What Are You Playing? (Winter 2012)

Following up my prior post...

Mass Effect 2 (PS3) - Going from 0 to Insanity is a bitch, but I'm getting that God damned Platinum, and I'm not playing through it two more times. So the path less (and frustratingly) traveled it is! It really makes you notice where the game doesn't let you save, like where you have to send the cure through the air vents to help get the Salarian doctor to join. That should really be three separate checkpoints, but it's only one, and you can't manually save in the middle. So there are roughly seven waves of enemies, all with armor on Insanity, in-between save opportunities. Ouch.

F-Zero X (N64)

I remember playing this in a department store once back in the day, but that's it. Goddamn, what a bitchin' soundtrack! I need to find a CD version of this. Gameplay wise, I would put this right up there with F-Zero GX. They nailed the controls; I just wish the AI was a little better. And of course, it's got fog and pop-up out the ass, but that's to be expected on the N64. The rumble pack makes the experience a lot better!

I'd rank the series:

F-Zero GX > F-Zero X > F-Zero

Haven't played the GBA games, but I'd like to someday.

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Originally Posted by jyoung

Haven't played the GBA games, but I'd like to someday.

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You don't want to do that to yourself. The GBA games did not live up to the other entries in the series. Though I think the one good F-Zero GBA game didn't see release in NA.

I'm playing Dustforce at the moment and love many things about the game (its simplistic and quaint art, the relaxing music, the fact you play as one of four ninja janitors wall running, the hack-and-slash and air dashing elements).

One thing I find a little irritating is having to S Rank a stage in both Performance and Finesse (sweep 100% of the map, chaining all of your sweeps without getting hit or falling in a pit) is a little ridiculous, even if I'm someone who tends to enjoy a challenge.

I S-Ranked the first 10 maps or so and each SS Rank rewards you with a key to the next area. Keys are classed between Silver, Gold and (Crimson? Boss?) keys. Silver Keys seem completely doable by the general public and already Gold keys tend to vary between I Wanna Be The Guy spikes laden across 99% of the terrain on a map to large gaps which exceedingly welcome death. It's the length of some of the tracks and the requirement to perfection that might rub people the wrong way, even for me one or two of the maps so far gave a real "Whaaaat is going oooon" type of mentality.

It's a beautiful and fun game, but I think locking the game's levels until you do perfect runs might hurt them a bit in the end. Love the challenge, but I think it would have been a better idea to lock an extra 10% of maps based on perfect runs and make them truly marvelous maps for those willing to seek a bigger challenge.

Maybe they wanted to create a hardcore niche or pander to gamers who crave the ninjaphysics that games like Super Meat Boy and N+ have revived.

Finished up all of the Spartan X inspired games in my collection (Dragon Wang, Makai Retsuden and THE Kung Fu). Was thinking of tackling both Yie ar Kung-fu games next.

In the meantime, have gone back to the Batman Returns games. The NES one is horribly monotonous but the bosses are actually challenging. Will play the Lynx one again on my next long flight this weekend.

I liked all the tricks you could do from the movie, in the SNES version.

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Originally Posted by YellerDog

I liked all the tricks you could do from the movie, in the SNES version.

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Yah, it's a much better game and probably the best game based upon the movie. The NES version doesn't have any grapple mechanics or enough variety with the regular enemies.

Skyrim: College of Winterhold and Companions quest lines are done. It's Thieves Guild time.

Unreal Gold (original missions): Looks amazing for a 1998 FPS, with a fucking amazing soundtrack featuring some techno/trance/ambient tunes. Even some FPS released a year or two later can't keep up graphically- this even has some great reflection effects on floors. A PS2 version would probably have needed to be cut down bad. One cool feature is that some enemies actually try to dive away from your shots. The Eight Ball rocket launcher has a charge ability that can fire several rockets at a time, which reminds me of Razing Storm's Cluster Shot. It's worth holding off on starting your game right away to see the castle flyby.

TGM3: Still stuck on the 900-999 section, around 920. This part is almost like playing the first section of Shirase. Lately I've been getting lots of 1 or S1 grades.

I thought MW3 was a little too easy. I played on Hardened and got it down in a 3-day weekend. Black Ops took a little longer. I'm wondering if Activision should put the COD series on a 1 year hiatus and try to come back with a really kickass revamp with better AI and graphics. Visually I'm thinking of something on the level of BF3 or Crysis 2- something where the Ultra mode would REQUIRE at least a high end card like Geforce 580 GTX. COD needs more destructible elements, for one thing.

The final boss of Phantasy Star II is a cunt. I'm not giving up, though.

Unreal looked great but it had just the shittiest underpowered (feel as well as damage wise) weapons ever. Also it never fucking ended. Super boring.