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- Aug 4, 2024
The complaint about the level design was common for the Perfect Dark Zero too. I think the sequel would have been an okay game had they had more time/budget to work on it, in any case I still liked the multiplayer.
Playing Old Games For the First Time - Give a Short Review of Some 10+ Year Old Game You Played For the First Time
- Thread starter The Ugly One
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- Nov 15, 2021
It was on sale on GOG, and I remember kind of wishing I could play it back in 2003, but lacked either an Xbox or a DX8 GPU, so I never did. I've mentioned it before, but Deus Ex: Invisible War was widely regarded as a disappointing mediocrity at the time, and I can say with full confidence that these assessments were entirely correct.
I just finished it last night, and the best way to sum it up is nothing really matters. I guess you could choose to not have stealth abilities, but they're so insanely powerful that it's crazy not to use them. There's no skill system, so the only constraints on your loadout are your inventory slots...but you get plenty of slots to pack as much firepower and as many gadgets as you could really need. Combat is nothing special, and in keeping with 2000s shooters, your best play is headshots with a sniper rifle.
The story is trying to feel larger than it is and fails. The UNATCO conspiracy in the first game was brilliantly done. The way the factions work out in this game falls completely flat. I won't spoiler, but there's simply not enough build-up for the "big reveal" to be anything more than a ho-hum moment. I didn't care, because the stakes felt low and nothing was really interesting. The only real memorable thing was you help a literal niggerfaggot get hooked up with a twink. This was 2003, so I guess they got goodboy bravery points. You choose which ending you get on the last level of the game. Your choices early on don't really matter for the ending, but you can get a slightly different experience here and there, I guess.
Graphics are fine. They took the Unreal engine and hacked in normal mapping and stencil shadows. This being the era of excellent game optimization, the game ran like absolute dogshit on recent GPUs:
Fortunately, my 5060 Ti could handle the game. Anyway, at the end of the day, it wasn't bad enough for me not to finish, but not good enough for me to ever play this again or particularly recommend it. If you want to play it just for the sake of having played both older Deus Ex games, go right ahead, but it's not much of a sequel. This is a little artifact of gaming history that is notable principally for how pedestrian it is.
I just finished it last night, and the best way to sum it up is nothing really matters. I guess you could choose to not have stealth abilities, but they're so insanely powerful that it's crazy not to use them. There's no skill system, so the only constraints on your loadout are your inventory slots...but you get plenty of slots to pack as much firepower and as many gadgets as you could really need. Combat is nothing special, and in keeping with 2000s shooters, your best play is headshots with a sniper rifle.
The story is trying to feel larger than it is and fails. The UNATCO conspiracy in the first game was brilliantly done. The way the factions work out in this game falls completely flat. I won't spoiler, but there's simply not enough build-up for the "big reveal" to be anything more than a ho-hum moment. I didn't care, because the stakes felt low and nothing was really interesting. The only real memorable thing was you help a literal niggerfaggot get hooked up with a twink. This was 2003, so I guess they got goodboy bravery points. You choose which ending you get on the last level of the game. Your choices early on don't really matter for the ending, but you can get a slightly different experience here and there, I guess.
Graphics are fine. They took the Unreal engine and hacked in normal mapping and stencil shadows. This being the era of excellent game optimization, the game ran like absolute dogshit on recent GPUs:
Fortunately, my 5060 Ti could handle the game. Anyway, at the end of the day, it wasn't bad enough for me not to finish, but not good enough for me to ever play this again or particularly recommend it. If you want to play it just for the sake of having played both older Deus Ex games, go right ahead, but it's not much of a sequel. This is a little artifact of gaming history that is notable principally for how pedestrian it is.
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Shamefuru Disprayu
kiwifarms.net
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- Dec 26, 2025
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- Nov 15, 2021
I even turned on anti-aliasing.Careful! You're pushing it with this game
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- Jul 3, 2021
Star Ocean is a series I never touched before, but recently played through the first game. It is surprisingly modern, cinematic, and customizable while staying fast-paced. You can knock it out in 30 to 40 hours, probably faster in later playthroughs. There are a couple remakes, but the original holds up fine IMO.
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- Sep 28, 2022
It runs pretty decent on a GF3 in the horrible, horrible times of the Geforce FX!
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- Sep 26, 2019
I never got past maybe the 4th or so mission as a kid. Just played the combat simulator a lot. So then I grew up and buckled down as a MAN and played through the whole game on the easiest difficulty.
I was right to just stick with the combat simulator. The campaign isn't horrible, but the level design certainly blows ass. You can tell they wanted to step it up from where Goldeneye left off, but the Goldeneye design style is more conducive to short levels. The final level gave me a lot of trouble and the final boss was stupid. I think I even ran out of ammo on a few attempts, which is amazing because the game throws ammo at you all the time.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
The GF3 came out before the FX and was significantly slower.
- Joined
- Jun 20, 2023
Recently played my first Street Fighter games in the form of Alpha 2 and 3rd Strike against nephew. They were pretty fun, I can see how Street Fighter became the dominant fightan series with the speed and sounds and visuals of 3rd Strike especially. Quite liked Oro and Makoto, myself.
Unfortunately, we ended up giving up on Street Fighter pretty quick and swapping over to Killer Instinct: There's a handful of similarities that made the swap easy, but by far the deciding factor was that if you input a special in Killer Instinct, it fuckin' comes out. Street Fighter would only correctly register a special maybe 1 in 20 tries.
Unfortunately, we ended up giving up on Street Fighter pretty quick and swapping over to Killer Instinct: There's a handful of similarities that made the swap easy, but by far the deciding factor was that if you input a special in Killer Instinct, it fuckin' comes out. Street Fighter would only correctly register a special maybe 1 in 20 tries.
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2023
on my first playthrough, on the first level of pelagic II when you're on the ship itself, i killed every enemy and forgot i had to go find elvis so i had to backtrack the entire level, then find some other part of the level in the maze, and follow him as he sunday jogged through the last half of the level where all the enemies would be.
that just shouldn't happen imho.
Retarded Weeb
kiwifarms.net
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- Dec 17, 2022
I just finished Shining & the Darkness for the Mega Drive. Or Shining in the Darkness as it's also called. It's a dungeon-crawler RPG in the same universe as the more famous Shining Force games the developers made afterwords. But I haven't played any of those yet so I can't compare, but what I have played is Golden Sun made by the same devs after they renamed to Camelot and broke off from Sega and started working for Nintendo, and it's quite clear the developers didn't change much stylistically over the years. The game literally uses the exact same (Japanese) font as Golden Sun, very similar-looking menus in general, and some vague gameplay similarities (though a lot of it is stuff taken from Wizardry and Dragon Quest in the first place).
Unlike most dungeon-crawlers you don't get to pick your team or anything, your just given a team of three consisting of a human fighter you can name, and his two friends Bilbo the hobbit priest and Merlin the elf mage. Very reminiscent of Dragon Quest II to me, though Bilbo doesn't die nearly as easily as the Prince of Samaltoria.
Overall, the game is very aggressively fine. It doesn't do anything particularly wrong, it's got decent presentations, plays alright (it's not particularly slow for the time, but so little goes on in battle that I spent almost the entire game holding down the speed-up button in battle), and can have decent balancing when you're at just the strength the devs want you to be at. But I can't say it does anything particularly excellent either. If I had to point out two major flaws, they would be:
1. The difficulty is kind of schizophrenic. That's probably also influenced by how I played it, but still. This going to be a long section because the easiest way to explain this is just to describe my entire playthrough.
2. There's not much interesting going on with the floor layouts. Every floor is basically just a variation of a long, winding hallway where you walk through it from a start point to an end point, with some dead ends off to the side that either waste your time, have a chest, or rarely have some plot-important item you need to stop to also get on the way. I guess you can technically say every dungeon in a game is trying to get from point A to point B, but generally dungeons in Wizardry or other good dungeon-crawlers have something more going with the floors, with things like shortcuts or non-linear layouts, or different gimmicks. But there's not really anything like that in S&tD, except maybe one floor that's heavy on hidden pitfalls (which no other floor really has). Once you notice it, it makes the game has a whole feel a lot more monotonous, like you're literally just trudging forward through a hallway, fighting any random encounters that harass you until you reach the end. And you'll be harassed by random encounters a lot, this is one of those games where it's not rare to win an encounter, walk forward one step, and immediately get another one. At least Merlin learns a spell early on that lets you turn off random encounters for a while so long as your party is above them in level. Because of this, despite combat getting more interesting in the second half, I just generally had the feeling by that point like I had already seen everything the game had to offer and I was just kind of grinding through to the end.
Overall, it wouldn't call it a bad game. But it's so average I wouldn't really call it a good game either, and wouldn't recommend it.
Unlike most dungeon-crawlers you don't get to pick your team or anything, your just given a team of three consisting of a human fighter you can name, and his two friends Bilbo the hobbit priest and Merlin the elf mage. Very reminiscent of Dragon Quest II to me, though Bilbo doesn't die nearly as easily as the Prince of Samaltoria.
Overall, the game is very aggressively fine. It doesn't do anything particularly wrong, it's got decent presentations, plays alright (it's not particularly slow for the time, but so little goes on in battle that I spent almost the entire game holding down the speed-up button in battle), and can have decent balancing when you're at just the strength the devs want you to be at. But I can't say it does anything particularly excellent either. If I had to point out two major flaws, they would be:
1. The difficulty is kind of schizophrenic. That's probably also influenced by how I played it, but still. This going to be a long section because the easiest way to explain this is just to describe my entire playthrough.
You have to play through the first floor with just your fighter, so the game at that point is nothing but mindlessly whacking at things and grinding enough EXP and money for equipment so you can kill everything before it kills you. Fairly monotonous but easy, but then the first boss completely kicked my ass, so I spent like two hours grinding until I could buy out almost all the best equipment available at the start, and then destroyed the boss without effort. I noticed by this point that the game's damage formula is very simple, just one upgrade to your armor can have you taking half the damage you did before, and having enough Defense can potentially have you take 1 damage from everything.
After I got my other party members, they both started at level 1 and with barely anything on them, so I figured out how to exploit a spawn point where you can keep fighting the first boss to grind for like another couple hours until they were caught up with the fighter and everyone had the best equipment they could have at that point. I was able to keep up with equipment for everyone from then on, and basically for the whole first half of the game I was just mindless killing everything with physical attacks while taking almost no damage from enemies in return. At most I just needed to target stuff that could potentially status effect me first. Magical attacks felt not worth using at all since they're so weak until you get the upper half of them.
In the game's second half though, it stopped messing around and had the enemies dealing decent damage even against a party with the best armor, as well as them using powerful magic attacks and occasionally instant death attacks on you. At this point Bilbo and Merlin's magic attacks were also pretty powerful, so the game became more resource management heavy in trying to balance killing things with physical vs. magical attacks so you don't run out of MP before getting somewhere new. But then in the 2nd-to-last floor, I got the best sword in the game, which casts a lightning spell when used that can screen clear just about every random encounter in the game, and because it's a plot-important item it never breaks, so random encounters became a joke for the last couple hours.
And as for boss fights, almost every boss and mid-boss in the game is basically just a physical attacker with high attack. There's not much to them except buffing and healing while hitting them, and hoping you don't get screwed by them critting you (which they seem to get critical hits about as often as you do). Which makes them all both really easy but randomly sometimes really annoying.
After I got my other party members, they both started at level 1 and with barely anything on them, so I figured out how to exploit a spawn point where you can keep fighting the first boss to grind for like another couple hours until they were caught up with the fighter and everyone had the best equipment they could have at that point. I was able to keep up with equipment for everyone from then on, and basically for the whole first half of the game I was just mindless killing everything with physical attacks while taking almost no damage from enemies in return. At most I just needed to target stuff that could potentially status effect me first. Magical attacks felt not worth using at all since they're so weak until you get the upper half of them.
In the game's second half though, it stopped messing around and had the enemies dealing decent damage even against a party with the best armor, as well as them using powerful magic attacks and occasionally instant death attacks on you. At this point Bilbo and Merlin's magic attacks were also pretty powerful, so the game became more resource management heavy in trying to balance killing things with physical vs. magical attacks so you don't run out of MP before getting somewhere new. But then in the 2nd-to-last floor, I got the best sword in the game, which casts a lightning spell when used that can screen clear just about every random encounter in the game, and because it's a plot-important item it never breaks, so random encounters became a joke for the last couple hours.
And as for boss fights, almost every boss and mid-boss in the game is basically just a physical attacker with high attack. There's not much to them except buffing and healing while hitting them, and hoping you don't get screwed by them critting you (which they seem to get critical hits about as often as you do). Which makes them all both really easy but randomly sometimes really annoying.
2. There's not much interesting going on with the floor layouts. Every floor is basically just a variation of a long, winding hallway where you walk through it from a start point to an end point, with some dead ends off to the side that either waste your time, have a chest, or rarely have some plot-important item you need to stop to also get on the way. I guess you can technically say every dungeon in a game is trying to get from point A to point B, but generally dungeons in Wizardry or other good dungeon-crawlers have something more going with the floors, with things like shortcuts or non-linear layouts, or different gimmicks. But there's not really anything like that in S&tD, except maybe one floor that's heavy on hidden pitfalls (which no other floor really has). Once you notice it, it makes the game has a whole feel a lot more monotonous, like you're literally just trudging forward through a hallway, fighting any random encounters that harass you until you reach the end. And you'll be harassed by random encounters a lot, this is one of those games where it's not rare to win an encounter, walk forward one step, and immediately get another one. At least Merlin learns a spell early on that lets you turn off random encounters for a while so long as your party is above them in level. Because of this, despite combat getting more interesting in the second half, I just generally had the feeling by that point like I had already seen everything the game had to offer and I was just kind of grinding through to the end.
Overall, it wouldn't call it a bad game. But it's so average I wouldn't really call it a good game either, and wouldn't recommend it.
The Paleblood Vessel
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 12, 2024
I am legitimately pissed that it took me this fucking long to actually get into the Metal Gear series not just because I got spoiled on a bunch of things that would have been way cooler going into it blind (Psycho Mantis and Miller's identity in 1, the Colonel and Protag swap with "Iroquois Pliskin" later appearing in 2, the sniper duel against The End and entire idea behind The Sorrow fight in 3, The Hallway and The Return in 4 just to name some examples), but because these are some of the best stealth games I've ever played in my life and it took me this long to actually get into playing them. My supreme autism usually makes me averse to stealth heavy games as I treat them all like they're on European Extreme where I reload if I get spotted in literally any capacity, but for some reason the Metal Gear games don't trigger it when it happens. I need to find out why so I can work on it and play other stealth games I skipped out on because of this 'tism, I know I missed out on some gold because of it.
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2018
Dynasty Warriors ( 8 ). I haven't played that since 3 on the PS2 20 years ago. I don't remember its mini map being that bad for navigation. Hack and slash is fun, but damn that there are no checkpoints per stage. You die, start over from the beginning. Story is wacky, Chinese lore. You're a general set to conquer land and kill other generals/soldiers. Good enough for me.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
I still remember mapping those dungeons on graph paper as a wee lad. not the most mindblowing game but solid. as far as I remember it didn't really overstay it's welcome and was decently paced (don't remember I had to grind a lot).
lot of people started with shining force tho.
Retarded Weeb
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
Well the only competition I think it had on the system at the time was Phantasy Star 2 & 3, and PS2 is way more tedious and grindy, and PS3 is just plain shit, so I think it could've easily been called the best RPG on the Mega Drive for at least a hot minute. (I'd also put it above the first Phantasy Star on the Master System.)
- Joined
- May 4, 2023
I bought Bully for the Xbox 360 a number of years ago, and when it arrived, the system greeted me with a red ring. Back in the dead box for that machine and that game where it is to this day. Recently I discovered Bully was available on the PS3 Store as a PS2 Classic or whatever they call these janky ports, and while I think it's morally repugnant to buy the same game twice, I broke my own rule just this once to get it knocked off my list without causing an electrical fire wrapping the old system in a bath towel or something.
I'll cut right to the point: I'm not sure I gave it a fair shake, but I also had some high hopes for it that went unfulfilled. It's a Rockstar game in their prime so I expected great to excellent presentation with a goofy undertone and polished gameplay. GTA III in junior high school, more or less. It opens up with a relatable hook - troubled kid, missing biological father, mother who loves the kid but has run out of options to get him to shape up. Not terribly original but doesn't have to be because it's set dressing for mischief and mayhem. Like Claude from the aforementioned GTA, he had a stellar range of character development from amoral psychopath to amoral psychopath and I beat that game twice a year, so cliché is not a problem here.
In function and in tone, Bully plays like the 2D platformers that became contemporary later of small child in big scary world. You do feel like you're in a very hostile environment from the word go, and despite the abundance of weaponry and tactics a lot of the time it just feels more productive to run away. There's an aggressively short span of time to get to and from classes and stopping to get an indian sunburn and a nouggie on every trip saps that time away very quickly.
Which brings me to the world itself - it's kind of too small and kind of too big, mostly owing to the time limit but also to a lack of flow. Shortcuts are rare and clunky, and when you've managed to get that jump timed just right, what's waiting for you is a series of minigames that aren't quite Mario Party level of wanting to play them over and over, much less once. Skill issue, whatever, but I couldn't get that art minigame to work at all, and the chemistry one felt mind-numbingly easy. This is most story missions that I played through, too - it was just unengaging with Jimmy being dragged along for the ride.
I put it down when I unlocked the second area because the idea of doing even more wasn't appealing. If there was some major character development or twist I wasn't seeing it. Jimmy didn't carry the game and the gameplay didn't carry the game, so this one's going to the dead box too.
In function and in tone, Bully plays like the 2D platformers that became contemporary later of small child in big scary world. You do feel like you're in a very hostile environment from the word go, and despite the abundance of weaponry and tactics a lot of the time it just feels more productive to run away. There's an aggressively short span of time to get to and from classes and stopping to get an indian sunburn and a nouggie on every trip saps that time away very quickly.
Which brings me to the world itself - it's kind of too small and kind of too big, mostly owing to the time limit but also to a lack of flow. Shortcuts are rare and clunky, and when you've managed to get that jump timed just right, what's waiting for you is a series of minigames that aren't quite Mario Party level of wanting to play them over and over, much less once. Skill issue, whatever, but I couldn't get that art minigame to work at all, and the chemistry one felt mind-numbingly easy. This is most story missions that I played through, too - it was just unengaging with Jimmy being dragged along for the ride.
I put it down when I unlocked the second area because the idea of doing even more wasn't appealing. If there was some major character development or twist I wasn't seeing it. Jimmy didn't carry the game and the gameplay didn't carry the game, so this one's going to the dead box too.
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Stasi
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2019
Recently played through Outlaws, the old LucasArts FPS.
I've seen it mentioned and talked about over the years but never got around to playing it. The way some people talked about it I thought maybe it would be something comparable to a Duke Nukem 3D or maybe Shadow Warrior. What I got instead is something that makes Redneck Rampage look amazing in comparison. Aside from being generally uninspiring and tedious to play they somehow made a game where the shooting feels worse and more jank than Redneck Rampage which is really impressive in a retarded kind of way. Its only a few hours long but I was so underwhelmed with the base game I don't think I'll be touching the Handful of Missions expansion.
This isn't the first time I've come away from a LucasArts "classic" feeling completely unimpressed.
I've been meaning to check out Dark Forces for a while which I think runs on the same engine but given how boring Outlaws was I don't know if I'll bother.
I've seen it mentioned and talked about over the years but never got around to playing it. The way some people talked about it I thought maybe it would be something comparable to a Duke Nukem 3D or maybe Shadow Warrior. What I got instead is something that makes Redneck Rampage look amazing in comparison. Aside from being generally uninspiring and tedious to play they somehow made a game where the shooting feels worse and more jank than Redneck Rampage which is really impressive in a retarded kind of way. Its only a few hours long but I was so underwhelmed with the base game I don't think I'll be touching the Handful of Missions expansion.
This isn't the first time I've come away from a LucasArts "classic" feeling completely unimpressed.
I've been meaning to check out Dark Forces for a while which I think runs on the same engine but given how boring Outlaws was I don't know if I'll bother.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
In defense of Outlaws, it was a "you had to be there" game. Every other major FPS of the time was about blasting either demons or aliens with cartoon weapons in absurd locales, while Outlaws had realistic guns and manual reloading in the Wild West. It felt different than anything else.
Hello Again!
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2022
I tried E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy. Thought it was cool, but got a bit frustrated at the seemingly non-functional stealth and gave up on it - I will probably give it another shot in the future where I don't even bother with stealth, because that seems like the way to go.