I have no idea how you beat Chow Mein and co. at level 40. My hero is on level 48 and it was very tough.

My line-up is Hero, Ragnar, Torneko, and Meena. I consulted some guides after beating it and it seems no one uses that line-up.

Basically my lineup is Hero/Ragnar/Alena/Maya. I gave Alena Sages Stone and each person has a Tree Leaf(you go up the tree grab it from the ground, go outside of town, give it to someone not in party, repeat til you have plenty). Alena uses the stone each turn after the 1st. Hero uses Zap on the small guy(not Chow) and Ragnar attacks while Maya uses her strongest solo spell(kafrizzle I think?). If my HP gets low because they used Boulder or something I use Hero's Omni heal or bring in Kyril for Maya and have him heal as well. I try to keep Kyril alive as he has the Kazing Spell which is basically a necessity. So if I need a quick heal I might use the Secret Char(full heal) or Meena for Fullheal as well.

I just repeat this and I usually only lose 1 or 2 people each time, but it takes forever. I'm not sure how to do it faster without my party dying in the process. I read off the guides that I will eventually have to beat them in less than 10 turns, I have no ****ing clue how to do that, lol. I'll do a few more battles after leveling up and see if I figure something more out.

I think Boyra and Maya would >> Alena and Maya just because they both can hit harder more consistently but I can't keep people alive long enough without sage's stone each turn. The battle is a huge pain in the ass. And it's not even the final boss, lol.

Figured this question had been asked a ton so didn't want to start its own thread. I'm thinking about finally getting a PS3 or XBOX360, what would you recommend based upon the following considerations:

I want to play online
Due to my apartment setting, I would need to connect wireless (++$$ for xbox?)
There are many old PS2 games I would like to play/replay (how well does PS3 play PS2 games?)
Fewer old XBOX games I want to play
Big fan of sports games
Big fan of MGS series
Also like playing WWII style shooters online (COD4?)
Will be my first bluray/HD DVD

So what should I buy?

Based on your statements, PS3.

Appreciate your comments. Can you explain a little more the backwards compatibility of PS3 again? Is it only the 60 Gig HD systems that are the last, but then you mention the MGS4 package, which is an 80 gig. Just trying to figure out which PS3 would maximize backwards compatibility, since the size of the hard drive has less relevance to me.

I ended up getting Brothers in Arms from GF.

Less pretty, and controls feel worse than COD obv. The squad based aspect of it is kind of cool, you recon and then can send your teams to flank Nazis, you get the action and the command feel of it. A lot of fights are cover system based which sucks considering the cover system is super clunky and makes you appreciate the games that get it right so much more. But fights are still usually pretty fun.

They also try and force a super mediocre story down your throat, fair enough, it's a game about shooting Nazis, but oh wait, Ubisoft thinks their poorly written/acted cliche WWII story is too important for a player to have the power to skip through, despite the fact cutscenes are common and often around 5 minutes long. Dicks.

Highlight of the game for sure was that on good grenade tosses it'll go into slow mo of the frag, and dudes get meeeeesssed up it's pretty vivid. It does it for a great percentage of headshots too, it's awesome when you're in an extended cover type battle with a dude and BAM slomo headshot when you pop up. Both are super satisfying.

I also highly approve of the fact they name their control schemes "Ring World," "Tour of Duty," and "Tactical Six," after such games. Worth a rental maybe if you want a slight mix up on the WWII game deal.

posts like this tilt me so hard. ppl come in here describe specific system attributes:

oh you know my gf isn't really into games but loved playing smash brothers...umm i have friends over all the time so some good 4 player games would be good....i like old nes/snes games and wouldn't mind playing them again....so what do u think i should get guys?

punch-out wii, coming q1 2009



potential for greatness. played the original and the snes game a ton. in fact, on the snes game, i found out that the win-loss counter stops increasing at 255-0

Does anything cool happen if you beat them in less than 10 turns? I can beat them in exactly 10 now, but nothing less.

Meh absolutely nothing. A minor cutscene but nothing super. I beat them in 8 turns(Hero/Ragnar/Secret Char/Maya-Alena). Got really lucky with critical strikes on Hero and Secret Char. But after that you can't fight them anymore so no more relative easy way to get alot of XP(lol that they were super difficult when I first went to them).

The Final Boss was completely anti-climatic as I am WAY overpowered to beat him. But I did enjoy the 6th chapter as it at least gave me the first bit of trouble I had in the game and I did learn a trick to level up:

Where you found the Mirror Shield in the cave to the underworld, its a place with 2 stairs and a crevasse in the middle with a chest on the other side of the crevasse. You can fight King Metal, and 3 metal babbles. Sands of Time is a great tool in this battle and have Alena attack the king and then have your other 3 attack the babbles and hope for luck.

I'll check this place out. I've still been leveling up at the cave/tower south of Endor. Since I ditched Torneko and his whistle spell I just use musk, and it works well. The secret character gets a metal slash spell at a certain level that usually does two points of damage, so that along with the liquid metal sword makes it pretty easy.

Have you completed the monster book? When it's completed you apparently get
I'm about seven monsters short. I don't want this game to be over but I should probably get back to playing poker.

Forgive me if this has been discussed ad nauseum, but I just rediscovered Progress Quest. So excited.

http://progressquest.com/ for you noobs

i just saw an ad that you can by blizzcon PPV for $40? wtf who on earth would pay for that.

I haven't finished that book yet, but I checked out the casino and their really isn't anything there that I really want. But just for the sake of completion I have about 12 monsters left(and I'm sort of lost on where they could possibly be) and I have 53 medals. I started the town but am not really sure on how to get that going to get the last 7 medals. I guess there is always the max stats thing...but that is so long and tedious I think I'll skip that.

For the 360, is there any way to combine multiple profiles into just one?

On my old 360 I had a profile, call it "grrouchie" and I used it to connect to xbox live and whatnot.

So, got a new 360, created grrouchie and played games on it for the last month or so.
Connect to Xbox Live today, have to go through the recover gamertag thing and whatnot....

and now I have two profiles on my new 360, both called grrouchie, one saying Xbox Live under it..

However, now my achievements and everything are split between the two profiles.

I'm guessing I pretty much just need to delete the one that isn't associated with xbox live and lose any achievments or whatnot I had on it correct?

thanks

For any people in the UK, insanely cheap 360 games at PC World at the moment. Usuallly they are a terrible shop imo, but was in there yesterday and they had a load of titles for 10 pounds, and a fair few for a fiver.

I got Table Tennis and Colin McRae Dirt for a fiver each. Table Tennis rules!

anybody here ever just lose their passion for playing video games solo? I can only stand playing with friends drunk or sober online vs other players nowadays whereas as a kid I could play for 8 hrs/day.

I think i'm going through that now as well.
I've played a few games to completion this year, but they usually require more time (physical days not time played) than they should.

I tried playing gears and got bored after a couple of hours.

However, last night I got on xbox live for the first time ever and started playing gears with a friend and had a blast.....

New Xbox Channel will go live on November 19, 2008:

http://majornelson.com/archive/2008/...mber-19th.aspx

wat does that mean

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10....html?part=rss

So basically they're ripping off Home?

I just finished Uncharted and god, I can't even imagine how anyone gave this game the sick reviews it got (88 on Metacritic). There are so many things about it that are just flat out bad. It's basically Prince of Persia with guns, except the hand-to-hand combat is a large part of what made PoP so awesome.

It's the best looking game I've ever seen on a console, which is a solid achievement, and the story is delivered in a fun Hollywood kinda way - all the cinematics/animations/etc look super nice. But the gameplay is just lacking. Sitting behind cover popping out to try to headshot guys with your pistol (and occasionally a machine gun, shotgun, or sniper rifle, none of which are particularly exciting) as they advance on you just isn't that exciting; it's like one of the designers played too much Time Crisis and thought it would be fun to try to infuse that kind of **** into a third-person adventure game. The platforming is alright; not quite up to PoP's level, but certainly above average. The puzzles might as well not even be there due to how obvious they are (typical puzzle: open your journal, see that there are a bunch of symbols oriented in a certain manner and all those symbols are now before you! zomg, you should probably turn the symbols in front of you in the same direction they're facing in your notebook!).

I basically finished the game to see if he'd , but even the ending disappointed me. And holy ****, the ending sequences of this game were so lifetilting. If I were to someday write a manual about things NOT to do in game design, an entire chapter would be devoted to "forcing your players to re-do repetitive sequences over and over if they die." It's probably bad enough anytime a game has a scenario which requires you to perform a sequence in exactly one specific way, and when you add the prospect of dying and getting to repeat it several times into the mix, it becomes terrible. Example, from the second to last level:



So it takes about 10 tries to get through all this without dying, hitting the exact same buttons at every stretch of the way, and I'm like "wtf, this isn't fun, it's ****ing busywork." The final level was exactly the same way, with the final showdown being just laughable in this regard.

And speaking of scripted fights, this game's scripting is terrible. I thought we learned from Doom 3 that "making a bunch of enemies spawn when you cross a certain trigger in the room" is a crappy way to open fights. I also thought we learned from, like, every game ever made that there are several better ways to extend a fight's life than by simply spawning successive waves of enemies as you kill off the ones already there. Not to mention how awkward it is as a player when you happen to be standing in the area that the new enemies spawn from - all of a sudden you go from being free and clear to surrounded by enemies coming from behind you, on top of you, wherever, with clunky controls that while passable most of the time, guarantee in these situations that you will be dead before you can find apt cover. Again, totally not fun, and as you respawn you just plan out your robotic, algorithmic approach to beating the upcoming fight you face rather than doing what fun games make you do, which is just react to **** as it happens.

All the levels that took place underground with were completely unnecessary and are introduced so late in the game that the diversion just feels awkward. The plot really didn't need to go in that direction either. It was kinda refreshing to play a modern treasure-hunting swashbuckling or whatever game in a modern, believable setting; bringing all that **** into the game basically ruined that vibe.

I give it a 7.8/10 on the IGN scale. It's an alright game, maybe even good, but far from great.

Maybe I should start a thread where we can all pitch in ideas for "things you should never do in games." I can think of quite a few of these rules this game broke. For example:

- Do not **** on your players' effort. In the level where you fight alongside that dude for awhile and then when you kill the last enemy, there's a cutscene where , but in general, games where you're doing some fight for a specific purpose and then afterwards there's some cutscene that's like "ha ha, thanks for trying but your success in that fight doesn't actually matter cause we're gonna arbitrarily force this conclusion on you anyway" are annoying as hell.

- Do not give the player sidekicks that are completely ineffective and cannot kill anything. I'm not saying the player should be able to hide in a corner and let his sidekick do all the work (you can let the sidekicks die, for example - obv you don't want to have to nanny them, but I've played games that managed to strike a solid balance between making sure you don't completely neglect them while also not letting them die if you turn your back for 2 seconds), but at least let their guns shoot real bullets.

- Do not send your player on wild goose chases. If your major devices for advancing the plot involve fighting through one level just to find some kind of clue for where to go next in a "The princess is in another castle!" kind of way, you're probably doing it wrong. Please tie your levels together with some kind of coherent plot so I feel like I'm accomplishing something by slogging through all this terrible combat. Fighting through the church just to discover I'm supposed to go to the monastery where I then discover that what I was looking for was under the church floor all along is garbage. This is one of the few things that annoyed me about System Shock 2, which was otherwise a great game.

Goofy, it sounds to me like you had a disposition going in that you already didn't like it. Many of your complaints can be said about a lot of games including God of War. Trying stuff 10 times, not knowing what to do next, ridiculous twists, occasional awkward controls... but then again I come to expect that in pretty much every game I play.

I knew very little about it going in aside from the fact that it had gotten good reviews (which is why I bought it), and I was extremely impressed up until I realized the shootouts weren't getting much better.