Finished Any Games Lately?

Just finished Sayonara Wild Hearts (didn't take me too long), and it was fun and different, but I didn't really love it. It was enjoyable, and some of the tracks were really cool, but I don't see myself coming back to the game to chase hi-scores. Very pretty, though.

I finished replaying Assassin's Creed II. When I originally played it I 100%'d it, but I won't be doing so this time around. It was fun to revisit the setting and style of those early games, even if they're as janky as I remember. The music in particular is still really effective at setting the mood.

I'm in the mood to continue replaying some of the older games, but I'm not sure if I want to continue on to Brotherhood, or jump ahead to AC3. 3 is my least favorite of the series, but the setting was always unique and stuck in my memory.

beanman101283 wrote:

I finished replaying Assassin's Creed II. When I originally played it I 100%'d it, but I won't be doing so this time around. It was fun to revisit the setting and style of those early games, even if they're as janky as I remember. The music in particular is still really effective at setting the mood.

I'm in the mood to continue replaying some of the older games, but I'm not sure if I want to continue on to Brotherhood, or jump ahead to AC3. 3 is my least favorite of the series, but the setting was always unique and stuck in my memory.

I really liked both of them, but I enjoyed Brotherhood more because the Ezio trilogy is amazing .

Yeah, I know there are people who still cite Brotherhood as their favorite to this day. I know I liked it at the time, but I worry about getting burned out on the setting, and while I like Ezio, I wasn't as enamored with him as a lot of people were.

I can see that, and it makes a lot of sense. That said, yes, I would still cite Brotherhood as my favorite, having played all of them except for Origins and Odyssey.

Aeazel wrote:

Finished Link's Awakening last night. For the most part it was a fun, short experience, though the last two dungeons felt a bit tedious to me.

I'm actually about 2/3 of the way through Link's Awakening & have stopped as it is starting to drag. Fun enough little game but one that feels a bit dated. I was excited by overwhelmingly great reviews everywhere but this falls way short of top marks for me.

Spikeout wrote:
Aeazel wrote:

Finished Link's Awakening last night. For the most part it was a fun, short experience, though the last two dungeons felt a bit tedious to me.

I'm actually about 2/3 of the way through Link's Awakening & have stopped as it is starting to drag. Fun enough little game but one that feels a bit dated. I was excited by overwhelmingly great reviews everywhere but this falls way short of top marks for me.

I'm sure it's a fun game, but I get the feeling that the mix of Zelda fanboyism and nostalgia-tinted glasses has made most critics simply unable to be objective about it. Having played the original - it was the only GB game I owned for over a year... that and Mortal Kombat, but we don't talk about that - and seeing that it is essentially the same game, in today's modern gaming landscape, I doubt that it really warrants such high scores.

Just my two cents. Still looking forward to eventually purchasing it... possible second hand... because of reasons.

"Finished" Return of the Obra Dinn. It starts off really strong, but once I got through all the memories and the story, I found it tedious to keep going back through them over and over again. As interesting as the art style was, it was more of a hindrance and there was a lot more guesswork involved than I expected which just wasn't fun and some of the deaths weren't very clear.

Overall, I enjoyed most of it, but I got way less than half of the identities and I wouldn't recommend it for the above reasons.

Just wrapped up Assassins Creed: Syndicate.

When this was released there were a lot of people taking about how tired and stale the series was getting and they should stop with the annual releases, so I didn’t get too excited about it. I picked it up in an actual retail bargain bin - maybe the last time I’ll do that with a PC game - then promptly forgot about it until just recently decided to give it a spin.

I loved it.

I enjoyed it more than Unity and Black Flag. With both of those I did the main quest and the bare minimum of optional stuff to get by - but in Syndicate I devoured all the optional story and character missions and “liberated” every sector of the map. I just skipped the fight clubs, races (always do in any game) and most of the heists because I didn’t need the resources.

Yes there are a few annoyances, the kidnap missions never get better, and the kidnapping mechanics are confusing and over-used throughout the game.

I like the characters and story but my favourite thing is the city of London - always stunning, lifelike and crammed with little details in every corner. Well worth a look.

I loved Syndicate. The London setting was amazing.

I enjoyed Syndicate as well, certainly much more than Black Flag and Unity, like you said, Redherring.

Finished BL3 wuith Fl4k and then got him to 50.
I am about 3/4 through with Amara and halfway through with Moze and Zane.
When you are wise enough to get the right gear, you don't have to do side quests. It makes Eden 6 much less of a slog and enjoyable for the story.

We will see how Outer Worlds turns out but this could be GOTY for me though I am not really into those types of things...

Finished off Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Very much a Symphony of the Night style game in all but name and definitely up there with the best of Koji Igarashi's Castlevania games. Unfortunately it's also just as tropey as those games were.

Getting the best ending was a bit annoying though. First, the condition to actually get it is a little obscure (personally I had to use a guide). Secondly, to that ending you have to go through what turned out to be the worst sections of the game.

Doom 2016 finished, didn't enjoy the bosses but the rest of the action felt very much like the original Doom series in the 90's. Enjoyed it, relatively short but got it very cheap in a sale so all good.

It's been awhile, but I finished a game again! This time it was Bioshock Infinite. I've never manged to finish the first game; I'm guessing I've never made it much more than 1/2 way through. And it has been awhile since I played any of it at all, so I'm not sure what references I might have missed.

Spoiler:

I wasn't super fond of the "both sides are bad!" when the anti-racists took over. I guess my lack of fondness was by design, which maybe makes it worse.

Elizabeth is obviously supposed to remind one of the Little Sisters; I'm not sure if that is obvious before she first changes her clothes, but they seemed to hit me over the head there. It seemed like another big connection hammer when she had the large needle sticking out of her back. But as far as I can tell, they didn't actually make any connections anywhere, that is left to our imagination. If I wanted to imagine things, I'd be reading a book! ;)

The gameplay kept me hooked. I enjoyed that there were a bunch of choices in approach, and it looked like they could all be equally viable.

I probably won't play the DLC anytime soon, as I don't already own it (I was gifted the game itself I believe). It does sound like one of the DLC's might decrease my annoyance over the lack of connection to the first game though.

Wrapped up The Bradwell Conspiracy yesterday. It was an OK game, mired by bad Unity porting and bad Apple Arcade synching. In theory, I should have been able to play it on my AppleTV, continue playing on my iPhone, and also on my Macbook, without loosing any progress. Unfortunately this wasn't the case, and ended up redoing a good 1 of progress because the AppleTV save overwrote any progress I made on the other platforms.

I think the game can be completely in about 4 to 6 hours, but the Unity ports don't feel very optimised. Some gamestopping bugs (like, not being able to step off a ladder kind of bugs) that force you to reload the game, and for a game that was pretty simple graphically, it ran crazy choppy.

I'm glad it was part of Apple arcade, 'cause if I'd bought this game at full price I'd probably be pretty disappointed. But for a $5 monthly subscription, it was fine.

I finished off two very different games tonight. First was Call of Duty: WWII. I haven't played a CoD game since Modern Warfare 2, but I've been reading a book about WWII and it made me think of the old Medal of Honor games. I figured this was about as close to that as gaming has been in the last few years. Mechanically, the game was fine. Level design wasn't bad, but there was nothing close to some of the real standout missions of the first Modern Warfare. And the story is literally every WWII cliche stitched together. Still, a good enough game if you're looking for some mindless fun.

Secondly, I replayed What Remains of Edith Finch. I played it for the first time early this year and since then it's been the game to beat for my GOTY. It still remains a brilliant piece of storytelling. It does lose a little something the second time around, but there's so much here that I love.

Costume Quest is done. The battles were kind of bland. Cool seeing what the different costumes looked like and their powers but the execution was all the same.

This was my third attempt to finish this game all around Halloween. The first world was a little to long but the second was just right.

Greedfall completed. Very much enjoyed about 90% of it - the combat is good, there's an excellent fast travel system and there's the scope to develop your character however you want. There's also plenty of choice in the story, and no sense that you have to grind to get anywhere.

That said...

- the last part of the game is anti-climactic, and the final 'choice' doesn't seem like one at all, given that I can't think that you could follow the story and make one of the two choices at the end. The narration after the last battle feels tacked on, like the developers couldn't decide what to do at this point.

- the skill circle is very confusing, some skills that you need for certain weapons are actually unlocks about half way round a certain branch. Even putting them in different colours would be helpful.

These minor gripes aside, I enjoyed my time in it, and would definitely pick up a sequel.

I finished Fallout 4 over the weekend. I dropped 65 hours into it, which was enough to finish the main story, hit level 50, do Far Harbor, mess around a bit more, and uninstall.

This is one of those games where a lot has been said, so I don’t have much to add. The shooting and wandering around the world was good, and it got those Bethesda hooks in me that kept me going for awhile; the streamlined growth system where they removed a bunch of stats and just used SPECIAL and perks was fine; and the writing and general lack of skill checks was disappointing. There weren’t many role playing options, since most conversations just came down to yes or no.

The thing that strikes me about this game the most is that there weren’t a lot of memorable sidequests; I can think of some from FO3 and NV that are still memorable today, and I played those years ago. Now, the only one that stands out from FO4 was the Silver Shroud mission, and that’s mostly because it was so long and I was listening to the Silver Shroud radio plays during the whole thing, which gave it great atmosphere. And it gave me fantastic armor as well. The fact that I have a hard time remembering much of what I did during this game, even for stuff I did just a couple of months ago, is kind of a letdown.

Am I glad I played it? Yes. Am I glad I got it on deep discount and modded the weight of all the junk down to zero? Even more so.

Finished two Apple Arcade games this weekend:

Lifeslide is a game where you are a paper airplane flying through stages of your life (Infancy, Adolescence, etc) with the levels getting increasingly more difficult. It gets punishingly hard until you collect enough gems to upgrade your plane or you can collect plane parts to gain access to three other planes. Just when I finally got the fast plane was I able to complete the game. Short and sweet, and I wish it were a bit longer but overall very good.

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a strange one. It's a game that is primarily a lane runner, but it briefly switches sometimes to other game types such as a side scroller bullet hell. It's not very difficult overall, but there were some frustrating bits for me - which thankfully the game allows you to skip. (It doesn't allow Y-invert which made parts more difficult for me.) It has a really unique style that I can only describe as "trippy." Overall, it didn't work for me, but it was a really brief game to finish and I'm glad I experienced it.

I'm really enjoying Apple Arcade so far as it allows trying tons of different games that I might not have ever bought otherwise. I also appreciate that many games are shorter and complete experiences without feeling the need to keep you on the hook for micro-transactions.

Played Zone of the Enders HD on the PS3. This sure didn't age well.
Bad dialogue, even worse English dubbing.
The fighting mechanics are simple enough, but the game sometimes insists you have to be stealthy or to protect buildings/civilians, which just seems counter intuitive to the game.
The camera is just another enemy I had to fight against.
There's just a clear lack of polish to the whole thing.

Meanwhile, I've started the sequel, which seems like a vast improvement on all fronts.

Technically, I finished the Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus main storyline over a year ago. But I was itching for some FPS action, and Destiny 2's po-faced story and Hub running didn't do it for me. No sirree, give me Grace's "let's kill some f*cking nazi's" attitude all day every day!

So I finished all 15 Uberkommando missions, completed all side missions, and got all collectibles while I was at it. Oh and some side trophies as well. I temporarily found an uneasy balance with trophy hunting: they gave me some additional mini-goals to achieve while I well... killed some f*cking nazi's.

And now it's finished. Until next year at least, when I may go for a difficulty level above 'Please Don't Hurt Me'

I was born in 91, so when my older brother played Doom and Quake 2 - I only managed in the first stages. When I grew up I really liked shooters like Q3 Arena and Escape from Tarkov became my passion. When I played EFT and played, I started to get bored. So I started both games mentioned above (not at once) and finished them in my free time.
For now I am playing with my friend on the one same account, we just share it like we share with EFT roubles.
What more can I say about EFT is that game is so dark, friendly and great but brightness is dark. So I spend so many hours at Escape from Tarkov buying weapons and currencies like that. Rubles are the main currency in Escape from tarkov and next to Euro and Dollars, it is the rubles that players care about the most. Movement is convenient, very interesting aiming system with great recoil. EFT also includes a fairly complex system of dealing damage to the opponent. This is a great game and you can buy roubles https://odealo.com/games/escape-from... Escape from tarkov roubles

I finally finished Zombie Vikings a couple of days ago, and what started as a fun, irreverent romp turned into an almost unplayable mess of jittery animations, missing frames, crushing bugs, and annoying glitches that rendered the game almost unplayable in the last few levels, especially the final boss. I don't know if it was because I was playing online and it might have been better had I been playing solo, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

slazev wrote:

Played Zone of the Enders HD on the PS3. This sure didn't age well.
Bad dialogue, even worse English dubbing.
The fighting mechanics are simple enough, but the game sometimes insists you have to be stealthy or to protect buildings/civilians, which just seems counter intuitive to the game.
The camera is just another enemy I had to fight against.
There's just a clear lack of polish to the whole thing.

Meanwhile, I've started the sequel, which seems like a vast improvement on all fronts.

Finished the sequel. More refined, more focused (no stealth in this one) and with a sprinkling of panzer dragoon. The camera and the lock on are still not the player's best friends. The dialogue continued to be positively horrendous. The English dubbing was better than the first one, but not by much. Overall, better than the first one. I recommend skipping the first one and go straight to the sequel.

I finished A Plague Tale: Innocence last night. I actually bought it at release because everything I heard told me it was right up my alley - story-based, stealth, little in the way of direct combat, well-written & acted, beautiful - but friends dropped by that night, then there was a crisis at work, then there was an opening to play in a string quintet, then some books I had on hold at the library suddenly became available... Suddenly it's five and a half months later, and I finally have time to play it.

Word of mouth was not wrong - in addition to everything I'd heard, it's got a great soundtrack by Olivier Deriviere (who also did Vampyr). It's told in 17 chapters, and there's a decent amount of variation in locations and mechanics. Because I was playing it on a PS4, it wasn't as drop-dead gorgeous as some of the PC video I've seen, but still the high-res photogrammetry-based textures made it look shockingly good for a $40, not-from-a-AAA-studio game.

Because I'm the guy who has to explore every nook and cranny and craft every upgrade, it took me a week to play, and I was loving pretty much everything about the game. Until the last boss fight. To be fair, I've never enjoyed any boss fights - I don't get why abandoning the game mechanics you've been enjoying for new ones is a plus - and as usual I could feel my total enjoyment of the game sinking lower and lower as I kept on dying and was forced to replay the same thing over and over and over, sometimes making a slight bit of progress but often dying within the first minute due to a slight twitch of the controls or accidentally bumping into a rat and being instantly swarmed. Finally, after an hour of increasing frustration and starting to feel like if I kept at it all my previous enjoyment of the game was going to be nullified by this emphatically not-fun ending, I resorted to watching a video that showed that, yes, I was doing it right but needed to be slightly more agile, and the furthest I'd gotten was actually about 10 seconds short of triggering the end. I'm sure others (maybe most) actually enjoy that kind of thing, but I was this close to quitting, deleting the game, and putting Innocence in the "Sorry I played it" category.

Other than that hour of soul-crushing anti-fun, I enjoyed the hell out of the game. It's astonishing how good and polished the game is for the product of a 45-person team.

Mario_Alba wrote:

I finally finished Zombie Vikings a couple of days ago, and what started as a fun, irreverent romp turned into an almost unplayable mess of jittery animations, missing frames, crushing bugs, and annoying glitches that rendered the game almost unplayable in the last few levels, especially the final boss. I don't know if it was because I was playing online and it might have been better had I been playing solo, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Sorry that you had performance issues from the game. I played through it last year and, while the game isn't a technical marvel, I experienced no egregious issues such as those you describe. I played it solo all the way, though.

brokenclavicle wrote:
Mario_Alba wrote:

I finally finished Zombie Vikings a couple of days ago, and what started as a fun, irreverent romp turned into an almost unplayable mess of jittery animations, missing frames, crushing bugs, and annoying glitches that rendered the game almost unplayable in the last few levels, especially the final boss. I don't know if it was because I was playing online and it might have been better had I been playing solo, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Sorry that you had performance issues from the game. I played through it last year and, while the game isn't a technical marvel, I experienced no egregious issues such as those you describe. I played it solo all the way, though.

Sounds like a network issue, then. Oh, well --I'm glad you didn't have any issues!

Katana Zero, neat little game with Hotline Miami vibes in terms of trying to decipher what the hell is going on.

Your essentially an assassin sent out on kill missions by your psychiatrist, he gives you drugs that enable you to slow down time. The gameplay is fast & about timing, it can take a while to gel but once it does its fairly rewarding. Deflect bullets with your sword, time your rolls to perfectly get out of the way of gunfire. There are objects that can be thrown much like Superhot, the difference being that these objects usually kill enemies.

Its a short enough little game, there's a pretty neat conversation system that enables you to interrupt when someone is talking leading to different reactions/outcomes. It works really well.

Good game overall but didn't quite grab me like the initial trailer suggested it would.