Recently completed video games

[SuperBiasedMan]

Relevant.

[Bjorn]

You've made me want to play it even more than I did before.  How long did this trainwreck take to get through?

[Tanukitsune]

Of course it would win an award, it deserves to be game of the year! XD

 

The game let's you choose the players in this game, you can have a gay couple and it has "sensitive" issues... handled horribly. I already explained how terrible the game is at being morally ambiguous and the situations get increasingly hilarious.  

 

 

The game can take about 6 hours,  I had to waste a lot time doing boring jobs to afford to continue in the game and fishing to not starve, the fishing is ridiculous, no I'm not kidding, it keeps making Ridiculous Fishing references every time you fish.

 

It's better that you try to play it in not too many sessions, you'll want to keep the plot fresh in your brain to see the inconsistencies, although like I said, many happen in the same scene.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I too own this already, intended to play it after hearing good things but now I REALLY wanna play it.

[Tanukitsune]

I beat Monument Valley, which might not be the only "Escher" puzzle game, but it's certainly the best one I've played.

 

How many of you felt really bummed out when the totem follows you and sink into the see and joy when it returned?

[twmac]

Of course it would win an award, it deserves to be game of the year! XD

 

The game let's you choose the players in this game, you can have a gay couple and it has "sensitive" issues... handled horribly. I already explained how terrible the game is at being morally ambiguous and the situations get increasingly hilarious.  

 

 

The game can take about 6 hours,  I had to waste a lot time doing boring jobs to afford to continue in the game and fishing to not starve, the fishing is ridiculous, no I'm not kidding, it keeps making Ridiculous Fishing references every time you fish.

 

It's better that you try to play it in not too many sessions, you'll want to keep the plot fresh in your brain to see the inconsistencies, although like I said, many happen in the same scene.

 

I played this for about 30 minutes at EGX Rezzed and there was this meta moment where you play as the devs and they keep going on about how they need a lesbian black girl so that they win all of the awards. I think it was meant to be funny but it just came off as hamfisted.

 

I played it past that and was bored senseless - when people started making a lot of noise about this being a good game I was very surprised.

[Sno]

So Spintires, that kickstarted offroading sim with the really, really fancy physics simulation and terrain deformation tech. That came down to ten bucks during the Steam sale and i had heard enough good things about it that i decided to give it a shot. By "good things", i mean that it's allegedly one of those weird niche sims that executes on its subject matter well enough that it works perhaps beyond its intended audience. Hell, i've certainly never driven offroad in conditions even remotely like what are depicted in this game, but i'm still really enjoying it. It certainly helps that it's a very polished and elegantly presented game, much moreso than you might expect.

 

The general gist is that you start out on one of a half-dozen or so fairly enormous maps with what is very likely a crappy jeep wholly unsuited to the ultimate goal of the map, so you first go around exploring to map out terrain, hoping to discover new trucks better suited to your needs, then running equipment out to abandoned garages to set them up as resupply points, and ultimately setting out to accomplish whatever the map's ultimate objective is. (Using your UI's map to swap between all of your controlled trucks on the fly, perhaps configuring one at a garage so it can go refuel or repair another truck, or go hook that truck up to a winch and pull it out of the mud.)

You start learning to read the terrain and assess which truck is suited to which challenge, and also how you should respond when something goes horribly wrong.

 

Really, and all of the terrain deformation and physics simulation that happens is really, really impressive. Having a road you need to travel back and forth across a bunch become nearly unusable because you've dug a huge ditch through it with careless driving, or trying to cross a river only to notice that your truck is starting to lift off the riverbed while water piling up on one side threatens to tip it over, it's all really tense and pretty great.

 

Not the kind of game i usually end up recommending, but i've been having a bunch of fun with this, it seems to do what it's trying to do very well. (Unfortunately, the 66% off pricing has already ended, but it's still available on a smaller discount until the sale is over.)

It also has four player online co-op, i believe? Apparently you can't save in the mp mode though, and based on my experience it seems like a map can take a few hours to complete. There's also a casual mode that eases up on some elements of the simulation and lets you "rescue" a truck to any controlled garages. (Though it forces you to abandon any loads the truck is carrying, so it doesn't let you cheat through the cargo-hauling goals.)

[Tanukitsune]

I just beat Tex Murphy: The Tesla Effect and... now I kinda wished I backed this game instead of the Jane Jensen's one.

 

Most people would agree that Moebius is merely so-so and the Gabriel Knight remake... I couldn't make it though the first conversation.

 

Not only do I wish I KS'd the Tesla Effect, I kinda wish that that I could play the old ones, but I just couldn't deal with the controls and just watched Longplay's of them. Tex is an adorkable loser, closer to Inspector Gadget than to Sherlock, which I why I liked him 100 times more than Gabriel Knight.

 

The puzzles were contained and logical, the "puzzle" puzzles are skippable, and while the story was a bit far-fetched, it was still enjoyable, not to mention it managed to get a chuckle or two out of me.

 

For once, I actually kinda feel bad to have gotten this in a cheap bundle, that's how much I enjoyed it, not to mention it's the first FMV game I've played in ages. 

[elmuerte]

Legend of Grimrock 2

Just finished this. This game is so much better than the first one, and the first one was already great. I really enjoyed the fact that it's not just going deeper and deeper in a single dungeon. Being able to complete areas out of sequence was also nice, but doing so can make things really difficult and then really easy. I completed

the bog

after

crystal caves

, so that was rather easy. The puzzles are really good and often take quite some puzzling to solve.

I played it on normal which was often quite challenging. The final boss was also much better than in LoG1.

I hope that they are going to make a LoG3 which adds more story and NPCs, i.e. becoming more like Stonekeep.

[Bjorn]

I played all the way through Among the Sleep last night while I was waiting on South Park to download (only took 2-3 hours to play).  It's really fucking intense, I can see how some people could actually have problems playing it.  It's in the vein of a Gone Home style exploration of a space kind of game.  Though ultimately I found myself rushing through it.  Each area didn't feel compelling enough to really dig into, and the hints about the story (mostly through a child's drawing) weren't interesting enough to hunt them all down. I think Papa y Yo managed to do a better job of connecting an exploration of childhood trauma with game mechanics.  But I find it fascinating that we've seen several of these types of games in the last few years.

 

Oh, seeing your toddler shadow toddling along is one of the most surprisingly affective things I've experienced in a game.  It sells just how small and weak you are compared to the world. 

 

Oh, there is a DLC prologue chapter, which I think is skippable.  It kind of explains things you already figured out and doesn't add much besides another 20-30 minutes of doing the same thing, but in a different house. 

[eRonin]

I finally finished Mass Effect 3 yesterday. I played with the extended cut, and I was pretty happy with the ending. I feel I would have been happy (in different ways) regardless of whether or not I had the extended cut though. I think a high-profile game that finally lets you

have a Pyrrhic and hollow victory would have been ambitious and with the extended cut, it feels too "neat"

. But again, I did like the ending that I got and felt it was a nice way to cap off a series that I had devoted quite a lot of time to. Kai Leng was a dick though. I could have done without Kai Leng.

[Bjorn]

You should reload a save and get the secret ending.  Which I delightfully got by accident the first time I fired up the extended cut.  To get it:

 

Shoot the boy.  I have a bad/good habit of just shooting NPCs in games to see if they react.

[SuperBiasedMan]

You should reload a save and get the secret ending.  Which I delightfully got by accident the first time I fired up the extended cut.  To get it:

 

Shoot the boy.  I have a bad/good habit of just shooting NPCs in games to see if they react.

 

Aw man, now I wish I had finished ME3 cause I probably would have gotten that ending. (at least I'm guessing so, I don't 100% know what you're talking about)

[eRonin]

You should reload a save and get the secret ending.  Which I delightfully got by accident the first time I fired up the extended cut.  To get it:

 

Shoot the boy.  I have a bad/good habit of just shooting NPCs in games to see if they react.

 

Haha, unfortunately I got that spoiled when I snooped around seeing what the other endings were like. In any case, I uninstalled the game already and have moved on to my next single-player game (Tomb Raider)

[Tanukitsune]

I just beat Richard & Alice, a short adventure, almost a visual novel with puzzles. Think "To The Moon" but made with AGS.

 

It's a game about two prisoners in a post "snow-pocalypse" world, who tell (and relive through gameplay) how they ended up here, mostly Alice. You control Richard in the jail scenes, and Alice in the flashbacks.

 

I'm not entirely sure, but I think your decisions affect the end a lot. The ending did catch me by surprise. It's not as great as To The Moon, but it's so cheap on Steam right now, it's worth giving it a shot. I can guarantee it's at least better than Always Sometimes Monsters. XP

[Dewar]

So Spintires, that kickstarted offroading sim with the really, really fancy physics simulation and terrain deformation tech. That came down to ten bucks during the Steam sale and i had heard enough good things about it that i decided to give it a shot. By "good things", i mean that it's allegedly one of those weird niche sims that executes on its subject matter well enough that it works perhaps beyond its intended audience. Hell, i've certainly never driven offroad in conditions even remotely like what are depicted in this game, but i'm still really enjoying it. It certainly helps that it's a very polished and elegantly presented game, much moreso than you might expect.

 

The general gist is that you start out on one of a half-dozen or so fairly enormous maps with what is very likely a crappy jeep wholly unsuited to the ultimate goal of the map, so you first go around exploring to map out terrain, hoping to discover new trucks better suited to your needs, then running equipment out to abandoned garages to set them up as resupply points, and ultimately setting out to accomplish whatever the map's ultimate objective is. (Using your UI's map to swap between all of your controlled trucks on the fly, perhaps configuring one at a garage so it can go refuel or repair another truck, or go hook that truck up to a winch and pull it out of the mud.)

You start learning to read the terrain and assess which truck is suited to which challenge, and also how you should respond when something goes horribly wrong.

 

Really, and all of the terrain deformation and physics simulation that happens is really, really impressive. Having a road you need to travel back and forth across a bunch become nearly unusable because you've dug a huge ditch through it with careless driving, or trying to cross a river only to notice that your truck is starting to lift off the riverbed while water piling up on one side threatens to tip it over, it's all really tense and pretty great.

 

Not the kind of game i usually end up recommending, but i've been having a bunch of fun with this, it seems to do what it's trying to do very well. (Unfortunately, the 66% off pricing has already ended, but it's still available on a smaller discount until the sale is over.)

It also has four player online co-op, i believe? Apparently you can't save in the mp mode though, and based on my experience it seems like a map can take a few hours to complete. There's also a casual mode that eases up on some elements of the simulation and lets you "rescue" a truck to any controlled garages. (Though it forces you to abandon any loads the truck is carrying, so it doesn't let you cheat through the cargo-hauling goals.)

 

Hmm, I had considered this for a while, but I'd heard that it really breaks down after a few hours of play. How much time did you put into it if I might ask? Also, keep in mind we probably still have a Christmas Steam sale coming, so there might be another shot at the discount.

[sclpls]

I completed Shadow of Mordor! It was good, and I have lots of ideas about game design now.

[Sno]

Hmm, I had considered this for a while, but I'd heard that it really breaks down after a few hours of play. How much time did you put into it if I might ask? Also, keep in mind we probably still have a Christmas Steam sale coming, so there might be another shot at the discount.

 

I have about 15 hours on it with a couple of the maps completed and a lot of mucking around on others, and i intend to keep playing it for some time. The basic framework of the game is quite thin, it's very loose and open-ended and if you're not good at setting objectives for yourself it'll probably feel like there's barely anything there. (There's actually some really fun, goofy achievements in the game, so don't ignore those. I'd also encourage learning on the casual mode, but then playing on the hardcore mode, since casual essentially negates a lot of the more involved elements of the game's mechanics, such as the shifter, fuel management, and basically ever needing to rescue a vehicle.)

 

Still, i find the mechanics on offer engaging enough that it shines through the relatively spartan context offered by the game. For me, i think it kind of scratches the same itch that Red Lynx's Trials games did, the way this is also so much about sustaining mommentum and balance enough to carry you through rough terrain. Sort of fudging the physical limits of what your vehicle can do to overcome some tricky environmental obtsacle. As to how realistic the physics are, i literally cannot tell you. I'm guessing vehicle damage being modelled as a health bar suggests that it's not aiming for 100% authenticity. The range of what it presents is where its strengths are, because with such a wide range of things being simulated, you often have far more options than you might initially realize. Obviously small trucks can nimbly navigate around obstacles, and larger trucks can move through deep mud and cross rivers relatively safely, but the largest trucks can actually even just bull through light forest and create new paths.

 

It also really is just a very nice and polished game, where these types of niche sims usually tend to come with a certain degree of jank. Instead, there's some really elegant, stylish floating UI and the game controls well and has some really interesting little mechanics. For example, It does this thing where it simulates a little gear shifter in the bottom right corner of your screen, which you control with either the right stick of a gamepad or the mouse, forcing you to manually slam from first into second before you lose your mommentum in the mud and stall your engine. Regarding other controls though, there are some oversights, like there not being any winch controls mapped to the gamepad, which - if playing on a pad - is definitely an issue since the winch will often be the solution to many of your problems. (The developer is allegedly working on full gamepad support, along with various other improvements.) The other issue i'm having with it is that it only allows you one checkpoint save, starting another map overwrites your progress. (Though it's not like a map presents you with a long and involved campaign. As i've noted, each map is only a few hours or so.)

If you're apprehensive about risking money on the game, and i can understand why, wait and see if it gets another deep price cut when/if the winter sale comes up.

[chickenmonger]

I recently finished *Lilly Looking Through*, after getting it in one of the ubiquitous bundles that pop up every day. I spent a little less than 3 hours finishing it.

I will admit that my love of adventure games is usually in their art and sound design, because frankly, I stink at solving puzzles. That doesn't stop me from seeking them out and playing them, however. Lilly Looking Through succeeds in this area. It is a beautiful game.

Spoiler free, one should have correct color vision in order to finish this game. I feel that any sound/light puzzles in adventure games should offer options for solving in an alternate way. I ended up looking up a Let's Play in order to count mouse clicks...which was annoying. The built-in hint system was helpful on the early puzzles, but became less helpful as the story progressed.

All in all, worth playing when purchased on sale. The animation is cute, and the story, though it felt a bit unfinished, sets up the potential for a sequel.

[Dewar]

I just beat Tex Murphy: The Tesla Effect and... now I kinda wished I backed this game instead of the Jane Jensen's one.

 

Most people would agree that Moebius is merely so-so and the Gabriel Knight remake... I couldn't make it though the first conversation.

 

Not only do I wish I KS'd the Tesla Effect, I kinda wish that that I could play the old ones, but I just couldn't deal with the controls and just watched Longplay's of them. Tex is an adorkable loser, closer to Inspector Gadget than to Sherlock, which I why I liked him 100 times more than Gabriel Knight.

 

The puzzles were contained and logical, the "puzzle" puzzles are skippable, and while the story was a bit far-fetched, it was still enjoyable, not to mention it managed to get a chuckle or two out of me.

 

For once, I actually kinda feel bad to have gotten this in a cheap bundle, that's how much I enjoyed it, not to mention it's the first FMV game I've played in ages. 

 

How much did watching those videos help you with Tesla Effect? I can't decide if I want to go back and play most of the old ones, or watch them, or just jump in to the new one.

[Merus]

So I finished Steamworld Dig. It's a quite clever mining game - you go down a shaft, mining and collecting resources, but you're also making paths to get back up so if you don't think carefully about how you're mining, you can make it so that you can't mine in the direction you wanted, and potentially not be able to get back up. There's some light puzzle solving and gear gating, more as spice than anything, I think - I don't know if I needed two separate systems for acquiring new abilities.

[Trip Hazard]

Started and finished Max Payne 3 in a little over 8 hours. That's a good running time, really; any longer and it would overstay its welcome. But, I enjoyed it, for the shooting gallery that it is. Excellent music! Glad I only paid a few pounds for it, mind you.

[Sno]

Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is... Wait... Is that a 3D pun? Fuck this game!

Anyways, no, it's actually pretty good. It's essentially Geometry Wars 2 and Geometry Wars Galaxies mashed up into one package. The main mode has the Gradius-like options and mission progression that Galaxies had, but there's another mode that is also pretty much just Geometry Wars 2. (There's also a co-op campaign or something? It even has online play.)

 

The boss fights and some of the other mission types that have been added to the Galaxies-esque mode are pretty fantastic, and i like the new mechanic they introduced for how you collect primary weapon power-ups. Some of the progression restrictions in that mode feel super tight though, i wouldn't be surprised if most people don't get very far.

Some people have been bitching about the three dimensional stages limiting your view of the arenas, but the much bigger issue is how muddled the distinct spawn tones are in the audio mix of the game, which is kind of a really important part of being able to keep up with the chaos of Geometry Wars. I feel like i'm getting taken out by small, fast-moving enemies way more frequently without those clear, distinct sounds serving as an alert. It feels like something they could probably patch and they should, it's the only thing that really feels like it's keeping the game down. Also, it's less of an issue and more down to personal taste perhaps, but I don't like the tron aesthetic as much as the vibrantly beautiful vector graphics-aesthetic featured in the previous games.

 

Kind of going to give a "Hey, the first Geometry Wars may be on steam, but Geo 2 and Galaxies aren't, and this is kind of like those" recommendation here. It's not the best Geometry Wars has been, but it's still better than almost any other twin stick shooter out there.

[Zeusthecat]

I recently finished Dishonored twice. Once on normal (non-lethal low chaos) and once on hard (super murderer high chaos). This game is absolutely phenomenal and has some of the most satisfying gameplay I've ever experienced. Things that are awesome about this game:

• Banter between guards and other NPCs is very entertaining. Peeking around a corner to see things like a guard throwing a rat into one of the light walls and then busting out laughing were always a treat.
• The controls are about as close to perfect as I think a video game of this type can get. I never had any difficulty blinking all over the place and quickly switching between various powers and weapons to do what I needed to do.
• The weapon and ability variety was very well balanced. I used pretty much every power and weapon at my disposal during my high chaos playthrough and I love how each situation could be solved by using multiple different variations of powers and gadgets.
• The boat guy called me out for being a cold blooded murderer and alerted enemies to my location in the last level during my high chaos playthrough. That was awesome.
• I dumped a guy into a bathtub of goo to help a witch brew some stew. Sorry Slackjaw.
• A bunch of dudes + a rat swarm + grenades + freeze time = a lot of dead guys and me feeling like a badass.

Also, I finally decided to set up a Twitch account and start streaming because of this game. It was fun and there were definitely some cool moments that came out of that. I also did a dumb thing and streamed the last two missions against the Truman Show soundtrack (one of the best motion picture soundtracks ever!!!). When the video was archived, all the audio ended up being muted so I deleted the video. But to my surprise, it magically appeared back in my Twitch archive last night with the audio fully restored and it ended up turning out kind of awesome! I'm attempting to upload it to my YouTube channel but not sure if it will get rejected for copyright reasons. We'll see. But this game is great and everyone should play it!

[elmuerte]

Finished Batman: Arkham Origins today

I took a break for a long while and returned back to, apparently, do the last few fights. I'm glad that it did not have a long multi phase boss battle this time. Just like with Arkham City this game became rather tedious with the constant running around the city to just do another series of fights. I've done most of the side quests, only remaining were the riddler things which is simply too much, and the 20 fights you have to do after you completed the game. I just can't be bothered to do that.