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Yay someone besides me actually liked Remember Me!

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I'm hard pressed to find a complaint about the game to be honest. I read that some people didn't like that there wasn't enough memory mixing stuff. Which I guess is a fair point, but I'd prefer that there was less remixes that has more purpose rather than a bunch more inconsequential remixes that are less enjoyable.

 

Even the fighting was ok. The different enemy types kept the combat fresh, and although some were really annoying, it was cool. Also it looks amazing. and it's cool? Did I mention the cool part?

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I finished Tearaway! I'm too tired to write much about it, other than it's rad. A lot of love was put into making that game and it should have shifted a lot of Vitas. Oh well, at least some people got to experience the incredible creativity that went into that. I mean, they managed to get use out of the rear and front cameras on the Vita. Who the hell thought a portable gaming device needed two cameras? Yet MediaMolecule manage to get use out of them both. 

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I finished Wind Waker HD and boy do the changes make a difference, you can get a faster sail for starters, it's also a weird one since the ocean does kinda change the feel of the game, but it's a pretty damn awesome Zelda game.

 

And then I played Game & Wario for a while and.... it was over... Seriously, I think this game only has twelve mini game in single player, sure they might have harder levels, but... that's almost disgusting! That photo game that was 5€ one the DSi and has almost twice as many games.... this is SOOO messed up guys! How can they sell this full price, specially when they have sell something with more content for less?  :fart:

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I've finished Resistance 3; it's been collecting dust for quite some time now. I remember playing the first one way back when the PS3 was new, but I think I've missed the second. 

 

Overall, I thought it was ok. I liked the environments they created, especially the town at the beginning, not so much the alien stuff towards the end. There was a bit that I thought was a carbon copy of Ravenholm from Half Life 2. The variety of weapons were fun to use; switching from high tech alien weaponry that can freeze or disintegrate things, followed by some sledgehammering was quite satisfying. As was being able to kill the alien grunts by damaging their cooling backpacks.

 

Decent enough, nothing special though.

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Well, I beat the Vita version of Broken Sword V and... I don't think the Vita is that great for adventure game, even though I played Broken Sword I on the GBA, maybe they didn't optimize this enough? All I really wanted was a zoom feature, even with the feature that lights up hot spots when you get close to them if the hot spots are close, it's rather hard to choose which to use.

 

As for the game play, it feels like they found a perfect spot to end Episode One, but Episode Two feels to short. It feel pandering in a weird way, Paris, England, Spain and the Middle East seem to be the only places a Broken Sword game can take place and almost half the cast are people from precious games... 

I'm counting the goat as a returning character.

 

The game literally has a "honey cat stache" puzzle, except this time it's OK, because she's drunk? *shrugs* But you can no longer say it's worst puzzle ever, it felt even more forces in this case, maybe they were making fun of those who hated that puzzle?

 

Some puzzles did bother me, like fooling an expert in demolitions with a sausage with a fuse, the "poodle wax stache" puzzle...

 

Many of the puzzle felt like filler or time wasters, specially in episode one, making things needlessly complicated just to make the game longer. As for the story, it seems to simply do what Broken Sword does, some points are forced, some points are great, in the overall, I'm pretty content.  :tup:

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I mean, I didn't have much of a problem playing the first Broken Sword on my GBA, so I think it would take some real problems for it to be an issue on Vita. (On the other hand I played that game as a dumb kid so I probably didn't notice/care about problems playing it that way... )

 

EDIT: Then again I played "Warlocked" (an RTS on the Game Boy Color) with no problems, so maybe I've always been very forgiving of control issues...

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Having spent all that money on a PS4 means I now get to play all the games you guys finished with a year or more ago, it's really cool. I'm still working on Rogue Legacy but today I finished The Swapper.

 

I thought it was downright excellent to be honest. Really atmospheric (the music! :swoon:) and a great, unique look achieved by making all the things out of plasticine apparently. The progression is handled well as you have a fair bit of leeway to explore the main ship if you get hopelessly stuck in one of the puzzle rooms, and I did on a couple, and the abundance of teleporters makes whizzing around the map effortless. The mechanics are very pared back - you can make up to four clones of yourself and choose to take control of any you have line of sight with, with some restrictions later - and they never really add to this beyond what you see in the opening hour which sounds like a negative but they get a lot of mileage out of them and I never felt I was doing the same thing over and over.

 

I often get "puzzle fatigue" in games like this (I finished Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty the other week which I enjoyed overall but gave me this affliction) whereby the act of moving forward into yet another room which I need to scope out and explore and experiment with becomes tiresome in and of itself regardless of how satisfying the puzzles are to solve but that was never an issue here. Partly I think because the rooms are so small and self-contained they're never intimidating scale-wise, and also because there are no enemies or environmental hazards of any kind so I felt encouraged to just sit back a bit and idly peruse my surroundings whilst enjoying some lovely tea and occasionally a tangerine. It was all very relaxing. There's a story but it was too clever for me until a bit right near the end which I got and then ruined the mood of by making my dude dance in an awkward marionette style while some very serious business played out. This game is fun.

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I've got a similar response as Yasawas, it's a double whammy of great indie games. Today I beat NG+ of Rogue Legacy. Really happy with that game, took me a long time to get the first boss down (I've had this game on PC for ages, but double dipped to get the vita version, which is perfect for it), and once that happened, the rest all started to fall into place.

I really enjoy battling the way through the castle to a boss, even the farming up gold when you get a shit bunch of kids is fun. However I found myself only really using 3 classes: The Barbarian King/Queen; my work horse, these guys did most of the discovery and boss battling. The Assassin; my boss killer, they pump out so much damage and can avoid tons of incoming damage, but don't have enough health to deal with the trash. Finally The Paladin; my farmer. The rest of the classes I found to be either pointless, or not compatible with my play style. I'm probably going to keep playing this through until I'm really bored with it. It's a shame the boss remixes are ridiculously hard. I've only managed one of them, but I'll keep giving them a go.

The other game I finished is Transistor. I'm on my NG+ play through because I'm really enjoying the challenges they give you. The combat in this game is sublime. It really feels like a great balance between turn based and real time action. Super giant have accomplished extremely well what many Japanese AAA developers have failed at miserably (I'm looking at you Kingdom Hearts and Ni No Kuni) with the pseudo-turn-based action RPG.

What else can I say? The music and art direction are gorgeous. The story is intriguing, but I don't think it's done fantastically well. While the relationship between Red and the Transistor were interesting to see pan out, I don't think I ever fully understood the antagonists' motives. Maybe that's my failing, but I found the reading hard when there's a narrator constantly talking over the news articles you discover. Another great game though! I think I prefer it to Bastion.

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The only things I've managed to beat recently are just the other Tomb Raider games on the Trilogy disc for PS3. Legend was pretty good after Anniversary and while I appreciated the added dialogue, story, and cutscenes, it felt very rough in comparison and the combat was basically useless. I do understand it's because Legend came before Anniversary, so I'll give it that. I was a fan of the decreased difficulty in Legend, but the game was way too linear for my tastes even though I didn't get anywhere near as frustrated on anything as I did in certain sections of Anniversary.

 

Boy did I enjoy Underworld though. I don't even understand the lukewarm reception (or hate) it received other than it made the mistake of coming out after Uncharted 1? It was a nice blend of everything I liked about both Anniversary and Legend. The areas tended to be very open and have some relatively tough puzzles to solve and there were lots of great jumps and mechanics that felt great, much more nimble like a Prince of Persia game. Combat was still mediocre, but it was done so in a way where it was not the focus so it wasn't a big deal. There wasn't even any bosses in Underworld and instead everything was done with puzzle solving and platforming. That's a-okay with me. There's a few technical problems and the beginning part where you swim is probably the worst way to ever present a game like this considering hardly any of the rest of the game is like that. I had to restart my game because I hit a game ending bug halfway through, which was incredibly frustrating, but only set me back about two hours since I knew what to do and it had saved all of my collected treasures and stuff so I didn't have to go off the beaten path at all.

 

I guess I would have just liked more cutscenes and a more fleshed out story for Underworld. Everything felt so crammed and exposition was just rattled off without any meaning. I read a forum back and forth with the creative director where he said he wished he had more time for cutscenes but there was no time and the game was rushed out the door as it was, but it seems like maybe a game that is supposed to wrap up a trilogy and have a lot of amazing events should also have a well directed story that follows this. In comparison to the game locations and level design the cutscenes just felt ridiculously quaint even though what they had was most likely already high enough budget. Maybe it's me speaking from the perspective of having played all Uncharteds as well.


Also maybe Lara's swimsuit at the beginning of the game could have had a third less ass cheek coming out the sides because I sure spent a lot of time with the camera point right up there either swimming or climbing and my wife was raising eyebrows.

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I beat Waking Mars, which was fascinating because it's one of the few games I've played where I felt like its world was large and unmanageable. It's quite easy to completely fuck up an ecosystem if you're not careful, which I did towards the end.

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I beat Waking Mars, which was fascinating because it's one of the few games I've played where I felt like its world was large and unmanageable. It's quite easy to completely fuck up an ecosystem if you're not careful, which I did towards the end.

 

Did you get the real ending?  I got the "bad" ending where you survive, but don't really wake Mars.  I can always head back into the tunnels to attempt to revive the place, but I think I've permanently ruined the Martian ecology.

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There's a few endings; I got the one where you wake Mars, but there's another two endings that I looked up on YouTube where you go a little further still. I felt like I'd had my fill of it at that point, but I'm open to going back and doing it "for real".

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Just finished playing through Psychonauts for the first time in years.  Damn, that game is even better than I remember it being.

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I dug out the Super Famicom for a wee retro session this afternoon and had a bloody decent time.

 

Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius - This is fantastic. I never played any of these at the time and I doubt most (any?) of them came out in Europe anyway so I picked this up on a bit of a whim. I'm not crazy into shmups but I've enjoyed Ikaruga, Gradius V and Ketsui in the past and good though they were, none of them let you be a flying cat shouting insults through a megaphone to defeat enemies. This game is beyond stupid in terms of characters, setting, music and the addition of commentator constantly yelping at you (you can turn him off but it hardly seems in the spirit of the thing) but the actual gameplay and mechanics are those of a very solid shooter. Solid as in well-designed with regard to upgrades and scoring and solid in the sense of being pretty fucking hard. I had a great time with it and will be keeping an eye out for a copy of Gokujou Parodius at a decent price. I took pictures as I was playing it as it was amusing to me:

 

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Starfox - I played through this so many times as a kid but could barely remember any of it, this was a delightful nostalgic jaunt. Nowhere near as hideous-looking as I'd feared despite me playing it on a far from optimal setup (42" LCD through composite. Yep) and once I'd adjusted to the framerate I was zooming and barrel-rollin' all over the place with the cocksure space swagger I had last exhibited 20 years ago. This is still a really fun game to play, there's a ton of content with the alternate routes and the forced simplicity of the graphics has left it looking a lot better than you might've feared. I enjoyed this a lot more than the 3DS game.

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I haven't been here in a while, so there's a bunch of things i've played and not posted about!

Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall - Really enjoyed this add-on, it comes across as a more assuredly designed product than the original campaign for the game. Many oversights are addressed, you're generally allowed a considerably greater degree of freedom, and SRR continues to be surprisingly well-written.

 

Civilization 5: Complete Edition - Never played Civ 5 before, was always warned away from it earlier on, but i had been hearing such good things about Brave New World, and the sale price the complete pack was going for during the Steam summer sale was pretty hard to ignore. I do think i still like Civ 4 more in some respects, but Civ 5 - as of BNW, i suppose - does some pretty tremendous things with the end-game that i have really, really enjoyed. Definitely been playing a lot of this one.

 

Kentucky Route Zero - Really, really thrilled with this. It's hard to go in depth on what makes it so great without spoiling it, but i ended up playing through all the currently available episodes in one marathon session and can't wait for the rest of it to become available.

 

X-com: Enemy Within - For being a huge expansion pack to one of my favorite games of 2012, it's not clicking with me as much as i would have hoped. The Exalt missions in particular don't exactly end up feeling like you're fighting an insurgency against X-com as much as dealing with an intermittent piece of busywork and an annoying additional resource sink.

 

Lovely Planet - I instantly fell in love this game and it now strikes me as particularly odd that it's something that hasn't really been done before. Mixing simple old-school FPS mechanics with that rapid-fire trial-and-error masocore mentality just makes so much sense to me now.

 

Surgeon Simulator: Anniversary Edition - The new surgery types from the iOS version of the game come across as maybe a little too finicky and precise for the original PC control scheme, and the randomization present in the new corridor environment can completely screw you in a way even the ambulance environment wouldn't have. Hey, but it's like three bucks, and there's a ton of new stuff in it.

 

Shovel Knight - Shovel Knight is tremendous. I think it might be the best platformer i've played in years. Shovel Knight might also be one of the only games of this style that feels like it actually understands what its imitating, it takes the right things it needs to build itself into something that manages to feel simultaneously evocative and new. It reminds me of playing Megaman 9, a game that felt like it benefited from years of hindsight and pent up ideas about its style of game, though Shovel Knight draws from a much broader pallete of inspiration than just Megaman. (Even if it is still mostly drawing from Megaman.)

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The last game i finished was Beyond Good and Evil a couple of weeks back. I'd been hearing so much about it for years and recently picked it up at a GoG sale to see what all the fuzz was about. I wouldn't say i was disappointed but i'm having a bit of hard time to see why everyone is praising this game as much as they are. Anyone care to comment on what they thought of it? Also: fuck that last boss...

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BG&E's one of my favourite games, so, sure:

 

I love Hillys; it feels like a place I'd want to live in. The place feels alive in a way most Video game worlds don't, which I put down to a few things: the wildlife photography sidequest, making the various kinds of wildlife on Hillys worth observing, and the game's commitment to concealing its plot triggers, so that things seem to change because the world does, and not because it needs to open up access to the next part of the game for you.

 

I love the tonal journey it goes through - each of the major indoors areas have a very different feel to them, in appearance and in gameplay. The characters are appealing, with appealing designs, and what happens to them is unexpected but reasonable. (I love how the inventory is a character.) There's a scene towards the back half of the game, the lighthouse scene, that's just this wonderful confluence of the narrative and how you've been playing throughout the last couple of hours.

It uses a deft hand to entice you to act just how it wants, and then it presents you with this well-written scene where Jade expresses her guilt by projecting it into her dog just as the players are feeling a little guilty for running after more shinies instead of checking in on the orphans.

 

I enjoyed that the game handled its stealth sections more like puzzles than as the prelude to combat. I liked how the music throughout tied into plot elements in the last dungeon. Overall, I loved that it felt like a game that had been crafted by people who agreed on what their game was about, and wanted to ensure that their part of the game made everyone else's parts work better. The story elevated the gameplay and the gameplay elevated the art and the art elevated the music and the music elevated the story.

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I think the atmosphere and story and tone of the game hold up very well today, so if that's your main issue with the game, then it's probably just a matter of taste, unfortunately!

 

If your main issue is with the gameplay, however... Well, it's an old game for sure. It felt pretty great way back then, but I played it somewhat recently myself, and while the structure of the world and the level design is still pretty all right, the actual mechanics of gameplay - and, in particular, the fucking camera - are nowhere near as strong as they were back then.

 

I pretty much agree with everything Merus said. It's also one of my favorite games! :D

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I'm with everything Merus said, plus I love the themes of media and subversion that run through it.  Ultimately you are fighting a propaganda war, trying to reveal what the occupying force is doing while the occupying force is trying to obscure what they are doing.  You're putting your life on the line to be a citizen journalist.  That's powerful territory for a game explore. 

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Finished Tex Murphy: Tesla Effect :tmeh:

Never played any of the other Tex Murphy games, so I don't know how the game compares to the originals. Either way, it's an adventure game with FMV. The puzzles are just standard generic puzzles in most cases, the rest are the usual inventory puzzles. So not much special in that regard. The game is full of awful humor, so that's a :tup:

My main annoyance is the running around trying to find that one inventory item you keep missing.

The game felt too long for me, steam registered 10 hours.

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Just finished Jazzpunk. It was a pretty entertaining, amusing game. I like absurdity and silliness, though at times it seemed like it was trying too hard. The experience definitely varied and it ended before it lost too much steam.

 

I was a bit disappointed in the mechanics though, and maybe I was foolish to expect this, it involved a lot of walking around and clicking. More than a few times I veered off track because I must a queue or else there was no good queue for where to go next. For something that was vaguely absurdist and lampooning games, I'd have preferred to not have several sections where I collect a bunch of things and then return back with them. In my opinion, the game would've been better if it was just an open narrative where I could wander off and find some fun gags and things, then turn back to resume the plot without it gating me or asking me to do tasks that really added nothing for me.

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"Finished" isn't quite the right word, but I went back to Watch_Dogs, completed the narrative missions and then tooled around solving puzzles and collecting audio tapes. It's a really interesting game: in some ways it is comically stuffed with content, and in other ways things seem to be missing that you'd expect in that kind of game (multi-button melee combat, most obviously, although I don't think that was a bad call - who actually used melee combat in GTA when they weren't being forced to by the mission structure)?

 

I think I'm actually enjoying the world more now the narrative mission is over, but I'm also aware that to get the full story of the narrative you'd need to complete a phenomenal number of individual puzzles - which are sometimes pleasantly brain-teasing and at other times pretty rote...

 

It's certainly a game I got the hours out of, though. Although it feels like if the cars handled better, especially the early available dial-a-cars, it would have taken less time, because the fixer contracts would have ended faster. Likewise if the cars were less titanium-reinforced and the world less breakable...

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"Finished" isn't quite the right word, but I went back to Watch_Dogs, completed the narrative missions and then tooled around solving puzzles and collecting audio tapes. It's a really interesting game: in some ways it is comically stuffed with content, and in other ways things seem to be missing that you'd expect in that kind of game (multi-button melee combat, most obviously, although I don't think that was a bad call - who actually used melee combat in GTA when they weren't being forced to by the mission structure)?

 

I think I'm actually enjoying the world more now the narrative mission is over, but I'm also aware that to get the full story of the narrative you'd need to complete a phenomenal number of individual puzzles - which are sometimes pleasantly brain-teasing and at other times pretty rote...

 

It's certainly a game I got the hours out of, though. Although it feels like if the cars handled better, especially the early available dial-a-cars, it would have taken less time, because the fixer contracts would have ended faster. Likewise if the cars were less titanium-reinforced and the world less breakable...

 

It felt a lot like GTA in terms of the cars in that there were like one or two in each vehicle class the drove to my liking but I had to go through every one of the crappy ones to find them. Not to mention there was no way to "favorite" the dial-a-cars, so I had to memorize which ones were suitable. By the end of the game, I got tired of that and just committed to one car and one motorcycle.

 

I actually ended up liking the world/story by the end too, but only by attrition of going through literally every story-relevant thing. You shouldn't have to play an open world game for 30 hours to get a complete picture of the story.

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I completed Yakuza 4. Ugh. 37 hours and only 24% completion rating on my first playthrough. Admittedly after the first character, I just blitzed the story and ignored the side-quests, as there are fucking loads. But not shitty half-assed side-quests. Whole fleshed out side-quests that are like a completely different game. There's a Training simulator, there's a Dating simulator, there's a digging-for-treasure mission, there's a fucking crane game simulator. And they are all completely separate from everything else. There is nothing that forces you to do them. They can be completely ignored. It's fucking weird. and also what makes the game so good.

 

It's also a hilarious game, in the way Japanese games are funny. Being weird and also totally over-the-top. But yet all kinda coherent. The story has a lot of laughs, but by far the best is the revelations side-quests. These are cut-scenes which you have to find in the world (there's an email you get which hints towards their location). Upon activation of the cutscene, you have to enter a QTE whilst watching a scene, usually quite amusing, and then answer a question, as to which the character will commit it to memory and you'll learn a new technique if you get it right. How you commit it to memory is the funniest thing though. One guy gets out a block of wood, and there and then chisels an immaculate wood sculpture of the attack he's learnt. It's fantastic.

 

 

I've also never played a Yakuza game before, but it's made me want to play the rest. The story also made sense, and didn't rely on intricate knowledge of the series.

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