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saucerman posted:May I ask how you are able to play through/beat so many games so quickly? Some of the games are not exactly short, too. Quest for Glory II has a focus that I can only hope to achieve. He is capable of playing through a single game at a time, sometimes finishing over the course of a few days or even one day. Meanwhile, I end up meandering through 5 games at once making tiny, tiny progress in each one before slowly losing interest and moving on to the next thing. I'm jealous is what I'm saying.
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Jan 20, 2015 00:11
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americanzero4128 posted:Beat: Tomb Raider: Legend Or considering this beaten, because I'm crashing non-stop once I get to the first Young Lara sequence. Always at the first obstacle, where I step off the wood platform and have to roll/crawl through the crawlspace thing. Shame, I actually like these games. I did some looking online for fixes, got nowhere fast with the suggestions, and said gently caress It. I'll probably install and beat Tomb Raider: Underworld before going into the 2013 remake, but that's a bit down the road...need a break from raiding tombs. Underworld is probably the most Tomb Raider-y of the Tomb Raiders, so that's not a bad choice. It is a pity, though, because Legend is the one where they basically try to have Lara Croft be James Bond, which is funny in its own right and it also includes the finest tomb ever raided: a ramshackle, abandoned tourist trap in the English countryside full of dangerous traps like faulty wiring and rotted floorboards, culminating in driving a forklift into King Arthur's tomb, which in fact was totally underneath the basement and is in far better shape than the tourist trap up top. Archaeology, ladies and gentlemen.  Sadly at that point it starts getting glitchy again, and the boss fight in that sequence had the targeting go so crazy I had to alternate between KBM and gamepad throughout the fight. As for me, I played through a bit of all my Saint's Row games, and tried out Beyond Earth during the free weekend, and then decided to pass on Beyond Earth. I also ended up picking up LYNE which is sort of un-BACKLOG but is super-chill. I'm not sure if I'm liking it more than dhamster or not because I agree with everything he says but fire it up to solve a half-dozen or so puzzles each night anyway. In progress: Darksiders. Fired this up alongside SR3 since I got it at the same time and just kind of kept going. I guess I'm halfway through it now. I'm not particularly impressed, but it's also been a goodly while since I've played a game like this, so hey, I'm on board.
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Jan 20, 2015 03:41
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To be fair, Lara has always been a sort of James Bond-ish character. In the original game they make it very clear that she deals with shady characters all over the globe, fights Bond-like villains, evil corporations, and even the US military at Area 51. And then there's Angel of Darkness but we don't talk about Angel of Darkness. I guess it's better to say James Bond is one of the last of the big pulp action heroes and Tomb Raider is a throwback to pulp fiction.
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Jan 20, 2015 08:04
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I'm seeing 0% James Bond and 100% Indiana Jones.
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Jan 20, 2015 08:52
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BEATEN: Uncharted 1 - A bit of a mess of a game. If I had to compare it to anything, I'd choose Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. This is not a harmony of chocolate and peanut butter. Combat and platforming shouldn't mix, keep them on separate sides of the dance floor. Very poorly balanced there. Enemies that have perfect accuracy and too much HP. Poorly coordinated waves of enemies as you're moving through a room. Bleh. BEATEN: Uncharted 2 - Well this is way loving better. You can run&gun in this game, as well as mash the melee if you get into 1 on 1 encounters. I don't give a poo poo about Drake, another generic Nolan North character, but I did end up liking Elena in this series. The set pieces are grand as has been hyped, and most importantly, no crossing of the streams: The platforming chapters are about platforming, and the action chapters are a bunch of set pieces with thin platforming stringing them together. The balance is on point. BEATEN: Everyday Genius SquareLogic - Okay this isn't COMPLETED because it would take me ten lifetimes to do it (or at least an hour a night over a couple of months), but I solved all of the challenge puzzles and unlocked every region in the game. NOW PLAYING: Again, Jake Hunter, Kentucky Route Zero (in no rush on this one), ah poo poo you know what here's everything I've started on but not finished: Hector Badge of Courage (Episode 2), Iron Fisticle, Child of Light, Brutal Legend, Dead Island, Enslaved, Legend of Grimrock, Assassin's Creed Liberation, Far Cry 2, Shank 2, Scribblenauts Unlimited, Adventures of Shuggy, Mass Effect 2, Sleeping Dogs, Valiant Hearts, World of Goo, Skyborn, Teleglitch, Vertical Drop Heroes, Binary Domain, SMT: Nocturne, Tales of Symphonia, Wild Arms, Grandia, Breath of Fire IV, Trauma Center New Blood, Dark Cloud 2, Etrian Odyssey 4, Final Fantasy X-2, Wario Land Shake It, Xenoblade, Super Paper Mario. I don't intend on nulling ANY of these, but I also don't intend on coming back to any of these for a while. I list them only because at some point I might make a new post and suddenly DING one of them is beaten, because I decided I felt like finishing one of them. I have an interest in playing each and every game-- well maybe not Mass Effect 2 but that's another story-- but part of the backlog quest is experiencing new fun poo poo, and I have a lot still to get to. Speaking of: UNPLAYED AND UPCOMING: Hatoful Boyfriend, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, TRI of Friendship and Madness, Kairo, Shadowrun Dragonfall, Roundabout, Analog a Hate Story, Hate+, Bully, Eidolon, MIND: Path to Thalamus, Year Walk, Call of Cthulhu, Lovely Planet, Magical Starsign, Infinite Undiscovery, Nostalgia, Spectrobes Origins, Legaia 2, Star Ocean 3, Sin & Punishment Star Successor, Trails in the Sky, Night of the Rabbit, Dark Fall 3, Sanitarium, Miasmata, Fract OSC, Double Dragon Neon, Jurassic Park the Game (lol), Rhythm Heaven, Vagrant Story, Alundra Considering I only beat 3 games since the last update, it's gonna take a while, and yeah I actually do work and poo poo, not a ton of free time, but I could probably get through a lot of this list by the next Steam Summer Sale.
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Jan 20, 2015 10:25
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:I'm seeing 0% James Bond and 100% Indiana Jones. The espionage genre has its roots in adventure novels, replace ancient tombs with the villain's lair and the lines start to blur. Both characters are independent adventurers with an international reputation that tangle with thugs ranging from lowly criminals to government agents. Everything else is set dressing, the ancient tombs vs. the underground lairs, it's all just a setting for the struggle between the hero and villain. Hell, one of the themes in Crystal Skull is that without the Nazis there are no more classic badguys, just warring governments roping their people in to sabotage each other. But my point is that Lara has always been something more than just an Indiana Jones clone. As the series continues she straight up deals with international agents, spies, the military, and big corporations. She doesn't have the government backing her but she has money and reputation which puts her on equal footing. Quest For Glory II posted:BEATEN: Uncharted 1 - A bit of a mess of a game. If I had to compare it to anything, I'd choose Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. This is not a harmony of chocolate and peanut butter. Combat and platforming shouldn't mix, keep them on separate sides of the dance floor. Very poorly balanced there. Enemies that have perfect accuracy and too much HP. Poorly coordinated waves of enemies as you're moving through a room. Bleh. You should definitely get around to Valiant Hearts and play it through in one sitting or as close as possible. The final chapter ramps the tension sky high while you're riding off the good vibes built up in the beginning. It's otherwise a short game, you can probably finish it in a weekend.
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Jan 20, 2015 14:04
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One of the biggest mistakes people make when playing the Uncharted games is shooting everything. There's actually a pretty decent brawling system in there and tons of rad takedown, environmental, and melee kill animations. e: if i remember correctly Uncharted 1's hand-to-hand combat used this weird timed button press thing but once you got good at it you could wreck dudes
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Jan 20, 2015 15:51
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Uncharted is one of those games that has half-assed stealth in it. This means I will attempt to stealth at every opportunity possible, despite it not being fun.
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Jan 20, 2015 17:26
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I don't know, the stealth isn't bad per se it's just not a key part of the game. You can usually move very quickly on the battlefield and clear an entire map without even trying before you hit the invisible trigger that causes guys to start jumping over walls. But the secret to Uncharted is shoot someone to stun them then bash their face in. Same rule applies to The Last of Us where the pro tip is to snap necks until someone spots you then toss bottles in their faces so you can run up for an instant kill.
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Jan 20, 2015 18:01
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ManxomeBromide posted:I also ended up picking up LYNE which is sort of un-BACKLOG but is super-chill. I'm not sure if I'm liking it more than dhamster or not because I agree with everything he says but fire it up to solve a half-dozen or so puzzles each night anyway. I think in my case I just don't really feel the motivation to do all ~26 puzzle sets after doing the first 3. I might pick it up again in the future to peck away a few puzzles at a time, but it might just be one of those games I need to be in a certain mood to play. So maybe it's not "nulled" so much as "shelved," with the expectation that I probably won't complete it. That said... Beat: Renegade Ops Pretty enjoyable shooter. I liked the twin-stick controls, and the storyline was humorously over-the-top. It didn't nail the B-movie aspect as well as, say, Blood Dragon, but it kept me interested I liked that it didn't take itself too seriously. There was also a semi-comic-book aesthetic going on in the cutscenes as well. The different player characters didn't seem especially balanced (the EMP seemed far and away better than a couple other specials), but I could see them interacting in interesting ways in co-op. I only played it solo, so I can only speak for the single-player. None of the player characters were voice acted, which started to get a little weird after awhile when your boss does all of the talking for the Renegades. The gameplay itself was retro and a bit challenging (limited lives per level, enemy rockets hit like a truck and were hard to dodge). The campaign itself was somewhat short, but I could see it potentially dragging if it went on any longer. Overall, a fun (but often mindless) experience. Started: Trine Started this ages ago, then forgot about it. A couple weeks ago I started it up again and I guess they've done a complete graphical overhaul. Nearly at the end now, can see myself finishing this one reasonably soon. Nulled: Sonic CD This was in a Sonic bundle of some kind. Already played this for Sega CD, plus it hasn't aged super well. The time travel mechanic is interesting, but kind of clunky. Some levels have areas which are just downright annoying to get past. Plus, they didn't even have the original Sonic Boom song in the opening sequence! I guess they couldn't get the rights. Nulled: Race the Sun I wanted to like this game but it just got too annoying. They handle the "race against time" aspect in a really interesting and compelling way, but it's marred by the fact that crashing into any of the many obstacles strewn about the level will instantly end your run. Which wouldn't be so bad if your glider didn't handle like crap (on kb+m, at least). The quests system was neat at first until poorly thought out stuff like "Complete X levels while only turning left" started to clog up my log. Maybe this one is a better experience on gamepad, but I think I've had my fill of this game for now. 
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Jan 22, 2015 07:21
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Beaten: Wasteland 2 [7] I know it's not, strictly speaking, Fallout, but drat if this doesn't scratch that Fallout itch real well. It grabbed me right from the intro and at no point did I feel like it was wearing out its welcome and I just wanted it to be over already. I enjoyed the poo poo out of this game, and it makes me extremely optimistic about Pillars of Eternity and Numenara Torment. It's not perfect. Intelligence is still the god-stat, some characters or skills or weapon types are just flat out better than their competitors, and there's a bunch of places where either alternate quest solutions were hinted at but not implemented, or where I managed to break the quest triggers somehow. That aside, InXile have clearly learned some things about polish and design since the Black Isle days, and it doesn't have any issues as egregious as, say, Fallout 1's endgame armour where every attack (depending on crit table rolls) either did nothing at all or instantly killed the target. It's also -- like the Black Isle and, more recently, Obsidian RPGs that I love -- very hard to optimize, plotwise. There's relatively few places where one option is Just Better, and when there is that option, getting to it is often hard (and easily screwed up). A lot of the time your choices are just unpalatable in different ways -- see, for example, Hollywood, or Titan Canyon. As always, I don't really have a lot to say about games I really liked. Did you like Fallout? Play WL2, it owns. It's even making me want to try WL1 again, although I'll probably just look for an LP because I just can't deal with the WL1 interface. Beaten: Hack'n'Slash (laptop game) My wife had gotten to the endgame and wanted to compare notes, so I fired it up and burned through it in an afternoon. Bromide described it as "lovely concept, unforgivably janky execution" and that sums it up pretty well, I think. As an idea, I love the game to death, but it needed a few more rounds of work, some of it at the design level. It's not too bad when you're just fiddling with globals (although seriously, consolidate all of those into one inventory item please), but once you gain access to game code it's both super cool and really annoying. The UI for getting at the code is slow (especially the Library), the actual code is presented using some kind of custom lua disassembly prettyprinter that manages to be less readable than either lua source code or the output of the reference disassembler (luac -l) and entirely omits important information like the scope of if blocks, and editing any sort of large function is slow and kind of unstable. And there are some weird bugs, like the Death Clock crashing the game because it couldn't find the global "error" function rather than crashing the game with the message it was programmed to. That one started working again after restarting the game, but why did it happen in the first place? Who knows? That said, I didn't encounter any of the "unstated assumptions" he complained about. The one he specifically calls out -- the fact that the front door has to be opened to exactly 350 units, no more, no less -- is evident from looking at the code, once you figure out how to read its unforgivably terrible rendering of the source. In short, I actually really enjoyed the game, but there's enough wrong with it that it's hard to recommend. I would like to see the same concept done by a more competent team. Now Playing: Not sure. Nothing in X really appeals at the moment, so I may skip to Z and try out Zigfrak. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 06:53
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I like to believe Wasteland 2 is what Van Buren would've ended up but Black Isle was already a shell of its former self at that point so probably not.
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Jan 24, 2015 08:19
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ToxicFrog posted:That said, I didn't encounter any of the "unstated assumptions" he complained about. The one he specifically calls out -- the fact that the front door has to be opened to exactly 350 units, no more, no less -- is evident from looking at the code, once you figure out how to read its unforgivably terrible rendering of the source. I hadn't grasped that I was supposed to defeat the electric field - I had interpreted it as meaning broken editing interface, which in turn meant I had only deduced that the door would stop autoclosing past 349. I reversed the direction so that they'd just keep going. This was also hilarious because I made it to the library without being able to read beyond doing the substitution cipher myself - you only really needed it once before that, and I solved it the way I solved the similar puzzle in La-Mulana. The assumption was clearly that you shouldn't have been able to get past the Warden without that ability, but, well, the game is meant to be broken in half, and in this case I had already broken it in half by accident.
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Jan 24, 2015 08:23
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Nulled: Xenus II: White Gold [7] (aka White Gold: War in Paradise) It's kind of like a janky eastern european mashup of Morrowind and STALKER, which sounds great on paper, but it's not nearly as good as either of those. It has a certain charm, but mostly all it did was make me want to replay both of those games. Nulled: Zigfrak [7] Another "neat concept terrible execution" game. The combat has no real weight to it, but its main sin is that it is so visually noisy that in any fight you can't even make out the HUD indicators. This, in turn, makes any sort of strategy beyond "target an enemy, hold down 'fire all weapons' until enemy is dead" impossible. The X series may not have the same sort of fast-paced lootfest appeal but those at least you can interact with. Nulled: Act of War: High Treason [7] I really enjoyed the original Act of War, but when it came out the expandalone was way too crashy for me to make any progress in it, and these days RTSes have to be much better to hold my interest. Nulled: Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic [8] I may still noodle around with it from time to time -- I do enjoy it -- but I don't have any realistic expectation of ever finishing it. Beaten: Cloudbuilt: Through the Fog A quick detour to play the new Cloudbuilt DLC. It's more levels, and levels without enemies, which are the best kind of levels. My earlier complaints about wonky wallclimbing controls and limited lives being a terrible fun-vampire mechanic still stand, though. Now Playing: Avencast: Rise of the Mage Picked this up aaaaaaaages ago, played it for a few hours and then got distracted. I'm going to give it another try. ManxomeBromide posted:I hadn't grasped that I was supposed to defeat the electric field - I had interpreted it as meaning broken editing interface, which in turn meant I had only deduced that the door would stop autoclosing past 349. I reversed the direction so that they'd just keep going. This was also hilarious because I made it to the library without being able to read beyond doing the substitution cipher myself - you only really needed it once before that, and I solved it the way I solved the similar puzzle in La-Mulana. The assumption was clearly that you shouldn't have been able to get past the Warden without that ability, but, well, the game is meant to be broken in half, and in this case I had already broken it in half by accident. Concerning the substitution cipher, something that I would have missed had symbol not pointed it out to me is that, after activating the letter grid, you can then go back and examine the glyph grid again to automatically translate all of the symbols throughout the game. By that point you've probably already solved the cipher "by hand", but it's nice not to have to. That and the fact that you have an inventory screen are probably the two things that most badly needed to be clued better.
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Jan 24, 2015 22:11
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It's been two months since my last update and I managed to get through a good chunk of my backlog. Beat: King's Bounty: Armored Princess A really fun game in the style of Heroes of Might and Magic, I picked a mage as my class and it did turn the game in an i-win scenario by the time the endgame rolled around. Still it was a very charming game, with enough RNG to keep it interesting but mostly free of frustration. The writing wasn't too spectacular but entertaining enough. Beat: Saints Row IV Looking back at SR3 wasn't that great, it was fun sure but missed a lot of the charm SR2 had. The gameplay itself was smoother though in SR3, and I feel that while the feeling of grounding is completely gone in SR4 this is for the better. A very fun and funny game until the end, it's total nonsense in the best way. A return to more standard open world action or even weirder options in the true SR5 are both exciting prospects. Beat: Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed A very fun, and good looking kart/party racing game. I count it as beat because I unlocked all cups and beat all events on. Most to gold or S-rank. I am keeping it installed for playing with friends online. Completed: Assassin's Creed II If you know me by now I have an unhealthy track record with getting 100% sync in AC games, I finally cracked down on those last feathers and now have 100% sync in all the AC games up to Unity. Beat: Back to the Future: Ep 2 - Get Tannen!, Ep 3 - Citizen Brown, Ep 4 - Double Visions, Ep 5 - OUTATIME! I am a giant fan of this movie franchise, with 1 and 3 being my favorites. and It's weird I put off beating the rest of these games so long after playing episode 1 quite close to release. The writing in episode 1, 3 and most of 5 was the best. With episode 4 feeling the most unneeded out of the bunch. The gameplay is standard 3d point and click adventure but they really captured the atmosphere and the game is a treat to fans of the BTTF franchise. Beat: Borderlands 2 - Mr. Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage & Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt [DLC] With this I have finished all content in Borderlands 2 outside most raid bosses once, Hammerlock was buggy for me with regards to mission flagging, but decent-if-by the numbers.  Mr Torque is probably the most entertaining character in BL2. While I found the humor in BL2 very hit or miss he and his appearances where the type of over the top crazyness I do appriciate.Beat: System Shock 2 A classic, I never really beat it in the old days. I played it unmodded and it's showing its age for sure, but that was to be expected. While I find the pure run-and-gun in most modern games, the depth and atmosphere are still impressive, especially for it's time. Beat & Completed: Scribblenauts Unlimited A fun game, though a bit simplistic. But it entertained for a good 7-8 hours after beating all levels and dicking around a bit. Getting the last achievements to satisfy my OCD added another hour or so. Beat: Max Payne 3 I love Max Payne 2 and was always a bit wary of this game due to it being polarizing at release. When I played it myself I found a stupidly well optimized PC version with excellent and meaty gunplay. Max controls how you would expect for a man of his age bodywise, but I did not mind this relative sluggyness. And while I personally miss bullettime-reloads and don't feel the need for the giant setpieces it was a very fun campaign. The Story captured the atmosphere well enough at the start, and in the end was able to grant Max well earned rest, but you can feel remedy wasn't writing this one. The major downside, and one of very few issues I had with the game, is the unskippable and long cutscenes when you just want to replay a level. That got tiring fast. Beat: Binary Domain A pretty by the numbers 3rd person cover shooter, elevated to something more by a clean artstyle, entertaining banter and a good concept for character interactions. The plot kept me interested, though I really feel they could avoid 95% of the issue by investing in metal detectors. It's a game that was fun and good, but rough, on it's own and would shine in the sequel well never get. I wrote a more lengthy review here: http://steamcommunity.com/id/ZeddNL/recommended/203750/ Beat: Sonic Generations The first sonic game I played to the end, and the first experience with 3D sonic in general. I can see how this is a series that can be excellent, and I did enjoy half the levels. I just got too frustrated with the florty controls/jumping at lower speeds and some of the maps to say I liked the overall experience very much. Very nice and colorful though. Beat : Rock of Ages Monthy Python-esque humor in presentation with a fun gameplay concept. It's entertaining for the campaign, but lacks true effective defenses and can be annoying at times. Pick this one up on a deep sale and see if you like it. Beat : The Tiny Bang Story A short (3h) hidden object game with a very charming artstyle. even for these types of games the puzzles where easy. I do feel like it's worth your time though just because it's so charming and doesn't overstay its welcome. Beat: The Blackwell Legacy I own the first four games of this series and I liked this one, I played the the "5 years later" dev commentary and seeing how the developer is aware of the sometimes rough edges of his first entry I expect the other ones to be even better. New Games I didn't buy myself any games because I was trying to beat my backlog, but return-gifting and general kindness made me add these: - Half Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax Ultimate Boy - Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition - Tomb Raider (2013) - Cook, Serve, Delicious! - Analogue: A Hate Story - The Stanley Parable - The Longest Journey All in all I am getting through my backlog at a steady pace, and I am enjoying the process. Zedd fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Jan 25, 2015 |
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Jan 25, 2015 00:11
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Zedd posted:Completed: Assassin's Creed II 
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Jan 25, 2015 00:33
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Finished a couple games today. Beat: Trine One of my longest-owned Steam games, finally got around to finishing it. The core gameplay mechanics (switching) was kind of cool but I felt like the Rogue was so useful and versatile that I played as her probably more than half the time. Didn't blow me away and was simplistic at times but was pretty fun and didn't drag much. Beat: Shovel Knight Great game. Really nice presentation, well crafted characters and dialogue, solid platforming. A little on the short side but I enjoyed just about the whole game, besides a few of the harder parts/a little bit of the recycled content near the end.
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Jan 25, 2015 07:28
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Nulled: Boson X Looks allright, plays decent, but my backlogs too long for this and Runner 2 is in the same vein, only better. Complete: Hexcells Plus Took me ages to perfect this, as the blue number cells really threw me off. Now to wait for the next sale to grab Infinite 
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Jan 25, 2015 07:52
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I was moving along in my backlog, getting further and further in Risk of Rain, Batman Arkham Asylum, and Shovel Knight, but then I went and got Resident Evil 4, now on the fourth platform I've owned (GC, Wii, 360,and now PC). It's either telling of the game's quality or my lack of gaming sanity that I'm once again fully-entrenched in Leon's plight. The Commando/Bruce Wayne/Shovel Knight can go to hell for the time being (but not really, I quite enjoy all of those games  )
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Jan 26, 2015 01:10
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Nulled: Avencast: Rise of the Mage [9] It's fun in small doses but gets repetitive and boring pretty fast. Nulled: Bridge It Plus [9] I can't even finish Medium. On the other hand, the first few Hard bridges are trivial. This characterizes the entire game for me: puzzles are either too simple to be fun or too hard for me to solve. Now Playing: Shovel Knight (laptop game) I was debating between SpaceChem and Shovel Knight, and my wife voted for the former. This was a good vote! I've only finished one level so far but it's really fun. And I have to say I'm kind of intimidated by SpaceChem these days, I've made zero progress since finishing Don't Fear The Reaper.  Now Playing: ??? Options are Escape from Butcher Bay, Cortex Command, or Contraption Maker.
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Jan 26, 2015 03:15
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BEATEN: Again - Campy as gently caress supernatural thriller for NDS by the creators of Hotel Dusk. No real puzzles in this game so much as finding the areas that are different between past and present and recreating the scenes. The actual fun is in the goofy terrible story and the hammy rotoscoped live actors. BEATEN: Words for Evil - another Bookworm RPG, but this one was short and simple and didn't overstay its welcome. Cleared it in about 2 hours. BEATEN: Gunblade NY - gently caress yeaaaaaaaaahhhh BEATEN: LA Machineguns - So I never played the sequel to Gunblade, it looks better because it went from Sega Model 2 to Sega Model 3, the nice thing about both games is that the Wii remote controls really well with them (this is a Wii port I'm describing) and is more accurate than the actual gun from the cabinet, which was huge and unwieldy and had all sorts of re-coil (THE RECOIL WAS AWESOME THOUGH ALRIGHT). POSSIBLY NULLED: Wrack - Ugh it sucks, I didn't want it to suck but it does POSSIBLY NULLED: Volgarr the Viking - I just can't do this kind of game. Especially because there's no saving the game. It has to be completed in one sitting. It's not for me. STARTED: Call of Cthulhu - So I'm having fun but every time the game loses priority it crashes, which is annoying when I have any kind of notifications. STARTED: DARK - Don't get me wrong, it's a bad game, but I enjoy stealth games that get broken with superpowers, so I will probably play through it. STARTED: MIND: Path to Thalamus - Much like Master Reboot I'm disappointed that the actual presentation feels a little more low budget than I was expecting based on the store page, but it's alright so far. Nothing special though. STARTED: Legend of Mana (PS1) - The best that I can describe this is a clunky but non-linear quest-based side-scrolling brawler RPG by the Saga team. It's funky. ADDED: The Joylancer, The Detail, Silence of the Sleep, May's Mysteries, Punch-Out! (Wii), Metal Dead, Valkyria Chronicles
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Jan 26, 2015 10:25
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Quest For Glory II posted:POSSIBLY NULLED: Volgarr the Viking - I just can't do this kind of game. Especially because there's no saving the game. It has to be completed in one sitting. It's not for me. This is not, strictly speaking, true. But it doesn't admit it. (Be sure to read the manual!) It's still not really a Backlog game because it's hard as balls and gives no shits about making things convenient for you. It's clever, but I nulled it long ago. Maybe I'll have actual progress to report again before the month is out, but I don't yet.
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Jan 26, 2015 10:49
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ToxicFrog posted:Options are Escape from Butcher Bay, Cortex Command, or Contraption Maker. I'm voting Butcher Bay, it owns. Also Volgarr Pro Tip: go left 
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Jan 26, 2015 23:12
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Beat - Spud's Quest: I had Kickstarted this game because I liked it for what it was - a Dizzy clone. I got exactly what I expected, and I enjoyed it. Much like Dizzy, there were some nitpicks (limited inventory, back-tracking, semi-convoluted uses of items, etc.). However, there were slight improvements to the formula to lessen those annoyances. Overall, a good game if you like Dizzy. On a side note: I don't think this game really sold too well. I beat the game with 98% in just over 6 hrs, which put me at #30 on the leader boards, which is really high for my general mediocrity at video gaming. In any case, it was nice seeing my name on a leader board system that only showed the top 50 players - made me feel a bit of accomplishment.  
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Jan 27, 2015 04:40
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Yodzilla posted:I'm voting Butcher Bay, it owns. I ended up playing a complete campaign of Cortex Command in less time than it took to download Butcher Bay. Beaten: Cortex Command This took 11 years? Really? I could actually see it being a lot of fun in multiplayer, but it only supports local multiplayer so gently caress that. Now Playing: Deadcore
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Jan 27, 2015 04:43
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I've been going through a whole mess of titles, I might as well post about them I guess. Beaten: Half-Life (PC) I don't have any nostalgic value for Half-Life 1, I never played it when it actually released, but honestly I think it holds up pretty well. I love the atmosphere and the gameplay is still a lot of fun. (gently caress xen though) That said... Replay-Nulled: Half-Life: Blue Shift/Opposing Force (PC) First time through, I liked them well enough. This time though they just felt... I dunno, too mod-like? That and the level design actually feels a lot worse than in the original game. They also didn't really capture the same atmosphere and while Opposing Force did add some neat stuff, both it and Blue Shift ultimately just didn't feel as fun. Now Playing: Mega Man X2 (SNES) Mega Man X1 was pretty friggin' great, but while X2 is about equal in a lot of ways, I'm not a huge fan of the X-Hunters so far. Now Replaying: Half-Life 2 (PC) More than half of the way through. Similar to Half-Life 1, I first played through the entirety of this around like, 2009, and I think it still holds up very well today, probably even better than the first one. (It's even better when you're playing it on a PC and not the half-assed PS3 Orange Box port.  ) The one thing I find especially impressive about this is the environmental design, the graphics are aged but it's easy to forget that with how awesome and, dare I say, cinematic all the environments look.Now Playing: Brave Fencer Musashi (PS1) Decided to give this a look and was pleasantly surprised. It's got fun writing and really fun dungeon crawley adventurey gameplay. I'm gonna give Musashi: Samurai Legend a try after I beat this, though I fear that one won't be as good as it's own intro. No, seriously, just watch the intro to Musashi: Samurai Legend. It is way too awesomely animated for what looks like an actually fairly mediocre game. Now Playing: The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (PC) I burned myself out trying to play too many JRPGs recently, but I'm sticking with this in small doses. The combat system is aight, but the soundtrack and the writing are loving awesome. I think Estelle might have beaten out Vyse from Skies of Arcadia as my favorite JRPG protagonist, the cast of characters in general all have a surprisingly huge amount of personality. Highly recommend this to just about anyone. Now Replaying: Mega Man Legends (PS1) This game has so much goddamn charm and I still love it, but I really do wish the combat didn't inevitably boil down to side strafing everything. Still, forgiven because it is passable and the visual style is awesome and the voice acting is amazing. Upcoming: Gurumin (PC) Goddammit Mastiff I've been waiting months for you to release this on Steam and I recently found the soundtrack and I can't stop listening to it and the visual style looks awesome and this game looks fun and just release it already you lazy bastards!!!  On Hiatus: Persona 3 FES, Viewtiful Joe, Tales of Symphonia As stated, I got kinda burned out on JRPGs so Persona 3 and Tales of Symphonia are two I've still got enough interest in to maybe pick up again later. Viewtiful Joe, though, I just hit a difficult level and got a bit frustrated. I'll pick up where I left off on it later though, definitely, VJ is a perfect example of making a really fantastic, satisfying action game with relatively simple mechanics.
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Jan 27, 2015 08:12
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I finally feel like playing games again and kicked some asses I've been neglecting for way too long. Feels so drat good to be in the groove again. Beaten: Pikmin 3 Such a beautiful game. The character dialog was just charming enough, but the constant delight was the scenery, the wildlife's animation and design, those uniquely tense moments that only this series can deliver (that whole final sequence...good lord.)...I can't believe I got this day of release, played 2 hours, and let it fall to the wayside. The Pikmin games get a healthy amount of love online but I think they deserve even more. I feel like this is one of the few first-party Wii U titles some might skip. If you have, please give it a look. Beaten: Pokemon Alpha Sapphire Yet another "Bought Day 1, played 2 hours and put aside" game. Depression blows. But this game doesn't. My least favorite pair of games were always Diamond & Pearl (I'll try Platinum someday), next in line was Ruby & Sapphire. I could never really pin it down, but I was never quite a fan of FireRed & LeafGreen either. I think something in the GBA Pokemon aesthetic just never quite felt "right" to me, but there's no way I'll ever be able to explain that. Enter a remake in the Gen 6 engine. I was definitely not excited but decided to give them a fair chance, seeing as I collect Pokemon games anyways. Played it again on a whim the other weekend and have put 26 hours into it since. The game struck the right chord with me. Hoenn looks great in the Gen 6 engine, the sound font is just good enough for my tastes (though I've been spoiled by live performances from the anime for ages), Archie is very well written for a Pokemon villain...I dunno. Everything was batting perfectly, it just won me over. Episode Delta was even better. I'm meandering in my sentences now and it's probably tough to read. But even if you didn't care for Gen 3, ORAS deserves a chance. So charming. Beaten: Little Inferno (Wii U): This definitely seemed to start out as commentary on "Freemium" games, then by the end became something completely different that I won't spoil for those who haven't played it. I got it on sale with the last of my $5 eShop credits and felt that was a fair price for the game, as opposed to its regular $10. I don't want to play it again but it has a nice charm, and is maaaaaybe a little long in the tooth but that gameplay shift makes up for it solely for making it interesting enough to pay attention to again. Cute little game that gives you enough story to speculate over, if that's your kind of thing! New Game: Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze The last thing I needed was to buy more games to add to the backlog...but Walmart had it for $35 and seeing as how rarely big Nintendo titles drop in price I couldn't pass it up. I've played a couple levels, seems very in line with DKCR so far which is good. It's more charming, excited to dig into this one soon. Now Playing: The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD Cue another entry in the "I couldn't wait to get it, then I got it, then I didn't finish it" pile. Got 20 hours in when I last played it, was right before the Earth and Wind Temples. I've cleared those now, they're much easier than I remember them being as a kid. Will be jumping into the Triforce Quest soon. Curious to see how much better it is than the GC version, no spoilers please (I've heard it's better but not too much better)! I've also been rotating through Hyrule Warriors and Smash U sporadically for months. They're fantastic for zoning out right after coming home from work. Been playing Shining Force: Sword of Hajya or whatever on my 3DS at lunch breaks to fill the Pokemon void. I'm enjoying it well enough so far, I'm a few battles in. After this I should hit up Shining Force II finally. I've played the first SF many many times. Video games.
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Jan 27, 2015 10:00
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The Colonel posted:Now Playing: Brave Fencer Musashi (PS1) This is the game where one of the early enemies is a rich man whose "attacks" are begging for his life and giving you money not to attack him, right? I never played the game (just watched my brother), but that's stuck with me for 15ish years now.
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Jan 27, 2015 19:48
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Nulled: Deadcore It looks like there's a pretty cool story in there somewhere! Unfortunately, I'm not good enough to even clear all the levels, let alone find all the logs (most of which are hidden, often quite fiendishly). And the process of getting that good will be more frustrating than enjoyable, I think. Now Playing: Defence Grid 2 First impressions: still good, but the dialogue is a lot more annoying and it looks like they've entirely removed a mechanic I rather liked (earning (cores)% interest on stockpiled resources)
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Jan 28, 2015 00:44
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Mad Jaqk posted:This is the game where one of the early enemies is a rich man whose "attacks" are begging for his life and giving you money not to attack him, right? I never played the game (just watched my brother), but that's stuck with me for 15ish years now. It's also the game with a simulated action figure economy. Each chapter includes exclusive figures at the toy store. You can either open them up and play with them but ruin their value or wait until the end of the game when they sell fr shittons of money. BFM is one of Square's weirdest games. The loving sequel is a better game but it's dull as hell. Maybe they were trying to play it safe but holy poo poo I can't remember a more disappointing sequel to a game. Even Invisible War at least followed in the spirit of Deus Ex.
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Jan 28, 2015 01:24
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The Colonel posted:Now Playing: The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (PC) Have you ever played Grandia or Grandia 2? The main characters and light-hearteness in Trails in the Sky remind me of those two games.
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Jan 28, 2015 10:46
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Bought and Beaten: This War of Mine Holy poo poo. This is the game Cart Life wishes it was. I'd even go so far as to say that TWoM dethrones Papers, Please as the king of "games that make me feel emotions about war/society/the suffering of eastern European people in imaginary analogues to historical situations". How do I describe This War of Mine? TWoM is based, loosely, on the Siege of Sarajevo, and goes in with a focus on showing the civilian side of war. It's a game that makes you do terrible things in order to survive, and then successfully impresses upon you just how horrible those things were. It is a game where you will rob an old couple of all the food and medicine they own because the alternative is starving to death yourself. It is a game where you will feel guilty about taking from the defenseless, so instead, you do the honorable thing and sneak into the base of some bandits to steal their poo poo instead. And it is a game where while doing that, you will get caught and uncompromisingly shot to death. I really cannot overstate how well this game conveys the themes it's carrying. As an interactive experience, something that was supposed to make me walk away with some kind of moral or lesson, it's unparalleled. It's like someone managed to take the emotional weight of the nuke scene from Call of Duty 4 and stretch it out over several hours. But how is it as a game? It's good. The production values are very nice, the controls are (relatively) intuitive, and the art style let them get away with a lot of corner cutting without you noticing much at all. The difficulty is hard to quantify, partially because you sort of choose your own difficulty, depending on how upstanding or how much of a dick you're willing to be. There are a lot of options for how to develop your home/base, with the end goal of some kind of self-sustainability, whether that be food, alcohol, cigarettes, medicine, or just being the best-armed motherfuckers in the city. However. It is a very short game, about five hours in length, more or less, assuming you don't game-over. (Oh, yes, there's permadeath. Forgot to mention that.) But it's not just in campaign length. There's some variation between playthroughs, different characters with different strengths, weaknesses, and stories to tell. (Bruno: Great at cooking and making moonshine. Significantly less great at consoling grieving people.) But once you find a solid strategy that works for you, and start to learn to step around the game's gotchas and traps, all the difficulty gets sucked out of the game. You can extend this by using different characters and trying out different strategies, but even that only does so much. It's a game you can only experience once, and one where looking up spoilers or survival tips significantly softens the impact of what the game is trying to show you. Final Verdict? If you already have it sitting in your Steam Library, you can knock it out pretty quickly and will definitely enjoy it. If you're looking for something else to scratch the itch that Papers, Please or The Walking Dead Game left, you could do a lot worse than This War of Mine... but it's probably not worth the $20 asking price without some kind of Steam Sale. Still, if you do see it on sale, or have it, it's a nice little experience, and you can help support a dev who responded to their game being pirated by handing out legitimate CD keys and telling people to tell their friends about the game.
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Jan 30, 2015 08:47
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BEATEN: Year Walk - The jump scares were pointless and dumb but it was otherwise an interesting walking sim. I appreciated the... uh.. new game plus? Probably not really by definition but there was one final thing for you to do after beating the game. BEATEN: Hector Badge of Carnage (Ep 2) - Not the worst Telltale series but not the best either, it tries way way way way way way way too hard to be edgy. BEATEN: Vertical Drop Heroes - I beat the final boss multiple times but he kept reviving, I guess I was supposed to do it X number of times but I don't care, that's beaten in my book. There's an addictiveness comparative to most timer-based iOS games, but like those games, I can't actually vouch for the quality of this game. It's probably a bad game. There's something about this type of game design where you can make a mediocre game and have it still be addictive, just by having persistence and warps and upgrades. BEATEN: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth - Despite it crashing a billion times, this was a rad game with a silly story. I liked the ability to examine everything like an adventure game even though it was largely just a first person shooter with clunky animations. The nice thing was no real fear of ammo conservation, as long as you pay attention you'll always have plenty of ammo, so it just comes down to medkit conservation since your injuries are treated in meticulous fashion (severity of injury to body part could require different treatment, for example, from bandage to suture to antibiotic to splint, all consumable resources).
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Jan 30, 2015 09:25
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saucerman posted:Have you ever played Grandia or Grandia 2? The main characters and light-hearteness in Trails in the Sky remind me of those two games. Yeah, actually, I played about ten hours into Grandia 1 a while back and I really loved it! I really need to pick it back up at some point, that and Skies of Arcadia. I mentioned Vyse being one of my favorite JRPG protagonists, but I didn't mention that I got stuck at the fight in SoA immediately after the red giga and still haven't taken the time to get through it.
The Colonel fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Jan 30, 2015 |
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Jan 30, 2015 09:38
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Why is it 2015 and I still have to install Java and run a command line tool then copy paste to import a steam games list into a website focused on steam games. Isn't there an API to magically make this happen? I have 27 websites that will shame me about how much I've spent on steam! Anyway those websites say I have now officially bought twice as many games as I've played, so I'm joining this thread.
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Jan 30, 2015 16:05
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rypakal posted:Why is it 2015 and I still have to install Java and run a command line tool then copy paste to import a steam games list into a website focused on steam games. Isn't there an API to magically make this happen? I have 27 websites that will shame me about how much I've spent on steam! Because Backloggery has no official API or import tool and I hate writing GUIs. If you want to whip up something using Seesaw I do accept patches.  (Writing a GUI for bltool is actually on my to-do list, but it's pretty far down the list.)
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Jan 30, 2015 17:17
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rypakal posted:Why is it 2015 and I still have to install Java and run a command line tool then copy paste to import a steam games list into a website focused on steam games. Isn't there an API to magically make this happen? I have 27 websites that will shame me about how much I've spent on steam!
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Jan 30, 2015 19:53
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BEATEN Infamous: First Light - meh. It played well and looked nice but I really didn't like any of the characters and the city really isn't anything interesting. Here's hoping Infamous: Second Son has a lot more to it than this because the first two games were really drat good. BEATEN (i guess) The Blue Flamingo - meh. I like the idea of a shmup made entirely out of filming miniatures and the backgrounds are pretty nice but as far as I can tell this game has one ship, two weapons, no difficulty settings, two levels, and a handful of enemies that just repeats over and over again. You can never regain health so you just play until you die and that's it. I want to like it but it needs a LOT more. Hell even some sort of scoring system other than "you shot a thing" would be helpful.
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Jan 31, 2015 05:11
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BEATEN: Darksiders. I can't say it really does anything wrong, but except for mounted combat every time I was doing a thing I found myself wishing I were playing one of the other games that did it better. They were, at least, different other games depending on where I was, and as far as Zelda-style puzzle temples go I'm willing to say they're the best I've played on the PC. REPLAY COMPLETE: Sonic the Hedgehog. It's not as much fun as 2 or 3 or &Knuckles. It gets a lot of stuff subtly wrong. But playing through it and making notes of the annoying parts was actually pretty instructive. I don't claim to be a very good level designer, but I'm a better one than I was before I did this replay. "NEW" GAME/REPLAY ON DECK: Grim Fandango. I don't think I've played this since the 90s. The remastering is a fine excuse to revisit. INCOMING: Sunless Sea. Leaves Early Access next Friday, aaaaaaaaaa. Keeping to short stuff in the meantime.
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Jan 31, 2015 06:17
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BEATEN: Super Paper Mario - Came back to this one to finish it. It's a bad paper mario game but a very fun quirky platformer. Tons of personality, interesting NPC chatter, varied gags (dating sim world, "aftergame" hell world). It's just not an RPG in the slightest, other than you having an attack stat, HP stat, and "levels" (which is measured in your score rather than experience points for some reason??) BEATEN: Jake Hunter - Cheesy detective visual novel. Nothing noteworthy about this one, it was cheap. BEATEN: Doc Louis' Punch-Out! - I probably shouldn't have done this before playing actual Punch-Out because the difficulty curve spikes really quickly with Doc, but eventually I got the hang of the timing, learned how to get a couple of stars, and beat him on every difficulty. NULLED/BEATEN: Doorways - This game sucks. I don't know how far I was in but it's not a very long game (2 hours max?) so I marked it as beaten in SteamCompletionist. I knew it would be bad but I didn't realize it would be so REPETITIVE. Fun bad this isn't. BEATEN: The Last Door - As always, the jump scares aren't necessary as it's exceptionally creepy already, but this is a quality super-low-res adventure game. The big problem is that it doesn't explain much and ends on a cliffhanger for "season 2", and who knows when that will be finished (the website is still showing Season 2 Episode 1 at the moment). ADDED: Metroid Prime Trilogy, Kid Icarus: Uprising BACKLOG TRACKER Steam: 272 Beaten (50.5%), 102 Played (18.9%), 30 Unplayed (5.6%), 131 Blacklisted (24.3%) GOG: 1 Beaten, 7 Unbeaten UPlay: 0 Beaten, 4 Unbeaten PS1: 3 Beaten, 8 Unbeaten PS2: 1 Beaten, 8 Unbeaten PS3: 5 Beaten, 2 Unbeaten NDS: 3 Beaten, 3 Unbeaten 3DS: 2 Beaten, 6 Unbeaten WII: 3 Beaten, 10 Unbeaten 360: 1 Unplayed VITA/PSP: 4 Unplayed The 7th Guest fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Feb 5, 2015 |
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Feb 5, 2015 11:09
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