A Winner is You (2008)

[TheEdge]

I ran out of continues yesterday playing Streets of Rage I. I won in spirit though. (Puts head down in shame)

[Nicpezer]

I finished up Light Crusader today, it was kind of mediocre.

[havok666]

Finished Mystic Defender on ONE continue today. When I got to the final boss I was like, "hmm, great I have three credits to fall back on" yet I didn't even need them.

[Sudo]

Last game I beat was Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters (PS2) the other day. Awful port, easily the worst game in the series.

[Noiman]

Ristar twice, at the second time i was much more fast and careful. I'll play it again trying to collect every treasure i find. I loved that ending!

[Kollision]

Looped R-Type for the SMS - It's actually fun after you get past the slow pace and the awful flickering of some stages.

Also beat Mega SWIV with the helicopter - Nice shmup that's a bit easy... I suppose I gotta try it again later with the jeep!

[JoeMusashi]

I beat Streets of Rage II earlier today! =]

[Parker619]

Top Spin - Xbox - Just finished all the tourneys and my player max,, and done all my sponser challenges,, now theres nothing left, so completed

[Noiman]

I beat the first 10 stages of Fire shark. That flame throwing weapon is quite possibly one of the most destructive weapons you can have in the shmup genre, too bad that when you loose it the fun stops very abruptly...

[Smii]

I started working on completing SNES things I never got round to, and played through Starwing (yep, I never completed it before, despite playing through Lylat Wars a billion times - best game on the N64!) and then SFII Turbo, with Dhalsim (seen everyone else's endings, but never his - owing to the fact that after Balrog, he's my least favourite character).

[Kryonas]

Just beat Stinger.

[Melf]

I've beaten a shit ton of games this year so far, so here's my 2008 run down:

1.



I got 950/1000 achievements. After I was halfway through, I find out that the Pistoleer achievement is glitched. I should have known, as many of the kill achievements (and the Sword Master one) were popping up almost randomly.

It was a decent game for $15, but the A.I. is retarded, it's too easy, and there was no sense of immersion like in COD 2. They did manage to make a Civil War era FPS's weapons work better than I thought they would. I <3 the Henry rifle.

2.



Two Worlds was the latest game to go down, and I have to say that the hate it receives is very, very unfounded. If you liked Oblivion, then there's no real reason why you wouldn't like this one. It's not on the same level of Oblivion in terms of polish (the voice acting can be downright LOL sometimes), but the plot is cool and there are an insane number of side quests to do and places to explore.

Basically, I break it down like this:

PROS:

- Long and involved quest
- Huge world to explore, with all kinds of different terrain
- Massive diversity of enemies
- Lots of weapons and equipment to find, buy, and use
- An awesome weapon building feature (combine alike items to make them insanely powerful)
- Lots of cool spells
- Simple and effective combat

CONS:

- Unpolished at times (nothing game-breaking, but there are glitches that piss you off, like not being able to sometimes mount your horse. WTF?)
- Laughable voice acting
- Your character has a tendency to become overpowered later on
- Too few skill points offered with each level up (a shit ton of skills that can go 10 to 15 levels each, and you only get 1 point every time you level up)
- Side quests can sometimes be vague (go find my family heirloom! I don't know where it is and have no clues for you at all! Good luck!)

Overall, I'd give it a 7/10, as it's a great RPG for speding about 35 hours with. After this and Oblivion, the typical JRPG makes me cringe. THIS is how the RPG genre should be handled from now on.

3.



So I completed with 100% and all achievements.

4.



I finished Mass Effect for the second time and didn't get the ally achievements because I only did about 50 side quests. I'm kind of burned out on the game and don't really think I'll try for any more.

5.



My daughter coaxed me into playing Crystal's Pony Tale on the Genesis, a simple platformer loosely based on the My Little Pony franchise. I at least got a review out of the fifteen minutes it took to play it from beginning to end.

AND I SAVED ALL THE PONIES! LOLOLOL

6.



I beat the single player career mode in PGR4 and achieved the rank of #1! I also beat both the arcade and download challenges in the extra content for Project Gotham 4. I really love this game, and it's such a massive improvement over the broken third installment. I doubt I'll ever beat the platinum challenge, but I'll at least finish the arcade mode.

7.



I finished it and only need the Mile High Club achievement to 1000/1000 the game. It was great overall, but I will never touch it on Veteran again, especially since Infinity Ward never bothered to make your squad AI worth a damn. Seriously, those guys deserve a swift kick in the balls with a steel-toed combat boot for that lazy shit.

I don't know if I'll get the Mile High Club achievement, as that level is brutally insane. I also traded in the game.

8.



Finished with all achievements. Pretty decent game that suffers from the same thing most licensed titles do: a shitty camera and repetitive gameplay. I swear, sometimes combat would actually go off camera, and I'd be left hearing the fight with no one onscreen. It wasn't anything game-breaking though, and the experience was true to the source material and fun enough to play through to the end. It was a bit on the short side, unfortunately.

9.



A decent little platformer that sometimes suffers from vague objectives and questionable game design (I can re-enter mini games any time I want, but missions with special achievements are one-shot deals?). I liked it overall, and it was fun for the cheap price, but when the hell are licensed games going to finally have decent cameras?

10.



The game was much shorter than the first, and the last level was extremely underwhelming. I got elite status and went through it again on Realistic for the achievement, but didn't get it because it was glitched. Even the patch didn't give it to me, so I traded it in. Decent single-player experience overall, but the meat on this one is TH, even more so than in the original.

11.



What a broken, glitchy piece of shit. The whole "liberate each province and get new bases" premise was ultimately undone by the fact that each liberation mission was exactly the same. The cartel missions were just as repetitive.

The fact that the game suffers from some horribly sloppy programming (leave your helicopter, turn a corner and then come back, and it's gone!) and glitches every so often make this one to forget. It's like the developers got high before they decided to copy GTA and only copied the faults. What a bad, bad game.

No variety made the game go stale quite quickly, and I only finished it because it had been sitting on my shelf for over a year. Now I can trade in this POS and never have to look at it again. Here's hoping the sequel is better (lol, yeah right).

12.



I got it used for $25, and while it's short as hell, what's there is an absolute blast to play. Great level design, spot-on presentation, and solid gameplay make for a winning combination. The camera sucks on occasion, and the collectibles are almost over the top, but the game is really fun to play in co-op, and it's probably the best Simpsons game made thus far. I got all the collectibles too!

13.



Holy hell what an awesome dungeon crawler. It still subscribes to the same "kill everything and smash all the crates and barrels" gameplay that the genre is known for, but it does it with so much more flair than other games. The minions are awesome, and I really liked the dynamic of using the different types to complete objectives.

The plot was pretty weak, but this is a dungeon crawler, so who cares? I'm going to buy the expansion and beat that, but Codemasters had better be working on a sequel. I want more!

14.



I'm done with this one, and I'm surprised I played it as long as I did. The gameplay is simply horrible, and the characters are just too stiff and slow (even the "fast" ones) for it to be any fun. The mini games were cool, except for those damn Chu Chu ones, and I unlocked everything. The whole Superstar set up was a real cock tease, because many of the worlds had one or two challenges and that was it. The Space Harrier one didn't even have its own stage. Lame.

I would have gotten almost all of the achievements, but no one is playing this online (surprise).

15.



Great shooter with some awesome powers that tends to bog down with seemingly endless side quests. The ending sucked too. It was a good buy for the $25 it cost me, and I'll play the sequel, but not at full price. Oh, and the Darkness has a glitch where if you play multi-player after having started the single-player story on hard, it defaults back to normal, and there's nothing you can do to reverse it. So I played the first 80% on hard and the last battle on normal.

Fuck you Starbreeze.

16.



Finished with 1000/1000 achievement points. Great overall, but it was lacking the charm of the SW games. I can't wait for Lego Batman though.

17.



Quite possibly the worst WWII FPS I've played. Friendly AI is much better than COD's (they actually advance), but that only means that it's slightly less retarded. They move up, but retreat should one German advance, leaving you all alone.

I liked the weapon upgrades, but your weapons are completely useless until you have them. It's possible to empty a clip at a German from point-blank range and never hit him once. Of course, the Nazi Jedi sharpshooters this series is famous for are in full force here. That's probably my biggest problem with MOH: Airborne: it show just how long in the tooth this series is. Seriously, EA has tried nothing new since Frontline, and this is practically the same thing. Lame.

18.



Repetitive, repetitive, repetitive. This game is basically one level you have to play 16 times. There was so much that could have been done with the co-op dynanic, but Ubisoft missed the ball. Even the achievements weren't distributed right. Each stage has rankings, and there's a ton of stuff to unlock via replays, but no achievements for the effort?

[megabomberman]

Wow way to go Melf, and I don't mean to be any way insulting when I say this, but why did you play some of them games??? (bar the one your daughter coaxed you into playing).. I mean TMNT and the tennis, surely you expected they'd be bad? But fairplay for persisting,

me...

I've just finished Final fantasy 12 but I feel fairly embarrassed to say it now after that mammoth list

[Melf]

Sega Superstars Tennis was decent but really lacking in the old school Sega love. The gameplay was kind of iffy too.

The others, like Ratatouille and TMNT, I play with my daughter. She has her own Xbox Live profile, and we play the games together. I do admit that I love the Lego games though!

Also, that list is from January on, so that's why it's so big.

[Kollision]

Amazing... I would never have the time to beat all these time-consuming new games....

My 2008 list would be something like this:

1. Gun Frontier (SAT)
2. Divine Sealing (MD)
3. Twinkle Tale (MD)
4. Astro Warrior (SMS)
5. Atomic Robo-Kid (MD)
6. Curse (MD)
7. Sol-Feace (SCD)
8. M.U.S.H.A. (MD)
9. Robo Aleste (SCD)
10. Subterrania (MD)
11. Gradius (NES)
12. Castle Shikigami 2 (PS2)
13. Gunbird (SAT)
14. Darius II (SAT)
15. Whip Rush (MD)
16. Panorama Cotton (MD)
17. Cotton 100% (SNES)
18. Mars Matrix (DC)
19. Panzer Dragoon (SAT)
20. R-Type (SMS)
21. Mega SWIV (MD)
22. Xenon 2 - Mega Blast (MD)
23. Shooter - Space Shot (PS1)
24. Abadox - The Deadly Inner War (NES)

Just beat Abadox today without losing a single life!

--- And yes, I'm a retro gamer all the way.......................................