Gaming in 2014 was for me quite interesting, I played a bit of everything. More or less quitting speedrunning and regular streaming made me instead focus my gaming time on "casually" playing games.
In this post I'm gonna try to remember what games I beat during this year, and write a little about them.
Last christmas I got a 2ds, and shortly after I got this game. But it wasn't until January that I beat it. Anyway, really great Zelda game. Probably my favorite of the modern ones (post Wind Waker). It had great controls, great dungeon design and great gameplay. The bosses were everything from super easy to super hard. All in all, I enjoyed it. I didn't get 100%, I only got like 95% or something (still a few hearts missing IIRC)
I remember this. I was sick, PSN was having a sale. I saw this game, remember hearing about it, so I bought it. First time playing it I didn't know what to think. The music was super cool, the gameplay was super fast and cool. A couple days later I had beaten it and the only thing I can really complain about is that stage when you're in a hospital.
This is probably one of the more random games I beat. I was at the time playing Prime1 on the GameCube, kind of speedrunning it, and then I got this game on my USB Loader for fun, and well I started playing it, getting mad at the controls but somehow stumbling my way through it. At the end I remember thinking the controls weren't that bad. I remember it being quite fun and relaxed to playthrough casually, I enjoyed it.
I cant remember why, but my cousin came over a Saturday night, and we both had been (re)watching some AVGN episodes, so we felt like playing some "retro" games (sidenote: I kind of hate the term retro game), and we popped this in and started playing. We played 1 stage each OR 1 game over each, and I think we made it up to 6-1 (sidenote: this evening was one of my greatest gaming moments in recent years, so much fun). After that, he went home, school started again on a Monday, and later that Monday I played again, using a password to get back, and I got a little further each time. I think I made it up to 8-1 on monday, then on Tuesday I beat the rest (8-1 through B-3).
Beating this game was super dramatic. I had never beaten this game before, except on emulator with save states. And I had not watched a speedrun of it, so I did not remember how long the game was. When I got to A-1, and the classic Castlevania remixes started playing I knew I was close and had to keep going. B-2 was super frustrating (the room with the platforms flying up). And then B-3 with it's boss rush was super intense. I assumed, like in the previous stages, that if I die here, I will go back to B-1, so I put my entire mind into it and went into beast mode I guess you could call it, and managed to beat the first 2 bosses without dying once. When I got to Death, I died and I got devastated. I was like "OH GOD, no, I have to do it all over again!!" but nope, I started at the same place again so I pushed on and made it up to Dracula, the last boss, and eventually managed to beat him too.
All in all, this was a great game to playthrough for my first time, and I enjoy playing it today too, kind of trying to get a good run-through of it (deathless optimally). The music is epic.
I remember this night. I was home alone and bored, and WoW was boring. I downloaded Stella (Atari emulator) and this game's rom and played through it. I did it kind of cheatingly though: I looked at the SDA run and more or less copied his exact moves (Stella had an function for pressing a button the first frame possible, so getting the RNG manipulated was easy). I remember thinking that the game wasnt that bad, but would probably be if you didn't have a speedrun to copy.
First off, by beating WoW I mean reaching the max level. I started playing WoW again in octoboer while being home alone, and bored. I got on skype and talked to my friend, who plays WoW, and so I bought some game time. I also noticed that I had all the expansions, except Warlords, since I had bought Vanilla in 2010 or something. Anyway, WoW was a ton of fun. It's a really special atmosphere to play that game. It's so peaceful to level up in that game.
When Warlords hit, I sat with my friends in Skype and basically tried getting into the realms a whole day, played for a couple of hours, went to bed, then queued a whole 'nother day, rinse and repeat. Once I hit 100 I lost all motivation to play the game, which is good as my school work was taking a hit. Maybe next expansion I'll play again.
Being bored a weekend, after being done with WoW, I was looking at lukemorse1's videos and saw his arcade stuff. Therefore, I remembered MAME and started googling on how to get it setup, I had previously never played MAME. So I got my old original Xbox out, hooked it up, put an MAME emulator on it, got some roms on it, and played. I played a bunch of games, but then I saw the "mslug*" roms, and mslugx looked the coolest, so I picked this and started playing.
The game quickly appealed to me. It had nice graphics, nice controls, nice sound effects, nice music and nice gameplay. So about 30-45 minutes later I had beaten it. Maybe someday I'll play through the other Metal Slug's too.
PSN had sale in like April or May or something, which is where I got this game. And I actually started playing it then too, I played all the way up to Chapter 12. Then I forgot to play it, and I forgot the game.
Well now in December, while bored and waiting for my Wii U I decided to finish it, and so I sat down and just finished it. It's not really a fun game. It's pretty tedious because you just shoot people, survive, and do it again. I think the story must've been pretty good though since I played through it, I can't remember any of it though :P
This game is awesome. Probably GOTY. Sm4sh might be good (I haven't received it yet), but at the time of writing, Mario Kart 8 is GOTY 2014 for me. It's so fun. The stages are awesome and unique, the music is fantastic, and the gameplay is just plain fun. And that's the strange part, I don't know what's so fun. You just hold down A, and drift in the turns and press R right after leaving a ramp to get a speedboost, and that's pretty much all of the techniques I know of so far, but it's super fun.
The strange thing is that I have never really been a big fan of Mario Kart games. SMK is boring, MK64 was okay, MKDD was pretty good co-op, MKWii sucked, MK8 GOTY...
Anyway, I played through the Grand Prix on 150cc and I am now in the process of doing Time Trials (seems like you get a stamp for each Nintendo-ghost you beat), and getting 3 stars on all Grand Prix's.
I really wanna like this series, I really do. The graphics are cool, it looks cool, but I just don't find it cool to play. I find it more frustrating than anything else. It's basically like Super Mario World for the SNES, but with a new engine and graphics and story and sounds and levels and everything. But I think it's the engine I don't like. Being used to the older games, I find it awkward when Mario suddenly starts sliding along a wall waiting for me to wall-jump, and often when this happens, I just wanna cancel I so I mash like A and B but that results in me jumping into a pit and getting killed, proceeding to hear the super annoying mario voice saying "Oh no..." and then "Aihhh" on the World Map.
So ugh, not my cup of game. It's okay but it's more frustrating than anything else.
So that's all. Not a lot of games, atleast from what I can remember. I'm considering writing a "Games I beat in 2015" (similar to MTI's), for each game I will beat in 2015, but we will see.
Also shoutouts to Taylor Swift. Shuffled her entire library while writing this, she is so good.