(Marco Ecko's) Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure (PS2) - that other, now probably mostly forgotten, grafitti game, which I mostly got/started because I like the idea of platforming in dirty dark and run-down urban environs. The urban exploration/platforming could have been better but I like the urban ambience (reminds me of my city in the 90s), the beat em up combat is passable, stealth sucks (and I like stealth games) and the story is laughable (when Jet Set Radio has a more plausible story than this, you know you fucked up). Not to write too much about this one currently, this is basically a time capsule from the peak Wigger Era, where enemy grafitti "artists" call you a "Toy Biaaaatch" in the most cringy early 00s manner (FYI: "toy" is an insult in graffitti circles), you collect hidden ipods and probably can notice more crap familiar from early 00s MTV or whatever spawned Wiggers admiring ghetto hoodlums back in the day. Also the Marco Ecko guy that's in the title was to my surprise not a grafitti artist, but some urban(?) fashion primadonna who wanted to do a "2deep4u" game (probably why the title is so fucking long, needed to be pretentious enough). He got very butthurt about how the game was received - called gamers "rascist" (things didn't change much here it seems
) and "nerds that got wedgies in school" apparently. I'll probably do a separate post on this in the "wasting your time on" thread once I finish it because there's a lot to say about it (and compare to Jet Set Radio).
Advance Wars: Dark of Ruin/Dark Conflict (DS) - finished it, although had to use a walkthrough for ideas how to tackle the last mission. Definitely harder than the last mission in AW1 and 2, even the advanced/hard campaign versions (shame this game has no hard campaign mode).
Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together (Saturn) - got to chapter 3 going the lone wolf unaligned route. Battles are fairly tough and I end up trying different approaches to beat them, which is nice. The remade for the sega saturn music is also quite nice and enjoyable.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance - Finished the UEF campaign, in one mission (the last one with QAI) I managed to trigger a bug that ended the mission prematurely in victory, apparently a Mavor (or 2) sniped a commander before some scripts triggered related to operational area expansion, which skipped the hole part with bringing Brackman's Megalith to QAI. Was a bit funny.
Gran Turismo (PS1) - needed a racing fix after I was done with Wipeout, ended up firing this one up and finishing "Simulation" mode with various tuned Nissans where allowed. Still a very fun enjoyable game after all these years, very obvious why it became a long running series, with some nice music as well (which, unlike in GT3, you can actually make louder than the fucking engine noises, seriously why there's no SFX volume slider in GT3 Polyphony?). The license tests seem way harder than in later games, I didn't get even a single silver or gold award in those, just barely scraping by for bronze. Also this was the first time I actually finished it and unlocked the 60 fps (well 50 since I have the PAL version) versions of the tracks, it was an interesting experience after playing the game in 25 fps for so many hours.
Dawn of War 2: Dropped it, I have no idea how I managed to waddle through the campaign back in the day. It's monotonous shit with no real challenge, just busy work mopping up enemies and then dancing/kiting in MMO-like bossfights with next attack damage area markets. Worst Relic campaign ever.
Warhammer 40k: Squad Command (PSP) - finished two missions and again got stuck on another one (the penultimate one?). Hopefully I'll finish this game sometime this year.
Crown Wars: The Black Prince - that nuXCOM clone from the Nahelbeuk guys. I managed to finish this and overall it was ok with some rough edges. I think Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters was a much more fun tactical romp, shame the maps there were noticably samey. As for this game, things are lifted from nuXCOM 2 without thinking if they make sense in the setting (most notably evacuating at random extraction zones on the map, while surrounded by enemies). There's also a bit of wasted opportunity with the setting, why no saintly relics or something to give you divine blessings and abbilities to combat the occult threat better? Likewise if they were copying XCOM 2 so shamelessly, why not also add prestige classes? I do think it's a bit lame that it forces you to grind up a whole squad to max level to finish the last mission, it's simply not balanced around beating it with a level 6 squad (which I had since I really rotated companions around) and I had to grind the squad up to beat it since you need those ultimate abilities (especially the flayer's throwing knife burst which can crit into multiple stacks of poison on the final boss, DoTs are so good in this game), at a point where similar to nuXCOM 1 the game already got stale and repetitive, and you just want to finish the campaign.
Earth 2150 - Finished the UCS campaign. I love the campaign concept, even knowing all to well that most of it and other design choices are lifted wholesale from Warzone 2100 (I need to beat that one day). But still, the idea that the campaign has a time limit and you can "fail" missions but still progress, because the only goal is to mine the needed million resources for the escape fleet/ship from Earth, that's very original. As for the UCS campaign, which I couldn't beat so many years ago, it seems just the first few missions are rather hard, then the game is rather easy. No, sorry, it's easy if you know that there are 3 FUCKING MISSIONS WHERE ALL YOUR UNITS GET HACKED AND YOU LOSE THEM AT SCRIPTED/TRIGGERED POINTS. In all the RTS campaign I ever finished, this has to be the most bullshit gotcha ever. Seriously, who thought that is a good idea, in a campaign that has persistence? Just encourages cheesing and metagaming those missions. Also this game has a fair bit of jank, most notably mouse clicking hitboxes/collision detection, screen shaking on explosions which make said clicking harder, and you need to micro the units a lot so this become very frustrating. There are far older RTS than this that avoid such jank and still play good.
Skies of Arcadia (Dreamcast) - Quite a few years ago I got to near the end of the game and didn't get around to finishing it, mostly because I was to lazy to swap some cables (the NTSC version doesn't work with a RGB cable). Turns out I had just two not so long dungeons and a bunch of actually a bit long boss battles left, so I finished it finally. It's a fun throwback to "classical" jRPGs if you're into that sort of thing, deliberately triggering nearly every jRPG story cliche you can think of, with an Air Pirate and floating island world twist. The party Spirit Meter and the ship battles are nice and unique gimmicks though.
Earth 2160 - The sequel that does some thing better, but drops some other things (particularly the campaing persistence). Should have maybe played The Moon Project expansion for Earth 2150 as UCS first as I never played that one at all, but eh, maybe one day. Anyway, finished ED campaign (they're fairly short compared to Earth 2150, 6 or 7 missions each?), nearly done with the LC campaign and almost unlocked the UCS one. I will probably not play the final campaign as the ayyys and finish the game as such, as the Aliens are boring as fuck to play despite unique mechanics which IIRC only Gray Goo tried copying many years later with the titular goo (where those mechanics also bored me to tears, Beta and Humans were much more fun to play in that one).
