Currently playing 4: Guns of the Patriots

[Stan]

Decided to go retro for this month. I ended up importing Bleach Blade Battlers from Japan for my PS2. The game aged horribly, but thankfully the 4 player matches are still fun! I never understood why we barely got any Bleach games outside of Japan?

[TehDonutKing]

PS2 is retro now? Guess i've lived long enough; time to go to hell and bro it up with my Uncle Satan.

[NemZ]

He's barely been playing for 5 minutes, not everyones a foal who can gallop right after being birthed.

Hardly. He's mentioned these frustrations several times over the past few months.

[Stan]

PS2 is retro now? Guess i've lived long enough; time to go to hell and bro it up with my Uncle Satan.

lmao!!! Im actually older than you, but my first system was the PS2 so it is kinda 'retro' for me (which I know it's not since it hasn't even been 20 years yet!)

[IronEvangelion]

Recently I finally decided to start buying games in the Assassin's Creed series, since the older ones are so inexpensive these days. I currently own 1, Bloodlines, 2, Brotherhood, and Revelations, and I've just finished 1 today. I'll begin by saying that I tried 1 a couple years earlier and it just didn't click with me so I got rid of it, but I enjoyed it a lot more the second time around.

The story was pretty good, but the major flaw I found with it was the gameplay. It starts out really fun, but it gets really damn repetitive after a few missions. There's no variety, it's always "Go here, go to the bureau, scale x number of tall buildings, save x number of civilians, eavesdrop x number of times, eliminate x number of minor targets/collect x number of flags for informants, pickpocket x number of people, go back to the bureau, go kill the big target, go back to the bureau again. Good job. Now repeat all that 8 more times." Needless to say, it turns into a major grind towards the end when everything gets tougher and you can easily find yourself facing 10 or more guards at once every time you screw up.

Anyhow I still had fun with it, and so far AC2 is shaping up to be much, much better in the gameplay department.

[Rosenakahara]

I should stop playing civ 5, i get too invested and waste so much time, however at the same time i have to make sure i wipe those filthy people of Venice and their pathetic religion off the face of the earth, they can join the Indians and Montezuma, as well as the long forgotten Napoleon.
then i can go after arabia to get a foothold in america, and finally rome will fall to me.

[Monk Ed]

I played several games tonight, which reminded me of long-standing comments I've been meaning to make on them.

Bayonetta 2: Accusations of character development in this game are wonderfully accurate. Although she keeps her cool, Bayonetta is more emotionally involved in the story than her counterpart in the Devil May Cry series, which I think suffered terribly in the story department from Dante's persistent aloofness. Also this game does something very right that I wish were an acknowledged standard: 60 fps gameplay, 30 fps cutscenes. It works wonders, and I don't like that when I play Ground Zeroes on my PC I have to choose one framerate to rule them all.

Assassin's Creed 3: This game is buggy as fuck. The framerate is embarrassing for any console game to have (you have fixed hardware, there is no excuse!), there's frequent visual glitches (and no, not the intended Animus ones), and I've actually had a case of a cutscene where the characters' mouths stopped moving entirely, making it very eerie all of a sudden. The controls feel sluggish too, but I suppose that's an unavoidable outcome of the style, which favors realism over responsiveness. (Which is not bad at all, I really enjoy it in Resident Evil 6, but I feel it's poorly executed half the time in this game.)

Alice: Madness Returns: After owning this for over a year I finally started it tonight, and I'm not impressed. The gameplay is really, really boring so far (I just finished the first area and arrived at the Hatter's Domain), and the aesthetic actively repulses me. I don't know exactly what I was hoping for, but what I'm hoping for now is that this will be a brisk experience that I can just breeze through while deriving whatever enjoyment I can from the story.

[Shinoyami65]

I played several games tonight, which reminded me of long-standing comments I've been meaning to make on them.

Bayonetta 2: Accusations of character development in this game are wonderfully accurate. Although she keeps her cool, Bayonetta is more emotionally involved in the story than her counterpart in the Devil May Cry series, which I think suffered terribly in the story department from Dante's persistent aloofness. Also this game does something very right that I wish were an acknowledged standard: 60 fps gameplay, 30 fps cutscenes. It works wonders, and I don't like that when I play Ground Zeroes on my PC I have to choose one framerate to rule them all.

Yeah, Bayonetta remains awesome as ever while also becoming more relatable; in the original she sort of swung back and forth around the anti-hero character type but here she's a bit more noble; it's also nice to see her being kind to a character who's

Bayo 1 spoiler  SPOILER: Show

Not herself as a child

Even Luka and Rodin seem more developed throughout the game.

SPOILER: Show

The added detail to the story of Balder and Rosa was also cool, especially since they managed to turn Balder from a creepy pedophiliac villain to a likeable hero in this installment (and his younger appearance is much more attractive than his aged visage from the first game xD)

[Rosenakahara]

Alice: Madness Returns: After owning this for over a year I finally started it tonight, and I'm not impressed. The gameplay is really, really boring so far (I just finished the first area and arrived at the Hatter's Domain), and the aesthetic actively repulses me. I don't know exactly what I was hoping for, but what I'm hoping for now is that this will be a brisk experience that I can just breeze through while deriving whatever enjoyment I can from the story.

i really do like the story and concepts in madness returns but i agree the game looks ugly, they didnt do wonderland much justice here i mean in american mcgee's alice (one of my favourite games of all time) wonderland has a very dark and depressing feel as alice is........well very much insane and in a dark and depressing asylum, but wonderland in that game still looks like wonderland, a twisted version yes but wonderland all the same.
here it feel kind of............generic? until you get to the Asian themed area and the dollhouse.

My main problem with the game was they focused more on combat which was shit in the first game too instead of the fun platforming (though i could have used a double jump at certain points in the first game thanks *cough* river of tears section *cough*).

Alice really is one of the best parts of both games, i love the girls personality and you can see the points in which the Alice from the books became this very cynical person worn down by her years at the asylum,

SPOILER: Show

the ending to this game however is godawful so to me the series story ended with the first game

[Squigsquasher]

Alice: Madness Returns: After owning this for over a year I finally started it tonight, and I'm not impressed. The gameplay is really, really boring so far (I just finished the first area and arrived at the Hatter's Domain), and the aesthetic actively repulses me. I don't know exactly what I was hoping for, but what I'm hoping for now is that this will be a brisk experience that I can just breeze through while deriving whatever enjoyment I can from the story.

You playing it on PC? I have the PC version and it is the buggiest piece of shit I have ever played. Ugh, fuck that game. Doesn't help that it whored itself out to NVidea and as such you can't turn the graphics to max without an NVidea card (welll you can but it slows to a crawl). Also, the framerate is locked to 30FPS unless you change a .ini file.

[Tankred]

Hardly. He's mentioned these frustrations several times over the past few months.

Depending on the game he's playing it can take a while to master, also he hasn't had heart to play properly for the past few months anyway. Not every fighting game is the same either, you try going from Capcom to airdashers or vice versa, new things have to be learned.

[Squigsquasher]

Started Dungeon Keeper 2. It's pretty great. The artstyle is great and the gameplay is awesome- we really could do with more "management" games outside the realms of shitty phone games and bargain bin simulators.

[CX1329]

I'm currently playing Watch Dogs. I love how wacky this game's moral compass is. Earlier, I was hacking into some random guy's bank account while doing a crime prevention mission, thus committing a crime while stopping a crime. And I still got the positive karma bonus, seeing as the game doesn't penalize you for syphoning money from bank accounts. Hilarious.

[Monk Ed]

I love how wacky this game's moral compass is. Earlier, I was hacking into some random guy's bank account while doing a crime prevention mission, thus committing a crime while stopping a crime. And I still got the positive karma bonus, seeing as the game doesn't penalize you for syphoning money from bank accounts. Hilarious.

I forgot to even mention that part in my own analysis over in the Watch Dogs thread. It's even funnier when you consider how utterly pointless money is in the game anyway. (Or at least, that was my experience of it.)

[Ray]

You steal a few hundred bucks from an ATM from rich people who won't even miss it. To fund your activities with a greater good in mind. I think the big good you do eclipses the smaller bad of stealing a few bucks off a rich dude who can afford it.

Anyways. . . .Alien Isolation. There's no feeling quite like sitting under a coffee table, thumbing the motion tracker, praying to every deity imaginable you don't get horribly murdered.

Word of advice though. . . don't buy the PS3 version like I did. It's really buggy, I had to start a whole level over as much from being killed by an Android or the Big Chap as by being stuck in a wall due to a bug keeping the textures from loading.

How much longer until the PS4 gets a price drop again?

[Shinoyami65]

Looking for a change of pace so I started Endless Legend after a friend recommended it to me.

Now, I have never, ever played a 4x strategy game before; I have played RTS games like Command and Conquer but this is a very different beast altogether. I have to say, though, I'm not having much trouble picking up the early stages of the game- I started as the Cultists of the Eternal End, the expansionist faction, and I didn't have much trouble exploring around, doing sidequests and converting villages to the cause of the Eternal End. The soundtrack and visuals of the game are pretty stunning, which makes a lot of the exploration and base-building very enjoyable.

I was told that combat was something of a weakpoint in the game, and I would have to agree that it's the low point, although I can't really compare it to other 4x games. Combat in the early-game pretty much amounts to getting your Hero units and foot soldiers into position, choosing who they attack and then letting them loose; I found the process a bit slow at times but that may be common for all 4x games. It's not particularly thrilling to watch both sides slowly whittle each other to death, although it is satisfying once your enemies bite the dust. One thing I didn't grasp early on was how my units were supposed to heal (it is rather telling than typing in 'healing units' into Google immediately brings up Endless Legends info) so my troops ended up getting worn down after a few battles and then demolished after I overestimated the military strength of a small village. You can level up your units and Heroes for perks, which I thought was a nice touch, although the impact of those choices isn't evident until they've gained a few levels.

Micromanagement and production aren't as difficult as I thought they would be; as I progressed I amassed more gold, influence and productive workers which in turn boosted the rate of my city's production and made it easier to pacify other settlements. The steady progression and growth of my faction was evident and there was a nice sense of triumph every time I added another district to my city and got some new perks. Each faction also has a questline, which gives you a sense of purpose in your travels and also influences you to build and develop in a certain direction to achieve your objective; this also creates a rich storyline and I have been quite impressed by the amount of lore that's been written for the game's backstory. The game isn't for people who like fast-paced drop-in drop-out action, though; total victory can take several hours so while the game can be good to play for an extended period you're gonna have to make time to play it if you want to win.

Overall I'm enjoying the game immensely; it's fun and vibrant and fairly accessible to newcomers, and also has a sense of depth and story that helps to keep the player going.

[Dataprime]

Picked up Link's Awaking DX & Mario 3D Land thru Club Nintendo.
I never played these ones before.

Also I re-bought Rayman Origins :) I love that game so much

Trying to beat SMT: Devil Survivor Overclocked too
man is it hard

That reminds me I should try SMTIV again.

[ElMariachi]

Just finished Betrayer on PC, it was a fun ride, the strange graphics (everything is monochrome, only the red color appears) played a lot on the disturbing and oppressive atmosphere, even when you're in a beach on broad daylight.
Although the game quickly become repetitive as you do the same things in each zones: unlock the destinations, find hints scattered around thanks to your "Listening" command, go to the Otherworld with the bell, find the ghost and talk to several of them to resolve investigation that almost always lead to the conclusion that English colonials are a bunch of nutcases that should had been sent to Australia instead, go purify the totems to unlock the next area, rinse and repeat.

In the end, the main incensive to continue is to discover what the hell happened in that colony to turn everyone into ash statues or berserker zombies.
Speaking of which, they pulled a nice Red Herring on that one:

Ending  SPOILER: Show

everything was pointing toward an expedition to find a lost kingdom full of treasures (and haunted of course) being the responsible for all this madness, then at the end it turns out that it's the ghost a colonist girl that fell in love with an Indian and got killed by her father for it the true responsible.

Still, now that it's over, I have just one thing to say:

Ending  SPOILER: Show

I should had put a bullet in the head of that fucking Red Maiden at the first opportunity, just let go of your twin sister's ghost goddammit, I don't intend to stay on that Resident Evil/Silent Hill themed founding father colony until the fucking American Revolution!
Still, freaking Scare Jump at the last conversation before the credits, guess that legend about giants living here before the humans was real after all...

[Oz]

After letting Papers Please be on the backburner for almost a year I completed it a week or two ago. It truly offers a wealth of story with tiny details enrichening the imagination. The recurring characters are very memorable and the unique subject is not used just as a gimmick - the gameplay is really intense and entertaining. Keeping up with the changing rules requires the player to come up with an efficient system to check the documents. I especially liked it how the game added one element after another at a constant pace and the numerous ending made me replay it a lot. Even the gameplay on its own is satisfying enough for replay.

I finally got around to playing Braid and I can see why it is so praised. It's a compact package of fun gameplay mechanics, puzzles that are challenging enough and a good soundtrack. The only world that I didn't like was the one with the ring that manipulated time because it took me way too much time to understand the logic of the puzzles.

I've played Banished more than any other game for the past week. Even though its gameplay is fairly limited and the buildings you can build are few, it is insanely addictive for anyone into city builders. The randomly generated maps offer an endless amount of challenges and there are surprisingly many ways to play the game. Banished is not just a city builder - it's similar to Dwarf Fortress in that your main purpose is to survive as long as you can. You learn the game's mechanics through trial and error. While that would be annoying in most games, in Banished it actually makes the game even more interesting as you need to adjust to new situations as they come and then try to use your newfound knowledge in a new game to your advantage.

However, Banished does have its own share of problems. It would help if the game offered more information about the town (like a precise list of priorities you could edit, a history log for each individual, etc) so that you could get a better sense of what is going on. There are also a few cases where more control would be sufficient. While not being able to directly control the citizens is intentional, it is quite annoying that the player is not able to decide which resources each storage takes and how much. The workers randomly move stuff between different spots and that can completely screw up the society when trying to expand.

But Banished has a charm that makes it easy to ignore these interface problems. It looks and sounds good. And it makes you want to play it over and over again. In only a week I've spent over 30 hours playing Banished so it's a time sink despite its restricted gameplay (which is enrichened by the modding scene).

Valiant Hearts: The Great War was not so great. While I think that way too many games these days have poorly made open worlds and that I want more games with solid linear storylines, Valiant Hearts felt too linear. It feels like you are just aboard a train rushing to its destination regardless of what you do. Partly this is due to the fact that this is a side-scrolling game with heavily restricted movemement and without anything to "discover" - there is nothing superfluous in the game. All of the background story and historical trivia are dumped into a separate menu and all you can do is complete the actions the game forces you to do.

The puzzles are simple to the point of feeling unnecessary and a great deal of them are basically quick time events, which goes to show how simplified the gameplay is (which also feels rather repetitive since the game lasts well over 7 hours). There are some gameplay elements that are a lot of fun (like the old school chase sequences tuned to classical music), but for the most part you need to deal with "puzzle solving" by repeating similar patterns and following unclear instructions (it takes some time to get used to how each mechanism works because the instructions for keys do not always notify how you are supposed to use them).

In addition to the mixed gameplay, the game's style and writing do not always match up that well. The heavy and tragic anti-war message of the game is often forgotten thanks to the very cartoonish visual style and outlandish action spectacles that makes the game's atmosphere much more light-hearted even when it shouldn't be. The most jarring element of the story is a recurring enemy general who is more diabolical than a bunch of cheesy superhero villain put together. The fight with him ends up being mostly handled in cutscenes and pure quick time event sequences, which is another problem of the game: the gameplay hardly ever advances the plot, but instead feels like a separate entity from the story that is mostly advanced in cutscenes and quick time event sequences. Add to that a bunch of fake deaths and an ending that overlasts its welcome and you get a pretty confusing gaming experience in terms of storytelling.

As much as I can complain about Valiant Hearts, it was nevertheless an enjoyable game. I loved its haunting soundtrack (which ended up being the only effective storytelling device) and the game looked nice for the most part even if the style didn't always fit to the story the makers were trying to portray. Knowing that Ubisoft was responsible for the game, it feels like a businessman's attempt to get some money out of the indie game market by dumping a game with awfully simplified gameplay, endearing visual style and forcedly sentimental story.

[ElMariachi]

I finally got around to playing Braid and I can see why it is so praised. It's a compact package of fun gameplay mechanics, puzzles that are challenging enough and a good soundtrack. The only world that I didn't like was the one with the ring that manipulated time because it took me way too much time to understand the logic of the puzzles.

Did you know that the story was a metaphor of the discovery of the A Bomb?

Valiant Hearts: The Great War [...]
As much as I can complain about Valiant Hearts, it was nevertheless an enjoyable game. I loved its haunting soundtrack (which ended up being the only effective storytelling device) and the game looked nice for the most part even if the style didn't always fit to the story the makers were trying to portray. Knowing that Ubisoft was responsible for the game, it feels like a businessman's attempt to get some money out of the indie game market by dumping a game with awfully simplified gameplay, endearing visual style and forcedly sentimental story.

That's pretty much what it was (and unfortunately that seems to be more and more Ubisoft's MO), that game was made to capitalize on the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of WWI, and was mainly targeted to the French Market as a way to know better the life of the soldiers in the trenches (especially since the last of the "Poilus", the nickname for the French infantrymen of that war, died a few years ago), hence all the background story and historical trivia being in a separate menu, like an educational program, which is pretty much how the game was advertised here in France, best exemplarized in the French name of the game : Soldats Inconnus : Mémoires de la Grande Guerre, meaning "Unknown Soldiers: Memories of the Great War".