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Post by JoeQ on Jan 18, 2020 6:32:23 GMT -5
Now play Riddick or Syndicate if you haven't already. Those are more of a sequel to The Darkness than the actual Darkness 2. Thanks for the recommendations. I played Riddick on PC and it's still one of my favorite first person games ever. I will look for a copy of Syndicate.
The Darkness 2 is still pretty good and worth playing, even if it was made by different devs and is a more straightforward shooter. Probably pretty cheap by now too.
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Post by Snake on Jan 18, 2020 14:35:12 GMT -5
Mega Man X SNES Replay 2 hours And let the Mega Man begin! Being a recent acquisition this was my first time playing this on a SNES. Unlike the expensive sequels with their special chips this one is easily affordable. Man do I still love this game. Does anyone play this without remapping dash to a shoulder button though? Bravo, it's a great Mega Man game to have. I almost wish I had it complete-in-box, but I picked up mine as a loose cart for $5, so I can't really complain. I mostly play using dash with forward-forward. I never thought about changing dash to L-button or R-button, since I only use button dash for a sped up wall scale, pushing A and B simultaneously.
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Post by Digitalnametag on Jan 18, 2020 17:04:09 GMT -5
I mostly play using dash with forward-forward. I never thought about changing dash to L-button or R-button, since I only use button dash for a sped up wall scale, pushing A and B simultaneously. I forget the double tap thing is even an option. Dash input error killed me several times playing X4 (my first Mega Man game) back in 1999. Since then I always remap. Sometimes I even put the shot button to a shoulder as holding a charge can start to hurt after awhile.
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Post by zerker on Jan 18, 2020 17:27:05 GMT -5
Mega Man games with auto-charge upgrades make me so happy.
... I too remap dash to a shoulder button. This became default in Mega Man Zero due to reduced button set, and was kept as default for Mega Man ZX. Does anyone know if it was default for any of the X games prior? I only own X to X3 now, so I can't check.
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Post by dsparil on Jan 18, 2020 17:56:35 GMT -5
Shoulder buttons are always for cycling weapons.
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Post by ZenithianHero on Jan 22, 2020 10:59:03 GMT -5
Completed a pair of adventure games. Do I have to give a rating score? I like simple verbal tiers like recommend or not. Bulb Boy (Switch, first time, about 2 hours) A creepy adventure game with crude and dark humor. The young boy that is a sentient light bulb must confront strange monsters/aliens that invaded his house. It was as if I played an Adult Swim cartoon. You are expected to solve puzzles, but also dodge traps and attacking monsters (the game had more action-type segments than I thought). Trial and error aside, doesn't drag on at all..
Rating: 7 Pan Pan (Switch, first time, about 2 hours) An minimalist adventure game where you explore the game world solving puzzles and figuring out how to fix your ship. Puzzles are typically about environment observation and logic puzzles in the form of retrieving the right objects to put into correct slots. The game does not hold your hand, you are expected to search the area for any visual clue and may have to return to the puzzle when you have a new item. I got lost maybe once the whole journey, I didn't expect my solution to the puzzle would have worked but it did. Nothing was too obtuse other than that.
Rating: 8
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Post by dsparil on Jan 22, 2020 11:50:57 GMT -5
You don't need to give a rating score, but I can't track a non-numerical rating if you want them to be.
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Post by ZenithianHero on Jan 22, 2020 16:08:48 GMT -5
If it makes it easier for you I"ll give them a number rating no problem.
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Post by dsparil on Jan 23, 2020 10:40:30 GMT -5
Another Code: R — A Journey into Lost Memories (Wii, First Time) ACR is a good follow up to the original game. Good use of the Wii Remote in puzzles although the game is mainly controlled with just pointing, the d-pad and A. Makes it really hard to emulate if you're using a mouse and keyboard. There were a few spots where I thought I'd have to dig up my packed up controllers but I managed. The hardest spot to get around was one point where you need to do a 360 rotation of the controller, but I stumbled upon the fact that Dolphin will do the rotation if you do a 90 degree side tilt and then a 90 degree forward (or maybe back) tilt. My only complaint is that it's a little too long/slow. There's too many "cutscenes" that are just a single line or two pointing out something obvious on the screen. Having the dialogue just pop up on screen without taking away control would be a lot less annoying. While I do generally appreciate the small scale family and small town drama that makes up most of the plot, it could use a little condensing. Everything is drawn out just a little too much. Tiny side note, but Trace Memory is a lot better as a title in English than Another Code. Another feels much more awkward in English than Trace while sticking a slightly random English word into the Japanese script is much less so. Also a little funny is that the game is heavily implied to take place in California, but the South California Regional for a music competition is given an address in Louisiana! I'm blanking on the city right now, but it was even given the correct ZIP code. I finished in 11:37:06. Rating: 8 Assassin's Creed III Remastered (Switch, First Time) I originally played through the Boston portion when this was originally released on Wii U. What a slightly strange time at the Wii U's early history when it seemed like it would actually get 3rd party multiplatform releases that passed the Wii by. Of course, Ubisoft ended up eventually ignoring the Wii U when it flopped which also led the to be initially sheepish on the Switch. Anyway, ACIII remains the only game in the series I have played so the modern day story is largely lost on me. I skimmed the earlier games' stories before playing this, and I wonder how much the fact that ACII wasn't supposed to turn into a trilogy ended up screwing up some of the overall arc of the series. It's a bit boring being stuck in the same cavernous ruin for most of the modern parts although there are 3 missions outside it that are undertaken. You get doled out a little bit more of the backstory too, but they're basically just info dumps. With the backstory that the series has The Ancient Aliens were from Earth the whole time! , I'm a little surprised that literally everything isn't about that. It seems like a waste to focus so much on the struggle between two groups with such poorly defined and fairly uninteresting goals. The historical story does have that nice fakeout with the first 3 Sequences using Haytham, but sticking Connor into way too many early Revolutionary situations really drags the story down, and why I didn't initially finish it. It gets to be too much and a little boring especially since those events are so oversaturated in American culture. It does pick back up in New York as that shifts to being more in the background or focuses more on events that aren't drilled into every American's head. It gets a nice conclusion too while the modern story hypothetically should be some kind of grand culmination but mostly falls flat. Gameplay is generally fun although the controls can be weirdly awful at times. It's a fairly easy game overall, and pretty much all the issues I had were due to fighting with the controls. Having to run by holding down a button and also making that the button to climb/freerun was a mistake in my opinion. There's so few situations where you need to walk rather than run that it doesn't make any sense to not have a standard walk/run setup on the stick. Climbing instead of running and then ending up on some ledge while being attacked was my single biggest issue. I also had a bunch of miscellaneous problems with climbing which is a little surprising given how much you need to do it. Stealth is also very underdeveloped. You can't even crouch! Maybe it's due to the accretion of combat features, but fighting is significantly easier and less time consuming than trying to be stealthy. You can take so much damage, health regenerates quickly if you're not in "open combat" and "kill streaks" let you effortlessly take out huge groups of enemies very quickly including enemies that are difficult to kill otherwise. I don't really bring up "world design" all that much, but it's a bit sloppy here. The Frontier in particular is a mess with the right side representing the area immediately around Boston while the left side is suddenly southern Pennsylvania. You can't access that area in pre-NY sequences, but it would have made more sense to just have two smaller maps. Boston and likely NY are also overdeveloped given the time period. It isn't particularly difficult to get historical maps even when the game was being developed (here's one for Boston in 1775 for reference). It isn't "immersion breaking", but it does show a certainly sloppiness in research that is fairly pervasive. Sloppier still is the amount of bugs present in this version. I don't remember the issues I had in the Wii U one, but I had small and large problems rather frequently. A few times, I shot high into the air when trying to climb a low object which led to a few deaths. One time I went horizontally instead which wasn't as bad but was weird. Everyone's eyes look really weird in general as they're polygonal and have a weird doll like quality to them. They also don't have lighting applied to them properly so they'll stick on in some scenes where everything else is dark. Some cutscenes having clipping issues with models on top of each other. The UI has problems too with missions objectives not updating or not having the right status. Plus there are those issues I had with climbing. Crafting, trading and hunting are also extremely pointless. You collect so much money during the game especially from fort liberations (you can do 5 of 7 right when they first become available), and you have almost nothing of value to spend it on. This makes nearly all the crafting recipes useless since there's no reason to craft goods to trade (which also knocks out items collected from hunting). It takes so long for the right Homestead missions to unlock in order to upgrade occupants, that the game is practically over by the time you can create any of the weapons or ammo expansions. The hidden blades are perfectly fine to use exclusively and you collect enough weapons throughout the game to not even need to craft any of the weapons. Literally the only thing worth crafting is the twin holsters since it lets you fire off two shots before needing to reload which is useful in exactly one place. I guess I am pretty harsh on this overall, but there is reasonably good core game underneath everything. I finished in 20:15:00. Rating: 7
I really wanted to finish/post these together because they have some weird parallels and contrasts. Themes of absentee fathers are all over the place in both as is memory but ironically less strongly in ACIII. Then there's ACIII explicit acceptance of violence versus ACR's explicit rejection. Nothing really worth heavy examination, but I did find it an interesting coincidence when playing them side by side.
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Post by Snake on Jan 23, 2020 20:07:48 GMT -5
1942, NES (First Time, about 4 hours)
A took a bit of time to learn this game, but it gets really repetitive. Ending is laughable, with a "Congratulation" screen, kill count/percentage (over 6800 planes, and 84% for me), and game over screen. The premise seems to be that you're a lone US fighter pilot in World War 2, taking on entire squadrons of Japanese planes, which seems ironic considering Capcom, a Japanese company, produced the game. Music is really more like beeping ambient static for every stage which almost seems like morse code. I ended up listening to podcasts while playing the bloody game. Oddly, the last few stages ramp up the difficulty with hoards of bullets. And at the very last stage, it's like they have no ammo and your only opposition are kamikaze planes. I doubt I'll ever do a full replay of this game again. Power-ups consist of upgrading to a 4 shot, and 2 option planes that join you by first twirling out of control in the air. Those option planes quickly die though, being such easy targets.
Score: 3.
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Jan 24, 2020 9:12:30 GMT -5
Mega Man X SNES Replay 2 hours And let the Mega Man begin! Being a recent acquisition this was my first time playing this on a SNES. Unlike the expensive sequels with their special chips this one is easily affordable. Man do I still love this game. Does anyone play this without remapping dash to a shoulder button though? It's weird that they still didn't have it on a shoulder button by default even in the PSX games. Especially since there are now two sets of L/R buttons so that cycling weapons is still doable with them.
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Post by alexmate on Jan 25, 2020 9:07:11 GMT -5
Let's be nice here. Context is always good to have, and alexmate did previously mention keeping an overall ranking of completed games and mentions those sometimes. Yeah, that probably came out a bit harsher than I intended. It was a bit of a strange comparison the way it was presented in the post. I was not aware of any specific attempt at ranking games, though I guess it's obvious in retrospect. alexmate , is the list available anywhere? A wider view would paint a much better picture
PS: Limbo is totally between Shinobi and Super Hot.
The list is here, it's still a work in progress and games go up and down.
I appreciate the interest. I've not played Super Hot and the only original Shinobi I've completed is the Master System one, so probably the worst version out of the Sega made games. To put it in context Alex Kidd is arguably the best platformer on the MS and Soul Blade is arguably in top 3 3D beat em ups on the PS1 along with Tekken 3 and Rival Schools.
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Post by zerker on Jan 25, 2020 10:21:08 GMT -5
Thanks for that. I actually haven't made a serious effort at rating my games besides assigning a 1-10 rating. Limbo, Shinobi and Super Hot are all 7s, so I just picked them together Maybe I should at least rank the relative position of all games I've assigned a 10. Wait, I really gave a 10 to 168 of my games? I'm probably a bit too generous.Personally, I didn't like Alex Kidd at all, and would rank it near the bottom (certainly below Blood, which is woefully low on your list). But differences of opinion are to be expected, of course.
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Post by JoeQ on Jan 25, 2020 13:22:21 GMT -5
Flat Kingdom Paper's Cut Edition (Windows/Steam) - First playthrough, Time: 08:20:55
Finally, my first game of the year! (I also beat Rebelstar Tactical Command and Final Fantasy X HD, but since those were started in November 2019 they don't count.)
A solid indie platformer with a charming aesthetic, marred by an uneven difficulty curve and a few unfortunate glitches. Combat also could've used a bit more complexity and "impact".
Got 100% completion, all the achievements, True Ending and all that jazz.
Rating: 7/10Alphabet Challenge: -----F--------------------
Number Challenge: ----------
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Post by alexmate on Jan 25, 2020 15:04:41 GMT -5
Thanks for that. I actually haven't made a serious effort at rating my games besides assigning a 1-10 rating. Limbo, Shinobi and Super Hot are all 7s, so I just picked them together Maybe I should at least rank the relative position of all games I've assigned a 10. Wait, I really gave a 10 to 168 of my games? I'm probably a bit too generous.Personally, I didn't like Alex Kidd at all, and would rank it near the bottom (certainly below Blood, which is woefully low on your list). But differences of opinion are to be expected, of course. I agree with you on Blood, I mainly rated it low due to the difficulty level and those hand things you can't see when entering a room which ruined a lot of enjoyment for me. It is one I plan to playthrough again though.
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