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Inspector Gesicht posted:Fallout 4 Funny how much more I enjoyed this game when I installed the story mod that removed all traces of you being a parent and trying to find your son. I guess as a non parent I couldn’t care less but Bethesda sure as heck wasn’t gonna succeed in making me suddenly start caring about Sean.
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Aug 19, 2022 18:17
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Quake 4 was better than Doom 3, though I'm not really a Doom 3 fan. It's a real cool mindless shooter.
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Aug 19, 2022 18:21
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Feels Villeneuve posted:Quake 4 was better than Doom 3, though I'm not really a Doom 3 fan. It's a real cool mindless shooter. You might call it a 7/10 game
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Aug 19, 2022 19:51
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It is still very funny for me that in Fallout 4 you put in the effort to go settlement by settlement and person by person to revive the greater Boston area, revitalizing the dead wastes, bringing civilization back to a dead land, farming the land and salvaging and rebuilding and expanded, turning hundreds or thousands of people all towards a singular goal - the singular goal of putting a laser sight on your assault rifle
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Aug 19, 2022 22:44
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I don't think anyone gave Fallout 4 a 7/10 when it came out, but now it's all laid out and the time has passed... yeah that was a 7/10 game, wasn't it. Jank polished to a shine, with a marketable wrapper.
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Aug 19, 2022 22:56
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Whizzing Wizard posted:Speaking of 7/10 games, Quake 4 just dropped on gamepass. Star Trek Elite force was more like a 8/10 game imho but that might be the nostalgia talking
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Aug 20, 2022 01:42
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Raven as an 8/10 developer is Monolith.
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Aug 20, 2022 03:39
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wuggles posted:Rated this thread a 3.5 and bookmarked  Sucks I had to rate the thread a 1 to get this to work, but I think it was worth the sacrifice.
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Aug 20, 2022 12:48
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RBA Starblade posted:It is still very funny for me that in Fallout 4 you put in the effort to go settlement by settlement and person by person to revive the greater Boston area, revitalizing the dead wastes, bringing civilization back to a dead land, farming the land and salvaging and rebuilding and expanded, turning hundreds or thousands of people all towards a singular goal - the singular goal of putting a laser sight on your assault rifle It is absolutely maddening how precious Adhesive is.
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Aug 20, 2022 15:51
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I have the most distinct memory of reading Game Informer when Psychonauts came out and they gave it a 7. I remember because not only did I feel that was way unfair (they hated the meat circus) but because I thought 'why are all the games I like rated a 7?' Turns out they retroactively bumped that score up at some point over the years. I can't find the original review either.
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Aug 20, 2022 15:55
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I remember when Joystiq gave Nier Gestalt a 0/5 because the reviewer got to the required fishing quest. The problem came about because he did not realize that he needed to move to a specific beach marked on the minimap to catch that specific fish. So he spent hours trying and failing to catch a fish, only to get the wrong fish, and just completely gave up on the game. Years later, a different editor would give Nier a much higher rating. That first reviewer's name? Justin McElroy
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Aug 20, 2022 16:27
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Forgotton Anne is the first thing I thought of for this thread. They tried to make a puzzle platformer with a Studio Ghibli-inspired story and a morality system, and all of that's there, but none of it's particularly good. The animation and voice acting is fantastic, but the gameplay is mediocre, the plot falls apart at the end, and the morality system is best described as "token". I think they had a nice idea and if they'd tried to make an actual movie out of it they would've had something good, but as a game it just kinda falls flat.
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Aug 20, 2022 17:35
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The Council (2018) The Council is a Before Disco Elysium rolled around, The Council had the RPG system I really would have liked to see other games steal. The skill tree does not revolve around combat, but around the kind of knowledge and social graces Louis has: you can specialize in detailed knowledge of the political situation, etiquette rules, and foreign languages, or in psychoanalysis or outright manipulation of the other guests. The game also makes a solid effort to give you impactful choices and react to them, both in the dialogue - one decision in the very first scene can give Louis a scar which is visible for the rest of the game - and with Alpha Protocol-style perks for succeeding/failing certain objectives, and post-chapter summaries pointing to alternate paths. The bad parts:
I really enjoy the idea and setting of The Council: It definitely needed another pass over the writing and the character models, but I still think it deserves a 7/10 just for the conversation casually introducing Napoleon Bonaparte as one of the other guests
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Aug 20, 2022 21:08
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Ash of Gods: Redemption (2018) This is one of my favourite games of all time. Sitting at 65 / 79 reviewer / user score on Metacritic and 74% positive on Steam. Ash of Gods was released in 2018 as kind of a Banner Saga-like, perhaps one of the only games in this pretty specific genre. It featured a large cast of fleshed-out characters, great worldbuilding and game world, slick cutscenes and gorgeous hand-painted art style, memorable bad guys and an incredible musical score. It was almost entirely let down by one of the most unintuitive and frustrating combat systems dreamed up in the TRPG genre to date - which was further exacerbated by huge power differentials in the main character cast. It also gets slugged for having translation issues, which I can't remember being particularly bothered by. What I love about this game is that it pulls no punches gameplay-wise to sell its world and worldbuilding. The most obvious example is that you have 3 parties for most of the game which are player-controlled. Two of those parties have very strong characters for in-universe reasons and the third...doesn't. The creators made no attempt to balance the game around this, which means the fights with the 2 super-characters are all moderately difficult to easy, and the fights without them range between hard and brutally hard. The game does have some of the best and most unique worldbuilding I can remember in a fantasy game to come out during the 2010s. It also tells a full, satisfying and complete story with no to-be-continued or sequel-bait ending shenanigans. It is also a pretty substantial play time for an indie game - I clocked in 24 hours total to finish it. This snippet from a user review sums up the highs/lows of the game pretty well: quote:It's Banner Saga except instead of the gods all gone, the gods are all gone and now angry demi-gods do this crossed comic book thing where they mind control a bunch of hillbilly mountain folk, Chinese people, and tall albino rastas with masks to start the end times by just marching around and murdering/sexually assaulting everyone. To stop the chinese/viking/cool runnings doomsday, you play as three different parties. Two consists of ultimate hardcore alpha dudes you will have no trouble with and the other being a stupid old man and his idiot mentally slow daughter who is complete garbage that you will grow to hate. The artwork and world building seem really good, but then you have gritty russian to english translations where some guy has a paragraph about how he eat out his horses butt after you ask him about a market or something which feels insanely out of place. So, you know, it's a mixed bag. Also, it deserves an honourable mention for being one of the only games I can recall to have throat singing in the soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ5kAO39of0 If you don't bounce off it because of the flaws, the game is an absolute gem. Note: It's 75% off on Steam (about $6) for the next day or so if anyone wants to check it out. Sally Sprodgkin fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Aug 21, 2022 |
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Aug 21, 2022 09:14
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The Urbz: Sims in the City (GBA/DS) The Sims is a very successful and well-received series on PC, so naturally EA wanted to expand the brand to consoles to try to capture some of that market. The Sims games on home consoles all vary in quality and few of them actually play like the PC series, but the games developed for handheld in particular are very interesting in their design. Rather than being a life sim sandbox, The Sims games for the GBA and DS were closer to RPGs than anything else. You only ever controlled one person, and your goal was to complete missions for a variety of different NPCs to advance the plot while maintaining your needs and playing minigames to earn money. This is the second of three games in this particular style, though I'll focus on this one because it's the only one I've put substantial time into. Your character arrives in the city of Miniopolis after It's actually a pretty neat and well-written game, all of the characters feel unique and have different personalities, and the plot is pretty silly stuff that doesn't take itself super seriously but isn't a complete bore either. There's a lot of small minigames scattered around that you play to make money, and they're all pretty fun in their own way. And it feels nice to start with a lovely apartment and slowly move your way up to the biggest penthouse in the city. There's a few things that take it down and make it a bit of a slog at times though. Since it's a Sims game, you have needs that you have to keep filled, and it can be frustrating to have to cancel a conversation you're having with someone because your character desperately needs to pee. There's also a few missions in the game that seem pointlessly gated by requiring a certain amount of skill points to complete, which is annoying because raising your skills takes time and is interrupted again by the needs system. Ironically, the parts of the game that tie most closely to its namesake are the most frustrating parts of it. But I have a soft spot for this game, and still play it from time to time cause its a pretty chill experience. It makes me wish there were other games in this style.
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Aug 22, 2022 00:34
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Naval Ops Warship Gunner 2 (PS2) The Warship Gunner franchise is a short lived series that is basically about controlling a ship, and gunning the living poo poo out of everything. There are two things that make it stand out: The game has a pretty involved ship maker, you use resources acquired in mission to slap various guns and other armaments onto hulls, from destroyers to battleships. The next thing is the game goes from WW2 weaponry to ships carrying beam cannons and rail guns. Even if you don't use those, you can slap together increasingly stupid designs of implausible construction and eventually end up with a dual-hull battleship that goes 55kts while carrying 16 quadruple turrets that are firing 510mm guns as fast as you can mash the fire button. Gameplay is controlling the ship from a 3rd person camera, but you can zoom in long range shots. Generally you will zip around the map, shooting at everything that gets into gun range, and you collect pickups from destroyed ships. The main game is a almost too long campaign, that starts with your character fleeing their homeland after a coup, and then getting wrapped up in a globe spanning series of missions to defeat the enemy nations. There is a branching campaign based on some early choices that will affect specific missions showing up, but the game has a pretty set path. What takes it down is pretty much everything else. The graphics are dire, even for a KOEI came on the PS2. The game reuses a significant number of things from the first game, from maps, ship models and I'm pretty sure some of the missions. What does stand out is how absurd the game balance is. The game ramps up the absurdity of missions so fast that if you aren't grinding older missions for money and to move the research tree along, you will be rapidly overwhelmed. Even if you do keep up, there are missions are so badly tuned around a specific gimmick that you have to design ships just for those. Some later missions are absurdly hard for what seems to be a road block. For all the negatives, the very core of the game works. You design a ship, you take it into combat, you blow up everything. Then you go back and do it again. And again. Then you break the game over your knee.
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Aug 22, 2022 05:35
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DemoneeHo posted:I remember when Joystiq gave Nier Gestalt a 0/5 because the reviewer got to the required fishing quest. The problem came about because he did not realize that he needed to move to a specific beach marked on the minimap to catch that specific fish. So he spent hours trying and failing to catch a fish, only to get the wrong fish, and just completely gave up on the game. Years later, a different editor would give Nier a much higher rating. My college roommate did the exact same thing, until he gave up in frustration and found a gameFAQs thread that told him he was on the wrong beach. Pretty lol but in his defense IIRC there's nothing in the quest-giver's dialogue that tells you to go to the other beach, and it's stll early enough in the game that you don't know to follow the red X on the minimap no matter what. Basically there's no real reason to believe that you need to go somewhere else, so a lot of people just didn't bother looking, and the game in all honesty is janky enough that they thought the frustrating fishing mechanics were WAD. Apparently this was a common enough mistake that in the remake they added a "lol u dummy" mechanic https://twitter.com/manfightdragon/status/1385748281255350272
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Aug 22, 2022 18:00
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That's pretty embarrassing to be so bad at a video game that they add a special mechanic.
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Aug 22, 2022 22:17
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ninjahedgehog posted:My college roommate did the exact same thing, until he gave up in frustration and found a gameFAQs thread that told him he was on the wrong beach. Pretty lol but in his defense IIRC there's nothing in the quest-giver's dialogue that tells you to go to the other beach, and it's stll early enough in the game that you don't know to follow the red X on the minimap no matter what. Basically there's no real reason to believe that you need to go somewhere else, so a lot of people just didn't bother looking, and the game in all honesty is janky enough that they thought the frustrating fishing mechanics were WAD. A lot of people had that problem. It's kind of like the Sonic 3 barrel thing where it sounds stupid but there was clearly some poor design going on there. Speaking of, Nier was a very 7/10 game.
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Aug 22, 2022 23:09
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