The last few games you beat and rate them III

[Osprey]

I saw a massive wall of text (though very nicely paragraphed, I must say) and instantly said to myself, "that's a Ceremony post." Every game review of his is like this, but, oddly enough, most of his posts in the political forum are one-liners. The man knows which topics are important .

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

Just Beat:

8.5/10

 

[Ceremony]

I saw a massive wall of text (though very nicely paragraphed, I must say) and instantly said to myself, "that's a Ceremony post." Every game review of his is like this, but, oddly enough, most of his posts in the political forum are one-liners. The man knows which topics are important .

Or I know which topics I can write more than eight words about without making (too much of) a fool of myself.

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

Just Beat:

8.5/10

f***ing love that game.

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

****ing love that game.

Me too.

It's a shame the second one was such a clusterf*** of a letdown. Especially in the final act.

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

I'm legit trying to remember how the 2nd one ends.

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

I'm legit trying to remember how the 2nd one ends.

Condemned 2: Bloodshot - Wikipedia

It was good until that magical vocal cords/screaming at enemies bullshit

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

Ummm... what the hell? I legit don't remember this .

 

[Shareefruck]

Celeste - 4.5 (Brilliant)

I'm pretty blown away by how good this is. It makes other indie darlings like Super Meat Boy look like complete trash in comparison, IMO, and I honestly feel compelled to put it up on a pedestal with the classics from the SNES era.

Positives:

• The controls are tight and an absolute joy to handle, and the levels are flawlessly designed.
• More importantly, the pacing is absolutely perfect. Simple, intuitive mechanics build on each other cleverly and seamlessly as you encounter new areas, and the gradual pace that the mechanics are taught, that the challenges escalate, and that the momentum shifts is perfectly considered. It's challenging and unforgiving, but the re-spawning is quick and perfect, and it's all done in a way that never feels frustrating, despite potentially dying thousands of times.
• The minimalistic sprite-work and ultra-small tile size is absolutely gorgeous, as are the backgrounds, the color scheme, and the soundtrack. While you're in the thick of the game, it looks and feels perfect.
• The story's themes and circumstances work really well with the gameplay.
• Optional secrets and challenges are handled perfectly.
• It's just thoroughly addictive, charming, rewarding, and exhilarating as hell, and is a blast to play through.

Minor nitpicks:

• The biggest turnoff for me is the user interface, smooth fonts, and between game art/portrait style. I wish the whole game used the same style as the sprites-- that would probably make it one of my favorite games, period. The smooth vector-ish art looks really amateurish to me, especially when its combined with the sprite art. It's not super important, but it's a factor.
• While the themes integrate into the gameplay perfectly, and the story is very serviceable in isolation, it isn't nearly as strong as the game itself, IMO. It seems to have the typical honest, cute, feel-good, and moderately meaningful/introspective but somewhat vapid indie sensibilities that I tend to associate with weaker games. It works, but.... I don't know, I think it distracts from the much better game that it's built around. I think I would have preferred if it tried to do less and maybe just vaguely hinted at the themes rather than tell the story directly (which I think is an approach that works better with platformers anyways).
• I don't understand why they had so many leap-of-faith-to-the-next-room, point-of-no-return one-way platforms. It's easy enough to return and pick up what you need, but it's still a little regrettable. There are branching paths, you have no idea which ones are secrets/optional challenges and which ones are the main path, and once you pick one, you're often forced to continue down it.

Tremendous game regardless.

Post-2000s Favorites
1. Inside
2. Mother 3
3. Portal
4. Celeste
5. Shadow of the Colossus
6. Garou: Mark of the Wolves
7. Limbo
8. Portal 2
9. Radiant Historia
10. Journey
11. Metal Slug 3
12. Ikaruga
13. Megaman 9
14. Shantae: The Pirate's Curse
15. Undertale

Hollow Knight next.

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

Ummm... what the hell? I legit don't remember this .

Your lucky. I wish I could forget the abomination that was the final act of "Condemned 2"

Frankly the only things I remember about "Condemned 2" (besides that supernatural vocal cord bullshit) were fighting/beating the Alcohol Demon and the level with that huge rabid bear that's chasing you.

 

[Static]

Celeste - 4.0 or 4.5 (Flawless/Brilliant)

I'm pretty blown away by how good this is. It makes other indie darlings like Super Meat Boy look like complete trash in comparison, IMO, and I honestly feel compelled to put it up on a pedestal with the classics from the SNES era.

Positives:

• The controls are tight and an absolute joy to handle, and the levels are flawlessly designed.
• More importantly, the pacing is absolutely perfect. Simple, intuitive mechanics build on each other cleverly and seamlessly as you encounter new areas, and the gradual pace that the mechanics are taught, that the challenges escalate, and that the momentum shifts is perfectly considered. It's challenging and unforgiving, but the re-spawning is quick and perfect, and it's all done in a way that never feels frustrating, despite potentially dying thousands of times.
• The minimalistic sprite-work and ultra-small tile size is absolutely gorgeous, as are the backgrounds, the color scheme, and the soundtrack. While you're in the thick of the game, it looks and feels perfect.
• The story's themes and circumstances work really well with the gameplay.
• Optional secrets and challenges are handled perfectly.
• It's just thoroughly addictive, charming, rewarding, and exhilarating as hell, and is a blast to play through.

Flaws that hold it back:

• The biggest turnoff for me is the user interface, smooth fonts, and between game art/portrait style. I wish the whole game used the same style as the sprites-- that would probably make it one of my favorite games, period. The smooth vector-ish art looks really amateurish to me, especially when its combined with the sprite art. It's not super important, but it's a factor.

Minor nitpicks:

• While the themes integrate into the gameplay perfectly, and the story is very serviceable in isolation, it isn't nearly as strong as the game itself, IMO. It seems to have the typical honest, cute, feel-good, and moderately meaningful/introspective but somewhat vapid indie sensibilities that I tend to associate with weaker games. It works, but.... I don't know, I think it distracts from the much better game that it's built around. I think I would have preferred if it tried to do less and maybe just vaguely hinted at the themes rather than tell the story directly (which I think is an approach that works better with platformers anyways).
• I don't understand why they had so many leap-of-faith-to-the-next-room, point-of-no-return one-way platforms. It's easy enough to return and pick up what you need, but it's still a little regrettable. There are branching paths, you have no idea which ones are secrets/optional challenges and which ones are the main path, and once you pick one, you're often forced to continue down it.

Tremendous game regardless.

Post-2000s Favorites
1. Inside
2. Mother 3
3. Portal
4. Shadow of the Colossus
5. Garou: Mark of the Wolves
6. Celeste
7. Limbo
8. Portal 2
9. Radiant Historia
10. Journey
11. Metal Slug 3
12. Ikaruga
13. Megaman 9
14. Shantae: The Pirate's Curse
15. Undertale

Hollow Knight next.

Celeste is a great game but I think hollow knight blows it out of the water. Think you're going to enjoy this one.

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

Your lucky. I wish I could forget the abomination that was the final act of "Condemned 2"

Frankly the only things I remember about "Condemned 2" (besides that supernatural vocal cord bull****) were fighting/beating the Alcohol Demon and the level with that huge rabid bear that's chasing you.

Yep. I liked the bear part of the game. Intense shit.

 

[Osprey]

Yep. I liked the bear part of the game. Intense ****.

Have you ever heard of something that wasn't better with bears? I've seen people say that they didn't like The Revenant, but liked the bear part, or that Annihilation was too weird for them, but the bear part was awesome. Bears make everything better.

 

[SniperHF]

Have you ever heard of something that wasn't better with bears

Camping

Also people really seemed to hate the first bear in Pillars of Eternity
Of course they were just people who needed to git gud.

 

[syz]

Camping

Also people really seemed to hate the first bear in Pillars of Eternity
Of course they were just people who needed to git gud.

Football.

 

[Shareefruck]

Celeste is a great game but I think hollow knight blows it out of the water. Think you're going to enjoy this one.

That's what I hear. Although to be honest, going into them (played a tiny bit of Hollow Knight), Celeste was a bigger draw to me and felt more instantly appealing to my sensibilities.

I'm expecting Hollow Knight to be a bigger, deeper, richer, more meticulously crafted, lore-heavy world packed with more stuff and probably will feel more complete, but despite the effort that went into it and how high quality it is, I still don't really love the computer-drawn art-style and the way jumping and slashing feels compared to the basic look/feel of Celeste, which I instantly fell in love with (I actually tried to speed through it a second time-- really satisfying).

We'll see, though. Super Metroid is my favorite game of all time, so I'll probably be into it.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Ruiner - 5/10

Maybe it's because I'm not really a fan of top down shooters but I wanted to really like this game because the aesthetic and theme looked really cool. Some of the abilities are cool but the game can be a bit of a clusterf***. I realized after about 2/3 of the way through the game that the way to go is to just max out your dash ability, and max the ability that refills your health using energy and refill your energy by shooting. You just constantly spam bullets everywhere and keep healing through whatever damage you take to basically end up being invincible. The story was OK, gameplay was about what I expected but really chaotic. Overall, I'd say it's a pretty average game. If you like top down shooters, maybe you'll like Ruiner. If you don't really care for top down shooters, just skip over this one.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Cuphead - 9/10

The beautiful aesthetic will surely drive in a lot of players, that's what got me intersted. The art, animation, sound, music, it was all top notch and reminded me of cartoons from my childhood. I thought that alone was enough reason to play it. But the game is great. It's essentially a boss rush bullet hell/platformer game. The bosses have some RNG as far as order goes but you learn the attacks and movement patterns as you fail a few times to ultimately beat them. None of the bosses felt unfair and every win felt incredibly satisfying.

I'm not normally a fan of bullet hells at all, but this is also the first bullet hell/platformer style game I've played, I still really enjoyed it. Overall, I think it's a great buy at full price and a steal at a sale price. I'm not normally one to go for the hardest difficult and trying to get perfect rankings in every level, I'm sure that would add a lot more time to the game, but I played on normal difficulty and it took me about 6 hours to complete which is a great duration for a game like this. My only complaint about the game really is that the run and gun levels felt like such filler and I think the game would have been better off if they just weren't included.

 

[Unholy Diver]

Bioshock 10/10

Not sure how may times I've played through this game, but it never gets old, the story was so great, the atmosphere second to none, still a masterpiece to me

 

[Shareefruck]

I was totally onboard with Cuphead from the start, the aesthetic is mindblowing, and there's nothing I'd call a glaring weakness about its gameplay, but I just didn't find the design and feel of playing it nearly as satisfying as I wanted it to be. It ended up being a good but not great game for me.

 

[Commander Clueless]

I was totally onboard with Cuphead from the start, the aesthetic is mindblowing, and there's nothing I'd call a glaring weakness about its gameplay, but I just didn't find the design and feel of playing it nearly as satisfying as I wanted it to be. It ended up being a good but not great game for me.

I think personally I was hoping for more than just a boss rush game, but I realize that's asking a lot from a hand-drawn game.

Still, I thought it was pretty great overall. Frustrating as all hell at some points.

Hard to argue with the aesthetic and music, that's for sure.

 

[Commander Clueless]

Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption (PC)

Finished up this gem last night.

I'll admit that I'm extremely biased in favour of this game, as it was made by the creators of the Quest for Glory series (which holds a special place in my heart) and has many references to the series....and all the puns you could ever want!

With that out of the way, I really enjoyed this game. It's a hybrid between RPG and time management, with a sprinkling of point-and-click adventure.

You play as a young aspiring thief who is sent off to Hero University to learn to become a Rogue...err, "Disbarred Bard". You manage time to improve your skills, make friends, and gather information. You crawl through dungeons to search for loot and do story quests.

As you play a thief/rogue in this game, you rely on sneaking, lockpicking, throwing daggers, items and eavesdropping more so than raw combat. Surprise attacks, traps, and other items such as runes or potions to counteract certain enemies are your friend. Brains over brawn.


The turn-based combat is a bit jank, as is the movement (although a recent patch helped that a lot). The story and puzzles in the game aren't quite as deep as I had hoped, although a few of them had me stuck for a while. The pacing felt a bit off as well, although not terribly so.

Overall, I'd absolutely recommend this title....especially if you loved the Sierra games of old.

 

[Frankie Blueberries]

@Shareefruck - have you tried Dead Cells yet? Seems like the type of game that would be right up your alley, being a difficult Metroid[vania] game with beautiful sprites and tight combat mechanics.

Dead Cells

 

[Shareefruck]

@Shareefruck - have you tried Dead Cells yet? Seems like the type of game that would be right up your alley, being a difficult Metroid[vania] game with beautiful sprites and tight combat mechanics.

Dead Cells

Nope. At a first glance, I'm not totally sold on the look, but I'll keep it in mind, thanks.

 

[Liminal Cat]

Nope. At a first glance, I'm not totally sold on the look, but I'll keep it in mind, thanks.

Seriously, try Botanicula. Given your love of 2D animation, I can't imagine that you wouldn't get at least something out of it.