01. Peggle 2 - PS4 - Story Mode finished on 1/2/15I am a Peggle fiend, it's one of my guilty pleasures. There's just something mesmerizing about watching that little ball bounce around on the pegs.
02. Far Cry 4 - PS4 - Platinum'd on 1/18/15My GOTY for last year, and after thoroughly finishing it I stand by that. Great game.
03. New Super Mario Bros. 2 - 3DS - Finished on 1/23/15Eh, it's a 2D Mario. Fun, but the latest Rayman games are the kings of 2D platformers as far as I'm concerned.
04. Deathsmiles - 360 - 1/29/15SHMUP w/ a ridiculously insane story. Was pretty short to blow through w/ unlimited lives - without them I wouldn't have had a prayer, some of the later levels are insanely difficult.
05. Rogue Legacy - PS4Fantastic game, I enjoyed every minute of it! Finished with a time of 24:22, but I may mess around with it a little more - we'll see. Perfect difficulty curve balanced with a great feeling of progression. NOT A ROGUE-LIKE THO!!!
06. The Order: 1886 - PS4Gameplay was average on this one - not bad, but hardly inspired. The lycan fights were not fun IMO, and that's both the standard ones and the boss fight ones. Gunplay felt good minus an iffy cover system, but they should have been much more experimental with their weapons - the phosphor gun and lightning gun were fun, but I wanted more like that. That said, the game is gorgeous and it has an excellent story with great voice acting and some insanely good facial animation. I've talked to some who didn't like the story, so just be aware that this is very much setting up a franchise and they are not going to answer every question or address every point/relationship by the end of the game. Overall, I'd say the game was good, not great. But it's a very promising start to a franchise. One more thing, if you're going for the plat (which is very easy to get) follow a collectible guide as you play. Collectibles are handled very poorly - only one of the 4 types are tracked and they aren't removed from the game when you find them, so if you miss some it's hard to figure out exactly which ones you missed.
07. Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Cury God - I have to say I really enjoyed this game. Very light-hearted breezy rogue-like. Great characters, very funny and the dungeon crawling gameplay was fun except for a few nit-picks. My main issue is that Kuu, your companion that follows you around the dungeons, learns his abilities randomly after the first dungeon. Being a rogue-like, he of course forgets them all when you leave a dungeon which would be ok except for the random part. Since only a few of his abilities are actually useful (he's generally use
less as a fighting companion since he does minimal damage and really just gets in the way more than anything) you end up getting pointless abilities far more often than the ones you really need. What you want is his ability to carry 8 items, which is the only way to expand your inventory, his ability to identify items you pickup & his ability to let you combine items while in a dungeon (otherwise, you can only do this in town). I never got the combine ability after the first tutorial dungeon and I rarely got the other two.
The only other minor negative I'll point out is that the goals for the plat are absolutely ridiculous. Not in a "wow, that's hard" kind of way, but in a "that's an insane amount of time to invest in this game" way. As an example, after I beat the game (not having played the bonus dungeon that opens up after the credits roll) I had killed just shy of 1,500 monsters according to the in-game records. There is a trophy for killing
10,000 monsters.
Yeeeeaaaahhh....no.
08. Tennis in the Face - This was a surprisingly fun little puzzle game! I picked it up in the PSN Flash Sale last weekend for under a buck, and I definitely got my money's worth. You & the enemies are in fixed positions on a one-screen board. Your goal is to knock out all of the enemies w/ tennis balls, using as few as possible. To do so you have to angle the ball & use a fair bit of brains to figure out how to get the job done. There were a ton of levels - probably in the neighborhood of 100 - but the game still went relatively fast. I'd say I put in around 5 hours this week to gold all of the levels & get all of the trophies.
09. Bloodborne - That's right, Bloodborne is beaten!
I didn't do all the optional bosses, so I didn't get the "good" ending, but I'm pretty proud to have finished my first "Souls" game. Looking forward to playing some less-intense stuff for a while now.
Fantastic game tho, will definitely be in my top 5 of the year.
10. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - Played through this one, again.
I've lost count of how many times that makes, but I think it's safe to say that it's easily the game I've played through the most times from start to finish. Soooooo good.
11. Dracula X Chronicles - I've actually never beaten this game before. Heck, I don't even think I've seriously played it (dabbled with it, yes). I usually don't enjoy the more "traditional" Castlevania games, but this one was a lot of fun. I got the bad ending, not sure if I want to replay it right away to go for the good ending or move to something else & come back later - leaning towards the latter.
12. Bust-A-Move Deluxe - Or as I insist on calling it, Puzzle Bobble (its Japanese name that makes MUCH more sense). This is one of my guilty pleasure games, I own several versions of it on different platforms. This one was fun, I completed VS. mode & then Classic Puzzle mode - after which the credits rolled, so I'm calling that beaten.
I had one complaint - you couldn't lower the volume on the music or turn it off, and it had about 4 12-second loops it played during the 300-board puzzle mode I played through.
Needless to say, that got a LITTLE annoying.
13. Mortal Kombat X - Finished the story mode. Glad I bought this one used and I'm still within my 1 week grace period at GS, because it's going back today. I like to watch other people play this game more than I enjoy playing it myself. Never was a big MK guy, I think part of the problem is that the button inputs don't match up with the animations - you have to input the commands quickly & just watch them play out. Very unintuitive for me. Plus maybe it was just me, but I found this story mode dull compared to the one in MK9 or especially the one in Injustice. Oh well, at least they finally made Raiden bad-ass again.
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14. Kirby Squeak Squad - 100% completed this one - great game. Just an old-school traditional Kirby game. The game isn't that challenging, besides some of the chests being tricky to find or get. But it's just a LOT of fun! Love me some Kirby!
