Games Beaten 2024

[Flake]

January
Injustice: Gods Among Us (Xbox Series)
Metroid Prime Remastered (Switch)

Metroid Prime Remastered looks the way you remember the game looking back in the mid 2000s. If Metroid Prime 4 (assuming it ever is released) looks as good as Metroid Prime Remastered, we're in for a good time. My only complaint about the game is that they made a gameplay change where you rapid fire a few rounds before the charge beam starts up. I have no clue why they did this, why they did not make it something that could be toggled off, or how they thought this was a good idea. Other than that, amazing game is even amazinger.

[elricorico]

1. Sonic Lost World (WiiU)
2. Kirby and the Forgotten Land (NS)
3. Kinect Adventures (XB360)

4. Metal Slug (PC)

Had a half hour to kill and I was sitting at the PC. Metal Slug had been a "free" game with Amazon Prime some time ago, so I decided that would be a great way to burn the time. Played through with the standard settings and credit-fed my way to the end. Spent 25 credits this time.

I really enjoy these games and this one is no exception. I do find there are some parts late in the game that feel a little "bullet hell" to me, but I'm sure great players see this game differently than a scrub like me. Since I'm not having to feed actual money to keep playing I don't mind getting brutally beat on; as long as the overall game brings a quality experience.

[Raging Justice]

Rockman X - Rockman X Anniversary Collection (Switch)





After Adding this to my Switch collection physically, I decided to play through these old classics again.

Going back and revisiting Mega Man X, I found myself annoyed by the same stuff that always annoyed me about the game. Launch Octopus is an annoying boss and his stage is annoying too. The Spider boss in Sigma stage 1 is obnoxious. The final boss fight is horribly designed. Also, it's weird that there is two ways to get the strongest buster. For story reasons, getting it from Zero should be the ONLY way in my opinion.

On the plus side, I still love the Flame Mammoth and Storm Eagle stages. The Storm Eagle level theme is fucking awesome. The hadouken is so much fun to wreck bosses with, though it's lame that you can't use it in the final boss battle. The stage theme for Sigma stage 1 is fantastic. The music in general is just phenomenal.

I love the story in this one. As a younger player I remember feeling a bond towards Zero and the game does a great job of making you want to see X get stronger. Vile is such a pussy though. He constantly delivers speeches about how much stronger he is than X, despite the fact that he never actually fights X without hiding behind his ride armor until he is forced to. I don't know why some people love the character. Sigma has more genuine balls than Vile and is far stronger no matter what body he is inhabiting. I guess people just dig the Bobba Fett thing.

There was talk surrounding input lag when the collection first came out. I have to say that playing this version in handheld mode, I rarely ever noticed any input lag. Also, I was playing this with the Hori d-pad joy con replacement and man this game feels so fucking GOOD with that AMAZING d-pad. I really feel like I had the same amount of control I had back in the SNES days and it is so easy to do dashes by doubling tapping, which is my preferred method of doing it and always has been, unless I have to dash jump off of a wall which you have to press the dash button to do.

I turned off the graphical smoothing and didn't use the retro scanline emulation (even though it looks great). I also turned off the wallpaper and change the screen size to original aspect ratio with no zooming. I don't know if any of that affects performance because again, I didn't notice any input lag.

The game has in game trophies, basically the same ones available in other versions of the game. It's sort of weird seeing them pop up on the screen though as it looks exactly like a playstation trophy popping up, even though I was playing the Switch version.

MM X is a classic, and feels right at home on a Nintendo system just like its original release, especially if you have the awesome Hori d-pad, which is as good if not better than a SNES d-pad. That joycon replacement makes me want to try some other retro games now on the Switch, and a few fighting games too. If you use the retro scanline option while playing MM X in this collection, it looks exactly how I remember playing it back on the SNES. All that said though, having recently revisited MM X 2 in this collection after finishing X 1 again, and playing through a few of MM X 2's stages, I think that is the better game and that MM X is probably the weakest entry in the SNES trilogy. MM X 2 just feels better designed and has better boss fights, plus it has the visual pizzazz of the C4 chip. The first stage theme music is so amazingly good and this one has a better Zero theme than X 1. I'm now leaning towards MM X 2 and MM X 4 as the two best MM X games, each representing different eras of the series. I remember when I was younger I also replayed both of them more than any of the other entries.

Honestly though, everything from MM X 1-4 is great. Things got a little shaky after that though, and opinions vary a lot on the subsequent games in this series. This is the greater of the two MM X Collections. If you do want the second one though, pick up a Japanese copy. It has them all on the cart, not the case in the West. It has English support, both collections do. You also get the original Japanese intro themes for the games in the second collection. Some people claim they are better than the themes used in the Western releases. I think that's debatable though.

[Limewater]

Super Mario 3D World (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

I completed Super Mario 3D World last night. I did not 100% the game, I just completed the main game. Each level has three stars and a stamp to find, and there are special stages to find additional stars. I finished the game with 200-something stars and a bit more than half of the stamps.

Overall, I enjoyed this game. The levels are set up a bit more like "traditional" 2D Mario levels with 3D elements. So stages are relatively short and you have a timer. The camera is fairly on-rails, which I actually really liked. I rarely ever wanted to change it from the default view, though, annoyingly, I sometimes nudged the right thumbstick while executing a B-run jump, causing the camera to move and causing me to miss my jump.

The game is fairly easy overall. Just in terms of completing levels, only a few gave me trouble. And if I didn't like a level very much I just didn't worry about missing some stars or stamps. I think I had 27 or 28 lives at the end and never saw a game over. The difficulty does ramp up a bit. At one point I had over 40.

The presentation was very good. Everything looked beautiful, bright, and cartoony.

I only died a few times from things I couldn't see due to color-blindness.

I want to talk about the camera a bit more. Having the more linear levels and the camera on rails alleviated a LOT of my gripes about 3D Mario games. I still made plenty of mistakes, but I had a much easier time simply understanding where Mario was in relation to the environment and enemies. That's not to say there weren't plenty of times where I made a jump thinking I was lined up with a platform only to see Mario fall down in front of or behind it to his doom.

I also realized in playing the game that I really appreciate and prefer blockier stage design for platformers. Super Mario 3D World didn't have too many weird angles and curves that Mario 64 or Sunshine have.

However, it also reinforced how much I simply prefer 2D platformers to 3D. For a lot of my play-through, I really felt like I would have liked the levels even more if they were adapted to 2D and I didn't have to worry about awkwardly aligning my characters in 3D space.

Overall, I had a fun, nice experience with minimal frustration. I don't feel the need to go back and 100% the game, but I'm not glad it's over the way I was with Super Mario Sunshine.

[Raging Justice]

Super Mario 3d World has cool boss fights. I only bring that up because it is something that was apparently an afterthought for Super Mario Bros. Wonder's designers.

The final battle against Bowser in 3d World is EPIC.

[prfsnl_gmr]

1. Chico and The Magic Orchard DX (Switch)
2. Dusk ‘82 (Switch)
3. Dusk (Switch)
4. Rock Boshers DX (Switch)

Dusk is a FPS very clearly inspired by Doom, Half-Life, Hexen, and Quake. It looks and sounds like the ‘90s best FPS, with blocky character models, pixelated textures, rudimentary lighting effects, creepy voice samples, and heavy metal music. Aesthetically, the game is a mishmash of horror and sci-fi tropes - Cyborgs! Hooded cultists! Masked commandos! Alien horrors! - all layered in cheese. The levels, divided across three distinct episodes, are all well-crafted, and despite utilizing “use the red key to open the red door” gameplay, they’re never dull. More importantly, the game is insanely fun. It moves at lightning speed, completely devoid of performance hiccups. Each of the game’s weapons are distinctive, and each level is full of both secrets to uncover and enemies to destroy. I loved Dusk, and its reputation as an indie classic is well-deserved. Highly recommended.

Rock Boshers DX is a distinctly anglophilic twin-stick shooter. In it, you play as a steampunk Queen Victoria claiming Mars for the British Empire. To unlock bonuses, you can find a cup of tea, a scone, and a hunk of cheese in each level. It was developed in the UK, and it’s styled after ZX Spectrum games, making use of a bright, but extremely limited, color palette. In concept, i love this game. The execution, however, was a bit lacking. Really great twin-stick shooters rely on fast movement and almost all of them feature some sort of dodge mechanic. Rock Boshers DX features neither of those. True to its aesthetic, you can fire in only eight directions, and it moves very slowly. This frequently makes the game frustrating for the wrong reason, and despite being very short, the game definitely dragged by the end. Hesitantly recommended.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2023 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat
1. Terranigma (SFC)
2. Eastward (PC)
3. Pulse (PC)
4. Lost Ruins (PC)
5. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (PC)
6. Dropsy (PC)
7. Call of Juarez Gunslinger (PC)
8. Pokemon Ruby (GBA) *
9. Secret of Mana (SFC)

10. Fire Watch (PC)

This is a game I’d heard great things about for years, but I’d never really put much priority on ever playing it. However, it recently went on sale for two bucks, so my wife picked it up to play through, and I figured what better time to pick it up and play through it myself than when I have her to talk about it with. It took me about 4 hours to play through the English version of the game.

Fire Watch is the story of a man named Henry who takes a job in one of Wyoming’s national parks doing exactly what the title of the game says: watching for fires. You follow his time there during the several months he’s assigned there, seeing the things he gets up to on the job as well as following his radio-enabled relationship with another of the fire watchers, Delilah. I hesitate to give more away than that, because a lot of Fire Watch’s story is really just going to hit better when experienced firsthand rather than being told about it. Though there is a slight degree of optional content to engage in, this is a game at the very least adjacent to the “walking simulator” genre, so the story is really what you’re here to see in the first place.

And that story is done really well! The dialogue writing is excellent, with Henry and Delilah feeling so much like real people in the way they talk. The end result is a game that does a great job discussing guilt, regret, and the passing of time. Even though I don’t feel I relate to Henry on a direct level very closely at all (he’s just a very different person than me), the larger story beats were something I had no trouble seeing myself in at all. It’s a real shame that this dev team is probably never going to get a chance to actually make another game, because the way they execute the storytelling here is top notch, and as far as modern story-over-gameplay games I’ve played, this is easily near the top of the pile.

The gameplay itself is, as I mentioned before, really nothing terribly special, as it’s basically all just walking places and pressing the button on stuff at the end of the day. You have general objectives to complete, sometimes they require a little bit of scavenger hunting via the map & compass you’re given to navigate, and there are some optional places to explore here and there, but this absolutely isn’t a game you’d go to because you heard the gameplay was stellar on its own without the story. I absolutely think that the gameplay does a good job of putting you in Henry’s shoes, at creating the correct atmosphere for the relevant story beat and all that, but this really is basically a walking sim at the end of the day, so don’t go in expecting some narrative-focused survival game or anything like that (not that I’m sure why you’d have that impression in the first place <w>).

The presentation of the game is really well done. Just as the gameplay does, it compliments the narrative very nicely from the graphics to the sound design (not to mention the excellent voice acting. It’s so well done, it’s honestly hard to imagine the game looking much different while still having such an affective narrative. My only *slight* issue would be that, with the way the color palette of the game is done, it can be a bit hard to actually find your way through the forest sometimes. It’s an uncommon problem, sure, but it’s one I encountered often enough that it felt wrong to not mention it here.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a game that absolutely lived up to the hype. The normal price is a bit steep for a four hour game, I’ll admit, but if you can get past that (or get it on sale), this is an excellent narrative to spend an evening with. If you’re a fan of narrative-focused games, this is for sure not one you wanna pass up on, because you won’t be disappointed.

(A very special thanks goes out to my friend Robin for buying the game for me when I was having payment processing issues on Steam, as I was like 7 cents short of affording the game on sale <w>)

[Ack]

1. Live A Live (RPG)(Switch)
2. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (Action)(Switch)
3. Pathway (Strategy [Tactics])(PC)
4. Rewind or Die (Horror Adventure)(PC)
5. Tomb Raider (Action Adventure)(PC)

Ok, before any of you get excited that I beat the PS1 classic Tomb Raider, no, I beat the 2013 reimagining of Tomb Raider. This game is more like a prequel to the series, as Lara Croft is only beginning in her adventures but also coming to terms with the difficulty and brutality of what she will end up inevitably doing across numerous games.

To start, you are an intelligent, physically fit, well educated woman; don't go thinking Lara is a slouch at first, because she's not. She's just never been thrust into a situation where she'll have to take lives to survive. That rude awakening and her coming to grips with violence is the main purpose of the game, to show she is, above all, a survivor. And she'll suffer traumatic injury and wade through literal rivers of blood and bodies to get there. And I appreciate that the experience leaves her harrowed, represented physically by the number of scars and crusted blood and dirt she builds up over time. Even by the end, she'll still occasionally clutch at that first major wound, but by that point, she's a certified badass.

There were some complaints from critics on release that they felt Lara too quickly got to that point, but I didn't have any issue with it, particularly because I developed her hunting and world skills before her combat skills. Lara starts with a bow, and you can hunt small game for bonus experience. This experience, gathered from a variety of sources, concerts into skill points that are used to unlock things like gathering more scrap from bodies, better being able to detect hidden objects, reclaim arrows shot at animals, and so on. Because I focused on these, Lara's approach to violence felt more organic; I began with rabbits and deer before I was stabbing foes in the knee and unloading shotguns into their faces at point blank.

Of course, as much fun as the combat got (and by the end, the tough final opponents you face really let your options shine), there is a lot of platforming. Yes, Lara has the upper body strength of an Olympic bodybuilder, but she's just as likely to collapse in exhaustion in a cutscene, which sparks another major difference with something like the Uncharted series. In those games, I never really felt like Nathan Drake got tired; Lara definitely does, so even though you're performing ridiculous maneuvers, at least you know this lady isn't a total superhuman. The platforming also grows in difficulty, though this also furthers Lara's drive to get through it all.

If I have any complaints, it's that the game came from an era of quick time events and relies on them quite a bit. Using them in combat for special attacks is fine, but having to repeat a sequence because you missed a prompt or the prompt after, or the prompt after again, does get tiring. Also, while there are "tombs" to raid that revel in puzzle solving, these are limited in use and scope, like the developers weren't sure they'd work. They definitely did, so it would have been nice to see more.

I liked 2013's Tomb Raider. It gave me a brutal and violent alternative to what feels like the goofiness of the Uncharted series, like someone took Uncharted and mixed it with the horror film The Descent. The combination worked for me.

[Markies]

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2024!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

1. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
2. Jackal (NES)
***3. Evolution: The World Of Sacred Device (SDC)***



I completed Evoltuion: The World of Sacred Device on the Sega DreamCast this afternoon!

Way back in 2015, I picked up Evolution. I was looking for a longer DreamCast game, kind of an RPG length when I went through my Wishlist and I spotted Evolution. After picking it up, the game sat on my shelf for many years collecting dust until it became my final DreamCast game. After playing it on my march to finish my Backlog, I absolutely loved the game. So, I was soon looking for another RPG to play until completion and that is when I spotted Evolution. I wanted to enjoy the Dungeon-Crawling feeling again and so I decided to put it back in to finish off the final dungeon.

Evolution is a turn based RPG dungeon crawler where the hook of the game is that the dungeons are randomly generated. You have 4 dungeons to select from at the beginning, with whatever you pick as the first dungeon being the easiest and the final dungeon being the hardest. Each level is completely unique in its layout. In a way, the game kind of reminds me of a 3D Shining in the Darkness mixed with Skies of Arcadia. There is a large empire that you fight at the end with a bad guy that reminded me very much of Alfonso. I have always been hesitant of playing Dungeon Crawlers because they always seem such a huge time sink along with being incredibly difficult. Evolution is one of the perfect starter RPG Dungeon Crawlers that I have ever played. I beat the game in about 40 hours, so it is not too long. The map is slowly displayed on the screen as you slowly make your way through the floors. The combat system has some nice advantages where you don't to worry about resting or saving all the time. Each time you play, it takes a bit between saving, but the game moved along at a brisk pace and the dungeon exploring and RPG combat made the game a breeze to play through. The final dungeon was a bit harder than the rest of them, so it took me a bit longer, but I absolutely destroyed the final boss.

Overall, I really began to enjoy my time with Evolution: The World Of Sacred Device. The story is very hackneyed and the graphics aren't great considering this was an early DreamCast game, but the game play is where this game shines. If you have always wanted to try a Dungeon Crawling game and enjoy turn based RPG combat, I would highly recommend this game to anyone!

[TheSSNintendo]

The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark. Bought it on Steam in late 2021, and got around to finishing the last few cases. Fun game if you're into the point & click genre.