Well all of her spoken lines are short and she says something different each time. Talking about Manus is just the last thing she says.
Manus appears in an ancient kingdom, ruled over by a princess. He spreads darkness there, fills the kingdom with monsters, captures the princess, and retreats into his fortress. He fights a noble swordsman. The veering off point is that he defeats the noble swordsman, and that is where you come in. The clear delineation between the light of Oolacile - which is a kingdom of light - and the darkness of the Abyss, which Manus spreads - is a pretty easy parallel between the light and dark that's been thematic for Zelda games ever since Link to the Past. If you want a more explicit comparison, Oolacile is the overworld while the Abyss is literally the underworld, echoing the geographic divide between the overworld and dungeons in the original Zelda.
It's tenuous, maybe, but as a body of connections I felt it pretty strongly. It's a very simple story.
Also Manus kind of looks like Ganon, with horns instead of tusks.
It's really good! The engine is showing its age like whoa, but I'm enjoying myself. It's doing some really clever things with the knowledge the player has, using it to establish stakes and foreshadowing stuff.
Having multiple characters is also pretty dang cool. It helps maintain the scope of the series, lets you see multiple parts of Westeros in a way that makes sense, and really encourages roleplaying. Having those different viewpoints, those different goals and tools, makes it easier to go, "What would this character do?" Instead of "What would I do?"
Digging it, digging it
+1
Clint EastwoodMy baby's in there someplaceShe crawled right inRegistered Userregular
Animal crossing, skyrim, kid Icarus, and smash ds.
My number 1 game I played in 2014 was gunpoint no contest. Mostly because it was so good and short that the average amount of goodness going on at any moment was astronomical
My friend is working on a roguelike game you can play if you want to. (it free)
0
BrocksMulletInto the sunrise, on a jet-ski. Natch.Registered Userregular
edited January 2015
BrocksMullet's Games I Played in 2014!
BrocksMullet only played one game released in 2014, and it was a remaster/updated version of an old game. Too many "old" games to play for the first time, not enough time, too much procrastination. Here! Behold!
17Lifeless Planet A story based exploration platformer without enough story, platforming or exploration. Was fine, but it's main accomplishment was to make me appreciate Waking Mars even more than I did.
16 Shelter A rogue-like where the only loot is sorrow. Theoretically a good game, though playing it certainly did fell like a chore. The path through each level feels too specific, to easy to screw up. Really, what I'm saying is that I was a terrible badger mommy. Really looking forward to Rain World, which seems to be the same concept with more meat on the bone.
15 Far Cry: Blood Dragon is a great idea for a video game, a mix-up of a specific, collective childhood filled with illicit pleasures like Predator, The Terminator, NARC, Commando, and Contra, with amped up far cry 3 mechanics.
It's a good game, I think, but I walked away from it feeling a little empty, and more aware of an apathy I've developed with certain gameplay systems that have become very popular by the start of this decade, and which Ubisoft seems to have embraced more than any other developer. They want you to clean all the doodads off the map, and unlock all the guns, and do things your way, with a minimum of friction
14 30 Flights of Loving is rather neat a fractured memory that I don't remember much about. I should play it again.
13 Rayman Origins is a lovely platformer, with great controls, that's not quite hard enough, or open enough to be really memorable for me.
12 Dark Souls This is the game I played the most this year, by a fair margin, which may be why it's so low on my list. There are things that Dark Souls does very well. It's basic combat mechanics are something that I hope gets copied and tweaked for years to come. Many of the boss fights are striking and well designed. And the world feels like stepping into some kind of grand, ancient myth, which is a rare feeling.
But it's too often a game that seems intent on wasting my time. Take Lost Izalith. Do I really need to run 10 minutes from the bonfire to boss, one or two shooting most of the enemies, just so that dumb tree can knock me into a pit. This isn't challenge, it's tedium, forcing to pass a test I know backwards and forwards, and I feel encouraged to find the most efficient way to do things, which is often not the most fun way to do things, which usually involves abusing the woefully stupid AI.
But most biggest problem is that most of the time, it never really gave me a reason to care. Maybe I'm stupid baby who needs to be spoonfed his story, but when it came time to dethrone the broken, fading god of this post-coda world, I approached it with all the wonder and anticipation of a trip to the store to buy catfood, and the game was more than happy to match my apathy.
11 Ninja Gaiden XBox (Replay): The enemies in this game hate you, they despise weakness, they seek out, they hunger. If you've been playing it reguarly, you might not notice this, because a properly wielded Ryu Hyabusa is nigh unto a god, and the game isn't as difficult as it made out to be. But step away from it for a while, and watch poor Ryu get pummeled and tossed, throat slit and exploded. Moreover, there's a real adventure game here, with platforming, puzzles, and a large, interconnected enviroment. The dumb, dumb story has the good grace to only drunkenly stumble in every now and then, to tell you that they was a sailor back when football players wore leather helmets,a nd that the worse thing to ever happened to Richard Nixon was becoming governor.
10 Super House of Undead Ninjas, where-in you guide a bold ninjette down through a semi random tower, racing the clock and scything through foes, unlocking weapons and tools, and attracting both the amused contempt and gobsmacked wonder of the towers master. Not the most deepest, not my favorite, but moment to moment, the one that feels the best.
9 Borderlands 2 with DLC (Replay as Maya, in progress). Borderlands 2 works. It's combination of goofy cel-shaded space cowboys, loot and bouncy action is more than the sum of any of those parts. It's also perhaps a smarter game than you remember, it's humor more dependent on individual character voices than any meme, and it does a lot to establish a universe I hope to visit more in the future.
8 The Binding of Issac(Additional play) I come back to it again and again for the same reason so many do, to discover what young Issac will become. Like opening a weird, weird present from an uncle you never knew you had.
7 The Binding of Issac: Rebirth is a better game, expanded and filled out in a way that makes the original look like the house you lived in as a child, it's vast yard turned into a postage stamp. Only weakened by the soundtrack, which is good, but is accompaniment to the originals commentary, losing a certain spark in the process.
6 Grid 2, like most racing games, is simplicity itself. You drive in a circle, applying speed, removing speed, and try not to crash into things. There are things that I think it does objectively well-- a good mix of cars, fun customization, a variety of race tracks the differ significantly in feel and visuals, from the wide canyon angles of chicago, to the treacherous curves of the Portuguese coast, to it's minimally embarrassing ESPN/Message Board framing motif --- but none of these really matter compared to how it feels. Grid 2 sits somewhere between Burnouts comical rocket sleds, and the perhaps awkwardly real sim-cars of Forza and Gran Turismo.
It doesn't so much simulate driving a car at high speeds, but how it feels to drive one in memory and imagination. The closest a racing game has come to my beloved Project Racing 2. Earns many extra points as a Spotify delivery service.
5 Don't Starve is a game where the main character grows a beard, which keeps you warm during the winter, but which may be shaved to boost your sanity. This a game where you must sneak up on giant buffalo analogs, to steal their poop so your garden may grow. This is a quality, quality video game that I haven't even begun to conquer.
4 Brothers is one of the shortest games on the list, but more than any other it creates the sense of being on an real journey, the gradual transformation of of the world from something familiar to something strange. It helps that it's one of the loveliest games I've ever played.
3 LA Noire: I like LA Noire. I like It a lot, I'm pretty sure more than anyone on this board, where it's generally spoken of with frustration and disapointment. I like truth/doubt/accuse system for being essentially an expanded version of Monkey Islands insult dueling, where the trick is not catching a lie, which is easy, but properly marshaling your resources.
I like it's working class Los Angeles, where most of the people you talk to are bartenders, bus drivers, shop owners, mechanics, and girls with a dream. I like the jazzy, melancholy soundtrack. I like Cole Phelps, his priggish valor, his progressive values, his sense of being a person in flux, the thinky-frowny face he makes. I like that it's a videogame with an entire section on insurance fraud. I like that this game exists, whatever it's flaws.
2 Spelunky is a perfect videogame, if such a thing exists. It's a child's-play version of Indiana Jones, a super-cut of spooky spiders, spike traps and gold, gold, gold, expressed in a series of interlocking systems--enemy behaviors, bomb radius's, the feel of the terrain, physics that will mock your feeble efforts time, and time again. It doesn't test your reflexes or ability to learn routes through a level as it does your ability to quickly size up your current situation, and figure a way out. I can't imagine what I'd change about this game.
1 Dragon Age Origins.( In progress, 2/3rds of the way through.) Big, talky RPG's are probably my favorite type of game for many of the same reasons I play them so rarely-- There's so much to do, so many choices, systems, and characters that it can be a bit overwhelming. Still, this is quality. One of the best overall Bioware casts, with at least two all timers, a detailed world that overcomes it's tropes to feel more like a real place than anything they've made, some of the more interesting scenarios, and a combats system that really works if your a freakish micro-manger like myself.
Most memorable moments
Brothers: Stumbling into the Valley of Giants, and the accompanying awe and disgust.
LA Noire: Rusty Galloway mocking Cole Phelps brow-beating of an old lady for a solid 5 minutes while driving through downtown LA. Having to ask some kids questions about their dead mom.
Don't Starve: Being chased by a giant avenging tree, leading him through a burning forest.
Binding of Issac Rebirth: Turning enemies into an army of attack spider with my blood vomit.
Well all of her spoken lines are short and she says something different each time. Talking about Manus is just the last thing she says.
Manus appears in an ancient kingdom, ruled over by a princess. He spreads darkness there, fills the kingdom with monsters, captures the princess, and retreats into his fortress. He fights a noble swordsman. The veering off point is that he defeats the noble swordsman, and that is where you come in. The clear delineation between the light of Oolacile - which is a kingdom of light - and the darkness of the Abyss, which Manus spreads - is a pretty easy parallel between the light and dark that's been thematic for Zelda games ever since Link to the Past. If you want a more explicit comparison, Oolacile is the overworld while the Abyss is literally the underworld, echoing the geographic divide between the overworld and dungeons in the original Zelda.
It's tenuous, maybe, but as a body of connections I felt it pretty strongly. It's a very simple story.
Also Manus kind of looks like Ganon, with horns instead of tusks.
In 2014, the first game I beat was first game beat Professor Layton and Pandora's Box, and the last one I beat was Pokemon Alpha Sapphire.
And the top games I beat (not all were released in 2014)
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey
Radiant Historia
Professor Layton and Pandora's Box
Professor Layton and the Lost Future
Cherry Tree High Comedy Club
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Fantasy Life
Fire Emblem: Awakening
Magical Diary
I also bought Solatorobo: Red The Hunter and Resident Evil: Revelations, but I haven't beaten them yet.
Posts
I assume you mean Ganon from Zelda and have to wonder how on earth you could have related those two prior to her conversation
Manus appears in an ancient kingdom, ruled over by a princess. He spreads darkness there, fills the kingdom with monsters, captures the princess, and retreats into his fortress. He fights a noble swordsman. The veering off point is that he defeats the noble swordsman, and that is where you come in. The clear delineation between the light of Oolacile - which is a kingdom of light - and the darkness of the Abyss, which Manus spreads - is a pretty easy parallel between the light and dark that's been thematic for Zelda games ever since Link to the Past. If you want a more explicit comparison, Oolacile is the overworld while the Abyss is literally the underworld, echoing the geographic divide between the overworld and dungeons in the original Zelda.
It's tenuous, maybe, but as a body of connections I felt it pretty strongly. It's a very simple story.
Also Manus kind of looks like Ganon, with horns instead of tusks.
That fucking game
It's really good! The engine is showing its age like whoa, but I'm enjoying myself. It's doing some really clever things with the knowledge the player has, using it to establish stakes and foreshadowing stuff.
Having multiple characters is also pretty dang cool. It helps maintain the scope of the series, lets you see multiple parts of Westeros in a way that makes sense, and really encourages roleplaying. Having those different viewpoints, those different goals and tools, makes it easier to go, "What would this character do?" Instead of "What would I do?"
Digging it, digging it
It also features the best NPC invasions From have ever done in any game.
BrocksMullet only played one game released in 2014, and it was a remaster/updated version of an old game. Too many "old" games to play for the first time, not enough time, too much procrastination. Here! Behold!
17Lifeless Planet A story based exploration platformer without enough story, platforming or exploration. Was fine, but it's main accomplishment was to make me appreciate Waking Mars even more than I did.
16 Shelter A rogue-like where the only loot is sorrow. Theoretically a good game, though playing it certainly did fell like a chore. The path through each level feels too specific, to easy to screw up. Really, what I'm saying is that I was a terrible badger mommy. Really looking forward to Rain World, which seems to be the same concept with more meat on the bone.
15 Far Cry: Blood Dragon is a great idea for a video game, a mix-up of a specific, collective childhood filled with illicit pleasures like Predator, The Terminator, NARC, Commando, and Contra, with amped up far cry 3 mechanics.
It's a good game, I think, but I walked away from it feeling a little empty, and more aware of an apathy I've developed with certain gameplay systems that have become very popular by the start of this decade, and which Ubisoft seems to have embraced more than any other developer. They want you to clean all the doodads off the map, and unlock all the guns, and do things your way, with a minimum of friction
14 30 Flights of Loving is rather neat a fractured memory that I don't remember much about. I should play it again.
13 Rayman Origins is a lovely platformer, with great controls, that's not quite hard enough, or open enough to be really memorable for me.
12 Dark Souls This is the game I played the most this year, by a fair margin, which may be why it's so low on my list. There are things that Dark Souls does very well. It's basic combat mechanics are something that I hope gets copied and tweaked for years to come. Many of the boss fights are striking and well designed. And the world feels like stepping into some kind of grand, ancient myth, which is a rare feeling.
But it's too often a game that seems intent on wasting my time. Take Lost Izalith. Do I really need to run 10 minutes from the bonfire to boss, one or two shooting most of the enemies, just so that dumb tree can knock me into a pit. This isn't challenge, it's tedium, forcing to pass a test I know backwards and forwards, and I feel encouraged to find the most efficient way to do things, which is often not the most fun way to do things, which usually involves abusing the woefully stupid AI.
But most biggest problem is that most of the time, it never really gave me a reason to care. Maybe I'm stupid baby who needs to be spoonfed his story, but when it came time to dethrone the broken, fading god of this post-coda world, I approached it with all the wonder and anticipation of a trip to the store to buy catfood, and the game was more than happy to match my apathy.
11 Ninja Gaiden XBox (Replay): The enemies in this game hate you, they despise weakness, they seek out, they hunger. If you've been playing it reguarly, you might not notice this, because a properly wielded Ryu Hyabusa is nigh unto a god, and the game isn't as difficult as it made out to be. But step away from it for a while, and watch poor Ryu get pummeled and tossed, throat slit and exploded. Moreover, there's a real adventure game here, with platforming, puzzles, and a large, interconnected enviroment. The dumb, dumb story has the good grace to only drunkenly stumble in every now and then, to tell you that they was a sailor back when football players wore leather helmets,a nd that the worse thing to ever happened to Richard Nixon was becoming governor.
10 Super House of Undead Ninjas, where-in you guide a bold ninjette down through a semi random tower, racing the clock and scything through foes, unlocking weapons and tools, and attracting both the amused contempt and gobsmacked wonder of the towers master. Not the most deepest, not my favorite, but moment to moment, the one that feels the best.
9 Borderlands 2 with DLC (Replay as Maya, in progress). Borderlands 2 works. It's combination of goofy cel-shaded space cowboys, loot and bouncy action is more than the sum of any of those parts. It's also perhaps a smarter game than you remember, it's humor more dependent on individual character voices than any meme, and it does a lot to establish a universe I hope to visit more in the future.
8 The Binding of Issac(Additional play) I come back to it again and again for the same reason so many do, to discover what young Issac will become. Like opening a weird, weird present from an uncle you never knew you had.
7 The Binding of Issac: Rebirth is a better game, expanded and filled out in a way that makes the original look like the house you lived in as a child, it's vast yard turned into a postage stamp. Only weakened by the soundtrack, which is good, but is accompaniment to the originals commentary, losing a certain spark in the process.
6 Grid 2, like most racing games, is simplicity itself. You drive in a circle, applying speed, removing speed, and try not to crash into things. There are things that I think it does objectively well-- a good mix of cars, fun customization, a variety of race tracks the differ significantly in feel and visuals, from the wide canyon angles of chicago, to the treacherous curves of the Portuguese coast, to it's minimally embarrassing ESPN/Message Board framing motif --- but none of these really matter compared to how it feels. Grid 2 sits somewhere between Burnouts comical rocket sleds, and the perhaps awkwardly real sim-cars of Forza and Gran Turismo.
It doesn't so much simulate driving a car at high speeds, but how it feels to drive one in memory and imagination. The closest a racing game has come to my beloved Project Racing 2. Earns many extra points as a Spotify delivery service.
5 Don't Starve is a game where the main character grows a beard, which keeps you warm during the winter, but which may be shaved to boost your sanity. This a game where you must sneak up on giant buffalo analogs, to steal their poop so your garden may grow. This is a quality, quality video game that I haven't even begun to conquer.
4 Brothers is one of the shortest games on the list, but more than any other it creates the sense of being on an real journey, the gradual transformation of of the world from something familiar to something strange. It helps that it's one of the loveliest games I've ever played.
3 LA Noire: I like LA Noire. I like It a lot, I'm pretty sure more than anyone on this board, where it's generally spoken of with frustration and disapointment. I like truth/doubt/accuse system for being essentially an expanded version of Monkey Islands insult dueling, where the trick is not catching a lie, which is easy, but properly marshaling your resources.
I like it's working class Los Angeles, where most of the people you talk to are bartenders, bus drivers, shop owners, mechanics, and girls with a dream. I like the jazzy, melancholy soundtrack. I like Cole Phelps, his priggish valor, his progressive values, his sense of being a person in flux, the thinky-frowny face he makes. I like that it's a videogame with an entire section on insurance fraud. I like that this game exists, whatever it's flaws.
2 Spelunky is a perfect videogame, if such a thing exists. It's a child's-play version of Indiana Jones, a super-cut of spooky spiders, spike traps and gold, gold, gold, expressed in a series of interlocking systems--enemy behaviors, bomb radius's, the feel of the terrain, physics that will mock your feeble efforts time, and time again. It doesn't test your reflexes or ability to learn routes through a level as it does your ability to quickly size up your current situation, and figure a way out. I can't imagine what I'd change about this game.
1 Dragon Age Origins.( In progress, 2/3rds of the way through.) Big, talky RPG's are probably my favorite type of game for many of the same reasons I play them so rarely-- There's so much to do, so many choices, systems, and characters that it can be a bit overwhelming. Still, this is quality. One of the best overall Bioware casts, with at least two all timers, a detailed world that overcomes it's tropes to feel more like a real place than anything they've made, some of the more interesting scenarios, and a combats system that really works if your a freakish micro-manger like myself.
Most memorable moments
Brothers: Stumbling into the Valley of Giants, and the accompanying awe and disgust.
LA Noire: Rusty Galloway mocking Cole Phelps brow-beating of an old lady for a solid 5 minutes while driving through downtown LA. Having to ask some kids questions about their dead mom.
Don't Starve: Being chased by a giant avenging tree, leading him through a burning forest.
Binding of Issac Rebirth: Turning enemies into an army of attack spider with my blood vomit.
Grid 2: Tokyo Drifting everywhere to this:
Get it girl.
Dragon Age Origins: The Gauntlet sequence, among many others.
Least Favorite
Tomb of Giants, with no bio-luminescent head maggot. Words can't even begin.... I just... ugggh.
Steam: BrocksMullet http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197972421669/
Wyborn
I love how crazy you are
its really great
And the top games I beat (not all were released in 2014)
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey
Radiant Historia
Professor Layton and Pandora's Box
Professor Layton and the Lost Future
Cherry Tree High Comedy Club
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Fantasy Life
Fire Emblem: Awakening
Magical Diary
I also bought Solatorobo: Red The Hunter and Resident Evil: Revelations, but I haven't beaten them yet.
Not enough games let you stab-murder Moon Nazis.
(Also, that game had much better writing than you'd expect from something with Moon Nazis)
Why I fear the ocean.
What'd it ever do for anybody
Nothin', that's what