Gaming What was the last videogame you beat?

Tomb Raider (2013). Got the definitive edition for cheap on the Xbox One to play while I took a break from Bloodborne. I never played any of the old TR games, but this seems like a solid reboot for the franchise. Lara is a great character, but unfortunately her transformation over the course of the campaign is one of the only interesting parts about it. The platforming is fantastic, and I wish there was more incentive to hunt the wildlife, but the game too often devolves into a generic third person shooter against your run of the mill militaristic bad guys. I was hoping for a more stealthy approach to most of the scenarios, but the game simply doesn't let you play it that way. I would've preferred Lara to be a silent predator picking off bad guys one by one instead of running and gunning with a shotgun, but alas, that isn't the case. Not to say the gunplay is particularly bad, it's just nothing special and seems out of place. The story for the most part is bland and forgettable (featuring an uninteresting mysterious island reminiscent of Far Cry 4), as are most of the side characters. But it looks good, the platforming segments are great, the optional tombs are well designed, and it's fun to see Lara transform from a stranded archaeologist into a badass survivor. It's little more than a poor man's Uncharted, but I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of improvements the developers are able to make in the sequel.

 

I'm going to get that game sooner or later. I'm not usually a survival horror fan, but I'm an Alien fan.

 

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag. Yeah, fun little pirate game, but it's safe to say I'm sick and tired of this series by now.

 

That's the only game in the series I enjoyed, probably because it's barely an AC game at all.

 

The Witcher III: Wild Hunt

Alright, I'll confess - despite being an unwavering cynic on all things video games, I was never in a position where I would not love this. I was in deep on the franchise - I played the first two games, read a good chunk of the novels, watched that goofy Hexer movie adaptation no one likes (Including me) - and consequently I was hell bent on seeing how it all ended.

Make no mistakes - it is the last chronological adventure for Geralt of Rivia. While the books might continue due to alternate universe declarations on the part of Andrzej Sapkowski, the games have tied up all remaining loose ends. I won't spoil anything, but if the series continues, it will not be with Geralt; that much seems certain. To compensate, CDPR provided a suitably grand finale; I'd be hard pressed to think of a plot element or aspect of the conclusion I wasn't fond of, although depending on your choices it does risk being weirdly upbeat for such a frequently downer series. While there are flaws in the gameplay, none of these games have played "flawlessly" in any sense of the word, so it didn't really bother me.

As you probably know, this installment is open world, or at least possessed of sufficiently large sandboxes that any meaningful distinction would be lost on most. There's tons to explore - perhaps too much for me to ever see. In a couple of days I plan to begin a proper open world screw around - exploration, pointless card minigames, the works. In a year or so I'd love to go back, try a run on the hardest difficulty, and try to get a different set of ending slides.

But for now, I'm content to let Geralt ride off into the sunset. Va faill, Gwynbleidd.

 

Dragon Age 2 - Mage Ending.

 

Star Wars: Bounty Hunter

Fantastic game!

 

Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures.

100% percent this one and I would have to say this is one of my favorite lego games.

 

Valiant Hearts: The Great War
There's a hidden ending, probably related to some choice or optional achievement earlier in the game, but I got the standard ending.

A fun and interesting game, with lots of educational information about the first world war, for those interested. The educational content is also completely optional, always available from slides in the pause menu that change for each level. It can be played purely as a charming puzzle-solving side-scroller if you so wish. However, I would argue that the entire appeal of the game is that it presents the subject of the first world war - to most people boring, too far gone and completely overshadowed by World War II - in an easily digestible, fun and vivid way. The plot, following several intertwining stories, is also moving and engaging. Well worth paying attention to. In short, a game I highly recommend.

 

Gears of War: Judgement

Apparently this is the worst Gears of War game but I haven't played any of the others. It's a really fun game though and I liked the story.

 

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Such a blockbuster game, and an improvement on the first in every way, from controls and mechanics to gameplay variety and narrative. These games are the popularity juggernauts they are for good reason. They are quality productions throughout. I beat it on normal difficulty in 13 hours, which I'm quite pleased with. I would have liked revisiting some of the more action heavy chapters again, and perhaps on a higher difficulty for the challenge. But I have so many games still in my backlog, so I will move on to the next pasture. Besides, it's very much a type of game where you can never recreate the feeling of the first ride.

 

Assassin's Creed: Unity. This is a game that's largely been defined by negative press, so I'll start with the positives. I had no technical issues. Playing it fully patched on the Xbox One, you'd have no idea it was ever a "broken" game. It doesn't make it all better for those who had a buggy game on day one, but it does make it all pretty meaningless for anybody playing now.

And it's a great-looking game. The things it does with light are just amazing. I could sit and look at stained-glass windows for hours. Realistic lighting has always been the key to getting genuinely photorealistic visuals, and we're finally there, or at least close. The quality of the light toward dusk, the way it bounces off skin, it's all there. The game even perfectly mimics the way your eyes transition going from inside out into the bright sun and vice versa. The faces are great, and look completely natural. I was genuinely impressed when Arno got drunk and I could see it in his face -- slack jaw, hooded eyes glazed over. And Paris is just gorgeous. Tremendous design work. It's absolutely a great advertisement for next-gen systems.

I'm a little mixed on the total overhaul of the gameplay, but there were definite positives. The freerunning is really fluid; the only thing that needs tweaking is how it responds to head-height walls. I shouldn't have to transition out of ground-hugging freerunning to vault over them and continue along the ground.

The cover system was a great addition, though it needs to iron out the kinks in snapping to cover. I loved the way the game treated assassinations, building them back up into carefully planned centerpieces by introducing little optional side objectives to provide assistance or a new way in, while deemphasizing overly complicated, railroading "100%" sub-objectives.

It's surprising they did such a thorough overhaul of every system after Black Flag basically perfected mechanics they'd been refining since ACII. A lot has been stripped out, presumably to be rebuilt and added back in later over the course of more next-gen sequels, and I missed a lot of the systems. However, there was also a lot of fat that had built up, and it's nice to have that cut out.

I hated the new combat system, though. I got a little more used to it after spending a lot of time on it and leveling up to where I wasn't absurdly fragile, but the fact is that it's a misstep. Its emphasis on super-finicky timing for counters doesn't mix well with its decision to start you off and keep you for some time incredibly fragile, with one or two strikes killing you, keep your weapons so weak as to be almost completely ineffective, and then throw hordes of free-swinging enemies at you who give you very little notice to counter and like to attack simultaneously despite the game having no mechanic to deal with that. Oh, and they love to shoot at you, even from point blank, their shots are devastating, and the mechanics to dodge are frequently ineffective, let alone to see the shots coming. One or two of those things could combine, but not all of them, and especially not in a franchise that's developed its combat mechanics so strongly in another direction. Leveled up and stocked up on medicine, I could still powerhouse my way through mobs of enemies, but before that point it was insanely frustrating, to the point of making the game unpleasant to play. The inability to dodge shots reliably was just the worst. Ideally they'd roll the combat system back to Black Flag, but at the very least it needs a massive overhaul.

As for the writing, it was merely so-so. Arno wasn't a well-executed protagonist; I could see what they were going for and liked it, but he never actually interacted with anybody enough to really bring it out, and as a result he came out underwritten. And the story started off interesting, and kept its focus tight, but never found a way to reconcile that with playing with the Revolution. It was backdrop without feeling integrated into the story. It feels obligated to stick in Robespierre and Bonaparte without quite knowing what to actually do with them.

In the end, it's a game that's in many ways spectacular, but in many important ways disappointing. Unlike almost all AC games, I can't see myself wanting to replay this one for quite a while.

 

I agree with most of this. Even generic characters these days have depth. They almost seemed like parodies of their character types akin to a Disney channel kids show. I thought it was interesting that they had so much 3PS, yet simply gameplay mechanics, had childish button prompts, yet had a dark and ominous location.... which made it more difficult to see than it did make it scary.

That leads me to my disagreement. Reminiscent of Far Cry 4? The Pacific Ocean island in TRE was dark and really only mysterious because it lacked personality whereas, like Uncharted 2, Far Cry 4 is bright colored and very obviously inspired by Nepal and the Himalayas. But I digress.

It was ok at best and I won't be playing the next one.


I also played Assassin's Creed: Black Flag and, man, I know it's an uber popular franchise but it's a good thing it's fun being a pirate because if I would've jumped into this franchise anywhere else, I don't think I would've finished it. Controls are frustrating. Battle isn't good. "Tail so-and-so" ugh "...into their castle... and then kill them" really? OFC the "reason" for that is so you can eavesdrop. I can't help but lol they have those kinds of missions peppered throughout the game. My wife got so sick of hearing the whistles hahah It was meh to good depending on land or sea so this'll be the only AC game I play.


Both somewhere in the 6 - 7.5 range for me.


Beat Flower, Never Alone, and The Unfinished Swan, too. Bought them to play with the wife. I ended up finishing Flower and Swan myself. They're both alright. She beat Never Alone (as I assisted playing the part of the fox). Solid. Child of Light is still the only one she's really enjoyed. (Another one where she played the female lead and I assisted, that time playing the firefly.) (She wants to get the PS4 version because we found out it has DLC that's not available on the Wii U.)

This'll probably be one of the next games I play. Haven't played any of the others but I noticed this was on the Wii U.

 

South Park: The Stick of Truth. I'm not really into RPGs, especially ones with turn-based combat, but I'm a big SP fan and I loved it.

 

The Witcher 3.

I've played computer and console games since the Atari 2600 was first released, and Witcher 3 is without a doubt one of the top 3 games I've ever played. I don't think I could really put my top choices in order, but it's got to be top 3.

It's also the best role-playing experience I've ever had-- not just in a computer game, but period. I played lots of D&D 1st Edition when I was in high school, and the last few years I've had DMs that worked for WotC on the D&D line, and I've never been as immersed in a game as with Witcher 3. Two specific examples:

• When it is night out, and there's a storm with the wind blowing and thunder crashing and lightning flashing in the sky, I go to the nearest shelter I can find and meditate until daylight. There's no in-game reason for this; I could just as easily keep going through it, the character doesn't ever get tired or anything like that. It's just that the psychological discomfort I feel as a result of the sound and graphics is enough that it "feels" right to me to voluntarily go ride out the storm in shelter.
• There are a couple of brothels where you can hire a working girl and watch some (not particularly graphic but still probably rated R) sex scenes. Which I wanted to see. But at the same time you hire the girl, you can choose to talk to her, though there is no in-game advantage of doing so. For two of the six girls, the conversations I had with them made me feel sufficiently crappy about their situation that I was unwilling to hire them, so having completed the game I still have no idea what those sex scenes look like.

The biggest complaint I have with the game is the main one other people seem to have as well: the XP curve seems to be off, so by midway through the game you tend to out-level your opponents by a sufficient amount that you can pretty easily just mindlessly button mash your way through fights, even on high difficulty. There are several mods available that make you earn XP more slowly, though.

 

Remember Me
This platforming action game by French development studio Dontnod and published by Capcom is set in a near future where memories are possible to digitise and store electronically. As a consequence, everyone in the game have a holographic disc behind their head representing the Memorize application they're connected to. If I'm honest, I found the combat a bit tedious and also hard to perform satisfactorily. I finished it mainly due to its compelling sttory

 

The Witcher: Wild Hunt - I played the original Witcher on the PC for a little while. Can't remember how far I got, but I lost interest long before seeing it to its conclusion. The Witcher 2 I think I barely started. Wild Hunt, however, totally captivated me from start to finish. The huge open world was (mostly) a blast to explore, the characters and plotlines were deeply compelling, and the gameplay, while nothing to write home about, served the purpose of the game extremely well, swimming controls notwithstanding (seriously, those were some Superman 64 levels of bull ****). Geralt is such a great character, I wish I would've stuck with this series from the beginning so I could appreciate him more. But I'm sure they'd feel antiquated now that I've played this one. Despite a few hiccups that thankfully didn't severely hamper the experience, I thought this game was tremendous.

Spoiler

I ended up getting the ending where Ciri (supposedly) dies. I didn't even know there was a way to prevent this until a friend told me about his ending where she lives. I started looking that ending up online, but stopped. While a bit lackluster, with Geralt sitting alone in the Crones' shack with Vezemir's medallion, and various monsters descending upon him, I was satisfied with the fact that that was the ending to my game. That was the consequence for my actions, minor as though they seemed at the time. I didn't want to see anything else. And that's a testament to the fantastic writing of the game.

Batman: Arkham Knight - I'm not really sure where to begin with this one. I absolutely disagree with those who say that this is the best of the series, as I think it's easily, easily the worst. There are strokes of brilliance, no doubt. Sections of the story were fantastic. The voice acting, as always, was spot on (Mike Ehrmantraut as Commissioner Gordon being a particular highlight). But those are really the only positive things I can think of right now. Rocksteady really beat you over the head with the whole "Be the Batman" angle pre-release, which is ironic considering I felt like anything but the Batman in this game. That's especially disappointing when Asylum and City succeeded so well at doing that. But I just could not find a rhythm in this one. Every single time I would start to enjoy the game, something would happen that reminded me just how mediocre it really was.

I guess I'll start out with everyone's favorite toy, the Batmobile. I actually didn't mind it much in the beginning. I thought it handled fine, solving puzzles with it was okay, I really thought the complaints were overblown. And then it just kept dominating the game. Tank battle after tank battle after tank battle. I felt like the writers' solution for bridging gaps in the narrative was just to throw some tanks at the problem and be done with it. I hated the entire militaristic feel of the environment this time around. It wasn't that the Batmobile was particularly bad or handled poorly, it was just so average that I couldn't wrap my head around why Rocksteady would want to take you off your feet so often.

Of course, it'd probably be more of a problem if playing as Batman was actually entertaining. It wasn't. I remember Asylum and City so fondly, but Knight just tries to do too much with a system that was previously immaculate. These thugs have stun sticks, these thugs are gigantic, these thugs are literally electric and can't be touched, these thugs have riot shields, these thugs are invisible, these thugs have ninja swords and play leap frog with each other... just stop. I couldn't find a rhythm with this game. The camera swings wildly around and I can't tell that I'm about to roundhouse kick a walking power generator, or that some guy is about to tackle me from behind. After every encounter there was a feeling of "Glad that's over," instead of the intended "That was fun, I'm a badass." I could not be more disappointed with this game, and I really tried to like it.

I'm also amazed at how easily Rocksteady is getting away with locking the ending behind the 100% wall. Are you kidding me? I looked it up online, it's not good or fulfilling, and that's how you're gonna cap off your trilogy? What a shame. Post credits endings are bad enough, but I find that flat-out inexcusable.

 

Spoiler

YOU COULD'VE THROWN THE SNOWBALLS, MAN. YOU COULD HAVE PREVENTED THIS. I was pretty fond of the "good" ending because it felt like it rewarded you for playing Father Simulator 2K15 in a way that games don't really explore, although I can understand getting attached to the consequences of your actions.

 

GTA V for PC - great stuff!

 

First half of The Getaway for PS2. The game doesn't reveal that there's a second play-through until you finish the first 12 levels. Then a new dozen levels from the POV of the cop become available, allowing you to follow his story.

 

Blast from the past! That was my first PS2 game

 

About to beat Assassin's Creed Rogue. Very underrated (as is the entire Kenway Saga).

 

I finally got around to playing through Bioshock...yes, the first one. It was very enjoyable even though I went in only a touch spoiled. I decided to save all the Little Sisters to get the best ending. I still have 2 to play and I want to buy Infinite at some point, but I'm totally spoiled with Infinite and the bonus content thanks to Youtube, but I still think they'd be fun to play eventually.

 

The Conduit

 

How does it compare to Black Flag (the only AC I enjoyed)? I was holding out until they ported it to current gen, which I'm surprised hasn't happened yet.