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Xeogred
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Re: Games Beaten 2016

by Xeogred Tue Jan 26, 2016 9:49 pm

ElkinFencer10 wrote:I just finished Silent Hill: Homecoming. With the exception of Book of Memories, that was definitely my least favorite Silent Hill game. The story was actually pretty good IMO, but the gameplay did was Resident Evil 5 did (although to a much lesser extent) and put the actual horror on the backburner for the sake of action.

Ugh Homecoming is so bad. Silent Hill = VIOLENCE? Right? It's all about blood and guts? Apparently that's what they thought with the American movie and Homecoming.

Downpour has a way better story again, but unfortunately you can tell development didn't get much funding and was cut short. The gameplay is not that great.

Have you played Origins? It plays just like 1-3, I enjoyed that one a fair bit.

Glad I've completed just about all of them, but yeah 1-4 set the bar way too high heh. And well American's just can't do horror like Team Silent / Japan did.
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MrPopo
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Re: Games Beaten 2016

by MrPopo Tue Jan 26, 2016 9:52 pm

PartridgeSenpai wrote:Did you play an emulated fan patch, or can you read Japanese, too, Popo Sensei?

Patched all the way. I can recognize non-kanji characters as being Japanese characters and that's about it.
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Exhuminator
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Re: Games Beaten 2016

by Exhuminator Tue Jan 26, 2016 10:04 pm

Xeogred wrote:Ugh Homecoming is so bad. Silent Hill = VIOLENCE? Right? It's all about blood and guts? Apparently that's what they thought with the American movie and Homecoming.

If you think Homecoming was dumbed down and overly violent, you'd best never read up on Silent Hill: Book of Memories.
PLAY KING'S FIELD.
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Xeogred
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Re: Games Beaten 2016

by Xeogred Tue Jan 26, 2016 10:08 pm

Exhuminator wrote:
Xeogred wrote:Ugh Homecoming is so bad. Silent Hill = VIOLENCE? Right? It's all about blood and guts? Apparently that's what they thought with the American movie and Homecoming.

If you think Homecoming was dumbed down and overly violent, you'd best never read up on Silent Hill: Book of Memories.

Not touching that with a 10 foot pole. Looks rancid.

I'm not sensitive to the violence or anything, but it seems like the people behind Homecoming thought that was the main component of the series. The story and characters were garbage, phew! So bad.
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Exhuminator
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Re: Games Beaten 2016

by Exhuminator Tue Jan 26, 2016 10:10 pm

Xeogred wrote:Not touching that with a 10 foot pole. Looks rancid.

Aww, but it's a hack 'n' slash dungeon crawler made by WayForward. It can't be all stinky and stank can it?
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Re: Games Beaten 2016

by flash1987 Wed Jan 27, 2016 12:12 am

PartridgeSenpai wrote:Also in regards to Diablo 3, I'm also part of the "What's the big deal?" club in regards to that game. Once I played through it once and knew the story, even with friends I really had no desire to play it any more.


Bizarre. Who plays Diablo for a story? I must have played through over 100 times and I couldn't tell you what happens. Its like playing a single game of pinball and saying you're finished because you've seen the story. I do feel that some people don't understand the difference between a pc ARPG and the rest of the RPG genre.
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Re: Games Beaten 2016

by MrPopo Wed Jan 27, 2016 1:05 am

1. Oni - PC
2. Donkey Kong 64 - N64
3. Yoshi's Story - N64
4. Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide - PC
5. Forsaken 64 - N64
6. Bloodrayne: Betrayal - PSN
7. Fire Emblem Seisen no Keifu - SNES
8. Fire Emblem Shin Monshō no Nazo: Hikari to Kage no Eiyū - Nintendo DS
9. Valkyria Chronicles 3 - PSP
10. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing - DC

I haven't gotten everyone to champion yet in Championship Mode, but when I realized it was just a matter of mashing buttons for an hour per boxer it lost its appeal. I did enough to unlock Kemo Claw and then beat Arcade Mode, so I feel like I've seen all this game has to offer.

Ready 2 Rumble is a boxing game that takes some cues from Punch-Out, specifically in terms of being a bit more arcady and having a cast of colorful characters. The game officially licenses Michael Buffer and he announces the start of every match. The devs also got him to read their names in the credits, which I thought was cool. The overall presentation is quite nice. As you work your way through Championship Mode you work your way from small venues to large stadiums, and a bigger crowd comes with a bigger venue. Additionally, the same small venue has a larger crowd when you're on the more prestigious circuit. It's one of those little things that adds to the presentation.

The basic mechanics of the game is that you get left and right high and low punches. You can combine those with holding directional inputs to throw a wide variety of punches. You also can block high or low or sway to dodge high or low attacks. This is more important in Arcade Mode for reasons I'll get into in a bit. You have a health bar and a stamina bar; the latter depletes when you throw a punch or get hit and when it empties you can't throw any more punches until it fills again. The stamina bar depletes very quickly (depending on the strength of your punch) and rises moderately quickly, so there is a definite rhythm to your attacks. Additionally, as you land strong blows you gain letters to spell RUMBLE. If you fill that up you can activate rumble mode at any time. This gives you infinite stamina for a period of time and also allows you to unleash a rumble flurry, which is a preset series of punches. You lose the letters if you get knocked down or at the end of a round, and if your opponent is knocked down then rumble mode prematurely ends.

Arcade Mode is your standard "fight your way through 10 opponents" deal. Because of the limitations of the stamina bar you need to pick and choose when to attack and when to block; you can't just press an advantage constantly like you might in a fighting game with a rush down character. Stick and move, learn to anticipate your opponents. One thing that helps is activating rumble mode and then throwing a non-stop stream of left hand jabs. They are the single fastest punch, do decent damage, and the computer will eventually drop its guard and take a bunch in the face. Because of the requirements to earn letters you are pretty much guaranteed your opponent will be low enough in health to be knocked down by the non-stop jabs.

Championship Mode is about running a gym where you train a boxer and lead them to victory over the three circuits. When you sign a boxer you have 20 fights to make it through the 10 ranks. In order to train a boxer you need money, and that's where the prize fights come into play. These fights don't affect your ranking but do give you money (with the option to make a side bet to really rake in the cash). Training consists of several mini games that are targeted towards different stats. All of these are taken from actual boxing exercises, so it's a nice touch.

But here's where things break down. The first is that the minigames have an "auto" option that skips the game and just gives you the stat boost. You won't get as good of a boost as if you did the minigame very well, but you also don't risk doing poorly and it's much faster. Money is an utter non-factor once you realize that with a bet prize fights pay out 20k + the base value (2k, 3k, or 5k depending on circuit) and training costs between 500 and 2000 for most and then 5000 for the weight lifting (but that isn't cost effective). And once you realize money is a non factor you realize you can very quickly get your boxer to 100% in the three trainable stats. Strength is a measure of your ability to deal and take damage. A fully cranked up strength will lay out early opponents in a handful of punches and make you a brick wall. Stamina affects the regeneration speed of your stamina bar. When it's maxed out you literally cannot deplete the bar; it refills during the cooldown period between your punches. And dexterity affects your movement speed in the ring; I don't believe it affects your punches but you can bounce around the ring like Bugs Bunny dodging rifle shots. The final stat is experience, and I'm not sure what it affects, but it also goes up when you fight and will cap with no effort on your part.

So now you have an invincible boxer who can trivially punch their way through the ranks with no strategy whatsoever. Just find a couple of punches that chain well together and go to town. The whole process takes about an hour to go from a fresh boxer to beating all three circuits. It's fun the first couple times but quickly becomes boring. You might say "well then, just don't train", but the problem is that the CPU opponents DEFINITELY get stat boosts across the ranks. You'd have to figure out exactly how much training is fair without being over or under powered. It's frankly far more work than it's worthwhile to make the fights in Championship Mode balanced.
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RyaNtheSlayA
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Re: Games Beaten 2016

by RyaNtheSlayA Wed Jan 27, 2016 5:03 am

I just got done with Tales From The Borderlands after a five hour session. I think that kind of speaks to the game's quality. :lol:

I'm not a big fan of Borderlands nor the characters and humor introduced in Borderlands 2 but I absolutely adore Tales. It contextualizes that world and those characters a thousand times better than any of the mainline games. It's a long game and your choices matter in a way I feel works better than most of TT's other offerings. There are a few problems that worked there way in seemingly from Jurassic Park, those being the, ahem, "adventure" segments which really feel out of place most of the game, and the instant Game-Over action sequences but considering how well everything else is made it's something I'm personally willing to overlook being a fan of this genre.

I wish GearBox were able to write humor like these guys can too. Or anything really. A lot of the writing feels like it's right out of Borderlands - but ya know, if it were actually good. The humor is clever in its own right, and it isn't afraid to pepper the game with heavier, more human moments (or in the case of the end, unload a bucket of them). They even managed to make Handsome Jack into more than just an obnoxious egotistical asshat who likes to make butt and your mom jokes - he's now all of that but actually funny and with far less butt and your mom jokes.

This really didn't have any business ending up being the best TellTale adventure but I'm really happy it turned out the way it did.
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PartridgeSenpai
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Re: Games Beaten 2016

by PartridgeSenpai Wed Jan 27, 2016 7:46 am

flash1987 wrote:
PartridgeSenpai wrote:Also in regards to Diablo 3, I'm also part of the "What's the big deal?" club in regards to that game. Once I played through it once and knew the story, even with friends I really had no desire to play it any more.


Bizarre. Who plays Diablo for a story? I must have played through over 100 times and I couldn't tell you what happens. Its like playing a single game of pinball and saying you're finished because you've seen the story. I do feel that some people don't understand the difference between a pc ARPG and the rest of the RPG genre.


Well, I'm not sure story is the right word to use in this case. I really didn't understand the narrative too much, or care for it, but the setting was really cool, and that kept me interested. I still nearly just abandoned it halfway through though. The loot just isn't enough to keep my attention.
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ElkinFencer10
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Re: Games Beaten 2016

by ElkinFencer10 Wed Jan 27, 2016 10:35 am

Xeogred wrote:
ElkinFencer10 wrote:I just finished Silent Hill: Homecoming. With the exception of Book of Memories, that was definitely my least favorite Silent Hill game. The story was actually pretty good IMO, but the gameplay did was Resident Evil 5 did (although to a much lesser extent) and put the actual horror on the backburner for the sake of action.

Ugh Homecoming is so bad. Silent Hill = VIOLENCE? Right? It's all about blood and guts? Apparently that's what they thought with the American movie and Homecoming.

Downpour has a way better story again, but unfortunately you can tell development didn't get much funding and was cut short. The gameplay is not that great.

Have you played Origins? It plays just like 1-3, I enjoyed that one a fair bit.

Glad I've completed just about all of them, but yeah 1-4 set the bar way too high heh. And well American's just can't do horror like Team Silent / Japan did.

I haven't played Origins, but I picked it up yesterday for PSP. I plan to play through it soon...or....eventually. lol It's the only one of the series I've never played....


Exhuminator wrote:
Xeogred wrote:Ugh Homecoming is so bad. Silent Hill = VIOLENCE? Right? It's all about blood and guts? Apparently that's what they thought with the American movie and Homecoming.

If you think Homecoming was dumbed down and overly violent, you'd best never read up on Silent Hill: Book of Memories.

....and that's the only one of the series (excluding Origins, obviously) I've never beaten. It's just....awful. And I'm usually a huge fan of WayForward's more recent games. I think it would have been fine if it weren't pretending to be a Silent Hill game because it's obviously not.
Exhuminator wrote:Ecchi lords must unite for great justice.

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