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BEATEN: FEAR: Perseus Mandate Boy howdy am I sick of warehouses. I dig bitesize chunks of FEAR - when it goes right bursting into a room in slo-mo and balletically dispatching a room full of freaked out soldiers feels utterly badass (it's even better if you do it using just the kung-fu moves). On top of that, the weapons are punchy, loud and effective - especially the all time greatest shotgun ever. Why can't all videogame shotguns boom like a bomb going off, cut people in two and send them spiralling through the air?  ahhhhhh Still, having now played FEAR, Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate the formula has gotten a bit samey - mostly down to the dowdy and repetitive environments. There are only so many grey warehouses, grey offices and grey sewers I can take, all populated by the same handful of props. But Perseus Mandate was the best of the original FEAR package - mainly due to the cool backflipping, time warping Nightcrawler baddies who actually present a challenge. Godammit I am glad its over now though. I need something more colourful in my life! Necrothatcher fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 14:49
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BEATEN: Witcher III: Hearts of Stone It was weird going back to Witcher III 18 months or so after beating it - for at least the first hour or so I fumbled around having forgotten all the buttons and how the game works. Then I ran into the brick wall difficulty of the Toad boss, which kills you in a couple of hits, constantly poisons you and takes an age to kill. But once that was out of the way I was back on the horse and laying into one of the best expansions I've played to any game.  Every character and performance has something notable about it - particularly Mirror Master, Olgierd von Everich and Iris von Everich. Then there's the little flourishes in dialogue: trapped in a hostage situation and getting out of by accusing the negotiator of racism, the hilarious ghost possession wedding scene and dealings with miserable lovelorn ghosts. CDPR just nail the drama over and over again - making everyone else (though particularly Bethesda) look like chumps when it comes to storytelling.  On top of that it's just a beautiful game - with some of the warmest looking sun I've seen in a game, great weather effects and brill animation. It's even more impressive given that I'm playing on a 2013 laptop with a now kinda obsolete Geforce 750M (have to travel for work a lot). I set it to 720p and turn down most of the fancier effects but it still looks amazing, and runs at somewhere between 40-60FPS.  I had heard that this was the lesser of the two W3 expansions, so I can't wait to play Blood & Wine. Also you can buy some stupid sunglasses and give Geralt a totally dorky hairdo: 
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Dec 3, 2016 20:17
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BEATEN: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Well my games randomiser said I had to play this, and I vaguely remember being impressed by the Omaha beach level on PS2 back in the early 2000s. But, after 15 or so years of military first person shooters, it has not aged particularly well. Worst of all is the way you absolutely have to quicksaving every couple of meters - enemies fire hitscan weapons at you without warning and a burst of fire can cut you down in a second or two. It's tolerable enough in the interior environments - at least you can pop in and out of cover and take them down, but my god the outdoor sniper-based levels are a loving drag.  There's apparently a bug in the game where the enemies don't have to be pointing their guns at you to shoot you, so you spend a lot of time being sniped through walls from long distances. This is hard enough in a destroyed French town level, but at least you get used to scanning all the doors and windows for Nazis. But the snowy forest levels, where the enemy's view is further than yours can go gently caress itself. I lost count of the amount of times I was sneaking along and then *BLAM* dead without warning.  Thing is, I guess random death out of nowhere actually makes for a decent simulation of how horrible war is. In the Omaha beach level you die over and over again - it's pure luck whether you make it to the beach before getting carved up by machinegun fire. It's frustrating and unfair, but I guess running up an exposed beach while being shot at is frustrating and unfair. Fave bits were the stealth levels - if only because you can be primitive Hitman and stalk commanders, steal their uniforms, flash their papers around and feel a tiny little bit like a proper WW2 superspy. But I finished it, with a slight use of a 'full health' cheat when things got particularly unfair. I'm not particularly raring to go on mission packs Breakthrough and Spearhead though. Maybe one rainy day. BEATEN: Deus Ex GO Crackin' puzzle game that transplants the Hitman GO style onto Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Puzzles are as clever as you'd expect from the series, graphics and animations are brill and the whole thing has a shiny, responsive, classy vibe to it.. Only slight flaws are that the game doesn't tell you when a new skill is unlocked, that the plot is rubbish and (at least compared to Hitman) there's no retro bonus levels. Oh what I would do for a JC Denton/DX1 themed skin and level pack...  If you haven't played a GO game you totally should. I've got Lara Croft GO all lined up and can't wait.
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Dec 8, 2016 01:20
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al-azad posted:Allied Assault was such a sting to me because it was one of those visually groundbreaking games you played the HUGE demo of but that was really the best part. It is impossible and I refuse to believe anyone can beat that loving sniper village legitimately. The sniper levels are so hard and so unfair that you wonder what the devs were thinking. It's kinda rough because there's the bones of a decent game here and, for better or worse, Allied Assault's set-piece led FPS design presaged the CoD game style (I think Infinity Ward is actually composed of ex-MoH devs). Still, actually playing it is a dog. Also, I got a bit weirdly put off by the complete lack of blood - the enemies just fall over. Even Goldeneye had the enemies get red stains when shot, so Allied Assault feels weirdly clinical and theatrical. Still, Michael Giacchino's score is great, and the sound design is alright. Love the *PING* of the Garand when you reload.
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Dec 8, 2016 12:51
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BEATEN: Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut Played this (and loved it) on PS3 on release, but have had the Director's Cut knocking around in my unplayed list for a couple of years. I'm pretty sure someone's gifting me Mankind Divided at Christmas, so I figured I should run through it to remind myself of the plot. I've also played DX1 and DX2 this year, so it's nice to round off the full set. Am pleased that it's held up really well. Okay, so the facial animation, some of the NPCS and a couple of incidental animations are a bit rough, not to mention that Hengsha and Detroit suddenly feel a bit unpopulated compared to modern games, but the bones of the game are about as solid as you can get. Also it's nice to see a game with a consistent design philosophy - though the black and gold thing was made fun of at the time the aesthetic really holds up.  This guy feels like a refugee from Oblivion Sure, level design is maybe a little too riddled with man-sized vents, but the game gives you a decent amount of creativity to go about tasks as you see fit. For my money the best moments in the series are when you feel like you're getting one up on the designers - using your strength aug to create a pile of boxes to jump over a fence you're supposed to go around, or bouncing off electric floors and chugging hypostims to get somewhere early. The game is rigorously designed, so they've probably foreseen all this, but it feels like they haven't and it makes me feel smart for figuring it out. Even little things like refusing to pay the 1000 credit cover charge for the nightclub and sneaking in through the bathrooms creates a kinda smugness in the player.  A Very Special Adam Jenson selfie The first time I played it back in 2011 I was assiduously kind and caring to the baddies - using concussion grenades, tranq darts and knocking people out. This time I figured that these bastards turned me into a hideous robot monster man. I've got loving swords in my arms and I'm goddamn going to use them. Carving a bloody path through everyone didn't quite change the game as much as I'd have liked - though I dug Pritchard calling me Attilla the Hun and various NPCs referring to me as the Grim Reaper and pleading for their lives.  BASH! It made the ending - where Jenson is all "but didn't I try to use my resources carefully and avoid unnecessary harm?" a bit ridiculous. Adam, you chucked a frag grenade into a bathroom where a guy was taking a poo poo. You wiped out hundreds of innocent brainwashed zombies with a minigun. You jammed a sword through David Sarif's neck just to see if it was possible.  Take THAT you smug Brit bastard. Also on first play I hadn't realised quite how much of a boner HR has for Metal Gear Solid. Missing Link DLC was excellent too. But good times all round. On to Mankind Divided.
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Dec 20, 2016 11:55
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EightDeer posted:You forgot The Fall I played that too. I can't remember anything about it. I think the main character was bald? That's it. edit: BEATEN: Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 2 I got both episodes of Sonic 4 in the Humble Bundle earlier this year, and thought the first episode was a decent way to kill a few hours. People complain about the physics, but it didn't bother me too much. The only sticking point was a frustratingly tough final boss and the limited life system.  Episode 2 is pretty much more of the same, but apparently with fixed physics to make it more like the originals. It was powerfully 'alright'. It plays okay, looks alright and generally runs fine, but there's no spark of genius or creativity in it. The level designer is clearly a big classic Sonic fan, but doesn't have the imagination and skills that made Sonic 1 to S&K so much fun. Also, the designers decided to put helpful TV screens showing what move you need to use to solve the 'puzzles', which feels a bit insulting to the intelligence. Not to mention that being able to summon Tails to lift you into the air and fly around mildly breaks a lot of the jumping puzzles. Also the music really sucks, which is pretty unforgivable for a Sonic game. Overall, not a complete waste of time, but forgettable stuff. Still, at least the plot is kept to a bare minimum and there's no dialogue. Special mention has to go the 'Controls' screen.  This is less than helpful when playing on a keyboard. Necrothatcher fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Dec 21, 2016 |
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Dec 21, 2016 01:58
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BEATEN: Walking Dead Season 1 Way late to this party, but I finally played through this. Though a bit graphically and structurally creaky nowadays, especially compared to Life is Strange, it's still an amazing feat of videogame storytelling. I actually gave a poo poo about nearly all the characters, felt bad when they died and got genuinely angry with a couple of people. I guess a lot of people criticise it for giving players the illusion of choice while secretly railroading you pretty hard to a fixed destination. For example (from the 400 Days episode), if a creepy weirdo asks you to get into his car and you repeatedly tell him to gently caress off, the game just throws a couple of zombies at you and forces you to get in. Still, as long as you don't peek behind the curtain too much (or read the potential impact of choices online) the illusion holds up well enough and I felt like my choices were directly shaping the story in big ways (even though they weren't). Also, despite the limited facial animation and low-key graphics, the game is really well directed visually. It's also beautifully written - nobody feels like any particular stereotype and every major character has their flaws, moments of triumph and severe low points. I also dug how hosed up the game was willing to get - the emaciated, starved to death child zombie in the attack was really dark....  The only real narrative flop for me came right at the end when you get confronted by the man who you may or may not have stolen from earlier in the game. I chose not to steal from him but the character pretty much behaved like I had anyway, which felt like a bit of cheap conflict at my expense.. On a non-game note, this game has caused me several arguments with my girlfriend. We were supposed to play through it together, episode by episode, but she got bored in September and stopped playing. In December I figured she was done with it, so quietly finished it off. She hit the roof when she found out (by seeing the trophies on my Steam account). We made up, but then she decided to finish it herself ... on my PC and her logging me out of Steam and logging in as herself managed to accidentally overwrite my save files. I'd finished the game by then so I guess whatevs, but it'd have been nice to take my save into Season 2 and beyond. Oh well, I hear Season 2 is crap anyway, so I'll put that on the backburner for a bit.  BEATEN: Metal Slug 3  I've been playing this series since I was 10 and I am still absolutely terrible at it. It's bollock hard at all times, but I'm pretty good at vertical shooters and other arcade games, but I chew through hundreds of credits in these games and die about every ten seconds.  Oh well, the animations rule, the game is loving bonkers (you fight crab monsters, aliens, zombies, ancient mutant gods and some giant tiger head that spits ghost wolves at you) and the music kicks rear end. Also you can turn into a zombie and puke blood at enemies.  Also also there's a robot that grows a giant missile dick and tugs it off. Lots of the other missiles also look like dicks.  God bless you SNK. HEEEEAAAVYEEE MACHEEENGUN! Necrothatcher fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Jan 3, 2017 |
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Jan 3, 2017 15:33
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Mercedes posted:I'll fite you Ready to be convinced! The only thing I really I know about s2 is the constant slagging off it gets in the main Steam thread.
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BEATEN: Batman: The Telltale Series Let's get the technical poo poo out of the way first. Despite being graphically limited the thing runs like a dog, dropping frames and descending into jerkiness at the drop of a hat. On top of that it refuses to run if the game resolution is different from your desktop resolution, the game doesn't detect completed saves from the free Episode 1 trial, there's a tonne of small annoying glitches (character's mouths not moving, the background remaining static when you're supposed to be speeding through it in the Batmobile) and the anti-aliasing is either broken or just bad. But, leaving all that aside for the moment, it's a pretty good Telltale game and a decent semi-original spin on Batman. It's one of the only times in Batman media where I've felt like Bruce Wayne is the real person and Batman is just a scary tool he uses to get things done. It's just downright fun smarming and charming your way through scenes as Bruce, especially if (like me) you play him as a borderline autistic creepy weirdo who reacts to direct questions with blank silence. While I enjoyed the fighty QTE bits, I just dug the little things: wandering around Selina Kyle's lovely apartment in my pants looking for bagels, outright agreeing with the surprised bad guys during their little monologues or using the "punch him/her" option whenever it came up.  This is Bruce running around in his pants frantically hiding his Batman stuff as someone turns up at Selina's apartment door. The only downsides are the usual Telltale problem - the moment when the illusion fails as you realise that, no matter what decisions you make, the game has decided what's going to happen. Most egregious here is you can prevent Harvey Dent getting scarred and turning into Two Face, but he goes crazy and starts shooting up the place regardless. He's even referred to by the game as 'Two Face', despite having precisely one face.. There's a tonne of annoying things like that, like the repeatedly underlined 'important' choice to make Batman vicious or merciful having no impact whatsoever or... just loads of little disappointing thing Oh well, I've had worse times with Batman. Worth a go when it's deeply discounted. BEATEN: Volume  Steam roulette tossed this one up. As someone who deeply dug the MGS VR missions (completed all of them in MGS1 Integral and MGS2 Subsistence) I was pretty psyched for this. But frankly it falls a couple of marks short of good. Problem number 1: the lovely voice acting. The main character is voiced by YouTube personality Charlie McDonnell - who is clearly NOT an actor. It's a downright terrible, flat performance - and he rarely shuts up throughout the game.  Problem number 2: though a stealth game there's no room for improvisation. There's a load of stealth toys to play with, but (aside from very rare situations) you don't choose which one you'd like to use to get past guards. It makes things feel a bit prescriptive. Problem number 3: there are 100 levels, a lot of which feel like filler. Too much game is a weird criticism, but I'd have dug this a lot more if there were maybe 50 levels. Plus, they all look basically the same - sure the game tells you you're in an art gallery, military base or prison - but they're all the same drat boxy rooms. Problem number 4: the plot is absolute dogshit. BEATEN: ABZÛ  Pretty, short game that desperately wants to be a ThatGameCompany game (even having some ex-staff from there on this), but falls slightly short. Swim around beautiful ocean dioramas, marvel at the colours, interact with a couple of things, dig the orchestral soundtrack and you're done. It's good stuff, but never quite comes together in the same way as Journey on PlayStation.  BEATEN: 80 Days  Kickin' rad Phileas Fogg-em-up where you must plan and make your way around a slightly alt-history Victorian planet. It's basically an interactive novella with the barest smattering of strategy, but it's beautifully written (even makes steampunk non-cringey!), looks nice and gets tense when you're approaching your deadline. Think I'll fiddle with the mobile version and try out some different routes when I'm bored and on the go.
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Jan 15, 2017 20:21
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BEATEN: XCOM: Enemy Unknown Ever since roundly bouncing off X-COM: UFO Defence and having absolutely no idea what was going on, I'd put Enemy Unknown on the backburner. But, with XCOM 2 getting shitloads of great reviews and currently being $10 in the Humble Monthly Bundle, I figured I'd give it a go and see how I liked it. Oh my god what a game - somebody should have told me it's like a scifi combo of MGS Peace Walker/Phantom Pain. Loved naming my soldiers after my friends, then guiding them through a hard as nails war where they got murdered in all sorts of horrible ways by monsters. Just gradually getting more and more powerful, until your guys are psychic, robot-armoring wearing, jetpack-equipped dead-eye snipers was super fun - as was getting the tactics nailed down and clearing out rooms. I got the mind control power just before the final mission and there's nothing finer than turning the baddies against one another. Tried my best not to savescum too, it feels like missing the point. I did reload a couple of times when the positioning reticule moved me to the wrong place, but it feels like that's on the game not me. I hear good things about Enemy Within, but given that I now own XCOM 2 I think I'll go straight to that. Opinions? BEATEN: Sleeping Dogs: Zodiac Tournament DLC  More Sleeping Dogs is never a bad thing, and I got this for a couple of pence in a sale. It's about an hour long and takes you through a barely concealed 'Enter the Dragon' ripoff. I haven't played Sleeping Dogs in 6 months or so, so it took me a moment to remember what the combos were, but before too long I was snappin' bones with the best of them. The only annoying thing was a huge difficulty spike where you have to fight in a room with a slowly lowering spiked ceiling. I got it in the end (by gumming the gears up with mooks) but it must have been my 15th or so attempt. BEATEN: Sleeping Dogs: Wheels of Fury DLC  Also a short one - basically a series of driving missions in which you trick out a sports car until it's essentially the Batmobile. Not much to say here, just that the fully upgraded car is pretty ridiculously fast and comes with a battering ram, an EMP and twin machine guns. It also sounds like a goddamn monster.  NULLED: Baseball Stars 2  I don't understand baseball and I don't understand this video game. Got it in the SNK Humble Bundle and figured I'd get it out of the way. Played one game - couldn't work out how to hit the ball without it being a foul, or how to pitch properly and the weird baseball lingo is pretty incomprehensible. Still, I managed to claw my way to a thrilling 3-2 victory (all points scored in the first.. round?). But to finish this would require playing 6 matches of 20 mins each and I cannot be arsed. I did get my pitcher punched in the face though. 
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Jan 18, 2017 19:23
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BEATEN: Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (PS4) Wow. Now, The Uncharted games are a tiny bit shallow gameplay-wise, especially the gunplay sections, but this about a visually dazzling, exciting and slick game design as it gets. Every couple of minutes there's something jaw-droppingly beautiful - from huge sun dappled vistas to building interiors detailed to millimeter precision. It feels like a luxury experience, probably the best environment design I've seen yet in a game. I'm not going to go on about it too long because everyone's probably sick of hearing about this game and it's so obviously amazing, but it's definitely one of the most memorable gaming experiences I've had in a while and the perfect capper to the Uncharted series. Also, it's such a spectacle that it makes for a great social experience. My friends were urging me to play simply because it's so much fun to watch. BEATEN: Dead Space  Tossed up by Steam Roulette. I enjoyed it, though it became a bit of a slog by the end. The first couple of levels were great - I was low on ammo, constantly low on health and the monsters and environments were genuinely scaring the crap out of me. Then, as I upgraded my equipment and learned the game systems, it gradually stopped being scary and became bit action game by numbers. Your first necromorph is heartstopping scary - your hundredth? Not so much. Thought the silent protagonist thing didn't work in this, why is this bozo staying stone cold silent as he's betrayed, runs into his long lost girlfriend or is mocked by mad scientists? It just doesn't read properly. But it's straightforward enough to get through, even if the game is maybe 1/4 too long. BEATEN: Sonic the Hedgehog  I was hungover and fragile this week and decided to spend the morning playing through the version I got from the Sonic Humble Bundle. This is an old friend for me - I vividly remember playing it on a Megadrive demo station in a kid's store in 1991, and getting it a couple of months later for my 7th birthday. It's a classic and it mostly holds up well: though Marble Zone and Spring Yard Zone are pains in the arse. I particularly appreciated Starlight Zone here - partially for the superchilled music (that bassline... mmmMMM) - and partially because it just looks rad. Also, I nabbed all the Chaos Emeralds and got the good ending, so pleased with that. BEATEN: Sleeping Dogs - Nightmare at North Point DLC  3/4 Sleeping Dogs DLCs done and this was the worst yet. Delving into Chinese magic and the afterlife is a neat prospect - as is bringing back all the characters you mulched and blew up in the main story. But, in practice, it's driving between locations and fighting badly animated Chinese 'zombies', which stiffly hover at you and use one move. Disappointing. Hope Year of the Snake is better. Necrothatcher fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 16:14
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BEATEN: Wolfenstein: The Old Blood Current events put me in the mood to blow up, stab and otherwise brutally maim Nazis, and Wolfenstein is about the best way to do it. I absolutely loved The New Order when I played it last year - finding it surprisingly touching and smart about history for a game where you murder giant Nazi robot dogs. Plus you get to drop acid with alt-history Jimi Hendrix, what's not to like? This isn't as good as TNO, but I still thought it was brill. The moment to moment action and impact of the guns in these games is brill, as is the careful environment design and pulpy sense of adventure. I love the way it swings between kinda sobering reflections on the consequences of Nazism and silly Indiana Jones-y gags. Still, fighting Nazi zombies isn't quite as fun as regular Nazis and it kind of dragged on a bit towards the end. Still, I got it for £3 in a sale and can't reasonably complain too much. Scratched the fash bashing itch. BEATEN: FLY'N  Randomly churned up by Steam Roulette. On first inspection it's a cute, chilled out platformer. But there's a difficulty cliff early on when the game gets CRAZY BOLLOCK HARD. It's never unfair, but it asks a lot of your platforming skills and patience. At times it felt like bashing my head against a wall (thus getting the 'Resilient' die 50 times in one level and go on to beat it trophy), but I inched my way through. Glad I did, because the last levels were rock solid but a hell of a lot of fun. Felt like a hidden gem. BEATEN: Sleeping Dogs: Year of the Snake DLC  I'd heard that this was the 'good' Sleeping Dogs DLC, so saved it til last. My mistake, it's another really lightly written and short bundle of missions that doesn't go anywhere. It even ends in a half-assed way - you catch the main villain and he gives you the old "ah Wei, do you really think this ends with my capture" routine and... then it really IS over. I guess the tear gas launcher was fun... My favourite of the SD DLCS was Zodiac Tournament - at least that was nicely silly. NULLED: Deponia  Another from the Steam Roulette. Now, I have nothing against adventure games, but I got halfway through this and just couldn't take it anymore. Not only is it crammed with kind of lol random humour that drives me up the loving wall, it's got headache inducing puzzles that, as far as I could tell, rely wholly on randomly trying objects in your inventory on whatever's around. It's infuriating. But - worse than all that - it has the absolute worst gaming protagonist I've ever played as. Rufus is a snide, dickish and bizarrely sexist jerk who is constantly making lovely asides to the player and acting like a 13 year olds idea of a cool. I can normally get past this poo poo, but it's so in your face that I couldn't go on. I guess the game looks nice, but my god the writing kills whatever they were going for stone dead.
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Feb 13, 2017 16:52
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credburn posted:BEAT: Final Fantasy 8. Man, the entire time, I'm thinking, how the gently caress did this game get made? Who read this script and decided this would be the successor to the incredibly popular Final Fantasy 8? The entire thing is like some weird fever-dream that feels like it's been assembled through madlibs. Flying paramilitary schools, bizarre time manipulation, alternate dimensions, spaceships stuffed with aliens and an ending sequence that goes full bananas.  One of the best FFs imo. Maybe the best.
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Feb 20, 2017 12:29
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al-azad posted:If you enjoyed diving deep into FF8's systems then you'll enjoy Vagrant Story which is just as open ended and broken. It's also surprisingly cinematic for a PS1 game with comic book style dialog and movie like transitions cut to the music. Vagrant Story is top tier PSOne gaming, but be sure to read up on how the combat and weapon systems work. I bounced off it a couple of times until it all finally clicked - you'll eventually hit a brick wall of difficulty if you don't take care to make sure you've got the right weapon for the job.
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Feb 20, 2017 12:51
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al-azad posted:I like the audio logs read by B list voice actor celebrities although I hear the actual direction of the game is a middle finger to them which just makes me hate Blow as a designer even more. How can the direction of a video game be a middle finger to b list voice actors? Does it insult their union or something? Idgi.
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Mar 5, 2017 10:29
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BEATEN: Dragon Age: Inquisition I had a very quiet couple of weeks at work and fancied myself something long and epic. And, with Witcher 3 having faded from memory enough to enjoy a lesser RPG I fired this up. I've played through Origins, Awakening and II and largely enjoyed each of them, and despite all the entirely justified naysaying about II I just set the difficulty to easy and steamrollered through it enjoying the silly story. But Inquisition really knocks the rest of the series into a cocked hat. There's a bunch of entirely justifiable stuff to criticise in the game. The setting is pretty bland fantasy, there's lot of filler quests, the bad guy is like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon and the general situation of 'rifts' opening up and spewing monsters into the countryside is suspiciously identical to Oblivion. But on the flip side I really enjoyed the progression of building up my Inquisition into an army - travelling around recruiting people and sending them out on missions around the world. I also had a surprisingly fun time playing with the armor and weapon creation tools, which doesn't quite break the game but certainly bends it a bit.  Mostly I just dug the characters and world. Bioware aren't breaking any boundaries here, but there's a tonne of stuff to explore at your own pace. Right up to the end the game was surprising me with gigantic open maps crammed with sidequests and dungeons. If you ignore the obvious boring "collect ten ram's horns" quests they're usually pretty good quests too. The main missions are also all nicely choreographed, with the highlight being a great imperial ball sequence where you have to charm the party and stop assassins. Oh yeah, and I shagged the beefy bondage bull man. He's clearly the best choice. Good times (and considering I paid $5 for it and played it 70 hours great value for money). I'm interested for the expansions, though as far as I can see only the last one is really crucial. Any tips? BEATEN: The Last Guardian  Got this for Christmas and had been putting it off a bit because I'd heard it was a bit frustrating/disappointing. I was a huge fan of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus back in the day and didn't want to be let down. Daaaaamn what an idiot I was. This game is loving outstanding and interacting with Trico is like nothing else I've ever experience in a videogame before. I can only figure that people who complain about him not doing exactly what they want at a moment's notice have never had a pet, or just don't have much patience. There's this fantastic gameplay loop of observing the environment from both your POV and what you imagine Trico's is, then looking at what he's doing and trying to get inside his head, then trying to knit the whole train of thought together into (what feels like) an organic solution. Plus the general Ueda aesthetic and minimalist plotting is very much my poo poo. Yeah the framerate can be a bit variable, but it actually annoyed me just once in a very early scene with lots of foliage. Maybe it's a product of being a 90s kid growing up on N64 and SOTC on PS2, but as long as a game chugging a bit doesn't cause me to die, I'll bear with it. Most games I play kinda sink into the memory after a bit, but this (and especially the outstanding ending) are going to stick around. BEATEN: Doom 3  Was very sceptical about this, but I have a rule. I'm only allowed to play the latest in a franchise after I've completed the previous ones I already own. It's a (girlfriend encouraged) way of making sure I'm not blowing money on games I will never play. So, I own DOOM, but am not allowed to play it unless I make my way through the Doom games I already own. So far I've been through Ultimate Doom, Doom II, No Rest for the Living, The Master Levels, Final Doom, Doom 64 and now Doom 3. Pretty much all of the poo poo thrown at this game sticks. It's overly dark, crammed with cheap scares, monsters teleporting behind you and has terrible weapons (this might feature the single worst shotgun I've ever used in a game). Buuut, I can respect the technological leaps it makes. I'm playing the BFG edition, so looking at it through a smartened up HD lens, but this must have blown people away in 2004. I particularly enjoyed the seamless interface with the in game terminals (why haven't other games done this?) Weirdly it actually gets a lot better in the final quarter of the game. A brief trip to Hell is a welcome change from metal corridors and from then on it starts throwing many more monsters at you. I think the criticism that it's not really a Doom game is a bit unfair - it is, just with somewhat limited ambition. I'm glad I played it before DOOM though, that game looks 10x better than this. Oh well, gotta play Resurrection of Evil and The Lost Mission first... BEATEN: RYSE  Recent bundle fodder and tossed up from the Randomizer list I use. It's not quite as bad as its reputation suggests, but it is still pretty bad. You are essentially doing the same thing ad nauseum (slice slice slice, QTE) in pretty environments. But I got through it and had a moderate amount of fun just enjoying the scenery and dumb-rear end plot. Perhaps it helped that I played through one level a night, meaning I couldn't get too bored of the tiny gameplay loop. Anyway, it's done and can be consigned to the 'beaten' list. BEATEN: Virginia  I have no idea what the gently caress this game was about. You play an FBI Agent investigating your partner and trying to solve a missing persons case. Essentially you wander through environments and the game 'cuts' and dumps you in random places. One minute you're sitting in a restaurant, the next you're examining a dead baby bird, then someone hands you a stuffed buffalo. Eventually you drop acid and experience a range of possible futures? I dig the flat shaded style and the great orchestral score, but gently caress me it's two confusing hours. The most I got out of it was a critique on race in the FBI - with the main character encouraged to report on her minority colleagues to further her career and perpetuate racism. But where the Satanic cult, UFOs, ghost buffalo and flower-picking fits into that beats me.
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Mar 10, 2017 11:53
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BEATEN: Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil / Lost Mission I was a bit burnt out by Doom 3 at the end of the campaign but wanted to get it into my 'Completed' list and so soldiered on through the two Add-ons. I'm glad I did. Turns out most of my problems with Doom 3 are solved by turning you into an invincible superpowered punching machine or simply siccing big arenas of baddies on you. Resurrection of Evil came out just after the game, and its big USP is that you get a hellish heart powerup that's gradually upgraded as you defeat bosses. It is ludicrously overpowered. You start out with 'just' ultra slow mo, but you soon get fists of fury (one punch kills pretty much anything) and invulnerability when you use it. It's powered by the corpses of dead UAC workers, and given the hell invasion there's more than enough to keep you going. The heart completely sucks out the fear of the original - leaving you barrelling down corridors punching everything that moves into a fine paste. I particularly like the way the Revenant skulls bop back like something out of a carnival game. These missions also add a super shotgun, which is awesome and a (slightly pathetic 'me too!') gravity gun - which is almost entirely useless. Lost Mission isn't quite as fun. It's a short campaign produced for the 2012 BFG edition and the leap in technology basically manifests as being able to have larger areas and more enemies. It's best during the last few Hell levels, when you finally get proper Doom-like arenas full of monsters to blast. Feels like a bit of an attempt to re-Doom the game. Fun and short enough though Anyway, now that that's out of the way I can FINALLY play DOOM 2016. BEATEN: Jurassic Park: The Game  I'd heard this sucked, with people mainly criticising it for being a QTE fest. Thing is, I don't really mind QTEs, I like Jurassic Park and generally like Telltale. How bad could it be? Well it turns out the QTEs are FAR from this shitpile's worst thing. First up are some seriously shoddy graphics. It's obvious that the dinosaur models had the most care lavished on them, but even they look plasticky. Everything else looks like an early PS2 game at best, with maybe the single worst facial animation I've ever seen in a videogame. The human characters twitch and squint like hosed up automatons, and the lip syncing is atrocious. I mean check this out:  On top of that, the environments are ultra low effort. It's basically okay when you're in concrete corridors (a decent portion of the game), but any jungle scenes are a flat box with some lovely plant models scattered about. On top of all that the dialogue is atrocious and character motivations flip around randomly. At one point you even controlling two characters as they argue with one another - which just makes things confusing. I think most of this is down to each of the four episodes having a different director and a different writing team. Episode 1 is merely mediocre, but things really nosedive in Episodes 2 and 3, especially with the introducing of wisecrackin' mush faced cretin Yoder, a bounty hunter who looks like Syndrome from the Incredibles. The game even starts to rip off Aliens when a new dinosaur is introduced that cocoons people and lays eggs inside their bodies. Total trash. Finished it only because it was short and wanted to see how bad it'd get. BEATEN: Combat Wings: Battle of Britain  Ultra arcadey World War 2 dogfighting game made on a strict budget by a Polish dev team. There's not much to the game really, but the core dogfighting is pretty fun - especially once you get your hands on a Spitfire. It's pretty short and doesn't demand too much of you, as well as having a pleasant bit of personality. Each of your wingmen gets his own mini-story you hear over the radio during missions, and there's little things to notice on the maps as you zip around blasting the Luftwaffe. Look, I even found Stonehenge! BEATEN: Sid Meier's Ace Patrol  Cheapo WW1 biplane fighter mobile port that I'm willing to bet Sid Meier has had absolutely nothing to do with. Short and a bit easy, kind of like a dulled down XCOM. You name your pilots and give them special powers as they level up and take down the hun. The actual strategic bit of the game - positioning your fighters to intercept the enemies - is actually fun once you get the hang of it. The most enjoyment it actually provided was reading a thread full of people moaning that it's got women pilots (*gasp* even Asian and black women) in it. Someone made a mod makes the game entirely male - but then it turned out that had a virus in it. Hahahahahaha. NULLED: Poker Night 2  I quite enjoyed Poker Night 1, but this didn't really grab me. Partly it's because I don't really know who most of the characters are. I've never seen the Venture Brothers, never played Borderlands and, though I know who Sam is, never played a Sam & Max game. I do know who GLADOS is, but she's badly written here and Ash (for some bizarre reason) isn't voiced by Bruce Campbell. What's the goddamn point of putting Ash in your poker game if you don't have Bruce Campbell - he can't be that hard to hire. Worse, the guy doing his voice isn't even doing a good impression. NULLED: Gun Monkeys Looks fun, but for some reason every global server says 'FULL', so I can't play it. NULLED: God Mode No matter what I did it wouldn't load. Tried everything. Apparently it's terrible anyway.
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Mar 28, 2017 13:12
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BEATEN: DOOM Fargin Icehole posted:I hope you enjoy it. DOOM 2016 is such a refreshingly good change of pace, it's like you're going back full circle to the beginning, but in a good way. This was everything I hoped it'd be. Every single molecule of the game is geared towards speed and violence - from the way Doomguy zips around the place like he's got a rocket up his arse to the way he punches the upgrade robots and tears demonic heads in two. I felt like there was a real Platinum Games vibe to the arena combat - every weapon has a time and a place it should be used and every monster has a specific tactic to take them down. It's easy enough in theory, but when you're juggling a room full of leaping monsters that want to beat you to death with your own arms, it ends up being a kind of instinctive ballet of shotgun-shotgun-chargebeam-melee-shotgun-grenade-lockonrocket-rocket-melee-grenade-CHAINSAW. On top of that everything is so beautifully responsive. The first person physicality is beautiful - especially the mantling - with the impact as you land from a height, or bash in some door cranking up that feeling of being the most badass thing these demons have ever seen. And y'know, the visual design, music, sfx and level design are all polished to a mirror sheen. Probably one of the best single player FPS campaigns I've ever played. Didn't touch multiplayer and Snapmap wouldn't load for some reason, but I'm perfectly happy with the SP on its own. Pleased to have finally completed every single ID DOOM game. BEATEN: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild  I'm not quite sure how I even came to be playing this. Back in January someone came to stay in my spare room and offered me a Wii U as payment. I didn't have time to fiddle with it so I left it in its box. Then another friend calls me and says his Mum had a game randomly show up from Amazon that she didn't order ("Legend of something or other?"), and do I want it? Well it turned out to be BoTW - and gently caress me this game is exactly as great as everybody says it is. I haven't played a game that's sucked away time as easily as this in ages. You sit down, play a bit, then notice it's dark outside and - poo poo - it's midnight?! But I was just having lunch. There's just so many distractions and so much stuff to do, and it's all fun and rewarding. For example, near the start of the game I decided to see what was at the top of the nearest mountain. Four hours later I'd uncovered this enormous free-form quest complete with a kickass action sequence (done entirely without checkpoints or quest markers) that relied on my smarts, skills and curiosity to work it out. It's a genuinely humongous achievement in game design and really feels like the pinnacle of what Nintendo are capable of. I finished up the main plot and did about half the shrines and a bunch of sidequests, and I'm still hungry for more. Leaving it aside now until I get the craving again. Praise be to the random fates that bestowed this upon me. BEATEN: Alan Wake  In which Sam Lake's writing ambitions can't surmount his writing skills. It's a half-baked third person shooter with a lovely gameplay look and about three different enemies. The game essentially consists of wandering around the woods until a bunch of axe-wielding shadow lumberjacks attack you. You shine a torch on them for a couple of seconds and then clumsily shoot them. Rinse and repeat for 12 hours. The game mixes things up with possessed inanimate objects ("oh nooo an evil floating pipe") and killer crows, but that's about it. I wouldn't mind too much if it were in service of a decent plot, but it's essentially all about the psychological turmoil of its hero, Alan Wake. Problem is - he's an unlikeable rear end right down to the final credits of the DLC episodes. Not only does he spend the game wearing a hideous hoodie and leather-elbowed houndstooth jacket combo, but he just whines and moans (in bad voice acting) through boring interpersonal drama. "I'm a successful writer and celebrity boo hoo hoo." I like Sam Lake's Max Payne noir pastiches, but this is fatally sincere and crammed full of genuinely crappy dialogue that restates the same thing over and over. Also annoying is that the game is full of product placement for Energizer batteries, Ford cars, Microsoft products and Verizon wireless. I can usually overlook this kind of thing as the cost of doing business but if you're trying to create a kooky, subcultural Twin Peaks kinda vibe, having ads for a phone company popping up really kills the atmosphere. Especially when characters begin quoting the loving ads back at you in dialogue. I ground through the thing constantly hoping it'd get better, but it never did. Resorted to chugging through the DLC extra episodes on easy. Really hope American Nightmare doesn't come up on my Steam Randomiser anytime soon. Deadly Premonition may be technically atrocious, but it does what Alan Wake's trying to do with ease. BEATEN: Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7  I asked the Steam thread what games to play with my girlfriend, and they recommended this. She's a Harry Potter fan so the whole experience went down pretty well. Fun game with a lot of attention to detail and some surprisingly nifty visuals at times. I think a potential flaw is that the mimed cutscenes can't really convey the complex plot of the books - and I haven't read all of them/seen all the films. If I were playing it singleplayer I'd be mostly confused as to why stuff was happening, but fortunately my GF was happy to explain who was who etc. Good times. Think I'll check out Lego LoTR next. NULLED: The Cave  Really wanted to like this. Ron Gilbert's writing has always tickled me and the opening sequence was weird enough to get my intrigued. But some boneheaded design choices made me quit pretty early on. The game's gimmick is that you take three characters through a surreal platforming cave, using their abilties to solve puzzles and piece together their stories. But you can only control one at a time, which means that you essentially have to do each piece of platforming three times in a row. It's teethgrittingly repetitive and the platforming mechanics are kinda floaty, slow and imprecise. I really tried to force myself through as it's pretty short, but this killed it stone dead. A simple 'warp all characters to me' button would have made it work too... Oh well.
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Apr 19, 2017 15:28
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BEATEN: Assassin's Creed: Syndicate & DLC I have now played every single one of the main series (including Liberation and Rogue) and Syndicate was possibly the best of the lot. I really appreciate the way they've tried to strip out a lot of the poo poo that bogs down the rest of the series. There's a tonne of quality of life improvements here, but probably the best are that any tailing missions are mercifully rare and it feels like there's less arbitrary mission desync conditions than before. Moving around the city is fun and easy, fighting is a bit easy but the animations are satisfying and the set piece assassination missions are all very well thought through. The undisputed highlight for me though were the Dreadful Crimes detective missions, where for once the game slackens the leash and lets the player work stuff out for themselves without being led through a mission by the nose. You essentially play Sherlock, using your eagle vision to piece together a crime scene, track suspects and evaluate evidence. Generally you have to triangulate means, motive and opportunity, while eliminating the red herrings along the way. For example, you can have a crime where a crapload of evidence points towards a women drugging the victim and robbing him, but despite her seeming incredibly suspicious, she wouldn't have had the strength to hurl him from the roof of the train. It's that great kind of design that makes you feel smart when you get it right. It's all much better written than the main game too. I guess I also liked it because I live within the in-game map and, though it's only really accurate in the West End and around major landmarks, it's still fun to sit on the approximate position of where my house is now, and get to climb up landmarks I cycle past on the way to work each day. Even right now from where I'm sitting at work I can see the place where, in-game, Charles Darwin tasked me with ridding St James Park of hallucinogenic flowers. Only real downside is that familiar old Assassin's Creed problem of being completely unable to tell a satisfying story. Jacob and Evie are in the top tier of AC protagonists, but the main bad guy is so thoroughly disconnected from them and has really vague plans that there's not really a drive to kill him. There's good moments in the story, but think about it a little and it all falls apart. Plus the modern day stuff is completely unintelligible. DLC wise, The Last Maharajah is skippable filler, and the Jack the Ripper missions are alright, but jamming Assassin's Creed silliness into real life serial killings felt a bit tasteless. BEATEN: Gunstar Heroes  Tossed up by my randomizer. I'd played it before back in the day, but I'd forgotten just how much creativity and imagination goes into the game. Every single level has some wild twist or surreal new element: whether it's a side-scrolling space mission, heading through a mineshaft, or playing an ingame boardgame. I love experimenting with the different weapon combos and I particularly like the decision that touching the enemies doesn't hurt you, and you can toss them about the screen. Gets really hard towards the end though and even with infinite lives the checkpoints are so unforgiving I had to save state my way through the last bosses. BEATEN: Syberia  Loved the design, weird atmosphere and writing, hated the time it took to get anywhere. Unravelling the mystery of Hans Voralberg really is interesting, and the really original clockwork faux Eastern Europe setting is quite striking in a dowdy sort of way. Most of the puzzles seem to rely on sensible logic too, and though I did have to look up a couple of things in a walkthrough (mainly finding out that I'd missed clicking on a tiny background element) the game does hang together pretty well. There is one giant convoluted puzzle in which you're trying to get $100 where I was just wishing Kate could go to an ATM and withdraw it instead researching wine, fixing a clockwork violinist and so on, but hey-o that's the genre. The only really awful thing in the game is that it takes forever to do anything. You can't skip screens, so a huge portion of the game is spent watching Kate running across pre-rendered maps. Also, the animation engine can't deal with stairs well, so when she reaches one she the character has to painstaking align with them and start a slow canned climb. You'd think if the game had this much trouble with stairs they might avoid them buuuut nope, there's stairs loving everywhere. BEATEN: INSIDE  Loved every second of it. It's not the most ambitious bit of game design, but what it does it does perfectly. It's a real masterclass in scene-setting, visual storytelling and gameplay informing the atmosphere. The graphics are beautiful, with fantastic use of muted color and lighting, mixed in with one of the best implemented procedural animations systems I've ever seen in a game. The puzzles are precisely as hard as they need to be, not exactly slowing you down but still giving you a sense of achievement. Even though it's a brief game (took me three hours to get through) images from this game are going to lodge in my memory far more vividly than say, the 50 hours I put into Fallout 4. And that ending!  If you have it play INSIDE asap.NULLED: Dysan the Shapeshifter  Tossed up by a cruel randomiser, this game has a rare outright 'negative' Steam rating and reeks of cheap, badly coded trash. Fortunately for me, the game absolutely shat the bed at rendering this, leaving the game as a psychedelic nightmare. I fiddled with the settings a bit, but couldn't be arsed to fix it so nulled it. NULLED: Space Hack  Another cheapo disaster. Personality free ARPG that, despite having N64 level graphics, judders and creaks along. Is badly translated (I'm guessing from Russian) and just feels awful to play. Killed a bunch of aliens and decided my time was better spent doing literally anything else.
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May 10, 2017 16:02
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BEATEN: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided What a crushingly disappointing game. It's disappointment that sneaks up on you too. I went into it with lowered expectations as it notoriously suddenly ends about 2/3 of the way through the plot with nothing much resolved (and it's never going to be resolved as the sequel was cancelled) but it fell short in areas I wasn't expecting it to. First the good. Whoever is in charge of environmental design at Eidos Montreal deserves a pay rise and a promotion. Picking up where Human Revolution left off, the game is crammed full of fascinating scenery and art. Prague looks futuristic in a believable way, obviously influenced by Blade Runner but with a contemporary digital sheen over everything. The amount of care that's gone into building cool places to walk through is seriously impressive, particularly the Palisade bank and the augmented ghetto. But then there's everything else. The gameplay doesn't really seem to have advanced one atom from Human Revolution. Though the game bills itself as having a choice between stealth and action, it's heavily weighted in favour of stealth. But even that's finicky. Guards are omniscient, so when one spots you they're all on your case immediately. It takes them so little time to go on full alert and so long to cool down that it encourages quicksaving and quickloading, which doesn't feel right. Plus there's technical glitches like being spotted under a desk because the model has a 1 pixel gap between two vertices. But even if you do decide to fight back you're limited. I couldn't see any fun heavy weapons in the game - just a boring selection of bog standard shotguns, rifles and pistols, none of which are particularly satisfying to use. The new augs don't add much either and seem mostly redundant. On top of that the game stays rooted to it's Prague map for most of the game, getting rid of the globetrotting fun of the previous games. Prague is a big, complex map - but they tease other locations that you never visit, which I guess were probably intended for the sequel. On top of that the dialogue is subpar, the ropey facial animation is distinctly last gen, the mantling system is unreliable, the lovely FtP Breach mode is boring and the game never really feels like its adapting to your actions in the way other DX games do. When I started I figured that a DX game couldn't be that bad, and that I could get round the fact that it's essentially half-finished. It's not a crushingly bad, unplayable game - just that there's a thousand tiny annoyances, flaws and problems that add up to a pretty bad experience over time. I can see why it didn't sell, and I probably won't bother with the DLC unless I see it deeply discounted. BEATEN: Sonic: Lost World  Chucked up from the randomiser. This is apparently a Wii U port that I think I got in the Humble Bundle Sonic collection. It's a weird departure for Sonic, obviously copying from the Mario Galaxy games. It also makes you hold down a button to get Sonic to run fast, which feels kinda wrong. Despite a couple of fun moments it's a pretty bad Sonic game, mainly because controlling him here simply isn't fun. At high speeds he's overly twitchy and his jump seems weird decelerated, so I was constantly falling short of gaps and dying. There's also a fair amount of jank where the lock on jump fails to work or collision detection sends you plummeting into the abyss. Also, the 2D levels feel like they were constructed in Mario Maker - often being just blocks suspended in mid-air above bottomless pits. There's also these sudden difficulty spikes that are so severe that Sonic Team put in a 'Wing' power-up that just skips the part of the level if you die so many times in a row. Throwing your hands up and admitting that bits of the game just aren't fun seems like a red flag for game design - though much of this feels like it was rushed out the door without a proper design polish applied. BEATEN: A Story About My Uncle  Ultra chilled out first person grappling hook fun. I knew the game was good when I found myself leaning forwards in my chair to try and get the last inch out of a jump and make a platform. FPS platforming is a tricky thing to get right, but the combo of a long-range grappling hook and later kickass rocket boots makes for a pretty drat fun package that doesn't outstay its welcome. The plot and acting are a little weird, but they're easy to forget about when you're swooping through the clouds acrobatically. I think it's in the dollar tier in a bundle at the moment and it's well worth the price. BEATEN: This War of Mine  Hardcore depress-em-up that gives you an insight into what it's like being a normal person scrabbling for existence in an urban warzone. It sounds kinda weird, but I think the game actually gives a pretty accurate depiction of life of Sarajevo during the siege. You quickly learn to fend for yourself and focus on keeping your basic needs met, together with dealing with boredom and depression. It's not exactly a fun game - though it is satisfying when you find a stash of food cans amidst the trash that'll ease you through the next few days. Played two campaigns, in my first everyone froze to death in winter because I didn't realise you had to add several firewood to the heater to keep things warm. In the second I managed to make it through to the ceasefire, though my characters did murder a lot of semi-innocent people to do so. It's tough going and grim as gently caress, but a really cool and unique game. BEATEN: Lara Croft GO  The last of the GO games I've played and probably the best. Has a gorgeous flat-shaded aesthetic and some seriously clever puzzle design. I actually thought it was a bit easy at first and blew through the main campaign in about a week. But the bonus missions, Cave of Fire and Mirror of Spirits, are loving fiendish and took me two months of on and off playing to make it through. I've enjoyed all the GO series, they're great value for money, and hope they're planning more soon. NULLED (for now): Rust  Rust is pretty objectively not fun. You get dropped naked and hairless into an online warzone crammed full of homophobes and racists who casually murder you just for fun. The environment is full of furious animals, you starve to death pretty quickly and there's invisible pockets of radiation everywhere. Despite this there's something weirdly compelling about it - like you're participating in some hosed up Darwinian social experiment. When you're not being murdered it's surreal to walk through this (quite pretty) landscape, full of rickety player built structures. Typical game story: I spotted a group of players running down a valley so hid in a bush and watched them bomb their way through an enemy base for no good reason other than they could. I sneaked in after they'd had their fill and found myself a load of supplies with which I managed to build a bone knife and, once I'd figured out how to, a furnace. I was just about to smelt some metal and make something a bit more high tech when a bear came out of nowhere and killed me. But that's Rust for you. It's still in Alpha after three years, but the devs promise it's going to be a finished game one day. I think I'll check back in every so often to see how it's doing. It's weirdly compelling. NULLED: Mordheim: City of the Damned  Essentially XCOM meets Warhammer. I don't know much about the setting, and this is a game crammed to the top with stats, percentages and weird status effects. I found it all but impenetrable until I read a bunch of beginners guides. Essentially your job is to wipe out the enemy while collecting glowing green stones. On my first attempt half my team were killed by my second go. Upon restarting the game I made it to the end of the first section, only to be brutally smashed into smithereens by a giant monster and an unfriendly RNG. I guess the main problem is that it's simply not very fun to play. The environments are bland, the combat lacks oomph and there doesn't seem to be much scope for tactics other than desperately hoping the RNG swings your way. On top of that the game is locked into Iron Man mode, so one false click and you can screw over your entire save game. Feels like a game for masochists. (man I wrote more than I meant to)
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May 26, 2017 12:55
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dhamster posted:Beat: Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition Congrats on beating Dark Souls. I also finished it relatively recently, after bouncing off it a couple of times. It's astonishing that it manages to live up to its lofty reputation.
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Jun 18, 2017 23:19
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BEATEN: Dishonored 2 Huge fan of the first Dishonored, but this felt ever-so-slightly disappointing by comparison. Don't get me wrong, Dishonored 2 is great, but (by the end of my second playthrough) it was feeling a bit like a chore in a way Dishonored never did. But there's so much great stuff here. The Blink power is as freeing as it was in the original, and loving with guards continues to be sadistically fun. Whether you're diving onto them from rooftops, mincing them with razor mines, possessing them and walking them into deathtraps, hurling them off buildings or just plain immolating them, it never stops being excellent fun. Also, while I think Dunwall just about has the edge aesthetically, Karnaca is a downright beautiful Mediterranean pastiche. The whole thing hangs together beautifully, with the dusty slums seamlessly segueing into lush manor houses and squares. The architectural highlight is definitely the Duke's Castle, which is this semi-brutalist/modernist concrete dream plonked in the middle of Neo-Victoriana. It's brill. There's also two immediately classic levels. The clockwork mansion with its sadistic inventor in the middle is a mind-boggling feat of level design, essentially two or three levels crammed into the same spot that whirr and click between layouts. It all makes spatial sense too, and the first time you duck behind a sliding bookcase and access the grimy back passages of the house full of gears is brill. Then there's the time-shifting cursed house, where you can switch between two eras and engage in all kinds of time-travellin' puzzles. The best bit was, without being nudged one way or the other, I managed to fix someone's sanity by thinking laterally (and fourth dimensionally). Impressively, this managed to change lots of different aspects of the rest of the game - as I'd changed the future so drastically it affected lots of stuff outside of the immediate mission. The downers are little things that mounted up over time. Much moreso than in the last game I was constantly hungry for Mana potions and generally on the last gasp of Mana throughout most of the game. I didn't feel like I was being particularly OTT with the powers, but if you try for creative stuff like linking minds, freezing time and unleashing rats and so on, you're going to run dry pretty quickly. On top of that the loading took forever on my computer - which is pretty bad for a stealth game in which you're vulnerable and will probably die a lot. I did a low chaos Emily run first, which wasn't so bad as I was careful, but my high-chaos Corvo run was load times city. Got a bit much. BEATEN: The Saboteur  Really wasn't expecting much from this, and got it for about 20p because of goon recommendations. Glad I did because the game is pretty drat excellent. Sure it's dated graphically, a little janky and doesn't really do anything original - but as a complete package it's boundlessly entertaining. Shooting Nazis is always fun, but shooting them as a sweary Irishman who's constantly shouting "BOLLOCKS" makes it all the more fun. The whole game has a pulp vibe to it that it never swerves from. Lead character Sean is all but invincible in a firefight, regenerating his health in just a couple of seconds of cover. It means that, while there are stealth systems to work with, by far the most efficient way of completing missions is to run at the Nazis screaming obscenities and gunning down anything with a red armband. It's not smart, it's not original and it's honestly pretty easy - but it's fun as gently caress and nails the tone. Enjoyed my whole time with the game (albeit playing just the main missions). BEATEN: Metro 2033 Redux  Really enjoyed this too. Felt like a slightly retro tinged retake FPS, with the ruined industrial background, silent protagonist and real-time(ish) progression through the levels. There were a couple of things I was skeptical about - the constant hunt for air filters sounded like a pain. In the event they seemed to be everywhere, though maybe this was added in the Redux version. Anyhows, it's beautiful in a grotty kind of way, doesn't go on too long, has an intriguing backstory and surreal weirdness lurking the background. The gunplay against monsters could be a little tighter, but it's easily overlookable. Moved Last Light up my to-play list. BEATEN: The Turing Test  A pretty shameless Portal ripoff, but one that just about squeaks into interesting territory. Just about. It's 'yer standard how human is an AI story with a minor twist in the middle that works. However, the puzzles are a bit too easy (that or I'm a genius) and have very little opportunity for the player to think outside the box and come up with their own solution. If the devs made a game that was a bit more original I'd go for it, but shamelessly copying nearly every aspect of one of the most iconic games of all time (minus the humour) feels a bit lame. BEATEN: Costume Quest  Overly simple, repetitive turn based RPG. I think it might actually be intended for under tens. Also I made the mistake of playing this on my Android and the port seems to have been bodged together in an afternoon. Completely lacking any tactics, levelling up, or skill - bit of a waste of time. BEATEN: Neon Drive  Pretty but hard as gently caress 80s themed rhythm action game. Even on normal it's pretty merciless - two missed beats and it's game over. But I liked the aesthetic and the music, so I got through it eventually. Maybe worth a look if you're really into 1980s kitsch. NULLED: Brilliant Bob  Bottom of the bargain bucket platformer assembled in Unity. Controls like a dog, full of physics glitches and the intro sequence is a powerpoint presentation. Made it halfway through before realising I was wasting my life and quickly uninstalled.
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Jun 26, 2017 15:29
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BEATEN: HITMAN: Season One Loved it. It's an effortlessly cool combination of puzzle, stealth and action packed with imagination. Above all that it's a hilarious comedy as well, with the best deaths being the most funniest and ironic. There's something really satisfying in the way you get tasked with killing these horrible 1%ers in darkly funny ways, usually by turning their own passions and flaws against them. Best deaths in my opinion were yoga-ing someone to death, scaring someone by pretending to be the ghost of his Mum, a poisoned vegan birthday cake, shooting a plane down with an antique cannon, exploiting someone's OCD to drive them nuts and hacking an AI surgeon to go bananas and turn the patient, my target, into a pin cushion. Got a couple of regrets: I was seriously skeptical of the episodic release format but now I really wish I'd picked it up at the start. I replayed each level a bunch of times, but there's the sense that it'd be much more satisfying if I had a month to really learn each environment inside and out. Also, I came in just in time for the final 'Elusive Target', which hosed up by mistake in about 30 seconds and now can never retry. The only real flaw is a twitchy 'subdue' button that occasionally had me thumping a victim in the head and drawing guards from all around. There's also the menus, which I think do an online check each time you bring them up. There's a 10-15 second wait each time you bring up the save menu, which really adds up given them myriad ways you can gently caress up. I hope IO get Season 2 out now that they're independent, though I'm going to play Blood Money for the first time soon and can't wait. BEATEN: Super Street Fighter II Turbo  Ended up at a pub a while back that had a SF2 machine in the back. Got drunk and had a great time playing all night, so when I got home late I ordered an arcade fightstick I definitely don't need. Figured I should probably take the opportunity to finally get good at Street Fighter II. Read a couple of articles (and Shoryuken's excellent beginner's book) and did some serious training. So, after 27 years of playing Street Fighter II I have progressed from embarrassing to 'merely' bad. At least I can finally do dragon punches >70% of the time now. Played a bunch of matches on Fightcade and got my butt kicked (though I won once... possibly because of lag), but I'm getting my butt kicked in a constructive manner. Counting it as beat because I finished the game with every character (on the easiest setting but still) and got the Akuma fight at the end. Incidentally, it still totally rules and the gameplay doesn't feel at all dated. One of my GOATs. BEATEN: Sengoku 3  Scrolling beat-em-up I assume came with the Neo-Geo Bundle on HB a while back. It's alright. Typically nice SNK animation for the leads and enemies, but backgrounds are digitised pre-renders and a bit bland. Fighting system is alright though, it's all about mixing up quick and heavy attacks to get a decent combo going. Completel oval office of a last boss though. BEATEN: Streets of Rage 2  Another scrolling beat-em-up, but probably the best one of all time. Had a kinda fun time playing it. Started with a friend playing co-op, but he couldn't stick around so I went through the last levels solo. The game is much more fun with a friend. Love the constantly shifting and imaginative levels (secret elevator in a baseball field! tropical beach! Gigeresque Alien hive!) and, obviously, the totally bangin soundtrack. Not such a fan of the cheap bosses and the loving jetpack enemies. Still, you can see why it's a classic. BEATEN: Titan's Souls  Minimalistically tricky boss rush game where one hit = death for both you and the 17 bosses. The skill comes from uncovering each bosses' weak point and timing firing your one arrow into it. I enjoyed it, though it was loving frustrating at times. For every time I executed a perfect chain of dodges ending with a pixel perfect shot there were 30 times where I got whomped with no recourse. Then there was the slightly unsatisfying moments where I randomly shot the arrow and happened to score a win. I beat every boss in the game and unlocked the secret final boss and full ending, so it must have been doing something right for me not to give up in annoyance. BEATEN: Space Channel 5  Still funky after all this time. I used to be pretty good on this back in the day, so I was pleased to see it pop up at courtesy of Steam Randomizer. Took me a couple of tries of the first level to get my rhythm down, but I quickly got back into the swing of things. It's a rhythm game that's entirely based on sound cues rather than visual bars and so on, so often the best thing to do is look away from the screen to get the timing right. Aced most of it, but the reverse directions final boss nearly finished me off. Will play Space Channel 5: 2 soon as I've never had a go. NULLED: S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl  Bought this in the Steam sale and was really psyched for it. Installed the fan-fix mods and a graphical upgrade and then played it and... it was terrible. Enemies are bullet sponges that I couldn't hit and the game just seemed janky and dull. I really tried to like it, and I figure it's got to have something going for it if it's got such a rabid fanbase. But after three or four hours I wasn't having fun and refunded it. NULLED: Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors Dreams  Had this lying around and thought I'd give it a whirl as I liked Alpha 3 on the Dreamcast back in the day. Feels like a proof of concept more than a proper Street Fighter - character selection is back down to eight and they don't even have their own stages. Finished it as Ryu and Sagat and decided to shift focus to Alpha 2 whenever I can get hold of a copy.
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Jul 23, 2017 21:46
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Khablam posted:Much like the original Deus Ex, you're not meant to have fun-with-guns a la every FPS out there, but find other ways to achieve things. Poor gun handling is solved in time. I get that, and I dig the original Deus Ex. However even on 'Master' difficulty (which FAQs were recommending for new players because it makes gunfire more deadly for you and enemies) I was sneaking up on enemies and shooting them in the head point blank and they just turned and killed me. I really tried to enjoy it, but every second I spent with the game was depressing, ugly and unfun and I've only got so much free time.
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Jul 30, 2017 00:10
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Ulio posted:I think the makers didn't have any idea what to change at higher levels so they took the easy way out of more hp + more dmg even though it makes no sense in the lore of the world. But i think the point of Stalker's Master difficulty is that health remains the same but weapons are more deadly, so it's kinda like Deus Ex's Realistic mode.
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Jul 30, 2017 12:29
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BEATEN: Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice Ludicrously good looking action adventure with a fantastic design sensibility and some of the best audio design I've ever heard. Hellblade is something I want to see more of: a mid price, relatively short and focused experience that tells a tale without DLC, sequel hooks, crowbarred in multiplayer or microtransactions. Ninja Theory has always been threatening to make atruly great game but have always fallen short (Enslaved was the closest they got imo), until now. Hellblade is actually a fairly simple and easy game that's sometimes just a couple of notches above walking simulator (it actually reminded me of Ryse quite a bit, albeit done right), but it transcends that by offering an outstanding audio/visual package - everything from the psychotic break simulating visual distortions to the excellent binaural audio throughout and a great script (though the characters sure do say 'darkness' a lot). Also, if there were an award for digital mocapped performance in a game, then Senua actor Melina Juegens really deserves it, she's jawdroppingly great.  Buuuuuuut. About 90% of the way through the game I got hit by a save ruining bug. I ran past a flame I was supposed to light my torch with, and the game autosaved when I was in a room where I needed a torch to progress and it wouldn't spawn my character with one. As the game only has one save file there was no way back or forward. I waited a week for a patch, but that didn't fix it. After whinging on the internet, Ninja Theory themselves got in touch with me and asked me to email them my save file. Apparently, my save is being used to make a new patch that'll fix the issue I had.  But I'm out of town for while from tonight so I just gritted my teeth and played through the whole drat game again. It's a pretty short game if you know where you're going, but that's still five hours out of my life. I still loved the game, but the bug has tainted the experience a bit (I also felt the ending was a bit underwhelming). It's probably the prettiest game I've played in a while though - and it's got an amazing photo mode. BEATEN: Titanfall 2  A bit underwhelmed by this. The single player mode has been praised to high heaven, but I think it's polished but deeply derivative. The game absolutely nails FPS movement and acrobatics, and it's great fun to wallrun around the obstacle course levels and murder dudes like some high-tech space ninja, but the Titan sections feel clunky and a bit loose for my liking. There are a couple of interesting flourishes in level design and I dug the level where they build a house around you. There's also a level where you shift between past and future to fight and solve puzzles, which would have been amazing if I hadn't just seen the concept executed better in Dishonored 2. What's left feels pretty bog-standard, with a complete nobody hero and a cliched buddy-cop relationship with a robot. On top of that, while the graphics aren't exactly bad the character models look very last-gen. Feels pretty inessential. Didn't touch the multiplayer btw. BEATEN: The Walking Dead: Season 2  I never hear a good thing said about Season 2, so I wasn't exactly hyped up for it. Three episodes in I was sure that this was a classic case of nerd nitpicking, it was easily as intense and gripping as the amazing Season 1. But then it all fell apart in the final two episodes and I realised why it's got such a bad rep. The characters start constantly getting into arguments for no obvious reason - bickering at each annoyingly and ignoring you when you tell them to act like adults. By the fourth time this has happened you're ready to throw up your hands and abandon them to the zombies. Also, as in the worst Telltale games, the choice mechanics are painfully exposed. Go out of your way to save someone from the zombies and you can guarantee their role in the story is done even if they survive now - with the 'saved' character generally dying 20 minutes later and there's nothing you can do about it. It all culminates in a seriously stupid (and badly written) finale full of painfully artificial conflict that ended with me getting the 'worst' ending and ditching the other characters and heading into wilderness alone. I think Clem is better off by herself than surrounded by these jerks tbh. BEATEN: 2000:1 A Space Felony  Neat pint sized detective game that came with the Humble Monthly and parodies 2001: A Space Odyssey. You play a detective tasked with visiting a Jupiter bound spaceship and investigating the deaths of the crew. The first part of the game is collecting evidence in and around the ship, then you confront the AI and try to find logical inconsistencies in his story. It's not very well optimised and some of the humour doesn't land, but it's about an hour long, the flat shaded graphics are pretty stylish and it's just a really interesting experience (particularly if you're a Kubrick fan). If you got the July Humble Monthly, I recommend checking it out. BEATEN: X-Men Children of the Atom  Continuing to work through a load of 2D fighters with my new arcade stick. Although this feels a little rough compared to the later "vs" fighters and only has ten characters (with some weird choices like Spiral) it's still a lot of fun. In fact, the relative simplicity made it possible for my six-year-old nephew to enjoy playing me while I was babysitting him - he had a great time leaping about as Wolverine and Psylocke. The single player is 'yer bog standard arcade mode that culminates in a seriously unfair boss fight against Magneto in which he uses impossible to dodge attacks and frequently becomes invulnerable. I only managed to beat him by playing extremely defensively and running the clock out on the fights. Cleared it with a couple of characters and called it a night. Great game, especially as it was Capcom's first go at a Marvel fighter. NULLED: Galactic Civilizations I: Ultimate Edition  Dated and borderline incomprehensible 4X space conquest game. Doesn't have any kind of tutorial so I tried my best (on the easiest possible difficulty) and just couldn't work out what the hell I was supposed to be doing or how anything worked. Put an hour or two into it and gave up. I probably could watch a YouTube tutorial, but from what I saw it didn't feel like it was worth the time. Necrothatcher fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 13:22
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:Whoa this is really cool! I know right? I've been moaning about games online for years and this is the first time I ever got an email from one of the game's creators offering to fix it personally. They even tried to patch my specific save file and email it back to me, but that didn't work out. Pretty drat good customer service from Ninja Theory.
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Aug 22, 2017 23:34
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BEATEN: The Witcher 3: Blood & Wine I've putting off playing Blood & Wine as I don't really want to live in a world where there's no new Witcher 3 to play. But I gave my housemate the game on PS4 for Christmas and he'd finally gotten to it so I felt obliged to get through it before I was spoiled. As I felt after playing the main game and Hearts of Stone, CDPR just leave pretty much every other developer in the dust. Not only is Blood & Wine exceptionally well written and full of rounded characters whose stories I actually care about, not only does it look and sound stunning in every way, but the open world feels meticulously designed in a way that other devs never come close to achieving. Everything feels bespoke and carefully considered - from the smallest sidequest right down to whatever's lying in the back alleys of the cities. And there's so many memorable moments just in this game, with the obvious highlight being the ridiculously detailed fairytale world-in-a-book you travel to late in the game. Beauclair itself is a technicolour dream after the muddy misery of Velen, but then you go to an even more fabulous Wonderland that's filled to the rafters with actually funny gags and imaginative flourishes. How can I hate a game where my grizzled monster slayer ended up losing a fight to the three little pigs (bit embarrassing that one). And, despite all the effort that's gone into that location, it's an optional branch of the main adventure (apparently the other branch is similarly amazing). I felt a genuine sense of loss when the credits finally rolled. I've been playing Witcher 3 since May 2015 for 240 hours according to the ingame clock and now that the game is finally exhausted of mainline story content it's going to be drat tricky to find anything that can replace it. To extend the goodbye a bit I'm doing a little stroll down memory lane of the game, riding from south to north Velen, checking off those Skellige isles I skipped and maybe finishing up some of those contracts I half finished. Then it's goodbye for good. Possibly the best game I've played in like, thirty years of videogames. BEATEN: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter: Redux  Visually dazzling but somehow incomplete feeling walking sim. It's got great atmosphere and a smattering of neat moments but it never quite came together satisfyingly for me. For one, the game proudly opens with the message that it's not going to hold your hand. That's admirable, but I'd have liked a teeny bit of guidance on what you're supposed to be doing - not knowing left me wandering through half the game leaving most of the puzzles incomplete (I didn't even realise they were puzzles at first) and then having to backtrack across most of the game map to end the game (this appears to be a common complaint). Also, while it's always nice to see a vaguely literary narrative it's just felt a bit twee. And while the game world is stunning, it's also pretty much entirely static, kind of like a pre-rendered environment in real time. Still, it's short enough. BEATEN: Sonic Spinball  Sonic Spinball is a bit of a gaming white whale for me. As a Sonic mad kid I got it for Christmas in 1993 - having been desperate for something new after finishing Sonic 1 & 2 50 times each. Even back then I knew this wasn't great - the animation was off, the graphics were kind of gross and Sonic just didn't look like Sonic. I perservered as best I could, but never managed to get past the second level before dying. Eventually I moved on (Sonic 3 was released 2 months later). But now, with a nudge from Steam Randomiser, I can finally see what I'm missing - via cheating like a bastard with save states. The answer is... not much. The game is an absolute teeth gritting bastard even with save states - requiring you to flip Sonic through pinpoint holes on the tables and always ready to send you plunging to a rapid, unavoidable death. Even if you don't die, misjudge a flip and you plummet to the bottom of a table. Mistime your attack on the final boss and it's plausible you can fall so far down it'll take another 10+ minutes of frustrating pinball wizardry to get him back up there - and then you might have to do it all again! Finally seeing the credits was satisfying though, even if I cheated. I guess in some ways impressive given that the game was developed in only 61 days to meet a Sonic-less holiday season, and the soundtrack is pretty fun. But I'm honestly glad I never ever have to play it again. BEATEN: Shelter  Indie badger-em-up in which you play a mother badger who has to guide her babies through the forest to shelter. It's got a... unique graphic style that I had a love/hate relationship with. Feels a bit janky to control and is pretty drat repetitive. Managed to get all my badger babies to the final level which concludes with an unwinnable sequence where you're stalked by an eagle until you die. The message is a circle of life kind of thing as it's feeding its babies. The game is basically alright as a small scale experiment, but the ending felt a bit  NULLED: Revenge of the Titans  Kind of a fast paced cross between a tower defence and an RTS. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, but boy does it get tough fast. I kept running out of money and not being able to get the upgrades I needed, and ending up in an unwinnable death spiral. Did that a couple of times and put about 5 hours into the game before accepting that I'll probably never finish it. Wish it was a bit more forgiving because watching your turrents blast invaders is pretty satisfying. NULLED: Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds Saga  It's Age of Empires 2 reskinned as Star Wars and released back in 2001. I'd only played a teeny bit of AoE 2 and this seems like a competent enough reworking of it. Buuuuuut, frankly it's a little too finicky to play for my tastes. I got annoyed by the constant micromanagement of commanding my workers to harvest resources and you can only select so many units at once so moving a large army is annoying. Plus I'm generally not a huge fan of RTS games so it didn't do much for me. Finished the first campaign and got halfway through the second before giving up as I wasn't having fun. Nice that it's gotten a recent patch for higher-res displays though.
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Aug 25, 2017 11:36
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BEATEN: Rise of the Tomb Raider An okay if kinda shallow ride. While not quite up the visual loveliness of Uncharted 4 there's still a jaw-droppinly pretty moment every couple of minutes that looks pretty much like playable concept art. Gameplay-wise there's not much new - Lara is essentially Nathan Drake with tits and a bow. Perhaps the only difference is that she's much deadlier than Drake: when you've upgraded her skills with multi-enemy lock on headshots, ultrafast regeneration and a near limitless supply of petrol bombs she's like some insane avatar of death. I felt sorry for the average mook soldier by the end. Storywise it's a bit of a dud, especially compared to TR2013. Lara doesn't do a lot of rising here and the dead Dad motivation is really played out. But nu-Lara is a fun character - she doesn't take any poo poo from anybody and is now entirely comfortable with murdering the gently caress out of the baddies. But aside from that the villains and supporting characters are bit limp and flimsily written and the plot doesn't have any surprises in it. It's not a bad game by any means, just a slightly safe sequel that's resting on its laurels a bit. BEATEN: Kane & Lynch: Dead Men  Escort missions! Insta-fail stealth! Broken cover mechanics! Endlessly respawning enemies! Turret sections! A cover-the-weak NPC sniper mission! K&L is basically a distillation of everything crap in games in the mid 2000s. Having said that, there is something compelling about playing a game where the lead characters have absolutely no redeeming qualities and gently caress up everything they do. You can kinda see what IO is going for at points - there's a mission in a nightclub that has a great atmosphere and a believably busy dancefloor, and the first couple of bank heist/assassination stages are pretty fun. But then you hit Cuba for the last third of the game and the quality of the game plummets. It has a ludicrously grim and hilarious ending through. BEATEN: Crysis 2  Every single loving bit of this game feels designed by committee - and not a very talented committee at that. I dug Crysis and Warhead, but this is so crammed with handholding mechanics that it drove me up the wall. Not just the 'tactical mode' that shows you where everything is in a level, but the constant button reminders, like the lights going out and it reminding me to turn on nightvision. I know!! Christ, there was a point six hours into the game where it felt the need to remind me to "Press W to move forward". Aside from that, it looks technically great (which is I guess the point of the whole exercise), but everything is blandly designed in a generic sci-fi sort of way and it's difficult to care. Story is largely a disconnected sequence of set pieces with paper-thin characters, the most developed turns out to be your drat outfit. Excitement picks up a little towards the end, but by that point I was skipping most of the fights by turning invisible and just running past the enemies to the next checkpoint. BEATEN: Renegade Ops  Fun/dumb playable Saturday morning cartoon-em-up by the Just Cause developers. You race a little car around landscapes blowing up everything in your path while comic-book panels pop up and tell the story. It's as shallow as a puddle, but it's fully aware of what it is and doesn't gently caress around too much. BEATEN: Child of Light  Extraordinarily pretty hand-drawn art and really nice music that just about carries a very easy kids-first-RPG. The whole game feels laser-targeted at getting the audience to feel - throwing in melancholy inserts, mournful string music and tear-smudgedpastels whenever it can, but there's something kinda intangible missing from the whole affair (possibly that the game is rather short for what's supposed to be an epic story). I enjoyed it and the battle system is fun enough, but it feels like they slightly whiffed the landing on this one. BEATEN: Marvel Super Heroes  Great fun and its relative restraint in comparison to the rest of the 'Vs' series is actually pretty welcome. Awesome sprite work, great backgrounds and extremely liberal input boundaries. Despite some of the weirder character choices like Blackheart and Shuma-Gorath, every character is brimming over with personality. In particularly, Capcom absolutely nailed how to translate Spider-man's moveset to a 2D fighter first time - MAXXXIMUM SPIDER! NULLED: Crusader Kings II  I tried, I really tried. I don't know if you can really 'finish' a game like CK2, but whenever I resolve to get back into it I load it with high expectations and then a week or so later give it up in mild frustration. This time I followed the newbie guides and tried to conquer medieval Ireland - but got bogged down in semi-incomprehensible rules on succession and unsustainable military campaigns. It kinda smarts when you read all the cool stories that come out of this game, but I don't think 4X is really my kinda thing. NULLED: Eschalon: Book 1  Self-consciously old-school CRPG that has many things wrong with it, but can mainly be summarised in that it's incredibly boring. Cookie-cutter fantasy world, amnesiac hero, ugly graphics and extremely uninspired combat. Gave it a decent try, but all that in combination with an excruciatingly slow movement speed meant I didn't get too far. Necrothatcher fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Sep 18, 2017 |
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Sep 18, 2017 10:52
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Glare Seethe posted:This is one of the things that annoy me the most in many contemporary games, the constant button prompts. Past the tutorial there should be an option to turn them off. If I've been playing the game for a few hours I probably remember how to open a container, thanks. It really narks me off when a game won't let you turn them off. The Last Guardian is an amazing game, but the devs assume you've got the memory of the goldfish as everytime you have to climb something they put a huge button prompt on screen, and you can't disable them. Rise of the Tomb Raider was similar, reminding how and when to use your rope swing every single time you have to. It just feels like they've got no trust in their audience.
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Sep 18, 2017 12:17
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BEATEN: NieR: Automata The original Nier was memorable stuff, even 7 years on from playing it. So I was very much looking forward to finally getting around to this really unlikely sequel and it more than lived up my high expectations. Yoko Taro isn't the best at straightforward game design/systems (and the graphics on his games are usually a bit budget) but he's one of the few creators that succeed in making their games thematically consistent and super chewy intellectually. On the surface Nier: Automata is a game about anime girls with big butts slicing up robots, but by the end it's a really neat examination of depression, existentialism, suicide and the futility of warfare. Whereas most games would just chuck this stuff into expository dialogue, Taro lets you put it together yourself. You can really feel his personality and philosophy shine through in pretty much everything in the game, from the excellent music to the item descriptions to the surreal NPCs to the weirdly detailed fishing lore. Called it completed after Ending E (which was incredible and is making me smile just thinking about it). It's definitely going to stick out as one of the highlights of this generation. BEATEN: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin & Reborn DLC  I kinda bagged on Crysis 2 last month by saying it was FPS-by-numbers. FEAR 2 is totally that as well, but somehow it's a more palatable kind of bland. Relatively short, pretty easy and kinda dowdy looking, but I dig the mashup of military shooter and Japanese horror. Plus the bits where you get a giant robot and can suddenly turn the enemy soldiers into mince with twin miniguns is dead fun. I actually preferred the even-shorter Reborn DLC to the main, which is a bit like a highlight reel and is some nicely fat-free level design. BEATEN: Ace Combat: Assault Horizon  Never played an Ace Combat game before and apparently this is a black sheep of the series, but I dug it. Bit of a shaky start as I've never particularly enjoyed contemporary milporn shooters, and this is very much aping the CoD feel. It just seems a bit tasteless to entertain myself pretending to fly a helicopter around a vaguely Middle Eastern city blowing people away. Fortunately the plot soon goes kinda off the rails and you're dogfighting over Moscow and the US while engaged in a silly Top Gun style melodrama. Also, it's super simple arcade dogfighting, but I enjoyed it - even the despised DFM mode that locks you into a pursuit of an enemy and just lets you focus on blowing bits off his plane. Dumb but kinda fun stuff. Neat score too. BEATEN: Western Press  Interesting little cowboy stand-off game / typing speed test. A word appears vertically on the left and you have to complete it before your opponent does (typos are penalised). Nice pixel art and sound (though the constant Big Lebowski gags are a bit lame). Thing is, if you're any good at typing the whole game takes about 25 mins to complete, with the only real hurdle being the final boss. I completed it, peeked into the online mode (completely deserted) and uninstalled. BEATEN: Doki Doki Literature Club  Convinced into playing this VN by the Steam thread hype squad, and it was totally worth it. Not going to spoil too much, but it's a really cool horror story masquerading as a lovely dating simulator. It's totally free (not sure why, they could easily charge for this) so check it out (especially if you liked Hatoful Boyfriend). BEATEN: Quake III: Team Arena  Still some of the funnest FPS movement ever made, and I'll never get tired of flinging myself around the maps and fragging opponents. I dig everything about Q3 - the cyberhell aesthetic, cool SFX, sense of motion and skill. But unfortunately while vanilla Q3 still has an online community and busy servers, Team Arena doesn't (or at least I couldn't find them). It doesn't even have the vaguest singleplayer that Q3 had - but I played all the mini-challenges and explored the game modes. Alright stuff. NULLED: Super Hexagon  Feels like a CIA mind controlling device masquerading as a rhythm action game. Makes you feel like a zen master when you get it right, less so when you're loving up (which is often). Managed to clear 'Hard' and 'Harder', but Hardest and beyond are completely beyond me. Maybe if I devoted myself to practising this I could do it, but it'd take a LOT of work. Beautifully minimalist game design though. NULLED: Umbrella Corps  What the gently caress is this? Why did Capcom release a budget RE styled team shooter with terrible mechanics built in Unity? The online community doesn't exist anymore (if it ever did), so I played the lovely single-player missions set in the multiplayer maps for a bit until I got bored (didn't take too long). The plot seems to revolve around a sadistic commanding officer called 'Honker' who has a really big nose, which didn't bode well for future developments. No idea what this game is trying to do or why it exists. NULLED: Beholder  Kind of like This War of Mine, except you're a snitch for an oppressive government who has to spy on his neighbours. It's a neat idea for a game, but the execution leaves something to be desired. Intentionally drab colours, slightly bland writing and repetitive gameplay does not make for thrilling times. Played a couple of hours and couldn't be bothered to go back.
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Oct 13, 2017 13:29
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BEATEN: Bloodborne & Old Hunters DLC Lived up the hype a thousand times over. Took everything I liked about Dark Souls and cranked it to 11. Much more aggressive playstyle and enemies, fantastically responsive controls and a difficulty that's tough but never unfair. The city of Yharnam and its outskirts is one of the single best videogame locales ever, and working out why it's in such a desperate state is rewarding as gently caress. Everything in the game is a piece of this huge puzzle and the entire game is about being smart and attentive, whether its to the mysteriously chained up coffins, blindfolded statues or the moans of the enemies. Then you have to learn the enemies, their parry windows, how the bosses behave and so on. Getting gud is rewarding as gently caress, eventually having the skills to duck, weave and parry your way through enemies that turned you to mincemeat earlier in the playthrough. Also loved the still busy online community. It's nice to see the ghosts, deaths and messages from other players and having someone help you out or hunt you down is exciting as hell. I had some really epic PvP battles in the final parts of the game, and got my rear end pulled out of the fire on bosses once or twice. When people say a PS4 is worth it for Bloodborne alone they're not kidding. BEATEN: Borderlands  I can kinda get why this is so popular. Shoot enemies to make yourself stronger and find more effective guns. Unfortunately, it's all bit samey. The vast majority of your opponents are various types of bandits and the experience of fighting them is much the same at Lv. 5 as it is at Lv. 30. Plot and characterisation is barebones, as are the skill trees. Finished the main campaign and got stuck into the DLC: beat The Zombie Island of Dr Ned but felt extremely burnt out by the first mission of The Armory of General Knoxx so stopped. I think I've played this enough. BEATEN: Bound  As pretty as it is shallow. You basically play a (beautifully mocapped) sci-fi ballerina dancing her way through a modern art painting. It's short and very easy, but never has a real emotional connection, despite a pretty indie family turmoil story. However it's short, has an excellent photography mode and I got it for free, so not a bad couple of hours. BEATEN: Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter  My first Frogware Sherlock Holmes game and, as I understand it, a bit of a downturn in quality. It's really frustrating to play as the meat and potatoes of the detective gameplay is excellent: observing people's clothes and body language, piecing together clues, paying attention to discrepancies in alibis and so on. Also, it really looks the part graphically. So it sucks that every five minutes you're sucked into a half-baked minigame. Does a detective game really benefit from rhythm action blacksmith sequences or beam balancing 'keep the icons in the circle' bits. No, it does not. On top of that, at least half the mysteries don't make a goddamn lick of sense - especially the second one. BEATEN: The Lion's Song  Charming four episode narrative game following characters in 1910s Vienna. It's clearly made with passion and smarts, but there's not really much game here: there's no puzzles and no matter what choices you make things are going to proceed in largely the same way. But it's nice to play a chilled out game about the nature of inspiration. I particularly liked giving the best drat lecture about abstract mathematics that Vienna has ever seen. Also the art and sound is very nice. BEATEN: Back to the Future: The Game  I'd heard mixed things about this going in, but though the animation is a bit dated I had a great time with it. Their faux-Marty McFly is spot on and Christopher Lloyd absolutely nails it as Doc Brown, especially in the 'Chairman Brown' timeline. This is pre-Walking Dead Telltale so there's no choices to make, which is a bit annoying as the time travel plot would be perfect to allow players a bit of agency, as well as seeing the consequences of their actions in the future. BEATEN: Tomb Raider II & Golden Mask Level Pack  There's a lot that makes playing classic Tomb Raider games miserable: the controls, the combat, trying to get it to run properly... But if you've got patience and maybe pace it out at a level a day they're enjoyable enough. I like how they don't hold your hand with markers and objectives and just leave you to wind your way through the enormous, labyrinthine levels. This instalment in particular has very neat, intricate level design, with the Temple of Xian a particularly winding, devilishly designed challenge. NULLED: Star Wars: X-Wing  I really, really enjoyed this. Though I don't have a flightstick I managed to get something going with an Xbox controller and keyboard in combo that worked. It just feels very grounded to have to multitask fighting and objectives with shifting power around the craft to your various systems. Also, despite being a 25 year old 3D game it's an absolutely joy to control and flat-shaded polygons more than suffice to recreate the ships. But it is loving HARD. And not in a fair way. I spent two weeks on one mission (after watching YouTube guides and reading tips). When I finally beat that (mostly by luck) the next mission put me in the middle of a minefield that blasts lasers at you. gently caress that. I can only imagine the game gets harder. Figure I'll have more fun with TIE Fighter in the future. NULLED: Insurgency  Dull milporn Counterstrike ripoff. Played a couple of rounds and worked out pretty quickly that there wasn't going to be much for me here.
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Nov 30, 2017 16:29
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I don't think anyone's going to be shocked that you found a 21 year old game a bit dated.
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Dec 6, 2017 01:30
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BEATEN: Super Mario Odyssey Pretty much distilled joy in videogame form. Every couple of minutes you come across some neat little detail, amusing character or imaginative gameplay wrinkle that makes you remember why Nintendo are so loving good at this sort of thing. Even better, the addition of Cappy really opens up 3D Mario's moveset, letting you combo all kinds of intricate dives, hat jumps and wall kicks together in a way that makes you feel like you're breaking the game. Of course, just when you think you've gotten somewhere you're not supposed to be you find a stack of coins up there and realised the designers anticipated this all along. On top of that there are some amazing set pieces. The New Donk City Festival is probably my favourite, but the ending sequence and final boss is a series best for Mario. It feels like a game that's building on the past rather than wallowing in nostalgia, particularly in that it repeatedly takes the 2D 1985 Super Mario Brothers gameplay and does all kinds of crazy things with it that don't feel dated in the slightest. Anyhow, I finished the main plot in the first week, then spent two weeks unlocking the two bonus stages, then spent a week grinding through the final stage - a non-checkpointed platforming sequence that demands pinpoint precision. Before the postgame I was a little worried that the game was too easy, so I was pleased to see it crank up the difficulty in the optional bits. I really hope they release some DLC for this - it's difficult not to smile when you're playing. BEATEN: Wolfenstein: The New Colossus  I was a huge fan of The New Order and The Old Blood, so it's a bit disappointing that this is a slight stepdown. It's still a great game mind you, it just feels like it could have used a bit more time in the oven. The 60s USA under Nazi rule setting is beautifully conveyed, and the plot still manages to be both loving barmy and weirdly touching (and Frau Engels is one of the more hateful villains I've seen in a game). It's fun on the moments of downtime when you can drink in the retrofuturistic set design and obvious historical research that's gone into stuff. Unfortunately it's a bit off as a shooter. For one, it's really difficult, at least to begin with. You will die a lot and quickly, often with no idea what's killed you. The slowly decreasing health system, which counts down when you're boosted, means you have to keep pressing forward and play aggressively. Fortunately the game supports quicksaves so it's not impossible to grind through, but there are many moments of trial and error throughout. Also, despite the levels generally starting off in cool environments you generally end up fighting in subterranean tunnels that feel a bit samey. I sound down on this, but I enjoyed myself. I just wished it had been the leap up from TNO that I thought it would be. BEATEN: Teslagrad  Diverting Metroidvania that's a bit light on difficulty. Cool enough fantasy Soviet aesthetic, but the anonymous young boy hero and various electricity related powerups felt overly familiar for the genre. It does have nice background art and music though. Sadly it committed one of my pet design hates late on - gating off the final boss and requiring you to collect X number of secret scrolls that the game hadn't indicated I'd needed before. There's nothing lamer than getting psyched up for the end of a game only to realise you have to do a bunch of backtracking. BEATEN: Metrico+  A puzzle-based platformer with a minimalist design that's obsessed with graphs. Looks and sounds nice, though some of the puzzles are a bit obtuse. There's also an overarching symbolic narrative that's way too vague to care about. It also glitched out on me a lot - most annoyingly during the ending sequence meaning I had to redo that last bit of the final level again to get an animation to trigger. BEATEN: Street Fighter Alpha 2  I'm not sure why I dig Alpha 2 so much. Arguably Alpha 3 is the superior game (it's certainly got 'more' in it), but I like the relative simplicity of this (which I played to death on the Saturn back in the 90s). It also manages to give the SF2 characters a lick of paint and smoothly slot in the newer Alpha characters - most of whom have really interesting gameplay gimmicks. I'm a big fan of switching up Gen's movelist midfight and also of Rolento's hit n' run fighting style. Managed to beat the game with every character and had a great time doing it - but after 20 hours of gameplay I still can't put my finger on why this particular SF stands out for me. BEATEN: Super Rude Bear Resurrection  A hard as nails platformer heavily indebted to Super Meat Boy in game philosophy and moveset. Has a really interesting mechanic where your bodies remain after death - so if you land on spikes the corpse renders them harmless. It essentially makes the game perserverance vs skill, as with enough patience you can gum up whatever death machine is in front of you with enough of your mangled corpses. It's also got a seriously cool grime soundtrack, with a bespoke track for each level. BEATEN: Sonic the Hedgehog 2  I still remember booting this up for the first time as a kid in 1992, and I think it's really stood the test of time. The levels are all memorable and have their own little gimmicks and it's got a beautifully judged difficulty curve, up to and including the final bosses (which I'm pleased to say I nailed first time on this playthrough despite not having played it in a decade or so). Decided to get all the Chaos Emeralds legit this time though and I'd forgotten exactly how much of a pain in the arse those half-pipe special stages are - ended up giving in and save-scumming through the more impossible ones. Great game though and one of the all-time best 16-bit soundtracks imo. NULLED: Sim City 2000  My Dad used to play this back in the day, but it was a bit dry for me then. It still is now, though I can appreciate why it's still so highly regarded. Anyhow, I created Dazzaville and begin to grow it into a burgeoning metropolis. Things were looking so good by the 1950s that I expanded across the river that cut through the town, thus creating wealthy Old Dazzaville and the sadly slum-filled bumtown New Dazzaville, where my heavy industry was located. All was well until I cut the cord on my brand new airport. A month later a jet liner crashed right into the middle of Old Dazzaville, starting a fire. In a serious breach of my mayoral duties I forgot you had to manually send out the firefighters and by the time I realised it was too late - the fire could not be stopped. In desperation I dynamited all the cross-river links between Old and New Dazzaville in an attempt to at least save half the city. It worked, but at a heavy cost: Old Dazzaville. After burning for two years it became an ominous wasteland of burnt corpses and twisted metal. We don't talk about Old Dazzaville. NULLED: Iron Storm  Janky-rear end early 2000s budget shooter that imagines a world in which WW1 lasted into the 60s. Played through the first mission and put up with crap guns, hitscanning enemies, atrocious graphics and lovely acting. Couldn't see much of worth here. Necrothatcher fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 16:12
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Ulio posted:Odyssey sounds awesome and makes me wish I had a switch. There are a lot of cutscenes, but they're really well directed and written so it doesn't feel like a chore. When you're not in a cutscene you are invariably killing the hell out of Nazis in gunfights with lazers, killer dogs and things exploding all over the place. I'd say it's pretty drat action packed.
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Jan 2, 2018 17:47
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Rookersh posted:I'm not going to make any broad claims about what I'm going to do this year. I'd still make the original Dark Souls a goal, but build up to it after a couple of games - but it's worth it - I've never felt as good as I did when I finally got through it and if you beat that you can beat anything. The rest of the Soulsborne games are significantly easier once you know the mindset of DS1. Also, look up your library on How Long To Beat and pick off some low hanging fruit. Necrothatcher fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Jan 9, 2018 |
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Jan 9, 2018 09:45
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BEATEN: Quantum Break Lives up to its mediocre reputation. Quantum Break isn't quite a bad game - the action sequences are competent and it looks nice enough. But instead of actually making a fun video game, Remedy chose to carve out some weird multimedia project that goes nowhere. I'm particularly bitter that I sat through the godawful 'TV show' in which you watch embarrassed looking actors working through dreadful dialogue - and even more annoyingly you can completely ignore this it never properly ties into the main plot. It's just a bit crap that with apparently endless monetary reserves at their disposal, Remedy ended up producing a game that has a script and story on par with a straight to VOD clunker. Jack Ryder is the epitome of generic white-guy video game hero, the villain's motivations don't really make sense (or why we should be trying to stop him) and the plot ends on a eye rolling cliffhanger. The whole affair just suffers from a lack of focus and (even though it was released in 2016) feels really out-dated. BEATEN: Life is Strange: Before the Storm  Despite being a huge fan of Life is Strange, I was super sceptical about this spin-off prequel. Explaining mysteries is never particularly satisfying, not to mention that it wasn't being made by the original devs and had a different voice cast. It felt like the whole reason for the game was that Square Enix wanted another LiS asap and didn't want to wait for Don't Nod to finish Vampyr, and a story being continued purely for financial reasons is never geat. Plus the Hot Topic pop-punk branding of really rubbed me up the wrong way. But a friend who I'd gotten into LiS insisted that I play it, and she was absolutely right to. This is brilliant and many respects better than the original. It's a beautifully heartfelt game full of interesting and three-dimensional characters who're all written beautifully. I fuckin' adore the stoned, pastel, melancholy vibe of the game, and it took me about 10 minutes to get sucked in. From then I played one episode a day til I finished it and got pretty drat emotionally wrapped up in the plot. It's kind of ironic that a game about arty teenagers trying to hide who they really are is so completely sincere and unironic - and the slightly better dialogue in this prequel makes them feel a lot more naturally adolescent. Knowing that LiS spoiler Chloe and Rachel both end up dead also makes everything that much sadder - especially when they're fantasising about their future lives outside of Arcadia Bay. I still don't think it's a game that needed to be made, but I'm super glad that it was. Also, sthis really shows up TellTale's lack of ambition. Can't wait for the bonus episode in March. BEATEN: Chroma Squad  Got this gifted to me by Xander77. I was never into Power Rangers as a kid, so a game that's largely made in tribute to them initially didn't seem like my thing. But it's weirdo premise of simultaneously battling evil both real and fake AND producing a hit TV show at the same time is so original that I couldn't help but dig it. Basically you buy cameras, make costumes and improve your sets and then head out to shoot an episode. The action is like a dumbed down XCOM, though eventually gets a bit more complicated with all the powers you learn as you level up. There's a couple of rough edges but it's an easy game to like and has some seriously toe-tapping music. BEATEN: Memories of a Vagabond  'Yer basic RPGmaker game that my Steam randomiser commanded me to play through. At least it's short. The game was made a bit more surreal when I decided to name my hero 'Chester', but ended up pressing the wrong button, leaving him confusingly called 'Chest'. The rest is a super generic JRPG with some downright dreadful dialogue that sounded like it was written by teenagers trying to be edgy. Pretty early on I realised that in all likelihood this is some kids' first RPG project so I cut it a bit of slack. If I had made this when I was like, 13 or 14 I'd be pretty pleased with myself. BEATEN: X-Men vs Street Fighter  As fun as all the other Vs games are. It's pretty toned down in comparison with later entries, but it's still fun launching around the screen and executing ridiculous combos. The only flaws are that the character endings are perfunctory (though sometimes pretty funny) and that the opponent choice in Arcade mode is a bit broken. Over the course of one Arcade mode I shouldn't have to fight Rogue three times in various matches. Also, despite finishing the game with most of the characters, I only ever fought Wolverine once. Feels like the RNG is busted or something. Beyond all that it's a mechanically solid as gently caress game that still looks great. NULLED: Kingdom Rush  Tower defence really isn't my thing, but this is one of the best I've played. There's a whole bunch of personality throughout the game, with great animation, character design and pop-culture reference heavy quotes. It's also pretty goddamn difficult until you get upgraded a little and, past the opening levels, I really had to think about tower placement and type. I finished the 'main' campaign and beat the evil wizard baddie, but it looks like the difficulty ramps up in the bonus levels for the Steam release so I called it a day there.
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Jan 22, 2018 13:15
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FanaticalMilk posted:Someone else can correct me but I believe the fact that you ran into multiple sets of Rogues and only one Wolverine indicates that the character you play against is actually a true random pick. If the game distributed the characters you played against more evenly it would be inherently unrandom. Good point. In that case, it should artificially limit the amount of times you face off against each character in Arcade mode.
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Jan 22, 2018 16:45
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I found a good method is simply to pick a game completely at random and do your damnedest to beat it. Sometimes it's a miserable trek and you give up after half an hour, sometimes you find an amazing game you would never have chosen to play.
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Jan 30, 2018 00:51
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Ulio posted:I have this game but I was wondering if this is game is co op or supposed to be better co op? It's designed to be played single player with you controlling two characters at once.
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Feb 6, 2018 18:22
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