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Post by Digitalnametag on Nov 21, 2022 10:16:51 GMT -5
Star Ocean: The Divine Force PS5 FTP 32 hours
Divine Force has the funnest method of traversal I have ever experienced in a JRPG: a jet pack. It is absurd how fun and fast traveling is. Easily the best part of the game. Makes going back to Xenoblade 3 painful. Why can't I just jet pack up this hill?
Outside of the very awesome jet pack the game is average. Battle system is weak compared to it's most recent cousin Tales of Arise and too easy on normal difficulty. You have very little incentive to try new abilities when you can mostly button mash your way through with the starting combo. Story is pretty meh and you cannot skip dialogue in cut-scenes, of which there are hours of at the end of the game. That could just be my patience wearing out. Xenosaga had hours of cut-scenes and I enjoyed them back in the 2000s.
Decent game and a solid turn around for the Star Ocean franchise. Play it for the jet-pack! Man, I haven't played this many new Square-Enix games since the 2000s! Out of this recent wave Star Ocean is definitely the best title yet.
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Nov 21, 2022 12:34:17 GMT -5
Lunistice (Windows; First Time; 1 hour 58 minutes)
This is a 3D platformer that came out a couple of weeks ago, inspired by those from the PS1 and Saturn specifically, in which you play as a tanuki who runs and jumps through obstacle course levels. I'm planning to cover this for the website now that I've finished covering that handful of adventure games (and Ardy Lightfoot) that I'd been working on since June, so I'll keep relatively quiet about it. However, I can say that it's a concise and cool platformer that focuses on making movement fun with plenty of opportunities for challenge, speed-running and exploration.
As a weird comparison, it reminds me a bit of the Toree games, in terms of being a speedy platformer where a lot of its appeal comes from replaying and mastering the stages. However, Lunistice is way more interesting to me than Toree is, mainly because it offers a lot to keep me wanting to come back despite not being all that keen on replaying levels to get the best times. There's nothing like having a short but well executed game to give you just what you're looking for.
It's available on the Switch as well, but here's links to the PC version on Steam and GOG. (There's also a demo available on all storefronts as well as itch.io, if you'd rather give it a test first)
Sonic Frontiers (Nintendo Switch; First Time; 14 hours 56 minutes)
I've actually beaten this for a good few days, but I was a bit hesitant to write about it immediately for whatever reason. Admittedly, part of that is because I wanted to know if I had more to say beyond what I said to retr0gamer the other day in the General Game Chat Thread, instead of just copy-pasting that as is. Well, I do, but I can also copy-paste when most of what I said still applies. What's life worth if you can't self-plagiarize on a forum thread lol?
This is the first Sonic Team developed Sonic game I played since Generations, as I was never interested in Lost World or Forces enough to give them a shot. The massive gap between games and the bafflingly unclear conveyance about what Frontiers was even supposed to be or why it could be appealing made me wonder if this was gonna be a similar fiasco to Forces (which also took ages and didn't explain itself until the last minute because there was very little game once revealed). However, as more info came out and I started trying to consider what the game was attempting, I became interested enough in giving it a bash.
For the first time since Generations, it has a specific idea of what it wants to be - an open-ended game where you make progress by earning items through platforming puzzles, more traditional Sonic stages set in "Cyber Space", combat encounters, or even going fishing with Big the Cat if you'd like - and accomplishes that quite well. There's a real attempt at establishing a mood through the more "cinematic" music, the rain that occasionally pounds down in the first area, and the more sombre tone of the story. Incidentally, this has perhaps the best storytelling in any Sonic game, with really solid writing, narrative cohesion and cutscene direction resulting in a late-game cutscene that legit gave me goosebumps.
There's a very addictive loop to exploring the areas, completing challenges that unlock more of the area's map, and doing little platforming puzzles to earn tokens which can be used to unlock new conversations and side bits with other characters. I often end up playing for way longer than I mean to purely because of this, and although I found the Cyber Space stages a bit clunky, they're solid bits of more concentrated action that offer a nice change of pace. The combat encounters have a focus on either enemies with a trick to them or large mini-bosses with a real sense of scale. There's one in the first area that flies around and you have to hop on its back and chase after it as it swoops across the map, and it can be quite thrilling despite the simplicity of what you have to do. And that's not getting to the proper bosses, which have a ludicrous scale and energy that can only be described as "Metal Gear Rising as heck".
There are things I'm not keen on: the 2D stages have you moving at a stodgy pace which isn't much fun, the more complicated combat encounters ended up becoming tedious at best and frustrating at worst, and the mini-games you have to do in order to progress are almost unanimously awful to the point of putting me off from replaying the game. However, it's a game that does its best to accomplish its ideals, and there's a good reason why there are plenty of folks who sincerely like or even love the game. I think it's more a title that you'll either enjoy or not based on how well your sensibilities mix with the game's.
I won't say it's my favourite 3D Sonic (Unleashed still has my heart), or even in my top favourite Sonics. But it's a damn good Sonic game with a solid focus that, hopefully, can be used as a foundation for further adventures.
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Post by dsparil on Nov 22, 2022 9:13:00 GMT -5
The Addams Family (TurboGrafx-CD, First Time)
There's the bones of a much better game here, but it's not what the world got.
I finished in 00:48:34.
Rating: 5
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Post by alexmate on Nov 22, 2022 12:55:26 GMT -5
N2O: Nitrous Oxide (PS1, first time, estimate: 2hr 20 mins) Fun shooter inspired by Tempest. Great soundtrack from Crystal Method, but a bit samey for 30 levels.
Rating: 7
Secret of Evermore (SNES, 1st time, Timer: 9hr 39) Not sure if I've added this above average RPG with some tedious bits.
Rating: 7
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Post by spanky on Nov 22, 2022 16:37:10 GMT -5
Battletoads and Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team (SNES, First Time)
Funny story about this game. I rented it over Thanksgiving when it came out in 1993. The rental store had gotten in two new SNES games on Wednesday of that week. This and Aladdin. The concept of a crossover game was extremely novel at the time and I was dying to play this. I had cousins coming into town over that holiday so I went with the game that had a two player mode. They were girls, but they liked video games so I figured this was a safe bet. By the time we got to the third level, as they watched my character pick up a scantily clad woman by the hair and punch her in the stomach, one of them asked "Why didn't you get Aladdin instead?" Complicating things was my great aunt, who was dying of cancer, walking in the room, seeing what we were doing then sort of huffed and walked out. My instincts were off on this one!
Personal anecdotes aside, this is a great game. It originated on the NES but the SNES version (as well as the Genesis version)is an enhanced port...for the most part. The graphics of course are completely redone and look great, like the massive Big Blag and Robo Manus sprites. A lot of the level compositions have been completely redone and every track is a banger, I think it is low-key one of the best soundtracks on the SNES. I said "for the most part" because there seems to have been a few things that were removed from the NES game. I wasn't able to throw the rats out of the windows in the rocket level and some of the cutscenes have been shortened or removed a bit. Oh and the ending, which was nothing special in the NES game, is even lamer in this version. Like zero effort at all. The control seems slightly less precise as well.
Despite the Double Dragons being in this, it is a Battletoads game through and through with the same context sensitive combat abilities and gimmicks. Fortunately they toned down the difficulty significantly in this game. From what I understand, the SNES version is the easiest of all the versions. I'm not sure why it is considered that way but I did seem to notice some very generous hitboxes on the enemy sprites. The Battletoads play like you would expect them, and the Dragons play similarly as well, though I think they are a little easier to use (they have a better jumping attack). I guess there are minute differences between the individual Toads and Dragons but I didn't notice it. If you're familiar with the other Battletoads games you won't notice anything too out of place here. The only thing really out of left field is the spaceship level which plays like Asteroids initially then completely switches your control scheme halfway through. Oh and if you care about Double Dragon "lore" I guess, then this game makes sort of a mess of it. Roper now has a gun (it's supposed to be Willy), and the "Shadow Boss" kind of looks like a more demonic and ripped Burnov. Not sure where he came from.
Still, it's a lot of fun and it's nice to play a Battletoads game that doesn't crush your soul by the halfway point. It's probably the best Battletoads game and to be completely honest it's in the upper tier of Double Dragon games as well. 8/10.
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Post by JoeQ on Nov 22, 2022 18:12:38 GMT -5
DuckTales (NES via PS4) - First playthrough, Time: very short, Rating: 3/5One of the most well regarded Disney games for the NES, but I found it kinda meh. The pogo jumping felt needlessly finicky and overall the game was just too short and easy, with some noteable very frustrating parts. I played the game through The Disney Afternoon Collection for PS4. Beat it twice (with no savestates or rewind) and got all associated trophies. Next up: Rescue Rangers! Alphabet Challenge: ABCDEFGH-JKLM-OPQRST------
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Post by Woody Alien on Nov 23, 2022 18:12:45 GMT -5
The Adventures of Poppe (PC, first time, lost count, maybe 5 or 6 hours?)
Bought this game on Steam (because it was listed as a metroidvania) starring a tiny man living around and inside a house with insects and other critters, and it had some cute NES-esque graphics... however it always crashed as soon as I tried to make it run (it was made in the Godot engine if anyone cares), so I copied the .exe on my laptop and managed to play it on there. No big deal since it doesn't even have achievements or anything.
I played it for a while but honestly... it's accurate in trying to be a retro-style game, but for all the wrong reasons: for starters, it's an exploration game presented like a platformer with the archaic lives system, you have either to find 1ups hidden somewhere or gain them by scoring.
The problem is, it doesn't make you want to explore since it has all the problems of an old school platformer (short attack range, fall damage, enemies placed in inconvenient positions, pixel-perfect collision damage, leaps of faith etc.) and at the start of your adventure you only have 3 hearts per life and a meager attack power and you have to find these power-ups to upgrade either, in addition to the items you need to progress... needless to say you'll die a lot in the beginning. Also 1ups and energy potions never respawn after the first time you took them, so what's the point?
The programmers tried to fix this by implementing a toggable "god mode" in the options menu, which is like admitting that the game is horribly unbalanced and such a system does not work for an exploration game to begin with.
The "metroidvania"/exploration part is not much better: there's no map, no quest log, almost no hints at all, only three slots where to keep items so you'll have to keep track of where you left the stuff in excess, there are some one-way roads if you don't pick certain items (I don't understand if by mistake or by design) and there's a lot of annoying backtracking. All this to make the game artificially longer because it would be fairly short (a couple hours I believe) if it weren't so annoying and frustrating. And some of the "puzzles" don't really make much sense, like using a clothespin you found in the house as a platform by putting it on some grass. Other things are stupid too, like some characters talking, other speaking with speech bubbles featuring pictures and other never communicating at all, so it shows how little the devs cared.
I had to rely on the lone YouTube walkthrough because I wanted to finish this game out of spite, since I didn't know or didn't remember where to go, given how samey certain areas look. And that I didn't understand that certain parts were paths to other areas, instead of just background graphics.
It's a shame because it has some nice ideas and all in all the graphics are fairly well-made, reminiscent of the Tom & Jerry or Chip 'n' Dale games for NES with all the oversized items and appliances when you enter the house, or Insector X for the parts set outside. But it's poorly balanced, obtuse, repetitive, the soundtrack is annoying, it makes exploring a chore instead of fun and it has no narrative to speak of (your daughter is missing, go find her). I do like retro-styled games but not when they have such blatant flaws with the excuse "games used to be like this" and that this the developers' first work. Screw it. 4.5/10
The only positive thing (beside the fact that "poppe" means something like "boobies" in Italian) is that I had zero minutes of play time on Steam because it didn't work, so I managed to get a refund. I bet that I will buy some super-cheap games that are going to be better than this with that money!
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Post by dsparil on Nov 24, 2022 11:37:33 GMT -5
Pokémon Scarlet (Switch, First Time)
Honestly, I feel like the technical complaints are overblown. It is rough in a way, but in practice it’s all surface level graphical issues and not anything actually troublesome. (Edit: After what SoSC posted, I'll change this to it's a very "your mileage may vary" situation. You might get lucky like me and pretty much be fine or you might get graphical glitches that are actually bad.) I never had performance issues or any weird glitches despite never closing the game and only putting the system to sleep.. I do have some issues with how certain landscapes look, but it mostly looks fine. What was a consistent problem is that animations get simplified way too close to the player. Minor but it’s everywhere.
As a game, I really loved it. It’s a good evolution of the series with a fun three strand gameplay/plot structure that eventually leads into a finale. I liked a lot of the new Pokémon and used mostly new ones. I’m a little surprised that the regional bird was the non-evolving Flamigo but it has good stats. The Pokémon models look great and have actual shading and texturing this time, and the character model look good too. My only complaint is that basically nothing new from Arceus got carried over aside from having a ride Pokémon that gradually gets all the movement abilities that existed in Arceus. I mainly miss wild Pokémon entering battles in progress, but the environment is littered with Pokémon like no other game in the series so maybe that would have been too much.
This gets talked about like some Cyberpunk level disaster when it really isn’t. It did fall prey to having to be the holiday Nintendo release and could have used a few more months to smooth everything over. It’s a great game as it is, and a few patches will hopefully fix up the issues that do exist.
Final Team (and basically my only team including pre-evolutions): Quaquaval (78), an early surprise traded Garganacl (87), Flamigo (80), surprise traded Goodra (78), Gardevoir (78), Pawmot (79)
I finished in 22:22.
Rating: 9
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Nov 24, 2022 15:49:54 GMT -5
Half-Life: Opposing Force (PC; First Time; 4 hours 48 minutes)
Last week, I talked about finally playing Half-Life for the first time via its aces PS2 port, and itching to try more of the official releases surrounding the original. I think the next day, I ended up talking with Zaphero on the HG101 discord who brought up how you can play PC games through Steam Input by using official/fan configurations that map the keyboard and mouse inputs to controller buttons. Curious about this, I gave it a whirl and after some initial tech hiccups (mainly remembering to turn on "raw mouse input" in the Half-Life menus so that mouselook worked properly), I got it working!
Excited to try out more Half-Life, I started by playing Opposing Force, the first of the expansion packs and the first game developed by the now notorious Gearbox. It's a pretty neat game where you take control of one of the soldiers raiding Black Mesa during the events of the original, though you end up getting knocked out and by the time you come to, everything's gone out of control. You have to get out of there, as it's not just the Xen aliens that are hounding you down, but the difficult Black Ops soldiers sometimes encountered in the original and an entirely new race of tougher aliens!
Given the marine focus, I'd say that the focus on the game leans more towards combat, introducing new weapons, squad mates you can occasionally find, and plenty of tough-as-nails enemies. In general, it's much harder than the main game with how scarce health/armor pick-ups can be. There is a teleporter gun you can use to self-teleport to parts of Xen where you can heal to full health or grab some additional armor (though you'll sometimes be flung into an abyss depending on when you use it), which does balance things out somewhat. Though at the same time, I also feel it seems like a quick way of giving the player some backup without rebalancing enemy layouts, damage input and whatnot, and I'm not sure how to feel about that.
Evidently, it doesn't really matter since I got to the end and actually beat it. It's a neat enough expansion, featuring a few cool puzzles and points where you cross over with events or locales from the main game. However, its general difficulty (especially with those heinously hard lightning shooting scorpion things that clog up the sewers later on) mean that I'm not as interested in revisiting it down the road as I would the main game. It's deffo a "made for the super players" kind of expansion.
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Post by JoeQ on Nov 24, 2022 17:18:52 GMT -5
Unreal Gold (Windows) - First playthrough, Time: 30h 48min, Rating: 3/5Another classic FPS done. Great graphics for it's time and still looks good, good athmosphere and level design and excellent music. Unfortunately the combat and enemies let the experience down. All the enemies are massive bullet sponges and your weapons feel really weak and wimpy. When even the weakest enemy minions can tank multiple rockets and grenades to the face something ain't right. It was a common problem with early polygonal FPS games, but it's really prominent in Unreal. A shame, since with better balance it could've been great. I played through the main game and the expansion Return to Na Pali on Hard difficulty. Time is combined for both. Alphabet Challenge: ABCDEFGH-JKLM-OPQRSTU-----
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Post by alexmate on Nov 25, 2022 15:46:21 GMT -5
Bushido Blade (PS1, first time, est time: 40mins - completed as all characters) This is the game were a fight can last hours or seconds luckily for me most were over within minutes. Great game , easily up there with the best fighters on the PS1 which is loads. Rating: 8
Pandemonium 2 (PS1, first time, est time: 4 hours) Psychedelic platform game with a very good soundtrack. Suffers from the perspective thing the same as Crash Bandicoot and moments were you don't know were to go. It's slightly above mediocre due to being stylistically different to anything else on the system or since. Rating: 7
Wild9 (PS1, first time, est time: 4 hours) Amazing soundtrack from Tommy Tallirico, probably one of his more underrated ones, let down by really annoying sound effects and voice quips. The graphics are decent, but not exceptional especially given it is a late-ish title. A lot of the game is also frustrating, but not impossible. The glove mechanic also annoying and underpowered even once you get your head round it. Pretty much Earthworm Jim mixed with MDK. Rating: 7
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Post by Digitalnametag on Nov 26, 2022 11:07:02 GMT -5
Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope FTP NS 23 hours
A fun game that makes several improvements on the last. This tactics Mario game is definitely the prettier of Nintendo's (Ubisoft's) holiday releases (cough Pokemon cough). The Rabbids are still obnoxious, but they did get me to chuckle a couple times. I thought the game balance was decent and the objectives fairly diverse.
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Post by spanky on Nov 26, 2022 19:20:59 GMT -5
The Legend of Zelda (NES via NSO, Replay)
Yep, the original. Only did the First Quest. I don't think there's anything original or controversial I could say about this so I'll keep it short. LoZ is one of my favorites in the series. I enjoy the focus on overworld exploration of the original game moreso than the lengthy dungeons that would become the bread and butter of the series. It's also why I enjoy Breath so much.
My kid watched me play this one too and he got a big kick out of it. I have the First Quest pretty well memorized though I had to break out my guide a couple of times. I had fun taking his suggestions on what to do next "Go that way! Bomb that wall! Burn that bush!"). I have a feeling he might want to watch me play the rest of the series. 9.5/10.
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Post by dsparil on Nov 27, 2022 11:14:25 GMT -5
Astalon: Tears of the Earth (Switch, First Time)
I guess this is the year of Astalon in this thread. I'll just say that the level design is pretty good as is the music and graphics, but there are some flaws. In particular, I don't think the game really does enough to justify having multiple characters especially once you can instantly swap between them. Algus, the wizard character, is the central character in the story, vastly more powerful than the other characters from one of his purchased upgrades, and his special ability (activating switches represented by orbs) get way more use than the others. It would have made more sense to just have him as the only character. I also found the difficulty largely artificial since it's largely derived from not being able to heal for the most part. Once you have enough health and defense upgrades, that starts fading away too. Regardless, this is a fun game but it could have used tweaking.
I finished in 11:19:58.
Rating: 7
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Post by excelsior on Nov 27, 2022 11:29:39 GMT -5
Astalon: Tears of the Earth (Switch, First Time) I also found the difficulty largely artificial since it's largely derived from not being able to heal for the most part. Once you have enough health and defense upgrades, that starts fading away too. I finished in 11:19:58. Rating: 7 I didn't think this was a flaw, since it was all baked into the progression system with it being a semi-rogue like. Each play as you grow stronger and unlock shortcuts you'll be able to make it further. The multiple characters become redundant pretty quickly as part of this system I agree. To be honest though I think that's when the game opens up. I'm never really a fan of character switching puzzles anyway (a preview to those Lost Vikings requests in the SNES thread....).
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