What game did you finish today?

Finished my annual Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti one life clear. Then screwed up my run at Castlevania 1.
And now my annual 1cc of arcade Splatterhouse. A couple shameful deaths, but finished on my first attempt. This is a significant yearly ritual. SH2 and SH3 may or may not follow in the coming weeks.

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Finished 2 demos this week:

I’m On Observation Duty 7 - Neat little cabin level with the usual anomaly shenanigans and fun weirdo intruders. I’ve played the first 6 games earlier in the year and had a blast completing every single entry.

We Harvest Shadows - Never knew that horror-themed farm work would be this extremely cathartic for me. Clearing up debris and weeds from the dilapidated property and taking care of my tomatoes and chickens warmed my stonecold heart, and I was more invested in taking care of my farm than any of the lame “”horror”” which wasn’t even scary. Here’s to hoping the full game releases soon and is slop-free.
 
Dark Souls.
Found it to be quite janky and overall much more difficult than elden Ring or bloodborne even taking into consideration the dlc, and I thought the gameplay itself was pretty bad, yet I still love the game. One of the rare instances of games being art. Gwyn is top 3 bosses so far for me.
 
Halo: Reach - It had been sitting in my collection for quite a while after I bought the Master Chief Collection. I had played Halo 1 and 2 on the original Xbox but never bought a 360 so I never experienced the rest of the series since then. It was good if a bit on the short side, also being a prequel held very little in the way of it being surprising story wise. I appreciate that the game's reliance on a lot of the ground vehicle sections of previous games was reduced and added aerial vehicles which are far less frustrating to play and these were also kept to a minimum. I'll move on to Halo 3 once I have the chance.
 
About to finish Halo CE on Legendary with a friend with several skulls, including Iron, activated. Its been a harrowing, but fun experience. We're thinking of getting two other buddies involved for a LASO run of Halo Reach; I don't know exactly how difficult it will be, but I think it will be something interesting to be sure.
 
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I got all of them in 18 hours. I honestly remember this game being much harder but this was honestly very fun to go back and play.
I just installed Arkham City, I heard the challenge mode in that is supposed to be much harder/grindy but I don't mind.
 
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Sons of the forrest. It was good, now I am back on square 1 with a friend I play co-op stuff with. What the fuck to play next?
 
Final Fantasy 9. One of the best gaming experiences i've had. Loved the story, the characters, the art style, the world... And i think this is the first time i've felt perfectly satisfied after finishing a game.

Ending was strong, there were no loose ends left, and you get a good feeling of what the characters' future will be. Didn't feel like i needed a sequel, prequel, or anything to expand on what i saw. It was a perfectly satisfying, fulfilling experience.

Actually, if i had to find an issue with it was the "final boss". I know it's a very typical JRPG trope, but i hate it when they replace a properly built antagonist with some random god for the final fight. Kuja was a great character, the final battle had oomph, meaning, and a killer soundtrack, and considering i completely forgot about the blue death god dude that pops out of nowhere after that, you really could've ended the game after Kuja.
 
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Fear and Hunger has got to be one of the best RPGmaker games I've ever played. Its a perfect blend of traditional RPG and Survival Horror, which is interesting because Resident Evil itself was inspired by a NES horror RPG called Sweet Home, and the mechanics of the two genres bleed into each other quite well. The characters are great, the worldbuilding is subtle and the story is woven into the inherent roguelike and semi-random nature of the game. A lot of people have grilled it for being "trial and error" but that really isn't the case. The coinflip instant death attacks for example tend to include a warning from the previous turn and can be avoided simply by having a party member guard during their turn. Its a very rewarding and fun game especially if you like survival horror.
 
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Days Gone

It was aggressively mediocre. It was aggressive in how it swallowed up all my attention for several days, and mediocre in that despite it it wasn't all that good. I only got it because people were celebrating it like the second coming of Jesus Christ in the Steam reviews.

The good aspect of it is the plot. The bad aspect of it is the way the plot goes nowhere. You've got a story that is, essentially, what if Walking Dead met World War Z (which I fucking hate for stealing Max Brooks' title to shill a movie that has nothing to do with the book at all). It's The Walking Dead with zombies capable of running. Your main character is an outlaw biker (who feels a little too "clean" to be believable) living with his friend after being separated with his wife when the shit went down. Along the way (story is initially kicked off by friend getting badly injured) you get put on a journey to discover what happened to her, eventually find her and have to spring her from the police state prison the local Poobah has built.

I compare it to The Walking Dead for multiple reasons. Firstly, it's what the devs themselves said. Secondly, it may as well be an actually good version of The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct: you're some cracker (except a Pacific Northwest version of one) with a crossbow roaming the countryside. Thirdly, it nails the kind of feeling that TWD has of being (and I mean this sincerely, it's one of the things I love about Prey) so blandly realistic that it loops around to feeling completely engrossing. It turns out the entire map is drawn from real obscure places in a small chunk of Oregon (trans-Cascades), characters have backgrounds like "fought in Afghanistan," people get blood poisoning, it's that kind of story. It insists on itself, takes itself seriously, and yet never tries to be poignant or make some gay moral point and so is a lot better for it.

As for the zombies, they're not as interesting as The Last of Us, but these are basically real living people that (unrealistically) are somehow able to survive rooting around in the grass for roots and taking down deer with their bare hands. They've got ass rabies that makes them act like hive creatures. Occasionally you get the freaks that are special (big nigga, fast nigga, etc) but 99% of the time you're just dealing with fast people that don't tire. Spoiler alert it was made in a lab (you fucking knew that already, it's ALWAYS made in a lab).

The problem is that it just shits the bed at the end. At first your big conflict is this mystery about what FEMA is up to (same villainy as IRL, being fucking useless while sticking their noses into everything) and dealing with this cult of Mad Max wannabes that worship the zombies. They're boring and I hated them, which is a problem because they're a huge chunk of the game. Then you move on to this big plot arc about joining the local militia, who are actually extremely competent, but go batshit crazy (Colonel is charismatic as fuck before his God stuff gets out of hand, I'd lay my life down for him right away) and have to be couped. The problem is that it's like they realized they'd clocked in 50 hours of content (which is all the same, this is not a good game from a standpoint of gameplay variety, it is ALWAYS the same) and just rushed to finish it up. So you get this big showdown where everyone sings kumbaya and teams up to fight the enemy, except in actual gameplay it's just you running up a hill shooting bulletsponge enemies. Your bro sacrifices himself but oh wait he actually lived, and then it all ends with a big wet fart and it makes you play some lazy epilogue cutscenes (as missions, have to go hunt them down) to tie up the plot threads it couldn't be bothered to finish before the fucking ending. It just shits the bed, and then lays in it.

The gameplay suffers from balancing issues. Now, you could argue it's my fault for not playing the right way, but the thing is, I didn't FEEL like I was cheesing, I felt like I was doing the obvious and CORRECT thing to do, I just wasn't actively gimping myself. The central gimmicks of this game are having a motorcycle, which is like having a car, except it's a motorcycle. And hordes. These zombies are fast, they don't tire (meaning they WILL catch you eventually as YOU tire), and they come in incredible numbers. The game really impresses how a huge number of people can fill a small space and still be a HUGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE, because you'll be dealing with 100, 300, 500 of them and it's a nightmare... early on.

So early on you get chased around and your guy will run out of juice really fast. You simply cannot shoot these things down standing and fighting: you pretty much have to turn, pop some, turn back. You expect to stay just outside of their grasp except for when you can use some sort of natural chasebreaker, some piece of terrain, that will slow them a bit. Early on you have a shit-ass motorcycle and shit-ass guns and regularly run out of ammo. But the game throws these stamina upgrades at you and you eventually reach a point where you can basically just outrun them all the time, and you'll eventually get a gun (for me, the M14) that can plug these things efficiently enough that you're no longer in genuine danger.

Despite that, it still manages to be engaging in the same way (genuinely meaning this) that cleaning up an apartment or doing your lawn can. You still have the feeling of hunting and wearing down these things, watching a massive swarm of hundreds of monsters slowly whittled away by your constant, consistent rifle fire. For me, I tended to (before getting the really OP submachine gun) kite them at long range with my rifle. But this is apparently not how it was intended to be played; it was intended to be played with you running around city streets, ducking around buildings, shooting them point blank with pistols, almost always getting overrun. In other words: played poorly, like a fucking moron.

I do absolutely hate that it doesn't start marking the horde locations until near the very end. It introduces the horde hunting at the very end, by which point I had literally killed half of them, including the largest free-roaming one in the game, by myself, with a semi-automatic battle rifle. Bad case of plot not keeping up with what the player's actually doing. The way hordes work is that they mostly lay around inside all day (but not always?) and roam at night with a dedicated cave for daytime snooze and watering and "feeding" (feeding on what? it's been two years) grounds. So if you really want to play detective, and I have done it, you can approach it like a real hunting game and try to find the horde based on the routes and the places you've exposed. Personally, I just think it should have marked the grounds as you find them, maybe have an option to track (hero is an uber-badass tracker/bounty hunter for reasons that are never, ever explained) them back to their cave so you can see the exact route.

The last time something like this happened to me was Sniper Elite 4, where I thought, naively, that I was supposed to actually use the stealth system and pick off enemies one by one and be a ghost (and it sucked ass, and it wasn't until near the end that I realized the game got a lot better if I played it like COD).

It also has bike chases that come up just often enough to be aggravating. I think they intended for certain mechanics to be more prominent than they were. You can stalk and hunt deer, but meat is just about useless in the game, exists to be sold but not worth the effort compared to popping zombies. There's crafting recipes for plants, and I did stop to harvest those, but it rolls them out so slowly that it's a joke; only the initial Stamina booster mattered (because I really needed those). There's these lone motorcyclists that your guy panics about, but only on very rare occasions did I see an actual pack of them. I think they missed an opportunity to pull a Road Redemption and combine melee with motorcycles, or improve the accuracy and have taking zombies on a motorcycle chase be viable (come to think of it, I probably should have used my motorcycles more for repositioning early on to regain stamina, but I also specifically avoided leading zombies into the motorcycle because they can knock it over, in which case you're just fucked, you won't get it set up and get on it in time). Ambushes at least were well done: sniper shoots you off your bike, wire knocks you off it, bike goes flying, enemies are on you RIGHT AWAY, it's not telegraphed from a million miles away like RDR2 (even if the bits aren't unique like in RDR2).

What else is there to sperg about. The game is fairly based in terms of diversity, until late in the game, and even then you can justify it as the southern parts of the map explicitly having lots of outsiders from California. The locals are White. Sometimes not, but you basically are fighting White people, most of your allies and camp members are White people. It does seem allergic to having White doctors. Oh no, you'll have a fat Black lesbo doctor that's banging this Indian-American (but White-looking, high caste) outlaw biker (???? she's honestly a good character) bisexual, there's a Mexican doctor (I assumed he was Cuban at first), there's a Black good guy militia leader, a Black doctor, basically if they're Black they're a fucking genius in this plot. But the thing is, I was able to get quite far in the game before race stood out to me at all, which is completely unlike something like Far Cry 5 (one of the games this is tempting to compare to). Even where it shows up, doctors aside, it feels very natural and if it's not natural (like a Japanese tourist) it's commented on.

The map is okay. The first region is absolutely beautiful. I love forested mountains. THICKLY forested mountain. It's rare if ever you see a game that actually has forests thick enough that you can't just walk through them (Kingdom Come: Deliverance does this), but here the "Cascades" do have the haunting feeling of land that swoops up all around you, every path is a ridgeline or a holler, huge trees that tower overhead, foliage everywhere around you, constant fog and rain. Then there is also this snowy mountain area that is woefully underused. Should have had a dedicated region for it. Most of the time you're in more generic stuff. Belknap is 'high desert," meaning ugly as shit sagebrush Western. Lost Lake is a generic Mountain West forest-countryside type deal, has snowy areas. Crater Lake is basically just there to serve the plot of having a base on Wizard Island (fucking awesome, it's like a postapocalyptic Tenochtitlan, I love it). Iron Butte is rather pleasant, like a warmer Lost Lake, but is used very little. Highway 97 feels like what I picture California as, almost more like a w

In summary, 4/10
Ready to buy a motorcycle IRL and road trip to Oregon
 
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I never wanna touch another Batman game again. Holy shit those challenge maps got so annoying. I was going to go back to Knight and finish the achievements there. But I'm happy that I have Asylum and City 100%.
 
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Astro's Playroom. Got all the trophies; the speedrun one was a huge pain in the arse but it's satisfying to see 100% on it.
 
Rogue trader. I built the most op character. Soldier with fortress world origin. Spec'd in archmillitant. Ended up with drukhari heavy machine gun and heavy bolter. Wrecked final boss in three turns. It was glorious
 
Wolfenstein 2009.

I can't really say much about it other than it being a very fun as fuck game. I might consider doing a playthrough with cheats on to see what dumb shit I can do.
 
Guacamelee (bad ending). I somehow got the impression that I only had to do four of the five orbs. I had to look them up; the first orb I found, THE FIRST, was in the chicken cavern and I only found it because I went out of my way to figure out what was the deal with these two regions (the other was Hell) that NEVER came up in the game before fighting the boss. In the end I beat all except the Yoku Blocks. Didn't think that the Tree Tops was bad at all. People bitched about it so much, but I think that even without watching someone do it first it's still pretty self-explanatory, it's not really a puzzle platformer at all, you just sack up and do it. But the Yoku Blocks are so fucking annoying that I had no stamina for it, I said "screw this" really quickly.

I left it installed (not like it takes up much space) for finishing it, but I'm kind of checked out on it.
Is a good game. I blew it off long ago - HATED the sense of humor, was surprised by the platforming, the combat sucked - but going back and knowing to blow past any speech bubble or background joke, just trying a little and unlocking the first few special moves, it turned into a very, very good game.
 
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