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A secret global conspiracy of game developers that control society?
August 11th 2001, 13:38 CEST by Tommy I am not sure if this deserves its own topic (<i>it does - mr0n the phantom ed</i>) but as a common lurker I didn't feel I could just drop it carte blanche into whatever topic thread was currently underway. A friend told me about this site: <a href="http://www.gameilluminati.com">http://www.gameilluminati.com</a> That is apparently a members only bulletin board. You cannot access it without a password. Apparently it is 'invitation only' for industry people. Beyond the password members enter a holy grail of mature discussions and non- flaming objective discussions about the merits of games, as debated by an elite few. Interestingly enough, this board is registered to a one George Broussard, he of 3D Realms fame. Unfortunately, I myself work for a Publisher and am hence patently evil, so will no doubt never get to feast on the intellectual riches within (it's for developers who have shipped titles only). I would be interested to know if loyal PlanetCrappers from the development side have been exposed to the joys of www.gameilluminati.com and if so, if perhaps they could 'illuminate' us on the merits of this site? Is this a joyous site, protecting true captains of the industry and allowing them a safe haven for discourse? Or is this a dangerous and subversive, insidious form of elitism that harms us all? Could www.gameilluminati.com spell the end of our honorable PlanetCrap (<i>No! Never! - mr0n the phantom ed</i>)? Will we see gamesbiz professionals flee in search of greener, safer pastures yonder? Please Comment and discuss. Me, I'm just fascinated and nosey. |
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So I might correct the outcome a bit before continuing to ME3 You're doing it wrong if you do that. ME3 works best when you bring all your decisions, good and bad into the final showdown. Replaying it until you get the ending you want kinda defeats the whole point of the series. |
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Far Cry 2 got a little better in the 2nd half, because the environment is more open which allows easier off-road traversal. And that's big, because by driving off-road you can avoid guard posts, making the game a little more enjoyable. The guard posts aren't actually much of a problem, but for what it's worth they get even more manageable in the 2nd half. Far Cry 2 was a really amazing, immersive and somewhat flawed game. Amazing open ended gameplay, it allowed stealthing all the way to my target without firing a single shot, or I'd take on a mission like a goddamn one-man army, and most often everything in between happened. Glorious. |
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So I was watching the quick look for Kid Icarus 3DS, and it looked better than I expected but not really worth buying, and then it happened. Brad finished a mission and got a reward from the treasure hunting screen, which was... holy shit, that looks like the... holy fucking shit, it's the goddamn reward grid from Kirby Air Ride! Sakurai, the Kirby/Smash Brothers guy, is behind this game, and he has carried one of Kirby Air Ride's best features over to it. For those of you who have forgotten (shame on you), each space on the reward grid is an achievement. Initially they're all hidden, but when you accomplish one you reveal the requirements for the adjacent grid squares. Some of them give you unlockables, and a rare few give you an item that will unlock any square without getting the achievement. I loved that fucking reward grid, and now I am going to buy Kid Icarus. Also it seems to have a lot of cool systems, including a lot of loot, crafting, and very fine-grained difficulty settings. But the reward grid is enough. What really pisses me off is I had no fucking clue. The game came out yesterday and I could have gotten release date shipping and a free 3D Classics Kid Icarus that I would never have played, had I known about the reward grid. The entirety of the internet failed me, and that goes doubly so for you guys. Shame on you. BUYBUYBUY
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Squeaky: You're doing it wrong if you do that. ME3 works best when you bring all your decisions, good and bad into the final showdown. Replaying it until you get the ending you want kinda defeats the whole point of the series. I can see that, however Miranda is too interesting a character and too powerful a party member to leave behind. I could care less about Samara or Thane, for instance, and I'm kind of ambivalent about losing Tali. Speaking of which, it's strange how some characters look really realistic, especially Jacob, where others look much more cartoonish. Jacob impressed me in the way he almost seems really human, at least where graphics are concerned. Miranda is definitely one of the more lifelike characters in the game. She's probably had sex with like 4 different guys by now and has no idea who he is anymore, his face lost in a memory sea of dicks.
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In between HATING YOU GUYS, I have also played some games. I played a little bit of X3: Albion Prelude, and Steam tells me that little bit was six hours. That's a lot. I don't know that I'll be playing any more of it. The economy part of it is still fine, slow but sorta interesting, but the rest of the game is poor. Combat is not fun and there seems to be little skill involved. The best ship wins. And the universe is depressingly static outside of the economy. I went through a warp gate and then turned around and went back through and the sector I just left was now overrun with enemies. Way to kill the illusion guys. I played a little bit of Multiwinia, which is about like I remember it. It's basically the Mario Kart of RTSes in that a very low level of competence is required to play and the powerups determine victory randomly. I played through the free part of Ghost Trick on iOS, which was interesting, but I am not going to spring for the rest of the game. The parts that annoyed me (slow dialog, having to replay the scene repeatedly to figure out the trial and error puzzles, inconsistent tone) apparently get worse as the game goes on. I played through Angry Birds Space, which is really good. It's a step above all the previous games. I finally finished Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. It's not a long game, I just keep getting distracted. It's alright but aside from the brief shock in the penultimate area, no secrets are revealed. It seems like you need to find all the secrets in all the levels and put them together yourself to gain access to a secret area, but the game doesn't make that easy. I doubt I'll bother. I bought Pushmo on the 3DS eShop. It's a lot of fun, mixing puzzle solving with some light platforming. At the start it exemplifies the "Japanese games think gamers are idiots" thing that has been going around recently, with you watching someone else solve a puzzle as each technique is explained, then you solving the same puzzle and having to sit through the exact explanations again. I got it the first time, game! But once you're past the tutorial levels, it leaves you alone. There are a lot of levels included, plus you can scan QR codes to get user-created levels, and there are a lot out there. BUYBUYBUY
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I also played the demo for Ghost Trick and I might actually buy it. I really like the Phoenix Wright series so I'm sort of biased though. |
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I'm liking ME3. It's more of the same. |
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A couple of months ago I bought Steel Diver for the 3DS because it was $5. Today I finally got around to playing it. It is not good. There's barely any game there at all: only seven short, shallow, simplistic levels. And you have to unlock the last couple. If it was a flash game I would have lost interest during the tutorial. It's not bad exactly, just generic and mediocre, so I'll probably play it more sometime. But Nintendo selling this for $40 is a goddamn crime. I ordered Kid Icarus and Warriors Orochi 3. Kid Icarus was backordered, then it went to "shipping soon" and stayed there all day. But it hasn't shipped yet and I don't know when it will. Warriors Orochi 3 comes out tomorrow but didn't have release date shipping; Amazon thinks I will get it Friday. So I bought a game to tide me over until then. I've been checking De Blob 2 on Amazon every so often because Amazon isn't selling it, only third party retailers. But it hasn't showed up, so I just bought it on demand on the 360 for $20. My first 360 game on demand! It's downloading now. BUYBUYBUY
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De Blob 2 is more De Blob, alright. They fixed basically none of the issues from the first game. The camera is still poor, mainly because they override your manual camera control to the shitty angles they think you should use. There are still lives and time limits for no goddamn reason at all. Being on a real controller and all, there's a button to jump, hallelujah, but there's nothing at all in the world that you can interact with by jumping on. Everything has to be "smashed", meaning you hold down the left trigger to target, then jump. And the targeting is worse than a hundred abortions. If they had a guy whose job it was to make the targeting as useless as possible, I'd say they should give that guy a raise, because he did a hell of a job. But eh, most of the time you want to smash everything in an area anyway. It's only an issue when you're trying to prioritize targets. The art style is as good as ever and finally has the resolution to do it justice, but the framerate sometimes tanks for no obvious reason. De Blob was a flawed game that I enjoyed anyway, and I'm enjoying this one too, but it's worse that they didn't learn from the first one. Oh well. They're all dead now. The one new thing in this one is the addition of sidescrolling sections, and they are godawful. They're not challenging but they are also not the least bit fun. You'll have to grab a certain color, then navigate a series of obstacles to hit a switch of the same color, then you'll likely have to backtrack and do the exact route again a couple more times with different colors, then you'll open up a new room where you'll do the same thing all over again. I'd say 20-25% of the game is made up of these sidescrolling areas, so that's a pretty big heap of suck. I'm not sure having the game on a real system with a real controller is worth the trade. Kid Icarus shipped this morning and will be here Thursday. BUYBUYBUY
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A while back I bought Dungeon Village, because I wanted something to play on my phone and Game Dev Story was so good. It's basically Majesty, except actually made for a phone, so quests take less than a minute and nobody ever dies permanently. Then the other day when I was buying tax software I picked up Rock Band Green Day because it was $10. After playing three songs, I think even that may have been a waste of money. I'm not sure whether I will export the songs to disc, because they'll just pollute my library. "I hope you one day decide to smarten the fuck up so I can stand to look at your posts." - gaggle
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Warp is charming and reasonably fun. |
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Ew, you bought an EA game. BUYBUYBUY
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I finally got my $1 worth in rebuild. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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That's right bob, fucking hell that game did it's best to prevent me from playing. Serial key bullshit (twice!), logging in (twice!), I was actually pretty close to just giving up playing something else. This was a Steam purchase ofc. The game itself is nice enough though. |
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Bob: don't you buy all the Sims and Spore stuff? |
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I bought all the Spore stuff, but then they killed it because it only sold two million copies or something and thus wasn't worth their time. I bought a couple of Sims 3 things but each expansion made the game even more unstable, so I stopped bothering. And that was a few years ago when EA was just annoying. Now they're by a wide margin the most evil and consumer-hostile publisher out there. I'd rather buy Zynga stock while blowing Bobby Kotick than have anything to do with EA. BUYBUYBUY
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Why? |
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Maybe he'd enjoy blowing Bobby Kotick. Who can fathom the ways of Bob. |
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Well, I'm sure I'd be well compensated for my time. BUYBUYBUY
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I got Kid Icarus in last night and I've played the first four levels of that. Kirby Air Ride reward grid! It's so good to have it back. It's also got a trophy collection type thing like Smash Brothers, but it looks like you're limited to viewing the trophies individually. I always liked looking at the whole collection at once. You get a lot of loot in the game. A lot of it is instant use stuff like health pickups or single use powerups or temporary power boosts, but you also find powers and weapons. You get a bunch of powers really quickly, but some of them don't seem to do anything. One of them shoots off some fireworks. Which is cool and all, but you can only take a limited subset of your powers into levels, and the others do things like restoring some health or paralyzing enemies. Weapons have random stats, which is great. You can also fuse two weapons into a new weapon, or sell weapons for hearts, which is the game's currency. Hearts let you buy weapons in the shop, but you also pay hearts to change the difficulty. The default difficulty is 2.0 out of 10, but you can change the difficulty in 0.1 increments. You have to pay hearts to do so. Lowering it below 2.0 (which is really easy so far, but 3.7 nearly kicked my ass) costs hearts just because, but raising it is a form of gambling. It costs more to enter a stage on a higher difficulty because you get more hearts as a reward for completing the stage. It's also got online multiplayer which you can play against random people rather than fucking with friend codes. I hopped into a deathmatch last night and didn't get a single kill, but I still got some loot for my trouble. And some achievements in the reward grid. Which they call the treasure hunt, but it will always be the reward grid to me. So with all that out of the way: the actual game. The controls are not good. If Nintendo releases a 3DS revision with a second circle pad, and then rereleases this game with dual analog controls and no other changes whatsoever, I would buy it again. It would make the game 10x more enjoyable. You use the stylus on the touch screen to aim and control the camera, the circle pad to move, and the left trigger to shoot. It would basically be impossible to play this game while holding your system, so a cheap plastic stand for your 3DS is included with all copies of the game. The problem with the controls is one that will probably plague a lot of 3DS games: the bottom screen is smaller than the top and the bottom screen is not 3D. On the DS games could get away with putting the action on the bottom screen so you could touch things directly, but the 3DS can't do that. The action has to be on the top screen. So you're using the stylus on the bottom screen to move an aiming reticle around the top screen, only the bottom screen is smaller and you can't have 1:1 control. Instead it's a mouse pad sort of deal, where you move left to right, pick up the stylus, then put it down on the left side of the screen and move left to right again. The camera controls in the on foot portions have some momentum, so you perform a flick and the camera will spin a bit, and this makes it more tolerable. But these controls are not good. I have four new games arriving today: Warriors Orochi 3, Rayman Origins, Mario 3D Land, and Pokemon Rumble Blast (3DS). BUYBUYBUY
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Rayman Origins looks good. I'm rather surprised you bought a 3DS. I guess you heart Nintendo just as much as I do (or more since I waited till the DS Lite and still don't have a 3DS). |
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Also I say that having never played a previous Rayman game (or even understood the appeal) and being someone who kind of hates platformers. |
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I used to like Nintendo a lot. Most of that goodwill is gone, but the shadow remains. I buy pretty much every system (never going to get a Vita though, what a joke that is) and always figured I'd get a 3DS, but the high price and shitty battery life and overpriced games and still-shitty online had me convinced it would stumble out of the gate and I could pick one up later. Then it did like record sales at launch and I figured it wouldn't drop in price for a while, so I went ahead and got one. Whoops. But it's a neat system. The play coins thing, where in sleep mode the system acts as a pedometer and awards you play coins for your steps, which you can spend in games to unlock stuff, is the kind of weird but cool thing that only Nintendo would do. Pokemon Rumble Blast seems neat. It's an isometric real time ARPG sort of thing, except without the RPG. Unlike normal Pokemon games, the Pokemon don't level up. But every Pokemon you defeat has a chance of joining you, and so you're constantly getting new, better Pokemon. BUYBUYBUY
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I've been having a blast playing Rayman Origins with my kids. Never played a Rayman game before, are they all this fun? |
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Pokemon Rumble Blast really is surprisingly good. It's just a button mashy beat 'em up, but the Pokemon license gives them over 600 playable characters to work with. The Pokemon themselves don't seem to matter so much, since you can mix and match moves, but there is a large variety of moves. Even among the direct damage moves you get a wide spectrum: some are slow, some require a charge up, some leave you vulnerable afterwards, some fire off a long-range projectile, some are beam weapons, some are offset AOE attacks that you need to aim, some have multiple hits in a row, some move your character. Then there are the status effects and the crazier moves. I just got a guy whose primary attack siphoned HP from enemies, and whose secondary attack spent HP to create a decoy. That guy was fun. It's kinda making me want to play an actual Pokemon game. Warriors Orochi 3 is fun in spite of itself. The lack of English voiceover is a serious issue, as expected. I just can't pay attention to the screen text most of the time, so I often have to pause and check the log to see what my objective is. The game also has literally the worst pop-in I've ever seen. I have WO2 on the PSP and this is worse. Knocking back an officer with an attack often leads to him vanishing, because he went outside the bubble around your character and there are too many other guys onscreen. I have to track down enemies using the minimap even when they're right next to me. It's really amazingly bad, and Gundam 3 didn't suffer from this issue, so this has to be some old hybrid PS2 engine or something. And for some reason they've implemented the harshest save system in series history, reverting to your last save when you fail a mission. That last one is manageable with diligent saving after pre-battle prep and mid-mission saves at critical events, but it's a baffling change. This really should have been the ultimate Musou game, but these issues hold it back. Despite all that, it's good. The characters' moves are crazier than ever before. One guy plants his spear in the ground and does a pole dance spin around it to kill everyone. One guy has a clockwork shield with swords sticking out of it, and he can wind it up and then use it as a helicopter to hover around. One guy does that Prototype move of surfing along the ground on someone's corpse. One guy throws a single enemy way up in the air and then breaks the enemy's back over his shoulders. BUYBUYBUY
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There was a news story about Just Cause this morning, which got me in the mood for more Just Cause 2. So I ignored all the games I just bought and spent all day clearing settlements in Just Cause 2. And I cleared all of them! In true Just Cause 2 style, the final tally as reported by the game is 369/368 locations completed. The extra one is a bonus, I guess. I'm still only at 94 percent and change completion, but I've upgraded all my weapons and vehicles to max level. I passed 80 hours of playtime on this save today. BUYBUYBUY
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Looks like I'll be playing diablo 3 this weekend. Can't wait! |
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Let me get you in the mood! *CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK* *CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK* *CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK* *CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK* *CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK* *CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK* *CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK* *CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK* *CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK* Zep-- w0rd up!
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I got Fez. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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Ditto. It's pretty great. BUYBUYBUY
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The D3 beta is more like a demo/extended tutorial. It's more of the same diablo-y goodness with extra flash. The monk class is a lot of fun to play: melee fighter that teleports and zooms around punching and kicking everything. Looking at playing a demon hunter next. I'd say it's a day one purchase, but I'm actually getting it for free so hooray for that! I guess I'll have to check out this fez thing people are on about. I haven't really heard too much about it at all befor elite three days ago. |
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Is this open to normal folks yet? <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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#43426 by CheesyPoof Is this open to normal folks yet? Dunno. They just did a mass invite of 275,000 people into the beta. Assuming you have a battle.net account and registered for an opt-in you may have had a chnace. I went and sold my soul to the devil by signing a contract to play WoW for a year to get D3 for free, and everyone in my guild that did the same also got into this wave of beta invites. |
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Last I saw you needed to have at least one Blizzard product activated on battle.net to get in on that, but I don't have shit. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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I finished Fez. It's pretty great. You can get the 32 required cubes to see the ending by regular platforming and basic puzzle solving, but there are at least 64 cubes total and the optional ones are hidden behind some really cool, tricky, and/or obtuse puzzles. Many of these latter kind of puzzles are especially susceptible to being spoiled, so I suggest anyone interested in the game get it and plow through it before everyone knows everything. BUYBUYBUY
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The leader board tells me that I am 21% complete. It's pretty good so far, though there was one section that felt like traditional platforming tropes that I did not care for. That said I don't like platformers but I like this one. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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I started Fallout: New Vegas today and am about to pick it back up again and kill some more escaped convicts. I find it a little silly that a whole town full of people is cowering inside a hotel and the NCR soldiers refuse to get involved because the convicts are sooooooo scary, and I walk in at level 3 and kill everyone. "I hope you one day decide to smarten the fuck up so I can stand to look at your posts." - gaggle
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I got 100% last night in Fez. I really, really enjoyed this game. I am not a fan of platformers and I generally hate the genre, so when I downloaded the trial I expected to quit it within 5 minutes and delete it forever. I was quite taken in by its charm and how non-traditional it was. The 'death penalty' was so not a factor in the demo that I took a risk and bought it, and thank God for that. I love the art, the style, the gameplay, the puzzles, everything. What I loved the most was how relaxed and easy going it was. I never felt a single second of tension, which is great. I never had to worry about repeating vast sections of jumping if my next jump failed. In fact, the lack of death penalty was probably the single biggest thing that made me love this game so much. The second is that there are more than enough cubes to finish the game without feeling lost or stuck. Some of the puzzles strike me as very obtuse and if they were required for 100% it would probably annoy me and drive me to gamefaqs. Thankfully that is not the case. I can only implore people to give the trial a whirl and see if it strikes your fancy. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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What a coincidence. I passed 200% last night in Fez. There's only one puzzle left in the game, and it's the impossible puzzle that only like five people have solved, and they're all developers who presumably got the answer straight from Fish, and someone said the answer isn't actually available in the game anywhere or some bullshit. I did give up and look up a couple of puzzle solutions at the end, so I'm not above doing it one more time for full completion, but I already got my 200/200 achievement points so whatevs. Cheesy, you at least started New Game+ right? Even if you don't play it, the modified intro made me LOL. BUYBUYBUY
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Bob, it is my intention to start New Game+ but I am saving that for tonight. I technically started it last night, but all I did was walk out of the room and quit. I didn't see anything LOL worthy. I'm going to try to get as many cubes as I can. Not sure if I'll breakdown to get 200% with a FAQ or not as some puzzles seem obtuse (like the bell on I looked up). <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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You looked up the bell? Don't do that! I looked up the bell too. Not the bell specifically, but the SPOILER REDACTED. It turns out I had all the info I needed and was just looking at it in the wrong way. That's one of the very last puzzles I did and I gave it an honest shot. You shouldn't be looking up any anticube solutions on your first run. They're supposed to be difficult! Go find the easy regular cubes. If you do go for more anticubes, come to me when you're stuck. I can give you non-spoilery guidance. Or spoilery guidance. I know everything now. BUYBUYBUY
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I learned from Gabe that the treasure maps contain legitimate information. I couldn't make heads or tails out of anyone so ignored them. Then I noticed that some secret doors would open (you know, the ones with the two cubes on them that light up when you use it) and some didn't and I assumed the treasure maps controlled that. I haven't used either artifact that I have, nor any treasure map at this point. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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And I looked up the bell because I thought that I could figure it out right there and couldn't and spent so much time that I had to get it, so I looked it up. I did get 7 anti-cube legitimately, though. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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If you explored more, you would know that the treasure maps contain legitimate information! Some of those silhouettes are pretty recognizable. Anyway, treasure maps are all anticubes and artifacts and even more secret stuff. Artifacts aren't used for anything, they're just collectibles. The glowy infinity doors are secret warp points. When you've been to the areas on each end of a pair of doors, they're open from them on. I don't use them much because I can never remember where they go. BUYBUYBUY
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Based on the description of the two artifacts that I have, I figured they had a use in puzzle solving (based on the solution to the bell and one of the artifacts that I got later on) What's worse is that some of those doors seem to be one way. I was getting my last cubes and went to an area I passed before when one of those doors opened. I took it and was dumped off a bunch of worlds away. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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Remind me to go back to this spot and read these posts later. I've just downloaded Fez and don't dare to read them. |
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I think I wasn't much in the mood for it, I'll try again later. Seems promising. It's charming I just got real sick of backtracking for now. |
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I went and pre-ordered Guild Wars 2. The game looks promising, and I'm very interest to see what the team managed to come up with. |
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I didn't feel like I did any real back tracking until I was near the end, for what that is worth. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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And the impossible puzzle has been made possible, and I cheated it. The solution was brute-forced though, and still no one knows why it works or how you're supposed to figure it out. After which absolutely nothing happens of note. BUYBUYBUY
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