Games that rape you on hard are a massive exception.

Also not having time makes no sense really. If you just have one hour a day for gaming, you wont spend any more time gaming on hard/normal.

For most games Hard is a much more rewarding experience.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger | PC, PS3, XBox 360

Thought I'd rush out my thoughts on this game as I just blew through it in about five hours since it first went up for the Steam summer daily sale, and there's still 12 hours left to get it. I haven't played any of the other Call of Juarez games, but from what I can tell this is to those games as Blood Dragon is to Far Cry 3: a stand-alone expansion that remakes the original with an unrelated, smaller and more tightly focussed story and heavily reused assets.

You play a bounty hunter in his later years who has stepped in to a saloon, been recognized as the hero of a bunch of western dime-novels, and pressed to recount his stories which involve his interactions with most of the famous outlaws and lawmen of the time. The devs could have left it at that and made another boring themed corridor shooter, but it does some really interesting and innovative things.

The bounty hunter acts as a narrator in the style of Bastion, where you'll be playing the mission while he's reliving it to the audience, generally without it interrupting your progress through the level. Sometimes you'll even be playing a mission from the perspective of what the audience has heard about in the dime-novels, then the narrator cuts in and corrects them which is handled in a few different ways, either having you replay the mission from an earlier point, or changing up elements of the point you're currently at.

The graphics and gun play are serviceable and mostly satisfying, though some of the larger maps tend to see some reuse in later missions, focusing on parts you probably didn't spend much time in. Definitely not something to pick up for the gameplay alone, it's intended to be a tight narrative experience with some gamey elements thrown in. If you enjoy spaghetti westerns, particularly anything by Sergio Leone, you'll probably love this.

Makes sense to me. People with wife/kids/job/etc. are gonna want to make more progress in that hour as opposed to being stuck on a certain part and getting absolutely nowhere.

No one lives forever 2
Finished it for second time. Its a spyshooter themed in the 60's where you play a female superspy. First played it like 8 years ago when i was little. Actuallly just finished this before bioshock infinite and had more fun with it. There is just something really creative about the level design, sense of humor and story in this game that you dont see in any other games. I really liked that level where you need to investigate the empty house for clues, and the later bossfight that followed in the tornado. The cool gameplay, humor and level design makes you forget its an outdated game imo.
A damn shame no sequel has been made. This was game of the year when it was released and it was a commercial flop? A sequel made by the same competent people with todays graphics would be amazing.

Odd that these games flopped so hard commercially despite excellent reviews. The AI was really good for the time as I recall.

wait until the guard patrolling the bridge walks to the other end at which point you can get on the bridge and hang off the side of it, moving to the other end where you can drop down onto a cliff and find a hidden weapon, camo, and an alternate route. oh and i recently replayed this game on extreme, and it made it so much better.

It's been getting a lot of press lately, but mostly from the corner pushing for more women protagonists in games who I've seen cite the commercial failure for NOLF as a result of having a non-overtly sexualized female protagonist. I remember picking up the first around when it came out, but none of my other gamer friends had even heard of it.. I think it was more just a marketing failure.

Reposting here because I was told it didn't belong in the "games you didn't finish" thread even though it's technically unfinishable:

The Pinball Arcade (PS3) - 9/10

This game is a simulation of real pinball machines, available for pretty much every system including iOS and other mobile. It's currently free on Playstation Plus.

Four tables are included with the base game, and they're quite fun. Tales of the Arabian Nights, Theatre of Magic, Ripley's Believe it or Not, Black Hole in approximate order of greatness. The first 3 are the more "modern" style where the boards are quite complex with cool technology, lots of fun modes, dot matrix displays, "endings" if you do quite a bit of work to get to them, etc.

There are 3 trophies (not sure if it's the same on non-PS3 systems) for each table - one for a high score, one for achieving 5 simple goals, one for achieving 5 difficult goals. There is an addictive quality to this game, and I can see why people get entranced by slot machines (the sounds, the pretty lights, the cool things going on). I want to say pinball could be a great tool to wean people off of slots, but at $0.50-$1.00 a pop in real life that might be more -$EV than some slots.

I briefly tried demos for the Star Wars and Marvel pinball games (completely separate games by other companies). Those are not based on real tables, and I feel like that makes a huge difference. Even though you are only playing a computer simulation with TPA, it feels "real" since you know it's closely emulating a real-life table. The special effects that would be really cool in real life are still cool in TPA.

Many more tables are available as DLC, in small and large bundles. Highlights include Twilight Zone, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Creature From the Black Lagoon (one of my favorite things ever). There is currently a Kickstarter going on for them to be able to purchase the rights to Terminator 2, and hopefully the legendary Addam's Family will be coming shortly thereafter. I definitely plan on eventually buying every single table, but I'll wait for sales and maybe the in-development PS4 version.

Definitely get your hands on this if you're nostalgic for any of these tables or for pinball in general.

DLC Quest | PC, Mac, XBLA



Picked this one up during the summer sale for a buck after having seen it mentioned everywhere. Not too much to say about it except that it's a super short game with simple graphics and platforming, but worth playing esp. on sale. The conceit is that you're playing a typical platformer game where progress is gated by the need to purchase DLC items to progress using ingame currency from collectible coins. There's a nice flow of exploration to figure out where the next roadblock is followed by fully exploring the available map to collect enough coins to purchase the next DLC to move on. It has a decent sense of humor if you're not put off by how obvious it is, and I had some fun with it, but would've regretted paying more than $1 for it as you can easily 100% the game in under an hour.

DLC quest is good for a couple giggles. That's it.

Last Of Us

10/10

I didn't really know what to expect when I started the game. Had heard it was highly lauded at one of the expos. The first thing that struck me was how similar it was to Walking Dead, the TV show. Especially when Joe/Ellie are walking on the highway or alone scavenging buildings. What makes this game so highly rated is the very movie-like drama. The cinematics are groundbreaking for a video game. You can make out movie out of the game. I mean literally create a movie-menage out of a walkthrough. Storytelling is incredible.

Weapon system is intuitive and works well. Combat with zombies are well-balanced, though I suggest HARD setting if you are a veteran game player.

Oh yeah and it's true, they did ripoff Ellen Page likeness. After finishing the game, I watched Juno and damn, the resemblance is amazing. Heard she got pissed but I think it's a great compliment. Hell, if they make a movie, she's definitely got to star in it. Page in Juno had the right type of spunkiness for Ellie.

Makes sense if you mistakenly equate progress with fun and make the strawman that people are going to be stuck that often on hard.

I have a kid and a family and want the time I get to play to be fulfilling, e.g. play on hard.

Makes sense if you mistakenly equate yourself ( and your tastes ) with the rest of the world.

I guess the "last" game I "finished" would have been the campaign in SC2, but since there's an xpac and I haven't bought it, I guess technically I haven't "finished" that game.

So I had to give it some thought and damn, the last single player game I actually "finished" was:

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords

Gameplay is very similar to the first KOTOR game from a mechanical standpoint. No using the spacebar to jump (no jumping at all as far as I can tell) as hitting the spacebar pauses the game, which gets annoying if you're used to being able to jump around. Combat is very similar to KOTOR I as well. In fact, the two games are so mechanically similar that it would take less time to list the differences:

1. 2 had different lightsaber fighting styles, 1 did not have this.

2. In 2, you knew before opening a container whether or not it was empty.

3. It was quick and easy to switch between melee and ranged weapons in 2.

4. 2 has a party influence system which did not exist in 1.

5. 2 gave you an additional equipment slot.

6. Forcing a lock in 1 would not turn the contents inside the locked container into scrap, which can happen in 2.


As for story, KOTOR 2 is a continuation of the story which began in 1. The action opens five years after 1 ends. You are a "jedi exile," and have lost/forgotten your force powers and most everything about your past. You will travel through different planets re-learning and re-attuning yourself to The Force and, unlike in 1, the process of getting a lightsaber is not as straightforward. You have already been through the Jedi training, but you will pick up parts in your travels which will eventually allow you to construct your own lightsaber.

You can also use workbenches to build/upgrade items you find in game, same as in 1. The same clunky interface that was in 1 will haunt you again in this game. Content creation was not very thoughtful...many of the same areas and same scenes from 1 were re-used in 2 with only minor (if any) cosmetic upgrades. Faces, and voices, were used over and over again, and often NPCs would repeat the same dialog in an area in the same voice. Kind of annoying iyam. And I won't spoil the ending, but it was highly anticlimactic, and that is being generous...

Still, I give the game a solid 8.8 out of 10. It's worth your time if you loved the first game as much as I did, and you will get at least two run throughs same as last time (one as Light and one as Dark).

Wat?


I am defending an objective statement, you wont spend any less/more time gaming on hard, so the statement I dont have time to game on hard makes no sense, and the observation you will get stuck and make no progress is an obvious strawman universalised across all people with families. So when I say I prefer to that time to be fulfilling, I am the one equating my tastes with the rest of the world, gtfo.

People can play on easy if they want, people can drink their own piss if they want.

Its also worth pointing out that games on hard are 90% of the time, not that hard.

lol at giving any ****s about someone's difficulty setting on a single-player experience. If you want to compete, play multiplayer.

Just finished Persona 4: Golden on the PS Vita and all I can really say is.... wow.

It's been a long time since I've been really impressed with a JRPG and it's not really my first genre of choice, but Persona 4 is really, really well done in my opinion. Mostly I was just really impressed with the character development and story, which might be some of the most detailed I've seen in a video game.

The game is aware of and totally fine with its own pacing, which is pretty slow compared to most modern games, but uses the time well and doesn't get boring. The RPG/fantasy elements are contrasted to the mundane life of a high school student in a small town, but the social aspects of the game are tied in with the RPG mechanics so you're pretty invested in both. Also, as a guy who spent time teaching overseas in Korea, the amount of correct detail in simple things like the layout of the high school, how the school schedule interacted with the characters social lives, etc., was impressive to me.

There's a ton of content here and the game is designed so there's not enough time to experience everything in one playthrough - how you spend your time definitely feels like it matters.

It's not really a game you can pick up and play for just a few minutes and is much better played in large chunks, but I got something like 65 hours out of it and could definitely give it a second play through and experience a ton of content that I missed the first time through.

If you somehow missed the game when it came out, I'd definitely recommend it the next time you're looking for a JRPG.

Just like 73% of statistics are made up on the spot?

People will spend more time on hard, especially if they aren't "hardcore" gamers. My GF probably takes 5x as long on a hard COD level, or a hard Theme Hospital level compared to me.

No.

The discussion was if you only have limited time for gaming you wont spend any more time gaming playing hard than easy. If I have 1 hour a day for gaming due to family commitments, then I wont spend any more time gaming on hard or easy. I will spend more time completing individual games but that is completely different.

Obviously for people who are inexperienced gamers there will be big differences between hard and easy, but for experienced gamers not so much imo. I cant remember a time I though a game was to hard. Most games if I played them on easy would return almost no satisfaction as I would just cake walk them, and that is as a very average old man gamer.

Lol are you nuts? That wasn't the point being made. You turned it into "Which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of rocks? Herp derp they both weigh the same!"

Yeah an hour is an hour regardless of what you're doing. The point was that people who have less time per day/week etc to play can most certainly make more progress in a game on a lower difficulty level than hard.

You are the one herp derping. Try following the discussion from the beginning. My summary is totally correct. The supposition was made that someone with a family ect does not have time to play on hard. This is only true if you use progress in a game as the only relative factor, an obviously false and illogical position.

You are fixated on progress = goal of time spent, which is dumb reductionist shallow way of looking at the issue. Saying you can get more satisfaction from playing on hard in the same hour is in nothing like the characterisation you give it.

Thread derails like this make me wish the site had a PM feature.

At risk of another derail, but I want what you are smoking if you expect any of the above to happen via PM. Im not responding to completely facile trolling via PM.