Completion Thread 2012: Hai! Dekimashita!

38. Dust: AET (XBLA) 400/400

Very much enjoyed this game from start to finish, about 13 hours I think. The combat and animations were silky smooth and worked like a charm. Dialogue had me laughing out loud a few times, overall not a bad story and it moves along pretty decent. It was fun rescuing the characters from the other games and then seeing them all hanging out together, a few notable ones (kid from Bastion, guy from Braid, Fez) had some really interesting little homages to their games. Finished with 114% and about 9 keys left, I'm not sure the final percentage but there's not much reason for me to open chests for more loot right now unless the sequel has a New Game+ from the beginning. Joust has me on 2 of the trials levels by a little bit, otherwise I got the high score on most of them so as to get the cheevo. Overall a great little game, very polished and fun to play, would recommend it to just about anyone.

#8: Lunar: Silver Star Harmony

I ended up caving and just playing this one using the PSP's screen rather than taking advantage of its video output, because I didn't like how it looked blown up on my PC monitor. And what a beautiful looking game it is! The art is a marked improvement over the PSX remake and is lightyears ahead of the Sega CD original, not that it's fair to compare the two. All of the visuals seem to have been completely redone (again!), save the anime cutscenes which were recycled from Silver Star Story Complete.

Audio-wise things were a mixed bag for me. The soundtrack, which will never compare to Lunar: TSS, ranged from fantastic to cheese-tastic and most of the dubbing was your standard bad anime fare. One key spot which ended up being a huge letdown was the English dub for Nall. While the Working Designs dub wasn't of the caliber of, say, James Earl Jones or Sam Elliot it was infinitely better than the generic garbage that XSEED (?) went with. As a result, it ruined Nall's classic, "Alex! O AAaallex!" intro and took away a bit from the personality of the game.

As far as gameplay goes, this version of Lunar gets top marks from me. The Lunar series have always been very straightforward games to play, relying more on their charm rather than a complicated battle system or puzzle-heavy dungeons for their appeal. ...Okay, so they were always kinda simplistic, but the lack of random battles in SSH, which I no longer have any patience for, and abbreviated areas and map size, probably due to the UMD's limited capacity, meant that things never took too long or got overly annoying. The game always felt nice and to the point. Also, most of SSH's spells/skills were satisfying to use and watch, which was a weakness in the Sega CD original.

Story-wise it's the same as the SSSC remake, with just enough updates and tweaks (and time passed since the last time I've played a Lunar game) that it still felt fresh. And although the plot and dialogue seemed a bit childish and hokey to my now 31-year-old mind, there's still a part of me that geeks out and remembers how much 11-year-old me loved the game.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed turning my brain off and revisiting one of the favorite games of my youth. I probably won't be back to the Lunar universe, however, unless Game Arts finally releases a Lunar 3. I won't be holding my breath. :tu:

#23: Half-Life 2 (PC version) - Normal difficulty

It seemed a little easier than the 360 version, probably because I was racking up Combine headshot kills with the Logitech Marble at 60 FPS. The Eastern European design of the besieged City 17 is a good atmosphere for an FPS.

One rumor I read says that Half-Life 3 will be a sandbox game.
I'm guessing this could mean a Shadow Complex/Metroid type level structure, or some sort of hub system being worked into the HL formula.

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Originally Posted by Joust Williams

Doom 3 is good. DNF isn't.

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Doom 3 does get some credit for letting you keep all weapons you pick up. With some more enemies in a given area at once, Doom 3 would go from good to great. I liked it but missed how there would be enemies waiting for you to show up in 1 & 2. In 3, the way enemies take their time spawning from a demonic portal allows you to do some cheap kills. See the portal, sprint near to catch them on entry, ready a weapon that's powerful enough to do a 1HKO or dish out damage quickly, and he hasn't got much of a chance. Doom 4 will probably fix this.

The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition

Wow. This is the best game I've played in some time. CD Projekt Red is a hell of a team, one of the best RPGs I think I've ever played. A lot of great stuff in there. Compelling story, some awesome characters and dialog, looks and sounds great, the combat is a lot of fun (it took me awhile to get a hang of it) and there is a ton of stuff to do. Choices that actually matter! More people gotta plays this.

Resident Evil 5

Completed solo. Didn't hate it as much as I thought I might. Obviously all of the "AN IRL PARTNER SURE WOULD HELP YOU KILL THIS" parts were pretty frustrating but overall I had a good time. I was worried that inventory management would get annoying with Sheva using up all of my ammo but I stuck with the Handgun/Shotgun/Grenade-Launcher and just threw her all of the machine guns & rifles and it was never really an issue.

But my biggest problem is that the game worked relatively well until they start throwing javos with guns at you and you're stuck with the hilarious system where you can only take cover at a couple very specific places and you have to deal with the laser-sight aiming which is just miserable when you either have to aim a long distance or god forbid you're trying to shoot something by lining up a red dot on, I dunno maybe one of the pulsing red-orange weak points on every boss. But whatever, it's not like the game was particularly difficult, just seems pretty weak compared to everything it's clearly trying to emulate.

Just beat DOA 5's story mode. It's ridiculous, but epic as well, and has a pretty satisfying ending.

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Originally Posted by Rumpy

The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition

Wow. This is the best game I've played in some time. CD Projekt Red is a hell of a team, one of the best RPGs I think I've ever played. A lot of great stuff in there. Compelling story, some awesome characters and dialog, looks and sounds great, the combat is a lot of fun (it took me awhile to get a hang of it) and there is a ton of stuff to do. Choices that actually matter! More people gotta plays this.

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Yeah, I finished this one as well. Pretty awesome and probably the best adult RPG story that I've ever played through.

Oh! Props to Pineapple for giving me some starter tips, helped a lot.

24) Half-Life 2: Episode 1 (PC) Normal difficulty

Not too bad in length for extra episodic content at about 5 hours. While the first couple chapters seem a bit slow paced compared to the last three, you get one more chance to lord it over the Combines for awhile when the Gravity Gun regains super power. That said, it picks up considerably. Chapter 4 "Urban Flight" is probably the best of this expansion, being quite a bit longer than the others.

11. L.A. Noire (360) - spent about 25 hours on this between the main story and all the street crimes (side missions). Overall, I liked the game quite a bit and found it to be a nice change of pace. I thought the story, voice acting etc was pretty solid. A few negatives: story portion was on the verge of being too long (got very repetitive at times) and the interview/dialogue choice options could be annoying - one or two key incorrect responses and that case was not going to end well.