[kiken]

Damn double-post!
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"Amidst utter chaos lies strict order."

[another god]

I bought Star Ocean 4 last night. Did not know this is where the fun battle engines went.
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interdimensional

[Rud31]

I think I'm finished with Fallout 3 and unless I really want to try for the rest of the trophies. The game screwed me out of 3 of the quest trophies. It didn't recognize two of them even though I completed them, and the third I was just starting out and had no energy and went to sleep in an empty bed and woke up and everyone hated me.

So back to Modern Warfare 2 online! And Uru (haven't started yet Cuba.)

Oh it's konami week. I should start Silent Hill:Homecoming.
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[CubaLibre]

[Rud31]

Man S.Viper, you are a more tolerant man than I. I give up on that Ecco the Dolphin bullshit. I spent 20 minutes trying to get that jump for the last crystal in the last stage of the first world. That was a confusing sentence! I might have the patience to try it again later, but then there's probably MORE of that bullshit later in the game. What if? That would make me waste my time with a game I don't like. Even if it bugs me I haven't beaten it. I need to stop. It's for my health. Just stop and sell it. I could be playing Shenmue or Jet Grind Radio or even Jet Set Radio Future (!) .

I think I'm getting obsessed with Trophies though.

Just about time for another backlog thread.

Oh yeah pretty sure BlazBlue is over my head. I played some more of it, and gah. Maybe some SBers are up for playing with me, maybe some SBers can convert me (talking ps3 version over here.)

! I play a lot of games! I started Suikoden 1 (for FKW). It's quaint! It's ugly and low budget. It's only like 12 hours right?
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[tacotaskforce]

[L]

I played Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, and am slightly intrigued at how it managed to crush the experience of playing Star Control II down into just 4 minutes, at the cost of reducing it to the facile mesmerism of Bejeweled.

[luvcraft]

heh, yeah, I guess it is somewhere between SC2 and Bejewelled, isn't it?

I played a lot of it soon after it became free.

I'm currently playing Epic Mafia, a nice online implementation of the social game Mafia / Werewolf. It's teaching me how to lie convincingly, which mostly involves keeping quiet until just the right moment. :)
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[Loki Laufeyson]

i've always liked puyo puyo, but never thought of it as being anywhere near as good as magical drop.

puyo puyo 7 has changed all that! i don't know why, but somehow i really love this game, and i've been playing it a ton
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[Rud31]

After like 12 years I give up on Jet Force Gemini. It's too cumbersome then and now, and trying to find the tribals and which character to use in which stage and remembering all that uggghhhhhh.
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[Mikey]

Jet Force Gemini was the first game I gave up on out of disgust, many many years ago.

[Broco]

[Loki Laufeyson]

puyo puyo 7 has the transformation rule, which is a slightly tweaked version of fever mode. i can't remember how different it is exactly, but it does feel different when you're playing.
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[wolf roboblitzer]

Tried to play Raw Danger again. Got an ending...and then immediately got shifted to another character. Apparently this game is a far greater time investment than first anticipated. Which would be fine if I hadn't (A) rented it and (B) already returned said rental but eh. I guess it's like that horrible-looking, expensive-looking PS3 game that's coming out next week, only while RD looks like it was made for chump change and is certainly goofy as hell at times. it still doesn't seem to embarrass itself quite so much. Want to find this game cheap, throw on my shelf, and never get around to "finishing" it (having the ability to >= "winning").

[Rud31]

Well Wolf you were about a third of the way through the game! I'd say each successive chapter is half the length of the last.
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[Talbain]

I can never seem to break a 7 chain in Puyo Puyo. I start getting freaked about the stack. Highest I've ever gotten was 14 I think, but it was definitely an accident. Any tips?
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[Lurky]

[P1d40n3]

I think it's safe to say that I am getting Mount and Blade. It's all clicking man; the combat, the party management, the tournaments.

Oh yeah. It's good.
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[Loki Laufeyson]

after about 15 minutes of the most generic rpg dialogue i'd ever seen with no end in sight, and not even a single second of actual gameplay, i deleted ragnarok ds.
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[Rud31]

FINAL FANTASY XIII!
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[Mikey]

The Conduit has not really impressed me in the few missions I've played so far. Maybe things pick up a little but so far it's corridors, boring enemies, and insubstantial-feeling gun play. None of the guns feel like they have any stopping power even if your enemies flinch. It's like Perfect Dark but a lot less interesting.

[kiken]

I've been playing ESPGaluda II in preparation for ESPGaluda II... Black Label.
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"Amidst utter chaos lies strict order."

[Renfrew]

I started Shenmue yesterday, started it again, and will start it again today.

I'm really enjoying the game. It really draws me in. I don't get tired of playing it. When I actually get further along in the game I'll provide more detailed, updated opinions.

On my first attempt, I accidentally pressed the wrong button on the kitten event, played for a few days, and realized it was going to die, so I started over. On my second try, I played to near the end of the second day, and the game froze. I'm about to try again.
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[luvcraft]

OK, duders. As the ONLY guy here in SB-land who likes Bioshock, I was obligated to play Bioshock 2, and I finished it last night.

Initially I was wary of it, since like nobody from the original team was involved in its creation (or so I've heard), but then it came out and I heard it was "more of the same", which actually sounds like a good thing to me, and someone gave me a $25 Gamestop gift card for my birthday, so I picked it up. I will refrain from going off on a 30-page Tim-style tirade about my experience at Gamestop. Suffice it to say I will make every effort to never set foot in a Gamestop again. Anyway, the game...

OMG this got really long. The short version is that Bioshock 2's gameplay is overall an improvement over the first game, but the story, presentation, pacing, and general "feel" of the game is nowhere near as good as the first game. Almost all of the horror and creepiness from the first game is gone, replaced by non-stop action. So, basically, this is Aliens to Bioshock 1's Alien. At first I was very put off by this, since I was expecting the same sort of moody horror that the first game had, but after a while I got used to it, but the negatives gradually outweighed the positive and I ended up being disappointed overall.

So, gameplay improvements! Hacking feels a whole lot more natural in this game; rather than stopping all of the action while you play Pipe Dream, you're instead just stopping a needle as it sweeps back and forth on a meter, a'la a golf game, while meanwhile the action is still going on around you, so if you're being attacked then you will continue to be attacked while you're trying to hack. This not only feels a lot more natural because it doesn't yank you out of the action like the hacking in the first game does, but the sort of "tuning in to the right frequency" feel of it makes more sense thematically than "rerouting mysterious liquid with little glass pipes". The whole "tuning" theme also lends itself well to the fact that you can now also get "hacking darts" which let you hack things from a distance. The camera is also much improved from the first game; whereas in Bioshock 1 you were taking pictures of enemies and getting points for framing and how active they were being, now the camera is a motion picture camera, and you start the camera running and then throw the widest variety of stuff at an enemy as you can before the camera stops recording, and are scored depending on how many different attacks you used, which is a lot cooler, more fun, and makes more sense. Also, there's unlimited film, which is very nice. Also also, there's actually a menu where you can track how much progress you've made researching each enemy type, which even tells you what upgrades you'll get for each milestone. That's something that the first game was sorely missing, as the only way to know when you'd completely researched an enemy type was that you'd get an achievement for it (on the first playthrough, that is. On subsequent playthroughs you'd just have to look for the tiny text that said "you've completed research on this subject" if you tried to take more pictures). Also nice is the fact that all of the upgrades have just been divided into "plasmids" and "tonics", so you just have a whole bunch of slots to plug tonics into rather than having tonics split up into "physical tonics" and "mental tonics" and a couple other types I can't remember. Upgradeable plasmids are also a great feature, especially the security bullseye upgrade that lets you summon bots whenever you want, and the rage upgrade that lets you befriend enemies. Running around with two bots and a big daddy on your side is pretty cool. The crossbow has been replaced by a harpoon gun, which is more fitting thematically, and is also pretty ridiculously strong, especially when you get the rocket ammo for it.

Gameplay changes that aren't really improvements but are just kind of "different" include adopting little sisters and guarding them while they collect ADAM.

The biggest gameplay change that actually detracts from the game is the fact that with the drill (which is your starting weapon) you can literally go toe-to-toe with a big daddy, and once you get the "freezing drill" upgrade you can do so without even getting hurt at all. This completely removes all of the strategy from fighting big daddies, which was a pretty big feature in the first game. This is mitigated a little bit by the fact that your drill consumes fuel, so you can only go toe-to-toe with a couple of big daddies before you have to go buy more fuel from a circus of values machine. The total removal of big daddies as a threat is also mitigated somewhat by the introduction of three new enemy types who are as strong as big daddies but also very fast and mobile.

The story / presentation / feel / pace is pretty lacking across the board. The two good things I can say about it are that you actually meet a couple of characters face-to-face, and have the option of killing them or leaving them alone (which, of course, effects the ending, but they're just sort of cowering in front of you so you can't actually interact with them at all), and there are a few places where splicers are just doing their own thing and not attacking you, and you can choose to either attack them or just leave them alone, which I thought was kind of a nice touch. Oh, also, the "experimental teleportation tonic" was cute.

Presentation problems, though... oh so many problems. First is the fact that the story is just really dumb and shallow, with a very unclear and half-baked underlying philosophy, and it literally reduces the complex underlying philosophy of the first game to an amusement park ride. It feels like the writer did his research by skimming through half of the Wikipedia article on Randian Objectivism. The story is that you're a prototype big daddy who died before the civil war, and has been resurrected at a vita-chamber 10 years later, and you have to go rescue a teenage girl who used to be your specific little sister from her mom who's a psychiatrist and is now kind of in control of a small part of rapture. That's it. No surprise twists, no questioning your own identity, just "go from point A to point B and rescue the princess". With a plot this simple, you'd think they could just explain it once and let it go, but every five fucking minutes you get a radio message from the psychiatrist mumbling some worn out new age drivel that has no bearing on anything, and then the next minute after that you get a psychic message from the little girl which just tells you to keep going, and then the next minute after THAT you get a message from Sinclair, this game's version of Atlas (who, in a surprise twist, does NOT turn out to be a bad guy but stays a good guy for the whole game until you have to kill him, making him one of the like three men with a southern accent in the history of American media who's not a bad guy) telling you to hurry up, and then the next minute after that you get ANOTHER message from Sinclair telling you again to hurry up, and reminding you where the next checkpoint is despite the fact that you're already moving toward it, AND there's a giant gold arrow at the top of the screen pointing toward it, AND the checkpoint itself is glowing gold and making windchime noises JUST IN CASE you'd forgotten what it was. Oh, and then after he's done talking the psychiatrist comes back on again and the cycle repeats. To spice things up, there are five different points in the game where YET ANOTHER person is ALSO constantly talking to you on the radio. This game NEVER fucking shuts up, but it also never has anything to say. I had to restart about half of the tape recorder messages in the game because halfway through listening to it someone would cut in to tell me about one-ness or remind me to reload my gun. Another problem is that the levels are linear; there's no going back to previous areas to get tape recorders, or plasmids, or little sisters you might've missed. Combined with the fact that you literally take a train from level to level, the game really feels like it's... well, you know what I mean. Despite being so linear, however, the pacing of this game feels terrible, whereas I loved the pacing of the first game. I'm not quite sure what the difference is, but this game really makes me want to pay close attention to pacing in games and try to quantize it, so I can figure out how to avoid all the pacing problems that this game has. Part of it might be the fact that, as I said before, you can just go toe-to-toe with big daddies and everything else in the game, so especially if you already have two bots and a big daddy or other major enemy on your side there's no reason to be cautious, so you can just plow on through wherever the gold arrow points you. By the time I got to the last level, I was so bored that I just ran through the whole climax in about 15 minutes, catching glimpses out of the corner of my eye of spooooky set pieces that must've taken someone a week to design, but which the pacing of the game made me NOT want to stop to look at.

Finally, there were several major bugs I ran into that surely should have been caught in playtesting. The worst two were a boss fight where the boss accidentally got locked outside of the bossfight room, so I couldn't fight him and thus couldn't get out of the room and had to restore a previous save (which, fortunately, wasn't so bad because I was playing with vita-chambers off so I was saving fairly frequently), and the second-to-the-last level where the game apparently lost track of how many little sisters had been spawned and failed to spawn the third little sister for the level, preventing me from getting all of the little sisters. I might be able to fix that by going back to a previous save and then saving again in a particular spot, but I was too annoyed by that glaring bug on top of getting bored of the game in general to try to fix it right then.

I also played a couple hours of the multiplayer, which had a neat intro, but was pretty dumb once I actually got into it (the fact that I was waiting in the lobby for about 10 minutes before enough people actually showed up to start a match pretty much says it all).

So... overall, there are a few neat improvements that could have made the first game more fun (the changes to hacking and the camera, and meeting some characters face-to-face), there are a few things that are kind of fun but which I think hinder the game's mood and pacing (summoning bots and recruiting enemies), and everything else kind of sucks.

[Toto]

pretty much sounds like the first game but without the pretension. just the barebones bullshit that is bioshock.

[luvcraft]

"barebones bioshock bullshit" is my favorite unreleased Fats Waller song.
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[Talbain]

I played Coloris for about 30 minutes today. It was pretty rad. I was a bit confused, and still am, about what to do, but I definitely enjoy the block-matching concept. The grey block stuff starts intruding pretty fast though (they impede progress if they start spawning, so the idea is to keep up a pace). I suppose if the volume were up then there may have been more cues that I simply wasn't aware of.
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[ghostribbon]

[Ghost Dinosaur]

I tried out the Fallen Earth MMO Free 10-Day Trial yesterday, because I might just be willing to play anything involving the words "post-apocalypse" and "free." As expected it is pretty awful -- I didn't even make it out of the tutorial zone before giving up.

[luvcraft]

[Mikey]

[Zebadayus]

Playin' 3rd Strike a lot.

[Talbain]

I want someone to explain to me how to get something higher than a B on any given fight in 3rd Strike.

Also, I can get to level 3 in Mars Matrix 1cc. :D

I have no idea why I'm proud about this.
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[elvis.shrugged]

Today I played through the Expert mode in the original Pilotwings, after unlocking it last night. I cruised right through it--I was surprised! I basically abused the bonus levels (the hang glider and skydiving ones) to get around doing well on the biplane (which I SUCK at landing with). Still, getting to the bonus levels requires quite a bit of skill, so I'm proud of myself. What a great game. I like it just as much as Pilotwings 64.
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[Mikey]

I actually started to play GRIN's remake of Bionic Commando and you know what? It's not so bad! I really expected it to be total shit but I'm having a pretty good time with it. Best bargain-bin purchase I've made in a while.

[Mikey]

[Talbain]

Decided to write a little piece on Coloris.

Hum.

Maybe I'll play Clash of Heroes some more today.
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[luvcraft]

[Talbain]

Well, here's what I thought.

Hope you enjoy it. I'll be sure to read your entries on Bit Generations. I think I've only played 2 or 3 of them, despite having had them on my DS forever.

edit: Interesting reviews. Laughed a bit at the Boundish jokes. :) Liked the reviews of Orbitals and Coloris, I definitely agree about the colors being far too close for a normal human eye to deal with realistically. I remember playing Orbitals, that game's a nice little slice of movement. The sound is fun too, particularly when you're still a small planet and everything pulls you towards death. Sort of reminds me of what a psychedelic beach might sound like, if the waves were replaced with high, rounded chiptunes.
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[ionustron]

An evening with Shining Force II.

I love this game, but ugg. It's not the game itself, but rather the tragic ending. Perhaps it's a good ending, but seeing that when you're a kid watching your brother dump countless hours into it start to finish, cheering him on, I can't help but always be reminded of how hollow it feels after you've won, and the game knows it. If I were to play this treating it as a tragedy, well, I can't because the game is just too bright. One of the great trolls of the sixteen bit era, and it's why I've never been able to complete it all this time though I plug away at my save file every year or so.

[Mikey]