Category: RPG

Torchlight 2 : 20 bones!

Runic announced the price for Torchlight 2 and clearly they are trying to make people to believe they are not making an A-class title (it’s an A-class title).  They also additionally mentioned that this is ALL you will have to spend.    That’s 5$ more than one month of WOW for probably 50 hours of play even before you delve into mods (and there will be mega mods).   And the last class was announced which looks like a more standard mage-esque type chick.   Looking forward to uhhh… October?

Torchlight 2 Hardcore Newb run (someday)

I’d love to say Torchlight 2 is right around the corner, but it probably isn’t.  That said, most of us will not get into the diablo 3 beta, so when Torchlight 2 comes out, we are planning on running Torchlight 2 the first time multiplayer hardcore WITHOUT having played the game before.

The Rules! (this is really on the honor system)

1) No one can have played the game before.

2) If you play, you cannot play at any other time until your hardcore character bites it (i.e.: no peeking ahead).

3) If your character dies, you are free to join again with a hardcore character. (rules 1 and 2 still apply) or quit this absolutely absurd waste of time once and for all.

4) We’ll make up many more rules as we go along if things don’t seem in the spirit of playing newb hardcore!

Of course, as much of this will be documented and posted to the tubes of you as emotionally possible.

Oh and they announced the newest TL2 class; The BERZERKER.

King of Dragon Pass for iOS!

King of Dragon Pass is one of those amazing and unique indy titles that only a small studio could have made.  At it’s core it’s a strategy title where you manage a germanic-like clan through it’s trials and tribulations, try to lump some other clans into a tribe and drive that tribe into a kingdom.  While it is a strategy game with resource management and area control,  it’s main goodness is a story component where random events play out over the course of years based on choices made at each point that the story is presented.  If you take in some refugees for instance, it could trigger certain (random) stories where some of the new women are stealing the men from your original clan group, pissing off the incumbent women and this will have to be resolved somehow, if you didn’t take the refugees, it could path out to a different set of random stories.  Given there are a mess of these stories going on at once and they all path, that’s a huge tree of story goodness to experience.   It’s a given that it’s never the same game twice, but what A-sharp did was create a game with that most elusive of all elements: soul.   From the way battles are managed to the aging of your clan elders to the myriad of paintings and images that go along with the stories, the game just oozes out soul from every pore.

So why bring this up now as it came out in ’99 and this game has been lost in the sands of time for awhile, at least in purchasable for?  It’s coming to iOS in September!  While not available on the iPad (which would be ideal), it’s going to be out on the iTouch and iPhone for what looks like OS4/5.

Summer Gaming Deluge

Well I had a week off and gaming got friggin’ done.  A lot of it.  Game after game of Shadowfist, two 5 hour + games of Talisman 4th Edition, Dragon Lairds and a weekend of  handful after handful of D10’s being thrown for Exalted to top the shit off.    Thanks to everyone that suffered through the debauchery, the rump-gasps, rank foists, dank, oppressive basement conditions and cursing as it was probably the most solid week of gaming I’ve had since 2004 or so.   To have two days in a row that consisted of waking up at 10AM, stumbling around trying to find food and the preparing for a few hours for another almost all nighter of the ultimate nerdery is really a gift that one at my stolid age and life-choices shouldn’t be allowed to have.

Shadowfist:  Some great games were played  and beatings delivered (as usual).  My only issue is that 4-player is the maximum enjoyable size.  Five player just starts to break down, not the game engine at all, but the ability for players to play with the intensity that a multiplayer CCG requires for that long of a time.  I’d rather get 2-3 three player games over the same span of time than one big-ass five or six player game.   My decks did OK, with the exception of my A-list deck, which did phenomenally well in the hands of some of the less experienced players (I never played the deck myself).  One player, we’ll call him STEVE, got Ting Ting, the Golden Gunman and Steven Wu out onto the table at the same time.   Even though he didn’t win that game, this was a moral victory forever.    The most interesting deck I saw out of the group was a horrific use of Bonechill by Mouth.

Dragon Lairds:  Becoming a favorite, though one person, we’ll call him SCOTT, wins every game all the time.  While this is derivative of another game (can’t remember the name), I wouldn’t play without the Tom Wham (and friends) art work.

Talisman 4th Edition:  Like Shadowfist, if you have more than 4 players, you’re just not going to be able to sustain the intensity over 5 hours of play.  Though the two games we got in were fun, I think that’s quite enough Talisman until the Dragon expansion is released this Fall.   The new horse deck is great as well as the trinkets and non-item rewards you can get, though I am still wrestling with the ability of players to gain Craft from monster trophies.  Overall though with more than 3, I would say this is just not going to be on the menu for a long time to come.   Notable is that someone tried to play the Monk (who got awful nerfed in the new version) and failed.  This is understandable when your only power is to have +3 to normal Combat.

Exalted: What can I say, I know the issues everyone on the internet has with this game and yet when we play it, it’s  hellaciously fun.  Not as much combat happened during the sessions we played compared to the last session with these characters, so only a hundred dice hit the table instead of hundreds and hundreds.  I’d been planning to run one of the (very few) published adventures (with some tweaks) for the game and it worked out well, inserting some of my own characters in here and there and decreasing the difficulty when an experienced RPG gamer pulled a Steel Reserve fueled newb mistake and wandered off during a dungeon crawl portion only to be jumped and nearly destroyed by one of the most obvious traps ever conceived.  While the combat has an awesome amount of crunch, I’m still not totally sold on social combat.  It’s interesting, but one of my players mentioned immediately: “if this is dropping my willpower, why wouldn’t I just instantly attack?”  Exactly.  In two instances of social combat from published adventures, both have antagonists that speak through other mediums so they cannot be instantly attacked (Return to the Tomb of Five Corners and Daughter of Nexus).  That’s telling about what players are apt to do during social combat when up against an actual enemy.  From reading the interweb tubes over the last year or so, and my shock at antagonists from the Scroll of Exalts with 50+ charms, I was thinking of converting the whole campaign to Feng Shui or FATE, but after these sessions I just don’t see the point.  I won’t mince words though that Exalted is a heavy bitch of a game to prep for and run as a GM, and as you get to higher power levels, well nigh impossible.

Realm of the Mad God

The character models sort of look like clothed scrotes anyway.

I was flipping through Google Chrome apps and saw this bad boy dubbing itself (as far as I can tell)  as a MMO fantasy shooter(?!).  The first part is bad, but the second parts (the shooter + fantasy bit) was too good not to check out.  It plays like Smash TV and has all the generic fantasy tropes you can imagine.  Of course it’s free, but you can buy shit in game as is the M.O. for every MMO these days.

After playing for a good 40 minutes or so it descended into tedium for me soloing around–especially since quests are for everyone on the map and can get gobbled up faster than you can get there to even see the enemies.  Sure I appreciate the permanent character death when you get shot from all sides, but it started to get tedious.  Then, out of nowhere, I got on what I’ve only heard described as a “RAPE TRAIN” and that made all the difference.  A rape train is a truly massive conglomerate of players, probably 100 – 200 at a time that run along a road way in a map zone as fast as they can shooting everything everywhere.  You can’t even see the enemy mobs that pop up before they are destroyed, let alone grab any loot that drops (you can’t see the ground— there are too many players on scren) unless you get off the train.  As there are  many high-level characters on the train, the mobs that spawn are superlative and give mass amounts of experience– but if you get off the train you can find yourself totally overmatched weeping all alone as you are surrounded and your 50 pixel character tossed into the permadeath pile.

Overall, an interesting game, it’s skill based and is completely unapologetic if you are fat fingering and get stuck between some rocks and killed.  Along with the perma-death, the fact that you can get GOOD at playing the game physically can be appreciated.  The game would be completely overlooked if it wasn’t in the browser, but it is, and it makes a pretty cool pick up game.

d2 hardcore mraakairy – part 6 – PERMA-DEATH’D

she got cornered. she got killed.

kunninglinguist is no more. she was gang banged to the great beyond in the final chamber of Viper Claw Lair. it was mainly my fault for running too deep into the mobs and not having a belt FULL of rejuv’s. once kunninglinguist was surrounded, it was time to give up. why the fuck i was not recording that boss fight is beyond my understanding for failure.

some thoughts about the amazon in diablo2:

– MANA CONSTRAINED GAY. you never have enough mana.
– the amazon was the first character i played when i bought d2 back in the day, i loved this character. but after playing hardcore version i will never again, the play feels too slow.
– i guess i needed some spear skills to help kill bosses?

some thoughts about hardcore death:

– it’s GREAT! you never know when your endgame play is happening until just before it happens.
– would be nice to see the items i lost and check some stats on the dead characters previous life. you can’t even load a ghost character to see all that shit.
– i’m almost possitive all my hardcore characters will die on the bone spear arms of duriel.

here’s a video of kunninglinguist last days in d2, you’ll see how long the boss fights were taking me and i’m sure that is a sign of the amazon being a shitty character at the lower lv’s.

 

Massive Exalted Gallery

This dude posted 700+ Exalted images to his picasa.  Comics, almost all the art from first and second edition as well as some (good and bad) fan made art.  Great stuff and lots of carnage and boobs.