Last game you DIDN'T finish and your thoughts

I loved Vice City as a kid but I have no doubt I'd hate it if I went back. I'll carry my love of Toto's Africa to my grave, though.

@The_Jaster wrote:

Yeh, I should point out that I'm not trying to convince him to buy it especially as it looks like his mind is made up but I just feel that you can never truly rule out the possibility of liking a game even if it's in a genre you don't normally play.

Ah yes, I remember the last time I took your advice and tried not to rule out that possibility...

@Muss wrote:

I really enjoyed Transistor. It works really well with a good set of headphones. I think it's guilty of Supergiant's pre-Hades phase, where the soundtrack, art, and voice acting do much more heavy lifting than the actual game mechanics. I thought Transistor's battle system was quite innovative and fluid, so it's mechanics are pretty good, certainly better than Pyre's. Have not played Bastian so wouldn't know about it.

I definitely agree that the soundtrack, art, and voice acting are expected to do more heavy lifting. That said, I also agree with you about the battle system. What I played worked really nicely, and I say this as somebody who doesn't normally like strategic fighting gameplay. It just wasn't enough on its own.

@gjones wrote:

...it felt text-heavy without the great writing needed to keep my interest.

I do also agree with this.

That said, I get the feeling that my habit of being quick to say I didn't finish a game, as opposed to like GJones keeping games around to maybe play again one day, makes people think I dislike more games than I do. I didn't dislike Transistor at all, just like I don't dislike vodka in drinks. I liked bits of it! (Not the yappy sword, granted.) If I had fewer games to play I'd definitely be getting back around to it, along with various other games I've dinghied. I'm just well aware from my time spent with THE DEEP BACKLOG that, on Switch at least, and with the eShop as hotching as it is, there's no way I'll ever clean up both my backlog and all the games on my wishlist that I want to played and the new games I'm looking forward to that will have come out by then. There's always something new and shiny on the horizon. So if I'm feeling 'it's decent' on a game I'm nowhere near done with, I'm likely to punt it and not regret the decision.

That said, I can get on board with Buska's suggestion. Looks like more time for reading for me!

A couple more games fall by the wayside.

PUZZLE QUEST: THE LEGEND RETURNS:

 

Puzzle Quest is a match-three puzzler in RPG trappings, which on paper is genius!  Just chasing a high-score doesn't cut it for me: adding a plot and context to the match-three puzzler should be a great idea.  In practice... not so much, not this context at least.  You see, the bog-standard match-three puzzler has two problems that make it ill-suited for an RPG battle system: it's either (a) infuriatingly luck-based, (b) repetitive and dull, or both.

Most of Puzzle Quest features problem (b).  The vast majority of the game is samey encounters on identical puzzle boards, with the only changes being your spells and the enemies'.  When every fight takes five minutes minimum, and the game loves its respawning encounters that block your path with no way to skip them (whose idea was this?  It was bad in 2007 and it's no better now), you'll slog through a lot of the same kinda-mediocre-anyway puzzling.  That's broken up by a bit of problem (a), in the form of foes with powerful spells and more spikes on their armour than the difficulty.  You see, if you match four gems in a row you get an extra turn, which is great when you get it and lousy when the opponent does.  In the tougher battles, your foes get spells that can chain these four-matches together, and take out half your health in one swoop if the replacement gems align correctly - leaving you watching them take turn after turn when their luck, inevitably, comes good.  Turns out the match-three equivalent of being stun-locked is about as fun as being stun-locked.

Throw in writing so generically fantastical that I can feel Tolkein turning in his grave from here, and the bare minimum of aesthetic competence with forgettable visuals and music, and you get Puzzle Quest.  Last Monday I described it as devouring my working day, and there's undoubtedly a 'one-more-go' hook to it!  It took me a week to concede that I wasn't having much fun during the devoured time.  I'd give it a tentative recommendation to anyone who gets anything out of Candy Crush or similar but hates its business practices: anyone else should avoid it.

RAJI: AN ANCIENT EPIC:

 

I preferred Raji to Puzzle Quest, all told, even if eventually I chucked them within days of each other.  It's a solid enough action game with commendable presentation.  That said, my emotions looking back on it are pretty similar - a resounding 'ehhhhhh'.

I'm not a fan of pure action games at the best of times, but Raji's combat was nice enough.  You get a decent variety of weapons (although in practice I always used the most recent one) and a decent variety of enemies to smack them with: you even get to do some faintly acrobatic manoeuvres, which was nice.  On the whole, I liked the action, despite (and it's a big despite) the finishing moves for some reason not having rumble, or any form of visual/audio feedback, associated with them.  I can only assume this is a bizarre bug.  Regardless, the moves that should have felt most powerful felt like slapping an enemy with a damp flannel.  The combat's broken up by some fiddly annoying platforming that was less nice, with fixed camera and a hit-or-miss wall-run being responsible for me getting bloody annoyed with the death jingle.  There are also 'puzzles' that don't really deserve the name.

To be fair the puzzles do often result in nice visual effects.  In fact, Raji as a whole looks quite nice, with pretty Indian locales fully realised in the background; and it's fully voice-acted and features an enjoyably different soundtrack.  However: the locations' nice looks hide that a lot of what looks like a pretty Indian locale is mostly set-dressing, despite looking no different from the actual level.  One's cut off from the other by invisible walls, but it's not always obvious where these walls are.  Meanwhile the two gods who spend the entire game chattering to each other are po-faced and dull in their dialogue, presumably out of respect to authentic Hindu deities - I don't care how authentic they are, I'd respect them more if they'd shut up.  Same goes for Raji, whose squeaky-voiced pleas for her brother's return made my ears grate.  The only incontrovertibly good bit of the aesthetics is the shadow puppet cut-scenes: I'd play an entire game in that style.

In the end I dumped Raji at the end of the third world, a beautiful-looking water temple that, again, was mostly set-dressing.  Apparently there were two more worlds, but there just wasn't anything that made me want to continue, or look back fondly, or think much at all but 'ehhhhhh'.

My approach to gaming recently has been a bit Marie Kondo: if a game doesn't 'spark joy', I dump it.  However, while struggling with those two, they did make me think of a game that did spark joy, and that I sidelined when I was enjoying it much more than either of these two.  I've redownloaded Yoku's Island Express, so that's the Last Game I Unfinished I guess.  I'll give my Thoughts on that soon!

Amen to the Marie Kondo way of gaming (not for possessions, I'm a hoarder and it suits me just fine), I admittedly have let some big games go by the wayside by acting like that but never seen the point in having to play a game for 15 hours before it gets good. Yoku is also an absolute joy as well.

I refuse to quit anything, ever.

It's a good idea, and it might just be from the games I play but the whole spark joy thing doesn't really apply to a Last of Us Part II or the other day when I got what Room you were watching muddled up, where I was like what the Room with Brie Larson that's not a fun film.

Then got things like Persona 5 which because it's so long, 15hrs just get you out of the tutorial, then again I've played likes of DOOM 2016 which after doing two levels knew it wasn't going to change & wasn't for me.

Oh sure, but then it sparks... I don't know, something else. Feelings. Sadness. Or just excitement. As long as it sparks something that's not frustration, that's fine. The above two games didn't spark anything. I'm not sure I could stick with a 15h tutorial though, unless it's a really good tutorial?

@Treesmurf wrote:

Amen to the Marie Kondo way of gaming (not for possessions, I'm a hoarder and it suits me just fine), I admittedly have let some big games go by the wayside by acting like that but never seen the point in having to play a game for 15 hours before it gets good. Yoku is also an absolute joy as well.

Yep, this - also with the two games above, Raji wasn't going to last 15 hours, and I was pretty sure Puzzle Quest wasn't going to change! (I have become less of a hoarder in real life, trying to clear things out to make my quite-small flat more liveable - apart from all my old gaming stuff. I'm never going to play my Wii U ever again, I reckon, and yet it still sits in my trunk...)

It does, and sort joking about the 15hr tutorial as Persona 5 tad long.

More it does come down what the game does and what the genre it is, then just giving up and sure some games like Death Stranding I would say you got to play like half that game before it gets superb, but that is a huge chunk of game a lot of people won't like.

I believe it's one even Smurf dropped because of something like that.

I think the first half of Death Stranding is the better half... You're more isolated, more vulnerable, the distance between destinations feels longer, the terrain more dangerous, and the experience is more pure.

I love it myself but can see why some would drop it if I said games 40hrs and you got to play 15hrs before story beats etc start happening.

It's one I intend on returning to one day as it did have me interested but if I know there's something else waiting in the wings that I'm gonna click with straight away I can't justify hanging around on something I'm struggling with.

That’s quite enough of Picross 3D, thanks. This is another one of those games I got for dirt-cheap years ago (a fiver in 2013, according to the Blockbuster receipt that lives in the box) but didn’t really bother playing. Eight years later, the promise of ‘a mind-bending puzzler with a new dimension!’ on the box took my interest enough to finally give it a go. Immediately, I knew I was playing one of those Touch Generations games as it had that familiar understated-yet-charming presentation about it. That eased me in alongside the tutorials, and for the first hour-or-so I was thinking ‘geez, why didn’t I play this sooner’?

It soon lost it’s appeal though. Once the game really moved away from it’s Picross origins into (predictably) the third dimension, I just got a bit scunnered with it. For me, it all felt a bit ‘Tetris 2’. Even at the beginning of into the Medium difficultly round of levels, I found Picross 3D to be needlessly complicated, twitchy to control and altogether less compulsive than your plain old Picross. Once the initial appeal had disappeared, there wasn’t a moment where I thought I’d prefer to play Picross 3D than, say, Picross DS. In my opinion, Picross 3D is a weird idea that’s I don't think is executed all that well. And with that, I’m done.

Don't know if it makes me a heathen or not but I think I prefer 3D Picross, the 2nd one is one of my top 3DS games in fact, found it very hard to put down.

My stance on Picross is that after the superlative Picross DS it needed to go somewhere. More of the same wouldn't have worked, and years of forgettable Picross E and Picross S games have kind of proved me right? (They also have shoddy presentation and obvious lower budgets, so it's not a precise comparison.) Given that, I was happy enough with Picross 3D and its sequel. They obviously weren't as pure as Picross DS, but I thought they were executed well enough, and they still had good fun puzzles. The very last one still gives me nightmares though...

I've decided to drop Age of Calamity, I hadn't played it in a few weeks until last night and while it isn't a bad game the linear mission structure has wore me down. Who knows I might return to at a later time but right now I've got way more interesting games I could be playing instead.

I felt like I had to keep going with Age of Calamity for two reasons - first was because I knew that if I dropped it, I'd probably be done with it for good. Secondly was because I thought it kept teasing the end of the game. It went on a few hours and several missions longer than I thought it would.

~



Pokemon’s 25th Anniversary seemed like an good time to give Pokemon Battle Revolution a shot. It came out during that decade-or-so where I had no interest in Pokemon. I knew of it, but knew nothing about it, if that makes sense. I got it on clearance at GAME a couple of years ago, but I’d never played it. I went into it blind – I couldn’t have told you what it looked like let alone how it played.

My first impressions were fairly OK, not bad at all. The presentation is nice and the menus are easy to navigate and understand (…even if there’s a tutorial on how to the Wii remote to point, which you need to do anyway to click that option…). Big, chunky visuals too, looking pretty good by Wii standards. It’s gameplay didn’t hold many surprises; knowing all about how Pokemon Stadium worked on the N64, I understood that I’d probably be getting a stripped-back game without linking the DS Pokemon Diamond/Pearl games to my Wii. I used the rental Pokemon, and away I went.

Thing is, they’re pre-made squads of six, with no variability of their stats or moves. Even then, you can’t choose from the hundreds of different Pokemon. You’re prescribed six Pokemon like a doctor prescribes medicine, and you just need to make them fit into whatever battle you face. And battle is all you do. You defeat trainer after trainer until you get to the Colosseum boss, and then defeat them too. Rinse and repeat. That’s your whack.

There’s none of Pokemon Stadium’s loveable minigames, no Pokedex to delve into or Game Boy Tower-like bonus modes. The online has been offline for years too. I ended up looking up the internet and seeing if there was anything else to Battle Revolution, but no, there’s not. So, after a couple of hours, I’ve seen no point in carrying on.

It’s not quite as redundant as one of these Battleborn-style games that are completely unusable without an online connection. But all the same, I’ve not played many Nintendo games that are as pointless as Pokemon Battle Revolution is today.

I remember buying this on release day and being quite excited about it too, as you mentioned it was very barebones but at the time when I was playing Pokémon more than anything it was just what I needed. Spent a lot of my time online and it was the spectacle that it needed to be, really liked the overall look of it too, ultimately though it was very lazy and there's definitely no point to it these days.

I remember NGamer giving it 55% or something like that. Utterly gutting after Genius Sonority's previous outing, the superlative Pokémon XD. I didn't buy it and I'm not surprised that it's bum now.

Halo 1. Played it for a couple of hours but found it so boring. Even though I already knew the series had a reputation for being fairly generic shooters outside of their innovations at the time, I thought I'd like it since I liked Halo 3 when I was younger.

This has been a while coming.  Thus far I haven't got on with Horace's visuals, or voice acting, or plot, or set-pieces, or how he feels to control, or the platforming situations he finds himself in.  Given that glowing summary you'd think I'd have dumped it before now, but there's always been hints of something more interesting around the corner.  I mean, look at these screenshots!  (If you don't mind spoilers.)  Also the two boss fights I've come across were fun and clever, and there are moments of what I'd almost describe as genius: the way the boots power-up turns your entire understanding of the game around is inspired.

In the end, though, the promise of better couldn't overcome the sheer frustration of controlling the titular Horace through his levels.  The game definitely errs on the harder side, and while my favourite 2D platformer ever does the same, it does so with a story full of heart, lovely aesthetics, and crucially a great-feeling character.  Horace, clunky robot that he is, feels more like an obstacle than an aid.  With both Bowser's Fury and Mario Maker 2's campaign awaiting me, and games like Kaze and the Wild Masks out there to try, I feel like I can drop this one.  

(Wait Kaze is how much?)

Also, a quick round-up:
- Spiritfarer: I touched on this in my Every Switch Game Part 2 post, but basically this was bought as a chill game to play with The Lady, yet the building up of things to manage put a pressure on me that I didn't find chill at all.  The animation and sense of ghostly world were lovely, but the gameplay itself did nothing for us.
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons: I was holding out to get the last few benthics, that come out to play in March, until well into February; until I realised that I wasn't having fun doing so, and wasn't going to feel very rewarded when my museum was 'complete' (hadn't got all the artwork).  Still a very good game that I had a very good time with, long after I got fed up with New Leaf say.

Kaze does have a retail release

I’m disappointed to be packing Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble in. Before I bought it in January this was the only Kirby game that I’d never played, and that was only because it never got a European release. I’d always wanted it though, as I’d heard very good things about it. Those very good things I’d heard about it are probably true. Using an in-built accelerometer to move Kirby about and jump across platforms, you scoot around these Monkey Ball-like levels. It’s actually kind of reminiscent of Monkey Ball altogether, but it’s very much a Kirby game. Loads of the series’ most recognisable tunes, power-ups and bosses make appearances throughout the game, so someone like me – a grizzled young veteran of the Kirby series – immediately felt at home. If only it’s two biggest flaws were sorted out, I think it would be an extremely likeable and worthwhile game.

As suggested, I’m patching it for two reasons. The first one is the accelerometer and it’s motion controls. Unfortunately, these are just a little bit too sensitive on a Game Boy Colour and on a first-run 2001 Game Boy Advance, and unfortunately don’t work properly on a GBA SP or a DS/DS Lite. Tilt ‘n’ Tumble is a fairly demanding game considering it’s a kiddies platformer, and I felt that the games’ (ambitious) level design just left too little a margin for error with any slight movements in the wrong direction. I think this technological barrier could be overcome, but it’s ultimately my second reason that totally knackers it: it’s the Game Boy Colour and original 2001 Game Boy Advance themselves. Remember how neither of those had a backlit screen? Aye, that. With the likes of, say, Pokemon Gold/Silver or Super Mario Advance, you’d really have to sit under something well-lit, and keep your GBC/GBA and your are planted in that ‘sweet’ spot. So long as you didn’t move and kept the screen lit, you could just about manage in something like those. As you’re moving the whole Game Boy to play Tilt ‘n’ Tumble though, you simply can’t do that. Ergo, 90% of the time you can’t have those ideal conditions, and so it’s just too dark and unclear to see where you’re going in Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble. It’s an insurmountable obstacle for me in 2021 I’m afraid.

How disappointing! In fairness, Nintendo came a long way with their motion-controlled and backlit technology a few years later – just look at WarioWare Twisted for your proof. For me, it feels like Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble came too soon. If this were a 2005 GBA SP game, I think it would be genuinely class. However, seeing as it’s exclusively a 2000 GBC game that only works on limited and limiting hardware, it’s very regrettable to say that it’s going on the unfinished pile.

Need to get that backlit Game Boy Lite, mate!

Nah, that's a shame to hear. I've seen copies of this knocking about and I'm still somewhat tempted to give it a go, but I'm now less excited.

Fun Fact: At least two people saw that this thread had updated and presumed it was me dinghying MonHun Rise. It wasn't, but that is a real shame to read: it's a game I always wish I'd played, but maybe not now.

I AM DEAD:

 

I think this is close to being a lovely sedate experience that I could enjoy in breaks between meetings during the working day. It's a game where you have to peer inside items in the environment to find things, and that core works fine. I actually prefer trying to recreate specific cuts to find the game's gremlin-type creatures - I think that's pretty fun.

Unfortunately the trappings let it down big time. The two main disappointments are the story progression, which is told through holding the R button down until the Switch/controller vibrates and is really dull without superb writing to back it up; and the dog's voice. You are a dead museum curator, and you're helped by your dead dog. Unfortunately the dead dog's posh English voice made me want to resurrect the animal and kill it all over again. (And as you can imagine, I don't usually mind posh English voices.) She's terrible, and she has too big a chunk of the speaking to ignore; and without the voice acting of the other characters, I don't think the game would have enough to recommend it.

When a game's starting out with such a simple, one-note premise, it needs to absolutely nail that note and everything around it. Otherwise it isn't worth carrying on with. And that's I Am Dead: not worth carrying on with.

People with Stockholm Syndrome who didn't have access to Mario wrote:

Spyro is the best platforming mascot of the late 90s and these remasters show how well the games hold up!

dull
Actually worse than dull, because I can't even be arsed to 100% things, which I am genetically required to do with a 3D platformer - I even finished Donkey Kong 64 ffs. If it wasn't dull it was inexplicably difficult.