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05/01 - Brutal Legend
07/01 - Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs
13/01 - Sludge Life
17/01 - AER: Memories of Old
19/01 - Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition (Human - Nero/Dante)
05/03 - CrossCode: A New Home
14/03 - Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
17/03 - Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (100cc)
02/04 - Drakengard (Endings A-D)
14/04 - Drakengard 2 (Ending A)
28/04 - Drakengard 3 (Endings A-D)
02/05 - Rain
10/05 - God of War: Chains of Olympus HD
15/05 - God of War: Ghost of Sparta HD
24/05 - NieR Replicant ver. 1.22474487139... (Endings A-E)
08/06 - Final Fantasy XV (NG+)
02/07 - God of War II HD
15/07 - Scarlet Nexus (Yuito)
20/07 - TRON: Evolution
21/07 - Sky: Children of the Light
01/08 - Scarlet Nexus (Kasane, NG+)
12/08 - Forza Horizon
18/08 - A Plague Tale: Innocence
21/08 - Contrast
31/08 - Forza Motorsport 7
04/09 - No More Heroes III
13/09 - Metal Gear Solid
23/09 - Metal Gear Solid 2 HD
09/10 - Psychonauts 2
15/10 - Unsighted
17/10 - Sable
18/10 - Halo: Reach (Master Chief Collection)
23/10 - Split/Second
29/10 - Darq
11/11 - Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut
14/11 -
Darksiders II (Apocalyptic)
After however many times I’ve played through this, it’s still a very fun solid experience. The combat still feels really good, it’s aesthetically impressive, and I actually think it has some good puzzle design that hasn’t really been replicated since. While overall dungeon design doesn’t do anything especially mind blowing, I think some of the mechanics they came up with to solve individual puzzles are still very cool, and make for some interesting problems to solve.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen another game that has something like the Soul Splitter. It’s almost a little like a test for the idea of making puzzles built around co-op, having you switch between two playable avatars. But making it so you have to turn your normal body in to a statue to use it makes for some cool moments. Putting a twist on the block pushing puzzle idea, by making the block in to your respawn point after solving the puzzle. So you have to think about how you place it and move it in ways that I haven’t seen any similar game do, despite it being a very natural iteration on ideas that many other games have done. And when they combine those mechanics with the portal gun in one of the DLC dungeons, that makes for some of the best puzzle moments of the game.
On this run I did also make a point to explore the combat mechanics in a more intentional way this time too. I’ve always really liked how they feel, and it has obvious inspirations from the likes of DMC. But since I last played this game I have gained a deeper appreciation for that series and other similar games, so I wanted to see how this stacked up. So I played around with the mechanics to see what combo potential there was, and how creative you can get. Turns out there actually is something to play around with here. It’s not a huge amount, but there are interesting quirks to the mechanics that let you pull off some cool stuff if you get your head around it and learn all the unspoken rules. I also tried to use the fist type secondary weapons this time, as I’ve always fallen back on the hammer type before. They are fun, and definitely provide more combo potential as they have longer attack strings and more mid-air attacks that juggle enemies too. Some types are better than others though, with the bucklers seeming the most viable given how their mid-air charge attack doesn’t drop you to the ground.
I also wanted to compare this game to the remaster. I do have this original version on 360 as well, but on PC I only ever played the remaster before now. I think by the end of it, this older version actually does look better. Maybe I need to go back to the remaster and compare them more directly, but the new lighting in that one was never quite right. Even though it had a softer and more realistic interaction with materials, it drained the colour out slightly, and introduced a bunch of lighting and shadow bugs. This version has a much richer and more vivid look, and it looks more consistent too. In the remaster there were certain parts where the lighting would react strangely to some material in a scene, and it was stand out unnaturally. Here that isn’t a problem, and everything looks like it fits in to the world better.
This old version is still extremely buggy though. At first it seemed like it was less so given the lack of graphical issues, but as time went on things kept showing up. First the awful performance. The game has terrible stuttering issues if you use vsync, and I had to spend a long time working out a way to solve that problem, eventually using a complicated workaround with two separate programs. But worse is what ended up happening today as I was getting towards the end of the game. I wasn’t actually planning on finishing it today. I still had the last DLC dungeon to do and a few sidequests to clean up, but as I was attempting them the game kept crashing. It turns out if your save file gets too large the game just crashes every time it tries to save, so that forced me to give up on a lot of things, and I just went to the final boss instead. Really disappointing. The remaster suffers from a lot of these issues too, but I managed to dodge or overcome them before, but this old version seems worse for them. I really wanted to play that last DLC too. The final boss of this game is a little underwhelming to be frank, while the boss of that expansion is a really fun tough challenge, so it helps make up for it. I also really wanted to see how it felt to play now that this version of the game doesn’t have the aiming acceleration bug of the remaster, which had a big impact on that boss as it has a phase that requires some really quick and precise aiming.
So anyway, apart from the headaches this caused, and the somewhat anticlimactic ending, this was still fun to revisit, and I achieved the things I really wanted to get out of this run too. Still an old favourite that I hold in high regard, and now with a deeper appreciation for its combat mechanics too. It would be cool if one day we could get a version of this game on PC that wasn’t riddled with crippling technical issues though...