Completion Thread 2021 -OVERTURE-

[gamevet]

I've been meaning to play this. Thing is that the only FPS's I've ever really played are Bungie ones (Halo, Destiny). I did the tutorial for Titanfall 2 a couple of years ago and the controls weren't clicking with me since it's more Call of Duty than Halo/Destiny. But I really do want to give it another shot.

It’s nothing like Call of Duty. It’s more like if you joined Ninja Gaiden with Mech Assault.

[Nei]

4. The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors



This had been on my PlayStation Store wish list for a while. Well, until they redesigned the site and they
deleted everyone's wish list. It was on sale last week (today could be the last day of the sale for 50% off).
for $9.99 so I bit.

I never played the arcade nor the original SNES version (upon which this one is based on). This is a pretty
straight forward and very simple arcade style hack n' slash. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Last week was
somewhat stressful and I really enjoyed turning my brain off and playing this for 30 minutes or so every night.
I finished it with Kunoichi, don't know if I'll go back for the rest of the characters. Could have done worse
for $9.99.

[Dolemite]

4. The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors



This had been on my PlayStation Store wish list for a while. Well, until they redesign the site and they
deleted everyone's wish list. It was on sale last week (today could be the last day of the sale for 50% off).
for $9.99 so I bit.

Wish list? The PlayStation Store has a wish list? Since when?

I never played the arcade nor the original SNES version (upon which this one is based on). This is a pretty
straight forward and very simple arcade style hack n' slash. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Last week was
somewhat stressful and I really enjoyed turning my brain off and playing this for 30 minutes or so every night.
I finished it with Kunoichi, don't know if I'll go back for the rest of the characters. Could have done worse
for $9.99.

I played the SNES version and this is basically an exact remake with nicer graphics/animation, some new moves, and two new characters. Nice, but I agree with you that it's not worth $20. $9.99 is more like it.

[Dolemite]

4. TITANFALL 2

Finally got around to playing this game. It totally lived up to the hype. It's nice to play a perfectly focused campaign with excellent level design with none of the bloat that most AAA games suffer from. This is on the level of Portal 2, Half-Life 2, Halo, The Last of Us, and the best single player narrative gaming experiences I've ever seen. It's only 6 hours or so and it's pretty cheap - I definitely recommend checking it out if you haven't played it yet. Multiplayer seems to be pretty dead these days, sadly.

Woah. This is a pretty compelling endorsement. I've been on the fence...I think Imma try it.

[Nei]

Wish list? The PlayStation Store has a wish list? Since when?...

The old store (not the blinding white mess that shows you nothing about the games that you want to know more about) had a wish list before Microsoft added a wish list to theirs. When Sony rebranded their store to what it is now, they removed the wish list functionality. Microsoft used to let you add games to your wish list from the webpage, that function is also now gone. You want to add a game to your wish list? You have to log into your console and add it from the console's store. I don't understand how UX at either company let these subpar experiences out into the wild. That being said, the world is falling apart. /shrug

[Dolemite]

My Resident Evil freakdown continues. Just finished RE0 for the first time, and it...was just okay. I played it right after finishing REMake and 0 came across as a harder (less ammo & health) copycat. I found the train segment interesting but you knew it was too limiting a setting to remain, and when we got to the mansion...it felt like REMake all over again. It got better as it went along, however, but it never felt quite as well-crafted as REMake.

The partner system was an interesting twist that wasn't used enough and the lack of item crates was annoying. And the enemies...what to make of giant frogs, leach-people and an effeminate opera-singer as the main bad guy? Ehhhh.

Next up: RE5. Never played it before, so it should be interesting as I'm coming off of Capcom's more horror-focused entries in the series and delving into their more action-oriented ones that drew some people's ire. We shall see!

[Tain]

I still gotta get back to RE0. I remember liking it but dropped it for something else a few years ago.

game dump game dump



12. Bowser's Fury

This was good. Probably the right length, and I wonder how they could build a game with the same core that holds up to be much longer, but the world this takes place in feels like it's made up of my favorite kind of side-courses from Odyssey and Bowser's appearances are a nice change of pace. Plessie is a lot of fun to dart around on in this, too.



13. Eliza

Obviously not the usual Zachtronics game but this was pretty well-written and hit close to home.



14. Amid Evil

A classic-style FPS that probably has more in common with Unreal than Doom or Quake. I don't think the weapons and enemies combine into combat that's nearly as enjoyable as something like DUSK, Doom 2016, or Serious Sam, but the environments are pretty cool to explore at least. A little overlong.



15. Ghosts n Goblins Resurrection

Great game. It's not an arcade-built game at all, but the divergences are well thought-out and deeply tied into the game's difficulty levels. You're encouraged to start by trying on Legend mode (both the hardest AND the default difficulty, surprisingly), and it is _brutal_. The retry structure is based on checkpoints and there's no lives system, but the difficulty is cranked up to incredible levels to compensate and the checkpoint spacing is huge.

After getting absolutely wrecked by Legend mode I dug into the difficulty levels and was surprised at how much went into differentiating them. Lower difficulty levels add more checkpoints, uniquely-colored to point them out. Arthur starts losing less armor when getting hit and has some amusing half-armored states. The easiest difficulty level lets you respawn on death, allowing you to choose where to drop your body. In all of the modes you get an option to lower a specific stage's difficulty once you've died so many times in it, and I was surprised to find that this actually lowers it to an in-between state rather than simply dropping you all the way down from Legend to Knight, Knight to Squire, etc. It's clear that offering a huge range of difficulty options while still making a well-balanced brutal path was a primary goal for this game.

The core action is very Makaimura, which has always been deeply hilarious. You can tell the developers were laughing to themselves as they packed the stages with absurd jumps and troll enemy behavior. The visuals, when you get over your initial reaction to them being paperdoll-styled, actually rule and the boss fights in particular are gorgeous.

There's just a ton here. Seven dense stages, arranged in a slightly-branching way, with alternate shadow variants of each. A freely respec-able skill tree full of fun shit and you can't grind your way up it. The game keeps track of found chests and has these hidden timed challenges that I've only found one of. There's even a neat-sounding 2-player mode with distinct mechanics.

They didn't deliver the arcade game I initially hoped for, but whatever. This is really, really good.



16. Dino Crisis 2

A pretty cool game, but ultimately probably merely better than the original Dino Crisis (which is probably the worst of the Capcom fixed-camera PS1 games). It's too simple mechanically to be a particularly good 3D action game yet it tries to focus on that brisk pace in lieu of any resource management. As a result there isn't a lot going for it outside of the spectacle.



17. The Room Two

Extremely more of the same, of course. Fortunately the devs steered away from using the viewfinder all that often. It's good, but I'm not rushing to play the third.



18. Outer Wilds

Incredible. Really, really floored by this. Outer Wilds is crudely a first-person adventure game. It gives you an elegant set of actions and a space explorer's toolkit and tasks you with solving a complex mystery spread throughout a small-scale solar system. This involves flying your spaceship from planet to planet, staying out of danger (which there's plenty of, despite the lack of combat), and scouring for every bit of information you can find. The puzzles are elegant and deeply tied to the history of the planets, which themselves are wonderfully varied. Everything is perfectly-sized and the flight mechanics are genuinely fun, so moving around the solar system stays engaging as you try to piece together what's going on.

I've been complaining for a while now that I haven't been able to find a game with a sense of mystery that feels like La-Mulana. This is probably the closest game around.

A shame about that not-Fallout game with such a similar name releasing later that same year, lol

[Dolemite]

I remember Dino Crisis 2 being better than the original game. But it's been years since I've played either one, so who knows?

[Tain]

G.G. Shinobi

An overlooked Shinobi game released a couple years after Revenge. The structure is kinda unique and takes a little bit from Rockman, with the first four stages being selectable and having you rescuing color-coded comrades that have unique weapons and abilities. The final stage is, like in so many action-platformers from around this time, a big maze. I usually dislike these, but this one is built around making you use all five of your squad members and uses a lot of cool little puzzle elements to do so. A pretty good game, and surprisingly tricky at times.



Ninja Five-O

Sick, maddening, methodical game. Fun to learn the grapple controls. Very tight HP. Stages are slightly mazy but never too bad. Awesome bosses, amazing pixel art.



Crazy Taxi 2

Went back to this one and got S-Rank on the two cities and did most of the Crazy Pyramid. Overall it's not as good as the first game, definitely not, but the arrow is better-behaved than in home CT1's Original City and there are a lot of neat elements to the city. Rocketing yourself around by drift-jumping is real fun, probably enough to make up for the fact that you can't drift into walls anymore.



Crazy Taxi 3

S-ranked West Coast and Small Apple, Awesome'd Glitter Oasis. I always loved what they did with the original arcade map in this release (adding a bunch of areas and the CT2 mechanics), and this definitely has the best mini-map mode of the three games with Crazy X. Glitter Oasis doesn't touch West Coast, but it's super novel with tons of open space to drift and ramp.



Moon Crystal

Great animation and it's fun to learn the weird movement. Stages are tightly-designed and the environment art is nice. Cool cutscenes.

Unfortunately, the bosses aren't as fun to fight as they are to look at, and there's an inconsistency to pulling yourself up a ledge (it feels like you'll fail a third of the time depending on how far away you are when you latch on).

Definitely worth a playthrough

[gameoverDude]

1.) The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (PC)

Finished it on Blood and Broken Bones difficulty after a total playtime of 125 hours. For a 2015 title, TW 3 holds its own graphically against a LOT of 2020 releases. I'll give the main game another playthrough on Death March once the free next-gen update (with RTX ray tracing) is released.

My ending: Ciri survives and receives a Witcher sword from Geralt. Philip Strengar's wife Anna is saved. Nilfgaard loses the war and Radovir takes over, leading to Emhyr getting offed. Cerys rules Skellige. Geralt remains a Witcher on the Path. IMO, the final boss Eredin was actually way easier than Caranthir.

2.) Mega Turrican (PS4 version, Turrican Flashback)