How are these? This is a JRPG series that I have completely ignored.
They are excellent. The series' big problem is that it isn't very newcomer friendly as you can't just play the most recent one. And while the series is broken down into arcs that each tell a single story, these are increasingly becoming less self-contained.
My recommendation if you want to give the series a try is to pick up the first Trails of Cold Steel game. You don't need any outside story information to enjoy it. Under no circumstances should you try to jump into Cold Steel IV.
Go play the Trails in the Sky games! They're fantastic! And also happen to be where the whole Trails series kicks off. And Estelle, the main character (or I guess one of two main characters), is great!
It feels so weird to see the old art (I've only played the Evolution versions).
Oh dang, I only played the original (Steam) versions, with the extra quality of life features, but none of the Evolution stuff. Didn't even know there was a version that was that significantly different out there.
It feels so weird to see the old art (I've only played the Evolution versions).
Oh dang, I only played the original (Steam) versions, with the extra quality of life features, but none of the Evolution stuff. Didn't even know there was a version that was that significantly different out there.
That's not all that surprising, given that they were Japan-only Vita exclusives. I think there are mods out there that add some of the Evolution features (like voice acting) to the old Steam versions.
The Evolution versions more or less just update the UI and presentation of the Sky games to make them match the Crossbell ones. There are some gameplay tweaks as well but they aren't that significant.
It's pretty good. I liked the first one and enough time had passed/heard enough good stuff about this one that I was ready to jump into a new thing. But I hope they give it some time until the next one.
Played through Control and got the platinum trophy on PS5. I was gonna play it on PC since I have a fancy graphics card that would make it look nice, but I was in the mood to play something on the console and it just happened to be this month's PS+ game. Also, it ended up looking really nice anyway with the graphics/ray tracing mode. I started it last year on PC but fell off of it when I got lost and wasn't having fun with the combat. This time, I turned on some of the accessibility options (fast recharging ammo and energy and enhanced aim assist because being accurate with a controller kinda sucks) and it ended up being much more enjoyable. The base game was really cool, lots of interesting stuff and characters and stories. It was a bit too creepy for my tastes, though, especially one of the DLC's, which I'll get into later. Also, some of the sidequests were pretty boring and tedious. Like, "go kill these 6 people scattered around the sector" kind of stuff. Ended up doing all of the sidequests in the base game and the AWE DLC, but skipped a couple in the Foundation DLC because by that point I was done with the game and ready to move on. The platinum itself was pretty easy to get. I had to do both of the DLCs to get enough ability points for it, though. And there were a couple trophies related to the DLCs that I didn't get because they were obnoxious, but fortunately they didn't count towards the plat.
Spoilers for the first DLC (AWE) since it's got cool story stuff:
The first DLC, AWE, was super cool (and also hella creepy). It was centered around Alan Wake and the event from the game and what was happening to Alan Wake at the moment. It also hinted at an Alan Wake sequel, which was cool. I'd be down for another one of those. Anyway, I thought it was neat how they incorporated a bunch of the Alan Wake darkness combat stuff into the gameplay of Control. And reading stuff about that game in this game from the perspective of the Bureau was neat. As I said, tho, because of all the darkness stuff and Hartmann as a huge creepy monstrous antagonist, it ended up being way creepier than the base game, which was already pretty creepy. At any rate, if you played Alan Wake before, this DLC is super good and worth a play.
The other DLC, the Foundation, was alright. I think part of it was me just being kinda fatigued of the game by that point, but it didn't really grab me that much. It had some cool lore stuff about the Oldest House and the Board, but spending like 80% of that DLC trudging through caves wasn't super fun. Also, learning more about Northmoor and Ash (Northmoor's son and chief of research at the time) was interesting, too. The whole lost sector thing was a cool idea, too.
Anyway, I liked it well enough. It's very pretty and it has lots of cool SCP type stuff that made it interesting.
I'm counting this as two games since I had to redo everything I had already done in Hitman. I normally would have waited a while before essentially replaying a game, but the whole impetus for my finally getting around to playing these games was that the Sniper Assassin multiplayer servers are expected to go down in the near future.
Anyway, it was more Hitman. I think I preferred the levels in the first game overall, but nothing here was bad and they largely corrected my complaint about the last game (that generic NPCs didn't seem to match their settings). The Sniper Assassin mode was a lot more fun than I was expecting, though I don't really get why they tacked multiplayer onto it.
(Also, fun fact: games are apparently only allowed to have 125 trophies (including DLC). This game has 146, so it appears as two separate games on trophy lists.)
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Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
edited February 2021
2. Civilization VI (PC)
I just have the base game for this but decided to load it up and give it a go again after barely playing it after I bought it ages ago. According to the thread for the game the AI in vanilla is kinda garbage, and they aren't wrong. I probably wouldn't have finished a campaign of the game if it weren't for this challenge because boy howdy by about the 2/3 mark I was bored as heck. Overall I would rate this version of Civ pretty far down the list of those I've played. Maybe it's better with the dlc/expansions? I'm never going to find out though.
Edit: I won through cultural victory as Germany in case anyone is curious. Did nuke Delhi the last turn of the game just to see what that did. Underwhelming compared to Planet Busters from Alpha Centauri (my favorite civ-like)
Do you like JRPGs? How about JRPGs with relentlessly optimistic protagonists, a reasonably sized cast of interesting characters, pretty good combat and a story with the perfect balance of normal JRPG nonsense and melodrama?
Seriously, Ys XIII was good and Ys IX was better in every way. Yes, it looks like a late generation PS3 game, but if I wanted the shinies I would play FF IV Remake again.
1. Yakuza: Like a Dragon (PS4)
(I haven't finished yet, but I'm gonna!)
A fairly meandering but heartfelt story about a criminal who apparently never understood what "crime" is. Combat is fun, though the game doesn't really want to encourage me to switch jobs a whole lot! As I mentioned in the game thread, one bothersome nitpick is that I have a party of really well fleshed-out characters, but as one of them is not a plot-mandated character, they conveniently vanish in cutscenes.
2. Super. Hot. (Xbox One)
This was a Games With Gold entry a long time ago, but I replayed the entirety of the game to pick up the hidden terminal achievements. Still fun.
3. Control: Ultimate Edition (PS4) [PS+ February game]
(Platinum-ed the main game, finished both DLC campaigns but don't feel like 100%ing them)
Take 5 parts SPC Foundation, 1 part House of Leaves, 1 part... Psi-Ops, I guess? Then gently shake so the parts mix up without melting together. I loved the worldbuilding, and the combat is generally fun with only the occasional bullshit boss fight, even though I quickly found two favorite guns that outpaced all the others. The graphics were generally very good even on my launch PS4, with noticeable slowdown only in one particular room. There was a foggy haze everywhere, though, which wouldn't go away no matter how I set my display options.
4. Tetris Effect (PS4)
Can one "beat" Tetris? If it's the kind that has disparate stages, unlocks, etc. you could make a claim that you "beat" it by having done everything the game is offering to you. You can also say you "beat" it when you're just done playing it, which I'm not saying either. But it's on this list anyway, because I'm realizing that this isn't Tetris as I recognize it, and it's not going to get a lot of serious rotation from me. My spouse, on the other hand, has revealed herself to be a serious Tetris addict from back in the day and has been mainlining this like it had an expiration date.
I learned Tetris on the NES, and continued with a freeware PC game called Acid Tetris and Tetrisphere on the N64 (I know, shut up. It's still fun and has fantastic music). Later versions of the game are... unintuitive to me. I play Tetris as a marathon: the more lines you clear, the faster the game goes, and the better I feel I'm doing. Today's Tetrises have bonkers rules like score combo chains, piece holding, T-Spins, and the like, and Tetris Effect has the temerity to give me a letter grade of D for letting myself get relaxed in a game named after acquiring a relaxing headspace. I just wanted to play some Tetris with pretty visuals; stop beating me over the head with competitive scoring and online rankings.
5. Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition (PS4) (PS+ from... November?)
(Finished the campaign on Normal, then dabbled in Echoes)
Fun fact: Bulletstorm is currently lodged in my X360's disc drive, because the plastic gear has literally worn away the teeth and it can never open under its own power again.
I was midway through slogging through Gears of War 5, which was one of the Games with Gold recently, when I realized that I would much rather be playing Bulletstorm instead, so I fired it up and played through the campaign. I really wish this had gotten a sequel, for as much as it is an over-the-top, bloody mess of childish language and gore, pulling off the trick shots and being recognized for it can lead to an almost puzzle game experience, especially in the remaster's Echoes Challenge modes. The reasoning behind it all is fully digetic: the scoring system was designed by assholes for assholes to train to be better assholes, so asshole up and start blastin'.
The art is lodged fully in the Gears/Epic universe of impossibly broad men who all wear fingerless gloves because the design couldn't figure out how to make the gigantic hands not look cartoonish, and huge chunky guns that would weigh upwards of 30 pounds if they actually existed. Despite the characters all having color palettes best described as brown and black, the outside levels feature really impressive colorful scenery befitting the paradise vacation resort in which they take place. The Gears-design love of shakeycam is in full force here, and in first person it can be a bit much (such as the few times you're forced to crouch-walk through vents). At some point in the game's climactic cutscene, the script just decided to drop the main character's lines entirely; his head bobbed and he moved around, but no voice played, his mouth didn't move, and no subtitles showed up during his big speech.
I never finished the MP on the 360, and it looks like I never will on PS4, either; apparently I was the only person on Earth searching for a multiplayer game last night.
6. Disco Elysium (PC)
(Finished once)
For some reason I started playing this back in 2019, and stopped at a point that turned out to be only half an hour or so from the end. I finished that playthrough and then immediately started another, with a much different set of stats.
7. Half-Life 2
With recent monetary positions being what they are, I'm not going to be going out of my way to get new games much in the near future, instead turning my focus towards replaying games I already own. I've had this installed since launch day, and according to my save files I hadn't played it since 2011 (Take that, Stanley Parable!). I replayed in three sittings over the last few days, and while it certainly is a classic in level design, it's interesting to see how mechanics and gameplay sensibilities in big FPS titles have shifted over the past decade.
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.5 Dragon Quest 11 (Xbox) [Gamepass]
I rolled credits on this but it's pretty clear that the credits are only about 3/4ths of the way through. Took a break since I'm like 100+ hours into it but I plan on finishing the story up here soon.
1.5 Bleed (Xbox) [GwG]
Short little romp of a side scroller. Think I took about an hour to beat it. It's got tight hit boxes, a nifty slow time on LT, and excellent check point locations. Epilogue boss goes long but pretty fun overall.
8. Ghost of Tsushima (PS4) - 115 hours - Platinum trophy, almost all DLC trophies
Assassin's Creed: Japan. I'm in the minority in that I really disliked the story. But the gameplay was fine (perhaps even good if the targeting issues are ignored) and, especially playing it on a PS5, the game was absolutely gorgeous. I played through it in both languages and the Japanese was really well done with interesting touches like changes all of the poems from haiku to tanka. It's a little baffling that they didn't do motion capture of the Japanese voice actors though. Legends mode was fun, if a bit shallow. I ultimately did not give the raid mode a try.
Woof. To be enjoyed in an ironic sense, only. Not all games need to be great, or even good, but this was an absolute dog. I can only imagine how disappointed I would have been if had I had any affection or familiarity with the source material. Bad combat, bad animations, bad voice acting, laughably small environments, meaningless upgrades. This is the worse game I have played in quite some time.
I hesitate to add this because it was short, but it was also really good. Contra with twin stick controls and a triple jump. I wish it was ten times longer.
I hesitate to add this because it was short, but it was also really good. Contra with twin stick controls and a triple jump. I wish it was ten times longer.
I liked that I was able to get through it in one sitting. I wish the secondary fire didn't require you to be shooting your primary, ended up eating a lot of shots I was trying to deflect because of that.
I hesitate to add this because it was short, but it was also really good. Contra with twin stick controls and a triple jump. I wish it was ten times longer.
I liked that I was able to get through it in one sitting. I wish the secondary fire didn't require you to be shooting your primary, ended up eating a lot of shots I was trying to deflect because of that.
I ran through it twice, once on normal and once on hard, right in a row. This is not something I normally do. The game just felt that good.
There was a PSN sale with a bunch of 1$ games. I didnt buy any with this thread in mind but Im adding them nonetheless.
-6 Inksplosion (Ihr) A bare bones twin stick shooter with color splatters behind your bullets. The most surprising thing was that it had a platinum which popped in record time.
-7 Titan Attacks (3Hrs) Arcade shooter a la Galaga. But you get to repair and buy upgrades before each level. Pleasant little game.
-8 Soulcalibur 6 (20hrs) Can you beat a fighting game? Well SC6 has some extensive single player options, so I'm going with yes. Its got a create a character adventure mode that feels lacking but they tried. And a classic character story mode. It does seem to be missing something in the polish, but the combat is satisfying and very familiar to the others.
-9 Witcher Tales, Thronebreaker (30Hrs) I picked this up to experience a cool story while figuring out how to play Gwent. Truns out Gwent is actually discontinued on PS4, and this game crashes all the time. CDPR and crashes, who knew?
When it works, the story, deckbuilding and standard best of 3 battles are great. The puzzles and forced custom deck fights aren't my favourites but they at least fit thematically.
Hoping to complete it but the crashes are spoiling my appetite.
I didn't actually finish the Bowser's Fury add on, as I have an my fill of Mario-ing, but seeing as Super Mario 3D World is a rerelease of a Wii-U title I still think it counts. Feels like a traditional Mario, which is not a bad thing, but the isometric view point can make precision platforming much more difficult that it needs to be. That on top of most levels floating in empty space with no borders leads to quite a bit of plummeting to an untimely death.
Still, I never had a Wii or a Wii-U, so these updates are welcome.
Beat it on Squire. Better than Page, but not Knight or Legend. Attempted it on Knight and got three levels in before I began to fear for my Switch's live and had to put it down.
15. Endurance (XBX)
Very cheap pixel art twin stick shooter full of poor translations and a story that never quite lives up to what it promises. For sub $10, what can I expect.
9. What Remains of Edith Finch (PS4) - 2.5 hours - all trophies
I wanted to play something short after a series of 100+ hour games, so finally crossed this off of my backlog. It was very good, but I wish that it hadn't left quite so many plot points unexplained.
Dynasty Warriors 3 was the game that got me to buy a PS2 (my first console since the NES) and ever since one of my masochistic tendencies as a gamer is to 100% Musou games even though it usually requires a borderline offensive amount of grinding. I realized that it had been almost 2 years since I played one (except for Troy, which doesn't count), so I was overdue to play one again. I was a little worried about how it would play on the Vita, but load times and pop-in were much better than I was expecting (this also came out on the 3DS and I have to imagine it would have been kind of rough there). You play four characters on each mission which was a nice way to at least partly alleviate the issue the Musou games of having way too many playable characters. Other than that, it was a typical Musou game but it was pretty good. My 15th platinum for the series, which is kind of crazy.
11. Trails of Cold Steel IV (PS4) - 131 hours - Platinum
More Trails goodness. Seems crazy to me that people would play this without having finished the Sky and Crossbell games, given how closely they're conenected. I've heard that some fans really didn't like the ending, but it didn't bother me. To be perfectly honest, I'm more interested in the world building and the characters than the actual plot (which, let's face it, has it's fair share of anime nonsense). I imported Hajimari no Kiseki, but I think I'll give the series a breather before starting it.
12. Far Cry 5 (PS4) - 76 hours - Platinum, all DLC trophies
I've been trying to catch up on the Far Cry games after not playing them for several years, so played 4 and Primal last year. Finally got around to 5. Gameplay was fine, though I agree with most of the criticism of the story. I had the ending spoiled for me long before I started playing, so at least I was prepared. The DLCs ranged from mediocre (Vietnam) to bad (Zombies).
13. Jedi: Fallen Order (PS4) - 24 hours - Platinum
The game I picked up a EA Play subscription for. I really enjoyed it. It was pretty interesting playing a game with Soulslike mechanics without Soulslike difficulty. Story was good, even if it was pretty by-the-numbers Star Wars.
14. One Finger Death Punch 2 (PS4) - 14 hours - Platinum
I really enjoyed the first game so was happy when I saw it got a sequel. It was good but kinda felt like they added a bunch of stuff just to justify it being a sequel. Still really addictive, though. The last few fights really felt like a chore as things got too fast and you just had to kill too many enemies.
15. Sea of Solitude (PS4) - 5 hours - Platinum
I gave this a try because I wanted to get a little more value out of EA Play and pretty much everything else was a sports game or something I already owned. Ended up having to use my PS4 for the first time in months because graphical glitches on the PS5 make it pretty unplayable. I did not enjoy this. The gameplay was on the level you'd expect of an artistic narrative-focused game like this (i.e., not great) and the story was undercut by some pretty bad voice acting.
16. Port Royale III (PS3) - 12 hours - DLCs
Played this years ago and finally got around to playing the DLCs. They were fine but nothing special. I'm kind of glad it took me so long to go back to the game to do these as I remember being pretty burned out on it by the time I finished.
After multiple starts since it was in very early access, finally working to complete Subnautica. Closing in on the end. Looking forward to grabbing Below Zero when it's done.
5) Days Gone - Platinum - It was pretty good. The story and characters were pretty forgettable, but once the game got going, the gameplay and systems had a satisfying loop.
6) Delete - Very short, Hexcells-ish. Good puzzler.
7) Conquer and Breed the Demon Queen - Kind of mixed on it. Like the premise/scenario of it, a lot of the art's good. The writing is pretty mediocre and there's way too much pee stuff in it. I'd recommend reading a doujin with that premise instead.
8) Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance - My first Fire Emblem game! It was a lot of fun! It was a properly epic continent spanning journey with lots of cool encounters. The cast was pretty solid and Ike was a pretty dope protagonist.
9) Jedi: Fallen Order - It was alright. Kind of wish it had some sort of fast travel system. Less of a problem once you get more traversal abilities, but you spend a lot of time in that game just sort of walking back to where you came from.
Kinda stopped tracking stuff for a while there. I think that's everything I missed. Currently working on Octopath Traveler (which I might end up dropping after awhile) and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. Might start up Yakuza 3 on PS5, too. Also probably should go back and finish Ace Combat Zero since I started a replay of that awhile ago.
Started and stopped Spiritfarer during that time, too. It's beautiful and it's got some resonant themes, but it is an absolute chore to actually play.
17. Far Cry New Dawn (PS4) - 26 hours - Platinum
I hadn't planned to play this just two weeks after finishing Far Cry 5, but the guy I did the co-op trophies in that game started it, so...
Overall, I really liked it, definitely more than I liked 5. My only real comment would be that I wish the cult from 5 was less prominent in the story.
17. Far Cry New Dawn (PS4) - 26 hours - Platinum
I hadn't planned to play this just two weeks after finishing Far Cry 5, but the guy I did the co-op trophies in that game started it, so...
Overall, I really liked it, definitely more than I liked 5. My only real comment would be that I wish the cult from 5 was less prominent in the story.
Agreed, New Dawn I think didn’t do as well because people were turned off from 5, but it’s superior in pretty much every way.
I took advantage of the PSNow $1 special to play two games that I had been planning to buy before the PS3 store went down:
18. Red Dead Redemption - Undead Nightmare (PS3) - 10 hours - 100% single player completion
I've been hearing good things about this DLC for years and, now that I've played it, I'm not entirely sure why. It was nice to go back to RDR again, sure, but otherwise the story and added content didn't really seem like anything special. Maybe I'm just a little burned out on open-world games at the moment. The game also suffers from a bug (zombies start spawning without heads or limbs) that requires reloading an old save every 45 minutes or so. I didn't bother with the multiplayer trophies as the RDR servers have been an utter mess for years.
A sequel (?) to The Technomancer, which came out three years later. I've always had a soft spot for Spiders, the poor man's Bioware, and kind of liked The Technomancer so wanted to give this a try. It's pretty janky, but I knew what I was getting into and liked it overall. I will warn that a guide is required if you don't want to accidentally lock yourself out of side quests and that the first third of the game is extremely frustrating if playing on the highest difficulty level.
Overall, I'm glad to have played both but am very happy that I didn't have to drop $20 to do so.
I also played something I'd never heard of before:
20. Narco Terror (PS3) - 8 hours - 100% completion
This is a digital-only, delisted PS3 twin-stick shooter. What little story there is involves a DEA agent shooting up a drug cartel in Peru and saving his daughter. I was going to describe it as thoroughly average, but the final boss fight is honestly pretty awful.
21. Chronicles of Teddy: Harmony of Exidus (PS4) - 30 hours - 100% completion, NG+
Still using PSNow. This used to be called Finding Teddy 2 on PC (and apparently still is on Switch? Weird). It's a Zelda-inspired metroidvania and is the sequel to a point-and-click adventure game I never played. It's a fun game, though perhaps a little too hands off, both in terms of telling you what you're supposed to do and what the controls are. I imagine most people will have to consult a guide at one point or another. I don't recommend playing through NG+, which seemed less challenging (although it was) and more... mean-spirited? I got the last laugh, however, when the final boss on NG+ glitched and his attacks stopped doing any damage to me.
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They are excellent. The series' big problem is that it isn't very newcomer friendly as you can't just play the most recent one. And while the series is broken down into arcs that each tell a single story, these are increasingly becoming less self-contained.
My recommendation if you want to give the series a try is to pick up the first Trails of Cold Steel game. You don't need any outside story information to enjoy it. Under no circumstances should you try to jump into Cold Steel IV.
Oh dang, I only played the original (Steam) versions, with the extra quality of life features, but none of the Evolution stuff. Didn't even know there was a version that was that significantly different out there.
That's not all that surprising, given that they were Japan-only Vita exclusives. I think there are mods out there that add some of the Evolution features (like voice acting) to the old Steam versions.
The Evolution versions more or less just update the UI and presentation of the Sky games to make them match the Crossbell ones. There are some gameplay tweaks as well but they aren't that significant.
It's pretty good. I liked the first one and enough time had passed/heard enough good stuff about this one that I was ready to jump into a new thing. But I hope they give it some time until the next one.
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Played through Control and got the platinum trophy on PS5. I was gonna play it on PC since I have a fancy graphics card that would make it look nice, but I was in the mood to play something on the console and it just happened to be this month's PS+ game. Also, it ended up looking really nice anyway with the graphics/ray tracing mode. I started it last year on PC but fell off of it when I got lost and wasn't having fun with the combat. This time, I turned on some of the accessibility options (fast recharging ammo and energy and enhanced aim assist because being accurate with a controller kinda sucks) and it ended up being much more enjoyable. The base game was really cool, lots of interesting stuff and characters and stories. It was a bit too creepy for my tastes, though, especially one of the DLC's, which I'll get into later. Also, some of the sidequests were pretty boring and tedious. Like, "go kill these 6 people scattered around the sector" kind of stuff. Ended up doing all of the sidequests in the base game and the AWE DLC, but skipped a couple in the Foundation DLC because by that point I was done with the game and ready to move on. The platinum itself was pretty easy to get. I had to do both of the DLCs to get enough ability points for it, though. And there were a couple trophies related to the DLCs that I didn't get because they were obnoxious, but fortunately they didn't count towards the plat.
Spoilers for the first DLC (AWE) since it's got cool story stuff:
The other DLC, the Foundation, was alright. I think part of it was me just being kinda fatigued of the game by that point, but it didn't really grab me that much. It had some cool lore stuff about the Oldest House and the Board, but spending like 80% of that DLC trudging through caves wasn't super fun. Also, learning more about Northmoor and Ash (Northmoor's son and chief of research at the time) was interesting, too. The whole lost sector thing was a cool idea, too.
Anyway, I liked it well enough. It's very pretty and it has lots of cool SCP type stuff that made it interesting.
I'm counting this as two games since I had to redo everything I had already done in Hitman. I normally would have waited a while before essentially replaying a game, but the whole impetus for my finally getting around to playing these games was that the Sniper Assassin multiplayer servers are expected to go down in the near future.
Anyway, it was more Hitman. I think I preferred the levels in the first game overall, but nothing here was bad and they largely corrected my complaint about the last game (that generic NPCs didn't seem to match their settings). The Sniper Assassin mode was a lot more fun than I was expecting, though I don't really get why they tacked multiplayer onto it.
(Also, fun fact: games are apparently only allowed to have 125 trophies (including DLC). This game has 146, so it appears as two separate games on trophy lists.)
I just have the base game for this but decided to load it up and give it a go again after barely playing it after I bought it ages ago. According to the thread for the game the AI in vanilla is kinda garbage, and they aren't wrong. I probably wouldn't have finished a campaign of the game if it weren't for this challenge because boy howdy by about the 2/3 mark I was bored as heck. Overall I would rate this version of Civ pretty far down the list of those I've played. Maybe it's better with the dlc/expansions? I'm never going to find out though.
Edit: I won through cultural victory as Germany in case anyone is curious. Did nuke Delhi the last turn of the game just to see what that did. Underwhelming compared to Planet Busters from Alpha Centauri (my favorite civ-like)
Do you like JRPGs? How about JRPGs with relentlessly optimistic protagonists, a reasonably sized cast of interesting characters, pretty good combat and a story with the perfect balance of normal JRPG nonsense and melodrama?
Seriously, Ys XIII was good and Ys IX was better in every way. Yes, it looks like a late generation PS3 game, but if I wanted the shinies I would play FF IV Remake again.
1. Yakuza: Like a Dragon (PS4)
(I haven't finished yet, but I'm gonna!)
A fairly meandering but heartfelt story about a criminal who apparently never understood what "crime" is. Combat is fun, though the game doesn't really want to encourage me to switch jobs a whole lot! As I mentioned in the game thread, one bothersome nitpick is that I have a party of really well fleshed-out characters, but as one of them is not a plot-mandated character, they conveniently vanish in cutscenes.
2. Super. Hot. (Xbox One)
This was a Games With Gold entry a long time ago, but I replayed the entirety of the game to pick up the hidden terminal achievements. Still fun.
3. Control: Ultimate Edition (PS4) [PS+ February game]
(Platinum-ed the main game, finished both DLC campaigns but don't feel like 100%ing them)
Take 5 parts SPC Foundation, 1 part House of Leaves, 1 part... Psi-Ops, I guess? Then gently shake so the parts mix up without melting together. I loved the worldbuilding, and the combat is generally fun with only the occasional bullshit boss fight, even though I quickly found two favorite guns that outpaced all the others. The graphics were generally very good even on my launch PS4, with noticeable slowdown only in one particular room. There was a foggy haze everywhere, though, which wouldn't go away no matter how I set my display options.
4. Tetris Effect (PS4)
Can one "beat" Tetris? If it's the kind that has disparate stages, unlocks, etc. you could make a claim that you "beat" it by having done everything the game is offering to you. You can also say you "beat" it when you're just done playing it, which I'm not saying either. But it's on this list anyway, because I'm realizing that this isn't Tetris as I recognize it, and it's not going to get a lot of serious rotation from me. My spouse, on the other hand, has revealed herself to be a serious Tetris addict from back in the day and has been mainlining this like it had an expiration date.
I learned Tetris on the NES, and continued with a freeware PC game called Acid Tetris and Tetrisphere on the N64 (I know, shut up. It's still fun and has fantastic music). Later versions of the game are... unintuitive to me. I play Tetris as a marathon: the more lines you clear, the faster the game goes, and the better I feel I'm doing. Today's Tetrises have bonkers rules like score combo chains, piece holding, T-Spins, and the like, and Tetris Effect has the temerity to give me a letter grade of D for letting myself get relaxed in a game named after acquiring a relaxing headspace. I just wanted to play some Tetris with pretty visuals; stop beating me over the head with competitive scoring and online rankings.
5. Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition (PS4) (PS+ from... November?)
(Finished the campaign on Normal, then dabbled in Echoes)
Fun fact: Bulletstorm is currently lodged in my X360's disc drive, because the plastic gear has literally worn away the teeth and it can never open under its own power again.
I was midway through slogging through Gears of War 5, which was one of the Games with Gold recently, when I realized that I would much rather be playing Bulletstorm instead, so I fired it up and played through the campaign. I really wish this had gotten a sequel, for as much as it is an over-the-top, bloody mess of childish language and gore, pulling off the trick shots and being recognized for it can lead to an almost puzzle game experience, especially in the remaster's Echoes Challenge modes. The reasoning behind it all is fully digetic: the scoring system was designed by assholes for assholes to train to be better assholes, so asshole up and start blastin'.
The art is lodged fully in the Gears/Epic universe of impossibly broad men who all wear fingerless gloves because the design couldn't figure out how to make the gigantic hands not look cartoonish, and huge chunky guns that would weigh upwards of 30 pounds if they actually existed. Despite the characters all having color palettes best described as brown and black, the outside levels feature really impressive colorful scenery befitting the paradise vacation resort in which they take place. The Gears-design love of shakeycam is in full force here, and in first person it can be a bit much (such as the few times you're forced to crouch-walk through vents). At some point in the game's climactic cutscene, the script just decided to drop the main character's lines entirely; his head bobbed and he moved around, but no voice played, his mouth didn't move, and no subtitles showed up during his big speech.
I never finished the MP on the 360, and it looks like I never will on PS4, either; apparently I was the only person on Earth searching for a multiplayer game last night.
6. Disco Elysium (PC)
(Finished once)
For some reason I started playing this back in 2019, and stopped at a point that turned out to be only half an hour or so from the end. I finished that playthrough and then immediately started another, with a much different set of stats.
7. Half-Life 2
With recent monetary positions being what they are, I'm not going to be going out of my way to get new games much in the near future, instead turning my focus towards replaying games I already own. I've had this installed since launch day, and according to my save files I hadn't played it since 2011 (Take that, Stanley Parable!). I replayed in three sittings over the last few days, and while it certainly is a classic in level design, it's interesting to see how mechanics and gameplay sensibilities in big FPS titles have shifted over the past decade.
PSN: Wstfgl | GamerTag: An Evil Plan | Battle.net: FallenIdle#1970
Hit me up on BoardGameArena! User: Loaded D1
*plays wow classic for 1.5 months*
I rolled credits on this but it's pretty clear that the credits are only about 3/4ths of the way through. Took a break since I'm like 100+ hours into it but I plan on finishing the story up here soon.
1.5 Bleed (Xbox) [GwG]
Short little romp of a side scroller. Think I took about an hour to beat it. It's got tight hit boxes, a nifty slow time on LT, and excellent check point locations. Epilogue boss goes long but pretty fun overall.
Assassin's Creed: Japan. I'm in the minority in that I really disliked the story. But the gameplay was fine (perhaps even good if the targeting issues are ignored) and, especially playing it on a PS5, the game was absolutely gorgeous. I played through it in both languages and the Japanese was really well done with interesting touches like changes all of the poems from haiku to tanka. It's a little baffling that they didn't do motion capture of the Japanese voice actors though. Legends mode was fun, if a bit shallow. I ultimately did not give the raid mode a try.
Woof. To be enjoyed in an ironic sense, only. Not all games need to be great, or even good, but this was an absolute dog. I can only imagine how disappointed I would have been if had I had any affection or familiarity with the source material. Bad combat, bad animations, bad voice acting, laughably small environments, meaningless upgrades. This is the worse game I have played in quite some time.
I've heard it's actually quite faithful to the source material.
Also
12. Bleed 2 (XBX)
I hesitate to add this because it was short, but it was also really good. Contra with twin stick controls and a triple jump. I wish it was ten times longer.
I liked that I was able to get through it in one sitting. I wish the secondary fire didn't require you to be shooting your primary, ended up eating a lot of shots I was trying to deflect because of that.
Dead Space 1-3
Mafia
Just Cause 4
What Remains of Edith Finch
I ran through it twice, once on normal and once on hard, right in a row. This is not something I normally do. The game just felt that good.
-6 Inksplosion (Ihr) A bare bones twin stick shooter with color splatters behind your bullets. The most surprising thing was that it had a platinum which popped in record time.
-7 Titan Attacks (3Hrs) Arcade shooter a la Galaga. But you get to repair and buy upgrades before each level. Pleasant little game.
-8 Soulcalibur 6 (20hrs) Can you beat a fighting game? Well SC6 has some extensive single player options, so I'm going with yes. Its got a create a character adventure mode that feels lacking but they tried. And a classic character story mode. It does seem to be missing something in the polish, but the combat is satisfying and very familiar to the others.
-9 Witcher Tales, Thronebreaker (30Hrs) I picked this up to experience a cool story while figuring out how to play Gwent. Truns out Gwent is actually discontinued on PS4, and this game crashes all the time. CDPR and crashes, who knew?
When it works, the story, deckbuilding and standard best of 3 battles are great. The puzzles and forced custom deck fights aren't my favourites but they at least fit thematically.
Hoping to complete it but the crashes are spoiling my appetite.
I didn't actually finish the Bowser's Fury add on, as I have an my fill of Mario-ing, but seeing as Super Mario 3D World is a rerelease of a Wii-U title I still think it counts. Feels like a traditional Mario, which is not a bad thing, but the isometric view point can make precision platforming much more difficult that it needs to be. That on top of most levels floating in empty space with no borders leads to quite a bit of plummeting to an untimely death.
Still, I never had a Wii or a Wii-U, so these updates are welcome.
14. Ghosts 'N Goblins Resurrection (Switch)
Beat it on Squire. Better than Page, but not Knight or Legend. Attempted it on Knight and got three levels in before I began to fear for my Switch's live and had to put it down.
15. Endurance (XBX)
Very cheap pixel art twin stick shooter full of poor translations and a story that never quite lives up to what it promises. For sub $10, what can I expect.
I wanted to play something short after a series of 100+ hour games, so finally crossed this off of my backlog. It was very good, but I wish that it hadn't left quite so many plot points unexplained.
10. Samurai Warriors Chronicle 3 (PSV) - 125 hours - Platinum
Dynasty Warriors 3 was the game that got me to buy a PS2 (my first console since the NES) and ever since one of my masochistic tendencies as a gamer is to 100% Musou games even though it usually requires a borderline offensive amount of grinding. I realized that it had been almost 2 years since I played one (except for Troy, which doesn't count), so I was overdue to play one again. I was a little worried about how it would play on the Vita, but load times and pop-in were much better than I was expecting (this also came out on the 3DS and I have to imagine it would have been kind of rough there). You play four characters on each mission which was a nice way to at least partly alleviate the issue the Musou games of having way too many playable characters. Other than that, it was a typical Musou game but it was pretty good. My 15th platinum for the series, which is kind of crazy.
16. Metal Slug 3 (XBX)
It had been a while.
17. Raging Justice (XBX)
Side scrolling beat 'em up in the style of Streets of Rage 4, but nowhere as good.
It was on sale for $3.
11. Trails of Cold Steel IV (PS4) - 131 hours - Platinum
More Trails goodness. Seems crazy to me that people would play this without having finished the Sky and Crossbell games, given how closely they're conenected. I've heard that some fans really didn't like the ending, but it didn't bother me. To be perfectly honest, I'm more interested in the world building and the characters than the actual plot (which, let's face it, has it's fair share of anime nonsense). I imported Hajimari no Kiseki, but I think I'll give the series a breather before starting it.
12. Far Cry 5 (PS4) - 76 hours - Platinum, all DLC trophies
I've been trying to catch up on the Far Cry games after not playing them for several years, so played 4 and Primal last year. Finally got around to 5. Gameplay was fine, though I agree with most of the criticism of the story. I had the ending spoiled for me long before I started playing, so at least I was prepared. The DLCs ranged from mediocre (Vietnam) to bad (Zombies).
13. Jedi: Fallen Order (PS4) - 24 hours - Platinum
The game I picked up a EA Play subscription for. I really enjoyed it. It was pretty interesting playing a game with Soulslike mechanics without Soulslike difficulty. Story was good, even if it was pretty by-the-numbers Star Wars.
14. One Finger Death Punch 2 (PS4) - 14 hours - Platinum
I really enjoyed the first game so was happy when I saw it got a sequel. It was good but kinda felt like they added a bunch of stuff just to justify it being a sequel. Still really addictive, though. The last few fights really felt like a chore as things got too fast and you just had to kill too many enemies.
15. Sea of Solitude (PS4) - 5 hours - Platinum
I gave this a try because I wanted to get a little more value out of EA Play and pretty much everything else was a sports game or something I already owned. Ended up having to use my PS4 for the first time in months because graphical glitches on the PS5 make it pretty unplayable. I did not enjoy this. The gameplay was on the level you'd expect of an artistic narrative-focused game like this (i.e., not great) and the story was undercut by some pretty bad voice acting.
16. Port Royale III (PS3) - 12 hours - DLCs
Played this years ago and finally got around to playing the DLCs. They were fine but nothing special. I'm kind of glad it took me so long to go back to the game to do these as I remember being pretty burned out on it by the time I finished.
6) Delete - Very short, Hexcells-ish. Good puzzler.
7) Conquer and Breed the Demon Queen - Kind of mixed on it. Like the premise/scenario of it, a lot of the art's good. The writing is pretty mediocre and there's way too much pee stuff in it. I'd recommend reading a doujin with that premise instead.
8) Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance - My first Fire Emblem game! It was a lot of fun! It was a properly epic continent spanning journey with lots of cool encounters. The cast was pretty solid and Ike was a pretty dope protagonist.
9) Jedi: Fallen Order - It was alright. Kind of wish it had some sort of fast travel system. Less of a problem once you get more traversal abilities, but you spend a lot of time in that game just sort of walking back to where you came from.
Kinda stopped tracking stuff for a while there. I think that's everything I missed. Currently working on Octopath Traveler (which I might end up dropping after awhile) and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. Might start up Yakuza 3 on PS5, too. Also probably should go back and finish Ace Combat Zero since I started a replay of that awhile ago.
Started and stopped Spiritfarer during that time, too. It's beautiful and it's got some resonant themes, but it is an absolute chore to actually play.
I hadn't planned to play this just two weeks after finishing Far Cry 5, but the guy I did the co-op trophies in that game started it, so...
Overall, I really liked it, definitely more than I liked 5. My only real comment would be that I wish the cult from 5 was less prominent in the story.
Took me about 26 hours with Subnautica. Could've been more but I didn't explore everything. Great game, my gold standard for survival/crafting games.
Agreed, New Dawn I think didn’t do as well because people were turned off from 5, but it’s superior in pretty much every way.
Point and click adventure about stopping a murder that is also the beginning and end of the universe with a jazz soundtrack?
I think?
Got to be honest, I played most of this while drinking so it is probably not as good as I think it wqs.
18. Red Dead Redemption - Undead Nightmare (PS3) - 10 hours - 100% single player completion
I've been hearing good things about this DLC for years and, now that I've played it, I'm not entirely sure why. It was nice to go back to RDR again, sure, but otherwise the story and added content didn't really seem like anything special. Maybe I'm just a little burned out on open-world games at the moment. The game also suffers from a bug (zombies start spawning without heads or limbs) that requires reloading an old save every 45 minutes or so. I didn't bother with the multiplayer trophies as the RDR servers have been an utter mess for years.
19. Mars: War Logs (PS3) - 16 hours - 100% completion
A sequel (?) to The Technomancer, which came out three years later. I've always had a soft spot for Spiders, the poor man's Bioware, and kind of liked The Technomancer so wanted to give this a try. It's pretty janky, but I knew what I was getting into and liked it overall. I will warn that a guide is required if you don't want to accidentally lock yourself out of side quests and that the first third of the game is extremely frustrating if playing on the highest difficulty level.
Overall, I'm glad to have played both but am very happy that I didn't have to drop $20 to do so.
I also played something I'd never heard of before:
20. Narco Terror (PS3) - 8 hours - 100% completion
This is a digital-only, delisted PS3 twin-stick shooter. What little story there is involves a DEA agent shooting up a drug cartel in Peru and saving his daughter. I was going to describe it as thoroughly average, but the final boss fight is honestly pretty awful.
All style, no substance, ends on a cliffhanger.
Unless you have GamePass, don't bother.
Still using PSNow. This used to be called Finding Teddy 2 on PC (and apparently still is on Switch? Weird). It's a Zelda-inspired metroidvania and is the sequel to a point-and-click adventure game I never played. It's a fun game, though perhaps a little too hands off, both in terms of telling you what you're supposed to do and what the controls are. I imagine most people will have to consult a guide at one point or another. I don't recommend playing through NG+, which seemed less challenging (although it was) and more... mean-spirited? I got the last laugh, however, when the final boss on NG+ glitched and his attacks stopped doing any damage to me.