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Recently completed video games

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I just finished playing Wolfenstein: New Order, which i overall really enjoyed. It's pretty uneven in both its narrative and its design, but given that one could have reasonably expected it to be a disaster, it's actually something of a small triumph. It manages to hit some pretty strong highs along the way.

 

I haven't quite finished it yet, but i also recently played through the Tomb Raider reboot, and... It's alright. It's inoffensive, more interesting to me than the old series ever was, but ultimately kind of forgettable. I enjoyed it enough that I won't immediately write off the sequel they certainly will make. I just hope there's more actual tomb raiding, the game starts looking a little too much like Uncharted. (Edit: What's all this about the QTE's? I didn't have any problem with them.)

I've also done a couple playthroughs through Dark Souls 2, which i'm going to just go ahead and say is an early contender for my personal goty.

 

I finished F.E.A.R. last night. I really liked the mix of j horror and action movie influences. I also appreciated how most of the horror came from atmosphere and general creepiness rather than cheap jump scares. Seeing Alma appear in a corner, or Fettel move past a hallway and disappear kept me feeling way more unsettled than a monster jumping in my face would have. 

 

Also, I thought it was really clever the way the game used the flashlight to enhance the creepy atmosphere. Because I’m a huge pussy when it comes to horror games, I wanted to use my flashlight all the time to light up the dark, scary parts of the levels. The game discourages this because when enemy soldiers see your flashlight, you lose any element of surprise. In order to have a tactical advantage I found myself turning off my flashlight when I really didn’t want to, sustaining the dark, scary atmosphere of the environments. 

 

I did think the game dragged a little bit in the middle. I got pretty tired of fighting soldiers in office buildings, but overall it was really great. Next I’m gonna move on to the DLC.

 

Timegate's add-ons for FEAR are pretty decent, if i remember correctly. I guess they've been discarded from the series' canon by Monolith's own FEAR 2 though.

 

Also, let me throw out a recommendation for Condemned, the other spooky game Monolith put out around the same time as FEAR. It was built up on the same engine and even shares a lot of the same assets, but has an emphasis on melee combat instead of bombastic slow-mo shooting. It retained the smart AI though, with enemies that would try to use the environment to circle around and sneak up on you. It's also, in my opinion, much, much scarier than FEAR.

 

 

Beat Halo: ODST with Zeus co-op last night, it was great going back to that game. Kind of disappointed that it's not going to be remade as part of that Halo Xbox One collection, because the atmosphere/lighting stuff could look really great in a modern iteration of that engine. The pacing of that game actually really reminds me of Halo 4, with lots of periods of quiet and exploration punctuated with short combat encounters. Also, weird uncanny valley stuff with Nathan Fillion and Tricia Helfer!

 

ODST is my favorite Halo, but strangely it's the only one that I actually prefer to play solo because I feel that the atmosphere of the game is better suited to being alone.  Not that it isn't fun in co-op.

 

I'll throw another vote in the pile for ODST being my favorite Halo campaign, it really benefited from being a smaller project that Bungie was allowed to take some risks with. It's a tragedy that it seems to be left with the legacy of being "the bad one" because it didn't have a fully featured multiplayer suite. I'm sure they'll eventually pack ODST and Reach together and throw them on the XBO at some point in the future though.

 

 

After playing through some downer zombie games (new Walking Dead ep, Last of Us), I felt like playing something that's a bit more relaxed, so I played through Riven over the weekend which I had picked up in some recent sale. I mean it's a Myst game so there's not really much to say about it, and the only reason I mention it is that it's got a number system puzzle that's nearly identical to the one in Fez, though deciphering it is a little more straightforward here. I'm curious if the similarity was deliberate or not.


One of the Miller brothers gave a retrospective talk on Myst in 2013 at GDC and during the questions segment, Phil Fish shows up out of nowhere and starts expressing what a huge influence the Myst games were on him and then asks to have one of the Myst novels signed. So if you're seeing some Myst influences in Fez, it's probably because there are. The video can be seen here, Phil Fish starts talking around 51 minutes.

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I'll throw another vote in the pile for ODST being my favorite Halo campaign, it really benefited from being a smaller project that Bungie was allowed to take some risks with. It's a tragedy that it seems to be left with the legacy of being "the bad one" because it didn't have a fully featured multiplayer suite. I'm sure they'll eventually pack ODST and Reach together and throw them on the XBO at some point in the future though.

 

ODST has a rep as the "bad one"?  :blink:   Did not know that.  It was an absolute treat, and in a lot of ways was the turning point in the series for me.  I played Reach, but don't remember a lot and skipped 4 completely. 

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Yeah, it really bums me out. Whenever i come across people discussing ODST in a more "casual player" context, they're never saying kind things about the game. Always just that it's boring and that it doesn't have multiplayer.

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Just to point out the issue with the QTEs in Tomb Raider - this is what I experienced and other people also have noted:

 

1) Some were bugged (the sexual assault minigame one specifically for me) and had no actual button prompt, just a shrinking circle.

 

2) Some had very specific timing and the graphic on screen was no help. The wolf attack was this for me and others. It spammed the buttons you needed to jam on very fast on the screen, but to complete it you needed to press them very methodically with about 1/2 a second between each press. The graphic deceived you, but at least told you what buttons to press.

Here's an example: 

 

3) It had QTEs without an option to turn them off. Any game that does this should be called out, QTEs are shitty - learn from The Witcher and make them optional. 

 

I believe they patched them in the end, but playing within the release window was horrific. 

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I totally didn't get this problem when I played Tomb Raider, but I was playing with a controller, and probably a while after the initial release, so it must have been patched.

 

I finished Cave Story! Oh wow I'm late on this game rite? It's super good. Just got the normal ending, but replaying it to get the best ending. Now stuck in hell. T_T I can get past the first screen, but I run out of health before I can even get past the falling rocks.

 

I love how much variety there is in such a small game. Idk, I wasn't expecting it at all. Stuff like saving Curly Brace and getting the 2.0 booster is super cool. Also the actual story isn't that bad.

 

My favourite part so far has to be the first time you meet Balrog. He has a dialogue option where he says "You don't want to fight me with that pea shooter do you?" when I first did that I just clicked 'yes' instinctively and fought him. I was pleasantly surprised in my second run that upon choosing 'no' he just fucks off. In my head I was sure to get some amusing quip and then forced to fight him. Coz you know, it's a boss. Stupid thing, but it was pretty cool for me.

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Finished up Monument Valley last night.  I enjoyed my time with it, but it's the first time in a while that I wished a puzzle game was harder.  I had heard a lot of comparisons to Echochrome, but found this was a fallacy as there were only one or two puzzles that required shifting a perspective to create a new pathway.  Most puzzles took less than 20 seconds of thought.  Usually I'd just try out whatever popped into my head and it would work.  I'm terrible at puzzle games, so this was a bit disconcerting.

 

The story felt like another cryptic post-civilization morality tale with an "uplifting" ending.  It's cool that games are attempting to make us feel things other than awesomeness, wonderment, and puzzled, but the "thatgamecompany trope" felt trite in the first place (executed ham-fistedly in Flower, less so in Journey), and now we're getting copycats...  :(

 

It's super pretty, but otherwise not recommended.

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I just beat Violett, an adventure game that I think was Kickstarted? Or was that the Lilly one? They are both so similar in their "Alice in Wonderland" vibe I can't tell...

 

In this one, Violett acquires telekinetic powers, which ruin the game in the sense that how powerful you are depends on the puzzle, sometimes you carry heavy objects a long distance, sometimes you are forced to pick them up manually... It's quite frustrating, specially since all the puzzle are mostly trial and error. The girl can float and move objects with her mind, but the game always makes us do everything the hard way. It's like playing an adventure game with Superman, you know he can punch the door down of fly over a chasm, but the game has a convoluted puzzle.. and no excuse to NOT use the powers, nope, just do it the hard way, because adventure games.

 

You also gain more powers that are needed in a final boss fight, I hope you clicked on the hidden orbs because those indicate how much you can use them, the boss was pretty annoying specially knowing it was added TO AN ADVENTURE GAME, because some said they wanted one. 

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ODST has a rep as the "bad one"?  :blink:   Did not know that.  It was an absolute treat, and in a lot of ways was the turning point in the series for me.  I played Reach, but don't remember a lot and skipped 4 completely. 

 

 

Yeah, it really bums me out. Whenever i come across people discussing ODST in a more "casual player" context, they're never saying kind things about the game. Always just that it's boring and that it doesn't have multiplayer.

 

ODST tried something different and was much less bombastically outrageous than the other Halos, probably largely in part because you're not a big bad cyborg killing machine who is going to single-handedly win a war.  It's outrageous in other ways because it's still a Halo game, but it's different than the armor clad guns blazing grenade throwing sexy AI voice in your head game that players were used to.

 

And that's not a criticism of the other Halo games, they're fun too.  I just appreciate what ODST did more than the other ones.

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Just finished Shank.

 

It was pretty fun. I remember playing a demo of it and loving the look of it and the way it played, and then I ended up purchasing it as part of one of the Humble Bundles... and then I completely forgot about it until yesterday.

 

The in-game animation looked fantastic, but by comparison the cutscenes just felt lackluster. The gameplay wasn't anything too great, a basic sort of beat-em-up, but with a really cool combo system that just made it feel much better than the typical brawler. It was pretty short, but the pain in my thumbs tells me that maybe thats a good thing.

 

I fell on the other side of experience with the gameplay parts, finding it a little boring. Getting new weapons was always neat, but I felt their novelty wore off quickly. That said, it was definitely the animation quality that kept me going. Shank 2 has the same gameplay problems, but has really visually stunning moments as well. There's a particular scene on a rope bridge during a lightning storm that sticks with me.

 

I beat Max Payne 3 this long weekend. Oh boy was that a video game. I honestly don't know what to make of it, really strikes me as similar to Kane & Lynch 2. Both games had better than average gameplay, bonkers stories that depended on you giving a shit about the main character's fucked up history, and weirdly exact atmospheric touches. Max is just a wildly unrealistic character in what is otherwise a strangely realistic world, if you ignore the literal hundreds of bodies that Max leaves in his wake. It seemed like at every turn, Rockstar was trying to remind you that he is a cartoon character - example, for the first half of the game after every single mission there's a two or three minute cutscene where Max drinks, pills, and smokes himself to being passed out in his apartment. Also, every time he picks up a bottle of pills in his environment he has a unique pithy remark about why he needs them.

 

So... yeah. I don't know. I don't really regret my time with it, it had some real moments that I enjoyed surrounded by weird moments of "goddamn this is a video game". My only real, direct criticism is that it seemed pretty long. Probably a good 10+ hours, which is really unnecessary for a linear shooter.

 

Honestly, the main reason I wanted to play it is because I've had it installed forever and it takes like 30 GB on my hard drive.

 

I didn't mind the game's length, though I was surprised every now and then that the game was still going. The part I enjoyed most was what Rockstar's various studios have managed to do best: really compelling environments. The dirty New York bar, the yacht, the high rise, and the favelas were all rendered really well. As usual, I also kind of wished they would put this much effort into making a game that didn't use such great renditions as just playgrounds of violence. L.A. Noire veered in that direction, but the location felt more important as a backdrop than as an active participant in the narrative.

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I haven't quite finished it yet, but i also recently played through the Tomb Raider reboot, and... It's alright. It's inoffensive, more interesting to me than the old series ever was, but ultimately kind of forgettable. I enjoyed it enough that I won't immediately write off the sequel they certainly will make. I just hope there's more actual tomb raiding, the game starts looking a little too much like Uncharted. (Edit: What's all this about the QTE's? I didn't have any problem with them.)

I was very conflicted about that game. I hated it for having so much shooting, for practically mocking the old games with the 'secret tombs' and magnetic platforming. Despite almost not wanting to enjoy it I still did though. They did an amazing job with Lara, I haven't seen a character animate as well as she does, reaching out to touch walls, covering her face near fire etc. That was enough to make me enjoy simply running around in the world. It pains me to think what a great Tomb Raider game they could've made if it didn't have to be a 3rd person shooter.

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It's funny that you call it DLC, because I remember F.E.A.R. Extraction Point as one of the last proper "expansion packs" I ever bought the old-fashioned way. 

 

Ha. I bought FEAR on steam during the last sale, so the "expansions" were included and, within the steam interface, they always had the purple DLC banner attached. I didn't even think about how they would've been released before we were using the term "DLC."

 

 

Also, let me throw out a recommendation for Condemned, the other spooky game Monolith put out around the same time as FEAR. It was built up on the same engine and even shares a lot of the same assets, but has an emphasis on melee combat instead of bombastic slow-mo shooting. It retained the smart AI though, with enemies that would try to use the environment to circle around and sneak up on you. It's also, in my opinion, much, much scarier than FEAR.

 

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll definitely check out Condemned. I had a hard time taking advantage of the melee combat in FEAR, mostly because I have difficulty twisting my fingers to hit multiple keys on the keyboard. I'm going to try to play FEAR Extraction Point with a controller and see if I can become more of kung fu and guns operative.

 

 

Regarding ODST, I also thought the campaign was refreshing with its quiet exploration sequences. They really contributed to an atmosphere that I didn't expect from a Halo game. The structure was cool too, the way you investigated what happened to your team was a smart way to jump you into a variety of different situations while still keeping the game cohesive.

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Today I finished Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (For the Frog the Bell Tolls), a forgotten Gameboy game that is similar to Link's Awakening, but came before it... I have no idea why we had to wait for a fan translation, this game didn't seem to have anything controversial or copyright infringing like the other games Nintendo never published.

 

Maybe it didn't sell well enough in Japan and that's why they never released it worldwide?

 

Any game were all battles are "cartoon dust clouds" is cool in my book!

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I finally got around to finishing Infamous. It started out a little slow but after I had unlocked a decent number of powers, everything came together and it ended up being a really fun game. The story was okay and I think the stylized cutscenes went a long way to bolster it but it was hard to ignore how much of a gravelly voiced emo cliche Cole was. Overall though, I think the positive aspects of this game far outweigh any negative aspects.

 

I think what I enjoyed most about Infamous was how well all of the powers were implemented and how much fun it was to just fight dudes and blow a bunch of shit up. Having the powers doled out slowly throughout the game meant that I ended up getting pretty proficient in the usage of each one and by the end of the game I was having a blast unleashing all of my powers in different ways to take out big groups of enemies. I also ended up playing through on hard and I think it provided a consistent level of challenge without ever getting too frustrating (except when I had to defend the prison; it took me like 2 hours to finally beat the part where two big ass conduits show up).All in all, very fun game!  :tup:

 

I also played through Journey again and finally got my white cloak and most of the other trophies. I imagine I'll play through this yet again sometime within the next couple weeks. I just makes me feel good every time I play it.

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I beat Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall last night.

 

I fought the final battle a few days ago; my character receiving a killing blow during the last round of combat.  My team defeated everyone, but combat did not end and I wasn't revived.  Since none of my characters had BuMoNa revival kits left, I skipped through two rounds and let my character die, losing the game.

 

Then I found out that my game autosaved after that last round of combat.  Since I was dead, one of my teammates walked up to the last NPC standing and had a conversation with them.  After the conversation was over, the YOU DIED screen immediately popped up.

 

Last night I played through this final battle again, my character barely surviving.  There are a lot of interesting choices to make in this game, even after the final battle is over.

 

Now to get back to playing Steam Workshop missions for this game!

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I beat Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall last night.

 

I fought the final battle a few days ago; my character receiving a killing blow during the last round of combat.  My team defeated everyone, but combat did not end and I wasn't revived.  Since none of my characters had BuMoNa revival kits left, I skipped through two rounds and let my character die, losing the game.

 

Then I found out that my game autosaved after that last round of combat.  Since I was dead, one of my teammates walked up to the last NPC standing and had a conversation with them.  After the conversation was over, the YOU DIED screen immediately popped up.

 

Last night I played through this final battle again, my character barely surviving.  There are a lot of interesting choices to make in this game, even after the final battle is over.

 

Now to get back to playing Steam Workshop missions for this game!

 

Are there any Workshop missions that you really liked? I've been meaning to check some out, but I've had a pretty mixed experience with user generated content in the past, so I was hoping to find a list of good ones before jumping in.

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Are there any Workshop missions that you really liked? I've been meaning to check some out, but I've had a pretty mixed experience with user generated content in the past, so I was hoping to find a list of good ones before jumping in.

 

I replied over in the Shadowrun thread.  Short answer: Silver Angel 2050!

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Such beaten! Very pride. FREE AT LAST.

 

(do not click the spoiler button if you do not want to spoil the ending of Doge2048, but do click the spoiler button if you want to join me reveling in this victory):

wpNlTaf.jpg

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I recently finished Ultima Underworld, a mere 22 years after it was first released, and I would recommend it to anybody. It's so utterly captivating, I'd frequently find myself playing for up to 5 hours at a time, and into the wee small hours of the morning.

I'd played it a few times before, but not gotten so involved. I think the lack of direction at first was a bit overwhelming for me, so this time, I went in with a guide to hand and dipped into it when I needed a bit of, well, guidance. There are several very important items which it is possible to miss completely, or simply ignore as you're not aware of their ultimate value, but because of the guide I didn't get into any unwinnable situations. I do feel the start of the game was stronger than the end, focusing more on conversation and exploration, than on awkward jumping puzzles (tho there is some of that even in the early levels) and combat, which I felt was the weakest part of the game.

There are issues with it. As I mentioned, it's possible to lose or ignore critical items, there is too much fucking jumping, and the combat becomes tiresome. But scrape off some of the grit and you have an absolute pearl of a game, which plays well and looks good despite its advancing years. I want to expound on it further but I'm a bit drunk...

 

Edit: And you can annotate the map! OMG! All games should have a map with wrinkled corners which I can scribble all over. It made my journey through the dungeon feel so much more personal, and was just a big practical advantage on top of that. I'd really love it if I could see what other people had written on their maps.

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Fury Boy, you are going to make me dig this game back out. The only reason I stopped is because it was impossible for me to jump gaps using my laptop trackpad. Ultima Underworld deserves its sterling reputation.

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I completed Kero Blaster today. The new game from the creator of Cave Story. It's a really great, sidescrolling, bullet hell shooter. I would thoroughly recommend it to fans of vvvvvv and the Chris Remo favourite You Have to Win the Game. It harkens back to the same era of games.

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Fury Boy, you are going to make me dig this game back out. The only reason I stopped is because it was impossible for me to jump gaps using my laptop trackpad. Ultima Underworld deserves its sterling reputation.

 

Yes! Play it all through, tricky gaps be damned, and send me screengrabs of your annotated maps :)

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I've always felt like Ultima Underworld is secretly one of the most influential games ever made. If you trace out a lineage of the things it's peripherally influenced and directly inspired, it's clear that its impact on gaming has been unbelievably profound, but it doesn't feel like it's ever really been given the credit it deserves.

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I beat a few more indie bundle games:

 

-Alien Rage: Unlimited: It's a pretty generic shooter, despite it's low score my main critique about the game was the perk system, it's so hard to get them and the reward doesn't seem to merit the effort.

 

It has a bunch of relatively subtle game references, the game has some gears only to make a subtle Gears of War reference. The bosses were brutal, but fun... The fact that I managed to finish a shooter much mean it's half decent, right? I usually hate them.

 

-Fearless Fantasy: A short RPG that skips all the dungeons and towns is just a few waves of enemies and some story before the next wave of enemies. It plays a bit like a Mario RPG in the sense that you have to do some special mouse gesture to make you attack more powerful and defend. 

 

-Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi: I kinda posted this in the "quitter's" thread, only to give it another chance and figure out what I did wrong.

 

The Count has captured your family and friends and you must rescue them because with each of their deaths, Malachi will become stronger, if too many die, he will become invincible and you lose the game.

 

The game is semi randomly generated? The castle is always the same, but the locations of people to rescue, keys and other items change each time, some things are on a timer. At the very start you meet a priest that is injured and you must rescue a doctor to heal him. Rescuing your friends not only makes the final boss weaker, but they always reward you with something useful.

 

I only had one more member to rescue and I gave up on him, only to find him on the way to final boss and then I found out you can only fight the final boss at dawn, but since I rescued everybody it magically became dawn.

 

You can't rescue your sister because she's sacrificed by the Count and the boss needs at least one soul to even awaken. Oh well, I guess I still got the best ending.

I also got the worst accident by dying there, which awoke Malachi to full power.... Oops?

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I beat Thomas was Alone today. I wish the ending had a bit more... something. I dunno, anything would have been good I guess. The rest of the game was a pleasure, besides some repeated platformy bits that the developer specifically called out in his commentary. Definitely worth playing.

 

Edit: Also, finally ended my on-again, off-again push through Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. It's certainly no the worst game ever, but it was pretty damn bad. It features mysterious platforming sections where it's not clear what you can hang on and where you can't, guns that are all piss-poor for accuracy while all of the enemies are laser accurate, and pretty lousy check-pointing. I know that it's seven years old at this point, but even compared to Gears or Halo 2 it seems pretty substandard. 

 

On the plus side, I'm officially ahead on my games completed/games bought ratio.

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Well, I beat Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 and... I kinda really liked it, it's like a stealth game with no gadgets, just a sniper rifle and a silenced pistol... The fact that you can shoot grenades on soldiers belts was kinda cool too.

 

I wasn't even upset when I lost my guns... TWICE, that usually annoys me, even in stealth games.

 

I played FarCry 3 basically as a sniper, maybe I like sniper games now? Does anybody recommend any sniper game that isn't just Sniper Ghost Warrior One? :P

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