52 Games Challenge 2018

[bikingjahuty]

It's been close to a month since I beat a game, mostly because I'm currently in the middle of an RPG and also the nice spring weather as been calling me outside, away from gaming recently. But I got to play one of my most sought after games after buying it this afternoon, and...well, it wasn't all that great. I'll probably end up selling it since it's hard to justifying holding onto a $250 game that's just "okay."

29. Blast Wind (Saturn): It's always a shame when you finally get a chance to play a game that is wildly sought after and expensive only to ask yourself why that is after playing it. Blast Wind is possibly the most wildly mediocre shooter I've ever played, doing nothing really that well, but not doing anything that bad either; the game is just sort of...there. I coasted easily through its very short length and mostly felt like I was going through the motions the whole time. The game is pretty easy as well which contributes to its overall mediocrity. I will give credit where it is due and say that the music is pretty good at times as are the graphics, but still not enough for this game to be anything worth recommending, especially at its going rate of $250+. (5/13/18) [27/50]

[shfan]

22] Lego Jurassic World (PS4)

Wanted to play this since release, spotted it in a supermarket for £17 (and CoD Infinite Warfare for £5) the other week and had to have it. This is by far the best of the Lego games I've played, which is limited admittedly.

[wolfen]

9. God of War (PS4)

What a wonderful fully connected story and game. Everything that you can do in the world really feels connected to the story and world even when they're just sidequests. The story is very well done and shows a very real relationship between a father and son. The gameplay does not get repetitive with all of the different stances and combinations you can pull off on the fly in addition to the basic combos and the boss enemies are fun to fight, specifically the Valkyries.

Overall a super solid game from beginning to end.

Time: will update, prob 50-60 hours

[wolfen]

Mega Man Legacy Collection (Switch)

10. Mega Man 1

This is my first time ever playing a Mega Man game and it actually felt fresh even though it's a classic game. It has a good difficulty throughout except for Wily's Castle which I shamelessly used the rewind feature to beat (Yellow Devil can die in a fire). All in all I really liked it and will be playing through the rest.

Time: 2-3 hours

11. Mega Man 2

It's a straight upgrade from MM1 in all aspects and is much more polished in movement and graphically. The levels were layed out much better than MM1 and the weapons are more creative and Wily feels like much less bullshit to fight.

Time: 2-3 hours

[kamikazekeeg]

23 - State of Decay 2 (PC 2018) - ABANDONED - I hate quitting games, especially ones I've put over like 15 to 20 hours into, but I'm tired of the games bugs.  Initially I was alright with it, it's just a visually improved and slightly better gameplay take on the first game, and it's only 30 bucks, but that is it.  There's almost nothing new added other than the Blood Plague, which are just ever so slightly more aggressive versions of the normal zombies and revolve around a new horde fight strewn around the town, and co-op, which I don't use, so it's pointless.  It's not starting off on great ground not being particularly better than a game I thought was just alright to begin with.

As a kinda challenging survival sim experience, the game borders on this balance beam between tedium and enjoyment.  I can get lost in mindless open world experiences if it feels like I'm seeing progression.  When progression starts to stall for whatever reason, and I'm continually coming across bugs, or seeing the same ones, it's quickly tipping things towards tedium and I'm not having fun.  Last night I quit after finding a repeatable crash from a specific loot point.  Tonight I'm quitting after the game stalled as I tried to cure some of the blood plague after a tough fight (Plague Heart fights aren't fun).  Combine that with frequent smaller bugs and some lazy ideas (Why can't I just instantly switch to my follower with a button press?) I come across all the time while playing, I'm just done.  I'm not having fun anymore.

[kamikazekeeg]

24 - Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (PC 2018) - BEAT - Well this was a lovely little gem! I had forgotten it was even going to come out till like 2 weeks ago or whenever they announced its release, and while they did have an error getting codes to backers on consoles, they gave a free Steam code and that is just dandy for me right now.

Based on sort of a loose NES design, more due to your character sprites and gameplay, this is a pretty faithful recreation of that era, but doesn't get stuck in it, cause it has some fantastic background, creature, and boss designs.  Good music, a pretty comfortable challenge on Veteran (There's a Nightmare mode when you beat it), and overall it was fun, though it is short.  What stands out is that eventually you'll unlock four players you can switch on the fly.  This means basically 4 health bars and if a character dies, you'll only get set back abit, with the leftover crew.  All crew dying is a gameover and uses a continue.  They all got their gimmicks and keeping them all alive allows you to use all sorts of shortcuts through the levels.  And certain things can let you really cheese your way through areas and boss fights.  It'll be cool to see speedruns of this.

Even having gotten it free, it's totally worth the 10 bucks they are charging for it.

[bikingjahuty]

Another top 10 game of all time contender down

32. Final Fantasy X (PS2): Final Fantasy X is a game I wondered for years if it deserved a place in my top 10 given how fondly I remember this game, well most of it. See, I never actually beat FFX as a young teen when the game first came out; I got all the way to the final boss, he destroyed me, and I never tried playing FFX again. I had a lot of shit going on in my life at that time and it was probably a combo of the game's difficulty spiking heavily in the last 5% of the game and some serious adolescent depression that kept me from wanting to try again. Still, I remembered the rest of the game so fondly that it always skated the border of my top 10 games of all time. 16-years since I last played FFX I replayed the entire game and finally beat it, and wow, what a game this is! FFX is an amazingly designed game; from it's epic, original story to it's even better game design, this is truly one of the best FF games, if not the best I've ever played. The soundtrack is perfect as well with great music and voice acting. Perhaps FFX's biggest disadvantage is my subjective bias against JRPGs, which barely got in the way of me enjoying this game, but did ever so slightly, as did a few minor pacing issues, balancing problems, and the aforementioned difficulty spike at the end. In the end these were minor issues that did little to blemish one of the best JRPGs of all time. (5/27/18) [43/50]

[wolfen]

12. Destroy All Humans (PS4)

Super fun, crude, hilarious, and very unique. If you just want to have fun and your okay with crude humor this game is fantastic, it's not long and the story is ridiculous. It was nice to replay this again after a long time.

Time: 10-15 hours

[droaa]

I realized since this post was started, I have not posted anything on this thread mainly due to school so my gaming has been pretty low. At this point I have been 3 weeks out of the semester and gaming has gone up so heres my updated list with hopefully with 52 by the end of the year or sooner, who knows.

1.PS1-Street Fighter Collection(Jan 1)-4/5
2.PS1-Space Jam(Jan 1)-3/5
3.GEN-Mighty Morphin Power Rangers(Jan 1)-3/5
4.SNES-Final Fight(Jan 1)-3/5
5.SNES-Mighty Morphin Power Rangers(Jan 20)-4/5
6.Switch-Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers(Jan 21)-4/5
7.SNES-Batman Returns(Feb 3)-3/5
8.SNES-Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie(Feb 4)-3/5
9.DC-Sega Rally 2: Sega Rally Championship(Feb 4)-3/5
10.SCD-Bram Stoker's Dracula(Mar 21)-1/5
11.PSVR-Doom VFR(Mar 26)-3/5
12.PS4-Doom(May 20)-4/5
13.PSVR-Batman: Arkham VR(May 27)-4/5
14.PS4-Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul(May 29)-4/5

[kamikazekeeg]

Halfway through the year and I'm doing alright at 27 played.  Have a few more abandoned games than I'd like and Assassin's Creed: Rogue might go on that pile too as its a tad boring, but might just power through the story and do less side stuff.  It really was just "Take the content of AC3 and Black Flag and make a new game out of the parts".

[realpoketendonl]

...Well...I've beaten Bayonetta...again...for the second time this year...I just really love this game all right??

I decided to play through it on hard mode, and it's a fairly short game, and it's one of my favourite games of all time and snap, it's beaten again. I've honestly kind of fallen out of the gaming and beating games-rhythm. Personal issues and other stuff I guess. Maybe I'll get back into the swing of things later, but for now I'm content just playing through stuff at a slow pace. Guess that'll just be a short list this year.

[telly]

Game 7: Paper Mario: Color Splash (Wii U) - 32 Hours

This is one game that I actually have a lot of thoughts about, and I'm going to get really technical with this post because my thoughts are much more granular this time around (sorry for the long post y'all).

Positives

• The graphics and overall art design are amazing. Everything is made out of cardboard and paper; it's colorful, well designed, and it looks really good
• The dialogue is actually really funny/clever. There's a lot of cultural references and even some risque dialogue slipped in, it seems like Nintendo gave a lot more leeway with the translation team here
• The soundtrack is really great. It helps add to the overall themes of the game, it just makes you feel good and happy when you play it
• There are some cool scenarios that you have to complete, which is really neat. Some of my favorites are the pirate ship section, the ghost house, the circus, and the level where you go into Mario 3. Really fun and makes you want to keep playing to see what's next
• Filling all the color spots with your hammer is fun and encourages you to explore the level for all the nooks and crannies
• I really like the idea of the paint mechanic. It makes for some kind of scary moments in the beginning of the game where the shy guys are draining paint out of people, and it ties into the theme of the story
• I like the Thing cards, it makes for interesting puzzles and it adds to the environment exploration as well. There are actually some really decent puzzles in the game that were fun to figure out.

Negatives
Easily the  biggest problem that I had was the combat. First, battling is made up of a deck of cards that are all single use. While I like the idea as a concept, ultimately it didn't work out in the long run when comparing this game to something similar, like Mega Man Battle Network. I think if you guys play this game for yourself you'll see where I'm coming from.

• The fact that cards are single use means the only strategy is about bringing/using the cards that will work on the right enemy. There's no deck building because your deck just gets changed around as you use and acquire new cards in the overworld/from battle.
• Along those lines, there's very little variety in the actual cards. For example, you can get a worn hammer... then a regular hammer... then an even stronger hammer... then an even stronger hammer... or 2 hammer swings at once... or 3 hammer swings at once, etc., etc. The combat is so basic and two dimensional that the cards are forced to be very basic too.
• Sometimes the enemy or boss will "decide" that your attacks won't work, or miss, and that means you wasted your single use card for nothing. Also, any cards that you select but end up not used in battle are lost forever too, which is dumb.
• The targeting system is so jank. You can't select your targets, and it's really hard to tell if your attacks will take out the enemies and if your string will work as planned. If you mess up the timing, or select too powerful or too weak cards, it can throw everything else out of wack (and again, you waste your single use cards).
• This has been mentioned before, but there's no EXP/level up system other than getting expanded paint capacity. That's at least something, but it means that you have no reason to fight a lot of the enemies because again, your cards are single use. Why bother wasting your strongest cards if it's not going to make you stronger or help you level up?
• The balance is kind of wonky too. The only time I felt like the game was putting up a decent challenge was in the last 20% of the game. Money was also never a problem since you get showered with coins from doing in game tasks or competing in the Roshambo temples. They didn't optimize it well enough

Aaaanyway, aside from the combat, there are two other things that I didn't like.

• The first is that the game has no creative characters or enemies. The ONLY unique character for this entire game is Huey. I was super disappointed when I found that the mini bosses were just the koopa kids, and that the main enemy was just Bowser. Come on, how formulaic can you get? All the enemies are your standard Mario fare, and EVERY NPC is a Toad. Compared to TTYD, it's a total let down.
• The game sometimes forces you down these dumb twitch scenarios where you have to react quickly to something like an oncoming train or run away from a rogue chain chomp or some poisonous black paint. And if you mess it up, you get a hard game over and have to start over from the title screen. It was super aggravating.

[/list] <- I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get this out of this post so fuck it.


Back to my list

[bikingjahuty]

  35. The Pinball Arcade (PC): I recently attended a large pinball expo that had a ton of pinball machines which were all free to play after the price of admission was paid, and it really gave me the itch to play more pinball. For anyone that doesn't know anything about the pinball market, they range from very expensive to you'd better take out a loan expensive. Given this and my lack of available space for even one pinball machine, I researched what would be the next best thing which led me to find this game, which is also available on consoles. As a note, I won't be reviewing individual tables, but rather my general experience with this pinball simulator. First off, this game faithfully recreates every pinball on your TV or monitor almost exactly how they are in person, which includes everything from the sounds and music to the art and asthetics of each machine. Maybe more impressive is the excellent pinball physics that recreate the real life physics of each machine almost to a T. The only noticeable issue I found in regards to the feel of the machines was a slight delay on the paddle controls, which I did get used to, but were apparent the whole time I played this game. Overall though with everything considered, The Pinball Arcade's collection of games generally felt 90% authentic to the real thing, give or take a few percent depending on the game. I definitely recommend grabbing the season packs as soon as you can, however, since the licenses for the Bally and Williams tables are going to expire after June 30th of this year, meaning you won't be able to get them anymore. Buy them while you still can! (6/9/18) [40/50]

[shfan]

Chugging along at 23/52, if I can beat 3 more by the end of the month I'm on-target. Getting stuck into Dark Souls Remastered has slowed me up considerably, but it's been a blast to play, hope to have it beaten by the end of the week. Then I've got Vampyr to get stuck into and after that maybe a few of these casual games from the 2000s I've been picking up, used to play a lot of games on Big Fish Games (1 hour free trial) and now the physical versions can be picked up for a few quid online, casual games from that period are quite different to retro games and modern ones.

[kypherion]

Interesting to see people do this. I could beat 52 in a year if I really tried, but that would have to wait until next year.