/games/ - Video Games

I beat the legend of Grimrock. A slow burn dungeon crawler. Defnitely has to be played on the highest difficulty or you'd fall asleep.
On this difficulty it was really good though. Many traps were rather terrifying or seemed impossible without previously finding hidden equipment. One time you are dropped in the center of a room full of mushroom monsters and the only reason I made it out is using up all the lightning rod charges (of which there's only 2 in the whole game).
Some of the riddles stumped me, but many puzzles are optional so I definitely skipped a few bonus areas. The last boss is funny, as it's just a cube rolling around the grid. A silly conclusion to the grid-based combat system. I'll play the second one eventually, but I've read from some fans of the first that it lacked the feeling of escalation.

>Ape Escape: On the Loose
It's a remake of the original PS1 game. The game is fine but not made for on my age. In some parts you may miss a second analog and that's the programmers fault of not making it properly ported. I'm not a gamer so i found the game kinda long, but one might not find a problem on it.
I'd give it a 6.5/10. Though it's very nostalgic, I could have spend my time with some other game.

>>58064
dungeon crawlers make me wish for game that is just a massive labyrinth filled with traps and secrets, similar to deathtrap dungeon/minecraft but without monsters. exploring the mines of moria in lotro is closest thing to ultima underworld and arx fatalis, by exploring I meant getting lost down there.. moria is just massive :/

>Beatdown: Fist of Vengeance
Messy, jankey, intentionally and unintentionally hilarious. This game has RPG, beat 'em up, and fighting game elements in it and while it doesn't really excel at any of them, it's competent enough to keep you amused. The story is nonsense, side missions are kind of repetitive and bullying and threatening NPCs into being your allies is fun and very funny. I'm giving it a 7 or 8/10. Don't know if it deserves a score that high but i had fun with it.

>Ico
Nice to knock out a section every day or two when your in the mood. The puzzles aren't very hard. I'm dumb as shit and i only had to look at a play through once and it wasn't because i couldn't crack the puzzle, it was because i couldn't get the timing down on that pump/jump thing (if you've played the game you know what i'm talking about). A lot of people might find the camera annoying but i didn't really have a problem with it. If anything i think it contributes to the game being too easy. It almost functions like a big arrow pointing at where you need to go or smack. The atmosphere of the game is obviously the biggest selling point and why it was so praised when it came out but other than that, the game is kind of empty and there isn't a lot of reason to replay it. It's the kind of game you replay every few years when the details have started to get foggy in your head i think. I had fun but i'm just not as into it as a lot of other people i guess. Also the animation of Ico yanking the fuck out of Yorda's arm makes me chuckle every time.
6 or 7/10. Can't really decide.

>Rayman: Revolution
Baby game i had an urge to replay. A decent platformer with a few irritating, bullshitty parts that you can eventually get past with repetition. Most of the boss fights are also pretty forgettable. Apparently the dreamcast version is the best to play and i have to admit the PS2 version dose feel a little unnecessarily bloated with its hub world. Despite this it really doesn't take that long to 100% the game if you want to. I'd have to play the dreamcast or replay the N64 version to really do a comparison but i can't be bothered tbh. Also shocked at how bad and compressed the audio in this game can get.
6.5/10

Finished, other than the art, it was alright. Puzzles weren't too easy nor too difficult, they give you a hint book that literally tells you what to do if you get stuck, but at the point you might as well watch a walkthrough. Gameplay is, well, a point and click game. I thought the humor was on point and the music was nice.

Finished one of the best crpgs I've ever played. I say best because it's definitely one of the most unique experiences I've ever had in the genre. The guys behind this really went their own way, for better and for worse. The result is a bit clunky but with a lot of heart. If you like RPGs at all I urge you to play this. Don't read anything about it, go in blind and figure everything for yourself, it's not a difficult game at all and you can reach an ending in a day or two. It's a great experience. A lot of it is the writing. Both the setting and dialogues are very well written and it has a bunch of ideas put together in a way I've never seen before. It's a game with grit. Really is dark fantasy done right. Graphics are old school and it works perfectly for this particular title. Not shiny and too polished, giving this universe a fitting look and atmosphere. The music is beautiful, or should I say it's ambient noises and tunes are quite something and tie this whole thing together.

The only thing that I think people would dislike about this is how harsh it is and not in a good way sometimes. It's really fucking punishing. It doesn't feel unfair, it just feel really damn harsh. So save often. Read everything the game throws at you, that's where the magic of The Age of Decadence happens. I had to start over a couple of times before I realized how to properly play this but it was quite worth it figuring things out by myself. A short but fascinating experience.

Supposedly the last good Tomb Raider.
A shame really because it's a great game, the new mechanics like rope swinging and first person shooting are welcome, also being able to go around corners while hanging is nice.
I like the new huge levels and I love that the game is more focused on puzzles and platforming than on combat (that was a problem I had with TR2 and to some extent with TR3).
It's really a shame that they couldn't keep moving in this direction with subsequent games in the series.

>>58481
>>58481
>Ico
>there isn't a lot of reason to replay it
Quotes like that makes me remember that We, as human being, are really different from each other.
I beat ico almost 6 times, i really think the ending is the main reason that hooks me to this game until this day.

The feeling of mystery makes me want to keep searching for something i'm not sure what about really is.
The beach, the peace of mind, the symbolysm on it.

All of that makes me praise and feel comfy about it.

>>58536
Honestly, I'm kind of a jaded faggot so pay me no mind. I probably would have gotten more out of it if i had played it in my teens. I will replay it at some point though.

>>58536
>>58538
Video games are kinda sad like that, as once you tend to get jaded and cynical exploration doesn't intrigue you because you know it's a video game, it has limits, and can only ever include stuff the devs thought include. I remember exploring pikmin as a kid and feeling genuine fear and excitement going into caves cause the stakes felt real. But as an adult I don't care if I lose my pikmin they're just game pieces, and caves don't scare me cause they are limited and can be solved.

Mass Effect

cool game. my brother played it on xbox when we were younger. i thought it was just a weird star trek movie-game type of thing and was too autistic to enjoy games with 'story' so i never tried it out

really wish i had played it when i was younger.

>>58491
I played the demo for this game (which is quite generous being like 3 hours long) and I appreciate what the game is trying to do but I just didn't like it. Having tons of choices in every single conversation is kind of cool but because it's mostly text based it almost feels like a choose your own adventure book at times, it kind of takes the 'oompf' out of making choices when it's all just dialogue boxes and static images.
Also paradoxically enough, I felt that because the game gives you so many choices at every turn it almost feels meaningless, but maybe that sounds retarded.

>Disco Elysium
A masterpiece
Basically all you do is run around and talk to people, but the writing is probably the best I've ever seen in my 30 years of gaming
Truly, more of a piece of art than a game

>>58591
i bought it
i felt like playing it at one point
but everything around the game, its "dirtbag left" fans, the politics, the pretentiousness, even the portraits..
it totally killed my interest.

>>58591
Every time I see a screenshot of this game I can never tell what the fuck is happening.

>>58591
Yeah the game is absolutely amazing, haven't played the complete version though (different voiceacting,more quests etc.)

>>58597
This is one of the more iconic screenshots
It happens at the very start of the game
You are living in a hostel and the owner asks you to pay
You can choose to run away
This is what happens if you fail the dice roll
You try to run away but end up crashing on some poor old lady in a wheelchair
>>58596
>dirtbag left fans
If anything this game is a critique on communism, but like I said it's more of an art piece than a game and art tastes are totally subjective

>>58596
>even the portraits..
i fucking hate the weirdly disfigured artsy style where nose, ears, etc are inflamed and red. remind me of succubi artists on deviantart back in the day. sorry. took one look at the guy in bottom left of pic and got flashbacks to a horrible time of the internet

Finally finished Zelda: OOT.

About 20 years ago, not long after I got it, I had to box up my shit as I was transient/working for a long time. Within the past couple years, not only did I finally find a cheap place to live and finally settle a bit, I was able to recover and find boxes of my old stuff. Unfortunately, a lot got lost or probably stolen (a copy of "The Misadventures of Tron Bonne" which I see is worth nearly $1k or $2k now, which really eats me up), but fortunately I was able to recover a lot of games from my childhood that I never got to play due to shitty circumstances.

Even then though, I still wasn't able to play my old N64 games because it just wouldn't run anymore. But one day a couple months ago I just went at it with isopropyl for a long time out of desperation and…I guess I got lucky and got it working again. For the past couple weeks I've been playing Zelda: OOT.

It's such a bittersweet feeling because on the one hand I have these overwhelming sense of, "Shit, can I play videogames again finally? Is life really stable enough for me to be able to enjoy it a bit again?" combined with, "…this really would've had a lot stronger impact on me 20 years ago."/"This is kind of a slog as an older wiz."

I remember when I last played, I stopped after losing against the Bongo boss. Strangely, I don't remember having that difficult of a time in the water temple. Now in replaying the entire, I can see what happened: I beat water temple out of brute fucking force and spent FOREVER on it. By the time I got to the Bongo boss, I was so completely exhausted that I probably gave up. This time I was able to slowly stick to it.

Seeing this ending screen really hits me in a strange way. At first I was sad because I took it to me, "Alright, you spent 20 years waiting to play this again, and now it's done." Instead, now I find myself taking the ending that "Link returns to be a kid again" to a metaphorical meaning about my own life at the moment. Like it's the game telling me, "Hey, we've taken you back so you can be a kid again now and catch up on all that time you missed," and I find myself looking at the rest of the games I had in my old chest.

Finished the last psx Tomb Raider, Chronicles.

Now I wouldn't say this game sucks like a lot of people, but it certainly is the worst of the original 5, by far. First of all it's really short, I've heard the game is something they made with leftover levels and it shows, levels are dull and uninspired. I has some weird stealth sections thrown in that are plain awful, I hate stealth when it's done halfassedly and oh boy this is a prime example of that.
The game is also riddled with bugs that can ruin your playthrough and softlock you, I gave up after a while and just used a guide because there is a lot of shit that is really hard to figure out, or times when stuff just didn't work as expected and you're left to wonder aimlessly like a retard.
The gameplay is thankfully still the same, and there is some nice platforming, although it's not very inspired, there are secrets to find that for some reason they decided to replace with golden roses, I prefer when secrets are actually useful shit like ammo and health.
My favorite part was the one on which you play as teen Lara, not because the level was amazing but because of the atmosphere and the cheesy demon dude.
I'd rather think of this game as a bonus, o b-sides of the first 4 games, and when you see it that way it's not so bad. I don't know of they charged full price for this at launch, but if they did, and they charged the same for this as 3 or 4 them I guess why do many people hate it

>>58637
Forgot pic, not that it matters

Finished Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth, the last effort by konami to make a classic style castlevania.
It is also a remake of the first game boy castlevania, now, I haven't played that game for more than 5 minutes so I can't attest to how faithful it is, but judging it as its own thing it's a great game, the music is all there, I mean it's the classic songs for the most part, but I won't complain because I love them. The levels are the usual castlevania fare (clock tower, dungeons, outside of the castle, caves, etc.) and the bosses are some of the usual suspects (giant bat, death, drac, some succubus) and a few not so common like hyde, some slime thing, a giant golem (my favorite), bosses feel simplistic to be honest, save for the last 2 fights (death and drac of course) which were pretty cool.
The game is difficult (or maybe I'm just really bad), the last boss had three phases and it took me a good two hours of retries to win, luckily the game has infinite retries, and this was on normal, I don't wanna imagine on hard difficulty.
I'd recommend this game if you're into classic castlevania, they did a really good job, sadly they stopped after this one, for some reason, and didn't remake the other game boy games.

Just played Beyond Good and Evil. I remember this game being a usual suspect on "best games of all time lists" made during the late 2000s, but I almost never see it brought up anymore.

I put off playing it for a long time because one of the things I always hear about it is the story being unfinished like HL2, but I found the ending pretty satisfying. Starting to feel like that's just a thing people say when the answers to every question they have aren't directly spelt out to them.

Game's atmosphere/art direction are some of my favorites ever. Story is fine too, you see where it's going within the first hour or so but it's still fun watching it play out. The whole photo journalist exposing a conspiracy thing is just really cool, there's one part in particular where to access a restricted area for a mission you have to play the racing minigame and go off the track during the race and I just found that really clever. The racing minigame exists on its own and isn't just there for that story mission and I can't think of another game doing something like that off the top of my head.

My favorite part though has got to be the banter/cooperation between Jade(the protagonist) and Peyj(her ai controlled pig companion). I don't know, I normally hate that kind of thing but it just felt so organic and natural to me, and it never felt like he was in my way or not doing the thing I wanted.

If I had one complaint, a few of the stealth sections are just frustratingly bad. The guards have infinite line of sight and act in extremely unpredictable ways. Most of them have clear solutions but if you deviate or you're playing one of the few that don't it can start to feel like pure luck.

>>58655
This is something i missed and have wanted to play for a while as well. The only thing i really know about it is that it was made by the rayman guy.

Finished Crash Bandicoot for playstation.
It's pretty good, kinda weird, a 3d platformer that's basically a 2D platformer in structure and level design, different from stuff that would become yhe standard, like Mario 64. If I had a complain about this game is that the way the camera is placed in some level it makes it difficult to tell the distance to some pits or enemies, also that it is too short, although I thought it was pretty difficult for a game made for kids

>>58669
I only found getting 100% the first time as a challenge, same thing with Crash 2, that one was way tougher. The time trials are what screw me up in the other games.

Finally beat Glover, a game I got from Blockbuster as a kid. I'm very glad to be over with this game. Not that I didn't like it, but because I like finishing old games. I didn't like the carnival world and the fact some levels had hidden walls with no indication. I used a guide in those cases, and everything turned out fine. Save states made the game way more fun to play as well. I wouldn't have bothered with this game on the original system originally if I had known you had to beat the Frogger bonus level for 100%. Also, it's good to not waste time with falling off the edges and other things that waste your time, like the other minigames. I wouldn't play this game without them.

I like the final scene where the wizard blasts the evil glove with Glover. It makes me think that the power I, and the evil glove had were drops in an ocean compared to the wizard's power.

So glad to be done with this game.

>>58669
one of the few good naughty dog games tbh

Finished 2 in the past couple of day

First was Mega Man x4, not the first I started but the first I finished. I liked the first 3 mega man x games, but I wasn't sure about the generation change, you know, how they started putting more dialogue and video into them, luckily they kept that to a minimum. I loved this game, the bosses are all varied and fun, the stages are pretty diverse and don't get old, music is great as per usual in these games, difficulty is just right for me, but some people seem to think it's too easy, and it probably is the easiest of the first 4, except the final boss who took me a couple of hours to beat.

Other game was Evil Within, it's a competently made third person shooter, the game was marketed as a sort of successor of Resident Evil 4, and at times it does sort of feels that way, like a very cheap, walmart version of RE4. However, the plot and imagery seem more like something out of a cheap silent hill knockoff.
My main problem with this game is the lack of enemy variety (it's all juts zombies). Also the scenarios are alright, but from the get go you know what is going on, and I like a bit of mystery in my horror games. The first chapters take place in a resident evil 4-style village, and it kinda feels disconnected from the rest of the game, it occurred to me they made it so the trailer looks like that game, but I want to believe there's a better reason. The second to last level is a generic sewer level you'd expect halfway through the same, the level prior to that one feels way more like a final level, just weird decisions all around.
There's no survival aspect to this game, you get so much ammo you can just blast enemies with the shotgun, rifle or crossbow as you wish. It implements a "stealth" system, but it's stealth as it's used in modern games, the "crouch up to en enemy and push a button to kill them" stealth formula, pretty lazy and unimaginative.
I really disliked the final boss, I saved my magnum ammo for a last fight, and instead what I got was a bombastic sequence with QTEs and turret shooting, so I didn't fire a single mangum round in the entire game, I fucking hate that kind of shit, let me use the weapons I upgraded to take down the boss. All the bosses are generic looking meat creatures with tentacles, only the guy with a safe for head feels somewhat original, if we don't think about it being a pyramid head rip off.
The reason I started this game before MMX4 and finished it after is because it's fucking long (for a game of this type, of course), game is over 20 hours long and honestly it drags for a while, shouldn't be longer than 15, so I had to play something else because I was getting sick.

Anyway, play mega man x 4

>>58838
Finished Mega Man X5 now, twice actually because the first time I unknowingly played it on normal. Didn't actually feel a difference on the difficulty except for 3 things, first is enemies don't drop health pickups on hard, second is an attack on the last boss that hits way to hard and it's really tough to avoid and third there are way more enemies in some places.
Other than that, the game although good felt like a step down from X4, level design is more boring, for some reason they added hints that popup any time and are really annoying, there's a pseudo time limit that doesn't let you go in and out of stages any time you want, like in previous games. There's even more curscenes than in previous games, still not a lot by modern standards. I thought a couple of bosses were really annoying because all they did was try to push me into stage hazards that would instantly kill me, I hate that shit. Other bosses were pretty balanced and didn't turn trivial when I figured their weakness out, which I appreciate.
I'd say it's harder than 4, and did one or two things better, but 4 is still a better game.

Ok so this was a big step down from the previous game.
Not only the levels are unimaginative, the are linear as fuck, the difficulty in this game consist in filling the levels with enemies so you end up dying due to the constant damage, sometimes it works, most times you can just boost your way through the level crashing into everything and finish the level. By work I mean sometimes they're hard, they're never really good, and never really fun.
Bosses range from easy as fuck to annoying bullshit, some just float there and spam projectiles, most are pretty cheeseable, one particular boss near the end completely depends of rng, he basically can be hurt only during certain attack and he can spend quite a few minutes not doing the attack.
There is this "nightmare" system that I don't really get, there are these humanoid things floating in every level (and I mean fucking everywhere) that chase you and hurt you, when you kill them they drop some orbs, which I guess serve as experience, but it only serves as an excuse to send you grinding, maybe there weren't that many of those fucks in normal mode, but who knows. Having the same kind of enemy everywhere gets really old, and they come in big groups sometimes, I don't really get what they were going for.
The sigma fight in this game is probably the easiest in any mega man X, but the boss before way pretty tough in my opinion.
I don't know, I wouldn't say it's bad, but mediocre as fuck, the game was rushed and it shows, the music and pixel art is still great, so there's that.
There are patches for x5 and x6 that supposedly solve a lot of issues, I'll have to try those, but I wanted to get the full experience the first time.
Now on to x7, which is supposedly an irredeemable piece of crap, but I guess we'll see.

Alright, so yeah, I beat it. It's bad, don't play it.
Forced 3d ruins this game, some of the 2d stages are actually ok, but god damn it when it goes 3d it's awful, clunky controls, buster auto aim, terrible camera. Boss fights are tedious, they have way too much health and take forever to go down, even with their supposed weaknesses, for some bosses all the weakness does is stun them for a while, they also hit really hard, I think this is a way to mitigate how easy most of the patterns are to learn, because they end up being easy, just long fights, ironically the one boss where the weapons hit really hard is the last one, who has 2 bars and you can shave a quarter of one with a single attack, it's ridiculous.
Another thing to note is the awful voice acting, this was a constant in all mega man x games since 4 but it reaches an all time low on this game, I ended up fighting a lot of the bosses on mute, one of them stands up as probably the worst fight in the series, both mechanically and in the voice regard, I'll leave a clip in case you want to torture yourself, this isn't edited.

Anyway, 8 is supposed to be a return to form and a good game, I hope it is.

>Sonic Frontiers

I had pretty low expectations for this, when the initial trailer dropped I thought it looked stupid but watching it on a stream shortly after release it looked kind of fun so I gave it a shot. It was a decent game overall but it has the same problem many open world games do for me where it wears out its welcome and feels like pointless padding past the halfway mark. Areas after the first two are marred by forced 2D segments which is retarded for an open world game, the "puzzles" are all stupidly easy, and the upgrade system has way too many levels for each stat increase to feel meaningful (plus the rings capacity upgrade is basically a downgrade since you get max boost speed when you have full rings). Moving around the world is pretty fun though and the boss fights are nice spectacles. I hope they focus less on aping BOTW if they end up making another game in this style.

>Sonic Generations

Never finished this years ago for some reason so I went back to it. It was great besides the final boss which was lame and easy. The various challenges are also fun enough for me to go back and finish them in small chunks.

>Sonic Adventure DX

I had somehow never played this before despite having a Gamecube back in the day and playing Sonic Adventure 2. It had some jank but was pretty fun, the different character stories are pretty well paced as Sonic has the most and longest stages while other characters have fewer and shorter stages with various gimmicks. A lot of the voice acting and animations were bad but in a good funny way. And Gamma's story which was kind of separate from the main plot was actually really well-done and quite touching.

>>58936
Ok I'm done
Took me a while, it got difficult at times, especially the final boss.
It's a really good game to be honest, a return to form and whatnot, I liked most of the levels (except a couple of autoscrollers which I hated), graphics are fine but I wish they were sprites and not 3d models, music is always good with these games. The gameplay feels way smoother and fun than 7, way more fast paced too.
It's a shame they didn't continue the series because this game was definitely a step in the right direction.

It's an agitating game that I would not recommend purchasing in its current state performance-wise, it does a lot of things worse than previous installments and it repeats a lot of the same mistakes of those as well, but I still had a lot of fun with it. One of the largest positives (for me) is the accessibility of hold items. Instead of only being scattered randomly across the map and/or locked behind the battle tower, you slowly unlock more to purchase at one of the store chains as you earn more gym badges.
Of course, it's as childish as any other Pokemon game, but there was a surprising amount of character development. It feels like many of the supporting roles received much more screentime. There are tons of little cutscenes involving not only the people from the three main questlines, but also the faculty of the academy through classroom studies (which remind me of the schools in early towns of past games, but executed better because it's treated as a hub and covers more of the mechanics). I especially liked the endgame story with the expedition into the crater to finally meet the professor (and the subtext from it that I hope hints at some interesting developments in the DLC).
Hoping that fate will deal me more soloable 6-star raid combos in the coming days so that I can develop my raiding Pokemon more quickly to cover all the boss/tera gaps that I currently face. Another update (or hack) that would be greatly appreciated is making the game truly open-world by having it scale with you in some intuitive way.

>>58910
I sometimes get this perfectionist urge while playing, and not being able to save the people in the stages combined with the ranking system just made me quit.
>>58936
Can you go into a bit more detail about the 3d? I remember before that game came out I wanted to play it because I heard about that. What made it so bad exactly? I mean, is it like Resident Evil tank controls?

>>58966
>Can you go into a bit more detail about the 3d? I remember before that game came out I wanted to play it because I heard about that. What made it so bad exactly? I mean, is it like Resident Evil tank controls?
No, no tank controls, but it feels bad, it's slow and clunky, like early 3d playstation games, but 6 or 7 years later. It's hard to describe but if you play it you'll notice right away, also the auto-aim system works like ass, it rarely points where you need it too. And to top it off, the levels are just plain and boring, just long empty corridors with some enemies, it's boring as shit. Mega Man Legends came out before and plays better.

>>58968
Bro MML STILL plays better than most modern games.

>>58969
Sure, my point was, there was a good template for 3D mega man, why didn't they use it?

Beat Mega Man 9, it was fun after all the Mega Man X, like a breath of fresh air. The game tries to emulate the look of the NES games despite being released in 2008, but you can tell at times it's a modern game.
Still really good, and quite hard, had to use items near the end because I would've never beaten it otherwise.
Anyway here's some credits art which I thought was cute.

>>58980
I appreciate all your posts, I love mega man. You're gonna play 10 now? Planning to get into the Zero series?

>>58981
Yeah I'll probably play 10 and 11 next.
Regarding Zero I did play the first game years ago but couldn't really get into it, maybe I'll give it another go when I'm done with these two

>>58982
Zero 1 is honestly tough for anyone not familiar with his series and the smaller screen size thoroughly changes the core gameplay. Dashes are used as dodges instead of traversing the levels since you won't be able to react in time (unless you already know the level layout and enemies). Also the ranks are a pain, but I love Zero. I hope you'll try it again.

>>58980
Alright so I finished 10 now, pretty similar, pretty good. Maybe a bit harder? The levels, not so much the bosses, the final Wily fight is a joke though, maybe I'll take a break before 11 now, I don't wanna get burnt out.
>>58991
Yeah I think my main problem with it is the same I have with most Game Boy games, and it's that sprites are comparatively too big, of course this is because of hardware limitations but on an emulator it shows. But I will give it another try, it's not like I hated it back then, I just kinda lost interest.

>WD2
Good story. It's sad that the game tells exactly what's happening in the real world, but the difference is that there is no happy ending. The technocrats rule our lives with their technological means and there is nothing we can do about it

>Halo: CE
Really liked. It gives me thrills to play the other games.

>FF
Worst shit I've ever played. Can't explore the map and the dungeons because there is so many enemies. Can't walk for 3 seconds without engaging in a battle unwilling. It was the first time playing any FF and I'll never play any in the series again.

Finished this game on Saturday and forgot to post about it, since its still fresh in my memory it was fairly decent
I played it on my PS5 since it's free to download in some PS+ collection
For a zombie survival shooter looter motorcycle riding "open world" sim, it was pretty good
My only complaints are that the story went on for too long AND that the weapon selection sucked ass
When it comes to the plot it feels like the game should end but then another plot happens, this keeps on repeating and at a certain point you start losing interest, fighting Zombie hordes and clearing zombie infested areas was fun at first but then you have to go gather and forage supplies to do it multiple times just for some fucking bike decal was so off putting
When it came to the weapon selection they had this stupid system where you'd find/purchase guns of better quality BUT then you'd own like 4 versions of the same gun, in different qualities, instead of just improving the quality of a gun you already owned, this is what pissed me off the most since I have no clue how anyone playtested that and was like "feels good to me", the whole point of getting a gun and having characters tell you that you can improve it but then not including that was so mind boggling bad

Overall its a game that I'll most likely replay in the future, maybe on a harder difficulty, I recommend checking it out if its on sale, the ONLY thing I recommend you do before getting deep in the main story is doing the optional challenge mode first, it lets you practice and you apparently earn rewards that help you in the main game (wish I knew that before unlocking the final area of the map)

>>59070
I actually hate a lot about Combat Evolved. Feels like half of most levels are mirrors since you just walk back through them. Besides the Breaking Benjamin gondola, I liked 2 a lot more. 3 had some pretty crazy parts too. I will say that Halo in general has nice bots. Wish you could play BTB with them.

>>59070

The newer FF games don't have random encounters. I think they did away with them starting with XIII.

>>59076
Are you a Final Fantasy fan. Are you guys okay with that random and annoying encounters? I had such big expectations since it's one the most famous game franchises.

>>59077
pokemon has it as well. it was a defining feature of jrpgs back in the day

>>59077
I actually prefer random encounters to having the enemies in the map, because sometimes I wanna grind for something and instead of resetting the map I can just walk in circles and get all the encounters I need

>>59081
I also like random encounters.

>>59077
Do not play the first Dragon Quest games lol, you can get a random encounter after taking a single step following a battle or entering/exiting a location.

>>59083
I'll make sure not playing this one. I'm actually a newbie in games. Had no idea JRPGs were like that.

>>59086
yeah im in the same boat, though i've tried. it sucks because those games have story, characters, a world to explore, but i simply cant handle the random encounter bullshit. it's a shame

>>59086
You can try more recent JRPGs who usually don't have random encounters.
You can also try Bravely default where you can change the encounter rate at any time on the fly, all the way down to 0% if you want.

>>59087
Why not just Gameshark it up then?

>>59086
>>59087
Check out Lufia 2 maybe, or Earthbound.

>>59094
It sounds like they're straight up uninterested in the combat system. Which if that's the case, then you might as well just cheat and skip the combat entirely.

>>59083
I beat dragon quest 1 and 2 like last year or so and they're a lot more fun than modern jrpgs though. Frustration beats boredom.

I finished Donkey Kong Country Returns
It's a modern reimagining of dkc I guess? You can tell they designed it to be played at a faster pace than the original SNES games. Graphics and music are great, my only issue with it is the stupid motion controls, you need to shake the controller to roll, and you roll a lot, along with other actions which also require you to shake. I don't know what they were thinking, I know they pretty much forced developers to have motion controls back in the wii days. Thankfully in an emulator you can just map the shake motion to a button, so it plays like a regular platformer, and it's pretty good, I don't know if I would've been able to play it otherwise. I've heard the 3ds version replaced the motion with a button too, so maybe play that one if you don't like emulators.
One thing I felt this game was missing were water levels, I know people hate them but in the old games some of them were good, and they're completely gone from this game.
There's also not a lot of animals to ride, just the rhino iirc, I don't remember if the first DKC had other animals, but I remember the others having spiders, parrots, snakes, and of course swordfishes, but since there aren't any water levels you can't have those I guess.

So I't a good game, there was some stuff missing, and it is a bit on the easy side, although I lost a lot of lives in the last few levels, but as something that came out out of nowhere in a series everyone thought was dead, it's very welcomed.

Supposedly Tropical Freeze is a better and more complete game (now with water levels), I tried it for 5 minutes and it controls like a normal game, no motion crap thankfully, so maybe I'll play that next.

>>59213
I remember watching stream_wiz play this. Very entertaining game to watch played out.

I played and finished Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, my first visual novel type game; a battle royale with a bunch of students trapped in a school. I thought it was pretty good, enjoyed it a lot. I've basically never played around with the mystery or detective genre so it was all new to me, lots of twists and turns - someone more experienced could probably guess but I couldn't, made it pretty exciting. The characters and dialogue were fun, good character interactions and one liners helped by good VAs, though I don't love the character designs themselves - I looked up some beta concept art before they decided to make the game less dark and I vastly preferred the original designs, apparently they reworked the art style to be more cutesy and palpable because they didn't think it would sell which pissed me off, it's lame to hear someone's vision getting diluted by corporate faggotry, it was also meant to have a trust / distrust system which would change who dies and send you down alternate paths, instead this game is very linear and only has one alternate ending. I don't want to discredit the final product because I enjoyed it a lot regardless but this always happens with things I like, I can't help but focus on what could've been, seems like wasted potential for a more mature, more complex game, but maybe that's just a me issue; the released version still feels very bleak and hopeless (in addition to being cool and flashy) and this works well with the dark humour - maybe a darker edgier setting would've been too dull and the branching paths superfluous. The various reveals throughout each chapter do enough to keep the atmosphere sufficiently bleak so I think it still nails the themes it was going for.

The gameplay loop is good enough, before each murder you basically play a dating sim and learn about the characters, in the investigation stage you find clues (though it tells you where to look) and during the trial you dissect the evidence through a series of minigames and conversations to learn the truth - the rhythm one being my favourite, helped by the banger soundtrack. It's not a difficult game even on the hardest settings but it's fun trying to work things out and it helps the writing is fairly clever, though more agency to make mistakes and more meaning to who I choose to befriend would've been welcome - I initially thought I could miss clues and accuse the wrong people, you can't, the game will set you back on the right track regardless. I didn't know what to expect so I wasn't disappointed, the story is still engaging and the characters still fun, so eh, just as a replayable "game" there's little room for player expression, but then it is a visual novel, and a pretty good one at that. It's a story I was engaged in from start to finish, I got attached to the characters, and each chapter was exciting - and this is coming from a game I had no prior knowledge of and decided to play on a whim, so a win-win, really I should be giving it more praise.

I'd probably give it a 7/10 - I'd recommend it if you want a dialogue heavy game that'll make you think and feel a bit that doesn't take itself too seriously (though maybe it'd be better if it did). If you enjoy battle royale situations or movies like Cube you'll probably like it. Oh, I also played the anniversary edition through xbox game pass but it's being removed in a couple of days so just a heads up.

>>59214
Sorry for deleting my post, wanted to add more.

i finished the rocket league tutorial
its a fun game its free and comfy

>>58635
So you're still playing more stuff from your old boxes? Your post almost makes me want to play video games again, it's been some time now I'm in one of my "Games are fucking shit" phase for the milionth time now, but your post makes me remember that games can mean something on a deeper level.

>>59215
it gets worse with every entry in the series. Rather amazed you didn't find the characters shit

I done beat GoldenEye 64 emulated with mouse aiming. It was alright. Definitely easier than aiming with an analogue control stick but what game isn't?? I am replaying now with cheat options set to maximize damage taken and beef up enemy reaction time, and I just use the revolver. Makes me feel badass, wish i could run around killing people like bond IRL

done with all the characters in Saga Frontier. Anyone else likes Saga? I'm glad I did not give up on Romancing Saga 2, it might not be the best entry to get started with the series…

>>59246
That game makes me feel dumb. I am so used to grinding levels that I do not understand how to beat that game. Also, LP are permanently lost, which adds another level of complexity that I do not understand.

I am too smol brain for Saga Frontier.

>>59262
You can swap a character low on LP for another one if this is a problem in a dungeon. Have you played Romancing SaGa 2 or 3? They were a lot more punishing, a character was lost forever if their LP got to zero, although they could be recovered a lot more easily in the latter. This is also the case in Frontier, I don't really understand what you mean by "permanently lost"?

It might click eventually if you keep playing. What character did you pick and how far did you go?

>>59263
But I thought the LPs never recover. Yeah, you get through _that_ dungeon, but by the next dungeon, you're fucked, right?

Also, I do not understand how to NOT grind. I need to learn combos, but in order to do that, I need to grind. But if I grind, by the time I enter the next area, the enemies will be WAY over my level and I'll die super easy.

I've played Asellus, the robot, Lute, and that magician guy. They all end the same way. The first world I'm O.K., but by the second area, everything's overlevelled and I die.

>>59275
No you're not fucked. As I said LPs do recover, just fly to another region or stay at the inn if there's one. If you happen to be in a dungeon that you cannot exit and find your main party low on LP, MP and JP right before a boss battle, you can use a sanctuary stone.

Combos are only really necessary for one boss fight with one character, you will see when you get there. Besides that I never bothered much with finding new ones, I simply went with whatever was most convenient at any given moment…
Unlocking techniques and spells is a lot more important.
You do know you can flee most encounters, right? If enemies seem too dangerous just run away.

There's a lot of useful, concise info in the help menu if you haven't read it already.

By the way I am puzzled you made it through four characters' stories and haven't figured that out by experience regarding LP, or are still struggling with mobs. You should have no problem now…

>>59277
I played the first area/intro of four characters, and I didn't get into the second area very far.

I also warned you that I am smol brain.

For real though, why do all the monsters get so buffed when you travel? Like I said, after traveling past the first area, everything gets crazy powerful.

>>59280
As I said you can flee most encounters, so run away if the enemies look too intimidating, and grab whatever treasure and money you can find. There are characters almost anyone can recruit as soon as you're free to fly anywhere, like Cotton the monster (Lab in Shrike), Rouge (Devin or Luminous) Emilia in Baccarat, the folks sitting at the bar in Scrap and so on.
I recommend going to Kyo and buying Mind Heal even for the characters who are not magically inclined so they have a way to heal in combat.
Guns can be very good, they scale with concentration and you can dual wield them with the akimbo skill equipped, there are also a few skills you can learn with two swords equipped in your weapon slots.
Make sure you always have a free skill slot on your characters so they can learn sword, martial arts and dodge techniques (that satisfying lightbulb animation). You don't need to worry about this with guns though, gun skills are acquired at the end of battle, it might be easy to miss that you unlocked one if you mash buttons when a fight's over…

I finished Tales of Destiny
It was the first jrpg I ever played, almost 20 years ago, and one I started many times but for different reasons I couldn't beat, so this feels very nostalgic to me. The 90s anime art style, the beautiful pixel art and the great music, playing this was like going back to my childhood for a bit, but beating the game and seeing its flaws brought me back.
the game is far from perfect, even though I still love the music and art, the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired, I get that they tried to do something different than the general jrpgs, but the ai (both enemy and allied) is so braindead you can just spam the same attack and win all fights, even against the final boss. I never lost a fight (outside of a couple you're supposed to lose for plot reasons) and never even had to do come up with some sort of strategy or anything, the game is just too easy and the enemies too stupid, the only complication I ever had were some monsters that kept spamming spells, so I had to target those first to interrupt their attacks.
The plot is what you'd expect from every 90s rpg, ancient evil awakens, kid from bumfuck nowhere and a group of teenagers have to search for some macguffin and stop it, the final boss appears out of nowhere pretty much at the end of the game, and it's a generic giant meat monster, at times this game feels like it was written by an ai.
So yeah it's a decent game, carried mostly by its art and music, but nothing really to write home about, sorry kid me.

Posted in the wrong thread, reposting here

>>59301
You didn't want to play the Director's Cut version on the PS2 that was translated recently? maybe it's an improvement.

>>59303
Because of nostalgia mostly, but yeah, some people claim the remake has the best combat not only of these two but of the entire series. I might give it a try later.

>>59220
I decided to try out 2 and yeah it was more of the same except with a less believable scenario. I think I found the characters acceptable because it was novel for me (and my standards for amicable games are fairly low considering every other game nowadays makes me want to vomit) though I have no idea why there's such a large fandom - the characters are shit for the most part, but sometimes shit can be enjoyable, at least the first time around.

>Want to post in this thread
>I've been playing Morrowind, Fallout 2, and a small collection of games for the past twenty fucking years.
>Still haven't moved on from them.
…I like your guys' posts, but I think I'll never be able to participate.

>>59311
Yeah it's hard to avoid replaying old but good games over and over again. Seeing the same sights, hearing the same sounds. it's human nature to be drawn back to home.

Let us know when you finish a quest!

>>59311
it's ok wizzie, I somewhat envy people who can just keep playing a game, I always get bored of whatever I'm playing after a while and have to look for something new, sometimes I spend months before finding something I can enjoy

>>59311
>and a small collection of games
Which ones? I'm curious.

>>59316
There are a few games that I feel like I'm always able to play, or that keep getting "rehashed."

E.g., SimCity. SimCity became SC 2k, 3k, SC 4, City Skylines, etc.. But for me, I don't really see the difference, so I can keep playing SC, and I always feel willing to pick it up.

Civ2 is another one. Yeah, they're up to Civ6 or 7 or whatever, but I remembering playing Civ3 and even Civ4 and thinking, "I don't really see the difference." And always kept playing Civ2. I do the same whenever I see any other 4X game.

Harvest Moon. Yeah, there's Harvest Moon: Whatever and its million titles. Yeah, there's Stardew Valley. But again, I don't really see the difference, so I kept playing Harvest Moon.

Morrowind, like I mentioned, might be different. There's so many mods and the game is so broken in such a fun way that I can play it forever. Yeah, there's Skyrim or Oblivion or even Fallout 3–but all those Bethesda games are so similar that I'm fine just playing Morrowind more.

Zelda a Link to the Past is another one. The whole "find the item to progress to get the next item" theme, especially with the randomizer, fits that itch for me. So when I played Zelda OOT or Skyward Sword or cetera, I just kind of felt like, "I've already played this game," and just kept replaying SNES Zelda instead.

Any new Metroidvania game just makes me want to go back and play the SNES Metroid instead.

If I feel like a platformer, just basic-ass NES Mario is fine for me. If I play any other 2D platformer, I just end up thinking/feeling, "I've already played this game," and lose interest and play NES Mario for a while again instead.

When I see a grand strategy game like EU4 or HOI4 or Viccy, I end up thinking, "This feels a lot like RotTK4," and I just end up replaying that over and over again instead.

Minecraft fits the same theme I'm talking about here. Then again, Minecraft doesn't have an "ending".

Does this idea make sense? I guess the idea I'm getting at is that enough games seem so repurposed to me that I feel alright replaying the "older version" again and again than getting the "new" one. It feels like people trying to get the latest model of car if we lived in a world where cars didn't break down over time. Although for a small period I tried to "keep up," after a while, this devolved into where I'm just playing the same games over and over again. I'll see a new game and think, "Oh, it's just like X," and I'll go back and play X over again instead. Either that, or I already have in my head the "model" game for each major "genre," and replay that "model" again instead.

This is also probably why I like really open world or sim games. If you're playing the same games over and over again, those are the ones that allow the most freedom or experimentation to do whatever the hell you want.

There is a different category of games as well. Some games I end up replaying just…really weirdly, I guess? Like for example I'll sometimes "replay" my old save files of Earthbound or FF7, but I'll like ignore the story (because I already unlocked everything in the game) and end up making up my own? Now that I'm trying to explain and write this out, it's kind of like playing with dolls. I think that's how I get my "rpg" fix or whatever.

Thanks for listening to my TED talk.

Last night I finished Kings Field 4. Compared to the previous games the biggest improvement is the sound and music, and the curiosity of what you might see or hear next keeps you going. I played at a relaxed pace and completed the game (including the optional stuff) in 20 hours, so it's relatively short. I would recommend it

>>59318
that looks way better than the first one on ps1. thats all i played. how are the controls?

>>59318
I remember dying in the first 5 seconds of that game. Fell right into the lava pit at the beginning because I didn't see it. Made me laugh.

I've never been able to force myself to play it properly though. Maybe a few hours at most. It just feels too "slow" for me, and I do enjoy janky old games more than modern stuff so it's definitely not that. Grats on finishing it

>>59319
The controls are the same, but turning speed is slower than the previous games

>>59320
I can understand that. The opening hours of the game are among the most challenging as you have no weapons and no health, and thanks

Finished 2 games
>Tomb Raider Legend
I come from playing the playstation games, and this is nothing like those, of course graphics are better and thankfully it works great on modern computers. Gone are the tank controls and with them the precision platforming, the old games were unforgiving, a pixel off and you're dead, in this game Lara seems to have magnets in her hands and just jumping in the general direction of a ledge will have her grab it (sometimes you have to press an extra button!), there are cutscenes with QTEs, but not so many so I won't complain, it was a time when every game needed to have QTEs it seems, so I was prepared for them. Levels are way too linear, old games gave you a big level to explore and find secrets, exploration in this game is pretty much non existent, levels are just a straight path with some platforming. Platforming in this game feels way more similar to the ps2 Prince of Persia games, but I feel like those had way more interesting level design. The combat is not great, but it was never great for this series, and puzzles are your usual push the thing to the place and something will happen, not very creative, but whatever.
Overall I'd say it was ok, not great but competent and easy as fuck, sadly the original psx games will never be matched.

>Scratches
It was good, I never played Myst or Riven and whatnot so it was my first first person point and click graphic adventure game. It's also a horror game and honestly it's amazing how it creates this oppressive and unnerving atmosphere just using music and the graphics, even when you know nothing can happen to you because it's a fucking point and click game, of course. Unlike other games in this genre it uses panoramic 3d rendered images to give the illusion of 3d, being able to rotate the camera as if it was a first person shooter, and it works seamlessly, honestly this looks really good for a 2006 game. Like I said before the atmosphere in this game is better than most games I've ever played, it takes place in an old run-down manor and there's enough shit thrown around to make you feel like you're digging through some old person memories, I think what sells it is the amount of stuff that has nothing to do with the game's progression, it full of papers you can read, paintings, photos and just random stuff that paint a picture of the people who lived there, just for worldbuilding I guess. The music and sound design in general is amazing, it doesn't fit the mood, it creates the mood, some parts feel very nostalgic, others sad, and others plain unnerving, it's amazing how it can make you nervous while playing a glorified power point. The plot is good, of course there's a mystery in the house and you will unveil it in just the right pace, as you advance and find more documents that shed light on what's really going on, the problem with that is that the ending is lackluster, one of those endings that makes you say "that's it?". Progression in this game is kinda weird sometimes, you have a clock, but not in real time, it advances as do certain actions, some puzzles require you to solve them at a certain time, even if it's obvious what to do, also some of them you can't solve unless you read something or see a picture, which I guess it makes sense in the game's world, but it can be frustrating knowing what to do and not being able to do it because you didn't read a letter or made a phone call, or it's just not the right time.
Anyway, Scratches was pretty good, probably the best atmosphere of any horror game I've played, and in a point and click adventure nonetheless, supposedly there's a "spiritual sequel" in the making, but it has been like that for like ten years. This is a small Argentinian studio so it's understandable, so I'm not holding my breath waiting for a new game.

>>59386
So as an addendum to Scratches, I just finished "The Last Visit" an extra episode, I guess to make the ending of the original game a bit more clear, it really doesn't add much and it just confirms stuff you figure out by playing the original game, the whole thing was no longer than half an hour, fully voiced and with just a couple of really easy puzzles, seems a bit pointless to be honest. It ends with a fmv that's honestly kind of lame, but I guess it's a better ending than the original.

Finished Pikmin
It's fun a charming game and I feel dumb for not playing it before.

Beat the first 2 Wario Land games. First one was ok, it still close to a regular Mario game, in structures and power ups, it's still good.
The second game feels more fleshed out, it was unique mechanics and it's more of a puzzle-platformer than a regular mario game. It has plenty of hidden stuff and different routes, it's honestly pretty impressive for a game boy color game, really good. My only issue with it is the way it feels to move the character around, feels clunky, and it having a game boy screen to work with makes the sprites too big for my taste, it's understandable but annoying nonetheless.

Just finished Maptroid Worlds. It's one of those games that makes me feel in control, and I mean that in the most fundamental sense. Maptroid feels very compact and clean, its gaming concepts and visuals are stripped down to very fundamental levels. So here you are exploring this tiny "golf course galaxy", it's devoid of life and you're the only one there, exploring these little planets, collecting equipment and keycards so you can explore some more. You pick up disks along the way to read some very basic lore about the place. Music is really, really good. And then, about an hour later you explored everything. 100% done, little credits role, you're back to the title screen.

And that's it, really, a bite-size experience. It's very relieving in a way to experience Maptroid. Just you, a nice tune on the background and running around for ruined disks in thick forests, underwater and rocky deserts. It's not a nostalgic feeling exactly, but if you're kinda old by now and your infancy games were all 2D and much simpler than they're today, this might hit just right for you. I thinking about people that grew up with GB, GBC and Nes in particular.

I quite like this tune of it
>>59498

>>59499
that looks pretty nice, gonna give it a try

>Hogwarts Legacy
Really weird game and I can't tell whether I like it or if I'm disappointed. I think at best I can call it an average game with a lot of missed potential. It's largely carried by the "Hogwarts" aesthetic. My primary issue with the game is that it leans way way too much into the AssCreed formula of littering the map with the most dull collectables and busywork imaginable. Merlin Trials, Treasure Caves etc And the map frankly isn't that interesting outside of Hogwarts, which is very good. Combat is adequate and fun enough even if it's mostly Simon Says with colours for breaking shields. The story is decent enough. RPG elements are non-existent and the gear system is absolutely abhorrent. You will be finding and swapping out gear near constantly which renders to upgrade system largely useless as it quickly becomes redundant. It does have a large number of cosmetic items though if you're a fan of dress-up. The big deal made over the House you join is a smokescreen as it has no impact on the game whatsoever and the Common Room is pointless. The companions you get are also pointless and serve no purpose. You can't even have them follow you outside of specific quests.

Overall however, while it starts off engaging and very very slowly unlocks content, it quickly settles into a rather boring routine. If you aren't a fan of Harry Potter I can't see it hooking you for long. I'd give it a 6/10 and classify it as "decent" where 5 is "average" and 7 is "pretty good". If you're a big Harry Potter fan then it would be a 7.

>>59516
I 100%'d it. I'd say it's in a similar vein to the newer Assassin's Creed games. Not really worth a replay, but not necessarily bad.

I just finished my yearly replay of Banjo Kazooie.My run time wasn't to good this I finished it in 6 hours and 30 minutes. I almost got through the game deathless and then my controller screwed up and I died in the engine room damn.Still a great game. I plan replaying Banjo Tooie also.

>>59519
yeah those games are a lot of fun. havent played em in years tho. too many things i havent beaten even once.

>>59519
Heh, I do that too, but with Mystical Ninja Goemon, also for the n64. I play it like I'm a tourist in that world, taking several screenshots like a tourist would take pictures. I remember I posted all of them from one of my runs 2 or 3 years ago here.

>>59521
i remember you doing that, or at least the screenshots from the game getting posted here

neat

>>59519
>>59520
These were favourites when i was a kid and i haven't replayed them since but i notice that they seem to be one of those games people love to shit on and i have no idea if it's actually warranted.

This is a classic dungeon crawl game with the ‘you move they move’ type of system. It’s a basic one at that but it works. Along the way you’ll collect herbs, scrolls, staffs, food, weapons and building materials, but more of that later. Weapons come in a huge variety since you can combine their magical properties, the seals, using a special item called synthesis pot. The weapons you have are the most enduring aspect of your character since everything else you carry are consumables. Even your levels reset at the end of each run. That’s how it works in this game; there are 16 floors with one stop at the middle of the path. Once you enter the dungeon you can only return to the village with your stuff if you beat all the floors. You can choose to go back before that but you’ll lose your items by doing so. At the end of the run your level resets to 1 again, making your weapons particularly important and valuable.

There are over 160 types of monsters lurking the corridors and rooms of Shiren’s world and they really make the crawling varied and interesting. They go from your basic slime that in this game kinda looks like a cat, all the way up to magic users, demons and heavily armored spiders. They can also evolve and gain levels and even the slime can become pretty tough if you find them in their more powerful forms. The monsters are not the only thing you have to worry about while adventuring. Often you’ll find traps on the ground and here’s my only complaint about this game.

Traps are plentiful, interesting and some have very cool animations. The problem is you’ll have to step on them, even if you can clearly see where they are. This game happens in a grid and sometimes you’ll have a trap right inside a corridor with no way of walking around it. Shiren can’t jump tiles and the only way to deactivate traps is by destroying them, but you need a particular weapon for that, a mallet, and you only run into those very, very, very late into the game. To add salt to injury, they eventually break, so even mallets are not a permanent solution to this. Basically you’ll be walking right into traps that you can clearly see and that always makes me a little annoyed. The other problem I have with the traps game is how to detect them: you swing your sword in front of you and if there’s a trap there, it will show up. Sounds simple enough, but swinging your sword takes a move. That means the game gets twice as slow if you’re swinging your weapon after every step you take, making trap detection a very dull, time consuming chore. There are some spells that reveal the location of traps but I felt those spells are rare to come by. Best solution is to just walk right into them and take the damage. Only a few traps are truly dangerous so you’ll be able to deal with the damage 99% of the time.

To help you on your quest you’ll find companions along the way and they add some interest to the gameplay, but their main function in the game, I believe, is how they’re involved in the story. You’ll find a total of 5 buddies to join you as you progress to the game. Some of them have their own special abilities, some are pretty much like you and you can even give them equipment. The only really useful one in my opinion is the walking drawer that can help you with carrying items. This is a major aspect of Shiren 2: what to carry and what to leave behind. To talk about your inventory I have to explain to you the plot a little bit.

So you’re Shiren, a type of wanderer warrior that goes around helping people. One day you and your friend Koppa, a talking weasel, end up in a village at the foot of a mountain. You go in for a nice bowl of udon and while you’re enjoying your meal demons attack. Apparently this is going on for a while and after a little bit of talking to the local prophetess and the mayor, Shiren receives the task of building a castle to protect the villagers from the attacks. Due to plot convenience, at the summit of the mountain there lives a group of castle builders… bear with me here. Those guys can make really good castle parts, but they need building materials, more specifically, 5 of them, that would be soil, water, wood, rock and iron sand. And, you guessed it, you can find that stuff by going inside the mountain where the dungeons are, and collect all that stuff as you go up the mountain. That’s how the story justifies the gameplay and it’s done rather well. Not that you needed a particular excuse. It gives you enough reason to keep going inside those dangerous places and it’s satisfying to reach the end with lots of building materials for the castle. You give them to the master builder, he builds the castle parts you need and toss it downstream back to the village, where a nice spot is ready to do some castle building.

continue…

>>59610
Your inventory has very limited space, so you’ll be constantly struggling with it. Should you take a risk and toss that herb or food in order to bring one more iron sand? That’s the type of decision you’ll be making all the time and it adds some difficulty to the whole thing. It doesn’t end there. Building materials are not all made equal. Each of the 5 materials come in 3 varying degrees of quality: regular, good and perfect. This is important because the demons will be constantly attacking your castle and the quality of the materials you use have an impact on how sturdy the construction is. Only parts built entirely of perfect materials will be indestructible.

When going up the mountain you can choose what trail to take. Easy, mid or hard. The easy trail will only have normal quality materials, mid will have good and sometimes perfect and hard has more perfect and good materials. So you have the monsters, the traps, different items that you can combine, trail difficulties, the companions and different types of materials you should find and bring up to the top to the builders. All of this makes for a very entertaining dungeon crawl experience.

To add to the experience you have the plot itself that helps to give you a sense of progress. As you build this castle, you get to know more about this village, your companions and the demons themselves. It’s nothing extraordinary but the little stories that play out as you interact with the villagers are really nice and dare I say, quite endearing sometimes. It’s all done in this optimistic, lighthearted, whimsical manner that makes for a very soothing game. Speaking of soothing, the graphics are charming and add to the atmosphere perfectly. The characters have this blend of 2D and 3D aspects to them. It works. The music is truly excellent and it shows the producers knew the grinding of going up and down the dungeons works best with relaxing tunes.

Each individual aspect of Shiren 2 is nothing really new and maybe not done inventively or extremely well but when you put everything together it makes for a very excellent game. It took me about 17 hours to complete and I very much enjoyed all of it. It just felt very nice to traverse the dungeons with your friends, specially the walking drawing Mamo, while you gather some building materials, deal with colorful and varied monsters, step right into clearly there traps and at the end of the day, build decorous fortifications against not-really-evil-but-clearly-misguided demons. It’s optimistic, lighthearted and a perfect game to spend the afternoons with.
As it turns out, once you complete the game, a whole new gameplay becomes available. One of the villagers wants to create a monster zoo, so a new dungeon opens up where you can find a special item known as monster pots. Basically they are pokeballs and now you can go on in these monster capture runs and use your captured monsters to fight for you. They gain levels and everything and it plays very differently from the main game, since inside this dungeon you can’t use any weapons. That was a very nice surprise and it gives a lot of replayability. This is a game I would play once a year even without that part.


On a personal note, it took me a long time to play this one. I knew of its existence for years and the visuals always attracted me but forgot all about it for years at a time, for some reason or another never getting in the right mood to play it. Now that I have it’s one of my favorite Nintendo 64 titles. I quite enjoy games with this mood and atmosphere and a dungeon crawl game where you can grind on in a relaxed and lighthearted environment is right up my alley, though it gives me an intense sense of waste and depression when I step out of the game and realize sooner or later, you have to come back to reality, and reality looks particularly uglier and cruel when you step out of the world of Shiren the Wanderer 2: Oni Invasion! Shiren Castle! I even had nightmares the night after I finished the game, which was odd. I can’t remember what they were about other than they were nightmares. This is all particular to my own psyche of course and I very much recommend this game.

Now, on the technical side of things, make sure your video drive is vulkan if you’re using retroarch. I have the original hardware and can compare it side by side when it comes to n64 games. The other drivers give you a very crisp image and for n64 in particular that’s not how you want, since you’ll be looking at the “seams” of the graphics in many parts of the game. The way it looks on CRT with the original console is better since it makes the perfect amount of blending, giving a more uniform look. Maybe if you never played the original stuff you’ll be fine with that very sharp look but since I got so used to how they look in old TVs that it really bothers me when it’s sharp and crisp.

All that said, I still don’t feel I was able to capture how nice of an experience it was for me to play this game. Shiren 2 is filled with quiet moments where you just stop there for a moment and enjoy the fact you're in a quiet place and that is all there is to it. It's a colorful, immersive little world and I've grown very fond of it. I guess the only way to find out if you'll like this is to try it out for yourself.

Also I'll be posting lots of pictures.

>>59526
Nice to know you rememeber, I was going to play Goemon again but ended up playing >>59610 instead, lots of pictures for that one as well.

>>59610 - >>59616
Cute looking game, thanks for writing such a thorough review wiz

Finished Condemned: Criminal Origins (stupid tag line now that I think about it, doesn't really relate to anything that happens in the game).
For those not familiar, it's a first person horror game with melee combat and a bit of shooting. I had a pretty mixed experience playing it, there were some good moments here and there but it trended towards the negative.

Starting with the positive: the atmosphere is great. They really did some cool stuff with lighting in this game and the environments are well crafted and designed; everything has a gritty, industrial feel and most of the locations in the game are abandoned places (school, library, mall), or back alleys and subway service tunnels. Those type of levels have the potential to come across as drab and boring but the devs made it work and there's absolutely some memorable levels and setpieces. That being said, there are sections in the game where the grey corridors become a bit overbearing and it unfortunately drags the good levels down a bit. This game suffers from the fact that games need to hit a certain amount of playtime or else the customer feels like they're not getting the most bang for their buck. I probably finished it in 8 hours and that's a good thing because the game started to drag on a bit, for my taste.
Sound design is great as well. There's several moments for example where you can hear an enemy yell from far away, and it actually sounds like it, their yells reverberating throughout the environment. There's also constant footsteps, screams, creeks and thuds and god knows what else which really adds to a sense of unease and tension. You constantly feel surrounded and get the impression that an enemy might pop up behind you at any time (and sometimes they do, to good effect).
In general the art direction in this game is pretty good.

Now the mixed: this game is often times praised for it's combat but I found it so-so. I found it to be a bit floaty and weightless, although other people seem to have the exact opposite experience when talking about this game, but I just didn't get that at all. The physics engine in this game is pretty standard, you hit and enemy, a staggering animation plays, you kill them and they flop/ragdoll to the ground (I found the ragdolls in this game to be really bad, and they glitched out on my several times, but that might just be because this game wasn't meant to be played on modern hardware). It didn't feel particularly weighty, or satisfying. There's some games where a hit feels like a hit, but to me, this wasn't one of them.
Another problem is how easy the combat was. You attack an enemy, they stagger and try to attack you, you walk backwards out of range, then move in and attack again, repeat. I feel this is sort of a fundamental flaw in first person melee games and perhaps why we've seen so little of them. Range/distance management is a pivotal component of real life fighting (whether it be boxing or fencing, or whatever else) and the AI simply isn't capable of or given the tools to deal with that; I'm sure it's a difficult problem for developers to solve and it's probably the reason why the only first person melee games that are actually half decent are multiplayer (Chivalry and Mordhau) or have you face of against a horde of mooks (Vermintide).
That being said, the combat is serviceable. It's not all melee though, and the game has guns. The guns cannot be reloaded, and have very limited ammo in them when you find them most of the time. This seems understandable on it's surface; you don't want the player to feel powerful in a horror game, you want to maintain a certain sense of tension and struggle -except because the combat is so easy that's never really present regardless. Add to that, the fact that guns are found in abundance and you can get your hands a pistol or shotgun every couple of minutes, and any sense of tension surrounding resource management and combat just melts away completely.
So not being able to reload becomes more of an annoyance than a tension builder. Being able to carry ammo but having it be very scarce, would have been a better decision in my opinion.
Another feature of the game is that you can take weapons from the environment by for example ripping a pipe off the wall. This further adds to the sense of ease, because you're never without a weapon and as such enemies are never truly a threat. Oh, and you also have a taser which is capable of incapacitating any enemy you might face and half way through the game it gets an upgrade making it even more OP. So all in all the combat is made way too easy to inspire any sort of tension. It really feels like the game didn't know what it wanted to be in that regard. On the one hand it feels like it wanted to be a tense, survival horror game, but at the same time it feels like it didn't want to be difficult or inconvenience the player in anyway.

And finally the negative: The story in this game is absolutely dog shit. You're an agent with the 'Bureau' (although they never actually mention the FBI, legal reasons or something, copyright?). You're after a serial killer that kills other serial killers. He kills two cops with your gun and you take the blame and go on the run while trying to catch the serial killer.
Then you start having psychic premonitions and at a certain point it's revealed you're genetically enhanced or something. There's shitty pseudo plot twist at the end of the game.
Initially you fight insane homeless which have gone insane for some reason that is never quite explained, but eventually weird ghoul creatures start showing up. Towards the end of the game you start fighting some weird monster looking dude that dual wields metal sticks which he twirls around in an exaggerated Hollywood stuntman type of way. Then the final boss is an even weirder monster looking dude that twirls around a metal pipe like he's in a samurai movie. What starts out as a pretty grounded, gritty psychological thriller, just completely goes off the rails and becomes some retard fantasy shit that's truly becoming of a video game story. The story in general is disjointed and relies on a sense of mystery, but the mystery is never really explained or comes to a conclusion which is a sure sign of poor writing.

All in all, if you like horror stuff the game is worth playing for it's atmosphere alone, the combat is serviceable but not as great as people say and the story is just absolute dogshit. There's some other undercooked game mechanics that I didn't touch upon like the crime scene investigation stuff, or the level design (having to find a fireaxe to break down a door type stuff, etc.) but those elements are quite unremarkable and this is already long enough as it is.
I guess the final verdict is that the game has very good atmosphere, okay combat, mediocre game design, and a downright dogshit story even by video game standards. Play it if you really horror, but don't be afraid to quite half way through because you sort of get to experience everything the game has to offer in the first couple of hours and there's nothing really worth sticking around for (in fact I would say the game gets progressively worse as it goes along).

>>59617
you ever play azure dreams? i will recommend that to you

>>59626
not him, have you played the gbc game?

>>59628
no, just ps1. i know the gbc has something like double the monsters, more floors (i think) in the tower to explore, and the twon building and dating stuff is removed? in any case i was impressed by the ps1 version, you have a whole lot of freedom in your actions and ways to play the game, theres lots of cool interactions and mechanics.

>>59626
Yeah I heard of it but visually it's not at all appealing to me. I have an easier time enjoying a game I find visually appealing with mechanics I find unintersting than the other way around. I'll try it eventually, thanks for the recommendation.

>>59620
It's funny cause I played that game not so long ago and I can remember is the manequin part and the combat being alright, but getting repetitive with time.
So you're right about the plot I guess, there's a second game but it was an Xbox360/PS3 exclusive so I never played it.

Finished The Legend of Zelda for the NES. The first Zelda game, released in 1986. I've played plenty of older games like this and the first thing that impressed me about this title is how merciful it is for a game of the 80s. You can save your progress, if you die you get to keep your items and money and if you die inside a dungeon you get to restart on the first room instead of having to walk all your way back inside. This encourages you to explore far and wide since you're not afraid to die in each step. Which is good because you'll die a lot, or at least I did.

Very soon you realize how fragile Link is. He is faster than most monsters in this land but boy his reach is awful when he's not in full health. While you are in full health, your sword shoots little sword bolts, giving you a ranged weapon as soon as you start the game. This is fine and well but once you get hit, you'll be dependent on Link's arms reach and he can only hit things that are an inch away from touching his nose. So if you get hit once you lose your ranged weapon and that means you'll be getting hit constantly from then on and die. Like I said this is not really a problem since you don't lose any money or items. And you get better as the game goes on, so it's all good.

Exploring is a major part of the game and it's a fun process. There's a little bit of trial and error in some dungeon locations but I wouldn't call it unintuitive. A couple of secret locations however I would call unintuitive. It's literally just random places you have to bomb to open a passage. The items you find there are optional but I would like to be able to find them without having to place bombs in every square of the overworld map. I ended up using a guide.

The meat of the game is exploring the overworld to find items and health containers, finding a dungeon entrance and proceeding to kill the monster inside and fetch a piece of the triforce. Here's the whole plot for this game, 2 lines you can read when you turn the game on but don't push start: "Many years ago prince darkness Ganon stole one of the triforce with power. Princess Zelda had one of the triforce with wisdom. She divided it into 8 units to hide it from Ganon before she was captured. Go find the 8 units Link to save her." And that's it. I don't think you need more than that, really.

The dungeons themselves are engaging, fun to run around and, again, they're quite merciful. I only had difficulty in about 5 or 6 rooms throughout all the 9 dungeons in this game. The only one that is really hard is the last one. And I only beat it in a reasonable amount of time thanks to save scumming, something you can do without but then you'll be replaying this dungeon for days before you either get good at it or get lucky. But that's not the only problem. You see, you can only carry 8 bombs at a time and in this dungeon you have to blow up holes in many, many walls. Which walls you should use a bomb on is a matter of guessing most of the time. That means you'll be running out of bombs to use constantly and will have to go outside the dungeon, fetch more bombs, return, kill all the monsters again and try different walls. It starts to feel like busy work fast. Usually I don't mind this type of thing but here I did. Still, for a RPG released in 1986, this is nothing. Try playing Faery Tale Adventure. It's insane how brutal and outright punishing games from this era can be.

There's 3 tracks for this game. Overworld music, a tune I'm certain you'll recognize, the dungeon track and the last dungeon track. All of them are excellent. They're all 10 second loops but I don't mind that at all. In fact I find repetitive music very soothing. And most importantly, it's all square waves and triangle waves, none of that generic symphony so many RPGs use these days.

Graphics are pretty good. Especially in the overworld map they managed to convey different biomes across the land which is quite nice. I find pixel art from this era endearing to look at. There is solid art direction here but I feel like Castlevania spoiled me forever on graphics for this particular console. Nothing looks as cool as that.

I would also like to quickly talk about the monsters here. If you ever played a Zelda game before, you'll be surprised how you'll find most monsters you come across in later games are already on the very first Zelda title. Famous ones like Stalfos, Octoroks, bats, mummies, those flying things called peahats, spider-like Tectikes, they're all already here in their beautiful 8-bit appearance. Even Dodongo, a boss monster you find in Ocarina of Time is already here as well, except he looks more like a triceratops in this one. But you kill him in the same way; feeding him bombs. What a terrible way to go.

So all in all, soothing music, nice graphics, good monster variety, nice enough map to explore, fun dungeons. Yeah I can see why this game was a hit when it came out, so much so that Zelda became one of the bread and butter franchises for Nintendo. I say it's well deserved.

>>59766
>Which walls you should use a bomb on is a matter of guessing most of the time.
I only beat this game because I followed a guide, but I didn't use any cheats. I didn't feel bad though because there were like two places you could not progress unless you knew to plant a bomb on a particular wall. If I were going at it solo I would have had to farm to buy bombs, then autistically laid them out at every corner of every room in every dungeon till I had found this hole. A Link to the Past is a better game it seems to progress without needing a guide.
>Faery Tale Adventure
never played it, but a lot of rpg games from this era are brutal. King's Quest is another example I am familiar with where you could go down entire story branches that end up being dead ends because you didn't do something the first 3rd through the game.

I finished the legend of Zelda breath of the wild. I have to say, I'm somewhat disappointed. Not because I didn't enjoy the game, but I was just expecting a bit more from the way people talked about this game. Ultimately it's good but not great.

First off, the story is complete shit and the voice acting is a crime against the franchise. Every time there was a cut scene it was painful to get through and I regretted not skipping it. Beyond that though, its main flaw is its overall simplicity and repetitive nature. There are only a handful of enemy types to fight and they remain fairly trivial to beat throughout the entire game. The weather aspects of the game only make it more annoying, not more fun. The rewards for side quests all suck terribly. Everything respawns endlessly. There are tons of unskippable or only partially skippable cut scenes for stuff like crafting, upgrading clothes, etc. Some of the shrine puzzles were okay but most were painfully simple. Weapons breaking adds basically nothing but annoyance, and holy hell are there not enough arrows. It is painful having to fast travel around to shops buying 15 arrows at a time because they don't drop enough. Savage lyonel 5 shot bows are also broken as hell. I defeated gannon in like 30 seconds just hitting him with the bow. The "you meet the same people everywhere" gimmick was overused and started seeming lazy rather than humorous.

It feels like a small and simple game that was just copy and pasted a bunch of times to make it bigger. I don't get why people rave about it.

Finished Hardspace: Shipbreaker
It's alright, I like first person puzzle games like Talos Principle or Portal, so this seemed like something I'd enjoy. Of course I didn't enjoy it as much as those games, it gets a bit repetitive with time, once you figure out how to avoid the hazards there's no challenge, and even if there was, there's next to no penalty on death. I played the story mode, there's an endless mode but honestly I think I've had enough, about the plot, it's ok I guess, it feels like something a leftie teenager would write, but I actually became kind of envolved with it

Finished dark souls 1 some decent time ago, 2 semi recently, 3 right after that, and doom 2016 today

Dark Souls 1
Not much new i can say. i actually attempted this game years ago but when i noticed that i would need to run to the boss fog gate every time i die and there was no bonfire in front of fog gates i gave it up. only on the 2nd attempt i finished it. the first half of the game was great, i went into the graveyard before the undead burg like many people but directions were given to me after a short while so i went into the burg, basic melee guy, got lucky and got the black knight halberd after the knight fell off the cliff. with havel's set game became easy mode i guess. defeated manus without walking, just spamming r1 and drinking estus. games quality drops noticably after orn and smough, bed of chaos cancer, izalith was subpar, seath's invisible walkways were bothersome, tomb of giants was fine, blighttown was actually interesting to go through once you took out the toxic dart guys. i liked the depths too i dunno why. sewer and a poison swamp hah. overall had a good experience. gwyndolin best waifu

Dark souls 2
overall game felt halfcooked, lack of development time was apparent throughout the game i think. far as i understand game was made by the b team and was re done mostly halfway through the development so its impressive its as adequate as it was. was not a fan of needing to get to emerald waifu to level up, overall the story and characters felt odd and not as interesting as the first game, i think it would have been better if it was an entirely different game disconnected from ds universe. i liked rotten the most out of the bosses. dlc were good though. if only the base game was like that.

Dark souls 3
immediately the graphical improvements are visible, game looks a lot better, yet the combat felt unpleasant. i have not played bloodborne myself but going from what ive seen on internet combat here reminded me of bb a lot, the way enemies flinch with almsot every hit, very fast paced combat (in ds1 you can roll 3 times with starting stamina as a knight, here as a sorc you can roll 6 times) poise as you might have known is practically non-existant. playing with magic felt a lot better than melee though, i almost regret playing melee in the previous games. everything in the game was adequate really, dont have much to complain. i wish lothric itself was a bit more involved in the game, you just stick to the wall and the castle, i think going through the more urban/civilian areas would be nice. i hate the ghrus and the poison swamp area, the leaping ghrus were the most cancerous enemy by far, wish the ending was a bit more elaborate, i dont know. firekeeper is beautiful and adorable. another thing i didnt like is how it didnt make sense for some npcs to just sit in a corner at the shrine. irina and greirat make sense but especially for orbeck it was a bit odd to me that he was for one using a ruin with mobs as his residence, had a table and bookshelves and tons of scrolls, but then after you talk to him just decides to move in with basically none of his belongings and sits there for the rest of the game, i just didnt like it. ocerios was awful boss, champion gundyr as frustrating as it was is good boss. i love the early part of soul of cinder's theme.

Doom 2016
finished today and 100%'ed the single player, overall was good, i wish gun sounds and feel were a bit more mechanical or whatever you call it, game looked a little bit cartoony like some nu-blizz game but it wasnt so bad, certainly not as bad as doom eternal from what i ve seen. the health/armor/ammo system is clever, incentivizes engagement with the enemy instead of something like say call of duty with regenerating health where you just sit in a corner. needed to look up for most of the classic map secrets' levers though, dont think i could have found them by myself, the perk that helps you find secret areas is pretty underwhelming. overall it was good fps. levels were very good too, the part where you reach vega's core on a small train/tram was the biggest peak in difficulty for me

Minstrel Song. one of the best jrpgs I've played

play SaGa, now!

>>59620
The second one is a very unique game

>>57966
I just finished the first Diablo and I had a really good time with it. I'll definitely count it among my favourite games ever, I would honestly give it a 10/10. I consider it an example of a perfect game, not because it was the most fun I've ever had with one, but because it's such a wholly complete package that does exactly what it sets out to do. I really can't think of a single complaint to make about it. It was so refreshing to play a game that knows what it's all about and never loses sight of that from start to finish. Your goal set from the very beginning is to descend into the depths and defeat Diablo, and every moment that you play and everything that you do is to bring you closer to completing that goal. The game starts you in the town that you're here to save, there's the dungeon that you're here to delve into and there's the great evil waiting for you at the end. It's all laid out so cleanly and concisely. There's dialogue for all the townspeople so you can get to know more about them and the town itself which is all written and acted very well, but you're free to not engage with any of it if you're not interested and just get to the killing and looting.

I'm a guy who never got into ARPGs. I never understood the appeal of effortlessly clearing an entire screen of enemies and hoovering their droppings up off the floor just so you can do the same thing you're already doing with marginally higher efficiency. That's what I always knew the genre to be, and I had just assumed that Diablo was the same. I see now that the original essence of the experience was lost by its successors in the effort to make everything exponentially Bigger™ and Better™ than before. Where worthwhile loot would once drop only sparingly and as a reward for the completion of quests and defeat of bosses, you now get your inventory filled with assorted junk to sift through every 10 minutes. While you would once fight in separate skirmishes with small groups of enemies, you now fight 50 enemies at a time, filling the whole screen with a diarrhoea of visual FX as you do. Where you would once spend the whole game delving deeper into a single enormous labyrinth of a dungeon, that one dungeon is now split into hundreds of barely distinguishable 5 minute strolls where the only interesting thing is the carrot at the end.

Finding loot was definitely part of the excitement of Diablo, but I found real joy in the adventure itself; the foreboding atmosphere, the thrill of inching along shadowy corridors and bracing myself for what sinister new adversary would await around the corner. Watching my stock of potions gradually diminish as I went on. I loved reaching new areas, going deeper and deeper into the dungeon and seeing the scenery get more and more removed from the Cathedral itself until I reached the very bowels of Hell.

The simplistic combat and lack of mechanical skill involved means how/when/where you engage enemies is of utmost importance, because there's nothing that your skill as a player can do for you if you bite off more than you can chew or get yourself surrounded. Keeping a mental note of doorways and other chokepoints you pass that you could fall back to later, splitting groups of enemies by leading them around obstacles, being aware of enemies trying to lead you further into the unknown and into a trap. There's a surprising amount of decision-making and tactics involved, it's not just the mindless clicking it appears to be.

The soundtrack is wonderfully angsty, atmospheric and unique. My favourite was the theme of the Catacombs.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrK90XJfqRs
The tribal drums and grungy guitar accompanied by wailing and laughter of succubi and children does a brilliant job conveying the spirit of the pure, primordial evil that you're fighting. But there's also a sense of grim, heroic resolve hidden in there that always spurred me on when I heard it in-game.

I can't fully put into words how or why this barebones game managed to hold my interest and thoroughly entertain with such ease. I don't even normally play games this old because, at least in my experience, they never hold up. Perhaps I've just been sorely missing games that were made simply because the developers really wanted them to exist.

>>59968
ive played both d1 and d2 and i also think d1 was the better experience, it was concentrated, atmospheric and immersive

>>59983
d1 was too cartoony and childish for me, the cardboard graphics make the "grim" parts seem comical
D2 has way better gameplay and a cooler looking diablo himself

>>60008
i like d2 more as well, but i had a lot more experience with the community when i played it. knew kids from school who played it, played ladder with randoms a lot online, read forums for it, etc.

>>59968
I think Diablo is more atmospheric and "scary" than 2, but 2 is infinitely more replayable, on the first playthrough yeah I prefer 1, but if I had to pick one to play for long periods of time I'd pick 2.

Finished the first Monster Hunter for ps2, the offline part of the game that is since the online is long dead.
It's a good despite what people say, of course it's different from later games but the foundation is there, there are some issues, like every wyvern having basically the same moveset, but they different enough I guess, people don't like the controls but I didn't think they're so bad once you get the hang of it. There's a lot of grinding, I guess people are put off by that, but it's also a given in these games. I don't know, I liked it. I think the people who shit on it the most haven't really tried it

>>60036
i tried playing that within the past year but god damn the controls did not age well. shame because it has a ton of interesting game mechanics and nice details

>>60036
They have a private server for it

>>60083
They're weird at first, I got used to them after a while
>>60084
only for the japanese version, I played the american version

Finished Fire n' Ice for NES
it's apparently a sequel to a game called Solomon's Key (which I think it's also a name of a book about summoning demons, funnily enough). It's a very simple and fun puzzle game, none of the puzzles are insanely hard but they aren't trivial either, it's a really fun game to play casually

>>60155
It looks like a GBC game.

>>60156
yeah I mean looks like an 8bit game

I heard a new Talos Principle is coming out and since the first one was on my backlog since it came out I decided to make it a priority. Took me about 40 hours to beat it 100%, though it would take longer hadn't I looked at a guide for the location of 3 stars and the solution for one of the puzzles. The rest I braved by myself. I have strong but mixed feelings about this title.

First for the most important part. The puzzles. They're fun and the reason why I kept playing all the way to the end. As the game goes on you get new tools and that helps keep up the interest. The fact every puzzle is mostly self-contained also helps, it gives a very clear sense of progression. They're very playful puzzles if that makes sense, where you have a few basic tools and you play around with them in order to open a door or make a block fly to the place it needs to go. They're not particularly cerebral problems with a high level of abstraction needed, in fact most are more hands on, trial and error type of thing. The problem with that is you need to haul your reflectors, jammers and cubes around all the time to test your solution and that really wore me down in the long run. Felt like a cable boy hauling stuff around the levels. Say, if you want to test if you can open a door by placing a reflector on top of a box so it reflects in such and such angle, guess what? You have to haul all that stuff here, here and there and if it doesn't work, you'll be hauling it all back to try something else. For every 2 minutes of thinking and planning you get 10 minutes of pure hauling stuff around. It wasn't a problem in the beginning but by the end I was really feeling the pain.

Regardless, finding the solutions are satisfying enough and they never feel unfair. I still feel like an idiot for not figuring out the one I looked it up. They're not particularly hard but their layout can really throw you off and you'll be trying 10 needlessly complicated solutions when the obvious one is right in front of you. So imo the puzzles are 8/10 and a good enough reason to actually play this game.

The puzzles themselves are not what I really want to talk about though. The bizarre part of this game is the plot and the presentation of the plot. I've been playing video games for 30 years now and for the first time ever in a video game I found myself skipping audio logs and text files. Never done this before but this game really pushed me to it. It's the most overwritten, confused (not confusing, confused), haphazard fluff material I've ever witnessed in a game. And at the same time the plot is fine. It's not at all new but it's fine. To talk more about this I'll have to spoil the story but the game already does that in the first 30 seconds of playtime, so I'm not sure how much of a spoiler it is.

The plot is this: Some whatever calamity happened and humanity is about to go extinct. So they make a digital library containing all human culture and put it in a vault somewhere. Part of this digital library is a software made to improve AI. That would be the puzzles. You're one of the AI versions solving it. This software's overseer is called Elohim and he likes to play the Abrahamic god by being a booming voice while you're going through the levels, saying if you behave nicely he'll grant you eternal life. In the end you decide to stay in the computer or get unplugged.

So there you have it, it's 6 lines worth of a plot. This game however drones on and on about it, trying so very hard to sound smart. But that's not even the main problem with the plot. The major issue here is that the game tries very hard to pretend there's a moral dilemma between obeying Elohim or not. Except we know from the very beginning we're just in a simulation (parts of the levels keep glitching out, making it obvious you're inside a computer), rendering the mystery, the very point where this supposed dilemma pivots on, completely pointless and null. We know for a fact Elohim is just a piece of software trying to keep you in the program. But the game plays out as if you don't know this. The dialogue, the pieces of text you find on the levels, the levels themselves, everything pretends there's a mystery going on when you already know what's going on with 100% certainty from the get go. I actually began to suspect there was more to it because it was hard to believe the game would simply ignore the fact there's no mystery while everybody is acting mysterious. But nope, you reach the end and it's exactly what it is. I've never seen a game sabotaging its own plot like that before.

This was like if a Shyamalan movie had a text crawl at the start telling you what the twist is. It's just bizarre. And it doesn't stop there. This presentation wasn't what made me stop collecting the audio logs and reading the text files. It was the absolute garbage of the writing this game has. And I mean the fluff for this plot is complete trash.

The text files you get from the computers feel like a bunch of poorly made notes of a bunch of wikipedia articles the writers liked. Of course, it tries to pass it out as a "philosophical plot" which is like trying to pass a Scooby-Doo episode as a "deep mystery thriller". It usually goes by posing a very vague question like "what is life?" "life has a purpose?" and then responding by giving a passing reference to something the writers read on wikipedia for about 2 minutes and thought it was cool. And you know 2 minutes was all they gave to the topic because the name of the philosopher or term mentioned is all there is to it. There is no insight or understanding about the things being mentioned, just bringing the name of a philosopher or a novelist is expected to be enough. It's odd. If you don't have anything to say about those things, then don't say anything. It would be a lot better. I guess this can pass as philosophy if you never read a single book in your life but if you ever read even a single dialogue by Plato or anything, really, you know philosophy is not pushing an extremely vague question with a multitude of possible answers and then whining about your life and then giving a wiki link at the end as some sort of answer, that's more like youtube comments, or reddit posts.

What makes it annoying however is that virtually nothing of what you read in the text files adds to the plot. Once you know humanity has gone extinct and they made a program to save human culture, that's it. That's all the useful information they contain. 2 lines. The plot, like I said, is this: You're inside a computer simulation. The AI overseeing the program is playing God and possibly going a little bit crazy. You choose to get out or not. The end. But the game fills this simple, serviceable plot with drivel, trying to pretend it is smarter than it is. I don't think a game's story needs to be deep or smart to be decent but Talos Principle is hell bent on the idea it needs to be deep and smart to be good and boy it loses itself in that thought pretty badly. It got embarrassing at times and that's when I stopped reading.

The audio logs you find around the levels are not any better. It's the journal of this succubus that knows the world is about to end and she takes the time to talk about her life and opinions and this is just as bad as reading youtube comments. It's just damn awful. Here's one I found the script for:

>"When I was in ninth grade, my parents took me to Pompeii. At first I was amazed by the feeling of walking through an ancient city, but then I suddenly got scared. I realized that I was walking through a real place, where real people had lived. People like myself, with mothers and fathers and lives and hopes and dreams, and now it was all gone forever. I ran to my father, crying, and told him about this, and he said- I remember so clearly- he said, "Yes, but we are here. So long as there are people in the streets, the past isn't really gone."

The Blah Blah Blah levels in those audio logs are off the charts. Imagine collecting and listening to 30 or so of nonsense like that. The good thing is you don't actually need to collect any of that, which is how I saved this game for myself. About a third way in I simply stopped picking them up and the game improved significantly when I did. This is a very good quality of Talos Principle. It lets you ignore all the fluff material, which is great because the fluff here is probably the worst fluff I've ever read in a game. The plot is ok, the fluff is garbage. I think the developers knew about it, otherwise they wouldn't let you skip it with no consequence whatsoever.

So what to say about a game that sabotages its own plot, has the worst fluff material in the history of video games but also has nice puzzles in it? Well, it's actually a good game, since the gaming part is the puzzles. The plot is funny to follow in a trainwreck sort of way and the fluff material can be 100% ignored. I'll be playing the second one. Also the art on the cover is pretty cool.

>>60174
>I heard a new Talos Principle is coming out
Really? that's great news, I love that game

Finished Ys Origin
The game is good, plays like Ys VI and the remake of Ys III, it's the only game in the series that I know of in which you don't play as Adol Christin, instead you get to play as 2 characters (and a third one after you beat the game with any of them). Game looks good, I like the 3d environments with 2d sprites, but it has the problem of sometimes not being able to tell the depth of things, music as usual is amazing and the plot is pretty jrpg by the numbers, the gameplay is fun at first but it devolves into just button mashing and spamming an attack until you kill everything, except some bosses, which are fun to figure out. In the hardest level of difficulty I felt the bosses were designed to be killed at an specific level with an specific gear, whiched forced me to grind a bit in some occasion, but it's not a lot if you don't use your items like an idiot (like I did), the geat is the usual 6 sets you have in these games and unlock as you progress, there's not much science to it and it's fine, I wasn't expect it to be Diablo 2 or anything like that.
I only finished with one character but since it seems the game doesn't change much between playthroughs, I probably won't play the entire thing with the other two, at least not in the highest difficulty.

>>60283
yeah the mobs are just fodder to get at the required level to face the bosses and to upgrade your gear accordingly.
it's incredibly satisfying going from getting destroyed on your first few attempts to finally figuring them out, their patterns, taking advantage of your invincibility frames etc. the classic Ys games are all about the boss fights really, and they should be played at the highest difficulty one is comfortable with.

modern Ys (from seven onwards) are more like budget Tales of.

Finished playing the original Pikmin
I had the game as a kid but never got past the 2nd level because the time limit and pikmin dying stressed me out, always loved the atmosphere and world of the game though. Revisiting it the world is just as cool as I remember. The gameplay is mostly good but the pikmin AI is kind of retarded, lot of dumb pathfinding and they'll constantly stop to hit stuff when you're just trying to get from point A to B. Having to tard wrangle them kind of added to the charm for me though.
The time limit was also pretty lenient, as a kid it seemed intimidating but with how small the maps are it's pretty easy to get 1 or 2 parts each day even with a lot of fuck ups.

>>60174
I liked the plot and all the logs of that game but I'm a sucker for stories about AI and consciousness. One thing I do appreciate though is that you can pretty much ignore the audio logs and computer terminal chats if you choose to (unless I'm misremembering) and complete the puzzles just fine, or just choose to read them later. I tried a demo recently for a puzzle game called Viewfinder that had a pretty neat concept, but it had a succubus constantly yapping in your ear and giving hints which ruined it. Fucking hate that trend of handholding in many modern games, just let me find shit out at my own pace.
Anyways the sequel is probably my most anticipated game this year, I just hope it won't be unoptimized shit which will force me to upgrade my PC. So few games requiring high specs are actually worth playing.

>>60455
Pikmin is a trip. I thought beating it in 14 days was impressive, then I thought beating it in 9 was, then 6, but in speedruns people basically clear every area the day they get there and still have ample time leftover. It's nuts. I'm looking forward to Pikmin 4. 3's story was pretty easy, but it had a lot of extra content. 2 was good as well, but the first one just has something special about it. When you play it blind, it has a very urgent feeling to it.

Wanted to add, the sound of many pikmin drowning is one of the most cursed things I've ever heard. I've played tons of creepy or scary games, too. Pikmin gets pretty fucking dark for how cutesy the surface presentation is.

>>60283
Well I went back and played as the other character, it was actually worth it, most of the game is the same but the gameplay is different enough and the plot feels more fleshed out, this character actually seems to have an arc, unlike the succubus.
Will probably try the third character, that dante wannabe

>>60283
>>60462
Ok I finished with this edgelord, it's apparently the canon ending since there's an extra final boss, gameplay is too similar to the succubus to my taste, so, since you're forced to play the game at least twice to get the real ending, I'd say play it with the two guys, whom are brothers and have the best plotlines, the succubus ends up being pointless.
The true final boss is as brainded as they come, just mash attack hoping you'll kill him before he kills you, I finished the fight with 8HP…
of course I could always go back and grind my ass off to level up, a single level makes a huge difference but it takes forever to level up once you hit level 52 (max is 60)
There are also upgrades that take WAY too much SP (the game currency), by the time I beat the game I had 30k and there were upgrades for 500k,getting that shit probably takes 30 hours of just grinding the same room, I'm sure someone has done it, but I sure wont.

ok I just finally finished it, didn't 100% because that would take me forever
I felt like I was being held hostage by this game, feeling like I couldn't finish because I hadn't found every cave, but last night I just said fuck it, and I beat it, easiest final boss of all times. I don't even feel like talking about it, sadly nintendo doesn't seem to be planning on going back to traditional zelda format, I doubt I will play a botw 3

>>60455
Went through the other Pikmin games after enjoying the first so much, just completed 4 tonight

Pikmin 2 was great, much better AI than 1 and the I like the cave exploration even if the random generation can get a bit repetitive. Loved poring over the piklopedia and treasure logs and just reading Olimar's thoughts on things, they're surprisingly well written.

Pikmin 3 DX was pretty good, the 3 captains thing and ability to multitask is neat but the time limit even on hard is pretty lenient. Kind of wish the hardest difficulty was just unlocked from the start. Also way too much talking and I wasn't a fan of boss cutscenes or the bosses themselves, they felt a bit too Zelda-like. The side modes for Olimar and the challenge missions were great, honestly enjoyed them more than the main story.

Pikmin 4 was great, probably my second favorite after 2. Once again this has way too much talking but I eventually learned to just tune it out. Caves being handcrafted is great and the dandori challenges are neat. I do wish the game relied less on Oatchi, the charge ability + ice pikmin are incredibly overpowered and it's pretty much the best approach for 95% of encounters. If they had given the swarm ability early on I would've been more willing to move around without riding him but without that it's easy for Pikmin to get killed (they're much more spread out than in 3 where even 100 pikmin would condense in a fairly small line behind you) and for some reason they held that ability until the very end of the game. Besides the lack of difficulty though the game is very fun and it feels like a lot of love was put into it, lots of callbacks to 1 and especially 2. I hope they update or release a DLC because even after 30 hours of playing I still wasn't really ready for it to end.

>>60457
I've watched a couple of speedruns of the games after completing them and they're pretty insane. It's fun to watch people optimize.
Pikmin 1 is definitely special in its atmosphere, being completely alone aside from the Pikmin and only having Olimar's thoughts probably contribute to that. Also not being as explicit about the planet being Earth added to the mystique a little (from what I remember in 1 I think there's only the bottle in forest navel to indicate it might be Earth, not sure if the manual for the game ever gave additional clues). I love 2 but having the ship dialogue, Louie, and all the treasures based on real life objects definitely killed that special feeling.

Ghost Trick (DS).

I didn't expect much, but it was alot of fun, and I really enjoyed the mechanics of the Rube Goldberg Machine puzzles. It also doesn't overstay it's welcome (It's about 10-15 hours long). I think this is one of Shu Takumi's better games.

Finished Baldur's Gate 3 the other day, since I enjoyed the original games a lot back in the day. Liked first two acts, disliked the third, hated the ending, or rather lack of one.
First two acts gave freedom to approach things from different angles, shit load of companion content, and a a lot of class related dialogues choices, even for not so quirky and charismatic class as barbarian. Act 3, which was supposed to be the peak, the climax, the apogee of the game - arrival into the city itself, fell flat on it's ass. Freedom to pick out of several possible routes? Down the gutter. Unique dialogues and interesting quests? Off you go with boring fetch quest bullshit. And in general there was a massive drop in the tension. Act 2 ended with fighting an immortal chosen of Myrkul, god of death, who later becomes the avatar of his god. Was a very tough fight with a lot at stakes. And it all happens in a surreal, lovecraftian nightmarish hellscape. And then the tension drops, you suddenly find yourself strolling around the city, talking with random peasants discussing wines and giving interview to newspapers. Not to mention the next two big bosses were jokes and disappointments. It's fine, I can live with lack of tension.
But the ending. Jesus fucking Christ, the last time I saw an ending like that was ME3. Only this time there won't be any Extended cut nor Citadel DLC. There was no ending. You win the final fight, against one of the most dangerous things Faerun has ever seen, and there is nothing after your victory. No celebration, no saying goodbye to your companions. Holy fuck I am salty.

Finished playing Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
Really enjoyed it, it's a squad-based stealth RTS although it's borderline a puzzle game in some segments with how enemies are placed. Each mission introduces new mechanics like footprints in the snow, reduced enemy vision at night, etc and you get different character combinations for each which forces you to switch up tactics and learn how different character abilities synergize. Missions generally took me 1-2 hours each, looking over the map and planning how to take out guards or sneak past enemies was really fun although I only played 1 mission per session usually due to how mentally exhausting it was. Trial and error and savescumming are definitely encouraged which might put some people off but I don't mind that style of play. Story is interesting enough and the cutscenes between missions were always fairly short which I liked.

My 2 main complaints
1. Pathfinding doesn't allow for things like jumping down or going through doors to get somewhere so you have to do multiple clicks to do that which is annoying if you want to move multiple units
2. Jumping down and dumping bodies into the water/off cliffs often requires you to hover over a really specific area for the context action to show up. This was especially noticeable in the last mission where several jumps required almost pixel perfect precision which is annoying when you're trying to avoid an enemy patrol.

Other than that had a lot of fun with it, will probably check out the expansion and Desperados III from the same devs at some point.

finished a baldurs gate 3 watch through the streamer finally beat it i liked act 1 and 2 but the third one felt rushed

>>60571
sounds cool i will watch a streamer play this next

Finished 2 games
>Wheel of Time
It's a fun first person shooter, made with the always nice unreal engine 1. I loved the game, it's not a regular FPS with guns, you play as an Aes Sedai (basically a witch in WoT universe) and of course you use magic, or rather magical artifacts, since this is a witch that can't really cast spells, which I think is really stupid, it's like playing as Mike Tyson but not being able to punch anyone… anyway, it makes no difference gameplay wise, you just cast the spells of the artifacts you get and it works just the same. These spells are very varied, from defensive spells, to an assortment of projectiles to spells that teleport you and exchange places with the enemies, you can get really creative pushing enemies off cliffs, locking them in rooms with fire floors or teleporting them to the bottom of a pond (they can't swim and it's really funny watching them running around the bottom while they die slowly), you are pretty much forced to do stuff like this in the hardest difficulty since the enemies are damage sponges and love dodging projectiles, which are not so scarce, but they're not endless either. The only problem I have with the weapons is that there is not a single hit-scan weapon, all of them shoot projectiles which move really slow in some cases, making the enemies really hard to hit since they can just move out of the way, teleport or use a shield. As I mentioned before, enemies are pretty tough in hard difficulty, and can make short work of you if you let them, sadly the AI is kinda primitive so you can just exploit it to get them stuck in places.
The plot is fine, I don't know if it's based on any of the books, I've only read one and a half and I haven't heard of any of the characters in the game, there are FMV cutscenes after each chapter, which I guess were ok for the time, but now they're laughably bad.
I really like the level design, some of the interiors were designed by actual architects and it shows, here's a video of me going around some of the hallways.
A really high point for me is the music, I think it's superb and I added the soundtrack to my reading playlist, after the game released they made an extended version to release as an album, sadly they added some tracks in the album with vocals, which I really don't like.
Overall a pretty good game, people seem to have forgotten about it, but it's great nonetheless.

>Eye of the Beholder
All of these first person dungeon crawlers always seemed kinda esoteric to me, as if only a selected few nerds would appreciate them, but once I started playing EoB I got hooked. This game is exactly how I imagine getting lost in an actual dungeon would be like. No map (unless you pay for the guide), no music, cryptic puzzles, and next to no help. You're just thrown in a dungeon and locked inside in hopes you rid the town of whatever the hell is lurking down there, of course anyone with a shallow knowledge of DnD that has read the name of the game knows what to expect. The game manages to create a great atmosphere without any music (the is music in the snes version, but it plays slow as shit, really not worth it) which to me is a hell of an achievement.
It's supposedly a really short game, but it took me probably over 30 hours, most of them wondering in a seemingly endless maze, I got really excited when I finally found the eponymous Beholder… only to be fried in a second, took me quite some more time to figure out how to kill it.
It's a really good game if you feel like getting lost in a maze, with all the charm of early 90s DOS games, and it really is not too heavy on the DnD stuff, which can be a detriment to players that aren't familiar with its system (the only thing that took me a while to figure out is that apparently the less armor class you have, the better). There are 2 sequels, and it lets me import the saves from the previous game, how cool is that? Supposedly the second game is even better.
In the video you see me "fighting" the final boss, it's a really cool sprite death animation, of course don't watch if you don't want spoilers, although what could be spoiled? It would be like learning that you kill Diablo at the end of Diablo.

>>59386
ah I like Scratches. I played it after playing Fatal Frame 3 so I spent the whole time expecting jump scares. I like how it confines you to the house and lets you slowly explore it and open new areas. Being a kid in an old house there were no-go places for me like the basement and attic, and this really captured that feeling.

>>58061
I've just finished playing Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin for SEGA Genesis. Spider-Man has always been my absolute favorite super hero, so his video games on every console I've ever owned have always been a must for me. I owned a FamiClone (PolyStation) and played Spider-Ma: Return of the Sinister Six, I onwed PlayStation and both Spider-Man titles on it, I owned PlayStation 2 and every single Spider-Man title on it, so on and so forth… but my 1st console was Genesis and I didn't own the major Spider-Man title in it, one that early on in the console's life span was owned by pretty much 2/3rds of all Genesis owners… and for good reason, it's an excellent licensed video game.

>Pros:
1. It was the 1st time a Spider-Man video game felt like one instead of just a video game with Spider-Man on top, his moveset is perfectly represented, websliging feels superb, having a web shield is helpful, and his standard punches are satisfying due to the lovely SFX…
2. They made sure to add elements of Peter Parker's life as you must take photos of villains for the Daily Bugle to make money for your web fluid, also you rest on your apartment to restore health, at the cost of time, important for the plot due to the Kingpin's bomb in NY.
3. While not every Spider-Man villain is present, due to his rogue gallery just being ridiculously large, the ones present are a terrific choice overall, especially due to it being Venom's 1st major console video game, due to the previous ones being on Game Boy, Game Gear and Master System… also the way you must defeat a few of them can be frustrating at first, but you grow to appreciate their uniqueness.
4. Kingpin's boss at the end is what a final boss should strive to be in a video game, he's the hardest one by fair, but not downright unfair, just tough to figure out at first, and the way they have Mary Jane descending into a pool of acid slowly as the fight goes on adds to the tension, it's also interesting that you can web up the chains to stop her descend for a brief moment, interesting design, immersive too.
5. Atmosphere is fantastic, those cutscenes with Kingpin talking to NY through the TV, with that moody OST in the background, the few cutscenes showing Spider-Man's interactions with the villains and his through process to figure out what to do next, it's all terrific and gets you pumped to go out there and put a stop to Kingpin, especially when Mary Jane gets kidnapped suddently, it's dark, but not too dark.

>Cons:
1. It's minor due to the level design being built around it, but not being able to turn corners while wall crawling isn't very good at all…
2. I can see how someone back then, without internet, could get stuck and just despise playing this, at times I got quite frustrated too.
3. Kingpin final boss is good, but figuring out you can web MJ isn't obvious at all, and losing being an automatic Game Over is punishing.
4. Nightmare difficult dropping Venom on literally every level, including the tight corridors in the 2nd to last one, is quite a pain really.
5. Level design could be more inspired, the 1st level, and Kingpin's hideout are good, but the others feel too linear and/or short to me.

I picked up my hacked 3DS again earlier in the year and have been working through games I missed, pic related was alright. It was fun enough but very easy: I finished it in just over 8 hours and the only fight I didn't immediately clear was the last one, but that was just a matter of changing a few equips around. I played Dawn of Sorrow when it came out and remember that having a lot of replayability, but I can't be fucked to get everything in this one or even do the bonus dungeon. Order of Ecclesia is next on my list, then probably some more DS odds and ends. Maybe I'll get around to finishing Tales of Vesperia if I can bother sitting at my desktop.

>>60668
I remember playing Wheel of Time many years ago when I wasn't even familiar with the books, very fond memories.

Underwhelming. That’s the one word to describe my feelings after putting well over 100 hours in Baldur’s Gate 3. It started out good, carried out OK, just to have the whole thing come crashing down with one of the most underwhelming, shitty, rushed, patchy, lackluster, unsatisfying finales I’ve ever seen in a video game, and especially one so laser focused on story-telling. I seriously have seen better endings in Puyo Puyo games, and that is a Tetris game basically. Jesus Christ, it’s so crappy it kills my enthusiasm for a replay, which I was considering all the way up to the end (I was intentionally ignoring the wizard class during my playthrough in order to focus on it for a replay.) So there, that’s my paragraph summary for Baldur’s Gate 3. It hurts that the game sent me off with such disregard for its own story and characters. Now for the detailed review.

2 months ago my sibling got this game, played it for a couple of hours and then spent an entire weekend riffing it. He hated the narrator, hated the characters, found the atmosphere of the game phony and the exploration uninteresting. He disliked how the story is mostly told instead of shown and how nobody can ever shut the fuck up. Meanwhile, on the internet side of things, I’m reading how this game is pathetic, how you can be non-binary, how it focuses on romance and sex and it’s a disgrace to the Baldur’s Gate franchise altogether. After watching an official trailer and all it showed was monsters kissing I decided I would not be playing the game despite enjoying the first Baldur’s Gate a lot. I thought the game was not for me and just forgot about it. Except I didn’t and a week later decided to give it a try, just to see how bad it was.

And the internet was once again wrong. Not entirely, just mostly wrong. Yes you can choose non-binary and give yourself a skin disease in character creation. You can see dicks and tits. This however has literally zero impact on the narrative or gameplay. The romance is there but again it’s not nearly as big as people were saying. There’s a whole lot of stuff to do here other than trying to fuck your companions. They all have their own lives and problems going on that you can explore and know about without the ‘fucking them’ part. In summary, I know why Larian focused so hard on these details of the game when promoting BG3. It was to get the dummies on twitter to talk about the game and make them purchase it. And it worked. They knew talking about how you can choose non-binary in character creation was going to generate social media clout for the dummies. And the internet, being the idiot it is, fell for it. Why would you talk about challenging turn-based combat (this game has it btw)? The Divinity and DnD geeks are going to purchase this game anyways, so why bother.

The media focus on these parts of the game however gave me something very valuable when starting with a new game: ZERO EXPECTATIONS. Because of the whole buzz generated around BG3 and what people were talking about I had pretty much negative expectations for it. I didn’t even think there was going to be a game there, more like a woke walking simulator. Instead I found a game with solid, even challenging classic turn-based encounters. So challenging in fact I had to actually take the time to read the spells and potion ingredients. I realized there IS an actual video game in Baldur’s Gate 3! I was so damn happy about it, being a fan of the first games and a D&D player since AD&D days. I was elated when I actually suffered a TPK on the Goblin camp. It made me so happy I was being forced to play smart in order to survive.

But I wasn’t happy about all aspects of the games right away. Some things bothered me greatly and some things needed getting used to. First, my brother was correct. Characters in Baldur’s Gate 3 won’t shut the fuck up. Not for the first 10 hours at least. They quiet down a little bit after that. It was hard for me getting used to this. I don’t usually play games heavily focused on telling their stories through voice acting. Usually it’s just a block of text. And the narrator voicing the text you can read at the bottom of the screen for yourself was even harder to get used to. I’ve been reading video game fluff for over 30 years now, so you can imagine I can read these things in half a second. The narrator on the other hand is acting and reciting these lines like a troubadour. It took me a while to take a step back and let the narrator do her job. Once I got used to the pacing of a game that is focused on conversations for plot points, it was OK. In fact I even grew fond of the acting. In fact I have to say I’ve never seen such good voice acting all around. Not in cartoons, movies or games. They really went all in on this aspect of it. Even the random animals you can talk to using animal speak spells or potions have excellent voice actors. The cats and several birds in particular have very amusing and endearing one liners. Little by little this game won me over. They knew the voice acting is one of the better parts of their game and relied heavily on it. For example, I had to redo an entire session because of a crash and the same stretch that took me an hour I finished in about 25 minutes, doing everything the same way but skipping the dialogue. Turns out so much of the game itself is just you listening to people talking. I wouldn’t be surprised if my 120 hour run of BG3 has at least 40 or so of me just sitting there listening to people talking about stuff.

Some things I couldn’t get used to however. The first of these is the camera. It’s wonky as hell. It flips and jumps and makes sudden turns that make you click on things by accident. I can’t even begin to count how many times I accidentally clicked on Lae’zel while trying to see a threshold or passageway. The inventory windows are a little bit weird and they have a tendency to show up in inconvenient places and they’re even more inconvenient to drag around the screen. Again, can’t count how many times I accidentally clicked on something else while trying to drag a window around to compare items or whatever. The sellers are also a bit weird. Each character has to deal with the seller individually and it makes it a pain to check and compare for items across all characters. Those are minor issues though and it’s not a big deal. For myself at least.

The bugs did bother me though. And there are so many of them. I’m sure a lot of them must have been ironed out by now. There’s a whole area of the game in my version that is basically broken. Some helmets and things keep jumping from the characters’ heads and float above the character models instead. Several pieces of dialogue repeat themselves if you approach the characters from a less than obvious direction, or won’t play right. The game crashed over a dozen times and in one particular case I lost over an hour of progress. I tend to be quite forgiving towards technical issues like these, so whatever. I just need to download a newer version if I ever play this thing again.

As for the gameplay, it’s a turn-based RPG. For a game that is supposed to be some innovator within the RPG genre, I found the gameplay itself to be same old same old. Yes the animation is fancier now and the characters have one liners and the sound effects are cool but it’s the turn-based RPG we have been playing for decades now. I don’t have a problem with it but it surprised me how standard it is. Then again, this is just 5th edition D&D in video game format. I liked how you get to roll dice for ability checks, though I would think for people who are not into tabletop gaming this must look odd and out of place. Why have a long dice roll animation when we know the result can be had virtually as soon as you click your mouse? Still, being a tabletop gamer myself I approve of this. There are many situations where I just wish the game gave you nat 20s to use in difficult roles instead of rerolls (inspiration). There’s about 5 or 6 roles in BG3 that you need a crit and it pissed me off I had to resort to save scumming to get it. In this too BG3 feels very much like an old game like classic Fallout games and the first Baldur’s Gate where you pretty much had to save scum, get incredibly lucky or die.

Moving on to another aspect of the gameplay I want to talk about: exploration. This is where I’ll start to get into the plot and atmosphere side of things. So let me put a SPOILERS ALERT right here. If you want to experience this game for yourself then stop here. You’ve been warned.

continue…

>>60808
Alright. The exploration of this game is also nothing new. In fact it’s pretty close to how exploration is done in the original Baldur’s Gate. The main thing about this though is the general atmosphere and mood of the places you explore. BG3 locations exist in the Faerûn continent, more specifically western of Faerûn, along the Sword Coast. This area is the most used for D&D games because of its potential for adventure. It’s a dangerous place too, except BG3 fails to really convey any sense of real danger or even a sense of wilderness. I never quite felt like I was exploring the wilderness and ancient temples, it felt more like exploring a mini golf course or a movie set. It’s the same feeling of exploration I get in Zelda games but in Zelda I have a sense it’s on purpose and in Baldur’s Gate 3 I feel like this is mostly an accident. I think the main factor behind this is because every single place you can explore, there lies some scripted event for you. Everywhere you go there are boulders and trees and rocks that block your way, even though you have teleport and fly and magically enhanced jumps. It makes no sense to be this restricted to open road but the game requires to railroad your exploration severely so you get these script events sitting there for, hopefully in order. So instead of getting the feeling of exploration, you get the feeling you’re looking for a particular store in the shopping mall. There’s very little sense of danger or mystery. It pretty much feels connect the dots.

There’s still fun to be had with the exploration but it quickly turns from “what’s out there?” to “what exposition dump is scripted for me at the end of this road?”. My sibling pretty much hated this and I’m guessing a number of people would be bothered by it as well. I was more prone to accept this for a few reasons. First, I’ve explored these areas in the past the way they were meant to be explored: the tabletop, classic RPG experience. I read the books and played lots of games in the Forgotten Realms setting so I was curious to know how a video game released in the current year would handle it. My brother on the other hand has no particular interest in D&D and was experiencing BG3 as a video game first and foremost. He compared it with the exploration in the Elden Ring which he says is infinitely better. Since I have a connection with these locations prior to this game it was fun for me to “explore” them. Also I didn’t play Elden Ring.

The graphics are another reason for this lack of grit. Everything feels too pristine, shiny, movie set props. Even the cobwebs look like cotton candy. The whole appearance of the game feels a little bit toothless and lacking in grit is what I’m saying. This is not a BG3 issue alone, I felt that way with video games like Pathfinder.

And finally we have the story itself. It’s a game pretty much focused on telling a story. So is it any good? Sorta. The main plot, again, for a game said to be revolutionary, is pretty milquetoast when you really look for what it is: A big baddie trying to take over the world. Not exactly brilliant, is it? Are there some interesting plot twists here and there? Yes, there are interesting moments in there, but it’s not revolutionary in any shape or form. But then again, BG3 doesn’t seem to care all that much about its main plot (something that really fucks up the ending, but more of that later), but instead is focus on the personal stories of your companions and here’s where I have problems with the story. It’s virtually THE SAME STORY for every.single.companion. To the point I was laughing out loud how ridiculous it got.

So we have Shadowheart. She’s rebelling against her Goddess. We have Lae’zel. She’s rebelling against her Goddess. We have Gale. He’s rebelling against her Goddess. We have Astarion. He’s rebelling against his soon-to-become-a-god vampire master. We have the Emperor. He’s rebelling against his basically-a-God Netherbrain. We have Halsin. He’s trying to rebuild his grove. Oh. OK. Halsin gets a pass I guess. It was hilarious to see the same story unfolding over and over and over again. Seriously? A story driven game and they couldn’t come up with something a little different for each of the main characters? It had to be the same fucking story for everybody? Fucking LOL man.

There’s this anti-god agenda that REALLY, REALLY trumps everything else in the story. It’s like the writers completely forgot the Gods in D&D are an actual thing that exists with actual powers and stuff. Instead we get these toothless, sleazy Gods made in order for the characters to appear “cool” and “rebels breaking free from tyranny and oppression”. Yeah, don’t make me laugh, BG3. These are lvl 4 characters, they’re not breaking free of SHIT. If I was DMing this I would make sure to show the players just how out of touch this plotline is with the actual tabletop game, but whatever. For one all the magic would be basically gone. All clerics would lose their powers, all paladins would become mere fighters. This is what you would get for fucking with Gods in an actual D&D game, but these milquetoast Gods is all the writers could come up with so we’re rolling with it I guess. And when you get a good, helpful Goddess in the game (Selune) she’s severely handwaved and ignored, despite being a major aspect for Shadowrun down the line. Again, fucking whatever, I just went with it.

Since all the characters’ plotlines are basically the same and the major plotline is “kill the big baddie” there’s not all that much to talk about, instead I want to mention a few things the game did get right in my opinion in regards to the flavor of these stories at least. First the plotline with Astarion, easily the best one. Not only is the actor probably the best one in an already excellent cast, the game nailed for me the general atmosphere of vampiric decadence and how gay vampires are in general. This is an impression I always had about vampires since reading Dracula and Anne Rice novels like Interview with a Vampire. They’re just incredibly gay and decadent. And I don’t mean necessarily sexual, Dracula has 3 wives after all, but their lust for human blood really puts them in this “sensual area” of interaction where they need to basically give you the kiss of death in order to feed, and they’re usually very urban libertine types, prone to unusual almost-sexual and straight up sexual behavior. I gotta say this game really got it and I was happy to witness I’m not the only one that feels vampires should have that atmosphere about them. Astarion is a character that nailed these particular aspects of vampires for me and it made me quite happy to watch it unfold, however cliched and predictable his plotline is. When we finally get to Cazador there’s one of the gayest, most vampiric scenes I’ve ever witnessed in a video game and it was great, just perfect.

As for Lae’zel I mostly liked how she’s very much how I imagine Githyankis to sound and behave (when they’re not outright fucked up and evil) and it was nice we got a more noble character from a race that is basically a bunch of raiders. It’s cool they saw that potential there but at the same time this has been done before so, meh. Meh also goes for every other character. Didn’t care at all about Gale (a lvl1 nobody character that happens to be the lover of the Goddess of Magic? lolnope). He’s mostly there so Elminster can be inserted here and there in the story but the whole thing including Elminster himself are pretty much shoehorned in there without any narrative grace or taste. It’s mostly pointless, it goes nowhere and the guy playing Elminster is trying too hard to sound like Gandalf. I know Elminster is just a clone of Gandalf but come on. They have an Aasimar there too but the necromancer keeping her in captivity is way more interesting than her (and you have to kill him, which sucks.)

There’s plenty of side characters with better stories than the main ones, because at least their plot is different from the ‘rebel against the gods’ thing. The whole Tiefling situation there is cool, I mostly enjoyed anything related to Raphael and Hope as well. Barcus has a really nice friendship story that is better than the main romances that you can engage with the main characters. Then you have Shadowheart and the only thing that caught my attention there was how her head model is one of the most attractive 3D models I’ve ever seen in a video game. She looks stunning, especially with the dark hair. As far as her story goes however it’s pretty run-of-the-mill. There’s also a dog you find in act I with a very endearing little tale, again, better than some of the stuff written for the main characters. I mostly enjoyed the depiction of the Goblinoids and most monsters. I’ve been looking at illustrations for these creatures since the second edition and it didn’t disappoint.

continue….

>>60808
>>60809
Be that as it may, despite all the lack of grit, the predictable plot line, the lack of variation, I was enjoying myself. D&D is part of my childhood, everything has an endearing air to me, even when I disagree with what they’re doing. So I kept playing. It’s not a bad game. Main encounters are challenging, there are tons of weapons, scrolls, objects, potions, ingredients, food and wine and gadgets to collect, read about and use. So after over a 100 hours of this and over two months bonding with the characters and locations, you reach the end. And the ending for Baldur’s Gate 3 is really god damned awful. The worst part of the game hands down.

It’s about 30 seconds long, the main characters get a single line or none at all, no epilogue, barely any closing or care. Rushed out the door with complete disregard for the story, the very effort that went in the rest of the game and the player himself. It’s so bad it’s obviously a scheduling thing. It’s crystal clear they had no time to finish this game properly. Several stories that seem to be pointing to a certain culmination and having their loose ties resolved never happen. No epilogue, nothing. You spend the whole game politicking and solving people’s problems in order to make them your allies and none of them show up and it doesn’t really matter after all. “Thanks to you the whole continent of Faerun is safe, good bye now” THE END. Wow. It almost made me sad. I would be happier with a block of text with a little bit more enthusiasm than this poorly made 30 seconds of pointless small talk. It really undermines the rest of the game when the ending is this fucking bad.

To add to that ending there’s also the problem of how boring the last few hours of gameplay got leading to it. They tried to make epic looking battles in turn-based combat. The mistake was putting a lot of enemies to fight against you in order to give a sense of menace. And you know what happens when you have 20+ enemies in a turn-based combat game? You move your guys and then are forced to watch as the game plays with itself, moving 20+ fucking units around the field for 5 minutes at a time. What a terrible idea that is. I almost gave up and switched to easy just to make things quicker but persevered because I felt like I wanted to “deserve” the ending. Then the ending rolls and it’s a disgrace. Then 2 hours of credit rolls.

So yeah despite all these problems, all in all I enjoyed it. I think it’s harder to enjoy this if you don’t have a previous connection to the D&D franchise and Forgotten Realms, if you don’t know who Elminster is or what an Illithid is. Sure the game will explain all those things to you but you don’t have any previous attachment to any of that, so it won’t be as important or endearing to you.

>>60808
you can't give a game a negative review when you end up spending over a hundred hours on it. doing so means you either don't value your own time, you are just dumb, or lying, or some combination

glad I skipped BG3 and Starfield
Armored Core 6 didn't disappoint, it's pure gameplay and has some kino moments. I think it will game of the year.

>>60813
I always get stuck in Armored Core games.
I think I would have more fun if I actually read a guide or something for them. There is something I just am not getting about how you are supposed to build/modify your mech for encounters that I never wrap my head around.

That said I am in no hurry to play 6.
Now if a new proper front mission game came out I would be hyped.

>>60812
Some games you want to see through to the end even if you dislike them. I have very mixed feelings towards Starfield after playing it for 50 hours, I'll probably end up putting 200+ hours into it because I'm interested in fully exploring it before moving on.

>>60815
fair enough, i probably just overreacted to seeing your initial underwhelming review. i couldn't read it since i don't want spoilers but i did just see at the end you said you enjoyed it.

100%ed Robot Daycare.
It's a free visual novel so barely a game, and pretty short only taking me 2 and a half hours to do/see everything.

The good end was a lot better written then the bad end imo. Story overall had a lots of interpersonal drama, which isn't exactly to my taste, but the game being short and having a cute robot kid helped.
Since it's both free and short I recommend it.
If it was longer or cost money I probably wouldn't.
It's fine for what it is but I am not exactly longing for more.

>>60808
>>60809
>>60810

Well put, high level wizard.
I was the opposite of you - I was hyped as hell and had expected this game to be perfect everything. Foolish, I know, but I really wanted it to be the best rpg ever. But it wasn't.
Act 1 was great, act 2 was too linear and I didn't like certain things, however, the atmosphere was thick, macabre and enjoyable. The ending of Act 2 was so tense, so epic, so good.
And then Act 3 happens. This is where the game turns to shit, as you have already said. Companions go mute, quests go nowhere, antagonists become irrelevant. Even the boss fights with them were awful. And in general it was clunky, buggy mess with CUT CONTENT written all over it. No Upper City! Despite them showcasing and boasting about it one month before the release!
And the ending just killed me. I sat there in shock and disbelief. This is it? Jesus fucking christ, they didn't even put the ending slides - could even write epilogues. WRITE. It is not that hard to write BG2TOB like epilogues, at least for the main characters. Holy fuck.
The other thing I absolutely, vehemently despised was the Emperor. I hated that thing and the whole 'think like a mindflayer' shit. what a load of crap. They tried to make 'dramatic' choice and they failed miserably. It was just shit.
However, if they aren't complete morons, they will fix at least some parts of the game in a year or two with in some sort of an enhanced edition, so the hope yet exists. the first, most fun playthrough was ruined though.

>>60814
It's cool bro you don't need to be insecure about having play every game in the series to enjoy it
6 was my first armored core game and I liked it a lot but I have absolutely no interest in the previous games

>>60808
>>60809
>>60810
I'll play it eventually but I'm wary about trying BG3, the huge approval from normalfags and braindead critics for a turn based D&D RPG is suspicious to me. The reaction doesn't fit the game and something funny is going on.

>>60818
It's not foolish to want the game to be amazing. I wish this game would be perfect myself, everybody would win. The publishers, the players and the RPG genre in general. If only they didn't fuck up the ending so bad. The ending is the last thing you see, kinda important. It sours the experience when the good bye is so half-hearted but whatever. I moved heaven and earth for Shadowheart during my playthrough just to make her happy and then her ending is a shitty as fuck one line joke. I literally hit my head against the table when I saw it I was so disappointed.

I didn't even think the third act THAT bad. It does feel completely out of place though, to have this party who visited all the dangerous places and defeated all these super evil super powerful creatures suddenly be working as pest control for the chef of a local restaurant. What held the third act for me was the whole thing with Astarion and Cazador. They really brought that to a climax once inside the city. If only the rest of the stories and specially the main plot had the same momentum and conclusion inside Baldur's Gate as that, it would've been perfect. Tall order I guess.

The Emperor thing. Yeah. I decided to side with the Githyanki right from the beginning so I wasn't even paying that much attention about the shit he was throwing at you during the whole ordeal. It was a very easy decision for me when it came to it.

>>60824
I guess it's what I said. They put non-binary in there in character creation and now the dummies feel like they have to nod and praise this game to appear cool or whatever. Like, you can choose female but you can still pick the male body model. The publishers obviously focused on that during marketing to get the dummies talking. It has ZERO impact on the game itself. The gender doesn't even show up on the stats or anything. It was purely a marketing ploy and it obviously worked. Also you have to remember D&D had a huge surge in popularity recently because of Critical Roll. Dummies now like to talk about DnD, despite never playing it and not even knowing what it is. There's a bunch of new players now on roll20 showing up for games and then disappearing. My last 2 5e games there ended up with the casuals playing for 2 weeks and disappearing, probably because they foolishly thought the game was going to be like a Critical Role episode, which is not at all the case.

The fact is they're not even playing the video game, just buying it and talking about it. Looking at steam stats, less than half of people who bought it even bothered to complete the first act. They barely touched the thing. Only 8% finished the game at all, and that's counting the ones finishing on braindead easy. Less than 1% finished on hard.

So yeah, they buy it, don't play it and praise it. BG3 is a solid, classic (if not downright standard, gameplay-wise) turn-based rpg. It reminds me of a nice and classic chocolate cake. The only issue really is the cherry on top being rotten (the ending). But you won't throw the entire cake away just because of a foul cherry, you just try to forget the cherry exists.

>>60825
Have you played an evil playthrough? I heard is is so much worse. You lose shitton and gain nothing. Minthara, the only reason to play evil, has zero content. She's bugged so much they can't fix her in two large patches.
I was depressed after beating that game. I did immerse myself and I did like being my character only to be screwed over by the endings. No mater what you choose, no matter how many worms you put inside of you - nothing matters. It felt like ME3 all over.

>>60808
>>60809
This post reads like the script for one of these pretentious Youtube essays that morons watch because they're too stupid to form their own opinions. Whoever wrote all of this probably spent most of his time watching that trash because he can only speak with buzzwords.

So when baldur's gate came out I decided I wanted to play it, but then I thought it was probably going to be full of modern game stuff I don't like, so I decided to play BG1 instead, but then decided that if I was going to play BG1, I'd rather play Icewind Dale, which is another infinity engine game from that era, but I remember liking it more, for 2 reasons, basically, first is because I prefer the winter theme this game has, and second because it gives you full control over the creation of your party, allowing you to play the game however you like.
The game is just great, maybe the plot is not as fleshed out as baldur's gate but the setting, music and graphics more than make up for it, I love the real-time pausable gameplay too. I don't know, it was just a good time, my only problem is with some parts of the expansion, half the time it feels like just a straight hallway filled with enemies, as braindead as they come, and it has a few moments where it locks you in a room with no exit and a shitload of enemies, not giving you much choice but to fight, it's still not a big deal and it doesn't affect the base game at all

>>60826
I haven't. My first and only play through so far was with a goody two shoes paladin. I did start another run yesterday to explore the wizard class and follow Karlach's story closely since I ignored her completely the first time around. Turns out, at least so far, her story is pretty close to the rest of the side plots. She's rebelling against authority like every character in the roster except Halsim and she has a mcguffin inside of her, so it's the Gale thing again. Not sure if I'm going to continue or not but I'll at least finish the first act again, which is probably my favorite part anyway.

>No mater what you choose, no matter how many worms you put inside of you - nothing matters.
Hah! For me it was the opposite. I never even used the illithid influence for the easy ability check rolls fearing they were going to impact my character and make him fall to the dark side. Same thing with the bottled tadpoles, I didn't put them inside my pack, thinking this would affect the story. Yeah, turns out nothing really matters lol

Just finished Luigi's Mansion. This game is just fun, I really like exploring the mansion, it's like a really casual take on resident evil 1. All the ghosts are unique and they all have their gimmicks.
It's a pretty easy game, only the final boss gave me some semblance of trouble, of course I wasn't expecting it to be hard, and I'm playing armored core vi on the side, which is kicking my ass, so I needed an easier game. Also pretty short, wish it was a bit longer.
Might try the third game later, sadly the second game doesn't work on the emulator.

>>60834
I love this game so much.

>>60834
I was trying to play this and 100% it, but I stopped because the damn gym ghost is so hard to succ in your first try. I ended up giving up. However, when I was a kid, I was very close to the end. The game's nice and fun, but like a lot of Nintendo games in the Gamecube era, it's difficult / annoying to 100%.

>>60829
Karlach is the character they fucked over the most. She has no good ending and either dies or cucks you and goes to hell with Wyll, since it's not possible to fix her engine.

I've played Starfield for 150 hours and have seen most of what the game has to offer.

The biggest difference you'll notice compared to previous Bethesda titles is how disjointed it feels. No longer is the game entirely on one big coherent map, you have to fast travel with your ship everywhere. It hurts the immersion because you can't talk everywhere, but on the plus side it does give the game a bigger variety of locations.

The procgen stuff is okay in my opinion, I had fun landing on different planets, scanning minerals and aliens, clearing out some dungeons and then leaving when I got bored. I saw a couple of repeating locations not many. A vehicle option would be nice because the locations are far away from each other.The combat is a decent shooter, it's main downside being a lack of enemy variety. Also the gore and dismemberment from Fallout 4 is gone. The ship building and ship combat is reasonably fun when you get into it.

There main quest and factions are alright, better than the Skyrim faction questslines I'd say but nothing that will blow your mind. There are 4 main companions involved with the main quest who are probably the best companions Bethesda has ever written, they actually have good voice acting and decent writing, a large amount of reactivity in terms of commenting on quests you're doing or places you visit. The other followers are basically just Skyrim tier guys to fill out your crew. There's a lot of timewasting fetch quests where you have to just fast travel somewhere to pick something up, fast travel again and hand the item to an NPC. Previous Bethesda titles also had fetch quests but you could turn them into a sort of grand adventure if you were playing without fast travel and walked everywhere, you can't do this in Starfield so it's just loading screen filler.

In terms of roleplaying it's a minor improvement over Fallout 4. No voiced protagonist and you're not forced into any set background. Can choose some nifty traits to customize your character (like your parents being in the game or having the Adoring Fan from Oblivion join you as a companion). Main downsides are a lack of reactivity in quests and a truly obnoxious number of essential NPCs, this has been an increasing problem in Bethesda games since Oblivion and it's kind of reached an intolerable level in Starfield. Someone needs to convince Todd Howard to respect player choice and let us murder people in TES VI. Skill system is okay, not hugely balanced in that some perks are WAY more powerful than others but it's reasonably open ended to let you build your character how you want. You also have to perform little challenges to unlock the perks which ranged from fun to rather irritating.

The lore is lazy and mostly just feels like a more boring, sanitized version of Fallout in a space setting. They tease this huge backstory about mechs being used in a historical war between the two big factions, we even get explore old factories where these mechs were built but never get to pilot or even fight one. It's like Bethesda took the laziest, most boring options with the worldbuilding.

If you like Bethesda games and want to play one with a space setting Starfield is worth playing, but go in with low expectations because it doesn't really fix the problems of their previous games and has new ones thrown into the mix due to its different structure of taking place of hundreds on planets rather than one continuous world. DLC and mods could make the game a lot better depending on the level of support it recieves.

>>60841
yeah i'm really disappointed in this game. the distances between random generated places on the planet is too far to comfortably explore, you spend like 5 minutes running in a straight line every single time. the base building serves no purpose, spaceship combat isn't fun, space travel is annoying, everything to do with space ships is lame, all the starting perks aside from the background story ones are pretty much worthless, even on max difficulty enemies are pathetically weak, you can rarely ever make decisions in quests, the lockpicking minigame is aids, picking up a hamburger on accident results in the entire city picking up their weapons and firing at you, the npc crowds in this game do nothing at all, npcs dont seem to have schedules (like close shop, go to bed, walk around town) and the world feels lifeless and artificial, succubi rule the organizations, fight alongside men, and there's a 50% chance that someone's race is some flavor of brown

>>60841
If you want to know why the game is this bad, you should watch the credits. 95% of the devs are pajeets and other street shitters, basically, cheap laborers with no passion for what they do. I quit after getting the ship and never looked back. It is one of the worst AAA games I've ever seen. Not to mention, it has 1070 in minimum requirements while looking just like F4. It is crazy, Todd is a money hungry lunatic who doesn't give a shit at this point.

>>60902
Did you read his review? It's pretty positive and he mentions multiple times how it's better than previous Bethesda titles in several key areas.

Armored Core won. I had no interest in either BG3 or Starfield but now that even normies see them as flops the only game that stands out this year is AC6. I think it'll win GOTY this year kind of like when Sekiro won in 2019 over a bunch of AA titles.

>>60904
>I think it'll win GOTY this year
If you mean at TGA then Baldur's Gate 3 and Tears of the Kingdom are the only real contenders

>>60904
it won't win because it's not an open world game in which you have to sink 200 hours to beat, normalfags today seem to think the amount of time you played a game is the only thing that matters, I hope you're right because it is a better game in my opinion
>>60905
I'd say starfield too

>>60905
They might be in the pool for GOTY but I doubt they will win
>>60908
>it won't win
It will since it has a better story+gameplay than Starfield, BG3, and TOtK

Finished Quake again. Just playing the same games over and over and over again.

I just finished Super Meat Boy Forever well at least the main story it's not as good as the original but it's still an alright game.An autorunner isn't what I would have gone with but if you can look past that it's a solid platformer.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder
I 100% completed it before launch and thoroughly enjoyed it. I've never been especially impressed by 2D mario, so it became my favourite of those by default.

Finished Diablo II again, but this time it was version 1.0, I found the old CDs laying around somewhere and figured I had to beat it since I never had.
It's like a whole different game, rare items are actually useful and you don't just spend the entire game hunting for runes, it's also a bit broken, beat it with whirlwind barbarian at level 45 (that's a level you have halfway through the game, usually)
It also feels much more atmospheric for some reason, closer to diablo 1, I feel like act 5 is a huge change of feel from the original game.

Talos Principle 2

Don't care too much about the philosophy, but the puzzles were neat and a great sequel to the first game. Way too much walking though

Would recommend though if you like 3D puzzle games

>>61036
I really wanted to play that game because I loved TP1 but it's like 50 fucking gbs, what's up with that

>>61038
I bet the bulk of it is uncompressed audio.
That is usually the culprit.
Even UHD textures and a bloted as fuck custom engine don't take up that much space even if it's a large game.
It's not compressing the audio that turns a 10 gig game into a 50 gig game.
Shit is dumb because most people play using shit speakers and headsets so barely notice the difference.

Just finished RE1: Directors Cut as Jill. Fairly sure I got the bad ending though, but I don't think I care enough to replay it. No intention of playing 2 or 3 either. I've got my fill of this genre.

The best word I can use to describe it is "fine". It's not bad, it's not great, it's just "fine". The game gives you enough ammo to kill almost everything in the game (which is good because half of it seems to be in tight corridors and rooms)

I did try RE1 Remake a few years ago and I disliked it. Inventory was always full of garbage, zombies regenerating (unless you keep backtracking so you can burn them) and other crap I just didn't care for. The original felt much less tedious

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley

I didn't really do my research on this one and it bit me in the ass.
Turns out it's technically not complete yet. Only the first two ep. come out and most of the branching paths end on a cliffhanger.
Checked out the forums and it's supposed to be 4 parts in total and at least a few months before part 3 is out.

I WANT IT NOW!
For a walk and talk game with very light puzzling it's actually really good. The story, the tone, the fucked up collection of characters, and the humor, I love it all and want more.
But if I knew it was incomplete I would have held off until it was finished before playing it.

It probably won't be finished until next year, and that's if things go smoothly. If something goes really wrong then it might not finish at all.


Another "game" I completed tonight was Locke(d).
It's was a mysterious VN that I went into blind.
It's very short, has no branching paths or alternative endings, and no meaningful choices.
Basically it's just the author talking at you, and it thinks it's deeper then it really is.
Was honestly just bored by it.

Don't wizzies finish games anymore?

Here's a couple I beat, both are shin megami tensei tactical games, I started them at the same time just to compare, one is the first tactical megaten, the other one is the last (not counting persona 5 tactica or that fire emblem crossover)

>Majin Tensei
It's sort of a weird game if you consider latter releases and, while I appreciate the effort put into it, it really shows its age. The game went more for a fire emblem style, but instead of a rock-paper-scissors system they opted for a race-based thing in which each race of demon is vulnerable to certain races (or magic element) and almost immune to other races, this makes the game unnecessarily complex in my opinion, thankfully the developer agreed with me and added an in-game chart with weaknesses, or you could just go by the rule of thumb that flying demons hurt other flying demons and ground demons hurt other ground demons, doesn't work for every single case, but at least you know for sure ground demons NEVER hurt flying demons. Speaking of demons, there are quite a bunch, you recruit them in traditional megaten fashion and it's really easy, there are only 2 dialogue options and sometimes the right option is pretty obvious. It's good that it's so easy to recruit because the fusion system fucking blows, more often than not the resulting demon will be worse than either of the two demons you're fusing, also you have to pick each one individualy before it shows you what you're fusing so it's tedious and useless, I just stopped fusing demons altogether and still had plenty of demons to fight. This is not the only tedious thing in the game, there are missions that are a slog to get through, HUGE maps, with a lot of enemies and tiles that keep spawning demons you have to kill to finish the mission, and it just takes forever, they're not particularly hard, they just take forever, some maps are in a desert setting, in which you can only move one or two tiles per turn, this is insane, sure you could use flying units, but they're only good for other flying units, so yeah, it's just a pain in the ass. Some other maps work as dungeons and some use teleporting pods you have to blindly step in and it's just trial and error until you find your way through a dungeon, not a fun time.
The plot is the usual megaten fare of word went to shit and you have to kill satan to save it, in this game instead of having the traditional law-neutral-chaos routes you have a bad, good and 'true' ending, I got the good ending because I knew how to avoid the bad ending, but for the true ending they require you to be some sort of clairvoyant, there are some maps you have to play in certain order, some of them you have to play them multiple times (they don't tell you this, of course), so I'm satisfied with the ending I got, I can't be bothered.
Presentation-wise, it's great, great graphics and music, the monster designs are great too, I just love this era of megaten.
In conclussion, it was a good game, with some weird mechanics that got too tedious way too often for my taste.

>Devil Survivor 2
Ok so now we went to the opposite side. While I found some scenarios in the other game way too long, in this game each map is small and missions are quick, in fact you could finish some of them in one or two turns if you play your cards right. There's no recruiting now, instead you get an auction house in which you buy demons with the money you make in missions, kinda weird but it works well enough. Fusion now is way more streamlined, you can see what you're fusing before picking two demons, you could also search by result, which is insane, you could even argue it makes the fusions too easy, but I don't mind.
Now, you may think these changes make the game easier, but I think this game is actually more difficult, at least in the high difficulty setting.
The presentation now is 100% anime, they got the guy from Durarara! to design the characters and it could almost pass for a persona game, this game is as persona as smt gets. I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing, I'm just describing it, although I do preffer stuff like Strange Journey personally. Music is also great but since it's a portable game you can tell it wasn't their main focus.
The game is divided by days and each day there is a new monster attacking Japan, these monsters remind me a lot of the evangelion angels, in fact there is a moment I feel it's directly rippef off eva, but it's a cool concept I guess, each monster is named after one of the ursa major stars so it's also good for learning astronomy, I guess? They never say why the ursa major and don't go very deep into this, it's a shame, feels a bit half backed.
Anyway, it's a good game if you don't mind the personification of smt, I personally had a great time and will do all endings in ng+, speaking of which ng+ feels pretty meager, not really a lot of cool post game stuff and you have to kinda know what you're doing to unlock things.
Anyway, I enjoyed both games, and I know it's not fair to compare two games that are like 20 years appart, but I can't help it since I decided to play them at the same time, there is a Majin Tensei II I hear is way better, gonna have to try it to see.

>>61212
>Don't wizzies finish games anymore?
Been playing games that don't have easily defined endings.
Like playing that tony hawk remake/remaster.
Or playing CS2.
I probably only "finish" games like 6 or 7 times a year.

>>61216
I get you, been playing a lot of non-beatable games lately

Yesterday I finished Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered. This is going to be a long, convoluted and filled with spoilers review, so if you want to experience this game for yourself, don’t read this post beyond this paragraph. I’ll just say if you like Spider-Man, you’ll like this game a lot. OK, now to the review.

This must be the ultimate game for casual gamers. It requires absolutely no thinking whatsoever. Every mission is clearly marked on the map. You have a special scanner that highlights everywhere you need to go, everything you need to do, interaction with every single object is literally hit F and the game doesn’t even let you read plot exposition by yourself. When you open a document in-game that gives you plot exposition, the voice actor gives a summary of the whole thing in case you’re not literate, which I honestly found completely hilarious. Every aspect of this game is twice digested and I think I’ve never seen a game doing this amount of hand-holding, it was quite an experience to play an ultra polished game for the cool gamers™ out there as I don’t usually play big studio games unless it’s a franchise I’ve been following for a very long time like Fallout or Zelda.

Yet I played this one because it’s Spider-Man. I’ve been following the comics since childhood. I am completely out of the loop as far as SM games go though, the last one I played was the 2000 Neversoft’s Spider-Man N64 port, originally a PS1 game and I had good fun with that. I mention this game because it’ll be relevant to this review. I’ll divide the game in a few parts and comment on each section.

Puzzles 1/10 - I’ll start with this one because it’s arguably the worst part. There are 3 types of puzzles in this game but all of them are a slight variation of the shape matching toy for kids. It’s not even in-game, you have to access it on a separate screen, it feels straight out of Google Play for your Android phone. The developers knew this was complete and utter busy work so they included an option to skip all the puzzles and I think they were so painfully aware of how bad this was because they don’t even have the heart to take away the XP you would get from solving them. You get the XP even if you skip them. It’s a way for the game to tell you it’s sorry I guess.

Combat 6/10 - Amazing how combat in Spider-Man games has not changed in 20 years. The fights are pretty much the same as Neversoft’s Spider-Man. You get close to the enemy, you click to dish out punishment until the enemy dies. Sometimes you have to hit a button to dodge. You get several gadgets in this game but they all make you feel more like Batman using a bunch of toys than Spider-Man. Besides, you have to select different toys with the mouse and doing that kills the rhythm of the fights, so I barely used them. You don’t need it anyways, most fights are easy enough. The difficulty is in the number of foes you have going at a single fight, it’s not rare to have a literal mob all trying to hit you at once and it felt satisfying to dodge all of them.

It is a completely basic and tired formula but at least the game nailed the formula correctly. The animation is also pretty polished. Hitting and dodging enemies felt pretty good for the most part, even though there’s like only 4 types of enemies for the entire game. A guy that tries to punch you. A guy that tries to shoot you, a guy that tries to hit you with a blunt object and a guy that flies around. Getting close and clicking away will solve 90% of your problems.
Traversal 8/10 - This is the reason why I decided to play this game to begin with. Swinging around the city feels amazing in this game. They really got it right I think. You really feel the level of freedom you get when you’re Spider-Man. Manhattan looks very polished and cool and I quite enjoyed the level of details it went into it. One thing I loved is the fact you can actually see inside people’s apartments. They are not all unique of course but there are many types. Office, bedroom, living room, etc. I think this part of the game works specially if you live in a city and you get periodically stuck in traffic. It’s almost depressing experiencing the city as Spider-Man in this game and knowing you’ll never come close to feeling like that in real life. It’s that good, at least in my opinion.

The main problem with traversal in this game is how it has a low cap to energy so it doesn’t matter how much energy you give Spider-Man, he’ll always go at about the same velocity. For example if you jump from a very tall building, conservation of energy dictates that when he swings back up he’ll have a lot of stored energy and will go pretty damn high and fast. But it doesn’t work that way, there’s a cap on his speed and how high he will go so jumping from a 30 story building or the Empire State Building will give you the same energy which is quite ridiculous. He reaches terminal velocity jumping from only 10 meters high. I know this is probably an engine limitation but it does reduce the fun a lot.

Open World stuff 6/10 - You have a good looking Manhattan to play around but there’s not a lot to do. The side missions are few and the stuff to collect is also very limited. There’s pretty much only two things to collect: 50 backpacks and take 50 pictures from tourist sights and that’s it. I can imagine tons of little side quests you could do in this world like delivering pizzas (since they obviously love the movies and ripped several scenes from them, a pizza delivery repeatable mission would be a nice touch) collecting comic books issues, finding SM graffiti, the list goes on.

The repeatable missions are either go here, beat waves of identical enemies, sneak missions or chase the drone. And they’re fine for what they are but, again, this open world environment looks so good, it deserved a lot more. Also it’s funny how the developers always assume casual play throughout the game. In between main missions, Peter Parker always ends his lines with “Better go do some spidey things” but I had always pretty much everything there was to do as soon as it became available so there was no spidey things left to do in between the main plot missions. I guess people are not into collectathons anymore but it was not nearly enough to scratch that itch in my case.

Story 10/10 - And here’s where this game gained my uttermost respect. Now everybody has seen this happening before. A big studio gets a license to make a video game/movie/series/whatever and they have writers there that don't give a flying shit about the material. They don’t care about those characters at all so they go to what is popular and safe. I’ve seen this done to Spider-Man many times. A bunch of disinterested writers get their hands on Spider-Man, what do they do? They make a SM origin story and then proceed to use Venon asap. Happens all the time.

Not here though. I can tell somebody in that team of writers cared. Somebody in there loves and understands Spider-Man so we get this pretty good plotline exploring Dr. Otto. Only someone who understands the world of Spider-Man would make a move like that and whoever it was has my appreciation. Not only Oc is the most interesting villain of all the great villains SM has (you would have to read the comics to know) his version here is damn perfect. In fact I empathize with the doc here more than any of the other characters. And then they also made a pretty damn enticing Wraith narrative as well. For a first game! Bold move.The DLCs are less interesting but not bad, either.

Music ?/10 - Since I was looking for a slice of life Spider-Man experience (just web around the city pretty much) and turned the music off. The music is this grandiose symphonic stuff that was really trying to make everything in the game this tremendous, heroic thing and I just wanted to relax and swing around buildings. It’s probably fine.

Screwball 10/10 - I found it hilarious how there’s a bunch of kids complaining about Screwball on Steam reviews when the character is a representation of their generation. So yeah, for causing that reaction she’s alright in my book.

Mary Jane 0/10 - Why would developers do this I’ll never understand. You get several missions in this game that you have to play as Mary Jane. It’s the sneak in and out sections and they’re excruciatingly boring. Why the hell would anyone want to play as slow Mary Jane when we could be Spider-Man? I don’t get it. And it also ruins the enemies since they’re shown to be upstaged by not at all powerful Mary Jane. There are also missions like that that you play as Miles Morales, a SM I never cared about.

So all in all I love playing through this. It took me 4 days to 100% everything. Now for people that play a lot of games, this might not be interesting at all. I’ve read plenty of reviews saying this is just an Arkham’s Asylum game but with Spider-Man and worse gadgets which is most likely true. I’ve never played any Arkham’s Asylum though and SM has a definite advantage over those games and that is sunlight. Gotham looks gloomy and I have enough of self made gloom myself.

If you like Spider-Man, this is definitely something you’ll enjoy a lot. Just a heads up, the plotlines don’t follow exactly as the comics so don’t expect that. I feel like I have to say this because some people get pissed when that happens. If you like casual games on top of liking Spider-Man, this is definitely for you. It’s a very basic but solid beat’em up. If you don’t care about Spider-Man and you like to think for yourself when playing games, yeah, this can be safely ignored. There’s nothing in here for you.

Some more pictures. There's a picture mode that removed the HUD but I only realized it after a while.

RoboCop is one of the best games I’ve ever played in a very long time. Maybe it’s in my top 10 favorite games of all time, which is strange because this game has a number of shortcomings, probably due to being a small team with limited budget. Yet there’s so much love poured into every detail of this game it’s hard to not overlook its faults. I first realized I was completely captivated by Rogue City when I went to visit a k-mart around the corner just so I could browse the wares. Ice Creams, several soda brands, frozen pizzas and so on. The world of this game is rather small but the developers clearly love the source material and nailed every single aspect of Robocop and the city he lives in, perfectly capturing the visuals and atmosphere of those movies. Even if you don’t care about RoboCop (I watched the movies once but I’m not particularly fond of them) you can tell people behind this cared a lot about getting this thing right.

I began playing Rogue City expecting a mindless, action-focused FPS (that's what I got it in the first place) and ended up getting a thoughtful plot, endearing characters and even some decently put together RPG elements to go along with the FPS sections. I think the reason I like this game so much is because I never experienced so many depressing, moving, thoughtful and hilarious moments in such a small package. They managed to put in a whole lot in that small portion of Detroit you walk around and serve. Also RoboCop himself is a great character and he’s even more relatable and interesting than in the movies. I guess because there’s a lot more going on around here with all the little side stories you can play out and affect your colleagues and friends it’s pretty damn great. Dialogue is hilarious and the humor rings very true to the source material but it’s even better. Lots of lines here I would like to memorize and say to myself from time to time. At the same time the city itself is depressing as hell. It gives for a nice bittersweet experience.

Gameplay wise, I really felt like RoboCop. You move pretty much like you would expect to move as Robocop. You are a walking tank and this FPS is unique in that regard. You’ll be getting shot A LOT. It’s very hard to avoid damage in this game. I mean you’re huge, shiny and there are tons of enemies shooting at you. You’ll be getting shot but that’s part of the experience. Your firearm has a blank check for ammo so you can shoot everyone to your heart’s content and it does feel like you're giving quite a punch with the sound, animation and recoil. Some enemies are a little spongy though.

The only real problem with this game is that there’s no manual saving and saving points are far in between sometimes. I had to redo a few missions because of this but it bothered me none since I plan to replay this game anyways but I can see becoming a problem for some, maybe most people. Another problem is how small the open world section of the game is. It feels a little cramped and tiny but then again, I feel like this was due to budget and limited number of people working on the game. However they more than make up for it by telling a captivating story and making the best use of the limited number of characters you meet.

Funny thing is I don’t even care for FPS games. Only one I actually like is Quake. This one though is very special to me now. I’m even going to re-watch the movie. I’m sure the game actually surpassed the original in terms of best RoboCop content out there. You can pretty much experience everything the game has to offer in about 20 to 25 hours. It took me only two days to finish but I binged, playing like 12 hours a day because I was having so much fun and the world was so engrossing to me. Definitely recommend this one, even if you don’t care about RoboCop. I assure you if you play this you’ll care about Robo soon enough.

>>61233
I played some spider man game on the xbox 360. Swinging around was the best part. Pretty much the only part that I can even remember enjoying.

>>61235
ive watched a video about how the interior rooms were generated. very cool use fo shaders

>>61212
have you played the original games on DS? idk if I should go for these or the 3DS remakes

I finished Tyrion Cuthbert. Its an ace attorney like indie game.

Ehh, its nice that somebody tries making more games like these. The first case was a standard tutorial case that can almost be skipped because I've played every single mystery murder game there is nothing tutorial case does nothing for me at this point

2nd case was surprisingly good. 3rd was awful and retreads too much of 2nd case. Could have been skipped in hindsight

4 was fantastic. Really entertaining and kept you guessing with the culprit too

Then the final case falls flat on its face and has stupid twists.

Ace attorney game have this unique pacing. They can be a bit too slow but its all part of the charm. Every character is larger than life. Odd contrast to have this game where the judge calls in a witness then they just have a 10 minute statement and theyre out of the game.

Sry for my retarded english, I'm not good conveying my thoughts plus not a native speaker

If you like Ace attorney games I would advice you to play cases 2,3 and 5. Its not a long game (12 hour all cases) But you dont gain anything from cases 1 and 3.

Finished nocturne, I had finished it before but I had never gotten the "True Demon" ending.
It's as good as I remembered it, full of bullshit deaths too, every battle is a coin toss pretty much, if you get bad rng you're toast, especially at the beginning of the game, I wouldn't have it any other way. Last boss took me a few tries until I got lucky enough to beat him with him casting some bullshit spell that one shot my main character.

I beat 3 games this week

>Prince of Persia (DOS)
It's great, I love this kind of game, I see it more as a puzzle/memorization game than an actual platforming game. A lot of people would say the trial and error part of the game is bad game design, and they may have a point, but I still loved the game and getting further each run felt rewarding. The time limit seems a bit restrictive a first but it pushes you to play better, and at the end of the day, it's not that bad, it only took me a couple of days to get used to it. Anyway, great game, the snes version has better graphics and more levels, but the DOS version felt smoother.

>Flashback (Genesis)
After PoP I wanted another game in this style so I decided to try Flashback, it's set in a cyberpunk future with very stylized graphics and even "fmv" cutscenes, which was huge back in the day, the game starts nice, with more focus on puzzle solving than platforming. But starting on level 3, the game just turns into screen after screen of enemies with little to no platforming or puzzles, I never considered combat the strong suit in this kind of game and I suffered through the last 3 levels (there are 5, so over half the game), enemies are annoying, they just move at very high speed towards you and since it takes forever to pull out your gun and shoot, you end up getting hit a lot and just dying trying to get away from them and even if you manage to shoot them, I played the game on hard which made every enemy a bullet sponge, real fun. I found the last level particularly frustrating when you had to deal with more than 1 enemy at the same time. It's a shame, feel like what creativity they had to make graphics and plot they lacked on level design, more style than substance, wouldn't recommended, at least not on hard.

>Dragon Quest (NES)
Dragon Warrior if we're going for the localization title. After Toriyama died a few days ago I felt compelled to play one of these games and since I had only played V I decided to start from the beginning. Now of course the game feels primitive being one of the first JRPGs, you only have 1 character, and there's basically no strategy (just leveling up until you're strong enough, getting the best gear and attacking enemies until they die) but I absolutely understand how important this game must've been, being a kid in the 80s and having a whole world to explore, discover secrets, finding new weapons and armor to equip yourself and killing more powerful enemies, while still being able to go to the first map and easily killing the monsters that used to give you trouble, it gives a sense of adventure you couldn't see in other games back in the day, unless you were playing wizardry or ultima on a computer, but I doubt a Japanese kid would even know those games existed. The game has none of the obtuse shit you usually see in old games, there's nothing that you couldn't figure out from the dialogue in the game, there are a bunch of remakes with QoL improvements but I wanted the original experience and I gotta say I enjoyed it (just had to speed up the emulator a bit on long grinding sessions).

>>61418
I've also been thinking of playing Dragon Quest, namely DQ7 on the PSX. I had an old CD1 to CD2 save file that was at like +80 hours lol. Last year I figured I might as well start over from the beginning, and I made it to a very memorable point in the story… but I haven't played since then. As much as I love it, it is a very long game and it does get very tedious at times…

Finished Elden kino, peak Action RPG.The stance break system fixed the ds3 combat by encouraging you to make charged attacks, guard counters and jump attacks instead of spamming R1 all the time, is not a linear piece of shit and has and actual color palette,the only real flaws are the repeated content and the post-Leyndell endgame. The next evolutionary step for action RPGs would be to make party-based combat that doesnt feel like shit.

Finished AC4 Black Flag

The naval gameplay is fun for a short while and then it very quickly gets boring and tedious. Half of the main missions seem to be "follow this guy and stay within range" which is never, ever fun. There's a ton of collectathon grinds that add literally nothing to the experience beyond padding out playtimes, but thankfully you can skip it all.

If you like pirates and want a shortish 15 hour or so story (main missions only) then you might like it. If you have no interest in the theme/era, then don't even bother.

>>61423
Yeah that pretty much sums it up. I played it until I fully upgraded my house and then I lost all interest. I should probably delete it because I have to admit to myself I don't care enough about the story or the gameplay to finish it.

>>61418
I really hate your zoomer-tinted way of reviewing games.

"FMV"? Those are not "fmv" cutscenes. FMV cutscenes were their own special thing back in the day.

>>61430
>zoomer-tinted
what the fuck does that even mean

beat Alone in the Dark
Amazing how much credit resident evil gets for basically ripping off this game

>>61419
Maybe play one of the shorter games like V, I have the same problem with long games, I just lose interest

Finished umihara kawase, with all backpacks, doors, levels and endings. It was pretty good but infuriating at times, especially with the enemy spawns.

Yesterday I finished Phantasy Star 3 with my brother. It’s funny, I had the impression this is by far the worst of the first 3 Phantasy Star titles but reading my reviews for Phantasy Star 1 and 2, it seems like they’re not too far apart. The third one for sure has the most scattered art direction for the monsters. They’re all over the place and most look rushed to meet the deadline. They have no uniformity whatsoever, some look like crappy Dune character clones, others like wind up toys. Music is generally good and the idea of playing through several generations of the same family is pretty interesting, despite the fact the game stays pretty much the same no matter who you’re playing as. Plot for this one is about this big bad that made his way into the spaceships the Palmians used to escape the destruction of their planet thousands of years ago. The ship you’re in has been drifting in space for who knows how long because there’s no one left that knows how to pilot the thing. A classic Star Trek tale. There’s also a cyborg revolt and family feuds, all told in a rather disjointed manner. There are so many monster encounters and MacGuffin hunting inside labyrinths even if you’re trying to follow the plot you’ll forget what you’re doing most times.

The game looks OK and sounds good. Combat is the same old same old, not really a problem. The real problem with Phantasy Star 3 is the backtracking and the layout of dungeons. The amount of backtrack is truly mind boggling. It feels like the game is trying to defeat both your characters with the monsters and you personally with constant backtracking, furiously testing your patience every time you have to go somewhere. To make you more likely to quit, the dungeons are built to force you to zigzag towards your target, and the correct path always turns out to be the longest one.

So anyways, we cheated. One hit kill and invulnerability. The thing is, those two cheats only solve the heal items maintenance (as in, you don’t need any), leaving the most frustrating part of the gameplay intact so you can experience it in all its glory. All that said, this game does have a lurid charm to it and there are several cut scenes that punctuate the milestones in the plot rather well. So you keep going. We also used maps and a FAQ. There’s enough going back and forth as it is and wandering around lost in those huge maps was out of the question.

It probably took around 10 to 12 hours to complete this thing. It was worth it in a completionism sort of way, having played the first 2. Now the fourth one is the last of the ‘classic’ Phantasy Star titles before the franchise became an mmorpg thingie. I heard good things about 4, I’ll guess we’ll see.

Finished Beyond Oasis
it's good

I just played through Defense Grid: The Awakening. Out of the blue I felt like trying a tower defense game and after perusing the Steam list and doing a quick internet search this one looked like the one I would have the most fun with. There are so many tower defense games out there now but very few are strictly tower defense, usually they’re a mash of genres with stuff like resource gathering or base building and that sort of thing. Defense Grid wants nothing but to be a tower defense game and that’s what I was looking for.

The graphics have an alluring appeal to it, the towers and aliens have just the right amount of color, without becoming jarring or bleak. Music is OK, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Gameplay is very repetitive actually but in a relaxing sort of way which is a hard balance to achieve. I think the difficulty is a bit wonky though, where most of the stages (there are 20 of them) feel a little too easy and you can pretty much brute force your way to victory by spawning a huge amount of guns in the obviously right places. Then, by stage 17 or 18, the game sends wave after wave of very spongy enemies that can breeze through your defenses. The level called Waste Disposal took me about a dozen tries to get through and that’s when you begin to realize there’s very little room for error with this game. In fact your best bet is just spawning cannons, they’re relatively cheap and carry a heavy punch.

The most fun levels were the ones you get to shape the path the aliens take by placing towers in front of them in order to make a labyrinth to mow them down more effectively, but those are rather rare and far between. Most of the time the aliens are running through a predefined path and you just get to choose your weapon, usually the cannon or the meteor strike that is not that great but it has a great range, so it’s worth it. Enemy variety is minimal, but then again, you won’t be looking at them closely, it’s mostly a green crate looking thing with spiny legs attached to it. Some look like bugs and that’s about it.

I’m not sure how well I can judge Defense Grid given the only other tower defense game I’ve played is Plants VS Zombies but all in all I had a really good time with it. I know there’s a Defense Grid 2 so I guess I’ll be checking that one next.

Took me about 10 hours but I beat Lust From Beyond.

Couldn't find all the collectables and it has a second ending so I might play through it again using a collectables walkthrough, but that is for another time.

Controls were a bit clunky but overall I liked it. The other world was very cool looking and the puzzles were in that right spot between being too easy and not making sense to the point of frustration.
That said, for a game with so much, well you know, the character models seem almost intentionally unappealing. Actually digesting the plot overall it could be said that the game has a generally negative view of sex, somewhat like old horror movies. So while there is gratuitous sex and nudity it is almost universally depicted as a bad thing, disgusting, and leading closer to destruction. Which honestly I expected from playing lust for darkness.
Speaking of which the world building is much more fleshed out and the story overall feels very complete.

Not sure why but the load times are absurd. Like 2-4 minutes long for some reason. I hate the way most doors and draws work. The walking speed is too slow. The combat is clunky even for a horror game. Really I could come up with dozens of small little complaints that add up to make Lust kind of annoying and unpleasant.

While the aesthetics were good same with the sound, especially of Lusstgar (the other world), and the story held my interest. Unfortunately the game play and amateurish feel of the game really hold it back.
It just feels like the devs need to make a modern action game or something to pratice focusing on improving gameplay and game feel.
I mean they are great level designers. I didn't feel lost once despite how elaborate the layout of some levels could be. But moving around, interacting with things other than puzzles, interacting with inventory, and especially combat all are pretty bad and hold down the rest of the game. Also feels fucking weird not to be able to jump at all, but falling 15 feet is fine. Granted puzzles are directly built around you not being able to jump, but it still feels fucking weird.

*shrugs* I could be better but it just isn't.
3 out of 5 if I am being very generous.

>>61543
This looks so odd. In one hand it looks like my type of game with the whole gothic Cthulhu look and atmosphere going for it but then they also included orgies and sadomaso stuff which puts me off. I guess this is the type of game I would have more fun just watching it instead of playing myself.

A solid 7/10, A fun but very hard beat em' up game. It doesn't explain it's mechanics very well, and drags on towards the end a bit.

Finished playing SMT Nocturne HD Remaster
I wanted to play and actually beat this before SMTV Vengeance came out, I've emulated the game a few times over the years but always quit around the Nihilo Assembly.
The remaster for this game was kinda lazy, I thought people were over exaggerating when shitting on it but no somehow they released it with 30 FPS and the same shitty compressed audio. Luckily there were mods that fixed a lot of the issues.
As for the game itself I mostly enjoyed it, the encounter rate could get annoying at times and some of the later dungeons get really obnoxious with the invisible teleporter but the atmosphere was great throughout and the combat was always enjoyable. I ended up going TDE since I didn't care for any of the Reasons or the teacher.

>>61550
play Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2

>>61551
I'll give it a try, should I play the first one before that? I've heard mixed things about the combat but I can put it up with it if the atmosphere/characters/story are good enough.

>>61552
you don't miss so much but you can play it before the second one

>>61550
the brutal encounter rate for all the smt games is what turns a 5 hour journey into a 40 hour game. I still remember that miserable tower you were expected to climb at the ending.

Game: Zombie Exodus Safe Heaven
Genre: Text Based CYOA

The level of details and character creation is a nice touch. The only thing I can't over with is its unfinished structure. I don't think I'll be still alive when part IV comes out

Finished SMTV: Vengeance last night (new CoV route, chaos ending)
I liked the original SMTV a lot despite the shit performance on Switch, annoying level scaling and barebones story. This fixed pretty much all those issues. Characters get more screentime and development compared to the original where I remember them barely being a part of the story. Similar to Atlus's other rereleases there's a new succubus added but IMO she's integrated much more smoothly into the story than the succubi from some of the other SMT releases like SJ Redux or P5R.
Gameplaywise also there are a bunch of improvements, level scaling is much less overtuned, demons all have hardset passives which can be really powerful and are fun to build around, new bosses, new Omagatoki skills, and an entirely new 3rd map that replaces Chiyoda. I played on hard mode and the difficulty felt great, I had to retry a lot of bosses but I never felt the need to grind besides at the very end of the game for superbosses since sidequests generally give enough XP to be within a few levels of the boss.
I do wish they had done more to overhaul the last area of the game though, the route split happens really late and most of Taito feels the same besides some different bosses.
I'll probably come back to do the remaining superbosses and NG+ at some point, godborne seems like it could be fun since every enemy gets scaled to level 150

>>61710 now play this >>61551

Just finished pentiment

This game is one of the first games where the mystery was not as important as learning the history and bonding with the characters in the game in fact when the twist at the end was revealed, I didn’t really care for it too much. I just wanted to talk to the towns people more. They are written so well and the dialogue is so realistic that I was completely immersed into being a 14th century peasant for the entire game.

All in all, another classic from Obsidians Josh sawyer and company

Finished playing Zortch
Pretty good retro-style FPS. The default normal difficulty was a bit too easy and the game feels a little too generous with ammo but enemies are much more mobile than most singleplayer shooters I've played and there are lots of surprising features like enemies being weak to certain weapon types, certain parts of enemies like armor blocking bullets, certain enemy types infighting and friendly fire being on for enemies, etc. that you don't really see in a lot of these indie shooters.
Level design was good but I do wish there was a bit more variety visually, one of my favorite levels was one where you go through caves and come upon an alien burger joint in the first episode. But after that most of the levels just feel like industrial mazes/factories with a few exceptions. It would've been neat to have like an alien city level or something. I did manage to sequence break 1 level by stacking objects which was pretty cool.

Psychopomp

Free little indie game that I enjoyed 100%ing quite a bit.
It's weird but not in a lolRandumXD way.
It's got great atmosphere but isn't pretentious.
And it's short enough that you don't even get the chance to get bored.

I highly recommenced it. It cost nothing, will run on damn near any system built within the last 15 years, and doesn't even take much time to do a full playthrough.

>>61805
the grid lock and slow movement filtered me hard, a shame, I quite like of the concept and aesthetics

100%ed Rental.
Ultra short and kind of a nothingburger of a game. Mostly style with almost no substance.
Think animal crossing on the PS1 aesthetics but with mild horror elements.
I think it was made for a game jam or something.

Anyway, it's free and only takes 10-15 minutes to play through. Less if you are going for the short term rental achievement.

>>61805
this looks pretty cool, like a westernized yume nikkie clone

>>61944
>game is nothing like yume nikkie in any way shape or form
>but it's weird so it's a yume nikkie clone somehow
*rolls eyes*

Played through VTBM for the first time the other day. Now I understand why people rate it so high. That gorgeous, thick atmosphere, that wonderful OST. The main story was pretty basic, the second half was extremely linear but up that was to be expected since I read beforehand that game's development wasn't finished. Last two missions were very frustrating, especially Ming Xiao and Sheriff fights.
But I loved it. Shame there will never be a game like that again. VTMB2 looks like gaynigger trash typical for modern games. Utterly despicable and disappointing.

>>61967
>VTMB2
vtmb2 will be pozzed, woke shit in the game is unavoidable.
still didn't play vtmb but I plan to get it on steam when cheaper

>>61968
Well, I certainly recommend playing it. Cured my gaming impotence for a couple of wonderful evenings.

>>61969
whats the most comfy place you liked the most and stayed the most. I didn't play the game but the ocean house hotel looks comfy to me.
the ost are perfect. game with 90% of their music being good are rare

>>61970
I liked the fact that all hubs and locations have different atmosphere about them. I liked the dark vibes of the Chinatown the most I think. Regarding the favorite one place I've gotta say I enjoyed just chilling at Vesuvius, it had a wonderful theme song which is now stuck in my head.
Also I was rather disturbed by Andrei's place. Fleshcrafted furniture and those two-legged manbeasts. It was certainly visceral and unique. Haven't felt that way since Silent Hill 3. Andrei in general was a pretty memorable character, shame he didn't play a bigger part in the story.

>>61967
I still see VTMB2 as vaporware.
They have been trying to make the game for almost 20 years in one form or another and failed each and every time.
VtM in general is pretty shit and filled to the brim with SJWs who can only tolerate safe edgy. World of Darkness in general is dead to me and I doubt there will ever be a decent game based on any of the properties again.

>>61973
Paradox jews just trying to milk the VTMB name while not giving a shit about the quality whatsoever. They gave it to a studio that has never developed RPGs cause they were very cheap to hire. It is a real shame though. Gaming in 2024 is just money grubbing and Paradox are the worst scum on par with EA and other parasites

>>61974
>Gaming in 2024 is just money grubbing
There are expeditions. While that is true of the major corpos, there are still decent mid sized studios and indies still putting out decent stuff.
I think most studios and game companies lose their way as soon as they get to a certain size and get taken over by business guys instead of people who give a shit about games being fun or providing value to their audience.
But thankfully there are still hundreds of small teams making good stuff so I always feel like I have way too much stuff to play. Which is a good problem to have. Makes ignoring the trash going on in AAA extremely easy.

>>61975
>I think most studios and game companies lose their way as soon as they get to a certain size and get taken over by business guys instead of people who give a shit about games
I agree 100%. when a small studio who made a good game, big companies want to buy them so they can milk money from it like a mad cow

Silent hill 2 remake
It's ok, but just not the same, the original game had so much going on, this one just feels as generic horror third person shooter, might as well be playing resident evil. It's like if they remade jacob's ladder or something, they won't ever make it justice

>>61983
I played it a bit and dropped it because i wasnt enjoying being in claustrophobic ugly apartment buildings

>>61983
>it's like if they remade jacob's ladder or something
Oh god, please don't give the hacks in hollywood any ideas.
I got horror shivers just thinking about it.

>>61986
if that kind of thing bothers you, you made the right call, it only gets worse after the apartment building

>>61983
I tried playing it but it seemed a bit too hollywood for my liking. Original SH2 had way more unique soul. It is the main problem with remakes. They become soulless or at least get a different one.

Finished playing through Mouthwashing.

Was a lot more linear then I was expecting.
It was more a vehicle for the story then a game imo.
On the one had I feel like I probably missed a lot because there are a fuck ton of hidden achievements somehow, but on the other hand I don't really feel the urge to play it again.