Last game you finished, tell us about it

[lura345]

Hello,

I was missing this thread on this forum. This is a thread for those who like to finish games on regular basis, where you can write the game you finished as well as a short review.

 

To get things going I will list the last 5 I finished from most recent and then back in time.

 

Psi-Ops - The Mindgate Conspiracy (9/10)

Metal Gear Solid meets Jedi Knight in a game about a special operative with psionic powers. Decent story and superb gameplay. Sad that so few know about it.

 

Sanitarium (7/10)

Bizarre horror adventure with decent graphics and a deep disturbing story.

 

Runaway 2 (9/10)

Possibly the best adventuregame I have played in years. Glorious 2d art, advanced storyline/plot, loveable characters, hillarious jokes.

 

Halo (7/10)

Some features such as vehicles was ahead of it's time save this FPS from complete boredom. Possibly the most repetitive shooter I have ever played. The story was nice though and the last level was truly epic.

 

The Suffering (8/10) + Ties That Bind (6/10)

The Suffering was a quite decent horror game. Dark disturbing story, spooky atmosphere, twisting storyline with multiple endings, nice storytelling techniques and pretty good controls. Questionable graphics was the only flaw.

[Gimli]

Torchlight - a decent Diablo clone from some ex-Blizzard people. Play the demo and see if you like it. It is very similar to Diablo so don't expect anything revolutionary. It's pretty cheap though.

 

Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter - if you played the original, then it's pretty much the same game only with spiffier graphics. It is a remake after all.

[FullAuto]

CoD Modern Warfare Reflex on der Wii. Typical CoD, shoddy single player with spawning enemies with no idea of tactics. However, controls are excellent, much faster than a gamepad, and the multiplayer is good. I've also unlocked Arcade mode, so I get a score now. Cue me replaying levels over and over again because I know I can do better.

[Civilian]

Silent Hunter 4: US WWII Sub-Simulation, very demanding (hard) and millions of awesome mods.

 

Plants vs. Zombies : Great (and cheap) tower defense like game with a twist.

 

Future Pinball: Freeware pinball simulation with thousands of tables and excellent graphics. And an editor!

 

TFTD: gave up on that one, some mission terrains are bugged and others drag on forever.

 

Fallout 3: Despite good graphics and very interesting gameplay I gave up on that one, too. Too many addons divided the community in too many groups.

 

 

Gimli, you have to try Serious Sam 2, it's very good. And cheap

[Gimli]

Civilian, I've had it since about release. All the games.

[Civilian]

The last boss was very hard to beat imo, not because of its strengths but I got physically exhausted after shooting several minutes at it, constantly moving around....

 

 

"Finished" Free Falcon 5.3 yesterday. It is a freeware combat flight simulation based on the 10 year old Falcon 4 flightsim. However the terrain graphics are..... well, let's say, one can see that they are 10 years old Too much of an immersion killer for me, so I uninstalled it, despite the many features and planes.

[Bomb Bloke]

Got a new laptop for my last birthday. Been slowly munching my way through a few titles on it.

 

BioShock

Really fun, but also really, really easy - there's no penalties for letting your health bar hit 0, and very few "powers" are required to "pillage" the entire map. Heck, at one stage in the game you're actually given access to all of them, ensuring you find out exactly how useless most of them are. The "spooky atmosphere" is also kinda lost on me, System Shock II was probably the last game that put me on the edge of my seat. I played through Doom III running around with the chainsaw and laughing the whole time.

 

ProtoType

Essentially an arcade game - sorta like Destroy All Humans, only you actually DO get to, well, destroy all humans. And anything else unlucky enough to get within 50 feet of you. Also replaces all the corny jokes with lots of style. Puts the likes of the GTA series to shame in terms of loading times - you can cover an amazing amount of distance in very short order. Puts me in mind of X-COM Enforcer with the odd "race" mission thrown in.

 

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Played through this one more then once, but I just now finished it again today, so what the heck, why not. Difficult to say whether it's the best platformer on GBA or not - it only really has the Metroid and Sonic titles to compete with.

 

Final Fantasy Tactics A-2

Great turn-based tactical gameplay, shame about the complete and utter lack of storyline. You keep playing, wondering when the plot starts, and just when you suspect it might be about to happen - the credits roll. Luckily the extensive side missions (which account for over 90% of the game) make up for it. Kinda. Certainly addicting however you look at it.

[Gimli]

BB - I only recently played the demo of Bioshock. My impressions seem to coincide with yours. I really like the setting and the story looks very interesting. I do not like all the limitations and hand-holding though. Some things are also scripted in a way that makes things look fake.

 

Is the full story good? (no spoilers please, just a yes or no)

[Bomb Bloke]

There's a bit of scripting, but no more then you'd expect from games in this day and age. For example, early on you find a giant hallway filled with ice. A single shot from your flame power and the whole lot melts into nothing. There's a small handful of silly things like that.

 

The other odd thing is that the entire gameworld is this giant underwater city that's filled with leaks. And I don't mean like condensation-type leaks, I mean there's waterfalls coming through the glass that divides it from the ocean... that all goes nowhere too, though by all indications the place should be flooded out within an hour of play.

 

The story is interesting enough, and there's a "pick your path" type thing going on with the children in the city - you're supposed to either rescue them or kill them off. I get the impression the plot stays about the same no matter what you do, though, just as how none of the "selectable" powers make any real difference to how you progress in the game. Thus far I've only played through once, so I dunno. There's also a plot twist part way through which you'll probably see coming from a mile away (even if the exact particulars of it may surprise you somewhat).

 

In addition to your powers (which can be changed out as the game progresses - think of them as exotic "guns", you can only carry so many at a time, and there are "storage thingys" around the place where you can switch which ones you're holding), you also get to upgrade your more conventional guns. The one weapon you can't upgrade is the wrench, but that's ok 'cause you're bombarded with ammo the whole way through. You're unlikely to ever run out, especially after you've gained some damage upgrades.

 

The final patch for the game included an option to turn off the respawn points, so if you die you need to reload the game instead. This was nearly as silly as the original setup, because if you were to use it, you'd just find yourself relying on the save button instead, and spend a bit more time looking at loading screens. Having to stare at loading screens does not, technically, make the game more difficult. It makes it boring. So I guess you'd say it's the story that'll drive you to finish at all - that, and to see what the next new upgrade/power it is you'll be getting.

 

How they never hit on the way System Shock II did it, I'll probably never know - that game allowed you to respawn, but charged you "money" every time you did so. Sure there wasn't much of a penalty for dieing once or twice, but if you did it too often, you'd eventually have to resort to the save/load buttons to get by.

 

It's all "pretend difficulty" - a "really" hard game would give you a set amount of lives, no save points at all (or perhaps save points that delete themselves when reloaded), and when you get a game over it's back to the start again. More or less what we call "ironman" mode when playing X-COM.

 

A common compromise is with a checkpoint system, which does at least force you to complete a certain amount of the game without failing (Prototype and GTA are games that work like this - once you start a mission, you're not allowed to stuff up until it's completed).

[acluett89]

I am playing MW2 online , I can't stop playing it. It's like a drug. I bought DS last week, have to start playing it.How about you ?

[NKF]

Last bundle of games I've completed recently include mostly console games.

 

Persona 3 and Person 3:FES's extra chapter. Played the vanilla Persona 3, then hit FES's extra chapter. FES is basically an expanded edition, with lots of extra and an extra chapter that concludes the story a little more. Didn't replay the FES edition of the main story - leaving that for my next play through later on during the year.

 

Basically a game where you play the role of the hero in the main storyline 'The Journey' where a bunch of high schoolers battle beings called Shadows during the Dark Hour - an extra hour in the day that most people don't experience. Decent story, memorable characters, amusing enough menu based combat random dungeon crawler (or climber in the main story's case) mingled with a social sim that is played over the course of a year as your hero attends school. Well, there's not a lot of skill involved in the social sim bit beyond deciding who to spend time with each day so that you can optimize your social links towards the end of the game. Has a bit of fusion action where you fuse your personas into different ones - similar to alchemy in the Atelier series. The extra chapter 'The Answer' in FES is difficult to star , and you lose a lot of the mod-cons from the standard storyline such as the Persona compendium where you can trade cash to regain personas you'd lost through fusion - with all their upgrades. However that's all balanced up by the fact that there's no dungeon crawl time limit that was an ever present pain in the normal campaign.

 

Wouldn't call it the best game ever, and it doesn't break any grounds by any means. But I guess it amused me enough to the point I went and bought some merchandise including an Aigis action figure and the original soundtrack.

 

Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier - Fun, but short extra chapter to the Jak and Daxter series. As with various other High Impact games, the game is geared towards the Playstation Portable, and feels like it consists of multiple minigames, with standard platforming action, a simplified flight sim and an action puzzle of sorts starring a mutant Daxter. Thanks to this, each segment just doesn't feel like they were used to their full potential - which is very similar to what happened in Secret Agent Clank. Amusing enough.

 

Gundam: Dynasty Warriors: Easiest way to describe this game is it's a bit of a field management game where you pilot a mobile suit and head out and beat up thousands of (often) respawning weaklings, defeat enemy commanders and what have you while conquering fields and dealing with scripted events designed to throw spanners in the works. Play as various characters from various Gundam series. The point of capturing the fields is to man them with your own team of chaff strength defenders and stop enemy chaff units from re-spawning, weaken enemy supply lines (aka make the next field stronger) and unlock story events. Technically I've only completed it as far as unlocking all the playable pilots and playable mobile suits. Very repetitive, but a fun time waster all the same. Haven't spent much time with it, but I have not been overly impressed with the sequel - which I note with some disappointment has dropped the audio language selection.

 

About a years worth of game collecting (Without the console - at the time) to work though.

 

- NKF

[Azrael Strife]

Finished Mass Effect 2 yesterday.

 

Excellent game, but it was less "wow" than Mass Effect 1, the final battle while entertaining was not nearly as epic as the final battle in the first game.

 

Really looking forward to Mass Effect 3 though, the story is very entertaining and the world is RPG's best yet, IMO.

 

 

 

 

I did manage to beat it losing only the Krogan, how about you?

 

 

 

[Matri]

Saved everybody, including Yeoman Chambers.

[FullAuto]

Rainbow Six Vegas 2, or How Not to End a Game.

 

1) A boss battle. In a tactical FPS.

 

2) A ham-fisted attempt to have a plot, in a medium where good narratives are rare, in a genre that isn't particularly suited to it.

 

3) A monologuing bad guy.

 

4) A hero insisting he must do it alone, for no good reason.

 

5) Not shooting the bad guy for no reason at all.

 

And so on and so forth.

[Matri]

Hmm, regarding Mass Effect 2, I've discovered something really significant: the Male Shepard's voice stinks.

 

I watched my brother play through as a male Shepard. During Tali's trial, his defense was lackluster, monotonous, and almost put me to sleep. By contrast, female Shepard reading the exact same script put a lot of passion and emotion into it. You can try it and see if for yourself. I just did a half hour ago.

 

Seriously, Mark Meer sounds like they dragged someone in, drugged him up, got him drunk, and fed his lines through an auto-tuner. In contrast, Jennifer Hale never disappoints.

 

Have to wonder, did BioWare blow the budget on Hale, then realize they don't have enough for anyone better than Meer?

[Azrael Strife]

Machinarium is 10/10 as far as point and click adventures goes, I just didn't want it to end, the world was amazing and the gameplay is as good as it gets. Simple and beautiful.

[FullAuto]

Aaah, nice one, glad you liked it Az.

 

I enjoyed Heavy Rain, but it does have bugs (I suffered several, and one crash). On the whole, they're not serious.

 

What's more serious is the cliched story (serial killer, cop/FBI investigation, private eye, sexy journalist, flashbacks), uneven voice acting (some of it is good, some of it is bad, some of it is quite obviously foreigners too busy trying to mask their accented English to act), uneven dialogue (there's some awful lines in there), predictable plot (which goes so far as to 'cheat' the player at one point) plus twist, which are so common these days as to be predictable, defeating their purpose. I'm not happy with the sexism present in the game either, but HR is completely derivative of Hollywood, so of course it's going to be. There isn't one single original idea in the story.

 

The QTEs are sometimes made needlessly tricky because they don't always display facing the camera, so you can't always see what to press. This, in a game which is heavily reliant on them, is a massive oversight. Having to change the view just to see what button to press adds another layer of irritation to the controls.

 

On the whole, I enjoyed it, but try before you buy, I think. Borrow from a mate, or rent, and see. The gameplay is terribly limited in some aspects, and so are the choices, but the illusion of freedom is definitely present in some scenes.