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Post by Adam on Apr 13, 2010 8:22:57 GMT -5
I may well take you up on that at some point. Just let me know - I'm in Oxford from Saturday, for the record. I've never been particularly good at games like Soul Calibur II, probably partly because I've never had a games console myself I suppose and only ever play those sorts of games when I'm round at friends. Thus the character I am best with is usually the one that I seem most able to accidentally make good attacks with in the course of random button mashing. I'm in the same boat; I have next to zero console experience. Pressing all the buttons at once is my general modus operandi. It works wonders occasionally... I particularly remember one such occasion when my friends and I were playing a game like that (it might even have been one of the Soul Calibur series), and there was a character whose weapon was a full height staff. One of its moves seemed to consist of repeatedly hitting the opposing character in the groin with its staff, this was quite effective at doing damage and by quirk of chance also happened to be one of the moves that coincided with my random button mashing a lot. Needless to say we all found that highly amusing and I kept using that character. Was that Kilik? ( This bloke.) One of his L2 attacks may be the one you're thinking of... he pokes them. A lot. He does have another one where he steps back and does a massive lunge directly towards the opponent's crotch. Best character for random button mashing is probably Cervantes, the zombie pirate. He will quite happily deal lots and lots of damage on your behalf while you flail mindlessly at the controller. Voldo (the acrobatic super-gimp) does much the same thing. Talim and Seung Mina are pretty good for it as well, the former because of her array of evasive abilities which mean you can accidentally dodge a surprising number of attacks, and the latter because she's got a massive long glaive and loads of spammable knockdown attacks. Great stuff.
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Post by dragonlord on Apr 14, 2010 15:14:54 GMT -5
It could well have been, or at least if not it was someone with a very similar looking staff.
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Post by Adam on Apr 15, 2010 14:03:45 GMT -5
Gratuitous Space Battles (Demo)
What is it?: Unique and amusing space-fighting game where you design ships and then watch them kill each other from a considerable distance. Previous experience: none, other than Alan telling me he was in the beta. Played for the review: The demo, involving the first three missions of the campaign, one of which is a tutorial.
GSB is pretty unusual. You design ships by slotting components into hulls (nothing new there). You balance firepower and resilience with crew and power requirements, as well as cost (likewise, although more complicated than most such systems). You then deploy them, give them standing orders, and... do nothing.
The ships fight each other. It's kind of relaxing in a way. RTSs are very hectic and can put a lot of pressure on you; a lot seems to ride on each decision, each moment, and a lost match is a waste of half an hour or more. With GSB, you just sit back and it doesn't matter so much if you win or lose. You can speed up time if you're just trying to blast through the mission on a repeat attempt, slow down time if you want to watch an enemy ship get catastrophically destroyed Hollywood-style, zoom in or out to look at the pretty graphics or the battle as a whole, and... well, that's it. You can't give mid-battle orders to your ships. The setup of orders and armaments/defences is the entire thrust of the game.
It's a unique, and laid-back, approach. Multiplayer consists of people posting 'challenges' - built fleets - online, other players downloading them, and then deploying their own ships to counter. Results can then be fed back to the original player via the company's servers.
Do I like it? I'm not sure. It's enjoyable enough, but I don't feel any sudden urge to go and buy the game, or even the 'ok, yeah, I could buy this' I got from Torchlight's. Battles progress slowly, and I can envisage them getting fairly repetitive, to be honest. The ships look nice - very nice - but there aren't a huge number of them and you can't customise their appearance. Designing also seems fairly samey. Loading up some cruiser hull with 11 normal slots and 7 weapon hardpoints sounds awesome until you realise that you need to use up most of said slots just to get 'minimums'. A shield, two lots of armour, two power generators, two thrusters, two crew compartments: that's 9 right away. I found myself mostly trying to juggle what I felt I needed rather than actually customising, returning to roughly the same mix on every ship. The weapons are multitudinous and reasonably varied, but there's no good measure of how much damage per (amount of time) they actually do, given that it'll vary massively depending on the target's speed, shielding, armour, etc. I generally just ended up spamming whichever I thought would be the most effective. Didn't really seem to make that much difference in battle. There's a post-battle screen telling you your ships' performances, but it's quite confusing and doesn't give that good an indication of what went on (which is a surprising shame, as the rest of the game is very well explained through hint boxes and such).
So, yeah. Not really my kind of thing, I think. It's clever, though; a neat concept. Maybe more in-depth order options and greater variety would help. There are more hulls, races and ship components to unlock as you progress through the campaign. Many, in the case of the latter, although lots of them are just different versions of existing parts. I don't really think they'd do that much to provide huge new variety though. You don't get a whole lot of tangible feedback on the efficacy of different ship designs. Different hulls give different bonuses, and different weapons have different stats, but the hands-off approach means that when the actual combat is going on you just sit there waiting for the enemies to die, having no real idea what's happening inside the program. Perhaps you get more of a feel for it as you gain expertise. I don't know. From my viewpoint, all I can see is that Rebel ships look way cooler than Federation ones...
One (massive) redeeming feature: This game is funny. Everything - upgrade descriptions, help text, manual, the lot - is laced with humour and satire. If I'm going to buy it for any reason, it's that. Check out the demo, anyway; it's free, you'll get a laugh out of it and it'll make a couple of hours pass enjoyably.
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Post by dragonlord on Apr 17, 2010 7:35:02 GMT -5
I agree GSB is not something that you will want to play for hours on end but it is good for a bit of fun now and then, particularly if you want something less mentally demanding than an RTS.
While what you say about needing a certain set of basic components that fills up a good deal of space is to some extent true, you can do a lot of juggling around with the power demands of the weapons you are using (some use massively less power than others) and the associated crew demands, which again vary a lot. You can also vary your balance of shields and armour, going for an entirely shield protected ship or a tank with layers of armour and no shields. Indeed some of the missions (probably not in the demo) have environmental effects that stop some components working, one of which shuts down shields, and thus requires you to modify your ships accordingly.
I can see your point about the end of battle report not being hugely helpful as to what did well and what didn't, but to some extent you can see what works and what didn't from watching the battle. Did your ships get swarmed by enemy fighters and start taking heavy damage before their bigger vessels even got in range? Well better beef up your fleet's anti-fighter capabilities then. Having a hard time getting through the enemy capital ships shields? Load up on weapons with high shield penetration. An important point I think is that the game is as much about fleet design as ship design, no one ship is going to be able to carry the battle, even spammed to the max, getting the fleet balance right is just as important. Indeed as is often the case having a fleet composed of different specialist ships is frequently better than having many all-rounders.
I definitely agree with you about the humour factor, it always makes me laugh every time I play it.
I have the full version and the first of the two expansion packs and you are welcome to have a go on it some time if you want.
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Post by Adam on Apr 18, 2010 8:37:03 GMT -5
You can also vary your balance of shields and armour, going for an entirely shield protected ship or a tank with layers of armour and no shields. You certainly can, but I'm too paranoid to do that, haha. I can see your point about the end of battle report not being hugely helpful as to what did well and what didn't, but to some extent you can see what works and what didn't from watching the battle. Did your ships get swarmed by enemy fighters and start taking heavy damage before their bigger vessels even got in range? Well better beef up your fleet's anti-fighter capabilities then. Having a hard time getting through the enemy capital ships shields? Load up on weapons with high shield penetration. Your comment on fighters is of course valid, but I can't actually tell whether I'm having a hard time shield-busting/armour-busting or not. There's no measure of how much damage you're actually doing and inaccuracy throws another spanner into the works anyway (there's no constant rate). I'm surprised, actually, at how much randomness the game has in it. I assumed they'd set it up so the same matchups would give the same results each time. In any case, the slow (default) speed of the game means that everything takes "ages" rather than some amount of time you can easily grasp or get a feel for. Contrast most RTSs, where if you take upwards of 30 seconds to destroy something, you're doing it wrong (or your opponent's doing it very very well, haha). This can of course be remedied by turning the game speed up, but I worry I'll miss things then. An important point I think is that the game is as much about fleet design as ship design, no one ship is going to be able to carry the battle, even spammed to the max, getting the fleet balance right is just as important. Indeed as is often the case having a fleet composed of different specialist ships is frequently better than having many all-rounders. Yeah, I got that impression. I found in the few games I played that missiles worked well, as the ships move so slowly that the range advantage is very significant. I do actually have a cruiser design named simply 'missile spam'. It sits in the back of the formation lobbing long ranged death at people. In the third mission, I fielded a fleet comprised of two of those, two balanced cruisers, 6 or 8 long-ranged missile frigates, and five shorter-ranged frigates with anti-shield ion cannons. The ion cannon ones were in front, and four of them died before they could do anything significant. The rest proceeded to methodically demolish the enemy fleet, losing maybe two or three more ships, one of them a cruiser. I do like the way the fleets are built up almost as a whole, though. One of my ship designs is the 'Meatshield' frigate, with anti-fighter weaponry and plenty of shields and armour. It can quite effectively shut down incoming fighter waves and absorbs a bit of firepower while the stuff that causes actual harm to the enemy does so in peace. Essentially, they're cover saves. ;D
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Post by Adam on Apr 21, 2010 9:51:35 GMT -5
Just to let everyone know, this series is going on a hiatus now, as I'm in uni. I didn't exactly manage to play a new game every day, but I did at least get to finish a few of them instead. I'll throw game reviews in here when I have the time or inclination, which may well mean it picks up again over the summer.
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