It’s not really “finished” because I haven’t even touched the Sunbreaker expansion and I haven’t done higher rank content and the other side quests, but I beat Magnamalo and reached the credits in Monster Hunter Rise. I wonder if the development for this game was impacted by COVID, because I ended up clearing the “story” in less than 25 hours, and they made Magnamalo a bit too much of a push over. I think I had a harder time fighting Khezu in Freedom Unite. It’s fun but I’m really hoping the game stops feeling like a tutorial and starts to cave my shit in. I wish that Low Rank just wasn’t so easy. At the very least the developers for Rise understood that some players would rather skip the credits and they understand that people want to play a game than slog through a shitty story like World.

>>1312172 Rise's mechanics are different enough that they probably wanted to let people get used to them and made LR super easy as a result (I also wonder if some of it is trying even harder to evoke P3rd vibes for the Japanese audience since it was heavily pandering to them). They definitely have some monsters that get real aggressive in HR & Sunbreak to accommodate all your new moves and defensive tools. Honestly I'd probably love Rise if they didn't gut my Hunting Horn gameplay; I tried to cope with it because I thought it was the future of the weapon but Wilds for all its issues gave us the best HH yet so now I can confidently say that shit was ass outside of some of the new melodies (Sharpness Regen allowed my DB-maining friend to go so braindead it was funny).

>>790791 Using the PS2 collection, I finished Sonic 1 for the first time, and I want to tear my hair out. How incompetent of a game designer do you have to be to make players lose if they finish the game without completing an inane minigame? I caught up to Eggman at the end of the stage, and I didn't win. I don't understand it. The end of every boss battle has him escape by increasingly small margins, but in the final battle, the one where you can easily catch up to him, you don't get the satisfaction of catching him. Other than this, the level design is bad after the first few stages. The game really seems like someone tried to make a console game then gave up and decided to waste the player's time as much as possible by making an arcade game that you can't get continues in unless you play that same minigame. The controls are unresponsive, and collision is fucked up for both the environment and enemies. I can breeze through 3D and 2.5D Sonic games, but Sonic 1 felt like I was playing while someone was breaking my knuckles. I'm going to play the rest of the collection and cheat to get the hidden games, but this is not a good first impression. At the end of last month, I finished the Atomic Edition of Duke Nukem 3D. I liked it a lot more than Doom. There's such a wide array of weapons that I can switch between, and the environments are really cool and fun to move around in. If I die, it's my fault because I wasn't strategic enough when it came to ammo. I can tell why Randy made Duke Nukem Forever the way he did, even if I don't agree with it. I'm saving the expansions for later. It's a shame what they did to the Anniversary Edition, but I respect Randy for not bending the knee. I think that the next game I'll finish is Manhunt. I was interrupted halfway through my last playthrough.

>>1398834 What minigame are you talking about? The Special Stage? That's a 100% completion thing. Lots of games back then had bad endings like that. Do you mean you lose if you don't hit Robotnik when he tries to escape at the end of the game? If so, I didn't even know that, because I never thought of not trying to hit him. But you refer to "the same minigame," meaning you do it multiple times, meaning you must be talking about the Special Stage. Don't be a fag. You beat the game, but you didn't get 100%. That's how games worked back in the day. All that said, Sonic 1 sucks balls compared to all the mainline sequels. Sonic 2 is way better, and while some people argue that they like Sonic 2 better than Sonic 3 & Knuckles, I disagree, and would say Sonic 3 & Knuckles is way better. I'd also put Sonic CD above Sonic 2, but that one kind of comes down to what you're looking for, as they have pretty different styles, and I can understand why some would prefer Sonic 2. Sonic Mania is the best one, even better than Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Sonic Superstars is good, too, and I'd at least put it somewhere around Sonic 3 & Knuckles' level, but it is better if you have friends to play with, as it's designed for co-op. And oh yeah, don't bother to play Sonic 3 alone or Sonic & Knuckles alone. Sonic 3 & Knuckles is just the two combined. There are a couple things in Sonic 3 alone that aren't in the combined game (one boss is removed if playing as Sonic but still there as Knuckles. A couple of music tracks are replaced. Knuckles' socks are a different color), but these aren't important. The combined game is much better. You can play all of the Sonic 3 stages as Knuckles and all the Sonic & Knuckles stages as Tails. I almost forgot that Sonic 4 exists. Episode I sucks but Episode II is a lot better. And if you have both you get like four new-ish levels where you play as Metal Sonic and they're called. If you're playing today I assume you'd play Sonic 4 like it's one game, but really Episode II is very different, so even if you hate Episode I, I'd recommend giving II a try. They're both really short, though, since they're just "episodes," so it's not like they take long to beat. <Sonic 4: Episode Metal<Sonic 4: Episode I<Sonic 1<Sonic 4 Episode II<Sonic 2< Sonic CD<Sonic Superstars<Sonic 3 & Knuckles<Sonic Mania

>>1400613 >Do you mean you lose if you don't hit Robotnik when he tries to escape at the end of the game I mean that you don't lose if you don't do the Special Stage. Hitting Robotnik is just something I thought about because it makes sense giving the gameplay. The whole point of Sonic 1 is to catch Robotnik. You can catch up to Robotnik fairly easily in the hallway after the final boss, but doing so doesn't do anything. Instead, whether you win or not is based on whether you got the Chaos Emeralds, a system largely disconnected from typical gameplay. >You beat the game, but you didn't get 100% I don't know why a console game would give you a bad ending for not 100%ing it unless it was aping arcade games. I didn't play the nauseating and hard to control minigame, the Special Stages, well enough to do anything except get a continue one time, and I'm punished for it with the game chiding me to play it all over again to play this minigame which has no relation to my skills in the main gameplay loop. I could understand getting the bad ending if the Chaos Emeralds were hidden in levels or in secret levels or gated behind scores or times, but I have to play a shitty minigame or else I haven't won. Apparently, the 8-bit version has the superior design here and does hide them in levels. The Special Stages would be better if they were dependent on tilt-controls, but that's not something a Genesis game can do. >don't bother to play Sonic 3 alone or Sonic & Knuckles alone Thank you for the advice. Is Knuckles in Sonic 2 worth playing?

This year's finishes >Live A Live '22, True Ending (?). >Star Fox 2, C Rank. >Super Princess Peach, 100%. >Aria's Story, All endings. >Midnight Train. >Cat In the Box, All but 1 bad ending. >Donkey Kong '94, 99 Lives. >Wario Land 2, all 100%. >Edna & Harvey 1 and 2, All endings both. >Mario & Luigi Super Star Saga Remake, 100% Beans and Coins, no Bowser's Minions. >Mario & Luigi Dream Team, All Expert Challenges >Wario Land 4, S-Hard Some recent picks >Bravely Default, at the end of Chapter 4. >Dragon Quest V, just married. >Nine Sols, first boss beaten, (may drop due to hardware issues). >Crazy Machines, idk how many puzzles already completed. >Terraria, I can just beat Wall of Flesh (but I don't want to).

Completed TMNT Tactical Takedown. If nothing else they really nailed the idea of making a traditional beat-em-up turn-based with the way abilities are designed and how combos/scoring work. I didn't expect multi-character stages given the format but I do think it should've let you use every character in every stage after clearing the game, though they do manage to give you a way for the brothers to fight together in the final stretch which I thought was really nice. I didn't get a Radical score on every stage (it's probably hell to do it with Mikey & Donnie unless you play around with the customization). Music was actually good despite being completely unlike what you'd think of as TMNT music, particularly in how each character had somewhat different-sounding tracks (Raph's music was the best). Story was a decent "get the band back together" plot but putting Karai in the lead villain role was based. 8/10 game, would buy a DLC or sequel. Also beat the freeware WH40K Boltgun typing rail shooter in <15 minutes on Medium. It's actually kind of tricky since the phrase bank has a bunch of stuff that is in-universe lingo, but it's otherwise just a way to promote Boltgun 2. Apparently the hardest difficulty has been taking people up to 2 hours to beat so if you're super into Typing of the Dead, there you go. Solid 7 for what it is.

>>1401794 >>1401794 >I don't know why a console game would give you a bad ending for not 100%ing it unless it was aping arcade games. Because that's what a good ending is for. You get the good end if you 100% the game. That's why you 100% it at all. >I'm punished for it with the game chiding me to play it all over again Yeah. You didn't do it all, so try again until you can do it all. I don't see how this doesn't make sense to you. >I have to play a shitty minigame or else I haven't won. You won, but you didn't get 100%. That's what 100%ing a game means. If you just don't like the Special Stages, fair enough. I think a decent percentage of people agree with you. They're much better (and totally different) in each sequel. >Apparently, the 8-bit version has the superior design here and does hide them in levels. The 8-biit version of Sonic 1 is actually a totally different game. It has a few of the same level themes (but many new ones too), but totally different layouts. Sonic 2 is the same type of thing but even more different. So yeah, check them out. Fans don't usually think they're better, but they do usually think they're good. But check the 16 bit sequels first. Those ones are definitely better. >The Special Stages would be better if they were dependent on tilt-controls, but that's not something a Genesis game can do. Sonic 4 Episode 1 has Special Stages based on Sonic 1's, but you rotate the stage manually instead of Sonic just always falling in an automatically rotating stage. Most people just hate on Sonic 4, especially Episode 1 (Episode II is significantly different and better), but I think the Special Stages are better than Sonic 1's. I'd say (and I bet you'd agree) that Sonic 1's are the worst in the series. >Thank you for the advice. Is Knuckles in Sonic 2 worth playing? Definitely, but it's not a different game. It's what it says on the box. It's Sonic 2, only you play as Knuckles. That's a lot of fun, though. And actually there are a few minor level design changes, but they're basically all minor secrets. Sonic 3 & Knuckles, on the other hand, really is significantly made better, even beyond just getting to play as more characters in more levels. Also, note that Knuckles is actually harder to play as than Sonic in some ways, because his jump is a bit shorter. It makes the last boss ridiculous, but I was able to do it as a kid. Just do Sonic's game first. I might as well note that there are both official versions and mods that add more stuff to the games. In the early 2010s, they released HD remakes of Sonic 1, 2, and CD. They're much better, but Sonic 1 and 2 were only released on iOS and Android, for some reason. CD was released on everything. >Sonic 2's remake included playable Knuckles, of course, since that already existed officially, but also game Tails his Sonic 3 moveset (in Sonic 2 original he's just a sprite swap), and even added a secret level. >Sonic 1's remake added playable Tails and Knuckles (first time officially). >Sonic CD's remake added playable Tails, but not Knuckles. However, you can mod Knuckles in easily. Also included both soundtracks and let you swap (CD got a new soundtrack when released in the US, so now you have both), and some other neat bonuses like that. These were well received, so the same people made Sonic Mania, which is widely regarded as the best Sonic game. However, they never made a remake of Sonic 3 (& Knuckles), the most well regarded game. That is until Sonic Origins came out. I haven't played it and a lot of people seem to hate it because they're charging a lot of money for just a few upgraded Genesis games. I would have been tempted by the physical edition, "Sonic Origins Plus," but all the "Plus" content was still downloaded, even if you get a physical copy. So fuck that. But anyway Sonic Origins does have additional content. >Official playable Knuckles in Sonic CD >HD remake of Sonic 3 & Knuckles >playable Amy in all games (she is just a new character since she was never playable in any of them before) >unlockable Game Gear games (these are just straight ports, not remakes like the Genesis/CD games) >animated cutscenes >new challenge mode >options for infinite lives, in case you're a modern babby that can't handle '90s games. >fun UI (and they had the nerve to charge an upgrade to the UI as DLC). A few songs in Sonic 3 & Knuckles were also changed. The original version had some songs by Michael Jackson. For unconfirmed reasons, those were removed and replaced with earlier songs by the guy who composed the rest of the game, which were removed once MJ got on board. Shitty MIDI versions of these songs were previously on a late '90s Windows port, but these versions in Origins are good. However, the mod to put the original songs back in was already made on day one. Of course, you can mod Amy and zillions of other characters into all the Genesis games, too (and I'm sure you can mod many more characters into Origins). And there are mods like Sonic 3 AIR, which has every autistic option you could dream of (and can be modded further). And decompilations of the iOS/Android versions of Sonic 1 and 2, which likewise have tons of upgrades. But I haven't looked into them in years, and last I saw they were autistic pains in the ass to set up, and had shitty UIs and stuff, so it wasn't worth playing them rather than just emulating the original. Maybe they're better now though. >tl;dr: Sonic Origins seems good but I'd never pay for it and it has Denuvo so I can't pirate it. Otherwise just play the originals, and mod in extra characters if you want. Sonic CD's remake is the exception, as it's easy to get and way better. Also apparently Sonic 3 AIR is good but I still just play the original because I don't care enough.

>Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna I don't care what anyone says; this game is better than 2. It's only lacking in story, and that can't be helped, given how little there is to work with. The overwhelming amount of tedium that was in the original game has largely been removed. Field skills don't require you to mix and match blades. NO MERCENARY QUESTS. Side quests are way less obnoxious. Items acquired from treasure chests don't fall into the void. Fewer encounters that take place in enclosed spaces while the party is targeted by enemies off-screen. You can review tutorials, and navigation isn't outright fucking terrible. The battle system is faster paced and doesn't take half the damn game to get to a point where everything works. I also like that the blades AND drivers are shown to be competent fighters and can work independently. It's nice to see how Lora/Jin's fighting style became the whole basis of Blade/Driver combat in the future. You don't get a whole sea of blades in this game, as it's focused on a core party, and there's far less ass and titties. Despite that, I found Torna WAY more enjoyable as a whole. I do think the ending should have shown what happened to Lora and Jin explicitly, as well as Adam's fate. But mechanically? I'm picking Torna. >South of Midnight I learned of this game only months before release due to looking into Compulsion games. Contrast had been on my wishlist, and it went on sale. This is a really charming game that feels much like the action-adventure games of the 6th generation. Really nice artstyle, and the blues soundtrack is excellent. I liked the overall theme of people suffering through painful experiences but eventually being able to heal. And, obviously, references to American slavery and Reconstruction. Combining the south with gothic, supernatural elements made for a pretty cool setting. The platforming is relatively simple, and the combat is fine, albeit frustrating at times when dealing with multiple enemies. I had a good time with this. I think it lacks replay value, but it's good for a playthrough. I enjoyed this/10. The animation and artstyle in this game are fantastic. I don't have many screenshots, and I have nothing from my Switch, but here.

I finished "playing" Mouthwashing, if it can even be called a game. It's an artpiece walking simulator meant to answer the questions posed by How Fish Is Made, and I liked How Fish Is Made. I hate Mouthwashing. What's the point of it? Be a gay slave to the government and vote Social Democrat because capitalism is unfulfilling? Don't have one night stands in case you're hit with a rape allegation? Be a 'good person' and never pursue a transfer to management so your deadbeat friend can have you blown to bits, melt your skin off, and force you to eat your leg but be 'redeemed' in the end by forcing you into a cryopod then killing himself as a way of 'taking responsibility'? Be a hedonistic alcoholic boomer because it's better than being a gay slave to yourself? Be a whore? What's the point of this game? "Take responsibility" is such an asanine, Asiatic message. In the context of this game, I guess it means to watch Eva three hundred times, cry, and make an overblown visual novel about a bunch of retards stuck in a contrived situation that they can't get out of due to said contrivancy in a setting more fit for the mascot horror genre. 0/10. Anya isn't even hot. The Japanese guy was the best character, even if the developer's portrayal of him is slightly racist. I liked Jimmy more when I figured out that he caused the crash, but I hated him for being a weak bitch when I learned that he only caused it so everyone could be heroes instead of using it as a stepping stone to put everyone else behind him. This is a game about being a total victim and never escaping that.

Although in some ways you can't really "beat" a rogue-like I finished Balatro's Red Deck on Gold stake. I've had the game and reached gold stake on a lot of the easier decks like the checkered deck, plasma deck, and blue deck, but the red deck eluded me. Still a fun game that feels like if you get an itch to play it, you end up playing 20 hours in a week or none in 4 months. Next up I'll probably start on my playthough of Persona 3 FES on my PS2. If anyone has tips, would love to get some.

I finally beat Sonic Spinball. I've been playing this game every so often since it first came out. I always liked it, but I could never get past level 2. Actually, I got to level 3 once in the early 2000s, but that must have been sheer luck, because I was never able to replicate that feat. But eventually I overheard that the game only had four levels, so I sat down and forced myself to do it. Holy hell this game is hard. Maybe I just suck at pinball games, but I like this one more because it has light platforming elements and you can actually control the ball a little bit like you can in the main Sonic games. So I kept trying. I do think the game is mostly fair, for a pinball game. I always hate that in pinball sometimes there are bounces that just seem impossible to survive, like when the ball goes directly between the flippers so you can't do anything about it. I guess the solution is to not let the ball bounce that way, but frankly, that's a ridiculous amount of super fast geometry skill that I don't have, and I can hardly imagine having. But that's every pinball game, and this one has it less than others that I've played. So my only real complaint is the final boss. The bosses are fun, but the final one is bullshit. >He sits in the middle of the room and is only vulnerable on top, so you need to go around him. >That's perfectly fair, too easy, even, but he has two traps on each side that will just catch you unless you deactivate them. The second layer of traps will shoot you right out of the boss room, so you'll have to work your way back up to the top of the stage. >There's a little button on the bottom of the boss that you need to hit multiple times to deactivate the traps. >But the game scrolls, and you can't see the traps at the same time you can see the flippers and button >and the game never tells you how many times you need to hit the button >and if you hit the button after the traps are deactivated, they re-activate >So basically you need to guess how many hits it takes to de-activate the traps, and if you guess wrong, the traps catch you, and the second layer of traps can throw you right out of the boss room. >Even if you guess right and de-activate the traps, they're on a timer, so they'll come back after some time >The number of times you need to hit the button the first time is different than the number of times you need to hit the button to de-activate the traps on later attempts. If you could see the whole boss room at once, the boss would be fine, maybe even too easy. But you can't. So it's total bullshit. That said, I do enjoy the game. I love that the levels are huge and don't feel like simple pinball tables. They feel like video game levels. I wish more pinball games would take this approach. I never understood why you'd make a pinball game that just replicates a real table. There is so much more you can do with the video game format. Sonic Adventure does slightly more with its pinball tables, but it obviously doesn't compare to how far Spinball goes with the concept. Sonic Pinball Party is just boring because it's just realistic tables. Spinball might only have four levels, but they're huge. You explore them. They feel like video game adventures. Sonic Pinball Party just has like two pinball tables. Fucking boring. I almost bought it back in the day thinking it was gonna be a sequel to Spinball. If I had bought it, I'd be pissed. That said, Spinball is too hard. It's a product of its time. No saves, no continues. You begin with three lives, and if you play very, very well, you might get two or three extra lives while playing the game. You're gonna get kicked back to the title screen dozens, or in my case, hundreds of times before beating the game. It took me 32 years. I do think Sonic Origins giving you infinite lives in the mainline series was a bit ridiculous, because while Sonic 1 and 2 are kind of hard by modern standards, they're not that damn hard. But Spinball? It is that damn hard. My enjoyment of this game would be increased exponentially with infinite lives. Maybe make it so a game over makes you start the whole level over, having to get all the emeralds again, but doesn't make you start the whole damn game over. >tl;dr: Sonic Spinball is my favorite pinball game by far. I love that it isn't just regular pinball tables, and really feels like actual video game levels. That said, it's too damn hard to not have infinite continues, and the final boss is bullshit due to having two connected elements that are never on screen at the same time. Now I gotta beat the 8-bit version. From what I've seen, it has significant differences. But it's not the version I grew up with, so I'm even worse at it. And from the little I've played, it sucks balls.

>>790791 I recently completed Expedition 33. I had to use the easy mode since the parry and dodge system wasn't as precise as I wanted despite being able to dodge the majority of attacks. I also used auto QTE since QTEs suck.

Just finished Stellar Blade today. At first I chose to side with Adam just to see what happened, but I was in no way fighting Lily So I just did what could be the regular ending I really liked it, I know I shouldn't compare it to Elden Cockring, but the combat just had much more variety and the bosses had much more to it than just rolling. Hoping good things for the next game. Now I am wondering what else to start, I kinda dropped Bakeru when I picked this one up, could try to finish that one next.

It had been a while since I’d finished a game, or anything really, so I told myself that I’d just play through the Dark Souls trilogy this month to get back into the habit of actually reaching the ending of a piece of media and it felt good. Since the rest of the Soulsborne games are standalone I’ll spread them out instead of playing them all at once. For Dark Souls I used the Great Scythe and later the Lifehunt Scythe. For Dark Souls II I used the Warped Sword. For Dark Souls III I used Vordt’s Hammer. It’s amazing how fast you can go through these fames if you know where you’re going. My STR build absolutely carved through DSIII (at least the base game, though I did killl the Nameless King).

I just finished System Shock 2 Remastered. It's been over a decade since I last played SS2 and I still really enjoy it. The remaster is great because it actually improved a bunch of the guns and made some of the shittier OS upgrades useful now (The originally shit hacking OS upgrade for instance now makes robots unable to detect or attack you if you hack security stations. This is bullshit OP for some sections.) I played it as a navy hacker specialising in standard guns, shame the game stops giving you ammo for them near the end. I'm starting again as an OSA agent now, since I've never played a Psi character before. I still hate how the game spoils its own twist ten minutes into the game with XERXES straight up asking you why you're working for the evil machine that tried to kill all of humanity.

I just finished disco Elysium. Shit was cash. Shame it ended so abruptly.

>>1612725 Wasn't it developed by Baltic Communists?

Just finished a bunch of games that I got recently. Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii - It was pretty shit for a Yakuza game. Very short with a pretty basic and linear story and stripped down combat. Though it was fun beating the shit out of random thugs with ninja master moves while wearing the most stereotypical Hawaiian tourist clothes and sandals, then hop on your e-scooter and drive away while flipping the hang-loose hand gesture. Red Dead Redemption - It was alright for a 360 game, but it's basically just a straight up port with vastly expanded draw distances and better LOD. Beyond Citadel - Pretty good, but the environments didn't have a whole lot of variation or creativity to them - and that kind of visceral gore isn't really my thing anymore, but it's not like I was really put off by it either. The weapons felt good to use, but I also turned off the manual loading and jamming mechanics. May do another run after a bit with all that stuff turned on to play it as the devs intended. Mafia II - Huge disappointment in terms of both story and gameplay compared to Mafia I, and the definitive edition of Mafia II didn't get the same graphical facelift to the new engine that Mafia I did. Asura the Striker - Didn't actually beat this one yet, but I'm pretty close. It's a basic Space Harrier clone with the same kind of branching levels of Outrun, featuring an android girl. There's also a new mechanic where you can hyper-punch enemies when they are at the apex of their approach to the screen that can take huge chunks off of a boss's healthbar, but leaves you vulnerable to attacks since you have to charge it up in a window where projectiles have a very short travel distance to you.

>>1612749 Probably. Didn't stop me from having a good time with it.

So I also just finished re village recently. The main game was good but lacking and Miranda was a failure of a final villain. The dlc was complete ass ngl. It didn't feel like resident evil at all. Strange thing is, I'm sure it was an almost entirely japanese team that developed it in the credits which is strange. It felt too western and trying to be like silent hill mixed with life is strange. And, they reused the duke and Mother Miranda again which just disappointed me. Evelyn and Lady D were far more memorable antagonists. 4/10 if I'm feeling generous. Mercenaries was good which is how it should be in every RE title. Nothing bad to say there.

Adventure mode in Forge (FOSS single player MtG sim). The difficulty curve is whacky here. Starts out by throwing you into a super deadly world, but once you can assemble a competent deck nothing can stand against you except for boss foes, who get all the bullshit (stuff like start with a Mox in play and draw extra cards every turn as an inherent property). Then you assemble some stupid broken deck and even those are trivial (I went with Green/Blue deck based on getting out Blighted Agent into play quick and buffing it. Except for one boss that isn't even important, they all lose from having 10 poison counters and Snakeskin Veil effects will protect your attackers from most removal). The game is still loads of fun though. The early game has gotten better over the years not because of any change by the developers, but because Draft is essentially the only thing WotC has actually improved over the last two years of MtG and you can enter draft tournaments vs the AI in Adventure Mode. You can draft almost any set from the last two years and walk away with a high synergy, totally functional deck (especially if you draft the same set with the same colors twice) that you can add whatever random broken cards you find to.

I just finished the full version of Black Mesa for the first time. I played the free version on release back in 2012, but not the polished, complete one on Steam until now. I really liked it, it had some cool touches the original Half-Life lacked, like giving the Black Mesa staff and HECU Marines more personality, and neat things like overhearing emergency broadcasts showing how fucked the outside world was getting as the events progressed. Surface Tension also showed the US Military getting fucked up a lot harder than in the original too. But there were a bunch of things I disliked. Cutting some areas was bullshit, On A Rail isn't that bad, so why make it 15 minutes long? The Marines AI somehow feels worse than Half-Life 1's at times too, since they either rush you or pace side to side in gunfights. The areas you fight the Marines in HL1 are designed for their AI - only shooting when crouched and for them to flank you. The BM Marines don't use any of the natural cover and just sprint around like it's a deathmatch game. I also saw a couple blow themselves up, so I guess that behaviour stayed from the original. Xen is bad in a different way, The original was shitty platforming but at least it felt alien. BM Xen starts off great but quickly devolves into a glowing blue jungle for some reason, looking more like an Oddworld game than Half-Life. Interloper is far, far too long and I notice most of Xen is repackaging shit from HL2 and its episodes only with a Xen twist. I loved it all the same, a great attempt at remaking HL with more modern tech and I would recommend it to any HL fan, but I don't agree with the sentiment that it's a straight up replacement.

I finished all the content in 9 Kings. You get quite a few Armies/Kings to choose alongside perks to choose. In game you have a roguelike kingdom management with support and unit structures you can place a limited number of. You get to pick a new card each turn from a limited and random selection. After your building phase, you have an autobattler segment. Repeat this until you get a boss fight. The game also has buff tiles where empty build tiles reward you for building certain units there by a certain time, but most of the time this interferes with whatever layout I had in mind. Gameplay wise it is pretty addictive, and if you abuse the buff towers, you can make some obscenely overpowered units that have broken levels of stats and buffs. The Kings also declare war and peace with you as the game goes on so you can try to pinpoint what factions you want to play against or get buffs/structures/units from. Finishing a match doesn't take long, but the game lets you go into overtime once the boss is dead, although they admit it can be buggy and is not balanced yet. Clearing the overtime part even gives you a message wondering what broken strategy was abused to get that far which I thought was amusing abuse the Boars to make your units gods or libraries to stack absurd numbers of buffs on a single unit to make a near immortal knight squad for example. The autobattler part needs some work though as units will not collide with each other which means most of your army will bunch up and be extremely vulnerable to AoE attacks which is frustrating against some waves in the overtime segment. Speaking of the overtime segment, later waves can get way too laggy which is annoying. Some units and towers were a bit underwhelming in comparison, but a lot of them, even your HQ building can be buffed into some really dangerous things. Overall, it was alright. 7/10. Would probably bump it up to an 8 once it is done and gets a bit more polish. Hopefully the rest of early access goes well for them.

Played through The Alters, came away thinking it'll probably be my GOTY. It's a genre-defying sci-fi game that's difficult to describe, it's sort of a story driven resource management social sim base building game? It's not as complex or in-depth as you'd expect any of those games to be, nor is it trying to be. The main thing about The Alters is your ability to clone yourself, but from different versions of your life with different skillsets. Besides research you can do any job you want, but you'll never be the best at it, so you better get a botanist if you want to grow crops or a miner if you want a lot of metal. Have you ever heard of ludonarrative dissonance? The Alters is the opposite of that, all of the gameplay ties into the story. The clones aren't just peons, they're characters in their own right who can and do cause problems. The Worker was a union leader and is extremely anti-corporate, the Miner suffers substance abuse problems and begs for drugs, the Technician is just an asshole all around and you'll probably grow to hate him. That said, some Alters are less developed than others, I found the worst to be the Shrink. Has a neat backstory of suffering a mental breakdown after he lets his mother die, finding peace in some hippie group, becoming a therapist, and gradually turning into a mental health grifter, but none of that shows up in his story. And some Alters are significantly less useful than others, again the Shrink is guilty here. The game also forces you into always picking two Alters, the Technician and the Scientist, every playthrough. The game loses some of its earnest charm halfway through the second act and the level design in said act is an absolute chore. The game felt too easy, I was hitting bottlenecks left and right and always felt like I was outpacing the game, even on the highest difficulties. Towards the end I had nothing to do so I decided to see how many Space MacGuffins I could build, pic related. You can probably tell I'm struggling to write anything about it, it's a unique game and I'm finding myself either spoiling the whole thing or bitching about nitpicks. Go try it, it's different to anything else I've played. >>1612725 The ending of DE bugs me, I know some journos screech "the muted ending is intentional!!!" but I can't bring myself to agree. Not after the tribunal and the phasmid. I think they were trying to do the Fallout New Vegas thing but it's not reactive enough, the game can accuse you of things you didn't do like threatening suicide. They admit in-game it had a rough development with a lot of ideas cut, I'm sure had ZA/UM not fallen apart they would have done better in the sequel. >>1630281 I hated Xen in Black Mesa for three reasons >It looks like James Cameron's Avatar >It's way too goddamn long >It runs like shit And I absolutely agree the level design suddenly turned into Episode 1 for no reason, it even uses the same plugs from HL2.

I finished the main story of Skyrim the other night. Despite owning the game for a decade now, I've only just now actually gotten around to beating it. I don't think it needs any introduction at this point. Overall, I'd say it's simultaneously overrated and overhated somehow. I do genuinely appreciate the game's relative nonlinearity, on top of the game's design choice of putting in optional side areas en route to the main quest objectives. Outside of some iconic Bethesjank During the Elder Scroll vision, I had to reset the game because Alduin straight-up didn't show up the first time, causing the game to effectively softlock, I didn't really run into any major bugs. I didn't do super much past the main story, so there's no shortage of meat still left on the bone, and there was enough hook there where I'll probably mess around further. Also, getting the Animal Assist shout super early and using it to kill a giant with a mammoth was peak, and probably the highlight of my run. There were some pretty glaring issues I had, however. The vanilla UI was fairly annoying to navigate at times, and the puzzles were pretty lame as well, where they could simply be solved through brute force rather than actual thinking, having the solutions make absolutely zero sense Or maybe I'm just dumb, or some combination of the two. And the late part of the main quest in general was pretty lame. Both Alduin fights kinda sucked, and the ending was a massive wet fart. tl;dr I thought it was a good, but not great game. It was missing that "it" factor for me. 8/10. And through the entirety of my playthrough, I didn't have a single guard pull out the Arrow in the knee line, oddly enough

>>1612807 What's so good about it? I've been tepid about playing it for a while.

Just finished a Paper Mario randomizer. It was quite a hoot because I unlocked Bow early and got her ultra-ranked, so she was popping out 10 damage per turn to early game bosses. Though the funniest thing was that I forgot that the "shuffle bosses" feature was enabled, so here I spend a ton of resources trying to prepare for a boss, only for it to be switched to a completely different boss. Game definitely became broken after finding out that I could buy infinite Whacka bumps from several stores.

>>1631112 One good thing I'll say about Skyrim, is that a hell of a lot of attention to detail was put into the environment to help navigate the player through the world. Last time I played it, I ran a heavily modded Skyrim VR game with nearly all HUD elements either turned off or appropriately hidden. Had to navigate using a an actual paper map and compass that were attached to my belt and forearm respectively, and those subtle visual and audio cues really helped out a lot. Especially the rock piles with banners that marked the trail to caves and dungeons off the beaten path. Where it ends up falling flat, though, is that quest and dialogue designers EXPECTED you to use the quest marker by default, so those parts of the team never bothered to have NPCs give you accurate directions or differentiate quest item models from general clutter so there were a few points where I had to turn on the quest marker temporarily just to find some wandering NPC or generic short sword amid of pile of dropped NPC weapons or randomly placed in an area without much thought to how such an item would have been treated. The single biggest improvement that Bethesda could make for TESVI, aside from reversing the streamlining of character development into "jack-of-all-trades, master of all" slop, is to design the game as if there were no worldmap, quicktravel, quest markers, or any of that other shit. Once the game is done, THEN add all that shit back in as QoL for the inattentive and the stupids.

After a few weeks of playing, I've finally "finished" DK Bananza. I haven't done any of the post game content, and I need to clear out the bananas in the latter half of the game, but I had a really fun time. Honestly my favorite part was simply getting to finish the game without ever getting the Zebra Bananza power-up. The game even acknowledges it in the post credits, so it seems like the devs expected people to complete the game without going through each zone. The finale is of course great, but overall the game definitely lacks difficulty. Hopefully there's post-game content similar to the moon with Mario Odyssey that's at least a bit more difficult. Would post my own screenshots, but my system needs an update

>>1670571 Following up on this since I have finished the main post-game content areas. Its unfortunately not very fun.

>>790791 The last game I finished was Mad Max for PC. It was alright. It came out in 2015 so I didn't have any expectations of it being ground breaking, especially with the open world tag. However the game turned out to be pretty fun overall. Customizing your car felt good and earning more passive income from taking out camps felt rewarding. The combat was quite easy with parries being very forgiving and healing from kills in Rage mode, but they did a good job with the various executions and making you feel like every punch had impact. Where the game faltered I feel was bloat, especially once you max out one allied fortress and get all the bonuses, taking out the rest of the random events on the map felt like a waste of time since even on hard mode I was barely taking damage or using my shotgun that often, but even if I did I could immediately fast travel to the completed fort and refill on everything right away. The story was average action. Nothing really to write home about, but I did enjoy the ending sequence where Chumbucket betrays you and steals the Magnum Opus and then Max just runs him the fuck over trying to push Scrotus off the cliff like holy fuck no mercy I would give it a 7/10 considering I paid $5 for it, got about 30 hours out of it and most of it was enjoyable, even though I rushed the story toward the end. 8/10 if I played it back in 2015 probably.

>>1631112 >That last spoiler. Not that surprising if you leveled your skills fast enough or did a few quests. The skill-based unique guard dialogue is far easier to trigger in Skyrim than it should be, activating at level 30. Grabbing enough skill books and always doing some alchemy, enchanting, and smithing for more gold will get you plenty of them.

Spent the last couple weeks playing through Arx: Fatalis thanks to the discussion in a recent thread. If you're interesting in giving it a try, I highly recommend playing it through the open source version titled Arx: Libertatis. The game is great if you're into immersive sims, it plays very similarly to Thief and Deus Ex. You play as a stranger with amnesia who finds himself stuck in the world of Arx, an underground fortress inhabited by several extant races, making due with the subterranean life they subsist in against the harsh outer, cold, dead surface world. Rather quickly you become embroiled in the goings on between them, and before long make yourself known as a champion against the coming dangers of a hidden cult worshiping a slighted, envious god. Literally just finished it a few moments ago, and wanted to share some of my thoughts: It's very fun. I played it a few years back and didn't finish it then, but having given it another go I really do appreciate the roundabout design a lot of the levels have and how much thought really had to have been put into their design. Plus, there's quite a lot you can miss on your first playthrough so giving it a second go around really opens your eyes up to how many options really were available initially. The game came out around the same time as some of the later King's Field games and may have taken inspiration from them; the game world itself is built shockingly similar to a Dark Souls title in design. It's essentially one giant cave system, with the surviving kingdoms spread out over several floors of it after the sun died and the surface world froze over: Humans and Goblins live near the surface levels, Snake Women and Rat Men live in the deeper levels, the Dwarves live in the deepest since the previous floors were part of the mine they had previously excavated. Sometimes you'll be sent back through a previously explored area, often to talk to a specific character or return to a place you couldn't originally access. But you'll also inevitably discover shortcuts from the fifth floor up the fourth, or the second to the third, and so on in ways that make sense diagetically. Including a warp system linked to each floor unlocked about halfway through the game. Praise: -There is a lot of interactivity for what really only tries to be a decent RPG. The goal of the game is combat and exploration, but it also provides the ability to fish, combine ingredients to make better foods, cook things by placing them in front of fires, experiment with the runes you have to discover new spells, and interacting with objects and actors in the environment (even if it's just clicking on a spit over a fire to make it spin or a chicken to make it cluck). btw, you can click on a chicken ten times to make it explode into a cooked chicken. -For being restricted to such a limited environment, there's an appreciable variety of enemies to actually come across. You've got rats, spiders, goblins, trolls, and zombies, but also liches, mummies, demons, cultists, Ylsides (cult warriors), snake women, golems, rat men, and even an optional dragon to fight. -The game repects the player's own agency pretty well, especially for a lot of the earlier areas. If you don't want to waste time talking to the trolls or goblins, you can just kill them and take what you need from them. The same can be said for numerous figures in the game, though it does make achieving some goals significantly more difficult. Additionally, some quests can be completed in the same vein by just killing someone or stealing something instead of bargaining or working for it like stealing Krahoz from the rebel camp, completely skipping the crpyts as an area and missing out on like 1/3 of the game. -The game also respects the player's time to a good degree. If there's a mechanic that needs a pickaxe or a puzzle that needs a fireball or levitation spell, chances are you'll find one of those lying around relatively close. Plus, there's a spell explicitly for making you run around the map faster. -Spoilers: The main character isn't actually a human, but the avatar of a Guardian sent from another world. This gets revealed relatively early in the game, but that fact really helps to sell the voice actor's slightly stitled, awkward performance. He's not really human, or used to his body, he's just mouthing out the words that he knows through intuition as a mystic being make sense. -There are some very nice looking environments in the game, which again I didn't really experience fully on my first playthrough. Swampy cavers, dusty crypts, spider dens, stony temples... fleshy cult dens, icy caverns, molten remains of deserted workshops. For taking place in one singular cave system, it's impressive how much variety the game designers packed into the world. Gripes: -The game is still very janky despite being incredibly well-designed and detailed. Several mechanics (platforming, combining items, placing items, casting spells) are difficult to get the hang of and can sometimes just outright not work even if you appear to be doing the right thing. The crypt puzzle especially was very frustrating to solve, despite my initial suspicion being correct. Firstly, there's a chasm of lava you don't find any way to cross. You just jump/levitate over it or tank the damage. Then in the actual puzzle's room, you don't have to match the inner symbols with the moon phase they belong to, but instead the outer symbol closer to an "arrow" that blends in with the platform's design. Placing the stones with those symbols also made me wonder if I was doing something wrong, since setting them down on top of each pillar left them floating noticeably off of them like it wasn't intended. --Several mechanics don't work exactly the way you'd think, notably a lot of the spells. Casting heal heals you and any nearby enemies. Levitation doesn't let you fly freely, just hover horizontally across the map. A lot of status-boosting spells, like bless and speed don't give you a flat bonus for X seconds, but instead are constant effect spells that drain your mana indefinitely until you run out. --(This could a plus depending on your opinion but) Very little is actually spelled out directly to the player, both in terms of mechanics and objectives. That works pretty well when you're thrown into a goblin kingdom and have to figure out how to finagle your way around to come out on top and with their king's good graces, but not so much when you're explicitly told to talk to someone or do something, but to accomplish that you have to use a specific item on a person or interact with one specific thing in the environment to get the proper response. It doesn't help that sometimes events just immediately happen and drag you into a cutscene instead. -There are several points in the game where you hit a pretty massive difficulty spike, the most notable being when you run into Ylsides for the first time, either in the temple or back in Arx. If you try to fight them like any other enemy (approach, bait out attack, counterattack) you're going to get your ass reamed. They almost necessarily require magic, either through damaging spells or through buffing yourself and casting debuffs on them to actually overcome since they have an immediate attack and movement speed buff they cast that lets them stunlock and devastate your health if you're not paying attention. -(Relevant to last point) If you don't invest in magic, you're basically handicapping yourself. Several points in the game require you to use magic to achieve something, and while there are scrolls that can accomplish those goals they're limited and can be wasted. There's also no reason not to invest in magic, since it's necessary but also beneficial to any play style. Buffs, heals, offensive spells, defensive spells, stealth spells like invisibility, utiliy spells like setting traps or dispelling magic fields, etc. -Inventory management is on a grid-based system, which is fine in theory. But the fact the tiles are so small and some items don't line up perfectly with the grid makes management frustrating and being able to only move one item at a time, even from stacks, especially tedious. -There are several spells that are not automatically revealed once you hit the skill level and runes necessary to cast. Which is really cool, it encourages experimentation. But even once you cast those, they stay unrevealed. That's to say even the simplest of hidden spells can't be referenced unless you manually write down what they are. It's cool that there are hidden spells, but it would be nice if they got written down in the spellbook like all of the other spells once you discovered them. -The ending is really sudden. You manage to kill Iserbius and then the lizard guy from the Noden shows up and goes "Yeah, good job, now go back home." and then a little static image cutscene plays showing the frozen planet. They went through the trouble of making a whole 3D model with rigging for the guy and he shows up for like 5 seconds. --It makes sense a lot of the story is left in the background, since your main goal is just to kill Iserbius and stop Akbaa from incarnating, but a ton of the story near the back end is really rushed all of a sudden in general. You solve the queen's murder, then in a single cutscene find out the rebel chick does want to meet her father, meets him, nearly gets abducted by the snake bitches due to an old forgotten treaty, they all get interrupted by the queen's ghost who reveals Alia was just the younger one of a pair of twins, you get shown like five (!) unique cutscene painting, then the snake ladies disappear from the game forever and also there's a rat there for some fucking reason. A lot of the custscenes and unique interactions happen in the later half of the game, and really make the first half feel a little more lackluster because of it. Arx Fatalis is a very fun game. It's also a bit rough around the edges, but that helps make it unique. A lot of the game feels almost half-finished, like the devs were on borrowed time, but it's easy to see how quickly the features included could have spiraled out of control and makes it easier to appreciate what was achieved in the end. I really love the world building and general design, but the fact so little of it is substantially fleshed out makes it feel all the more mysterious. Arx is exactly the kind of game you might see getting remastered as a cult classic, which is a shame since its existence as such an obscure title lends so much more to the atmosphere it carries. So much about it makes it feel like a game from another timeline, like a studio's passion project that almost never got released. Also as a very minor aside, there are so few good screenshots of this game online, the ones you get from Google or whatever don't do the game justice at all, they're all in the native 640x480 and look like shit. Almost makes me want to go through and take some nice pictures of every unique location in the game for archival purposes.

>>1759426 Also, I realized I could hide the minimap with the R key but didn't want to go back to each of those levels and take another screenshot because I'm lazy. Also also I'm not sure if stealing Krahoz or aggroing the rebels changes anything, but a quick search says that certain actions like that do alter some cutscenes and quest outcomes in the game, which is pretty cool.

I recently marathoned Banjo-Kazooie, Diddy Kong Racing, Conker's Pocket Tales, Donkey Kong 64, Banjo-Tooie, Conker's Bad Fur Day, and Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge. I had 100%ed Banjo 1, DKR, and both Conker games before, but it had been many years. And I played DK64 and Banjo-Tooie a lot when they were new, but never had the patience to beat them. They're all good games, but honestly they do become a bit of a slog. >Banjo 1 Annoying due to needing to get all the Notes in one go, which was clearly a technical limitation of how they programmed the game, since all later games (and the Xbox versions of Banjo) didn't have this quirk. >DK64 Like everyone says, it does have an annoying number of collectables, but I don't think it's as bad as everyone says. I do think the water level goes a bit too far with it though. >Banjo-Tooie Fewer collectables and is a shorter game but I still found it slightly annoying in some sections. I think DK64 and Tooie would both have benefit from more smaller levels, perhaps. I think the issue is that you spend too much time in each level. In Tooie it's only like half as bad, but it's still an issue. Give me twice as many levels that are each half as long. But I guess the point of this sort of game is that you only build one level and then just dump a thousand collectables in it so players spend forever with the level you made. Oh yeah, the shooting controls also bugged me. I hate that C-buttons strafe instead of aim, and aiming is vertically inverted, and you can't change either of these things, as far as I know. These people made Goldeneye years earlier, so you'd think they'd give you a few options in these regards. >Conker's Pocket Tales A simple little Game Boy Color game that deserves more credit. It's a fun adventure that honestly does evoke the more famous N64 game a little bit as far as gameplay goes. Both of them aren't collectathons, but adventure games. This one is maybe a bit too simple, but for a Game Boy Color game it's pretty good. Also at one point I switched the emulator to Game Boy (not Color) mode and it had way bigger changes than just color being turned off. Many sprites were very different, and I think I even noticed slight differences in level design. But I switched back to Color mode because I figure that's how it's meant to be played. But I should go back and play the non-Color version some time just to check it out. >Conker's Bad Fur Day An absolute technical marvel that blew me away when it came out. Sure, voice acting wasn't impressive by 2001, but it was on the N64. Even though I mostly played PlayStation, I was still impressed that they pulled it off on that hardware. And yeah the humor was a big draw. And I know, both of these things are passe and even frowned upon in some circles now, but I am playng these games to go back to the past, and I appreciate what the game did in 2001. However, I do find that by removing practically all the collectables, you're left with a game that is really just going from setpiece to setpiece. There are light puzzles, but I wouldn't say they're very fulfilling. The combat isn't exactly stellar. Also the shooting controls still suck. When the spectacle wears off, the gameplay isn't the greatest. I still definitely had a fun time overall though. >Grunty's Revenge Very underrated game. Too easy and too short, but honestly I like the level lengths here. Each level makes an impression but doesn't overstay its welcome. The issue is just that there's too few of them. But I suppose it's a GBA game so it's almost expected. That said, the Spyro GBA games are very comparable, and much longer. Spyro 2 and 3 on GBA might be of comparable quality, as well (they're pretty good, but the first one has some problems). Anyway, Grunty's Revenge does a great job at feeling like a legitimate Banjo game. The isometric view does lead to a couple of bullshit jumps here and there, but overall it works very well. It deserves to be remembered as part of the series more often. >Diddy Kong Racing It's a different genre but my autism made me include it anyway. I think it's a big improvement over Mario Kart 64, but Crash Team Racing improved upon DKR much further. Compared to that, the driving is too simplistic. That said, the hub world is a lot of fun to explore, and the hovercrafts and flying do add a lot of fun variety. Later kart racers improved it further, but those vehicles and the hubworld add enough to keep this game novel even in the face of later gameplay improvements. Now I have to play Banjo Pilot, and then I'll probably go back and play Star Fox Adventures. But I've never actually managed to beat Star Fox or Star Fox 64 on the hardest paths, and my autism won't let me just skip them. I found it easier to skip Adventures, even though really from what I can tell it should be in my Rare marathon. I'll get to it eventually.