Recently completed video games

[Zeusthecat]

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)

 

No. It won't. I'm also currently playing this and finished the main campaign with about 105 hours logged. Deep Roads was quite a lengthy segment too so have fun with that. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the experience overall but goddamn it just goes on and on and on... Currently working on DLC since I got the Ultimate Edition and I hear Awakening itself takes around 20-30 hours. Then there are like 5 other smaller DLCs. So yeah, I might be playing this game for awhile still. On the brightside, once I am finished with this, I can easily knock off another 5-10 games from my backlog in the same amount of time it took me to finish just this one and then I will be so close to freedom.

[Twig]

I did Deep Roads first so I actually liked it a lot but it seems like most people do it later in the game and are exhausted and just want it to be over. For me, it was Denerim. I was just like get me out of heeeeere.

 

(final part of game spoiler)

So it especially sucked that the final battle was also in Denerim...

 

(I don't know how you spent 105 hours on it Zeus, I feel like I did everything and I only spent 70-ish! Only...)

 

Awakening definitely did not take me 20 hours, but given how long you spent on the main game maybe it will. The rest of the DLCs are super duper short.

 

Dragon Age 2 is considerably shorter, although much more repetitive, although with much better story and characters, although act 3 (the final act) sucks ass, although it's also the shortest of the acts.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I played through DA 1 with a cheat to instant win every fight, I've still racked up over 20 hours and yet to finish.

[Twig]

That's because most of the game isn't combat! It's either exploring or talking to people.

[Dewar]

Ug, combat took so long in that game though, I enjoyed the other bits.

[Zeusthecat]

(I don't know how you spent 105 hours on it Zeus, I feel like I did everything and I only spent 70-ish! Only...)

 

Some idling here and there was definitely part of it but for me the biggest culprit was how difficult the combat was. I must have specced out my party in a way that put me at a huge disadvantage because I had countless fights that I had to do over and over and was constantly dealing with having almost no potions, not doing enough damage, and not having a tank resilient enough to last during some of the longer battles. Honestly, I expect that I probably spent somewhere around 20 hours just redoing fights that I kept getting wiped out on. Also, that time includes all of the DLC that is integrated into the main campaign so there was a small chunk of hours dedicated to that as well.

[Twig]

Ah, dying and redoing fights. That ol' trick. That'll do it. (I did all the DLC, too, though. I played it very recently, via Ultimate Edition. And then I played DA2. And now I'm playing Inquisition. All for the first time.)

[Bjorn]

I quit DA long before finishing it, but I remember being pretty surprised at how varied its combat could be. I went through one section of the game deciding I was only going to murder enemies with traps. Stealthed, you could nuke whole encounters instantly, even if it did take a bit of time to set up.

Without the combat variety, I don't think I would have played it as long as I did.

[eot]

I played DA:O so wrong. I think I missed every optional party member.

[Trip Hazard]

That's because most of the game isn't combat! It's either exploring or talking to people.

 

I'd say it's about 50/50, so far. I think Alistair really fucks you over initially by suggesting you go to see the Arl of Redcliffe first, instead of getting the best healer which any sane person would.

 

I think the combat is pretty good, but it was too hard for me at the start so I knocked it down to easy. It was still reasonably tough, but now I've got Shale (literally made of rocks) and Wynne (has a wispy moustache, and casts heal a lot) and it's smooth sailing. I think if I put it up to normal now I could cope but...naaaahhhhh, this game is taking long enough as it is.

 

Zeus, you could try getting a respec mod. I think it's criminal that this game doesn't come with a respec option built in.

[Trip Hazard]

Oh, I *actually* completed Rage tonight, just now, five minutes ago. Damn, that last mission was a piece of piss! I bought tons of ammo and gadgets thinking the game was going to open the taps and throw everything at me, but it just didn't do that, at all.

 

It was alright. 7/10, as they say in games churnalism.

[Sno]

I felt like Rage was maybe one of the most disappointing games i've ever played.

That game basically never gives you a scenario in which it makes sense to for you to ever have bothered building tons and tons of craftable gear, all throughout it feels like a crescendo that never reaches anything, the systems and the shooting just never click. It feels like there was a lot being held back for a second game, considering that it introduces some of its most interesting enemies literally just before it limply concludes on an underwhelming set of scenarios and a story that has gone absolutely nowhere.
 

It also featured some of the most aggressively unavoidable and nonsensical invisible walls i think i have ever seen in a game. There's also some really incredibly intense rubberbanding going on in the racing mini-game, fuck that too.
 

Like, and it's not a badly made game, there's so much craft evident in that thing, but it just doesn't amount to anything more than painfully and forgettably average.

[Merus]

Played Twilight Princess again.

 

It's clear that they're drowning under their own expectations, a bit, and the economy in Twilight Princess is probably the worst in any Zelda game I've played, but I really like the dungeons. There's some mediocre dungeons, like the Forest Temple and the Temple of Time, but there's some real corkers, like Arbiter's Grounds, Snowpeak Ruins and City in the Sky. Thankfully, I'd forgotten basically everything except for the items, so I had actual puzzles to solve, it was great.

 

Midna is not as well-written as I remember. My standards for video game plots have really gone up in the last ten years. My standards for exactly how far a character's mouth can extend before it starts getting creepy is the same as ever, though, and Midna does creepy well.

 

Speaking of things that got old in the last ten years: this was the Zelda where Nintendo gave into people wanting a "mature" look, and so there's just a lot of brown. The constrained 3D environments with skybox set dressing to make it feel like the world's more expansive than it is does not hold up. When they pull away from that - anything involving the twilight realm, and some of the more exotic locations - it looks pretty great.

 

I know a lot of people had problems with the plot filler between dungeons. I really like the idea that the game's trying to contextualise the world with additional story bits but it's just not done that well here. Okami does something very similar where it's just a bunch of story to push through until the next dungeon, but it's usually filling in what Amaterasu's like, and it's coasting on charm to a large extent. Beyond Good and Evil does better because 1) there's an ongoing sidequest that tasks you with poking around and observing wildlife, which does a lot to make the world feel inhabited and 2) it gates the game using platformer-esque goal collectibles instead of gear collection, so side areas don't feel quite so much like impositions before you get the next cool thing.

[Trip Hazard]

Most disappointing? Suppose that depends on your expectations going in, but from what little I can remember of the marketing, they tried to pitch it as being more open-world and having more RPG elements than it did. I didn't pay very much for Rage and I bought it way, way after release so I had read plenty about how it was mostly a shooting gallery.

 

Your comments ring true, though. Whilst I liked the heft of the weapons and the nimble, well animated enemies, there are only a couple of moments where I really felt engaged. Jackal canyon springs to mind as one, bringing a few more interesting elements like grenade tossing enemies on high platforms and floating TNT which you had to keep track of, all while keeping an eye on the relentless melee enemies. That bit was more difficult, had less cover, and was generally more intense, but it was very short! Like, 20 minutes and it's over.

 

The ending was so disappointing. Here,press these three buttons, you win! Oh, do I win? How did I win? What do I win? Why do I care?

 

I gave up on the driving when it got to the later "rocket rally" arenas, because the enemies were psychic and always seemed to know where and when the next checkpoint would open. Drove me insane, pardon the pun.

[eot]

It's a double pun, because Insane is also an old off-road racing game

[Tanukitsune]

I beat a few games since my last post:

 

Starship Damrey, with damn cute robots and the story really got me, it's really short and barely has any puzzles, but the few things it does have it does well. 

 

Deadfall Adventures. a ripoff of Uncharted that even has the "notebook" thing to help you solve puzzles, it's very bland, like a so-so vanilla ice cream. 

 

Child of Light, a very pretty game, but it seemed too easy and that was before I realized how game breaking the potions are. It was like playing a whimsical fairy tale. 

 

Rogue Legacy, I'm pretty sure I cheated on the Steam version, so my hope for beating the Vita version was low, specially since I hadn't played in almost a month and left it right before the final area, the hardest area, and yet...

 

I beat the final area rather quick and easy, and the final boss? Sure, I died a lot, but once I got the pattern down, I beat him! HUZZAH! 

[eot]

I finally got around to taking a stroll through Hernhand. I'm going to have to disagree with Clyde here, I think Bernband is better. Maybe this is unfair and has to do with the order I played them in, but to me Bernband was evocative of a city out of a 60's sci-fi novel, while Hernhand felt evocative of Bernband. There are a few things I think Bernband does very well. First off, it has fantastic economy of space, which is something that always appeals to me. Secondly, it's great at creating contrast. For example, you go from an overcrowded room directly onto the strangely serene outdoor bridge with the cars passing by underneath. It's also just amazing at creating atmosphere. For me it's a lot about the details and I think more attention was paid to those in Bernband. Every room has something interesting going on, either with its lighting, sound or geometry. I like the way the low resolution makes things in the distance vague, I like the grain filter that makes untextured walls feel natural, I like the room geometry that's just there to cast interesting shadows.

 

Now, I like things about Hernhand too, but I don't think it's as strong in its execution. It's the opposite of Bernband in its use of space. Every room is large, every corridor is long. It's not as dense. For every scene that makes you feel like you're in a place, there's a long corridor with a stretched jpeg artifact-ridden texture that doesn't feel evocative of anything. There are a few locations that mirror ones in Bernband and for me those highlighted how well executed they were in Bernband. I don't mind the lack of alpha channel on the sprites and that kind of stuff, but Hernhand just seems to care less about every part of its presentation whereas Bernband feels like it cares a huge amount and in fact derives most of its strength from it. I realise I talked more about Bernband than Hernhand, but I can help it because think the former is a pretty amazing lesson in environment design.

[Dr Wookie]

I finished South Park: The Stick of Truth this week (I'm really burning through my steam list). As I said earlier I'm a bit of a lapsed SP fan, but I did like it even though I'm not the ideal audience.  This is mostly because the game is very solid, with mostly fun combat where different attacks are buffed by different input... e.g. hit A here, here and here or rotate left stick then press X at the flash... there's even a special move that turns into a rhythm game. I played as a thief, and my specials felt good and powerful; I'm interested in playing again to see how the other classes feel, but not right now. I also like that while most characters get knocked out, if you choose Kenny as a buddy he'll get straight up killed (for the fight)... also his specials are very risky.

 

I enjoyed most of the references that I got, but I'm sure I missed a whole load others. The whole game felt like an extended episode, and clearly a lot of love went into getting the feel just right. As another Ubisoft-published game, I suppose it's not too surprising that the cutscenes in the last hour or so glitched so that random characters kept fading into and out of existence. With 66% off, I definitely am happy to have played it for $20... full price would have been too much though.

[elmuerte]

Fist of awesome

A rather boring repetitive "streets of rage" kind of fighter. It's one of those heavily pixelated games which try to be retro. The problem is that every fight is the same, the background and the costumes just change a bit. You just keep smashing the punch button and try to kite a bit to line up the enemies.

If you want to play a retro "streets of rage" kind of game you should play Fist Puncher.

[Tanukitsune]

Just how long was that game? I got bored after the first time travel level for the same reasons you mentioned. Also I agree with Fist Puncher being a good retro brawler. 

[elmuerte]

It's quite short. I think maybe 10-12 levels or so.

[TychoCelchuuu]

I've been playing a bunch of games so that when I make my GOTY list it will be a little less "list of games I played" and a little more "my favorites of 2014."

 

So, I finally played Kentucky Route Zero Act III and Here And There Along The Echo. Both were, predictably, among the best games I have ever played in my life.

 

I played (and I guess completed...? I played as much of them as I'm going to for a while...) Bernband and Hernhand. Enjoyed both for the reasons one might enjoy them, pretty much - wandering around alien worlds, feeling various feelings evoked by these kinds of environments, etc. Definitely fun, and I think Bernband especially has some really tremendous level design of the sort that anyone interested in making a first person game ought to take a look at. I like its low-fi aesthetic, too.

 

I played through 'Til Cows Tear us Apart a bunch to the point where I'm pretty sure I saw basically everything. It was fun and cute - I enjoyed the art a fair amount and the music definitely adds a lot. The writing is certainly good enough that you're happy to read it, but it's not exactly anything transcendent. The whole package is what makes it, and if it were in a different package I suspect I wouldn't have enjoyed it quite as much.

 

I've been playing through many of the 50 SHORT GAMES by Thecatamites. I'm a huge Thecatamites fan so that's been great. Eventually I'll stop in our thread about the games and share some more detailed thoughts.

 

Speaking of being a fan of obscure game developers who make games that are varying degrees of obtuse, I adore increpare so it's probably no surprise I had fun with Cooking, for lovers. Increpare games are great because you never know whether it's going to be a huge production or very short. This one was very short. And poignant. And... yep! It's the sort of thing it's worth playing because it takes less than five minutes, and you sort of know as soon as you start playing what you're in for, and there you go. I really appreciate games like this that are sort of the game equivalent of a short poem - evocative, interesting, memorable, and nothing that even begins to overstay its welcome. Chris Remo is always going on about how he wishes games weren't so long, and it's games like increpare's (and Thecatamites') that definitely hammer home how a short game can often be such a better idea than a 40+ hour slog through whatever the fuck it is that some game company thinks you want to spend 40+ hours doing.

 

I played Glitchhikers. Definitely worth a play. It reminded me, more than anything, of a Richard Linklater movie, especially Slacker (but also Before Sunrise). Slacker is a really apt comparison, I think, because Glitchhikers shares with it both the train of strange characters that pop up, providing the spice of the game, and because both Slacker and Glitchhikers (and also Before Sunrise and other Linklater films) have the intellectual/psuedo-intellectual sorts of conversations that revolve around slightly but not overly intriguing and deep concepts, like fucking "sonder" in Glitchhickers (I fucking hate "sonder") and eastern mythology and how you have a bunch of bacteria living on you so you're never alone and so on and so forth. I feel like a bunch of people don't like Linklater films, or they don't like them as much as they might, because they pick up on the fact that these conversations are much more shallow than they at first sound, but I feel like this is really missing the point. These sorts of shallow but quasi-intellectual conversations are the sorts we have all the time, ESPECIALLY if we're the kind of people who might be tempted to dislike insights because they are (actually or ostensibly) shallow, and to think that we're any better at escaping the sort of platitudes that we might castigate a Linklater film (or this game) for is to give ourselves far too much credit. That, though, is kind of beside the point, because whether or not we're in the same boat as these characters having these conversations that we think we mostly see through, it's the fact that these conversations are so common and are as much a part of the mood these movies or this game set as anything else. Bernband and Hernhand are about being lost in these evocative sci-fi locations - Glitchhickers and Before Sunrise are about (among other things) having these kinds of conversations, being the sorts of people that have these conversations, the existence of a world in which these conversations occur, and so on. And all of that is as tremendously compelling as wandering around amongst space aliens, or cooking for one as in the increpare game, and so on.

 

I played Intimate, Infinite by Robert "Radiator" Yang. Definitely neat but as is often the case with his games I wish it were a little less of a pain to play - most of it was fine, but the garden sequence was really tedious and I never ended up finishing it because I deleted some bushes I ought not to have deleted, or something. Still, there's a lot to like in here. I appreciate the very minimal controls.

 

I played The Domovoi a few times. The writing and art are great but the meta-narrative and the moment to moment story sort of left me cold. It's worth a play or three because it's so short, but overall I feel like either it just wasn't for me or I wasn't a fan of the message that I think I got from it.

 

And I still have a bunch of games to play... having lots of fun though. 2014 was a year I played relatively few games, so catching up is kind of neat.

[TheLastBaron]

So I finished The Longest Journey a week or so ago and I liked it. I don't know if I was expecting to like it more than I did because of all the praise it gets, I found it really solid though. I liked the world and the characters and the voice acting, and the puzzles were good too. Basically everything was just really well done. There were times that I liked April and times that I didn't which is a good thing. I felt more time could have been spent in Stark though as you didn't get as much of the world as you did with Arcadia and it seemed really interesting.

I started playing Dreamfall though and it's so weird, I didn't realize it wasn't a point and click game and the controls are annoying me so I'll probably end up playing it with a controller. Also I guess the two worlds ended up merging anyways, which is what you were preventing in the first game? Does this mean you don't revisit the setting of the first game? I don't know how I feel about it, I'm still really early on. We'll see.

[JonCole]

Just beat Danganronpa after like 4 days of rabid consumption. Excellent game, I wish someone had told me that it's basically just Persona + Ace Attorney because I would have played this much sooner. As is the case in both of those franchises, the gameplay isn't anything mindblowing in Danganronpa but I did really enjoy it. The logic of the courtroom-style puzzles seemed a lot more consistent to me than they do in Ace Attorney where I feel like I'm often just throwing guesses at the wall to see what sticks. Also, the story was exceptional. It really kept me guessing throughout and didn't make many cheap leaps of logic to lose me for no reason.

 

I'm really stoked to check out the next game and I really wish that more stuff like this would get made and brought here. Anyone know any other games similar to this? I think I heard that 999/VLR might give me a similar feel.

[Merus]

I think I heard that 999/VLR might give me a similar feel.

 

You heard wrong. 999/VLR are thriller novels with interstitial puzzle bits.