Recently completed video games

[Berzee]

Me and my wife just beat NANCY DREW AND THE LEGEND OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL!

I thought it would be an easy "casual" game for twelve year old babies.

It was SUPER HARD. You guys...it was like...if Myst let you call your boyfriend on a cellphone every 15 minutes, it would be this game. It was a big nonlinear mansion+garden+cemetery full of statues and furniture and other stuff that looked normal but was secretly PUZZLE MACHINES covered in BUTTONS and STRANGE SYMBOLS. I deciphered a thousand rhyming scraps of paper, and gave this guy some bad gumbo that gave him diarhhea.

 

We played it with a walkthrough handy at most times and it was still quite a challenge. We might need to play the next one on "Junior Sleuth" mode. Friends, respect Nancy Drew. Her games might crush your face. (I still haven't decided if it was a good game, but it was certainly difficult and pretty engaging when it wasn't being incredulously confounding).

 

[mikemariano]

"Clown hair on the iguana" is the new "Syrup on the cat hair makes a mustache." Yay, adventure games!

[miffy495]

I finished Zelda Skyward Sword yesterday as my final hurrah with my launch Wii before I transition to the new shiny Wii U. That was a pretty good game, you guys. It had it's flaws, sure (repeating boss fights is lame even when they're GOOD boss fights. Girahim and the Imprisoned were not good boss fights), but overall I really liked it. Of course, I played my 40 hours over the course of about two years, so the gradual approach may have made me look more favourably on it than I would have had I tried to marathon it in a week, but I liked it. There were some standout dungeon designs, too. The time manipulation one in the desert was fantastic, and the final dungeon in Skyloft where you actually had to move rooms of the dungeon around like a sliding block puzzle to get where you needed to go was awesome. I think the game may have been too big for its own good, as those standout moments ended up a bit buried (why keep sending me to the Silent Realm? That place sucks!). Still, those moments DID stand out and were really worth experiencing. I think it's a fitting conclusion to my time with the Wii, and I'm really glad I finished it off before I pack the old girl up. The only console I ever camped out for, I got the very last one they had in stock on the morning of launch day at my Future Shop. Good memories, and even though the console had looooong dry spells, that doesn't change the fact that every time I fired it up I had a good time. I'd still call that a success. It will have a place on honour on that bookshelf with all my old Nintendo consoles, and the Zelda gold wii remote/nunchuck combo will still be used with the Wii U for the foreseeable future. I salute you, Wii.

[elmuerte]

The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav

A point and click adventure game by the makers of Deponia, and Edna & Harvey. The art is quite beautiful. The story is interesting, but sometimes a bit corny. This adventure game is much more like the classic adventure games, it involves quite a bit of pixel hunting and figuring out combinations of objects. I did enable the hits to get points of interest because pixel hunting is quite a task in this game due to the fidelity of the art. The puzzles start off quite logical and easy, but there are a bunch of illogical puzzles, and there are a few puzzles that really require you to think. In the end I did need to resort to brute forcing a solution.

Anyway, I had 9 hours of fun trying to finish this game. It's not really a must play, but it is enjoyable. (unless you're not into point and click adventure games).

[Ucantalas]

We played it with a walkthrough handy at most times and it was still quite a challenge. We might need to play the next one on "Junior Sleuth" mode. Friends, respect Nancy Drew. Her games might crush your face. (I still haven't decided if it was a good game, but it was certainly difficult and pretty engaging when it wasn't being incredulously confounding).

My mom decided to buy a few of the Nancy Drew games. It has been a few years and neither of us have come close to beating any of them. Those things are much more difficult than they appear.

[JonCole]

They didn't change anything at all? I though the Vita version added some extras at least?

 

Well, in the 30 minutes I've played, it seemed exactly the same. They may have added a new difficulty or some weird Vita-based controls or something, but honestly that kind of stuff doesn't interest me when I honestly think that kind of game isn't very pleasant to play on the platform.

[Berzee]

I beat a game! It was Nancy Drew: Message In A Haunted Mansion!!! (ooOoooOooOOOOooo...)

It was actually a much easier one and we were able to beat it without a walkthrough...on Junior Detective level...frequently calling Nancy's friends on the phone for hints...but STILL, a solid victory for us.

The mystery seemed a little more cliche and simplified than in the later Crystal Skull game I mentioned previously, and there wasn't anything nearly as zany as an iguana in clown clothes, but there were a lot of parts I liked quite a bit better. I liked that there weren't so many crazy mechanical puzzles, and that a lot of my time was actually spent exploring rooms and finding secrets instead of doing minigames (there were still plenty of those too but they were less in the limelight). Also, I probably just enjoy Victorian mansions and artifacts more than the N'awlins setting in the Crystal Skull. I mean, look at this beard (apparently it contains VALUABLE HINTS):

Edit: of course I forgot to mention the one truly special thing about these games, which is that they are games from this century which require you to write down tons of stuff in, like, *real life*, if you want to finish them. (I have a nice big stack of post-its now, which would really confuse any burglars who happened across them ^_o).

[Berzee]

My mom decided to buy a few of the Nancy Drew games. It has been a few years and neither of us have come close to beating any of them. Those things are much more difficult than they appear.

 

Whew, this shared experience makes me feel slightly better about getting trounced by the last game! =P

[Zeusthecat]

Just finished Secret of Monkey Island Yesterday. It was the first point and click adventure game I've ever played and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was determined to make it through the game without looking up any hints but ended up getting completely stuck and gave in when I couldn't find the sword master. Luckily I was able to get through the rest of the game without any further help so I feel I did pretty good overall.

 

I have to say I was really surprised at how funny this game was and how much it made me actually laugh. Of all other games I've played, Conker's Bad Fur Day and Portal were probably the only other games that have ever elicited any laughter out of me. Either most video game writers really suck at being funny or the video game medium itself does not lend itself well to comedy, but I must say the writing in Monkey Island just hit me as some of the best I've ever seen.

 

One of my favorite moments was when I first met the shopkeeper. I went through the initial segment of dialog and said some pretty sarcastic shit to him and then finally asked him about the sword master of Melee Island. I don't know why but the way he just up and left me in the store and said he'd be right back made me chuckle. I wasn't sure what to do then or if he would come back so I decided to ring the bell on the counter, at which time he immediately opens the front door, makes a sarcastic comment, and comes back to the counter. I laughed a little more. I then repeated this process about five more times and by the end of it I could not stop laughing at the shit he had said to me each time I sent him out. The fact that he actually recognized how many times I had sent him out and the way each response was unique and built on the one before blew me away (ign.com). I then tried to steal something from his store, laughed some more when he referred to me as a little shoplifter thereafter, and went on my way.

 

Overall great game, I highly recommend it. Now on to Monkey Island 2...

[quantum_leopold]

I finished Hitman Absolution this weekend. It was...okay.

 

It's the first Hitman game I've ever beaten, despite having spent a lot of time with past Hitman games. What I liked about past Hitman games was well replicated here: big sandboxes with an interesting variety of ways to kill targets. The best levels gave me everything that I wanted, and the instinct system made the game less punishing, less frustrating, and more fun. Unlike past Hitman games, I rarely triggered alarms by wandering into an area I didn't know was restricted, or by getting spotted by a guard I didn't think could see me. And I'm not sure if I can credit this to the game or to my own personal growth, but I was able to finish this game as opposed to other Hitman games in large part because when I began to get frustrated by a level, I felt okay about abandoning stealth, pulling out my silverballers, and blasting my way out, shitty score be damned.

 

Unfortunately, while the game does have a lot of great scenarios, there was a lot of other stuff in it too. The story is garbage, as it is not just predictable and stupid, but also entirely unnecessary. The "sexy nun brigade" is all over the place in cutscenes, but were involved in maybe three minutes of actual gameplay. The game also puts you through frustrating and boring sections of gameplay where you don't have a target, you're just sneaking from Point A to Point B, trying not to be seen. I can only assume those sections exist to serve the story, justifying how the Hitman got from Mission A to Mission B...but then there are other times you're going to a new place for no apparent reason with no explanation. And the cutscenes (which look terrible on 360) make some really strange choices about which moments you get to control and which you don't. On at least a few occasions, I shot a target point blank in the head or blew him up with C4, only to trigger a cutscene in which my victim then delivered an extended monologue about something. Shouldn't his brains be splattered across the wall? Why are we talking? Everything about the story feels like an afterthought.

 

Despite my gripes, however, there were still significant portions of this game that I found to be really thrilling and inventive. It's worth your time if you're interested in a creative stealthy action game. I just hope the next Hitman game will ditch the pretense that it has a story worth telling.

[Ucantalas]

On at least a few occasions, I shot a target point blank in the head or blew him up with C4, only to trigger a cutscene in which my victim then delivered an extended monologue about something. Shouldn't his brains be splattered across the wall? Why are we talking? Everything about the story feels like an afterthought.

I felt the same way several times in the Assassin's Creed games, though not to the extent I would have if I had used explosives.

[Zeusthecat]

Just finished Journey and wow, just wow.

 

For the most part, video games are really only capable of utilizing 2 of our 5 senses: sight and hearing. I feel like a lot of games tend to focus more on what we are seeing than what we are hearing and end up missing a big opportunity to elevate the experience by not spending enough effort on the musical side of things. In Journey the music was so well done that when combined with the awesome imagery it created an experience that was much greater than the sum of its parts. It is so hard to describe but somehow what I was seeing combined with what I was hearing just elicited an emotional response that I don't recall feeling before when playing a game. Maybe the closest thing I can think of that made me feel this way was the plastic bag scene in American Beauty. It is just one of those things that reminds me of how beautiful life can be.

[miffy495]

I beat two whole games today!

 

First off, I'm really late to the party with Mass Effect 3, but I wanted to have all the DLC before playing the game all the way through, as that really changed a lot about 2. Since I'd played one of the DLC packs already in 3, I decided to wait until they'd released all of them for this one. Full paragon, good ending, etc etc. Y'know what, the ending was kind of dumb, but I don't mind. It felt like, by that point, they'd built the setting up to a point that a fairy tale-ish ending worked well enough. I enjoyed my time with that game thoroughly, even though it took me roughly a year start to finish to get through it. Now I get to wonder where they're going to take the series next, and the rumours of Space Cop have me very excited. I love the universe they created, and small stories within it would be fantastic.

 

Second, I finished off Binary Domain, which I'd arrived at the last chapter of at March Break, and now finally had time to PLAY the last chapter of. That game's story got way more Philip K Dick than I expected, and I really respect what it tried to do. The gameplay was a weird mix of Gears of War and Dead Space (cover shooter + dismemberment) and was enjoyable, if a bit repetitive. The story made it worth it. Check this game out if you haven't yet.

[Max Ernst]

I just finished all of the DYAD levels and I am just going to say that playing that shit late at night with headphones is a transcendent experience.

[Henroid]

Wrapped up Monaco just a bit ago. There's still the 2nd campaign and all but that feels like more of a bonus challenge to things. That was a hell of a lot of fun. Failed attempts at levels never really deterred me, I was always able to see how things could've gone better. Bonus moral boost for going back to earlier levels and cleaning them out in a hurry, compared to my first pass at them. So I knew I was learning things.

[Roswell47]

Got the non-secret ending in Kairo earlier today. Great, creepy atmosphere and music. Striking visually and good environmental puzzles. The last 5 mins or so were pretty lame. Reminds me of the last level of Trine but instead of feeling frustration it was disappointment. If your game has such great atmosphere and mystique don't throw that all away for some poignant (I guess?) ending. Other than that I highly recommend it. Now to figure out those optional puzzles and see what the secret ending is all about.

[Zeusthecat]

Man, I've been burning through my backlog like crazy lately. Just have to finish Assassin's Creed Revelations, COD World at War, Saint's Row 2, Borderlands 2, and Resident Evil 5 and I'll be all caught up on my 360 games.

So last night I finished Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and I have some really mixed feelings about it. When Chris originally talked on the podcast about how he felt about the first game I disagreed with his assessment. I felt that the gameplay was fresh and unique, the historical setting was great, and the story wasn't all that bad by video game standards although there was a little bit of absurd stuff in there. It was just a world that I liked to be in and the music and ambient noise mixed with the setting and gameplay made for an engaging experience that I kept coming back to. Then I played Assassin's Creed 2 and had even more fun. It seemed like there were so many systems in place and so much variety that whatever I was doing just felt exciting and full of possibilites. It was around the end of that game that I think I started to see it the way Chris did.

Enter Brotherhood. It was a really good game and introduced some awesome stuff that I had a lot of fun with but something was just different this time. While I feel it was the best game yet it started to lose some of its luster. First, I feel like the story went from 'not bad' in the first game to 'a little bit annoying but still okay' in the second game (except the ending which seemed really fucking unoriginal and just stupid) to 'I fucking hate Desmond and the other walking stereotypes he is surrounded by and this story fucking sucks my balls'. But I can get past bad stories. I would prefer for them to be good but if the gameplay is great it doesn't matter all that much to me.

Beyond the story, I think the real problem I had was that I realized I was kind of fooled by how much variety I thought there was. I still really liked being in the world but I just felt, egh, hrm, blah. I started to notice I had 3 different types of projectiles that all did the same thing, poison was fun at first but it acted like any other distraction tool in the game, the courtesans and thieves didn't seem all that different from each other and the mercenaries were just dudes that fought with you. Buying property was fun at first but there was almost no depth to it. I think the saving grace was that they added the ability to recruit and train assassins. This was my main source of fun for this game but by the end it also started to lose some of its luster. I just feel like they haven't done enough to change the way you go about infiltrating areas and assassinating guards and after 3 games it is the same old dance with a few new mechanics here and there.

So, I think I now see where Chris was coming from and I pretty much agree, I think I just had my rose tinted beer goggles on for the first 2 games. As much as I'm complaining about it, I guess I still had a good amount of fun. Enough at least that I'll continue on with Revelations and see how that goes.

Edit: Despite everything I said, I had some truly great moments in this game. There were a couple missions where I had to tail someone while staying on the rooftops and avoiding being detected. It was in these moments that I felt like a true assassin, shooting a poison dart at an archer on a roof to distract the nearby enemies then sending my assassins to take down another couple guys on another roof and then running full speed past them to assassinate the fuck out of another guy before he spotted me and dropping out of site immediately afterward all while keeping my target on the ground in sight. That made me feel fucking badass.

[Professor Video Games]

I finished a couple games recently. First was Binary Domain, which I'd picked up after reading in various places that it's something of a hidden gem. The gameplay is for the most part stock sci-fi third person shooter, though the enemies, all robots, are fun to shoot as they have lots of tiny pieces and limbs you can blast off them, and it's pretty satisfying. The characters are cliche as fuck, but somehow endearing. Though the best/most absurd one, a french robot, disappears at one point never to return and with zero resolution (I think if I'd gotten the "best" ending that would be different, but that's not happening). The plot had some neat ideas but I don't think it ever really went anywhere interesting. I'd say overall I didn't come away very impressed.

 

The other game I finished was The Last Express, which I'd gotten after it was mentioned in some older 'cast. This game is super sweet. The setting (pre-WWI Europe on the Orient Express) and characters are interesting and unique, and the real-time gameplay for the most part really works. It lets you rewind time as much as and whenever you want, which helps with the "I'm gonna miss something" anxiety. The entire thing takes place in essentially just four or five cars on the train, which I suppose could be considered a negative, but it allows the environments to be much more detailed. Also since the cast is limited, the characters, even non-critical ones, are all well realized. The game does have some of the typical adventure game problems pop up, like hard to find hotspots and a few weird puzzle solutions, but nothing terrible. Oh also I love that when the game starts you know nothing about the main character and you have to infer his backstory through the dialog and some notes you encounter over the course of the game.

[TheLastBaron]

I'm so close to finishing Arx Fatalis, but  I'm also at the point I get in most games when I feel like I've gotten the full experience and maximum level of enjoyment out of the game and actually finishing the game is more of a completionist side achievement for gamer points.  I think I'm going to manage to finish it, but at the same time I think the last game I actually finished was Bastion when it came out, so I could be lying to myself.

[mikemariano]

I'm so close to finishing Arx Fatalis, but  I'm also at the point I get in most games when I feel like I've gotten the full experience and maximum level of enjoyment out of the game and actually finishing the game is more of a completionist side achievement for gamer points.

 

The ending is mildly interesting, if I remember correctly.  I spend most of the endgame just running through the troll village and avoiding confrontations.

 

If I remember correctly, the ending is basically the ending of Half-Life 2, with the weird lizard dude in place of the G-Man.

[Stephen]

I just finished playing through Lollipop Chainsaw and it's telling how little I enjoyed that game by how quickly I pushed through it, like I wanted to get through all of the gameplay to experience the game's flavor as quickly as my fingers would allow. At a certain point I found the end of the game and wondered how that had happened. The combat is impractically constructed to hide its combos in a shop system and I didn't begin to even derive a mild pleasure from it until the last third of the game. There was maybe a five minute chunk of time where I might have muttered to someone next to me, almost obsequiously, "Hey. Hey, this is alright. I kind've had fun there in that mime-in-a-box, Serious Sam AI, animation-priority indulgent arena."

 

It's a shame that I have an affection for SUDA's games. They're largely boring to play, and Lollipop Chainsaw was almost frustrating as well as bland.

 

But yeah, I guess that's a game I just finished.

I don't recommend the experience.

[Frenetic Pony]

I haven't completed it, I'm not sure I'm ever will, but I've been playing Final Fantasy 13-2.

 

The game feels huge, absolutely massive, almost overwhelmingly so. Each "level" is quite large in and of itself, you run around them gathering quests, finding items, battling random enemies. And there's this time travel mechanic, by which I can see that there's going to be plenty of levels, and know that you can come back to certain levels several times with new things to do thanks to the games whole "Time Travel" conceit.

 

The visuals are solid, though western games have definitely surpassed the once legendary production values of Final Fantasy games on basically all levels. I kind of like the story as well, as anime-ish as it is, there's still enough time travel fuckery going on that it at least feels rather fun. And there's just a fuckton of stuff going on with the systems in this game.

 

You've your assortment of items, and then this Pokemon like capture system where the third member of your party is some sort of monster you've tamed. And then there's this complicated level up system I haven't even gotten too, a bunch of fuckery concerning how you go about switching levels and thus "times" and the items you need to do so, and basically there's a lot of stuff going on.

 

And it's all severely, drably, hampered, suffocated by a battle system that is an entirely uncomfortable halfway throwback to the old FF menu battle system and some sort of not concession to the fact that everyone else has figured out how to do realtime battles and that they're pretty damned cool.

 

You're attention is split between a ton of menu options, you need to switch between "Paradigms" which determine which moves you have available, how your AI partner behaves (you can switch which character you're controlling) and what your third monster party member even is. But it's all "in real time" which comes into play when you're best off to switch your Paradigms on the fly. Sometimes this is ok, some "Paradigms" get you to concentrate on one enemy at a time, which is fine if there's a group of enemies but one big one you'd rather take down first, before switching to one better at dealing with groups.

 

It gets a bit complicated when you're asked to take down an enemy(ies) with a ton of health. Which is when you need to combo them until a meter fills up and they're vulnerable enough to actually do some real damage to, but comboing and actually dealing damage take two different kinds of attacks. But it's really annoying when you're asked to also watch what the enemy is doing, such as with bosses who tend to have a huge attack that you need to switch to a defensive paradigm for, but only when their big attack is about to hit, otherwise to beat them you should be in damage dealing mode. Oh, and you actually have to be queing up your own attacks, even if by "auto battle" all this tome as well. And it's hard to keep flitting between menus and submenus and keep track of your health and what the enemy animation is doing all at once. Not to mention your monster ally's special attack for which you have to activate and do a stupid QTE for every time. Did I mention you're graded on how you do each battle, with the items you receive dependent on your grade?

 

It really just feels uncomfortable, and often kind of boring. Most common enemies can be defeated using the exact same strategy every time. You'll encounter group of enemies type X, employ Paradigm type Y and then just auto attack until they're dead with the exact same results every time. Battle thus becomes a chore "Oh, these guys" and then you just repeat the exact same button presses pretty much to a T. There's a lot of stuff, but it doesn't add up to much depth. It's like Square Enix had ambitions to move beyond its menu and turn based battles, but didn't actually want to go all the way towards a proper no menu, free movement, real environment "3d" type system of fighting either. Frankly I still like Pokemon battles, so I'd have vastly preferred one or the other instead of this shallow and uncomfortable middle ground.

[miffy495]

I finished the DMC reboot just now. It was dumb, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The traversal felt really good, and the environments were frequently crazy as balls, so I could overlook other things that would have frustrated me in a lesser game. I thought some of the challenges were pretty cool. One that stands out involves polishing off four enemies (two weak, two mid-strength) without using the same attack twice. That really got me into the combat system and taught me how to use it well, and I thought it was a great little side thing. Recommended if you can get it in the $20 - $30 range.

[Malice Song]

I haven't completed it, I'm not sure I'm ever will, but I've been playing Final Fantasy 13-2.

 

Not having seen anything about that game, this was pretty much the most marvelous description I could have expected. I was trying to picture the game in my mind based on your input and the result was a giant clusterfuck of panda, baumkuchen and sheer, beautiful entropy. I will never play that game, but today is the day I regret that fact.

 

I'm not even joking, that was a gorgeous write up.

[Tanukitsune]

Well, I just completed Okami HD, and I do mean "completed", I did all sidequests, all treasures found and I even did all the fishing minigames to fill the fish database... I think I might like fishing minigames? I got Platinum, but I don't care, I'm just sad there is nothing more to do with this game, which is weird since this game feels long at the same time? If the game ended after the first "big" boss I would have been more than happy.

 

Is it me or is this game ridiculously easy? I always had too much money, items to even be close to dying not even once. 

 

Of course, since it's a Japanese game, Issun is total pervert and "Ammy" has.. explosive poop? JAPAN?!?