Finished Any Games Lately?

Just rolled credits on the 2018 Spider-Man game. Awesome game, loved it. Really captured the heart of the character, and if course the webswinging and combat was fantastic.

Got a few things to clean up I'm the open world to 100% it. I've heard mixed things about the Black Cat DLC, not sure whether I'll do that or skip straight to Miles Morales.

I played both Spidey and Miles when they launched respectively; I'd recommend taking a break before starting the second installment. Miles Morales is a great game - in fact I think it's slightly better by virtue of being more focused and smaller - but it's very much the same gameplay, and I suspect you'd burn out if you played them back to back.

Stele wrote:

I've had it on wishlist just waiting for another sale on Switch, for months it seems.

Its worth every full price penny. If the extra $5 isnt going to hurt, just get it, play it this week, and have one of the most memorable games ever in your brain to enjoy.

Yeah, it's an all-time great. Rock Paper Shotgun even recently listed it as the greatest PC game of all time.

Finished Collar x Malice (PS Vita) last night.

The detective story bit ran out of steam at then end, and was replaced by a dull secondary-school-level debate about the nature of justice. But the initial romance was actually really touching. In particular, I thought the player's character, Ichika Hoschino, was really well drawn. Her internal dialogue really felt like that a real person.

I don't think I'll go back and grind through the other romance options, though; I've seen all that I need to see.

I beat HiFi Rush! It's really good. I'm glad that developer got their first big guaranteed win. Tokyo Ghostwire was a big let down (for me), and The Evil Within was ambitious but ultimately boring.

As part of my OCD obsession with finishing old games I left undone as a child, I rolled credits on Banjo-Tooie last week. While the original was one of my favorite games ever, the sequel left such a bad taste in my mouth that I quit during the repeated 6 FPS sections halfway through the game. All the game proved that Rare had bit off more than they could chew, with huge levels well beyond the capabilities of the hardware, forcing long boring walks back and forth due to their now overwrought and overly complicated collectathon mechanics.

But with the advent of emulation, my two biggest issues were solved. The better hardware fixed the FPS drops, and by setting my right trigger to fast forward, I could quickly scoot through all the large empty hallways and fields. As a result I enjoyed the game enough this time around to get through it all. Still overdesigned and inferior to the elegant simplicity of the original, but at least this time I was able to enjoy the extra time I got with my favorite bear and bird duo.

I recently finished Marvel's Midnight Suns and Ancient Enemy. Trying to decide what to tackle next.

After picking it up towards the start of the year on sale, I finally got around to beating Batman: Arkham Asylum, though by the end, I found myself wanting. Maybe it's something to do with the decade-plus of other comics-based movies & games we've seen since then, especially the ample games that have been able to run after B:AA taught them to walk.

Part of me expected to be more blown-away by the story - I mean, Paul Dini spins a good bat-shaped yarn, but I have to remind myself that Dini's primary medium before this was half-hour cartoons, versus this 10+ hour game.

Ultimately, I'm glad I got that experience under my belt, but now it's time to slip back under the cozy blanket of Hollow Knight.

At the time it was pretty amazing. I got the platinum on PS3 and then bought it again later for PC when it was $5 and did 100% achievements on Steam too.

The sequels I've only finished story. Never 100% the challenges or the in world side missions. Way too much bloat on them.

The true best sequels to Arkham are the Spider-Man and Miles Morales games

Yeah, Arkham Asylum is the only one I've revisited. The sequels are just too much. I like the argument that Spider-Man is the true sequel.

Stele wrote:

The sequels I've only finished story. Never 100% the challenges or the in world side missions. Way too much bloat on them.

The true best sequels to Arkham are the Spider-Man and Miles Morales games

Agreed re: bloat. I initially tried Batman: Arkham Knight because I had it as a PS+ game, but I got a lil overwhelmed with the abundance of systems and UI right out the gate. Insomniac's Spider-Man was a nice fit when I played it years ago, and I can see the lineage in there.

Just finished IXION, the "Frostpunk in Space" survival colony builder game.

It's got a good story that the game tells really quite well, and keeps the beats ticking throughout each chapter of the game. The soundtrack really emphasises this and, although short, is really quite excellent.

It's a game where you need to keep a lot of plates spinning all at the same time, and if you get too far out of balance you can quickly get yourself into quite a downward spiral. However, once I'd figured out a few things the game doesn't really explain too well or make information about easy to find, it was recoverable.

That's really where the game trips up to be honest - some really quite important information isn't always easy to find and tends to end up in obscure places. The tech tree is well presented, but the upgrades to those techs - some of which are game critical - are more hidden and often involve dependencies on other techs to be researchable. It's also entirely possible to soft-lock your progress by running out of the science resource, but they are patching that in the next patch. It also has a habit of putting game critical buildings and upgrades to your space-station in really obscure places. You know you've researched them, but the UI will be dammed if it'll tell you where they are to build!

Lastly, some of the tools it gives you to manage all those spinning plates are great - resource distribution between sectors in particular is overly micro-managed while at the same time being moderately abstract - you are constantly managing the logistics of resource and crew but it often feels like the game is making the decisions of what goes where rather than you as the player.

Still, it's a solid thumbs up from me. With some relatively modest patching it feels like this is more than worth entry into the genre.

I finished The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap on this Switch tonight, which I had not played in many years. It still holds up a a great 2D Zelda, but I am thankful for save states and rewinds.

I finished Abzu, a Journey-like that takes place in the ocean instead of a desert. It was a very pleasant 2-hour experience. Doesn't quite reach the same emotional heights as Journey, but still a nice way to spend an evening. There are a few collectables to find, and spots to meditate in where you can simply watch different fish swim around. You can also play through individual segments again if you want to grab some of the items or meditation spots you miss the first time through. All in all a relaxing, good time.

beanman101283 wrote:

I finished Abzu, a Journey-like that takes place in the ocean instead of a desert. It was a very pleasant 2-hour experience. Doesn't quite reach the same emotional heights as Journey, but still a nice way to spend an evening. There are a few collectables to find, and spots to meditate in where you can simply watch different fish swim around. You can also play through individual segments again if you want to grab some of the items or meditation spots you miss the first time through. All in all a relaxing, good time.

Man, this was a game I put off playing for various reasons. But once I got around to it, it was just gorgeous and relaxing and put me in a very zen-like mode.

I finished Full Throttle Remastered, and had a great time with it. I never got to play the original but had always been curious. I loved the new graphics, and I though the voice acting was fantastic. The logic to solve the puzzles wasn't too "out there," but I still needed to check out a guide a few times to help me through. Overall, a very fun time.

I finished the main quest for Monster Sanctuary. I wrote about it a bit in the Thread for Games that Don’t Have a Tread, but it’s a metroidvania monster collector, although it leans more heavily on the monster collector side. The metroidvania side is a bit simple, with some traversal and jumping puzzles, as well as lots of opportunities to use each monster’s field abilities to get new items and occasionally get to new areas.

The battle system is actually very in-depth, as there are a series of elemental weaknesses and strengths that you have to contend with, but the real pull is in the series of buffs and debuffs that you and your opponents are engaging with in the common 3v3 battles. There is a lot of options in how you build your team, not just with what monsters you choose but also how you build them, since they all have 3-4 skill trees that you can choose new attacks or abilities from. It really encourages you to engage with these systems and find monster that work well together, and I think it would be difficult to beat the game in a casual playthrough if you are not engaging with the systems (just doing straight damage and healing sometimes doesn’t seem like it would overcome a number of enemies that you run into). The highlight of the battle system is probably the 6v6 battles you have against other monster tamers, where the difficulty is bumped up and your team composition and cohesion is tested.

I found myself getting a bit bored of the battle system mid-game, and then found an easy solution – just change the team up a bit as newer or better monsters come along. Any new ones are hatched from eggs just a couple of levels below your current team, and so plugging someone new and changing things up is actually about as grind free as it could reasonably be in a game like this.

Honestly, I really enjoyed this one. It feels like they took a lot of lessons from the Pokemon series and then just made things tougher and more engaging. And they have a bunch of added modes you can play once you can beat it, like a New Game+, a mode where you get limited monsters and you have to work with what you're given, a randomizer mode, a permadeath mode, and so on. Again, things Pokemon could have built in as challenge mods. I plan to give it another run later maybe with the randomizer on, just to get a different challenge. The battle system is a lot of fun once you figure it out and have a team that is working well together, and I don’t want to be done with it just yet.

This is one of those games that I don’t think would take the gold come GOTY time, but could fit in as one of those top 5 games that a lot of people could find out about and put on their wishlists. And it’s on sale a lot, so it can be had for pretty cheap on a lot of platforms.

If you liked Tomb Raider I (1996) and Tomb Raider II, but thought they were too easy, well, Tomb Raider III says 'Hi'.

I hadn't played that one to completion in probably 15 years and, while I liked it overall, it was still incredibly hard. While I replay I and II regularly, I'm not sure if III will be added to by rotation. I might have to play it again to confirm.

I finished The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap a couple of nights ago. Such a great game. I had started playing it a number of times before via emulators but never got much past the first dungeon.

Divinity Original Sin 2 PC

When I started playing Dungeons and Dragons, I was the Dungeon Master for our group. I did a lot of research on how to be a good DM and help my players have the most fun; the biggest piece of advice I received was "never say no". A big part of the fun in roleplaying is the freedom to do whatever you want, and a good DM should facilitate that.

Divinity Original Sin 2 is exactly that. This game gives you an incredibly varied gameworld and lets you do whatever you please. It's shockingly open-ended and expects you to come up with interesting solutions to problems. There's no wrong way to play (except maybe playing this like your typical linear RPG!) so you can devise incredible combos that feel like you're breaking the game, do quests out of sequence, or feel like you're playing in a way that opposes what the developer's intended. This is all an illusion, because the intended way to play IS to think outside the box and break rules.

A possible downside to this freedom is the difficulty of the game when on its default setting. It took me many hours to get used to what combat requires, and the min-maxing required may put some people off the game. While there are easier difficulty settings, learning the intricacies of combat and character building is immensely satisfying and worth putting the effort into understanding. Because the game is so open, you'll often find encounter balance varies constantly; some fights will be ridiculously easy while others will take 4 or 5 attempts. It comes with the territory.

As for the quick pros and cons:

Pros

+ Best strategic RPG combat system I've ever played (grumbles about mixed armour aside)
+ Flexibility is incredible, it feels like the game wants you to break it and that's so much fun
+ Very cool lore, I particularly loved the elves being able to eat body parts to gain their memories
+ Classes that feel unique, and can be mixed freely. My best tank was a necromancer/mage/hydro mix, while my summoner was a high INT melee prodigy

Cons

- Mixed physical/magic armour system starts to feel restrictive despite being interesting at the start. I had to respec to almost pure physical damage/spells to make progress
- Final chapter is a huge difficulty spike with very few places to level up, I had to scour a small zone for non-combat quests while always getting ambushed and having to reload
- Despite being SO open, it is somewhat level gated and can feel like you don't truly have all of the options the game makes you think you do
- Final fight was busted. I had a pretty well optimised team and I just couldn't make progress; I'd get killed before I could even take my turn.

So all in all it was an incredible experience. I very rarely stick with games this long, so the positives very much outweigh the negatives (and the beauty about playing on PC is that you can tweak some things if you start to feel any friction that's truly getting in the way of your enjoyment)

It's on sale again. Stop tempting me

Thanks for the review, Unicycle. It's the second time I've read it today, as I saw it on Steam earlier!

I'm tempted, too. The game has been out for six years now and is never more than 60% off, so I'm not holding my breath for a better deal...

Divinity 2 was such a great coop experience. Although I found with any more then two people it becomes a bit of a mess. Combat wasn't that tough but I was playing with a fellow min maxer and we did all the side content. That said when you make a mistake the game can punish you rather hard. Lots of ways to exploit things though.

A_Unicycle wrote:

Pros

+ Very cool lore, I particularly loved the elves being able to eat body parts to gain their memories

My main character was an elf. When Shymlark and I were playing he would occasionally point to a corpses and say, ”There’s a severed leg over there for you,” or he’d hand me an unsavoury body part and say, “You can eat that.”
To which I’d respond, with a notable lack of enthusiasm, “Gee thanks.”

Finished the new Dead Space game and really enjoyed it. Very atmospheric, scary (few games actually get that right) and a great story. I generally dislike big boss battles but thought the few were fairly straight forward so that seemed an improvement. Well recommended.

Wasteland 3

I was obsessed. I think I managed the whole 40 hours in about a week?

Story was a bit juvenile at times and everything had a bad moral implication so nothing felt too important. On the other hand, when the jokes landed, I got a good chuckle out of the game quite frequently! I laughed my ass off when I encountered a giant goat from hell after 30 hours, because I'd picked the goatkiller background for my main character:

Nobody believes you, but you know what you saw. A giant red goat, standing over your mother's body, freaky golden eyes glittering in the night. Goats aren't normal, just listen to 'em! You're going to kill every goat you can, draw out that Monster Goat, and this time, you'll be ready. Bleat, bleat, motherf*cker.

I thought this was just silly flavour text, but no! It gives you a rare chance to encounter the goat and get your revenge! Bloody incredible.

Combat and character-building was just amazing. Streamlined, but including everything you'd want for a smart tactical RPG. Level-ups and new equipment came at a very fast pace, and all the little armour mods, weapon mods, and craftable combat tools made me feel like I'd made my own unique party by the end.

I played on 'hard' (ranger) with permadeath which felt like a very balanced difficulty, though the final 2 areas were a bit of a breeze once all of my builds came together! Satisfying!

Unfortunately, it suffered a few annoying bugs. I'd regularly see the game drop to <10FPS seemingly at random, requiring a restart to fix the issue. I'd also have party members randomly get angry with me and permanently leave the party after some fights. This was a huge pain in the butt because I'd have to reload entire encounters just so all of my equipment/skills/items invested weren't lost to the whims of the game's code.

Looooved this game. Will be continuing my foray into crpgs with Pathfinder Kingmaker next! It looks VERY dense, so wish me luck!

A_Unicycle wrote:

Wasteland 3

I was obsessed. I think I managed the whole 40 hours in about a week?

Story was a bit juvenile at times and everything had a bad moral implication so nothing felt too important. On the other hand, when the jokes landed, I got a good chuckle out of the game quite frequently! I laughed my ass off when I encountered a giant goat from hell after 30 hours, because I'd picked the goatkiller background for my main character:

Nobody believes you, but you know what you saw. A giant red goat, standing over your mother's body, freaky golden eyes glittering in the night. Goats aren't normal, just listen to 'em! You're going to kill every goat you can, draw out that Monster Goat, and this time, you'll be ready. Bleat, bleat, motherf*cker.

I thought this was just silly flavour text, but no! It gives you a rare chance to encounter the goat and get your revenge! Bloody incredible.

Combat and character-building was just amazing. Streamlined, but including everything you'd want for a smart tactical RPG. Level-ups and new equipment came at a very fast pace, and all the little armour mods, weapon mods, and craftable combat tools made me feel like I'd made my own unique party by the end.

I played on 'hard' (ranger) with permadeath which felt like a very balanced difficulty, though the final 2 areas were a bit of a breeze once all of my builds came together! Satisfying!

Unfortunately, it suffered a few annoying bugs. I'd regularly see the game drop to <10FPS seemingly at random, requiring a restart to fix the issue. I'd also have party members randomly get angry with me and permanently leave the party after some fights. This was a huge pain in the butt because I'd have to reload entire encounters just so all of my equipment/skills/items invested weren't lost to the whims of the game's code.

Looooved this game. Will be continuing my foray into crpgs with Pathfinder Kingmaker next! It looks VERY dense, so wish me luck!

Thanks for the write up. This has been on my radar for sometime and is regularly on deep sale on psn. This moves it up the list for me once I am done hunting monsters.

bbk1980 wrote:

Thanks for the write up. This has been on my radar for sometime and is regularly on deep sale on psn. This moves it up the list for me once I am done hunting monsters.

No worries! It's a very good game with great tactical combat. Always nice when these gems are steeply discounted

Looooved this game. Will be continuing my foray into crpgs with Pathfinder Kingmaker next! It looks VERY dense, so wish me luck!

An update to this:

I. Am. Overwhelmed. LOL

A_Unicycle wrote:

I. Am. Overwhelmed. LOL

I am planning on playing Kingmaker next as well and have spent the last month reading up on the different classes, abilities, etc. Still no clue what to pick.