That scene with Madeline and Theo in Celeste.
The part where it guides the player through blowing the leaf and keeping it aloft? Chills.
She IS still alive.
This was a triumph.
“The part where he kills you” was funny with the 1-2 punch with the dialog followed by the chapter name text, but what really made the moment shine for me was the first-playthrough-only achievement popup on Xbox with the same text coming in to finish the joke.
It’s one of like 2 great jokes I remember through achievements. The other was a 4th wall joke from “High on Life” where a boss taunts you by giving you an achievement for “Spending 15 hours in the Alien Strip Club” and explains that it’s permanent and all your friends can see it now.
I don’t mean to set the bar too high, but god damn, Chrono Trigger was the absolute goat
I miss the Squaresoft / Square Enix we had in the SNES to PS2 era. Almost every game they put out during that period was an absolute banger.
The opening of the mission “party time” in saints row 3. Screenshot wouldn’t do it justice. Starts as a wide shot over the shoulder of your protagonist looking out of a helicopter. Power by Kanye West starts as you jump out of the copter and parachute onto a huge penthouse full of enemies. Song continues to blast as you clear it out. Great mission and the best pairing of contemporary music with a game I know of.
(Slight spoilers but its very low resolution)
Both in terms of gameplay and the plot reveal.Honestly the game became too grindy for me and then I stopped playing. Still wanna finish it at some point, but right now there is no time. Did you enjoy playing, and did it take very long for you?
A stranger joins your conversation. “I highly recommend using the Blue Paths website for hints once you get stuck. Also, don’t waste your time and money on Blue Tents; the wiki has everything you need to know about them. It still took me 100 hours to reach the final puzzle but I enjoyed it.”
I’ve logged 170 hours on steam (although a chunk of that was idling I think - call it 100 at the absolute minimum)
If you don’t enjoy the choice of rooms, the game doesn’t work, no matter how good it is. If that’s tedious, nothing will redeem it. But for me that was enough of a tactical choice that it worked.
After that point, you need to have a flexible approach to enjoy it: for most of the game you will never have a run where you don’t accomplish something, be that seeing a new room, solving a new puzzle, or just testing a theory and eliminating a possibility. But if you go in with a singular goal, “I want to solve the puzzle in X room” you will get annoyed fast.
The story is really good, and the way it’s gradually revealed as you solve puzzles, the way your understanding of the situation changes wholesale, is really fantastic.
As long as the drafting is entertaining and you stay flexible, the minor issues with the game are less than negligible. Those issues are: a few mechanics should be communicated properly (most egregiously, the axe), getting around is too slow, and by the time you’re on day 100 and solving end game puzzles you need a more reliable way to reduce the rng. You end up with quite a lot of mitigation, but you need more. A once per day ability to pick a room, and a way to keep a chosen item that isn’t dependent on coat check, that you unlock after solving a mid-late game puzzle, would do the trick.
Regarding hints, I think the best way to get hints is to find someone who’s played already so they can give you the smallest nudges possible. I regret going online for hints at times and getting a bigger one than I wanted. When I got hints from friends I was occasionally able to get… almost nothing and yet it was enough to get unstuck, which is really ideal! They’d tell me for example, “you have the right idea” and that’d just be enough for me to persist a bit more. But in general, the end game puzzles are not really designed to be solved by a single brain. Getting hints likely won’t reduce your enjoyment, because you’ll still be getting the satisfaction of solving other bits.
For me it was:
Tap for spoiler
Entering the safehouse…
That was the point where I realised the magnitude of the story in that game!
I played the DLC for Cyberpunk through in one sitting (the main story), start to finish. I made the choice near the beginning that I was going to save Songbird. I knew there were multiple ways to end Phantom Liberty, but I wanted the best ending for Songbird. I went in not knowing about the back story, not seeing the game trailers, so when I played it, I had a huge amount of sympathy for her.
Even on the train ride over to the launch platform, inspite of everything she said, I made sure she was safely on that shuttle. I would have had V given her a kiss on the forehead if I could.
By the time Johnny and V were talking, as we watched the shuttle launch, I was already an overtired mess, barely holding back tears, and then the end credits and music (for the DLC, not the main game) kicked in and I lost it.
I’m glad I didn’t know the launch version of Cyberpunk, I heard it had a rough start. If I had, I don’t think it would be one of my favorite games I’ve ever played. I’m almost done with my second play through and I’m eyeing my third. ~send help~
I played for like a couple hours at launch, and my character was T-posing on jackies bike.
So glad i gave it another shot this past year, the DLC is so damn good (maybe we’ll get more content after the next anime story, too?)
Never felt so bad about beating a boss.
SLAG?? REE-EEEEALLY???
You slag!
That moment when all the visual story telling snaps into place and you realize what is about to happen to the Sunbeam.What game is this?
Subnautica
I just played Subnautica for the first time a couple weeks ago! This was indeed pretty awesome. When the countdown got close, I still sailed down there to watch…
One of my favorite games ever has to be Outer Wilds, and truth be told, of all the games I’ve played recently, this one came closest to giving me those outer wild vibes.
The ending of Spiritfarer. Man I just sat and thought and basked in the moment.
Uncharted 2
The Uncharted series has so many great cinematic scenes. I remember when we were first married, my wife would ask me to play it just so she could watch. Even as a spectator, those games were pure entertainment.
That opening is epic.
Pointcrow, anyone?
Looks like he wants to ponder his orb.
Well, i was unable to find the actual screenshot i wanted, but it is the end of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy game, but I could never actually beat it. Every time i enabled the improbability drive, i turned into the sperm whale instead of the missiles.
I played the game so many times start to finish, but never could completed it. I had a print out of the guide on the green and white dot matrix paper. I followed it exactly multiple times.
So instead, here is a screenshot near the start of the game.
OK, I can’t just post a screenshot.
Crysis 2. I knew nothing of OG Crysis until I saw an ad in Xbox 360 for 2, and I watched the cinematic trailer and immediately bought it for both 360 and PC.
The detail and graphics, the music (Hans Zimmer score), the voice acting, the cut scenes. Fell in love, played the fucking hell out of this game! Went back, played 1, Wars, and eventually 3. I, for a very brief time, was top of the Crysis 3 leaderboards.
I remember way back in the early days of WoW. WoW was my first MMO, and I hadn’t been playing the game for all that long, but I saw there was a group looking for a fifth for a dungeon, so I thought I’d give it a go. I’d done one or two before.
Uldaman. We were having a rough time of it. I can’t remember if we were underleveled, or just inexperienced, but it was a slog. Near the end of the dungeon is a room with four big statues that come to life one by one. We wiped a few times on them, and the rest of the dungeon was starting to respawn on us, so we were on our last legs, but we managed to make it through that last room, and up to the boss room. The scene I remember is that door opening.
More of the big statues that we’d just been throwing ourselves against. Rows of smaller statues on top of that. And the boss, towering over it all.
Fuck.
Well they are rereleasing classic with addition quests and updated graphics if you wanna do it again.
I’ve sunk enough hours of my life into WoW already.
