No, everybody doesn't know that. I certainly don't. Just take precautions and build them far away from fault lines and sea shores.

I should move A New Beginning up on my backlog though. I think it's lower because of lack of steam trading cards (I know, I know...)

Is it just the English VA works that's poor, or translation? If the translation is good, can the game be played in German but with English subtitles? I'm used to watching anime with subtitles, so shouldn't be too bad playing a game that way.

Finished MIND: Path to Thalamus. Actually finished it the day after it was released here. Just late posting that.

Updated the list.

EDIT: And posted a review on the game's page.

I didn't want to derail this thread by making comments about the pros and cons of nuclear power, though I did get carried away somewhat beyond merely pointing out how the game was unfairly underrated.

Anyway, here's a map showing the nuclear power plants in Germany. Notice how not one of them is anywhere even remotely close to Berlin where the government is located. Rheinsberg which can be seen on the map is turned off and is being decommissioned.
Maybe it's a big coincidence that the capital is far away from all the nuclear power plants but sarcasm aside, I think the map nicely speaks for itself.
Here in Europe everything is close together so there is no space to build nuclear power plants at a safe distance from civilization. Fault lines and seashore aren't the only risk factors.

EDIT: I think you can choose the language separately in the installer, I just remembered now.
Unfortunately, I already deleted my installers so I can't verify this right now.

I've recently completed the game and yes you can have different languages for voices and subtitles. If I was to play the game again I would definitely choose German with English subtitles. The English voicing for the main female character is dreadful - it's like she was given hundreds of individual sentences and asked to simply read them out without any context whatsoever. Sometimes the way she said things left me unsure whether an action had been successful or not.

The rest of the game is actually pretty good and in my opinion it's well worth playing.

I'm about to write my usual mini-review, this time for Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive.
Please, if you start reading, read everything, because I will start with harsh criticism (especially towards Nordic and GOG) but I will end with my thoughts on what I believe to be one of the best games I ever had the pleasure to play.

First of all, let my rant begin with this: Nordic Games, GOG.com... how could you distribute a game in this condition labelling it as "compatible with windows 7"? The game crashed CONTINUOUSLY and I experienced several slowdowns: trying to solve the frequent problems, first of all I had to waste a lot of time to convert the entire sound library, with more than 2000 files (!!!) using WinFF to avoid an error in .wav files decompression. That greatly reduced the crashes, but the game still remains unstable as a pogo stick during an earthquake, often forcing an HARD RESET! (It frequently happens when many different sounds start toghether.)
To avoid the slowdowns, especially one that "freezes time" when lightnings strike, I had to resort to a method that, while speeding up the incriminated sections, completely messed up the menus.
Moreover, if you don't want your eyes to bleed for the tearing effect, forcing the vsync is a pain.
I also heard that playing on Windows 8 is almost impossible, though I cannot say if it is true, since I'm using Window 7-64bit.
This is NOT how you release a game, not at all.

That said... you should consider that I did not suffer all this delirium just because I like to finish what I start: the incedible quality of the game actually made me glad to have gone trough this nuisances.
Desperados is a real time strategy game with an heavy emphasis on stealth: you take control of six characters with widely different abilities, and you goal is to find and happrehend the Jamesbond-ish villain "El Diablo", leader of a murderous pack of bandidos who is terrorizing the southern US.
Let me say that both the mechanics and the level design could be only described as a real achievement of tactical brilliance, forcing the players to melt their brains to overcome those which I consider among the most clever, challenging and exciting moments I ever had the pleasure to play in a videogame. The thrill of seeing your smart plan come to fruition, the constant need to adapt your tactics to the menaces of a very good AI and the -few- extremely tricky scripted unexpected events, and even just the sheer quantity of realistic details and possible solutions are just a few of the game's outstanding virtues.
The world, completely hand-drawn with a beautiful art style, is full of those little details that can build the difference between a good game and a masterpiece: every kind of terrain has a certain noise coefficient; you can manipulate the environment to suit your needs, being them throwing a stone right on the face of a bandit, "silencing" your shots using a waterfall, climbing a wall to launch a double attack from both above and below and many, many other possibilities I'll leave to you to discover; accurate, precise and realistic response from every single aspect, spanning from the overheating of a weapon to the reaction of the civilians, sometimes good friends and some others the worst enemies you could ever make; the fact that every trick you can use could be also used against you (what if an enemy hides in the shadow? What if you scare some birds, revealing your position? Etc...)
The sheer amount of effort the developers put in this title is astonishing, and it shows. They never allow you to lower your guard, and while sometimes this might result in a so high difficulty that you'd think to be trying to crack a strongbox, the sense of accomplishment when you bring a mission to success is unmatched.
The only criticism I can move is about the voice acting: every single line felt uninspired, like the actores were reading the lines without too much contest, and several death exclamation were so bad to result funny in a cartoonish way (whaaaa! I'm dying! I'm bleedin' to death)!

Definitely one of the best games -if not THE best game- I have played this year, I recommend it to anyone who has the patience to fight with a release that displays a shameful and undeserved lack of care. I sincerely hope it can be brought back here and given the proper respect a title of this caliber demands!

Thanks for clearing this up, I wasn't 100% sure if that was possible. The German voice acting is very good, in fact when I checked out the English version from Youtube videos I was shocked, such a big difference.

To anyone unsure about the game because of bad voice acting, please don't play this game with English audio! Some of the voices sound like the voice from Google translate, not kidding.
Thanks for the heads up about Desperados & Win 7 problems and for linking to a solution thread! I finally bought the game from the last sale and was planning to play this soon. Also, thanks for reviewing the game. It helps with motivation when others play the stuff one intends to play and are excited about it.

Thank you for the kind words!
By the way: I read your interesting review of A New Beginning. I'm playing it right now, so I'll be sure to let you know if I agree when I finish! ;)

P.S. You can choose the language the first time you launch the game, then you can select it again in the options menu.
ddickinson warned me about the English voice acting, so I started directly with German! Anyway, whenever possible, I try to set the original language for every title. In theory, it *should* be closer to what the developers had in mind...

Just wanted to say that that was a great review! It answered a few questions I had, and gave a lot of info that I hadn't known before (but absolutely needed to know haha). I suppose It's like one of my all time favorites (Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines), extremely buggy at times (without fan patches/fixes) but an absolute gem of a game when it's working right.

Good to know, thanks!

Diff'rent Strokes Department: I played this game [Edit - we're talking about A New Beginning here] a couple of months ago - in English - and hated it. The voice acting in English, and this really cannot be overstated, is beyond terrible: I often thought that one or both leads was a machine, and it was only on occasion that some glint of sensible emotion came through and made me wonder if a person really had been hired for this project.

Beyond that I found the story pleasant and the art pretty enough. The puzzles were too often nonsensical (and did not always work), the translations overall were as bad as the voicing, and the fact that the game was clearly unfinished both on release and after patching - visible in the way it drops into French or Russian for no reason from time to time, as well as in a few game-stopping bugs - did not give me confidence in the product. Working through the story, however, was tedious and, to my taste, unrewarding. The characters are garishly silly, caricatures whose responses are often clearly unrelated to the personalities they're supposed to have, and by the time we reached the endgame I had lost patience with just about everything about it.

I felt like their art people had created a beautiful environment for a story that had been planned with a dev team, but then the dev team had been fired and the project had been completed by a bunch of people who knew how to code but had never met the art team, so were doing the best they could with a project they didn't really understand.

Not saying you're wrong, just saying I disagree.

Holan (Alpha). A Slenderman clone in alpha that features grating background noise (that constantly loops), those noises eventually get painful to listen to as they get more and more grating as you find more pieces of paper. If I hadn't gotten "lost" (due to focusing 90% of my attention on how much pain my ears were in) I probably could have finished it in ten minutes but as it is I spent about twenty minutes in total on it. My favorite parts of Holan (Alpha) are that you can back up just as fast as the antagonist can walk forwards (at first, he eventually speeds up as you find pieces of paper) and your sprint is always FAR faster than his...and you can sprint indefinitely.

The Darkness II

Got it in a cheap bundle, had never heard of it before, hadn't played the first game (which isn't available on PC), wasn't familiar with the comic book series, didn't even know it was based on a comic book series. Screenshots and premise looked kind of interesting, but I expected it to be a rather mediocre game I would soon lose interest in. Instead, turns out I loved it. It might not be a masterpiece as a game, but it's an awesome piece of entertainment. Some would probably describe it as an average corridor shooter with low difficulty, quite a bit of handholding and too much cinematics, and I didn't mind any of that one bit. It was a lot of fun to me regardless or maybe also because of it.

It's got a simple but gripping plot that's well written and well told, it's got great over-the-top professional voice acting, it's got appealing comic book aesthetics, it's got humor, it's got radio shows that rival those of Bloodlines, occasionally even a bit of TV reminiscent of Max Payne, it's got self-awareness, it's clever without claiming to be more than it is, doesn't take itself too seriously despite the dark story, explicitly caters to the guilty pleasure of power fantasies, making you feel badass and awkward at the same time, it's got a kill reward system and skill trees - hell, it's got tentacles and a darkling with a terrible British accent that you can throw at people, if that isn't enough I don't know. Yes, it's short, but that also means I got to see the ending, which is more than I can say of quite a few other games that I lost interest in halfway through. It's also pretty brutal and I was really lucky that I unknowingly got an uncensored version and not the crippled German one. :)

massively underrated game.The first part sadly never came to PC but it's just as good only in a different way I'd say.

Please do, I'm curious to hear what you think about it.

I'm sorry to hear you didn't enjoy the game, most certainly this has a lot to do with the English voice work which doesn't nail the characters at all. They couldn't even get decent voices for the main characters, that's pretty weak.

I only found only one puzzle nonsensical but even that one was logical, it was just an unreasonably far stretch and very close to a no-go in my opinion. Sure there were a few other occasions where you almost hear the designers chanting "why can't you immediately reconstruct our flawless thought process! We want you to think this and that way and we worked hard to create this unique puzzle, now get it you stupid player!". This is an old problem with virtually all point & click adventure games. Now that most games have dropped the verb system, the game does a lot of the thinking for the player and the characters just go and do their thing once you click on an item without even having any intention of wanting to do a certain thing. In my opinion this has made games easier but results in the player feeling mentally one step behind and therefor thinking the game is nonsensical. It seems to be unavoidable, in pretty much every adventure game, including all the 5 star ones.
I found no dead ends (believe me, I tried) and I only saw one glitch which was Dr. Braun disappearing while I talked to him, he was still clickable as a hotspot though and reappeared so it wasn't a big deal.
My only technical gripe was the inconsistent volume of the music and the occasionally abrupt way it ends, meaning the sound editor didn't do a flawless job here.

About the characters being garrishly silly characters, well most of that is surely due to the voice work as mentioned above. The German voices nailed most of the characters perfectly, Salvador for example has a super snarky voice (especially in the beginning) which really gets his attitude across, things like that got completely lost in the English version.
As to the characters being caricatures, well that's what most of them are intended to be. Daedalic adventures are inspired by the classic Lucas Arts adventures which are full of caricature characters. Even if the story of A New Beginning is rather dramatic, the game itself is still a semi-realistic cartoon and doesn't take itself all too seriously. Have you noticed the blue rabbit from Edna & Harvey lying around? Or perhaps you saw the rubber chicken from Monkey Island? The latter is a clear nod to the kind of games the Daedalic crew admire and are inspired by. In general tone, A New Beginning is similar to Lucas Arts titles like The Dig, Full Throttle and Indiana Jones and non-Lucas games like Broken Sword, Beneath a Steel Sky and Runaway, meaning it's set in a sort of realistic setting and serious but not too serious. There's even some inspiration from darker Sierra titles like Gabriel Knight but without any gore. The comic book style cutscenes seem to be inspired from Gabriel Knight as well. All these games had some caricature characters, remember Sergeant Moue from Broken Sword or detective Mosley from Gabriel Knight? What about Biff the Nazi from Indy 3, ok that's an extreme example of a character that simply doesn't need any development as he is just a comical hindrance thrown into the player's path. I could go on and on about more characters but I think you get the idea.
A new Beginning was meant to be more serious than Monkey Island & Co. but less serious than a grimdark sci-fi thriller with on-screen torture and a depressing mood. Playing A new Beginning is fun and the caricature nature of some of the NPCs is very entertaining and fitting imho, take the slimy assassin character for example. His voice fits perfectly, again this is talking about the German version.
The sillier characters are contrasted with at least a couple serious characters like Lisa who is voiced very appropriately, and so are Bent and Fay who are down to earth characters who help with effectively balancing out the NPC silliness.

I got it from a bundle as well, but haven't played it yet.
Your post just made me move it up several spots in my backlog :) It sounds like my type of game.