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Post by ZenithianHero on Jan 20, 2021 20:35:36 GMT -5
Bastion (Nintendo Switch, First Time, About 7 hours)
The best narrator I heard in a video game. The guy not only fun to listen to but he comments in real-time to your actions. The whole sound design is top notch. The gameplay is a decent hack and slash as well, with an interesting graphical gimmick (floating platforms over a background image like Disgaea). Kinda put off that you cannot revisit levels, I'm used to going back and level/money grind in games and this game is stage-by-stage linear. There's minigames for each weapon and these survival arenas (which too have narration which is neat).
I plan on buying the other games the dev have on Switch which are Transistor and Hades.
8/10
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Post by Deleted on Jan 21, 2021 10:17:52 GMT -5
Pokemon Shield (Switch, First Time, 25 Hours) I don't have much to say about this one. I'm not a big lover of the mainline Pokemon games so this was pretty much more of the same to me. Of course there's the wild area which didn't really add to the experience and Dynamaxing which generally was just a case of Dynamax at the same time as the cpu opponent. Overall Pokemon's battle system doesn't work too well for me since it's based around one on one battles. I think just switching to team battles adds to the strategy personally. There's also a real lack of difficulty. Opposing teams almost never have a full team of 6 so you always have the advantage.
One thing I did get from the game that others here likely won't is the UK setting, that I thought was executed very well, gives it a cosy, homely feeling for me. It was lovely to see all the influences from the UK implemented into the game. I have seen criticism of the Pokemon designs, but for me they tend to be a good fit for the region too. The only thing bizarre about the setting was the inclusion of a decade late Jedward reference.
Anyway, the games are never bad, but they are also never particularly good either. It was solid.
7/10
Super Ninja-Kun (PS Classic, First Time, 1 Hour) I really disliked this. Seriously, the jumping is momentum based, which is normally a preference, except from a standstill you barely move, making platforming clumsy. Shooting is slow and clunky also. Thankfully, since I played on an emulator, there was a glitch that turned off the music. A blessing since the songs (I think there were only 2 anyway) were dreadful. The sound effects are also poor and obnoxiously loud for some reason. Just, nothing good to say about this game at all unfortunately.
3/10
Void Bastards (Switch, First Time, 11 Hours) I don't normally enjoy roguelikes but I had a nice time with Void Bastards, particularly early on. You are only given a short task to achieve at any given time, and whilst it is luck reliant, you will get through it after a bunch of tries. Around halfway through it starts to throw too many enemies for my liking, and since this has the added survival element of giving you very limited ammo, I didn't enjoy that. Turning down the difficulty was my response. There's 5 difficulties here so you can find the setting most to your liking, though I found there to be a big jump between them. I struggle with FPS games a great deal anyway, so man will probably be able to progress on normal or above.
For the gameplay, there's a lot of focus on being strategic in how you approach each ship layout you're given, and adapting as you spot enemies to minimise conflict, whilst looting for the best result. I did find that later addition of more enemies ran counter to this concept, however. It also caused significant frame drops which was a shame. Of course being a roguelike there's a lot of focus on crafting new items, but only sometimes are these actually useful. It would have been nice to see more weapon powerups since I found I was unable to really harm the later game enemies.
In terms of visuals and personality, this is where the game really shines. There's a real British sense of humour there (even though the game is largely from Australian devs I believe) and I was amused by a lot of the insults I would have heard as a kid being thrown around by aliens. There's a real juxtaposition at play between the setting and the language used and it works well.
I wanted to give this one a little higher, but I really was put off some by the second half. Kudos for being the first roguelike I actually managed to stick with to the end though.
7/10
Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair (Switch, First Time, 15 Hours) This is very much a gameplay copy of Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze (it also has the same composer), and, well, if you're going to rip off a game make sure it's a good one. Fortunately, this is a good clone, and has some ideas of it's own. The central idea of 'The Impossible Lair', for instance. The titular end level can be accessed at any time, and as you beat other areas in the game you gain bees (hits) to play through it (well, technically the 'Not-So Impossible version of the level). The Lair is long, and tough, and fortunately they added the ability to play through in 4 sections, recording your best 'bee score' for each. Even with all 48 bees though, this is a tough challenge, that will frustrate many. It was a nice concept, though I'd have preferred it to be split into more segments (there's a boss for each - I'd have liked those to be separate). Of course the individual levels also have some challenge to them - fortunately there's no lives and plenty of checkpoints in those, so some might take perseverance (there's some kind of superguide alternative also, but I didn't try it so I'm not sure how it works).
The other original idea is an interactive overworld which works more like an overhead Zelda game. This is used to find access to the next level, but also for each stage there is an environmental puzzle to alter the level in some way to access the alternate version of each. These, whilst using the same area, are completely different, so there is no deja-vu or repetition (the last game I played with an alternate version level gimmick was Yoshi's Crafted World which left me with negative feelings on the concept). The two gameplay styles do pull together nicely, though the platforming can be intense whilst the overworld was quite relaxing, so dependent on my mood I found myself preferring each at different times.
I can't think of much negative to say on this one, except that there are a few collision glitches (I even fell through the floor once) and the load times are just awful. I'd say this is a really good platformer, with a nice level of challenge, between easy games like Mario, but not close to as hard as, say, Celeste or Super Meat Boy.
8/10
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Post by dsparil on Jan 21, 2021 12:43:26 GMT -5
Pokemon Shield (Switch, First Time, 25 Hours)Overall Pokemon's battle system doesn't work too well for me since it's based around one on one battles. The weird thing is that doubles is the only format for the official tournaments, and some moves are literally useless in single battles. I mean, who can forget Se Jun Park's iconic usage of Pachirisu for Follow Me in the 2014 World Championship. It's such a completely generic Pokémon, but was the key to his strategy because it was so easy to overlook. It'd be nice if Gen. IX actually worked it into the main game more than only throwing in one or two.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 22, 2021 4:56:40 GMT -5
Pokemon Shield (Switch, First Time, 25 Hours)Overall Pokemon's battle system doesn't work too well for me since it's based around one on one battles. The weird thing is that doubles is the only format for the official tournaments, and some moves are literally useless in single battles. I mean, who can forget Se Jun Park's iconic usage of Pachirisu for Follow Me in the 2014 World Championship. It's such a completely generic Pokémon, but was the key to his strategy because it was so easy to overlook. It'd be nice if Gen. IX actually worked it into the main game more than only throwing in one or two. Afraid I don't know a single thing about the competitive gaming 'scene'. Learning Pokemon is doubles there does help me to understand it's popularity. In single player I just ditch all support moves as soon as I can, there just isn't much use for them. Honestly though, I don't expect a change in the series.
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Post by dsparil on Jan 22, 2021 5:28:25 GMT -5
The weird thing is that doubles is the only format for the official tournaments, and some moves are literally useless in single battles. I mean, who can forget Se Jun Park's iconic usage of Pachirisu for Follow Me in the 2014 World Championship. It's such a completely generic Pokémon, but was the key to his strategy because it was so easy to overlook. It'd be nice if Gen. IX actually worked it into the main game more than only throwing in one or two. Afraid I don't know a single thing about the competitive gaming 'scene'. Learning Pokemon is doubles there does help me to understand it's popularity. In single player I just ditch all support moves as soon as I can, there just isn't much use for them. Honestly though, I don't expect a change in the series. Yeah, the main single player tends to be geared to be easily completable and not take advantage of the full complexity of the battles. Most of the games have a Battle Tower or equivalent that offers more challenging battles across all the possible formats, but at this point, it'd be nice if there was some kind of harder mode that at least let the fancier trainer AIs percolate downward.
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Jan 22, 2021 6:09:13 GMT -5
Afraid I don't know a single thing about the competitive gaming 'scene'. Learning Pokemon is doubles there does help me to understand it's popularity. In single player I just ditch all support moves as soon as I can, there just isn't much use for them. Honestly though, I don't expect a change in the series. The problem is that there's a pretty big difference in playing Pokémon if you do the single player or are competitive-focused. And I feel with Gen 8, they focused too much on the competitive side. Which lead me to try out getting more into online battling, but it still takes a long time to get mons ready (they streamlined it a lot, but for me it's still too lengthy and complicated), so ultimately for a player like me, you need a good single player. And for that, I'm better off playing one of the GBA or DS games, with how short and easy SWSH are. Double battles are indeed also much more interesting than single battles, but they're barely found in the main game. Pokémon is pretty much the first RPG series I got into, since it was a defining childhood thing for anyone my age, but as I've gotten older and played more other RPGs, the one-on-one battle format does annoy me more and more. I will admit, though, that I really enjoyed the last gen, so hopefully SWSH are just kind of GF being in a rut or something. I guess the one advantage of single player SWSH is that they would be a good entry-level Nuzlocke gen.
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Post by dsparil on Jan 22, 2021 6:10:33 GMT -5
Dragon's Lair (Switch, First Time) Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp Space Ace
Dragon's Lair Trilogy was on sale recently so I snatched it up as I haven't really played them much. DLII I definitely remember seeing in person, but DL and SA are both a little before my time. I get the feeling I might have played Space Ace at some point since parts seemed very familiar, but it could just be from seeing clips here and there since there's only about 6 or 7 minutes of total animation.
The first game is the best of them by far. It feels the most like an actual game in being divided up into discrete rooms with a specific challenge that needs to be overcome. By default, you switch to a different uncompleted room when you die, but this can be changed to keeping you in the same room. Swapping when you die does make sense from an arcade perspective since it teases more of the content while also keeping you from being able to master one room at time and extracting more quarters. In an interview* included in this collection, Don Bluth mentions that it was a shame that he and designer Rick Dyer weren't able to better understand each other's worlds and make a better game, but it's still an interesting artifact.
Space Ace is better in some ways, but I think a step down overall. It's divided up into action sequences more akin to something actually out of a movie, but they have a very strange jumpiness to them. In the same DL interview, Bluth mentions that sometimes he'd get notes about cutting out lulls in action from movies. This greatly feels like a result of something like that. The pace is unrelenting but with an odd staccato rhythm. What saves it a little bit is that there usually are multiple versions of a level depending on whether you stay as Dexter/"Ace"'s Infanto Ray-ed child form or Energize temporarily back to normal.
Dragon's Lair II has the best looking and smoothest animated sequences but is also the least fun to actually play. The biggest drawback is that it feels entirely like you're just pushing the correct button to keep the animation going. These are all literally QTE: The Game, but the first game did a reasonable job wrapping it in a suitable format and SA had some variation. This is just like trying to play a video that needs to have the player hit just the right way every few seconds to keep going. Also intensely annoying is that you also need to collect a bunch of treasures in order to unlock the final level with the game looping endless until you do. These have no narrative purpose at all and only show up being dumped out of Dirk's backpack at the end. They don't even serve as slight alternate paths in a level as it just plays a quick collection animation before continuing.
* The site's article on DL oddly includes a still from this interview, but raises questions that are answered within it…
Rating: 7, 6, 6
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Jan 22, 2021 6:18:22 GMT -5
Pokémon Trading Card Game (GBC, played on a GBA SP, 1st time, 20h30m)
At last I've got something to claim in this thread.
I really enjoy this, as I've indicated in the main thread. When there's an exciting match going, there's actually a lot of different decisions to make, and there are always good dilemmas because you never know how the luck of the draw/coin flips is gonna work out. One of my favorite things about RPGs is the uncertainty and having to deal with bad luck, and I think this game has some good moments regarding that. It's too bad that some matches are very one sided. I wanted to do this game's equivalent of the Elite 4/champion in one go without saving, but sometimes you just get an opening hand that's so bad that you can't possibly win. Ah well.
I have some minor gripes with the way the actual video game is set up (especially in regards to what kind of match options you have - you don't get booster packs from the challenge machine, for example), but overall I really like this game, and I'm still playng it non-stop trying to get all the cards. I'm considering picking up a bootleg of the fan translation of the second game. That one does seem to have a good amount of improvements and additions over this one.
Rating: 9/10
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Jan 22, 2021 8:04:52 GMT -5
Prince of Persia Classic (Xbox 360; First Time; 1 hour 41 minutes) This is a remake of the original 1989 Prince of Persia, made back in 2007 by Gameloft with a presentational facelift inspired by Sands of Time (I'm fairly certain they just recycled the character models for the Prince and the Vizier/Jafar, whereas the Princess is at least a fairly modified Farah). The level design and controls are about the same, with the only real changes being slight tweaks to make certain things easier - switches that open and close doors are marked with orange and red glyphs respectively, you can follow an optional sparkle that guides you through the level, and there's even a mid-level checkpoint if you'd rather not repeat previous sections. That last bit could potentially break the game's hour-long time limit challenge, but you lose some time if you reload from the checkpoint; whereas you regain your time if you restart the level over, sometimes making that the more pragmatic option now that you're more familiar with the layouts.
Prince of Persia was one of the earliest games I remember playing, as we used to have it on our old Macintosh back in 2001/2 (along with a surprising amount of vintage computer classics like The Incredible Machine, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom II, the Star Trek: 25th Anniversary adventure game, and even Another World). However, I was never very good at it due to stinking quite badly at slow-paced cinematic platformers. I got a code to download Classic with the limited edition of the then-recent Forgetten Sands back in 2011 and had always hoped to finally make some progress with it, but I still got too frustrated with some of the trickier challenges and gave up. Now that I'm trying to beat games I've owned for ages, I figured I may as well give this a shot since it couldn't take more than an hour or two considering the aforementioned time limit.
I'm very pleased to have finally beaten it, and gotten a chance to appreciate the trickiness of the level designs and how smooth the controls are. Some of the latter is due to some smart additions from Gameloft such as automatically turning to jump grab a ledge, but most of that I would presume is down to the original. The one area I'm not keen on is the combat, which seems to be considerably worse than the original from what I've looked into. It's poorly telegraphed as to when you should attack, so getting in hits feels very random, and there's not so much strategy as dumb luck that determines how you win most of these fights. It feels very at odds with the consistent, considered nature of the platforming and I wish there was a mode that removed combat altogether. Just give me some extra levels as compensation (maybe based on either the Mega Drive or SNES ports from back in the day).
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Post by dsparil on Jan 23, 2021 8:49:25 GMT -5
Re:Turn — One Way Trip (Switch, First Time)
I guess this horror adventure game set on a haunted train has potential and some people seem to like it, but for the life of me I can't see why. The pace of the story is glacial, the gameplay is dull and heavy on running back and forth on the same handful of screens, and there basically isn't an ending. I can't say a good ending to a boring game is completely redemptive, but it's always good to actually end on a high note instead sputtering out entirely.
Rating: 4
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Post by Woody Alien on Jan 23, 2021 12:45:20 GMT -5
Insanity's Blade (PC/Windows, replay, about 2.5 hours)
Retro scroller hyper-violent hack 'n slash heavily inspired by old Capcom coin-ops such as Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Magic Sword, Tiger Road, Forgotten Worlds plus other similar games like Rastan, Rygar, etc. I completed story mode 2 years ago and now I came back to it to complete arcade mode too: only 1.6% of Steam players has that achievement as of now, so evidently not many people cared. It starts off well enough and then devolves into a mindless button masher, with an extremely annoying platforming section featuring gusts of wind over chasms near the end. In theory it should have been the first game in a series, but the guy who made it then made for his daughter Battle Princess Madelyn, and, judging by the reviews, he doesn't seem to have learned much about game design in the meantime. Sucks to be him I guess. 6.5/10
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Post by Digitalnametag on Jan 23, 2021 23:47:54 GMT -5
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 - FTP PS2 28 hours
Like several other multi-part games on the PS2 this one doesn't feel much like a stand alone title. More like the second half of a game cut into two for profit reasons. You start from zero as well so it's kinda like playing the same game twice. Which is why I took a several year break between parts. It's still a very competent dungeon crawler with a variant of the Nocturne battle system, but the story is rather lacking. Not much character development to speak of. The sound-track is okay, although it seems Shoji Meguro was saving most of the good stuff for Persona 3.
Battle system is an easier Nocturne. Random encounters can still wipe the floor with you given the opportunity though. I only experienced one or two ambush/instant deaths while playing and feel fortunate for that. I never lost more than ten minutes of progress. Save points are mostly plentiful and should be taken at every opprotunity. What I found I missed the most was a demon compendium. I kept forgetting weakness while playing. Ah modern conveniences.
So yeah. Kinda a middle of the road SMT title. Not quite appealing to the hardcore fans and everyone else would probably rather play a modern Persona. I had fun but cannot see myself ever revisiting this one. Or remembering anything about the story a couple days from now. Something about karma, mantras, and hermaphrodites. That about sums it up.
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Jan 24, 2021 16:48:53 GMT -5
Rise: Race The Future (Switch; First Time; 5 hours 54 minutes) This is the first game I've downloaded since starting this Game Finish Challenge, and I'd actually completely forgotten it existed until I was browsing through the eShop for something cool on sale. For those who don't know, this is a racing game developed by VD-Dev, a two-man studio named for its developers Fernando Velez and Guillaume Dubail who consistently produced a series of technically impressive games for handheld consoles from the late 90s to the early 10s, such as the fully 3D versions of Asterix & Obelix XXL and Driver 3 for the GBA, and COP: The Recruit for the DS. Rise: Race The Future was originally intended as a celebration of their career and their love for racing games, but took on an extra level of significance when Fernando Velez passed away in 2016. (The awesome folks at Stop Skeletons From Fighting did an overview of their games a while back, and is worth watching if you haven't heard much of them before.)
It's a racing game set in the near future, so in addition to a bunch of sleek looking cars, your car automatically turns into a hovercraft when over one of the many bodies of water featured throughout the game's tracks. However, the handling is much looser and you're way more likely to spin out if you're not careful, so they play a larger role in how things can turn out than it initially seems. Despite releasing nearly two years ago, Race The Future has still been receiving updates, and these have largely added to the degree of customization on offer. You adjust how tight or loose the handling is, reconfigure all the buttons, switch between "smooth" and "detailed" graphics if you like, and various other things to make sure that your experience is what you want it to be.
It's quite a good racing game, but the one thing that consistently kept bugging me is how... threadbare it can feel at times. Considering Velez passed away two years before Race The Future's original release in 2018, I have no idea how much his death impacted the game's development or how much content was planned to be included. But I can't help but feel that while the game's mechanically sound, it's in the other areas where I think maybe there wasn't enough time to flesh them out. There's no tutorial to help you get acclimated to the controls; the only modes available are challenges, a championship mode and a time attack; 2 player wasn't originally available on the Switch until a very recent update.
This becomes particularly obvious when it comes to the number of locales available. There are a total of four areas: seaside cliffs, a canyon surrounding a lake, a desert, and a snowy wasteland. To the game's credit, it cleverly designs a very big, winding race track with multiple routes for each area that it then chops up and rearranges into much smaller tracks - making for eight race tracks, with reversed versions available. That effectively means there are 72 race tracks to mess around in, and while that's very cool, the locales soon end up feeling very repetitive after a while. Whether you're taking on the challenge or championship modes, which have you playing through every single track with no secret levels and are generally quite long to beat, it starts to feel like the amount of locales have been stretched pretty thin. Not helping this is with the soundtrack. I appreciate how much it goes for rock, to the point where I sometimes felt like I was back in the late 90s/early 00s. However, there's only nine songs and each one only lasts a couple of minutes, so they start to grate as well.
I enjoyed the game enough to complete the Challenges mode, and briefly checked out the Championship mode for curiosity's sake. I'll likely even come back to it every now and again for a quick race or two, but the threadbare nature of the modes and presentational variety keep me from viewing it any more fondly.
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Post by dsparil on Jan 26, 2021 5:44:56 GMT -5
I remembered that OpenEmu has a small built-in (and very outdated) home-brew catalog, and I spent a little bit poking around the dozen or so games in the Atari section. I finished three, but only one technically qualifies do to rules about looping. The spirit of the rule is about games like Donkey Kong that keep a score between loops instead of games that fully reset, but it's not written that way. If anyone has been holding back on second gen. games because the rule wasn't written with them taken into account, I'd consider changing it.
Blinky Goes Up (Atari 2600, First Time)
The whole premise is in the title. You play as the eponymous Blinky and move up the screen to the level exit collecting 1-up granting treasure along the way. It’s a very slight game with only 8 or so levels, but it’s not a terrible way to pass a coffee break.
Rating: 7
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Jan 26, 2021 18:40:27 GMT -5
Halo: Spartan Assault (Xbox 360; First Time; 2 hours 55 minutes)I wouldn't call myself a Halo fan. I like the original and 3 well enough, but I'm certainly not as big a fan as my brothers, one of whom downloaded this spinoff way back in 2013. It's a top-down shooter where you play through a series of short missions blasting the Covenant, and it's a decent little game for what it is. I'm surprised at how much of the main games' mechanics were translated into this new genre without much difficulty, and how some of them - such as only using two weapons and the special abilities introduced in Reach - work even better here than elsewhere due to the quick, concise nature of the design. I know it's still a shooter, but I reckon it took a good bit of work to effective translate as many concepts as they did, all while retaining the series' default control scheme to boot. Makes it feel that much more like the main series beyond the presentation and surface detail.
Something I'm rather ambivalent about is how short most missions are. This likely comes from the game's roots as a title for mobile phones and tablets, necessitating very brief stages so the player could make some progress even if they only played it for a couple of minutes, but the majority of levels only have one or two objectives that you complete before moving on to the next one. Levels are fairly small, there aren't any twists that surprise or encourage new strategies, and there aren't any bonus objectives to add something interesting to what's already there. (There are special goals for each level, but they're all ludicrous things like "Kill 40 Elites with X Weapons" that force you to replay missions constantly.) It's not bad, it's just not for me. I personally would've preferred more lengthy missions that reflected more of the Bungie games' quiet moments.
I also would've preferred the game to be optimized better, because good grief, this thing was constantly crashing on me. I played the game over 7 sessions, and it crashed 4 or 5 times after barely half an hour of play. It is the worst case of a game consistently crashing I have ever seen, which comes at such contrast to the mostly smooth 60FPS framerate it carries. It even threatened to derail my playthrough altogether, before I decided to just keep pushing through the last few levels of the game and see what came my way.
It's fine for what it is, but I can't recommend it due to how badly it crashed for me. It did get a sequel called Spartan Strike, and while I've never heard anyone talk about that game (or this one for that matter), I can only hope it keeps the same quality gameplay while improving on the mission designs and the technical front. (Though it's only on mobile devices)
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