Topic: Games you've recently beat

Beat The Pirates of Dark Water on Mega Drive. I have no idea what that cartoon is but the game was alright up until the insta death pits. And the knockback was horrible. Mostly ok though.

Finished up this month’s RetroAchievements challenge with a hack of Castlevania Order of Ecclesia where you play as Zero from Mega Man X. I’m way more rubbish at 2D platformers than I thought I was, I played like 4 this month and struggled with all of them. At least GameCube support is coming very soon which is exciting, looks like achievements are coming for games like Super Monkey Ball, Pikmin, Super Mario Sunshine including sets for glitches and speedruns, Smash Bros Melee, 1080 Avalanche and so on. Gives me a good reason to revisit the old classics and play some Cube games I never got round to. Cheevos for Rogue Leader does sound like fun.

Finished Infinite Wealth yesterday. My feelings haven't really changed from the longer post I made in the other thread, so I will just summarise. Feels like the general consensus of the game from the community is that this game improved on LAD in basically every way except the writing. This would be fine, but the writing isn't just worse, but a significant step backwards. And for once, I am really with the community consensus on this. IW is way more fun to play than LAD, but the story is genuinely sorta awful and I do feel it makes it a worse game overall.

Just beat Resident Evil 3 Remake for a second time. I wanted to see if I was wrong about it the first time and, unfortunately, I was not.

It is just a sad re-imagining ... it was done fast enough just to cashout. And I do not even count ALL reused assets + whole areas that are from RE2R.

At the ending scene Jill was absolutely right when she said that it was not the T-Virus that destroyed the place ... it was human greed. So poetic

Finished Yakuza 0 a couple nights ago. Got through it in a couple weeks, which is fast for me. I had high expectations going into it after hearing such great things about it. I found it to be a little more “boring” than Kiwami 1, but still enjoyed it a lot. I think my expectations caused me to not enjoy Majima’s origin story as much as I could’ve. I was expecting a little more focus on Kiryu and maybe that was why I didn’t enjoy it as much as Kiwami. I also felt like Majima’s transformation at the end was kind of rushed and tacked on. I’m excited to continue the series though. I may take a break from the series to play through the Judgment spin-off. I’d like to play and complete those spin-offs before they leave PS Extra.

FUBAR is right… that is enough to give a guy PTSD! I managed it in the end… but have returned from my deployment a different man 🫡

@colonelkilgore Wow, well done.

@CaptD It was horrendous mate, not gonna lie. After 12 hours of hitting my head against a brick wall with it yesterday, I kinda thought it was beyond me. A nights sleep must’ve done the trick though thankfully

Need for Speed Underground 2. Less focused than the first one for better or worse. The open world is fairly pointless, just kinda gets in the way of racing to make you go across the map just to enter a single race. Finding the garages across the map was good fun though. I had this on the Cube as a kid but was rubbish at it so glad to finally go back and complete it. The final boss was laughable too, compared to how brutal Underground 1 was at the end.

@nessisonett Cool. Congrats man. I have so far not managed to beat it (at least I dont think so). But it is a game that I have very found memories of none the less.

@oliverp The vibes are amazing to be fair. Especially on a CRT, the neon totally pops.

Finally finished the last chapter in Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name. Really enjoyed it, even if it is just a 'bite size' Yakuza game. Now to play Infinite Wealth.

@Korra
I've played and enjoyed all the Yakuza games so I'm expecting to enjoy Infinite Wealth also but I have heard similar from other people that it's a good game but definitely has some flaws.

Just finished Burnout 3: Takedown on the original Xbox after 13 hours of playtime. Another very fun racing game after having recently played through DiRT 2. It's crazy how many fun racing games there were back in the day. The concept of racing, taking down other vehicles and increasing your boost gauge is just brilliant and so much fun.

The game isn't without a lot of frustrations though. You constantly crash into other stuff while racing, such as civilian vehicles, which ruins the fun. Not to mention that the AI can be ruthless sometimes. In some races, if you crash once, you'll be set back a lot. On the other hand, if the bots crash, they will respawn right behind you. It's really unfair and there are not even difficulty options to choose from.

Also, it's crazy to me just how many crash events there are in the campaign. Out of the 170 events, 100 of them are crash events. I was really surprised as I was nearing the end of the game and there weren't any more races to do. I literally had to do 70 crash events before I could finish the game. Absolutely bizarre. The crash events are fun, but I don't want to do 100 of them.

All in all, it's a very fun game but you can clearly tell this game was made in the early 00s as some aspects just don't hold up today.

I enjoyed Baldurs Gate 3 so much it inspired me to make another attempt at Divinity Original Sin 2, having previoulsy bounced off it twice due to finding it too difficult.

It was definitely more challenging than BG3 but I beat it last night, after what I think was a fairly completionist run (I think there was one optional boss I didn't fight). Played through it almost-blind, but I did read up on the combat before starting this run - went for all physical damage, ranger, two fighters and rogue. Main was Sebille. I think I enjoyed it almost as much as BG3, fantastic game, glad I went back to it.

Finished the Unicorn Overlord Demo and thought it was excellent. If everything continues to develop the way it looks like it will, this will be a must buy for me. I especially love how snappy everything is. Well worth a try for anyone curious!

Also finished Sifu and Final Fantasy VII Remake finally.

Splinter Cell: Blacklist - played through most of it last year when the servers randomly went back online. Returned to it last week to finish everything off. I enjoyed my time with it and would definitely play another Splinter Cell game… it doesn’t have the narrative and lore of the Metal Gear games but actually plays better than most of them with the exception of V (and maybe IV) tbh.

Finished the INTERmission DLC and really enjoyed it. Yuffie is super fun to play as, the boss fights are great and the short runtime suits its playful nature while still packing an emotional punch. Really solid DLC.

@colonelkilgore I’ve never played a Splinter Cell past Chaos Theory but really enjoyed that original trilogy. I’m surprised there hasn’t been a more recent entry.

@Jimmer-jammer there was a lot of talk about a remake of the original a year or two back but seems to have all gone quiet of late. Blacklist was my first ever Splinter Cell game but I did recently pick up the original trilogy on PS3 under the HD Classics collection. I’ll definitely be dipping back in when I get the chance.

Splinter Cell Blacklist was great, really surprised that Ubi hasn't ported it (they don't do remasters, just bog standard ports. ).
Especially strange considering that I think Blacklist was released just months before the PS4, these companies make some very weird decisions.

Apparently there is a new Splinter cell in 2025/26, hopefully their season pass will include a Blacklist port (highly unlikely but we can hope).