The 2023 Backlog Challenge

[Gloves | 11,843]

1 minute ago, Reed Rothchild said:

...also, this happened 2 attempts prior.  What happens when you forget that scarlet rot is a thing.  I almost threw the controller

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Spoiler

Is fighting the embodiment of Scarlet Rot...

Forgets.

 

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

5 minutes ago, Gloves said:

Is fighting the embodiment of Scarlet Rot...

Forgets

I was distracted by getting stabbed in the face five million times at Mach 10 speed.

[MagusSmurf | 577]

The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero - Beaten 02/05/23

It's a Trails game in a pretty similar vein as FC and SC. Good story, tons of worldbuilding, slow pacing for most of it but gets pretty crazy later on, lots of sidequests, jokes or weird comments in every single treasure chest, and a neat quasi-Materia customization system.

The extensive optional NPC dialogue seemed less well balanced than in FC and SC if you're the kind of person who talks to everyone every time it updates. You can freely roam a pretty large city area from early on and get access to several more major NPC locations not too far into the game, which leaves a massive pool of people to talk to every time NPC dialogue updates, which it does maybe slightly less often than FC/SC but there are way more NPCs than in any individual FC/SC region so it seemed more time consuming. On the plus side though, this lets you follow their lives for a longer time period.

The battle system has gotten a couple minor tweaks but it works pretty much the same as it did in the Trails in the Sky games. The harder difficulties were actually an intended part of the original game design so are better balanced than they allegedly were in FC and SC; I went with Hard Mode and outside maybe a couple early fights (that didn't trip me up for long but that I felt I kind of lucked out on) it was generally pretty reasonable. No grinding was done and not much trouble was had. Nightmare difficulty might actually be reasonably playable this time?

Lloyd is a decent enough JRPG main but I don't think he compares well to Estelle in the first two games, who just had vastly more personality. You're mostly stuck with the same 4 core characters all game plus an occasional guest member. The main cast grew on me but I feel like the developers were probably holding back a little too much for the sequel - or at least I hope they were. The story does a pretty decent job at wrapping up the game's plot while leaving some unanswered questions. I'm interested to see where the sequel takes the setting and characters.

I guess 8/10. I'm pretty fond of it but it's not an all-timer and it'd be tough to ever justify a replay.

Edited February 7, 2023 by MagusSmurf

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

*finds the talisman that "enormously" reduces physical damage, after fighting Malenia*

...anyway, finally ready to end the game an--wait, who the fuck is this?

[Foochie776 | 1,062]

I’m at what I’m guessing is the half way point for Kingdom Hearts II. Enjoying the game a lot! Despite this boss battle making me want to rage

 

I ordered a new copy of Pikmin as I must have sold my last copy? So I’ll be starting that soon too! 

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

Elden Ring

[Gloves | 11,843]

2 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Elden Ring

That certainly is one of the endings.

[Gloves | 11,843]

I'm on Chapter 8 of Dead Space. Love this game. 

[Sumez | 2,995]

Cuphead - Beaten 2/2 + Delicious Last Course - Beaten 4/2

Obviously a game that needs no further introduction. Even if you somehow hadn't heard of Cuphead, just seeing five seconds of footage of the game immediately reveals everything it's about. Run'n'gun boss fights presented in absolutely gorgeous old-timey cartoon style. I don't need to spell out how fantastic the animation in this game is, short of just about nothing else out there? It's the whole package - the style, animation, music and humor and creativity at display here all works together to create the precise feeling of a classic Max Fleischer cartoon.

But that doesn't say much about the game beneath - it's easy to lose yourself in the visuals, and given the massive appeal Cuphead managed to achieve it goes without saying it had a tendency to reach quite far beyond the typical fan crowd for run 'n gun adventures, giving the general voice less basis for comparison that you'd ideally like.

And Cuphead is definitely a game geared more towards a mainstream audience - but fortunately that doesn't mean the challenge was compromised. Each boss fight will undoubtedly take even experienced players through a multitude of deaths before you'd be able to beat it.
Those deaths come from various things, ranging from genuine challenge to unpredictable and poorly telegraphed attacks covering half the screen or more. There's a lot of trial and error in play which often feels unfair, but usually it's easy enough to adapt that it's hard to seriously hold it against the game. Other mild issues come from the visual clutter of the hyperactive graphics covering the screen, as well as the bold animations obscuring the precise hitboxes that you need to consider while trying to dodge attacks, something especially prevalent during the shmup-inspired flying stages. But given this looks like a game that would typically be completely bogged down by those sorts of issues, it is honestly quite remarkable that Cuphead doesn't actually suffer from it any more than it does.

One might also expect a game of this style to rely heavily on repeated predictable patterns, but clearly a lot of care has been put into shaking all of those up with enough RNG that you never know exactly how they are going to play out. Some times the rhythm or trajectory of attacks gets shifted randomly, or the way different patterns combine will be equally unpredictable, meaning you always need to stay on your toes. In fact the variation between each face-off against the same boss can be so big that you'll often face entirely different patterns or mini-bosses between attempts, which might fall a bit on the absurd side when it comes to reasonable RNG implementation.
What the game did however to remedy "modern expectations" of video games is giving the player an infinite number of attempts to beat each boss. It is completely irrelevant how many times you died fighting a boss, as long as you won eventually.

That design dictates that you'll only necessarily practice a boss up to the point where you are good enough to beat it once, rather than a point where you are able to beat it consistently. Thanks to the game's massive reliance on RNG it's absolutely possible to get a fluke where you have a lucky break and avoid most of the tougher pattern combinations, rather than requiring the player to prepare for the worst as you would in a classic arcade game where multiple stages are strung together.
For better or worse, the game somehow remedies that with the ranking system. Beating any fight takes you to a result screen which pretty much begs you to do better unless you already earned an A+ or S ranking. You beat the boss sure, but can you do it faster and without getting hit?
This ranking system doesn't really remedy the massive difficulty variations in RNG, but it does facilitate a way to satisfy players who want to perfect their performance while also providing an easy way through for impatient players who just want to beat the game with the minimal required experience.

I guess it bears mentioning that these boss fights, which the game is entirely based around, also really aren't the type of quick bosses you'd usually see at the end of a long stage in any other game. Every boss has multiple phases, and rather than being increasingly aggressive variations on the same patterns, every phase typically constitutes a completely different fight, often involving the boss transforming and employing entirely new attacks. As such, each boss challenge is in reality three to five successive bosses, which all need to be beaten in a row.

I had enough fun with the game to go immediately back and get an A ranks in the few bosses I hadn't already, and proceed straight into the DLC afterwards. Delicious Last Course offers only six new major bosses (and a really fun five-boss gauntlet where you aren't allowed to shoot), but man if all of them aren't some of the most fantastic animation I have ever seen a in a video game. I didn't have the patience to replay more than a few fights in Expert mode, but I'm happy to know it's there for me if I ever feel like returning to the game again!

 

After the bliss of having recently wrapped up Tanuki Justice - and Steel Assault just a couple of years ago - Cuphead does feel a lot less mind-blowing in comparison, and it's hard to escape the thought that you might be putting up with a mediocre run 'n gun, powered exclusively by its incredible presentation.
But even if it's not a phenomenal game, Cuphead is absolutely 100% adequate. And on that note I'd like to reject the common notion that graphics aren't important for a video game. Of course they can never make up for lacking gameplay, but I think the satisfaction of seeing the thing you are engaging with unfold on the screen is always, and has always been, the core joy of playing a video game. And with that in mind, Cuphead's visuals are undeniably a massive boost to its qualities!

[ConfusedCollector | 36]

On 2/5/2023 at 6:21 AM, Lago said:

Thanks for mentioning this game.  It had completely flew under my radar.  It sounds interesting to me.  Do you happen to know if there is any difference in purchasing the physical copy for XBOX One or Series X if it is played on a Series X?  I Googled but the best I could come up with was performance on different consoles.  I'm imagining it is the same game but I could be wrong.

It sounds like you had a blast with this game!  I've tried a couple times but just couldn't seem to get into the groove of things.  I might pick it up and try again.  I'm wondering if it might have been because my preferred weapon was the sphere and I kept getting gored\trampled to death.

I played on ps5 but I would just get the Series x version so you're good to go. The regular xbox version has stripped down textures and limited performance. 

[ConfusedCollector | 36]

45 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Elden Ring

Nice! That had to be a lot of hours?

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

6 hours ago, ConfusedCollector said:

Nice! That had to be a lot of hours?

Over 100.  That was close to a completionist run.

[Jicsan | 591]

I'm just over 50 hours into Dragon Quest XI now, I think I added about 30 hours played in January. 

Spoiler

I just regained Jade to my party and restored Octagonia from the demon Booga.

Unfortunately for the backlog I just got Hogwart's Legacy...  Then in March it's Resident Evil 4 Remake, then Star Wars in April, then Zelda in May, then Final Fantasy XVI and Diablo IV in June.

[Sumez | 2,995]

Dusk - Beaten 6/2

I don't really like the term "boomer shooter". If you tell me something is a "boomer shooter" I'd imagine something primordial along the likes of Asteroids or Centipede. Instead the term has now somehow been attached to traditional FPS games. It's intended as an affectionate term I'm sure, but it really seems to paint this style of games as a relic of the past, when the meat of the issue is that first person shooters in recent times have become more focused with replicating the likes of bloated gams like Half-Life or Call of Duty, rather than the much more staight-to-the-point action games that the genre used to represent. Something even AAA studios seem to have acknowledged, what with the release of the new Doom games.
Dusk takes it a step further though, and very intentionally tries to recreate all the little things that made Doom and Quake specifically memorable. Things like the way the story is told, the little quips in the text descriptions whenever you pick up certain items, the boldly color-coded keys, and of course the blocky 3D graphics designed to recall the look of Quake especially, but probably more importantly allowed the developer to design a lot of distinctly evocative looking locales without a massive art team backing them up, not dissimilar to the advantages of pixel art in 2D indie games.

As such, Dusk has been heralded as the big inauguration of said boomer shooter, ie. the recent boom in indie FPS games of which Dusk is still said to be the king, whenever you look up any dive into the trend. And with that in mind, I guess I probably expected a little more from it than what it was able to deliver.

The game starts out in a basement as you try to fend off three big hooded guys with chainsaws with nothing but a pair of sickles, though you can find a pistol nearby and start shooting as soon as possible. As you climb up and escape from the house, you find yourself in a rural township with a few houses, fields and a whole lot of KKK-looking cultists trying to take you down. The level design is sort of intriguing, in how it likes to turn mundane settings upside down, and its favourite trick in the first episode is hidden underground compounds which have a tendency to take you way further down than you'd immediately expect.
Just like the games that inspired it, Dusk is split into three separate episodes, which manage to have a bit of their own identity. Each of them introduce entirely new enemies, and even new weapons, and feature thematically quite distinct environments, that each evolve in different unexpected ways - Showing a bit of retraint, the first one is mostly quite prosaic, while the final episode literally starts turning things on their head, making progress through the game neatly recreate some sort of lovecraftian descent into madness. Without ever really taking itself seriously.

Departing slightly from the classic design that inspired it, Dusk denies you the ability to carry weapons and ammunition across stages, starting each one with only your basic melee attack - thus also discouraging players from stockpiling the strongest ammo throughout the whole game. That design allows each stage to build its own identity based on which weapons even appear on them, and makes finding secret weapons consistently rewarding. Some elements to the stage design doesn't feel like it's aware of this mechanic though, as you will often find large caches of ammunition towards the end of a stage where it no longer has any real use, or even secret rooms with ammunition for weapons that don't appear on the same stage.
In general though, I think the secrets are some of the highlights regardless. They are often hidden in really clever ways that makes finding them super satisfying no matter how much you need the stuff that you find. I missed more than half of the secrets on my playthrough, but all the ones I found were cleverly hidden in a way that rewarded paying extra attention and thinking outside the box, never expecting you to simply push up blindly against every inconspicious wall.

Adhering to classic FPS mechanics, Dusk also gives you the option of quicksaving anywhere, and is designed with the expectation that you use it, which I think is one of the more regrettable decisions here. The stages are a bit too large to learn without frequent saving, but saving anywhere means it's also impossible to ever mess up when you can undo any mistake you made, and never actually need the health pickups placed around. I'd have preferred some kind of sensible checkpoint mechanic instead, forcing you to at least do well at several encounters before you get to check in your progress.

I've always advocated simplistic and predictable enemy patterns for FPS games, similar to what you'd expect in many 2D games. But I think Dusk probably takes that idea a little too far.
Every single enemy in the game has exactly two stages - inactive or active. The moment an enemy becomes aware of you, it will continue to know your exact position forever, and never stop taking the direct path towards your location, no matter if it has melee attacks or is purely a long distance fighter. As such, if everything else fails, a surefire way to clean out a room is to retreat around a corner, and take out everything as they walk right into your bullets. Of course, that is a somewhat boring way to fight, and you'll probably enjoy yourself more by running into the open, hopping around guns blazing. But even then, the repetitive behaviors of the enemies unfortunately turns most encounters into somewhat mundane events, since they tend to play out the exact same way every time, which is a stark contrast to something like Doom, where each new room layout offers a new experience.

In a way, Dusk is the real sequel to Quake that I never got. In another way though, it's sort of ultimately quite an unremarkable game. If you really really like FPS'es of old, and would love to see a loving callback to those, Dusk is worth playing - but don't expect anything on the level of either Doom or Quake. Though I guess that is obviously a pretty tall order.

[Gloves | 11,843]

OK! Dead Space - done.

Let's see if I can knock a game off the actual list now...

[FireHazard51 | 2,053]

1 minute ago, Gloves said:

OK! Dead Space - done.

Let's see if I can knock a game off the actual list now...

Ditto....

Finally beat a game that IS on my backlog, Half-Life.  This game kept going and was cool to figure out the maze to keep the game moving forward.  Game doesn't hold your hand really.  It's up to you to figure shit out through trial and error.  I only had to Google something twice.  Once to realize I was encounter a bug in the game that prevents the next level loading (guess they never patched that bug that was found in 2003).  And once to figure out how to perform a "long jump".  Now can I start playing Half-Life 2 (VR mod).  But before that I think I'm going to start on Horizon Forbidden West (PS5) and Moss 2 (PSVR).

[Renmauzo | 1,205]

4 minutes ago, Gloves said:

OK! Dead Space - done.

Let's see if I can knock a game off the actual list now...

I hear you. I just beat Dead Space over the weekend, so I'm back to working on a couple of games from the list like Tactics Ogre and Symphony of the night...whew TO is a HUGE game; I'm only on chapter 4...trying to save Cressida is proving to be a challenge.

[Sumez | 2,995]

Today is a historic day. I have started playing Trails in the Sky Second Chapter on my daily commute. I did some research, and if I play the game on every train ride I should be able to be done with it in around 24 weeks.

It's been six years since I completed First Chapter, so another quick calculation says that at my current pace, I'll be done with the entirety of the current Trails series (not including titles currently in development either) in around 54 years.

[T-Pac | 7,590]

6 hours ago, Sumez said:

It's been six years since I completed First Chapter, so another quick calculation says that at my current pace, I'll be done with the entirety of the current Trails series (not including titles currently in development either) in around 54 years.

[Sumez | 2,995]

Nice touch with the PSP 

As if every PSP battery hasn't exploded within the next ten years

Edited February 10, 2023 by Sumez

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

On 12/4/2022 at 1:10 PM, Gloves said:

Feb 8: started The Quarry

I've seen that on sale a few times recently.  But the mixed reception kinda scared me off.  Will be interested to see what you think.

[Gloves | 11,843]

2 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

I've seen that on sale a few times recently.  But the mixed reception kinda scared me off.  Will be interested to see what you think.

It's honestly really good so far. I'm on the second-to-last chapter and people need to get over themselves - unless the ending is a complete dud, it's a game I planned to tag you and suggest you bump it up the list. I have more of my initial thoughts on my tracking site here: Gloves Off Games

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

Winback

I shared my thoughts in the N64 thread.  But I was pretty disappointed considering I've wanted to play this for 25 years.

[Gloves | 11,843]

Beat The Quarry. Really enjoyed it. I especially appreciate that failure is likely, and not just via QTE failure and the like. You can just straight up make the wrong call and be dead, with no recourse. LOVE that since it just means you've entered a parallel universe where that person/people is/are dead. Really makes me wanna see what happens with different decisions. I got a pretty epic fail of an ending, will have to go back sometime to try for a win. 

[Foochie776 | 1,062]

I’m stuck on a mini boss in KH II so I’ve been playing Pikmin and wow, I can’t believe I’ve skipped this game over for so long! It’s incredibly addictive and so fun. 
 

I’ve also started (and almost completed) Super Mario Land 2, much better than the first.