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@thegamediary-blog
Flash: House of Dead Ninjas
7/10 Unbeaten
A sweet little retro style platformer of sorts that I've wasted quite a few minutes on today and plan to come back to. It's highly replayable and fast paced. It seems a bit simple at first but once you give it a few minutes to master the weapons and moves and can get below level 100 it gets really challenging and pays off.
Here's a pic of my best game so far:
Flash: Epic Battle Fantasy 3
6/10 Unbeaten
Six out of ten is a pretty big score for a dinkly little flash game but Epic Battle Fantasy III really delivers considering it's absolutely free (the thumbnail links to the game). It obviously owes just about everything to classic japanese rpgs like Final Fantasy. Here's a screenshot of my save file:
While most of that time there is just the game sitting idle behind other tabs, if I played it for even a quarter of that time, I got more than I bargained for out of it. Right now I have 40 achievement medals in it and haven't been able to beat the final boss... maybe I should try it again right now.
Did you ever play Escape Velocity: Override, and did you know EV: Nova was the first official port to Windows?
It's been so long I can't really distinguish between any of them without doing some research. Was it Override that I played through or was it Nova? I dunno. I just remember playing 2 of them and really liking em! I wish some flash game developer would pick up and run with the formula it certainly seems do-able.
PC: Portal
3/10 Beaten
Luckily for me I snagged a copy of Portal on sale... for free... and I'm pretty glad I didn't pay much more than that. While flinging yourself bodily through the air thanks to the nifty portal gun gimmick is a nice trick, it got old pretty damn fast. The AI talking to you as you escape quickly fell into the classic gaffe of trying too hard to be funny and of course wound up corny and incredibly annoying. It only took 3 hours to beat but by that time I was so fed up with the whole thing that there was no way I was going to ever attempt any of the level challenges.
PC: Half Life 2: Episodes 1 & 2
7/10 Beaten
At this point I don't honestly remember much about Half Life 2 Ep 1 beyond the fact that it was pretty fun, but since I recently played through Ep 2 I thought I'd put up a post about the two together. They're smooth running, story well told, entertaining shooters that ultimately don't really stick in my mind as the immensely compelling classics they want to play themselves off as. Managed to beat HL 2 Ep 2 on hard the first time through but am not interested in playing it again to either see developer commentary or pick up those last few achievements I missed.
PC: Torchlight
5/10 Beaten
Welp, this game was incredibly unsatisfying. I bought it because in the demo it seemed very playable, but it just doesn't have that certain magic that Diablo II had despite being basically a better looking clone developed by ex-D2 creators. The characters and skill trees were incredibly uninteresting and without that, a game like this is totally sunk. I put way more hours into it than I should have just to try to beat it and maybe get some achievements but ultimately decided it wasn't worth my time:
Playstation 2: Shadow of the Colossus
10/10 Beaten
Amazing on every level. Fun, challenging, understated, beautiful, exciting, expansive, inventive, mysterious. It just has everything I look for in a game, and it's almost as fun to watch as it is to play. Forget about the awesome battles (literally adrenaline inducing) you could spend hours exploring the world finding hidden fruits and lizards to get power ups (I bet a lot of people completely miss this when they play it). You can go back and do the time challenges to get the secret invisibility cloak. The only problems with this game are that the controls weren't quite as fluid as they could have been, and that it doesn't have a sequel made every year!! What's his horse's name? Anego? One of the best sidekicks in game history.
Playstation 2: Kingdom Hearts
6/10 Beaten
Not expecting to like this game I was actually pretty surprised by how decent it turned out to be. I had always kind of wanted to try a FF style game with more action oriented gameplay and Kingdom Hearts delivered that. Anime and Disney mash-up animation makes me cringe on an aesthetic level, and the characters and storylines were as generic as possible, but I had a good time exploring the (all too limited) 3d worlds, mashing attack combos Dynasty Warriors style, and doing all that gear collecting and stat boosting crap that Squaresoft RPGs are based off. I ended up kind of liking Donald and Goofy in spite of themselves.
Playstation: Final Fantasy 8
5/10 Quit
Just couldn't get into this game and eventually quit playing it somewhere around half way through I guess. I actually had more fun playing the trading card minigame than the actual storyline. This is due to poor writing on square's part: the characters were bland or off-putting and the plot repeatedly slapped your brain with uncompelling teen soap opera bullshit. It also felt much more like you were playing a game on rails than previous FFs (even if it wasn't in fact any different).
PC: Command & Conquer: Renegade
6/10 Beaten
Had a huuuge amount of fun playing this online multiplayer with my buddies in college, but the memorable terribleness of the singleplayer experience caused me to drop its score a bit. As a multiplayer game it was a great combination of FPS and RTS - having to protect your base and manage resources was a good twist to a game that otherwise might have felt like an Unreal Tournament clone - and being rewarded with being able to purchase better characters and tanks and shit by being useful for your team was pretty cool. Loved playing as Mobius at first but later became an expert at 1 hit killing dudes from the hip with the sniper. Pretty sure the credit of discovering the tactic where you could fit a flame tank between the building and the ramps in the city stage is due to me as well - and that changed gameplay on that level forever (nobody was doing it before me and a couple days later you couldn't play that level without someone doing it the entire time). When it was popular, you would have been hard pressed to find someone better at this game's multiplayer than me. I changed handles often but people might remember 'Ninjafoot'.
PC: Nanosaur
2/10 Unbeaten
I think this game was bundled with my dad's Tangerine iMac. I can't think of any other reason why we would have owned it. I mean it's a fuckin velociraptor with a laser gun and a jetpack but even that couldn't carry the game in and of itself. 3D graphics were impressive at the time, but you couldn't see more than a few feet in front of yourself or control the dino very well. It just wasn't any fun. I would play it every now and then when I had nothing better to do but I don't ever remember actually bothering to find all the eggs.
XBOX: Psychonauts
8/10 Beaten
Psychonauts was awesome from the get-go. A complex world of interconnected stages to explore and collect power-ups within, lots of cool abilities to discover and use paired with decent controls, really nice art direction and pretty decent writing as far as storyline and characters go. It was consistently fun and engaging throughout. When I watched the movie Coraline I remember being pissed off because it was basically a detailed, non-interactive lift and graft of this game's look and story elements. I tried to find pretty much every hidden thing in the game but don't think I got there in the end.
PC: Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
7/10 Beaten
Clunky at first, and pretty cheesy, but I gave this game a chance (well, this was back when I pirated basically every game I ever played, so tossing it in the trash after 5 mins of playing it wasn't a big deal) and it payed off. It has that Deus-Ex era vibe to it in that it's a combination of 1st/3rd person shooter and RPG adventuring. Where these games really payed off was in your ability to guide the kind of abilities your character would gain, which influenced how you would go about accomplishing the various tasks and missions. I had a lot of fun playing through with a hyper fast + strong bare handed brawler type vampire, but never bothered to play through again with different strategies. It was a nice stride away from the usual shoot-em-up style that these types of games usually wind up as, though I would have liked a more free-form sandbox type of world and mission structure to explore.
Playstation: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
8/10 Beaten
I didn't actually play Symphony of the Night on the PS1 when it came out, but instead on an emulator many years later, but it still drew me right in, which is perhaps a good reason to give it an even higher rating than I already have - timelessly good games are few and far between. I ended up playing this for a really long time because of its open ended exploration and RPG like elements - I'm a sucker for tracking down hidden power ups and stat boosts. I also liked collecting all the rare weapons and items from monsters, though this became too much of a grind eventually. I beat through both the first castle and the nightmare version, but didn't really enjoy playing as Richter after unlocking him (he felt clunky and annoying after being spoiled with a suped-up Alucard).
Playstation: ESPN Pro Boarder
4/10 Beaten
Shit all these PS1 snowboarding games are really starting to blend together in my memory. I have no idea why I played so many of them. At any rate this one was a good improvement over previous efforts like Cool Boarders. Controls, physics, and graphics were a bit smoother, and I enjoyed the addition of different events like the Big Air contest. Ultimately a pretty forgettable experience though.
Playstation: ESPN Extreme Games
2/10 Unbeaten
I mean I guess this game was a little fun if you could do multiplayer and have little fist fights between the luger and the in-line skater. It's such a weird concept - it's like the video game version of your dad turning his Mariners cap around, sitting on a chair backwards, saying 'Let's Rap Yo' and then talking to your 12 year old self about how you should be practicing abstinence. It's one of those racing games where all of your opponents are off the screen in the first 3 seconds and you spend the rest of the track hitting checkpoints and trying to catch up. It had really bad collision detection which IMO is always a huge faux pas in racing games of any sort.
GameCube: Animal Crossing
6/10 Beaten
Animal crossing was a daily staple for me and a couple of my buddies for one of our sophomore semesters. I was the first one with a golden statue in town. It was pretty fun on its own, but the real reason we kept playing was sheer competetiveness rather than any particular strength of the game itself. The best part was leaving satanic/antisemitic/rude signs outside the NPC critter's houses - or writing them extremely threatening letters and ransom notes and reading their banal replies. My buddies and I were always trying to 1-up each other on who could come up with the sickest letter or most hilarious shirt design that would show up on one of the NPCs. Oh hey Mr. Raccoon, nice new Swastika Tshirt! Good times.