Games Beaten 2018

Post by **BoneSnapDeez** » Sat Mar 24, 2018 11:17 am

prfsnl_gmr -- The Variant Master!

Ya know, I should have figured that out on my own.... When I said Apollo had eleven games I got that figure from the AtariAge list... And some games were listed twice so, yeah, derp. I've only seen blue!

Post by **ElkinFencer10** » Sat Mar 24, 2018 11:22 am

Games Beaten in 2018 So Far - 42
* denotes a replay

January (16 Games Beaten)

February (18 Games Beaten)

March (7 Games Beaten)

42. Bit.Trip Fate - Wii - March 22

Bit.Trip Fate followed Runner's example of having more detailed environments and models than the first three games in the series. This time, the game is a sort of side scrolling on rails shooter; Commander Video can move back and forth along a line that often zigzags up and down like an EKG, but he can only move along that line as the screen steadily scrolls to the right. I've not played many shooters quite like it, and while it gets pretty tough, it's ridiculously fun.

Whereas most of the Bit.Trip games (save Runner) took place over three giant levels, Fate is broken into three environments with two levels in each. The first level's no problem. The second level isn't too bad. The third level is where the difficulty starts to increase. By the fourth level, the level itself isn't insurmountable, but the boss is no walk in the park. The last two levels, however, get brutal. It's not unfair, mind you, but the game's not pulling any punches by the time you get to the last environment.

Music stays central to the game, but like Void, it takes a back seat to the timing of the gameplay here. Fate has all the intensity and tension of a standard shmup, but the limited range of movement adds a new element that changes how you have to play. It's a fantastic take on the series, and when coupled with the distinct "Bit.Trip" visual and musical style, it's an experience I haven't seen truly or well replicated in any other game.

Bit.Trip Fate doesn't manage surpass Runner's greatness and addictive nature, but it's an excellent game nonetheless and is second only to Runner in the Bit.Trip series. It's extremely challenging in the latter levels of the game, but it's totally worth it. The visuals and music are superb, and the Wii controls work perfectly. Like with Runner, Fate is an absolute must-play.

Post by **BoneSnapDeez** » Sat Mar 24, 2018 11:25 am

Are all these games, like, on one disc, dawg?

Post by **Segata** » Sat Mar 24, 2018 4:37 pm

Super Bomberman R.

Music sounds mid 90s 32-bit era midi. That's a big plus. You can play as so many Konami characters. Dracula, Goemon, Simon, Anubis from ZOE, Pyramide Head, Jehuty from ZOE, Reiko, Vic Viper and more. I mainly played Vic Viper and Jehuty. The game has a Dreamcast era vibe to it. Really enjoyed the story mode. Not tried online yet. Hey if you don't have a Switch no worries it's coming to PS4 and Xbox this May!

Post by **MrPopo** » Sat Mar 24, 2018 9:31 pm

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

After my foray through the Gold Box games I decided to move on to the next in the old D&D PC games. Since I'm not equipped for Eye of the Beholder yet (I lack a numpad on my Surface) I skipped over to the first Dark Sun game. And I gotta tell ya, this game is incredibly flawed. There's a core there that makes it worth playing, but it's clear that SSI was not ready to create a new engine; the game really needed another year of incubation before it was released.

The game is set in the second best AD&D campaign setting (unfortunately, the game set in the best campaign setting is still in rights limbo). Dark Sun is basically Mad Max AD&D style; magic draws its power from life itself and a bunch of mages went power mad and in the process turned what was once a lush world into a desert. Now everyone is either a slave or someone profiting from slaves, and everyone is dressed incredibly inappropriately for the weather. Also, the world is much more deadly than your average campaign setting; new characters start at level 3 and you roll attributes between 5 and 20 before racial modifiers (which, hey, gets around the exceptional strength bullshit in favor of just getting 19 and above).

The game is from an overhead perspective and the interface takes some cues from Sierra adventure games. By default you click to move around, with everything happening in real time. You can right click to cycle to some interaction icons, which also pauses the game. This also makes it a bit clumsy to talk to people (well, that and the fact that it goes look at person, which opens a menu which you can then click a button to talk to them). You also need to use this look interface in combat to see the name of anyone you're fighting, so again, clumsy. You get a shiny paper doll inventory, complete with support for the Dark Sun system of armor pieces rather than full suits. One thing the game does have which was sorely lacking in the later Infinity Engine games is the ability to see the targets who will be affected by your aoe spells before you launch them; it was less of an issue in Gold Box because you could count the squares, but this game is free move.

The plot is a bit disjointed. You start off as gladiators, escape, find your way to a free city, and then get a mission to unite the tribes. So far, so good. There's a bunch of sidequests with some nice loot at the end and a picture into the world (see how many things you know are wrong). The game is definitely harmed by the general lack of a journal to keep track of some involved quests with lots of steps. Then when you're ready to help the tribes fight off the evil city you suddenly have to go into a newly revealed temple that was buried to get a genie. That genie can be used to make the last battle easier, but it doesn't do anything plot relevant. It's a weird ass pull and it feels like they originally wanted to do more with what you find in that temple before they ran out of time.

The biggest issue with the game, though, is just how janky everything is. Movement feels janky, the camera is super janky (rather than following your character, it moves the camera when your character moves, so if you've scrolled off screen it will stay off screen and move as the character moves), NPC interaction is janky (both talking and escorting), quests are janky, the whole thing is janky. It feels like an alpha that was built up to show "hey, check this out" and you go "that's cool", and then they didn't do the polish phase.

Underneath all of that is a decent game, but man, is there a lot of grime obscuring it. I'd only recommend it if you have a high tolerance for poorly implemented gameplay; the ideas are good, the execution fails.

Post by **BoneSnapDeez** » Sun Mar 25, 2018 2:25 pm

I like the game but yeah, it brings the jank. Al-Qadim does the real-time thing better, but is still awkward. Kinda wish those games had just been developed for the Genesis or something.

Post by **Sarge** » Sun Mar 25, 2018 4:17 pm

Finally finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2. There's so much content there that you could probably spend a good 200 hours easily and not realize it. I don't have that sort of resolve, so I stopped doing a lot of the side quests and mostly stuck to the story path for the last few chapters. That's what usually happens to me in these games, anyway.

Let me preface this by saying the Switch is a great platform. But there were some obvious technical issues getting this game to work well on the system. Unlike Breath of the Wild, which ran at 900p and mostly maintained frame rate except in a few instances, XC2 keeps the frame rate up through dynamic resolution adjustment. Sometimes, that resolution is pretty decent. Other times, it drops tremendously low, getting awfully close to 3DS levels. They mask some of this by applying some very strong sharpness filters and other filtering, but it can be a distraction at times. Still, overall, the game works fine, and it looks better than the Wii game, at any rate. I'm actually fuzzy on my memories on how it compares with XCX, though.

There are some really cool tunes in there, too. I really like a lot of the music, and the choir/chant music in places like Tantal or Indol is even really cool. Character voices are pretty convincing as well, and I like that they went back to the various UK accents.

Character design turned out... hmm. The game looks far more "kiddie" anime than things did before, with Rex looking rather doofy. Some other characters look cool, though, even if a few of the antagonists look like they dropped straight out of Kingdom Hearts. And the outfits... hmm. Some of the rare blades look super-cool. Some look hilarious or are meant to be cute. And a few... well, they don't leave much to the imagination. Pyra (and later iterations) has some rather sizable assets, and if you pull Dahlia... :shock:

There's lots of skin showing everywhere, y'all. :lol:

Still, we're in this for the gameplay, right? Well, if you didn't like X1/XCX, I don't think this will change your mind. Some things have been streamlined, but otherwise the combat still feels a little sloggy at times, with enemies taking a bit too long to fell. Your immediate combat options have been reduced to three face buttons for your skills, but you can also swap Blades out to access three more skills. It all works pretty well. Quests are done a bit differently; most of them don't auto-complete and you have to return to the quest giver. Thankfully, they're labeled on the map much better, so that's not too bad. The other quests you might have taken in earlier games were replaced by Merc Missions, in which you send out your unused Blades on various missions that give you gear, EXP, and gold.

I don't think I quite explained blades, but basically they're partners that give you various abilities. You get them through a gacha mechanic. Why this was necessary, I don't know, especially in a game that isn't selling these things as DLC, but whatever. At least getting them in most cases doesn't require ridiculously convoluted quests; it just requires hoping for good RNG.

For whatever reason, I actually did enjoy the story, even if it was even more anime than the other two. And not to spoil anything, but I very much enjoyed the ending. But speaking of the ending, that last boss pulled the usual JRPG trope of being quite a bit tougher than anything you'd faced up to that point. It necessitated a change in tactics after the fifth time I bit it. That was even more frustrating because it takes a lot of time to work him down... or so I thought.

Once again, avoiding spoilers, there were a few combat mechanics that I'd largely ignored. The most important revolves around your Party Gauge, which fills up as you hit enemies and use arts and whatnot. You get three bars, and you can use one of them to revive a fallen party member. This is what I mostly used it for. You can also use it when completely full to trigger a "Chain Attack", which lets your entire team unleash all at once, with a pretty significant damage multiplier. I tried it a few times, but didn't deem the multiplier enough to risk being defenseless if I used it and then Rex fell in battle. The last battle changed that, though. I was getting wiped out pretty quickly by two attacks in particular. The first I could recover from, but the later pretty much killed my entire team at once. Doh!

In goofing around, though, I finally learned the deal with adding "Orbs" to your enemies. See, you can chain level 1, 2, and 3 specials into a powerful ender combo that adds an "orb" to the enemy you're fighting. Once you've added these orbs, then if you use your Chain Attack, you have an opportunity to break them. If you break them, you get a big boost in your multiplier, and you get to add another round to your onslaught! You can see where this is heading...

...there's also a massively powerful boost for Pyra in the end game that makes her output amazing amounts of damage, especially in chain attacks. It's a one-time-per-battle thing, though. So I worked down the last boss to about half health, adding orbs as I could (it ended up being three), activated the super mode, and triggered my chain attack. I broke all three orbs, and in the course of the chain attack, I basically took that massive pool of health down all in one go. Heck, I had damage to spare! I was just piling on at the end. :lol:

So I went from being mad at the game to saying, "Okay, not so bad after all."

Do I recommend this? Well, if you've got lots of free time, then sure! I'd give it a 8.5, probably. When I was in the groove I didn't want to put it down. It's certainly not perfect, but for fans of the previous games, I certainly wouldn't pass it up. I enjoyed it more than XCX; it takes a lot less time to feel like you're getting somewhere. I still think the first game hit more high notes for me, but some of the quality-of-life improvements here would be great in, say, a remastered version of the original.

(Oh, right, final time was 76:24, but there's so much I didn't do.)

Post by **MrPopo** » Sun Mar 25, 2018 5:29 pm

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

While I'm killing time before The Alliance Alive arrives I decided to noodle around with Lords of the Realm II, while the first game was still fresh in my mind. I wasn't expecting things to go this quickly, though. LotR II sets out to simplify the gameplay of the original to make it more approachable, and in the process makes things easier strategically and overall a less interesting game.

Just like before, the king is dead and nobles are feuding with each other. This game has one less noble and the maps are smaller than the original. In addition, there are less connections between counties, causing you to be much more funneled in your movement. It removes some of the diplomacy that used to exist because you'll find yourself with an explicit order of nobles to beat just due to how the map is, whereas before you had more freedom. You still manage your workers, have the option of following a grain cycle or going dairy, and you still recruit your troops from the populace. Sheep have been removed, which is good riddance.

In fairness, the game actually does add some depth in the county management at the same time it removes it. The removal is if you leave advanced farming off; now you have a constant number of serfs all year round on grain, rather than the boom and bust. But the boom and bust ends up being the way to go because dairy was nerfed (you can't go big with just cows) and efficiency was buffed; as long as you keep one peasant on industry you will maintain that 100% efficiency, even if you toss an extra 500 peasants at it the next season. So there's no reason to do anything but grain now, and definitely with advanced farming on. But the depth added is the fact that you don't necessarily have 10 fields; different counties have different numbers. Additionally, the only industries you are guaranteed to have is blacksmithing and the option to build a castle. Iron, stone, and lumber availability differ from county to county, and a given county will have one or two of those available. In my time I saw that I always had forestry available and then had either nothing, stone, or iron available. Blacksmithing was also made more complicated; now different weapons take different amounts of wood and iron to manufacture, and they cost different amounts at the merchants. So now there is actual advantages to having differing compositions of melee troops or ranged troops, rather than just going archers and either swordsmen or knights.

The battles, though, end up being less fun in my opinion. Your army units move fast enough that it feels more RTSy rather than the slower strategic movement from before. On the plus side, regular maps now have real choke points, so you can do some mean stuff with your archers and get some good flank maneuvers going. Sieges now are always fully real time, rather than you sitting for several seasons plinking away with trebuchets til you win. Now you always have to storm the castle to get through, which makes the sieges far more costly. But at the same time, it also means you win or lose a siege in a season or two (it takes one or two seasons to build the battering ram that is the only worthwhile siege engine in this game depending on your army size). On the flip side, forcing this confrontation means defenders have a decent shot at being able to repel an invading force compared to the original.

Honestly, I prefer the first game to this. Too much was shaved off in the name of accessibility, and the interface actually is worse for it. Moving people between industries if you're micro managing is much more painful than the sliders of the first game.

Post by **ElkinFencer10** » Sun Mar 25, 2018 5:55 pm

BoneSnapDeez wrote:Are all these games, like, on one disc, dawg?

Yeah, Bit.Trip Complete on Wii is how I've been playing them although they were all originally released individually as WiiWare titles. They're also all part of The Bit.Trip on Vita and PS4.

Games Beaten in 2018 So Far - 43
* denotes a replay

January (16 Games Beaten)

February (18 Games Beaten)

March (8 Games Beaten)

43. Bit.Trip Flux - Wii - March 24

Bit.Trip Flux is the last part of the original six game Bit.Trip series, and it turns the series into a bit of psuedo-Pong sandwich. The first game in the series, Beat, played like a rhythm-Pong with the paddle on the left side of the screen; the last game, Flux, plays like a more refined rhythm-Pong with the paddle on the right side of the screen. While it can seem a bit minimalistic when compared to added visual detail of Runner and Fate, it's a fitting end to the WiiWare series.

Visually, Flux is very similar to Beat. Aurally, Flux is very similar to Beat. Mechanically, Flux is very similar to Beat. The biggest differences between the two other than general refinements are the side of the screen the paddle is on and the way the game is segmented. Whereas Beat was just three extremely long levels with a couple of "checkpoints" that didn't actually serve as checkpoints, Flux is broken up into three similarly long levels, but Flux's levels are broken into eight segments (the last of which is the boss). The biggest improvement in Flux is that the checkpoints between sections actually do serve as checkpoints allowing the player to restart from the last checkpoint rather than the beginning of the level. Granted, your progress through the level is lost if you quit, but it's still a very nice change over Flux.

Bit.Trip Flux is a fitting end to the Bit.Trip series even if a bit anticlimactic depending on your feelings about Beat. It feels like the developers said "What if we had made Beat knowing everything that we know now after five games?" It's basically Beat but better, but that's not quite doing Flux justice. Flux does add a lot to the Beat's foundation, and the game's conclusion does have a good feeling of finality to the Bit.Trip series (except for the Runner sequels). I was a little disappointed, personally, that Flux was the series conclusion after having so thoroughly enjoying Runner and Fate, but that's not to say that Flux is a bad game. It's still a great time and wholly Bit.Trip; it's just not what I would have done for the end of the series.

Post by **Markies** » Sun Mar 25, 2018 7:16 pm

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)*

I completed Mafia on the Microsoft Xbox this afternoon!

What I love the most about Mafia is the game's aesthetic. It takes place in a 1930s Chicago and everything is completely correct. They have cars that look and handle correct, the characters talk and look period correct and they even have perfect music. It is a nice take on a historical setting with a GTA style. Unfortunately, the freedom of GTA is taken away and it's mostly a linear third person shooter where the shooting controls aren't all that good or even that memorable.

racketboy.com

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