Games Beaten 2018

Post by **pook99** » Thu Feb 22, 2018 12:31 pm

ElkinFencer10 wrote:
noiseredux wrote:Does Evil Within 2 work better if you've played the first first? I'm interested in both, but that's some praise.

I'm curious how it improved over the first. I thought the first game was a massive exercise in missed potential and disappointment.

1) The story is much better in evil within 2, although I did enjoy the first game, the story did not interest me as much as the sequel. There is really good development of the main character and I really became emotionally attached to him and the rest of the cast. The main bad guys are all interesting as well and they are not just your typical angry big monster as they are in most survival horror games.

2) I love stealth games and evil within 2 gives you all the tools you need to play stealthily. For me it was very satisfying being able to stealth kill zombies. The game does have an extensive upgrade system where you can model your character any way you like, the game offers flexibility in how you play, a feature often not seen in games like this, and it really works well.

3) The game has some open world elements, not so much that they get annoying, but they encourage you to explore and you are rewarded with better gear as well as some interesting story elements and side stories. Personally, I hate open world games but this game offers these segments in chunks so you are never doing long tedious backtracking, but they are open enough to make you want to explore and see whats out there in the world.

Those are some things off the top of my head, just keep in mind I really enjoyed the first one as well, so I am approaching this game from a different place than you. However, most reviews I read do say this game is much better than its predecessor, but you may not be as gushy about it as I was if you didnt like the first one.

Xeogred wrote:Good stuff pook99. While most eyes were on RE7 last year, I think Evil Within 2 was vastly superior. Axiom Verge is amazing and up there with Shovel Knight and Momodora for my favorite retro indie games so far.

Agreed, I did love RE7 but evil within is the much better game. I just installed momodora 4, havent played it yet but I loved 1 and 3, 2 kept crashing on me so I couldnt get through it unfortunately.

noiseredux wrote:Does Evil Within 2 work better if you've played the first first? I'm interested in both, but that's some praise.

It does, the story is a direct continuation of the first game, events from the first game are referenced throughout the game, and one of the coolest boss fights won't be half as cool if you never played the first one.

Post by **noiseredux** » Thu Feb 22, 2018 12:36 pm

I'll prob stick with my original inclination to play the first game first then.

Post by **ElkinFencer10** » Thu Feb 22, 2018 5:34 pm

Games Beaten in 2018 So Far - 28
* denotes a replay

January (16 Games Beaten)

February (12 Games Beaten)

28. Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA 2nd - PlayStation Portable - February 22

Since I played my first entry in the series back when I got my Vita, Hatsune Miku has been my absolute favorite rhythm game series. Between how damn adorable the character of Miku is to how incredibly catchy most of the songs featured in the games are, it's an utterly addicting series. prfsnl_gmr sent me this Japan-exclusive entry in the series knowing how much I love it, and it's been my go-to game to play while relaxing for the past week or two.

If you've played any of the games in the series, then you know what to expect here. From the four I've played, they all play more or less the same just with different songs and extra features. The track listing is really what makes or breaks a Hatsune Miku game, and this one had a fantastic track listing. I think I still slightly prefer Project DIVA F 2nd, but Project DIVA 2nd does have two of my favorite Hatsune Miku tracks - Clover Club and Melt. Honestly Clover Club is all it would really take to make me happy, but having Melt included as well was fantastic.

The game looks fantastic (probably thanks to having very little to actually render visually) and is truthfully one of the best looking PSP games I've seen although I'm by no means an expert on the system. The game's sound - the most important part of a music game - is, unfortunately, hindered a bit by the PSP's speakers, but plug in some good headphones, and it's pure auditory bliss. While I normally prefer to play games on consoles if at all possible, but music games are my exception. Because the screen is hardwired to the console, you naturally eliminate the risk of input lag which, obviously, can be a major issue with any rhythm based game.

Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA 2nd is a truly fantastic rhythm game and a serious must-play for PSP owners who are fans of the genre. It's a real shame that it never saw a Western release, but since the PSP is gloriously region-free, all you need to do is import a copy of the game and go to town (which I absolutely recommend everyone do). I'm extremely grateful to prfsnl_gmr for sending me this game because Jesus Christ, I had a fantastic time playing through it. If you own a PSP, you seriously need to look into importing this.

Post by **PartridgeSenpai** » Thu Feb 22, 2018 11:43 pm

Partridge Senpai's 2018 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017
* indicates a repeat

1. Tyranny (PC)
2. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (PC)
3. SUPERHOT (PC)
4. Hotline Miami (PC)*
5. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (PC)
6. Mario X Rabbids Kingdom Battle (Switch)
7. Nine Parchments (Switch)
8. X-com: UFO Defense (PC)
9. Chocobo Racing (PS1)

10. Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak (GBA)

The other game in this series for Gameboy Color, Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite! is one of my favorite adventure games ever. I never even knew a sequel to it existed until a little over a year ago while talking to a friend of a friend about it (I can't exactly remember why). I was so happy to finally find a copy a few days ago, and now that I'm all done with it, I can pretty safely say that it was alright. It's not that it's a bad game, it's just that it doesn't really surpass or equal the sequel in most any way.

I was quite surprised to learn that this game and the previous one were produced by Miyamoto, but given their brilliant simplicity, I suppose that's not really that much of a surprise. There is no combat, and really no dying or failure state of any kind either. Instead, this is an adventure game where the biggest feature is learning Ham-chat, which are special code words that work a little like the information prompts in Final Fantasy 2. Hamtaro, the titular character whom you play as, doesn't talk outside of saying these phrases. You can't use one until you've heard it at least once. Each hamster you talk to and item you interact with has a certain number of them possible to use (with ones you don't have yet represented by a ???). These effectively function as dual passwords/skills that you use to solve just about every puzzle in the game. To get more words, you need to talk to people, so there is a LOT of doing tasks for other hamsters and just talking to them generally to try and learn all the Ham-chat you can.

The story is fairly simple, but more complex than the first game in that it actually has an antagonist. Spat, the devil-costumed hamster, is doing his best to destroy all the love (brotherly, romantic, friendship, you name it) among Hamsters (for no other reason than because he's a hateful bastard, I guess). An angel-costumed hamster named Harmony has come to give Hamtaro and Bijou the task of fixing all the love in the land and kicking Spat out of town. The game actually has a lot of really well localized dialogue, quite funny lines combined with quite meaningful and well done scenes of healthy ways to express relationships. Many hamster couples you mend the relationships of are never explicitly gendered either, so I like to give it at least a slightly LGBT-positive notion, even if I'm pretty sure the Japanese version genders the hamsters at least implicitly with gendered speech patterns. One thing this game definitely has over the original is that slightly stronger plot and much better dialogue.

What this game doesn't have over the original is the strength in premise. While the original had a weaker plot of just "find all the ham-hams and bring them back to the clubhouse," it felt far more organic to the more fluffy plot of the show. Spat is a fun villain, sure (I gave him a voice of Skeletor, because that's basically who he is), but he hardly makes for a super compelling narrative. A lot of the things he does feel very out of place in the Hamtaro universe due to the other problem this game has of a very poor use of setting.

Hamtaro's whole thing is that they're hamsters. So much of the charm in the first game is found in the locations you explore from the perspective of a hamster. A junk yard, a school, a playground, a grocery store. Crawling over and under all that human-sized stuff as a tiny little hamster was just so cool! Other than some big sunflowers, this game might as well not even be a Hamtaro game with the settings it has. A hamster-sized amusement park, a hamster-sized haunted house, a hamster-sized beach resort. ALL the locations wouldn't be out of place if the main characters were humans instead of hamsters. The other bits of wasted premise lie in things like slightly obvious puzzle solutions (at least I certainly remember the original's being harder, but given that this is probably a game intended to be accessible for younger kids I can forgive that) and really uninspired new Ham-chat phrases. Those are really my biggest complaints about the game, and they're fairly small all things considered.

Verdict: Recommended. It's definitely an inferior product compared to the original, but it's still a damn fine adventure game for all ages on the GBA. Even if you aren't into Hamtaro, this is still a fun adventure game that'll take you probably 10 or 15 hours to get through

Post by **prfsnl_gmr** » Fri Feb 23, 2018 12:27 am

ElkinFencer10 wrote:I had a fantastic time playing through it. If you own a PSP, you seriously need to look into importing this.

Awesome! I’m happy to read that. If I’d kept the game, it would have sat unplaced in my collection for years. I am so glad it found a good home and that you enjoyed it so much!

.....

1. Bastion (iOS)
2. LaserCat (360)
3. Zombie Incident (3DS)
4. Bye-Bye BoxBoy! (3DS)
5. Monument Valley 2 (iOS)
6. Zenge (iOS)
7. Master of Darkness (Game Gear/3DS)
8. Wonder Boy (SMS)
9. Adventure Island (NES)
10. Yoshi’s Wooly World (Wii U)

Poor Yoshi’s Wooly World...I was about half way through it when Nintendo released BOTW, and I set it aside when I was absorbed into that (spectacular) game. I finally picked it back up last month and pushed through it. It is a splendid platformer with great art direction and fantastic music. Moreover, it controls wonderfully, and it is easily the best Yoshi’s Island game I have ever played. (Sorry, Super Mario World 2!). Moreover, the difficulty scales perfectly to your level of commitment; so, people who want to breeze through the game can do so easily while people (like me) who insist on doing everything are in for quite a challenge. While hunting down all the trinkets in each level can get tedious at times - and while a few of the special stages are insanely difficult - the game really is a masterpiece of Nintendo game design, and I have no problem recommending it wholeheartedly to any fan of 2D platforming.

Post by **MrPopo** » Fri Feb 23, 2018 2:39 am

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

My journey through the D&D Gold Box games is nearing its end; I'm down to the last trilogy and then I'll be done. There were also two Buck Rogers games on the engine, but they're not on GOG so I'm skipping them. Champions of Krynn has the distinction of being the most different from the previous games I've played thanks to the Dragonlance setting. While the other Gold Box games (and indeed, most other D&D RPGs) are set in the Forgotten Realms setting, this trilogy is set in the Dragonlance setting. This manifests itself in a couple ways. Most noticable is the fact that the suite of enemies you face are quite different, though there is some overlap (basic undead, hobgoblins, ogres, etc). The other thing that you might notice is that Dragonlance is much more of a classic "good vs. evil" story. While D&D has always had alignments, they tended to have some level of nuance. Dragonlance is more of a Tolkein style "forces of good" and "forces of evil" type of story. And that is the terminology used in game.

Champions of Krynn is set shortly after the original book trilogy (as I understand it). While evil was defeated, evil never goes away permanently, so you get drawn into some cleanup action. It's worthwhile to contrast it with Treasure of the Savage Frontier from a storytelling perspective. While Treasures was set up as you needing to do a ton of quests in various towns in order to clear your good name and beat back the local evil group's plot to destabilize the region, here you have a much more narrow narrative. On the flip side, that also means you have a series of story beats that make for a stronger narrative than anything we have seen in other Gold Box games. This also means that while technically the map is wide open (due to the lack of blocking terrain support in the overworld), the game will still railroad you by having events either not fire if you aren't told to trigger them or by having hordes of enemies that will keep you away from an area you're not supposed to go to yet. Given that the overall engine was never really designed with a tight narrative in mind, they managed to do a pretty good job at telling a story here.

I mentioned the bestiary being quite different. The main foot soldiers of the enemy forces are the draconians, which are created by corrupting dragon eggs. There's four different kinds, and they're all annoying as hell. The weakest ones have a chance to disarm you for the rest of battle when they die. The next level up can paralyze you on touch and turn into a damaging acid pool on death. The level above that are casters with lighting bolt and they explode on death, hitting every adjacent square. And the worst are fortunately only seen a handful of time. They have permanent invisibility (so you can't target them in ranged mode), are casters, when they die the first time they get back up and start attacking, and when they die the second time they become invincible and will explode after a few turns for big damage. All of this sets up a theme of the game's combats being on the hard side. Enemies tend to have better AC than similar enemies in other games and the caster density is much higher (not to mention clerics being common enemies starting from the get go). It's rough going for quite a while, and only the general availability of places to rest and restore spells (not to mention the bonus spell system that lets you stack several fireballs as soon as you learn it) helps balance it out.

Overall, I found it to be a mixed experience. The parts that I didn't like really stood out, and hurt the overall presentation. We'll see how things go in the second game, though I've heard that there is an even more intensely annoying enemy to be seen, and I'll be forced to micromanage more to deal with it.

Post by **dunpeal2064** » Fri Feb 23, 2018 4:34 am

ElkinFencer10 wrote:Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA 2nd is a truly fantastic rhythm game and a serious must-play for PSP owners who are fans of the genre.

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed 2nd, it was the game that got me into the series, and I've only continued to fall in love with it since.

Post by **ElkinFencer10** » Fri Feb 23, 2018 9:16 am

Games Beaten in 2018 So Far - 29
* denotes a replay

January (16 Games Beaten)

February (13 Games Beaten)

29. Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 - Game Boy Color - February 22

Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 is a game with which I'm quite familiar on Nintendo 64, and unlike the last three Army Men games that I've reviewed for Game Boy Color, I've actually had the Game Boy Color port of this since I was a kid. I remember getting it in my Easter basket when I was eight or nine years old and being SO excited to play it but being rather disappointed when I did because I had no concept of hardware capabilities or that the Game Boy Color was capable of significantly less than the Nintendo 64. Going back through it as an adult, however, it's become clear to me that I was disappointed in all the wrong things. Not that there aren't things that disappoint in this game - there are many - but none of those stuck out to me as a kid.

One of the first things that stuck out to me was what a drastic departure this game is from the story of the original console version. I expected a significantly slimmed down version like I saw in Army Men and Army Men: Air Combat or even a story somewhat loosely based on the original game like I saw in Army Men 2, but this is completely unrelated for the most part. The only thing it really has in common with the console versions of Sarge's Heroes 2 is the characters and the nebulous goal of "Defeat General Plastro." Otherwise it's totally different. No portal to the "real" world even though that's literally what's on the cover. No real interaction with half of Bravo squad. No mention of the Blue Army or their femme fatale spy Bridgette Blue. I could handle a super watered down rendition of the story, but not even trying to keep the storyline common was a letdown.

Of the four Game Boy Color Army Men games that I've played, I'd say that - in general - Sarge's Heroes 2 looks the best. The vehicle models aren't the most attractive, but the game overall has a pretty good look to it. Unfortunately this seems to come with a hit to performance. The game didn't just slow down; it absolutely chugged in places. While this generally seemed to happen around areas with a lot of Tan units to destroy, there would be other times that it seemed to drag for no apparent reason as well as times with a fairly large number of enemies but no evident delay. It was curious and frustrating, but it wasn't frequent or severe enough to be game-breaking. Definitely worth noting as a con but not something that would ruin an otherwise great game (if this were such a game).

I mentioned in my other Army Men GBC reviews that music tended to get annoying repetitive. Apparently 3DO's solution to this issue was to take the music out entirely. Now the game has an uncomfortable silence broken only by the repetitive sound of your weapons - PFOOSH PFOOSH PFOOSH PFOOSH. It's not exactly an improvement. There are also no voice clips aside from the "URAGH!" of a Tan soldier's death, but that's so distorted that it hardly even sounds like a scream. All in all, the sound design is an even bigger disappointment than the story.

With a poor storyline, horrendous sound, and lackluster performance, surely the gameplay itself is good, right? Well...kind of. The control is decent enough, and the missions are pretty fun. There are several missions, however, that require that you switch between a boat and a tank several times, and this switch is extremely finicky. You press Select to switch when you're in proximity of the other vehicle, but it's apparently a VERY precise distance. Stay too far away, and it obviously won't work. Get too close, and it won't work. You have to be JUST close enough but not TOO close, and there doesn't seem to be an enormous amount of consistency as to exactly how close or far you need to be from one instance to the next. The missions also vary wildly in length. I'd be finishing the early missions in two or three minutes whereas some of the later missions would take me upwards of twenty minutes. I'm all for having missions get more difficult and longer as the game progresses, but to go from a minute and a half to twenty minutes seems a bit excessive.

Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 on Game Boy Color isn't the worst of the four main series Army Men games on the platform, but it is the second worst after only Army Men. It's a shame, too, because it had potential. Had they just tried to follow even the more major events of the console games' story and gotten some of the performance issues hammered out, it would have been a genuinely good handheld experience. As it is now, however, it serves only to sit on a shelf and disappoint Army Men fans hoping to experience Sergeant Hawk's exploits on the go.

Post by **dsheinem** » Fri Feb 23, 2018 1:18 pm

Games Beaten 2018

Darkwing Duck - NES (PS4)
DuckTales - NES (PS4)
DuckTales 2 - NES (PS4)
Talespin - NES (PS4)
Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers - NES (PS4)
Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers 2 - NES (PS4)
Scarecrow - PS1 (Vita)
The Heart of Dark - PS1 (Vita)
Justice - PS1 (Vita)
Caligo - PC
Tomb Raider (2013) - X1
Nephise Begins - PC
Diablo III: The Darkening of Tristam - PC
Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams - X1
Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest - SNES
Forza Horizon 3 - X1/ PC
Elbub - PC *new*
Tekken 4 -PS2 *new*
Injustice 2 -PS4 *new*
Apollo 11 VR - PSVR *new*

Total: 20

Previously: 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010

Elbub lets you play a game as a bubble, grappling invisibly off of other bubbles near a string, to ultimately try and land quickly in big bubbles. It is pretty dumb, to be honest, but not the worst way to kill an hour or so.

Tekken 4 is the first game I've played using a PS2 emulator on my PC, and I was more impressed with the quality of contemporary PS2 emulation than I was with Tekken 4, which has to be considered one of the weaker entries in the series.

Injustice 2's Ultimate Edition finally went on sale on the PSN for a reasonable price (about $30), and as has been the case with the more recent MK releases, I am more interested in this game for the add on characters (Hellboy and TMNT!) than the DC roster of dark, brooding, and grumpy super heroes who I don't care about. I played through the story, but I skipped all the cut scenes after the first few.

Apollo 11 VR is more of an experience than a game, though there are several sections that require you to do some skillful things with the controller if played in "interactive mode". The whole thing is really expertly done and is a smart documentary/VR game mashup that I'd love to see for more topics. They do a good job with the "in the cockpit" scenes especially in this one, and I can see using it to give non-gamers a new thing to try out in VR.

Post by **noiseredux** » Fri Feb 23, 2018 2:01 pm

dsheinem wrote:Injustice 2's Ultimate Edition finally went on sale on the PSN for a reasonable price (about $30), and as has been the case with the more recent MK releases, I am more interested in this game for the add on characters (Hellboy and TMNT!) than the DC roster of dark, brooding, and grumpy super heroes who I don't care about. I played through the story, but I skipped all the cut scenes after the first few.

did you play as the Turtles? I have been interested in Injustice 2 (liked the first a lot), but got way more interested when TMNT were announced.

racketboy.com

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