Freedom from the Pile!

Finally time for me to attack my pile.

I nominate Red Dead Redemption as my first victim. I hear it is quite a long game. Heres hoping I wont need to carry it over to August...

Wish me luck!

finished up Fallout: New Vegas just now, the ending kinda confused me ... but oh well, my pile game is done and I'm not buying the DLC anytime soon.

I am going to keep chipping away at the pile with Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep for the PSP. Dumb title but hopefully the game is okay.

I'm down for Witcher but I started playing InFAMOUS as well and finished that yesterday. Terraria also distracted me from Witcher, but I've now beaten Skeletron and done just about everything there is to do there. Now back to Witcher!

Strong Bad Episode 2: Strong Badia the Free is finished. I had a much better experience with this episode than I did with the aimless first one. I'll definitely be going through the rest of the series in the coming months.

billt721 wrote:

Strong Bad Episode 2: Strong Badia the Free is finished. I had a much better experience with this episode than I did with the aimless first one. I'll definitely be going through the rest of the series in the coming months.

That was my favorite episode of the series. It was much stronger than the first, but the quality only went downhill from there. The fourth episode was such a drag that I completely lost momentum and never finished the fifth. I'm curious to see what your impressions are of them as you finish them up.

I promise I will finished Batman this month...already started a bit of Portal 2 though...I know...

Just beat Infamous, and wow, is that a good game. There were definitely some annoying parts (ridiculous numbers of enemies with improbably aiming skills, and occasionally spotty platforming, mostly), but I really enjoyed it, and am psyched to play the second one now.

I'm not going to finish Bayonetta this month. I'm on chapter 12 (of 16) and loving it, but I'll be disconnected for the next week and a half due to cottaging. Ah well - summer weather > video games.

This is my kind of thread.

The thing I like about the pile is that mine is littered with old games, games that I bought on the CHEAP.

Now that I'm taking a break from my degree and about to spend more than a year deployed, I'm attacking the pile I built up over the last six months in anticipation for this window of gamer-tunity.

So, the game I'm working through right now, Half-Life.

That's right, the original. I have beaten Half-Life 2 and the add-on episodes, I've bean Portal but I never played the original all the way through. So, I installed it (bought it long ago, in several formats, bought it again via Steam) on my netbook so I could play on travel.

Now that I'm back home I need to move the save games to my desktop and knock this thing out. I'm about four hours in and I'm really enjoying it, old graphics and all.

Tim

Really wanting to declare something for the month but I'll be re-hashing the good-ol-games of FF3 SNES and ME1 Lady Shepard renegade jerk-face.

I'll catch up in August.

The wife (Michikodesu around here) and I finished off Castle Crashers (on PS3) tonight. We've had it since early December and didn't really play it much for a while. So a true pile game, but not a declared one.

Just finished up Assassin's Creed. I got through the first three assassinations pretty quickly but because of how repetitive it was, I stepped away from the game for a few weeks, finally coming back to it this week and powering through it to get it completed. Not a bad game, certainly, but way too long given how similar everything was.

billt721 wrote:

Just finished up Assassin's Creed. I got through the first three assassinations pretty quickly but because of how repetitive it was, I stepped away from the game for a few weeks, finally coming back to it this week and powering through it to get it completed. Not a bad game, certainly, but way too long given how similar everything was.

I found doing one assassination a night (with all the required info gathering) made it much more tolerable. Yes, I was doing the same thing each evening, but at least I wasn't doing it 4 times in a single night. I imagine it wears pretty thin when you try to power through.

I need motivation to get through Bioshock. It's been a great game so far, but it's really starting to get repetitive. I just finished the creepy theater/casino level, so I'm not sure how far I am from the end.

Can I at least look forward to a great ending or some pretty cool end levels?

I'm also (re)playing Bioshock in the hopes of actually finishing it this time, and I'm already really missing many of the changes made in Bioshock 2.

I put BioShock 2 on the backburner until I finish Deus Ex.

jdzappa wrote:

I need motivation to get through Bioshock. It's been a great game so far, but it's really starting to get repetitive. I just finished the creepy theater/casino level, so I'm not sure how far I am from the end.

Can I at least look forward to a great ending or some pretty cool end levels?

You have a long, long way to go. And what you think is near the end is still quite, quite far away from it. Like you, I started becoming bored with it at this point. I didn't last much longer past what I thought should have been the proper ending.

jdzappa wrote:

I need motivation to get through Bioshock. It's been a great game so far, but it's really starting to get repetitive. I just finished the creepy theater/casino level, so I'm not sure how far I am from the end.

Can I at least look forward to a great ending or some pretty cool end levels?

It's been a few years since I finished Bioshock but I remember feeling the same way, it got a little rough and I wasn't sure if I was going to finish it. The story is what ultimately kept me going.

Once you have the "big reveal" however the game seemed to keep on going, making me wonder if I hadn't already had the best experience it had to offer.

By the time I finished I felt that the game had just barely finished up in a manner that lived up to the story arc. It was a satisfying end, if a little drawn out.

Stick with it for the story and you won't be disappointed. I actually started to replay it to make sure I had fully experienced all of the nuances of it, I didn't make it through it a second time for various reasons. I'm really looking forward to part 2 after hearing the GWJ podcast about Infinite, just have to finish up a few more items on the pile before I get to it.

Tim

EDIT-

One other thing, if the level you are describing is Fort Frolic then you are about halfway through the game. Good luck!

Finished The Witcher just now. I'd say it was pretty good. Had some good aspects and some not-so-good aspects.

ZaneRockfist wrote:
jdzappa wrote:

I need motivation to get through Bioshock. It's been a great game so far, but it's really starting to get repetitive. I just finished the creepy theater/casino level, so I'm not sure how far I am from the end.

Can I at least look forward to a great ending or some pretty cool end levels?

You have a long, long way to go. And what you think is near the end is still quite, quite far away from it. Like you, I started becoming bored with it at this point. I didn't last much longer past what I thought should have been the proper ending.

Well I dropped the difficulty to easy and it's going much faster. To give myself a little bit of a challenge, I'm doing a lot more running and gunning/aggroing multiple targets rather than going slow and picking off people with the crossbow. I'm also not healing in the middle of combat.

Hopefully I'll be able to scratch this one off my list before next SUn.

As I mentioned, I took a swing at Bioshock about three years ago and flamed out in about the same place as everyone else: after the Andrew Ryan reveal but before confronting Fontaine. This time, I'm determined to finish the game and have changed the way that I'm playing it by turning off vita-chambers, turning off the quest arrow, and playing on hard.

As I found with my playthrough of Bioshock 2, turning off the quest arrow helps me to explore the levels at my own pace without feeling pressure to move on to the next area. Playing on hard and turning off vita-chambers has really made the combat more strategic and more interesting. I've really had to learn how the different weapons and plasmids interact and how best to use the environment to my advantage. The Big Daddy battles are also now incredibly tense battles where I'm always a hair away from defeat; the feeling of bringing one down now is so much more satisfying.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'm also (re)playing Bioshock in the hopes of actually finishing it this time, and I'm already really missing many of the changes made in Bioshock 2.

I'll say this: Bioshock has better writing and better storytelling, but Bioshock 2 is the better game in every other regard. The audio logs in Bioshock are more engaging and do a better job of building up the arch of the story, and the environmental storytelling is generally better than what Bioshock 2 has to offer, but when it comes to gunplay, level design, encounter design, and game mechanics, Bioshock 2 has its predecessor beat.

Well, it turns out that Heroes of Might & Magic V finished itself for me. Before we even started. My PC is apparently too good to run it. For August I'll have to make sure I test drive the game before listing it

To my surprise, I had some free time around this weekend to play Recettear. To my greater surprise, I managed to finish the main story line in one loop. That's just the sort of game I enjoy, though. I had a lot of fun, even though I did feel like I ground my way to the final goal in the last week. I'm quite likely to play it some more, but there are an awful lot of other games over here wanting me to pay attention to them.

jdzappa wrote:

I need motivation to get through Bioshock. It's been a great game so far, but it's really starting to get repetitive. I just finished the creepy theater/casino level, so I'm not sure how far I am from the end.

The place where I stopped right before going on the trip I'm on (the reason I won't finish Bioshock this month - again) was entering Hephaestus, right after Fort Frolic, which took several hours to work through.

I'm still working on Dragon Quest IX, but...it's long. Outlook: Ask again later.

I did, however, take a few adventure games off of the pile:

Back to the Future 102: Get Tannen! (PC)
Back to the Future 103: Citizen Brown (PC)
Back to the Future 104: Double Visions (PC)
Back to the Future 105: OUTATIME (PC)
Puzzle Agent (PC)

All but BttF 102 were unannounced, and 104 and 105 are probably too new to qualify. I wasn't a huge BttF fan going in - heresy, I know - but once I got to episode 3, I was really digging the setting, humor, and story. I found myself caring for the characters and wanting to know how it all turned out, and also wanting more when it all ended. Definitely recommended!

Puzzle Agent is Professor Layton on the PC, but, while good in its own, short way, not quite up to the same caliber. I also swear that at least two of the puzzles have more solutions than the game accepts. It's a good first effort for a new franchise, but only get it if it's cheap.

I also finally finished Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES). You know all about it already, so I won't say much other than I have yet to meet a platforming or action game that contains fun ice levels in which sliding is involved. I also acknowledge that side-scrolling labyrinth-like stages in which doorways led you in circles were common at the time, but that doesn't make them acceptable. Overall, most worlds are fun, giant world is great, but MAN that ice world sucks.

Funny, I thought I'd tear through Deathspank. While I am loving it, it does get a little grindy at parts. Hopefully, I'll be able to put some much deserved time into it on my off days this week, before the moth ends. Maybe I'll even finish it. Should be able to, now, shouldn't I?

I just finished up the last mission in The Saboteur. It was flawed, but I had fun, er, sabotaging Nazi equipment. The game reminds me a lot of Assassin's Creed, but only the first one. The second Assassin's Creed game fixed a lot of the original's shortcomings, and given that Pandemic doesn't exist anymore, it's pretty much assured that there will never be a Saboteur sequel.

Just when I was about to be finished with all WWII-themed games, though, I got Wolfenstein for the 360 at Best Buy today for $10. I think it will sit on the pile for a bit, though. I want a change of gaming scenery.

No joy on Baldur's Gate 2 this month, but that's OK: I finished Baldur's Gate 1.

I think I'll declare my attempt at Deathspank a failure this month. Doubt I'll have time in the next couple of days to polish it off.

Next month, I say!

Well... Half-Life is done.

That was an interesting experience.

I think I'll move on to Mass Effect now, if my netbook will run it.

Good luck to everyone trying to knock one out before the month ends and to everyone in the month of August.

EDIT: A read on a wiki cleared up my confusion and negated the need for the spoiler talk.

Tim