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Recently completed video games

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I finished Shadow of Mordor. Well that sure was a game. Wasn't anything particularly amazing, but it did have an interesting mechanic. I liked it enough I get all the achievements, but I think that was mainly because the achievements were mostly quite interesting ways to interact with the nemesis system.

I liked it, it was a pleasant distraction from destiny, and totally worth the money. So I guess thumbs up!

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I beat "Boo Bunny Plague", a MUSICAL brawler... I cannot describe how amazing this game is, the musical numbers before each boss fight are just superb. The fact that singer belongs to a group called "Skeleton D*ck" speaks volumes of the prodigious wonder that is the game.

 

The final boss is "God/Morgan Freeman", nuff said.

 

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Completed Hitman:Absoluton just moments ago. Having only played Hitman:Contracts before, I don't consider myself being that much of a fantatic of the franchise. I did enjoy the game, it did not come across as a pure Hitman experience to me. Missions are a lot more linear and your hit alternatives are a lot more limited this time around. It feels like IO Interactive wanted to give the players the experience of a thriller or and action movie rather then relying on a set of game mechanics to experiment with, thus it makes it feel like Absolution is a bit of a step back for the series gameplay wise.
 
I might come across a quite negative but I must admit  I had a good time playing it,, despite its short comings. Controls were solid enough and graphics still are quite impressive for a 360 game. A great third person stealth game whilst at the same time being an underwhelming hitman experience.

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I'm beginning to wonder what people really mean when they call something a "walking simulator", I beat two of these today and I'm they were vastly different.

 

The first game Coma: Mortuary, was amusingly terrible, it's like listing to an audiobook while wandering a bad Painkiller level, and the game is ridiculously lazy, you can die in few parts, but the death are ridiculous, you get a game over when touching a ghost, that's it... not even a jump scare before killing you. The plot is kinda hilarious, the main character blathers about the underworld like if Max Payne was giving a tourist guide of Hell and then... the game ends and they tell the rest of the story in a confusing cutscene.

 

Montague's Mount was a completely different story, it's a first person adventure than anything, but I guess gamers will call any game where can walk two steps without a monster to fight a walking simulator now. it does have it's flaws, unless you tinker with the visual setting you are going to have miserable time even picking up the easiest object. The puzzles were few, but delightful, any game were you have to use Morse code to solve a puzzle is fine in my book. The remote Irish island is gloomy, but you know how beautiful this place would be if the weather and lighting was better. And some signs are in actual Irish, so I learned a word or two. I think the only reason this game has any bad reviews is that (apart from the easy to fix visual issues) you encounter puzzles instead of "spoopy" ghosts. *shrugs*

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I finished Psychonauts. It had a really unique and charming story, a good soundtrack, great voice acting, and solid gameplay to back it up. Thanks to the awesome variety of areas and unique gameplay elements in each one, the gameplay stayed fresh from beginning to end and was pretty much always enjoyable. I liked all of the different areas a great deal but the three that stood out as my favorites were the bull charging area, the milkman conspiracy area, and the Napoleon area.

 

Leading up to the end of the game, I was definitely dreading the Meat Circus that I had heard so much about. Thanks to whatever patch they issued to make this area less frustrating, I found it to be a pretty decent segment and got through it fairly quickly. I'm assuming the checkpointing must have been tweaked or something because unless they actually fundamentally changed how it played, the only major frustrating thing I could imagine about this area would have been having to repeat large segments of the level whenever you fall down or otherwise fuck up. That happened to me quite a bit but once I reached certain thresholds, I would hit a checkpoint making the whole thing pretty manageable.

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The fact that there was checkpointing is the major thing that changed. Originally, if you ran out of lives, you started the level over from the very beginning. Having played it for the first time after the patch as well, my only complaint was that I absolutely hate timed platforming sequences. For some reason I can calmly head shot 5 guys in a slow-mo sequence in CoD, but I get all flustered when I have to platform with time constraints.

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The flooding of the meat circus was the worst part, and it was made quite a bit easier (still quite annoying though).

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It seems like the flooding part of the Meat Circus is easily fixed: the intended path, where you're climbing around the outside of the mesh cylinder, doesn't play well with their controls. So make it easy for players to go literally anywhere else and it'll probably be fine.

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I finished Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. It was a pretty good game and I mostly enjoyed it but it was still probably one of my least favorite Mario games. The platforming was fairly solid, the soundtrack was decent, the art style was interesting (but too busy for my tastes), and the boss fights were all pretty great. I just could never get over my frustrations with the baby Mario and egg throwing mechanics. Those last two worlds had too many irritating parts where I had to keep backtracking to find the eggs I needed. And having to jump around like a mad-Yoshi to try to get Mario back whenever I got hit was absolutely infuriating on some of those later levels. But despite that, it was still a pretty good game.

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I finished Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. It was a pretty good game ... it was still a pretty good game.

 

The most underbaked part of these games are the vehicles Yoshi transforms into.  They are odd, self-contained minigames.  I spent so long as a mole-truck digging for red coins.

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I also just finished Shadow of Mordor. I really enjoyed messing with the nemesis system. Zogdush the Brave was my go to guy for conquering the Uruk horde...  a beserker with poisoned  axes. I really learned to hate Pash the Brain Damaged throughout the latter half of the game... I kept getting him, but the bastard kept coming for more!

I thought I got rid of him when he didn't show up to protect his master, but he was my official Nemesis that led the first army when attacking the Tower

 

I also really enjoyed my missions with Tavion, and am glad to see that there will be more in DLC. The story was OK but nothing special. Unlike some people, I can definitely see a reason for Gollum being there other than fan service. Definite thumbs up from me; the good vastly outweighed the bad (looking at you here final boss battle)

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I finished Jazzpunk this week. I love that most of the game is in odd side missions and things you poke at. I spent so much time trying to interact with every object I saw. Any game that has a quake clone, frogger and pizza zombies is great :) I do wonder how they created this game, was every crazy idea greenlit? I would highly recommend playing Jazzpunk especially if your significant other and/or roomate can glance over and be super confused by what is happening on you screen.

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I finished The Unfinished Swan. What a breath of fresh air that game is! Short, sweet and beautiful. Echoes of Gilliam are suitably supported with a drop of actual Gilliam too. Up there with Journey for me, really recommended, especially as an antidote to the 20 hour+, over-serious slogs.

Also save-stated my way through Sonic 2 on the Game Gear (3DS). Great music!

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I didn't mean to but I just finished Ocarina of Time 3D. I had the Shadow and Spirit Temples left and had intended to do one but got a little carried away, and as someone who rarely plays for two hours in a sitting, being compelled and able to do six is kind of rare and awesome in a really geeky way.

 

It's a really good video game. It was an odd feeling as I've completed it once 15 years ago and had tried to replay it about half a dozen times since but given up very early on so from about Jabu-Jabu onward it was all stuff I only half-remembered and to see it again and think back to the time in my life I first experienced those parts gave me a lovely wee nostalgia hit along with it also being a supremely tightly designed game. What a thoroughly pleasant way to spend a Sunday.

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I managed to complete my journey around the globe on my third attempt today in the magnificent 80 days.

 

In my first attempt I tried to skirt around the southern edge of Eurasian landmass, heading through the Suez canal before embarking on one disastrous venture after another along the south-east Asian coastline, up toward Yokohama which was the last outpost before the long trek across the Pacific. At this point we were still making fairly good time and I was cautiously optimistic that we'd actually complete the journey on the first attempt. However, arriving in Yokohama it was revealed that Mr. Fogg had picked up a bug somewhere along the way that incapacitated him to the degree that we were unable to leave for the better part of two weeks. Short on funds and time we finally ended in Dakar where, frustrated by both having failed to return to London on time and having to request yet another bank transfer to progress to the next town, I finally abandoned the journey.


The second attempt fared much better, seeing us return to London after 84 days. Once again, a few missteps, being detained by Russian military police, staging a failed mutiny aboard a submersible, repeatedly missing my fare by spending too long rearranging my bags, had slowed us down too much. But at least we made it back, and close enough that victory seemed attainable.

 

Third time was the charm, sailing into the skies above London on the afternoon of the 80th day on an Icelandic airship. I felt genuine accomplishment, excitedly showing my sister the phone where "Day 80 - London" could be read with a silhouette of Big Ben stretching upward. This trip had also had its troubles, with murders, sentient automatons, cults and train robbers causing us much headache on the way but apparently I had made enough good decisions that these obstacles were overcome. Despite it all, we'd made it.

 

As you might be able to tell, I quite like this game. I especially like the way the game tells its stories, the unexpected turns and twists, the images it paints of the life of the people you encounter.

I do feel that there might be a problem with how common "catastrophes" seem to become in certain parts of the world, but I realize that it also serves a purpose for ramping up the stakes.

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I finished Steamworld Dig. It was a pretty good distraction whilst watching shitty TV, or laying in bed. I don't think I could have played it for more than 30 mins at a time, but I enjoyed it. Quite charming, nothing special though. Not really got anything else to say about it. 

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I finished Jazzpunk this week. I love that most of the game is in odd side missions and things you poke at. I spent so much time trying to interact with every object I saw. Any game that has a quake clone, frogger and pizza zombies is great :) I do wonder how they created this game, was every crazy idea greenlit? I would highly recommend playing Jazzpunk especially if your significant other and/or roomate can glance over and be super confused by what is happening on you screen.

I also played it recently. There were a few jokes that got me pretty good, like the flying toasters that go by for two seconds (a reference to a great old mac screensaver). I thought the resort area wasn't as imaginative as the rest of the game though.

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Divinity Original Sin: Fun times! Some really challenging fights! Less than inspiring story, but serviceable enough. I have the kind of broken brain where I love tweaking the gear on a myriad of NPCs for minor, idealized stat gains, and the game provides amble option there, plus a robust set of geegaws to modify your gear.

 

One thing that never works for me is that every RPG gives you a million pots & scrolls and I just never use them.

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Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - This game was great! It's been a while since I beat a non-violent game but this one was just delightful. I played one Professor Layton game in the past for a couple hours before being relatively unimpressed with the actual puzzle gameplay, and I played the first and part of the second Phoenix Wright games. This one was particularly good because it took the mechanics and gameplay of both games and put them together to each others benefit. Plus, the whole Wright doing puzzles and Layton doing lawyer-y things didn't stop being charming the whole time. This was just the game to get me back into playing things on my 3DS, which is excellent as I can play it in bed under my electric blanket. ^-^

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Monument Valley.  Short but sweet.  I wish it went further though.  I don't necessarily mean that its too short (although it kind of is), I mean I wish the ideas were explored more.  Sounds like the DLC does that.  I'm interested to try it at some point.

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I also just finished Monument Valley today, less than 24 hours since I got it. It definitely left me wanting more, the ending seemed a little premature but not terribly so. I think if I wasn't primed to expect a short game I would be super bummed now.

 

I feel bad focusing on the length, but it's because everyone else has said so much wonderful stuff about this already. It's a great game, for entirely ungamey reasons. It has puzzles sure but it's more akin to Journey, where failure is never an expected outcome at all even if you might have temporary trouble getting from A to B. I love it like I love good walking simulators and I look forward to the DLC, I'm not even sure if I want them to be longer and challenging or just more spaces to explore.

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Well, I beat a game I was going to quit on called "Always Sometimes Monsters", it's so terribad it's awesome all over again.

 

I'm baffled everybody loves it for it's story when it makes Sakura Spirit a game about fox ladies showing their panties look like Grim Fandango.

 

It's just so... hamfisted? It's like they tried to emulate a Telltale game in RPGMaker and failed miserable and are completely unaware of it. It's all about decisions... and indie game references, the new "Obligatory Monkey Island reference", I guess.

 

It fails horrible at making the decisions grey or simply not obvious. On the very first day you're options are stealing an old ladies' pension money or doing the right thing and sleep on the streets... The game is utterly aware of the constant GIANT errors in logic it's constantly makes. At one time it asks you to break into a mansion and your characters spends some time talking about security, only to have no security what so ever. The game constantly does things like this, it's just lazy.

 

I don't know if they just bought a bunch of asset, but it's just lazy all around, so many graphics are so lazy it's painful. They were too lazy to make the sprites sleep, so when you sleep it's just the sprite in the up position, probably because they were to lazy to edit the sprite. In one scene you eat pancakes.... except it's a salad... a salad.

 

They are too lazy to draw a pixel pancake, all they had to do was edit the sprite, it's just a few pixels! *rambles incoherently for hours*

 

My opinion from the game changed quickly from thinking it's bad, to thinking it's dumb, to think it's so terrible it's brilliant.

 

So many times the games seems to actively want you to hate it with the tedious tasks, you're forced to do many jobs for which they obvious did no research (well, maybe they did know about the pot farm), and they just make it time consuming, inefficient and boring. You could claim it's trying to reflect a harsh reality, but it's clear the people who made this live in a fantasy world of their own. It's like playing someone's bad fanfic... Thumbs up? 

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