Games Beaten 2024

Sun Dec 22, 2024 11:56 am

MrPopo wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2024 12:47 am
RobertAugustdeMeijer wrote: ↑Fri Dec 20, 2024 2:43 pm
MrPopo wrote: ↑Thu Dec 19, 2024 4:30 pm There's some seriously hot takes in your 10 worst.
Perhaps, but I'm desperately trying to find good arguments as to why other folks apparently enjoy them! Have you written reviews on them?
I've got reviews for Last of Us and Halo 3 in my archive (which I link in all my beaten game posts in this thread), and I loved Goldeneye back in the day. Unless you were referring to the 2010 remake, in which case, carry on.

I had a difficult time enjoying GoldenEye back in the day, mostly because I had already been used to playing Duke Nukem 3D and Quake. I always enjoyed the production values, and I think couch multiplayer is peak gaming, but the controls, level design, weapons, respawning enemies, unclear level objectives, lack of enemy variety, frame rate... it's just hard for me to enjoy.

Will look up your other reviews, thanks!!

Sun Dec 22, 2024 12:06 pm

On The Last of Us:

"The heavy parts are delivered well, and you could easily turn this game into a TV miniseries adapting the plot without losing much."

Isn't this perhaps the worst thing you can ever say about a game? My second biggest gripe with The Last of Us is indeed that I often felt like I was watching television with extended, annoying, combat sequences I was forced to control.
I haven't seen the actual TV show, but since they can be compared, does the act of playing the characters add anything to the story?
The fact that the story and gameplay are often at odds, I feel like controlling them made it an even worse experience.

So to me, it was altogether a subpar television experience. And on top of that, you could just read or watch The Road! Why bother with this mess?

(I totally agree with you on the combat parts, obviously! <3 )

Sun Dec 22, 2024 12:19 pm

On Halo 3:

"It's a decent conclusion to the trilogy, and it's not a bad game by any means. But given what I already experienced in Reach this feels like the point when the series starts to go downhill."

Yeah, I agree with that. I just don't get the appeal of Halo unless you were restricted to consoles. Before Halo 1, I was having a way better time with Tribes, Unreal Tournament, Half-life, and Quake 3. And half the levels (hallways, Flood) weren't that fun anyway, so I never thought much of it. Halo 2 slightly improved everything, so that was a fairly good time. But nothing compared to what I was enjoying on PC. Now I understand Halo 3's single player is indeed deemed a bit lacklustre. The gameplay is almost the same and the story isn't anything better than your average Saturday morning cartoon. Apparently, it's all about the XBox Live experience. But from what I've seen, there was nothing that wasn't already the norm for shooters on PC in the 90s.

Post by **Raging Justice** » Sun Dec 22, 2024 7:37 pm

alienjesus wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2024 9:31 am AJ's games beaten 2024:

1. Yakuza 3 Remastered PS4
2. Gley Lancer Mega Drive
3. Flink Mega Drive
4. Zero Wing Mega Drive
5. Super Bomberman 3 SNES
6. Streets of Rage Master System
7. Goof Troop SNES
8. Pokémon Card GB2: Great Rocket-Dan Sanjō! GBC
9. Pop'n Twinbee: Rainbow Bell Adventures SNES
10. Ganbare Goemon 2: Kiteretsu Shougun Magginesu SNES
11. Super Mario Maker Wii U
12. Donkey Kong Land 2 Game Boy
13. The Fish Files GBC
14. Kirby Super Star Ultra DS
15. Yakuza 4 Remastered PS4
16. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel Vita
17. Psychonauts 2 PS4
18. Spyro the Dragon PS1
19. LittleBigPlanet PS3
20. Faxanadu NES
21. Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia DS
22. Donkey Kong Country Returns Wii
23. Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars Master System
24. Batman Returns Master System
25. Master of Darkness Master System
26. Sonic Chaos Master System
27. Cloud Master Master System
28. Disney’s Aladdin Master System
29. Astro Bot PS5
30. Darkwing Duck NES
31. DuckTales 2 NES
32. Tiny Toon Adventures NES
33. Adventure Island Part II NES
34. Yakuza 5 PS4
35. Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride DS
36. Kabuki Quantum Fighter NES
37. New Ghostbusters 2 NES
38. Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance Switch
39. Demon’s Crest SNES
40. Control PS5
41. Zero Time Dilemma Vita
42. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart PS5 *NEW*
43. Star Fox Zero Wii U *NEW*
44. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy PS4 *NEW*
45. Star Fox Guard Wii U *NEW*
46. The Violinist of Hameln SFC *NEW*
47. Chibi-Robo!: Park Patrol DS *NEW*

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Ratchet & Clank is a long running franchise which I only have a little experience in, having only played the PS4 remake of the original game. I went into the newest entry of the franchise Rift Apart hoping that it wasn’t going to be overly reliant on prior knowledge of the series and for the most part it was fine. The game is a combination platformer and third person shooter where you run and gun through levels with a variety of fun weapons, do a bit of collectathon platforming and working through some big game setpieces. The setpieces seem to have been a big focus for this entry, as it tries to show off the PS5 – partly through it’s graphics, which look great, almost like playing an actual Pixar movie – and partly through the dimensional rift gimmick where you pass through portals into new areas, which is intended to show off the load times of the SSD. For the touted feature of the game, I think the rift mechanic is a bit underwhelming – it didn’t do a lot I felt was unrealistic to pull off on previous consoles, and most of the time it was used it just moved you to another nearby place on the same map. Luckily, the core gunplay and platforming of the game was still decent regardless, and I had a good time. Ultimately I don’t think this is a must play title or anything, but it’s a decent way to spend some time.

Star Fox Zero

Star Fox Zero is a widely maligned title, largely due to the control scheme which involves you piloting your arwing on the main TV screen, whilst using gyro controls and your gamepad screen to adjust your aim. It’s an odd control method that takes a lot of time to adjust to, and honestly never really feels super intuitive. I have to agree with the general consensus that the game would probably be better with standard controls. On the other hand, I don’t agree with the opinion that this game is bad or unplayable. In fact, I had a pretty good time playing through it, despite the controls. The game is basically another retelling of the Starfox 64 plot, despite the ‘Zero’ moniker. There are 12 core missions, some of which are on branching paths, as well as 8 smaller missions which can be unlocked via secret routes. The core game is pretty quick to play through, but each main mission features 5 medals you can unlock via various requirements - the first mission is always a high score challenge which is generally fairly tough, but other missions can involve finding medals in the stage, taking out specific targets, killing enemies via an unusual method or more. The game doesn’t tell you these, and some can be hard to discover alone, so I’d advise a guide. Mostly, Star Fox Zero feels like a victim of the Wii U’s failure – it’s clear that the game could have used a little more time and budget, but at this point in the system’s life the Wii U was on life support.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy

Continuing the run of sci-fi games, I played through Guardians of the Galaxy. This is an action game with some Telltale style narrative adventure elements. It draws heavily from the characterisation of the 5 main characters from the films whilst also drawing a little more history and lore from the comics to expand the worldbuilding. You play as Star Lord and interact with your other team members and other characters. The plot is entertaining and follows the Guardians as they try to earn money by capturing a monster to sell to Lady Hellbender and accidentally release a malevolent entity which leads to the galaxy being indoctrinated to a cult. At the time I think the game got a lot of flak for not using movie likenesses for the characters, but I think the use of comic book lore and similar is unique enough and the characters depictions here are charming enough that it didn’t really bother me at all. The actual combat gameplay is good, not great – you run around shooting enemies as Star Lord whilst being able to instruct your other team members to attack occasionally. They all have specialities in combat with Drax being good at stunning enemies, Gamora doing high damage to single targets, Rocket providing spread damage to multiple enemies, and Groot being more supportive with trapping and healing abilities. In addition, you progressively gain elemental abilities for your guns which allow you to exploit enemy weaknesses, freeze, stun or burn enemies and pull distant enemies down close. It’s all functional and reasonably fun, but never quite feels amazing. Despite that though, I really enjoyed the characters and stories whilst playing through this one, and I think it’s really quite underrated. Well worth a play.

Star Fox Guard

Star Fox Guard was a game that was bundled with Star Fox Zero at launch. You playing a new employee working for Grippy Industries, a mining operation ran by Slippy Toad’s uncle. Each of his mines has a core in the centre powering it, and are being attacked by robots aiming to destroy the core. You remotely access turrets with cameras on and defend the facility from the invading robots. Each facility has 12 cameras which you can view in a small thumbnail on the TV, but by selecting a specific camera on the gamepad you can take control of that camera directly to aim and shoot. You can also drag the cameras around on the map on the gamepad to reposition them as long as they attach to a wall, which is useful as some robots can destroy cameras or temporarily disable them, if you need to defend an area no longer guarded. The robots come in attacker varieties who aim to destroy the core, and disruptor robots who aim to interfere with the cameras. They use tactics such as shields to block front on attacks, fake images that replace the real camera footage and smoke screens to hide other robots. You progressively unlock the ability to change a few cameras into better models, such as homing rockets that can hit behind the shields or a model that slows time when shooting. The main issue with the game is that there are 100 levels to work through and it can get pretty repetitive, but otherwise it’s a fun little distraction.

The Violinist of Hameln

The Violinist of Hameln is a puzzle platformer game based on a manga series. You play as the titular Violinist, a ‘hero’ out to defeat an evil demon lord, except you’re actually a bit of a dick. You wander through levels platforming and attacking with music notes from your violin, but to get past the myriad hazards of the stage you make use of your companion, Flute – a teenage girl who joins you on the quest. Being that you aren’t actually a very nice person, the way you make use of Flute is by throwing her at brick walls to break them down, and forcing her to dress up in a variety of mascot costumes which give her different abilities. For example, the first costume dresses Flute as an ostrich, making her run forward in a line. You can stand on top of the ostrich suit to ride across spikes. Other outfits include a frog outfit which you can stand on to jump to high platforms, a robot outfit that punches holes in walls when you jump on it, and various swimming and flying outfits. You work through 4 worlds featuring roughly 8-10 levels each, gradually unlocking more outfits as you progress. The plot roughly follows the opening of the manga from what I make out, but to be honest I didn’t care too much. The game is fun and certainly feels fairly unique mechanically, but it’s a slow paced game despite only taking 2 hours or so to finish. I liked it well enough, but I think people’s mileage may vary on this one.

Chibi-Robo!: Park Patrol

Chibi-Robo for the Gamecube is one of my all-time favourite games, but other than the very mediocre Ziplash for 3DS, I’ve never played any of the sequels until now. I finally picked up Park Patrol, the second game in the series for DS recently. Neither of the DS entries never got PAL releases so I had to import this one from the US. You play as a new Chibi-Robo who has been deployed to a park, with the objective of making the run down park green and vibrant and full of flowers again. You do this by watering flowers to make them bloom, then dancing with them using a boombox to get the to drop more seeds. Growing 30 flowers in a tile of the park makes the grass grow again. You can make friends with toys in the nearby town and they can help you till earth so more flowers can grow as well as set up features such as fountains and benches or create environmental features such as paths, rivers and hills which change the colours of flowers that grow. The game has an environmental theme – toys can be found thrown out in the rubbish, traffic runs through town and can smoosh you, and the main enemies are smoglings who kill flowers. Early progression is slow – you’ll grow a small number of flowers each day and constantly need to run back to base to recharge your batteries, but later on you’ll be growing dozens of flowers every day. To beat the game you need to grow 999, so it can get quite repetitive. It’s probably a 7 out of 10 game at best, but the game has all the charm of the original game and I enjoyed my time with it. It’s no masterpiece, but it’s well worth a shot.

I agree on that Guardians of the Galaxy game being underrated. It's really everything I could have wanted and feels like the movies even though it's drawing a lot from the comic books. I'd like to try Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 sometime as it seems the characters are well represented in that game as well.

I desperately want Nintendo to make another Star Fox. I don't want Zero to be the end as that definitely isn't ending the series on a high note. I honestly don't know why Star Fox doesn't get regular installments the way Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc. do. Nintendo doesn't seem to have much love for it. I forgot that the Star Fox Guard game even existed until now. It seems like an interesting enough distraction for what it is.

The Violinist of Hameln is a fun looking game. Chibi Robo on the Gamecube I've always wanted to try, one of these days.

Post by **MrPopo** » Mon Dec 23, 2024 1:45 pm

RobertAugustdeMeijer wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2024 12:06 pm On The Last of Us:

"The heavy parts are delivered well, and you could easily turn this game into a TV miniseries adapting the plot without losing much."

Isn't this perhaps the worst thing you can ever say about a game? My second biggest gripe with The Last of Us is indeed that I often felt like I was watching television with extended, annoying, combat sequences I was forced to control.
I haven't seen the actual TV show, but since they can be compared, does the act of playing the characters add anything to the story?
The fact that the story and gameplay are often at odds, I feel like controlling them made it an even worse experience.

So to me, it was altogether a subpar television experience. And on top of that, you could just read or watch The Road! Why bother with this mess?

(I totally agree with you on the combat parts, obviously! <3 )

Hah, didn't realize I predicted the TV show.

So I think it really depends on how you engage with games. My first games were those NES classics, but then in the SNES era I was introduced to RPGs and suddenly I had something that combined my love of reading and stories with the gameplay I had been introduced to. And for me, personally, a good story in a game can get me to overlook various complaints about the gameplay as long as it isn't actively hostile. To me, to say "what's the point of playing when you could read/watch a version instead" is like saying "why read the book when you can watch the movie" or "why watch the movie when you can read the book". While you might have the same story, the manner in which you engage with that story is going to change how it impacts you.

Also, as I recall, Last of Us 2 drastically improves the combat. They dialed down on the zombies and gave you a ton more tools for stealth, which turned the combat sections into mini sandboxes where you get to use every advantage you can find to take out the obstacles in your path.

Post by **MrPopo** » Mon Dec 23, 2024 1:58 pm

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023

First 50:

51. Metaphor: ReFantazio - PS5
52. Mechwarrior 5: Clans - PC
53. Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred - PC
54. Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven - Switch
55. Dragon Age: The Veilguard - PC
56. STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl - PC
57. Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers - PC
58. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake - Switch
59. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - PC

Anyone who has been in this hobby for a long time knows that licensed games are treacherous; far too often they miss what makes the original appealing or stray too far from the source. However, like last year's Robocop: Rogue City, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle clearly was made by fans of the property who wanted to do right by it, giving an experience that evokes the same feelings we got when we saw our first Indiana Jones film.

Great Circle is set in between Raiders and Last Crusade. Indiana Jones is woken from a nap in his college and finds a giant of a man stealing an item from the college's collection. Naturally, he uses this as an excuse to get back in the field and track down why this item was stolen by someone with an apparent connection to the Vatican. And naturally, since this is still in the lead up to World War II, the fascists are involved, both German and Italian.

The game is mostly first person, though it drops to third person for cutscenes and certain maneuvers, usually involving climbing/swinging with the whip. It is divided into three open world segments and a handful of focused story segments that are linear. The open world segments involve you trying to figure out the current segment of the plot, and in the process you can also do some sidequests and collectables. Unlike most open world games, here the sidequests pretty much all serve as branches off the primary plot; while not necessarily vital, they are clues for the mystery you're trying to uncover, so it doesn't feel like you're faffing about.

Exploring these areas is going to put you into conflict with the Axis forces, and you have various approaches to deal with them. You can acquire disguises to move about undetected, though civilian disguises are restricted from certain areas (military disguises have full access), and enemy officers can see through your disguise and sound the alarm. You can take the stealth approach, or you can just punch dudes out. The punching has that super meaty sound from the films and it's incredibly satisfying as you box Nazis out. One key feature is the improvised weapon system. There are a ton of objects in the environment you can use to bash on enemies, though they all have limited hits before they're broken. It adds some verisimilitude to the combat, as if you get into a large scrap you'll start frantically turning your head to find something at hand to turn the tide, just like Indy might.

The game also features a bunch of puzzles, as you would expect. They have a different feel from Tomb Raider puzzles, but it's hard to articulate what specifically that is. The best I can convey is they feel like they might have shown up in an Indiana Jones film, so it feels right. And speaking of feeling right, let's talk about the script. Troy Baker delivers a fantastic sound alike of young Harrison Ford, but more important is the script captures his tics and vocal mannerisms that really makes it seem like this is another production from the heyday of the films. There are also some of those quintessential moments of light heartedness that can occur in a cutscene, like Indy disguised as a priest being pulled into a confessional by an Italian fascist.

Overall, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a celebration of the best moments of the film series, crafted by people who loved it and wanted to make something that would stand alongside it. If you're a fan of the property, I highly recommend it.

Post by **Raging Justice** » Mon Dec 23, 2024 6:22 pm

Mortal Kombat The Chosen One

Another OpenBOR game. There are a couple of Mortal Kombat inspired games on OpenBOR that I've seen people talk about, but this is the only one I've enjoyed. It doesn't seem to get mentioned as much as MK Defenders of the Realm or MK Outworld Assassins, but it's way better than those games. You can play as Robocop and Batman! And Batman kills people! You have a very large move set in this game, including multiple fatalities. Lastly, it's not as obnoxiously hard as many other OpenBOR games, which is always a plus in my book

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joEAd3Ex3lE

Post by **PartridgeSenpai** » Mon Dec 23, 2024 11:46 pm

Partridge Senpai's 2024 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat

1~50

51~101

102. The Granstream Saga (PS1)
103. Faxanadu (Famicom)
104. DK: King of Swing (GBA)
105. Thousand Arms (PS1)
106. DuckTales (NES) *
107. DuckTales 2 (NES)
108. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (NES)

109. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2 (NES)

After finishing the first Rescue Rangers game, the next logical step was to continue on to the next one. Much like the other most famous Disney-licensed Capcom game on the NES, DuckTales 2, I had heard for many years that Rescue Rangers’s sequel was still fine, but a decidedly lesser game than the first. Even still, I enjoyed the first game so much, I just had to see what the sequel was like for myself. It took me around 40 or so minutes to beat the English version of the game on one continue.

Rescue Rangers 2 has a similarly light narrative to most NES action games. Fatcat, their feline nemesis, has broken out of prison, and he’s got some dastardly plot, no doubt! It’s up to the Chip & Dale and the Rescue Rangers crew to bring him to justice! It’s a light narrative, sure, but it sets up the action more than fine enough. Frankly, it really is more than fine enough because there are a good few quite long dialogue sequences between levels among the cast. You can skip them easily enough, but I ultimately felt they were a bit long for what they were. Perhaps if I were more familiar with the show, these would come off as more charming to me <w>

The gameplay is very much more of the same as the first game, however. You go through levels as either Chip and/or Dale avoiding enemies and taking them out with throwable blocks, just like the first game had. Level design is a tad more repetitive and simple feeling at times than the first game had, admittedly, and there were a few traps I just sorta had to luck my way past, but it’s overall around as solid as the first game for level and enemy design.

The big changes between this game and the first one are down to health and bosses. For health, it’s a lot harder to actually get more lives in this game compared to the first one. No longer does collecting the coin-like objects in levels grant you an extra life. Instead, collecting at least 50 gets you a credit at the end of the level, and every 2 or so credits gets you a new max heart container, which is very appreciated for how tough some of these levels can get (and how extra lives can only be gotten in bonus stages between levels). This isn’t much of a problem if you’re playing by yourself like I was, but I can very easily imagine that a co-op game gets quite competitive with who’s going to get which coins so you can both try to get one of those upgrade credits at the end of the level (if it’s even possible in that stage in the first place x3).

Then there’s the bosses. In the first Rescue Rangers, every boss took only 5 or so hits, and every boss arena had a red rethrowable ball you could repeatedly bounce at enemies. It made bosses, quick challenges that were hard mostly on the grounds that you only ever had 3 hits to fight them with. Here in the sequel, bosses routinely have far more health than that, and your friend the red rethrowable ball is nowhere to be found. Instead, every boss has some mechanic or another that will spawn a throwable object that you’ve gotta then pick up and hurl at them, much like bosses in Kirby games often do. Even with the ability to get more max health, this makes boss fights much harder than they ever were in the first game. They’re overall designed pretty well, but with how scarce extra lives can be, it made the game very nearly tip over into “so hard it feels a good deal less fun” territory for me.

The presentation, however, is as stellar as ever. The graphics are colorful and cute, and they do a very good job of feeling like an upgraded version of the first game’s sprites and such without ever making sprite flicker or slowdown get too bad. The music, however, is just as boppin’ here as it was in the first game. I was lowkey blown away by just how good the first game’s music was for a licensed NES game, and I ended up surprised in just the same way by the sequel here.

Verdict: Recommended. Though I would say I ultimately prefer the first game a bit more due to its slightly quicker pacing and somewhat less difficult gameplay, this is a sequel that is far more comfortably made than DuckTales 2 is to its predecessor. If you liked Rescue Rangers 1 or just like 8-bit action games, then this is an absolute no brainer to pick up and play through sometime.

110. Tomb Raider (PS1)

This is a game and series that a few friends of mine have told me about for ages as they’re childhood favorites of them. As such, when I saw this for 100 whole yen at Book Off a couple weeks back, I snapped it up at once so I could finally experience this myself (and have them watch me do it~

). I told them not to give me unsolicited hints during it, but their advice was still very appreciated over the course of my wild time with this game X3. It took me about 20.5 or so hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

Tomb Raider, much like some earlier Core Design games like Rick Dangerous, is a love letter to old Indian Jones-style movies in many ways, and that includes its story. After a sudden strange explosion in the New Mexico desert, Lara gets a mission from a mysterious benefactor to hunt for a legendary lost artefact in the Peruvian mountains. With a great treasure and bounty on the line, Lara sets off on a grand adventure that will lead to truly unpredictable twists and turns X3. The writing is a fairly minor part of the game, with only a cutscene here or there between the game’s 4 main areas, but it’s good campy fun for what it is, and it wears its inspirations on its sleeve (even down to fighting rival treasure hunters and running away from boulders x3).

The gameplay of Tomb Raider *does* have combat, but the real star of the show here is the platforming. Combat is very simple, but also very clever. Pressing triangle pulls out your guns, and Lara will automatically aim them at an enemy when she has one in her field of view. From there, just hold down the X button to fire away until they’re dead. All you’ve gotta do is stay out of the way in the meanwhile so you don’t get torn to pieces XD. A lot of aspects of the combat feel somewhat survival horror, at least in terms of your non-basic pistols having limited ammo and healing items being a limited resource, but Lara is far too agile for this to feel too much like a Resident Evil-type experience. Almost every enemy in the game is some sort of animal with no ranged attack, so bouncing around as you dodge their melee strikes (or very slow projectiles) certainly is awkward, but it makes for a solid way to spice up the gameplay loop without feeling too unfair or cumbersome.

That larger gameplay loop is mostly platforming and puzzle solving, and hoo boy is there a lot of it. For a game from 1996, Tomb Raider is an incredibly ambitious game for the kind of platforming it’s trying to pull off on a D-pad. Lara can do standing and running jumps depending on how you press the square button along with the D-pad, and she can even jump side-to-side and backwards to get around enemies or particularly tricky obstacles. It takes a fair bit of trial and error to get used to, but for the most part Lara’s controls are quite precise. They’re just quite unorthodox compared to any modern control method. In my own experience, once my friend told me that the world was made up of uniform squares and that those dictate how the platforming works, that made things like judging how much space I needed to actually do a running jump far easier to do, and it led to a lot less deaths.

Some of the trap and puzzle design can be very mean, but save points are never *too* far apart, mercifully. If you’re playing on anything but the original Saturn or PS1 hardware, you’ve even got unlimited saves anywhere, which is also a nice touch that most players’ experiences will be very benefited by. Even though I eventually gelled with it, however, the awkwardness of 3D platforming with tank controls and the relative distance between save points is definitely going to, very understandably, turn a *lot* of people off from this game. While it was super cool to be able to get a look at such an early and influential entry in the 3D platforming space, age has not been kind to Tomb Raider, and inquiring minds would do well to take heed in how eagerly they tackle a game like this that is so frequently old school in its approach to difficulty.

The presentation is very striking, and it’s not at all difficult to see why people were blown away by this in ’96. Things are very early-PS1 polygonal, sure, but the stylized nature of both people and enemies combined with the attention to detail on the animations would’ve been so stunning back in the day. Lara has a nice balance of detail to her motions without feeling like we’re being too gratuitous. That said, there are also really neat touches that let the player indulge in a bit of gratuity, like how Lara does an extra fancy animation if you hold the walk button while you climb up a ledge or jump from a height.

The music I’m of two minds about. Most of the game is silent, and the very nicely done music that is there only triggers very occasionally at certain flags upon entering certain rooms to indicate things like puzzles, enemies, etc. I don’t think it’s bad, per se, but I do question whether the sense of isolation they’re seemingly going for with their approach to the score actually compliments the Indiana Jones-style 3D action platformer they’ve created. I know plenty of people that this works just fine for, but for me, it never really hit the right spot. At the very least, I’m certainly curious to see how Core Design’s later Tomb Raider games handle their soundtracks when I eventually get around to playing them.

Given the game’s English-language development team and its age, I was honestly shocked to see that it actually has a Japanese dub! While the dub itself grabs some quite big-name talent and they do their jobs very well, the localization itself has some very odd choices here and there. For starters, they rename Lara, but only in Japanese. Anywhere her name is spelled in English, it’s still “Lara”, but the Japanese makes it “Leila” for some inexplicable reason. Similarly inexplicable is the change of the title from “Tomb Raider” to “Tomb Raiders”. They’re very minor changes, and the localization itself is overall excellent, but they’re things so delightfully odd that I just had to share them here x3

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a *very* weird and hard game to recommend. As mentioned earlier, the control scheme and save points make this an almost impossible game to recommend to anyone not into retro games already. Even 3D platforming control schemes later in the PS1’s lifespan are far more intuitive and less punishing than Tomb Raider’s is, and I would be the furthest thing from shocked if most gamers who are more used to modern games balk at how this game controls. That said, if you’re into retro stuff and are okay with tackling a somewhat unwieldy new control method, then there’s a quite cool and novel 3D platformer adventure game waiting here for you. As much as this is a “your mileage may vary” sort of situation, I could never outright not recommend a game I genuinely enjoyed as much as I did here.

111. The Darkness II (PS3)

I thoroughly enjoyed The Darkness when I played it earlier this year, and I immediately set out looking for the sequel. I watched a Let’s Play of The Darkness II many years back, so I was somewhat familiar with it, but I’d forgotten damn near all of it other than it being a much more linear game than its predecessor. Both games are quite uncommon out in these parts, and I was ecstatic to find a copy out in the wild here so soon after beginning to look for it (as experience led me to believe that this would take more than a year of casual searching). It sadly lacks any Japanese dub (only having Japanese subtitles), but that was no huge deal. It took me around 7-ish hours to finish the English version of the game on original hardware.

The first “The Darkness” game was a somewhat loose adaptation of a graphic novel of the same name, but for any sequel anyone was making for it was out of luck for material to adapt, as the original game already covered it all. Digital Extremes had to make their own original story for the sequel, and they took it in a decidedly more “dark comedy” direction than the first game had. Picking up two years after the first game’s ending, Jackie Estacado has taken over his Uncle Paulie’s crime family and managed to somehow seal the Darkness away inside himself. However, a mysterious and powerful group launching an attempt on his life forces Jackie to bring the Darkness back out to confront them, bringing the both of them into another wild, supernatural battle for survival against a foe more dangerous than ever.

I’m of two minds about the writing in The Darkness II. On one hand, it’s a pretty poor sequel to the original game’s story. The tone of the writing is quite radically different, and several key elements of the original game’s narrative (such as the directly adversarial nature between Jackie and the Darkness) are nigh completely abandoned in favor of their new drama between human characters. On the other hand, the new story they’ve cooked up stands pretty well on its own. While it may not be a brilliant sequel to The Darkness, it paves its own way confidently enough that the comedy and drama work more than well enough that I was having a great time with the game. I’m less of a fan of how they drop a couple r-slurs over the course of the game, but overall their approach to language is fine enough that modern sensibilities won’t be too distressed by how the 2012-era comedy here has aged. The writers were clearly big fans of big Italian mobster movies both silly and serious, and they’ve woven that love into something great fun to go through here.

Understandably from the guys who had brought us Unreal and the guys would immediately thereafter give us Warframe, Digital Extremes have made a game that is AWESOME fun to play. The big gimmick with The Darkness II is “quad-wielding”, where each tentacle is bound to R2 and L2 respectively, and then you can duel-wield handguns or SMGs via L1 and R1 (or just aim down sights with a bigger gun or one of the smaller firearms with L1 and R1 like any other normal game). It takes a little getting used to, but it is such incredible fun and makes for a frantic, joyously powerful pace to combat that I couldn’t get enough of. Level design is fairly linear, but that just makes the set pieces all that much more fun to go through, and I don’t think a less linear design would’ve really benefited the gameplay at all.

There are some light RPG elements where you get points from killing enemies that you can use to diversify how Jackie fights. You can go into more activatable Darkness powers like powered up Darkness bullets and swarms of bugs to stun enemies, or you can go into turning executed enemies’ power into a shield for your Darkness-powered normal guns to tear through them with. Heck, you can just go for a mix of everything like I did and have a great time with that too! Words can barely describe what fun it is to rip off a car door to use as a shield as you walk mowing down enemies with darkness-infused bullets before flinging the car door at another enemy to cleave them in half, but you’ll have to take my word for it that it all makes for an amazing time X3

Aesthetically, I’m of two minds about the presentation here not unlike how I was with the writing quality. I quite liked how the cel-shading was done in the first The Darkness, and the way they’ve change it here makes things look very different in a way I’m not sure I prefer. Things still look good, and the game runs perfectly fine (despite a slightly too small field of view), but I do prefer the grittier cel-shading to the newer, cleaner look they’ve gone for here. Music is good though, and while I didn’t find it terribly memorable on its own, I found it underscored the action at hand perfectly well.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Almost never have I felt the desire to replay an FPS game (a genre I’m not super into) as soon as I was done with it, but The Darkness II was just so damn fun that I very very highly considered it. The writing is good, campy fun (and good at being sweet when it wants to be), and the action is LOADS of fun even now. If you want a great-feeling FPS campaign to play through with a story that’s a bit away from the mold of most shooters (especially from its contemporaries), then you absolutely must give The Darkness II a play, because once you really get going, the feeling is magical x3

Post by **MrPopo** » Tue Dec 24, 2024 5:16 pm

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023

First 50:

51. Metaphor: ReFantazio - PS5
52. Mechwarrior 5: Clans - PC
53. Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred - PC
54. Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven - Switch
55. Dragon Age: The Veilguard - PC
56. STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl - PC
57. Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers - PC
58. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake - Switch
59. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - PC
60. Extraneum - PC

Extraneum is a bite-sized indie FPS that takes a lot of design cues from the Catacomb 3D and Wolfenstein era of early FPS's. The entire game is block-based and on a single plane, with no vertical aiming. It was done by one guy with some help on level design from a second guy and a third guy doing music, and it's honestly quite well put together for such a small team, as it knows exactly what it's trying to do and doesn't overreach.

The story is about as deep as Doom's; you're a security guard when an evil scientist unleashes cloned mutants on the world, so you kill them all and then the scientist. The cutscenes in between episodes even have the same tone as Doom's. The game is divided into three episodes of eight stages each. Five of them are normal stages, one is a boss stage, and two are secret stages which are unlocked by taking an alternate path through a stage which requires you to have a certain number of lore disks to open. The game is very secret heavy; every stage has a data disk that gives lore on the game, and every stage has one or more persistent power ups such as increased max resources or a better version of one of your six guns. There's also the requisite "get a gun early" or "here's a bunch of resources" power ups. Be prepared to do a bunch of wall humping, though most of them are cued from a texture with some variance from the rest around it.

The game has a standard weapon array. A knife that gets upgraded into a chainsaw that you'll only bust out for breaking boxes. Your actual starting gun is an SMG that, when upgraded, has a three round burst alt fire which can put down many enemies quickly. You get a pump shotgun that becomes double barreled when upgraded; this lets you fire two shots before needing to pump as well as being able to unload both barrels at once. The grenade launcher is the timer or hits an enemy type of launcher, and the upgrade lets you fire rockets instead (I could never tell if they dealt more damage). You get a heavy machine gun, which is just a better SMG, as it has no windup, but then the upgraded version has an alt fire that turns it into a minigun; you trade a windup for a massive fire rate increase. Finally, you get a plasma gun, whose projectiles are shockingly slow and hard to land, but then the upgrade turns the alt fire into a railgun that pierces enemies, one hits all but a single end-game enemy type, and the only reason it doesn't replace the heavy machine gun is the fire rate and being unsuited for the open areas.

All the guns work well, but they unfortunately suffer from the problem of the last two being strictly better than everything that comes before them. If you are studiously secret hunting then you will get the heavy machine gun before you get the upgrades for the SMG and shotgun, making those upgrades too little, too late. Now, you might say, aren't you limited by ammo? Well, the game has a system of vending machines that you can purchase health, armor, and ammo from, and money is PLENTIFUL. Once in a while I would have to swap off the heavy machine gun because I ran out of ammo before the next vending machine, but otherwise I could just stick with the HMG and occasional railgun use against certain targets. The grenade launcher also suffers from some weird physics; as far as I can tell it was implemented as it firing out tracers, with tracers not piercing enemies, so as an area damage weapon it actually does a very poor job.

In terms of enemies you've got a decent spread, with new ones being introduced every so often through the first two episodes. They're mostly ranged enemies that don't hitscan, so you don't need to change tactics much, you just have to deal with larger health pools and bigger damage. The one exception is the grenade soldiers, which become invincible as they go behind their blast shields after firing a grenade, which is mostly annoying. Especially since they explode on death. It isn't big damage, but you still don't want to take it. The bosses are standard fare of ye olden times, where you circle strafe and take cover when they are unleashing a big attack. Nothing inspired, but you're not expecting more from a game like this.

Overall, it's a nice way to spend about six hours. If you don't take the game seriously it will absolutely kill you, but if you play methodically and use your weapons well you should make it through no problem. The level design is quite nice, with a wide variety of locales and a good usage of locked doors to loop you in ways that don't turn into too much backtracking (until you try to find that last secret). Definitely recommended for shooter fans.

Post by **MrPopo** » Wed Dec 25, 2024 6:51 pm

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023

First 50:

51. Metaphor: ReFantazio - PS5
52. Mechwarrior 5: Clans - PC
53. Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred - PC
54. Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven - Switch
55. Dragon Age: The Veilguard - PC
56. STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl - PC
57. Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers - PC
58. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake - Switch
59. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - PC
60. Extraneum - PC
61. Diluvian Ultra - PC

Diluvian Ultra is a retro-styled FPS that came out of early access last year, but is still only chapter one (presumably of three). The thing that sets it apart from its contemporaries is its dual damage system of armor damage and lethal damage. However, the actual implementation leaves much to be desired.

The story both tries too hard and doesn't give enough. It eschews the "as you know" style of exposition, but at the same time shows why that has become a convention. Best I can tell, the salient parts are you are from a race of humans without FTL travel and a weird religion, and you run into humans with FTL travel and you fight for unexplained reasons. And there are multiple traitors. Story is told through a lot of mid-mission dialog that is unvoiced. Sometimes it pauses the action, so you can actually read it, but other times it's mid fight and you miss all of it.

Now, let's talk the fighting. You are fairly mobile, with a double jump and an air dash. There's a decent amount of platforming, and you definitely need to use that mobility in the fights to keep from taking too much damage. It is surprising just how fast your health can drop, and this appears to be due to how the damage system works. Like most FPS's, you have health and armor. Unlike most FPS's, these two have a very synergistic relationship. Your max armor is capped at the same as your current health, so you'll find that over time your overall reserves deplete without finding health pickups. There are two kinds of damage in this game: armor and lethal. Armor damage is generally higher, but only hits armor. If you only have health left, armor damage does nothing (and the same for your enemies). Lethal damage will immediately remove all health that is not protected by armor; if you (or your enemies) are out of armor this means it's a one hit kill. Lethal damage can punch through armor, and as far as I can tell it basically gets split between armor and the underlying health. The intent is that you have some guns that do armor damage and some that do lethal, so the game wants you to get into a rhythm of poking out the armor first, then cleaning up. And in the first few levels, this is the best strategy. But then the enemies get more dangerous and all the weapon switching becomes a liability. Fortunately, at this point you get the shotgun, which can two hit most enemies, so you stop giving a damn. And then you upgrade your machine gun analogue to also do lethal instead of armor damage and you basically ignore the system outside of a couple of boss fights. I give the dev points for trying something new, but the execution falls flat and it doesn't really give room for the weapon roster to grow (and the UI thinks the final gun total will be double what we've seen).

The levels are pretty sprawling, and sometimes they involve some poorly signposted backtracking. The kind where you hit a switch and have no idea what it did, so you just start backtracking and realize you're going the right way due to the enemy spawns. There is a decent variety between corridors and large arenas, and it does make use of the verticality you have. But overall, this is a very mid-tier game and the fact that it's unfinished means you should pass for now. Some games have pulled off releasing an unfinished story and finishing it later, like Hedon, but this is not one of them (you don't even get an end of episode boss).

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