i just beat a video game.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > i just beat a video game.

Ms Adequate: Oct 30, 2011; Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling

Got all cheevos in Star Ocean The Second Story R. It was never quite in the highest echelon of my PS1 JRPG faves, but it was absolutely top of the second tier, and this remake basically captures all that magic and more. Good poo poo all around.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2023 23:57

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 23:25

Ms Adequate: Oct 30, 2011; Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling

Not the first time I've gotten off-planet in Rimworld but I just wrapped up a real long game (Basically the only thing I played in the last 6 weeks other than a single run through Robocop) by getting like 38 pawns into space.

I immediately tried to start a new, themed run (A lost squad of Spess Mehreens building a small monastery-fort) but I'm thoroughly Rimmed out and couldn't generate any interest. Which is good because I got a thousand other things to play.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2024 07:37

Ms Adequate: Oct 30, 2011; Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling

Foul Fowl posted:

free the world with a caged dong? don't think so pal

Chastity is the greatest freedom, friend.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2024 10:06

Ms Adequate: Oct 30, 2011; Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling

SchwarzeKrieg posted:

Just finished Days Gone, a very good game that's very difficult to sell. I don't want to throw the word "generic" at it, but it certainly is an amalgamation of every AAA open-world trope of the last decade, and the two defining features (the motorcycle you upgrade ala Mad Max and the giant hordes) aren't quite immediate enough to set the game apart from every other open-world zombie game with light crafting mechanics. It looks like the ultimate Daryl Dixon simulator about 10 years after the sell-by date, and while I guess that's not entirely inaccurate, the game as a whole works far better than that would imply. For starters, the game just feels great in the hands on all fronts, from the hefty punch of the guns to the weighty but still loose handling of the bike down to the simple inertia and movement of the main character, it's all a joy to control. It strikes a perfect balance of feeling sturdy and deliberate without being sluggish. The core gameplay loop is great too, and the crafting and scavenging mechanics are tuned just right to feel rewarding and not punitive. For me at least, the typical cycle would be to clear out a couple missions or objectives then swing by any site that looked interesting on my way to the next one (or whenever I started to get low on something specifically useful). The locations are near-universally interesting to explore, with nice little environmental storytelling vignettes and plenty of opportunities for emergent events (ambushes, survivors in trouble, etc).

Which, after writing it out, still sounds exactly like every AAA game of the last 10 years, but everything actually meshes together in a cohesive way instead of feeling like a dozen separate systems loosely cobbled together. It just works real good, y'know? The power curve is smooth, there's a nice progression from struggling against a handful of zombies to manipulating giant hordes, and the motorcycle grows alongside you in a satisfying way (even if I never quite got attached to it as a character in the way the game seemed to want). The core mechanics are good enough to carry it a long way, but the game around them can be kind of hit or miss. The characters and dialogue feel natural - I especially appreciated how unpolished a lot of the dialogue is in a believable way. Deacon St. John (side note: what a Hideo Kojima-rear end name) is constantly distracted, stressed, and struggling to articulate his thoughts or even finish a sentence in a way that actually makes a lot of sense and isn't often done in games. A lot of the side characters and camp leaders feel pretty well-rounded and three dimensional as well, with understandable motivations and outlooks. The relationships especially are a highlight, and all the characters bounce off of each other in interesting ways that, again, feel surprisingly natural and believable, which makes it stand out even more when the game dumps some boring video game-rear end video game villains onto you from a seemingly different universe. The story as a whole just kinda spins its wheels, occasionally feinting in interesting directions before reverting to the mean. Without delving into spoiler territory, it feels like the game wants to be an intimate, personal story but is afraid to be too low-stakes so it throws in a generic Big Bad occasionally to ratchet up the tension, but it just ends up in an unsatisfying middle ground where the 'climactic' moments feel unearned and the personal moments feel unresolved. There are some bafflingly bad mission design choices too, with a bunch of instant-fail stealth missions and bizarrely terrible QTE boss fights. It's always a bummer when the latter levels of action games lose inspiration and just start throwing bullet sponges at you, doubly so here when the game spends a couple dozen hours teaching you how to tame hordes and bears and create all kinds of crazy emergent situations and then decides to strip all that away and turn into a corridor shooter against a bunch of walking tanks.

Again, a tough game to sell, but the bones really are strong enough to overlook the weak aspects. It's a shame the underwhelming reviews (and subsequent Chud-y Twitter tantrum by the game's director) seem to have confined this to Reddit le-hidden-gem posts and killed off any chance of a sequel, because this ended up as one of my favorite open-world games in recent memory even notwithstanding the glaring issues. A sequel that irons out the rough spots could have been something really special, but either way I'm pretty curious to see what the studio is working on next.

Agreed with Fridge Corn that this is a great writeup. I played and finished Days Gone when it released and wasn't honestly expecting too much but enjoyed the idea of fooling around on a bike killing zombies, and what I got was actually a really solid open world open world game that somehow was more than the sum of it parts. As you outlined here all the individual parts sound - and mostly are - rote and uninspired, but somehow they got it all tweaked and polished and fit together juuuust right and it was just a good game.

Admittedly I'm always weak for a MC, but "woman foolishly romanticizes outlaw bikers on the open road, unbound but any laws by their own" is about as obvious a statement as can be made.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2024 21:21

Ms Adequate: Oct 30, 2011; Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling

That's really interesting to me* because I had a pretty different experience, as someone who played the original way back at release, and the PSP version. Maybe it's from my knowledge of the game but I found R to be dramatically less difficult because it adds several things to the mix that make you way stronger with trivial effort, like the formation bonus thingies and assault actions (Being able to call in a healer to patch everyone up with a short cooldown is incredibly OP.) Along with the immense benefits from completing challenge missions and guild missions making you exceptionally wealth and festooned with crafting gear.

I mean, some of it is absolutely my foreknowledge because I will start a fight and be like "Oh it's one of these, I gotta get interrupts in" but I definitely found myself expecting a tough fight in places only to stomp all over them. The bosses of the Hoffman Ruins and the Field of Might are the foremost example for me, both those fights always pushed my poo poo right in when I was a kid but were effortless for me in R.

A few are worse though, I've never had trouble like that with the end of Minea Cave before.

I've always had a huge soft spot for SO2's crafting though, but that's definitely something colored by past experience, because the OG gave you way less info and there was no in-game way to track what you could get from stuff or how many undiscovered things remained. I miss the woopy-woopy-woopy noise and morphing graphic from the old crafting.

On the other hand I fully agree that the dodge thing is crap, I tried it out a bit and yeah it's nice when you succeed but failure costs way too much for it to be worth it and as you say the animations weren't designed for it, so some work just fine but some are outright deceptive. Also the new equipment properties can be very powerful but wow is the system for removing/adding them hot garbage, I straight up barely bothered with it even though the potential is enormous. Like FutureCop says the game is definitely made for breaking, like if you want levels fast you're fully intended to combine food, scouting, training, music, and an in-battle item to stack up a five-chain fight with a ton of multipliers. And then later get Bodyguard up to a good level and AFK somewhere.

But at the end of the day, yeah, I'm never gonna have an unclouded view of the game because even though I can't say it's a true top-rank JRPG, there's a part of me that is always, always going to feel like I am a little bit at home when I hear The Venerable Forest.

* There's no way to say that without sounding like I'm being smarmy and dismissive, but I promise I'm sincere!

# ¿ Mar 8, 2024 08:49

Ms Adequate: Oct 30, 2011; Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling

abraham linksys posted:

The original version having much more opaque crafting actually makes a lot of sense to me. I imagine it's both more frustrating but also more interesting because of the less-clear possibility space - you'd feel more like you're stumbling into breaking the game, rather than it being pretty obvious from the jump that if you just alchemy up some good rocks and get blacksmithing to level 10 ASAP, you'll quickly get armor that will carry you through the rest of the game

This is a very good point, and it was further compounded because back then an awful lot of us didn't have any Internet access (I sure didn't) so this kind of knowledge was only available through tips pages and guides in magazines, or trial and error. Or talking with others who actually had the game I guess, but that wasn't a group I fell into.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2024 20:38

Ms Adequate: Oct 30, 2011; Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling

H13 posted:

Yeah the main reason why it "cant" be remastered is because apparently nobody can figure out who actually owns the rights for it.

So before legal action could be taken against you, they would first need to figure out who is going to take legal action.

Sounds ripe for an OpenNOLF project tbh

# ¿ Mar 9, 2024 21:33

Ms Adequate: Oct 30, 2011; Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling

Sway Grunt posted:

But everything in-between the beginning and end was pretty drat great. 3 feels like the most expansive and unwieldy of the bunch, especially in the DLCs. Some of it's a mess, but it's usually a charming mess.

This is exactly how I felt and still feel about ME3. 95% solid gold game, sandwiched between two chunks of absolute shite. I replayed the series a couple of years ago and realized I might actually like the beginning less than the ending, everything feels so bizarrely contrived and out of place. Also, felt like if they'd actually included some of the tribunal they could have had a fantastic way to recap the previous games and, if you don't have save data, to determine which choices you made. Granted I understand not wanting to start the game with a big dialog section but even so...

Anyway I still think ME1 is the best of the three.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2024 00:00

Ms Adequate: Oct 30, 2011; Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling

I don't think Sleepy Dogs was really trying to ape Yakuza at all, it's completely a GTA style open world game, and the PS2 GTAs at that; that's exactly why there are a bunch of side activities that don't even bother with preamble and old-school collectathons all over the shop.

Also it's a personal favorite, brawling in a club while Hudson Mohawk blasts or bombing down the highway to Aberdeen at absurd speeds while Echo Beach is playing is peak gaming, but I can see where your critique is coming from and I can't say it's really wrong it just... doesn't drag the game down for me.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2024 19:23

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 23:25

Ms Adequate: Oct 30, 2011; Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling

Wrapped up Dragon's Dogma 2 and I'm not going to say I didn't enjoy most of it but uh, not every swing it takes is a hit, let's say that

# ¿ Apr 3, 2024 12:25

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > i just beat a video game.