What Are You Playing? (Winter 2012)

[gameoverDude]

Skyrim: Thieves' Guild questline completed for a total of three. Civil War, Main, and Dark Brotherhood still to go.

Unreal: Finally off of that damn ISV-KRAN ship. Flak cannon is probably one of the better weapons, like a higher powered shotgun. A few Kralls went down by stealth kills with this weapon. The minigun and a sniper rifle aren't too bad either. Right now I'm a bit past the halfway mark.

[jyoung]

Resident Evil: Director's Cut (PS1) -- I played the Gamecube remake first, but this still holds up surprisingly well. Prerendered backgrounds looking good! I just beat the snake boss, and so far the Gamecube version doesn't seem to have made too many revisions to the original. I started in "original" mode with Jill, so I wonder what differences there are in the "arrange" mode. Kind of bullshit that the American version of this "director's cut" got censored. I read that it was a mistake during development and that both the JAP and USA versions were originally intended to be uncut, but only the JAP game ended up uncensored.

[Pineapple]

Got to Albus in OoE and beat him, warp over to Ecclesia and did the glyph union and boom, game over. I thought for a moment that I'd beaten the game without ever seeing Dracula... Nope, looks like I missed 2 villagers (don't get imprisoned behind breakable walls morons!). Saved them, now I guess I fight Barlow and then maybe I get to go to a castle where I might find Dracula? None of this is explained very thoroughly.

[MechDeus]

Finally installed and started the Bulletstorm I picked up during the Steam sale, and getting it set up was the worst experience I've had since Dead Space. It's some kind of shitty crossover between Steam and GFWL, and apparently the GFWL that comes packaged with Steam generally doesn't work with most games. Especially aggravating is that it appears as though the same solution rarely works for more than a couple people, and there are a LOT of solutions. After about two hours or so, uninstalling GFWL to get rid of the Steam packaged version and installing the real one, and then finding a command line to reset some random text log and rebooting, it finally connected and worked. I don't even understand how the hell they fucked things up this bad.

That said, I played through the first few levels and it's pretty fun. Not worth the hassle of getting it working, but still enjoyable.

[dog$]

Got a Move and a few games in February. Overall it's Not Bad.

Sports Champions - Serviceable. Nice to have a few games that use two dildos.

Kung Fu Rider - Endearing but yes, the control seems like something you have to work at to really pull off everything the game expects you to do. That every button on the wand does something doesn't help matters. It does have charm, though. Cute touch to have the game take pics while playing, though what it really does is show how terrible the camera is. The woman has a very jiggly ass.

Child of Eden - Nice when you can wrangle the calibration down. Shame that you can't use a second controller or the Nav so that you don't have to jab the screen to shoot the lock-on. Otherwise the game is Rez 2, right? Style over substance and everything else, so it seems at this point.

Time Crisis Collection - Do I really have to recalibrate the damned wand every time I pause the game? Really? Good value for the content otherwise. Raizing Storm seems to be the best made game on it, and at least doesn't have to have a split screen compromise for two players like traditional TC4 does. The pirate game is probably playable and much more engaging if you play two players solo, since it doesn't seem to have any sort of mechanic that requires you to press any button other than the trigger.

The last game has been ordered and is en route. You can guess what it is. I'll let you know when it arrives.

[Tain]

Been beasting through Binary Domain. Once beaten (tomorrow, maybe tonight), I'm expecting a lot of Under Defeat HD.

[Melf]

Working through Dragon Slayer II for Mega Drive using a FAQ - a really, really general and vague FAQ. Still, it's enough to get through the game. I'm trying to tackle more import titles, and so far it's been really fun. I'm getting through the backlog of MD and Mega CD games I never got around to playing.

[gameoverDude]

Warzard (CPS III, Capcom) aka Red Earth - Credit-fed to the end with Mukuro (Kenji). This is one Capcom game that sadly never got enough respect, like the CPS III system itself. Still, some characters like Kenji, Tessa, & Hauzer will probably be familiar.

The single player "quest" mode has you going through a lineup of opponents but this isn't a tournament, instead it's lethal combat. Your life bar must last you throughout the game but it can be restored after a stage or by food/drink pickups during battles. Orbs are used for super moves. If you get KOed and continue, you come back with a full life bar- but any damage you've done to an enemy will remain. There are fatalities that happen if a certain special move is used to KO an enemy- try Kenji's Enma-zuki (HCB+P). Sure it's the heart rip that Kano has done 15 billion times, but there's a little something else at the end. SQUISH!

Some of your special moves won't be available on the first play because you need to "level up" by earning enough points to unlock them- so be sure to write down the password that shows up at game over. There are two bonus stages which you'll find helpful for this.

[jyoung]

Metroid: Zero Mission (GBA) -- Wow, this game is nothing like the original Metroid save for a few rooms here or there. They took a great exploration game and have made it linear as a bowel movement coming through the intestines. Pretty much all the difficulty has been removed by giving you a ton of health and telling you exactly where to go with a big blinking spot on the map lol. The sparse soundtrack of the original is replaced with a bunch of overblown MIDI choir nonsense. How did they manage to make a GBA game sound worse than a NES game? This is like a case study in how NOT to do a remake. This is Metroid for fucking spoon-fed philistine monkeys.

[Finch]

Hm...