Massive Chalice

Picked this one up a few weeks ago when it was half off and enjoyed my first run through immensely.

It combines a bit of the xcom style combat with a meta game that comes down to breeding strong bloodlines over the course of 300 years leading up to the final battle. If you manage that piece of it well, you'll have heroes capable to handling it, if you manged it the way I did you'll be lucky to survive 300 years much less field a 5 man team capable of winning the day (which I didn't).

Despite suffering through entire team wipes on a few occasions (the sort of thing that would drive me batty in xcom to the point of just stopping) it doesn't play as a show stopper in this game because death is just part of the game design, either your heroes die in battle or they die of old age, somehow that takes a bit of the sting out of it, or at least it did for me.

I really liked this one, tough choices all the way through, not overly complicated mind you, but still desperate battles and hard choices abound.

And yes, I know there's a certain crowd carrying a hate on for DF over past project failures, simply put, means nothing to me, I'm just talking about this specific game they made and for me, it was a good time. Good enough I'm heading back in to give it another go and this time, hopefully with a bit of luck and better bloodline planning, we'll win the day in the end.

Circling back after a 2nd play through, first one I discussed above was about learning the game and how to play, second to actually go for the win. A complete blast both times, last battle was quite good and quite a surprise.

Had so much fun I'm going to play it yet again, this time on hard!

Sounds like my kind of thing.

Addition, you should really get over your aversion of consoles, You are missing out on a lot of TBS goodnes

Yeah, not likely I'll ever go console, had a PS3 given to me for free that collects dust. But never say never.

As for Massive Chalice, I can't say enough good things about it. Shame DoudleFine got themselves in a bind reputation wise before they kickstarted this one, it blinded a lot of people to taking a real look at it on its own merits, xcom fanboys did the same thing, dismissed it w/o actually understanding it for what it is.

I don't run across new game design concepts often, when I do I bring them up here. This is a new approach. Just like Valk was something new and fresh.

You should try Silent Storm if you can find it, old but good. Also really funny, the characters say hilarious things. There is permadeath but you can usually save them anyway. A must play for TBS gamers.

For your ps3, Disgaea, since you already got a ps3 its a no-brainer

FYI, MC is on GOG right now DRM free for 10 bucks.

I've played a bit of Silent Storm, keep bouncing off it, not sure why, it should be my exact cup o tea, have not given up no it though, i'll keep trying.

If I ever pull myself away from the PC and decide to check out Disagaea, two questions: have consoles finally managed to join us in the 21st century and allow you go purchase the game digitally? And secondly, this is a series, which one if I was to play only one would you recommend?

Of course you can purchase it digitally. And any version will do they are all great. Especially the music is fantastic. This is just one of the many and not even my favorite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoDg...69CEC5425EF47E

edit, found my favorite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSVfhHfy-D8 but there are MANY awesome tracks, worth a buy just for the music

Just finished another campaign in Massive Chalice, had a blast yet again. This time I focused on just 3 families, one caber, one hunter and one alchemist. Wanted to make particularly sure I had a solid family of alchemists for the final battle. In the end I did manage to field 2 solid alchemists in the last battle, both of which had relics that were lvl 7 and lvl 9 respectively, and both of them were lvl 10 alchemists, which meant they had a skill opened up called mad bomber, which gives them the ability to load up on 10 bombs they can throw, so lots of ammo). They put their AOE to great effect and carried the team, although my stealth hunter did what he did best and one shotted the really tough enemies from a far before they could get close and harm the chalice. Immensely fun once again.