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Beating Games

Dracula

Plastic Vampire
(He/His)
Stinkoman 20X6 is in the bag, only mere hours before Flash dies forever, denying future generations their chance to finally stick it to Z-Sabre and Mecha-Trogador.

Seriously, if you can carve out an hour today, at least go play the final stage of this game. It's worth it.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Stinkoman 20X6 is in the bag, only mere hours before Flash dies forever, denying future generations their chance to finally stick it to Z-Sabre and Mecha-Trogador.

Seriously, if you can carve out an hour today, at least go play the final stage of this game. It's worth it.
Yeah, I just finished. Perfect excuse to get away from New Years company.
 

Sarge

hardcore retro gamin'
Aw, you're killin' me. While I don't think it's amazing, I still like it for what it is, for whatever reason.

Oh, wait, which version? Genesis or arcade? I think the Genesis game is a lot more fair, even if it loses just a bit on the presentation side.
 

ShakeWell

Slam Master
(he, etc.)
Aw, you're killin' me. While I don't think it's amazing, I still like it for what it is, for whatever reason.

Oh, wait, which version? Genesis or arcade? I think the Genesis game is a lot more fair, even if it loses just a bit on the presentation side.

Arcade (played it on the Astro City Mini). And yes, it's way more unfair than the Genesis version.
 

Sarge

hardcore retro gamin'
Oh, well, that makes sense, then. I remember being very, very frustrated with that version - like many arcade games, it's incredibly cheap in spots.
 

clarice

bebadosamba
Finished Dragon Quest VI. I don't get why it is considered a minor game in the series. It is interesting to see how the dream world reflects the real world, there are interesting narrative hooks (like what the hell was that scene in the beginning, is Tania the main character dead sister, etc), dungeons are fun mazes, and mostly, it is a very exploratory game. A couple of poignant moments, too. The class system is unbalanced, but it doesn't bother me too much. I wish the mage characters were more viable though (my party still was Hero, Carver, Ashlynn and Milly).

(There's also an awful transphobic moment
where someone male looking dresses like a bunny girl and it is supposed to be a funny moment or something.)
 
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Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Sea of Solitude. Controls aren't the best but glad I played it, it's a rather obvious but still interesting mental health concept. I'd probably recommend anyone else who is interested to either play it free on Gamepass or just watch a Let's Play.
 

Mr. Sensible

Pitch and Putt Duffer
Mega Man 8 is done. I really enjoyed this one despite some rough spots, in particular the awful "JUMP JUMP SLIDE" auto-scrolling sections. I had never beaten this game until now because the first Wily stage starts with one of these segments, which killed my original playthrough back in the day. Fortunately they weren't quite as bad as I remembered, but don't mistake this for me saying they're fun, because they most certainly are not.

Of course the sprites are gorgeous, some of Capcom's best work on the series, and second perhaps only to X4. The colorful cast of enemies all have tons of personality in their animations, and the background graphics in every stage are lovingly detailed. The music is mostly kinda whatever, although there are a couple of standout BGM tracks such as the laid-back synth tones of Aqua Man and Astro Man's stages, as well as the spicy drum and bass rhythm of Wily Tower 1.

In summary, it may not be the best Mega Man title, but MM8 is definitely in the running for prettiest Mega Man title.
 

Rascally Badger

El Capitan de la outro espacio
(He/Him)
I beat Bloodstained Curse of the Moon and Valiant Hearts last night. Valiant Hearts was a real downer, which I guess comes with the WW1 territory. I generally liked it; it is a little clumsy and stilted at times, but it has some good puzzles and shockingly few frustrating moments. Curse of the Moon does a great job of looking and feeling like an NES game while also having enough modern qol improvements that it goes down pretty smooth.
 

Exposition Owl

more posts about buildings and food
(he/him/his)
I finished Ever Oasis, and I think I liked it better than any of the actual Mana games I've played. The action parts are delightfully Zelda-like, and the town management parts were really well done. Particular materials that drop from enemies and plants in the world become important, but the game arranges this so that you (almost) never have to grind for them. There were multiple occasions when, just when I was thinking how nice it would be to be able to automate some management task, I gained an Oasis level and discovered that the game now allowed me to automate exactly the thing I'd been thinking about. Finally, it's nice to play something in the Japanese RPG space in which the female characters aren't ridiculously sexualized. In fact, the game's character designs are such that it's usually pretty difficult to tell what pronouns a given character will use just by looking at them.
 

FelixSH

(He/Him)
I'll just consider Little Bug beaten. That's not actually the truth, but for some reason, the very last part of the game is bugged. I fell through the floor multiple times, and then didn't even get killed, continuing to fall forever instead. Frustrating, but ok.

Unfortunate, really. It's short, but well done, and I never played anything like it before. It's pretty hard, considering that you basically have to move two characters, but it's doable with some trial and error, as the respawn is instant. If nothing else, the swinging physics are pretty unique, and for that alone, I'm glad to have played the game. The atmosphere and the graphics are also pretty great. So, if you got the itch.io bundle, I'd say give it a try, just to experience it a bit.

Considering the game-breaking bug at the very end, I can't really recommend buying it, though. It's just 1,5 hours, plus some extra, if you got some sidestuff, and not being able to play through it just makes it not worth the 5 bucks, that it normally costs. It hurts me to say so, but, oh well.
 

Patrick

Magic-User
(He/Him)
I beat Slay the Spire as the Ironclad. I had a bunch of cards that doubled my strength, and a couple of ways to add strength, so as long as I could last through the first few rounds of any fight I could do 20-40 damage per attack. Plus, I had one 2 cost attack that counted strength 5x. My final hit on the last boss was for around 500hp.

I haven’t played as the other characters as much, and I just unlocked the last one, so I’m sure I’ll play a lot more. But I saw credits, so it counts as beat.
 

Cadenza

Mellotron enthusiast
(She/they)
I just finished Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest today. I think it's a pretty good game! Short and breezy, but not entirely toothless, and the soundtrack is great. (Give it a listen!)
 

q 3

here to eat fish and erase the universe
(they/them)
Seabed has left me emotionally devastated and I find that very rude
 

Aeonus

Still not amused
(he/him)
I completed the story mode of Creeper World 4 (PC) last week. It's a tower defense/RTS, only instead of fighting off waves of bad guys, you have to deal with literal waves. The eponymous Creeper is a blue liquid that enemy structures generate (or launch at you), and you have to shoot it out of existence before it floods the map--or at least your HQ building. It's a pretty neat take on the genre; topography becomes critical, as Creeper behaves like an actual liquid - flowing downhill to fill valleys first, or through gaps in your defenses.
Ultimately, though, the game ends up feeling more like an open-ended puzzle game; each map's enemy structures are fixed, so once you build up enough of a base to protect your key structures and also remove as much Creeper as is being generated, you pretty much can't lose. But while it never takes more than around 10 minutes to assure your victory, it can take an hour and a half to actually play it out. You spend that time inching the battle line forward until you can build a nullifier next to an enemy building or connect a new resource to your network. It ends up feeling a bit tedious to do that on map after map. But also kinda zen.

All in all, I rather liked it.
 

Mightyblue

aggro table, shmaggro table
(He/Him/His)
Credits rolled on Hades. It was good! And the extensive post-game stuff hinted at would undoubtedly consume a lot of time, but that'll have to wait for a while. Cleared at least once on each weapon, though I did the extras mostly on bow and rail to get to the 'final' run.
 

Sarge

hardcore retro gamin'
I just finished Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest today. I think it's a pretty good game! Short and breezy, but not entirely toothless, and the soundtrack is great. (Give it a listen!)
Yep, agree with all of this. Yes, it's easy, but it's easy because the penalty for failure is so low. You can game over really quickly if you get a bit unlucky, it's just you get to take another crack at it immediately.

Still, it's remarkable that this team managed to go forward and produce an RPG of the caliber of Treasure of the Rudras. That game is fantastic.
 

Juno

The DRKest Roe
(He, Him)
Death Stranding is done.

I was really loving this game in the first 2/3 of the game, especially around chapters 5-8. You've got a wide range of tools to work with, there's a big area to explore, and the environment feels challenging to navigate without getting too annoying. Climbing mountains and walking across big open plains was fun.

But then you get to chapter 9 and it starts getting bad. The story, which I kinda hated from the very beginning, gets worse. You're railroaded into moving forward with the plot and can't just wander or explore any more. There's way more combat, and it's not fun. And then the game just won't fucking end once you get into chapter 13. It's just several hours of Hideo Kojima begging me to think of this as profound while I'm just cringing and rolling my eyes. I hated it.

So yeah, some mixed feelings on this.
 

Fyonn

did their best!
My favorite thing about that game is that it correctly identifies the culture that dreamcatchers come from, the Ojibwe people, and then refrains from having any characters from that still-living culture appear in the game, despite having themes of reclaiming lost histories.

Instead, Kojima google translated strand and knot in a bunch of different languages and then went "look this means something."

The only way I can really put this into words is that Death Stranding is the most spiritualist-rich-white-woman-with-dreads video game to ever exist.
 

Juno

The DRKest Roe
(He, Him)
My favorite thing about that game is that it correctly identifies the culture that dreamcatchers come from, the Ojibwe people, and then refrains from having any characters from that still-living culture appear in the game, despite having themes of reclaiming lost histories.

Instead, Kojima google translated strand and knot in a bunch of different languages and then went "look this means something."

The only way I can really put this into words is that Death Stranding is the most spiritualist-rich-white-woman-with-dreads video game to ever exist.

In a messed up way, there’s something fitting about that- after all, the game talks so much about the need to rebuild America, a nation built on the destruction and appropriation of native cultures like the Ojibwe.

Like, even setting aside my own personal cynicism about America, there’s something missing when you talk about rebuilding a country without attempting to seriously interrogate what that country is. Kojima has a very Hollywood understanding of the USA, and that’s fine when making allusions to James Bond in Snake Eater, but he’s not in a position to discuss what America really means.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
Finished Paradise Killer. Music was amazing, characters were neat, aesthetics were aesthetic. But also, the writing was bad, just amateurishly sloppy, and some of the investigation/trial stuff was a bit clunky. Good idea, rough edges on the execution, but all in all, definitely memorable.
 

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
Death Stranding is done.

I was really loving this game in the first 2/3 of the game, especially around chapters 5-8. You've got a wide range of tools to work with, there's a big area to explore, and the environment feels challenging to navigate without getting too annoying. Climbing mountains and walking across big open plains was fun.

But then you get to chapter 9 and it starts getting bad. The story, which I kinda hated from the very beginning, gets worse. You're railroaded into moving forward with the plot and can't just wander or explore any more. There's way more combat, and it's not fun. And then the game just won't fucking end once you get into chapter 13. It's just several hours of Hideo Kojima begging me to think of this as profound while I'm just cringing and rolling my eyes. I hated it.

So yeah, some mixed feelings on this.

I mean on the one hand, Kojima, but on the other hand the existence of [region] [vehicle] simulator [year] for a staggering number of combinations is a great argument that the game would have been better off with a more abstract story.
 

MetManMas

Me and My Bestie
(He, him)
Finally beat BioShock; even though I spoiled it for myself years ago, I figured I'd go ahead and actually finish the original game before I dug into my recently acquired Switch copy of BioShock Infinite. I could talk about my thoughts on the major twists or whatever, but instead I did an Animal Crossing photo shoot.

 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
I just finished Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom and popped into this thread to post about it, only to see:

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a charming enough game that I really hate to be as down on it as I was by the end.

Which is kind of exactly how I felt about the game. I love its dedication to the Wonder Boy series, and it plays pretty smoothly and looks fantastic, but it also gets a lot wrong, particularly

Just kind of an uncanny ability to get the difficulty curve wrong

I had a finish time of about 18 hours, 90% completion, and 155 deaths. A lot of those would have been self-inflicted, because I realised that if you lose your elixir but die before saving then you’ll keep whatever progress you’ve made but also get the elixir back when you respawn rather than having to buy another (I had to grind for cash a little, I think because I spent so much money on elixirs before figuring this out), but also a lot of them were just the difficulty of the game. If you don’t have the right equipment on you’ll lose huge chunks of health from single hits, and there are long stretches between save points in some areas. There also aren’t enough warp points, so revisiting old areas looking for stuff is a pain, and you don’t get ready access to warping early enough. There are also a lot of places where you have to complete some kind of challenge, like a race or something, which can easily be failed towards the end meaning you have to repeat the easy starting part over and over until you figure out the tricky bit at the end.

Just a lot of annoyances that get in the way of an otherwise fun and often quite clever game. It’s got a broad ability set and really puts it through its paces, but sometimes just goes too far in doing so.
 

StriderDL

Still just a dad
(He/him/his)
I finished Spiritfarer yesterday. It was a beautiful game that felt maybe 10 hours longer than it needed to be. Some of the passengers really hit me as they departed but others not as much.
 
I've come back to Celeste multiple times in the last 2 years, each time pushing a little further. For example, the first time I beat the game and Core with all strawberries and maybe did some B-sides.

Yesterday I finished what would have originally been the 100% definition finally. All A, B, and C-sides and all berries. After 7-C, 8-C was actually pretty easy. I had almost double the deaths on 7-C as anything else.

Anyway, very cathartic, but now that's not the end of the game so I'm pushing through the Farewell chapter, which I stuck my toe in before but much further in now than previously. I doubt I'll go for much of the golden berries, but there's a ton of fan-created content out there that looks pretty solid I hope to sample and dang why is this game so good?
 
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