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Started by Keef Monkey, 11 June, 2011, 09:35:35 AM

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Keef Monkey

Yup, that was my experience with Psychonauts too. Bags of charm in spades, but clunky in the gameplay department. They're one of those studios I like a lot because their games always have a ton of character, but haven't played one yet that I didn't have quibbles with.

I've moved straight onto Grim Fandango Remastered actually, because I never played that back in the day. So far it's got the charm and character down, will see how the gameplay goes!

GrudgeJohnDeed

Quote from: Professor Bear on 03 February, 2018, 02:12:10 PM
Urban Chaos: Riot Response

Such a good game!! Rocksteady have been teasing their next game for ages now and i have my fingers crossed its a sequel to this gem. A boy can dream!

I've been playing lots of Wii and Gamecube (via Wii) games, some highlights include:

Starfox Adventures - my first time playing this, I'm a huge fan of Rare and this was a glaring omission. It still looks and sounds great, and is a blast to play. It's basically the Zelda formula with a Rare twist and style, and on-rails shooting sections. It's also shorter and less obtuse than your average 3d Zelda too, which makes for perhaps a tighter more focused experience (but you could argue on the flipside, less open and non-linear). Speaking of the shooting sections, the seams do show a bit, in places you can definitely tell that the Starfox IP was injected into the game late in development. Something at the end is very jarring indeed!

It makes me think you could make an awesome RPG out of Starfox though, it's not a series I've thought much about in recent years but it's a really cool world. I'd love to see them tell the story of Andross's rise to infamy on Corneria and Starwolf's fall from grace, have you fly to air battles on the overworld map in your Arwing and explore on foot the cities we've seen collapsed so many times.

Resident Evil 3 - For me, as awesome as Resident Evil 2 is, it's RE3 that delivers on that promise of surviving an infected city. RE3 is kinda Resident Evil's Dawn of the Dead to RE1's Night. No hiding inside police stations like in RE2, you must face the rampaging hordes head-on as you explore the streets and overrun buildings, with the unstoppable Nemesis snapping at your heels the entire time. As you would, you see more zombies than ever on the streets (I think I saw 8 on-screen at once?) and there's constant ambient zombie wailing to keep the hair on the back of your neck bristling, it might even be baked into the music. Buckets of atmosphere. The music in general is scarier and more sinister than ever for my money, the save room music for example which often in Resi games has *some* feeling of respite or a change of mood is just so bleak and oppressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBYSQxrk7QI&t=172s

Needless to say it's the scariest of the old-style Resis imo, you never feel safe and they deliver on the premise. I should also mention it looks great too, looks like a lot of the backgrounds are higher resolution than RE2 and tons of detail has been put into the cluttered city.

I also played through Burnout 2 again, which is still fantastic and perhaps my favourite in the series!

Theblazeuk

God the amount of time spent on the Mercenaries mini-game in RE3. And when you realise you can save people if you get there fast enough! What a game.

jacob g

I just replayed my Nier: Automata copy to get all the chapters and endings. Maybe I played Horizon Zero Dawn more but Automata IS my game of 2017.

But also I played Zelda and I must say I loved every minute of it. This is one of the greatest big games of last year, yet still Nier wins all.

Now I'm in the Monster Hunter World badwagon and... all the praise is justified.
margaritas ante porcos

Professor Bear

Old games a go-go in Casa Bear, as a long-overdue clearout has forced me to finally finish all the old games I bought when they were going for buttons at the end of/after the shelf life of previous generations of consoles, if only to make sure they still work before hitting eBay.

Robocop on PS2 is pretty dire, but Robocop (the movie) has inevitably dated in the decades since its release, so now the PS2 game feels like an artifact from the franchise itself, with its dated mechanics and crusty graphics engine.  Hard to believe that Robocop knock-off Judge Dredd was a mere two years away from this one, as it covered the same kind of territory much better.  I can't quite explain why I liked playing this beyond some kind of fondness for its anachronistic gameplay.
Red Star is a scrolling beat-em-up that has gunfighting mechanics built in.  You're never swarmed with enemies as you are in shooters or regular fighting games, instead you get faced with a small number of enemies who each have certain weaknesses that have to be exploited: some are weak against gunfire, others are immune and have to be fought hand to hand, that sort of thing.  Every so often you encounter a boss who attacks with a bulletstorm of some sort.  An enjoyable oddity.
Super Mario 3 - incredibly tiresome runny-jumpy thing.  I know some people love these games but it's 2018 now, and - as you can see above - I can just about justify playing games from the mid-2000s.  Not my cup of tea at all, I much preferred Wario and the Yoshi games, though I gather there's not that much clear water between them and this.
Mario Smash Football - combines my two least favorite things: Super Mario (he looks like a nonce), and Sportsball.  Well, it works, anyway - onto the eBay with you, wretched thing!
Dragon Sisters - pretty bad, but after a level or two it spams you a sort of Street Fighter 2 minigame between levels where instead of smashing up a car you smash up a glowing alien orb to get in-game credits to beef up your character's stats, and once you move at more than a geriatric snail's pace and don't have to punch enemies 50 times to do any damage, this is actually a pretty enjoyable post-apocalyptic beat-em-up.  It feels grind-y to start with, but a few plays later and you're flying.
Forbidden Siren - super-tense stuff where you sneak around a village full of murdery rednecks avoiding them by jacking into their eyes so you can can tell if they can see you or not when you sneak past.  I wasn't sure about this mechanic as it seemed a bit too far into the supernatural for what is mostly a spin on the Resident Evil game archetype, but always knowing what the gibbering pitchfork-wielding fuckers can see just makes things insanely tense.  The voice acting is epicly gash, but this just makes it sound like an old VHS dub of a Hong Kong movie from the mid-80s, the photo-mapped gormless expressions on the characters further selling it.
Forbidden Siren 2 - more of the same, but with larger environments and more outrageous enemies to get paranoid about.  The puzzles and stealth elements aren't actually that hard, but combined with the sight jacking thing, the game works to paralyse you with indecision and fear of what calamity your next move might bring down upon you.  A really fun pair of survival horror games.

Goaty

Is it worth to get Dark Souls 3 as never play DS1 or DS2.

Greg M.

Quote from: Goaty on 07 February, 2018, 04:00:57 PM
Is it worth to get Dark Souls 3 as never play DS1 or DS2.

A resounding 'yes'! I'd never played either of the previous installments (though I had played 'Bloodborne') and I loved DS3.

Keef Monkey

Couldn't get along with Grim Fandango at all sadly. I enjoyed the style and the writing enough that I wanted to see it through, but couldn't tune into the logic of the puzzles so wound up using a guide just to get it done and dusted. There were a bunch of puzzles where I feel like I would have found the solution if the interface was better - lost count of the amount of times I didn't know something was interactive because it was sitting too close to something else and with the default control scheme it was incredibly fiddly to recognize and distinguish between interactive objects. I ended up switching to the traditional point and click controls, and then got hopelessly stuck in places because there were things you just straight-up couldn't do with that control scheme.

I knew if I persevered I would just end up hating it, so just blasted through with a guide in the end. A bit gutted, some of those LucasArts adventures are in my all time favourites list (Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Day of The Tentacle, Fate of Atlantis) and with the reputation Grim has I thought it would be a match for those. Not a fan.

Then I played through Her Story in a couple of hours and really enjoyed it. The credits have rolled but I feel like there are important parts of the story I might have missed, looking online though it appears the credits will only roll once you've seen all the pertinent information.

A really unique game mechanic, and a very unusual way to tell a story, and the voyeuristic rabbit-hole you go down as you search for videos and unravel what's happened is massively absorbing. Really liked it.

IAMTHESYSTEM

Penumbra Overture. A click puzzle type game with a scary Lovecraftian premise set in Greenland. The controls are awful and trying to swing a hammer has so far proven to be problematic, but it is very atmospheric if somewhat dated Graphic wise. Bought in the Steam Lunar sale, they're having at the moment. The sale ends tomorrow 19/2/2018 so hurry if you want something cheapo.

"You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension."

http://artriad.deviantart.com/
― Nikola Tesla

Keef Monkey

Thomas Was Alone, brilliant. A really pleasant relaxing puzzle platformer with a perfectly tuned learning curve, a fabulously engaging narration and a lovely post-rock style soundtrack. Exactly what I needed after Grim Fandango convincing me I was now too dumb for puzzle games, this made me feel a bit cleverer again!

JamesC

A couple of excellent Megadrive pick-ups.

Atomic Runner - an absolute blast of a game. These days it would be called an 'endless runner' but it's really a shmup in which you control a running man instead of an aircraft or spaceship.
It's hard to quantify exactly what makes a great shmup but what ever 'it' is, Atomic runner has it in spades.
It doesn't look anything special in screenshots or videos but if you get the chance to play it then do so - it's fucking ace.

Shining Force 2 - I'm not the biggest fan of RPGs but I wanted to give this a go because I'd played a bit of Fire Emblem (because I'd heard it was a bit like Advance Wars) and really enjoyed it. So far I've only completed 5 or 6 battles but it's great fun. The presentation is top-notch too (lovely music in particular).

Pyroxian

Quote from: JamesC on 19 February, 2018, 02:43:24 PM
Atomic Runner - an absolute blast of a game. These days it would be called an 'endless runner' but it's really a shmup in which you control a running man instead of an aircraft or spaceship.
It's hard to quantify exactly what makes a great shmup but what ever 'it' is, Atomic runner has it in spades.
It doesn't look anything special in screenshots or videos but if you get the chance to play it then do so - it's fucking ace.

I remember playing the Arcade version of that a lot during a holiday in the South of France in the late 80's :) It's good, but pretty hardcore.

The Enigmatic Dr X

Quote from: Keef Monkey on 19 February, 2018, 11:14:37 AM
Thomas Was Alone, brilliant. A really pleasant relaxing puzzle platformer with a perfectly tuned learning curve, a fabulously engaging narration and a lovely post-rock style soundtrack. Exactly what I needed after Grim Fandango convincing me I was now too dumb for puzzle games, this made me feel a bit cleverer again!

Loved this. Never realised quite how attached you could get to a little square block.
Lock up your spoons!

JamesC

Quote from: Pyroxian on 19 February, 2018, 03:04:07 PM
Quote from: JamesC on 19 February, 2018, 02:43:24 PM
Atomic Runner - an absolute blast of a game. These days it would be called an 'endless runner' but it's really a shmup in which you control a running man instead of an aircraft or spaceship.
It's hard to quantify exactly what makes a great shmup but what ever 'it' is, Atomic runner has it in spades.
It doesn't look anything special in screenshots or videos but if you get the chance to play it then do so - it's fucking ace.

I remember playing the Arcade version of that a lot during a holiday in the South of France in the late 80's :) It's good, but pretty hardcore.

I never played the coin-op which is weird - growing up in Great Yarmouth I played most things in one arcade or other but don't remember ever seeing this. I'd still like to play it but am happy with the M.D. version really, which I think is a bit of an upgrade by all accounts.

Tjm86

Quote from: JamesC on 19 February, 2018, 08:32:29 PM
- growing up in Great Yarmouth  ....

Oh man!  You have my sympathies.