Games I Played With the Intent to Beat Them in 2015
This shall be the year I beat more games than I have ever before which isn't much of an accomplishment. I think like beating four games would beat my record. Thoughts on each one because why not.
List items
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Xbox 360
1/27/15
Halo and World of Warcraft had an awesome baby. Very satisfying FPS/RPG filled with quests, skill trees, and a plethora of delightfully dickish characters. I feel I got too powerful near the end of my first playthrough. There was one boss where I literally just shot into it's mouth repeatedly and beat it in maybe half a minute. I'm looking forward to playing the DLC.
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Browser
2/25/15
It's a cute little endless runner with the combination of jumping, timed attacks, and sweet, sweet coin collection. It's visual style is adorable and I found the gameplay addicting in that way you say, "Just one more." You should go play it. It's got upgrades and achievements to give you a sense of progression, but you could beat it all in under an hour if you were really gunning for completion.
I found this via VSauce3's DONG.
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Xbox One
2/28/15
This is a fine product. I'm super glad Microsoft decided to fund/produce this long-awaited sequel. The playable characters are rather balanced and very unique. The hits hit hard and the combo system is easy to grasp. The character leveling system is a fantastic way to get players playing all the different characters. While they are constantly added new content in the form of characters, stages, and accessories for said characters, if you aren't somebody that is looking to just fight, you may find this game lacking modes. Mostly for me, It's lacking narrative. I love a strong story.
EDIT: They finally added a story mode to season 2. It was kind of disappointing though. It's another arcade mode with a few slides between the fights. You get a lot of plot points, but it's all just read off by a narrator. Even a boring fighting game story is made so much more entertaining by seeing the characters performing their own actions.
Technically, this game isn't even completed yet due to the constant addition of content, but I've played soo much of this since I got my XB1. I got all the endings available in the story mode. I'm calling it beaten.
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Xbox One
3/12/15
This was the first game in a while to capture me entirely. I beat it in two sittings. The last game that did it for me was Uncharted 2. Ori and the Blind Forest is a fantastic metroidvania style game. If I were to more accurately describe the game, it'd be like metroidvania mixed with Super Meat Boy and Legend of Zelda. It's just really good. Go forth and play it.
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Browser
3/26/15
What the fuck did I just play? This game starts off simple, but then goes way leftfield. Talking about specifics would really ruin it. Just go play it yourself. It's free and on a webpage.
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Xbox 360
4/11/15
I can't believe I actually went through with this game. It's not very good. It's not the worst game ever, though. The character models look nice still (unless they have hair showing), but the stages are so barren looking. The basic combat is the really similar to the Mortal Kombats from the last generation with fighting styles taken out and an awkward button for 3D walk. You can even tell that this game is built from those games with how intros and victory poses are done. Then they added Klose Kombat and Falling Kombat which both are button matching mini-games that are no fun to play and kill the pace of the match. There's also a button mashing mini-game but I don't think it has a name. If these systems weren't in place, the game would actually be okay/tolerable.
The only saving grace of this game is that this is where NRS started their cinematic story mode. The story is dumb. It's a crossover, that's to be expected. It's like something I would watch if it were on, but I wouldn't seek it out.
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Xbox 360
5/20/15 - NOT COMPLETE
I didn't beat this game. I couldn't bring myself to it. (Look at the previous game I beat. What the hell?) It could be the high/dark fantasy thing for me. That stuff just disinterests me. It took me a long time to watch LOTR because it was visually unappealing to me. Those movies are alright, though. It could just be my desire for a good constructed narrative. I don't know.
After 12 hours of gameplay, I think I can safely say this game might not be for me. I find the combat repetitive. Most of the story is in item descriptions? There appears to be a lot of options for combat, but I don't seem to be able to use them effectively unless I want to grind for stats. I don't know. I mostly feel bad about this game right now, but I still want to like it. I like the challenge, but I don't feel anything driving me to it. I need something besides the challenge itself. It wasn't bad, but I'm not sure if I'll ever finish it. I might come back.
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Xbox 360
5/25/15
This game has a really cool idea. Too bad it's execution is just plain awful. For a game that is all about running, it makes you stop so much. Also, they make Faith ridiculously weak in combat for constantly throwing you into it. The story has just eye-roll inducing levels of cheesiness. It looks pretty though. Runner vision is a cool idea that rarely help me. I constantly felt lost, especially during sequences that were indoors. When the game has you running at full-speed, it is fantastic. It's just too bad that that's like 10 percent of the game.
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Xbox 360
6/19/15 - NOT COMPLETE
This game was fun for the first few hours for me. After getting up to my A class license, the fatigue set in. I don't know, where are the races are just "hey! make a b-line for this place!" they feel less special. None of the races feel deliberate. I'm sure they are to an extent, but like Need for Speed Underground 2 was "open-world", but I don't remember feeling like this about it.
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Playstation 4
7/2/15
Pretty neat little game. Very fast paced and twitchy. One of those games that make you want to give it 'just one more' before you go do something else like sleep maybe. My only (tiny) complaint is that reaching the max level of 25 gives you a game devoid of objective at that point. No thing to reach for besides a higher score.
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Playstation 4
7/30/15
I LOVE METAL GEAR. This makes The Phantom Pain seem pretty exciting. Even though most people clear the only story mission in under three hours there's plenty of other engaging content. It's ridiculous how many options you have in this game for doing whatever you want to. All the controls feel really good. There's something addictive about marking enemies with your binoculars. I find stealth to be quite difficult and I wish the scoring system would be less harsh on time if you were stealthful. The side missions were much different than I thought they'd be. One operated more like House of the Dead or Area 51 than MGS. The Deja Vu was a kind of beautiful trip to the past to remember MGS. It'd be great if it and the Jamais/Deja Vu missions weren't hidden behind finding nine VERY WELL hidden items. I would love a statistic on how many people found them on their own. I started off trying to, but when I looked one up and saw that in game I couldn't really see it unless I was using my binoculars, I decided against that. As of now, only 6.8% of Ground Zeroes owners on PS4 have gotten them.
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Playstation 4
8/1/15
A charming puzzle-platformer that doesn't escape the horrific nature of war. For the most part, the puzzles were quite fun. There were a few times I grew frustrated and didn't know what it wanted me to do. It has a hint system, but I refused to use hint systems. Besides the puzzles, it's very narrative focused. The story was rather engaging and had some pretty good pacing. I never felt like I wanted to stop and the ending will stay with me for some time. Despite, the cartoonish style, it gives you facts each level about certain aspects of WWI and was always trying to make sure you knew the reality of the this war. The art is just fantastic. I played it on a 24" inch screen, but I think it was made more for a PSV or something. Infrequently, the art was stretched too large and distortions would be visible. I don't think this game would've been nearly as effective if it featured realistic 3D models.
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Nintendo 3DS
8/4/15 - Incomplete
I'm so mixed on how I feel about this game. First of all, it's not cool that the option to play online isn't a thing. Second of all, it's not cool that it seems they didn't adjust gameplay at all to account for that. Some of the later end game-y stuff (which I haven't played all of yet) is frustratingly difficult. Which is not a thing I'm used to in a Zelda game. I'm talking about the combat btw. In the Hero's Trial area every large button is like a a death wish. You have a ridiculous amount of enemies and every single one of them is focused on you. They don't go for the doll at all. Why would they? He's just sitting there doing nothing. In addition to combat difficulty getting the Hero Keys is quite a silly task in single player. I only got one of them before I called it quits and to get that one I had to farm an enemy spawn location for twenty minutes. Iono. That peeved me a little. While, I could solve my difficulty issues by having a friend, there are other grimy aspects of this game. Namely, the fact that you have to replay everything thrice to get to the full, content-complete end. There's keys to unlock Vaati's Palace and three doors are there. Each door requires a separate set of keys that are unlocked in the three main areas by collecting so many rupees. 1000. 3000. Then, 5000. You have to collect the smaller amounts to first. You can't collect the 5000 and get all three keys for one stage. Hopefully, I can get a friend to do a multiplayer run someday. I would love to do a four player run eventually. That will probably never happen though. You see I actually do enjoy this game. I'm not sure why. When I think about it, the puzzles aren't particularly challenging. The combat is alright. There's not any memorable encounters save from the bosses. The bosses are good. They're not amazing. The Realm of Memories with levels based on Link's Awakening, Link to the Past, and Zelda 1 are really cool looking, though. They actually re-did the sprites for Link and all the enemies in the game in those stages a la Mario Maker. While that's cool, it's just a neat paint job. The gameplay itself...I don't know. Is hunting thousands in rupees in a few minutes really that engaging? Am I a sucker? All I really have for it is criticism. I don't really have anything good to say besides I somehow enjoyed myself.
Wow, this one was long. I guess I could see it being a better game and I want it to be. Like I said, hopefully I'll revisit it with a friend later.
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Nintendo 3DS - GBA Virtual Console
8/10/15
I love WarioWare so much. That really all there is to it. I'm glad it rewarded me for being anal and getting the high score on every game in grid mode.
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Nintendo DS (on a 3DS)
8/10/15
It's so cute and fun. Also, hard. This game can be really hard. Especially any of the games that use flicking. I haven't really content completed the game, but I'm going to frequent it. I feel I may start to hate it if I only focused on trying to get medals.
I forgot to mention how encouraging this game can be. You might fail a stage, but a little thing will popup saying, "Hey. That one part was great! Keep trying!" Also, the hilarious ways it'll show you that you missed the timing. Like your teammates in certain challenges will look at you as if they were saying, "What are you doing?!" Just real disgusted looks. It's great.
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Xbox 360
8/11/15
Finally played this game like 4 years later. PRETTY COOL. Has some nice moments (if you made the choices I made). I'm sure the other choices have their merits. Combat is fast and fun. Very narrative focused and good because of that. There were a few times where the background messed with me, but I'm an idiot.
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Nintendo 3DS
8/12/15
Most the stages are Bit.Trip: Runner style gameplay except the boss battles which are more like Space Channel 5. Needless to say, real fun. The only issues I have with the game play are the pitfalls. I know it's a platformer, but there's a 5-heart health system. Even if you're full, you lose entirely when you fall. It'd be akin to a song in Rock Band having certain notes that if you missed, you'd fail. It just doesn't vibe with a rhythm game. Second issue: The game sparingly makes you play as one of two side characters. They play fine. It's just the game pretty much pauses the music and takes a second to switch to each. It's not a loading thing. It's just how they decided to do the switch and it kills the rhythm aspect of the game for me. Third issue: a lot of difficulty comes from the game obscuring what is coming next. That just isn't fun. I'd rather have unusual note placement. The would feel more difficult and fair. The way the game uses the camera in the last final stage is just cruel. About 2-3 minutes of gameplay took me about an hour of trying to beat. Besides that, the game has very demanding timing. It is truly fun despite my problems with it. There's eight worlds and five(?) bonus stages with Pokemon music and each stage has a faster variant. I still haven't even collected the best rating on all the normal speed stages. So, I'll be playing this game for a while.
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Playstation 4
8/15/15
MK9+interactables and character variations. The interactables I'd be okay if they weren't in the game. They don't seem to really affect it that much. So, their inclusion isn't offensive. Character variations can be really cool. It makes it that much harder to be better at the game though. You have to know all of these nuances for the currently 87 variations in the game. Brutalities are a cool thing too. It makes me think of Samurai Shodown where the final hit can just split your enemy in half, but these have the creativity of fatalities. It's really great when you weren't expecting them to happen as you land you're final blow. They also make me think of fatalities in MK1, 2, and U3. Those fatalities were over so quickly unlike the gore shows that we have today. I like the gore shows. Not complaining.
This game looks (mostly) really pretty. The kove particularly seems to be a really good stage to show off the graphics. The waves in the background look really good. After certain fatalities you can see the wet wood of the pier. The blood from your opponent spilling onto that looks amazing. Then, there's the faces. Some of the faces still look weird to me. Especially Cassie Cage for some reason. Maybe it's because I mained her at the beginning and had more time to study her face. I think it's her eyebrows. Certain tiny things look really bad. Like the end of Tremor's first fatality. I know he's DLC, but that shouldn't excuse it. Doesn't really matter, but iono that's HOW bad it looks to me. The women of MK while still wearing mostly non-functional clothing are at least a little more realistically proportioned.
INTRO DIALOGUE. This is a really neat idea. Too bad every character only has two different animations when they come in. Also, a lot of the exchanges feel really stilted or make little sense. A lot of Goro's dialogues start with him just saying the other person's name and that's super lame. I would've expected different stuff for when you choose undead versions of characters too, but that doesn't seem to matter. Would've loved to see different things happen dependent on costume and stage choice. Like instead of both character walking in the stage maybe Sub-Zero would be waiting for the opponent to approach when he fought at the Lin Kuei temple. I'm really into narrative features of games, but I can see why they wouldn't spend too much time messing with this. In about 99.9% of matches people mash OPTIONS to get past them.
Speaking of narrative, ever since MKvDCU NRS has loved making giant movies for their fighting games story. I still really like this idea. MKX might have the worst story of the four games that they've done this for. MK9 was really good, but maybe that's because they've had 20-ish years to mess with that plot. It felt real weird for Cassie to be the main character. Some parts of the story made NO sense. Eh, I take it back. MKvDCU was still worse. I think the best approach to story would be combining the Arc System and NRS methods. The highly cinematic approach with NRS but applied to each character individually. Especially in Injustice, a lot of characters just didn't get their due. Plus, DLC characters would have the ability to have some story at that point. I'd pay a few more dollars for more story content.
This game can be really fun depending on how you're playing. Locally vs. online I mean. The online functionality... is not great. While having a bunch of online modes, NRS still really hasn't made a fighter that feels great online. If I've only been playing MKX online for a while it starts to feel okay, but as soon as I play KI it become apparent how bad it is. They should bite the bullet and invest in some other company's tech. *cough cough* GGPO. Maybe not GGPO itself, but rollback definitely seems like the best choice for fighters. Lucky for them, that they brand recognition. I doubt as many people would play this online if it wasn't MORTAL KOMBAT. It's a shame because I really do like MKX, but I won't be coming back to it very often because online is where fighters live nowadays.
Last note: I really don't like how NRS does DLC costumes. For starters, DLC characters only have one costume. That's really lame. 5 of the 29 characters have one look. Second, all the characters after MK2 aren't getting any love save Shinnok, Kenshi, and Quan Chi which all have a grand total of one DLC costume. Scorpion now has 6 DLC costumes and 13 of the 29 characters have zero DLC costumes. A part of fighting games to me is connecting with the characters and, I don't know, I really don't like seeing the developer spending more time on a certain group than others. I get to stare over at Scorpions with all their cosmetic options while I'm playing Tanya I have the choice of one costume and two colors. It really sucks as a fan of a character that is left out. This is something they've done since MK9 and it bothers me. :(
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Playstation 4
8/29/15
This is so pretty. Probably the best marriage of 2D gameplay with polygonal visuals yet. Gameplay wise, it's what you'd expect from GG. Fast-paced, tight-links, over-the-top, air-dashing, etc. The characters' personalities are shown a lot more in the presentation of the game and that's fantastic.
The story mode is kind of cool. It's a shame it's completely separated from gameplay. The presentation of the story mode is like a semi-frequent cutscenes parsed by what are essentially MGS codec calls. It lasts about 6-8 hours (guessing) and is split into 20 sections. So it's easy to digest at your discretion. I would suggest not doing it in one go. They are some pacing issues. It was interesting to see flashbacks of Sol and That Man back when they were just scientists and of course Sol's relationship with Aria. They are also plenty of things not answered that happened. Hopefully there's a decent chunk of story with the release of Revelator.
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Xbox 360
11/7/15
This game would be super amazing if I hadn't played a Metroid game before, but pretty much everything besides the aiming in the background was ripped from that series. Regardless, it was fun. I beat it in like 5-6 hours.
The only bad things I can say is the story, duh, and sometimes, especially when trying to turn around a lot, the controls were a little unwieldy.
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Xbox 360
11/9/15
This game is broken...in a fun way. KOF is always a good choice of a fighting game. This game serves as the ultimate dream match, letting you play as all characters (including multiple versions of a lot of characters) from KOF94-98 and a few not even in those games. The problem with that is playable bosses that aren't balanced.
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Xbox One
11/10/15
Pretty neat. It's not an amazing game from a design perspective, but the aesthetics of this game are very pleasing. It seems to be more focused on conveying this story than providing challenge. The most interesting thing about it is it seems to be psuedo-randomly generated. I did run into a nice little thing where the final boss didn't drop the relic it was supposed to because it was off-screen for the killing blow. I ventured a little further ahead and found the same boss and had beat it again. :I
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Playstation 4
12/1/15
The main draw for me with Metal Gear games is the story. This game still had a Metal Gear-ass story, but it was presented in an awful fashion and with so much "filler". It's only filler from a story fashion. Most of it was still unique gameplay, which is fantastic. It's a great feeling action game. I've gone through all the main missions. There are still a ton of side ops to do and I feel like there's a good number of unique items for me to research. I'll probably be playing this game for a while on and off.
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Playstation 4
12/30/15
Not much of a single player progression...
The AI is real dumb in spots too, but at least it has an AI option. I'll probably try the online a little. Good fun.
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