I picked up “Mafia: Definitive Edition” cheap the other day (I’ve linked it on Steam as it’s still on sale for the next few days).
I was a fan of Mafia (the original from 2002) and felt it was cheap enough to give it a shot and I’m glad I did: besides the infamous/arduous racing level I found it to be very enjoyable overall.
I was sad to see that there wasn’t any “Freeride Extreme” in the latest version (this was bonus, fun, ludicrous content, available after completing the game) as it would have been a nice addition, the “Freeride” mode is likewise a little lackluster but the actual campaign is great.
What was the last game you finished? Was it any good?
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Finish? Hahahaha!
I finished Outer Wilds a few weeks ago. It was, in my opinion, one of the strongest arguments for treating video games as an art form that I’ve ever experienced. It’s not long - I finished it in about 20 hours - but the narrative and story is so well put together and thought out that it felt a lot longer. I thought it was beautiful and thought provoking.
Video games as a whole aren’t for everyone, but if I meet someone and they’re interested in games but hasn’t played them much, Outer Wilds is on the top of my list of recommends. If you play a lot of video games, this one will amaze you. Don’t read anything about it - just grab it when it’s on sale and go in blind. I did and it made a big difference.
Any of the main games by Quantic Dream are of similar artful quality I’d say. Really a playable story with choices impacting the plot and twists and discovery that keeps you hooked. I liked Beyond: Two Souls the best, but Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human aren’t far behind.
Life is Strange is great in that same vein too.
Stray. It’s an awesome game to play casually, lots of fun pluzzes.
Baldur’s Gate 3.
Loved it. Immediately started my second play through. Loved it, immediately started my third playthrough.
I recently finished Mirror’s Edge on PC. I mention that because I’ve owned the game on Xbox 360 and PS3 and strangely I found the keyboard controls on PC easier to master, hence the completed game. I think it’s such a beautiful game that was a little misunderstood upon release.
If you want the long-winded waffly answer, I wrote a review on my blog here.
Persona 5 Royal.
It was a masterpiece.
Hotline Miami. Very fun game.
That was my go-to “blow off steam” game before DOOM 2016. What a killer game, literally, and a work of art imo.
I’ve realised that I need fun, skill-based gameplay the most. I get fed up with doing inventory management, stuff-shuffling and crafting, both in-game and IRL! Edit; awesome soundtrack too
Try out some mods, it’s fun
I just finished Spider-Man 2. Next, I will finish Spider-Man 2.
It was not Starfield
Super Mario Wonder. I got it at release as I came down with Covid and beat it 100% that weekend. Excellent experience, I just wish it was longer.
Deathloop. I kept reading reviews saying it failed to live up to the standards of Dishonored and Prey, but I think those people went into it with the wrong expectations. Dishonored and Prey are amazing immersive sims, yes, but Deathloop was like if you took an indie game that sought to better contextualize trite video game mechanics like endless multiplayer war, respawning, checkpoints, etc. within a reasonable story and then polished it with the skill of industry veterans and a big fuckin budget and everything about it (short of some network latency) worked magically. It’s one of my favorite games now and I strongly recommend it to any fans of well-told stories and FPS games.
If I had any complaint, it’s that the game holds your hand at the end a little too much. If they had given you space to plan your final attack it would’ve felt so much more satisfying. Regardless, great fuckin game.
Baldur’s Gate 3. I loved it as a cRPG fan who grew up on them. It’s ambitious, innovative and I’m really happy it’s brought the genre to a whole new audience. I hope we see something of a genre revival. But if you’ve been online at all you’ve seen all the praise I could give it already anyway, so lets talk about the bad.
It’s shockingly buggy and it’s weird that it’s always just a footnote in the discourse. I’m not sure I’ve ever finished a game this broken before. I was constantly encountering issues that would cause me to reload a save. There are plenty of posts about the bugs - pretty much every single quest in the game will have dozens of threads about various issues - but when it comes down to reviews people are really forgiving of it in a way I haven’t really seen before.
It’s also made some fundamentally terrible design decisions that wont be fixed by patches. Long resting to progress the story triggers is particularly awful. It absolute kills the pacing, despite the narrative suggesting a heavy time pressure (that isn’t actually there), and encourages you to just nova everything. I found myself just spamming long rests after every narrative beat until the cutscenes stopped triggering just to make sure which was very tedious.
Same! it is like my 7th playthrough already, going for the good dark urged route.
F.E.A.R. and I thought it was pretty fun.
Looks great for when it was made and the lighting was pretty impressive. The story was kind of dumb and super cliche. The scares mostly didn’t work, but they got me with a few jump scares. The music and atmosphere were pretty eerie and effective. Decent shooter!
I’ll eventually check out the sequels and now I really want to play that studio’s spy games. I think they are called No One Lives Forever or something like that.
Honestly, that would have to be Oneshot, and it was amazing. All I can really say without spoiling it is that it’s somewhat like Undertale in terms of enjoyment, at least for me.
Undertale and Oneshot spoilers
Although I would prefer that the emotional tension in Solstice was kept with more side stuff that you could mess up and have permanent consequences. What I liked about Undertale is how your actions truly felt like they mattered in the long run. Go from town to town killing everyone? The other’s will know and hate you for it. If you instead give everone mercy, never killing a single soul, those actions won’t matter until the end. And by then, you’d be glad to have done it. So, the way you play truly mattered, and affected the game’s perception of you the player. In Oneshot, I initially thought that my actions truly mattered, but found out quickly that they didn’t. The story remains the same no matter what actions you take. That took away from some of the impact the game had. I still cried during Solstice, though.
I finally played Mass Effect 3, I’d played 1 and 2 but after all the stink about 3 and it being on Origin / EA Play for years I never bothered until a recent $1 sale on a month of that EA subscription, which has ME3 on it.
I spent 90%+ of the game going “Wow this isn’t bad at all, I am really impressed! This really is a good game!”
…until I got to the ending sequence, when it felt like the game had taken crazy pills all of a sudden. I understood why everyone was mad about it, and totally agree that it ruined the game. It wasn’t that Shepherd died, it wasn’t the Red/Blue(/Green) choice they gave you, it was a combination of 3 factors though:
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Crippling your character and making you limp along, unable to use any of your powers, forced to slog through a bunch of token combat EDIT with only pistol, and all your cosmetic choices were erased as you drag around at half speed through corridors just to get further in the chain of conversations.
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Except for the pass/fail check on the conversation with the Illusive Man (which is very easy to miss the requirements for without expecting it), none of what you did before entering that final sequence matters, it really was just press a button to receive ending. On that same note, you can have all 3 endings regardless of what you did, spent the entire trilogy making nothing but Renegade choices? Don’t worry you can still press the Blue button! Hail Mary deathbed confession!
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I found the child avatar kind of out of place and a bit weird, yes I know it was a reference to the kid that died, but it was not really immersive and it made this gigantic long conversation that makes up “the last boss” really awkward, especially since half the conversation is just explaining the story for people that weren’t paying attention or missed all the side quests.
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