Last game you finished, tell us about it

I finished Legend of Grimrock and I really liked it. It plays like a more friendly, streamlined version of Eye of Beholder and to me that's not a bad thing

Of course, I had to Google for some puzzles especially after I got to dungeon's level 4
Now onto Legend of Grimrock 2 !!!!

Finished first playthrough of Torment:ToN and I am left feeling the same way I began: frustrated by the consequences of my actions ( which may be the philosophical point of the game). Just as at the very start of the game I knew I was supposed to have a choice about my character role yet was only presented with one option at the critical point, I experienced this over and over again throughout. Examples: has Casti the nano has two potential resolutions but as I played only one of them revealed itself; there are 6 different endings but as I stood in the final chamber I had but one path to take. I understand that I got what I did because of decisions I made earlier in the game, but since they were so natural and transparent to me I worry that another playthrough will only net me the same results!

Finished Bayonetta, third time is it?, this time on PC.
Best fun I've had, well since the last time I played Top Platinum game.
Everything is so hilariously over the top, but when it "clicks", it justcomes together and you can't help but chuckle and chuckle and chuckle through everything and simply enjoy the ride...god, how many crazy sequences and absolutely best action combat out there.
Like Vanquish more, but this is Pt at their finest, zero inhibitions or sense/pesky publishers holding them back.
Only flaw is no Hard difficulty option at the start and some annoying QTE's/long drive sequences.

Just finished Persona 5. Played it in a PS4. It's a long game, took me about 125 hours.
Combat is turn based, you have a group of teammates, 3 of them can fight with you at any given time, and you can switch to others out of combat, or if a certain Confidant gets ranked enough you can do it during combat. There are no random battles (you can see them) and there is no enemy respawn as long as you don't leave the area you're in.

In short the story is that you're a high school student that gets on probation for a crime you didn't commit, and has to go stay under a guardian for a year. During that year you'll get to live the (more or less) daily life of a student while also going to the metaworld, a world where you go fight with personas you recruit and your teammates. Personas are basically monsters and creatures you can recruit from battles, each with different abilities, resistances and stats. They level up too but after 5 or so level ups they learn all their innate skills and you're better off fusing them with other personas to make new higher level personas who can inherit some of the skills from its parents. Sort of like you're constantly shifting gears. For battle you get to hold a certain amount of personas to use so there is a tactical decision of which personas to bring with you.
The second aspect of the game is that of personal relations, you have teammates and other important people that represent different Confidence types, as you get closer to them you get bonuses when you fuse personas of that aspect, plus your friends get new abilities or bonuses too (like, a teammate can stop a hit that would kill you or cure you of some abnormal status, or a shopkeeper giving you discount or access to special equipment, etc).

I loved the game of course, but it has a few things I didn't care for. One, they brought back Persona negotiations when getting a Persona. I prefer previous PErsonas where you just got them. Supposedly each Persona has a personality and you're supposed to pick responses depending on that but most of the times it didn't make sense to me which response was 'funny' or 'serious'. Another aspect I don't care for (and this is common for all Persona games) is that when the protagonist dies it's game over. At least in this game you can retry a boss battle which minimizes the effect, but specially in the first part of the game, an enemy may surprise you, hit you with your weakness, hit you again and game over.
But the thing that I really didn't like about this one is that in previous Personas I could plan what to do each day with little issue, but in P5 it feels like most days are scripted, so I stopped attempting to plan ahead early on and just go with the flow.
One more nit-pick perhaps is that this takes the "Yay we killed the boss! oh wait, there's more!" aspect of JRPGs to new levels, that's part of the 125 hour reason.
Still, great game, hope I don't have to wait a long time for P6 (just wish they made it a college game so I can finally order a beer!).

I'm going through old kickstarters at the moment. I just finished Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs after just over 20 hours. It was a charming japanese style SRPG with relationship building and time management inspired by Persona. The combats were nicely tactical and the protagonists were diverse. The final battle was a jump in difficulty but I had maxed out the alchemist and was able to brew mighty potions of war to sustain me. Next up is StarCrawlers, which is already turning out to have a nice atmosphere.

And done with Vanquish. What a ride…blew up the station, though cyborg Putin ( with bit less hair) managed to live through the day

The game is fairly short ( only 6-8 hours depending on difficulty), but non stop adrenaline rush from start to end.
Even credits scene is hilarious…shooting asteroids with devs faces on it. This is why I love Platinum…their games are pure fun because they have a blast making them.
Absolutely recommended.

I don't finish games very often. Today I finally finished Picross 3D on the DS, including all downloadable puzzles (which I downloaded before the DS servers were turned off. I estimate about 840 puzzles in total. I bought the game in 2011, so that's six years of puzzling. Now on to Picross 3D 2! I've played it a bit already and the dual colour system seems to be easier than the first one.

Notorious said:

I don't finish games very often.

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Okay.
Why?

Because I don't like doing the same things over and over, so I get easily distracted into looking for the next shiny game that comes along. And there are far too many games these days so it's harder to focus on just one. My GoG list is over 200 games long. Fifteen years ago, I would sit down and play Wizardry 8 to completion. These days, I can't even finish Might&Magic X.

Geez man, stop hoarding everything, recently I refused to add IIRC Dirt freebie on my HumbleBundle acc - I mean, when will I ever find enough time to play it. Besides, I don't like racing games anyway.
Mission Impossible: clean that overgrown backlog.

joxer said:

Mission Impossible: clean that overgrown backlog.

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I'm going to steal that for my signature joxer...

It's a classic case of false economy.

For example, if you're at the supermarket and it says 50% off your second pack of tomatoes if you buy two, you might think "might as well buy it for that price, I'm sure I could find something to do with them". Let's say one pack is 1 Euro. By going for the promotion you've now spent 1e50.

Then life returns to normal when you get home. Your natural routine doesn't allow for you to consume all those tomatoes, that's why you only usually buy one pack. Do you a) throw away those quickly rotting tomatoes in a few days time? or b)stuff your face with tomatoes until you're sick of them just 'to get your money's worth'?

Of course you can nitpick about tomatoes and how long they last and the extent to which you'll never get sick of eating tomatoes, but that's missing the point of the allegory/metaphore, obviously.

You should have some idea of how many games you play per year. You should have some idea of what kind of games you like.

If you tend to play, for simplicity's sake, 10 games per year, then you could buy them all one at a time when you felt you needed to buy a new game for full price and spend say 200Euros for your year's gaming over the course of the year. If you dish out 10Euros every time someone has a sale, say every other week, then you've shelled out 260Euros in a year.

But also, because you're addicted to sales then the games might not necessarily be games that you definitely know you'll like, you just liked the price. So you could well have spent more money for less actual gaming.

Again, you could nitpick the details of the allegory/metaphore but the principle should be obvious.

Further, your psychology is damaged as you develop a 'backlog', which makes your mind think as if it has homework to do, aka a form of stress. And, like the tomatoes, you leave yourself with a choice of either gorging on something you don't really fancy or just chucking away your over-purchase [ie: don't ever play them].

I still do what I did when games were sold as discs in shops. I'd wait till I had nothing left to play then I'd go buy 3 or 4 games and see how long they lasted, then, when I'd worn them all out, go out and buy another batch. To me this just seems like common-sense normality, but I'm aware that this idea is alien to a lot of people. While I understand why some people behave like that I don't really understand the why if you know what I mean.

Just a few words about Life is Strange, finished it a few days ago.

Pros:
- You'll love the story. You will. Honestly. Your choices affect that same story.
- Controls are great although it's an obvious port from garbage hardware.
- Main voiceovers, music scores and overall sound kicks arse.
- The avoiding copyright infrigment style of muddening pics and posters allows player's imagination to go wild.
- Somewhat easy puzzles are still fun thanks to refreshing time travel mechanics (backwards timeflow at one point was brilliant!)
- No pixelhunt, you need to explore and use your wits.

Cons:
- No romance. I wanted to hit on the school's #1 bitch and couldn't. Yea, noone cares about my soft spots.
- Graphics looks as if the game is 10 years old, it's almost like in Gothic 1.
- Episodic approach - always buy these games when released complete!
- Stalling and dragging in episodes 1 and 5 (if a player feels a need to rush, don't bombard them with unnecessary explorable/talkable objects!).

The game is basically a combination of Butterfly Effect and Tesis. Yes, I know you've never heard about Tesis before. Shame on you. Watch now. Thank me later.

The difference is while these movies had a male+female major roles, the game concentrates on two girls which instantly feels refreshing, I'm sick of cliche "Hollywood pair" stories.

Sorry I refuse to spoil more. This is one of those games that do things completely different from any other, yet pushes all the right buttons. The game, complete version, was on some sale maybe it still is with the price of just a few bucks, but it's IMO worth more.
Even with cons I numbered, this game is a musthave. Apparently the prequel is in the works (skippit as it won't have timeshift and voiceovers won't be from the same actors), but also the sequel which hopefully will address at least the eyehurting graphics. Can't wait.

8/10

joxer said:

Cons:
- No romance. I wanted to hit on the school's #1 bitch and couldn't. Yea, noone cares about my soft spots.

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There is two romance options in the game

I still say no romance - IMO things going on with those two is a simple innuendo that never turns into an actual romance.

joxer said:

I still say no romance - IMO things going on with those two is a simple innuendo that never turns into an actual romance.

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You get to kiss both in the last episode.

I finished a few games recently.

First, Half-Life 2 + episode 1 +2 and this was the first time ever for me actually. I checked my backed up decade+ old saves and I must have gotten bored on Highway 17 back in the day as my ancient saves were from that level.

HL2 did not really grab me back in the day and it actually annoyed me a lot in the beginning because it made me nauseous after mere minutes of playing.
This was due to the original HL2's low FoV (it was not motion sickness but just FoV sickness).

Thankfully Valve has included a FoV slider in modern HL2 so you can choose to play it at any FoV you wish between 75 and 90 so with my 32" screen at 1440p I went for 90 and I had zero issues throughout the entire game which helped a lot to enjoy it much more than back in the day when I had to exit every five minutes to avoid a pukecident .

It was pretty good fun but I won't shed tears if HL3 stays AWOL. The cliffhanger at the end of episode 2 made me lose even more respect for Valve. They really should have followed up with an episode 3 to at least somehow conclude the story of part 2. With their resources there is no excuse for not delivering anything in over 10 years. Lame.

Secondly, I finally finished SOMA and against all the overwhelming praise on Steam reviews etc., I have to say that I wasn't too fond of the game and had to force myself over the past weeks and months to finally see it to the end.
It had very nice visuals and a decent atmosphere, of course, but horror games don't do much (just don't work) for me. The philosophy in the game was more of the kitchen philosophy type IMO like what you'd discuss with a good friend at 3AM on a weekend night after a (couple) bottle(s) of wine .
Nah. Not impressed overall.

Finally, I also did a quick replay of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter but the Redux version this time which I got added to my Steam library for free as an owner of the original version. There wasn't really that much of a difference. The game still has awesome visuals, a decent story but too little gameplay. It's still just a nice, relaxing walking sim with a bit of interactivity tacked on.

Last game I finished was Gothic 2 Gold a couple weeks ago. 91 hours total and I missed a lot of stuff, I'm sure. Played as a Fire Mage, which was great, but a bit weird at the end due to my (poor) character build. I ended up having to summon Demons at the end mostly and just run around while it wiped everything up for me.

Thought the game overall was really good. It was much larger and had more content than I ever imagined. Somehow I blew through Gothic 1 at 37 hours, but this one was just massive it seemed. Overall it was my type of thing, loved the hand-placed feeling of stuff, rare plants, etc.. I thought the 3 main areas I explored - Khorinis, Valley of Mines and Jharkendar just had excellent design, both physical terrain design and content-wise. They were interesting to explore, loaded with stuff to do/kill/see/find, little secrets tucked all throughout the map. With the D3D11 renderer the game looked beautiful as well, with long view distances and sharp graphics.

For an action RPG that is "open world", it doesn't get much better so far for me than G2. Morrowind is up there, too. It's weird, though, because in some regards I prefer the first Gothic game. Basically that is due to the incredible setting of the penal colony and the more interesting (to me) factions. I also enjoyed The Sleeper lore and story more than the dragon story of G2. G2 had more exploration, though, since it basically had the entirety of the first game's landmass and then added 2 entirely new, huge areas to that. Can't go wrong with either one, really.

Playing Gothic 3 now and enjoying it a lot, too. It's much different than the first 2, but the simply massive open-world with plenty to see/find/do keeps me wanting to explore it. The game is also quite beautiful for something released in 2006.

Finished Metro 2033 Redux yesterday. Environment and atmosphere were pretty great. There's not much exploring or choices/consequences, it's basically a story telling, tunnel shooter (the last very literally). Things get a bit esoteric but it doesn't really explain what's going on which was a bit of a let down. Maybe the sequel or I just missed the journal entries. Still enjoyable enough to digest in about 20 hours.

Really liked Metro 2033 (esp the rail shoot out); soma was ok. Not as good as the steam reviews but not as bad as Moriendor comment (or perhaps i misunderstand his view of the game). It has an interesting but not a new premise.