Games completed 2021

Finished Steamworld Heist. Fun little game. Essentially XCOM on a 2d vertical map. Took me about 15 hours to get through and is regularly on sale for <£5 if anyone likes that types of thing.

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Gone Home - 7.5/10

Enjoyed this - good couple of hours exploring and piecing together the story. Think the story itself could have been a bit stronger, but it was fun. Not as atmospheric as Edith Finch.

Completed the Lisa games, really loved them. Definitely not for everyone (deals with very incredibly dark themes, sensitively but blended with a degree of humour that might jar with some people) but I really enjoyed it.

Kind of hope I get to play Earthbound one day, given how much I love games inspired by it - Undertale, Deltarune, Yume Nikki, etc

Completed Disco Elysium for the second time, this time playing as a himbo centrist specialising in Shivers, Half Light and Empathy. Discovered so much more of Martinaise this time around (completely missed the pinball back rooms, a lot of stuff to do with Cuno and the date with the widow in my first run) and the moralist vision quest was superb, particularly as I got a very ominous non-standard game over through it).

Bit of a strain towards the end because the game bottlenecks you to make sure you can complete the investigation, but overall it remains one of my games of the decade. It’s become the one I generally recommend to almost everyone who’s happy to chat about the vidya, I just want to talk about it more.

It’s easy to emulate, isn’t it? I have it on my Chinese handheld, and the Mother 3 translation.

don’t think i’ve posted inhere before but i saw the thread and it made me think about it so might as well join in:

think i can officially say i completed F1 2020 now that i got the platinum trophy - always hard to know the difference between “completing” and “being done” with a sports game for me that in theory has infinite playtime, but this feels like a good end. i also won the drivers and constructors titles on My Team mode so yeah, that’ll do me. 829 hours of playtime though :grimacing:

completed Control the other week, it’s such a good game. some of the combat bits were a bit frustrating, and when i was going round clearing stuff up to get the platinum i cba and just turned invincibility on (there was one side mission boss that wound me up so much, tried to do it properly so many times but it felt so cheap and unfair at times so i turned one hit kills on and just ended it in a second, take that stupid side boss), but otherwise the story, setting, characters, the way you can generally just fly around and throw stuff in people’s faces, all super good.

earlier in the year i completed Hitman 3 - very good game, haven’t got the 100% or platinum or anything yet cos a couple of trophies glitched on me, hopefully they’ve fixed that by now. the Dartmoor, Berlin and Chongqing levels lovely in particular, and it looks great on a PS5, especially some of the older game levels that have been upscaled e.g. Sapienza :heart:

i also replayed a couple of old games, guess they count:

  • Sonic Spinball - absolutely fuck this game, honestly
  • Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine - still fun, might get Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 one of these days

feel like i might have completed something on the Switch too, but then i mostly just play Tetris 99 and i dunno how you complete that.

Yes

Feels like TRASH. Awful feeling pinball and awful feeling sonic game

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the pinball bits are bad and need such precision to do anything, usually hitting targets off screen you can’t even see. but the Sonic bits are appalling, he can’t run or jump or dash properly, it’s terrible.

music is OK though.

January 15th - Spiderman (PS4)
January 17th - Labo VR goggles and camera (Switch)
March 19th - Labo VR blaster (Switch)
March 19th - Bowser’s Fury (Switch)
April 12th - Bloodborne + Old Hunters DLC (PS4)
April 18th - Star Wars: Battlefront 2 campaign (PS4)
April 19th - Journey (PS4)
May 24th - Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20th anniversary edition
June 23rd - Vanquish (PS4)

July 15th - Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (PS4)

Always been keen to play this as a big fan of MGS3, a fairly big fan of 1 and someone who enjoyed parts of 2.

My issue with MGS is that, for all it’s great looks and style, it’s a mess to actually play and can’t make up it’s mind what it is; I don’t mind the story being zany, that adds to the charm, but I do mind the gameplay being so schizophrenic. One minute it’s super serious and realistic, the next utterly ridiculous. Sometimes you have to take ages to drug and hide a soldier, yet sometimes you can sneak around in a box and no one notices. The control to stand up AND hide is the same button. And the camera means the stealth in it isn’t really very good.

On the whole, I very much enjoyed this super level demo. I loved figuring out ways to break in, scoping out paths through the site, working out places to do safe extraction, using the weather to my advantage and the overall look of it all. I even tried to tackle certain areas in differing ways. MGS is a massively stylish series.

I still find as a series that it’s stuck between stealth and action though. When I have to get a gun out or go nuclear on enemies, it doesn’t feel as great as The Last of Us or Tomb Raider. And when I have to sneak around and get a lie of the land, it doesn’t quite nail it in the way that Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Splinter Cell does.

I felt halfway through the demo that I was 100% up for 40+ hours of MGSV straight away. But by the end, I’d been found twice despite seemingly doing nothing wrong and found myself wondering if I am just not supposed to ever play stealth games.

I start out every game of this ilk saying ‘I won’t get found once’ and by the end I’m willing them to end.

So I’ll park the full MGSV experience for now I think. But Ground Zeroes has enough to suggest that I’ll like it more than I did some of the earlier MGS games, gameplay wise.

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fwiw, there are lots of ways of mitigating getting spotted in MGS5 and as far as I remember, it’s mostly a lot easier to tell where you and the enemies are than in Ground Zeroes, plus the meta game upgrading elements add a lot to the compulsive gameplay loop.

2 Likes

Definitely what @Bamnan says. I’ve loved MGS from the PS1 days and Ground Zeroes felt far too bare-bones for my liking. V improves the stealth in every way - you have far more options/tools/skills at your disposal. The gameplay loop is fantastic, the weather systems and environment are great, but I just don’t think there’s a very good game built around it. It’s definitely worth a go though.

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I lobed playing 5. It feels amazing. The story and weird side of gms is wrverely lacking though

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It’s annoying because it genuinely is the best one to play from moment to moment, but it’s so diluted by the open world format - it’s like they didn’t know how to implement it properly so instead you get a million outposts to clear. That’ll do. Think I only remember an airport, a smallish castle, and a house in a canyon, and that’s from ninety hours of playtime! At least in Death Stranding Kojima made repetition central to the conceit itself.

It might not quite be there in the pure feedback like super mario world but if you factor in the amount of systems going on, mgsv is probably the best feeling game ever made

Riding a horse, vaulting a wall, sneaking through grass, running to your helicopter, throwing a guy to the ground, all best in class

4 Likes

Been watching my flatmate play it and it does seem just insanely polished, almost like the very best Nintendo games

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yeah, though it does have huge flaws in terms of story and pacing. Hard to go back to any other stealth game though afterwards

Enchanted Arms (PS3 - 2007, launch title)

What started as a joke race to completion between me and a colleague turned into me genuinely loving this. Its very mediocre but total JRPG comfort food. I had this back in 07 but bounced right off it cos it wasn’t next gen enough and I was a dumb kid. Anyway, I win in the race and had a good time.

Oh, and it’s the best From Software game lol

1 Like
  1. Sekiro (third play through to get an alternative ending). PS4
  2. Paper Mario (Switch)
    3. Demon’s Souls - Remake PS5

Really enjoyed the remake of Demon’s Souls. Never played the original but I have extensively played all the other SoulsBorne games so this has been on my want list for a while. Looks amazing, the game play is excellent and the world design in terms of the variety in the different areas is really impressive.

3 Likes
  1. Sekiro (third play through to get an alternative ending). - PS4
  2. Paper Mario - Nintendo Switch
  3. Demon’s Souls Remake - PS5
    4. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut - started on PS4 finished on PS5

This game is a modern classic for me. An amazing story, full of humour, pathos and incredible narrative nuances with brilliantly realized characters. The mystery you are trying to solve has a lot of twists and turns but it is the sociopolitical story underpinning the whole game that really is what pulls you into this perfectly formed world and the breathes life and purpose into the twisted cast of characters that inhabit it.

3 Likes