Jolt Country

Here's the damn official website!

But wait! That just looks it's a frigging ad! Try this instead!

THIS IS A PREVIEW OF THE GAME OMIGOD BEAR IS DRIVING HOW CAN THAT BE

THIS tells you nothing about the game... but ooooh, shiny!!

Underdogs!! Master of Orion II

Underdogs link for the first one.

Oh, yeah!

The only thing that scares me about the game is that it was essentially scrapped and redone somewhere midway through the development process. The original idea was, I guess, to encourage the player to take on a more abstract role, rather than worrying about what paticular space building is being built on Planet #354 this year. You would have like a limited number of "influence points" which meant you could only directly meddle in a limited number of things on each turn, and instead had to rely on the Bureacracy. And then, essentially, the personality and effectiveness of your bureacrats would be determined by your Empire's predominant culture (militant cultures would be more likely to build ships, uneducated and/or hedonistic cultures would be more likely to not do anything useful at all). But this was apparantly too much for them to pull of successfully, so they scaled back to a more traditional entry in the series.

Also, there's like this whole goofy backstory that tries to explain why MOO has happened 3 times and who the Orions/Antarans are and so on and so forth.

On the other hand, the diplomatic model looks like it might just R0XX0R (the only game I've ever seen even try to do "United Nations" on anything approaching this level was Emperor of the Fading Suns, and that was hampered by the fact that the computer AI was absolute shitter), and the 3D space combat with task forces and everything looks fun. Plus, designing your own ships never gets old.

Debaser wrote:You would have like a limited number of "influence points"

Ah, good, I was wondering when Jolt Country was going to officially lose its status as the only BBS where a bunch of geeks with no concept of what life is about or what to do with their other hand wasn't bitching and moaning about the removal of IFP's from MOO3. Way to go, Debaser. Here's your medal... your MEDAL OF REPUGNANCE!!

But this was apparantly too much for them to pull of successfully, so they scaled back to a more traditional entry in the series.

And, like most of the aforementioned geeks, you have gotten it completely wrong. "IFP's" are still in the game, but they've been implemented differently (and optionally), as a turn *time limit*. In a sense, this is actually more realistic. The only reason an emperor can't nitpick over how many blueberries the chef on Optimus Prime is putting in his muffins is because he wouldn't have time. Now, neither will you.

The hell? There was once someone who actually did read my shit? I am at once shocked and elated.

But, anyway...

Ah, good, I was wondering when Jolt Country was going to officially lose its status as the only BBS where a bunch of geeks with no concept of what life is about or what to do with their other hand wasn't bitching and moaning about the removal of IFP's from MOO3. Way to go, Debaser. Here's your medal... your MEDAL OF REPUGNANCE!!

Are you just being abusive, or are there actually discussions of this going on all over the internet? Honestly, I visited the official boards a couple times to figure out when the game was going to come out, and got caught up in reading the discussions there, but I don't generally "hang out" anywhere on the net other than here and the POE News Forums where, as you might guess, there has been precious little MOO3 talk.

Anyway, I'm not so much complaining about the lack of IFPs as I am saying "they were going to do a bunch of stuff that they're not doing anymore", which means that the game they produced isn't quite the game they set out to produce. I applaud them for realizing their reach was exceeding their grasp and not turning this into some sort of prententious unplayable mess, but at the same time, mid-development overhauls can lead to unforseen problems. This should be obvious.

And, like most of the aforementioned geeks, you have gotten it completely wrong. "IFP's" are still in the game, but they've been implemented differently (and optionally), as a turn *time limit*. In a sense, this is actually more realistic. The only reason an emperor can't nitpick over how many blueberries the chef on Optimus Prime is putting in his muffins is because he wouldn't have time. Now, neither will you.

Are you under Quicksilver's employ or something? I mean, seriously, timed fucking turns? This is a fucking turn based strategy game: It's about thinking well, not thinking quickly. This type of thing has absolutely no place except as a way to get the slow asshole to hurry the fuck up in multiplayer.

I mean, I understand you're probably just trolling me to kill time at work, but how can anyone not understand the difference in focus between "you can only do a set number of things per turn" and "you can do as many things per turn as your ability to make snap decisions and navigate the menus quickly allows"?

And realistic? I what alternate universe is a world leader presented with a map of the world and told "you must plot the course of our destiny, but you must do so in the next five minutes!!!". While I'm sure time is something an issue for a "real" world leader, the scale of the time and tasks involved aren't even remotely comparable.

And, you know what else? The idea of IFPs in and of themselves aren't even that interesting. The part I really did dig on was how the various cultural influences of your empire affected what kind decisions the AI made. So that, instead of telling a magistrate to "build ships" because you wanted a war, you had to macromanage your people into a more aggressive mindset, so that the leader would want to build warships. Instead of being some abstract immortal dictator, you would take on a more guiding role. Instead of worrying about production bonuses, you would be concerning yourself with the very way your citizens think about and define themselves. As someone who was really into Anthropology for a while, I find this concept endlessly fascinating. Hell, I admire the design team for even thinking of it, even if they couldn't get it "right" in the sense that it leads to a fun, playable game. Maybe it'll be more realistically implementable by the time MOO4 comes out, who knows.

Debaser wrote:Are you under Quicksilver's employ or something? I mean, seriously, timed fucking turns? This is a fucking turn based strategy game: It's about thinking well, not thinking quickly. This type of thing has absolutely no place except as a way to get the slow asshole to hurry the fuck up in multiplayer.

POINT, HOME TEAM!

EAT IT, LOCKJAW! HAW HAW HAW

We are the Borg Review Consciousness. All reviews will be assimilated. Our review for Master of Orion III is as follows:

The game is completely inaccessible and the graphics and presentation is by and large ass ugly. But once you have surmounted the learning curve (a process for which the manual is absolutely no help) it is possibly the best turn-based strategy game ever.

Hey Jonsey, you're the guy who seriously follows all this game development stuff, right?

Okay, so Tom Chick, posted this review of MOO3 that basically identifies the game as an incomprehensible morass that, rather like Chaosium's Call of Cthullu, can only be played well by not playing it at all.

Most of the other reviews out there currently, while positive (even glowingly so), either:

A. Are written by folks who have obviously invested way to much of themselves in the game to really be objective.

B. Read like a fucking press kit.

C. Are one-two paragraph opinion pieces written by people who are known for things other than game-reviews.

Oh, and there was that blurb from the Penny Arcade guy.

Okay, so usually I don't have this problem. I mean, the last game I bought at or near release was... um... Mafia. Which I bought completely uninformed about except that it looked "like GTA only less 'gamey'", and have since regretted that decision. Before that was Morrowind which wound up playing exactly like I expected it to (for better or worse). But that was a game by a team of developers whose previous work in the exact same vein I was experienced with; and I was willing to bank $50 bucks on the chance they'd learned from past mistakes. Plus it had the most gorgeous screenshots ever. MOO3's screenshots look like the graphical equivalent of a dogturd, but that in itself hardly matters.

So I'm aware enough to know that Chick is a "name" reviewer, as asinine as that might sound, and I know he disliked Deus Ex, and I know he writes articles about his thirty-something-year-old best friend who lives with his mother. None of this really tells me Jack or shit, but he seems like a better source if it weren't for the numbers involved and the fact that I've managed to let myself fall into "hype mode" for the game.

So, in buying the game, I'd basically be banking on Tom being a bombastic asshole and/or that Penny Arcade guy (and some asshat named Safety Monkey) having a good critical eye for strategy games.

What odds would Vegas be giving me here?

Note: Please don't tell me to wait a month and see what the general opinion is like or buy it somewhere with a good return policy, as both those strategies require me to not be a lazy fucker with a low attention span who will likely forget entirely about his plans to buy/return the game in a month and, therefore, are completely unfeasible.

Debaser wrote:Hey Jonsey, you're the guy who seriously follows all this game development stuff, right?

I'll edit this if any girls start posting in this thread. But the answer is.... YES!

Okay, so Tom Chick, posted this review of MOO3 that basically identifies the game as an incomprehensible morass that, rather like Chaosium's Call of Cthullu, can only be played well by not playing it at all.

Chick has a past history of some whoreitude, sure, and I will never be a fan of the guy, as he was jumping with glee when the Old Man Murray forums were killed, but I get the sense that he played the shit out of MOO3. I'd been keeping up on this thread with some interest. There is a poster in that thread called "Ryvar" whose opinion I normally disagree with on many non-gaming topics, yet who I hold in the highest regard when it comes to games. His take is that the strategy guide points out many things that Chick didn't like. This might be the first time in a long, long time where the strategy guide matters and is worth buying. Unfortunately, pages two and three in that thread are nothing but a bunch of guys who write for a computer game magazine whining about how gamers unfairly categorize them for practices that have shown up in every fucking gaming magazine since "Abacus Gaming Monthly" first hit the stone tablets. But there's also a link to some forum where Chick clarified some points in his review, and a bunch of mindless MOO3 fans just lose it on him.

A. Are written by folks who have obviously invested way to much of themselves in the game to really be objective.

Yeah, that's what makes this game positioned so differently, I think. MOO1 and MOO2 have a passionate fanbase. I'd like to think that if a, say, new Bard's Tale game came out I'd be able to dislike it like I did Zork: Grand Inquisitor, but it took ZGI practically spanking me in the face with a cock that said "MYST!" on it before I turned.

If it does take reading through a manual and strategy guide to make sense of MOO3, I can't really fault it. I've been playing through Freespace II lately and there are probably five dozen commands you can input at any one time. You get better at the game by figuring out how to turn the simulation console (er, your computer) in front of you into a sci-fi fighter jet. If MOO3 is the same way, then it's a credit to the game, I think.

MOO3's screenshots look like the graphical equivalent of a dogturd, but that in itself hardly matters.

Right -- from what I've heard it looks REALLY bad. And this is a genre with Space Empires 4 out there, so if someone wanted to play the "space sim with shitty graphics" so badly that they lost all reason, they could do it for a lot less than $50.

So I'm aware enough to know that Chick is a "name" reviewer, as asinine as that might sound, and I know he disliked Deus Ex, and I know he writes articles about his thirty-something-year-old best friend who lives with his mother. None of this really tells me Jack or shit, but he seems like a better source if it weren't for the numbers involved and the fact that I've managed to let myself fall into "hype mode" for the game.

(An aside -- his Shoot Club articles are really funny. I have to say that I dislike Deus Ex at this point, as I have tried to get into it on three seperate occasions and it just doesn't hold my interest. I think I'm missing something and in fact the game's install disc has been sitting next to my monitor awaiting a fresh install on my PC to see if it's any better with the Geforce4.... but I haven't done it yet.)

So, in buying the game, I'd basically be banking on Tom being a bombastic asshole and/or that Penny Arcade guy (and some asshat named Safety Monkey) having a good critical eye for strategy games.

What odds would Vegas be giving me here?

You love MOO2, right? I mean, not only do you love its body and the sound it makes when its going down on you, but also how it looks hungover in the morning and after it got one of those really bad haircuts which is somehow much too short yet not short enough to be sexy and you have to wait four weeks for it to grow out so that you don't feel as if every single guy you pass on the street when its on your arm is secretly shaking its head at you, correct? If I didn't think I was going to get whacked in three months there's a good chance that I'd go out, buy the guide, read it at work, come home and start getting in bases and killin' d00dz. It's utterly indefensable that the thing requires a $70 investment at this point. But it may be necessary to unlock the goodness in it, from what I've read.

But I may end up waiting until the price comes down -- it might get killed at retail, especially if the graphics are as bad as people are saying. You and I probably don't give a shit, but then our street cred in saying gameplay over graphics is actually backed up by playing too many text adventures. Dunno, could be totally wrong, and I hope I am. My respect for computer gamers as a whole will skyrocket if the thing does well in spite of looking like crap.

Chick has a past history of some whoreitude, sure, and I will never be a fan of the guy, as he was jumping with glee when the Old Man Murray forums were killed, but I get the sense that he played the shit out of MOO3. I'd been keeping up on this thread with some interest. There is a poster in that thread called "Ryvar" whose opinion I normally disagree with on many non-gaming topics, yet who I hold in the highest regard when it comes to games. His take is that the strategy guide points out many things that Chick didn't like. This might be the first time in a long, long time where the strategy guide matters and is worth buying. Unfortunately, pages two and three in that thread are nothing but a bunch of guys who write for a computer game magazine whining about how gamers unfairly categorize them for practices that have shown up in every fucking gaming magazine since "Abacus Gaming Monthly" first hit the stone tablets. But there's also a link to some forum where Chick clarified some points in his review, and a bunch of mindless MOO3 fans just lose it on him.

Right, caught both threads, actually. Yeah, the IG forum thread was just an embarassment, but I get the feeling a lot of what Chick and co are saying is that "it is completely unacceptable that one should have to buy additional documentation", which is very very true as far as it goes, except that:

A. Isn't it generally someone other than the development team who's in charge of writing the docs? If so, I can hardly fault them.

B. I'm not the type of OMM's Eric hardcore enthusiast who's willing to dismiss a game out of hand just to punish the company for a really really boneheaded decision. At the end of the day, I'd rather have a fun game than make a fucking political statement about the importance of proper documentation in interstellar strategy games, dig?

Yeah, that's what makes this game positioned so differently, I think. MOO1 and MOO2 have a passionate fanbase. I'd like to think that if a, say, new Bard's Tale game came out I'd be able to dislike it like I did Zork: Grand Inquisitor, but it took ZGI practically spanking me in the face with a cock that said "MYST!" on it before I turned.

In related news, I finally tracked down a copy of Quest for Glory V a month ago, and it's amazing how it's simultaneously as horrible as the reviews say and absolutely wonderful.

If it does take reading through a manual and strategy guide to make sense of MOO3, I can't really fault it. I've been playing through Freespace II lately and there are probably five dozen commands you can input at any one time. You get better at the game by figuring out how to turn the simulation console (er, your computer) in front of you into a sci-fi fighter jet. If MOO3 is the same way, then it's a credit to the game, I think.

See, that's the thing. I have no problem with the learning curve. I welcome it to a certain extent. Really, from what I can tell about the game design, it's the quality of the AI that's the clincher for a variety of reasons. And, since I've seen everything from "this is the best AI ever" to "the AI makes completely incomprehensible decisions and, as the shitstain to top the sphincter will often override your own, more comprehensible, decisions".

(An aside -- his Shoot Club articles are really funny. I have to say that I dislike Deus Ex at this point, as I have tried to get into it on three seperate occasions and it just doesn't hold my interest. I think I'm missing something and in fact the game's install disc has been sitting next to my monitor awaiting a fresh install on my PC to see if it's any better with the Geforce4.... but I haven't done it yet.)

My completely uninformed opinion on Deus Ex is that it's to FPS's what, say, Diablo is to RPGs. The crossover title that hooks folks such as myself who don't really care for FPS's with other gimmicks (cool storyline, immersive levels, and the always beloved "Role Playing Elements") but which actually fails at the things that usually make FPS's good (I really have no clue what makes other FPS's good, but I've heard tell that the enemy AI in Deus Ex is pretty weak which I imagine would dampen the game for veteren fraggers).

You love MOO2, right? I mean, not only do you love its body and the sound it makes when its going down on you, but also how it looks hungover in the morning and after it got one of those really bad haircuts which is somehow much too short yet not short enough to be sexy and you have to wait four weeks for it to grow out so that you don't feel as if every single guy you pass on the street when its on your arm is secretly shaking its head at you, correct?

Just so you know, these sorts of paragraphs are precisely why I started lurking on this BBS way back when.

If I didn't think I was going to get whacked in three months there's a good chance that I'd go out, buy the guide, read it at work, come home and start getting in bases and killin' d00dz. It's utterly indefensable that the thing requires a $70 investment at this point. But it may be necessary to unlock the goodness in it, from what I've read.

But I may end up waiting until the price comes down -- it might get killed at retail, especially if the graphics are as bad as people are saying. You and I probably don't give a shit, but then our street cred in saying gameplay over graphics is actually backed up by playing too many text adventures. Dunno, could be totally wrong, and I hope I am. My respect for computer gamers as a whole will skyrocket if the thing does well in spite of looking like crap.

Yeah, I think you've sold me here. My plan at this point is to pick the thing up on my way home from work Wednseday and skip the Strategy guide at first, relying instead on my natural instincts and the various forii to help me get through. This is probably a tactically unsound decision, but I think it's the best way to weight risk/expense. If I find the game hopelessly obtuse I can always pick up the guide a couple days later.

Just to voice my disagreement, didn't Zork: Nemesis bite the big Myst cock first? I enjoyed Zork: Grand Inquisitor. I thought the humor was there, and I got the feeling that time around that the designers were actually familiar with the Zork games. And then when you throw in A*Team actors, it gets better.

I guess I've forgotten enough of the game that I could replay it if I wanted and see if I still enjoy it.

Roody_Yogurt wrote:Just to voice my disagreement, didn't Zork: Nemesis bite the big Myst cock first? I enjoyed Zork: Grand Inquisitor. I thought the humor was there, and I got the feeling that time around that the designers were actually familiar with the Zork games. And then when you throw in A*Team actors, it gets better.

I guess I've forgotten enough of the game that I could replay it if I wanted and see if I still enjoy it.

Yeah, Nemesis was definitely much like Myst. I don't think I spent money on it, if I remember right I was given it via working at an EB when it came out. My manager said something like, "Activision gave us a copy of Zork," and everyone knew Zork was my favorite game, so I ended up with it.

I'll credit Z:GI for being a game that took place in the Zorkian universe, but I have a real hard time with games that tell me "hey, we're going to suck for a bit." Z:GI did that when the Dungeon Master (he was in the lamp, right?) said, "this puzzle will test your blah, blah, ability to blah, and clicking skill" or whatever it was. Jesus Christ. One of the ten worst moments ever in gaming. A fucking ZORK GAME being reduced to a clicking exercise? Icewind Dale II did the same thing, in terms of getting all meta on me when they said that I'd have to go do a Fedex quest. Hey, howabout instead of sheepishly apologizing for a shitty stretch, you devs instead REMOVE said shitty stretch from the game? That bugs the hell out of me. Most games these days I stop playing more because I go a day or two without playing them and fall out of habit, but those two games -- games that I was otherwise digging -- irritated the hell out of me. The rest of IWD2 is probably great fun. Someday I'll be back, I guess, but who knows when.

Dirk Benedict being in Z:GI was great, you're right. And the guy who played the actual Grand Inquisitor is one of the best villains in gaming.

Debaser wrote:B. I'm not the type of OMM's Eric hardcore enthusiast who's willing to dismiss a game out of hand just to punish the company for a really really boneheaded decision. At the end of the day, I'd rather have a fun game than make a fucking political statement about the importance of proper documentation in interstellar strategy games, dig?

That's just it. Space games tend to be complex. Every D&D game seems to rip off Tolkein, so it's no big deal if they avoid explaining in lurid detail just what an ettin is. Space games, though... Alpha Centuri had a huge book, any Battlecruiser game has a giant manual or PDF file (can't say which -- the only version I own is the original one, which my brother bought as a gag Christmas gift a few years back. Best brother ever.) and so forth. Well, the Starflight one was rather smallish, but then that was kind of a different game.

Flight simulators ship with enormous manuals as well. Yeah, more info should have been included with MOO3, it appears, but I'd rather have a rich game and need the guide than something like NWN, which did not require an additional purchase, but was also gelded due to its one-person-party decision.

OK, that last bit was me straining to work in a NWN shot. Sorry.

What kills me is that the editor of whatever mag would rather pay a kill fee than just use Chick's review. WTF? WTF, I ask, WT frigging F? So your reviewer thought an A+ release blew. If someone had the testicles to take a stand like that on Black & White, that magazine would be the Holy Grail of gaming magazines. But instead, all those worthless cocksuckers drank it right up.

My completely uninformed opinion on Deus Ex is that it's to FPS's what, say, Diablo is to RPGs. The crossover title that hooks folks such as myself who don't really care for FPS's with other gimmicks (cool storyline, immersive levels, and the always beloved "Role Playing Elements") but which actually fails at the things that usually make FPS's good (I really have no clue what makes other FPS's good, but I've heard tell that the enemy AI in Deus Ex is pretty weak which I imagine would dampen the game for veteren fraggers).

I read somewhere (possibly that MOO3 thread) that Deus Ex was a game where none of the weapons did any damage. I certainly got that impression in the time that I have spent with it.

Yeah, I think you've sold me here. My plan at this point is to pick the thing up on my way home from work Wednseday and skip the Strategy guide at first, relying instead on my natural instincts and the various forii to help me get through. This is probably a tactically unsound decision, but I think it's the best way to weight risk/expense. If I find the game hopelessly obtuse I can always pick up the guide a couple days later.

This would also mean that you will be the first guy in the history of electronic gaming retail to say -- when asked by the fat, greasy guy behind the counter if you want the strategy guide -- "Not right now, let me see how I do first" to actually mean it. If you think you see something out of the corner of your eye when you buy the game, you probably did: Gaming Historians of the 25th Century will be time-traveling back in order to get a holographic copy of the event.

(They will then return to their time and wonder what quarter Duke Nukem 4 will be released.)

... and again, sorry. That last bit was me straining to work in a Duke Nukem 4 shot. I have a contract to fulfill with certain parties, and if I don't do a certain amount of mewling I don't receive the monies. (No kill fee either, unfortunately.)

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

Debaser wrote:Hey Jonsey, you're the guy who seriously follows all this game development stuff, right?

I'll edit this if any girls start posting in this thread. But the answer is.... YES!

Do I count? Bwahahahha, just here to torment the masses =)

-LG

Roody_Yogurt wrote:Just to voice my disagreement, didn't Zork: Nemesis bite the big Myst cock first? I enjoyed Zork: Grand Inquisitor. I thought the humor was there, and I got the feeling that time around that the designers were actually familiar with the Zork games. And then when you throw in A*Team actors, it gets better.

I guess I've forgotten enough of the game that I could replay it if I wanted and see if I still enjoy it.

Really, when you get right down to it, didn't Return to Zork bite the aforementioned "Myst Cock" before Myst even came out? Then again, my entire memory of that game boils down to "Want some rye? Course ya do!", so take any comments on it with a grain of salt.

I think I was just so happy that they were continuing the Zork franchise that I'm a lot easier on RTZ than I really should be. Zork: Nemesis is the one that I absolutely scorn, both puzzle-wise and thematically. It's pretty much a non-Zork game with Zork slapped on its title and maybe some mentions of Antharia here and there. Some people like it for this while I detest it.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Icewind Dale II did the same thing, in terms of getting all meta on me when they said that I'd have to go do a Fedex quest. Hey, howabout instead of sheepishly apologizing for a shitty stretch, you devs instead REMOVE said shitty stretch from the game?

Yeah, but that was a pretty short stretch, and at least they gave you that magical teleporting kid to get it over with quickly.

Really, they were kind of locked into a pacing problem there. They had two attacks (the one at the docks at the very start of the game, and then the one at the walls that occurs after the aforementioned fedexing) and obviously needed to put some level of "time lapse" between them, in order to pace the game's plot effectively, give the various townsfolk running around enough personality so that you at least notice when the goblins start slaughtering them, and then to give players time to equip themselves, get settled in, and conduct the ever-popular side quests. And you've got to fill that stretch of time with some sort of motivated task. Granted, they could theoretically have solved it better probably, but I didn't find it terribly egregious or anything.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: I read somewhere (possibly that MOO3 thread) that Deus Ex was a game where none of the weapons did any damage. I certainly got that impression in the time that I have spent with it.

Do any damage to the player or to the enemy? If the former, yeah probably, at least in the early going. But you are an nano-powered weapon of mass destruction and everything. But sniper rifles, and the "heavy" weapons (flamethrowers and the like) can pretty much demolish you in a shot or two. Later on you'll encounter these bionic commando guys who you absolutely cannot take in a fair fight. If the latter, I ain't seeing it at all. Or, at least, I ain't seeing it any more than I did in Mafia or NOLF. Maybe you just need to take more headshots. Or else stop using tranq darts and the fucking stealth pistol.

Surprisingly for me, though, I got my rocks off by playing Mr. Nice Guy in that game. I got through the first couple areas without capping a single terrorist; and, later, when you have to betray UNATCO because they're a pawn of the evil conspiracy (I don't think I'm spoiling anything with that, right?), I replayed that level several times until I figured out how to avoid getting into a shootout with my former comrades. Of course, then I had to slaughter an entire platoon of them in the very next scene, but at least that time they were the aggressors instead of vice-versa.

UPDATE!!!

I did, point of fact, buy the game on Wednesday as planned. I played the shit out of it on Wednesday, and haven't really fired it up for great length since. Part of that's situational (I actually tried to socialize with my coworkers on Friday, and spent most of today arranging my new furniture), but a lot of it's that I'm spending far more time reading about the game than playing it.

Glad I didn't buy the strat guide, as it's apparently much out of date, and lurking on the various forae seems to be the way to go for folks (like myself) who despise learning by trial and error. Of course, this means everytime I sit down to play, I check the internet for updated advice/info, get bogged down reading (especially since every thread post-release for every game ever inevitably turns into a giant flame-war between mewling fanboys and over-expectant self-absorbed trogladytes) and generally feel pretty burned out by the time I'm ready to actually fire the game up.

So, anyway my verdict as of this moment is that the game looks really really cool in theory, but might not actually be fun for another patch or so due to various issues. If I have a better handle on the game by next weekend, I might just up and feed the content beaver.

Debaser wrote:Of course, this means everytime I sit down to play, I check the internet for updated advice/info, get bogged down reading (especially since every thread post-release for every game ever inevitably turns into a giant flame-war between mewling fanboys and over-expectant self-absorbed trogladytes) and generally feel pretty burned out by the time I'm ready to actually fire the game up.

:(