What game did you finish today?

Finished my House run of New Vegas. I put about 130 hours into the save and I plan on doing a properly modded Legion run next, probably with a cowboy build. I haven't played the game since shortly after launch and never played any of the DLCs to it was practically a fresh experience.
 
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Hollow Knight.
Im a big Ori fan, so I didnt know I would like it, but its really good.
 
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Just finished Iconoclasts. Such a good game, I picked it up because I liked the charming art style that remind me of SNES platformers, It is a Metroidvania-like but it has more of an emphasis on puzzle platforming. What I was not expecting was for the game to have such a great story that went really dark in many situations. Some parts of the combat and boss encounter almost wanted me to pull my hair out, but in a way that reminded me of good classic 16-bit games. I really did not expect to like this game as much as I did. Very highly recommended.

It is 80% off right now on GOG until March 14.
 
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DeadwastePrime said:
i set myself a goal to complete at least one game this year (but obviously more if i can), as in go from start to credits. reason: most of the games ive been playing as of late are not like this and ive been putting off many games in my library due to not actually wanting to beat them, but i have to eventually. gta 6, if it launches this year as rockstar says they will, it'll probably be that. otherwise, im gonna try to finish that indiana jones game that came out a while ago. but damn does the curse of procrastination have quite the effect on me.
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it ended up being ratchet and clank rift apart
 
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Kaze and the Wild Mask, been interested for a while and picked it up in the recent sale when it was $3. The developers just wanted to make Donkey Kong Country basically, and that's why I wanted to play it. It really is almost like a graphical overhaul rom-hack of DKC, mechanically it's extremely similar but as you'd expect it's not as good in pretty much every regard... but that's a hard legacy to match. Obviously the place it falls shortest in is vibes, playing something so close in gameplay made me realize how much the DKC triologies graphical style and especially music contribute to it's legendary status.

Still very good if you wanna play the closest thing to a new classic DKC style game, doesn't waste time being easy for longer than a level or two since they expect you've played the trilogy already and all your favorite level gimmicks from all 3 games are there.
 
Finished The Ultimate Doom tonight. First time in 20 years.
Thy Flesh Consumed is still very challenging. I still absolutely hate Romero's map "Against Thee Wickedly". Fucking sadist.
On to Doom 2...
 
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I finished the DLC of Watch_Dogs 1, Bad Blood featuring T-Bone. Nice closure ending where T-Bone finds peace after causing the Chicago Blackout of 2003 thanks to ctOS. Now I just need to finish Watch_Dogs 2 and its DLC.
 
En Garde! It's fantastic.

So what you've got here is a (very short) swashbuckling action-adventure, indie or AA. Very nice bright and platicky (in a good way) aesthetic that fades into painting-like style. aggressively Spexican. The game's goal is to be a cheesy parody of stuff like Zorro, Three Musketeers, pirate movies and such like. The plot is minimalist kiddy nonsense (whole thing is kiddy, bloodless combat). The central gimmick is being the most cinematic swashbuckler game possible. I'd very much like a full length sequel; I think they'd have absolute gold if they tried to do something that mixed this core land gameplay with ripping off Black Flag and Breath of the Wild.

"Cinematic" is something I've talked about in the Unpopular Opinions thread.
Games SHOULD be cinematic. But game devs' concept of cinematic is completely wrong.

Cinematic, as it's always used, means flashy graphics/animations/cinematography like a movie, and pacing like a movie. But the way people should be using it is in the sense of recreating the feeling of movies.

There's lots of games that do that well. Often people compare FTL to Star Trek with its power and crew management.(ship battles being more about what your people are doing at their stations; maneuvering is completely abstracted out). Sleeping Dogs felt like playing a kung fu movie. Just Cause built its whole identity off of action movie bullshit like stunts, hijacking, and what not. Desperados is practically made to recreate movie scenes like the woman luring the guard into the bushes so her allies clobber him.

I think "cinematic" can be very good when it means giving players tool sets and mechanics that let them naturally remake movie-like stories. It's bad when it's taken at its most shallow interpretation, which is "movie where you press X to move forward."
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This game manages to do that excellently. Mechanically, the rapier fencing is nothing but basic attack, parry and dodge, but it themes its combat very well around environmental combat that fits its cartoony swashbuckling tone, makes that environmental combat absolutely necessary to survive, and themes its combat in a way that reinforces the idea of fencing. There's two main points that achieve this:
1) Enemies do not wait. They're absolutely relentless, in fact, they specifically try to attack you simultaneously.
2) Almost all enemies cannot be harmed by just directly attacking them. These enemies know how to defend themselves. The only way to get an opening to hurt them is by physically battering them or catching them off guard.

And this is represented through three mechanics: a fatigue bar (for them), a guard bar for elites and a surprise mechanic. When surprised they can be attacked or kicked. When you batter them about environmentally you build up fatigue, which once filled takes away their ability to resist kicking and attacks and their ability to fill their guard. Lastly, the guard bar is basically that elite enemies can refill their health if you fail to keep making contact or get hit, so against an elite you essentially have to (regardless of how other many enemies are gangbanging you at the moment) fight a perfect duel.

Environmentally, there's traps (cheesy things like dropping chandeliers, or luring them in front of a cannon and setting it off), but also tons of things to throw (throw a turkey on their head and watch them squirm around trying to get it off, throw grenades into fires to set them off), things to kick over like wine jugs. Basically, if you can imagine it in a cheesy swordfight scene, it's in this game, and there's a lot of little nuances to it, really clean clear gameplay but each thing or interaction has a distinct effect.

The sum total of it is that you're zipping around all over the place. If you stay put, you get gangbanged, you die. So you're kicking people down stairs, swooping around on ropes, chucking beer mugs at heads, lots of silly fighting dirty that's cartoonish in presentation but plausible in the basic idea (anything to disrupt the enemy crowd or startle them into slipping up).

Game's not woke, but it does have Current Day diversity. The hero's a brown woman, she's lesbos with a Black pirate woman (all pirates are Black now, I guess), her dopey brother is the comic relief, the captains (heavy brute enemies) are butch women, and the grenadiers (ranged enemies) are old women. It's kind of faggy, but it doesn't explicitly shriek girl power or racism or anything at you, it's just there in the same way it's been in pop culture for a long time.
 
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Beat En Garde! legendary arena mode. Arena mode is fantastic. It's a little shallow compared to a purpose-built roguelike, but there's a ton of maps and interesting (and thematically sensible) modifiers you pick to play with. I wound up beating the bullshit legendary difficulty (boss fight is all three bosses at once, basically impossible) thanks to an absurd stunlock arsenal of modifiers. Dodge --> stun --> slippery area, knock health off --> stun, basically just constant stunning. Forces you to really polish your understanding of the mechanics.

I think this is actually one of my favorite "small" games.
 
Finished Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion. I enjoyed it more than the regular campaign.
 
Finished Heaven's Vault today, I like it, 7.5/10
I wanted to play something before the Golden Idol DLC coming out soon, and I think its a good game.
Kinda clunky sometimes and slow, but I'm surprised about the decisions.
I went to see the other ending on youtube and the majority actually replaced the robot lmao
 
Tropico 4 (as in, the campaign) after well over a decade of having last played it. Does it hold up? Eh. I found I didn't really care about the humor/characters (I remembered the shtick already, you know how it goes with strategy games: their inane dialogue gets buried in your memory) and the campaign suffers in a way that other strategy games don't in that it feels like it's going to naturally funnel you towards doing the same thing every time.

You do have to keep your regime alive, and you do have to make money to fulfill other goals. So you have to build an economy (which has room for experimentation, but for me it just seemed obvious to diversify every time (between farming, mining, industry and tourism: industry builds out of farming and mining). So it's like being asked to do the same thing (build a functional island) 20 times with little twists. And some of those twists are fun conceptually, but I don't feel like it ever actually changes the gameplay in the same way that playing, like, an Age of Empires II or Company of Heroes 2 would change dramatically from mission to mission because the campaign allows you to be presented with scenarios and means and mechanics radically different than a random match.

It usually felt too easy politically, but I did actually lose a few times (coups, revolts). One thing I get better and better at is not allowing my boomer tendency to keep me from plopping down social services (like churches) as soon as possible, and doing the same with schools so that I already have a workforce to make industry profitable and naturally grow it over time instead of artificially importing them (at massive expense) in an awkward way.
 
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