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Messages - nidoking

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31
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: QFG style game
« on: June 24, 2013, 09:04:40 PM »
C-C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!

Sorry, I had to do that. Have fun with your game.

32
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: XBox ONE thoughts?
« on: June 19, 2013, 10:14:41 PM »
It looks like even Microsoft finally realized that their policies were consumer-unfriendly and not likely to help them sell consoles - they've announced that they're removing the DRM they've been so proud of and region-unlocking the consoles, while removing the digital game-sharing that actually was one of the few good ideas they had. The point remains, though - game sharing and reselling was never a concern at all when games came on discs or cartridges, plenty of people don't want to need an Internet connection to play games that don't intrinsically require it, and if a developer wants to take the steam out of the used game market, they should concentrate on making games that nobody wants to get rid of.

33
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: DOSBox Help - For beginners
« on: June 12, 2013, 06:18:01 AM »
I've got a Dosbox directory under my Personal folder which is my C: mount point, my physical DVD drive is D: (since I use physical CDs for a significant number of games), and I mount Y: to a directory where I can store video files, just for convenience. All of that is in my default config file, which works for almost every game I've ever played, and I just start DOSBox from a generic shortcut and navigate to the game I want to play using DOS commands, because I actually used DOS before Windows 95 made everyone hate command prompts and typing and I'm fine with it.

34
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: XBox ONE thoughts?
« on: June 11, 2013, 06:29:43 AM »
Microsoft clearly doesn't want to be in the video game business. They probably never did, but now they're really making it clear that they're trying to provide a complete home entertainment solution despite the fact that anyone who wants to be entertained at home already owns systems that provide every capability the XBOne features. The only thing I can figure is that developers (or more likely, publishers) have complained about the used games market cutting into their profits, and Microsoft was the only console manufacturer who thought it would be a good idea to cave to the pressure. They want their platform to be friendly to publishers, at the expense of being anti-consumer. They all seem to have forgotten where the money enters the system from.

Oh, there will be buyers for the XBOne - but I expect it'll be the "gramer" crowd in that video I watched ages ago and am too lazy to link, if it even still exists. The ones who actually play sports games - which I can't figure out why Gamestop even accepts, since they more than any other genre become obsolete when a new version comes out. Well, if Gamestop made good decisions, they'd be backing away from the XBOne, since as Microsoft is proud of pointing out, publishers can choose whether to allow their games on the used market or not. Now, not only is Gamestop likely to be party to lawsuits focusing on First Sale Doctrine for having a monopoly on used games and using technology to make an end run around the law, but they're going to have to update their system to keep track of which games they're allowed to take in trade. Publishers in general are probably going to move to allow more used sales of their games quickly when their initial sales drop - just look at the number of copies of new games on used shelves and consider how many people depend on trade-in value to drop the effective price of their games, and realize how the market has sustained such a high price for so long - but it will come at the cost of most gamers owning a competing system despite any former brand loyalty to Microsoft, which they'll never recover from.

My thoughts on the right way to combat the used game market - realize that Gamestop prices their used games at about five bucks less than the new copies, and price games accordingly so that they can't offer a good trade-in value and continue to undercut the price. I also actually like the pack-in DLC codes that PS3 games have been using recently. The used copy is a complete game, but features like multiplayer or other not-quite-core gameplay modes are sold separately, but included with new copies. If the cost of those features is greater than Gamestop's artificial price difference, then it's actually cheaper to buy new if the gamer wants the whole package - and even when the used price drops enough to be the better deal, if it ever does, the publisher still makes a profit on the resale of those features to gamers who care enough to buy them. It sounds anti-consumer, and perhaps it is, but at least it offers some value for the extra cost. All that remains is to make games that are worth the price to begin with - but I'm trying to be realistic here.

35
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: My tech/software talk thread(Updated)
« on: June 09, 2013, 10:03:06 AM »
Needless to say, I don't advise paying if you get infected with ransomware - you'll never see the money again, and there's no guarantee you'll get the program to fix the computer, which is why they make you pay via means that don't offer refunds. Keep backups and be prepared to reimage your computer at any time.

36
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: Books! Reading is fun!
« on: June 06, 2013, 05:51:54 AM »
There's at least one copy of each season available right now from whona.com, which is where I go for pretty much anything in British sci-fi now. Of course, I live close enough to their warehouse to go there in person and avoid the shipping charge.

37
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: Books! Reading is fun!
« on: June 05, 2013, 10:11:40 PM »
It may be off-topic, but I'm noticing plenty of mentions of Douglas Adams, so I have to recommend the radio play versions of the Hitch-hiker's series and the Dirk Gently series. Hitch-hiker's particularly began as a radio play, so it's the original, almost unchanged story as it sprang from Adams' head, slowly over the course of many weeks while the actors waited in closets to receive the scripts so they could record it hopefully before going on air. Very recently, the third through fifth books were recorded as well, featuring as many of the original actors as they could gather, and while they follow the books very closely (the second season in particular is almost nothing like the book), the ending is worth the entire trip, and hopefully worth the cost as well. If you haven't heard the chorus of a hundred Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots singing "Share and Enjoy" off-key by exactly a flattened fifth, you haven't read the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series at all.

The Dirk Gently series is just full of subtle humor that manages to come across surprisingly well in audio.

38
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: Books! Reading is fun!
« on: June 04, 2013, 08:35:09 PM »
I enjoy pretty much anything that's entertaining - historically, I've been a huge fan of comedy authors like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. Lately, though, I haven't had as much time to read, so I stick with children's books. I find the Lemony Snicket series to be particularly fun, and I've got a clear preference for Dork Diaries over Diary of a Wimpy Kid (but to be fair, I've only read the first book of the latter series... it must get better somewhere along the way). How to Train Your Dragon is interesting mainly because of how different the novels are from the movie. I've also got a bunch of novels that inspired manga and anime series that I need to read, like Haruhi Suzumiya, Karin, Slayers... I spend most of my reading time reading the actual manga, though, and there are way too many of those to pick favorites.

39
Quest for Infamy / Re: Getting rid of Rayford- speculations?
« on: May 10, 2013, 11:23:15 PM »
If this line of speculation goes any farther, we're going to have to rename the game.

THE ARISTOCRATS!

40
Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: What is the Worst Sierra game ever?
« on: April 26, 2013, 02:46:48 PM »
After such a great game in SQ4, how'd things get so bad?  I guess that one Andromeda guy really was central to the success of SQ....

You do realize that Mark Crowe worked on SQV as an employee of Dynamix, while Scott Murphy took the helm of SQ6 after Josh Mandel... so "that one Andromeda guy" definitely worked on at least one of the ones you hate.

I think it's important to consider more than just the basic stories of the later Space Quest games. As I said in the "best Sierra game" thread of KQVI, I developed a much deeper appreciation for SQV as I spent more time looking for interesting things to do outside of the game's main story. Mostly subtle things, like looking at the ships in the Starcon Academy's docking bay - did you know that if you look at Beatrice's ship before meeting her, and then again after meeting her, you get different messages to reflect how Roger remembers her? Granted, IV had a lot of that too, and I didn't care much for it until, again, I did the Let's Play of it and explored some of the amusing options available. I think if the entirety of SQ6 had as many amusing asides as the Deepship 86 has, it would be among the best instead of the worst. (Seriously, try using the Mouth cursor on everything in the Deepship. EVERYTHING. It's worth it.)

I'd be pretty hard-pressed to choose a single game as my least favorite, but the original King's Quest II likely qualifies. It did away with almost everything that made the first game good and centered around even more arbitrary puzzles, even more linearity, and even more hoping to bump into characters who randomly appear without bumping into others. Letting you retrieve stolen treasures was pretty nice, though. (Has anyone but me gone through the original King's Quest and gotten the shield first? It really works!)

EDIT: Actually, one game I developed LESS appreciation for as I LPed it was Torin's Passage. It's got some great stuff, but the bad parts are absolutely atrocious, and from reading the design documents, it was planned to be that way, rather than trimmed down from something that was going to be much better!

41
Part of me wants to go out on a limb and say Hunter Hunted. Just part.

The rest of me has to go with King's Quest VI. It edges out Space Quest V mainly due to the excellent voice work and the number of options available for solving the puzzles, and Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers because I found the world a bit more interesting than relatively true-to-life New Orleans - and because the transitions felt a bit less arbitrary. I gained a new appreciation for the former two due to the Let's Play process and exploring each one a bit more, but King's Quest VI just amazed me with the amount of extra dialogue and hilarious descriptions for doing things you'd never think of. (Unfortunately, I don't have any of those videos online anymore, but I suppose I could upload them to my Youtube account if there's any interest.) I did almost an entire video of just using every inventory object in the game on the guard dogs and Death because so many of them had unique responses. If any other Sierra game has that much depth, I never found it.

Honorable mention goes to Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist just for being awesome in general. I can't give it the victory because the CD version removed the truly excellent responses for using inventory items on each other in unexpected ways. Some of those interactions were even clues to puzzles.

42
Quest for Infamy / Re: EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW - Big Box Art
« on: April 10, 2013, 09:31:48 PM »
Just wait until you find out what you have to do to play as one of the other two characters pictured there...

Oh, wait, I'm nine days too late to reveal that.

43
once I got the hang of it I thought it was ok, but I do think they need something for close quarters - that guy fought worse than I could at close quarters.

I just cast the flame ring spell over and over. The goblins died before I did.

44
Quest for Infamy / Re: Combat in Quest for Infamy
« on: March 10, 2013, 02:57:57 PM »
"I say, Janice, is that man trying to break into that domicile? Do you deem it necessary to alert the authorities?"
"No, Reginald, I don't believe there's any danger of him succeeding. The Genesques recently had a new Level 75 lock installed by the locksmith, and that man has the raiment of a Sorcerer. His lock-picking skill couldn't be higher than 50."
"Why, Janice, I do believe you're correct. He seems to have given up on the lock. And - I say - he seems to be inserting the lockpick into his left nostril!"
"Silly man. That isn't the right type of lubrication for that job."

45
Quest for Infamy / Re: Quest For Gory 4.5 inspired this?
« on: March 10, 2013, 02:49:40 PM »
PushingUpRoses did a full playthrough of F*** Quest with Oancitizen some time ago, and I think they abandoned the playthrough of the sequel halfway through - not necessarily due to disgust with the content, but I can't imagine it provided much motivation.

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