Recently completed video games

[manny_c44]

Ok thanks

[Frenetic Pony]

I haven't completed it, but I am playing, and quite enjoying Castle Storm. It's an odd combo of worms and controlled tower defense. And so far it's just plain fun. I like shooting things with my ballista in an angry birds-ish fashion. I like mashing a button to spawn my own creeps, I like spawning my hero for a bit and smashing enemy creeps in the face. And that's about all you do, and it's fun and not a shooter (sorry Metro Last Light) and I guess that's all I want from a video game at the moment.

 

It's a downloadable title only out on the 360, so there's that. But whatever. It's got competitive play which I've yet to try but hope to do so tonight.

 

- As for Revelations, that game wasn't worth playing for free. I was done with Assassin's Creed two thirds of the way through 2, and Brotherhood and Revelations were approximately the exact same thing so far as I was concerned. Hoping AC4 will bring something nice, but I'm really, reeeeeally disappointed it's an AC game and not just a pirate game. I want to be a pirate damn it!

[Tanukitsune]

I beat the PC version of Resident Evil: Revelataions, it felt like a blend of the old and the new games, in some parts it's improve a lot, in others.... not so much...

 

The story in an RE game is never the highlight, and this one's story is about as silly, I could tell from the beginning who the real bag guy was, and I'm terribly disappointed that the game tries so hard for us to care for these new characters that nobody wants to see again.

 

RE games never really scared me, but this one was probably the first to make me feel tense? I didn't feel scared whenever I saw a duct a monster could crawl out of, but I did feel uneasy. But at the same time, I could tell when I'm about to get into trouble, because I just entered a room full of ammo.

 

I don't know why, but the one thing they had to change was the ammo limit, as far as I can remember, the ammo limit was pretty high, but finding it was the real challenge. Here? It's almost like Dead Space, where you have to leave ammo behind because you can't carry anymore.

 

All, in all, I hope future RE game will be more in this style, although it was twice as long as I would have preferred. The longer the game is, the more comfortable you feel playing, so the terror and tension dissipates. :|

[elmuerte]

Thomas was alone

Interesting concept of a minimalistic puzzle game with a story running besides it. I think the puzzles were crafted and paced perfectly. There were a few annoying levels (I hating forced scrolling). But overall I never reached the point of "ugh... more of these puzzles". The change in puzzles always came at the right time. Also the way the new game mechanics were introduced was great. The only tutorial parts were for moving, jumping and double jumping. All the other stuff came naturally.

[Patrick R]

Little Inferno

 

Thought the gameplay was really powerful and evocative and amazing, but the story (especially the ending) just tried to hammer it home too hard and turn it into a character arc instead of a more abstract statement on capitalism. Also, this game has a serious case of Nintendo mouth where the all-text dialogue is really weird and stilted and has way too many text boxes that just consist of "hmmpphhh" "hrrmmm" "hmmmmm" noises and ellipses. That stuff always drives me nuts in games, and every time I got another letter it threatened to break the tone of the game completely.

 

Still, pretty amazing. Burning stuff is incredibly addictive.

[axemtitanium]

I could tell from the beginning who the real bag guy was

 

Was it this guy? Please tell me it was.

 

[dartmonkey]

I spunked through Bioshock Infinite over the weekend. It did a good job of replicating the pace of the original (I thought it dragged around the third quarter).

The whole Mrs Comstock mad ghost thing went on a bit and I saw the DeWitt/Comstock reveal coming for so long I was getting irritated by it.

 

I'm a player that has to search every single dead body and desk. I need every lockpick, every Voxophone, every stack of coins and I'm going to explore and retrace and hoover up all the resources I can. While playing I felt the narrative and the mechanics were pulling me in different directions. The way I play games (and the way I'm encouraged to play this game) undermines the story they're telling. The plight of the poor man waiting with his family on Finkton Docks loses any emotional impact when I compulsively rifle through his belongings and he just looks at me gormlessly. Sure, the scenario made me laugh but the collectathon ground me down. Half the time I'm not even seeing what I'm getting - I'm just listening for the cha-ching to signal I can move on. In offices I'd just run along a line of desks, head down, and ram the F key repeatedly. It was a real chore and felt like I was being punished with some archaic 'game' tropes just to get at the story 'meat'.

 

Columbia was a beautiful place. This will sound douchey but the repetition of character models was off-putting. I didn't count but I swear there were Goldeneye levels of repetition. I'm really and willing to suspend disbelief but two guys in trunks on the beach sitting next to two idential guys sitting next to two... It was all a bit Twilight Zone and jars against the obsessive detail of the rest of the game. 

Also, as lovely as Columbia is, the thrill of seeing Rapture again made me wish for more than thirty seconds there.

 

So yeah. It's definitely a mother-fucking video game, but I was really playing for the world and the story and felt the 'game' elements kinda spoiled it a little. In fact, It made me feel I was spoiling it myself with my OCD. But then I'd miss a tape. The Voxophones aren't just optional asides - they reveal the story, so missing one means the narrative is 'unfinished'. Fuck you Columbia! Everything has the veneer of sophistication but then I have to scour for hours to find some bullshit lockpick to open a door that leads to a safe that's actually only got fucking coins in it anyway. Come on, lockpicks?? I've got a fucking RPG! Stop being such a...game!

 

Argh, what have I said?!...

 

It does many things incredibly. It felt a lot like Half-Life 2 with Elizabeth and the tears, etc. There's a shit load of polish here but I don't feel that it does anything more than HL2 and that's nine years old now.

[twmac]

"- As for Revelations, that game wasn't worth playing for free. I was done with Assassin's Creed two thirds of the way through 2, and Brotherhood and Revelations were approximately the exact same thing so far as I was concerned. Hoping AC4 will bring something nice, but I'm really, reeeeeally disappointed it's an AC game and not just a pirate game. I want to be a pirate damn it!"

 

This is a statement that perturbs me every time I read it. If you were sick of the previous games (3 of them no less) then why are you still playing the bloody things?

 

No series deserves to have been gone back to so many times.

[Frenetic Pony]

So I've just about completed the campaign in Castle Storm, and finally played some splitscreen multiplayer. Overall

 

For those wondering, it's a game in which you fling projectiles angry birds style between castles, trying to knock the other persons castle over. But at the same time you and your enemy are both spawning different types of creeps, that will walk across the arena (it's a 2d arena) and knock down the enemies gates, or fight enemy creeps along the way. The first to either steal the enemies flag (knock down their gate, grab the flag with a creep, return it to your gate) or to totally demolish the enemy castle wins.

 

It's got a decent amount of stuff going on. The ballistae angry birds versus castle thing is all physics based, you build your own castle, and your rooms give you bonuses and decide what creeps you can spawn (archer room destroyed? no archer creeps for you, etc.) You've also got spells, including summoning your "hero" which is a kickass creep you control in a slightly castle crashers style to go and kick the enemy creeps ass. You have to balance between destroying the enemy castle and either stealing the enemy flag or at least defending your own.

 

The campaign was entertaining enough for a decent amount of hours, the multiplayer is good for some kicks, and for $15 you could do a lot worse with a lot of games, and not much better with not a whole lot of others. Again it's only out on the 360 right now though.

 

I also bought Gunpoint, and was immediately unimpressed with it. I like the idea of a stealth game where you die almost instantly upon being discovered, but the rest of it just feels flat to me so far. I didn't give it very long at all, and since I DID spend $8 on it I'll be trying again, hopefully I'll get something out of it.

[Tanukitsune]

Hmm, I just realized there a few games I recently beat I haven't said a thing about:

 

-Portable LEGO games in General: The games are very condensed and many things are missing, but somehow the combat is more complex, the prices for the unlockable are also different. In some aspects I like Vita version better in some the "console" version. For example, Tom Bombadil in the Vita version of LEGO Lord of the Rings walks by skipping and prancing around and kills with laughter.

 

-The Night of The Rabbit: The Daedalic game that came out of nowhere is a pretty whimsical tale of a kid transporter to a magical world where he wishes to become a magician. I love the story and the world, but the puzzles sometimes don't make sense and I needed a guide a lot.

 

-Tomb Raider: Jesus, this game was amazing, it was funny to see how Uncharted tried to be like Tomb Raider, but more cinematic and the new Tomb Raider has surpassed Uncharted in so many ways. The fact that she doesn't wise crack when killing people and while Uncharted makes things fall as you walk over them, in Tomb Raider the game doesn't wait for you and you will DIE if you think the game will wait for you. She seems terrified most of the game, the only way to explain it, is that this is the Die Hard of games, she's in a terrible situation and doesn't feel like the unstoppable killing machine she will surely become in the sequels.

 

-Waking Mars: I'm glad I posted about this in the "Quitting thread", because this game is pretty amazing too, but I hit a part I didn't understand and without help, I would have just left the game there. I liked the characters and I loved experimenting with each "seed" on every life form. Once you begin to understand the ecosystems ins and outs, I don't think you can actually mess up.

[elmuerte]

Little Inferno

You burn stuff, and discover combos by burning combinations of things. It's just useless fun of burning stuff.

... and then there's this weird ending ...

[Ucantalas]

Journey:  So yeah, I just played Journey the other day. It was... a thing. I don't know what I think of it. I think part of it is that this game has been hyped to an insane degree online, I've never heard a bad word about it and I've heard so many people tell me its a masterpiece, it's emotional and intense and brilliant... but I just didn't feel that.

[mikemariano]

Is Journey a game that is radically different now from when it first came out in terms of multiplayer?  Are there fewer players to join up with you, or are they all speedrunners who get impatient with new players?  I know the difference can't be as radical as all the updates to Team Fortress 2, but I don't know how wildly a changing player base can change Journey.

[Ucantalas]

I actually played it offline, so I have no idea.

Would playing it online with other people have actually changed the experience that much?

[Tanukitsune]

I didn't even know you could play it offline, the game I played with an anonymous player and it was pretty great experience talking to each other only with chirps. Do you actually play alone or with some AI partner?

[Ucantalas]

Well I didn't really have a choice, I didn't have an internet connection at the time. (Hear that Microsoft?)

Anyways, there was no AI partner, you just go through it alone.

[Tanukitsune]

Well, fortunately the game is more about journey than the anonymous interaction. It's good to know you can play it offline too.

[Zeusthecat]

Call of Duty World at War

 

I managed to beat this game on Veteran. Fuck this game. 

 

I also learned that World War 2 was much different than what I had learned in history books. Apparently the entire war was fought with grenades, the Japanese preferred to charge people with bayonets from over 20 feet away instead of shoot at them, and every single member of the German and Japanese military apparently only went after one guy (me).

 

Did I say fuck this game?

[youmeyou]

I actually played it offline, so I have no idea.

Would playing it online with other people have actually changed the experience that much?

 

Playing it with another player makes a pretty significant difference. The loneliness is never more profound than when you look for your partner after sliding down a mountain only to realize they've disappeared. And the last bit is even more intense when you see another person going through what your own avatar is going through. And then after finishing the game you get to see you've been playing with someone called Sukmydix87 and you're like... huh.

 

I'm sure there are more speed runners playing now or people trying to collect all the scarf pieces but I also heard a lovely story about someone who had played the game dozens of times, bedecked with a dazzling white robe (you get for getting all collectibles), and acting as a sort of mentor or guide for newer players, showing them how to get to certain spots and grab hard-to-find collectibles. Of course, if you don't want to be shown what to do you can always hang behind until you're disconnected and wait to find a new partner, but I think there's something nice about this sort of benevolent as opposed to competitive interaction being supported within the mechanics.

[quantum_leopold]

I finished Dishonored last night. I'd gotten about half way through it around the time of its initial release last October, but stalled out on it due to an excessive amount of fiddling with stealth (playing the same sequences over way too many times in a row). I started up again over the weekend, and finished last night. It was fine. Great level design, wonderful and unusual art style, some aspects of both the combat and the stealth that are pretty fun (particularly once I unlocked the second level time slowing ability, which was great). Mediocre-to-poor story that seems to rely too heavily on the star power of its VO cast, and it featured a narrative disconnect that I found frustrating, where you, the player, know better than to believe something someone is telling you, but you, the character, have no way of doing anything other than going along with the plot's demands so that you can fall victim to the surprise twist. And the story dragged on too long after what seemed to be the climax--I spent each of the last three nights this week thinking "okay, I can't have more than an hour left of this, right?" only to discover that there were entire missions still left to complete. 

 

I was surprised that I managed to get the Low Chaos ending, despite having killed dozens, maybe even hundreds, of guards, and a handful of civilians. This is likely because when it came to my assassination targets, I was generally more interested in taking them down the non-violent way rather than killing them, but that seems like an arbitrary result. I wish the game found a less binary way to make your choices affect the outcome of the story; it appears to be a very strict "kill most of your targets, get the bad guy ending, spare most of your targets, get the good guy ending" path. Especially given that the non-violent outcomes for many of your targets seem to be nearly as bad as death, perhaps even worse in some cases, I don't see that the endings should follow in this way. I'm glad I eventually got around to finishing this, but I'm not sure I'd be very interested in a Dishonored 2.

[melmer]

Bejeweled = Done. I have all the jewels, also

Trine 2 in single player was really fun, I finally picked it up on sale but i had alway been put off it as I thought it was meant to be played as a co-op game, but actually I think it would have been a far lessor/easier game in co-op. not that it was particularly difficult (apart from those frozen stairs) it was just a really nice play through and way worth the price of admission.

[Ucantalas]

Playing it with another player makes a pretty significant difference. The loneliness is never more profound than when you look for your partner after sliding down a mountain only to realize they've disappeared. And the last bit is even more intense when you see another person going through what your own avatar is going through. And then after finishing the game you get to see you've been playing with someone called Sukmydix87 and you're like... huh.

 

I'm sure there are more speed runners playing now or people trying to collect all the scarf pieces but I also heard a lovely story about someone who had played the game dozens of times, bedecked with a dazzling white robe (you get for getting all collectibles), and acting as a sort of mentor or guide for newer players, showing them how to get to certain spots and grab hard-to-find collectibles. Of course, if you don't want to be shown what to do you can always hang behind until you're disconnected and wait to find a new partner, but I think there's something nice about this sort of benevolent as opposed to competitive interaction being supported within the mechanics.

I just got back from playing Journey online with other people. I didn't realize until the end that there were multiple people I was connecting with, for some reason I thought you get connected with one person for the entire... journey.

It felt kind of weird because I spent a lot of the early game just sort of rushing through while the other player(s?) were going off and getting stuff. But later on I was sticking close to the other player(s) no matter what. I started feeling like I was getting closer to the other player (again, at this point I thought it was the same person I had been with since the start...)

By the end, when you're making that final push up the mountain, and you're freezing... I was basically trying to cheer on the other guy, sticking close to him the entire time and constantly just thinking "If we stick together we can go farther. We can do it." Then we fall down in the snow, and I felt sad.

But then you continue on to the super-happy flying segment thing up to the very top. I started with the other guy, and he just dropped straight down while I moved forward. I felt kind of sad, it was like I had just abandoned a friend. I ended the game by myself, even though I stopped and waited for him to catch up... and he never did.

[axemtitanium]

words words words

 

I'm glad you got the chance to play with other people. I felt a similar arc of discovery when I first played Journey, confused and probing the boundaries of what it considered "multiplayer", wondering if they were real or just AI. I don't necessarily think it was the transcendent experience that most of the internet calls it. However, I think it was joyous, melancholy, and life-affirming in ways that 99% of games aren't. Regardless, playing online is definitely the way to go and it's really a different and kind of bland experience without it (which is what you did the first time). Thankfully, that doesn't seem to have reflected poorly on your second playthrough in the so-called "way it was meant to be played".

[osmosisch]

I finished Dishonored last night. I'd gotten about half way through it around the time of its initial release last October, but stalled out on it due to an excessive amount of fiddling with stealth (playing the same sequences over way too many times in a row). I started up again over the weekend, and finished last night. It was fine. Great level design, wonderful and unusual art style, some aspects of both the combat and the stealth that are pretty fun (particularly once I unlocked the second level time slowing ability, which was great). Mediocre-to-poor story that seems to rely too heavily on the star power of its VO cast, and it featured a narrative disconnect that I found frustrating, where you, the player, know better than to believe something someone is telling you, but you, the character, have no way of doing anything other than going along with the plot's demands so that you can fall victim to the surprise twist. And the story dragged on too long after what seemed to be the climax--I spent each of the last three nights this week thinking "okay, I can't have more than an hour left of this, right?" only to discover that there were entire missions still left to complete. 

 

I was surprised that I managed to get the Low Chaos ending, despite having killed dozens, maybe even hundreds, of guards, and a handful of civilians. This is likely because when it came to my assassination targets, I was generally more interested in taking them down the non-violent way rather than killing them, but that seems like an arbitrary result. I wish the game found a less binary way to make your choices affect the outcome of the story; it appears to be a very strict "kill most of your targets, get the bad guy ending, spare most of your targets, get the good guy ending" path. Especially given that the non-violent outcomes for many of your targets seem to be nearly as bad as death, perhaps even worse in some cases, I don't see that the endings should follow in this way. I'm glad I eventually got around to finishing this, but I'm not sure I'd be very interested in a Dishonored 2.

Gosh, you are pretty much the first person I've heard who thought Dishonored was too long. I wanted more, not less.

[tegan]

 

 

I owe like fifty percent of this playthrough to things that were spoiled by Chris and Jake playing it on Twitch (a video which I didn't realize existed until yesterday), because I am terrible at Adventure games.