The Heart of a Gamesman

[SpaceLions]

We didn't have games growing up instead we learned to be creative and use imagination. Hence Frog Stick!

heh I actually have a pre-release copy of Frog Stick II that was only released in Japan... it's pretty cool, they expand the story a lot and it features REALLY solid graphics for all 5 frogs and 6 all new never seen in America sticks

I never played this game but when I was a kid the first eroge I stumbled across was the unlicensed Frog Dick: Maximus Theater and having watched a longplay of Frog Stick II there's quite a lot of subtle parody in the eroge.

[peng]

Surprise ending: You WERE the frog ALL ALONG

[peng]

to get back on topic Final Fantasy Tactics is the only game ive bought 5 times. 3 times on playstation, once for psp, once for my phone.

it's not a particularly challenging game but the way the art and mechanics come together on a backdrop of the vatican summoning demons to direct the course of history is pretty cool. there's a real sense of loss as you begin to realize that this is a world of crumbling ruins of what was once a great age. technology and magic has crumbled and been replaced by fortresses of stone and weapons of steel.

ive always had a soft spot for rpgs with job systems and fft i feel uses final fantasys jobs to their utmost. even compared to more modern ff job games like Bravely Default, in fft the combination of active, secondary, passive, reactive and movement skills let's you craft unique character builds that can compliment each other rather than relying on cookie cutter "these are the last jobs you unlock so you will be playing endgame as them" problems. additionally, over the course of the story you recruit characters that possess unique individual skill sets which set them apart fundamentally from all other party members and learning how to use their strengths and integrate them into the job system as a whole is a lot of fun

i like its story because once you strip off the supporting characters and world building, much of the plot is the main character just wants to fuck off and live with his family in peace, while he is doggedly pursued by The Knights Templar for knowing too much. his prime motivation in fighting the final boss isn't so much saving the world but just to rescue his sister.

sadly none of the other ivalice entries square has made since have really captured the gothic, dark ages tone fft sets. outside of vagrant story the setting is now more known for it's easily merchandisable monster races --look! we've got moogles in funny hats! sexy rabbits! and even an entire race of Eeyores!-- than anything fft set out.

[Loud Speakers MC]

Panzer General, and in particular Panzer General for the Playstation 1.



It was introduced to me by my (now ex skinhead) skinhead step father when my mother passed away. My aunt, grandmother, and I were visiting him from Florida so that the we could deal with my dead mother (she was cremated). I remember my algebra teacher yelling at me about making sure I did my math homework because I would be skipping school for a week, bringing my math book with me, but never once opening it (and I've never been fond of any kind of math higher than basic arithmetic ever since).

At the time in October 2001 when my mother overdosed, Gastonia, North Carolina was one of the worst places for opioid abuse at the turn of the 21st century, so all this stuff people are crying about regarding "the opioid epidemic" is something I already knew a lot about as a 13 year old kid 18 years ago.

The best, and entertaining gameplay I have found online for Panzer General in its entirety is none other than Mr. Kritic, doing longplays on the PC.

The start of the war for the Germans:


The start of the Bagration, the Soviet offensive into Europe proper:

[don]

arcanum.jpg (42.93KiB)Viewed 22812 times

To answer a little more seriously, I wanna talk about Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

This is an RPG by Troika games, which was made up of people worked on the original Fallout. Arcanum is basically a Fallout 1/2 style RPG but pumped up to be as big as that partiuclar style of RPG could handle. There's a lot of reasons not to play it. Just to get them out there:

• The graphics are really bland and repedative most of the time
• It's straight up hard to navigate the maps (both in town, wilderness, dungeon and overworld) because you have to use this janky waypoint system
• The game was released buggy and unfinished so it needs a fan made patch to be decently playable
• It suffers from a slow, slow start and it can be more grindy than Fallout 1 (it's about as grindy as Fallout 2, but it's bigger so the grind drags more)

Arcanum is a deep RPG, though. It's really reactive to how your character behaves and there are so many builds possible that it feels a little bit like an endless game, since there's always a new way to experience it. My current character is named Vandril St. Vane and he's a gentleman necromancer. So while he practices dark magic I tried to be polite and to stick to the main quest as much as possible. I'm level 25 now and a little OP compared to where I am in the game (I just arrived at the Isle of Despair) but I've been raiding dungeons for a while so I'm fine with it. I found a ruin belonging to an ancient necromancy cult so I took special care cleaning it out. At the end of the dungeon I found a skeleton begging me to bathe him in dragon blood so he could return to life. I went and got some dragon blood from another dungeon and poured it on the skeleton and it turned out he was a thousand year old undead warrior with first hand knowledge of ancient necromancy, and I could recruit him into my party. The only problem was that my alignment was too good. Despite my "gypsy blood curse," which I acquired for being an asshole to the wrong gypsy, I was still too good to recruit the death knight. So I needed to farm some negative alignment.

Vandril is a night mage, so I planned my arrival in the town of Stillwater for dusk. My party and I went from house to house, killing every man woman and child in the village, raising the toughest citizens from the dead to kill their former neighbors at my command. By the end of it I was just evil enough to recruit the guy.

There is a moment in a great RPG when you realize you are playing a character even if you didn't mean to. Vandril St. Vane ended up being more necomancer than gentleman and I ended up descending on a snow swept town at sundown like Death himself for a few hours tonight, which was a nice distraction from the yawning horror of the world.

[SpaceLions]

arcanum.jpg

To answer a little more seriously, I wanna talk about Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

There's a good video about this game

[DevilDoa]

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[DevilDoa]

arcanum.jpg

To answer a little more seriously, I wanna talk about Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

I looked up some gameplay vids and Arcanum looks massive. But I didn't find the graphics to be necessarily shitty. They actual looked pretty advanced, especially for an old school RPG.

[don]

arcanum.jpg

To answer a little more seriously, I wanna talk about Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

I looked up some gameplay vids and Arcanum looks massive. But I didn't find the graphics to be necessarily shitty. They actual looked pretty advanced, especially for an old school RPG.

The thing is I love isometric RPGs and my favorite of all time is Fallout One. Arcanum is a lot like Fallout One, so I find it very playable but it has a few differences that make the graphics harder to take. First off, unlike Fallout, the overworld can be walked through manually as opposed to just zooming out to a world map. The world is MASSIVE, and like Fallout it's realized with relatively few graphical assets, which makes all of the environments repetitive in the extreme. Also, and this is kinda mean since they did try, the aesthetic of arcanum is just not as a clear or as cool as Fallout. It's the combination of repetition and blandness that makes it bad, because those two things together actually make the game harder to play as environments blend into one another