My backloggery
I can get behind this. Though I generally like to "Complete" a game before I move on, so getting to 51 is probably not going to work, but hey, we'll see.
Game #1:
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance - 44 hours
This game is just pure over the top action fun. I have collected everything, except all the titles because that's a bit over kill, 1st ranked all vr missions and completed Revengeance difficulty. I cannot recommend this game enough and it's only 20 euro on steam, with all the dlc.
9/10
Game #2:
Portal 2 - 15 hours
First did the co-op with mah man Sendouche and then completed the main story myself. Was a pretty good game, really enjoyed the multiplayer. Singleplayer was really good too, though I hated the section where you get out of the
and it becomes a white spot search instead of a puzzle game. If the game was only test chambers it would've been excellent.
7/10
Game #3
The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds - 25 hours
I think this is the first Zelda game I ever collected every heart pieces in. That, IMO, says a lot about this game, everything is fast and almost has a "no non-sense" kind of feel. Side quests aren't fetch quests that are way too long, but short burst. The 60fps is so good, really flued. First time controlling Link just gives you a "yes, this is going to be good" feel.
8/10
Game #4
Corpse Party - 20 hours
Really, really disturbing game. Think of something horrible and it probably has it (and if it doesn't it will probably be in the sequels). The game was really scary the first 2 chapters, almost too scary, like I was almost to scared to go on. It's weird how an RPG maker game can make you so scared. Though truth to be told, I was really afraid there would be random jump scares. After two chapters and only one jump scare, my mind could kind off relax and the game wasn't that scary anymore. From that moment on the gore starts to ramp up, and as told before, it's really disturbing. There are some really archaic game design choices littered all over the game, which can be immersion breaking.
7/10
Game #5:
Portal - 2 hours
It just felt like a tutorial to me. I know it originally was just a little side game for the Orange Box, but after Portal 2 and hearing a lot about it in the internet I was really underwhelmed.
5/10
Game #6:
Swan Song - 20 hours
I think this will become my LTTP GotY for 2014, this game is beautifull. The cast, except for MC and the love interest, is exceptionally strong. That may seem a bit of a contradiction since that's 33% of the main cast, but the other 4 characters are just so strong that it makes up for it.
I'm sure not many people have heard of this game, since it's a Visual Novel. The game takes place after an earthquake and leaves a town completely devastated. Yes I know that there has been an abundance of these type of games lately, but keep in mind this game is a bit older.
It's pretty much the standard fare, they try to survive and things don't go really smooth. But the game goes a little beyond the standard fare. There is a lot of social commentry and goes into some deep things. Dealing with rape, extreme anti-religious movements, extreme religion, gang wars, dictatorship, dealing with change and so on.
What really sold me on this game was one particular character, at first it seems like he's just a little side role, but 1/3th through the game you're pretty much playing with him most of the time. The character development this guy goes through is the best I've ever seen, I've loved him, hated him, whatevered him, I pretty much felt it all. And in the end you feel real compasion towards him.
Keep in mind this game has extreme depictions of rape and violence, so if you can't handle that stay away from it.
9/10
Game #7:
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc - 20 hours
I didn't sell my vita just for this game and it was definitely worth it. It's so over the top and it really doesn't take itself serious. The courtroom sections were kinda meh and I encountered some glitches in it, but aside from that the game was awesome. Very likable characters with the exception of only a few, and a solid story.
8/10
Game #8:
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze - 8 hours
Just beaten for now, I haven't done all the levels yet. After the amazing Returns I had high expectations for this game, and when I found out that (again) key people left at Retro I was a bit iffy. But, they proved me wrong and did it again, they blew away my expectation. It expands on Returns, adding more charm, better music, better bosses and the enviroment feels more interconnected while keeping the tight platforming. A truly great sequel, just like DKC2 was to DKC1 at the time. There were stages where I had a smile on my face, stages where I stared my eyes out at the beautifull scenery and even stages that made me feel nostalgic to Returns. The last world is the best world I have ever played in any platformer. Bravo Retro, this game is a true masterpiece.
9.5/10
Game #9:
South Park: The Stick of Truth - 10 hours
Great game. I'm not that much of a fan of South Park, but when it's on TV I usually end up watching it. Game is great to experience, but playing it can be a bit of a dread sometimes. Walking through South Park is really fun, seeing all those places that are not really connected in the TV show form a "real" town in the game is nice. I found that the game had a bit of a slow start, but after the first night things really picked up. It had a lot of funny moments too.
I loved all the little nods to gaming in general. There was this one section that made fun of audiologs in videogames that had me gasping for air. Game is clearly made by people who love videogames and enjoyed making the game and it channels through.
The combat can be really boring at times. I had to take a break every 2 hours because I couldn't stand the combat anymore. There really is no depth to it. Every single one of my battles had the same strategy. Oh and maybe I missed it, but there seems to be no run button for combat. How can you miss something like a run button? When I was max level I really didn't want to fight anything anymore, but I was forced to.
8/10
Game #10:
Final Fantasy Tactics: The war of the Lions - 30 hours
I didn't enjoy this game as much as I could, and that is partly my fault and that of the game. Upon starting the game one of the things I hate most showed itself. I was greeted with these three options: "New game","Continue" and ..... "Tutorial". I absolutely hate it when a tutorial is not a part of the game, but just there on the start screen. Now even though I hate it, most of the times it's doable and could have been part of the game anyway. But no, this was different, when opening the tutorial I got greeted with a shitload of options. I did one before giving up. Gaming should be fun and this just felt like learning. So going into the game I had no idea of most of the mechanics and such.
Anyway after finding stuff out on my own I got a little better at it and it became enjoyable. But only for short burst. There just isn't much variety; it's either defeat all the enemies or defeat a boss. Defeat Boss is pretty much; rush the boss and kill him the first or second turn. What also didn't help is that most of the time you spend preparing for battle. The battles are so short that you win in your preperation. Do the battle, die (or get lucky and win) remember the lay-out and pick your team. What I did really like about the game was the story, really nice story, with an awesome ending that took me by surprise.
6/10
Game #11:
MDK - 3 hours
I enjoyed it, not really much to say about the game. Apparently it was pretty groundbreaking for it's time, but now it obviously isn't and won't have an impact on me. Had to mess around with the controls for a good hour before playing, the way the PC controls work are so weird. Wish it was a little longer, because I really were enjoying it.
7/10
Game #12:
Titanfall - 40 hours
Hadn't really played any competive shooter since MW2, couldn't get into them. But with Titanfall I could get into it again! This game is just so much fun and that is thanks to the freedom of movement. If you can imagine it, you can probably do it and so much awesome moments have come from that. Sometimes crazy things just pop up in your head and when you pull it off (which is not that often, lol) it's just such a great feeling. It just makes you feel good about yourself. Titan combat is really solid and a ton of fun. A lot of mind games involved with it.
The grunts really are useless and often I get really screwed over by them. It doesn't add anything to the game, just confusing. Often times I mistook a grunt for a pilot, resulting in me dying head to head or getting seen on the radar and getting swarmed. Something that's happening a lot to me and not sure what is causing it or if other people have it too is that the killcam shows at least a 1 second gap with what I witnessed. Sometimes I pump a few bullets into an enemy before dying, but in the killcam I haven't shot a single bullet. I wish it had more game modes too, sometimes I just feel like playing without Titan, but auto-Titans suck and get destroyed in no time. That, in turn, leads to the enemies having the upper hand and destroying our teams Titans resulting in you as a pilot being cannon fodder.
8/10
Game #13:
Persona 2: Innocent Sin - 37 hours and 38 minutes
Hard to begin with this one. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I liked the setting, the characters and the thought of the game. I hated the combat and the encounter rate. Combat gets dull after a while and the encounter rate is just way too high. I've heard good things about the sequel, Eternal Punishment, so I hope this was just a very mediocre prelogue to that game
6/10
Game #14:
Dead Space - 10 hours
Got this for free on Origin and I didn't expect to be in for a ride this good. Survival horror done right. It has tank like movement, but feels a bit faster than other survival horror games. There's a good amount of scarceness and the atmosphere is great too. Like Resident Evil 4, there is a shop where you can better equipment. While in Resident Evil you basicly just save up and buy better guns, in Dead Space there's a little strategy to it. See, you can buy nodes to upgrade your gun, and they are really expensive. Sometimes you have to choose between buying ammo and buying nodes(which will save you ammo in the long run, since it will take less bullets to kill enemies). So you even have to think a bit about what you want to buy, I liked the "shoot off the limbs" part a lot, changes things up a little bit from other games. Story was there to advance the plot, not much to say about it really. All in all I really enjoyed my time with Dead Space and will definitely pick it up again this year to play on nightmare difficulty
9/10
Game #15:
Silent Hill 2 - 8 hours
Another horror game and another great one too. Compared to Silent Hill 1 I found this game to be a lot more scary. Just something about the locations that was a lot more scary. During one area
I felt like a big boss monster could just burst out of no where any second.
Not as much improvements compared to SH1 as I was expecting, camera is still utter shit and the combat is just bad. The melee attacks were even worse than Silent Hill 1, because of weird slash angles or hitting walls(which you could not in SH1). It's a bit of a shame that the bosses in Silent Hill are always so bad. They're either laughably short or way too long. Story and atmosphere are way better than SH1. The cutscenes are lovebly cheesy.
8/10
Game #16:
Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos - 2 hours
First non-Japan VN I've enjoyed playing. It mostly helps that it is really short and it's an interesting concept. You are a mediator in training, what they do is interfere in worlds where there is chaos. During your first training shit hits the fan in the world you are in and you try to make the best of it. There's not much to say really, because it's so short, but I still enjoyed it. Would've been better if it was atleast an hour longer so that the choices you make feel more weighty and the interactions between characters would be some more in depth.
7/10
Game #17:
Just Cause 2 - 73 hours
The game that has been eating my time for the last 3 weeks. It's just so much fun, I truly believe this is a hidden gem of the 7th gen. It's pretty much your standard fare open world game, only difference is that your character has this claw. I usually don't enjoy open world games, but the claw makes it fun. I think I could mess around with the claw for an infinite amount of time. Not to mention that the world of Just Cause 2, Panau, is beautifull. There are like 300-400 places to go to, which is a little TOO much, but 5-10 of those places almost make you go "holy shit". One area in particular I really liked was a military base in the depths of the jungle. The regular missions that you do aren't anything really special, but they're a nice change of pace every once in a while, which is nice.
Now during 73 hours things get to irk you too. I've had a fair amount of glitches happen during my playtime. Sometimes you just want to clear some villages, but in order to do that you often have to demolish things. This in turn will generate heat which is the typical "omg cops are after you" thing all open world games have. It's almost impossible to avoid having heat and the cops are magnets, they will find you everywhere. Not to mention that after a while they will send helicopters after you. If you don't take them out they will kill you, it's almost impossible to avoid their fire thanks to bad hitboxes. So to take them out you grapple on to them, take out the passenger and then you have to do a little quick time event to get in the helicopter. So now you're in the helicopter, but you don't want to be there, since there is stuff to collect on the ground, so you disembark. By the time all of this has happend the next chopper has arrived, rinse and repeat.
8/10
Game #18: Castlevania - 5 hours
I wanted to challenge myself for a bit, so I thought: "Hey why not go for one of those hard NES games". To be honest, I didn't really think it was hard, more trial and error. Until I got to stage 5 and that final hallway + boss combo decided to fuck me up. I think I have spend more time in that stage than I have in the rest of the game. The final stage was pretty hard too, but way more managable than stage 5. Anyway, stiff controls and huge knock back made the game way harder than it should be. Still enjoyed it
7/10
Game #19:
Max Payne 3 - 9 hours
Funny enough, I found this game to be harder than Castlevania, hurray for modern checkpoint systems. Max Payne is always fun, bullet time is awesome and this game in no exception. It was fun to fuck around with the physics and to do some stylin' moves. But I felt like the game didn't really reward the jump and shoot thing, just regular bullet time without any style. Doing a jump drained too much of your bullet time meter and you really need your bullet time to survive. I mean it's good that some modern games are actually difficult again, but in a game like Max Payne, I just want to style my way through the game, run and gun. Not hide behind cover, wait for someone to look up behind cover, activate bullet time and then pick him off. I enjoyed the over the top gruesome story and I mean really gruesome. Some parts were just genuinely "Holy shit, that's nasty". However the thing they did where some of the words in the dialogue appear on the screen made me cringe.
6.5/10
Game #20:
Tales of Symphonia - 54 hours
I went into this game without knowing anything about the game, so I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be an action RPG, instead of a turn-based RPG. The story is pretty much your typical RPG story, along with as much twists and turns the developers could come up with and put in the game. Some of the twists were really unnecessary though, some were easily predictable, while others were just laughibly bad. The most common theme in the game seemed to base around racisme, which I found surprising to see in a game. I can't really judge how well they touched on the racism aspect, since I don't have much experience with it, but I thought they handled it pretty well. The most fun parts of the game were the interactions between the characters, they were very nice to read, made you care about the characters.
The combat was okay, it wasn't really complex or anything, a lot of button mashing and abusing one skill (Tempest). When you just keep pre-emptive healing you'll almost never die. There was one feature I didn't really get, something with the Z button while in combat, but I don't think it would have mattered much if I knew what to do with it.
Everything in the game was "okay", an "okay" game with great character interactions
7/10
Game # 21:
Transistor - 15 hours
Truly a beautifull game. There was a time, some years ago, where I pleaded that gameplay is the only thing that matters in a game. That was a time when I only played Nintendo games and only owned Nintendo systems. Over the years I have branched out, played almost every genre thinkable on a lot of different platforms and witnessed how wrong I was in this statement. Transistor only makes me realise that more and more. Now I'm not saying that the gameplay is bad, but it's not amazing either. The battle system is unique and fun, but it's definitely not the gameplay that makes this a great game. It's the entire package, art, music, story, they accompany this game so amazingly. Honestly, I would play this game for just the art alone, even if the gameplay had been really bad. Every location is jaw dropping beautifull and just very stylefull. The city of Cloudbank is very well realised and it feels lived in. The game has so many little touches that are very pleasent to look at, or hear. The music is what originally sold me on the game. I remember a friend sending me the link to the OT and after listening to the
first song I was positively sure that I had to get this game. Even now, while I'm looking for the song on youtube and those first notes hit me, I get goosebumps. Yes, the soundtrack is THAT good. The story is simple and effective, the way Red and the Sword communicate is genuinly nice to listen to (or observe, since Red lost her voice). I feel like the story is the way it is, because the theme of the story. The theme of the story IS about boring and simple and people trying to break the mold.
8.5/10
Game #22:
Mario Kart 8 - 5 hours
Well, what's there to say about Mario Kart other than "it's Mario Kart". Well maybe there is a bit more to say. After being really disappointed by the Wii version this is a return to form on consoles. I feel like the balance is atleast slightly back, some changes I like, some I don't. Online is decent, but has it's hiccups. And even though the game is great and plays well, I don't play it anymore right now. And I blame only just being merely "decent". Why is there no voice chat while in race? I want to hear live reactions to crazy shit that goes on while racing. The tournaments are not great. Everything is just shy from being great. Maybe the DLC will change my mind and atleast add more replayability.
7.5/10
Game #23:
Persona 4 Arena - 25 hours
Fighting games, the only one I was atleast a little bit decent in was Soul Calibur 2. Though I always wanted to become good in one, the amount of time that you have to put into one was a bit too much for me, since I like to play all kinds of games. When I got into Persona I also got introduced to Persona 4 Arena. Hearing it was a VN I decided to give it a spin, since if I didn't enjoy the gameplay I atleast had the story to keep me going. After going through all of the character paths I came to the conclusion that it was the story that was a drag and that the gameplay kept me entertained throughout the story mode. The only story path I really enjoyed was the one with Labrys, because it was something else. The other paths ended up being the characters having the same problems as they had in Persona 4, coming to the same conclusions as they had come in Persona 4 and so on. It just felt too much like a repeat of Persona 4, which I already found the extra content in Golden to suffer from.
The gameplay on the other end was a lot of fun and fast. Even I, someone who never got into fighting games, ended up doing some flashy thing (And no, I didn't spam square). It was very easy to pick-up and play. I'm sure that even when I pick up the game now I'll manage to keep up with the CPU's. It also helps when the game is just a joy to look at, it's very chaotic, but for some reason it really fits and the pixel-art is beautifull too.
7/10
Game #24:
They Bleed Pixels - 15 hours
Got this game during the Steam sale for a few bucks. Decided to play it when internet kicked the bucket and this was one of the only games I actually finished downloading. I ended up enjoying it. It's a fairly short game, but it has a lot of replayability. The combat system is a bit weird at first, since every moved is coupled to the same button, but you get used to it. Some stages can get a bit hard, but it's all perfectly managable. The platforming itself was pretty good, except for a few weird hiccups where hitboxes are off, or your character doesn't behave as you expected her to. The little story cutscenes that played between dreams were cute too.
7/10
Game #25:
Tearaway - 11 hours
Really cute game and a very creative game too. The world is beautifull, so colorfull and just so... cute! If I had to discribe this game in one world it would probably be cute. All the little forest critters having conversations with you or the goofy scientist, they are all so cute. I'm not that creative as a person though and I feel like people who are more creative and can actually create nice things could have had more fun with the game. Sometimes the game asks you to make something and then makes it part of the game (which is really cool). But the things I made always looked like shit and after a while I just gave up on making something pretty and made some half-assed things. The platforming does it part, it's functional, but if the game was a little bit harder I think it would fall flat pretty hard. At times it's really hard to judge where you're going to land. It's good enough to get you through the game. Aside from that there a few little things that annoyed me. Frame rate would get pretty bad at certain points and the sound the camera makes when you make a picture. Even with headphones on the sound would be audible through the speakers and I only noticed this half-way through the game. Which was after the 4 hour plane ride... ehheh... I'm sorry people on the airplane.
7.5/10
Game #26:
Touch my Katamari - 15 hours
It's Katamari, it's awesome. The candy system is a bit annoying though ¯\_(ツ
_/¯.
8/10
Games in the backburner:
- Persona 2: Eternal Punishment
- Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright
- Corpse Party: Book of Shadows
- Fallout (Now Playing)