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I finished Dishonored on Saturday. I am lukewarm on it. I don't enjoy games that give you tons of tools to kill people with, then encourage you not to use them. I might do a violent playthrough just to actually use some of the offered powers. I found the stealth to be a big letdown because of how linear and small the levels were. Teleporting around would be so much cooler if there wasn't one obvious stealth path to teleport along. 

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I finished Dishonored on Saturday. I am lukewarm on it. I don't enjoy games that give you tons of tools to kill people with, then encourage you not to use them. I might do a violent playthrough just to actually use some of the offered powers. I found the stealth to be a big letdown because of how linear and small the levels were. Teleporting around would be so much cooler if there wasn't one obvious stealth path to teleport along. 

 

I did a non-violent playthrough followed immediately by a super violent playthrough. Highly recommended. Also, going through it a second time made me realize how non-linear the levels were, even if you were primarily going the stealthy route. There are a surprising number of alternate ways to get through a level that you never really realize on your first playthrough. The level design in this game is among the best in my opinion.

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I did a non-violent playthrough followed immediately by a super violent playthrough. Highly recommended. Also, going through it a second time made me realize how non-linear the levels were, even if you were primarily going the stealthy route. There are a surprising number of alternate ways to get through a level that you never really realize on your first playthrough. The level design in this game is among the best in my opinion.

 

Funny, I figured that I wouldn't have the patience for a non-violent playthrough, so I just did the super-violent one and was really put off by how the game reacted. I wasn't killing everyone in the level, just everyone who got in my way, but it was really disconcerting and tedious how quickly the writing turned, from condemning the conspiracy against me and the empress as worth any amount of blood spilled in order to stop, to calling me a monster because I'd killed a few dozen traitors, soldiers, and cops in the course of restoring order. In the scene before the final mission, the way that everyone treated me like shit for accomplishing all of their dreams and schemes for them while they sat in the bar and chatted really turned me off of any good feeling for a sequel. A non-violent playthrough should be its own reward, don't bash me over the head with heavy-handed writing about morality and just force. Barf.

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Funny, I figured that I wouldn't have the patience for a non-violent playthrough, so I just did the super-violent one and was really put off by how the game reacted. I wasn't killing everyone in the level, just everyone who got in my way, but it was really disconcerting and tedious how quickly the writing turned, from condemning the conspiracy against me and the empress as worth any amount of blood spilled in order to stop, to calling me a monster because I'd killed a few dozen traitors, soldiers, and cops in the course of restoring order. In the scene before the final mission, the way that everyone treated me like shit for accomplishing all of their dreams and schemes for them while they sat in the bar and chatted really turned me off of any good feeling for a sequel. A non-violent playthrough should be its own reward, don't bash me over the head with heavy-handed writing about morality and just force. Barf.

 

Oh absolutely agreed. The story in this game just sucks, period, whether you are doing a violent or non-violent playthrough. And fuck that boat guy that calls the guards on you at the end if you were doing a violent playthrough. I immediately restarted that mission and murdered him before he could ever sound the alarm. Especially considering all the morally reprehensible stuff you have to do to complete the game 'non-violently'.

 

Luckily for me, the act of playing the game was just so so good that I was able to keep my eyes from rolling out of their sockets. Story bits aside, I got immense satisfaction out of both playthroughs.

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Especially considering all the morally reprehensible stuff you have to do to complete the game 'non-violently'.

somehow kidnapping and dissapearing people is more moral than murder.

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It still bothers me that games don't react with alarm to you killing one person. That's why MGS5 seems so interesting - even though you're a soldier in a war zone, every death hurts you because that's one more person you can't recruit.

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Just yesterday, I finished a playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.  It was my second time playing through the game.  I was a staunch defender of the game when it was first released and praised nearly everything about it, in the face of some of the criticism the game received.  Upon replaying it, I need to temper my praise a bit.  I apologize in advance for the wall of text, but I have a lot of thoughts I want to put down.  Also, possible spoilers for the game.

 

Last time, playing on the Wii with the Motion+ thing added to a regular remote, I had zero issues with the controls.  Everything generally worked smoothly, I had no problem with playing the harp (apparently this was a big thing back in 2011/2012) and I pretty much always slashed where I wanted to slash.  Now, I don't know if the integrated Motion+ controller is different or if my skills have declined, but I really had trouble with some areas.  I could never get the game to slash where I wanted it to slash, and that damn harp was a nightmare for me this time.  Thrust strikes, which are integral to several enemy battles, were really difficult to pull off for some reason.

 

The game is still very slow to get started, much slower than most games to which I am accustomed.  You probably spend a good hour or more in the opening hub world before you can get down to "the action".  

 

Fi, your companion for the game, is annoying.  Like really really annoying.  I think I might have been impressed by "ooh shiny!" the first time that I played it, but this time, every dialogue interruption really started grating on my nerves.  "I calculate an 85% chance that you should go to this area next".  It's just obnoxious writing for me, with these silly percentages and whatnot.  Further to that, the game's text boxes that come up every time you pick up an item on a new play session get really tedious.  This was a huge complaint back when it first came out, and it bothered me then, but really bothered me this time.

 

In addition to following the regular Zelda tropes, I didn't realize just how much SS relied on a lot of lazy conventional gaming tropes.  Some of them were integrated well, or at least logically consistently (the powerless sections, the forced stealth section), but the mandatory escort quest is brutal.  I'd completely forgotten about it after I played it the first time, so it was quite a frustrating and unwelcome surprise when it came up this time.  

 

For those who aren't familiar, Skyward Sword’s world is a series of navigable areas connected by a sky overworld.  You fly around on your giant bird and drop into these areas on the ground.  You start at one point on the ground and make your way around the ground areas.  At each save statue (there are a handful throughout the area), you can fly back up to the sky, and you can select which statue you want to drop down to – a modified, slightly slower fast travel.
 
At one point, you need to extinguish a giant fire in one area with a basin of water from another area.  Your robot sidekick, who’s an absolute asshole to you for no reason except that the writers thought that it would be funny (NB: it really isn't), hauls the basin away.
 
However, when you drop back down from the sky to the volcano, the game doesn't let you choose which statue you want to drop to.  Instead, the game forces you to the bottom of the volcano for seemingly no reason.  So I get to the bottom of the volcano and Scrapper, that little piece of shit, he tells me that he won’t carry the basin up to the top because it’s too heavy (even though he was able to lift it from Lake Floria and carry it into the sky), but that he’ll haul it if “we play a game” and I escort him up the volcano while protecting him from damage.
 
It’s such a hackneyed trope, but more so than that, it’s so forced and lazily awkward that it’s ridiculous. “You can drop to any save point on the map at any time, except for this one time, but there’s no good reason for it.” Combine that with a stupid robot that won’t get out of the way of enemy attacks and it’s obnoxious. Fair play that Scrapper has a good amount of health, but nonetheless, there’s no logical requirement for this escort quest. It’s just crammed into the game for literally no reason except to have Scrapper continue to be a piece of shit to you.
 
To that end, characters being turds to you happens a fair bit.  One of your main allies, the Water Dragon, whom you save from injury earlier in the game by going on a long and irritating hunt for the necessary cure, holds part of a song that you need to learn to open up the final dungeon.  However, despite the fact that you nursed her back to health and saved her lake from monsters, she won't teach you the song until you prove that you are the real hero by going on a long fetch quest in the wooded area that she flooded, swimming through the area to collect notes for the melody.  It's a really annoying requirement that just seems to impede your progress.
 
You also need to fight the two bosses three times each - Ghirahim and The Imprisoned.  Now, I quite like Ghirahim as a character - his writing is definitely the best in the game.  But the battles are just obnoxious and require motion controls that are not at all intuitive, especially not the first time you face him.  Needing to face the two bosses three times each, with only minor changes to the battles themselves, was just so very lazy.
 
Also, I just hate hate hate the Scervo battle.  Scervo sucks.
 
Now I don't want people to think that I'm super down on the game.  I'm definitely disappointed as my memories were best left alone, but I did still replay the entire thing, for over 40 hours.  The game's highs are wonderful - when you're successful in combat, it really does feel like an accomplishment.  Dungeon and overworld design is top-notch, the music is fabulous, boss fights are wonderful (I really loved Tentalus, even if it looks like a creature from Monsters Inc), item use feels good, and the story is interesting and deep, while still being straightforward enough to follow.  It's just that the game's lows are really bad.  It's a bloated game, much longer than it needs to be, and now that I have much less gaming time than I did three years ago, I'm very protective of that time - games can't be bloated or unnecessarily huge.  Things like the Silent Realm powerless areas, the forced stealth and stupid escort quest areas, the flooded fetch quest, they could have been ditched in favour of more or beefier dungeons, which would have been welcome.  Ditch the crafting requirement.  Don't make us fight the same boss so many times.  Things like that.
 
I think I'm suffering from Zelda fatigue.  In the past 12 months, I've played seven titles from the series.  I'm not at all excited for the next one, and that needs to change, because they're still good games.
 
tl;dr still good, but not nearly as good as I remembered

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I finally knocked two more games off of my Steam backlog over the weekend.

 

First, I finished Unepic. This game gave a horrible first impression. The premise behind the story isn't necessarily terrible (dude goes to the bathroom while playing a tabletop game with his friends and is transported to a medieval castle) but the writing and voice acting is absolutely atrocious. After five minutes I turned the character voices off and the game immediately improved. I guess terrible writing is a lot easier to deal with when you are reading it rather than hearing it spoken.

 

I contemplated quitting this game after a couple hours in but decided to stick with it as I did find the Metroidvania and RPG elements somewhat appealing. Over time, the game surprisingly ended up growing on me quite a bit and revealed itself to be a much more competent and well designed game than I originally gave it credit for. Navigating through areas was satisfying and just challenging enough so as not to be frustrating. There was a wide variety of different enemies with various strengths and weaknesses that forced you to get creative and actually use a lot of the spells, scrolls, and potions that you might otherwise ignore in a lot of games. And the boss fights were extremely intimidating at first, but manageable once you figured out a workable strategy. There were definitely a few bosses that seemed completely impossible at first and had me considering whether I really wanted to keep going or not, but each time I pushed through and eventually found a way to crush them. Looking back, those boss fights were actually all really good. I don't normally like boss fights but they really did an excellent job of presenting a seemingly impossible situation and then giving you a wide enough variety of tools to overcome it and feel smart and badass for doing so.

 

So I'm definitely glad I ended up playing this. Overall, the gameplay ended up being quite enjoyable despite the terrible writing and finishing the game actually felt like a real accomplishment. It's just too bad my reward for finishing was a dumb scene where the bad guys in the game go into the real world and try to sodomize a guy who says bad things about Unepic. I would normally spoiler an end game detail like that but this game doesn't earn the right to have anything about it spoilered.

 

The other game I finished was Outlast. I'm not really a fan of survival horror but felt obligated to complete this since a friend had gifted it to me and I consider it a part of my backlog which I am so damn close to completing now. It was pretty alright. I got a good handful of jump scares throughout and the atmosphere was good and creepy through a lot of the game. Similar to other survival horror games I've brought myself to play, my favorite part of this game was the first couple hours. At that point, everything is still a mystery, things are so much creepier because you have no information to go off of, and it isn't even really clear what kind of game it is. And then, the naked men start showing up. I don't know, call me a weirdo but there is something about staring at the flaccid penis of a deranged, emaciated cannibal that just sucks all tension out of the game. I guess that's how they thought they could bring something new to the tired old "spooky insane asylum" cliche: just make all the enemies naked. It's just really frustrating because there is no good reason why they wouldn't be wearing clothes. It is stormy and presumably cold outside, plus there are other deranged people around that apparently like to castrate other patients as well. If I was a patient there and had witnessed the horrors that had been committed, the first thing I would do is put on five layers of clothes.

 

Flaccid penises aside, this game was entertaining enough to hold my interest for the 7 or so hours it took me to complete it. I enjoyed exploring around and the tense situations definitely got my heart pumping. Unfortunately, as the mystery unraveled, it became clear that it was a really stupid mystery. Like really stupid. I'll just leave it at that.

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I would imagine a certain subset of people that play these sorts of games would be really creeped out by dicks. Personally, when I watched a few videos I thought the same as you, "You let that thing dangle out there, and someone's gonna chop it off."

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I finished Elliot's Quest, a vania in the Zelda II style (Steam seems to have a lot of those lately).

 

The game is incredibly unbalanced, I was tripping over magic upgrades left and right and same goes for the money chests, I eventually had run out of things to buy and the only thing I could buy was potions, which I didn't need.

 

The game kinda breaks pretty fast since the first magic power you get is a tornado that doesn't do damage, but stuns almost every enemy, sucks up flying enemies and makes you almost invincible, might combined with the "too many magic upgrades" makes the games almost too easy...

 

But at the same time the game has so many optional and practically useless stuff, specially the crystals, you need four to open a gate to best weapon and armor, but... the rest are for optional bosses which do nothing and are broken in the game's favor by practically killing you in one hit.

 

The game had a morality system which I never saw shift an inch and while the game is "easy", you are not informed of anything.... What does the item you just picked do? Figure it out yourself! The game even has a feather in stores I could never buy or figure out what it did.

 

The ending felt so unsatisfied since it made me remember how much effort I put into the game for apparently nothing... I didn't steal and that didn't do nothing, I got all the crystals and nothing happens, I beat a few optional bosses and nothing happened.

 

 

If you ever get this game, just get the four crystals to get the best gear, you won't need any of the optional items... even the dash is only needed for ONE optional boss.

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I just finished Assassins Creed: Rogue which is a decent sequel to Black Flag. I will still suggest Black Flag over Rogue as the game to play to get the ship combat, but that's just because the world of Black Flag is larger and better realized. Rogue has made a few fun changes to the standard AC formula, unfortunately few of these were part of the ship game play, which is the part I enjoy more. In one of the two naval maps there are icebergs you can shoot to damage and destroy smaller ships, which can be fun, enemy ships will also occasionally board you which is a neat reversal of game play from Black Flag.

 

The real changes are in the more classic AC game play of city exploration. Since you are playing as a Templar this time around you have to be on the lookout for assassins trying to take you out. Occasionally you will hear whispering and have to either find or avoid an ambush, it definitely spices up city exploration in a way no other AC game has. Similarly there is a new side mission called assassin interception, you have to track down multiple assassins while they get in position, you get 3-5 minutes before they will start trying to kill the target. They were a fun new mission type, but nothing too special. Overall Rogue is a decent game I enjoyed playing, but nothing revolutionary. I am interested in trying out Freedom Cry which was a standalone expansion for Black Flag. I really just want more ship combat/piracy game play. Maybe the upcoming Warhammer Man O’ War Corsair will scratch that itch without being tied to a landlubber series.

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After fighting through all the tech problems I was having, I beat Mass Effect. I have a lot to say on it, mostly from the perspective of delving into something that has a bit of a legacy now, but I'll write about it another time. Now I'm moving on to part 2 and it is a complete "what the fuck" for me as of the start. This better go somewhere good.

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Undertale: Never has a game brought such joy, laughter, sorrow and anger to me, it's just amazing... I really regret not backing it.

 

It's incredible what it managed to do with it's "combat" systems, it's so versatile and fun!  :tup:  :tup:  :tup:

 

BUT IT NOW!

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Instead of butting it I suggest you buy Undertale. It's funny, charming and has a good RPG system. I won't spoil much about it but there's a free demo you could try out. It's basically the game's opening and it sets the scene well. (note I have not finished it)

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I finished Undertale and am thoroughly pleased. Possibly my favourite game this year.

At least try out the demo here, it's basically just the first area of the game and is a perfect introduction to the game.

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I finished Chroma Squad today! It was really good. It has three endings, and each of them has their own unique final chapter(s)...I think...but I doubt that I'll play it through again. Maybe some day in the distant future. It was quirky and a lot of fun the first time, though!

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I (mostly) finished Uplink over the weekend. The release of HackNet reminded me that I'd taken a couple of shots at playing Uplink, but never got very far, so I decided to go back to it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if I'd recommend it. There are a few moments in the game that really make you feel like a badass hacker, but there's also a ton of repeating the same boring thing over and over for cash. There are also a lot of mechanics that aren't explained particularly well (thankfully Introversion has a pretty good FAQ webpage up that helps with a lot of it) and, if you fail to understand them and get caught, your save is deleted. Cheating and using save backups, I got all the way to the end of game on the evil side, only to find out that I physically can't hack fast enough to beat the game as things are now, and I'll have to go back to the start an accept certain missions that aren't marked in order to weaken the opposing company enough to be able to win. So, I watched the end on Youtube.

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I've taken probably a half dozen good runs at Uplink over the years, and never been able to get to the end.  I didn't backup my saves, because I wanted to try and make it pure, but ultimately having to start over is what made me quit trying, so maybe I should have.  I always had a fondness for that game though, even if it there are a lot of problems with it.

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There's a lot of depth there, but none of it is communicated directly by the game and, with such a huge price of failure, it doesn't really encourage exploration either. It's like a school teacher encouraging you to sound out a word using phonics, then rapping you on the knuckles with a ruler every time you get it wrong.

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I really liked the idea of Uplink but I was always frustrated when I actually played it.  I felt like the UI got in the way a lot of the time (too much clicking on specific pixels with a mouse while a timer counts down) and the systems are pretty unclear in how they work.  I tried to play it several times and didn't even realize there was a story until like the 5th attempt.  The music is pretty catchy though.  It still sticks in my head for some reason.

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I am only just realising why it is that Uplink allows you to hank a bank, transfer a ridiculous amount of money into your accounts, and skip all the progression. If you can do it, you don't need the progression to ease you in.

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I am only just realising why it is that Uplink allows you to hank a bank, transfer a ridiculous amount of money into your accounts, and skip all the progression. If you can do it, you don't need the progression to ease you in.

 

Is that really true? What I recall is that even if you know how to do it, you need to buy a bunch of specific stuff to be able to do bank hacks, and that this stuff costs enough that you have to do milk runs for a while to be able to afford it.

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That's what I remember as well, but it may still be possible to skip a pretty good chunk if you know what you're doing.  I don't remember the progression well enough to say for sure. 

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From their FAQ:

 

.1 - Bank Hacking

Despite the risks involved, hacking a Bank is relatively easy. As long as you are fast, by following this guide you should have no problems. Before you start, you will need to know an Account Number at the bank you want to hack, your Uplink Bank Account number, and the IP of Uplink International Bank.

1. Connect to the bank, with InterNIC as your first bounce, and bypass the monitor and proxy with Level 5 Bypassers.
2. Break into the account you want to steal from, using the account number as the user name, and the password breaker to get the password. You should not have a trace on you because of the monitor bypass.
3. Enter the transfer screen and transfer money to your Uplink bank account
4. Delete the Statement logs from the account you stole from saying you just transferred money.
5. Connect to Uplink bank, log into your account, bypass monitor and proxy then delete the log saying you received money
6. Connect to InterNIC and delete the bounce logs.
7. Start Spending. You don't have to wait before you can spend the money you just stole.

Note that once you have a password of an account, you don't need the monitor bypass to access it, the bank doesn't trace normal account entries.

 

So this would require about 50k for the best Bypassers. I guess since you're not on any sort of trace, power of your machine doesn't matter so much. But then I read a lot of complaints of people trying bank hacking and getting caught, so I wonder if it's a bit more complicated than this.

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