Games Beaten 2018

[MrPopo]

Phantasy Star employs a first person perspective that completely revolutionizes the immersion of dungeon crawling and is, as far as my experience goes, completely unique for RPGs of the era.

Akallabeth, Ultima 1-5, a large number of Ultima clones, and then the games that were first person all the time, like Wizardry and Might & Magic.

[BogusMeatFactory]

Phantasy Star employs a first person perspective that completely revolutionizes the immersion of dungeon crawling and is, as far as my experience goes, completely unique for RPGs of the era.

Akallabeth, Ultima 1-5, a large number of Ultima clones, and then the games that were first person all the time, like Wizardry and Might & Magic.

NERD FIGHT!!!!!!!

[Xeogred]

1. Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (Genesis)
2. Darkwing Duck (NES)
3. Batman* (NES)
4. Journey to Silius (NES)
5. Aladdin* (SNES)
6. Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse* (SNES)
7. Run Saber (SNES)
8. Batman: Return of the Joker (NES)
9. Ninja Warriors (SNES)
10. Thunder Spirits* (SNES)
11. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Switch)
11. Thunder Force III* (Genesis)
12. Donkey Kong Country* (SNES)
13. Skyblazer (SNES)
14. Super Turrican* (SNES)
15. Donkey Kong Country 2* (SNES)
16. Super Turrican 2* (SNES)
17. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (PS4)
18. Monster Hunter World (PS4)
19. Resident Evil: Director's Cut (PSX)
20. Resident Evil 2: DualShock* [Claire A/Leon B] (PSX)
21. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (PS4)
22. Resident Evil HD* (PS4) [PLATINUM]
23. Resident Evil 5: Lost in Nightmares* (PS4)
24. Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition* (PS4) [Vergil]

* = replay

I still like DMC more than Bayonetta. DMC1 has the cool dark gothic atmosphere, DMC3 is incredible, and DMC4 retains that incredible gameplay but is a little lacking in that you backtrack through the entire game at the midpoint and fight all bosses three times across the game, haha. Oh well.

This is my second newer Capcom import, along with Resident Evil HD on PS3. I think DMC4:SE was digital only in the US but you can easily import a copy and... literally everything defaults to English in the game, like REmake.

The Special Edition is cool in that it adds in playable Vergil and Lady/Trish. I went with Vergil since he was a beast in DMC3 and he's insane here as well. You've got Yamato, Beowulf, and Force Edge which completely destroys everything when you get a hold of things. I'll check out the other stuff eventually, but I think I've heard Lady/Trish mostly use guns. Vergil had some new cutscenes, but nothing hugely story related or anything. It's still cool Capcom put in this much effort though. For how insane the combat is and versatile the characters play, it's a huge deal adding in more complex characters like this.

If you somehow still haven't played this, definitely check this version out. The game holds up extremely well. While it feels a little lazy in some areas, the replay value is extremely high. I've gone back to it several times over and if you skip cutscenes and know the game, it's easy to blast through in just a few hours. All your items and stuff carry over into the chapter select even on higher difficulties like other Capcom games at the time, so it's fun to max things out like you're playing NG+ or something.

I'm holding out on the ongoing rumors that DMC5 will be a real thing while DmC gets completely ignored. Good riddance.

[Exhuminator]

Fantasy Star

I'm sure you meant Final Fantasy, but a hybrid of Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star would be interesting.

but it does allow for larger, more detailed enemy sprites.

Yep, and let's not forget these big PS enemy sprites are also animated.

first person perspective that completely revolutionizes the immersion of dungeon crawling and is, as far as my experience goes, completely unique for RPGs of the era

Phantasy Star's first person dungeons were pretty uncommon in console games at the time. This type of dungeon was more common in PC RPGs back then though. However, Phantasy Star's animated first person dungeon traversal was uncommon. This game probably had the most smoothly animated first person dungeon crawling at the time of its release. Most first person dungeon crawls back then simply clicked from room to room in a grid-like manner, with no animation portraying the traversal.

Phantasy Star is, admittedly, not quite as flawless as I remembered. It is, however, still the epitome of 8-bit JRPG game design in my opinion.

To be fair, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest both have their fair share of flaws as well. I agree that Phantasy Star is the 8-bit epitome JRPG. I'm glad people still enjoy it today. If you ever feel like revisiting the game, consider this version (just for the sake of variety).

[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

Back when I was younger, I saw an article about an upcoming PC strategy game called Lords of the Realm II, which let you simulate trying to take over medieval England and Wales. You would need to balance running your counties, building an army, and building castles to win. It sounded awesome, so I added it to my birthday list.

Naturally, my parents ended up getting me the first one.

When I first got the game as a kid, I found it to be quite difficult. I rebought it when GOG added it to their catalog, and I recently started trying to beat it. And at the start it was just as hard as I remembered. But if you can get over that initial hump, things start to snowball for you and victory becomes inevitable.

The basic premise is that the king is dead without an heir, so various nobles are trying to unify the land under their rule. Your goal is to capture the holdings of all the other nobles. To do so, you need to build up your infrastructe, build an army, and march across the land. So it ends up being a bit Civilization-esque, in that you need to balance your approach. The biggest thing that stands out from the management end is the different food streams. Your peasants can be fed from three sources: milk, meat, and grain. Cows produce milk, and can be eaten for their meat (but eating them means they stop producing milk). Sheep produce wool and can beat eaten. Grain involves managing the growing cycle; you need a lot of peasants to sow and reap the fields, but during the growing season you need relatively few. How you approach these food streams will vary depending on what stage the game is in. Sheep and cows will give birth and thus the herd/flock grows over time. In addition to the food, you also have various specialization tasks your peasants can do. They can be miners, foresters, stonemasons, or armorers. Each of these are skilled labor, which means peasants assigned don't do a good job right away. It behooves you to keep peasants doing one of those jobs for a long time, rather than cycling people in and out. While adding a few as your population grows isn't a big hit, the big swing from the grain curve will have a major impact. Miners produce iron, which can be made into weapons. The other two produce resources needed for castle building.

In terms of the army building, it is all done through conscription. You can simply get a bunch of peasants with pitchforks, but if you actually want to win you'll want to give them real weapons. Unfortunately, the balance is pretty out of whack. There's really only a handful of units worth building; crossbowmen, swordsmen, and knights. Everyone else is an inferior version of the other three, and the difference in upkeep costs is minimal, so there's no balancing there. Similarly, producing or buying weapons costs the same regardless of what you produce, so the only real difference between unit production is that knights cost twice as much, as they need both swords and armor. Their mobility and stats make up for it, though. The actual battles seem more tactical than they really are. Pretty much the only real tactic is to have enemies march into your crossbow fire, rather than meeting them halfway. Though if you're paying attention and the enemy decides to march piecemeal, engaging those right away will severely reduce your losses. The interace for combat is a bit clunky, but it's always over fast enough that it never becomes too sloggy, and the auto resolver actually does a good job, so that can be worth doing any time you have a halfway decent advantage (either in men or materiel).

Castles are the other stand out feature, though in the end they made the game drag on. Building a castle makes it so that enemies have to capture that to capture your county, and they can be garrisoned. Once garrisoned and attacked you have a couple options as a defender; hold up and wait for another army to relieve you, or sally forth in a glorious charge. As an attacker, your army shifts into siege mode and can build siege engines and attack the walls. I was never able to figure out how to properly use units to attack with ladders and siege towers, so I just stuck to spamming trebuchets. The whole thing ends up being about as slow as real sieges were, as the siege engines rarely do enough damage to the garrison to end things quickly, so you usually have to starve them out in the end. This made my victory take much longer than it should have, as once I reached a point where I was rolling much harder than the CPU I still had to deal with these large road blocks that would inevitably go down, but still take a bunch of turns. I never bothered building any myself, and I actually would demolish the ones I captured so I could sell the recovered building materials. Like Risk, this game comes down more to offense as the best defense, and castles are really only good for consolidating after a big push if you have a few seasons to build them up.

If you don't properly manage your economy at the start and greedily try to quickly expand you will be so far behind the eight ball that defeat is inevitable. This game really needs a strong start in order for you to make it through. Once you get that foothold, though, you probably will be able to make it to the end. It's just unfortunate that the point where you know you're going to win is so far ahead of the point where you actually win.

[ElkinFencer10]

Phantasy Star employs a first person perspective that completely revolutionizes the immersion of dungeon crawling and is, as far as my experience goes, completely unique for RPGs of the era.

Akallabeth, Ultima 1-5, a large number of Ultima clones, and then the games that were first person all the time, like Wizardry and Might & Magic.

[MrPopo]

Phantasy Star employs a first person perspective that completely revolutionizes the immersion of dungeon crawling and is, as far as my experience goes, completely unique for RPGs of the era.

Akallabeth, Ultima 1-5, a large number of Ultima clones, and then the games that were first person all the time, like Wizardry and Might & Magic.

You should be thanking me for giving you so many good suggestions of games to play.

[nullPointer]

The List So Far:

1. To the Moon [PC/Steam]
2. Super Mario All-Stars: Super Mario Bros. 3 [SNES]
3. The Goonies [Famicom] [Together Retro - 01/2018]
4. Disney's Kim Possible: Revenge of Monkey Fist [GBA] [Together Retro - 01/2018]
5. The Addams Family [SNES] [Together Retro - 01/2018]
6. The Adventures of Batman & Robin [SNES] [Together Retro - 01/2018]
7. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy: Justice for All [3DS]
8. Mickey Mousecapade [NES] [Together Retro - 01/2018]
9. Assassin's Creed II: Discovery [NDS]
10. Half-Life: Source [PC/Steam]
11. The Great Giana Sisters [Amiga] [Together Retro - 03/2018]

12. The Colonel's Bequest [PC/GOG] [Together Retro - 03/2018]


The Colonel's Bequest wears its murder mystery inspirations on its sleeve. This is a 'murder mystery in a mansion' that plays it fairly straight as an homage to the works of Agatha Christie most prominently. The heroine detective, the time period, and the menagerie of possible suspects are all very reminiscent of the trappings you might find in a Christie novel. I also detected some Nancy Drew DNA running through The Colonel's Bequest insofar as the protagonist is a young 'all American girl' out doin' detective stuff. Finally there's a pretty strong Clue (the board game) vibe running through the whole thing. I mean the titular Colonel in The Colonel's Bequest is Colonel Dijon, an obvious riff on the Colonel Mustard character in Clue. I'd go so far as to say that most of the characters in Clue have similar allegories to characters in The Colonel's Bequest. I suppose this makes sense due to the fact that Clue was similarly inspired by an Agatha Christie 'murder mystery in a mansion' framework, but it's slightly problematic in terms of The Colonel's Bequest. It muddies the waters in terms of inspiration and makes the game feel a bit uninspired and dare I say … derivative. It would be like forming a Led Zeppelin cover band in which a large part of the inspiration was drawn from … an earlier Led Zeppelin cover band. If you're looking for a thought provoking or even subversive take on the classic murder mystery formula, you won't find that here. If you're looking for a fun Sierra styled adventure romp through bog standard genre tropes, you're in luck.



Like most Sierra games from this era, The Colonel's Bequest utilizes a familiar combination of text parser plus point & click interface. The text parser is required for most contextual actions in the game as well as all conversational dialogue, but the mouse can be used for navigation and cursory inspection of most objects. I'll be honest, text parser games live or die based on the sophistication of the parser itself. An overly strict parser rapidly devolves into a meta-game of searching for the exact necessary wording to carry out your desired actions. Luckily The Colonel's Bequest is fairly lenient in this regard. I did encounter a couple of situations in which the parser suddenly wanted more precise wording (i.e. 'put key in control' worked whereas 'use key on control' did not), but for the most part those situations were notable only for their infrequency.



I've made mention of the characters being slightly derivative, but it's worth pointing out the ways in which they make the game unique. Based on my experience I'd say that The Colonel's Bequest contains more dialogue than the large majority of the Sierra library. Exploring a myriad of conversational choices with each character often reveals interesting interrelations between characters. I suspect that many of these conversations are merely decorative in terms end-game completion percentage, but they definitely add a richness of texture to the plot and characterization. Roberta Williams has always had a knack for well written flavor text, and The Colonel's Bequest is no exception in this regard.



Despite some interesting ways in which The Colonel's Bequest differentiates itself from other games in the Sierra playbook, there were only a few moments in which I felt like it captured the same magic as other widely heralded Sierra classics. Its use of secret passages as a means of spying on other characters in the house is rather inspired, and although the puzzles are somewhat scarce they're still quite satisfying. Still ... I'm not sure that The Colonel's Bequest ever quite rises to the high water mark found in the best of the Quest for Glory or King's Quest series. All the same, a middling Sierra game means that it's still better than most adventure games from this time period. I'd definitely recommend The Colonel's Bequest for murder mystery buffs or players seeking to explore the entirety of the Sierra catalog. Apprentice adventure gamers might be better advised exploring the classics before investigating the darkened corners of the Colonel's estate.

[Exhuminator]

I'd definitely recommend The Colonel's Bequest for murder mystery buffs or players seeking to explore the entirety of the Sierra catalog.

Awesome job beating that one. It's a mark of shame on my own "Sierra classics I still need to beat" list. I absolutely adore the graphics in Colonel's Bequest, that's about as good as EGA can get.

-

I want to ask that anyone having beaten a game for ELN, also make mention of it in the ELN thread, and not just here. I plan to create a participation list for when the thread is over, and I'd hate to miss anybody's hard work.

[PartridgeSenpai]

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)
11. Dragon Quest Builders (PS4)
12. Dragon Quest (3DS)

13. Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below (PS4)

Dragon Quest Heroes is part of the Musou (aka Warriors) series spin-off family of games with things like Hyrule Warriors and Dynasty Warriors Gundam, two games I very much enjoyed. I also quite like me some Dragon Quest, so I thought that this would be a perfect fit for me. While I wasn't exactly wrong, I will preface this review by saying that this is certainly nothing terribly special. If you aren't already a fan of the Musou games, this isn't gonna make you a believer.

On the good side, you have a level of presentation up there with its sister spin-off game of around the same time: Hyrule Warriors. You have an original cast of 4 fighters backed up by a collection of 9 fan favorites(?) from across Dragon Quests 4, 5, 6, and 8:

Four from DQ4: Alena, Kyril, Maya, and Psaro (the final boss of that game)
Two from DQ5: Nera and Bianca
One from DQ6: Terry
Two from DQ8: Yangus and Jessica

While most of the selection is very understandable, I put the '?' there because I genuinely had to look up who the guy they had from DQ6 was, and that's a game in the series I've beaten, while I knew immediately who the members from DQ8 were, and that's a game I've played maybe two hours of total. They're beautifully rendered in 3D though, and while the voice acting on them ranges from pretty good to noticeably bad, the English dub is totally serviceable. The sound track is also excellent, with many tracks from older games, although with how much DQ reuses music, that's more or less to be expected. The game also runs fantastically, and I never encountered a single bug otherwise.

On the bad side are how the characters actually play compared to something like Hyrule Warriors. Compared to Hyrule Warriors that came out four months prior to this, the move trees are seriously lacking in any kind of depth. Where HW has you constantly unlocking new combos and weapons for each character and their different weapons, every character in DQH has a combo tree that is mostly static the entire game. There are some extra bits and bobs you can get through the level-up skill tree, but it's nothing compared to HW's progression system. While they do try and make up for it with a little equipment system and a little crafting, if you look at the comparatively small, unbalanced character pool along with no option for co-op, and it ends up feeling like a noticeably lesser experience.

This is also probably one of the longer Musou games out there. Perhaps it's because I did almost all the side-quests, but those don't really add up to too much outside of the normal gameplay until right before the last chapter (where I spent like 8 hours doing them), as most of them are just collecting a certain amount of ingredients or killing a certain number of monsters. However, most of the "kill X number of monsters" quests ARE given after those monsters have more or less disappeared from your main-story quests, so those do add up to a fair bit of time wasting. On top of that, all of the non-story mission quests take place in the story-mode maps, so it really doesn't feel like anything that different anyways. I racked up a little over 30 hours on this game, but I certainly can't say that I was absolutely enjoying all of it.

Even for Dragon Quest, the story is really nothing special. Even just doing story missions, the game is going to take you at least 20 hours to beat (judging from HLTB), and the story is just so trite and predictable that it never grabbed me at all. You may say this is to be expected of a cross-over game, but I quite enjoyed the Hyrule Warriors and Gundam Warriors plots in comparison to this, if for any reason just because they were so much shorter. Omega Force has just not come up with the mission variety to make this series that compelling for so long, and no amount of new spell-casting or equipment systems can hide that. They really should have done something like Dynasty Warriors 8 (which came out 2 years earlier) where certain characters are required for certain missions to freshen up the combat a little bit, because with how few characters there are, combat starts to feel old REALLY fast. Even Hyrule Warriors acknowledged that staleness and drip-fed the new characters to you far better as well as encouraging you to play certain missions as different characters to earn them heart containers.

This is all on top of how DQH also has the very modern Omega-Force problem of a really inconsistent difficulty curve. Due to the certain enemy make-up and/or contours of a particular level, it may be vastly harder compared to ones around the same time, and this is especially true for side-quest missions. The other common Omega-Force problem this game has is fucking god-awful menu systems and UI. For all the hand-holding the tutorial does, it NEVER tells you how to level up, which is buried in the "Misc." part of your pause menu as "Allocate Skill Points". I went for like 8 or 10 hours at effectively level 1 just because I figured I hadn't unlocked the ability to level up yet, as I was so sure the game would tell me how given the precedent of instruction it had set so far.

Verdict: Not Recommended. As much as it pains me to say, this game just really not worth the price. With a sequel that, from what I hear, is much better (despite not having co-op) also on PS4 for a similar price, the far superior Hyrule Warriors in the same console era across (almost) three systems in counting, not to mention Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Complete Edition which is also on PS4 (and has co-op), there is no shortage of far better Musou games or even Dragon Quest Musou games to occupy your time with. This probably isn't a game you'll hate, but it's probably one you won't end up finishing (even for a Musou game).