This is really hard.

I went through World 2 and 3 with maybe 2/3s of the puzzle pieces, but the World 4 part where time goes forward when you go forward and backwards when you go backwards? *holds head*

I have a feeling that this is going to be the I Wanna Be The Guy of puzzles.

You bought something for me? That's it, I'm buying you R: TW

That'll teach you

Braid sounds like this game.

I don't want it. And you're supposed to get Osi something.



... actually, that video is a parody of Braid. A rather spot-on parody I might add (although it hasn't gotten THAT complicated yet where I am).

Although I could use that time elixir.

Are you sure it's a direct parody of Braid? I have no idea which came first. I guess it probably is, since all of the other videos that guy did are parodies.

Yeah, it is. Unless there's another really hard princess-saving time-reversal game out there that I'm not aware of.

Well geez. Frad picked me up a copy of Torchlight, something that I've been eyeing greedily this whole time. I'm really looking forward to digging into this one. I might have to extend holiday breaks for another couple weeks

Well, I think before the sales run out, I will pick up a copy of Europa Universalis based on Mr F's recommendation. I do enjoy those types of games a lot, and with someone else on board, it might motivate me to put a little more effort into it. I still regret not fully giving dwarf fortress a second chance. Some day ...

Part of what I liked about Braid was thinking about the different layers of meaning behind the metaphor of the princess and Tim's character. A couple of the puzzles were pretty tricky too, but never got annoying.

I beat Braid.

My favourite time gimmick was probably the backwards thing from the last world. That was cool, but then they didn't really do anything with it. I hated the slow ring.

Uh the story... um... wait, was there a story? It felt like one of those deeply spiritual things that this girl I was once affiliated with used to read/write a lot. But my main thought throughout the game was "FUCK THIS PUZZLE" and so the story sort of went over my head.



Don't get EU, it's bad. I tried it again and actually played something that resembled a real game, but ultimately it wore me out. One game in the thing is going to be something like 60 hours long if not longer. Plus the game is filled with bogus handicaps for non-whites.

I didn't fully get that part either, but the quote at the end by Oppenheimer was the real give away. The city at the beginning -- maybe not just the night life. And if you collect all the super secret stars (Which I did not bother with), the princess supposedly explodes.

Anyhoo. The other thing I got was a copy of the AI fleet war game for me and the wife. This might have been a mistake, it says a normal co-op game can take as much as 8-12 hours over multiple sessions. We'll see how it goes.

I think part of my motivation with 4X games is remembering back when I was a young kid with no responsibilities and sitting down to multiple games of Civilization, Seven cities of gold, M.U.L.E. (not really a 4X game) and spending days mastering the complex mechanics. Recapturing that experience is something I'd like to recreate

If you like the 'base game,' (EUIII Complete is actually the original game + two expansion packs) consider picking up the expansion Heir to the Throne.

If you ever need help and I'm not available, there's the forums: (Register your game there if you use them, you get a hat which tells people you own the game and also lets you see and post in the tech support forum)
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/for ... .php?f=323

And the wiki:
http://www.paradoxian.org/eu3wiki/Main_Page

Quit trolling, Naelok.
The only true statement here is that a single game can indeed take a long time to play.

I think EUIII will deliver on that.

Yeah, I saw a video of that. Bizarre. I also read that if you stand in certain places in the epilogue, the text in the books subtly changes, which makes the whole thing that much more obscure. I don't like that. It's like gluing a couple of pages together in a book or something.

Mind you, the game was still rather good and I thank you again for your gift. I particularly enjoyed the music.

EUIII is ultimately too clunky and filled with too much arbitrary 'historical' silliness to be a satisfying Civ-type experience. Being a Protestant gives you a +10% tax revenue bonus. Having a vast European Empire will trigger various 'Our Empire is kind of stupid, lose all your gold' and 'Our nation has declined, lose tech investment' events. There are all sorts of things that can randomly happen that just are specifically designed to fuck around with you ("The Peasants saw a comet. Lose one stability").

And there are all sorts of little things that can fuck you over if you aren't very careful. Like there's a provincial upgrade called 'Establish March' which gives you a local manpower bonus, but it gives you a point of decentralization which you can only get rid of every 50 years or so. One misclick on the magistrate screen and it's time to reload your game. Ich.

Of course there are reasons behind all of that stuff, including ways to avoid bad events, some entirely, all of which I explained to Naelok, but he would have none of that. So he ragequit his obviously doomed game because those rascist Swedish developers obviously had it out for him since his unfairly gimped empire was only #1 in the world (I even modded his game for him so that all religions were exactly the same, consequences be damned.)

Maybe if he had been able to play that Magna Mundi mod he'd have a new appreciation for vanilla.

And although normally poison, Establish March is useful if you're already at max Decentralization.

Hardly an uncommon occurrence in games.

The Swedes are still a presence in Europe in spite of their being a nothing-power in real Europe by the 18th century. I assume that they have some sort of hidden Blond Master Race bonus. Though of course I still beat them to death and steal their luxurious blond curls when they look at me funny, so it's all good.

Basically when I play the game I consider the European countries to be representatives of the developers. It's pretty funny to see a whole swath of countries that are given such completely bogus bonuses being kicked in the balls over and over. Like beating a map hacker in Starcraft.



I don't remember a game where accidentally clicking the #2 option instead of #1 on a REALLY long list forces you to reload to undo it. Maybe clicking the "NOW YOU DIE!" option accidentally in a Bioware RPG, but that's a lot harder to do than accidentally clicking 'Establish March', especially when your provincial summary has like 200 provinces.

I finally finished Braid.. I think? I think I got the "you fucking suck" ending.

Story?

*waves hand over head*

WOOSH.

It's a metaphor or something. The Princess is actually the nuclear bomb and his pursuing it is bad or something. Or maybe it's some girl he was stalking. Or maybe it's both. There is a second ending involving collecting a bunch of stars. This presents you with an ending that's even MORE confusing. I don't recommend it.

I honestly really don't know what the hell was going on there. The game just got too artsy for its own good. It's like a T.S. Elliot poem. Some people can read those things and earnestly think 'I have no idea what that was about, but I do know it was DEEP' and proceed to come up with bogus explanations for what it might be about. People like me though read the things and think 'Wait, what? Oh whatever. Quit bothering me.'

Fuck metaphors, all I know is I was running from a giant fire and the princess helped save me and then through bad mojo they reversed time and she was kidnapped again and I didn't get to fight the last boss.

SHE WAS KIDNAPPED DAMMIT

Yeah it tried a little too hard, but the story was about more than one girl, and the boy. His mother (sister?) with the braid, at the candy store and the princess.

The princess was the pursuit of the nuclear bomb. His obsession with controlling and understanding. His inability to see the bigger picture ""This improvement, day by day, takes him ever-closer to finding the Princess. if she exists - she must! - she will transform him, and everyone." and the desire to redo things. The city line firey haze.

The fire was the princess, taken and locked away again, rescued? by someone more responsible than the dude? I don't know if that matters so much. We should give consideration to the idea that Tim may be somewhat insane.

Mother/sister? Braid? Candy store?

What? No! She was a princess. Obviously. She had a dress.

NO. This is all wrong. I think Braid is a pretty cool guy, eh reverses time and doesn't afraid of anything

Also he fought a bunch of monsters, so he's obviously good.

He's a stalker/rapist that created his own weird fantasy world around this girl who was clearly terrified of him. The guy at the end saved her from him. Though the girl is also a nuclear bomb so the flip side of that is getting his desire is bad. Or something.

It's postmodern, it doesn't need to really make sense.

Yeah, and DA is on sale for 33%. Yoink!
Wait, is that what cool kids say when they happily grab something up? That thing.

Good choice, sir.

The expansion pack is out today but I'm going to hold off till there's a price drop as I still need to do my second ME2 playthrough here. Plus it's a bit steep, adding like 25 hours of game for 50 bucks. I guess compared to the average game that's fine, but my first 50 bucks netted me 70+ hours so...

Yeah, for $40, I'd really rather pick up the fallout 3 expansion packs and give that another go. But let's see how I feel after I dive in to this. It might be awhile, I started on a few other things from my steam list that I want to finish up first. Osmos was good for about an hour. Ghostbusters was pretty decent for $7.50. Trine was absolutely perfect and beautiful and just the right length. And I'm about done with Company of Heroes. I picked up the expansion pack bundle of COH but I'm not sure that I'll bother with it, it got great metacritic reviews, but it just didn't strike a chord with me. Maybe I need to finally admit I don't like RTSes as much as I once did.

Plus God of War 3 just came out ..

You've got more game than you can chew in DA anyhow so no need to be an expansion pack early adopter.

What I like about DA is while there are moral choices, there's no moral point system. Being a goodie-goodie doesn't net you goodie-goodie points that give you goodie-goodie powers or whatever. There are good and bad things you can do, of course, but the game doesn't give keep an arbitrary good/bad meter.

Though the flip side of that is influence. If you make a choice that your party members like, their influence bar (which is the measure of how well they like you) goes up. If you do something that makes them upset they'll pout at you and you'll lose influence. You can just buy them gifts to keep them happy though so it's all good.

Hey, take this over to the Cave Story thread, I'm raging about Braid and how I want to know how to kill the Knight guy for a proper final boss fight.

Ah, it was never about boss fights anyway. I'll send you my copy of Crysis if that's what you want