Last game you finished and your thoughts

You and me both, Jas! I've stalled on Wind Waker HD for the moment... although the Bayonettas land in a couple of days.

ZeroJones wrote:

You and me both, Jas! I've stalled on Wind Waker HD for the moment... although the Bayonettas land in a couple of days.

Indeed! I ordered them on a whim when Andy told me shopto were selling it for a decent price.

Perhaps it can be a very Platinum November...

The_Jaster wrote:

I think I should give TW101 a second go, don't know why I stopped especially when I was getting to grips with the combat.

The moment I figured out how to unleash more than one unite morph at a time ( about half way through the damn thing ) I began enjoying the game even more.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

This was a real surprise. I'm in the middle of a real Tolkien kick at the moment so I thought this might be a bit of fun. Turned out this was a really quality videogame; a phenomenally well-realised Mordor to explore, amazing graphics, slick and playable fighting and Stealth all wrapped up in a game with a level of freedom and emergent storytelling that's truly next-gen.

The crux of the game is the nemesis system, whereby all the captain and higher-ranked orcs have procedurally generated names, traits and personalities. To kill or, later, capture and turn, the highest-ranked orcs you need to interrogate informants and lower-ranked captains to learn their weaknesses, then come up with a plan to take them out. The level of freedom, apart from one or two tutorial missions, is brilliant throughout. This is the game Assassin's Creed should have been.

The plot's pretty standard guff but the individual characters are likeable. People slag Talion of for being dull but I liked his big sad face and his smirking, fatherly sense of humour and his reminiscing about his family. The real stars are the orcs, though. When we found amusing ones, me and my mate spent days trying to work them up to the warchief positions.

10/10

masofdas wrote:

There is the following to come

Nov: Twilight Princess Pack:
A new playable character
An additional weapon
An additional Adventure Map
2 new costumes

Jan: Majora's Mask Pack:
2 new playable characters
Additional Adventure Map
3 additional costumes

Feb: Boss Pack:
2 additional game modes

Those first two packs there will be £6.29 on there own, the last one there I think is £2.99. So at £13.49 it's a big saving.

Sounds like quite a deal then, went ahead and got the season pass and I'm quite excited at the prospect of the Majora's Mask pack in particular seeing as it hasn't been represented much so far in the game.

Cool Smurf, Yeah Majora is interesting guessing the adventure map will based on it which does seem a lot of work compared to what was the 1st DLC pack for Koei.

I dread to think what's Drunka's GOTY is as everything is a 10, I'm still yet to start my Mordor after owning it for about 3 weeks but was ill for a bit then PSN+ came around and now Bayonetta is here. Good job there's only actually a few games I want coming the rest of the year.

Binary Domain
I completed this for the first time this evening. I suspect I'll be playing it again, to try out different tactics and characters and try to get the best ending, and I'll say more when I write that opinion piece I talked about after Vanquish, but for now I'll say this: Binary Domain is the quintessential game about shooting robots.
10/10

Dust: Elysian Tail, PS4



One of this month's PSN+ games was one of my fav downloads of the 7th gen ported to the PS4 now in 1080p and it looked great any way on the 360 due to it's art but we have had some better looking games now due to ubiart engine for instance over these pat 2 years.



On the game I started it and I thought I just check it out compared to the 360 but nope I got hooked again, so instead of playing mordor I played this for 10hrs. As the game has some great mechanics and plays a lot like a metroidvaina as you get power ups which means you can go access new areas etc



So if you have a PS4 and are a Plus member go play this game but not it might be on steam now as well if you not got a 360.

Only problem for might be voice acting but the game was made by one person and budget might of been tight to get better voice acting.

8/10

I tried it and it just seemed like a poor mans Muramasa, might fire it up again soonish though.

It might be I've not played that, and didn't that get reviews of like 9. So this isn't as good then even by my score.

I've got it on Steam - yet to fire it up. Maybe soon!

I know this is wrong but the art style for this really bugs me (don't like the bloom/blurriness of it) to the point it puts me off massively of even wanting to try it.

The art is one of it's best bit's though.

It's just really busy for my taste especially in that second screenshot you used.

The_Jaster wrote:

It's just really busy for my taste especially in that second screenshot you used.

I can understand this - that was one of the big problems with Trine II; when everything's ornate like that you can't tell what's what. Having said that, Dust seems to be less of an offender, and I may still pick this up one day.

Final Fantasy II (iOS)

It's been fun to play this, because it's been so odd. Characters don't level up like they usually do - they react to what happens to them instead. So, if you get hit a lot, your defence and HP level up more quickly. If you use lots of magic, your intelligence and MP go up, and so on. There was a better story to it than I thought there would be, which has been somewhat bleak (NPC's do a whole lot of dying in FF2). However, it is very basic and the port has gotten buggier as new versions of iOS have been released, making it hard to recommend. And touch controls! No.

13/20

I echo your thoughts on this! I played it back on GBA (Dawn of Sorrow ports) and I too found it fun and really engaging. Would play it again, though as you say the iOS port isn't great. It's based off the PSP version but it's a really sloppy and old port.

The smartphone ports of FFV/FFVI are much better by comparison, though.

Final Fantasy XIII-2




Honestly it's been so long I don't really have much to say.  Last time I played this was release period when I lost to the final boss, which was inevitable because I finally looked at my gear and found I was still using extremely early gear, it's little wonder even normal encounters required attention and the final boss's hp was like an insurpassable dam.  

So, the game.  Well, a lot of folks hated the first game for basically being one long corridor until the end of the game (I would frankly be even more scathing than that but this isn't the first game's review and I'm not going to spend time posting about it), and that was completely solved with this game because the development team actually sat down and designed levels this time!  Yes, that's right, we actually had explorable areas this time!  We even had a city area!  And there were tons of things to find and collect!

The battle system was basically the same thing with its paradigm decks and switching between them effectively playing more of a role than individual skills and attack, only with some tweaks such as preventing the spamming of the super moves, I personally think they nerfed them a little too much by making them only usable once per battle but oh well.  Better that than the easily abusable Army of One which literally broke the boss fights in the first game.  The monster taming was hit or miss, although you gotta love being able to have a don tonberry and chocobo in the party!

Graphics were pretty but they were so intense hectic cutscenes had serious framerate issues, which is a shame given the choreography on display in them.  Music was typical final fantasy and square enix quality, featuring some good melodies and outstanding production values.  On the music note I'd honestly say this one is one of my favourite final fantasy soundtracks, you've got your usual themes you'd expect from the game but the different genres was refreshing, having some really awful misses but also some really sweet hits.  Hamauzu's contributions weren't even close to his xiii compositions, but Naoshi Mizuta and Mitsuto Suzuki made some seriously awesome stuff.  Shout out to Chaotic Guardian in particular, an awesome version of the theme of the main villain Caius Ballad.

The story was so awful it was amazing, casting and acting was top class even when the dialog got a tad silly.  On that note gotta give a mention to Liam O'Brien playing the main villain Caius Ballad, the result was perfection.  Back to the story, I swear they must have been watching modern doctor who before making this, two characters travel through time solving problems that shouldn't be happening in history with an increasing amount of linking things that ultimately become the focal point of the plot up to and including the climax.  Sound familair?  Even the loading screen is pretty much the Tardis time vortex from the Russel era!


Whew, even without anything to say I think I've managed to put enough rambling thoughts down to warrent a post.  So, time for the final stuff.  Overall rating of 7.5 out of 10.  It's nothing amazing besides the production values but it does what good sequels do and improves on its predecessor in almost every area and was just all round a fun romp.  Also that ending was amazing.  I can only imagine the rage those playing it for the first time must have had.

If you're curious about said ending, obvious ending spoilers should be obvious.:

Alien Isolation



As a massive fan of the Alien films I was so worried for this game especially after the mess that was Colonial Marines but thankfully Creative Assembly took this in the correct survival horror direction this franchise needed.

It's so refreshing to be made to feel so vulnerable in a game these days & isolation consistently does this through out in a variety of ways, one of them being the crafting system where you have to make weapons or healing items from materials you scavenge on space station this basically forces you to explore which you may not want to do with an Xenomorph constantly stalking you, of course you are free not to but you may find yourself short of ammo or an ingredient short of making a medkit you desperately need later.

All of these materials are combined in different ways to make multiple items so you also have a choice to make in what you use them for, do you go for pipe bomb for being on the brief offensive or a smoke bomb to sneak your way past? Even when you get traditional weapons like a revolver/shotgun it's a case of use them at your own risk.

I also have to highly praise the sound/audio department for absolutely nailing the atmosphere of the films, any of the slight noises you hear aboard the station has you worried if the alien is right there but it's not just thrown in for the sake of it either as there are plenty of quiet moments that make you on edge just as easily, the musical score is also fantastic.

This game might frustrate some folk especially if you are playing on the recommended hard difficulty as you can easily lose progress of about 30 - 40 minutes from one tiny mistake, this didn't personally annoy me too much as I found I was learning from my mistakes as I tried different strategies to get to my objective & the save points are quite generous at times.

I had an absolute great time with this game and is one my favourites of 2014 so I'll be mostly giving it a 9 out of 10, mostly.

Bit Trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien



A bit late to the party with this one, despite owning the Bit Trip collection on Wii I'd never actually played a Bit Trip game until this and I understand Runner is the best of the lot so a good place to start. Being greeted by Charles Martinet was a brilliant way to start the (bit) trip and I found the opening scenes and presentation to be rather lovely.

My first impression was that it was fairly standard Rhythm based gaming although perhaps a little too simple, the music itself was nice and whilst it didn't get tiring or repetitive it would have been nice to hear some more music, only changing the basic beat once a world is a bit rubbish. It didn't feel like such a huge problem however as it's easy enough to play without the sound on as it's more learn the routine than react to the beat, something I know many dislike but I found it difficult to put the controller down and tell myself "this is my last level".

The bonus "retro" levels were a nice addition too and despite being basically the same thing felt like a whole other game (one which I'm assuming the original version of Runner is like). The boss battles also offer a nice change of pace despite again being the same basic game.

The difficulty didn't really increase too much I felt for the most of the game, it was only if you wanted the highest score possible and to get all the unlockables that it got a bit hard, that is until you reach the final world which I felt had a massive spike and in the end ultimately put me off watning to unlock every costume and collect every piece of gold as I'd done before as I just couldn't manage it without giving myself a serious concentration headache.

All these gripes aside I enjoyed my time with Runner 2, it's simple yet addictive, is rather nicely presented, quite humorous and features some very neat references to video game culture.


7/10

That was something I found with FLoRA too - it was almost learning the routine, with the music barely factoring into it. The perfect rhythm game for Andyman, maybe, but I tired of it quickly. Shame, as the aesthetics are lovely.

Yeah it's not so much of a rhythm game as a platformer that generates music. I do rather enjoy it but I've not got around to playing my Vita for a while.

Bayonetta, Wii U




So I've just finished for the very first time Bayonetta 1, I had played it before back on the 360 when it came out but I got distracted by Mass Effect 2 back then.

What a game, it does everything really well apart from maybe the story and graphically it is looking dated but it's a 5 year old game nearly, so should be expected.



The new Nintendo Costumes are a cool addition but that's about really with them.

I don't really know what else to say it's just dam good but from what little I've now played of 2, I can't give this top marks as 2 all ready seems better.

So a 9.5/10, but back in 2010 if I had finished it then it might of got a 10.

Yeah, FLORA was a sound game (nooooooooooo!) and I loved its joy but it was not quite extra-special.

Looks like I should be getting on with Bayonetta then, mas? I played a bit but it's shelved at the minute in favour of EarthBound.