Recently completed video games

[Tanukitsune]

I'm pretty sure this thread is for beaten games, despite the "misleading" name and I doubt 90% of the posts here are from games with 100% completion, not to mention many will disagree on what 100% completetion really means. :|

[JonCole]

I was being facetious. I've posted about "completing" games here before, when I decided I was "done" with a "complete" experience. Example, the first five hours of FFXIII constituted a very "complete" game as far as I am concerned.

[Tanukitsune]

Well, I finally beat Final Fantasy IX... And I'm currently debating whether it tops FF 6 as my favorite FF game... I'm so glad I gave this game a second chance.

 

Now the question is whether I should give Final Fantasy 8 a chance. :|

[Gormongous]

So I did something I never thought I'd do. I went back and played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 - Oops! All Jedi with the new restored content mod. It was tough to get the ball rolling -- the "tutorial" on Peragus, which lasts maybe two hours, is miserable and frustrating in a way every RPG's opening act is -- but departing the first full world, Telos, for Dantooine in search of the lost Jedi, I knew I was hooked. I played a spellcaster, which I rarely do, and was totally hooking into the systems in a way I haven't done since... I don't know, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, maybe?

 

Speaking of, the mod puts KotOR2 on par with all the other flawed Obsidian masterpieces, except without the flaws. Not once did I encounter the ridiculous bugs and glitches that plagued my first playthrough back in 2005, let alone the whole "hey guess what one of your party members was the big bad all along go fight 'em on this planet the end" jumble that was the original final act. The characters are strong, their arcs clear, and your role apparent -- even though Kreia now lies and contradicts herself a bit less than what won her fans like Richard Cobbett and Rowan Kaiser in the first place (I can't find the article I'm thinking of in praise of her character, maybe someone's Google is better than mine). There is absolutely no reason in the world now to play KotOR2, which is every bit the Empire Strikes Back to Revan's A New Hope.

 

Actually, I do have one sour note. The fan-made droid planet M4-78 that was cut from the game early on and that the same modders have decided to reconstruct is not very good, not at all. It's easy to see why it was cut: imagine a world full of identical droids and nothing else, all of which send you on fetch quests that often involve talking to various generic, unnamed NPCs until you find the one that tells you the quest trigger in a bad accent recorded by a laptop microphone. It comes right at the end of the game and it kills whatever momentum you have dead. I don't want to crap all over someone's hard work, but this mod is terrible. Don't play it, KotOR2 is a big enough game that you don't need characterless filler like this.

[Henroid]

I was being facetious. I've posted about "completing" games here before, when I decided I was "done" with a "complete" experience. Example, the first five hours of FFXIII constituted a very "complete" game as far as I am concerned.

 

 Okay because your first response made me feel really, really bad.

 

Anyway I beat Castlevania, the NES one, for the first time a few days ago. The furthest I'd ever gotten as a kid (when I was better at video games) was Death, the stage prior to fighting Dracula. I watch Game Grumps and saw Jontron beat the game, and considering how hard of a time he had with stuff I considered easy I decided to man up and just do it (plus I felt challenged at that point; if he can do it, I should be able to). My first death was right after fighting, uh, Death, being knocked into a pit by a giant bat. And then I had to continue once during my attempts at Dracula.

 

But hey that was a kickass record for me because I used to die a lot on stages 3 and 4. I also beat the Frankenstein boss without taking any hits from him or the invulnerable fleaman. So all in all it was very satisfying.

[Malice Song]

So I did something I never thought I'd do. I went back and played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 - Oops! All Jedi with the new restored content mod.

 

Actually played and beat that one for the first time, myself. Well, beat vanilla, tried the restored content mod, but got my savefile corrupted right before the end of the game for some reason. Very different experience from yours in terms of bugs and glitches on the whole.

I have to say, though, there were some curious design decisions in that game and I wonder how much they merit discussion (or had been discussed, apparently i'm always five to ten years too late on games). One being your influence on your party members and their interactions among eachother being a bit of a theme, but then having that kind of thrown out of the window to a degree whenever the game decides you should go solo. Another being the game strongly encouraging you to draw yourself into a bit of a stereotypical corner. The run I beat the game on, for the most part I went for conversation/actions, which felt the most fitting and natural to me, which resulted in a somewhat even light/dark split - and consequently being denied prestige classes and an entire dungeon. Which is even weirder, considering your designated mentor rocking a perfect neutral alignment.

 

Now the question is whether I should give Final Fantasy 8 a chance. :|

Well, it has great music and a certain quality of flavor, a weird charme about it. Whether good or bad, it strikes me as very imaginative in a fairly wild way.

Then again, everytime someone explains why they absolutely hate FF8, I find myself saying: "You know, you're really not wrong."

Whether you should give it a chance, I'd say probably yes, but iirc you may need to suspend disbelief (and potentially common sense) every now and then something fierce.

[Tanukitsune]

I actually did give FF 8 a chance, but I couldn't get over the fact that you have to extract magic before using it, being the wizard snob that I am, this was a major flaw for me. 

[elmuerte]

A New Beginning

A short graphic adventure game. It was ok, quite some annoying bugs in the audio and a few wrong localization on non-vital game elements. The voice action was quite bad. Most of the puzzles were rather simple and straightforward. Overall it's a rather forgettable adventure game.

[Gormongous]

I have to say, though, there were some curious design decisions in that game and I wonder how much they merit discussion (or had been discussed, apparently i'm always five to ten years too late on games). One being your influence on your party members and their interactions among eachother being a bit of a theme, but then having that kind of thrown out of the window to a degree whenever the game decides you should go solo. Another being the game strongly encouraging you to draw yourself into a bit of a stereotypical corner. The run I beat the game on, for the most part I went for conversation/actions, which felt the most fitting and natural to me, which resulted in a somewhat even light/dark split - and consequently being denied prestige classes and an entire dungeon. Which is even weirder, considering your designated mentor rocking a perfect neutral alignment.

 

Well, I played a Jedi Master, so I had the fun of all my companions loving me to death and becoming light side out of that love. Still, I feel your pain there, even though I've never experienced it. Has any game with an explicit alignment system ever incentivized the middle ground? I know Alpha Protocol and Dragon Age 2 both have much subtler and granular takes on alignments, but they still benefit the most from people either thinking you're a bastard or a saint.

[Malice Song]

Has any game with an explicit alignment system ever incentivized the middle ground?

I feel like Fallout's Karma system does the job a bit better. But that might be mostly tied to the world itself being in a very desolate state and you as the player basically trying to get by as the hired solution to a problem. Iirc the narratives themselves very rarely imply that what you're doing is flatout saintly or despicable, you're just doing what you have to. Mass Effect feels similar in that it just paints you as good cop / bad cop (but, ultimately, space cop), but in that one the consequences feel less nuanced and as a player you're more aware of the definite benefit you gain from leaning to a particular side.

So yeah, I can't think of a more compelling example. Which is a bit sad, since I feel like that gray area is often (or has the potential to be) the most interesting path.

Although I might just feel that way, because that choice often isn't provided for, so its potential feels 100% intact, if that makes sense. To tie it back to KotoR 2, I went dark side on my second run and managed to turn Mira dark jedi. So this whole narrative came about in my head, how she's now practically my protege, whom I'd bring up in the joy of the dark side, where there's rivers of milk and cookies growing on trees. But that happened practically right before the end of the game and the whole ordeal ultimately was of no consequence. I don't want to spell it out too directly because spoilers, but that one actually bothered me a bit. Might have been some metanarrative that went straight over my head, but the whole theme of influencing people felt like I should be given the option to bring that to its conclusion on an individual per party member basis.

[Yasawas]

Resident Evil Director's Cut and Resident Evil 2 (both scenarios).

I don't know what brought this on but I had a hankering to play through the main RE series last month so picked these up. I'd played varying amounts of 1, 2, 3 and CV but never finished any of them for a number of reasons so I've been sorting that our over the last week. They're clunky as fuck and absolutely brilliant.

The first one takes place in one of the worst designed areas I can remember seeing in a game - a big mansion full of nonsensical corridors and turns that go nowhere which is genuinely distracting in its madness, it also has the absolute worst voice acting I've ever heard and the abysmal controls and combat the series was famous for pre-RE4. It does however have atmosphere and charm and while the puzzles are daft they're logical and never difficult so every time you load the game up you'll get a bit farther, it's six or so hours of exploration and constant progress which I appreciated very much. Surprisingly enjoyable.

The second is more of the same but a bit more polished. I remember the game coming on two discs but never knew why but it seems that you have one for Leon and Claire, the two playable characters, and once you complete the game with one you continue the save with the other disc, playing through the same timeline from the perspective of the other. It's an interesting idea and I was really surprised how much additional content there was in the second scenario I played - it's not just the exact same locations as I had suspected, adding quite a few new ones and some new bosses and weapons and NPCs.

A good start to my RE marathon then. And I'm delighted to see that RE3, the one I'm on now, is the one to introduce the 180 degree quick turn as the lack of that in the first two is the most frustrating thing about revisiting them.

[JonCole]

Re: incentivizing the middle ground

 

I find it fascinating that games with morality systems that basically make anything less than 100% good or bad worthless often get mods on PC that essentially bring value to that middle road through as little as a different ending cinematic/text or full gameplay sections that mirror differences in gameplay based on being good or bad. I remember at least in the case of KOTOR and Fallout 3, there was clearly some interest in playing the the morality system since there were literally fans out there that would develop some kind of reward for being the (appropriately) Han Salo-esque Scoundrel in KOTOR that mostly cares for opportunity and momentum rather than being "good" or "bad".

[Gormongous]

Yeah, it's a weird thing. Out of Star Wars games, all of which have an in-universe reason to incentivize black-and-white morality, KotOR has maybe the most subtle take on it, since they have a character based entirely on the "gray" concept (and who doesn't love Jolee, really). There are also maybe a dozen items in KotOR2 alone for neutral characters that boosted charisma like crazy, allowing them to use powers from both ends of the spectrum with as little or less penalty as a full-fledged Jedi or Sith.

 

But at the end of the day, that flexibility isn't worth giving up the incredibly powerful prestige classes and stat bonuses that come with committing to a morality. Maybe a less rigid lore would have allowed Obsidian to explore that better. I imagine they would have liked to do so, judging from the main theme of KotOR2, which is "fuck these systems that force us to act in certain ways".

[Malice Song]

Maybe it's this thing where the game feels the need to reward a distinct alignment (not entirely sure why that's necessary) and since you usually start out neutral in these kind of games, you'd start out with a perfect neutral bonus you could loose, which probably would be relatively frustrating. I don't know, I find that stuff a bit unsatisfying. Imo the consequences of your moral compass should manifest themselves in interactions with characters, based on sensible reputation. But that might be down to opinion. Also it's probably hard.

On track, I've finished XCOM - Enemy Unknown. On Normal Ironman. Because I'm a baby. Game's propper brilliant.

I'm trying Classic Ironman at the moment. It's ugly.

[JonCole]

Well, rewarding a "perfect" alignment seems far from ideal as it is. I'm not really sure how I feel about completely filling a blue or red bar and that dictating my fate. I feel like if morality has to continue being a theme in games, it should be the combination of several points of data rather than how far you're slid down a continuum scale.

[Gormongous]

Well, rewarding a "perfect" alignment seems far from ideal as it is. I'm not really sure how I feel about completely filling a blue or red bar and that dictating my fate. I feel like if morality has to continue being a theme in games, it should be the combination of several points of data rather than how far you're slid down a continuum scale.

 

I like the idea of a character's discrete relationships with NPCs amalgamating into some sort of overall judgment on the character themselves. Like I said, kind of similar to Alpha Protocol, except with one more layer, with NPCs not only reacting to your actions but also to other NPCs reacting. Less of a continuum, more of a galaxy, to borrow current sociological terms. But that's pretty hardcore armchair design from me.

[Zeusthecat]

I have recently been marathoning games I've bought on Black Fridays over the years and never played. The most recent game I beat was Dead Space and it turned out to be a really awesome game in my opinion. I started it 2 1/2 years ago and got to chapter 3 but stopped playing. I picked it back up a couple weeks ago and powered through it in about a week. I tend to take my time with games and really explore every area so when I finally do decide to put the game away I feel like I really experienced a significant portion of what it had to offer. That resulted in a play-through that clocked in at a little over 20 hours instead of the 10-12 it would normally take for that game.

 

With some good surround sound (7.1 with some decent speakers was amazing!) the sound design in that game added an amazing amount of tension and I feel had a huge affect on how the game was perceived. It was one of those games that just kind of sucked me into the world and made me shit my pants regularly. I actually experienced a weird phenomenon where I had a hard time starting the game each day because I was so stressed out about going back into a world where I knew necromorphs were about to rip my fucking body to pieces. I guess I was just more of a coward in 2010 and have recently gained enough courage to get over that initial hump and actually finish the game. I'm glad I did because it turned out to be a great experience and scared me more than any game in a long time. Anyone else ever experience a game that you enjoy but find yourself making excuses of why not to play because it's scary or something or am I just a pussy?

[Yasawas]

That's exactly how I felt with the original Dead Space. I loved playing it but I found it so draining that even though I was off work at the time and had hours to devote to it if I'd wanted, I could only manage a chapter a day which equated to about an hour for me.

Great game though, except for that last level and those terrible asteroid bits. I got the first sequel from PS+ while ago and put an hour into it but didn't enjoy it at all.

[soggybagel]

I'm not one to be too afraid of games but Dead Space was stressful  as hell. I honestly had a couple times where I thought about playing but just couldn't.

[Zeusthecat]

Glad to hear it's not just me. To me, that kind of experience shows that the developers did a great job of combining sound and imagery with crescendos in all the right areas in a way that enabled me to suspend my disbelief more than I normally would for a game and kind of put myself in Isaac's boots. The effect this had on me psychologically when I attempted to start the game each day was along the lines of "I don't want to get back on to that crazy ship of death, there are necromorphs, I'm low on ammo and I will eventually go insane like everyone else on that ship did. Besides, I need to get some yardwork done and my HOA said I need to get rid of my weeds". However, once I did get in the sound and visuals enveloped me and I found it equally as hard to put the game back down. I felt a strong urge to survive and get Isaac the hell out of there and found myself doing 3-4 chapters on some nights. When I put it down I felt a great sense of accomplishment and found myself reflecting on the experience in a similar way to when I finished the original Bioshock.

 

There was one part, however, that I thought was super cheesy and actually made me laugh. It was when I went into some room to mix some poison and when I opened the door they played some really cheesy music that reminded me of a corny horror film. The room had blood smeared all over it and some graphic imagery and I think it was supposed to make me feel disturbed in some way but when I heard that cheesy music I just laughed and for a few seconds, the illusion was broken. That is, until that regenerating necromorph bastard broke out of his test tube in that room and I crapped my pants and unloaded every last round I had into him. Oh yeah, and fuck turret sequences...

[feelthedarkness]

Re: incentivizing the middle ground

 

I find it fascinating that games with morality systems that basically make anything less than 100% good or bad worthless often get mods on PC that essentially bring value to that middle road through as little as a different ending cinematic/text or full gameplay sections that mirror differences in gameplay based on being good or bad. I remember at least in the case of KOTOR and Fallout 3, there was clearly some interest in playing the the morality system since there were literally fans out there that would develop some kind of reward for being the (appropriately) Han Salo-esque Scoundrel in KOTOR that mostly cares for opportunity and momentum rather than being "good" or "bad".

 

Witcher 1 explicitly incentivised staying neutral, though I couldn't personally do it. 

[Gormongous]

Witcher 1 explicitly incentivised staying neutral, though I couldn't personally do it. 

 

Did it? All I remember is being harangued for not picking a side, then for picking the wrong side.

[feelthedarkness]

Maybe incentivised is the wrong word, but the narrative of W1 as I remember framed the Witchers as being a neutral faction, and that there was an ending for staying out of the politics. Witchers. I love that. 

[Malice Song]

Anyone else ever experience a game that you enjoy but find yourself making excuses of why not to play because it's scary or something or am I just a pussy?

Happens to me all the time. Horror games I don't even consider anymore. Amnesia for example is a game that is an incredible temptation to me, it seems incredibly interesting, but I just know there's no way I'd finish that on my own. What's worse is I think in my case all first person games are affected by this. To me it's just a different kind of investment in terms of immersion and the question "do I want to spend time in this world". For example, I spent quite a while (two or three years in fact) "investigating" mods for Fallout 3 in order to transform that game into a harsh, unforgiving survival simulator. Now it's gotten way too big and intimidating for me to expose myself to it again. Oh well, one of these days ...

 

 

Maybe incentivised is the wrong word, but the narrative of W1 as I remember framed the Witchers as being a neutral faction, and that there was an ending for staying out of the politics. Witchers. I love that. 

That actually sounds decently enough or at the very least a step up from the usual saint/devil stuff that is often going on. It's too bad I just didn't like The Witcher in terms of gameplay, but I just might have to reconsider at one point.

Also just finished The Binding of Isaac. I think I finished it anyways. Saw an ending, that has to count for something. Anyways, this game is either devious or I got some sort of gaming specific gambling problem. I don't actually like the Zelda games, including gameplay, which Isaac seems to be very much in the tradition of. So I probably shouldn't like Isaac's gameplay all that much. But there are soooo many randomly placed shinies in this game. It's a bit of an Indiana Jones vibe going on, the wikia up on the second monitor, reading up on the artifacts you find in the dungeons. And that part is seriously horrifyingly addicting.

Also speaking about emotional impact in gaming: no bombastic cinematics, no sweeping orchestra scores, but boy is this one a downer. I have rarely felt as much sympathy for a character in a video game as I do for Isaac. I'm not entirely sure how they did it, since the story of Isaac is presented in only a few rather simple images, but I just can't help but to think "man, that poor kid" pretty much all the time. Even if I manage to pimp my character to be an avatar of destruction, that little between-levels interlude makes it completely meaningless in terms of emotional impact, even then Isaac still feels like a helpless victim, no matter what happens in the game at that point. It's rather impressive, really.

[TychoCelchuuu]

I installed, played, and beat the Syndicate FPS reboot yesterday (although I fully intend to go through the coop if I can find anyone to join me, so I'm not done with the game yet). I found it to be a stupendous mediocre first person shooter, by which I mean if you enjoy shooting people with guns and hiding behind walls and throwing grenades and hitting "use" to open doors, then it's hard to imagine not enjoying Syndicate. If you get easily bored when a game is about shooting people and you need more gimmicks or an interesting story or something like that, you might enjoy the beautiful graphics, but if not the game will likely leave you cold.

Whether you enjoy the graphics will hinge on whether you can deal with massive amounts of bloom (used to good effect, mind you) or whether it just annoys you. Personally I think the game looks stupendous and plays very well so I had a lot of fun and I'm sort of sad that it didn't seem to do too well for Starbreeze, which continually churns out games that deserve more recognition than they get.

The game's not without flaws, even for what it is - mashing "use" to open certain doors is a stupid mechanic (games are not more fun when you have to press a button a lot of times to do certain things...), the story is predictably stupid and uninteresting, and the casual misogyny that some of the characters threw around so that you could tell they were bad people was pointless and unhelpful, given that the characters are all serial murdering psychopaths that the player will dislike even if they don't go out of their way to comment on how attractive and bitchy the inexplicably beautiful female lead is. But, you know, this wouldn't be a true AAA video game if it didn't have casual misogyny slotted into it for absolutely zero reason. The game is also very short and a little more linear than is good for it - there are a few fun little puzzles with the hacking mechanics but it could've been much better had those been expanded and if the game had been more open like the shooters of yore, or Half-Life 2, or even sections of the Riddick games Starbreeze has made.

Still, if shooters are the sort of thing that interest you, and if you like the idea of running around in a gorgeous cyberpunk world while you do your shooting, you can do much worse than Syndicate. If you want to coop it with me some time let me know.

As for being a reboot of the beloved franchise: eh. They nailed the world, and nothing else. Although I hear coop brings back a bit of the original Syndicate flavor.