You are aware that 8/10 is a very, very good score right? You say you don't like the driving but still give it an 8 when driving makes up a very large part of the game? Especially compared to the original Mafia this game is more like a 4 or max a 5/10. Definitely not worth wasting time/money.

This is why 1-10 rating systems are silly. Can anyone articulate the level of suckage between a 2/10 and a 4/10? It allows mediocre games to score "higher" simply because there's such a wide width for poor games.

I'm saying it was an enjoyable game with some aspects I didn't like. The story made the game pretty enjoyable, which also encompassed a big trade off of not having any real choices in the game. I definitely felt compelled to watch the whole story unfold, it was almost like a movie in that respect. I quit gta 4 and la noir because I just didn't enjoy them at all. This game I finished in about a week or so. I think it was definitely worth the 75% off price I paid while I wait for new titles.

For me, a 7+ means I think the game is worth buying. 6 is it has some merit if you like that type of game, and <= 5 is it has varying degrees of fundamental flaws even if you like that sort of game. The thread is about games you completed, so I could never see myself having less than a 7 here since I wouldn't complete a game I didn't like. Maybe I should scale accordingly, but I am giving my universe of games rating.

Just finished Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Stopped playing it 2 years ago 1/3 of the way through the Dark World floating dungeon.

HOLY **** DID THAT GAME END BADLY

I literally had zero issue coming back and completely dominated the last two dungeons with ease. I hope Nintendo realizes that Zelda exists for people who love the franchise and should design the game with the knowledge that everyone who plays it is probably pretty damn good at it before picking up the controller. Ganondorf didn't take me past 5 hearts, fu Nintendo I was excited to fight his final form only to rape his face. The shield in that game is too overpowered.

Everyone else I remember that game is just blandness. The spinner boss and the flying hookshot boss were fun...and nothing else strikes me as memorable. I did think that Hyrule looked beautiful and was really fun to explore...for the first time.

I would give the game 8/10 despite being a massive Nintendo fanboy and loving the Zelda franchise to death.

I am about halfway through a play of TP and skyward sword. I did recently beat links awakening. Good Zelda game minus the constant shield switching you have to do due to the limitations of the gameboy. Currently playing seasons and its more of the same.

I think the problem with Zelda in general is that it relies too much on item gating. In seasons, literally all items are just there to get you past obstacles and provide no additional fun functionality. Speed seeds? Cool, maybe I can run every where. Nope! Takes too log to switch but here this long pit for you to jump over with your speed boost. That sort of stuff is tedious, it's like key puzzles in doom except there are 20 keys instead of 3.

Zelda is at its best when it provides you with challenging environmental puzzles (water temple, dungeon 8 in awakening). It's hard to remember the last time a Zelda item actually provided a unique and interesting way to interact with the environment. Flying beetle in skyward sword is kind of fun but also suffers from gating issues.

You are right about the item gaining.

Zelda needs to get back to bigger puzzles too. Every room it's his own puzzle and then you move on to the next one. I liked the Majora's Mask dungeons because they revolved around large scale goals like the water dungeon where manipulating the flow of water was the main task and was always prevalent .

The spinner stuff in TP was really fun...then I never remember using it until the very end to get to the last boss. So lame.

Ya I like going through older Zelda games with a better understanding of gameplay to see how they stand up. Still thought ocarina of time holds up, would love to play MM on 3ds. I can give the gameboy ones a pass due to the hardware limitations of the time. Skyward sword has no excuse though, it's mostly just lazy. I still like TP, not sure why though.

I've recently played through zelda 1, 2, link's awakening and am playing lttp right now

they age very well

Just finished this, and have to say I disagree with bleffo and found it to be a very fun game. Given that this will probably be $3-4 during the Summer Sale, I'd say give it a try if you're at all interested and have a machine capable of running it well now that it's almost two years old. I'm running an i5 3570k and a GTX 670 2GB and had no FPS problems, though the texture streaming is a bit wonky until you mess around with some custom settings. This is my biggest mark against the game, and it's pretty silly this far after launch that this hasn't been patched to work well out of the box.

The story is that the asteroid Apophis hit the earth in 2029, and a program was set up beforehand to bury capsules filled with genetically engineered troops in cryostasis, to come out after like 100 years or so. You wake up early for some reason, it's never explained, and spend the game working through different quest hubs siding up with a rebel group fighting a military faction called the authority.

Obviously, this being id, the story is not its strong suit, but it's not cheesy or too cliche, and each hub has a ton of different NPCs that you can interact with. After each mission they'll have something new to say that might be related to something you've just done, or something about the city/world/other characters. The voice acting is great across the board, and the dialogue is better than average. The character models are the real standout, with lots of unique mocap gestures and actions each individual will do while idle or interacting with you, and they react very naturally to your presence, like turning to address you if you get close to them or cocking their head to follow you. id clearly put a ton of time into little touches here, and as far as NPC interactions go, this is the gold standard I've never seen another game live up to.

The hubs also have other things you can do. There's a racing pit where you can tune your car or find races, and there are four different vehicles you can get. I was pretty indifferent to the racing, the ai felt like early Mario Kart ai that never gets too far behind or ahead of you, and as long as you don't **** up the end you always win. You can safely ignore all of this, except I think for two races where you have to race an NPC to win a new more powerful car that'll be needed to get to new areas. Then there are four or five different gambling mini-games which are all mostly forgettable after a time or two except for a pretty cool collectible card game you can play. You start out buying a starter pack, and you can buy rare cards from vendors in different places, and also find them as hidden items throughout the world. This was one of the most interesting things in the game, and I wish they had gone a little farther with it; but as is, I found myself playing a round or two whenever I was in a town and had a new card to try out.

The missions themselves are all pretty varied and cool. You get them in the hubs by talking to people or checking a job board, then go out into the wasteland, which is basically a series of corridors down canyon valleys or mountains, and follow your minimap to get to a location. A few times you'll backtrack to mission locations you've been to before, but the areas are altered so it's not exactly the same and new parts are opened up. It is very much a disguised corridor shooter, you never really have any options as far as what path to take, but the areas are usually large and open and the exit points not obvious, which has the benefit of making you look around a lot without being overwhelmed. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really get into the story until the last few missions, and then ends very abruptly. Either a case of them not having enough time, or they had planned on doing a DLC to tie things up.

Being a FPS, it really should come down to the combat and weapons, and I had no complaints. The weapons are your standard fare, a few different rifles, a pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, crossbow and a type or bladed boomerang. They're all well balanced to be useful in the right situation, and I found myself swapping between all of them instead of falling back on to a single clear favorite like most games find me doing. And again, I think Rage wins another award for the best enemy AI in a game ever. There isn't a lot of variety, you have a few different types of humans and mutants, but they do a great job of working together to press and flank your position, or if they're being beaten, falling back and covering each other retreating to the next room. The melee enemies, especially the mutants, do an amazing job of being hard to hit by juking and rolling and being a PITA, if they ever get too close you're really stuck just using the shotgun or trying to strafe away from them and spray bullets with whatever other gun you have. Together with the AI, the animations they use are on a different level than anything I've ever seen. Shoot a guy running at you in the foot, he'll trip on that foot and take a while to recover, hurt them bad enough and they fall down and try to recover enough to shoot at you from the ground, and eventually get back up and limp away. Shotgun one running at you in the head, he'll go limp and momentum will carry him forward to topple over a ledge or go sprawling, or if he's juking go crashing into a wall and crumple up.

I could go on, but I won't - best FPS I've played in years.

I liked rage too, and you can probably get it pretty cheap at the steam summer sale. Actually it may cost more in bandwidth than the actual game price.

I just finished campaign in Saints Row The Third and I may even go for 100% completion. I must say it's a really good game, it's been a while since I watched cut scenes. Missions variety was wide, plot interesting and engaging and I liked how it was connected. Overall I'd say 8+/10.

Which ending did you choose?

Metal Gear Solid 3 HD (PS3) - 4/10

I wrote about this while I was playing it. Man, this game was a chore. It's difficult for me to rate it because I know it's generally well-regarded, and some people even have it as one of the GOATs. Part of the problem is the game's fault. I played it on Normal. There's a balance issue where basically you don't receive enough damage on that level (at least in the HD version). One of the people who thinks the game is GOAT told me I need to play it on Hard or above, but I think that's crap. They should have balanced the game properly on the default level.

So, on Normal often the best way to do things was just to run through levels in full view of everyone, stabbing them with a knife when necessary. You were on alert the whole time and were being shot at, but you rarely took enough damage for it to matter. I would either advance to somewhere where I could hide, knife every guard OR simply trigger a cut scene that canceled all alerts. This isn't the way the game was "meant" to be played apparently, as people talk about all the inventive ways they move through the levels and trick guards and such. I shouldn't have been able to successfully play it the way I did if the balance was correct, but I was and it was boring as hell.

Cut scenes actually weren't the worst thing ever. Revolver Ocelot is corny as hell but wound up entertaining me a little bit. I got mad when the game led me to believe I was fighting the "final" boss literally 4 times (and in fact I had a bunch more jungle wandering to go).

There's a chance that some day I'll watch one of these fabled Let's Play videos where it's fascinating to see how people handle the levels. Maybe in a moment of weakness I'll even play MGS4, but god I hope not.

the PS2 version of MGS3 is one of my all time favorites (haven't tried the new HD one idk if they changed anything)...i guess i wouldn't like it either if i played it like you did but lol at doing that just because you can, if you didn't enjoy it while you were playing why not use a normal playstyle? best part of the game for me was the replay value and perfecting no alarm/no kill etc runs

Just finished the first 32 cubes and got to New Game+ on the PC version, and not sure what to think about it. Took me about four hours without using any hints, beating the game is pretty easy without learning too much about the language and symbology of the game that you'll need to solve a good portion of the puzzles. There were only a few puzzles that I was able to figure out towards the end that had initially stumped me, most of them are impenetrable unless you're good with these types of things or cheat by looking online, or else ignore them and feel stupid and hope you can beat the game without them. And I doubt there are too many people out of the millions that bought this game that fit the first description. For example, looking online now I see that there was a rosetta stone type drawing that links english words to some of the game's alphabet, but I had completely missed it. There's so much noise with the background symbology that I just glazed over it after a while.

So it's an interesting looking game with good atmosphere, and some of the platforming puzzles are fun and some are just annoying as **** (think the lava level), and the bulk of the game is over the heads of most of the people that will play it. Like I said, not sure what to think about it, but I'm glad I played it.

EDIT: also if you're on PC you'll probably want a 360 pad for this, pretty frustrating on keyboard, and there are even 3-4 puzzles that require the rumble pack to figure out or else look online when you get to the things that look like tuning forks, not sure if there are alternate cues for M&K.

The Walking Dead: 400 Days (DLC)

Five bucks gets you five short stories about people during the first 400 days after the outbreak. Took about 90 minutes or so to play through. If you liked the initial game with it's point and click interface story, you'll like this. I consider it 5 dollars well spent. Supposedly the choices made here will reflect on to the "second season" of the game when it comes out. I like that.

My results spoiler


Not sure if I want to play through this again making different choices. I might. It's short enough and I like the stories.

Bioshock Infinite (PC)

Finally managed to finish this game. I was playing it only for the story, as I am not a big fan of shooters. Also, I haven't played Bioshock 1 or 2 (well, I played Bioshock 1, but only finished medical pavilion, so I was still at the very beginning), so I wasn't 'connected' with the series.
TBH, I was expecting something more from this game than only shooting and running. Yeah, the story was ok, but the gameplay not so much (as for me). Not much choices in the game, just run and shoot following waves of opponents
All in all, I still think it's a decent game overall, but if I could choose again, I wouldn't pay full price for it.

I was never taught or forced to learn another playstyle. I wanted to get the game over with, so I took the path of least resistance. I did still attempt stealth a lot of the time.

Yea I'm definitely in the camp where you should never have to impose your own restrictions on a game. If a stealth game doesn't force you to be stealthy, just merely gives the opportunity, it's not a good stealth game imo.

Just curious, how long did it take you to finish?

MGS3 is also too difficult right off the bat for a "modern" game. The stealth in the prior games in the series was pretty straightforward and easier to jump into. MGS3 apparently requires a lot more finesse, using gadgets, patience, etc. This is not communicated well to the player, and the beginning sucked. Even having finished the game, I have absolutely no clue how I was expected to cross that long rope bridge at the beginning without being spotted by anyone.

Thinking on the final few levels, they don't even seem any harder than the beginning. Possibly easier at times.

Grunching, but how long have you played video games without knowing that anyone with a clue of how to play games needs to start the game on the second-hardest difficulty to get a balanced experience?

It's always, always like this:

Easy: for 6 year old kids that can barely use a controller
Normal: for casual gamers that like to play Halo with their bros
Hard: for people that have a clue <-- you are here, generally
Really hard: for people on a second playthrough or who are really good at this particular genre and want a challenge

I always play Normal because I don't have time to spend on hard on every game. And games like Viewtiful Joe would straight up rape you if you didn't start on the easiest level of difficulty.

13-14 hours, but I know, that many people finish it in 10 hours or less