Board 8 > Post Each Time You Beat a Game: 2023 Edition Part II

(+) Yeah! (+)

Monster Train (XS/X)

Beat it on my fifth run with Awoken/Hellhorned combo (regen stacking + heavy attack on heal my savior on final boss). This could supplant Ring of Pain as my favorite deckbuilding roguelike.

Project Warlock (PC)

Decided to replay this just to mouthwash Turok 3 from my mind. This time I played on Hardcore which ended your game if you ran out of lives and made every monster stronger and faster. Didn't change much but kept me amused. I first played this game when it was relatively unknown. It was one of the few games that didn't come from the revolution DUSK brought and was just sort of there being its own little Wolfenstein clone but now that the sequel is in early access there's more of a buzz going around. Plus, it was made by just one guy and you know how I feel about games like that.

Anyways, I played this game on launch I believe because I recalled loads of bugs. Like, my last playthrough I blew up the lord of hell then the game ended itself to no credits. Some UI options exist now; crosshair and enemy lifebar are now off by default and you should really turn those things on. Yes it makes the game a little more unfair, but balance is all around the place in this game. I had a helluva time but the final boss was a marathon and wasn't so fun especially when the arena didn't actually replenish your ammo infinitely and you were forced to make do with what you had. So if you've been spamming that BFG I'm sorry that's all you're gonna get.

Those reasons along with some pretty noob mistakes like the inability to recall spells you've already learned and / or refund weapon mods not knowing that one choice is clearly better speaks to the amateurish efforts of this sole dev. Fortunately he is learning his lesson as the more ambitious sequel takes its time.

These are all the reasons why it sits in the "meh its okay" part of my tier list. I'm only listing it again here because I keep forgetting to put Fashion Police Squad which sits pretty high.

Hedon
Ion Fury (previously 3rd)
Turbo Overkill (PC)
DUSK (previously 2nd)
Hands of Necromancy
Cultic - is only this low because they decided to release it as "Episode 1"
Cruelty Squad
Fashion Police Squad
Dread Templar / HROT
Project Warlock
Amid Evil - This is my "Its okay, Average" Rating
Powerslave Exhumed
Warhammer 40K Boltgun
Postal: Brain Damaged
Prodeus
Forgive Me Father

Yakuza 4 (PS4)

A solid Yakuza title. The gameplay is much improved from 3 even with the multiple protagonist system - I enjoyed playing with Akiyama, Tanimura, and Kiryu, but not so much with Saejima. The story, besides the callbacks to 1/Kiwami, is complete nonsense. Rubber bullets is a Yakuza meme because of this game, and the villain shooting someone after being defeated is a trope that really is overused here, more than other Yakuza titles. Luckily, the story is only about 15-20 hours long and you can spend your time doing the usual Yakuza activities instead.

0 > Kiwami 2 > Kiwami > 4 > 3

Picross e4 (3DS)

Another picross title. This one has an additional 15 Mega Picross puzzles that only unlock if you have data from the previous three games in the series. I completed those as well as the other 150 + Micross puzzles.

Like a Dragon: Ishin! (PS4)
The PS3 era is back! Feels like the Yakuza 3 era, really. This game has far too much stuff and not enough design, making for an ugly mess of busywork, grinding, weird balance, flashy magic attacks and confusing progression. If you manage to push the bad off to the side, which is no easy task, the core combat and story are still pretty good.

Spider-man 2

This was fine. I think the level of VA and writing is slightly overrated - it's good, but it certainly isn't on Naughty Dog's level and I've never really enjoyed Miles' VA in particular. I think it's just the inflection in his voice at certain moments that bothers me. The decision to fill every boss battle with loads and loads of dialogue, some of which became repetitive as hell, was also questionable and became annoying.

With that said, there's about a 90 minute sequence where you fight Li, fight Kraven, fight Peter as Miles (which ruled), create Venom, PLAY AS VENOM, FIGHT KRAVEN AS VENOM, AND BITE KRAVEN'S HEAD OFF that absolutely fucking ruled. That's where the game really sang, and what elevated it to like an 8.5 or 9/10. I assume they have a plan for Harry, otherwise the decision not to just kill him off seems gutless.

But yeah standard open world stuff otherwise. I loved the feel of the combat though and I never felt like I was overwhelmed with too many side-missions or anything. They all felt like they served a purpose and were more carefully selected as opposed to just sheer quantity. That said, feel as though I need a break from open world which I'll get with Separate Ways BUT THEN IT'S TIME TO FINISH THE POKEMON DLC THEN FINALLY PLAY THE HORIZON DLC THEN PLAY THE GOD OF WAR DLC THEN FF16 AND THEN FF7R IN FEBRUARY

Although I'm likely to buy myself the MGS collection for Switch to fulfill the dream of PORTABLE MGS so there's that

Super Kiwi 64 (PC)

I've now beaten all of Sicatro's games except Toree 2 I think. I was particularly impressed with them blending retro graphics with an incredible sense of control with fast and fluid movement.

God of War Ragnarok: Vahalla (DLC) (PS5)
After Ragnarok, Kratos plays Hades in Valhalla. This is a nice little Roguelite mode with some interesting story. First, downsides
-Coming back to it after a long time, there are a lot of controls to have to remind myself of between all of Kratos' weapons, shields and rage powers.
-The temporary perks, consequently, are not as significant as in some Roguelites because they're built on top of so many actions that are always available.
-Helios is a jerk! I know he's supposed to be, but I could live without having insults yelled at me in the high-pressure timed section before the final boss.
-The sanctuaries could be smaller. Running around looking for junk is kind of a waste of time. I was glad to take the meta perk that destroys all the pots when you enter one.
Otherwise, it's quite good, and it was a free content patch so, nice.

Freedom Planet (Wii U)

This was my Wii U-game-to-play-to-avoid-system issue of the year. I first beat this on PC around a decade ago. I had meant to choose Carol this time instead of Lilac, but I forgot.

Flower (PS3)

Flowers go bloom! This is an interesting puzzle game, very pretty looking for sure. The trophy where you have to go through the 5th level without getting hit sounds like a pain, so I'm not sure if I'll go for all trophies.

And this may or may not end up being the last game I beat in 2023 depending on whether or not I can bring myself to play short games next week.

Mega Man (WiiUVC)

Death is an interesting concept in video games. On the one hand, it is needed to create tension and the tension adds an important and exciting aspect to the playthrough. On the other, death breaks immersion. You're in the game, making it happen, living through it, and then you see a game over screen and you realize, "Oh right, I'm playing a video game."

Mega Man is not an immersive game. It hails from a time when games were just games, entertainment bits in the way you'd watch an episode of a TV show. And good for it too, as you will die a lot in Mega Man.

Modern video games are accused of having bloat; endless amounts of meaningless sidequests just to have content, just to pad out the game length. Mega Man, a game from 1987 also has bloat. The bloat is also part of the game design. Death is the bloat.

Other video games released at the time have their difficulties. Doing a deathless run on your first time through Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda is not easy...but it is not impossible (especially if you go to them now with experience in video games, back then it was far harder). Doing a deathless run on your first time through Mega Man is impossible. Every encounter with an enemy is basically teaching you what the enemy does and how it hurts you by hurting you. The flying cutters will hit you the first time they appear. The big hopper will hurt you the first time it appears. If not by their attacks, just the area where they spawn. Mega Man loves spawning enemies at points where you have to jump over a gap. It teaches you by killing you.

Doing a deathless run on your first time through Mega Man is impossible, but is almost required to beat the game. The game is unforgiving with health drops, throws enemies and bosses at you continuously and to beat it, you will need to know the level, spawn locations and boss strategies by heart.

And that is the bloat. If you use the Suspend Point function on the Wii U VC, you can get through this game in a short amount of time. If not, you'll probably spend months honing your skills, perfecting level after level of a NES video game.

Is that worth it? If you like bragging to your friends that you perfected Mega Man 'the right way', it is. You can pat yourself on the back afterwards for your skill. If not, Mega Man does not really have anything to offer you.

.Cat (Switch)

You play as a white cat that got whisked away from his room into another world.
Short game. It was ok but nothing special.

. Cat Milk (Switch)

A platformer where you play as a white cat and your goal is to retrieve a bowl of milk and bring it back to the little cat house while you jump on platforms, balloons and take portals while you avoid buzzsaws in some of the levels. It has 50 levels. Short game but fun.

Timberman: The Big Adventure (Switch)

A spinoff of the Timberman series. You can play as Timberman or a Bear where they team up to rescue the Bear's wife and baby from the Evil Corp. The pixel graphics in this game are very impressive with some nice animations. You can double jump, float, chop/punch down trees to create a bridge to cross over or use blocks, toss the axe/boomerang as a projectile to hit enemies/retrieve items/hit switches and in all the levels you can even find an arcade cabinet to play Timberman as well for extra points/earn extra lives. I also like the mechanic of punching in the air which allows you to do an air dash. Although it's called the Big Adventure, it's only 3 Worlds with 5 levels each but that's ok. It was fun stuff.

Captain America and The Avengers (Arcade)

I played this via Fightcade with a friend. He was Captain America and I was Iron Man.
This game introduced me to Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye and Vision back in the day. I like everything about this game. The presentation, graphics, music, voices and the ability to use the super powers. One of Data East's best games for sure.

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir (Switch)

It was nice to have a remake of this game and have it finally localized into English, but after playing it, it feels like they made it too close to the original game. The game constantly has you going through a number of menus just to find the correct order of how to proceed - sometimes you have to choose the same option two or even more times just to keep going, without any reason pointed out to actually do so. It got frustrating enough that I eventually just pulled up a guide multiple times just to find out what to do. I feel like it would be easy to put together a similar dialogue system like Ace Attorney instead of sticking with the NES dialogue and stuffing the menus with several options that provide nothing.

The story isn't that impressive either. I guessed at who the culprit was an hour into the game and was correct, which made the entire story completely predictable. There's a lot of loose ends with a number of the characters who survived, and I assume most of them will go unresolved as the second game is supposed to be a prequel to this one. I will play the second game at some point, but I'll lower my expectations a bit while playing through it.

Have I really not beaten a single game this year??

(Ive been achievement hunting in FF14 since like February or something so I havent been playing many other games, but Im surprised that its *0*!)

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

I always wanted to get into these games, and I've become really nostalgic for the OG NDS these days, so yeah I enjoyed this one quite a bit. The puzzles always made me feel either like a genius or completely stupid. I like how literally everything in the game is a puzzle, and how the villagers' obsession with puzzles is explained by the plot twist. It's crazy there's such a huge amount of puzzles too: like 120 in the main game, 50 more in the postgame, AND there were ones you could download online for free (wish I could still get those). Also always cool to see a DS game that gets a lot of mileage out of the touch screen. Overall 8.5, very solid game, excited to play more

Grand Theft Auto V (XS/X)

This felt like a proper evolution of the phenomenal III/VC/SA trilogy that IV did not quite capture. Official and unofficial heist missions were a blast, and if Online allows you to do an infinite amount of those, I can see myself playing that a bunch. My main gripe about the game is that I really disliked flying.

Eff it, I am including

GANBARE NEO POKE-KUN (Switch) - Some time in the Summer

I played this for probably 20-30 hours. It was an endless grind. I was at the final form of the final boss on the final mini game of the entire game. This involves mashing a single button as fast as you can. I barely made it this far without cheating by rewinding a whole lot. I was on this boss for hours and hours. Screw this thing. I can't mash that fast.

I beat this game darn it, everything else was unlocked and. Blah.

The rest of the game had fun little mini games along side of a kinda virtual pet landscape where he really just does funny things. You gotta keep him happy to get him to 'build' new games. They unlock slowly. If he gets sad, nothing ever progresses.

If the switch version did not have rewind, I am officially declaring that this game is impossible to beat for about many different reasons. Keeping him happy is RANDOM. Things do random stuff and change his mood. Also several games are nearly impossible without rewind cheating. It's fun but kinda terrible lol. It would take 100's of hours and maybe years off your life if you were to beat it on an actual Neo Geo Pocket.

Mahjong Adventure DX (PS4)

I've played a lot of mahjong solitaire games but I've never seen one that hates the player this much. Still extremely easy to get gold medals on all levels. Either way it fulfilled its purpose as a trophy streak extender during my vacation.

Having not beaten a game since May, I figured I'd end the year on a high note...

Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Luigis Mansion (Gamecube)

This game is kind of ass. SO MUCH BACKTRACKING. Like even by 2001s standards. AND LUIGI WALKS SO SLOW. You get to a door that requires 20 boos, go back through the mansion and get the boos, return all the way back to the door, beat the boss in the next room, game teleports you back to the lab, go all the way back to boss room, next door the powers out, backtrack all the way to the basement to turn the power back on. Fuck me man

Collect a bunch of coins and currency that have literally zero use. Even the simple act of healing is grindy pain in the ass. Controls are ass. Moving and turning is a huge chore, and why does the A button call mario? We can clearly see the room where hes being held captive. I just love that the largest button on the controller does the most useless shit

Theres so much questionable shit in this game, but i do like the unique portrait ghosts and boss fights. Theyre all like their own unique puzzle, and they get a lot of mileage out of the otherwise simple mechanics. Lots of personality and charm too, like luigi singing along to all the quirky totaka music. At least the game tries something different, its got a lot of charm, and it has a pretty dedicated fanbase. On the other hand its a rushed launch game. I really want to like it more than i do, but theres too core design issues to ignore.

But i also cant really imagine my gamecube collection being complete without it

Like

Its fine i guess

Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Switch)

Managed to beat one (1) game this year right under the wire!

LordoftheMorons posted...

Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Switch)

Managed to beat one (1) game this year right under the wire!

See my post two above yours. High five bruh

I closed out 2023 with these games
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Streets of Rage 4 (PC)

Replayed with a friend. It was his first time going through the game too. He was Blaze and I was Axel. He wished he had gotten it sooner cause he really enjoyed it.

Belle Boomerang (PC)

This was a neat game. Very NES inspired. It has a few frustrating moments but I persevered from not changing the difficulty. Very pretty looking pixel art and some very creative boss fights. Creative use of the power ups you get in the levels as well.

Angel's Punishment (Switch)

Another Metroidvania that involved archangels and stuff. I face tanked most of the bosses except for one. Beat it in less than 2 hours. An ok Metroidvania but I played much better.

Street Fighter II Champion Edition (Arcade/Switch)

Replayed via Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection
I wanted to go out on a fun note. I finished the game with Guile.

The music in streets of rage 4 is criminally underplayed. Sure they only had yuzo koshiro for like one song, but they still managed to knock it out the park regardless

TEVI (PC)
TEVI is, to a significant degree, the sequel to Rabi-Ribi. Many people seem to fall into one of two camps: Rabi-Ribi is the gold standard for Metroidvanias, or Rabi-Ribi is too cringe to play. To the former, TEVI is often regarded as a step down, but still respectable. To the latter, TEVI may be easier to tolerate. Personally, I find it very good, although I didn't turn up the difficulty past normal, so it wasn't that rough a time. There's a lot to like here: visuals, music, boss fights, movement, combat abilities, exploration, loadout customization, hidden secrets, and an involving-enough story and writing. I recommend it to anyone who likes the genre.

The Stanley Parable (PC)

Decided to end 2023 with one last game after all. I'm not sure how to call this game "beat" since there are many endings depending on what you do in the game. The "normal" ending is just straight up following what narrator says but it's only like 10 minutes of gameplay (you even get an achievement saying you beat the game).
Beyond that is when the game gets interesting because you're free to do whatever you want with some witty dialogue from the narrator commenting on what you're doing.

All in all, it's a quirky walking sim where you're free to go wherever you can and see what happens or you can just run through the game following the narrator and be done with it.

Yes, I did get the ending where the game shifts to Minecraft and then Portal.

I got all the Steam achievements except for the one where you have the game on for full 24 hours during Tuesday, which happens to be tomorrow, so I guess I'll get it then. Looks like my 2024 Steam wrap-up will have an early contender for one of my most "played" games of the year!

Yes, I cheated with getting the Go outside, Speed run, and Unachievable achievements. I'm going with the theme of the game of not always following directions.