Father's Day: 52 games/year Challenge

[Luigison]

Between now on Father's day 2015 post 52 games played in said time period.  Each game must include at least one screen shot and at least a three sentence review.  Bonus points for playing with or in view of your dad and/or your son/daughter.  In the event of a tie the community (Fungi Forum members) will decide the winner.  Said winner may receive a game or equally valued merchandise totally less than $60 at the discretion of Luigison.   Feel free to post games as you play them or wait until the end to post them all.  In the event that games cannot be beaten, a minimum of 8 hours will be required.  Proof of game play may be required. 

[BriGuy92]

In the event that games cannot be beaten, a minimum of 8 hours will be required.  Proof of game play may be required. 

The goal is not just to play, but to finish 52 games, then?

[Luigison]

The goal is not just to play, but to finish 52 games, then?

Yes.  Sorry for not saying that directly.  You must finish/beat each game or at least play it for 8 hours.  Proof may be required. 

[bobbysq1337]

Time to fire up Action 52.

(Actually, I'll probably play something that someone could tolerate 8 hours of, maybe take some time to set up streaming software and stream the challenge on my Twitch channel that I've just used to screw around with the Minecraft streaming feature a few times.)

[bobbysq1337]

A bit late, but my first game is done, Sonic Colors. I was slowed down by not having time to do the final boss, so the next game will be shorter, and probably will be Super Mario Bros.

Have some 1080p screenshots

Edit: Wait, they're actually in 576p?

[BriGuy92]

Woo! Two weeks later and I've finished A Link Between Worlds. It's the first Zelda game that I've played in a while, and it certainly didn't disappoint. Well, except for the plot. "Ganon did the thing! Link, quick, do the thing!" And then it went and got really interesting right at the end, which was odd, but it was a satisfying conclusion all the same. The music was great, my favorite being the fantastic remix of the Dark World track from A Link to the Past (which, interestingly enough, sounds a lot like the one from Brawl). All in all, it was great fun. Now I'm gonna play some short games to get myself caught back up.

Anyway, here's some proof!

[CrossEyed7]

Finally beat a game! Shovel Knight, after 6 1/2 hours:



Stats:





I was a Kickstarter backer, so I've been looking forward to it (and telling other people to look forward to it) for a while, and it really did live up to the hype for me. Music is perfect. I'm not usually a huge fan of NES-ish graphics, but these are great (granted, they did take some liberties -- adding four colors to the palette, ignoring sprite flicker, using big sprites that would have had to be background graphics on the NES, and using a lot of parallax scrolling). Shovel-pogoing is really fun. I'd really like to see them go through with making a SNES-style sequel next.

Minor gripes: Shovel-pogo seemed a bit too easily triggered sometimes (that may just be an issue with the GamePad's D-pad). When I first started, it took me a little while to get the hang of the game's visual vocabulary for whether a pit was bottomless or not. ...Can't think of any others right now.

Now I need to go burn through some short games.

[CrossEyed7]

Game 2: Completed all puzzles in Picross e4, including the bonus puzzles unlocked by having save data from the first three Picross-e games.

The Picross-e games are all really nice, and e4 is the best. It's the first one to finally have puzzles bigger than 15x15 (only up to 20x15, and only a few, but still). My personal favorite feature, though, (which was actually first added in e3, now that I check) is the ability to use Free rules on every puzzle. In Normal rules, putting a mark on an incorrect square gets immediately marked as incorrect and gets you a time penalty. In Free rules, you don't know if you're right until you finish. I like that better both for the increased challenge and because I have times when my hand slips or I'm not paying attention for a second and mark a square I didn't mean to, and in Free rules, I can just fix that myself instead of getting a couple minutes added to my time. So anyway, yeah, if you like Picross but only enough to buy one game of it, e4 is probably the best choice (though if Mario's Super Picross is ever available on the Wii U VC in your region, that might be even better).

[CrossEyed7]

Game 3:



I don't know that I ever fully realized how short Super Mario Land is. With this run, which was pretty much all in one sitting, I took my time and died four or five times, and it still took less than 30 minutes. When I first got it back in 1993, I was terrible at it, and only ever beat it with Game Genie (Walk Through All walls, Infinite Lives, Always Big Mario. Always those three. Experimented with Always Have Powerball a couple times, but didn't feel it was as useful as Always Big.). There are still some places in the game that I don't know how you're supposed to get to without walking through walls.

Anyway, the game's length does make sense for a handheld game with no battery save, no passwords, and no built-in rechargeable battery or included AC adapter on the console. And now that it's a game you can download for under $5, it fits pretty nicely in the category of video game candy.

It's got a lot of unique stuff to offer. Where Super Mario Bros. had eight worlds that looked pretty much the same and even had several duplicate levels, each of Land's twelve levels looks and feels unique, as do its five bosses (even the three side-scrolling shooter bosses feel distinct). Also, I've always had an easier time with the physics of SML than the original SMB (though ideally I'd prefer SMW, or maybe SMB3 but without having to keep tapping B to float down with the raccoon tail). And the music is really nice too.

It kinda gets overlooked now, but I think it fully deserves a place next to the SMBs.

[Weegee]

Sounds like a solid 3/10.

[CrossEyed7]

Game 4:



Super Mario World was probably one of my first games, so it can be a little tough to get perspective on it. Its controls feel the most right of all the Mario games (though there's nothing wrong with SMB3's controls either, other than having to repeatedly tap B to float). However, it does kinda seem like it was rushed to make the SNES launch. With SMB3, they definitely went all out; with SMW, they improved on SMB3, but it could have been a lot more. Part of that's probably from a more rushed development time, but part of it is also from being a game at the beginning of a console's life versus one at the end of one. Still, it has a lot going for it. One of my favorite aspects of it is that it's the only Mario sidescroller that aims to make a whole coherent world that stays within its limited range -- there's no desert world, fire world, or ice world (though there are a couple of ice levels), because there wasn't a place for them, and there doesn't always need to be a place for every kind of thing in every game.

I don't think I can call it the best Mario game, but it's really good.

Incidentally, I beat it in 17 minutes in this run. Definitely not world-record caliber, and not even my personal best (I once beat it in ~16 minutes on the Wii).

[CrossEyed7]

Game 5: The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse, SNES





This was the first game I ever beat. It's shorter and easier than I remembered (The other Mickey SNES game we had growing up, Mickey Mania, is still just as hard as it was back then, tho). It's a fun little Capcom Disney platformer. The music is well-done and will stay in your head for decades, there's some really great graphical effects, and the suits you get are all pretty fun and useful. Controls can take a little getting used to (as a kid, it was one of the games that always messed me up because you don't hold down Y to run (Fun fact: I instinctively held Y while moving in most SNES games, whether or not it was actually a thing in that game. In Bubsy II, which I rented several times, there's a hub world with teleporters to levels. When you stand on a teleporter, one of the ways you can warp into a level is by pressing Y. When you beat a level, you go back to the hub world, standing on that level's teleporter. So most of the time, when I beat a level, I would get warped back into the level when I tried to leave and it really ****ed me off, and I don't know if I ever realized why it kept happening but I just kept on playing)). Maybe someday I'll play it on normal mode.

[WarpRattler]

#1: Super Metroid

This isn't my first time completing Super Metroid, or my first time completing it since getting this copy, but I figured this playthrough would make a good opening post for this thread.

To be honest, I don't have too much to say about the game itself, despite it being one of my all-time favorites; anything I'd say would just be retreading ground covered by many people before me. It's an amazing game, and every time I play through it, I'm saddened more and more by how most other exploratory platformers ("Metroidvania" is a terrible term), and indeed most other games, ignore the design lessons Super Metroid was teaching twenty years ago. I plan to (re)play various other exploratory platformers for this challenge, and when I post about them here, I'll be writing about how they fare against Super Metroid. (Sadly, a lot of them are going to end up with me talking about their merits as action RPGs instead.)

[WarpRattler]

#2a: Astro Boy: Omega Factor (Birth)

No picture; I'll get one once I finish this.

Astro Boy: Omega Factor is one of three excellent Treasure games on GBA, and is the best of the trio. (The other two, Gunstar Super Heroes and Advance Guardian Heroes, might show up here later.) Omega Factor is a very fun beat-'em-up (with several shmup sections as well) based on characters from Astro Boy and numerous other Osamu Tezuka works. Like most modern beat-'em-ups, it has a character progression system; however, this one does not involve grinding. Instead, you gain points to apply to upgrades by meeting characters and adding them to the Omega Factor, which is basically Astro's soul.

This is the first of two posts I'll do for this game, and I won't consider the game complete until I do that second post. Omega Factor has an NG+ mode, Rebirth, that has a different storyline than the first playthrough, Birth, and the game isn't truly finished until you get the true ending in Rebirth, which involves completing the Omega Factor and defeating the true final boss.

[CrossEyed7]

Game 6: Donkey Kong Country





no but really





I'm pretty sure I've beaten this once before on the GBA version, but this is my first time going through the entire SNES version (though I did sample pretty much all the levels on the SNES when I was pretty young; we had a preowned copy where one of the files had beaten the game). I played it on an emulator on my phone (mostly during breaks at work) but I didn't use savestates (other than suspending and resuming; no reloading).

So I started playing this run when I was about a world or two into Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D, and have been playing though them simultaneously. DKC1's controls are a lot floatier than DKC4's, which threw me off for a while as I hadn't played it in a while, but I got back into it pretty quickly. Takes some getting used to. I'm also realizing now that they did design the game intending you to use your ability to jump in midair by rolling off edges. There's nowhere that requires it, but there are a lot of places that seem perfectly matched for it and reward you for it.

I don't know that I ever realized before that the animal bonus levels (the ones where you play as the animal and collect tokens to get extra lives) can be annoying. The levels themselves are fun, but the fact that it takes you out of the level you're playing and then drops you back at either the start of the level or the halfway barrel can be frustrating on later levels. Poison Pond took me a while (largely because of fish movement patterns that you kinda have to just memorize), and then one time when I finally got through the hard part, I got a third Enguarde token and had to do that whole section again.

You do tend to replay a lot of the same segments in DKC1 (if you, like me, are not great at it). DKC4's having multiple checkpoints per level is a really welcome addition. However, I do kind of like how DKC1 has save points instead of saving after every level, especially since, unlike Super Mario World, you can't always just go back to an earlier save point. When you get to a new world, you're gonna have to get through about three or four levels before you get to Candy or Funky, and if you're up against a level that you know is gonna take a lot of lives, you have to find somewhere in a level you've beaten where you can farm some lives and start-select out. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I think there is something about that aspect that I like. It feels more like you're fighting for survival in a new hostile world, and then when you finally see the path to Funky after all those levels, it feels really good.

Every level has something unique to it, which I consider a sign of a great platformer. Boss fights do leave a bit to be desired, though -- every one except the final boss is just a giant version of normal enemies. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but then even with only six of those, there's still ones that are just faster palette swaps of earlier ones. And Boss Dumb Drum, the third-to-last one, is just dodging generic enemies for a while until the boss kills itself. DKC2 improved on that, from what I remember (I've never really played DKC3, though I'm planning on getting to it later).

Should also mention that DKC1's music is pretty great and the graphics actually do still hold up in my onion.

[WarpRattler]

I actually was just discussing replaying DKC1 and playing DKC2 co-op with my dad the other day. We'll see if that happens.

I'm still working on Astro Boy, but the final stage in Rebirth on Hard is completely nuts. I'm also working on the first exploratory platformer for my earlier thing, Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, and the first game for another series I'll be doing here, Kirby Triple Deluxe.

[CrossEyed7]

Game 7: Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D



(I didn't get a screenshot of the ending movie because I had assumed I'd be able to rewatch it in the movie gallery, but apparently I need more puzzle pieces before I can do that.)

69% completion; total playtime of 13 hours and 21 minutes. And that was on easy mode. No game overs, beat the final boss on my last life (or second-to-last; since I've never gotten a game over, I don't know whether the last life is on 1 or on 0 like it was in the SNES ones). I did buy extra rocket hitpoint potions from Cranky for the last rocket barrel level, but other than that, I only bought keys, so I've got over 800 banana coins now.

So, this is the only DKC game out of the five whose music wasn't composed by David Wise... except he actually did compose most of it. The soundtrack leans pretty heavily on nostalgia. It works, though. And I suppose it should be expected, considering the name of the game is literally Hey, Remember Donkey Kong Country? This Is A New One, Which Is Something That Has Not Happened In A While. (In the Volcano world, though, I think the main theme is new, and it sounds pretty Norfairish)

I don't think Retro really tried to copy the physics (or "physics") of the original trilogy, and they're probably better off for it. Donkey Kong feels much more like he has actual weight and momentum, and while going from one game to another takes some time to adjust, I think Retro ended up with a better feel overall. (Also, the fact that the camera can zoom out to give you a wider view when necessary helps a lot, especially on some of the boss fights with bigger fields.)

Playing it on the 3DS is nice because there's no controller shaking. I've never been one to hate on motion controls, but DKC4 is definitely a case where they added nothing of value and made the game harder to play than it should have been.

I like it a lot.

(I do want to go back later and get 100% and do the bonus levels and all. I'm thinking I might do an epilogue of stuff like that if/when I hit 52.)

[WarpRattler]

Game #3: Kirby Triple Deluxe

I've actually been done with the main story for a while now (before my previous post, in fact), but I'm slowly working on 100% completion.

What stood out to me while playing this was how good these guys still are at copy power design. The last new non-gimmick non-remake Kirby game I played before this was Squeak Squad several years ago, so I hadn't used the new powers from Return to Dream Land or seen the various changes to classic powers, but I quite like many of them, and the Beetle power (new to Triple Deluxe) is one of my favorite copy powers ever. For classic powers, Fighter's various changes turn Kirby into the shotoclone this series needed, and the iconic Hammer, Beam, and Parasol abilities all benefit from minor tweaks and improvements over their Super Star incarnations; also, many classic one-trick powers, like Wheel, Needle, and Stone, have been given additional capabilities that make them a lot more fun to use.

Aside from copy powers, I really liked the boss designs, the keychains, Dededetour!, Kirby Fighters (which totally needs a side tournament at EVO 2015), the soundtrack, and the smooth 60fps.

[bobbysq1337]

Turns out SMB is kind of hard.

Game 2: Wind Waker HD



(Link toMiiverse post)

I got this game for Christmas last year and I finally decided to beat it. I've enjoyed it all the way through. The Wii U version was not just a port by any means. It added tons of new content and even made some parts better (Triforce pieces+Swift Sail) If you liked the original, you should definitely get this.

If you're wondering why I'm going kind of slow, it's because I've been on vacation and school is starting soon, so going one game/week is kind of taxing, and it's getting kind of crazy. (hint)

[WarpRattler]

YA YA YA YA YA

I'll be posting another game later tonight, if all goes well.

[WarpRattler]

Game #4: Castlevania: Circle of the Moon

So, I don't feel like writing up the whole "why 'Metroidvania' is a bad term and how no one learned anything from Super Metroid" thing tonight, but...of all the games I've played that get the "Metroidvania" term thrown at them, Circle of the Moon is one of the few that actually deserves that term, being a Castlevania game that's very close to Metroid.

CotM stars Nathan Graves, apprentice vampire slayer, as he explores Castlevania on his quest to halt Dracula's resurrection and rescue his master. Along with standard Castlevania gameplay mechanics like whipping candles and throwing crosses, and standard Metroid gameplay mechanics like defeating bosses to get new items to improve your mobility and open up new areas, CotM features a very cool mechanic called DSS, in which you combine the cards you sometimes get from enemies for special effects. Some of these combos are stupidly good, like Uranus/Thunderbird (which makes you invulnerable for several seconds and does huge damage to everything on-screen for its duration) and Pluto/Salamander (which lets you use Richter Belmont's Item Crashes).

Once you clear CotM for the first time, you can start a new file with the name "FIREBALL" to activate Magician Mode, as seen in the linked picture. CotM features five distinct classes: Vampire Killer (a normal playthrough, with balanced stats), Magician (high INT/MP, low HP/STR/DEF, and you start with all twenty DSS cards), Fighter (no DSS at all, but high HP/STR/DEF), Shooter (mediocre stats in general, but you get a lot of hearts, and subweapons get huge buffs), and Thief (crappy HP/MP/STR/DEF, but higher LCK at level one than all other classes' LCK at max level).

Luigison, since the core rules of Circle of the Moon change quite a bit between different classes, would separate playthroughs count as multiple games for this thread? (Note that I'll be playing through the game again as every class regardless of the answer.)

[bobbysq1337]

Game 3: Crazy Taxi (Android, Crazy Box)

http://i.imgur.com/3yEVATp.png (Spoilers on what you unlock after beating Crazy Box)

[Will add more later, pretty late right now and still hyped from beating S-S with less than a second on the clock]

[CrossEyed7]

Game 8: SteamWorld Dig

So this is kind of a Metroidvania-ish game, I guess. You're a robot and you dig, and you keep digging to find powers that let you dig further and money to buy stuff that lets you dig faster. And then there's a boss battle at the end. It's quite short, probably falling into the category of video game candy, but it's very well designed, with a very clear and satisfying feeling of progression. Sound is good, character design is good, controls are good.

This is the fourth time I've beaten it, and my first time doing it in under 3 hours. A run under 2 hours probably wouldn't be too difficult for someone much better at video games than me. My first time through, my 3DS's shoulder buttons were broken, so I couldn't switch weapons, but it was actually still beatable. There are places where you need the drill to get through a rock, but if there's a laser nearby, you can lead the laser into the rock and break it that way. There's a lot of potential for speedruns and challenge runs here.

I may end up rebuying it on the Wii U someday. I like it a lot.

[CrossEyed7]

Game 9: Art Academy: Lessons For Everyone


(had to take pictures of the diplomas with my phone because they never made a Miiverse community for this one)

I haven't done all the sidequests or the DLC missions yet (those'll probably be post-52 content), but after playing 30 hours in the last two weeks, I've finished the main story.


Looking at this one now, that shadow looks kinda off. Reflection still looks pretty nice, though.


Really like the stem on here.


On this lesson, Vince only had me draw the tree and not the background. I want to go back and do the whole scene now.


Fungi.


This one was pretty simple to do, but I think it's really effective.


One of the sidequests. Not sure if I'm totally happy with the skin, but the pit and hole came out really well (this will sound good out of context).


What is up with those clouds? I guess it works though?


First time with pastels, and one of the first ones that I was really happy with. I like the sense of depth that the different levels of detail give.


Perspective on the building came out a bit weird, but maybe I can just say that was an artistic choice? Like the ivy is choking and distorting everything in your field of view?


A koi. This one's starting to grow on me I think.


NSFW?


Okay, I really love the wet sand on this one.


Should the tabletop have been more defined? Who knows?


This is Diego. This is the only face picture I'm happy with.


One-point perspective!


Water! I like this one!


Another one in pastels. This one came out better than I was expecting.


So yeah, this is supposed to be a portrait. Google recognized it as a face when I uploaded it, though, so I'm going to count it as a success.


I think I redeemed myself on this sidequest anyway.


The Tower of London. Trees could have used more work, though.


Westminster, the final boss. The lens flares on the lights were my own addition.


After beating the final boss, I went back and did this sidequest, though I went a bit less impressionistic with it than Vince recommended. I really really like this one.


Finally, I topped it off with a totally original painting of my cat in my driveway.

As for a review of the game itself: It's a pretty powerful painting tool (for making small jpegs), and the lessons are actually really good. It does actually kinda feel like I took a real-life introductory art class, with drawing technique and smatterings of art history and color theory. Great presentation, too -- the music, the ambient sound, and Vince talking like Bob Ross really puts you in a painting mood.

[CrossEyed7]

Game 10: Sonic Adventure 2 Battle







<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQHbVGFZ0v0" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQHbVGFZ0v0</a>
Some mood music.

This game was my Final Fantasy 7 -- a game with a big serious cinematic story, played on a brand new console that was way ahead of what I was used to, first played when I was about 11 or 12. My first experience with the game was playing a demo of the first level, City Escape, in a store. It was the kind where the TV was attached all the way to the top of the case and I had to crane my neck all the way back, and the level completely blew me away. And when it got to the part at the end with the truck chasing you, I heard a kid walking by go "Whoa! That's awesome!" When I finally saved up enough to buy my Gamecube, I bought Luigi's Mansion and Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. I was really into both, but I was absolutely obsessed with SA2B. I even recorded a VHS tape stitching all the cutscenes together in chronological, coherent order into a single movie, which ended up being about 2 1/2 hours long with some levels included. I made multiple revisions of that tape. I made a case for the tape. I would make my younger siblings watch the movie with me (at the beginning, some of them were still young enough to think they were playing the game if the tape was going and they were holding an unplugged Genesis controller).

I can't find my old memory card right now, but I know I had hundreds of hours clocked on it. Possibly over a thousand total, because I think I actually got up to like 300 or 400 hours and then got my file erased somehow and got back up to hundreds of hours again. A lot of that was leaving the game on overnight to age my Chao, of course, but still. And I never even got close to getting all 180 emblems, even with an Action Replay.

So anyway, this is the first time I've played it in a couple of years. And honestly, it's aged better than I expected. The translation and voice acting are pretty bad, but gameplay-wise, it's definitely not a bad game. It's a bit rough around the edges, but it's a lot more like an actual complete video game than Sonic 06.

So one thing that really stood out to me going back to it this time was that it is absolutely packed with extra content beyond just getting to the end of the 31 levels of the main storyline, but none of it is required. There's five missions on every level, there's a boss time attack, there's a very hastily thrown together kart racing mode (there's no collision detection between your kart and the CPU players' karts. Was there supposed to be? Who knows!), and there's a very in-depth virtual pet garden, but the developers trust you to go check out all that stuff on your own if you want. In Sonic Generations, after you get through a few levels, you eventually hit a plateau where you have to run around doing side missions like that to earn your way to the next pack of levels.

There are still the Knuckles/Rouge levels to break the momentum, of course. But those levels are actually pretty good if you can get in the right mood for them. It's a very abrupt genre shift, which isn't aided by the fact that so many of the levels seem completely pointless to the story, but exploring all the details of the large environments can be pretty fun.

And I really love the music in this game. That definitely hasn't changed. If anything, I like the music even more now than when I first played it.

I didn't really mean to write this much for my three-sentence review, but yeah, this game is always going to have a special place in my heart, and fortunately it actually is still pretty good.

[WarpRattler]

Game #5: Ikachan

 くコ:彡  くコ:彡  くコ:彡  くコ:彡  くコ:彡

Ikachan is an odd freeware single-map sidescrolling swimming action game by Pixel, better known for the phenomenal Cave Story. (It was originally an engine prototype for Cave Story, I believe?) The title character is a squid who wakes up to find himself trapped in an unknown underwater village, ruled by the fish tyrant Ironhead, whose subjects live in fear of the constant earthquakes happening in the area. Ikachan's goal is to escape, and he'll help a bunch of villagers and fight Ironhead along the way. His sole method of propulsion and attack is swimming around; there are also minor Metroid-esque elements with swimming upgrades, and very slight RPG elements with a level system. The game is very short (I finished it in under an hour), but it's very fun during that time, and it's full of the same charm and smart game design that made Cave Story a beloved classic. Highly recommended!

[WarpRattler]

Game #6: Continent of the Ninth Seal

I'm invoking the "play for at least 8 hours" clause on this and the next post, as both are MMORPGs.

Continent of the Ninth Seal, or C9, is a free-to-play Asian MMORPG in the same vein as the incredibly popular Dungeon Fighter Online, featuring instanced quests for one to four players, with real-time clientside combat models and serverside damage and loot calculation. However, while DFO is a sidescrolling beat-'em-up in the vein of classics like Guardian Heroes, C9 draws its inspiration from games like Devil May Cry, and is a 3D hack-and-slash-and-sometimes-shoot game. I've been playing as a Witchblade (no relation to the comic of the same name) and having a lot of fun killing everything with twin swords and magic, but man, as a non-paying player, this class has some of the worst outfits I've seen in any game in a long time (example). Also, the combat grading system makes very little sense; it grades you on four categories, but you can seemingly only really influence a couple of them through play. I haven't looked into it much yet, but there seems to be very little in the way of English documentation for the game, making looking into anything about it difficult.

[WarpRattler]

Game #7: Marvel Heroes

Marvel Heroes is a Diablo game where you play as your choice of one of dozens of Marvel characters. If you've ever played Diablo, you know exactly what to expect: endless loot, endless enemies that are generally weak and act as loot piñatas more than obstacles, an inconsequential story that mostly exists to provide context for you fighting endless enemies to get endless loot, and enough clicking on things to wear out your mouse in a week. I'm currently playing as Cyclops, who's honestly a pretty boring character at the moment; my goal is to get him to level 50 to unlock the XP bonuses he grants for my other characters, then switch to one of the other characters I haven't played as, then switch back to Cyclops once he gets his rework (hopefully next month) and becomes more fun to play.

[WarpRattler]

Game #8: Ragnarok Odyssey







Ragnarok Odyssey is a monster-hunting game based on the world of the incredibly popular MMORPG Ragnarok Online. You (and up to three friends) fight monsters and giants, and harvest materials from their corpses to upgrade your weapons and armor so you can kill bigger monsters and giants. The gameplay is very similar to Monster Hunter, with the key difference being that RO has jumping and airdashing and stuff.

I bought the original version of Ragnarok Odyssey on release, but never finished the main story, as the gameplay balance was pretty poor; solo play was absurdly difficult, to the point where end-of-chapter missions stopped being doable around chapter six (of nine), and even playing with a friend in online co-op, we got stuck in chapter eight. I recently picked up the expanded rerelease, Ragnarok Odyssey ACE, and have been playing that instead; as with other monster-hunting games' expansions, ACE includes the base game in its entirety, but all the new gameplay systems are available as well, massively improving the gameplay experience, and making solo play far more reasonable.

In addition to all the new content and gameplay systems it already included, Ragnarok Odyssey ACE just got an enormous free expansion a few weeks back, so I'm going to be playing it for a good while longer. ACE itself will be getting another post here, as it's a separate release; when I'm done with that, Soul Sacrifice and Soul Sacrifice Delta will be receiving two separate posts for the same reason.

[CrossEyed7]

Game 11: New Super Mario Bros. 2





I actually beat this a few days ago, and I just haven't gotten around to working up the motivation to write three sentences about it.

It's not a bad game at all. It's a solid platformer, and it does have some pretty interesting additions from previous NSMBs. The endless runner warp cannon levels are one of my favorites. There's nothing outstanding about it, but it's a good game. I think most of the problem was that it was announced at the same time as NSMBU and it felt like there were too many NSMBs, when there've actually only been four (or four and a half?) in ten years, and only one per console.

I do kinda wish we could just take all the best parts from all the NSMBs and just make one game out of it, like how once the third Hobbit movie comes out someone should edit them all down to just an adaptation of The Hobbit (which would be maybe two hours long tops).

[WarpRattler]

Game #9: Elminage Original







Elminage is a series of hardcore first-person Wizardry-style dungeon-crawling RPGs by Starfish SD, who developed some of the later Japan-only Wizardry games before starting this series on PS2 in 2008. Elminage Original is the PSP remake of the first game in the series, and the only game in the series currently available in English (though that's changing very soon, but I'll get to that later). The barrier preventing evil from entering the game's world has broken, and demons are invading; your party of six homegrown adventurers (who I named after people in #tmk) must complete quests and find the five rings needed to perform the ritual to recreate the barrier at Dragon's Fang, and beat back the unholy menace.

Elminage is mean. It's not uncommon to have your entire party killed, slammed with status effects, level-drained, or otherwise inconvenienced greatly by preemptive attacks from random encounters, even if you're revisiting low-level areas for quests. Because the game uses spell levels instead of a more modern MP system, you have to be careful to manage your casters' magic uses so that you don't get trapped deep in a dungeon with no attack spells, no healing, and no chance of escape. Furthermore, your characters have limited inventory space, and equipment takes up item slots, so it's not good to rely on healing items and the like, because you won't be able to carry loot if you're bogged down by potions. If you try to play Elminage like other JRPGs, you will die horribly and repeatedly, and it will be your fault every time.

Elminage Gothic, a later game in the series, is getting a Steam release in English next Thursday. I can't wait! (Hopefully it has a better localization than Elminage Original.)

[bobbysq1337]

Game 4: Super Smash Bros for Nintendo 3DS



This is the best demo I've ever played. It actually makes me excited to play the full game. All the characters are great, and the stage is picked well. (Good job not making it Mushroomy Kingdom)

Don't worry, even if a Wii U demo comes out, I'll go for completion on that run.

[Weegee]

Cocktease.

[WarpRattler]

Game #10: Escape Goat 2

Escape Goat 2, like the first Escape Goat, is about a magical purple goat trying to escape from a deadly labyrinth and rescue some sheep along the way. He'll jump, double-jump, and airdash through dozens of fiendish puzzles, and he'll probably die hundreds of times along the way too. He also sometimes gets help from the magical mouse he befriended in the first game; the mouse can walk on walls, press buttons, teleport, and do some other new things.

I loved the first Escape Goat, so of course I bought the second. I played about 2/3 of it when I got it, but stopped to do other things, and didn't get back to it until last night, when I finished all but the last three stages. I finished those tonight (they were pretty mean!), and here we are now. I still liked the new game a lot, but a lot of the stages were less "here's a puzzle, now figure out what to do" and more "here's what to do, now time your movements properly to make it happen," which I don't really want from a puzzle platformer.

[BriGuy92]

I made a website to keep a log of these games. I've written three posts on it so far.

A Link Between Worlds
Spyro the Dragon
Rhythm Heaven Fever

More to come as I write more posts (and also play more games).

[WarpRattler]

Game #11: The World Ends With You

The World Ends With You is a DS action RPG from Square Enix, about a teenager named Neku Sakuraba who wakes up to find he's died and has been chosen to play a game in the afterlife for a second chance in the real world. The game is set in Shibuya ward in Tokyo, so Tetsuya Nomura's typical ridiculous character designs actually fit for a change. Battles play out on both screens at the same time, with an independently-controlled character fighting on each screen; it's tough to get used to at first, but once you're into it, it's one of the most interesting battle systems around. (Shame they ruined it for the iOS port.)

This was my third playthrough of TWEWY. I hadn't played it since sometime in 2010, but it turns out it's still awesome in 2014!

[WarpRattler]

Game #12: Drill Dozer

This was mostly to test out the replacement GBA SP I got last night, but I also hadn't played it since release, so it was fun going through it again.

Drill Dozer is a GBA platformer developed by Game Freak, released somewhat late in the system's life (after the DS came out). It stars Jill, a pink-haired anime girl who pilots a drill mech, on a quest to-wait, come back! It's a good game, seriously!

[Toad]

She's an assist trophy in Brawl! One of my favorites.

Also: I didn't know GameFreak made platformers. I might have to look into this one.

On-topic: I've been playing games, but not really enough to post in this thread like others have. A couple I would have to invoke the "played for eight hours" rule (Puzzle and Dragons and Animal Crossing: New Leaf) since they have little/no story.

[WarpRattler]

I'm intentionally waiting to post Puzzle & Dragons until I defeat Zaerog, who's technically the "final boss" of the game's "story." Otherwise I would've posted it back when the thread went up, since I already had an obscene amount of time invested in the game then, and my pace hasn't slowed down at all four months later.

[Toad]

Ah. Yes, that would be a good idea, to wait until such a time..

[WarpRattler]

Game #13: The Wonderful 101

"The impossible is possible when you're Wonderful, baby!"

What better way to celebrate the arrival of Bayonetta 2 than by saving the world with the most wonderful group of heroes Earth has ever seen? ("By playing the first Bayonetta" doesn't count, since the Wii U version of Bayonetta exists and all.) The Wonderful 101 is a [darn] fine character-action game from Hideki Kamiya and the other folks at Platinum Games, and...you know, I'm not even going to bother describing it, because I can't do it justice. Instead, I'll say this: if you own a Wii U, and if you enjoy things that are fun, you owe it to yourself to buy this game.

[WarpRattler]

Game #14: Game Dev Story (20 years)

Game Dev Story is a lightweight management sim by Japanese mobile developer Kairosoft. You start a game development studio in the 1980s and move through twenty years of parodied video game history, developing games for platforms like the Sonny PlayStatus and the Intendro Whoops, and maybe even developing your own hardware. The core gameplay is pretty simple: when you start developing a game, you pick a genre/theme combination, decide on a budget, and set your employees to work on making your game. Then you ship it and watch the sales roll in. It's all very simple, hence my "lightweight sim" description, but it ends up being quite fun, as you work out the best genre/theme combinations and build up funds to hire more staff, put out advertisements, get console dev kits, and other stuff.

While you can keep playing until you run out of money, the game is technically over after twenty years, and the game records your best final liquid cash total at that time. You can then start a new game and retain all genre/theme levels from prior playthroughs, making it easier to develop good games sooner. That said, I had no prior playthroughs recorded, since this was my first time playing through the game on my new tablet.

[WarpRattler]

Game #15: Bayonetta

"Welcome to my fantasy zone! Get ready!"

There's not really much to say about the original Bayonetta at this point, and the quality of the Wii U port is well established. It's still a great game, especially if (like me) you're onboard with Hideki Kamiya's neverending '80s Sega references. Instead, let's talk about how good the Link costume is. You have access to the four Nintendo character costumes (Peach, Daisy, Samus, and Link) from the beginning of the game, and they all have fun cosmetic effects, but the Link costume also includes the insanely useful parry effect, which otherwise requires you to buy a particularly expensive accessory and use up one of your two accessory slots. I never bought said accessory during my time with the 360 version, so having it from the beginning in the Wii U version was an enormous gamechanger, and I spent a lot of time parrying everything I could. I can't wait to continue doing so through the other difficulties and Bayonetta 2!

[WarpRattler]

Game #16: Web of Deceit: Black Widow

This is a pretty decent casual-oriented point-and-click adventure for mobile devices. Your character travels to some crappy rural town in the 1960s and solves a mystery involving people getting abducted and killed by ROBOT SPIDERS. Also, you'll solve some hidden-object puzzles and stuff on the way. Also also, it has live-action FMV cutscenes with amazingly awful acting.

I got this and several other games for free from Amazon App Store promos, but didn't start it until yesterday, when I was trying to clear space on my tablet. It turned out to be interesting enough to warrant playing all the way through, but I wouldn't recommend spending more than a couple of dollars on it.

Note that I played on hardcore mode, which disables the hint, minigame skip, and item highlight functions, but the achievements are broken, so I'm missing the no-hint achievement (as seen in the linked screenshot) and several others I earned in the course of playing the game. I don't plan on replaying it to try to get it to credit those achievements.

[WarpRattler]

Game #17: Brütal Legend

Not too much to say about this one. It's a heavy metal-themed open-world third-person adventure/real-time strategy game with a killer soundtrack and a lot of celebrity guest voices, and it's still pretty good however many years after I first played it on 360. The PC version is kind of buggy, but I've come to expect that from most PC ports of console games.

[WarpRattler]

Game #18: SteamWorld Dig

Unlike CrossEyed7, this was my first time playing the game, via the Vita version (which was recently free on PlayStation Plus). I wasn't paying attention when I could've screencapped my stats, but there wasn't much of interest there anyway. I guess the money and orb totals would've gotten me gold stars for those categories, since I got achievements for them (as seen in the screencap), but then time and deaths definitely would've been bronze.

I can understand the exploratory platformer comparison, but I wouldn't really put it in that category. If nothing else, it's the most linear game I've ever seen described that way!