Gabriel Knight 3
I played the first and second one back in the 90s. I'm not exactly sure why I skipped the 3rd one... Maybe because The Beast Within was a bit disappointing? Or did I read a bad review in PC Gamer (UK)? Maybe I had other things on my mind the years after its release? No money? No illegal copy? All of the above?

Anyway, I'm glad I've now played it. Though these early 3D graphics are pretty terrible (I can't imagine myself seeing them with '99 eyes), it's a lot more interactive than the previous instalment.The Beast Within wasn't bad, but the FMV made it closer to the later Telltale games - click to continue.

It feels more cheesy and less dark than Sins Of The Fathers - but it's hard to compare because I played that one 25 years ago. I looked at the walkthrough more than I should've but I'm ok with that - I'm not 17 years anymore, my time is precious. I figured a lot out myself and the experience was great; that's more important than spending hours or days on that one obscure puzzle.

Now I want to know what happens between Gabriel and Grace, but there'll probably never be a 4th game. :-(

Just finished Infamous: First Light on PS4. After AC: Unity I was kinda still in the mood for some open world action but wanted something shorter and lighter - and this one has it right in the title!

So, First Light is a prequel to Second Son but it's really rather stand-alone DLC than an actual game. A friend had warned me that this is a game for one afternoon and damn, he wasn't kidding. I spent the first hour getting all the collectables available at that point (which is like 99% of all collectables in the entire game), fully upgraded all abilities available at that point, and I think I did all the story missions in another two hours. The game also takes place on only one half of Second Son's Seattle map. The map already felt pretty small and bland in Second Son, which I also beat in a single weekend, but here it gets even worse since this one's protagonist, Fetch, can move insanely fast. I guess moving between the two furthest corners of the map takes like a little more than a minute, two at best.

Now, little amount of content aside: it's pretty enjoyable and after Unity I welcomed this insane speed and freedom of movement in this one. It's just satisfying to turn into weird neon light and run... float... well, move up buildings, hit a neon cloud and shoot halfway over the map. But there really isn't much to do and Fetch's other powers aren't really interesting at all, most of them being identical to stuff from earlier titles in the series.

Second Son was as forgettable as it was short, I barely remember its story and can't say how this prequel fits into the continuity at this point but this one's story is as basic and stupid as it gets. It has the most cliched and generic asshole enemy boss with a scheme that could have been thought up by an eight-year-old. Then there's also the thing that the story starts with Fetch in captivity of that government agency that hunts conduits (super-powered people) and the motivations of the evil woman from Second Son are equally weird and stupid. It's one of those cases where the heroine escapes and kills hundreds of the villain's underlings but it's somehow according to the villain's plan. Sigh.

Oh yeah, and this one is missing the series' hallmark morale system, so there's literally no replay value whatsoever - I don't really mind, though, because already in Second Son the morale system was executed pretty badly and the "evil" path was utterly unbelievable. Ironically here the one and only (neutral?) path is just as badly written.

I guess in terms of playtime the main portion of the game is actually a survival arena mode which is all about getting high scores and which has to be done if you want to unlock all of Fetch's upgrades. After finishing the story you can also play as Second Son's hero, Dhalsim, no, Delsin here. It's a pretty fun mode but frankly I don't think I'm gonna keep playing that one.

It's really sad that the series went down the drain so bad. The first Infamous is possibly my favourite sandbox game to this day but then things only kept getting worse. Things aren't catastrophically bad but especially the last two Infamous games on PS4 are just a shadow of the first game's greatness.

Today I joined the illustrious company of those brave Goglodytes who finished Jack Keane 2: The Fire Within.

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Ultimate Doom - Thy Flesh Consumed (wasn't easy. way too many lives lost)

Chuchel (2018) (Linux/Wine)
(thank you for the game, Doc0075!)

To be honest, I'm a bit disappointed with this one. What I liked is abstract sense of humor and crazy drawing style. What I don't:
– the abstract sense of humor becomes too abstract ;)
– the humor lacks some brilliant, non-obvious elements; it's mostly infantile humor of cartoons
– actually there is no puzzles in the game, except 2-3 scenes
– the story (hunting a cherry) becomes a bit tiresome at some point
– making mistakes is funny here, but in most of scenes the game enforces you to make all possible mistakes before a proper solution is available - this goes against the idea of point&click adventure; it looks like someone designed all that funny animations and wanted to be sure you'll see all of them, no matter that it just kills gameplay, if you role is click all available options before continue...
– black version of protagonist looked much better

Game works perfectly under Linux/Wine. No additional actions were needed in my case, it works out-of-the-box.

List of all games completed in 2019.

Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands, with WINE/Proton 4.2-1
I really liked this one, except the Prince looked weird for some reason :P Really smooth and upgraded controls from the AC engine especially compared to the original trilogy. The combat wasn't as good I thought, it also got very easy once I unlocked most of the combat upgrades. No glitches or that one end game glitch I read about thankfully.

Tooth and Tail
I got it from the community giveaway, donated by Doc0075, thanks a lot again!

A very interesting strategy game about animals viscously fighting each other for survival. While it can be entertaining I must admit that I’m somewhat disappointed as I have a feeling that the game could have been so much better.

It’s definitely not a typical RTS. There are some limited building options: you can create farms to provide food, build turrets for defenses and finally warrens that create your troops but they do it by themselves until they reach their limit. It means you have to think in which order you should build your warrens because each of them will try to reach the limit as soon as possible and obviously you won’t have enough resources to produce every unit at the same time. So for example if you build too many warrens of strong land units you’ll be depleted of the resources for a long time and then a squad of airborne enemies may crush you completely. What complicates the matter even more is the fact that your farm can produce only a finite number of food and then become barren - you can’t rebuild it so try to take good care about your troops, it’s not that you can replace dying animals all you want.

Even less typical is the way you control your troops. Instead of clicking them and giving orders you only control a leader that can rally the troops. You basically move him with WASD and ask your troops to follow him/attack a specific target/hold fire etc.

The campaign is divided into several chapters and you will command a different leader every time learning the whole story. It’s not very complicated and quite early you can figure it out that things are not that easy as they are presented in the first chapter but can be interesting nonetheless.

So where is the part that disappointed me? The problem is that there is not much strategy in commanding your troops. In fact you’ll be mostly asking them to follow you. You can’t combine them in squads and give orders to just a few of them (with an exception to all units of the same type but this option is actually useless). In short: the game comes down to running around the map with all your troops near you and having turrets to defend your mills. Don’t get me wrong, it is quite entertaining, you can think about it as an arcade RTS but with just a bit strategy it would be a much better game. Heck, even much older games like Sacrifice or even Herzog Zwei allow more strategic approach.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun with the game but it left a bit sour taste in my mouth.


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The World Next Door (steam)

Quite charming, so far since release, I have finished it twice, addicting game.

Subterrain and Distraint: Deluxe Edition

Subterrain - finally finished it after four or five attempts. Not very popular yet not so bad survival horror game with resource management elements. Strangely addictive but it does get tiresome after a while as there just isn't enough diversity in enemies and level design departments. There's also a steep difficulty spike near the end, I almost didn't finish the game because of it.

Distraint: Deluxe Edition - finally got to it after it was given away in January I think. Charming but SERIOUSLY too short a game. Puzzles are few and far between and not hard to solve at all - game makes sure to always let you know what to do next. Still it may be worth a price if one likes narrative driven games. I think I'll get a sequel if it ever goes on sale, the money to playtime ratio is just too steep for me here.

Streets of Rage REMAKE!!! Finally, i managed to beat the Event mode! My fingers bled, my eyes almost fled, but what the hell? 100% completed, at long last! Fear Max, Blaze, Shiva and Mr.X! Now to store that saved game somewhere safe...

Diablo

I've played the game back then, but never completed it. Now I finished it for the first time. My character was a warrior and I didn't have much problem with it. Gave him some good amor (with resistence against magic, fire and lightning) and a mighty sword and most of the enemies were quite easy to beat. Especially melee battles were very easy. Just lure the opponents to a doorway or a narrow passage and take them out one by one. Battles against big crowds of magicians were harder, but also doable. I also invested several skillpoints in magic and learned several spells, but I hardly ever used them (except for Town Portal and Flame Waves from time to time).

All in all the game was still quite fun and addictive. Certainly not the big sensation that it was when it was released, but still enjoyable and a good way to spent some hours. Especially I liked the fact that the monsters don't respawn and so there isn't any need for grinding.
The one thing that I didn't like is the fact that you can't run and your walking speed is the exact same than the walking speed of the monsters. So sometimes they run away and you just follow them and try to confront them in a corner (so they can't get away).

Music and sounds are really atmospheric, graphics are ok and level design is really good in the first few levels, but gets a little boring in the end.

Might try to beat the game with another class one day in the future, but for now I'll take a break and play something else.

Complete list of finished games in 2019

Return To Castle Wolfenstein.

I went in hard, I didn't listen, the game kicked my ass, The ending was a let down, but the journey was well worth the time investment. Sniping, stealth, action and a real sense of mortality wrapped up in an old school shooter. Good level design and the occult weapon idea was ... different. At times it did feel like a dying simulator. This game takes no prisoners and will kick your ass when it can.

I waited, I expected a shotgun and it never came. For that it made the game all the better.

Every review rated this game highly. In 2019 it still holds up and doesn't look that bad as it runs on the quake 3 engine.

RiME, Apr 1 (GOG)-This reminds me a lot of Brothers. Similar light puzzle type game, dialog-less narative, bit of a sad, lonely, melancholy story. And like Brothers I enjoyed it while it lasted. The ending was a little bit sadder because I only managed to collect one toy. It should have been 3 but after not being able to grab some more with a couple of attempts I moved on. Overall I enjoyed it and quite a bit more than their other game, Deadlight, and definitely looking forward to The Sexy Brutale.

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Fallout 3 GOTY (GOG version)

This is my 4th time finishing Fallout 3 and this time I also finished Mothership Zeta. I love the quests and the world of the Capital Wasteland in F3. M.Z. is also pretty good but a dungeon crawler..... in a spaceship.

Didn't have any technical issues with the GOG version on Win7 64-bit. After about 30 hours I began to use a mod called Fellout that removed the green tint from the game but sadly also made water transparent and nights way too dark.So after 20 more hours I did disable the mod.

All in all Fallout 3 is a great Bethesda open world RPG.

Just finished Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered on PS4. I started on Veteran difficulty (the highest level) since that's the level I always played the CoD games on on PC and also finished MW on back when it first came out. Towards the end I figured, though, that life's too short for this shit and set it to Regular difficulty and just got it over with.

Anyway, I really don't like this game and playing on Veteran really highlights how shittily designed the game is. No matter how much military jargon the characters throw around, the developers' understanding of military operations is pretty much zero and the missions make no sense whatsoever which is exemplified by the fact that your guys keep getting shred to pieces and only survive because they are as immortal as they are useless.

That said, some of the scripts are still quite impressive, the gunplay is good etc. and when I wasn't facepalming myself over how moronically scripted the missions are I got some joy out of it. Anyway, I don't remember the last time I felt this strongly that I'm wasting time by playing a game.