Recently completed video games

[Sno]

I just finished Ys: Oath in Felghana on the PSP.

Took a chance on the game because it looked like a fun snappy action RPG and came away completely in love with the game. Searching for a comparison, it reminds me most of the latter-day Castlevanias, despite the top-down perspective. It's very focused on action and exploration, a lot of elaborate boss fights, and a fucking phenomenal soundtrack. Not a huge game, finished it in a little over twelve hours on normal, but the gameplay is really tight and the challenge is enjoyable. I am probably going to do a new game plus run on a higher difficulty.

I would recommend this game.

The localized retail disc was only released in North America, but it's apparently available on PSN everywhere.

[Tanukitsune]

As a Spanish gamer I feel kinda bad for not supporting Spanish adventure games, I didn't even know about the existence of a Runaway sequel.

I guess it's because I despise Spanish voice actors? We seem to use the same ones for every game and they never seem to give a damn. I should definitely try to get this game in English.

I finished D.W.A.R.F.S., which I got in the Strategy First Bundle that's going on, I'd call it a Nanobots ripoff if it didn't come out the same year. It's a level based adventure game where each dwarf has a special ability (strength, fixing things, bombs, jumping...) they must use to complete the mission.

The game has no text or voice except for the cutscenes, which barely have any text at all (BAD GUY ESCAPES!), they use images instead. It was short and simple, but it had a bit of charm and if you can still get it with the coupon code, I'd recommend it.

[Kolzig]

Doesn't Runaway have two sequels actually?

I only played the first one and I waited for that since the project was ever made public, shame that the final game wasn't that good. I sold it away right after I completed it.

[Tanukitsune]

Only two? I could swear there was more? Oh, now I remember! There are two versions of the original Runaway, Pendulo Studios altered the original game before releasing it worldwide.

[Kolzig]

Wikipedia is the god, yadayadayada.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway:_A_Road_Adventure

Runaway

Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle

Runaway 3: A Twist of Fate

What did they change with the first game, it came out two years earlier in Spain than in US and three years earlier than UK? Or did it just take that long to localize it to different languages?

[miffy495]

Half Life 2 Episode 1 is now done, throw another single player Half Life universe game on the pile. That's 5 down, 3 to go (and one mod). Thoughts in the Valve replay thread. Makin progress, yeah!

[CaptainFish]

I just beat Runaway: A Road Adventure.

It was alright. One thing I think I enjoyed more than The Next Big Thing was the camera work. Since all the dialogue occurs on the game screen, rather than zooming in for closer shots, the closer camera of Runaway is much preferred to the often zoomed all the way out stuff in TNBT. I'm not sure how I feel about the mechanic where you can find multiple things in one place, but only after you know that you need them. That coupled with some kinda pixel-hunt-y things meant that I usually knew the solution for a puzzle but had no idea where to find the item.

The game seemed a little bit cutscene heavy, but I'm not sure how I feel about that. There are usually points in adventure games where there is a big important dialogue, and you get the chance to choose every option and go through in your order. If you take that and turn it into a cutscene with more animation and production, that should be better, right? I think I end up feeling less engaged. One example that comes to mind is the big dialogue in the penultimate act of Curse of Monkey Island, just before you get turned into a child. It's one of my favorite parts, I love annoying LeChuck "my way." I'm not sure if I would like it as much if it had just been a scene that played, even if it had better music and more dynamic camera and animations. (Maybe I should've just used the pirate song as a better example)

This complaint might be unfair, but I think Brian talks way too much. He basically performs descriptive audio for the vision impaired. I don't think there's a single animation that occurs that he doesn't narrate before and after. I understand that adventure protagonists talk a lot, but usually it feels like they're reacting to what's going on, not just explaining everything to the audience. Maybe it's because he's the straight man and all he's capable of saying are matter-of-fact statements, but by the end of the game I just wish he would stop yammering.

Anyhoo, I'm definitely going to play the last two because I'm kinda interested in the plot arc (the cover of the 3rd game has me intrigued).

[Tanukitsune]

I just beat A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda, which is basically Megaman X only much MUCH easier... and shorter!

You pick up the scrap left by enemies to upgrade your weapons, and you can look for hidden database entries, some of which give you upgrades. You get unlimited grenades if you complete the database, breaking the game even more!

[elmuerte]

Crysis

It's just Far Cry; different island; slightly different story. Game crashed at least once a level. And I even had to manually delete a save game because it crashed during saving (and then crashed while showing the savegame list).

The most annoying part was the escape by boat; I had to do that a shit load of times. The heli was just insane. I eventually went by foot, and still has to run like hell from the heli, it could follow me through the dense jungle.

Just like with far cry,

the story changed, and now I had to fight mutants... erm.. aliens

.

And then suddenly, the credits rolled by... I think they forgot to add an ending to this game. The game didn't reach a conclusion...

[Lu]

That entire game was buggy as shit for me. Kind of ruined the whole thing for me. Falling through geometry, crashing, having to redo entire missions because a certain event would not trigger, spazzing physics. Ugh.

[Raff]

I bought crysis in the steam sale recently and closed it down after about 15 minutes. The shitty trailer-like unskippable introduction video seemed to be setting the trashy tone and I quickly realised I had no interest in sitting through hours of soulless shooting and manpunching.

Steam causes me forget that demos exist.

[vimes]

I'm going to balance those negative comments and say Crysis is a very good shooter - at least in Delta mode and disregarding some of the spaceship sections- with very peculiar gameplay mechanics : I don't think I ever had so much fun with AI in an FPS and its open world aspect (you can pretty much access a target from wherever) gives it a definite flavor compared to modern linear FPS like Half-Life or CoD and RPG flavored ones like STALKER.

It's really a shame that stability is an issue for you guys.

Also, I think you should give a game an hour to convince you, 15 minutes seems way too short for me.

[Orv]

Because to my knowledge (the Thumbs I have on my Steam list being the extent of this knowledge), Anvil/Purple and I are the only ones playing this, so I'm going to put this here instead of making an entire thread for it.

Terraria

OR

Hipster Minecraft

OR

There Is Something Deathly Wrong With You People

So let me disclaimer this before I start.

I have;

60-65 hours played

Every piece of equipment in the game has at some point been in my possession (and I'm currently clad in and wielding what is considered "endgame" equipment.)

I have a base that goes 1254 feet into the earth and is made of every material in the game, except Ebonstone, and you'll learn why later.

Finally, in addition to the disclaimer, I'd like to apologize to your free time and Toblix, this is going to be long, and a review of sorts. (Though if this were anywhere else on the internet, I'd expect people to not read all of it.)

-----------------------------------------------

So Terraria. Let's get the obvious out of the way. Is it inspired by Minecraft? Yes, absolutely, you'd be incredibly foolish/blind not to realize this. The issue that you run into with that comparison is that Terraria is such a rich, complex set of systems that there's, well, actually a game there. As much as I love Minecraft, it has absolutely zero set objectives. Everything you do in Minecraft is a result of your own impetus.

This is where Terraria begins to do things differently. From starting out with a wooden pick and axe, to making copper, iron, silver and finally gold armor, you are slowly (or quickly) working through a process of equipment progression. The four aforementioned materials make up what is referred to as the "mineral tier" and is where you'll be spending a lot of your time in the game.

As I said, you start off with two simple items. A pickaxe and an axe proper alow you to do two things; mine anything that the ground consists of (to a point) and cut down trees. Here's where you run into another Minecraft comparison, material quality. The simplest material in the game world is dirt, with the most elaborate being hellstone. Your first issue in material quality is running into ebonstone, which is simply stone that has been Corrupted.

Corruption is an area on every Terraria map that consists of terrible, terrible things. Flying cyclopian teardrops of evil and pestilence called Eaters of Souls accost you at every turn in the Corruption, and gigantic, multisegmented worms do their best to knock you into chasms. Chasms are where the game first runs into its serious progression scale.

You've been mining silver and gold for a few hours now, you're in mostly golden equipment and you decide to go have a nose about the Corruption. You carefully make your way down a chasm and can see, just out of your reach, a shadow orb. Breaking enough shadow orbs spawns the first boss of the game, the Eater of Worlds. Essentially a hundred Eater of Souls chained together, he's no joke. But how do you get there? Trying to mine the ebonstone with your golden pickaxe has no results, but what about those bombs that you found while spelunking? No dice there either, but you do seem to remember the demolitionist selling dynamite. . .

The dynamite does the trick and suddenly you're blasting shadow orbs wherever you find them. Eater of Worlds has spawned! The purple message flashes across your screen and you hear a swift digging sound. You explode into viscous chunks of human and spawn back at base. You have no earthly idea what happened, but suddenly the giant worm that just murdered you is in your house, killing your dudes. After a pitched battle of who knows how long, the area in and around your house is littered with worm parts and you have demonite ore.

Now begins the semi-fast track towards the end game. You kill the Eater of Worlds again, kill the Eye of Cthulu for fun, and you're clad in Shadowscale armor, a Nightmare Pickaxe in hand and you're ready to go into the dungeon. From here everything spirals into the endgame and hours later you're decked in armor made from the very ground of hell and wielding an extendo-mace that ruins every boss in the game with a few hits. You've "beaten" the game.

The developers have promised content for "years" to come, and can most likely deliver, so you'll likely be revisiting the game for a short time again and again in the days to come. But there's a lot to do in the game besides get the best gear, so let's take a look at many of the interesting additions to the Minecraft formulae.

To start with, the demolitionist that I mentioned? He's an NPC that you can build a house for. Among the list of NPCs are a Merchant, a Nurse, a Dryad, an Arms Dealer and the Demolitionist. They all require you to build a moderately sized house, with a table, a chair and a light source. Now, because Terraria is 2D, for something to be called a "house" it must have a back wall. Hammers remove certain placed items and the back walls of the map, allowing placement of man-made walls, from stone bricks, to gold ones.

NPCs sell various items and provide various services. The Merchant sells a number of incredibly useful items. The mining helmet gives off a circle of light, meaning you don't need to carry a torch actively to see. The piggy bank is a fun item. Your character is a separate entity from your saved worlds. And the piggy bank means you can store one chests worth of items, and no matter what piggy bank you use, wherever in whatever world it is, you can access the items in it. For that specific character mind.

The Arms Dealer sells bullets. For guns. Yes, gun. You can find a musket in shadow orbs, or buy a chaingun that fires hundreds of bullets a minute. All the NPCs do useful things, from the Nurse healing you, to the Dryad selling powder to remove Corruption. They're fun little additions to the game that make interesting game possibilities.

There are some interesting possible world events. Blood Moons have a 1-in-7 chance to occur every single night. Zombies and Demon Eyes (flying eyeballs) spawn at highly increased rates, and zombies are able to open doors. It's a hell of a thing to deal with when you're new, but unfortunately is easily dealt with by blocking over your door. Fun, but eventually more a nuisance than a treat.

Goblin Invasions have a specific set of spawn requirements (as do NPCs) and spawn a large force of goblins to attack you wherever you are on the map. In multiplayer, each extra player spawns an extra number of goblins. They drop things like the Harpoonitron that is a weighted hook that you fire out and retrieve. They also drop Rocket Boots, that allow you to quite literally fly, but use mana to do so.

One of the interesting aspects of gear aside from tools and armor, is Accessories. You get 5 accessory slots (no more, no less) and have to choose what accessories are more relevant to the situation at hand. Accesories range from A Lucky Horseshoe, which causes you to not take any falling damage, to the Cobalt Shield, which prevents you from being knocked back when taking damage.

Items like the Grappling Hook, which does what is says on the can, to the Hermes Boots which allow you to move super-fast when running on a flat surface, make for easier travel around the world. And the world can be very large, from a small world taking a day to run across (about ten minutes) to a large world taking almost three days without any movement items.

I could ramble on about how much of a bastard Hell is, or how much I hate Hornets in the Underground Jungle, but the simple fact of the matter is that I enjoy(ed) the hell out of Terrarias current content. Not to mention I expect to continue enjoy any further content to be greatly enjoyable, even if only for a few days at a time. I'm still enjoying building bases and helping friends get their items, but I am mostly done with the game for the time being.

An enjoyable experience and certainly worth ten dollars. And here's a quick-ish list of Minecraft/Terraria comparisons, because I'm sure there's a few I haven't covered.

Minecraft AND Terraria

• A certain equipment quality is required to mine certain blocks.
  
• Any block in the world can be removed and placed wherever you please (with certain limitations.)
  
• Crafting is extensive and uses many materials and crafting implements to create a wide variety of objects and blocks.
  
• A large, randomly generate world to explore.
  
• Monsters of all shapes and sizes.
  
• You can change your personal spawn point by placing a bed.
  

Minecraft ONLY

• Non-domesticated, non-violent animals roaming the world.
  
• Pets.
  
• Weather.
  
• An unlimited world size.
  
• A three-dimensional world.
  
• Wider variety of landscapes and biomes.
  
• A large modding community and the ability to mod the game at all.
  
• Food, crafted and otherwise.
  
• Farming.
  

Terraria ONLY

• Projectile weapons.
  
• NPCs (that aren't monsters.)
  
• World bosses.
  
• Linear gear progression.
  
• Mine carts and their accompanying tracks.
  
• Health potions.
  
• Magic spells.
  
• Burrowing monsters.
  

I'm sure I've missed many, and keep in mind the Minecraft points are the vanilla game without mods. Hopefully you've got a better idea of the game, despite my rambling.

Oh, I totally forgot. If you place Ebonstone anywhere outside the Corruption in sufficient amounts, it has a pretty good chance to spawn the Eater of Worlds.

[syntheticgerbil]

Finished Ratchet and Clank, LocoRoco, and Prince of Persia Harem Adventures recently.

I think I need to do a post on Ratchet and Clank somewhere (still missing my follow-up post on Whispered World) but I feel really lazy about typing my thoughts right now, sorry guys (an apology just in case there's an individual who waits for my opinion, haha yeah).

[ThunderPeel2001]

Because to my knowledge (the Thumbs I have on my Steam list being the extent of this knowledge), Anvil/Purple and I are the only ones playing this, so I'm going to put this here instead of making an entire thread for it.

Sounds like this might actually be worth its own thread?

[Orv]

Sounds like this might actually be worth its own thread?

If enough people are interested I'll scrap this to a link and move it over. I wasn't aware of any other Thumbs playing it currently, though. This was sort of a ploy for that.

[captainkitteh]

I'm going to balance those negative comments and say Crysis is a very good shooter - at least in Delta mode and disregarding some of the spaceship sections- with very peculiar gameplay mechanics : I don't think I ever had so much fun with AI in an FPS and its open world aspect (you can pretty much access a target from wherever) gives it a definite flavor compared to modern linear FPS like Half-Life or CoD and RPG flavored ones like STALKER.

It's really a shame that stability is an issue for you guys.

Also, I think you should give a game an hour to convince you, 15 minutes seems way too short for me.

Crysis has one of the most deepest and sophisticated gameplay mechanics in a FPS game. Don't let the pretty graphics fool you. The physics, the AI, the objectives and even the level design blow away 99 % of other video games. Even the story is good. I love the characters of Nomad and Psycho who are no nonsense professional soldiers. Not every game needs a melodramatic protagonist with a troubled past.

Put simply Crysis is an excellent blockbuster movie taking place in one of the most lifelike simulation oriented sandboxes ever.

[DanJW]

Crysis has one of the most deepest and sophisticated gameplay mechanics in a FPS game. Don't let the pretty graphics fool you. The physics, the AI, the objectives and even the level design blow away 99 % of other video games. Even the story is good. I love the characters of Nomad and Psycho who are no nonsense professional soldiers. Not every game needs a melodramatic protagonist with a troubled past.

Put simply Crysis is an excellent blockbuster movie taking place in one of the most lifelike simulation oriented sandboxes ever.

Sounds wonderful. How come the long term response has been pretty average?

I should point out that I haven't played it yet, so I'm not in fact disagreeing with you.

[ThunderPeel2001]

When I played the Crysis demo I did love sneaking through bushes and setting up traps for approaching bad guys, relying on the AI and physics. It was a lot of fun. Now there's several Crysis games, right? If I were to only play one, which should it be?

[Patters]

When I played the Crysis demo I did love sneaking through bushes and setting up traps for approaching bad guys, relying on the AI and physics. It was a lot of fun. Now there's several Crysis games, right? If I were to only play one, which should it be?

Crysis or Far-Cry.

[vimes]

When I played the Crysis demo I did love sneaking through bushes and setting up traps for approaching bad guys, relying on the AI and physics. It was a lot of fun. Now there's several Crysis games, right? If I were to only play one, which should it be?

Amon Far Cry, Crysis and Crysis 2, I'd say Crysis, since I haven't really played a lot of Warhead.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Crysis or Far-Cry.

Crysis. (We all know that Far-Cry 2 is the Far-Cry of Idle Thumbs, right?)

[Patters]

Crysis. (We all know that Far-Cry 2 is the Far-Cry of Idle Thumbs, right?)

Far-Cry and Far-Cry 2 aren't really related.

[Orv]

They are both, however, Crytek engine games, which means that hiding in bushes, le gasp, actually means you are hidden.

Any of them will give you the "using your brains to outwit the environment, AI and engine" feel. But I'd say Crysis 1 (not-Warhead, mind) is the fullest experience of that.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Far-Cry and Far-Cry 2 aren't really related.

I know. What's your point...?

Actually, given, as Orvidos, has just pointed out, that they both use the same engine, which game offers the most enjoyable "hiding in the bushes, setting traps, sneaking around, good enemy AI/physics" experience? Out of Far-Cry 2 and all the Crysis games? Does Far-Cry 2 still win?

Edited May 30, 2011 by ThunderPeel2001