Last game you finished, tell us about it

Ah, suddenly you make me feel good for getting oldish (approaching 57). Only 10 more years to go before I can dedicate my self to … TES 7(?)

Nyah , nyah, nyah!!!

pibbur

You'd better enjoy your gaming-heaven retirement, or I'll never pay attention to your bad jokes again!
 
The last game I finished was portal 2, but that was like 5 games ago. I have a bad tendency to not finish games or play games that seemingly last forever :/
 
Joined
Nov 26, 2011
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Battlefield 3 Single Player Campaign (PC)

Yeah, I dared buy and play an EA game. Sue me :biggrin: .

Anyway, I just finished the single player campaign of BF3 the other night and here's "wot I think" as they say some other places on the net.

You know it's really not all that easy to write something on a game with as little substance as BF3. Where do you begin to describe this mess of a game? This awesome mess. This terrible mess. This mess that's leaving so much to be desired and yet fulfills so many desires.

Well, before this starts sounding like an emo piece let's look at what this game really has to offer.

What it has to offer on the "hard" difficulty level where all aim assist is turned off (kinda insulting that they left it in for the PC version at all but thanks to implementing "hard" without it they are forgiven - almost) is a ~10 hour rollercoaster ride with missions that range from abysmal abortions to complete awesomeness.

In BF3 you can tell that DICE has tried very hard to shift the gameplay into the Call of Duty (CoD) direction. This is not overly surprising since the CoD series has been seriously pwning any other FPS franchise on the market so everyone wants a piece of that action, of course.
There are quite a number of elements that DICE have copied over almost 1:1 from CoD which goes as far as mimicking the basic premise of the game, i.e. the main character being subject to an interrogation by "the powers that be" and recounting past events that make up the levels of the game, which is a blatant rip-off of Call of Duty Black Ops. It's so blatant in fact that it makes me wonder how they've avoided litigation but maybe Activision is too busy counting the money from CoD MW3 sales to really give a hoot.

Historically I don't think we have seen too many examples of where ripping off a successful concept has worked out overly well and BF3 is no exception.
It is the mix of trying to stay true to the more "realistic" and serious BF experience and the over-the-top CoD popcorn action that is turning this game into a mess.
A graphically stunning and beautiful mess and a mess that has its moments, even in the story department but it remains still a mess since the game just can not decide whether it wants to be taken serious or not. It is a collage of CoD and BF. You're playing BF the one minute and CoD the other and it alternates all of the time, making it all a very strange experience. Not necessarily a bad experience but still a messy one. One that leaves you with plenty "WTF?!" moments.

Even after a couple of days after finishing the game now I still can't quite make up my mind or come to any sort of conclusion. This game was just too confusing and too much of a mixed bag. Overall I'd say that it was definitely enjoyable and -hey- I finished it so it can't have been all that shitty, right? Sure. There were some frustrations due to the checkpoint save system and the hard difficulty where some of my enemies seemed to "suffer" from impeccable aim. As usual it was really nice to get shot dead in the face while lying prone in the pitch black of the night by a dude shooting his AK47 from the hip while strafing and sprinting sidewards. Riiight. I also could have done without the lame QTEs which were not even half posing a challenge, not even on hard.
Other than that it is hard to argue with the mechanics of the game. With the exception of one Blue Screen that I had two minutes into the game it was rock solid and the shooter mechanics worked as expected and advertised. It was a flawless experience in that regard.
What they really need to do, however, is make a decision about who they want to be and what they want to do with the BF franchise. Do they really want to relegate themselves to making CoD clones? Well, congrats. This wasn't the worst attempt yet. Or do they want people to recognize BF as something unique? Well then get to work and add substance to your game. Give it shapes and contours. Or don't. Drop the single player and focus on your strength which is undoubtedly the multiplayer component. Be aware, however, that right now as far as the single player is concerned, you're only CoD's bitch.

$.2c
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
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Battlefield 3 The single player campaign is indeed weak. It feels like an afterthought to it main focus - the multiplayer portion. The actions is short, fast paced and without coherent plot - the game just push you forward from one point to another point, in a game world that has minimal story, as well as characters that means much to you.

The graphics?, yeah, it definitely the best i ever seen for a PC game.
 
Joined
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Battlefield 3 The single player campaign is indeed weak. It feels like an afterthought to it main focus - the multiplayer portion.

Personally, I'm not surprised reading this - in this genre.

An reviewer pointed out that everything moves more and more into multiplayer these days - especially in this genre.
 
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Nov 5, 2006
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Limbo
Limbo is one of the more famous indie games to have been released in recent years. It made quite a name for itself on Xbox 360, due to its art style and solid gameplay.

Limbo is a 2d puzzle platformer (like most other indie 2d platformers) , where you play as a young boy who is trying to get through a dangerous world, filled with traps and things that wants to kill you. The story is told not through text or dialogue, but through the events that transpires as you make your way through the world.

The puzzles are for the most part quite clever, and they require more in the way of thought than manual dexterity (though there are some puzzles that require a bit of manual dexterity, in particular near the end of the game).

The art style is, as you would expect from a game known for being artistic, quite nice. Everything is in black & white (more black than white, really), and the creatures of the world are all well animated. I could imagine that some people will have issues with some of the rather gruesome deaths that can take place in this game. Even more so due to the fact that you play as a young boy. But if you are one of those who don't mind that, then I would highly recommend this game.
 
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Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

its strong points are the storyline, the graphic details, the gameplay and the music.

Its only weak points are the missable cinematic subtitles, and what's worse, the French language, I don't understand at all. Damn Ubisoft... -.- The other weak point is the Loading times ala Half Life. -.-
 
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Jul 13, 2011
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Deus Ex: Human revolution
Before we start, I should tell you that I was one of those who found the first Deus Ex to be a bit overrated. Not bad, mind you, just not worth all the hype. I found that System Shock 2 did the statbased shooter better, and the stealth mechanics of Deus Ex was clumsy, in part due to enemies being a bit inconsistent in when they could spot you and when they could not. Deus ex 2 was just uninteresting and rather boring.

Deus Ex: Human revolution takes place a few years before the first Deus Ex, when human augmentation (as they call it, basically advanced cybernetics) has reached a point where it divides people into two camps, those who are pro-augmentation, who think that it is the natural next step for humanity, and those who are against it, who claim that augmentations will ruin us of our humanity. You are one of those augmented people, who after an attack on the lab that you were working in gets some of the most advanced cybernetics ever created. After 6 months of recovery, your company gets attacked again, and you get called into duty. From here you have to find out what happened, who did this, why they did this and of course do something about it. Things are never that easy, and anyone who played the original Deus Ex knows what to expect.

Graphics
The graphics in this game looks quite good, even on a weaker system. Some of the animations can seem a bit off, which is more obvious during the many dialogue sequences. The game has a very consistent art style, one that really fits the setting as a whole, and even though you get to travel to several different places around the world, it still manages to feel coherent. It does at places clash a bit with the artistic style of Deus Ex 1, though as that takes place 30 years into the future, that is to be expected. One thing that does seem a bit odd is how cybernetics is portrayed though, it feels more sleek & streamlined in Human Revolution, even though it is supposed to be far more primitive.

Sound
Most sound effects work well, and the voice acting is surprisingly good. Most of the characters feel believable and have voices that works well for them. Generic NPCs have voices that repeats a bit too often, but that is a minor issue. Much like in Vampire the masquerade: Bloodlines there are radios & TVs scattered around the world, which fills you in on certain peoples view on the events that transpires, from the more serious news report, to conspiracy nuts on the radio. These added a nice touch, and were quite entertaining to listen to (in particular some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories, which sounded like something straight out of a youtube conspiracy video)

Gameplay
This is where Deus Ex HR shines. The stealth mechanics works really well in this game, you can easily figure out how well hidden you are, and if you run the risk of being spotted. The game actively encourages you to use stealth, as it gives you more experience for a stealthy takedown (to get the most, you should get up close and personal with the enemy, knocking them out in melee) . The gunplay felt like it worked well, though I only ever used it during the bosses, as I played through the game without killing a single non-boss enemy.
The level design was quite open, offering many different paths to most locations. It was not uncommon for me to find two different entry points from the outside, then enter the location, and once on the inside find 3 more possible points of entry. And the game actively rewards exploration, giving you both experience and a few goodies to pick up for taking the less obvious rout. This was probably a good design choice, as it emphasis stealth and mind over pure gunplay, which probably helped quite a few people to play the game as intended, instead of just as a decent shooter.
There is also a hacking minigame, which sees heavy use during the game. At first glance it might look like it is a lot to do in it, but in reality it is rather simple, and to a large degree luck based. Not the best part of the game, but still one of the better hacking minigames that I've seen to date.
As you gain experience, you are allowed to level up different abilities. There is a good variety of abilities, some focused on hacking, some on stealth, some on dealing damage, and a few oddball ones, like the ability to break down walls, or jump really high. Sadly the balance between these did not seem all that great. A few were incredibly useful, like the ones preventing detection while hacking, while some were less useful, like the ability to ignore flashbangs. There was even a totally pointless tree, which felt like something that they forgot to take out after doing some changes to the hacking minigame.


The bad
We have all heard about the bosses. They stink. At least there are not a whole lot of them, but they just don't fit into the game at all. At least they were not very hard, even if you had not spent any points in combat augmentations (I don't see why some reviewers complained about how their lack of proper augmentations made these nigh impossible, I died twice against the first boss, and not a single time during any of the following bosses).
The game also showers you with experience points, which makes augmentation choices less more a question on "when" than "if". By the end of the game, I had all augmentation options that seemed useful, almost all that seemed to have some use, and even some that seemed totally useless (and they were actually totally useless). This watered down the experience a tad bit, but it was not a gamebreaker.



Overall, I was quite impressed by this game. The story was interesting, the stealth mechanics worked really well (though I would have preferred leaning to the cover mechanics) and the level design was very good. The game had a few minor issues, but nothing that seriously detracted from the experience. Overall I think that this game was superior to the original Deus Ex, but a surprisingly wide margin. Now let's hope that they are as good to Thief.
 
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Thanks! I expect that most people here will disagree with my opinion regarding which game is the better one out of Deus Ex 1 & 3. In the end, I think that people should play both, as they both offer something different.
 
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I just finished playing an interesting little game called "Trauma" that I bought on an impulse, without knowing anything about it, during the last sale on steam for next to nothing.

I think this one might be the best example of a game being art that I've seen so far. The story is about a young woman who recovers from a car accident and you get to guide her through four of her dreams that pretty much illustrate her anxieties about what she wants to do with her life. The gameplay is easy and rather limited, though with an interesting twist on the standard first person point-and-click adventure game mechanics. Its messages are equally easy to decipher: doing what others expect you to do is futile and treacherous but following your own road is hard, while overcoming problems creates or reveals more problems and any way you look at it you're screwed etc.

I'd say both its concept and its presentation (although it is without a doubt very skillfully constructed) make it feel more akin to an art student's project - which nonetheless puts it light years ahead of the 99.99% of existing games in this aspect.

Unfortunately it is very short, it took me about 40 minutes to finish it and about an hour more to discover all the hidden endings and secrets. I would nevertheless strongly recommend to anyone who hopes that computer games will one day bear more sophisticated concepts than simplistic variations of 'killing bad guys saves the world' would 'invest' on this game so that such things will be encouraged to grow and spread.

As I said I got my copy from Steam but anyone interested can actually play the entire game for free on its website at http://www.traumagame.com/
 
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Sep 18, 2009
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I'm not going to write a long review this time around, I have other things that needs to be done right now, so this will have to make do

Eschalon: Book 1
Eschalon book 1 was quite a nice little game. It did in many ways remind me of the D&D-based games that were released during the mid 90's (but with a more intuitive rule system, AD&D was not the most intuitive or straight forward system around). The game was relatively short, clocking in at just shy of 9h, the first time around. There were a handful of sidequests left undone, but I did most of them.
Overall I thought the game was well made, the writing was good, the game system worked well and the music was fitting. I would have liked to see the same system & engine being used for a more tactical party based game, but it worked well for a single character game.
 
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We hounded Basilisk a good bit for party-based back when Book1 was being made, but Thomas said that the engine did not lend itself to those mechanics. Also, he mentioned that the story arc, both of Book1 and of the (at that time) possible 3 game series, was far more appropriate for a single character.
 
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Oct 18, 2006
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Last night I finished Fahrenheit (which Americans call Indigo Prophesy because Americans are weird like that) and I was fascinated by it.

A quick review for that game is the easiest thing to do: The gameplay consists of using of items - sometimes on other nearby items - in an obvious way, selecting dialog options, and Simon Says style quicktime events that are at best irrelevant and distracting. Most of the gameplay is obviously an afterthought meant to add some interactivity, as it often comes down to keep pressing a button so that the video you're watching will keep playing! Sometimes, however, it has a point and it becomes brilliant - for example, the very first part when you have to escape the murder scene is one of the best and most unique gaming experiences I've had.

So there's a little really good gameplay accompanied with tons of filler button pressing. But the focus of the game is obviously elsewhere - it shows straight away when it presents you with a start 'new movie' button instead of a 'new game' one. Well, that movie's production values are absolutely terrible… actually if it's a game then they are top notch so I'll keep thinking this as being a game and I'll be happy. The soundtrack is the best I've heard in a game by the way - and it's fine for a movie too I guess… the acting too.

But the part that really got to me is the story… And I will be completely absolutely serious now… this was a story of quality that proudly reaches the heights established by the likes of… Ed Wood! Any doubts? "Plan 9 from Outer Space" was about a group of aliens trying to stop humans from creating a doomsday weapon that would destroy the universe by raising the dead and turning them into zombies. Fahrenheit is about
a group of 2000+year old Mayan serial killers competing with a group of AIs (that evolved on their own in the internet in the 80s!) trying to find a certain child that will tell them the secret that will make them gods. Also the protagonist is zombie-Neo, he's a zombie (in account of him dying and being brought back to life, but still being dead - cold and everything) but he doesn't go around moaning 'braiiiiins' but does kung-fu in the air while dodging projectiles and stuff!

So it's Zombie Neo vs. the Mayan ripper society vs. the AIs that can raise the dead vs. NYPD's finest. Also there are alien artifacts protected by the military. I didn't notice any ninjas or werewolves but maybe they were in one of the alternative endings.

Now you might ask me what on earth was I expecting… I don't know, but I didn't expect to start with 'Seven' and end with the 'Life of Brian'. If you want to tell me a story then make up a good one, if not then make the gameplay good and I'll be happy with "sorry but our princess is another castle". Honestly if the people making these games want to be taken seriously they need to to raise their standards. The gamers also need to really encourage higher standards because at this point "Plan 9 from Outer Space" has a better, deeper and more inspired story than most games out there have.

Anyway, I'd still recommend the game for what it gets right. The first few hours especially are particularly good, the atmosphere is great and I don't remember any other game delivering suspense so well.
 
Last edited:
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Sep 18, 2009
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Advent rising
Advent rising is, if nothing else, a very ambitious game. It is the first part of a planned trilogy (that sadly never got any further than this).
One of the main highlights of this game is its story. It is by famed sci-fi author Orson Scott Card, who is known for the immensely popular Ender’s Game series. And even though the story of this game is quite different from that of Ender’s Game, you can see similarities in the way that the story is told, and how the characters are handled. It is an Orson Scott Card story, that is very obvious.
The story starts with you entering an alien ship, as part of a diplomatic envoy who are about to make first contact with an alien species. These aliens turn out to be friendly, and say that they want to protect humanity from another alien species, who intends to wipe out humanity from the face of the galaxy. Things quickly go sour though, as the hostile aliens shows up and attack both the human owned planet and the alien spaceship. I won’t spoil the rest of the story, you need to play it for yourself to find out why these aliens did what they did, and how you intend to stop them.
Another outstanding part of this game is its sound. The music is used to great effect, in order to set the tone of each scene. Many other games, and movies, could learn from this game when it comes to proper use of music. The sound effects are not as outstanding, but they work well.
The graphics also look quite nice, with a good artistic design that is not afraid of using colours. From a technical point of view, the graphics look good enough, though it is not outstanding, even for its time. Some of the character animations looks a bit strange from time to time, but this is never bad enough to seriously detract from the overall experience.
One major fault with the game is its vehicle controls, at least with a mouse & keyboard. At an early point in the game you get to drive a car, but the driving controls never feel natural. On foot things works a lot better though, and your character move like you would expect him to.
A lot of games frontload most of their content and after a few hours you will have seen all that the game has to offer. Advent Rising on the other hand keeps introducing new powers up until the very ending of the game. It also has a rudimentary experience system, where you get better at using powers and weapons as you use them. You even get better at jumping & dodging as you jump & dodge.
Apart from all of this, there is one other thing worth mentioning, and that is all the bugs. Some events don’t trigger as they should from time to time, which means that you have to reload from the last checkpoint, and the AI sometimes bugs out, which can result in enemies mass suicide down a hole, like a bunch of fictional lemmings.
With its flaws, I can’t give this game a perfect score. It is a good and highly ambitious game, but it is not perfect. It is also a game that needs to be experienced by any and all sci-fi fans out there, for its story and setting.

There is a fan patch out there that restores some cut content.
 
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I also have played and have it original retail edition. It's a pity they didn't allow the game to be continued in trilogy. If you read here, you'll find this sentence that caused its un-continuation:

In June 2006, Donald Mustard posted a statement on the website of his new venture, Chair Entertainment, stating that he "would be happy to finish the Advent series if the opportunity presented itself," but confirmed he does not currently hold the rights to do so.

I hope in the future, they release this epic game in trilogy, but they need to have the copyright to progress it much further.

What a shame... :(
 
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Thessaloniki, Greece
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