Bullets ricocheting off dermal armor, jumping off rooftops like f**kin batman and punching dudes in the face with some kung fu matrix shit. For all of Human Revolutions problems, it's damn awesome.

Unreal Gold

This classic FPS has been in my opinion undeservedly overshadowed by its contemporary Half-Life, yet it still has a lot to show.
First of all, the fairly long game has some of the best maps in the genre, built on large, open spaces with multiple interconnections. They are neither mazes like in the Build Engine games nor oversimplified corridors, always leaving the chance to approach each encounter in multiple ways.
The extremely fast combat is based on a wide array of alien (and “classic” human too, in the expansion) weapons, each providing two firing modes that can prove themselves more or less useful based on the enemy type and the situation.
Unlike other shooters Unreal presents a relatively small amount of enemies, but keeps the challenge high by giving them much more power than your average baddie: they are fast, smart, physically tough (without feeling like damage sponges) and each of their hit inflict serious wounds, so to vanquish them you will have to aim steadily with the most suited weapon while choosing carefully how you move trough the rooms. A bit of ambushes can come in handy, too, since health and armor do not regenerate and medkits and protection gear are scarce – just as it should be!

The poor Prisoner 849 (the protagonist) spend all his (or her) time trying to flee the planet where the detention spaceship he was being transported in has crashed, immediately discovering that his jailers have been attacked by the Skaarj, a race of space tyrants trying to enslave the universe.
Exploring the visually compelling strange world of Na Pali, Prisoner 849 will soon meet the Nali, natives of the planet that will aid him in his travels thinking he is the Messiah come to put an end to the “Sky Demons” regime of violence, abuse and slavery.
The narrative develops itself trough logs as in System Shock 2, an it is greatly enhanced by an astounding soundtrack coming from the same composers of the Crusader series and the original Deus Ex.

If you are searching for a good old school shooter, I warmly recommend you to give Unreal a try: it is more than worth your time.
Also, be sure to use the high resolution textures from this site: they massively improve the graphic quality of the game while being completely faithful to the original!



The Dig

After reading <span class="bold">andysheets1975's review</span>, I decided to give this game a try since it was already on my “to play soon” list... and I must say I agree with their opinions.

While it is certainly a good adventure game, I think The Dig has both very convincing moments and very unconvincing ones.
The graphic department is absolutely great: I loved the design of the alien and suspiciously barren setting the stranded astronauts had to explore, and the animations are probably the smoother I have seen among the adventure games of the same time.
The brilliant and evocative ambient soundtrack also works wonders to enhance the experience.

Puzzles are based on figuring out an unknown technology step by step, and while most of them present fair and satisfying (other than visually compelling) challenges, I have to say that I stumbled upon two very bad cases of pixel hunting, where only after nearly twenty minutes I found out the item I was searching for was right under my nose and I remained stuck just because I simply wasn't able to see it.

I can directly quote andysheets1975 for what concerns the plot:
While the game gives a precise explanation for those that might seem nonsensical actions, sometimes the characters act indeed in an inexplicably odd and irrational way, leaving the player to wonder why they chose that course of action. Also, I think that in the very end the plot presented a significant inconsistency, but I cannot say more due to obvious spoilers.

All in all The Dig is a good game, but since its quality often “fluctuates” from highs and lows rather than remaining constant I think its level is behind that of other Lucas Arts titles or several more recent adventure games similar in style, like Wadjet Eye's games.

I had it when it came out. I got D cut because of the DLC.

The original had ......

No new game +

and

The boss battles were some of the worst I have ever encountered.

Downside is that you cant install the D cut on the x360 so the load times are horrible and your console overheats. Like wtf man?

Willy Protects the Property

A surprisingly fun little action browser game. You play as Willy, a Bernese mountain dog from Switzerland. Your task is to defend Willy’s food dish from the greedy state – represented by a variety of thieves including the Tax Mouse, the Fees Rat, Dues Marten and Thieving Magpie. They are going to try to steal all the bones from your dish and when you lose all the bones it’s game over. The mouse and rat steal only one bone at a time but if a marten gets through, all the bones are instantly gone. The magpies just kind of fly by but barking at them nets you the most points.

Controls are simple, you can rotate on the spot using the left and right keys and bark at the thieves by pressing the spacebar. Both touching and barking makes the thieves disappear but only barking gets you points. You have to be careful with the barking because sometimes a tax refund floats your way and if you bark at it, poof it’s gone and so are all the extra points you could have racked up!

There are two power-ups, one is a “nuke” that wipes out all the enemies on the screen, you can only use this twice per game. The other power-up is a shield which protects the food dish for 5 seconds but costs you 400 points each time you use it. From time to time, you get a puppy dog as a sidekick which will rotate along with you and bark when you bark only at a slightly different angle. It’s a bit like the sidekicks in Tyrian 2000. If you let any of the animals come into touching distance you lose your sidekick but it will show up again after some time.

The difficulty is rather easy but things get more hectic as you progress and if you’re not careful you can lose the game in an instant if you let a marten through.
All in all, a fun distraction for a couple minutes.

You can play the game for free here:
http://www.svp.ch/mitmachen/games/

The game is in German so I translated the instructions into English, see screencaps.


Full list

just trying to add a friend.


anche solo odorare

PER ME VA BENE LO STESSO

It always surprises me that console games even have these issues. >_<

Carmageddon: Reincarnation

Did all the events so I consider the game beaten, even though I didn't 100% career mode, because I believe that would require, for example, killing all pedestrians 16 times which I definitely can't be arsed to do when there's hundreds of them in a single level. The post-victory screen was pretty lackluster (basically, a modern equivalent of "You win! Game over." of the NES days), but whatever.

Anyway, the game combines the best elements of Carmageddon 1 and 2 so in theory it should be the best game in the series, but sadly, it's plagued by technical issues. My rig is less than a month old, yet I got framerate drops very often, especially in later levels. Considering the game is definitely not a looker (overall it looks like a PS3 game, although character models look like they're from a PS2 game), I find this unacceptable. Also, the AI is bonkers, but I guess that was always the case. One particular game mode, Fox 'n Hounds, is especially broken because while the objective is to run away from the others when they're "The Fox", the AI couldn't give a rat's ass about that and will try to smash everyone and everything even when they are The Fox. Even worse, there's no immunity period when the role is shifted - thus, when the enemies are clustered together in a big ball, the Fox role and the corresponding color flicker like a light bulb that's about to break.

Therefor, this game will not take the crown of being the best Carmageddon game, unfortunately. In my opinion, that crown still belongs to the original: it's not perfect either, but at least it will run without hiccups.

Leisure Suit Larry 2. I like the first game fine, but this one is a significant improvement on it. I've been playing a lot of these Sierra games lately and this strikes me as the biggest leap from first to second game of any that I've played. The graphics are quite nice but the puzzles are mostly better and the game feels huge in comparison to the first one, with a decent variety of locations. The game is not only very funny but I quite liked that it turns the common death scenes in Sierra games into self-reflexive jokes that sometimes give you good hints about what you should be doing differently; e.g., the way your cross-dressing costume keeps failing to get you past the KGB guards on the beach, who themselves get more hoarse-voiced because they're catching you and replaying the same scene over and over again. You're not just expected to die in this game; to a large extent you're supposed to die.

The first game was fairly raunchy but this one tones it down a bit since it's a James Bond parody that just mocks Larry's bad sex life. It's like watching Porky's and then following up with Austin Powers (not a criticism, just an observation).

Jade Empire: Special Edition

After a slow start that merely consisted of endless dialogues and one cutscene after another the game got better and I really enjoyed it. Mostly because of the story and the likeable characters. In the first three chapters there were also a lot of sidequest and some of them were quite interesting and gave additional background infos about the gameworld. Unfortunately the game got a lot more linear after that and the sidequests more or less vanished.

Combat was ok and offered many different styles, but it also is unbalanced and once you get the Jade Golem style it's nearly impossible to lose (it almost feels like cheating to use that style).

Technically everything worked fine and I didn't encounter any bugs. But I consider it a very bad design choice that the cutscenes before the boss fights are unskipable. It's annoying to watch a cutscene over and over again when you have problems to beat a boss.

Thank you to my Secret Santa who gifted me the game!!!

Complete list of finished games in 2015

Ravensword: Shadowlands

Just finished Ravensword: Shadowlands which is, apparently, the 2nd Ravensword game but the first to make it to PC, ported from mobile platforms.
And there's the thing of it - It's like Skyrim... only on a mobile device except now its on PC so now it's like Skyrim... only 1/10th of the size (6 - 12hours to complete) and 10 times as janky and generic, it doesn't even really have much of a sense of humour, unfortunately
Buuuut.. I had fun with it and it somehow kept me hooked until it was over and I got to fly a pterodactyl
There's better choices for modern 3D RPGing on PC but if you're all out of them and you have this from a bundle or you want a bitesize RPG rather than the banquet of something like Skyrim or Witcher 3 the you could have a look, I guess


Full List:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2015/post118

Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna)

It's beautiful to look at and to listen to, the story and the background info didn't exactly fill me with enthusiasm, but I thought they were interesting enough. Gameplay was okay, there was nothing wrong with it, even though it wasn't the most fun either, somewhere in between very relaxing and just a little bit boring. Maybe that sounds a bit too negative; I quite enjoyed the game in short doses, and I will probably buy and play the DLC tale, too. It's not the greatest game I've ever played, but then again I guess it needn't be, seeing that the philosophy behind it is one of humbleness. It's cool that such a game rooted in Iñupiat culture even exists and the developers deserve support for their effort.

Apart form the above, what I liked best about the game is that it had a very good sense of where to place checkpoints, something that I often miss in other games. They were placed very fairly and counteracted the frustration of a few random deaths. Whenever I thought 'Damn, will I have to do all this stuff again now?', the game just told me 'No, it's fine, you already convinced me that you're capable of doing it, just repeat that last bit and have fun!'. I also liked the documentary shorts that I could watch whenever I felt like it, but I didn't like that they are treated as collectables, seeing that the game is very linear and doesn't have much replay value. I unlocked 19 out of 24 shorts just by following the obvious (often only) route, so I wonder why they had to hide the other 5 in small spots I apparantly overlooked. I wouldn't even know what to look for, I didn't notice any collectible symbols in the environment that would represent them. Oh well, here's hoping I can just watch these shorts on youtube somewhere.

Oh, and I played it solo, which worked fine for the most part. Some parts were a little more challenging due to that but not by much. It was still quite easy. I could imagine that it's fun to play with a loved one or a kid, but I can also imagine some people being too impatient and too hard to impress to play it in co-op mode with them. :D

EDIT: And the Foxtales DLC. More of the same, yet kind of different, as it's more rowing and underwater swimming than jumping and climbing and it introduces new puzzle mechanics. It's short (about an hour long), but I liked it. The story felt a bit more on point, too. Same problem with the shorts though, I only unlocked 2 out of 5.

Flipper

Flipper is a rather minimalistic puzzle game. Once you understand the logic behind it, it's quite easy to solve the task and complete the levels with the minimum flips possible. It's quite relaxing though and the I like the ambient music.

All in all it looks more like a concept demo than like a real game though. Some things seems to be unfinished (e.g. you get achievments while playing, but you can't look at them or when you beat the final level nothing happens and you have to use the "Back" button to get to the menu again). Developer's site says that it was the first project of the company and made in just two weeks to see how the team works together and it clearly shows.

Complete list of finished games in 2015

Ouch. It seems this was quite the letdown... thanks for sharing your opinion, as I was eager to know more about this apparently very promising title. What you described is basically the sum of everything I wouldn't want to see in a similar game, so I appreciate the warning!

On the other hand, I'm still pretty interested in the first one: may I ask you what the strongest point of the original Breach & Clear are?