Gaming What was the last videogame you beat?

Tekken 7

 

MGS2 is insane, but ingenious. I feel like it's getting better as it ages!

I finished Resident Evil: Code Veronica X HD on Thursday, I hadn't played it in years and abandoned my Xbox 360 playthrough in 2012. There's some amazing symbolism with the dragonfly and the Ashford twins, but the puzzles are a little bit over-complicated and and 3D environments/models haven't aged as well as the pre-rendered ones in the other classic RE games (this could be my nostalgia at work though).

I love Steve's voice acting though - "Father ... fatherrrrrrr!" - and the fact he keeps screwing up. Claire really should have just locked him in a safe room while she found them a way out.

 

Horizon Zero Dawn

Brilliant game-world, incredible robo-enemies, lousy main quest gameplay but excellent story-telling.

 

Just finished episode 5: What's New, Beelzebub?, and with that the entirety of Sam & Max: Season 2 - Beyond Time and Space. In this episode, it turns out that the subway station to hell has always been underneath Sam & Max's city block. Our two detectives must find a token to board the Soul Train to Hell LLC (it turns out that Hell is a limited liability company. Cuts down on legal expenses).

At times when playing each of the episodes, I felt like I was playing just to finish it, but considering I originally paid only £3 for the entire season, it was well worth it. The writing was never hilarious, and I never found Max as funny as the writers seem to think he is, but it often put a smile on my face, or gave me the odd chuckle now and again. The most funny jokes, I found, were the ones that poke fun at elements of pop culture, while the ones that were rooted in the fiction were very hit and miss.

I certainly don't regret having played it, but I can honestly say that I don't have any desire to play any more of the franchise either. I don't know how faithful these episodic series are to LucasArts' old output, but if what I just played is a representation of the overall library, then these games are simply not for me. Which is slightly worrying and potentially disappointing, because I had already bought the Monkey Island special edition collection a long time ago, and the Tales From Monkey Island episodic sequel series, on the assumption that these are instant classics that I implicitly am going to love.

 

I finished the third episode of Telltale's Guardians of the Galaxy last week and was utterly bored. I don't love the Guardians team as much as most people seem to, and I don't feel like much of consequence has happened in this season so far.

 

My journey through the mainline Mario games continues, and boy oh boy do I hope this was the low point. Super Mario Bros. 2 might actually be the worst game I've ever seen through to completion. I don't think I ever found myself having a good time once. There's absolutely nothing I enjoy about it. The enemies are boring, the level design is dull and incessantly cheap, music is so-so, and the physics are horrendous. I played as Mario the entire time, so maybe I would've had a better experience with Luigi or Peach, but that's hardly a worthy defense.

Fortunately the next title in the series is one of my favorite games of all time, so there's that to look forward to. Not sure if there's another franchise in gaming that can claim one of the worst games ever made, followed immediately by one of the best. And what follows SMB3, well, is pure gaming perfection. So things are certainly looking up.

 

Uncharted: Lost Legacy. It was great

 

You probably already know this, but this was only re-skinned as a Mario game in the West, released domestically as Doki Doki Panic. They simply changed the character sprites for the Western release and named it SMB. 2. In Japan, Super Mario Bros. 2 was a continuation of SMB in the same art style as the first game, with even more challenging levels. It was later released in the West under the title Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, as part of the Super Mario All-Stars re-release collection for the SNES.

 

The Walking Dead: Michonne
Season 3 was not ported to PS3, so I played this to hold me over until I get a PS4. For £3, I couldn't resist. I'm wondering whether my decisions from seasons 1 and 2 will carry over to season 3 when I play it on a new system.

From what I can tell, the story of Michonne can develop in quite divergent directions depending on your choices. I'm torn on whether to delete it or to make another play through to see what I can change in a second session. I finished it all in one sitting today, which is unlike what I normally do with games in the TWD series, but this narrative had less infighting than the main series, so it wasn't as emotionally draining. I liked my time with it overall, and liked that it was a shorter narrative with a quicker, less puzzle-centric gameplay style. But at the same time, it didn't put as intimate an emotional impact on me as the main series. Both styles have their advantages, IMO, but ultimately, I find the main series more satisfying.

I don't know if a continuation of this narrative is planned, but I felt that the story had a natural ending where the game concluded. In truth, I'm also not as emotionally invested in her character as I am Clementine's, and would likely not pursue any sequel seasons.

3/5

 

Just beat the first episode of Life is Strange: Before The Storm. It felt a little shorter than any of the episodes of the first game, but was still pretty good. I'm certainly looking forward to the next episode when it's released.

 

Crysis
I had already finished this once last year on the Delta difficulty, which is the hardest in the game, but your gameplay style naturally becomes more cautious and stealth-oriented when playing on such a punishing difficulty, so I wanted to try it again on the easiest difficulty to be more playful with the arsenal of superhuman abilities your character has at his disposal. Being that I had already gotten the hardest Trophies of the game by default through my first playthrough, it also became a nice opportunity to breeze through the campaign to complete the remaining trivial ones. Both approaches have their own appeal. The game offers much more immediate fun on the easiest difficulties, where you can truly play around with the suite of abilities, vehicles and weapons you have on hand, and try different approaches to tackle an enemy compound each time. On the hardest difficulties, you will naturally gravitate towards stealth whenever possible to survive. But the acute sense of danger also makes crossing an area undetected, or clearing an enemy stronghold silently that much more satisfying.

 

Well, I did end up replaying it for a second session to see what I could change with a few different decisions in key areas. And as before, I did it all in one sitting. I will put the rest behind spoiler tags for those who might want to play it.

Spoiler

It turns out that not a lot changes. The writers excellently craft events and the behaviours of the other characters to manipulate you into making expected decisions, moving the plot in their desired direction, thus expertly giving you the illusion of choice, to the point that you blame yourself for things that the game wouldn't have let you do differently anyway. If you choose the less obvious options, other characters will steer the narrative back toward the planned outcome, so that events will more or less play out exactly the same, except for a few key details that you can change here and there. But these details in the end only affect things like, let's say, the number of survivors you have left at the end of the game, not the overall direction of the plot, which always remains constant. Events inevitably play out the same way. If you don't decide what the game wants you to decide, then other non-playable characters will simply override your decision.

I'm not sure whether to praise the game's deceptive writing or criticise its poor design. On the one hand, this is excellent writing if you only plan to play it once and live with whatever choices you made. Once you've replayed it, you know that events can not transpire any other way, yet I felt personally responsible for having escalated a confrontation on my first playthrough. On the other hand, it's poor game design if you plan to play it several times to see what you can change.

Getting into the story itself, I'm still not clear about the details of the player characters' abandonment of her children in the past. Did she have to leave the children with their father because of work on that fateful day? Was she a nurse or a physician? Or did she leave them due to divorce and handing over custody to the father? Dialogue during flashbacks hints at both of these. Regardless, I don't see how she could be culpable for it. She blames herself directly, as if she ran away due to cowardice. But choosing the right options during flashbacks reveals that she was not at home at the time of the attacks, and her leaving was before the outbreak. I get the impression that she blames herself for walking away from the marriage and the custody of the children, feeling that if she had not given up in life and walked away, she would have been with the children that day. But that is conjecture on my part, and leads to my main complaint with the story and the game:

You cannot resolve Michonne's psychological trauma from the past without playing the dialogue options during the flashbacks right. You have to choose the truthful answer, and not lie to yourself to try to change the past, in order to help the player character accept what has happened and move on. If you fail at this, the game will end with Michonne still unable to put the past behind her, and her hallucinations continue in the epilogue. But the game expects us to do this with incomplete information. It wants both to be an in medias res revelation of what really happened in the past, as well as let us take part in her acceptance of it, which in my opinion are two conflicting goals that cannot be resolved, unless you as the player have a remarkable amount of intuition. Worse still is that if you choose to open the door rather than answer the phone during a key flashback sequence, crucial information about the past that you will need later is kept from you, and you are unwittingly helping her rewrite her memory of the past.

So, in short: I am expected, in the role of her, to stop lying to myself, but since I as the player of the game still don't know her past, I don't know which answers are lies and am unable to help her resolve her trauma. It also seems to require a flawless sequence of choosing the right dialogue options during the final pivotal scene in which she confronts her past. A more forgiving final dialogue tree that allows you to reel yourself back in with a couple of wrong answers would be preferable. As is, the game withholds the character's emotional resolution from the player without a flawless run, and leaves the story feeling immensely unsatisfying if you don't get it right.

 

Dear Esther

It was interesting game, the landscapes were nice, especially the caves. The story was kept very ambiguous and symbolic, which I appreciated, leading to a variety of interpretations.

I think The Chinese Room's game Everybody's Gobe to the Rapture was a bit more successful, capturing a very mundane domestic drama and setting juxtaposed with an intriguing sci-fi premise. Esther was still good, but felt a little too detached for my liking, the remote island not being as familiar a setting as a quaint English village and countryside (which is basically where I live )

 

Beat Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords for the first time with the restored content mod. It didn't change as much as I thought it might, but it did add enough to polish the game experience and help show off just how great the game's writing is. Such a brilliant game. I've got a couple mechanical quibbles with it and I still wish all the planets were a little livelier, but they're not ultimately that significant as complaints in the face of just what a great game it is.

 

I finally finished Horizon Zero Dawn. What a fantastic game! The narrative wasn't as strong as I would've liked, but the journey was. It constantly had the feeling of a great game. All of the elements were there. The world looked absolutely stunning and was a lot of fun to explore. The visuals were nearly perfect, including the faces. The main character, Aloy, was awesome. I loved seeing her develop throughout the entire game. Sadly, none of the other characters stood out that much.

The gameplay was incredible, and had the best combat system ever made. That's no exaduration. The main quests and side quests were great. The music was great. Everything about the game was fresh and exciting. For a new company, I am absolutely blown away. They're going to be doing some big things in the future. 9/10.

 

They're not a new company. They're responsible for the Killzone series, which has been going since 2004.

 

I finished Uncharted 1 today. It only took me two sittings, but I loved it! Awesome characters. The journey was great. The music stood out as well. 8.5/10.

 

You know their first DLC for it, The Frozen Wilds, is due start of November?

 

Yeah. I'll definitely be getting that!

 

Final Fantasy 15 & Destiny 2.

 

I recently completed Mass Effect Andromeda. I finished the game with mixed feelings. As much as I enjoyed the first three instalments, Andromeda didn't strike the same note. The game world didn't feel as immersive and populated. Nor did the storyline draw me in.

There were some positives. The combat was fun and some of the dialogue with the team members was well written. I ended up completing almost all of the optional side missions, so I must have enjoyed it to some extent.

 

Portal 2 it was amazing.

 

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. Okay, so maybe it wasn't quite as bad as I may have intimated in the other thread. My overall feeling about the game is a positive one, but the first half is much more fun than the back half. The challenges it introduces in the later stages make the game less fun and more of a chore, and the same goes for the environmental puzzles. But I did manage to 100% the entire thing, including finding all the collectibles and completing all the challenges, so take that as you will. Certainly not a killer app for the Switch, but it is a pleasant surprise and a solid addition to the system's burgeoning library.

 

Been a while since I posted, played 3 games since:

Dear Esther: This was a walking sim, it was good, but a bit odd. The music was lovely, it was composed by Jessica Curry, she does very nice music. The game itself was based a lot on player interpretation.

The Witness: A bit disappointing, there was minimal to no story! The puzzles were great and the area was beautiful, the scenery was just lovely, but it felt like the game got a bit repetitive.

Destiny 2. It was very enjoyable, the story had more depth than the first game, before all the DLCs. I liked the new subclass, it was fun to have a different super to play with. Definately recommend, it is, overall, an improvement on the first.

 

The one and only story mission in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. I thought it would be easier than this. People apparently finish this in five minutes without firing a single shot. I finished it rather clumsily over three hours of trial and error and 27 checkpoint reloads! I literally cannot imagine how anyone could have completed it without being seen once. I suppose the way to do it is to find the exact limits of the enemy AI and detection range and, for lack of a better description, play it like a game. Or, in other words, break the immersion in the game's virtual world. In any event, I have now unlocked the side missions.