Recently completed video games

[Nappi]

I finally right click spammed my way through Torchlight's main dungeon. I don't think I need to go back there for a while. The game could have ended at least five dungeons earlier, if you ask me. Still, I was surprised how much I enjoyed most of it. Can't wait till the holidays to be able to play Diablo III.

[Moelman]

I finally right click spammed my way through Torchlight's main dungeon. I don't think I need to go back there for a while. The game could have ended at least five dungeons earlier, if you ask me. Still, I was surprised how much I enjoyed most of it. Can't wait till the holidays to be able to play Diablo III.

You mean holiday 2011?

[Nappi]

You mean holiday 2011?

Probably more like 2012.

(I actually have no idea when it's going to be released.)

Anyway, I'm 3 missions away from completing Tropico 3. It gets a bit repetitive after a while (apparently

tobacco

is a good solution to all your problems) but it has still kept me playing surprisingly long. It's not that often that I finish a strategy game for good.

EDIT: Just completed World of Goo. I'm seriously finishing stuff right now.

Edited May 28, 2010 by Nappi

[elmuerte]

Finished Dragon Age: Origins.

I don't know why, but I have the feeling something was missing or not so great about the game. Maybe it was too much realistic medieval and not enough fantasy. Or maybe it's because of the rather small world, or at least, it felt small. The world also appeared quite dull, there wasn't much going on. It was another one of those worlds that completely revolved around me.

The story of the game was also very focused (just like Mass Effect 2). Right from the beginning it was quite clear what the direction of the story was. That didn't leave much room for exploring the story.

The game did have a very satisfying ending, but I hated the battle outside of that fort. It took me quite a few tries to get past that part while the rest was quite a walk in the park.

Sometimes it wasn't very clear what the effect was of certain choices in the dialogue. There often wasn't room to change your mind about things. But I did like the the hard choices you had to make (i.e. either in or out) which also affected more that just that part of the quest.

The premium content quests really pissed me off.

The AI and path finding also failed a lot. Sometimes it completely ignored my request to attack. They simply stood there becoming dead. It would also have been nice if the characters understood how to use those injury kits.

I did enjoy the "fade" segment. That was an interesting side step of from the rest of the game.

And why didn't I have the ability to drop items. I could only destroy them...

Anyway, I'm giving this game a .

I think I expected a Baldur's Gate like game, but it wasn't.

[Sleepdance]

I have a felling that when I get Dragon age, I'll just play it in god mode. In a 50 hour game I just don't see any reason to be stuck with a fight that takes 5 hours to do. On the other hand this could brake the game, since only thing that would be left is the story that maybe won't suit me.

[elmuerte]

I think I took me about 60 hours to complete most of the game (only a few side quests were not completed due to lame reasons). Not a single fight took me over 5 hours.

[Moelman]

Baldur's Gate was also what I wanted and expected from Dragon Age and while I think it's the closest we've had since the original games, it definitely doesn't match up for me. Baldur's Gate (the first one) is one of my favorite games of all time though so it would have taken a lot for it to equal it in my eyes.

[Garden Ninja]

I beat Overlord II finally, on Monday. I've been playing it on and off since I bought in January. I really liked it, but on the whole, I think the first one is slightly better. They are both excellent games (must plays, in my opinion), but the second has more annoying crap.

Some differences:

• The Minion AI is better in 2 (non-Blues are significantly less likely to drown) if you send them near water.
  
• Browns, Greens and Reds have mounts that they can ride, which give them some additional abilities. Browns ride Wolves, which can rush to break up enemy formations, and jump short gaps; Greens ride spiders, which can climb on webs; Reds ride salamanders, which move quicker (for ride by torchings), and can move along ramps.
  
• Forging weapons and armor has been changed. Simplified in that you forge specific items with specific bonuses now, and a set cost, rather than generic items with general buffs, depending on how many minions you put into the item. I like this better, I think, but it does limit customization. They also complicated it by adding two additional resources for forging -- Gems, and Dark Crystals -- the second of which there is a limited amount in the game (30, I think) which isn't enough to forge all items.
  
• The alignment system serves roughly the same purpose in both games, but the naming makes more sense in 2. Destroying things, or killing your subjects gave you corruption in the first. In the second, they changed it to Domination vs. Destruction. However, it felt better implemented in the first. If you killed a couple people, you gained corruption, but you could recover from it, and get back to 0%. In 2, it came down to Dominating or Destroying the town (more than 50% of the residents I think), so one or two didn't matter, but you couldn't recover from a Destruction action if you are trying for Domination. Although, the Alignment decisions are all larger scale in 2 (I killed the first boss, rather than enslaving him, and the Reds burned something I didn't want them to, but I didn't reload), and the only Corruption actions I made in 1 were on a smaller scale, so it is probably a wash.
  
• Normally I hate not having direct control of the camera, and I remember finding that somewhat annoying in 1. They used it for 'sweeping' your minions instead, and it worked well. In 2, they added direct camera control with the right stick. Sweeping is still there, but you have to press up on the stick first, which makes sweeping much less fluid, and therefore much less useful.
  
• Some of the fights felt really cheap, often, but not always, because of the camera. I haven't played it in a couple of years, but I don't remember that being a problem in the first one.
  
• Unless I missed it (possible, since your Lair is much larger), there is no dungeon to refight defeated monsters. I didn't use it much in the first game, but it was a neat feature that they should have kept.
  

[Nappi]

Finished Tropico 3 campaign yesterday. I liked it. Either I really grasped the essence of being a good dictator president of a small island nation at some point of the campaign or the game wasn't particularly challenging, as I was practically swimming in money in some of the later levels. Fine by me either way. The gameplay got a bit repetitive at some point and I'm not sure if the expansion pack is going to offer enough new content to remedy that. Has anyone bought it? Are there new mission types, for instance? Looking forward to possible Tropico 4, though, as this game was by no means perfect.

I also just finished Lucasarts' The Dig. A bit :tmeh:ish but still entertaining enough. The atmosphere was great for the most parts but the setting didn't really do it for me. I liked how much digging there was in this game.

[syntheticgerbil]

I liked how much digging there was in this game.

Wait, what? There was no digging at all from what I remember! Didn't the original cover have shovels that were later taken out before release?

EDIT: I realize I might be ruining a possible Dig joke.

[Nappi]

Wait, what? There was no digging at all from what I remember! Didn't the original cover have shovels that were later taken out before release?

EDIT: I realize I might be ruining a possible Dig joke.

You had to use the shovel like ten times in the game. It was weird. And there was the zero-G digger, too.

[syntheticgerbil]

Ah you're right, I completely forgot. I've only beat it twice and I think it's been almost a decade since then.

I always liked the music and backgrounds though. Not so sure about the story or puzzle designs.

[miffy495]

I still really like The Dig. Nuts to all the people who treat it as the bastard child of the LucasArts adventure family.

This afternoon I finished finished Just Cause 2. I was tooling around the map and found one last faction mission I'd left undone. I now have the "did all faction missions" achievement, so I decided that at 43%, it was time to uninstall it. It felt a bit sad, but it made room for Splinter Cell Conviction (purchased in the recent Steam sale) so it seems like the right choice. Plus now I won't be tempted to fire it up again just for the hell of it.

[Kolzig]

I have played The Dig only once through and that was definitely 10 years ago or so. Should replay it, I don't remember much of it anymore. Really liked T1000 as the main character's voice.

I have Alan Dean Foster's book version of The Dig, but I have not read it yet...

[syntheticgerbil]

I think the Dig got less and less interesting as a story as the game went on. I remember the ending being really shoddy and sappy, as if it were written by Spielberg himself.

I was much more interested in the barren wasteland and mystery, as well as your threatening crewmate, until everything was revealed.

[Nappi]

I think the Dig got less and less interesting as a story as the game went on. I remember the ending being really shoddy and sappy, as if it were written by Spielberg himself.

The ending seemed hilariously hurried to me. As if they only had time for a 40 second climax or something:

Boston: Can I go to this place and still be able to come back. One way to find out.

Boston: This is awesome!

Boston: No, I'm not going any further!

Griffins: You are stronger than we are. Congrats.

[syntheticgerbil]

BOSTON LOW! YOU'RE WINNER!

[elmuerte]

Just finished Borderlands.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this game so it's a (but a good , almost a ).

I competed all quests as far as I know. Most of them are quite tedious, although some of the side quests are interesting. Overall the world is quite boring, not a lot of interesting sights. It's more or less the same stuff all over. At the end there is some change, or at least, there was an opportunity to do interesting things. But the whole vault thingy is just as boring as the rest of the world, just different kind of rocks.

One of the things that annoyed the shit out of me was the respawning. I usually clean out a complete area and then continue to the next. You often have to backtrack, and when you return to the area you cleaned out 10 minutes ago, new enemies are there. That's quite annoying. Luckily I was a soldier and quickly chose for the support gunner class where ammo regenerates. The only thing left was to find good guns, and boy are there a lot of guns out there. And sometimes it's quite difficult to choose which of the guns to use.

Anyway, most of the quest are quite similar. Go to X and kill Y. Or go to X and pick up N times Y. Go to X and pull lever Y and Z. Go to X and talk to Y. Although the difficulty of the quests vary from a walk in the park, to a serious pain in the ass. And it has nothing to do with the associated level. When I was level 30 I did a level 27 mission that was seriously difficult, and right after that I did a level 31 mission that barely took some effort.

But the absolute worst thing of the game would be the ending.

First you have to travel a ridiculous long route with quite some tedious fighting, and then when you get to the end boss, it's nothing more that holding the fire button for a minute or two and barely moving, and you're done. I had more trouble with the fight right before the end boss than with the end boss itself. And then the end cinematic... even Prince of Persia 2008 had a better ending.

It took me a little over 26 hours to complete the game. And a lot of that time was spend on traveling, either by car, or backtracking by foot.

Once in a while you get a notice that person X has new missions.... great, wtf was X again? Usually it's in a completely different section of the world.

I haven't played the game in multiplayer. But afaik the concept is quite cool as you can jump into multiplayer right from the singleplayer game.

I also tried Mad Moxxi's something something DLC for Borderlands. But.. ugh.. it's a series of arena matches. If there is something I really dislike in normal singleplayer games, then it's arena matches. The normal Borderlands game already had 2x3 arena quests. And this DLC is nothing but that? Seriously, cut that out people. If I wanted to play single player arena matches I would play any of the Unreal Tournament games. Maybe this DLC is fun in multiplayer.

Anyway... I also have the Dr Ned DLC which at least has normal quests.

[Patters]

Assassin't Creed 2: Finally got round to this, I enjoyed it, though there was an annoying fetch quest near the end of the game which nearly made me stop. Overall

[miffy495]

Fetch quest? I don't remember any fetching?

[Nappi]

The fetch a flag quest? It was the most annoying mission in the game, in my opinion, although I beat it on my first try.

[miffy495]

Oh wait, did you mean getting the codex pages, Patters? I still don't recall what you mean by the "fetch a flag" thing though, Nappi, so that's all I can think of. The codex pages didn't bother me because I was ridiculously anal about collecting them as I went through the story. There was not a single one that I didn't already have when that mission came up, so I didn't have to do any collecting. Hell, when I played AC1 I did every single side mission, even though you only needed to do three to get to each assassination. I just play that series in a strange way, I guess.

[Patters]

Oh wait, did you mean getting the codex pages, Patters? I still don't recall what you mean by the "fetch a flag" thing though, Nappi, so that's all I can think of. The codex pages didn't bother me because I was ridiculously anal about collecting them as I went through the story. There was not a single one that I didn't already have when that mission came up, so I didn't have to do any collecting. Hell, when I played AC1 I did every single side mission, even though you only needed to do three to get to each assassination. I just play that series in a strange way, I guess.

Yeah the codex pages, I had to run to a specific area and do the same bloody fight 16 times.

[Nappi]

Oh yeah, the codex pages. I had already picked up most of them so that wasn't a big deal for me. I was talking about the capture the flag thing during the carneval. Of course that is not a real fetch quest, but I was still sleepy when I wrote the first reply.

[n0wak]

Hey, I actually completed games. PLURAL.

Zeno Clash

Red Dead Redemption

PixelJunk Shooter

The latter was completed just in time for a PixelJunk Shooter 2 announcement at E3, which gets me excited. Liked the game a great deal.

There was an Ace Team game announcement too, so doubly so.