Turn Based and Real Time poltroons equally welcome.

Shoot off some interesting anecdotes! I've just heard about Buggshash's legendary rout in Myth. And Ravi's occasional skirmish in Heroes.

King's Bounty preview (Gamespy)

Spiritual father of HoMM series gets a remake.

Unlike the Heroes of Might and Magic series, where army leaders were merely puppets for the player's unseen ruler, the RPG elements of King's Bounty are very personal and right in the player's face. As the player travels around the kingdom fighting tactical battles, their character will earn experience and level up, learning new spells and abilities. They'll also begin to acquire crystals they can use to make one-shot spell scrolls found in the wilderness into permanent abilities. They'll earn runes that act as a sort of talent system by purchasing a number of special skills that fit their particular style of play. They'll also be able to tame one of four different spirits to serve as a familiar and acquire a wife that contributes to their powers and abilities.


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Microsoft kicks out Age of Empires makers

I have mentioned with regret the closing of several quality game studios over the past several years but I never considered that ES would join the list. Everyone at our studio was shocked, and I think remains very disappointed that this is going to happen. I believe we thought we were immune to shut-down talk because our published games have done so well and have been so profitable. Plus we felt we had built a really stable (low-turnover), talented, hard-working, and creative team, which is not easy to do. We thought we were among the best studios in the world, and that may be true, but we don’t fit in the future plans of MGS as an internal studio so we’re out.

'tis the fall of that empire, alright. Wonder how they can stay motivated to wrap up Halo Wars after this. Maybe there'll be crapload of Hot Coffee style easter eggs. No, I don't want to see Master Chief au natural.

There'll be an "idle Master Chief" button and it won't work.

new Red Alert 2 preview

Co-op?

...the mission I played had a really sensible cooperative beginning: escorting our mobile construction vehicle. My partner controlled the dolphins (which tear up anything water-based) while I manned a squad of Hydrofoils (antiair boats). My partner could take care of any threats in the water, and I protected him from any sort of Death From Above action. Another piece of co-op teamwork was having my Hydrofoils use their jamming ability to temporarily disable some water-based defenses -- defenses that my buddy unleashed his dolphins on. Soon afterward, we were both able to establish bases, and the gameplay became a more straightforward "let's assault the A.I. in a pincer attack" deal.

IGN's review of King's Bounty - The Legend

Sweet but hard seems the verdict.

...You're going to be spending a lot of time in combat and, fortunately, that's a good thing. The turn-based battling system in King's Bounty is fantastic. At its core, the combat is simple, yet extremely deep. Like Might and Magic, skirmishes take place on flat, small, hex grids. While your chosen hero will not participate directly in battle, you'll be able to utilize summons and spells to turn the tides of war....

It is also important to keep track of the terrain...Demons have a higher defense on lava levels, the undead get a morale boost for fighting in cemeteries...

...While victory may still bring you casualties, retreating from battles isn't a wise strategy either. Running away causes you to sacrifice many of your troops on the battlefield...

King's Bounty's difficulty can often be brutal, too brutal in fact; most of the time it's best to navigate around enemies...play on the easy difficulty first...The "normal" default difficulty may overwhelm even the most seasoned RPG gamer


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Starcraft II to be sold as 3 games

Blizzard today announced that StarCraft II will be released as a trilogy of separate games, each concentrating on one of the universe's three factions.

The first game in the trilogy will consist of the Terran campaign, and is set to be titled "Terrans: Wings of Liberty."

The second Zerg-focused title will be "Zerg: Heart of the Swarm," with the third game being "Protoss: Legacy of the Void."

"[The second and third games] will be like expansion packs, but we really want them to feel like standalone products,"...

So Starcraft II full game = $49.99 + 2 x $29.99 = $110?

Playable Demo for A Vampyre Story HERE

Here's hoping it will suck...in a good way [:D]

FUCK THIS. Downloading the demo is a frustrating point n' click exercise in itself.

ravenus wrote:
Playable Demo for A Vampyre Story HERE

Here's hoping it will suck...in a good way [:D]

FUCK THIS. Downloading the demo is a frustrating point n' click exercise in itself.

Hahaha! That post was practically a sitcom in itself, except with better writing.

Durr. I finally got the demo from Filefront LINK

The download gives you a zip file which when extracted into a folder gives you a completely retarded directory tree:


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THEN you run setup and install the game. I really want to like this game and see it sell reasonably well but they surely aren't winning any fans with their lack of polish and user-friendliness.

As for the game itself...it looks quite good if the ~ 10 min gameplay extract (yea, that's what you get for your 445MB download) is representative. The interface is classic Lucasarts point n' click (think Curse of Monkey Island).

The humor is alright: there are some decent jokes and some that fall embarrassingly flat, nothing so far that had me guffawing out loud. Lead character Mona's voice is a little shrill, and overall there is an element of amateur school about the voice-acting. The puzzle (you have ONE main puzzle to solve in the demo, which is getting Mona out of a locked room)) was alright, a mixture of some logical thinking and some arbitrary clanging together of inventory items.

So ya, as of now I don't see the lightning in the bottle. I'll keep an eye on the reviews to see if the final product is significantly better than this sample.

CoH: Tales of Valor preview at IGN

Tales of Valor isn't an expansion that requires you to own CoH; it's a stand-alone game that focuses on you controlling a handful of units at a time. In fact, this isn't a "traditional" RTS game, as the single-player campaign doesn't feature any kind of base building or node capturing as seen in CoH. This is a much more tactical game in that sometimes you'll control only a single tank and its crew. The reason is because you become much more invested in your units if you don't have an endless supply of them being churned out at some base. And if you don't have to manage a dozen vehicles and squads over an entire battlefield, you can focus on carefully controlling a small team as it navigates around the map.

Despite opening to apparently universal positive reviews, Dawn of War II seems to have certain issues:

VISTA 32-Bit CRASH ON DAWN OF WAR II

There is a frequent out-of-memory crash that plagues Windows Vista (32-bit) users of Dawn of War II. Often this crash occurs at the start of the very first Campaign mission; other times it occurs mid-mission when a ‘talking head’ appears onscreen or when returning to your battle barge after a mission is completed.

We are actively testing several fixes to this memory problem, but in the mean time, you can reduce your ‘Texture Detail’ and ‘Effects Fidelity’ settings to ‘Medium’ in the Graphics menu of the Options Screen. This should drastically improve stability.

We are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused our community. We are doing everything in our power to fix the problem as quickly and responsibly as possible.

The DOWII Team

I think a patch for that issue is already available, at least for the Steam version of DoW II