Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

Just beat Luigi's Mansion today and it's been awhile since i've beat the game (last time i did, was when the gamecube was still in production.) so, this is my 2nd run of beating it.
I Got Rank F this time. (i think it was lower last time)
i got 40 over 50 boos in this game. (41, if wanna count King Boo.)
but, i enjoy the game and loved fighting King Boo,

Neville - Gold
Lydia - Gold
Chauncey - Silver (1st Boss)
The Floating Whirlindas - Gold
Shivers - Silver
Melody Pianissima - Gold
Mr. Luggs - Silver
Spooky - Silver
Bogmire - Bronze (2nd Boss)
Biff - Bronze
Miss Petunia - Silver
Nana - Silver
Slim - Silver
Henry and Orville - Silver
Madame Clairvoya - Gold
Boolossus - Gold (3rd Boss)
Uncle Grimmly - Gold
Clockwork Soldiers - Silver
Jarvis - Silver
Sir Weston - Bronze
Vincent Van Gore - Silver
King Boo - Bronze (Final Boss)

sadly, i skipped Sue Pea. so no rank for her. if i tired to beat the game for the third time. i'll post her rank later.

now that Luigi's Mansion is finish, im off to play SMT III for PS2.

@Tyranexx That's exactly how I see the game. I would have liked to know more about the Deleter (spoiler: it's James) and how was his fight with K.G. before he thrown him into the lava. We also never find out who were the ones that hired James as a spy of the corrupted people that lurks in the Galactic Federation. There were areas that have potential to engage the player more in the story.

I hope that in the future they consider voicing the characters again, because that wasn't the problem of the story. The problem mainly resides in that Samus should already have overcome PTSD after facing Ridley 3-4 times. Perhaps if they have given the PTSD to someone like Madeline Bergman or Melissa, it could have gone better. Melissa, despite being an (spoiler alert) android, she got humanized due to her interactions with the humans and (story spoiler) the baby metroids.

@SamusLv7: Yeah, I was also surprised that they didn't elaborate more on the "Deleter". It was a missed opportunity IMO. Part of the reason I played through the epilogue was in the hope that they'd address that. Oh well....

Overall I didn't mind the voice acting; IMO the bits with Anthony were pretty well done. If only there had been a better plot for that voice acting to adhere to....

I finished Steins;Gate Elite last night with the true ending. It is an outstanding visual novel. The way the adapted the anime back into VN format and then added in all the cut content that wasn't originally in the anime, including all of the alternate endings, is superb! This is simply a must play for anyone who likes visual novels, hard science fiction, or strong character driven stories! It's a difficult story to talk about without spoilers, but I can say it is without a doubt the best depiction of time travel I have ever seen in fiction. It examines the concept very deeply and manages to portray a sci-fi story that is both believable and fantastic at the same time. The likable, quirky and very memorable cast drive the story so well. Characters evolve and change throughout without losing a core that makes them who they are. There is a great deal of good humor, but this is not a happy story and likely several of the endings will leave you heart broken. But not all of them. #spoilers.

There are a few flaws however. For one thing, it isn't even clear, if you are going in blind, that this is a game at all. If you bought it blind you might think you just bought an anime where you need to press A to move forward. But ultimately your choices do matter. Another minor drawback is how heavily steeped in Japanese culture the story is. There are some things that will likely just not make sense to a western viewer unfamiliar with them. But these things are rare and shouldn't detract from the experience much. And the final gripe was the amount of science-babble. Steins;Gate does an excellent job of writing sci-fi from a very real science position, almost too good of a job. There are a few points that felt like sitting in a physics class. However that stops about a third of the way through the story.

The story does start slow, but once you get pulled in it becomes extremely hard to stop. By the end I flat out couldn't and played the last 2 and half chapters in one sitting, staying up several hours later than I intended.

If you like science fiction and anime, you owe it to yourself to experience Steins;Gate in some fashion. You could totally just watch the anime online, but if you want the full experience, Elite is absolutely the best way to do it!

Final note: VALUE! this VN is effectively the entire anime, plus all the alternate endings, at a price far cheaper than it would be to buy the boxed set new.

Title: Yumi's Odd Odyssey (AKA Sayonara Umihara Kawase)

Platform: Nintendo 3DS

What is it?: The 3DS (and eventually Vita/PC) entry in an obscure, Japanese cult classic series that started on the SNES where you play as a girl named Umihara (or Yumi in this localization, I guess) who uses her fishing rod to grapple her way through levels that pose a variety of platforming challenges. Levels are completed by finding doors, and the structure of the game is such that you open up alternate routes through the game by way of somewhat hidden doors in certain levels. There are optional backpack collectibles to find as well, along with alternate characters to unlock.

Level of completion: 3/5 endings cleared; 39/50 total stages completed; 17/40 backpacks found. I could play it more, but, honestly, I feel like I'm pretty much done with the game.

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What I liked

• The gameplay hinges almost entirely on the manipulation of a complex, physics-based grappling system which is your primary means of platforming through the various levels in the game. Lengthening and shortening your fishing line at various elevations and arcs of your swing will wildly alter how you progress through the level. I became proficient enough to progress through most of the stages, but truly skilled (primarily Japanese) players can perform awesome feats of skill and blitz through the most brutal of levels in a manner of seconds.
• Alternate characters to unlock. Some of which have special abilities.

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What I disliked:

• There's little enemy variety. Just a couple different types of mutated fish monsters that eerily lumber around the stages. They're totally at odds with the cutesy design of the rest of the game.
• Of the special abilities available to your characters, only one, which adds a single level checkpoint which you can re-spawn at once, is of any real use. And then that is often poorly implemented, because it often doesn't reset other elements within the level. If you die from a fish monster boss near a checkpoint, for example, it's not uncommon to immediately die again upon re-spawning because the fish monster is literally standing in the same location where you re-spawned.
• This game is ugly. Very bland visual presentation with squat character models. Very little variation in the backdrops, and they never seem to have any rhyme or reason to the way they're arranged. The level design is unimaginative as well, with platforms feeling like they've been arranged almost at random at times.
• While I understand that the developers wanted to make your platforming success solely dependent on your ability to manipulate the complex physics related to your fishing line, I wish that controlling your character didn't feel quite so clunky as it does.
• The performance, at what feels like a sluggish sub-30fps framerate, is disappointing as well.
• There's no context for almost anything that happens in this game. You swing around, capture horrifying fish monsters, find backpacks, and enter hidden doors... cuz. This extends to boss battles as well, if they can even be called that. The game will just unceremoniously dump you in another level, except this time there's a larger fish monster lumbering around, and you have to find a way to get stuff to fall on its head. In the case of one particularly evil level, you have to grapple onto loads of fruit in the ceiling and use your body weight to spill them out onto the boss below (if you're, indeed, lucky enough for the boss to happen to lumber far enough over for this to happen). The fruit will knock you down to your death if it hits you, however, which means you have to swing away a split second after activating the spill. This, on its own, would be manageable if it wasn't for the fact that nine-tenths of the floor wasn't covered in spikes that insta-kill you. And even that would be OK if the swinging wasn't entirely momentum-based, which doesn't play well with split-second evasions.
• For a game where death can come at any time, it's annoying to continually get booted into the level select screen upon dying.
• Here is a screenshot I took of my 3DS on the results screen of the third ending stage. This game is brutally difficult just to play. This is a perfect encapsulation of the futility of my struggle. By the way, all 310 attempts took place in the same excruciating day:
  

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Final thoughts: The game isn't unplayable, by any means, and I can see how this might appeal to a certain type of player who is taken in by the unique system of locomotion in this game. With that said, even if I were a big fan of the game in this respect, it wouldn't excuse the lack of effort and polish in nearly every other aspect of the production.

Score: 3/10

@Ralizah another sound and detailed review. Great job!

Just finished my first play through of darksiders on switch. And wow, did that game blow me away. And very unexpectedly. Never knew much about the series going into it other than it being a zelda like. It was such a well done game from combat to puzzles etc. Some cool bosses and whatnot. I did love that alot of the extras and collectables werent so far out of your way which makes for easy gathering. Everything was fairly simple to learn and the game flowed rather smoothly. Might even give darksiders 2 a look now. 9/10 from this guy.

Just finished Pikmin 3 for the first time. This is a funny one. I preordered it back when it was coming out since it was only 30€ for some reason. I played the game for 2-3 weeks and absolutely loved it. Now, why haven't I finished the game if I played it for so long? Well, I actually only played the first 4 days of the story mode and everything else was multiplayer. Me and my sister got the best rank from most of the fruit collecting missions and played all enemy focused maps as well. My sister wasn't that into bingo battle, though. There was a little bit of skill gap so we didn't play that mode much. I still love it though.

Now we get to the actual single player story mode. There have been a lot of Pikmin videos lately, at least from the people I watch on YouTube, and I've been meaning to go back to Pikmin 3 for a while, so I finally did. I think the game had a bit of a slow start but it wasn't long until I started saying to myself "I still have so much left to do, just one more day". I really enjoyed my time with the game. But then I entered the last area today and it just wasn't for me. I lost Pikmin left and right, sometimes because I left them on one job so I can continue exploring and then I notice I can't easily get back, sometimes because of bomb rocks, sometimes because I'm just stupid and then the rest on the final boss. I basically tripled my dead Pikmin count in the last area. Once I dealt the final blow, I was just happy it was over. It wasn't the way I wanted to finish the game.

I'll still continue my adventure and collect those 10 or so fruits I have left. I still have some places to explore in earlier areas when I didn't have access to all Pikmin types. The game is great. The idea behind the last area was good too. I just didn't like the jump from casual exploring and fruit collecting to stressful and lengthy boss battles in general. I had the same problem with previous bosses too, just not quite to the same extent.

After on and off, I've finally finished zelda: spirit tracks for the first time. It was better than phantom hourglass but not nearly as good as other entries in the series. I did love some of the puzzle solving in the game. The battles were kind of tough. Not because of the enemies or anything like that. But it due to your hand covering parts of the screen at times with your stylus. The last few hours honestly dragged on though in the tower of spirits. I still loved the game nonetheless, 9/10 I'd say, maybe 8.7/10 at the worst. It's worth a play through if you never have.

@Ralizah Yumi's Odd Odyssey isn't a stellar game by any stretch of the imagination, but the 3DS port was indeed pretty bad. I bought it for full price and it felt like I was scammed...

Finally finished The Great Ace Attorney/DGS:NRnB, many moons after first starting. Because of the timespan, my thoughts might not be as joined-up or cohesive as they could be, but I’ll scribble a few of them down anyway.

In short, I enjoyed it. It’s basically the classic Ace Attorney setup retrofitted to the backdrop of turn-of-the-century Victorian London, with Sherlock Holmes and chums thrown in for good measure.

I’d like to say, “it’s as whacky as it sounds” (and does have its fair share of whack), but given the level of zaniness on display in the series’ more contemporary entries, I’d say it actually takes a more somber and grounded tone for the most part, which the Victorian setting lending the game a sense of historical weight and importance.

You follow our titular/eponymous/dude-whose-name-is-in-the-title protagonist on his adventures from Japan to the distant shores of the British Isles at a time when Japan is beginning to open up to the world and engage in wider international diplomacy.

Setting the game between two countries engaged in very new and delicate international relations is a fantastic device for ramping up the tension, as your actions not only have ramifications for the individuals involved, but threaten to being the whole diplomatic situation crashing down around you.

As for the individuals in question, I’d say they’re a slightly mixed bag of charming and likeable characters mixed with somewhat overblown caricatures who never really develop beyond a punchline. There’s quite a variety of character designs too; while most of the main cast looking relatively human, many of the side characters adopt rather more eccentric proportions. It’s a mix that is occasionally jarring but also equally often quite amusing, so I suppose I’m generally happy they allowed a little artistic license with these designs.

I won’t give too much away, but the story starts and finishes on a high note in my opinion; setting up your adventure by throwing you straight into the deep end of your own trial. The story is nicely tied together in the final trial too, although not without some unexplained mysterious (to nicely lead into the second game). There’s perhaps a little bit of sag in the middle where the plot doesn’t feel quite so driven, but it generally keeps rolling forward with enough pace to kee you interested.

Altogether, I’d say it’s an enjoyable romp. There’s something quite epic about sailing the stormy seas to distant lands at a time of equally tempestuous diplomatic negotiations, then trying to establish yourself in a whole new world. There’s also something very interesting about seeing Victorian London from the perspective of a fledgling Japanese exchange-student/defence attorney. It’s really just a very interesting setting to have chosen.

I picked up the second game at a secondhand bookshop, and I’ve heard people be quite positive about it, so I’m looking forward to getting stuck into that. But got the time being, I’m just proud to have seen the first journey through to its completion!

I played and beat Knack last night. I know it has had mixed reviews, but I thought it was a decent game. I'm not sure what the public opinion on the sequel is, buti plan to play it sometime this weekend.

Farpoint (PS4/VR) - A Sci-fi themed FPS, where you're out to find your way off an alien planet after crash landing.

As a VR Experience: The few times you rode in a suttle (such as the opening scene where you were flying around a space station, plus the following crash landing) were really cool. The way the jumping spider enemies (the first enemy type you encounter) move is just right enough that they creep out your subconscious and make you jump everytime you encounter them (at least for the first few hours), and the sense of scale during the game's one boss encounter is truly mesmerizing. There is one stealth section that is pretty intense as well, as you'll constantly be looking over your shoulder to make sure a drone isn't swooping down from behind as you hightail it to the next area of cover. However, while there are a few interesting setpieces, most of the game takes place in a sort of canyony desert theme, and while I suppose it makes decent use of the depth effect, it's not a particularly interesting place to be, though a couple of later missions shake things up a bit. Oh, and there are also video logs (at the end of most missions) that make good use of the effect as well.

As a game: It's a pretty standard FPS. Kill things in a larger area, settle down as you walk along the path where you're either treated to a hologram that moves the story along, a setpiece, and or maybe a jumpscare ambush by one or two enemies, before coming to the next open area where you'll fight another large group of enemies, rinse & repeat (later levels tend to have less downtime with more constant large enemy encounters, but I honestly preferred the balance of the early game). It's not particularly great as a game, but they regularly introduce new enemy types & weapons so things never get boring (your gun is tied to the motion of your controller, so you physically have to look down the sight correctly in order to accurately shoot anything, which you'll know you're doing correctly when you see a lazer sight in the middle of your reticule, which is pretty cool). The main story has 8 missions which on average are an hour long each (at least for me), plus there is a challenge mode that sees you tackling the story missions in a time trial like environment, standard online multiplayer, plus a co-op mode of some sort (I assume online for that as well). I wasn't a big fan of how the story ended up, though.

Just finished Deltarune Chapter 1. It was... alright. Definitely a good time for a free game. I wasn't hugely impressed, though. The world that was introduced just wasn't developed enough to give it a sense of character. Most of the new characters, outside of Susie, weren't terribly memorable. Making the sparing mechanic a constant part of the plot itself takes away from the subversion of typical JRPG tropes and the personal responsibility the player felt for behaving like they would in any other game (what unspoiled player didn't initially kill Toriel, only to feel a gut-wrenching sense of guilt when they realized what they had done?). Figuring out how to negotiate enemies out of a battle is still cute and fun, but it's too reminiscent of Undertale's system, and there's nothing quite as memorable as, say, getting the two guards to realize their love for one-another (was very happy to see them later in the game!). And the way you interact with Lancer is far too similar to initial run-ins with Sans and Papyrus in Undertale. It was very Undertale-lite. Diet Undertale.

With that said, I didn't dislike my time with it. I thought Susie's primary character arc was reasonably well-executed, even if it was a bit rushed. The game is still filled with the sort of wonderful humor that was so charming in the original Undertale. I also like how you gain TP when enemy attacks come close without actually damaging you, and there's an interesting risk/reward mechanic there. And the end of the game, where you get to travel around your home town and talk to the townsfolk, many of who return from the original game, was a lot of fun, and helped showcase the great character writing that is clearly the developer's specialty.

Also really liked the creepy cliffhanger at the very end.

If the rest of it was eventually released as a full game, I'd absolutely purchase, play, and enjoy my time with it. But I do feel like it needs to do more to distinguish itself from its predecessor.

I just finished Lifeless Planet, which I picked up on sale. Overall, it's not the best game in the world by any means, but I think it was pretty solid. It didn't review super well, so I have to say I was pleasantly surprised compared to what I expected. It got a 5/10 on this site, and while I can kind of agree with the reviewer's gripes, for me that stuff didn't matter that much. I'd probably give it a slightly-better 6 or 6.5 out of 10 (maybe 7 if I was feeling particularly generous).

The main issue for me was the slightly clunky jumping mechanics. Most of the game did not really require precise platforming, but there was a section or two that did, and it got a little frustrating. I get that you're in space, so the jumping should have some float to it, but I found it kind of hard to accurately judge your jump distance, and many times I actually landed on the intended platform, only to weirdly slide off because I ended up a bit too close to the edge.

Other than that, the story was good in general, though it has some weaknesses if you really start to think about it. The character model for the astronaut (the main character) was good, but the model for the other main character you frequently run into looks off. The environments were pretty nice, and I really enjoyed exploring them. Overall, I'm glad I did not buy this game at full price (I would not recommend it at that price point), but on sale for 50% or more off, it might be worth a shot if you enjoy exploration/walking sim/light puzzle & platform types of games.

Just finished cuphead on my first play through. Moments where i loved the game and moments where I wanted to delete it from my home page😉. But it all seriousness it was probabaly the hardest game I've beaten(not just played for a little while and gave up ). Only ahead of zelda 2 and zelda 2 was tough as nails for me. I feel like there were some cheap shots in the level that were definitely designed to make you fail, or in other words, no matter if you jump, duck or dash you were bound to take a hit which is kind of frustrating considering you only have 3 hits( 4 with a charm).

Other than the cheap shots and the game just being hard as hell , I actually enjoyed it alot. Love the animation, the music, the sound effects and my favorite part was that cuphead and mugman shoot out of their fingers. As hard as the game was, that light hearted nature and comic relief helped alot. You can tell these guys put alot of thought and effort into making this game as unique as possible. If you're a fan of run n gun, or platforming, and don't mind dying over and over, give this game a shot. It's probably a top 15 game for me on switch, maybe top 10, but I'd have to think about it a little more. 8.5/10

Title: Star Fox Zero

Platform: Wii U

What is it?: A remake of the N64 classic Star Fox 64 (which itself was a remake of the much more rudimentary SNES original).

Level of completion: Unlocked all the extra routes, levels, and events, so I've beaten pretty much the entire game. Did not get the highest score on every level, however.

What I liked:

• The fun animated short that was included that functions as a prologue to the story in the game. It's not going to blow anyone away, but I always find cross-media storytelling techniques like this to be, if nothing else, quite interesting.
• So, in this game, you have two viewpoints: one on the TV that's third-person and gives you a sense of where your ship is, like in a traditional Star Fox game, and then one on the GamePad that's in first-person. Aiming in this game is totally liberated from the manner in which you fly your ship, so you use gyro controls to aim your blaster. And, despite my significant misgivings with this dual-screen set-up, I'll say that I really found the gyro aiming to be responsive and fun to use. As always, Nintendo reveals themselves to be the masters of the effective use of motion controls in gaming.
• Ditching single-screen gameplay allows you to pull off some interesting maneuvers, such as shooting at a target while flying away from it, for example. It also allows you to have interesting camera viewpoints in some of the huge boss battles, instead of the game forcing the camera to stay locked behind the Arwing the entire time.
• Some of the unlockable content is interesting. For example, there's one level that you can go back to after you receive a certain upgrade to your Arwing, and you can unlock a level where you play as Peppy Hare and take on a gigantic enemy battleship by yourself. It's not the best thing ever, but stuff like this is fun. You can also unlock some extra matches against Star Wolf's crew.

What I disliked:

Oh boy...

So there are problems in virtually every area of this game. I'll just start with the dual-screen set-up, which is the most immediate and obvious issue with this game: the unwieldy dual-screen set-up. Maintaining a sense of awareness of both is crucial, considering aiming is far too imprecise on the TV, but you still need to reference it to make sure you're not into obstacles or whatnot. This makes it where your attention is constantly split between the two screens, which is pretty much constantly stressful, even after you learn to adapt to it somewhat. Unlike a game on the Nintendo DS, where the two screens are extremely close, you're having to look down in your hands to up at a TV, back and forth, as you play. It's extremely unpleasant. What this does is rob this rail shooter of the operational simplicity that is the biggest appeal and hallmark of the rail shooter in the first place. It inserts this big, middling control issue directly in-between you and the game, and even after you learn how to manage it enough to complete levels easily, it definitely saps most of the fun out of the experience. It's even worse in free-range levels, with a lot of movement and dodging, as with certain bosses, where I constantly felt like I was fighting the controls more than the enemy itself.

That's hardly the end of this game's issues, though. For one thing, it's incredibly derivative. A lot of the missions in this game are just straight up lifted, aesthetics and all, from Star Fox 64, and, unlike that game, it almost never successfully introduces new level designs or engaging mechanics. There's a sense of "been there, done that" the whole way through. It's incredibly uninspired.

When the game does attempt to do new things, it's pretty much always to its detriment. One area where this becomes especially clear is when the game introduces new vehicles to the mix. The worst of these is the Gyrowing, which is a clunky, difficult to control, and slow moving helicopter of sorts where you spend the majority of a level awkwardly navigating your way from one boring environmental puzzle to another. I'm not sure what the game is going for in these levels, but it's pretty much the opposite of what you'd want or expect from a high-speed space shooter. The walker (or, as I call it, the Star Chicken, because it looks disturbingly similar to a chicken) itself is a total nightmare to control, and any level that employees it heavily often sees me frequently crash into walls as I try to navigate the level geometry. The game pushes Star Chicken transformations in boss battles, but, more often than not, I find it to be such a hindrance that I'll opt for the Arwing even when its not suited for a level. This becomes especially the case in the obnoxious final boss encounter with Andross, where the challenge really comes from trying to juggle multiple different styles of control simultaneously to even do something as simple as move, aim at the boss, and shoot where you want. Apparently the Star Chicken was introduced in Star Fox 2 on the SNES, but, having never played that, I don't know if it's any more tolerable there.

Visually, the game is bland, and reminds me of what a launch GameCube game might look like upscaled to 720p. This is probably due to the game streaming two different views of the game at all times, which must be costly in terms of resource requirements. Of course, the game doesn't do nearly enough new stuff with this to justify moving away from the series' traditionally single-screen gameplay.

The narrative presentation is especially unambitious and does nothing that the original Star Fox 64 didn't already do decades ago. The music is serviceable, but the best tracks are all taken directly from SF64.It fails as a story, fails as a tech showcase, and even fails the basic test of being a fun, approachable rail shooter.

Final thoughts: Innovative in ways that didn't require innovation and unchanged in ways that make it feel stale, this game represents a solid backward step for the franchise as a whole. I really wanted to like it, but I just didn't. Definitely not the worst game ever made, but I do think it deserved to be savaged the way it did. This lack of polish is totally unacceptable for a major Nintendo property.

Score: 4/10

Just finished Zelda Breath of the Wild a second time (all Shrines, all Link's Memories, a bit more than 300 Korok Seeds and half of the Side Quests). Got to say the game's Hyrule Castle is one of the best dungeons of all Zelda dungeons.

Just finished yoshis crafted world. First yoshi game i ever finished and I shockingly loved it. More than I thought I would. Dont really feel like giving a full review but i loved it just as much Mario oddyssey in all honesty. Real talk 😊

Completed Onimusha Warlords (Switch) recently.

It's a bit rough around the edges in spots due to age, but it honestly had me hooked & had me wanting to go back for more every time I had to put it down. It had a fantastic atmosphere (I actually really dug the detailed pre-rendered environments, and I felt that with few exceptions, they still looked pretty sharp, at least on my 32" 720p TV), while the combat wasn't flashy by today's standards I found encounters with regular enemies to be engaging, it was nice to break up the action with the light puzzling elements (really, I quite enjoyed the whole "Metroidvania" structure of the game itself), and while the story is pretty standard, playing it in Japanese (with subtitles) really helped to bring me into it, given the theme. The only disappointment was that, aside from a couple exceptions, I wasn't too fond of the bosses (this is where the aged camera work really came into play). Still, I didn't find any of them too troubling (the last two maybe, but I had managed to find all health upgrades & stockpile the best medicine, so I was able to power through them), so not much of an issue in the end.

Definitely worth a look if you haven't played it before, especially if you like "Metroidvanias".