Last game you DIDN'T finish and your thoughts

Me waiting for the VITA version

Drunkalilly wrote:

Unfortunately, it is pretty tedious but design and having already heard what to expect, I didn't feel any great urge to see it through to completion. I also don't think I'll need a game to tell me what it's like living in a police state that is unwelcoming to foreigners soon enough.

Hmmm... yeah... that's why I put it down. I like the idea, but you know it's always going to be bleak. There's also the "monkey paw" effect, where you have to make a decision split-second with no possible indication of whether it's a good or bad choice.

I liked the gameplay, it gets pretty tricky towards the end and I like the multiple choices and stuff. But grim pixel atmosphere is also kind of my thing and I enjoy a bit of mousey-keyboards. I think you may enjoy, Reigns, when you're doing one of your short game quests again. It's a little dark, but with enough comedy to keep it from going down the papers route.

Very interested in Reigns, but would ideally want it on a phone.

This looks and feels like a PS2 game from 2003 - standard collect-athon gaming that throws a nod to Katamari Damacy but nothing more. Zip around lifeless levels with two maniacal white rabbits as they push a shopping trolley to collect rubbish. The story revolves around the premise that these bonkers bunnies want to build a tower of garbage so high that it reaches the moon, so it's hard to take this game TOO seriously. Interspersed with some fun cutscenes (my 4 year old finds them hilarious in that Minions way children do), it's a shallow game that relies on its goofy visuals and many gamers' desire to collect items. Think Donkey Kong 64 with a shopping trolley.

I'm not going to complete this game as it's very repetitive and takes 107 blocks of memory - but it''s a decent, if unremarkable title.

6/10

The minions are 100% just rip-offs of the rabbids, aren't they?

I don't know why, but I really, really liked Rabbids Go Home. I know the Rabbids are jerks, but I really wanted to help them out with their plan. I sort-of saw them as Wayne and Garth almost - I can't quite explain but it involves some kind of 90s alternativism that [it's too late to explain right now]. They look like lunatics, but it was really important to them. I even bought the soundtrack, made by that Moldovan folk band.

I finished Rabbids Go Home, but only because I'll only let myself trade a game in once it's finished. It suffered from being played between two games that I really loved (one of which was LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4, and the other one might have been a Galaxy?) and it seemed flat and uninteresting in comparison.

As for Rabbids and Minions being similar, they both have their origins in France. So, er, maybe.

The Last Guardian

It's rare that I don't finish games. I've persevered through the grindiest RPGs, some properly guff shooters and mediocre platformers. But I couldn't finish The Last Guardian, and I'm pretty bummed about it.

I'll start off by saying that despite all the pre-release chat about the game looking like a PS3 game, the game itself is actually a bit of a looker. I was impressed by its visual design, especially the animation style of the boy you play as. I'll also praise its atmosphere - something that both ICO and Shadow of the Colossus had in spades, and the eerie mystery of traversing forgotten ruins full of strange artifacts with nothing but a potentially killer cat-dog-bird had me hooked... for a while.

See, the big issue I had with the game was its controls. I'll be honest, Shadow of the Colossus had pretty iffy controls at the best of times, but its core premise of beating up towering giants was just too good to pass up. Here, the controls are frustrating. It's difficult to persevere with the game when you know how to solve a puzzle, but the controls are so finicky that you cling to walls you didn't mean to grab or you jump off a platform trying to grab a ledge. The game has constant pop-ups reminding you of what the controls are too, which only adds to the frustration. Couple that with the janky AI of your dog-bird-friend-foe (I spent literally 15 minutes gesturing at him to jump up onto a ledge I'd cleared out for him, and he wouldn't do it) and it just adds up to one of the most frustrating experiences I've had playing a game in recent memory.

It's a shame too, as I bet had I the patience to grapple with the controls and work out how to get the bird-idiot-dog to do what I need him to do, I'd have enjoyed this. But, maybe I'm growing impatient as a gamer for things like that.

I never could reconcile with Shadow of the Colossus controls, which for me were so unintuitive I quit the game before even climbing the wall to the first tutorial boss. Sounds like I'll be giving TLG a miss when I get my eventual PS4 as well.

As someone who's just given up on SotC because of its controls, I'm glad I'm not alone.

I need to get back to The Last Guardian but as its one of those games I'm never going to get rid of in-till maybe the PS5 comes out (I would hope it would be backwards compatible), I'm in no rush to play as I've waited like 10 years anyway.

As I'm here and as you can't really finish it but none of us have really given it a review, I may as well do one.


Single Player = Nope
Many Maps = Not really
Many Modes = Again not really

That makes Overwatch a game with 25 Million active players look like a bad deal, however it has gameplay second to none with excellent characters all with their unique abilities and play-styles to master all wrapped up in a loop of loot boxes to have fancy costumes for your main character.

With reasons to keep coming back like now we have a Chinese New Year event, then we may have Easter and so on, in a game that keeps evolving be it new modes like capture the flag, new maps like oasis or best of all new characters.

I may even go as far as saying this is the best multiplayer shooter ever with only Goldeneye and Halo 1&2 in the same league that is how good it is.

Mei is Bae out of 10

I never had a huge issue with Shadow of the Colossus' controls to be honest. I just found Ico really boring.

I had a great internal struggle then; I originally wrote SotC instead of typing out the game's whole name, but I couldn't decide whether it would end in an apostrophe or need a letter s.

Balladeer wrote:

As someone who's just given up on SotC because of its controls, I'm glad I'm not alone.

Same!  

For me it ended up being one of the few games I actually outright disliked, and all because of the controls.  Far as I'm concerned bad controls are a video game cardinal sin. SotC is a perfect example, everything about it oozes quality, but those controls. . . Those controls. . .  I was fighting just to get the camera to behave naturally, the avatar to control the way I needed it to, after about half an hour of fiddling around trying to see if I could get things to work or learn to tolerate the controls I gave it up as a lost cause.

I never had a huge issue with Shadow of the Colossus's controls - the camera was the main issue as it often led to misjudged jumps. The main issue that The Last Guardian has over SotC is that the grab and jump button are both mapped to Triangle. This led to countless times where I'd jump off a ledge or grab hold of something when I didn't mean to. At least SotC had the sense to map grab to a different button than jump!

How hard can it be to get the controls right in a video game? It's the equivalent of having a novel whose pages you can't turn, in my book.

I wonder what we think of Zelda as I hear playing on the Joy-Cons in any form is bit of pain as the jump button is right under the r-stick, which I hear people were pressing by accident.

ZeroJones wrote:

How hard can it be to get the controls right in a video game? It's the equivalent of having a novel whose pages you can't turn, in my book.

I see what you done there *tips hat* but I think we're spoiled somewhat with how great Nintendo nail controls time & again.

masofdas wrote:

I wonder what we think of Zelda as I hear playing on the Joy-Cons in any form is bit of pain as the jump button is right under the r-stick, which I hear people were pressing by accident.

There seems to be plenty of space between the buttons and the sticks on the Joy-cons so I imagine that's a user problem rather than the controller itself.

EDIT: Actually just looked it up & it's definitely a user issue seeing as jump is mapped to the X button so how they were hitting the right stick I'll never know.

Must of been a user issue catching the X button which right under the right stick whilst using the right stick, maybe they had big thumbs.

Shame Nintendo didn't nail Star Fox Zero's or Super Mario Galaxy's controls

Is that a joke, from masofdas?

Lol at Super Mario Galaxy. That game has perfect controls and I've never seen any criticism of how it controls before. There's some fiddly bits (such as the level that sees you flinging Mario between chunks of rock that just happen to have giant rubber nipples on them) but a Nintendo game with bad controls? Nah. Super Mario 64 DS is more of a contender for that title but there's probably worse offenders.

I thought you even brought up once you didn't like the control scheme of SMG, but I've said before it's more of the Wiimote and Nunchuck then anything I don't like as I find it fiddly and I'm fighting those. SMG 1&2 are my most wanted remakes/remaster/ports but seeing the Switch has the Joy-Cons, I can see it only being copy and paste with the control scheme.

Did you read the Gintendo review of Star Fox Zero?, it is truly dreadful. One people also like to bring up is Kid Icarus Uprising which is perfectly fine, fine I say.

masofdas wrote:

I thought you even brought up once you didn't like the control scheme of SMG, but I've said before it's more of the Wiimote and Nunchuck then anything I don't like as I find it fiddly and I'm fighting those. SMG 1&2 are my most wanted remakes/remaster/ports but seeing the Switch has the Joy-Cons, I can see it only being copy and paste with the control scheme.

Did you read the Gintendo review of Star Fox Zero?, it is truly dreadful. One people also like to bring up is Kid Icarus Uprising which is perfectly fine, fine I say.  

No I was critical of not being able to lie down and play it - it is a game that requires you to sit up and point at the screen.

Yeah those are more realistic contenders, also DK Jungle Beat on the Wii

To some extent I get what Mas is saying. The spin attack would have been easier to use if mapped to a button, and the bubble-pushing thing was an example of a not-great use of motion controls that's surprising to see in such a blinding game. Only to that extent, mind you: manta raycing, ball-rolling, and star bit shooting all worked just fine, and never were the motion controls bad enough to be an outright negative. (Upside-down movement, mind...)

SM64DS is definitely up there, for ruining a classic game, as is SF0. Mind you, I hated SF0's controls but got on like a dream with KIU's...

Mas is talking nonsense, as ever, because he is the only human being on Earth who doesn't like Galaxy's controls.

Also, I found Wii games the best for lying down because I could separate my hands.