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I just beat Oblivion after six months of playing it non-stop!

Now I can play the Shivering Isles or play a different game entirely.

  • Sam and Max Season Two?
  • A Boy and his Blob?
  • Metroid Prime? (I keep putting this away and not finishing it.)
  • Or the many bundle-bought games that won't run on my MacBook?

Eh. I'll figure it out.

Well, you should play all those, but priority wise you should play Metroid Prime. When it comes to setting atmosphere in video games, it's a... prime example of doing it right! (ha ha, ahhh kill me)

Also, is that the original A Boy and His Blob, or the Wii one?

And what did you think of Oblivion? Did you do a lot of the secondary / tertiary content or just the main story?

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Also, is that the original A Boy and His Blob, or the Wii one?

And what did you think of Oblivion? Did you do a lot of the secondary / tertiary content or just the main story?

It's the Wii version of A Boy And His Blog. I picked it up cheap simply because I heard it had a hug button.

I'm going to put my Oblivion thoughts in the Oblivion thread to satisfy those that hate this thread, but yeah, I think Metroid is next. I feel like I'm almost at the end, though I have a lot of Chozo artifacts to hunt down. This is the same point at which I stopped playing Wind Waker!

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It's the Wii version of A Boy And His Blog. I picked it up cheap simply because I heard it had a hug button.

I'm going to put my Oblivion thoughts in the Oblivion thread to satisfy those that hate this thread, but yeah, I think Metroid is next. I feel like I'm almost at the end, though I have a lot of Chozo artifacts to hunt down. This is the same point at which I stopped playing Wind Waker!

That's one of the best reasons to buy a game. So neat.

As for the Chozo artifacts, after you complete the game once, if you have an acute Metroid-vision, you can get most of those as you normally progress.

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Q.U.B.E. :tup:

I think you can best describe it as a portal like first person puzzle game. Overal it's not that difficult and can be finished within 3 hours. There are 2 annoyingly difficult puzzles right after eachother. That was a bad call. The game more or less lacks a background story, although at the end of the game there's something going on. It would have been nice if they had dressed up the game a bit more. Anyway, it was a fun couple of hours.

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I just finished the Portal 2 single player campaign the other day.

Overall I was very happy with it, I really enjoyed the fact that there was some more story to drive you along in this one, also Wheatley -> awesome character!! the new puzzles where quite interesting and I'm sure that the coop expands on them more but I haven't had a chance to play the coop yet (I will do soon though :))

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I just unearthed Advance Wars: Dual Strike from one of the boxes (I'm in between homes) and look forward to playing it again!

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I should really get around to playing Q.U.B.E. I'm glad it's only a few hours, my free time has been severely truncated of late.

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Renegade Ops :tup:

Finally decided to finish this game (and the coldstrike DLC). The only real negative point I can think of is that every primary mission is timed. So in quite some cases you cannot finish the secondary missions. But for the rest it was an absolute blast.

When the game came out I also played some coop with other thumbs, it's just as fun.

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I think Metroid is next. I feel like I'm almost at the end, though I have a lot of Chozo artifacts to hunt down. This is the same point at which I stopped playing Wind Waker!

Wait, these Chozo artifacts are mandatory? I only have five of these things!

Forget it: just like Wind Waker I am never playing this game again because it's suddenly decided its optional, arbitrary treasure hunt is mandatory.

It's A Boy And His Blob time instead.

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Wait, these Chozo artifacts are mandatory? I only have five of these things!

Forget it: just like Wind Waker I am never playing this game again because it's suddenly decided its optional, arbitrary treasure hunt is mandatory.

It's A Boy And His Blob time instead.

The hunt isn't anywhere NEAR as bad as Wind Waker. Really, it's not. And if you have 5, you already have a good amount.

In other news, I've been tapping away at hard mode of Advance Wars DS, which isn't really an exercise in game strategy so much as puzzle solving / abusing mechanics to beat stages. But now I'm back on the stage that held me back for so many years. And as it would go, I failed it because of the stupid unique condition it has.

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Just finished Blade Kitten, I don't know why. Krome Studios are one of those weird ones. They clearly have a really good group of artists but they have no one who can design a level or combat for shit.

Hellboy looked great, played like arse the same can be said of Blade Kitten.

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God of War II :tmeh: - Meh, God of War II has so much going for it and I can see why people love it. The combat is generally good, but like many games of this type it tends to break down when you fight a variety of different enemy types in a single encounter. The exploration is also generally good, but the platforming sequences and various "these spikes will murder you unless you do X, but also these enemies will keep spawning in to prevent you from doing x" are quite annoying. They wouldn't be quite so annoying if they didn't bring attention to the fact that this game is LONG. My playthrough hit about 15 hours, which I find is pretty ridiculous when I compare that time to what I remember actually happening throughout the game. The plot would almost be entertaining if not for the extreme predictability of everything. Everyone but one dude hates Kratos, and then that dude will eventually betray Kratos. Kratos will get angry and seek revenge, making everyone hate Kratos. I get it. Can't say I'm very excited to hop into GoW3, glad I don't have it waiting in the wings right now.

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Just finished the Witcher whose final few boss battles proved to be easier than expected especially with some of the potions/weapons and armour they give you towards the end of the game. I took me about 65 hours and part of me wants to re-start on hard just to see how much more important potions etc are for random encounters and not just story related fights.

Definitely a game where talking is a far better option than killing which reminds me of a cut scene where Geralts says he gets more joy from lifting a curse than killing a monster.

Also a game where a neutral path is totally valid and doesn't punish you for not taking sides. At the start I was going to back the elves till I saw the consequences of an earlier decision and decided that both sides main goal was kill everyone who doesn't agree with you. A rare example of me actually caring about a choice in a game not because of how it would effect my game play but how it affected my thoughts. Now onto STALKER and Hitman Blood Money

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God of War II :tmeh: - Meh, God of War II has so much going for it and I can see why people love it. The combat is generally good, but like many games of this type it tends to break down when you fight a variety of different enemy types in a single encounter. The exploration is also generally good, but the platforming sequences and various "these spikes will murder you unless you do X, but also these enemies will keep spawning in to prevent you from doing x" are quite annoying. They wouldn't be quite so annoying if they didn't bring attention to the fact that this game is LONG. My playthrough hit about 15 hours, which I find is pretty ridiculous when I compare that time to what I remember actually happening throughout the game. The plot would almost be entertaining if not for the extreme predictability of everything. Everyone but one dude hates Kratos, and then that dude will eventually betray Kratos. Kratos will get angry and seek revenge, making everyone hate Kratos. I get it. Can't say I'm very excited to hop into GoW3, glad I don't have it waiting in the wings right now.

That's interesting. I kind of felt similarly for the short time I played GoW2. I love GoW1: one of my all-time favorite games of that generation. I played through the HD remake of 1 and started on 2 but I stopped after the first chapter and haven't returned for a while. It just felt like they weren't trying terribly hard to introduce anything new to the game, just giving me more of what made the first one great. Except by this point it was slightly stale. Sequelitis I suppose. I do hope to eventually finish it and go on to the subsequent games in the franchise, I've even got the HD remasters of the PSP games...

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I just ditched finishing Infamous 2.

At first it seemed interesting, it was basically the only open world Superhero game I've played since Spiderman 2. While their were some interesting and cool moments, such as battling giant rampaging monsters that destroy everything in their way against the backdrop of a beautiful sunset, most of the game actually ends up being the usual Open World collectathon/repetitive missions bullshit. If you're gameplay is going to be repeated hours on end with almost no variation it damned well better be GOOD gameplay, and for the most part this wasn't.

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I just ditched finishing Infamous 2.

At first it seemed interesting, it was basically the only open world Superhero game I've played since Spiderman 2. While their were some interesting and cool moments, such as battling giant rampaging monsters that destroy everything in their way against the backdrop of a beautiful sunset, most of the game actually ends up being the usual Open World collectathon/repetitive missions bullshit. If you're gameplay is going to be repeated hours on end with almost no variation it damned well better be GOOD gameplay, and for the most part this wasn't.

Ha, weird. I'm getting near the end of my first playthrough myself, and I really like it. I have completed good and evil playthroughs of Infamous 1 on my hard drive, so the intent is to see how each side goes through the second game, but with a couple of other games as a palette cleanser between run-throughs. I don't mind the collect-a-thon stuff so much, seems kind of inherent to the game (see also: Crackdown, which I see Infamous as following in the footsteps of), but it can certainly be janky as hell. That may also be inherent to the gam, I don't know. I'd say that this, Crackdown, and to a certain extent Prototype kind of split off into their own genre, and I love those games for it. It does require a certain tolerance, but if you have it the game is fantastic. I'm seriously considering picking up the DLC that came out for Hallowe'en last year where you become an electric vampire. Sound like just the right kind of stupid to appeal to me.

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On The Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness Three :tmeh:

Just finished it after a tough boss battle (took me 4 tries). Overal the game is good, great music, great writing. But I'm giving it a :tmeh: because the fighting becomes quite tedious. Especially when you found a winning sequence of actions that'll win you every battle (except the boss battle) without even thinking about what's going on. But that's an standard problem with jRPGs. Yes, unlike the first 2 rainslick games, this is not a SNES era jRPG like game. So no QTE during moves to get the best attack, no 3D, etc. I think it's quite well done. There's not as much griding as in the usual jRPGs, but still to much for me.

Anyway, it took me about 9 hours to finish the game, and for $5 that's a good bargain.

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I agree about the tediousness of battles, I actually used a money cheat to buy everything in hopes of making battles less tedious and it worked, but the game seemed to have a bit of unnecessary parts in it. Sure, the retro part is a bit annoying, but once it did the Star Trek one I groaned, that felt like pandering and stalling for time.

I beat Analogue: A Hate Story which is for or sequel to Digital: A Love Story and the hate part is pretty apt, your mission is to recover the logs on an abandoned ship and there is a lot of hate in some of these log and the "moe" AIs that show these logs to you. I was glad the game isn't about seducing these AI and that is completely optional, you can even ignore them completely, although this game does seem to want to appeal to the anime fan, which is weird since the previous game wasn't anime-like at all. The story was pretty good though, even though some walls of text seemed a bit unnecessary, then again it IS about reading logs, so some have to be a bit boring? *shrugs*

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Blur :tup: - I love this game. Really good transition of the mechanics of something like Mario Kart to an aesthetically realistic game. Maybe it's just a lack of proper Burnout games, but I needed to wreck some shiny sports cars. Just wish it was more successful, honestly think it might have been better suited to XBLA with a reduced scope.

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I just finished Braid. I got a little weepy, but i don't know why. Puzzles were insane on the last two rooms.

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On The Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness Three :tmeh:

Just finished it after a tough boss battle (took me 4 tries). Overal the game is good, great music, great writing. But I'm giving it a :tmeh: because the fighting becomes quite tedious. Especially when you found a winning sequence of actions that'll win you every battle (except the boss battle) without even thinking about what's going on. But that's an standard problem with jRPGs. Yes, unlike the first 2 rainslick games, this is not a SNES era jRPG like game. So no QTE during moves to get the best attack, no 3D, etc. I think it's quite well done. There's not as much griding as in the usual jRPGs, but still to much for me.

Anyway, it took me about 9 hours to finish the game, and for $5 that's a good bargain.

9 hours is pretty generous for a JRPG (even though it's not J... hell I know the guys, but we all know what we mean by JRPG). Sounds good though.

I agree about the tediousness of battles, I actually used a money cheat to buy everything in hopes of making battles less tedious and it worked...

A money cheat?! You should be a hero and report it to the dudes so they can fix it!

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Wait, these Chozo artifacts are mandatory? I only have five of these things!

Forget it: just like Wind Waker I am never playing this game again because it's suddenly decided its optional, arbitrary treasure hunt is mandatory.

It's A Boy And His Blob time instead.

Hold on there, it is absolutely not like Wind Waker. (Where it's a known story that entire dungeons were cut from that game and they instead tried to engineer another way to pace the back half of the game.)

If you've been good about constructing a mental image of which corners of the world you haven't already been through, collecting the artifacts at the end of Prime is a loop around the game that will take maybe thirty minutes. (It's also possible to have almost all of them before they're required, anyways.)

It may have been a lazy way to try and pad out the game just a little more, but in the case of Prime, it's a victory lap and not a ten hour ordeal. (The chozo monument above the end-game crater, near where you parked your gunship, is filled with a bunch of exceedingly obvious hints that give you pretty much the exact location of every artifact.)

The hunt isn't anywhere NEAR as bad as Wind Waker. Really, it's not. And if you have 5, you already have a good amount.

In other news, I've been tapping away at hard mode of Advance Wars DS, which isn't really an exercise in game strategy so much as puzzle solving / abusing mechanics to beat stages. But now I'm back on the stage that held me back for so many years. And as it would go, I failed it because of the stupid unique condition it has.

If you're ok with a hollow victory, the AI in Advance Wars is predictable to a fault, and following steps laid out in a faq would be a fairly certain victory. The AI in those games is almost entirely reactive, and in the context of the rigidly designed campaign missions, a set sequence of player actions can almost always produce an expected result. (To be fair, it's much less predictable in the longer and more chaotic MP skirmishes, but it will still never surprise you with clever strategies, the worst it will ever do is force you into a protracted stalemate since all it's really doing is acting to counter your moves.)

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9 hours is pretty generous for a JRPG (even though it's not J... hell I know the guys, but we all know what we mean by JRPG). Sounds good though.

A money cheat?! You should be a hero and report it to the dudes so they can fix it!

I said cheat, not bug. I used something like a Game Genie for PC games, but only for grindy things.

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The Darkness :tup::tmeh: - This game has been sitting on my backlog for almost five years (got it a few months after release). Don't know why I let it get that far behind me, so I decided to barrel through it over a couple days. I'm not really surprised at how well it holds up considering Starbreeze's reputation, but that rep also follows in that the combat really isn't that great. I did decide to play it on easy for the sake of brevity, however, meaning I felt a minimal amount of slog. Otherwise, The Darkness is a really great game with quite a unique story. I'm eager to check out The Darkness 2, though I'm quite sure that due to relatively little commercial success it'll get even cheaper in the future (currently going for $12.50 on Amazon DD).

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