VideoGame_Discussion

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.

I beat Call of Duty 2 on the xbox 360

It is with a heavy heart that I say that my grandfather, who I previously stated had two strokes recently, has now passed on. He’s in a better place now, leaving my family to grieve and honor his memory. Thank you for reading.

SupremeSarna wrote:

Very sorry to hear that. My condolences to you and your family.

I’m sorry for your loss.

SupremeSarna wrote:

I beat Mega Man 4 .

A great Mega Man game for sure. The Charge Shot is a great addition to the series. I think they might’ve gone a little too hard on the Robot Masters, as I needed Energy Tanks to beat a few of them, both during the initial fight and the rematch. I’m not the biggest fan of there being two fortresses at the end, but it’s nice having a new faux-villain for a change.

My #22 is Resident Evil 7 Biohazard: All DLC.

https://imgbox.com/PhWZe0wu

This took me about as long as the main game to complete. Lots of different stuff here, with different playstyles and mechanics. 8/10

#23 for me is Metroid Fusion via

Easily my all-time favorite 2D Metroid title hands down and it has aged like fine wine here from the first time I played it over 2 decades ago. From the sense of wanderlust for completing the map and finding new areas and items to the slow churn anticipation of recovering your abilities one by one and the awesome music and boss fights to the airtight crisp controls, this is the complete Metroid package for me. I wish it had a NG+ cause the mere 3.5 hours it took me to run through this game was not nearly enough. Luckily, I'll be replaying Metroid Prime Remastered soon enough.

The first year I participated in this thread, I played through Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII for PSP. The game has a short campaign, only about 20% of which is interesting to a homecoming Final Fantasy VII, and a truly awful script, but it's chock full of bite-sized, portable-friendly content, and the combat is great. Flaws aside, I was incredibly pumped and pleasantly surprised to see that Square was giving the game the remake treatment; and unlike the rushed, buggy, and poorly-optimized remasters that so many of their classics get, they actually did a fantastic job with this one.

Number: 17
Full Title: Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion
Platform Played: Steam
Collection: N/A
Native Platform: Windows
Original Platforms: Windows, Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Applicable Badge: N/A

My backlog is starting to feel unruly again. With a week to go before Tears of the Kingdom drops, I still have a long way to go in Golden Sun, so that may be set aside for a while. On the home front, I've started exploring Just Shapes & Beats for Frank's Game of the Month thread, and I'm looking forward to diving into Rayman for the Retro Talkshop Thread.

I'll update this once Splatfest wraps tomorrow. I had relatively little time to play this weekend with the funeral and related errands taking up much of my time.

#37 down: Redfall on Xbox Series X. I would like to count this toward the You're Winner badge. It has a Metacritic user score of 2.9 for the version I played and caused Phil Spencer to say that he was upset with himself, so I feel like that category makes sense. It's even worse on Steam, where it has one of the lowest scores of all time.

That being said, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. Despite its flaws, it still has some of the things I love about Bethesda games (and Arkane games in particular). The gameplay is fun, the skills of my particular character made for some interesting scenarios, the guns provide options in terms of how you approach a situation. (The sniper rifle helped tremendously at times.) Some of the boss fights are pretty neat, and the environmental details are really interesting at times (random bodybags and candles as if a ritual is taking place in someone's office, a story about people being sacrificed to a monster whenever someone lights a red candle in a particular window, etc.). There are two human factions at war in one part of the game, so you can end up fighting them both and vampires, or you can lure some vampires over and get them to fight the vampires while you pick off whoever you want. The looter shooter aspect of it is nice, because you can keep doing side quests and looking for new guns when you start to hit a difficulty spike. (That being said, though, the bosses all have strategies that make them reasonably beatable even before you get more powerful, but a couple can be tough if you don't know what you're doing. The final boss fight wasn't bad once I figured it out, but it is pretty annoying.) One neat thing that I didn't expect is that, if you kill enough important vampires, a new enemy type stalks you in the middle of a red lightning storm, which was intense whenever it happened, particularly since it tended to happen in places where I had to quickly run for shelter.

I think this is going to go down as the most underrated game of the year for me. I feel like it suffered mostly because people put way too many expectations on it as needing to be a home run for Microsoft.

OP updated! I missed @Scott 's Pokémon Scarlet clear last month, so that's fixed now.

I beat Star Wars: The Clone Wars on my XB1. I love the backwards compatibility on this thing.
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Despite the name, you’ll find no mention of Ahsoka Tano or Asajj Ventress here. This game’s based on the Geonosis battle in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, not the 2D or 3D animated shows of the same name. I was delighted to hear Terrence “T.C.” Carson, Tom Kane, and Corey Burton playing the same characters they’re now famous for playing in those animated shows (Mace Windu, Yoda, and Count Dooku), but using the likenesses from the live-action film. The game has that trademark attention to lore that Lucasarts games often do—for example, the Wookiee planet Kashyyyk appears here three years before it would show up in Revenge of the Sith, since it was used in more obscure works prior to that movie. John Williams’ prequels score is used, too, and it’s brilliant as always.

The game has you piloting tanks, gunships, and walkers to destroy enemies on the battlefield, gaining ground against the Separatist Alliance and thwarting Count Dooku’s evil scheme to use old Sith tech to wipe out the Republic. The vehicles control decently enough and can shoot down enemy weapons from a good distance, which is fun to do. They aren’t all fun, sadly—the walker is really slow, and on-foot portions are incredibly janky and undercooked. You run around like a marionette when outside your vehicle, flailing your lightsaber all over the place in a vain attempt to hit something. The voice acting in the cutscenes is super quiet for some reason, and the story doesn’t make much sense.

The last thing to comment on is the difficulty. It’s jarringly hard to beat on normal difficulty, with enemies getting the better of you quite often. Some enemy shots will hit you dead-on without damaging you while other potshots will drain your health like nothing else, so it can be hard to know what attacks will kill you and what won’t. I just about blew a gasket when I fought the double Protodeka (which look nothing like Droidekas, thanks for asking), as they fire homing missiles that are difficult to outrun and can shred your health to zero in seconds. Winning this war ain’t a cakewalk, but at least it puts some midichlorians on your chest.

It’s a decent tie-in game, but a one-and-done for sure.

I beat Zelda II: The Adventure of Link . I loved the heck out of this game last year, but I haven't played it since last March. Going back to it now, I'm way worse than I was before, and I had to resort to more EXP grinding than I could in my prime. Hey, that happens when you step away from a practiced game for so long. I still had a great time, though!

That Shadow Link fight was intense. Bravo 👏

My #23 is Resident Evil 8 Village.

https://imgbox.com/rziILcuM

Fastest enemies in the entire series. I played hardcore and the opening village section took me about 2 hours to beat. Even though the game says 10 hours, my steam has 17 hours due to sections needing a few replays to get through. Great wrap up to my Resident Evil game series, excited to play something that's not shooting zombies in the head. 9/10

I beat Saint's Row 4 on the xbox1 (I beat this and TMNT shredders revenge with online partners, getting me the BFFL badge)

I beat Kirby: Canvas Curse , getting me my first DS clear.
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[imgt w=640 h=853]https://i.imgur.io/iqE9XjW_d.webp?maxwidth=640&sha...[/imgt]
[imgt w=640 h=853]https://i.imgur.io/IU3bK8f_d.webp?maxwidth=640&sha...[/imgt]

Canvas Curse is a great spin-off game. It has a ton of personality, weird but quality remixes of classic Kirby tunes, awesome graphics for an early DS game, fun gameplay, and a memorably deranged final boss. There are even time trials and multiple playable characters! I highly recommend it. There’s only one issue: the length. It’s a 2-hour game to beat the bare minimum, a 10-hour game to beat 100%. I feel like it’s an incomplete experience without getting 100%, but you have to play every stage five times to do that—that’s repetitive. Other than that, super game!

Funnily enough, I could've just used this for the Gamer's Day badge. Oh well, playing Wild Guns Reloaded five times is never a bad thing.

#24 Resident Evil 4 Remake

9/10

Minus some learning curve with tweaking the controls, I simply adored this remake to pieces. RE4 is my all time favorite RE game so I had high standards here and it almost exceeded my expectations in many ways. I love how they complimented most of the original game’s moments and environments with little nuanced extras from expanded locations within chapters or by just adding a new enemy or boss because reasons. Graphics wise, the RE engine is still one of the best graphics engines of late I feel and I played in performance mode with ray tracing on and it ran smooth as butter. Even the more annoying parts of the original game like babysitting Ashley didn’t feel as aggravating here for some reason and her sections with some new additions were pretty cool too. They also made some moments that I found scary and eerie in the OG game even more terrifying like the first encounter with the regenerators. And the replay value I feel is higher than ever with NG+ and collecting all the weapons and upgrades along with the merchant’s shooting gallery and mercenaries mode. I’ll definitely be returning again sooner than later for another play through. Alas,, Capcom continues its trend of being the poster child for how to do remakes just so right.

Finally got my first of May, been working on a few concurrently
Crysis 3 on the
25th overall, already have badge

I finally got around to playing and beat the first Crysis game like 2 years ago and had the other 2 as well from I think GwG so I beat 2 last year and finished off 3 tonight. Game was decent, they all felt generally similar, with 1 being the most unique I suppose since it starts in the jungles of North Korea while 2/3 are mostly in NYC. Don't ask me to give you a rundown on the story though, b/c in 3 it's confusing as all get out, not that 2 is much better. But it's an FPS, do we really care about the story that much? I generally don't.

I wanted to beat another long running (for me) FPS as well tonight, but I have a 4TB drive connected to my XSX which I've had a while as it was on my initial X1 and then X1X and I have played a lot of games off of it. Well the last 2 times I was playing this other title the system lost connection to the drive and thus the game crashed. So that wasn't fun and I need to look into that and get it resolved. I did try to move the game to the internal storage, but it failed 3 times in that process, so something is up with the drive or cable. I did switch to a different cable and a different USB port on the console and it seemed to be okay, but then my time with the TV ended so I haven't been able to investigate further. At least I could just redownload it onto another drive or the internal if I need to, but I'll be wanting to fix or replace that drive as I generally have like 140+ games on it that and as mentioned have played a lot from it. When it was down, I only had like 15 games on the internal 1TB.

Beat legend of zelda link between worlds on the 3ds this morning and gets me the first half of the hylian hero badge

#38: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on PS5. I would like to count this toward the Hyrulian Hero badge please. This was really good. The fast travel option (which I didn't notice until probably halfway through) was much appreciated and will make getting the rest of the collectibles far less painful than was the case with Fallen Order. Compared with the previous game, the map is still annoying, but the combat is better, and the story was engaging by the end. Graphically, it looks really solid, and it played smoothly as well.

#11 Mass Effect: Andromeda (PS4). Pales in comparison to the original trilogy of course, but overall not a terrible game.

Updating... Please save new clears until I've finished...

Done! I would've put River City Ransom EX for me, but I can't be bothered to beat it since it's garbage.

Since you're done Sarna I'll post now.
Got my 2nd of May and 26th overall, 1st
Mighty Doom
I almost want to count this towards You're Winner - I'll explain.

I played a similar game to this a few years ago on my phone that I can't recall the name of currently, but it was an auto-shooter and it hooked me, but it was great with progression and you would hit level gates but it always felt like you were slowly making progress, earning upgrades and moving forward, the grind was there but was fair, in Might Doom they are so MF'n stingy with upgrades the progression is nearly broken. It was so bad that I hate that I liked that style of game and got sucked into it, I hate myself for spending $$ on the game too, but I pretty much had to.

Here's a quick premise of the game, you are the Doom Slayer and can equip a helmet, chest, gloves and boots, as well as you need a main weapon that you fire constantly, then a heavy weapon that is on a 10 second cool down that resets each floor, plus an auto-canon on your shoulder and an ultimate weapon that takes kills to earn, generally I could fire it about every 8-11 floors. You start a run with your gear and get up to 11 'random' perks from 3 options each time you level up. You have to clear each floor to move forward and some foes will get stunned momentarily before dying such that you can glory kill them for health. The 5s floors (5, 15, 25, 35) you get 'an offer' of either healing some or 1 of 3 minor boosts (crit, fire rate, damage) and after you beat the bosses on floor 10, 20, 30 you get either a spinning wheel or a perk and curse option like melee damage boon for ranged damage curse. Your main weapon can be the assault rifle, shotgun, plasma gun, burst rifle or chain gun; heavy can be rocket launcher, gauss cannon, super shotgun or ballista; shoulder canons can be acid, ice, electric, explosive or fire and lastly the ultimate can be the chainsaw, crucible sword, BFG9k or unmaker. All pieces of gear come in 4 levels, common, uncommon, rare, epic and 3 of a lower level can be merged into a higher rank. Floor 40 is the final boss and if you die you can revive once per run via watching an ad, or using some gems currency or 2 different floppy disk things you can get. Every dead enemy also drops a base currency used to upgrade your dude or gear as well as about a 0.0001% chance of getting a piece of gear - no joke I made likely legit over 2 hundred runs and got maybe 20 things, it was BS.
So I started playing and got 'stuck' on a few worlds where I needed to gain XP it seemed to progress, then in April they did a month long Easter event with daily missions vs. bunny zombies and a perk tree you could unlock. That's when I spent $7 (thankfully from Google Rewards so not my actually $$) to access the 2nd track of upgrades for that month. By the time it was over I was maxed at level 60, had my preferred chain gun to a green (uncommon) max of 40, my rocket launcher at blue 60 max, BFG9k blue 60 max and a blue shoulder canon at 60 max. I also had a helmet, chest and gloves I preferred all at blue 60 max, but my boots were only green 40. And. I. Could. Not. Beat. World 9.
I could absolutely blitz 1-7 with this setup and generally beat 8, sometimes having issues, but mostly not. I nearly quit then, frustratingly stuck on 9, but May started and a new monthlong event and I eventually earned all of the free upgrades and got a different shoulder canon up to magenta epic and started to push it's level above 60, I also got a new set of gloves that I didn't love to epic and pushed above 60... and still couldn't get World 9. I could finally get to the floor 40 boss a few times, but floors 31 and up were brutal. They also raised the Slayer's max level to 70 and I eventually hit that peak and still no dice, it was clear that I needed a stronger weapon. I had the shotgun to blue and around level 48, but it's shorter range and slow fire was tough. I also got different boots to blue and hit level 45.
So I broke down last night and bought the May pass (again for $7 and again with Rewards funds). It included like a dozen keys to chests that I opened, hoping for another green or grey (common) chain gun to merge up... and I got jack squat. But I also got like 200+ of these gems to redeem towards chests and S.O.A.B. I got the grey chain gun I needed. Since then, with the gun now upgraded to around level 55, as well as pushing the canon and gloves into the low 70s, I finally had enough damage and health to beat World 9. When the May update dropped, they released a new World, 10 and it's like World 5, with a slightly different progression layout, but since it wasn't part of the original release, I'm counting this dumpster fire as completed.

All that said, I really don't think this is You're Winner worthy, b/c the game is well made, it's just total trash in terms of stingy with upgrades that are 100% required to beat World 9 - which really is a mobile game's way of doing things. I took 1 run at World 10 and got to floor 13 (of only 20) so I think I'll keep playing this disgusting game until I max out a few of the gear pieces I'm using and beat World 10 - I 100% will NOT buy any more passes, I will not play it further if they add an 11th world. I gave it a 1/5 stars on the play store and a nasty review, it's just a crap game that hooked it's claws into me and I'm so glad I finally beat it. I'm looking forward to NOT playing too much more of it b/c I for sure put a LOT of time into it across the past 7+ weeks, when normally mobile games lose my interest in 1-2 weeks tops.

#10 - Super Mario World

Beat all but Special Road. I hadn't beat this since...best guess...early teens. Felt great to go back through it. I even remembered most of the secret paths to levels. Crazy how good our memory can be when we're younger. I could memorize much more back then...
Took about 7 hours.

image

Now time to finish up FFIX this month. I just hit disc 3 this morning.

I bought an NES on Saturday with about 13 games, so I beat one of them to get the system out of the way early. It was Batman Returns .
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It’s a good if not great Konami beat’em up based on the controversial Tim Burton film Batman Returns. While there’s no Danny DeVito biting a reporter’s nose off, Christopher Walken overacting, Catwoman tazer-kissing a man to death, or Alfred Pennyworth having the hots for a woman half his age, it’s still a decent summation of the film. As a beat’em up, it’s not as versatile as Final Fight or something similar, and it gets repetitive pretty quickly. The later stages are super hard, but with enough persevere, you’ll save Gotham from the cold-blooded animal that is The Penguin.

This gets me halfway to the Quest for Peace badge. It looks like I’ll have to return to (sigh) River City Ransom EX if I want that darn Pile Drivin’ badge.

I beat enter the domminatrix (Saint's Row 4 DLC) on the xbox 1 I also beat South Park the Stick of Truth on the xbox1

My #24 is Resident Evil 8 Village: Shadows of Rose DLC

https://imgbox.com/Y6MNK63C

Didn't care for this one a whole lot, which I can't say why without spoilers. It just had some content that I thought was dumb. Being able to dodge at the end was nice though. 7/10

incubus421 wrote:
Did you do the haunted house shortcut? It was one of the first ones I ever found out.

FFIX? Ahhh, been on my to play list for a long time now.

I beat Monster Party . It was okay. You go around killing enemies and bosses as either the human, Mark, or the pterodactyl, Bert. They have different attacks and attributes. Bert is almost always the better pick for any situation, sadly. A few stages are frustrating or not thought out super well, but I managed. The ending is weird. I probably won't play this again, but at least now I can say I'm more skilled than JonTron.

nonamesleft wrote:

A lot of the Haunted Houses have secret paths, but I assume you're talking about the one in Donut Plains that leads to the 'Top Secret Area' level. I made tremendous use out of that spot as a kid!

Believe it or not, I have never played more than 5 hours of FFIX growing up. 23 years later, and I'm just now getting around to beating it...

I beat Locoroco .
[imgt w=640 h=480]https://i.imgur.io/KbSpUhK_d.webp?maxwidth=640&sha...[/imgt]

It’s a positive, quirky game where you tilt the world and pop colorful blobs into the air, scaling hills and bashing enemy Mojas in the process. Sometimes you’ll spring off bounce pads, other times you’ll catch a gust of wind to fly away, but you’ll always be singing a merry tune in a goofy, alien language. There are walls that can fall away to reveal secret characters to obtain, so your goal is to explore more than anything. It can get a little tedious after a while, so I’m glad it only has five worlds. It’s a pleasant little game, but I’ve had my fill for now. I bought the sequel at the same time, so I’ll get around to that someday.

3rd of May, 27th overall, 2nd
Rayman
Badge: 1st towards Hop 'n Bop

Beat this for Ren2k's RTT-GotM selection mainly. I hadn't jumped into a selection from there too much in the past few months and this one seemed worthwhile. I had tried my ROM for this on my last PC and it didn't run great, it ran pretty well on this newer machine and I took full advantage of save states as the game is generally pretty challenging and when I use save states I get dumb and go for a zero death run basically. That likely lengthened my time spent but the game was solid, it looked good on my monitor, full of bright and vibrant colors. Had some decent music and lots of cool mechanics sprinkled in. The platforming was more difficult than any foes or bosses really, outside of maybe 1 or 2. They were largely pattern matching, though earlier ones mixed up those patterns more vs. some of the final ones.
I might look to play some other main Rayman titles that I have, since I have Rayman 2, 3, the GBA ones, Legends and Origins.

4th of May, 28th overall, 9th
Doom (2016)
Already have the 2nd Amendment badge

I got this game with my original Xbox 1 way back in 2016 not long after it came out, but while it was only 1 of a few games I had, I really didn't play it much back then. And so it sat for a long while until this year when I wanted to focus some on non-GP titles (it is on GP, but I technically own it as well). Anyhow I jumped back into it several weeks ago and slowly made progress. I had apparently picked the 'Hurt me Plenty' level of difficulty which is more akin to hard and I didn't want to change it. So a few sections I needed to play 2, maybe 3-4 times, but in general I got pretty adept at it. Taking advantage of the staggered foes and constantly moving were key and then busting out the chainsaw when ammo got low.

The final boss was a little bit of a challenge, but after about my 5th attempt I got it. I also wanted to finally beat it to move forward onto Eternal, so I hope to get that a whirl sometime later this year.

Slickriven wrote:

I played that during the 2020 quarantine. I haven't played any other DOOM games, but I recall liking it. It was quite difficult, though.

I beat PAC-MAN with a high score of 44,970. Just shy of 45k. I didn't like PAC-MAN as a kid, but I've been coming around to it recently. I quite enjoyed my time with this. What I didn't like was trying to get it running. The NES I just bought on Saturday is a tempermental beast, and booting PAC-MAN gave me by far the most trouble out of all the carts I've tried. Very annoying!

Is it just me, or is Clyde particularly aggressive in the Tengen version of the game? It's not just me, right?

SupremeSarna wrote:

I cut my teeth back in the early 90s on the original Doom, Final Doom, Ultimate Doom, and Doom2. I also beat the PC port of Doom64 in '21 and the first title again in '19 for Frank's GotM club. It's a series I love, especially as it reminds me of my dad since he enjoyed those early Doom games on PC.

I got my 5th of May, 29th overall and 1st
Shock Troopers: 2nd Squad
Badge - I'm thinking I might seek to beat this 4x more times as it was generally fun, quick and there are 3 different paths, so I sort of want to try the other 2 at least.

This is also my 300th game since 2020, or so - I know some folks blew that out of the water nearly last year alone, but I had been recording my beat titles for this thread in a basic text document and recently decided to put them into a spreadsheet for better tracking/metrics and with a few others from before I joined this thread, I'm at 300 now. Kinda blows my mind that I've beat so many, if anyone cares I got 66, 120, 80 and 29 recorded in '20, '21, '22, '23 (so far) and that's 295, but I had beat 5 GamePass games in the later part of '19 that I also had recorded and thus included.

For this game, I was going through my still incomplete console list and picking a title to pursue for each when I got to NeoGeo. I decided to try to play something and my emulation wasn't setup, so I got that working and ended up giving Shock Troopers a go. Well 10 credits and maybe 30+ mins later I beat the mountain path. Game plays like a twin-stick shooter, but only with 1 stick, so if you hold down the fire button you remain aiming in that 1 of 8 direction and can move all around which gets a touch odd to control. You can also dodge-roll with B and fire a sub-weapon (grenade, rocket launcher, etc) with C. In a few sections I did great with not taking damage, but in others not so much. Game is kind of cool with like 8 different characters whom actually perform differently and have different sub-weapons. You can also select just 1 or 3 per credit, allowing you to try them out, it felt like they shared a 'normal' health bar as I would burn through the damage limit, per person, in that mode a bit faster vs. if I selected just the 1 character. Regardless, with the diff characters and paths, it surely lends itself to replaying, and as an arcade game at heart, that tracks. Only needing 10 credits, I thought, wasn't all that bad, since I was likely a touch iffy learning the controls and some boss fights or segments were tough, but apparently not as BS as some quarter-munching titles are.

I beat this on my PC via a ROM, but it's on my mini, so I think I will do at least 1 run on there to see how different that feels, could try 2 since there's on-device controls and I have a controller for it and they are different.
Once (if) I beat it 4x more times I'll let you know Sarna and you can give me the badge.

Slickriven wrote:

Wowzer! That's a lot of games, amd certainly a momentous occasion! Go out on the town top celebrate.