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Recently completed video games

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I own that somehow, think I got it in a Humble Bundle aaaages ago. I'd be interested in giving it a brief shot as I know its reputation full well but it doesn't look that intimidating from screenshots, sadly this computer can't play 3D anything though.

 

I look forward to reading your shaken account in the quitter's club thread.  :P

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After 28 hours and 122 deaths I beat* The Binding of Isaac (*killed mom). I can pretty confidently say that it's one of my favorite games ever. If you thought the dungeons in the 2D Zelda games were best thing about those games then I'd definitely give this a try. Now onto Sheol and the Cathedral.

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Now onto Sheol and the Cathedral.

 

Last week I finally beat Mom in The Binding of Isaac with someone other than Isaac. (Maggie?  Whoever gets the Yum Heart.) But instead of opening the chest I walked into another room that had never appeared before.  It was more levels!

 

I was severely overpowered for most of the game.  I was a "scary" flying wraith with poisonous quad shot and a ridiculous number of hearts.  But the laser eyes of the following level beat me quickly.  I should have just finished my Maggie game, assuming I still had that opportunity.

 

Meanwhile tonight I beat Half-Life: Blue Shift, playing through it for the first time.  It was brief, but was probably just the right length.  The level design was good, but a lot of the enemy placement wasn't very creative (lots of vortigaunts teleporting in over and over).

 

I also took this immature picture of the game's nagging scientist Dr. Rosenberg (voiced by Duke Nukem!)

post-8337-0-75387400-1378435704_thumb.png

 

Ah, Kleiner and Rosenberg.  What slash fiction there could have been....

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Once you beat Mom, beating her again just opens up the next floor. There is no "finishing" at that point until you beat the next big boss.

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I played a shitload of Hotline Miami after I first bought it (which was shortly after the Thumbs talked about it on the podcast) but always hit a wall at the "final boss". I reinstalled it recently and played up to that point and beat it in 5 attempts. Crazy how something like that can just click out of nowhere.

 

I love how creepy and transgressive it's willing to be, but I found myself wishing there was some actual point to it. The "explanation" at the end of the game feels like a giant cop-out. Still, that game is hella fucking fun.

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After almost two years of owning it and barely touching it, I beat Dead Rising 2 today. I really enjoyed myself. The problems I had with the first game (mainly the difficulty of the psychos and the timed events) were tuned down just enough to make them attainable, but not so much as to make the game easy. The final after-credits S ending boss fight was a pain in the ass, but I felt very satisfied after.

 

I'm looking forward to Dead Rising 3.

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Grand Theft Auto III (PS2) - Warming up for a week on Tuesday by playing though the GTA games I own but haven't finished. I must have quit on this about two missions from the end back in 2001/02, I haven't played it in ten years so I'm a little hazy but I definitely unlocked that third island and completed a few missions there and there really isn't far to go from that point. This is still a fun video game if you can stomach the dismal framerate, lack of camera control and shitty gunplay - I remembered it looking rough at the time but although it's far from pretty it isn't as bad as I'd feared, and there are no infuriatingly tough missions which is pleasing.

 

Now Vice City Stories on the Vita! The tracklist looks spectacular so I expect to enjoy this regardless of gameplay concerns.

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Analogue: A Hate Story - Fun and intriguing game, though I'm not a big fan of how the last part of it went down. Still, well worth playing and I'm looking forward to starting Hate Plus later this week.

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Just beat Saints Row IV, loved the dialogue between the characters and I had a few Laugh out loud moments (SR 3 and SR IV have been the only games to make me laugh). But I can't say it is better than SR 3, it feels a bit too much like a expansion. And If you have been keeping up with the development, it basically is. The starting and ending hours are great, but I feel the middle section is lacking. The loyalty missions are really good and there are some good Saints row franchise call backs, which were nice as I have been playing since the start.

The traversal mechanics are good and you can get quite precise with them. The weapon skins also add extra lunacy to the gameplay.

Over all I would recommend it, but I would say to just main line the story and loyalty missions, as the side activities are lacking.

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Last week I finally beat Mom in The Binding of Isaac with someone other than Isaac. (Maggie?  Whoever gets the Yum Heart.) But instead of opening the chest I walked into another room that had never appeared before.  It was more levels!

 

I was severely overpowered for most of the game.  I was a "scary" flying wraith with poisonous quad shot and a ridiculous number of hearts.  But the laser eyes of the following level beat me quickly.  I should have just finished my Maggie game, assuming I still had that opportunity.

 

If I am not entirelly mistaken, it didn't really make a difference, by trying to get further you should have unlocked everything that came with finishing that run up to that point and the only thing you potentially missed out on was the ending scene. There's actually still a good chunk to do after that, Isaac always seemed somewhat ambivalent in terms of when its actually finished, since, surprisingly, it's not entirely providing a clear-cut "propper" path from that point.

 

Also just beat The Walking Dead. That game's kinda good.

 

I don't know, there isn't even much to say except that I'm really glad with the way this was constructed. At first I thought "wait a second, this isn't a game", echoing some of the criticism I've heard about it before, but you know what, the most fun with a Telltale title (with any adventure game, actually) was with Back to the Future, and I attribute that to the fact that I never got stuck on a puzzle with that one and it just flowed really well. Same here, even though in hindsight some of the choices I had to make don't really seem to have had much of an impact, it seems to me that a lot of the focus was on story and choices. In which case, yeah, why throw some arbitrary stuff in there that distracts from the flow and the writing, which was excellent and highly deserved to hog the spotlight.

 

Extra props for

that last scene in Episode 5, where you got to use the environment to direct Clementine. That one was emotionally inredibly effective and in one last incredible move conveyed how games can put you in a situation the way no other medium can. Kudos to whoever came up with that.

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Just finished 999 on the ds because Virtue's Last Reward seems really popular on the 3ds. I guess I haven't actually finished the game because I got a bad ending so I'll have to play through it again. It was interesting and the puzzles were pretty fun, but the writing is hit or miss and the story was predictable. There's still 5 more endings and I'm assuming that to actually comment on the story I'd have to get the good one so I'll probably say more once I do that. I started the second play through but having to redo all the puzzles I already did sucks so I got bored and stopped.

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Now that you've finished it once, i'd recommend just using this guy (minor spoilers?) to make it easier to see the other endings. Yeah, it sucks replaying the puzzles, but with the flowchart you can minimize how much you have to do that. (If i'm correctly remembering how the game works, I think you basically want to ensure that you've seen each ending and each room at least once to meet the various requisites for the true ending.) VLR, on the other hand, builds a story flowchart into the game and lets you skip around between sequences you've completed, so it streamlines that whole process significantly.

The thing to understand, about both of these games, is that you really have no idea what the game is actually about without seeing the true ending. (It will be both not what you expected and way crazier/dumber than what you expected.) Each bad ending gives you a small piece of the total picture, pushing you towards the true ending.

Absolutely don't read any of the forum threads on here about either game until you finish them, virtually any information will be a spoiler... Except for the massive save bug in VLR, you definitely need to know about that. (Never save in puzzle rooms, save only during story sequences outside of the puzzle rooms. A couple of the puzzle rooms are bugged and will brick your save, rarely other rooms will do it too. Just don't save during those puzzle sequences. You can use the flowchart to escape out of a puzzle room if you need to save.)

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I beat The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons on Sunday.  The final boss is kind of cheap and the story is flimsy, especially when compared to Link's Awakening. But the puzzles and dungeons were solid. The game also brought back a lot of classic Zelda enemies I didn't expect—Lynels recreating their exact NES behavior!

 

I also started Oracle of Ages, and it was fun to see that the game's introduction changes entirely if you've beaten Seasons.

 

 

 
If I am not entirelly mistaken, it didn't really make a difference, by trying to get further you should have unlocked everything that came with finishing that run up to that point and the only thing you potentially missed out on was the ending scene. There's actually still a good chunk to do after that, Isaac always seemed somewhat ambivalent in terms of when its actually finished, since, surprisingly, it's not entirely providing a clear-cut "propper" path from that point.
 

 

Thanks; I did get some unlock messages so I should be fine.  But I don't know how I'd survive any more of that dungeon!

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But I don't know how I'd survive any more of that dungeon!

Not sure if item combinations in these games are considered spoiler-ish, but

going Guppy seems to be the most reliable way to do it. Mainly because it makes everything your bitch.

On a sidenote, Link's Awakening seems to get quite a bit of love around here. This makes me happy.

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Finally, after owning it since release, I have completed the main campaign of Tropico 4. I've got to say that the last mission was actually challenging, and I only squeeked it out with about 8 months left to go until automatic failure. I could swear that I had the 80s DLC, but it's not registering for some reason and I decided to take that as a sign that I'd played quite enough of it and called it done.

 

I'm not sure if I'd recommend it, it gets tedious very quickly, but I definitely had some fun with it along the way as well.

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I finished Ratchet and Clank Tools of Destruction a few nights ago. I feel like I keep wanting to make a thread on the Ratchet and Clank series since I've played from Going Commando in order to Tools of Destruction this year, but the game series tends to just be a typical cartoony platformer except very well made. This is not a bad thing for some games, but the series has tended to repeat itself a bit much in some cases. Other than that I don't know what I can really say about the series in terms of highs and lows, they are just pretty addicting and I 100% everything and move on to the next. Tools however is the first time I was fully on board with the art style, so there's that. I think I have five more to play.

 

I finished the Walking Dead DLC but I'm pretty annoyed about it and don't feel like ranting in that thread just yet.

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I just finished Tales of Graces f and I loved nearly every bit of it. The game made me realize why I tend to like JRPGs over Western ones because they tend to make me laugh before they make me cry. Not to mention that they tend to have their own characters instead of you creating your own.

 

And mostly, this is like, the third JRPGs I've played in a row that is SHORTER than a AAA game and it was more respectful of my personal time too! I never had to grind and the optional stuff went by so quickly and not a single moment felt like padding, yeah JRPGs have LESS padding that AAA games now, wow...

 

And this game was from Japan and it didn't include:

-Having a female character over 20 and calling her a granny.

-Obligatory swimsuit section is optional, hard to find and ridiculously chaste for Japan.

-Cheesecake in general.

 

My only complaint is that the dungeon kept getting bigger and bigger and had more annoying puzzles, which were still short, no more than 5 floor until the final one which was ten, but there were mostly small puzzle/mini-boss/cutscenes rooms.

 

And I heard this was a mediocre one? Geez, I can't wait to play Tales of Xilia! :3

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Another World 20th aniversary edition :tmeh:

Just completed this baby game ;)

There are a couple of really annoying parts in the game. First, if you do things out of sequence you won't get the proper checkpoints so you will have to redo quite some large segments if you don't figure out you did something out of sequence. But besides that, there are a couple of really annoying parts which take a shit load of tries to get right. Timing is often vital and the controls are quite shit, they don't respond properly. Sometimes you start shooting while you are running.

Anyway... it's an interesting journey. It's just a shame that there isn't much story to go by. As a scientist you are teleported to another world due to a accident. When you arrive there you have to escape danger and subsequently escape capture. But other than that.. nothing.

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Just beat The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

I didn't do as well as my save game from 20-ish years ago on this SNES cartridge. Apparently dying with fairies to revive you still counts as dying! So I have 22 deaths instead of the zero I thought I would have. Oh well!

Now onto Earthbound...?

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I'm SUPER late this this AAA party but I finished Dishonored the other night! I really, really enjoyed it. I had a super fun time as "Peacoat Adimral Batman". While that might sound like a crack at the game I think it really exemplifies everything I loved about it. I really enjoyed their world craft. While you can feel visually similar themes to city 17 this feels like a much more internally consistent world. This is a seaport city tasked primarily with whaling. In the scenario you're in (The empress Assassinated! Plague!) it makes sense for many of the environments to feel largely baron of people outside of security.

 

While I do love their world craft there is one element that sticks out super oddly and that's "The Outsider". I understand the need for the existence of "something" like that in order to explain away how you have magic powers (that enable all the awesome game play). That just felt cheesy as all hell. All of a sudden the evil lead singer from 30 seconds to mars shows up in my dreams to give me black magics... His entire through line is the part of the game that felt like the most video-gamey nonsense.

 

All in all Dishonored felt like the exact kind of thing that I hoped thief could turn into someday. It's the first game I've played in a long time where I am actually intrigued to check out the DLC.  

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Faerie Solitair :tmeh:

A casual game. Clear the table of cards by removing cards which are higher or lower. You have to complete some challenges like, x number of perfects, or a combo of x cards, etc. It's not really challenging, just clicking around. It's really casual. And there's some story about faeries and a wizard.

It's a good game to play if you're waiting for something to finish.

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Uncharted Golden Abyss (Vita) :tmeh:

Average experience that got better towards the end, i almost quit as the levels in the first 1/3 of the game were dull. Also the gunplay is never that much fun at the beginning of an uncharted game as you always start out with shit/weak/unaccurate weapons, it gets alot more enjoyable when you start getting the desert eagles and the M4s and the grenade launchers with the running and the screaming.

 

The game is super cut scene heavy, even for an uncharted game, which was pretty annoying. And another thing that was highly highly irritating is the game is linked to a separate top trumps style card game that needs to be purchased off the PSN store for about £4, these cards are all linked to a collectable in Golden Abyss (of which there are many) i must have got 200+ notification throughout the game that i had levelled up one of top trump cards for a game i didn't even own. grrrrr

 

Wouldn't really recommend it, but as its free on PS+ if you've got nothing else better to do there is fun to be had. But definitely not essential playing, not even for uncharted fans as the writing is sub par

 

Stealth Inc (Vita) :tup:

Again free on PS+. Half twitch based platformer half puzzle game. New mechanics get introduced throughout keeping the game relatively fresh. Again not essential playing, but it is a lot of fun and rewarding. The game is sort of like the flip side of Mark of the Ninja, probably quite similar at the conceptual stage but taken in complete different directions

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All in all Dishonored felt like the exact kind of thing that I hoped thief could turn into someday. It's the first game I've played in a long time where I am actually intrigued to check out the DLC.

I've heard the latest DLC is excellent. I quite enjoyed the first part playing as Daud. His version of the Dishonored powers are a neat twist on an already awesome set of tools. Specifically his new blink, which freezes time when you engage it, allowing you to leap, hold down blink and leisurely choose where you'd like to blink to. (It also allows for blink chains giving you insane traversal ability)

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