Declare Your Independence from Something New by Playing Something Old

Clemenstation wrote:

Oh snap, son! A pirate!

Copies of Torment are expensive these days eh? If mine wasn't so dog-eared and the discs weren't all scratched to hell from falling out of their poorly designed little pouches, that sucker would be on eBay tonight.

Yeah, have a look on Amazon for example. Painful! Sadly, my conscience these days won't let me pirate, otherwise I'd be all over that

You can mark me as finished Disgaea DS.

Mmm, New Game +.

Put me down for Retro Gaming Challenge on the DS. I'm at the last challenge and at the last dungeon in Guadia Quest. I totally see how Jeremy Parish at Retronauts and others can fall in love with the nostalgia and retro-ness of Guadia Quest but my patience is just about done with it.

Clemenstation wrote:

Copies of Torment are expensive these days eh? If mine wasn't so dog-eared and the discs weren't all scratched to hell from falling out of their poorly designed little pouches, that sucker would be on eBay tonight.

Holy cow, a quick google search sure confirms this! I picked up a big-box french version in 2001 for about $20, and an english language budget release at wal-mart a few years later for 5. ...wish I'd bought extras now!

I HAVE DESTROYED THE TYRANID HIVE!!!

If you would be so kind as to mark me as having completed DoW II! Now... I need to think long and hard on what's next.

I'm gonna tag that ferocious stress-a-thon known as Theme Hospital. Combined with this bleedin' heat I will probably develop a misunderstanding for eustress and quite a fair share of hair which I could ask a wig maker to turn into a merkin thus giving me that much needed mane opposed to my normal natural curl.

Just solved Wallace & Gromit's first new adventure! As with most Telltale games, it's not a particularly hard game, but overlooking one simple thing can get you stuck a good long while (which is what happened to me at the final puzzle).

The animation is quite well done, I laughed several times, the gameplay was varied enough and...well, let's just say that I felt like I easily got my money's worth.

...just in time for the new Monkey Island...

Ultimate Spider-Man is pretty cool. I like the cell shading. It won't win any awards for graphics, but it's a fun Spider-Man game.

Super Mario RPG falls!

Oh my god, the cable car segment in Gears 2 is absolutely killing me. I didn't even remember this part of the game because I blew through it on Hardcore, but the Reavers that attack you

a) require two sniper shots to take out, while they're ducking and weaving their suicide-bombing way towards you

b) also fire rockets that can one-shot you if you're too busy aiming to notice them

c) instantly kill you if they reach the cable car

I can take the first four out consistently, but the last two... gah! I was seriously considering firing up a second controller and playing one on Insane and one on Casual, and just taking out the Reavers with the Casual controller while Insane cowered in the corner. But that would be cheating. That said... anyone up for co-op?

Thanks to a three day long man-cation, I've been able to put a ton of time towards my pile resulting in me completing my quest in Dragon Warrior III today! It was a grindalicious prequel to Dragon Warrior/Quest 1 with a bunch of little nods to players of the original.

All in all, a vast improvement over DW2, which I slogged through a few months ago. The player consistently has far more direction versus the hours of nearly aimless sailing I did in its predecessor until I either quit for a few years or pulled out a walkthrough. Also, in a noticeable first for the series, three of the four party members are completely customizable by the player including such classes as Merchant and Goof-off in addition to the standard array. Later on there is even class-switching, gambling, and more. I'm guessing it was sanitized for western audiences, as the "dancers" in Assaram weren't just putting on a variety show as a younger gamer might believe. Rather impressive stuff for an 8-bit game originally released in 1988.

DW4 goes significantly further than this - I'll probably take that on in a month or two.

Scratch another one off the list. Battlefield: Bad Company has been finished. I'm glad a finally got through this. It was definitely a unique story. I don't know why but there were some sections that just really got the best of me, but my stubbornness won and I managed to push through. Of course the respawn system was kind of in my favor. I'm even having some fun in the multiplayer on this, but I never put the headset on.

Plants Vs. Zombies has fallen... and the ending was so unexpected - I just couldn't stop laughing

Gears 2 Insane goes down! I also picked up all 41 collectibles.

With one teeny-tiny exception I did the whole thing solo, which was frustrating as hell at many points but ultimately felt pretty damn good.

Played through Turtles in Time (SNES) with a buddy over the weekend. I had forgotten how great that game is. I might have to get the xbox live version next month. Next on the list of old school co-op beat-em-ups to revisit is Battletoads & DoubleDragon.

Ultimate Spider-Man falls. I hated the chase sequences and the last fight was sort of mind numbing, but I enjoyed the game. Thinking about playing The Punisher next. I'm on a real Xbox comic book game kick. I'd same Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, but I just got Prototype too, and i think the similarities would prevent me from enjoying and/or finishing one or both.

Count me in! I'm trying to concentrate on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on 360, which I will never finish this month. Like many others, I have quite a pile of games on a few platforms (Can you say, "Steam Sale?") so we'll see how long this actually takes...

Hemidal, please move me from MP3 to Professor Layton and the Curious Village. I'm about to go out of town for a while, and the Wii...doesn't travel. Thanks.

After 2.5 months of promises, you can finally scratch Robotech: Battlecry off for me!

As a fan of the series, it was a treat to play a game that had a visual style and sound utterly authentic to the source material. The game brought back many of the original English voice actors (with great little cameos), crafted a believable side story, and mostly played "right."

Unfortunately, not all is rosy, as the levels often felt a bit empty, mission design wasn't always the most inspired, and worst of all, I was constantly running into invisible walls! Furthermore, this was one of the more challenging games I've ever completed, and not always "challenging" in a good way. A good number of missions seemed designed to only allow you to pass with a sliver of life left, and several of these seem nigh impossible to play legitimately without possessing god-like skill. As a result, I found myself playing several missions in ways that didn't seem "right" - either exploiting weak AI, or, as one walkthrough suggested, not firing a single shot but rather just launching decoy flares until the mission timer expired. You know it's going to be a rough ride when the walkthrough writer basically says "Good luck storming the castle...by yourself."

Multiplayer is an utterly forgettable 1 on 1 affair that would have been better left off entirely.

Recommended for adherents to the Robotech/Macross universe who are willing to put up with some major frustration.
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Since I'm feeling cheeky this month (3/3 so far!), let's add to my pile for July!

Mafia (PC - there were console versions, but they are abominations) - I once described this game as "GTA done right" and it is one of my favorites. Whether following the great story or simply cruising about the town, soaking in the 1920's-30's atmosphere, this game is fantastic! A wonder then that I stopped 75% through years ago. Time to rectify that!

Missing: Since January (In Memoriam to anybody who didn't pick up the North American version) (PC) - an interesting adventure title that sends you emails, makes you sift through (fake) websites, and generally gives the player an impression of working on something larger than just code contained on a CD, similar to EA's Majestic, which came before. It may be a bit tough to complete nowadays, 6 years later, as some of the reference websites are gone, but luckily I found a German-language solution guide to assist in such situations.

I threw Mafia in Multi just to be difficult.

Mafia has been....taken care of, if ya gets my drift.

Words don't seem adequate to describe what an utterly FANTASTIC game this is! It is somewhat hard to believe that Illusion Softworks was able to pull off such a varied and lifelike large city and surrounding countryside in 2002. Look up "immersive" in the encyclopedia, and it should say "see: Mafia - the game." I marvel at the distinct atmosphere of the various sections of the city, the believable cast of characters whom I felt myself caring for and empathizing with, the great story that puts not a few movies to shame, and the little touches scattered throughout, such as getting a ticket for speeding, detailed alleyways all over the city that many players will never even see, or a carpet hung in the courtyard, airing out after having been beaten.

I was completely in love with this game 6 years ago, even when I got stuck on the riverboat mission for so long that I moved on. Now, coming back, I discovered something that makes that mission much, much easier - a simple bucket. Coming back to it in 2009, I'm in love again. The graphics quickly stopped looking dated and 1930's "Chicago-York" became a place I'm living in. Only minor niggles exist - signage is reused a bit too frequently (either that, or the Star Hotel, Chinese Laundry, and home of finest baked goods are franchises so successful, they're on every third block), it would be nice to be able to enter more buildings, and the driver AI needs some driver's ed courses in right-of-way rules. Hopefully they'll be in this fall's sequel!

Anybody who has never played the PC version of this game is making an omission akin to never having played Beyond Good & Evil or a Zelda. It's that seminal, IMO!

(...and after you complete the game, a rather amusing additional freeride mode is unlocked with extra unlockable vehicles which I'll definitely be working on getting

I'm going to find it hard to get Blacksite finished by the end of the month i think. Despite it apparently being a short game, my progress has been slowed through many crashes to desktops.... which then turn my PC OFF!!. I've never experienced anything like this before.

Trying to find a solution i went looking for the patches.... but patch 1.2 wouldn't install - despite the file it said was missing being present in the correct place. I downloaded 1.1 thinking it was a sequential update process and that flung up the same error. So i'm currently stuck fairly early in the game with a game-stopping bug/crash that turns off my PC when it occurs.

My last resort is a new patch (1.2) which, for some reason, is not available on any of the normal PC webhosting services like fileplanet/gamershell etc. though it supports every version of the game as opposed to the current one reportedly only supporting the US version. Unfortunately the midway server hosting the file is only letting me download at sub 10kb/s speeds for a 117MB file. If this doesn't work then i'm just going to jack the game straight into the bin.

[edit]
Well, i applied the patch and the good news is that they seem to have done a lot of optimising: the game runs much more smoothly now and the mouse lag seems to be pretty much gone. It also solved my CTD problem.... only to create another about a minute after the point the last one was occurring. :/ Basically the problem seems to be a scripting issue as, when the game comes to a point where it needs to move onto the next objective or line of dialogue it just crashes and then turns off my PC.

I'm officially removing this game from my pile as i am unable to play it. It's the buggiest game i've played on PC since Kotor 2 and i never finished that one either. I'll probably come back to it when i get windows 7 and see if it runs any better under that.

I'll switch out Blacksite for X-men origins: Wolverine. I'm a fair way through that so i don't think it'll be a hassle to get it finished.
Now... let's see if i can finish Mirror's Edge before the end of the month!

FFX is not going to happen by end of month, and not for lack of effort. I honestly forgot how bloody long JRPGs were - mostly due to absolutely unnecessary cutscenes. Now I don't mind a good cutscene, or even a long one - but many in this game seem to add nothing. Its cool when they reveal a plot element (Tidus seems to be cool with having the convoluted history of Spira revealed to him piecemeal), but when they just reinforce the fact that "Wakka hates Machina" or "Auron is taciturn", I start to lose my patience.

I like a lot of stuff about this game, and dislike a lot of stuff. I'll save a more complete picture for when I'm done, but suffice it to say that the main thing this game does is remind me of how much better FFVI was, at least in my head.

Oh, and Blitzball is dumb.

Dysplastic wrote:

FFX is not going to happen by end of month, and not for lack of effort. I honestly forgot how bloody long JRPGs were - mostly due to absolutely unnecessary cutscenes. Now I don't mind a good cutscene, or even a long one - but many in this game seem to add nothing. Its cool when they reveal a plot element (Tidus seems to be cool with having the convoluted history of Spira revealed to him piecemeal), but when they just reinforce the fact that "Wakka hates Machina" or "Auron is taciturn", I start to lose my patience.

I like a lot of stuff about this game, and dislike a lot of stuff. I'll save a more complete picture for when I'm done, but suffice it to say that the main thing this game does is remind me of how much better FFVI was, at least in my head.

Oh, and Blitzball is dumb.

I don't think I could agree much more. Especially on how great FFVI is (being my favorite doesn't hurt!). As for FFX, I personally got tired of it after about 30 hrs when I found out I had 10 or more left to go. Oh, and that's after using a walkthrough for the past 20 hrs. I think I'm too old for those games anymore...

I'm going to fail yet again this month. I've just been too occupied with new shiny stuff. Someday I'll get to Zelda and wrap up DoW II, but it wont be this month. Damn Gamestop and their trade in deals!

I have to admit that i got pretty bored with FFX after a while... It was my least favourite out of 7-10. I've only played through the first FF in the 8-bit arena at the moment... maybe some day i'll get around to playing through 2, 4 and 6 (i hate the look of the 3D reincarnations).

On topic though, i've completed Wolverine!! I guess i was further into it that i realised. It was actually a very solid game with only a few frustrating parts where the forced camera angles really annoyed me... and the one boss that eschewed the whole premise of what we'd been taught about fighting larger enemies.... took me a while to work out what i was doing wrong - though thankfully, the quick healing system meant that i only died a few times throughout the game and most of them were due to game glitches or my own stupidity.

Count me in for Advance Wars:Dual Strike. Ive had the turn based itch since I started playing Reign of Swords for the itouch.

I've failed this month. I've been so preoccupied with other things that I haven't even touched my pile. I barely played anything. I'll definitely play something in August since it's the last month before school starts.

Sorry, but I am slow and am still slogging through Odin's Sphere. I like the gameplay, but I cannot stand the grading of the battles. I fight my way through a difficult battle with not enough experience and after failing ten times I beat it, Only to get a D and feel like a failure. And then I get to the boss, only to find my character not strong enough to beat it. I have to go back to home an grind through the same battles again. This game loves punishing the player. But I will continue, though I doubt I will beat it until August.

Dwango.

I finally started Dead Space on the weekend; got a couple of chapters in, and I'm finding it very enjoyable so far. Might be a stretch to get it done before the end of the month, but I'll give it a go anyway