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Beaten Deus Ex: Human Revolution with all the achievements I wanted to get from a single playthrough (read: gently caress Foxiest Pacifist Deus Ex run). I'll do the rest when I have some hardware that can run the game on highest settings.
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Aug 7, 2012 23:31
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Bought & Beaten: Symphony - This was just released a day or two ago, and I pre-ordered it on GOG on a whim; the idea of fighting battles on levels generated by the music I listen to sounded pretty cool. It's very addictive, though a bit repetitive and not enough weapon & ship variations. And the boss battles felt unnecessary, though they did provide something of a change (although the later bosses sucked rear end, spawning out instant-kill attacks repeatedly). Still, a great time waster. Next time I play I'll look and see how long it took to beat. I've also started Skyrim: Dawnguard, barely. And playing through a couple of The Incredible Machine games from GOG, though I haven't added that to my backloggery since I consider them more casual.
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Aug 8, 2012 03:23
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I took a look at Splice since I'd heard decent things about it and it was one of the Shoveled Indie Pack Titles I got incidentally (to Botanicula and EYE, IIRC), and wound up beating the main game in one sitting. So, cute but short, I guess. It goes from trivial to absolutely murderous all at once (at the point where you win, shockingly enough). Everything else got put on hold once someone told me that the La-Mulana WiiWare Edition got its PC port, though. I actually enjoyed the original, though the remake seems to have removed about 80% of the Myst-like stuff and replaced it with more gruesome platforming and combat challenges. Still, I've managed to get full access to the Twin Labyrinths so I'm well into the late midgame. It's also scratching an itch that Treasure Adventure Game failed to reach.
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Aug 8, 2012 09:45
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Beat Rochard today. Pretty fun game overall and not too long (5hrs33mins according to the in-game clock). Decent VA (the guy who does Duke Nukem's voice is the main VA) and soundtrack. It's a side scrolling puzzle game with some combat elements. However since it makes decent use of physics you can go without firing your gun for a long time. The puzzles themselves are really great without being too easy or too hard. The ending was a bit... meh though. They set it up for a sequel (in the most obvious way) without really answering anything. Thankfully the gameplay was fun enough that I can overlook that. I feel sad that I got this for free from IGN - these guys really deserve the money for the game.
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Aug 8, 2012 15:37
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Dodoman posted:I feel sad that I got this for free from IGN - these guys really deserve the money for the game. Buy it for a friend. Really. It's like you paid for it orignally, and you end up making someone else happy in the process.
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Aug 8, 2012 15:48
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Also beat Dawnguard as a vampire. It adds some nifty things to the greater Skyrim experience but the DLC content itself wasn't too special. Par for the course when it comes to Bethesda's in-house DLC really. Probably overpriced too but I didn't mind because it let me play Skyrim again (I was putting off DB until I could use crossbows and vampire powers to assassinate people in fun ways so I wanted to play but couldn't bring myself to do it with the dlc). Nearing the end of VTM: Bloodlines. The questionnaire put me as a Malkavian which makes for an awesome game but now I'm concerned for my own mental well-being.
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Aug 8, 2012 19:35
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Finished Planescape Torment. It turns out rage can change the nature of a man. Went the entire stint Lawful Good, righter of wrongs, keeper of vows, til I hit the late game roadblock Trias the Betrayer. I'd heard he and Vhailor had some bad chemistry; you could redeem him, actually, unless you had Vhailor in your party, who'd insist he pay the ultimate price for his crimes. So I left Vhailor out of it, or brought him in at low HP, enough to do some damage, take some hits, then die before negotiations took place. In exchange for my charitable forethought, I got total party killed. Several times. Over the course of an hour. Maybe two. And Annah left the party whenever I tried to rest because she'd arbitrarily decided she'd had enough of Fall-From-Grace. So I snapped, healed Vhailor to full HP, buffed him with every spell imaginable, and let him smite the treacherous bastard. I can only hope Fhjull fully appreciates what I've done for him. But otherwise, good game. And I've only one more before I've successfully cleared my backlog.
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Aug 8, 2012 20:47
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Beat Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood a few days ago. I'd had it sitting on my half-played list for a few months after getting a few hours into it, but shortly after picking it back up I did the mission that introduced my bros, and I liked it a lot more after that. Problems with the first game aside, I really like the Assassin's Creed series, but I can't put my finger on why, exactly. I don't really care about Ezio's story, care marginally about Desmond's, and the gameplay can fluctuate between being fun (driving the tank, figuring out how to take down the Borgia towers) to frustrating as poo poo (piloting the bomber, screwing your chance at full synchronization three-quarters of the way through a memory because of one slight slip-up). I'm going to play Revelations eventually, but I need a break for a while-- it's really easy to build up Assassin's Creed fatigue. I also just finished up with Sol Survivor earlier this morning. God help me, I like tower defense games, but I feel like I've been spoiled by having had Defense Grid be my introduction to the genre, because everything falls a little flat in comparison. Sol Survivor is no exception. For the most part, the gameplay is pretty by-the-books and not overly difficult-- I played through the campaign on Normal and didn't lose a single round, and only came close in one mission (out of the 20 in the campaign). At the start of each mission you choose from a varying number of generals, each of which who have different turrets and special powers available to them, but several of them share turrets and abilities, so I found myself sticking with one general for each act. Lastly, I jumped back into Darksiders today, and I think I finally got to the part that hooked me. I had finished the Twilight Cathedral a while back and then put the game on the back burner for a while, but after going through the Drowned Pass and doing the first bit of Anvil's Ford I think it's finally got its hooks in me. WE'LL SEE.
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Aug 8, 2012 23:42
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Bad Seafood posted:Went the entire stint Lawful Good, righter of wrongs, keeper of vows, til I hit the late game roadblock Trias the Betrayer. I'd heard he and Vhailor had some bad chemistry; you could redeem him, actually, unless you had Vhailor in your party, who'd insist he pay the ultimate price for his crimes. So I left Vhailor out of it, or brought him in at low HP, enough to do some damage, take some hits, then die before negotiations took place. Awesome. I had no idea about that between Vhailor and Trias (I generally do not recruit Vhailor, because then I'd have to leave someone else down there to make room in the party and who am I going to abandon?) and I've never had Annah and Grace get so pissed off at each other that one of them leaves, either. On the other hand, Trias did not put me in a forgiving mood and my approach to the fight with him was to buff the hell out of my party and then use him as the beam stop for an extraplanar particle accelerator powered by the entire Plane of Law. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Aug 9, 2012 |
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Aug 9, 2012 00:15
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ToxicFrog posted:On the other hand, Trias did not put me in a forgiving mood and my approach to the fight with him was to buff the hell out of my party and then use him as the beam stop for an extraplanar particle accelerator powered by the entire Plane of Law. To be fair, the path you take to gain that particular ability is a bit off the beaten path (I missed the entire region). That said, my playthrough also missed an entire major plot thread for some reason (Morte never got kidnapped in my playthrough, I think because I was using him as inventory space for every skull I found, including the one that that plot thread was about getting) and I'm also the only person I know who did the first thing I did after leaving the first room (walk up to a Dustman, snap his neck, and nick his clothes for a disguise). Apparently nobody plays DEX-heavy.
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Aug 9, 2012 03:06
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Finished Lone Survivor today while listening to Giant Bomb podcasts  . Took me about 3.5 hours according to the end game psych report. Ended up getting the blue ending which is not so bad I guess. Died a lot in the basement  . Worth playing through once at least.
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Aug 9, 2012 15:12
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Finished Bastion and From Dust yesterday, finally. Bastion was really a great little game but From Dust got old after the first mission with lava manipulation available. Next up is: Driver San Francisco!
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Aug 9, 2012 15:28
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Beat Batman: Arkham City. Compared to the original it was kind of weak. The story just wasn't as interesting, and the plot twists were pretty dumb. I don't know why they had to crowbar in the Catwoman stuff, it was like they didn't think their main mission was long enough. The difficulty ramp up toward the end is nuts, though. The combat system is actually pretty satisfying once you get the timing and combos down.
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Aug 9, 2012 16:40
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party everyday
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Nulled Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword. Something just feels... wrong. I can't put my finger on it really.
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Aug 9, 2012 20:56
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Beat: Trine 2. Looks a lot better than the original, but also has a lot more puzzles and I had to resort to YouTube on multiple occasions. Beat it on Hard and the combat was more challenging than before, but still manageable, I tried a couple of levels with Hardcore Mode on and that ended poorly. The end level/boss was alright but poor hit detection made it more irritating than it really should have been, and it was much better than the end level of 1 at least. Beat: BIT.TRIP.BEAT. I was on the 3rd level of this for so long before I eventually defeated the Pong Boss. Runner is still my favourite BT game. Beat: Capsized.: Really liked this after getting it in an Indie Royale Bundle. Physics are low-grav/'floaty' but it fits and once you get a hang of the gravity hook, it's like having unlimited Ninja Ropes in Worms. Even on Medium the combat seemed pretty frustrating at times, although I didn't get a game over till Level 11 but aiming was very difficult. That might have been because I ignored the games advice and used a gamepad, but movement would have been less fun with KB/M to make up for more precise aiming. Took me about 4-5 hours but has tons of replay value, I only got around 1/3 of the available stars, plus there's co-op and different arcade modes available. Completed: Xotic. Finished all modes in the base game. Put 27 hours into it and still have most of the (free, from the BeMine Bundle) DLC available. One of the best surprises from any of the indie bundles I've bought.
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Aug 10, 2012 01:36
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I've recently decided to only keep 20 Steam games installed at a time. Partly so I focus on the games I've started, and partly because then I can set Steam to grid view and see all the stuff I have installed at once, nice and pretty. Recent successes: Beat Bulletstorm. Was not into this at first because I was hoping for more of an open Painkiller-y game instead of the super linear closed spaces of this game. But a few nights ago I got into it and played the last three quarters of the campaign in a sitting. Beat Noitu Love 2. On easy, but gently caress if I have time to grind through it on normal. It's a really nice looking game and the way it controls is interesting, but man, combat is dull as gently caress except for boss fights. Completed Ben There Dan That!. Never been much for adventure games. My new policy for them is to keep a FAQ up to consult any time I get stuck on something for more than five minutes. That carried me through the latter portion of this game. Played a buttload of Crusader Kings II. Game can't really be beaten, but since I actually understand it enough to play competently, I changed it from "Unplayed" to "Null".
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Aug 10, 2012 02:28
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I get through games so slowly. I wish I was back in college.  I haven't beaten anything, but I've made some progress in some games. And this being a "support" group of sorts, I'd still like to share. Borderlands - My Siren is level 26, and I just entered Krom's Canyon. I'm pretty sure I missed some missions prior to this area, so I may go back and get them. I was playing with a friend who has a level 37 Hunter - it was fun to watch him demolish stuff with his melee. LoZ: OoT 3D - I entered the Spirit Temple. The Gerudo Fortress was interesting, but not much stealth involved. It was more about shooting the guards with arrows than hiding and sneaking. I'm on the fence whether I want to get all the heart pieces and golden skulltullas. My "collect everything" sense nags at me, but I know there's really not much reward in getting them. I've installed Skyrim and VVVVVV in preparation to play those. 
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Aug 10, 2012 04:14
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Installed New Vegas again this afternoon, wasn't planning on playing through some huge rpg right now but it looks like I'm doing just that. Driver: SF is even more fun than I expected, gonna be glad to come back and finish it.
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Aug 11, 2012 09:09
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Beat Botanicula. Short, easy, fun, definitely more an experience exploring a strange world than an actual game. If you liked Machinarium, this is the same style with plants instead of robots.Dodoman posted:Nulled Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword. Something just feels... wrong. I can't put my finger on it really.
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Aug 11, 2012 10:46
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Pierzak posted:Beat Botanicula. Short, easy, fun, definitely more an experience exploring a strange world than an actual game. If you liked Machinarium, this is the same style with plants instead of robots. Loved Mechinarium, gonna check out Botanicula, might just have been the steampunky atmosphere that I was so charmed by though.
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Aug 11, 2012 11:08
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Pierzak posted:Beat Botanicula. Short, easy, fun, definitely more an experience exploring a strange world than an actual game. If you liked Machinarium, this is the same style with plants instead of robots. I really loved Warband . I don't know why this felt so different.Also, beat Dark Messiah:Might and Magic today. Playing through it has increased my anticipation for Dishonoured. Arkane does good work.
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Aug 11, 2012 14:13
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ACPaco posted:I don't know why they had to crowbar in the Catwoman stuff, it was like they didn't think their main mission was long enough. If I recall correctly, the Catwoman sections were DLC.
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Aug 11, 2012 15:00
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flatluigi posted:If I recall correctly, the Catwoman sections were DLC. They weren't. There was the opening combat tutorial, one bit near the start, one bit near the end (she was too busy being kidnapped in the space between these events, natch) and then you can switch between her and Bats in the postgame.
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Aug 11, 2012 15:11
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Cleretic posted:They weren't. There was the opening combat tutorial, one bit near the start, one bit near the end (she was too busy being kidnapped in the space between these events, natch) and then you can switch between her and Bats in the postgame. Being able to play as her in the post-game is definitely DLC, the bits during the story may be there without it but any point in which you can collect her Riddler trophies is part of the DLC. They split Catwoman out of the game to use it as an "Online Pass" for the console versions to curb used sales, this doesn't affect the PC version at all since you can't sell used PC games.
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Aug 11, 2012 15:31
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Pierzak posted:Beat Botanicula. Short, easy, fun, definitely more an experience exploring a strange world than an actual game. If you liked Machinarium, this is the same style with plants instead of robots. And if, like me, you didn't like Machinarium, Botanicula is way better. Still a couple of troublespots near the end but nothing remotely as terrible as Machinarium's endgame. I'm starting to get into Defense Grid more now. I've had my first mazing level; it's a lot more whiteknuckle than Sanctum was for some reason.
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Aug 12, 2012 08:32
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Beat Rock of Ages today. Was pretty fun, but the last boss fight was pretty bullshit.
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Aug 12, 2012 16:03
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I've beaten Warlock: Master of the Arcane on Challenging, and it... wasn't. There's a great 4X game in here, waiting to be unleashed, but the terrible AI, rudimentary diplomacy, and stunted tech trees kind of hamstring it. Hoping that they'll fix that, because I really, really want to like this game.
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Aug 12, 2012 18:06
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 edit: Nevermind, figured it out. There's a link on the person's page that you want to be friends with. I could swear that there used to be a place to just type in names though. ZebTM fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Aug 13, 2012 |
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Aug 13, 2012 04:46
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Beat: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. The plot was typically dumb video game fluff but the missions were mostly fantastic. I played thru it on Normal because I'm a wuss and just wanted to get through it and see everything without feeling to rushed or having to restart any missions, but I'll probably go back and tackle some of the missions on hard at some point. Pretty much every mission had a unique twist of some kind, and I really enjoyed the ones where you just get to turtle and murder millions of zergs. Up next: I'm going to spend some time with Crusader Kings 2 and then probably Hitman: Blood Money.
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Aug 14, 2012 05:43
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Finished: Saint's Row the Third. Well, I completed the main story, I'm imagining that I'm going to go back and just do random poo poo in the game every so often because it's very fun. Story-wise though, I preferred SR2. 2 just seemed... well a lot longer, there's that, but also more well thought-out and smarter. I mentioned it in the 'thing dragging this game down' thread, but in SR2 the Boss was a straight-up psycho, and some really gruesome things happened. I've started comparing them to 'actually crazy' versus 'fake crazy'. SR2 is actually crazy, it's got some right proper lunacy in what you can do, and along with it you have things like killing a woman by getting her boyfriend to drive over her, and burying someone alive. It makes for a more enjoyable story, if not gameplay. SR3 is someone sane pretending to be crazy. Everything's coming from so far out of left field that it's become the right field, but there isn't that faint streak of bloodthirsty madness that makes things stick out. SR2 Boss' psychopathy was as loud and ridiculous as the game it was in, and it worked. SR3 is even louder and even more ridiculous, but the Boss is pretty much a straight man for it all, which is really disappointing.
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Aug 14, 2012 06:27
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^^^ I ended up nulling SR3 because it wasn't SR2, I wanted more SR2 damnit. Finished NecroVisoN. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to think. Half the game was a bad FPS in the style of Painkiller, the other half was a bad FPS but you're punching dudes into space with your new gauntlet. Kind of like Dark Messiah's mighty boot on steroids. Every time the game started to drag in the second half, punching dudes into the atomosphere/lava/walls/each other gave me the strength to keep going. Would not play again, but I'd watch GIFs of things getting punched for sure.
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Aug 14, 2012 09:35
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The best part of the game was the middle honestly. The beginning and ending parts sucked.
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Aug 14, 2012 10:29
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Tommofork posted:Half the game was a bad FPS in the style of Painkiller Did you get burned on Painkiller's lovely expansions? The original one was awesome.
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Aug 14, 2012 11:06
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Dodoman posted:The best part of the game was the middle honestly. The beginning and ending parts sucked. Agreed. It's all a long blur of suck punctuated by guys rocketing away into space for me. Sometimes pretending to be a dreadnought from Warhammer 40K hosing down fuckers with endless angry bullets was kind of fun too. Riding the dragon parts can go gently caress right off. I was amused by the final boss' damage resistance. The shotgun from level 1 did more damage per shot than the bullet hose and the rocket launcher from the dreadnought wannabe machine. Pierzak posted:What. NecroVisioN felt like it was trying to emulate Painkiller except that it missed the point of being not poo poo. That said, I've only played a few levels of PK, I think that will be my next project.
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Aug 14, 2012 11:24
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Beat Q.U.B.E and Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes. Clash of Heroes was great, the puzzle mechanism really works and makes the battles interesting (if a little easy). QUBE is short and buggy, has one interesting level out of seven and some of the most aggravating puzzles in any game ever including that one with the rodents. Almost 100 games completed! Only 400 more to go!
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Aug 14, 2012 11:56
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Pierzak posted:What. I honestly do not get the love for Painkiller at all. I tried playing it a few months ago, and it was just: walk into large area, get locked in, face dozens of monsters, kill monsters, enter next area, repeat indefinitely. And it was way too slow at introducing new weapons. I don't remember how far in I got, I think three or four levels, but I *still* only had the first two weapons, one of which was lame/boring, the other confusing on how to use. At the same point in the Serious Sam games (which I enjoyed), I probably had three or four times as many weapons. And the enemy variety wasn't that great either, unlike Serious Sam. The thing that pisses me off the most about the game, though, is the fans who call it a direct descendent of the Doom games, and they couldn't be more wrong. Doom and Doom 2 had a great variety of enemies, an ok selection of weapons, and most importantly, weren't made up of linear levels where you're locked in room after room and forced to jump around and kill wave after wave of boring enemies. If I hadn't heard so many people say "This is what Doom 3 should have been!" I might have enjoyed it somewhat, or at least not despised it like I do; it just seems like the people who say that haven't even played either of the original Doom games. Maybe I should give it another try, but people really need to stop comparing it to Doom.
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Aug 14, 2012 14:07
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Eh! Frank posted:I honestly do not get the love for Painkiller at all.
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Aug 14, 2012 14:33
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Eh! Frank posted:I honestly do not get the love for Painkiller at all. I tried playing it a few months ago, and it was just: walk into large area, get locked in, face dozens of monsters, kill monsters, enter next area, repeat indefinitely. And it was way too slow at introducing new weapons. I don't remember how far in I got, I think three or four levels, but I *still* only had the first two weapons, one of which was lame/boring, the other confusing on how to use. At the same point in the Serious Sam games (which I enjoyed), I probably had three or four times as many weapons. And the enemy variety wasn't that great either, unlike Serious Sam.
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Aug 14, 2012 14:34
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Pierzak posted:Different tastes then. I found Serious Sam boring, and wondered what the hell people see in it. Ditto, I loved Painkiller but Serious Sam just pissed me off. I think the people going "Painkiller is the next Doom!", however, are remembering the swarms of enemies from Doom but not the level design. It's a very different game despite the superficial similarity of shotgunning demons in the face. Also, in what way is "left-click is a shotgun, right-click is an ice beam" confusing  RightClickSaveAs posted:I liked the stake gun in Painkiller, and I really liked the huge boss fights, but other than that I'm with you here. I don't know when the whole FPS thing of locking you in a big room and spawning waves of monsters at you started, but I don't remember that from the old FPS games I grew up playing, and I don't care for it. Games like Doom (especially the first one), weren't really like this, there was usually exploration and more of a purpose to the gameplay. I blame Half-Life. No, seriously. Throughout the 90s, it was the norm for story and gameplay to be divorced in FPSes. The plot advanced through cutscenes between levels, if at all. And in games where this is not the case, they often came up with various ways of presenting the plot nonlinearly within each level (PiD's conversations with the dead, Marathon's terminals, System Shock's audio logs - it doesn't matter what order you find them in, ultimately, as you can assemble them into a coherent narrative after the fact). This meant that level design was suggested by the plot - this level is a waste processing plant, this level is a reactor complex - but not constrained by it. Level designers could, by and large, build levels as spaces that the player can explore rather than as a linear sequence of challenges to overcome. When this is done badly you get the worst keymaze levels, but when it's done well you get things like Thief. Then Half-Life shows up. The plot and the gameplay are integrated; levels are a completely linear sequence of gameplay challenges and plot points, both presented entirely in-game without ever directly taking control away from the player. And it becomes wildly popular and successful, so it must be doing something right. So developers start copying it. Of course, a lot of them copy it badly, or miss the point entirely. But the end result is that you now have developers thinking of levels as strings on which to thread combat challenges and/or plot developments, rather than as spaces to populate with gameplay. And the cheapest, easiest, laziest combat challenge is "lock all the doors, spawn waves of enemies, unlock the door to the next room when they're all dead". That's my theory, anyways.
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Aug 14, 2012 15:06
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Ok, I just reinstalled Painkiller, and it's not nearly as bad as I remembered. The level designs are still stupid, and I had completely forgotten about the "quest"/waypoint arrow, wtf? But there are more enemy designs than I remember (though each encounter just floods you with dozens of the same one, for the most part). It really helps that I'm now seeing it as a Serious Sam clone (or vice versa, whichever came first), and not "What Doom 3 should have been!". And when the hell did I pick up the stake gun? There was no indication that I had picked it up at any point (I only noticed I had it after I was switching back from the blade gun and accidentally hit 3 instead of 2), and I definitely don't remember getting it the first time I tried playing. It's reload time is a bit too long to be useful against hordes of monsters. Same with the shotgun's freeze attack, so I'm pretty much just using the shotgun the whole time. But at least there's more weapon variety than I remembered. ToxicFrog posted:Also, in what way is "left-click is a shotgun, right-click is an ice beam" confusing
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Aug 14, 2012 15:38
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