Finished Any Games Lately?

Pretty sure I'm giving up on Dragon Age: Origins for the PC.

The world is flat and drab. Everything is a weird pinkish-brown color. Doesn't set my imagination on fire.

The overarching story is predictably... ancient evil rises up, etc. But I was expecting more nuance, more intrigue in the smaller scale stories. I'm 20 hours in and have yet to really feel anything about anyone in the game.

Bean's Quest for iOS is so fantastic, though. You just move your character left and right and he automatically jumps in a set rhythm. The level design is perfectly bite-sized, and the frustration level is perfectly tuned. An utter joy! Absolutely worth playing through the entire game.

And I also finished up King Cashing for iOS. Such a weird prototype. It's addictive, even though you can't really lose. Slots and RPG battles. Will definitely be picking up the sequel as soon as my current pile of games gets completed.

jlaakso wrote:

I'd say I'm done with Banner Saga: Factions... having played just a bit under one hour (tutorial plus one game). Unbelievably tedious waiting. This could've worked with an asynchronous setup or just seriously improved feedback, or much tighter time limits per turn, but as it is - I have much better use for my time. Shame, as the mechanics feel fine and it looks gorgeous, even though the audio is amateurish at best. Failing the MP doesn't mean the SP wouldn't work, so let's see about that in time.

It did take a while, but I found it strangely addicting. Also figured out that you can seriously speed up a match by turning on "Expert Mode", which nets you a little more...valor, or whatever they call their spacebucks, I forget at the moment. But it also reduces the turn timer to 30 seconds. Made the pace a bit more bearable.

Beat Tomb Raider. A very good game, but one with puzzling, and bad imo, design choices. The core gameplay is mostly unaffected in spite of them. Give it a look if you're an Uncharted fan.

Saints Row the Third. I powered my way through GTA IV back in the day and could never get too into any of the other ones, in fact, GTA III and IV almost turned me off to this particular style of game completely. SR3, on the other hand, was well written, witty, over the top, and completely embraced the absurdity of the genre. It also succeeded in connecting me with the various characters in the game through things like your character and another singing to a song on the radio or reminiscing about something they'd experienced earlier. Lots of little touches which show a panache for character development well above the level of the Rockstar crew to date.

Also, blowing stuff up never gets old.

SR3 for me too. I have to take back what I said earlier about this game being little more than a sociopathy simulator, consisting mostly of murdering innocent people with sexual aids. I was quite surprised by the wit and charm of the characters and story, and I agree, the character development was really something. The homages and parodies of existing games were spot-on -- Ride of the Valkyries during a high-speed drive down an empty freeway? Check! -- and it truly is laugh-out-loud funny. Not entirely unlike Bulletstorm in that regard, come to think of it.

Spoiler:

"There has to be a better way to do this."
"Undoubtedly." [jumps out of one passenger jet to land on another]

DmC Devil May Cry has been a very nice surprise. I'm so glad they stuck to their guns with the character redesign, because his characterization really stole the show for me. The bosses were a bit easier than I expected, but my first playthrough was admittedly on the game's version of Normal. Once it was over, I immediately started up a Son of Sparda level playthrough. Great stuff.

Assassins Creed 3 followed by Alan Wake: American Nightmare.

AC3 wasn't perfect. Some of the optional 100% synch challenges were ridiculous. I especially disliked the one near the very end where I was asked to reach my target within x minutes. I know that AC isn't a stealth game, at least it's not as I would understand the word. But I'm positive an assassins should be carefully planning out an attack, tracking the positions of guards and planning silent take downs while advancing on their prey. That's how I play the game anyway. Not attempting a 100 meter dash while waving a tomahawk. And yes I apreciate they are optional but when red text flashes up on the screen telling me I've failed it's damn distracting. It's also true that the protagonist for much of the game was a bit dull. For anyone else who's played we all know who we'd rather have been playing all the way through. Having said all that I've really enjoyed the experience as a whole. Moving through the frontier hunting and hunted by game, exploring, clearing forts, building a homested and being a god damn pirate was loads of fun.

American nightmare reminded be how much I loved Alan Wake and despite the pile I am now very tempted to replay the full game. I just can't get enough of the whole bombastic writer rewriting reality meta drama. It's almost a guilty pleasure for me. I'm usually a bit of a horror game snob. Preferring the slow burn of Silent Hill to the gun ho action of Resident Evil. However blowing away the Taken with a combat shotgun never got old. It's true this episode is made up of three repeated locations but as a horror / Twilight Zone fan I was happy to see it as part of the narrative. Gave the arcade mode a brief look but stripped of story the gameplay obviously becomes mundane.

Next up Dead Space 2. I just hope it's at least as good as 1.

I just finished Starcraft 2. I still have never finished the first one.

Bastion. Nice little indie game worth the hype, but it could've used a little variety in the gameplay department. It was fun, nevertheless, for the 8 hours or so it took me to run through it. The endings are quite nice, all bitter-sweet, just the way I like them.

Finished Devil's Attorney on the Ipad. Actually was pretty darn fun!

Finished the main campaign on Borderlands yesterday. Moving to the DLC now. Looking forward to it!

Tomb Raider is finished. It comes with my highest recommendation.

I've been working on Gravity Rush (Vita) in 15 minute chunks for the past month or so, and as it turns out I'm getting near the end (mission 17 of 22). That'll be done by week's end, and will fill my 4/month quota. No harm in going over, of course.

Lego City Undercover and Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate are about a week out and I'll be buying both, so I've got a week or so to work on the pile. I don't think that's enough time to finish one of the longer games (Two Worlds 2, Darksiders 2, Resonance of Fate, Nier) so I'm thinking I'll work on El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, and/or Anarchy Reigns.

Majin and the forsaken kingdom, damn good game that I almost never heard of and tried on a whim. A little bit zelda and castlevania mixed together, with a decent world and story. Big thumbs up.

Hey brokenclavicle... I finished Bastion today too. I can't get over what a great mood it had. Loved it all (the soundtrack and narration especially). The ending I ended up taking was really powerful.

I finished Jurassic Park! It has the worst QTEs you will ever experience. Lots of yelling will be involved when playing it. You can see how they learned from it when making The Walking Dead. Personally, I liked the overall plot and setting much better than The Walking Dead. I loved the Scuba rebreather part towards the end.

Anyways, I'm very glad to be done with it because of the frustrating aspects.

I finished Cook, Serve, Delicious! on the iPad. It's well worth the $3.99 or whatever the price is. Funny how a game that intentionally uses accuracy and quickness to stress you out is a stress reliever when you're plagued by the same demands in real life.

WearyAmoeba wrote:

Hey brokenclavicle... I finished Bastion today too. I can't get over what a great mood it had. Loved it all (the soundtrack and narration especially). The ending I ended up taking was really powerful.

It's a pretty good game. The main focus is clearly the story and the narration, obviously. I hope they do a sequel or a spiritual successor somewhere down the line with a little more gameplay variety.

On a separate note, I finished my NG+ for Dark Souls and took the Dark Lord ending this time around. Satisfying, as always, despite how short the endings are. Also got Batman AA down and I must say it was an enjoyable rump through the asylum. Not much to add about the ending since, well, what can they really do with it?

Just rolled the credits on Gravity Rush (Vita). Shifting gravity is the core mechanic, and while it's interesting to toy around with, it's often disorienting and clumsy to control. Still, it's and oddly compelling game. Kat, the main character, is endearingly lackadaisical but sometimes ill-defined.

I can't really form a coherent wrap-up of the game, possibly because it's late and I'm tired, or possibly because I played the game in 15 minute chunks over a whole month. If you have a Vita I do recommend it, or at least the demo, but I wouldn't recommend the platform for it (I wouldn't recommend the platform period, yet).

Should have El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron in the bag tomorrow. I guess after that I'll try to knock out Ace Combat: Assault Horizon between then and Monday, when new releases take priority.

My next handheld endeavor is Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask (3DS). I'm planning to have that finished by April 30th, when Soul Sacrifice is released.

Finished God of War 3 last night. Epic boss battles throughout, and one of the few action games I've played that maintain that fast-paced, over-the-top action throughout. Puzzles left a bit to be desired, but then, it never was a puzzle franchise, so whatev's. Next up, I finish Crysis 2.

Yeah, finished El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. Broadly speaking I didn't like it much, though it's hard to explain exactly why.

After Super Metroid turning out to be better than I expected I decided to knock out A Link to the Past as well. It's the only Zelda game I've played and I can't say I get it. Some of the dark world dungeons were fun, but they weren't that spectacular. The game mostly relies on the same tricks over and over, so if you just explore all the rooms it becomes fairly evident what to do. Push a block here, bomb a switch there, dodge the floor tiles, repeat. I did get stuck on a few things, like when the game requires you to have a specific spell that you get in this one random place that maybe you could've known about if you explored literally everywhere, talked to everyone and paid close attention to what they said. To me that was just inane adventure game type stuff.

I didn't dislike the game (well I did initially), I'm just looking at it from the perspective of how good of a game it is today, by modern standards. That's probably not fair but I keep hearing people say it's the best game of all time and that it does hold up, which is what made me curious to play it to begin with. I also thought that Metroid had some genuinely modern, or perhaps timeless, game design so I was hoping ALttP would be the same, but I just didn't see it. If we're talking about how good it is for a game released in 1992, well that's a different story.

Done with Crysis 3. Holy moly do those characters never shut up. This game follows the franchise trend of having a ridiculous amount of exposition while not explaining anything.

Spoiler:

Establishing the basic fact that there is a comically evil company controlling everything? Get ready for tons of mind-numbing dialogue giving you a history lesson you literally can't care less about as a player. Establishing the fact that the last game ended with you taking over the suit and free as a bird, and this one starts with you having been captured, two decades passing and being cryogenically frozen the whole time? A throwaway sentence and a codex entry.

Once you put up with that, however, what you get is get another entertaining sandbox shooter, except this time way more weapon and enemy variety than ever before. As far as I am concerned, the Crysis games are right below Half-Life as my absolute favourite FPS series of all time, one that I could play any of them over and over again.

Finished Uncharted: Golden Abyss last night. Yes, the narrative outlasts it's welcome and spending an extra 60 seconds rubbing your finger across the entire screen because a charcoal etching is 99% revealed is the exact opposite of fun. (I can actually forgive the latter because it's pretty much a guarantee that Sony forced them to include that kind of crap.) But as a whole, I actually enjoyed it more than any of the console entries into the series. The combat felt way more satisfying to me for a reason I can't pinpoint, and the sniping in particular was implemented on the Vita well. Also, the thing some reviews complained about - how there were no crazy bombastic moments - are probably why I liked it so much. The thing that always turns me off Uncharted games are the timed scripted sequences where I'm struggling to read the minds of the developers who want me to follow a specific trail of events or fail instantly. Those were pretty much non-existent in this one.

Tomb Raider which was shockingly good. I really wasn't expecting it to be so engaging or affecting. The thing that got me to pre-order (a rarity for me)? That light-hearted ad where Lara chases a chicken around and does pull ups. Yep.

Just wrapped up Dead Space 1. Really enjoyed the game and the atmosphere. Did my playthrough on Medium, so I was able to get through most of the game relatively quickly. Unfortunately I don't think I got to appreciate much of the survival aspects of the game until the end of the game. I was pretty well stocked with ammo, med packs, and stasis modules up until the last few sequences.

Definitely can't wait to hop into the second game

silentsod wrote:

Tomb Raider which was shockingly good. I really wasn't expecting it to be so engaging or affecting. The thing that got me to pre-order (a rarity for me)? That light-hearted ad where Lara chases a chicken around and does pull ups. Yep.

Got a link to that? I tried to find it on YouTube, no luck.

Like I need more reasons to get Tomb Raider, everyone seems to be gushing about it. Maybe next month! I have a feeling Bioshock Infinite will have me tied up for a while. Until then, it's Euro Truckin' for me.

Finished up DmC on the PC today. I can't see how this game doesn't get into my top 5 for this year. As someone who liked the original Devil May Cry games, I not only didn't hate this but thought it was an absolute blast, ran like greased lightning on my PC and was polished to a mirror shine. It kept all the narrative madness of the Japanese games while also adding in some amazing expensive environments and a better (though still not perfect) camera. Ninja Theory's got some incredible talent. I'm definitely doing the DLC soon.

Just beat silent hill for the 9th time and finally got the rebirth ending

Toshinou Kyouku wrote:

Just beat silent hill for the 9th time and finally got the rebirth ending

The original? Beat that for the first time 3 or 4 years ago. Really liked it, but I have too much else to take on, so I just youtubed the other endings.

Just rolled the credits on Rayman Origins. It's lovely and charming, but I feel like most of the game is a little too easy and the end is devilishly hard. It would've been a better game had they spread the artful platforming design more evenly across the experience.

I've only got today and tomorrow to play stuff before I buy 3 new Wii U games, so I think if I get anything in between now and then it'll be an XBLA game or something.

Finished X-Com, with the saved the world ending.

Enjoyed the game immensely, wasn't over impressed with the ending. Did my soldier miraculously survive (I'm hoping she did, she was the only psionic out of all 15 of my troops) ? Is the world safe ?