I finished FarCry 3, fun game but man what is it about big budget games where the ending just have to be worse than what came before?
Finished the Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mixalot
That was some final fight. Star Wars prequel fever seems to have been pretty strong during the development. If that ending had been in a game with about half as much cruft in it would’ve probably gotten misty-eyed like the sap I am. Almost made the whole Roxas stuff and his infamous 2 hour tutorial seem justified too but, like most of the game’s plot points, it’s crammed into the first and final 3 or so hours of a 60 hour game and loses a lot of impact because it.
Went back and got that Sephiroth and felt like I got the gist of Advent Children from it. The game’s most fun when it gets that hectic. Started doing some of the journal completion stuff since I had actually gotten 91% of it done by just doing the side-stuff as it came along throughout but gave up on the idea when I realized it also invovled grinding for hundreds of random drops from enemies. Would’ve honestly been fine with it if it was just the mini-game high scores and optional bosses that I expected it to be. Tried the (Terra?) Final Mix fight you unlock and managed to get destroyed in less then 10 seconds in three unique ways right out of the gate which was funny.
All in all, glad I played it but should’ve probably beelined it through more. Game was better then I expected, story more inane then I had heard. Play it only if you get enjoyment out of asking yourself “What were they thinking??” many times over and see the anime trends of the day. This HD version looks and sounds really good on the TV.
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I “beat” Soul Reaver 2 AKA got 80% of the way through it, then experienced a crash that erased about 2 hours of progress, and then watched the rest of the game on Youtube. I’m actually glad I didn’t try to get through the last gauntlet of enemies because it looks intolerable. Still, I was really happy with this game, I thought it was definitely a neat mix of the first game’s puzzles with semi-decent combat and a way more intricate story.
Playing LoK Defiance now, since Blood Omen 2 looked like a badawful game. Defiance is alright, Grim described it as a Post-DMC game and yep, that’s right. Air juggles and shit. Less cutscenes though which is bumming me out. The combat is kinda janky and boring as usual, but slightly more engaging. Of course, since the combat is slightly more engaging there is approximately 5x more of it in the game. So there’s that.
Also the camera is this weird pseudo-fixed angle thing that causes lots of problems, particularly because I’m playing the PC port so can only move in 8 directions. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be at first, but it’s still kinda bleh.
On chapter 6 now, we’ll see how it goes. I have a lot more thoughts on the series but I’ma make a mega-post once I finish this game.
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Tried one of the Australia mods for Civ V. Ben watching lots of Civ VI videos, so’ve been playing it off-and-on a little over the last weeks. I’m being nice and not invading anyone and most’ve us are in a big chums groups and it’s nice. This particularly mod must’ve been made by a wacko though because the leader is one of Australia’s soppiest Prime Ministers : / I’ll probably try one of the others next.
The other game I’m in I’m trapped between two nations that are constantly trying to invade me and it’s a disaster. Looking forward to getting into a better era and knocking out one of them hopefully.
Also playing a bit of Fairy Bloom Freesia every now and then.
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Kudos. I loved Kingdom Hearts for a hot minute but I am always hesitant to go back to any of them. I think I I could just play the end caps the actual plot parts and skip the Disney run around I’d like it more.
i played wizardry: tale of the forsaken, an old out of print ps2 wizardry derivative game made by racjin and published by atlus
sometimes, you just want to go wandering around deep dark dungeons, okay. it’s nice and comforting.
to not spam up the thread too much i’m making the rundown collapsable:
click here for lots of random notes/observations about it
interesting stuff it does:
- multi-level areas! each ‘floor’ is actually a complete zone, with slopes and curves and paths on top of other paths and other stuff that you basically just don’t see in tile based dungeon crawlers
- one area is actually a spiral down around a central waterfall, with a navigable maze build into the caverns around it. it’s really neat! (and then it makes you climb all the way back down after you get to the bottom)
- characters have a trust rating towards the protagonist character, and personality traits that affect their trust rating depending on how you play. eg there’s a type that prefers to fight strong enemies and gets kind of sad if he’s stuck fighting weaklings
- dungeon layouts are interesting, maze-like, and not wholly linear. I mean, they’re still a bit of linear, but they’re infinitely more interesting than anything in etrian odyssey
- symbol encounters only, rather than random encounters. symbols are in a loose shape of enemy type, so you know that something that looks like a human probably has humanoid-type enemies. they move in real time, which i’m not sure i like.
- some dungeon floors are randomly generated, although the random generation isn’t done very well it’s an interesting idea
- lesser demons have the most amazing idle animation, i need to take a clip of it sometime
- the orcs are moe
bad things:
- it takes like most of an hour of play before it lets you create your own characters, emphasizing that it wants you to use the premades, which are all fairly OP compared to what you can make.
- localization is kind of half-assed. “BRESS DEF” shows up for the breath protection skill!
- you can’t speed up combat, and the animations are long and obnoxious and repetitive, i had gotten to the point where i’d input party commands and then go look at twitter or something while it plays out
- in particular, spellcasting animations are unnecessarily long! there’s a ‘look, i’m casting a spell’ animation and then the spell itself happens. whole anim’s like 15 seconds usually
- the game asks for a Protagonist Character from you, name whatever you want, specifically shows both genders as an option, but 100% of story dialogue assumes male. and there’s even a Ghost of a Deceased Love Interest hanging around!
- trust is used for team-attacks, but the team attacks are so strong it kind of destroys the point of worrying about individual character classes. it also builds so slow you effectively cannot change party members or bring in new guys.
- magic is gotten by a crafting system, which is fine, except you need to level up spells, which can take upwards of 15 seconds per level for spells that can go up to level 30 or so. this also means that you’ll spend roughly an hour worth of game time just upgrading spells throughout a whole playthrough. barf
- the post-game dungeon is completely randomly generated and 9999f and apparently actually loops if you reach the end, for that extra layer of futility.
this game has a japanese-only sequel, BUSIN 0, that clears up some of the problems of above; no assumptions about protag geneder, magic upgrading is much faster, you can create custom chars immediately, you can turn off combat anims(but only from outside of combat so no “hey this guy looks cool let’s watch him do stuff”). it also seems better written, i’d like to give it a real go sometime
overall i don’t think i’d recommend the game to anyone who wasn’t already nuts about killing stuff
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I just got Battlefield 1 yesterday. Seems like the gameplay is slower paced than the other games in the series. Anybody else got this on PC? Would love to get a squad together.
I loaded up some THPS2. It still feels so familiar; the frustrating puzzles of seeing a place but not seeing how to get there, the temptation to do tricks encroaching on the need to maintain momentum, the occasional unexpected oddities in improvising interactions between bits of the level design. And of course the music.
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Severed is pretty damn cool I just rue the fact that I’m playing it on the 3DS instead of a Vita with its presumably higher resolution screen.
what sorcery wizardry is this
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I (paid the pound of flesh and) tried Modern Warfare Remastered last week, after having last played MW1 circa 2006. This Eurogamer article has good stuff to say about it:
I’m up to the fourth level. The quotes are definitely one of the things that struck me again. They seem to be taken somewhat randomly from a war quote database – the only line drawn is to exclude openly pacifist quotes – and they rarely feel like they have any connection with the ingame action or plot. The overall impression that comes out of them is a general impression of war as an eternal necessary presence (not sure I would say evil) in the world. That’s also communicated by the tone of the protagonists in the intro cutscene which are all like “ho hum, another day of battles all over the globe”.
The other thing that struck me this time is how obsessed this game is with logistics. The game is so openly about getting from setpiece A to setpiece B in the most concise and efficient way. The in-between-mission cutscenes do the absolute bare minimum to establish a sense of place and motivation for being there as they careen you around the world. Then the missions themselves are about walking between areas to get to the next impressive vantage point with a lot of token mooks sprinkled in between to give the impression of “game” and “warfare”. The mooks also drop varied and uniformly useless guns which are worse than your starting rifle, because they had a gun designer on staff. It’s partly because the 3rd and 4th areas I just did are among the weak filler sections of the game, but I’m amazed at how skeletal a shim this is around “content”.
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Finally decided to play (Forbidden) Siren 2. Love the original, Blood Curse was good.
It quickly shows a nice bit of technical improvement over the first game, introducing the mechanics and flow of things. And some minor changes make completing certain actions and interacting with the environment just a bit less awkward. With that and the military characters running around, I had a slight impression they traded some of the demanding and obtuse elements for a little more action and accessibility. Which is fine and common enough but I wasn’t sure how much tension would be lost.
I like the first few hours I’ve played though, never really gathered how it’s connected to the first game so I’m curious about that and the Yamibito.
Yeah this game has effortlessly sucked me in. It’s got a nice mix of Metroidvania, Punch-Out, and Zelda going on. Plus you tap on the screen to eat monster hearts.
I feel like this game could be incredible if it gets ported to PS VR or something. Hell, if I had the hardware I might buy the game a second time just to experience it like that.
Played an hour of NuShadow Warrior and it was good, want to play more. Played an hour of NuShadow Warrior 2 and it was good, want to play more. The games are very different. There’s not much gameplay continuity. But that’s fine for me! One problem was that they both didn’t look and feel right to me from the start… Then I realized it was the FOV and cranked it up. With SW2 especially I felt like there might be too much clutter on the screen for me but that ended up not being it at all.
I played Paladins and want my money back on Overwatch. I never really got into that. Put less than 10 hours into it when I expected to play it regularly for months on end… Whelp. Paladins is the shiznit though. Must play more and then write up a little more.
Played GTA5 for the first time and liked it a lot. But I either have a memory leak kind of bug or I need way more RAM… Stuttering all over the place. So won’t be playing that again until I upgrade, perhaps next month.
Civ 6. Hell yeah.
Blood Omen 2 is absolute garbage but you absolutely must play it because it stretches the pre-dmc action genre in ways that were never looked at before or since
Never played before, but I booted up this bad boy: MAX PAYNE
It’s really interesting. I played Max Payne 3 before, but that really just felt like 201X third person with a twist, fun as hell. But looking back it really lacked so much of the personality that went into this one. It’s such an over the top noir blast. I mean as long as you don’t look at anyone’s face, the game holds up really well, and doesn’t even look too bad most of the time.
I did have to find a couple of patches, one for audio, one for wide screen (apparently there’s a site dedicated to just widescreen mods of old games, and that old PS2 Punisher game was on the PC? I need to look that up)
I’m like a third of the way through. Glad I knuckled down and just booted this up.
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Yeah the kitschy over the top hard boiled hysteria of max payne 1 and 2 is so much more nourishing than the banality of 3
I mean it’s a grimy girtty city where you get painkillers not health packs in the days when detailed textures were not a thing.
If any game earned it’s ugly, it’s the Payne.
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It’s Payne! Yeah this game is just great. MP3 is still my favorite game of the series but the first will always be special to me