| | La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 | |
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+9The_Jaster Crumpy Andy The Cappuccino Kid JayMoyles Muss gjones Treesmurf masofdas Balladeer 13 posters | |
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masofdas The Next Reggie

Posts : 22583 Points : 22935 Join date : 2013-01-18 Age : 32 Location : VITA Island
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 05/05/22, 10:35 am | |
| More that I can't say hey you're wrong or someone is about a well regarded game based on review score (even though you're all wrong about GRIS and possibly will be about 13S), when myself I don't think some critically acclaimed games are all that (even if I am right). Picked TOEM up in the eShop sale, and played last night as it's a nice relaxing game where you go around taking photos for challenges. Think TOEM came out last year when we suddenly had like 8 photography based games come out, I still prefer New Pokémon Snap yet that is on rails, where in TOEM you do get to wander around the levels finding all your challenges, which it is far better than Pupperazzi. |
|  | | Crumpy Andy The Sausage to Go For

Posts : 4738 Points : 4745 Join date : 2013-01-15 Age : 29 Location : The South
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 05/05/22, 11:34 am | |
| Mate TOEM is fantastic, how dare you prefer Pokemon Snap. I'll bloody snap you if you start spreading rumors like that around... |
|  | | masofdas The Next Reggie

Posts : 22583 Points : 22935 Join date : 2013-01-18 Age : 32 Location : VITA Island
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 05/05/22, 05:37 pm | |
| Well we both liked it, so maybe others should pick up whilst on sale. |
|  | | Balladeer The Next Miyamoto

Posts : 24963 Points : 23792 Join date : 2013-01-16 Age : 32 Location : Admintown
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 06/05/22, 09:28 pm | |
| I can't say I'm not t(o)empted, but I didn't get on with (the original) Pokémon Snap as much as many, so it's not a high priority. I don't think many of y'all are going to give a monkey's about a very anime JRPG that doesn't really do anything new, so I'll put the next game (which I have overmuch to say about considering that fact) into a spoiler. It's good, just. - BLUE REFLECTION - SECOND LIGHT:
Blue Reflection: Second Light isn't the otaku-bait echhi-courting game it might first look like, despite the, er, curious search engine text for it on Sony's store. If anything it feels like it has more in common with shojo manga like Sailor Moon in its tone. No wait, stop, please keep reading... The basis is that a bunch of schoolgirls find themselves trapped in an abandoned school, surrounded by sea. They've all lost their memory, and to survive, they find themselves collecting resources from the demon-infested Faraway. It's serviceable as plots go, but the real appeal is the girls themselves. I felt they were almost all very well-written and endearing characters. There's a lot of getting to know the other girls in both story beats and through going on 'dates', which feels like a mistranslation - you date at the facilities you craft on the school grounds, and there's nowt romantic about staring at a space suit. It's genuinely enjoyable getting to know most of them: even the apparently fanservice character turns out to be a deadshot hunter and a food connoisseur. The exceptions are the two rather dull main characters of the original game and the prequel anime, but they're in the minority. Outside some slight Uncanny Valley stuff in the character models from time to time and the odd pervy camera moment (and - sigh - optional swimsuit costumes), it's all pretty heartwarming stuff. The Faraway is your source of dungeons and battles and danger and that. The dungeons are some of the better examples in the genre: tedious 'travel gimmicks' are outweighed by the surreal and varied aesthetics. The battling sadly is not quite so good, although you won't think that at first. It's a mixed turn-based/real-time system with plenty of initial depth: the girls snowball in power as each battle goes on, learning new moves, growing in each individual combat. The trouble is, there aren't many new battle elements introduced throughout the story. You'll rely on the same moves and strategies at the start and the end of the game, with little-to-no evolution of the system. This was worse for me because I accidentally overlevelled, making the latter third of the game a walkover. Pro tip: for the best experience, don't use any optional exp-boosting equipment or facilities. And that's the game's problem in a nutshell really: almost everything starts off well, but doesn't stay that way. The girls are great to know initially, but by the end there are too many of them, and you can find yourself skipping through ten dates in a row late-game. The battle system starts well, but it has nowhere to go. The landscapes are colourful, but spending time with the girls reveals technical flaws in the visuals. The music is cheerful enjoyable stuff, but there's a paucity of themes that you really feel when you've heard three pieces of battle music after 20h. The dungeons are fun, but it's easy to overlevel and make them feel like tedious slogs by the endgame. The final dungeon nearly made me slash a mark off my score. Developer Gust seemingly had the time/budget/expertise to make a really charming enjoyable 20-25h JRPG, but the game lasts 40h. What we're left with feels slightly bloated, and yet at the same time lacking in material. On here, where we're all male and I'm not sure how many of us like indulging our feminine sides for 40h, Blue Reflection: Second Light was always going to be a hard sell, even before it began to drag in its last third. It's a JRPG where the main selling point is talking to teenage girls as a teenage girl. I would still recommend it though, just. It's a cosy charming game full of good characters. If you want a relaxing heartwarming time that has more in the way of gameplay than Chicory, you could do much worse. 7/10 (recommended) p.s. Whoever decided to lock the 'true' ending behind New Game + can sod right off. It's only twenty seconds of difference, look them up on YouTube after.
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|  | | masofdas The Next Reggie

Posts : 22583 Points : 22935 Join date : 2013-01-18 Age : 32 Location : VITA Island
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 06/05/22, 09:55 pm | |
| Toem you walk around and do quests, compared to on rails Pokemon Snap. |
|  | | Treesmurf Sheegoth

Posts : 3741 Points : 3743 Join date : 2013-01-17 Age : 32 Location : Manneh
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 06/05/22, 10:01 pm | |
| Yeah the only real similarity between the two games is the camera, they play wildly different, I gave TOEM a 8/10 back on page 5 of this thread, if we must compare it to Pokémon Snap then I'd definitely say I preferred TOEM over last year's Snap. |
|  | | masofdas The Next Reggie

Posts : 22583 Points : 22935 Join date : 2013-01-18 Age : 32 Location : VITA Island
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 06/05/22, 10:06 pm | |
| Yeah just happen to be photo based games, which was a few last year for some reason.
Still BG&E, the best photography game. |
|  | | Balladeer The Next Miyamoto

Posts : 24963 Points : 23792 Join date : 2013-01-16 Age : 32 Location : Admintown
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 09/05/22, 08:07 pm | |
| I'm not sure a free-roaming non-combat adventure really appeals either, see Chicory on that subject.  What does appeal is Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion! You play a law-defying turnip who goes through dungeons that feel like microcosms of 2D Zelda dungeons, in a game that feels like a microcosm of 2D Zelda. It only lasts 2-3h, but unlike other shorter games it's excellently paced, with just the right level of gameplay variety, story beets, and escalating tension. Plays nicely too, but what you're really here for is the writing: it throws a stream of jokes at you, and most of them land. Even if one doesn't there's another one along in a minute. Lotsa laughs, although if the idea of clicking 'okie' instead of 'okay' makes you hurl then maybe steer clear. It goes surprisingly dark places too. It's not perfect sadly. The limited sword combat feels floaty and unsatisfying, the soundtrack is quite foul (although well-matched enough that I thought it worked in situ), and the visually simple game twice developed frame rate hiccoughs that only resetting it entirely would cure. Still though, as what is apparently a student project, it shines. I had a grand, if short, thyme with it. A high 7/10. |
|  | | masofdas The Next Reggie

Posts : 22583 Points : 22935 Join date : 2013-01-18 Age : 32 Location : VITA Island
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 10/05/22, 11:41 am | |
| That just come to Game Pass, maybe I'll give it an installation, then never play it. TSORF is a few hours long Walking Sim with some horror stuff even though it's done in a Gone Home way, also a bit of Firwatch as someone on a phone to you throughout the game. It is darker in terms of themes compared to Gone Home, which you can guess from the game's title, then what led to those events. I liked it and think I paid about £3 on Switch in the sale. |
|  | | The Cappuccino Kid Portrait Ghost

Posts : 6123 Points : 6276 Join date : 2013-02-25 Age : 103 Location : East of Mombasa
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 10/05/22, 09:50 pm | |
| Skelattack is one of the most promising games I’ve played in a long time. It’s a gorgeously animated Metroidvania with high production values, loads of likeable characters with fun snippets of dialogue, and a varied and suitably atmospheric soundtrack that deserves to be heard. The story – about rekindling spirits from the dead and confronting your past life – and the unoriginal scenery aren’t up to the same high standard admittedly, but they’re perfectly fine and they serve their purpose. I quite like that Skelattack gets right to the point too, taking me just shy of five hours to complete. So close to brilliance, and yet so far. Where Skelattack badly falls down is in its outrageously uneven difficulty level. Skelattack is a game that’s all too happy to punish you, and deaths happen often – and often extremely cheaply. I really don’t know why, but the developer has got a massive raging hard-on for awkwardly-positioned insta-kill spikes. They’re jumbled across everywhere and anywhere you’d carry on with your adventure and search for treasure and potions. Consequently, Skelattack’s platforming requires unrelenting precision. But then, this near-sadistic challenge is counter-balanced by checkpoints that, no joke, you pass every ten seconds. You die all the time and in the most frustrating ways imaginable, but because there’s literally hundreds of checkpoints around there’s basically no punishment for death (apart from losing your currency which, to be honest, you don’t really need). Skelattack manages to be too hard and too easy at the same time, it’s quite an abnormal feat of game design. In other criticisms, Skelattack’s wall-jumping is sloppily handled. You can never reliably cling onto walls or bounce off of them, which is really irritating in a game that requires the precision platforming that I was typing about, and doubly so in a game where wall-jumping is used in pretty much every segment. I think I could do a better wall jump. The combat is similarly arse. Never amounting to much more than clumsy button-mashing, it’s got none of the flair or style of other Metroidvanias I’ve enjoyed, like Guacamelee. At least there’s much less combat than wall-jumping and insta-kill spikes I suppose. It’s a bit of a shame. Skelattack is carried by its endearing presentation, music and characters, and I think those make it worth a playthrough. That’s especially seeing as Skelattack is often on sale – I bought it for 90% off late last year, for around £1.59. You’ll definitely get value for money with a similar discount. On the other hand with much more polish and a consistent approach to its difficulty, Skelattack could have definitely been much more than it is. In this (surprisingly unpatched) state Skelattack is very flawed. But all the same, it’s nice for me to come across a game that I enjoyed more than the critics did. 7/10. |
|  | | Balladeer The Next Miyamoto

Posts : 24963 Points : 23792 Join date : 2013-01-16 Age : 32 Location : Admintown
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 11/05/22, 09:55 pm | |
| - The Cappuccino Kid wrote:
- awkwardly-positioned insta-kill spikes
Aw no! The devil of game design itself! And the thing that killed Cave Story for me. Given that, I doubt I'd get 7/10 fun out of Skelattack. Is the 3DS retro yet? I'm not sure. Given that you can still just about acquire this elsewhere, I'm putting it in here rather than the equivalent retro thread, but it's a borderline case.  Probably the last 3DS game I'll get off the shop, I polished off Weapon Shop de Omasse yesterday, and for the most part I had a really good time with it. You forge weapons for customers by tapping away at metal to the beat, then follow the quests those customers go on via bugs you work into your weapons that become fantasy Twitter. It's joyously written, genuinely entertaining if not quite laugh-out-loud. It's lovely to look at for a 3DS game (albeit that's helped by its very limited visual scope), and easy to play. The soundtrack, as befits a rhythm game, is good too: the music's fine, but frankly it's the sitcom-style laugh track that makes it. Although the fact that it's difficult to follow the fantasy Twitter that makes up the meat of the game while you're smithing away was a noticeable setback, none of the game's flaws were too affecting... at least, not until the end. The game is so well-written, and tells decent stories with it - and then ends on a massive shrug. None of the customers' stories interlink, the ending such as it is is such a wet fart, and the game tells you to defeat the final boss with every main customer to get something more, only for that 'something more' to be a gross disappointment with no narrative weight at all. An absolute travesty. For eight out of the eight-and-a-half hours, though, this was a little bit of a gem. It won't appeal to those who don't like their games too talky, and it might be a bit lightweight to be anybody's main game for any length of time; but it would fit nicely into a rotation of multiple titles. Sigh... Remember when Level-5 could do no wrong? This is a slightly sad reminder. 7/10 |
|  | | masofdas The Next Reggie

Posts : 22583 Points : 22935 Join date : 2013-01-18 Age : 32 Location : VITA Island
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 12/05/22, 10:43 pm | |
| NLH, I picked up on a eShop sale in the USA yesterday which you can guess posting now it's short, at around a hour long. NLH isn't a great game, even for someone that likes these types of games, but I’m glad it exits as I can't think of any other game with a non-binary couple (I can't even think of any characters even) for that should get some praise, why it was up for an impact award. |
|  | | The Cappuccino Kid Portrait Ghost

Posts : 6123 Points : 6276 Join date : 2013-02-25 Age : 103 Location : East of Mombasa
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 17/05/22, 06:45 pm | |
|  Here’s some quick thoughts on Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – The Definitive Edition on Switch. While based on the building blocks of the monumentally influential GTA III, Vice City established its own unforgettable atmosphere. I’d say Vice City’s believable ‘80s setting is definitely the reason why it’s the more fondly remembered game. An incredible critical and commercial success back in its day and frequently placed on ‘Greatest Games of All Time’ lists, it’s not unfair to call Vice City one of the most iconic and beloved games ever. You can’t have missed the critical mauling that the Definitive Edition got from all corners late last year. Perhaps like you, all the impressions I read and heard were that The Trilogy was released in really poor condition, where from any perspective all three of its games were in an inexcusable state. In the six months since then there’s been waves of patches to sort out the most egregious of its abuses. Playing through the most up-to-date version of Vice City – The Definitive Edition as of May 2022, I don’t think their work is complete. Disappointingly, the quality of my experience was undone a bit by fairly regular framerate problems, graphical glitches and gameplay bugs. There was the occasional crash to boot. And I know that this has already been discussed at length virtually everywhere else, but the visuals aren’t what you’d expect from a remaster of a game from twenty years ago. Strangely blurry, plastic-ey and low-quality with loads of pop-up and rubbish-looking textures, it looks and feels like something you’d have perhaps experienced on the Wii in 2008, rather than something that’s well-placed in the ninth generation of gaming. I appreciate modern quality of life updates such as the mission checkpoint system and weapon auto-aiming, but despite numerous fixes Vice City – The Definitive Edition remains pretty rough and unpolished. Happily, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City still holds up superbly two decades later. It’s a testament to the quality of the original game that it can just about overcome all of these disappointments. Above all else, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – The Definitive Edition still has all that freedom that makes any Grand Theft Auto game a massive amount of fun to play – just with more Spandau Ballet. All the exploration, gunfights, vehicles, jumps and missions are still here, and so too is the entertaining story, the memorable characters, the dark sense of humour and the best-of-all-time soundtrack. No, this uncaring, sloppily-made and badly-optimised Definitive Edition isn’t the remaster that Vice City deserved. You can’t help but wonder what could have been with the whole Trilogy if, you know, Rockstar were arsed before they were utterly shamed into sorting it out. But it’s not a complete write-off. At least in Vice City’s case, it’s still a brilliant game at heart. Let’s see if Rockstar do any more work on this, and maybe do it justice. 7/10. |
|  | | masofdas The Next Reggie

Posts : 22583 Points : 22935 Join date : 2013-01-18 Age : 32 Location : VITA Island
 | Subject: Re: La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5 17/05/22, 07:56 pm | |
| That might be part of a great trilogy and others like LotR or Star Wars come to mind, yet joining them now is Only the medium of video games can tell such an emotional plot about a jar of Mayo, who gets wrapped in some saucy things where its girlfriend wants some of that white stuff all over her. This leads to Mayo suffering from depression, yet finding himself with his buddy Muss the Mustard. I can't put into words how good of a game this is and how this epic trilogy has ended. |
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