Author Topic: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?  (Read 509248 times)

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Offline Triforce Hermit

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #475 on: August 04, 2016, 08:42:25 AM »
MGSV TPP: Regardless of all the controversy, the **** story, the cut content, the controversy crap I don't care about, etc, this game is still the second best Metal Gear Solid game, with MGS3 remaining #1. I as happy with it, I am at 95% completion and just grinding animals, combat deployments, and trying to steal a nuke (nuke tab is broken so it is harder then it needs to be). The game stopped being fun at the last 5%. But the other 95% was great.

Azeke mentioned the Quiet Exit mission being bullshit. I can't tell him he is completely wrong, but the game is a great stealth sandbox if you take your time to explore your options. One of those options is mist parasites and night vision. It made completing the tasks easier (still a fucking bitch to do). S-rank was easy with it. I died once at the checkpoint, but it was pretty simple. Kill the soldiers who work as spotters for the tanks in the mist. Spam rockets. Done.

Ending was fine, except the huge fucking cliffhanger with "episode 51".

MGS3 3D: This port is a mixed bag. It still looks fine albeit the ending cutscenes looked worse then any other point of the game. You can crouch walk and use third person aiming which is unique. Circle Pad Pro/ N3DS is mandatory for competent controls. Sadly, the game suffers from frame drops and aiming with the N3DS nub, in the Fury and Fear boss fights especially, hurts your thumb. Still, it costs $20 on E-shop and that is a good deal imo.
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Offline Order.RSS

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #476 on: August 05, 2016, 06:54:09 PM »
Beat Octodad: Dadliest Catch (on Wii U) today.





This funny, short game (3 hours maybe?) is kinda old by now, 2010 I think, but had never played it. Basically you're the dad of a family and do chores like housekeeping, groceries, irresponsibly serving your kids hamburgers for breakfast, and going on a trip to the local aquarium. The (dadliest) catch? You're actually an octopus, posing as a human dad.


Controls are a real mess, but that's where the humour comes in. Octodad is impossible to control, even more so when you co-op and assign each player a single limb to flail around. Towards the end though they start demanding some more precise, faster movements from you. Most of the game you can just blunder through by sheer perseverance, but it's a minor annoyance when they want you to do complexer stuff that the game clearly isn't built for.


Performance on Wii U isn't great, not gonna lie. Loadtimes feel longer than necessary, and there are pretty noticeable framerate drops whenever it saves a checkpoint. Many lines of dialogue are subtitled but don't get spoken at all if you're too far away or interfere with their triggers in any way. The Gamepad clones the screen though, so you can effectively switch the channel for off-screen play which is nice.


Overall there's a lot to like here. Very casual-friendly for co-op, funny writing & scenarios, it's nice and short, rarely gets difficult and there's two more bonus levels outside the main story. None of its flaws managed to spoil any of the (many) laugh-out-loud moments we had with this, so it's all good.  7/10, recommended!

Offline Soren

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #477 on: August 09, 2016, 02:50:38 AM »
No Man's Sky

Alright. It's finally here. Played for about two hours. First and foremost to answer the question of what exactly this game is.

This is a survival game first and an exploration game second. Expect to micromanage your inventory from the very beginning. Inventory slots are painfully limited. I managed to get a decent starter planet. No real hazards to worry about. I've already read of some harrowing experiences on people's first planets. Some minerals are in healthy supply. But other, specially the Plutonium needed to activate the Launch Thrusters every time you take off are much harder to get. Also, carbon for your life supply, zinc for something else, etc.

The first time you take off and you see other planets in your starter system is a really jaw dropping moment. That moment when you set off for a new planet really made the hair on my arms stand.

HUD elements are sometimes a bit too ambiguous. It might take you a while to figure out how to craft different items. I appreciate not even bothering with the training wheels but a little help is never bad. I keep getting "You have unredeemed items, to claim them please use the options menu" messages but I can't for the life of me figure out what items the game wants to give me. Also I've explored several planets but missed the way to scan flora or fauna. I've just been mining resources from it but not reaping the rewards of scanning them I guess. There's a lot of things the game doesn't tell you which could prove useful.

I like the game but I'm worried the gameplay loop is going to be extremely shallow. The planets have a bit of samey quality to them. I hope that the further I travel I really start to see more differences instead of different colored rocks.
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Offline ClexYoshi

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #478 on: August 09, 2016, 05:46:21 PM »
No Man's Sky

Alright. It's finally here. Played for about two hours. First and foremost to answer the question of what exactly this game is.

This is a survival game first and an exploration game second. Expect to micromanage your inventory from the very beginning. Inventory slots are painfully limited. I managed to get a decent starter planet. No real hazards to worry about. I've already read of some harrowing experiences on people's first planets. Some minerals are in healthy supply. But other, specially the Plutonium needed to activate the Launch Thrusters every time you take off are much harder to get. Also, carbon for your life supply, zinc for something else, etc.

The first time you take off and you see other planets in your starter system is a really jaw dropping moment. That moment when you set off for a new planet really made the hair on my arms stand.

HUD elements are sometimes a bit too ambiguous. It might take you a while to figure out how to craft different items. I appreciate not even bothering with the training wheels but a little help is never bad. I keep getting "You have unredeemed items, to claim them please use the options menu" messages but I can't for the life of me figure out what items the game wants to give me. Also I've explored several planets but missed the way to scan flora or fauna. I've just been mining resources from it but not reaping the rewards of scanning them I guess. There's a lot of things the game doesn't tell you which could prove useful.

I like the game but I'm worried the gameplay loop is going to be extremely shallow. The planets have a bit of samey quality to them. I hope that the further I travel I really start to see more differences instead of different colored rocks.

as someone who's played a lot of Starbound, No Man's Sky really doesn't surprise me all that much... or at least, people's thoughts on it don't.

Offline Oedo

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #479 on: August 10, 2016, 03:29:22 PM »
Yoshi's Woolly World

First off, I can’t get over how much I like the music in this game. They hit a lot of the notes that I expect from a game like this, but they do it exceptionally well. I’m positive that I’ll go back and listen to the soundtrack again at some point. Aesthetically, the game starts out great and gets even better in the later worlds. The tropical, jungle, and forest themed levels are particularly awesome and probably my favourite levels in the game.

On the gameplay side, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much the challenge ramped up in the later worlds as I tried to obtain all of the collectibles. A lot of the increased challenge came from the collectibles being more well hidden, which I expected, but there were more instances of difficult platforming and puzzle solving than I anticipated as well. It’s still not super challenging and that might disappoint some people, but there’s something to be said for a game that can be consistently challenging (to some degree) without feeling frustrating at the same time. That was clearly the intent with Woolly World and I think the game pulled off that balance well in the later worlds.

There was one minor drawback to this. It might seem a little unfair to hold this against Woolly World because it’s a problem games of this ilk often have in general, but I didn’t like the fact that I could sometimes miss collectibles on my first playthrough of a level because I was presented with multiple options and chose the wrong order to play them in, with no way of going back. In some instances I found I was missing an obvious clue, but other times there was no discernible way to tell which order I should play the level in. I did run into this problem less in Woolly World than I have in some other games, however, and in the end it was more of a minor, occasional annoyance than a real issue.

Another surprise for me was how much the gameplay varied in the later worlds. The basic gameplay concepts behind swimming up balls of cotton, swinging from knitted scarves that move throughout a level, or creating your own platforms by throwing things are far from new, but these concepts were still implemented really well around the arts and crafts theme and did enough to keep the gameplay feeling fresh throughout the game.

The bosses were laughably easy. There’s a certain degree of challenge in trying to satisfy the full health requirement to 100% a level, but even then it’s a straightforward fight once you’ve seen their simple attack patterns for the first time. It’s clear that this is an intentional design decision though and I didn’t mind all that much since the fights (and the bosses themselves) were still amusing.

Yarn Poochy. Yarn Poochy is adorable.

As a bit of an aside, this game has given me a greater appreciation for Good-Feel as a developer. I played Kirby’s Epic Yarn and while the aesthetic, music, and general premise are all fantastic, the gameplay felt somewhat lacking. Yoshi’s Woolly World has all of the aforementioned positives (if not to quite the same degree as Kirby’s Epic Yarn), but it also has compelling gameplay. There’s nothing amazingly innovative in this game in a gameplay sense, but it still felt like a good game from start to finish. When you pair good level design with Good-Feel’s ability to build a game around these unique aesthetics and themes, and to be able to do it with such creativity and attention to detail, you've got the potential for something special. When we hear about Good-Feel’s next big Nintendo project, it’s going to mean more to me now than it did before I played this game.

Offline Luigi Dude

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #480 on: August 10, 2016, 04:37:08 PM »
As a bit of an aside, this game has given me a greater appreciation for Good-Feel as a developer. I played Kirby’s Epic Yarn and while the aesthetic, music, and general premise are all fantastic, the gameplay felt somewhat lacking. Yoshi’s Woolly World has all of the aforementioned positives (if not to quite the same degree as Kirby’s Epic Yarn), but it also has compelling gameplay. There’s nothing amazingly innovative in this game in a gameplay sense, but it still felt like a good game from start to finish. When you pair good level design with Good-Feel’s ability to build a game around these unique aesthetics and themes, and to be able to do it with such creativity and attention to detail, you've got the potential for something special. When we hear about Good-Feel’s next big Nintendo project, it’s going to mean more to me now than it did before I played this game.

Have you played Wario Land: Shake It?  If not then I heavily recommend playing it since that was Good Feel's game before Epic Yarn and shares more in common gameplay wise with Woolly World then Epic Yarn did.  That's one of the reasons I was disappointed with Epic Yarn because Shake It already showed Good Feel was capable of more compelling gameplay which Woolly World was a nice return to.
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Offline Oedo

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #481 on: August 10, 2016, 09:49:41 PM »
I haven't, but it's definitely on the list now after playing Woolly World. I know Europe got a Virtual Console release a while ago and North America figures to get it at some point as well, but looking around it seems that used copies are really cheap, so I might just pick it up that way sometime soon instead of waiting for it to show up on Wii U.

Offline ejamer

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #482 on: August 10, 2016, 11:34:39 PM »

I haven't, but it's definitely on the list now after playing Woolly World. I know Europe got a Virtual Console release a while ago and North America figures to get it at some point as well, but looking around it seems that used copies are really cheap, so I might just pick it up that way sometime soon instead of waiting for it to show up on Wii U.


You won't regret it. Wario Land Shake It! is a fantastic game - gorgeous art and animation (although I wish the animation was a bit smoother), a wonderful soundtrack with different music on each level, and superb level design across the board with creative boss battles as icing on the cake.


Beating the game isn't hard - unless you seek out the special hidden levels, or try to beat the challenges on each level. That ups the difficulty quite a bit, but also showcases the level design and requires you to really make the most of what's available each time.


When it came out lots of people complained wondering how a 2D game could be worth the asking price - but anyone who skipped playing Shake It! missed out on a true hidden gem for the Wii!
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Offline Oedo

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #483 on: August 12, 2016, 03:18:50 PM »
Yeah, every time I hear or see people talk about it they almost always have only good things to say about it. I'm not surprised to hear that the challenge comes from the optional content, since Woolly World is the same way. I'm fine with that given how well Woolly World pulled off structuring things that way.

Offline MagicCow64

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #484 on: August 12, 2016, 11:29:34 PM »
Reposting from the download thread:

I'll chime in and say that I think Wario Land: Shake It is the best of the three Good Feel games overall. Beautiful style, and it manages to redeem the shitty Wario Land 4 rush-back-from-the-end-of-level gimmick, while controlling perfectly for a Wario game.

Offline Soren

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #485 on: August 13, 2016, 02:02:33 AM »
I am pretty much done with No Man's Sky and Hello Games in general. At this point I would actually pay money to have all the mining and crappy space dogfighting taken out of the game and have it be a pure walking simulator experience. There's just no fun at all here.
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Offline Oedo

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #486 on: August 15, 2016, 04:12:42 PM »
Metroid: Zero Mission

With the buzz around its 30th anniversary, I had the sudden urge to play some Metroid and settled on Zero Mission. Somehow, even with all the the praise that surrounds this game, I was caught off guard by just how amazing it is. 

I’ll get the only real issue I have with Zero Mission out of the way first: it was a bad decision to not make the hard difficulty available to players right from the beginning. If the normal difficulty was very challenging and hard was effectively a “super hard†mode, this would still be a palatable approach. However, the normal difficulty in this game just feels a little too easy. This wasn’t an issue for me in the overworld, where more damage and less health would just mean I play a little more cautiously rather than running through the underground tunnels of Zebes with reckless abandon, blasting through anything that got in my way. Where it really hurts is during the boss fights. I got pumped up for the fight with Ridley, but when I actually got to the battle I don’t think it lasted even an entire minute. It was the same with Mother Brain and Mecha Ridley. However, as I said, that’s my only real issue with Zero Mission. Taken as a whole the game is fantastic.

I played Super Metroid recently when it came out on the New 3DS and there’s a stark difference in pace with Zero Mission. I played Super Metroid somewhat meticulously, since I’m by no means an expert on the game despite having played it before. By contrast, I feel like there’s a much greater sense of momentum in Zero Mission. It’s still obviously an exploration heavy game and often requires a thoughtful approach to reach new parts of the overworld, but even when I was exploring I felt like I was pressing forward at high speed. Part of this is attributable to the fact that there are Chozo Statues marking areas on the map and the fact that I was playing on the normal difficulty, where I didn’t have to worry about the enemies or hazards in the overworld as much, but Zero Mission just feels like a faster paced game in general. To that end, it’s amazing to me how the development team behind Zero Mission made a game that can feel this way. To make a game that so heavily leverages backtracking and precise overworld exploration feel like it has a constant sense of forward momentum at the same time seems like an incredibly difficult task, and yet they completely nailed flawlessly. People often talk about how indie developers have a difficult time making games that live up to the Metroid standard because these developers can’t make a large overworld feel as interconnected and cohesive as Nintendo can with Metroid. There’s a lot of truth to that and that may even be the biggest factor, but striking that balance between a great pace and exploration that still feels natural and consistently engaging is what sets Nintendo apart for me. I haven’t played nearly as many Metroid-inspired games as a lot of other people have, but Zero Mission feels like the pinnacle of this particular kind of game design to me.

The other thing I love about Zero Mission is that it’s just so cool. The general premise, the setting, the music, Samus, and even what story is present in the game. I’m not particularly well versed in Metroid and the deeper lore that surrounds it (though after playing this game that’s almost certainly going to change), but, following the series from afar, I was aware of major plot points like Samus being raised by the Chozo and parts of Zero Mission game taking place on the planet which she grew up on. And yet, despite the fact that I already knew this, the cutscene near the end where they show Samus as a child with the Chozo, before she gets her Power Suit back in the present, was still so cool to me. The masterful game design is what makes people love this series, but there’s an appeal to Metroid which you won’t find in most other Nintendo franchises even beyond that.

Offline Mop it up

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #487 on: August 15, 2016, 05:19:42 PM »
You won't regret it. Wario Land Shake It! is a fantastic game
I second this. I think this awesome game was an unfortunate victim that got drowned in all the hate over the infamous E3 with Wii Music and Animal Crossing City Folk. Of course, some of the reviews didn't help either, as I remember at least one reviewer who did not play / find the secret levels in the game and claimed it was short and easy. The secret levels are almost half the game, so he missed a lot from laziness.

One thing I'll warn about however is that Wario Land Shake It! is only in 4:3, not widescreen. When widescreen is enabled, it just has borders on the left and right sides of the screen. It's a bit of a bummer given the game's nice graphics, but it isn't a big deal gameplay-wise.

Good-Feel are a bit under-appreciated as a dev I feel. Or at least the three 2D platformers they've made are. They're pretty high quality, but I don't think any of them have sold all that well.
« Last Edit: August 15, 2016, 05:21:52 PM by Mop it up »

Offline Luigi Dude

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #488 on: August 16, 2016, 12:23:16 AM »
Good-Feel are a bit under-appreciated as a dev I feel. Or at least the three 2D platformers they've made are. They're pretty high quality, but I don't think any of them have sold all that well.

They've actually done pretty good.


Wario Land: Shake It: 1.06 million

Kirby Epic Yarn:  1.85 million

Yoshi's Woolly World:  1.37 million


Yeah none of their games have been Mario sized hits, but I'm pretty sure they all still made a nice profit and pleased Nintendo in the end.
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Offline Khushrenada

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #489 on: August 16, 2016, 12:45:36 AM »
Considering Nintendo mentioned that Fire Emblem needed to sell around 750,000 units to be profitable, I think they're probably doing good with the numbers they're pulling in.
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Offline ejamer

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #490 on: August 16, 2016, 07:07:08 AM »
I always worry about sales figures from Nintendo's perspective though.


Sometimes it seems like their viewpoint is skewed, as if something isn't a super mega-hit then they consider it a failure. Maybe that's a side effect of having so many multi-million hits in the stable and a limited set of development/translation resources to work with? I mean, why bother spending time on anything that isn't expected to sell as well as Mario? (Rhetorical question - I know there are many good reasons to expand their library with different types and brands of games.)


I see Wario Land Shake It with a million sales and think "wow, that's not bad at all", and just pray that Nintendo isn't looking at it and thinking "we should have churned out another Mario game instead".


Regardless, I'm glad the game exists. And that this conversation exists, because it reminds me to go back and play Shake It again.
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Offline NWR_insanolord

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #491 on: August 16, 2016, 08:37:28 AM »
I think the fact that they keep going back to Good Feel and having them make that kind of game would indicate they're pretty happy with how they've sold.
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Offline Mop it up

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #492 on: August 16, 2016, 12:34:18 PM »
They've actually done pretty good.
Wario Land: Shake It: 1.06 million
Kirby Epic Yarn:  1.85 million
Meh, if those are worldwide figures then I stand by my statement for these two, especially in the case of Wario Land. I also remember Kirby's Epic Yarn dropping in price quickly and eventually falling to $10 because of how much unsold stock stores had.

Considering the Wii U situation, Yoshi seems decent, and it's still for sale so it could get even better.

Considering Nintendo mentioned that Fire Emblem needed to sell around 750,000 units to be profitable, I think they're probably doing good with the numbers they're pulling in.
Sure, but my point was about popularity.

Offline Luigi Dude

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #493 on: August 16, 2016, 02:19:59 PM »
Meh, if those are worldwide figures then I stand by my statement for these two, especially in the case of Wario Land. I also remember Kirby's Epic Yarn dropping in price quickly and eventually falling to $10 because of how much unsold stock stores had.

Epic Yarn was released October of 2010 and Nintendo's own Q3 report said it sold 1.38 million by the end of December 2010 that year.

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2011/110128e.pdf

Then their own end of year fiscal report has them selling 1.59 million by the end of March 2011.

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2011/110426e.pdf

Then there's the Neo Gaf thread where the guy keeps getting updated info about Nintendo's shipments and has Epic Yarn at 1.85 million as of the end of December 2014.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=963700


Seriously I'm not sure were you live but worldwide Epic Yarn was a success that sold the majority of it's sales at full price.  A company like Nintendo isn't going to ship an extra 500k after the original sales if there's tons of unsold stock around.  If that was the case they could have cooked the books to make games like Other M cross the million mark by dumping even more stock.

Plus in the case of Epic Yarn, it's also the best selling home console Kirby game.  Seriously, just look at the charts from said Neo Gaf thread I linked above.

Kirby's Adventure: 1.75 million
Kirby's Super Star: 1.44 million
Kirby 64: 1.77 million
Kirby Air Rid: 1.35 million
Kirby's Epic Yarn: 1.85 million
Kirby Return to Dream Land: 1.79 million

Every other home console Kirby game not listed like Dream Land 3 and Rainbow Cruise never hit the million mark.  Which goes to show how impressive Epic Yarn did considering it wasn't even a traditional Kirby game and yet it managed to outsell every other home console Kirby game.  Hell, even when compared to the handheld Kirby games, Epic Yarn is the 2nd best selling Kirby spinoff behind only Pinball which did 2.19 million back in it's day.

Even Wario Land: Shake It did decently all things considered.  Yes it was a drop from the 2.20 million Land 3 and 4 both did, but at the same time Wario Land 2 only sold 1.48 million back in it's day which was a much bigger drop from the 5.19 million Land 1 did.  Wario World and Master of Disguise didn't even hit the million mark so it's not like it's the worst selling game in the franchise either.  Even when compared to the Wario Ware series, the original on the GBA only did 1.10 million, Twisted never even broke a million and Touched and Smooth Moves despite being casual friendly games on the casual monsters that were the DS and Wii sold just short of 2.5 million each.

So it's not like Wario has been a real gaming sales powerhouse outside of his first game on the GB which sold mostly on the fact it was called Mario Land 3 and still had very traditional Mario gameplay.  Of course even then it was a huge drop as well since Mario Land 2 sold 11.18 million, so the Wario series having drops between installments isn't anything new.
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Offline Mop it up

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #494 on: August 16, 2016, 02:34:40 PM »
You're missing the context of my point. Given the quality of the games, I still feel they deserved to sell better. Comparing them to other games in their respective series doesn't show anything, as I also feel many games in the Kirby and Wario series should sell better as they're both great series. Things like profitability never entered the equation.

Offline MagicCow64

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #495 on: August 16, 2016, 05:14:19 PM »
I'm pretty sure Nintendo was fine with Good Feel's Wii output, and satisfied with Woolly World given the WiiU install base, but I also wonder about the increased production cost of WW given its HD assets and long dev cycle. Though the stuffed Amiibos probably helped out.

Offline azeke

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #496 on: August 18, 2016, 01:54:30 AM »
Human Resource Machine (Steam):


Too see it in action check out this webm i made or watch NWR video of James Jones playing the game.

I am cautious about "playing" these types of programming puzzle games. Being software engineer who does programming for living the idea of a game that forces you to work, calls it entertainment AND doesn't pay you is preposterous. It is like that picture where dude works on a forklift all day and comes back home to relax and play forklift simulator videogame.

Still i started HRM thinking i can finish it in a few days time. Because game features rather basic machine and starting puzzles are basically just exercises straight out of computer science textbooks i thought i can be done with it very quickly. And for many tasks i did, writing out the perfect (both in code size and speed) solution literally on my first try.

However few puzzles were much harder and had me trying to solve them in the span of several nights. I also had to write several vastly different solutions depending if i aimed for speed or tried to shorten the program.

Puzzle when you are asked by to split digits in a number (so that you get "437" and output "4 3 7") gave me a trouble, especially in efficiency challenge. It requires division by 100s and 10s but HRM can't do division by itself, and you have to emulate it by subtracting subtrahend repeatedly until you reach zero or negative value. To fullfill speed requirement i went way, way overboard with loop unrolling and had to wrote a program so long it reached program limit:



Another interesting problem was sorting. Sorting is a classical task in Computer Science and as a student i spent a lot of time studying various methods and reading "Art of Programming" which had an entire chapter dedicated to sorting alone.

Because i tend to gravitate to the simplest algorithms i first wrote selection sort, it was short (33 commands) but not fast enough. Then i started over and did rather complicated heap sort which theoretically should be much faster, however because of primitive nature of commands (modern processors can access memory at address 2x+1 all in one command, but in HRM you have to write like 8 commands to do the same) and input data being too short my code ended up slower instead. Then i restarted again and wrote insertion sort algorithm which did the trick.

Re-learning all these things was kinda fun. Just like 15 years ago, i was once again stunned by the cleverness of heap sort algorithm.

The final puzzle with prime factors turned out to be much easier than i thought it was. For the first day i thought that i HAVE to actually calculate prime numbers (at least first 7 of them), but apparently i didn't, because the way algorithm works it outputs prime numbers by itself naturally.

Game's art style and atmosphere with story vignettes helped to make it more of a fun game. Background ambient music very old by the end and i was just muting it.

Overall: this "game" might be interesting if you want to learn the basics of CS and will be hard enough if you go for optimized solutions. Not sure if i recommend to people who just want to have a good time though, because i fully realize that spending an hour trying to optimize the program by one command is not everyone's idea of fun.
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Offline ejamer

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #497 on: August 18, 2016, 08:42:39 AM »
Interesting comments - recently picked up Human Resource Machine again with my brother-in-law and his (teenage) kids. He and I both have CS degrees. He does more coding than I do these days, I tend to be limited to less demanding web-based development. But everyone enjoyed the game, with kids playing and adults givnig hints and trying to improve optimization after a level was solved.  It was a good little puzzle for the hour or so we played.


That time was also enough to convince me to pick the game up solo and finish some challenges that I had ignored previously. My first time through the game I spent maybe 3 hours to see the ending - but didn't satisfy a bunch of optimization challenges and ignored a handful of optional levels.


I like your approach of trying to actually maximize efficiency (not just meet the stated goals), but am not sure I enjoy the game enough to sit down and focus on the problems long enough to push for the best solutions for both size and speed.  I'm also not sure that I'm going to do the prime factoring level. It's the only stage I haven't even attempted, as each time when I reached that point my reaction was simply "nope, not interested in doing that right now".  Maybe another time.  :)


The one thing that left me disappointed in Human Resource Machine was the background story. I feel like there is some cute humor at play, but the payoff for beating this game just didn't live up my expectations after playing World of Goo or Little Inferno.
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Offline rygar

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #498 on: August 18, 2016, 05:40:46 PM »
 Link’s Awakening DX – 3DS VC
I finished my play through last night and really enjoyed the experience. The previous games in the series were firmly on the fantasy continuum, but LA has a more fairy-tale like tone. It works well with the game’s aesthetic and gameplay. The emphasis is squarely on puzzle solving and platforming over combat, to the point where combat is downright easy. It doesn’t detract from the game though because the complexity of the environmental puzzles would become annoying if it were as difficult to clear rooms in LA as in LOZ or AOL. The sequential dungeon-crawling structure of the game is similar to past Zeldas, but there is enough thematic changes to make it fresh. The story itself is surprisingly poignant. The fairy-tale tone also opened the door to some surreal elements which I think add to the game’s appeal. There are numerous easter eggs, the fourth wall is amusingly broken, and the NPCs are often interestingly idiosyncratic. It’s all executed well and adds a layer of cleverness to the game. LA is obviously revered and I understand why.


 As an aside, I really like the introduction of the roc’s feather and would have killed for that in LOZ. The wizzrobes crush me in the last dungeon.
 

Offline ShyGuy

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Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« Reply #499 on: August 19, 2016, 01:13:14 AM »
Serious Sam: BFE.

It took Too long to become a Big Fucking Encounter. The last level is absolutely epic. It also needed more varied environments, it's 100% set in Egypt, so it's all sandy yellow. The level designs aren't as creative as the first 2 games. It's not a bad game or anything, just takes too long to hit peak explosions.

Stange for me to say this, but they needed to Micheal Bay the **** out of this game.

I feel the same way, I played a several hours of this and it still never ramped up to the fun of the previous games. Parts of it feel like your playing a mundan COD clone. The weapons are fairly hard to find as well.