307 posts in the previous thread. Time to move on.

I just took a short break from my gradual completion of the TurboGrafx CD database here, and was unexpectedly overwhelmed by good games:

Sabotain: Break the Rules: I can't believe nobody added this to the database yet! I just discovered it by accident. No, it's not Deus Ex, but it's an interesting and fun game, with all the generosity, atmosphere, bad character graphics, bugs and general total weirdness you would expect from an ex-Soviet game! Decidedly the best Russian FPS I've played so far (naturally, I'm not counting all those other FPSs people think are Russian which are actually Ukrainian, like You Are Empty, STALKER, Cryostasis, Metro 2033, and the three awesome games by Deep Shadows).

Front Mission: Gun Hazard. The guys here recommended it to me, and I'm very grateful for that. Excellent gameplay system, very addictive, plus great Final Fantasy-like music! Cheesy story, but it's a Japanese game after all.

Once I take a break from those two, Super Metroid and Borderlands await.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more hype around that last one. After all, FPS/RPG hybrid is one of the most precious and rare genres out there. Am I in for a big disappointment?..

If you enjoy boredom, you will have the time of your life.

The few people who I heard being enthusiastic about it played it in coop. Might not be as much fun in single player.

Borderlands is a game I REALLY want to like because I do love RPG/FPS hybrids and it's one of the very few games out there that tried a visual style other than that fucking photorealism crap that every developer and their mother is so fixated on; but I started playing it 4 times if my memory serves me well and every time I drop it a couple hours in.

As the others said, apparently it's pretty cool in co-op, but since I pretty much don't have any friends (let alone gaming friends) I wouldn't know; what I do know is the single player campaign is incredibly, mind-numbingly boring. So much so I don't even remember what exactly is that I didn't like about it, it was so forgettable.

If you enjoy boredom, you will have the time of your life.

How true it turned out to be :(

On the plus side, both Front Mission: Gun Hazard and Super Metroid are just fantastic!

Not enough hype for Borderlands? I can tell that you're completely divorced from the gaming community at large. Borderlands is just about the hypest game there is. I enjoyed it because a) I like picking up character abilities over time and slowly turning into a walking avatar of death, b) The game looks like an interactive issue of Shaolin Cowboy, and c) I have an extremely high tolerance for tedium. Sadly I never had the chance to play much co-op, and the co-op is not designed for random people to just jump in and out.

I can tell that you're completely divorced from the gaming community at large

My only gaming community is right here, and since nobody has ever said anything about Borderlands in our forums, I assumed it went by unnoticed :)

We have 3 reviews of the game here, 2 mildly positive and one very negative - but that was also the one I read with most interest.

I mentioned it a couple times in the last thread, guess you missed that. It basically amounted to: "Boy, this game is boring in single-player. But it's a ton of fun co-op!"

So...yeah. :)

Well, Mass Effect 3 finished. Verdict: WARNING - ***POSSIBLE SPOILER*** ending started well, but after Shepard shoots the Illusive Man (I used the renegade option for it) just turns into a damp squid. Not awful, but doesn't do the game and series justice. Bottom line, Bioware buggered it up, and delivered a below par ending.

I've also managed to finish getting that oblivion walker achievement in Skyrim, giving me the full 1,000 gamerscore for it, and will probably wrap up the few remaining odd quests at some point, but before that I will be getting a copy of Binary Domain. What I've heard is that it lives up to the hype.

On an unrelated note: You're not gonna play Mass Effect 3 either?

On an unrelated note: You're not gonna play Mass Effect 3 either? .

Me? I finished Mass Effect 3 long time ago. Even posted a review of it here...

So, what's your take on that heated debate about the endings? Which one did you choose, by the way?

So, what's your take on that heated debate about the endings? Which one did you choose, by the way?

I have no idea what I chose, because Shepard could only crawl at that time and it took forever to get anywhere; I just shot something and voila, the ending :) The Earth and everything around it was completely destroyed, mass relays stopped functioning, and Normandy crash-landed on another planet. That's all.

The ending per se is weak, but not weaker than other game endings out there. The problem with it is that people have invested into making decisions and importing files from game to game, and in the end all that mattered nothing. At least not in my ending - perhaps there is another ending that shows how your take on Krogan genophage really influenced subsequent politics or whatever.

I pretty much got the same ending, only in the one I got, Earth survives, the reapers retreat, and its the mass relays that blow up. Also got a post credits cinematic showing a man tell a child (presumably his son) about the legend of Shepard.

Which path did you take Lynx? As I recall, there's 2, one on the left and one on the right, with me taking the left route.

If you'd maxed out your galaxy preparedness meter you'd also get a center route!

And, yeah, there is barely any change between them at all. The only important and universal event was the relays blowing up. When the post-ending DLC comes out expect all three endings to be merged into a single canon, like DX Invisible War did to DX.

Never played it, but by the looks of it there are some Omikron undertones.

So I turned on my PS3 to make sure it was still alive and realized I don't have anything all that interesting to play on it. I've been so busy collecting for my old systems the last three years or so, I've totally neglected it, and now there's supposedly a new one coming out next year. The very next game I get will be the Orange Box no matter what. I'm a bit tired of dwelling in gaming past. Does anybody have any recommendations?

Trade away Deus Ex for something new and shiny.

Get it on PC, for the love of all that is good and pure.

Unfortunately, my pc is too old to upgrade at this point, and I don't have the money to build a new one, so the PS3 is my only choice. I took your advice to not get it for the PS3 a few years ago, and I think that was mistake in the long run, because it still goes for 60 bucks!

Here's the real question: Do you want to play Orange Box, or do you want to enjoy Orange Box? You only get the first on the PS3.

Man, the Orange Box is running at 15 bucks these days on Steam, so you're getting ripped off badly.

Also, seriously, the Half-Lifes are about the most enjoyable shooters ever when played with a mouse. The responsiveness of the controls has rarely been matched, ever. If you're usually missing out by playing an FPS with a gamepad, you're missing three times as much by playing a Half-Life like that. Trust me on this. Plus it's widely known that Valve did a pretty crappy job with the PS3 port --even they admitted that much.

As for the PC, I live in Uruguay, where hardware is ridiculously overpriced, and yet my entire PC wouldn't cost much more than 500 US dollars today (including the monitor), and it runs The Witcher 2 with very high settings, let alone a Source-powered game --it cuts through those like a hot chainsaw through butter.

You really don't need to invest that much to have a decent gaming PC these days: A GTS 250/GTS 450, a dual core CPU and a couple gigs of RAM, and you can face pretty much everything that's out there today without breaking a sweat (and Asrock makes some really decent cheap-ass micro-ATX motherboards). Hell, a coworker of mine plays Modern Warfare 2 on a GeForce 8600GT, and that card is 5 years old already. Don't believe everything that hardware freaks tell you.

I suppose I can come up with some money for a new machine as long as it's modest. The last time I seriously thought about building a pc was back in 2007, so I guess I'm pretty out of date when it comes to prices. :D I just can't really justify upgrading the one I have now, since it was never that great to begin with. It's fine for everything but gaming really. (The drive is way too slow, and it gets hot pretty easily.) Plus I get what you mean by playing with a mouse. During HL2, I found my self missing Combine soldiers at point blank range all the time.

It's worth it, man. There are lots of stuff that are way better on a PS3 to play in the meantime, but Valve games are meant to be played on a PC.

Also, I don't know how computer savvy are you, but a low-income third-world dweller like myself can be your best friend when you're out for a reasonably powerful PC on a tight budget, so don't hesitate to ask if you need advice with that.

Try TF2 first (it's free nowadays). If you can run that you shouldn't have any problems with the rest of the games.

Second everything Doc said. Upgrade your PC and play Half-Life 2 on it, Daniel. MobyGame gurus order you! :)

You mean Orange Box for the PS3? because not playing Orange Box would be preferable to playing the PS3 version.

Dark Souls is wonderful and everyone should play it so that they can be reminded that video games can still be more than 20 hour long tutorials.

For a while now I've been trying to not get too excited about the rumor of that one coming out on the PC.

It's just been confirmed for an August release.

Unfortunately, it's also been confirmed that it will use GFWL, which makes me think that the developer is completely out of touch with PC gaming, which makes me fear the shoddiest kind of port, which now makes me VERY cautious about the thing. I'll have to test drive it first hand before even considering putting down any money :/

Ready for the weird part? It seems like it might only use GFWL outside of North America. So I don't have any idea what is up with that.

The plot thickens! o_O

This story is getting much more thrilling than the game itself will probably ever be: Now the last rumor is that the port would be in the hands of Hijinx Studios, AKA the people who brought you the Silent Hill HD clusterfuck, AKA the 2012 games that looked worse than the PC ports from 2002/2003.

Can't find any serious source for this, though, but that would be really funny. The “no way I'm spending more that $ 1.99 on this” kind of funny.

That was a joke. Hijinx only does stuff for Konami. FROM is doing the PC version internally, but they have zero experience programming for PC (the only other PC game I know of from them was that version of King's Field with a level editor that came out in the late 90s). I have a feeling that its going to end up kind of sketchy like DMC3-era CAPCOM PC versions. I also hope they include both the 1.03 and the 1.05 versions of blighttown.

I just beat Shadowgrounds. I've played Alien Breed 2: Assault not too long ago, and once I installed Shadowgrounds I thought "well, more of the same". Turns out I was wrong and Shadowgrounds is a better game, it seems. I'm thinking about installing Shadowgrounds Survivor now.

ALL of them are Ukrainian? So all this time thinking I was a fan of Russian games and I had it all backwards D:

Which FPSs are you comparing this Sabotain to, then? I can't think of any other post-Soviet one right now. Also, what makes it so good? Because right off the bat it's ugly as sin.

ALL of them are Ukrainian?

Absolutely.

So all this time thinking I was a fan of Russian games and I had it all backwards D:

Angry Ukrainian nationalists are boarding a ship on its way to South America, armed with primitive, yet deadly cossack weapons as we speak :)

Which FPSs are you comparing this Sabotain to, then? I can't think of any other post-Soviet one right now.

Stalin's Subway, Hellforces, this kind of thing.

Also, what makes it so good? Because right off the bat it's ugly as sin

Did I say it was pretty?! :) It's an ugly, broken, poorly balanced, fun game, get it? :)

So, taking a small break from all the Mass Effecting, I decided to resume my Alan Wake playthrough.

And after having made it to what I guess is nearly the ending of chapter 4, I'm torn about whether or not to continue playing, ever.

Apparently, at some point the developers considered the plain combat would get too repetitive, and started sprinkling the game with what I assume they considered to be “gameplay variety”, but I will take the liberty of calling “an impressive amount of fucking retarded ideas”.

In the last couple hours I've been put through annoying flying little shits (just about the worst type of enemy in the history of gaming); nearly non-functional vehicle sections; being chased by giant indestructible monsters without having much of a clue of what the fuck I was supposed to be doing to escape; a couple jumping sections that became almost impossible because of the sloppy, bouncy-rubber physics engine; and right now I left while traversing a monster-infested area with about six bullets in my gun, no chance to even try to outrun the enemies, and also the ground is littered with beartraps.

I don't know if the developers are incredibly sadistic or just plain stupid, but all of a sudden a game that had a cool atmosphere and fairly decent combat plays like the kind of garbage designed by people who never in their life played a game before --not even their own, because I can't imagine how any of this crap could possibly make it past any sort of playtesting.

So I finally finished this. It took some hardcore transcendental meditation to get through the most annoying -and sadly frequent- bits (or what would pass for "transcendental meditation" in my very limited and completely illiterate understanding of it anyway --I guess the word "hardcore" could hardly have any place in the vicinity, for one thing), but I finally did it.

I'm torn about Alan Wake as I haven't been about a game since the early times of Bloodlines, when that beautiful masterpiece was at its worst regarding bugs and stuff. On the one hand I stand by my criticism about the retarded jumping and flying bugs and, very especially, the horrible, horrible cramped maps that make the camera go haywire at every turn and suck every ounce of fun out of the combat; but on the other hand the combat *is* a blast when it works (i.e.: when there's enough room to move around and enemies are reasonably humanoid), and there are lots, LOTS, or really brilliant ideas in there --especially in terms of writing and Twin Peaks / Twilight Zone fanservice. It's a game that flirts with the horror but doesn't shy away from making fun of the genre and of itself all the time --it's simply a Twin Peaks / Twilight Zone's fan paradise.

It's been quite a bumpy relationship between us, I'll tell you that, but there is definitely a very good game in there. Even a great one. No sooner would I be cursing some idiotic, infuriating form of crappy gameplay filler than the game would throw me a piece of pure, unadulterated genius that would make me fall for it all over again.

All in all, I'm definitely playing through this one again soon; I preordered American Nightmare as soon as it was available and am enjoying it nicely right now. Though I know there are spiders in there, because OF COURSE they would up the ante in terms of retarded gameplay decisions somehow. These guys are gonna turn my hair grey. Here's hoping the Emmett Brown look fits me.

I never have imaged I would even come close to saying this, but: The shifting in Driver: San Francisco is cool. It is absolutely retarded, but so is the rest of the game. It is well incorporated into the gameplay which makes it a nice action game. And honestly, it is not like the on-foot passages were the high-point of the series.

I also tried to play it with a controller and failed. Games like this need to be played with a keyboard.

Finished Thief couple days ago. Loved it! Will have to play the other two (I've actually owned Thief III on steam for a couple years but hadn't played it yet because I wanted to play its predecessors first) before the fourth one is released who knows when.

But first I'm playing Arkham City. Which is great, except for the DRM. If I need to be online to play it and my CD-key is permanently bound to my Windows Live account and I can only re-install the game a couple times before I have to buy the game again, why do I then ALSO need to keep the DVD in my drive? It boggles the mind.

Also unskipple logos on start-up.

The game itself though. Top notch so far.

Been playing Binary Domain since last Tuesday, and have got up to the final boss battle, which is a ammo spewing, will-he-just-drop-dead affair with the usual reviving useless teammates, constant dying and bitting my tongue before eventually swearing all whilst wishing the boss WOULD JUST SHUT UP.

Yep, its a very cliched end.

Aside from that, its a very decent game. Looks very Japanese, your left in no doubt as to where it was made. Gameplay wise, I can't complain. Cover system is good, it isn't Gears of War, but hey, Epic did it so well and I can't knock it. Sniper rifles have the same kind of driftiness you got in the first Mass Effect, although much less pronounced, and it didn't prove to be a problem.

The characters are a bit weird I found, in that they were pretty cliched/stereotypical in terms of nationality, but not irritating, and, well, very likeable as national stereotypes go.

But the highlight of the game is definitely the story. Very good, thought provoking, despite being an obvious Blade Runner affair. I wouldn't say it rips it off, but it does have a Blade Runner vibe to it and it shows.

Verdict: a very commendable effort from Yakuza, despite cliches and a borrowed story, at least until the very end. Worth a gander at least.

I know I said I was tired of gaming past, but darn it! Mario Golf is just a bit too good to put down.

I started replaying Super Metroid last weekend thanks to Oleg, and put in about three hours. Been close to a decade since I last played it, and it's still fantastic. I remember some of the bosses being harder than they were this time, specifically Kraid. Guess I've improved since high school. :) Though my session was interrupted by a couple releases this week that I've been waiting for.

Skullgirls came out on Wednesday, and though I've only put in a few hours on it (mostly in training mode) it feels like the most technically-accomplished and well-balanced fighter to come out of a western studio...well, ever. The voice acting is cringeworthy but beyond that I quite like it. I'll need to get some versus matches in at some point before I can really decide, though.

And the big one: Fez released today. I've been waiting for this game for four years now -- downloaded it before work so it would be ready and waiting for me as soon as I got home. After a couple rather ironically-timed freezes, I got to really dig in and I must say: this game is utterly fantastic. The design, art, and sound all ooze an incredible amount of polish. Spent four hours with it tonight and I can't wait to go back for more. The enemyless environments are simultaneously calming and menacing, peaceful and foreboding. It's beautiful.

I picked up Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay again to finally play through it. While I can see how it was quite the technical marvel to pull that game off for the original Xbox, the game itself is merely average in my opinion.

I guess I just don't feel like I manage to feel involved in what's going on in the game, since it's just a bunch of "cool" people saying "cool" things and on top of that a somewhat loose feeling melee FPS with bare bones stealth.

Oh well, I'll finish it out of patriotic sympathies since the company who made it is from Sweden. ;)

Finished up Fez the other day -- I'm amazed nobody else submitted this one over the last week! -- and I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone who would be interested in a clever, intelligent puzzle game. I feel like I've been extolling this game to anyone who will lend an ear, but it truly is fantastic.

I could go on about this game at length, but I feel like saying too much would almost diminish the wonder about it. Suffice to say, if you have the means and it sounds at all interesting, give it a go.

I'm still waiting till they realize there's no money to be made on XBLA anymore and making a PC version is a necessity.

I imagine that will come when the Microsoft exclusivity runs out, just like Braid and Limbo.

Just played through the Diablo III open beta. I must say that I'm sold. Had great fun and the drop-in coop at any time is marvellous.

Have you played the Path of Exile beta? Everyone I know who's played it has said it makes D3 looks like an anachronistic joke. I've played neither myself because my computer is trapped somewhere in 2001.

On that subject I've been playing Might and Magic 3 this weekend. A friend bought a copy of GOG's six-pack for me at gunpoint. The game is not nearly as difficult as I was led to believe this era's RPGs were. Its trivially easy to get murdered in the game, but one you figure out that you need to be blessed if you want to kill anything before level 5, and learn about bows and how to exploit sight ranges, it's actually a very manageable game. I also really like how every monster in the game dies a perma-death; you'll never get attacked unless you're entering new areas.

Never even heard of it :) I must say I usually don't care much for these hack 'n' slash type RPGs.

So for a while now RPS has been making quite some noise about some indie horror game called Lone Survivor.

I gotta admit, however, that much like our good Oleg I'm kind of put down by games that look too intentionally "retro" --especially if they belong to genres that require a big deal of emotional involvement. That said, I finally went out and played the very short demo and I came out seven kinds of impressed: The amount of stuff the guy did with such little resources blew my socks off.

In two words --and I do realize it's gonna sound a bit too much, but try it out if you don't believe it: Lone Survivor is more of a Silent Hill game than any Silent Hill has been since the second. So there.

FINALLY! I managed to log on using my old ME pc. Why? The power supply unit in my other pc decided to go bad. I was planning on upgrading soon anyway, but trying to do anything internet related on this thing is a pain in arse. Anyway, I did manage to finish HL1. I loved it! The end of the game would have been a lot more fun it it weren't for all the jumping. It's not that jumping doesn't belong in a fps, it's just HL1 doesn't do it very well. It's the single most frustrating aspect of the game, and they made it even worse near the end!

When you get the long jump, they decided to use two keys for it. It would have been nice if they told you what they were though. I actually had to look at a faq to figure out what keys to use. Then, not only does it use two keys, it requires you to press jump, then crouch and jump again to use it! I found myself screwing up a lot because of this confusing configuration. I suppose it would make too much sense to make it like a double jump by pressing jump twice since that's all it really is.

Otherwise no complaints. Until I can build my new pc, I think I'll play Wave Race 64.

Finished Arkham City. Or the main and most of the side quests at least. Thought about getting all the riddler trophies, but there's just too many of them and getting them isn't that fun. So decided to call it a day.

Played through Tales of Monkey Island Episode 1, which I got a free key for a while back (not sure anymore why that was). Not impressed. The humour is pretty good at times, but the voice acting is mediocre, sound design poor, and the puzzles retarded. Likes the Sam and Max seasons MUCH more.

Decided to give Diablo 1 a new try after being impressed with the beta. Haven't gotten really far yet to definitely make up my mind yet, but so far it's just not as fun.

Also continued a bit further with CaslteVania: Symphony of the Night (after being constantly reminded by it by Arkham City). About halfway the default castle now I think. It remains quite cool as long as the characters keep their mouths shut :]

ToMI E2 is better than the first, in that it has a few nice parts instead of being completely irredeemable in every regard like the first episode. I kind of want to go full on nerd and write a dissection of every single moment of E1, because there is not a moment of it that is not awful.

Finished it. As in, I killed the bad guy and saved the world. I'll leave grinding the game up to 200% finished up to the people without 40 hour work weeks.

Are you sure?

I just finished Assassin's Creed: Revelations. It is a competent game, no question about it, but I liked Brotherhood better. Istanbul is a great scenario, but other than that, all additions fall flat: the Den Defense mini game is bad, annoying and out of place (and optional, thank god for that) and the bombs are both useless and overly complicated. The Mediterranean mini game is fun at first but gets tedious quickly, those Desmond memories in first-person didn't catch me. I didn't find the story to be engaging: just a few actual assassinations and a generic "get five of that" for most of the time. There were also no real side-quests, just stupid mini games, boring two-seconds book hunts and just one faction quest for the Romanis, thieves and mercenaries.

I don't play many puzzle games, but currently I have a lot of fun with Crazy Machines 2.

I finally decided to take The Witcher 2 seriously and, just in time for the Enhanced Edition update, I got onboard for the long haul. And what a fantastic game it turned out to be. It's complex, deep, big, it has plenty of choices with surprisingly far-reaching consequences, it's terribly punishing of every tiny mistake --in short, it's everything that all those bland, trite games of today are not. I mean, I love Mass Effect to bits, but it feels like Snake Xenzia compared to this. And I had almost forgotten what it feels like to not have your hand held all the f'ing way.

Also, it fixes everything I didn't like in the original: The story is involving from the get-go and it only gets better and better as I move forward, the quests -even the secondary ones- are much more entertaining to play --hell, even the sex scenes are handled much better.

I'm so captivated by this that I'm considering giving the first one a second chance. It bore me out of my mind by the time I ended the first act, but now I feel I'm missing quite a bit of background story from having jumped straight into the sequel, and I'm becoming such a fanboi that I need to know EVERYTHING there is to know.

Gave up on Diablo 1. It's a fun game, but it's just too monotonous for me (which is what drove me away on my previous attempt). The item fever alone isn't doing it for me.

Finally started on Civilization V. It's a great game and some of the improvements over the previous games are quite nice. But it does feel a bit like same old, same old. It's also by far the buggiest release up to date. Though none of the bugs I encountered are show stoppers they do make the game feel rather sloppy. Sometimes when loading shortly after saving you get sort of a merger between the two game states. Other times units are at two locations at the same time, for anything gameplay related they are at location X and visually they are at location Y. Which looks weird when for example a city bombards my ship which is logically 2 tiles away from it, but you see the cannon balls flying halfway across the ocean...

Played through a single game and was great fun as always, but it's a real time-sink so I'm not going to start a new game immediately.

Meanwhile I've started on The Ocarina of Time. A classic I've never played. Just finished the tree level. It's all a bit childish for my tastes, but I can see why so many people love it. Haven't made up my mind yet (or haven't played it enough in any case) to decide on how it compares to Link to the Past.

Gave up on Diablo 1. It's a fun game, but it's just too monotonous for me (which is what drove me away on my previous attempt). The item fever alone isn't doing it for me

Hear, hear!

Meanwhile I've started on The Ocarina of Time. A classic I've never played. Just finished the tree level. It's all a bit childish for my tastes, but I can see why so many people love it.

Those were my feelings exactly when I played it back in 1998; and now I'm totally going to play it properly and see for myself.

Haven't made up my mind yet (or haven't played it enough in any case) to decide on how it compares to Link to the Past.

I could never get into Link to the Past. Am I missing a great classic?

As you were recently enjoying Metroid and CastleVania games, it's basically that but top-down instead of side-scrolling. It features very similar mechanics of exploration and not being able to pass certain points until you've acquired certain powers/items. It's a bit more light-hearted, but definitely a great game. Took me a while to get into it as well, but its status as a classic is well deserved.

The top-down view is what bothers me, actually. I find it really hard to enjoy overhead action games. Also, Metroid and Castlevania have platforming...

LttP is a very long dungeon crawl. Later entries like Link's Awakening and Ocarina had a balance between dungeon delving and world building, but LttP is p much all hacking all the time. It's been a long time since I played, but I remember the "puzzles" in the dungeons to be just as esoteric as those in later games.

If you're going to play one Zelda then either Link's Awakening or Ocarina are the way to go, but I'd play LttP before the NES/GBC/GBA/Wii games.

That's one of the reasons why I'm enjoying Ocarina less than Link to the Past. Too much melodramatic BS not enough pew pew. There's much more focus on story elements. But the story is so run-off-the-mill and cliché and doesn't interest me at all. Which wouldn't be so bad if 90% the conversations and cutscenes weren't unskipable. The amount of unskipable cutscenes with 0 content really puts me on tilt at times. That freakin owl which says the exact same thing 10 times and then flies away in slowmotion. It's pure torture.

The other reasons why Ocarina of Time doesn't match up with Link to the Past for me:
- The game also has a bad case of late 90s bad third person console camera. It never points at what you want and constantly clips through walls showing the void.
- Some of the sound effects are really bad on the ears. And the repetitive midi music is pretty lame as well for 1998.
- Might be an issue with emulation, but it's incredibly difficult to get link to move in anything but 90 degree angles. Making the bowling mini-game much more difficult than it should be. (I use the thumbstick on a xbox 360 controller)

The dungeons so far were pretty cool though. And it has some nice exploration and interesting and meaningful stuff to collect. In fact it's good enough to make up for all the flaws mentioned above. But it does give that "Yeah whatever, now let ME play again please" vibe that I only get with Japanese games.

Link to the Past is definitely one of the most effective Zelda games. It's actually pretty surprising that it's based on the foundation of the first game, as it feels completely different. Personally, though, I'd rank it behind Majora's Mask and Wind Waker in the series, but just barely.

I'm actually one of those people who enjoy Zelda the most when it's seen from a top down perspective!

My favorite by far is LttP, followed by Wind Waker. For some reason I never really found the "serious" Zelda games too appealing (such as Ocarina and Twilight), but they are still all solid games worthy of my time for sure. :)

Actually, I'm much more fond of the first entry than the second. I think the second game is much more guilty of repetition since it's a much longer game. The first one is over pretty quick, and the dungeons are very atmospheric. I think as far as RPG's go, Diablo might have the most sinister dungeons I've experienced!

But I understand it's not for every one, and hardly anybody agrees with me on this regardless if they're fans of hack and slash RPG's (most Diablo II followers shiver at the thought of playing Diablo 1 again). The same goes for franchises like Resident Evil and Silent Hill where I feel like the first entry is my personal favourite (and not just because of nostalgia, for I played the first games in both series way after I had finished the newer installments), yet the general consensus is that they've been long outclassed and surpassed in every way.

I actually prefer Diablo II because at least it has a variety of locations, so the randomness factor is less depressing. But I also think it is too long.

I'm getting very close to finishing up my Baldur's Gate game. Went all the way through 1&2 and now I'm wiping out the last of the bhaalspawn in Throne. I'm running out of steam though, just like the game is. Right now I've got a level 30 party clad in -2AC armor and a collection of +4 through +6 weapons. At this point I can kill everything that's in the monster manual, so all the game can do is toss me into fights I know I can will, but that will be a complete pain in the ass to do so.

After that I think I'll go back to RDR. I wish there were more open world games like that. It's empty, sure, but it's empty because it's supposed to be empty.It's be nice to have an open world fantasy game that looked that nice, but a) the AI would never be there, and b) no one making fantasy games seems to be interested in that.

I realise it isn't gaming exactly, but I just got the latest Gears of War book, The Slab. I enjoyed reading all the other Gears books, and really liked how they fleshed out the Gears universe, and I'm expecting this to be no different as it deals with the Fenix back story as well as the battle of Ephyra, one of the pivotal moments of the locust/human war.

Ocarina of Time will have to wait. Installing Diablo III right now.

It's funny how games like these have the complete opposite effect on me... the more hype, the less I want to play them. That's why I haven't played any of Blizzard's games since the first Diablo.

If you like the story in RTS games then SC+BW are worth playing. After that Blizz games are only worth playing for the multiplayer modes.

Haven't played either StarCraft (1/2), Diablo II, nor WoW. So I'm hardly a Blizzard fanboy. I wasn't convinced I wanted to play Diablo III until I tried the open beta couple weeks ago which was great fun. A bunch of my friends are playing as well and I haven't played a good coop game since Left 4 Dead 2.

Edit: In related news, the login servers have been down since I've been home from work (as did the rest of Europe it seems). No surprises there of course. So perhaps a bit more Ocarina anyway.

Edit2: Oh, I'm in now.

I'm here wondering if I should or shouldn't pay the circa US$ 50.00. Do you guys think the price will drop at some point in the near future? =P

I'm play HL2 again, but on my new pc! There's only one thing that bugs me. I know it's a silly thing to complain about, but why is the frame rate so high? I hate super high frame rates! Is there anyway to turn it down?

Well, that's something I never thought anyone could complain about O_O

You may wanna try enabling VSync on your videocard's options menu and have the monitor at 60Hz, the games shouldn't go above 60 FPS (I assume you don't consider 60 to be too high?).

Also, there was a program called FPS Limiter that applied a framerate cap to DX9 games. I don't know how well it works with newer versions of Windows, though. Here are some linky links.

Edit: Just found this. Apparently there's a way to limit framerates on Nvidia cards, so you're definitely not alone.

Nope.

The price was a bit off-putting for me as well. Suggested retail price of €60 which is 10 more than all other PC games (except those released by Activision). And most games when you spend as much as 5 minutes to look for the cheapest option only cost €30-35 (I don't think I ever paid more than that in the last 4 years (with the exception of DX:HR). With Diablo 3 I couldn't get below €45 though. And saw it going for €65 at some sites.

I'm alive! I've been kinda busy lately, so not much time for gaming. Anyway, I figured out to limit the frame rate in HL2. Stupid me forgot there was a developer console I could use to set it. I have to set it every time now, but it's still better than it was before. Thanks for the help anyway Doc.

Currently level 53 Wizard in Diablo III. Act I of Hell difficulty. It was starting to get a bit of a boring grind. Was playing together with a friend who plays a barbarian. Yesterday joined some colleagues from work in their game and with more people it's definitely more fun. Alone or with two some of the enemies are just outright impossible to defeat, while with three or more there's always enough damage to be dealt.

Was trying to set up a multiplayer match of Civilization V with some colleagues during the lunch breaks, but our game broke a couple days ago. It looks like we figured out the cause now. Apparently one of us bought a DLC that not everybody owned. And it's impossible to start matches with each other if not everybody has exactly identical DLC. That's a pretty nasty way to force us to buy DLC... but it worked, but I'll think twice before buying my next Firaxis game and/or DLC.

Continued a little bit with Ocarina of Time, but the further I get, the more I'm doubting whether I'll finish the game. I'm getting more and more annoyed with the terrible controls, camera issues and endless backtracking.

Been tempted to buy Arma II to play the Day Z mod. Did anyone play this yet? Some colleagues are constantly talking about how awesome it is.

Actually, you can play games with people who own DLC that you don't, I've already done it. I'm not sure why it broke your current game, though.

Yeah today we couldn't get it to work again, so in the end that wasn't it. But when it does or doesn't work seems to be quite random now. But judging from the Steam and 2k forums we're not the only ones completely clueless about the absolute lack of multiplayer support and the terribly broken state it is in.

I finished HL2 last night. (For the third time this year.) I think I can say I've finally had my fill of it. Now onto Episode One and Portal!

Make sure you play the episodes (and Portal) with the "developers' commentary" on after you finished them once. Very very few developers have made commentary in such an interesting and entertaining way.

I finished EP1 yesterday. I loved it! Except for one sequence. The part with the elevator in the dark was almost unfair. If you didn't set a zombie on fire, find a flair, or have your light last long enough, you were in the dark, while zombies of every kind attacked you! It took me no less than six tries to get through! Anyway, now it's onto EP2 and Portal!

Yeah, I hated that part every time I played it (though it did get somewhat easier after my second playthrough because I would place exploding barrels and flares and all sorts of crap in strategic places before the fight broke, but, admittedly, that was borderline cheating).

I thought it was pretty odd to find such a staple of terrible game design not only in a Half-Life game, but in one that had Erik Wolpaw working on it --after all, he did complain largely about such stuff back in the OMM days.

Hey, what's your Steam name? I'm right here if you'd like to add me. I'm a really nice Steam friend and I even gift games now and then :P

I'm right here. I don't use it much though. I find Steam kind of confusing.

I finished EP2. I now understand why everybody is waiting for EP3. HOLY CRAP! That was probably the most intense game I've ever played ever! The striders AND hunters were a bit much, but it was still great. Speaking of great, I started Portal as well. This is the first game in long time that has made me laugh or smile in a while, let alone both at the same time. I can't believe I've waited this long to play it.

Welcome to the club :D

I think you're spot on about what an intense experience Episode 2 is. I finished it three times, and hearing Alyx cry breaks my heart every f'ing time.

As for Portal, yep, it is quite the masterpiece. And just wait until the credits roll --the whole thing is a landmark in videogame history.

Also, you'll want to play the second one as well: It does lose noticeably in terms of the subtle balance of humor and darkness as well as that sense of isolation that the first one conveys so nicely (it's much more out-and-out comedy this time around, and there are three different voice actors around), but boy, I don't think any game made me laugh so heartily since the first two Monkey Island's.

By the way, I don't know if you're aware of it, but Kim Swift, the woman that pretty much invented the foundation of what in the end became Portal, is now working on a game of her own called Quantum Conundrum --you may wanna keep an eye on that.

I finished Portal! And I only had to look at a walk through once! (The last part in challenge 18.) I love it! Now there's only TF2 in the Orange Box left for me to play. I'm not really interested in it at the moment, so I'll probably move back to my PS2 for a while.

It's almost as if you had to set a zombie on fire or find a flare to survive.

Got to the part where you become adult link in Ocarina of Time. I'm still a bit in the middle of whether to play through the entire game or not. At points it's delightful, but quite often also very frustrating and filled with too much boring backtracking and empty cutscenes.

Still playing Diablo III on and off, but decided to capture my thoughts on it in a review (just submitted) rather than trying to cram it all into a post here. It's definitely one of those games with large ups and down which warrants a more detailed analysis.

In between been playing some Civ V multiplayer. In the end I think the problem was the network at work, cause from home my colleagues and me can always connect without problems. So perhaps the problem is LAN connections.

Been playing lots of Gears 3 lately, unlocking some of the player avatars and weapon skins. Just unlocked the Col. Hoffman & classic Marcus avatar, along with the Team Insignia skin for the Lancer. Up next, the Onyx Lancer skin, the last major unlock I want to get.

Grinding away at Gears 3 is a bit of an oddity for me, in that most games which i try grinding at, I usually get bored sick of it, and give up. But with this, I've been grinding at the versus games against bots pretty much since I got it, in between other games I've got mind you, and not got bored of it yet. That's a first for me, really.

I wrapped up some games I was nearly done with, namely:

Beowulf: The Game (pretty mediocre) Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (technically impressive, but not my cup of tea really... I had an ok time with it though) Psychonauts (I love you Double Fine!!! I hate you for the Meat Circus, but you're still really awesome with me!)

Not sure what's up next, as I'm debating whether I want to keep finishing up old games I never completed, or break it up with a "fresh" game now. We'll see. :)

I ended up submitting a game instead tonight. Michigan: Report From Hell sure is one odd game. For better and worse...

It is from grasshopper manufacture and Suda 51 after all, so it is to be expected. ;)

I finally finished Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. It was refreshing to play a FPS which at least tries to avoid the usual "go and win the war by yourself, super hero". Still, I found various situations to be very cheap (Why can't my squad use bazookas? No, I have to destroy multiple tanks by myself which take about five direct hits). Maybe that is my fault, but some scenes required more luck than tactics. It also has no free saving which does not win the game any plus points. Overall a good game.

I also played Law & Order: Legacy. Totally worth the 20 bucks (however, note that I am a fan of the TV show). Definitely much better than the first three games based on the original series. The focus on conversations is justified from the source material. I came late to the party and could play all episodes at once, but the episodic format is absolutely fitting.

I think the whole teammember thing started already with the first Call of Duty and I think the "super hero" trope has been thing of the past in WWII shooters since then, most of them feature squads or some other allies moving alongside you.

I decided to pick up Batman: Arkham Asylum again for the 360 to finish it finally. I kind of put it away when our son was born and just haven't gotten aroun to it until now. I'm comin up on the end soon, so it won't take that long to be done I'm sure. Pretty awesome game overall, where my only complaint so far is that sewer scene where you have to walk slowly across floating pieces of wood in Croc's lair. It just felt like a time padder to me for no reason.

I didn't care that much about that part as to complain (the rest of the game was that much more awesome), but yeah, it was most likely the weaker part of the game, and it was definitely the most uninteresting one; especially since after all that foreshadowing Croc ended up being quite the wimp.

Today I beat Bastion. What a wonderful game.

So, I just finished Arcania: Gothic 4. It is a horrible Gothic game. It is a mediocre RPG. But the fighting system is the more or less only improvement over the predecessor, so it is at least an acceptable action game.

And now I finished Fall of Setarrif which is even worse. Still better than the atrocious Götterdämmerung, but not much.

I've finally got (kinda) bored with Gears 3 versus grinding, so I've gone to playing games I didn't complete. First up: Dead Rising 2, which for me is the stand out for me because 1) I started it, and then stopped for a reason I can't remember, and 2) it doesn't have any significant changes over the first one. Waaayyyy too samey. I mean, save for the weapon combos and Chuck, its practically a carbon copy.

Should be a passable game though. Its not like DR1 wasn't a crap game. Just fairly flawed.

Well joy of joys, I've hit a game killer level!

**SPOILERS**

Up to case 4 (I think) that has the reporter reveal her source, with the twins hijacking proceedings, amounting to a boss battle. And like they have the same inhuman speed and health as the psychopaths, they are ridiculously overpowered. Or to put it into perspective for you, with your typical pyscho, you can accurately offload five machine guns at them, and only do 10%. Add to that the speed of them. And I've got to deal with twins. Or the equivalent of two psycho's. At once.

Contemplating writing it off completely now.

And here is why DR1 was a better game. In DR1 it was almost possible to do everything in one playthrough, but it was fiendishly difficult and needed precise knowledge of the game world and mechanics, so no one bothered to try for it on their first time through. Failing the storyline on your first, or even second, game was expected.

In DR2 getting everything done is so simple that pulling it off is a cakewalk... once you're high level and have good combo cards. This is why you can hit roadblocks despite feeling like you should still be able to progress. I'd suggest skipping the storyline and just focusing on survivors for the rest of this playthrough.

DR2 update: Did some level boosting via survivors, bosses/psychos became pretty easy once I hit level 30. Then it was really about knowing what weapons work best.

Any way, completed it with ending A. Story's pretty lousey, but passable, I suppose. Like with the first Dead Rising, the fun is in the gameplay, only more so in this due to the weaker story. AI has definitely been improved, survivors don't need as much attention to ensure their survival. The game also now gives you the option of saving after story chapters, although this is as close to an auto save as you get.

Final verdict: B-.

I'm 44 stars (and 4 grand stars) into Super Mario Galaxy now. And while I think the controls are fairly fluid, I still long for a gamecube controller after a while... :\

Just finished American Nightmare. Glad to report they did away with all the gameplay stupidity of the original Alan Wake, including the cramped maps, that now favor huge, open areas with plenty of room to run around. On the flipside, this one is so much easier! I barely found myself in somewhat pressing fights towards the ending. I hope this improves in nightmare mode; I mean, these big maps and ammo caches all over the place just *beg* for crazy enemy spamming.

Storywise it's more Alan Wake, with all the good/bad you can perceive about that. I did miss the frequent Twin Peaks references, though. And for a game that takes places in the very town of Night Springs, it's surprisingly un-Night Spring-y.

Still well worth the coin, anyway, and overall I'm really happy these guys eventually decided to pay PC-Town a visit. And I'm really looking forward to that mysterious sequel they're cooking up.


I'm currently playing through Quantum Conundrum, which is, as it could be expected, something of a "Portal lite" in terms of ambition and storytelling, but it's just as clever when it comes to puzzle design, and MUCH more of a challenge gameplay-wise.

People have been complaining left and right because it features quite a bit of jumping puzzles, which is a well know heresy for first-person games, but frankly I found the controls to be responsive enough that so far the jumping has only been a problem if I lose my cool --as any precision-based sort of gameplay should be.

So the game is noticeably tough alright, but I rather like that, especially in this time of so much hand-holding and 10-long-hour tutorials and such. It's tough but it's also fair, so beating every challenge often involves as much brain job as good reflexes, and every time you do it, it's the goddamnest thing.


Other than that, I'm still working through The Witcher 2, which keeps being all sorts of amazing, but I guess I don't need to lecture anyone here about that. At any rate, I decided I'm definitely pre-ordering or day-one buying *anything* these guys put out from now on. CD Projekt RED might very well be my absolute favorite developer at the moment, and until they burn me I'm gonna be the most faithful bitch they've ever seen.


Also I just installed the Extended Cut Thingie for Mass Effect 3 and I'm off to see what's what with that revamped ending. I need to build up a bit of Galactic Readiness, though, which -as much as I loved the multiplayer- in this moment is quite frankly an annoying bullshit move. I just want to see the endings and I really don't feel like grinding for a couple hours in order to get the decent one.

I've just beaten Diablo III for the first time (in normal difficulty) with the Demon Hunter. He kicked my ass some 20 times before I finally beat him. Don't know what to do now, if I start it over in a new difficulty or if I start it with another character. Or maybe (and most probably) start playing another game.

Is it OK to post about old games here? Because I'm restarting playing Duke Nukem - Manhattan Project from the beginning, this time on hard (got stuck while playing normal some 5 years ago).

I accidentially completed Duke Nukem Episode 1 again, because I forgot I already did that o_0

While we've passed the 67000 entries mark, I'm celebrating crossing my 100 new games submitted, with over 300 entries added in total. After three years I constitute for nearly 0,5% of MobyGames now :D See that tiny speck? It's me!

You fell for that scam, then?

I went from not really caring about Diablo 3 (from what I've seen -and what little I played of similar games- it's nothing more than a glorified whack-a-mole --not really my thing) to downright hating its guts. It's the biggest swindle in the history of gaming, and it would seem to get worse with new, more ridiculously punishing and restrictive moves every day. The fact that it's been such a success in sales anyway is really worrying --I mean, what's stopping EA or Activision from using this same scheme for their next games, if people have shown they will sheepishly put up with literally *anything*? How low can we stoop to play a game?

It's pretty unbelievable, but the whole situation makes Ubisoft's naziware look like the soft caress of a tender lover in comparison.

In this case, I have to share the whole pessimistic view of modern day gaming I stood against in that other thread; and I'm more ashamed than ever to consider myself part of the whole “gaming community” thing :(

I'm afraid I have to agree with this. I can't understand why people would put up with all the hiccups and limitations to play a game like this. Such a poor launch, and a lack of good faith from the publisher would kill any lesser game. The fact that there are people around me who originally argued against the game's service model eventually caved for this game puzzles me further. It's a dungeon crawler. There are others like it made by people who don't seem to hate their customers.

People can play what they want, but I wish I wasn't seeing such support for the business model that places games as a service. I can't see anything good coming from it.

In my defense I have to say I got the game for free (I got it as a gift from my credit card). =)

I'm also going to post my gaming habits in this thread, who knows what a therapeutic effect it might have.

Just finished Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee (Windows). I liked it, but a bit too much trial-and-error and restarting at the previous checkpoint as far as I'm concerned.

I started playing Cubemen (Windows) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Windows). It seems that the first isn't quite deep gameplay-wise, but I'm having fun with the second.

I've picked up all kinds of stuff recently, but I decided HL2E2 needed a revisit. Just when I thought the intensity had worn off from only playing it a month ago, the last part was even more desperate and hard than before! I was literally shaking when it was all over. My gawd what a great game!

With all the fuss over the new Tomb Raider, I'm going to revisit the original. I haven't fully played through it for a while, so I think it's time for a refresher. I still have to say though, I'll probably end up liking it more than I already do. For all the sequels in it's nearly twenty year history (!), the original is still probably the best game out of all of them.

Been playing GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony. Its another game i started on but never got that far, which was because when I originally started playing it, I just finished The Lost and Damned (I got them both on the Episodes from Liberty City stand alone expansion pack) and had a case of GTA fatigue. Now I'm back at it and enjoying it again. Ahh, how I missed Iggy Pop on Liberty Rock Radio.

I just finished Half-Life 2: Episode One and am currently playing Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Picked up both at the Steam Summer Sale.

Just finished Spec Ops: The Line... second time in a row. It would have been almost a typical modern cover-based shooter (although I learned to appreciate it after some time), but the story really makes it stand out. Though nothing too special for Coppola fans (think Apocalypse Now, or Heart of Darkness), it was strange and unusual to see a story like this in a shooter. The protagonist gradually going mad... just loosing it. And it's presented way better than in other games I've played so far. Definitely, recommend for all shooter fans.

Lately been playing a lot of Civilization V, both single and multiplayer and with the Gods and Kings expansion which is great.

Had a LAN party last week where I also played some Super Monday Night Combat, which was a pleasant surprise. I don't like DOTA games, but the whole 1st person shooter angle made it a lot more enjoyable. I did have to turn the sound off because of the commentators which are super annoying.

Played some Minecraft again with the focus of slaying the dragon in the whole endgame thing that wasn't there when we were last playing it. The dungeons and stuff are pretty cool. The dragon itself was a bit of a pushover. The whole experience grinding for enchantments was a bit lost on me since enemies die easily anyway and you lose it al when you inevitably die.

Other games on the menu were Pro Evolution Soccer, 'Splosion Man (terrible, at least in coop), StarCraft II customs (Some tower defence game mostly), Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Civilization V and FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage.

I've been trying to get into Stacked, but for some reason it doesn't quite grasp me. Like Costume Quest it's mostly a boring grind wrapped in very pretty wrapping paper.

This morning I bought Warlock: Master of the Arcane. Which tries to be to Civilization V what Master of Magic was to Civilization. I only played it for a little bit during lunch so can't really form an opinion about it. Definitely a bit rough around the edges compared to Civ V (Obviously due to a difference in budgets), but has a fair share of interesting ideas in it. Besides I loved Master of Magic.

Because I apparently can't stick to a single game at the moment I'm now installing the beta of Shootmania. Not sure what to expect. I LOVED TrackMania United; it's definitely one of my favourite games. I also love shooters that don't involve cover mechanics. But the trailers for this game left me dead cold.

Shootmania started a bit "Meh" for me, but it grew on me quickly. It's terrific to be able to play a fast paced shooter once more. I haven't found a decent one of those since Unreal Tournament 2004. It's absolutely perfect for when you want to just have some 30 minutes or an hour of instant fun and adrenalin.

Now the steam sales have ended my backlog of games has grown to 21. Which isn't that bad I guess. But it's time to try and clear some. Started on Orcs Must Die, which I bought last week in the sale due to various recommendations. So far those recommendations were very valid. It's a very solid and funny tower defence game.

Mine is 288. I am not too good in the "self-control" discipline when it comes to budget games.

I think mine is 134 right now... mostly RPGs... *sigh* When will I find the time? :\

Downloaded and started playing Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta, the only DLC for Fallout 3 I haven't played and completed yet. So far, its not to good, not too bad. Although it does have the alien disintegrator. Having fun with that and tracking down the audio recordings.

Once I'm done with Mothership Zeta, I'll be moving onto the two DLC expansions for Skyrim, Hearthfire & Dawnguard. Should be fun.

EDIT: why has this ending up half way down?!

My brother decided out of the blue to just kind of lend me his ps3 for an unknown window of time, so all of a sudden I have even more games to play!

I decided to give Bioshock 2 a rest on the 360 and turned my attention to Portal 2 on the ps3 instead. So far, I'm loving it! :)

Oh, Jesus Christ, with all the work it took for Daniel to see the light, you too? Valve games on a console? REALLY? :P

Yeah, they really are better on the pc. That being said, the first two HL console ports for the PS2 and Xbox are actually pretty damn good. It's what introduced me to Valve in the first place, so it isn't all bad. :)

I have a comfy couch, what can I say? ;)

And besides... the only games from Valve I've given a crap about are the Portal games. Half-Life, Left 4 Dead et al aren't interesting to me in the least. Sorry Doc! :p

Games I recently finished:

• Max Payne 3: A surprisingly stale plot. It is not like the two predecessors are nobel prize category, but the great presentation with the comic book sequences made up for it. The gameplay mechanics are solid and the complaints about unfair checkpoint placement are exaggerated.
• When it comes to story, Spec-Ops: The Line is the direct opposite. The gameplay offers nothing new (I don't play that many third-person shooters, so that did not bother me) and makes no mistakes. But boy, is the story well done. It has genuine surprises and an awesome ending. There are some truly disturbing sequences, but - in contrast to so many other games - not just for simple shock value. Yes, I'm looking at you, Modern Warfare 2. It seems like the usual military stuff in the beginning, but that changes over time; they really give the plot and characters time to develop.
• The Walking Dead: Episode 1 just wanted to play for twenty minutes and finished the thing in one sitting (two hours). That says all.

I just finished Dungeon Siege III and it is a good and competent game. It is more action than RPG, but that is not bad by definition. The story is OK, the dialogues are OK, the fighting system is OK, the gamepad controls are OK. The game is not a masterpiece like Obsidian's usual offerings, but certainly worth playing. However, I didn't notice the difficulty spikes all the reviews are complaining about (I played the mage; I don't know if the difficulty changes with the other three characters).

Next, I want to give Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption a second chance. I hated the game when I played it the first time, but everyone just keeps on talking good things about it.

Just got my hours at work cut down, so I decided to clear some games from some of my purchase backlog whilst I can, starting with Saints Row the Third, Forza 3 and The Ratchet & Clank trilogy. Starting with Saints 3, then will probably move to Forza 3.

Condemned: Criminal Origins. I'm not sure if I'm scared while playing it or not. The common mobs aren't that bad, but whatever those things in the subway are really creep me out. It is suspenseful though, mainly due to the excellent sound design. I'm not sure what to think of the story yet, looks like paint by the numbers dark crime thriller right now, but I'll see where it goes.

Currently I'm in some sort of mannequin store. We'll see how that goes. :P

I wish I was playing it now for the 1st time like you do.

Seconded. Man, how I loved that game. The subtle way in which the supernatural begins to creep slowly into what at first glance appears to be a regular thriller --there has never been anything similar in gaming, ever. I remember those crawling things in the subway that Donatello mentions, and how they completely threw me off balance, like shit just had gotten serious right there, but I still had a hard time believing what I was seeing (or WAS I? :P). That level was one of the most intense moments in my gaming life. And pretty much every level after that one.

Hell, now I'll have to play this again and see how it holds up.

Too bad the main character isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. :D

I'm up to library at the moment, and that department store chapter was the tensest part so far. However, after Cry of Fear this game is wee bit too "clean", smooth animations and all. Cry of Fear on the other hand, those half-glitchy thingies really made me piss a bucket. Condemned has a killer (haha) sound design, though, as I previously mentioned.

Yeah, I was pretty surprised at how thick the protagonist was. I think I even mentioned that in my review. My memory might be kind of fuzzy, but I seem to remember him not only needing to have spelled out the dumbest things, but also falling for painfully obvious ambushes and traps several times throughout the game XD This was especially odd considering the game would seem to trust the player to be smart enough as to get off with a rather convoluted story with plenty of ambiguities and whatnot.

I still need to give Cry of Fear a good test drive (only played for a few minutes, though it was enough to have my mind blown by all the technical aspects (not only the visuals but also the improvements to the control system, you can hardly recognize the original HL underneath all that awesome) and to get the sense that it knows how to manage its atmosphere).

Indeed, that's a truly great game. And don't miss the sequel.

The second was prettier, but I didn't like it as much as the first one for some reason. I think it was because the second one struck me as more "FPS-y" so to speak.

Loved the first, got tired of the sequel after a few levels. It was a bit too samey.

I wanted to play the sequel for the gameplay improvements I read about, but according to Yahtzee's review they really ruined the pacing of the original, going way too far with the supernatural stuff and introducing a lot of really dumb things. Of course, it's Yahtzee, so you have to take his words with enough salt to give a small child a heart attack, but he does seem to be making a point in that one.

It never came out for PC so I'll probably never know anyway.

He's pretty much right though. They added this more complex combo system with context sensitive finishing moves and pushed up the tempo a whole lot as well. I didn't play the first one wanting an action game. Yes, it's prettier and more complex... but it's also a completely different game to me.

Also... they end the second game with a "to be continued..." basically, which pissed me off.

Finished Trine 2 in coop and Orcs Must Die. Both great fun! Although I couldn't play OMD for more than a level or two at a time. Too chaotic I think to play in long bursts.

Now started on Bastion. Not sure what to think of it yet, some mixed feelings so far.

Continued on Bastion again for the first time since I posted that message.

Still equally mixed feelings. Love the storytelling and graphics, but so far I've pressed alt+F4 within 20 minutes each time I've booted it up. Theres just a lot of frustrating interference in the game.

Developers: I don't care if it took you 2 hours to get that camera pan "just right". I don't want to see it more than once, and even once is pushing it. Any game with challenges that doesn't make it as forgiving to start over as TrackMania and Super Meat Boy make it be have no right to exist anymore. They learned from the past and moved on. So should you! If a challenge fails that is punishment enough for the player, you don't have to get under his skin with unskippable cutscenes and having to walk all the way back, because that's not FUN and games are played because people want to have fun. Sure challenging bits can be frustrating, but it's a fun kind of frustration. Having to walk back to the start of the challenge is frustrating, but not fun, because it's not a challenge. [/rant]

Anyway I'll probably give it another go in a bit. I want to play Black Mesa but the download goes oh so slow, so I probably won't be able to play it until Sunday evening.

Played some levels of Black Mesa. It's freaking awesome. It's a superb update of the original Half-Life back up to ~2007 graphics standard. I'm loving every moment of it!

Speaking of Black Mesa, is it allowed an entry here? Or is it considered a mod not worth the attention?

Maybe once it gets released through Greenlight on steam?

Source mods are a bit special since the Source SDK has been released for free. This essentially means that you should be able to run some mods without having another Source game installed. However this only works if the mod doesn't use any assets from the games.

It's a very tricky thing flirting with our rules. The game requires Source SDK Base 2007 to run. It used to be part of the shared sources you received when you had any Source Valve game in your library.

In July 2011 however, because of the free-to-play release of Team Fortress 2, the SDK became free for everyone. So if it works as advertised (may need to be tested!), that essentially means that the SDK has entered the likes of DirectX or the C++ redistributable where it has become a "tech spec" to play the game. That would also open up thousands of Source mods that can become new game entries.

Edit: what Kabushi said, the dependencies need to be verified before it can be considered truly standalone.

It happens so that I have recently reinstalled Windows and I don't have any Steam games installed at the moment. I've downloaded the Black Mesa zip and now I'm downloading the free Source SDK Base 2007 from Steam. See if it works for me. (Fellow gamers from AG.ru however have already confirmed that free Source SDK is the only thing you need).

[upd] Tried to run the game while Source SDK is still downloading, but won't launch.

Once Source SDK downloaded, the game launched successfully.

That's the verification you need (vanilla Steam) to have it added as a new game entry =)

Glad to hear that.

Finished Black Mesa. Freakin' awesome! If you liked Half-Life, you just have to play it. They did just about everything right. Props to the modding team and their dedication to create this terrific homage to Half-Life.

I forgot how annoying those jumping puzzles are.

Having finished Black Mesa continued with Bastion again. And while I may have my gripes with some of the gameplay, I must hand it to them that it's one of the best game soundtracks I've ever heard.

Finished Bastion. Definitely worth a playthrough. There's some annoyances in the game that get under my skin, but those are outmatched by the sublime graphics, music, narration and story. The game definitely grew on me more and more the more I played it.

At the moment I've been playing WKC 2, 2Worlds2, and Harvest Moon Save the Homeland. None of these are exactly good games, but I like all of them for the town/house building aspects. I've been suckered into so many bad games because they have that aspect, and usually they aren't even a major part of the game.

Incidentally I hope everyone else in this thread is playing Dark Souls right now, because its out for PC, its a good port, and you no longer have any excuse.

What?

I know! It's crazy!

Aye-aye, sir! I'm doing my part!

Really, making so many excuses about how bad a port it was going to be was probably a great marketing move from From Software, because as it turns out it isn't nearly as bad as I feared. Yes, the graphic options are really limited and the framerate is capped at 30 (this is the one thing that actually bothers me) and the resolution they used makes no sense (though there is already a mod that fixes that), but performance (at least so far, including New Londo which I understand was one of the problematic areas) is really good in my 3~4 year old PC.

Hell, even playing with a keyboard and a mouse is nowhere near as terrible as I had expected. A higher framerate would probably make the camera less awkward to control, but even then it's completely playable, I even managed to beat the first boss thing without that much of a hassle. I have certainly seen MUCH worse ports in this regard (Binary Domain, I'm looking at you).

And the game, at least during the first couple hours, is every bit as awesome as everyone has been saying all this time. It's challenging and relentless like very very few other things I've seen, which makes leveling up and overcoming obstacles tremendously rewarding; and the setting is rather interesting --the whole living-in-an-undead-limbo thing kind of reminds me of The Void, which I really like.

I would've appreciated having a manual to explain a bunch of stuff I'm still trying to make sense of, though (What does "being hollowed" mean and why doesn't it allow me to "kindle"? And what the hell is "kindle", for that matter?).


EDIT: By the way, for any exo-Americans out there (like me), the game has disappeared from the Steam store a few days ago, but you can still buy it at GamersGate and you will be able to activate it on Steam without a problem (that's how I did it and the price was even better).

Hollowed means you're not human. When you are human you can summon other players to your game, but you can also be invaded by other players as well (Dark Souls also has a couple NPC invaders). Humans can also kindle fires. Kindling is exactly what it sounds like. You add Humanity to a campfire, and it burns brighter. A brighter fire will fill your Estus bottle up farther.

Cool, you rock. So that's the use of that black light thingie that adds to what I assume is the humanity counter when consumed, then. I really like the way this game handles the XP/cash system with souls (and how fragile your grasp on them is too), by the way. It makes resource management quite the serious business.

Another question: What's the use of belonging to a group (guild? can't remember the exact word)? Some guy welcomed me to his and he also taught me how to shrug, but I don't know what's the use of that (or any of the other gestures I can make for that matter).

Do you think of something else I should know about the gameplay basics? (Other than "don't be so stupid as to get in a fight with a huge orc thing whose health bar barely reacts to your attacks when armed with a knife and a small wooden shield", because I learned that by myself last night :P) (And I also learned the one about "don't approach what appears to be a dead dragon that sits on a bunch of tasty tasty loot, because it might very well be actually just sleeping, and not a deep sleep either").

Those are covenants. You just joined the Way of the White, which most people have. When you're human you're more likely to see summon signs put down by other people who are in the same covenant, and your sign will be seen more by people who also belong to your covenant. Some covenants give you access to exclusive spells, others give you exclusive items if you rank up in them (which you usually do by turning in uncommon items the covenant wants). Don't worry about locking yourself out of items or spells or anything; it's impossible to get everything without at least 2 new-game pluses anyways.

For the most part Covenants are related to PVP (Forest, Darkmoon, and Gravelords especially).

I don't know how far you are into the game, but eventually you will find a lightning spear. It will look like an excellent weapon. Do not use it. Find another weapon you like using and upgrade that enough so that you can put lightning on it instead. Ironically around the place you gain access to lightning weapons is also where you fight the boss lightning weapons are mostly useless against. That's just how Dark Souls rolls.

Upgrade your stats enough to hold a weapon and a shield you like one handed, and no further. Endurance (stamina? whatever influences your green energy bar) is your most important stat.

Dark Souls has three kinds of magic: Miracle, Sorcery, and Pyromancy. Pyromancy IS NOT influenced by any of your stats.

Also you absolutely need to learn counter and riposte timing for knights. The tiny little target shield you can find in the Anor slums has twice the counter window of other small shields. Roll and backstab would also be good, but its trickier and more used for PVP.

I don't know what the controls are for the PC, but on PS3 the select button would open the gesture menu. It's mostly used for communication with people you summon/who summon you. It's standard to bow when you meet someone in either co-op or planned PVP. If someone invades your world just murder the hell out of them as soon as you see them.

Shows up fine for me here.

That's because Brazil is a first world country :P By the way, I received confirmation it doesn't show up in Argentina either.

Finished Sam & Max: Season One. I understand why people like Sam and Max, even though I never played Sam & Max Hit the Road.

The characters have lots of personality, but truth be known, Hit the Road was one of Lucasfilm's weaker adventures.

I remember doing at least the last third of that game with a walkthrough by my side.

Maybe it was just me starting to become jaded with adventure logic by that time, but in my memory the level of obscurity and nonsense in Hit the Road's puzzles could rival the worst Sierra game any day of the week.

I beat that one without any help of walkthroughs or such, but the first Monkey Island took me much more time and I could only beat it after reading how to solve that disembodied head puzzle.

I used to be the first one in line to whine about how stupidly easy games are nowadays, through absolute fault of the f'ing console retards, whose wimpy, malfunctional, jelly-brains the entire industry aims to cater to.

Then, along came Dark Souls, a game that belongs in the console world through and through and is only incidentally making a late appearance in my platform of choice; and goddamnit I don't remember having my ass kicked this badly even in my first run through the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Right now I'm going with a second character (a bandit), because I started as a thief and that came to a dead end, I hit a wall in a way that it had only happened before in the famously relentless The Void, and I had no choice but to start over. And I was only at the Undead Burg. You can laugh at me right here. By then, I learned that lowly stupid noobs like myself are best advised to start with either a bandit or the pyromaniac one (which I'll probably do a test drive of soon), and that the thief is actually about the second worst choice for a first run.

Thanks to the good advice of our trusty Lain Crowley here, and then to a deep study of the beginner articles in some wiki and a couple forums, now I know A LOT more about what the hell I'm doing and what and how I should be going about. I'm still at the Burg, mind you (blame having been really busy making drawings for a new game in the last couple weeks, as well as me sucking ass at this I guess) (also my gamepad is no help either), and I died about a hundred times to the Taurus demon guy; but last night I had what I assume is the rite of passage of the "Souls" player: At some point something just clicked in my brain and in my hands, and suddenly I noticed I had gotten much better at the game. I was breezing through the lower enemies, even going after them for the sake of farming, parrying and that countering thing and backstabbing like a bawss; and I came THIS CLOSE to kill the Taurus, he had about 3% of his health left, but then I got trapped in a corner and had no way to get out --or even get up long enough to land one sorry blow.

I left the game at that point because it was about 5 AM, but now I absolutely kind of think I know what I'm doing, and that guy won't live for much longer (oddly enough, on the other hand, that black knight at the end of a narrow hall still scares me pantsless and I couldn't bring myself to try and defeat him).

Like I said before, however, this game desperately needs a good manual or at the very least a more detailed tutorial; there is a lot of very very important stuff I had to find out by digging around the interwebs (hell, I didn't even know I could jump!), and I don't think that's how a game should work. I'm old like that.

At any rate, it was quite the gamble to buy this on release day, but I'm happy I did: This was absolutely worth the monies. Screw the technical annoyances of an admittedly poor port; the game could display in blocky 640x480 and 16 colors for all I care, and it would still be seven kinds of awesome. It's fascinating just how much of a happy masochist a gamer can be. I'm genuinely scared of what the hell Demon's Souls -which I hear is even tougher- is like. And I have a newfound respect for console players. PS3 ones at least :P

Personally I find that Dark Souls is the harder game. Dark Souls was meticulously designed to kill the invading player. You will constantly find rooms and situations where you're sacrificed to the whims of the designer. It's kind of like those Mario ROM hacks, but more fair.

Demon's, on the other hand, is kind of designed without thought of the player at all. The world existed before the player got there, and it is apathetic to the player's presence. This leads to several long sections of the game where nothing tries to kill you at all, and that's something I felt was missing in Dark.

Goddamn, I love Dark Souls. I really, really need to get back to my second playthrough sometime. Maybe by now I've forgotten where most of the traps are, so I can die a million times all over again. :)

I spent about half a day playing today, and I'm doing pretty fine --slow but steady. I just rang the bell at the Undead Whatever Tower Thing, after a boss fight that had a lot of tense building up but ended up being almost a flat-out cakewalk, thanks to the help of the good Prince Sunnychest (it was probably the only fight in the entire game so far in which I didn't die even once, in fact I went through it with my humanity intact).

Now I'm just backtracking and getting some loose ends tied up before I decide where to go next. There's this thunderbolt-casting thing underneath the blacksmith, which seems pretty dangerous; and then there's the entire New Londo Ruins area, which I've barely explored. Oh, and there's some fat guy at the bottom of the Taurus Demon tower that kicked my ass a while ago, I might give him a try now.

I'm taking things with a lot of calm, because I've been human for so long that it would break my heart to lose it again (which I'm pretty sure will happen the moment I step into a new area).

In other news, I wanted to become a swordsman (woman, actually), but I ended up favoring the battle axe a lot. It's shaping up to be my definitive weapon of choice (I already upgraded it like three times). Though I just found this hammer/pickaxe hybrid weapon that seems promising too (it basically feels just like the axe, only it promises to make lot of damage to metal armors, which would be nice to help my crippling fear of those large dark knights).

Playing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood on PC, about a halfway through, and OMG I've got about 6 000 screenshots taken ALREADY, how am I going to sort this MESS?!

I'm currently skipping back and forth between Phantasy Star II (from the GBA Phantasy Star Collection) and Michigan: Report from Hell.

PSII is just a grind fest at the moment as I try to get my characters up to snuff for the last stretch of the game. I'd be lying if I said I was enjoying it, but my OCD of having to finish all of my games I own at some point is forcing me forward now.

Michigan is one of those games where you're unsure if you really dislike it or love it to bits for being so bad. I think I'm in the latter crowd. Being a big Grasshopper Manufacture fanboy, it's hard for me not to like it. What I like about their games is that it feels like you have to take a second to just soak it all in and kind of relearn how to play games.

This one is a weird one. Basically the premise is that of a standard survival horror game, but the execution is that of a first person point and click adventure game with action elements. Very strange. You play as a cameraman, and you film everything, getting points for either filming suspense, immoral and violent things or up skirt panty shots of the news anchors. It's hard to explain why I like it, but I guess that the odd premise, half broken context sensitivity and the voice acting (which makes porn stars look good!) all come together enough to charm me into this "just a little more" state of mind.

I tried to play The Longest Journey but I gave up on it near the end of chapter 3. The game tries too hard to be Gabriel Knight and in doing so copies along all the huge flaws that were present in that game.

The graphics are good for when it was released (and have stand the test of time) the voice acting is quite good and the characters are definitely less one dimensional than in most games. I found the story rather off-putting, it tries way too hard to be "epic" and everything at once (fantasy, cyberpunk, philosophical, spiritual) creating some incoherent blend. There are some cool parts in it though so I had decided to just put up with it and see where it took me.

But in the end the retarded adventure game logic made me abandon the game. Particularly at times when I found myself stuck for the exact same reasons I always got stuck in Gabriel Knight: 1) having no goals at all from time to time and just having to chance upon some random event that ends the current day 2) Having to click on things that weren't previously clickable 3) Half the puzzles are absolutely retarded and illogical.

This game has been on my to play list for ages, but in the end it was quite the disappointment.

Funny that both Gabriel Knight and Longest Journey are among my favourite games of all time. :P Also it's kind of sad that you stopped at Chapter 3. You didn't even reach Arcadia!

I did see a bit of Arcadia, had to play a delivery boy for a map maker there.

Some of the more ridiculous puzzles I came upon in the last play session are the one for retrieving the rubber duck, how to use the rubber duck, replacing a human eye with one that was about a tenth of the size while the owner of said eye spent literally hours on the toilet, popping out his eye every 10 seconds, and the one with kerosene covered candy. None of those made any sense whatsoever and because of that forced me to use a walkthrough.

Finished some Mass Effect 3 multiplayer matches yesterday. I'm mostly playing multiplayer when these special operations take place during weekends. The squad goal for Operation Vigilance was extremely easy, I will get a commendation pack for sure.

Team Fortress 2 is next. I haven't played the new co-op mode yet...

I finished Rage. The shooting feels right and is much fun. The rest... not so much. I don't like racing, I don't like boring worlds and I really don't like stupid side quests which just send you back into already cleared dungeons. At least none of this is mandatory, aside from a bit driving.

Currently playing (and at the moment trying to submit): Kidō Keisatsu Patlabor: Game Edition for ps1.

I seem to be slow with my game submissions simply because I want to play the game enough to get an actual feel for it myself, as opposed to trusting text descriptions online. But it gives me a nicer feel on the inside when I can get behind what's written in the description, since I've actually played it myself. :)

Sadly, lately it seems all I tend to add is Japanese ps1 games and the rare game for other consoles, so it takes a while for someone as Japanese impared as me to actually understand what I'm doing half the time. :p

Currently downloading the Hawken alpha! Can't wait!

It's an audio/visual blast. There's nothing quite like it. But it's so intense I can't really play it for long durations. After ShootMania: Storm with its Quake/Unreal-like fluid controls it certainly takes getting used to these chunks of metal.

The game also shows that it might be high time for a PC upgrade...

Taking a break from Bastion, I started on Dungeon Keeper 2. I never really could get into the first game, but somehow this edition clicked with me. About one third through the campaign now.

That's funny, because for me it was the complete opposite. I loved the first one, but the second one just left me kind of shrugging my shoulders for some reason.

Hawken has turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. As mentioned audio/visually it's probably the best game out there and it's a competent shooter. It just simply isn't as fun to play as, say, Unreal Tournament, or recently ShootMania: Storm. In the end I just like fluent controls that let me do what I instinctively want instantly rather than having to "fight" with my avatar to get it to do what I want. Hell, if I wanted that I would've bought a console ¬.¬ I definitely enjoyed this more than more sim-type mech games such as Mech Warrior though. I never liked those, for the same reason I never liked space sims: lack of level design.

I just finished Knights of the Old Republic II, but had to realize that the Restoration Mod did not install correctly :( Well, of course it was still about three times better than its predecessor (which I played right before).

I planned to concentrate on Black Mesa next, but I decided to celebrate the Project Eternity kickstarter by replaying Alpha Protocol, one of the best games ever made.

I bought Dark Souls on PC, a game I already own on console, because, I don't know, I'm probably a chump. Maybe I was just looking for an excuse to take another crack at it (I never did finish the console version), or maybe I just wanted to play Blight Town without the abysmal framerate. In any case, it's as fantastic as I remember. My only issue is that I've never been invaded by a non-laggy player. I blame GFWL, but regardless, it's frustrating to have a malicious player suddenly teleport behind me and put a sword in my back.

I've also been playing FTL: Faster than Light. I only heard it was a Kickstarter game after I bought it. The trailer bored me, but I decided to buy it after I saw a bunch of my online friends playing it. I'm glad I gave it a chance, as it's really an interesting little game. It's very simple at its core, but it scratches an itch that other, more hardcore space sims don't. It shines best when things go belly up, and you have to scramble your crew around to desperately try and keep your ship from falling apart. Very addicting. I hope to see more done with the mechanics that they've set down.

Yesterday i went out and got myself a MiFi dongle, which means I am now on Xbox Live and PSN! Don't really have many PS3 titles, so most of my online activities will be on my 360.

Bit of a Bad first day on XBL, truth be told. Went to play Gears of War 3, but needed to get the title update first. Which corrupted my save games. If you've read my posts in here, you'll know I put a hell of a lot of effort getting some of the high end unlocks, getting up to level 50+. Also lost my single player saves, too. Needless to say, not to happy.

Other than that, I've been playing some gears online, but I've largely spending my time on Live downloading the stack on DLC extras from the limited editions I've brought.

Today in our Dark Souls report: I'm finally, officially glad to report that Blighttown runs quite nicely --if it runs this well in my PC, you'll need a REALLY crappy one to get any serious chugging. There are some noticeable drops here and there, but not much more than pretty much any time particle effects are involved elsewhere. I'm suspecting the reports of terrible framerates were rather exaggerated.

I'm amazed at how good-ish I got at this game. To think the first hollow at the asylum killed me three times in a row, and now I'm parrying and backstabbing like nobody's business. The infamous Capra Demon went down on my first go (what a terrible room design, by the way, the camera is hands down the worst enemy in that fight) and the formidable-looking Gaping Dragon went down fairly easily as well, once I figured what I was supposed to do. I'm still mustering the courage to face the black knight in the Parish and that damned Havel, though. One-hit kills still creep me out.

I'm looking forward to start all over again to see whether I'm actually getting better or it's just the leveling/weapon upgrading at work. And to try a more faith/intelligence-focused character; from what little ranged combat I can do now, I imagine the game will change quite a bit.

Right now I'm entering some cave with lots of spiderwebs and people being used for some creepy form of egg-laying, so I guess the mandatory giant spider that every fantasy game and their mother needs to have is coming soon.

Oh, and whoever came up with those giant mosquitoes should be thrown out a 13th story window, goddamnit.

Well, as a follow up to my grief with gears of war 3 corruption, I've just found out that as a result of XBL not syncing my account properly, I've lost achievements from 19 games out of the 96 that I earned achievements from. All I can say is **"bravo, Microsoft"**. You can kiss goodbye to me ever paying for anything XBL related.

So Mothership Zeta complete. Twice. Had to give it a second run through to catch the last achievement, alien archivist. Need to get all the recordings of captives, and missed a few first time.

Anyhows, that just shows how short it is. 2 complete runthroughs in, ooh, ~8 leisurely hours with breaks and a cooked meal in between, and isn't really good at anything. Worse ways of killing time, though.

Anyway, downloaded Hearthfire after I completed Zeta, and will get started on that tomorrow. Also noticed Heathfire and Dawnguard aren't in the database. Will work on them for now.

So this is the "what are you playing now" thread? (Sorry, only recently started poking around forums here.)

In my case, Two Worlds 2. Level covermount in August, so said might as well get it, though annoyingly they didn't remove the DRM, like they tended to do before (haven't gotten any since 2010 though, and noticed that some issues since then came with Steam or even Origin keys for activation, so guess that changed, and blah), so it still requires activation. But uh well... What I can say about it is that it's a real time sink, though likely less so than the first one, but a pointless one.

The world may actually be bigger, but there's far less reason to explore it, and actually quite frustrating to try. Need to "open" locations when it wants you to, half the doors and even some chests are barred till you get a quest sending you there, no more ghosts popping up at night (but some creatures respawn, turning a somewhat enjoyable double exploration into "why even bother?"), lots of basically empty places, areas reused like crazy (seriously, go through a few dungeons and see perfectly identical large chambers, with perfectly identical little paths that go nowhere off to the side, perfectly identical center rooms in ruins, etc. ... and in a fair number of those dungeons there's NOTHING to make it worth your while, not a single chest or item or anything) and no reason to try one over the other, with just a few monster types inhabiting large areas and lootable content leveled (chests themselves leveled too... level 1 lockpicking, most locks tend to be improved (level 4), take it to level 10, all locks but the quest-related ones (which now end up weaker) suddenly become master locks (level 7)... and if you have few picks and break one in a lock, the chest in question will contain a lockpick on top of whatever other content it has). Then again, lootable content was leveled in the first one too, and far more poorly so (simply setting the level of what you find as a bit above your own, but at times without doing much for the stats - now at least there are set items that start appearing once you get close to the min level to equip them), but... it still felt more interesting because it wasn't frustrating to explore, largely because you COULD go anywhere and do anything. Now, as I said, lots of locked places, mountains and cliffs barring everything, poor jumping abilities and even less control (lots of momentum in whatever you do) so can't climb your way through, horses have turned from neat to one hell of a chore (and only available in the chapter 1 area anyway) that I just did without...

Plus the same atrocious voice acting... which is somewhat sad actually, because at times the writing is above the rest of it. Some pretty neat books and journals and notes and so on to read and a few nice twists in tales, plus the odd reference in that may get a smile from you in the most random quest (questing system quite MMO-like at times really). The Monty Python one is cool :)) But as soon as somebody starts talking... oh boy.

Hm, ok, I'll hold on to this piece for when I'll review it once I'm done.

Otherwise, I sort of stuck to freeware games this year...

I bought 2worlds2 on PSN for $10 when it was on sale, and it's a $10 kind of game. What I can't get over, however, is how short the protagonist's arms are. They're so short! Like tiny baby arms! The custom characters in the multiplayer mode don't have that problem.

Level's 15 RON (~$4.25), so got it for less than half that :p But it could have been a better game if it'd just allow exploration just like in the first... and get horses everywhere and remove that right click to accelerate (but careful not to overdo it and get thrown off) crap on them.

Ha, now that you said it I notice, but never have so far. Robes and staff probably make it less obvious. Noticed how tiny the heads were in the first, at least this seems better now.

EDIT: What I find funny is how there's no reaction to you. I wander around in full necromancer garb without a care in the world even though necromancy is supposedly feared and hated by almost everyone and the mage's guild as a whole is outlawed. Was sitting in front of one of the Hatmandor town criers, in same full necro garb, listening to him telling people that, by order of the emperor, all mages or possible magical activity must be reported and stamped out. Um, yeah, hi there :D (Plus the arena guy, warning me about mage opponents as being something else... Ya think?)

And done... Hell of a final battle there. But, um, after the credits you're just dumped back into the world to do whatever? Says epilogue, there's that "tomorrow" quest in log that doesn't point to anywhere if you click it, so nothing to do, just letting you continue in case you'd still want to? And that entire last continent, bar those 2 bits, is unexplorable? Weird...

45h, 46 with poking around a bit looking for smth to do in epilogue, according to its counter on save. Had over 100 in the first one...

Been playing Borderlands 2 with a friend. It's good fun in coop. Not sure if it would hold up in single player. I wasn't very enthusiastic about the art style when the shift to cartoonesque was first announced during Borderlands 1's development, I must admit it works really well. It also runs surprisingly well on my PC which was having troubles with Hawken and ShootMania.

The whole loot mechanic requires something of a mindset switch after playing Diablo III earlier this year. The stats of the weapons are completely incomparable due to a multitude of invisible stats. The only way to really find out if a weapon is good is to try it out. But since you constantly find dozens of guns you're not going to try them all out so you're likely vendoring weapons which might be better than what you currently have. The mindset switch is that you have to tell yourself that it doesn't really matter. As long as it has good accuracy, damage, exploding bullets and a decent clip size it'll do just fine. You can keep some more specialized weapons for special situations.

Now installing Dishonored. Can't wait!

Dishonored is amazing so far. It doesn't really do anything new, but it takes some of the best elements of Thief, Deus Ex, BioShock and Assassin's Creed and turns it into one awesome game that can easily keep up with the competition. I must say that my expectations for this game were insanely high, and I haven't been let down so far. I also already look forward for a second playthrough in an attempt to go for the ghost (nobody ever saw you) and/or no-kills goals. Right now I'm trying to play stealthily, but a couple of times the shit hit the fan and I just let it role. Other times the temptation to kill was just to big, or the only way to quickly dispose of an unconscious body was to drop it off the balustrade...

I must say it is a bit unclear what constitutes a as a kill. Guards sometimes charge to attack rats and then die (and get gruesomely torn to pieces until nothing is left) which doesn't count as a kill; but other times I unleash rats onto guards and the same thing happens (or rats start eating unconscious bodies I leave behind), but I'm not sure that's allowed for the no-kill way of playing.

Completed my playthrough of Dishonored. Absolutely loved it. I'll want to do another one at some point to try out some of the different play styles. I'll let it rest for a while though as I'm trying to cut back on gaming a little bit.

Not sure what I'll play next. I still have some behemoths like Fallout: New Vegas and Crusader Kings lying around, but I don't want to get hooked on something large right now.

I'm going on vacation starting this weekend, so probably I won't be starting anything new for a while anyway.

Cut back on gaming? Aw :(

I seem to have found myself giving Baldur's Gate (the first one) another go, though I was saying that it's the game I have lying around that I'm least likely to continue. Really don't like the mechanics, and that Cloakwood part (where I stopped) is just dreadful. But at least I cleared out all the junk I had stored in chests to sell off, after uncountable trips (keep in mind that it takes about a game week for a round-trip to the inn, with 2-4 random fights on the way, including one hell of a (very frequent) one against 2 wyverns and 3 giant spiders, died in that too many times to count, plus however many (admittedly very easy ones) there are till you somehow manage to rest in the mines, since you get interrupted some 4 times out of 5 or so), and did a couple of quests I had left off (and written in a file on my desktop since I gave up, since the journal it has is useless). The next main quest part... very not keen on trying.
The fact that it's the non-GOG version and looks wonky doesn't help either, but at least worked so far... Been told by the person who nagged me a few years ago till I eventually started it that she wasn't able to finish it on newer OSs because it crashes at some point in chapter 5 or 6 and no fixes she found worked, but didn't get there yet. It'll suck if I do and it does...

If it's the problem which I think it is, you just need to have the disc in the tray or mounted, since it cannot play the video from HDD or something like that.

I am currently working on the first real mission and the game is absolutely fantastic! Thanks to lean keys the stealth works so much better than the third-person cover mechanic of Human Revolution. Exploring the levels is great. I almost feel like I'm playing a modern Thief II.

I go out on a limb and declare it Game of the Year right here and now.

Yeah, Dishonored is really awesome, finished yesterday myself. Two incidental kills through the whole game and ghost on almost every mission. Will probably replay it later, top difficulty.

I never touched Thief series, is it as captivating as Deus Ex or Dishonored?

Yes! I played the whole series two or three years ago, so nostalgia is no issue in my evaluation. The games have the same advantages as Deus Ex and (presumably) Dishonored: great open levels (and especially in Thief II, large ones!); awesome atmosphere and many optional things to discover. There are many tools and ways in the levels which allow for multiple approaches. The only things the Thief series does not have are classic side quests (well, Thief III has a few) and suitable combat oriented approaches.

Thief II is the second (or third, depending on my mood) game I have ever played.

By the way, there is a fan-made expansion for Thief 2 that's *very* highly regarded among fans of the series, it's called T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age and it's of course free.



I've been playing a bit of Dishonored myself in whatever little free time I had lately, and I am having as much of a blast as apparently everyone else is. I decided to turn off most markers, indicators, highlights and helps because the heavy hand-holding ruined my DXHR experience (only noticed how badly when I played through the DLC with everything off). Not knowing where to go enhances the exploration aspect greatly. I'm trying to non-lethal my way through, as usual, but I decided to man up and go with the flow whenever I screw up. That the combat is quite fun helps with that (though after playing Dark Souls it feels extremely rudimentary --the parrying window is enormous, but I keep screwing it up because I wait until the last moment to make the move, DS-style :P )

What I'm finding the most appealing part is that even though the powers give the stealth a very interesting twist and make up for a crazy varied and inventive gameplay, the game is still pretty solid to play the regular way (i.e.: on-foot sneaking, knocking down, stashing bodies). At some point I ran out of blue potions in the middle of a mission and I was like, OK, I'm screwed, but it turns out it was completely possible -and just as fun- to stealth-finish it old-school style. I'm actually wondering how viable would it be to play through the entire thing without using any powers.

I'm loving reading people with the heart, by the way. That's an awesome detail there.

And the city. The city! VIKTOR ANTONOV YOU COMPLETE ME


I've also been playing an even smaller bit of XCOM on the side. I already did a bunch of missions, but I have the feeling I'm still at a post-tutorial-yet-still-tutorial-ish state, where people still give me way too much help and explanations. The game itself, the mix of strategy and action, is incredibly fun and sleek to play. Can't wait to get to the point where the game starts throwing the really tough stuff my way.

When it was released, I wasn't into Thief - that steampunk mix didn't sound right to me. And then I played the demo - and got hooked instantly.

With those unofficial engine patches released recently and winter coming, go back if you haven't played Thief. It should be played in darkened room (those long evenings coming up). It REQUIRES concentration, so this isn't a game for ADHD crowd, as you get into the story by eavesdropping conversations while evading guards' sight. 3D sound (quad speakers will do) is a must. So you need a quiet evening in order to focus - luxury not for everyone. You don't have crying children in diapers?

Finished playing Dawnguard, achievements included. Played the vampire side, and am glad to Bethesda did vampires better in this than they did in Oblivion. That said, I prefer playing as a werewolf. All the difference amounts to is the option to range attack, but that's so weak its just faster to kill with your talons. You can reanimate corpses, but why would you want to? Plus werewolves out and out move faster.

Story wise, it isn't that great. Cant knock it too hard, it serves its purpose, I suppose, but considering how great the Shivering Isles DLC for Oblivion was, I would of expected more.

Verdict: don't expect many new weapons or a great story and play as the Dawnguard. Playing as a vampire, your not missing much. A so so effort, but a good a way as any to kill time, especially if your aching for more quests for Skyrim.

While I'm still waiting for word on the HDD (last time they kept it for 15 days to replace it with one that was DoA... thankfully they then only needed one day to replace that) and not reinstalling anything of what I have, I went to a hypermarket today that I haven't been to since last year, ended up also looking through the games they had and was quite shocked to find Fate of the World: Tipping Point among them, for a mere 37.9 RON (8.4 EUR, 10.8 USD)... And since I was curious about that, said might as well, particularly at that price.

Nice touch with the biodegradable (in landfill conditions) casing, FSC-certified paper and last pages of the manual being taken up with ads / support for Sea Shepherd, Viva con Agua and vegetarianism(/PETA - logo in the corner).

Doubt I'll do much better than Indra (as per that review of the original game), or any of those who wrote the other reviews I read (and submitted) for either version, but hey. More of a show of support / matter of principle really, buying this, and now that I have it and I'm not doing much else these days...

I've been playing Baldur's Gate for about a week or so; as a Ranger. This game gives me such good vibes that I might actually finish it this time without taking a break.

Yeah, I have a problem when it comes to games... I start one game (let's call this game X), I play it for a good few days, a week (assuming that it's a game that takes that long to play/complete), but at some point I decide that I want to play a bit of something else for a while. Then I get immersed into that other game; after a while I yet again go to something else completely.

By the time I remember that I was originally playing X, which I genuinely liked, a month or so has passed and I don't even remember where I left the story and what the hell I was supposed to the next in the game. Faced with a situation that I feel breaks the immersion - getting back in the middle of a story I left behind a good while ago, I usually decide to (a) start again from the beginning (this is particularly true for RPGs and adventure games) or (b) leave the game for some other time.

This is why I played Morrowind for the best part of 4 years, I knew the setting better than my neighbourhood probably, I could tell you exactly where everything was from memory, yet I only finished the main story-line once in those 4 years. Yeah, that's a bit daft :)

Now that I had just somehow managed to pick BG back up before the failure, thinking I'll go back to calling it the game I have lying around that I'm least likely to get back to if this continues. Was hard enough to get back to it once, but to do it twice... No good vibes for me...

I usually give up when stuck or fed up with something. Particularly if stuck, I can get back to it weeks or months later and get it right on first try, that happened a lot of times. If fed up, meh, may or may not get back, and if I do it may well be years after giving up, not weeks and months.

Morrowind is an example of the latter here. Started it in 2008, found it outstanding at first, but then the respawns and the need to keep track of what you use to maximize your level up bonuses (and to some lesser extent the need to run around finding shops that can afford to buy what you have to sell) had me fed up with it quite suddenly... and I put it away till earlier this year. Picked it back up then completely on a whim, and almost like I never left, knew exactly what I was doing and where I was going (even if it wasn't in quest log), long-term memory's not a problem (unlike short-term, will turn around for a moment and completely forget I meant to do something with something that now ended up out of my line of sight, will remember it hours or even days later), went through all the repetitive training to get my char with everything of any import at or close to max, did a few more quests, explored a few more things... then all of a sudden gave up again. I was somewhere in the northwest, looking for a shop to sell an expensive sword to. And again too fed up of the same fights every single time I pass by an area. Wonder if it'll take 4 more years to try again.

I never had that problem with Morrowind; I'm not sure if it was because I never needed that much money, but what I do remember is that at one point I had this large collection of weapons and armor in a lodge in Solstheim (the island in the Bloodmoon expansion).

...spoiler(s) to follow... :D

Then again, I also knew where to find Creeper. This was a scamp merchant who lived in a house in Caldera and he always had lots of gold, plus he offered you full price for your items. I found him quite early on, with the obligatory "OMG, I talking scamp!" reaction on my part. He was a bit of an Easter Egg in plain sight. There was also a trader in an Ashlander camp (can't remember which one) that had a lot gold on him.

And of course, there's the Talking Mudcrab. The best merchant in the game; 10000 gold on him, full price selling. This one I didn't find on my own; I learned about him from the Internet. He would be very hard to find by accident, since he's - if I recall correctly - on a small island off the south-eastern cost of Vvardenfell and he looks (and is labeled) as a regular mudcrab.

It's been 6 years since I last played it and I still remember quite a lot from this game. Apparently my long term memory is fine.

Know of Creeper (has 5k) and the Mudcrab (this one also after glancing on-line), and that the high class alchemist in Balmora has 3k, and that the fletcher in Vivec (official mod) has 8k. Not sure which Ashlander you mean though. Bit of a pain to get to the mudcrab though, and either way getting full price for your items sure is an issue when you have ebony or daedric stuff, or some special items.

I've checked now on the UESP wiki; there's a guy called Ababael Timsar-Dadisun in a yurt in the Zainab Camp. He's got 9000 gold on him. He also has a mercantile skill of 100 and is supposed to be the author of "The Buying Game" skill book.

I unwillingly admit to having a similar problem, despite the signs of OCD ;) Sometimes I take a break not because I'm stuck (adventures) but when I feel exhausted by repetitive gameplay (that's why I hate "grinding" mechanics, so I stay away from MMORPGs). When the break gets long enough the immersion is gone, I barely recall story and all those subquests/secrets, so that I start the game from scratch, sometimes after years. Recently I've finished Fantasy General and Duke Nukem Manhattan Project, restarting them after getting halfway years ago. I've finished System Shock on 3rd? attempt.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that it's not even the fact that I don't remember where I left off in the game; it's just that if I don't play a game for long enough, the immersion - or whatever you want to call it - is gone and I simply no longer feel like continuing. Take Arx Fatalis for example - I haven't played it in 3 months, but I know exactly were I was (I think); I simply don't feel like getting back into it even though it was a perfectly good game.

With Oblivion, I probably started the game 10 times before I finished the main quest. I stopped playing it shortly thereafter; I've kept those saves for 2 or 3 years now on the off chance that at some point I'll want to continue all the other quests in a world with none of those damned Oblivion gates. :)

Same with Fallout 3. I even have some Planescape Torment saves. And the weirdest one... Septerra Core. I fuzzing love that game, I was probably 90% of the way through the game when for some reasons I stopped; I still have the saves.

Yeah... keeping saves I know I'm very unlikely to continue. Nice. I almost never have this problem with shooters; most of the games I've finished recently are FPSs and that's not even a favourite genre of mine.

There is this issue with games that require you to plan ahead and think, mixed with perfectionism and/or OCD. Make you increasingly anxious that you'll mess up, you find yourself juggling too much data and second-guessing your every step, and at some point it's too much of a chore to continue. Or at least that's how it is for me. Shooters, on the other hand, don't require too much planning ahead, but generally excellent reflexes (which I don't have in the least) and quick thinking on your feet (not a strong point either). I stay well away from them anyway, don't like guns in any game anyway.

About the games mentioned here... The first System Shock I just started, went "ugh, can't deal with this anymore" at the interface and gave up. The second one I started, trudged along for a while, but then called it quits. Respawns again. Really hate that! Also the scarcity of useful stuff, and trade-off between developing further and immediate supplies. Ugh. See above, second- (and third-, and fourth-)guessing every move. Plus the pseudo-postapocalyptic setting, no thanks.
Arx Fatalis was all right, quite sure I finished it without taking breaks. Nice atmosphere... And neat when those guards see you and then you hide and they start looking, calling out for each other, asking you to come out because they won't do anything to you (and then laugh)... What you could do with items, like cooking, was nice too. Crashed like crazy though, but still managed to get through it. Secret spells rock.
Oblivion, never played it... And don't plan to till I'll finish Morrowind, which at this rate may well be never. And not sure I'll want to even after I'll finish it, though it is there on my list somewhere.
Fallout 3, no interest. Played some of the 2nd at some point, but gave up. Postapocalyptic setting, guns, no, really not my thing.
Planescape: Torment, yup, finished, and not sure if without taking breaks or with just one for Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide (which was done in a week or two). End of 2009 - start of 2010, but better late than never. Great game.
Septerra Core was neat too. Not keen on JRPG mechanics, but that one really worked. Card magic system was cool too, and you sure need to make good use of it at the end. Again think I didn't take breaks.

On an OCD related topic... all this talking about Morrowind has given me a sudden urge to install the game when I get home. MUST... FIGHT IT... MUST FINISH... BALDUR'S GATE... Control yourself, for goodness' sake :P

Speaking of, what about this piece? Not that there's anything new in it, of course.

I've skimmed that article; as you've said, nothing new.

To be honest, I no longer bother with all these endless (and I'd say pointless) debates, discussions and analyses about the effects and impact of gaming on --insert social or psychological aspect here--. Are they addictive or not? Do they promote violence, social misconduct and whatever else? Can computer games be considered works of art? Are there benefits to playing games? Is playing games a productive or otherwise fulfilling hobby? Are they even worthwhile?

All these things and many more have been talked to death and it's obvious there's never going to be a consensus; is there even such a thing? As always, just people's more or less informed opinions.

Of course, people will never get tired of justifying why what they enjoy is good and why what they don't like and/or understand is bad, m'kay?

Playing Drakan. Played it way back, but it was a illegal rip from a compilation disc that would crash after a certain level so I never was able to finish it. Not as good as I remember it, but still worth a play. The similarities with Divinity 2: Ego Draconis are striking.

This is probably the last game on my list of games from the 90s that I didn't finish or never picked up back then and have been on my should play list for decades.

Next, the list from the 00s?

Yup :)

You're lucky. I've still got tons of those (

I myself am playing through Planescape: Torment for the first time at the moment.

Treasure that (ah, those last two paragraphs in that piece... ain't that a fact?).

Uninstalled Drakan. I got about two thirds through it, but it became a drag. While the whole combination between playing Rynn on foot and flying Arakh is fun, the story is just downright terrible. The voice acting and cutscenes are just sad, but easily skipped. The gameplay starts to drag on in the second half though. None of the puzzles are really interesting. They rarely go beyond, pull the lever and a door opens. The graphics are very impressive for 1999, but all the enemies are a bit boring and the easiest way to dispose of them is by abusing their poor AI and pathfinding.

In the second half of the game the gameplay takes a major dip and resorts in finding macguffin after macguffin without any reward except allowing the player access to the next area. If you're going to make me find important items at least let them give me cool new abilities (as in Zelda) to make me want them. All the things I found were just keys and didn't even make sense within the story. I need to do a trial to get a crystal, but to start the trial I need two items by the name of RandomNameGeneratorInput#1 and RandomNameGeneratorInput#2, but to get one of those I first need to find the six crystals that form the key and... Blergh... As I said, I uninstalled it. Started out nice, but in the end fails to deliver long lasting appeal.

Picked up a small stack of Japan-exclusive PS1 and PS2 games recently, with a bunch more on the way in a few weeks. Only had a chance to dig into a couple of them so far:

Brave Prove is a mechanically average Zelda clone with some nice sprite work and music, amusing writing -- in the second town, your fairy companion never misses an opportunity to blame you for dooming the entire world -- and easily the most labyrinthine dungeon designs I've seen this side of Phantasy Star II. I'd been interested in this one for a while as it's the last game ever produced by Data West before they left games behind. Very traditional, but a solid console action RPG nonetheless. Good music, too!

Marl de Jigsaw is, well, a jigsaw puzzle game that plays just like every other jigsaw game that Nippon Ichi has made (and they've made a fair few). I like action puzzle games and goofy anime humor, so this one was a no-brainer for me. Fun, but extremely niche.

I'll probably talk about the others as I have time to dig into them a bit. :)

I've finally gotten some free time recently. I decided to start working through my rather large backlog. I've started with my every psx game I have that isn't a jrpg. Right now I'm on SotN. All I can say is, I now remember why I love these Castlevania games so much. :) After that it's Crash Bandicoot, Tekken 2, Dead or Alive and Disruptor. Then it's on to the n64.

I just hope you're not planning to try to play the N64 Castlevania games. ;)

I don't think I would want to subject my N64 to such a tarnished title. :D

I finished SotN. I haven't explored all of the castle, but I'm pretty satisfied with it for now. It's everything I love about Castlevania, but I only have one complaint. What is with the ending theme song ? There are some things about the 90s I don't miss, and that was one of them. *Gack* Cheesy end themes aside, Crash Bandicoot is up next!

"Castle", singular? 'cause if so, you haven't really finished the game at all.

Yeah... you're not done until you have 200.6%. :)

I know, but I've never finished any Castlvania game in one shot. I usually go back three or four times and try to get everything. For example, I'm only missing two cards in Circle of the Moon. :)

I am the wind? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FsFiBXOVK0

Cheesy indeed.

I've currently been putting a lot of time into the beta for Heroes and Generals. My usual response to beta acceptance is to log in a few times, then decide to wait for the full version. This one, however, has kept me glued, even though it's in a very early state. The overall campaign (The Generals side of things) reminds me of one of the few nice features of WWII Online (the persistant map of Europe), and the FPS portion reminds me of Battlefield 1942, that is to say, something that aims to be fun and a smidge light-hearted, rather than realistic. It's in its early state and therefore riddled with bugs, severely unbalanced, and lacking in content, but what's on display clearly shows that the developer is focused and knows what it's doing.

It's been a bit slow for me both on the gaming and approval front lately for various real life reasons, so it's mostly been some iphone games here and there.

I did start up Final Fantasy X-2 a few weeks back, and i'm slowly working my way through it. Overall I like it, with a nice sense of frantic speed in the battles and bite sized missions. It's just such a shame that it's so stupid... the emphasis on "silly" for the dialog and "sexy" for the outfits just kind of clash with its predecessor a little too much for me. But like I said, the mechanics are interesting enough and the game is so pretty it's hard not to want to see it through to the end. :)

I really want to like Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption. The dialogues are interesting, the atmosphere is right and I want to know how the story progresses. But the gameplay is such a slog. Every dungeon has two enemy types which are repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated. Party-based games rarely get the pathfinding right, but here it is just annoyingly bad.

I don't know why exactly I can't stand this game. Normally I love party-based RPGs, and Vampire certainly is no bad game. But I just can't get into the combat which makes continuing pointless.

You sure you don't mean Redemption? Bloodlines isn't party-based.

Silly me, of course I mean Redemption. I adore Bloodlines. I corrected it.

Remember how this was all the rage around here after it was released. I played it in late 2002 - 2003, after... my gf gave it to me. Then she gave up on it, but I finished it. Less keen on the later portion, struggled (generally successfully) to stick to the playing style from the first part. And it had its fair share of cool moments, and with how I always micromanage don't recall being bothered by what my chars wanted to do, they rarely got to do anything they wanted :p

Yes, that is the thing that bothers me most. If you want me to micromanage my party, don't let me control only one member at a time. And let me zoom out the camera.

There is one place where you reeeeeally need to micromanage paths, that daytime bit. Particularly when outdoors, walking on a tiny beam of shadow (though in that spot I remember I just ran for it, got them through unscathed otherwise, but there I took the burn for a moment, they were good at healing).

Had some time to dig into a few other games a bit more.

Thunder Force VI is an absolute mess. It's cheap, ugly, sloppy, short, way too easy, and feels like it was slapped together in about two months by a team that has never even played a scrolling shooter once between them. The only decent aspect is the music, but even that doesn't feel like Thunder Force (it sounds straight out of Darius, actually). Probably the most interesting thing about it is the rather sordid tale if its development, which involves an uncredited development team, a ridiculously tiny budget with grandiose plans, and a self-aggrandizing (and outright lying) director. It's also got a nasty save bug that can format your entire memory card. I can't believe Sega had the gall to release this at at all, much less at full price, in the twilight days of the PS2.

Honō no Takuhaibin is... bizarre. It's a package delivery game that plays a lot like Crazy Taxi only with a FIERY BURNING PASSION '70s manga vibe pervading the whole thing -- which makes sense considering Kazuhiko Shimamoto was involved. You play as a genetically-engineered courier delivering packages in the name of love and justice, fighting against an evil transport company with designs on world domination. It's very, very Japanese. Simply as a game, it's not that interesting, but it's just so over-the-top and ridiculous that you can't help but smile. Also, the full voice acting is hilarious. And when I say that, I really mean FULL voice acting -- even the menu options and tutorial text are fully voiced. It's absurd and excessive, and I love it.

If games have enough soul/charm/originality (at least one of them), then I'm more than ready to overlook other aspects of the game. Eat Lead and Michigan being prime examples. They are both pretty broken and not really good as actual games, but they sure do have the inspiration, soul and originality to make them something I'm more than willing to sit through at least once. :)

Yep, pretty much this. I loved Eat Lead despite its flaws, and Michigan is on my list to track down.

Just try to find a Japanese version of Michigan. The voice actors in the European release make porn actors look professional.

That's the plan. I've read that a lot of bonus stuff got cut out of the PAL release, and I wouldn't have any way to play the European version, anyway.

Apparently Suda didn't even know it was released outside Japan until just a couple years ago. He got into an argument about it during an interview and they had to look it up to settle it. :)

No surprise here... I decided to take a break from Baldur's Gate. I still want to finish it, but I felt I needed a diversion. So for the last week or so I've been blowing off steam with Far Cry; FPS games aren't always my cup of tea, but sometimes I simply feel the urge to shoot stuff.

The game ended up being better than I expected it to be. It has some very solid AI, a nice implementation of stealth and it's genuinely fun. Mild spoiler: I didn't like the early plot twist which introduces mutants, or trigens as the game calls them. I was hoping for missions almost exclusively offering you tons of room to maneuver and plenty of opportunities to dish out death on unsuspecting mercenaries. Unfortunately the game also features many up-close-and-personal encounters with mutants in narrow corridors, something that completely changes the game experience I think. Not a deal-breaker, but still something I wish the game didn't have. I'm on mission 15 now.

On a side-note, I think 10 euros for an 8 year old game is a little bit of a rip-off, I don't care how big Crytek and their franchises have become. Then again, if 10 euros for an 8 year old game is a tad much for my taste... what case can someone make for Doom: BFG Edition? 30 freakin' Euros for what's basically an inferior version of another 8 year old game - Doom 3, plus Doom 1 and 2 with a new engine that's probably incompatible with most old mods. And did I mention how they sanitized (read: censored) the Wolfenstein 3D secret levels from Doom 2? I know I'm ranting, but is this really worth 30 Euros? Ah well, it's probably worth 30 Euros to the many people who, I imagine, have bought it.

Onto something more enjoyable then. For a very modest sum you get a bunch of interesting (or so I hear) indie games. It's a pay what you want deal, but if you pay more than the average, roughly $6 for PC, you get 11 games, instead of the normal 5. I've only played one of the games, Waking Mars, and I can honestly say $6 is worth just for this game alone. It's not long, it took me just over 9 hours to complete, but it's been a very rewarding experience. It really brightened up my week-end.

It's a side-scrolling 2D adventure game that allows you to explore a cave system on Mars where life has been discovered (in 2097 that is). As you go along, you learn how the various forms of life interact with one another; you need to understand how things work in order to advance through the game. Most of it isn't terribly difficult and I've breezed through some areas. However towards the end a good level of skill, planning and careful exploration is required in order to get the best possible outcome. Yes, there are multiple outcomes; I've discovered two. It's even possible to get a species extinct if you're not careful. Anyway... Achievement complete: Mars Awakening. Well done, Sir! :)

You should contribute a game entry for this one! And yeah, Humble Bundles are great, I've bought most of them and I'm not buying this one just because I have already half of the bundle.

In other news, I'm completely addicted to The Binding of Isaac (which, by the way, I got in one of those Humble Bundles). I'm currently trying to beat the Sheol for the first time, and the game just keeps me coming back for more. Also, I bought Crusader: No Remorse on GOG for less than US$ 3 and I'm currently at Mission 3; back in the day I played Crusader: No Regret and I remember having a great time with it. No Remorse seems a bit harder, but I'm comparing it with my 16 old memory of No Remorse, so maybe I'm wrong.

I have already contributed a game entry for Waking Mars a few days ago. :)

There's still a few things that I'd like to add to the entry when I have the time.

Played a little bit of Rayman: Origins. It's delightful. The visuals are just perfect, particularly the animations. I never got quite far in the original as I remember it being quite difficult and unforgiving. I did play through the whole of Rayman 2 (which ranks high among my most favourite games). Origins so far is quite challenging, but a lot more forgiving than the original Rayman. You die easily, but checkpoints are frequent. Like Rayman 2 there's a lot of incentive to replay levels in an attempt to find all the lums and such.

One element of confusion is that in the 30 minutes of play I finished 3 levels and unlocked 5 or so characters, but I have no idea what the use of those characters is. The game doesn't really explain if they are just skins or whether you can actually do different stuff with them.

The only thing that ruins the game experience is the fact that it doesn't cloud save so I can't continue my game from any of the other locations I play games...

A bit strange for a 2012 game that's on Steam to boot...

Now downloading Kerbal Space Program, but now my lunch break is already at an end.

That's a cute game, Kerbal Space Program; well, considering there's not that much content in it yet.

It's a nice game, but not really suited for playing in 15 minute sessions during lunch break. More something to dig into when you have some days of to spare. All I have now is many dead kerbal's on my conscience and so far I've only reached about the hight of Mont Blanc.

You can always use the GameSave Manager + DropBox combo --instant cloud saving for every PC game that ever existed.

How many PCs do you play on, anyway? o_O

Great suggestion! I knew about Dropbox, but I didn't know about this other software.

The only thing that's missing is some way to save-state games in Windows, but I'm pretty sure that's impossible (and I'm not talking about DOSBox or other virtual machines),. You'd have to dump the entire RAM, OS and all, plus swap files I imagine, track temporary registry changes, file system changes. Kinda like hibernation, but not quite.

The thing is some games have buggy saves, or use save systems I dislike (like checkpoints). Sometimes I just wish I could hit a key and save-state like you can in most emulators. One can only dream :)

Might give that a try at some point.

As for how many PCs. With Steam games, I play them at home on my own PC, I sometimes play at work during lunch breaks, I often log into my account a friend's place when we're playing something splitscreen co-op (like Trine or Jamestown for example) and I sometimes play a game at my parents place when I visit them over the weekend. So that makes 4 PCs and 4 reasons to have cloud saves in all games :) Yes I've grown spoiled in this regard in the last few years, because about 2 years ago not a single game had cloud saves. But it's a really nice feature.

Talking about saves, I recently had a major disappointment with Telltale. The Walking Dead episode 4 about month ago corrupted my and some other thousands of people saves. Naming support forum "Home of tears" was very precise, almost no one had their issues solved by developers. Well, "next episode will address that issue" I though and waited. Somehow, I managed to restore the save and played half of new episode, but PC crashed. Guess what? Corrupted again, no backups this time. Had to either replay whole game again or use randomly generated choices just to finish the game. It felt like Mass Effect 3 all over again.

Well, GameSave Manager for you too; and that will never happen ever again.

And the fact this is the only negative thing I can say about it just shows how much I love this game. It's absolutely flawless in every other regard. Possibly the best 2D platform game I've ever played.

Dark Souls diary: I'm in day 4 of hitting a fucking brick wall against Ornstein and Smough. I must even admit, o diary, that it came to a point where I'm cheating. Indeed, I have set the savegame to "read only" so that I start at the fog gate and I only have to summon Solaire and cross the door for the fight to start --how do people manage to play this particular spot otherwise is beyond me. I admire you more than I ever have, console tards. My guess is most people will co-op this one, but in PC-land the online component of Dark Souls amounts to little more than being owned by scumbag 13-year-olds using trainers of some sort, so there's that.

The worst part -which, in a true-to-form Dark Souls fashion, is also the best part- is that, from a purely abstract standpoint, I have the fight DOWN --I know the tells, I time the times, I know exactly when and how to take my chances, and in general I simply fly through the whole thing. There's nothing I can take from videos, tutorials, wikis or any other form of internet advice; I'm doing everything right, and then some. But the fight takes so fucking long that, sooner or later, there WILL be a point when I'll get careless/cocky/plain down tired, and I'll make a mistake that will "You died like a bitch" my ass in no time.

Right now I'm considering going back to do some farming and enhance my health bar or maybe get me some new piromancies. It's driving me insane. And -again, in a true-to-form Dark Souls fashion-, I'm enjoying it like a degenerate maniac.

This game is the shit. THE SHIT.

By the way, at some point I played and beaten Dishonored.

It's a gorgeous-looking game and it has a lot of very very clever ideas, but overall it felt incredibly washed out. It's not only that it's laughably short and overall it feels like a pack of standalone challenge maps barely held together by a sorry excuse for a plot starring a bunch of shallow sock puppets (which is ironic considering there's plenty of lovely and very intriguing backstory for the world and a couple brilliant lateral characters, like The Stranger and Granny Rags), but it's also insultingly easy.

At all times I could feel how I was clearly holding back, deliberately crippling myself (not upgrading weapons or powers, not using half the stuff in my inventory, not taking advantage of half the environmental opportunities that were clearly laid out for me to exploit) just so I could get something resembling a half-decent challenge in the highest difficulty level.

There's no glory in outsmarting a foe so stupid he'll gladly run into an electric fence after seeing his comrade getting fried alive right then and there --let alone *six* of them, all merrily running in a bizarre suicide beeline of massive retardation. There's no sense of victory in taking down five enemies using just a switchblade and barely putting any effort on it --let alone when at all times I also had the chance to, at the very least, stop time and teleport away to a safe spot, which would also have them forgetting all about me in a couple seconds, the very guy who had just killed three of them mere seconds before.

In short, Dishonored gives me a lot of options to play this or that way, but it just doesn't matter. In fact, if I use those options, they make the game so much worse.

This is, of course, Dark Souls' blame through and through. It's been years and years since the last time I can remember playing something with such a beautifully tuned challenge/sense-of-accomplishment ratio, and I don't even remember whether I ever played a game where every experience point spent, every choice of weapon/piece of armor, was of such a capital importance. And with that, Dark Souls would seem to have ruined every other game out there for me. So good going, From Software. But I seriously hope you have something equally awesome for me to play by the time I'm done with this.

I have officially given up on Brave Prove. As mediocre as it is, I really wanted to like this one, but the dungeons are simply far, far, far too convoluted for their own good. And if it's any indication, I managed to complete Phantasy Star II without using maps, yet I've gotten hopelessly lost in this one several times. There aren't any guides out there apart from an abysmally bad one on GameFAQs ("When you reach this area, continue until you reach the next one."), and it's just not worth the effort to scrawl my own maps down on paper. After spending well over an hour wandering in circles in the third section of a forest, only to wind up back at the save point I started at, I've decided it's not worth the effort to continue.

Mechanically, the game is solid and a lot of fun. It gives a good first impression, the graphics are nice in that early 32-bit sprite work sort of way, and the music is quite good. Unfortunately, there's simply not enough variation, and it's far too easy to get lost. I can only suspect this was done to extend the game's length, as even with all the running in circles, as well as a fair amount of time left sitting in the menu, my total time is only around 14 hours and I'm fairly close to the end of the game. If someone had taken a hacksaw to the map design, this might have been a neat hidden gem, but I really can't recommend this one at all.

Have you tried this resource? http://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/PSX/index.htm#BraveProve

Woah, thanks! Judging by those maps, I'd actually reached the end of the area *twice*, and turned around thinking it was a dead end. There's no indication you can destroy the dead trees blocking your path, and the only place you actually *have* to do so is the very last screen of the area. Everywhere else, there's an alternate path elsewhere, which is why I went looking for one. That's just poor design.

Nevertheless, I've already watched a video of the last few bosses and the ending sequence. I was pretty close anyway, doesn't look like I missed much.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand Ornstein & Smough are done. It took a good couple dozen tries, going back to farm like crazy, upgrading/buying new pyromancies, building Quelaag's Furysword and of course the invaluable help of my good friend/dumbass decoy Knight Solaire; but I finally did it. And it was a moment of air punching as I haven't had in ages, even in this very game.

Anyway, I met with princess Amazing Chest Ahead, I placed the Lordveseel (God I love Kingseeker Frampt :D ) and now I'm biding my time, deciding where to go next, whether to explore some optional areas or run headfirst for the Lord Souls.

By the way, I killed the Moonlight Butterfly last night and I felt sort of bad about it, it was such a beautiful thing :(

Did anyone play Miasmata already? I was thinking about picking it up, but so far have no idea whether it's any good.

Currently I am playing DSA: Drakensang (I just cleared the dungeon under the Hesinde temple). It has its fair share of problems like slow walking, not enough feedback for non-DSA players, bland companions, not too inspired dungeon and many typos (German version). I still like it a lot. Part of it may be the DSA system which, as far as I can tell, is much more interesting than the D&D I know from video games.

Absolutely, the system shines in that one... But yeah, as I said in the review, would sure help if it'd say whose rear end it pulls some of those numbers out of!

PS: Any idea how the next ones in the series are?

Well, of course I did not play River of Time yet, but reportedly it is better than its predecessor: more feedback, more reactive party members, quick travel on the maps. It also has full voice acting (except the player character), but I don't have a problem with limited voice acting (although it would help if they did not zoom in on the silent NPC's face). The dungeons are more or less unchanged.

Its add-on Phileasson's Secret was not so well received, contains mostly dungeon hack & slay (which is not Drakensang's high point) and can be skipped. Drakensang Online has no relation to its predecessors and is a free-to-play Diablo variant.

I bought The Walking Dead a long time ago but only started playing this weekend. I'm glad Telltale finally tackled a more mature theme. The writing and the cinematography stand out, it has amazing moments. The moral choices it presents, though sometimes a bit too black and white, and especially the relationship with Clementime, are something of a wonder to play. I really like her writing, the little quirks, the way she observes Lee's actions, clings to him and nudges you to be sensitive, and the excellent camera framing that can give little details meaning. You can play it like a bastard, but you'll feel like one afterwards too.

Finished Dark Souls. Hands down, the best, more fulfilling game I played in I don't even remember how long. May very well be my game of the decade, to say the least.

Gwyn was something of a pussy, though; I got him in my first try. I was stupidly under-prepared and quite drunk at the time, and I just spent the whole time running backwards, downing estus flasks as I had been downing beers a couple hours before and pyromancing his ass off all of the while, and before I knew it he was down.

Also, I'm not sure what to make of the ending. After a rather unceremonious final boss battle, all I got was this really crappy cutscene (which is especially bad considering that the cutscenes so far were few but formidable-looking) and back to square one again --how did Mass Effect 3 attract so much ire and noone ever mentioned this, is beyond me.

In any case, it's a testament to how awesome the game is that such a crappy ending didn't affect my general impression of the experience at all, and I'm still up to NG+ its f'ing ass right away.



I should be paying some attention to XCOM, though, I preordered it like a month in advance and I've played about 30 minutes since it came out.

Also, I just bought Spec Ops in some crazy sale or other, and I guess I should give that one some love as well, and see what all the fuss is about.

I just finished Postal III. Now follows a comprehensive list of all things the game did well:

• The intro movies can be skipped

I was actually wondering what you thought about it, when i saw on Steam that you were playing it. I never quite understand why people finish games they don't like.

It's like a good friend of mine who could say things like "This TV series is pretty bad, although halfway season 4 it does seem to get better a bit," while keeping a straight face. To me that just sounds like: "I just wasted hundreds of hours of the most valuable commodity in a human life: spare time."

I guess am the only one who doesn't get fulfilment from intentionally watching/playing crap.

Well, it is like five hours long, so no big time investment for this one. I knew exactly what I bought (cheaply!). I enjoyed the predecessor and it had almost the same negative reception as Postal III.

Overall, I didn't hate it completely. The gameplay is crap, but sometimes I love stupid, juvenile humour like Postal III (and Postal II) displays. I don't say the humour is good, it is not, but I still enjoyed it. But I also liked Duke Nukem Forever, so take it as you will.

I also somehow admire the balls the designers had to insult their customers. There is one thing if a game makes fun of itself. It is another thing if a game has bad AI. But it takes someone special to have horrible AI like Postal III, design missions specifically aimed to piss off the player because of said AI and then throw a mission description like "Now enjoy this escort mission with our clusterfuck AI. Hahaha." in their face.

For the record, I didn't have a single crash.

You have to play the bad, so that you can recognize the good. Same goes for any medium.

Sure, but there's a difference between spending five minutes on a game that's bad or 30 hours.

You can't appreciate the bad without spending some time wallowing in it. I dunno, I'm trying to justify here. I once spent six straight hours playing through The Tick on Super Nintendo, an incredibly mediocre and repetitive beat-'em-up. I hated myself by the end of it, but I couldn't stop playing because there was no way to resume from where I left off, and who knows? Maybe by the third hour, things start getting really awesome!

Things didn't start getting really awesome...

I'm with vedder here. Sadly, we're not immortal. Wasting your life on a bad movie is usually under 2h, bad games often eat more time.

Some people are just so bored, have OCD or no taste, that they expose themselves to just anything, "just to kill time". That "meh, whatever" attitude. I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Yeah, I used to suffer from that sort of obsessiveness. Even though everything said that it was crap I still forced myself through it - whether a movie, tv series or a game - just so I would know certainly that it is crap.

While sometimes it turned out to be true that behind the crap there was some genuine goodness... it is far more wiser to not do anything that doesn't captivate you from the first moment. Life is just too short, and things are too interchangeable and similar with each other anyway.

Sad things I've done. I watched Star Trek Voyager to mid 7th season before I finally gave up. Just sad. So sad.

You can spend your life worrying about how much time you've wasted, or you can just play whatever you feel compelled to because you're legitimately fascinated by the hobby and want to experience everything it has to offer. I'm sorry, but I highly doubt that on my deathbed my last words will be, "I wish I could have the time back that I spent on Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2."

I believe I'm now really set for next year and then some. On top of what I was saying I was poking around in and the few major titles started years ago and abandoned at various stages which I may get back to again, went and got Divinity Anthology some time ago and now just won both Witchers (yey! - technically I won 2 games of choice, so I picked these) on GOG.

So, yeah, at the moment not playing, still want to submit ranks for a couple of games on here by the end of the year, and probably also go through whatever was written since I last did this (months ago) for all the review sites I kept track of after submitting as sources, to submit what's in the database, but plan for next year would be sort of as follows:

- Poking around Beyond Divinity some more, see if I want to try to finish it or not.
- After either finishing or abandoning BD, Divinity 2: Developer's Cut (or Dragon Knight Saga really, since I'm not playing in dev mode).
- The Witcher
- See if I can return to Baldur's Gate.
- Poke around some more through Fate of the World: Tipping Point.
- See if I can return to Morrowind.
- Possible, though unlikely, attempts to return to Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark (and if I somehow finish that, start the Kingmaker campaigns) and/or Gothic 2 Gold.
- As for The Witcher 2, rather wait for a new computer first. That would be in plan for next year, but with keeping current video card for the time being, so this will still need to be put off till I'll replace that too.

With me usually finishing 4-5 games a year, that's already going past, without anything I may grab by the end of 2013. So, yeah, all set I guess...

I just finished playing through To The Moon. As much as the game has a touching story, it's heavily undermined by clunky interactions, insincere (and mostly unfunny) humour, and a tendency to assassinate its own pacing. Gameplay is sparse and typically involves pixel hunting until you've found enough mostly arbitrary objects to proceed. The story is told through dialogue boxes in the same way as classic JRPGs. In short, it has no business being a video game. Its story would be better told through a purely visual or text media, it completely wastes its potential for interactivity.

Still, the story itself is decent, so it might be worth a look.

Well, I finished Spec Ops: The Line.

Shooter-wise it feels like what I imagine Mass Effect felt like during its early development stages --they really shouldn't have put the whole squad management in if they were just going to half-ass it like this. You can't even give specific orders to your team mates, how didn't anyone during testing pick up on this, I'll never know. Also the combat is simplistic and repetitive like hell, and this makes the game feel way too long for its own good. And if you consider the awesome evolution of Mass Effect's gameplay throughout its iterations, this one feels that much worse. During the last hour or two, I was forcing myself to press on out of curiosity about the story, but it had been long since anything close to enjoyment was over.

But the selling point here was always the story, anyway. And I can imagine it would probably blow your mind if you went in expecting your regular run-of-the-mill military gang-wank. Unfortunately, having already read so many overly enthusiastic pieces about it, I was expecting much more. It's very good, mind, especially for a game -and a military manshoot at that-, but it doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before and better in film. Plus, the really good parts start way too far into the game.

I don't know. It is well written and its heart is in the right place, and I guess it's important that it exists in today's market; but quite frankly I'm enjoying the storytelling and characterization of The Walking Dead much more, and gameplay-wise it's below pretty much every other game I played this year --especially a year in which Dark Souls happened.

It should have been either a better shooter, or just shorter. As it is, it was too much of a hassle to play through, and that hurt the whole experience.

Maybe it just should've been a movie.

Had a bi-annual LAN party with friends between Christmas and New Year. Played some Battlefield 3, Civilization V, Worms Reloaded, Flatout: UC, ShootMania and StarCraft customs. Only new game I played was Dota 2, which I only played a single match and definitely isn't my thing.

In the world of single player I finished Rayman Origins. Got all the lums except for 2 and all the medals bar 6 or so, but the remaining ones were in levels that were just tedious to do perfect. Still an amazing game and definitely game of the year 2012 for me.

I started and finished Superbrothers: Swords and Sworcery. Picked it up on the Steam sales for next to nothing and was a nice experience.

I continued with Escape from Monkey Island, but gave up on it. The game's puzzles are just tedious and on a whole the game rarely surpasses mediocrity. I have better things to do with my time. Got as far as getting Pegnose Pete arrested.

Now I've started Fallout New Vegas, which has been glaring at me in my Steam list for quite a while. Got hooked immediately, but I've only played for 2 hours so far.

I do feel that my dopey looking, big nosed, 65+ year old, balding Chinese-American scientist with the most profound luck is pushed into all kinds of situations that are hard to roleplay properly.

You do known when you're playing a Obsidian game, when your quest logs says you have to talk to that guy who is in a room without doors. What's preventing them from hiring decent scripters?

A room without doors? Isn't that just a large crate?

At any rate, man, the quests in New Vegas are boring :/

The irony was this was the first quest that was actually quite fun. So far I agree that the quests were pretty uninteresting. But I was now in a rocketry research facility inhabited by ghouls and mutants and it was actually fun until it abruptly broke. :/

The room has a door actually, it's just that you can't interact with it. There's also a window to taunt you with the knowledge of the NPCs being there.

Oh, that *is* a good one. You didn't get to finish it? That's bad, the way it ends is pretty cool. Is the game still in such bad shape, bug-wise?

Anyway, now I remembered one about a vault where they played some lottery to select the next overseer or something like that; that was a good one too.

There are a few good quests, to be fair; but the ratio of clever/entertaining quests to boring/uninspired fetch-fests is pretty bad overall, certainly much worse than it was in Fallout 3. Especially when it comes to the unmarked ones; those are almost non-existent in NV, whereas they were one of my favorite aspects of FO3.

Hmm don't know. I've quite a lot of unmarked quests in my log.

The lottery was interesting, particularly because it was my first encounter with Caesar's Legion and it showed the large difference in style between Fallout 3 and NV (i.e. goofy tongue in cheek setting vs. harsher conflict zone).

I do feel that Fallout 3 was more free roaming. In New Vegas I feel pushed through a corridor. You never really get two quests in opposite directions. So far every quest was just a little bit further down the road to Vegas. I don't mind that much though.

By "unmarked quests" I mean quests that are not technically quests, i.e.: they wouldn't show up in the log. Basically, when you navigate a building or a cave or a town and, while you don't get objectives and maybe you don't even meet an NPC, you will learn a story of the place and more often than not you will end up with some kind of unique item or other (like the L.O.B. Enterprises or the Dunwich Building in FO3).

FO3 was full of those; NV, not nearly as much.


I'm not talking about the Nipton Lottery, the one I mean is a sidequest taking place inside a Vault (Vault 11 if I'm not mistaken). I seem to remember it was based on a short story. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure whether a lottery was involved, but there was some tricky business about electing the authorities, that much I'm sure about.

Anyway, one difference in favor of NV, come to think about it, is that the main quest is much more interesting. In fact, I loved FO3 for the world and the sidequests (and the mods! THE MODS!), but the main quest I kept leaving on the backseat all the time, it was pretty forgettable for the most part. The main quest in NV is pretty good, and it has quite a few memorable moments.

The final showdown in NV is a big letdown, though, nowhere near as good as the march with Liberty Prime.

Finished New Vegas.

Buggy as hell (I was lucky if the game didn't crash every 30 minutes), graphically incredibly ugly, but I did like the story a lot.

(spoiler alert)

I began the game my Chinese American scientist with 10 luck and high intelligence and generally being a helpful guy. But the further I got into the game the more morally grey my choices became until eventually this helpful guy became a selfish bastard. I took care of Mister House in order to create my own despotism with the help of Yes Man. I already made enemies of Caesar's Legion early on, killing Caesar. I infiltrated the ranks of those selfish tech-hoggers of the Brotherhood of Steel only to betray them later on. I let the Khans wipe themselves out. I kept friends with the Boomers as they generally seemed agreeable. I also let the White Society live, but took care of their Soylent Green issues. I had wanted to take care of the Omertas entirely (not just Benny), but I kind of forgot about and accidentally told Yes Man to leave them be.

I wanted to side with the NCR as I had been doing since the beginning. But unfortunately they didn't agree with my ideas for creating my own power base. I did let them retreat, instead of wiping them out entirely though.

All in all I liked the story and atmosphere much better than that of Fallout 3. More dark, gritty and political.

I finally picked up Tokyo Jungle off the Playstation Network. I'm quite fond of the game. Its unusual premise is something that would feel right at home on the Dreamcast or Playstation 2, and so would its graphics. It's just not the kind of game you see too often anymore. I'm quiet impressed by its system of progression, which has you playing survival mode and completing tasks to unlock further chapters in Story mode and other animals to play as.

Unfortunately, since the game requires you to replay survival mode over and over again, I can't see myself playing it for long enough to see the end of story mode and unlock all the animals. There's a bit too much repetition, and while each animal does feel unique, they don't feel different enough. To the game's credit, the world is set up in a way that makes it difficult to see all of it without several playthroughs, but again, I feel seeing it all is beyond my attention span.

I do, however, look forward to trying out multiplayer, as soon as I can rope someone into trying it with me.

I've been interested in this one, but unfortunately I don't own a PS3. One day...

Personally, I've been bulking up my stash of Japanese PS2 games. I've actually got a recording system en route as well, so I may finally be able to show off some of these oddities soon. Been holding off on really digging into them until I can start recording, actually...

And here's a bit of unedited footage from the only Japanese-made FPS I've ever stumbled across. Technologically, it's scarcely a step above Wolfenstein, but really, I wouldn't have expected Nichibutsu to make a military shoot-man game at all.

I love the hilariously ill-fitting music. And yes, it plays as clunky as it looks. :)

Oh wow, that draw distance. At first I thought it was supposed to be emulating darkness in the car park, but nope, it's also in the second level. It's pretty bad when you can't even render narrow corridors.

Games I played:

• The Secret World: I love the scenario, but I don't like those MMO mechanics. I really wished they made a single-player RPG instead. Still got enough entertainment for my bucks, even if I did not even finished the second area.
• Call of Duty 2: Your average, mediocre Call of Duty.
• Call of Duty: World at War: Your average, mediocre Call of Duty
• Call of Duty: Black Ops: I think this is the best Call of Duty of the ones I have played. Still mediocre.

All are mediocre, yet you still play them, eh?

I have no idea what I'm doing here anymore... Seem to be poking through Divinity 2 again now, though I wouldn't say this means deciding to give up on Beyond Divinity completely, particularly since you can't say they're exactly related. Dropping that was due to a mix of the nasty battle at the end of act 1 (best I could do was kill 1 of the 4 enemies, once out of several tries) and the video issues that make it apparently return my video driver to an invalid state upon exit (everything's fine then, but if I don't set the video settings back myself or play some other game that will do it properly, at next reboot I'll be looking at my desktop in 640x480x16 - so worried that if it happens enough times it may corrupt something worse).

Well, it is still mindless fun. But the more I play of Black Ops, the more I actually like it. I particularly like how the story ties in with World at War and that you actually stay with one character.

I know this is not really the popular opinion, but so far I like the Treyarch COD much better than Infinity Ward's.

The first Modern Warfare is the only good one, from what I understand. When it came out it did quite a few waves with THAT SCENE and it was all kinds of shocking and whatnot. After that they felt the need to repeat the shock, and they made every iteration more and more exaggerated, but obviously they will never hit the mark ever again.

I liked Modern Warfare 1 and 2 the least.

Finished XCOM. And there goes the other big disappointment of the year.

It's a great game, mind, and they managed to mix strategy and action in a way that's nothing short of admirable; but it pulls all kinds of shamefully transparent tricks in order to cater to the player's stupidity (in the easier difficulty levels) or to rise up the challenge (in the harder ones) --I'm a pretty dumb person, and I could see right through the game's lies all the time. And this does no good to a game supposedly based on strategy. There's no point in strategizing anything when I know for a fact that "78%" will mean a different thing depending on whether the game wants me to feel empowered or frustrated.

On top of that, the campaign is incredibly linear, they want to tell a story and they will damn well have you navigate on rails as they please in order to do it. This, added to the small amount of weapons, armors and upgrades there are to work with, kills whatever replay value the game could have.

I started a second playthrough because I really enjoyed the gameplay, but I'm pretty certain I'm not gonna be playing much longer; about three missions in I noticed I was playing *the exact same game* again, I know exactly what and when will happen (both in terms of story and gameplay), and no amount of randomly picked maps will change that.

Of course, this is all, once again, Dark Souls' fault.

I replayed Deus Ex: Human Revolution. My very positive opinion has not changed, but this time I invested some praxis kits into the Typhoon. The boss fights are much more bearable if they take only five seconds.

Now I started to play Far Cry 3. It is too soon to decide on a verdict, but I am positively surprised that there actually is a "Quit to Desktop" button. This comes from the same developer which was responsible for this crime against humanity.

However, I already have the feeling that the crafting system is superimposed, unnecessary busywork. It shows me with with big, huge symbols on the map where to find the stuff. I also would not be surprised if I become a untouchable super-human after a quarter of the game if I craft properly. But that remains to be seen.

Holy shit, I seriously didn't even know it was possible. I got to the login screen once I think. Usually exit games with Alt+F4 anyway. But it did always strike me as odd I couldn't exit the game through the UI.

I remained very pleased throughout, but I wish I had played it on the highest difficulty right away. Not because of becoming overpowered (which doesn't really happen), but to keep the tension as high as possible.

I recently played through Shadows of the Damned, and I'm not sure what it is about Grasshopper or Suda51, but for all the annoying quirks in their games, I always end up having the best time with them. I guess they tend to be a bit like playing a movie by Robert Rodriguez or Tarantino. Just so crazy over the top and out there you can't help but get enamoured!

And a few nights ago I started on Crackdown, a game I wasn't at all sure about after having played the demo which left me rather cold. After playing it a while however, I've gotten into a nice flow with the game and jumpin across skyscrapers while firing a rocket launcher like a madman is actually more fun than it should be. :)

So, I finished Far Cry 3 and it was quite good. I liked the change of tone during the second half. Directly after, I started to play Assassin's Creed III. I won't spoil it, but the first twist in the story really got me by surprise.

I wonder why game designers absolutely insist on adding awful lockpicking mini games.

The Germans' voice acting in The Saboteur is about as convincing as this guy. (English version)

AT LAST! Free time! Even though I have a stack of games to go through, I picked up Oblivion GOTY. I've wanted to play this since it came out, but I never had anything to run it on. It's actually kinda nostalgic. I saw so much of this game back then, and now I'm actually playing it! It brings back good related memories. Especially when I installed it. No cd key, no online verification, no nothing! Just insert disk and and install. Ahh, simpler times. (Kinda.) I am a bit disappointed with the graphics though. They're starting to show their age, even on max settings. Don't get me wrong, it's still pretty, but I can tell it's from another era now. I just hope it doesn't suck up all my free time. :P

I know what you mean, I just finished Fallout New Vegas, which uses the same engine, and it looked pretty bad. In my memories Oblivion looked a lot better than Fallout 3/New Vegas anyway. Well the landscapes at least, the character models were pretty ugly in all three the games.

I'm still trying to figure out why S.T.A.L.K.E.R. had a bigger atmospheric impact to me than Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 3/New Vegas.

The textures and the lighting are what get me. They're very 2006. HL2 has aged incredibly well in everything but textures, yet Oblivion is showing it's age worse despite it being a newer game. The lighting unless it dark, dusk or early morning, just doesn't look that good anymore. It's still pretty, but obvious it's getting old.

That's kinda sad actually. I mean, from a distance there are a lot of epic structures if you pay attention, but at best it gets a ho-hum reaction for some odd reason. I suspect it has to do with the seemingly bland color choices. Personally, Oblivion seems to have better color choices than Skyrim or perhaps that's my imagination. I wanted to say too much gray, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was gray everywhere and it still worked.

Coincidentally, I just built the courage to start playing Morrowind for the first time. If Oblivion looks bad, Morrowind must look a lot worse! NPCs who look more "human" fall into the uncanny valley, but I don't know, I don't mind that much about graphics anyway.

I couldn't stomach playing Morrowind for some strange reason. I vaguely remember being constantly surrounded by fog or something like that.

Maybe it was your settings for "view distance", though I may say that it seems a little foggy even in the highest settings.

So far I'm enjoying it, specially now that the main plot is unfolding (START of SPOILER - I just got to know that I'm probably the messiah dude - END of SPOILER). It is weird how the game has some simple but awesome features (the sky, for instance, looks great) and some really dumb immersion-breaking aspects (like how foes won't open doors and follow you, or how it rains even under completely covered structures, as in those stairs in Vivec's cantons).

With the few hours of Morrowind I did play, the only thing worth mentioning was the mode of transportation...that big weird monster thing, which was mildly amusing, fantasy-wise. Something that seems to be missing from Oblivion and Skyrim...something so fantastically weird, and not this standard medieval fantasy theme that infuriates Dr. Katze with similar effect when little kids stray on his lawn. :p

Not just him. Oblivion's setting was just plain horrible except for the Shivering Islands expansion.

... which just got me to reinstall it.

Another HDD failure, the repaired one lasted all of 3 months. 5-year warranty expiring on April 1st (joke on me for buying it on that day, eh?), but this was 3rd failure, and the first time they had given me a DoA one first, so would have been 4th replacement and after a wtf's up with this they offered money back if I got a replacement of another model from them (so essentially the replacement for free)... So did one better, got a WD Black from them on account of this to replace the old IDE one I was using as back-up so far and a WD Raptor from somewhere else as main (was looking into a SSD, but was eyeing the Intel 520s for the 5-year warranty and usually (bar the 320 series, which I heard was a disaster, with many controller failures after mere days) proven reliability of Intels, and only the 60 and 120 Gb models can be found here, bigger ones no longer imported and no info on when or if anyone'll get any again, so said screw it, sticking to HDDs a while longer). And a Win 7 while I was at it...
So got that yesterday and now that I saw this, Morrowind became the first game I installed again. Date of last save, April 7, 2012, which marked the end of my brief return to it after starting and then dropping it in May 2008. Let's see if I'll try again now... though the first thing it did was crash, before I had even finished making the control settings again. Running in compatibility mode and affinity on single core now, bit of a stutter, but let's see. But there were some occasional crashes under Vista too and if it'll still have issues, I'll be installing XP mode and trying like that then, I guess.

Oh yah, and while searching for Morrowind / Win 7 issues, I saw a thread about it looking very foggy in Vista and 7.