Last game you finished, tell us about it

JDR13 said:

Separate Ways isn't really an expansion, it's just a very short side story that shows some different aspects of the storyline.

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Bonus story then maybe.

JDR13 said:

Since you mentioned "Seperate Ways", then you obviously played either the PC or PS2 version.

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Yes, the patched PC version with darkness/light and the mouseaim utility. I bumped the resolution up to 2048*1536 as well. I know, no dynamic light like the GC version but I doubt that would have changed my opinion regarding the actual content of the game.

JDR13 said:

My opinion is biased though because I've always been a huge Resident Evil fan, just look at my avatar.

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I am a huge horror fan but that have upped my resistance quite alot so to me RE4 wasnt scary so what was left for me was a storydriven actiongame with some continuity flaws. When playing storydriven games like this I am generally picky about things that seem to not fit into the environment or theme of the game without at least giving a decent reason for it.

My wife have planned to buy a new television set and when she does I might grab a previously owned GeCube and play the RE1 remake. I have RE2/3 on PSOne, just never played them since I want to play the upgraded RE1 first.

So you've never even played any of the other RE games yet? If you had then you would have understood RE4 better and no doubt liked it even more.

I own them all on Gamecube, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and Code Veronica. It's the main reason I bought a Gamecube to begin with. Someday I would like to play them all in a row from beginning to end.

As far as scare tactics go, I don't think RE4 was really meant to be that scary, they seemed to put more effort into the story and suspense which is fine by me. I'm not sure what you mean by "continuity flaws", I think that stems from not totally understanding everything because you haven't played them all.

JDR13 said:

So you've never even played any of the other RE games yet? If you had then you would have understood RE4 better and no doubt liked it even more.

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I know alot about the games already and played parts of them. I did not feel like I missed anything from the plot.

JDR13 said:

I'm not sure what you mean by "continuity flaws", I think that stems from not totally understanding everything because you haven't played them all.

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It have nothing to do with the story. Throughout the game you visit many areas and find many objects that seems to be out of place. The castle is the best example. It seems to be a very sharp contrast to the rural landscape. Even if you would happen to find a castle like that in the wilderness, it would definitely have been run down/part ruin, not spectacular in richness and glory. A volcano is usually not a good place to build a castle on either. What about the gigantic statue? It seems just tossed in like the developers felt like "Now when we have a castle, a lava cellar, a built in rollercoaster etc. we must also have a gigantic robot, yeah, that seems like a good design plan".
As soon as I passed from the rural landscape into the castle, my mind pretty much snapped and I started to wonder where the developer lost it. If I designed the game I would probably have placed something like a runned down small city/village at that point in the game which then passed over to the mine. I feel that would have fit together better.
Then you have all this gold. It seems every farmer in the area have striked a gold rush and im in fact here to get rich, not to rescue the presidents daughter. Put against the backdrop of a run down rural landscape with parasite infested farmers, all the gold seems severly out of place. If I would have designed the game, I would probably have dropped the whole merchant concept (it doesnt fit the game nor it's theme) and I would probably have spent more time placing ammunitition in places where they make sense. A traditional rule in theese kinds of games is that weapons & ammunition doesnt come in numbers, especially not in a rural landscape southern europe.

JemyM said:

I am a huge horror fan but that have upped my resistance quite alot so to me RE4 wasnt scary so what was left for me was a storydriven actiongame with some continuity flaws. When playing storydriven games like this I am generally picky about things that seem to not fit into the environment or theme of the game without at least giving a decent reason for it.

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Played it together with a friend who owns a playstation. First we ate pizza until we couldn't really move anymore and then we got ourselves pretty drunk. I think it's really the way to do it. RE4 was mucho fun! You wouldn't believe how satisfying it is to shoot a few villagers if you're drunk... story doesn't matter much either then.

System Shock 2

Picked up a copy off Amazon a year or two ago, and just recently cleaned up my six-year-old computer and promoted it to my Legacy Gaming System. Could never get the game to run on my newer systems, especially the dual core, since it likes to randomly crash or hard-lock the system when frobbing objects, even though I can get Thief TDP and 2 to run.

Disappointing.

That's the only word I can think of to describe the game. And I cannot yet put my finger on why. There seemed to be lots of little reasons, but it's the big one below that stands out.

There were lots of little things I liked: a character development system, the Dark Engine's stealth system (only it didn't work very well here), the graphics were surprisingly good, but then it's easier to do sci-fi/techno textures than fantasy/stone textures. And the ambiant sounds frequently reminded me of Jedi Outcast.

The biggest problem I had was the infinitely, instantly respawning monsters. There was only one thing better than killing a mutant, looting the body, and finding yourself being shot in the back of the head by the instaspawn replacement before you can grab that bag of chips -- and that was killing the monster, starting to loot the body, and having the replacement spawn in right in front of you, arms stiffly ourstretched in that crucified pose the Dark Engine uses for actors before the animation system starts up. Then getting shot in the face.

Reminded me of trying to play through the city zones in Thief 3. In the end, the best tactic was to get through them as fast as possible so you could reach the next mission zone -- to skip the game content, not to experience it.

It felt like two completely different games badly bolted together. One of them being a really bad (id style) first-person shooter. Step on the invisible trigger, game spawns monsters. Oh look, a really nice power-up just sitting in the middle of a room, with nothing guarding it! I'll just waltz over and pick it up. Ri-i-ight.

The never-ending parade of monsters really killed any sense of progression. At least in a Sacred/Diablo game you get XP for the endless waves of monsters. Here you might get 5 nanites or a bag of chips, assuming the body doesn't disappear before you can loot it. Which does not make up for losing half your health or wasting several irreplaceable rounds of ammo if you weren't able to sneak up on the critter.

Then I finally got the invisibility power. That should have felt like an accomplishment. Instead, it felt like I'd turned on a cheat code since I could just run past all of the monsters -- in fact, I'd often run around a corner and see the game spawn in a couple new monsters down the corridor. And if I'm using cheat codes, it means I've given up on the game and just want to get it over with. Then I realized that's exactly what I wanted to do.

I do hope Bioshock is not going to be a spritual successor to this kind of gameplay, but given their emphasis on it being a whole new form of FPS, I'll be expecting the same old lame FPS tricks in a sparkly new package.

@ JemyM, I guess those things could seem out of place, but why are they any stranger than anything else in a video game? A castle in a rural area seems odd to you, but giant parasites exploding out of villagers heads is ok? The RE series is fiction, there are no traditional rules.


@ Stanza, Sorry to hear you're not enjoying SS2 as much as everyone else did, that's actually one of my all time favorites. It sounds like you might be experiencing some bugs though. Yes, the respawn rate is on the high side, but never once in all the time I spent playing it did I see a monster respawn right in front of me as you describe.

Just finished Titan Quest Immortal Throne (thanks to Magerette for sending me her end game TQ character!) - I've also made it back through with my own character and made some progress on Epic difficulty with each of the characters. I like most of what they did in the expansion, but I get some pretty serious 'rubberbanding' at times ...

... and I've probably finished a dozen or so others since my last update (about a month ago) so I'll just list them ...
- Final Fantasy VI Advance (GBA)
- Virtua Tennis 3 (PC & PSP)
- Trackmania United (PC)
- Call of Duty: Roads to Victory (PSP)
- Test Drive Unlimited (PC & PSP)
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (PC)
- Trace Memory (DS)
- Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusade (PC)
- MLB '07: The Show (PSP)

So you finish an average of 3 games a week?!? Do you play video games as a job or something? It must be nice to have that much time for gaming.

I'm lucky to finish 2 games in a month right now.

JDR13 said:

So you finish an average of 3 games a week?!? Do you play video games as a job or something? It must be nice to have that much time for gaming.

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Final Fantasy VI I've been playing for a while, and most of the others are pretty short. STALKER was one that cost me some sleep ...

JDR13 said:

@ JemyM, I guess those things could seem out of place, but why are they any stranger than anything else in a video game? A castle in a rural area seems odd to you, but giant parasites exploding out of villagers heads is ok?

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There's a good explanation for the parasites, but not the castle. In many great games, the theme is followed to the end, things fit right in and they make sense based on the changes in reality that have been made for the setting.

JDR13 said:

The RE series is fiction, there are no traditional rules.

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That's never a good excuse. All good fiction with supernatural content still keep themselves into the framework of reality with just a few aspects changed. For instance, in Alien, there are aliens. That doesnt mean Ripley can fly. Some elements of reality is changed in the movie, but the rest of the laws are the same as the real world. If las plagas infects a rural area in spain, las plagas infects a rural area in spain. That doesnt mean that rural areas in spain is suddenly a good place to find a well equipped top-notch castle.

Splinter Cell Double Agent (7/10)
This would have been a 9 if it wasnt for the extremely bad PC port. I have had the game installed for ages but it's first now I got it to work until the end. I have to say that Splinter Cell 3 was better, but SC4 is not a bad game. I am glad I kept on trying.

Having said that, it's now time for me to take a few weeks break for schoolwork. I have finished all the larger games I had planned for now. Maybe I will spend some time with Sam & Max but that's it until the holiday. I have a few projects for summer though.

I gave up on Titan Quest. I was half-through babylon, but I just played it to have something to do with my girlfriend. I explained to her how much I hated it and she allowed me to deinstall it.

JemyM said:

There's a good explanation for the parasites, but not the castle. In many great games, the theme is followed to the end, things fit right in and they make sense based on the changes in reality that have been made for the setting.

That's never a good excuse. All good fiction with supernatural content still keep themselves into the framework of reality with just a few aspects changed. For instance, in Alien, there are aliens. That doesnt mean Ripley can fly. Some elements of reality is changed in the movie, but the rest of the laws are the same as the real world. If las plagas infects a rural area in spain, las plagas infects a rural area in spain. That doesnt mean that rural areas in spain is suddenly a good place to find a well equipped top-notch castle.

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So a castle in the countryside in rural Spain would be on par with Ripley being able to fly in Aliens?

The castle isn't out of place at all. Why is it so hard to believe that the Salazar family, along with the assistance of the Los Illuminados, had protected that area for years and over time outfitted the castle to that degree? It was explained that Ramon Salazar was the eighth castellan of the castle, showing that it had been in that family for quite a long period of time. It was also a very secluded area due to the fact that they controlled the surrounding villages which in turn helped protect the area from outsiders.

If anything was out of place in that game it was the merchants.

Finally finished my latest replay of StarCraft and SC Brood War. It took me longer than I thought it would but it's been a busy month and I haven't had much time for gaming.

Definitely still my favorite real time strategy game, now I'm looking forward to starting C&C 3 in the next week and seeing if it lives up to expectations.

Still waiting on patches for Gothic 3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in the meantime.

JDR13 said:

So a castle in the countryside in rural Spain would be on par with Ripley being able to fly in Aliens? The castle isn't out of place at all. Why is it so hard to believe that the Salazar family, along with the assistance of the Los Illuminados, had protected that area for years and over time outfitted the castle to that degree? It was explained that Ramon Salazar was the eighth castellan of the castle, showing that it had been in that family for quite a long period of time. It was also a very secluded area due to the fact that they controlled the surrounding villages which in turn helped protect the area from outsiders. If anything was out of place in that game it was the merchants.

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It doesnt feel right to me for several reasons.
1. Alot of administration is required for a such place, including deals with the rest of the world. This takes skilled people who can make deals with outsiders. The Los Illuminados doesnt feel like such people.
2. The robot, the rollercoaster and similar constructs required good engineers/mechanics. Yet again, the Los Illuminados doesnt feel like engineers/mechanics.
3. Despite the amount of followers you got, castles decay over time, even if you work on them non stop. This castle had simply no decay.
4. Castles was built by alot of people for their leaders. Only cities of a certain size had enough people and resources to actually build one. There are no city next to this one.
5. Some puzzles seems thrown in to give the player something to do, but doesnt feel like something that have any purpose in a real castle, such as the pathway that you had to rise up from the water using two winches.
6. The lava room. Come on.
7. I have many problems with the medieval catapults on the rooftops. They are made out of wood, so they have to be freshly built as well as loaded with fresh ammunition. Why go that length to build and load catapults when you can more than likely afford modern weapons, especially when you have already taken over a nearby army base.

All in all, the castle feels tossed in because it's a game. The developer did not seem to take the moment to plan the environment as something which should make sense or feel realistic, and that's what breaks my illusion.

I could easily pick apart all the reasons you listed but I really don't want to drag this out any longer, you're really just nitpicking here. I could point out a dozen things that aren't perfect about any game but why bother? My advice to you is to pass on the other Resident Evil games because I don't think you're going to like them.

JDR13 said:

My advice to you is to pass on the other Resident Evil games because I don't think you're going to like them.

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I have already decided to play through at least the RE1 remake, RE2 and Codename Veronica in time. This might not happen for yet another year though as I have many other games on my list.

Just finished Ultima Underworld 2 again. The game world feels remarkably small (and here I tend to complain about the tiny size of Gothic 3 and TES "continents"), but at least the scale is right (each world is after all basicall just a building). The game and particularly the interface hasnt aged that well. I dont mind pixellated graphics but the controls are very sluggish, and there are too many places where jumping and finding the right lever are at the core of puzzles, something I hate even in games with an appropriate engine for it. The dialogue and dialogue-related puzzles are however good and disingenious, but would have been helped by a built-in journal. I like my games to be somewhat less linear, but knowing that non-linearity and good story tend to be at odds with each other I can forgive this.

The game is as far as I can tell (might be my rather unsophisticated playing style) heavily biased towards melee fighters, with ranged weapons running out of ammo, and spells requiring space to cast (in a real time game with sluggish controls this make them useless). Crappy ranged combat also makes certain levels (the void with those brain-suckers) a pain.

6/10 for being ahead of its time I guess. Good story, but TBH even the old Goldbox games provide a more fluid interface for combat and such...

That game was WAY ahead of its time. I may be biased, but it's in my top 5 all time games!!

Oh, I loved to play it when I first got in my 486, and back then I would have rated it 9/10 or so, but it's just a bit too clunky to play today EDIT: If it had been a human I would say that it had a good life but is past retirement age