BBRoundtable

For me, it's Mario Galaxy right now!

Don't have a whole lot of time to play it at any given time, but the times I get around to playing it, it's a total blast!
Tonight I tackled Toy Time Galaxy & got pretty annoyed in the process!

What's your current game addiction?

I had been addicted to Mass Effect for a good long while, but after two playthroughs, I've about had enough... although I have been trying for a few odds and ends achievements still Mario Galaxy will be my next main title to go through... only thing that prevents my total addiction to that one is the immense frustrations it causes me

No particular game here. I've been bouncing between Half-Life 2, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, and GTA: Vice City as the mood strikes me. That said, I haven't done a lot of gaming at all the last week or so.

Pathetically enough, I went back and started playing Dragon Quest VIII again. I sank almost 120 hours into that game the first time, but I never did do the bonus dungeon at the end that you have to beat to get the extra ending to the game. There are only two ways to kill this one dragon thingy in the bonus dungeon - whack it with many critical hits or use this one specific defense-ignoring attack a couple times that the hero learns at lvl 65. The problem is that I took the wrong skill paths to get the critical hit skills, and it takes FOOOOORRRREEEEVAAAARRR to get to lvl 65 in that game (I ran out of patience at lvl 49 after hours on end of monotonous level grinding). My curiosity finally got the better of me, though, and since it's been probably two years since I last played it, here I am, back at it again. Oh well, at least I'm getting my money's worth.

I've recently become hooked on Gears of War online again. And I've also come to the conclusion that GoW's multiplay mode is miles ahead of Halo 3.

Funny, but i used to play lots of PC games. Not anymore though, because it's always the Wii or the PS2.

About a couple weeks ago I was playing Guild Wars a lot. But by now, I've pretty much stopped. All the things I need to do like the dungeons I need to finish my master dungeon books are ones all the serious gamers have already done. Which means it's almost impossible to find a group for those. I could join a guild or alliance that's focused on this stuff but I was already in one where the core gamers got what they want and there isn't much more going on. So I may just wait until they do something like make a game-wide party search that will make it easier for gamers to find each other for what they need.

I haven't had a game console since the Nintendo 64 so obviously I haven't been doing that type of gaming for a long time. I really like those situation games for the PC where you see views of rooms in a house and click on items to progress. But I don't like the puzzles and brain teasers. I'd rather play a game focused on clues to the storyline so I'm always on the lookout for the right game for me.

Corvette Girl wrote:Funny, but i used to play lots of PC games. Not anymore though, because it's always the Wii or the PS2.

I kind of did the exact opposite. I can't remember the last time my GameCube was even plugged in (it must be at least 4 months...) and my DS gets very little use these days. However my collection of computer games has kept me fairly busy instead, when I do find time to do gaming.

I'm working on Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. Though I've been working on it since November. I've got about 6 or 7 battles left to beat it, I think. It's a long game. And then when you find out who the Black Knight really is, it's one of those Darth Vader is Luke's father moments. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it turns out in the end.

^ Oh geez, I forgot I had to finish FE on my GameCube. Maybe sometime soon it will finally come time to plug it back in somewhere.

I loved the Gamecube FE. I played through on every difficulty level. Though the Wii version is a lot harder than the Gamecube version. I thought that since I had played through Hard on the Gamecube version that I could tackle Normal on the Wii version without breaking a sweat. Man, was I wrong. It's really hard early in the game before your units get a chance to level up. I'm not sure I want to play through Hard on this version.

Yeah, I'd heard that Radiant Dawn was brutally hard at times. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, mind you. Yeah, it sucks to have to replay missions because you're too much of a perfectionist to let anybody get killed and all, but some careful planning will usually circumvent that issue. Seeing as I still don't have a Wii yet, I obviously can't play FE:RD right now, but I may get it someday when I eventually do get the system. I certainly enjoyed Path of Radiance, anyway. That said, I really wish they'd upgraded the freakin' graphics a little for RD. I mean come on, the Wii is so much more powerful than the GC, yet the best attack effects in any FE game are the the sprite-based ones in the GBA games. Swordmaster's critical hit animation in the GBA FE games is so freakin' cool. Srsly.

That's a complaint one sees time and time again about the Wii. There's not that much focus on making things look decent. Now admittedly it's not the same hardware as a 360 or PS3, but it's capable of a lot more than most 3rd party games put out.

Really, this is less of a gripe about the Wii's graphical capability being unused and more of one about Nintendo continuing to severely neglect the visual presentation values in their console FE games. Even the GC was capable of way the hell more than Path of Radiance did with it, let alone the Wii with Radiant Dawn. Gameplay is always the most important aspect of a game, sure, but it never hurts to add some more of teh shinies here and there. I mean, lack of voice acting and more CG cutscenes aside, couldn't they have at least made the battlefields look a LITTLE bit more detailed and given some flash and variation to the attack animations? That's not a lot to ask.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if they ever made magic users more viable in RD than they were in PoR. I barely ever used my mages in PoR because it took so danged long for them to ever get their magic skill levels up high enough to use the best weapons in the game. When a modified basic lightning tome (which was actually amazingly strong, btw) was more useful to me than all of the highly advanced tomes (which none of my chars were skilled enough to use), that's kind of pathetic. That's in stark contrast with the GBA FE games, where mages are an essential part of kicking the crap out of whatever comes in your general direction. Chucking magic gooood.

It was the God of War: Chains
of Olympus demo on the
PSP, however, I ha-
ve gone back
to the Si-
mpso-
ns:

(game...)



(used to be Mass Effect!)