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Post by JoeQ on Oct 4, 2020 12:35:10 GMT -5
Sonic Dreams Collection (PC) - Replay, Time: 49 min (GOG Galaxy timer) What a wonderful, magical experience. Rating: Defies ratings/5Alphabet Challenge: ABCD-FGH-J-LM--P-RSTUV---Z Number Challenge: --2-------
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Post by Digitalnametag on Oct 4, 2020 17:20:32 GMT -5
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim PS4 FTP 25 hours
It's good. Cool sci-fi story and beautiful artwork by Vanillaware. The tower defense portion is kinda lacking in graphics...but that is the worst I can say about the game. It is way more visual novel than Odin Sphere was but I'm cool with that. The stories are linked the same way Odin Sphere is just instead of five protagonists you have thirteen. Really cool how well planned and interconnected the stories are.
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Post by zerker on Oct 4, 2020 19:44:11 GMT -5
Finished Carrion (Linux; First time). A quality, if disturbing, action-adventure game controlling an evil parasitic monster of some variety. With many mouths, and a good set of increasingly powerful abilities.
9/10, would doom humanity again.
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Post by spanky on Oct 4, 2020 19:56:31 GMT -5
Beat Wizards and Warriors (NES) this morning. Family was out of town and it was a gloomy cold morning, so why not spend it playing an ancient NES game?
This is one of the earliest NES games I ever remember playing...well, watching. My asshole neighbor rented it and he never let me play his games so I had to be content to watch. The fact I never got to play it until years later always gave me an odd fascination with it.
This is a trite observation but it is kind of funny that a game called "Wizards and Warriors" and stars an armor clad knight has you jumping around like a rabbit for the majority of the game.
It has lots of classic 8-bit bullshit. Enemies fly at you from all corners of the screen, often too fast for you to react, and it's kinda easy to pick up an item you don't need - which can replace an item you're already carrying.
That being said, the game offers infinite continues with no penalty as far as I could tell (does it rest your score?). It even starts you off where you died, making the game a mostly trivial affair. The final boss IS sort of tough. He teleports around the room and he disappears too fast for you to hit him if you chase him around. You just need to pick a spot and camp and wait for him to come to you.
Not a super great game, but I had fun with it and I like the music. The sequel, Ironsword is about as difficult but doesn't have infinite continues which means its REALLY tough in comparison. I've never played the 3rd one but it looks kind of interesting.
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Post by dsparil on Oct 5, 2020 5:20:31 GMT -5
Beat Wizards and Warriors (NES) this morning. For record keeping purposes, was this a first time or repeat completion?
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Post by spanky on Oct 5, 2020 6:06:47 GMT -5
Beat Wizards and Warriors (NES) this morning. For record keeping purposes, was this a first time or repeat completion? Oh sorry, this was the first time I've beaten the game.
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Post by dsparil on Oct 5, 2020 13:47:28 GMT -5
Shin Megami Tensei if... (SNES, First Time)
if... is a mess. The central Guardian mechanic doesn't work that well, the concept of having dungeons based on the deadly sins is very haphazard, and there's barely any story. Like I said in the general thread, the dungeon for Sloth is one of the most boring in the history of dungeon crawlers. Then the final two are just giant sprawling mazes. Not a very pleasant experience at all.
Rating: 5
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Post by dsparil on Oct 6, 2020 8:46:36 GMT -5
God Eater 3 (Switch, First Time)
God Eater is basically a story-based Monster Hunter but tweaked to be much faster with significantly less grinding for materials. The story itself is okay, but very backloaded. The background is that on top of the unexplained(?) presence of the monstrous aragami of the earlier games, now there's also the Ash cataclysm that's seemingly causing massive desertification and will kill anyone in minutes if not protected. The actual story of the game starts very slowly and doesn't really pick up until about halfway (rank 4 of 6). After the first introductory rank, you're basically on an extended delivery mission and just clearing out the path for the vehicle you're stationed on. The second half is much better, with a heavier focus on story. It's nothing earth shattering, but there's some nice cutscenes. I do wish there was more development of the plot as it can feel like you're only getting glimpses into it. Based on YouTube compilations, it's about 10% cutscene versus closer to 20% for a standard RPG.
The gameplay is fairly similar to MH, but there are significant changes. While weapon type has its own quirks and differences, they don't have radically different gameplay attached to them that makes each one feel like a different game. I don't see that as a minus though. The upgrade trees are also much simpler without the crazy branching MH can have. Material drop rates are also just higher in general so you rarely need to grind for them. The big difference is the Burst attacks that you attach to each weapon as they can radically change how they play. When in Burst mode, which you should always be in anyway, a weapon's ground, air and step (dodge) can be changed to various unlockable attacks. I mostly used the Charge Spear which as the name implies is based around a charging air or ground dash attack. Its ground attack options include changing the strong and weak attacks, turning its special backflip into an attack and turning the charged dash into a strong stationary attack. On top of that, you can also add a secondary effect to it like an extra slash or a short range blast. I think the general difference is that GE's combat is more like an advanced version of an action RPG's which I kinda like more overall.
What ended up being a more minor change that I expected is that you also have a secondary long range weapon which can be either a sniper rifle, shotgun, rapid-fire gun or a laser. The main downside is that you chew through ammo very quickly. It is replenished through melee attacks, but at a rate that's a little too slow. Except for one specific aragami that's weak to long range attacks, there isn't much reason to use them.
My main criticism is that it can get repetitive. I've seen Monster Hunter being described as all boss fight which isn't entirely true, but that applies here 100%. Almost all the missions are basically boss fights in generally donut shaped smallish areas with only minimal or no other enemies. There are a few missions where you only fight small aragami, but that's a minor component. You end up seeing a lot of the same larger aragami over and over again with differing amounts of health particularly towards the end when you tend to face multiple ones in a single mission. This is offset by the quick speed of the missions though. Despite getting a 40 minute time limit for almost all of them, they're all completable in 5 to 10 depending on how many aragami you face.
I did like it overall despite the repetition. It's a reasonable difficulty that didn't make me feel like I was constantly hitting a wall like I do with MH. The only mission I failed was the last one as the final boss does massive damage, but is actually fairly easy once you know what they are. I'd definitely pick up a GE4 and even pay full price for it.
I finished in 29:15:24.
Rating: 8
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Post by spanky on Oct 6, 2020 9:28:41 GMT -5
Beat Streets of Rage II yesterday afternoon for the Genesis on Normal difficulty. Well, I played it on my Mega SG.
I've beaten the game before, but it was always on one of those Sega Genesis collections for modern systems. I think playing the game on "real" hardware and not an emulation helps with the input lag a bit - because this run was surprisingly easy. The extra few frames of responsiveness must have really helped because I had several lives and a continue left whereas on other runs it always comes down to the wire. This could all be in my head though.
I don't know what else I can really say about this that hasn't been said before. It's just really excellent. Max might be my favorite character in a beat-em-up ever. A huge arsenal of super powerful moves. He is really slow, but he just tears through enemies.
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Post by personman on Oct 6, 2020 18:50:14 GMT -5
Castlevania III Dracula's Curse (NES)- first time
Think I saw someone played through the japanese version. I went through the American one on the Switch collection so, if it can't be counted no worries. Honestly I'm mostly just interested in getting back into the habit of writing little rambles about games I finish than competing anyhow.
So it's October, that means I'm obligated to explore the Castlevania series as much as I can, and this year that means not dinking around in the SOTN because there is just really nothing left for me to do in that game. But dang do I wish I did because this game annoyed the hell out of me. The level design, particularly the enemy placement just tries so hard to be really cheap more than anything, like there seemed to be no way to get to Dracula without taking damage from the jerk skeleton that just hangs out right on the stairs. Frankly a couple levels were just terrible too, I believe it was level 6 where you just had to wait around forever for falling blocks, that's not fun at all. I was also really annoyed when I got Alucard on my team. I found Grant really useful and thought I'd be able to have both him and Al with me but then he leaves and Alucard is just plain awful. He's only good for skipping a couple platforming sections and maybe taking out things like the crows or flea men. I did find him much easier to beat Dracula in his final phase with him but that was it. Like, one way they could have made him so much better is just letting him attack on stair for crying out loud, there is so dang many in this one that its a serious handicap to be helpless on them.
So yeah I didn't really like this one. Some of the bosses were just cheap and I'm afraid I'm just too old to put up with a game that wants me to be perfect and even then it still felt like I randomly got screwed (the cyclops with the hammer charging you non stop, wth). Like I felt the original game was challenging but so long as you respected it you would be relatively fine. Here I just felt like the game wanted to kill me and nothing else, and I was bitter about Grant, climbing on walls is fun I wanted him back darn it. Maybe the other paths are much better but meh, I'm not interested in revisiting this.
Rating: 4/10 personally. I bet its a classic to most but just too mean for me.
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Post by dsparil on Oct 7, 2020 5:18:01 GMT -5
Castlevania III Dracula's Curse (NES)- first time Think I saw someone played through the japanese version. I went through the American one on the Switch collection so, if it can't be counted no worries. The rule about only one person claiming a game got dropped a few years ago. As Snake implied when he posted about it, the American version of III is considered harder than the Japanese version. I don't think you'd suddenly change your mind, but I'd give it a spin since it's in that collection too. I should note that they are too similar for each to count for you if you do finish it, but feel free to post your thoughts on the difference even if you don't finish it.
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Post by dsparil on Oct 7, 2020 5:26:29 GMT -5
Macbat 64 —Journey of a Nice Chap— (Switch, First Time)
For a cheap $2 game, this actually ended up being not too bad although as short as the price would imply. As a retro N64 style game, it pretty much nails that janky camera and all. There's even a tiny vocal cameo by Grant Kirkhope! The levels are bite-sized, and it doesn't really take into account that you play as a bat with a nonuple jump, but I still had a fun time.
Rating: 7
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Post by alexmate on Oct 7, 2020 5:40:30 GMT -5
Binary Domain XBOX 360 - First Time, Time Taken 8 hours est.
Great game, much better than I expected. I think Vanquish also from SEGA is a bit better.
Rating: 8
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Post by dsparil on Oct 9, 2020 6:59:00 GMT -5
Reverie: Sweet As Edition (Switch, First Time)
A competent Zelda clone with some vaguely Earthbound-ish graphics and little else. It's too short, too easy and doesn't do much to differentiate itself from other clones outside of the graphics which are mostly generic and lack EB's whimsy. The full price of $13 is preposterous, and even the $5 feels like a ripoff.
I finished in 3:06:14.
Rating: 5
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Post by dsparil on Oct 10, 2020 13:31:48 GMT -5
Birthday of Midnight (Switch, First Time)
I could cut and paste what I said about the prequel Midnight Deluxe two and a half years ago. This is a kinda fun puzzle-golf game for a while, but the later levels require way more precision than you reliably get. There's a few new quirks but this is pretty much more of the same.
Rating: 6
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