Finished Any Games Lately?

JillSammich wrote:
Carlbear95 wrote:

Just finished Deus Ex: HR. Good fun... not sure its worth playing again to see different endings.. new ways of doing things but definitely enjoyed my time. May look into some DLC the next time it goes on sale. 25 hours says steam... and check one off the pile!

I think I have hit a wall with HR pretty early. The boss fights and forced combat is keeping me from playing as much as I would like, which is sad because I really enjoy the game as a whole. I'm really liking the cyber punk motif and the RPG and stealth stuff is super fun. I'm currently at a point in Hong Kong...

Spoiler:

When you have to fight the room full of guys after the conversation with Zhao... I just don't really feel like trying to get through and all the ammo I have at the moment is a couple clips for the SMG.

Not to derail the thread to much, but that was definitely the hardest part of the non-lethal, ghost play through. Escaping that room without fighting or anyone noticing you was hard.

Luggage wrote:
JillSammich wrote:

When you have to fight the room full of guys after

Escaping that room without fighting or anyone noticing you was hard.

Quickly escaping ended up being surprisingly easy once I played around a bit:

Spoiler:

Use your invisibility and make a beeline for the air duct on the far right (as you leave). Take that as far as you can, letting your invisibility recharge, then do the same thing sprinting from the airduct exit to the room elevator. You can also hide behind the furniture a bit for this second stage instead of one long sprint. Obviously you need invisibility and the move/run silently augments help. Also, the Wikia page for that level mentions using gas grenades; though I did not use them.

And Uncharted 2 goes down. Definitely going to need a break before I jump into the 3rd one.

trueheart78 wrote:

And Uncharted 2 goes down. Definitely going to need a break before I jump into the 3rd one.

Way to power through! I hope you enjoyed the ride.

Everything was good except the late game combat. It was nice to hang with Claudia Black again, too.

trueheart78 wrote:

Everything was good except the late game combat. It was nice to hang with Claudia Black again, too.

Finished the main story for Batman Arkham City. Maybe one day when the pile is smaller or if I pick up the DLC for it I'll revisit Arkham City since I've only 44%ed the game, but for now I enjoyed what I got out of it and can move on to something else on the pile.

Prozac wrote:

Finished the main story for Batman Arkham City. Maybe one day when the pile is smaller or if I pick up the DLC for it I'll revisit Arkham City since I've only 44%ed the game, but for now I enjoyed what I got out of it and can move on to something else on the pile.

I just recently came back to it to get all the riddler stuff done and finish off some of the other sidequests. I also tried new game plus, but I'm not sure I like how all the indicators for combat are turned off. It just gets frustrating. I had a lot of fun with the side stuff though. definitely worth coming back to after a break.

JillSammich wrote:
Prozac wrote:

Finished the main story for Batman Arkham City. Maybe one day when the pile is smaller or if I pick up the DLC for it I'll revisit Arkham City since I've only 44%ed the game, but for now I enjoyed what I got out of it and can move on to something else on the pile.

I just recently came back to it to get all the riddler stuff done and finish off some of the other sidequests. I also tried new game plus, but I'm not sure I like how all the indicators for combat are turned off. It just gets frustrating. I had a lot of fun with the side stuff though. definitely worth coming back to after a break.

That definitely worked well in AA, but I don't think I could do it with AC. The combat got so varied as to make it complex. Taking away the indicators would make it even more so.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

That definitely worked well in AA, but I don't think I could do it with AC. The combat got so varied as to make it complex. Taking away the indicators would make it even more so.

It definitely makes combat more of a handful, and it feels cheaper without the indicators. Especially in big groups. I feel like that's when combat was at its most fun in the main game. You're surrounded by baddies and your combo meter is going up and you feel like a badass. In new game +, it just feels like you get surrounded and you can't pay attention to the animations that give away the attacks and you just get slaughtered. There's too much going on to really manage large groups.

My girlfriend and I finished Rayman: Origins which we've been co-opping together off and on since it released. As I've always thought, it is simply a work of artistic brilliance. The last level is one of the harder platforming sections I've ever played though, plus we've been doing all the Tricky Treasure levels because, apparently we like to hurt ourselves or something. We only have 1 left but don't have enough Electoons to unlock it yet. We'll do it though!

Finished Saints Row: The Third the other day. Man, that was fun.

Also just finished my second playthrough of The Witcher 2. I took the Iorveth path this time and enjoyed it even more. I almost never play through games twice; in fact, TW2 is only the third game I've ever completed more than once, the other two being Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 2. Like those games, TW2 has well-developed, interesting setting, a satisfying narrative, and branching storylines determined by my decisions. I'm really looking forward to TW3.

Was desperately trying to power my way through Kingdom Rush on the iPad this weekend, but to no avail... In between cool-downs (it's impossible to immediately restart a tower defense level after losing on the final wave) I found myself moving through League of Evil and ended up finishing all the levels. I was shocked at how good the controls worked, as I pretty much always died because I was bad at the game, not due to an awkward button press. Makes me excited to see how Team Meat's iPad Super Meat Boy-inspired project is going...

Undead Nightmare. I hadn't played RDR since finishing the SP when it was released. Nice to be back in the world and to see the characters. A pleasant diversion.

Just finished Amnesia (11hrs). Such a nice simple game. Got stuck a couple times and had to resort to a walkthough.

Spoiler:

Like obtaining the vaccine solution: After using the hand drill on a dead guy's head, insert the copper tube and affix the hollow needle. Proceed to ram yourself into the needle to inject yourself with the dead guy's vaccinated blood.

Another observation of the game:

Spoiler:

Never seen so many schlongs in one game. In fact, I've never seen any in a video game. Quite amusing actually.

Finished the main story for the Double Fine adventure game Stacking.

Absolutely charming and fun game.

Also happens to be on sale on Steam atm.

Finished all the Blackwell games that have been released so far. Highly enjoyed all of them, and I felt they actually improved as they went on. (Most of the annoying puzzles are all in the first game, and even then they aren't that many.)

Finally got around to finishing The Witcher 2. I already provided details in the Catch-All, but overall I felt the game was average. I loved the world and the atmosphere, disliked the majority of design decisions and wasn't a fan of some of the dialogue.

Played the campaign for the 2010 reboot of Medal of Honor since I bought the game for chump change during a Steam Sale. The less said about it the better. It had all of the shortcomings of scripted shooters like COD and almost none of the flair.

Just finished 10000000. Six-and-a-quarter hours of pretty intense joy for $1.99. Well done!

My iPad has a really specific, grid-like grease pattern on it now from that game.

Finished up Star Wars: KotOR this weekend. It was fun, but I'd say that about 50% of that enjoyment was derived in seeing the DNA of the Mass Effect series in it. The final Star Forge levels felt really cheap in how they ramped up the 'difficulty' by throwing endless amounts of enemies at you. Of course I didn't realize until right before the final battle that I should have been spamming Force Wave to make it easier on myself. And the glitchy gameplay didn't help much either: while the idea of dice-roll turn-based combat is nothing new, the worst aspect was the 50% chance that the game would delete my squad's combat queue leaving them standing there doing nothing but taking a lightsaber to the knee. And more than once my main character would lock up altogether and would not even do any attacks at all, forcing a checkpoint reload.

Completed Super Mario 3D Land. Got all the star coins and flags. Feels good to complete a game rather than see credits and go onto the next game. It was one of the best 3ds games. The cosmic Mario enemy can go die though.

I finished all the single player missions of Unit 13 for the Vita which I've been chugging through on lunch hours. It's pretty fun actually, the levels are a bit samey but most of the missions are relatively short and the real challenge is in doing them multiple times to get higher scores and star ratings. The only thing I don't like is that the enemies are way too bullet spongey and I had several cheap deaths as a result. Still want to go through it co-op if anyone's interested.

Finished Mass Effect 3 finally.

With the extended cut, I was satisfied with the endings for the most part. I did bypass the MP/microtransaction business, though. OMG, Hax. :-p

While I'm still ticked off at Bioware/EA for the way they handled the game, I think I can fairly say I got my money's worth, so it's all good.

Finished Diablo II. On to the expansion...

I wrapped up The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword last night.

In some ways, it's the best Zelda game yet, and in some ways, it's the worst. When it's on, it's brilliant and creative, boldly using motion controls to create innovative new encounters unlike anything else the series has ever seen. When it's off, it's a tedious bore with tacked-on waggling and quest lines that never end. There's not a lot of middle ground.

The game's biggest innovation is its directional swordplay. It brings a level of strategy to combat that the series has been missing since Zelda II on the NES, and it allows for some interesting puzzles like locks that must be struck in certain directions to open, or water droplets that must be impaled and then thrown from Link's blade.

Unfortunately, the directional attacks aren't universally utilized. While a handful of the game's early enemies require the player to plan and aim their strikes carefully, the majority are best defeated by flailing. This creates a situation later in the game where players have been trained to approach combat in one way (reckless waggle) but are being confronted by enemies that require more care. I found myself getting frustrated by combat in the middle of the game because it hadn't really taught me how to fight well.

But it's in the later dungeons and encounters where the swordplay really comes to life and becomes thrilling. It becomes in some ways the sword fighting game I'd always wanted from the Wii: Link and his enemy circling one another, shifting from stance to stance, until a weakness is revealed and I strike for victory. I went from avoiding combat in the first half of the game to anticipating it in the second. I actively sought out some of the game's enemies because they were fun to fight. One enemy in particular, a lizard creature with one arm encased in stone, became my favorite encounter.

If the game had focused on its innovative swordplay, it would have been a winner, one of my all-time favorites, but it was bogged down by that familiar bane of Nintendo games, a sometimes slavish adherence to tradition, and by an effort to cram more stuff—more collectibles, more items, more questlines—into a formula that didn't need it.

Skyward Sword begins slowly, pedantically introducing players to each of the game's concepts by running them through paces familiar since the '80s. Here's your boomerang, of sorts, and your bomb bag and the boss who is defeating by tossing said bombs into his mouth.

It's a drag and does nothing to convince players that there's anything special worth sticking around for, but it's necessary at least in part because Nintendo made the baffling decision to give each and every one of Link's items a unique control scheme. No two items are used in the same way, even when it would make sense for them to be. So for each one the player needs to not only be taught how to use it in the game but also taught how to physically use the item in real-life and be given time to adjust. For me, I found that I never became comfortable with any of the items. I always took a moment whenever I equipped each one to remember just what I was supposed to do with the controllers now. It pulled me out of the game and broke any sort of flow it may have established.

Without that need to laboriously teach the player how to use each new item, the game's opening section could have been sped up considerably, and some of the more advanced swordplay techniques could have been introduced earlier in the game to give players an idea of what to look forward to. Although even if that were to happen, Skyward Sword would still have serious pacing issues.

Simply put, the designers made too much game. There are too many side quests (both optional and mandatory), too many items to collect that are of little value, and a completely unnecessary crafting system that neuters player's sense of discovery by rewarding them with useless raw materials rather than vital character upgrades. It's similar to Arkham City and the way that game's developers tried to improve on Arkham Asylum by simply packing in more Riddler trophies and other collectibles and adding dozens of side attractions that cannibalize design space from one another.

But through the pacing issues and the piles of useless loot, Skyward Sword presents the most swooningly romantic take yet on the story of Link and Zelda. It gives players beautifully crafted dungeons and marvelous visuals like a ship inside a time bubble sailing across an ancient ocean long since turned to dust. It pushes players into boss fights that are not only fun to play but feel epic and important in their scope; the final boss fight, in particular, is a duel pitched at a mythic level that doesn't disappoint.

Ultimately, Skyward Sword feels transitional, a game between where the franchise has been and the direction it could be going. Dialogue options and light character customization hint at a more traditional RPG-like experience while the late-game swordplay suggests a novel character action game. Skyward Sword will likely be remembered as one of the franchise's lesser entries, lumped in with Zelda II, Majora's Mask, and Twilight Princess as games to play if you're curious but that aren't essential.

I can't personally say I want another Zelda game just like it, but I'm happy I stuck with it and played it through to the end. There are some marvels to behold here.

Great read, Clockwork! I've been so done with Zelda games since Ocarina of time came out. For some reason I just can't bring myself to get interested in that style (Darksiders included..).

Just finished the story on Kingdom Rush on the iPad! Fantastic, charming, and a great value (at least 6 hours of gameplay for $2). I'm more of a fan of the set-path TD, as it takes me long enough to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of towers in TD games, that having to also manage the enemy path makes it too challenging.

Finished up Mafia 2 this morning, fun little romp, no where near as sandboxy as a GTA or SR game, but I enjoyed the story, so linearity suited me fine.

Got around to finishing Crysis 1 on PC and am about half way through Crysis Warhead. Pretty good for the price (Steam sale). Looks great on 1-year old PC.

Finished up a second run-through of Portal. So much more enjoyable with a KB/M setup.

Spoiler:

The huge jumping puzzle took me only 2 tries!! Took me about 100 tries on the PS3..

Still a really enjoyable game. I'll probably play another game or two before jumping into Portal 2. Don't want to overdue that style.

I finished the main storyline campaign of Guild Wars: Prophecies last night. I started playing Guild Wars for the first time, ever, on July 24, 2012. I had a lot of key help from various Goodjers along the way, but I completed nearly all of the missions solo, which feels very strange for an MMO.

I had never tried GW before, primarily because when it originally came out, a WoW guildie gave me the synopsis that the game was entirely focused on PvP -- and as I didn't care much for PvP, I completely wrote the game off as something that would never interest me. I just need to say this: f*ck that guy. GW1 is a brilliant game for PvE, and I actually feel pretty bad that I had to take a rush tour through the game now, in preparation for GW2 (which I had similarly completely written off, until I saw some gameplay videos and tried the free GW1 trial in July).

I just wrapped up 10000000 on iPad. 5.5 hours for the escape, and full upgrades, all challenges etc.

I thought I was done with match 3 games, but apparently not.