Last game you finished, tell us about it

Black Crypt ... I just played the PC level they once distributed for free. I found it hilarious to see just how many designs they recycled for later games.
Apart from that, I'm not qualified to talk about the quality of Black Crypt. I do love ShadowCaster dearly, though. Clever design. Really clever.

CyClones is not nearly as deep in the gameplay department, nor is it as beautiful, but once I overcame initial frustration about controls, I really liked it. I'm not sure you'd like it though, Dart.

Not sure if I'd held it in the same regard I still hold Heretic and Hexen (and Doom), though, as these games are clearly more beautiful and have way better atmosphere. As far as SF games go, it's definitely a lot better than that other 1994 title Corridor 7. But it's a Raven game, so I kinda expected that.

I loved Hexen for the hub system, even though that wasn't exactly new, but that other (... first) hub game was extremly hard on the eye.
 
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You did the review with an agenda, and with a goal you hate the game. It never changes, and I'm tired of the negativity to all things Bioware does on this site.

So keep the reviews coming as I said there at least good for a laugh.;)

There are two posts. The first one is about the game. I don't hate the game.
But yes, there was an agenda. I hate something else. The second post about the same game says exactly what I hate and who I hate. It's not Bioware - instead of hands, I hate the head.
 
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It's not the best part it sux.
And I didn't really review it in detail as I quit playing it very soon. But it didn't affect by any means the 0 nor 7 /10.

But if you want a bit about it…

Initially you have a few races/classes to play with.
By playing, you level them and earn cash.
With cash you pay a lotery ticket and gamble - maybe you get another type of champion, maybe not.
Oh, and… You can pay with Bioware points (real money) for this gambling.

There is a huge difference between these MP toons and ingame NPCs. Multiplayer ones have only 2-3 skills. And you can't, by any means, change skills on keys.
I was furious I can't put warp skill on another key when I was playing a human adept in multiplayer!

Some multiplayer toons are much more useable than others. For example two asari chicks can instakill Atlas (Cerberus boss, mech) just by biotic explosions as asari have warp+throw.

Thanks to MOBA genre, EA wanted as much different "heroes" as possible to milk you on gambling. What fans got?
Another bloody plot hole!

Did you play and finish ME2? Yea, you did. A question:
How many ships collectors have?
1. Only 1 and you know that from ME2. And in ME2 you will destroy it.
From Mass Effect movie, suddenly happens that there was a second collector ship, James Vega destroyed easily and almost singlehandedly without Normandy, EDI and all those resources Shepard needed in ME2 (another bloody plot hole because of which I toldya not to watch that milk fans rotten animated insult).

And one of "heroes" you may win on a lottery is?
http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Ma..._Customization/Adept#Awakened_Collector_Adept
Well excuse me. Shepard killed every single collector out there. If we will close an eye on the plot hole in the movie, let's say those Shepard didn't kill were destroyed by James Vega. WTF are now Awakened Collector Adepts and where the hell did they come from? Imagine additional confusion if a player never bought Leviathan DLC. Oh and did you see any of these mobs in Mass Effect 3 singleplayer? NO YOU DIDN'T.

How do you play? Easily. Either you create an instance or join another, some maps are a bit harder than others, but you can't lose if you pick bronze challenge any mobs and any map.
On the map you need to deal with about a dozen of challenges. Hack some points, nail some hostiles, pick and carry an item to another spot or protect a repair drone. And that's it. Oh and it's not PvP like someone mentioned in this thread Call of Duty, maps are PvE. One of those you've seen near the end of ME3 in a singleplayer mission and honestly it's one of the worst designed maps in the game if not the worst.

Sorry but there was no fun for me in it at all. But as I can't be objective on a grinder, I mean I hate grinding, sorry but I can't say it's x/10. All I can say it wasn't fun.

——-

Oddly, noone asked me how come I didn't mention the "bug" on imported savegame where your minerals war assets are not 100, but just 10 or 25 although you had hundreds of thousands minerals collected in ME2.
Not only that, ppl were and still are trying to find how does that work (fell free to check both google and bioware forums).

I'll tell you this. I didn't have hundreds of thousands of minerals on import and got 100 assets both recent replays. What I did have both times is almost all DLC.
IMO the value of minerals asset doesn't depend on the grinding mineral mining minigame in ME2. I'm 99.99% sure it depends on how many DLC you've bought. No DLC, you get 10. One or two DLC, you get 25. Three or more, hey here's 100!


ME4 is being developed and it's possible we see it next year.
Do you remember when Ray Muzyka wrote that in ME3 they won't leave any question unanswered and that we'll find out exactly what was bothering us in ME1&2 (I've mentioned I wanted to see how does Tali look without her mask).
After we didn't get answers and after it was an obvious and blatant lie, Muzyka left Bioware.

Me, a fan who didn't stop only on their dirty DLC business but bought also comics, the movie and N7 jacket replica - I'm not buying ME4.
The only way I'll buy it is if there is no gameaffecting DLC.
I don't care if it will have multiplayer, it's not for me, okay, there are people who will enjoy it. I also don't care if there will be plot holes thanks to cashgrab DLC (like the biggest one with how Earth wasn't destroyed - thanks to Arrival DLC where just a relay destroys a solar system and in ME3 it was the biggest relay of them all, Citadel, in Sol system).
Give me the whole game, I'll pay any price you ask, but I don't want to be an idiot any more. If you need to sell DLC, sell it as a standalone thing. But do not touch the game.

Honestly I had so much more to write, a detail on every mission, story and substory I like or dislike, but in the end what's the point of it? I've already written too much about ME3 anyway.

If you will accept to buy ME3 with all DLC, you'll have fun and I bet you'll agree it deserves 7/10 as I've posted in the first post. But if you don't buy all DLC, and then stop and think about the whole business EA did with ME3, all you will see is one letdown over another.
A game should be fun, not a letdown. A collection of letdowns can deserve only one thing. That's my 0/10 in the second post.
You pick the one you feel is more proper for you.

——

And a spoiler for the end in the case you're still confused why I sound like a complete lunatic when it comes to EA.

Imagine you play ME3 and pick botoxed Ashley and blue beauty Liara with you on the mission to cure the genophage. Wrex has a comment. Uninteresting one.

But you buy deliberately cut out From Ashes DLC and you pick Garrus and Javik (Prothean) with you. Wrex says this:
mt6qsw.jpg


And EA dared to cut out this from the game? Exact words I thought in ME2? A perfect oneliner, hilarious especially coming out from Wrex' mouth?
And it's not the only thing you miss to see. In the game. Remember this is in the game. The game you've payed for. This is not some separate optional DLC mission that can't affect the game anyhow.
But to see this, you have to pay for DLC.
Sorry, but it makes me sick.
 
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Actually all the MP player races are quite fun to play. I've played them all on gold difficulty successfully. One thing that you left out is that they all have different skills. And the skills are much more interesting than Shepard's skills on single player. One of my favorite races is the ex cerberus fury who can teleport through walls. And the guns you unlock allow for different strategies based on skill synergies available to different races. The combinations are quite cool. The coop gameplay is what really makes it fun for me when you're playing with a good group. It's really quite fun, much more than SP. I have yet to see a multiplayer game that puts all that together as well. And the awakened collector adept one of my favorite races to play, BTW. Dark spheres of green glowing explosions and the collector particle beam rifle for the win. ME3 lore? Well, that's not really my thing. The MP gameplay is where it is at. :)
 
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IMO you should try at least one MOBA game. Not only you'll see so many different heroes, you'll be amazed how far synergies can go where a team of 3 if solo completely crappy toons when in group can massacre a group of 5.
And of course you need a good group, not everyone has "skills" to pull out some lunacy combos. ;)

A positive thing about ME3 MP I forgot to say… The community is not trolling nor is rude. I've played with ppl never seen before or after and all were helping. Me too, ofc.
It's just… The whole thing was not fun.
 
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Black Crypt … I just played the PC level they once distributed for free. I found it hilarious to see just how many designs they recycled for later games.
Apart from that, I'm not qualified to talk about the quality of Black Crypt. I do love ShadowCaster dearly, though. Clever design. Really clever.

At the time of release, Black Crypt was quite ahead of its time in terms of dungeon crawler - or at least I thought so.

ShadowCaster was also fantastic - but it didn't quite beat Black Crypt - for me.

CyClones is not nearly as deep in the gameplay department, nor is it as beautiful, but once I overcame initial frustration about controls, I really liked it. I'm not sure you'd like it though, Dart.

Probably not, but I could still check it out ;)

Not sure if I'd held it in the same regard I still hold Heretic and Hexen (and Doom), though, as these games are clearly more beautiful and have way better atmosphere. As far as SF games go, it's definitely a lot better than that other 1994 title Corridor 7. But it's a Raven game, so I kinda expected that.

I never liked Hexen and Heretic very much. To me, they were just reskinned Dooms - and I never cared for Doom beyond multiplayer. Well, it was a very pretty game - but also very, very boring.

With games like Ultima Underworld and System Shock - I could never quite understand why Hexen and Doom were so popular.

Probably has something to do with most people preferring to shoot rather than think :)
 
Well, the most important thing for me is atmosphere, and atmosphere doesn't have to mean eye-candy. I liked Heretic and Hexen because of that (and, of course, Doom). But I love shooters ... not all shooters, but most ^^.
Hexen was a bit more than just shooting ... it was an extended memory test as well ('What, a door just opened on the Guardian of Ice? Where the heck was that again???').

Have you ever played Strife, then? If you haven't, you should. It's a Science Fantasy shooter adventure with great comic book panel style character dialog graphics, good voice acting (though sound definitely makes it unplayable if you play it without DOSBox), neat story twists and 100 ways of rendering it unplayable by doing the wrong quests or things in the wrong sequence (somewhat like Redguard and LoL2). It has choices with consequences, though, and three different endings, and somehow - I just don't know why, but I'm not the only one who felt like this - it has a pretty Star Wars-y vibe.
The problem is that you have just one save slot per game, you need to save often ... and if you save after having butchered your game (which you probably won't know at the time), you're screwed.
Though the only really bad decision you can make in this regard is pretty close to the start, and you'll notice your error during the first sixth of the game, so not too much is lost.
 
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Well, the most important thing for me is atmosphere, and atmosphere doesn't have to mean eye-candy. I liked Heretic and Hexen because of that (and, of course, Doom). But I love shooters … not all shooters, but most ^^.
Hexen was a bit more than just shooting … it was an extended memory test as well ('What, a door just opened on the Guardian of Ice? Where the heck was that again???').

We have that in common. To me, atmosphere and exploration are the most important elements in pretty much any game - and I suppose you could lump my favorite stuff together and call it immersion, but it's a hard thing to quantify.

To me, System Shock was the peak of all that I like about the first person perspective - and I never considered it much of a shooter. Frankly, the shooter gameplay was clumsy and awkward compared to Doom or the other games mentioned.

But it did immersion better than any other game had done before - and the way you were all but free to explore that big space station at your leisure was amazing to me. The amount of innovative features crammed into a single game that had but a couple of years in development with their own proprietary engine still boggles the mind.

The shoot-shoot-shoot-find-the-keycard gameplay of Doom was just nothing in comparison.

It's true that Hexen did have some very basic RPG elements, but I kept hoping for more from Raven after the games mentioned - and I just didn't care much for anything they did back then. Did they do Return to Castle Wolfenstein? I think that's about the only Raven game I've really liked since ShadowCaster.

Well and those two Jedi Knight games they did, IIRC.

Have you ever played Strife, then? If you haven't, you should. It's a Science Fantasy shooter adventure with great comic book panel style character dialog graphics, good voice acting (though sound definitely makes it unplayable if you play it without DOSBox), neat story twists and 100 ways of rendering it unplayable by doing the wrong quests or things in the wrong sequence (somewhat like Redguard and LoL2). It has choices with consequences, though, and three different endings, and somehow - I just don't know why, but I'm not the only one who felt like this - it has a pretty Star Wars-y vibe.
The problem is that you have just one save slot per game, you need to save often … and if you save after having butchered your game (which you probably won't know at the time), you're screwed.
Though the only really bad decision you can make in this regard is pretty close to the start, and you'll notice your error during the first sixth of the game, so not too much is lost.

No, I think I missed that one. I wonder if it's from before I got my own PC - which was around 1993. I was a diehard Amiga fan before I finally caved and realised PC was the only choice for gaming after Commodore screwed time after time.

Sounds interesting, though - will have to check it out, thanks ;)
 
Strife is from 1996, but it was severly overlooked back then (just like RotH, but that's a different level of … er, greatness :p ).
It's a Doom engine game with a similar level of object interactivity as in Hexen, and it has hubs as well. It also has several states of locations depending on what you did, so if you manage to cross locational state borders by accident or exploit, you're probably screwed as well :). But it has the better NPCs … I mean, it HAS NPCs.


EDIT: I also loved the original SysShock, mother of the audio log.
 
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Have you ever played Strife, then? If you haven't, you should. It's a Science Fantasy shooter adventure with great comic book panel style character dialog graphics, good voice acting (though sound definitely makes it unplayable if you play it without DOSBox), neat story twists and 100 ways of rendering it unplayable by doing the wrong quests or things in the wrong sequence (somewhat like Redguard and LoL2). It has choices with consequences, though, and three different endings, and somehow - I just don't know why, but I'm not the only one who felt like this - it has a pretty Star Wars-y vibe.
The problem is that you have just one save slot per game, you need to save often … and if you save after having butchered your game (which you probably won't know at the time), you're screwed.
Though the only really bad decision you can make in this regard is pretty close to the start, and you'll notice your error during the first sixth of the game, so not too much is lost.

Thank you for this, I was trying to remember the name of this game last week and would never have come up with it. I was working at Software Etc at the time I played this game and was able to ummmmmm . . . test it out before I bought it. Also at the time the company had a very generous return policy for workers. Thus this particular game was not in my physical inventory.

One of the few shooters of the time I played all the way through. Engaging story at the time.

Strife
Nice wiki with some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strife_(video_game)
 
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Strife is from 1996, but it was severly overlooked back then (just like RotH, but that's a different level of … er, greatness :p ).
It's a Doom engine game with a similar level of object interactivity as in Hexen, and it has hubs as well. It also has several states of locations depending on what you did, so if you manage to cross locational state borders by accident or exploit, you're probably screwed as well :). But it has the better NPCs … I mean, it HAS NPCs.


EDIT: I also loved the original SysShock, mother of the audio log.

A game like that from 1996 I didn't hear about? That's unusual. Gotta look into it.

RotH is definitely on another level. In fact, if RotH had been less of a shooter and more of an RPG - it would probably have been in my top 10 games of all time.

Yup, System Shock CD version did audio logs first, as far as I know.

But one mustn't forget that Xenomorph did the "log" thing a few years before Shock. I'm sure there are even older sci-fi games doing something similar, I just haven't personally played them :)

There was also that ancient Mac game called Marathon - which I never played. Some people claim it did something like Shock - before Shock - but from what I've seen, what it did was much, much less impressive. But Mac owners have to go with what they've got, I guess ;)

As for you, Jaz, I trust you've played BioForge? If you're into this kind of thing - you MUST try that one, if you haven't already.
 
Thank you for this, I was trying to remember the name of this game last week and would never have come up with it. I was working at Software Etc at the time I played this game and was able to ummmmmm . . . test it out before I bought it. Also at the time the company had a very generous return policy for workers. Thus this particular game was not in my physical inventory.

One of the few shooters of the time I played all the way through. Engaging story at the time.

Strife
Nice wiki with some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strife_(video_game)

Interesting.... So, it's a game recreated from some lost source code? Wow ;)
 
Oh, I never played Xenomorph. It was the first audiolog game? Cool. SysShock was the first one I ran into ... and it was the first game with elevator music for me. I never owned a Mac, so I don't know about Marathon ...
The first hub level game I encountered was Catacomb Apocalypse, I think.

Yes, I played BioForge. While I liked the story, I found the third person view ... difficult (never been a huge fan of that). I liked CyberMage (same year, same dev, same distributor, same cyberpunk backdrop) waaaaaaaay better. Despite the horrendous hardware hunger. Despite the horrendous CTD bugs ... because, you know, it had atmosphere, some nice new gameplay elements ... and there was always a way to circumvent the bugs. This even added to the adventure elements :p.

RotH is pretty much my favorite game of all times, depending on my mood :). There are times when I prefer Thief: Metal Age, though.
 
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Oh, I never played Xenomorph. It was the first audiolog game? Cool. SysShock was the first one I ran into … and it was the first game with elevator music for me. I never owned a Mac, so I don't know about Marathon …
The first hub level game I encountered was Catacomb Apocalypse, I think.

Nah, Xenomorph didn't have actual audio in the logs - just the logs in the form of disks you'd find lying around. You could them access them at various terminals - which was very cool at the time.

It's one of the most elaborate sci-fi dungeon crawlers I know, and it's well worth checking out if you're so inclined.

http://www.indieretronews.com/2013/10/amiga-dungeoneering-collection-over-60.html

I can highly recommend checking out the above site for emulation packages. They take care of all the annoying technical stuff and you just launch an .exe file with everything already configured.

Yes, I played BioForge. While I liked the story, I found the third person view … difficult (never been a huge fan of that). I liked CyberMage (same year, same dev, same distributor, same cyberpunk backdrop) waaaaaaaay better. Despite the horrendous hardware hunger. Despite the horrendous CTD bugs … because, you know, it had atmosphere, some nice new gameplay elements … and there was always a way to circumvent the bugs. This even added to the adventure elements :p.

I agree the third person perspective made it frustrating at times, but I found the story particularly well written and engaging in BioForge. Another early example of logs lying around. There's a surprising amount of in-depth text if you really care to delve into it.

I was used to the control setup and perspective from having played Alone in the Dark - which is another of my early favorite games on PC. Just a fantastic game at the time.

Cybermage never appealed to me much - and I forget why. I think I was used to something a bit more "meaty" from Origin and it seemed more like a shooter than anything else.

RotH is pretty much my favorite game of all times, depending on my mood :). There are times when I prefer Thief: Metal Age, though.

While I admired Thief a lot - it was never quite elaborate enough for my tastes. Your "gameplay arsenal" was just too limited and seemed to focus around standing still a lot of the time.

I prefer stealth games where you have more tools and stuff to do in general.

But it's by Looking Glass which is my favorite developer of all time - so I can't help but like a lot about what it did.
 
I played Alone in the Dark, too, alternating with Doom. I liked Doom a lot better, but I already said that I love shooters. If they have adventure or RPG elements it's even better, but I'm definitely a shooter person primarily. Or was. The last purestrain shooter I thoroughly enjoyed was Quake 4 back in 2005, which was unexpected as I had not enjoyed Halflife 2 much. After that I kinda lost interest in the genre because I didn't like the tendency towards realistic settings and graphics (and my reflexes aren't what they used to be, naturally :p ). I don't like the uncanny valley, thank you very much. Those ... faces really turned me off when I watched the trailer for the new Wolfenstein game ...

As for recently finished games: I'm not sure I'd call this finished, but I actually managed to level my first SWTOR character to level 55 last week (and finished his class storyline). I did a lot of procrastinating instead of grinding, so it took me quite some time to get there, but I had a lot of fun helping my slightly lower-level RL friend level up his main char - so there.
We're both playing Troopers and take great care to always wear the same sets of armor, but his is a Commando (ranged DPS/healer) while mine is of the Vanguard specialization (ranged Tank/close quarters DPS). Fighting difficult PvE battles together and winning against all odds, then going to a cantina to dance and throw confetti and get all flirty with female Jedi characters ... yeah, that's fun :).
Now I'm alternating between my two low-level Sith chars and my mid-level Bounty Hunter, but I just don't get warm with the Force users. I think I'll continue with my BH for the time being.
 
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I haven't had a lot of time for gaming lately, but I did finish Thief Gold recently.

Thief is a game I had started several times over the years, but for one reason or another I always got sidetracked and never finished it. I played all the levels on Hard difficulty and felt pretty satisfied when it was finally over.

With the exception of the controls, Thief has aged extremely well imo, and it's easy for me to see why so many gamers consider it a classic.

It's one of the most immersive games I've played in a long time, and the level design is fantastic. I especially enjoyed 'Down in the Bonehoard', 'The Sword', 'The Haunted Cathedral', 'The Lost City', and 'Strange Bedfellows'.

I didn't care much for the final level, but that wasn't enough to bring down my overall enjoyment of the game.

I was planning on going back to an RPG for my next game, but the pull of Thief 2 is too strong to resist. I might just end up playing through the entire series now.
 
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Bound By Flame

If you've played games developed by Spiders before, you know what you're in for. If you liked Of Orcs and Men/Mars War Logs, I suspect you'll enjoy this too. It's basically Mars War Logs in a fantasy setting with expanded content (more side quests, more items, more crafting, areas seem bigger).

If you haven't played their games before, temper your expectations. Spiders doesn't develop AAA titles. They work on a small budget and the scope of their games reflects the limited finances. If you're looking for a sprawling open world like Skyrim, just move along. Maps are setup much more like Dragon Age 2, fairly linear with things tucked away in corners. Game length is short (took me 11 hours on normal doing most of the sidequests). It is Action combat (not personally a fan), but it does function alright. My only complaints are only being able to dodge one direction (straight back and only if using daggers) and strafing don't really give the freedom of movement I'd like to have in this kind of combat system (would like to control dodge direct and/or have a roll). I had some minor annoyances with the camera in combat too. If you wind up getting an object between the camera and you're character you can't see what's happening, really bad for this kind of combat system.

Usually Spiders does a very good job crafting compelling stories. The story here I found far less interesting than Mars War Logs or Of Orcs and Men (amazing story imo) and the writing didn't pull me in like those games. I also feel like the companions fell a bit flat here which is unfortunate as they aren't all cookie cutter archtypes. However, the writing is still better than a lot of other RPGs I've played. I found the game to be fairly bug free, other than archers shooting at you despite facing another direction, and two random crashes which seem to be linked to a compatibility issue with my GPU (AMD Radeon 6950 HD).

Overall, not a bad game if you're expectations are in line with the offering, though probably easier to justify on sale. I would call it my second favorite Spiders game behind Of Orcs and Men.
 
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Well, I just finished Risen 2 and had a blast doing so.

I really thought the level of craftsmanship and overall quality of the game was very high - higher than I had ever expected. It felt like a well-polished gem, which was nice.

It wasn't perfect, but I'd rate it a solid 8.5/10. The level of immersion was very high and the world was great to explore.

This was my first real foray into Piranha Bytes games and the experience was extremely positive. I already feel like these guys are masters of crafting an interesting world to explore.

Next up will be Gothic 3 probably, or Risen 1 (which I've spent about 15 hours with but never finished). Or perhaps the first Gothic game. Whatever game I play next, though, it's sure to be a Piranha Bytes game. I really feel like they do many things in the RPG genre that I would do myself if I developed games, if that makes sense.
 
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