The Backlog Check-in Vol. 229: 5/21/22: Sniper Elite 5 Edition

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Phaseknox
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The Backlog Check-in Vol. 229: 5/21/22: Sniper Elite 5 Edition

Post by Phaseknox »

Played: Alice: Madness Returns, Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry

Finished: Alice: Madness Returns

Playing: Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry

Added: Bloodshore, Bloody Zombies, Blue Fire, The Complex, Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry, Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice, Rise of the Third Power

I finished Alice: Madness Returns, and I was left feeling fairly unsatisfied afterwards. The best aspects of the game are its art design and combat, everything else is rather average IMO. The story is surreal/weird, and primarily told through 2D puppet scenes which I didn’t particularly care for. The core game itself is platforming, almost nothing but platforming. The entirety of almost each level consists of continuous platforming challenges with only a few instances where you fight enemies, or do a short activity like a tile sliding picture puzzle, music mini-game, or side scrolling 2D segment. There are also brief segments when you’re in the real world strictly for story purposes. I actually enjoyed these segments as they were a break from the constant platforming challenges in Wonderland, but they were really short.

The game had the potential to be an adventure game, but instead they opted to make it a pure linear action platformer and went overboard with the platforming. It looks and plays good even for a game that came out back in 2011, but the levels drag on for much too long repeating similar frustrating platforming challenges throughout. Just fighting the same few enemy types and platforming without almost anything else on offer is daunting and repetitive.

The art design and spectacle of the levels are what kept me playing the most, but I realistically could have passed on playing it again and finishing it since it didn’t really provide me with enough entertainment to make it worth it. In fact, it was a somewhat frustrating experience a lot of the time due to the constant aggravating platforming.

I started playing Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry, and I’ve been enjoying it. The last Leisure Suit Larry game that I played was Box Office Bust back in 2009. This one is a return to form as it’s a point-and-click adventure/puzzle game similar to the originals with you playing as Larry Laffer instead of as his nephew like in the two previous games. It’s nice to play a classic style LSL game again with hand drawn graphics, adult humor and clever key item puzzles.

Games releasing this week
Amazing Superhero Squad
Arcade Spirits: The New Challengers
Crossfire: Legion
Fault - StP - Lightkravte
Floppy Knights
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Kao the Kangaroo
Moo Lander
My Little Pony: A Maretime Bay Adventure
My Time at Sandrock
Ogre
Pac-Man Museum+
Roller Champions
Sniper Elite 5
Touken Ranbu Warriors
Zombo Buster Advance
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jfissel
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Re: The Backlog Check-in Vol. 229: 5/21/22: Sniper Elite 5 Edition

Post by jfissel »

Finished: Gran Turismo 7 (campaign menu), Unpacking PS5 (platinum #85)

Now Playing: Final Fantasy VII Remake, Gran Turismo 7 (a few modes left for me to try), Bugsnax DLC

Added to Backlog: Nothing

Current Backlog: 39 games
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canedaddy
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Re: The Backlog Check-in Vol. 229: 5/21/22: Sniper Elite 5 Edition

Post by canedaddy »

Played recently: Elden Ring

Finished: nothing

Added to backlog: Dishonored: Definitive Edition

Current backlog: 21 (20 PS4, 1 Vita)


Yes, I'm still playing Elden Ring. It boggles my mind that there are people on their sixth or seventh run through this game. I still have several parts of the map I haven't unlocked yet. :lol: We're looking at 200+ hours by the time I'm done, which is months away, I'm sure.

I grabbed Dishonored on sale at a friend's recommendation. Not sure why I never played it before.
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isthatallyougot
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Re: The Backlog Check-in Vol. 229: 5/21/22: Sniper Elite 5 Edition

Post by isthatallyougot »

canedaddy wrote: Mon May 23, 2022 10:59 am Yes, I'm still playing Elden Ring. It boggles my mind that there are people on their sixth or seventh run through this game. I still have several parts of the map I haven't unlocked yet. :lol: We're looking at 200+ hours by the time I'm done, which is months away, I'm sure.

I grabbed Dishonored on sale at a friend's recommendation. Not sure why I never played it before.
And then you've got people that beat it in a matter of minutes, lol. Autism. :P

Dishonored reminded me visually a lot of Bioshock. There were some cool abilities facilitating that "power fantasy" you find often in gaming, but it never totally grabbed me. It was lukewarm for me, and I don't remember a great deal of it, appropriately enough, given my tepid response. I do remember it controlled well and that there were a lot of possibilities for how to deal with foes and situations. I even watched some videos of clever players really pushing the game. Maybe it's one of those times where it just never really clicked and I'd like it more if I went back to it with fresh eyes.

I've still been playing Unreal World and loving it. With the current character I'm on, I'm not just surviving, I'm thriving. I've got a large log cabin finished before winter with a sleeping bunk and some furs and loaded up with firewood and a rock stove, a large pot (via barter), a couple of fishing nets via trade, 3 great (and different purposed axes), a couple of nice knives, a hunting bow, and I've crafted a nice array of fine-quality arrows. I've got traps set up all around my lakeside home, including some pit-traps filled with stakes and baited with quite a bit of meat, hoping for a stray bear or some other large animal to wander in. I've foraged for tons of blueberries and raspberries along with plenty of nettle and hemp leaves, and tons of other things while harvest season is in swing. I've built a cellar to maximize the length of food preservation so I don't have to worry about such rapid spoilage. I've learned from the lives of my ancestors and I'm making the wilderness my b*tch. Now I'll be undone by a tick or something. :P (I don't think there are ticks in the game, although I wouldn't be surprised - just commenting on how fragile life is.)

I'm almost through with my Dead Space replay and that's been a blast. I had forgotten how to solve one puzzle later in the game and felt like an idiot, lol.

And I'm maybe close to half-way with SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated. It's a competent platformer that is comfort food if you enjoy the genre, but it doesn't really excel as a *special* entry in the collectathon platformer realm. But I'm enjoying it well enough and it's surely worth playing imho.
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Phaseknox
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Re: The Backlog Check-in Vol. 229: 5/21/22: Sniper Elite 5 Edition

Post by Phaseknox »

canedaddy wrote: Mon May 23, 2022 10:59 amI grabbed Dishonored on sale at a friend's recommendation. Not sure why I never played it before.
It failed to really grab me for some reason, but I plan on giving it another chance in the future. I heard that the sequel is better (which I have), and you can play as a female character so that alone should make me like it more. :P
isthatallyougot wrote: Mon May 23, 2022 11:49 amDishonored reminded me visually a lot of Bioshock. There were some cool abilities facilitating that "power fantasy" you find often in gaming, but it never totally grabbed me. It was lukewarm for me
I felt the same way about it, I just couldn’t really get into it for some reason. However, I plan on giving it another chance in the future.
isthatallyougot wrote: Mon May 23, 2022 11:49 amI've still been playing Unreal World and loving it. With the current character I'm on, I'm not just surviving, I'm thriving. I've got a large log cabin finished before winter with a sleeping bunk and some furs and loaded up with firewood and a rock stove, a large pot (via barter), a couple of fishing nets via trade, 3 great (and different purposed axes), a couple of nice knives, a hunting bow, and I've crafted a nice array of fine-quality arrows. I've got traps set up all around my lakeside home, including some pit-traps filled with stakes and baited with quite a bit of meat, hoping for a stray bear or some other large animal to wander in. I've foraged for tons of blueberries and raspberries along with plenty of nettle and hemp leaves, and tons of other things while harvest season is in swing. I've built a cellar to maximize the length of food preservation so I don't have to worry about such rapid spoilage. I've learned from the lives of my ancestors and I'm making the wilderness my b*tch.
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canedaddy
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Re: The Backlog Check-in Vol. 229: 5/21/22: Sniper Elite 5 Edition

Post by canedaddy »

Phaseknox wrote: Mon May 23, 2022 1:38 pm
isthatallyougot wrote: Mon May 23, 2022 11:49 amDishonored reminded me visually a lot of Bioshock. There were some cool abilities facilitating that "power fantasy" you find often in gaming, but it never totally grabbed me. It was lukewarm for me
I felt the same way about it, I just couldn’t really get into it for some reason. However, I plan on giving it another chance in the future.
I figure it's worth my $7.99 investment to give it a look. ;)
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Phaseknox
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Re: The Backlog Check-in Vol. 229: 5/21/22: Sniper Elite 5 Edition

Post by Phaseknox »

I stopped playing Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry because I got tired of constantly needing to look up the solutions to the item puzzles. What I liked about the classic Leisure Suit Larry games were their creative, and logical item puzzles. Whenever you got an item or items, it would make sense what you had to use them for or combine them with. They would take some figuring out which was part of the fun of solving them, but they almost always made sense. There was rarely a time where something could only be figured out by looking up the solution, which was good because there was no looking up the solutions back then. But the problem with a lot of point-and-click adventure games is that many of their item puzzles make no logical sense, and the only way to solve them is through tedious trial-and-error or by looking up their solutions. And unfortunately that’s the case with LSL: WDDD.

It starts off good with a limited amount of items that you collect most making sense what they should be used for/combined with, but then you start accumulating an overwhelming amount of items and there’s a lot of things that you can interact with in multiple different areas. Things that you think should logically work don’t, and then you look up the solutions and you’re like seriously? Stuff that you would never be able to figure out on your own, because it doesn’t make any sense. Figuring out clever item puzzles is fun, but it’s not fun when your progress is constantly halted because you don’t know what items to use in multiple areas that each have a lot of things to interact with. Having to stop playing a game to look up solutions to things is one of my biggest pet peeves with gaming, and in a game like this it’s constant. There’s no fun having to look up almost every solution, it defeats the point of playing.

I started playing Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate because I was having a discussion about it at another forum and it got me in the mood to play it again. I originally played and finished it over three years ago, and really enjoyed it. It’s one of my favorite games in the series due to its setting, main characters (primarily Evie) and its bigger focus on combat than on stealth (it’s almost like a beat ‘em up). It’s also the least focused on the modern day sci-fi stuff out of all of the Assassin’s Creed games, it’s reduced to brief cutscenes every once in a while so it’s not very intrusive. The game still looks really good, and it’s packed with content. I’ve been enjoying it since I love playing as Evie, she’s one of my favorite video game characters. You have to play as her twin brother Jacob for some story missions, but I like him too. I’m not sure if I will stick with it until the end since it’s feeling a little familiar, but I have been enjoying my time with it so we’ll see.
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canedaddy
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Re: The Backlog Check-in Vol. 229: 5/21/22: Sniper Elite 5 Edition

Post by canedaddy »

Phaseknox wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 12:26 pm It’s also the least focused on the modern day sci-fi stuff out of all of the Assassin’s Creed games, it’s reduced to brief cutscenes every once in a while so it’s not very intrusive.
I hope they get it down to zero at some point. I'm pretty sure I'd love many of those games if they just stayed in the past. I tried one a while back, though, and shut it down as soon as my dude died and there was a neon green computer animation.
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Phaseknox
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Re: The Backlog Check-in Vol. 229: 5/21/22: Sniper Elite 5 Edition

Post by Phaseknox »

canedaddy wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 3:45 pm
Phaseknox wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 12:26 pmIt’s also the least focused on the modern day sci-fi stuff out of all of the Assassin’s Creed games, it’s reduced to brief cutscenes every once in a while so it’s not very intrusive.
I hope they get it down to zero at some point. I'm pretty sure I'd love many of those games if they just stayed in the past. I tried one a while back, though, and shut it down as soon as my dude died and there was a neon green computer animation.
Syndicate pretty much does stay in the past, the modern day sci-fi stuff in it is just brief cutscenes that don’t occur very often. They’re not very intrusive, just something to have to watch every once in a while. I would recommend buying it for cheap (it’s currently on sale for $8.99) to check it out, because you might like it. It’s not typical hoodie guy Assassin’s Creed which I know that you don’t really like. It takes place in London during the industrial revolution, and you play as twins Jacob and Evie. You can play as who you choose for most of the game, only certain story missions will have you playing as one or the other. They’re both likable, but of course I like Evie a little more since as you know I typically prefer female characters to male ones in video games.
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