Author Topic: Father's Day: 52 games/year Challenge (Read 28345 times)

WarpRattler · « **Reply #30 on:** September 13, 2014, 05:26:32 PM »

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 · « **Reply #31 on:** September 13, 2014, 06:08:21 PM »

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 · « **Reply #32 on:** September 13, 2014, 08:00:20 PM »

Cocktease.

WarpRattler · « **Reply #33 on:** September 14, 2014, 08:39:13 PM »

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 · « **Reply #34 on:** September 21, 2014, 07:23:27 PM »

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 · « **Reply #35 on:** September 27, 2014, 01:02:03 PM »

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 · « **Reply #36 on:** October 11, 2014, 01:53:45 PM »

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 · « **Reply #37 on:** October 12, 2014, 04:10:09 PM »

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 · « **Reply #38 on:** October 12, 2014, 06:23:21 PM »

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 · « **Reply #39 on:** October 13, 2014, 12:01:49 AM »

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

WarpRattler · « **Reply #40 on:** October 25, 2014, 02:14:56 PM »

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 · « **Reply #41 on:** October 27, 2014, 10:50:54 PM »

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 · « **Reply #42 on:** November 01, 2014, 04:18:53 PM »

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 · « **Reply #43 on:** November 21, 2014, 08:53:29 PM »

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 · « **Reply #44 on:** December 06, 2014, 08:55:05 PM »

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.