@tbk: May be an age thing - I remember buying the game when it came out, and after lord knows how many hours dealing with Steam's alpha/beta whatever the hell mess it was before actually playing the game..I can't say I enjoyed it much. To me, it was just another shooter with a really tedious map layout, great physics which they didn't do anything interesting with (I'd already played Psi-ops thanks) and boring characters.
Tried again 4 years ago - still as boring as I remember it.
Don't like Source games as a whole, with only Vampire being the exception. Even then the combat, physics and graphics are pretty terrible. Huh they came out day and date with each other.
Looking at the games that were released in the same year - Dawn of War, MGS3, KOTOR2 - Shit Butcher Bay came out the same year. I'll take those over Half Life 2 any day.
@tbk: I like the original, can't stand the second. I don't rate the overall series highly at all. Doom just does everything better, and yes, I include the storyline..
@zombiepie:Used to be number 1, but replaying XII last year bumped that one up to first.
I still don't get the RE4 comparison - it's Ninja Gaiden. Even the horror elements are Ninja Gaiden. They really need to release those games on Steam.
Darksiders is a terribly boring game. It's mechanically fine and they do some interesting things with some of the powers but it's just so boring. Like most 3d Zelda games actually...
None of the 3ds SRW games are available on the US 3ds without some hacking. There's a region free hack that used to exist afaik but I don't know how things are these days. From what I understand BX is a massive improvement on UX - I'll be playing that next year...
If you haven't taken a look at the GBA Original Generation games, please..do. They're translated and among my favourite games of all time. Sanger is in both and it sets up his character - I dunno what other characters from SRW are in PXZ - despite playing both games. Despite having the name, Endless Frontier is nothing like SRW. Haken and whatsherface aren't exactly SRW characters, they're..well...parallel universe equivalents of the two main characters of SRW: Kyosuke and Excellen. Excellen herself is..complicated.
I guess someone might say Ryusei and the SRX team are the main characters - but they would be mistaken.
The storyline of SRW involves parallel universes, ancient aliens, robotic gods and all sorts of nonsense, but it's very 80s and great fun. If that doesn't put you off - seriously, check out the GBA games.
The DS games haven't been translated, but will work on your 3ds. I highly recommend W..I actually think it's the best of all the crossover games. Helps that it has Tekkaman, Astray Frames from Gundam, Gundam Wing and a good OG Mech...oh and Mazinkaiser, Jeeg, Gaogaigar and Getter.
Moon Dwellers (the 4th OG game) was poorly translated into English and is on ps4.
There have been fan translations of J (GBA) and Alpha Gaiden (PSX) and there are a ton of patches for the other games that translate everything but the story.
Then there's the Masou Kishin series which follows Masaki (a character in the GBA OG games) and Cybuster down in Las Gias - basically an updated version of Aura Battler Dunbine. These games are mostly on psp - vita and finally ps3/ps4. None are in English but I highly recommend at least the first game's remake on psp. It's fantastic.
That's a lot of information - sorry - but that should give you an idea of the OG games at least. Mainline SRW games are on everything - but more recently on Sony platforms. I prefer the hand held stuff - never liked the Z series really, despite owning them all.
Yeah, Echoes is on my 3ds and I'll take a look at it sometime next year. I remember liking the older FE games to a degree. I've still got another 7-10 hours on SRW UX to finish first...could be longer. I don't know if this is a 50 or a 52 mission game. Either way, Echoes is on my list to try out at some point.
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