|
Post by backgroundnoise on Dec 28, 2017 20:09:56 GMT -5
The reason he looks like that in the cartoon is because the true hiding place of the vampire race is Finland. Or is that the home of Santa? I can't remember.
|
|
|
Post by lurker on Dec 28, 2017 20:24:41 GMT -5
And then there's Mega Man looking like "generic children's birthday card space man".
|
|
|
Post by toei on Dec 28, 2017 20:29:25 GMT -5
And then there's Mega Man looking like "generic children's birthday card space man". "Those Japanese designs are just out there, that's not what American kids want. Let's just replace it with an incredibly awful design of our own."
|
|
|
Post by ResidentTsundere on Dec 28, 2017 21:07:38 GMT -5
And then there's Mega Man looking like "generic children's birthday card space man". "Those Japanese designs are just out there, that's not what American kids want. Let's just replace it with an incredibly awful design of our own." View AttachmentOh jeez.
|
|
|
Post by Bobinator on Dec 28, 2017 21:53:15 GMT -5
I honestly didn't play a whole lot of new stuff this year, but, let's see...
THE HIGHS
Sonic Mania: I had been pretty hyped for this ever since it got announced, and I'm happy to say it pretty much hit all my expectations. It's rare for me to say a game really hit my nostalgia center, but I hadn't had this much fun with a Sonic game since when I played Sonic 3 & Knuckles on my PC for the very first time. Even the returning zones are incredibly fun to play through, the soundtrack is addicting, and I wouldn't mind a bit if this is all Sega did with the series from now on.
Fight N' Rage: It's been a pretty slow year for beat-em-ups, but this is probably the best out of what we had. An incredibly fluid, fun brawler with a fun combo system. Enemy variety and level design could be a little better, but it's paced just well enough I never ended up sick of it. I still haven't finished it yet, but maybe I'll gather up enough people to be able to finish a playthrough.
Cuphead: What more can I say that nobody else has said, honestly? I'm bad at it, but I've still been enjoying it a lot.
Nex Machina: I usually try to avoid twin stick shooters, with the last one I bought before this being Assault Android Cactus. Honestly, I prefer this. It's a lot easier to actually figure out how to play properly, and I appreciate that it's got a generally faster pacing to it. Probably the best in the genre I've played in a while.
Bleed 2: An incredibly fun mixture of Gunstar Heroes and Ikuraga, full of incredibly challenging, but fun boss battles and a whole lot of fun setpieces. It gives me some big Noitu Love 2 vibes, and I loved that game to pieces, so this one is HIGH up on the list.
XCOM 2: I never put much time into the first one, mostly because it had a bug where Alt-Tabbing had a chance of utterly crashing the game. Since the sequel seems to have fixed that, I've been putting a lot of time into it. I admit I've been playing on Easy, because I'm honestly pretty awful at strategy games, and things have been going pretty well so far with that. I'm never sure if I'm playing the Geoscape segment right and doing everything quickly enough, but I guess that's the kind of thing you figure out in multiple playthroughs. The actual combat part can be, of course, frustrating, but it's at least easy enough to figure out. I've also been abusing the voice pack mods, because playing with a team composed of The Joker, Tommy Wisseau, Stuart Ashens, and Johnny Cage should feel wrong, but it feels so, so right.
West of Loathing: I hadn't played Kingdom of Loathing in years, but I still ended up enjoying this game a ton, anyway. A ton of jokes that are pretty consistently gold, a lot of content that I feel like I've just barely scratched the surface on, and a lot of mechanics that keep from getting frustrated like 95% of other RPGs. Definitely the best RPG I've played all year, out of... a very small number.
Wild Guns Reloaded: Doesn't technically count as a new game, since I've played the SNES original for years. Still, this is pretty much how all remakes should be handled. The new art blends so seamlessly that it looks like it came straight of the SNES game, just with extra widescreen. The new characters and levels add a fair chunk of playtime, and the game remains incredibly tough, but fun. If only it had online play, but oh well.
THE MIDS
Cook Serve Delicious 2: Pretty fun, and a great way to waste time, but overall, I'm not sure if I could say if this is better than the original game. I kind of miss the upgrades and such that'd do things faster, keep customers patient, things like that. Here, the challenge seems more like it's about perfecting every possible stage, which ends up getting frustrating for me when I end up screwing up near the end of the day. I'm still enjoying it, though, amd it's basically my game of choice for wasting time.
Night in the Woods: This seems to be a pretty divisive game, but I admit I don't have any strong feelings about it one way or the either. I admit I'm generally too much of an action junkie to stick with this game for a long periods of time at once, but I still appreciate the story and characters. Mae gives me the same vibe as Bojack Horseman does, honestly, where you really, really want to see them try and do better, but they keep screwing up, and you feel bad for them, and yet you're still frustrated because they can't stop screwing up. I guess it's a trait that I've dealt with at least once in real life, so I can emphasize. I'm certainly enjoying it, I just have to be in a very certain mood to be willing to put the time into it.
Amplitude: Not entirely sure how I like this one, either. The gameplay's fun, if, much like CSD2, one of those games where I have to constantly reset if I don't feel like I'm doing well enough. It's easy to get into and easy to know how to score well, which isn't always a guarantee for a rythmn game. What kills it for me, however, is the soundtrack, which just sounds like a variety of radio-friendly pop. It's no Gitaroo Man when it comes to the soundtrack, sadly.
Tekken 7: I don't usually go for 3D fighters, but it seemed like a lot of people I knew were grabbing this. Unfortunately, it seems like the playerbase is kind of drying up, and it's been difficult to learn how to get into the groove of this sort of fighter. Oh well, at least it was only $25.
Spark The Electric Jester: An action platformer by the guy who did Sonic Before/After The Sequel. Those games suffered from some pretty weak, repetitive level design. For $15, I expected the guy to have learned from that. Apparently not. The Kirby-esque power system gives it some variety, but I'd much rather just play Freedom Planet again.
Puzzle Chronicles: Not really sure what I think of this one. Imagine a cross between the RNG of Puzzle Quest with the real-time puzzle stylings of Super Puzzle Fighter. Unfortunately, the way the game works, anybody who ends up getting the lead is basically going to stay there. A good concept, certainly, but not one I think I'll be able to hold the patience for.
Aztez: A very intruiging cross between a turn based strategy game and a spectacle brawler. Unfortunately, I'm really awful at this one, especially once you hit the late game areas where you start dealing with gun-weilding Spaniards. The game is fine, it's just me being so awful that I get salty and start ranking the game donwards. I need to go back and give this one another shot, because it's got some pretty fun combat and some good ideas.
Worms WMD: For some reason or another, I feel like I'm single handedly keeping Team 17 in business because I keep getting these. I generally like the series and like playing it with other people, and eventually I might write about all these dang games, so I keep buyin' 'em. This one's a mixed bag. The gameplay's definitely improved. I feel like the class system from the previous two games isn't working out, so I'm glad to see that gone. The physics and general game feel edge a lot closer to Armageddon, which I appreciate. The vehicles feel a tad unbalanced, but they're fun to use, if you can't get to them first. Why, though, why is there no longer a way to use custom voice packs? What possible reason would there be to remove that feature?
THE LOWS
Farnham Fables: Morbid curiosity and a temptingly low price made me get this. I regret it immensely and wish I could punch my past self in the face. Don't even Google it, it's just kind of gross.
Pocket Rumble: The core gameplay is fine, but I bought this game in March and I'm still waiting for it to leave Early Access. I assumed that since they said they were releasing the WiiU version soon, they'd, y'know, finish their game. Silly me.
Bedfellows Frenzy: Definitely not the worst game down here, but I'll be honest and say I only really bought this because somebody I know did the programming. Otherwise, a game inspired by Rampage, only with "roguelite" elements, that's also based on a furry animated series is probably something I'd be willing to play a lot less for. It's definitely better than the actual Rampage games, I'll give it that, but... the game's sense of humor (We're talking 'Trump's wall marks the level boundaries' here) means I can basically never show it to anybody.
Neverending Nightmares: The spookiest game of Red Light Green Light you'll ever play. Walk forward. Wait for a monster to pass by. Repeat about four times. Watch your character rip off his own face or something, then repeat.
Punch Club: I don't feel as strongly against this game as a lot of the other games down here, but I need some more Low games, and I'm not really a fan, so. I dunno, I guess it's moderately fun to watch the numbers go up, overtime, but it's basically so much grinding and careful juggling it to play it properly, and I'm just not getting much of a payoff from it. Reference-heavy humor doesn't really do it for me, either, so it's not like I'm getting much of a reward for my time, honestly. I don't hate it, I could even start playing it again if I really wanted to, it's just that it'd be a very rare occurence I'd be in that kind of mood.
Craploads of DS shovelware: Y'see, I've been slowly building up my ROM collection, and I've recently added just about every English-language DS game to said collection. Unfortunately, there's a lot of crap on the DS. A lot. Far more than the Wii, even, I'd wager. And a lot of it... well, it doesn't even qualify as a game, honestly. There's tons of games about raising animals, all of which seem to be basically built from the same template. Tons of ripoffs of Brain Age, a game which I'd hesitate to even call a game, myself. A whole ton of ripoffs of Cooking Mama, a game that I can't even really play because of the precise stylus movements it demands. A whole ton of 'casual' games, so if you're a fan of hidden object games and title matching games, hoo boy, the DS is for you! Some of those games even combine both of those in one, for double the pointlessness of running it in a low resolution emulator! And stuff that's just basically useless, like My Stop Smoking Coach. Thankfully, I don't find myself needing that.
I've been slowly trying to trim down my DS rom collection on the simple criteria of "If anybody was watching me play this, would they find it incredibly boring?" Even on that broad criteria, I've still got 1,284 DS games. Pray for me. Still, though, I can't help but be worried that I'll end up deleting something interesting I haven't even looked at. I mean, it feels good to lose 50 megs from getting rid of a hidden object game like "Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle", but what if there's something secretly hilarious in "The Cheetah Girls: Passport to Stardom" that I'll never get to see? You think this wouldn't happen, but I discovered that "Barbie & The 3 Musketeers" was made by WayForward, and is thus, not total shit, meaning I basically have to keep it. This is the curse that burdens me.
That's all the games I have a solid opinion on that I've played this year. Hardly ALL the new games I've played this year... I've got a huge backlog I guess I'll need to start cracking on. If anything else comes to mind, I guess I'll add it on here. Sorry that there's not much retro stuff on there... it's mostly that there's not many retro games left that I'm interested in I haven't played already. I'm sure something will crop up in all those DS games. Eventually.
|
|
|
Post by moran on Dec 28, 2017 23:06:44 GMT -5
I seriously cannot understand why Simon Belmont looks like a pilot in the Captain N cartoon. I can understand taking some creative liberties, but what the fuck. It’s best not to think about it. This is the same show that personified Tetris.
|
|
|
Post by TheGunheart on Dec 28, 2017 23:20:17 GMT -5
The actual reason is that the character designer was only given a really small CRT as a ref and none of the official character art. This is why Megaman is green: the TV actually didn't display the colors properly. With that in mind I can imagine mistaking Simon's tunic for a bomber jacket.
That said, he was also the monster designer for Real Ghostbusters, so it's really more the result of being given little to work with and absurd deadlines.
|
|
|
Post by Bumpyroad on Dec 29, 2017 2:22:16 GMT -5
I discovered that "Barbie & The 3 Musketeers" was made by WayForward, and is thus, not total shit They've got basic platforming elements covered and there's fully voiced cat as well. That adds values.
|
|
|
Post by kaoru on Dec 29, 2017 8:22:55 GMT -5
That's a little better, I think the red hair is what really bothers me the most. Wow. I know you are from the south, but try to not be so gingerist, thanks.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 29, 2017 12:33:01 GMT -5
Looks pink to me, really.
|
|
|
Post by moran on Dec 29, 2017 13:16:38 GMT -5
Its definitely more pink/fuchsia than red.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 29, 2017 14:04:25 GMT -5
Only partially. Green/yellow often look similar. Blue/purple. Red/brown.
|
|
|
Post by kaoru on Dec 29, 2017 14:10:39 GMT -5
Just thought it is mildly funny you are the one to first pin down the exact shade of red, considering.
|
|