after several tries over the years for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the game. The last time I tried it, it wouldn't play nice with my Vista machine. As for those trying to tell me that a console only RPG is the greatest game of all time, well, th

Since I was interested in Elven Legacy, I recently downloaded the Fantasy Wars demo, since I understood the new game was pretty similar. I liked the demo, and thought I'd wait for the new game to be released this coming week, but when I saw this thread, I could not resist the $7.99 price and bought Fantasy Wars last night. Although the game downloaded without a hitch, I found that I needed to activate it before playing. And in the My Games section of GamersGate, where the serial num

I've played just about every game mentiioned above (to a greater or lesser extent), and just about every one is worth playing depending on your tastes and interests (except perhaps the Gothic games--while I like the basic concepts, I found the control system too odd and nonintuitive to be any fun). My favorites of the games mentioned would probably be The Witcher and Kings Bounty. But, to be frank, the OP noted that he couldn't deal with travel times or even running around cities in KotO

I'm afraid I agree with (the modest) Brad. Admittedly, I have not seen this article and I don't know the criteria that were applied, but as much as I like and admire Stardock (and I do very much) I think their output to date is somewhat small to rank them so highly. Unless I am missing something, Stardock's ouevre consists of one very good game (GCII, which I would consider an improved, more fully realized version of GCI, so not two games), one decidedly mediocre game (the

[quote who="Zubaz" reply="4" id="2077747"]A manual is forth-coming. [/quote] If up to the usual Stardock standards (all the GCII manuals as well as Sins) it will be of marginal help. I love Stardock's games and responsiveness to the community, but their manuals (and "tutorials"--I really don't consider non-interactive tutorials to be worth much) are terrible.

I liked Fallout 3, despite the usual Bethesda console oriented flaws to this old school RPGer. LOL, I better, since I logged over 100 hours in it tyring to visit just about every location before completeing the (typically for Bethesda) uninvolving main quest. But the virtually unheralded King's Bounty is easily the better game, with charm oozing from every pore and, despite is cartoony, WoWish graphics, a very deep combat system.

Opinions and taste are subjective, but here is mine: As good as GCII--ToA is (and it is very, very good), it still can't hold a candle to CivIV. YMMV depending on your tastes. First, I invariably play a turtle/development oriented strategy in TBS games. This is just way more interesting in CivIV since you have a whole lot more development tools at hand. Not only is the entire workers/city resources concept absent from GCII, but the number of city (or planet) developments is li

I've nothing against Impulse. Though I havn't happened to use it to buy any new games, it's worked well to update GCII-ToA and SOASE. I've bought a number of games from GamersGate, several Paradox titles/expansions and some third party games like King's Bounty (great game) and Civ4: Colonization (a surprising mess). I have had minor to moderate technical problems with GG (primarily, it has a habit of timing out a lot, and a large DL often has to be restarted a lot), but overall it seems

[quote]Lets see, 9.99 for about 1/3 of what we get in a 29.99 expansion pack at retail[/quote] Well, that's where we disagree. I don't see the tiny amount of announced content as equal to one third of the content of a quality $30 expansion. This is, obviously, a matter of opinion. Compare it to a very good recent expansion--Civ 4's Beyond the Sword. For $30 you got new units, new buildings, new civs, new leaders, new wonders, major new gameplay concepts (corporations, the Ap

[quote who="Dargoon999" reply="3" id="1857507"]I am wondering what the other 2 expansions will bring to the game, your thoughts?[/quote] Well, given the announced details of micro expansion one, I'd expect a smidgen of new content (less than Stardock often provided for free in Gal Civ II updates), for an astronomic price (given the new content/value ratio). That this was announced almost simultaneously with the gamer's bill of rights is ironically amusing. I'd

Unlike the prevalent kneejerk fanboy reaction here, even $10 for this (assuming the expansion contains no more content than described) is way too much, ditto for triple that described content for $30 (or even if bundled for somewhat less). As another poster noted above, this really has the un-Stardock feel of milking the popularity of this game. Even three of these micro expansions (assuming a similar level of content for each) would offer significantly less than either of the Gal Civ II