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Recently completed video games

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I found that Transformers game super tedious and with too much "busywork", I gave up just a few levels in!

I just finished the Silent Hill HD games and I don't know why everybody was complaining about them, I guess the patch fixed everything they whined about? (I did notice a milisecond of slowdown, the game froze ONE and in SH 3 some closeups looked weird, but that's about it.)

You can play Silent Hill 2 with the new voices or the older ones and frankly the older ones sound a bit "Jill Sandwichy", if you know what I mean. I think my favorite of the whole series is Silent Hill 2, which I never played until now and it seems better streamlined and sensible compared to the others. Some of the puzzles in SH 2 were kinda silly and I only knew what to do because I know insane adventure game logic.

And maybe because the monster's symbolism isn't constantly throwing itself at my head in SH 3? It's so obvious in SH 2, it was almost refreshing to know have any idea what the monsters meant.

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Last night, I finished Persona 3 Portable for the PSP (on a Vita). This is significant for me, because it's the first time I've played a Japanese-style RPG to completion. I have tried a handful over the years, but invariably found them to be tedious and unrewarding.

Both Eastern and Western computer and video game RPGs seem to stem from someone seeing Dungeons & Dragons and missing the point of what makes it interesting. Numerical stats and dice rolls and rounds of combat are the best you can do to simulate things around a table with pencil and paper, but it's in service of pretending you're in a magical faerie forest and lording around or whatever. The stats aren't an end unto themselves. (This is not the only view, and to be fair, plenty of games take tabletopesque wargaming mechanics and make compelling electronic experiences through creativity and selectivity in their application.)

That's a bit of a tangent, but in my limited experience, the bulk of one's time in a JRPG feels like sitting around a table and taking an hour to resolve what is supposed to represent 3 minutes of realtime combat.

The combat in Persona 3 is conventional and boring, and primarily takes place in a single dungeon which way overstays its welcome by the end of the game. It leans heavily on a rock-paper-scissors style of elemental interaction, prioritizing finding weaknesses, etc. I'd be happy to never again see the classical elements represented in a game system.

What kept me slogging through this exercise in attrition was the writing. Now, I should be specific, because in the broad sense, the story of the game is generic and stupid. There is a bad thing afoot, and monsters are shitting up the town, and only you and your squad of high school students (and an eleven-year-old and a dog and a robot) can stop them. Holy shit, right?

The crazy thing is that I gave a crap about those students and robots and dogs and shit, and their classmates and teachers and still others to boot. Little stories are attached to each character, most of which are to be explored optionally at the player's leisure (many of which I missed out on altogether or only dipped into). When you're not in combat, things play out like a very chatty adventure game. I think it's the same as the social simulation/dating sim genre, though I wouldn't know, because I'm not a weirdo.

You can choose to spend your time after school hanging out with people, and this turns into a little series of dialogs (voiced at key points) in which you find out more about them, and probably help them through some kind of difficulty. It's mostly pretty mundane stuff, like dealing with parental expectations or social anxiety or coming to terms with being an artificial life form who was created solely to destroy. You know, high school.

It's all very linear, and it's all very predictable. Your interaction is limited to dialog choices which barely affect the course of things. It's simply a matter of what kind of attitude you want to project at any moment. Your protagonist is a barely-there cipher type. The explanation that such protagonists exist in order to promote self-insertion by the player usually seems like an excuse for laziness, but here I think it actually works. I made my dialog choices based on how I thought I'd react in each scenario.

The linearity should be a turnoff for me. As was probably obvious in my earlier tangent about RPGs, I like the self-destination that RPGs allow, or at least often try to present (even if it's illusory).

So far, most of this post looks like a list of reasons why I shouldn't like this game. I love it, though, and I think it's for one reason: the writing is snappy. I thoroughly enjoyed interacting with these characters. Even if my choices didn't matter, I liked seeing their reactions. The characters are well-realized enough that as you get to know them, you can predict how they'll respond to things, but they can still surprise sometimes. The writers and translators deserve a lot of credit; every similar-looking game that I've tried to get into has been utterly dreadful in this regard by comparison.

There is, however, a weird side to how each character arc progresses, in that they are driven by a mechanical system. A meter increases as you hang out with someone (which has an impact on your ability to fart out magical beings), and you always know when some kind of emotional breakthrough is imminent because it's getting full. It's rigid and prescriptive in structure, but the moments within that structure are deftly handled.

It helps that the world (aside from one hour every night when all hell breaks loose) is the real world, and the people in it have concerns to which I can relate. I remember what it was like to be worried about exams… It's much more difficult for me to relate to a fucking elf in a mystical bog who fears the weirding of the dragonwytch. That kind of shit is in here, too, but there is always relief in the form of a little snippet of character growth right around the corner. (Most of the characters aren't aware of the magical elements of the setting, so you're free from that stuff during most interactions.)

Spoiler alert: I saved the world and all life in it. But, what I'll remember from Persona 3 is sleeping in class and hanging out with a bunch of jerks and talking about beef bowls.

It's funny how refreshing mundanity is in games. It's the reason I love Heavy Rain; chunks of it are about familial love and doing chores. That's way more interesting than space bugs and gnomish steam tanks and all the other nonsense that games tend to be about. (Seriously, if you're making a fantasy game and even consider putting in a begoggled little person who tinkers with anachronistic technology, then fuck you.)

Needless to say, I'll be playing Persona 4 when it comes out for the Vita.

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I recently just finished Fall Out New Vegas for the PC. That last guy with the sword was IMPOSSIBLE, my speech skill was high enough that I could talk him out of fighting which I did, but not after A LOT of tries to kill him. I feel like I "soft" beat the game. Still a lot of game breaking bugs 2 years on, I guess after they didn't get the publisher bonus they shelved any ideas of fixing the remaining issues, can't say I blame them.

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That last guy with the sword was IMPOSSIBLE, my speech skill was high enough that I could talk him out of fighting which I did, but not after A LOT of tries to kill him.

My big fancy plasma rifle and I beat him after a long battle in which he slaughtered all the NCR and former Enclave soldiers who followed me in.

Reading his Fallout Wiki entry reveals that there are a lot of tricks to give him "boss" level help without making it look like he's superhuman.

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I recently just finished Fall Out New Vegas for the PC. That last guy with the sword was IMPOSSIBLE, my speech skill was high enough that I could talk him out of fighting which I did, but not after A LOT of tries to kill him. I feel like I "soft" beat the game. Still a lot of game breaking bugs 2 years on, I guess after they didn't get the publisher bonus they shelved any ideas of fixing the remaining issues, can't say I blame them.

I felt the exact same way when I beat the first Fallout a few years ago. I convinced the Master to kill himself through my godlike speech skills, then I reloaded and shot him in the eye (along with everyone else in the base) just to prove to myself I could. It's really weird how combat is implicitly the fullest consummation of a game experience.

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Just recently finished Kingdoms of Amalur : Reckoning and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Played through the game with main focus on might and a bit of archery and it worked out very nice throughout the game. At the moment I'm thinking about picking up the DLC for the game, but I haven't yet decided.

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Finished Alan Wake a couple of weeks back, really felt like giving up a few hours in. After the initial wow of the atmosphere it goes really flat just running through woods with the screen doing that 'you mind is f-d so your graphics are as well' thing. Once I got past that stupid bulldozer though the game really picked up and the sequence on the music stage is one of my very favourite parts of any game of that type for a while. On a side note its a great PC port.

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I.... I... beat God Hand! OK, I was playing on "easy", but still, I beat bloody God Hand.

Now THIS is how you make a GOOD challenging game, the enemies telegraph their moves well enough and even when the enemies surround you, you do have ways to keep the crowd under control.

Any game with mad midget morphin' power rangers and gorillas in wrestling masks in awesome in my book. The best thing is that the game forces you to get better pretty well. At the beginning I wet my pants every time I defeated an enemy only to see that it was possessed and see a demon come out, by the end of the game I could handle them with relative ease!

Oh, God Hand is nuts. Everything about how that game works is just completely upside-down and I really like it.

It's a shame you played it on Easy cos being really hard was part of what made it good for me. I especially remember the difficulty in God Hand would Level Up as your combo streak got higher or whatever, and that was a really fun system.

I reccomend you check out Vanquish, cos that's an arcadey, fast, goofy shooter that reminded me of God Hand.

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Oh, God Hand is nuts. Everything about how that game works is just completely upside-down and I really like it.

It's a shame you played it on Easy cos being really hard was part of what made it good for me. I especially remember the difficulty in God Hand would Level Up as your combo streak got higher or whatever, and that was a really fun system.

I reccomend you check out Vanquish, cos that's an arcadey, fast, goofy shooter that reminded me of God Hand.

Isn't Platinum Games formed from ex-Clover members? It should remind you of God Hand since it's the same people!

God Hand is "PS2 easy", which isn't like modern easy modes. It was still pretty challenging for me, but in a good way.

Anyway, I just beat F.E.A.R. 2, which I kinda had to since I beat 1 & 3 and it's just felt weird but, wow... American AAA companies just don't know how to make scary games! Dead Space and FEAR just keep throwing gore, blood and jump scared and hoping that will scare you. And in FEAR you get to ride a mech, which makes YOU the scary one! Near the ending I was mowing down enemies to a heavy metal tune, which made me laugh hysterically. Yep, nothing says horror like overpowering your enemies while heavy metal music plays, I mean, when ever I see I get a ridiculous weapon and get to go through my enemies like a knife through butter.... That's terrifying! :P

I hear FEAR 4 will be in giant mech where you'll be squishing enemies like roaches and you'll hear spooky noises like chains rattling to keep you scared! The mech comes equipped with a fake skeleton that drops in front of you at random to scare you! SO SPOOKY!

But seriously, that's how American AAA horror games feel like to me. :(

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Their two FEAR games are pretty limp when it comes to horror, but Monolith's Condemned series is something legitimately frightening. (The first game moreso, the second game kind of loses it.)

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Oh yeah, I forgot about how great Condemned was! The fact that you spend mostly of the using your fists or melee weapons instead of lasers and machine guns. And it was more "restrained" and didn't spend the whole game sending monsters at you and let the atmosphere grow more tense.

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Just finished Trine 2: Goblin Menace :tup:

Pretty much the same stuff as the original game, but you get some new powers (magentism and low gravity areas) and 5 very different levels/themes (and an endboss).

The DLC is a perfect extension to the game, there are no changes to the core gameplay or difficulty, it's simply more adventure in the exact same style.

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I just finished Sleeping Dogs.

That's a good game, an easy recommendation. :tup:

Not much needs to be said about it, it really is just GTAIV with a big emphasis on a pretty excellent melee system.

One of those games that doesn't break any new ground, but is so completely competent that it doesn't need to get by on novelty.

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I've recently finished

  • Alan Wake American Nightmare
  • The Darkness 2
  • Spec Ops the Line

Actually all really enjoyable games and i'd say they're all worth a play

On a side not, a quite recently started Mass effect 3 got about 12 hours into it and stopped. absolutely hated it. Can't remember the last time i hated a protagonist more then Shepard, even though i'm supposed to have control of what he's saying everything that came out of his mouth made me cringe

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Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (Mouthful).

This was a really, really fun game! Usual story: picked it up during a Steam sale for a few bucks, not expecting much. I only knew it was led by part of the Dishonored team and I was interested in seeing their roots.

If Dishonored is anything like this, it's going to be amazing. For one thing, the melee combat is super fun, if not incredibly goofy, but the goofiness doesn't take away from the tactility of kicking someone over a bannister in the middle of a sword-fight. Or grabbing a barrel and tossing it down a stairwell at a bunch of approaching guards. Or using telekinesis to grab the dead body of a recently felled enemy and launch it at the ones still standing, knocking them all off the edge of a balcony. The designers essentially built a playground, gave us the controller, and told us to go wild.

DMMM is on the surface a linear rpg-like dungeon crawler. You proceed from mob arena to mob arena, following a story that looks like it was cobbled together from the backs of Magic cards. It feels like a story told by an extremely sexually frustrated dungeon master. The main decision you must make in the game is between unrealistic hot fantasy babe 1 or unrealistic hot fantasy babe 2 for example. But the story is easy to push aside. All the things mentioned previously make this a fun 10 hr romp through a series of dungeons, cliffside monasteries, and medieval towns brutally maiming a whole horde of humans and monsters in often hilarious ways.

One other thing that stood out to me in a comparison is respect to elite mobs between this and games like God of War. Both used oversized monsters like Cyclopses (Cyclopi?). But where God of War introduced the unfortunate trend in quicktime events to get around how exactly a character of human size would bring down a building sized monster, DMMM actually forces you to think and figure out how to use your environment to kill the monster. Often there will be statues that one can break the base of, or log bundles held precariously by one rope. Failing that, I actually came to the decision, all on my own, to shoot him in the eye with my bow and arrow. The game did not flash it for me in brilliant foot-high lettering "His eye is the weak spot!" I just put two and two together and aimed for the eye, brought him down, drew out my dagger and finished him off. It was all seamless and unspoken and while I bet this makes for less consistent gameplay across the spectrum of people playing, I was so grateful that the game let me figure it out by myself. (And this was a repeated pattern throughout).

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It's a very different game, but i'd recommend also checking out Arkane's other game, Arx Fatalis. (Apparently it's on Steam? I just have an original box copy.)

It's the kind of game where you can physically drop a piece of meat next to a fire and the fire will cook the meat just by being near it. Systems and systems and systems. It's just a big, ambitious, and open-ended Ultima Underworld tribute with an incredibly flexible and cool "draw runes in the air with your mouse" magic system.

Arkane is very ambitious about their designs, definitely looking forward to Dishonored.

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Thanks for the recommendation. Sounds neat, and just up my alley. I was just talking with my friend a couple of days ago about loving that Assassin's Creed video about combining poison and money:

and we both realized just how much we love it when a game has robust systems. I guess that makes me of a mind with most here, but playing a game like DMMM really drives how just how important that is to me.

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I just realized I had Stacking on Steam unplayed which I beat and then play the Hobo King adventure, which was new to me. I loved the idea and look of the hobo kingdom and it had a few cameos from the normal game.

It was strange that you could just dodge the ghouls, I didn't expect of the solutions to be just dodging them!

It was just another chapter, but it was a fun one. It looked like most puzzles had one relatively easy solution and one devious one, so everybody would be satisfied.

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Youmeyou, you are killing me. I have been dying to replay AC2: Brotherhood, but my 360's still busted. Argh, this isn't helping! I also want to poison people and throw money on the ground.

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I didn't realize that people always reacted that way when poisoned in AC2. I thought that I had just discovered some weird bug once during my playthrough. Watching some noble I was specifically told not to kill swing a battle axe at a crowd of civilians was my favorite part of the game.

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and we both realized just how much we love it when a game has robust systems. I guess that makes me of a mind with most here, but playing a game like DMMM really drives how just how important that is to me.

How is that a robust system :D

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I dunno, NPCs don't just loop animations and barks, they respond specifically to everything that happens, whether you toss money or kill someone or climb a wall or shove a bystander.

It's deliciously robust. *smacks lips*

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