Gaming the System 25th July 2010

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This week on Gaming the System
Wow, it’s been a while hasn’t it? Our apologies, we’ve had a bunch of issues that have prevented us from putting out a GTS. Hopefully we should be back to our usual fortnightly schedule. Don’t forgot to check out this thread on the forums for your chance to win a big Demon Lord statue from Runes of Magic! You can checkout SWAG’s interview with the folks over at Frogster below
Our week in Gaming
SWAG discussed the questionable delights of Lost Planet 2 and TotalBiscuit gushes about Alien Swarm and how much he hates bullet-time.
Music Break – daxx – Golden Axe Orchestral remix
This week in gaming
Our roundup of this week’s news and comment, featuring the following stories.
- The Daily Star forced to apologise to Rockstar over fake GTA blunder
- Streetfighter X Tekken announced
- This week’s releases
Music Break – Shunsuke Kida – The Nexus (Demon’s Souls)
The Review – Demon’s Souls
Demon’s Souls has taken an awfully long time to get to the EU, but it’s finally arrived. TotalBiscuit and SWAG review the game that will kick your ass and have you begging for more.
Music Break – Andy Gillion – Streets of Rage Tribute
TB’s Top Tens
SWAG and TotalBiscuit come up with the Top 10 things that Dragon Age 2 requires to be a good sequel.
Music Break – Supersweep Co. Ltd – Theme of the Legendary Hero (3d Dot Game Heroes)
The MMOrrerry – World of Warcraft – Cataclysm
Is it worth coming back to WoW for Cataclysm asks SWAG? TotalBiscuit gives his honest opinion straight from the beta.
Music Break – Shunsuke Kida – Phalanx (Demon’s Souls)
Your Turn – Your hardest game experience
You can get your opinion featured on the next show by leaving a comment on this article. What was your hardest ever gaming experience? SWAG weighs in Gauntlet : Dark Legacy while TotalBiscuit waxes lyrical about the punishment dealt out by Godhand. Both agree on the subject of Ikaruga and accept that they suck.
Music Finale – Motoi Sakuraba – Shining Force 3 Opening Theme (Shining Force 3)


The gaming experience I will always remember with a grin was as an Enchanter in Everquest somewhere in Lower Guk or on the Plane of Fear. Having a ton of mobs around yourself you need to pacify and the mana running low and having to sit down to regenerate mana really puts a lot of pressure on you and this makes succeeding in these hard encounters really fun. These encounters at level 60 and with not really much top gear practically requires you to become good at it and I think I had some non-magical soft leather boots until level 62 or even higher.
Easy boss encounters usually get boring fast and if the effect of gear far outweighs the base stats too much (done in EQ and WoW in the later expansions usually) the whole game becomes less fun and I usually quit.
my hardest gaming experience i tryed as a online game is aoin after lvl 20 just to stay alive for more than a half hour is hard cous the asmodaus i think they are named can enter up to lvl 39 and well lvl 20 vs 39 who doo you think win and on top of that often when you engage a battle with a mob
if we dont talk online game or rpg then i would say chest vs computer on the hardest mode i newer magined to beat that yet but i will get it i hope
Great show, espically loved the part about the negative view of Video Games in media. One thing you did not point out was the thing w/ the UK Shooter and a GTA about it, was a similar-ish story came out after the terible shooting at Virginia Tech, they blamed Counter Strike for training the shooter, and the Doom games for inspiring him.
As for the espically bad view on games versus other entertainment, you’re spot on. I mean the Bible is more violent, and other books are more profane, sexual, violent, or any combination of the aformentioned for as long as there has been the technology to make them avalible to the public.
The hardest gaming experience I had was to get 100% (getting all the achievements) in Bayonetta on the Xbox 360. I usually don’t care much for achievements, but I had so much fun playing through the first time that I told myself that I will get every one there is. Which meant completing the game on the hardest difficulty.
But to be fair, it’s not really the hardest game I’ve played, but it’s definitely the hardest game I stuck with to the bitter end, without rage-quitting.
Not to sound rude TB, because I really enjoy your shows and have a great deal of respect for you, but if you had read the lore you would know why a) the game is called “Dragon” Age and also why there are so few Dragons in the game.
SPOILERS BELOW!!!
Long ago the hunters of Nevarra hunted the Dragons of Thedas and for many years people thought the Dragons had been driven to extinction.
Now roll on the days before the Dragon Age begins, the battle of River dane is about to take place and, as Loghain is standing on the cliff looking across the terrain he sees a High Dragon flying around the mountains on the other side of the river.
Every one hundred years is a new Age, and each new Age is named by the Chantry in Val Royeaux, the capital of Orlais and they name each Age by an event that takes place just before the new Age begins. Because this High Dragon had been seen just as the new Age was dawning, the chantry declared that the next one hundred years would be known as the Dragon Age.
Hope this helps to clear things up.
*facepalm* WE WEREN’T ACTUALLY BEING SERIOUS.
*shrug* Oh well, now you know anyway :p
My arc NEMESIS in videogames is the “Nuclear Raven Girl from Hell” in Thouhou11
Bossfight at 2m15s : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdRbNCwpMs&feature=related
I can´t beat her !
Play Touhou, train your reactions today and NERVER get hit by green stuff from Heigan again.
Fans even made a 3d machinema of this bossfight via Mod wich I totally recommend to be seen! : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2H8pL8gTXo&hd=1
Touhou is a very big shot in Japan but as good as unknown over here, big events like touhou-concerts are broadcasted in tv there.
-more gaming concerts please!
The hardest game I’ve ever played was a game by the name of “Breakdown”…It was INCREDIBLY HARD!, but not only that its one of the worst games I’ve ever seen. Its a first person shooter in which you have to take the time to PICK UP EVERYTHING!, you have to get your hands out and then activate objects…its maddening. Not only is that completely annoying your enemy’s in the game are tough and guns are essentially USELESS so you have to play it out like a very lame version or “Street Fighter” or maybe a “Dragon Ball Z”. But even if you manage to play through the bad story line, get through the difficult fights and manage to brush off the bad game mechanics, the FINAL full circle slap of the game knocks you flat on your ass. in the story line you go back in time and end up having to do WHAT YOU’VE ALREADY DONE ALL OVER AGAIN! This is why i have to tip my hat off to this game and say it was the hardest game to beat, not just because the enemy’s were tough but it was hard to bring myself to play this game and actually have the patience to beat it.
Ugh, God. Hardest gaming experience I’ve ever had was with a very well known game called Two Worlds. Not that it was hard, of course not, the difficulty was purely in getting me to play it past the first 15 minutes. EVERYTHING about that game was utterly awful.
i was just thught up a more hard game i tryed pixiline. just to get it instaled is a pain and then you simple fall asleep before even get mooving but that is another kind of harssip than actuly have problems with the game. other can be a game i tryed when i was at the hospital and cant remember it’s name sadly. but it was abaut a labyrant and you find ridles 1 was on latin and now days you dont lern latins as a langue and took me 3 hour to figure 1 single settings out and the answer was: thees is writen on latin. that was an uber brain crusher aspectly when you where 16 (im 21 now)
The hardest gaming experience?
I Wanna Be The Guy for the pc, search it on Google for further details. Basically you’re this kid with a wee little peashooter for a weapon against hordes of enemies with horribly difficult platforming. One hit and you’re dead, even to your little pinky toe. I only know one person that has finished the game without flying into a nerd rage on how difficult it is. On the first screen, you have to watch the level like a hawk. There’s these little cherries on the trees, and you would think to yourself “This level is going to be easy” WRONG. They drop from the trees and kill you instantly. Get used to this since every level is engineered specifically to kill you and make you feel like ripping your hair out.
On the upside, the game combines music and sound effects from other games such as the Legend of Zelda for example. Remember Link? He’ll stab you in the arse if you fail on his level, literally.
They may not be considered “Hard” in the same sense that Demon Souls is, but I recently got into the ‘Monkey Island’ series of games with the release of the special editions. I chose to play through without the use of the built-in hint systems and since i’m a total newbie to the adventure game genre and therefore not in-tune with the adventure gamer mindset, a lot of the puzzles in those games took me absolutely ages to figure out, leaving me feeling either stupid for missing out something obvious that I needed to do or just outright confusing me because the solution turned out to be something totally out-there and weird.
Other than that, I recently went back and played through the original Diablo as I never actually finished it back when I last played it 10-odd years ago. The last few levels were rather difficult and unforgiving due to an insane number of “Blood Knight” mobs that hit pretty damn hard and pull in large groups if your careful and very large groups if your not careful. I was the latter. It hurt. And of course Diablo himself was hard unless you had an inventory full of nothing but health potions.
Hardest gaming eperience..
There is one damn game that comes to mind, and that would be “X-com: Terror from the deep”.
Hardest damn game I have ever played, I have beaten it once out of several hundreds of tries to clear the game!
The game was released in 1995, I managed to beat it 2009.
Why is it hard? Well, it is a followup of the Enemy unkown game (Damn good game), but it was somehow made so much harder by the creators to “give the players a challenge”, but it is far too hard, where even beginner is unrealistic hard unless you save before every step you take throughout the whole game!
I liked that dragon….IN THE MOUNTAINS
I believe my hardest gaming experience hails from a game known as NINJA GAIDEN 2! So i heard about how difficult this game was and how fun me being so eager started out on the hardest difficulty never playing a game like this before i was doing pretty well going through the enemies and thought oh this isnt to hard.Then i met genshin and then i had my ass removed and handed back to me……GENSHIN!!!!!!! and the worst part he came back almost 10 more times!
Tetris on the last speed was allways the hardest…
The hardest game is and will ALWAYS be Ghosts’n Goblins. If you managed to painstakingly make it to the last boss and actually beat him, the game basically kicks you in the sack saying “this room is an illusion and a trap devised by satan” and making you start from level ONE again.
If you did manage to make it to the last level again (which was virtually impossible without the use of cheats or being a spaz) you would expect some grand ending,right?
WRONG.
What you got was 2 lines of text saying “this story is happy end”.
You go through all that crap and the developers cant even make the effort to MAKE A GODDAMN PROPER SENTENCE?
The hardest game experience I ever had was trying to complete a single race of Rig Wars without committing suicide.
Nah, I joke, it’s probably trying to get all the platinum medals on PGR2.
DA:O was pretty hard to play the 1st time!
It’s really demanding if you try to get the dragons down and you have little to no help from online guides.
On consoles it has to be MGS4 in hardest dificulty any step = “who goes there?”
The hardest game i ever played is a while back. And was a teeth grinding game but fun at the same time.
Battletoads for the NES ahh memories. so it’s not really a part of a game but the whole game itself.
The hardest gaming experience for me was in The Burning Crusade, the final encounter of the expansion: Kil’jaeden. I believe my guild spent around 3 months learning the fight. People that had been with us for ages were leaving the guild in frustration thinking it was just impossible, that our dps would never be good enough, that we would never coordinate fast enough to survive the massive raid damage etc. So it wasn’t just dealing with the fight itself, but also having to deal with members growing restless and the high requirements Sunwell put on raid setup (11 healers for one fight, 6 healers for the next).
If you havn’t done the fight yourself, think of it a bit as C’thun but instead of planning the positions in groups of 5, you would plan the positions for the entire raid of 25 in a pretty small area. They would have to run into the center of the room every now and then and be expected to quickly run back to where they were relative to each other. Not the easiest thing to coordinate as a leader when you’re dealing with WoW raiders.
My hardest gaming experience ever was probably beating Ninja Gaiden (Well, the title is “Shadow Warrior” here in Sweden) to NES. Had to learn where all the power ups where and how to beat all 3 end bosses without dying. But the feeling of beating that game (on a real console I must add!) was just amazing.
The hardest gaming experience was playing through Final Fantasy 7 and get up to Sephiroth…seemed like an impossible fight at the time
Good to see GTS is back on the intertubes, unfortunately I managed to miss the goddamn live episode of it, oh well. I look forward to seeing, well, hearing GTS return to my PSP on the bus tomorrow morning.
my hardest gaming exp ever was Persona 4 the secret margate boss battle.
Hard to discrimbe the fight but if you dindt beat hear in 50 turn you woot died bease of bad luck.
Bease she has attack that beasele one shots you and if you have a speail ring you can defend your self 1 time ageste it. And after that you just have to be lucky she doenst do it again next compel of turns. And when she on 30% of her hp she heals back to max again. toke me like 3 weeks to finally kill her.
my hardest gaming experience so far was definitely trying to beat Ruby Weapon in Final Fantasy 7 without looking at a strategy guide, and without any of the special ‘Chocobo’ materia. I don’t remember how I finally did beat it, but I just remember it being REALLY hard.
I played majesty 2, that game IS hard, sadly i lost it an age ago. Getting heros to complete missions for you? PAINFUL. Ever get a hero high level just to have him die painfully? I don’t know if there was a revive system in that game, i just remember one mission trying to make some mystical monks of some sort and they kept dying, necromancers were fun though
On the Dragon age front, i would LOVE more skills and talents, but i’d also like if there was more than one way to learn each class type. i didn’t like sucking up to the duelist but that was the only person to unlock it.
I had a long speil for demon’s souls, but i deleted it when i switched pages, there are no throwing axes in Demon’s souls TB! /nittpick. If you thought 4 1 was hard, wait til you start the second levels of each stage, that’s when the traps really start. C4_hertz is my playstation username too, add me and i’ll drop in to help ;D
Hardest gaming experience… well, you can tailor Demon’s Souls to be EXTREMELY hard. Try beating the game at level 1 like that one guy on youtube. Guy dances around like the ground’s on fire. Just try fighting black phantom Miralda, she oneshot my character who had stacked vitality and endurance.
wait, scratch that Demon’s Souls invite, I’m on the NA server, i don’t think they’re connected, if they are great, but i don’t think they are
TB, whats the name of the song right at the end of the podcast?
Adrenaline in Alien Swarm is fine, you just need to not play with chimps who use it when it’s not needed. When you’re actually getting your arse kicked, it can save your lives.
Hardest gaming experience? I wanna be the guy, definitely, never came close to finishing that. But I’m not sure if it counts, since it’s literally made to be hard. Other than that I’m not sure. Diablo 2 soloing hell difficulty untwinked maybe? Or Bayonetta, although that’s not really hard to finish, it’s just hard to finish while not having the game calling you out on sucking so much all the time.
My hardest gaming experience was, unlike most others, a multi-player game by the name of Red Orchestra, as well as the mod Darkest Hour. The reason why these games were so incredibly difficult despite being based in multi-player was their play-style. The game is pseudo-realistic, however it approaches realism very closely. Generally, a single bullet will kill you, if you get hit in the foot, you’ll be forced to limp, and if your weapon is shot, you’ll have to search around and pick it up off the ground.
The combat is class based, and the classes are intentionally unbalanced, much like they would be in reality. Tanks will mow down absolutely everything, commanders can shell random areas on a whim, machine-gunners can sit back and spray bullets over large swathes of land, and you’re stuck with nothing but a bolt-action rifle and a couple grenades. In order to overcome this weakness, you have to time your pushes perfectly with smoke grenades, covering fire, and other riflemen. Oh, and did I mention the enemy looks almost identical to you, so accidental team-killing is fairly common?
After getting fed up with being mowed down by everyone else, I thought: “Hey!, I know, I’ll drive a tank!” Little did I know, the view you get out of the window is about 1/5 the size of your screen. The realism of the game, mixed with the incredibly hardcore player-base created the second steepest learning curve I’ve seen, (after Eve Online) while still remaining fun.
Swag should TOTALLY do a Runes of Magic podcast! I’ve looked for one as well, and been disappointed just like you. My wife and I even tossed around the idea of doing one ourselves, but due to time constraints it never worked out.
I would definitely listen every week. It’s something that’s very needed in the RoM community.
It seems, Totalbiscuit, that you were obviously so busy you forgot to put down the link to the movie about sexuality in games you mentioned,
Hmm, my hardest gaming experience, that’s a tough one to decide. I’m going to have to say Dwarf Fortress, more specifically, trying to figure out how to play the damn thing. After hearing about the game on this very show some time ago last year, I decided to download it and give it a try, completely disregarding your statement of “the game has a learning curve like a cliff face.”. I ended up playing it for a few hours, and promptly quit the game out of sheer frustration, I couldn’t figure out how to do ANYTHING.
This continued for many months, the game sounded so great, I loved the idea of it, and I kept hearing great stories about it all over the internet, so I kept coming back, and ragequitting and coming back, and rage quitting. After about 6 months of this continuing pattern of stupidity, I decided to do something intelligent, and actually read the instructions on tutorials found inside the game(even that was complicated and confusing to use!). Although it helped with some things, it was incredible vague in many respects, and there were still many things that I had no bloody idea how to do. Like place a bed, I kept trying to build one, but it said I needed a made bed first, and the tutorial provided no insight in to how to actually make the blasted bed, it just told me how to place one. Much frustration ensued, as did more ragequitting, which, again, continued for many months, because I was too retarded to figure out how to make a goddamn bed.
Eventually, around the time 0.31.03 came out, I gave it another bash, and did the most intelligent thing a man can do when facing the brutal world of Dwarf Fortress. Check the Dorf Fort wiki. It explained pretty much everything I needed to know, all of the basics required to enter the world of Dwarf Fortress without frustration and without your fortress falling within the first few seasons. I even learned how to make a bed! And my Dorfs have been sleeping happily ever since! Unless they were dying a horrible death, which happens an awful lot.
turns out i never played Majesty 2 i played Majesty, the origional, i have fond memories of that game.
and the manual