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STEAM | March 2017 - IT'S MAHVEL BAYBEE!!!

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So apparently, Princess Isabella was the first game in a trilogy, and the reviews in the series go from "Very Postitive" to "Positive" to "Mostly Negative." Is the second game worse after all? Let's find out together, as I give impressions for Princess Isabella: Return of the Mack Curse:

The story: You play Princess Isabella, who...wait a minute, wasn't I supposed to inherit the throne in the last game? Why am I not Queen Isabella? Maybe my lazy-ass parents didn't commit their ritual suicides yet. ANYWAY. Your baby (Bella) has been kidnapped by the witch, your castle and the surrounding grounds have been cursed - AGAIN - and members of your household have been magically imprisoned...AGAIN. Points for consistency, I guess...anyway, once again you have to uncurse the area screen by screen, free your staff members and your blonde soulpatch-sporting husband, and save your baby.

The story is, believe it or not, actually confusing in parts. Some of the cutscenes switch images so fast you're not exactly sure what happened, and some things aren't explained. Your parents are nowhere to be found (but again, you're still a princess,) the witch appears to be using roses as part of her MO, even though it was determined in the previous game that your older sister Rose wasn't at fault (perhaps we were wrong and she is? Who knows?) and most curious of all, you have to burn Rapunzel's hair in order to gain access to her tower - how does this make any sense, considering normally her hair was the only means of entry? - and then she explains she let her hair down for the Prince, but Isabella at no point wonders why Rapunzel is seeing Isabella's man. Baby or no baby, if I heard that, he would be SO exiled! *snap snap*

Anyway, spoilers for the ending!
Upon being freed, the prince seems to think you're the evil one and runs off to the witch, so it looks like now he's being manipulated, and not even by Rapunzel. You save your baby, but the witch turns you to stone. The baby is subsequently raised by fairies.
That ending is quite a bit darker, as most part twos are, so be aware if you're giving this game to a kid that the ending is more bittersweet than happy.

The graphics: Slightly better than the first game. The animations are improved, too: I was pretty impressed with the cursed tree that almost had a claymated look to it, and followed your cursor around, swiping at it if you get too close. I know, even rudimentary flash games do things like that, but these kinds of games usually don't put that much effort into animation. So kudos for trying.

The game still doesn't have high resolution options, and the widescreen option had a black border on all four sides for some reason, so I had to stick with fullscreen.

The dialogue and audio: Tries too hard this time. The first game was good. The voices were clear, and some had accents, but it wasn't over the top. This one bordered on the cartoonishly stereotypical. Also, this ties into the story a bit, but some of the dialogue seemed out of place, like there was an expository bit missing, or perhaps the Princess was presumed to know something already. Pretty odd.

In addition to a chipper fairy helper, you get a chipper baby dragon. Once you hatch the dragon, the fairy leaves, and the dragon is clearly voiced by the same person as the fairy. The difference in their voices reminds me of the scene in Fawlty Towers where Basil explained the difference between the two alarms, and one was "one semitone higher."

The gameplay: We all question design choices from time to time, but if you think hard enough you might figure out what the developers were going for. But this time, I've been truly stumped. The gameplay directions are hidden at the top of the screen, and you have to mouseover the top to see what the game is trying to tell you. So things like "I don't have that ability yet," "I need something to get down there," or even flavour text like "These crystals are pretty," are hidden unless you rollover the top of the screen. Starting the game made me very confused because I'm clicking objects with question marks, and nothing is happening. It was only by happenstance that I saw the top of the screen come down with the text. WHY? Why would you hide the game's directions? Did you really need that spare couple of centimetres for the graphics?

The game does have an advanced mode this time, and thank goodness for that because the first game was too easy. The hidden object scenes were slightly tougher and the minigames were slightly easier. It once again ends in a boss battle, which is still pretty cool.

The length: My profile says 2.4 hours. So a bit longer than the previous game, possibly because I was playing advanced mode and spent more time looking for things.

The verdict: The game is pretty mediocre. The lower reviews are indeed justified. I won't say avoid it, but I wouldn't strongly recommend it. I know some of you have it in your bundle trash. It might still be worth two and a half hours to knock off one of your yearly 52. You could do worse.
 
So, 2 months later, i finally finished Ubisoft's Wallpaper Generator aka Far Cry: Primal. Took me almost 30 hours to complete it, mainly because i was trying to grab every single collectible and visit every place that was marked with ? signs on the map. I knew it was not necessary, but main reason why i was collecting all this stuff - unexpectedly gorgeous world and graphics. It so much better than FC4, more bright colors and overall lightning was significantly improved. I can't say Primal is perfect in therms of graphics, it's amazing in close distance but long range LODs are still shitty sometimes, but on the other side game is very well optimized, it holds stable 60FPS on my 5 year old GPU with Ultra settings, which is surprising for Ubisoft+Denuvo game. Gameplay is typical Ubisoft openworld game, but usual elements like crafting and sidequests are finally doesn't feel out of place, it's perfect match for Primal setting. Story is not something special, 2 main antagonists doesn't have such memorable personality like villains in FC3-4, but at least Batari final fight was well directed and feels like ending. Also, all Urki missions is very funny, and shaman visions was brilliant, especially that one
where you need to shoot moon with your bow and moon explodes, holy shit!
. Yeah, this is still Far Cry game and many old issues are still here, but it was fun to wander around and explore Primal's world, which is never happened to me in previous FC games. I recommend to give it a chance even if you don't like previous Far Cry games, it was definitely worth it. And don't forget to disable as much HUD elements as possible, it's much more enjoyable and immersive game without minimap and markers all over screen.
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zkylon

zkylewd
The thing about Prague is that most places seem to be linked to a quest in some way so it's not really worth exploring beforehand. I did a lot of mucking around and hacking open storage containers only to find out that later quests sent me to the exact same places or provided me with codes to those same storage containers.
ahh i see, i'll take that to heart since i'm not enjoying exploring all that much

Finally finished HL2.

What are the other must play fps games Gaf?
Thanks.
i didn't see anyone recommend FEAR

that game is great

also in risk of hurting my credibility, call of duty 4 actually has a really enjoyable campaign. not sure if it survived the test of time but it'll probably be interesting to play nonetheless
 
The newest out-of-nowhere Steam success. Also beating Sea of Thieves to the punch.

I remember seeing WIP videos of this and it looked cool. But now that I hear it's multiplayer, I'm...less interested. Would have been cool in the framework of a singleplayer game.
 

Vamphuntr

Member
Stardew Valley is so great. Can't believe it was mostly made by one person. The amount of stuff you can do never cease to amaze me. It kind of ruin Harvest Moon and whatever else it's now called for me.
 
i myself started right after the BUE and it has been a blast. pretty much all i played for the last month

So do I. Just reached 60 with Rocket Raccon and I unlocked Jean Grey and Emma Frost, though I'm a bit lost right now because the game has more depth than what I was expecting.
 

kagamin

Member


The newest out-of-nowhere Steam success. Also beating Sea of Thieves to the punch.

Seems kinda like Guns of Icarus Online except with boats instead of airships.

Stardew Valley is so great. Can't believe it was mostly made by one person. The amount of stuff you can do never cease to amaze me. It kind of ruin Harvest Moon and whatever else it's now called for me.

I still vastly prefer Rune Factory 4, I'm gonna play that game forever unless it gets a damn sequel. I'll try to get more into Stardew later but RF4/rhythm games/other RPGs dominate my playtime outside of home so.
 

Arthea

Member
I still vastly prefer Rune Factory 4, I'm gonna play that game forever unless it gets a damn sequel. I'll try to get more into Stardew later but RF4/rhythm games/other RPGs dominate my playtime outside of home so.

Stardew Valley was my GOTY and it has chances ending on my GOAT list, but I still want RF4 on PC so bad. I don't think they are really comparable all that much, even being the same type of a game.
 

Teggy

Member
ahh i see, i'll take that to heart since i'm not enjoying exploring all that much

Yeah, it always tough in games that allow you to explore because they tend not to communicate this well. I remember one apartment that I broke into that had bad guys guarding it for no apparent reason and had very elaborate shortcuts/vents/defense mechanisms. I cleared it and then much later in the game a quest sent me there so I was able to just walk in and grab what I needed. But this was linked to a main mission chain so it was kind of clear the designers didn't want me to do it in that order.

Witcher 3 was the best at this in that you could read a letter that would get you to go to a certain place or you could just stumble on the place but you would start the quest either way.
 

Teggy

Member
Found another one from LotA, since it's way too easy at max ilvl I just have time to take a bunch of pictures at certain parts:




Nightmare, the hardest possible difficulty, is not what you want to go for.

It's really easy on normal. If it's too hard on normal, just spend like 3 mins leveling up and it's a cakewalk. Great game though

I started up Ys 1 at one point, it was a little archaic with the bumping thing. I remember I was doing ok then went into the next area and stuff started kicking my butt meaning I was going to have to grind.
 

Tonton

Member
I've got that game my library, great!

Is it that hard on normal difficulty?
Fairly manageable, I don't consider myself very good at games and still managed to beat hard mode with all but one character (where I still got to the final boss)

I started up Ys 1 at one point, it was a little archaic with the bumping thing. I remember I was doing ok then went into the next area and stuff started kicking my butt meaning I was going to have to grind.
YS 1 is a bit weird, each level makes a lot of difference and you'll likely get to the level cap midway through it
It still has a place in my heart

I beat him there on Normal. I didn't even try on Nightmare, lol.
Bummer
 

zkylon

zkylewd
Yeah, it always tough in games that allow you to explore because they tend not to communicate this well. I remember one apartment that I broke into that had bad guys guarding it for no apparent reason and had very elaborate shortcuts/vents/defense mechanisms. I cleared it and then much later in the game a quest sent me there so I was able to just walk in and grab what I needed. But this was linked to a main mission chain so it was kind of clear the designers didn't want me to do it in that order.

Witcher 3 was the best at this in that you could read a letter that would get you to go to a certain place or you could just stumble on the place but you would start the quest either way.
i find this wouldn't be a big deal if the "open world" side of it wasn't so darned huge
 

kagamin

Member
I started up Ys 1 at one point, it was a little archaic with the bumping thing. I remember I was doing ok then went into the next area and stuff started kicking my butt meaning I was going to have to grind.

The thing about Ys 1 is that there is a really low level limit, meaning once you hit level 10 all you have is your equipment or skill at the game to augment further.
 

fallout

Member
Stardew Valley is so great. Can't believe it was mostly made by one person. The amount of stuff you can do never cease to amaze me. It kind of ruin Harvest Moon and whatever else it's now called for me.
Meh. Natsume had their chance. The market was there for it, obviously.
 

Arthea

Member
Meh. Natsume had their chance. The market was there for it, obviously.

Talking about that, I can't help but wonder will we get Stardew Valley 2, after all ConcernedApe made his dream reality with Stardew Valley already, and he's still working on the game.
 
Talking about that, I can't help but wonder will we get Stardew Valley 2, after all ConcernedApe made his dream reality with Stardew Valley already, and he's still working on the game.

Stardew Valley seems like one of those games that's so good it doesn't even need a sequel. If I was ConcernedApe, rather than going back to the SV well, I'd find another niche game that never found its way to Steam and clone that (perhaps Pokemon? SMT/Persona? Some kind of open-world cowboy game?)

Edit: Persona with Stardew Valley characters would be gold, come to think of it.
 

Vamphuntr

Member
Talking about that, I can't help but wonder will we get Stardew Valley 2, after all ConcernedApe made his dream reality with Stardew Valley already, and he's still working on the game.

I suspect he will keep adding stuff to it just like what is happening with Terraria and Starbound. Lore-wise there's a lot of stuff in the game that isn't totally realized yet too.
 

Oscar

Member
Is Pillars of Eternity worth the $17? I'm in the mood for a slow paced isometric rpg, it's currently in my steam cart.
 
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