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Post by dsparil on Oct 15, 2019 10:50:29 GMT -5
The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime (macOS via ScummVM, First Time)
I have the second PC release of the original JP (Turbo!), but I also picked this up on GOG some time ago but never played it for some reason. Stranger still is that I put up with WINE weirdness for JP3 two and a half years ago, but still skipped this over despite running in ScummVM generally without issue. This is a significant remake which only came out for the Power Mac in the US although it also was released for the Pippin and PSX in Japan. This could very well be the only game supported by ScummVM that actually needs it without having any other way of running it outside of vintage hardware. It's pretty sad that the sequel did at some point work in a fork of ScummVM, but that fork (Project Cabal) is either gone or rolled back into the main project but without JP2 support. It won't even build support for it from source for unclear reasons.
As for the game itself, it's a nice upgrade over the original version with the addition of walk animations between points of interest instead of being a Myst-esque slideshow (the original actually predates Myst), expanded gameplay and more FMV. As a time travel game, you visit 3 places in the past and correct alterations but with the little twist that they're still the future relative to now. The plot is a whole lot more sci-fi than SF overall. The now united Earth is about to join the alien Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings when the inventor of time travel, Dr. Elliott Sinclair, goes rogue and changes various important events in the past to keep this from happening. He doesn't really get a full backstory until the third game, and his motivation as presented here doesn't go much further than simply thinking it's all an alien ploy. The areas you visit are all fairly small with just a few main sections and a handful of both inventory and mechanical puzzles. You do need to hop around a little bit to get items from other time periods, but it's fairly light.
Overall, a pretty fun game with nice atmosphere. It's a little sad that this seems like it was supposed to be the start of having the games get a little bit of a remastered treatment, but that doesn't seem to have happened.
Rating: 9
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Post by Snake on Oct 15, 2019 13:10:48 GMT -5
Soul Calibur 6, PS4 (1st time, approx. 5 hours)
Completed the entire story mode, short of DLC characters. I haven't touched Soul Calibur since the Soul Calibur 1, when Link was a guest playable character. In terms of timeline, it seems like Soul Calibur 6 retails everyone's individual story. Interestingly, you don't have to fight all the other characters in the story. Seems like some characters don't even intersect at all with anyone else in the story. It was interesting to see the whole lore laid out in the format given, and I feel more or less caught up with events. Except there's no account of what really happens to Rock and Li Long, who gets replaced with Maxim as the nunchaku fighter. Hwang gets left out as a playable character?! The character maker/editor is a cool feature.
8/10. Doesn't feel revolutionary. Gameplay to me is like Tekken, but with weapons. Really tempted to pick up the 2B/Nier Automata DLC content.
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Post by lurker on Oct 15, 2019 13:14:19 GMT -5
Soul Calibur 6, PS4 (1st time, approx. 5 hours)
Completed the entire story mode, short of DLC characters. I haven't touched Soul Calibur since the Soul Calibur 1, when Link was a guest playable character. In terms of timeline, it seems like Soul Calibur 6 retails everyone's individual story. Interestingly, you don't have to fight all the other characters in the story. Seems like some characters don't even intersect at all with anyone else in the story. It was interesting to see the whole lore laid out in the format given, and I feel more or less caught up with events. Except there's no account of what really happens to Rock and Li Long, who gets replaced with Maxim as the nunchaku fighter. Hwang gets left out as a playable character?! The character maker/editor is a cool feature. 8/10. Doesn't feel revolutionary. Gameplay to me is like Tekken, but with weapons. Really tempted to pick up the 2B/Nier Automata DLC content. That's SoulCalibur 2 you're thinking of.
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Post by Snake on Oct 15, 2019 18:50:20 GMT -5
Soul Calibur 6, PS4 (1st time, approx. 5 hours)
Completed the entire story mode, short of DLC characters. I haven't touched Soul Calibur since the Soul Calibur 1, when Link was a guest playable character. In terms of timeline, it seems like Soul Calibur 6 retails everyone's individual story. That's SoulCalibur 2 you're thinking of. Ha! I stand corrected, thank you. =) Shows you how much attention I paid to this series.
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Post by JoeQ on Oct 19, 2019 9:38:10 GMT -5
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (GBA) - First playthrough, Time: 12:46:20 (timer)
Game beaten on Normal with the best ending, 100.0% of the map explored and 100.0% enemy souls obtained. Wayyy too much of that time was spent farming for enemy souls, the droprates are awful.
Good Igavania, though not as good as I hoped. Order of Ecclesia is still my favorite.
Rating: 4/5
Alphabet Challenge: ABCDE-----K-MNOP-RST-----Z
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Post by Digitalnametag on Oct 19, 2019 22:54:54 GMT -5
Indivisible PS4 FTP 20 hours
Already posted some complaints on this in general chat but I did mostly enjoy the game. Inspired by Valkyrie Profile; Indivisible is more of a platformer with RPG elements whereas VP is the other way around. The combat and levels ultimately feel kinda meaningless. You get characters that the game tells you are good at juggling enemies but there isn't any in game mechanic that takes advantage of that. In VP you could knock crystals and gems out of enemies by juggling or knocking enemies down. Clearly a similar mechanic was planned for Indivisible but cut for the release. Stuff like that left me disappointed. I'm sure the game will get even better with patches I just wish it was complete when I played it.
Still the platforming was fun and the combat was serviceable. It's uh, a ridiculously easy Platinum if that matters. I got it just by normally playing the game. A little too much backtracking doing all the character side quests at the end of the game as well. A couple more warps would have been nice. So yeah. Good game. Just maybe give them another year or so to fully implement everything.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time SNES FTP 30 minutes
Cart came in the mail yesterday so when my brother came over today we both played this for the first time. We had (and I still have) Hyperstone Heist growing up so playing the SNES version was interesting. We both thought the levels and bosses on the SNES were better. One more enemy on screen at a time too. They sure picked a lot of turtle (Tokka, Metalhead, Slash) bosses for the game though. Funny playing the future stage. 2020! Still technically in the future!
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Post by dsparil on Oct 21, 2019 6:38:19 GMT -5
Possessions. (iOS, First Time)
The second Apple Arcade game I've gone through, and it's not that good. It's a pretty simple game where you have items floating in a room and have to rotate the room to get them in the right spot. There's some kind of light story about people's lives changing over time, but it's really superfluous. The main problem is that it's so incredibly short despite having 33 levels. You only have a handful of items per level so they just blast by, but unlike Assemble With Care, there's nothing interesting here which makes me want more.
I finished in 0:35.
Rating: 5
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Post by alexmate on Oct 21, 2019 15:11:09 GMT -5
Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star (PC\GoG Version) Time Taken: 1 hour I'm a fan of the first game, but this shameless cash-in isn't really worth your time. Very little gameplay even for a visual novel and very little in the way of plot. Music is slightly above average for a game of this type, artwork is OK, but not great. Game score 6 for quirkiness, I bought it on sale a while back, deffo wait untill the price drops if like me you like that sort of thing.
Rating: 6
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Post by JoeQ on Oct 23, 2019 5:16:21 GMT -5
Harvester (PC) - First playthrough, Time: 07:30:00 (timer)
What a weird, disgusting, messed up game. As an adventure game it's pretty bad, especially the first half with all the red herrings (cut content?) and puzzles that only make sense after the fact. It's pretty much entirely carried by the creepy atmosphere and effed up things you see and do. I definitely recommend just using a guide if you want to play it.
Rating: 3/5
Alphabet Challenge: ABCDE--H--K-MNOP-RST-----Z
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Post by dsparil on Oct 23, 2019 7:21:33 GMT -5
NAIRI: Tower of Shirin (Switch, First Time)
Not really sure why the title is in all caps as that's the name of the main character. This is an adventure game set in a vaguely middle eastern setting where most but not all the characters are anthropomorphic animals for some reason. The art is pretty good, but that's about it. The parts where you're in the city of Shirin are standard inventory puzzles, but the two parts in the tower are mostly mechanical and they kinda stink. There's one puzzle involving rotating rings that's so easy it might as well not exist, but the rest are all shoved into a moving block format even if it doesn't make sense for the puzzle concept. The only reason I can think for this is to save on programming. You'd think that one type would be super polished, but it's not and they're all a gigantic pain. Movement isn't 1 to 1 with the cursor and using the touch screen isn't any better. The blocks also have a tendency to get stuck on each other which makes some of the puzzles difficult to complete. The story isn't all that interesting despite starting out okay, and it just ends on a cliffhanger out of nowhere.
I really wanted to like this, but the technical issues just wore me down without having a story good enough to counterbalance that. This seemed like a mobile game quickly ported to Switch, but it actually isn't. It was a simultaneous PC and Switch release about a year ago with no mobile version at all!
I finished in about 4.5h.
Rating: 6
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Post by alexmate on Oct 23, 2019 13:53:21 GMT -5
The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy (Arcade via MAME, 1st playthrough, Time Taken: 1 hour) Completed as per rules with 2 credits per stage. This is a surprisingly fair game, as long as you don't fall off the platforms. I've listed time taken as 1 hour, but it took me an hours extra practice before the final run. I heard about this from a video by NintendoComplete on YouTube. Graphics are great with excellent animation, voice samples are clear, music is excellently composed, but forgettable. Characters and story also forgettable. So all in all this is a highly polished game, with mediocre gameplay and style. That said clearly a lot of effort and love went imto makeing this Indiana Jones tribute.
Rating: 7
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Post by Snake on Oct 24, 2019 18:17:32 GMT -5
Final Fantasy V, Super Famicom (replay, approx. 30 hours)
While the characters you play are mostly flat in personality (I do like Faris' persona a pirate not cut-out for the princess life), the overall plot does have an interesting and twist to it. At least I always found it intriguing. Though it is never explained how it is possible to travel between worlds on a meteor.
The openness of the job system is what really makes the game fun. For those that really want to grind, you can have some rather game-breaking abilities from early on. And the music soundtrack is among Nobuo Uematsu's best work. A lot of cool, iconic tracks, with Battle on the Big Bridge/Gilgamesh fight BGM seeming to be among the most popular across the entire series.
8/10.
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Post by kaoru on Oct 25, 2019 1:12:44 GMT -5
I love FFV. I prefer the GBA version though, because the translation really livens up the second rate plot by infusing a lot of charme and humour.
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Post by alexmate on Oct 25, 2019 5:57:32 GMT -5
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (time taken 2 hours total, Arcade) Times include practise plays. Actual clean run was about 50 minutes. Frankly miles ahead of any other side scrolling beat em up in 1989 in terms of sound and graphics.
Rating: 8
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (time taken 3.5 hours total, Arcade) Actual clean playrun about an hour 20. Absolutely stunning grat use of license. Letdown by tough difficulty and enemy spamming.
Rating: 8
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Post by dsparil on Oct 25, 2019 6:46:43 GMT -5
Soulslayer Episode 1: The Wedding Eve (Switch, First Time)
You can't really tell by the title, but this is a Chinese visual novel set in historical China. You play as Yao Xiu, a woman poisoned the day before her wedding. Some kind of mysterious force gives you three loops through the day to find the murderer. An individual play through is fairly short, maybe 30 minutes tops, as the whole time loop thing is just a function of the plot. Of course the point is to get through all the different branches and explore the possible suspects for the murderer. The plot is fairly twisty by the end of it, and I did like it. The music, Mandarin voice acting and visuals are quite good too.
The only shortcomings are some technical issues and the translation. Text sometimes overflows the box occasionally requiring you to use the history to see all the text. It also seems a little haphazard exactly when text shows up there, but it could be related to the overflow bug. The translation can be a little iffy at times too. One Steam review by someone that speaks Mandarin notes that the original text is in period appropriate Mandarin and that a substantial amount of nuance is lost. It is serviceable, and there is some attempt to show those nuances, but it doesn't always comes across well.
I finished in about 3.5h.
Rating: 8
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