Catherine

All round good block puzzle game, if you like block puzzle games, which I do.

Was there even nudity if not lame I tells you.

I tried hotline miami one some minutes somewhere and I thought that it was too fast and those colours.. Re-run of of miami vice for me thank you very much (after stonekeep there already has been police quest 2)

I don't really get what the all hubbub is all about in miami like in Dark souls. it's just indeed prepare to die edition.

I don't remember a ship level. xD
I didn't know there are secret levels though. :P

Like I remember any of the level/chapter names. :P

doctor who the doctor and the dalek (1pm 20th march)

An ok android game, simple but a good way to waste an hour or so

I'm marking off Dead Island Riptide even though I didn't "finish" it. Its an abysmal game constantly and overwhelmingly throwing its one-trick at you and the main quest fully broke 14% into the game with no way to recover for me. I was already contemplating aborting since it was the least fun AND most frustrating game I've played in a very long time, but with the need to start over, I'm sticking a fork in it. The first game was a buggy mess but still had some redemption in it. Riptide has no redeeming qualities that I can find at all. Rest in piece.

03-21-15 - Thunder Wolves

A decent arcade helicopter shooter. Nice over-the-top 80s action at times, but not much else. Decent enough time waster.

Halfway - replay in game mode+

Haven't had this much fun with a game in a while.

When I first finished the regular game last year, I immediately started the campaign again because I felt warmed up and ready for more, this happens very rarely and usually only with action RPGs like Diablo 2 and NOX.
In normal mode, Halfway is (imho) a bit too easy in the first half of the game so I abandoned my replay and decided to wait until the developers added game mode+ which would make the game more difficult overall.

I just finished the campaign in this recently added hard mode and I was surprised at how much fun it was. Usually, increasing difficulty just makes things more aggravating without increasing the fun but in Halfway, the game finally reaches its full potential. The regular game already got a 5 star rating from me but game mode+ makes the experience even better. The developers of this game, Robotality, are great because they listen to the feedback from fans e.g. on the Steam discussion boards, even now they still read posts there. The game has come a long way since its earlier versions, many design and balancing issues have been fixed.

The game crashed twice in a row in the same level but other than that isolated incident I encountered no problems whatsoever, no glitches, nothing. Assault rifles still feel somewhat underpowered so once again I didn't use them quite as much as I wanted to early on in the campaign, relying on shotguns and sniper rifles for many missions. It makes sense that shotguns are the best weapons at close range and sniper rifles are the best at longer distances. Assault rifles cause less damage than shotguns at close range and are less accurate/powerful than sniper rifles at long distance. Once your characters have enough points in AIM to hit a target with an assault rifle using only one action point, assault rifles suddenly become very useful. If your AIM is too low to hit something with one action point and you need to use both action points for one shot, a sniper rifle is the better choice even at mid range where assault rifles can place more accurate shots and are supposed to excel. Sniper rifles have lower accuracy at close to medium range even if your character has high AIM but they do so much more damage and placing one reliable high damage shot into your target using both your action points is generally more useful than shooting twice with a so-so chance of hitting. If you hit twice with an assault rifle, you do more damage than one sniper bullet but if you miss twice, you wasted ammo and your turn. Some of my characters carried two weapons so they could switch depending on the situation, this costs one action point though. Makes things challenging but fun as there is no ultimate weapon for everything, you need to adapt to the scenario.

All in all, I feel that most balancing issues have been ironed out and beating the game in hard mode put this to the test beautifully. It's challenging from the get-go because the number of enemies is higher - in some cases double - and the amount of damage they can take and dish out is considerably higher. People who complained about how Halfway requires no tactics need to shut up now because if you let your characters stand anywhere without cover, they are going to get shot to pieces in no time. Position is absolute key. There are many situations where it's entirely impossible to survive unless you retreat to a better position.

Some players complained because there is no preemptive cover fire in Halfway, meaning if you go into retaliation mode your characters only shoot back when they get shot at. This makes turtling up more difficult than in games like XCOM because it's harder to set up a killing corridor. Halfway is more about survival than a turkey shoot. If you want to turtle up comfortably, play Stronghold and build ultra unbreakable defenses.

Despite the increased difficulty of game mode+, things don't descend into frustrating unfairness. There was only one mission where I was getting slaughtered down to the last man - or in that case last woman, meaning my female badass sniper was the last one standing in a mission where you have to survive several waves of enemies without being able to resupply at base. Some players criticized the game for having a crappy RNG system (random number generator) regarding the fact that you can sometimes miss shots despite a 80-90% chance. This didn't bother me, on the contrary it makes things more realistic because there is chaos in real life and according to Murphy's Law, you're bound to occasionally see a bullet miss even if the chances are a whopping 90%. It works in your favor as well, meaning an enemy can miss you even if they attack you at point blank. This chaos factor forces you to take less chances, e.g. instead of risking to take a shot from a position without cover or if your health and shields are gone, you better retreat or use a medikit instead of gambling on landing a shot.
This is why Halfway is a tactical game, unlike puzzle games where you can reliably calculate the outcome. If you want the latter, play Sudoku or one of the many dedicated puzzle games available.

All in all, I found game mode+ in Halfway a very satisfying experience because some tactics that worked in normal mode are doomed to fail in this mode, thereby adding a new set of challenges even if the maps are the same. Hard but not unfair or impossible, meaning if you come up with a good strategy you don't need luck to survive. There were only a few difficulty spikes that made me curse a bit, the finale was surprisingly easy in comparison and this time, no one in my team died during the final showdown and my inventories were still completely full at the end of the game so things were a lot less hairy than I thought they would be.

In retrospect, I made things unnecessarily hard on myself by not distributing most of my stimpacks (increase character attributes) until the end of the game. The reason I was saving them up was so that I could mathematically distribute them with the highest efficiency and have nothing left over at the end, that requires planning because you can only upgrade each character 5 times. Looking back, there was no need to be so ultra paranoid and anal about this because there is no need to get it absolutely perfectly right. Since I played with underleveled characters throughout most of the game, things were even more challenging and once I had upgraded everyone for the final mission, it felt like a breeze even in hard mode.

Now I need game mode++ :'O

Or more appropriately, I'd like to see a sequel for this very fine game. Chance of buying = 100,00%, even if I use only one action point :)

Review of first playthrough

Full list

9 Clues: The Secret of Serpent Creek

Not a bad little (<4 hours long) hidden object game by Artifex Mundi, but not one of their best. It's also the first of AM game that I've played on Steam which doesn't have a small bonus chapter.

Into the Repository of Happy Accidents goes Evil Pumpkin: The Lost Halloween, a daffy, madcap Casual Adventure game that is more gonzo than general interest. I'm pretty sure it's not going to suit all tastes - be warned - but if you get the flavor of it, you'll find it tasty.

This game is an adventure game with a light dusting of hidden object scenes, rather than vice versa. Right out of the gate, Evil Pumpkin invites you to play in Casual style (with hints and Hidden-Object puzzles), Adventurer style (no Hidden Objects, some hints), or in Epic Adventurer mode (no hints, no Hidden Objects, no active-area display on the map). Thinking this would be the usual paranormal downstream paddle, I went for Epic Adventurer. Surprise! This game is hard! My playthrough in this mode took 19 hours, almost twice what a regular player would put in with Casual mode, and involved some baffled recourse to the few video playthroughs that have been made for this title.

In brief: you are a young boy living with your distant father outside the hamlet of Dern, under the constellation of the Octopus. You are curious about Halloween, because, well, where did it go? There are some strange doings in the house, and then you meet the Talking Owl, and then things start getting really wieird.

My expectations for the game were low. I gave away a copy a couple of weeks ago on Steamgifts, and I got curious about how it played. It came to me in a Groupees Casual bundle, and with this modest provenance and a set of mixed-to-poor reviews on Steam, I figured I'd get six hours' mild diversion, give or take.

In fact, the game turns out to have a lot of solid thought under the hood. It's made by Two Desperados, a small studio in Belgrade, which accounts for some hit-or-miss wording - the translations are solid, but the expression a little clunky - and some barking-mad voicing, complete with heavy accents. Like, Outstarwalker sounds like a native speaker in comparison (for those who watch the GOG Twitch channel). Many of the minor parts are voiced, I gather, by one guy, doing gruff and squeaky voices in turns. It's, well, it's kind of awesome.

Some will surely be annoyed at this, but I chose to look at it as intentional hilarity, done in the same ramshackle spirit as a B-movie indie monster picture will do the special effects it can't afford. The game is raggedy and smart, bursting with personality, well put together and full of cheeky puns. Some of the jokes are playful manglings of the titles of books on their bookshelves ("Donkey Hot," for one) and names of wine bottles in their racks - we get Chianti Alighieri, and Marilyn Merlot, and more, and you'll get an achievement for cycling through all of these, so clearly someone was proud of the funny. Others are snappy quips in the descriptions and comments from the characters. These latter range widely in quality, rather like Dad Jokes, from seriously clever to funny-for-foreigners. There is more and better humor in this game than in anything I've played in ages.

Sometimes this playful approach obfuscates already obscure puzzles. There are some pretty zany challenges here. One or two were so hopelessly lateral in design that I seriously missed my absent Hint button. Most, though, are the clever kind that seem impossible but begin to unfurl as you poke away at them. There's a fair amount of trial and error, but not enough to be generally daunting.

On the downside, the story can be hard to follow, in part because of the game's bad habit of moving documents and backstory into your journal in partial, abbreviated format. In some cases, as with an important newspaper clipping in the early part of the story, the information goes to the journal without ever displaying to the player, and I often found myself catching up with plot that the game already took for granted. Who were these people? I didn't know, but they were funny. (The first guy I was sent to interogate in town was convinced that I was suffering from a severe and debilitating short disease, and could not understand that I was simply a little boy.)

In addition to the oddball main story, there are tiny hard candies to collect in each scene, and you can use these to buy Halloween decorations for your backyard in a cute but unrelated side game.

Overall, Evil Pumpkin is attractive but not posh, and endlessly clever rather than polished. Puzzles are well-designed and only occasionally ludicrous; voicing is terrible, in a really fun way, and the devs have used real wit and brass to patch over the gaps in their indie budget. I had a blast playing it, complete with frustrations. My guess is that you'll like or loathe this game based on how much you can appreciate a smart punster, rather than whether the type of game is your usual pudding.

My gaming year to date

Outlaws! :D

How is it? How does it compare to other FPSs of the time?