Games Beaten 2018

[pierrot]

Super Mario Sunshine is, for me, for the Mario IP what Majora's Mask is for Zelda. It's that one game in the series that it seems like most people love but that I just detest. I've got a couple of friends who also didn't enjoy Sunshine, but the general consensus seems to be that this game is fantastic, and I just don't see it.

Nah, people have always hated those games, along with Wind Waker. It's just that over time, people like me who bitch about most of the other games in those series have worn down Nintendo fans who will basically support anything in deference to the brand. There are people who really like those three games--I happen to be one of them--but it's a relatively vocal minority, and always has been.

My most immediate issue with Super Mario Sunshine is that it just feels awkward. Like, maybe it shouldn't, but so many things about this game make me just uncomfortable. Mario's short sleeves. Peach in a short sleeve dress. The fact that Peach, Toadsworth, Bowser, and Bowser Jr all have fully voice acted dialogue. Like, maybe I'm just a crotchety old man who's stuck in his ways, but that stuff just made my skin crawl.

That does seem like kind of an odd criticism. The voices made so little impact on me, I don't even remember them. Aren't there characters other than Mario voiced in Galaxy, though? Mario 64 opens the game with voices for Mario and Peach--. (In the English version, anyway.)

The game's mechanics themselves and the setting aren't bad, but the whole thing just felt a little off, and I think that mostly stems from FLUDD. It was a cool gimmick for a while, but it started to feel like it took the emphasis off of the platforming somewhat to focus on that gimmick.

I find Mario games to be too boring without gimmicks like FLUDD, personally. I've never cared for the Mario brand of platforming (it never feels good to me). So having FLUDD to gloss over my typical issues makes stages actually feel fun to me. Not to mention the real variety of gameplay it affords the whole game.

I really tried to like Super Mario Sunshine. I played it years ago and hated it, so I let some time pass before trying it again because I really WANTED to like it. I wanted to say "Wow, I was crazy years ago! This game is great!" But it's not.

Not really a surprise, but oh well. I guess you're just a normal person, Elkin.

[elricorico]

1. Captain Toad Treasure Tracker (WiiU)
2. Minecraft (Xbox360)
3. Phantasy Star (SMS)

4. Theatrhythm Final Fantasy Curtain Call (3DS)

I've been playing this a half hour at a time for a few weeks. I'm a fan of rhythm games and I have a lot of nostalgia for the music of Final Fantasy (at least the first 10 games or so). Seems like a match made in heaven. You pick a team of four characters from the series and just start playing through songs to score points. Some songs are structured as battles, some are structured as travel, and a few play over a background of scenes from the original game. I feel that overall this could work as a phone or tablet game just about as well as it works on the 3DS.

I must say that I enjoy a lot about this game: there is a vast selection of music to choose from, a lot of characters to unlock, collectables to gather and quests of varying difficulties to play through. I have one glaring dislike, and that is the art style. The overly simple looking characters and enemies are really not my cup of tea. There could be so many better styles to choose from that I could have enjoyed, but what they did choose just plain annoyed me.

After enough playing you reach a score threshold which leads you to a "final boss" type stage. Beating that unlocks a special character and rolls the games credits. There isn't really a story here, but the game really doesn't need it.

This is a fun game, and I keep going back to play a stage or three as there are still plenty of unlockable and collectables. The music brings back fond memories and the gameplay is good enough to get me past the lame art style.

[Markies]

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2018!
*Denotes Replay For Completion*

1. The Granstream Saga (PS1)
2. Perfect Dark (N64)
*3. Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete (PS1)*
4. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (XBOX)
5. Donkey Kong Country (SNES)
*6. Pikmin (GCN)*
*7. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time (N64)*
8. Shining Force II (GEN)
*9. X-Men Vs. Street Fighter (PS1)*
*10. Mafia (XBOX)*
11. James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire (GCN)
12. ChuChu Rocket! (SDC)
*13. Super Metroid (SNES)*
14. Final Fantasy II (NES)
15. Devil May Cry (PS2)
16. Mega Man: The Wily Wars (GEN)
17. Secret of Evermore (SNES)
18. Test Drive: Eve of Destruction (PS2)
19. Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour (GCN)
*20. Paper Mario (N64)*
21. Grandia II (SDC)
22. Ghostbusters: The Video Game (PS2)



I beat Ghostbusters: The Video Game on the Sony Playstation 2 this evening!

A very good friend of mine is a huge fan of the Ghostbusters movies. He has seen them countless times, owns all the video games and even owns a Ghostbusters Pinball machine. Several years ago, he got the PS2 version of the game that came out in 2008. Well, a few years went by, he eventually got a Wii and the Wii version of the game as well. With no need to own the PS2 version of the game, he offered to sell it to me and so I bought. The game then sat on my shelf for several more years until I finally decided to play it this year.

Personally, I enjoyed the Ghostbusters movie, but I have only seen them a few times. The games were terrible and I didn't have much of a fandom for them. So, I didn't have much expectations going into the game though I did hear that the game is basically the third movie. With that in mind, the voice acting is really good. Winston, I think, puts in the best performance compared to the others as Peter just sounds tired. Ray and Egon get most of the lines, which makes sense as they wrote the entire game. The story is good, but it retreads old ground way too often. The first half of the game is going through areas from the first two movies. It's great fighting the Marshmallow Man, but it has been done. The combat feels right as it is the first Ghostbusters game to really nail using a Proton Pack.

However, the combat gets really old, especially in the late game when you are swarmed with enemies. Your pack always overheats and it is very hard to find the enemy you want when it is too crowded. The mini-game of smashing the ghost is fun at first, but that also gets old. However, that is nothing compared to the glitches and bugs throughout the entire game. At least 10 times, the game would randomly freeze and I would have to reset. This happened during cutscenes and action scenes and end of chapters when I got to redo the entire chapter. Your friends have some help, but they are mostly useless.

Overall, for an eight hour game, Ghostbusters The Video Game is about two hours too long. The last part of the game becomes too much for the combat and the amount of collecting and backtracking really just pads the experience. I know that we would have never gotten a movie, but I wish they did. This feels like a too long of a movie and a padded game. It's not bad, but it does fall apart too much at the end.

[MrPopo]

1. Ultima V - PC
2. Ultima VI - PC
3. Might and Magic VI - PC
4. Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny - PC
5. Pool of Radiance - PC
6. Curse of the Azure Bonds - PC
7. Secret of the Silver Blades - PC
8. Pools of Darkness - PC
9. Gateway to the Savage Frontier - PC
10. Treasures of the Savage Frontier - PC
11. Champions of Krynn - PC
12. Death Knights of Krynn - PC
13. Dark Queen of Krynn - PC
14. Into the Breach - PC
15. Lords of the Realm - PC
16. Dark Sun: Shattered Lands - PC
17. Lords of the Realm II - PC
18. The Alliance Alive - 3DS
19. Shattered Steel - PC
20. Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition - PC
21. Battletech - PC
22. Pillars of Eternity: The White March Part I - PC
23. Pillars of Eternity: The White March Part II - PC
24. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon - Switch
25. Pillars of Eternity II - PC
26. Dragon Ball FighterZ - PS4
27. Detroit: Become Human - PC4
28. Call of Duty: United Offensive - PC
29. The Last of Us - PS4
30. The Last of Us: Left Behind - PS4
31. Prey: Mooncrash - PC
32. Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds - PS4
33. Resident Evil 7 - PC
34. Resident Evil 7: Not A Hero - PC
35. Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War III - PC
36. Overwhelm - PC
37. Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation - PC
38. Hard Reset Redux - PC
39. Nier: Automata - PS4
40. Darksiders - PC

I remember this game came out a number of years ago, and seemed super teenage generic, so I passed on it. Then last year (I think it was last year, maybe it was two years ago) they revealed that Darksiders 3 was going to come out, and that actually looked more interesting. So I decided to pick up the two previous games on Steam Sale, and finally got around to beating the first one. And I have to say, my initial impression all those years ago does the game a disservice. The game is actually a concentration of the 90s in one game, for better and for worst.

So the basic plot of the game is that heaven and hell waged war, then humans were created and they went on truce. There were seven seals forged, and they would be broken once humanity was ready for the Armageddon war. At that time, the Four Horsemen would land and fight to maintain balance or something. You play as War, and you get sent out because the battle is joined, but it turns out the seventh seal wasn't actually broken, so now everyone has jumped the gun and humanity is wiped out. You get in trouble and need to clear your name, because someone made you think it was time. So you murder a bunch of demons, find the truth, break the last seal, and now your bros are ready to come down and join you as you kick everyone's ass. I once saw it described as "The Bible by 90s Image Comics" and that's a pretty apt descriptor. Going along with that theme, the character designs are so over the top that even Rob Liefeld is like "dude, tone it down a bit". Everyone has a permanent scowl and frankly, the VAs should be applauded for managing to deliver everything straight. Even Mark Hamill gets in on the action, doing his Joker voice without the levity; just the parts where he was pissed at something.

Gameplay-wise, the game doesn't have a single unique idea. The basic gameplay is Ocarina of Time with God of War combat (complete with orbs when you murder stuff), and then at the end the game introduces a shittier version of Portal. The loop is to go to a dungeon, collect a new item to progress through that dungeon, then use that new item on the boss of that dungeon. And when you use it on the boss it stuns him so you can wail on him with your sword for a while, before he gets up and you repeat. Every dungeon also has a map and a compass (to see the treasure chests) available as pickups, though they have slightly different names. I mean, it is BLATENT. The combat is that sort of combo based God of War style where you can transition between moves, except all your best stuff you already have from the start. And the Portal mechanics can only be activated on certain very specific spots, and rather than being momentum based you have the option of making an exit push you out fast when you first deploy it (and even then, only if the game feels it's necessary for you to have a fast exit there). And the real shame is that the final boss is such a wimp. Whereas Ocarina of Time called on you to use a bunch of your tools to take down Ganon, here you just hit him with your sword a lot, because storywise nothing else can hurt him.

Overall, the game is fairly mediocre. Apparently the second one has some mechanical changes, so maybe that will be more interesting.

[laurenhiya21]

Still trying to catch up with my reviews haha...

6/9: Nurse Love Addiction (Vita)

Nurse Love Addiction is one of those games that I went into without knowing a whole lot about it. It was a Limited Run game that I took a chance on, and I think it thankfully paid off. It definitely was not quite what I was expecting, but I’ll get to that in my review.

The game stars Asuka, a girl who decided that she wanted to become a nurse because of some words she had written in a book from her childhood. She heads off to nursing school (along with her sister), and there she meets several potential love interests (her sister, two students, and one teacher) and shenanigans ensue! When I first started the game, I thought that it would mostly be about romancing with the love interests, and while there is a lot of that, the game does have a bit more meat to it than that. For one, the game spends a lot of time with the main character trying to remember her forgotten childhood, which ends up in a direction that I was totally not expecting. Another thing is that, depending on which girl you end up pursuing, the plot can get really weird. There’s never any fourth-wall breaking moments here, but some messed up things can happen in the game, especially in the bad endings. I did enjoy nearly all of the endings though, minus the generic “you didn’t get hitched with anybody” ending. I find that it’s pretty rare that I’ll like all of the endings in a VN, so that was a good surprise.

Speaking of endings, there were a few annoying aspects about them. Not really the endings themselves, but how you get to them. Throughout the game, there will be various choices to make in a very typical VN fashion. While some of these choices are pretty clear on which would lead to which route (aka which would lead to which love interest), some of them don’t seem to really make much sense. I wasn’t willing to just guess willy nilly so I ended up using a guide for a majority of the game, but I don’t particularly like guessing in a very romance-driven VN (if it’s a story based one I don’t mind as much). Another thing that I didn’t really like that much is that most of the character’s routes have a TON of shared story within their routes. Thankfully the skip feature is pretty good, but it still takes a while to get though all of the previously read content.

Other than that, there isn’t much else for me to complain about. The music isn’t amazing, but it does its job. The visuals are pretty well done and really nice to look at. Maybe one other thing that was slightly odd about the game is that there seems to be no male characters in the game, but I didn’t really notice that until after I had finished all of the routes. Overall, I’d say that this was a surprisingly good VN. I don’t think that it would become anybody’s top VN any time soon, but if you like a good story with good characters and don’t mind a few strange moments here and there, then Nurse Love Addiction might be a good game for you to try out.

[Xeogred]

Yeah, I tried to play Darksiders myself a few years ago and was bored to tears. I still have nightmares of that swinging grab-bat-kill animation, since you kill thousands of them. REAL FUN...

[MrPopo]

The bat grab gives me a morbid fascination when there's a pack of them, because you can play "The floor is lava".

[Ack]

1. Jungle Book (SNES)(Platformer)
2. Metal Combat: Falcon's Revenge (SNES)(Light Gun Shooter)
3. Might and Magic VI (PC)(RPG)
4. Revenant (PC)(RPG)
5. Neo Turf Masters (NGPC)(Sports)
6. Fatal Fury: First Contact (NGPC)(Fighter)
7. Pac-Man (NGPC)(Action)
8. Golden Axe (Genesis)(Hack and Slash)
9. Blood and Bacon (PC)(FPS)
10. Gain Ground (Genesis)(Strategy)
11. Flicky (Genesis)(Platformer)
12. Zombie Shooter 2 (PC)(Top-Down Shooter)
13. Phantasmagoria (PC)(Point and Click)
14. SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighter's Clash - Capcom Version (NGPC)(Card Game)
15. Toonstruck (PC)(Point and Click)
16. Riven (PC)(Point and Click)
17. Dragon Wars (PC)(RPG)
18. Dungeon Hack (PC)(RPG)
19. SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium (NGPC)(Fighter)
20. Portal 2 (PC)(Puzzle FPS)
21. Goat Simulator: Waste of Space (PC)(Action)
22. Goat Simulator: Payday (PC)(Action)
23. Goat Simulator: MMO Simulator (PC)(Action)
24. Goat Simulator: GoatZ (PC)(Action)
25. Goat Simulator (PC)(Action)
26. Streets of Rage 2 (Genesis)(Beat 'Em Up)
27. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (PC)(Action Platformer)
28. Deadlight (PC)(Platformer)
28. Antichamber (PC)(Puzzle FPS)
29. S.C.A.R.S. (N64)(Racing)
30. Anvil of Dawn (PC)(RPG)
31. Earth Defense Force 4.1 (PC)(Action)

Do you want to shoot giant bugs?

Do you want to blast alien warships out of the sky?

Do you want to use a giant robot to beat up a giant lizard?

Do you want to do all of this while wandering through destructible environments, listening to the other grunts in your platoon lose all hope or sing songs while swarms of massive ants, spiders, wasps, dragons, killer robots, and alien fighter drones rip them a new one?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then Earth Defense Force 4.1 is for you! Just pick one of four classes, select one of the 89 levels, and pick your difficulty, and then go to town! Thrill as you level an unnamed Japanese city that you're supposedly protecting! Watch as the Earth is overrun with alien forces hellbent on conquering our planet! Listen as you are told that over half the Earth's population is wiped out, and areas like Hawaii or Sydney, Australia, have been wiped from the face of the planet.

Yes, the game looks like something from the PS2 days, but that's because if you see a building, you can blow it up! After all, aliens can't level the city if there's not a city to level! And as for sound, who doesn't want to listen to a bunch of goofy-sounding voice actors talk about what they want for dinner, whether they'll get married, and how this whole experience has ruined aliens for them forever.

If you have read to this point, it's time I get serious. Earth Defense Force 4.1 is a simplistic game: play a level, shoot stuff, collect weapons and more health, move to the next level, eventually win. It's formulaic, it's ridiculous and over the top, and it's also quite addictive in the way that a game like Dynasty Warriors is. The game also tracks progress across all difficulty levels and character classes, so you might become extremely good at the basic soldier, the Ranger, but have put no progress into improving the vehicle guy, called an Air Raider. Also, do the math: 89 levels, 5 difficulties, 4 character classes = 1780 levels to get through total. That's a lot of levels. EDF 4.1 is something that you get on discount and play a long time, not because it's visually stunning or mentally stimulating, but because it's good, clean fun with a setting reminiscent of kaiju movies or 1950s B-movie sci-fi from a Japanese perspective. And with so many levels, it's a lot of content to keep coming back to. EDF 4.1 will last you for ages. Heck, I've beaten the game on Normal now with one class, done 50 levels on Easy and 30 on Hard, and I'm not even 10% of the way into the game.

Plus, the game does get steadily more ridiculous, both in the foes you face and in the weapons you'll obtain. I recently found a grenade launcher that shoots a sticky bomb which ignites in a geyser of fire. Quite literally, a geyser, with force behind it. You can use it to set traps for enemies, but I get much more entertainment out of firing at an enemy and then watching as the flame geyser operates like a jet engine and launches them into the air. Now that's entertainment.

[Flake]

January:

Yakuza Kiwami (PS4)
Batman: The Telltale Series (PS4)
Super Mario Odyssey (Switch)
Mario vs Donkey Kong: Minis March Again (DSi ware)

February:

Roundabout (PS4)
Pocket Fighter (PSX)
Double Dragon Neon (PS3)
Batman Arkham VR(PSVR)

March:

Gundam Versus (PS4)

April:

Batman: The Enemy Within (PS4)
Megaman 9 (PS4)
Megaman 10 (PS4)

May:

The Legend of Zelda: BotW (Switch)
Injustice: Gods Among Us (PS4)
Metroid: Zero Mission (GBA/WiiU)

June:

Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors Dreams (Switch)
Megaman (Switch)
Megaman 2 (Switch)
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PS4)
Ikaruga (Switch)
Batman: Tell Tale Series (Switch)
Gunbird (Switch)
Street Fighter Alpha 2 (Switch)
Caladrius Blaze (PS4)

July:

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater HD (PS3)
Street Fighter (PS4)
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (PS4)

Revisiting old favorites in new wrappers this month! Not a lot to say about these games since they are so well known. A Haiku for each about how I felt, then:

Metal Gear Solid 3:
My despair at Trump
Solace in fighting Russians
Throwing poison scorpions

Street Fighter:
First time to play it
Since once at Taco Bueno
Back in '94[/b]

Street Fighter II: World Warriors
Not bad, truthfully
Slow movement, hard blows
Sagat is bullshit

[prfsnl_gmr]

I like your reviews.
They are all elegant poems.
Let’s bring back that thread!