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Recently completed video games

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I beat Vera Blanc: Full Moon, a "visual novel" that surprisingly enough had no teenage girls showing their panties. It was about a girl that can read minds and is on her first case to find a werewolf.

The game has a few minigames, mainly the mind reading one where you have to guess the phrase (Hangman?) and it's mostly about looking for clues about whether the werewolf is real and who could it be. I don't think you can actually miss on vital clues since it looks like the day ends when you have enough clues, but I could be wrong.

Two spoiler-y things bothered me:

-You meet a couple that tries to kill you, you see them in a cutscene talking about whether to kill or not and they decide that they need to see if they are on your side... only to never be seen in the game again. It could be that I simply missed them in the game, but it didn't look like this game would have such different branching paths.

-You spend most of the game with no clue on who the werewolf is, only to figure it out on the last moment. It just comes out of nowhere, no hints, no suspects, nothing!

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In preparation for Borderlands 2, i dived back into the first game. I have just about everything finished, including the DLC, and am at the level cap on playthrough 2. (Speaking honestly, i still have another character in progress for co-op.)

It may shock you to hear, but that game is still pretty good.

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Finished General Knoxx and Claptrap's Revolution DLC for Borderlands 1. Both of them were :tmeh:

Both of them had a lot of tedious traveling and backtracking. The mission of both DLC were ok, not much special. It was not much of a challenge because my character had a much higher level than the missions. Well, except for the boss battle of Claptrap's Revolution, and the ultimate boss from Knoxx (which I haven't played because it was +20 levels). Those two things had a challenge.

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wtf did you get the time?

I just loaded up old games and went from there? I only had Knoxx and Robot Revolution to go through.

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I completed a video game! It was Last Window: The Secret of Cape West on the Nintendo DS. Got it second hand from a shop since I enjoyed Hotel Dusk, the previous game. It was kinda weird. Like Hotel Dusk, it wasn't particularly fun to play. You run around an old hotel with lots of identical rooms and talk to people. Once you get into the right mindset you do start to enjoy it, but it takes time to bully your brains into accepting the way things are.

As an adventure game / visual novel I can't wholeheartedly recommend it, but if you dug the superior Hotel Dusk, this might be worth checking out. IGN.com.

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Ah, same like me. Took me about 9 hours to go through Knoxx and Claptrap.

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I completed a video game! It was Last Window: The Secret of Cape West on the Nintendo DS. Got it second hand from a shop since I enjoyed Hotel Dusk, the previous game. It was kinda weird. Like Hotel Dusk, it wasn't particularly fun to play. You run around an old hotel with lots of identical rooms and talk to people. Once you get into the right mindset you do start to enjoy it, but it takes time to bully your brains into accepting the way things are.

As an adventure game / visual novel I can't wholeheartedly recommend it, but if you dug the superior Hotel Dusk, this might be worth checking out. IGN.com.

I really wanted to play this, i'm still mad it didn't get a North American release.

Ah, same like me. Took me about 9 hours to go through Knoxx and Claptrap.

What level did you finish at? Find any pearlescents? :eyebrow:

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I think I'm 44. Don't know about pearlescents, I didn't change weapons during the Knoxx nor Claptrap. I've got a really powerful rifle, combined with my eagle eye aim, most enemies die within a few bursts of critical hits.

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You must just be on Playthrough 1 then.

Pearlescents are the best weapons in the game, they rank above the three tiers of orange legendaries. Originally there was a bug in the game's internal rules that was labeling the highest quality weapons as white, and people started refering to them as pearlescents. Gearbox fixed the bug and later reintroduced the concept of pearlescents as a legitimate part of the game. I have never seen one in all of my time playing the game, is how rare they are.

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Death Rally (the new one) :tmeh:

Basically a port of the iOS game. The concept is the same as the original from 1996, but there are a whole bunch of subtle differences. The biggest change is the money/market system. In the new game you first have to unlock cars, weapons, etc. Money in the new game can only be spend after the race and everything not spend vaporizes. The new system fits the "pay to win" model better, you can spend real word money to unlock those things (in the iOS version).

The worst part of the remake is the small number of tracks. The original had 19 different tracks, this one only 6 or something. So it becomes quite tedious at some point.

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I beat Bunny Must Die, a metroidvania game that has time powers in it too. Most of the items you find aren't really the kind that change how your character, you mostly get keys, a dash and a wall jump. The time powers help with some puzzles, and in boss battles, but that's about it.

The final boss had SEVEN forms and after beating it I got a bad ending for not getting enough items. I'm not bothering, getting the items can be ridiculously difficult.

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Wow, I hate to "double post" but I REALLY want to talk about the game I just beat...

Double Dragon Neon is just.... Magical? It's a love letter to 90's which you will either love or loathe, I don't remember the Double Dragon series being this crazy, the I only played a few and they seemed pretty tame.

Here are a few things you will encounter in the game, I'll put a spoiler because the game is much more magical if the madness is unspoiled:

-The main bad guy is basically Skeletor, he even sounds just like him, probably on purpose.

-One of the bosses is a Mega Man parody.

-You might a giant plant monster that has a shark head and dinosaur head... Yep, that's the 90's in a nutshell.

It's pretty RPG-esque since you get cassettes that give you special moves and stat boost, the more of the same tape make the boost or attack stronger. There is a limit to how many upgrades you can have that is increased with the items the boss drop. Speaking of cassettes, the music is also so 90's, one level even sounds like a Madonna song!

One of the things I miss from the arcade era are bat shit crazy brawlers, I never thought I would play one again.... I was wrong, oh boy, was I ever wrong!

I'll put a spoiler on a very amazing secret that is so 90's, OK, TWO secrets:

-You can find a secret character called Fuzzface, that drops health and items and is making fun of every annoying sidekick from that ever: it's like having Snarf mate with Navi...

-There is a code that turns you into a robot... A ROBO-BRO-BRAWLER!

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Just beat FTL for the first time. By chance, Remo was my gunner and Breckon was my mantis murder-sergeant.

Breckon went down with the Rebel flagship. Chris shot him.

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I finished 999 recently; it's a visual novel about 9 people locked on board a ship to play a madman's game. It's got some adventurey/room-escapey bits with some mostly quite good puzzles. It has no 'text speed' option and sorely needs one, and it shares Japan's fascination with pseudo-science, probably to its detriment. However, it gets the characters right, it has at least one meaty mystery that's fair and grounded in fact, and it manages to be menacing without needing to spend a lot of time on that menace.

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Once you play through a part of the game once, you can fastwforward through it on a second playthrough. Which you will want to do to get the most out of the story.

999's successor, Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, is coming out really soon and I can't wait to play it. Good visual novel-style adventure games are a treat!

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I got kind of wrapped up in it and ended up playing through to see every ending and event in 999.

I thought the true ending was totally rubbish, but that is otherwise a really, really wonderful little game, definitely amped up about the sequel.

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I guess I've finished Jet Set Radio HD, there's still more side-missions and achievements but I think I'm done with it.

It didn't really wreck my nostalgia for it, the game still looks incredible, but it was strange. Now I've got more patience and understand of games, this was the first time I've ever actually beaten the game. In fact, I think it's the first time I've ever gotten more than an hour into the game. It was just weird to only have nostalgia and fondness for the first few levels only to realise you never even touched the surface of a game.

I'd be curious to see what a modern Jet Set Radio looks like. Mainly because not many big console releases have such a strong sense of style to them anyway.

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I just beat Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit. This game was amazing, it's so crazy I'm not even sure how it was released! The psychedelic level has a six-breasted Patrick from SpongeBob and some flowers that are so obviously female genitalia I just don't know how they got away with it! And if what I heard is right, you regain health with menstrual blood! I don't if this game is going for puerile or insane, or maybe just insanely puerile? Either way, it's magical!

You have to kill 100 demons that have seen some indecent photos of you with a rubber ducky and get the photos back. Most of the time you have to confront them directly, but many times you'll have to puzzle your way to kill them. And when you do, you get a Wario-ware-esque mini game you must win to unleash the finishing move.

My only complaint are the side missions, they are too annoying for so little pay off. But that's not part of the main game do I can't really complain.

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Torchlight 2 :tup:

Just killed the final boss. Took me about 21 hours to go through the game, finished it with a level 53 engineer. So yeah, this is to Torchlight 1 as Diablo 2 is to Diablo 1. The outdoor parts were ok. It's only a shame that everything had the same formula. Every dungeon was 2 levels deep with a boss on the 3rd level. Ok, except for the final dungeon. It would have been nicer if dungeons were between 2 and X levels deep just to have a bit more variation. None of the bosses put up a real challenge. I had more trouble with various multi-hero battles. I died twice because I didn't pay enough attention to my health, and had a lot of close calls. It would also have been nicer if there was more side-story going on. Not a lot of characters had something too say.

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I bought and beat Spec Ops: The Line this week. Have mixed but generally kind of negative thoughts about it. I admire it for trying to take the subject matter of war a little more seriously than some other contemporary games, and the overt Apocalypse Now references were sort of interesting, just as that's not a subject I've seen in a game before. Still, I feel the amount of positive talk it received in regards to its really simplistic moral dilemma kind of telling about the state of industry. Its a SUPER easy observation to make (war is bad...yeah, gotcha) and while it tries to make the player complicit in the horrible actions the characters commit, I still felt pretty distanced from it due to me controlling a voiced character from a third-person game. It wasn't ME who committed that war crime, it was some idiots who volunteered to be there that I got stuck with. Not only that, it purports to have a bit of an anti-war agenda in its story while still encouraging you via experience meters and trophies to keep shooting people in the face. Just felt at odds with itself and a bit hypocritical in that regard.

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I actually just finished spec ops earlier this week as well. Kraznor, did you get it in the cheap $5 deal that (I think it was) gamefly had the other week? I didn't think it was phenomenal but it was nice to see a game like that try really hard to have a meaningful story. It's one of the only games I've found to be mechanically mediocre but I've still persisted through due to narrative curiosity. After I finished I gave a listen to the following podcast and had a whole new appreciation for Spec Ops.

http://www.gamespot....e-line-6386587/

Not in a way that makes it great. Not even in a way that makes is succeed in a post-mortem kinda sense even. Just a respect for the kind of things they where trying to attempt in a video game. It's rare that a game is able to successfully reach outside of the realm of pure enjoyment and novelty to provide an introspective or communicative experience to the player. I don't think spec ops is one of those rare successes. I played the whole thing and listened to a podcast about it an I still don't think I clearly understand the message it wanted to get across. However they tried, and I'm down for unsuccessful attempts just because it's such a rarity in the medium.

I especially like the way they attempted to create the Jacobs Ladder of video games inside the heart of darkness of video games. I also happen to love those sources.

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I bought a big pile of PS2 games cheap the other week and not really knowing where to start, pulled out Shadow of Memories at random and gave it a go. I don't know how well-known this is but it's a third person adventurey exploring thing set in a small German town where you begin the game by getting murdered. A helpful fellow gives you a wee time machine so you can go back and try to learn about who killed you and why, and attempt to change the past to remove any motive.

It's hideous looking, terribly acted, features some of the worst music I've ever heard and has astonishingly clunky controls but all those negatives cannot mask its genius. It's a superb idea and once I got the hang of what it wanted me to do and started upping the puzzle complexity a bit I really got into it and was able to take the broken bits as a humourous bonus. Very enjoyable and if I didn't have another 30 games to play through I might have run through it again as there are multiple endings and I finished with items I couldn't even guess where to use so I think there's a fair bit I didn't see.

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Torchlight 2 :tup:

Just killed the final boss. Took me about 21 hours to go through the game, finished it with a level 53 engineer. So yeah, this is to Torchlight 1 as Diablo 2 is to Diablo 1. The outdoor parts were ok. It's only a shame that everything had the same formula. Every dungeon was 2 levels deep with a boss on the 3rd level. Ok, except for the final dungeon. It would have been nicer if dungeons were between 2 and X levels deep just to have a bit more variation. None of the bosses put up a real challenge. I had more trouble with various multi-hero battles. I died twice because I didn't pay enough attention to my health, and had a lot of close calls. It would also have been nicer if there was more side-story going on. Not a lot of characters had something too say.

Oh crap, I forgot to post about beating the game! I've done so twice actually; Prismatic Bolt embermage (which is the cheesiest build in a game ever) and my dual-wield Outlander. The dungeons being two floors all the way through was pretty formulaic and boring, yeah. I'm not sure I agree with the bosses not putting up a challenge. On my first character through that was true but I knew I was having an easy ride. On my Outlander I had to do a lot of running away from scary attacks. I have yet to beat the game on any melee builds and they are tragically the most difficult.

Still, it very much does invoke the same feeling as Diablo 2 did for part one. Plus my hindsight criticisms of Diablo 2 are nowhere to be found here.

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