Turtling with static defenses works very well against RA3 AI. Throw in some artilleries/aircrafts and one can stay in base forever.
Just when I got rid of my preference for static defenses, single player mode instills it in me again. Damn!
Last Sunday, Jaedong vs Tempest, Zerg vs Protoss. Jaedong lost. Holy fuck! Tempest must have been celebrating really hard after that because he beat the Number 4 SC player in Korea (according to official ranking list). Holy fuck! Can't really believe Jaedong lost. The defending champion of this series lost in the round of 32. Un-fucking-believable!
They could shove all those stats they showed at the beginning up their asses because those numbers proved nothing. Jaedong had 9.3-9.8 out of 10 for almost every aspect of his gaming skills except for Macro which he got an 8 out of 10. Tempest's scores were mostly in the 7 to 8 range except for Macro which he had a 9.5 out of 10. Which means that even though Tempest has an advantage over Jaedong's weak point, he should not have won.
But he did.
It wasn't the micro. Jaedong's micro was superb but the problem was in his strategies. Even a noob like me saw that something was wrong when he used a strategy that relied heavily on Hydralisks. Somehow, despite it working for other players, it did not work against Tempest. Plus Jaedong did not seem to pay much attention to the Corsairs that slowly killed enough Overlords to get his Supplies in the red, stopping him from training more units till he spawns more Overlords.
His Scourges started spawning only when Corsairs were attacking, which means they always arrived too late. It was like Jaedong didn't really care, seeing them as minor annoyances.
Of course, the main problem was with his Hydralisks being unable to stop the flood of Zealots. True, Zealots are strong, like Orc Grunts in WC3, but it takes 4-5 Gateways to spawn enough of them in a short period of time, making the whole strategy easy to spot.
Which means Jaedong knew the massed Zealots were coming but was unable to prepare adequately for it. I blame his dependence on Hydralisks (which includes his unorthodox upgrade of ranged attack damage instead of the standard Carapace level 1). This strategy was very offense-oriented but does not seem to be effective against a combined force of a lot of Zealots and a few High Templars to throw some Storms.
I know I'm not a good player, just stating the obvious here. I think a combo of Zerglings and Mutalisks, the standard, would have worked better.
Completed Fallout 3. Nice game. I'd expected an ending similar to Oblivion's because, after all, it was almost like playing Oblivion, with the same graphics and all. Fortunately for me, I disliked how Oblivion ended ( I prefered things to actually end when they end) and Fallout 3 did finish properly.
I had to make a choice, to save myself or greatly improve the lives of many people. I hope I got the best ending - I've been a good guy throughout the game and my karma level was Paragon. I tried 2 endings, out of the estimated 200+. One was to say that I would, but stood there and did nothing. It ended with me being alive but the place was destroyed. That was unintentional because I didn't know that I had certain information hidden among my notes. I then reloaded the game and used it, sacrificing myself in the process.
Either way, I was unable to continue playing the game after that, quite unlike Oblivion. I also expected an ending in which I saved both myself and everything else, but it seems to be impossible. So far, I'm unable to find a list of possible endings of the game and could only come up with a list of factors that affects the endings, including my karma level and certain actions I committed during the course of the game.
About 70% of the people online seems to believe that the ending sucked, but I'm already used to my protagonist dying at the end, especially after playing NWN2 and Planescape: Torment. If the developers decided not to include one in which everyone gets to live happily ever after, so be it. It's a great game after all, with a style that is so interesting. According to Wikipedia, the term for it is "retro-futuristic", an apt name for the sort of fiction that includes a mix of 1950's artworks and technologies (like computers that still used vacuum tubes) and futuristic sci-fi stuff( like sentient robots and plasma guns).
Indeed, it was an excellent experience to kill monsters, robbers and robots with 1940s oldies in the background. I turned on GNR radio all the time whenever I'm in range of the station. It was quite interesting that one time I was slashing at someone and noticed the song was about "hack and slash" or something like that. I didn't know they sang about these things in those days.
Also, it made me learn to appreciate those ancient music. After listening to those 20+ songs for 20+ hours, I can remember some lyrics of some of the songs. Since I've never played the Fallout games before, such a mixture of old and new stuff was quite refreshing. It also made me think about how impossible the whole world in the game was.
To develop plasma weapon with vacuum tubes instead of chips would require supercomputers the size of Singapore, probably. I remember back in primary school when one of my teachers, some old guy, told us that in the past, some of the best computers the world took up the space of an entire room. I bet those computers can't beat even this laptop I'm using now to type this rant. They wouldn't have near enough processing power to create such technologies, let alone design one that could be mass-produced. I'm not even going to discuss the fact that vacuum tubes were notoriously fragile and unreliable.
It was inevitable that I compared the Fallout world with reality. After all, it made use of many things that used to exist. Right from the start, the game used the Pip-boy logo for its icon. The art style of Pip-boy was reminiscent of those old advertisements I saw in the past. In the Vault 101, everything was in a style that was already outdated 2 decades ago, like the hairstyles of the adults and the radios. I had thought the background was that the nukes landed in the 1960s or something until I saw the dates on some documents.
It was less "old" after I left the vault because everyone looked like some kind of scavengers. Though everything was wrecked and in ruins, the cars everywhere was from the 60s or so. Only the people and their weapons looked futuristic.
Also, Little Lamplight. Come the fuck on, where did those kids come from if there were no adults allowed?!?! It doesn't make sense. Maybe I'd have gotten a clue if I went to Bigtown with that teenage that got kicked out after reaching his 18th birthday, but I didn't. One notable reason for replaying the game, for me, is that I never got to visit many places like Bigtown and Paradise Falls. It was like an invisible line existed from the NE to the SW of my map and everything on the NW half of the map was unexplored.
Next time I play the game, I'll explore all those places and find all the Bobble-heads. I only found one this time. Played without any hints except for the Gary vault (to find some hints as to why everyone was a clone of "Gary") and the ending because I wasn't satisfied by my first choice.
Wonder how long it will take for me to be able to replay the game. 3 months like Mass Effect? Or more? Probably more. Mass Effect >>> Fallout 3 in more ways than one despite Mass Effect's ending being slightly cheesy with my Shephard standing there like a statue. I was like," Oh fuck that's ghey..."
LOL!
I'm also quite curious about the whole story of the Fallout world. What was the Commonwealth that Zimmer was referring to? What happened to Europe and Africa after the war in 2077? Did they survive and become the political superpowers?
Maybe I should play the previous Fallout's to find out. Fallout 2 was released 10 years ago. The graphics looked similar to Ultima 8's. Also, their endings were narrated by a wall of text instead of cinematics, which means even Planescape: Torment could beat them (but Fallout 2 was release 2 years before Torment).
Oh well, I'll just get them and play when I'm out of better games.
Looking at those years, I'm quite surprised how games have changed in just a decade. I know it's nothing compared to the almighty Internet, but still, I never noticed how short a time it was since the last good 2D RPG was made. It was like once the 21st century began, all games have to be 3D to be good.
Wonder how games will turn out in 20 years' time. Maybe they will be playing holographic MMORPGs and RTS then. It would be fucking comvenient if I could play RTS with voice-recognition softwares. Sometimes things move so quickly I wish I don't have to click and the units would move however I want them to.
Better still, if only I could move the units with my thoughts alone. Things would be so much smoother. I always have difficulty clicking on the spots I aim for. Always takes 1 large swing and a smaller move or 2, which makes me lag by precious milliseconds. Maybe I need to adjust my mouse sensitivity or maybe my coordination just sucks.
My bro got Dead Space but I'm not planning to play that. Thought it sounded like a nice game until I found out it was basically a sci-fi zombie game that relies heavily on slashing on the right parts of the monsters. As if shooting at monsters wasn't enough, they had to make a game in which monsters couldn't be killed and must be disabled by dismemberment.
Also beat RA3 Soviet campaign. It was gay! I played the final mission on Hard and all I needed was a fucking wall of Flak Turrets and Tesla Coils. Didn't even need Tesla Troopers (or whatever they're called) to boost my Coils. Gay! With that wall and an early Vacuum-whatever-the-Superweapon-is-called plus my Magnetic Satellite and space junk dumping ability, I was able to disable the Allied Superweapon and rape his base. I sucked up 2 tanks and threw them in together with my Superweapon. I thought it was an overkill because before my Vacuum was halfway done, the Collider was already destroyed. Also used my Bounty ability on it for extra cash. Was pumping Kirovs en masse then and needed more cash.
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