Recently completed video games

[Ucantalas]

Well, I just finished Risen 2: Dark Waters.

I really enjoyed it, and scratched a certain piratey itch I've had for the past few months. Plus, for what amounts to an action-RPG, it didn't seem too long to me, as many are, clocking in at around 26 hours for me to complete.

It started off slow... really slow. I think I spent more time on the first 3 islands than the entire rest of the game. You start off feeling very underpowered, even for the beginning of a game. It takes a long time before I felt comfortable enough to move forward in the game simply because I really didn't feel ready for any combat encounters at first. (By the end of the Sword Coast area I felt like I was actually a capable and competent person, but that was about 10 or 12 hours in...)

Once I had trained a little and gotten a bit stronger, I found the combat to be quite decent. I liked having the off-hand weapons be a bit slower than your main weapon, with a cooldown period, lending a bit of strategy to when you should fire off your pistol/sand/coconut/whatever.

 

The one thing I really have to say though, is... there are times where this really feels like part of an MMO. Maybe its the controls, maybe its the quick action bar along the bottom making it look a little like WoW, I don't know. But if someone said to me, "Yeah, Risen 2, that was supposed to be an MMO when we started but we had to cut back so we switched over to a single player game and salvaged as much as we could", I would be like, "Yeah, feels like it."

[syntheticgerbil]

I'd pretty much say the only tasteful Twisted Pixel game there is is The Maw. Splosion Man is a bit sparse, but there's a lot of mean spiritedness and gruesome ideas that exponentially carres over all the way to Gunstringer. I haven't play Lococycle so I can't say how extreme it gets in comparison to some of the less savory parts of Gunstringer. Although that this tone is a surprise to anyone kind of says to me that they finished The Maw and maybe three levels of Splosion Man and that's about it.

[Tanukitsune]

Eating innocent animals is tasteful?

 

To tell the truth, I stopped playing Mrs. Splosion Man because of how distasteful I found it with "girlified" Splosion Man, she spouted the kind of stuff you heard from that Barbie parody in the Simpsons and while I don't remember exactly, I stopped when I realized the next level was a spa or a mall? You know, because girliness!

 

The worst I saw in LocoCycle was the little people strapped with dynamite they toss at you, suicide bombers are rather distasteful, but almost a staple in video games.

[syntheticgerbil]

Well haha, I was going to mention it, but I just chalk that part up to the food chain. Like in Bambi... I think.

 

But it The Maw ends with a hug and a wave goodbye, you know...

 

My favorite suicide bombers in games are the ones from Oddworld Stranger's Wrath. They are so fucking scary but are yelling dumb shit like, "Boom baby!"

[Raldoh]

Recently completed Deus Ex: Human Revolution on the PC. As a fan of the original Deus Ex I did not expect very much from it. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised! Regardless of more or less completely streamlining the RPG-mechanics, what was left was still a solid stealth shooter with some truly fantastic art direction and production value (apart from some truly horrible voice acting for some insignificant characters). Story was pretty good, would have liked to have some of the questions regarding ethics and human nature being fleshed out a bit more. Well worth giving a try if you haven't already, oh and definitely give the original a go!

 

Onto KOTOR!

[SecretAsianMan]

I finished all the currently available levels for Hitman GO.  I played it over the course of a couple weeks in brief toilet sessions.  It's really good.  I love the board game aesthetic and the levels are pretty well designed.  The different challenges for each level add some variety but aren't too difficult to figure out, even with just basic trial and error.  I managed to get all the stamps because I enjoyed playing it so much.  My only real gripe is I wish there was an option to turn on a step counter.  There is one that can be seen when you open up the hints menu but it's an extra step that you have to take every time you restart a level.  It's easily the best Hitman game I've ever played.  Also the only one.

[Griddlelol]

Onto KOTOR!

 

Oooh, you're in for a treat. Easily the best Star Wars game, and a pretty darn good RPG to boot. Hasn't aged particularly well though.

[osmosisch]

Tie Fighter is better IMO, but it's close.

[Griddlelol]

Man I always forget about TIE fighter. I still prefer KOTOR, but that's probably because I prefer RPGs in general.

[Tanukitsune]

I beat "The Novelist", a weird indie game.

 

You are a ghost inhabiting a summer house were a novelist and his family will spend the summer, the novelist needs to finish his novel, the wife is an artist and the kid... is a kid.

 

You play "story mode" or "stealth mode", which just means whether the humans can see you or not, but since you can hide in lamps and jump from lamp to lamp it doesn't really matter which you choose. The ghost must find clues, a.k.a. "read every note in the house", then sneak up to the humans and enter their memories and search for more clues, then you read their minds and they will say what they want.

 

Here is the real interesting part of the game, you can only really help one of them, but if you get the clues for all of them, you can make a "compromise" and try to help the other person a little, so it's a bit of juggling act, and I'm not sure you can even get a happy ending with all three of them? It does get rather tedious, though.

[Yasawas]

After a heartbreaking experience during my first playthrough two years ago where I nudged the cart and deleted my save game, I've finally gone back to Super Metroid and I'm going to suggest it's alright. The first half I thought was truly magnificent, the second not so much. Part of this is me just subjectively not liking the watery/sinking sand area as a place to be, but it also seems like the point where the ideas ran out, the bosses definitely get worse and the progression either gets far more linear or it just felt that way as I wanted to put it to bed. When it worked it was fantastic and I have a new appreciation now for everything that came after and how much they owe to it but I can't help but be a little disappointed by it overall.

[elmuerte]

Lili: Child of Geos

Originally a mobile game, and it shows. The main gameplay mechanic revolves around swiping, but it's quite doable with the mouse. The game world is quite beautiful, or maybe just very colorful. It reminds me much of a studio Ghibli movie. Anyway, the core gameplay element where you have to pull flowers out of the back of spirits becomes tedious at some point. Luckily you don't have to bean all spirits in order to complete it.

 

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

An action RPG with the usual elements. The game is not very well balanced. Most of the it's between easy and challenging, and then sometimes it's seriously hard and you die within a second. And those are not even boss fights. Some boss fights I completed by getting some hits in, run away for potion and spell cooldowns to finish, and get back. This was quite tedious. When you reach the 2nd part of the game the devs apparently lost interest in dressing up the world and it's just hordes and hordes of monsters you have to fight through without much variation. The worst part is probably the tower defense segments. In the 2nd part you have a lair which at 2 occasions you have to do a tower defense game. The version I played was rather bugged and some traps did not work as they should (according to forums). Either way, this was tedious as still, and impossible to finish without monsters getting it, but I did not have to retry it (luckily).

Anyway, there are much better other action RPGs to play. This one isn't strong in mechanics or story, or anything else. You're better of playing something like Titan Quest, or Grim Dawn, or Diablo, or Torchlight, or etc.)

 

Stick It To The Man!

This is kind of an interesting platform game. Running around in levels, reading and influencing people's minds. Most levels have a puzzle part where you have to put thought stickers at various places, and some avoid-attackers jumping around stuff. The latter part is tedious and sometimes feels like it's mostly chance rather than skill. The sticker puzzling part was sometimes just trying everything on everything to see what sticks (pun intended).

The game has a funny story and great art direction.

 

Hack 'n' Slash

just finished this recent Double Fine game. It's one of the games that made it out of the amnesia fortnight. It was rather short, hopefully the community is going to create some additional content. In this game you "hack" the game in order to progress. Initially you hack by setting variables of objects (which are hackable), later on you'll be able to alter scripts. You don't get full access to the script, you can change some operators and variables. Some variables are the function being called. So you could do a lot, including breaking the game. There's no info on what method names can be used, so you have to check other scripts to get some info on that. The scripts are presented in an assembler like way, and editing a script gives you a node based graphical representation. So it is a bit difficult to read and analyze this. But this is part of the fun. If you screw up big time the game can crash. But that's not a big problem as every level transition automatically saves, and you can go back to any save point. And just like Paper's Please you can branch a save game at any time.

I would say that this is a game for programmers.

[undermind9]

Finished The New Super Mario Bros (Wii u) with all star coins

Thoroughly enjoyed the progressive difficulty, if I was 6-10yrs ands this was my first Mario it would be as difficult as Mario 3 was in my childhood

The star coins adds even more especially since the star road levels were some of my favorite. Star-8 took better half of the afternoon

I am going to go through Luigi-u next, after world 1 I can tell the floaty jump is going to be bad news

[Yasawas]

I loved Super Mario U too! It gets shat on a bit but I think a lot of people just go from left to right and on to the next level, if that if you make a point of going for all the star coins it becomes a different game.

 

Luigi U I enjoyed too but has an annoying flaw if you try to play it the same way - the game is fundamentally harder and I always found lives scarce therefore because you can't save progress whenever you complete a level I was constantly worried about having to use a continue and be made to recollect star coins in several levels again. It's a stupid system and that alone is responsible for me enjoying it way less as the actual content is fantastic and one of the best pieces of DLC I've ever played.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I reached hole 1001 of Desert Golfing, so I guess I 'completed' it. I didn't actually get a scoreboard, so either that was changed or I misunderstood how that works. I cared mostly about personally progress anyway, I managed to work my way down to less than a 3 average per hole with a total of 2896.

 

This game is actually just something that instills a wonderful cocktail of feelings. You've presumably all heard the podcast saying the premise of just being a simply controlled ball in a series of sandy golf courses, but my personal experiences really went beyond that. It has real triumph and mastery, like most games out there.

Every time I hit the ball and had to watch and wait for it to settle it actually had a really significant tension as I watched to see if it managed to stop exactly where I wanted. The ball starts slowing so much that it actually scales the tension so well when you're hoping it will stop in the exact right place. And on top of that is the unknown of what the next hole could be, an almost flat plane or a maze of catacombs you'll need 4 perfectly precise shots to navigate.

 

It's just so good, I really don't think I'm done playing, though I think this is probably the milestone where my play slows down (especially since I can go back to PC gaming soon). It's just weird though, I don't know if I just had the right attitude going in or what but I find a lot of games really lack in making the minutae engaging and I have to consciously bear in mind the macro rewards of continued play (where the story or mechanics will develop a real pay off) but this tiny little thing has pulled me right along with it all the way.

[prettyunsmart]

I beat "The Novelist", a weird indie game.

 

You are a ghost inhabiting a summer house were a novelist and his family will spend the summer, the novelist needs to finish his novel, the wife is an artist and the kid... is a kid.

 

You play "story mode" or "stealth mode", which just means whether the humans can see you or not, but since you can hide in lamps and jump from lamp to lamp it doesn't really matter which you choose. The ghost must find clues, a.k.a. "read every note in the house", then sneak up to the humans and enter their memories and search for more clues, then you read their minds and they will say what they want.

 

Here is the real interesting part of the game, you can only really help one of them, but if you get the clues for all of them, you can make a "compromise" and try to help the other person a little, so it's a bit of juggling act, and I'm not sure you can even get a happy ending with all three of them? It does get rather tedious, though.

 

I think I managed to get some semblance of a happy ending for all of the characters, but it does end up being bittersweet for everyone involved.

 

The end of the game was pretty rough for me as I'd been trying to keep everyone as happy as possible, which usually meant going for small disappointments rather than big ones. Ultimately, I ended up having to choose between disappointing the wife and son, or getting Dan a job as an English professor. I gave up the job, which really hurt, because in real life that's pretty much the thing I want more than anything in the world (and I know that if I want to stand a chance at getting it, I'm going to have to ask my wife to make a similarly jarring move across the country). 

I found a lot of the game to be lacking, but that last choice really got to me. Damn it, being an adult is complicated.

[Bjorn]

I finished Wolf Among Us a couple of nights ago.  It was okay, but nothing spectacular.  I'm somewhat convinced that traditional style mysteries just don't work very well in video game form.  I think games that are about exploring a space to solve a mystery work (like Miasmata or Gone Home), because the player has some agency, can discover clues out of order, pick up things from the environment without them being highlighted and ultimately figure out what is going on without the developer telling them.  But when a game has a straightforward narrative like WAU or LA Noire, it just feels like it loses any sense of agency in the discovery process, which is the fun part! 

[prawks]

 

I finished Wolf Among Us a couple of nights ago.  It was okay, but nothing spectacular.  I'm somewhat convinced that traditional style mysteries just don't work very well in video game form.  I think games that are about exploring a space to solve a mystery work (like Miasmata or Gone Home), because the player has some agency, can discover clues out of order, pick up things from the environment without them being highlighted and ultimately figure out what is going on without the developer telling them.  But when a game has a straightforward narrative like WAU or LA Noire, it just feels like it loses any sense of agency in the discovery process, which is the fun part! 

I think I feel the same way, the last episode didn't really pack the punch I was hoping for. And you really had to be paying attention to "get" the ending scene, I feel.

 

 

I beat the newest Tomb Raider the other day. Really enjoyed the first half of the game, but I think I just got bored after a certain point with the story. Though I thought the character development was good, Laura's relationship with different characters takes some nice turns. It probably could have been a little shorted, with more tombs to explore. Combat was pretty fun once you get the hang of it, but a little exhausting at times. Some good stealth moments sprinkled around towards the later part of the game which made it fun picking people off with the bow. And pretty neat scenery and environment to run around in. Overall I enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it to people who like 3rd person shooters with some platform-y stuff thrown in.

 

Also, I was super pissed that you only get to dual up on pistols at the very last second of the game, and in a super lame cut-scene way. I thought for sure when you get the old guy's pistol it would be dualie time, but no dice.

[Twig]

Pff who would want to use pistols when you have that sweet rad bow and arrow???

[Tanukitsune]

 

I think I managed to get some semblance of a happy ending for all of the characters, but it does end up being bittersweet for everyone involved.

 

The end of the game was pretty rough for me as I'd been trying to keep everyone as happy as possible, which usually meant going for small disappointments rather than big ones. Ultimately, I ended up having to choose between disappointing the wife and son, or getting Dan a job as an English professor. I gave up the job, which really hurt, because in real life that's pretty much the thing I want more than anything in the world (and I know that if I want to stand a chance at getting it, I'm going to have to ask my wife to make a similarly jarring move across the country). 

I found a lot of the game to be lacking, but that last choice really got to me. Damn it, being an adult is complicated.

 

I think we got the same ending, only I interpreted it differently.

 

I just beat the PS3 version of the Deadly Premonition: Director's Cut, which I think might be the best version? Sure, I miss the 360's green tint on everything, but... this version is so ridiculously stable, not a single crash or glitch, I only got some ridiculously low frame rates and that's about it... Everything is easier in this version, the driver, the mini-games... It was great to play this game with nothing going wrong...

 

I'm looking at you PC port.

 

Apart from some DLC that I think was added to the game, the extra scenes don't really add that much up until the very end.

 

If you've played the game before and even if you haven't, it's pretty obvious who is reading the story and you assume his grand daughter was named after Emily... Only to find out that it's Zach not York and he's a bit senile and couldn't remember the child's name.

 

Also, at the very end, Zack sees the girls and York at the dinner and leaves with them to solve a case? I don't know if he died or anything, but when the child returns Zack has vanished.

 

Is Thomas transgender or a transvestite? The game never seems to even address his dress.

[Trip Hazard]

Finished Risen. 

 

Was just relieved to get it over with by the end. I quite enjoyed the first half of the game, slowly levelling up, feeling myself improve at the combat, encountering new enemies quite regularly. But, the latter half is one big cave, basically, with a load of shitty (easy, but shitty) puzzles in it. By this point, you've seen everything, and you've mastered the combat, so the game throws insta-kill deathtraps at you and you never encounter enemies solo, but in a group. You always have to get enemies stacked up in a line if there is more than one, or else you get juggled and there's nothing you can do. 

 

I was like when I started the game but at the end I was like :/

[Dewar]

I completed King's Bounty: The Legend on Monday. This game pretty much gives me everything I wanted out of Heroes of Might and Magic. It's the combat sections from HoM&M, stiched together with a real time RPG framework instead of the kinda lame city-building stuff. I had a lot of fun, but boy is it long. I've noticed that I have quite a few 1C published games that I've collected over the years, and they all seem to suffer from this flaw. At some point, I just wanted it to end, which is sad for a game that I was enjoying so much at the start.

 

Regardless, it's worth checking out if you're interested in that sort of thing.

[Bjorn]

All of the modern KB games suffer from being overly long, but are otherwise terrific games.  I think the base Armored Princess game (without the Crossworlds expansion) is the shortest of them all.  I eventually gave up on Warriors of the North, as it just drags on forever.  I haven't played Dark Side, but it sounds like it makes the length even worse, by encouraging replayability by making each class a unique character, with unique companions and one would presume at least some changes to dialogue and whatnot. 

[Dewar]

I plan on playing the Crossworlds version of Armored Princess (I got the platinum pack on Steam that came with both) at some point, but I'm not quite ready to jump in and blow that much time again.

[Tanukitsune]

I just beat Max and the Curse of Brotherhood, which I guess is either a sequel or reboot of Max and the Magic Marker.

 

The intro and ending are almost Pixar quality and in this game you can't draw everywhere, limiting to only glowing spots on the floor and each of the spot's color represent a different element, wood, water, fire... 

 

This means you can't break the game's physics almost never and you have to think a little more, but only a little more. You have be pretty creative a few times and the few times the game demands you draw in the middle of a jump, the game slows down giving you enough time to crate a vine or platform.

 

Frankly, the biggest flaw in this game is the number of levels. I have no idea why, but the first non-tutorial world has so many levels I had to take a break to not get bored by the game... only to have the rest of the worlds have only two or three levels in them.