Gaming What was the last videogame you beat?

Season 2 isn't quite good as 1 but still worth checking out IMO.

 

I finished the first episode of season 2 last night. So far so good.

 

Gears Of War 3 on Hardcore. Next up is GOW Judgement. I'm a Renter.

 

Far Cry: Primal! I'm a big fan of the series and this was just an amazing experience. There's a lot that's familiar so it felt very much like a Far Cry game, and there's a lot that's different too so it wasn't just more of the same. It's not a small game like Blood Dragon was, and it's taken me over 60 hours hours to complete. It did not feel like it took that long though, which is great.

 

Finished my first full year in Stardew Valley. Far from being done with it, but I felt like posting something about GOTY 2016.

 

I think the last game I beat was RE0 HD edition.

 

Finished episodes 2 and 3 of The Walking Dead season two. The whole premise of TWD is conflict and infighting, so I can only take so much in one sitting.

 

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

 

Ratchet & Clank (PS4). I've been a die hard Ratchet & Clank fan since the original released on the PlayStation 2 fourteen years ago, and even I'd readily acknowledge that the series has grown stale over time. The last good game we got was 2009's A Crack in Time, with the various one-offs Insomniac attempted since then failing to latch on. So when this re-imagining of the original game was announced alongside the new movie, I was skeptical at best. As it turns out, any negative expectations I had were completely and utterly false.

Ratchet & Clank is ******* BACK.

It took me four days to beat the game twice (once normally and once in challenge mode) and earn the Platinum trophy, and dammit if I wasn't gleefully enthralled every step of the way. As it's a loose remake of the first game in the series (of which I've played countless times over the past decade and a half), I found myself innately familiar with a lot of the game's locations and enemies, but it's certainly not a simple up-res. The storyline has been changed up quite a bit, with some new planets and characters being added and old ones missing (I found myself quite sad that the poisonous planet Orxon was absent). But there is still enough of the original game there to conjure up tons of nostalgic feelings, and I even found myself getting misty eyed while looking through Holocards (one of the game's collectibles) of items, characters, and locations from previous games in the series.

The gameplay has never been better, with tight third-person shooter controls complimenting the franchise's signature brand of hilariously insane weaponry and light platforming. It's all old hat, but it works flawlessly. The game is also deceptively deep, with you having the ability to level up weapons through repeated use, and earning Raritanium to upgrade them further through a light sphere grid-style layout. You won't be able to fully upgrade everything in one playthrough, but thankfully there is a Challenge Mode, basically the game's New Game+ option, where all of your progress carries over. In addition, Ratchet & Clank is an absolute visual feast, one of the best looking console games to date, and the framerate never dips no matter how much chaos is on screen (and there is a lot). The writing and the characters are also fantastic, and the planet hopping storyline never misses a beat. From the bustling metropolis of Kerwan to the island paradise on Pokitaru, I was always itching to see what else the game had in store for me, what new weapons and gadgets would be available next. I can't say enough good things about it, and it's the most fun I've had with a new Ratchet & Clank game since Up Your Arsenal. It's definitely my favorite game of the year so far, and with the price tag being only $40, is a total bargain. I really hope this game does well for Insomniac because I feel like they've breathed new life into this terrific franchise, and I'm absolutely left wanting more.

 

Just finished season two of The Walking Dead. I liked it. I thought it was fine. Although, I did find the first season better.

Spoiler

I don't think the next season is going to continue Clementine's story, as the available endings are wildly different.

From the beginning of the season my instinct was to leave any group I encountered and make it on my own. Clementine appeared very capable at this point, and I adopted her wish to recover Christa. Besides, all of the groups you encounter along the way have people who are either unstable or hostile towards you and I kept thinking that I don't want to have them in tow when/if I find her. In other words, well done on immersion! Of course, the narrative never gives you that option

In the end, I killed Kenny and let the stranded family in. From the statistics, it seems that was the most widespred ending result.

 

Well, I finished the season and I still don't understand this reference. I watched all of the possible endings too.

 

Life Is Strange. I recommend everyone to play it at least once.

 

Finished Tales From the Borderlands a few minutes ago. I started off really enjoying it in the first episodes, and thought it had great humour. But in the latter episodes it feels like you get ever fewer chances of playing as Rhys, and I preferred playing as him. His character arc is, after all, a lot more interesting with his lowly status and being lured into what he perceives as a chance at power. Fiona and Sasha are simple con artists in the beginning of the tale, and end up still being such. Especially considering the game series that inspired this story, where the gameplay is all about levelling up, you would think that Fiona's story would have more character development. And the revelations in the final episode didn't have much weight either. A disappointment in the end. The adventure was fun overall, though.

 

Sonic Generations. Very fun.

 

Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal. Got the Platinum trophy for Ratchet & Clank 2016 a couple weeks ago, got the Platinum trophy for Going Commando last week, and got the Platinum trophy for Up Your Arsenal last night. All in all, probably over 70 hours of sweet Ratchet & Clank goodness over the past few weeks. And if Uncharted 4 wasn't coming out on Tuesday, I'd likely move on to A Crack in Time. Alas, that'll have to wait.

 

Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast

 

Why would you spend money and buy Uncharted 4 when you disliked the previous three? I would at least wait for a discount.

 

Spoiler

Kirkman confirmed that Season 3 will continue with Clementine's story

 

Thanks for the confirmation.

Spoiler

Unfortunately, that will undermine player choice at the end of season 2, which is a shame. In the end of season 1, it didn't matter, as all variations of the story concluded at the same time and place. The ending to season 2 has you either ending up north in the fortified refuge or back south in the mall, depending on who you join, meaning that the continued story has to pick one of them as canon to continue from and discard the other. There's also a third possible ending where you and Kenny just survive on your own in the wilderness. The fourth possibility, that Clementine and the baby go off on their own, I think can be discarded out of hand. But any of the other three can be chosen as the startoff point for season 3.

 

Dragon Age: Origins. This game is the definition of too much of a good thing. It's a fun game, and it sucked me into its immersive fantasy world. But the developers, in their desire to make the ultimate fantasy RPG, overstuffed the game so full of **** to do that it becomes a massive waste of time. It's just a grind to run back and forth from city to city delivering letters, to grind through hours of repetitive dungeon battles featuring the game's awful combat system, just to get at the good stuff. I liked the roleplaying, liked the worldbuilding a lot, didn't care for the art style (it's a bit too cartoony to really go with the dark, grim story they're trying to tell), liked the story . . . but the game needed a serious trim. What's fun for thirty hours is not fun for a hundred and ten. There are a lot of quibbles I could make (the darkspawn are terrible villains -- a mute army of off-brand orcs led by a mute dragon. Let the archdemon speak! It's an evil god, it shows up in your dreams, and yet they never even bother trying to develop it as a character so that it could actually be an interesting villain and not a giant McGuffin), but overall I liked what the game had to offer, and I look forward to the sequels (and the eighty-five billion expansions and add-on campaigns for DAO itself). But the developers needed some goddamn restraint.

 

Hah, you thought Origins had too much stuff? Inquisition is waiting in the wings all

 

I still want to hear their justification for having like six separate dungeons just to get through the Deep Roads. "Here's where we go to find Branka!" "OK, we found the place, it's over here!" "Alright, there's a clue, now we've got to go over here!" "Oh, we know for sure where she is now, we've got to go to this thaig!" "OK, it's just through this dungeon now . . . and out into the dungeon on the other side!"

**** YOU.

 

Yeah, it definitely leaned a bit excessive at times, but in general I thought it had about the right amount of content relative to the amount of time I was able to put into it. DA:I... not so much, that game's got some bad bloat, possibly to compensate for people complaining about 2 feeling threadbare. If/when DA4 rolls around I'm hoping they find a better balance.

 

Despite my Half-Life fandom, I'd never played Half-Life: Blue Shift pr Half-Life: Opposing Force. I got them on Steam recently and beat both, having just capped off Opposing Force a bit ago. I liked Opposing Force's variety of weapons a lot.

 

I thought they had a pretty good balance in the Brecilian Forest. It was the least interesting location, but the gameplay balance worked, where you had the camp, and then you went through two relatively limited forest maps that mixed combat and interaction with characters, and then about three dungeons that were relatively restrained in size. But the sprawling locations like Orzammar and its plethora of city maps plus eight huge dungeons jam-packed with enemies, or the Circle Tower with about four levels of endless enemy-packed rooms topped off by three hours in the damn Fade were just over the top.

In general, I just like my games to feel tight and trim, like they're not trying to waste my time with endless repetitive content. I'd rather have a tight twenty-hour game and get my money's worth by being able to come back to it and replay it over and over because it only represents a week or two's investment, than a sprawling sixty-hour game that I'll never want to replay again because it's an investment of a month at least and I'll get tired of it long before it's over.