Gaming What was the last videogame you beat?

Assassin's Creed: Revelations. I didn't play the series when it came out, but now that it's the end of the console cycle, I've been barrelling through each title. I'm on AC III now. I know a lot of fans weren't happy with it, but I think it's a solid, entertaining game. Maybe I have an easier time accepting it bc I haven't been waiting years in-between title releases.

 

Just finished the story-mode for Infamous: Second Son. Never played an Infamous game before, but it was pretty fun.

 

Persona 4: Golden Edition

 

Mass Effect

 

Walking Dead Season 2: Episode 3

Spoiler

I get the feeling I'm not playing the way Telltale thinks I should. Since episode 1 they wanted me to care about the kid Sarah and this episode I think I was supposed to care about Reggie, but I looked after Clem whenever I was given the chance. Also it seems I was right to hate all the characters in 400 Days, or Telltale heard everyone hated them and turned them all evil.

 

Kingdom Hearts! One of my favorite game series of all time!

 

Zone of the Enders

 

Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes

and

Lego Marvel Superheroes

 

The first Borderlands. I have to say, the ending was abrupt, underwhelming and disappointing, and without much circumstance. At least the journey was worthwhile.

 

Wolfenstien: the new order. Amazingly fun game. Takes you back to the old school style of fps games.

 

Super Mario 3D World.

Probably one of the first Mario games that I legitimately hated playing. I'm considering selling it.

 

SW: The Force Unleashed

 

How come?

 

The Force Unleashed 2 on Hard. Now time for the Unleashed difficulty, which will not be frustrating at all.......

 

It's boring, slow-paced, unoriginal, and repetitive as hell. The extra playable characters don't make up for the fact that it's pretty much the same game as the last five.

 

Going through the Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider Trilogy. First up is Tomb Raider: Legend. It's basically a cheesy pre-Daniel Craig Bond film. While fairly short at six hours (and so completed in one session), it makes the most of the time it has, by going to seven different countries. Gameplay is pretty basic, with the shooting having auto-lock, but not unenjoyable. Story ranges from "excuse to visit another location" to genuinely interesting. Pretty easy game, only difficulty I had was with the final boss. Motorcycle sections were awesome.

I'll give it a 7/10.

On to Tomb Raider: Anniversary.

 

Well, I did say Legend was too easy. Anniversary makes up for that by killing you every couple of minutes. Falls, spikes, rotating blades, wall crushers... all instant death. Indeed, there is one room on the penultimate level that requires you to ascend to the top across precariously slim ledges, all while being attacked by flying enemies, that if they hit you, will send you hurtling off the side to a very hot lava-filled death.

That's not the only major difference between Anniversary and Legend. Whilst Legend was very much an action-adventure, it would be more apt to call Anniversary an action-platformer/action-puzzler - that is to say that only towards the last couple of hours does the game really start throwing enemies at you. Gone are the linear levels replaced with large, more open tombs that you can actually get lost in... which is as much a boon as it is a curse. Accidentally miss a key you were supposed to pick up, and you could be looking at retracing your steps through those same traps that killed you ten or twenty minutes ago.

Story is even more of a non-factor here, with the plot only really appearing in the last two hours. Levels will begin with a short cutscene and then let you loose for 2-3 hours before receiving another short cutscene. So later on when the game tries to emotionally impact you with Lara's first human kill, it falls flat. The atmosphere is fantastic though. Anniversary actually has very little ambient music, and it really draws you into the long-dead civilizations that you begin to uncover. Though as much as I adored the atmosphere, this does result in a lack of variety when compared to Legend, which had Russian military bases, Tokyo heights, and Himalayan mountains. Anniversary sticks to tombs for the whole experience.

When combat does take place, you end up fighting all manner of animals - rats, panthers, bears... mummies, raptors, a T-Rex. It's all very indicative of 1996 game design, as, of course, this game is a remake of the '96 original. I can't compare them as I haven't played it.

Now onto the worst thing about this game: the camera. At times, it simply refuses to look in the direction that you want, especially as you grapple across walls. This will result in multiple deaths, and it's an aggravating experience, rather than you making a mistake and learning from it, you know it's the game's fault. It becomes a matter of finding the precise camera angle necessary to make that jump. Ugh.

Overall, this was another solid, if not exceptional Tomb Raider entry. It lasts for much longer - I clocked at 10 hours - and as such occasionally drags in the middle.

7/10, with the advantage tipped slightly in Legend's favour, due to the aforementioned environment variety, and faster pace.

 

So after having owned it for many years, but never getting around to playing it, I finally began playing LEGO Star Wars recently and finished the story yesterday. This was the Complete Saga edition. It was great fun, very accessible and simple, not to mention forgiving. But it can also be challenging and deep if you want it to be, depending on how hard you want to amass "coins" without dying. In that respect, it's perfection in game design. If you want to just breeze through the movies in LEGO form, you can play it fast and not worry about neither death nor coin collection as you respawn infinitely.

 

I'm ticking off finishing my old games, and with only the final chapter left, I finished Mirror's Edge yesterday, after having played it sporadically for years. It's a fun game to be sure, whenever you get in that sweet flow and feel invincible as you're sliding, rebound-jumping and wall-running along your route like nobody's business. I had the game's "runner vision" turned off when I played it, but doing that gets a little in the way of this experience, as you will constantly have to stop to look around for viable paths, breaking your momentum. With runner vision turned on, you don't think. You just run, and that's the way it should be played, in my humble opinion, making it a far more fast-paced action game instead of just a first-person-viewed platformer. Ultimately, though, it depends on your preference of pace, I suppose. Personally, I would have played it with the option turned on, if I could turn back time.

Amusingly, I never took advantage of the time-slowing focus ability that you have at your disposal. Thinking back, many an enemy encounter could have been done away with much easier.

 

Persona 4 (PS2 version)

Just... So damn good!

Playing the ps vita Golden edition now.

 

The Orange Box. More specifically, Portal.

 

Thief (2014).

 

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

 

Alpha Protocol.

It's been a while since a game so fully grabbed my attention that I blew an entire weekend in single-minded pursuit of beating it (The last one that comes to mind was Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies, so that's a good eight months) at the expense of reading, or watching lots of movies, or what have you. But this Tom Clancy-inspired stealth/action/RPG hybrid thing really grabbed me - the plot is interesting, the characters are interesting, and the limited time response system (Heavily reminiscent of Sakura Wars for all none of you familiar with that franchise) keeps you engaged in the conversation. The myriad ways (It would appear) that things can develop is truly remarkable - major allies can and will die. They straight-up executed one of my character's best friends off camera as a means of committing psychological warfare against me. I mean, damn.

That said, it's got some warts - stealth is so heavily overpowered you'd be a fool to not specialize in it... but true to Obsidian form there's so much damn fighting in the boss fights and the final mission that I really wish I had invested in a solid assault rifle. That's not even false choice, that's just plain schizophrenic design. Pop-ins are an issue, though I've seen worse (Last Remnant). Still, for $10 or less - which is all it's going to run you, because this thing sold terribly - it's utterly sublime.

 

COD: MW 2 and COD: Black Ops.

Modern Warfare 2 was quite the pulp affair. Black Ops too, don't get me wrong, but it remained sort of interesting. Modern Warfare 2 was just hyper-patriotic schlock, though. Not that I expected any different, to be honest. I thought the Battlefield series was a masturbatory self-congratulation of American military might and valour™. How wrong I was. The Battlefield games are documentaries next to the COD games. They're both the pulp fiction of video games, though, so don't worry. I have plenty of disdain to go around.

I had the sound muted during my MW2 run, and followed the story half-committedly through subtitles and cut-scenes. A big "meh". Black Ops started the same way, but halfway through, the mystery of the brainwashing, and what parts of the protagonist's memory were real and what parts were fake became interesting. Enough for me to power through to the end, even though I had had my fill of COD between this and MW2. If this game is the only one in the COD series to have an interesting story, I will not be surprised.

Spoiler

The Mason/Reznov split personality thing was telegraphed early on, though, I have to say, as Reznov began showing up at the unlikeliest and most convenient of places.

Of course, I know as I'm writing this that most owners of these games will have no idea what I'm talking about, as people only buy these for the multi-player components, just like nobody cares about the story mode of a fighting game. But I'm not a big multi-player gamer. I prefer the solitary experience, so when I was gifted with these games by a friend of mine, I had to try the story mode once. In fact, my friend, it should be noted, gave me Black Ops in the first place for me to play Zombies co-op mode with him. That mode, admittedly, is a lot of fun.