Slag

I feel kinda the same way @mentoand I think the reason is that the game is really poorly balanced in the beginning. It isn't till you get some of the dash upgrades and the shotgun that the combat starts to flow correctly. And then the combat is great, I really enjoyed the last 40% of the game or so. The last boss fight was super fun and challenging in a good way.

I think they would have been better off making it more linear and get the balance right. The freedom early on doesn't really off you anything worthwhile anyway, especially since it's not like there is story bits or whatever to discover or gameplay differences (since the optimal way to upgrade is the same regardless really)

And you are totally right that the timing on chain dashes is too rough on controller. Not enough feedback and too narrow of a window. On M&K it's not nearly as bad especially since you can aim the mouse at the center of the map so you don't have to worry about chain dashing into a wall. I think it's asinine that there is unlockables requiring you to nail 800 consecutive though.

I also think the collectible design is kinda lazy. There area crap ton of them and most of them are variants of the same solutions.

So yeah, lot of mixed feelings about HLD. There is a lot of great things there, but there are a lot of serious problems too.

First off congratulations on the birth of your child! That's awesome man

So I go to play some Sonic Mania which for some reason was at a Video card company's booth at PAX and it felt very much like to Sonic 1 to me. In fact one of the levels seemed to be a barely modified Green Hills Zone Act 1. I think it even had similar routes through the level, it felt like I was playing through muscle memory. Hard to say to say if that's a good or a bad thing, probably depends on what you want out of it.

Sonic Mania felt more like an expansion or a level pack to one of the old Genesis games than a proper new entry or a re-envisioning like New Super Mario Brothers was to classic mario. I'm personally ok with that, but I was hoping for something a bit more ambitious though. The performance on it was great though, didn't notice any latency whatsoever and framerate was buttery smooth. Couldn't even tell I wasn't playing on a CRT.

2017 is so stacked with games from killer franchises, it's nuts man. I'm happily drowning in Zelda as it is and I doubt I'll personally be done with it until I get 200 hrs in it at the rate I'm going, no idea how I'll even get to a lot of the good stuff this year.

@sparky_buzzsaw: So I just tried I am Setsuna at PAX and it didn't grab me as much as I was hoping. It seemed like a slower, more melancholy shallower game than ChronoTrigger.

Now granted the showroom floor and ten minutes isn't really enough time for a game like that to show what it's got.

What did you like about it?

Damn, that's exactly what I was afraid of. Beseria is the first of the Tales games that have seriously caught my attention in years because I thought the lead had a lot of potential to be interesting in a way Tales protagonists basically never are.

@sparky_buzzsaw on here frequently calls Tales the "comfort food' Of JRPGs and sadly that continues to sound completely apt. :(

Well that isn't strictly true, which I'll elaborate on behind a spoiler tag ( No story spoilers)

I get your augment about completionist-itis, but for me achievements etc actually help with that. I've always been a completitionist, long before stat tracking existed. I'm going to for 100% if I like a game whether the achievements are there or not. So Achievements, icons on the map etc save a me a ton of time trying to figure out whether I found everything. And they also help me determine whether or not I'll try. Some games I'll notice have some really asinine achievements, and in those cases I'll just ignore them and do what I want.

@bigsocrates I agree with @guthwulf

I've long felt certain genres don't lend themselves to handheld well. Open World game are one of those precisely because of the need to discern small things in the distance. Really anything 3d (FPS games I never found worked well either) can be tough. I think that's partly why you don't see many of those on 3DS etc (yes there are some, just comparatively a lot less than consoles).

That being said, Playing BotW handheld mode on the Switch I think could be really awful if you tried to do one of the gyroscope puzzles in the shrines. I have no idea how you'd even see where the ball is when you have to flip the unit completely over. It's impressive to me that you can play BotW that way, and I've done some on the WiiU gamepad, but isn't the best way to play it imo. And I wouldn't expect it to be, given that it's an open world game.

It does sound like you've given other handhelds a shot, so maybe it really just isn't for you. Or maybe it's just the style of games that work well there aren't for you. Hard for me to say.

Fwiw I do find (and this may sound strange) that how I'm sitting determines what genres I like. Lying down on my bed, I like platformers, adventure novels, SRPGs and JRPGS. If I'm in office chair, I like FPS games and Strategy. If I'm on a couch or in a recliner I like open world games, RPG, fighting games and well really most console things. So for me when I get home, where I feel like being determines what I feel like playing a lot of the time (e.g. I'm physically tired but awake, therefore I'll go to the couch)

maybe that's part of your issue with handhelds is that it might not fit how you personally want to relax.

@viking_funeral: Yeah it really was, although I did enjoy the final blow up the "not death star" mission as well. And you're right hoth missions are generally some of the better missions in SW games, it's just it gets a little old reliving and replaying the same speeder/towcable thing year after year.

TBF it always felt like Lucasarts had an impossible job, trying to appease fans who just wanted to relive the original trilogy of movies and people like myself who'd prefer to see new stuff designed with videogames in mind in the expanded universe (still salty we never got a proper Boba Fett game, though the Jango Fett one wasn't bad)

The Star Wars games always to me kinda had a disjointed feel to them (unlike say Metal gear which has one cohesive vision guiding those games) as a result.

p.s. I never played much of KotoR as by the time I had a decent PC to play it, it looked really really dated, so if I had Star Wars would probably be higher in the list.

I think Dan the writer is my favorite Dan

@morecowbell24:

Well the thing to keep in mind is that I do like the vast majority of this, really only Tier 6 down are things I'm not looking to play more of. So the big names near the bottom in many cases I still like, I just like them less than other things.

If I had to boil down my tastes, I'd say I tend to best like

• RPGs with great stories, high production values and engaging tactical combat
• 2d Platformers and Action games that have great controls
• Third person Action Adventure games that have an emphasis on exploration, puzzle solving and story

I also enjoy Fighting games, racing games, Stealth, Puzzle games and Adventure games. I think I also like Dogfighting games like Ace Combat, but I don't get to play many of those.

What I don't seem to gravitate to these days MMORPGs, Sports games, Rhythm, Simulators, SHmups and First Person Shooters. I certainly like games in those genres, but most things in this list aren't them. I used to branch out more but these there are so so many new games I tend to stay in my comfort zones as I just don't have time to play other stuff.

I can see why this list might be confusing, but it makes sense to me :). Probably a lot of is a function of when I started gaming.

Jumping into Final Fantasy now as a newcomer would be interesting I think. If I were you I might just go straight to XV, FF games I've always felt are products of their era and are intended to be. While older entries are in my estimation likely better games than XV is, I do think since one of the ambitions of the series is to do new things. So you do miss part of what makes them special if you don't play them near release. You might as well take advantage of the opportunity to a fresh one while it's there, we haven't a proper new mainline entry in a very long time

Whatever you do, I hope you have fun! Good luck on your quest to 100 games! Thanks for the comment!

@eder: Hey thanks man!

Sonic is a purposeful omission on my part because I want to be fair to it. I didn't grow up playing SEGA stuff (Nintendo Kid here) so I missed out on a lot of those classic series. In fact there isn't a SEGA series on this list although I'm sure Yakuza, Shining Force, Phantasy Star, Ecco, Streets of Rage and Valkyria Chronicles once I've played at least two of any of them would place pretty well. VC will probably get on there first. I really really loved VC 1.

Sonic is one those series where I have played a quite a few of them, but I've never really "played" them if you know what I mean. I never really sat down and really dug into them for more than ten minutes at a time since I didn't own hardware that had them. I admit I'm kinda worried that it won't seem that great to me now if I really tackled the Genesis ones as time isn't always kind to old games being seen by fresh eyes. It's also a long and very varied series, so i think I'd need to play alot of them to give it a fair shake.

Green Hills Zone is one of my favorite chiptune tracks of all time though for sure.

Uncharted, Doom, Baldur's Gate/Dungeons&Dragons, Borderlands, Halo and Quake are some other ones that fall into that category of I've played these games but I haven't really played these games enough to know how I really feel about their franchises in relation to everything else.

I can say with some confidence that Sonic is probably a middle of the pack (of the above) series for me personally. But where in the middle is a big range. Somewhere between 20 and 70 most likely.

@devoureroftime:Thanks! Go for it, I'd love to see what you come up with!

@sparky_buzzsaw: Can you tell I hate that series? :)