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Post by Jay on May 31, 2017 21:52:58 GMT -8
I maintain that there's little reason for this subforum to not have an equivalent catch-all thread for gaming that isn't specific to platforming or franchises, so I may as well queue one up again...
Since it was released in the thick of my semester struggle, I hadn't gotten an opportunity to play Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment until recently. There are some corners cut storywise but it's not bad considering and I enjoyed the overall mechanics which, dash slash aside, reminded me a little of Ninja Gaiden.
Having recently 100%ed that, for the third time, and finally 100%ed Final Fantasy VI as the Steam incarnation, I'm probably going to scale back a little on the gaming front in favor of reading, although I have active games of Axiom Verge (hard mode) and Cave Story+ (easy mode, a first) going on and I'm probably going to finish Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim later this summer along with getting sucked into River City Ransom: Underground. The release of a new entry into the film franchise may also tempt me into giving Alien: Isolation a shot although, while I am excellent at survival horror games, I am famously bad at stealth games as my play personality trends towards flashy recklessness.
So, whatcha playin?
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Post by ThirdMan on May 31, 2017 22:46:00 GMT -8
After finishing up with Breath of the Wild after seven weeks of play, I'm back on Super Mario Maker. Made my first new course in three-and-a-half months, and am nearly up to 5000 Stars on just ten levels (many Makers don't get there with nearly 100 levels produced). I'm still encountering new mechanics in this game, even after having played it for nearly a year. Hopefully Nintendo continues to produce games in this series, with the online servers connected across platforms, so Switch owners can have access to the millions of levels produced on the Wii U.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Jun 1, 2017 5:37:43 GMT -8
Bioshock Infinite. I loved the original, but never got around to playing the spiritual sucessor. The gameplay is solid, but the story is absolutely mind blowing. Although if you play it I recommend switching the field of view, because it's way too narrow. On PC, it might lead to motion sickness.
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Post by Zarnium on Jun 1, 2017 15:26:52 GMT -8
I was playing the original Half-Life from around last December to this February off and on, but I didn't like it a whole lot and I quit when I got to Xen. I can see why it's such an important and influential game, but I'm just not a fan of that whole playstyle. That said, I bought the complete Half-Life set on a super-cheap Black Friday sale last year mostly because I wanted to play Half-Life 2, which I'm led to believe is a lot more robust in the story and world-building department, So I will likely just watch the remaining cutscenes of 1 and move on to 2 sooner or later.
I played through Antichamber a couple months ago and loved it. Very cool first-person puzzle game with an excellent atmosphere and graphical style. Highly recommend to anyone who likes Portal.
Most recently, I've been playing Heavy Bullets and having a blast. It's often billed as a "first-person shooter roguelike," which is misleading because it doesn't really have any Roguelike elements beyond permadeath and randomly generated maps. Rather, it seems more like a modern arcade game, or what a classic arcade game would be like had they been able to use modern 3D rendering. The idea is that you're put into a randomly generated map with nothing but a revolver and six bullets, and when you're out of bullets, the only way to replenish your ammo is to go to wherever your bullets landed and pick them up again for re-use. I think this is a brilliant mechanic, because it requires you be very accurate with your aiming without requiring you to conserve your ammo. You can't just flail around and while mashing the fire key, since you'll quickly run out of bullets and die, but you never permanently run out of ammo, so you don't need to worry about conserving it long-term or hunting for more supplies, which is something that always annoys me. (See above, Half-Life.) The game is very fast-paced, and you'll usually have multiple enemies attacking you at once and need to be very quick and precise with your trigger finger. Every enemy drops coins as well, and these coins can be spent at vending machines which can give you items like more bullets or more hearts. There are also banks at which you can store coins and items which can be recovered on your next playthrough if you die, since when you die, you lose all of your progress and any items or coins you had on your person. The game is very difficult, and I have yet to beat it, only getting to the final stage a couple of times. It's meant to be played over and over again until you finally win, though, and games rarely last more than a half an hour; I suspect that a winning game would only take around forty minutes, provided you're not an expert speedrunner.
It's not perfect, and I have a couple complaints. One is that a lot of the items are nearly useless (barring gag items like "high heels" which purposely don't do anything); anything with "bomb," "missile," or "mine" in the title is almost unusuable, since they're very hard to aim, take a long time to deploy, and can damage you if you're not careful. I've tossed multiple bombs into a room before only to find that none of them hit the target I wanted to destroy, other times I've used them too close to myself and died, other times they didn't work fast enough to be useful. A bunch of other items like the spike helmet or the knife are duds as well, or at least so much less useful than many other items that they quickly get swapped out once something better comes along. My other complaint is that there's no endless mode. While I've never made it that far, it seems a shame that the game just ends after eight stages rather than continuing with increasingly ramping difficulty, which I doubt would've been difficult to program.
Despite this, the game comes highly recommended by me, and it's only ten dollars. One of the best values of in terms of dollar-to-enjoyment ratio I've ever bought, honestly.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jun 1, 2017 16:00:50 GMT -8
I played Half-Life 2 to completion, a few years ago. The overall design is fine, but like many future dystopia stories, I just feel like it's lacking in personality in many regards. It's probably one of the reasons I reverted to the Nintendo stuff in recent years, because their first-party games are so full of colour, personality, and humour. I don't want to spend hours upon hours in a depressing environment, is all.
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Post by Zarnium on Jun 1, 2017 16:12:25 GMT -8
I played Half-Life 2 to completion, a few years ago. The overall design is fine, but like many future dystopia stories, I just feel like it's lacking in personality in many regards. It's probably one of the reasons I reverted to the Nintendo stuff in recent years, because their first-party games are so full of colour, personality, and humour. I don't want to spend hours upon hours in a depressing environment, is all. I've been drawn to it largely because of what I know about its dystopian world. The idea of a previously unknown alien empire completely subjugating the human race just seven hours after first contact and maintaining total misery for almost two decades while the world's infrastructure rots away just sounds so bleak and hopeless, I want to see if it does a good job of actually immersing the player in that. I'll give the first Half-Life credit in that it did feel pretty immersive, since the entire game is in real-time and there are no cutscenes where control is taken away from the player.
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Post by Jay on Aug 9, 2017 22:45:56 GMT -8
I have finished Hollow Knight and gotten all three endings. The game is very atmospheric and very sad and very buggy (SO MANY INSECTS) but for all the good stuff it has going for it, I feel like it's a B-B+ game.
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Post by ThirdMan on Sept 9, 2017 19:50:25 GMT -8
A friend of mine gave me his old PS3, which he mostly only used for Blu-Rays.
So I snapped up the following used games:
Batman: Arkham Asylum GotY - $10 Batman: Arkham City GotY - $10 Bioshock Infinite (comes w/ the original Bioshock) - $6.50 Grand Theft Auto IV - $3 Grand Theft Auto V - $15 Portal 2 - FREE! (Craigslist dude failed to appear for initial $8.00 transaction, felt bad, gave it to me for nothing.) Skyrim - $10 Sleeping Dogs - $5 Uncharted 2 - $5 Uncharted 3 - $10
I may try to track down a $10 copy of Red Dead Redemption (it's usually selling for $20). Though it's a great game in dramatic terms, I'm not sure how much replay-value The Last of Us would have. I'm also on the lookout for South Park: The Stick of Truth. I may grab Mass Effect 2 and 3 as well.
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Post by Jay on Sept 12, 2017 14:00:44 GMT -8
The Arkham games are good stuff. Haven't played the rest though. I kind of want to get The Last of Us eventually just so I can understand some of the fuss, but I have played parts of it, rather poorly.
So I've been playing Rosenkreuzstilette off and on lately. RKS is more or less an attempt by two doujinsoft developers to answer the question "what if Mega Man 4 but with gothic lolita magical girls?" which more or less summarizes the whole enterprise. The game plays like a love letter to the original six and it's hard to go into a level without seeing some influence: Here is a boss fight reminiscent of the dragon in MM2, this item is found in the same way as the wire in MM4, oh look, the Yellow Devil from MM and MM3, this ability functions almost exactly like Beat in MM5. To spice things up a bit, the castle area does borrow rather heavily from Castlevania, but to claim the RKS isn't derivative would require a rather substantial ignorance of gaming. That aside, if it were presented as a MM game with updated graphics and soundtracks, would I complain as much? Probably not. As far as flaws go, I'd say that the level soundtracks go a bit too much to the same well, the graphics are somewhere between a few styles, and any one stage is about two-thirds the length of what you would expect. But the game is actually rather challenging at spots and it actually tries to have a little bit of a plot, unless you play Arcade Mode in which case you don't have to deal with that. I don't think enough of RKS to do a full review of it in part because Steam is stupid because their only options are "DO YOU LIKE ME YES X NO X", but there's enough in the gameplay that feels right, so I keep dropping in for a little bit.
Speaking of Mega Man-likes, I should probably see how 20XX is again now that it's a full release, but I found that having a rogue-like blend with a Mega Man style game tended to frustrate me perhaps more than a rogue-like would on its own where you would just die and restart because your early drops are shite. MM games are often about tight input controls and when you're randomly generating levels that defy that, depending on your load out, that's kind of aggravating.
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Post by Zarnium on Sept 12, 2017 15:23:51 GMT -8
Have you played either Portal game before, J.C?
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Post by ThirdMan on Sept 12, 2017 15:33:38 GMT -8
Yeah, I played Portal 1 on the Orange Box compilation a few years ago, and played the first dozen rooms in Portal 2 the other day. The voice acting from Stephen Merchant is hilarious. I've now got the three most acclaimed wide-release games of 2011: Arkham City, Skyrim, and Portal 2.
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Post by Zarnium on Sept 12, 2017 19:23:56 GMT -8
Portal 2 is one of the best games of all time, IMO. It excels as its own product, it excels as a sequel, it has great game design, it has a great presentation. It's not quite my number one favorite, but I don't think there's another game I've played that so flawlessly accomplishes what it sets out to do.
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Post by ThirdMan on Sept 12, 2017 21:26:12 GMT -8
I've been jumping from game-to-game, but I look forward to getting back to it soon.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Sept 13, 2017 3:58:14 GMT -8
Portal 2 is one of the best games of all time, IMO. It excels as its own product, it excels as a sequel, it has great game design, it has a great presentation. It's not quite my number one favorite, but I don't think there's another game I've played that so flawlessly accomplishes what it sets out to do. Also, the co-op online multiplayer is so fun. Just make sure your partner isn't an imbecile (like me).
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Post by ThirdMan on Sept 18, 2017 22:36:18 GMT -8
I'm on Chapter 6 -- The Fall -- of Portal 2, and the vagueness with regards to the direction I'm meant to go is starting to annoy me. I don't usually enjoy puzzle games much, but I was enjoying this one...until now.
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