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2018 VIDEO GAME CATCH-ALL THREAD


SirSmUgly

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On 1/1/2018 at 12:25 PM, Keep Calm, Akira Hokuto On said:

Has anyone asked you if you want to work for Apple's Black Ops division and cosplay being part of a secret society of assassins?

I quite like the games so long as I just play and forget about the present-day story.  It's mind-boggling that no one thought "You're a knight templar during the crusades" was enough of a hook to sell the game.

There are a TON of people who swear by the present-day stuff.  I don't get it.  As if Altair and Ezio weren't enough?  Good grief.

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13 hours ago, AxB said:

The point of JC3 is to use the exotic weapons and tether people to shit and fling them off the map. Or plant rocket boosters on them or something. Oh, and do some challenges to upgrade your abilities (if you're doing a Scrapyard Scramble, press L1 to turn the magnet on or off. I'm telling you because nothing in the game does.).

The controls for the grappling hook never really clicked with me.  Once I got the jetpack wingsuit, I barely used it.  It always annoys me when "open" world games force you to play a certain way.  I beat the game anyway, it was worth $10 I guess. 

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I'm enjoying Steamworld Dig 2 a whole lot, even though the first one never really clicked for me.  It's a good Metroidvania with some tricky puzzles and pretty relaxing progression.

Also I'm finally getting into Binding of Isaac in a big way.  My wife really enjoys watching me play as she can be on wiki duty and look up what all the items do.

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4 hours ago, RIPPA said:

Just in case this wasn't brought up before - Gravity Rush 2 is having its online servers shut down on January 18.

Again - in case you have the need for 100%

Thankfully, the trophy list has no online trophies so the Platinum will be obtainable offline.

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3 hours ago, Zimbra said:

Also I'm finally getting into Binding of Isaac in a big way.  My wife really enjoys watching me play as she can be on wiki duty and look up what all the items do.

Had a similar experience with the game, until she started playing herself. Every day after work, for hours. Did almost every challenge on the Switch version, beat Delirium with most characters, prying her off the thing took some work. She never played Robotron or Smash TV or 2D Zelda. Her ascent to mastering what I assume is one of the harder games of its generation was a harrowing couple of months.

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From Herb:

It was announced at NJPW’s pre-Wrestle Kingdom 12 fan festival that the company is partnering with Spike Chunsoft, the development company behind Fire Pro Wrestling, in time for Fire Pro Wrestling World’s release on PS4. The game will be out on PS4 before the 2018 G1 Climax and the NJPW collaboration will include some licensed characters and a story mode where you start as a young lion with the goal of winning the IWGP Heavyweight Championship.

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On 1/1/2018 at 7:49 PM, FireThunder said:

Finally replaced my broken controller, so I'm finally getting around to playing Witcher 3 and I'm very impressed.  So much stuff to do, a well constructed world full of characters and grotesque monsters.

That reminds me. Gotta finish that 100% Death March one day. Started off with Deus Ex. Free on psn and I'm digging it so far. Also somehow I got my son hooked on arcade Double Dragon. Warms my heart.

Edit: Also @FireThunder SAVE OFTEN.

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I made a last-minute Steam Sale buy of Killer Instinct 2013, because I have such fond memories of the arcade and SNES versions of the original (less so the sequel).  So far, I like a lot of the stuff it does in theory, but in practice I'm not having a lot of fun and I find the controls a lot harder to master than most fighters with the same button layout.

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On 1/2/2018 at 7:12 PM, Death From Above said:

I want to comment carefully on Bastion by opening with: yes it is a good game.

I do feel that the "WOW GREATEST INDIE THING I EVER PLAYED" (and there might be a thousand copy and pasted steam reviews saying just that) got way, way out of hand with it. Sort of reminds me of the Fat Old XBox days when there was this weird movement to call Fable the greatest game ever made for being "a pretty good Zelda game without any dungeons". Really good game but I was happier for not getting swept up in the hype.

The art and music style in Bastion is pretty cool, though I don't really see in this era of indie games pumping out a legendary soundtrack a month at this point how it stands out as anything particularly special. The story is total mumbo jumbo even for a video game. The gameplay is pretty good, Diablo-style combat with a few interesting choices of weapons and setups. It's a good game, solid, the gameplay is fun. At no point in playing through it did I get really frustrated or want to put it down before finishing. But I haven't had any real urge to revisit it after beating it once.

It's absolutely worth pocket change if that's what it is on sale for.

I thought that Bastion was beautiful. It was just a game about letting go of arbitrary cultural divisions and creating something new and diverse rather than re-hashing old disagreements and re-creating the old ways of living that formed and exacerbated those divisions. 

Plus, the gameplay hooked me. I think that it's a masterpiece...and that Pyre is even better than that.

I really need to revisit Transistor, which I didn't like when I tried to play it, because I think SuperGiant makes wonderful games that marry theme and gameplay quite nicely. I'm probably missing something with Transistor. 

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So the week before Christmas I suffered a Trimalleolar fracture in my ankle, so I've been laid up for a bit with only my laptop to amuse myself at my folks place as I recover:  This has made me tackle some of my Steam backlog:

Wolfenstein The New Order: I'm not a big FPS guy, but Wolfenstein was the first PC game I ever owned so I always have  had a soft spot for it.  That being said I think The New Order might be my favorite single player FPS (The Borderlands games are my favorite FPS out there).  I've never played an FPS where the fighting had such a satisfying feel to it.  The guns have heft, trying to be sneaky is fun and I like how the skill tree exists but really doesn't need to be paid attention to.

My favorite moment came pretty early on when BJ snaps out of his coma.  I knifed the first Nazi and got the perk to dual wield knives.  I then proceeded to sneak around and get stabby on  his friends.  I was about to get the last guy, when I noticed he had a friend.  I knifed guy #1, got the perk to throw knives and then immediately threw the knife at his buddy.  I felt like such a badass.

 

Steins;Gate: From an FPS to a Visual Novel.  I remember really enjoying the anime, so at some Steam Sale I bought the visual novel.  So with nothing better to do  I dove into the game.  Well 40 hours later I managed to get one of the six endings to the game and damn does it pack an emotional punch.  It starts off as sort of a carefree Sci-Fi mystery, but things take a darker turn when it looks like CERN might be hiding some dark secrets.  It's an engrossing read, with fun characters and a unique way of altering the storyline via your character's cellphone.

 

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel:  The LoH series and I have a love-hate relationship.  I bought the first games that came out on the PSP and found them to be unenjoyable.  They were PS1 RPGs that felt like they were still stuck in the 16 bit era for all the wrong reasons.  Then recently the Trails in the Sky trilogy was getting all sorts of hype,  turns out this was an ode to Classic RPGs for all the right reasons.  So with Falcom being 1-1 with me I was gifted the first Cold Steel game this X-mas and dove into it.  Here we have a perfect example of what I've come to call "Comfort Food RPGs", games that Don't try to (sometimes unnecessarily) reinvent the wheel but deliver a solid game that fans of the series know they'll enjoy.  We've left the PS1 era here and jumped straight to the early PS3 days graphically.  As for the story, you follow a group of students from a military academy as they explore the empire they live in, until it looks like someone wants to heat up the world-wide cold war that's going on.  It's got likable characters, a cool magi-tech setting, solid combat where status effects are actually beneficial, a partner-combo system that rewards you for getting invested in characters personal stories and  a Sphere-grid like system to customizing your characters skills.  I'm almost 50 hours in and have been enjoying it immensely; hopefully that holds for the rest of the game.

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I got my first official hole-in-goddamned-one in Everybody's Golf.  And it was in the International Tournament with the tiny cups and championship tees.  Nobody can tell me shit today!

I also beat Mom's Heart in BoI twice, although the second time I used the bible so that's kinda cheating.  As someone who is generally bad at videogames I've been on a real roll lately.

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Won my first game of Fortnite Battle Royal today. In team mode, but still. I got the winning kill, so it still counts. He was hiding in a bush. I was shooting bushes with my Shotgun.

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NIOH [4]
WOW I am a big dumb idiot for sleeping on this. It is a Souls game from the Team Ninja people. It is exactly how you think that sounds. It plays like it can crush things in the material world. It will kill you with a breath. It is 60FPS the whole time. They also add in the solution to the Souls Stamina Bar: a ki charge move that functions like the active reload from Gears of War. This might be the one souls game I end up finishing, and it's not even a From Software game.

RAINBOW SIX SIEGE [4]
WOW I am a big dumb idiot for sleeping on this too. Watching it from afar makes it totally obvious who this game is for, but playing it reveals a second layer of people who benefit from this game: complete paranoid lunatics that see the advantage of an ambush (that's me!). The ways that the individual character's powers interact is way more interesting than it seems like it's going to be. One recommendation though: if you play on PC, you can 100% turn off the text chat function. Usual "Don't Play With Randos" rules apply. If you have a squad of 5, like I luckily do, this game is fucking super cool. It'd be a solid 2 out of 4 if I tried to play it on my own.

I HAVE JUST STARTED DRAGON QUEST 6 [n/a]
I got a DS Lite for christmas, and what the fuck, why is every button on the DS Lite better to use than every button on the 3DS?

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Because I don't have too much unfinished to play already, I picked up an Xbox One S on the cheap last week that came with Forza Horizon 3 and the Hot Wheels bundle.

I can see why so many people trash the Xbox One S dashboard because it is the most baffling thing to navigate

Also, adapting to the Xbox One X controller is interesting. The amount of rumble and feel you get from driving around in Forza is really need and adds life to that game.

I picked up Cuphead as well, which is beautiful, entertaining, and challenging. I am awful with it. I played it with a friend who ended up moving for a few months, so trying to figure this out on single player. I find myself currently not able to get past the slot machine portion of one of the early bosses.

Also, I have played some of Halo 5 through the Game Pass trial I have. It may be that I haven't played a Halo in some time and my main shooter is Destiny, but this feels different than past Halos outside of just the teamwork and Spartan Charge stuff they implemented in the game. The shooting feels like it takes longer to take out enemies (although, I'll never get tired of interacting with Grunts), and the Grenades feel like they don't have the same oomph as past halos to me. To the point I haven't gotten used to aiming frags precisely yet.

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So I have been just focusing on Witcher 3 and it is amazing. I never usually follow the hype with games but this game has grabbed me like no other in the last few years. Beautiful game and focused story make it a blast to play. The side quest have been so much fun and I just got to Novigrad at level 13. It is one of the few games my wife will sometimes watch me play for a bit. 

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I have this weird relationship with Witcher 3.  I play the crap out of it for a week or two, then I'll finish up a location and not want to play it for six months.  Of course, by the time I get back to it I've forgotten how everything works.  Last thing I finished was helping the redhead escape from the guys that want to kill all the witches.  Then some girl climbed on a Viking funeral boat and I lost all interest for a while.  That was probably about September, so I guess I'll be back to playing it obsessively around March.

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I have been replaying a lot of Dark Souls 1 the last month and it's pretty amazing how many games have ripped it off while at the same time managing to miss nearly every fundamental thing that actually makes it an enduring legendary title completely. Hell this even applies to the DS development team themselves throwing shit like Darkeater Midir and that ridiculous three stage DLC boss into DS III because they ran out of design ideas so just went with the indie ripoff "difficulty for the sake of difficulty" meme that, honestly, Dark Souls 1 really isn't about at all. The only real exceptions would be Manus and Kalameet but both of those are 100% optional bosses that exist solely as endgame challenge content basically.

Anyway, I was struck by just how brilliantly laid out the game world in the first game is. I mean, it's not really news Dark Souls 1 is a much better game than 2 but man side by side does the level design ever look bad in large parts of the second game by comparison. It's also interesting how once you know where items are in the first game, it's actually really obvious the developers were leaving you little hints and help lines almost everywhere, it's just that it isn't a game that held your hand and told you where to look for them. I was actually struck by how much the game feels like an adult Legend of Zelda game in terms of the layout of a lot of the areas.

Not to say Dark Souls 1 isn't hard, because going in blind it absolutely would be. But so many of the games that have knocked it off are a lot harder, and frankly worse, because that's really the only thing they have going for them while having usually next to none of the little things that make DS 1 worth revisiting. DS 1 gives you skips of areas if you want them, overpowered weapons, insanely strong magic, reliable tactics for nearly everything, multiple ways to fight nearly every boss, and that's not even touching that the game is 6 or 7 years old and if you want to know about cheese/exploits at this point they're common knowledge you'd have to work to avoid. Dark Souls 1 is tough but actually wanted you to succeed. So many of the Souls-like games just threw any random difficult thing at the wall and went *Italian Chef Kiss* and called it a day.

I got re-interested in it watching nearly every speedrun of it ever done at an Awesome Games Done Quick, and some weird challenge runs on youtube, and it's still absolutely a game I like very much. It's just a flat out "interesting" game that has so much more going for it than raw challenge.

Edit: That NIOH game looks really dope but there's a 0% chance my PC will handle it.

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Played some stuff.

Batman: Season One by Telltale exposes the issues with the Telltale formula pretty quickly. I guessed that nothing mattered in terms of keeping certain characters from going down certain paths of character development, and try as I might have, I couldn't. It was a shame because they played with the Bat mythos so much that I had hoped that they would have found a way to give the player more narrative freedom rather than two paths to the same place. It's still a worthwhile game with an interesting narrative, and it plays fine for what it is...except for the QTEs, which at this point I wish they'd just dump so that I can make my dialogue choices and move on to the next set of dialogue choices. However, I'm also done with this formula (other than The Wolf Among Us Season 2, and that is only because the first one was a surprisingly refreshing critique of gender and class in a video game about the Big Bad Wolf attempting to rip out Tweedledum's throat during a standoff with Bloody Mary and the Crooked Man). 

I am not quite sure why people were so down on Dangerous Golf. It's more than a tech demo; the light strategy and somewhat-considerable skill needed to rack up a high score by destroying an area with a golf ball is a fine combination. The putting is satisfying, too. 

I like NBA Playgrounds: Enhanced Edition, but I'm not sure that it's a good game mechanically at all. Releasing the ball at the top of your jump isn't good enough for this game, but I don't love the meters, and I don't love the percentages applied to where you stop the meter. I've blown too many easy layups that should go in because they're in the green area simply because Gary Payton's layup skills number isn't high enough. These dudes are mostly legends; they can hit layups at better than an eighty-percent clip. It's still actually a fun game, though! Once you get shot timing down and you learn to get over the RNG behind the scenes, you are left with a fairly solid arcade basketball game that is way better than Street Hoop/Hoop Dreams by a wide margin. I'm glad that I have a reason to stop playing Street Hoop, is what I'm saying. 

I feel as though maybe I should bow out on Mafia III. I did beat Mafia II, but III is shaping up the same way. Looks great, cars are cool to look at if not particularly fun to drive, story and gameplay are less than compelling. There are other third-person shooters that I could be playing. I'll keep playing for now intermittently.

I am definitely bowing out on Batman: Arkham Knight. It's got all the same open-world design problems of Arkham City except now, there are a ton of shitty Batmobile segments to play. They should have stopped after Arkham Asylum. Well, no, I'm sure they sold a ton of copies of City and Knight, but just from a "stop before you overstay your welcome with Smelly McUgly" standpoint, they should have stopped after Arkham Asylum. 

 

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5 hours ago, Cliff Hanger said:

Mr. Freeze in City is one of the greatest boss fights in modern gaming. I can understand why some dislike the game as a whole, even though I may disagree, but that sequence makes it all worthwhile.

It's been a few years since I've played that game, but I do remember that icy MFer making me run away from him for too damn long.

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