Games Beaten 2015

by **Michi** Thu Dec 24, 2015 2:31 pm

I finished off the Tomb Raider reboot last night.

Pretty fun game overall. The combat and platforming were pretty evenly spaced out, the optional tomb puzzles were simple, but did require a bit of thought and the QTEs didn't bother me as much here as they do in some other games (or maybe I'm getting used to them.) I do wish they hadn't added so much of them into the combat, though. Those extended kill shots might have looked nice, but they ended up distracting me more than anything. I did have to use a guide to pinpoint a couple stray collectables, but everything else was pretty intuitive, which I really appreciated.

One thing I was a little let down by was the ending. After having taken down the giant Oni, Methaias ended up being a cakewalk by comparison. Still satisfactory, but I was expecting just...a little more, I guess *shrugs*

Oh well, still fun. And only mildly irritating to my not-very-much-a-shooter-player sensibilities.

8/10 Would not hesitate to give the sequel a go.

by **MrPopo** Thu Dec 24, 2015 4:05 pm

First 50:

Second 50:

101. Alien Isolation - PC
102. Medal of Honor Allied Assault - Spearhead - PC
103. Medal of Honor Allied Assault - Breakthrough - PC
104. Castlevania Bloodlines - Genesis

And with that the last of my Classicvanias is beaten. A lot of blood, sweat, tears, and practice to remind myself how to play a Classicvania. But it was worth it to kill Dracula yet another time. He just doesn't seem to take the hint.

So Bloodlines is rather unique in Classicvanias in that you start off by choosing to play as either the standard whip user or a new spear user. The spear does less damage than the whip but it can attack straight up and at angles while you're on the ground, and when jumping you can stab downward (which is quite nice for medusa heads). You also get a super jump (which you are invincible during). The whip user can whip diagonally up when he is jumping; this allows him to swing off of pretty much anything his whip attaches to. These two different mobility options are emphasized in levels 3 and 5, where the path branches depending on whether you can swing over a large gap or jump up super high.

Bloodlines is also unique in that there is a third whip upgrade. If you break open a large number of candles it will drop a third level of power for your weapon. This increases the damage you do and gives you a new super subweapon. If you later collect a different subweapon you can get back the super subweapon by collecting a second one of whatever subweapon you currently have (e.g. if you're holding axe and have level three attack grabbing anther axe gives you super subweapon). The super subweapons are unique to each character but are roughly equivalent to the item crashes from Rondo. One caveat is that if you take a hit you lose the third level of weapon power and the super subweapon. This ends up being an overall frustrating mechanic, as a little mistake can make a huge impact on your going through the levels, as that third level of power can mean it takes one less hit to kill an enemy. Speaking of item crashes, since the game uses the C button for your items it also has mini item crashes for when you hit up plus C. These tend to be a larger version of your subweapon, rather than a screen filling attack.

My biggest complaint with Bloodlines is that the difficulty is very ragged. A large number of enemies take multiple hits to kill, but you fight them in areas where those extra hits are a major liability. Additionally, the damage enemies do is all over the place. While with the NES games you have a general sense of being able to take X hits before you die, in Bloodlines the damage varies widely between enemies, and it feels like the distribution is rather nonsensical. I found myself dying a lot when I intuitively expected to be able to take another hit or two based on previous experience.

The game also likes throwing in a bunch of minibosses. Most of them are rather uninteresting, with the worst being a bone dragon with slightly more HP than a normal one, but nothing else to mark it as a mini boss (other than the health bar and boss music). The stage bosses are all pretty weird and not fitting in with the more traditional Castlevania bosses. The most bizarre is the gear golem boss with his oodles of HP and his Rayman-like lack of connective stuff between his body parts.

by **BoneSnapDeez** Thu Dec 24, 2015 4:37 pm

84. Hydlide (NES)
85. The Legend of Zelda (NES)
86. Esper Dream (Famicom Disk System)
87. Sylviana: Ai Ippai no Boukensha (Famicom Disk System)
88. Kalin no Tsurugi (Famicom Disk System)
89. Soul Blazer (SNES)
90. Illusion of Gaia (SNES)

I think that wraps things up since my last update (August!!!).

Was hoping to hit 100-120 this year, but got slowed down by my daughter who requested multiple playthroughs of Zelda, Dragon Warrior, and Kirby.

by **IrishNinja** Thu Dec 24, 2015 5:27 pm

BoneSnapDeez wrote:84. Hydlide (NES)

oh man, how was this? i beat Super Hydlide on the Genesis in the day, but revisiting it a few years back...yikes. still love the OST but beyond that, it's rough!

by **BoneSnapDeez** Thu Dec 24, 2015 5:37 pm

Hydlide is fun but rough around the edges. You have to keep reminding yourself that it's a port of a game originally released in 1984.

by **MrPopo** Thu Dec 24, 2015 6:00 pm

First 50:

Second 50:

101. Alien Isolation - PC
102. Medal of Honor Allied Assault - Spearhead - PC
103. Medal of Honor Allied Assault - Breakthrough - PC
104. Castlevania Bloodlines - Genesis
105. MechWarrior 3: Pirate's Moon - PC

The Pirate's Moon expansion for MechWarrior 3 was overall a disappointment. It's short, tough for the wrong reasons, and ends up tripping over the elements that MechWarrior 3 put in. Unless you're getting this as a package deal with the base game I wouldn't recommend it.

The campaign is 10 missions and across four maps. You end up having to do two of the maps three times and two of them twice. And most of those involve traversing the same route in each engagement; you don't even get to visit different parts of the map most of the time. It feels very lazy, especially when MechWarrior 3 had unique maps for every mission and a good feeling of progressing through Smoke Jaguar territory. Pirate's Moon feels like a series of instant action scenarios with minimal story tying them.

Speaking of, now your character gives their thoughts before and after each mission, which could have been nice except it robs you of the actual mission briefing. You still get a map and an indication of the nav points, so you aren't going in completely blind, but you aren't getting a proper briefing like you're supposed to.

The shortness of the campaign also means that the salvage mechanics of MechWarrior 3 are now a major hindrance. Ammunition based weaponry is something you use on one mission and then you're out, because you don't have enough time to build up the necessary stock. You also end up having to make some very subpar loadouts because you don't have enough good equipment even though the enemy's forces are ramped up hard (again, because of the shortness of the campaign).

And in order to increase the difficulty they decided that the enemy mechs should be godly at coring your Mech; if you come under fire they will utterly destroy your torso with every shot. Fortunately, they aren't as accurate against your lancemates and so the real tactic is to get within radar range, then stop and send in your lancemates to draw fire before heading in and finishing them off. It's rather unsatisfying.

The game does add in a few mechs (including the conspicuously absent Atlas) and some new weaponry. Most of the weaponry is pretty pointless; we don't need light and heavy machine guns, and the heavy lasers and x-pulse lasers don't provide enough benefit for the drawbacks and are rare enough you don't get much opportunity to use them. And then there's the Thunderbolt missile, which is hilariously OP just like the Arrow IV was in Mech 2 GBL and is only balanced by the fact that you get it super late and get very little ammo for it. I had just enough to take a pair into the last mission and snipe a ton of mechs with it.

by **MrPopo** Fri Dec 25, 2015 6:30 pm

First 50:

Second 50:

101. Alien Isolation - PC
102. Medal of Honor Allied Assault - Spearhead - PC
103. Medal of Honor Allied Assault - Breakthrough - PC
104. Castlevania Bloodlines - Genesis
105. MechWarrior 3: Pirate's Moon - PC
106. Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption - PC

Of the two VtM games available on the PC, this is the less good one. It ends up being too much Diablo, not enough VtM. The setting isn't really explored the way it is in Bloodlines which is a real misuse of the property. It's a shame, too, because having the game being set in both the Dark Ages and the Modern Ages has promise. The devs just failed to deliver.

You are a wounded Crusader who is left behind in the care of a convent. You immediately get a hard on for one of the nuns and she reciprocates, leading to the overarching goals of the game. Shortly thereafter you are introduced to the world of the vampires when you try to defend the town against nearby monsters and you get turned by clan Brujah. Here we see the game's biggest strength; they take a look at clan Brujah in the olden days, which is different from how they are in the modern setting. You also get to interact with the Cappadocians and gain one as a party member. Then you do some jobs for your sire, and during this time the hot nun gets kidnapped and sold into vampiric slavery. This becomes the main plot; you spend the rest of the game trying to get back your virginal squeeze. Midway through the game you fall into torpor and are only awakened in the modern era.

The game is incredibly combat focused, with the minimal town areas being little better than the original Diablo's. You traverse from one dungeon to the next killing tons of dudes. This would be ok if the combat was interesting, but again, it falls short. You have a party of up to four members and melee combat is straight Diablo. You do gain a selection of powers, but until late game they are all too costly in blood to be useful as a primary means of attack. So you're left swinging away and usually missing in the early game and overall it's very unsatisfying.

Then you get the best sword in the game that steals blood on hit and your strength and dex get high enough to regularly hit and you instantly morph into a death god. Unless you were trying to build a caster. Then you're just gimped. The game throws a ton of disciplines at you but most are worthless. I found the ones I needed were healing, celerity, fortitude, potence, and prison of ice, the last of which turns all bosses into ez mode. As it turns out, bosses don't resist disabling spells, so you can just keep them perma frozen while your party beats on them.

Speaking of disabling spells, there are far too many of them that enemies like to use on you, which makes things incredibly frustrating. You end up having to do a lot of drawing enemies out with your expendable party members before you swoop in and trash the joint. It doesn't really feel like proper difficulty, just fake difficulty.

by **MrPopo** Fri Dec 25, 2015 8:43 pm

First 50:

Second 50:

101. Alien Isolation - PC
102. Medal of Honor Allied Assault - Spearhead - PC
103. Medal of Honor Allied Assault - Breakthrough - PC
104. Castlevania Bloodlines - Genesis
105. MechWarrior 3: Pirate's Moon - PC
106. Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption - PC
107. Star Fox Assault - GCN

Holy shit. I had heard this game was a disappointment, but I wasn't prepared for the level of how much I hated playing this. This is the reason the Star Fox series has been dormant; Namco produced a steaming turd of a game. It's like the devs decided to make a sequel based on gameplay footage of previous games, rather than actually playing the games themselves.

So the first thing; there are only three levels that are the classic Star Fox on rails. All range mode is a fun diversion, but you don't want it for every level. That is where Star Fox Command falls short; every battle is all range mode. Star Fox is about rail shooting. Also, they manage to cock up segments of the rail shooter levels by having a really floaty camera when you take turns. This leads to a lot of running into stuff that shouldn't be happening.

The second thing; holy shit they utterly ruined the Landmaster. It only shows up in all range segments and controls like ass. If you are using the twin stick controls (which you'll want for the next paragraph) then the Landmaster moves forward and back with the left stick, you move the turret up and down and the Landmaster side to side with the c-stick, and left and right on the left stick will have you strafe. Except that you barely move at all when you hit strafe, and it seems to take precedence over turning. So it handles like garbage. Add on an incredibly slow movement speed, the movement boost that barely lets you climb an elevation thanks to the slow movement speed, and these fucked up mollusk enemies that I still haven't figured out how to kill, and I frequently felt like the Landmaster was a liability. I'd rather go on foot.

Which brings me to on foot. Someone at Namco was like "hey, remember that mode in Star Fox 64 where you could run around rather than fly? Well I saw footage of that and want half the game to be devoted to that!" Fuck that guy. Rogue Squadron 3 had a couple of on foot segments, but they were done a lot better; the non-Luke Skywalker ones were short and only a small part of the overall mission that was focused on a vehicle, and the Luke Skywalker ones involve a lightsaber. The Star Fox ones involve a selection of weapons you need to flip through like Goldeneye but no menu to shortcut and a much slower draw speed, a bunch of enemies that are immune to weak shots and you either need to use rockets or your slowly charging blaster, and extremely tediously long mission objectives. I'd like to emphasize, half the game is spent on foot. If I ever find the designer at Namco who thought that was good idea I'm going to feed him into a Pac-Man themed wood chipper.

Also, the story presentation is terrible. Various cutscenes interrupt the flow of things, whereas Star Fox 64 kept everything in one smooth line. And the previous blast off at the end of the mission is instead an immediate cut to a results menu and some minor chatter. Also, they cocked up some of the voices. Leon is the biggest one; he was a cultured enemy in Star Fox 64 but is now a standard sniveling baddie here.

So glad this game is short and gives a ton of lives out, so when I got screwed over by poorly telegraphed patterns I could recover. Oh, that reminds me. The shooting on the Arwing feels terrible. It feels like you're always using an incredibly underpowered gun on regular fire; you need dual blasters to feel like you can actually kill stuff, and it still had a weak feel to it.

by **BogusMeatFactory** Sat Dec 26, 2015 3:14 pm

MrPopo wrote:106. Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption - PC

Of the two VtM games available on the PC, this is the less good one. It ends up being too much Diablo, not enough VtM. The setting isn't really explored the way it is in Bloodlines which is a real misuse of the property. It's a shame, too, because having the game being set in both the Dark Ages and the Modern Ages has promise. The devs just failed to deliver.

You are a wounded Crusader who is left behind in the care of a convent. You immediately get a hard on for one of the nuns and she reciprocates, leading to the overarching goals of the game. Shortly thereafter you are introduced to the world of the vampires when you try to defend the town against nearby monsters and you get turned by clan Brujah. Here we see the game's biggest strength; they take a look at clan Brujah in the olden days, which is different from how they are in the modern setting. You also get to interact with the Cappadocians and gain one as a party member. Then you do some jobs for your sire, and during this time the hot nun gets kidnapped and sold into vampiric slavery. This becomes the main plot; you spend the rest of the game trying to get back your virginal squeeze. Midway through the game you fall into torpor and are only awakened in the modern era.

The game is incredibly combat focused, with the minimal town areas being little better than the original Diablo's. You traverse from one dungeon to the next killing tons of dudes. This would be ok if the combat was interesting, but again, it falls short. You have a party of up to four members and melee combat is straight Diablo. You do gain a selection of powers, but until late game they are all too costly in blood to be useful as a primary means of attack. So you're left swinging away and usually missing in the early game and overall it's very unsatisfying.

Then you get the best sword in the game that steals blood on hit and your strength and dex get high enough to regularly hit and you instantly morph into a death god. Unless you were trying to build a caster. Then you're just gimped. The game throws a ton of disciplines at you but most are worthless. I found the ones I needed were healing, celerity, fortitude, potence, and prison of ice, the last of which turns all bosses into ez mode. As it turns out, bosses don't resist disabling spells, so you can just keep them perma frozen while your party beats on them.

Speaking of disabling spells, there are far too many of them that enemies like to use on you, which makes things incredibly frustrating. You end up having to do a lot of drawing enemies out with your expendable party members before you swoop in and trash the joint. It doesn't really feel like proper difficulty, just fake difficulty.

You came into the game at a point where it was patched a gazillion times to make it even playable. I got the game at launch and, for the first month and a half, your party AI was so bad that they would spam spells to the point where they went into frenzy and would attack you... AT ALL TIMES! Whenever combat was engaged, they would immediately run out of blood and frenzy attack you. It was really really bad.

The level creation toolset was also a bust, as it required you to do some hardcore modding to add custom maps. You were left with a handful of premade garbage maps from the game. Outside of that though, the actually Dungeon Master tools they gave you were awesome and it was fun to mess around with, but was very under utilized.

As for the game itself, it was a great concept that fell horribly flat on its face. I never picked it up again after the launch fiasco. I will stick to my FPS/RPG alternative thank you very much!

by **MrPopo** Sat Dec 26, 2015 3:23 pm

First 50:

Second 50:

101. Alien Isolation - PC
102. Medal of Honor Allied Assault - Spearhead - PC
103. Medal of Honor Allied Assault - Breakthrough - PC
104. Castlevania Bloodlines - Genesis
105. MechWarrior 3: Pirate's Moon - PC
106. Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption - PC
107. Star Fox Assault - GCN
108. Contraption Maker - PC

Contraption Maker is a spiritual sequel to The Incredible Machine series and made by the same devs. Since they don't have rights to the name they came up with a new name, but the game is very obviously a sequel. Nearly every part from the previous games is in this one, along with some new parts.

The biggest difference with Contraption Maker is that all objects that can move are fully physics modeled. So if a candle is falling and one side hits something on the way down it will flip over. Sometimes this is required in order to solve a puzzle, while other times it's something to watch out for so you don't get in trouble. Other than that, the game has a much smoother UI; this is especially noticeable with ropes and belts, as well as placing lasers. I don't know if those things were in the two TIM: Contraptions games because I haven't played those yet.

One fun thing is that when you solve a puzzle it also shows you the official solution running. Sometimes you can be very different from that on the really hard stuff, as the number of possibilities increases. A few times I've done a solution that was much simpler (in my mind) than the official solution, which is a testament to how great the concept of the game is. The devs agree, as they've tweaked some puzzle goal triggers for when people come up with an alternate solution that looks right to a human but is just a little off from what the puzzle was looking for.

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