Games Played in 2014
The time is now for 2014! Here's a list of whetever I played during the year.
List items
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2013. Simple, cheap, tower defency game that was good enough to kill some time with.
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I'm curious when we'll see part two, as it stands now it looks great, sounds great and has an interesting story. Only got seriously stuck 2 times in each "campaign", which sucked a little bit. Also some of the music is not my favorite, reminds me of similar music I didn't like in Psychonauts.
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2012. While I started this game in early 2013 I didn't come back to it during the rest of the year. But now it's finished and it was quite alright. 3rd person shooting and switching hands without a cover system never felt quite right throughout, but the different robots you controlled and their alternate forms were fun. The flying decepticon sections were a particular highlight, though there was not enough time to get fully used to the controls, or they could just have been better. The story occasionally feels like it forgets to tell you a couple of things but was overall enjoyable in its direness. I would definetly play a sequel that continued the story... eventually.
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2013. My first Fire Emblem game. A good game. I had heard that it is the first Fire Emblem game that allow you to grind and sometimes I wish that it didn't as me leveling my guys made parts of the game a bit too easy, though playing at a higher difficulty might also have helped. At the same time I liked that I could spend time increasing the "support" between characters indefinetly and see all I wanted to see out of their relationships. As for the characters, even though plenty of them use some anime stereotype or another as a base I felt they were all fairly well realized, with enough detail put into their personality beyond their initial few defining character traits to make them more than the one-note characters they could have so easily been. The story itself isn't much to speak of and the way that the different characters often aren't integrated into it beyond their introduction is a bit disappointing if understandable, given the structure of the game. It's all servicable though. As for the presentation it is pretty great. Battle animations, voice clips, some of the music, it is all fantastic. The only place that it is lacking are the places where you'd just want to see more of it. More unique writing between characters, more unique characters depending on who marries who, more character models and different art for every one of a characters possible class options. Those are all things that you could see the developers realize had they had infinite time and money. I'm not sure I'll play another one of these, but I'm glad I played this one.
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Dark Souls 2 is a game that streamlines things beautifully, yet in doing so removes a bit of the charm of the obfuscated world and systems in the first. As an example, Lightning Spear is now easy for any miracle user to come across, which is good in that it's easy to access a good offensive miracle, yet it loses some of its status in the world and lore as a miracle class separate from the traditional. Covenants are changed in much the same way, they are better for playability, yet are lenient with consequence of choosing one over another, it seems you can easily leave one without risking anything, and then rejoin any time. The whole game is kind of like this, streamlined perhaps a little too much, at the same time so many of the improvements are so welcome it feels wrong and unfair to complain about them. So I'm not going to, as a whole it is a bit lacking but from a pure mechanics perspective it is my favorite in the series, and it's not like the other games where anywhere close to flawless either. I'd only wish I could make myself play through the DLC I bought for it, but after the usual 300ish hours I'm kind of done with it.
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Started the main game, it's challenging which has been satisfying yet I've gotten a bit burnt out after many hours of random encounter after random encounter that demands your attention. The story has me interested in seeing its inevitable twist, though I already have a few ideas of what it will be, and it's dark and melodramatic in a "sort-of" satisfying way. Mostly the characters are just kind of annoying though, as are the plot points, it feels a little too much like an anime I don't want to watch. I din't feel like I'll finish it at this point.
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A fun, beautiful racer, even when playing it on the gamepad. Does get frustrating every so often when you lose to a last minute item that ruins your shot at a 3 star gold medal. I finished all of the Grand Prix stuff, but may yet put some more time into the Time Trials. They are definetly challenging.
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A good, modern, old school platformer. It has perhaps too many collectibles hidden everywhere and a sprint function I never really got used to, but it's generally tough in very satisfying way. I haven't touched the Wii Donkey Kong so this was a real treat. I was particularly fond of the world and enemy design, really top-notch stuff, and the bosses were interesting and challenging, though perhaps a bit too tough at times. In some stretches it turns into an intense roller coaster, and not only of the minecart variety, these were some of the most visually impressive parts of the game, but they too could get a little frustrating if you were scrambling for collectibles. Overall it was a cool game, just not something I would jump at if they made another sequel to it.
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2013. Not loving it. Disliking the collection systems mostly, otherwise it is just kind of ok. Very goodlooking though.
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2012. Like Mario Kart but harderer and more fair and also teaches you stuff good. Good looking but I don't care about most of its characters.
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2013. Looks good, plays poorly, as expected. Surprising amount of plot. A bit of a slog to play through. I don't think I'll play another.
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Mega-like. Well made, fun, pretty. Didn't like the parts where you could tell it was a Kickstarter game. Also not a fan of its story parts. Money is useless by the end so the death mechanic looses its edge completely. Other things were great though. Inventive and varied, kinda liked how they made the phase locket item good enough to abuse. I feel like you too often see the edge of those items taken off completely by balancing.
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Adventure! The kind of story setup I am really into, looking forward to maybe seeing more.
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Kind of dumb but occasionally funny adventure game. Vaguely Psychonauts-ish in spots, totally had a Double Fine logo reference hidden in it too. Evading guards got a little old.
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Only played a little bit. They say it's Dark Souls but easier, but I've had more trouble with it than I have with Dark Souls. Still there are things I like about it and it has a nice weight to its combat, all other issues aside.
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A smoother, more varied and polished version of a game I really liked. Oh, and it also has, straight up, more stuff in it. I'm still warming up to the music and my boy Cain's nerf is a little sad, if fair. A hell of a game.
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Getting back into World of Warcraft was both fun and time consuming, with the changes in Draenor being all pretty swell, it is a bit sad that the rest of the game now doesn't hold the same quality. I almost wish that they would reboot it or something, and not keep tacking on more and more levels. I'm nearly done with it, but I look forward to seeing what they're going to do in the future.
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Aesthetics are nice, world seems dumb but charming, characters whatever, premise is kinda interesting, combat feels bad so far.
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A simple game with many problems, yet it can be fun and addictive. It's at its best when you're racing from one objective to the other, trying to manage multiple fronts and kill enemies as quickly as possible, When I fell of it, I fell of it HARD which is a bit of a shame, there's still some stuff I'd like to do in it.
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As always it's quite a package with tons upon tons of stuff. An uninteresting boardgame mode aside the smashing is perhaps better than it's ever been. Sadly I haven't been able to play it with others enough yet but I'm really looking forward to it.
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An interesting remake that fixes some stuff and messes up others. Most of its changes are smart, especially some of the small stuff like some mechanical quirks around the ai management. It was something that I definetly didn't mind because I was used to it but that made sense that they would change. Other stuff, like the iffy framerate, especially during some high speed parts, and things like Mines being tougher to detect by sight and sound drag it down considerably. The good changes outnumber the bad by a fair bit, but it still disappointed me.
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Perhaps a bit too much South Park in one go, as I played through it all in 2 days. But it was a tight game without any real filler to speak of. The battle system was fun if a bit underutilized maybe. It did do things pretty well so I would have liked to see some more complexity added as you went along.
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I've never playe done of these. It definetly feels "pure" in its simplicity but it is HARD. I'm not sure if I'll be playing it a lot more but I can recognize its quality at least.
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It's unfinished, but far from unplayable, and it's going to be interesting to see it grow. Still I might get my fill before it is properly out, so let's just put it on the list this year, yeah?
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The Remastered PS4 version. It's been some time since I dug into a game like this, I had heard people have caveats about the combat and the slow start, yet I didn't really have a problem with either. The two issues I had was the huge amount of dudes you killed, which got a bit ridiculous by the end. It didn't feel thematically appropriate somehow. The way that all the characters you met were generally jousted out of the story come the end of a chapter also felt off. Other than that, a great playing and looking game, more mechanically interestning than Naughty Dog's other recent work anyhow. The story had some good punch to it as well.
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