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

[broodwars]

I have finished Danganronpa, though I have much to do before I've "completed" it. Man, that game has some really awesome moments, but it kind of plummets into some real cheesy crap towards the end and common sense just flies out the window. Still highly recommended, though.

On a sidenote, the bonus mode that unlocks when you beat the game is just...bizarre...

[azeke]

Arkham City (Wii U):

Also collected all 440 doodads.

Open-world and/or collectathon design can be slapped onto any genre be it platformer (Mario), 3d space shooter (Elite), city roaming simulator (Assassin's Creed), primitive brawler (Arkham games) or anything really.

Collecting aspect ensures that people with mild OCD will enjoy this part either way, but the main gameplay routine be it walking, flying or jumping that you're doing in between collecting, should also pull its weight.

I do enjoy platforming or roaming the cities, but i can't say i like brawling as Batman as much. It's okay i guess but the combat system just never really clicked with me.

One of the problems that spoils entire game, not just the combat, is overcomplicated controls -- most of the dozens and dozens and dozens of things you do in the game are mapped onto combination of different buttons pressed in some order. It's just as demanding as fighting game where you need to memorize combinations of button presses.

And it's not just button presses -- moves also differ depending if you're pressing it once or twice or hold it. Plus there's a timing placed on top of all this heap of game mechanics.

Bayo's combat is enjoyable by itself, but in Arkham games it's a slog you need to push through to get to good story parts. That's why i didn't bothered with combat arena challenges in the game.

There are so much stuff you can do, so many moves but some of them are so situational and arcane, you will miss majority of this stuff unless you start doing challenges that will force you to do this on purpose, like glide boost kick or grapple boost takedown.

Still, it's a good game, and you definitely feel how big it is. VA, story stuff, comic book fanservice are best parts. Oh and flying with a grapple hook is also pretty cool in a Spider-man 2 kind of way.

I still kinda want to playand finish Origins... Halp.

[azeke]

The Swapper:
According to steam, entire playthrough took me 7 hours. A good hour of it took me to solve one particular puzzle wasn't that hard in hindsight.

My impressions about quality of puzzles hasn't changed: they're still stull too "fussy", and can be solved just by trying out things in random ways until it kinda solves itself. There is no thought put into them, no "trick" behind them, like every single puzzle in Jelly no Puzzle has.

Probably the only puzzle i felt was genuinely well designed mechanically was the one where i had to place spaceman on four pad on both floors and ceilings:


There are two endings, i chose suicide over taking over other man's body to save myself. It's kinda irksome that you can't come back after one ending and choose differently to see second ending. But no big deal: i just watched the other ending on youtube.

The plot is okay, good even. Certainly better than most. Nothing super special that wasn't explored in good sci-fi stories half a century ago, but the attempt is appreciated.

[josephhotseat]

I don't have much to say about the games I've finished since I starts with one and end up with another one 

But I already finished The Walking Dead Episodes 1-3, I am now playing episode 4. 

[azeke]

Ninja Gaiden (both on 3DS and on Retro Achievements emulator):
I've already cleared the game on 3DS a few times before but it was using a save state starting from 6-1 so i didn't counted that.

I wanted to do it all in one sitting. Also i was skipping all cutscenes and was missing out on "amazing" story.

The most important thing you need to remember to beat this game is "don't stop for nothing". Enemies in this game are not there for you to kill, they're here to stop you from moving on. So don't pursue them if you're not progressing at the same time.

Screen border is your most efficient weapon -- use it by running all the time and getting everyone (mostly birds) cut by the border and vanish. There are places where by abusing enemy AI you can make them go into the border and disappear completely.

The other thing is that you need to treat your health almost like an item or an ammo. You have lots of health so why not use it? Getting yourself hit is sometimes the best option you have. You can hit yourself on purpose and use temporal invincibility to get through impossible segment, or even use knockback animation that otherwise is the bane of your gameplay.

The hardest part in the entire game is probably 5-3, because of a segment where you need to jump two times right towards the dudes with rocket launchers while the green dude is jumping at you AND you have a white bird on your tail AND a bat appears on second jump:



You can cheese through the first jump by getting fire magic earlier but it won't last enough for the second jump... You need to slash in the very millisecond you land to kill rocket launcher guy before he fires and knocks you back into the pit.

The part right before it can also get tricky:

Cheetah appears running at you right when you land your second jump -- there is a window of quarter of a second for you to react and jump out of the way.

Stupid thing about the final boss isn't that it sends you back to 6-1 after you die (i've played level 6 so many times, i've memorized all right patterns i need to do to finish it in one go so it's not really a problem), but that your magic depletes completely between boss phases so if you want to do all final boss phases in one go there is no reason for you to save your magic for later phases, because come phase 2 your magic will be zero whether you used it or not.

I can do phase 1 without magic, i can do phase 2 without magic, but the last phase is just too much to handle with just a sword. It's much simpler to stock up on magic by replaying level 6 (get at least 80 magic) then remove the head with two fire blasts and then just start spamming alien's belly with further blasts.

Music. While 4-2 is definitely the shining gem in the soundtrack (even developers realized that and made it the music for the ending sequence), after playing the game back and forth so many times i got to appreciate other tracks as well: 5-1 is HYPE incarnate, 5-3 sounds like something written in times of Bach and Mozart and to be played on a clavier.

Because i played on raNES (i.e -- PC) i needed some PC controller setup. Xbox controller that i otherwise for everything else on PC clearly won't do because of atrocious d-pad.

So i dusted off my bluetooth receiver and used gloverpie program to connect my Wiimote and Classic Controller Pro. It is such a hassle to set up and i always have to do a few times for it link up properly and the worst thing is that you need to do it each time anew for each session.

At least once i got it working, it felt very good. Classic controller's d-pad is awesome.

There is still some small lag with this setup though, i feel like reaction time on button presses need some tightening up because i found a few moves way too hard to do with this setup, like climbing the wall vertically -- it's much easier to do on a keyboard of all things.

After finishing the first NES game, the next day i received Ninja Gaiden Black in the mail! Spoiler: it's also awesome!

[lolmonade]

Just beat inFamous: Second Son.  It's sort of a mixed bag compared to inFamous 2, but overall i'd say I had just as much fun as the last one. 


The protagonist, Deslin Rowe, is a surprisingly enjoyable character that's fun to play as, and his brother Reggie is an entertaining opposing force to him throughout the story.  That said, the downside is that those two characters are the only ones you really care about.  inFamous 1 had an interesting feel of you unraveling this complex story with a crazy twist near the end.  inFamous 2 had a feel like you were fighting against the clock to prepare yourself against the prophesied beast.  The downside of Deslin being so jovial in trying to get his powers is that there doesn't feel like there's much weight to the story until a pivotal moment late in the story that drives everything towards the conclusion. 


The powers are pretty neat.  Deslin's power is that he can absorb the powers of other conduits, which acts a means of gaining new powers.  I won't delve into what powers you get, but they all have strengths & weaknesses.  The best part about the new powers, and this is probably the biggest improvement over the other games, is that they allow you to traverse the city so much more effectively than Cole was ever able to.


Overall, a lot of good fun, if maybe a little less compelling from a story standpoint.  Can't deny it's probably one of the better games for PS4 right now, so I'd say it's worth the purchase.  I'd give it about an 8/10.

[azeke]

Assassin's Creed: Liberation (PC):
Finished it. Save file says i spent 15 hours on it, though it felt longer (maybe it doesn't count replays). Also note that i tried to prolong the story as much as i could and collected almost everything and did all extra missions.

Did full sync on everything. It wasn't as hard here as in main games, conditions mostly are pretty lax and you can get them on the first go, there were probably just 3-4 missions that i had to replay many times to get full sync.

As usual for this series, it gets annoying when full sync depends on broken game mechanic (like vehicle control in Brotherhood was amazingly broken and made it impossible to full sync without using glitches or missions in III that depended on your ally AI -- so infuriating when your full sync relies on somewhat random mechanic that is completely out of your control).

There was one mission that depended on "stealth running": run through predetermined path while guards will shoot at you if they see you and you're on a timer and oh... DON'T GET HIT even once.

One "boss" mission that had full sync requirement to never get hit i did after many retries but i had to figure out almost perfect positions and moves i need to execute. Almost perfect because combat system is very wonky and not reliable at all, your moves may or may not work and enemy AI also acts somewhat randomly.

After spending an hour on this, i got enough of it and bought lots of smoke bombs. The other two "boss fights" i cheesed through just by spamming bombs and killing everyone while they cough.

I collected most of the doodads, but was missing few voodoo dolls and assassin coins. When i looked it up, it told me that these two voodoo dolls are not on the map and only appear during two special missions that i have to replay in full. Yeah, no, not gonna do that.

Pocket watches are rather blatant attempt to give you something to spend your money on, given that they don't have any importance for neither gameplay or story.

Story is stupid as per usual (for all videogames i could say), but the mission where i had to scare soldiers with voodoo magic was funny. By the end plot got very hokey, but that's par the course for the series (after all so far the only legitimately semi good story was in Revelations).

Also there was one character who looked normal in most of his missions, but in his last mission he suddenly became a pimp. A hat with feather, purple outfit and he even changed the manner of his speech to match. Am i supposed to laugh or cringe, i honestly have no idea...

Overall the game is very fully featured for a console game brought to handheld. They didn't really change anything. Probably the only thing lacking compared from console games is sound design: from somewhat mediocre music to small selection of citizen's reactions. It gets bizarre hearing people sighing constantly as you run past them, it's almost like i'm playing Pikmin or something, they sigh in almost exactly the same way.

Despite all my whining about this and that, it's a good game.

I can honestly recommend it if you want to check out some AC game but not sure which. Sure, II or Brotherhood are better picks, but they're also extremely long. If you want something with a smaller commitment both in price and time and gives a good representation of the entire series with warts and all (good city roaming and collecting, mediocre/tolerable everything else), it might be worth checking out.

[broodwars]

Infamous Second Son - "Eh"/10

I just beat this game last night, and while it's decent enough and has its strong moments the game overall just felt really flat to me. It doesn't hit any of the highs that Infamous 2 hit, and the powers are REALLY too similar. This is the first Infamous game where I really felt the repetition sit in, and I'm really not looking forward to playing the game again on the game's cartoonishly-evil path.

[broodwars]

I just finished Knack, and aside from a final boss encounter that is total bullshit (no checkpoints in a multi-stage encounter where you die in two hits? Really?!!!)...I actually had a reasonable time with the game. Maybe it's because I played the game at a fairly leisurely pace over the course of several months and maybe it's because I gamed the system quite a bit by importing a ton of rare collectibles in from the companion App, but I found the game surprisingly relaxing. Sure, the game is brutally unforgiving, but at the same time most of the time (once again, "**** you", Final Boss) the challenge was pretty fair and its leads to a fairly relaxed flow of battle. You study your opponents' attack patterns for openings, you dash in, and you annihilate them. If you mis-time your movements, 1/2 your health gets wiped out. If you time it perfectly, you slaughter everyone.

[nickmitch]

Recently beat Pikmin 3.  I got all the fruit and, in total, took 58 in game days.  I feel like I wasted so many days trying to figure things out and not actually getting fruit.  The multitasking aspect felt weird.  You couldn't really do anything while not controlling the other characters.  You either had them waiting somewhere or walking someplace.  Maybe I was trying to fight enemies in one area and move fruit in another somewhere else instead of just focusing on fruit and population.  Though, using that feature to stock up on spicy nectar turned out to be an excellent strategy, so the feature is clearly useful.

I really liked this game.  Exploring the world is really fun, especially as you get more Pikmin types.  I didn't like that you get blue Pikmin at the very end of the game, (the next area is the final boss) but the world really opens up after that.  Getting the fruit always felt like a realistic goal and typically felt rewarding.  Enemy regeneration was a constant pain that often slowed progress.  I don't mind the day structure, since without it there's no urgency, but I wish the days were longer.  There was a time or two where I had to retrieve fruit/harvest organs from an area boss and ran out of time.  And most of the bosses are a trek; even though, the game has good ways of having you create new paths and shorts around the levels.

Also, this game looks great, and the Pikmin are totes adorbs.

8.5/10

[Soren]

Batman Arkham Origins: Blackgate Deluxe Edition HD Remastered Game for Gamers Limited Edition eShop Version
6/10

Finished the main story in 7 hours, 80% complete on Normal difficulty. The game is great good alright. The exploration can be fun. Moving around in the 2.5D space can be a little janky at times as you find out where you can go and grapple. But once you do everything clicks, specially once you begin acquiring upgrades for you gadgets. Unfortunately the combat never clicked for me. It felt unresponsive and muddled. As you got more upgrades to your batsuit you could reel off more impressive combos but it never felt satisfying. All it took is one missed button prompt to break up the flow of the fights. Some bad guys required specific movements (stunning them with the cape, then flipping over them to attack them from behind) that were hit-or-miss. Things did not get better with the boss battles. For me it just became an exercise in frustration. Hit them once, die while trying to figure out the next pattern. Rinse and repeat until dead.


I know there are alternate endings to the game but I don't think I'll replay this game for them. I'll just watch them on YouTube. Maybe I'll go back and 100% it, but the game didn't motivate me enough right now. At least it's short enough that I could finish it.


Knytt Underground
9.5/10

This game is probably the best eShop game I've played so far, if not the best Wii U game overall. I enjoyed the sense of exploration and the story. The environments and the music combined in ways I've rarely seen before. The first 2 chapters in the game were great starters for the real meat of the game: Chapter 3. It is a truly massive world, and while it does use parts of the first 2 chapters, there's still plenty of stuff to explore. The good thing is those first 2 chapters taught you everything you needed to know about the game and overcome the environmental puzzles the last chapter throws at you. And the secrets...oh there's plenty of those, too. Secret passages. Secret areas. Secret puzzles. Even secret rooms in the menu screen.


My one main gripe with the game concerns the ending.It is not satisfying at all. The game just abruptly ends, just like Chapters 1 and 2 ended. That felt really frustrating because you go all over this big beautiful world ringing all the bells of fate, and the game doesn't even give you a chance to ring the final bell! Yes, I can appreciate that game ultimately teaches me that it's all about the journey and not the destination. But dammit I spent so many hours and I really wanted that last moment of gratification. And the game took it away from me.


Aside from that, I will say I loved the story. It's one of the few games I've played that deals with the concept of faith in a way that does it justice. It doesn't force you to pick a side because it understands that we all have biases. Instead it molds the supporting characters in such a way that you can experience the story through your own personal lens, or take the opposing point of view and see how it feels. I will disagree with Daan's review on this site and say that while there is lots of swearing, I never saw it as childish or unnecessary. It fit well with the characters and the mood of the story at the time and never felt gratuitous.

[azeke]

Jelly no Puzzle (freeware puzzle game on PC):


Last level requires some real ingenious thinking and now finally after few weeks of tackling it on my lunch breaks i finally solved it. Levels 40 and 19 were the highlight.

Unquestionably the hardest block puzzle game i ever played. Superbly crafted levels and extremely tight design where literally every detail matters and is a part of final solution.

Last week i showed the game to my colleague, he basically went though most of it it since then and really, really loved it (with some harm to his professional duties i'm afraid). Last time i checked he was also stuck on 40. Even though he solved at much faster pace than me i at last was still the first to crack final level.

[ejamer]

Etrian Odyssey Untold: Millennium Girl (3DS)


Solid game. I enjoy dungeon crawlers, and the Etrian Odyssey series is pretty solid in that regard. Untold adds a bit of story and a pre-determined party to make it an easy introduction point. (Advanced users can skip those features, and might prefer to build a party of their own choosing.)


Regarding the game itself, my only let-down was the "final" boss being far too easy - but in RPG tradition there are multiple optional bosses to take on along the way that should give you a run for your money, and the real final boss that can be attempted as a post-game to challenge if you so desire.


Glad to have played it, well worth owning in my opinion The only question is which to get between this remake and Etrian Odyssey 4 - but I think that depends on what you are looking for. I liked 4 slightly more but felt Untold was an easier entry point into the series.

[azeke]

AiRace Speed (3DS):
Done. Got all achievements. The last two ones where i had to keep getting "low energy shield" warning for 60 seconds straight (got it by finding sparse enough area with a slow ship and scraping the floor doing circles while keeping the shield meter in the red whole time) and the one with keeping nitro for 120 seconds without crashing (i stupidly mixed up 120 secs for 1:20 and was confused why am i not getting it, until i realized that it's 2 minutes and none of the regular levels are long enough to last 2 minutes with nitro on whole time).

The game itself is alright i guess. The gameplay gets stale rather quick and environments are kinda bland. What saves it is achievements and friends leaderboards. Checking if you friends beat you and then beating his time is pretty fun.

This game reminded me of NY Racer (game based on flying taxi part in Fifth Element) -- man i played it a lot back then. I remember it having great, vertical 3d spaces.

[Adrock]

It may have taken almost a year, but I finally completed every level in Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D. I have neither the patience nor the desire to go through Mirror Mode and Time Attack Mode. I'd say 90% of the game is really fun, and the rest makes me want to punch something due to the extreme difficulty. I can finally open my copy of Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze now.

[broodwars]

After more hours invested than you would believe, I have Platinumed Final Fantasy X HD for my 91st Platinum. I killed all the Dark Aeons, Nemesis, and Penance. I fully-upgraded all the Celestial Weapons. I maxed out the Sphere Grid for EVERY character.  Yet despite all the sheer bullshit I had to do to get this Platinum, it's still easily my favorite game in the series with one of the best stories and cast of characters.

Unfortunately, then Square-Enix made a sequel, and man did it suck by comparison. But that's a game for another time.

[Phil]

91st? That's some dedication! How many of those are games that were grinds or unfun? Which ones did you enjoy getting platinum on the most?

[broodwars]

91st? That's some dedication! How many of those are games that were grinds or unfun? Which ones did you enjoy getting platinum on the most?

Sorry for the late reply, but I had to look through my list a bit. For the most part, there are only a few games on the list that were a pure grind or "unfun". Of the 91 games I've Platinumed, it's hard to argue that I hated any of them more than I hated Resonance of Fate. Man, **** that game and everyone who made it. Pure grind from beginning to end. "How much of a grind?" I spent 110 hours on that game, and 5 of those were playing the ENTIRE game a second time in New Game+.  The combat system is pure, convoluted tedium. If you're wondering why I stuck it out for so long, it was one of my earliest Platinums, and I was unemployed at the time. It is BECAUSE of that game that I draw the line at Platinuming most Japanese games. Hell, after that game I'm amazed I stuck it out with Ni No Kuni, because that was one tedious, ****ing mess.

There are a few other games that were unpleasant, but for other reasons. For instance, Dark Void was an interesting concept, but the game was released unfinished so there were entire levels that failed to load required objectives into the environment and the game as a whole crashed fairly often. When the game worked it was pretty decent, but it rarely did. Likewise, Fallout 3 is a crash factory on PS3. It barely works, even by Bethesda's standards. It's because of that game that I didn't stick it out with Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim (which were far worse).

Generally speaking, I've seen a pretty clear delineation between the trophy lists in Western games vs. Japanese games: Western lists tend to favor skill and collectables, while Japanese lists tend to favor time investment and doing every single task possible. I hate Japanese trophy lists. They're made for obsessive-compulsive people without lives, which makes sense when you consider their otaku culture.

As for my favorite Platinums, I combed through the list a bit and here are a handful of them: Bioshock, Final Fantasy 13, Final Fantasy 10 HD, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Rayman Origins, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Dead Space 2.  In general, each of these games are pretty hard Platinums, but the pursuit of those Platinums caused me to invest myself into learning and understanding depths of the games' mechanics I hadn't really appreciated before. 

Having to complete Bioshock and Dead Space 2 on the games' hardest difficulty modes without any revival mechanic (and in the case of Dead Space 2, without the ability to SAVE more than 3 times) really made me come to appreciate their respective level designs and the sheer options available to you at any particular time. If you don't explore the bonus content in Final Fantasy 13, you won't appreciate the complexity and mechanical precision you're capable of with that battle system.

So yeah, the best lists push the player to their limits, but they're fair. They make you re-examine the way you look at the environment and gain better understanding of why the game is designed the way it is.  Unfortunately, most trophy lists are sheer checklists, especially Japanese ones.

[azeke]

 Super Hexagon (Steam, PC):

I am not finished but i'm done with this game for now.

Main reason is because i am tired of trying to make it run smoother than 20fps on my home PC. It runs great on my outdated work computer, but just absolutely refuses to play nicely on my monster PC at home dropping frames, tearing frames and overall lagging.

I tried almost everything: switching to regular monitor (instead of plasma TV), setting monitor refresh rate to 59 instead of 60, turning v-sync off (it helps somewhat, but game still lags), updating AMD drivers, lowering output resolution and running it fullscreen or window. Nothing works.

On work PC i have five of the six levels beaten (you need to survive 60 seconds on them). On my home PC i barely finished third and even that with huge effort and after mutlitple tries, because Steam at first didn't register the achievement for whatever reason and i had to reset local data and redo it.

Had a lot of moments like this where i was less than a second from beating the level, very frustrating especially when you're unsure if the progress will be ultimately recorded or not:


The other big reason for stopping is this:

Open Hexagon.

It's freeware clone of Super Hexagon and it runs like a dream on anything. Playing Super Hexagon at home feels like moving in a barrel of honey, movement in Open Hexagon feels like moving through ether: extremely fast and responsive with zero resistance.

So yeah, i guess until i find a way to circumvent my work network conditions so that i could connect to my steam profile from work, i will be content with Steam registering that i only beat half of the game. And from time to time dabbling in Open Hexagon should i want my hexagon fix.

Still, all these tehcnical whinings aside, i greatly enjoyed the game. I wouldn't have bothered with all these tinkering in the first place if i didn't thought it's worth it.

I recommend anyone to check Super Hexagon out, or Open Hexagon or even an early prototype made in flash if you don't want to commit yourself to downloading and installing software.

Controlling seemingly uncontrollable and mastering the impossible is a much better power fantasy than buff dude killing dudes. Think operator from The Matrix -- at first you only see incomprehensible stream of green letters but as you spend more time with it you start to see it and control it.

This is the reason i started to gravitate towards games where at first you go "WTF is going on?" but then as you play more it clicks and you start to master it. Things like bullet hell or intense hack'n'slash games.

The intense learning curve where you go from "WTF is this?" to becoming the master of this chaos is incredibly satisfying and about million times more fun than any "press A to awesome" hollywood aping "experiences".

You are having Hero's Journey as you learn the game and overcoming it's challenges, you, not yet another made-up short haired dude, brooding hero #234 who saves yet another loli/princess/world. You, personally you defeat the game and take control, instead of game developer graciously "allowing" you see his badly written and directed movie by pressing the start button.

[nickmitch]

I beat Zelda: Link Between Worlds last week.

The game was really fun.  I liked that the wall mechanic worked just about anywhere, and in places where it didn't work, you could tell easily.  I thought I'd be able to break the game somehow with it, but I guess it was more polished than that.  Buying/Renting the items was never a problem for me; I even ended the game with maxed out rupies.  So, that mechanic never had much give and take, and I almost always had all of the items at all times.  As for the items themselves, the boomerang felt totally useless, even after the upgrade.  The fire rod was kind of OP, especially after the upgrade.  As for the difficulty factor, I died once because I wasn't paying attention (something happened on TV) and then twice in the battle tower thing (forgot to pack a potion).  I used a guide twice, once for the last master ore (didn't think to look in a place I hadn't explored yet ) and for the last two maimais (I wanted that great spin).  As an aside, the Treacherous Tower gets a LOT easier after maxing out the sword and getting the great spin.  I did feel that some of the bosses were too easy (especially after sword, health, and tunic upgrades), but some were challenging enough.

Also the SHOCKING TWIST ENDING! was pretty cool.

8/10

[broodwars]

I've utterly finished Transistor for my 93rd Platinum (the 92nd was Amazing Spider-Man 2, btw) and..."meh." I didn't "hate" the game, but it's hard to think of a more underwhelming game I've played in at least the last few months. The combat's fine, but it's ALL you can do in this game. The story is so boring & poorly told that the developers go out of their way to obfuscate it to make it "mysterious" and the voice acting almost put me to sleep several times with how completely flat it is. I do not recommend it. Just go play Bastion again.

[Pixelated Pixies]

As someone who wasn't exactly enraptured with Bastion either, I found the first few hours of Transistor to be similarly underwhelming. In fact, for the first few hours I would have agreed with your assessment Brood.

However, I'm now in what feels like the closing stages of the game, and things have changed drastically (at least for me). The core relationship between the Transistor (or whoever is inhabiting it) and Red has subtly and quite inexplicable began to affect me. It was so subtle that I almost didn't realise it, but somewhere along the line I actually began to care about who these characters were and what they might have meant to each other before the events of the game. It was surprising, because I really didn't feel like the story was pulling me in; I suspect that the outstanding visuals and superb music somehow managed to create a persuasive crack in my resolve, through which the story (such that it is) was able to seep in. I still don't think the story is great, but there's enough intrigue and world-building there to pull me through.

And I've had pretty much the same experience with the combat system, in that it's only been during the past few hours that it's finally clicked for me. Although I could sense that there was depth to the combat, I really wasn't finding much satisfaction there until the latter half of the game. Indeed, only in the last couple of hours have I managed to unlock enough 'memory' (upgrade slots) to support the combination of 'functions' (skills) that feels balanced and effective.

Throughout my play-through, however, I have been using the maximum number of 'limiters' (enemy buffs) which make the enemies more difficult but reward you with more experience, so perhaps that might have caused some early frustration for me, and from which I am only now reaping the rewards. In any case, I'm now finding the depth of the combat to be very satisfying.

I'm actually planning to post something about this very topic in the next few days. The two most recent games that I've played through have been Child of Light and Transistor, both of which are very aesthetically pleasing games, both have immensely satisfying battle systems that only make their depth apparent towards the end of the game, and both are arguably hampered by their story-telling conceits.

Both games, in fact, have brought to mind The Last Story. That game had an awesome battle system that was only brought to bear in the very final encounter.

On which point: What I wouldn't do for a sequel to The Last Story.

[ShyGuy]

I just finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution: Director's Cut: Wii U Edition Very satisfying, I spent waaaaaaaaaaaaay too many hours playing the game (I bet around 70 hours total) I think I would currently rank it as the second best Wii U game I have played.

There a four possible endings you can choose after defeating the final boss, and I went with the "tell everyone the unaltered truth edition"  It is was the most Rorschach ending. NOT EVEN IN THE FACE OF ARMAGEDDON, NEVER COMPROMISE

[Drizzt]

Last Window: The Secret of Cape West

   A marvelous addition to the DS library, the game takes everything from Hotel Dusk and improves upon it. Kyle Hyde remains a superb protagonist and the interactions he has with the various tenants are both memorable and at times comical. The narrative is very well thought out and encourages the player to unravel the mysteries of both the apartment and its residents. The core gameplay of Hotel Dusk is present with a few minor improvements, such as now being able to combine items and access things faster. The detail in the apartment is astonishing; Kyle has something to say about every object in the residence even the toilet paper roll holders! The music is excellent and makes segments which might otherwise be boring, stay fresh.

A new feature, which I did not take full advantage of, is the novelization of the game. After you finish a chapter in the game you can read the events of that chapter in book form. The game has a built in bookmark and the ability to listen to your favorite in game tunes while you read. After finishing each chapter of the novel a top secret section, which is only supposed to be used when you get stuck, appears, open it up to get hints, but the manual strongly discourages you from doing this as resisting these sections unlocks a special bonus upon completion.

This was the first game I’ve ever imported and I do not regret the decision. Anyone who likes mysteries, puzzles, visual novel style games, or Hotel Dusk will be right at home in Last Window. I cannot recommend the game enough.

[NWR_insanolord]

Just finished playing through Mario 3 on the Wii U VC. I honestly don't see how anyone can find this game especially hard. If you have trouble with this, you might want to consider giving up on video games altogether and move to a less intensive hobby like knitting or Chinese Checkers, because you've clearly lost any skills you may have once had.