Include me

22/1/2019 - Quest for Glory IV (GOG)
?/4/2019 - Orwell (GOG)
13/6/2019 - Deadlight (GOG)

The Hobbit.

"Say to Bard 'Shoot dragon.'"

"Bard says no."

An early text adventure based on the book. I figured since I'd read the book a few times, I'd be able to beat this handily, and I generally did know what to do (e.g., defeat the trolls by waiting until dawn) but I had to wrestle with the parser quite a bit to get the game to understand what I was trying to do or understand what the game wanted me to say. The parser is sophisticated in some ways, like how you can order NPCs about, but it can't tell the difference between, say, "Climb into boat" (the correct command) or "Climb in boat" (bah, thou fool! How couldst thou even utter such stupidity?!). I ended up making liberal use of walkthroughs just because of the parser issue.

A major innovation of the game is how the NPCs (Thorin and Gandalf mostly) are autonomous and will wander about on their own. For the most part, this doesn't affect much but there are cases in which they'll just refuse to do something critical (as in the example above) or they'll do something that will lock you out of the winning path.

As an adaption of the book to a game, it's reasonably well-done. Most of the major events are covered, with some exceptions like no Battle of Five Armies. The cast is understandably condensed, with Thorin being the only dwarf present. Hilariously, you can murder Gollum right after meeting him. He never even got a chance to play the riddle game with me. I ended up killing Smaug by throwing the ring at him, which instantly crushed his skull. I couldn't get stupid Bard to shoot his damn arrow in time.

Melbourne House went on to adapt Lord of the Rings in three games, too. Hopefully they improved the parser a bit for those.

Just finished MDK for the first time.
What a strange, strange game.

I highly recommend the 2003 Sierra game. Also the soundtrack is delightful and free here: https://thehobbit.bandcamp.com/album/the-hobbit-the-complete-original-soundtrack

https://thehobbit.bandcamp.com/track/a-walk-in-the-shire

Anyway, Tomb Raider Chronicles

Decent game, definitely not as complex or long as 4. Worst part may have been the last level mainly because of the savegame bugs. I did really like the Irish island levels as far as the design and aesthetic went (and presumably Irish mythology), and some of it was definitely creepy-horror.

I mainly beat Chron so I could say I completed the first 5 Tomb Raider games. (with weapons and health cheats for some, though)

I may revisit Angel of Darkness at some point; it, Akella's Pirates of the Caribbean, and Doom 3 were the first three games I played when I got my first PC in 2004. I got to the giant bug-human boss towards the end but didn't know how to beat it because of an aiming mechanic I wasn't aware of. Part of me would like to beat AoD so I can whine to Square Enix about getting Legend, Anniv, and co. here. :P

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Finished the story. Have no desire to the challenge missions or any more side ops. Might try one just to test out the Parasite Suit which I never got around to. Maybe.

It's a well made game mechanically, ran like a champ on my 1050ti with only a few settings reduced from max (no AA in this game though.) Controls weren't bad, I used the 360 pad to better everything except aiming.

Story was, as you may have heard, incomplete. Which sucks, since it basically cuts off in the middle and the final story mission is the god-awful first mission again, with just cutscene changes to reveal the twist. Ah well.

Edit: Oh, looks like there was one more story mission which got unlocked. At least that finished Quiet's story, so that's better.

Yeah, I've often been tempted to check that one out. I remember when it first came out it got a mixed response, but it seems like it's kept a cult following over the years.

It's an action-adventure 3D platformer aimed at kids, so obviously if that isn't your cup of tea no hard feelings, but I had great fun with it back around 2005. If nothing else, check out the OST since it's free. (Link here again)

Azuran Tales: Trials

Fun sidescrolling platforming action rpg. A bit rough around the edges, and rather hard at times, but checkpoints were frequent and lives were infinite, so kept me playing till past 5am last night, and then I finished it today.

Porradaria 2: Pagode of the Night

An ugly yet fun short little metroidvania. Used Google Translate during the amusing dialog from Portuguese, as English was not supported in the latest version.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole (Gold Edition)

This game and I started off on the wrong foot, as it made quite a bad first impression on me on the technical side.

First of all, it's made for 16:9 resolutions, and when I chose a 16:10 resolution, like my native 1680*1050, the image was displayed with bars on the top and bottom edges of the screen, which wouldn't have been an issue if these bars had been black, but for some reason they were actually light grey which I thought ugly and immersion-breaking. I was already fearing that I might have to play the whole game like that, but choosing one of the lower resolutions fixed the color and turned the bars black like they're supposed to be.

While I was experimenting with the settings, I started the game but during the intro I decided to go back to the main menu and change some settings. The game wouldn't let me. You can't abort the intro cutscenes to go back to the main menu or even the settings menu. You can only pause them, or try to skip them, which will provoke resistance and insults from Cartman (mildly funny), and when he finally let's you skip after several tries, you skip the whole game and the credits roll. The idea is okay as a joke, if a bit clumsily implemented, but after that, the cutscenes start from scratch. So your only way out of them is to watch. IMO that's kind of a douchebag design decision, to sacrifice user-friendliness for the sake of a joke, and it also shows a fundamental ignorance of the diverse reasons why people may actually feel the need to skip cutscenes. Apparently the designers were aware that a demand for this functionality exists, and still didn't really seem to understand why, and they only implemented it half-assed, so while later in the game you sometimes get an option to skip cutscenes, at other times you don't, and particularly not where the ultimate attack moves are concerned, the cutscenes of which will be repeated a lot during combat.

The next issue I experienced were long loading times and occasional crashes. Two times the game crashed to desktop when I had loaded it up and pressed Continue - luckily my worst fears didn't come true and none of the save files were corrupted; the next time I tried, it worked, and I didn't lose any progress. The third crash happened later in the game, during the end phase of one of the final fights, and this time it completely froze my PC so that I had to do a hard reset. I had to repeat the combat, but it wasn't as much of a big deal as I feared either. Still, a forced hard reset is pretty bad regardless.

The game itself had some minor irritations in store for me as well, but it turned out I was too quick to judge them. In the beginning the gender of my female character was ignored by the cutscenes (the parents talking about "him"), but it turned out to be a joke, and it evolved into something quite funny. I think it's also related to the previous game, The Stick of Truth, assuming the main character was a boy? But it's been so long since I played it that I didn't remember that part.

The second mild irritation was the new combat system, which is not only tactical turn-based but using a grid involving positioning this time (while the first game was just old school JRPG menu based combat). That's refreshing, but in the beginning it takes some getting used to that each attack move has its own very specific range and attack pattern, and most of them are horizontal only, so if you stand in the same vertical column as an opponent, even right next to them, most often you can't touch them at all, which seemed weird until I understood that those are just the rules and that choosing varied attack moves with different patterns, including vertical ones, is an essential tactic later on, once you get more variety concerning classes and attack moves. The moving patterns can also seem weird at times, like a character being able to move 3 steps to the right, but not one to the left or so. And very little of how the combat works is actually explained very clearly (although it's possible that there is a combat manual in the menu, I forgot to look; I just don't like reading manuals and prefer important stuff to be explained in-game). ;) Not that this actually made the combats difficult, they're quite easy on Normal difficulty most of the times, I hardly ever had to repeat a combat in the game. But if you know what you're doing, they might not take quite as long. It's also a bit of a pity that you gain so many different attack moves but you can only ever use three plus one ultimate attack at the same time, which somewhat decreases the appeal of experimenting a lot with the various moves, IMO. I'd have preferred to have four plus one combat slots, at least.

All that being said, the game turned out to be great fun and even though I'm aware that this isn't a common opinion, I think I loved it just as much or even more than The Stick of Truth. It's still very true to the source material and just as funny, and to me the superhero theme added to the enjoyment. The Gold Edition comes with three DLCs; the best one was From Dusk till Casa Bonita because it offered cool new locations, an amusing plot and maybe 2-3 hours extra; Bring the Crunch I liked a little less, because it was very heavy on puzzles and item related quests that I often solved accidentally, and in the wrong order, without having learned about them first, which decreased my enjoyment of them a bit, while plot and opponents were less interesting and funny. It's still okay though, and just as the first DLC, it also unlocks a new class and a new companion, and especially the class is pretty bad-ass, and usable in the main game as well. The third DLC, Danger Deck, I skipped, as it's just a couple of more challenging combats with rather meagre rewards and no story. As a completionist and slowpoke who likes to take his time and who even left the game running while doing other things at times, I think I put something between 30 and 40 hours into the game. I don't know about the regular prices for the game and its DLCs, but I bought the complete package in a sale for 15 EUR, and after I got over the initial annoyances, I thought it was totally worth it.

TL:DR
On the technical side, it could have been a little more user-friendly at times, but the game itself delivers. In the end, I enjoyed it just as much as the first one.

Being able to cause a complete freeze is a dealbreaker for any game...
Good review though.

Thanks! I'm amazed someone actually read my walls of text. :D

Oh, and I forgot to mention one little detail, that's probably quite significant for a lot of folks here: Apparently the game uses Denuvo on top of the Uplay client. I didn't realize that when I bought it, because it's mentioned neither on the Ubistore page nor on the 2game.com page where I bought the UPlay key, just on Steam. Now, I think there are rumours going around that Denuvo can cause games to slow down or crash, but tbh I have no way of knowing what caused the slow loading and crashes - it might just as well have been something about my rig or the game itself, and others may or may not experience the same.

All I can say is that it wasn't consistent. Sometimes the game loaded a little faster, sometimes slower, and the crashes seeemed to occur when the game was struggling with such slow loading periods. And maybe they were memory related, because often I still had other programs open in the background, like Firefox or Spotify, and occasionally after I quit the game, these programs were very slow and had to be shut down as well. It doesn't usually happen with other games (and I do actually have 8GB of RAM), but still, I have no clear evidence that it was the fault of the game or Denuvo. That's probably enough of a warning sign for some though (if they aren't already put off by the game requiring Uplay to run on PC).

Yoku's Island Express

Actually, I finished the main story about two weeks ago, but I was still a few collectibles short of unlocking the second ending and I put off getting them until now. It's a very nice and short metroidvania game with an original twist, in that jump button and fighting mechanics - which you'd usually expect in a metroidvania game - are replaced by pinball mechanics. You control a small bug that drags a ball around with itself, and you also control pinball bumpers spread all over the scenery that propel the bug and its ball around. You collect fruit in order to unlock more bumpers or buy upgrades for yourself (such as bigger fruit purses), you stuff letters in mailboxes, and you search for other collectibles, while following a simple but neat storyline and solving quests for the creatures you meet on your travels. There are a few boss battles as well, but everything plays out as pinball puzzles and there isn't a lot of stress, and no fear of dying.

I enjoyed the gameplay concept and the setting a lot, there are just some minor aspects that could have been handled better. For one, the economy of the game seems a bit out of whack; in the beginning you might occasionally have to "grind" a little for fruit in order to unlock bumpers or buy something, but pretty quickly you'll be stuffed with fruit and there will be nothing left to buy as the purchase offers are few and far between. So while you can still collect lots of fruits in the pinball scenery, it's basically worthless, which makes the actual pinball sections mostly pointless as well and just a waste of time to repeat. But since this is a metroidvania, there is a lot of backtracking. The island offers a fast travelling system with several stations in every area, but on most stations you can't get on - you always have to walk to the end station of the line in order to get to a station in the middle, which makes the fast traveling system not as fast and useful as it should be.

All of these things become a bit of a problem later in the game, when you've already explored most of the map, as they make traveling from point A to point B rather tedious. There's not much going on anymore in the parts you've explored, but you still need to traverse them again and again, and the pinball sections additionally get in your way and steal your time. Pinball mechanics aren't exactly the most precise either, and there are other slightly frustrating mechanics like swinging (too fast) and exploding snails (never properly explained, hard to master) that made hunting for the last collectibles during the endgame a bit of a pain.

I still recommend the game very much. It's really cute, creative, enjoyable and mostly relaxing to play, and it doesn't take that long to complete (HowLongToBeat says 6-11 hours, I took my time and finished it after 13, with 95% completion - couldn't be bothered to hunt after the meaningless chests). Nice graphics, art design, music and sounds as well.

Funny story... I just wrote a very long post about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild which I just finished on Switch earlier today and... it disappeared. Maybe because it was too long, maybe because the session had timed out, maybe because there were too many expletives... only GOG knows. So, I'll keep it short(er) this time:

Update: I did not.

It's a good game but I have qualms to call it a very good one and I'm not sure it would be this "OMG, 11/10!" game if it weren't for the Zelda label. Now, I fell in love with the game straight away: it's gorgeous, has a beautiful atmosphere, a beautiful soundtrack and the amount of originality and courage in its design is impressive. For the first 30 or so hours I was mesmerised by it. However, this is a 100+ hour game and eventually that nagging voice kicked in that kept telling me that I have been cheated.

I will try to briefly summarise my problems with the game (this time). First off: there's almost no story in this game. There's some backstory (but not that much, actually) that you discover through flashbacks, but there's no interesting turns of events or great discoveries or anything like that in this game. The first time you do one of the dungeons, sure, big animal machine threatening a village, stakes are high, cool - but by the time I did the second dungeon it occurred to me that this pattern would be used every time. And whereas many good RPGs use side quests to tell interesting stories that could easily be the basis for a whole game or movie etc. here they are almost exclusively fetch quests that don't affect anything. I know Zelda isn't a traditional RPG and I wasn't expecting another Witcher 3 here but come ooooon, even past Zelda games were far more interesting in this regard. If I can't meaningfully affect the whole world at least let me affect individual lives - alas, I can't.

Then there's this utter lack of progression which has ironically been a hallmark feature of the series since its conception. BotW reveals all its cards in the first couple of hours. You basically start out with all the powers (the later ones are just minor stuff that makes the game a tad easier), you soon encounter all the enemy types (later on its just different colour and strength or elemental effects), you soon get all the weapon types and then it's just stronger variations - not to mention that all weapons with the exclusion of one particular sword break anyway (and that one gets depleted by frequent use and then has to recharge). HP and stamina development is of course linear - after a while a single heart or piece of the stamina wheel just doesn't matter at all and eventually I didn't even bother upgrading them anymore. The only thing that felt like genuine progression was finding new armour but most of it is super situational, I think the conventionally strongest one can be found very soon by following the main quest line, it certainly remained my armour of choice until the very end. You can upgrade armour and that's cool but soon you're equipped well enough to take on Ganon anyway - and I looked up the requirements for upgrading them further and those are just insane. A game changer were clothes that allowed me to venture deeper into particularly cold or hot areas but then again, I could have just as well kept drinking potions with the same effect.

A recurring theme in the game are the shrines that serve as fast travel spots and mini dungeons with small puzzle challenges (and a few combat ones) but those all have the same visual theme and pretty arbitrary design - they seem cool at first but after I had done several dozen of them I considered them nothing but a nuisance anymore - and you do have to complete a fair amount of them to get a sensible amount of HP and stamina. There's also a variety of horses but somehow I apparently ended up unlocking what seems to be the best one just a few hours in - and I didn't bother using mounts anyway because why would I in a game with unlimited fast travel and where you have to climb mountains every couple of steps you take?

Anyway, my main problem is this lack of unique content. Eventually it occurred to me that besides the four (interesting but short and visually similar) dungeons plus one particular mysterious forest and the castle housing Ganon there's nothing that feels truly unique here. There's tons of samey ruined buildings, a few arbitrarily placed labyrinths (seriously, who built those and why?), lots of small forests, lakes and a shitload of mountains but you rarely if ever get anything valuable out of them. Weapons break anyway, side quests are meaningless, there's very little interesting dialogue to be had with NPCs, it's the same couple of enemies all over the whole world just with different colours, elemental effects etc.. Shrines and the occasional riddles that need to be solved to unlock them are very welcome at first but become meaningless and tiresome eventually.

Of course, there have been a few beautiful moments in this game, some of them breathtaking even, it has made me laugh a few times and so on but it honestly pales compared to many other RPGs and action adventures in this regard. And sure, there's this whole "systemic design" going on here - you can go anywhere you want, do stuff in seemingly thousands of ways, sometimes the game will throw mechanically interesting or at least funny situations at you (like that time I fired a burning arrow at some thorns to gain access to a shrine but it began raining at that exact moment and the flames were extinguished and I had to wait for the weather to change) but I, as a goal-oriented player, didn't get many kicks out of that stuff because I didn't have to because the base game, or at least the obligatory content, is super easy. There's still a lot of DLC content waiting for me but that on the other hand is so sadistic (at least to me) that I probably won't even bother with it, even though I just spent 20 bucks on it, knowing full well that no interesting rewards await me for completing them (for instance one of them is an upgrade for the Master Sword... which I didn't need to finish the game to begin with).

Sooo, it's a good game, I wouldn't have put 70+ hours into it if it weren't but honestly, in my book it's a far cry from that mindblowingly amazing perfect masterpiece that everyone and their uncle had made it out to be. And the things I enjoyed most about it aren't something I haven't seen in at least several titles before. If I were to rate it I would probably give it a 8/10 but just barely.

Oh heck, why not.

HuniePop - January 3rd
"I'm more or less done my first run through HuniePop, and GOG is telling me that I've managed to spend 12 hours already. Twelve hours in a dating simulator, using match-3 mechanics to date cartoon women and memorizing details about characters whom I could never meet in real life. That just goes to show that, despite the rather simple premise, the game hooks you and doesn't let go. The dialogue is funny, the various characters are -- with one big exception -- likable and relatable, and the match-3 gameplay has a deceptive depth that will keep you focused on your every move. I definitely recommend playing this game. It's well worth the price."

Guns, Gore, and Cannoli - January 14th
""Guns, Gore & Cannoli" is, at its core, a time waster. It doesn't have a deep story, nor are the mechanics that difficult to grasp. There is not sense of personal fulfillment at the end of the game, nor a sense of wow at the scope of the world. This is not, however, a bad thing. Sometimes you just want to pick up a game and shoot zombies, and that's exactly what "Guns, Gore & Cannoli" offers. You play as Vinnie, a mobster who is tasked with retrieving someone from a town that has been incommunicando for the past few days. Upon arriving, you find that it is filled with zombies, gangsters, and soldiers, and it is your job to fight your way past them and finish your mission -- and maybe discover what the heck is happening. Over the course of the game (about 3 or 4 hours), you'll use a range of weapons to defeat an assortment of enemies, including three bosses. Each type of enemy has its own skills. Some might explode, others might run through crowds, and still others might spray poison gas. The art style is easy on the eyes, and the gameplay (keyboard only) is smooth. Overall, a fun time waster, and well worth a buy."

Braid - January 16th
"I decided to play Braid after seeing it mentioned on several YouTube videos as an interesting and allegorical game. I hate to say it, but I'm not seeing what the hype is about. Sure, the art style is cute, and the puzzles tend to force you to think outside the box, but I cannot say I enjoyed the "allegories". The big "surprises" were both clearly signaled in the flavor text, and I was already bored of Tim as a protagonist before reaching that point. The allegories themselves felt forced, particularly as neither of the common interpretations really influences the gameplay in any way. It's not that Braid is a bad game, but that it doesn't actually do much for gaming as an art."

Gorogoa - January 19th
"I decided to play Gorogoa despite not being much of a fan of puzzle games owing to the beautiful illustrations and rave reviews. It certainly is beautiful, and quite calming to play; the soundtrack complements the game perfectly. Gameplay is innovative, with tiles either being stacked, pulled apart, or put next to each other to advance the main character's quest. There was only one puzzle that frustrated me when I was trying to solve it, about mid-game, and that's not bad. I'd say for puzzle game fans, this is a must-buy. For people who aren't fans of the genre, it's worth trying the demo (available elesewhere) first; if you like it, go for it!"

Brutal Legend - January 24th
"After reading up on Brutal Legend, I decided to try it. It sounded interesting: a metalhead roadie gets sent back in time and brings metal back to a land born of metal and inspired by metal covers, using a metal car and metal riffs and metal axe to fight back metal demons. Add in Lemmy Kilmester, Jack Black, Ozzie Osbourne, as voice actors, as well as a (fricking amazing) soundtrack with over a hundred metal tracks, and you've got yourself probably the most metal thing this side of, well, metal. I have to hand it to Double Fine; it certainly is a fun game, especially at the beginning. Black's comedy mixes well with the shear... well, uniqueness of the game, and the first 30 minutes was easily the most fun I've had with a game this year. But over time, with metal this and metal that, as well as the introduction of rather clunky RTS elements midway through the game, I just couldn't bring myself to finish everything. In short, I'd say that for most gamers Brutal Metal is worth buying on sale... but not at full price. Not until we can buy the soundtrack, at least."

Memory's Dogma: Code 01 - January 25th
"Overall, Memory's Dogma: Code 01 is a pretty good sci-fi visual novel. Your name is Kusuhara Hiroki, and your high school friend recently died in a car accident. Fortunately, an organization called JCO has stored her memories, which are available for access until the end of the month. Unfortunately, inconsistencies in these memories lead you down a rabbit hole of conspiracy and assassination as you attempt to uncover her true cause of death. Honestly, I'm not sure why Japanese RPGs and VNs seem to enjoy turning every story into a conspiracy to take over the world and doom humanity, but that's what happens here, and -- as common in stories like this -- the seemingly hard sci-fi of the initial story gives way to a much less scientifically plausible one. Oh well. ... This game is supposed to be episodic, so don't expect all of your questions to be answered through Code 01 itself, but at least the story can stand on its own if needed. Story aside... there are only five significant choices, with one "true" ending and four "bad" endings, so if you like your VNs with branching storylines this won't be for you. Illustrations and music are reasonably high quality; the voice overs (Japanese only) are quite good. All in all, worth a go if you're interested in sci-fi."

Star Trek: Judgment Rites. Pretty much the same as 25th Anniversary but just a little more so. Mostly it comes across as being more adventure game-like in both good and bad ways. The game feels a bit bigger and puzzles are often more demanding. There's just more stuff to click on and interact with, whereas in the previous game talking to your people and scanning stuff and generally acting like you were in an episode of the show would get you a good chunk of the way through. You're still doing a lot of that, but there's one chapter in which you're basically doing fetch quests for a series of people. There's something hilarious about hearing William Shatner voice-act his way through something like that. I got tripped up on a couple of puzzles because the game wanted me to pixel hunt. Maybe pixel hunt is too strong a term, but I was clicking all over the screen but somehow missing the precise part I needed to click to solve a puzzle to which I already suspected the solution. In one case, the object I needed just wasn't well defined from the background, an issue I've occasionally had with games from this era.

The game is much lighter on ship battles this time around. The graphics are mostly identical except cut-scenes with the Enterprise moving in space are pre-rendered. One nice thing is that they got more of the cast involved, so for example Chekov comes with you on one mission and Uhura on another. They ditched the "try to get your red shirts through the mission alive" mechanic, which I kind of missed, to be honest.

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Gargoyle's Quest. In which you get to play as that red bastard demon from Ghosts and Goblins, except it plays much different. You cross an RPG-like overworld to find levels in which you can hover for a limited time from one platform to another while enemies are trying to get in your way. It controls nicely - just hit the jump button and then hit it again to hover and then you have to get where you want to go before your meter runs out. Reaching land or clamping onto the side of a wall instantly refills the meter and you can make another move. It's not very hard for the most part, except maybe for the last couple of levels.

It looks pretty good for a Game Boy game as they got just the right balance of keeping the characters big without zooming in so far that the levels feel claustrophobic.