Never played WoW, but grinding in Dark Souls is downright therapeutic sometimes. If you're OP enough, that is. That's the thing about Dark Souls; unless you're an obscenely high level, even the world 1 enemies will fuck you up.

I find you have to be in the right mindset to grind for any periods of time as it gets painfully boring fast.

However I do like grinding in Pokemon just because there's a chance you'll encounter a rare Pokemon; or perhaps if your lucky enough a Shiny.

The grinding in Dragon Quest 8 is pretty fun too.

Once the world opened up in DQ8 I really started to get frustrated with the random encounters. Fighting a million jargons while walking to a distant chest only to find it was locked and my thieves key wouldn't open it was not fun. The grinding was certainly fun at times, like when trying to hunt down rare monsters or metal slimes.

Here is an example of how vanilla WoW worked:

Find eight xy. You get xy by refining x

Enemies drop x, but the drop rate is about 25%, so you could kill thirty enemies and only get about seven x.

After you've got your x, you need to refine it into xy, and here's the kicker: The refining process only has about a 25% chance of success. You can and will more than likely kill a hundred enemies to get twenty five x, and then just fail in getting enough xy because the RNG God hates you.

That's frustrating and horrible and gets old fast. Not the kind of grinding I like.

Poker Night at the Inventory. I have a decent grasp of relative odds and sensible ways to play my hands, but I suck at reading the less obvious tells. I think The Heavy scratches his nose when he has a good hand.

I win more than 1/5th of the time, which means I'm better than the AI. Considering I learned to play Texas Hold 'em on Saturday, that's not so bad.

I started Bioshock Infinite last night. After the chapel, the sainted founders, the baptism and everyone walking around in their Sunday best I was feeling extremely unsettled. It wasn't until I realised that every face was white that I realised exactly why Columbia is so unsettling. And then the raffle, dear god. I've never been so angry at fiction before. I actually relished the ensuing slaughter. I really, really want to destroy that place.

I started Persona 4 and am just after the Shadow Yukiko fight. I'm in two minds on it after Persona 3.

On one hand, the characters and plot are a lot better, the gameplay is harder and more involving and the English voice acting is much much better (Special note goes to Chie's new voice actress Erin Fitzgerald, who has so much energy and vigour).

On the other, I dislike the ridiculous amount of free reign you get from the very start of the game. Persona 3 introduced new things very slowly and though the beginning left you feeling a bit lost and alienated (Like a school transfer student would), you always had kind of a feel for where you were once you got your bearings. There's so much stuff thrust on you after the shadow Chie fight in 4 (Not in the least 'Beat the first dungeon within twelve days or GAME OVER) that I just feel really lost and scared that I'm making wrong choices all the time. I hope things get a little more focused later on.

Also fuck the first dungeon. Not being able to level grind because I keep running out of SP, and need to waste a precious day to restore it is not my idea of fun.

(Joe hasn't even finished persona 3)

What a fag.

I know right

right

I finished Bioshock Infinite. It was an unusual storyline, but I thought it worked really well. The original Bioshock had mad biotechnology as a central theme, and was set during the dawn of molecular biology (the last major revolution in biology) while Infinite had mad quantum mechanics as a central theme and was set during the dawn of quantum mechanics (the last major revolution in physics).

What was the last major revolution in mathematics? *trying to predict the new Bioshock's storyline*

Addition.

Vertical addition.

I hadn't heard of that one yet. I must be a bit behind.

It's gonna be a hit

Lately I've been playing Batman Arkham City (almost finished) and Walking Dead Survival Instinct. The latter may have received bad reviews but to me it still is a fun and challenging game. I still prefer it to ZombiU which only has a cricket bat, is too dark and has ghosts.

I think the level of Grinding depends on the game, for example I like building up my weapons gradually in Fallout New Vegas, finding new guns in Borderlands and raising my Multiplayer rank in games like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty

I'm playing The Walking Dead. It's a game about dead people that walk.

EDIT: I finished it. It was cool. Play it

Just finished Fez with 64/64 cubes and the heart cube things. For obvious reasons, I didn't manage to get the latter without outside assistance.

I'm now playing Cave Story. I've owned it for a while now (from a Humble bundle) but never got around to playing it. That was a big mistake, because it's pretty awesome. I've actually completed it once (it's fairly short, taking me about 4.5 hours first time), but I'm going through it again for the best ending.

I was going through some of my games and noticed my DJ Hero turntable lying around near my shelf so I decided to hook the thing up and play a few songs in the game. Well, I had completely forgotten that my main saves were on my old Xbox 360 which isn't connected to the TV right now and I didn't want to go through the trouble of moving the saves to my current Xbox so I just decided to start a new game. I actually set myself sort of a challenge; I played through the game on hard difficulty. It took a while to get used to the directional scratching/crossfade spikes, but I managed to 5-star every song in the game on hard. Got a nice 80 Gamerscore achievement too. Expert is still way too much for me to handle.

In today's episode of Big Al's All the Art You Can Eat, we're going to push the boat out and look at a science game instead.



They've just released a sandbox version, which you can see here.

I'm playing Cave Story+ too. It features caves and a story. It's frustrating-fun. I'm playing on hard even though the game said I shouldn't. Also, it's japanese

It's the original 2D indie platformer. The one Phil Fish can't possibly acknowledge as an influence of Fez because his ego won't allow him to take back the remark that all modern Japanese games suck.

It's from 2004 and it's stylized to look retro. Can it really be called "modern" now?

Don't know what you're talking about, WoF.

Well, I'm now going for the best ending on normal and hell and Ballos seem pretty difficult. I dread to think what they're like on hard.

I believe the game is pretty much the same with the one difference that you have only 3hp. Pretty much everything kills you in 1 hit

I finished Persona 3. It was sad, I feel fulfilled.

I'm halfway through Persona 4. It is happy, I feel fulfilled.

Flying to Arathi Highlands. WoW is the only game I play anymore, other than some Street Fighter and Tekken with my friend.

I'm about two thirds way through Persona 4, having finally rescued Naoto and now have my full party. I'm enjoying it a lot more in the mid-game now I've settled into the pace of small town life.



Also Shadow Naoto is my favourite so far, narrowly beating out Shadow Yukiko, though I'm not quite sure about the Astro Boy aesthetic.

I've being playing HOTLINE MIAMI and MY GOD! That game's amazing and addictive fun.

Dota 2.

I had 5 games today. It's time consuming but man I love it. Played Windrunner twice, I love her stun ability. Just watching my entire team destroy a player after I've pinned them down is just great. :)

Jakiro is another favourite of mine. He's probably my best hero too. Freezing players with the ice wall is satisfying and even though he's a support, he can be pretty tough. I also like to harass players with my flame attacks.

I played Multiwinia against a friend. I won, which means it is therefore a good game.

If you find RTSs too complicated, this is good. You don't build any of your units; half of them spawn like creeps and the rest fall in crates like Worms. And it keeps all of the fluidity from Darwinia.

I'm playing Puzzle Agent. It's a game about an agent which's job is to solve puzzles. It's fun. I regret not being interested in that game before.

WARNING: The sequel falls flat on its arse, plot-wise. The first game sets up an intriguing premise, but the resolution was underwhelming.

I've been playing Quake Live duels pretty much every day for the last few months.

I'm getting much better. I can actually put up a fight against players better than me now. I can't aim for shit, but I'm getting good at item timing and my map awareness has been fantastic lately. I just won a game against a guy who outaimed me simply because I was listening to his every move. I caught him standing in the wrong place once or twice and I completely turned the map around.

I love games that require high skill like this. Because I'm so patient I don't need to aim well to win games. I just sit back until my opponent makes a mistake, at which point I make it really hard for them to get back into the game.

I spent most of last night playing The Last of Us. It's a great game, really atmospheric, but it's bloody hard.

And then I got hit with a (now fixed) bug which broke the save system and now I'll need to replay all the progress I had made.

Yeah I heard about the save bug, always sucks when that happens.
The opening does indeed look good. Shame the first bit is pretty linear but then that's to be expected. Looks interesting for sure

I've finished The Cave. It's a game about heroes in a cave. I'm a bit dissapointed, but only a bit. It was a good game. I just thought it'd be better.