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hint: the bottom part of the disc contains the protective layer, scratch the top and the disk is ruined.

 

I have never scratched a DVD.

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I finished up A Link Between Worlds. That was a great game, best use of 3D I've seen so far on the 3DS.

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On to Dust: A Tail on PCP.  howlongtobeat.com is telling me 9.5 hours.  Seems a bit long for a side-scroller... We'll see!

 

I didn't finish Dust because I found some areas just dragged way too much because of their size and lack of variation. Also, you've probably heard this elsewhere, but it really is quite mind-numbingly easy on the regular difficulty, so knock it up a notch (bam)

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After the unveiling of the 

 got my nostalgic juices flowing, a quick search revealed the 2009 game on Steam for 10€. I never got round to it at the time and I've just had a great few hours with it. The voice acting (Ramis and Ackroyd especially) is top notch, great writing and the devs absolutely nail the atmosphere. It's very 'Tab A, Slot B' gated gameplay, nothing spectacular, but the core ghost wrangling mechanic is nigh-on perfect. It looks great and feels authentic. If you're not into Ghostbusters, you won't miss this at all, but if that Lego set above gives you a pang of joy, you'll have a blast.

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I played through Thomas Was Alone in two nights on my Vita. Wow. Really impressive that they managed to pack so much fascinating and varied characterization into a bunch of little rectangles. I can see this existing as some Newgrounds platformer with techno music and no narration but otherwise being identical, and it wouldn't 1% as brilliant.

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After the unveiling of the 

 got my nostalgic juices flowing, a quick search revealed the 2009 game on Steam for 10€. I never got round to it at the time and I've just had a great few hours with it. The voice acting (Ramis and Ackroyd especially) is top notch, great writing and the devs absolutely nail the atmosphere. It's very 'Tab A, Slot B' gated gameplay, nothing spectacular, but the core ghost wrangling mechanic is nigh-on perfect. It looks great and feels authentic. If you're not into Ghostbusters, you won't miss this at all, but if that Lego set above gives you a pang of joy, you'll have a blast.

 

I loved that game, it's up there as one of the best movie related games ever made.

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Last week I beat: 

 

Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart: Remember when I talked about Infected the Twin Vaccine, an hidden object adventure that was so bad it was the greatest thing ever?

This one was actually good, probably better that some adventure games that somehow got a sequel *cough*Jack Keane 2*cough*, the puzzles and the logic were pretty solid and the story writing wasn't that original, it wasn't flawed or boring.

 

The most interesting part? This hidden object adventure makes the hidden object sections OPTIONAL, that is, if you play a game of mahjong instead.

 

So yeah, hidden object adventures are getting really decent really. Some are even worth checking out!

 

 

Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure:

 

I'm not sure why I played this adventure game, I kinda hate first person adventure games, but the idea intrigued me. You are a safe cracker that must find the will of a guy who really likes puzzles and safes.

 

You don't actually crack safes, you just solve puzzles to open them or get the code to open them. As you play you find letters about the family and in the end, you get to decide who gets the inheritance.

 

And the game let's you print the will you create, which is kinda cute?

 

 

Dysfunctional Systems Learning to Manage Chaos:

 

A visual novel that is.... pretty short, I guess it's episodic, the story didn't really captivate me, so I don't think I'll get the next one.

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I finished Broken Age! Call me raspberry jam, 'cause I'm on a roll!

 

Really excited to see part 2. I'm bouncing around all sorts of theories for what's going on with the two different stories.

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I just finished The Banner Saga. Beautiful, stately game, both in terms of design and aesthetics, but hey, fuck that boss fight. I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for DLC chapters, though.

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Just finished Ol' Man Clancy's HAWX: It's remarkably dumb. As in somebody watched the dogfight in Hot Shots and thought to themselves "Yes, but what if we took it seriously?" It's great fun though and the best example of a keyboard controlled 3d flight game I can think of (i.e. you don't really have to aim all that much).

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I finished Attack of the Friday Monsters for the 3DS.  At least I think I did, I got credits.  There's more stuff to do after that but it mostly involving grinding a card game so I think I'm calling it here.  It's a fun, quirky game that's really silly but incredibly charming.  I had a good time with it.

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I just beat Yama for the third time in Spelunky, and I think I might have to put a fork in that one.  I don't have access to the daily challenge (playing on 360) so I've done just about everything at this point (except for the Mothership).

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I've got a couple that I finished lately that I want to recommend.

 

Zeno Clash 2: I really loved the sheer weirdness of Zeno Clash 1, and the sequel delivers on that in spades. It pushes itself artistically to an extent that is shocking for such a small team. The only things the game suffers for are a tendency towards excessive exposition (really a shame after the subtlety of the first game) and a game-y progression of "please visit the four corners of the map" (again a downer compared to a natural, Journey-style progression into the unknown in the first game). However, there are some genuinely ingenious ideas for combat, and the story was a page-turner that kept me up late to play a little bit more. I think this series is sadly ignored. In my mind, these are the games that pick up the ball of Half Life 2's first person narrative games and do something genuinely different with it.

 

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers: A fun adventure that is kind of stuck between the keep-turning-pages style of a dime store mystery and the hard stops of an old point and click. I ended up playing with a guide open on the other screen because I was more interested in the former experience. The writing is fantastic, with little bits of snark from Grace and the narrator in particular convincing me gaming dialog peaked in 1993. It's also always lovely to play a game that is about something games are not about: real people with real skill sets in a real, modern location, solving a mystery with just a little bit of a paranormal layer.

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I'm just gonna quote my 3DS thread post cause I'm lazy.
 

Finished Starship Damrey last night.

Fun little game with a cool initial conceit (controlling the robots from a cryopod), but it does end up kinda not delivering on the promise of the robot selection screen which teases like 10 robots, but you only ever really control one. This gets explained a bit in the endgame narrative, but it's still disappointing.

The cutscenes starring the robot are really at odds thematically with the rest of the game. Why they thought making them super comical was a good idea I don't understand, it really undermines the tone of the narrative and game play sections. If they had played the game more straight up horror I think they could have had something really special.

Also I think they game would have been better with more restrictive movement kinda Grimrock style, that or a way to strafe. Too many times I would be going down a corridor and turn say left for a door only to be a step short and staring half at a wall and half at the door, turn right move forward one tick, turn left again to use the door. That's shitty.

Still for the 3 bucks I paid for it it was absolutely worth the price.

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You know, when I hear "In a cryopod controlling like 10 other robots", all I can think of is Suspended, the old Infocom text adventure with a similar conceit.

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Mirror's Edge :tup::tmeh:

Even though I beat this game previously on Xbox 360 when it first came out, I had the PC version installed on my computer and figured I should clear out 7GB of space on my HDD and scratch a game off my "games not played" list on Steam. It was a pretty quick thing as I remembered, only a little over four hours that I beat in a handful of 30 minute one or two mission chunks. I suppose I also wanted to play it in case there is to in fact be a new Mirror's Edge title, because I want a complete perspective on the series as a whole.

The one major thing that struck me is that the gameplay isn't nearly as fluid as I remember. Sure, there are tons of tricks thrown in there where you can land with a roll to avoid damage or using a chain of wallruns and wall jumps to go ridiculously farther than one would expect. But for every thing that felt super fluid and almost superhuman, I experienced a death because for some reason my jump off a monkey-bar-type suspended bar was too short, or I missed a jump because I jumped a little too early, despite the fact that it's really hard to tell visually how far I can go before executing that last-minute jump.

I also think the story is theoretically good - I generally appreciate threadbare stories in games, I like a female protagonist who is saving her sister, I even like the "big government is bad" overtones to the actual plot points. That said, I hope they get even just slightly more ambitious with the sequel if there is one - if you go with the same world/universe, maybe have part of the game actually being the "running" business aspect and make the thing a deal gone wrong. The whole "running" as a profession was more or less a backdrop in ME1, and so when the government was targeting runners I didn't really detect the stakes and just had to assume the stakes were high because they threw a million helicopters and rent-a-cops at you.

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Mirror's Edge :tup::tmeh:

Even though I beat this game previously on Xbox 360 when it first came out, I had the PC version installed on my computer and figured I should clear out 7GB of space on my HDD and scratch a game off my "games not played" list on Steam. It was a pretty quick thing as I remembered, only a little over four hours that I beat in a handful of 30 minute one or two mission chunks. I suppose I also wanted to play it in case there is to in fact be a new Mirror's Edge title, because I want a complete perspective on the series as a whole.

The one major thing that struck me is that the gameplay isn't nearly as fluid as I remember. Sure, there are tons of tricks thrown in there where you can land with a roll to avoid damage or using a chain of wallruns and wall jumps to go ridiculously farther than one would expect. But for every thing that felt super fluid and almost superhuman, I experienced a death because for some reason my jump off a monkey-bar-type suspended bar was too short, or I missed a jump because I jumped a little too early, despite the fact that it's really hard to tell visually how far I can go before executing that last-minute jump.

I also think the story is theoretically good - I generally appreciate threadbare stories in games, I like a female protagonist who is saving her sister, I even like the "big government is bad" overtones to the actual plot points. That said, I hope they get even just slightly more ambitious with the sequel if there is one - if you go with the same world/universe, maybe have part of the game actually being the "running" business aspect and make the thing a deal gone wrong. The whole "running" as a profession was more or less a backdrop in ME1, and so when the government was targeting runners I didn't really detect the stakes and just had to assume the stakes were high because they threw a million helicopters and rent-a-cops at you.

 

 

There is a planned reboot/prequel of the first games that will have an open world design. Sounds pretty good. Here's a trailer.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s97B97dIpDQ

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How the heck did I miss that? Looks pretty dope, if a little limited due to it being a kinda teaser thing.

 

I want them to explain why she has those weird shoes. Oh, the possibilities of a prequel!

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Dust: An Elysian Tail :tmeh:

It's not a great game, it's ok, it's fun to play. It's quite easy on normal, fun enough to simply go through to game. The story is really really corny. If you've got 13 hours to spare, and like to mess around in a platformer this is a good pick.

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Dust: An Elysian Tail 

 

Holy shit, 13 hours?! I played it for about 4 and assumed I was near the end and quit. 

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Holy shit, 13 hours?! I played it for about 4 and assumed I was near the end and quit. 

 

 

I think we've found the source of those low game completion stats

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Steam says I played Dust nearly 20 hours, but I lover brawelrs and Metroidvania style games, so it's expected I'd play it more.

 

 

I played 39 Steps, it wasn't really interactive at all, but the story was gripping and kept me going until the end. I thought it would just be a visual novel, I did not expect a great adaptation of a Victorian suspense story!

 

 

 

I also completed "GO GO NIPPON!"... I don't know what to think of it, this was made by a Japanese company for Otakus? Maybe even full blown "weeaboos"? It's just... Well, I'll try to explain.

 

It's supposed to be a visual novel of a guys first trip to Japan, he's going to spend a week with some guys he met online, except they are cute girls... and eventually you have the obligatory "walk in and accidentally catch them changing clothes" scene from almost every anime and in the end... depend on which places you pick, you fall in love with one of them, because visual novels?

 

It was pretty uncomfortable, it was mostly about the game geeking out about everything, sometimes I was embarrassed because I knew I would act the same, but sometimes... it was just hard to read. 

 

In one word, that game is "Japandering".

 

 

Heck, that game was so embarrassing to play, I'm not afraid to say it was more embarrassing to play than "My Girlfriend is the President!" a visual novel that I would actually recommend to you all because it's legitimately funny and well written... but it's one of THOSE games... I really wish I could skip THOSE parts. Because of THOSE parts nobody will ever want to hear more about this game, I'll just say that at least the romance felt more legit that a Mass Effect one... which isn't that hard.  :getmecoat

 

 

I also just finished The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles, which takes place before the first game and tells us how Nate & Critter met. Nate was my least favorite character and playing as Critter can be annoying since you can't understand what he's saying.

 

The game recycles some content form the first game, more than some, which would be OK if this was an episodic game, but it's not. The game makes more sci-fi jokes than fantasy jokes for reasons that will become obvious once you play the game, but it didn't feel as fun as the first game, there some pretty convoluted puzzles, Nate even admits he wants to do things in the most convoluted way possible and since half the dialogue is from a critter you can't understand... it's not as funny either.

 

Obligatory Monkey Island Reference: Not only is it an achievement, but you even get to say the "behind you, a three-headed animal!" line, not mention the game just dressed up one of the characters as the Purple Tentacle, that's way too blatant for my tastes...

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