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Fart of Presto posted:
Is this actually Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, or did Thi4f also have intra-level loading screens and lovely "open world" intermissions? Thief: The Dark Project had neither.
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Dec 15, 2015 14:12
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ToxicFrog posted:Is this actually Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, or did Thi4f also have intra-level loading screens and lovely "open world" intermissions? Thief: The Dark Project had neither. It's the latest one, and on Steam it's just labelled as Thief, but I guess it's Thi4f 
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Dec 15, 2015 19:31
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Fart of Presto posted:It's the latest one, and on Steam it's just labelled as Thief, but I guess it's Thi4f People call it that just cause that's the name they originally unveiled it with.
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Dec 15, 2015 19:36
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ToxicFrog posted:Is this actually Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, or did Thi4f also have intra-level loading screens and lovely "open world" intermissions? Thief: The Dark Project had neither. General consensus is that Thief 3 is now an underrated gem. There was also a patch/mod recently released that does away with the intra-level loading screens. Deus Ex: Invisible War remains lovely though. Thi4f practically laughs at you for liking the previous games. edit: I only said that because people shat on Thief 3 during its release the way Thi4f is being shat on now. SolidSnakesBandana fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Dec 15, 2015 |
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Dec 15, 2015 23:09
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Thief 3 was never a bad game, it was just never as well-designed as the first two. It's a better sequel than Invisible War, because it never quite takes the same big dive that game did into becoming a poorly designed piece of crap.
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Dec 15, 2015 23:13
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Just want to say this thread is helping me a fair bit  I realized I had 900 games (including family shares) and was spending more time looking for sales than playing them. So Ive reorganized my game lists into categories (gf, roommate, roommate, me) along with beaten games. My long term game is XCOM (long war mod), which I've almost beaten. I've also just beaten Gunpoint, with my next install being Escape Goat
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Dec 17, 2015 04:46
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B-Mac posted:Nulled: Brothers, Tale of Two Sons. I'm pretty sure Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is only like 3 hours long? Less than 5 for sure. Please go back and finish it because the ending is full of literally the most feels ever, and you like the game for all the best reasons to play the ending. SERIOUSLY tldr: play the end.
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Dec 18, 2015 04:28
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BEATEN: Life is Strange - if max isn't supposed to use her time powers then why was she given them in the first place??? why do episodic games always write themselves into a hole they can't climb out of??? so far no episodic game other than The Devil's Playhouse has felt no more than 4.5 episodes strong. They never QUITE get there. BEATEN: Tales From the Borderlands - The humor is still not very funny but the story is fun. I could have used 80% less Vaughn in the story, just in general. Also I love the sequel-bait that happens in literally the final 2 seconds of the story. BEATEN: Monument Valley - Short Escher-themed puzzle game. A lot better than The Bridge. BEATEN: Device6 - Cool interactive fiction for iOS, very slickly designed. The 7th Guest fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Dec 21, 2015 |
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Dec 20, 2015 21:11
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Well this year is over and Ive beaten a bunch of games. More than usual for sure. My list: A Story About My Uncle Alien Rage Alien: Isolation Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs And Yet it Moves Back to the Future: The Game Bloodborne Bob Came in Pieces Broforce Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 Cinders Citizens of Earth Cubemen Cut The Rope Experiments Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin Dead Island Riptide Defense Grid 2 Donkey Kong Country Returns Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist Dragon Fin Soup Ducktales: Remastered Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition Dust: An Elysian Tail Escape Goat Farcry 4 Foul Play Freedom Planet God of War: Ghost of Sparta Grow Home Guild of Dungeoneering Halo 4 Hammerwatch Helldivers Infamous Second Son: First Light Injustice: Gods Among Us Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet Jazzpunk Killer is Dead Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey Lost Planet 3 Luxor 3 Magicka 2 Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker HD Murdered: Soul Suspect Never Alone New Super Mario Brothers Wii NOX Oddworld Stranger's Wrath HD Organ Trail Ori and the Blind Forest Outland Outlast PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate Platformines Polarity Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad Rogue Legacy Saints Row 4: Gat out of Hell Shoot Many Robots Shovel Knight Stacking Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm Steamworld Dig Strider Styx: Master of Shadows Super Mario 3D Land Super Mario Galaxy 2 Super Time Force Ultra Tales from the Borderlands Tearaway The Bard's Tale The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II The Marvellous Miss Take The Novelist The Stanley Parable The Swapper The Walking Dead: Season 2 They Bleed Pixels Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers Tower of Guns Toy Soldiers: Complete Transistor Trine 2 Valiant Hearts: The Great War Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Wolfenstein: The Old Blood Xeodrifter Zeno Clash Ziggurat STAR WARS: Jedi Knight - Mysteries of the Sith Total: 94 Also Played: Fallout 4 Elder Scrolls Online Playing Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy strategery fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Dec 29, 2015 |
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Dec 24, 2015 19:01
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ROAP TRIP TIME NULLED: Xeodrifter - Just like Metroid except boring and tedious and not interesting in any way whatsoever. NULLED: Rocketbirds: Hard Boiled Chicken - The art is great and I like what it's going for but the humor falls completely flat and the gameplay isn't very interesting whatsoever. Controls on foot are slow and clunky like Prince of Persia for no good reason because it should be a shooter like Metal Slug. Very much feels like a game conceited in the west and then farmed out overseas which is apparently exactly what happened. 0/2 on Vita games today, maybe Gravity Rush will be better??
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Dec 27, 2015 00:54
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Wow, I've actually got a few updates backlogged. Nulled: Card City Nights This was my laptop game for a while, but I find myself with no desire whatsoever to return to it. Beaten: DLC Quest Nulled: DLC Quest: Live Freemium or Die The joke is funny for a bit, and the game is very short. I highly recommend buying both the horse armour and true ending DLC, too. LFoD is a bit more of a game than the original, but not enough to actually be worth playing once the joke stops being funny. Nulled: Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows I'm probably still going to open it up and play a level or two now and then, but the game is very...flat, for lack of a better word? After the first 20-30 levels you've seen basically all the mechanics in play and there are still a great many more levels to play. I much prefer the Defence Grid approach of having a smaller number of longer, more difficult levels where each one shows you something new. Nulled: Super House of Dead Ninjas I'm enjoying it, but I'm not enjoying it enough to put in the practice needed to advance further rather than playing something else. Definitely worth a look if you like platformer roguelites, though; my only prior points of reference are Spelunky and Rogue Legacy and I enjoyed this more than either. Nulled: Transcendence: Stars of the Pilgrim The original top-down spaceship roguelite! I remember playing it back when it was an unfinished freeware game. Now it's post-1.0 and has one free campaign (Stars of the Pilgrim) and two commercial ones (Corporate Command and Eternity Port). The big problem is that the mid/late game are stupid tedious. There's not a lot of variety in missions to begin with, and the stations that give you missions are extremely rare, perhaps one every 3 or 4 systems, so in practice, most systems give you nothing to do except jump in, knock over all the enemy stations, and sell the loot (which probably involves backtracking several jumps, since most of what you find is only purchased by a tiny handful of stations throughout the game). At the same time, you can't afford to just ignore all the enemies and run for the gate, because then enemy power levels will outpace your equipment -- but actual equipment upgrades are rare enough past the early game that they don't reliably give you something to look forward to, either. A "town portal" style ability would help here, and there is actually something like that in the game, but the consumable version cannot be purchased and is an extremely rare drop from a single specific enemy type, and the reusable version is hugely expensive and uses up a ship device slot (and isn't guaranteed to spawn in your game, either). There's also a prayer/casting mechanic in the form of the Domina Powers, but unlocking them requires donating items to the Sisters of Domina (there's no XP/level system), and these items are super, super rare. You start with one such power; I just unlocked the second one (out of perhaps 8) ⅔ of the way through the game. When it originally came out, "roguelites" weren't really a thing and the idea of Nethack crossed with Escape Velocity was mindblowing. These days, though, it doesn't hold up. Now Playing: Wolfenstein: The New Order I liked it at first, but I find that the more I play it the less I like it, as the levels get more and more linear and uninteresting. I'm almost finished now, though. (I've kind of given up on the idea of playing things in alphabetical order, but I'm still trying to play in whole-alphabet chunks.) New Games: Delver Divinity: Original Sin EE Endless Sky Gravity Ghost Megabyte Punch Out There Somewhere Puzzle Agent 2 The Room Shadowrun: Dragonfall DC Shank 2 Skulls of the Shogun None of this is from the current sale -- it's a mix of gifts, bundle fodder I hadn't activated on Steam yet, and things from the previous sale. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Dec 27, 2015 |
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Dec 27, 2015 16:29
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Started: Hand of Fate - About halfway through so far. Pretty fun. Neither the 3rd person action nor the deck building are that incredible on their own, but the combination of the two is interesting, and the game itself has a nice atmosphere, and flavor. Started: Final Fantasy Tactics WoTL (iPad) - Incredible game. Never played it before. It still holds up. I'm about halfway through. Great game to play while traveling/etc. Beat: Sid Meier's Ace Patrol - Beat the British campaign, I figure it's pretty much the same as any other game. Very clearly an iPad port, and the missions get kind of samey after awhile. Still, a fun experience, not bad for the price. I think I got this one in a bundle. Nulled: Sid Meier's Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies - Eh. Tried it a little bit but I didn't really like it. The UI and graphics struck me as much uglier and the gameplay didn't really seem any different. I think I've had my fill of it for now. Nulled: NightSky, Gish - Two indie platforms where I didn't like the control scheme or, well, anything else. Nulled: ORION: Prelude - Kind of a poo poo game. Was cheap, iirc. New: Undertale, Besiege, LISA - Games which were recommended to me, but I had waited for a sale to pick up. New: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2, Empire at War, Clone Wars: Republic Heroes, Starfighter, Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith, Dark Forces 1 + II, Jedi Outcast, Battlefront II - Picked up the Star Wars bundle on a whim, there was a good mix of interesting games in there. Already Beaten: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, KOTOR I + II, Jedi Academy, Republic Commando - These were in the bundle too. Already beat them in the past but I might replay one or more of them in the future. 
dhamster fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Dec 28, 2015 |
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Dec 28, 2015 03:08
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dhamster posted:Started: Hand of Fate - About halfway through so far. Pretty fun. Neither the 3rd person action nor the deck building are that incredible on their own, but the combination of the two is interesting, and the game itself has a nice atmosphere, and flavor. So it is much like the redlettermedia Pre-received describes? I don't always agree with them. Also your streams are chill, don't stop.
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Dec 28, 2015 03:32
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PosSibley posted:So it is much like the redlettermedia Pre-received describes? I don't always agree with them. Also your streams are chill, don't stop. Hey, I remember you from twitch! I haven't streamed in awhile, but I do want to start broadcasting again at some point. Lately I've been working on a little bit of pre-recorded stuff, in addition to putting some (old, lightly edited) streams up on youtube. Anyway, I just checked the video review out and it looks pretty spot-on. One thing to add is that the complexity/challenge of the game ratchets up noticeably as the game goes on. In the first level or two your encounters with enemies are pretty basic: in each fight, generic bandits rush at you with telegraphed melee attacks. In later levels they force you to adjust your tactics by mixing in enemies with throwing knives, toxic gas and other quirks. I've seen a few defeated bosses show up as opponents in later levels, as well. Levels get longer, too, which puts pressure on your health and food supplies as the dungeon chips away at them. I paid $12.50 USD for the game awhile back and I think it was worth it at that price. Then again I like that kind of poo poo (procedurally generated stuff, cards, dungeons...)
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Dec 28, 2015 07:18
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dhamster posted:New: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2, Empire at War, Clone Wars: Republic Heroes, Starfighter, Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith, Dark Forces 1 + II, Jedi Outcast, Battlefront II - Picked up the Star Wars bundle on a whim, there was a good mix of interesting games in there. Picked up the same! Already played through Dark forces 2. Sadly, I played 19 hours of KOTOR 2 only to get stuck in a room and unable to get out. Sigh.
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Dec 28, 2015 16:34
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Nulled: MASSIVE CHALICE - Kickstarted this for 20 bux a couple years ago, tried to get into it a couple times, but in the end it just plays like a stripped-down version of XCOM. The class/enemy variety is kind of lacking, and the long-term strategy just feels clunky.You can't build/research two things at once, troops can't raise kids without permanently retiring from combat, other non-combat roles also commit your troops until they die. If you keep your troops in combat, they won't pass anything on to the next generation unless they get a Relic.The genetic aspect is interesting, but I think they went a little too far by tying it to class diversity. Matching up characters based on their traits was fun, but it's a less fun to match up a couple myopic heroes just so your Hunters don't go extinct. It can be a letdown to breed two heroes to try out a hybrid class, wait 18 years, and find that you don't really like that particular hybrid class that much. Too bad--you just raised a whole new generation of them. There's just too many things to select for via breeding considering how small the breeding pool is, and how infrequently you can make choices. Time moves so quickly that your heroes are ready to retire after only a few battles. I wanted to like this one, but there were just too many things that annoyed me for me to want to stick it out through a 300 year campaign. Nulled: Star Wars Starfighter - Although I was intrigued by the idea of a space-action game in the Star Wars universe, I wasn't a big fan of the controls or the Episode I-centered story. Nulled: DARK - You're anemic vampire trainee Eric Bane. Your job is to sneak around and drink the blood of homeless people. I bought this because I was intrigued by the idea of a vampire-based stealth action game, but your vampire powers are underwhelming, the AI is bad and the story is awful. Not a very good game.
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Dec 30, 2015 16:36
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Beaten: BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM - Yes I know this is an old game, but it was pretty fun though I avoided all the Riddler stuff. End boss fight was a thing. Postponed: SHADOWS OF MORDOR - Starting this right after Batman was probably a bad idea, since the combat is pretty much the same. I learned about the Nemesis system when the world first opens up - some boss Ogre beat me and got promoted, then I saw him again a few minutes later and beat him, then I saw him a third time and that was getting tiring. Completed: DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION - After skipping DA2, I was surprised how much I liked this game. The combat is fluid and fun (first with a Knight Enchanter Mage, now with an Assassin Archer), the story is good, characters well-developed, it's a return to form for Bioware. My main criticism is that there are a ton of fetch quests in the expansive areas, and OCD says "gotta do them all!" but they are optional and easy to just ignore. The dragon fights are spectacular. The DLC was also quite good, Trespasser in particular which I'd consider as required as the Citadel DLC for ME3. It's also remarkably well-optimized - I was running the game for about a month on an old 6850, and outside of the occasional frame rate stutter due to lots of particle effects it looked great. Overall a fun game and worth the ~$30 for the GOTY version that includes everything. Refunded: THE WITCHER 3 - I liked TW2 and was looking forward to this title. I say "liked" because there was one thing that I never really enjoyed, the combat. One of the first things TW3 does (after the cutscenes) is put you into training so you can remember "oh yeah, the combat  " The problem is Geralt moves terribly - I get reminded of cheap Unity games because it seems like he either goes from 0-60 in 1 second, or takes forever to move (typically when someone is swinging their sword at you.) Annoyance: I was in one of the opening areas, at a fort where you are trying to track down information about the game's McGuffin, when I did the normal thing of "scan for things, pick flowers because I'll probably need to make potions at some point" when I accidentally clicked when a crate was highlighted. This got all the guards to attack me, kill me, and leave me with less money and no health (which doesn't appear to recover automatically so I had to eat consumables just to not worry about dying on the way back to town.) About this time was when my two hours were almost up, I realized I wasn't having fun and while Geralt cared about tracking down Yennifer, I didn't; thankfully Steam has a very nice no-questions-asked refund policy which made me thankful I bought it there instead of GOG.
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Dec 30, 2015 21:40
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Beat - Jotun: I kickstarted this game because I thought it looked pretty awesome. The art style, music, story, and VO all turned out great, but the game mechanics are a bit clunky. The player character is way too slow for most of the boss fights, which really frustrated me a lot of times. It's only an average game because of this. .
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Jan 1, 2016 04:17
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BEATEN: Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry. Finally. I was basically sick of this by the end, which I suppose means it's all for the best that I didn't spring for all of ACIV. BEATEN: Capsized. Exploration platformer. Not great, but not awful, and Apotheon, by the same guys, looks fabulous. YOU KNOW WHAT, I'M GOOD: Crashmo, TIS-100, Chip's Challenge 1 and 2. These are all puzzle games. I'll poke at them when I feel the urge, but I can't bring myself to sit down and just do nothing but this for an evening. BEATEN: Giana Sisters 2D. Poorly ported, not that great to begin with. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams is better in every way. UP NEXT: I'm almost done with my first playthrough of Freedom Planet (as Lilac), which is fun to play even if everything about it is cringeworthy, and I'd like to give Apotheon a go. On the higher-budget side, Dark Souls II has been glaring at me out of my unplayed list quite a bit lately.
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Jan 1, 2016 06:11
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ManxomeBromide posted:UP NEXT: I'm almost done with my first playthrough of Freedom Planet (as Lilac), which is fun to play even if everything about it is cringeworthy the funny thing about freedom planet is that they were actually going to cut the whole story mode, they only decided to implement arcade mode instead of fully removing it because they didn't want to waste the hours of voice acting they'd recorded
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Jan 1, 2016 06:13
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Story mode is at least worthwhile for Brevon, except for one moment that felt like it was trying way too hard.
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Jan 1, 2016 06:27
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i don't know who the gently caress decided it was a good idea to include a part where he painfully tortures and is apparently implied to have dismembered the main character in what is otherwise a dumb and mostly light-hearted saturday morning cartoon plot
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Jan 1, 2016 07:30
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Beaten: Sproggiwood (laptop game) Difficulty on this game is kind of an inverted U. It eases you in slowly, then gets pretty brutal in the mid-game dungeons, then towards the end you unlock the Wizard and it just turns into eternal facestomping. I was playing on Normal, though; I understand it's a lot nastier in Savage. Null: Sigils of Elohim (laptop game) Apparently you can unlock cool things in The Talos Principle by playing this, but (a) it's not actually fun and (b) it tells me to "enter this code" in TTP but then doesn't show me the code. At least it was free. Not sure what my next laptop game should be. Fortune Summoners is windows-only, so it's out. Legend of Grimrock runs surprisingly smoothly, but the controls are mouse only (what the entire gently caress) and the UI is a clusterfuck on a 3K screen. Xenonauts is also going to be tragic in 3K. Maybe it's time to have another go at Betrayal at Krondor, or perhaps finally pull the trigger on Reassembly or Axiom Verge while they're on sale.
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Jan 1, 2016 18:39
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Beat: Just Cause 3 - Beat the storyline and liberated the whole map after 43 hours. Very good and I'll be revisiting (and reoppressing) once the DLC is out. Beat (for now): Paint the Town Red - It's early access so there's only three levels but it's a really interesting concept and I'm interested to see what comes of it.
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Jan 1, 2016 19:26
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All of my completed games from the 2nd half of 2015 get this poo poo outta here! Gothic 2: Gold Edition: I loved Gothic despite being a rough, ugly game but Gothic 2: Gold is a huge pile of trash. Maybe the base game is okay but Night of the Raven fucks with the difficulty to the point where it's no longer fun. Just another example that developers should ignore the hardcore section of their fanbase. The expansion content was actually quite good and reminded me of the kind of grand expansions we don't see in this DLC map pack days, but not a single loving person tested the endgame. Jazzpunk: A "walking game" with a sense of humor. Also some of the best graphic design I've seen in a video game? 2 1/2 hours well spent. Rogue Warrior: Garbage game but Mickey Rourke gives a wonderful performance finding creative ways to shove dick and gently caress into every sentence. I'm sorry if anyone paid $60 for this when it came out. Shovel Knight: 10/10 platforming all the way. Where was this game during the PS1 era? Corpse of Discovery: A "walking game" that's kind of trash but also haunting and beautiful. Runs a bit too long but if you liked Moon and the opening parts of Alien definitely give it a look. Danganronpa 2: I wasn't as into it as the first but the last two chapters swept me away. I need more high school murder sims, Chunsoft! Gemini Rue: An okay adventure game. Just okay. I know it's one of the weakest Wadjet Eye projects but I'll give it some props for a few of its ideas. Until Dawn: My surprise of the year. Schlock horror, beautiful graphics, some actually decent acting and you get a really good time. Best played with friends chattering over your shoulder. PixelJunk Shooter: Alright. Just alright. Rack N Ruin: Middling Zelda-clone where you're a demon actively destroying a peaceful world. I appreciate that you're the full blown badguy and not an anti-hero fighting an even greater villain, you are literally corrupting the earth and murdering people. Reminded me of Blood Omen but that's a far better game. Tales of Hearts R: The most generic of Tales games is also one of the more fun ones I played. Painfully "anime" story but a lot of fun subsystems to play with. Ether One: Kind of Myst-like first person adventure game with some obscure rear end puzzles. Has an interesting story about healing a person with dementia and some appropriate twists thrown in. Decent. Double Dragon Neon: It blows my mind that Double Dragon helped launch an entire genre, quickly fell behind better titles in that genre, practically died off from the public mind, came back with this game to kick loving rear end and then die again. A brutally difficult brawler but beating Noby Noby Boy: Girl's journey is complete and I helped contribute over, what, 6 years? Got all the trophies and said goodbye forever. Guacamelee!: This game was badass. I played it on hard so I was really forced to use all combat options and that lead to a really enjoyable experience. One thing I want to see in more Metroid-y games are powerups that double as movement options. By the end of Guacamelee you're zipping around like Sonic the hedgehog and it's so satisfying. Driftmoon: Okay indie RPG. Some memorable dungeons and funny characters but I must admit I'm a liiiitle off put by the Christian overtones. It shouldn't bother me because it's so distant but eh. Now Playing because I love juggling a million things at once Dragon Quest Heroes: Not at all a fan of Musou games but I do love Dragon Quest and its aesthetic which is enough to keep me interested. Galak-Z: Having a ton of fun with this. Sometimes the perma-death aspect is frustrating but it's a game that invites you to master its tool set and is incredibly rewarding when you pull off flawless kills. Gothic 3: Why do I torture myself? Undertale: I really wish the first hour was redone because it's obvious everything up to Toriel is a proof of concept and "the true Undertale begins here" is apparent. Still, very relaxing and it hits its stride with fun encounters. Wolfenstein: The New Order: I need some therapeutic Nazi murdering right now and Wolfenstein excels. Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls: An average Resident Evil clone but hoooooly poo poo is this game dark. I mean, Danganronpa is already dark but the villains are elementary school children so have fun with child abuse on top of the usual high body count and neon pink bloody corpses littering every hall. An average game at its core but thoroughly entertaining.
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Jan 1, 2016 22:22
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The only things I remember about Gothic 3 are that it's blurry, bloomy, and DoF'd to the extreme and that boars can murder the world. BEAT - Gravity Rush: great mechanics, great music, cool setting and art style, and extremely likable characters. Sadly the story ends out of loving nowhere and does nothing to resolve the main story or explain anything. It's biggest failing of being on a Vita is shortly being corrected though and I'm pretty excited for the sequel! PLAYING - SOMA, Nuclear Throne, Heavy Bullets: woot
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Jan 2, 2016 03:44
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Null: Wolfenstein: The New Order So, the first thing I noticed about this is that the weapons are boring. All together now: knife, pistol, SMG, assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle, grenades. Much later in the game you get a rocket launcher (which hits hard but does not feel particularly impressive) and a laser rifle (which is the tau cannon from Half-Life, except worse), but the weapon selection never really gets interesting. The second thing I noticed, though, is that once you get out of the tutorial, the level design is loving excellent. Big sprawling heavily connected areas where you can charge in guns blazing or sneak around picking off nazi officers with thrown knives and both approaches are totally viable. I am willing to forgive a lot of boring weapons for level design like that, it's something that's been missing from most FPSes since, as far as I can tell, Looking Glass went out of business. Unfortunately that turns out to be a momentary blip and a few chapters in everything is completely linear again. Wolfenstein, the 2009 reboot, could get away with that because the weapons and magic powers were pleasingly chunky and I could listen to the particle cannon warm up all day. The New Order can't. I made it to the Nazi moonbase, so I'm about ¾ of the way through the game, but I find myself with absolutely no desire to return to it. Now Playing: Xenonauts This seems like it should work on my laptop, but it copes poorly with both small screens and high resolutions and the laptop has both. So desktop only it is. Three missions in, I have one interceptor out of service for repairs, four 'nauts KIA, and two more in sickbay with serious injuries.  So far this is a lot more like X-COM than the Firaxis game."I haven't seen any aliens in a while, there's probably just one or two hiding in the UFO." *opens the UFO to find six aliens*
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Jan 2, 2016 04:01
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New: Besiege - Fun once I found out how to easily turn. Got through the first zone, will probably come back to it when it gets out of early access. Beat: Medal of Honor (2010) - Pretty short game, probably wouldn't have taken the time to beat it if it weren't. Firefights are dynamic because your squad of generic white soldiers will give a stream of useful audio cues. Not really super challenging. Health regen is forgiving and your allies are way more competent than your enemies, who often run out into the open to give you a better shot. Plot is full of holes and doesn't really go anywhere. At some point Chechens show up to help the a-rabs and it's not really explained why they're there, or even acknowledged after that mission. Several times your player character or a squadmate will fall wounded for dramatic effect, and then seconds later you'll get up and be at full fighting strength as if nothing happened. The ending is supposed to have an emotional impact but it totally falls flat because, well, one of your player characters dies but who gives a poo poo, he had no interesting characteristics and there was basically no reason for you to be attached to him. Writing is lazy, tone deaf at times. Less than halfway through the game NPCs start to ease up on calling your enemies "Taliban" or "Al-Qaeda" in favor of the less nuanced "bad guys." You are constantly shifting to different playable characters in their own squads of nondescript soldiers with no personality--sometimes the transitions are interesting, but the characters are typically not. Decent variety in missions: some focus on vehicles, stealth, sniping, etc. However, even "wide open" levels are on somewhat rigid rails. Oh, and there's a part where you level a small village with a helicopter as blaring rock music plays in the background. We're warriors, guys! Hoo-ah!!  ???: Cloudbuilt - For some reason it crashes every time I try to start it. Maybe I'll try it on my desktop when I get back from travel.
dhamster fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Jan 2, 2016 |
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Jan 2, 2016 11:33
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BEATEN: Adventure in the Tower of Flight - I can't explain why I played this through all the way to the end, but I couldn't put it down. Imagine a game built out of the sidescrolling parts of Link's Awakening, but you also have the ability to fly? You also get new abilities after every boss (the game is not a Metroid however), like dash boots, projectile shield, bow & arrow, heart container, etc. BEATEN: Axiom Verge - Compared to Environmental Station Alpha, Axiom Verge is just okay. Compared to every other metroidvania, Axiom Verge is pretty great. Axiom Verge goes in a more action-oriented direction, as most of the weapons pickups involve either weapons or tools that can glitch enemies to make them easier to kill (or harder? or not an enemy at all!). There doesn't seem to be as much overwhelming post-game content as ESA, but I felt pretty finished with this with the regular ending I got. BEATEN: Aviary Attorney - Okay it's loving lovely as heck that they didn't finish all routes of the game, but that being said, probably the top Ace Attorney clone on Steam until the real deal eventually shows up someday. I got what I think was the best route? In that ending you put the king on trial which is interesting. I have no idea how to get the A route and I probably won't bother. BEATEN: Circuits - Musical puzzler where you're given nodes that contain portions of a song and you construct the song properly with those nodes. Some nodes have to be looped, some nodes have to be switched to like a train track, and towards the end it gets very layered to the point where it's hard to piece out the individual instruments just by playing back. BEATEN: Musaic Box - Similar to Circuits but better, I felt, because it didn't have that busy confusion to figuring out the individual instruments. Rather than node-based, Musaic Box uses tetriminos that you fit into a shape. The remixes are, well, they're not the best. Cut 'em some slack it's like a 2 buck game from 5+ years ago.
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Jan 2, 2016 20:58
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The Colonel posted:i don't know who the gently caress decided it was a good idea to include a part where he painfully tortures and is apparently implied to have dismembered the main character in what is otherwise a dumb and mostly light-hearted saturday morning cartoon plot BEATEN: Freedom Planet. Yeah, this, pretty much. I can sum up the whole game as, basically, needs an editor. Drastic tonal shifts, cutscenes that do not know when to stop (or, for that matter, when to start), wrapped around the best 2D Sonic gameplay this side of Sonic & Knuckles. And while we're at it, the gameplay manages to not be too slavish a copy of Sonic either; various abilities seem distributed among the characters and their bread-and-butter moves aren't very Sonic-y. I'm not going to say the no-cutscenes mode isn't better, but it isn't ideal. They should have rewritten and focused so that they told the same story with a tenth of the words. And I strongly suspect they could have. Also, the final boss was a bastard. In a playthrough with 80 deaths, 35 of them were to the final phase of the final boss. COMPLETED: TIS-100. I shelved this but then kept getting ideas for how to solve the challenges I hadn't solved. I've now solved everything in the base game, including the hidden puzzle mentioned in the achievements. And I managed it in 7 hours flat, which is pretty good if I say so myself. (It probably helps that I dabble in assembly programming anyway.) It's finally time for Dark Souls II, I think.
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Jan 3, 2016 06:35
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2016 So Far (5 Beaten / 2 Being Played): BEATEN: Star Wars: Dark Forces 3: Jedi Academy BEATEN: Party Hard - Looks like Hotline Miami, but plays way different. Much slower. It is quite fun, but may get frustrating for some, seeing as failure means re-doing 20+ minutes. BEATEN: Star Wars: Dark Forces - A classic. Maybe Ill get some mods or custom campaigns in time. But for now, I'm done. BEATEN: Shelter - I lost 3 badger pups. Sigh. Really short, but a fun little game. BEATEN: Pid - A really great 2.5 puzzle platformer with perfect pacing, variety, and really solid mechanics. A really great little surprise. Playing: Rebel Galaxy - Its a space game where I can blow poo poo up, smuggle illegal goods, and build up my ship. The only things that i might want it to be better is basically be star citizen. Playing: Grim Dawn - Level 5 Tank. Digging it so far, but not very far in. strategery fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Jan 11, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 23:26
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It's been a year, time for an update. NULLED ======================= The Red Solstice: Friend got me this with the intention of doing some multiplayer sometime. That never materialised, but I decided to give it a look after I learnt it finally got out of Early Access. It seems like someone re-used their RTS engine to build a twin-stick shooter. WASD moves the camera, not your character. You need to click for both moving, aiming, picking items up. Feels clumsy. Also has some RPG mechanics thrown in where you grind to unlock new classes to play with. Mainly intended to be a co-op multiplayer experience, but the community is pretty dead just six months after release Ski Region Simulator: Bundle stuff. Has some interesting ideas going on, first-person ski resort management. Gets very monotonous quickly, you can get the AI to do tasks for you but it costs too much if you still want to make a profit. It's a bit old and buggy. Same engine as an old version of Farming Simulator, including the wonky physics. Organ Trail: (Android) more bundle stuff. Cool idea but touch-screen controls make some minigames this too hard. I think it woulda been allright with mouse and keyboard. Guild Wars: I like the idea of an MMORPG optimized for a co-op experience. Shows its age though, servers are pretty empty and the gameplay feels simplistic. Oil Rush: Gameplay very similar to Galcon Fusion, Dyson. Ship Simulator Extremes: You can't beat a simulator. Decent simulator, but very very simplistic. Let me push more buttons! Has no mod support whatsoever, which means no user-created content to liven things up. Seems like a missed opportunity. PAYDAY: The Heist This was free! But Payday 2 is what everyone's playing today. Race the Sun Another freebie. That seems about the right price. If you mess up it's instant death, and you have to restart all the way from the beginning. Got frustrating pretty quick. Torchlight II I love the art style and colours. RPGs however are really not my cup of tea. The action is interrupted too much with inventory, quest and stats-management. The Binding of Isaac: I think there's a decent game with good replay value hidden underneath the very high difficulty level. After two hours and countless deaths without unlocking anything, I'd had enough. LIMBO: A bundle crap platformer that's more about puzzling than twitch reflexes. Infinite lives. Actually managed to hold my interest for two hours before I got fed up with the constantly flickering background. BEAT ======================= Broken Sword: (android) Point and click adventures can be ported pretty well to work on a touch screen. At some point, it completely stops alternating viewpoints between the two characters, which is a shame because I enjoyed that. Eve Online: I reached my personally set goal, so I figured I'd "won Eve". It took about a year before I felt this had become a daily grind. Actual gameplay isn't very good, but this is offset by the fascinating universe of players and in-game economy. I don't think there's anything like it. This game taught me a lot about Google Spreadsheets and importing XML. Prison Architect: 100 hours played, I've seen all this game has to offer. It took years, but it finally left early access last year. However, new features are still being added. And then there's fun stuff on the Workshop too. So I'll probably play this some more. I love games like these. The part where you can sell your prison and use the enormous amount of cash to start a new one is a feature all such management games need to have. Corporate Lifestyle Simulator: Interesting take on a zombie horde game. Not too hard, and good for a few hours of fun. Attack office management with a stapler! Continually spews overused catchphrases. Farming World: Way too easy once you figure it out (grow pork, sell the meat, repeat). It's actually a freemium game that was made not-freemium, and it shows. Lots of waiting, and clicking to restore the status quo. Coins drop that need manual picking up. Sim City 4: Not really a beatable game, but it's finally time to move on. After more than a decade of being the best city-builder around, it got pushed off the throne by Cities: Skylines. RIP Maxis. Yet Another Zombie Defense: Core gameplay is allright for a few hours of co-op fun. There's no real end to get to, it's all about surviving as long as you can, and beating your old highscore. Bad sounds and music. Ridiculously cheap, even more so in a sale. Space Engineers: 100 hours in, I consider it beaten. It's still in Early Access, and still terribly buggy for anything other than creative mode. There's a survival mode, and there's multiplayer support, but I've found those too unstable, and often a weekly update would break more things. Once it becomes a bit more stable, I'll play it some more. NEW ======================= Too much to mention. Mostly cheap bundles and other stuff that was on sale. And a whole pile of multiplayer games that I either bought or got as a gift, but which still haven't been played. No more buying multiplayer games on sale unless they're gonna get played right then and there.
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Jan 4, 2016 01:46
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Yo I want to beat Dungeon Siege III for once and for all but for some reason my 360 controller likes to randomly decide that I actually just want to stand around and block a lot and get my brains mashed in rather than dodge stuff and while I can power through most of the content eventually I want to strangle a developer with the controller cord plz help tia
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Jan 4, 2016 02:29
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I... never had that happen while I played that game. It was years ago and on Win7, but still. Are you sure your controller is perfectly fine? Do you have anything else connected via USB that could cause an input conflict?
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Jan 4, 2016 03:01
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A surprising number of games I have seem to cause my controller to logically unplug itself whenever the rumble function is invoked. I'm not sure if it's a dodgy wired connection or what, but disabling vibration has helped me in several games. On the other hand, it's kind of hilarious because rumble usually happens when you take damage, so it means enemies are punching you so hard your controller breaks 
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Jan 4, 2016 04:45
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I beat Undertale. And I totally sympathize with people who ask "what's the big deal" and only get "just play it.". It is the most video game rear end video game I've played. Maybe Nier is more on the nose but even Kojima, the troll master, holds the fourth wall together majority of the time. The best way I can explain it is a combination of Earthbound and Chrono Trigger that goes above and beyond what those games were trying to accomplish in 1995. There's a good article on Polygon that says the game's biggest problem are the preconceptions that most players go into it with. And I won't lie, I thought it would be some Homestuck internet meme bullshit but no, you have no actual idea what it's truly about until you beat it and even then the full weight of everything isn't apparent until you play it again. The gameplay I could take or leave, I died maybe twice and really only the boss battles stood out. But I seriously hope major RPG designers like Bioware take note because this is how you design a largely linear game while making the player seriously dwell on their choices beyond RENEGADE = RED, GOOD GUY = BLUE.
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Jan 4, 2016 04:51
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Saoshyant posted:I... never had that happen while I played that game. It was years ago and on Win7, but still. Are you sure your controller is perfectly fine? Do you have anything else connected via USB that could cause an input conflict? I dunno, I'll try it without the mouse plugged in, but it's an issue I had with my old desktop and now this laptop. Sometimes I can dodge flawlessly and other times hitting left trigger with the stick fully pushed in one direction or another just makes me block and I get run over. It's really frustrating, especially because the game just really isn't that hard, even on hardcore. I got to the final boss last time I played it (5 yrs ago) but then quit in disgust because it was literally an impossible fight when you can't dodge reliably.
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Jan 4, 2016 05:24
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Decided to take a shotgun approach to a number of unplayed games in my backlog to see what I liked best. Started: Star Wars Empire at War - Pretty neat strategy game. Might check it out some more later. Some elements seem a little bit shallow because it's pretty ambitious (tries to do space battles, ground battles and 4x-ish type gameplay all at once) Started: Civilization V - Been meaning to give this a try. Not really feeling 4X games at the moment though so I'm going to wait a little longer to devote more time to it. Nulled: Bad Rats - Got this notoriously bad game as a gift. Tried to at least play it but it crashed immediately. Oh well. Started: Crypt of the Necrodancer - Finished the first zone. Pretty unique game. I like dungeon crawler/roguelikes, and the rhythm element adds a lot of challenge (at least while you learn the enemies' steps, so to speak). Going to try and beat this one eventually. Started: Jade Empire - I liked the idea of a game in a fantasy kung fu setting but it doesn't seem like it's aged very well. The controls are king of clunky and the combat isn't very satisfying. Will probably end up nulling this one in the future. Started: Torchlight II - A solid Diablo clone. A little generic but very well polished. Beaten the first act so far, as Cannon Engineer. Beat: Q.U.B.E: Director's Cut - Portal-esque first person puzzler. Only a few hours long, doesn't overstay its welcome. The central plotline is intriguing but it could have been fleshed out a little bit more. Neat game overall. Beat: Skullgirls - I'm not typically a fighting gamer, but a few of the characters were really, really fun to play. Beat the story mode 2 or 3 times. Might give the local multiplayer a shot at some point. Nulled: Binary Domain - It seemed to have a few redeeming qualities, but the base gameplay of shooting guns at robots behind chest-high walls just wasn't very satisfying. "Arcadey" in some ways. The controls were a bit odd and I wasn't all that interested in using the voice commands.
dhamster fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 01:16
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BEAT - Lords of the Fallen - janky eastern European Dark Souls but that's okay? The art style is horrendous and the story presentation laughable but it looks nice and isn't a completely unfun game. It's got maybe a tenth of the depth of a Souls game and is worse in every possible way but not an awful way to spend 10 hours. Its biggest issue is that many builds aren't even close to viable and the bosses just plain loving suck. Way too many tanky enemies that you can't stagger. C+ BEAT - SOMA - the story hosed my head up in unexpected ways and overall SOMA was goddamn excellent. If you like horror and/or science-fiction I can't recommend it enough. Frictional pushed the Penumbra/Amnesia model way farther than I expected them to. BEAT - Wolfenstein: The Old Blood - MachineGames knows how to make great shooters and Wolf continues to own. The story is a little weird since it's basically two DLC packs stuck together and it starts with a bad forced stealth section but yo this game is still fun as hell. PLAYING - Heavy Bullets (meh) and Mad Max
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Jan 6, 2016 03:14
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Beaten: Axiom Verge (laptop game) This is a pretty excellent metroidvania and scraches the itch quite well. It deliberately reminds you of Metroid only to constantly subvert your expectations, especially when it comes to movement abilities -- you keep running into places where you go "aha, I know what ability I need here!" and then it turns out that ability doesn't even exist in this game. It's short, but good to the last room. It also has a staggering selection of weapons, and the movement abilities are very good -- not just acting as "keys" to get past specific obstacles, but making movement and combat in general easier. It does come with one rather large caveat, though: if you are a completionist, it hates you and wants you to suffer. So much does it hate you. Unlike recent Metroid games, there's no indicator on the map of which rooms contain items, just a per-zone "all items found" indicator. Furthermore, there's no "reveal secrets" action like the scanner or the power bombs. A lot of the items are hidden inside destroyable blocks or walk-throughable "walls", and some are behind walls that can't be bypassed except by entering specific passcodes. So finding all the items is basically a matter of mashing your short range teleport/remote drone/mining laser against every wall in the game, and also hacking every single enemy in case it reveals a passcode you need -- 90% of the time there's no visual indicator to guide you to the right part of the room or give you any sort of hint what tools you need, even if you have a priori knowledge that there's an item hidden there. Basically what I'm saying here is that it's a good game, but if you want to try for 100%, use a walkthrough. (Fortunately, you don't need 100% to get the "true" ending -- which is confusing and ambiguous sequel-bait anyways.) New: Aerannis, Axiom Verge, Dark Souls II, Downwell, Enchanted Cave 2, Fortune Summoners, FRACT OSC, Luckslinger, Ori and the Blind Forest, Reassembly, Rebel Galaxy, Savant Ascent, Spirits of Xanadu, Sublevel Zero, The Talos Principle Damage from the sale, both bought for my self and gifts received. Now Playing Still Xenonauts on the desktop. Not sure what on the laptop. There's a bunch of games on that list that run natively in linux and that I'm actually excited to play, but I'm also almost done the alphabet again which means I'm restricted to games starting with BFIKLUY. That probably means Betrayal at Krondor or Luckslinger. I'd actually really like to play Fortune Summoners, but it's windows-only.
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Jan 6, 2016 03:46
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