Topic: Games you've recently beat

@Malaise Soma is decent, I never finished it though as I found it got too samey eventually. Sounds like you may not have that issue though.

Just finished Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves on PS3. It's been a long time coming since I bought the Sly Collection and my PS3 back in 2012, but I've now finally completed all three games. It's such a great feeling as I've wanted to beat all of Sony's three main PS2 era 3D platformers (Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter as well as Sly Cooper) ever since I got my PS3.

As a whole, I think Sly 3 is a good game but I'm unsure if I would call it my favourite in the series. It got a bit too samey towards the end. Granted, the second to last chapter was really interesting where you got to control a ship and sail around islands while engaging in naval battles, sort of like in Assassin's Creed 4. Sly 3 really was ahead of its time in this regard.

The amount of variety in Sly 3 was great as well. It's kinda like Crash 3 where most levels had you do something different. Although it did feel like you weren't playing as much as Sly and whenever I had to do missions as Bentley or Murray, I wanted to play as Sly instead. So I guess that another reason why I ended up not liking Sly 3 as much as I wanted to.

All in all, I'm glad that I managed to finish it as I was about to lose interest in it due to other games. I do want to say that I am looking forward to playing Thieves in Time down the line as I'm curious to see what a PS3 Sly Cooper game looks like.

@LtSarge damn , that’s a bummer to hear . i love sly 3 , even though the gimmicks were treading annoying and overdone territory, & it’s confirmed that the game was rushed and/or didn’t have enough time because the PS3 was coming out soon, so it’s noticeably shorter than sly 2. but yeah , i can see why you wouldn’t enjoy it as much even though i am surprised that you didn’t enjoy playing as murray and bentley, im guessing sly 1 is your favorite ?

(while sly 3 is my personal favorite, i do rank sly 2 as the best in the series ….barely)

@nomither6 It's been so long between each game, but I think Sly 2 is my favourite. It was consistently good from beginning to end if memory serves.

Just finished Maneater on Series X after 9 hours of playtime. I managed to collect all the achievements, which were fairly easy to get. So if you're looking for something relatively easy to Platinum, this would be the perfect game.

Anyway, I got really addicted to this game. So much so that I wanted to do everything in it. It was just a blast to play and my worries that the gameplay would become repetitive did not come to fruition. It was honestly still fun to play towards the end. It could be due to the game's fairly short length. If it had been for example 10 hours longer, I do think I would've gotten tired of it.

@LtSarge ohhh that’s a game I’ve been meaning to try. If only for its absurd dlc cover art.

Just watched the credits roll on The Witcher 3, which I started back in April and have, according to my PS app, invested 212 hours in. Beat it on Death March difficulty, so I will give the platinum a go, considering I only have "kill x enemies with so-and-so tactic" type trophies left. Some seem a bit grindy, but I still have both DLC expansions left to tackle as well, so hopefully I can get a few of them while playing through those. Loved the game, loved the story and I must say that I am very impressed that I'm not completely burnt out with game after so many hours. Am feeling a slight fatigue, though, so I worry I might not be able to stick with it through the expansions if they are as lengthy as I suspect.
Will give at go, though, so we'll see

Excellent game!

@FuriousMachine the credits only truly roll when you've completed the Blood and Wine expansion, so a long way to go for you yet with Hearts of Stone to kick it all off again first. And oh yes, I think you will probably stick with the DLC's, and I'm actually quite jealous that you've yet to experience them as i'd love to be able to experience those for the first time once more 😛 they are removed enough from the main game that they will probably refresh you as you play through them, really well made.

Good luck on the path ⚔️😁

@FuriousMachine Think I sunk just over 400 hours into the base game of The Witcher 3. 😬 Hopefully you will fare better with the dlc, as each time I've tried to get to it I have failed. I think my main issue is that they patched in enemy scaling, so was getting rinsed when I tried to get back into it.

@Ravix Thank you, I will probably be able to start it this evening. Looking forward to it

@JohnnyShoulder The DLC has enemy scaling? Ouch, I was getting used to being a badass witcher cutting through swathes of low level monsters. Well, thankfully, the Death March trophy has been done and mounted, so I can always adjust the difficulty if I run into trouble

@FuriousMachine Oh I thought that was in the base game too, as I've yet to start the dlc. This was a few years ago mind, so maybe getting things mixed up.

@JohnnyShoulder Or they've changed it again, maybe? I don't know whether the quest encounters scale or not, but every monster I've met in the wilds have been easy pickings the last couple of levels. There were some witch hunters in one of the last questlines (the prison break quest to free Rita) that were surprisingly competent, but I have no way of knowing if they were scaled or simply high level badasses by default

@FuriousMachine remember, hearts of stone is the one to do first ⚔️

@JohnnyShoulder

I can't remember if there's scaling, I thought that was a menu toggle. But there are definitely, definitely a few fights that will smack your bare booty if you aren't careful, if I remember rightly (and I do 😅😅) all part of the fun though.

And I now feel compelled to urge you to start the DLC now too. You guys can compare notes then 😁

@Ravix Yeah, I plan to play that to completion before starting Blood & Wine

@Ravix Yeah it's been so long since I last played it I don't remember exactly where I was in the game. I do remember I should be making mincemeat out of these enemies that I was struggling with lol.

I've always sorta planned to go back to it, but whenever I think about it always seems to be the wrong time. As I've recently beaten Shadow of the Erdtree, it won't be for awhile before I play an open world game. And there are few other games I would start before I get to that too. It is on the list before No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 though, which I also want to go back to.

@JohnnyShoulder ah, the dreaded "go back to" is something I know all too well 😅

When I first played TW3 I got stuck in a cave with some spectres and I noped out of it for over a year, I think. Then maybe I finished it but wasn't totally in love with it (I honeslty can't remember the exact timeline when i completed the main game now) but it was only when I'd played RDR2 and realised no other new games would be as good that, that I made my way back to it a third time, to either finish the main game or just do all the DLC's which are basically new games anyway (blurry recollection) but either way, from whenever that point was, I bloody loved the game, and the DLC's were a big part of that, for sure.

I still haven't finished Cyberpunk either ffs 😅 and I went back to that early this year/late last year.

But a good bit of advice that I now follow is, play a game I fell off, for whatever reason, for ten minutes, no commitment, and if I end up playing it for 2 hours then I'm probably back into it, if not, nothing lost, another time it shall be.

Finished Cult of the Lamb (on PS+) last night. Nice palate cleanser after Shadow of the Erdtree. I loved the art and animations and chuckled often. Shocking performance for something that looked like it should run fine on a Switch though - crashed or froze quite often.

@woollypump How many hours to beat? Been a backlog game for a while..

@Ravix @JohnnyShoulder So, I started the Hearts of Stone DLC and I checked that "scaling" was an option and was duly set to "off", I still got in trouble fairly quickly. Scaling or not, the area where this DLC takes place is tough! After having playfully dispatched forktails and arch-griffins and barely having needed a dried fish to recuperate after on Death March difficulty, I now was laid low by a group of Nekkers... NEKKERS! Sheesh.... Then I got trounced by some bandits and, after that, struggled with a handful of boars. Thankfully they weren't wolves... if I'd been hurt by wolves at this point, I fear I would have to hand in my Witcher membership card.
Then I started the first main quest of the DLC, which led me into the sewers with the toad monster, which has got to be the single most frustrating and annoying fight in the entire game! There were a couple of fights in the main game that demanded all my patience, especially the fight with the wraiths while protecting the botchling in the "family matters" quest, but this was a whole new level of annoyance! And just as I prepared to fling my controller through the air, in slow motion, in order to detonate my frustration as it impacted the wall, the sage words of a wise man could be heard over the early fall rain:

So I did that, and all is well
But, yeah, difficulty spike with the Hearts of Stone DLC

@FuriousMachine give the wee toady a kiss 🐸 yeah, it sure is an intro to the DLC. I think the devs perhaps mentioned how they went a bit far with that one 😛 or maybe not.

Level wise it is like starting a new game, so progression will come soon enough and you will probably be back on death March once more. And also, they di reward you for it with everything else in the DLC, so there is that. And thankfully no controllers or walls were harmed 😁

I feel like there's another memorable fight soon enough, if memory serves me, so tag me in when you think you got there haha.