What Games Have You Completed? (2021 Edition)
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Join Date:Posts: 50597
Game|Platform|
- Megaman X2|SNES
- Streets of Rage 4|PC
- Sekiro|PC
- Megaman 7|SNES
- Megaman 8|PS1
- Megaman X3|SNES
- Megaman & Bass|SNES
- 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim|PS4
- Broken Sword: Director's Cut|PC
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert|PC
- Mischief Makers|N64
- Wolfenstein 2: New Colossus (DLC)|PC
- Deception 4: Blood Ties|PS4
- Final Fantasy Adventure|Gameboy
- Virtua Racing|Switch
- Thief 2: The Metal Age|PC
- Medal of Honor: Allied Assault: Spearhead|PC
- Crysis Remaster|PC
- God of War: Chain of Olympus|PS3
- Resident Evil Village|PC
- Live a Live|SNES
- Clockwork Knight|Saturn
- DuckTales|NES
- Drakengard 3|PS3
- Double Dragon|NES
- Secret of Mana|SNES
- Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions|Android
- Halo 5: Guardians|XBox One
- Air Combat|PS1
- Kamui|PC
- DuckTales 2|NES
- Turok Dinosaur Hunter|PC
- Professor Layton and Pandora's Box|Android
- Ape Escape|PS1
- No One Lives Forever|PC
- DuckTales Remastered|PC
- Yakuza: Like a Dragon|PC
- Asterix|Master System
- McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure|Megadrive
- Fuga: Melodies of Steel|PC
- Quake|PC
- Return of the Obra Dinn|PC
- Tail Concerto|PS1
- Contra 3 (Hard Mode)|SNES
Contra 3 (Hard Mode)
A common misconception about the NES and SNES contra games. They aren't that difficult and perfectly manageable. The difficulty is fair and it shouldn't take more than a few evenings to beat them.
Turning Contra 3 up to Hard difficulty however is another story. Hard Mode subtly changes the enemy behaviour of the game to make it a different experience from normal. It's a ball buster but it's mostly fair once you get used to it. I say mostly because the overhead stages which are the weakest part of the game add some bullshit that is annoying to deal with. You also get a special boss fight at the end that is exclusive to hard mode. So it's well worth trying once you have mastered normal.
As for Contra 3, it's a classic. It's not my favourite contra, the Megadrive's Contra Hard Corps is for me the ultimate Contra experience, but it's a great 16-bit update to the series. It really takes advantage of the 16-bit hardware to add some cinematic set pieces that might look quaint now but had my jaw hitting the floor back in 1992. There's some great homages to the older Contra games and even Hideo Kojioma's Snatchers make an appearance as bosses in Stage 3. The only weakness are the mode 7 overhead stages which are far and away the weakest part of the game. There's only 6 stages and it's such a pity that 2 of the stages are wasted on these overhead stages. It's why for me Hard Corps is the much better game.
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GAME: Gears of War: Ultimate Edition
PLATFORM: Xbox One
This game is comfort food for me. It's not overly long, and is mostly set-piece after set-piece. There's very little filler.
I've beaten it so many times (this includes the original 360 game, as well) I could play it with my eyes closed at this stage. I love Gears, so much.
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Join Date:Posts: 50597
Game|Platform|
- Megaman X2|SNES
- Streets of Rage 4|PC
- Sekiro|PC
- Megaman 7|SNES
- Megaman 8|PS1
- Megaman X3|SNES
- Megaman & Bass|SNES
- 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim|PS4
- Broken Sword: Director's Cut|PC
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert|PC
- Mischief Makers|N64
- Wolfenstein 2: New Colossus (DLC)|PC
- Deception 4: Blood Ties|PS4
- Final Fantasy Adventure|Gameboy
- Virtua Racing|Switch
- Thief 2: The Metal Age|PC
- Medal of Honor: Allied Assault: Spearhead|PC
- Crysis Remaster|PC
- God of War: Chain of Olympus|PS3
- Resident Evil Village|PC
- Live a Live|SNES
- Clockwork Knight|Saturn
- DuckTales|NES
- Drakengard 3|PS3
- Double Dragon|NES
- Secret of Mana|SNES
- Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions|Android
- Halo 5: Guardians|XBox One
- Air Combat|PS1
- Kamui|PC
- DuckTales 2|NES
- Turok Dinosaur Hunter|PC
- Professor Layton and Pandora's Box|Android
- Ape Escape|PS1
- No One Lives Forever|PC
- DuckTales Remastered|PC
- Yakuza: Like a Dragon|PC
- Asterix|Master System
- McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure|Megadrive
- Fuga: Melodies of Steel|PC
- Quake|PC
- Return of the Obra Dinn|PC
- Tail Concerto|PS1
- Contra 3 (Hard Mode)|SNES
- Rocket Knight|PC
Rocket Knight
I don't know what possessed me to try this game. The mere existence of this game has disgusted me for years and put me off playing it. Well it definitely wasn't the train wreck I was expecting but it wasn't amazing.
I've a lot of nostalgia for this series. I knew I had to own the original Rocket Knight Adventures. It looked incredible when I saw it on Movies, Games and Videos and it got glowing reviews in magazines at the time. When I finally got my hands on the game it didn't disappoint. For me it's the second best game on the Megadrive just behind Gunstar Heroes. It's got the classic Konami style in spades right when they were at the height of their greatness. RKA is your standard action game with the stand out difference being a rocket pack strapped to the protagonist Sparkster's back. It's a really fun mechanic that the game explores through constantly surprising set pieces. It's very boss heavy but the bosses are quite simply incredible. It looked and sounded gorgeous with a soundtrack by some of Konami's greats, including Michiru Yamane how would go on to compose the symphony of the night soundtrack. There's a great sense of humour throughout with some funny visual gags and homages to Konami's past.
The game would get two sequels, both called Sparkster. One was made for the Megadrive, the other for the SNES. Both games were totally different to each other. Reviews for the megadrive game were pretty decent, around the 80's. I had to get it of course. When I did eventually play it, it was massively disappointing. The game was no longer a linear game composed of a gauntlet of creative boss and set piece designs. Instead the levels were large sprawling affairs, emphasising exploration. There was a severe lack of bosses and the ones that were in the game just weren't as well designed as the first game. It also somehow managed to look worse than the original and had none of the cutscenes that provided continuity to the levels and world. It isn't a bad game, just no where near as good as the original and played like a totally different game. At least the soundtrack was amazing.
To make matters worse, the SNES Sparkster looked incredible and seemed to play a lot closer to the original RKA. It mostly garnered 90's from the magazines. I felt betrayed! I'm playing the SNES version now and while it's also nowhere near as good as the original game it does play closer to RKA and is a much better game than the Megadrive Sparkster.
Anyway after the two Sparkster games there were no other games in the series. The team that made Rocket Knight games were the same team that made Contra and they would sneak cameos of Sparkster into their games such as Contra Shattered Soldier and Track and Field on the DS. There was no sign of a new game until the PS360 era when a new Rocket Knight was announced by Konami for XBLA and PSN. I was initially excited until I saw the developer would be Climax. They weren't a bad studio and had made the pretty decent Silent Hill: Shattered Memories but nothing about them said they would have the chops to create a classic japanese action game.
Climax gave it a good shot but the game just feels lacking. It feels a little bit cheap. Sparkster looks all wrong. His 2D promotional art is on point but the 3D modelling was outsourced to a chinese studio and it's very weak. Rocket Knight doesn't follow the setpiece and boss gauntlet design of the original RKA and instead focuses more on bigger levels that are more open for exploration. It feels a lot more like the Megadrive Sparkster. You have a lot more control over Sparkster after a rocket boost and there is some advanced movement tech but it's only really required if you want to go for achievements. There's not a huge variety in the level design, it's all pretty standard platforming with few surprises. The levels are a little too long at times. The final stage I did enjoy as there's a real focus on challenging the players mastery of Sparkster's movement, I just wish there was more of this. There's one really naff stage that freezes Sparkster's rocket pack. It takes away the game's central mechanic and ends up turning hte game into dull bog standard platformer for the entire stage. There's a few side scrolling shooter levels sprinkled through out the game but they are pretty weak. There's a boss at the end of each of the 4 main areas but they are pretty easy and not that solidly designed. The soundtrack is totally forgettable.
I expected the game to be awful but it's not bad. It's a pretty solid game that's just a bit unremarkable. I expected more from the series considering how close to my heart it is. Sparkster's movement is great it's just that there's not many levels or set pieces that really take advantage of it. Now with Konami being a shadow of their former selves I guess I'll never get that sequel to the original Rocket Knight Adventures I've always wanted.
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GAME: Gears of War 2
PLATFORM: Xbox 360
More of the same.
Not much else I can say.
Playing it on Xbox One X meant I was able to play it fully rendered in 4K, which, aside from the obvious 7th-gen texture work, it looked pretty good. Gears Ultimate Edition didn't even get any 4K treatment at all so I was stunned to see Gears 2 look a lot sharper in detail, despite the former being a remaster.
There was one small aspect that I wasn't getting used to, at all, and that was the omnidirectional jumping mechanic not being implemented in here (it was first implemented in Gears 3, and ultimately the Gears 1 remaster), so when I made an attempt to dive at an angle, it would just straight-up throw me 90 degrees to the left/right. Frustrating to say the least.
Another thing that grinded my gears (ha!) was the checkpoint system. Maybe I'm spoiled by newer games but there were times where I'd get to the end of what was 2 or 3 set-pieces one after the other, dying, and being thrown back to the very beginning of the set-piece. It made what should've been 10-minute sections into about half an hour. Speaking of time, this one felt like it started to drag near the end. There was one particular boss fight that made me think, after I beat him, I would be really close to the end of the game. Turned out I had another hour and a half to go.
There was a lot I forgot about Gears 2, so there were a few moments that made me go "oh yeah I forgot about that bit". Of all three original games in the series, this was my least favourite. I even remember the online mode being horrible to play. The bullet lag that was infamously bad in Gears 1 (unless you were the host - damn P2P servers), returned for Gears 2 and it was even worse. The only thing I really played online for was the newly added Horde Mode. Other than that, I often went back to Gears 1.
Gears 3 ended up being my favourite -- it added so much QOL fixes and the bullet lag was almost completely removed for online. But I also found the single player to be much better than Gears 2's offering, so I'm buzzing to dive into that one again.
Post edited by Gamer Bhoy 89 on0 -
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GAME: Gears of War 3
Platform: Xbox 360
A solid trilogy that had a perfect conclusion. Nothing more I can say. It was the best from a gameplay perspective for me. They fine-tuned every aspect to perfection in my books.
Onto Gears 4 (f*ck Gears of War: Judgment lol)
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Join Date:Posts: 50597
Game|Platform|
- Megaman X2|SNES
- Streets of Rage 4|PC
- Sekiro|PC
- Megaman 7|SNES
- Megaman 8|PS1
- Megaman X3|SNES
- Megaman & Bass|SNES
- 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim|PS4
- Broken Sword: Director's Cut|PC
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert|PC
- Mischief Makers|N64
- Wolfenstein 2: New Colossus (DLC)|PC
- Deception 4: Blood Ties|PS4
- Final Fantasy Adventure|Gameboy
- Virtua Racing|Switch
- Thief 2: The Metal Age|PC
- Medal of Honor: Allied Assault: Spearhead|PC
- Crysis Remaster|PC
- God of War: Chain of Olympus|PS3
- Resident Evil Village|PC
- Live a Live|SNES
- Clockwork Knight|Saturn
- DuckTales|NES
- Drakengard 3|PS3
- Double Dragon|NES
- Secret of Mana|SNES
- Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions|Android
- Halo 5: Guardians|XBox One
- Air Combat|PS1
- Kamui|PC
- DuckTales 2|NES
- Turok Dinosaur Hunter|PC
- Professor Layton and Pandora's Box|Android
- Ape Escape|PS1
- No One Lives Forever|PC
- DuckTales Remastered|PC
- Yakuza: Like a Dragon|PC
- Asterix|Master System
- McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure|Megadrive
- Fuga: Melodies of Steel|PC
- Quake|PC
- Return of the Obra Dinn|PC
- Tail Concerto|PS1
- Contra 3 (Hard Mode)|SNES
- Rocket Knight|PC
- Enemy Zero|PC
Enemy Zero
Enemy Zero is a game that is more interesting than good. Enemy Zero was created by the late Kenji Eno's company Warp and was a follow up to their first game D. D was a pretty big deal on release. It came right at the dawn of CD based consoles and its pre-rendered graphics and graphic true ending were mind blowing at the time. It's a Myst type adventure game. I beat it last year and it hasn't aged well. The mind blowing story is tame and just bad by todays standards and the CG is laughable.
It's worth reading up about Enemy Zero's development as it's pretty nuts. Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) got his start doing CG animation on this game. The score is by famed film composer Michael Nyman who Kenji Eno convinced to write music for the game by locking him in his own hotel room until he agreed to it. And the reveal of the game was equally bizarre. It was revealed at Playstation's Tokyo expo in 1996. Kenji Eno was pissed off at Sony for screwing him over with the marketing of D which meant lower than expected sales on the Playstation. So at the end of the trailer for the game at Sony's press conference the Playstation logo morphed into the Sega Saturn logo and Kenji said the game would be coming exclusively to Sega Saturn.
Warp tried this weird digital character thing years before the likes of Hatsune Miku and the like. Their character 'Laura' who is the star of D was used in multiple Warp projects, up until D2 on the Dreamcast. Many of the other Enemy Zero characters would also translate to other Warp games. I think they were trying to make her a Lara Croft type mascot before Lara existed and were beaten to it by Core Design who frankly put out much better and marketable games. It's curious even though it's a never quite worked out. There's some nudity in this game which is pretty risque for a 1996 console game but it's very tame. Laura appears naked but she looks like a barbie doll. Kenji Eno said there was supposed to be visible nipples but the team had massive arguments over the size of them that he just said she will have none. Probably the right call and it's kind of creepy enough without this detail.
But anyway, the game. The game follows D in that about half the game is moving about prerendered CG environments solving adventure game type puzzles. The puzzles aren't too difficult but the fact you can't skip the animations between transitions means doing anything can be frustratingly slow. The game however expects the player to hit arbitrary triggers to advance the game at points which can be really frustrating. The CG rendering of these scenes look bad today but for a game in 1996 they are really impressive. Warp traded in their Amiga's for Silicon Graphics workstations and the jump in rendering is easy to see. The rendering was probably the best seen in a game until a month later when FF7 blew it out of the water.
Linking the CG prerendered areas are true 3D first person section. These areas can have a few enemies wandering around and this is where the game gets interesting. Said enemies are totally invisible. You have to guess their position using the sound emitted by a detector. Also your gun can only fire off 2 or 3 shots before needing to be recharged. To make matters worse, the gun is useless except at point blank range. These sections are super tense and can be genuinely terrifying, especially when you have multiple enemies and find it hard to pin point them. And it's one hit kill. The tension is also raised by the fact that you save on a handheld device with a very poor battery. This means you can only save and load your game a set number of this. This might seen tough but I found I had plenty of saves to get through the game but it does mean you have to be careful not to be sent back a long way if you get careless.
The story is frankly complete shite. The game came out when games were attempting to get more cinematic but being very amateur about it (and probably still haven't gotten over the amateur bit going by the vast majority of triple A games). Enemy Zero just rips off the alien films' story beats and it's all very predictable. Characters die, there's emotional scenes and it all falls totally flat as none of the characters are fleshed out at all. It hurts me to say it as I respect Kenji Eno a lot but this is sub-David Cage at his worst. The soundtrack and sound effects are a highlight. Michael Nyman's soundtrack kicks in at key points and while simple is very effective. It really should have been attached to a better game. Sound design is excellent throughout and helps build atmosphere.
The final disc does feel quite rushed it it mostly consisting of maze areas filled with enemies and big gaps between where you can save to artificially pad out the game. I suppose that's par for the course for games of this era where the rental market was an issue for publishers but it's pretty frustrating to get one hit KO'ed deep into these annoying mazes.
Enemy Zero is interesting enough to be worth playing even if it's not great. It succeeds as a horror game with it's gloriously tense 3D sections but the adventure sections are bogged down by poor design, awful writing and a story that is just pure cliche.
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I could actually see what they were going for with Route B. It was to show that 9S was actually far more powerful than 2B. However there was probably a much better way of doing this than having you replay the entire route A. Even the original Nier which performed a similar trick only had you complete the game from the halfway point.
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I expected the underhanded snarky comments because you seem to be someone that just can't let anything go but I can't really let slide the fact that you are insinuating that I'm a racist now?
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Awh, what did I miss? (rhetorical) 😂
GAME: Gears of War 4
PLATFORM: Xbox One
Completely forgot this game ended on a cliffhanger. No other game in the series did so. It was very abrupt.
What else can I say? It's more Gears.
Not a fan of the new protagonist, but the new female addition has a great arc, plotwise.
Looks stunning in 4K as well.
Jumping onto Gears 5, although I'm pushing my luck because I'm supposed to leave for work in an hour. I might go later just to get an hour into this :P
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This is my first update in a while, so bear with me.
Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge
I haven’t done a full playthrough in years. It still holds up exceedingly well. Great controls, cheesy, fun story, likable hero. I love the map designs and settings of the game (with maybe the one exception of the lost city) Thoroughly brilliant.
Moto G.P. 2
Pretty much more of the same as the first game…it’s grand.
Ghost Recon: Future soldier.
This was great fun. The shooting was enjoyable, all the gadgets were nice to play around with. The stealth sections were fantastic, especially the lone wolf mission where you insta-fail if you trip an alarm. It’s probably the last proper Ghost Recon we’re likely to get for a long time.
Project Sylpheed.
A bit of a strange beast. As a spaceship shooter, it’s fun and bright, if a little easy. It’s story is ripped straight from Gundam. It’s Achilles heel is every mission has an invisible timer counting down. You only get a warning when it goes below three minutes and you better prey that you have all your objectives done because otherwise f&^k you! I just can’t understand why a developer would willingly sabotage an otherwise decent game like this.
Battlefield: Bad Company
The gunplay is good if a little sticky. The maps are nice and big and the characters are fun. I know battlefield’s big selling point is the vehicle combat but I really only got into tanks and jeeps when I had to. It got old driving a tank and then 50 RPG soldiers spawn in the hills around you.
Battlefield 1.
This was a massive improvement. Visually it’s stunning and the controls are much more fluid. I liked the war stories format for the campaign but I don’t think I’d prefer it long term (not much danger of that happening now though) The vehicle controls were much better than Bad Company. Setting it during the Great War was a masterstroke as the world is so different to the other big games out.
COD: WWII
The campaign is standard enough and the characters are…grand, but COD always has great set-pieces. The presentation is fantastic and the gameplay is smooth (The M1 Garand is more fun here that I think any other WWII game). Iv’e stormed Normandy about three times in the last year and a half and while Allied assault is by far the best, this is a respectable second.
Battlefield 3
A short campaign isn’t a bad thing. B3 is grounded as oppose to COD’s ott extravaganza. My biggest issue is that you can be running around and get caught on a tiny pebble in a car park. It’s decent but still comes off as a cheap mans COD.
Battlefield 4
A step down from 3, I encountered a few minor bugs, most notably where the NPC’s wouldn’t follow me and I had to mission restart. There was the odd design choice in the campaign that don’t really work following on from 3. The multiple choice ending is laughably lazy. There was one apart I found really frustrating. At one point you have to cross a large area filled with about 20 normal enemies, snipers and armour, then go through a short tunnel into a second area filled with normal enemies, snipers and rpg troops as well as another armour. Any sane person would put the checkpoint in the tunnel but not DICE, clear both areas as well as the park behind or it’s back to the start again. The game looks great though.
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