VideoGame_Discussion

I beat Game & Watch Gallery 3 yesterday, but I intend to keep playing to get the remaining stars.

My #20 is Resident Evil 6.

https://imgbox.com/i2DA33Ga

At first I didn't like this game. But once I embraced the ridiculousness of it's settings, plot and enemy types, then I began to relax and have fun on this Micheal Bay mess of a game. The story is told from four points of view with none of them being particularly good. Leon is over the top sky scraper leaping. Chris plays more like a Call of Duty zombies. Jake is mostly boss fights from the other campaigns. Ada is doing spy things in submarines. None of it is horror except the enemies you face. The inventory system is the worst of the series. 7/10

I beat Mega Man 5. This one's pretty rough compared to MM6. It has a jerkier framerate, a good number of the weapons are really situational, and I can't tell at a glance with Robot Master is weak to which weapon. Enemies seem to drop lives really frequently here, which I don't remember happening in the others. Throw in an uninspired plot hook (the good guy Proto Man is actually eeeevil? Gasp!) and two final castles, and you have a good but not great MM game.

#9 on 4/25
Oregon trail

Ran through a DOS version of Oregon Trail today. 1409 points, just stock pile food and run it!
image

I haven't been paying much attention to the Evercade Game of the Month promotions, but I decided to try out this month's entry on the Evercade EXP to put it through its paces. I was completely taken off guard by how fun and addicting this bite-sized, retro arcade-style game is. Every time I have five minutes to spare, I've been picking up Donut Dodo just to put the diabetic bird through its paces. I finally made it all the way through the game today.

Number: 16
Full Title: Donut Dodo
Platform Played: Evercade VS
Collection: N/A
Native Platform: Evercade
Original Platforms: Windows, Switch
Applicable Badge: Quarter Muncher (1/2)

My update is pretty much the same as it's been all month: I'm still working on Crisis Core and Golden Sun. I put hours upon hours into Crisis Core's side missions, and now, I'm less than halfway through the game, have beaten the game's superboss, and am expecting a cakewalk through the rest of the game's so-called challenges. We'll see.

#22- Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros 3 via

I forgot how much fun SMB3 was. It really set the template and precedence for my favorite SMB 2D game of all time, Super Mario World. And it looked great on the GBA with all of the enhanced colors, sprites and even Mr Martinet adding in some audible Mario VO work.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

Did you play all the e-Reader stages? It was really cool that Nintendo packed those in. They're way more interesting than the main game IMO, and they feel like they were made in the mid-2000s rather than 1990. They really play around with new ideas for level design.

Are the e-reader stages available via emulation via Switch? Cause that’s how I played it.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

Yep! They revived them on Wii U and then ported that version over to Switch Online.

Interesting. I’ll have to go back and find them. Thanks

Can you just go straight to the E-readers stages? Or do you have to play a certain amount of the game first?

I remember being amazed by the idea of the E-reader levels when I first learned about them, and wanted to try them for the longest time. But, I didn't get around to it until after Mario Maker had been out for a little while, so the new ideas they tried out really didn't seem all that special anymore.

You can go straight to the extra stages. They have their own separate world map.

I’m willing to count those as DLC, since that’s more or less what they were on the GBA.

Anybody else not able to access the spreadsheet?

I'm late to posting it, but I beat Pokemon Scarlet earlier this month.

legendrko25 wrote:
Got it sorted. I had to create a copy and use it to replace the original, but I forgot to reenable the viewing permissions.

Here's an update to some games I beat and didn't talk about:

Game & Watch Gallery 3
[imgt w=1280 h=720]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FuxgaBrakAIoWQF?format...[/imgt]
An awesome, nostalgic collection of updated Game & Watch games featuring Mario and co. Still super fun and challenging. The best game is a tossup between Egg and Turtle Bridge, with the worst game being Greenhouse. If you have NSO, give this game a try!

Battletoads Arcade
[imgt w=2048 h=1536]https://i.imgur.com/9wOPvQu.jpg[/imgt]
A fun, surprisingly gorey arcade game starring the Teenage Muta--I mean, the Battletoads. Beat'em ups get pretty samey for me, so I'm glad this one wasn't too long. It's got nice visual presentation and some good humor.

Crashmo
[imgt w=1536 h=2048]https://i.imgur.com/FlAUQFz.jpg[/imgt]
A much, much harder sequel to Pushmo. Most fans don't seem to appreciate this game, and I can understand why. The game is pretty good overall, but the new puzzle system requires much more thought and experimentation than all other Pushmo games. I noticed that this game has a problem with tutorials--they'll introduce a mechanic by explaining how it works and then immediately throwing you headfirst into a legit puzzle that requires the taught trick. I almost had to look up one of the first stages because they did such a bad job of explaining what I was supposed to do in it. Even when I unlocked bonus worlds, I lost interest when the credits rolled.

Paper Airplane Chase
[imgt w=2048 h=1536]https://i.imgur.com/Lci9X2e.jpg[/imgt]
A simple DSiware game that lets you play a WarioWare Inc. minigame endlessly, or in a few time attack stages, or against a friend. I scored over 200 points on Endless Mode and cleared every Time Attack stage. It's fun, but I prefer Bird & Beans.

Kirby's Dream Land
[imgt w=1280 h=720]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FuxgZ-laEAEMvM5?format...[/imgt]
Happy birthday, Popopo (that is, Kirby's conceptual name)! For his 31st anniversary, I figured I'd devote a few minutes to beating his first game. It's a good one, though obviously not his magnum opus. I beat both the Main Game and the Extra Game in under an hour. Did you know that by his own admission, the hermit crab Coner is believed to be the first enemy Masahiro Sakurai created for the Kirby series?

#36 down: Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge on PSVR2.

I know people complained about wanting more light saber stuff in this, but I enjoyed getting to use all of the different guns (especially the storm trooper ones). The graphics are decent, the characters are interesting, and the gameplay was pretty fun. The way the guns handle is about as good as I've experienced in VR before. You can also play darts with darts that you aim and let go with something like a rocket propulsion system, eat tacos, use a hoverpack, etc. This was a solid game. I don't think it's worth full retail (at $49.99), but, since I got it free with points at GameStop, I'm happy.

I beat Club Penguin: Game Day

I had this game many years ago, bought it about a year after release to get all the stamps on Club Penguin, and I 100% beat the game back then. I recently found it at my parents' house when I was flying back from a business conference a few weeks ago, and decided to replay it for nostalgia. Club Penguin shut down 6 years ago, so this this one of the only pieces of media keeping the franchise preserved (There are also 2 DS titles)

It's just a minigame collection like most Wii shovelware titles. It has a story mode where you pick a team and you have to conquer all of the other areas of Club Penguin Island for your team during the Game Day party. You do this by going to an area and playing a selection of 4 minigames, then 1 final microgame to take over the area. Once you have all 6 areas on the island, you win.

Simple enough game, You can beat it in around an hour

I beat Battle Garegga (arcade), Final Fight (arcade) and Aliens (arcade) recently. Hooray for unlimited continues! Never would have been possible when I was a kid.

I'll be updating the thread Sunday night instead of Friday or Saturday. Makes sense to conclude the month without a minor update in between.

@Staraang Are you officially joining this thread? If so, I'll need a complete list of your gaming consoles.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker -
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yes I did complete all 3 chapters

Time Gal - Retroid ( )
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Fire Emblem Engage -
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I beat Saints Row:Gat Outta Hell on the xbox360

I beat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge on the xbox1

SupremeSarna wrote:

Yeah sounds good. I have NES, SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, TG-16, GB, GBC, GBA, DS, N64, PS1-3, Xbox 360, Xbox Series S. Are arcade systems just generally under ‘arcade’ or the different arcade systems?

@ErickRPG Nice! Solid. Keep those pics coming. :)

How was Fire Emblem Engage?

And how was Treasure Tracker? I've been wanting to try that one for a long time.

DragonmasterDX wrote:
Nice.

Haven't seen you on here in awhile. How's it going?

Scott wrote:
Sweet. How was it? I'm not even close to playing Scarlet/Violet. (I'm still only a couple hours into Shield 😅)

My #21 is Resident Evil 7 Biohazard.

https://imgbox.com/7FFgrk1u

A reboot for the series, this game does away with it's franchise's previous characters in favor for a new guy, Ethan Winters. It's gameplay is much slower than the last few games that allows more horror moments. I was jump scared at this game a few times which hasn't happened in a previous RE game. Normal was much too easy, I wish there was a harder difficulty option available at the beginning. 8/10

Staraang wrote:

Are you playing from an official arcade unit or a different platform (i.e. MAME)? MAME is categorized as MAME, Steam Deck is categorized as , and acade machines are categirized as .

SupremeSarna wrote:

It’s MAME.

Got my 6th of April, 1st , 24th overall
Fire Electric Pen
Badge - earns me the Localize one, with Gals Panic SS as my first

Was doing some more ROM management and Launchbox didn't know what this game was, well it's one of those 'Don't touch the Walls' style games and that means I really didn't need to read/understand Japanese to play it. There are only 6 boards to beat and I did alright and beat the first after not too many tries... and I was hooked. I resorted to save states b/c you control the pen with the analog stick, which isn't the best with accuracy it has a rather tight time limit as well as ZERO forgiveness, so instead of playing it legitimately I used states and a few too many sections I have absolutely zero faith that someone could clear them without touching a wall/obstacle and do it fast enough to beat the time and not go crazy. I even had to look up how to get RetroArch to slow down a few sections b/c the final board was beyond BS. I only used that in like 3 sections, 1 I think it was nearly mandatory because of the lack of precision with an analog stick while the other 2 was more of me getting tired of playing it.
It's not a game I would recommend unless you wanted to use save states, heck a section of 2 is so tight and precise with moving things that there's zero chance I would have made it there over and over without save states and Not thrown my controller in frustration, the window was tiny. It's apparently related to some bonkers Japanese TV show and there's an announcer yelling out as you progress as well as some intense music, so at one point I muted it especially with all the times I was failing it just got too annoying to listen to.

I'm updating the OP now. Please refrain from posting until it's done...

Thread updated! As always, correct me if I made any errors--it's 1 AM over here, so things may slip past my fatigued eyes.

April is squared away, bringing rise to May. I'll run down a few of the stats for Beat a Game this month:
-I tallied 92 clears this month, absolutely dominating February and March, and coming close to January! A couple of those were posted-too-late March clears, but my policy is to lump all posted clears into the current month, regardless of when they technically took place. So if there are any stragglers for April, I'm puttin' 'em in May.
-Our top player this month was SupremeSarna, who played a number of short games on 3DS to get 14 clears. @TalonJedi87 was very close as well. He beat 12 games and had a real penchant for Nintendo Switch Online the past few weeks.
-The top badge earner this month was SupremeSarna as well, with five badges (though that's only because I forgot to apply a badge months ago and put it in April). @Bleed_DukeBlue won four badges and @Yoshi earned three, which are numbers I love to see!

Let's keep things going strong as summer gears up! 'Til then, nighty-night, everybody!

nonamesleft wrote:

Fire Emblem Engage was really good, not Three Houses good, but solid. I found myself enjoying the past character emblems and chosing who gets which. I found myself also wanting more, that I even considered the $30 expansion pass. I think if it ever went 50% off I'd get it and play again to get even more emblems.

Treasure Tracker was decent. I had never beaten it even though I've played it on both WiiU and 3DS. So I finally stuck to it and got to the end. It's not the first 3DS game I'd recommend but I'd certainly put it in the recommend list.

ErickRPG wrote:
Thanks for the feedback.

Have you played Fire Emblem Awakening? I beat that one not too long ago. Put a nice amount of time into it. Around 60-80 hours. Enjoyed it. If you played it, how would you compare Engage to Awakening?

nonamesleft wrote:

I think Fire Emblem has gotten better. Meaning the Switch ones are even better than the 3DS ones. I liked Awakening, but I went from in the DS one maxing out EVERY character (I loved optional grinding) to not doing it in Awakening. Because with the marraiges/kids there were just too many characters for me. This one is just about right. I picked my 12 characters and went with them. If I play again I'll try to play as many new characters I didn't play the first time.

ErickRPG wrote:
I hear what you're saying about Awakening. I liked the mechanic of passing on parents' abilities to their kids, but I was spending so much time trying to get specific abilities passed down. It was fun, and it was time well spent in terms of enjoying what the game has to offer, but it was very time consuming. Cool to have certain units with certain abilities though.

For April, counted for May I suppose:

Ice Cream Surfer (PS4): Quick shmup, nothing too spectacular or fancy. Beat it with all the characters and got all the trophies.

Null Drifter (PS4): Quick game, can get hectic in later levels. Got the plat.

Days Gone (PS4): Wow, really liked this one. Everyone was kind of a douchebag, but even so I genuinely cared about the characters. Driving the motorcycle was great and dealing with the enemies was interesting, even if I'm not a big fan of zombie games. I hope they get the change to make a sequel or something at some point. Kinda silly Sony shut it down just because it didn't sell 15 billions, lol. Got the plat.

Need for Speed Heat (PS4): I'm definitely a NFS fan, lol. Really had a good time escaping cops and racing in Miam... eh, whatever the city was called. The main plot isn't half bad, kinda like an old F&F movie. Having to tune the cars to work in different types of races was interesting too, although once you have access to the best parts and cars it's just a matter of throwing money at the mechanic and going fast.


Aside from that, I've played some Astral Chain and Skyward Sword, but got distracted and haven't finished those.

As my 50th clear, I beat Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure .
[imgt w=1536 h=2048]https://i.imgur.com/5Q82FOR.jpg[/imgt]

It's a great rhythm game by SEGA. The stylish Parisian art thief Phantom R and his dog Fondue must solve an growing mystery surrounding his father's disappearance, a possibly-resurrected Napoleon Bonaparte with an evil army, a mysterious symbol appearing on various magical treasures, and more, all while dodging the authorities and supporting a new friend. The story and characters are fairly memorable, even if some moments are a little stupid or pointless in the long run. As for gameplay, you spend a lot of time in visual novel-mode, tapping the Touch Screen to find collectibles, recording sound effects for use around the overworld, and solving minor sound-themed puzzles. When you're not doing that, you get to play rhythm minigames that usually advance the story. They use various inputs, like button controls, swiping with the stylus, and even gyro controls. The tunes are catchy, but I'll have to listen to them again to really memorize them. It's satisfying knocking out Napoleon's knights with single palm strikes, quickly sneaking around museums at night, and kicking a soccer ball to pummel a bratty child detective.

All that stuff is good, and the game is really cool because of it. But I do have some critiques. A fair number of the minigames are just annoying. The difficulty curve is pretty forgiving until about Chapter 7, when this go off the rails. Before you know it, the game expects you to divide your attention between two sides of the screen with little time to breathe or quickly flip between six different inputs. (The poodle minigames especially are abysmal.) You can spend coins to use items to enhance your performance, which I strongly encourage in the later chapters. The most obnoxious part is the grading system. You hit the right notes to fill the groove bar from E to A, and any mistake drops it down at least one grade. So you can still get an A if all your mistakes happen early on, but a late mistake is basically a guaranteed B. I can handle that, but the real kicker is the high score system. You can earn an A and still have a low score, but you can also get a D or C and have a high score, depending on when you messed up. The game prioritizes your score over your grade, so a worse letter grade can overwrite your better one. Did I mention some level content is locked behind getting all As? So if you're not careful, you can play yourself into a corner, getting an extremely high score but making just one or two mistakes at the end to net yourself a B. Now you have to outperform your amazing score to replace it. I had to reset the game without saving in order to feasibly get an A on a few difficult minigames, which isn't how this system should work. Your score and overall grade should be saved separately so average players can prioritize getting As to unlock that final bonus chapter, while dedicated players can keep trying to top their scores without fear that the bonus chapter unlock could be affected.

Tapping everything on the screen to find important--and missable--trinkets is a tad irritating when you just want to get a move on. The art style is one part nice and another part cheap. It looks like a lower-budget Prof. Layton game, which is nice until you see Marie's character portrait, as it in particular looks amateurish. The voice acting is adequate but can be flat at times, and there are countless moments where the actor says something completely different from the subtitle--as an example, every time Napoleon says "hare" in the subtitles, his VA says "rabbit," perhaps because they didn't think Americans knew what hares were. Sometimes entire sentences will be changed, shortened, or restructured, which is distracting and just looks sloppy.

Overall, I give it an 8/10. Not amazing, but compelling and stylish enough to play all 18 hours of it and nab every A rank. I recommend buying it on the 3DS eShop while it's still $20, because if you don't, tracking down a rare cartridge will run you a fortune! ...Huh? The eShop's closed? Good luck, then!

Just finished Just Shapes & Beats on Steam for the Game Club.

Really fun and unique rhythm game. Highly recommend it for anyone who's a fan of electronic music.