Games Beaten : 2011

[Xeogred]

I'm not sure if I've played the Advance games, I didn't think Sonic Rush was all that bad though. Still not amazing, but not bad.

They're worth checking out, particularly the first one. It really is fantastic.

I happen to think they're all better than the Rush games.

This game is AWESOME! Wow, way better than Rush (I remember too many rails and well, didn't love the split screen thing). This is seriously just straight up 2D Sonic, how have I missed this for so long? Haha. Different music per every stage too? Pretty nice.

[BurningDoom]

Resident Evil 0. Not the best entry in the series, but also not nearly as bad as many gamers made it out to be. Quite the enjoyable old-school Resident Evil experience, but a little light on the story. And the buddy-system was a nice touch to the gameplay.

[geozeldadude]

rating scale: thumbs up = highly recommended, one thumb up = good not great, thumbs down = avoid

see http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopi ... 01#p438301 for previous entries

- donkey kong jungle beat (GCN) -- thumbs down
* contra (NES) -- thumbs up
+ f-zero (SNES) -- one thumb up
* the legend of zelda (NES) -- thumbs up
+ pokemon puzzle league (N64) -- one thumb up
+ revenge of the 'gator (GB) -- one thumb up
+ wario land 4 (GBA) -- one thumb up
+ animal crossing: city folk (wii) -- one thumb up
+ etrian odyssey (DS) -- one thumb up
+ mario kart: super circuit (GBA) -- one thumb up
+ polarium (DS) -- one thumb up
+ wii play (wii) -- one thumb up
+ NEW mario vs. donkey kong 2 (DS) -- one thumb up
* NEW advance wars (GBA) -- two thumbs up
+ NEW mr. ninja (iOS) -- one thumb up
- NEW line runner (iOS) -- thumbs down
* NEW game & watch gallery (GB) -- two thumbs up

hm. looks like it's been a while since i've updated. here's the rundown:

mario vs. donkey kong 2: liked it better than M vs DK 1, but despite having a lot of potential was just too mindless overall.

advance wars: 2nd playthrough, S-ranked normal mode and some of the war room maps. still an absolutely fantastic game with so much content. some of the "difficulty" is really just memorization which is kind of annoying, but it's hard to complain when the game as a whole is so great.

mr. ninja: my first real foray into iphone gaming. polished and fun enough, but not something i plan on ever playing again.

line runner: another iphone game. tolerable, but completely disposable.

game & watch gallery: made a strong contrast to the iphone games. my first experience with G&W games; this collection features some truly excellent games. the modern mode of fire is fantastic, as is the classic version of manhole (despite its high learning curve). i highly recommend the game just for those two games alone.

as usual, full reviews on my blog.

[Gamerforlife]

Games Beaten:
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin for the DS
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light for the PS3
Sonic 4: Episode 1 for the PS3
Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii
Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee for the original Xbox
Portal 2(PS3)
Flower(Playstation Network)
Darksiders (PS3)
Alice Madness Returns(Xbox 360)
The Dishwasher Vampire Smiles(Xbox 360)
Heavy Rain (PS 3)
Plants vs Zombies Game of the Year - PC Steam version
Outland - PS 3

Catherine - PS 3

Easily one of the most annoying, frustrating and infuriating games I've ever played. The story is really good though. I like that it's another one of those games where you can choose what happens, who lives, who Vincent falls in love with, etc. Great for people who like Heavy Rain, Bioware games, etc. Catherine's strongest element is definitely the story and how it tells that story. The characters are great too and I love those interludes at the bar where the game becomes a social simulator. You can order drinks, interact with patrons, play an arcade game, answer text messages, etc. All of this stuff affects the story, the main character and the other characters within the story. The game's weakest element though is the puzzle stages that make up the bulk of the gameplay

The game's has HORRIBLE difficulty balancing. If you play the game as it was originally designed, which means not using the undo feature that I believe was put into the game as a result of japanese gamers complaining about its difficulty, it is sadistically hard. If you make one mistake, you can screw up the whole stage and have to start over from the beginning unless you were fortunate enough to get one of the game's very sparse checkpoints. Plus, the game is constantly rushing you. You're trying to figure out how to move the blocks so that you can advance and you're hoping that you don't move them the wrong way and screw yourself. Meanwhile, the ground is falling out from under you forcing you to think quickly. It's annoying. Imagine playing Portal 2 and being told in every room that if you don't solve the puzzles in thirty seconds you're dead. Think of how much less enjoyable that game would have been. Plus, the boss fights in Catherine are even worse. You're given even less time to think because the bosses move quickly and catch up to you. Plus, if figuring out the puzzles in Catherine under a strict time limit isn't annoying enough, you have to deal with boss attacks which can instantly kill you or mess up the layout of the stage making it impossible to proceed.

On top of all this, Catherine's controls are flimsy. Vincent moves too quickly and the controls are over sensitive. So sometimes he does something you didn't want him to do. Plus, when you're hanging from a ledge and moving around, the controls get completely schizophrenic. Suddenly left becomes right or right becomes left. The camera angle is a bitch too. One level has blocks in the background and you can barely see them because the camera won't swing around. This feels like an intentional part of the game's design though as Catherine is a very cheap game, especially during the last few stages and the final boss fight where random occurrences can completely fuck you over. You have mystery blocks that can turn into any type of block in the game. Plus, monster blocks that randomly move around. Plus, the final boss will randomly alter groups of blocks in the stage, possibly making it impossible for you to proceed. If that annoys you, don't even bother trying to beat the Babel stages, which also come down to luck. Then there's the different enemy types in some stages who try to kill you or move blocks around or get in your way to halt progress. Oh yeah, their actions are randomized as well and jeez, I haven't even mentioned the one hit kill trap blocks

Now, it seems that in response to the game's over the top, evil and sadistic level of difficulty they patched in this "undo" feature in the Japanese release and included it in the North American release. It's a nice feature. It allows you to take back previous actions. So if you move the blocks in the wrong way and screw yourself, you can basically rewind time like it never happened. It's like rewinding time in Prince of Persia Sands of Time. Unfortunately, the undo feature breaks the game. It makes it almost impossible to fail a stage since you can undo indefinitely until you finally luck out and figure out the right sequence of block moving. It also breaks the game's rank system, since that system relies on you building up a combo gauge by quickly ascending the towers in each stage. There is a certain amount of time you have after increasing the combo meter in which you must reach a higher level on the tower to increase the combo meter by one more or else the combo will completely reset itself back to zero. However, using undo instantly resets this timer. So essentially, your combo meter has infinite time making getting gold ranks on each stage a joke. The undo feature breaks the boss battles as well, since it can nullify their attacks when you use it. I abused this on one boss battle and it never got off a single attack

So basically, the point of all this is to point out that Catherine essentially has no normal difficulty setting. If you use the undo feature, the game is practically a cakewalk, at least until you get to the cheap as fuck final chapter, but it makes even that chapter considerably easier. Using undo is like playing the game with a cheat mode. However, if you don't use undo(and hard mode actually disables it)the game becomes one of the most frustrating games you will ever play. It's like they went overboard on difficulty(as evidenced by all the complaints from japanese gamers) and over compensated by including the undo feature, which was basically like throwing in a cheat mode. What a mess

That's disappointing, because the game delivers in so many other ways. It looks great, it sounds great, it has an awesome story and assuming you don't find yourself hating the puzzle gameplay, it actually has a ton of extra content(but it's all just variations of the game's main puzzle gameplay). If you take the time to play the arcade game in the bar, it seems like the kind of game Catherine could have been. You're presented with all these puzzle block formations that you have to figure out to ascend the tower and rescue Rapunzel. What's nice is that there is no fight against time here. You have all the time you want to use. Plus, there are no annoying enemies to deal with. In Rapunzel, you get to see what Catherine could have been like if it had been a pure puzzle game like Portal 2 instead of a game where you're constantly being harassed while you're trying to solve puzzles by annoying enemies, annoying time limits, annoying random factors and annoying bosses. The whole time I played this game in my head I kept hearing myself scream, "Will you leave me the fuck alone so I can solve these goddamn puzzles!!!" Imagine having some annoying person constantly distracting you or bothering you while you're trying to concentrate and figure out some puzzle in Braid or Portal or some other puzzle game. That's the experience of playing Catherine in a nutshell

I love what this game sets out to do though. The mix of puzzle based gameplay with a choice driven story, mature adult themes(dealing with life in your thirties, coming to grips with lifelong personal issues, deciding whether or not to commit to someone or stay faithful to them, etc.), social based gameplay(hanging with friends in a bar, interacting with other patrons, ordering drinks, answering text messages,etc.) and heavy anime influence is an intriguing combination. It makes for a game that is very different from anything else coming out this year and I definitely would recommend it to people who want to experience something different, but the puzzle stages kind of drag the whole experience down with their difficulty issues. You can play through Catherine legit and try very hard not to throw a controller through a window or use the cheat mo....I mean undo feature to make the game so easy it's a joke.

[final fight cd]

castle of illusion - sega
disney's aladdin - sega
the lion king - sega
mickey mania: the timeless adventure of mickey mouse - sega
mickey mania: the timeless adventure of mickey mouse - sega cd
disney's the jungle book - sega
dungeon explorer - sega cd
phelios - sega
doom - 32x
kolibri - 32x
mega turrican - sega
bc racers - sega cd
bloodlines x2 - sega
3 ninjas - sega cd
die hard arcade - saturn
final fight cd - sega cd
quackshot - sega
hyperstone heist - sega
streets of rage 2 - sega
twin gadgets x2- sega
gex - saturn
mario 3 - snes via mario all stars
mario - snes via mario all stars
double dragon - sega
sonic cd - sega cd
robo aleste - sega cd
snatcher - sega cd
mercs - sega
sonic - sega
symphony of the night - ps1

i beat the game with the 'good' ending. i was able to get 196ish% complete and i am pretty sure the most you can get is 200.6%. i probably won't go for the other 4%. i know i am missing a relic and there are a few rooms that i can't turn blue on the map for whatever reason. i did, however, get the duplicator. it took forever to get 500,000 monies, but damn was it worth it. i have one hand holding a throwing star with 128 strength and the other hand holding a spell with 98 strength that attacks all enemies in the room. enemies don't have a fucking chance.

i don't think there is one single thing i can say bad about the game. controls, music, graphics, etc are pretty damn flawless. and the out of place celine dion-esque song at the end was the biggest surprise of the game. i have nothing against celine dion - my heart will go on has a dozen plays on my itunes - but it certainly isn't something you expect to hear after fighting zombies for 13 hours.

i also thought it was cool that if you play as richter it goes back to a normal castlevania game; health is reverted back to the life bar and all rpg elements are eliminated, which is very similar to how rondo of blood was set up.

i am kind of surprised castlevania has been the only game to copy metroid. i wish somebody would have taken mario, mega man, zelda or any other well established platformer and turned it into a metroid game. because it would have worked. the 2d metroid formula can't be beat.

[Xeogred]

i am kind of surprised castlevania has been the only game to copy metroid. i wish somebody would have taken mario, mega man, zelda or any other well established platformer and turned it into a metroid game. because it would have worked. the 2d metroid formula can't be beat.

Word. Especially Mega Man, that would be so awesome. I hear the Zero games on the GBA are kind of like this and I know ZX was a bit, but still... not quite as good as Metroid/CV stuff to me.

[brunoafh]

I hear the Zero games on the GBA are kind of like this and I know ZX was a bit, but still... not quite as good as Metroid/CV stuff to me.

Ehh... they're no more "Metroid" than the original X games. There's a larger amount of hidden items/parts, but that's it.

[swiftzx]

i am kind of surprised castlevania has been the only game to copy metroid. i wish somebody would have taken mario, mega man, zelda or any other well established platformer and turned it into a metroid game. because it would have worked. the 2d metroid formula can't be beat.

Have you played Cave Story?

[J T]

Have you played Cave Story?

Yeah, Cave Story has the magic.

Others to try...
Knytt
Iji
K.O.L.M. / K.O.L.M. 2
Momodora/Momodora 2
The Iconoclasts

(Those are all freeware and linked)

[alienjesus]

I heard Kirby and the Amazing Mirror is a metroidvania ( I also hate that term).