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Recently completed video games

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I know there's a separate thread for it but I decided to post about it here.

 

Pokemon Y! I wrapped up the story a couple days ago, now toiling in the post-game to make a team worthy of competing against friends. This game was pretty damn amazing. The past couple of generations (Black/White, Diamond/Pearl) I had played like... 3 badges into each, but they failed to hold my attention like Emerald did (and Blue before that). What helped this time was the extreme abundance of old Pokemon from the generations I was really into the series (1st and 3rd gen). I mean really, the nostalgia was in overdrive and for the better. There's only like, what, 70 new Pokemon in X/Y, and a lot of those are evolutions so it's less than that actually. In a weird way, I want to say that Pokemon X/Y qualifies as Pokemon Red/Blue 2. The only disappointing factor was Team Flare not being silly and misanthropic. Seeing their bad-guy level be so serious just had me kinda feeling like it was out of bounds for the tone of Pokemon. But that's a mild complaint. I liked their theme (aesthetically) a lot.

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I've played a few things lately.... since I needed a Move controller for Halloween, my cheapest option that would arrive in time was... Wonderbook: Book of Spells...

 

I... I had fun.... I guess I'm a bigger Harry Potter fan what I expected since I did have fun casting the spells from the books and I was surprised at how many spells you "learn". I'm still new to the Move, but the "flick" motion seems to work fine and it understood which spells I was tracing 95% of the time, oddly enough, it had more trouble with the simple line gestures than the complex ones. And while it was for kids, any Harry Potter fan would enjoy it enough... Also... WIZARDS!

 

What I really bought it for was House of the Dead III. IV and Overkill, 3 and 4 were awesomely cheesetacular and Overkill, I only played a level, but it was way too long for a rail shooter. I doubt it will top the robot zombie ninjas in IV.

 

I also miraculously completed Hotline Miami, once again a game I couldn't really stomach on PC was more fun on my Vita, also

#~%& fighting those two panthers and a ninja lass.

 

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Okay. Get ready for this.

 

Portal.

 

I welcome any and all chastizing / berating any of you feel to send my way. I never avoided the game per se, but I never felt compelled to jump in on it for some reason. I see now that I am wrong. Here's the amazing thing - I heard the credits music for the first time just now too. I'm so glad I managed to avoid it all this time because it really would've diminished its impact.

 

What a neat game. I wonder if there's gonna be a sequel!

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I just completed Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle, which is from the people who made So Blonde and.... Steve Ince worked on this? Apparently he worked on So Blonde too, but the "dumb adventure game character" didn't work at all in this case...

 

The Beavis and Butthead games use their stupidity to justify the puzzles and it works, but anyway, Captain Morgane works... specially compared to So Blonde.

 

It felt kinda forced that she was never really a captain, just an acting captain under her father's supervision, but they did work the angle of her being recognized as a valuable member crew well enough. Puzzle wise it was pretty decent, it was very Lucasarty in the way in that people give you hints in the "I heard X item does this" and soon you'll need that item for something similar.

 

It was weird how the game chooses at random when it's OK to steal an item and when you have to ask permission, she is a pirate after all.

 

This is point where I'd complain how the desperately references classic adventure games in a very blatant way, but it didn't make any adventure references at all that I noticed, it referenced a lot of other things and pretty subtlely, which is a vast improvement since the last game. You would see a sponge in a cleaning cart that you would have to look at closely to realize that it's wearing square pants.... But the game won't point it out and Morgane will mention that the plant in the pot that looks like a green pipe has teeth, but that's about it. There are a lot of sci-fi references and some seemed out of place, but still, they were not blatant.

 

It's no game of the year, but it's improved leaps and bounds over So Blonde, in almost every aspect.

 

Speaking of So Blonde, they had a character based on Sunny Blonde, which reminded me a bit of the whole John Greene thing in DR: Off The Record, she seemed to exist for the sole reason that Morgane could mention how much she hates dumb blondes and "Sunny" seems to be almost mentally challenged...

 

While admitting your last game had flaws, it makes me feel really uncomfortable when the game creators go out of their way to ridicule it, it feels like pandering in a very disturbed way.

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Little Inferno

Great to play something with the spirit of World of Goo though it felt a little repetitive where that game didn't. I think an ipad/3DS touchscreen (I played PC) would be the natural home for this - it's better suited to shorter play sessions and the interface is skewed towards touch. The Holiday for Strings-esque shopping music worked well, evoking in me that same stress I get when I'm waiting for someone in a department store at Xmas and I'm just a notch too warm in my winter clothes but can't be arsed to remove my jacket because, damnit, we're leaving any second!

Also *PEDANT ALERT*, I thought it really odd that the brick textures in the fireplace didn't align! In an FPS you can get away with the odd mismatching doorframe but here you're spending 2 hours+ staring close up at the same brickwork. Seemed odd for something that is otherwise so polished. 

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Portal.

 

I welcome any and all chastizing / berating any of you feel to send my way.

 

I only played it for the first time last year, right around this time of year. You are not alone.

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I may have completed Tale of Tales latest game? You never know with them...

 

You fly down a deep corridor "rubbing" it, while hearing innuendos and the game chastises you if you finish the level too quickly... I wonder what this game could symbolize?  :eyebrow:

 

But seriously, I think I need an adult.  :frown:

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The "Assassin's Creed IV Blag Flag" is a pretty good time. I slogged through AS3 because I enjoyed it's colonial towns, forests and ship segments. but that game was very linear in the way it gated you through the world, cutscene and scripted sequence heavy, and its different systems were awkwardly cobbled together. AS4 has all those systems wrapped into a more cohesive package. And my awareness of the islands around Cuba is slightly increased. And the meta-identity crisis going on in the "modern day" segments were pretty goofy. I might even go as far as to say it's my favorite of the Creed games.

 

Sorry to show up advertising AAA silliness but it was a fun ride.

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Scriblenuats Unlimited :tmeh:

I'm probably not the target audience ;) The game is rather tedious, it's just typing a word to solve a single thing over and over again. Quite often the solutions to the problems are the same. New worlds just offer the same stuff, and there is little else to do except guessing the right word.

 

Journey of a Roach :tup:

Picked this up in the Daedalic humble bundle. It's a short (about 2 hours) adventure game where you play a roach and you have to help your friend. It's the standard adventure game logic of finding and applying inventory items. It's not very complicated. The only special thing is that you can walk on walls and ceiling, which is often needed. It's a :tup: mostly because of the fact that I almost had an hour of entertainment for a very small pricetag. I wouldn't pick it up at 15 euros, or even 5. So, get the deadalic bundle while you can. You need to pay at least $6 to get this game.

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I recently completed Brothers : A Tale of Two Sons. I think that's probably the most emotionally effective game that I have ever played. It's about 2 hours and I would recommend it to absolutely everyone out there! Surely one of my favorite video games of the year!

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Yeah, I just beat Journey of a Roach and I agree with ElMuerte, it's a charming game, but it's only worth getting with the current bundle. It's like Bad Mojo, only cuter... And I have to point out that not only does it have the obligatory Lucasarts reference, you literally have to point it out to continue in the game. Oh, and Harvery makes a cameo too, I guess all Daedalic games do that now... You'd think it would be Rufus since he's the more popular character, but I guess Harvey is more of a mascot to them. *shrugs*

 

I also beat Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and it was awesome, I'm not sure if the stealth can even work in this game, it's just to fun to slice everything to piece to even try. It's kinda dumb and stupid... in the fun way a Metal Gear game should be. It's hilariously that they made up a whole backstory for Raiden, just to have an excuse for a "power up"... 

You know the whole Jack the Ripper thing was just an excuse to enter super ninja assassin mode, right?

 

I don't know what to think of the George kid that appears in middle of the game.... why does he need subtitles? He speaks with a thick accent and a bit of jargon, but he's pretty understable. Was it supposed to be funny? It kinda feels racist, but I might be reading into it too much.

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I beat The Swapper which was amazing in almost every way. It looks gorgeous, the progression feels just right (the amount of stuff you have unlocked at any time), it's got a great mood, the story is kind of intriguing (not quite up to the rest of the game but better than I expected) and most of the puzzles are great. There's actually only one puzzle I didn't like, but I could've done with a few more head scratchers. It's somewhere between the triviality of Portal 2's puzzles and Braid's challenging ones which is a good balance, it's just that sometimes it feels like you can just burn through puzzle rooms. Still one of the best games I've played this year, certainly the best one I've played that released this year.

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The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD - Had this on the Gamecube but stopped playing at some point before the final main dungeon so I missed the Triforce quest I've heard so much about since. I rather enjoyed that bit so I'm going to say this was a successful remake, and the addition of the faster sail definitely helped out too. The dungeons were great I thought, and I felt like a genius for being able to play a game like this without getting stuck and having to Google an answer so it's probably on the easy side, the characters were entertaining and even the sidequest stuff, which I never bother with in any game, was interesting enough that I dabbled with some of it. Obviously it was already the most beautiful video game of all time so the sexifying of the graphics has propelled it into hitherto undreamt-of realms of unimaginable splendour. Utterly delightful. I was almost at the end by the time I discovered I could export full-res screenshots through the internet browser which is sad. 

 

I have Skyward Sword on the shelf and one of the Bitsocket boys has been going on about Oracle of Ages on Twitter all week but I'm going to save myself for the 3DS one and then decide where to go from there. The scores as it stands though: WW > OoT > LA > LttP

 

New Super Mario Bros. U - It's the best 2D Mario in 20 years. It does everything the old games did as well as they did but with the addition of the Star Coin mechanic which I like but don't want to be punished for not going for, as I like to leave that for the end. I was worried there would come a point where it would tell me I needed so many to access a level or something but that never happens thankfully. Difficulty pitched just right, some levels were pretty challenging but never to Donkey Kong Country Returns degrees, great to see Mario in HD and the final boss was an enjoyable wee shot of nostalgia. I thought I was sick of these and only picked it up out of a sense of obligation but I'm glad I did.

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I beat Pushmo this weekend. Well, mostly beat anyway. I looked at one hint because the stupid palm tree had me confused about specifically what jumps  I was capable of, and I have 4 other puzzles I skipped, but I did beat the hardest one in the game, so I'll call that a win. It was fun, but I'd had quite enough of it by the time I was done.

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Just finished up the last case for Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies.  Pretty good overall, but with a couple of minor exceptions it seemed a lot easier than the rest of the series.  Evidence seemed a bit more obvious than before and they really lead you directly to the answer more than once.  The 3D effect looks pretty good on the game, although I turned it off after a while.  I also wasn't completely satisfied by the conclusion.  I think Apollo Justice is my favorite game in the series but this wasn't bad either.

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Mirror's Edge. I hit a bug at the 50% marker of GTA V (I've since found a fix, so I'll be back on the story mode of that soon) ands couldn't face a restart, so I went over to Mirror's Edge which reached the top of my catch-up pile (fun fact: next up is Turok). I really enjoyed it, a lot. I found there was an initial difficulty spike, but loved how, on a good day, the timing of movement reminded me of the combat in Arkham - it just flowed.

 

The shooter parts were the least satisfying to me - not because they played badly, I think they did a good job of making it feel like shooting just wasn't the protagonist's 'thing', and thus a little unwieldy - but because I found it too hard to not shoot people in the later levels, even though my preference would have been a 'no kills' play through. That's probably me just being a baby gamer and not really learning to do the unarmed combat well.

 

If I had more time, I can well imagine getting into the speed runs and so forth, there's something very satisfying about the zen-like state you hit when your mind and controls are working as one. LOVED the art direction and level design, for the most part - the way the level tells you where to go without telling you where to go, so well done.

 

TL:DR - Liked it a lot.

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Arkham Asylum. This feels like a real cocktail game. 1 part Gears/2 parts Bioshock/1 part Sands of Time, shaken with Batman, garnished with a dash of Metal Gear. And I drank it and liked it. It felt like a 'fan' game, by which I mean made by fans who thought up the concoction using off the shelf ingredients but really made it gel perfectly. There's absolutely nothing original on offer, except the chance to be Batman, and feel like Batman. Rocksteady should make a Bond game.

Detective Mode was a great conceit but I did wonder what the point was of the beautiful texture work when I spent 80% of the time looking at it through a luminous blue filter. Overall though, I liked most that it felt like a 'game' - it had collectables that I actually enjoyed collecting but it felt doable without resorting to the internet or scouring some massive gameworld for hours on end.

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Gosh I don't even remember everything I've beaten since my last post. More Ratchet and Clank (Size Matters and Tools of Destruction), a ton of Rabbids games (1, 2, TV Party, Go Home, and all of their DS counterparts), Journey, Flower, flOw, Double Dragon Neon (still need to do the final trophies, waiting for a friend), 'Splosion Man, Machinarium, Gray Matter, Heavenly Sword, and Dr. Mario and Puzzle League GBA, Walking Dead and DLC. I actually don't remember what I totally posted last time, so there may be overlap or missing games. It's mostly backlog clearing. Besides the ones I've probably posted in length about, I don't have much to say about the other games other than they were regular video game fun.

 

Really loved the novel Rabbids Go Home, now that I finally got around to it. May bump the thread to say a few random things.


I should really stop finishing so many video games and do something else with my life though. Still, I think my backlog is something like 150+ games. I'm afraid to count. ;(

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At one point my backlog totaled more than 200. I simply had to go through my whole list and uninstall/sell back games that I really had no intrest in playing. I still have around about 100 though.

 

Something that's really helped me this year is to aim for a "Completed Games/Purchased Games" ratio greater than one. It's led me to look at some of the Steam sales or Humble Bundle deals and think "Do I really need to set back my goal by 5 games? Will I ever play those games?" Unfortunately, I also picked up a PS3 which has destroyed my ratio what with all the free PS-Plus games and also buying the whole Infamous and Uncharter serieses.

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Geneforge 2: More retro PC-RPG from Spiderweb. Something about totally filling in those maps scratches some primal gaming itch for me. A little disappointed that clearing the final extra dungeon didn't change the ending.

 

Metro Last Light: Great fun! I think they hit a nice balance of scripted events and freedom to move and tackle levels your own way. The scripted stuff looked really nice on my low-high end machine. The early levels where they make you leave the tunnels for the surface are totally nerve wracking and really sells the world. The monsters are meaner, spawn a bit dynamically on some levels, and air filters are tight at first, so I was frantically looking for an entrance back into the cramped, but breathable metro tunnels. Well done! 

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Hunted: The Demon's Forge

 

It has splitscreen co-op. The split of the screens is retarded, the setting is generic as shit (might as well be Forgotten Realms in D&D but less diverse.) There's not nearly enough enemy types. But fuck it, it was mechanically sound, the characters were oddly self conscious of the ridiculously forced game mechanics, and it has splitscreen co-op. Beat it in 4 runs of like 3+ hours at a time, and had fun.

 

It will never get a sequel, and doesn't deserve one, but I've spent 12 hours and $5 in many diverse ways that were worse in terms of both time and financial cost.

 

Long Live the Queen

 

Stat RPG randomly generated narrative rogue likes with random Anime aesthetics have never been so good as a genre. Nor have they have, technically "been" before Long Live the Queen, but that doesn't make it any less interesting. You are some retarded princess about to become queen of whereverland. Seriously, you don't know SHIT! I got shot with an arrow and thought pulling it through me was a good idea for some reason and died.

 

But anyway, you don't know shit and are about to become Queen, so random people come to the court to ask you for decisions, and random events happen to you. In order to pass those events in a good manner, or even understand what the right decision are when you have a choice, you need to have a high enough stat.

 

In order to get your stats up you take classes, you get two a week. These raise your stats in one like 50 god damned stats you need to have. The thing is, how well your stats go up depends on your "mood". If you're "angry" you learn military strategy and bashing people with swords better than normal, but might say, can't learn at all how to "royal manners" some shit up. Which sucks because you need to get past the bitch assed guards in your own castle to grab your magic gem, but need "royal manners" to get past them because you aren't Queen yet. So you sit there and for your weekly activity choose to get your anger down progressively, and some other emotion "up" so its bonuses take over.

 

And then you finally get to learn royal manners, and are going to your friend from schools birthday party, and bandits attack on the way there. You don't have enough reflex to dodge the arrow and get hit, and then like the little fucking retard you are you "heard about arrows needing to be pulled out the opposite way they came in" and push the arrow in more and kill yourself because you don't have enough skill in "archery".

 

Apparently there's hundreds of ways to die, and I'm going to go back and play again tonight and probably find another way I'm a retarded assed fourteen year old princess that's going to die. Oh also guys a decade your senior will try to marry you, because you're going to be queen so apparently that's appropriate.

 

Edit - Second playthrough went from "randomly generated" to realizing "Fixed series of events" (at least at the beginning). Game goes from "awesome" to "Boooh! Lame!"

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Man, you guys finish a lot of games. Maybe I should be doing more of that myself.

 

Battlefield 4 (Campaign)

 

Man, how do I even talk about this one? I actually kinda liked Battlefield 3's campaign; now take that with the knowledge that I also enjoyed for instance Call of Duty: Black Ops 2's campaign, so I'm more a FPS nut than a narrative aficionado. Battlefield 3's campaign was slammed for not really promoting Battlefield gameplay - it was wildly linear and didn't even feature large arenas or vehicle combat that BF is known for. Now, that's the one place where BF4's campaign improves, adding a few more open areas where you're supplied with anti-tank mines or C4 and have to dispatch a couple roaming tanks on foot, or offering a small city with plenty of buildings to enter, an apartment complex with a sniper overwatch position, and another building with a rocket launcher emplacement.

 

You also have vehicular combat - a scene where you're driving a tank through a city, following mostly a linear path but also entering small parks or urban plazas where traversing the streets in certain patterns can give you the advantage over enemy RPG-wielding foot soldiers or other enemy tanks. You also have the opportunity to drive one of the newly ubiquitous gunboats, which is quite enjoyable.

 

All of that is great, but the story itself is actually noticeably worse than the one in BF3. It involves some degree of globetrotting, which is par for the course, and the major enemy is the Chinese, which is also par for the course. It brings back a character from BF3 (surprise!) who they unceremoniously kill off after not even discussing his origin or properly contextualizing his presence in this new game (surprise horseshit!) You also have the awesome Michael Williams from The Wire fame, who is completely wasted and only serves to be a chaotic force in the narrative who makes all the dumb shit happen. Worst of all, you make absolutely no narrative choices throughout the game, which wouldn't be a big deal until you're actually given a time-limited choice in literally the last moment of the game that decides the final message of the story. There's nothing more annoying to me, narratively, than giving a choice when one wasn't warranted, expected, or most importantly effective.

 

That campaign was a huge pile of shit. Stick to the multiplayer if you can, although beating the campaign unlocks certain guns. So, I guess play the campaign on the lowest difficulty and breeze through it in 3 hours of D+ gameplay.

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Long Live the Queen

 

Stat RPG randomly generated narrative rogue likes with random Anime aesthetics have never been so good as a genre. Nor have they have, technically "been" before Long Live the Queen, but that doesn't make it any less interesting. You are some retarded princess about to become queen of whereverland. Seriously, you don't know SHIT! I got shot with an arrow and thought pulling it through me was a good idea for some reason and died.

 

Reminds me of a Harry Potter rip-off game I played called Academagia. Random events, various storylines to follow, areas of the campus to explore. It was promising at the time, but I'm not sure if development is still continuing.

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Man, you guys finish a lot of games. Maybe I should be doing more of that myself.

 

Battlefield 4 (Campaign)

 

Man, how do I even talk about this one? I actually kinda liked Battlefield 3's campaign; now take that with the knowledge that I also enjoyed for instance Call of Duty: Black Ops 2's campaign, so I'm more a FPS nut than a narrative aficionado. Battlefield 3's campaign was slammed for not really promoting Battlefield gameplay - it was wildly linear and didn't even feature large arenas or vehicle combat that BF is known for. Now, that's the one place where BF4's campaign improves, adding a few more open areas where you're supplied with anti-tank mines or C4 and have to dispatch a couple roaming tanks on foot, or offering a small city with plenty of buildings to enter, an apartment complex with a sniper overwatch position, and another building with a rocket launcher emplacement.

 

You also have vehicular combat - a scene where you're driving a tank through a city, following mostly a linear path but also entering small parks or urban plazas where traversing the streets in certain patterns can give you the advantage over enemy RPG-wielding foot soldiers or other enemy tanks. You also have the opportunity to drive one of the newly ubiquitous gunboats, which is quite enjoyable.

 

All of that is great, but the story itself is actually noticeably worse than the one in BF3. It involves some degree of globetrotting, which is par for the course, and the major enemy is the Chinese, which is also par for the course. It brings back a character from BF3 (surprise!) who they unceremoniously kill off after not even discussing his origin or properly contextualizing his presence in this new game (surprise horseshit!) You also have the awesome Michael Williams from The Wire fame, who is completely wasted and only serves to be a chaotic force in the narrative who makes all the dumb shit happen. Worst of all, you make absolutely no narrative choices throughout the game, which wouldn't be a big deal until you're actually given a time-limited choice in literally the last moment of the game that decides the final message of the story. There's nothing more annoying to me, narratively, than giving a choice when one wasn't warranted, expected, or most importantly effective.

 

That campaign was a huge pile of shit. Stick to the multiplayer if you can, although beating the campaign unlocks certain guns. So, I guess play the campaign on the lowest difficulty and breeze through it in 3 hours of D+ gameplay.

 

I never played much of the BF3 campaign, but I've got to say I enjoyed a lot of the BF4 campaign, despite agreeing with most of the negative points in your post (and adding a bit of "it's a buggy mess" on top.) Mainly, I thought a lot of the combat set pieces were well setup and interesting, unlike CoD with all of its infinite spawns and invisible tripwires. The story was pretty bad, but I liked the characters well enough, even if the choice at the end was kind of dumb. I've gotten to the point that I don't feel like I need a ton of choices in my narrative FPS games anymore.

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