Topic: Games you've recently beat

@Jaz007 Yeah, Never Alone was pretty good. There are a ton of other PS Plus indies and lesser known games that you might have sitting in your library. The Unfinished Swan, Gone Home, Abzu, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Fez, Valiant Hearts, Rime ... some of these I haven’t gotten to myself either. Burly Men at Sea fits the bill this month too.
Just stay away from Drawn to Death.

@Kidfried The thing I really love about the first game is how the level design, sound, and environmental interactivity transform something as usually mindless as storming around a level murdering people into something of a puzzle game. Especially some of the mid-to-late game levels, such as "Hot and Heavy" (my personal favorite level in the game, partially due to how satisfying it is to FINALLY master it). While the game practically necessitates the abandonment of any hesitation when killing to get the best score (mainly due to the score multiplier, which is brutal even with the mask that lengthens the window), through continual retries, you gradually develop complex strategies about the best way to clear out an area. "Well, if race around the corner and batter this guy when I first come through the door, I can steal his gun and not worry about him popping out to snipe me later. Then, if I shoot this guy through the window, I take out an immediate threat, and the sound will draw these other guys from areas x, y, and z to my location, where I can flank them. Then..." etc. etc. etc. Absolutely crucial to this, of course, is the reliance on sound design and environmental interactivity. If I race into the kitchen without a weapon, I can quickly grab the pan to knock a guy to the floor, and then use the boiling water inside to kill him. Guns are loud and draw immediate attention, so if you're going for the best grade in a level, they're often useful as noisemakers. Shoot the wall of a room where a bunch of enemies are gathered, hide, and then ambush them. Even then, though, you might find, to get the timing of the level right, that you only kill a few of them at the time and let the others walk back a bit so you can refresh your multiplier as you make your way across the level.

Well, sorry for the fanboy screed, but I wanted to communicate what I really loved about the first game. The second game is filled with overly large, often window-filled levels filled with gun-toting enemies, and the placement of enemies with guns, unlike the original, punishes creativity as opposed to using them as another engine to enhance your puzzle-massacre, and some of the masks give abilities that are often... super specialized, to the point where it's hard to take advantage of all the emergent layers of the gameplay. Some of the masks in the original do this, but the vast majority have small quirks that make certain strategies more viable than possible.

The music is still great in the sequel, though, for sure, which I appreciated.

Despite regarding the original as a flawed masterpiece (all of my favorite games, I think, are ones that have obvious flaws, but do certain things incredibly well), it does have some issues. While it doesn't happen to the point of irritation like in Hotline 2, enemies popping you off-screen will occasionally happen as well. It's just a function of the overhead viewpoint and some enemies with guns being able to see you before you see them. Thankfully, this doesn't often happen, as the placement of gun-toting enemies is VERY deliberate in the original. Another (BIG) criticism is the boss battles. Hotline Miami wasn't built with boss encounters in mind, so getting instakilled by a powerful boss a hundred times in a row until you figure out the gimmicky manner in which you're supposed to beat them isn't fun. They're not common, but they're there. Any levels involving stealth obviously suck, although this is more of a general gaming rule I've learned: unless a game (like MGS) is built around stealth and sneaking, incorporating those elements into a game only weakens it. The worst parts of Gravity Rush 1 and 2, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the Hotline Miami series, and I'm sure other games as well ALWAYS involve stealth.

I also had issues with aiming with the PC on the mouse, and with the sticks on console (small taps of the right stick turn into big movements for the character due to the limited size of the sprite when turning), but the Vita version brilliantly addressed this issue of mine by allowing for a lock-on system via the touch screen. It really made guns viable for me.

I actually picked Hotline Miami 2 back up this year and tried it again. Couldn't get it into it, but count on me doing that again in a year or two when I kind of forget what made me dislike it in the first place. I think the problem with it is the problem that crops up with a lot of successful indie games: the creators take the material for a winning game and change stuff about it to justify the existence of a sequel, but it usually makes the game worse. Hotline Miami is VERY intentionally designed, so them messing with elements of the gameplay and level design kind of broke it for me. Similarly, even though I actually liked it, Velocity 2X tacked on unnecessary additions that overcomplicated the twitch brilliance of the original Velocity Ultra (another scenario where I platinumed the original, but will likely never do so for the sequel). Same thing happened with Amnesia (although at least, in that circumstance, the developer actually changed).

Well, again, sorry for the novel, and for interjecting my opinions, but thanks for the reply! I do love talking about this series.

@KratosMD Oh so it does change quite a bit then? Tempted to fire it up again.

A word of warning regarding Axiom Verge, although I enjoyed it, it took me around 30 hours to complete! It can probably be beaten a lot quicker than that though.

Not sure if i could only play indie games though, I like to have a good mix going on. But I can see why you would at this moment time.

@Jaz007 Glad you got your gaming mojo back. I tend to pick and choose which AAA games I play, and only pickup a handful max on day 1. I don't feel the need to play everything as soon as it is released, as i know not every game is gonna be for me. And especially this time of year, who on earth has the time to play them all? The way it seems to be working these days is that it will only be a couple of months until some of the game will be reduced, by that time you may feel differently and fancy a more substantial experience.

One for my gaming bucket list: I beat the original Super Mario Bros. last night.

I've spent a lot of time trying to beat it the "old-fashioned" way, by trying to beat it in one run, restarting the whole game when I got a game over. Once I got past World 7 though, I cracked and used save states on the NES classic. World 8 is crazy hard compared to the rest of the game.

But, I'm glad either way that I beat it. Now I wanna see if I can beat the rest of the Mario classics.

@KratosMD Thanks for the write-up. I had a feeling it wasn't going to be really good, despite enjoying the demo, which is why I passed on it in favor of Ys VIII (which turned out to be a fantastic experience). I feel like it'd be a fun $30 purchase, though.

It took a lot of time and effort, but I finally reached an ending with Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked on 3DS. My expectations before playing it were low, as I wasn't too keen on SMT4 and I don't much like turn based strategy games, but it turned out to be very enjoyable.

It was a unique blend of the Shin Megami demons and battle system, the grid from strategy games like Fire Emblem, and plenty of visual novel mixed in there as well. All these different elements worked well together. The story was fairly good, and all the characters were quite interesting.

My main issue with it was the difficulty. Even on Easy, it can get very challenging in places. There are difficulty spikes when faced with certain particularly deadly demons, some of which required me to do a lot of grinding against weaker demons before the fight so I'd be strong enough to win.

I'd be tempted to pick this up again in the far future and try to get a different ending, but for now I'm done with it.

Red Dead Redemption 2. Superb. Just superb.

I recently finished God of War: Chains of Olympus. Originally a PSP game, I played the PS3 port.

For a portable game, it's pretty good at keeping up with it's console counterparts. It didn't feel any different to me from the PS2 games aside from it's shorter length.

Gonna play Ghost of Sparta next.

@Ralizah Dead Nation is awesome - a good 8-9/10 for me. I played it all local co-op with a friend a couple of times though. It probably sucks solo.

@kyleforrester87 even bad games can be fun in coop so that's a completely different story.

@Ralizah I have a similar experience with Alienation. It's not a bad game but when I play it solo it's not much fun, but when someone joins my party it gets better. These games are obviously made with coop in mind.

@NecuVise they arnt really bad games then, they are just games that are (as you say) only good in co-op.

@kyleforrester87 we could argue good vs fun but that would be pointless, right?

Yakuza Kiwami. It's a good game, but it's obvious that this is two gens old game. I'll probably play other games in the series but not going to jump immidiately to other installments.

I liked its story and combat was fun but that's pretty it. I didn't expect much so I wasn't disappointed. But when I looked into other games in the series, namely Yakuza 0 and 6, I was disappointed to see that it looks literally the same. So much so that I think my wife would think I'm playing the same game again.

@Kidfried Well, it's not like it's going anywhere if you already have access to it. A few other Transformers games were yanked as well, but this was the biggest casualty.

Between OnRush (PS4), Smash Ultimate (Switch), Torna: The Golden Country (Switch), and Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice (3DS) my December is pretty much already full as well.

@NecuVise I’ve only played Yakuza 0 so far and it was fun. It’s meant to be better than Kiwami overall as it was made more recently and I guess they’ll look similar as they’ve all been updated for the modern console; it would be weird for remakes for the same gen to look vastly different wouldn’t it?

@Thrillho I'm not talking about art direction or graphics, I'm talking about walking the same streets, fighting, characters, it looks like the same game. Yakuza 0, Kiwami and Yakuza 6. That's disheartening to me, but regardless, I'll play them down the line.

Been playing Portal 2 this week. I played the game way back in 2011, but felt a replay was long overdue; this time on the PS3.

The writing is brilliantly dry and witty, with many laugh-out-loud moments. The story itself has a reasonable pace and is utterly silly. There's even some background on Aperture and even Glados herself.

As with the first game I prefer the puzzle solving in the test chambers to the more open level traversal in the mid-portion. However, the introduction of coloured "gels" that allow Chell to either slide really fast or bounce add a new dimension to the gameplay and build on the complexity of the puzzles. Overall puzzles are well designed and fun to work out, as is discovering more efficient routes to completion.

Incredible game that I had a blast replaying.

Portal 2 is a lot of fun and has some great writing in it, but I've always personally preferred the more tightly-designed original. I love how easy it is to beat that game in an evening.

@Ralizah The tightly designed test chambers are excellent. When I played Portal the first time I was disappointed with its length, but something nice and short that can be done on a weekend afternoon is very appealing to me now.

@mookysam Portal 2 co-op is great too.