EA Sports WRC (XSX Game Pass)

E...A....Sports...It's in the game! This is actually Dirt Rally 3, except it's now branded under Codemasters overlords EA. It's actually quite good. I played through 3 championship seasons, starting with the WRC one make junior category, then the WRC2 and finishing up with the full WRC championship. I thought that starting with the support classes would make adapting to the driving easier...maybe it did, but I cannot shake the feeling that the more powerful WRC cars are easier because of that extra power being usable to power steer into corner far easier.

I found no issues with the game other than some stages are a real pain- like Greece with its slow uphill hairpins, plus far too many tarmac stages. That's more a feature of modern Rally racing I suppose. The highlight is the fast gravel stages- especially Kenya.

The only thing is, if you already have Dirt Rally 2 on disc with all seasonal content, as I do...then I'm not sure this newer version is really necessary unless you're a hard-core WRC fan that needs the latest seasonal content.

AssCreed IV

That was great. Pirate parts I enjoyed
Assassin parts not

Hence I think i wont be touching any other AC game in a while

Vampire Mansion (Steam)

I played this whilst waiting for S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 to install...Microsoft download speeds have been really slow lately. Anyway, Vampire Mansion is like a cheap Alien isolation, where you are chased around a mansion by a female vampire (named Velina) that has very unlikely body proportions. You hide, wait for her to move on, then get back out and look for the clues and weapons you need to escape. You finish easy mode, then hard mode. Then 3 extra modes. It was actually more engaging than I originally expected. I completed all the modes and unlocked a lot of Velina's outfits, in 5 hours of play. Just in time for S.T.A.L.K.E.R to finish installing.

Wargroove 2, Dec 22 (Xbox Game Pass)-I wanted to play this series since I first thought it was coming to GOG. Having not played the first game all the characters and factions and pre-existing conditions were a little lost on me. It was interesting that for each campaign the allies and enemies would change even if the overarching factions didn't. I think it was quite a bit easier than the Advance Wars game I played a while ago. I liked how each campaign was a little more complex than the last and introduced a new type of unit or mechanic to the game. I had a lot of fun just pumping out units and overwhelming the enemy. A handful of the maps had interesting mechanics or twists and I really enjoyed the penultimate battle. The final battle though was really frustrating.

Full List

Red Faction. Tyrannical megacorporation is exploiting workers on Mars, but the workers revolt and your guy gets caught up in it. Not only do you get involved, it appears you're the only guy in it who's remotely competent besides maybe the leader, a woman with an off-putting Jimmy Hoffa accent.

A lot of the game plays like Volition played Half-Life and went "Ooh, me now, me now!" You just go from one area to the next and there's an elegant lack of cutscenes or hamfisted storytelling. So it's jarring when suddenly a cutscene starts playing and your guy starts talking and sounds like kind of a dumbass (he does talk a bit in the introduction). Valve knew what it was doing keeping Gordan Freeman silent.

In terms of how it plays, it's a mostly quite good FPS with the gimmick of being able to destroy terrain. Like a lot of games, the gimmick is incorporated more in the early sections and becomes less prevalent as you go, until by the late game the levels are mostly conspicuously impregnable to being detonated by anything. When it works it's pretty neat, though, and there were a couple of sections where I was able to do something like break a hole in the wall and use it as a window to snipe enemies with some good protection. There are also a couple of stealth sequences and some vehicle (air and sea) parts.

For about 2/3 or so of the game, I was really impressed by how everything was coming together. Then you get to where the elite mercs start showing up and they've got this new rail gun weapon that one shots everything and can also penetrate cover, and the enemies throughout the game are generally extremely good shots, so with the introduction of this weapon the game turns into a save scum hell. Every encounter you have to save before and after because there's a high likelihood that your progress will be wiped out by one guy who gets a shot off before you can take him down. It's annoying enough that the game went from "dang, this is really good!" to a very mid-tier FPS for me.

I've completed all 72 career races and 210 out of 216 challenges in Fuel, unlocked all vehicles, all but 1 paint jobs, and all but 3 clothing options. Favorite locations include Hoover Dam, Big Cauldron's Edge, and the highway that stretches East from south of San Fran and then North into the Salt Flats. Every region has a paragraph on the map meant to summarize it, but it's all dull-witted climate change drivel like shaming astronomers for not fixing the weather. This is supposed to tie into the Mad Max-style worldbuilding where the modern world of an unspecified future zips by in their private jets while a culture of unwritten thrill-seekers deplete the last of North America's fossil fuels. Aside from the theme song that only plays if you wait at the title screen, the music is generic forgettable trash instrumentals; which is of no concern to me because I just listened to YouTube for the entire game.

Milo and the Christmas Gift

This is a short game about a cat and a bunny that’s meant to advertise Milo and the Magpies, but in my case just confirmed that it’s nothing I’d ever care to touch. And while Milo, the cat, can be said to be the main character, it’s not the player character, the player interacting directly with certain areas of the screen. And there are few screens, chapter one taking place on two, but chapters two, three and four on the same third one and chapter five on a fourth. So, if you can figure out what you have to do right away, you can finish the game in minutes, even if some animations can be rather slow and the interactions between the cat and the bunny are tedious and serve no real purpose, not even being cute, at least from my point of view, yet the game requires them in order to progress, and in fact chapter four consists solely of this, and includes a part where any attempt at realism is thrown completely out the window.
However, it's chapters two and three that are frustrating, the puzzles taking me a while to figure out, and in case of the one from chapter three I can't even say that I did figure it out. I mean, I did feel pretty clever when I figured out the correct placement, but then I had no idea how to use it to figure out the numbers and apparently just stumbled upon the solution while I was actually trying to go for a different number. And while chapter five was easier to figure out, it struck me as strange that the sign wasn't translated to English when clicking, which has to be a bug. But at least I was able to finish the game in one sitting, albeit only finding one of the secrets. Still, while there's no way to manually save, if you quit you resume from the start of the chapter you were in at that point.

Nox

for the third time this year

each path, conjurer, wizard, warrior provide different gameplay style and story.

hence i did all 3 this year. Conjurer now. Wizard in March and Warrior in June.

its great game but it does have it shortcomings.

Shadow of a Tomb Raider - Definitive Edition

In one word: Amazing!

Even with the presence of some graphics that really don't work like they ought to, the game is a very enjoyable experience.

8/10

list

Starcraft 2 Legacy of the Void and Covert Ops, Dec 27 (Xbox Game Pass)-Protoss is my least favorite faction in Starcraft but the campaign was fun. There were a handful of difficult missions specifically the defend for a set time ones. I didn't care for the final couple missions switching the playable faction on me after I had spent the game getting familiar with the Protoss. Covert Ops was a fun mini campaign. But at this point I think I'm Starcrafted out for a while.

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Milo and the Christmas Gift (2023) (Linux/Wine)
Well, thank you, GOG and Johan Scherft for the freebie, I've completed this one, but I didn't like it, sorry :)

A Normal Lost Phone (2017) (Linux)
And this one was even worse :|

Serial Cleaner (2017) (Linux)
It's time to face the truth. I won't be able to finish this game. It's time to drop it. For someone who likes the genre - brilliant. Great graphic style, great music, humor, references. I just don't have enough patience and dexterity for it. For me Contract 8 (Gator Fears, quite compact one, I know) was too much.

List of all games completed in 2024.

And my list for 2024 is probably complete with the last games.

Finished lately:
- Agent A: A puzzle in disguise: A really nice point'n click with some clever puzzles and a good story.
- Splasher: A good platformer with some challenging parts in the late levels but I finished it and liked it.
- Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders: An average point'n click for the Agatha Christie fans. I liked it though.
- Cosmic Star Heroine: A good retro JRPG for Zeboyd Games. A few improvements over their previous game. The game was really solid and I enjoyed it. It is a bit repetitive though.

Full list here.

I lied :)

I finished the free game Milo and the Christmas Gift and, sadly, I did not like it a lot. Graphics were good but puzzles lack logic and the human characters were badly drawn. I'll pass for the other game in the series.