Last game you finished, tell us about it

So much for content, is the DLC any good? LotSB is one of Biowares stronger attempts at building a DLC that is like a mini-expansion, which is what a DLC should be. I cannot say that the story or the gameplay had as many surprises as Overlord did, but I can easily put LotSB on 2nd place and fans of ME who plan to play ME3 would be stupid to not check this one out.

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Stupid, really?

JemyM, you should join the 'Watch staff, you know. You produced more content in this thread than they have features on the main page...

Definitely a strong contribution, and just so that I'm not bitching without sugar - I do appreciate people taking the time to play through all that!

So, thanks, Jemy

Now, all you need is a sense of taste and accept Bioware as boring developers

DArtagnan said:

Stupid, really?

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Stupid as going against your own interests, if your interest is the ME trilogy (=fan).

GhanBuriGhan said:

JemyM, you should join the 'Watch staff, you know. You produced more content in this thread than they have features on the main page…

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Thank you. I have an interest in games, gamedesign as well as psychology. For me, writing these mini-reviews is a way for me to practice my english and also to reflect on the game I just played. I have no idea how these reflections match professional reviews. The recent ones are radically longer now since I scribble notes while playing the game and also refrain from posting it until I had a nights sleep.

Darn these review bribers are even getting to the little guys… haven't you ranked ME and DLC a bit tooo high?

Seriously JemyM your reviews are better than many of the professional ones.

JemyM said:

Stupid as going against your own interests, if your interest is the ME trilogy (=fan).

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I can be interested in something, without wanting to waste money on greed-driven tiny content packages

That shouldn't make me stupid, but if that's how you feel about it…

GothicGothicness said:

Darn these review bribers are even getting to the little guys… haven't you ranked ME and DLC a bit tooo high?

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ME1 and ME2 are masterpieces when it comes to presentation. That means, when it comes to telling a story, grasping the player in an epic cinematic experience, these "games" or "interactive movies" are as good as they get.

ME1 and ME2 are awful when it comes to gameplay. Remove the presentation and what you have left is a bleak copy of Gears of War. It's telling that the inventory system in ME1 was so awful that removing it in ME2 was in my book an improvement. That doesn't mean I would have preferred the return of the classic paper-doll inventory system from Baldur's Gate, KOTOR or Dragon Age. The RPG mechanics are equally dumbed down and poor.

Me and my friends would talk for hours about how we played Fallout, since each playstyle was different, every place had plenty of angles, ways to solve quests, choices to be made. ME offers as much discussion as a movie, we can only discuss what we saw, very little about how we played the game. When it comes to actual choice you only have two ways to play the game, orange or light blue.

I rarely consider dialogue options in this game. You pump the left choices for information, then you drag up+left to get a light blue point or down+left for an orange point. Dialogue is meaningless in ME, it's just there to be consumed.

The morality system is an option between two sterotypes which have nothing to do with morality itself. Real moral choices is context based and require a reflection of the data you are dealing with, which was the case in Dragon Age. The 2 stereotypes morality system was bad already in KOTOR. Even Dungeons & Dragons had a deeper morality system with it's chaotic/lawful angle.

They had to pay me a lot more to rate the games 95% like many reviewers did without completely revamping the games core mechanics.

DArtagnan said:

I can be interested in something, without wanting to waste money on greed-driven tiny content packages

That shouldn't make me stupid, but if that's how you feel about it…

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Slapping labels on stuff in attempt to rationalize why you shouldn't try it is actually quite stupid in my book. That's how I feel about it. Feel free to disrespect my opinion.

JemyM said:

Slapping labels on stuff in attempt to rationalize why you shouldn't try it is actually quite stupid in my book. That's how I feel about it. Feel free to disrespect my opinion.

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Why would I disrespect your opinion?

If you think I'm stupid because I don't agree with you about this kind of DLC, then that's a part of who you are - and I respect all human beings as a starting point.

They have to display more profound flaws than is evident in your character

That said, your opinion about my stance on DLC isn't particularly interesting to me - but that goes without saying

Dragon Age: Witch Hunt
I played everything released for Dragon Age this summer, including the expansion and all DLC's except for Darkspawn Chronicles. After that I am willing to let Dragon Age rest. Witch Hunt promises an end to the story, the last chance to play the Warden and get some answers to what happened with one of your companions after Origins.

On the paper, that sounded like a great deal for me. I was surprised to discover that this is the weakest DLC from Bioware I have seen in a long time.

Like the other DLC's you get new companions, but as far as I concern only one of them had any actual depth. At least Dog returns from Origins. The new companions are fully voice acted. I tell you this, because it seems it was the only *new* content in the DLC. Beyond that, Witch Hunt is a complete rehash of old stuff. There isn't a single new area in the entire game. Every area you have seen before, Circle of Magi, a place from the Stone Keeper DLC, an area from Awakenings etc. There i actually a new boss monster but that's it. I have to compare that to Lair of the Shadow Broker that had very little old content, everything made new for the module.

To add insult to injury I actually had to play the DLC twice. Due to a bug, Witch Hunt do not acknowledge the key choices made with your character in Origins unless you import your Origins save game. If you are like me, you of course import your character from Awakenings or Golems of Amgarrak so I got the bug in my first playthrough. Luckily ater finishing With Hunt with my Golems of Amgarrak character on hard, it only took me half an hour to rush it through on easy with my origins character and sucessfully managed to avoid the bug the second time through. Yes, that's how short this DLC is if you know what you are doing.

Considering the lack of content, the major bug, the fact that the DLC feels much like an advertisement for Dragon Age 2 that you payed for, and the extremely short length, Witch Hunt definitely made me a bit fooled to have purchased it without first reading the reviews.

Hmm.. this thread is too good to allow it to disappear into oblivion

Just finished Realms of Arkania 3: Shadows over Riva - and I liked it very very much! In fact I was trying to play Fallout 3:NV at the same time, but had to put that one on hold while I finished the oldie.

I don't know about you guys, but most of the time when I complete a game I'll look back on it and find that it had some sections I really liked, some sections that were OK and usually also one or two sections that I really didn't like. For a long time I thought RoA3 : SoR would be the first game in a long time, where I didn't have any sections to put into the "did not like" basket. Unfortunately the last 30min (of a 25-30h game) did not turn out so well. But more on that later…

The game is a city adventure, where you control a party of up to 6 characters (plus the occasional guest party member). You arrive in the city of Riva and discover that strange things are going on. The Orc and someone called the Holberkians are acting wierd and so are people in the city. And being total strangers you are obviously the perfect choice to figure out what is going on So far, pretty standard stuff.

The game is based on the TDE pen and paper ruleset, and it can be quite intimidating to begin with. There are *lots* of stats, *lots* of spells .. and *lots* of dice rolls involved. You really have to study the manual to figure out how things work in this game. Even creating the party (or even a single character) requires aid of the manual and a good portion of patience. Once you get the hang of it, it's really not so complicated though.

One thing that I really liked about the game is that it has some sort of "pen and paper" feel to it. There are no completely random encounters with monsters. Every situation and every battle has a short description associated with it, which will describe what is happening and why. Often you also get role playing choices presented to you to decide how to overcome a certain obstacle. These are not always easy.. for example, an option might be "Cast a spell"… if you choose this you can then specify which of the more than 100 spells you want to use for the given situation. Again, as far as I tried, both the correct and incorrect spell choices has a small piece of text associated to it, which will describe what happens next.

On the down side - the interface used for combat is… clunky (some will not be so nice and call it "horrible"). The graphics for the environment is pretty good, but there is no 3d graphics for characters and monsters. These are only visible on the combat screen.

The locations and dungeons are generally really cool, and have nice puzzles and stories attached to them. They are also quite varied and interesting. As I mentioned in the beginning there were pretty much no areas that I didn't like. This includes the final area, which is quite creative and even have some (simple) crafting that is fun.

Then they, for some reason, decided to add a *huge* maze to the game… very near the end. And by huge I mean *really* huge! They just dump you into the maze with no explanation, and expect you to find the exit. That was just incredibly annoying. Luckily I just found a map of the maze on the web and pretty much skipped the section. Call me a cheater, but that maze was just too much The curios can click this link to see what I'm talking about:
http://nlt-hilfe.crystals-dsa-foren.de/page.php?52.1
Oh, and they also changed how the automapping worked for that level, so instead of filling out a map you always were only able to see a short part of the map immediately around you...

After that maze there is a mandatory difficult fight.. and then you're supposed to reach the final fight in the game. The climax. Unfortunately the fight before the end fight were bugged for me, beyond repair! In addition to the enemies that were supposed to be included in the fight they spawned an invisible bogus enemy that were also invincible After much googling I found out that it was indeed a bug, but I could find no fix. In the end I was forced to watch the end fight and ending sequence on YouTube instead of playing it myself. We're talking about 5-10min of game play max that I missed out on, but it still felt like a huge let down after spending so much time with the game. Especially considering that I had not encountered a single bug before that one.


All in all I loved the game though, and now I think I'm off to play RoA1 and RoA2 … maybe after catching up on some of the newer games that were pushed aside by this one.

KasperFauerby said:

The graphics for the environment is pretty good, but there is no 3d graphics for characters and monsters. These are only visible on the combat screen.

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I take the liberty to comment a little bit on this : Personally, I'd call the combat "isometric view", and the running through the town is indeed in 3D, but unfortunately with no people on the streets - this was at that time simply beyond their possibilities, I assume.

The TDE community says that this game is not canon, due to some points I've forgotten about.

So I finished Fallout 3. Well, it's been a while, but I haven't got around to write about it until now.

Did I like it? Yes, very much.

I liked the world, I spent (like I do in these games) a lot of time just walking around, exploring. Yes, exploring, even if there wasn't that much variation in the landscape. I didn't mind the greenish-brownish-greyish pallette, after all we are in a world of destruction and ruins. Still, the world didn't look quite like I expected. 200 years after the big bang, I would expect at least some completely cleared and reconstructed areas, with new builings, not just camps built from salvaged parts. And in the areas still in ruins, I would expect more signs of decay caused by wind and water and moss. The ruins were too fresh. Not a big issue, didn't disturb me at all. But I thought I should mention it.

I liked talking to the NPC's and I really felt connected to/cared for some of them (especially the children). I just wish there was more of it (and not only in this game). I still remember how I in the Ultima games went back to the same NPC's again and again, obtaining new information as the game progressed and I learned more about the world. Sadly, I can't think of any recent games with the same level of interaction. It's been a looooong time since I've played any of the U's, so I may very well give them more credit here, than what they deserve.

Didn't mind the voice acting, because I don't care about voice acting at all. It's one of the things I definitely can do without and don't miss in older games. I don't listen to it, and I often turn it off, if I can. Similarly, the quality (or lack thereof) of faces and animations - couldn't care less. Well, I probably could, but it's very unimportant to me. Didn't pay attention to it MW or Oblivion, and didn't pay attention to it here. Probably won't take much notice in NV either. Or in Skyrim.

The story was OK, no better, no worse than in most other games.

I liked the skill/advancement system, better than the one they used in Oblivion. I wish however that they kept the level 20 cap, since by going from 20 to 30 I could maximize almost everything that mattered. Which made the game very easy.

And that's my first main critisizm of the game, which has all been said before, so if you want you can skip this and the next paragraph. For the first few levels I had problems in certain areas, the mutants were especially difficult if I ran into one of them. But after that things went smoothly. Apart from the level of the mobs, this has also something to do with the availability of gear, drugs, ammo, whatever. There were no real shortage, especially since I spent a lot of time walking around, outside the main quest. I wish I had postponed playing the dlc's as at least one of them gave me extremely good equipment too soon. One of the aspects of C&C is that you have to decide very carefully how you spend your money, your healing potions and augmentations, your ammo. Therefore there has to be shortage of these earthly goods. No shortage in FO3. Which also means that I didn't have to collect and sell all those packs of cigarettes after all. This is one area where I put a bit of myself into a game. Picking up and selling tobacco products always makes my real life character uncomfortable.

When I start NV, I'll definitely turn up the difficulty level. And if I find that things are just as readily available as in FO3, I think I'll not only skip the tobacco, but leave much of what I find where it is. And I won't use VATS unless I have too (if that's still in NV).

Now to the second main issue: The X-rays. Of course you can't expect top x-ray equipment in post-apocalyptia. So some technical problems like under-exposed images are to be expected. And ultrasound, CT, MRI and PET scanning was all invented long after the 50's. But there are severe faults here. First, the lack of projections. The chest xray for instance were taken with the patient standing. With the patient standing, the mandatory lateral view is easily obtained. So why is it missing? Similar for the other body parts examined: Only one view, there should at the very least have been two. And while we're still at the chest x-ray. You'll notice that you don't see the lateral parts of the chest wall and lungs. But it's in these missing parts you'll first see accumulation of excess fluid (a standing chest xray, remember). Inexcusable. And if you look closesly at the xray of the neck and count the vertabrae, you'll notice that anything below the middle of the 5th cervical vertebra is hidden by the shoulders. You should have been able to see at least the top of the 7th. Bad, bad, bad. You can say a lot of Bethesda, but they've got very lousy radiographers.

But again, all in all I found FO3 to be a veryn pleasant experience.

Bad radiology? OK that's the last straw.

Anybody want to buy FO3 GoTY cheap?

Thrasher said:

Bad radiology? OK that's the last straw.

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Yeah
It seems though, that the more stick their games get the more I love`em.

Crazy, dumbed-down games, can't even get basic radiology right. It's the console kiddies ruining our hobby, I tell you! What's the Codex saying? Oh, yeah—-DECLINE!

Force Unleashed 2
I reviewed Force Unleashed the 25th of July 2009 and my verdict was lukewarm. Not bad but not good either. A failure to utilitize the story premise, technical issues, frustrating movement and no memorable story. Can a sequel redeem the game?

Story
If you haven't played Force Unleashed, it's difficult to explain TFU2 to you without spoiling the ending. In the Dark Times era, between Episode IV and V, Force Unleashed tells the story of how the rebellion was established. The main character of the story was Starkiller, Darth Vaders secret apprentice, trained to hunt down and defeat Jedis across the galaxy. Starkiller defied his masters plans, turned against him, sparked the rebellion and in the end made the ultimate sacrifice. TFU wasn't only a sidestory, it connected the two movie trilogies which made it an incredibly important part of Star Wars canon, even the story could have been better written in my opinion. TFU2 begins on Kamino (the planet with the cloning facilities in Episode 2), with a cloned Starkiller. As soon as the game starts the clone defies Lord Vader and escapes. The story that follows is incredibly short and pretty uninteresting. Instead of being part of a greater picture, like TFU1, TFU2 is a personal story that just failed to connect with me, emotionally or intellectually. In essence you play a clone in search for answers about who you are, or who you were cloned from, but with no deeper philosophy about existence or any new twist on the Star Wars Universe, the story failed to grasp me.

Engine
TFU was glorious to look at. In TFU2 there are even less different landscapes than in the first game, but still those that are in the game are amazingly beautiful to look at. Do I need to tell you that they are using John Williams Star Wars music in the background?

Gameplay
TFU showcased an incredible engine, with amazingly good AI and breakable environment. The game however, failed to use it's potential. TFU2 is sad to say no different. You break and bend stuff here and there, but usually just because you have to to move on, with the game telling you exactly what to do. The game boils down to a simple hack n slash. I finished the game on 5-7 hours on medium difficulty without the need to upgrade my forcepowers until the final few levels, that's how easy the game was. You know exactly what technique to use against every foe that pops up, often because the game tells you which technique to use. It boils down foe A = technique A, foe B = technique B etc, with very little reason to break the routine. At least I found the game easier to control than the first game. I never accidently attack the wrong opponent or grabbed the wrong item to throw, which was a great improvement.

Conclusion
I would say that you have to be a Star Wars fan to play this game, who are eager to play whatever is labeled Star Wars. For those, you get a few hours of easily digested entertainment. For the rest, TFU2 really have nothing new to offer.

You didn't mention the radiology.

Apart from that, an excellent review which saved me some money, as I had planned on buying it.

Dead Space 2
The sequel to the game that still believes in the survival-horror genré.

Story
Dead Space is a sequel and as a such it's difficult to tell the story here without spoiling the first game. If you haven't played it yet, do. The main character in Dead Space was Isaac Clarke, a computer engineer who spent the first game exploring a large spaceship ran over by an alien infestation, cutting them up with advanced mining equipment. There were plenty of storybuilding prior to the game, with several prequels in the form of movies and minigames. However, in the game itself there wasn't too much of a story. It was there, it just wasn't that great, and Isaac was one of those characters who never spoke.

All this is improved in DS2. Dead Space 2 put Isaac in much greater focus and he now talks and I also found there to be a lot more story to this one, more emotion. I did wonder how they would build a second game after the first one ended, but I say they did it, and it fits perfectly into the ending of the first game, even expanding the universe for another sequel. Overall I say DS2 present a better story than the first game, with several twists and turns.

Engine: Graphics & Sound
Dead Space 2 uses about the same engine as the first game, so there are no real surprises when it comes to graphics & sound. They are both excellent. The armors still look unique, the monsters still gruesome. One thing I liked in particular was that the game moves fluidly into and out from cutscenes, as you walk forward the game might take over the controller and look at something that happens. The camerawork is excellent and there are some really gruesome in-your-face sequences. Dead Space 2 is a game that doesn't save on artwork and some brilliant minds was at work here.

Gameplay
Dead Space is essentially a 3rd person shooter, but Isaac moves far slower than your average action hero. You can feel that he walks around in this bulky armor (which packs a "stomp" that makes the Hulk proud). Some people are ticked off by this, but I think it is what you should expect from a Survival Horror game. That doesn't mean the game is slow, but it's more about aiming and shooting than running around.

It should be known that I played Dead Space 2 on PC, using an XBox 360 controller on my 40" HDTV, leaning back in the chair. I played DS1 with keyboard and had plenty of issues doing so, but I had no problems at all playing DS2 with the pad.

Just like in the first game you get a lot of weapons and armor which you can upgrade. The weapons have a lot of variation but I kept falling back to the first four you got, so I guess I didn't fully utilize this variety.

There were quite a few puzzles, although none I felt difficult. But there were almost no repetition in these, every puzzle was completely new from the old ones. There were a hacking minigame though, but I did not feel it to be difficult. In general I found the game to not be repetitive.

Conclusion
Fans of DS1, there's nothing that hold you back. DS2 is a worthy sequel. It's rare with real Survival-Horror games these days, but DS dares to be different. With breaks it took me two days to complete the game and I kept feeling pulled back into the game even if there was other things I should do. It was also quite hard on medium which is uncommon these days. But the action isn't bad either. The laser cutter that can be aimed horizontally or diagonally to better cut off limbs is still a brilliant new idea.