The bubble popper game on my phone. :)

So fun.

If their opinion of Vampire: The Masquerade is tainted by Twilight then Stephanie Myers deserves to have her knee caps blown out, her thumbs cut off, and her big toes severed so doctors couldn't attach her big toes to replace her thumbs. In fact every actor in the series should suffer the same fate.

I bought it off Steam last year but I had to download an unofficial patch to get it to run properly because it was the last game developed by Troika and I don't think it sold enough for Activision to give a shit. Never beat it though, made it close to the end with my Gangrel but I couldn't kill Ming Xiao because I decided to go the neutral path because aligning yourself with anybody will always lead to your death in the World of Darkness.

The gameplay was quite adequate but melee weapons and fists were severely favored over guns, meaning unless you put at least 4 dots into your firearms skill you couldn't be guaranteed to shoot straight. The stealth aspect worked pretty well and there was always plenty of ways to go about completing a mission which was cool because it provided a lot of replay value. The game did a great job at depicting a World of Darkness setting where everything was similar to it's real life counterpart, but things were a lot more run down and decrepit which was something the TV show Kindred: The Embraced failed so hard on.

Overall the game had so many positive elements in it's favor that it's kind of sad that the game didn't sell that well and the bugs never got fixed. It provided people who aren't familiar with table top RPG's a watered down experience of what many people have been enjoying for over 10 years and even brought some of the main characters from the mythos into play, like the Gangrel archeologist Beckett or the Brujah legends Smiling Jack and Nines Rodriguez. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is easily the best buggy game to ever come out, and one of the best PC Role-Playing games to come out in the last 10 years.

Good god yes.

That game requires absolutely no skill or thought (except for getting the higest score possible), but it's impossibly addictive.

I'd agree with the sentiment that it's the best buggy game game to be released. Until I patched it, I couldn't even get past the tutorial at the start. :laughing:

My impression was that ranged weapons were underpowered until about halfway through the game and became quite OP thereafter. I played a Toreador and towards the end I was using the Steyr Aug with 11 points in ranged and nothing could touch me... I don't think I took any damage at all while clearing out the Sabbat and bosses went down pretty quickly.

I agree it's quite replayable since missions can be completed in multiple ways and I'd like to play it again using a stealth/melee Malkavian sometime. I liked the dialog/atmosphere in the game... and the herbal remedies / weapons dealer in Chinatown was hilarious.

I haven't tried playing a Toreador yet... I'm pretty biased against that entire clan in general, but they do apparently have some interesting perks. Last time I played Bloodlines though I was playing as a Gangrel and maxed out my Protean discipline so I turned into this giant bat like thing and just annihilated people. My firearms skill was high enough and I replaced all my starting guns with higher powered ones after the Hollywood/ Chinatown missions so the raid on the Sabbath hideout went pretty smoothly. Even the boss fight against the Tzimisce was relatively easy.

funny, the few times i tried the game on paper i was always a Toreador haha

Some of my friends occasionally call me toreador on our email list. ;)

I finished the game with my gangrel .. Tried it a bit again after with a brujah and some other, basically because I wanted to test the other disciplines or what they're called. Celerity was quite fun if I remember correctly.

I don't always have the patience for the social role-playing aspect of the game and the Toreador and Ventrue almost always play a more social role. In every game I've played I've always been the tank and the one who dies last, which is ironic because in every session I've ever played I've always come up against some kind of action sequence which either results in me slaughtering everyone or just barely crawling away. Only time I ever died first was in my first game where I totally overestimated the strength of a Garou and totally got my head ripped off. This is why I prefer more of the fighting classes for the Camarilla clans, but Lambrosa and Ravnos are not to be overlooked either.

Celerity is probably the most unbalanced discipline and if you come up against someone with it (in paper or computer game) you'll see what I mean. Despite it's usefulness if you're playing as a Brujah, they do not resist frenzy as well as the other clans and that can severely **** things up if you're low on blood.


I love role-playing games.

I wanted to play a Toreador from a powergaming perspective for Auspex/Celerity and from a roleplaying perspective because it sounded like they could wander amongst humans without much trouble and were less primal than Gangrel but not as ponsy as Ventrue.

Malkavian would have been my next choice for the interesting dialogue. I think I judged the Nosferatu too harshly when I started out because having finished the game, I think I'd really like to try them out. I'm more favourable of Brujah nowadays because I ended up allying with the Anarchs... and because Jack is such a badass.

fair, we only played a handful of single shot games during downtime back in college in the late 90s. i enjoyed playing a Toreador because i could get away with making sarcastic comments about the other players actions and still be 'totally in character' hahaha. so all this extra fluff about the various houses and clans is just WAY over my head. i was more of a D&D nerd.

as for the social vs. mathematical aspect of PnP games i tend to prefer dice rolling as well, although i'm great at BS-ing too but you need a really good GM to be able to properly balance things within a group, seems to me you're more likely to roll a natural 20 with 2d6 than end up in a group with one of those. wouldn't mind trying to get into a paper group again someday though i always wanted to get a good Shadowrun campaign going but could never create a plot hook big enough to keep interest back in the day.



going back to digital games - anyone have an opinion on the recently announced 2K reboot of the X-Com games?