Completion Thread 2018: Lock & Load Then Rock & Roll

[Mzo]

Played and beat Mega Man 11 on Normal. It took a little under 4 hours. It's good! Definitely a Mega Man game but the double gear system and the much more complex boss patterns add a lot. Looks great, too!

[kingoffighters]

Such a short game, garbage.

[SamuraiMoogle]

Such a short game, garbage.

If it’s not open world and 80 hours long the game is shit. Younger gamers suck.

[Pineapple]

8. Dark Souls Remastered (PC)

Finished 100% again, the final achievement took as long as it did on the 360 originally, and it was the same last one: Knights Honor (get all the weapons). It was the same final weapon I was chasing (Channeler's Trident) as well. I've heard from several people that they got this weapon as a drop in their first playthrough without even trying, while I've spent a collective 25 hours (not exaggerating) across two versions of the game just to get one in each game. ANYWHO, feels fuckin great to clean this one up, as it's essentially been done for about 2 months now. There really weren't a lot of differences from this game to the original, it looks and runs better and you can summon more folks and I think there was one or two extra bonfires (not even totally sure on that). The second Gwyn fight was very hard, I think originally I may have summoned someone to help, but this time there was no one around so I was forced to learn the parry timing. It's not that the timing is that hard, in fact the window for the parry seems pretty generous, but it's harrowing standing in front of the final boss and just waiting for him to swing his giant flaming sword at you. Even with a Black Knight Halberd +5 it took about 15 parries. Love this game.

Of note, recently tried the network stress test on the Switch version and I fucking hated it. It somehow looked worse than I recall the 360 version looking, and the drop in framerate was noticeable. Summoning was basically the name of the game, and it worked very sparsely. I was invaded twice without any notification, and watched people literally teleporting large distances. Guy was just coming into view down a long corridor so I heal, before I've drank the estus he was behind me doing a backstab, just appeared there. Was thinking about getting it for Souls on the Go, glad they let me try it first and save some money.

[gameoverDude]

27) Mercs (arcade)
Score: 1045800- counterstop at 999,990

Had 939800 after the final boss was destroyed, 100000 clear bonus, 6000 for 2 bombs left.
On the Genesis, Sega added another digit to the score- so there's no counterstop on that one.

28) Return of Double Dragon (SFC)
Forget about Double Dragon 3 & 4. Just play this instead.

[A Robot Bit Me]

4) Castlevania: Circle of the Moon

If anything or anyone wants a soft spot in my heart in which to hang out for, say, 17 years, there's a vacancy.

In my mind, the repetitive halls and damage sponge enemies were the domain of the first two DS Castlevanias, but these problems were around much earlier, turns out. 1:06:00 - 1:11:00 of this video shows a particularly egregious stretch of the castle, but nearly every room does this: takes a single screen with decent enemy placement, then clones it 2-4 times, tapes the whole thing together and calls it a hallway. It feels like one of those Tiger games.

Screen-cloning was around in SotN, but SotN mystifies it because it's a clever game. By the time you're going down that long hallway full of Mandagoras for the 10th time, you can transform into a wolf and blow through it. That not only conveniently masks the game's padding--it feels good. It gives you a sense of progression: the room that used to take me two minutes just took me 3 seconds and looked awesome. CotM never learns how to hide its seams in this way.

Another example is its abilities-as-keys. The main utility of the gas cloud in SotN is to get through that one grate. It's a key. But it a) looks cool and b) has utility outside of being just a key, however small, which hides the seams of its being Just A Key. Compare the gas cloud to CotM's abilities-as-keys, "You can now break grey blocks!" and, "You can now push brown blocks!" These abilities don't have utility outside their use as keys. So they lay bare the game's cold mechanics; there's no mystification of what they really are. And we need the mystification. Without that, we're reminded that we're just playing dumb games of simple pattern recognition and coordination. We're just paying $60 for different-colored cup-and-balls over and over again. I don't want to be reminded of or confronted with that. You gotta lie to me.

[Rumpy]

Dead Space 3

I think I liked this more than 2. Big fan of the first game so I've been wanting to finish off this series for a long time. For a game that came out last gen, five years ago, it looks really good. The sound design is probably the show stopper as the music and sound effects are really well done.

I liked how this game had a lot of different locations, in that regard it reminded me of Bioshock. Starts on a snow planet you eventually get to, then an act in a city, then off into space where you go on a few different ships and there's some brief spacewalk section. I like that kind of variety. The enemy types were I think the biggest in the series, something that was really needed in the first game. Even though the monsters are different people, they all mutate in the same way so they look identical. Once you know how to handle one monster, the fear is gone. This game had a good mix of enemies so you frequently had to change tactics in combat. In the 20 hours it took me to finish, I only had low resources twice which was rather surprising (I did die a lot).

The idea of side missions is good (can't remember what they were like in 1 or 2) but every single one of them was the same. Go through one specific door when you find a key and then take the linear path to the end where you have to survive a kill room. One of these side missions was actually difficult (one of the times I almost ran out of resources) but the pay off is almost always trash.

Which brings me to the crafting system. Good idea but a lot of the stuff you pick up is worthless. By the end I had a ton of upgrade circuits and no use for them. I used 4 weapons the whole game, 3 crafted and 1 being the stock cutter you start with every game. A big problem (sorta) is that he main cutter is so useful and easy to make so powerful that you never want (or shoiuld) unequip it. The other 3 being machine gun with a revolver, a shotgun with a machine gun and a grenade launcher I turned into a rocket launcher (the ultimate in crowd control). Everything else I made was either too weak or too hard to use effectively. I was really annoyed to find out that the buzzsaw weapon, one of the coolest in the games was so awful. No damage, no matter how I upgraded it and you have to let enemies get right on top of you for it to even hit.

That said, I liked it a lot. I really liked the games Visceral made and it's a bummer they got shut down.

[Joust Williams]

I really enjoyed DS3 too. I played them all again recently, and I once again did it only using the Plasma Cutter.

[gameoverDude]

29) E-SWAT (AC)
1CC on Hardest difficulty. 2,473,100.
The stage 3 boss with the anchor is an easy speedkill. After you've dodged his 1st attack which is always a low one, go in point-blank, duck, & get ready. Start beating the hell out of the shoot button when he throws it above you. If you fire fast enough, that's it for him.

[Frogacuda]

Valkyria Chronicles 4

I actually beat this one despite it being a lot longer than the first (which I never finished). Never been a big tactics guy, but this one got its hooks in me. I think the level design really took it past what the original ever did. Good villains in this one, too.

There's a good variety to the strategies now, you don't just rush scouts around the map the whole time, although learning to account for the dumb AI and hitting objectives hard and early is still a thing. But it's kind of a puzzle. You can't play it like you're playing against a human any more than you'd play Castlevania like your enemies were human-controlled.