This post was last modified: Jan 13, 2017 at 2:32 AM by T-man.

Saints Row 2 is fucking sweet, it's the perfect amount of grounded and batshit crazy.



This game had it all. A killer soundtrack, a varied open world, expansive character customization, and the fucking edgiest, most badass cutscenes known to man.


*gotta add a disclamer, the cockney voice is the only way to experience the game, other voice options are inferior
**not that that has anything to do with the above video

Then there's um, ahem, Saints Row the Third...



As you can see by this point they have embraced the absurd. Saints Row 3 sucks dick. In a sentence, it's style over substance. Everything took a hit this time around, the characters are boring, the new city is fucking boring brown buildings ad infinitum, the customization is simplified, and the cutscenes are stiff and boring. Oh, and they killed off Johnny Gat, what the fuck? It does have this going for it, it handles like a dream and has this line



I can appreciate it retrospectively now that we have Saints Row 4, while it's technically a better and more fun game it's still essentially video game fast food.

FUCK MEGAMAN BATTLE NETWORK 4

what an awful game to follow MMBN3 nearly perfecting the series' formula. like jesus christ what a mess.

>you only get like 1/3 of the game's content each playthrough because of a replay hook where what tournament scenarios you get are randomized

>DID I MENTION LIKE THE ENTIRE GAME IS A TOURNAMENT ARC? THE ENTIRE GAME. WHY?

>so many stupid annoying gimmicks, oh boy i sure do love having my controls reversed for a whole section of the game that sure is fun capcom

>the translators didn't care either. what a nice young man she was. leg's go, lan.

It's not purely because of the furries, but they don't help

they absolutely DO help and you know it

I agree with finding Saints' Row the Third somewhat underwhelming compared to Saints' Row 2.

Saints' Row 2 did a pretty good job ramping up. It starts out fairly grounded, a little weird, but grounded, and then you build up to owning the city and spraying shit on buildings and fighting a corporation, nicely maintaining a good contrast between where you started - practically nothing - and where you end - owning everything. As the game expands, so too does the strangeness of what's actually happening.

One of the first missions in Saints' Row the Third has you stealing missile launching attack drones from a military base, and then soon after that you literally steal a penthouse. The nothing-to-everything contrast is immediately shattered and because the whole game maintains a wacky tone, it gets boring much more quickly. When EVERYTHING'S over-the-top, over-the-top gets boring.

I wouldn't go so far as to call SR3 a bad game by any means, but SR2 is way better - I actually bothered finishing that one.

As for an original contribution? I really liked the original Epic Mickey, flawed as it was, because even though it wasn't the best it could be, it still had a lot of charm and a great story. Epic Mickey 2 was soulless garbage that completely lacked anything resembling passion or interesting conflict. "Hey maybe the Mad Doctor's a villain or maybe he's reformed except he is obviously the villain because he's the only villain left."

Mass Effect

ME2 was mildly disappointing compared to the first. Instead of fixing what didn't work in the first one, they just removed it, and the writing took a hit. Then ME3 came out and I don't even need to elaborate, do I?

This post was last modified: Jan 13, 2017 at 10:13 PM by Fun With Despair.

I actually really didn't like OoT as a kid. At all. Weird opinion, but even now I still don't really like it at all compared to ALttP and MM afterwards.

At first I was wowed by the graphics and everything, for all of five minutes, but I HATED it as a kid because it felt, and still feels insanely empty compared to ALttP. The overworld is as empty as can be for the most part, and a chore to navigate until the second half of the game. As opposed to the puzzle and enemy-filled overworld of ALttP, there's nothing to really do, and nothing to impede you in OoT, unless it's night and you're a kid in which case you're just SWARMED with some of the most fucking annoying enemies in the game.

Plus, the game really fucking shoehorns you into swordfighting, and I get that it might be the main point, but in the prior ones, because of how the game was laid out, you could damn well hotline miami that shit with a bow, or use the variety of magic spells and items, like the Magic Wand in the first one, or the Fire Rod in ALttP. You're forced to use your sword for almost everything in the game, which really cuts down on and hurts replayability in my eyes. I guess that's why I like the Souls games, because they remind me a lot more of the classic Zeldas.

MM fixed almost all my gripes though. Different attacks with different forms for different playstyles, a very dangerous and dungeonlike world, way better puzzles, etc. BotW looks to be another great game with options too, so I can't say Nintendo hasn't learned.

I do question why OoT is so many people's favorite, and heralded as such a great game, when even as a kid I thought it was kind of dogshit.

yeah i wasn't a big fan of saints row 3. I loved the tone of saints row 2 though, fun stuff

also fuck saints row 4. i bought it and the game consistently crashes in like the opening level so I've never actually gotten anywhere with it. blows my mind that this game even got released

ALttP

tbh I could never get into alttp
I don't know why when LA is my favorite zelda game

I loved Saints Row: The Third only because I played it before 2 and the only version of 2 I have is the crippled PC port. In retrospect, I probably should've just bought the latter on PS3.

If anything, the real low point of the series is Gat out of Hell. "We need something to wrap up SRIV's plot, let's release a glorified DLC campaign where vehicles are somehow even more useless than they are in IV, radio stations are completely gone, and the civilians are all generic soulless husks." One of the unique features it brought was weapons based on the seven sins (i.e., Sloth gets a Gatling gun recliner), which are fun but merely using them causes your wanted meter to rapidly increase, and every time it caps you're forced to fight a mini-boss. Thankfully I only paid $5 at launch as part of an online sale that GameStop was having.

Changing the subject, I was pretty disappointed with BioShock Infinite after I played and loved BioShock 2. A few months after beating it, I thought Burial at Sea would make up for the main campaign. It almost did. And although I played Borderlands 2 first, I later played Borderlands 1 and ended up liking the latter more.

While I wouldn't really say I dislike Dark Souls 2, I do think the first game is better. It's really unfortunate that the port was bad while the port of 2 somehow runs well at 60fps even on weaker machines which encourages people to skip it.

Dark Souls 1 had much better world/level design (with the exception of that one area that was obviously rushed). I loved how things looped back around and reconnected but you just don't get that often in the sequel. The entire thing just kind of felt less cohesive overall. There were several things in DS2 that felt like a inferior copy of the first game too such as Sif vs the giant rodent.

I also felt that DS2 had more frustrating areas than the first game. The best way to describe it would be that the developers of the sequel looked at the praise DS1 got for being a challenging game, then thought they should make DS2 challenging as well. Except they completely misunderstood how to do difficulty well. DS1 is "hard but fair" and DS2 is "hard and unfair".

This was a longer post than I expected so I put it in spoiler tags, feel free to click if you want to see me complain about Xenoblade Chronicles X for a few paragraphs

Spoiler: Show

I loved Xenoblade Chronicles, which is pretty surprising. I'm not too big on JRPGs, but hey that Shulk guy in Smash Bros. sure seems like a cool dude and I like playing as him, so why don't I at least give it a go, eh? Takes a while to get into it, for sure, definitely hated that Lv. 5 named enemy on that first beach that sneaks up and is all "YOU WILL KNOW OUR NAMES 'CAUSE NOW YOU'RE DEAD" but then the game introduced Chain Attacks and Monado Arts and the Break-Topple-Daze system and I'm like "holy shit this is actually fucking amazing except for Spike Damage who came up with that and can they be shot please"

So obviously I was like "hey Xenoblade Chronicles X you're probably gonna be pretty good" and ho-ho-hooooooooooo boy was I wrong, so wrong I haven't even finished it yet I care that little for it

It's super-weird having your custom-made character never talk in cutscenes. Or even seem to be that important compared to Alma and "a thirteen-year-old girl because of course". I really liked Shulk, 'cause he actually had a character and got shit done by going out and doin' it. Colony 9 attacked? "Welp I'll just bop on over to Mechonis and kill all the Mechon wanna join me Reyn?" It wasn't a particularly original story but it was at least engaging. The characters in general are also quite dull. It doesn't help that the game uses way more canned animations and the voice-acting is a massive step down, and I can only hear that fucking thirteen-year-old girl make the same "haha Tatsu looks like food let's eat him joke" so many times.

(I also liked playing as party members other than Shulk at times. Like Melia was pretty badass when player-controlled. I don't really get that feel in this game because the player character can wield every weapon and learn every skill and Art. I also think you literally can't play as anyone else. It's kinda lame.)

The setting's also far less interesting. Xenoblade the First had the AWESOME concept of two titans duking it out, killing each other, and then life grows on the corpses of these titans and as you explore you can actually see one titan from the other and make out features and all that and it's really cool. I liked exploring the severed arm and looking at the map and seeing that it was actually shaped like a hand, that was cool. XCX has "aliens blew up Earth and now we're Lost in Space". It's cool that the world is big and outside of your barracks there's no loading screens, and I still like the "it's there you can go there" thing, but I dunno, at times I feel less inclined to explore.

The game also gives you a million different party members, that you have to maintain bonds with and level up separately, but you can only carry around three of them (and for story missions two of them have to be Alma and the kid), but instead of doing a smart and letting you use a simple menu in your barracks to recruit them, you have to run around Los Angeles and find them to recruit them to your team. Who thought this was a good idea!? The only reason to do their missions is to get their unique skills for yourself, anyway.

Combat had a couple neat ideas. I like the secondary cooldown mechanic, which makes conserving Arts a much more valuable option in order to make use of their level two benefits, and I don't hate being able to switch between close-range and long-range. Tension also makes a little bit more sense in that it's actually a value used to power stronger Arts, which I'm okay with. But Overdrive is way less intuitive and fun than Chain Attacks were, and activating the Affinity Links is kind of hit and miss and some of them don't actually seem to do much. Finally getting a giant robot is neat, I guess, but unless ALL of your party has a Skell combat kinda loses that team mentality. Characters also feel way less unique, partially because like I said, the player character can learn literally every skill and Art so you could pretty much just have two Almas running around if you wanted, but weapons, skills, Arts, and Classes overlap between the other party members too, so ehhhhh. Plus you can hire randoms off of the Internet, which is neat, but it'd be more neat with actual co-op multiplayer which the mechanics seem tailor-made for

Soundtrack's pretty garbage too. Seriously there's only a couple tracks in the game I can stand listening to for any extended period of time.

Like I said, I never finished it, so I have no idea if the story gets any better or what, but as it is, it feels like a chore to play.

This post was last modified: Jan 18, 2017 at 4:03 PM by DrTapeworm.

spongebob battle for bikini bottom was a surprisingly good game and spongebob truth or square was decidedly not. i class this thing as a sequel because same developers, and also because it reused 50% of the assets (the other 50% is reused from the movie game)

This post was last modified: Jan 18, 2017 at 6:37 PM by DrTapeworm.

you might think that was a meme responge but i assure you i take heavy iron's spongebob games very seriously

I loved Saints Row: The Third only because I played it before 2 and the only version of 2 I have is the crippled PC port. In retrospect, I probably should've just bought the latter on PS3.

The PC port of Saints Row 2 is a travesty. You can take all the mods and hacks in the world to it and it will never feel right. It's a shame. Saints Row the Third isn't a bad game in a vacuum but it's very much a step backward. You know how halfway through the game they're like, "Whatever, just do all the side activities!" Well, in Saints Row 2 those were actual unique missions that took you all over the varied locales of Stilwater. I can name so many scenarios and it still wouldn't be anywhere close to being all there is. Setting bombs on each floor of a Ronin Hotel and skydiving from the top floor into the lobby while they explode, escaping from the police with Maero in a cavernous tourist attraction, a sword fight to the death with the Ronin boss in a burning ship, being ambushed by like a dozen monster trucks on foot, the list just keeps going and going. Saints Row the Third had it's share of over-the-top set pieces but they were much further and fewer between.

you might think that was a meme responge but i assure you i take heavy iron's spongebob games very seriously

no one can argue that battle for bikini bottom was the shit

anyone who tries to argue by virtue of it being a spongebob game obviously hasnt played it

i wish they stuck with the final boss' unused middle phase where it grows anchor arms though

you might think that was a meme responge but i assure you i take heavy iron's spongebob games very seriously

no one can argue that battle for bikini bottom was the shit

anyone who tries to argue by virtue of it being a spongebob game obviously hasnt played it

I loved the game as a kid but fuck me, it aged very badly. I tried to stream it like a year ago and it's not unplayable, but it's really not great.

Ever go back to a collectathon like Banjo Kazooie and think the areas are way smaller than you remember?

Battle For Bikini Bottom takes this to the fucking extreme

This post was last modified: Jan 18, 2017 at 11:20 PM by T-man.

Ever go back to a collectathon like Banjo Kazooie and think the areas are way smaller than you remember?

I had this exact experience when I replayed Banjo-Kazooie earlier this year. That being said, I found it to be a positive once it was time to start playing Tooie. Banjo-Kazooie was great, everything was concise and all the interesting shit was in relatively close proximity. Banjo-Tooie on the other hand is just too fucking massive for it's own good. Levels are ginormous, getting Jiggies feels like much more of a chore because of how many require some mini-game or errand boy bullshit. You don't find very many Jiggies just hanging out at the end of platforming challenges anymore. Then there are the cross-level Jiggies, fuck these with a rake heated to 1000 degrees. It's not fun to hunt a Jiggy for 20 minutes only to run into a brick wall because it turns out you need some ability that you'll get way later. For the most part, in Banjo-Kazooie, you could complete a world without having to exit it until you're done.

I used to be much more appreciative of massive levels when I was a kid because I could make up my own "games" in my head and make use of all the space without feeling like a fucking schizophrenic dork.