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So I never thought I would say this, but Diablo 3 is a better game on console than it is PC.  We finished our first playthrough over the weekend of the Ultimate Evil Edition, but we'll probably play around with some of the other end game content and different characters.  It will never be Diablo 2, but it's been quite a bit of fun to play through. 

 

I hated Diablo 3 on release on PC.  It was a bad game that deserved to die in a fire.  While it still looks the same, so much is different now that it feels like a different game.  But I still wouldn't go back to the PC and click, click, click my way to hell.  Playing with one or two other people on the same screen with controllers in my living room is the best.  Other things that I think are unique to the console versions are also pretty awesome, like the Nemesis system, Legendary gifts dropping that you can give friends and apprentice mode.  Apprentice mode boosts that stats of everyone in the party if someone is significantly higher level.  Perfect if you've got someone over visiting, or a kid who wants to play who doesn't want to have to manage their inventory.   Just make them a level 1 character and they will be able to run around with you wherever you want to go without having to worry about gear management.

 

I really don't know why controller support, local co-op and apprentice mode aren't all in the PC version.  They are the three best additions to the game. 

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That seems to be the general consensus, which just makes me mad they don't patch in controller support (and the other cool stuff?) so I wouldn't have to get a console to play it the best way. C'est la vie.

 

The other general consensus is that Reaper of Souls fixed most of the problems in Diablo 3 on PC.

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Monument Valley 

It is really great, just finished the DLC. One of the best puzzle games I've ever played, felt like I was using parts of my brain I didn't know existed.

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That seems to be the general consensus, which just makes me mad they don't patch in controller support (and the other cool stuff?) so I wouldn't have to get a console to play it the best way. C'est la vie.

 

The other general consensus is that Reaper of Souls fixed most of the problems in Diablo 3 on PC.

It's really shocking how much the numbers under the hood have changed since launch. The loot system is completely different. A bunch of the skill trees weren't just rebalanced, but in some cases skills were entirely redesigned. Locking legendaries to characters and eliminating the auction houses are massive reverses in philosophy. The end game content basically didn't exist. The whole game was a shell of what it is now.

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Monument Valley 
It is really great, just finished the DLC. One of the best puzzle games I've ever played, felt like I was using parts of my brain I didn't know existed.

I just completed that too, well, not the expansion yet. I really liked the style and the idea of the game. But I can't say it was a success for me. I'm not the type of guy who expects every game to be 30 hours by any means. I love short games, but Monument Valley just felt like the first world of a much bigger game. In fact, I thought that the fact that I could only see 9 levels on the level select screen meant that it was only the first world. I was literally thinking "Here's where things should pick up" and then the credits rolled. It really felt like the first 4-6 levels were tutorial, and the game ended as soon as it started to get going. I wasn't stumped for one second, and that kinda bummed me out. It ended up only taking me like 45 minutes.

 

Maybe the expansion would fix some of my concerns, and I have some iTunes money from christmas, so I might have to check that out.

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So I never thought I would say this, but Diablo 3 is a better game on console than it is PC.  We finished our first playthrough over the weekend of the Ultimate Evil Edition, but we'll probably play around with some of the other end game content and different characters.  It will never be Diablo 2, but it's been quite a bit of fun to play through. 

 

I hated Diablo 3 on release on PC.  It was a bad game that deserved to die in a fire.  While it still looks the same, so much is different now that it feels like a different game.  But I still wouldn't go back to the PC and click, click, click my way to hell.  Playing with one or two other people on the same screen with controllers in my living room is the best.  Other things that I think are unique to the console versions are also pretty awesome, like the Nemesis system, Legendary gifts dropping that you can give friends and apprentice mode.  Apprentice mode boosts that stats of everyone in the party if someone is significantly higher level.  Perfect if you've got someone over visiting, or a kid who wants to play who doesn't want to have to manage their inventory.   Just make them a level 1 character and they will be able to run around with you wherever you want to go without having to worry about gear management.

 

I really don't know why controller support, local co-op and apprentice mode aren't all in the PC version.  They are the three best additions to the game. 

 

That makes sense to me. I remember picking up the Xbox 360 port of Torchlight, and vastly preferring playing that game on a controller to mouse and keyboard. It made me really bummed that Torchlight 2 didn't include controller support (but is still the preferable version to play because of co-op and because I don't really use consoles anymore).

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I have to reluctantly admit that I didn't enjoy The Stanley Parable that much. The narration is obviously key to the whole thing, and I simply did not like the delivery, or much of the actual text. I've heard nothing but how funny this game is, but none of the jokes hit for me. I didn't enjoy Bastion either, so maybe it's just me.

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If somebody told you Bastion's narration was supposed to be funny, they seriously mischaracterized it to you.

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Maybe the expansion would fix some of my concerns, and I have some iTunes money from christmas, so I might have to check that out.

 

It will. You breeze through the initial game without effort, the expansion is where your brain comes into play. It also is rather short and my guess is they will release further episodes, especially since they've been vocal about piracy and the need for different pricing model than the single purchase.

 

I'm tempted to start over and look for secrets and hidden paths. I only came across one playing through it.

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If somebody told you Bastion's narration was supposed to be funny, they seriously mischaracterized it to you.

Maybe I worded that poorly. I just mean it's another game that narrates your play.

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I hit the steam sales hard over the holidays, and am enjoying a wide variety of games after spending much of last year testing Elite Dangerous.

 

I knocked off Jazzpunk and To the Moon each in a single day; both were wonderful in different ways. Both are like collections of minigames used to progress the story, but couldn't be more different tonally. Jazzpunk plays everything for surreal laughs, and definitely worked for me, lasting just long enough to start outstaying its welcome; it's a bit like an extended version of the Milkman Prophecy level from Psychonauts. To the Moon was highly surprising and touching, as I didn't really know anything about it. 

 

I also finished Episode 1 of Tales from the Borderlands. I heard very encouraging things about it, and am glad I tried it out. However, I am somewhat concerned that the rest of the episodes don't live up to the killer pilot (I'm looking at you here Wolf Among Us)

 

I am currently going through Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, a 10 year old game that was recommended to me time and again. It took a little bit of work to get it going, but I am enjoying myself immensely. I chose to answer a series of questions rather than chose my character directly, and I ended up with a Malkavian that sees the future but is clinically insane... the dialog options are great (getting their own dedicated font) as I often say things that don't often make sense at the time, but do later on like scrambled visions of the future.  Love it!

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There's a lot of really interesting player character specific dialog in Vampire: The Masquerade. I kinda want to go back and play as a Malkavian to see some of the more interesting options.

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I beat WadjetEye's Golden Wake, at first I was worried when I was playing a game about a real estate agent in Florida in the 1920's, but the little I knew of American history, made me realize what I would really be in for.

 

While the game is linear and not very challenging puzzle-wise, I really enjoyed the story and the setting of Coral Gables, Being a sales man, there are a lot of persuasion puzzles, which aren't that new, but still interesting enough.

 

I do believe this is the first of GrundislavGames to be on sale and not free and it's a pretty good start, if I may say so.

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Just finished Never Alone. Don't really have a lot to say about it, as it's a kind of sub-standard platformer with beautiful presentation and a slightly naïve-but-likeable story. Buggy as hell in places, but I left it with mostly positive impressions.

 

RE: Monument Valley:

Maybe the expansion would fix some of my concerns, and I have some iTunes money from christmas, so I might have to check that out.

It will. You breeze through the initial game without effort, the expansion is where your brain comes into play. It also is rather short and my guess is they will release further episodes, especially since they've been vocal about piracy and the need for different pricing model than the single purchase.

 

I'm tempted to start over and look for secrets and hidden paths. I only came across one playing through it.

 

Absolutely, the expansion goes much further with the mechanics of the original, and a few new mechanics. And I definitely had to stop and think about it in several places, which never happened in the main game. But man, there are secrets? I don't think I found any!

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My wife has been playing Never Alone recently. She loves the content but man I don't think I've ever seen her angrier at a video game. She's not much of a platformer player really, but even when I picked up the controller to help out once I had a heck of a time as well.

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I'm a big, big fan of the TA-school of RTS, but i've been out of the loop for a while, and while i'm not quite ready to look past all the incredibly toxic things i've been hearing about Planetary Annihilation to go dig into that, the also much-maligned Supreme Commander 2 was available for pretty cheap in the last Steam sale, so i picked that up.

I did play a demo when it originally came out and was pretty immediately turned off at the time by what it was trying to do, but this time i'm finding myself being a little more receptive to the changes it tried to make. (Either because i simply gave it more of a chance to make an impression, or i've more settled in with the reality that i have to take what i can get.)

There's both good and bad in SupCom2 though.

Bear with me, i have some thoughts on this game and i need to stick them somewhere.

First and foremost, the reworked economy is kind of a disaster, units and structures being paid for in single sums - that more traditional and theoretically more easily understood RTS economy - ends up being a huge pain in the ass in this style of game. If you have multiple units on multiple construction queues like you kind of have to, but you're running a negative or even a steady economy without any significant growth, small projects end up eating resources before any big projects ever have a chance to start, and it forces you to go in and micromanage things in a way you never had to in other games like this. Construction assists have also been massively downplayed, engineers are now only able to help at unit factories, and the effect caps off pretty hard once a few engineers are in place.

 

The omission of resource storage structures also makes players weirdly more resilient, with any resources gathered being stored safely and untouchably beyond the scope of the game field, allowing players to recover quickly from some pretty devastating losses. It sounds like it could be a good thing, but in practice it deprives offensive strategies of a valuable and interesting target that can easily blunt another player's industry. It also makes rule sets other than the core assassination goal pointless excercises in futility.

 

The absence of persistant energy costs on structures and units also affects the game in a lot of very peculiar ways, such as it being much, much easier to set up large banks of long-range artillery with ceaseless, sustained fire. This seems to have led to artillery being reworked in some strange ways, as it's generally much less powerful and threatening than in earlier games, with shields being much more effective defense against even heavy artillery fire. Artillery also lacks friendly fire now, which is dumb.

 

There are some other more general balance things that i'm also kind of not into, unrelated to the economy stuff. Mainly that I think air power is probably a little too dominant in SupCom 2, and they've given experimentals some pretty crippling flaws that make them very awkward and unpleasant to try and implement in battles, as opposed to being fairly definitive stalemate-enders in Forged Alliance.

 

There are also way, way, way too many small maps. There's nothing wrong with small maps in this style of RTS, those games are fast and dynamic, but people love these games for the big and drawn out battles across large continents.
 

So what's good? Well, i think the streamlined factions and the research system are actually really good. TA and SupCom both had just enormous collections of redundant or irrelevant units, and a great many of them have been condensed down into leaner factions. Where most low tech units were just a stepping stone to late-game stuff, they've sort of formalized that with a pretty interesting research system with some really elaborate trees, and it's probably the most successful part of SupCom2 and it's why i'm still playing it after a couple dozen games. They've also managed to make their factions feel appreciably different and distinct, perhaps in part to condensing things down so much, and that's definitely a first for any of these games. It also does away with the structure adjacency bonuses that SupCom and FA had, which i'm firmly in support of, that was too much minutia.


The UI also still does everything a SupCom game should do, it's still kind of brilliantly executed on. There also isn't a horrible game-breaking memory leak in the skirmish AI like there was in SupCom and FA, that's kind of a big thing.


Perhaps it could be described as one of those "Disappointing sequel, but totally alright taken on its own" things, but that would dismiss some of the things it does that i would actually hope persist into future games. (GPG's still around, and they got that Total Annihilation license back.)

 

Anyways, i'm pretty firmly :tmeh: on SupCom 2, but i'm also probably going to play it a whole bunch more. (If somebody has not ever played any of these games, this might actually be a fairly accessible entry point, but i don't think the game actually does a particularly good job explaining how anything works, despite trying to work in more easily understood mechanics while streamlining everything else.)

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I finally beat (saved the village) Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate for the 3DS. I don't really have a ton to say about it. It's a Monster Hunter game much like any other so you either like those or you don't. I can say it was perfect for my hour long bus commute each morning. Bring on Monster Hunter 4!

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I just beat "Attack of the Friday Monsters" and it was one of the most adorably whimsy game I've played in a while.

 

I liked how the game was constantly teasing you with the whole "Are the monsters real or just in the child's imagination".

 

I simply thought it was a weird card game, but I'm glad it was so much more!  :tup:

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Finished Valiant Hearts just a few minutes ago.

 

I quite liked this game, especially what it does to try and represent the realities of WW1. The game contains some of the best collectibles I've seen in games. Those little nuggets of history you receive are really interesting and add a bit more weight to the setting, well illustrated by you picking up a piece of cloth on the level that first features poison gas and learning that it is an urine soaked cloth, the closest thing soldiers had to a gas mask at that point in the war.

 

I think it sometimes gets a bit too cartoony for it's own good (especially with regards to the big bad of the game (Baron von Dorf), but I think this is mainly a narrative concern. The art style I think does the job well in avoiding the game getting too grim for consumption, but also allowing for quite a bit of nastiness. Especially toward the end of the game, aided with some well done audio.

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This week, I finished The Cat Lady by Harvester Games. I'm not usually into jump-scare horror video games, but this one hooked me. It might have been the adventure game genre that did it for me.

 

The art is creepy and frightening at all times. Of note, is that the most commented thread on the Steam forums is how the main character isn't pretty enough. I say, well, we aren't all pretty, so it's good that diverse games can show us all, pretty or not.

 

The gameplay is the standard adventure game fetch quest at times, when single items procured hours before just happen to become a critical piece later. It's unfortunate for the genre to keep doing this, over and over, and unfortunately, I think I've become used to it. Reach a dead end? Well, time to lookup a walkthrough to find out what critical item I missed.

 

I personally don't have many complaints about when this happens. Others' enjoyment of these games, however, may rely more heavily on puzzling, rather than art, music and story. 8 hours from beginning to end.

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Completed Infamous: First Light over the weekend.

 

I made sure to upgrade the traversal power first, which made getting around the city feel expressive.  It's spectacular!

 

I cleared all of the zones as much as possible before doing the story.  I did not enjoy the storytelling, and the missions themselves were rote.  It still feels like Sucker Punch doesn't know how to work the traversal mechanics into the story.  Instead I'm left shooting/beating up a bunch of nameless thugs, just like in Infamous 1, where, again, all I really liked about the game was the traversal.

 

Generally not recommended to finish, though it's free on PS+ at the moment.

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I put Vampire the Masquerade on hold for a while... I really enjoy the world and story telling, but I'm butting up against a bunch of combat heavy missions near the end that my character just isn't built for. Apparently there were immensely powerful weapons available in the original game for these missions that were removed in the unofficial update. It was good to hear from Dewar that there's lots of good character-specific dialogue for other clans, because I will probably need to go again some time later.

 

Continuing the story-based game theme, I also played Valiant Hearts over the weekend. In a year that Ubisoft shat the bed so badly, it's good to remember that they put this little gem out also. I found the story to be very moving, and a good reminder that people largely helped each other out no matter which side they were on when away from the commanding officers. I learned a lot about WWI from the collectibles and snippets found in each level... the game was made in conjunction with groups marking the centenary of the start of the war. In certain situations, I found myself wishing for LESS game, as the action came to a screeching halt while puzzles tripped up the momentum; it hardly seems realistic that a company of soldiers would halt mid-charge while someone futzes with some levers and boxes somewhere.

 

Valiant Hearts was suitably grim in many places, although presented with gorgeous style, so as a bit of an antidote I've started on South Park: The Stick of Truth. I've not watched the show for many years, but am having a good time. At its heart lies a very solid RPG, where the fantasy is in the minds of the kids playing a game (a bit like Costume Quest, but with considerably more depth). On top of this, it looks and sounds just like the show, and that's a good thing so far.

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After like 50 hours, I've made it to the Deep Roads in Dragon Age: Origins. Will this game never end?!

 

(It is a good game tho)

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