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[handCraftedRadio]

Company of Heroes. I suck at it. It's a love-hate relationship.

It´s you and me then. For me however CoH was all about the scirmish mode. Lots of great fun.

I've been playing company of heroes a lot too! That game is great. Well, besides the campaign. I actually hated the game until i tried skirmish and multiplayer.

[baconman]

Considering I barely survived last month, and not a lot of wiggle room to splurge on...

SUPER PUSSY WAGON ADVENTURE.

Just. So. Randomly. Hilariously. Win.

Losing it a lot though, but the bad endings are better than the good ones, I'd imagine.

[Tanner]

Can you link me to the game? It sounds fun.

[baconman]

SUPER PUSSY WAGON ADVENTURE!!

DISCLAIMER: I may be making that "pussy" part up.

[aptanor]

Just finished Dead Island. News of the sequel propelled me to finish it. It didn't take nearly as long once I stopped agreeing to get every single person absolutely any ridiculous thing they asked.

[alexfislegend]

Guild Wars 2, pretty dec.

[Fallsburg]

Tokyo Jungle.

A roguelike where you start as a pomeranian and try to take over Tokyo?  Fuck yeah.

My last death resulted from my pack of 6 pomeranians trying to take down a hippo.

[Sam English]

[SirNiko]

Tokyo Jungle is pretty badass!

I wouldn't classify as a roguelike, though, since it's really action oriented with relatively low strategy. Challenge Mode does feature permadeath (saves are only temporary and are erased when you load them) but it's pretty arcadey to play. Equipment is very rare, and only slightly increases your stats. You don't gain levels - completing goals from your challenge list earns you small stat boosts, which get passed on in part when you mate and move to the next generation. You don't gain levels by killing enemies - ranking up by killing enemies just lets you score better mates so you pass on a bigger chunk of your stats to your offspring when you choose to end the current generation. You get a few items, but they seem to just be hunger refills and similar temporary boosts. Combat always consists of the same basic bite, slash, dodge and throat lunge, with no spells or strategy beyond sneaking around a foe to get a surprise kill or fleeing from a pack of enemies. The most complex bits are hiding in tall grass, or fleeing from foes by leaping to rooftops. You have to periodically decide whether to save your items or use them, or decide which way to go when you've exhausted the food in a territory and have two possible neighboring territories to migrate to, but most of the survival is on whether or not you can successfully hunt deer without alerting the local tigers.

It has a ton of unlocks and challenges, and each animal features a unique set of a dozen+ goals customized for it, starting off with basics like killing an animal or taking a territory, and leading up to consuming a huge quantity of calories in a limited time or reaching a remote location within a specified number of years. You start off with just the pom and sika deer unlocked, but you can unlock the cat if your pomeranian can reach the market, defeat a pack of feral cats, and then take their territory. Then the cat has it's own challenge mode you can try later. Other animals are unlocked similarly by completing challenges in other animals' modes.

In survival mode, you have a pretty big open world to explore (although not THAT big at first glance) with various events rolling around like pollution, shifting prey (stay in one area too long, and there's nothing to eat so you have to move on) or influx of powerful predators. You'll find archive discs scattered around (and easily visible on the map) which give little emails and letters that reveal the background of the story, and unlock story levels which are a little more structured and feature boss fights. Beating a story level unlocks more discs in challenge mode, which in turn unlocks another story level.

You can find equipment to dress up your animal and improve his stats, and once you unlock it via random drops in challenge mode it looks like you can spend your saved up survival points to buy equipment before going into the challenge instead of relying on more random drops.

My pom puppies were felled when overconfidence led me to attack a tiger, only to realize, a little late, that pomeranians are simply not equipped to kill a tiger, even with the advantage of surprise.

The whole thing is a tight little package with a good, original feel to it and a clever, original premise for a really reasonable price.

[s0]

its a coo gam. like spore's creature phase but good, with a bit of evo: search for eden thrown in.

couple things i didn't like were the fixed camera, that there's only really 2 types of animals to play (predators and grazers) and that you have to unlock almost everything. also the starting area is kinda boring.

btw it's cool that sony is willing to publish weird games like that in the west.

[Tanner]

la-mulana remake. it's soooooo gooooooood

[crowe]

Testament of Sherlock Holmes


It's genuinely very good.

[SirNiko]

Does it play like a typical Adventure game? Like a Phoenix Wright style find-the-contradiction game? LA-Noire find the clues? Action game of some sort?

[crowe]

Does it play like a typical Adventure game? Like a Phoenix Wright style find-the-contradiction game? LA-Noire find the clues? Action game of some sort?

It's very much an adventure game; you wander around as Watson or Holmes and search for clues, which you use them to solve puzzles. Sometimes you connect up deductions in a flow-chart, or talk to people, or what have you. There's some inventory usage as well, though your item list never seems to get too large (thank god). I have not beaten it, of course, but it's quite good so far. Been stumped a few times -- the game will sometimes take pity on you if you stare at the more traditional puzzles without progress... which is good, because at one point, for example you'll have to solve the knight's journey, and there's no way I'm doing that again in any videogame.

The normal pixel hunt thing you get in these sort of games is alleviated by the addition of a meter you can use to find anything in the scene you've missed -- hit the button and it'll highlight a key clue you've missed in your viewpoint. That sounds like cheating, but anyone who's played an adventure game will tell you missing an item you need to proceed is the worst thing. It's a game that's not designed around making you stuck unless you enjoy that sort of thing -- you could play it on normal and solve the puzzles as best you can and have a good time, I think. The controls are, shit, though.

The writing is pretty enjoyable.



Sometimes, though, I am completely goddamned confused.

[Capntastic]

Hey is the code there 8-1-4-3?

[Blademasterbobo]

yep

[Capntastic]

Awesome.

[crowe]

Hey is the code there 8-1-4-3?

You're a wiser man than I (I had to skip it)


But I managed to do all the rest of the puzzles, and finish it. The ending was..... well. It sure ended, that's for sure.

[mono]

Putting Sherlock Holmes on hold cuz now there is XCOM.

[SirNiko]

I beat Final Fantasy 13-2, and started getting the bonus endings, collecting the collectables, etc. I'm still really pleased with it.

Save points are non-existent - you can save anywhere, and when you quit the game, you almost always appear right where you left off, in literally the exact same spot. Most areas unlock chocobo once you complete it, so you can ride around chocobo (for a small fee) to avoid encounters if you don't want to fight.

I had a bunch of areas left to unlock even after the credits, which made me happy. Most of them were just alternate times for areas I'd already explored, and it looks like a few nodes are literally just placeholders for the alternate endings, but they're still fun to find and explore.

The final boss was an especially grueling fight, and really felt satisfying to defeat. The game is pretty generous, and if you lose you can shuffle your paradigms and equipment and then replay the final battle so you don't have to go through the whole thing again. Unfortunately, the ending is a pretty disappointing cliffhanger clearly intended to set up FF13-3 (Which is already announced).

Most of the alternate endings are unlocked by going back to completed episodes, rewinding time, then beating the episode by defeating a powerful boss early than normal. You also get an item you can turn on to make certain unbeatable bosses beatable, and defeating them unlocks the rest of the bonus endings.

It feels like the "Cinematic Action" QTEs are forgotten towards the end of the game. After the first few bosses, the QTEs stop appearing in the middle of fights, and then towards the end they just stop appearing at all. I kind of was hoping the later fights would mix in some QTE you could use to turn the battle to your favor, maybe offering a quick bonus stagger, or reducing the strength of a powerful attack but this doesn't happen. Thankfully it only comes across as a small missed opportunity instead of something missing from the game.

The side quests are generally pretty simple, a few are for optional bosses, some are to solve puzzles involving connecting gems or moving clock hands, and most are fetch quests that make you try to match the place shown to find the hidden box with the quest item in it. The rewards are little tidbits of backstory, including narratives from the NPCs or details of how certain events came to be.

You unlock a lot of bonus abilities as the game progresses, allowing you to manipulate the encounter rate, increase item drops and things like that with as simple option in a menu. If you're the kind of person who gets giddy about optimizing your party and grinding for equipment to try and break the game, FF13-2 is perfectly suited to entertain you.

There are also a lot of optional things like monster decorations and monster capture allies that you can do if you like, but otherwise aren't graded or rewarded even with achievements, which is really nice.

If you pick it up for 20 bucks or less, I think you'll get a lot of enjoyment out of it. It's still a typical Square game at heart, so if JRPGs are a turn off this game isn't going to make you feel differently. If you like JRPGs and just are disappointed with some modern AAA offerings, you'll probably really enjoy FF13-2.