Recently completed video games

[Tanukitsune]

GUYSY GUYS! I am in excitement! If Undertale was like Earthbound, only better, Read Only Memories is like Snatcher only better too!

 

It's a cyberpunk adventure where you must solve the kidnapping of the creator of the first truly sentient robot, and it was pretty amazing, it's almost literally like Snatcher in interface, in the sense where it's really a visual novel where solve a puzzle (item or conversation) to continue. What's really amazing is that it seems that the game have many different paths and how you interact with each character will influence the whole game and you never seem to truly mess up, just make things harder and probably forcing you into a worse ending?

[jennegatron]

I did not like Read Only Memories, but a lot of people did, and I'm glad you did Tanukitsune!

[elmuerte]

Finished Lost Planet 3

It was actually quite an ok game. Running around a shooting stuff, and mech'ing a round and doing stuff. It was enjoyable. The boss battles in the mech were often a bit annoying to get the action queues properly executed. And there was quite a bit of back tracking in it. The side missions were mostly tedious as hell and I didn't complete most of them as they had little effect. I am a bit puzzles on the completeness of how I finished it. I bought every mech upgrade available in the shop, but there were still 2 missing items in my inventory thingy. Same with some character upgrades. Not that I needed them.

Despite the world being mostly a bluish ice wasteland the game did have quite some beautiful vistas.

Anyway, the game wasn't too long. It took me about 13 hours to get through it. There were some tedious parts where I wish I was finally done moving slowly as hell through some generic derelict base.

[mikemariano]

Just finished Shadowrun: Hong Kong.

 

It was a more manageable final boss than I thought, and I liked that the final moments of the story were extremely low-key.

 

I was amused by the fact that no one knows or cared that I battled and defeated an extradimensional god.  I should at least get credit for stopping everyone's collective bad dream!

[Henroid]

Shantae: Risky's Revenge

So if anyone hasn't heard of this series, it's a platformer / action / adventure game staring a half-genie with purple hair - and her whipping that hair is her main means of attack. I missed out on the first game, which came out on Gameboy Color, but this past week I found out that parts 2 and 3 are out on Steam. Part 3 I was aware of being out on the Wii U eShop, and it's as new as last year. Risky's Revenge though is... I think from 2010? I'll note right away that the game series makes a LOT of use of fan-service type stuff, though the characters seem to own it.

 

Anyway I was pleased. I knew it was a platformer, but I didn't know it was in the vein of Metroid games. I thought the difficulty was lacking at first but it definitely ramped up as the game progressed. I didn't take the time to 100% my first play-thru (yes, there are items to collect), but I will on following sessions. The game has multiple endings apparently, and it has a Metroid metric at the end for your completion rate; time and items collected. If the endings are locked to your performance in both cases, good grief, I'm gonna lose my life to it. I like that stuff, especially when it's in a manageable, non-RNG form.

 

I just started playing the third game, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, tonight. It doesn't waste time getting you into the action, and the open-world aspect has been split across multiple islands in the game's setting (but is more more manageable this way; less tedium).

[Griddlelol]

I love Pirate's Curse. It was when I was on my Metroidvania obsession, but it's a good version of that type of game. I think I 100%ed Pirate's Curse, or close to it. 

[Tanukitsune]

Wow, it seems almost everybody who played Lost Planet 3 liked it.

 

I somehow miraculously beat Bloodrayne: Betrayal and... it kinda wasn't worth it, I finally beat the bullet hell boss which was oddly not that hard only to find almost Meat Boy-esque level where you have you to jump on enemies head over giant buzzsaws with no floor.

 

The disappointing part was the ending, it was so short and unsatisfying. After such a brutal it felt like I got no reward, like one of those old NES games where you only get "Congratulations!". 

[twmac]

Yeah, I am starting to get weirded out by the number of people who keep giving Lost Planet 3 the thumbs up with caveat. The game was summarily shit on by almost everyone at release (then again, so was Lost Planet 2 and that game is amazing).

[SecretAsianMan]

I remember really liking certain parts of Lost Planet 2.  I specifically remember one mission where you use a railgun mounted on a train to kill a giant akrid.  It required a lot of coordination because the gun had to be aimed, fired, and reloaded at separate stations.  I somehow managed to achieve this with a group of random people and it was amazing.

[twmac]

Lost Planet 2 is one of my favourite games of the last generation. The way that Co-Op works is genius because it can be massively punishing when you don't know what you are doing but becomes immensely rewarding when you start working together.

 

Also, from a design perspective the level you are talking about is so good because you start in a two carriage section sniping enemies then have to run up the other train, with a strong possibility for instant death and then culminate in that boss fight.

 

Each section feels distinct and every section of that game is like that. There is one section that starts as an assault on ship turns into a tower defence game and then becomes something similar to a single-lane Lords Management with you having to defend your base against armed 'creeps' while trying to fight your way to their respective base and blow it up.

[elmuerte]

I haven't played any other Lost Planet, and I picked it up in the Capcom bundle so it didn't cost me a lot. (In no way would I have payed the original retail price.)

I simply had fun playing it without it becoming tedious or presenting difficulty spikes. I can figure it wouldn't review well at launch.

[Trip Hazard]

I've played Lost Planet 3 for 3 or 4 hours now, and it's...okay. It's solid. The guns sound good and feel good to use, the graphics are not bad, the writing (I'm specifically thinking of when your PC sends and received video logs with his wife) is strong. The controls on a gamepad are intuitive.

 

There isn't enough variety in enemies, and there's too much trudging slowly through barren snowscapes, but if the player limits their engagement with side-missions they can cut down on this. The main base is tiny and poorly laid out. The yokel rock music in the mech is godawful.

 

The main character reminds me a lot of Nick Cage, which is nice. I'll probably finish it if I can just get over wanting to do all the side quests.

[Dewar]

This weekend I beat Majesty 2.I bought it a long time back on a recommend from Giant Bomb, got about half way through, then put it down. I happened across the Quicklook last week, and decided to finish it off. It's a fun (sort of) RTS where you don't directly control your units. Instead, you act as the mayor in an RPG game, building and researching products for shops to sell, setting quests, etc. It's pretty clever and fun, but I figured out the reason I dropped it a few years ago is that the last few levels are hard. What's worse, you'll often play like 30 minutes in before you realize how screwed you are. With the judicious use of mid-mission saves, I finally made it.

 

I'd recommend it if you'd like a taste of a game mechanic I haven't seen done elsewhere, but not if your main goal is to actually finish games.

[Bjorn]

Majesty remains one of my favorite games of all time, and the last time I tried Majesty 2, the original was still better than it by a long ways.  But that was before a bunch of patches and expansions, so maybe 2 eventually got improved.  They botched the AI in 2, and from everything I knew at the time of launch, it was pretty much unfixable.  2 comes so, so close to being right, and then just isn't, which is a massive bummer to me. 

[jonbjohns]

This weekend I beat Lifeline for the PS2 as part of my Extra Life stream. I had the expectation that this would be a bad game, and yes it was pretty frustrating to play almost entirely by voice. Nothing worked consistently and there were voice commands that she responded to that weren't listed in FAQs or instruction booklets I've found while playing it live.

 

Essentially, the game is a point and click horror game that is operated by voice. However the story makes it an amalgamation of sci-fi,horror, survival. Parts of this game's story I actually enjoyed, but there were things that shattered my experience. Things from the very get go like I, an african american male, playing as "myself", a white guy. Also, taking over an hour to open a voice activated door because this game is actually terrible (Pro-tip: use a batman voice).

[Dewar]

Majesty remains one of my favorite games of all time, and the last time I tried Majesty 2, the original was still better than it by a long ways.  But that was before a bunch of patches and expansions, so maybe 2 eventually got improved.  They botched the AI in 2, and from everything I knew at the time of launch, it was pretty much unfixable.  2 comes so, so close to being right, and then just isn't, which is a massive bummer to me. 

 

I just looked and it turns out I played without the DLC, which is probably a good thing because I don't really fancy playing two more campaigns worth of missions. Not having played the original, I found the AI to work all right, no glaring bugs or anything, just really hard starting setups and bosses in the last few missions.

[Bjorn]

The AI in the original was charmingly hard to predict, which is what made it great.  You couldn't force group heroes, they either decided they wanted to run around together, or they didn't.  Gnomes would eventually abandon their building projects, and spend all day playing at the fair or chasing down bounties that they had no business chasing (though at very high level they could be pretty badass).  I played a lot of multiplayer in it, and I remember one session where my buddy and I had a pair of warriors (one paladin and one death knight) hammering on eachother for like an hour because they each had a healer type unit backing them up and couldn't actually kill one another.  It was often just entertaining to watch heroes wander and around and see what they were going to decide to do. 

[Dewar]

Ah, with the amount of effort required to beat some of these later missions, that sort of AI would be the peak of frustration. In a less demanding game though, that sounds like it could be pretty cool (and closer to what I expected when I first bought the game.)

[twmac]

I've played Lost Planet 3 for 3 or 4 hours now, and it's...okay. It's solid. The guns sound good and feel good to use, the graphics are not bad, the writing (I'm specifically thinking of when your PC sends and received video logs with his wife) is strong. The controls on a gamepad are intuitive.

 

There isn't enough variety in enemies, and there's too much trudging slowly through barren snowscapes, but if the player limits their engagement with side-missions they can cut down on this. The main base is tiny and poorly laid out. The yokel rock music in the mech is godawful.

 

The main character reminds me a lot of Nick Cage, which is nice. I'll probably finish it if I can just get over wanting to do all the side quests.

 

On X360 you could fix the Country music problem by rotating through the radio channels until you got to the custom soundtrack which would link to any ripped CDs. I imagine the PC will have something similar.

[elmuerte]

Trine 3

Picked it up at 50% discount and 100%ed it in 6 hours. Story can be completed in less than 4 hours. Getting all prisms and completing all challenged takes a bit more effort, the last two survival challenges are somewhat difficult. In overall the game is quite easy. Compared to 1 and 2 it's really easy and also simplified. Hardly any complex puzzles to solve. Also no abilities to unlock, you start with the "full" set of abilities. Unlike in the previous games there are no different arrows, and there's only the cube which the wizard can summon (a single cube). The game also finishes at about 1/3rd of the story (or maybe half way). It's not really a cliffhanger, it just stops there as if you would continue to the next level. The full 3D world is quite nice, except when you need to interact with it. In 1 and 2 you often were struggling with physics and positioning, but with the 3D world it's even worse. I don't know how many times I've jumped to the wrong direction and missed my landing.

So in short, looks gorgeous but it's really a disappointment.

[Trip Hazard]

On X360 you could fix the Country music problem by rotating through the radio channels until you got to the custom soundtrack which would link to any ripped CDs. I imagine the PC will have something similar.

Didn't know that, thanks. That'll certainly make the occasional frosty foray more bearable

[Dewar]

I beat Steamworld: Dig last night. It wasn't exactly what I was hoping for from a game influenced by Miner: Dig Deep. There's a large emphasis on platforming, wall jumping, and combat, where I was hoping more for strategic mining and trying to not get stuck. It was fun enough, regardless. 

[mikemariano]

Just beat Read Only Memories.  It was OK.  The recent 18-minute game Murder did a much better job scratching my cyberpunk itch.  ROM had much more of a plot, but the twists weren't very satisfying and the re-use of characters got tiring after a while.

 

I got what my Steam Achievement calls Ending Number Three, which is basically just the Wheatley plot twist in Portal 2.  If only I had been nicer to Turing!  I don't know if I'm motivated to try and get any of the other endings, though.

[Tanukitsune]

I beat Murdered: Soul Suspect and while I really enjoyed the story, in most case the gameplay seemed to get in it's ways? I remember people saying that the stealth section were bad, and yeah, they're not fun, but aren't even necessary, I was glad that in some cases (maybe all?) you could just run away.

 

As for the investigation part, even some of that feels like fluff, specially the mini-game where you have filter out the right words as in "Was she: A)Being chased? B)Eating Ice Cream with a Friend?", ugh.

 

 

 

I also beat Lucius II, if you remember the first game, is was more or less like The Omen, where you play as a the son of the devil and slowly kill off everybody in the house without raising any suspicions. While it had some goofy and cheesy moments, it had potential. Well, in the sequel it feels like the gave and just made a B movie?

 

You start off in a hospital and you basically set traps for people to fall in and die, but... it's just too goofy here. The AI is hilarious and will walk into the obvious and visible traps and won't even reach as you set up a trap right in front of them.

 

In the first game, you fell like you were actually pulling some devious master plan, this one feels like a cartoon. In one case I put a wallet in a slippery puddle that let to a open elevator shaft  and... people would still fall for it.

 

The most hilarious case was when I somehow got DYNAMITE in a hospital and just set in next to some sitting patients, set it off and when a nurse came over to check the sound, she panicked and walked into the fire and died and so did another patient walking by.

 

This game is terrible, this game is awesome?         

[Trip Hazard]

I finished...erm...Divine Divinity? Had fond memories of playing the demo as a kid, mucking about in Aleroth, killing pet pigs, pinching ganja from someone's garden and generally being a nuisance. The full game goes all serious about halfway through and has some massive dungeons to click through, and it ultimately tried my patience. Not bad, honestly, but too bloody long.