Twilight Dirac

The options provided by DnD are fairly broad and diverse. Between your choice of ability scores, races, classes, subclasses, backgrounds, feats and spells there are a huge range of characters you can create. But if that just isn't enough for you, go back to either 3.5e or Pathfinder(which is just DnD 3rd Edition but produced by a third party), the latter which has a massive number of options online.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I absolutely love the Deus Ex series and this game is no exception.

Paradox games have notoriously opaque interfaces. This is actually one of the better games, especially when compared to Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis. I am not certain it is even possible to mod the user interface. The best I can tell you is the outliner on the upper right gives you direct access to your fleets and planets. To get to the other stuff, you need to go to the tabs on the upper left. You need those for hiring leaders, chaning edicts, creating sectors, assigning research, designing ships and the like. Its a fun game if you can get past all that, although the now venerable Master of Orion 2 (available on gog.com and Steam) probably does what this game is trying to do better and with a better user interface to boot. Best of luck though, space 4X games are usually worth the trouble.

See, that is kind of the point. Factors that had nothing to do with the games quality propelled it beyond what a game of similar quality would be unable achieve without that aid of Microsoft's marketing clout and good fortune. Its reception went beyond what the game could achieve on its own merits and now there exist a gulf between the game's appeal and the game's quality. This is precisely the sort of disparity the term overrated is supposed to encapsulate. When it comes to turn based games, you have to remember that individual turns are actually representations of something that is going on in real time and the individual turns are something that exist for the player's convenience. If you can get past the abstraction that a turn based system represents, and I know many people who just cannot, you can find some amazingly deep and rich gameplay. Of course the turn based system has to be done well. There is an art both to enabling the player to ignore the abstraction of turn-based play and for pulling deep, rich gameplay out of a turn based system and as Discordian pointed out neither Pokemon or Final Fantasy tend to do a particularly good job at this. If you want to see turn based gameplay done right, play games like X-Com, Civilization and Divinity: Original Sin.

I am honestly not surprised, given the level of ambition of the project. Then again, I have never been a fan of these sorts of procedurally generated games, save those that lie within the 4X genre (Civilization V, etc.) or builder focused games like Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft. Games generally need focus and structure to succeed. Throwing a player in a massive world of randomly generated stuff gets dull surprisingly fast.

This term seems to get a lot of hate and I am not certain why. Yes, it is a subjective value judgement, but so is simply judging a game good or bad in general. Basically you are comparing a things popularity to its quality and trying to determine if its quality actually justifies its popularity. This could be because the things quality is low or its popularity is absurdly high or some combination thereof. Its an interesting concept because as OP says its possible for good games to overrated and equally possible for bad games not to be overrated based on their public perception. And I do find the concept useful. For instance, there was another thread in this forum where a poster claimed that Halo was the worst video game every made. In a world where games like ET and Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge exist, this statement comes off as downright absurd. I suppose he could have just claimed Halo was bad, but its a fairly solid first person shooter. Overrated would have worked perfectly in this context though, because while Halo isn't bad, there certainly isn't anything remarkable about it that explains its massive appeal and calling it overrated certainly seems more reasonable that calling it bad or the worst game ever. And it does look like there are other games posted here that fit the bill. I haven't played Undertale yet, but its been hailed as the Second Coming of Christ, and if I do get around to playing it I suspect I will come away somewhat disappointed given all the hype surrounding it. Anyway, with all of that out of the way its time for me to skewer some sacred cows that had it coming: Pokemon: Take the random, menu driven elemental rock-paper-scissors combat of the Final Fantasy series, cut the size of the party down to one, and remove the epic stories, character development and fantastic environments of the series and replace it with a kid playing hokey to carry out animal abuse, and you get Pokemon. I tried playing one of these games a while back but they get boring really fast. With only one combatant in combat, tactics simply are too limited to be interesting, exploration is dull, and there really isn't anything to see or do in these games, and yet they seem to be as popular as peppermint flavored crack. I just don't get this series. Ocarina of Time: I am tempted to just say go watch Egoraptor's critique and call it a day, but basically I just don't think Zelda made the transition to 3d properly. Compared to its 2d predecessors, Ocarina of Time feels far more empty, linear and tedious to play. Environments contain a surprising amount of nothing, it takes forever just to look around a take stock of your surroundings in dungeons, a lot of things like climbing vines or pushing blocks just takes unnecessarily long and combat isn't very interesting. It also lacks some of the more ambitious elements of some of its sequels, such as the shapechanging in Majora's Mask (but that game has its own set of problems). Final Fantasy 9: There are a lot of excellent Final Fantasy titles out there. Final Fantasy 7 put the series on the map with its cool cyberpunk setting, compelling story and nifty materia system. Final Fantasy 6 had an excellent story surrounding a forgotten war and a proactive fight against an aggressive conquering empire only to be followed by an Apocalypse after which the player is actually taken off the plot rails (yes, a Final Fantasy where you go off the plot rails) to personally reassembly a separated party and gather the tools necessary to perform a raid on the seat of power of a demi-god to free the world from his oppression. Final Fantasy tactics marries excellent turn based combat with a story centered around political intrigue. Despite all these excellent entries, it is Final Fantasy 9 that I constantly see at the top of best Final Fantasy list and I cannot for the life of me figure out why because this game is a lemon. Combat, the central gameplay element of the series, is downright tedious in the ninth installment. It takes forever to load, the game waste time rendering the most pointless actions (such as enemy casting animations), the ATB system doesn't work correctly, it provides no real challenge, never does anything interesting to set it apart from older installments, and just plain takes forever. Add to that the most limited character customization options since FF4, with locked character classes, locked abilities, and locked weapons giving the player only the ability to customize strictly defensive options meaning that he can never play around with anything that impacts the actual tactics used in combat or alter how combat is resolved. Characters simply stack more and more defensive abilities that make them increasingly invulnerable. All and all, combat is a complete dud in this game, and you will be fighting a lot of combats. The story doesn't fair much better. The best thing I can say about the story is that the Queen of Alexandria is actually a fairly well done antagonist. Unfortunately she is not the "real" antagonist and gets replaced by a horrible "for the Evilz" type antagonist part way through the game. But the real problem are the heroes who aside from the obligatory punch out Cthulhu to save the Universe battle that occurs at the end of every Final Fantasy don't really do anything heroic. For the first third of the game, you will be watching the Queen carrying out her evil plan, either as observers or in failed attempts in intervene, and the plot would have proceeded the same regardless of our heroes' efforts. Heck at one point you actively aid her by returning Garnet to her. Now you might be thinking this is all to set up a portion of the game where the heroes have to liberate all of the territory the Queen has conquered, but you would be wrong. Instead, the Queen gets offed by the real antagonist while the party fights his pet, and then all the territory she conquered seems to liberate itself Return of the Jedi style and you are left asking yourself why am I even playing this game? It's at this point you realize you aren't playing heroes, but press reporters that happen to get into an awful lot of fights. And the real kicker is that this earlier game stuff is easily the best part of the story. It goes downhill from there, and once Terra gets involved the whole thing just jumps the shark.

That is probably to best way to play that game. For you, the game was not riding on at least 6 games worth of continuity (some of the earliest games can kind of be ignored). So when the Avatar delivered his clunky exposition, it didn't sound like he had been kicked in the head one too many times and was now suffering from a combination of a concussion and amnesia. And of course you never had chance to play the much better Ultima games and realize how much the game that was supposed to be a capstone to the series had fallen. If you did like Ultima 9, you really ought to go back a try some of the earlier ones, especially Ultimas 4, 5, 6, and 7 parts 1 and 2. Just avoid Ultima 8, dear lord was that horrible.

I have a friend who has the same problem with those games. He wants to stealth through them but can't do it very well. I keep trying to tell him he doesn't have to stealth, the whole point of Deus Ex in particular being that you can go about the game in any way you choose (save for the boss battles in the third one), so if you can't stealth for crap go in guns blazing or hack a turret or do something else. But he insists on stealth and ends up hating the game because of that.

Yea it was called FF2 at the time. Completely linear like most of the FF series. If you got stuck, there was no where else to go so grinding was your only option.

Difficulty spike then. I suppose the second half is harder, but after playing FF4 which got ball crushingly hard towards the end and gave you very little to work with to deal with said difficulty I am not sure I ever even really noticed the difficulty spike in FF6.

I don't get it, how is the grinding in FF6 any different than any of the other FFs? And how the heck is there any more grinding in the second half of FF6 than the first? The only difference in game mechanics between those two halves is that you are taken off the plot rails in the second half, but combat, leveling and the like are all the same.

A post a just made in a different thread reminded me of another pair of games. Starcraft & Starcraft 2: Brilliantly designed RTS games emphasizing asymmetric warfare that are ruined by the need for stringent build orders and excessive micromanagement.

This is largely true for any of the Blizzard RTS titles. It is a real shame to because Starcraft 1 & 2 are probably some of the best designed asymmetric warfare games every created, but you never actually get to appreciate that fact because the games are basically micromanagement hell for anyone who isn't a professional eSports player.

Three words: Bridge to Terabithia. The movie based on the book of the same name basically exist for the sole purpose of doing this. The movie was advertised as a fantasy adventure made in the same vain as Chronicles of Narnia for some reason. I suspect children who actually watched it would strongly disagree.

The last two chapters in the Ultima series definitely apply: Ultima 8 - The Avatar gets banished to a post apocalyptic world were he must work to escape by mastering five different schools of magic, banishing the dark gods that control the world and take there place in this action RPG. It was rushed out by EA largely incomplete and with much of its content cut and with most of its gameplay functions barely working. To make things worse, the game is padded with some of the worst platforming I have encountered in any game. Ultima 9 - This was supposed to be the grand finale and capstone of the series, but basically had its staff cut by EA and was again rushed out by EA. The game was highly linear, largely based around mediocre puzzles, was beyond buggy and barely paid any attention to continuity, a major problem when you are supposed to be tying up the plot threads at the end of a prolonged video game series. The moral of the story is that EA f---ing sucks and they need to stop buying out smaller game studios that churn out good products. I am not really surprised by its failure. Spore was just too ambitious and pulling off 5 separate games modes successfully and having them tied together in a sensible, coherent way that actually enhanced the disparate games modes and expecting it all to work was just short of asking for divine intervention.

Apocalypse games can be a lot of fun, but they can also be absolute disasters. It depends on the planning that goes into them and the attitude and maturity of the players involved. If you want to play an Apocalypse be aware of the following: -Apocalypse games take time and will probably be an all day affair. Make sure you schedule a full day for an Apocalypse game. -5000 points is the absolute maximum a single player can manage in a reasonable amount of time, even accounting for large superheavy units. While it can be tempting to field everything you own, don't, you will never actually finish the game. 5000 is the absolute maximum a single player can field. Granted if running teams of players than each side will have more than 5000 points. -Warhammer 40k has never been known for its game balance and this goes double for Apocalypse. If you set out to break the game using rules exploits and broken combos or formations, you will succeed at breaking the game. Don't do this, and make sure other players understand not to do this as well. -As there is no force org chart it can be tempting to run minimum size squads of everything because that tends to be more advantageous for the points, but 5000 points of minimum size squads can slow the game to a crawl. Bring squads of reasonable sizes. -Beware of broken stratagems. Many are reasonable, but some can ruin the game. Stratagems to watch out for include Flank March and the one that eliminates deepstrike scatter. And just ban Signal Jammers outright, take my word on this one. -It is often tempting to run thematic Apocalypse games such a Imperium vs. Orkz, but be advised that the combined forces of the Imperium comprising approximately half the codices and the game and enjoying enormous forgeworld support will overpower the other individual factions with the possible exception of Eldar. Either restrict the Imperium to a single faction or face them off against a coalition of other codices that also get to enjoy the battle brothers or at least allies of convenience rules. -If you are about to start a game and it looks like one side has the overwhelming advantage, switch up the teams and factions until it looks like the sides of even. It is very easy for one side to steamroll the other immediately if you are not careful. -Remember to be a good sport and have fun.

Don't even get me started about the League of Legends community. All I will say is that I am glad Heroes of the Storm does away with the team selection team entirely if you are not running premades (just pick your hero and go), the problems I had with other people in the premade selection screen alone were legion.

I have been playing Tau since 4th edition and Eldar since 5th edition. Warhammer is a fun game, although its seems that each edition involves less actual tactics and more over the top power list (fortunately I have Eldar so I can play over the top power list if that is what is required). You could just switch back to an older edition. Formations weren't a thing until 6th edition. Personally, I wouldn't mind trying Horus Heresy myself except for the obvious problem that it excludes xenos factions entirely.

Deus Ex Human Revolution: The hacking, forcing you to constantly take breaks from a brilliantly designed games to play a boring, tedious minigame. Bonus points for poorly optimized controls on the PC during the minigame. The original handled hacking (which was actually lockpicking, electronics and hacking) much better. Most RPGs: Inventory management. The fact that crafting now seems to rear its ugly head in nearly every RPG (remember when you used to buy things with gold rather than random piles of crap) has only made this problem worse. League of Legends: Only one map per gameplay mode. Also everything that Heroes of the Storm does better. I don't think I will be returning to this game. Overwatch: Players who are too timid to get their hands dirty.

The UFO lore in X-Com is awesome, otherwise I don't really care. Time to kill some aliens in turn based tactical combat. Good luck Commander!

The Republicans have been wanting to build that stupid wall for as long as I can remember. It's not a unique Trump thing. Here is the thing, for an unskilled laborer with no family already legally residing in the United States there really isn't a "right way" to enter the United States. These immigrants are basically limited to EW3 and DV Visas, which are given to applicants at such a rate that a single year's worth of illegal immigrants would create a one century backlog. George Wallace certainly sounds like a terrible person, but I am failing to see how Trump is every bit as bad as this guy. He is just pushing the stock Republican anti-immigration and anti-Muslim stuff which doesn't sink to the level of pre-Civil Rights era segregation.

Why Georga Lucas of course: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sio_Bibble About 14.5 mW. Because oscillating wings generate more lift than if they were rigid. Don't use Bernoulli's law on oscillating wings, its for steady flow conditions only.

Honestly I don't see Japanese developers as being any more innovative the Western developers, if anything they feel even more stagnant. The only Japanese developer that comes to mind when I think innovation is Nintendo, but they recycle there own IP just as aggressively as any Western AAA developer. Oh look another Legend of Zelda, will it be an Ocarina of Time clone of more of a Windwaker clone? Among some more of the recent Western releases are Overwatch, Stellaris, Heroes of the Storm, Kerbal Space Program, Gnomoria, Battlefleet Gothic and X-Com 2. These titles cover everything from superheroe shooters to turn based tactical combat to space program management to managing and interstellar empire. Just avoid titles from long standing franchises if the stagnation is getting to you, if you purchase another Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, Uncharted or the like don't be surprised if its the same bloody thing.

The second poll really should have "no freaking idea" instead of "a third party" as one of the responses. The only thing I know about who will win is that it won't be a third party, sadly. At this point I might as well vote for Johnson though, its not like there is anything to lose.

I might be up for this if you happen to choose games that I would be interested in (the recording is all on you though). I play Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm Diablo 3, Civilization 5, Divinity: Original Sin, Borderlands (any of them really) and Stellaris among other games.