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MASTERED: BYTEPATH. In gameplay, this is a top-down endless shmup. There's only one screen, and enemies travel horizontally across it. Only a few spawn at the start of a round, but eventually, there will be so many you get overwhelmed. The real heart of the game is its incredibly complex upgrade tree, inspired by Path of Exiles. Although the game is designed to be played again and again, you can see everything there is to see in an hour or so, leaving you with nothing to do but grind achievements. Ultimately, the game is either very short or very repetitive, depending on whether you care about achievements or not. I went and 100%-ed it so I wouldn't call it awful, but about two-thirds of my playtime was driven by inertia, instead of real enjoyment. MASTERED: Conan Exiles. An open-world survival game, this game has two major strengths. One: it's open-world, but not a sandbox. There's a long list of goals to accomplish, and even an actual ending to the game. This may or may not be a good thing in your eyes, but I like my computer games to have at least a little bit of linearity. Two: There's a very long list of difficulty and world settings in the game. You can change the rate at which you get hungry and thirsty, the speed at which you earn XP, you can apply a multiplier to the damage you do in combat... Want to set it so you harvest 10x the materials with each swing of the pick? You can do that. Make the game as easy or as hard as you want it to be. It can take a bit of experimentation to find the perfect settings for you, but it's well worth it. In single-player, you can even adjust the settings on the fly. As you can probably tell, I loved Conan Exiles, and I did absolutely everything there was to do in this game. Visited every location, acquired every crafting recipe, got every achievement. PLAYED: Dungeons I. A garbage Dungeon Keeper clone, this one has the idea of treating heroes in your dungeon as your most vital resource, rather than an enemy to be killed. You have to make sure there's treasure for them to loot, monsters to fight, libraries to steal books from... The problem is, the whole process involves way too micromanagement for my taste. Also, don't forget the incredibly poor writing the game is full of. I didn't finish it. MASTERED (again): Hero of the Kingdom I. I reinstalled this and got all the achievements again. Wonderful little game. MASTERED: Megapolis. From Lonely Troops, developers of Hero of the Kingdom, comes this little thing. It looks like a city builder in the screenshots, but it's actually a puzzle game. You have a time limit and have to accomplish certain goals, like building X apartment buildings, or an office building, or having a certain level of healthcare et cetera. As you might expect from Lonely Troops, it's very casual, but still quite fun. It's designed to be played in 10-15 minute sessions, not something you binge on. Recommended. MASTERED: Realm Grinder. I have it all. Every trophy, every artifact, every unlock. All I need to say about this clicker game is that I have 5280 hours of playtime in it according to Steam, and I'm still looking forward to future updates. My favourite clicker game ever. PLAYED: Wuppo. This platformer is for children. I don't mean that in a sneering, dismissive way; I mean that it very much feels like it's aimed at a target audience significantly younger than I am. Abandoned unfinished, because I felt the game was not for me. MASTERED: Romopolis. The prequel to Megapolis, and basically the same game with a Roman theme. The one real difference is that the building upgrade system isn't as developed, which doesn't sound like much, but when there's so few mechanics to start with it really stands out. So yeah, it's Megapolis but a little bit worse. I still liked it enough to 100%.  Next up: I have Pillars of Eternity I and Yakuza 0 installed, but ehhh... not particularly excited about either. I might just press "Add random game" on steamcompletionist.net and install whatever comes up.
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Oct 27, 2018 12:23
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EightDeer posted:Next up: I have Pillars of Eternity I and Yakuza 0 installed, but ehhh... not particularly excited about either. I might just press "Add random game" on steamcompletionist.net and install whatever comes up. I'd suggest you give Yakuza 0 a bit of a preliminary swing if you don't know much about it. Pillars of Eternity I can understand as a niche you know from the outset you might not be into, but Yakuza's got a lot up its sleeve and isn't exactly what it might look like. EDIT: I just want to say that I just realized they're also releasing the remake of Yakuza 1 on Steam. No release date, but I don't care, I'm excited! Cleretic fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Oct 27, 2018 |
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Oct 27, 2018 13:04
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A shorter list for October, but the games were longer! #151: No Man's Sky (20 hours) - Like a Level 5 game, the enjoyment wears off about halfway through-- and I'm being generous here. There's just not enough content, even as of the NEXT update. #152: Destiny 2: Curse of Osiris (4 hours) - The first DLC expansion to Destiny 2.. it was okay, but relied too much on the procedurally generated infinite forest. I will say I appreciate it more than most, because I can tell it was a love letter to the old Bungie community that would create maps for Halo 1 on modded Xboxes (maps had to be built in the air because you couldn't alter the terrain). #153: Destiny 2: Warmind (4 hours) - The second, and much better expansion to Destiny 2. A proper DLC campaign, and a fun planet to explore. #154: Battlefield Hardline (7 hours) - I played this only for the campaign, a silly 'crooked cop' story that still enjoyed its bad treatment of criminals, and came out right after Ferguson, sooooooo... not the best timing. #155: SIMULACRA (4 hours) - Probably the best of the simulated phone games that I've played (although I have more of an attachment to A Normal Lost Phone's story). Better UI, much deeper diving into past interactions. #156: Subsurface Circular (2 hours) - 3D visual novel where you're a robot interrogating other robots on a train. It's simple but it's neat. #157: The Black Watchmen (11 hours) - ARG game by Alice & Smith.. personally, I prefer Ahnayro because its puzzles are much less baffling. #158: Metal Gear Solid V (25 hours) - Great gameplay, terrible storytelling and almost no Metal Gear feeling to it. #159: Xenoblade X (60 hours) - I wish this was 20 hours shorter.. I disliked the combat much like Xenoblade 1 but the world was fun to explore and the side quests reminded me of Yakuza at times in terms of quirky characters. The main quest being gated behind level/affinity requirements was pointless and dumb. #160: Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty (3 hours) - Short download-only R&C game set between Tools of Destruction and Crack in Time. A little clunky and VERY buggy for an Insomniac game. #161: Commando 3 (1 hour) - Decent adaption of Commandos/Mercs to a twin-stick style arcade format. #162: John Woo Presents Stranglehold (5-6 hours) - It may not be perfect, but it's an absolute blast to play. Diving all over the place, sliding across tabletops in bullet time while clearing out an entire room with twin pistols... it's Max Payne in arcade form. #163: The Mark of Kri (8 hours) - Boy this game has not aged well. It started out okay, but the combat becomes monotonous AND frustrating, and the level design is awful. Arkham did this style of combat better in later years, and the combos are really inconsistent in accepting input.
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Nov 1, 2018 01:01
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BEATEN: Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. It's a more traditional RPG than the later Mario RPGs, but it's still really good and I liked it a lot. I am a little boggled about how for 3/4 of the endgame Princess Toadstool had the best HP and damage output of the entire party in addition to having brokenly amazing healing abilities, but I guess she is generally pretty OP in any game where she's playable and actually in full command of her powers. NEW GAME: EXAPUNKS. New Zachtronics game out of Early Access, you say. Well, all right. BEATEN: EXAPUNKS. Entire main campaign complete, including a few dozen games of Solitaire, in well under 20 hours. EXAs are much less constrained than the CPUs of TIS-100 or SHENZHEN I/O, and that makes it a lot more straightforward to just write a program to do the thing you want to do. Also, for, I think, the very first time, the three leaderboards you can check after you solve a puzzle are both all worth optimizing and all independent. Good show. NULLED: Star Fox 64. I know it's not a hard game, but playing it with a Wii Classic Controller is awkward and there's no getting around the fact that this is a game with score, lives, and no continues or save points. I'm filing it with the score attack games. IN PROGRESS: Paper Mario. I got about halfway through this years ago and then dropped it for reasons I don't remember, so I started over. I'm partway through Chapter 2 now and I've definitely remembered why this was the game that convinced me there was still interesting gameplay hiding in the standard old-school RPG formula. It's also the last of my Wii downloadables! IN PROGRESS: DROD 5: The Second Sky. Very slow progress, but progress. The DROD series is still the best set of puzzle games I've ever played. IN PROGRESS: A Hat In Time. Also pretty slow progress. It's super cute but it's not really grabbing me very hard.
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Nov 1, 2018 09:59
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Finished: Final Fantasy XV Don't make my mistake. I love the Final Fantasy series more than I should, and this was the worst one; and I'm including the series punching bags of II and III in that. The gameplay's weak, the story's all over the place and even after patches to add content and cutscenes still feels like it's missing huge chunks, and the party interactions the game hinges so much on are between characters that, honestly, are all just kind of annoying and boring. Fortunately, it's bad at things that have been done very well elsewhere, so you don't even have to play it. If you're interested in the gameplay? Nier Automata's a better version of it. If you're interested in the story? It's basically a worse version of Final Fantasy X, with a worse Kefka as the antagonist. If you're interested in the character interplay and a party that feels like friends? Play Persona 5, and get a bonus of 'actually present female characters'. Honestly, the only compelling thing about FFXV by the end was when it leaves the open world behind and goes linear for the last half or so of the game. Partly because it lets the game have momentum, but mostly because that's when it starts being hilariously clumsy about what it's doing instead of just boringly incompetent. It starts being exciting when you get a stealth section or something, because they're gonna gently caress up in whole new ways that you haven't considered yet!
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Nov 6, 2018 14:02
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Cleretic posted:Finished: Final Fantasy XV I hate that I'm still kinda tempted by this game when I see it on sale even knowing that I'll probably hate every minute of it. Thanks for giving me some more mental ammo to keep skipping it. But it can't be worse than FF13 though... can it?
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Nov 6, 2018 14:14
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Final Fantasy 15 was a fun, if flawed, romp with a wonderfully executed ending sequence. Big lol that you recommend Nier: Automata when you complain about weak gameplay.
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Nov 6, 2018 17:43
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One thing I will say. I just played a few minutes of FFXV on pc but that version looks amazing. I'll give it a go one day just because I am a graphics whore.
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Nov 6, 2018 18:23
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Shadow225 posted:Big lol that you recommend Nier: Automata when you complain about weak gameplay. I'm not going to say that Nier: Automata's gameplay is flawless; I definitely feel like it's too floaty and nothing feels like it has much weight to it. But I was trying to think of games that do similar things to FFXV but better, and Automata's definitely fitting that mold in gameplay. For all of Automata's flaws, at least its combat isn't 'hold down one button, occasionally press another if you're feeling fancy'. FFXV's is anaemic, without enough RPG or action gameplay leanings to be good at either of them.
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Nov 7, 2018 11:03
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Shadow225 posted:Big lol that you recommend Nier: Automata when you complain about weak gameplay. Is this a common opinion? I thought Nier: Automata was fun right the way through. I mean, it's not particularly difficult, but it never stops being satisfying to whale on robots and that perfect dodge is very fun to execute.
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Nov 7, 2018 12:02
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FF15 has more DLC in the works for next year right?
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Nov 7, 2018 16:25
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By the end of Nier's 2nd playthrough/route I was 100% done with the combat and just stuck on the easy mode cpus. At least everything besides the combat (except the map travel and platforming) was still good (music, story, bosses, etc.). FF15 is fine. I've given up on a FF game having a story I'll give a modicum poo poo about, but at least its characters aren't as annoying as the cast of FF13, 13-2, and LR. Fishing, racing chocobos, taking selfies, cooking, and mindless quests+dungeons are all fun enough on their own. Also it has time traveling dogs and cool bosses. Snag it when it gets cheap enough IMO. My PS4 broke down and I finally couldn't resist replacing it with the recent releases and I'm now going through Spoderman and RDR2. RDR2 is way up its own rear end with context specific actions and the controls in general are incredibly convoluted. It also went pretty far to force you to see its world with restricting fast travel and tacking on the needless systems that often get cut in other games to keep things simple like caring about temperature, you and your horse's weight by eating regularly enough, dead animals decomposing day by day, etc. and has the silliness that reminds me of Skyrim where sidequest npcs suddenly being in a bind or performing some scene on the road, and you'll see them act out the exact same scene in a different river or road on the other side of the map if you didn't stop to talk to them last time. But it does enough right and is pretty enough it's really too big to fail. You can focus on whatever you find fun and do that for an entire day if you want.
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Nov 7, 2018 21:37
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Ya I never understood people complaining about story in FF games. At best they are just basic save the world stories and are comprehensible. But most of the time they are incomprehensible, trying to be "deep". 6 is the one with the best narrative.
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Nov 8, 2018 01:03
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Ulio posted:Ya I never understood people complaining about story in FF games. ... most of the time they are incomprehensible, trying to be "deep". 
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Nov 8, 2018 01:43
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FF games, for the most part, actually have pretty reasonable stories, although their complexity, seriousness and depth vary. 6 is serious and pretty stable and sprawling as a narrative, but it neither has nor tries to have any constant themes. 5 before it was basically a Saturday morning cartoon but with some surprising themes of family (and, like, a pretty big bodycount). 9 is silly as hell but all about death, 7 is an environmentalist cyberpunk story that's also The Thing, and 14 is honestly a pretty solid story about religious extremism and the dangers of going extreme in fighting it. It's just that some of the stories actually are total clownshoes messes (8 and 13 come to mind), and a few of them will just look like it if you expect total clownshoes messes and don't read further than surface level (7 and 10 for example). B-Mac posted:FF15 has more DLC in the works for next year right? Literally just today they announced they were canning three of the four DLCs they promised because the director left S-E. Two of those cancelled DLCs would have been about two of the only prominent female characters, so we're left without any playable female characters at all unless you count the multiplayer DLC with a character creator.
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Nov 8, 2018 11:50
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Cleretic posted:FF games, for the most part, actually have pretty reasonable stories, although their complexity, seriousness and depth vary. 6 is serious and pretty stable and sprawling as a narrative, but it neither has nor tries to have any constant themes. 5 before it was basically a Saturday morning cartoon but with some surprising themes of family (and, like, a pretty big bodycount). 9 is silly as hell but all about death, 7 is an environmentalist cyberpunk story that's also The Thing, and 14 is honestly a pretty solid story about religious extremism and the dangers of going extreme in fighting it. And people who bought it on PC aren't getting the multiplayer DLC.
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Nov 8, 2018 18:21
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Skwirl posted:And people who bought it on PC aren't getting the multiplayer DLC. They already have it, they're just not getting the standalone version.
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Nov 8, 2018 21:50
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I think this describes 7 and 8 pretty well.
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Nov 8, 2018 23:56
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:I think this describes 7 and 8 pretty well. It was more the whiplash of "I don't understand people criticising the story of FF games / immediately criticises the story of FF games"
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Nov 9, 2018 09:56
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Necrothatcher posted:It was more the whiplash of "I don't understand people criticising the story of FF games / immediately criticises the story of FF games" It was more "why are people complaining about the story in FF15 when it was still terrible in FF7, they've always been bad, it's not a new addition to the series", I think.
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Nov 9, 2018 10:38
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Back to the backlog again, finally! Trying my hands at X: Rebirth right now. Would be happy to have more friends and people to chat on Steam. Feel free to add me.  https://steamcommunity.com/id/exotarih/
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Nov 11, 2018 17:08
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Busier month as we near the end of the year! Here's the first half of November: #164: Lightning Returns (23 hours) - I'm finally free of the FF13 trilogy. This one is the best of the three, with the mild time restrictions keeping the pace of the game breezy, and the various sidequests have enough unique character to them that they're not a huge chore. #165: Here They Lie (2.5 hours) - A VR horror game that I expected a lot more out of. The game really didn't know what it wanted to be, with a third of the game having some neat artsy moments, a third of the game is spent in a dumb "human vices represented as animal people" loop, and another third of the game is really terrible stealth. 1 out of 3 is... well it's not enough. #166: Bound (1.5 hours) - Elegant gymnastic platformer that combines ballet with parkour. I played this in VR and that was a mistake: the game is much better with the camera following the character, as the static camera angles are often awkward to head track from. #167: Unfinished Swan (1.5 hours) - A game about splashing paint orbs at an invisible world (at least, that's how it starts). I wish there were more color options while playing. #168: Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (13 hours) - A much better iteration of Zelda that I initially gave it credit for when I abandoned the game a long time ago. While the world size is maybe the size of OOT, there's still plenty to do, and the bosses are fun. #169: Off Peak (.5 hours) - Quirky as all get-out walking sim. It's pretty low budget, and might feel like you stepped into a Second Life portal, but it's neat. #170: The Norwood Suite (2.5 hours) - The full-budget successor to Off-Peak, the game plays like one long trading quest, but with a cast of quirky characters, a hotel full of hidden passages, a dreamlogic plot, and absurd ideas that are just there in the world to find. #171: Sylvio (9 hours) - Anti-jumpscare horror game where you collect the voices of the dead with your spirit recorder and then scrub through the recording to find the words and phrases that lead you forward. It was fun despite the low budget, but the loop lost its novelty near the end. #172: Asemblance (1 hour) - In contrast to Norwood Suite, I also played some kind of bland walking simulators this month... although this was the best of that batch. Explore your own recursive memories as you go deeper inside yourself to find the truth. Not the greatest execution but it was interesting. #173: Caligo (1 hour) - Pretty but boring linear walking sim that has almost no exploration. #174: The Painscreek Killings (10 hours) - Excellent detective game that utilizes the tropes of walking sim mechanics (zoom in, get keys, memorize passwords, read diaries) to establish an investigative gameplay loop where using all these mechanics gains you educational progress-- you learn more and more about the history of the people, their actions, their movements, their alibis, their contradictions, while also gaining access to new areas and using that information (often cross-referencing) to come up with solutions to puzzles or combination locks based on the info you have. #175: Bulb Boy (2 hours) - This might be the first point-n-click adventure boss rush game I've every played. Every 'level' has you tackling a new threat using conventional inventory puzzling. Has a neat visual style and quirky storytelling. #176: Nothing Ever Remains Obscure (2 hours) - Another bland walking sim.. this one offers branching paths and optional puzzles, but there is still not much to discover from exploration, which I guess puts this in the 'Dear Esther' category of game but with SOME mechanics, like aiming and lobbing magic orbs like you're Kyle Korver.
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Nov 15, 2018 11:19
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2018 keeps releasing games I actually want to play. At least that means they don't make it to the backlog. NEW GAME: Return of the Obra Dinn. NEW GAME: Yoku's Island Experss. COMPLETED: Return of the Obra Dinn. This is a really nice variation on Myst style gameplay. You are mostly walking around mostly static scenes, but you have to notice a lot of details and put them together to come up with a series of facts that will let you progress. There are ways you can scum the metagame to conclude things you don't understand, but that does hurt you later on when you're expected to know certain bits of information you never got around to noticing—but I managed to only benefit from this once and it ultimately became a useless hint by the end. As a result I feel I can say I 100%ed this game without hints. BEATEN: Yoku's Island Express. Pinball-themed Metroidvania game that is super-cute in a way that actually worked for me, while A Hat In Time didn't really work. I'm not sure what the difference was, overall. I suppose at this point I should go back to my Paper Mario game.
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Nov 19, 2018 06:46
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BEATEN: Valiant Hearts: The Great War Was meaning to play this for a while, and what with the 100th anniversary of the Armistice it seemed like the right time. It's from that short amount of time where Ubisoft decided to let some of their designers loose on some low-budget games with big studio heft behind it, and this is the best one. While the gameplay is pretty straightforward 2D environmental puzzling, the continental comic book art is extremely cool and it's nice to see a game about war that deliberately avoids putting a gun in your hand and sending you out to shoot people. I appreciated the lack of jingoism towards any one country: the characters are a wide variety of nationalities and classes and each has their own perspective on the horrible war they're caught up in. I particularly liked that the final ending of the game (you killing your commanding officer for ordering men to their pointless deaths) was something I instinctively chose to do rather than being awkwardly nudged towards it. The poignant atmosphere is spoilt a little by the bad guy being a straight-up cackling comic-book hun riding a giant steampunk death tank, but most of the game is downbeat and practical, which feels appropriate for WW1. BEATEN: Firewatch  Neat atmospheric walking simulator with great voice-acting and a genuinely compelling mystery. I've had a lovely year in my personal life, so the main character's situation of mourning his wife and searching for something to fill his days really resonated with me. Exploring the wilderness is consistently beautiful and there's a nice physicality to the movements of your character as he clambers up ledges and down ravines. The story was also really compelling (I finished it late at night in one sitting as I had to know what happened). Like most mysteries the journey there was more satisfying than the conclusion, but I liked that it didn't devolve into supernatural surrealness as I assumed it would. BEATEN: Superhot VR  Makes you feel impossibly cool while also looking like a total dork. While a tonne of games are naked power fantasies, Superhot VR is about the best at making you absolutely feel like a Ninja John Woo Matrix god as you physically curl your body around bullets, take down endless glass men with satisfying smashy sound effects and deflect bullets with your guns. It's crazy how much this improves on the already awesome non-VR game - it feels like something genuinely from the future. The dystopian cyberpunk wrapper story also works better here than in the original, with your progress through the game moved forward by shooting yourself in the head or jumping off buildings. The only flaw is that there's not more of it. BEATEN: The First Templar  Ultra-janky Eastern European action adventure in which you play a Templar crusader on a search for the Holy Grail. It's pretty ugly, the voice-acting is often laughable, the enemy AI is a joke and the puzzles are just barely 'puzzles'. I was actually ready to put it down after a couple of levels and move on. Buuuuut.... it's mindless stuff and suddenly the plot starts to get a tiny bit more interesting and the levels seem to get better the longer the game goes on and... gently caress, I'm enjoying it somehow. Though designed for co-op you'll be lucky to find anyone online playing it and none of my friends were interested in slogging through such an obviously bad game - but it works well enough single-player. Plus, about mid-way through the game, your character essentially becomes immortal as you can boost critical hit damage to 300%, ensure you get crits every time and have them regenerate your health. Ordinarily, this would be a bit game-breaking but it actually works as part of the plot you are the titular first Templar, who is an immortal amnesiac due to usage of the Grail. Crap stealth levels aside, it was a weirdly satisfying game to get through. BEATEN: House of the Dead 4  My quest to play through every House of the Dead game in the arcade continues with number 4, which I tracked down to Las Vegas Amusements in Soho, London. While I still prefer the HotD3 shotguns, the HotD Uzis are pretty fun. There's a nice balance between precise headshots on individual enemies and spraying wildly as a form of crowd control. Either these games are getting easier or my zombie headshotting skills are improving, as I managed to clear this without too much of a fuss (9 credits), and the last boss was pretty much a cakewalk. The only real problem is that the plastic Uzis are pretty drat heavy and they expect you to waggle them to reload and to escape situations - and all this waggling and the uncomfortable shape left me with blisters on my fingers. This was going to be the end of my House of the Dead playthrough - it's been really fun tracking down these arcade cabinets and travelling off to casinos and amusement parks to clear them. The hunt for the cabinet is almost as fun as the game itself... Sadly there IS a new House of the Dead out, but the nearest cabinet was 3500 miles away in the Dave and Busters near Times Square which is a tiny bit inconvenient... BEATEN: House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn  but gently caress it I've got airmiles to spend and a long weekend to kill so why not make a very long round trip to the USA to finish off the series? Got it to NY and made a beeline for the cabinet, which lived up to expectations. It's all shiny and Unreal Engine-powered, and the deluxe cabinet vibrates, blasts air in your face and is loud as hell (there's even a button to calm the thing down if it gets too intense). The weapons this time are submachineguns and while they could really use some force feedback they're at least more ergonomic than the Uzis. Plus you get to pick from a range of subweapons (rocket launcher, electro-zapper thing, incendiaries, grenades, shockwaves etc) that can save you in a pinch. Also, having a mild investment in the overarching plot of the House of the Dead series actually pays off, as Scarlett Dawn reveals the mystery baddie teased throughout 3 and 4 as well as having callbacks to the first two games' villains. You also get some neat HD-ized versions of classic bosses like Chario- and the final boss is this colossal corpse demon angel thing that is very fun to fight. Worth the hassle getting to the cabinet, and I felt weirdly smug having polished off the entire series. BEATEN: Oxenfree  Indie cool 2D mystery game that's a little too enigmatic when all's said and done. I'm usually a sucker for supernatural teenage mysteries (Hi, Life is Strange), but something about this rubbed me up the wrong way. I don't know if the moving around was a bit ponderous or the supernatural goings-on were a bit vaguely defined, but I didn't get into it or care about the characters as much as I thought I would. It got to the point where the eeeeeevil demon thing was trying to put me through all kinds of tests with my friends' life at stakes while I took with my back to it fiddling with the radio ignoring it. Sadly the game didn't take this into account, nor did it really kill the friends as it threatened to. I didn't not enjoy it, but it never hit an emotional chord with me. BEATEN: God of War: Chains of Olympus (PS3)  My long trek through the God of War series continues with the first PSP prequel. I have actually played this before on release, but as it turned out I remember very little of it. It's a pretty neat, if ultimately inconsequential chapter in Kratos' tale, but has enough little wrinkles in it to make it just about worthwhile. Plus it's really short, so it doesn't outstay its welcome. Back in the day the game was mainly impressive for achieving what it did on PSP hardware, but that's obviously lessened a bit in the origins collection on PS3. Next up is Ghost of Sparta and then finally - finally - I will play the PS4 one. I have heard that it essentially has no links to the original games, but I'm somehow not tired of carving through zombie centurions yet so bring it on. BEATEN: deltarune  I absolutely adored Undertale on its release and will go to bat for it whenever it's being talked down, but I was pretty blase about deltarune when I started it. I figured it'd be its own little gamejam project, a short demo or trailer for something to come a long way down the line. About three hours later and with the game showing no signs of wrapping up I was once again bowled over by Toby Fox's ability to confound expectations by releasing essentially a full game for free and pretty much out of nowhere. While some of the morality systems of Undertale aren't present, the combat has substantial improvements and the game starts to probe at the corners of what committed non-violence actually means. It's free, funny and fun to play - and I think it stands on its own even without having played Undertale so check it out. BEATEN: DOOM VFR  Has a very bad rep amongst VR fans, but I had a blast. You only really appreciate the size of a Mancubus when it's leering over you and you blast a railgun hole in through its belly. Once you get the hang of the teleporting movements, zipping behind enemies and telefragging them it really captures some of the fun and intensity of Doom 2016. Despite that, the levels being arenas connected by corridors does get a bit samey after a while - but fortunately, you can unlock classic Doom levels as bonuses. This is undoubtedly the highlight of the package, as you get free-roaming monsters, more surprise attacks and much more of a need to conserve ammo and explore. There's something that makes the hairs on your neck stand up when you're standing in E1M1 and peering out the window - I wished I could show this to the ten-year-old me playing the same level on a 486 back in the day... BEATEN: Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India  More of the same after the China episode sadly. It's a nice experiment in translating Assassin's Creed gameplay to 2D, but there's too much animation and lag so it doesn't feel as snappy as it should. It's frustrating when I know precisely what I want to do and the character ends up continuously climbing up and down a ledge, or just turning in place when I try to hide behind a pillar. It leads to cheap deaths that don't feel like my fault, which quickly drove me up the wall. I guess it looks nice, but I have a deep sense of foreboding about the Russia finale - despite it the Russian Revolution being an ideal Assassin's Creed time period for me... BEATEN: Gorogoa  Intricate, painterly and literary - and made by devs with some serious creative vision and intelligence. You essentially manipulate images to link them together, zooming in and out of pictures to mess with the flow of time and alter perspectives. When it all works it's like little else I've seen in a game. When it doesn't it becomes a mildly annoying process of elimination as you try and jam together each jigsaw piece until something fits. I think I maybe hurried through this a little where I should have let it breathe a bit, because the contrast between the fantasy world and the wartorn city is neat, but I didn't really pick up on the symbolism running through the game. BEATEN: Here They Lie (PS3)  Interesting but flawed horror game on PSVR. Genuinely scary right up until the point where you realise that even if the tiny wanking skull-headed homunculuses catch you that it doesn't mean anything. You get screeched at, move back a minute or so and then that enemy disappears from the map allowing you to proceed. It is neat exploring a quasi-Eraserhead nightmare city in VR, but the writing feels like the liner-notes to a Marilyn Manson album and the animal-head imagery is a teeny bit played out in horror. The best bits are when the game stops trying to scare you and sends you through some psychedelic landscapes devoid of enemies, which at least means you can stare in wonder without having to worry about being menaced. NULLED: God Eater Resurrection  Vastly exceeds my usual tolerance for anime, but I found it kind of mindlessly compelling and the post-apocalyptic setting seemed neat. I was fairly enthusiastic about it until I realised that after about 12 hours of play I was maybe a fifth of the way through the stories, that the only thing ahead of me was reskins of monsters I've already seen and the same 5 or 6 arenas repeated ad infinitum. The future looked like a slog, so I bailed before it got really boring. NULLED: Star Wars: Battlefront  It's strange how something so visually dazzling and aesthetically beautiful can be so incredibly hollow. I picked this up for a few quid to get the X-Wing VR mission (which is honestly amazing and deserves its own game) but thought I'd give the main game a shot. It feels like some impossibly high-budget total conversion mod - and while it totally nails the look and sound of Star Wars there is no sense of grandeur or mysticism or... anything really. It kinda felt like an arcade game you'd pop a few dollars in for a minute and then abandon. I played a bunch of matches, did the short 'training' missions and couldn't find any reason to keep playing. It's kind of crazy how a 15 minute long VR bonus mission completely eclipses the big budget shooter. Necrothatcher fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Dec 4, 2018 |
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Dec 4, 2018 16:37
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You crossed an ocean to play House of the Dead. That rules.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:27
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Goddamn, that's some serious work on a "back log". How long did it take you to go through the two HotD games, and when in the arcade, and being so good that you beat the game, are there on-lookers that comments and cheers for you? Re. The First Templar, that is exactly how I felt as well. Really janky, but kinda made you go just a bit further.
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Dec 4, 2018 21:46
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I was gonna try to squeeze my 200th game into this next batch but we're now a few days into December so it'll just have to go in the next batch. There's a ton of games I've beaten in the second half of November so not many short blurbs for now. #177: Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter (8 hours) - Honestly not as bad as I was expecting going in, -it was pretty decent, but VERY silly. #178: Among the Innocent: A Stricken Tale (3 hours) #179: Quern: Undying Thoughts (9 hours) - Very good Myst-inspired realtime 3D adventure game. #180: Cube Escape: Lake (.5 hours) #181: Tattletail (1 hour) #182: Cube Escape: Theatre (.5 hours) #183: Cube Escape: Seasons (.5 hours) #184: Hidden Paws (2.5 hours) #185: Drawn: The Painted Tower (2 hours) #186: Livelock (4 hours) #187: Minit (1.5 hours) - Excellent #188: Nex Machina (1.5 hours) - Excellent #189: Cat Burglar (.5 hours) #190: The Monster Inside (15 mins) #191: Blameless (.5 hours) #192: Marie's Room (1 hour) - Like a condensed Gone Home experience (just one room) mixed with Life is Strange's tweeness. Pretty good for a free game. #193: Escape the Game: Intro (20 mins) #194: Tender Loving Care (9 hours) #195: Juniper's Knot (45 minutes) #196: Hollowed (1.5 hours) #197: Sagebrush (1.5 hours) - Creepy low-res walking simulator in the aftermath of a Jonestown style massacre. #198: Homefront (4 hours) #199: Bloodstained Curse of the Moon (2.5 hours) - a top 10 for the year, second best linear Castlevania game in the series The 7th Guest fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Dec 4, 2018 |
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Dec 4, 2018 22:56
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Fart of Presto posted:How long did it take you to go through the two HotD games, and when in the arcade, and being so good that you beat the game, are there on-lookers that comments and cheers for you? Well, each HotD game is about an hour long straight through, and it's less a question of skill and more of how much money you're prepared to put in. 1 and 2 I played in a free play arcade, and the other three took me 10-12 credits to finish. I did get pretty good at them though, the key is figuring out which enemies to prioritise (and always shooting projectiles over everything else), shooting background elements to reveal 1-ups and using grenades and power ups liberally as you get topups quite often. I'm also kinda impressed that there's actually a consistent narrative and generational characters running through 20 years of lightgun zombie games.
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Dec 4, 2018 23:23
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I have still never played the spinoff Loving Dead: House of the Dead EX about two zombies in love on the run, which is Japan only. I might go to Tokyo in 2019 and try to hunt it down. edit:  someday... Necrothatcher fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Dec 4, 2018 |
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Dec 4, 2018 23:27
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Necrothatcher posted:I have still never played the spinoff Loving Dead: House of the Dead EX about two zombies in love on the run, which is Japan only. I might go to Tokyo in 2019 and try to hunt it down. I think I played this at an arcade in Madison, Wisconsin. I don't know japanese so I didn't know what was going on, but I had to step on spiders for part of it.
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Dec 5, 2018 00:00
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House of the Dead takes a turn for the Horny
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Dec 5, 2018 02:55
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The first half of December was more relaxed, with a few longer games rather than a slew of shorter games. I will be on holiday break from work though in the back half of the month, so I'm going to get quite a few games done to finish the year. #200: CrossCode (30 hours) - Excellent spiritual successor to Ys that manages to make even a boring setup of "you're in an MMO" fun #201: Mafia III (20 hours) - If the gameplay wasn't a series of repetitive loops over and over, this could've been a fantastic game. instead it's Most Average Game I've Played in 2018 #202: Assassin's Creed Origins (25 hours) - Origins was fun, but.. it's not Assassin's Creed. I mean I'm glad it had far fewer tailing quests. But the gameplay and quest design is more like The Witcher, and that's not necessarily what I super get into. At least the side quests have some actual attempt at storytelling to them unlike most open world games. #203: Dishonored: Death to the Outsider (9 hours) - A step down from Dishonored 2, DttO is beautiful and slick, with a couple of fun new powers, but the verticality is a little lacking, the routing is less fun, areas seemed to be stuffed with far more guards/witnesses. Also, none of the fun "sparing the target is actually worse than killing them" quandries of the main games. I'd rank the first spinoff above this one. #204: Return of the Obra Dinn (8 hours) - All the accolades about this game are on point. #205: The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker (12 hours (two playthroughs)) - Lovecraftian FMV therapy game. Using a text parser you ask questions of various patients with unique abilities and problems. It's okay but the parser is really bad, and the game lacks in the way of branching, and though you CAN cure the patients, ultimately each day progresses the same regardless of what you do in your playthrough. A lot of the loose ends never get tied up.
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Dec 17, 2018 07:11
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Is Backloggery still the king of backlog sites? I'm seriously considering just wiping out my entire list and rebuilding it because it's kinda unwieldy. I'd love a SteamCompletionist style site where I can add non-steam games though. It works better for me but I play games that I didn't buy on Steam or got for free somewhere else.
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Dec 26, 2018 15:29
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I'm back (Edit: Going to look at my backloggery account, which is drat near null and void at this point lmao)
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Dec 28, 2018 05:28
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Been a while. MY entire 2018 list as I havent posted in a while: Games (37 beaten) AER: Memories of Old - Walking sim where you play a lady who can turn into a bird in a world of floating islands. Alienation - Its like helldivers, but you level up. Aragami - A modern day Tenchu. I liked it. Plus steam workshop. Aviary Attorney Batman: The Arkham Knight Bedlam Burly Men At Sea Death Road to Canada - it's double dragon mixed with Oregon Trail. What is there to complain about. Diablo 3: Necromancer DLC Environmental Station Alpha Far Cry Primal Firewatch - A well made walking sim type game where you are a staff member at in a forest for a summer. Sounds boring, but ends up being really good. The ending was a bit disappointing though. God of War (2018) - Wow I did not expect for this to have such a good (an actual) story. The ending legitimately was emotional as every character had a sound reason for doing what they did, which makes the characters a lot more sympathetic than most games, and a million times more than a typical GOW game. Gran Theft Auto 5 Hidden Folks - Where's Waldo, essentially. High Hell Hollow Knight - The Best gated platformer. Ever. Starts off a bit slow for the first 4-5 hours, but holy crap i couldn't stop playing once it opened up. Horizon: Zero Dawn - A really interesting open world RPG with a really great story and characters. Really enjoyed this one. Kero Blaster Mafia 3 MASSIVE CHALICE - Its XCOM. but everyone dies. Either of a weapon or old age. Characters dont matter. Only your empire over time. This can be a bit of a put-off, but in the end i liked it. Nex Machina Old Man's Journey - One of the few games i actually ever got (a bit) emotional in. And there are literally no words text or spoken in the game. Its good. Quantum Break - God i hope they make a sequel to this. Such an interesting experiment that i felt mostly really worked. I like this one a lot. Risk of Rain - One of the best rogue-likes ever. If you want to call it that. Shadow Warrior 2 - I love me some Wang. Steamworld Dig 2 Stories Untold - A text adventure game in 2017. And its really great. Styx: Shards of Darkness - Underrated series. I really liked this game. Its the best Hitman game not called Hitman. Sublevel Zero - Procedurally generated Decent. It is good. Subnautica - The best if not at least one of the best survival crafting games with an actual story and an ending. Tacoma - A good walking sim in spaaaaace. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: Blood and Wine Expansion - One of the best expansions to one of my favorite games of all time. Uncharted 4 - It was good. No complaints, but no reason t o keep playing. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy Watch Dogs 2 - A substantially improved over the original videogame. Maybe the best sequel. Or one of. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus - I liked it! They made a hub area quite large and often easy to get lost in, which was sometimes annoying. it felt like they wanted to include procedurally generated missions or objectives for areas or at least side missions with the way the hub was, but they didnt, which felt a bit like a missed opportunity. Otherwise put a lot of time into (but didn't beat/cant): - Warframe - Path of Exile - Fallout 4 Modded - Skyrim Modded - Elder Scrolls Legends - Shadow of War
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Dec 28, 2018 05:49
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Which one is the best site for backlogs nowadays? Backloggery, How Long to Beat, Steam Completionist, a new one? It's been quite some time since I used those.
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Dec 28, 2018 19:38
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i still prefer steamcompletionist but its had downtimes a lot in the past year. i also use my own personal tracker that i made in libraoffice. i'm gonna list the rest of december's games that i beat while on my Christmas break... there are still a couple of days left in 2018 so if I beat any more I will just edit them into this post. #206: Tiny Echo (1.5 hours) - Cute little point n click from the makers of Shelter -- I wish it had more interactivity though #207: Orwell: Ignorance is Strength (3.5 hours) - Still as addictive as the first season but a step down story-wise, with a very abrupt ending #208: Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (2 hours) - I beat MGSV first, then came back to GZ. It was fine, they gave me much better weapons than what I started out with in Phantom Pain, so that made me happy. #209: Yesterday Origins (9 hours) - Pendulo has been trying for years to mimic Broken Sword, and the Yesterday series comes closest in tone and in actual playability (their older games are AWFUL, WRETCHED DISASTERS). It was an above average game when all is said and done, although you still have to live with the weird art style that has defined all their games. (also you need to have played the previous game to know what's going on) #210: CAYNE (2.5 hours) - I wondered how a free game from the makers of STASIS with the same level of production value could possibly be getting mixed to negative reviews... well, it's the puzzles. The puzzles make no ding dang sense!! #211: Regeria Hope Episode 1 (1 hour) - Unlike other Phoenix Wright knockoffs like Avian Attorney or Miss Fisher, which try to introduce new ideas and mechanics to the formula, this one is just a flat out copycat. However, it's free. So I wasn't expecting anything incredible. It is also sensitive in its inclusivity, for what it's worth. #212: 404sight (1.5 hours) - A first person platformer that was meant to preach about saving net neutrality. The game itself is just okay, runs really unoptimized, and its ties to the message are really spurious. #213: Sally's Law (2 hours) - Side-scrolling puzzler that is a combination of autorunner and lemmings. The character on the bottom moves automatically and you control their jumps; their movement is recorded, and then you play a character on the top of the screen that has to open doors and clear obstacles for them as the movement plays back. #214: Vanquish (6.5 hours) - I'm starting to think PlatinumGames has only ever made one really really good game (MGR) but to be fair I have not played Nier:A or Bayonetta series yet. This has some great ideas, but almost no enemy variety, poor level design, and an ugly greybrown aesthetic. #215: Super C (1 hour) - Contra 2 is not too different from Contra 1, albeit a bit easier. The third-person levels are replaced by top-down stages that resemble Commando/MERCs. I kind of prefer that to Contra 3's awful mode 7 stages. It's not a classic but it's a fun run and gun. #216: Mr. Shifty (2 hours) - Hotline Miami with teleporting. I had a great time with this one, and it didn't overstay its welcome. #217: STRAFE (3 hours) - This is a SORT-OF beaten game. I got to the final level and was cruising through it when a door glitch suddenly killed me, which means i'd have to start all over again from the beginning. No thanks! That was after already having fallen through the floor multiple times, and not intentionally by the game's design. This is one buggy game. #218: Trackless (2.5 hours) - Okay this one's pretty cool, you might be into it if you liked The Norwood Suite. You walk around a surreal comic-book illustration style world overcoming 'trials' so you can witness "The Object". It's first person but with a text parser for interacting with objects. You get more points for being more creative with your word choices, which you can then spend on different themes for your in-game smartphone. I thought it was pretty rad, although the ending section is very Eidolon-like in its "here's a giant space of nothing, enjoy walking a lot" design. #219: The Frostrune (2.5 hours) - This game disappointed me. From the screenshots I was expecting a Nordic take on Year Walk, but in execution the game plays a lot like an Artifex Mundi game, only without hidden object scenes. Casual-lite adventure, essentially. Much like Artifex games, the 'characters' of the game all move like paper cutouts, and unlike Artifex games, there's no fast travel (you jerks!!). #220: Absent (3 hours) - Freeware adventure game with a pretty ugly art style but it played alright. Mostly I played through it because I accidentally added it to my account. The 7th Guest fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Dec 28, 2018 |
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Dec 28, 2018 21:58
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Mystic Stylez posted:Which one is the best site for backlogs nowadays? Backloggery, How Long to Beat, Steam Completionist, a new one? It's been quite some time since I used those. I like Steam Completionist, but it's appropriately limited to your Steam library.
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Dec 29, 2018 07:10
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Irritated Goat posted:Is Backloggery still the king of backlog sites? I'm seriously considering just wiping out my entire list and rebuilding it because it's kinda unwieldy. I'd love a SteamCompletionist style site where I can add non-steam games though. It works better for me but I play games that I didn't buy on Steam or got for free somewhere else. Mystic Stylez posted:Which one is the best site for backlogs nowadays? Backloggery, How Long to Beat, Steam Completionist, a new one? It's been quite some time since I used those. Yeah, Backloggery is still the gold standard for multiple systems / storefronts. SteamCompletionist is better than Backloggery for handling your Steam library, but if you have non-Steam games to track, you're kinda stuck.
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Dec 29, 2018 10:17
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| # ? Jun 4, 2024 15:28 |
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Hi, all, my name is Chief Savage Man. In 2011, I purchased 120 games on Steam and completed 8. In 2018, I purchased 7 games on Steam and completed 5. I believe in the rest of you that you can achieve what I have achieved. However, I might have a new problem...  I've bought all of these since September and finished one. 
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Dec 30, 2018 22:49
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