Sabreman's Content

#49571 Games Recently Bought

Posted by Sabreman on 15 April 2007 - 04:39 PM in Forum Guidelines

Puzzle Quest on the DS. I downloaded the demo for the PC and... well, I've rarely been so immediately addicted to this extent (I actually bought another DS to play it, seeing as I got rid of my last one a few months ago).

#48823 Have Your Gaming Tastes Changed?

Posted by Sabreman on 17 March 2007 - 09:13 PM in Forum Guidelines

Hmm... not so much changed, but rather there were a few genres I just never tried out until very recently. I've been playing games since the early 80s but only a year or so ago I got into RTS games properly. I mean, I'd played Herzog Zwei and Megalomania back in the day, but I'd never touched a Command and Conquer for example*

About this time last year I took a random chance on Rise Of Nations and it swiftly became one of my favourite games. I followed that up with things like Dawn Of War, and Total Annihilation. I also tried Civilization for the first time, with similar results. My PC game collection now leans heavily towards strategy games.

Apart from that I have stalwart favourites. Any kind of trading and combat game, whether they be Earth or space-based, shmups (which I tend to go crazy on in bursts then not touch for months - I'm currently getting back into them again). One genre I do seem to have fallen out with completely is the Japanese console RPG, while favouring a more western approach.

*and funnily enough, I've still never played a C&C.

EDIT: Blimey, I forgot Roguelikes! This very site introduced me to Roguelikes and I became obsessed with them. I could probably at a stretch abandon all other games and just play RLs for the rest of my life. Even though I'm crap at them.

#47901 Supreme Commander

Posted by Sabreman on 01 March 2007 - 12:58 AM in Your Favorite Games & Commercial Software

Foolish optimism led me to try this on my aging PC, with predictable results.

It runs alright with everything turned down, but then it looks just like Total Annihilation

#44483 Favorite Freeware?

Posted by Sabreman on 05 December 2006 - 10:11 PM in Your Favorite Games & Commercial Software

EDIT: Never mind

#44427 Favorite Freeware?

Posted by Sabreman on 05 December 2006 - 12:39 PM in Your Favorite Games & Commercial Software

I play a ton of freeware on a regular basis... in fact my all-time favourite game (Dungeon Master) is available as a couple of freeware remakes - Return to Chaos and CSBWin. That's a game I've basically been playing regularly since 1987

I play a lot of Roguelikes several times a week. Trying to whittle the list down to a few I can concentrate on, but I tend to like bits of this one and bits of that one. Mainly I play Dungeon Crawl, NPPAngband, ZangbandTK, Hellband, and ToME, and I'm trying to get into ADOM and Nethack more, but I find them incredibly unforgiving.

#44357 Doom: The Roguelike

Posted by Sabreman on 04 December 2006 - 08:08 PM in Games on Reloaded

This is awesome - I don't know why I never tried it before despite investigating pretty much every Roguelike I came across. It forms a great triumvirate of more actionful RLs with Castlevania and Metroid.

#44325 F F X I I

Posted by Sabreman on 03 December 2006 - 07:36 PM in Your Favorite Games & Commercial Software

Well, I'm completely in love with it. Story-wise it's not as engaging as some other entries in the series (I tend not to find political intrigue very... intriguing), but in terms of actual play it outstrips all the others. Moving around a persistent, scaled world is a treat, as is not having to bear the agonies of random encounters - a truly archaic relic from JRPGs that should have been consigned to the bin years ago. On a basic level it does so many things right and remedies so many aspects of traditional RPGs that have become albatrosses around the genres' neck.

The gambit system is a superb method of assigning menial tasks to your party members (do you really want to pause the action every few seconds to tell your white mage to heal a character with low HP?). There seems to be a general misconception about that the game plays itself for you. Believe me, if you set your party against a boss monster and put the controller down expecting Gambits to do the job you'll be in trouble pretty quickly. If you want the most hands-on, intense experience from it you can customize the controls to suit you - set it to fast active mode and turn off the Gambits. Conversely if you want it to play like a traditional RPG you can choose to take control of everyone yourself and play in turns.

It's a controversial title because of its innovations in the offline RPG genre (I know that a lot of its gameplay mechanics are lifted from MMORPGs). Diehard traditional FF fans are divided on it because of this. In my opinion the series needed a shakeup rather drastically (after the highs of 6,7 and possibly 8 it's been a steady slide downwards), and I firmly believe that FFXII delivers. I've played them all - some of them very extensively - but I don't consider myself a fan of the series, merely a fan of some of the games from the series. Therefore I have little bias either way. If XII turned out to be another lacklustre effort I wouldn't be crushed, but I am happy that I finally have a new console RPG I can get my teeth into and one that I'll undoubtedly play for a long, long time.

#42949 The Final Top 10

Posted by Sabreman on 08 November 2006 - 07:05 PM in Your Favorite Games & Commercial Software

I'm holding off to send him a postcard from somewhere further on than the first village :sneaky:

I don't seem to have much luck with that game at all...

#42071 Tibia

Posted by Sabreman on 20 October 2006 - 10:06 AM in Game & Software Requests

I played this very briefly but didn't get into it. I think to problem for me was that with it having no sound and a quite tame combat system, it never felt as though I was 'in' the game, if you get what I mean. It gave me the same sensation as a browser game. Still, it is very nice looking and it seems like there is plenty of variety in the world.

One thing that amused me though - the starting area is full of small animals... rabbits and the like, so that's where new players do their first bits of levelling. As a consequence the starting area is absolutely littered with the bloody corpses of fluffy little animals. I took a screenshot but it looks like I've lost it. Oh well :bleh:

#41611 Luola

Posted by Sabreman on 13 October 2006 - 09:39 PM in Game & Software Requests

Had a quick go and I like it

I'm quite a fan of this kind of game anyway (I still rate Solar Jetman in my all-time top 20).

#41127 Zangbandtk

Posted by Sabreman on 06 October 2006 - 07:36 PM in Games on Reloaded

Doing pretty well with a Dwarf fighter (playing it safe, I know). I've done a few quests and got myself a nice sword and shield, gone to the town SE of the outpost (Amaril or something?) and am starting to explore the dungeon there. Do different dungeons have different difficulties?* or is it just based on how deep they go?

Also, I kept running into a Greater Hell Beast which didn't seem to be able to harm me at all, but did follow me around gazing at me and slowing me down. A right pest.

*There's a sentence

#41105 What Is Anime (and What Isn't)?

Posted by Sabreman on 06 October 2006 - 05:28 PM in Forum Guidelines

As far as I'm concerned it's simply the Japanese term for animation, taken from the western word. So if you are Japanese then anything animated is Anime, just the way most people from my country would refer to them as cartoons. I don't think a particular stylistic or thematic choice determines whether something is classed as Anime (though that has become a prevailing school of thought in the west, usually by the type of people who seem desperately unhappy that they weren't born Japanese).

I've watched a fair bit of Anime, some of it excellent, a lot of it barely worth my time. I don't watch it because it's 'Anime'. I watch it because I enjoy animation regardless of it's origin, and I'm always on the lookout for something good.

#41103 Final Fantasy - Endless Nova

Posted by Sabreman on 06 October 2006 - 05:19 PM in Games on Reloaded

Your best bet for a universal and legitimate route would be either investing in a Nintendo GBA or DS, for which FF 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 have been remade (though FF3 is a DS-only game), or taking a chance on the Wii and hoping they turn up on the Virtual Console (I'm sure that 4,5, and 6 - the SNES ones - will become available on it, not so sure about the old NES trilogy).

The SNES three are the ones that Endless Nova is most obviously modelled after, and if you enjoyed EN you will enjoy them a great deal.

#41006 Zangbandtk

Posted by Sabreman on 05 October 2006 - 12:16 AM in Games on Reloaded

Bit weird - I was hacking about in the first dungeon to the east of town (now playing Zangband), and upon killing one of many, many novice mages I'd fought I got a message saying I'd completed a quest. The mage dropped 25 arrows of Slaying (very nice), and some average armour and a magical stairway appeared. The thing is, the only quests I have on the go are the two initial ones and Old Man Willow's quest. I guess I must have somehow fulfilled the requirements of a quest without actually picking it up?

Down the stairway was just another level by the way, though it did seem to be abundant in items.

#40985 Nazghul / Haxima

Posted by Sabreman on 04 October 2006 - 09:45 PM in Game & Software Requests

http://myweb.cableon...tt/nazghul.html

An Ultima IV / V like engine that's shaping up really nicely. There is one complete module for it called Haxima which I've been playing for a bit and am very impressed with already. I'd like to lay claim to it for reviewing at some point in the hopefully near future if no-one else has bagged it

#40978 Your Top 5 Favorite Games

Posted by Sabreman on 04 October 2006 - 09:23 PM in Your Favorite Games & Commercial Software

I think everyone's got at least one good game of Civilization in them. I only got round to trying it this year. Bought Civ4, played it incredibly intensely over a two-week period (marathon game taken right to the space race), then lost interest in it completely and have no compulsion to return to it.

�40 well spent

#40962 Zangbandtk

Posted by Sabreman on 04 October 2006 - 08:00 PM in Games on Reloaded

I think it must be a sound issue - I'm hoping it is, anyway. I'd be pretty miserable if I thought that there was some other unknowable problem preventing me from playing this game comfortably. I'm going to try running my next characters without sound. One of the crashes was yet again on picking up copper, but the other was on encountering and engaging a kobold. It's never crashed in Zangband, only Angband, but then I've read somewhere that it's best to practise in Angband because Zangband is so much more challenging.

#40940 Zangbandtk

Posted by Sabreman on 04 October 2006 - 02:45 PM in Games on Reloaded

Crasher stupidly succumbed to a room full of giant white mice. I bloody-mindedly thought I cold hack my way through, but of course when there's more than a handful they breed faster than you can kill them. I found myself in a dead-end, out of potions. The most annoying thing is that I had a scroll of Word of Recall, only I completely forgot about it in the m�lee

It's crashed a couple more times, too.

#40617 Final Fantasy VII: The Dark Cloud

Posted by Sabreman on 29 September 2006 - 08:55 PM in Games on Reloaded

I was a big fan of FFVII back in the day, as indeed I was FFVIII. I don't think they're particularly outstanding in the wider terms of RPGs, but what they do right is generate a compelling atmosphere and gameworld, and provide just the right amount of tinkering and side quests to keep the more dedicate dplayers happy.

Anyway, downloading this one now, before SquareEnix stamp all over it :ok:

#40616 Your Top 5 Favorite Games

Posted by Sabreman on 29 September 2006 - 08:50 PM in Your Favorite Games & Commercial Software

Alien 3 certainly had an interesting concept and situation for the characters. I think unfortunately they alienated (hoho) a large part of the audience by casting aside two characters they'd grown to care about a great deal in a couple of throwaway title sequence shots.

#40589 Your Top 5 Favorite Games

Posted by Sabreman on 29 September 2006 - 04:20 PM in Your Favorite Games & Commercial Software

Does anyone remember Alien on the Spectrum? Really basic-looking stuff, but a game that is right up there with the most atmospheric and tense things I've ever played. I remember not expecting much of it at all but becoming completely addicted - playing it over and over for hours.

Something else that's creeping it's way up my favourites is Space Rangers 2. All these years I've been looking for a great space combat game, since my childhood obsession with Elite I've needed something to fill the gap. I've been through the X games, Freespace 2, Freelancer, Darkstar One (very disappointing), and yet this wacky top-down, turn-based effort has completely won me over.

#40528 Within A Deep Forest

Posted by Sabreman on 28 September 2006 - 06:07 PM in Games on Reloaded

I really like this game a lot. In terms of play it reminds me of the old Dizzy games and Wizball, but without the extraneous stuff. Nice atmosphere created by the visuals and colour choices.

#40495 Sam And Max Episode 1 Halted

Posted by Sabreman on 28 September 2006 - 01:10 PM in Forum Guidelines

Hmm... I don't like the new Max voice - it's a little too whiney rather than the bordering on psychotic it needs to be. Also, I didn't find much to chuckle about in those gameplay movies. I hope I'll be more impressed by the full game though, which I definitely will be buying purely because I've waited so long for it!

#40335 Your Top 5 Favorite Games

Posted by Sabreman on 26 September 2006 - 03:12 PM in Your Favorite Games & Commercial Software

You do realise you're just going to get a whole bunch of different games with a single vote each :max:

However, in the spirit of things I'll bite:

1. Dungeon Master (Amiga; RPG)
2. ZangbandTK (PC; RPG)
3. Phantasy Star Online (Dreamcast; RPG)
4. Vagrant Story (Playstation; RPG)
5. Ultima 7 (PC; RPG)

Other things switch about a bit depending on my mood. I'm in a heavy RPG mood at the moment, as you can see. The only thing that never changes is Dungeon Master at the no.1 spot. In fact, I'd really count Return to Chaos in that place because it offers everything DM is and much more, but that's probably cheating :ok:

#39557 Defcon

Posted by Sabreman on 17 September 2006 - 07:07 PM in Your Favorite Games & Commercial Software

Weirdly, the thing that appeals to me the most about this is the fact that it kind of looks the way I imagine videogames should look - like something out of Tron. If ever you want to win me over just show me some flat shaded polygons or colourful wireframe stuff.

*goes off to play Rez*