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Steam Calculator and Backloggery both seem down for the count at the moment, and I also seem to have run afoul of the Steam issue where your category sets don't stick, so I can't do any fancy graphics. I've been keeping a personal Backlog count for awhile, though, so I can say that of my 148 Steam games, 44 are left. By popular rage at not having played it yet, it looks like Deus Ex is next on my list, though I may be sneaking other games in in the meantime. And also, because I have to admit to my problems, I just bought everything on sale yesterday for no good reason. Looking forward to both TR Anniversary and GoL when I get to them, though GoL may get kicked up the way Magicka was if there's co-op to be had.
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Feb 22, 2011 03:29
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Shovelmint posted:I'm pretty sure I taught myself to play civilization without tutorials. I started with Beyond the Sword (seriously, don't waste your time on any other Civ4 edition) and learned that there is in fact no tutorial in it. And it also changes the tech tree entirely and quite a bit else. I'd suggest civfanatics.com for a firmer intro to the games.
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Feb 24, 2011 07:17
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Mrens posted:I admit for the first few hours I thought the game was loving tedious, then I found out you could set workers to auto, and the game is pretty fun. They probably explained it in the tutorial. Auto workers never did what I wanted. I was the bane of my MP games because my turns took too long. "Sorry, allies, I'm just maintaining our massive war machine's logistics train, which you are thoughtlessly using for everything." In Deus Ex news I am now two (? three?) missions in. It seems to think I'm going the ENDLESS MURDERINGS FOR ALL ROUTE based on reactions and my own monologues, which is kind of annoying since I was trying to be nonviolent except in extremis. (Or, you know, when they really, really deserved it. There was one dude who, if I tranquilized him, would use his last 7 or so seconds of consciousness to open fire on a bunch of innocents. This was true to the point that he'd crawl through the loving tear gas I'd placed on the way to discourage him from doing that. He got bullets.) In other hilarious developments, with the new Steam client every time I toggle my lamp I take a screencap. I had about 20 shots of walls and floors by the time I was done.
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Feb 25, 2011 09:59
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All right, I now have a working backlog: I'm in the endgame of Deus Ex now, and so I need to start thinking about what to play next. Apparently if you play the game as if you're a cross between Faith Connors and Grey Fox, the game goes really fast. (I'm 23 hours in, which is apparently pretty low for a first playthrough. I've been doing a lot of cloak-dash-devastating-melee-attack, combined with careful sniping and jumping out of windows.) Not sure what to play next, but it probably won't be something first-person, just because I suspect any such game will suffer terribly for Not Being Deus Ex. Thus, up next shall Space Giraffe. I used to be a fair hand at Tempest, so I should be able to rock its logical negation. (EDITED to remove useless thumbnailing of list, which shrank it maybe 5% and thus did nothing but make it harder to read.)
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Mar 4, 2011 11:29
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hogswallower posted:Just for the record, if you go into Space Giraffe expecting Tempest, you're going to be like "what the gently caress is this game" and even if you don't go in expecting Tempest you'll still say that. It's a pretty unique game with a pretty bizarre set of rules. I personally really enjoy it, though. I've been warned. In fact, I was introduced to the game by someone I think made the top-100 leaderboards back when it was an XBLA exclusive. So I've worked with it just enough to realize that if you go in thinking "must be Tempest" you'll be screwed - because the game rewards and punishes the opposite things Tempest does, even though a lot of the elements are a one-to-one match. And yeah, I love shooters, so I'm looking forward to this one. Unfortunately, I also picked up BIT.TRIP RUNNER so my stack isn't any shorter. But 10 minutes of playing with it and I was already in love, so no regrets. EDIT: I have now completed Deus Ex, siding with the Illuminati - and this time we're going to do it right. Good stuff - I can see why it's on a lot people's list as best game of all time. And to formalize my earlier comment, the next games on the stack are Space Giraffe and BIT.TRIP RUNNER; both require different attitudes to play and so I'll be shifting between them as my mood does. ManxomeBromide fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Mar 5, 2011 |
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Mar 5, 2011 06:17
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PhancyPants posted:For anyone who ended up with Jolly Rover from somewhere, I just finished it. It's suprisingly not bad! Good to hear. I'm pretty sure most of us got it from the Indie Adventure Pack back during the Steam Treasure Hunt, since it was $5 for a pack containing Gish, And Yet It Moves, Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent, Jolly Rover, and Recettear. I suspect a lot of us went "Hey, five games for less than the price of one, one of which I actually want." For me, that was AYIM and Puzzle Agent, but I've since been told by a lot of people that Recettear is going to be awesome and (thanks to this thread) that Jolly Rover is actually decent. Gish is still on the list, sort of, but I'd played it with the Humble Indie Bundle and hadn't liked it much. Watching vids of decent players makes me want to be better at it, though.
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Mar 6, 2011 00:39
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I just finished BIT.TRIP RUNNER. Pretty amazing. I didn't realize you could actually make a game entirely out of joy; when you're playing it all that is wrong with the world is not in your way and nothing can break your stride, and you continue ever onwards as the game sings along with your play and then adds sparkles and rainbows and then you win. This is not hyperbole: I am trying, as literally as possible, to explain how the game works. Of course, when you aren't doing well, it's a game about being repeatedly punched in the nuts by meteors. Space Giraffe proceeds, though a bit slowly; until I learn to properly perceive the playfield I'm in real trouble. I'm a hair under a quarter of the way through, even so. I refuse to give up just yet; I haven't even seen the basic forms of all enemies. random.org says my next game should be Jolly Rover. I'm dreading this less now, thanks to the folks who have already played through it in this thread.
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Mar 7, 2011 07:06
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YOURFRIEND posted:Looks like it's all about trial and error and memorizing what you need to do when. Doesn't look fun at all, to be honest. This is in some sense true, in that it is every inch a "controller kata" game, but it's true the way it's true for Rock Band, not the way it's true for R-Type 3. I'd estimate I was playing about 80% of the game by reflex alone - when I made that video I was holding out for a run where I actually managed to stick all of the trick jumps that would max your gold collection. This is a very easy game to not put on your backlog if you don't do the game-as-adrenaline-rush thing. (I don't think it's coincidence that the first "modern" FPS I beat after Portal was Mirror's Edge.) In Space Giraffe news, Jeff Minter is still Jeff Minter:  This more or less sums up everything wrong with Space Giraffe. That said, closing in on the halfway point, and my violence against geometric shapes remains boundless.
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Mar 8, 2011 07:21
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Cable posted:Darksiders I loved the Hell out of Mirror's Edge, but can't imagine playing it with a controller. It came out on consoles first, though, so it's probably playable at it as much as any other one, but as a first person platformer it's going to be way better with a mouse. Seconding Misadventures of PB Winterbottom as your best bet for controller play.
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Mar 12, 2011 04:49
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Space Giraffe is victorious! I have now completed all 100 levels, and (except at the very end, because I was impatient) I only ever started on stages where I'd reached them with 3+ lives. (I may go back and complete the run that way later, but that's if it's in the rotation, not if it's on my stack.) Jolly Rover: Also complete. Like the rest of the thread said: not bad, still full of cheese. That said, the point-and-click interface is superb. There's a button to highlight all hotspots, hotspots are color-coded by "have you exhausted this hotspot's repertoire", left click handles inventory cleanly, with standard accelerators for 'stop caring about this object' all acceptable, click to skip dialog,  configurable walking speed . No regrets at all on this one, but tenbux is a bit steep for a game that takes four hours to beat if you dawdle.So, random.org, what do we have available next?  Wait, this (DEFCON, for those who didn't notice instantly) is multiplayer only. It doesn't belong on my backlog. I'll play the tutorial and call it a day. Let's try rolling again. That gives us Uplink and Onwards! EDIT: vvvvv The only way to win is not to play at all, right? That gets it off the stack real quick. ManxomeBromide fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Mar 14, 2011 |
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Mar 14, 2011 03:32
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Shovelmint posted:I had this problem when I first started playing, my dude (chick) started refusing to grab things altogether, and wouldn't vault over things either. After restarting the program it went away and the game was pretty easy. I had the most trouble with that in Chapter 1, honestly. The last jump - riding the zipline into the ceiling while the gunship is cresting the horizon - I swear is buggy. I had to be facing just so before I jumped or I wouldn't go the way I was supposed to. There are three other physics things that were surprising and that if you don't get them they'll just brickwall you, though, and that I think were intended. (Spoilers indicate the places in the game where knowing this is crucial to progress.) You can strafe when you're sliding down a steep surface. Needed on level 1. You can aim your jumps after a wallrun: jumping forward off a wallrun gets you further than a straight wallrun will. This is first absolutely necessary around level 5, but if you take advantage of this, level 1 gets a lot easier. Most questionable, possibly a bug: if you land right next to a vaultable rail you will autovault it. Makes a chunk of level 8 infuriating, because Faith keeps autovaulting into 80-foot plummets. You'll know it when you see it; aim for walls. ETA: Destroyed the Revelation virus, which I'm going to call beating Uplink. I'm supposed to be playing Half-Life 2, but I can't bring myself to care enough to actually make that be the sole game I play. Europa Universalis III, which was supposed to be next, crashed on me in the tutorial, so I may as well bow to the wisdom of the thread and queue up Batman: Arkham Asylum to replace it. ManxomeBromide fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Mar 20, 2011 |
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Mar 20, 2011 04:41
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Vince Videogames posted:I was trying to not kill anyone but that quickly ended by like chapter 7 where I just had to start shooting dudes just so I can get back to the good parts. Also it was really short. That loving boat. Seriously. It's like they brought in an intern to design it. I'll take the crazy ninja cops any day. My Half-Life 2 motivation remains extremely low. I should seriously consider shelving it.
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Mar 25, 2011 04:09
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ohnoitschris posted:How much do you even have to play a game to say you've gotten your money's worth? A lot of my games were less than $3, and I spend way more than that on a single trip to the arcade. I post this because there's no way in hell I'm going to dedicate hours and hours to a game just because it managed to slip in with some bundle or it turned out to be crap. My usual metric is "about 40 minutes to the dollar", which I set up long ago as meaning the money spent was comparable to catching movies at matinee prices. This was a while ago, yeah, but for games the metric has held pretty well. I usually run it in reverse, though. For example: Jolly Rover takes four hours if you dawdle, and it's reasonably good the whole way through. That works out to "$6 worth of play" by my metric. Its normal asking price is $10, which is a tad much for me to recommend it wholeheartedly. But if it goes on sale for $5, then if you have an adventuring jones I recommend it neutrally and at $2.50 or so it becomes "jump on it; no-brainer". As for when I stop, I'll take it off the stack once:
Progress Report: I've now taken Osmos off my stack because the final wave of Force levels are murder. (24% of players reached the final wave of all zones. 20% finished Sentient. 10% finished Ambient. 2.1% finished Force. I have no shame in deciding this may be beyond me - so I've unlocked every achievement that doesn't in some way depend on beating Force and have called it done.) I've abandoned Half-Life 2 for now, because I simply cannot get into it. Instead, I have pushed further into Batman: Arkham Asylum and have just entered what I strongly suspect to be The Scarecrow's zone. Random Steam Game says I should play Civilization IV. Sorry, Random Steam Game, I'm going to have to go with random.org's list because it can restrict to the games I haven't played. Yes I know I haven't won a Space Victory in Civ IV yet shutupshutupshutup
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Mar 29, 2011 03:54
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I've finished Batman: Arkham Asylum. Good stuff, though the second-to-last battle was about 50 times harder than the real final battle. One disadvantage of being an indie game junkie is that now every time I fire up Steam I've got 800MB of potato jokes to download. On the other hand, this has also given me a chance to refamiliarize myself with BIT.TRIP BEAT, and RUNNER (which I finished on Hard), and Cogs (which I played enough of to put it in my "money's worth" bin, technically. It's still made of nothing but sliding block puzzles  )I think I'll start flipping between adventures and action games now. So, random.org, my adventure will be... Monkey Island 2: Special Edition. Well, OK. My action game, assuming Half-Life 2 stays in purgatory, will be... Deus Ex: Invisible War? I guess I'll have to see if it's really as bad as everyone said it was. The nature of the complaints makes it sound like I'll have at least as much fun with it as I did with Borderlands, though. ManxomeBromide fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Apr 9, 2011 |
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Apr 9, 2011 08:55
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Finished Monkey Island 2: Special Edition. Wow. Such a bad game. Even with the Special Edition there's only so much you can do to save the design. The puzzle chains are long, require absolutely epic amounts of backtracking, and are almost totally unclued - the guiding principle is "if you can be a dick to someone, do so, and once you've done enough of this the puzzle solutions will fall into place for you", for the most part. And then a couple of research puzzles that were actually pretty good. The Special Edition adds a director's commentary mode that has Gilbert and Schaefer and, uh, the other guy MST3King their own game. That's pretty much the only reason this was at all enjoyable. I was going to pick up Deus Ex: Invisible War after that, but I figured I'd try Half-Life 2 again, since I've still been helplessly taking little stabs at it for about a month. This time, it stuck. I've logged a solid 10 hours on it since I last dropped it and am now up to Chapter 10. It finally started clicking for me about 3/4 of the way through Chapter 6. (mild spoilers below, but nothing that isn't revealed by looking at HL2's achievement list...) My best moment so far is the "second turret standoff in Nova Prospekt", as the relevant achievement describes it. Normally this is a frantic, pitched battle. It turns out there are just enough crates to let you basically skip the whole battle by hiding on the ceiling:  As a result, I cleared the battle with zero damage, as my robotic army slaughtered everyone from 15 feet in the air. Perhaps this is cheese, but there were enough crates to reach there! Obviously I was meant to do this. Four plot-related achievements left. I see no reason to not finish this off before continuing on.
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Apr 13, 2011 07:38
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fatpat268 posted:It's been a couple of months since I've played it, and I don't remember any puzzle really requiring a lot of backtracking. Most of the puzzles were self contained on the island you were on (unless my memory is sketchy). There certainly were some obtuse solutions (everyone who has played MI2, probably knows what I'm talking about). Well, it depends on what you mean by a "puzzle". Chapter 2 is "The Four Map Pieces" - every map piece has prereqs that require you to visit every island, and while I haven't done a dependency graph on it I'm pretty sure that you can't batch much at a time to proceed, though you can do step 4 before step 2 and such if you know the solutions outright. The commentary actually goes into this some, with a bit of a side of "Man, we were dicks". This may be coloring my reaction here. I did play it originally, and having some long-cherished excuses I made for them get shattered by reality may also be coloring my current negative reaction more. But I've always felt it was weaker than 1 and 3. I found 4 to be beyond my pain threshold, and Tales of Monkey Island is kinda hanging out further down my stack. The only reason it's not coming up in more detail is that I didn't get it from Steam in the first place.  This also, to be fair, means that I did not deal with the game with integrated hints, which I understand the Special Edition has. I cannot judge that part fairly, because I only remember the nerdraging teenager cursing at his VGA monitor. Perhaps the gobsmacking obtuseness is less gobsmacking with that. (This isn't getting into the non-obtuse but nevertheless totally unclued puzzles; the puzzle chain that culminates in you getting the antique shop's map piece is easily my favorite puzzle in the game, and the player has to take the initiative to make the answer happen. But, obviously, it didn't save the whole experience for me. And even in that puzzle chain, the spitting contest was just  .)Shovelmint posted:You're past all the crappy stuff, pretty much all that's left is amazing set pieces and the exciting finale. And the vastly superior episodes with the cliffhanger ending that will never get resolved. Heh. For the purposes of this thread, each episode is its own entry on the backlog. It's also interesting, though, because in the first part of the game, the parts I liked the most vocally (notably Water Hazard while your airboat is unarmed) was also the stuff most people seem to have not liked, and Ravenholm (which it seemed everyone loved) was a huge sticking point. (Route Kanal was too, but it looks like everyone hated that, so whatever.) I also have since finished chapter 10. I could seriously get used to having my escort NPC squads not being useless gits. (I had three casualties over the course of the whole chapter, and all of them were during pitched battles against apparently infinite numbers of enemies. I'm willing to call that acceptable losses given the odds.)
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Apr 14, 2011 08:56
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Half-Life 2 is finished, as is the Lost Coast tech demo, because what the heck, it's like 15 minutes. I'm a few hours into Deus Ex: Invisible War and it isn't nearly as bad as I'd been led to believe, though some of the technical jackassery is hilariously incompetent. I'd mind the constant zoning a lot less if zoning didn't look like a crash to desktop, guys. Seriously, have some pride in your work. I spent most of my gaming time messing around with the Portal 2 ARG silliness, though. I had all of those indie games on my list anyway, so I messed with the bonus levels, experimented with the games I hadn't tried at all, and then let it idle on the games that needed it. As a result of that experimentation, I'm a lot more excited about eventually getting to Defense Grid and The Ball.
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Apr 19, 2011 06:01
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The Invisible War is over.Lurchibles posted:It doesn't explain why the story isn't as good as the first one, but that answers one of the many questions that you find yourself asking when playing. Honestly, I was a conspiracy buff as a kid, so the first game's story didn't blow me away - I'd seen it all before, but I could at least admire the craft. I think Invisible War managed a similar level of craft, but it's kind of hard to loot the entire world of conspiracy theories for a new setting when you already looted it all for the first game. So I came into both with about the same level of jadedness one would expect for, oh, Mass Effect and its mishmash of sci-fi cliches. So I can see where Deus Ex could be a revelation that no sequel could hope to match, but the craft in Invisible War was pretty good too - I think it did a decent job of running the "what happens next?" part. Was there anything in particular that offended you about the plot here? Genuinely curious because outside of the (many) technical issues, everything in Invisible War was acceptable-to-great. The final level's design was well-done, too; I liked the setup, in which everything's going down at one place, so every major named conspiracy shows up and brings an army - it's up to you to pick a side and have them win. Mega bonus points for the fact that if you flip out and try to kill everyone, the psychopathic cyborg gun runners take over because now there's nobody left to oppose them. I dub this the "You Missed A Spot" ending. I was also greatly amused by the sidequest chain whose terrible secret was that Starbucks and Seattle's Best Coffee are actually the same company, not to mention how much they didn't file the serial numbers off. One of the major players is named after the first name seriously considered for its real-life equivalent. The technical problems still make it a hard game to recommend unless you happen to own it already for some reason, though. Short game, was absolutely worth the time I spent playing through it. I guess I'll be taking on the HL2 Episodes next.
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Apr 20, 2011 15:28
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seriously! posted:For that reason, I will not buy another game period until I finish all the ones I have: Super Meat Boy is designed to test you to destruction, and SquareLogic has, at minimum, around 100,000 puzzles. You may want to redefine "finish" in both. (Your "maximum" minimum for SMB should probably be "Beat the Light World", and a decent endpoint for SquareLogic is "complete all Challenge Puzzles".) That said, there is some very solid stuff on that list and you're in for a good ride. If you want suggestions, I'd suggest either Deus Ex or Mass Effect for your first "full-size game" go, and to space Civ III and Civ IV far apart. There's heavy discussion of Civ IV earlier in this thread, but Civ IV is actually designed to punish players who attempt Civ III strategies. (Also: only bother installing Civ IV: Beyond the Sword; it has all the previous expansions in it and the best-receieved version of Civ IV is the BtS version). Deus Ex: Invisible War spoiler discussion continued below: Lurchables posted:to find out that my actions aligning myself with one side up to that point were irrelevant just ruined the mid-point of the game (for me). That actually worked surprisingly well for me, because in Deus Ex 1, I had split the endings into 'become more than human to make a better civilization possible', 'build a civilization around humanity as we know it to be', and 'destroy civilization as a corrupting influence'. Both The Order and the WTO fit that middle option, and I'd actually observed to someone who'd played it "gee, both options match my reading of the Illuminati, so I've just been selecting options from case to case" and they understandably started biting their tongue really hard.
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Apr 22, 2011 04:12
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seriously! posted:I could've sworn there was some sort of progression menu in SquareLogic after you hit "play." Yeah. There are a 7 or 8 regions, each of which has ten or so zones. Each zone has 12 practice puzzles, which you do in order, and then a "Challenge puzzle". At any point you can skip to the Challenge puzzle. Once you complete the Challenge puzzle, the next zone unlocks, and then about 900 additional puzzles in that zone are unlocked. The "100,000" was sort of a back-of-the-envelope calculation. So yeah, not only will it probably still be there to play ten years later, it's even fairly reasonable. It's the only Sudoku variant I've ever actually enjoyed messing with. londonmoose posted:I've never actually completed Uplink (it's on my list) so I don't know how long the main story really is. Then again, I have completed Darwinia, so that probably says something too. I didn't do anything abusive and I beat Uplink in 14 hours. You do need to take a little initiative to make the plot start, I think, but it might start forcing itself on you later on. Once you've started the main arc, there are only a very small number of missions that are truly "main plot arc" missions. There are a few other "arc" missions but I believe every single one is optional. (Uplink is very sandboxy. You can pull off some insanely profitable but very difficult optional hacks and use the proceeds to utterly break the game.) Also, if you're playing for "winning", keep backups of your saves. Get caught by anyone important not only will your game end, your profile will be destroyed. (Meanwhile, I haven't completed Darwinia, but it's on my list.)
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Apr 22, 2011 10:48
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Made some pretty good progress. I finished off both of the Half-Life 2 Episodes, and also managed to solve enough of Cogs to reach the credits. The credits themselves were then a puzzle that it took me almost 15 minutes to solve. Not sure whether to treat that as  or , really.Then I played both Zeno Clash and The Ball to the first "reach this bit of the plot" achievement. I think I'll take on Zeno Clash first; howlongtobeat says both are pretty short games, but after three Half-Life games in a row I've kind of had enough of physics puzzles. My first impressions of The Ball is that it's Portal, but with a gravity gun and an alien katamari in a Mayan pyramid. I'm still looking forward to it, but I've had enough Physics for now. Once I complete those, I can move on to Bioshock and Amnesia and then I'll have cleared every single FPS off my stack. Oh, also: ChrisAsmadi posted:I tried the first episode of S3 and stopped because they changed the controls to something that's much worse - is there any way to fix it and make it the same as Season 2's? Not per se, but there are bits of Season 3 that would make the Season 2 controls kind of obnoxious (cluttered rooms with invisible floors, etc), but you can use WASD and it's much less obnoxious than the mouse controls.
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Apr 25, 2011 09:05
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ChrisAsmadi posted:Does anyone know any way of either cheesing or cheating past the final boss in Bit.Trip Beat? It's bloody hard, plus the paddle glitches out half the time. If you're on a Wii, get a friend or three and give it a taste of its own medicine. That's the only way I've managed it. That said, the AI seems to have more trouble dealing with balls that move fast in the Y axis, so steep bank shots seem to help a bit.
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Apr 27, 2011 03:59
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I have now hit a pretty major milestone. I just finished Zeno Clash (awesome - non-Tolkien-ripoff fantasy is so rare these days) and The Ball (also awesome, but only enjoyable in short spurts), and since The Ball was only enjoyable in short spurts I used Plants vs. Zombies as a between-level palate cleanser, and wound up clearing both. Reviewing my thread history, that makes Plants vs. Zombies the fifteenth game I've finished to "off the backlog" status since entering this thread, that was on the backlog when I joined it. (BIT.TRIP RUNNER and Cogs I didn't buy until after joining, and so they don't count.) In addition, Alien Swarm, DEFCON, and Europa Universalis III were removed from my backlog for being non-backloggy games (also EU3 kept crashing on me so that I couldn't play). Evil Genius has also been removed from the backlog. I'll get to that in a moment. I've also purchased and queued in Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Defense Grid: The Awakening. Buying Portal 2 is inevitable but has not happened yet, and as a result, my Steam backlog has dropped to a mere 25 games.  So, Evil Genius. I got about an hour of play into it. Ran the tutorial, started doing the early missions, and then this little exchange happened: GAME: NEW OBJECTIVE: Go capture this civilian and make her a hostage! ME: Minions! Go capture this civilian and make her a hostage! MINION: On it, boss! HOSTAGE: GAME: OBJECTIVE COMPLETE! ME: Yay! MINION: Yay! HOSTAGE: Boo. GAME: NEW OBJECTIVE: INTERROGATE PRISONER. ME: Minions! Someone go interrogate that prisoner! MINION: OK, boss! GAME: Oh, by the way, if you don't go send your minions out to steal stuff you won't get any money. You should probably get on that. ME: Hey, good point. Minions! Why don't a few of you go to Tunisia and knock over some banks or something? MINION: OK, so, first I open the cage, then I start taking her to the interrogation device OH HEY TUNISIA I AM ALL OVER THAT poo poo HOSTAGE: FREEDOM! ME:  MINION: OH CRAP SOMEONE'S LOOSE IN THE BASE, MURDER DEATH KILL HOSTAGE:  ME:  MINION:  GAME: WTF ARE YOU DOING KILLING THE HOSTAGE OBJECTIVE FAILED ME:  Into the cat box. If I want to give orders to hordes of minions that proceed to do the exact opposite, Darwinia's still on my stack.
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May 1, 2011 10:30
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Oh hey, this thread is alive again. And Backloggery's finished its site remake! That's good news for us all, since we'll still have huge backlogs once the registrations are re-enabled. My backlog has not changed size. I got Portal 2, and finished its Single Player. I finished Transformers: War for Cybertron, which was a very fine licensed game and actually more satisfying for me than Batman was. Batman did not let me drive a car over a speeding train, then snipe people in midair before landing. However, I also picked up SpaceChem when it went on sale, so new real progress. Currently playing: Bioshock and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. Morter posted:Thanks to you bunch of non-participators This is more or less the way to do it; if you play all the good stuff first you'll end up with an endless wasteland of crap or unknown stuff and no motivation at all to give any of it a shot. If you want a feeling of progress, you have the following games on your list with no time logged and that I happen to know are both short and, at minimum, decent: Bob Came In Pieces, Machinarium (although I detested the last fifth or so of it), Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, Secret of Monkey Island, Shatter, Trine, World of Goo. You also haven't put much time into Deus Ex, which is an awesome game. So is Aquaria, and QuantZ is a really neat match-three game if not exactly short.
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May 16, 2011 06:26
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, I just used randomsteamgame.com to get me the games I should start working on.
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Backloggery is set to accept registrations again June 3. I, meanwhile, have finished Bioshock, which means my backlog is FPS-free until Human Revolution hits. I've been trying to play Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but the sanity effects give me headaches and so I can only play for like 20 minutes at a time. I guess that's like fear.
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May 27, 2011 04:48
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seriously! posted:So, "Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved" is one of my backlog games. I don't merely want to just play it shortly and scratch it off the list but I want to achieve a respectable score that's possible for someone with average gaming skills to attain. What should I shoot for? Also, is a controller a must for this game? I'd probably make it a perennial; play a game or two of it each game session until you get bored of it or your score starts to plateau. As a twin stick shooter, twin sticks are mandatory. The Wii versions (and presumably also the PC version) have a move-with-a-dpad-or-WASD, aim-with-the-pointing-device mode, but this is wholly inferior. It lets you focus fire, but what you're going to want is to be able to rake fire over an area as you dodge. ChrisAsmadi posted:Now that I'm done with Uni til September, it's time to tackle this backlog. I liked Aquaria a whole lot, and Jolly Rover is a solid graphic adventure. MI2 is MI2, which I didn't like, but a lot of people did. Magicka is a blast, though it's very challenging single-player. Psychonauts is a great action-adventure until the final area, which is justly despised. The Devil's Playhouse (the Sam and Max games) are quite good. And you've also got Amnesia, which I'm playing right now and enjoying. I don't usually like survival horror, either. I think I'm liking Amnesia because it doesn't artificially increase the tension with crappy controls or cameras that don't show you things right in front of your face. Just keep the sound soft so when it starts being horribly dissonant you, the player, are not injured, but loud enough that you can hear the things coming to eat your face.
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May 29, 2011 23:24
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http://backloggery.com/ManxomeBromide Time for the flood! I'm going to hold off on adding in my "beaten/completed" PC backlog until after the site can get a few breaths of fresh air, but my more modest console collection is basically up to date. I'll have to dig through my closet to make sure. By a happy coincidence, I've also now finished exactly those games I mentioned last time, those being Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Awesome and peril-laden, and easily the first survival horror game I've actually enjoyed) and Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People (Pretty solid, liked Episode 2 the best). I also fell to the Ubisoft sales and have added Assassin's Creed 1 and 2, Splinter Cell, and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory to the log. The month of May saw my backlog grow the wrong way. Thanks to this thread I've gotten the sense that AC1 is to be played through straight, as fast as possible, and without looking from side to side. I'm now cruising through the cel-shaded Prince of Persia as a bit of a palate cleanser after all the horror. I still have the names of dead gods constantly whispered in my ears (thanks, Lovecraftian Magical Sparkle Princess!) but at least this time they're benevolent! Probably!
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Jun 4, 2011 09:19
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Pocket Billiards posted:I'm most of the way through the latest PoP game at the moment, the platforming is fun enough though simplistic, but the combat is repetitive and mostly QTE's. The banter between the characters is painful to sit through and worst of all can't be skipped. But overall its okay, just average. Just beat this a couple days ago myself, and, yeah, pretty much. You can cut down on the banter by never hitting L2. I liked them when they were helping each other balance, not so much when they open their mouths. I noticed about 3/4 of the way through the game that the QTE attacks can be triggered even when you aren't having them cued; by the last few fights I was much more in Baby's First Combo Fighter mode than I was in Generic QTE Battle mode. I never played WW, but I actually liked the backtracking in PoP 2008 - and this from someone who usually hates scavenger hunts. How similar are they?
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Jun 7, 2011 04:59
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Backlog progress has actually been pretty slow now that I've cleaned the easy stuff off of it. SpaceChem is an amazingly good puzzle game, but it's also an extremely thorough rear end-kicking. I did manage to blow through Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures, which cleans all the Telltale stuff off of my Steam backlog. (There's also ToMI, but that's non-Steam). All first-person and all graphic adventure games now off the Steam backlog. I also got distracted because Beat Hazard got a patch that was basically a completely different game. Thanks for the free game, Cold Beam, this actually does make me look forward to your next project - especially since this game is way better than the one you replaced. (Beat Hazard is basically Audiosurf meets Geometry Wars, and as such is not a "backlog" game.) Random roll says Assassin's Creed is my next action game. Time to start catching up on my third-person action games, I guess.
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Jun 12, 2011 03:17
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I finished off Assassin's Creed 1, which was really quite good. It didn't start overstaying its welcome until the last couple of missions. I'm not sure that not obsessively jumping off every tall building in the Holy Land would have helped that, though; I think even still it would have ended up overstaying its welcome by about four hours. Anyway, I had enough fun with it that I'm looking forward very much to Assassin's Creed 2. However, first I've decided that since this genre has gotten better with time, I should rewind the clock and play them chronologically. Well, sort of. I'm about 30% of the way through Tomb Raider: Anniversary now because I'm pretending it's a 1996 game, and it's really kind of interesting how much differently Lara Croft controls from the Prince or Altaïr. She's clearly based on a gymnast instead of a parkour person, and she also feels a little less blatantly superhuman. She can still break a 15-foot fall with her fingertips, but it's not as effortless as when the Prince does it, and the fact that you have to finish more exertion-heavy moves with a balance-correct input is a nice touch. It's also kind of nice to be able to turn while jumping, thus allowing Lara to grab ledges she's jumping past. The Prince never seems to have learned that trick. I guess wallrunning spoils you.
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Jun 20, 2011 02:30
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Let's see, off of Morter's Unbeaten list...
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Jun 26, 2011 04:31
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Ways to not have your backlog shrink:
I have sworn a mighty vow to only buy things that are on my wishlist already or that are new releases, or that I have never heard of due to hilarious ignorance. The damage:
And I'm still not through the fifty bucks. I did manage to get Peggle Nights and Gratuitous Space Battles off the list, at least. But now instead of making progress I have to go do tons of stunt play on games I've already finished, because THE TICKETS MUST BE MINE. Except now I also need to add more stuff to my wishlist to get it up to the point where I could theoretically win the Grand Prize.
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Jul 6, 2011 03:17
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Yodzilla posted:Holy poo poo I finally beat BIT.TRIP Beat Nicely done! I still haven't managed to do it on PC, and on Wii I had friends for that final boss, which made it a a lot easier.
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Jul 7, 2011 08:37
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Fallout 3 for   Will roll failed.At least Jamestown was awesome. Beat Story Mode on Legendary and 1cc'd the Gauntlet it on Normal, and (not 1cc'd) did a Vauntless Gauntlet too. Divine is kicking my 17th-Century Martian expat rear end, though, so I'm back to trying to finish off Tomb Raider: Anniversary now, and I guess I should finish Darwinia too. Both are at about halfway. Darwinia is, sadly, also starting to turn into the kind of RTS I don't like, which is to say, basically all of them - I have 200 enemies I need to grind through with an unlimited, slowly regenerating supply of weapons it is finicky and difficult to deploy. 
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Jul 9, 2011 10:52
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Mangoose posted:gently caress, now you made me buy S&M too! With yesterday's Aquaria debacle and this it is very clear to me that this thread isn't safe at all! It so isn't. If you're not ready for it, it's practically a recommendations thread for MORE MORE MORE. In entirely unrelated news, I've been grinding a bit on Everyday Shooter. I can't decide whether it's terrible or great. Which I guess means I should put it on the list of games I should consider doing if I ever do a VLP. Morter posted:In our defense, though, there's no woman complaining about $60 shoes that she only got 8 hours of wear-time out of. Maybe not shoes, but I've certainly heard that for dresses - though it's less "only got 8 hours of wear-time out of" and more "I only can wear it once a year if that". And that attitude is more GOG than Steam. 
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Jul 10, 2011 08:15
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All right! I finished Tomb Raider: Anniversary! I'm glad I played it, but I'm not sorry to see it go. The endgame had an awful lot of really annoying glitchy and finicky sequences, and pretty much every bossfight was absurdly opaque. Though I guess if you played Resident Evil for the puzzles this would blow you right the gently caress away. According to The Plan, I'm supposed to play Splinter Cell next, but so far I've just watched the intro cinematic and it is so   I could not keep a straight face. So I don't know if I can handle that just yet and might go back to Darwinia or try to clear out some more of my Summer Sale damage so that it doesn't count (Time Gentlemen Please in particular has been jumping out at me).
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Jul 11, 2011 09:09
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Aaaand, that knocks both Ben There, Dan That! and its sequel Time Gentlemen, Please! off the list. On the whole, I think Eversion was the better game - at least it didn't spend half its time going LOOK AT ME I AM A DEAD GENRE ISN'T IT HILARIOUS AND EDGY AND META THAT I WOULD MAKE A GAME IN THIS GENRE PS GAMES WERE BETTER BACK THEN EVEN THOUGH THEY WEREN'T ... not that I am bitter. Still haven't worked up the state of mind to try out Splinter Cell. Maybe this weekend.
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Jul 16, 2011 09:13
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homeless snail posted:I'm playing Amnesia, first hour or so was fun but really mild, ooh spooky noises, I'm real scared. Then I got to the cellar and the invisible water monsters Man, I think I was the only person who interpreted that sequence as ankle sharks, which definitely is less scary. I also broke the AI on it by accident once because I was going to quit for the night and decided to run up and give it hugs - it took off half my health and then had no idea what to do. We both just stood there kind of embarrassed. Hooray for monster hugs! Couldn't reproduce this later on, though, so it might have been a bug. I got mine later, though: (warning: I don't think you've reached this yet, but it's not far from where you are) It's one thing to feel reasonably confident about how to not get murdered by the things - stay out of the water - but then you put in a sequence where the only way to proceed is to spend a lot of time in the water holding still? Amnesia did a fabulous job of covering all the bases of Making You Uncomfortable.
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Jul 16, 2011 23:52
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Eh! Frank posted:2) What's the obsession with the weighted companion cube? Before playing the game, I seem to remember it being brought up in various "sad moments in gaming" threads, and was expecting it to be some huge part of the game. Instead you use various blank cubes to help "solve" various puzzles (and by solve I mean to weigh down buttons) and then for *one* level you're given one with hearts on it, and the evil computer taunts you for treating it as though it was a real companion, and then has you destroy it. I don't think you were actually supposed to feel anything for it, it's just more of the evil computer's worthless taunts. And yet we have this: The developer's commentary goes a little bit into why they did it this way - but the short form is "those aren't just taunts, they're ways to nudge players who got stuck in various ways." The final sequence was to correct players who did end up feeling for it - and let's be honest, it's a more useful companion than most escort mission NPCs. Then combine that with the fact that if you delay in the last step - the bit the cube is famous for - GLaDOS starts quoting justifications at you straight out of the Milgram experiment and you get something that resonates pretty ominously for a lot of players. Even people who haven't read about that experiment have probably been exposed to enough to catch the "banality of evil" vibe. That gets even stronger when later on GLaDOS will berate you for obeying her in a epic rant halfway through the final boss fight: "There was even going to be a party for you. A big party that all your friends were invited to. I invited your best friend the companion cube. Of course, he couldn't come because you MURDERED HIM." It's definitely either "had an effect" or "didn't" - and the dev commentary implies to me at least that yeah, it wasn't supposed to have an effect, it was supposed to be some clues and a jokey frame - but it really, really, really got under a lot of players' skins and into their heads. The best joke is that given the reaction and guilt some players had over the sequence - again, probably because of the Milgram echoes - this means that it's managed to be more successful at freighting the player's actions with moral weight than the vast majority of explicit moral choice systems. Massive nerd-lectures aside, I've been making little progress on my Steam backlog, because I got the Might and Magic 6-back off of GOG a while back. It's not backlogged because I explicitly got them just to own them, and then Might and Magic 1 managed to hook me for a week and a half. It's doing something right and I don't know what it is. Everyday Shooter continues to kick my rear end, though, so I think it's high time I finally started in on Splinter Cell. ETA: Played through the tutorial and the first real mission in Splinter Cell, and holy cow. Maybe it's that it's 2011 and they started work on this in 2000, but the drat thing plays like anti-American agitprop. It opens with quoting the UN's Four Freedoms and then adds a Robocop style "fifth freedom" that boils down to "the freedom to do whatever we want to whoever we want because FREEDOM " and then 15 minutes into the first real mission you get a message from mission control saying "actually, change to the rules of engagement: go ahead and kill all the cops you want to, we can totally blackmail them into silence." Bit of a  moment, that.Ah well. It promises a reasonable amount of sneaking around, ambushing dudes, and doing improbable navigation, and these are all things I like. ManxomeBromide fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Jul 18, 2011 |
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Jul 17, 2011 23:41
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It's not like it actually *does* anything in the game.
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Soral posted:I never played Deus Ex in it's day, and I understand that it's supposed to be a classic, but I feel as if it has not aged very delicately It didn't, but it also has some buggy drivers that can make it look much worse than it should. If you don't see the Statue of Liberty in the first five seconds of the game, you've hit a bug with the draw depth. Try switching the config to OpenGL mode instead of Direct3D and life will suddenly get much better.
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Jul 21, 2011 05:25
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