The 2024 Backlog Challenge

[Sumez | 3,170]

Rygar: The Legendary Adventure (PS2) - Beaten 17/7

In the wake of the first Devil May Cry, we started getting a new brand of 3D beat'em up style adventure games, which retroactively tend to be popularly defined using the rather nondescript "character action" moniker. Eventually this would result in modern classics like the God of War games and the Ninja Gaiden reboot. Some would even argue that the Souls series is a descendant of these.

The PS2 Rygar sequel is probably one of the earliest examples of these derivatives, though you rarely hear about it these days. I do remember it getting some high praise at the time, but even then it seemed to go mostly unnoticed, and I picked it up in a bargain bin not long after its release, after which it's been rotting in my backlog ever since.

At first sight it looks and feels really competent. Movement is smooth, and attacks feel good. Combat does come off rather uninspired - even though you have a vast array of potential combo attacks available by alternating two attack buttons, most enemies will just sit there and take it. Less solid are the early boss fights, where it's completely unclear how you're supposed to go about it, and the best strategy is to just find a safe spot and spam the attack buttons until it dies. Not very engaging, and while that does go for most of the bosses in the game, there are fortunately a few decent ones in there as well.

The Rygar "series" - which I think few people even recognize as a series - feels somewhat vague given the only real constant seems to be the iconic diskarmor (aka "yo-yo shield") weapon.
This game tries to introduce some plot and actual characters to the game world obviously derived from greek mythology, but otherwise takes mostly after the NES game, with its semi-open world and ability to upgrade your strength and defense as you play.
Although you can technically backtrack to the very start of the game, and even be rewarded with a few hidden upgrades, you're mostly forced ahead in a linear fashion, and will generally receive new skills right when you need them, allowing you to force new types or terrain, or use your unlocked weapons as a color-coded key.

I'm not sure anyone needs to care about the story squeezed in here. Even if you wanted to, you'll probably be struggling to figure out what is going on anyway.
Whatever epic storyline the writer imagined they'd cooked up, is completely lost in the useless translation, inept English voice acting, and what I'm assuming were already extremely poorly communicated cutscenes in the original Japanese version.
But you can tell they definitely had some sort of ambition, because at one point one of the characters breaks out into song.
At best, the story scenes are a reliable source of unintended hilarity.

Here's the lowdown however... Rygar: The Legendary Adventure never does anything to make itself memorable. There are a few visually distinct locales which do look really cool, but the gameplay is never engaging. The combat never exceeds just hitting attack until stuff is dead, and that is given there is even anything to fight in the first place.
You encounter surprisingly few enemies throughout the game, especially compared to how much time you spend constantly hacking away at every single piece of scenery that seems potentially destructible. This ranges from cracked columns to massive rocks or walls, almost anything can be destroyed. And although the rewards for doing so are most often pointless, ever so often you come across a valuable upgrade item, just frequently enough that it's better to check everything than risking foregoing those advancements.

The game never gives you experience points or such from beating enemies, though occasionally some stronger enemies appear which will drop upgrades - but most of the time, you'll need to find those upgrades inside the vast amount of things that can be destroyed, and frankly that does end up feeling pretty tedious when you're doing it constantly throughout an entire playthrough. I'm sure if you ask anyone who has played this game, that is probably the "gameplay" element they'll be remembering most distinctly.
 

[Reed Rothchild | 9,971]

God of War Ragnarok - Probably the best game I've played this year, edging out Bloodborne by a nose (we'll see if that is still the case by the end).  I think part of that is really being invested in the cast of characters.  A lovable group.

Trails in the Sky SC - On chapter 8.  Play time has to already be north of 50 hours.  Lots of complaints with how they handled some things, and how much retread there is from the first game, but I'm still excited to see how this concludes.

Side Quests

Tears of the Kingdom - I lied, this is the best game I've played this year.  It doesn't seem to matter how much I played BotW, exploring Hyrule never seems to get old.  Finishing this will likely be on my 2025 backlog, as I only play for like 45 minutes a week with my kids.

Furi - Just started, and got through the first 3 bosses.  Working on the Ragnarok berserkers was a good tune-up for this.

Superhot - Blasted through it.  I'll probably circle back to the extra content at some point.

Videogames are such a great hobby.  Everything is always so fun.

[Brickman | 4,216]

San Andreas (PS2)

I don't do this very often, but I'm giving up on San Andreas. When I played this on release I spent more time messing around than playing the game. I had really fond memories of that, probably should have just left that nostalgic memory alone.

Don't get me wrong, this game is still impressive in what it does and what it did at the time. There were so many moments where I actually stopped playing and was amazed at what they did. The weather effects, the day/night cycle, the NPC interactions on the street (even if some are rather weird). The soundtrack is fantastic and the attention to detail are really great aspects of this game.

Where this game really falls apart is the actual story. The Los Santos Chapter 1 story for the most part is great and I actually was surprised in some of the twists in the story. It had me engaged in the world around me and the lifestyle of the hood.

But after that it just becomes a bloated, all over the place mess. I'm currently in the last parts of the San Fierro story line and I can't take it anymore. It's like the writers have completely forgotten about what happened in Los Santos and have you do the most inane quests. Not to mention some of them are beyond ridiculous in difficulty. I'm proud to say I abused the hell out of save states for the RC plane quest.

Looking at a guide and it seems like I still have two more cities to visit before I even return to Los Santos which tells me it is probably full of even more meaningless bloat. It really feels like different teams were working on different sections of the game and never checked with each other how it would all connect together.

I think I'll watch the conclusion of this game on YouTube. Here's hoping GTA 3 and Vice City are better.

It's hard to rate this game because if you're just messing around and immersing in the world of Los Santos it's a great game, but if I actually rate it as the full game and what it is trying to do with the story I have to really mark it down. 

6.5/10

[Sumez | 3,170]

Signalis - Beaten 23/7

It's only a couple of years ago that the classic Resident Evil recipe really managed to click with me. The thrill of making it through a threatening open-ended environment with a finite amount of resources and tight limitations on what you can carry. Controls and combat mechanics being so clunky that it was hard to ever ensure you wouldn't screw up somewhere, combined with the risk and reward of stretching the time between saving the game in order to stay on top of your resources, making sure you'd have more to work with going forward.

The drawback to all this is that... no other games besides the Resident Evil 1 Remake really manages to carry that formula through to such high degree. At least, none that I have been able to find yet.

Signalis is one game that comes close. Healing and ammunition are all finite, and at least at first they seem quite rare. Go somewhat trigger happy and you'll find yourself running out much faster than you had imagined. Enemies even have the ability to revive after a while unless you use a certain item to incinerate their corpses, but those items are even more limited.
As in Resident Evil, save rooms are equipped with a bottomless storage box, magically connected to every other storage box, but your inventory only allows you to carry few things at a time. This limitation applies also to any weapon you have equipped, and extra ammunition for it, meaning you will often find yourself going out with less gear than you'd feel comfortable with if you want to also be able to drag back the items that you find.

The inventory limit feels annoying at first, as it never quite manages to facilitate the same level of risk vs. reward that RE1 does. But essentially it ends up forcing you to do a lot more resource juggling and backtracking through the same areas in order to scavenge everything you can - and being a survival horror game, it's arguably one of the very few genres that actually benefits from forced repeated backtracking, since figuring out the most effecient way to make it safely through familiar locations is the absolute core of the experience.

It's a genre that benefits a lot from foreknowledge of course.
When you find a save room that you'll be returning to a lot, obviously clearing out enemies nearby - and their corpses - is more beneficial than the ones in the rooms you'll likely only ever visit once. Most of the time, the game allows you to sneak past enemies, or run through them in a manner that won't allow them to get a hit in. There are many ways to avoid spending precious resources, but to me, the most fun approach is saving the game, and then going completely nuts with everything you have, a kamikaze run into uncharted territory to scout out what things you can find, what enemies are guarding them, and where you need to go next, before you go back and reload your save for a more optimized run.
As such, the one thing Signalis doesn't borrow from Resident Evil is also the missing puzzle piece that could have elevated it to something truly special. If saving the game had been a limited resource, forcing you to make meaningful progress every time you expend one, the gained ability to make one of those "kamikaze scouting missions" would have been a brilliantly fitting reward. When you can save the game as often as you like, this luxury is available at all times, making it less exciting.
I still really enjoyed this element of planning ahead in Signalis, but it's just lacking that one edge.

At the end of the day I ended up with way more healing than I needed, as well as boxes of unused ammo, and several weapons that I'd never even tried out. But hey - you never know when you need those, and the tension was still there.

The game also manages to do certain other things surprisingly well, however.
The puzzles required for progressing the game are mostly the classic Survival Horror staples: Find a weirdly shaped key and stuff it into the hole in a box where it fits, acting primarily as an excuse to send you on a detour and backtrack through rooms already explored.
However, Signalis very frequently manages to add twists on them which are both original and involving. It manages to perfectly hit that neat balance where they are easy enough that you won't get stuck trying to figure them out, but still requiring enough brain power to feel really satisfying to solve. Often the solution involves not just finding the location and the pieces required, but also one or more hints that are necessary to even understand how the two combine.
An especially nice twist to these puzzles is the built-in radio module which allows you to tune in to any frequency at any given moment. Many of the game's puzzles utilize that, and always in new and creative ways that are always gratifying.

Signalis's only real weakness in my opinion is its pacing, and I guess that's a bit more subjective. The game dwells a lot on its setting and plot. It's extremely confusing at first, teleporting the main character between different moments and locations. Lots of unfamiliar character names are being dumped on you, and pretty much everyone looks exactly the same - an unfortunate side-effect of the developer's art style, not helped by the fact that eventually it turns out multiple characters are more or less the same person (I think).
In traditional horror fashion, the story is mostly told backwards, with the pieces you need to get the gist of what's going on only being delivered at the tail end of it all, topped with a bunch of Lynchian abstractions. This also means that all the exposion-based sequences where you're slowly walking forward in first-person mode, as well as the excessively prolonged intro segment, won't be able to mean much to you at first outside of the atmosphere being pretty cool I guess.

But when the best aspects of the game are the actual gameplay segments where you are freely roaming a relatively open-ended area, everything that happens inbetween those ends up feeling like filler.
The game is especially taking a real long time getting into gear. It starts out with a tutorial-like intro, but then you go through some more story stuff, and end up in another pretty lengthy segment where every core gameplay element is slowly introduced. This lasts multiple floors of the first area of the game, where you're mostly just pushed ahead in a linear fashion. Occasionally the path splits into two branches, with one typically ending at a locked door, and the other leading to the key you need for that door.
That structure isn't very exciting, and goes on for so long that at first I thought the whole game would be like that. When Signalis finally does open up, you're already quite far into it, and ultimately there are only three larger areas like the ones I described that truly manage to tap into the core Survival Horror gameplay.
Regardless, those three areas made the game extremely enjoyable to me, and worth recommending to any fan of the genre.

[wongojack | 327]

6 minutes ago, Sumez said:

Signalis - Beaten 23/7

It's only a couple of years ago that the classic Resident Evil recipe really managed to click with me. The thrill of making it through a threatening open-ended environment with a finite amount of resources and tight limitations on what you can carry. Controls and combat mechanics being so clunky that it was hard to ever ensure you wouldn't screw up somewhere, combined with the risk and reward of stretching the time between saving the game in order to stay on top of your resources, making sure you'd have more to work with going forward.

The drawback to all this is that... no other games besides the Resident Evil 1 Remake really manages to carry that formula through to such high degree. At least, none that I have been able to find yet.

Signalis is one game that comes close. Healing and ammunition are all finite, and at least at first they seem quite rare. Go somewhat trigger happy and you'll find yourself running out much faster than you had imagined. Enemies even have the ability to revive after a while unless you use a certain item to incinerate their corpses, but those items are even more limited.
As in Resident Evil, save rooms are equipped with a bottomless storage box, magically connected to every other storage box, but your inventory only allows you to carry few things at a time. This limitation applies also to any weapon you have equipped, and extra ammunition for it, meaning you will often find yourself going out with less gear than you'd feel comfortable with if you want to also be able to drag back the items that you find.

The inventory limit feels annoying at first, as it never quite manages to facilitate the same level of risk vs. reward that RE1 does. But essentially it ends up forcing you to do a lot more resource juggling and backtracking through the same areas in order to scavenge everything you can - and being a survival horror game, it's arguably one of the very few genres that actually benefits from forced repeated backtracking, since figuring out the most effecient way to make it safely through familiar locations is the absolute core of the experience.

It's a genre that benefits a lot from foreknowledge of course.
When you find a save room that you'll be returning to a lot, obviously clearing out enemies nearby - and their corpses - is more beneficial than the ones in the rooms you'll likely only ever visit once. Most of the time, the game allows you to sneak past enemies, or run through them in a manner that won't allow them to get a hit in. There are many ways to avoid spending precious resources, but to me, the most fun approach is saving the game, and then going completely nuts with everything you have, a kamikaze run into uncharted territory to scout out what things you can find, what enemies are guarding them, and where you need to go next, before you go back and reload your save for a more optimized run.
As such, the one thing Signalis doesn't borrow from Resident Evil is also the missing puzzle piece that could have elevated it to something truly special. If saving the game had been a limited resource, forcing you to make meaningful progress every time you expend one, the gained ability to make one of those "kamikaze scouting missions" would have been a brilliantly fitting reward. When you can save the game as often as you like, this luxury is available at all times, making it less exciting.
I still really enjoyed this element of planning ahead in Signalis, but it's just lacking that one edge.

At the end of the day I ended up with way more healing than I needed, as well as boxes of unused ammo, and several weapons that I'd never even tried out. But hey - you never know when you need those, and the tension was still there.

The game also manages to do certain other things surprisingly well, however.
The puzzles required for progressing the game are mostly the classic Survival Horror staples: Find a weirdly shaped key and stuff it into the hole in a box where it fits, acting primarily as an excuse to send you on a detour and backtrack through rooms already explored.
However, Signalis very frequently manages to add twists on them which are both original and involving. It manages to perfectly hit that neat balance where they are easy enough that you won't get stuck trying to figure them out, but still requiring enough brain power to feel really satisfying to solve. Often the solution involves not just finding the location and the pieces required, but also one or more hints that are necessary to even understand how the two combine.
An especially nice twist to these puzzles is the built-in radio module which allows you to tune in to any frequency at any given moment. Many of the game's puzzles utilize that, and always in new and creative ways that are always gratifying.

Signalis's only real weakness in my opinion is its pacing, and I guess that's a bit more subjective. The game dwells a lot on its setting and plot. It's extremely confusing at first, teleporting the main character between different moments and locations. Lots of unfamiliar character names are being dumped on you, and pretty much everyone looks exactly the same - an unfortunate side-effect of the developer's art style, not helped by the fact that eventually it turns out multiple characters are more or less the same person (I think).
In traditional horror fashion, the story is mostly told backwards, with the pieces you need to get the gist of what's going on only being delivered at the tail end of it all, topped with a bunch of Lynchian abstractions. This also means that all the exposion-based sequences where you're slowly walking forward in first-person mode, as well as the excessively prolonged intro segment, won't be able to mean much to you at first outside of the atmosphere being pretty cool I guess.

But when the best aspects of the game are the actual gameplay segments where you are freely roaming a relatively open-ended area, everything that happens inbetween those ends up feeling like filler.
The game is especially taking a real long time getting into gear. It starts out with a tutorial-like intro, but then you go through some more story stuff, and end up in another pretty lengthy segment where every core gameplay element is slowly introduced. This lasts multiple floors of the first area of the game, where you're mostly just pushed ahead in a linear fashion. Occasionally the path splits into two branches, with one typically ending at a locked door, and the other leading to the key you need for that door.
That structure isn't very exciting, and goes on for so long that at first I thought the whole game would be like that. When Signalis finally does open up, you're already quite far into it, and ultimately there are only three larger areas like the ones I described that truly manage to tap into the core Survival Horror gameplay.
Regardless, those three areas made the game extremely enjoyable to me, and worth recommending to any fan of the genre.

Thank you for the detailed comments.  This is one I have had my eye on.

[Sumez | 3,170]

An added comment on Signalis that I think is worth mentioning - It's really damn impressive that the game was almost entirely created by just two people.

[LHCGreg | 149]

Super Meat Boy is done. I beat every level in both light and dark worlds, got all the bandages, and beat all the glitch levels for 106% completion. It's a fun splatformer with very short levels (5-60 seconds) that encourages speedrunning by having a target time for each level and by tracking your cumulative best time. After beating the game I went back and replayed every level for speed until I was satisfied I could probably not do better. I shaved 876 seconds off my cumulative best time doing that.

Grade: A

[Sumez | 3,170]

I took the leap and started Trails to Azure.

Just a couple hours in, and my patience for anime'isms is already stretching to its limit

[Floating Platforms | 824]

Tomb Raider (reboot for PS3) is done

I have never played any of the original Tomb Raider games, only the isometric Temple of Osiris. I also am not a fan of tank controls, so I probably will not go back to that era. This series reboot doesn't have tank controls (of course) and I've heard good things and I have all 3 on my hard drives since they've been offered through PS+ over the years.

The presentation on this early on was very eye catching and you can kind of see from this title screen that a lot of it is in your face. I did get worried early on because it starts off with a bunch of QTEs but eventually you will be traversing the island yourself and using a growing array of weapons to fight off the waves of people, etc. I've heard comparisons to Uncharted and I think that's understandable considering the subject matter and gameplay. It also suffers from the same tropes that I find rather unsufferable such as making you climb on various things and then have the obvious scripted near falls or random thing falling on your head. Every single time. Oh, look how dangerous this is! You almost died this time (even though it's impossible to get hit by the thing)! Aren't you glad you have to spend more time with the slow climbing so you can have that sense of danger and adventure?

Combat wise, it's serviceable. At least I felt like each of the weapons served a purpose and I was swapping between them in most of the longer sequences. Exploration is encouraged to get more scraps to upgrade weapons and the sections are tiny enough that it's easy to cover most of the areas.

Story wise, it's nothing to write home about. Pretty much all the expected beats (except for a little bit of the supernatural stuff), but I was disappointed in how quickly the ending seemed to happen and how lackluster the final battles were.

The game still scratched a good itch and was a nice linear adventure that's a change of pace from what I have been playing. I'm interested to see how the other two compare later on, at least.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,971]

I beat Ragnarok and the Berserker king last night.  Just want to do the final Valkyrie fight tonight and then I'm calling it a wrap and I'll do my scoring here.

I was gonna start Final Fantasy XVI next, but my kid is guilt-tripping me into doing Miles Morales alongside him.  Even though I just beat the original game.  At least it's supposed to be quite short.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,971]

God of War Ragnarok

I had a lot of fun with this.  I love the cast of characters, and I love just hanging around them, listening to them tell each other stories.  I could do that for another 20 hours and be perfectly happy.  And the gameplay's not too shabby to boot.  Combat is always visceral and satisfying, and has enough depth to keep the harder fights engaging.  Is it a tad easy to brute-force your way through?  Is their too much climbing?  Sure.  But those are minor demerits.  I also like the open-ish areas that let you cruise around and do side quests at your own leisure.  I like the series-typical epic boss fights.  And I had a good time with the bonus bosses in the end-game.

Do we need a third game to bookend the trilogy?  I think so.  It probably needs to shake things up and push the formula in some manner, but I think there's another game in there somewhere.

1. God of War Ragnarok (9.5/10)
2. Bloodborne (9.5/10)
3. The Witness (9/10)
4. Tunic (9/10)
5. Inscryption (8.5/10)
6. Yakuza 2 Kiwami (8.5/10)
7. Firewatch (8.5/10)
8. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (8/10)
9. Horizon Zero Dawn (8/10)
10. Spider-Man (8/10)
11. Bayonetta 3 (8/10)
12. Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations (7.5/10)
13. The Walking Dead Complete (7.5/10)
14. Rise of the Tomb Raider (7.5/10)
15. The Stanley Parable (7.5/10)
16. Resident Evil 3 (7.5/10)
17. The Talos Principle (7/10)
18. The Quarry (7/10)
19. A Plague Tale: Innocence (7/10)
20. Bravely Default (6.5/10)
21. Pikmin 1 (6.5/10)
22. Dark Forces (5.5/10)
23. Beyond Oasis (5/10)
24. Turok 3 (4.5/10)

[Jicsan | 603]

19 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Do we need a third game to bookend the trilogy?

The free DLC "Valhalla" is a worthwhile playthrough for the story line post script.  I really wish the gameplay loop for the DLC had been different than what it was but I'd still highly recommend playing, especially having just finished the main game and it's all (gameplay mechanics and story) still fresh in your mind.  I played it when it came out but it had been like a year since playing Ragnarok, so I was rusty on the gameplay at first.

Edited August 3 by Jicsan

[G-type | 2,836]

Got 39,500 in Keystone Kapers!

1 more game checked off the list.

[twiztor | 923]

Knuckles: Chaotix for the Sega 32x.

this Sonic spin-off isn't great. you (Knuckles) are tethered to another character (in my case Vector the Crocodile) which can help you advance but in more cases is a hindrance. they hold you back, speed ahead, and/or end up ping-ponging across the screen.

there are 5 worlds of 5 levels each. but you don't play them in order, and you don't get to select which level is next, either. there's essentially a lottery after each stage. it just leads to a very disjointed playthrough.

add to all of that the game is pretty easy. since any world can be played at any time, there's no ramping up of difficulty, or sense of progression.

while i don't think this is a BAD game, it's certainly the least of the Sonic games i have played. also, i got the "bad" ending since i didn't collect all of the chaos rings. i'm ok with that.

[fox | 1,778]

8 completed

Paper Mario 1000 Year Door


In a lot of ways Paper Mario feels like the prototype for TTYD.  The formula was refined and they even found a couple ways to subvert expectations for what a Mario RPG could be.

Is it better in every metric though?  The visuals are a treat, esp in the remake.  The art style is just sublime.  The writing also is a step up and they seem to have really found a voice beyond generic Mario plotting.  There is a surprising about of humor and character development throughout.  The combat system is tighter, and not having a cap on badges means you have a lot more freedom to experiment with different builds.

What does take a hit is the level design.  Almost every dungeon is designed so you need to backtrack two or three times before you can move on.  Go find this npc, now head back to the beginning to get a key, now huff it back to where you were you found the npc to open a door to make progress.  If they gave you a shortcut, or you could have done events out of order, it would help speed things up.  You want to go to the zone of the next chapter?  Hold up let's go back to the last zone, which you were already in for several hours, to check on some npcs.  And yes there is a meta joke at one point about backtracking, but that doesn't excuse how much it kills the pacing.

The Princess Peach segments where she talks to a Hal-9000 computer are a big step down from the castle stealth missions from the first game.  The Bowser segments are pure filler, he is almost a non-factor until the very end of the game.  There is a lot of great stuff here to sink your teeth into, but you sometimes have to deal with some fat to get to it at times.

Both are great games, I'd say check them out.

[Sumez | 3,170]

22 hours ago, fox said:

What does take a hit is the level design.  Almost every dungeon is designed so you need to backtrack two or three times before you can move on.  Go find this npc, now head back to the beginning to get a key, now huff it back to where you were you found the npc to open a door to make progress.  If they gave you a shortcut, or you could have done events out of order, it would help speed things up.  You want to go to the zone of the next chapter?  Hold up let's go back to the last zone, which you were already in for several hours, to check on some npcs.  And yes there is a meta joke at one point about backtracking, but that doesn't excuse how much it kills the pacing.

This is such a good description of TTYD, it's by far its most defining aspect to me.

I actually finished TTYD before going back to replay the first Paper Mario, finally getting further than the first area in that, and it's kind of shocking to me how much better the level design is in that game. It's a really weird thing to go back on when they, as you said, really wanted to up everything else for the sequel.

The Peach segments definitely feel much more natural in Paper Mario 64 too, where it makes sense why they exist, and ends up playing a role in the story. It seems like it's shoehorned into TTYD just to repeat that experience. So that's definitely one aspect where it makes sense to play the first game first just to understand that mindset.

Edited August 5 by Sumez

[Gloves | 12,290]

Ever since I got news I was gonna actually get a job I basically halted progress on my backlog. Gonna have to remedy that at some point but for now it's all Runescape and Call of Duty, mostly just zoning out.

[JamesRobot | 6,049]

Dukes of Hazzard - GBC: Beat 8/10/2024

Just beat Dukes of Hazzard and I started it almost right after I beat Mega Man.  It's a driving game, obviously, with some mission objectives to make it a little more interesting than a a straight racing game.  Several levels were difficult enough to make me take a few breaks from the game, but looking back after completing, they don't seem all that hard now.

 

Dukes straight up cribs the plot of half a dozen episodes or so of the TV show and it makes for a pretty good time.  It's basically a top down driver that lands somewhere between RC Pro Am and the PS1 Driver games.  

The pixel art lends the game loads of charm with great character and car representation.  Daisy Duke is spot on as are most of the cast but for some reason Bo is a little cartoony by comparison.  

Spoiler

The final mission sees the flavor of the week bad guy, Black Jack Perril (Jack Palance), kidnap Daisy.  After catching up with him, the Duke Boys chase him down in the General Lee before he can hit the county line and escape to freedom.

Overall, tons of fun if you like racing/driving games and pretty faithful to the Dukes show.  Definitely worth the five bucks invested.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,971]

Put off Final Fantasy XVI to start Village instead since it's shorter.  And that's because my boys now have me playing Tears of the Kingdom, Miles Morales, AND the Elden Ring dlc.  Nothing but side quests.

Should have Trails in the Sky 2 wrapped tonight.  The final area goes on forever.  I have to be like 6 boss fights in already.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,971]

Been caught in an infinite loop on the Trails last boss for the last hour.  It's quite a thing to behold... I don't even play, I just watch the boss revive and confuse my party members, who then attack one another.

If it doesn't resolve itself I'm calling it and moving on.  I refuse to force a quit and have to redo the first phase of the fight again.

edit:  oh thank god...

Now am I brave enough to even start another attempt?

[Reed Rothchild | 9,971]

Trails in the Sky SC

Lots to enjoy here.  Lots to be annoyed by as well.  

Pros: It's a world you love to jump back into, with increasingly large cast of characters to grow familiar with.  And the story, which kinda seems somewhat unsubstantial at the end of the day, is at least pretty fun to follow through with, with a pretty exciting conclusion, even if it is pretty tropey and similarish to the first game.  The battle system is also (in theory) still rather fun in concept.

Cons:  The backtracking, and the reuse of maps and assets from the first game.  Be prepared to walk the same trails, climb the same towers, and hunt down the same monsters.  Again and again.  And why is this game like 70 hours long?  It's like a 30 hour storyline.  Part of that is battles that can stretch on and on as monsters summon reinforcements, or hunker down.  But the biggest problem is the balancing of difficulty.  I don't know if it was just me, or if I accidentally played on Hard or something, but it was out of whack all game.  I do not know how many times I started a boss fight and got nearly wiped right off the bat.  Or how often my combat-balanced characters were unable to do physical damage.  Or how I got stuck in painful loops of having my arts cancelled again and again until the timing worked in my favor.  And the final boss was a complete nightmare, as I mentioned above.

Overall a mixed bag from the first game.  I'll take a month off before starting the third game.  Thank God it's much shorter according to hltb.  And then next year I can do the Crossbell stuff on my Switch and not my non-gaming laptop.  Another relief.

1. God of War Ragnarok (9.5/10)
2. Bloodborne (9.5/10)
3. The Witness (9/10)
4. Tunic (9/10)
5. Inscryption (8.5/10)
6. Yakuza 2 Kiwami (8.5/10)
7. Firewatch (8.5/10)
8. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (8/10)
9. Horizon Zero Dawn (8/10)
10. Spider-Man (8/10)
11. Bayonetta 3 (8/10)
12. Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations (7.5/10)
13. The Walking Dead Complete (7.5/10)
14. Rise of the Tomb Raider (7.5/10)
15. The Stanley Parable (7.5/10)
16. Resident Evil 3 (7.5/10)
17. The Talos Principle (7/10)
18. The Quarry (7/10)
19. A Plague Tale: Innocence (7/10)
20. Bravely Default (6.5/10)
21. Pikmin 1 (6.5/10)
22. Trails in the Sky SC (6/10)
23. Dark Forces (5.5/10)
24. Beyond Oasis (5/10)
25. Turok 3 (4.5/10)

[Brickman | 4,216]

Disney Sports: Motocross for the GBA complete. It's a decent game but has some shortcomings.

I also beat Chip n Dale for the NES for the first time. I really enjoyed this game and can see why it is still highly recommended as a must play for the system. I'll give the second one a go at some point.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,971]

Resident Evil Village

Wow, I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed this.  Probably up there with Remake, 4, 2, and 7 as a contender for favorite RE game.  It's definitely not as spooky as 7, or as groundbreaking as some of the earlier titles, but I really think it brings a lot to the table as far as having a fun world to explore, an absolutely tremendous rogues' gallery of villains (probably the series' best), fun gunplay, lots of awesome setpieces, and a severe lack of frustration (on the default difficulty it's rather easy for a RE game, or at least it was easy for me since I've played so many of them recently, and was able to settle into a groove).

I'm sure purists scoffed at the heavy emphasis on action and shooting, or some of the similarities to RE4 (including the gothic European setting), or the stepdown in scariness from the previous game.  And the final boss, while great thematically and a cool setpiece, was kind of a ridiculously dense bullet sponge.  But I think overall the game was a great mix of elements that worked in previous titles.  A jack-of-all-trades as it were.

And the fact I binged most of the game over the last few days is proof of how sucked in I was.

I still need play RE4 remake, and then I'm basically caught up on the entire series.

1. God of War Ragnarok (9.5/10)
2. Resident Evil Village (9.5/10)
3. Bloodborne (9.5/10)
4. The Witness (9/10)
5. Tunic (9/10)
6. Inscryption (8.5/10)
7. Yakuza 2 Kiwami (8.5/10)
8. Firewatch (8.5/10)
9. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (8/10)
10. Horizon Zero Dawn (8/10)
11. Spider-Man (8/10)
12. Bayonetta 3 (8/10)
13. Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations (7.5/10)
14. The Walking Dead Complete (7.5/10)
15. Rise of the Tomb Raider (7.5/10)
16. The Stanley Parable (7.5/10)
17. Resident Evil 3 (7.5/10)
18. The Talos Principle (7/10)
19. The Quarry (7/10)
20. A Plague Tale: Innocence (7/10)
21. Bravely Default (6.5/10)
22. Pikmin 1 (6.5/10)
23. Dark Forces (5.5/10)
24. Beyond Oasis (5/10)
25. Turok 3 (4.5/10)

[T-Pac | 8,148]

33/40 - Wizard of Wor [Atari 2600 - 1982]

Finished: 2024/08/18

Caveats: Scored 36k for the CBS medal.

[T-Pac]

[T-Pac | 8,148]

I realized it's been almost a month since I finished my last game for the backlog challenge. I've still been playing stuff, just sidetracked from the list I made in January...

Which has me wondering - is anyone finding more success with the goal of "complete this many games" vs "complete these specific games" for the year?

[T-Pac]