Recently completed video games

[Patrick R]

Oh man, my cousins and I spent hours and hours playing Day of the Tentacle, but I never did beat it. I should play it again.

 

(Checks Steam and GOG)

 

WHAT? NOOOOOOOO! Now I'll never find out what it's like to win the human show.

[Tanukitsune]

You can buy a copy for 30$ on Amazon.

[Patrick R]

Jesus, look at those prices. I should have held onto my copy of Grim Fandango for dear life.

[quantum_leopold]

Gosh, you are pretty much the first person I've heard who thought Dishonored was too long. I wanted more, not less.

 

Having a young daughter, I am probably much more likely than the average person to prefer a shorter game--I've got so many games I want to get to, and so little free time in which to do it.  But also, regardless of the length, I felt the story didn't require much of the last 2-3 missions.  I'm fine with there being a bit of a twist and some additional work to be done after taking down the character you might've presumed was the Final Boss, but like working through those sewers and the city to get back to your home base and then going to a whole new location, plus forcing you to close out a few other characters' stories, some of that stuff just felt like padding to me.

[osmosisch]

I thought meeting Daud again was a great part of the denouement, as was visiting the much-mentioned drowned district. I will grant you that the 'twist' felt a bit unnecessary though, and I found the very final level to be rather unenjoyable compared to the rest. That still made it immensely fun though, just a it less so.

 

Also, congrats on the daughter, they're fun aren't they? My 2.5-year old loves Proteus.

[tegan]

esus, look at those prices. I should have held onto my copy of Grim Fandango for dear life.

 

Never trust Amazon prices for old games. This one's my current favourite, though there used to be a listing for Secret of Mana that was even more expensive.

[SecretAsianMan]

Never trust Amazon prices for old games. This one's my current favourite, though there used to be a listing for Secret of Mana that was even more expensive.

 

I enjoyed the "Frequently Bought Together" combination of Super Mario World + Donkey Kong Country + Super Mario Kart for the low low price of $1729.92.

[quantum_leopold]

I thought meeting Daud again was a great part of the denouement, as was visiting the much-mentioned drowned district. I will grant you that the 'twist' felt a bit unnecessary though, and I found the very final level to be rather unenjoyable compared to the rest. That still made it immensely fun though, just a it less so.

 

Also, congrats on the daughter, they're fun aren't they? My 2.5-year old loves Proteus.

 

Definitely agree on Daud, I did like that bit--I liked that it let me spare him while still giving me the chance to fight him--in general, I liked the combat a lot but wanted to avoid actually using it so as to avoid the bad ending, so it was nice to have a chance to use my weapons and powers while still getting credit for being a good guy.  

 

Thanks for the congrats; my 16 month old has only shown interest in Ni No Kuni, although that game ended up falling victim to my habit of wondering if maybe I would like a JRPG every 2-3 years and confirming that nope, those are not for me.  Maybe we'll give Proteus a try!

[JonCole]

 

Haven't felt the need to 100% a game like this in quite a while, last one was probably Assassin's Creed 2. Very enjoyable, the story felt a lot more cohesive than I really expected. Definitely my GOTY thus far, but not by a huge margin over Bioshock Infinite.

[Zeusthecat]

Haven't felt the need to 100% a game like this in quite a while, last one was probably Assassin's Creed 2. Very enjoyable, the story felt a lot more cohesive than I really expected. Definitely my GOTY thus far, but not by a huge margin over Bioshock Infinite.

 

Congrats!

 

Last game I did that with was Skyrim and it felt so good.

[dibs]

Finished Bastion last night. The level structure fell apart somewhat at the end, but it was excellent overall.

[Zeusthecat]

My friend and I just finished Borderlands 2 last night. I found it to be a very good game and thoroughly enjoyed it.

 

Having recently played Borderlands 1 (which I enjoyed) I was very impressed with all of the improvements in this game. The combat felt much more polished, every gun was exciting and different, the loot game was very satisfying, enemy types were more diverse and required different strategies to defeat, the story was better, the environments were more interesting, vehicles were less frustrating and offered more variety, and the quests were more interesting. In my opinion this is one of the best sequels I've played in awhile.

 

Perhaps a big part of why I enjoyed this so much was due to the fact that I played it start to finish with a friend. I played the Soldier class with all of my skill points going into my turret and my friend played the Assassin with all of his points going into close quarters melee combat. By the end of the game I was absolutely in love with my turret. It had 2 guns, rocket pods, and fired slag bullets. Plus I ended up with a legendary class mod that reduced the cooldown by 25% so I was able to have it up over 50% of the time. It was so cool throwing my turret out and then mowing guys down with my rocket launcher/grenades/assault rifle/SMG/pistol while my buddy was running around as an invisible assassin knifing guys in the back. Then seeing all the experience popping up as enemies died and the showers of loot that rained out of their corpses was just icing on the cake. This game definitely sold me on the RPS concept.

 

I found the writing in this game to be well above average compared to most video game stories. It wasn't perfect and there was some awkward forced humor but by the end of the game I found that it had provided many more memorable moments than most video game stories (but I do think the damsel in distress thing with Lilith was kind of lame). Above all, my favorite character was Handsome Jack by far. He has to be one of the best villains I've ever seen in a game. He is hilarious, charismatic, insecure (although it is very subtle), and a fucking psychopath. The fact that you do some quests for him was so cool too. At times I felt like he was both a friend and an enemy and I really liked how they were able to make me hate him and like him at the same time.

 

So I'll finish with my favorite moment of the game. Jack asks me to kill myself and I see that my two options are "do it" and "don't do it". So my buddy and I go to the ledge where we can jump off and kill ourselves and start contemplating whether we should do it or not. At first we were thinking about just having one of us jump to see what would happen. After some deliberation I said "fuck it" and just ran and jumped and my friend followed my lead and did the same. It was so worth it. Jack's response to us actually killing ourselves was classic and we got a shitload of eridium for doing it. I like that a game rewarded me for purposefully killing myself.

 

I'll definitely be running a second playthrough to level up to 50 and am hoping for some good 4 player action this time around to see how the dynamic changes with the other two classes (we only ever played 2 player on our first run). Hopefully the people playing this game on Xbox Live aren't as shitty as those playing the first game.

[Sno]

Hopefully the people playing this game on Xbox Live aren't as shitty as those playing the first game.

Oh, they definitely are every bit as shitty as they were in the first. Don't do it, man.

Borderlands 2 is still broken for public games.

[elmuerte]

Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers

Interesting game. However, it's a real pain in the ass to cope with the physics. It doesn't help than the controls are everything except smooth. No save mechanism, just arbitrary checkpoints. The world has arbitrary rules, some stuff cane be cut, some cut stuff can't be moved. The funky often badly responsive controls don't help during the parts where timing is vital.

[Apelsin]

Mass Effect 2...

 

For being the sequel to a game I only played for a few hours it was surprisingly easy to get into the story without feeling I had missed too much.

Have to say that the game felt oddly incoherent though, Shepard rushing from loyalty mission to loyalty mission to looking up a random distress signal and so on.

[Twig]

Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers

Interesting game. However, it's a real pain in the ass to cope with the physics. It doesn't help than the controls are everything except smooth. No save mechanism, just arbitrary checkpoints. The world has arbitrary rules, some stuff cane be cut, some cut stuff can't be moved. The funky often badly responsive controls don't help during the parts where timing is vital.

Huh. I just finished it and thought it was great. I had no gripes, other than the weird-ass movement physics of tiny himself. (Sometimes he wouldn't move straight forward in the direction of the camera. Caused quite a few deaths.)

[Tanukitsune]

I just beat Luigi's Mansion 2: Dark Moon and... I'm rather disappointed.

 

In the original game you could find a ton of individual ghosts with a distinct look and personality, but here there are only a few that just get stronger as the game progresses. 

 

The idea of having more mansions sounds good at first, but the game "stalls for time too much" it's almost insulting. Each mansion is divided in several missions, which are more are less repeated in each mansion. The dog stole the key mission, the rescue the Toad assistant mission, the "Ghosts stole something you need to progress" mission, the "investigate" mission and the boss.

 

The bosses aren't that interesting either, they are always "possesser" ghosts, which possess something until you get them out of it. One boss fight was nothing but a "lazy arena", I really hate when a game just throws enemies at you instead of being creative. Although one boss was actually pretty cool... insultingly easy, but cool looking.

 

The game is much easier than the original, since the game is now mission based, it doesn't hurt much when and if you die. You can even come back to life if you find a certain item in the level.

 

The lighting did look amazing in 3D though.

[melmer]

The Cave

I almost completed it in one sitting, just had to jump back in for a bout half an hour the next day. I thought it was fantastic!

 

I no plans to play this because of all the whinging i saw on the internets about this and that. Okay i'll admit the game does have a lot of ladders, but the traversal was never really a problem.

 

And i have no doubt i'll be venturing back into the cave with some of the other characters some time in the future

[Ucantalas]

The Cave

I almost completed it in one sitting, just had to jump back in for a bout half an hour the next day. I thought it was fantastic!

 

I no plans to play this because of all the whinging i saw on the internets about this and that. Okay i'll admit the game does have a lot of ladders, but the traversal was never really a problem.

 

And i have no doubt i'll be venturing back into the cave with some of the other characters some time in the future

Ahh. I loved The Cave. I've played through it more times than I would care to mention. I worked hard at it and got every single achievement (XBox360 version). To this day my friends and I will still shout out "Shut up!" in an old man's voice, or "Gal durn mine cars!" if something doesn't go our way. We refer to engines as dynohypernators and keys as smurgs.

To say that The Cave has affected my life is a bit of an understatement, and I can only hope that one day I will be part of the creation of such a monumentally fun game.

Also, which characters did you go through as? (Depending on who you went as, some of my references won't make any sense, because of the nature of The Cave.)

[melmer]

Knight, time traveler and twins

Twins wouldn't normally have been someone I'd choose but I read somewhere they had a good story(?) so went with them. I found the narrator was really good at very mild hints to point you in the right direction, that if weren't there would have left me scratching my noggin. Like 'leap of faith' oooooooohhh

[Ucantalas]

Ah, very good choices. I liked the Twins, but I think my favorite story was the Hillbilly's.

Anyways, I (finally) just finished Dishonored. I went total chaos, killing everyone I saw. I had so much fun with this game, although I found I really didn't care about the story, I just wanted to play around in the city sneaking places and killing guards.

[Tanukitsune]

I finished Castlevania: Lord of Shadows: Mirror of Fate and while I found the game more enjoyable than I thought the plot was just too silly...

 

Half the Belmont's are vampires now? TREVOR IS ALUCARD?!?! WHAAAT!!?!?

[Zeusthecat]

I just finished Candy Box. It was really interesting at first but as soon as the discovery part of the game ended it became kind of lame. I probably would have liked it a lot more if it ended at

The castle keep

 

The sense of discovery at the beginning was really great though and genuinely caught me by surprise when each new mechanic was added.

[axemtitanium]

I recently finished Spec Ops: The Line. It was very good. The gameplay was a completely bog-standard squad-based shooter with some mildly intelligent AI (except on FUBAR difficulty, when they take stupid pills). The narrative, on the other hand, was something else entirely. While the ending was entirely predictable, I felt that the choices and actions that lead up to it are the meat of what the game is about. I don't buy the criticism of the game that it embodies all the tropes that it tries to critique. No, I don't think the game could have been made in any other way and still have the same impact. I particularly liked when it started going all Eternal Darkness and played with the loading messages (and I wish it did more subversion of systems like that). In retrospect, I'm a little bummed out that I found Spec Ops to be so much better than BioShock Infinite, at least thematically. I found that BioShock didn't end up committing to its themes nearly as much as Spec Ops did, opting instead to explore more of its hilarious sci-fi what-have-you, and suffered for it.

 

Also, Spec Ops: The Line is when Nathan Drake finally gets called out for being the world's most notorious mass murderer. Time to go play Uncharted 3!

[Apelsin]

If you are interested in learning a bit more about Spec Ops: The line you can check out the talk one of the developers has about the narrative.

 

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017980/We-Are-Not-Heroes-Contextualizing