Topic: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?

[ejamer]

I remember being absolutely in love with Bit.Trip Runner when I first played it, and I must admit, I felt no sort of passion for Runner 2. While I never knock graphical capability, I think Runner is one series that should have kept its retro aesthetics.

I feel the same way - except that Runner was only middle-of-the-pack from the first series of Bit.Trip games for me.


(Runner 2 is still really good; it just doesn't hit the right buttons to appeal to me. Interesting to see that Runner 3 is on the way and looks to up the graphical ante even further.)

[MagicCow64]

Yeah, I really liked Runner 1, easily the best of the Bit Trip games, but 2, while still good, didn't really have enough new ideas to sustain an expanded stand-alone title. And the aggressively ugly 3D graphics actively interfered with readability.

[Phil]

Huh. checking through this thread, I never mentioned my completed playthrough of Wild Arms in this thread! well, I have to rectify that!

First, the opening FMV, without commentary:

Oh gosh. <3 I soooooooooooooo wanna play Wild Arms EVERY TIME I watch that.

although, in a way, the intro is a bit misleading. what seems like it's leading up to some sort of Western inspired Anime adventure like Trigun (this game predates the anime, but not the manga), it actually sticks closer to more usual JRPG tropes than one would think. You'll encounter things like a princess and castles that house secrets beneath the castle, a lost and advanced civilization from 1000 years ago that plays a key role in the plights of today, Gemstone based macguffin, powerful monsters that lend the party their strength in the form of equipable stones, and the fuzzy and adorable JRPG mascot character! This is a world of swords and sorcery, there's just a couple of folks who choose to bring guns to a knife fight in this game.

By all accounts, this game SHOULD be a pretty bog standard 32-bit RPG. there's nothing particularly innovative about the battle system other than it uses very rudimentary polygonal graphics. It's turn based, you have one mage lady, one speedy swordsman guy, and one guy who's maybe a bit more defensive than the swordsman but has his powerful guns and tools he can use to level the playing field. besides maybe the mechanic of each of these 'tools' having individual ammo counts and the fact that in a twist on Final Fantasy 1's 'buy spells at shop' mechanic, the mage lady can basically learn any spell at any time in shops and dissolve spells she knows to make different ones, which means you should never have a situation where you don't have the right spells for a dungeon, although her most effective spells are the armor down and the speed down spells to cripple bosses and enemies.

The dungeon exploration is kinda cribbed a bit from Breath of Fire and The Legend of Zelda, where each character has a set of things they get that interact with the overworld, along with universal stuff like lifting crates and throwing them, a really neat dashing mechanic that works a little bit like mother 3's almost... the fact that the dungeons have more of a challenge to navigating them is part of what I find compelling here. some of these puzzles get obtuse and aren't well designed, but most of the time it's pretty intuitive to navigate the many ruins, castles, alien demon ships, ghost boat, caves, and libraries you'll be wandering around in this game. Sometimes they'll even split the party and have each one solving puzzles tailored to them and switching between one another to interact with puzzles in a lost vikings style. actually, that's how the game starts with each of them getting their own mini-campaign. it feels like the heroes of this game get equal billing most of the time. even if it is Rudy getting a lot of the top billing most of the time.

The story here isn't too overly complicated, thank goodness. It meanders at parts, given the heroes basically win the day, and then the game just keeps... going for a while until a new threat emerges... and this happens more than once. other than that, the characters are likable, the world is interesting enough, and the game doesn't suffer TOO bad from what has to be one of the most lauughable translations I've been subjected to in a while (there's a couple of instances where I had to do a double take on the names of things and how in the heck the translation team got from "Seig Zwei" to "Zeik Tuvai")

Regardless, this was enjoyable. I have Wild Arms 2 on my PS3, but that will have to wait for when I'm not drowning in Breath of the Wild (beat that game, but don't feel like doing a write-up) and other games. This wouldn't be a bad series for Sony Computer Entertainment to Dredge up. Media.Visions is still making games for Bandai Namco, so... i'm sure they wouldn't mind doing a Wild Arms project for the PS4!

This was one of the first PS1 RPGs I played, and this was pre-Final Fantasy 7, I think. So having basic polygonal models was pretty cool then for battles. I loved the puzzle solving with the various tools and some of the puzzles for hidden dungeons and bosses were very cool. I loved Wild Arms then, but I haven't played it in a good long while. I really want to try it now. I know for a fact that I still love the soundtrack. SOOOOO awesome, whether the fully orchestrated pieces or the pure synth ones. Michiko Naruke did a fantastic job.

[Soren]

Gravity Rush 2 + Raven's Choice DLC [PS4]

Finished the game and the recently released free DLC. Man, Gravity Rush as a series I really really want to love but the game just won't let me. The world of Hekseville is so elegantly designed, with a character that can easily traverse it and the devs feel the need to stunt that sense of discovery every step of the way. The world feels more alive than the previous game, but there's still nothing to do. The game is littered with boring, uninteresting fetch quests and every other mission has some sort of ridiculous stealth element. Oh man, the stealth. Kat has all these amazing powers but there developers never let you unleash the full potential. It becomes way more apparent in the DLC missions where you get to play Raven (who is mechanically more interesting and varied that Kat). I never felt a game so at odd with what it wanted to be and what it actually delivered. Having it come right in the middle of these great games (Horizon Zero Dawn, BotW, Persona, Nier Automata) just does more to exacerbate its faults.

The story tried to go different places and looked set to make some pretty biting commentary about inequality and social class structures, but then in the middle it seems like the writers remembered "oh yeah we left way too many loose ends on the first game and we really should tie those up now". It just ends up cobbling everything together in a ham handed way. I ended up with more questions than answers but was more than ready to put it down. Side stories help flesh out character development, but they're more of the same boring type of open world exploration. I did about a dozen of them and just decided not to bother with the rest. Didn't really miss anything.

You'd think I hate this game by what I wrote, but there's something joyous about it. The few times I got to really shine stayed with me, like putting Kat center stage and have her improvise a song you don't even know the words to (yeah it was a silly quicktime event, but it was a nice different moment) or taking the OP Raven for a spin in the middle of a boss fight. The game could push some buttons, it never quite figured out how to push them all.


Metroid Fusion [Wii U VC]

I liked it. A nice short Metroid game with just the right amount of bosses and light exploration to keep me engaged. Not really much else to say about it other than it's a very solid game everyone should play at least once.

[MagicCow64]

I've been remiss in passing along my objectively correct assessments of games lately, but I'll work some of the rust out.

Hollow Knight (PC):

While some of you suckers were wasting time with Zelda on your fancy new consoles, I was plowing 30 hours in yet another indie Metroidvania. Except that this is one of the very few that gets anywhere near real Metroid games, and either ties or exceeds Shadow Complex. I kind of don't want to say too much about it, but I think it does two things that really set it apart in a genre stuffed with also-rans.

(1.) It has a genuine sense of exploration, and allows you to get lost, confused, and overwhelmed by daunting but not impossible scenarios. Many genre entrants clumsily stitch together levels with some perfunctory backtracking, but this game does it right.

(2.) Ability progression, while somewhat staid in terms of content (wall-jumps, damage upgrades, e.g.), gradually and extremely satisfyingly changes how you understand and engage with the geography of the world and its inhabitants. There's some late game "lock and key" stuff that's a bit par for the course and disappointing, but your first hours in the game feel radically different from your last hours.

Also it's fucking massive and manages to squeeze a lot of mileage out of its aesthetic in a way that I think stuff like Ori and the Bling Forest failed to do. I could probably do without the Dark Souls-iness around the edges, but I do appreciate that it's challenging.

Snake Pass (PC):

Caught wind of this one shortly before release and pulled the trigger based on the sheer novelty of the concept. It was . . . okay I guess? It's kind of a cognitive experiment to see if you can program yourself to figure out the controls, and it was a specific kind of satisfying to breeze through the last levels as I achieved reflexive mastery. But aside from that there's not a hell of a lot to the game. I feel like it needed a greater variety of mechanics to make it a full-fledged experience. The stuff that gets introduced as it goes along feels mostly aesthetic, or just annoying. Ultimately there's a sense that once you've climbed one bamboo pole array you've climbed them all.

[Phil]

I Platinumed Yooka-Laylee the other night, and it was an enjoyable experience overall. Some of the challenges such as certain Rextro arcade games, platforming segments, and boss battles were less than stellar in the polish department, but many don't need to be done to simply "beat" the game. To 100% clear it, though? Yes. Anyway, my full, in-depth thoughts are on my site with my review. Obviously couldn't post it fully in the Reviews section of the site since it's not on Switch yet.

http://www.superphillipcentral.com/2017/04/yooka-laylee-ps4-xb1-pc-review.html

[ejamer]

I Platinumed Yooka-Laylee the other night, ...

Nice job! It's been interesting to see reviews that are consistently lower than I had expected for a nostalgia-fueled platform game. Still sounds interesting enough to check out, but after thinking long and hard during the KickStarter campaign if I wanted to back the results (and the fact there is no Wii U build) make me extremely glad I took a pass.


Fingers crossed for Bloodstained - the last big crowd-funded console project I had eyes on.

[ClexYoshi]

I'm glad the Wild Arms review there gave you some nostalgic Flashbacks, Phil! I think I got Wild Arms because I wanted to get a PSX JRPG my friends didn't have, and a gaming mag I had suggested it as a hidden gem Pre-FF7 JRPG along wiht Suikoden, but I couldn't find a copy of that, so... little me got Wild Arms!



But that's not why I'm here. Although I'm not totally done yet, I've become smitten with a little game called Spark the Electric Jester and would REALLY love for the game to come to Nintendo platforms if at all possible.


it seems like even if you're not directly involved with the Sonicretro community these days, there's an embarassment of riches to choose from when it comes to options if you want high-speed action platformers that come from a background of the brighter end of the Sonic fan community! Spark the Electric Jester has a lot more sonic to it than say... Freedom Planet, with sections of pure automation through boosters and camera that has trouble keeping pace with the hero when they break the speed caps the game normally has in place. Spark is brought to us by Lake Fepard, the genius behind Sonic Before the Sequel and Sonic After the Sequel, as well as the coder for the recently developed Hedge Physics Unity powered 3D Platforming framework!

However, unlike Freedom Planet to which obvious comparisons will be drawn, Spark gets a LOT of DNA from Kirby, particularly titles like Kirby Super Star, Kirby's Return to Dreamland, Kirby Triple Deluxe, and Kirby Planet Robobot. While Spark doesn't run around directly assimilating from enemies, the powerups that Spark can find in his adventure all are multi-functional like those Kirby characters, with Spark's base electric jester mode drawing moreso from Beam Kirby with it's arching attacks and charge-up blast. (not to mention Spark's yellow tint and Jester hat).

The style of boss fights, the easy campaign with a harder alt character with a mono-ability, the final battle sporting a super powered ability fought over a rotating globe, even the choice in some of the abilities such as Fire Jester, Ice Jester, Hammer Jester, Edgy (Ninja) Jester all seem tailored for the kirby familiar player...

And yet, the hilly terrain, the ramps, springs, speed boosters are all hallmarks of Sonic gameplay. Heck, the Wind Jester ability has a sonic style curl! the game is fun and breezy!

One thing is that the levels can tend to go on LONG. the first couple are quite short, but by the end, expect to be spending 15 minutes per level dashing, wall jumping, fighting, and doing all sorts of platforming or combat challenges.

The soundtrack is just... oooh my GOODNESS, it's everything i look for in a video game soundtrack. <3


This game is $20 on steam, I think. seriously. go check it out. heck, there's a demon floating around on this game's kickstarter page, I'm pretty sure. Check it out. it's great. <3

[Order.RSS]

Finished my run through Fire Emblem, the first Western GBA one. I think this one is originally called Fire Emblem 7: Blazing Sword/Blade.

Having only played one other entry of the series to completion (the GameCube title) I felt it was high time to return to this franchise. It's overall a pretty good entry; the grid-based combat looks nice, it has some catchy tunes, and clocking in past the 30 hour mark it's a pretty lengthy game too. For the ~5 bucks I paid (forgot the exact price) for this on virtual console that's nothing to scoff at.

At the same time however I felt the story dragged its feet at times, with over 30 individual chapters and the occassional sidemission. Doesn't help that the story is utterly predictable and every twist is telegraphed hours in advance.

FE7 doesn't have a really robust shopping system like the 'Cube game, you need to manually visit shops and trading weapons around is a bit cumbersome for a while. You can also really see how the 'support' conversations have become much more fleshed out; here they only happen if 2 characters spend A LOT of turns standing next to each other. In the GameCube one you could activate them yourselves in between missions.

I liked the defensive missions best, where you need to protect a castle or character for X amount of turns. Did lose a few people early on (about 6 in total), including a horseback rider who JUST hit level 20 (I was gonna class-promote him in the next turn). I also have this habit of getting a new character and instantly losing them, like the pegasus knight who died the very turn I recruited her.

Overall, Fire Emblem 7 is a pretty good entry. Its missions and in-between mission dialogues run a bit too long towards the end, but it's fairly digestible I would say. Pretty sure I'll move on to Sacred Stones next, but definitely need a break from the series right now. Rating: 7.5/10

[ejamer]

... Pretty sure I'll move on to Sacred Stones next, ...

I enjoyed the first GBA one quite a bit more than Sacred Stones. Not really sure why...
Maybe it has to do with Sacred Stones being one of the 3DS Ambassador titles, and never quite appreciating games that I get fro free?

[Order.RSS]

I enjoyed the first GBA one quite a bit more than Sacred Stones. Not really sure why...
Maybe it has to do with Sacred Stones being one of the 3DS Ambassador titles, and never quite appreciating games that I get fro free?

That makes sense I guess, appreciate it more if you were anticipating a purchase that you've been working towards? Just out of curiosity, were the Ambassador titles the same for everyone? Was it a pick X amount from these options kind of offer?

I'm pretty out of the loop when it comes to handheld gaming since the GBA.

[ejamer]

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Wii U)

Beat the final boss, but barely feel like we've scratched the surface of what the game has to offer. Completely enjoyed the game, and expect we'll play quite a bit more than we already have.

Some notes about what we accomplished and what we missed: 2 divine beasts restored, 85 shrines found/completed, 193 korok seeds found, 8 photo memories recovered, never fought a Lynel and lived to speak about it, didn't find the master sword or shrine of courage.

Edit: Played a bit further in the afternoon and found some shrines, korok seeds, a memory, and other general stuff. Expect this to get many more hours of play.

That makes sense I guess, appreciate it more if you were anticipating a purchase that you've been working towards? Just out of curiosity, were the Ambassador titles the same for everyone? Was it a pick X amount from these options kind of offer?

I'm pretty out of the loop when it comes to handheld gaming since the GBA.

Some of it is the difference between a game that I actively want to play vs a game that is just there.
Ambassador titles were the same for everyone. A good selection, but nothing earth shattering.  I'd have to google to even remember what they all were.

[Khushrenada]

Ambadassador titles were:

Mario Kart: Super Circuit
F-Zero: Maximum Velocity
Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi's Island (aka Super Mario World 2)
Warioware Mega Microgames (The first Warioware)
WarioLand 4
Metroid Fusion
Kirby and the Amazing Mirror
Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap
Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Mario Vs Donkey Kong

Yes, I remembered them all. Took me a moment on that last one. I did play though and beat 5 of them (Mario Vs Donkey Kong, Kirby Amazing Mirror, Warioware, Metroid Fusion and Yoshi's Island) in part because I owned them all and had beat them already so I knew I could finish them quickly enough. Tried to get into Super Circuit and F-Zero but the 2D versions just aren't as good as the 3D versions. Had started WarioLand 4 but could never get anywhere. I'd forget Wario's moves or couldn't figure out what I was doing or looking for in between plays. For those that complain about Nintendo handholding gamers, here's a case of them not doing that and the game suffering a bit from being too obtuse. (At least to me.) Put off Minish Cap because I was playing Link's Awakening for the first time and then got caught up in Phantom Hourglass later and then wanted a Zelda break and still have yet to dive into it. Put off Sacred Stones because I wasn't ready for the perceived difficulty and intensity of learning a Fire Emblem game yet. Yet, I imagine those two are really worth playing at some point.

[Evan_B]

Although NWR has not been particularly kind to Minish Cap (I seem to recall Neal saying it was overly wordy and lacking personality in a video covering its Wii U VC release), it is one of my personal favorite Zelda titles because of the sheer density of the world map, which is small, but littered with neat features.

[Mop it up]

That reminds me, I still haven't played Minish Cap. I should bump that up my play queue.

[Phil]

Although NWR has not been particularly kind to Minish Cap (I seem to recall Neal saying it was overly wordy and lacking personality in a video covering its Wii U VC release), it is one of my personal favorite Zelda titles because of the sheer density of the world map, which is small, but littered with neat features.

I really enjoyed Minish Cap. I agree with you on the density of the world map. It was just fun to explore as well and easy to get around for the most part. I also liked the dungeons, even if some were more linear in design, such as the Palace of Winds. The spectacle, though, of the dungeon itself and setting is rather fantastic and more than makes up for it to me.

[ThePerm]

I have beat more games this year  than I have in like a decade

Drakes Uncharted 8.5/10 I had  bought this game for my brother a decade ago. I had seen the trailer and I thought it looked cool. I never got to play it myself. I got a ps4 recently and I got the remastered special edition. This game was fantastic. It's like playing an Indiana Jones game. A lot of climbing, a lot of raiding. I'm not too much of a fan of the gun play it could be better.

Drakes Uncharted 2 8.5/10 I played through them one after the other. So, in a lot of ways it was like playing one really big game. The story continues.

Drakes Uncharted 3 9/10 The story continues with some improvements on gameplay.

Drakes Uncharted 4 9/10 This one is double the length of the other three games. It took me 9 hours to beat 1,2,3. But it took 20 hours on this game. This one is really polished too. It feels like a major payoff to have played the whole series.

Yooka Laylee  8/10 I would say this is better than Banjo Tooie and Donkey Kong 64. Marginally less than Banjo Kazooie. MY biggest problem is the small number of stages. The stages are larger, but I'd like more locales. Maybe some cheap dlc would fix this?

Layers of Fear 7/10 The game is fun. I like graphic whoring around the environments, but it has some issues later on where the game is somewhat annoying. This is less of a game and more of a funhouse. Still, it is pretty fun to walk around. You don't have to worry about lives, there's no real danger in the game. There's not even a whole lot of puzzle solving.

PT 9/10 Short and sweet. A lot of games were inspired by this demo. I wish I had this on my ps4. I'd pay $7.99 for it. I had the chance to play it at a friends house a few years ago.

coming up
Rise of the Tomb Raider, Assassins Creed Syndicate, Last of Us

[ejamer]

...

Wow, that's a lot of Uncharted! I don't know if I could play that much back-to-back (-to-back-to-back) without a break.
 

[Soren]

Yeah. The final boss of the first Uncharted was pretty bad and I wasn't in the mood to keep playing after that. The second one has a lot of undesirable kill rooms, some of the which were very frustrating unless done in some specific magical pattern. I still have 3 on my backlog but no real desire to fire it up.

[azeke]

I played all Uncharted games on PS3 and to me they were a bunch of cool looking vistas in-between all of the awful shooting and idiotic melee combat. Story is also obviously only there to provide (flimsy) justification why characters move from setpiece to setpiece so i am always baffled by people praising it.

These games are also more janky than say Assasin Creed in how they do climbing and movement animations which is weird because all of these games came after ACII.

[ejamer]

Didn't mean to stir up the Uncharted hate. I just can't imagine playing any game back-to-back-to-back-to-back...
(Although I don't know how different that really is than dropping 100+ hours into Xenoblade or Breath of the Wild or Monster Hunter. Some of those games have much less plot and development over that period of time also.)

[NWR_insanolord]

I've done Super Metroid-Metroid Fusion-Metroid Zero Mission back to back to back, but those are shorter games with more substantive differences between them.

[Ian Sane]

I played the entire Mass Effect Trilogy back to back to back but there's a common plot across the three games and it's an interesting plot that I wanted to see concluded.  The game themselves also aren't that long so the three together is kind of like playing a big RPG.

I couldn't see myself doing it with really long games and if the story was barebones or idiotic then I could see finding it rather dull to keep with the same gameplay.  I think it just takes a certain type of game and it has to really click with you.

[ThePerm]

I imagine the games are better back to back to back. They're pretty short.  1-3 are 9 hours. 4 is 20 hours.

At least they consistently improve. 3 and 4 are better than 1 and 2. It felt more like I played a single game than 4 games. The overarching plot-line between games is rewarding in the end. I also played the upgraded remastered editions, which may have tweaks to gameplay. I don't know how much. I never much liked the gun play in the games, it was pretty wonky. I wish it had more melee like Eternal Darkness and Zelda. I actually like to play the games with the cover mechanic, where instead of using all my ammo I run up to people and punch them. I did that with Gears of War too. If you don't like the gunplay there is an explorer mode. I'm not sure if that eliminates the gun play entirely or if it just makes it super easy. I've only ever played these games on normal.

I like set pieces. It's the same reason I liked Quest 64. The first time I played quest 64 I beat it the regular way, but throw it in gameshark and it's just an exploring game. I think it's the first game I saw with a day/night system that was 3d. If it had a party system, it would have been a well liked game. The locations were interesting, it just needed a little more.

[ejamer]

Finished off Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (DS) today.


I really liked the changes they made in this game compared to the first. Navies feel more fleshed out, although maybe not used as much as I'd like in the campaign. The less cartoonish story will likely turn off some people, but I enjoyed it well enough. CO powers are much less of a focus here than in other games from the series. Leveling up units who defeat enemies is a great addition; it reminded me of Military Madness and made me wish that support bonuses were also part of the game.


With all of that said, the campaign felt easier and a bit shorter than I expected. Not sure if that's faulty expectations going in, or if it really is a lighter game than the original. Still very happy with this game though - probably my favorite from the Advance Wars series at this point.