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Post by ResidentTsundere on Mar 18, 2020 23:54:26 GMT -5
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
First time playthrough on Xbox 360. I guesstimate that it took about nine hours.
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Post by Snake on Mar 19, 2020 10:58:31 GMT -5
Dragon Warrior, NES (replay, maybe about 20 hours) Dragon Quest, Super Famicom (1st time, 9 hours)
Original NES Dragon Warrior is a slog. While I somewhat enjoyed it growing up, it's really just a grind fest. Grind for money, grind for experience. Certainly some unique touches, which were of the time. Like making all the NPC's speak in thou, thou hast, etc. etc. References to Nester from the Nintendo Power comic strips, and a special thanks to Howard Phillips at the end. Quite a departure from the fan translation which chose to keep all the original names of places and things as accurately as possible.
The Super Famicom release is so much more balanced. While the total accumulated experience points gets capped at something like 65535 (very much like early Ys games?), enemies for the Super Famicom remake give nearly double to triple more experience points and gold. Plus, there's the addition of magic nuts and strength seeds to further boost stats. Of course, better sound synth makes for better and more palatable music quality.
Fan translation I played did have one uncompleted section of translation for the ending. And it deals with whether you brought Princess Gwaelin/Laura with you after killing King Dragon/Dragon Lord. If you don't rescue her, the King doesn't even bring up her existence, and you go on your merry way. If you did for the Super Famicom fansub, it gets a bunch of garbled letters and code. Also, bringing the princess with you to fight King Dragon, there's no acknowledgement by King Dragon, but for Super Famicom, he makes a comment about bringing him a gift. Quite a bit of suggestive lines from the Princess too. She'll ask if you "fantasize about her." Not to mention, no one seems to care when you bring the princess with you when you stay a night at an inn. There's another female NPC in the first town that follows you around, and she'll still be following you around as you carry the princess, even after a nights stay at the inn. Uncompleted programming bits?
NES - 4/10 Super Famicom - 5/10.
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Post by toei on Mar 19, 2020 14:36:39 GMT -5
Finished Devastator, Sega-CD. First time.
Nice side-scroller/shmup hybrid by Wolf Team, with a clever power-up system. The boss gauntlet at the end is a bit much, though.
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Post by dsparil on Mar 20, 2020 12:07:07 GMT -5
Mutazione (macOS, First Time) This has mostly good reviews, but I found it very boring despite the premise. You play as a Kai, a teenager on summer break going off to visit her ailing grandfather on the island of Mutazione (or maybe it's just a swampy region). The little twist is that Mutazione was hit by a meteor 100 years earlier which destroyed much of it and mutated the survivors although the current residents are a mix of the descendants of the survivors and a few outsiders. Kai's grandfather was part of a research team that came to the island decades earlier and ended up staying. He's also somewhat of a shaman for the people still living there. The biggest problem is that the game just seems allergic to any actually interesting. The backstory is barely even an element! The whole thing might as well take place in the Louisiana bayou and have nothing to do with mutants at all. The story would barely even have to be tweaked Everyone is so nice to each other and the only real conflict that even comes up (which is kinda major) is diffused unreasonably quickly. A second background conflict is somewhat tied to the main plot, but it's also treated way too lightly. (real spoiler) I really would expect a game involving a community struggling to recover from one of its members going crazy from a botched mystic ritual and murdering his children before disappearing would perhaps spend more than 5 interspersed minutes on the subject. The backbone of the plot is hypothetically about Kai's grandfather passing on his shamanic knowledge to her, but that's also treated in a very skimpy way until the end where it's rushed through in the least interesting way possible. It's just a complete mess. You get some build up for something that ends up being insultingly anticlimactic. Aside from dialogue, the main gameplay is in creating gardens with a specific mood, but this too is completely boring. You can hypothetically collect seeds and use those, but you're always simply given enough to complete the garden. You also can't really design it for aesthetic purposes as seeds can only be planted in certain sections of the garden. You just plop enough seeds down, play the right song (another extremely underdeveloped element) and possibly harvest a specific plant. I suspect that there may have been more to this at one point and it simply got watered down to almost nothing. You're given an encyclopedia of local flora at the beginning which contains information about each plant along with some cryptic symbols about how they're grown. In the final game, there's no deciphering or need to consult the book at all. You can't plant seeds in the wrong place at all and the song/mood is just in the menu along with some other information that seems to have nothing to do with anything. So in all, this is just an awful clone of Oxenfree with some useless extra "gameplay". That actually had a nice teen drama element coupled with a fairly well developed ghost story. This is just a skimpy outline in comparison. There's perhaps the barest skeleton of a most interesting game but nothing more. There's literally nothing here that hasn't been done infinitely better elsewhere. Rating: 4
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Post by toei on Mar 21, 2020 22:05:40 GMT -5
Finally beat El Viento (Genesis). First time.
I used to play that one a lot quite a few years ago, but that was before I really started to play side-scrollers, and I had no skills. Still, I had made it to the final level, which is pretty terrible. I like the speed and feel of the movement, and some of the levels are nice (the interior part of level 3 is really well constructed), but the game is really sloppily designed in some ways.
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Post by dsparil on Mar 22, 2020 6:56:44 GMT -5
Mega Man Zero 4 (Switch, Replay)
Inti really knocked it out the park with Zero 4! It has the best story with graphics occasionally verging on PSX in quality. This had double the cart size of the other 3 and it shows. Gameplay has some shake ups, some for the better and some for the worse. I do like the new Z-Knuckle which lets you steal weapons from enemies. It's only sometimes truly useful, but it adds some variety and it's fun seeing what different enemies give you. EX Skills are no longer tied to rank which is nice, but it's still basically the same saber skills as before. Elemental chips are gone so boss battles take a little longer since you no longer have elemental charged attacks, but they're also a easier overall for the most part. You hypothetical can use EX Skills as they are no elemental, but our good friend the fiery rising attack is the only saber skill that can really be used this way. Having an upgradeable cyber elf is a great change though. Overall, a fantastic end to the series with easily the best story out of any of them. Gameplay-wise, I'd probably go with the first one since they're all pretty similar and I liked having an explorable environment.
I finished in 2:51:30. (Edit: Forgot to mention that my total time for the 4 was in the 15 - 20 range)
Rating: 9
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Post by JoeQ on Mar 22, 2020 7:33:25 GMT -5
DmC: Devil May Cry - Definitive Edition (PS4) - First playthrough, Time: 44:38:13 (main game), 11:35:21 (DLC) The much maligned bastard stepchild of the franchise. Surprisingly enough I found it pretty good! It makes a terrible first impression, but the gameplay is solid (at least in the Definitive Edition) and Dante's obnoxiousness is toned down later. Did 3+ playthroughs of the main game and Vergil's Downfall DLC on multiple difficulties to get the platinum trophy. Rating: 8/10Alphabet Challenge: A-CD-F-H---LM--------V---Z Number Challenge: --2-------
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Post by toei on Mar 24, 2020 0:16:42 GMT -5
Beat Earnest Evans, Genesis, first time. It was clearly rushed out to market long before it was finished, and it plays like an early prototype. So it's not a good game. Pretty good music, though, courtesy of Motoi Sakuraba.
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Post by Snake on Mar 24, 2020 10:30:43 GMT -5
Beat Earnest Evans, Genesis, first time. It was clearly rushed out to market long before it was finished, and it plays like an early prototype. So it's not a good game. Pretty good music, though, courtesy of Motoi Sakuraba. Right?! Earnest Evans feels clunky compared to the fast pace of El Viento. You going to finish up with Annette Futatabi, next?
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Post by toei on Mar 24, 2020 13:21:26 GMT -5
Beat Earnest Evans, Genesis, first time. It was clearly rushed out to market long before it was finished, and it plays like an early prototype. So it's not a good game. Pretty good music, though, courtesy of Motoi Sakuraba. Right?! Earnest Evans feels clunky compared to the fast pace of El Viento. You going to finish up with Annette Futatabi, next?I already beat that one a few years ago. It's also not great, but I had vaguely enjoyed it anyway as I was in my beat-'em-up period. I'm not sure if I want to replay it, though. It's kind of the Sega-CD equivalent of Ane-San on the PCE-CD, interesting enough for a play but slightly broken/incompetent.
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Post by dsparil on Mar 25, 2020 8:54:13 GMT -5
Planet RIX-13 (Switch, First Time)
An okay-ish side-scrolling adventure game, but the full price of $5 is criminal for the extremely meager amount of content; the $2.50 I paid was still way too high. You play as a some kind of spacefarer that's crash landed on a planet and have to escape. The main problem is that everything is just so skimpy. There's few locations, barely any story, almost no puzzles and no music. The description says there's two endings and that verges on being an outright lie. You can do one of two things to finish the game, but they both lead to the same result. I only got this because the Steam reviews were overwhelmingly positive. This isn't bad but it isn't good either. It's be interesting to see an expanded version that feels more like a real game instead of a small demo.
I finished in 0:27 by my own timing.
Rating: 4
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Post by Null0x00 on Mar 26, 2020 4:47:56 GMT -5
Cleared Final Doom: The Plutonia Experiment using the GZDoom sourceport in 5 hours, 10 minutes on the Ultra-Violence difficulty using only stock Doom features and the 35FPS lock disabled. First time playthrough. 8/10. Such masterfully crafted dickery. If you think you're an expert at FPS games, play this on Ultra-Violence and prepare to get your teeth kicked-in. I can see why this got the two creators jobs at Valve.
Guess I'll have to play TNT: Evilution at some point, even though it's supposedly much worse.
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Post by dsparil on Mar 26, 2020 8:08:03 GMT -5
Dogurai (Switch, First Time)
A pretty good action/platformer in the style of classic Mega Man mixed with Mega Man Zero and with GB-esque aesthetics. Gameplay is pretty simple. You play as a dog samurai (ergo Dogurai) with only a melee attack along with a double jump and a slide that doubles as a quasi-dash. The Zero influence is more than coincidental although mostly visual as many enemies and most of the bosses have that distinctive cross-section view when defeated, the main robot enemies are very similar to the Pantheons from Zero and the final boss looks identical to Dr. Weil.
Gameplay is closer to classic Mega Man although the bosses are more like those in X/Zero, and at least one is more or less a direct copy. There's only 7 levels total (plus a shortish final level) although 4 are selectable after the intro level. You don't gain any abilities or weapons so it's more in keeping with the style of MM to have some selectable. The levels are pretty long though so that does make up for the small number.
This is maybe a little more difficult than MM as there aren't any health drops (only set pick ups) and the platforming does feel harder than average for MM, but you have unlimited lives on the default difficulty (Normal) and a reasonable number of checkpoints. The double jump also makes things a little easier as the platforming generally doesn't require its use so it's able to act as a safeguard for poorly timed jumps.
Overall, a pretty good take on MM and a reasonable homage to the Game Boy. It could use some story content—there isn't an intro and only about 3 lines of dialogue all in the final level—but that's a minor complaint. The full price of $10 on PC is a little steep, but it's only $5 on the eShop (and PSN) which is a little more reasonable. The PC and Switch versions are on sale for $2.50 right now and that's definitely a steal.
Rating: 8
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Post by zerker on Mar 26, 2020 19:05:03 GMT -5
Finished Bomb Squad Academy (Linux; first time) which was a fun & charming circuit puzzle game. Note: I enabled the 'long timers' option in the menu to reduce the stress a little bit. That does break a couple puzzles though. If anyone else plays this, you may need to turn that option back off for some of the puzzles. This is usually the case when you are manually running a timer down via button or similar. Steam says it took me 71 minutes. 7/10.
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Post by dsparil on Mar 28, 2020 6:13:41 GMT -5
Pikuniku (Switch, First Time)
Woody Alien pretty much described the main points when posting about this (short/simple/cute/forgettable), but I feel more negative on the forgettable aspect. Due to the ease, straightforwardness, and small amount of text, I get the feeling that this is really for small children but not necessarily marketed that way. I only paid 99¢ (the full price of $10 is ridiculous) so I mainly feel like I wasted an evening better spent on Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon.
Rating: 6
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