Stories Untold (Epic)

It just went free on Epic store. Don't miss it, it only takes a few hours and is a pretty unique adventure game experience. A mix of text adventure and item manipulation where everything like user manuals is all given to you. You have to work out how to operate test equipment, radios and even decode a bit of morse code. Told over 4 chapters that have you thinking it's just a collection of short stories...but keep going and it all makes sense in the end. Get it, it's free and only uses up a few hours of your life and is well worth it.

Remember Me

The first game from Dontnod, and it's really good. The story was great and the combat was fun for the most part, just a bit repetitive. There's platforming sections that remind me of Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands. I've heard they have a story written for 2 and hope they end up doing it someday.

Beaten star wars battlefront 2004. Great game, certainly like some things better than in battlefront 2.
No annoying space battles, but can use air ships on land which is nice, grenades certainly work interesting also how they don't kill you always if they sent you flying,more bots in 1 than 2 i believe, no unlimited units in the campaing for the enemy. Super battle droids can shoot rockets, i really don't know if they had that in battlefront 2.
Also played through the first 4 galactic conquest and beaten it. Now i believe i had enough of battlefront 1.
Also some maps have additional units which can help you or be against you, made it harder when they were against me.
And the jedi can't be killed, can send them flying with grenades and all but still survives. In battlefront 2 you could control jedi and their power but in 1 they just help you or are against you as a bot.
And you get planetery bonuses instead of buying them depending on which planet you have in galactic conquest and then just choose a bonus you like from all the planets you own.
Oh and if you win 4 times you can unleash your secret base bonus which is either winning over a planet without the need to fight on both platforms of the planet or destroy the planet, this depends which faction you have.

Last Of Us
*Spoilers*

What I liked

I loved the setting/characters and how they interacted(especially the MCs and also the hermit in the one town), the music, and the storyline(even if it was a tad depressing overall).

What I disliked

I didn't like, however, Ellie's/Joel's lack of caution....as I felt it flew in the face of their prior experiences/their cautious nature in general. By this, I am talking about how they kept getting ambushed upon entering various doors in the various levels.....you'd think they'd know to be more careful entering new areas. :\

Also I didn't like how everyone/every group(or at least most of them) were either irredeemable/nearly irredeemable d*cks or got killed off by bad luck/other d*cks: The two brothers get infected/kill themselves, many of the groups the MCs come across try to kill them, one of the starting MCs gets killed off, and even Ellie nearly meets a bad end(Joel also suffers and almost dies at one point).

Nitpicks

Joel somehow surviving his wound(with no major infection/sepsis/shock from blood loss) so long until he was patched up is hard to believe. Also how ellie managed to move joel's unconcious body by herself/in the sled with no issues was hard to swallow as well.

Also, a small nitpick is that they seemed to push the LGBT propaganda in this game a bit: The hermit is gay, Marlene(firefly from the start) is implied lesbian(with Ellie's mother), and Ellie is implied bi-gay in the dlc.

Disclaimer: I have no problem with such being shown in small doses in media, but some may not like such so I offer the above as a warning for those who dislike such who might want to try the game.


The overall

All in all I wouldn't mind a sequel(or even a prequel showing the beginning spread of the infection), as this game left me wanting more of the last of us. :)

Rainbow Moon (PS4)

This game is an RPG with turn-based combat on a grid, containing light tactical elements.

You start with one character, but as you play 5 more get unlocked and you eventually have a party of any 3 of them (you don't need to continue using the original character, and you can mix-and-match on the go). It's got leveling-up, gear and skills to acquire and improve, and dungeoncrawling.

I really enjoyed this game a lot. The combat is very simple and fun, and the story is very minimal and doesn't get in the way of the game.

The main disadvantage of this game is the length, it took me over 100hrs to complete the main story campaign and there is still TONS of content left to complete (uncompleted side quests, and new side quests). I didn't really do much grinding (on Normal difficulty), just doing the main quest and side quests gave me most of what I needed.

Although the game is very good, I do think it would be better as a shorter game. In some ways I want to continue on with all the new side-quests, but at the same time after 100 hours I'm simply exhausted and I want to play something else.

Still, I would not hesitate to recommend it if you enjoy story-lite RPGs with turn-based combat (and you have a Playstation).

Finished StarCraft 2 for the 3rd time.

I think maybe I should actually try something I haven't played before.

I spent $25 on this "Cake is a Lie" shirt; might as well play Portal 2.

Just Cause 2

Much more polished and fun than the first game which I got bored of and quit after two hours already. This one felt a bit similar to the later Far Cry games (especially FC4, because it's also set in a fictional Asian country), except that it's third person and there is no wildlife in the game. But lots of outposts to attacks, insane amount of collectibles, and comparably cynical view on politics and secret services. I'm not sure to what degree the "America Fuck Yeah" story is tongue-in-cheek (the devs are Swedes) or also catering to that mindset, either way it's very silly, but you don't really play this game for a story about a "just" cause. It's a huge open world playground to wreak havoc in, just because. So the title is very apt! There are a lot of different things to do in creatively destructive or destructively creative ways (yay terrorism!), kind of like your own Michael Bay movie to direct - it's all about the explosions.

And it's disturbingly enjoyable if you just want to shut your brain off for a bit. A pure silly action game without a conscience. Hardly food for though, not very nourishing, but tasty enough for the moment, and before you know it that moment has expanded to countless hours. There are only a couple of missions for the main story (six or seven, and I'd guess they are about half an hour long at best), but to unlock them you have to do side missions or some open world stuff. Since the story missions aren't that much better or more interesting than the rest, I didn't really mind though. Even though the gameplay can get a bit repetitive after a while, I found the side missions surprisingly varied. They all use the same cutscenes just with different text, but each mission is kind of unique in its own way.

The open world gameplay is a lot of fun as well, at least for a while, until you notice how overwhelmingly pointless it is. Apart from the main story missions I did all the 49 available side quests and additionally wasted quite a few hours on playing around with the open world, trying to clear cities and military bases of government property, hunting for collectibles etc. And all that combined took me over 40 hours (don't judge me), but my final completion rate was below 40%, because everything in this huge world counts towards the 100%, and you can spend a whole evening "accomplishing" things only to find that you have advanced the completion rate by a mere 1%. Apart from the (enjoyable, but ultimately hollow, fast food) experience, you are rewarded with money, armor/health upgrades and upgrade points for equipment and vehicles, but none of that really makes a significant difference. The improvements are barely noticeable and not really necessary either, seeing that the game is mostly easy on Normal difficulty.

Other points of criticism that I have: There are some pointless QTE sequences - every time you hijack an enemy vehicle, you have to press three numbers (from 1 to 4) in order to punch the driver or pilot, but you don't even need to do it quickly, it's just a waste of time. Similarly, every time you want to quick travel or upgrade or buy items or vehicles, before and after the transaction, you are rewarded with the same old cutscenes. Every f***ing time. You can skip them, but combined with the loading times, that still leads to several completely unnecessary seconds that add up quickly. The extraction (that is quick travel) screen is a bit inconvenient since it doesn't allow scrolling with the mouse like the regular map does and it doesn't display where the missions are. Also, some things are badly explained in-game, if at all. I only really learned how to properly control a plane very late in the game, when a mission forced me to (and it's tricky enough even when you know how to do it). I also read that you can dismount the minigun on turrets, but I never really got it to work. Only in the final mission, after I died and reloaded the last checkpoint, I suddenly had a minigun equipped, even though I never picked it up myself (made everything a lot easier, as if it was a cheat). And I encountered a few more occasional bugs, like false positive collectible indicators hanging below the PC's butt, enemies glitching into the walls and shooting at me without being targetable, or, at times, getting hopelessly stuck in an aborted grapple animation when unsuccessfully trying to hijack a boat while swimming.

But I guess the game also deserves praise for all the many things it allows you to do and that actually work or can lead to hilarious results. Solid game, quite good for what it is.

The Chosen (Steam)

Unfortunately it's not a game about Orthodox Jews playing baseball. Sad face. It's a little RPG Maker game that I bought on Steam for 75 cents on sale, with my account balance from selling those useless trading cards (I was truly torn between this or "Saving Jesus"). I thought it may be a nice short little game to fill in a gap whilst working out what bigger game to commit to next.

It's a basic 5 hour RPG in the style of something like the first Final Fantasy. It was okay and passed the time and supposedly has, or is getting a sequel. It was worth 75 cents.

Bayonetta

A fun spectacle fighter, though I never really mastered the combat system even to the point of being able to comfortably use the game's signature "Dodge Offset" mechanic which allows you to continue a combo after dodging an enemy attack. The fact that I needed to use healing consumables on last few bosses speaks to my lack of 1337 $|<|11$.

Story's over the top and kinda confusing, but I loved the characters, especially the extremely beautiful and snarky Bayonetta herself.

I beat the game on Normal, but won't try the Hard difficulty this unlocked. I did complete all the optional Alfheim challenges.

Project APT &
Farnham Fables. Episode 1: The King's Medicine

Sorting through all the unplayed trash from accumulated bundles and giving it a try, just for the fun for it, I stumbled upon these two short adventure games from Groupees. Both took me less than half an hour to play through. And both are very odd.

Project APT (I guess that's short for "apartment") has no explicit background story, you're just some guy walking around a building with three stories and nine doors on each of them (some of them barred or locked though). The more you delve into the game, the weirder the scenery becomes, furniture is floating in some rooms, others contain traces of blood, creepy teddybears, dead bodies or monsters built from human body parts. The whole thing has a dream-like quality. There is barely any text in the game and only a few hotspots you can interact with. So what you do is find the rooms that have some item to pick up or some monster to use your items on (that is kill them). The text on hotspots give you clues as to what to do with the items or monsters, but it's intentionally weird or metaphorical. You can die from monsters if you pass them or use the wrong items twice, and then you have to start from the beginning. There is no save function. If you do everything the right way, the game ends with an image that has you guessing what that was all about. But frankly, I'm not all that keen on knowing in the first place. The best about the game was the song played on the menu that gets quite nice if you let it run for a few minutes. Other than that, not really worth it.

Farnham Fables has hand-drawn graphics in a charmingly amateurish, cute cartoon style. It also features a pretty nice point-and-click system that allows you to switch between different characters (humans and anthros) with different personalities and every action you can do in the game gets a unique reaction, also dependent on who's your active character. I was really impressed and delighted by those mechanics, they were fun to play around with. The plot was not that special, but the story was told in a special way that made me play on. The few existing puzzles, if you can even call them that, were very easy, but I didn't mind. The game has some anthro nudeness that I wouldn't deem that problematic in itself, but what makes this game so odd despite all the good things I mentioned above are some quite disturbing comments and possible actions from one of the characters regarding a naked lizard child that completely poison the seemingly innocent nature of the story. Which is a real shame, but no, just no. Ugh.

I guess I wasn't that wrong in staying away from these two before ...

The Legend of Zelda. I'd played this various times over the years, but never actually went all the way through a single game and beat Ganon, so I figured it was time to rectify that. It's a very good game that holds up nicely, with simple but effective graphics, nice music, and gameplay that is fast and sometimes challenging with various enemy types (those freaking blue wizards always gave me trouble...).

The game plays very quickly and wouldn't take much time at all to beat except that there are certain items that will greatly enhance your ability to survive and dungeon entrances hidden in random places, too. This brings up the big problem I do have with the game. Hiding stuff isn't a big deal to me - I love Metroid and to beat that game you have to shoot and bomb all over the place to find hidden stuff - but when you have constraints placed on your ability to uncover stuff (unlike in Metroid, where you have unlimited bombs and normal shots...), it makes the exploration part of the game really annoying. You can burn bushes with the candle, but you can only use the candle once per screen, so if you want to check multiple parts on a screen, you have to constantly exit and return just to use the stupid candle again. At least you have unlimited uses, though. In the case of the bombs you use to blast stuff out of the way, you have a very limited number, so it's not unusual to find yourself grinding for bombs just so you can get back to probing the environment. For this reason, I think just going straight to online maps that show the secrets is a perfectly reasonable way to play, especially since I don't recall knowing any kids who beat this thing without a strategy guide back in the day.

Westerado. Nowhere near as old but kind of the same deal in that I've played it a lot but never got around to actually winning it until now. I would always get wrapped up in doing various sidequests and then get distracted by other games, then restart and get bogged down in sidequests again. This time I made sure to keep things simple and just focused on doing enough to uncover the identity of your family's killer, and then I randomly ran into the guy while in the middle of doing something else.

Which is a cool thing about the game - the sidequests seem to be static, but the identity of the villain always changes, so there's a lot of replay value there, in addition to the sidequests being so numerous that you could play a few times before uncovering them all. In one game you could help the ranchers, but in another you could help the Indians, or the Army. Whatever.

The combat is really simple but I like how it works. It's all horizontal attacks with your gun. You can fire one shot at a time, and have to take time to reload one bullet at a time when you're empty. If you get shot, your hat gets blown off, but if you run out of hats you're dead. You can get more hats by buying them from shops, or if you take careful aim you can blow them off of your enemies and pick them up. I wouldn't say it's an especially challenging game, but you do need to pay attention.

In its jokey sort of way, the game does a very nice job of getting across the whole western experience, and the game really only lasts as long as you want it to last. I'll probably replay it somewhat regularly, unlike a lot of other recent releases.

The Girl and the Robot (pre-alpha version)

This one was actually fun. A cute third person 3D puzzle game without words, reminiscent of ICO, in which you can switch between an agile little girl and her strong robot knight protector that she can control via some magic bond they share. The girl can jump and fit through tiny spaces, the robot can fight hostile robot knights with its sword, shoot a bow at targets or push boxes, and both can pull levers. The robot can also carry her, at the expense of not being able to fight or interact with anything else while she's sitting on its shoulders. You have to advance through the levels by helping each other overcome obstacles like locked doors, without the girl getting caught by the robot opponents or falling to her death or the robot being slain in combat (although that never happened to me, so I'm not 100% sure about this).

The Pre-alpha version had the first two levels, which I'd estimate took a little under an hour to complete. There was no way to save or quit that I found, but I discovered that you could freely choose the checkpoint in a level by pressing F1 or F2, and I could shut down the program with Alt-F4, so both was not a big problem. The release version has mixed reviews, so I can only imagine that there might be some frustrating spots later on or that people expected a more professional looking game for the price (the game is quite basic with mostly bare environments and simple animations, and there was hardly any music, but I found it quite beautiful nevertheless). Or maybe it's because it supposedly ends with a "To Be Continued ..." message? In any case, what I've seen in the pre-alpha version left me wanting for more, so maybe I'll buy the full game one day.

EDIT: Oh, I see it's currently on sale at the Humble Store for 50% off, including both Steam key and DRM-free version. Bought!

EDIT: And reviewed!

I utterly and absolutely recommend it. And then some. Those turrets are so cute.

Oops. I thought you meant the first one. Haven't played # 2

I've played the first one and it is absolutely one of the most amazing games EVER.
Not just the puzzles, the writing, the sense of humor, the dark twisted plot. LOVED IT!

Agreed. And I think that may be why I haven't started playing number two, even though I've had it for at least three years. It can't possibly be better than the first.