Topic: Games you've recently beat

I beat Resident Evil 5. It was my first Resi game and I played the entire thing with a good friend online. It was a lot of fun. It’s a good game for sure. I’m not sure you could say Resi 6 turned it into a action series though. This was barley a horror game if at all. It was definitely an action game.

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD ReMIx on PS4, i just did a "Kingdom Key" play through and it made the end boss quite hard

Finished A Way Out on PS4 tonight with my son and what a terrific game and experience it was. This game took me by surprise in how much I enjoyed it. I have been playing it the past few days and when I wasn't playing it I was wishing I was just to see the outcome of the story.

In my opinion the story is top notch and very well written. It give me the feeling of a buddy movie alot like Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. The story flowed nicely as well and there really wasn't a part that felt slow too me. The ending was really good and even caused me to get a bit emotional.

If there is a downside to this game it would be that sometimes when you failed it was because you had no idea what was coming up or what is needed for you to do unless you happened to have played it before or you are psychic. Alot of the trophies too are very cryptic at least for me so that may be a downside to trophy hunters.

Overall I highly recommend this game if you are looking for a co-op game to play even if you don't have anyone to play it with there's online. Definitely in my must plays for games that came out this year.

Finished Metal Gear Solid 2 on the Vita earlier. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the first game, which I think has a better story. The large chunk of pseudo-philosophical psycho babble-exposition near the end was hard to follow. The main themes of the story ring true, however. Perhaps more so in an age where many people are fixated on their smartphones and absorb social-media without question.

Sons of Liberty certainly has some very interesting characters though including Vamp, Fortune, Fatman and of course Onion Rose as well as memorable, well-choregraphed scenes.
The fight against the multiple Metal Gear Rays was quite difficult.
Anyways, I enjoyed this one, and am really looking forward to playing Snake Eater.

@RogerRoger @Tjuz Tagging you in because I thought you might be interested.

@mookysam MGS2 is peak weirdness in the series (and that's saying something) but a lot of the plot has significant implications in the other games.

Enjoy MGS3 though which is my favourite of all the games in the series.

@mookysam I agree, I found the part near the end difficult to follow too. I would say my younger head couldn't get round it, but in all honesty even now I probably would struggle with it!

@JohnnyShoulder I got the gist and main story points, but man it was just throwing too many words at the player. I almost zoned out. 😂

@Thrillho I'll probably play 3 within the next few weeks. Certainly interested to see where the story goes!

@mookysam Absolutely agree with everything you said, but I truly hope you meant Rose being interesting in a bad way!

I enjoyed the story in Sons of Liberty, or at least the main outline, but I definitely agree that a lot of the exposition when it got closer and closer to the end became tiresome. I get Kojima had a lot of themes he wanted to get across with this game and limited time, but I really wish he had paced that out better, or at least hadn't made them 10 minute monologues each.

Fortune was definitely my favourite Dead Cell member. It helps that she got the most character building, which I think was were Vamp was quite let down. Not to mention Fortune had a great theme that I was just happy to hear whenever she came on screen. Ocelot and Solidus seemed a bit all over the place, but they were still enjoyable enough. I intrigued to see what they do with the Patriots cliffhanger in MGS4 and in what context previous villains will show up once again there.

That Metal Gear Rays fight definitely gave me a hard time too. Once I figured out you could shoot them in the knee to destabilise them and deal extra damage, it got a lot easier. You just had to find some sort of routine that worked for you, even if that did take a little while for me! I'm also looking forward to digging my teeth into Snake Eater more, as I've only played the first hour or so so far. Clearly I have to now to keep up with you! Just been a bit preoccupied with Dreamfall: The Longest Journey.

The game did have it's real moments of frustration though(sniping to protect Emma while crossing struts, the swordfighting in the hallway with Snake...), but I actually didn't have many problems with the infamous underwater section. What about you? I've heard horrible things about it, but it actually seemed pretty straightforward to me (although the way back did take me a few times). The final fight was a bit of a pain in the ass too, but thank the heavens for those ledges! The fixed camera in a 3D environment definitely didn't help matters either in some cases.

I think the whole [/spoiler]Campbell/Rose bait and switch[/spoiler] was probably the weakest part of the story outside of the heavy exposition scenes. It was a shock to the system for sure, but I don't think it really landed the impact that Kojima wanted it to have since I wasn't exactly very attached to these characters. For me it was a moment which thought it was cleverer than it really was, and ended up not serving much of a purpose overall. Something like the explanation of Fortune's origin or Emma's death felt much more impactful and earned, even though they had a lot less screentime.

Anyway, I'm just rambling now and not sticking to what you were talking about in the first place anymore! Hope we both enjoy Snake Eater once we get around to playing it.

@Tjuz The underwater section didn't give me too much trouble. I failed twice on the way back with Emma and one of those because I inadvertently swam into a mine. The underwater controls are very dated and the fixed camera angle was a little counterintuitive..

Yeah, Rose was "interesting" interesting. A very manipulative and narcissistic character! Fortune was my favourite Dead Cell character too.

@mookysam @JohnnyShoulder La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo. LA-LI-LU-LE-LO!

@Thrillho Still no idea what that was about. I laughed when they said it in-game because it sounds so ridiculous.

@RogerRoger As 3 is so highly regarded I'm particularly looking forward to it. The cold war backdrop sounds fascinating.

@mookysam It's another name for the Patriots. Why they needed another weird name for them remains a mystery to me to this day.

@RogerRoger I checked wiki carefully to make sure it wasn't a spoiler and was sure it's from that game. That is one of the hardest parts of the overall story to get your head round though.

Beat the Torgue's Campaing of Carnage DLC tonight for Borderlands 2. Just like with Captain Scarlette DLC this was my first time playing through it. I didn't enjoy it as much as the Captain Scaette DLC and to me it didn't feel as long either. The only thing it has going for it really is the fact that you can grind for Torgue Tokens and buy legendaries with them in this DLC.

@Tasuki There’s almost no need to buy legendaries anymore with the amount of golden keys they still give away.

https://www.twitter.com/dgshiftcodes

Finally finished Shadow of the Tomb Raider. What a ride! Very good game, and sad to see it end. It didn’t last too long, and I finished it wanting more. But alas, time to move on to the next great adventure. Here’s hoping we’ll keep getting new TR games. 🤞🏼

Assassin's Creed Odyssey and really enjoyed it. My favorite AC to date. I had to start ignoring side quests which I hate doing but I was never going to finish it before RDR2 if I didn't. After 75 hours I still have a ton left to do. The amount of content is insane.

1. Spider-Man (PS4 duuhh)
2. Wolfenstein The Old Blood (ps4)
3. Wolfenstein The New Order (PS4)

And now I am struggling with Bloodborne

I recently fully finished Nier: Automata with the best [E]nding. What a fantastic game with a beautiful music score to boot. I must admit to buying a few trophies for the plat but only because I chose to sacrifice my save data. I've been humming Emil's theme tune ever since. Also, I might be in the minority here but 2A was my fave character.

Slime-san (Switch):
Skill-focused platformer ala Super Meat Boy or Celeste. There's not really much to this game outside of the challenge of the gameplay itself, though. There's a lot of characters, but they're not terribly memorable and only get a few lines of dialogue each. The music is unremarkable. The visual design is... weird, with hollow-looking characters and clashing colors all over the place. There are shops to buy new slimes, themes, and accessories, though. The new slimes actually change how your slime feels, although I found myself preferring the default character.

The saving grace of this release is decent level design and a LOT of free DLC content. In addition to the 100 levels in the base game (all with collectibles and time trials), there are four or five additional worlds to play through. Combined with the low cost of admission, it's a good value. I collected the majority of collectible apples throughout the levels and also completed a handful of time trials before hitting the end credits. While I'll probably dip back in here and there, I think I'm mostly done with it. Not an amazing game, but I'm happy enough with it.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (PC):
Finally got around to playing this. I knew I would have to try this eventually after playing through the excellent Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. It's alright. The core mechanics of the game are pretty solid, of course, and it's fun gradually building up your troops, although I feel like the pool of available skills and abilities for each type of soldier was a bit limited. The presentation is good in battle, although, for whatever reason, the cutscenes seem to top out at 30fps, which is a bit of jarring transition from the smooth 60fps gameplay.

Two things kind of held this game back for me. The first is the sheer repetitiveness of the gameplay. Once I cycled through the four different types of events in this game (UFO sightings, terror missions, panic management quests, and main story quests) a few times, the lack of a feeling of forward progression began to wear on me. This is very much a game where you do the same things over and over again, with little in the way of surprises. The first five or six hours are very strong, but afterward, it just feels like the same thing continuously.

The second thing holding this back for me is the lack of a compelling story. There's a narrative here, for sure, but it's razor thin and primarily communicated through boring and very short cutscenes. I continuously interacted with a handful of characters, but I barely even remember them after finishing. The campaign just kind of felt like it was going through the motions.

I also didn't like the limited control I had over managing panic in various nations. Other than completing missions, requests, and launching satellites, there's often not a lot to do when countries are on the verge of leaving XCOM. Thankfully, you can lose at least a few countries and still be fine, but the whole process was less than ideal.

I did like gradually building up my base over the course of the game. You kind of want to plan out how you lay out buildings, as adjacent ones of the same type grant bonuses, which can definitely add up over the course of the 25-hour-ish campaign.

I also enjoyed the variety of weapons and armors that you unlocked throughout the game. The ghost suit, my favorite piece of armor, actually allowed my characters to become very temporarily invisible, allowing me to sneak up on otherwise annoying enemies.

The best aspect of this game besides the actual strategy gameplay is the lore, surprisingly. As you dissect and study alien remains at your base after recovering them from battles, you learn a lot about the sorts of lengths the aliens were willing to go to to be as fearsome as they were. It made for some very interesting reading.

All-in-all, a solid enough game, but it also has a number of glaring weaknesses that kept it from being a top-of-the-line experience.