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Played through a campaign of Sid Meier's Ace Patrol this weekend. I enjoyed it, it's easy to pick up and the challenges increases as you play. It's mechanically simple, but not a cakewalk to play. The only problem is that its mobile roots show through as each mission is rather short, and they can feel repetitive after a time.

So far:
Carmegeddon 2: Carpocalypse Now
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
Alien Shooter + Expansions
Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death
Waking Mars
Far Cry 2
Splinter Cell
Mirror's Edge
Sid Meier's Ace Patrol
Eschalon Book I. Played it before, but going through the series again before hitting Book III for the first time.

Full List
Super House of Dead Ninjas

Very fun and fast rogelikelike platformer. Beat the main story missinons on Hard difficulty, but Ninja seems beyond my reach - though I'll still keep trying, occasionally.


Duke Nukem Forever

Finally installed and played this one because of the Playfire rewards. The first part of it was tiresome, and The Hive was unnecessarily ultra-offensive to boot. Afterwards though, I actually had fun with the game. Still doesn't hold a candle to Duke 3d, or even to the more recent "old school" efforts like Hard Reset.

It should be noted that I played with the "Expanded Inventory" option enabled, which ups the carried weapon limit from 2 to 4. I didn't even know this option was patched in at some point, and was glad to see it in the Game Settings menu when I started playing.
Last months I played through Cinders on my netbook, with mixed feelings. It's a somewhat more modern re-telling of the Cinderella story in the form of a visual novel, and while I'm not particularly fond of the genre, I have to say the production values are quite high. Graphics are great if you can appreciate the style, music and sounds are good too, the writing isn't half bad most of the times and managed to make me care about the characters. My favorite thing was that it actually made me empathize with the 'evil' stepmother and stepsisters of the fairy tale and see them as individual characters. You also get to make quite a few choices during the course of the story and that's a concept I liked, too.

However, I also have some serious criticism to address with regard to the execution of this interesting concept. Cinders presents itself as a visual novel that makes your choices matter and should therefor have high replayability. And personally I found neither to be true. The game is short, but still a couple of hours long, and having to re-read or skim all the known text just to be able to make a few different choices in between doesn't make for an enjoyable second or third playthrough. There is a fast-forward feature, but it doesn't completely skip the text, it just displays it with a high speed, which is still too slow. You can't directly jump to significant choices in the game, and the changes in the story that result from choosing differently are not prominent enough to make up for all the repetition.

Now, all of this wouldn't be such a big issue if a single playthrough would be satisfying enough to leave it at that. But the way Cinders handles the ending is preventing this. Because in the end it turns out the choices are not a roleplaying feature but a challenge, in which apparantly some choices are better or worse than others, and the ending is more like a score table telling you how well you did, figuratively speaking. I also suspect the variations of the different branches sometimes clash with the direction of the main path, the unchanged bits of the story, as no matter how hard I tried to make peace with the stepsisters, if things looked promising, Cinders would ruin it all of her own accord again, without me interferring. Maybe I made a wrong turn somewhere or maybe the game just wanted to do away with the "happily ever after", but the ending I got was rather bleak, and when I tried to revisit a few significant decisions in the last part, all other endings I got were depressing, too. Curiously enough, despite the modern approach I even felt like the endings I got were punishing Cinders for trying to be independent, and if she ended up unhappy it was often (not always) because of the prince (that is a man, and apparantly also the one and only man for her, although she hardly gets to know him).

Mind you, I'm not one to complain about sad endings in general, it just didn't fit with the tone of the game. While the course of the story itself was rather positive despite all the hardships - uplifting and encouraging about making your own destiny instead of just drifting along and letting others determine it - the endings completely undermined this message. You make a few decisions for Cinders during a short time of her life, and those decisions set the course for all the decades following it, when you don't have any influence over her choices anymore, and much of what follows isn't even a logical consequence of your choices. I think the game also shortly addresses this problem itself, but that is a weak excuse for ruining the whole concept and message. In the end, I felt the idea of choices and different endings was abused for providing the visual novel with some sort of achievement mechanisms in order to encourage replays for discovering all or the best ending(s), and I found this approach completely unfitting for this game, inadequate and badly executed.

So all things considered, I find it difficult to recommend Cinders even though I partly liked it at first. It could have been a really good visual novel (in fact it is until the ending makes everything that's good about it irrelevant), but the ambition to make it more than it is IMO condemns it to be an unsatisfying and contradictory experience without clear direction.
Post edited October 19, 2014 by Leroux
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mrking58: Duke Nukem - Manhattan Project (1st july 5:45pm)

A nice little Duke game. Not the best Duke Game ever but it is great to see Duke Nukem in the platformer again. I must say I gave up this game early last year since I couldn't beat the first boss. The shame
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CrowTRobo: Yes, that was poor balancing on the developer's part. The first boss was the hardest in the entire game!
I think the first boss was hard because I didn't know about the pipe bombs. I think the train one was harder (maybe)
Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians

I guess it was OK. I liked the hand-drawn backgrounds and the music; additionally, the main gimmick of most things and creatures living to the beat of the music track was an interesting idea. What I didn't like was that the gameplay mostly consisted of finding keys and solving fairly simple puzzles that had very little variety. Overall, nothing special.
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Leroux: How did you like that? Was it worth playing?
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realkman666: It's pretty hilarious and not too long. Original enough, but you need to like these games.
Thanks for the reply! I quite enjoyed some of the author's past projects, and in general I also like playing short 'amateur' adventures like free AGS games, I was only a bit unsure about this title since it seems to get rather bad reviews and I don't know whether I can stomach the singing. ;) Maybe I'll give it a try nevertheless.
I just finished Assassin's Creed. I hope GOG gets AC2 very soon or I'll have to do something not so nice :)
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realkman666: It's pretty hilarious and not too long. Original enough, but you need to like these games.
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Leroux: Thanks for the reply! I quite enjoyed some of the author's past projects, and in general I also like playing short 'amateur' adventures like free AGS games, I was only a bit unsure about this title since it seems to get rather bad reviews and I don't know whether I can stomach the singing. ;) Maybe I'll give it a try nevertheless.
Listen first: http://squinkyandthesquinkettes.bandcamp.com

I listen to it from time to time. xD
I made my New Year's Resolution to tackle my backlog.

So far, I finished 20 games in a little over 6 months.. Not too bad..

http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/tekzero/lists/2014-resolution/88692/
Thief Gold (7 July 9:46pm)

I can see why so many people like this game, there is nothing better than blackjacking people. I just hated two things the zombies and the level Escape
7 Wonders II
Seems I'm getting old. What else could be the reason that I played a match-3 game? What's next? Candy Crush Saga or Farmville???

Didn't even like the game very much. For me a casual game should be relaxing, but this one with it's ever ticking timer was rather stressful.

Complete list of finished games in 2014
Wooden Floor
A short horror game that took me just about 90 minutes to complete. It isn't too scary and it makes absolutely no sense, because the developer doesn't provide at least a minimal background story (except for "You have to escape from a haunted house") to tell you who you are and what's going on. Best thing about the game is the soundtrack whch is really great.

Thank you to xckx who gifted me the game!

Complete list of finished games in 2014
I just finished Dishonored and what a great friggin game! 23 hours of pure unadulterated gaming joy. I was trying different games in my backlog and stumbled across this and it easily makes my top 10 of all time. Great graphics, enough open world to be interesting, and so many choices and options that replay-ability is most definitely in the future plans. Arkane did a fantastic job of listening to fans during the development process and it paid off in spades. I can't wait to get back to it and try to achieve the Ghost status to the end. Simply put, if you haven't tried it, do so.
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CrowTRobo: Yes, that was poor balancing on the developer's part. The first boss was the hardest in the entire game!
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mrking58: I think the first boss was hard because I didn't know about the pipe bombs. I think the train one was harder (maybe)
Hah, I never even thought about using pipe-bombs on the first boss. That probably would have made it so much easier.

The train boss was tough. The first time I just tried to attack normally which got me nowhere. From what I remember I think I just stood in part of the train where you are safe from his attack and then moved up to lob a pipe-bomb through the hole in the roof, went back to the safe spot and repeated.