Growl is a mediocre but peculiar beat-em-up from the 90s. You control one of four badass park rangers who are kicking the crap out of poachers. I love animals so I think this is cool!

Unfortunately, the move selection isn't very big and I think the game is primarily meant to be played in up to 4-player co-op, because the game throws a ton of enemies at you all at once. Plus, the bosses are cheap as hell because even if you put in a new credit and have that initial invulnerability period, the bosses can still knock you down over and over, so it's very tough to even get more than one or two shots in before you're getting beaten up again. I don't know, maybe there was a technique that I simply didn't figure out? Ironically, the final boss was the easiest in the game because at least he had a distinct pattern I could exploit. Speaking of, the most memorable thing about the game besides the "save the wildlife" theme is that the final boss is a giant worm that erupts from the back of the lead poacher, revealing that the poachers were all under the thrall of aliens, and with the aliens vanquished the world can now go back to being happy and harmonious. Video games, y'all!!!

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Spider-Man (Dreamcast). Before Batman Arkham Asylum, this was my favorite comics-based superhero game. It's still pretty good, although it has some significant issues. Among things it does well is that it just plain captures the feeling of being Spider-Man. You have to manage your web supply, you can make stuff out of the webbing to help you in combat, you've got spider-sense, etc. Best of all, if you run or jump into a wall, Spidey just sticks to it immediately and you can wall-crawl all over the place, including ceilings. This is especially fun in the early levels when you've got a stealth aspect and can drop down onto a thug and knock him out before he knows you're there. The graphics aren't too bad for their time. And the game uses the Marvel Universe in fairly smart ways. It's just cool to be able to swing over to the Fantastic Four's building, see billboards with Captain America on them, and run into people that Spidey usually meets, like Daredevil or the Punisher. It even has narration by Stan Lee.

Biggest problem with the game is the damn camera. This is one of those third-person action games in which the camera often lags behind you, which can cause real problems in sections where you need to move and change direction quickly. It doesn't kill the game but it does cause needless frustration. The combat also isn't very satisfying. For the time it wasn't awful, but the short 3-hit-combo-based fighting system feels sluggish and not very Spider-Man-like. On later levels, it pays more to simply avoid combat as much as possible. Oh, and the story is freaking stupid. This game came out in the late 90s and it reflects a lot of what was wrong with Spider-Man comics of the time, mainly in how it made those dumbass symbiote characters the center of everything and the villains had all had stupid-looking redesigns.

Just finished Populous: The Beginning. The main campaign, not the add-on missions, I haven't played those yet. But this is the second time I played through the campaign, about 15 years after the first. Still a great game.

Some time ago I finished the main quest of Fallout 3. I don't consider it finished yet, though, because I still have three of the DLCs to play. Unfortunately, the game lost much of its appeal when I reached the level cap, which is a shame, because until that point I really enjoyed it a lot.

Firewatch, GOG.com

I was enthusiastic about this game; it got good reviews from critics whose tastes I often share, it looked beautiful from the screenshots, I like other games in the genre ... I beat it in an afternoon, and ended up feeling kind of let down. The art was nice, the voice acting was good, the writing was fine, but ...

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT
... the story seemed kind of pieced together and incoherent. The main character's wife is suffering from early-onset dementia; it seems like this is supposed to be the emotional focus of the story, but it isn't; aside from a few early conversations, it's basically unimportant. A few girls disappear, and it seems like maybe you'll be suspected of murdering them, but, no, they show up again and everything's fine. Someone's seems to be observing you, and a huge conspiracy is built up involving a fenced-off government research area that your supervisor doesn't know anything about, a.nd what must be tens of thousands of dollars worth of surveillance and monitoring equipment, but no, I guess it's just some lone nutcase living in the woods who's amusing himself by keeping detailed notes of your lives; a story-line, by the way, that is introduced when he leaves a page of his notes on the shore of a lake for absolutely no apparent reason

I should clarify that I don't mind "low-key" endings. But I simply don't think the story-telling in this game is very good; multiple unrelated subplots that sputter out, an emotional core that isn't, and an ending that doesn't explain anything. I don't know; I know a lot of people liked it, and I didn't [I]hate[/I] it, but I felt kind of let down.

Defragmented

A rather cool twin stick shooter/RPG with an interesting story told through VN style between mission cutscenes.

Civ V.

Beaten as I am done with it. off to Civ VI after i finish the war.,.

Played as Russia and got cultural victory. and now i am slowly conquering world. dropped few nukes (mostly on Poland but Philadelphia also got one. but now Poland is permanent host of UN so it banned nukes completely :( ), sent my robots on killing sprees against cavalry, and constantly struggling with happiness modifier. after conquering a couple of big cities in one turn my happiness went from +5 to -25. fortunately i had enough cash to go through my cities and just bought every possible + happiness building.

that lowered it to -9.

only after maxing out exploration tree i have enough happiness to continue the great war. I need to get rid of Poland as it has enacted ban on luxury items which i need to keep my population under -10 happiness. thats +16 to happiness which will be needed when i take mongols.

Outlaws - 3/5

I think I appreciate the game more than I enjoyed it - particularly in terms of presentation/story. It's not a bad game by any stretch, but the gameplay never felt like anything particularly special. I will say though that the soundtrack has some pretty nice tracks.

Yippidy yi yi yippity yay.

I initially started on the middle difficulty, but I got completely overwhelmed on the first level, so I ended up lowering the difficulty. All things considered, it might have been a bad idea; it definitely seemed too easy in many parts. So much so that I ended up self-imposing difficulty challenges on myself (the only 'weapon' I used during the final level was my fists).

<span class="bold">Gathering Sky</span>

When I picked up Gathering Sky I didn't really know what to expect from it, other than it was supposed to offer a short and laid-back experience. It certainly delivered on both fronts: my playthrough lasted a little less than an hour, but those were the most soothing minutes I've recently spent in front of a computer. Much of the blame for that relaxation lies with the outstanding score featured in this game. They are of course separate pre-recorded tracks, but they are combined in such a way that one could be easily fooled into believing the music is being played in real time, and reacting to what happens in-game.

About that... about things happening: to be honest I was probably expecting a little bit more, mechanics-wise. There's not much to do in Gathering Sky, just point and click the mouse to where you want your flock to go. Quite annoyingly, you need to keep pressing the mouse button all the time or else your birds will slow down and continue flying in a straight line. The main goal is to bring them to the end of each level (i.e. to the right) by taking advantage of wind currents, although sometimes they (as well as other environmental hazards) will play against the integrity of your gathering.

So yeah, if action and quantifiable progress is what you're after, this is not the game for you. Chances are you'll breeze through it and end up wondering what was the purpose of it all. If, on the other hand, you want to unwind after a hard day and are willing to take your time commanding a flock of birds through an epic journey, all the while listening to a magnificent soundtrack, be sure to give Gathering Sky a try. Even though I beat it yesterday, I'm not deleting it from my hard drive so I have it at the ready whenever my peace of mind needs a new little adjustment.


My list of finished games in 2016

Broken sword 4: The angel of death/ Secret of the Ark
I would like to apologize to Broken sword 3 for complaining about its faults. BS 3 was a masterpiece when compared to this one.
So, ok, it wasn't developed solely by Revolution, but that isn't an excuse.
The game has many problems in common with BS3 like pointless climbing sections, bare bones stealth, simplistic block pushing puzzles, awkward controls and a terrible camera that likes to sabotage the player. Only everything is somehow worse in BS4. The controls feel awkward and the characters get often stuck on the scenery. In the Martino's factory George got stuck while pushing a dumpster and I had to reload a save to get him out, for example.
And that's not even the worst part about the game.
The story is awful. Some parts of it feel like someone's fan-fiction. Many scenes turn the characters into idiots, in fact, most of the story could be described as an idiot plot. The often times cringe-worthy dialog doesn't help either and every single line being unskippable is just mean.
The worst part about the story is the end game stretch where every single important character shows up, regardless how pointless or nonsensical it is. And the absence of an ending is just the cherry on top. The game just stops without answering any questions.
Is there something I liked? Sure. The graphics are nice and I rather liked the hacking minigame.
In the immortal words of Comic book guy: "Worst Broken sword, ever."
I really hope BS5 will be better. I guess it's time to play it and see.
5/10

Not a lot of gaming time but finished Q.U.B.E. Fun puzzle game that is easy to get into and not all that long, but just about right for what it is as a game.

Your wish was granted! That was quick. :D

Breath of Fire. I liked it enough to finish it (obviously), but of the JRPGs I've played recently this was clearly the least of them.

Your main character is a blue-haired guy with a stupid-looking facial tattoo (not as bad the smear on the Dragon Age 2 guy's nose, but close) who is out for revenge against an evil army that wiped out your hometown. Along the way you gather a party of allies. The angle of the game is that the people are all animal-people - there's a winged race like the hawkmen in Flash Gordon, a humanoid fox guy, a minotaur, mole people, and fish people. Your thing is that you can learn to transform into a dragon, which comes in very handy for some tough encounters.

Being a 16-bit game from Capcom, the presentation in this game is excellent. The graphics and sound are very good, and the game includes some nice features such as an "autopilot" feature that you can use when you don't want to be bothered with having to give everyone orders just to wipe out some scrub enemies. You can also customize the controls.

The random encounter rate is really high. Like, I sometimes felt like I should have been taking notes on where I was going and what I was planning to do because the encounters come so frequently that I sometimes found it hard to remember where I was going. It's one thing if you're just running into 5 or 6 encounters, but when you're doing over a dozen just to get through one maze-like floor of a puzzle-based dungeon, it can get wearying and disorienting.

The story-based aspects are...rudimentary, I'd say. Maybe it's because Capcom wasn't a big RPG company but it feels like they came up with some really basic scenario-building stuff (army kills village, hero goes to stop them) and then just sort of stopped. I never really cared about any of my party members or the main character's problems, which felt so weird to me because it's this beautiful, modern-looking game that has less story development than a lot of primitive early 80s RPGs. Also, while the game is pretty good in the beginning at giving you clear tasks to do and ideas on where you ought to be travelling, eventually the game stops doing that and you're sort of left to wander aimlessly, hoping to stumble on the next step of the journey. Which is, you know, really tedious because of the aforementioned encounter rate. Exploration isn't as fun in this game as it should be. In the end, I happily resorted to using a walkthrough. If I hadn't, I'd probably either be playing this for another 30 hours or, more likely, just lose interest and move over to something else.

Normal Ending of Hyperdimentional Neptunia Re;Birth 1

Now only the true ending...

and Re;Birth 2
Re;Birth 3
Hyper Devotion Noire
MegaTamnation Blanc & Neptune vs Zombies
MegaDimention Neptunia U
MegaDimention VII

I'ma gonna be Nep-Nepped out ><

Yep, I got it the minute it was released and I'm gonna start playing it in a minute! ^_^

But before, I guess I should take advantage of my newly discovered power. Hmm, let's see... I wish all missing Linux versions of games already available on GOG were released at once! :P

Forgot, I also finished Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons which was a wonderful game to play and complete. Since I do not own a gamepad it was not as easy to control the two characters at the same time, but it is doable. Wonderful title that really deserves a play through.

It is wonderful to play unless the gamer hates sad endings.