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I got kinda drunk yesterday and ended up picking up a Bastion save about 65-70% of the way through the game and just finishing it. I was really surprised by the amount of narrative choice in the tail end of that game. I didn't make a single choice of narrative consequence the entire game and then last section actually presents you with 2 choices (one of which doesn't seem to make any material difference in the end)!

I think I like the game a lot. The art and music is just absolutely stunningly beautiful. As a work of art independent of being a video game Bastion is utterly stunning. I don't personally think the "video game" aspect is quite as strong. This is one of the few games that I will accuse of doing more then it should. To many weapons (some that feel almost worthless) to many challenge levels for the individual weapons. There's just to much to experience and really not enough game to do it in. The game play itself in Bastion is sort of an average take on "Secret of Manna" style game play. I don't really think there is a lot of super interesting stuff going on there. The games strength is tooling around their amazingly artistic world listening to Rucks go on and on. They're giving you new weapons to use all the way until the very last level of the game! I don't feel like I ever really fully familiarized myself with the weapons I liked the most. Every level was forcing a new weapon on me.... By the end of the game I felt like I was leaving the intro game play tutorial. However now that I had experienced all the art/music/story I don't really know why I would want to go back? The play isn't compelling enough to make me want to go back through and actually play with all those weapons. I think that's probably my main complaint about this game. Other then that I think it was pretty much aces (despite it taking me like 2 years to play through =P).

I was actually SUPER impressed with the ending section where you carry Zulf out of the Ura fortress (well if you choose to). How they're all initially shooting you and then they peel off and actually let you go. That was NOT something I was ready for this game to do at all. It felt extremely cool. They did a great job of preserving a sense of danger in that segment

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"Some of the weapons feel worthless" is a thing a lot of people say about Bastion, but then you ask them what their favorite weapons are or which are the best weapons and everyone has different answers, all of which eventually encompass all the weapons. I think one thing Bastion does really well is to make you feel like your way of playing is the right way or the best way, even though your way is much different from everyone else's way. It feels carefully tailored to you, even though it also turns out to be carefully tailored to everyone else.

The whole "I felt like I was finishing the tutorial as the game ended" is another really interesting aspect. Some people think it's important for games, even small, short games (or especially small, short games?) to keep introducing things to keep it fresh - a new mechanic or a new weapon or a new gimmick every level so that it never gets old. Other people just prefer to get most things on the table early on and then just play around with what the game has to offer, with maybe a few variations along the way. I'm not sure where I fall on the issue or whether people actually fall one one side or the other or instead just have different feelings about different games, but Bastion is a perfect example of this kind of thing. Personally I felt like it would have been nice to get more time with the weapons introduced later, because I never quite got to figure out if I liked them or not, but I dunno.

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"Some of the weapons feel worthless" is a thing a lot of people say about Bastion, but then you ask them what their favorite weapons are or which are the best weapons and everyone has different answers, all of which eventually encompass all the weapons. I think one thing Bastion does really well is to make you feel like your way of playing is the right way or the best way, even though your way is much different from everyone else's way....

That's interesting (and cool). I figured that the breadth of weapons was really there to individualize the experience but I was not really sure how well that worked for them (I am SUPER late to the party on this game. Where is everyone? ::crickets: :). I do agree with your second point there. Bastion does an amazing job of making you feel like your weapon/tonic/play style choices are "orthodox". That's why I was so upset with the fact that the game basically forced me to change my weapon on every single level I was in, rarely allowing me to experience the play style I enjoyed...

The whole "I felt like I was finishing the tutorial as the game ended" is another really interesting aspect. Some people think it's important for games, even small, short games (or especially small, short games?) to keep introducing things to keep it fresh - a new mechanic or a new weapon or a new gimmick every level so that it never gets old. Other people just prefer to get most things on the table early on and then just play around with what the game has to offer, with maybe a few variations along the way. I'm not sure where I fall on the issue or whether people actually fall one one side or the other or instead just have different feelings about different games, but Bastion is a perfect example of this kind of thing. Personally I felt like it would have been nice to get more time with the weapons introduced later, because I never quite got to figure out if I liked them or not, but I dunno.

Yeah it's hard to comment on. I really think the addition of all those challenge levels is a pretty glaring balance mistake. I'm sure they where quick to make, and appear to have a high level of replay ability at first look, but they're really just not very much fun. Especially to warrant as many of them as there are! I would gladly have lost ALL of those challenge levels for 2-3 more actual game levels. There's plenty of opportunities to play with the weapons inside the games numerous combat arenas.

Really if they had just gotten all of the weapons dispensed in the first 55-60% of the game and given me a touch more critical path to play my own style and more fully upgrade the weapons I like and I think I might have been totally in love with this game.

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I loved it the first time through, but REALLY loved it when I new game +'d my way through. Give it a try. Going through that game starting with everything really makes the whole thing open up in an amazing way.

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I just beat Trine, which was really enjoyable except that the children's fantasy setting was trash. I understand not crafting a robust narrative for a 2D platformer, but the setting, characters and story were all so boilerplate-fantasy that the game felt lifeless and flat. I really enjoyed the game in terms of solving puzzles and exploration, but I just wish a fresher coat of paint was applied over the mechanics. The game is pretty, but only in a technical sense.

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I just beat Trine, which was really enjoyable except that the children's fantasy setting was trash. I understand not crafting a robust narrative for a 2D platformer, but the setting, characters and story were all so boilerplate-fantasy that the game felt lifeless and flat. I really enjoyed the game in terms of solving puzzles and exploration, but I just wish a fresher coat of paint was applied over the mechanics. The game is pretty, but only in a technical sense.

Trine 2 isn't much better for "story" but is legitimately, eyewateringly gorgeous. And a breeze to beat on co-op since you can both be wizards and just levitate each other past obstacles ^_^

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I finished Folklore a few weeks ago. It's an early PS3 game that no one seems to have played. I really enjoyed the art, setting, story, and ridiculous amount of creatures modeled and created, but there's a lot of tedium thrown around in terms of having me do the same thing over and over for side quests. There's also a lot of grinding to level up your characters which of course I had to do 100%. I imagine if you didn't do that the game would be just fine, so I'm not a good judge of it.

I would have enjoyed the narrative more if not for some weird loose end at the end which was just nonsense plus the way Japanese narratives tend to turn into an introspective mess during the final act. Otherwise it was a nice small storyline within a city block with lots of reveals I feel were done very well.

I really wish the game had more cutscenes because they looked great when they appeared. Most scenes were played out in this shoddy mock comic book format that just looked awkward.

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I remember almost buying folklore right around when the PS3 came out simply because the monsters on the cover looked so imaginative!

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I remember liking the demo, but I never saw the game for sale... so I forgot about it.

I just beat John Goodman's Rage and I really enjoyed it, once again, the racing, vehicle part were actually fun, I got first place in every race in the first town and nearly all in the second (I hate the "rally races") and I really enjoyed the shooting even. It suffers from the "Goddammit, I shot you 20 times in the head, why are you still alive?!" syndrome, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

The thing is... I have a feeling it was rushed? The second area has so few missions and everything happens so quickly it's kinda strange? It's rather long for just an FPS, but rather short for a sandbox game.

Still, it's the first id Software game I've enjoyed since Doom II.

PS: Am I getting better at driving or are sandbox games being more sensible with the driving sections?

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Rage is a game I quit I hate that game I hate id I hope they all die I [multiple other unreasonable reactions].

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Still, it's the first id Software game I've enjoyed since Doom II.

Hmmm I actually took this off my steam list the other night cause I had heard so many negative things about it. I was waiting for 5.99-7.99 on that one...

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I don't really see why, the enemy AI was the best I've seen. Not only did they respond differently depending on where you shot them, but they actually fall back when they see they are losing the battle. All this was new to me.

But I guess it's because it feels like half an open world game? Either you take it as a good shooter in a open world-ish environment or a mediocre open world game with very good combat.

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It's because neither the shooty mcshootin' nor the drivy mcdrivin' was good. They were both half-assed and boring and ugly and boring and ugh. The most fun in the game is driving around the little RC car bombs. The shooting sections were dull, uninspired bullshit that offered no legitimate challenge (taking more damage because the difficulty is set to "hard" doesn't count). The level design was horrendously straightforward and offered little-to-no variation - not to mention the constant revisiting of levels for stupid missions. Too, the structured driving sections were all literally the same few things over and over again with slight variations in track layout that ultimately had no real effect on the effort or method of winning. And that's just the structured driving sections, like the races and rallies! Driving around the overworld was just a chore.

It's like it was trying to be Borderlands, but for serious and without the pinatas of loot every five seconds. Instead of removing what was wrong with Borderlands... they kept ONLY the bad stuff, and added MORE bad stuff.

Rage was such a huge disappointment. I honestly don't know why I let myself get excited enough to buy it as I did. Oh well, at least the environments were really goddamned pretty, despite being deserts and shit.

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It might be worse than any other open world game out there, but I still think it's id Software's best game in decades. *shrugs*

Maybe they hate the game because it gave them the ruddest slapping? ;P

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Well I already completed Gunstringer way earlier this year, but I moved and have a bigger Kinect living room so I took advantage of that to get all the gold medals and the Strings of Steel achievement. So dumb the game requires such precision to get the achievements when Kinect has no such precision. There was a lot of restarting levels involved on all accounts. Not being able to skip cutscenes just made it the more painful.

Strings of Steel requires you to beat the game straight through on hard without dying or quitting. This took about four hours with numerous level restarts (which are luckily allowed as long as you don't die), and my legs were fucking aching after standing for so long. I guess it's been a long time since I've had a job where I've had to stand for 8 hours.

Luckily since I have a friend at Twisted Pixel, he was able to relay all of my hateful frustrations to the designer responsible for the achievements. A fun fact is that this guy is also responsible for the Rock Band Bladder of Steel achievement requiring you to play 8 hours nonstop.

Anyway, while I'm relieved I've finally completed this game to 100%, I would not recommend anyone else do this unless they want to end up hating The Gunstringer.

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It might be worse than any other open world game out there, but I still think it's id Software's best game in decades. *shrugs*

That says quite a bit about the current state of id!

Shame, 'cause I love John Carmack. (But then, who doesn't?)

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Machinarium! I finally started and finished the free PS+ version of this I got a few months ago, absolutely loved it. I got stuck a few times and had to resort to the inbuilt hints system and even that bit was ludicrously charming and managed to help me out in bits where I might otherwise have gotten frustrated in a way that didn't make me feel like I was dumb and cheating. Fantastic, one of the best things I've played all year.

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On the topic of Rage, I found the game extremely easy and thought that the combat was very narrow and constrained. (So many invisible walls!) It gives you a sandbox-style set of toys that came across as totally inconsequential, you're never given the room or any reason to really play around with them. Also, there was that abrupt non-ending that happens immdiately after they introduce some of the more interesting enemies in the game.

Rage was not bad, it was just kind of disappointing and boring. The gameplay stuff and all of the technical shit on top of it has made me worried about what kind of company Id has become. (All the shit surrounding BFG isn't helping matters.)

Also, personally, i think Doom 3 was incredible and misunderstood, i love that game.

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Yeah I've not played Doom 3, but I've only ever heard really good things about it.

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What did you like about Doom 3 that made it so much better than RAGE? Was it that its walls were visible rather than invisible, or that it didn't give you any neat toys in the first place to make you feel disappointed in having no reason to use them, or did you mostly like the atmosphere/horror elements which of course weren't present in RAGE, or something else?

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What did you like about Doom 3 that made it so much better than RAGE? Was it that its walls were visible rather than invisible, or that it didn't give you any neat toys in the first place to make you feel disappointed in having no reason to use them, or did you mostly like the atmosphere/horror elements which of course weren't present in RAGE, or something else?

This is a tough question to answer, but i think it's a pretty fair one to ask. I'm in the unfortunate position of having almost anything i say run the risk of making it sound like i think Id should just go back to doing the thing they've always done. I don't think that, and i had high hopes for Rage, i really wanted to see Id succeed outside of their comfort zone. I unfortunately just don't think Rage is very good, and it was a pretty painful realization as a huge fan of those guys since the Commander Keen days.

Rage was trying to do a lot of new things, but in pursuit of those things, they kind of lost what Id was so good at. It feels like a game from a completely different studio. (Rumors have been that they staffed up so much for Rage that it effectively now is a different studio.) I think they've previously always been extremely good at making games with a real purity of purpose. Straightforward, surprisingly elegant, and highly demanding games. There's a real immediate tangibility to their stuff, i think. On the other hand, Rage has all these mounting little elements that really detract from that feel, like the iron sight aiming and the invisible walls that are absolutely everywhere. If you go running and try to jump over something and you are stopped mid air because of something you could not have possibly known was there, that sucks, and it's all over that game. All these clunky little things slowing it down and making it feel like less of an Id game.

I mean, and it's easy too, it's really easy. I'd feel really bad if i loaded up that game and saw that i played through it on normal, but i'm certain that i bumped it as high as i could and still pretty much coasted through. I mean, and i have a real problem with games that give you a big tool box and no reason to use it. I kept waiting for situations where i should start throwing out my crafted robot buddies, but they never really came. I ended up just chewing through the disposable items and the special ammo types simply to mix things up. Everything worked reasonably well against almost everything, and it was just kind of dull. I mean, for me, it's more a case of what they lost there than what they added. There was this very specific feel of game that only really Id delivers, and Rage isn't that. It's a game that just kind of meanders around, and even when the game finally starts ramping up and doing some really interesting things, it ends immediately. (I also thought the vehicle races, while incredibly beautiful, amounted to a really shitty and unfair kart racer. Like "Mario Kart at its worst" levels of bullshit. The way the AI telepathically knows where subsequent checkpoints would spawn on those randomized rally things is utter dogshit.)

Still, does it sound like i'm just whinning because Id didn't stick to their strengths and tried something new? I don't think i have a clear perspective on that. I think a lot of the more peripheral pieces they tried to bring to it were interesting, promising things. The weapons feel cool, that crafting system is really awesome, and the open-world vehicle stuff is also pretty great aside from being a touch too limited in scale. I think Rage just really fails on the core feel of the game, for me.

I mean, Doom 3 by comparison feels like a really purpose driven game. You use the pistol on the zombies so you have ammo left over for tougher enemies, the balance works and does so in favor of an earnestly tough damn game. (Ammo and health are very scarce.) Carmack has also spoken about how the flashlight was a product of him not wanting to have to render both the flashlight and the muzzle flashes at the same time, but the result is a really effective mechanic. You have to make that conscious choice to put yourself into a compromised situation so that you can defend yourself in battles lit only by ambient lights, fireballs, and muzzle flashes. Accident or not, it makes for an incredibly tense game. There are also just so many little incidental animations used to "monster closet" enemies into battles, and those crazy computer displays that you just stand in front of and manipulate using mouse look like a mouse cursor. Those displays are something that still impress the hell out of me, there are no giant red buttons to be seen in that game.

Doom 3 is an atmospheric skin on top of a pretty faithful update of Doom. They kept that core intact, but plastered so much else on top of it, and lost very little in the process. I think it works very well, it's a game i played through many times. Still, I've always felt like one of the few people on that side of the argument, there was so much backlash at Doom 3 for so long. (If you have any serious problems with games that are extremely dark, or having groups of enemies dumped in on you with very little notice, it's probably not for you.)

As for Rage, I feel like Rage kind of lost track of the things Id is good at. I mean, and now hearing some of the things going down with the BFG remake of Doom 3, it's hard not to be worried about what the future holds for Id.

- Oh god, this post ended up being way, way, way longer than i meant for it to be.

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Sounds about right. I never played much Doom 3 because it was scary, and I enjoyed RAGE a fair amount when the shooting was happening (but not when I was in a car) but it was definitely not as finely tuned as, say, the first Doom.

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I beat Anna, which is pretty short and pretty bad in a slightly humorous way? None of the puzzles make sense, which doesn't make it that bad since the game is so small you can do things at random and eventually get it right, but... there are only clues for ONE puzzle. I have no idea why I had to do the rest of the stuff.

The story makes as much sense as the puzzles, but the game claims to have a special "gimmick", the game know what you look at and if you "obsess" over an item too much by looking at it a lot, you'll see it everywhere? I think it might have happened in this game, but I don't see it making the game scarier. Speaking of scary, the jump scare will happen even if you aren't looking at them.

Also, you have to log in to play the game.... Yeah, you can skip this one.

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Over the past couple of weeks, I decided that I desperately needed a break from school stuff every now and then and have completed two (!) games.

The first is Assassin's Creed Revelations. I had started playing this way back in February, and have slowly been working my way through it at a rate of about two hours a month ever since. Turns out that the save I had created in September (last time I played) was about two missions from the end credits. So I got to them. The game was fine. I think I was just ready to be done with Ezio now. I still quite liked it, and can't say for any particular reason why it didn't grab me the way the other three games had (each of those took me a week to beat). Worth playing if you can get it on the cheap.

The second is Journey. I fired that up tonight after registering for a PSN Plus account, as I finally decided that would be a thing I should check out. Plus looks goddamned awesome, but that's beside the point. I started playing Journey a little bit last month, in that I installed it, played the first level, and went to bed. I picked up a save tonight at the start of the second level, and after about five minutes of fucking around noticed that there was a dude with me. At first I was actually irritated by this. Who is this clown crowding my meditative sand-surfing experience? Turns out it made the game so much better. We played from the start of the second level through to the end credits as a duo. That last section with the climb up the snowy mountain was incredible with a partner, especially as the game has what is basically a "huddle for warmth" mechanic. When we started getting separated and I noticed that the wind and cold had made my chirp far quieter, I felt lost and legitimately scared that my friend had left me to freeze. When we re-met later in the level, it was completely joyous. Journey, man. That game is amazing.

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