gdf

Recently completed video games

Recommended Posts

The art dude is working with another team on a similar game, only it takes place in space and you can visit as many worlds as you want. It's the same concept only broader. I keep forgetting the name. But even in development it's more robust than Terraria.

I believe that would be Starbound.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Just beat RAGE. There were three great things in this game. The first is the character design/acting: it was really fun to just look at the characters while they talked, especially the scientist with the adorable little robot on his shoulder that would soundlessly act out a huge range of emotions with just the ability to nod and blink its little LED eyes. In general a lot of the characters were really well designed, except for a lot of the female characters who were inexplicably wearing basically underwear. Video games :(

The second great thing is the graphics: the characters I've already mentioned, and the environment, as long as you never get closer than 10 feet, is absolutely beautiful. My Steam screenshot accumulation has acquired some wonderful shots from RAGE. The environments are not just pretty but also unique. All the crazy balloons floating around and stuff are really intriguing. Unfortunately if you get closer than 10 feet everything looks like pea soup. I guess that was to make sure it ran on consoles!

The third great thing is the shooting and the attendant systems. I think RAGE has my favorite shotgun in a Video game and my favorite assault rifle in a Video game. The movement feels as solid as it always does in an id game. Little touches like how the camera acts when you move or shoot or how the guns recoil all add up to making the basic "use gun on man" interaction incredibly strong.

Everything else about RAGE ranges from mediocre to bad. The driving is passable: I sort of enjoyed racing for a while, but it got tedious after a while. The open-ish world is pretty worthless: just drive from point A to point B to begin another linear mission. The plot is so stupid as to be offensive to my admittedly meager intelligence. The enemies had basically zero variety: aside from shield dude or little robot dude, every single enemy either ran towards you or shot a gun at you. Compared to something like Half-Life, which has many enemies that you fight in many different ways, RAGE's opponents really don't engender much excitement. The inventory stuff is just tacked on and useless. I collected god knows how many oil cans from god knows how many shelves for some purpose I still could not relay, despite having finished the game. The card minigame is boring. The gambling minigame is about as stupid as actual gambling. And so on. Basically anything else they put into RAGE is not impressive.

I had fun, but it's disappointing that Carmack's company, of all places, tried to get fancy rather than focusing on the basics. DooM had better enemy variety than this game!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Beat VVVVVV today. :tup: :tup: :tup:

Thanks again to Elmuerte for the free Steam copy.

Final stats...

20 Trinkets (w00t Secret Lab unlocked)

Time 4:49:04 (mostly lots of dying trying to get that one trinket, you know the one)

Flips 6033

Deaths 2343

Hardest Room 213 Deaths (damn that trinket).

Initially the graphics, and lack of animation was a minor turn off, but the music was able to carry me past that. Once I got into it, there was just the next trinket, the next crew member, the graphics didn't matter anymore. I was surprised to find that it was a Metroidvania style game, seeing it usually paired with Super Meat Boy I assumed it would be level based.

I liked it a lot, but I'm probably not going to play through the unlocked time trial, flip, and/or no death modes. Getting those last two trinkets was enough challenge for me thanks.

Highlight of the game. Successfully navigating the 6 screen slalom of death only to forget to hang right on the last screen. I landed on the wrong side of the nub, and had to spend another half-hour trying to do it again. The funny part was that it took me about a minute to figure out that I had just botched it because I was to busy celebrating having survived it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Highlight of the game. Successfully navigating the 6 screen slalom of death only to forget to hang right on the last screen. I landed on the wrong side of the nub, and had to spend another half-hour trying to do it again. The funny part was that it took me about a minute to figure out that I had just botched it because I was to busy celebrating having survived it.

Ah, the mark of a true VVVVVV devotee. Congratulations.

Now it's time to go play some user levels!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Just beat Resistance 3 on co-op, because screw it, I wanted a local co-op game.

And it is at times nothing more than a slightly lesser copy of another shooter, but if you're going to copy any shooter then Half Life 2 certainly isn't a bad one to go with.

When it wasn't being a slightly lesser Half Life 2 it was just as remarkably solid as it was often solidly unremarkable. I never really felt like I was doing anything terribly great, exciting, new, or etc. But on the other hand I was never really bored. For example there are "horror" sections, with atmospheric design and music and scenarios. But they never made me feel creeped out or panic like the first time played through Ravenholm, nor do they have the sheer atmosphere to allow replayability as such. But I still had fun using the fun guns (and they're all pretty much fun) and smacking squishy enemies left and right.

In the end the best thing was the assault rifle, which was just a blast to, well, blast through almost everything with like some sort of bizarre leadspewing chainsaw. The only other impression I got from it besides solid, not entirely memorable nor amazing fun was that the studio has enough talent and patience that I'd love them to try something that's markedly different from the run of the mill shooters that the Resistance series has been.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Just finished El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. What a crazy game, story could only come from Japan and the visuals are very stylized and spectacular. A brand new visual style and theme every chapter felt disjointed, like their shader and graphics libraries they had but never got to use were all dumped in to this game.

It's a red orb action game but the combat is very simple compared to other similar games, one attack button, 2-3 combos per weapon (there are 4) but for the normal difficulty playthrough I did it was rather satisfying. I'm curious to see how it actually works out in the hardcore modes that were unlocked when I finished (2 more difficulties, new game plus, leaderboards). I'm doubtful it holds up.

I had my stream running, you can see my journey through the Book of Enoch right

.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

You mean like all their Ratchet and Clank games? Or Spyro the Dragon?

Wasn't really a fan of either, never really got into Spyro, and I'm not a total fan of platformers. I know other's like them though. Point is, I'd just love them to do something other than yet another first person shooter, they seem better than that.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Lots of talk about Darksiders 2 at the studio I'm now working for. Looked into it, and it looks like fun.. so seeing as the stories will overlap in some ways, I decided it would be best to blast through the first game before it comes out. All I remembered of the news/hype for Darksiders was that it was heavily compared to Zelda, which is a good thing in my books. Combine that with the new gameplay trailers for Darksiders 2 and that's what I had going into this.

Darksiders ended up being a pretty straight forward brawler with, as advertised, a familiar Zelda-like item-based exploration/progression structure. I was happily surprised at the amount of puzzle solving and lever switching there was. It definitely made up for the less than spectacular "arena" rooms where you get locked in and have to fight increasingly hard waves of mobs before being allowed to continue. Lots of back tracking, especially when you get a new toy like the hookshot err... abyssal chain or the void*portal gun*walker. One of the highlights was easily the horse. Though pretty limited in it's use, the mounted combat bits were some of my favourite parts. The ending was pretty good too. Makes me a bit angry about the second game. The whole reason for me playing the first one was because the second happens in parallel to the first, but after seeing the end of the first... I want to see the continuation of the first storyline. By far one of the best features in Darksiders was the quality voice acting. They didn't really have much of a story to tell, but what they had was executed flawlessly by the voice actors (Mark Hamill being one stand out).

The most annoying part about Darksiders for me was that finishers are always the same. When you beat down an enemy to near death you get prompted to hit a button and finish them in some brutal way. Which is cool until you realize that each mob type only has one finisher animation... and you have to kill hundreds of these guys. Pair the lack of animation with the fact that the game slows down for a finisher... it gets frustratingly repetitive to watch. Plus the fact that they give different rewards for a finisher kill than a regular beat down kill. You are incentivised to watch the same finishers over and over (in slo-motion). You just have to roll with it. They didn't have time to make hundreds of elaborate death animations, I got over it eventually.

If you haven't played the first Darksiders, and are interested in the second. I recommend you hack and slash your way through the first game. It was loads of fun. Total play time was about 23 hours. Could be less if you aren't as obsessive about finding every last hidden chest as I am.

Looking forward to Darksiders 2. Just pre-ordered my copy on Steam.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I beat the only God of War game I missed, Ghost of Sparta, a side story on the PSP remastered for PS3 which looks amazing for a PSP port.

It's the usually stuff, Kratos kills half the planet for his own selfish reason because he's a douchebag and everything is probably his fault to begin with. They introduce some characters that give some background to Kratos that was pretty interesting and didn't seem to be necessary for the main narrative except for the fact that...

Kratos KILLS Thanatos the God of Death and is somehow the God of Death and War now? How does that even work?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I just finished Portal 2 and walking dead Ep 2.

Portal was fun as expected, but near the end i got a bit tired of the incessant bickering. Once Cave left it again i jsut wanted it to end. Also, the puzzles became a bit too easy to reverse engineer. The only one i got stuck on near the end was one wehre i didn't notice a switch right beside the door, not sure how that happened. Still a great play though!

Walking Dead is pretty sweet, and a far stretch from the stuff i usually play.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I really don't like post-modernist approach to games: I find it's always too early and too easy to go down the 'self/medium aware or self/pop referential' route. If you do, you better have some good reasons.

For a while Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP stands as a good exmple and uses its self-awareness successfully; notably in the session system and their Mr Loyal as well as

the moon cycle mechanism

, which pace the experience perfectly.Sadly, the game crumbles pretty quickly under the weight of its high-school-ish writing style and idiosyncratic elements, as it systematically attempts to mesh them into a mythology. That's where it failed for me: the result is a mess of bits and pieces that rarely work on their own and made little sense to me as a whole.

I find it very strange for a game to be that blunt and crass (maybe this qualifier is too strong) in the writing department when it's definitely elegant in its art, animation and music direction.

In any case, the gameplay is so-so both in its design and execution but I can see the latter to be actually very good on iPhone/iPad (I played the game on PC)

Deus Ex: Missing Link smells like a team designing an experience with mature tools after a production rich in trial and errors.

For those who don't know, this smells like success: Human Revolution was very good, but crawling in vents, hacking and learning background info from terminals, taking down guys, analysing patrols or facing a few baddies while being low on ammo and energy was never as satisfying as it is here.

It's funny though, the DLC also underlines the limits of mainpath linear missions in the Deus-Ex gameplay and narrative paradigm: it's enjoyable, but even polished, it can't match the small scale, not 'Mission Impossible' stuff of the hubs that offered more thought-provoking themes, branching situation and confrontational characters.

So, hopefully, the next step for this team is to apply those honed craft-related skills to more potent narratives.

Still, Missing Link a blast.

Steam Catchup: 5 games down, 67 to go.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Saints Row 2 :tup:

Started this game after Saints Row 3. There are quite a bunch of things wrong with this game, or at least when you consider this game is from late 2008. The most annoying parts were the sound quality, extremely high volume during cinematic, and poor vehicle handling. But if you delude yourself and think it's a game from 2004 it's not a big problem.

Anyway, I think had quite some fun playing this game. So I'm giving it a :tup:. There were a few missions that took me a bunch of tries because I kept getting killed for stupid reasons (really overpowered by enemies). Volition learned a lot if you compare this game to SR3. So many things have been improved in SR3 (gameplay wise). If you really liked SR3, you might also enjoy messing around in SR2 specially given the budget price it has right now.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I finally played and beat MGS 3: Snake Eater and it was even better than I expected! The radio conversations about whether how everything Snake picks up tastes like (Why can't he eat dogs?), the crazy Cobra battles, the jungle... The ladder so long it needs a song.

When I first heard about the game I refused to play because I wasn't that good at sneaking and though I couldn't do it without the help of a radar, but after playing other stealth games I finally built up the courage (and found the HD collection).

Just a few things:

-Kojima is crazy in a very amusing way.

-Kojima is probably a perv, is there any game in which you don't see a girl in their underwear?

-Why do Russians have posters of Japanese models? (Where these models even born back then?)

-Why does one of them have a toy mech, did they even build those in the 60's?

-Ha ha, very funny, the game makes fun of how much we hated Raiden.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Sword & Sworcery EP (PC) :tmeh: (borderline :tdown:)

Music: awesome. Art style: great. Gameplay: shit.

It took me quite a while to finish this because it was vague, tedious and annoying to play (on the PC). Pretty much the whole game is about tedious trial and error. Way too much QTEs during battles, and for the rest the game is like those awful adventuregames where the solution makes no sense at all.

The whole messing around with time was just dumb. You basically have to wait for a few days before you can continue playing, talking about breaking immersion. Obviously I cheated and changed the system time.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

You basically have to wait for a few days before you can continue playing, talking about breaking immersion. Obviously I cheated and changed the system time.

You don't have to change the system time,

there's a room where you can alter the phases of the moon so you can proceed.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
You basically have to wait for a few days before you can continue playing, talking about breaking immersion. Obviously I cheated and changed the system time.

There's an in-game mechanic to futz with the time.

Also, I loved everything about that game! YOUR OPINIONS SUCK!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

You don't have to change the system time,

there's a room where you can alter the phases of the moon so you can proceed.

I tried that, but it didn't work for me. I think.

Anyway, the backtracking for that sucks.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Just finished Star Wars: Republic Commando for the first time. It was refreshing that while the player character is a grim, tough, space marine-equivalent, the plot does not make the player the savior of the universe. In Republic Commando, you and your AI squadmates are not tasked with single-handedly winning the war against the separatists, but instead your missions revolve around doing things that commandos would actually be assigned to do, such as sabotage, assassination, and hostage rescue. No one discovers that they have secret powers, or are the chosen one, or must fulfill an ancient prophesy. It was a nice change of pace from what seems to be an increasingly common plot structure.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I.... I... beat God Hand! OK, I was playing on "easy", but still, I beat bloody God Hand.

Now THIS is how you make a GOOD challenging game, the enemies telegraph their moves well enough and even when the enemies surround you, you do have ways to keep the crowd under control.

Any game with mad midget morphin' power rangers and gorillas in wrestling masks in awesome in my book. The best thing is that the game forces you to get better pretty well. At the beginning I wet my pants every time I defeated an enemy only to see that it was possessed and see a demon come out, by the end of the game I could handle them with relative ease!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I couldn't ever get into God Hand, which really bummed me out. It seemed so much like the kind of game i'd be really into, but i kind of just found it boring.

I didn't like Mad World either, and was kind of bummed out by that too.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It makes sense that if you didn't like God Hand you wouldn't like Madworld. Platinum is mostly the same people who made God Hand and now that I think of it, Madworld feels like a spiritual successor to God Hand.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Transformers: War on Cybertron :tdown:

Very :tmeh: game. The whole gameplay is tedious, the story is boring, it's short, AI is dumb as shit, dumb boss battles, mostly easy as shit but sometimes annoyingly difficult.

A very forgettable game. A real shame, because they could have done some interesting stuff. There's no real connection because every mission you play somebody else, the rest of the game stays the same though. Point and shoot, walk a bit, point and shoot, etc.

I bought this game on sale and was considering to get the sequel. But after playing this I'm not really interested in the sequel.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Admittedly, I'm a life-long Transformers fan, so it was a game kind of made specifically for me, but I was actually really into War for Cybertron. More than just being the best Transformers game anybody has put out, to me it really actually seemed like a pretty tight, balanced shooter on its own merits. Though it succeeds more as a multiplayer game than a solo game. (Three player co-op on its campaign, a suite of fairly popular competitive modes, and its awesome "escalation" mode.)

At least give escalation a shot, it won't change your mind, but it's probably the best display of what WFC does right.

I'm playing through Fall of Cybertron right now, and this time around they made a much, much better campaign, but simplified some of their mechanics in ways that kind of mess up the balance and make for a less interesting game. There's also perplexingly no co-op support this time around. (Also, it's a small thing, but the added feature of being able to alternate your gun arm on the fly to better take advantage of cover is kind of awesome.)

Edit: aaand i just finished it.

I approve of FoC, i think that is a cool game.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now