Yikes. My opposite take on GTA5. It was bad enough that I've lost most interest in mainstream (AAA) games and mainstream gaming culture.

I saw that. And it certainly had me thinking.

In the last 10 years, I have played very few games. Or very few franchises, I guess.

GTA's
Borderlands's
Half-life/Portal's
Call Of Duty (black ops zombies with friends/fam)

Then like 2 or 3 other single games. I rarely game, is what I'm saying. So I have very little to compare it to. I'll be starting "The Last Of Us" remastered after Xmas, but no plans for other games at the moment. So I savored the crap out of GTAV.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

So this started as a GBA game for a short bit, then became a DS game with some sequels. Now you can get the franchise on iOS. The first few pieces you can play for free then buy any of the games individually or all for like $17 (which is a ton for an iOS game, but way less than what it costs on the DS, so go figure. I bought all three and am maybe halfway through the second one now.

What is this game all about:
You play a defense attorney defending people on murder charges. There are two venues you play in: an investigative one where you are talking to people and looking for clues, and a courtroom one where you are cross examining witness and such. This game is really more like a visual novel with some room to explore extra dialog (when you **** up). You have puzzles to solve, but you can't really fail in a traditional sense, you can just take forever.

Is it any good?
Well, yeah, it is. The strength of this game is its writing and characters. Piecing together the crime is interesting, and they are pretty decent whodunits. I think the game is pretty funny, and can even be a bit tense at times despite failure not really being a threat. There is a lot of game here in terms of hours, and it is a game you can really stop at any time and pick up at any time so it is really well suited to mobile device. The game is better with the sound on, but that is not required (and I often play it with the sound off).

I would highly recommend this if you like the visual novel genre (it definitely has a Japanese feel to it, even though it was completely rewritten in English by I assume native English speakers due to the quality of the writing). It doesn't have the consequential choices of a tell tale game, and it doesn't have the game aspect of some of the "story rich" games like divinity dragon commander, but it is pretty entertaining nonetheless, and just perfectly suited for a phone or mini.

Just finally played and finished GTA V the other week, I was kinda loathing going into it but had it from a buddy and figured it's one of those games I should probably play and I'll bang it out real quick. I hated San Andreas (blasphemy I know) and not really feeling another Californian version and felt like I was just kinda done with the series and it's drive **** shoot **** point A point B BS. By the end though I was fearing getting close to the end and I'm already looking forward to playing it 1st person on a PS4.

I see Baltimores complaint in that basically is every sandbox ever, I was often reminded of Mafia II (last game of this type I played) where it's just like ugh you're making drive places (loooong drives) to listen to bad dialogue, but with V at least I think the dialogue is pretty damn good and the world is so gorgeous it's enjoyable. Combat was kind of a joke in that it was way too easy and idiot proof but compared to old versions it's an absolute dream, fun although pretty brain dead.

The most frustrating thing for me about GTA is that they create this amazing world but don't do all that they could with it, but it makes total sense why. Imagine a kind of realistic more nuanced heist game in this world, with a deep economy system and like, complex gang/law enforcement AI in realizing patterns of heists or what dirt you do and spiraling story trees etc.

But GTA is GTA, and has to meet the criteria of being something that a large number of people can pick up and play, it has its edgy name to live up to and it has its massive bro/yokel base and has to work well enough across so many demographics. The characters are ridiculous, but they're funny for the most part and work well for what Rockstar needs from them. The pop culture stuff is a little beat you over the head but I did find myself laughing out loud many many times at radio stuff and thinking man you guys are good.

I thought so many times man I wish they could make DLC content and tweak and build the world, but for what it is, and what it's meant to be, it's an absolutely amazing game.

10/10

Shadowrun Returns

For those who are unfamiliar, this game was the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign to revitalize a game franchise/universe from the 16-bit era. It takes place in the near future, after magic comes back to the modern world and brings with it your typical Tolkien races - dwarves, elves, and orks. Instead of swords and axes, though, now they wield guns and hack computer. I'm not sure how well this installment was received by backers, but most reviews I saw were tepid. I didn't have much interest in the game despite sounding like something I would like, but the now-standalone expansion Dragonfal, got serious buzz, so when I picked that up on the last Steam sale I also grabbed this one for $1.50.

Overall, I enjoyed the 12 or so hours it took me to get through this game. It's an RPG but the role-playing elements, outside of character customization, are fairly light. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of an old-school JRPG transported to modern times: you click through dialogue, you upgrade your equipment when you can afford it, you improve your character's stats, and you just keep progressing through the story. Unlike those old games, though, there's no grinding for EXP or wonky inventory management. And rather than build your party of characters, you hire them before each mission, which lets you try out the different combat styles that the game has to offer.

The main complaint levied at the game seems to be how linear it is - there are few meaningful decisions to be made and you're mostly just guiding your character through the story. I mostly played this game while watching TV or loosely hanging out with my wife, so I'd actually say this was more of a benefit than a hindrance; it also makes the game ideal for tablets, as everything can be accomplished with one mouse click (or finger tap). Neither the story nor the characters are particularly interesting or compelling but things move along fairly quickly so you don't notice the lack of depth too much. There aren't really any puzzles or significant side quests, so you spend the whole time moving from scene to scene in the main storyline; again, in some games this would be a problem but it feels fine here. The combat showed the most promise, being a combination of turn-based tactics from both the old Fallout games and the new XCom, which are basically my favorite combat systems ever. Unfortunately it never lives up to its full potential, and on "normal" settings the game was fairly easy to complete without ever fearing that my character would be killed

Despite its shortcomings, though, the game was worth playing through once. Not every game needs to be tactically deep or involve gut-wrenching decisions - sometimes you just want to click around and move through an interactive story. I For $15 I don't think I'd be thrilled with this game, but for like $5 on a tablet to play for an hour at a time, it's a pretty good time. One of the few games that I've bought for the PC that I wish I had for mobile instead.

7/10

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

I played this on the Nintendo DS via an emulator on my phone.

For those of you who play RPGs on the consoles, Dragon Quest should be a familiar name from the SNES and Playstation 1 and 2 years. I played Dragon Quest VII on PS1 and some of the elements are similar. It's a very simple classic RPG from yesteryear with a good storyline and gameplay elements along with the usual RPG fare I expected in a Dragon Quest game ie. random encounters, linear path and storyline with a few choices that changes the dialogue but doesn't change the story too much. What I like about the game is that it doesn't force you to play certain human characters and that you can recruit certain monsters to round out your party. Actually, recruiting monsters is mandatory as some are better than the human characters you're provided with.

Gameplay: 7/10. Your standard fare basic RPG with the usual levelling, kill monsters, earn gold, buy/find better equipment. Old-school RPGers will love this game. However, gold is hard to come by later on in this game.

Sound: N/A I didn't play the game with sound so can't comment on the music or sound.

Difficulty: 6/10 You can get lost without a walkthrough, especially late in the game. The bosses weren't particularly too difficult, however a few of the basic enemies has a spell that can wipe out your entire party if you're really unlucky. If you get to a high enough level the enemies/bosses won't be too tough. There's a secret boss, but I didn't want to grind another 5-10 hrs to be a high enough level to fight and beat it.

Story: 8/10 To me a good story is a big component of a very good RPG game. The storyline for Dragon Quest V was pretty compelling for me at least to finish the game. Obviously you're tasked to save the world, but the how and why are interesting. Without revealing too much, the storyline spans about 20 years, so to me that was unique in the way they present the characters at different points of the storyline and how they develop. The puns in game will make you groan and roll your eyes as the game WAY over uses it.

Total score and summary: 6.5/10 Overall it's a solid game, if you're looking for an old school RPG. I would recommend it if you're looking for a simple RPG with a linear story path and ending that doesn't take too long to complete. It took me about a little less 30 hours. Otherwise, if you don't play this game you won't miss out on anything.

Assassin's Creed

So AC3 & AC4 were on sale on steam, so I decided I should also play thru 1 & 2. I tried AC1 once a while ago, but gave up on it for some reason, now I'm revisiting it.
AC1 is a really good game. Graphics are very good, story is reasonably good. I found the secondary Astergo plot unnecessary though. My biggest complaint is the game does get repetitive. Also the final fights are kind of meh. But these couple things are very minor in the grand scheme. Very good game overall
8/10

On to AC2.

Finished two games in the past couple of days, go me.

Rogue Legacy

To me, this was basically a perfect gaming experience, even if it's not necessarily a perfect game. Ever since I came back to PC gaming from exclusively consoles in 2014 and realized how easy it was to find great games for incredibly cheap, I've had a fairly low threshold for stopping something I'm not enjoying and moving on to something else (e.g. Metal Gear Peacewalker HD, which made me realize how much I hate stealth games that aren't Dishonored). Instead, I feel like I'm always looking for that next thing to grab my attention, and for the last month or so that has been Rogue Legacy.

I didn't see it reviewed before in this thread so I'll describe some of the basics. Basically, this is a platforming game where you repeatedly enter a castle, fight for as long as you can while collecting gold and finding items/secrets, then die and do it over again after using your gold to buy upgrades. The castle is randomly generated each time, though rooms repeat they will always be arranged differently and no two playthroughs will feel the same. There are four different sections of the castle, each with a boss you must eventually defeat before getting on to the final boss. The controls are simple and very tight - you'll likely struggle at first but with time you'll become more skilled and be able to get further and further into the castle, along with help from the upgrades you buy along the way. There were a few points where I felt like I was plateauing but ever single time I hit a breakthrough and was able to make progress. The economy is generally very well balanced, so you should able to afford a new upgrade each time through and on better runs will be able to get a few new upgrades/pieces of equipment. It basically creates a perfect gameplay loop where you enter the castle, play for as long as you can, use your gold to upgrade and then do it all over again until you can get deeper and deeper into the game.

What makes the game standout is the variety in both your upgrades (coming in the form of improved stats and items, including runes that will give you special abilities like double-jumping or draining life from enemies) and the way your character is generated. For each run, you "choose your heir" from three choices, which will have a class, a magic spell, and then between 0-2 traits. The traits can be positive (ADHD = makes you run faster), detrimental (there's one that makes you unable to use the mini-map), or purely aesthetic as far as I can tell (dyslexia = garbled text). You start with three classes but add more with upgrades, and the full cast adds a lot more variety to the game, as different classes will specialize in different ways.

I'd say the game took me about 20 hours to beat (it was $2.99 on sale) and I pretty much never wanted to put it down until I could no longer keep my eyes open. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but it took a few familiar elements that I enjoy (upgrading, platforming, and "rouge-like" concepts) and mashed them together into a delightful gaming nirvana. The only reason I haven't jumped immediately into New Game + is that I want to get to more of my backlog, and it seems like the difficulty jumps quite a bit.

10/10, can't recommend highly enough if this sounds like fun to you.

Bioshock Infinite

I'd been waiting to get this for Xbox 360 but the DLC is so expensive that I ended up buying the complete bundle on PC for $10, even though I was forced to play on a Mac which may have hindered the experience somewhat; I'm not positive but I think the graphics and textures came out pretty bad compared to the PC/console version. I know this game is somewhat controversial in that critics seemed to love it while players are more split, but my tastes tend to lean towards critic consensus so I figured I would enjoy it. Unfortunately, in this case I think that negative views were largely justified and I'm not really sure what some people loved about it so much.

Now don't get me wrong, I didn't think that this was an objectively bad game, more just disappointing based on what it could and should have been. Most of the elements are perfectly adequate - there's a fine enough story moving things along, combat can be fun given the gear/weapon/vigor combinations and melee executions- but it's nowhere near as entertaining as the earlier Bioshock games IMO. The narrative is kind of muddy, especially when they try to sci-fi it up, and I did not enjoy listening most of the dialogue outside of Elizabeth, who is one of the better female characters I recall encountering in a video game. Despite having a fairly large armory, there isn't a lot of variety in the guns, and I found myself avoiding several of the vigors, which are basically nerfed versions of plasmids in Bioshock. The sky-lines could have been a great element, but I always felt like I was moving either too fast or too slow to react properly from them. This was also one of the few games that I had to change the difficulty in, as I was getting frustrated in some of the larger battles on "hard" where I would get swarmed and die repeatedly - the gameplay is too stiff and your character is too limited to really get enough skill to overcome these areas without just grinding them out.

I'd say this game is right on the fence of "worth playing" and "meh." Given my love of the first Bioshock games, I think it was important for me to play, but I'd probably skip it if I didn't have any connection to those games. I had planned on writing more but I have to run to work; I know this has already been reviewed and it feels like an older game at this point given the way the industry moves. It's hard for me to give a score, I guess I'd say like a 6.5/10, or in other words it's at the bottom range of games I'd consider playing through.

Rogue Legacy seems cool.

Nowadays critics have split into at least two different groups. There are the more mainstream critics who are the same as always, playing into hype and stuck in the nerd/gamer culture bubble. They loved Bioshock: Infinite. Then there are the more..."indie"? critics who tend to have a broader understanding of art in general (as opposed to just nerds who think that Inception, Chrono Trigger and Game of Thrones are the greatest works of art mankind has ever produced) as well as frankly being more intelligent and thoughtful about these things. They mostly hated Bioshock: Infinite. The "indie" critics also tend to call out sexism, racism, problematic treatment of violence or politics, etc., but that is by no means their whole shtick.

I kinda still want to play BS:I largely just for the cool old-fashioned interpretations of modern songs.

Glitchhikers (PC)

Short, 20 minute game in which you're driving down a lonely road late at night. There are hitchhikers, there are nods to David Lynch, there is philosophy, there are some choices. It's gotten praise from the indie critics, but eh. I watched the Errant Signal review before playing it, which may have been a mistake because that basically gave everything away. If a critically praised indie title that you can get for free (it's technically name your own price which can be $0) intrigues you, then just go for it without looking up too many details.

Jurassic Park: Episode 2 (PS3)

Telltale made this in their in-between phase. They used to make more traditional adventure games. Back to the Future and Jurassic Park were in production and released at around the same time, marking their transition to bigger licenses and also some experimentation. BTTF was traditional, but extremely easy. They didn't want anybody getting stuck. JP moves away from traditional adventure gaming conventions. There is no direct control over your character, just some hot spots on the screen that you can click on and places you can choose to move to. There are puzzles but they are very easy.

There are also QTE's (Quick Time Events) for action sequences. A noble experiment which eventually led to their excellent Walking Dead and all of their other solid newer games.

This episode was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. It takes place immediately after the first film (first episode starts while the first film would still be happening), on Isla Nublar. It's kinda cool to visit locations such as Nedry's abandoned Jeep, and the Visitor Center after it's already been wrecked by the T-Rex.

The QTE's are a bit silly (outrunning velociraptors) and clunky, but the homages and some cool stuff made it worthwhile. At one point you come across a roller coaster where shenanigans take place, which really is a pretty good idea when you think about it considering the license.

I bought this on a PSN sale for $1 and at that price it's good. As with BTTF, Telltale is pretty good with the license, although you have to be willing to swallow a lot of cheese and some crap. For whatever reason I love playing even bad adventure games on a console, so that may have something to do with my appreciation here.

Alone in the Dark | PC



The original AitD from 1992 was my first horror game and one of the first PC games I ever played (being a console kid before that). I don't know if I ever made it past the first few floors of the house before giving up, probably because I was a huge scaredy cat. I've picked up a bunch of stuff like this from the 90s on GoG over the last few years meaning to replay or finish my childhood favorites and never really touched any of them until now.

Like a lot of those games, it's just a Dosbox wrapper around the original, and I don't think it does any graphical enhancements like some other emulators do, so you're looking at a pixelicious upscaled 640x400 in fullscreen, or a small window which you'll probably be in since you can't alt-tab out without windowing the game.

AitD has a fun if corny story about a haunted estate with a long sordid history with the occult and Cthulu. You play a man or a woman with different motivations for ending up at the house, but with the end goal of trying to get to the bottom of all the weird and crazy goings on in the house. Through manuscripts and books you pick up, you can read the backstory about the house and all the previous inhabitants, with some mildly terrible audio readings that you can skip over. There are a few simply puzzles, a maze, and a bunch of enemies like zombies, spiders and ghosts that you can either fight or escape, but the real test is fighting the control scheme. The character moves and attacks very slowly, with bad camera angles that sometimes completely hide the action or where you're trying to move. You use WASD to move, and the left-right arrow keys to aim and the up key to fire, or all three to perform different melee attacks. It takes some getting used to and is never anything but annoying.

It was fun to go back and finally finish this one, but I can't imagine anyone getting much out of it unless a die-hard horror fan interested in an early classic or someone like me looking for a nostalgia trip.

Cool, did you play it without using a walkthrough? I played it like 10-15 years ago but powered through it with a walkthrough. Just didn't feel like grappling with it at all.

I wanted to review Saint's Row 2 but I played it a year ago at this point. I'll say that I liked it much better than GTA4 or GTA5, and that Dane Vogel and Johnny Gat are two of my favorite gaming characters ever. Dane Vogel is probably in my top 10 favorite characters now in all media.

Wasteland 2
This is a really solid post apocalyptic RPG. Combat is turn based squad combat.

So you start off as a new Ranger unit in the Arizona dessert with 4 members (you can use preset characters or make your own from scratch or mix and match). The skill tree is pretty diverse, and you need to manage the non combat skills carefully. Resource management is also kind of important; there are many types of weapons, and many types of amo (for the weapons that need amo), but the weapons and amo type streams are mixed. For instance, some assault rifles use 7.62 rounds, as do some sniper rifles. Your squad is 4 people, but you can add up to three more followers who are effectively squad members, but who sometimes break command and do their own thing in combat.

As for the story line: You start off in Arizona and are almost immediately hit with choices where you are basically picking your poison. There are some cases where you can get a pretty happy ending for everyone involved, but there are others where there won't be any nice happy endings. And sometimes you don't even see the consequences of your actions for a while, if you even realize the reason something bad happened was due to something you did. There are two big parts to the story: the Arizona piece where you are working towards identifying the source of a threatening radio broadcast, and the california piece where you go to investigate the source.

The writing is really good and there is a lot of it. There are, for instance, a ton of radio broadcasts you will hear. And lots of conversations (via chat bubbles and in a little widow displaying text) that happen in the backgroud. Some of these will give you information that you might want to act on (like clues for side quests), but a lot of them are just there to enrich the atmosphere (and some of them are hilarious, especially in the mannerite town).

Anyway, this is a pretty damn fine game if you like these sorts of thing. Probably the closest related recentish game I have played is new vegas, which it is spiritually very similar to even though mechanically it is vastly different.

On doing things: there are lots of alternative ways to do things in the game. For instance, you come to a locked fence gate: you can pick the lock, you can force it open with brute strength, you can blow it up, or you can use a weapon to blast or smash it open.

(Confession - I didn't quite finish, I didn't feel like cranking through the last big fight so I youtubed the ending just to make sure I wasn't missing something epic, then uninstalled lest I be tempted to do another play through and sink a bunch more time into it.)

What was going to be so difficult about finishing up the last fight? Would you have had to grind? Was it going to take a long time?

Mainly the grind of it with the people I brought along. In general the fights are not a big grind, but this one was gearing up to be a long drawn out fight with only a bit of story to go with it that I could see on you tube, plus having to kill a couple of my followers for spoiler reasons.

I may do another play through in a few months and change some of my bigger choices. Its a cool game, and sometimes cruel in that by the time you realize you would rather do something a different way you are several hours of game play past the decision point.

The game says it has 80 hours of game play, and that lines up well with my experience. I just can't do ANOTHER 80 hours right now, that would be completely unfair to kerbal space program, which I just installed.

Did you ever play Wasteland 1?

I played Wasteland 1 on an emulator before it was rereleased and thought it was gawd-awful; a product of its time, for sure, but just not a fun experience by today's standards. Wasteland 2 is supposed to be closer to the earlier Fallout games, which may just be my favorite games of all time. I don't even have Wasteland 2 yet but I'll grab it the next time I see it on sale and move it up in my backlog when I get the free time to play it.

I did, but that was when it came out

I haven't played the one that came with W2, and doubt I will. The game is 25+ years old or something. It's kind of like the original wizardry: it was revolutionary and incredible when it came out, and it probably even aged well, but 25 years for a video game, yikes! I don't think I'll be revisiting that part of my childhood.

I think it's one of those games that has not aged well. I tried playing it a bunch of times over the years but there was always some problem. All pirated copies over the last 15 years (prior to the re-release) seemed to have an issue where there was already game data saved on the program, so you weren't starting with a clean game. Something tricky about the save system too where there was no easy way to just delete the save game and start over.

Even the legal copy that I had on "The Ultimate RPG Archives" from 1998 had that issue.

Beyond that it seems like there are a lot of easy ways to permanently screw up your game. And any time I've sat down with it it just feels awful and tedious.

so just finished call of duty black ops single player.

I'm not really into the call of duty multiplayer, but i enjoyed the modern warfare single player campaigns a lot. So once blops went on sale, i picked it up.
Its a good game, but nothing revolutionary after the three modern warfares. The story is ok, but not great. Its told as a series of flashbacks, and you are piecing together what happened to your character. The problem with this is you never really feel like you are part of a grander plan. You just kind of go about doing your missions and that's that.
The other problem I had was the setting. The setting is cold war/vietnam era. Now this is a good setting for this type of game, the problem is what it means. You just dont have a lot of cool ****. In modern warfare, every game you'd have some new **** to play with, but in blops, there's really nothing new. That being said, I'm looking forward to playing blops 2, and hoping its a little more interesting.
6.5/10. worth playing, but only on sale, and its not groundbreaking by any means.

Infamous: First Light | PS4

Super fun and quick game at about 4-5 hours. I usually don't go in for open world games, though I end up playing a lot of them. I would liken this to Just Cause 2. Unique and satisfying movement mechanic with some mindless zone activities and fairly forgettable story missions you can activate by visiting the proper world map location. I haven't played Second Son, but if it's more of the same I should pick it up.

Is that one of the free ones from last month? I grabbed all of the ones available since I got my PS4, but don't remember what they were.

First Light was a January PS+ title yes.

I've only done an hour or so of it, but yeah it felt awesome to be back in that game. From what I've seen so far (story missions) Second son is absolutely "more of the same". Probably gives a lot more context to First Light, even though it's later in the timeline. I guess they both give more context to each other! Second Son is prob available very cheap by now, if you like First Light it's def recommended. Was my first platinum trophy too, I very much enjoyed it (and the plat was easy!)

Cool, those kind of mindless easy games are fun every now and then. I can't stand Assassin's Creed because the story seems to get in the way of the game and that part isn't enjoyable enough to keep me around. Now I'm all excited for Just Cause 3. I had so much fun with the second just listening to audio books while hook shotting around Panau trying to 100% everything.