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Thread: Completion Thread 2018: Lock & Load Then Rock & Roll

  1. 19. Mega Man 11



    This was real good. It's been a little bit since I've played one, so I can't really tell if I'm rusty or if this actually is on the hard side for the series, but the difficulty level was pretty much just right for me. The new Double Gear elements seem game-breaking initially, but I think the game does a good job of being designed around them and they add nice wrinkles to both the level design and using all the weapons. The visuals are, honestly, almost as good as I can imagine a polygonal adaptation of the Famicom games being, and the end bosses in particular were pretty great (lol the Yellow Devil). What else? The music didn't do much for me and some of the extras seem neat.

  2. Quote Originally Posted by Mzo View Post
    Nice! That game is so good.
    Thanks! Now I just found a video of the Japanese version on Youtube. This one also has a blue flame kick that knocks enemies down & lights them up. Dash, jump, kick+down to do it. Maybe Capcom USA wanted it taken out for being too powerful? The flash kick also lights enemies up like this.


    Alien vs Predator has a bug in it which causes an instant counterstop at 9,999,949. Jump to 9:50 on this one.

  3. 20. Astro Bot: Rescue Mission



    lmao this was great. The core 3D platforming mechanics are pretty simple, but the situational mechanics they build around the Dual Shock are clever and most of the time they get explored enough to be more than novelties. The stages never get particularly tough, but the game ramps up faster than Lucky's Tale and isn't a total cakewalk. And speaking of Lucky's Tale, pretty much every boss in this game outdoes that game's final boss, which is saying a lot! I haven't tried the unlocked challenges yet, either, so I'm hoping those have some tougher scenarios and are more than just ranked time trials. The worlds don't have consistent styles, but environmental themes instead change on a stage-by-stage basis and each stage manages to look surprisingly unique. Hidden collectables come in the form of finding and saving robot friends, and there's a surprising amount of effort put into the situations they find themselves in. All of the robot designs are adorable, the music is adorable, and it's maybe one of the cutest games ever.

    Moss, Lucky's Tale, and Edge of Nowhere are examples of decent third person games with solid-to-good VR implementations. Chronos is a great third-person game with a very bare VR implementation. Astro Bot is a great third-person game that makes very, very good use of VR.

  4. 21. Tetris Effect



    Beat Journey on Normal, played a chunk of Expert, and played around with Effect a bit. This feels very slightly closer to TGM, mechanically, than PPT did, and the new Zone mechanic is neat if not particularly complicated. The various Effect scenarios seem pretty great, particularly Mystery. I think there's a really good argument to be made that this is the best Mizuguchi game: mechanically I'd take a very good Tetris over Lumines (let alone Rez), and aesthetically it builds on top of Rez Area X's particle-focused look and Lumines' theme-specific and beat-matched sound effects through a ton of super-distinct and beautiful stage themes. And that's before accounting for VR, which inherently adds a ton to the experience despite the game having nothing particularly noteworthy going on implementation-wise.

  5. Quote Originally Posted by Tain View Post
    21. Tetris Effect



    Beat Journey on Normal, played a chunk of Expert, and played around with Effect a bit. This feels very slightly closer to TGM, mechanically, than PPT did, and the new Zone mechanic is neat if not particularly complicated. The various Effect scenarios seem pretty great, particularly Mystery. I think there's a really good argument to be made that this is the best Mizuguchi game: mechanically I'd take a very good Tetris over Lumines (let alone Rez), and aesthetically it builds on top of Rez Area X's particle-focused look and Lumines' theme-specific and beat-matched sound effects through a ton of super-distinct and beautiful stage themes. And that's before accounting for VR, which inherently adds a ton to the experience despite the game having nothing particularly noteworthy going on implementation-wise.
    Yeah, I don't know that it's as revolutionary as Rez was at the time of its release, since it's very much a continuation of what's been done before, but there's still a pretty good argument that this is the most refined thing he's done, and it's certainly the best audio design.

  6. Metal Slug 4

    I have never played this for any significant amount of time, but I have read that it is the worst slug. It is true, this game sucks. The game is so unfair and gives you so little room to maneuver, it is just no fun. The slugs placements are also too sparse, and the ones they give you suck. As soon as you jump on, they throw so much shit on screen that you pretty much lose it right away. It took me 37 credits to bullshit my way through (on the Wii, MS Anthrology). I will never play this slug again, but will go back to 1 and 3.

  7. Quote Originally Posted by kingoffighters View Post
    Metal Slug 4

    I have never played this for any significant amount of time, but I have read that it is the worst slug. It is true, this game sucks. The game is so unfair and gives you so little room to maneuver, it is just no fun. The slugs placements are also too sparse, and the ones they give you suck. As soon as you jump on, they throw so much shit on screen that you pretty much lose it right away. It took me 37 credits to bullshit my way through (on the Wii, MS Anthrology). I will never play this slug again, but will go back to 1 and 3.
    Because SNK was going through bankruptcy, they didn't make 4. Their MS team left during that time. Noise Factory developed it, with Mega Enterprise Korea as producers. I wasn't amused at all the recycled environments in 4. MS5 is better- no involvement from Mega this time, just Noise Factory.
    What I did like about MS4 is that it added the double heavy MG. Sadly this doesn't appear enough in the game.

  8. 22. ZeroRanger



    At first glance, ZeroRanger is an extremely strong arcade-designed shooter. The visuals are stylish and very distinct. The backgrounds are varied and as dense as the satisfying destruction effects. The enemies run the gamut of archetypes you've seen elsewhere, but they're well-made and the pacing is extremely tight. You'll see references that are a bit on-the-nose, but most of them are meaningfully fleshed out and not throwaway gags (like in, say, Meat Boy) so I'm okay with 'em. You gain access to one of two selectable new weapons after clearing each stage, assigned to its own button, and they're all fun to use. The generous extends and four-stage length make the game maybe feel a bit short initially (especially given the nature of the fourth stage), but loop 2 includes some nasty new enemy behavior and a lot of unique elements on top of that: the backgrounds have big changes, the soundtrack is entirely remixed, you'll run into some new setpieces and bosses, and you're allowed to make full use of the weapons that you unlocked in the prior loop.

    Given all of this it's a very good game to approach as a straight-up arcade STG and attempt to single-credit clear, but there's more going on here and it's tricky to talk about it all without giving too much away. There's a continue limit that permanently raises as you play (like Ikaruga but based on total score rather than time) and you can select a starting stage, but getting a game over rolls you back to checkpoints so there's some learning involved even when credit-feeding. And as you start to reach the end of the second loop, the game has some very effective and unique tricks up its sleeve that will force some very tough and satisfying fights on the player regardless of how they're playing. There's a lot of narrative built around this (some of which is delivered through means outside of the typical arcade game framework) and it's pretty great. This is what I "cleared" and what will give you the game's lone achievement. I haven't 1CC'd the game and I haven't fully scoped out what's changed yet.
    Last edited by Tain; 27 Nov 2018 at 11:11 AM.

  9. 5) Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

    Here's why this is a bad game:
    - It tries its best to obfuscate the consequences of decisions. Want to know if the skill you're trying to learn is ranged or melee? AoE or single square? Too bad! Equip it and find out. Want to know what the stat growth is like on that class you're thinking of switching to? Ask GameFAQs, jerk!

    - Samey classes and skills. Mog Lance is the same ranged attack as Air Render is the same ranged attack as Nighthawk. Three classes, three species, same mechanic.

    - Experimentation is encouraged but disadvantageous. Wouldn't it be cool to keep a 20-person roster with diverse skill sets? Yeah, it would! But the enemy levels in random encounters scale to your average squad level while those of the story enemies are set, so the more characters you entertain, the slower and more dissipated your growth, the greater the level gap when it counts. All these species and classes and a 24-member capacity and the best strategy is to tell all recruits past the sixth to go fuck themselves.

    - Fighting the exact same battles against the exact same enemies in the exact same maps over and over again.

    - UI is a nightmare. No way to assess the stat boosts of prospective weapons nor discern what their skills do beyond what they're named.

    - What variance there is between classes is usually for the worse in terms of balance. There are three tiers of skills: OP, middle-of-the-road-junk-available-across-classes, and useless. Why would I want to spend five battles learning the skill that mutes and enemy when I already know the skill that disables absolutely any action an enemy can take when they have the same MP cost and same hit rate?

    - The law system is bad. It's just indefensible. Find better ways to vary your battles than "If you use a rapier in this battle, your fencer is going to lose 5% of her attack power permanently." Or worse, if you happen across an encounter full of animals when the "No damage to animal" law is in effect, you cannot win the battle unless you have the card in your (extremely limited) inventory that disables that law. Otherwise, I hope you saved recently.

    - Post-game sucks. You can recruit hidden characters that are worse than your normal characters, can't change jobs, and weigh down your average level and, by extension, your EXP growth to boot.

    Here's why this is an amazing game:
    - Though some status effect skills are flat-out better than others, skills that inflict status ailments are GOOD in this game. So good that you'll have to meaningfully decide whether you want to construct a character around reliably inflicting debilitating status ailments or outputting raw damage.

    - While there is no significant difference between most classes, the handful of weirdo classes that deviate from the ranged/magic/melee archetypes are ~ WONDERFUL ~ . There's a class whose entire skillset is flipping a coin to potentially put either all of the enemies or all of your party into some debilitating state like Sleep or Doom. Do you load up on status-resistant accessories and build your party around it, sacrificing an important equipment slot? Do you roll the dice? Is the ability to Morph into captured enemies worth reserving space for both the Morpher who turns into enemies and the Hunter to capture them? Is it worth the gil expense to level-up your caught monsters? Do those Blue Mage skills look good? Then you're also going to have to keep a Beastmaster to control enemies to use those learnable skills on him! Are the insta-death Assassin skills worth the trouble unlocking that class and their meager DEF growth?

    - Tight, rewarding gameplay loop. Win battle, get AP toward learned skills, buy items with more skills, fight with those items, get AP to learn those skills.

    - The portraits and backgrounds are cool. The Ivalice species are cool. Viera are cool.

    I had a lot of fun with this dumb game and I'm going to start Final Fantasy Tactics A2 now.
    Last edited by A Robot Bit Me; 27 Nov 2018 at 11:09 PM.

  10. 31) Bare Knuckle III (MD) 680,110 pts. 1CC
    Played on Very Hard mode using Blaze & got the best ending. It's a shame that Sega of America censored this when they made it into Streets of Rage 3.

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