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I honestly have no familiarity with the cultural source for Guacamelee so I have no concept of whether this is a 'good' depiction or not.  I also have no idea what Drinkbox's team is like (I really hope that it wasn't a group of all white dudes deciding to make a game like this).  I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt but I won't begrudge anyone who has an issue with their game.

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I'll say that the person I've encountered who loves Guacamelee the most is Mexican. That's just anecdotal, of course, but I think there's something to be said about seeing your culture represented in games when it doesn't show up that often otherwise. In this respect, I don't think Guacamelee's any worse than Grim Fandango or something similar.

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I honestly have no familiarity with the cultural source for Guacamelee so I have no concept of whether this is a 'good' depiction or not.  I also have no idea what Drinkbox's team is like (I really hope that it wasn't a group of all white dudes deciding to make a game like this).  I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt but I won't begrudge anyone who has an issue with their game.

 

Some of the Drinkbox guys have said in interviews/podcast appearances that one of their team is from Mexico, and jokingly talk about running everything by him first as an "is this racist" test.

 

I just replayed Dead Space 3 in co-op with my brother. It's still okay, but a weird departure from what Dead Space was. Co-op makes it better, for sure. Then we played the "Awakened" DLC, which I hadn't played before, and hoo boy. Some of the setting and story stuff was interesting, but it just sort of rambles on for a while and then ends in a big "SEE YOU NEXT GAME" moment that contrasts quite sharply with the "we could keep going if we had to, but this is a good stopping point" ending of the main game.

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Yesterday I finished Ys I, after almost 3 hours (atcually it was first 2h, followed by a break, to first playing a bit of Attila and then I returned to Ys) on the last fight against Dark Fact. That fight is ridiculous hard, not just he keep floating around but he also throw both small blast (which make the whole thing look a bullet hell) of energy and fireball that are aimed to hit where are you standing and if you hit him, the already limited ground became even smaller as a piece of it vanishes. Like the other bosses in the game you can´t use items or potions and none of your rings work there.

 

Despite that, is not frustrating as it could appear, maybe because the game is rather fast so you might die very quickly but to restart the fight is also very fast and once you start seeing the pattern in his moves became a bit easier. And Ys is really fun game by the end.

 

Just look at this video to have a idea how the last battle is:

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Tengami :tdown:

An adventure game based on pop-up books. It looks beautiful. But that's all, the puzzles are rather obscure (and some are repeated quite often) and require quite some backtracking. This wouldn't be much of a problem, except that the character moves really really slow. It's really annoying. There isn't much of a story going on, so it's just moving (really slowly) through pop-up book like scenes.

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Finished Shadow Warrior (PS4) over the weekend. Way more fun than I expected it to be. Still glad I picked it up on sale though.

 

I felt the same with Tengami. So pretty, but so dull to play.

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I beat Strider (PS4) last night. I was pleasantly surprised. I tried it when it was free on PS+ and I thought it was a crock of shit. Then I went away for about a year, came back having played a bunch of classic 2D games (Metroid mainly) and now I can see that it's a competent game. 

I enjoyed it, but I didn't care enough to get all the collectibles. 

 

Also I finished Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. I hated this at the start. It felt like it didn't realise it was meant for PS2, but was an up-rezed PS1 game. The controls are utter shit. 

But, it's an amazing game. Loved it. Not every minute, I could have easily stopped after the first 2 hours because I was so tired of fighting the controls, but I didn't, and I'm glad. The story is crazy and amazing. It's also way better than MGS1.

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Two and a half years after buying it, I sat down and demolished Far Cry 3 this week. I have tried to play every Far Cry game to the point that this one had come out (tried starting 2 like 5 times due to Thumb acclaim) and bounced off every single time. I'd even tried 3, getting so far as the third mission and unlocking two radio towers before bailing. On Sunday I decided to go back in and see if I was in the mood for it. 28 hours and 100% completion later, I guess I was. I have no idea why it clicked with me this time around, but I had a lot of fun. The story missions were often bad and frustrating, but approaching camps and clearing them out was ALWAYS awesome. I loved the way I'd meticulously plan out my approach, stealth through so much of a camp, and then find one dude who'd been hiding in a building or something while I scanned the place who'd set off the alarm and cause me to improvise and do ridiculous shit. If that dude didn't exist, I felt like badass silent death. If he did, it was always super fun to improvise and figure out what the hell I was going to do on the fly.

 

Great gameplay, really stupid story that did nothing for me. I'll definitely give 4 a shot next time it's on a Steam sale, and in the meantime I've also had Blood Dragon in my Steam library for forever. May come back to that later this summer.

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I just finised Her Story. It took me and my boyfriend 3 days. We got almost all the clips without hints. I loved it. Still curious what the writer's actual ending is. According to the PC Gamer interview, he had something specific in mind. I reccomend it. I'm very interested as to how they gated the more juicy clips. Must have been an interesting process of word choices.

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I just finished Citizens of Earth, the game is so Earthbound-y that even the final battle is like the Gygas battle, the main difference is that you have to recruit people to fight for you and it's not as balanced as I thought?

 

I didn't even recruit everybody and I was so overlevelled after I was done with recruiting that even the final boss fell in two turns, also the healing items kinda suck? They only go up to healing 50HP and become worthless when you have a healer and even more since you heal after battles and there is only ONE STORE for each kind of item. There a few more thing that show that maybe they didn't think it through completely, but nothing really ruins the game.

 

It needs an extra layer of polish, but it's still a hundred times better than that Boot Hill/Earthbound clone. :tup:

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I played Her Story through to 100% completion and i'm kind of on the fence about it. It's a particularly interesting experiment in non-linear narrative, there must have been quite a complicated script process to give rise to the subtle gating that occurs, though the structure of it wore thin pretty quickly and the whole thing ultimately left me feeling pretty unfulfilled. The presented narrative is so ambiguous and unreliable that you have virtually nothing concrete to take away from it upon conclusion, and i'm not even talking about the things that are being popularly debated about its story. It gives up virtually nothing, and though it then implies that this may be its intent, that doesn't make it satisfying.

 

Certainly didn't hate it though, it's consistently surprising and it's well worth looking at for anybody who's curious, it's just more interesting than rewarding, perhaps? Still, I at least feel like i got a worthwhile amount of value out of it.

 

:tmeh:

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I beat Shovel Knight and I don't think I can say anything new except.... I kinda expected it to be harder? I expected every level to be like the airship level. The game is stupendous, I only expected it to be as hard as the games that inspired it, it's no cakewalk, but still, I barely died at any bosses up until the final areas.

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I beat Shovel Knight and I don't think I can say anything new except.... I kinda expected it to be harder? I expected every level to be like the airship level. The game is stupendous, I only expected it to be as hard as the games that inspired it, it's no cakewalk, but still, I barely died at any bosses up until the final areas.

My biggest problem with Shovel Knight re: difficulty is that the new game+ hard mode is terribly uninspired. If I'm not mistaken: Enemies do more damage, and there are fewer checkpoints, and that's it. I was hoping for tweaked level designs or enemy placements or something.

 

In normal difficulty, it felt like there were too many checkpoints, and I was never in danger of losing any progress whatsoever. Hard felt like there were too few checkpoints, like the game (esp. insta-death pits, which were the main danger in both modes) were designed assuming you'd have the normal mode checkpoints, so they were more frustrating, but not harder per se.

 

On hard, the end boss rush seemed very dependent on getting a lucky boss order, since a couple were trivial (Tinker, King) and a couple seemed designed to almost require taking a hit or two along the way (Polar). (Sure, some people can perfect all the bosses, but I'm not one of them).

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Beat F.E.A.R. The combat was a lot of fun but the whole game only really took place in three environments, all with the same dreary industrial theme. I spent a lot of time going in circles, but I have that problem in general with FPS's. If it weren't for the perfect learning curve (I felt like my grasp of the combat rounded the corner of "unstoppable badass" right before the game ended) I don't think I'd have liked this much at all.  :tmeh:

 

Still gonna play through the Perseus Mandate DLC (or expansion? I'm not sure how this stuff worked when F.E.A.R. came out) because of the Gaynor factor.

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I think Perseus Mandate is the better of the two expansions, but it's really just more of the same. Getting lost in the repetitive environments wasn't a problem for me (the game is very linear in my opinion). My biggest issue was how the game encourages you to quicksave all the time. The combat is so fast and lethal that you can lose half your health if you're caught off guard for a second, but on the other hand the game is quite easy as long as you're in bullet time. I don't think it's fun to save every time I walk through a door, I wish the game wouldn't punish me for not doing it. Maybe it's just me though, to be fair I was always at 10 medkits etc. I can't help it. I also don't think the combat feels good when you're not in slow mo.

The other thing that bugs me are the scripted scares and such during which the enemies are invincible. It happens so many times, particularly in the expansions, and the slow mo makes it worse because you have so much time to not-kill them.

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I just beat LEGO Ninjago Nindroids, a LEGO game I never heard of before, based on some LEGO cartoon I've never seen and while it's very much like every LEGO game it does have big differences, with no hub the game has it's Golden Bricks hidden in challenges in each level. There is only one minikit hidden for level, but each level has a few kill/collect all of "X", except sometimes there is usually margin for error.

 

Oddly enough, there is NO margin for error for the time trials, some have bloody 40 seconds to beat them and nothing is a bigger turn off for me in a game than a timer. Even with "fast build" it's too close for comfort. 

 

I guess I could only recommend this if you have played every other LEGO game and want more, if not, you're better off with any of the other LEGO games.  :tmeh:

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I think Perseus Mandate is the better of the two expansions, but it's really just more of the same. Getting lost in the repetitive environments wasn't a problem for me (the game is very linear in my opinion). My biggest issue was how the game encourages you to quicksave all the time. The combat is so fast and lethal that you can lose half your health if you're caught off guard for a second, but on the other hand the game is quite easy as long as you're in bullet time. I don't think it's fun to save every time I walk through a door, I wish the game wouldn't punish me for not doing it. Maybe it's just me though, to be fair I was always at 10 medkits etc. I can't help it. I also don't think the combat feels good when you're not in slow mo.

The other thing that bugs me are the scripted scares and such during which the enemies are invincible. It happens so many times, particularly in the expansions, and the slow mo makes it worse because you have so much time to not-kill them.

 

I have a problem with not saving in general. It's the console gamer I was raised to be. I remember back when me and a friend both had Deus Ex, I was mostly used to console games and he was mostly used to PC games, and we compared stats when we finished: he had saved somewhere around 800 times, I had saved 16 times.

 

So I didn't connect it specifically to F.E.A.R. but I do suppose losing 15+ minutes of progress was more common in this game than most.

 

I thought the horror aspect in general was really shoddy and tacked on. Granted, I played the game while listening to podcasts, so I wasn't exactly allowing myself to get sucked into the atmosphere. But it felt like horror was just not what the game was about. It's pretty easy to make me jump, but the only time it actually got me in either game was once at the start of Perseus Mandate.

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Here's a long video comparing the FEAR expansions, etc. Check the timestamps in the description

 

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Alien Isolation.  Fantastic game, but it only felt that way when I gave up the sheer bloody-mindedness of racing for the end.  Once I accepted that it was a slow, methodical crawl, I gave up worrying about the length or difficulty, and really allowed myself to get immersed in the Alien universe.  Capturing a sci-fi scenario (from literature or film) has never been accomplished as well as this game does it.  I've got to thank Danielle R. for giving this game it's due in the alternative press.  I think she will be vindicated in time.

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Dragon Age: Inquisition... idk. Better than 2. I still love 1 the most. Too much filler, too much fetching while the world is ending. I did like the table missions and wished they had more impact. 

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Dragon Age: Inquisition... idk. Better than 2. I still love 1 the most. Too much filler, too much fetching while the world is ending. I did like the table missions and wished they had more impact. 

 

I played 1 and liked it, played 2 and didn't and am skipping 3 because I have grown to dislike biowares endless dialog trees. However I am wondering how much if any effect decisions from 1 and 2 have in 3?

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Dragon Age: Inquisition.... 

 

I had a weird thing where I really liked DA:I while I was playing it, but when I finished I looked back and hated it. I think I was just starved for a good WRPG, having not played one in years, which blinded me to the utter blandness that is DA:I.

 

 

Alien Isolation.  

 

It's hard. I got past a bit which I couldn't do then took a 2 week break. I should go back. It seems right up my alley.

It was the first encounter with people before you get a gun. I want to do a no kill run on hard. Probably my fault.

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2 is defo the best in terms of story and dialogue and characters!

 

The choices affect lots of things, but nothing in the Big Story.

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I played 1 and liked it, played 2 and didn't and am skipping 3 because I have grown to dislike biowares endless dialog trees. However I am wondering how much if any effect decisions from 1 and 2 have in 3?

 

I did NOT like 2 -- and 3 relies heavily on stuff from 2, however, with the DA:Keep you can see what choices are imported to give you an idea of what's what. 

 

I just... i really miss my Warden. She was the best, and they really toss her aside. The most frustrating thing is that i played thru DAO twice, once with my gut choices, and second time so i could be queen and run everything with Alistair claiming the throne. Apparently they make you warden go off adventuring or something and you get inane letters from Alistair being hopeless in 3. Goddammit. I get how much writing and scripting goes in to the game, but that doesn't mean I'm not frustrated.

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