Completed Games for 2014
Like last year, going to try and keep a list of games I complete throughout the year. Since I'm starting from the beginning of this year, hopefully I can keep everything in chronological order.
List items
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I thought this game was pretty fun, but was it ever short. My total "Run" time was 2:10:03, and I was done the game in less than three hours. It's got some extra challenges and stuff to do, but the core story was really short. I don't know if it's necessarily totally fair to knock the game down for that or not however. In a typical racing game you'd be doing the same tracks over and over, but here they were trying to do fairly unique stuff for every single race. A lot of the tracks were actually pretty good too, but at the same time the game doesn't have any of the customization Need for Speed usually has, the AI was incredibly easy on Hard, and as such I don't really have any incentive to want to go back to the tracks. I enjoyed my time with it, but I'm really glad I just bought this now on sale and not when it was new.
Price Paid: $3.75
Date Completed: January 5th
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Finally managed to do this. I really loved Persona 4, and have watched the endurance run many times, but was having trouble getting into Persona 3.
On about four separate occasions I got 10 hours or so into the game and then would stop, and by the time I'd come back I'd forget most of what had been going on and simply restart. I'd tried the PSP version, I tried playing the PS2 version on my PC, and I'd tried the digital version on PS3.
The last time I'd played was probably in October, and I'd stopped around 7-8 hours in. Around three weeks ago I my final exam for the past semester of college, and was going to have a bunch of time off. I picked the game up again sort of out of guilt. I had really wanted to buy Tales of Xillia, but I knew I'd already put a few long JRPGs off to the side, so the deal was I'd at least try to get into Persona 3 again before buying a new one.
I think what drove me away so many times that early on into the game was the exhaustion mechanic. The way I really wanted to play Persona was to beat the dungeon up to the next blockade in a couple of in-game days, but really early on the characters get exhausted so easily I was no where near being able to do that. After getting about half-way into the second block, the game finally let that stuff slide, and I really never ran into any issue with it again.
By the end of the game, I'd gone so far as to beat the Reaper, complete the extra dungeon, complete most of Elizabeth's requests, hit level 94, get 80%+ of the compendium complete, and fuse some of the top personae like Messiah and Lucifer. I really think that long, slow, drawn out intro was the only thing keeping me back all this time from delving into this game.
Total blast all the way through once I got past the intro (though admittedly the Reaper fight was dumb and not very fun), probably both one of the most memorable games I've played and the best $5 I've ever spent.
Price Paid: $5.00
Date Completed: January 6th
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Tales of Xillia was a pretty fun game overall. It started out strong, I liked most of the characters, the art, the setting, and the story. There were some grating aspects, like the constant harkening back to their joke of "Milla's a hot girl who doesn't know it", but aside of that I'd enjoyed my time through most of the game.
At the beginning of the game I was presented with the option of choosing which of the two protagonists I would like to play as. As I'd watched a little gameplay previously, I decided I liked Milla better of the two and opted for her. This didn't seem to have much impact on the game or story past the tutorial until about 2/3rds of the way through the game. Suddenly the characters were separated and a TON of story stuff was happening to the other character when he was away, and none of it was explained to me when they reunited. All of a sudden the game became a real slog for about 4 hours, and I really wasn't having any fun; I just wanted it to end at that point. Finally things started to pick up again though, and the game hooked me hard, getting me to play for five hours straight. I was pretty happy with the ending, and I'm really glad it managed to get itself back on track after the slog.
Price Paid: $20
Date Completed: February 1st
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I liked this a lot more than I anticipated I would when it was first announced at E3. The game is certainly less strict than the old Splinter Cells, allowing you to play most of the game as a typical cover-based third-person shooter if you'd like, but I still played it the same as I would the old Splinter Cell games. I set the difficulty to "Realistic" and completed the entire game without killing a single enemy (knockouts could be avoided on most missions, but on some they were mandatory).
Nothing from the game ever really blew me away, or really hooked me hard, but it was relatively fun. It felt very polished and well put together, and it never really had any frustrating slumps along the way either. Definitely a game for which I wish I had more friends who'd bought it though, as co-op definitely seems like it'd be some of the most fun to get out of this game.
Price Paid: $12
Date Completed: February 27th
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This game was fun! I think I liked Torchlight II better if I'm honest, but Diablo III was still a fun game. I did play it after the "big patch" though, and I did play it with a 50% bonus XP rate. As with most ARPGs, I wish I had a little more to do in the way of skills, but when I really reached a point where I was swapping out skills or runes any longer, I ended up only being a few hours from the end.
I finished the game at 55 so I'll probably play a little longer and get myself up to 60 and see what the Paragon stuff is about, but this time on expert (played on hard originally). Originally I started on normal but it was -way- too easy, and even after bumping it up to hard I only died once throughout the entire game, and it was entirely sloppy play on my part. I know there's like three more difficulties to choose from above hard though, so it should be fun to poke around at those for a bit. I can definitely see this being a good podcast game to go back to periodically and play for a bit.
Price Paid: $20
Date Completed: March 20th
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A week from release, and it's already over! I really enjoyed Dark Souls II. I felt like, for the most part, it improved on the first game and that's pretty much all I was hoping for. Dark Souls is enough of its own thing that I didn't need them changing everything up to keep it interesting, rather just having them improve a lot of the boss design, level design, art, etc, helped a lot. People seemed to be complaining an awful lot about small changes they made to the combat and general feel, but I didn't have any issues adjusting.
I was a bit concerned about the quality of the PC port the first time I launched the game, considering it immediately crashed without even reaching the main menu and it turned out there was a major bug with HDMI (it was easy enough to fix, but it's still ridiculous that that was a problem), but from there on I had zero crashes. It looked really nice on PC and I never had connection issues or controller issues.
The boss I died on the most, by far, in Dark Souls II was actually the first boss, The Last Giant. I'd picked the Swordsman class, died a bunch heading the wrong way early on (was on the path to Dragon Rider at first), and he'd kill me in one hit, regardless of the attack. I was also having issues with how big his stomp hitboxes were, where he'd still stomp me even if I was clearly outside the area of where his actual foot was. I ended up dying nearly 20 times to him, but powered through it and felt good.
Around Dead Man's Wharf I started putting my summon sign down and joining other peoples games, something I never did in the original Dark Souls, and had a blast doing it. Later on in the game I killed the Looking Glass Knight probably around 25-30 times, just helping other people get through that section of the game. I was having a ton of fun being able to help people, and all the souls I was getting back from it were helping me fix my character.
Before Dark Souls II came out, I was really worried about the change to the invasion system. It was now going to be that you could be invaded at any time, hollow or human. I thought PvP was the worst part of Dark Souls, and had absolutely no interest in having it forced upon me in II. Thankfully, over the course of the entire game, I was invaded twice (that's excluding NPC invasions), and both times it wasn't a big deal. I still don't find the PvP fun in these games, but it at least wasn't an issue.
All in all, I really had fun playing this game. I couldn't even rattle off an equivalent of Blighttown or the Tomb of Giants in this game; even the worst areas were still alright. Total time to completion on my first playthrough was near 33 hours, and that's with about 8 hours of co-op thrown in where I wasn't making any immediate progress. After the credits rolled, I immediately started a new character, so now I'm trying out the sorcerer to see if it's any more fun than it was in the first two games.
Price Paid: $40
Date Completed: May 2nd
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Price Paid: $5
Date Completed: May 10
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Price Paid: $20
Date Completed: May 27th
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Price Paid: $15
Date Completed: June 8th
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Price Paid: $9
Date Completed: June 11th
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Price Paid: $2.99
Date Completed: June 27th
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Price Paid: $2.49
Date Completed: June 27th
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I know this was on my list for completed games last year, but I just finished my Jedi Shadow, so now I've done both Empire and Republic sides. I still think this game is a ton of fun, even if I mostly just play it as a singleplayer game. It took me about eighty hours to complete the character, finishing the story at level 52 (around 75% to 53). I only paid for a month and I don't think I'll be resubscribing right away, but I've had a lot of fun again and I'm sure I'll return for more in the future. This was also the first character I broke a million credits on, so that was pretty fun too. I think the craziest thing about this to me is that it took less time for me to finish the Jedi Shadow story for this character than it took for me to beat Persona 3.
Price Paid: Probably $45?
Date Completed: July 9th
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Price Paid: $2.50
Date Completed: July 10th
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Price Paid: $39.99
Date Completed: August 6th
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Price Paid: $4.99
Date Completed: August 18th
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Price Paid: $0.00 (won in a raffle)
Date Completed: August 20th
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Price Paid: $0.00 (gift)
Date Completed: August 26th
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Price Paid: $58.49
Date Completed: September 2nd
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Price Paid: $70.00
Date Completed: September 14th
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Price Paid: $10.00
Date Completed: September 24th
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Price Paid: $54.99
Date Completed: October 3rd
Version played: Xbox 360
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Price Paid: $-.--
Date Completed: November 1st
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Price Paid: $45.00
Date Completed: November 26th
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Price Paid: $5.00
Date Completed: November 30th
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Price Paid: $6.60
Date Completed: December 19th
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Price Paid: Bought in a Humble Bundle
Date Completed: December 21st
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