The 2023 Backlog Challenge

[Brickman | 4,020]

46 minutes ago, Gloves said:

I mean, I could always edit the post to do this for myself...

Damn it you’ve got me there 

[Foochie776 | 1,062]

I got the 25 ship parts to finish Pikmin to find out I did not get the correct parts for a decent ending. 
 

 

So I will return to this one

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

Keepin' it rolling.

Strife

Early FPS built with the Doom engine, with some light RPG and adventure elements.  The game has some problems (think trying to hit enemies with precision rockets in Doom), but overall I had a lot of fun with it.

[MagusSmurf | 577]

Banjo Tooie was disappointing.

The good: Banjo and Kazooie have a pretty fun base moveset and there were a fair amount of fun or clever bits.

The eh: At 43 hours 50-odd minutes It took me twice as long to get 90 jiggies as it did for Banjo Kazooie's 100 jiggies and it was even a good bit longer than my 38:08 198/201 Golden Banana playthrough of Donkey Kong 64. A lot of that is because the way this game works can extend the playtime a lot if you don't know what you're doing. Replaying and/or extensively using a guide (I only resorted to those if I seemed truly stuck on how to get something) would cut that down hugely though.

What it comes down is this game's levels are just too big and complicated for their own good. Too big, too many separate areas that prevent you from being able to easily to take a good overall view of the level, and it's too obscure on what you need to do to start making progress. One substantial contributor to all this is that they snuck in Donkey Kong 64's "five different characters you can only change between at specific places." You've got Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo alone, Kazooie alone, Mumbo, and Humba's transformations, in every level, and it just feels very excessive. Mumbo in particular is seldom fun. I guess a saving grace here is that there's no minor collectables tied to specific characters like Donkey Kong 64's bananas. There's also a pretty large number of jiggies and other things that you won't have the right moves to collect your first time through a world, whereas I think this only happened like once in Banjo Kazooie. These jiggies in particular tend not to be very interesting to go back and get; they're generally just locked off until you have the move. And you're just never really sure if you've gotten all the jiggies you can before you need to move on. I don't think Metroidvania and Collectathon go well together, at least not as implemented here.

There are a lot of minigames (Red 1 points, green 2 points, blue 3 points gets repeated a lot!) but here they're at least generally using the actual main game mechanics to do them. I don't think these add a ton but they're okay. Two exceptions:

1. Canary Mary. "Rapidly press A with strict pass/fail" might just be my least favorite mechanic in video games and Canary Mary doesn't even play fair with some real silly rubberbanding in the last race. Fun Fact: Gamefaqs' Contests board has a long running "do you like this character?" series (currently on topic # 1438). Only three characters in all that time have gotten a straight 0% approval rating and Canary Mary is one of them; it was deserved. (The other two are The Kids from Trix and Ethan Ryan McManus from Ctrl+Alt+Del)

2. The Breegull Blaster stages. Rare apparently had gotten real full of itself from Goldeneye's success so they decided to throw in some FPS sections (with Kazooie being used as the gun and shooting eggs). I mostly dislike sudden genre switches with non-negligible difficulty on general principle and If I wanted a Rare-developed N64 First Person Shooter from 2000 with a particular resemblance to Goldeneye, I'd, uh. I'd go play Perfect Dark instead. But even without that I've played enough Goldeneye to know that game has like eight different control options to help compensate for the N64 controller being suboptimal for this. Banjo-Tooie just has the one. And two of the FPS sections are on a relatively strict time limit requiring you to kill like 20 things in a pretty decent sized maze area; I don't think I'd have ever been able to get through the second one if I hadn't looked up a map. Maybe all this seemed like a reasonable ask back in the day with how Goldeneye-crazy N64 owners were but it's just stupid now.

Worst jiggy outside of those was probably Witchyworld's Cactus of Strength. Just has no real explanation and makes no sense. The Styracosaurus Jiggy was also really long and annoying; Terrydactyland in general kinda was, really.

I think this game's reputation probably benefits from memories of childhood playthroughs when you didn't necessarily mind all the hours and hours spent on exploration accomplishing very little. The first Banjo-Kazooie was way better. 6/10

[Sumez | 2,995]

14 hours ago, MagusSmurf said:

I don't think Metroidvania and Collectathon go well together, at least not as implemented here.

To be fair, I don't think this design is very good in metroidvanias in the first place, even though way too many of them do it. If you need to back to a place you've already been, you need to have stuff to do there, not just open a door that might as well have been somewhere else.
I don't mind backtracking, but pointless forced backtracking is icky. The Shantae games are especially bad with it.

Edited February 22, 2023 by Sumez

[Sumez | 2,995]

On 2/9/2023 at 10:37 AM, Sumez said:

Today is a historic day. I have started playing Trails in the Sky Second Chapter

I just made it past the prologue chapter. Well, kind of. People are still talking, and were talking the entirety of my session today, so I haven't actually gotten to play Chapter 1 yet. But I have a good feeling I'm getting close to the end!

[Brickman | 4,020]

5 minutes ago, Sumez said:

I just made it past the prologue chapter. Well, kind of. People are still talking, and were talking the entirety of my session today, so I haven't actually gotten to play Chapter 1 yet. But I have a good feeling I'm getting close to the end!

Haha this perfectly sums up a Trails game.

Any moment now I’m going to get past this dialogue segment and explore…oh wait no another hour long dialogue session 

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

I was supposed to be out of town, but the concert was cancelled, so I spent the afternoon beating Dusk instead.

Loved it.

[Brickman | 4,020]

Wario World for the GC finished. Absolutely loved this game and is probably my favourite Wario game I’ve played. 

A great variety of levels, each level had a unique boss and heaps of collectibles if you want to go for 100%. Not really much I can fault with this game really. 

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

Super Mario 3D World - We're on world 4, I think, which might be close to the credits.  But it sounds like there's a ton of bonus worlds.  And we have like 20 of the collectables in Bowser's Fury.  I think we'll probably have both beat by the end of the year.

Shenmue - This one is painful. I'll stick with it because I want to see it, and I want to play the sequels, but I'm guessing this game and Yoshi's Story are going to be bringing up the rear on this list when all is said and done.  Probably by a decent margin.

Hades - I got super sucked in.  I wasn't the biggest fan of Bastion (and thus stayed away from Transistor), but this is night-and-day better.

House of Fata Morgana - On hiatus because I'm already reading three books at once.

[DoctorEncore | 3,691]

10 hours ago, Brickman said:

Wario World for the GC finished. Absolutely loved this game and is probably my favourite Wario game I’ve played. 

A great variety of levels, each level had a unique boss and heaps of collectibles if you want to go for 100%. Not really much I can fault with this game really. 

I have essentially never heard anyone say anything about this game. Awesome to hear that's it's pretty darn good. Someday I'll collect and tackle the GC library.

As for me, I've just been chugging along on The Witcher 3. It really is a remarkable game and I completely understand the hype. While the story is great, the actual gameplay and combat isn't particularly interesting. Yet it just feels right and the game is definitely more than the sum of its parts. It's just so fun to play and the difficulty balance is perfect. You can run around dominating everything and then suddenly get ripped apart by wolves because you decided to rush in without preparation. Witcher 1 and 2 were both decent, but this is clearly the culmination of everything learned making those games.

[Lago | 223]

I'm marking Stacklands as complete.  I don't think there is an actual end to the game and I've pretty much done everything I wanted.  i was super pumped at the beginning but the game turned into a bit of a slog in the mid and, what I am assuming, late game.  Still definitely worth the $5 if you like card/roguelite/survival games.  I ended up sinking close to 18 hours into this game instead of my anticipated 7.  It did something right, haha.

On the brighter side, I have ended up spending roughly 24 hours more than I anticipated gaming this year.  I'll give some credit to the backlog challenge for that as it has given me a clear defined goal to shoot for.  Also I wanted to spend more free time gaming instead of getting distracted by other things I'm not as fond of but end up being more of a time sink.  Glad to see I am actually doing that!

[Lago | 223]

On 12/22/2022 at 12:46 PM, spacepup said:

Since I did so amazing in 2022, I should probably carry over my success to 2023.  Sure, I didn't actually *finish* any of the games, but I started several and made some progress there, so I still consider it a win in my book

I'll have to think carefully about what I can actually accomplish, and will update this when I can!

Ok, I think I have a list.  I've partially played some of these and never beaten.  Need to go back and finally make it happen:

 

* Psychonauts 2
* Alwa's Awakening
* Rakuen
* Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
* Paper Mario: Origami King (Switch)
* Nier: Automata (PS4)
* Panel de Pon (SNES) (JP)
* The Last Guardian (PS4)
* Moonlighter
* Papo & Yo --- beat 02-12-23!
* Transistor
* Pyre
* Jade Empire
* Control --- beat 01-09-23!
* Alan Wake --- beat 01-18-23!
 

 

Jade Empire is an absolutely awesome game and I wish they would come out with a sequel for it.  Amazing story with martial arts action that improved on the combat system of KOTOR.  I can't recommend this game enough.  When I was doing an "evil" playthrough it hit me in the feels hard enough that I stopped playing.  I don't do great with "evil" playthroughs.

[Floating Platforms | 741]

Syberia is done

I didn't beat it under 6 hours going in blind, so I did a quick second run with a guide and skipping dialogue/cutscenes just to get that last trophy for 100%.  There are some good elements to this. Since it's originally from the early 2000s PC, it has a very comforting graphical look that isn't too blocky but not too crisp. The same goes for the audio quality. The voice acting may not be amazing, but it feels warm thanks to the audio equipment of the day along with the amount of file compression or whatever is going on. The puzzles are relatively simplistic and thankfully are mostly self-contained to their respective areas. The game does feel like it wanted to do more, since there are several side paths and a couple characters that were completely useless. The locations were interesting and varied as well, so I wouldn't have minded having to look through more of it.  But the game also has early 2000s jank. Kate gets inexplicably stuck on objects all the time, to the point where some paths or objects may be hidden if you assume you can't wiggle your way through. To exit the static image background to go to the next screen, you need to be in specific spots (even if the next screen shows that the whole left side should be open, you better exit at the top or else you're running in place). Perspective switches break the 180 rule so you can run down and the screen switches to where you need to walk up immediately after and that causes that frustrating backtrack.  Speaking of frustrating, the characters Kate deals with are all obnoxiously selfish petulant children. I get that this is intentional, but it was really pathetic over-the-top stuff like "why does my fiancé need to be a lawyer and do her job? Just come home!" or "you haven't found this guy we didn't know existed yesterday yet? What's wrong with you?"

With all said and done, I'm not completely sure why this one has stayed around in the public eye the way it has. It was fine. I have the sequel through PS+ on PS3 as well but I don't know if I'm all that excited to continue the journey.

[Brickman | 4,020]

2 hours ago, DoctorEncore said:

I have essentially never heard anyone say anything about this game. Awesome to hear that's it's pretty darn good. Someday I'll collect and tackle the GC library.

As for me, I've just been chugging along on The Witcher 3. It really is a remarkable game and I completely understand the hype. While the story is great, the actual gameplay and combat isn't particularly interesting. Yet it just feels right and the game is definitely more than the sum of its parts. It's just so fun to play and the difficulty balance is perfect. You can run around dominating everything and then suddenly get ripped apart by wolves because you decided to rush in without preparation. Witcher 1 and 2 were both decent, but this is clearly the culmination of everything learned making those games.

Yeah I hadn’t heard anything on it either, did a google search and the critics panned it or said it was average but the general public loved it.

It’s made by Treasure so I figured it couldn’t be that bad. Turns out the general public were right because it’s a lot of fun and very well made.

The GC has a great library and definitely something you should explore one day.

[Jeevan | 8,948]

@Reed Rothchild you can put me down for 11 new N64 clears this year so far......Hopefully a couple more over the next few days.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

Having a hell of a run right now.  With the AOE bow I haven't taken a single piece of damage yet...

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

Fuck yeah, Hades falls.  Got it in under 10 hours I think, mostly due to the insane damage of this build

I didn't actually die a single time until Hades Phase 2.

 

[Sumez | 2,995]

1 hour ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Fuck yeah, Hades falls.  Got it in under 10 hours I think, mostly due to the insane damage of this build

Awesome! You've made it to the point where this game really starts. Have fun playing the rest of it  

 

  

10 hours ago, Jeevan said:

@Reed Rothchild you can put me down for 11 new N64 clears this year so far......Hopefully a couple more over the next few days.

lol, update your own post, you lazy bum 

Edited February 27, 2023 by Sumez

[Jeevan | 8,948]

21 minutes ago, Sumez said:

lol, update your own post, you lazy bum 

You are lazy kuz i didnt wanna be a part of this anyway   read through the posts...... @Reed Rothchild pinged me to be a part of this, i didnt post to join     I love you @Sumez, but i didnt join up to complete a backlog, i joined up so reed would not bug me, although he pinged me again..........stupid reed   I love you buddy, reed, not sumez, although i love sumez..........life wouldn't be the same without sumez

[Jeevan | 8,948]

@Sumez

Battletanx for N64 done!  Was an ok game overall, pretty fun in parts and pretty tough from time to time!  

Now that is a lazy synopsis of a game .

@Reed Rothchild +1

[Reed Rothchild | 9,593]

@Jeevan You're catching up to me in the lead.  Although I'm gonna be slowing down once I finally start the longer/slower games.

[Jeevan | 8,948]

Just now, Reed Rothchild said:

@Jeevan You're catching up to me in the lead.  Although I'm gonna be slowing down once I finally start the longer/slower games.

well, i will prolly be on the same pace as you kuz n64 games are a little long from time to time, unless i just knock out a bunch of sporty ball games.

[Floating Platforms | 741]

New Super Mario Bros. 2 is done

I got the 5-star profile after a few days of coin grinding to reach that triple crown. I unlocked the other 4 stars with a little less than 600 lives built up, but triple crown requires something like 1110?  So, I explored levels and found that 1-A was the best option for me where I could get 12-15 lives per run consistently.  I know there's some better end screen if you max out the coins, but no thank you. That's months of grinding coins as you can see.

The game was surprisingly fun. I played New SMB 1 a long time ago and wasn't all that impressed. This game had that 2D Mario vibe and solid level design. The only new item, I think, is the golden flower that explodes bricks to turn them into coins and gives you coin multipliers for killing multiple enemies with a single fireball. Those are quite rare overall so most of the time, it's the flower, leaf or small mushroom (again, rarely needed). Even with that straightforward approach, it was fun to explore the levels and some provided a tiny bit of challenge. A few of the gold star coins were very well hidden, too. I've only played a little bit of SMB Wii U and it didn't grab me either. I'm now a bit more optimistic to go back to that one later this year. On my DS, I'll probably get Portrait of Ruin started next.

Two games down this week and I'll likely have Miles Morales done soon too. Just need to get a 100x combo, get one more skill and finish NG+.

[Sumez | 2,995]

@Jeevan

Doom Eternal - 26/2

 

One of my only issues with the last Doom (2016) game was how repetitive it felt. The core gameplay was very fun, but the nature of it meant that every single encounter was kind of the same as the previous one. It's not something I heard a lot of people talking about, but given the changes in the sequel, it seems like at least the developers were aware of this and tried very hard to remedy it.

In case you aren't experienced with either game, the core gameplay takes a little explaining because it actually differs a lot from your typical old school FPS. The primary aspect that sets it apart is how every single enemy type in the game has the ability to very quickly and persistently force any sort of terrain, and track you down no matter where you go. You can't just hide behind a corner like you do in Dusk - enemies in modern Doom will hunt you down and flank you, and even the weakest fodder-type enemies can tear down your healthbar in seconds if you ever stand still for more than a split-second.
As such the general strategy in Doom 2016 was to always be moving, and never standing still. Just keep running around the arena while shooting what you see, and that was kind of it. Even though the arenas were generally quite unique, the repetition of the approach you'd use to deal with enemies meant those differences didn't really affect gameplay at all, since all enemies can follow you anywhere - and familiarity with the layout didn't make a difference because the only thing that matters is that you are always moving from one place to any other place.

Doom Eternal retains this basic formula, but adds a lot on top, not in terms of how the arenas work, but how you approach each enemy. More of the monsters you'll be facing in this game have much more unique abilities and movement patterns, which means you'll spend a lot more time being aware of who they are and what they are doing. Most of the issues I've heard haters of Doom Eternal bring up are tied to how this also means that specific stronger demons have very specific ideal ways to deal with them, which makes combat very strict in how you approach them, not really rewarding free-form thinking on the spot.
While that argument does have some truth to it, I don't think the actual effect it has on the game is really that big. Targeting weak spots seems mostly optional, and often not something you have time for in the heat of the battle, where just bringing out the big guns might be a more effectient approach depending on your situation. I thought it was mostly notable with cacodemons which can be instantly defeated with the secondary shot of a one specific weapon, and doing anything else is essentially a waste that will likely get you hurt more than you want to.

In order to keep you busy, the game keeps adding new arms and skills to your inventory, and that is probably the biggest issue I have with this game. You know those games where you get like eight different weapons all at once and are expected to juggle them effeciently? In those situations I always end up gravitating towards the two or so weapons I like the best, and ignore the existence of the others, because switching between them becomes too much of a hassle. Doom Eternal does this, but then also adds two secondary shots to each weapon, a melee superpunch that needs to be fueled up to use, two types grenades you can toggle between, a melee chainsaw attack, and a flamethrower spray, all on a cooldown which means you can't go all in on them but have to remember they exist once you got them available to you again.

The chainsaw is important, because it's the only reliable way to refill your ammo, so you won't forget about that one, especially given how quickly you run out of ammo. Also returning from the previous game are "glory kills" which means holding back fire when enemies are almost dead in order to stagger them, and then take them out with a "punch" for an instant health refill. The core loop of the game involves (ideally) constantly switching between using the chainsaw to refill ammo, and using the ammo to refill your health. I guess you could also just not get hit, but, you know...

The basic design of the game takes you trekking between individual arenas where enemies respawn until they have been exhausted and you're allowed to move on. I'm not a massive fan of this type of design, since new monsters just spawn in your face whenever, and you never know how close you are to clearing them out. But I can see why Doom Eternal needs it, because a single wave of enemies is easily cleared, and spawning everyone all at once would just be impossible. Early on, an area will have two or three of the stronger demon variants roaming alongside a ton of smaller enemies that are still dangerous but quickly destroyed, existing mostly to make sure you can get your health back, and new strong demons only show up when one of the current ones has been exploded. Later on when you're equipped to handle it, you will face way more simultaneous "heavies", but they are still restricted by a similar queue.

Inbetween those encounters however, the stages are actually sort of fun to explore, and a big upgrade compared to Doom 2016. There is a lot of platforming over bottomless chasms and, rare for an FPS, it actually works well and is super fun. You get a double jump and two mid-air dashes, which can take you quite long distances, and adds a lot of finesse to your traversal as you're punching your way forward and looking for secrets.

There was some intrigue about the soundtrack for this game. I didn't care to read through it all (because it's a lot of text, and neither party involved seems super reliable), but the lowdown seems to be that the composer didn't get a full payment because he was slow to deliver finished tracks for a special edition OST release, though it also seems like he was still paid a massive amount of money regardless, so I can't really be bothered to care.
And I think that whole debacle becomes even less significant when you play the game and find out how forgettable the music is anyway. It's mostly just a few guitar riffs over some droning noise. It's not that it's bad, but it's pretty much the kind of ambient stuff you'd expect from this sort of game, feeling like it exists only to make encounters feel a bit more hectic while disappearing into the background. With these new Doom games trying to revive the idea of FPS games as fast-paced kinetic action games, I say why not also bring back the big catchy video games tunes as well? I think it would genuinely have made the game more enjoyable!

Doom Eternal is a polarizing game, and I can see why. The heavy reliance on utility weapons makes combat feel more convoluted than deep, and some times juggling everything just feels like work. I think it fixes the worst issues of the previous game, but the way it does so is essentially by giving you new toys the entire way through, and there is no way the game could just go on like that without growing even more convoluted.
As it is though, I had a ton of fun with it, and there's a sweetspot around halfway through where you unlock enough upgrades to rely a bit more freely on every tool and weapon, giving you the ability to feel like a superman as you're dealing with a truckload of concurrent gigantic demons, fighting for your attention. The game ends on a low point, with the final boss fight being one of the worst I've experienced in any game - and reflecting on it, it almost makes earlier stages worse in retrospect, due to how it highlights the limitations of the game's own design. But ultimately Doom Eternal is a very unique and action packed FPS, which is a rarity nowadays, even with the "boomer shooter" revival, and it's worth playing just for that.