Games - What You Finished Playing and What You Thought About It

[Auberon]

I searched through the forum to see if it already had a game review thread, but if it does it's not coming up on my search.  For some reason I thought there was one, but my memories of days long past must be faulty. Thus I'm creating one for video games.  A few years back my game playing slowed way down, but I've put away some of those distractions and have decided to work through my backlog of games.  Obviously these will have some age on them, but they'll be new to me! 

 

Note: "Finished" is a relative term.  If you've played for three hours and decided the game is horrible and you'll never play it again, then it is finished for you.  Feel free to post and save others from the horror.

 

God of War: Ascension (PS3)

 

The God of War franchise was a big money-maker and Sony wanted to see that money keep rolling in. But the trilogy had already been completed, so what do you do? Create a prequel! Easy right? Well if they had made Ascension before GoWII it would have been fine. Unfortunately they made it after GoWIII which is the best game in the series IMO. The graphics were great and the gaemplay was everything you could want out the genre. The second problem the game has is that it came out after GoWIII finished its story. Seriously, in GoWIII Kratos scaled Olympus to do battle with the gods. How do you get more epic than that? Sadly you don't. He can't actually fight any of the gods in Ascension because he'll be fighting them later (chronologically) in the other games. That leaves us with a short list of Greek mythological figures to play the role of bad guys, and none of them can be as awesome as the gods.

 

So to start the game already has a mark against it with the concept, but what about the gameplay? In that area at least GoW:A does fine. It's pretty much a formula by now; combat mixed with puzzle solving mixed with a bit of exploration and a few “interactive”action sequences. If you like the other GoWs I think you'll like this aspect of the game. They have made a few tweaks to make it different, such as removing the various godly weapons and replacing them with elemental enhancements, but overall the game remains mostly the same. It does have some death by camera angle that most consoles action games seem to have.

 

It is a short game. I finished single player in 10 hours and could have shaved an hour off of that if I wasn't so rusty. Fortunately by the time I picked this game up it already had some age on it and had gone through the price reduction sequence. If you pick it up cheap the dollar per hour still isn't bad.

 

Recommendation: Play, but pick it up cheap.

[Cranky Dog]

I... uhm... wow, this makes me realize I haven't played any computer games in years now. Plenty of casual ones you find on tablets/smartphones. But games with developing stories? It's been forever.

 

I think Portal 2 is the last one I purchased, played and completed. And this goes back to 2011. Not long after, the original Portal was free to download for a while, so I played and completed it too. GLaDOS was a wonderfully passive-aggressive antagonist.

[Glitterwolf]

I play a lot of PC games.

 

My all time favorite is Heroes of Might and Magic III

I love the Total War Series.

And I love the Elder Scrolls Series.

Oh and King's Bounty Series. and Civilization.

And... and... and...Age of Wonders and and..ok I'll stop...

 

Stuff I hate?

Well I love the Heroes of Might and Magic series, until VI came out and we all needed to play through U-Play which should be called U-shall never play again because this crashes everytime you want to even log in.

After a year of trying with several games I decided to never ever buy an Ubisoft game that couldn't be played off line anymore.

 

 

[Baldur8762]

5 hours ago, Xherman1964 said:

 

My all time favorite is Heroes of Might and Magic III

 

Heroes III is, in my opinion, one of the greatest games ever made.  I still have it on my PC today. 

 

Skyrim however is my all time favorite game.  No game has drawn me in the way Skyrim did.

[TGP]

I never have played any of these developing story games. Also, I detest the: 

 

•doesn't play unless connected to Internet...

 

model.  I am against software piracy but that is a Kludge-ish solution. I don't want some damned server somewhere logging and knowing exactly how many hours I devoted to a game. 

 

[Thes Hunter]

I have been finding, playing computer games == not painting minis. I have minisbecause I want to paint minis. 

 

But the ladt games games that had me in there clutches was civ 6, and moo 2016. I am forever playing that which I played in college.

[Glitterwolf]

22 minutes ago, TGP said:

I never have played any of these developing story games. Also, I detest the: 

 

•doesn't play unless connected to Internet...

 

model.  I am against software piracy but that is a Kludge-ish solution. I don't want some damned server somewhere logging and knowing exactly how many hours I devoted to a game. 

 

 

The older Heroes Of Might and Magic series are off line games.

[Auberon]

I can remember when the server validation as protection became popular.  You do have a few options:

• Play games that are more than 10 years old.  Very few games that weren't specifically online worried about internet connectivity prior to that.
• Play on Steam.  After it validates the install you can switch to offline mode.  You lose achievements but the games play fine.
• Play on a console.  Actually I don't know about the current gen, but PS3 & earlier don't require an internet connection to play.

[Werkrobotwerk]

I recently finished Mass Effect Andromeda.I would not recommend buying it unless there is a serious price drop, or another round of major bug fixes.

 

There is a decent but not great story, but it gets buried under poor pacing, open world and bugs. The loyalty missions take a format similar to previous mass effect games, and work well, the rest of the missions, not so much.

then there's stuff that the decided to fix from previous games that really was not broken, combat powers now have ammo while tech and biotic don't they are not stronger than the two free types, a number of the guns have no reason to exist, fusion mods are universally terrible, crafting materials are random so it is possible to have researched something that you will never be able to upgrade again, and you are limited to three powers at a time with no way to effectively quick swap them, profiles are not really useful.

 

Also it is long, absurdly long, so long you may be bored of the combat before you get to any of the good plot stuff.

 

bugs: geometry on the later levels is a mess, and it prevents a number of powers from working.

there is one kind of enemy that has an instant death radius that can kill you through walls before you can see it.

dropped loot causes melee not to work.

controls lag out in single player

multiplayer is frequently unplayable due to lag.

Audio cuts off audio from other sources, causing dialogue to get lost.

 

Some of this could still be fixed with technical and balance patches, but for now don't bother.

[Glitterwolf]

3 hours ago, Auberon said:

I can remember when the server validation as protection became popular.  You do have a few options:

• Play games that are more than 10 years old.  Very few games that weren't specifically online worried about internet connectivity prior to that.
• Play on Steam.  After it validates the install you can switch to offline mode.  You lose achievements but the games play fine.
• Play on a console.  Actually I don't know about the current gen, but PS3 & earlier don't require an internet connection to play.

 

I usually play older games or on STEAM, however the newer installs of the Ubisoft games I purchased through Steam, still needed validation/log in with U-Play.

It needs to "install" the game there too for some reason.

My beef with U-Play is that this won't work for my version of HOMM VI it always freezes at 99%.

 

Then I tried assasins creed which was free ( luckily) with my laptop, and it froze during play every time.

I decided to not get bothered with Ubisoft anymore.

If it not an older off line game, I will buy something else.

 

Games on Steam that are not Ubisoft, are no problem.

They work fine.

 

There is enough nice stuff out there for me, so I'll avoid the frustration.

I did contact U-Play's helpdesk several times.

Well...they better call themselves #- you, we gotyourmoney so go ....yourself...

 

 

[Citrine]

Thea, the Awakening is a very fun little strategy game where you have a small village and you send your villagers out to harvest and fight monsters.  I played the heck out of it, I even got every Steam achievement.

[Slush]

I could choose many but instead I'll keep it simple,  

 

1. Get on steam,  

2. find "to the moon"

3. Play that game,  shouldn't take but a few hours

4. Thank me later

 

[Sergeant_Crunch]

Um, I finally finished the main questline for Skyrim the other night.  I really liked it, and pretty much for the same reasons most people like it.  Now that I have a functioning controller for my XBox One again I need to go finish Fallout 4.

[VitM]

On 4/25/2017 at 7:32 AM, Citrine said:

Thea, the Awakening is a very fun little strategy game where you have a small village and you send your villagers out to harvest and fight monsters.  I played the heck out of it, I even got every Steam achievement.

 

I've been meaning to pick that up.  Maybe next time GOG runs a sale. :)

[Cranky Dog]

Agh! I forgot that I had tons of games on Steam + Humble Bundle.

 

I got a boardgames collection; a Star Wars collection; a Civilization collection. The majority of them in mint non-played condition!

 

Somehow, when I stopped having the TV and main computer in the same room, I just... stopped gaming. I could game more on my tablet, but the small screen just doesn't give it the same immersive feeling.