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Yeah I think the moment you stop being a noob and start being a normal player is when you figure out how good trading is.

Gathering Storm just adds goals
Rebel vs. Imperium adds takeover powers, where you can take over another player's military world if you have a ton of military power (most people prefer to play without this, myself included)
Brink of War adds prestige which is a new type of victory point. When you have the most prestige, you get a free extra vp chip every round and sometimes a free card.

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It's my favorite board game! You're playing no expansions right? I don't remember how to play vanilla race that much. I think you have to just think really hard about what the AI might do and take that into consideration. You don't want him always taking advantage of your action while you never take advantege of his actions (for example, if he has 8 cards in hand and you have like 2, and he settles or develops, thats bad for you). Also, consume x2 is considered slightly too powerful in the base game.

The first expansion changes the game a lot (for the better), and the ones after that are nice but don't add that much. So I do recommend turning on the first expansion.

Unfortunately http://rftgstats.com/ is down right now for some reason :( But it's a really cool website with beautiful charts showing which cards are correlated with winning games, and which cards are in general most often played, etc

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You know you can only move a channel to an empty slot right? Can't drop a channel on another channel.

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I just had a fantastic epic moment with the new rocket launcher. It was on red team, badwater, last point. The cart was all the way at the top of the hill, but my team got cocky when the blu team did a final push in the last ten seconds, and we all died except a couple of people doing their best to slow the cart down. The cart made it right up to the point, with 3 blu guys still pushing it as I respawned at spawn above the final point. I started loading rockets as soon as I spawned, ran out the door, jumped off the balcony, spewed a triplet of three rockets from mid air down at the cart, killed all three blus, overtime ended 5 seconds later. Awesome.

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6.8

It's really not that bad. Atmosphere's pretty good. The platforming is the worst of possibly any game ever.

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Here are a few opinions

-new dimension is hilarious and amazing. valve has outdone itself again.

-doomsday is a fun deathmatch. I wouldn't put it above my favorite koth maps, but it's definitely enjoyable. MM is right, the shortness is a great thing about it.

-new pyro flare gun is all right. there is splash damage/splash ignition when it hits a wall/the ground, so that's very nice, kind of as good as the detonator at flaming lots of people without needing perfect aim. the knockback is impressive and satisfying, I used it pretty well on doomsday. It's probably no flare gun/shotgun replacement, but it's definitely above detonator. I forgot to try to jump with it, probably doesn't work.

-new sniper SMG is all right. You have to kill with it to get the 3 seconds of crit bonus (you don't get it from a snipe/huntsman kill, which is what I was hoping). It's very bad at getting kills compared to the SMG which was already pretty bad at finishing people off. But when you get lucky and kill someone, SMG crits are pretty amazing (pretty sure you can switch to another weapon too).

-new soldier rockets are tricky to use. The gun is always unloaded, so when you're ready to shoot, you load up some rockets, then let go. You can run at full speed and everything while loading em. It's very effective, but it makes you defenseless all the time unless you're constantly loading up rockets and letting them loose.

-new scout scattergun is very fun. the speed is incredible, but you really need a good framerate to take advantage of it. having to refrain from jumping isn't much fun (and is very hard to do).

-new scout pistol is a cool idea, but I don't like that it's so passive.

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Fusion has no atmosphere? That's the best thing it's got going for it!

And no, nothing's better than Sotn. OoE is really interesting though.

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I hate pixar but thought brave was great

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I thought castlevania adventure rebirth was terrible

SMG2 is way better than SMG1

Nintendo Power is high

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ooe has such a weird atmosphere, title screen is pretty summarial

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Contrarily, IMO, affixes are the only non-empty way this game uses to increase difficulty!

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Oh man, you've never played Portal 2? One of my top 10 for sure. It's $20 all the time, but will almost certainly go on sale in a couple weeks.

Bastion and Super Meat Boy are landmark indie releases from past couple years, both $15 and very likely to go on sale.

Personally I would also recommend Peggle Nights. Peggle is sweet.

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Switching all of your gear to magic find right before opening a resplendent chest was pretty dumb. But the better solution would be: for the magic find to work on a resplendent chest, you have to wear it for the whole dungeon up to that chest. CLEARLY BETTER

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Just look at some of these levels in SMB1. Here's 5-1:



There's nothing interesting about it! There are some goombas, some koopas, some pipe flower guys, and a whole lot of flatness. I'll admit, some of these look fun. Here's 7-1:



That looks pretty interesting. But compared to levels from later games it's basically just a bunch of single bullet bills over and over, and *two* hammer bros. fights. So repetitive!

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Well, don't compare the controls to ice climbers', compare it to the other Mario games!

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What? I don't even think of SMB1 as a good game. It's almost unplayable. No vertical scrolling, no backward scrolling, really boring repetitive levels, thoughtlessly designed levels, way too difficult levels, control is effed, almost no powerups, no map, no nothing. Yuck. SMB1 is like a proof of concept, waiting for someone to make a real game out of sidescroller platforming.

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The hatred for Diablo 3 is extremely intriguing. I've mostly heard unfair arguments against it, and a couple of fair ones. Most commonly, people are pissed off that it's different than Diablo 2

The best arguments against it (IMHO) have to do with the gameplay of the game. One main one is that the gameplay is too static; that is, you never find an item and think, oh my god I need to rearrange my whole gameplay style now. The items are all just bigger numbers. As Yahtzee said, it's a game about falling into a routine and sticking with it. On the other hand, since skills/builds are so easy to modify on a whim, the gameplay is even more changing and adaptive than other ARPGS, so that's an improvement. Another good argument is that it's too easy on normal, and there's nothing you can do to avoid it. Even if you start a new class, you have to work through normal again, and unless you're trying to play fast, that's hours and hours of time before challenge begins to show. On my current wizard, I'm almost done with normal and haven't used a potion yet.

There are also some okay arguments about drop rates being low or unsatisfying, but I'm not sure that there's enough evidence to back it up, and if its true then the real problem is that there aren't enough interesting attributes on items, which ties in with the above points. If there were more interesting rolls happening when an item is generated, they could kick up the drop rates more, since there is more potential variety.

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A, just graduated
B, no more school

Computer Science + Math

Just got a job as a developer

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Yeah I was 32 when clearing normal, and I thought I was going pretty slowly (18 hours). So, you're crazy!

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Scan him and his weak points will appear =] =] you're welcome

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I remember my witch doctor set up: run in, use soul harvest to get awesome intelligence, vampire bats everything, everything dies instantly. Rinse/repeat for entire game. Use poison darts-splinters to kill stragglers/large enemies very quickly.

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The characters and dialogue are not intended to create an exciting plot. The intent was to build atmosphere and exposition, and it does a really good job of that I think. For 99% of games, I think that's the most important thing plot can do for the game: make it more immersive and more fun. The 1% is true RPGs where the story is the meat of the game (FF, Mass Effect).

minor spoilers below

The first character you talk to is Captain Rumford, a guard explaining the grave state of the town. He isn't building plot, he's building atmosphere. He is the only surviving captain of the guard party that went out hours ago. That's history/atmosphere. Think about most of the text/speech in the game. Most of it is in the journals, which clearly are meant to build atmosphere. Leoric's Manor wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable of a dungeon (literally a dungeon in this case!) if they hadn't spent so many diaries explaining its history. All of Act III is a great example of well, when you're in the shopping area it's families talking about their fear, guards talking about your heroism, merchants taking advantage of the giant battle. It builds an atmosphere, not a plot. And Act III certainly has excellent atmosphere.

There is some plot of course, but mostly to create a rising action. There has to be a rising action/rising excitement so that the second half of the game feels more epic and important than the first half. I have a feeling there was a lot of plot that was cut out for Tyrael--if you listen to the end game cinematic, it's as if Tyrael had some exciting change of character throughout the game, but in the game there is almost no evidence of this (except some of Act IV). I believe this development of Tyrael was removed because it just didn't successfully build atmosphere or was just underwhelming. The twist at the end of Act III ends the rising action making Act IV the climax, since all of the good characters are dead except for you and cormac.

What I'm saying is, there is a little bit of plot, but you always need a little bit so that the game gets more exciting and feels like you're making progress. Much much more time and text is spent on building exposition so that the world is fun to be in. Diablo 3 has really good atmosphere IMO and they made the right choice of not trying to spend too much time on plot.

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I'll participate! But backwards

15-Resident Evil 4
14-Trackmania 2 Canyon
13-Left 4 Dead 2
12-Klonoa 2
11-Minecraft
10-Hexen
9-Castlevania Curse of Darkness
8-Castlevania Rondo of Blood
7-Portal 2
6-Metroid Prime
5-Diablo 3 (we'll see how long)
4-Castlevania Symphony of the Night
3-World of Warcraft
2-Team Fortress 2
1-Doom

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One thing I seriously miss from torchlight is being able to start a new character on a slightly harder difficulty. I hate starting in normal. So boring.

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Got a barb and now a wizard most of the way through act 1, both are nowhere near as fun so far as my witch doctor was. I think. Hated the barb. I've never liked melee in arpg so I should have expected it. (Actually my titan quest character was based around damage-shields and pretty much standing still and taking damage, so that's pretty close)

I read a long analysis of all of the witch doctor runes a couple of days ago and this guy swore by the dire bats, but I can't even imagine playing the class without typical cone bats. Inferno may be a different story, but I don't think this guy was talking about inferno. WHATEVS

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oh you live in Interesting, NY? I have a friend from there

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" still probably wouldn't have died if not for my +12% movespeed"

oh my god my mind exploded from this sentence structure

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mmmm thanks

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belial has a phase 3? is that just in inferno?

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Notice in all of the ability tooltips that ability damage is based off of your weapon, for example, poison dart hits do damage equal to exactly 100% of your weapon damage and then 60% additional damage over time. If you don't have advanced tooltips on, hold control to see such details. The actual type of your weapon does not seem to come in to play ever (although if you don't have enough resources to use poison darts, you'll swing your weapon)

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Anyone else playing witch doctor? I haven't read how other people are playing d3 besides this thread. I have a feeling nobody is using poison dart-splinters but I couldn't live without it or any of these I'm using:

1-Grasp of the dead (unbreakable grasp)
2-Soul harvest (swallow your soul)
3-Gargantuan (humongoid)
4-Spirit walk (honored guest)

L-Poison Dart (splinters)
R-Firebats (death is life)

jungle fortitude
spiritual attunement
spirit vessel

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Tina Fey is a genius and is very funny.

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just finished normal. used witch doctor. can't believe how boring act 2 and act 3's final bosses were.

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One of my preferred Ghibli movies. It's also probably the most different than the others.

My favorites are probably cat returns > kiki > mononoke > ponyo > whisper of the heart > nausicaa > others

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* san francisco rush 2049 battle mode is the best local multiplayer i've ever played
* sonic adventure 2 is a must-play if you never have, SA 1 is also worth playing
* hydro thunder is a very fun 2p racing game but the sp is a bit too hard
* ikaruga is very popular
* chu chu rocket is a must play puzzle game, and the multiplayer is very likable

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ps2 castlevania curse of darkness is a good metroidvania

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9/16 and haven't seen a single one of these!

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yeah, I would say for a short-term school project, that's pretty great. not top-tier, but pretty high up.

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I'd like to take a moment and thank all of the people who wipe while standing for cleaning up all of the crap off of the floor and toilet seat afterward.

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trackmania 2 canyon > f-zero gx >>> all other racing games

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Definitely not, you won't even finish them if you try. I got diablo about 2 years ago and loved it and still couldn't finish it. It's too old.

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also, in the defense of laptops, my current laptop has had much fewer problems than any pc i've had (although that is probably in part due to my bad luck with nvidia cards, and this guy has ati in it)

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http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230257

This one is pretty good. $1075, i7 processor, 8 gigs memory, 750 gigs hard drive, Geforce GT 635M (not awesome graphics card, but good: 44 fps med settings skyrim) and 15.6", not the typical big screen laptop, but downgrading from 17.3" to 15.6" saves a lot of money.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230142

This one looks really good. $1379, i7 processor, 12 gigs memory (!!!jeez), 500GB hard drive but a faster one, Geforce GTX 560M (better graphics card: 55 fps med settings skyrim) and 17.3".

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ASUS is the brand you want. This research is a little old now but I imagine they still have the lowest malfunction rate. http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/11/17/reliability.study.has.apple.4th.place/

Three years ago I bought an ASUS for $1000 with 17" screen and an i7 and a like a B-grade graphics card and I'm still extremely satisfied with it. Probably not replacing it for another year at least. Only game I've been unsatisfied with is Witcher 2 which was too stuttery at lowest settings (I only really enjoy games if they're at 60fps).

My girlfriend got an ASUS 15" with an i5 and built-in graphics around Christmas for I think $500-$600 and she's extremely happy with it (I'm pretty impressed with it too), I don't think we've tried anything super graphical on it, but sims 3 and portal 1 run perfectly at default good settings.

One thing I especially like is the vent on the left side rather than the bottom or back.. My laptop's is powerful but somehow very thin compared to most good laptops I see, and as long as I use an air duster on the vent every six months, it doesn't really get hot.

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that looked pretty fun

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it's at 4 EST right?

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get the spicy chicken sandwich from steak 'n' shake. bob evans is also open and has pretty much everything and is cheap and is really tasty and there is bottomless hot chocolate.

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i get it

those are track titles

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castlevania bloodlines is very genesissy

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Out of 4 AP tests, this is the one I didn't get credit for at my college. It was a prety easy test, I just completely effed around in all of my classes senior year of high school, and in american history definitely the most (didn't open the books a single time, didn't do any homework if it required learning anything new). I still got a 3 on it.

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