Games You've Beat 2020

[danielpholt]

Kentucky Route Zero

 

The game grows a little long in the tooth towards the end (maybe a problem with the genre itself tbh) but what it does well, it does really well.

[TCP]

Pokemon Crystal

Ok, so, full stop, I spent 60 hours in this game (via 3DS Virtual Console), 58 of those were in 2018, yet for some reason I never finished it? Weird. Luckily I corrected that wrong this weekend!!

Anyways, this game is fucking nuts. Johto, Kanto, then fighting Red on the top of Mount Silver. Why can't they still do it like this? The best Pokemon game.

[Mister Jack]

Sonic Adventure DX

 

This was a fun little blast from the past. By today's standards the game is below average, but I paid a buck for this mainly because I never played it back in its heyday and at the time it was very well-received so I just wanted to see what passed for revolutionary design back in 1999. Boy, we've come a long way since then. The camera is awkward, the controls are clunky, and the main hub area connecting the levels is not very well designed at all. For some reason the game wants you to walk around this small city/jungle environment to get from one stage to the next and there's really not much to do in it otherwise. It has some very basic puzzles to unlock new areas, I guess, but even calling them puzzles would be pretty generous. It's more like "pick up this item and carry it to the place you need opened up." Really, they probably did this just to show off that the Dreamcast could do hubs like this at all and it was probably really cool at the time. I can appreciate what they were going for, even if it's pointless in 2020.

 

As for the game itself, Sonic's levels are actually rather fun, even if there's a fair amount of just holding forward on the stick to run through tracks. It's simple and even kind of brain dead at times but damn it, it's fun! Gotta go fast! The boss fights are too easy except for the last one, which is too hard thanks to wonky hit detection, but I still enjoyed it the same way I would enjoy opening a time capsule. The other player characters feel more like afterthoughts. They all have different objectives and playstyles in their levels, but their campaigns are all pretty short. I blew through three whole characters in a single day and I didn't need to marathon it or anything. They're okay, though. Except for Big the Cat. Everything about Big's campaign can go fuck itself. Worst fishing minigame I've ever played.

 

I don't even need to talk about the cutscenes and voice acting. They're legendarily bad, but it's the fun kind of bad. This was Sega's first real attempt at giving a Sonic game a proper story and boy does it show. The premise of the game's plot isn't terrible, but it's just impossible to take seriously when the writing, animation, and voice acting are all bad enough to make the original Resident Evil look like There Will Be Blood. It's cute that they tried though. On another note, I had to consult a gamefaqs walkthrough on one or two occasions, and the probably 13 year old at the time kid who wrote it also included his personal review of the game where he gave the story a 10/10 and that is just...

I'm not trying to be mean. I just found it adorable. People were so excited about Sonic on the Dreamcast that they were willing to gloss over the objectively terrible story presentation. If I had a Dreamcast in 1999 I might have done the same thing.

 

On the not so fun side, the game is kind of glitchy even after patches. It's not Sonic 06 bad, but I still fell through the floor a few times. Also the PC port is fucking terrible. You can't rebind your controller buttons despite there being an option to do so and the defaults are not ideal. I suppose I could have fudged a DS4Windows configuration if I really wanted to but I couldn't be arsed and just got used to jumping with the circle button and rotating the camera with L1 and L2. The PC port also removes content from the Gamecube version and it goes without saying that there are no VMU minigames with the chao. It might seem unfair to dock points for that but I remember the original PC version of FFVIII including the PocketStation chocobo minigame as a separate application that you could play in a little tiny window. If Sega gave a crap about properly porting this game I'm sure they could have done that but honestly that's expecting way too much from them. When the controller buttons on a PC port are labeled with numbers instead of actual buttons then you know you're fucked.

 

Probably won't play it again anytime soon, if ever, but I enjoyed seeing what those lucky Dreamcast owners got to experience back in the day. Making the leap from the Genesis or even the Saturn to this must have blown their freaking minds.

 

[MetalCaveman]

Horizon Zero Dawn

 

Played on Easy, Normal had some fights that were a bit too much for me, and to quote Michael from Achievement Hunter "I don't want a challenge, I just want to play the game and have fun".  

 

Fighting against humans was kind of annoying, but everything else was awesome. Firing a bow felt cool, and was pretty satisfying as someone who shoots in real life. \m/ \m/

 

The world looks great, machines are fucking awesome, the Thunderjaw is my favourite, weapons are cool, and the story was interesting.

 

I went through the Frozen Wilds DLC before finishing the main story, while fun, it had some parts that were a bit frustrating, particularly with how strong enemies are in that area. The weapons you get are totally worth it though, specially

 

Spoiler

The Icerail, that thing is hilariously strong, though it takes a while to charge.

 

 

Storywise:

 

Spoiler

I hope Sylens won't be stupid enough to plug HADES into the giant machine of death, but I know he's that stupid, as long as he thinks he can get something out of it.

 

Also, the signal, I have some theories as to who was behind it, keep in mind I haven't read much about this, so some of this stuff could have already been disproven:

 

• A different group of people. We only see a small part of the world, and while it's supposed to be that everyone lives in similar tribal societies, we've seen how different they are between tribes, if there was a whole group of people with the same curiosity, desire of knowledge and general aptitude as Sylens, they could maybe figure something out. This theory is kinda weak though, as they would know that HADES would destroy the whole world, them included.
• A hidden subsystem, or a whole different AI that was hidden from GAIA and everyone else, something either by Faro or someone else, designed to eventually cause chaos and assume control of the system.
• Aliens. Yes, aliens, kinda. Supposedly the Odyssey went BOOM, but what if it didn't? Maybe it actually survived, completed its mission and created a new world. In one of the notes by Dr Sobek concern is expressed regarding their version of APOLLO which lacks any of the failsafes and security mechanisms to avoid future people from fucking up like they did, and though Faro claimed to have destroyed all instances of it, that one was an Alpha version so he may not have gotten to it yet, maybe the people it was carrying survived, grew up, learned everything, and eventually made their way back, where they found a civilisation different from what was supposed to exist. Given that they weren't taught not to fuck up, they lack some of that empathy/knowledge and thus assume GAIA messed up, HADES didn't do its thing and thus decide to wipe everything out to start again.

 

As an aside, I'd like to think that Aloy repaired Sobek's house and lived there, as her own hunter, away from the Nora, but still in contact with everyone, in case her help is needed once more.  

 

[Mister Jack]

Sonic Adventure 2

 

This one was a definite improvement over the last one...for the most part. The hub area is gone and levels just go right into one another, which is definitely preferable. The camera is still not great, but it's better and I can at least control it with the analog stick this time. The voice acting is still bad, but the animations are passable this time. Not good, but passable. I was a little disappointed that Team Eggman plays pretty much exactly the same as Team Sonic, just in different levels, but I'll take that over more Big fishing levels any day. Tails in a mech is weird, though. I missed being able to actually fly with him. The plot is Saturday morning cartoon-tier, but I don't really mind that. It's still a story that, as cheesy as it is, makes sense within the world's admittedly silly logic and doesn't require the characters to make boneheaded decisions for it to work. Even Shadow isn't really as eye-rolling in his debut as he would become later on in the franchise. It's just too bad the sound mixing is so terrible. Characters are always talking over each other or getting drowned out by the music. Playing with subtitles is almost mandatory. On the plus side, the butt-rock soundtrack is actually kind of charming. I can only really enjoy it ironically, but at least it's more memorable than the kind of boring soundtrack of the last game.

 

I knew to keep my expectations tempered when playing this so I let a lot of stuff slide, but I still have to complain about the difficulty. The original Adventure was too easy but this one can often be too hard for reasons that shouldn't exist. Bad camera angles, unreliable lock-on, and sometimes slippery controls resulted in a lot of deaths that I felt I were not my fault. It doesn't help that the game can be stingy with checkpoints on extra long levels so if you die you're often doing the whole course over again. These issues also made the last couple of bosses WAY harder than any Sonic boss should ever be. I know they were still figuring out how to do 3D Sonic when they made this, though, so I didn't let it bother me too much. There was definite improvement here and if they had taken it seriously the next game could have been a real classic. It just makes me sad that they threw it all away on the rushed and unfinished Sonic 06. Sega really never recovered from that, even with occasional bright spots like Sonic Generations and Sonic Mania, and it bums me out. I used to fucking love Sonic as a kid. I even watched the cartoons and read the comics. Playing these games rekindled those nostalgic feelings, but it also makes me wish more than ever that Sonic Team would get their shit together. I want Sonic to be good again!

Edited March 3, 2020 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

I feel like it wouldn't be Sonic if the plot weren't Saturday-morning-cartoon-tier.

[danielpholt]

The Suicide of Rachel Foster

 

It's a walking simulator in the mold of something like Gone Home; lot's of picking things up, lots of wondering around a giant house (in this case it's an old hotel). The story isn't nearly as subtle as Gone Home (which in itself wasn't all that subtle in the first place), the voice acting is up and down and the games core method of delivering it's plot is a contrived and forced; leaving you wondering why everything in this 'scary' place feels so very staged.  It's fine I guess? I appreciate what it was going for, more than I do the the end product.

 

With all that being said....

 

 

They put Hockey and more specifically, my team captain in the game. So 11/10 GOTY2020.

 

 

Edited March 3, 2020 by danielpholt

[MetalCaveman]

DOOM II

 

A first for me, I had never made it to the Icon of Sin without help and I had never defeated it before. Felt good.  \m/ \m/ 

[Mister Jack]

Sonic Forces

 

I wasn't planning on any more Sonic games after I played the Adventure series and got all the chaos emeralds in Mania but this just happened to go free on PS+ so I went ahead and played it and boy is this a sour note to end my Sonic kick on. This one isn't horribly buggy or broken like some of the others but good lord it is lazy. Mania got complaints for recycling some of the classic levels but this one recycles Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and the Death Egg zones multiple times for each character, just with different layouts. In fact, I think there might be only four or five zone types in the whole game and only 30 levels total, most of which can be beaten in under 3 minutes which means the whole game can be finished in 3 to 4 hours. If I had paid retail price for this I would feel incredibly ripped off. The Classic Sonic levels are so insulting, too. They're trying to pander to my nostalgia but these levels don't feel like Classic Sonic. They feel like Modern Sonic levels pretending to be Classic Sonic levels. It's difficult to explain, but if you play literally any level in Sonic Mania and then play a Classic Sonic level in Forces I bet you would understand exactly what I mean. The layouts are just so low-effort and don't have any thought put into them.

 

It's honestly ridiculous that Mania was supposed to be a tie-in to build hype for this game when Mania is far, FAR superior to the game it was meant to promote. It's clear that all the effort here went into the character creator, and even that isn't very robust. You mostly just pick outfits. You can't change your body type outside of picking an animal species and you can't even give yourself a two-tone color scheme like, you know, practically every other Sonic character in existence. If you're trying to design a reasonable character that blends in with the cast instead of a Deviantart nightmare then there's just not much to work with. Sega obviously wants you to replay the levels multiple times to complete missions that unlock new clothing options, but that just doesn't really appeal to me. Oh yeah, the plot was super cringy even for Sonic and Infinite is so laughably edgy I'm surprised I never saw him teleport behind Sonic and cut him in half with a katana. At least the controls and camera were functional this time, I guess. It's okay to waste an afternoon if you're bored and you got it for free but that's about the most enthusiasm I can muster to recommend it.

[TheMightyEthan]

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore

 

I played the original on the Wii U and really liked it, so when they released an expanded version for the Switch I had to. I actually think I liked it even more this time, which surprises me.

[MetalCaveman]

DOOM 3:

 

Man did this game not age well. I used to think it was not a bad game, just a different DOOM game. After playing it again after several years... Not sure that holds up.

 

While I didn't have any technical issues, outside of an imp that phased through the floor, the biggest problem with this game is that it uses the exact same jumpscares/spawns/creepy stuff, in the exact same way a ton of times. There's something to be said about every game being "repetitive" but the difference is in the execution, here, the first time you open a door and a demon jumps at you is scary, the third or fourth time it happens, it's annoying, by the end of the game I was just numb, I didn't feel anything, it was just "Oh, there's a door, I opened the door, oh look, another demon." This is all coming from me, someone who is jumpy like a pogo stick, I'll jump out of my chair while playing a Ghost Recon game, and somehow DOOM 3 managed to make me numb to every scary thing it tries.

 

It also gets to a point where you can predict when enemies will spawn and where, you can even tell which enemies will spawn making every encounter feel like a chore.

 

The story was cool though, I liked how Swann and Campbell look like the shady guys behind the conspiracy, but end up being pretty cool dudes.

 

DOOM 3 Resurrection of Evil:

 

Still suffers from many of the issues that DOOM 3 had in regards to jumpscares and enemy spawns, but it being shorter means you don't get annoyed by that stuff that much. It also added the super-shotgun so that automatically makes it better than the base game.

 

I like to think that both the marine and Dr. McNeil survived, since the marine from DOOM 3 just sort of got sent back from hell and all.

 

DOOM 3 The Lost Mission:

 

Super short and actually quite fun, the last boss was more fun than the Maledict from RoE, if only because there were no lava pits/cliffs to kill you.

 

Spoiler

It's also the only one that sort of has a "happy" ending, where the characters that show up during the game all survive.

 

 

A complaint that I have about all the games is that the auto-aim thingy can be annoying and there's no way to adjust it, trying to shoot a barrel next to an enemy is extremely hard because the aim gets glued to whatever demon is close. Disabling it makes aiming super hard. This is obviously a console issue, PC players will fare better.

 

It also has the weakest shotgun I've seen (in recent memory), even at point blank you can see the wall behind a demon get hit by stray pellets, and anything beyond two meters will not even feel it.

 

Even with all the complaints though, it still has one of the best ending themes of any game ever. \m/ \m/  

[TheMightyEthan]

I remember playing Doom 3 when it first came out, eventually I got to a room with a button in it that would open a door I needed to go through. I knew that if I pushed the button a bunch of hidden chambers would open and monsters would swarm me. I realized I did not want to push the button. I quit and never played it again instead.

[TheMightyEthan]

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

 

Omg, sooo good. I loved the first one, so I was extremely excited for the sequel, and it does not disappoint. At it's core it's just a metroidvania, but everything about it comes together so well. My only real complaint is that some of the boss encounters are too long without a checkpoint between stages.

 

Dat ending tho...

 

Spoiler

I'm sad that they seem to have set it up so they can't really do another sequel...

 

17/10

[Mister Jack]

Doom Eternal

 

Okay so this is probably the best modern FPS game I've ever played, and when I say "modern FPS" I'm going all the way back to the original Half-Life. About the only shooter that can compete here for me are the original Doom games. It really puts its competition to shame. This is much more than Doom 2016 with a few tweaks. They practically redid the entire philosophy and design of the game and made it better than it already was.

 

The levels in this game are huge. In fact, they're so huge that they give you a fast travel point at the end of each one in case you need to grab some collectibles you missed, of which there are a ton. The biggest change in this game compared to the last one is a greater emphasis on platforming. Platforming in an FPS sounds awful, I know, but id actually found a way to do platforming that not only works, but is a ton of fun. You'll be jumping, wall climbing, swinging, and air dashing in ways that would make Mario himself proud. I could hardly believe sometimes how much ground I was able to cover just by smartly timing my double jump and my air dash. The best part is that unlike the last game, this time if you miss a jump and fall into the abyss you simply lose 20 life points and get teleported back to where you were instead of dying and having to reload. I had to redo quite a few jumps but I never actually died from falling so it never got frustrating.

 

The weapons got a face lift too. Also the pistol is gone. You might miss it at first but soon enough you'll understand that even if it was there you would never use it. The demons in this game are absolutely relentless and way more aggressive than in the last game. In fact, this might be one of the hardest FPS games I've ever played. It starts off simple enough but just you wait. They're throwing arachnotrons at you almost right out of the gate and those are considered the easy enemies! Demons also come at you in greater numbers now and you can't run circles around them like before. You can dash to put some distance between you, but there's a short cooldown after every two dashes. It's only a second or so, but that's long enough for the demons to gain ground on you. There's a bunch of brand new demons too and they will seriously mess you up. One of them in particular is so tough that it would be a major boss fight in any other shooter, yet here it becomes a normal enemy in the second half of the game. Some people were fooled into thinking this game would be easy because it has extra life power ups, but you will fucking need them.

 

Fortunately, the demons aren't the only ones who are stronger. The Doomslayer has so many new tools to even the odds and you can not afford to ignore a single one of them. While there are health and armor packs lying around as always, I'm telling you now that they will not be enough. You will be running out of ammo and life CONSTANTLY, and the best way to replenish them is with fodder enemies. Fodder enemies are basically zombies and commandos who are weak and easily disposed of, though they can still overwhelm you if you ignore them because they spawn infinitely until you kill all the elite enemies. You'll be glad to see fodder though because they'll be your primary source of power-ups and what you get depends on how you kill them. Need life? Glory kill something. Need ammo? Use the chainsaw, which now regenerates fuel after each use. Ammo caps are a lot lower now so you'll be using the chainsaw more than you ever did before. Need armor? Use the shoulder mounted flamethrower. On top of that each glory kill charges up something called a blood punch, which is basically this game's version of berserk mode. A single blood punch can kill multiple weak enemies or severely wound a strong enemy. Balancing your various resources by making use of all these tools is extremely intense and everything is happening around you so fast that sometimes you might forget to use your chainsaw or flamethrower until you get used to it. Demons also have weak points to exploit now. Sometimes a demon is weak to a specific weapon or sometimes you can shoot off a specific body part that will drastically weaken their offensive capabilities. The point is, you can't just spend the whole game relying on the super shotgun anymore. Hell, even the regular shotgun stays useful until the end of the game and that's never happened before in this franchise.

 

This is honestly the closest thing to a perfect shooter I've played in a long, long time. Everything is so fast and furious that it makes other FPS games look like day cares with bullets. Hell, even Doom 2016, which I still love, doesn't compare to Doom Eternal. About the only thing I can really say against it is that the multiplayer might not be for everyone. It's basically one Doomslayer vs two player demons and a horde of AI demons. It's not bad, but don't bother looking for your traditional team deathmatch because it ain't here. If you mostly play shooters for online multiplayer then I guess you should stick with Call of Duty or something, but if you want a near-perfect single player FPS experience I can't point to this one hard enough.

 

However there was one really shitty thing I can't ignore, and I bet this wasn't id's fault. You cannot start this game if you don't have a Bethesda.net account. It won't even let you go to the title screen until you either register for one or sign into one and I think that's downright appalling. Maybe it's possible to bypass this by disconnecting, but why should I have to do that just to play a single player game? It's ridiculous. It took me over half an hour to start playing because I had to come up with a unique username that wasn't already taken and that shit pisses me off. It's just a good thing the rest of the game is so fantastic. I would have been livid if I'd grudgingly given my email to Bethesda and then the game turned out to be a piece of crap.

Edited March 25, 2020 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

Does it solve the problem that the first (2016) one had where every encounter kind of feels the same?

[Mister Jack]

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by that but there are more environments with more variety, bigger spaces to fight in, and much greater variety in enemy types. A few levels also have death traps you can exploit.

[MetalCaveman]

DOOM 2016

 

Hesitated to include this because I had already finished it before, but this is the last of the DOOM games I own since my order of DOOM Eternal got (understandably) delayed, so here it is.  

 

It's still awesome, can't wait for Eternal, though I'm worried about how skill-shot focused it seems to be.  

[TheMightyEthan]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Cindered Shadows

 

Okay, so it was really just that one level that was tedious, and once I looked where the thing that I needed was I just rushed it with a flyer and ended it easy peasy. Beyond that, I thought the game was really good. It was harder than the base game, but not so hard as to be frustrating. I used Divine Pulse a lot more than in the base game, and I lost more units (I was on casual, so they came back ), but there was only one level, the last one, where I had to retreat and start over altogether.

 

My second attempt at the final level the only character I lost was Byleth, which is actually the only time I ever lost Byleth. I thought it was fitting that she should die to see that her students are kept safe. 

 

4/5

[TheMightyEthan]

@Mister Jack I don't know how to explain it, but when I was playing 2016 I got maybe half(?) of the way through, and realized I had no interest in continuing because every fight felt exactly the same. Like sure the environments were different, and there were different enemies, but didn't feel like that really changed the approach you needed to take.

[MetalCaveman]

DOOM Eternal

 

Mister Jack has already said most of what needs to be said, I'd just like to add:

 

Read the lore, it's METAL AS HELL. \m/ \m/

 

I've already mentioned the bug I ran into, where mastery weapon skins would not unlock, that's kind of annoying, but ultimately not something that prevents me from loving this game. Can't wait for the DLC. \m/ \m/

[Hot Heart]

FFVII Remake

 

Yeah boi

[Mister Jack]

Doom 64

 

Now THIS is what I call a preorder bonus, although you can still get it for 5 bucks on its own. This is really more of a remaster than a port, and a fairly well done one at that. Keeping in mind that this was originally an N64 game, the textures look good, the game plays at a proper widescreen resolution, the framerate is consistently smooth, and the controls are tight. There's even an extra pack of all new levels--more on that later.

 

Doom 64 is a good game, but I would still say it's my least favorite of the original Doom formula. That sounds worse than it is because I consider Doom and Doom 2 to be two of the greatest games of all time so saying that a console exclusive from the N64 era isn't as good really isn't all that damning. However, this game still made some changes that I don't think were for the better. Enemies all got redesigned and some look better than others, but this is a matter of opinion. Likewise, the music is more ambient and atmospheric, and while I prefer the rocking tunes of the first two games I will say that the spooky tone of this game would make it great for a Halloween playlist if you're the type to play horror games every October. Doom 64 is by no means a horror game, but it leans closer to that kind of feeling than the other games do. Take that as you will. The level design is a lot trickier than the other games too, with more emphasis on puzzles and activating far-off switches by shooting them, which isn't really much of a thing in Doom 64's predecessors. Your mileage may vary on how well this works. I personally prefer Doom to be just a straight up action game with minimal switch hunting and puzzle solving, but that's just me. Either way, it definitely feels like a different designer's vision was at work here for better or worse. Oh yeah, there's also a lot of platforming going on here, and by platforming I mean sprinting off of one platform fast enough to hop a gap to another one. This was a real pain for a while until I realized that the autorun does NOT let you run at full speed, which is necessary for a lot of platforms. You have to turn autorun off, then hold down the sprint button and run off the platform. Not the worst thing in the world but not knowing this from the beginning halted all of my progress for a frustrating amount of time. On one more note, the fact this was a console exclusive means no number bar for switching guns. They didn't add in a weapon wheel either. You have to tap the weapon switch buttons and scroll through every gun until you get the one you want. You can mitigate this somewhat by quickly tapping however many guns you want to skip over, but I still wish they had at least added a wheel, even if it wasn't originally made that way. I assume they chose not to do this for balance reasons, but the game already doesn't feel like it's balanced for a control scheme that can't quickly switch weapons. I died more than once trying to get to the weapon I needed. Oh well.

 

The new levels are pretty good, but also pretty daunting. They make up their own episode which means you start with just a pistol despite having barons of hell right there at the beginning. You end up going through most of these levels with the basic bitch weapons which means no plasma gun, no BFG, and especially no Unmaker until you're close to the end, but at least you get the super shotgun and rocket launcher fairly quickly so you can still manage, it just won't be easy when the game is constantly throwing enemies and traps at you. I found myself running dangerously low on ammo more than once. Ironically, the final boss fight at the end of these new levels ended up being a cakewalk because the game decides to hand you a fully powered Unmaker for free during the last level, but I consider that my reward for scraping by all the previous levels.

 

So yeah, Doom 64 still kicks ass and it's only 5 bucks. I remember this game getting dismissed when it came out because it wasn't as visually impressive as Turok or Goldeneye, but Doom ended up having the last laugh because it holds up much better today than the other two.

[TCP]

A few days ago I rolled credits on Animal Crossing New Horizons.

 

 

....Game of the Year!

[TheMightyEthan]

It actually ends? What's the end condition?

[Mister Jack]

6 minutes ago, TheMightyEthan said:

It actually ends? What's the end condition?

It really doesn't end. There's just a part where the credits roll and after that Tom Nook says he has no more advice for you. From there it's all up to you how you want to develop your town.

 

Spoiler

The last objective he gives you is to get K.K. Slider to perform on the island. The credits roll during the concert.