Finished Any Games Lately?

Finally finished Mark of the Ninja which took a lot longer than I planned because of constant pausing to look after the puppy. I didn't think I'd end up with a two way fight for my downloadable game of the year but this is in a dead heat with Dust: An Elysian Tail now. I actually restarted at checkpoint every time I got spotted which I never do in most games. Klei totally figured out how to do stealth in a way that's exciting rather than tedious. I really hope this succeeds and they get to do another one. I'll buy it again on PC no question.

Okay, finished two games the last few days.

From Dust: A quite enjoyable game that does a really good job of taking its one mechanic and building upon it through a succession of puzzles. Reminds me a lot of good indie puzzlers in that regard. I do think that perhaps towards the end, at least for me, it was easier to simply brute force a lot of the puzzles by simply stacking absurd amount of sand/stone to get above whatever was threatening my guys. This led to the later stages taking quite a bit of time, perhaps there was a more elegant solution that I just wasn't seeing.

Overall a really good few hours.

Shatter: A fun little block breaking game. I really liked the circle stages, added a bit to the formula. My biggest complaint about this game is that I couldn't find a way to remap the controls, my keyboard doesn't have a right control key, meaning I could never use the little shard shooty thing that I think was supposed to trigger off that key (never saw it so I'm not sure). The bosses were interesting, each having their own little puzzle, and the shortish length (took me about 2 hours) kept it from getting too repetitive. Found out that I suck pretty bad, given the scored of other GWJ players, I was generally about 25th in the list on about each level.

I also played a few hours of AI War: Fleet Command, it was alright I guess, I doubt I will play anymore. I feel like I have a pretty good bead on the game and it just doesn't seem to offer anything that Sins of a Solar Empire doesn't for me, and I think Sins does it in a much more polished and streamlined manner.

Xenoblade is vanquished. Thank. Goodness. What a slog the last 10 hours were, mostly because of the bosses, but somehow I still loved the game. The art direction, music, most of the voice acting and writing were great and involving. I was going to hop right into Last Story but I think I might need a breather from JRPGs.....

Xenoblade done? My hat is off, sir.

I finished Resonance Of Fate and all the optional content with 150 hours on the game clock. Took a couple of months. I'm pretty proud of myself.

beeporama wrote:

I finished Resonance Of Fate and all the optional content with 150 hours on the game clock. Took a couple of months. I'm pretty proud of myself.

That's some awesome dedication. I couldn't do that, at least not all in one go; I get antsy to switch games after I've played anything for 12 hours or so.

Metal Gear: Peace Walker, in that I completed Chapter Five. There are so many escalating, dovetailing mechanics in that game though, I imagine I could squeeze far more time out of it, but I never played MGS3 and I gotta do that.

KidDork wrote:

Xenoblade done? My hat is off, sir.

I left my Wii on for 3 days while I contemplated quitting because of trouble with final boss and the fact that you can't save between him and the boss prior to him. Not sure what brought me back to it.

I'm on a roll I guess. Finished Gemini Rue last night also. Great, great adventure game, if very clear in its inspirations.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Had held off playing this one due to lack of space to play it with sound, then just decided "What the heck, why not?!"

It works perfectly without sound. Played it on normal difficulty. Found the AI to be pretty good, though fairly exploitable. This was fine, as I got a bit weary of the whole thing around the 3/4 mark. It meant I could slam through some of the bigger rooms with lots-o dudes and not really die.

I was so glad that it didn't have an adaptive leveling system like in Skyrim. I could kill someone, sneak, hack, whatevs! It didn't have to be a game of min-maxing, where every enemy situation HAD to be dealt with in the same way so I could make sure to continue leveling up that skill...

Writing was great, though the actual story was fairly "cold". I know my dudes a cyborg, but motivation was something that was lacking.

Spoiler:

About the half-way mark I kept asking myself, why am I pushing forward with this? What was my relationship to the kidnapped scientist lady? (see? can't even remember her name...) Also it felt weird to be so buddy-buddy with a Corporation.

Ending:

Spoiler:

Chose the suicide ending. Didn't like the idea of the select few ruling the masses. Was well done, though it would've been nice to get a video of Pancheaeaeaea collapsing in on itself...

Lovely looking game, great writing, fantastic gameplay. Loved it!!

One complaint. Too long. 10-12 hours is my sweet-spot. Logged 37 hours (with prolly 2 hours or so of idling...). Definitely could've used some editing.

On to Psychonauts....

I always enjoy finishing two games in one weekend. Saturday morning I got through Super Mario Galaxy 2. When Nintendo is on all cylinders like that I don't even know why other developers bother. I guess sometimes they don't, and that's how we get to where we are in terms of third party support.

Tonight I finally cleared through Goldeneye 007, almost two years after the fact. The game really takes off at the halfway point, when you hijack the tank. It's not amazing, but I'm glad I played through it.

Finally took down Kingdom Hearts 3D this afternoon. Was an enjoyable experience although I made it a bit more irritating than it should have been by choosing to play on the harder difficulty from the start. I'll dump more thoughts in the JRPG or 3DS thread.

Finished Darksiders, and boy was it lovely. Probably what won me over the most was the Ninja Gaiden-like combat mechanics, mixed with the Zelda-style format. Almost shocked that no one had ever done it before.

But I for the life of me could not follow the story though. All I got was this dude killed this dude, and now you have to kill this dude. Thankfully they kept it from ever interfering with the game itself.

All in all, it was definitely worth the 5 dollars I paid for it.

I finished The Book of Unwritten Tales this morning, after a long hiatus. Despite a few graphical/scripting hiccups and a couple of pixel-hunter moments, I thought it was quite a charming little point 'n' click adventure, with plenty of self-referential humor and obvious nods towards other games and other media.

I also finished 10,000,000 this afternoon. I got stuck for a while at the ~7 million mark, then finally had one spectacular run that cleared me past the goal. I kinda do wish there were one more tier of store upgrades (with prices maybe a factor of 10 higher than previous levels), just in case someone needed a bit more help with that last run.

merphle wrote:

I also finished 10,000,000 this afternoon. I got stuck for a while at the ~7 million mark, then finally had one spectacular run that cleared me past the goal. I kinda do wish there were one more tier of store upgrades (with prices maybe a factor of 10 higher than previous levels), just in case someone needed a bit more help with that last run.

Tell me about it! I'm stuck at 9 million + and so close to the mark for days and days, now.

brokenclavicle wrote:

Tell me about it! I'm stuck at 9 million + and so close to the mark for days and days, now.

Try changing your potions around, and see if that makes a difference. For my winning run, I did not use all the score multipliers, just Invunerability and Holdfast.

Finished Torchlight 2. I might boot it up one day down the road with another character or go to a higher difficulty, but too many other new games are beckoning for my attention. Onward to Borderlands 2 and Guild Wars 2!

Finished Darksiders 2: I think the game is pretty boss. I wish that some of the game didn't drag a bit and some enemies at the end felt so cheap. The boss at the end wasn't nearly as hard as

Spoiler:

Samuel

. The game was super pretty though. The best part was the music. I could let that play and sorta hope there is an ost to listen to. Overall thumbs up.

Finished Defense Grid: The Awakening. What I learned is (a) I like tower defense games, and (b) I suck at tower defense games. Time to clear the pile next with Diablo 3 and Alpha Protocol, but of course I'll find time to add FTL to the happy funtime list.

To the Moon is done.... I enjoyed even though it's not really a game. I enjoyed the writing quite a bit.

Budo wrote:

Finished Defense Grid: The Awakening. What I learned is (a) I like tower defense games, and (b) I suck at tower defense games.

Same here. I was amazed when I went to the youtubes and saw people finish some of harder levels without losing a single orb. The atmosphere of that game is just great. Love the music.

Ok finished Diablo 3. By finished I mean completed the Normal quest, but will keep it on my hard drive for years as I try out the other classes and higher modes. Extremely polished game. A bit overrated and too streamlined if such a thing is possible, but an excellent game and so glad I own it. Ok FTL, I will join your zeitgeist now.

Warriorpoet897 wrote:

To the Moon is done.... I enjoyed even though it's not really a game. I enjoyed the writing quite a bit.

Nice. The more people that play this the better.

I finally finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution after starting it way back on December 22, 2011. It was a very interesting and thought-provoking premise, and though certainly DE:HR was not the first game to take up this mantle, I thought it was a very effective presentation. The combat felt very tight; hacking was simplistic, but pleasantly reminiscent of the old SNES Shadowrun game; and conversations played out pretty much exactly how I expected them to. I didn't care much for the boss fights, but those have been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere.

Finished up my first playthrough of Borderlands 2. I put some thoughts in that thread.

I beat Final Fantasy XII the other night. Coming from Final Fantasy XIII (which I beat earlier this year), it was a refreshing return to some of the mechanics of the older games. Which is funny since from what I hear, most people disliked how much of a departure XII was.

Anyway, I enjoyed it quite a bit, and it help me better understand the design decisions behind XIII, especially in regards to the combat mechanics. While I really enjoyed the XII's gambit system, coming from XIII I kept wishing I could easily do paradigm shifts rather than having to reorganize everything all the time. So I guess I can see now how they tried to improve the formula with XIII, and for the most part I agree with the decisions they made.

HL2:Ep1

This is how long I want story-driven games to be. It didn't overstay its welcome and told the perfect amount of story! No unnecessary padding.

Alyx's animations were terrific.

The gameplay was (duh) straight out of Half-Life 2. I wasn't in love with its parent, so I felt fairly cold throughout. It almost felt like a best-of. Here's a jumping puzzle, here's a shoot-out, here's an escort, here's a boss battle, here's a locked door (so go the long way!!). And they all succinctly followed one another. So form-wise I was a bit disappointed. I can't put my finger on it, but it didn't feel organic.

...and Ep2 just finished downloading. Onto the next!

I just wrapped up Deus Ex. The late game bosses weren't as annoying as the early ones, and some of the stealth stuff was kinda wonky in places... but overall I really enjoyed it. Great cyberpunk feel, and the rpg elements had me hooked. I'm glad I played it.

I also just beat Mark of the Ninja. Damn that game is good.

Just finished up Toy Soldiers on PC. I did play it on release on 360 (now dead).

Just as fun as I remember. This type of jump-into-the-tower tower defense has been done several times recently, but I still like this one the best.

I think a lot of my enjoyment comes from the art, sound, and general atmosphere. The idea that these are the little army men I played with when I was a kid is just great.

Finally finished up Sleeping Dogs and my first runthrough of Torchlight 2.