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

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Modern Panther

Just because I will promote this man's reviews at every opportunity...

I got into Stardew Valley after reading Paul Dean's review which compares the game's farming and building relationships with real world work, trying to become a writer, and how desperately sad life can be when the only entertainment in town is a pub.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/13/stardew-valley-marriage-work/

Keef Monkey

As someone who has never been good at (or particularly interested in) RTS games I did really enjoy the original Halo Wars as it was accessible and manageable enough for me to handle, plus the Halo aesthetic went a long way to getting me invested in it.

Finally got round to playing Halo Wars 2 over the weekend and really, really enjoyed it. The checkpointing could be a problem in places (occasionally a checkpoint would save just as my base was about to be overrun, meaning I had the choice of starting the whole mission again or dropping straight into an unwinnable sitation), but other than that it was great fun.

I have to admit to not digging too deep into the tactics of what units are best against what enemy units, but found it immensely satisfying to just amass a well rounded army and roll over the enemy forces. It would probably feel a bit quaint and easy to any hardcore RTS players, but if it wasn't I probably never would have gotten to grips with it. Great cutscenes too, those Blur cutscenes on Halo games always look incredible.

Keef Monkey

I'm not a big racing game guy (things like Forza are a bit too dry for my liking) but I do enjoy a bit of Need For Speed, and finally got round to playing the one from a couple of years ago (just called Need For Speed).

I really enjoyed it up to a point, basically the point that I'd rinsed all the Easy and Medium missions and only had Hard ones left and then some frustration kicked in. There's nothing more thrilling and palm-sweaty than holding onto first place while blasting along at 200+ mph, but there's also nothing more annoying than then being slammed off the road by another player who's coming up the wrong side of the road, and watching yourself slip back to an un-salvagable last place. Yup, it's always online with smatterings of other human players all going about their own challenges and races, and more often than not when something went wrong for me it was another player T-boning me at a junction and whatnot. Pretty vexing.

I don't recall getting frustrated with the previous game, NFS Rivals, but thinking back it was set on quite open roads and deserty/foresty spaces, trying to navigate tight city streets while 7 other racers pile straight through you at corners turned out to a bit more annoying.

The cop chases are very poor too, especially after Rivals being so focused on it and so fun in that regard. The mechanic wasn't very fun and the cops themselves were useless - there were mission objectives to keep cop chases going for X amount of time/points, and those were always a case of inching really slowly around so the cops could still keep up, before losing them in 5 seconds flat once the challenge was beaten. Disappointing.

Still, that thrill of winning was exhilirating whenever it happened, and the FMV cutscenes are so gloriously cheesy that I got really engaged with them. It was nice to feel like I was drinking Monster and fist-bumping my homies at cool parties, instead of just drinking monster in my loungpants on a beanbag in a darkened room alone. They drink a lot of Monster in the game, which I could relate to.


Professor Bear

As someone who drinks a lot of energy drinks, let me assure you there are no long term effects to your stomach you need to be concerned about.  None at all.

Keef Monkey

Quote from: Professor Bear on 16 March, 2018, 09:25:33 AM
As someone who drinks a lot of energy drinks, let me assure you there are no long term effects to your stomach you need to be concerned about.  None at all.

Ah, so that's why my insides have started eating themselves!

Played through Unravel on EA Access. It's a charming side-scrolling platform puzzler which occasionally frustrates (the controls can be fussy enough that you might figure out the solution to something, have it not work, get stumped for a while before eventually finding the thing you tried the first time was actually correct but the wee fella just hadn't jumped at the right angle or something - urgh), but overall is really nice and has a lovely atmosphere and looks very pretty. Liked it a lot (even if there were moments I called it all sorts of sweary things).

JamesC

Castlevania: The New Generation (Megadrive)

Super Castlevania IV (Super Nintendo)

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (DS)

I've played quite a few Castlevania titles over the years, since playing the first on NES sometime in about 1989. It's a series I've always had some affection for and I like the way the series has adopted various different play styles. I thought I'd revisit a few to see how they held up.

Castlevania: The New Generation is the one I'm enjoying most so far. It's a fast paced arcade action title and immediately grabs you with fun, tight gameplay and intuitive controls. It also offers a choice of player character from the very start.
Of the three games I've been playing it's this that has the 'just one more go' factor and is therefore the title I've spent most time on. It's certainly not the most original game in the series but is the most 'arcadey' of the ones I've played. It feels like they could have banged this straight in a cabinet and charged 20p a go.

Super Castlevania IV is the first Castlevania game I bought and it was always a bit too slow to hold my attention for very long. Despite its reputation as one of the top Castlevania games I still find it a bit of a slog. It plays about 3 times slower than 'New Generation' and while it's graphically and audibly superior (although some of the tunes are a bit annoying), probably more original on later levels, and a longer and deeper game, it just doesn't grab me. It's far more of a platform game than many others in the series. In New Generation you'll die fighting monsters, in CVIV you'll die 'Mario deaths' (falling off the bottom of the screen). I'll stick with it though.

Portrait of Ruin is quite nice despite the anime stylings, which are slightly too cute for my liking. As with many newer games there are far too many unskippable conversations between characters but the general gameplay seems pretty slick. I'm not sure the character-switching adds much but it's all done with a single button press so it doesn't really get in the way. The RPG elements are fine too but don't really add much to the sense of exploration or the thrill of fighting vampires. The worst thing about the game is that the combat feels a bit weedy. There's not much satisfaction to be had from hitting baddies as there's little sense of impact. It's a bit of a shame really - as you spend most of the time hitting things it would feel better if the hits looked like they were actually connecting and were accompanied by a satisfying percussive sound. 

Once I've spent a bit more time on these I'll give Symphony of the Night (which I have on Xbox Live), Dracula X (PSP) and Mirror of Fate (3DS) a go.

GrudgeJohnDeed

Sea Of Thieves - this is getting a lot of flack, but I'm loving it. It's definitely a co-operative multiplayer game through and through, you really have to work together just to sail effectively with everyone having jobs onboard, stuff like angling the sails, steering, and surveillance up in the crows nest. There's a smaller ship for 1-2 players but if you're playing solo there's still a lot of multitasking to do that would benefit from a second player, I could see how people playing alone would have a tough time and playing solo seems to be missing the point a little.

The quests and bounties are quite straight forward but you run into lots of cool random events on the way, not least of all other players out to get you! You carry your spoils back to the ship and sail back to designated ports to sell them, and as items that anyone can interact with, other players can take them from you. So there's a real tension around strangers, just seeing another ship in the distance gets the blood pumping. I cant think of many games that elicit the excitement of running back to the ship mid-island adventure as we see a galleon on the horizon heading for us and our sitting-duck of a moored ship (it was that filmic moment of one person noticing the incoming danger and being like "er.. guys?" as the others were fighting, oblivious), or successfully fighting off a boarding party as we are targeted trying to get our loot back to town. I look forward to hopefully forming an uneasy truce with another group some time, although its pretty cutthroat out there! Pun intended.

Keef Monkey

Got this too, but by the time I got round to booting it up the servers weren't taking on any new players while they did some bug fixing. Too many players joining at once overloaded things I think. I don't get mad about that stuff (although grud knows a lot of people do!) because it's just your usual launch day problems that need ironed out of these kinds of big multiplayer releases.

I'm hoping it's all running a bit smoother for the weekend when I can get stuck in. The friends I know who made it in had a great time, and even found themselves crewing up with friendly strangers and having a great time, which is rare these days (normally online gaming is just people yelling at each other). It all sounded very pleasant!

Krakajac

For PS4 owners - at least in my neck of the woods (Australia) - Bloodborne is free to download via PS Plus (one of the March titles).  Never played this when it was released - so it's downloading as we speak.  The free titles don't normally interest me, but hey...it's a AAA title...worth a go!

I, Cosh

Quote from: Krakajac on 22 March, 2018, 10:34:39 PM
For PS4 owners - at least in my neck of the woods (Australia) - Bloodborne is free to download via PS Plus (one of the March titles).  Never played this when it was released - so it's downloading as we speak.  The free titles don't normally interest me, but hey...it's a AAA title...worth a go!
Yeah, anyone who hasn't played this should grab it. It's an astonishingly good game. If I could stop playing Stardew Valley for more than ten minutes I'd maybe start another run myself.
We never really die.

GrudgeJohnDeed

#2050
Isnt that latest Ratchet and Clank game free on PS+ at the moment too? Meant to be pretty good, had a tie-in film too. Mighty No. 9 also, if you're in the market for an off-brand megaman game. Great month for PS4 owners.

Quote from: Keef Monkey on 22 March, 2018, 05:52:25 PM
I'm hoping it's all running a bit smoother for the weekend when I can get stuck in. The friends I know who made it in had a great time, and even found themselves crewing up with friendly strangers and having a great time, which is rare these days (normally online gaming is just people yelling at each other). It all sounded very pleasant!

Yeah good point you can matchmake to get into a crew with strangers if you need to, I bet it wouldn't take long to find a good group. We lived the dream of finding friendly members of other crews last night, it was pretty cool! It felt rewarding just to be nice and cordial when the crews can kill each other at any moment. We even all jumped on one ship and sailed it around for a while, but unfortunately you cant go on quests together or share loot between crews (you could give them loot, but only the crew that turns the loot in will get the gold) so unless one crew doesn't mind just helping there's not much to do in that situation. Although there are these 'raid' events to use the Destiny parlance, marked by an imposing storm cloud skull on the horizon, where different crews attending can work together to beat the CPU enemies so I guess we could've done that. I think there's enough pieces of loot at the end of the raids that you could split it all, but strangers with a tenuous truce will probably just turn on each other, or more likely never make a truce and shoot on sight :D

Keef Monkey

Played through Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock and loved it.

I'm not very experienced in RTS style games (this is a bit of a hybrid, where it pauses to allow you to give orders to all your units and then watch them play out simultaneously, bit like the X Wing tabletop game in that regard), but I love BSG so much and have wanted a decent game based on it for so long that I decided to learn the RTS ropes for it.

Decided to play through on Easy first while I got to grips with it, and while I found parts of it a bit confusing (and had to google how a couple of the systems worked - it's only occurred to me now that an online manual probably exists, forget about those with digital games!) once I got into the swing of it and got a decent fleet together and figured out some formations that would work I was absolutely loving it.

Last missions were particularly excellent, with raptors having to get to and dock with Cylon bases and then escape while basestars were jumping in and heavy raiders sneaking through and boarding my own base and needing fended off – proper season finale battlestar stuff, excellent.

Best part is when you pass a mission you can watch a replay, and control the camera angles to get a look at what happened (the amount of times I thought I lost a ship to cylon fire but had actually accidentally nosedived it into my own base was embarrassing), but the autocam mode makes for great replays. They've totally nailed the look and feel of the show and when the torpedoes are flying and you've got a ton of vipers scrambled it's lovely to behold.

I did hit a bug with it (I'm playing on Xbox) where when I saved mid-mission the save would generally be useless (the game would hang on loading when I tried to load into it), and one other point where hitting replay at the end of a mission caused a hang so I had to start that one again. Pretty annoying, but not the end of the world, never had a problem with the autosaves between missions. Hopefully they patch it up at some point.

All in though, great game if you love Battlestar.

Apestrife

Found Curse of monkey island on GOG.com this weekend. Not played it in almost 20 years, but I still managed to remember how to solve most of the puzzles outside one or two now and then. Held up really well both in regards of story and graphics. Only problems really I had were one or two instances missing out I could click on something due to mistaking it for random pixel, and the last chapter felt a bit rushed up to the ending.

Planning on playing the two original games on Steam soon. Perhaps also giving Thimbleweed Park a go.

Keef Monkey

Played through a couple of puzzlers last week, Slayaway Camp and Kalimba, both on the XB1.

Slayaway Camp is a sliding puzzle game where you slide a horror movie killer around a grid trying to kill every victim and reach the exit, along with lots of unlockable copyright-free movie killers (Candyman is 'Sweets Man' for example). Really fun and satisfying to solve, although I personally found myself using the hint system on a handful of levels towards the end because I really couldn't think that many moves ahead. Means I finished it feeling a bit deflated.

Kalimba is a really charming and colourful puzzle platformer where you control two characters on-screen simultaneously and try to get them to the end of levels without dying. It's very tricky in places, and it's amazing how much extra dexterity is required just with trying to keep both characters' movements in mind as you do things, plus one of the central hooks is that a blue character can move through blue areas but will be killed by green areas etc. which requires some crafty manouvering. Really good game, even if at the end of almost every level it told me one of my mates had done it better. Argh. The studio also made Max: The Curse of Brotherhood (also great) before folding I believe, which is a real shame.

Pete Wells

Blimey! I thoroughly enjoyed renting Ghost Recon Wildlands on XboxOne and saw it cheap for the PS4 and grabbed a copy. I was playing through it all again and then WOW! The game turned into [spoiler]Predator! Actual fucking Predator![/spoiler]

I k ew nothing about thus and so it was a total surprise, this may have been one of my favourite gaming moments ever! What a brilliant move! I haven't managed to beat the bugger yet!