Rate The Last Game You Played

[N1ghtmare]

Go look at Red Steel 2 then tell me about Wii graphics XD

It can be done. Its just when I see blob shadows in a supposed revolution of a classic game I feel bleh.

 

[Juggalo Kyle]

Rift beta

7.5/10

Nothing new to the table of MMO's when coming to this game. It takes elements from Guild Wars, War Hammer, Lord of the Rings and WoW, and crams it into one (even uses the same exact hotkeys as WoW). It looks nice, plays great, but it's nothing new.

Two factions, the Guardians (Old hero's brought back to life) and the Defiant (every day citizen's) battle each other or just PvE. I only know of the Defiant story, as that's the Faction I choose, but it claims that the Guardians murdered innocent people for trying to stand up on their own against the powers of EVIL!!! The Guardians claimed that they were getting in the way, or somehow siding with Regulos (the main boss, and destroyer of everything)

I don't pay much attention to the story lines of MMO games, except for Lord of the Rings Online, because of it's main story line system (each quest is a chapter to a book, and there are several books. Everything else is just a side quest pretty much) so I can't really comment too deeply on weather or not the writing is good. I just go kill what I have to.

The PvP is decent. Nothing spectacular, but decent.


Over all, a solid MMO while it's still in Beta form. Not sure if I'll ever pick it up though.

 

[Mister_Prophet]

Fallout: New Vegas - 8/10

Well I finally finished New Vegas for the first run through. It was a pretty uneven run for me, as I was neutral for most of the game. Do a little good, do a little bad, and eat people in between. Went pretty even until I unintentionally did enough NCR missions to get a Messiah reputation. Then I tarnished my name with some Legion missions, and then towards the finale I came full circle and sided with Mr. House in the endgame.

I did all the companion quests except for Lily's and Raul because by the time I seriously started to try them out as companions I was too close to the end of the game and it was too tedious trying to figure out what I had to do to get them to open up to me and tell me all their secrets (I don't like using guides). My favorite allies were Cass and Boone, since I did all the cooler stuff with them. ED-E was interesting but not so useful as a buddy, and he(it?) gets stuck a lot. Rex just kinda sucked, and on Hardcore mode he could die so easily in every mediocre battle that once I got his brain for him I never used him again. Veronica was a late game companion and I would put her up there with Boone and Cass if not for the fact that I experienced a few annoying bugs with her (like rare items disappearing in her inventory for no reason). Arcade was the last companion whose mission I explored and his quest was really kinda irksome. I liked the idea of an Enclave Reunion, but getting him to cough up the quest was just so random. I kind of feel like there really is no way to reasonably do all these companion side quests in one playthrough, since so much of getting them to open up to you require visiting places, and for 80% of the map you'll only really go to those spots once. It doesn't help that you'll likely buddy up with the first two or three you meet and some of them may not appear for a good long while. Arcade is the worst of it, since he was the last guy I met, his requirements to join are pretty faggy, he bitches too much for his worth, and by the time I got him to agree to hang out with me and be my BFF I had explored the whole Mojave for the most part and had no clue where I needed to take him before his quest triggered. Veronica had this problem with me too, but that kind of happened naturally on its own because I was still looking around places and doing other quests.

My gripes with the companion system need to be mentioned, because doing them opens a whole venue of endings you wouldn't get otherwise. I don't think I would have bothered to get them all if I didn't know this. I'll hit Raul and Lily up on the next run through, see what their stories are.

Otherwise, yes! It's a big expansion pack to Fallout 3. I mentioned earlier how they fixed the combat system and I'll say it again. While FO3 was quirkier and had more scope to the whole world, on Very Hard I had combat covered more or less by level 15, was near invincible by 20 unless I ran into multiples of those super enemies from Broken Steel, and by level 30 I simply could not die. This was not the case at all in New Vegas. At level 30 on Very Hard fights could go south very quickly and easily unless I knew what I was doing, and I died often from start to the bitter finish. A lot of this has to do with the Hardcore mode, which I adore in this game. It solved the issue I had with arsenal oversupply from Fallout 3 and added new elements to body maintenance that totally guided how I played the game and kept the theme of wasteland survival going till the end credits rolled. There were quite a few times, especially earlier on, where I would find myself in a jam out in the wilderness. Like a broken leg I couldn't mend with any of my provisions until I wandered to a town and things like that. I only wished some more Aid items made use of the weight system. It's true that many of the edibles and the rarer healing items like Doctor's Bags had weight to them, yes, there was still that abundance of drug related things and stimpacks that had no carry limit. This left me vastly oversupplied in Fallout 3 and it did so here as well. But I suppose I can't complain too much, it's a tedious aspect.

It is true that the game map is less explorable, there is a little less diversity in what is seen as opposed to the Capital Wasteland, and that there is really nothing vastly new in terms of locations aside from aesthetics. The Strip was pretty small compared to the DC ruins of FO3, though I did like the interiors of the casinos even if they were short. The gambling aspect can be pretty much ignored entirely, and there is little incentive to do try the tables. A feel a few quests focused on Casino gambling or maybe even a Heist would have been interesting...if something like that actually exists in the game then it's possible I missed it. That's another thing!

I like very much how versatile the quest paths are in New Vegas in terms of sticking to your reputation. If I got on bad terms with a major faction I lost access to a whole branch of storyline and side quests, which actually makes playing the game again kinda something to look forward too.

Anyway, when all is said and done...as much as I liked NV it really isn't a genuine sequel, and the best parts of it still aren't as wondrous as most of what I saw and did in Fallout 3. I did not run into any real main story bugs like I did in FO3, though I did experience freezing several times (it happened twice at the battle for Hoover Dam too, which suuuucked). I also noticed a lot of character bugs popping up and people no longer being able to interact with for no reason. Also, there were doors locking me in and things like that. I even noticed some glitches in the terrain, where whole boulders were half missing and I could see through them.

But there were worse issues. I felt as if whole quests were skipped because I was playing both sides a little too loose for the game designer's plans. For instance, I actually never got or finished The House Always Wins Part V, I think it was. The one where the President gets assassinated. That whole sequence just never happened. One second I was talking about the President going to Hoover Dam with Mr. House, and then after some dialogue suggestions he mentions how President Kimball had already been assassinated and I get a "Quest V" failed or completed. It was really weird, and even weirder when in the next part of the conversation he talks about Kimball as if he were still alive and needed to be kept that way for his plan to work. That happened in a couple of other cases. Most notably, a lot of the Brotherhood quests were like this, where things wouldn't start right or got skipped in between.

During the credits, they thanked the "testers" at one point and I nearly died laughing. There were three ****ing names. That says it all right there.

I probably sound like I'm rating it too highly for so many bugs, but I'll be honest. When it worked it was some of the most gaming fun I've had all year. Fallout games are always a cut above, bugs or no bugs, so either you discard them for it or you become an apologist and accept it for the good. I am the latter.

------

Dead Money (New Vegas DLC) - 0/10

So I tried out the first DLC for New Vegas. Have to admit, I was pretty excited for it, seeing how good the ones for Fallout 3 were. Well I start the game from my last save and pretty soon I pick up the new signal, as per usual for Fallout DLCs. It was weird how the radio broadcast from the Abandoned Brotherhood Bunker had no sound, but whatever I said! Off to the Bunker!

So I get inside and the first thing I notice is that there are parts of the room are missing. You know, things like floors, walls, and ceilings, and beyond them a void in the level, which I can fall off into. Floating furniture. No quest. Nothing. Just a bugged couple of rooms.

Okaaaaay, that was a DLC well downloaded. Maybe they need to patch it? What a crock of ****. Off to a good start with these DLCs I guess

 

[Balton]

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Dead Money (New Vegas DLC) - 0/10

So I tried out the first DLC for New Vegas. Have to admit, I was pretty excited for it, seeing how good the ones for Fallout 3 were. Well I start the game from my last save and pretty soon I pick up the new signal, as per usual for Fallout DLCs. It was weird how the radio broadcast from the Abandoned Brotherhood Bunker had no sound, but whatever I said! Off to the Bunker!

So I get inside and the first thing I notice is that there are parts of the room are missing. You know, things like floors, walls, and ceilings, and beyond them a void in the level, which I can fall off into. Floating furniture. No quest. Nothing. Just a bugged couple of rooms.

Okaaaaay, that was a DLC well downloaded. Maybe they need to patch it? What a crock of ****. Off to a good start with these DLCs I guess

that's weird, only troubling bug I had is that I downloaded over german xbox live. so now my english uncut jumps to a horrible ger-lish whenever any content from dead money appears. I liked dead money, gets better the further you're in and the sierra madre chips are worth alot if you know how to exchange them well
Just thought the dlc could have more uniqe loot.

edit: proph, maybe you need to delete the dlc and redownlaod it, also try to clear your 360 chache.

 

[Mister_Prophet]

edit: proph, maybe you need to delete the dlc and redownlaod it, also try to clear your 360 chache.

Yes, I'm going to try that. Hopefully it works.

 

[dotnetbeast]

NBA 2K11 - 9/10


(I know all but 4 of you care about sports games so for you all you can stop reading here)


Amazing game. I will say against the commercial that it is not the greatest sports game of our generation though. Still a lot of glitches that looks like they won't be fixed.

 

[dragonfliet]

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West B-

This is a pretty good game. The problem, as was pointed out on Brainygamer, is that it does everything Uncharted 2 does, only worse. It is a cinematic game, in the sense that you play through a very narrow, scripted story with regular small interruptions for a brief cutscene, which is fine, only that the story isn't much, the characters are shallow at best, and in the end ridiculous (when Monkey, at the end, tells Tripp to turn it back on, I wanted to scream). The gameplay consists of Uncharted 2 style climbing and jumping, only the handholds aren't very logical (I can jump 10 feet from a handhold to grab another handhold, but I can't climb on top of a dumpster to scale a 10ft wall?) and as such can be difficult to find out. Also, the contextualized jump can be infuriating (want to jump down a ledge from 3 ft up? not so fast, buddy, you can only do this in assigned jump-down spots!). The combat is mostly melee, and works pretty well, though the game, while easy, has a few moments that are inexplicably WAY harder than anything else (and no, they aren't the boss battles). Then there are the glitches. I had to restart from checkpoint almost a half dozen times because the trigger failed to fire. WHEEE. Did I mention that the story is a disappointment? When I saw it was written by Alex Garland (of 28 Days Later, which is in my opinion the best zombie movie ever, despite a minor flaw at the end), I was psyched. Well, it's just another videogame story. There is some decent banter here and there, but it is pretty typical damsel in distress (seriously, ALL THE TIME. She's worse than the girl in Ico) with tits almost falling out of her tubetop being rescued by shirtless, freakishly buff guy (cutscenes that show his hands to be as big as her head are amusing) blahblahblah. There is a bad guy and it attempts to discuss the idea of memory versus life, but it is shallow and whatever.

Okay, that's all negative. Despite this, most of the combat is fun, the game is pretty good looking (though, again, it loses to Uncharted 2), the platforming is mostly effortless and doesn't frustrate with jumping puzzles, the puzzles themselves are decent, if simple, and the story, while trite, moves at a mostly good clip and the characters, while stock, are likeable. It's the kind of game that's better than average, but just barely. Ninja Theory needs to stop trying to emulate movies and start playing the competition's games, because there are far better out there that they could learn a thing or two from.

~Jason

 

[Sjosz]

Mega update I suppose. Have played through quite a few games since my last post.


Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - 6.5/10 - (Xbox360)

For all its shortcomings where game mechanics are concerned, I actually had fun exploring Hogwarts. Having read all the books I had quite a bit of buy-in into this game, and the exploration part and the gradual opening of the world for more exploration was definitely fun.
The actual game mechanics are not good though. The game essentially alternates between some exploration, a small set of minigames, and cutscenes, and sadly the minigames aren't good. We have potion brewing, which gets more elaborate and difficult as the game progresses, with more complex potions to brew and different actions to do during brewing; there's Quidditch, which sadly restricts itself to linear flying sequences through a bunch of star-shaped checkpoints which is annoying; and there's dueling, the one minigame that's fairly entertaining, albeit balanced horribly.
The game itself really isn't really something worth recommending, and I only played it because I could borrow it from a friend, but I had to play this game as a bit of a guilty pleasure because I honestly could not stop laughing while watching the guys at GiantBomb do their QuickLook of it. The memory of that video constantly in my mind the game was hilarious and fun to get through.


Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom - 8/10 - (Xbox360)

This was a surprising little gem. The demo wasn't very convincing, but Amazon had it on sale within weeks of its release, so I couldn't pass it up. The game is incredibly comparable to Zelda, in the way that the game world slowly opens up with the abilities you gain. It is a heck of a lot more linear in that sense, because typically you really only have 1 way to go, and there's not really a free-roaming element, as the entire game world is fairly rigorously mapped out (as you can see on the world map).
Team-work between your character and the lumbering Majin takes center stage for gameplay, where typically traversing the environment and getting past the puzzles requires you to use them in combination in one or more ways. Add to it that you can upgrade the Majin by finding special fruit that he can't grab himself because he's too big (and because the fruit is tucked away out of his reach) and the game really quickly makes working together a thing you do and don't really have to think about.
Game doesn't look mindblowing or even all that impressive, but I did find it really cool to see the Majin change appearance as he grew stronger throughout the game. The game made me end up losing track of time, and I really enjoyed it.


Red Faction: Guerrilla - 8.5/10 - (Xbox360)

Oh my goodness this game is awesome. It comes across as fairly generic at the very start, but the moment I got control over your character, whipped out the hammer, and decided to see just how much you can actually destroy in this game, the game put a smile on my face and I kept that smile for most of my playthrough (heck, I even ended up getting the DLC expansion).
Really, it's mostly an open-world game like any of the GTAs, unlocking bigger portions of the world as you progress through the story missions, with a hell of a lot of side-quests to pad out the experience. Destroying stuff and completing (side-)quests yields you the game's currency, with which you can buy new weapons for your arsenal, upgrades for your weapons and armour.
There is a story arc in the game, of course, with a rebellion against the slave-driving police force that put the mining colonies on Mars under martial law, but for the most part it's fairly light-hearted, there's not a lot of serious drama or good acting in the game. Not that the game needs it, as I spent hour upon hour destroying everything I could find in any possible way. This game is just crazy fun, kind of like how Just Cause 2 is just crazy fun for the most part.


Mafia 2 - 8/10 - (Xbox360)

Another game I enjoyed during my Christmas break. This game is so immensely good at creating atmosphere. I was awed for a good while at how this game looks and feels.
Gameplay itself is solid. The cover-based shooting is not the best but it doesn't get in the way of playing the game, and for the most part the missions are nicely woven into a storyline, which, while not original, felt just fine for this sort of game. A lot of nods and references to well known Mafia films can be seen and experienced during the main storyline.
The one mistake I ended up making playing this game was trying to roleplay as the character you play as. For the most part this works out, as the actions you do during the missions are actions you can get behind or find reasonable motivation for, but there are some key moments where the game makes it abundantly clear you play the character's pre-set story, without any real choice, as there are some things Vito does in the game that I honestly could not find my character doing.
That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the game. Wonderful atmosphere, solid gameplay, decent story and pretty well paced overall. If I were to find any real flaw with the overall events that happen with the game, I'll just say that I got angry at the game's ending. Maybe that's a triumph on the developer's part (as it could very well be intended to piss the player off at that point) but man did I disagree with what happened. Oh well.


Microbot - 7/10 - (XBLA)

XBLA game which has you playing as a microscopic robot, injected into presumably a person, to fight for that person's survival by eliminating the virus from within.
Esssentially just a dual joystick shooter, where you fight a nano-infection (not my choice of words!) throughout various areas that can sometimes be identified with parts inside a body. There's also locations that seem wildly out of context and don't look like the inside of a body at all, but then I've never really actually been a microbot in someone else's body myself.
The game is fairly standard, but I quite enjoyed a little twist where your robot evolves throughout the game, gaining either more arms to equip tools on, or gaining new tools to equip, and upgrading them. Towards the end the game does get a bit tedious and feels unnecessarily long.


Ilomilo - 8/10 - (XBLA)

Such a cute looking game. I got this when it was a viral promotion online to go to some website to get a code to get the demo off XBL, and then I could buy the game since I had access to the demo.
The story in the game is essentially about 2 small thumb-like characters called Ilo and Milo (short for longer names, but fitting) who are best friends and always meet up with each other to spend the day. Their problem is that everytime they separate to go to their respective homes, the landscape/path gets jumbled up somehow and they have to figure out a puzzle to get back together again. This is where you come in, as you control both the little characters (alternating between them) and you make them interact with the environment to figure out how to best get them back together. Seems like a super simple concept and at first the puzzles thrown your way are fairly simple to solve, but later worlds become pretty fiendish and there have been a few levels where I just needed to go do something else for a couple hours to get rid of the train of thought that gets me stuck.
Still, super charming game, and I really enjoyed it.


World of Keflings - 7/10 - (XBLA)

So this is a bit of a weird game. It's the sequel to Kingdom for Keflings, and aside from a few additions and a bigger scale it's essentially the same game. In a nutshell, the objective of the game is to climb up the tech tree all the way to the end. You are your XBL avatar, who is a giant in the world of Keflings. These tiny people think you're awesome, and their king wants you to help him build a kingdom. What follows is you as the giant start organizing the tiny people, by giving them tasks to start getting resources (chopping wood, mining ore/stone/ice/crystal, shearing sheep for wool) with which you slowly start building the buildings required to advance further and further up the tech tree.
There's no real adversary in the game, and it's all fairly relaxed and free-form, letting you build buildings pretty much wherever you want, but at some point you want to build in a logical order and space to not make it take forever to gather resources.
It's enjoyable while it lasts, but there's no real feeling of satisfaction at the end of the game, it just sort of ends.


Spare Parts - 7.5/10 - (XBLA)

Ratchet & Clank lite is really an apt description of this cool little game. You're a robot that gets dumped on a planet as junk, only to crash-land right next to a ship that has Simon Pegg for an onboard AI. You learn from the AI that the ship is missing a bunch of parts, and it becomes your objective to go out and find the spare parts that will allow you to leave the planet with the ship.
So you set out, and it's basically an action platformer, earning coins to buy upgrades and finding spare parts and upgrades for yourself, including a few that look like they're right from Ratchet & Clank themselves.
The game can get a bit heavy-handed with taking control away from the player to show you something, and sometimes the controls can be a bit unresponsive, but the game looks really quite charming and I find it fun to play. If only one particular levels wasn't glitched, so I wouldn't be stuck at 99/100 parts collected.

 

[Hadmar]

Okami (PS2)

9/10
Let's make an action adventure where you control a wolf who's really the sun goddess. Because you're a god and gods have godly power let's also add a feature where you can freeze the game and use a brush to paint godly magic into the world. Let's make the optic kinda cell shaded and add a filter on top that makes it look as if it's drawn on paper. Also add good music. Let it cook for half an hour and serve it hot.

Sadly we also put a bit of these in it: Difficulty jumps around. Complexity of the dialogues is targeted at a younger audience. *edit* Actually that's a bad way to put it. I can't really think of a good way though. Some things just get repeated/stressed as if to make sure you get it and the connection to your actions.


The dish is good enough that I'll get a DSi later this year just to play the sequel Okamiden.

 

[Balton]

Bulletstorm demo just came out along with a crysis 2 mp demo. the bulletstorm demo was fun and I'll most likely buy the full game now. Now that crysis download better hurry up or else...

 

[Mozi]

BulletStorm Demo 9/10! Good fun all around...

 

[Balton]

Bulletstorm demo just came out along with a crysis 2 mp demo. the bulletstorm demo was fun and I'll most likely buy the full game now. Now that crysis download better hurry up or else...

crysis 2 mp plays like cod + crysis suit and the graphics are underwhelming, also very slugish/lagish

 

[Raynor.Z]

Alan Wake 8.5/10
Good atmosphere and storytelling, also decent combat mechanics plus some memorable plot moments. It would have been even better if it was more open-ended world (like originally announced). Despite of that it's time well spent.

 

[Capt.Toilet]

crysis 2 mp plays like cod + crysis suit and the graphics are underwhelming, also very slugish/lagish

Underwhelming for console standards or Crysis standards?

 

[Slainchild]

Crysis 2 looks decent enough for a console game. Lots of texture streaming issues however (low res popping to high res).

The demo was pretty bad imho. Laggy, clunky, nothing very original about the mechanics, level design was terrible, etc etc.

 

[dotnetbeast]

Crysis 2 looks decent enough for a console game. Lots of texture streaming issues however (low res popping to high res).

The demo was pretty bad imho. Laggy, clunky, nothing very original about the mechanics, level design was terrible, etc etc.

Maybe you won't need 10 supercomputers to run the PC version for 10 minutes on Very High then.

Maybe not

 

[Plumb_Drumb]

Okami (PS2)

9/10
Let's make an action adventure where you control a wolf who's really the sun goddess. Because you're a god and gods have godly power let's also add a feature where you can freeze the game and use a brush to paint godly magic into the world. Let's make the optic kinda cell shaded and add a filter on top that makes it look as if it's drawn on paper. Also add good music. Let it cook for half an hour and serve it hot.

Sadly we also put a bit of these in it: Difficulty jumps around. Complexity of the dialogues is targeted at a younger audience. *edit* Actually that's a bad way to put it. I can't really think of a good way though. Some things just get repeated/stressed as if to make sure you get it and the connection to your actions.


The dish is good enough that I'll get a DSi later this year just to play the sequel Okamiden.

how much are DSi [XL] now? I wonder if it's worth it to wait for the 3DS as it's backwards compatible.

But yeah, I'm so wanting Okamiden.


Oh yeah, I finally got a chance to play through Crysis recently. It's a good game with some control problem that obviously looks great, and is too short. But I got it with Warhead at the Christmas Steam sale for 10 bucks, so I guess I can honestly lump the length of both of them together.
But I haven't played through Warhead yet, so...

Anyway, 7.5 out of 10

 

[Peavey]

Heh rate the last DRUMB you PLUMBED

10/10

 

[Hadmar]

how much are DSi [XL] now? I wonder if it's worth it to wait for the 3DS as it's backwards compatible.

But yeah, I'm so wanting Okamiden.

I'm not sure if I'll get a 3DS or a DSi. I'll decide that when the time comes.

 

[Trustingsoup]

Anyone considering a 3DS should read this or this.

Nintendo's official page claims that you will be able to transfer content from system to system a limited number of times at some point after launch.

Nintendo’s senior manager of product marketing, longtime company employee Bill Trinen:

Wired.com: So it would be restricted to one 3DS, and I can’t move it? Even if I put the software on an SD card?

Trinen: Correct. Once you’ve bought it, it’s for the system you bought it on.