>> ^radx:

Nope, direct cable connection. Oldschool, serial port to serial port. Internet access was more expensive than hardware back then, so everything had to be done "in house".
Good times.>> ^ant:
>> ^radx:
We clocked endless hours on Diablo via DCC. Nothing was as hilarious as a chain-lightning-frenzy down in hell. Blowing through an entire inventory of full mana potions in a minute -- awesome.
DCC from IRC?


Oh yeah, I remember that! Good old serial cables. I remember using InterLink, LapLink, etc. with it and parallel cables through LPT1 ports. Then, came along LAN like through IPX/SPX before TCP/IP got popular.

Nope, direct cable connection. Oldschool, serial port to serial port. Internet access was more expensive than hardware back then, so everything had to be done "in house".

Good times.

Edit: just checked, the null modem cable is still in my bag of spare cables and adapters. Haven't used one since we played Outlaws in '97.>> ^ant:

>> ^radx:
We clocked endless hours on Diablo via DCC. Nothing was as hilarious as a chain-lightning-frenzy down in hell. Blowing through an entire inventory of full mana potions in a minute -- awesome.
DCC from IRC?

>> ^radx:

We clocked endless hours on Diablo via DCC. Nothing was as hilarious as a chain-lightning-frenzy down in hell. Blowing through an entire inventory of full mana potions in a minute -- awesome.


DCC from IRC?

We clocked endless hours on Diablo via DCC. Nothing was as hilarious as a chain-lightning-frenzy down in hell. Blowing through an entire inventory of full mana potions in a minute -- awesome.

>> ^NetRunner:

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.
Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.
I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.
Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.


I'd like to experience some of the good old days of shooters again not because games were better back then, much of the design has moved on, but now days there is just a flood of games all using the same mechanics as each other with no variety or substance.

Resistance 3 was a breath of fresh air, old school style gameplay mixed with modern mechanics. The health system, however was imbalanced. They could've done more to make it work better, but overall though, i really enjoyed Resistance dispite a few questionable design decisions. The fact that you can carry all the weapons at once nearly made me tear up.

DNF is a good example of totally cocking up the "old school" approach by implementing the WRONG modern features. Firstly the regenerating health. This right away causes a problem; you can regenerate your health, so for some challenge we need to make the enemies do a lot more damage to keep the player from abusing the system. What happens? You are almost always sitting back behind cover while waiting for your health to regen before firing again. That's not Duke Nukem! I heard other ideas were that you needed to kill an enemy to regain health, THAT is Duke.
Then there's the 2 weapon limit. George Broussard in all his game design incompetence said they couldn't find a way to implement a weapon wheel effectively on consoles... Resistance 3 seemed to do it fine. So did HL2 years back. Moron.

Regen health and 2 weapon limit can and do work for some games like Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War, but FFS let's try something a little different once in a while. But some developers use them as a development crutch; less testing, balancing and design required. Less effort in other words. Or they use it to make the game less complex, which is a bad thing. Ninja Gaiden is a good example. It seems to be going down a path of less and less substance, there's only the combat. This is terrible. The original game's store, upgrades, potions, rewards for exploration, non-linear main world all helped to pace the game better rather than an exhausting trudge through constant unrelenting combat seen in Ninja Gaiden 2 and from the sounds, even more so for the third game.

I can't be certain what you mean by "up here" but in the Canada I live in, physical therapy is not lumped under chiropractics and is covered by healthcare.

Physiotherapy is covered by our healthcare system because it is an accepted and proven medical treatment. Chiropractic 'medicine' is not, and therefore should not be covered, just as fairy dust and tiger penis potions are not covered.
>> ^bcglorf:

>> ^jwray:
>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^blankfist:
Very sad. I've seen good people in my home state (NC is my home state) worry about receiving coverage. My brother sells insurance in that state. He even knows the system is fucked.
At some point we gave over our power to choose medical treatment to the insurance companies. Today our insurance plans are meal plans (meaning visits to preventive care is covered, such as pediatricians, OBGYNs, etc.) instead of catastrophic care (meaning emergency visits, unexpected health emergencies and hospitalization).
Nowadays doctors and dentists have raised their prices to offset the constant denials of coverage from insurance companies. Out of necessity they've raised their prices knowing the ins. companies will usually deny coverage.
For a year now I've tried to have a "gum graft" cleared through my insurance. After going back and forth, finally it was cleared. But a year ago when I made the request it would've cost me just my copay of $10. A year later they've raised my premium, modified my treatment meal plan and raised the copay, and now I owe a copay of $20 plus $238 of the treatment. I don't mind paying that much because I really need this done, but it's obvious they waited for the changed so they could save a couple hundred bucks.
And the treatment would'nt cost so much if the dentists (and doctors!) didn't require insurance. And they've raised prices mainly to subsidize the staff needed to handle the insurance companies (and the time spent going back and forth with the insurance companies). When's the last time you've ever heard a doctor or nurse give you dollar amount for your visit? Not often, because all we care about is the copay, right?

"At some point we gave over our power to choose medical treatment to the insurance companies."
I am terrified to ask this Blankfist, but what is the alternative? Presumably like this guy you can just not bother with insurance and choose medical treatment yourself based on what you can afford, right? Isn't any other alternative the evil machinations of Statists like me?
I am after all Canadian, and we truly have given over our power to choose medical treatment to the government. Though, it's a mixed bag up here where private hospitals and medicine is illegal and vehemently decried as inherently evil, while at the same time dental, chiropractic and optical medical treatments are all 100% private for profit enterprises and good luck getting the government to spend a dime on you if you need treatment in those fields.

Chiropractic is not a real medical field in the same way that homeopathy and voodoo aren't. If you have back problems, go to a real GP doctor and they can refer you to whatever kind of specialist you need (which is NOT a chiropractor).

Up here any physical therapy generally gets referred to or lumped in under chiropractors, and you've got a big fight on your hands to get the government to count it as a covered universal health care treatment. If you need any physical therapy from a major join injury, good luck to you. Despite the government refusal to allow the existence of any for profit hospitals, those for profit hospitals frequently don't provide the recovery therapy for many things that people end up doing without, or paying out of pocket for.
I guess my overall point is what is the alternative to the insurance companies? It basically amounts to some form of government intervention to either regulate, replace or ban them. None of which I can imagine being alternatives that Blankfist is willing to tolerate, let alone advocate for.

>> ^oohlalasassoon:

A proper sorcerer would have cast fireball on those guys.


Obviously he forgot to bring mana potions.

The original Newgrounds review:
----------------------------------------­------------
i reley dont wan to say this, but i have to now.
this game is so esey. i mean, all you do is hit the spacebar. thats it! how is this an RPG anyway? you cant contrail anything but what it says on the screen! what if i didnt want to buy the potion? what apout quests? all you can upgrade is stranth? there is no way you can lose to the boss at the end! this game is crap! its not even an RPG at all! i mean look at it! in what way is this supposed to be an RPG if you can do quests and stuff? all you do is press one butten the entier time! explain to me! the athore coments al totol lies! is it supposed to be stick dudes? i dont even know how this damn game got the daily 3rd prize, or a rating of 4.26!
pepole think this review is worthles.
go ahead! say it! i dont care! im just trying to make a point here!
blam this piece of crap!!!!

P.S the only reson im giving this a 1 is beacuase the voices where pretty good. but thats it!

Dumb it down for console gamers? There is no console version -- Blizzard hasn't made a console game in over a decade. Or did you mean that they're dumbing it down down for people used to playing consoles? Because I don't think that's the case either -- Blizzard has always been about taking existing gameplay and refining it and simplifying it down to its absolute essence of awesomeness.
>> ^Fletch:

I am so "extremely and violently" sick of this shit that I refuse to buy Diablo III when it comes out for the teeny-tiny reason that they made health potions an instant power-up when you walk over them instead of a carry-able item (yeah, I got "issues"), and THEN tried to explain it away as making gameplay more seamless for PC gamers. Read: "we had to make fewer things that console players needed a button for". That's right, they took one of the simplest PC games with one of the simplest control schemes ever and they STILL had to dumb it down for console gamers. Fuuuuuck you, Blizzard!

Violently? Sheesh...

Most atmospheric games ever? Hardly. Yeah, it's different than Deus Ex. And I don't think every FPS has to be like Deus Ex to be good. But if I have to understand Russian to fully enjoy the game, as you say, then all I can do is take your word for it that it makes the game better. My experience was that it was boring. While THQ claimed the PC was the lead platform for the game, the XBox version was nearly identical. There is just no way to develop a FPS for both XBox and PC without dumbing down or limiting the PC version. I've been a PC gamer and PC game fan since I first fired up Space Warp on my TRS-80. But they ain't what they used to be. And it is because of consoles. I am so "extremely and violently" sick of this shit that I refuse to buy Diablo III when it comes out for the teeny-tiny reason that they made health potions an instant power-up when you walk over them instead of a carry-able item (yeah, I got "issues"), and THEN tried to explain it away as making gameplay more seamless for PC gamers. Read: "we had to make fewer things that console players needed a button for". That's right, they took one of the simplest PC games with one of the simplest control schemes ever and they STILL had to dumb it down for console gamers. Fuuuuuck you, Blizzard!

Anyway, you liked Metro 2033? Fine. I didn't. We disagree. I just used it as an example of my bigger bitch.

In the spirit of staying somewhat on-topic here, the video was of a cut-scene, not the fucking game. Yeah, it looked cool. But, gameplay-wise, I'll take Jedi Knight or Dark Forces over this dreck any day.

I found the dude's company...

http://www.himacresearch.com/letters/open.html

Apparently he's moved on from selling his [Superior Healing Potion]'s to discovering a whole new fuel by boiling gasoline. Something apparently the oil companies have been keeping from us.. check it out.. this guy's gonna save the planet!


http://www.himacresearch.com/about/christ.html <-- uh oh

So this is the news potion of Fox news. Fascinating stuff.

I don't think it's boring, but it does have some flaws. Along with the pets/minions getting stuck and the having to click on EEEEEVERYTHING, the enemy hitboxes are small as shit in relation to their body size, so most of the time you want to attack them with a melee weapon, you just run up next to them and hang out while they slap you across the face. The only way around this is to either be very patient with smacking things/constantly use spells and specials that don't require aiming, or play as the vanquisher (tits). Holding shift to stand in place while I actually shoot at shit is the only way to keep from getting annoyed by running around in circles because some of the enemies do sudden movements (goblinhounds, lizard dudes, etc) or just have smaller bodies (pigmies, drake things, etc). Other than those, the game's pretty great. Just stock up on potions and identify scrolls (or get the identify spell if you want, you really only need two offensive spells for yourself, one offensive and one heal all spell for the pet, and two slots reserved for health potions, one for mana potions. Good game.

1. Townspeople standing around over a mining shaft to Armageddon? Check.
2. Three superficial character classes, that could essentially do the same thing with minor class difference super powers? Check.
3. Big titties. Check.
4. May have to purchase a new mouse from wearing out your old one clicking on everything because there are no options for auto-loot or WASD to move. Check.
5. "Easy" is meant for those who are still fully entertained by LOLzCATS and should, by all accounts, be wearing a helmet when taking a shower. Check.
6. Why has your pet returned to the balcony above you, being chewed on by ten dragons? Or stuck in the other room behind you...being chewed upon by ten dragons? Check.
7. Eight identify scrolls and twenty unidentified items. Check.
8. Forty-nine health and mana potions of various sizes? Check.

I paid $10 for it off Steam. Played it for a week, got my money's worth, but it was around level 64 on my Vanquisher, using my explosive shot melty facey thingy that I was wondering what it was that I should be aiming for. Upon researching the game's "plot", I was saddened to find that I completed the main storyline back in my thirties.

I had no idea.

Sure, jack up the difficulty setting to very hard or nightmare to make it more challenging, but walking around town on your hands doesn't make all the rest of your life's inadequacies that much more bearable because it's now "more challenging".

Frankly, I think the review is spot on. The game is fun, but it is also streamlined, unoriginal, overuses the mouse clicking and is quite boring.

But if you got it cheap...well, there you go.

I'm very less than excited about this. I half expected him to climb platforms, fight skeletons and drink little red potions. Also to die repeatedly in spike pits.