Games NOT Beaten: 2015

[Exhuminator]

I tried Battle of Olympus not too long ago. It seems pretty solid, but it was a lot less linear than I was in the mood for. Probably a better play with a walkthrough at hand.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Yeah I just purchased Olympus last month after alienjesus talked about it in Games Beaten.

Only played about 30 minutes with my daughter. Seems pretty cool - Zelda II-ish. I'd bet it's <10 hours which is always appreciated.

[alienjesus]

Yeah I just purchased Olympus last month after alienjesus talked about it in Games Beaten.

Only played about 30 minutes with my daughter. Seems pretty cool - Zelda II-ish. I'd bet it's <10 hours which is always appreciated.

Took me about 10 including a few points where I got stalled for an hour or so.

[laurenhiya21]

Tales of Xillia 2
I tried pretty hard to get through this game, but I really don't like doing "kill X amount of monsters" or "fetch X number of certain items" kind of quests, and they're basically required if you want to get anywhere in the story :/

What happens is you get a huge debt very early in the game, and then after that you'll play a small story section and then a section where you go do things to pay off a portion of your loan. Unfortunately that means doing a bunch of sidequests. It wasn't so bad at first since the loan sections weren't that long, but now they feel like they take a century to finish. They probably aren't that much longer, but there's a good reason why I don't do those sort of quests in most RPGs... They're so boring! The story sections aren't that long either, so it doesn't really even out :/ Quite a disappointment.

[Exhuminator]

What happens is you get a huge debt very early in the game, and then after that you'll play a small story section and then a section where you go do things to pay off a portion of your loan.

That sounds... familiar. Does this guy make an appearance too?:

[laurenhiya21]

^I wish!

[Key-Glyph]

That sounds... familiar. Does this guy make an appearance too?:

Beat me to it!

[Exhuminator]

Konami / 1999

Could you survive on a deserted island in the middle of an ocean with nothing but a pocket knife to start with? That's the question Survival Kids asks of the player. And at first, Survival Kids is all about simply surviving, just like it says on the tin. Choose your gender, fall off a sinking boat, and wash ashore a new adventure.



Yes you've got to explore an uncharted island, looking for a way to escape, and for any other survivors of the peril that lead to your own stranding. You've got to find water, find food, and find shelter. You've got to create tools out of rudimentary elements such as sticks, rocks, and sticky tree sap. You've got to learn which plants are edible, poisonous, and medicinal. You've got to figure out which animals can be food, can be helpful, or can be dangerous to yourself. You must learn how to hunt, how to fish, and how to trap, and even how to cook meat. Learn to build a shelter, learn to build a raft, or even to make an umbrella. Yes there's a lot to surviving, and Survival Kids expects you to do all of it or die trying. You can starve to death if you don't eat, dehydrate if you don't drink, and you can even die from sleep deprivation. Or maybe you'll just get lost in caves and die from snake or bat bites. But believe it or not, all of this surviving is actually really fun.



Unfortunately the latter half of Survival Kids is not so fun. Once you have become adept at surviving, the game designers decide that the way you will escape the island is not as conventional as you'd expect. What it boils down to is yourself going on an island wide scavenger hunt for special runic keys to unlock a rather deus ex machina type of escape. Seeking out these keys is not much fun at all, due to the sheer size of the island and the slowness it takes to traverse. Not to mention the rather unintuitive methods that lead to finding most keys. This big key hunt is so obscure at times that one can't help but wonder if it was designed to sell strategy guides. This is a real shame because up until this point, Survival Kids is a great simulation with mechanics and puzzles that make sense.



For this player, the end game strategy hunt was the opposite of fun, and I dropped the game at that point. Instead of exploring and surviving, I was now just doing gopher hunt busy work. Ugh. A stark contrast to the fun first half in which I had to survive on my own wits against the elements. That aspect was highly entertaining. Well there are a lot more games in this series, so I hope in those sequels that Konami kept things a bit more grounded. Still, Survival Kids deserves respect for being such a unique game as it was. A survival simulation puzzle adventure hybrid. Combined with the pleasant graphics, great music, and fun mini-games, other players may not find the end game key hunting drudgery as annoying as I did. If they even survive that long in the first place.

Rating: 7/10

[darsparx]

*sigh* I didn't want to do this but I'm going to have to go ahead and start my list for this year

Quest for Camelot - I made it as far as what I suspect is right before the boss fight and was doing pretty well but these bats leading up to the wizard or whatever suck. It was a lot nicer when they were only a few here and there before now(from what I recall) but now it seems if I accidentally do a special attack(spin or dart) It somehow counts as them hitting me which makes no sense. Good for what it is but unless you somehow manage to hit the bats with the slingshot, this part seems near impossible for me and my 3 hearts and I'm trying to avoid wasting my heart refill on this mess. I've gotten this far and that's pretty darn far compared to everytime I've played this before because I don't think I can recall even doing this much. I think friday night and what little time I have left right now before going to sleep I'm going to update backloggery and get a new portable pick and a new console pick so I have one side by side. I'll try this game again in a month from this point

[Gamerforlife]

Broken Age

Sick and tired of getting stuck on the stupid puzzles in the latter half of the game. They don't give you any clues and it's just annoying.