Last game you finished, tell us about it

[wolfing]

Just finished Blackguards (1). Liked it. Liked the tactical combat, the availability of options, spells, tactics. Never used traps or poison. Maybe it's the game world but I felt there wasn't much variety in the armor department (I think my mage was still using the armor pieces he got in the first town at the end of the game).

The length of the game was perfect for me, longer and my attention would have dropped (according to Steam, I played it for 55 hours), like in Lords of Xulima that I haven't played in like a month and don't feel like continuing (after probably like 80 hours and only about 60% done).

I feel the game needs better explanations for many things, like encumbrance, weapon damage according to strength, some spells, difference of parry and dodge, etc.

Anyway, looking forward to playing Blackguards 2 some day. Now, next in my queue is…
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning it seems.

 

[Deleted User]

Have fun with Reckoning. It's a great game if you like getting lost in alternate RPG universe. Lots of lore and fun voice-acted dialog. Enjoy!

 

[Fnord]

Earlier today I beat Shadowgate (the Mac version that was recently released on steam). It's pretty much the same thing as the DOS & NES versions of the game, so anyone who as played either one of those will know exactly what they are getting into.
Shadowgate, for those who are unaware, is an old point & click adventure game, that is full of challenging puzzles, and it's also quite fond of killing the player for any mistakes (s)he does. That is not to say that the game is unfair, it is actually quite good at giving cryptic hints, and unlike King's Quest, most of the puzzles actually make sense, even if you use a semblance of real world logic. It is a game that will most likely frustrate quite a few, due to the difficulty of the puzzles and the sometimes seemingly arbitrary deaths (save often!).

 

[JDR13]

Earlier today I beat Shadowgate (the Mac version that was recently released on steam).

Out of curiosity, why would you choose to play that version? Do you plan on playing the remake next?

 

[joxer]

next in my queue is…
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning it seems.

I'm eagerly waiting your input to see if I tossed 5 bucks in the wind by getting that one when was on some -723784235% discount.

 

[wolfing]

I'm eagerly waiting your input to see if I tossed 5 bucks in the wind by getting that one when was on some -723784235% discount.

Yes, I got it for $5 too a long time ago and had been in my queue forever so finally decided to give it a go.
Early impressions are ok. I like the class system (you pick a main class early (fighter, mage, rogue), then later you pick a specialization or hybrid class, and later again. I'm only just leaving the first town, feels MMO-like, with plenty of quests (though not of the 'kill 5 rat' types, at least not yet).

I can see how they went bankrupt making this game, every NPC I find has a full list of spoken topics, different from one another. Just in the first town I've heard spoken dialogues about like 7 topics from like 20 NPCs. Overkill if you ask me (but then again, I'm the type that reads the text and skips the voice).

I can see how I'll have inventory management problems pretty soon, with all the little flowers to pick, plus components for gems and blacksmithing, each different thing taking an inventory 'slot', so basically a screw takes the same inventory space as a breastplate... I think I'll stop collecting flowers and blacksmithing and concentrate on just gemcrafting with my mage. I hate having to check my inventory to see what to discard in order to pick something.

 

[Fnord]

Out of curiosity, why would you choose to play that version? Do you plan on playing the remake next?

Already played the remake. I got the Mac version for free for owning the remake (people who bought it early, or who kickstartered it, got the Mac version of Shadowgate & Deja Vu). I figured that I would be able to beat the Mac version in less than 20min, due to me having previous experience with the NES & DOS versions of the game, and I was just curious to see what was different. In terms of puzzles & gameplay it seem to be identical to the DOS version (the NES version had a few details changed, one room was for an example removed, but it was not an important room).

 

[CelticFrost]

Well I guess being sick has it advantages, it gave me the time to finish Risen today.

Over all I really liked the game, it had a soothing quality to me. I did almost every quest as they all seem to relate somewhat to the main plot. This was a very enjoyable aspect to the game. It never really felt like fetch questing to me.

The combat did take a lot of getting use to and sometimes when I though I had it I still got me butt handed to me. I did find it interesting in the combat there were so many places you could sort of hide and pick off enemy's with a crossbow. Never the less most games to me are not about the combat.

The one Thing that really turned me off was the fight at the end. I just can't stand a fight like that. I didn't have to do it all game long and now I have to hop around like one of my children playing some console game.

That is really the only thing I can complain about and very glad I got around to playing it. 8/10

 

[Dajjer]

The one Thing that really turned me off was the fight at the end. I just can't stand a fight like that. I didn't have to do it all game long and now I have to hop around like one of my children playing some console game.

That is really the only thing I can complain about and very glad I got around to playing it. 8/10

Yep. It turned off a lot of folks here too. And it continues to turn off new players who are trying the game out for the first time. You're basically playing a new game when you battled that end boss. I think the best thing to do, would be to just watch the end battle on youtube. I spent a long time trying to beat that monster, and contrary to conventional wisdom, there was no sense in accomplishment - I kinda felt played.

IMO, it's just a bad stain on PB.

Risen 2 has a couple of boss battles that are bad but not nearly as bad as Risen 1. And Risen 3 has one console-y boss battle. So they are getting better. But if you take out their homage to console players, I think you have a great set of RPGs.

 

[CelticFrost]

Yep. It turned off a lot of folks here too. And it continues to turn off new players who are trying the game out for the first time. You're basically playing a new game when you battled that end boss. I think the best thing to do, would be to just watch the end battle on youtube. I spent a long time trying to beat that monster, and contrary to conventional wisdom, there was no sense in accomplishment - I kinda felt played.
.

That is what I did do after messing around for what seemed to be a half hour trying to kill him was go to youtube. I hated to have to do it but you couldn't even tell if you were hurting him. Plus being very sick with this dam cold I wasn't in the best of moods to be messing around hopping and dying.

I really don't like having to look up a walk through to figure out something in a game and rarely do it. As back in the day you really didn't have a choice but to figure it out yourself. BOSS fighting is DUMB......

 

[Dajjer]

Au Contraire,
Back in the day you had hint lines for $1.99 a minute. Or you could dig through the old AOL or Prodigy or CompuServe forums and hope to get some kind of answer. Or write a letter to one of the computer mags and hope for an answer.

I'm old . . .

But yeah, Boss fighting is dumb, but for some crazy A$$ reason, it is the norm and the standard.

 

[wolfing]

That is what I did do after messing around for what seemed to be a half hour trying to kill him was go to youtube. I hated to have to do it but you couldn't even tell if you were hurting him. Plus being very sick with this dam cold I wasn't in the best of moods to be messing around hopping and dying.

I really don't like having to look up a walk through to figure out something in a game and rarely do it. As back in the day you really didn't have a choice but to figure it out yourself. BOSS fighting is DUMB……

It's what I do with a lot of jRPGs to watch the 'true ending'. In jRPGs, it's almost expected that you'll either play following a walkthrough, or that you'll play several times using the 'new game +', something I never do considering jRPGs usually run in the 60+ hour mark, once is enough. So 90% of the times I watch the 'normal ending' in my game, and then head to youtube to watch the 'true ending'.

 

[wolfing]

Just finished King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame (the original campaign), it was surprisingly entertaining.

You play as Arthur and start conquering provinces in England. Many quests and sidequests will direct you to different objectives, quests that you can solve by force or magic or diplomacy (options depending on quest) and you have to make decisions on what factions to help. You can help Christianity or the 'magical' Fae, and you can be a lawful orderly ruler, or a tyrant. Advancing in these 2 'axis' will give you different abilities. For my first campaign I went 'Fae/Order'. Now in my 'saxon' campaign I'm going 'Christian/Tyrant'.

Your knights represent you in the world (on and off combat), they level up with experience and can be 3 different classes: 'Commanders' (specialize in leading troops), Champions (specialize in hand-2-hand) and Sages (specialize in magic). As they level up, you increase a stat and advance or learn a skill/spell. Battle units also advance with experience, and there are many units to use. Each unit consumes food & money which are very scarce up to about halfway in the game. As you take provinces you can assign them to one of your knights, who can also get married to women that have different skills (and penalties)… some knights/wives improve trade in provinces, others improve mining, etc.

I said 'surprisingly' entertaining because I went in thinking I wouldn't like it. I suck at RTS totally, and the battles here are RTS. Luckily archers here are OP so that didn't stop me from winning most battles (there was an option to reduce archers' power, guess after people complained they were too powerful, but I liked it that way to overcome my RTS suckyness).

Overall a game with lots of elements, which I totally love, that takes you through the Arthur story and lets you decide which path Arthur chooses for his future united England.

 

[Morrandir]

I just finished Blackguards 2.
It's a TBS/RPG hybrid with a strong focus on the combat maps, where you don't have any actual exploration.

First I must say that I'm a TDE fanboy, so I have an initial sympathy for the game.
However all in all I was quite disappointed as I expected an improvement of the prequel.

Cons:

• Character building: Compared to the prequel it's a little more streamlined. For example attributes (courage, strength, cleverness etc.) have been removed completely. Makes character building a little more shallow.
  
• Companions: Most disappointing thing for me. Your are restricted to the three known companions from the prequel: Naurim (dwarf), Takate (indigenous forest-man) and Zurbaran (human). While it's disappointing that you don't get to know more characters, the bigger problem for me is that having these 3 companions only narrows down the character building options for the main char (Cassia), when you want to cover all possible "archetypes" and especially when you want to build the companions according to their native concept. Naurim is the typical melee tank. Takate is more a dex fighter with a spear (dual whield blades would also fit). Zurbaran is a typical mage. While you could easily make anyone of them a ranged fighter, that just wouldn't fit their personality. You even could skill Zurbaran into a melee fighter but as he's the only one of the trio being able to cast magic, you'll lack a full mage. So if you stay true to their native concept and want to have a ranged fighter it more or less is a must to skill Cassia appropriately. And you should skill her magic a little as well (which even is advised in the manual), for having a (second) supporter for healing/buffing. So with these premieses, her building concept sadly is quite predefined.
  Daedalic could have solved this problem partially by adding a new companion. Best fit would have been a female elf archer: closes the gap of a lacking female companion, the lack of an elven companion and the gap of a ranged fighter companion. Perfect fit would have been Niam - but unfortunately they decided for her to get killed in the prequel.
  
• Collecting gear: A great deal of fun in these games is collecting and equipping your characters with better and better gear. While this works for some of the slots (1-2 armor changes for companions during the game), for other slots/characters you just don't find anything better during the whole game. For example my Naurim always fought with his personal axe. For Cassia (which was an archer in my playthrough) I haven't changed armor once as I haven't found anything better than her initial clothing. Takate's spear I changed only once too.
  All in all too little occasions for improvements.
  
• Combat: The general idea of the combat is still good, though it's a little too easy now (played on normal). One con was the rather monotonous choice of opponents. Iirc there have been way more different opponents in the prequel.
  Another strange thing where the "conjuring" circles and the organs. The mechanics behind it is that if you know a melody for a type of monster you can make the monster fight on your side when you play the organ (object on the map) while a monster of the appropriate type is standing in a circle. But I haven't encountered a single map where this strategy actually made sense. I don't know if I did something wrong. In attacking combats (when your troops attack a settlement) the circles and organs have always been unreachable until the very end of the fight. In defending combat there haven't been any appropriate monsters. So for me this feature was totally superfluous as I haven't used it at all.
  
• Story presentation: In the first hours of the game I felt as if I must have missed a cutscene or something. For me the setting with the 5 creator mages and their melodies hasn't been explained at all… I just learned about it incidentally on the way. It always felt as if the main char Cassia knew more about it than me.
  
• Defending battles: A new feature are the battles where you have to defend a settlement against Cassia's nemesis Marwan. While this sounded interesting, for me it became dull. In these battles you fight with your mercenaries only, so you can't see your built-up characters in action. Additionally you don't get any reward for winning. No XP, no gold. So when I was attacked (4-5x in total) it was always like "meh… not again".
  
• Epilogue: When you've won the final battle, you have a "town screen" in the throne room, where you can decide upon some characters' faiths. While this is ok, you also have the option to spend your new wealth on buildings for the city (schools etc.) by dialog options. Also you can do some actions (like going for a walk) by dialog options until a certain amount of hours is gone, where each action costs a certain amount of hours. I don't know what this scene of distributing ressources was for, but to me this all was totally useless. Perhaps they want to create a world state you can import into a sequel, but nevertheless this totally felt out of place to me.

Pros and conclusion:
I've liked the rest of the game quite well although it was a little too easy. It's a nice genre mix and I'm giving bonus points for the TDE setting, so it's a 7/10 for me, thus being on a level with TDE: Demonicon, (vanilla) Shadowrun Returns and Risen 3 on my personal scale. For the prequel I gave 7,5/10, which was on a level with D:OS and Mars: War Logs.

 

[Dajjer]

Finished Might & Magic Legacy
Steam shows 180 hours

I will say that M&M 10 is a very nice game. It kept me up late at night a number of times.

The game has a ton of combat, perhaps too much and it’s the long battling type of combat like you had in the last Wizardy. However the game also had a lot of puzzles. The developers must have played a lot of adventure games because many of the puzzles were of that quality. They even had dungeon puzzles with no monsters to bother you while you try to solve them. God bless them.

And I loved the story. Far more coherent than most RPGs, it was kind of easy to follow along and understand the plot. I also liked (not loved) the music and found the graphics superior for a tile/stepping RPG. Night gaming was beautiful. And some of the locations were so imaginative, it was worth it just to hang around and look for a while. And the character comments really added to the game. I wish they had a lot more because the ones they had were just about always pertinent.

But the game did have its wonkiness. Why the developers thought it was a good idea not to have a retreat function in combat is mind boggling. They also didn’t have enough skills. For me because there were so few it seemed like you could give points most of the important skills. But the game has a cap level and by the time I figured out I was only going to be able to grandmaster in a couple of skills and be expert in the others I had my points to far spread out. If there would have been more skills, for me it would be implied that I would have to replay the game in order to check out the others skill sets.

The UI for the spell book was horrible. It was just a tad better than an excel spread sheet. No, not really. And excel spreadsheet would at least categorize your items.

One idea that was nicely implement was their Beastery Book. The more monsters you fought the more info was placed in the book. Pretty soon, the book was filled with all the monsters stats and you could learn their strengths and weaknesses. A totally handy tool when fighting monster after monsters. When I was using my favorite prime magic spell and it was doing nothing. The Beastery book would tell me the monster had a 60% resistance rate. But it also had a -25% light rate. Tremendous info and I wish more games would do this for us.

However, this was not a Might and Magic game. Yeah it had some of some of the lore and the name thing going on but it did not have a Might and Magic feel. Putting a cap level on experience is unheard of in a Might and Magic game. When I played the prior M&M games I always felt like the developers were on my side. How were they going to make the game fun. In this game, I always felt like the developers number one goal was figuring out what they could do to beat the player.

For example one way to get a bunch of experience points in prior M&M games is to do all the promotion quests. In this game you can do the promotion quest missions but there is no honorary promotion. Actually you might even get stuck with a game artifact because no one in your party is eligible for the promotion so the promotion artifact stays in your inventory. And in some instances the NPC that gives you the promotion is stuck in a conversation type loop because no one in your party can get promoted.

Still, while I feel this was really not a Might and Magic game, I did like this game a lot. I just hope that if they do another one, they up their game.

 

[Dajjer]

Finished, yep that quickly

Hero of the Kingdom

After Lords of Xulima and M&M 10, I needed something less stressfull. The HOG games I play have some stress because sometimes the puzzles are really hard. So somewhere, sometime, somehow, I had this game on my desktop. Hero of the Kingdom. No idea. So, I checked out the Steam reviews to see what was up and saw that it was a hybrid RPG/HOG game???? SAY WHAT

The game took me 2 days and about 9 hours
most of you folks will finish it in one sitting in far less time.
Summary - I had a blast.

It is a casual game. It is a casual RPG. And it is a casual HOG.
The RPG part comes in where you have to level up your skills. (no levels).
The HOG part comes in where you have to scan the screen for various resources.
As you advance your skillset you can grab more and more things from the screen (via treasures, killing beasts, or gathering herbs etc)

There is no avatar representation on the screen which was totally off putting. I kept wanting to move my character but all I had to do was click the screen arrow to move to the next screen.

So simple, so easy, so fun.
The sequel came out today.

 

[Toff]

Finished Portal 2 and I may be the last person on this site to play it. Enjoyed it immensely and now I want to play the Half Life 2 games with a graphics mod.

 

[JDR13]

Finished Portal 2 and I may be the last person on this site to play it. Enjoyed it immensely and now I want to play the Half Life 2 games with a graphics mod.

Yep, Portal 2 was great. Have you played Black Mesa yet?

 

[Toff]

I have not but I will check it out. Thanks.

 

[wolfing]

Just finished Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. It's a pity that the company mismanaged both the company and the game. It could have been great, but some design decisions lowered it from awesome to just ok. It suffers from what I call 'toomuchitis'… too much of everything:

1) Loot: It's like whoever was in the designing chair thought 'loot is cool, let's put loot everywhere!'. You know if you give $100 to a homeless in the street, he'll probably love you and bless your family for 100 generations, but if you give $100 to Bill Gates he'll be like 'hmm… I already have enough toilet paper, leave me alone'. Well, that happens in this game.

There is SO MUCH loot that it totally kills the joy of finding magic items. Not only that, but it pretty much kills the crafting skills making them unnecessary, as you'll be tripping over so many Mega Swords of Awesomeness in chests next to the town's fountains or killing level 1 goblins that why bother? Same with alchemy (rain of potions everywhere), etc. I finished the game with over 7 million gold from selling excess loot.

Not sure how related to loot, but the game is very easy. I was sleepwalking through the game, until I changed difficulty to max and then it was a bit more exciting (still not challenging except for a few scripted bosses, but better). It's possible that the overabundance of loot is partly responsible for this.

2) Quests: Too many quests, almost MMO-like in that aspect. You have so many quests to do that it's hard to remember which quest advances what.

3) Voice acting: No wonder they ran out of money, they must have spent $300 trillion paying voice actors… every NPC (and there are hundreds) has a full list of topics to talk about, all voiced out. Not only unnecessary, but it only means that if you want to localize the game in another language, it's not going to be cheap.

Having said all that, the game is enjoyable. Bad design decisions aside, it's pretty, it has a serviceable main story, plus good faction storylines (about 4 or 5 of them which you can pursue all in one playthrough). I would give it a personal score of 75/100.