Playing Old Games For the First Time - Give a Short Review of Some 10+ Year Old Game You Played For the First Time

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Ibanez RG 350EX said:
I played Dead Space and Dead Space 2 for the first time. I think Dead Space could've been a more effective horror game than it is, but overall I see why many people regard it fondly. There's a very strong consistency to the design, how all the systems function, and the way everything is presented that makes it feel like a single person's cohesive artistic vision (even if it wasn't).

Dead Space 2, though? It jettisoned everything that made Dead Space unique for the worst of 2010s AAA gimmicks, higher production values, and bafflingly terrible writing. You could remove Stross (one of the game's very few characters and featured heavily throughout most of it) from the game entirely and NOTHING about the plot would've changed in the slightest.

Dead Space feels uncompromising, Dead Space 2 feels designed by committee.
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If you think 2 is bad wait til you see 3 lol.
 
Ibanez RG 350EX said:
Dead Space 2, though? It jettisoned everything that made Dead Space unique for the worst of 2010s AAA gimmicks, higher production values, and bafflingly terrible writing. You could remove Stross (one of the game's very few characters and featured heavily throughout most of it) from the game entirely and NOTHING about the plot would've changed in the slightest.
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It's still a good game, but I really wonder what they were aiming for.
3 had so many unresolved plots and unanswered questions to wrap up and answer only to come out as a dying diarrhea shit
 
I wrote a mini review of Halo Wars in the video game chat thread. TL;DR: it aged poorly and the PC port isn't good.

Fount of BadSpeak said:
I have been playing Halo Wars on Steam, and wow this game did not age well. Not only is the port bad, but I didn't remember how extremely simplistic the game is to compensate for the original Xbox controller controls that it had. It expects you to micro a lot of units, especially their powers, to be effective at the game, but also simultaneously is poorly made so that oftentimes I found myself more prone to just diving my army into the enemy base, using my damage powers indiscriminately on the enemy base, then letting my army duke it out and eating whatever losses I got. I also found unit pathing to be pretty bad; in particular, units would get hung up on other units and structures all the time, even when there is clearly more than enough room for them to navigate, but the controls are bad enough that trying to micro units was pointless and you might as well just let them die if they're going to die instead of trying to move injured units to the rear line so you can try to save them for later. Also, the Spirit of Fire power wheel is busted and the scrolling is borderline not functional, so the powers are functionally worthless and not worth bothering with. You will spend so much time fucking with aiming the powers, that you would have been better off not using it at all.

There's really no strategy or planning involved, just make lots of units until you hit the cap, then go roll over the enemies without a concern. Really the only "strategy" is fighting against flood, but unfortunately that strategy boiled down to never sending infantry against the flood ever, because you will just lose your whole army, then have to kill the space zombies on top of the base you were fighting before. Even though ODST troopers are the human "super unit", there's no particular point to using them after the introduction of the flood, unless you are going to station infantry in a garrisonable structure for money or power. In the end, that turns into "never use infantry ever", just out of pragmatism.

The story and characters, what little I interacted with, are also awful. There's tons of Marvel tier "well that just happened!" style of non-jokes, and it seems like none of the main cast takes anything that is happening seriously. When dozens of marines are slaughtered by an unknown alien lifeform, that isn't a problem, that's just a chance for some more glib non-humor that destroys the mood and shows that nobody in universe is taking what is happening seriously. I hated everything involved with the characters so much, especially Serena, that I just started skipping all cutscenes.

One particularly bad element is the introduction of the Flood. The game introduces the Flood at the same time that it introduces the mobile barracks, the Elephant, but the game makes the infantry functionally obsolete that same mission since any infantry you field will be instantly eaten by the flood. Why even bother having that in the game if the game's own mechanics negates any utility that the unit could have? Unlike a lot of other games, which try to give a mission or two for a new unit to shine and show you its benefits, this one instead goes out of its way to show you that the new unit you just got is going to be basically worthless and not worth building. I have never heard of an RTS game purposefully sabotaging itself like this.

I was originally playing this to get Halo Wars 2, but this game is so much worse than I remember that I won't be getting Halo Wars 2 after all. It's to the point that I am on the last mission, and seriously wondering to myself if I want to even finish the game, or just uninstall it and try to forget about the money I wasted on buying it.
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Lone MacReady II said:
If you think 2 is bad wait til you see 3 lol.
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I tried to force myself through it a few weeks ago. I was never really interested in the remake of the original but ended up trying it anyways and was immediately not feeling it. The fuck is going on with aiming.. yeah they give like 5 options to fuck around with it but the original game? Aiming just fucking works out of the box. So I went back and replayed the original instead.. still the best in the series. I much prefer the mute and probably deranged retard space janitor isaac from the first game.

I move on and I'm well aware of the bad rep DS3 acquired upon release that's why I chose to avoid it all this time. Times are tough though. I simply find that I generally prefer PS2 and PS3 era games to what's often shovelled out these days so I decide to bite the bullet and dive in. Pushed on until Chapter 10 and simply couldn't force myself to play anymore.

Game is absolute dreck. Most of the plot is a flimsy soap opera love triangle now? I'm aware in NG+ you can revert to classic weapon mode but it should have been there from the start. Universal ammo fucking why? Custom weapon builds sounds like a good idea but the execution is total balls and a lot of the new weapons are simply not useful enough. Cover shooter intro, human enemies, dodge-rolling around, a host of crappy looking suits fuck me what a mess. The volume of enemies apparently doesn't change whether you're playing coop or solo either (I went solo) so the game is loaded with choke points where you're forced to run around in crcles a lot just to stay alive.

Expanded zero g is a plus but there's still very little done with it beyond scavenging for ammo and credits. Side missions weren't bad either they feel more tailored to the overall flow of the game than the actual main story. In the end I really just got bored and lamented that they drifted even further away from any sense of survival horror. Game has absolutely no tension or personality. The music is fucking trash too full of orchestral bluster everytime it throws a cutscene your way. In fact overall sound design in the first two remain excellent while this one is desperately trying to fit in with the AAA cover shooter trends of the time and failing miserably.
 
Fuckyoudad said:
Game is absolute dreck. Most of the plot is a flimsy soap opera love triangle now?
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Much worse than this, the other side of this love triangle is directly involved in kidnapping the protagonist at gunpoint and telling him his girlfriend is in danger and will die if he doesn't help them. He has infinitely more motivation to brutally murder everyone involved than cooperate once this is revealed in the first hour of the game, but dutifully continues taking orders from them anyway.

A traumatized main character down on his luck can be sympathetic. A main character who's an IDubbz-caliber spineless cuckold cannot.
 
perfect dark on a n64 emulator with mouse and keyboard controls.

fantastic shooter, amazing attention-to-detail everywhere but level design sucks ass at the back half starting from the Pelagic II.
 
Battle For Middle Earth (2004 LotR RTS on the PC)

Why the hell was I not aware of this game back when it was new? I’m having a blast with it.
 
Baten Kaitos HD collection because it was like 60% off, really liking the art direction the character arts heavy matte saturation reminds me of this old OVA called Dragon's Heaven crossed with the works of Windsor McCay. Combat mechanics are rather unique though combat can get tedious and although there is an option to one-shot enemies or speed up combat it throws off the timing of card use.
 
I recently played Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth. I really enjoyed it, even if it ended up as mostly a FPS towards the end. Barring a few levels (the cannery, the Urania), and the bugs (which the unoffical patch fixed) the game holds up pretty well. While the game was a commercial failure for good reason, I do think it's a shame we never saw another game from the devs as I would have like to see what they could do with more experience.
 
Cool Dog Returns said:
Tried skies of arcadia recently, didnt now it was turn based shit, that killed it for me

Like what?
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What exactly Earthgov was thinking with making zombie apocalypse generators in civilian population areas, what the markers were really made for, how much Unitoligists really knew or had influence over, long-term consequences of Marker dementia, and what Isaac would do after.

it fucked up on nearly every account
the moon woke up, unc
all the moons woke up, unc, nocap fr fr bussin slaps
 
God of Nothing said:
What exactly Earthgov was thinking with making zombie apocalypse generators in civilian population areas, what the markers were really made for, how much Unitoligists really knew or had influence over, long-term consequences of Marker dementia, and what Isaac would do after.
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Wasnt the point in 2 that earthgov couldnt just keep planetcracking and needed new sources of energy and the markers fool civilizations into thinking markers are sources of infinite energy? plus the whole mental manipulation markers do to convince you to help it build more

Like the why planetcracking is over is never explained but it could just be the markers telling them that
God of Nothing said:
all the moons woke up, unc, nocap fr fr bussin slaps
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I think visceral did that cuz they knew 3 was going to be the last one forever so they had to finish the series somehow
 
Cool Dog Returns said:
Wasnt the point in 2 that earthgov couldnt just keep planetcracking and needed new sources of energy and the markers fool civilizations into thinking markers are sources of infinite energy? plus the whole mental manipulation markers do to convince you to help it build more

Like the why planetcracking is over is never explained but it could just be the markers telling them that
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They were excavating the last of Venus' moons, IIRC

Considering how big space is but how planetcracking became the most popular resource excavation process, it is ridiculous they ran out of shit by the time of the games.
Cool Dog Returns said:
I think visceral did that cuz they knew 3 was going to be the last one forever so they had to finish the series somehow
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and this was the best they could do
 
God of Nothing said:
Considering how big space is but how planetcracking became the most popular resource excavation process, it is ridiculous they ran out of shit by the time of the games.
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I get really tired of how all sci-fi is based on the audience not understanding how big a planet is.
 
God of Nothing said:
They were excavating the last of Venus' moons, IIRC
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Bro venus have no moons, but iirc they said in 2 that all moons in the solar system except for The moon got cracked with the stump left of titan being used to build the sprawl

CEC been cracking in other systems since then
God of Nothing said:
Considering how big space is but how planetcracking became the most popular resource excavation process, it is ridiculous they ran out of shit by the time of the games.
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Could be that their shockdrive ftl has a limited range and earthgov has already mined all planets worth a fuck, idk
 
The Ugly One said:
I get really tired of how all sci-fi is based on the audience not understanding how big a planet is.
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Yeah, it's like even if there's one dominant species, if they're anything like humans, they have huge variants on culture and less huge variants on appearance. Imagine if there was a planet known to be home of some backwards, violent species and then it turns out that our protagonists landed on the equivalent to sub-Saharan Africa there.

thread tax: I've been playing Dino Crisis and the tank controls aren't fun when you're trying to escape from dinosaurs, and they're bullet sponges.
 
I finished Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge. It was pretty good overall, but I have some gripes about it that make me understand why it wasn't as well received by Japanese fans as it was Western fans. I like all the new ideas that were also backported into the older system by Japanese spin-offs like the new classes, new races, new magic (though psionic doesn't feel as effective an idea as alchemy), being able potentially dual-wield weapons, some other minor stuff. The changes to stats are fine.

But the skill system feels overly complicated for no real gain. My problems with it can be summarized in 3 points. 1. Being able to increase most stats by using them brings the problems this sort of system always has where it encourages you to stop and do something tedious just to raise a single stat number, and to overspecialize because switching tactics will have you using some skill you haven't trained. 2. Because you can increase most stats by using them, and because some of them kind of suck, you're kind of gimping yourself if you put skill points on level up into anything but magic skills and kirijutsu, because those are the only skills that can't be increased by actions and they do important things. 3. This sort of system makes more sense in a game without classes, where you're basically making a class by how you build a character, but here we already have classes with distinct identities, so it feels less choosing what a character is good at and more like part of their intended kit is gimped unless you spent time or skill points on it. Sure you could say it's build differences between those of the class, but I don't think it matter much because of points 1 and 2, and because everyone can basically increase skills at the same rate it leads to situations like a Bard being basically just better than a Thief or Mage instead of a compromised fusion of the two. I guess a pure Mage would have higher MP growth, but still.

The new magic and MP system also feels iffy. I get what they're going for, but it's kind of similar to the skills, I'd prefer the classes could just do what they're meant to instead of having me need to pick a limited number of spells, especially when you might need to do things like spend a level up on a spell that isn't actually useful but gets you more MP for an element with a spell you do want to use a lot. I'd rather drop the spell level system, add more spells that are different level versions of other spells, reduce the MP amounts, and have casters learn 2 or 3 spells per level up.

And I think the resting system was poorly thought through. I get they wanted the game to have a different structure where it's all dungeon you're slowly traveling through, instead of a town to rest and stock up at and a dungeon that you do "dives" in and out of, but I think the latter way of doing things is just more fun. They could still of had the game work more that way without changing the plot or overall structure, but just having safe spots like where merchants are where you can freely heal up. As is, unless you're in the rare spot where they placed an HP+MP healing fountain, healing is a needlessly tedious ordeal of using spells to heal up your HP, saving, resting, and then repeating saving and resting over and over until your MP is finally restored. There's technically no reason to not rest up between every single fight except the tediousness and the possibility of getting attacked while resting, except you can save at any time so you can just reset if you get attacked by something too tedious to fight off with your party half asleep. Maybe it would be something to consider if there were safe spots to rest, but every tile in the game is a place you can get attacked by random encounters on as far as I can tell, so it doesn't matter if you retreat somewhere or just park your ass in the middle of an enemy base.

I guess I'll mention the story. I found the mystery of it fun for the most part, but I find it off-putting that they would have the ending change based off a decision you don't really have the context to decide until you've already beaten the game and seen at least one ending. I guess they expected players to do the more obvious thing first and then replay/go back and try the other? And I don't like that what could be considered the "best ending" has you fight less boss fights. Game devs, don't do that. It's also feels awkward to just end off on a sudden cliffhanger no matter what, like I didn't finish the game so much as it just stopped on me.

Overall it was a fun game, but I think I'd rank Heart of the Maelstrom, Scripture of the Dark, and Dimguil as better.
Side-note: What's up with places online seeming to imply people usually finish this game with a party in the 20s or low 30s? My party was barely level 14 when I finished and that's without ever changing classes.
 
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