12in12 / 52in52 Video Game Challenge in 2016

[shirenuファクトリー]

Week 11: Jet Set Radio

Hello, I'm here to fail again! Basically, I can't play JSR because the controls require you to have like a round stick movement to complete some very basic stuff and I don't have a controller with one.

Other than that, the beginning of the game reminded me of Parappa the Rapper which is legendary.

I'm just not going to stress about this challenge too much, k.

[Hart]

Sorry I haven't been updating on my progress.

Month 3/Week 9: Deadpool



What is there to say about a game about 'The Merc with a Mouth' who breaks the Fourth Wall? Just some good old-fashion hack-&-slash/shoot-up with Wade Wilson's brand of humor. Surprised at how short the game is. Could've finished the game within a week if I wanted to. Still enjoyable though.

Week 10: Syberia



Nice point-and-click game. Loved the visuals and soundtrack. Hated how I had to backtrack for solving each puzzle and progressing the story. Still....can't wait to play the sequel. As for why it's spelled with a 'y'? It's part of the storyline that I won't spoil.

Week 11: Evoland II - A Slight Case of Spacetime Continuum Disorder



Loved the first game. When I heard there was a sequel I knew I had to buy it immediately. Sorta like Chrono Trigger, mixed with all types of gameplay (RPG/strategy/shoot-ups/puzzles/music/etc), and a lot of video game and pop culture references. More content than the first game and a bigger storyline.

Week 12: A Bird Story



Not much to say. Not as great as To the Moon. Extremely short (just 1 hour long). Enjoyed it anyways. Anxiously awaiting the sequel for To the Moon, Finding Paradise.

[pikapikapika]

Week 11:






Smaller screenshots may contain spoilers.

Time Played? 5 hours or so.

This is a surprisingly unique fighting game from Bandai Namco & Pokemon!!
One thing it is not is a clone of Tekken with Pokemon characters shoved into it, which I'm really glad about because I have a terrible time with anything Tekken related XDD so this makes me very glad.

Each match starts off in a 3rd person Virtual On/Naruto style mode where you look behind the Pokemon like in the Pokemon games, after you do a certain amount of hits you end up in a 2D style battle like Tekken (it's not very Tekkenish though) and there are 3 buttons and a jump button. It's all very simple and follows a janken style system.

Since they came out quite close together it's hard not to compare it to SFV, SFV suffers from long loading times and long waits in general when it comes to online battles, this game shows SFV how it's really done. You fight your opponent in less than 10 seconds, and if you take any longer, it gives you a CPU match to practice with, but this has never happened to me once yet, I always connect in about 3 seconds and I'm fighting soon afterwards. Another thing it has over SFV is SINGLE PLAYER STUFF like tournaments, leagues, character customisations, a better training mode (seriously) and an official controller that actually WORKS.

I got the SFV Chun-Li Mad Catz controller and it has a shitty d-pad and the analogue stick is falling apart 
I may go back when the update comes out, but my PS4 has been off for weeks now ... I honestly regret buying it, I knew it was stupid :/

Oh and the character I play for now is Pikachu Libre who has a STONE COLD STUNNER as one of his moves.



Recommended? Gimmie a hell yeah!
Replay? HELL YEAH!

[shirenuファクトリー]

Week 12: Aerena

Maybe I should have done some research on some of the games I'm including on my list?

Aerena is a multiplayer game. This is something I learned only after doing the intro of three matches that the game forces you to do upon first launch. So basically I was only able to do those practice matches because I only play co-op style multiplayer games

Aerena is a turn-based strategy game with a sort of pirate-y theme, as the goal is to eventually 'sink' your opponent's ship that is defended by his dudes, and you also have your dudes. It seemed to have some fun mechanics available and if I at all was into games like this I'd probably love it. But I think if Final Fantasy Tactics couldn't convince me to get hooked on this 'strategic aerena' type battling, nothing could.

Anyway, aside from the multiplayer aspect, it turns out that in the end of April the game is shutting down altogether, as the developers don't have the money to keep the servers running. If you want to give the game a try, now would quite literally be the last opportunity to do so. This piece of news made this week's game a wee bit more depressing even if it wasn't the type of game I would play much, anyway.

[shirenuファクトリー]

Week 13: LISA

I did not have enough time to play this game this week, but this game seemed... unforgiving, gritty, funny, quirky, intriguing. It's another game I started playing rather blind and even though I did not get far, it was fun watching it unfold in front of me.

So I would definitely recommend it!

[coachie]

I've been postponing this for weeks now.... I was so lazy... still am... lol

Submerged



A Ps4 download game. I became interested in, when I saw that trailer last year. Without further knowledge I bought it on sale and that was, in hindsight, a good thing, because I still feel like the 9,99 I paid was too much.
First of all I have a huuuuge weakness for postapocalyptic worlds and the quiet atmosphere and music (though consisting of only two tracks) is beautiful and soothing, The way the Story is told through pictograms is also fitting for the game. The Story can probably be beat in under 2 hours, but if you try to get all the 86 collectibles to discover the backstory of the City, you can dunk in some more (it took me around 6 hrs maybe).
My main problem with the game is that I didn't care about the characters at all!!! The exploration part alone is too boring and repetitiv. Or maybe this is just my problem, I read comments that complained the map was too small! Uhm hello? How big a city with almost nothing to interact with do you need???


Never Alone

Another download game. It's cute and best played with a friend (sadly I had to Play with me and myself). I love how it tells a story while teaching about Inuit culture. I enjoyed playing as much as watching the Video Clips. Another game that combines playing while learing something is Valiant Hearts! We really need more of this kind of game.


Digimon Story Cybersleuth

Back in the days you were either into Pokemon or Digimon I was into the latter, though it never became that big over here. I watched the TV Show, well the first two seasons and that was it. I once bought a Ps1 game, but it was so ugly, I sold it after playing for ten minutes.
Since then I had almost forgotten about Digimon, that was until this game was announced for the west! I was super excited and i didn't even know why exactly. Thats what nostalgia does to you!
I beat the Story in 83 hrs and are at 100+ hrs still counting with collecting stuff and doing challanges. Pretty (stupidly) impressive for a game I don't consider that good. But man, you gotta digivolve them all!!!!

[Tuffty]

April (6/12): Salt and Sanctuary



Where does the line blur between something that can be seen as an homage or plagiarism? I only ask because Salt and Sanctuary, a 2D side scrolling brawler platforming RPG (phew) shows it's influences within minutes of first playing the game and continues well on through until the end. To say the game is inspired by Dark Souls is not an over simplification of the game, it literally comes through in the game's mechanics. There are modified version of bonfires to rest at and level up, you lose your exp upon death and have the opportunity to make the way back to the area you died from the bonfire and can claim it back if you don't die again, there are attribute scalings with weapons, covenants to join, fat rolling, fog doors, message left behind by other players, parrying, overarching narratives that you seek out via NPC dialogue and item descriptions, environments and monster designs that seem almost uncanny right down to very specific lines of dialogue lifted wholesale from Dark Souls. It almost feels like one step away from receiving a lawsuit.

But all of the above is fine if the game also manages to introduce some different mechanics to the mix as well as be a good game in it's own right and I'm happy to say it succeeds on both counts. There is a sphere grid system which you now use to level up your character as opposed to pumping xp to build up your stats. It gives you the freedom to persue a job class of your wish as well as grant additional benefits like being able to carry more healing potions or wield higher classes of weapons. Bonfires are customisable, allowing you to determine what merchants or services you can have at an area which also grants passive bonuses upon your character. It also acts as the game's covenant system, where if you choose to stick closely to the covenant you have selected you can be granted additional buffs and bonuses each time you spawn. You have gold to spend on merchants rather than using your xp, which also acts as another incentive not to die as any time you do you lose a percentage of the total gold you have. Perhaps the biggest and most fundamental difference between this and Dark Souls is the combat. Unlike Dark Souls you have more freedom to create combos in this, combining light with heavy attacks that allow the combat to feel slightly faster. You can combine a light attack with a heavy attack to launch your enemy in mid air and juggle him in the air, Devil May Cry style. It feels faster, more vertically viable than Dark Souls could be, which isn't a slight at all, it just helps to make this game unique. Dark Souls itself is not unique, drawing on inspiration from Castlevania games and at a certain point in the game I realised that Salt and Sanctuary too, can be classified as it's own Metroidvania game, as abilities you acquire in the game can be used to access areas you were unable to reach before, leading to new treasure or access shortcuts to new locations.

What the game also shares with Dark Souls is the level of challenge. Paying attention to enemy attacks is almost as critical as ensuring you are finding and upgrading new weapons and armor which creates a sense of dread and awareness in every area. This game isn't without a sense of threat lurking behind the oppressive darkness in each area as you venture ever deeper into it. It's why it works as an homage to Dark Souls, it really nails what makes those games so appealing and rewarding to play. As mentioned before it even draws inspiration from Castlevania games, making it almost like a slower paced Symphony of the Night. All this with a hefty amount of content and replayability with different character classes (I hadn't even touched on what magic you can use), secret areas, branching sub questlines and optional bosses and areas to see that can only be found on one playthrough, demanding that you play it again to see the alternate path. All this, achieved by Ska Studios, literally a husband and wife team. To see this game with this amount of content made by two people can put others to shame and surely even makes the studio behind Bloodstained, the Kickstarted project from the founder of Castlevania, get a little nervous.

Of course, with two people, there's only so far this game can reach and sadly that does show with it's lack of polish and graphical fidelity. It has a healthy number of bosses but the vast majority of these are not really well thought out as one strategy (attack a few times, roll to the other side before the enemy attacks, attack again, repeat) can be applied to most if not all of them which makes them very easy to kill and immediately forgettable. The second half of the game suffers from perhaps being too easy, enemies die faster than expected if you upgrade your weapon of choice a little bit. The artstyle is decent enough with some nice looking environments and monster designs but the player created protaganist, along with other human characters look, dare I say it, downright hideous. What really hurts is that there is no map, making it very difficult to not only remember any areas you could go back to in order to revisit with a new ability, but even just to imagine in my own head where it was I needed to go and know how exactly I was going to get there proved more difficult than a Souls game, considering the extra level of verticality that this game allows. Imagine playing a Castlevania game for the first time without an in game map to refer to and you can understand the frustration.

Taking it all into account, Salt and Sanctuary is definitely a game that wouldn't be possible without some heavy inspiration from Dark Souls and Castlevania. But what the game lacks in creativity is made up for the quality in it's level design, combat system and the depth and scope of it's content which adds up to a very good game in it's own right that begs to be replayed and deserves anyone's attention.

9/10

[Tuffty]

April (7/12): I Am Alive



I Am Alive is a game focused on survival. Set in a city devastated by a natural disaster, you follow an unnamed protagonist searching for his wife and daughter, documenting his travels as events unfold around finding a sickly young girl also looking to be reunited with her mother.

Resources are scarce from the get go, armed with a gun and a machete, you rely early on with your ability to manage your stamina. Actions like running and predominately climbing will all drain stamina. Let it drop below the limit then your maximum capacity will drop each second, making the hunt for a resting spot all the more dramatic unless you fall to your death. You also have a machete and a gun, where the latter handles one of the game's more interesting concepts. Because I've played enough video games to just accept that using guns is second nature, but what if you play a game where the very fact that you own a gun is enough to be seen as a threat? That it scares anyone who threatens you to give up or plead for their life?  That's what this game does and with ammo being scarce, you often use it as a means of turning the table as you wily assess how to deal with any group that threatens you. As an early example, a group of three scavengers come towards me threatening to kill me. Assessing the situation as they get closer and closer, I know they all have machetes and so as one gets just closer enough, I brandish my machete and take him out in one strike, quickly pointing my gun at the remaining two. They raise their hands begging not to shoot and I shout at one to back off just over a precipice where I'm able to kick him off. The other gives up and gets on his knees where I pistol whip him to knock him out. They weren't to know my gun was empty. It's as if the confrontations are as much psychological as they can be physical, I really think that's a cool idea I wish more games tackled.

It's definitely an interesting concept, it treats ammo as a rare commodity that you should think twice about before using on any enemy. As the game goes on more difficulties emerge such as bigger groups, enemies who also have guns etc that makes you have to act quick to survive......until about the halfway point of the game. At that time you are given a bow and arrow and it completely trivialises the difficulty of the combat for the rest of the game. Because while you only have one arrow and arrows are very rare, it can be picked up to be reused after you kill someone. It never breaks, so in essence you have a source of ammo that is unlimited. There's little disadvantage to using it either, you can pull the bow out quickly and notch the arrow in no time at all. The game always auto aims to whoever you point the weapon at so there's no danger of missing. It just completely breaks the balance of the game, even on Survivor mode, the more difficult option of the difficulty levels you can choose to start the game with.

In any survival game, the threat of failure should be hanging over the player and in this game if you die you have to restart the level over again. That can be offset by retry tokens, something found within the level, usually at the expense of using a bullet to shoot off a locked door, or give one of your resources to any survivors that you may find. Personally it was never much of an issue, the levels are so short that even if you die and have no retries left, you only have to replay about 5 mins of gameplay at most before getting back to where you were, now familiar enough with the level to have a better go at it.

The game feels like it's half done. You get a grappling hook to use to swing from point to point but I can count the number of times I've used it on one hand. You can find a retry in the level, lost it when you die, and then regain it back in the same spot, meaning you never lose one. The game wants you to feel an emotional connection between the player and the girl you find but it's hastily thrown together. The balance of the game becomes far too easy in the second half of the game, I ended it stacked with resources so I was never in any real danger. There's also some high score system, seemingly to encourage replay value when the game simply doesn't need it. The game is not without issues itself. The controls are difficult to work with, adding unnecessary frustration during climbing sections. The whole of the game world is slathered in this ugly grey filter. Hell, I had a consistent issue with the game where the game wouldn't even reach the start menu when I selected it, locking up my PS3 in the process. In QA testing, 'Does the game switch on?' has to be the first, most basic question and the game doesn't even answer that convincingly.

I was surprised to see that the game is also surprisingly short. On the Survivor difficulty, the hardest one available, I was able to complete the game in slightly over 4 hours. Pretty surprising for a game that supposedly took over 6 years in development. It's a game with ideas that are ripe for potential, but sadly I Am Alive doesn't make the most of them in it's all too brief playing time.

5/10

[shirenuファクトリー]

I'm thinking of calling it quits for the challenge... I saw this week's game was supposed to be Arkham Asylum and I just cracked up like OH HELL NO. I'd install that and end up playing it for like 30 minutes, and that's supposed to give me some kind of an idea? The challenge is not going well for me, or maybe it's going too well. I've already found four to five games that I'd like to spend more time on, including the previous week's game that I haven't reported on, which was Rogue Legacy and SEEMED like great fun, but again, I've only played it for a meager 30 minutes. I think the challenge has been great for getting me started in looking into games I've been meaning to look into for a while anyway, but overall it's just impossible even just to SAMPLE a new game each week. It's a great initial motivator, but after a certain point it doesn't make sense to really go on anymore because I've already discovered some great games and likely the experience will inspire me to keep looking once I'm "done" with those.

Then again I'm pretty impressed that I made it to mid-April. I might have bet my money on February.

If this kept going on, I'd have lost all my computer space by the end of the year to games I really wanted to keep playing, but couldn't because they were no longer the game of the week. And I'd only have like 30 mins play time in each.

I think the list of games will still be useful to me regardless, though!

Mang maybe I will enjoy gaming more again

[Tuffty]

I hope so! Don't be putting pressure on yourself when it's not needed!

[Tuffty]

April (8/12): Zombi (sorta)



A port of the Wii U launch title of the same name, Zombi is available on the PS4 and is just as bad as the name of the game itself. On the surface it sounds like a great collection of ideas, a true survival horror borrowing an element of Dark Souls into the mix (more on that later) with punishing first person combat set in post zombie apocalyptic London. But it just doesn't mesh well together and that's without including the massive technical error I had discovered...

The story is somewhat fresh in the many examples of video game zombie fiction, a zombie outbreak that is seemingly brought about as the result of a medieval prophecy that nobody paid attention to. You have the help from an ex soldier called Prepper, who communicates via headset but really, there isn't much more to it than that. You're given no reason to care about the state of the world or the very few survivors within it as you're just given tasks to do that have very few story revelations. Even the protagonists have no background, silent and disposable.

The game itself asks that you go out to complete mission objectives, often leading you to new areas of London. You initially have no map and have to rely on your own wits to keep a sense in your own mind of where things are, but venture far enough and you will have the means to unlock a map. Zombies are slow and puny to manage in ones or twos but can be threatening in groups so you have to try and isolate them. The gimmicks with the Wii U version are now all handled on a single screen, meaning that the mini map is always displayed as is the inventory, whereas in the Nintendo original you were forced to handle all that stuff on the second screen. I can imagine this has taken away the tension from playing the original as your eyes are never kept off the screen and thus removing the thrill of say having to force yourself to look away from the TV monitor down to the gamepad and potentially get ambushed by zombies. Without a second screen, I would say that it makes it an easier game overall too, of the few times I had died it was a result of the game spawning in zombies directly behind me as I was taking on a group, making it feel quite cheap and unearned. It's a shame that the bread and butter of the game, the combat, isn't very good. You will mainly rely on your trusty cricket bat to crack open some zombie heads but it's always the same animation, over and over and over again until it feels like you too are getting bashed around the head with it. No variety at all in say, maybe swinging horizontally to hit a group in front of you, it's always a vertical swing. Guns simply don't feel good, they're pithy, not loud enough and no good feedback from using them. The interesting gimmick around the game is how death is handled. If you get killed, then the generic person you were playing as also becomes infected. Your supplies are lost forever unless you are able to go back as a new character from the safe house to the place you were last killed and there you will find the previous survivor as a zombie, and you have to attack them until they're dead before collecting your supplies again. It's got clear influence from how Dark Souls handles it and it's a cool idea, one of the few things the game has going for it.

So I say that I sorta completed the game for a reason. Reason being that 10 hours into the game I hit a game breaking bug. I reached a section in the game where you have to fight in an arena of sorts and got up to the point where I was told I could escape, only to have a zombie come up behind me and kill me. So I died, I get a new person and I went back to get my stuff from the last survivor but then...nothing else happens. There's no other mission on my mission list and there's no mission objective on my map or anything leaving me in limbo as the scripting has been completely broken. Did a search online to see that it's happened to plenty of others on the Wii U version too. More than that, the issue was patched and resolved on the Wii U but wasn't included for this version. Like I said, 10 hours into the game, I felt like I had played enough at that point anyway to make a fair judgement on the game itself. Don't waste your money.

3/10

[Tuffty]

May (9/12): Invisible Inc



As far as I'm aware, Invisible Inc is the first turn based stealth game in existence, creating it's own sub genre that I hope others continue to follow. After your future spy organisation has come under attack, you assume the role of the 'Operator', essentially XCOM's Commander by any other name, as you lead the organisation back to survival. The organisation is powered by an AI program known as Incognita, but as she is running on backup power via a helicopter, you have 72 hours to prepare for an all or nothing final mission to infiltrate a rival company and find a power source for Incognita otherwise your company goes under. That's about as much story as you will get from the game, but there is well written dialogue and a captivating rogues gallery of characters to choose from. I only wish the game give them more opportunity to flesh them out better.

The campaign in Invisible Inc requires you to undertake missions to infiltrate rival corporations for different benefits to you. As you start with very limited resources it is up to you to decide how you want to strengthen your party. But it takes time to travel to that location and each mission you take will subtract a number of hours from the 72 hours you have remaining. But the game offers a wealth of opportunities, all of which are beneficial, so how do you balance it out? You could fly to Alaska to get that new gun but that takes 12 hours to get to, time enough where you could do 2 missions closer to you but may be more difficult to take. These choices matter. And that extends into the moment to moment gameplay of Invisible Inc as well. As mentioned it's a turn based stealth game where you guide your chosen spies around a level. Movement is simple, but positioning is crucial. This is a game where a door left unclosed can spell disaster as an unseen guard runs his patrol and can see your spy through the gap. Each movement or actions costs action points from your spies and you choose to end your turn, allowing the enemy to use theirs. Part of the game's brilliance comes from the addition of using Incognita, your AI, to hack objects that you want to bypass. Safes can be opened, security cameras can be turned on your side so you can see the layout of that room and any objects of interest or guards inside. As an example, you can get a spy to peek through a door to see a safe and security camera inside, you then shift to Incognita mode to hack that camera and reveal a guard inside with his back turned to the door, shift back to the real world where you can then get the spy to move inside the room behind cover so that when the guard takes his turn, his patrol won't spot you. In your next turn you can then use the spy to sneak to the safe, steal the money within and exit the room via another entrance. Every victory in Invisible Inc comes from using these two elements in combination with each other. After working through the level and reaching the primary objective you must secure your exit, a teleporter found elsewhere in the map.

But it's important to note that Invisible Inc is so tightly designed that every little facet of gameplay and the rules and restrictions within it all require you to do one thing. Be decisive. Using Incognita sounds like easy mode for your spies as you hack your way through the level until you realise that each hacking action uses up PWR. It's added resource management on top of getting your agents to move around the level and it is so crucial. Mismanagement of PWR could result in victory or defeat for your mission, where the penalty is an end to your campaign, requiring you to restart all over much like a rogue like game (the game even erases your save file). You quickly learn you can't hack everything in a level so choosing what objects could and should be hacked becomes important. Incognita can acquire abilities to allow her to hack firewalls using less PWR for example, but to counter that are Daemons, rival viruses housed within certain hackable objects which can then counter hack you, restricting movement, costing you more PWR to hack things and even recapturing any device you hacked into back under enemy control. Every turn your agents take is important as each turn raises the security level up by 1, eventually bringing in new guards, new cameras, tougher firewalls and other nasty surprises. In short, the longer you spend in a mission, the harder it will be. Each mission is a balance of rewards for a successful mission against the cost of reaching that objective. Yeah, the teleporter to exit the level is in the room next to me buuuuuuut there are 2 safes further down the hallway and I have just enough PWR to hack both, both the alarm level is going up next turn and an elite guard could be spawned in to give away my position immediately...

You're always considering the here and now and what you can earn, but you also must think of the long game in Invisible Inc, of that final mission looming over you that you feel so woefully unprepared for. Satisfying stealth, in this game, is a mix of exploration and innovation through decisive thinking. The game teaches you the mechanics and the rules and restrictions so that the control is entirely in your hands. Due to the fact that each level is procedurally generated, it allows you to create stories of tense, unlikely escapes and huge screw ups, even in one mission. Let me tell you a story. Early on in my first campaign I took on a mission to steal a prototype weapon. As I was exploring I was hacking everything I could see and stealing credits from safes but hadn't really found the objective in a while. I eventually did, an L shaped corridor led to two doors, both locked by a security key card. On realising I didn't steal one from a guard at this point, the alarm raised up to 4 and an Elite Enforcer was brought in, who's ability is to instantly know the location of one of my agents, alarming him and all guards to move to that area. I positioned one of my agents next to the only open entrance so that when the nearest guard came through on his turn, I ambushed him, knocking him out. To my luck he had a keycard on him, but then I had a choice. At the end of the corridor is the room with the weapon, but closer to me is another locked door which leads to an exit out and around a blind side of the guards leading straight to the exit. I decided I couldn't survive by sticking to the mission so my agent ran to the door and unlocked it, opening it only to find a security camera inside. I didn't have enough PWR to hack it that turn but would gain +1 PWR on my next turn which would allow me to hack it for my use. But then the next guard would come in through the door in the next turn! It was after considering my options for a very long time that I realised my other agent had a gun. Killing a guard would immediately raise an alarm level and what nasty surprise it brings but it was a chance I had to take, otherwise one of us would be dead. So I armed his gun at the door and killed the next guard coming in on his turn. That happens and the alarm level goes up again, bringing another Elite Enforcer in, closer to our team this team. I finally hack the camera with my last remaining PWR and get both agents to sprint into the room, closing the door behind them so as not to be seen. In the next two turns I was able to get my agents to sprint out of the room and past the guards towards the exit. I failed the mission, but I survived, living to see another day. It's moments like that will stick long in the memory, as thrilling and tense as any other game could offer and all done within the gameplay and not via a cutscene.

Invisible Inc can be exhausting to play at times, but that is because of the emotional investment on top of the need to remember the rules of the game and how you can use them to your advantage. Each new campaign you start allows you to play the game in different ways. Each agent has their own unique abilities, with different avenues to upgrade them and you can give them weapons and gadgets. Different agents have different perks, new Incognita abilities change the way you can handle the PWR resource management struggle and different means of hacking objects. Different missions you take also change what kind of rival corporations you go up against, including guards with augmentations or a guard force using drones, requiring different methods to work around them. A combination of all these things results in a game with genuinely different ways of approaching the game that are s equally rewarding as any other. There is real depth here in this game through it's many layers of strategic thinking and the roguelike elements offer nearly unlimited replayability, without even factoring into the different difficulty levels. It's a tactics game that's strategic, flexible and empowering. It's about as close to video gaming perfection as you can get.

9/10

[shirenuファクトリー]

^ Glad that you're keeping the challenge alive

I've just basically ended up playing more Sims 2 since giving up . . .

[shirenuファクトリー]

Okay, since it seems I lost direction completely after giving up on this challenge, I'm thinking of starting going through games again from the top, but this time with no time limit. Just trying to make use of the list that I already have It seems a lot of gamers have some sort of a backlog list of games they want to play next, so even if I'm not doing a challenge, this can still be of use to me ^^;; Tho I will be skipping the games I'm not enjoying or can't play...

[coachie]

Ok, a little update on my gaming!

At the beginning of April Nights of Azure/Yoru no nai kuni from Gust was released. A game I was really REALLY looking forward to.
It was advertised as a more mature, darker action RPG and coming from Gust, hell what could go wrong?
In the end it was just ok'ish, but at least it had (the promised) yuri

The game for May was Batman: Arkham Knight
I got this together with the insanely priced Batman Ps4 last year (i just had to have it), but somehow wasn't in the mood for playing it until now.
It took only minutes to get right back into the world and controls and I was THE BATMAN again!
Everything looks fantastic, the city is gigantic, i still discover new corners, the batmobile is a nice gimmick, thogh Gotham doesn't need supervillians to get destroyed, me in the batmobile can do that job just fine!

[Tuffty]

June (10/12): Gone Home



It's difficult to provide a comprehensive review of this game. For one, there is little gameplay to talk about. You walk throughout an empty house, investigate some items, solve very few light puzzles. Secondly there is little of the game itself to talk about, I managed to start and complete it in one sitting, in an hour and a bit of my time. The focus is on the narrative and to that end, Gone Home feels more interactive fiction than an actual game.

The story has you play as Katie, the year is 1995 and you're returning to your family home after a long vacation in Europe. The game starts outside the house, the door is locked, the house seemingly empty as a storm rages on outside. A note is stuck to the door and raises some immediate questions, what happened and where are Katie's mum, dad and teenage daughter Sam? As you enter the house you go through room by room, searching through drawers, reading notes etc piecing together the story on what happened. With so short a running time, I can't talk about the story that much but the creators of the game decided that family drama should be the subject of the game and I applaud them for it. You don't see many games approach it and it was an interesting experience to be able to understand and form a story in my own head just by inspecting objects or through looking at the environment around me. It doesn't always work, finding post-it notes stuck to the walls from the mother's perspective on her relationship troubles seem pretty forced and obvious. The game also makes it seem like there is something darker than it really is. The house is empty on a stormy night and you find information on rumours of the house being previously haunted and dubbed 'The Psycho House'. It all hints at a darker secret but never capitalises on it. It's unresolved, a plot thread that bares no impact on the main stories being told, as if the game was doing to have this horror element but was stripped away leaving only a few clues.

The main thrust of the story centers on teenage daughter Sam and her coming of age story. If you dig deeper into her personal life and find key clues you will get to hear a voiceover for Sam reading a journal she's been keeping which is addressed to Katie. As more and more of this continued I really grew to dislike this narration because it is such heavy handed means of communicating the story to the player that it almost felt like the game didn't have the confidence in me to be able to piece together the story for myself and so just straight up told me what was happening for fear of the story somehow being lost on me. Sam's story is not often told in the medium and I applaud the idea, but the writing of the narration would very generic and trite in some coming of age TV soap like Dawson's Creek. There are some interesting short stories you find in the house through exploration, which Sam has written herself at different stages of her childhood, fantasy tales of pirates, which do a much better job of communicating her struggles with her own identity. It's a method of storytelling that can only be done in this medium. To have the narration spell out her struggles for you almost defeats the entire purpose and focus of the game itself, working against it.

When the credits roll on Gone Home I was left disappointed. There was an interesting idea here but the total running time makes the story frustratingly slight. There's nothing new in the gameplay worth mentioning either making Gone Home an interesting piece of interactive fiction that I would recommend watching a playthrough of if you have an hour or two to spare. Sadly, there's not much more to it than that.

5/10

[pikapikapika]

Thanks! even though it's free this month you've given me good reason to not even try it I could probably watch this on youtube.

[shirenuファクトリー]

^ I actually enjoyed the experience of Gone Home, if it's free why not spend one hour on it ?_?

[Tuffty]

June (11/12): Uncharted 4



In what could be the last game in the popular action adventure series, Uncharted 4 may just well be the best of the series. Naughty Dog is just better at this than anyone else.  When it comes to matching narrative and gameplay, creating an interactive experience where you can be the participant and the audience, they just nail the balance right and Uncharted 4 does it better than any other edition in the series.

The story centers on Nathan Drake once again, famous explorer and adventurer now retired and living a quiet life of domestic bliss with the love of his life Elena. Although, it's not too easy for him, as he yearns to go back into adventuring rather than getting stuck with paperwork. That all gets turned on it's head once his older brother Sam, once thought dead, comes back into his life unexpectedly and it's to drag Nathan back onto the trail of treasure belonging to the notorious pirate Henry Avery. Nathan has sworn off the fortune-hunting life, but Sam's life is at stake, which eventually pulls Nathan in to seeking out the treasure on a globe trotting adventure.

Going into this, I was most curious about what the story would be like. The game itself seemed like it had a difficult period during development where the series writer and creative director Amy Hennig left, as well as the director of the game. They were replaced by The Last of Us' leads Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley and, according to star Nolan North, swathes of Hennig's story and months of work were scrapped. So it was interesting to me to see what tone the story would be. Would they stick to the series roots with high octane Hollywood movie esque action and set piece moments with the down to earth good humor and sentimentality or maybe strip it away and focus on something darker in tone? The truth is somewhere in the middle. Where Uncharted 4 differs from the previous games and in an obvious touch from The Last Of Us, is that the story is grounded in the characters and the relationships between them. As good as Uncharted 2 is, you couldn't help but feel that it was a series of set pieces thrown together with a story built to serve around it. Like I said, that's fine, earlier games were on another level in terms of structure, plotting and tone, it's just that what we have here in Uncharted 4 take a different approach and places the emphasis on the characters. I've always enjoyed Nathan, Elena and Sully and their banter between them but Uncharted 4 allows these characters, including fresh faces, to shine. You get insight into their true natures and desires to stay with each other, even if Nathan is such a mess of conflicting motivations and desires. It results in Uncharted 4 being a game that's paced very differently, the first half of the game, particularly the beginning, has quite a few sections where there's very little action happening. In truth, the game has a pacing issue at the beginning of the game because it's fairly slow, but it picks up a few hours in to make a consistently excellent adventure. Ultimately I really like the balance, the quiet sections means that the action hits home that much harder.

The spectacle comes from Naughty Dog's attention to detail, incredibly rendered landscapes that are fully explorable from intricately detailed buildings and ruins that impressed me the more I further I got into the game. Again and again, the game shifts emphasis from combat to puzzle solving to climbing platforms to exploration, interspersed with cinematics to let you have a breather. There are new additions this time round such as the grappling hook.  It allows for greater variation in world traversal while also used as a tool in combat. Instinctively deciding to take a risk by using the grappling hook to swing from one point to another as enemies are shooting at you, only to swing just far enough for you to fall and land an instant knockout punch on an enemy is every bit as exciting as you would imagine it to be. It also opens up the maps wonderfully, creating real playgrounds to explore and find secrets or hidden notes which rewards you with game bonuses.

The open nature of the playgrounds also feeds into Uncharted's new mechanic of stealth. As Nathan is more agile than Joel from The Last of Us, you're free to leap and jump between cover, hide in tall grass and choosing your moment to take an enemy down. Nathan and the crew are against a private army, so the odds should feel stacked against you that using stealth is a viable option and while it's satisfying, playing it on hard like I did seemed impossible to follow through completely. I assume lower difficulties have fewer enemies to deal with as it seemed impossible for me to take someone down without being spotted most of the time. I learned to accept it and use stealth as far as I could and if I got spotted then I would get into the firefight and use the environment to my advantage. It's as close to an Indiana Jones adventure as you can get. There is puzzle solving but they're pretty brief and not particularly challenging.

Last to mention is the jeep. A little before the halfway point, you get to drive one around an environment. It's a neat addition, it's fast, fun and opens up it's own smaller puzzles to deal with. For example, you have to use the winch at certain points to get the jeep up a particularly muddy slope and so you have to get out of it and run and jump your way up and across until you find a sturdy tree to use as an anchor to drag it up. It's these sections that also makes you appreciate the level design, gorgeous environments that leaves you in awe over just how much time, skill and money it takes to create something of this scale.

I also have to mention the multiplayer as it's enough on it's own to keep me away from Overwatch sometimes. It's not a heavyweight onling experience and it does nothing fancy at all but it is a lot of fun. Respawns are fast, loadouts kept pretty simple but offer a lot of variety in what you can get. It's the flipside of the coin, where single player is dictated by logic and physics and plot, in multiplayer it's pure insanity. Totems that can drain the life out of your enemies, a magic lamp that allows you to dash like the Flash and being able to summon AI partners out of thin air to help in the fight are commonplace within tightly constructed maps amongst gunfire and explosions. They are making good already on promises with continuing to support the multiplayer with free maps, gear, weapons etc so there's a good platform there to build upon.

Overall, the combat can maybe feel a little loose and perhaps the setpieces aren't as grandiose as falling out of an airplace, but the construction of it all is much more impressive than it has been before. This is without a doubt one of the best looking games I have ever played, not just in terms of graphical fidelity, but scene composition, camera positioning and lighting. It boggles my mind that there are assets and environments built which are so detailed in themselves that they could serve as great backdrops to games in themselves and yet they are never seen in the game again. It's been true of all the Uncharted games but to see it here, looking the best it's ever been and in the longest Uncharted game there has been, is something special. There's so much that goes into making every aspect shine that creates a masterful piece of storytelling, packed with jaw dropping scenes as well as touching character moments backed up by the always impressive cast of Nolan North, Troy Baker and Emily Rose. As a celebration and fond farewell of what the Uncharted series has offered, I really couldn't have asked for too much more.



9/10

[coachie]

Actually finished this game weeks ago, but I haven't beaten anything other yet so here I am.... whooop... Child of Light

Beautiful Visuals and Presentation and a superb Soundtrack!
On normal the game is way too easy, but that was ok for me, I didn't have the nerve to play on hard anyway.