Topic: Games you've recently beat

@JohnnyShoulder neuro-diverse dear, how many times do I have to tell you.

@graymamba
Congrats on your latest plat, I do think with it being that we won’t see another Deus Ex for quite a while (if ever) that it was worth the effort.

Cheers @CaptD, yeah it was definitely worth it… I’d still be waking up in cold-sweats for the next few months had I tapped-out 😅. Low-key one of my favourite series too. Easily forgotten about when you haven’t played one for a while but when I was in the midst of it, it was right up my street.

@graymamba It’s okay, buddy. Don’t let these non-trophy hunting Philistines get to you. Remember, true genius if first ridiculed, then violently opposed, and then finally universally revered. 😄
@JohnnyShoulder @Ravix

@Th3solution it’s too late my friend, it worked and their peer-pressure has resulted in me abandoning my foolish ways 😔.

No more trophy hunting for me… back to a life of accepting failure and quitting at the first sign of adversity… I’ll fit right in 😎. Look forward to me mainly residing in the Games you’ve recently give up on thread from here on in 🤣

I finally beat Trails of Cold Steel 4, my 9th Trails game, even if it’s taken me years. Yeah, this game is sorta a massive mess. Elements are absolutely fantastic and real payoff for fans of (the better) games before Cold Steel. But then the shockingly dreadful stuff is there like catgirl hijinx and making a childhood crush from Sky into what can only be described as sheer noncery. Also I am so incredibly glad I lucked my way into the true ending by making sure to do every side thing I could. The normal ending is literally just ‘Poochie died on the way back to his home planet’ and that’s not an exaggeration. This subseries really is a combination of great character work with the Thors graduates you find across the sidequests with insanely frustrating decisions across the main story with the cast. What a strange game to really delve into.

I would like to add @HallowMoonshadow that pointless boring Gaius becomes easily the most interesting out of the entire group. Which is insane considering our thoughts originally. But Machias still gets nothing at all to do by the end, truly a placeholder of a character. I think my main gripe with the male characters in the game other than the obviously homoerotic Crow dynamic is that they’re completely neutered by being designed to have zero romantic overtones at all. The female characters are a mix of classic dating game archetypes but the men aren’t even rivals for their affections, so they’re just sexless puppets that somehow go through high school without even the hint of anything. If the female party members are off limits then they should have been given their own subplots with supporting characters but instead they feel incomplete, with the exception of Ash from New Class VII who gets a subtle subplot across dialogue if you talk to him between story moments across the two games he’s in. New Class VII are generally better designed with the smaller number meaning more time given to each of them.

I dunno, it’s hard to really recommend Cold Steel 4 if I’ve given 50 hours (all on speed-up) to a game and I think more of its shortcomings than its genuinely brilliant moments where everything comes together and eras of the series marry together to hit like interconnected universal crack. It’s a complete mess but it’s hard to say I didn’t enjoy the ride mostly.

@graymamba @Th3solution Obviously not enough giant leaf fanning and grape feeding going on.

Just finished Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Definitive Edition) on Series X after about 23 hours of playtime. It's a good game but it has many flaws. At times it's really fun, but for the majority of the game, it felt like a bloated mess. Most of the missions lack substance, e.g. drive from point A to point B, shoot some people and then drive back. The missions in the countryside were especially terrible. One will have you drive all across to the other side of the map, and the next one right after has you drive back again to the other side of the map. It was like this for several of the countryside missions, it was so annoying. The missions that were fun were really fun though, such as breaking into Area 51 and stealing the jetpack. It was also cool to explore three different cities. But in all honesty, after Los Santos, I feel like the story took a nosedive. I didn't really understand what the goal was throughout the rest of the game. This contributed to the game feeling very bloated.

Another aspect I absolutely despised was constantly losing your weapons after certain missions. For example, one mission has you riding in a helicopter shooting at a tanker. The helicopter gets shot down, so you go down with it in the water. Then the protagonist says "Oh, I lost all my weapons in the water" and you have to start from the beginning. This happened numerous times throughout the game and it felt really frustrating considering I grinded for ammo capturing territories in Los Santos because you can't buy ammo in this game. If you go to the ammo store, you're buying the weapon that comes with ammo, but you can't buy the ammo separately, which is so stupid.

Speaking of which, I thought the aspect of capturing territories was really repetitive and not fun at all. Not to mention your progress gets reset when you leave Los Santos, so you could spend hours capturing all territories just to lose them when you progress through the story. Also, you're forced to capture a certain amount of territories in order to unlock the final mission, which I didn't like. I genuinely don't understand why older games always forced you to grind before letting you tackle the finale. It was the same in Vice City where you had to acquire properties and do asset missions in order to progress through the story. It ruins the flow of the game. At least in San Andreas, you weren't forced to do many asset missions except for getting the hangar and then doing the pilot school, which was also annoying. Flying in this game is terrible when compared to GTA 5. It's so hard to keep the plane straight.

I'm so glad that I played the Definitive Edition though. Having checkpoints and autosaves are absolute blessings as a lot of missions are challenging. I can't imagine playing through this game without them. I also thought the updated visuals looked fantastic compared to the original game. I didn't experience any bugs, but I did experience issues with some textures. Besides that, I'd say this is the best way to experience the game simply because of the checkpoints and autosaves alone.

I understand why San Andreas is so highly regarded. It offered the largest map the series had ever seen at the time, there were lots of side things to do, tons of missions and cool stuff to unlock such as the jetpack, fighter jet and so on. It's an ambitious game and should definitely be commended for it. But the overall package just doesn't hold up well today based on the things I mentioned above. I enjoyed GTA 3 and Vice City way more, the former for keeping a level of consistency throughout the story and the latter for its memorable setting. I'm glad that I've finally experienced San Andreas though.

@LtSarge San An is a weird one. I bought it on Day 1 back in 2004 and it was the best thing ever back then. Me and my mate played it in some form almost every weekend until probably late 2007.

I'm the other way round, I love the driving missions, the more mindless the better. Driving in GTA games is one of my favourite gaming activities, particularly in III and San Andreas. I could drive around and listen to the radio stations for hours, proper chills me out. Conversely, I hate any mission involving shooting, or getting out of my car whatsover!

I played the definitive edition last year and I agree with everything else you've said. The turf capturing stuff is a nightmare and the checkpointing system makes even the most intolerable missions bearable. The story doesn't fully deliver on its early promise in my opinion and yeah... don't get too attached to your ammo.

I always felt it was slightly overrated, even though I played it loads back in the day. My favourite story is still IV, the fifth game probably has the best world for exploration, and III is just my fave because, well, if you think me and my mate put a lot of hours into SA, that's nothing compared to III lol. I got it bundled in with my PS2, the first console I bought with my own money, so it has a special place in my heart

Glad you enjoyed SA though and I enjoyed reading your thoughts. I could talk about the PS2 GTAs all day!

@Gremio108 I do like driving in San Andreas, although I preferred motorcycles over cars. I felt like most of the roads were too narrow, so having a bike was a necessity for me in order to get around the map without crashing into every single thing on the way. Unfortunately, I didn't like the radio stations in this game. Vice City had great classics and GTA 3 had great trance/house music. But the rap music in SA just wasn't for me.

I do agree that San Andreas is rather overrated in terms of the story. My favourite one is also GTA IV's. What a fantastic game that was!

San Andreas did a good job of hyping me up for GTA VI later this year. I genuinely cannot wait to play it at launch. I'm guessing you're looking forward to it as well?

@LtSarge Yeah if you're not into early nineties hip hop then you're goosed! Radio X has some good stuff, bit of Depeche Mode, some Primal Scream etc but yeah. Or you could always get your country on, yee haw.

I'm looking forward to GTA VI very much. Assuming the writers of Red Dead II are on story duty, we should be in for a special narrative, at least that's what I'm hoping

I just beat Castlevania Lament of Innocence with 100% map competition

The last boss was definitely the hardest. I have played it before but never finished it.

Another Castlevania journey finished.

I recommend both Curse of Darkness and Lament of Innocence!

@Zuljaras you’re slacking with only 100% map completion on a Castlevania game 😉

@graymamba Lament is not like SotN. It measures the maps of all areas as 100%

@Zuljaras in that case, the devs were slacking 🤣

@Herculean Yeah I'm prepared for it to be delayed. Doesn't really affect me either way, I've got plenty backlog to be going at. The longer games get delayed, the better state they tend to release in as a rule so hopefully it'll be pushed back

@Herculean I read that and swore I played RDR2 on release in autumn/winter 2017 and definitely not Spring the next year. Turns out it was actually autumn/winter 2018. So it released and I played it through winter (my memory didn't deceive me) but I did get my years wrong. This means it actually got delayed a whole year after they initially said only a Spring delay, too.

I'd advise people to just buy GTA the day it releases and then you know it's really, genuinely out and available, especially when you consider R*'s proposed release dates changing so often.

Just finished up The Crew 2 and I thought it was really good. Unbelievable amount of content - be it the size of the map, the amount of events and how different from each other a lot of them are, the amount of vehicles and also the stories (which just involve cruising around without racing).

Racing games haven’t been my thing for a long time but I was a bit bowled-over by this tbh. Might not be everyone’s cup of tea but it was exactly what I’d want in a racer.

I know I’m in the firm minority here but I just keep enjoying Ubisoft games 🤣.

@graymamba I used to be a huge racing game fan, but for an unknown reason I seem to have lost interest. Nobody informed my mind, though, because I keep buying them, so I have a ton of racing games I never play. Well, not true, whenever I need a rally fix (typically coinciding with a weekend of WRC rallies), I'll bring out Dirt Rally (the first "reboot" of the series) and I still enjoy playing when I pick it up. I have the sequel, four WRC titles (including the new EA one), The Crew Motorfest, NFS, NFS: Heat, NFS: Payback, NFS: Unbound, Gravel, Grid Legends, GT7 and probably others I'm forgetting, neither of which get much attention... I really should try to finish one of them

Oh, and I'm with you on the Ubisoft games. While they release games I don't care for, they also release plenty I enjoy, so I'm definitely not part of the "everything Ubisoft sucks" crowd. I don't care much for what we're hearing about the company and Guillemot, though.

@FuriousMachine yeah Ubisoft definitely won’t be winning any awards for progressive business practices anytime soon… but I definitely think the quality of their games is overlooked within the gaming sphere.