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2015 VIDEO GAME CATCH-ALL THREAD

Gonzo

By Gonzo
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Craig H

Craig H

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I installed Hearthstone when it first hit. I may have installed it the first day. I beat the AI on the easiest difficulty and then didn't play it again until last week. I only started playing it again because Magic Duels: Origins isn't going to be playable on my 3rd gen iPad and it won't be available for Android for a little bit. I'm totally hooked. My main complaints or concerns are these:

  • For a game that is as much about tempo as Hearthstone, the way the game starts is horribly unbalanced. I can only make a comparison to Magic because I've played that since just before Revised (holy shit that was a long time ago...), but in Magic, unless you mulligan on your opening hand, each person starts with 7 cards. With Hearthstone, after your first draw, which is on your first turn, the person who gets to play first starts with 4 cards. The person who would go second or play "on the draw" for those familiar with Magic, starts with 6 cards, one of those being a mana token, which would allow you to play a 2-drop on your first turn. If you are playing first, you are at such a disadvantage tempo wise and card advantage wise, making things an uphill battle right from the get go.
  • It bums me out that, at least as far as I can tell, it will always be 1v1. I played competitive Magic for such a long time, but my favorite formats for competitive Magic were two-headed giant and trios (3v3). After competitive Magic, I fell in love with playing group game Commander/EDH and just whatever decks you want to piece together in big group games with the groups being as large as 10 people sometimes, so 5v5. My favorite way to play now is cube drafting, which isn't going to be an option for Hearthstone, and that's fine, but I really wish there was a way to play something more than 1v1 so larger groups of friends could get in on the action.

That said, after a few games, everything started clicking for me and I've taken a "basic" or free deck as far as I can take it. The perils of over-extending apply here, and the same goes for card advantage and tempo. In most of the games I win, it's because I get my opponent to over-extend by dumping his hand. Shit, even having 1 more card than your opponent is all it takes and that's why the start of the game sucks so hard if you're playing first. 

 

It also took some getting used to with not being able to play cards during my opponent's turn. There's a mindset shift there that I wasn't prepared for and I'm still learning. One thing I'm still learning more about are "secret" cards. Secret cards are ones that you play on your turn, but are a mystery to your opponent for what they are. Each Secret is triggered by your opponent. Some counter the first card your opponent plays, others reduce the health of the first cast creature to 1, etc.

 

The rewards format is great. Daily quests net you 40 gold and those are easy as hell. Three wins gets you 10 gold. When you first start out, you start out with a bunch of ways to get free gold that totals into the 100s. You basically want to take that gold to the Arena mode. Arena mode costs 150 gold to play, or $2. You draft a 30 card deck and then try to win as many games as you can. Once you lose three matches, that run in the Arena ends and you get your rewards. If I'm not mistaken, even if you get only 1 win, or maybe 0 wins, you at least get 1 pack of cards, which costs 100 gold anyway. Anything 1 win and above nets you additional gold, cards and dust. So you take the gold you get from that, play like you normally would and you can save up enough gold to play Arena again within a day or two at the most.

 

Games also go by quickly. I can't recall how many times I went the full 50 or 60 minutes in one game of competitive Magic. Faster games means you get to play more, which means you earn gold very fast.

 

And finally, there's no secondary market. I think Magic is in Fucksville right now because of how cost-prohibitive it is. It's fucking insane. In 2013, I bought two boxes of Modern Masters for about $350 at release. I sold something like 15 to 20 cards from those two boxes, earning about $500. Had I not opened those boxes and left them sealed, they would have been worth over $400 each in just a year. I don't even want to know what they go for now. A foil Tarmogoyf goes for close to $1000, or at least it did at one point. A non foil version costs over $150. Snapcaster Mage is worth around $80. If you want to build a Modern or Standard deck that's worth a damn, expect to pay close to or more than $400. So why does it cost so much? It's because of the secondary market. Yes, you could get all the cards you need for a deck out of packs, but the chances of doing so are unlikely unless you're buying a case of cards, which is just dumb. So you need to augment your deck by buying singles. This is where the secondary market comes into play and I don't blame game shops or whatever at all. This is scarcity issue created by Hasbro. Case in point, the Mythic rarity level, which was created after Future Sight, I think. So you used to have Common, Uncommon, and Rare cards. You would get one rare card, three uncommon cards and 11 common cards per pack. It still works like that, but every one in ten packs or so contains a Mythic, which replaces the rare. It's an artificial way of driving up demand and demand was already high. Mythic cards now are no more powerful than rares, and often, they're worse, but because they're Mythic, they're going to cost more, even if it sucks. Now, a casual Magic player is going to find more use out of a sucky card than anyone else, but because a sucky card is Mythic, it costs more. The reason why it's a Mythic is a quantity problem. So for every set, you need to have so many Mythic cards. Some are worth that status, but many are not. This problem doesn't even need to exist. Wizards can control the number of any card that's printed. So the Mythic rarity level is pointless. If you want to print less of the Planeswalkers that are included in every set and print less of another powerful card, then do so, and print the same amount of any other rare that would be turned Mythic because you have to have X amount of Mythic cards. In addition, the most valuable card to come out in the Modern era isn't even Mythic. It's a rare. It's just very unfriendly to customers, but Wizards doesn't care since shitloads of people are playing Magic. More now than ever before.

 

I will not have those complaints about Hearthstone and that feels so good. With Hearthstone, it's all about the gold you earn, the gold you purchase, and the dust you acquire. Dust is used to create more powerful cards. So if you put enough time into the game, there's no reason you can't have as good of a deck as anyone else and everyone is paying the same amount. At this point, it's $50 to play the Naxx and Blackrock expansions.

 

Hearthstone is really great. It's a very fun game that I can't endorse enough. If anyone wants to play sometime, my name on there is CubsFanCraig.

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JustJay

JustJay

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If you plan on playing for awhile then the $50 for both is way worth it since the cards you get from those sets are kinda needed. More so the Naxx set than Blackrock. 

 

I have been playing since the closed Beta, so for around 1 and half to two years now. I'd have a lot of the cards if I bought packs but I haven't ever did that so I only have a few legendaries.

 

There are 25 ranks in ranked play. You can earn bonus stars for consecutive wins. You can't lose ranks until you are past rank 20. Also, if you get to at least rank 20 every season(month) then you will earn a special card back.

 

If you have any questions add me, my battle tag is JustJay#1138. Couldn't add you since I need to know your Blizzard battle tag.  

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Cliff Hanger

Cliff Hanger

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Tonight's lesson: do not stream a pinball game without knowing what the goals are and where the mode targets are. I played Ant-Man in ZP2 for 30 min on Twitch without reading the table guide, and had no idea what I was doing at any point.

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Tabe

Tabe

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Tonight's lesson: do not stream a pinball game without knowing what the goals are and where the mode targets are. I played Ant-Man in ZP2 for 30 min on Twitch without reading the table guide, and had no idea what I was doing at any point.

Neither did I. Still managed top 50 in the world for PS4 - a ranking that will last all of 5 minutes, I'm sure. Most fun I've had in a first play of a table in forever...
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Cliff Hanger

Cliff Hanger

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The difference is that (1) you are way better than me and (2) didn't have an audience. :) going to go over the table guide after work and hit it again, but my initial reaction is positive. I do like the multi ball gimmick with the "pool ball" Pym particle you have to shrink to get out of the gate.

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Tabe

Tabe

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The difference is that (1) you are way better than me and (2) didn't have an audience. :) going to go over the table guide after work and hit it again, but my initial reaction is positive. I do like the multi ball gimmick with the "pool ball" Pym particle you have to shrink to get out of the gate.

LOL. I doubt I'm way better than you. I'm not all that good, certainly nowhere near any of the guys on the Zen or Pinball Arcade forums who talk about playing a single game for hours and hours.
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Cliff Hanger

Cliff Hanger

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Almost 30 years later, I'm still terrible at Gradius.

 

Meanwhile, Marvel Heroes is a *way* better game than it was a year ago, let alone at launch. It still has its problems, but pretty much anything that's dynamically tinkered with and played online will. I can't see ever being a raider or other hardcore, but I'm having fun with it which I never used to.  Blew through the revised Story Mode with Ant-Man this weekend, and started doing endgame stuff for the first time (with Moon Knight, because Ant-man is squishy and doesn't survive that well in lv60 stuff).

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Basara

Basara

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So after picking up a Wii U thanks to Prime Day I've been playing New Super Mario Bros. U.

I know 64 and the Galaxy games get a lot of love, and deservedly so, but Mario is always going to be a side scrolling platformer to me ever since I got an NES for Christmas as a kid. My favourite Mario game is always going to be Super Mario World and for the first time in over 20 years this feels like the closest thing I'm ever going to get to a true sequel. It feels like a mix of World and the New style and, correct me if I'm wrong, this is the first time the World style map has appeared since then? Little things like that to add some nostalgia to it make me love this game even more.

After playing pretty much nothing but Destiny for 6 months, and lately Arkham Knight, it's nice to relive my childhood one more time!

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SirSmUgly

SirSmUgly

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I've come to grips with the fact that I won't be getting a WiiU until after NX comes out. They can't aggressively price it because of the cost of manufacturing the gamepad, and there is no way that I'm paying three hundred bucks to play Smash, Kart, Donkey Kong, maybe a little Bayo, and of course Captain Toad because that game fucking rocks.

 

Nintendo needs to aggressively price their next console because between buying a console from Sony or Microsoft that I'll actually play on a regular basis and keeping up with reasonable low-to-mid range PC tech, I don't see how it makes sense for me to pay more than two hundred bucks for a console that I will almost certainly buy single-digit games for over its lifetime.

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