I already wrote my piece on it, but the main quest in Fallout 4 continues the trend of main quests in Bethesda games not being the reason you play them, though I think this one is especially bad. Enough so that I put the game down and never really picked it up again after seeing what passed for an ending monologue. It was hardly my only problem, but it was enough to kill any momentum I still had.
@loamlife: I played a decent amount of old games this year, but a lot of it was replaying stuff instead of playing older games for the first time.
@slag:I liked XIII-2 just fine! It's not amazing, but it's a better game than XIII was and I was a big fan of some of the goofy time-travel stuff it did, especially with alternate endings.
@yummylee: That's... not a bad way of explaining it. Bound By Flame is a garbage video game that sometimes dips into the realm of being unintentionally funny. I could make a case for playing RE6 as an example of everything wrong with modern video games and Resident Evil (that I still can't entirely dislike) but no sane person should play BBF.
King's Bounty: Dark Side is somehow even more freewheeling with its goofy, referential NPCs and quests than previous games in the series, which were already pretty lighthearted and silly. In the case of Sexy Vampire Snow White, she asks you to murder the seven dwarves who kidnapped her when she was young.
People like to dump on the post-64 Star Fox games, but I think Star Fox Command for the DS is kinda great. I'd have to play Adventures again to remember if that game was anything other than a passable Zelda clone (that got the Star Fox name bolted on once it moved from N64 to Gamecube) and I remember thinking Assault was kinda garbage when it came out.
Oh right, what were we talking about? This game? It's a shmup. $60 for these sorts of games is a little rich for my blood.
The core gameplay loop in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate got me really bad this year. There's a lot of doing the same fights over and over again to grind for materials, but the game is challenging and demanding enough that it still remains satisfying when you're fighting the Rusted Kushala Daora for the 12th time because you need one more wing part to finish that set of armor.
That said, unlike Destiny, which has a similar loop but still feels anemic as far as the late-game grind is concerned, there are several dozen different unique monsters in MH4U. It is not without variety.
@thatpinguino: I own it on Steam, but after hearing how unintuitive the controls are on that version, I'd probably wait for a sale on PSN. I should probably state that another reason I won't be getting to FF VIII any time soon is because I have other disasterpieces from that franchise that will inevitably need my attention... once I get around to them. It will happen. Count on it.
X-2 and Chrono Cross are great follow-up choices for very different reasons. Chrono Cross is near the same level as FF VIII during the height of PS1 Square's excesses and X-2 is a desperate, experimental cash grab after The Spirits Within almost tanked the company. Both games bury their beloved predecessors in different ways. For what it's worth, I liked what I played of both of those games but I also didn't get to the part of Chrono Cross where it goes batshit insane.
It turns out that the easiest way to get me to zone out of the podcast for 30 minutes is to start talking about VR. Not their fault, but they might as well be talking excitedly about all the new features of the next version of Android.
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