[Family Computer]

I gave up on Uncharted 3 today. I was stuck at one of Naughty Dog's patented endless shooting gallery parts and kept dying. It's the part where you need to kill 50,000 pirates who have an endless amount of grenades and rocket launcher ammo, plus access to two turrets. I even died on easy because I kept getting killed by a grenade when I was trying to fist fight some dude. I ejected the game from my PS3 and threw it across the room.
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3DS Friendcode: 2337-3480-4823
PSN: play2forget
This summer, become Buried In Games.

[boojiboy7]

[CubaLibre]

[John Mc.]

I was worried about that actually! :O

I got out the GameCube and played through Pikmin, which I had never done for more than a few minutes in the past. All said, it was sublime. What a wonderful, whimsical game (albeit where guys get eaten). I have never found squad management to ever work, yet here in 2001 Nintnedo got as close as anyone! Glad I have 2 in the queue as well.

Now I'm playing P.N.03, and I actually beat the first mission. It doesn't sound like much, but that's thhw farthest I've ever gotten!

[Mikey]

Pikmin 2 sort of loses something from not having the time limit, but at the same time gains something from not having it. It's hard to call one game or the other better, IMO.

[username]

Pikmin 2 is a lot more combat focused to IMO the detriment of the overall experience, but if you thought it'd be great to take an army of Pikmin through a randomly generated series of caves then it might just be your thing.
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http://www.audioatrocities.com/games/castlevania-sotn/clip1.mp3

[notbov]

I grabbed Elder Scrolls Online off of the Steam sale because I hate myself

opinion so far: it's better than terrible; building your character is confusing, exciting, possibly broken and complex in both the good and bad ways

quite possibly the #1 MMO for kleptomaniacs

like a bizzarro-universe version of SWTOR
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[Mikey]

I died in a pretty crappy QTE in Resident Evil 6 about 10 minutes into the game, and that was enough for me. Maybe I'll try that new one that's coming out in a few months, looks like they might have rediscovered what was good about those games. Or maybe I should try The Evil Within?

The Cave does the Lost Vikings thing but in the trappings of an adventure game. What I discovered in about 45 minutes of play was that this means there's almost always going to be three times as much tedious back-tracking. Pass.

My PS3 backlog is almost complete.

In PC gaming:

Trine does the Lost Vikings thing much more successfully but is also a bit janky sometimes. I'm going to try out the sequel next.

Monster Loves You! is a cute, short CYOA-style game. There are lots of endings to get. I got three of them in the space of an hour or two. I'm not even sure how to go about getting some of them, but maybe I'll give that a try at a later date.

[The Blueberry Hill]

[notbov]

Felix and 8128 will vouch for me when I say that the only proper way to play Trine is in multiplayer with the hero limit turned off and everyone is making up bullshit solutions to puzzles like grapple hooking onto a box that's flying across a chasm

or just tons of boxes everywhere

god bless physics
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[The King]

I picked up a NEOGEO CD. It came with 2 controllers, one working, one busted.

I've been playing disassemble a NEOGEO CD gamepad. It's probably the best NEOGEO CD game.
The stick is hitting the switch, the wires going out to the cable look fine. I can't repair it. :(
A shame. That clickstick is a thing of beauty.

The working controller might be my new favorite 2D controller; I guess I should get a NEOGEO to USB converter.
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[Mikey]

[Felix]

[Talbain]

Final Fantasy XIII is the prettiest "Mash A" simulator I've ever played.
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[Drem]

The Evil Within keeps turning the safe space into an unsafe space. I don't like that. :(

[Mr. Mechanical]

Finished my second run through Mass Effect and still didn't quite reach level 60. Oh well I'm moving on to the second game now anyway.

Also, Lego Marvel Super Heroes is great but I keep occasionally running up against spots in the story missions where I literally cannot figure out what to do to move forward and I get stuck in one spot for like twenty minutes until I look up what I'm supposed to do. Which is usually something along the lines of "stand on this switch that you didn't realize was a switch but was staring you in the face the whole time".

I can't tell if it's just that the last Lego game I played was Lego Star Wars II and I haven't kept up with the way the games have evolved since then design-wise or if it's just poorly designed in general.

Either way exploring the hub world of Lego Manhattan is great and totally worth whatever hiccups the story mode presents.
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[Talbain]

[Mr. Mechanical]

I remember everyone saying FFXIII is really linear for about 30 hours and then it opens up a bit near the end? I haven't played it but I kind of want to just for the spectacle of it. I wouldn't feel guilty about cheating my way through the battles either.

Also, Mass Effect 2 is so good. I played it a little bit on Steam a few years ago but playing it now right after the first one... It's just wow. The difference is night and day, it's like this is the game where Bioware started delivering on the promise of the first game.

So many little details I had forgotten about the game. Like the scanning/probing of planets you discover or how whenever you enter a system you fly a little ship around to each spot you want to visit, and you have to restock on fuel and probes at little refueling stations.

I've got to assemble my team and investigate the collectors but for now I'm just dicking around at the first city, the lawless space colony Omega. Seeing my Shepard from the first game, that I spent so much time with, wandering around in this newer, better game just feels so... I don't know. It's kind of cool. I like it. I like it a lot.

I'm really nerding out over here.
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[Ronnoc]

If you're not playing FFXIII for the combat, don't.

[Rud31]

[Talbain]

I think I'm playing FFXIII for the scenery? It has some really pretty landscapes.
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[SuperWes]

[Adilegian]

Ground Zeroes feels like a completely different game on PS4. I'm having a lot more fun with it this time around.
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

admidst this and that and the other thing, I finally returned to and finished Dig-n-Rig, which I had previously abandoned after about three layers down and then moving up. It's an enjoyable little experience, a quality production, but I have to admit, the ambiguity of the narrative left me a bit disappointed by the one-size-fits-all ending.

So, like our ancestors did before us, I crafted an ending of my own design:



Aside from the imagery of cascading minerals that appears, Tetris-like, when I close my eyes....I'm left feeling a bit peckish. The fluid dynamics, minor as they are, make me wonderful what I've been missing in the dozens of indie games that have utilized such physics in the past decade. The ability to freely place architecture that directly impacts gameplay - including enemy movement - is also something I feel I need to investigate further. Oh well.

I must admit, there's also something enticing about the idea of a game set after the average Dig-n-Rig playthrough. In the future, the mad ambitions of one scientist have left a world devastated. Humanity has suffered from the disruption and collapse of much of the planet's surface, as well as the long and destructive war with the displaced mole civilization. Large sections of the crust and mantle have been replaced with a BLAME-esque superstructure of abandoned platforms, ladders, conveyor belts and mineral scoops. The moon and stars themselves have been obliterated, eliminating all natural illumination during the treacherous night. Is there any hope for recovery? Perhaps it lies with an ancient, derelict machine, discovered by desperate scavengers....the same machine that brought about the great catastrophe....


I've also been reading too much Dwarf Fortress stuff. I'm usually able to resist urges to play the game (since I know it will only frustrate me), but I want to use the embark anywhere mod to settle on top of a big human town area.

[evnvnv]

Having been on kind of a JRPG kick lately, I've been playing through Breath of Fire 2 for some reason. It's not a very good game? It's nice to play things like this to remind yourself how good games like Chrono Trigger and FF6 actually are. Still, there are things to like about it, such as the idiosyncratic translation (which I understand is updated at least a little bit in the GBA version?) and the big chunky sprites. The plot is the first example of the "to win you have to kill god" plot that I recall seeing as a kid, even though I never made it more than 10 minutes or so into the game in the past. But even though that soon became a cliche, it's still jarring and kind of sensational to see it in what is otherwise basically a Saturday morning cartoon, which appears to have been written by someone whose only exposure to English is other Saturday morning cartoons.

One thing that has been kind of unexpected is just how many ways there are to screw up once you get to the last few hours of the game. I've been trying to avoid FAQs as much as possible when playing these games, but at a certain point the completionist in me kicks in and I have to see whether or not I'm missing anything. I haven't quite finished it yet, but apparently the game has several endings and most of them hinge on decisions whose significance is not immediately obvious. Not to mention, one of the subplots in the game involves you recruiting villagers from around the world to join a village that you are constructing. As the rule for this sort of game is typically to say "Yes" to everything, I didn't consider that eventually my village would run out of houses. So now I have to deal with this geezer who only tells me shitty riddles with no apparent reward, while the guy who can apparently teach me many powerful spells is left to wander around in a cave homelessly until I save the world, I guess. (To make matters worse, if you are playing the game on an SNES you can't have multiple save files per play-through, so even if you did know a critical decision was coming up, there's no way to see the results of the other options without starting the game over from the beginning.) There is something about how "features" like this simulate the real-world terror of the unfailing march of time and the persistence of fate that I find both appealing and disgusting.

Like a lot of other games of this type, outside of the battle system most of the "difficulty" comes from not always being able to figure out where you are supposed to go to trigger the next step forward in the plot. I can never decide whether to attribute this to bad game design, poor translation, or both, but sometimes it seems like the clues are just a little too cryptic to make sense of. (Let's call it "Castlevania II Syndrome.") Occasionally in this one they are actually wrong--towards the end of the game you have to track down a particular character to open up the last dungeon, and the "clue" that you are given is blatantly incorrect. Not to mention this happens after you've been stripped of your ability to fly around the map freely, so if you haven't completed the side-quest to unlock another way to do that it ends up seeming like a cheap way to add several hours of wandering the map to the play time (though you do have a warp spell that helps you move between different cities, and a really weird way of navigating the high seas).

After all this, though, I do still like this game. I wish it was as easy to explain why as it is to explain all of the stuff that's wrong with it. I'm debating whether or not to figure out how to play BoF III and IV, it seems like they are improvements over this one in many ways.
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The text will not live forever. The cup are small

[Talbain]

Breath of Fire III is quite a relaxing game by comparison to most of the other Breath of Fire games but has some really interesting ideas (particularly the desert section). It has an interesting fishing minigame, a lot of minigames generally and they all are quite different. None of them are particularly challenging but I think that might be why Breath of Fire III is a relaxing jRPG. It's a blue skies kind of game. Haven't played it in a long time but I did go back to it a few years ago and still enjoyed what it had to offer, whereas I couldn't really get into Breath of Fire II again. The SNES era of jRPG generally was quite a bit more difficult than the PSX-era jRPG, aside perhaps from games like Valkyrie Profile whose difficulty largely came from the game being obtuse about objectives. PSX-era jRPGs also come across as being a lot more experimental, tending to hit and miss with audiences and testing everything from graphic styles to fundamental mechanics a lot more (see Legend of Mana or Chrono Cross).
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[The Blueberry Hill]

Whenever I read things about BOF2 it always sounds like a different game to the one I played, and to the one I've read about other times, and that's pretty alright.

[The Blueberry Hill]

[The Blueberry Hill]

I don't really want to play through all the episodes again when it's done because I like the choices I made and want to stick by them.

[Rud31]

I think BoF3 and 4 are on US-PSN.
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My Hawt Blog Vita Games

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[evnvnv]

[Rud31]

Far Cry 4 is eating away at my soul. This is me rubbing my face in Ubisoft game formula. Hopefully should cure me me from playing another game in the Ubi brand for a few years.

The late game moral choices are hilarious. You're supposed to choose who will rule the country even though you have single handedly done everything. You have been the sole force. But you better decide between potentially bad and portentously evil.
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My Hawt Blog Vita Games

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[John Mc.]

Played through Geist because why not?

This game is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Possessing dog food, weaponizing soda and dogs, and terrorrizing people with parrots and microbes. It just keeps getting more and more riduculous as you go. The penultimate boss is an old man who flies around in a wheelchair and shoots rockets at you while the denizens of hell try to draw you into his line of fire. Then, you kill Satan in a Rez battle.

It's not a very good game mechanicallly. But, it is clever, fun and surprising most of the time. It has a Deadly Premonition feel to it, in that this was probably meant to be scary, but instead is a riot. This is special!

I have now moved to Viewtiful Joe. I can't get past the helicopter. Time to man up!

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Deets]

[Wall of Beef]

Xeodrifter for 3DS

Fairly basic Metroid clone. Spreads out gun-strength power ups and health upgrades enough to keep some mild challenge. Its a brief experience and the enemy variety is small. Nice pixel art environments and music throughout - heavy GBA feel to the game. I am trying to 100% the game now and its a bit annoying trying to find the last 3 health power ups because I am now grinding along every wall in the game looking for a hidden panel because there is nothing else to suggest where they could be hidden.

It feels like Renegade Kid cranked this out quickly to drum up funds for some projects that stalled out. Which is fine, its a basic game model to do that with.
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[evnvnv]

[Mikey]

I think it might partly be down to eye candy and slightly better writing but I'm enjoying Trine 2 much more than its predecessor.

[allensmithee]

[jodeaux]

[Deets]