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Hard to believe it is nearly a year, but JT's Pirate101 Afterschool Club still rolls along.  The party is up to five members now including myself and my daughter and we have all of the classes covered.  I am the party swashbuckler and my daughter is the musketeer.

 

Our class levels have outstripped our nautical levels due to aggressive pursuiit of the main storyline, so we've just been harassing the shipping lanes and blowing up enemy vessels the last couple of sessions. 

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Tabe, have you played around with sliders yet? You can lower the faceoff difficulty and increase opponent AI penalties. You get quite a few calls by controlling play in their end of the rink. They'll eventually commit a stick infraction. You can lower the difficulty and/or the "CPU Difficulty Adjustment" setting to make the game more manageable. I was decent at NHL 13 and have been getting my ass kicked so far in 14 on similar or even slightly easier settings.

I haven't messed with the sliders yet.  I'll definitely take a look.  My style of play doesn't involve a lot of control in the offensive zone so maybe I just won't be getting a lot of penalties.  So be it.

 

I played a game on Rookie last night just to remind myself that I have some clue what I'm doing :)  That was all well and good but I still ended up getting four penalties for shooting the puck over the glass.  GRRR.

 

 

Most important to me re: NHL 14...

How's the NHL '94 mode?

 

The one game I played with it was fine.  But that was a really fast one played with the demo.

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Besides NHL 14, last night I also played:

 

Galaga Legions DX - Not as good as the Pac-Man Championship Edition DX update but much better than I remembered from the demo.  I'll be playing this one a lot, I think, at least until I get all the trophies.

 

Diablo 3 Demo - Hey, it's Diablo for consoles.  Plays really well, controls great, moves fast.  Graphics are good but definitely not top-tier.  You won't be confusing them with the quality seen in Ni No Kuni or Uncharted 2, that's for sure.  Still, I liked the demo a lot and will definitely be buying the game at some point.  IMHO, Diablo is made for consoles.  The PSX version of the first game was a lot more playable than the PC version and this one plays real similar to that one.

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Been fooling around with M.U.G.E.N. It's fun in that "recaptures the childhood feeling of a chest of toys" kind of way. Would like to do some characters of my own but almost all the written tutorials are just terrible, and if I had bandwidth to watch a one hour long video tutorial I wouldn't be playing a game like M.U.G.E.N. in the first place. Really disorganized community on the whole. And you do have to put in a lot of time to actually get characters and add them etc. It's pure hobbyist stuff but that suits me fine.

 

Fun game. Marvel vs. Capcom vs. SNK vs. Mortal Kombat vs. DC Comics vs. World Heroes vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs. Killer Instinct vs. Saturday Night Slam Masters vs. TEKKEN would be a rather unwieldy title, but that's basically what I ended up with before I ran out of fighting games that I actually know what the hell I am grabbing. There are also a few decent originals out there but not nearly as many as there should be which goes back to the lines above. But it's the kind of thing I can see myself throwing on for an hour or two here or there to scratch an itch for pretty much as long as my system lives for.

 

Also have been playing some OpenArena, which is essentially freeware Quake III Arena with slightly altered graphics. For a casual FPS guy like me, it's exactly what I want. I don't have to shell out $40 on a game I might play one night a week tops, but instead I can plug in what's a perfectly decent shootin' game when I need to fill that hole now and again. Plus I downloaded a skin so I get to play as The Alien. Fuck y'all.

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I love you Tabe, but

 

IMHO, Diablo is made for consoles. The PSX version of the first game was a lot more playable than the PC version and this one plays real similar to that one.
are ramblings of a mad man.

 

You're right, fast action hack n slash games where you have to click on the screen to move is clearly a brilliant design decision :) 

 

Never let it be said that I'm afraid to express a minority opinion, that's for sure.

And thanks for the love, bro.  Right back at ya.

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Finished the main story in Marvel Heroes Online with Daredevil.  I am level 23 (of 60), don't even have the full power tree unlocked, and just received Cyclops as a freebie purchased with the Eternity Splinters (rare-drop currency for high end items and new chars) I got for beating Doom.  But I won't be seeing the end of the power tree, hitting the level cap or starting with Scott, because the game is just no fun.  It's like those iOS games that bore you to tears even as you keep plugging away at them.  But now that I've seen the end of the story, I can put it to bed.

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Finished the main story in Marvel Heroes Online with Daredevil.  I am level 23 (of 60), don't even have the full power tree unlocked, and just received Cyclops as a freebie purchased with the Eternity Splinters (rare-drop currency for high end items and new chars) I got for beating Doom.  But I won't be seeing the end of the power tree, hitting the level cap or starting with Scott, because the game is just no fun.  It's like those iOS games that bore you to tears even as you keep plugging away at them.  But now that I've seen the end of the story, I can put it to bed.

 

Sort of sums up my final feelings on Star Trek Online.

 

I want to love it. I want it to be awesome. I enjoyed it briefly. But once you play through it and have seen all the cool Romulan and Klingon and what have you ships flying around... it's just typical MMO grinding nonsense where you do the same thing 4000 times just because it's there.

 

Still the worst genre. Diablo II being one of the all time great games despite having some MMO qualities looks more like a miracle with every passing year.

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Rented Splinter Cell: Blacklist yesterday to give it a whirl for a few days to decide if I want to buy it.  Its interesting, but I'm not sure I'm liking the "earn money and upgrade shit" path, although the amount of side missions to get big upgrades is nice.   Bit of a pain in the ass to get used to controls, but now that I am, its flowing nicely.

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GUNPOINT- Super Meat Boy stealth game. Very silly, very precise. The wiring mechanics are an excellent counterpoint to how that game feels once you have to start moving. Everything you physically do yourself feels very dangerous and heavy, and really satisfying when a plan works perfectly- or works despite your planning.

 

CRITTER CRUNCH- Okay, it's old. It's an old PS3 release that ended up at Steam at...some point. Anyways, I was looking for a puzzle game to play, and Critter Crunch is a puzzle game I can play. The reference point it uses for its mechanic (Money Puzzle Exchanger) is so obscure that it probably will feel like a totally new idea if you've never seen either, so maybe give it a shot? It's like seven dollars.

 

BROTHERS- Lucky enough to beat it in one sitting, although I apparently missed a lot. It's definitely interesting, and it seems like the most publicly accessible game making an attempt at emotional resonance so that is definitely valuable. There is one moment specifically that is excellently designed, but I've seen the exact moment before in a game basically no one dang played, so it was filtered through my experience there. Still. I definitely think people should play it, and I totally get anyone that cites it as a Game of the Year contender, even if I don't agree.

 

OH NO THE END OF THE INDIE STREAK

GTA5- So far, the main thought I've had while playing the game is "man, Sleeping Dogs was awesome." Four hours in, GTA is yet to leave any kind of impression on me. I just bought it because I didn't want my relationship with the game to be defined with the stories terrible people tell about the terrible things they do. That's not entirely about the thread here, but I'm not excluding it either.

 

Oh, and Burnout Paradise still.

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Yeah, after doing Sleeping Dogs and Saints Row: The Third, there's a few things about GTAV that feels lesser than those games. The sports cars in Sleeping Dogs is pure sex and I found the races to be amazing.

 

But you're literally walking around Los Angeles. Not too many games today can do that.

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There have always been games that did "elements of GTA better than GTA" without capturing the overall whole. Like that Godfather game on XBox that had lots of great shit with hand to hand combat and the gun combat was better (roughing up shopkeepers in that game was a riot for a while), but that's all it has. At the end of the day you'd rather play San Andreas. Like that pool minigame in San Andreas was no more refined than Yahoo pool and had some fucked up physics bugs, but it was still something I'd find myself playing if I got into that game. Because it's there.

 

GTA is the three ring circus of video games. Don't like the trapeze artist? No problem we've got a guy being shot out of a cannon up next. There's always something there. That's their greatest strength, giving you enough things that you enjoy that you don't get bored.

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The thing about Sleeping Dogs that I'm specifically drawing from is how the story starts, where there's this growing tension until the moment that everything escalates into guns, after which everything goes absolutely fucking crazy. Contrast that with GTA, which is "Dramatic intro! Flash forward! Normal life... grind a little bit... little bit more... DOZENS DEAD. Okay now go play with this dog." For $226million in production, I don't feel it's weird to be expecting more than that.

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The thing about Sleeping Dogs that I'm specifically drawing from is how the story starts, where there's this growing tension until the moment that everything escalates into guns, after which everything goes absolutely fucking crazy. Contrast that with GTA, which is "Dramatic intro! Flash forward! Normal life... grind a little bit... little bit more... DOZENS DEAD. Okay now go play with this dog." For $226million in production, I don't feel it's weird to be expecting more than that.

It's called pacing (and mostly tutorial). 

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