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Recently completed video games

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Oh uh, last month I finished Deponia and Wario Land 2. Maybe more games. I had played an ending of Wario Land 2 before as a kid, but not this extensively to the 100% factor. Such a brilliant game, except for the secret hard ass last level, but that is forgiven since it's just one. I like the exploration and secret finding so much more than regular Mario platformers and the Wario's altered states from him getting hurt by enemies is a great idea. Maybe I should just make a Wario thread one day after I finish some more, I kind of hate all of these catch all threads we do for games now around here like recently completed, 3DS, WiiU, etc.

 

And Deponia I don't know what to say, I feel like I'd have to finish the other two to really get a grasp on the story as it ended with a cliffhanger and seems like Rufus was set on some sort of character arc. Too bad about 40% or more of the puzzles in the game were absolute crap.

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What's your stance on Unreal, might i ask? I've always been incredibly fond of the game. Its level design can be very inconsistent, but taken as a whole, that game does kind of a beautiful job making you feel like you're out on a big long, lonely journey through its huge, abandoned spaces. You're piecing together the stories of your fellow shipwreck survivors and being seemingly out of your depth against enemies that alternate between impressively enormous or impressively intelligent. (Halo later invoked an exceedingly similar setup to similar success. Skaarj = Elites, pretty much.) Also, whatever logic leaps led to the initial creation of Unreal's arsenal should still be lauded, because it's still just one of the most inventive and dynamic sets of player weapons in an FPS. Unreal's a great co-op game too, precisely because of those big, tough enemies and open-ended levels. (Now tell me that you hated playing through Unreal.)

You're right about the level design, it has some real up and downs. There are a few maze like levels that have no flow to them at all (I think Terraniux was the worst), and the swimming! So much swimming. It's such a 90's 3D game thing haha. I enjoyed it more than I was expecting though (never played it back in the day), and certainly more than Quake II. Something that stood out to me was how much of the combat is 1vs1, which is unusual not only for the time but for shooters in general. It works well though, because the arsenal and enemies are built around that (or maybe the other way around). In a lot of games it wouldn't, fighting an enemy 1vs1 is a dull affair in most shooters. There are not a lot of hitscan attacks in Unreal, not for the player either and the crazy dodging the Skaarj do makes them great fun to fight.

 

I didn't think of Halo until you brought it up, but it's a good comparison. In addition to what you already mentioned, they're both quite colourful games. I don't think the tech was quite there for what they were trying to build though. Of course, at the time the outdoor areas were impressive (they're my favourite parts of the game), but they show their age. Maybe the huge barren areas that are a result of the tech work to the game's advantage in some weird way though, because you're right that it does feel like a journey in a way that most games don't. You cover a lot of ground. Also, the first time you encounter a Skaarj, that moment was still good.

 

I played the expansion, Return to Na Pali, too. Apparently it wasn't received well at the time, but I liked it. To me it felt like Unreal with most of the bad levels cut out. Seems like they learned what worked and what didn't and applied that. I appreciate that it was shorter too, because damn, Unreal went on for a while! Anyway, it's a strange game, in terms of mechanics, the pacing of the gameplay, the setting and the atmosphere.

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Regarding it feeling like a journey, i think it's that it has so many areas that are present to serve as connective tissue between what are seemingly meant to be the major areas in the game. Like the one stretch in the game where the level in a downed spaceship is set up by first fighting your way up to it through its trail of wreckage. There's also the long stretch where you're fighting to and up through the "sunspire" to reach the Nali city on the floating island, a stretch of the game filled with strong level visuals both immediate and distant to establish this path through the game's environments. (If you're paying attention to diary logs left by other survivors, you've even had had multiple levels of people talking about the sunspire before you ever see it for yourself.)


There are even completely optional side areas in many Unreal levels as well, Nali villages you can take a swerve to go explore or completely skip, it reminds me of the road sections of Half-Life 2 which were just filthy with random side areas to poke through. (Which i know a lot of people find intolerable, but for me, they were the best parts of that game.)

You know, but on the other hand, you're absolutely right about there being some terrible labyrinth-like levels in Unreal that have just absolutely no immediate sense of flow. There are levels in that game that i have never not gotten lost in.


Still, that kind of connective context spread out over multiple levels which are designed to flow relatively seamlessly into eachother seemed incredibly novel when Unreal came out. Half-Life didn't come out until later that same year, but it's often something people attribute as part of that game's innovations.

 

With regards to that, I think Half-Life's true innovation lies in how, for the lack of a better word, "cinematic" and orchestrated it feels. Not just in the way it uses scripted sequences to seamlessly convey story, but also - as you described - the way it sets up so many fights with small scripted scenes which give you a chance to react to the changing situation while also making its world feel incredibly alive. (In this way, i think Half-Life might be, for better or worse, the precursor to the Modern Warfares of the world. Though, certainly, one could argue those kinds of games are emulating those things without understanding why they were so good in Half-Life.)
 

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I don't tend to complete games very often. I've started to be more attracted to the handheld market though, which generally provides more accessible and completeable gaming.

 

Except I made the mistake (definitely not a mistake) of buying Fire Emblem Awakening on the 3DS. Been playing that for 130 hours and still not completed it!! Lol (I got to 90% and then restarted it about 3 times on highly difficulty)

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The first Fire Emblem game i ever played, i made the scrub mistake of letting my tanks soak up all the experience, so by the time i got to the last few levels my army was just woefully inadequate for dealing with the challenges being thrown at me. So i restarted the entire game, started over from scratch, replayed the whole thing and beat it.

FEA gives you significantly more wiggle room than that, being able to grind out random battles and other similar things, or allowing you to play with the permadeath disabled if you so choose. (Something i'm of two minds about, let's just say i don't think FEA is perfectly suited to either option.)

FEA is so goddamned good though.

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FEA is wonderful. I played through on Hard from the off and never regretted it, despite all the resets. It's also a game that I thought used 3D really well to highlight and separate UI elements over the battlefield. Not showy, just well thought out and implemented.

 

Thanks to a few long flights and a Saturday to myself I've managed to finish some video games  :clap:

 

Bowser's Inside Story was my first Mario RPG. It dragged a little towards the end, and the inability to skip cut scenes was a ballache, but the writing was great and I enjoyed the series' timing-based battles. By all accounts this one was a high watermark so I won't track down the others but I had fun with it.

 

Castlevania (NES) on the 3DS VC. This was my first Castlevania. It feels a bit fraudulent to say I 'played' this - I spent about an hour and a half save stating myself through the game! But where Mega Man 2 was a real pleasure to go through for the first time, this will join Zelda I+II and Metroid on my 'glad it's ticked off but I won't be replaying it' list. As with those games, the kernel of the series is there and unmistakable but it's very difficult to relax with them, if that makes sense. Playing them feels like study time - pleasurable study, but still work. Constantly save stating because I'm terrible at video games probably doesn't help the flow. I'd love for SNES VC to come to the New 3DS - I'd be very interested to see if SNES incarnations of these series feel less like library research.

 

Psychonauts. Again, great writing. The art is grotesquely intriguing - it hangs together brilliantly despite all the sketchy lines and bulbous polys and the variation is impressive. Again, it dragged on too long, but as I get older everything seems to go on too long. Certain features reminded me of Mario Galaxy (the levitation ball and the boss where you ran around the sides of a floating cube mindscape). Fantastic music too. The Whispering Rock tune is just  :yep:

 

Mario Sunshine, a game I had but never completed, now 100%ed. Most vibrant thing I've ever looked at, but a horrible camera. It feels like a bit of an anomaly, like a throwback to less handhold-y days. 15 minutes before I completed it I discovered a move whereby if you spray the ground in front of yourself and dive into it you start a long slide. At no point was this communicated via tutorial, and I kind of liked that. I miss discovering little nuances in movesets without some doofus NPC saying 'Did you know that pressing X and B together while you're crouching will...'. On the other hand there are several places where I felt I'd have never discovered a certain door/passage/secret without help and some areas felt rushed or unfinished (or maybe just unpolished), which contrasts sharply with the Galaxy games which feel buffed to perfection. Perhaps I'm just a baby gamer and 'Old' Nintendo is too hardcore for me. I always thought the random trees you can burn in the original Zelda were unfairly obscure. Who the hell discovered that the third bush from the left was actually the entrance to the dungeon without reading the tips section of a magazine? Some poor bastard must have been bored shitless and tried burning very single one of the hundred of trees and bushes in that game. I guess kids in the 80s had a lot fewer distractions. Maybe that obscurity represented adventure or value for money. Now I feel cheated by it because my time is valuable and I'm not going to burn every single tree in the Lost Woods searching for the critical path. Sunshine has some issues and a couple of missteps (Bowser's voice acting sounds like I'm doing it), but it's an interesting game.

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Resident Evil: Operation Racoon City (PS3)
The only impression about this game prior to playing it was that it was a bad game. I don't play online shooters so the action gameplay emphasis in this game didn't bother me. It plays a lot like the Mercenaries side games from the main series. I enjoyed the trip back to Racoon City and the events of RE2 and 3 (bosses etc.) and I wasn't looking for much else. It's okay. I payed $7 for it so I can't complain, plus the online is fun as well. The game could have been longer or developed characters and story more but it's mainly interested in giving you co-op maps to play with and story is second. I still want to download the 6 extra DLC missions that lets you play as the heroes. 

Lightning Returns (PS3)
I really enjoyed this game and I think it's my favorite game in the XIII series. Let me explain.  I take issue with games with unnecessary grinding and I feel like I have less time to play 50+ hour games with grinding. Lightning Returns does away with grinding and just lets you go through the world rather quickly with many useful combat abilities from the start as well as complete objectives in the world in any order you want. I wouldn't mind another game with this combat system. I think it's very good. Story on the other hand, well even I can't defend that too much.

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I recently completed GTA San Andreas for the first time and I gotta admit that I liked it more than I thought I would. The characters were all surprisingly likable and I especially enjoyed CJ, he has so much more personality than boring-ass Niko. I also thought the mission variety was superior to GTA IV, with less missions being to just shoot the bad guys, however the checkpoint system was just as unforgiving. The only real complaints I had with the game were control issues since I was playing on IPad, but even then it played surprisingly well (flying planes was extremely frustrating though, particularly the military jet).

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Interesting, I loved the GTA III series of games but hated IV (not interested in V) and I figured I'd just grown out of their juvenile humour, overuse of caricatures and (quite often) bad writing. I wouldn't mind being wrong about that.

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Believe it or not, it wasn't the uninteresting characters and missions that turned me off of GTA IV. It was the fact that they abandoned much of the playfully juvenile humor from the earlier titles for a darker realistic tone that just didn't seem to mesh well with the gameplay. This resulted in a much less charming and entertaining game for me, but I know many people who love the series purely based on the gameplay and couldn't care less about characters or tone.

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I also finished The Room Two.  Its more of the same as the first Room game, but since I enjoyed the first game I'm ok with that.  The switching between puzzle areas thing didn't really grab me though.  It felt like a needless step most of the time.  Really there was only one room that I felt it made sense for the puzzles to be separated (the one with the reflecting laser).

 

I just finished this as well, and agree completely. I feel like there were more just random solutions as well. The

book you have to pull in the seance room comes to mind. There is no reason to think it could be interacted with.

 

Dark Souls 2... man what to say about this game. Maybe my most disappointing game of the year, still good combat and such but they lost all the atmosphere and pacing form DS and DeS. I took several month long breaks while playing, and this last session was just me dropping the side boss stuff i was gonna do and beating the final boss so i could just uninstall the game. I'll probably pick up the DLC in a steam sale at some point and go back to it but man.  :sad:

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Bowser's Inside Story was my first Mario RPG. It dragged a little towards the end, and the inability to skip cut scenes was a ballache, but the writing was great and I enjoyed the series' timing-based battles. By all accounts this one was a high watermark so I won't track down the others but I had fun with it.

 

If you have a WiiU you should seriously consider Superstar Saga on the GBA virtual console. It's a fantastic game, and while I loved BIS, I think I still prefer the original. The whole series is worth looking at, but 1 and 3 are definitely its peaks.

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Of the Mario RPG's i've played, Superstar Saga definitely stands out as my personal favorite, it's a fantastic game.

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 I'd love for SNES VC to come to the New 3DS - I'd be very interested to see if SNES incarnations of these series feel less like library research.

 

You're in for a real treat with Super Castlevania IV. It's tricky, sure, but never too hard imo, and has one of the best soundtracks ever, to boot. A real feast for the senses. I don't know if you like "AVGN" (that handle put me off his videos for ages until I actually watched a few for myself) but he recently did a two parter about it, where he played with a friend. Not spitting fury over it because he loves it, and it's a bit of a nostalgia trip. Worth a look.

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Beat Dishonored today on the 360, I enjoyed it especially as a "freebie" through xbox live gold. I tried to approach it as stealthily and non-lethal as possible without abusing the save functionality. I appreciated it as a stealth game a lot more that way without feeling the compulsion of doing a perfect run of every mission, it felt a lot more dynamic and fun that way. The abilities were all fun to use, especially blink. The art and graphics are astounding, the world they built felt very immersive just looking at it. The story was ok albeit a bit predictable and suffering from a rather abrupt ending. Not sure either if I am a fan of  the story telling being too reliant on audio diaries and notes scattered around the maps.

 

Did like it a lot though, is the DLC worth buying?

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I just played the DLC a few weeks ago and I thought they were better than the base game, mainly for how they change and add to your abilities and gadgets. It does a lot to improve the stealthy playstyle. The storytelling is better too, for what that's worth (it's one story across the two DLCs). They're what, $10 each though? It's always weird to buy expensive DLC for a cheap game. I'd say both of them together are about half the length of the original.

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If you have a WiiU you should seriously consider Superstar Saga on the GBA virtual console. It's a fantastic game, and while I loved BIS, I think I still prefer the original. The whole series is worth looking at, but 1 and 3 are definitely its peaks.

 

Also, while they are quite different, Paper Mario (N64) and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (Gamecube) are both fantastic.

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Yeah, Thousand Year Door is the best Mario RPG by far (and I replayed it in its entirety in 2012, so that is not just nostalgia talking).

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I just beat Hatoful Boyfriend and got ALL the endings. I suppose most got the game for laughs and only got one or two endings and yes, the game is wonderfully weird, but you should really try to get the final ending...

 

It's not what you expect, I'll only say one thing... 

Avian Flu.

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I just finished The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and the ending really changed what I thought of the game, I won't say more than that. But I really enjoyed it. Short game, and incredible looking. Def worth playing.

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Finally went back and finished up Sleeping Dogs last night, after watching Patricia and Danielle stream the new version the other day. The ending was reaaaaalllly dumb. Game is still really good though, well worth picking up next time it's on sale on steam.

 

It really feels like a game that could have benefited either from more time in development or, preferably, just cutting some half baked plotlines.

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Finally went back and finished up Sleeping Dogs last night, after watching Patricia and Danielle stream the new version the other day. The ending was reaaaaalllly dumb. Game is still really good though, well worth picking up next time it's on sale on steam.

 

It really feels like a game that could have benefited either from more time in development or, preferably, just cutting some half baked plotlines.

 

I finished this ages back and really didn't like that

your handler gets in such shit for killing the mafia dude and being manipulative... but your dude went around killing a bunch of people, other characters even remark on you being brutal.

And why? Because of a deep seated need for revenge that never really gets resolved, just absolved.

 

I just needed to vent that out cause my friends never played it.

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Beat Dishonored today on the 360, I enjoyed it especially as a "freebie" through xbox live gold. I tried to approach it as stealthily and non-lethal as possible without abusing the save functionality. I appreciated it as a stealth game a lot more that way without feeling the compulsion of doing a perfect run of every mission, it felt a lot more dynamic and fun that way. The abilities were all fun to use, especially blink. The art and graphics are astounding, the world they built felt very immersive just looking at it. The story was ok albeit a bit predictable and suffering from a rather abrupt ending. Not sure either if I am a fan of  the story telling being too reliant on audio diaries and notes scattered around the maps.

 

Did like it a lot though, is the DLC worth buying?

 

Hmm, when was this on Games with Gold? I must have missed it.

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I beat A Link Between Worlds over the weekend. I remember there being a lot of talk about this diverging from the Zelda formula what with you getting all the items up front, but I didn't really find that to be the case since most dungeons literally tell you at the entrance what one item will be needed for it, so it still boils down to having that item to navigate the dungeon and defeat the boss. I would have liked to have seen more dungeons have puzzles that rely on using a variety of items together. That being said, the dungeons are all really good and the overworld is fairly open from the start which made exploring more interesting. The use of 3D is great and the control over Link felt sooo good. Just very responsive and his movement speed was so perfect. Plus the game is far less hand-holdy than many Nintendo games have been recently, which I appreciated.

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