It's a thread! (Games discussion, etc.)

[Moge]

I liked the demo, but I'll wait for the inevitable Wii U port

[JG]

Halo 4:

8 out of 10

Pros: Visually stunning. Finally the Halo series has gotten enough attention to detail in the environment.  I really like how the grass blows in the wind.  The alien tech appears as imaginative as the first Halo, and more impressive than Halo 3, but still shy of the Metroid Prime series for sheer alien quality.  Cortana, the Chief, and enemies are much more detailed, too.  Thankfully the main campaign is a little longer than the embarassingly short Halo 3, but not by much, and still noticibly shorter than the first two Halos.  The cutscenes are gorgeous though and give it a much better "movie game" feel than earlier Halos. The game continues with the Spartan Ops weekly episodes of five missions.  It's not the Master Chief, but I'm enjoying it more than the campaign.

Cons: Dumber AI - grunts easily just walk right toward you and allow themselves to get shot in the face while elites stand still too often while getting shot at long range.  At the same time though, it's harder: you have to do more sniping and taking cover - you can't just run in and blast everything like you used to.  There's too many enemies mounting sniper rifles and rocket launchers (even on Normal), and though you might have fought 2 or 3 elites at once in earlier Halos, they routinely through 6-8 of them at you at once in Halo 4.  They took away the ability to carry a weapon in each hand, and with it a few of the weapons like SMGs.  Ammo is rather scarce in a few parts of the game. More Master Chief solo, which means less marines accompanying you, so they took away a lot of the vehicle combat: only one Scorpion, two Banshees, a single Warthog, and just a few Ghosts and Wraiths along the way. You do get a Pelican and a Broadsword fighter for the first time, but they don't quite make up for the difference.  The new Mantis exoskeleton is fun, too (in a MechAssault way), but again, there's only one so it doesn't last.  The physics engine isn't any better, as enemies (or yourself) still go flying with too little force and objects can float in midair for no reason at all.  4 years since Halo 3 isn't enough time to explain how Humanity suddenly went from near extinction to having this massive armada of starships - at the start of Halo 2 and into Halo 3, the Earth defenses are completely overwhelmed by a handful of Covenant cruisers, but now we have (as evidenced by one scene) a good 30+ Pillar of Autumn-class cruisers and a battleship 50 times the size of Pillar of Autumn in Earth orbit alone.

Summary: Microsoft/343 certainly didn't ruin it, and its a worthy continuation of the series, but there's just not enough newness to this edition.  After seeing how beautiful the environments are, I wish it was more interactive.  I was hoping, now that we've had a pair of new episodes of Gears of War since the last time we saw the Chief, that he'd be able to use cover and have it destructible, too.  Halo is supposed to be a good shooter made great by a gratuitous amount of vehicles.  Well, they took away almost all of the vehicles, and left us with a shooter that just isn't as good as GoW3, nor anywhere near as long or in-depth.  The Spartan Ops episodic campaign is it's redeeming feature.


If you want to play some, I'll share my Xbox Live id by PM.

[Moge]

I've seen screenshots of the new Cortana. Yowza.

Bungie was pretty lousy at modeling human face, as were other western devs like Bethesda for the longest time.

Less vehicular combat? Not cool. It was my favorite aspect of the series, wonky physics and all.

[Moge]

Now that the Wii is dead what is your top ten for the system, JGOO?

[JG]

Ten is pretty tough for me - I only have 20 Wii games that I've played (and a few I haven't got to like Punch Out!! and the new Epic Mickey 2).  Picking the top 5 or 6 was easy but after that it sort of ran together into a collection of games of which I could easily juggle the order if you asked me tomorrow.

Keep in mind, my tastes in genre are not the same as yours.  Yes, I have Super Smash Bros Brawl, and no, it doesn't make my top ten.


Top #1: Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (A+, truly excellent. #2 in the series, right behind Ocarina of Time, and #3 is much farther behind)

Top #2: Super Mario Galaxy 2 (A, really good, without being as grinding as the first)

Top #3: Xenoblade Chronicles (A, thanks for the recommendations everyone; this was a fantastic epic and almost my personal game of the year for 2012 [which instead goes to Kid Icarus: Uprising])

Top #4: New Super Mario Bros. Wii (B+, good solo, but better when multi-player [but also too easy])

Top #5: Metroid: Other M (B+, other than the absurd first-person missile mode that makes a few boss battles harder than they should be, this is on par with Fusion as a great classic Metroid game and gives wonderful background to the series)

Top #6: Super Mario Galaxy (B+, good, but they got it better second time around)

Top #7: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (B, much better than 2, but not not as good as the first)

Top #8: Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (B, not as good as the awesome "flagship" first chapter, but a suitable "escort" followup to show what happened to the heroes after saving the world the first time [Flagship and escort are NAMCO terms, indicating whether a game is a major release with a huge investment of time and money, or a smaller scale release, often reusing an engine from flagship games])

Top #9: Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (B, great gameplay, but baring the excellent use of Epona, almost everything else they did right in Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker they didn't quite get right with this one. The story is dull and there's just no humor or fun.)

Top #10: Super Paper Mario (B, its a shame they dropped the audience with this game: its what made the first Paper Mario and Thousand Year Door really fly; having just completed Sticker Star, I still think TYD is the best of the series)

Honorable Mentions: Epic Mickey (should have been voiced and easier; intended for kids but designed for advanced players only), Wii Sports (who doesn't love Boxing and Bowling?), and Red Steel (which used the sword slashes nicely, but not as well as the much later Skyward Sword which nails it)




Bottom #5: Metroid Prime: Trilogy (D+. Expected all 3 games to use the same controls as #3, and nope, it uses some odd button configuration for the first two games, and then leaves part 3 virtually untouched.  It's arguably better to get original GameCube discs and a GC controller for the first two, than it is to play them in the Trilogy mode.  Plus there's nothing new about any of three, as if Nintendo really didn't care about the product they were putting out. Just slap a few games onto one disc and call it a day. Add in the fact it came out mere months after #3 debuted, it displaced a good third game on store shelves, which was still too new to make interest in this one worthwhile, and ended up hurting Other M later becuase people were tired by then of being saturated by three Metroid games in two years.)

Bottom #4: Sonic and the Secret Rings (D+. Not as bad as the disasterous Sonic the Hedgehog reboot a few years back, but it grows old fast. Every stage feels like some odd crossover between Sonic and Prince of Persia. And not enough speed!)

Bottom #3: Wii Play (D. Cute games to keep kids budy for a while, but little else. Good thing it came with a controller!)

Bottom #2: Mario Kart Wii (D-. Here's an idea: Lets take all the fun of having two characters on a single kart, with well balanced courses that we saw in the last console game [Double Dash], and trash it by making the race winner the one who has gone the longest without crashing. It no longer matters if you dominated the entire match and someone blue shells you right at the finish. You might still win that scenario in DD, in Wii that nets you last place, garaunteed. So does running off course.  So does bumping another car or some scenery. So does hitting a banana.  Really, three laps is just too much if it all depends on the last quarter of the final lap anyway. Ugh. After the DS and Wii debacles, the Mario Kart series is completely off my interest radar. Haven't played 7 and probably won't becuase I'm really not expecting it to be any good.)

Bottom #1: Donkey Kong Country Returns (F. Utter crap. You die way too easily, even on early levels in world 1 and 2. And rediculous game controls requiring constant up and down motion of the controller and nunchuk to make DK slap the ground to stun EVERY enemy that comes along.  My word of advice: AVOID.  Now, I'm sure DK and Diddy will show up in the Smash Bros series again, but they shouldn't ever get another title in their series if this is the garbage we're going to get, especially after that dumb bongo drums set a few years back.)

[Moge]

I was going to ask which games you didn't like, but i see you went ahead and did my work.

Is Other: M really that good? Most of the feedback i've heard from that game sounds like its a huge slap in the face. Epic Mickey as well.

[JG]

I found Other M quite enjoyable for 98 or 99 percent of the time, because during that time it plays like a classic side scrolling Metroid game, but it's still 3D so you you can fire in 8 directions around you (jumping to fire higher than your level.)  Plus they give a good reason (military orders) for why you can't use certain weapons/skills early in the game, as opposed to the overused "suit destruction/malfunction" ploy.  The problem is when you need to use missiles.  By pointing the Wii Remote at the screen you can change to first person mode instead of the normal third person perspective. You have to use this method to fire missiles and you can't move when you do it.  Too many boss fights require swapping between the two modes to fire missiles, then move to a new location to fire more missiles, rinse and repeat, which requires rapidly swapping between modes which is terribly disorienting.  This is what blew it in an otherwise very well done game.  Despite this, I still enjoyed it more than MP2 or MP3 becuase it has a more detailed, engaging story.  If you're a Super Metroid fan and looking for a cheap 20-25 hour thrill for $20 or so, this isn't a bad pick.

Epic Mickey just completely misses its target audience.  It's Mickey F-ing Mouse folks, so you expect it to be a game for kids.  Instead its filled with dark themes, is very hard (though you do get unlimited lives), and contains a lot of dialog, almost none of which is voiced (only the prologue and epilogue are).  You need a good middle school reading comprehension to follow it, so it's not for little kids at all.  Except for some insanely difficult jumping parts and boss fights, it's a decent game for grown-ups, but then you may as well have used some other character or put it some other imaginary land than a trashed DisneyWorld.  If it was cute, funny, easier, and voiced, it would have nailed Game of the Year.  Instead we got dark, serious, and difficult, and it became one of the most returned games ever (EBGames has tons of these in the used bins from parents who bought it for kids who just couldn't play it.)  I would have ranked it in the top 10 if the game didn't feel like such a chore in areas where I'd die repeatedly.

[Moge]

Now i'm suddenly a bit more interested in Other M. The Epic Mickey franchise sounds like a complete disaster. I haven't heard any positive reception from the sequel and the 3DS spin-off this year, nor of any touted commercial success.

Without further ado, my top 10 on the Wii. I missed out on a lot of games late in the system's life, so my list isn't truly comprehensive.

#10 Resident Evil 4
#9 Disaster: Day of Crisis

#8 Little King's Story
#7 Wii Sports Resort

#6 Pikmin
#5 Twilight Princess
#4 DK Jungle Beat

#3 Another Code R -- Around 2004/05 i was introduced to point-n-click adventures, and since then Cing's titles became my absolute favorite in the genre. Of course the company is dead now

#2 No More Heroes -- While Grasshopper's games are kinda mediocre, they're very ballsy, which was why i'm a huge fan of their big titles.

#1 Super Mario Galaxy -- Perfection. Never seen a 3D title with such tightly designed gameplay, while introducing new concepts in just about every stage. All 120 of them :O

Honorable mentions -- Trauma Center, Meteoroid Prime 3, Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth, Wii Sports, RE: Umbrella Chronicles

Disappointatons -- Mario Kart Wii, FF4: The After Years, Super Paper Mario

[JG]

As you can see, I ranked SMG2 and Skyward Sword higher than thier predecessors, so you should check them out some time.


I, too, feel a piece of my soul has died when one of my favorite companies goes out of business.  Overworks produced perhaps the finest RPG ever in Skies of Arcadia, and then prompty broke apart upon being merged with WOW (which was already invested in the Phantasy Star series.)  Bugbear makes the best racing/demolition derby combo game series in FlatOut and then goes bankrupt.  Of course, Bugbear's come back to life (in name, but not in spirit) and was better off dead, as FlatOut 3 got the razzie for worst game of 2011, which totally ruined my expectations.

[Asukachan]

#1 Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
#2 Super Smash Bros. Brawl
#3 Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
#4 Metroid: Other M
#5 Resident Evil 4
#6 Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

[Moge]

What happened to the last four, Asukachan?

[Asukachan]

hmmm, maybe

#7 New Super Mario Bros. Wii
#8 Back to the Future: The Game
#9 Wii Sports
#10 Wii Play

I still dont think any game system had as much good games as Super Nintendo, yet....

[Moge]

With the whole Japanese game industry in disarray it's a guarantee there won't ever be another game system as awesome as the SNES.

I'm surprised Galaxy isn't on your list. Not a fan of Mario's 3D escapades? High five for Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition. Capcom, being the numbskulls they are, didn't even bother to produce another RE IR shooting adventure (and RE4 Wii sold extremely well), and instead shoveled its audience two lightgun shooters.

We lost so much gaming talent this gen that i want to just cry in a corner, JGOO.

[JG]

Capcom is the poster child for this generation's mismanagement.

Street Fighter is popular, but you can only do so many "Street Fighter VS _____" games.  They let all their other franchises rot away though.  RE6 is getting blasted for poor reviews and may be the last in that series (along with the movie franchise that's gone on too long already.) The last two DLC Mega Man games have been lackluster and unimaginitive.  Ghosts n' Goblins is long overdue for a modern recreation.  Breath of Fire also MIA.  Ace Attorney has also gone years without a new game (not counting a Professor Layton crossover.)

Capcom used to be THE most impressive third party publisher on NES and SNES.  Now I probably wouldn't consider them in the top 10 on any system.

[Asukachan]

I'm surprised Galaxy isn't on your list. Not a fan of Mario's 3D escapades?

I never bought galaxy and have only ever played it at demo kiosks. Im really looking for a 3d Mario game that gives off the feel of SM64. You know, the castle and all that classic stuff only in 3rd person and explorable areas to find the levels. Super Mario 3D Land almost nails this and gives the bonus of power ups which I always felt where missing in 64. Im also waiting for another real 3D Donkey Kong game as the series has been dead to me since after the last good game, DK64. I doubt itll ever happen....

[JG]

Not sure they'll be another 3D Super Mario Bros game.  It seems Nintendo's committed to take the series back to its 2D roots and let the other series handle 3D.  And I think this is a good idea, too, just as the handheld Zelda games (sans remakes like OoT) should be overhead view.

[Moge]

I think Capcom has done a lot of good this generation, it's just that their efforts might have been in vein when they chose the platform for these games, namely the PSP. Maverick Hunter X, MM Powered Up, Ultimate Ghosts n Goblins, and their last attempt at an RPG, Last Ranker...

The traditional 3D platformer had worn out its welcome as soon as it became about collecting, lots and lots of collecting. DK64's the worst of the bunch, having to replay each level 5 times for 5 different colored bananas. That game was pretty much a slightly reskinned Banjo Kazooie, but Rare, sniff... they were kings back in the day, and now their relegated to making stupid Avatar items.

[JG]

Collecting in adventure and RPG games: Good.  Collecting in action games: Not so Good.

Case in point: No one minds collecting the insects in Zelda games or finding all the mini medals in a Dragon Quest game. Everyone hates playing the same stage over and over in DK64 for those damn bananas.

This is something hardly any company gets right.  Even Nintendo messes it up sometimes.  Mario Bros series has recently introduced the three golden Star coins in each level, but its not so bad given that they generally aren't that difficult to acquire on the first or second pass.  3D Land pushes the limits of this, as you have to beat every level once with Mario and then again with Luigi and find all 300 star coins to unlock the final challenge level.

[Moge]

Collecting in Zelda has gotten a bit lame in the newer 3D games. Getting a heartpiece or an extra bottle... yeah, that franchise needs more worthwhile collectibles. Figurine collecting was purdy cool in Wind Waker, but the effort required to catch 'em all was very, very infuriating

[Moge]

Ready to post your top 10 games of 2012? Feel free to include games you never touched in previous years.

#10 Nier
#9 Rayman 2

#8 Energy Breaker
#7 Mighty Switchforce HD

#6 Lollipop Chainsaw
#5 Shadowrun (SNES)

#4 Ghost Trick
#3 Rolling Thunder 2

#2 Zombi U
#1 Demon's Souls