I ended up doing the exact same thing when I played the game many years ago. I'm sure I've still got the JPG image with the full layout of the maze somewhere in an old hard drive... :P


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:P

Great review as always. You perfectly express how I feel about the game and the whole series (which is one of the best puzzle game series ever made in my eyes).

And thank you for reminding me of the awful level 13 (I totally forgot about that). I was extremely frustrated when I found the exit before I killed the roach and when I finally found the roach, I couldn't find the exit again. In the end I used a walkthrough for that level as well.

But be asured that there is no maze level in part two of the series (but many new monsters, opponents and challenges instead). :-)

Could be. Actually bler144's the only one that can tell us for sure, but I'm pretty sure it was meant as a joke, hence my jab. ;)

FixEight is a Toaplan run-and-gun arcade game from the 90s, so called because you have a choice of eight badasses from which to choose in your fight against alien invaders. Each character differs mostly in their weaponry, but the main thing is that your basic weapon is relatively weak but allows you to fire in any direction, while the heavy weapon you can switch to can only be fired upward. You switch by running over clearly labeled "change tiles".

This is a really good game. The graphics are very nice, it moves at a fast but not hectic speed, the levels have some interesting gimmicks, and even as a coin-gobbling arcade game, it's very fair-play. I rarely felt like I got screwed over by the game but instead felt that I would succeeded if only I'd had the level memorized or had maybe picked a better character beforehand. I think my favorite ended up being the purple-haired chick.

There are a lot of "retro" indie games that come out nowadays, but only a very few are trying to hearken back to games like this - just well-balanced, exciting action that tries to show you something new and cool on every level. I wouldn't mind seeing this style get a stronger revival.

*****

Yakuza is a beat-em-up that's paced like an RPG. In many ways, it feels like a really glossy, gritty update of River City Ransom - you fight, you eat stuff, you learn new moves. If you want to waste tons of money, you can even visit hostess bars and hang out with fake girlfriends. There's a detailed storyline in which your guy, Kazuma Kiryu, goes to prison because he took the fall for a yakuza buddy who murdered the family boss. 10 years later, Kazuma gets out on parole and finds that Everything's Changed. The story is pretty good at first but gets convoluted and somewhat ridiculous as it develops, and some of the cinematics can get a bit lengthy for my tastes, especially toward the end.

That doesn't matter, though, because what I like about this game is that I walk down a street, get called out by some punks who want to mess with a yakuza, and then I smash their faces into nearby walls and break bicycles over their heads. The fighting is very simple but satisfying, although admittedly the controls take some getting used because there's no true lock-on feature. The camera can also be unforgiving at times. But all in all, the game held my attention very well and I'm looking forward to playing more games in the series.

I liked the graphic. I bought both in the same sale, so yes, 'twas a joke. ;)

I'd played about half of Portal 2 at the time - not sure why I didn't finish. Will probably start from scratch when I pick it up again, maybe over the holidays. Went back to mess around with the original Bard's Tale last night.

Nice choice. It was one of the first Dungeon Crawlers I've played on my C64 when I was a child. Think I never completed it (mostly because my self-drawn maps were crap).

Kind of in junk clearing mode to some degree, but in addition to this stuff I spent time this weekend with FTL, Mini Metro, & set up a new character for Fallout during the long weekend. Though my list contains some crap, I do play good games as well. :)

Endgame Syria: A card game with mechanics that are pretty light & uninteresting, with not much variety in the cards. Facing the regime, you have to go through some pretty impressive mental gymnastics to reach a point where you think you're not responsible for some war-criminal level atrocities. I played through a number of times... win, lose, or draw (peace treaty), you get the breakup of Syria, chaos, and the rise of fundamentalist militancy, so yeah, that's about the size of it.

Global Conflicts - Afghanistan: Obviously much more grim than Sweatshops even before I got kidnapped and nearly executed by the Taliban. I scored higher by reopening the burned-out school only for boys than I did when I risked everyone's death by going coed. So...

Lost Civilization: A HOG that was on sale at fireflower last week. Lots of easy inventory puzzles in addition to the hidden object scenes. I had 2 crashes, but didn't lose much due to the autosave. Overall polished and with a serviceable plot, I thought this was well done and enjoyable.

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Yeah, I'm not sure how far I'll get - I packed away my graph paper when I moved last month, and am too broke/cheap to buy more when I already have a pad in a box somewhere. ;)

[Edit - and I did play all three of the originals all the way through on a C64 once upon a time!]

It occurred to me that, since the last time I played, there's this thing called "the internet" and I can just download and print out my own graph paper at cost.

Who knew?

Tonight I completed my second playthrough of Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition with an Avenger called Sakhmet. For those of you who don't know BG, the Avenger is a Druid kit that knows 1 mage spell for each spell level, besides the usual Druid spells. Especially the Web spell and Chromatic Orb I used a lot (even though it's easy for an enemy to save versus Chromatic Orb, the effects are nice when it does strike, with effects increasingly useful as levels climb. I especially like the Blindness effect and the Stun and Petrify effects.

This november, I declared Fallout 3 to be completed. I finished Broken Steel, The Pitt and Operation Anchorage earlier this year and this autumn I tried my hand at Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta. But Fallout Fatigue (caused by too much radiation - or by having played the game on and off for 4 years now) set in. Point Lookout looked very drab, plus the locals were very overpowered. While Mothership Zeta was so much another kind of setting, it didn't feel like Fallout at all and also here the aliens were (past the first few) very powerful as well and I didn't feel like doing more difficult battles.

So I ended Fallout 3 with 3 of 5 DLC's plus the main campaign completed and started playing other games.

Undertale,went in blind and went for the best ending,loved every second of it.

I highly recommend this game.


Goat mom is best mom.

Carmageddon

Carmageddon has a special place in my heart. I still remember the first time I saw the game when I was watching a neighbor playing it. Back then when it was released, Carmageddon was the very definition of "cool". Returning to it after so many years, one cannot miss its flaws. Although there seems to be many missions, it is more like a (with some variations) repeat of 7-8 race tracks over and over. You are also forced to play the same missions if you did not score enough points to unlock the next race. This is a downside of the game which also makes it a bit repetitive. I would suggest playing this as a side game and not more than 2-3 races per day/session.

Car physics, for its time, are surprisingly good. When you pick a new car, you really feel like driving something different, The hits and damage mechanics are also quite realistic. I also really like the gore. Killing pedestrians for pleasure is still very entertaining when you know you are only playing a game :) Many people don't know, Carmageddon was based on Death Race 2000, a pretty good movie (if you are watching the original) with Sylvester Stallone.

At the end, I enjoyed Carmageddon and think it aged well. It is not a masterpiece by any measure but definitely worth buying.

damien score: 8.5/10

List of all games finished in the last years with best and worst games played in each year

Time Mysteries 1 - Inheritance (Android)

It seems to be one of the older HOGs by Artifex Mundi and is inferior to the Grim Legends series and the others I've played in every way but one, you can actually see all the objects you have to search, just not very good. In the newer ones some of the objects aren't even in the picture and you have to open stuff in order to make them visible in the first place, which makes the 100% clean achievements nearly impossible.

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Costume Quest + Grubbins on Ice (Linux)

This one was in my backlog for a long time.
Although I hate Tim Schafer, most games from Double Fine are quite fun and so is this. They only seem to be able to make very childish games but since it's what the games are built on anyway, it does fit most of the time.
It's basically Final Fantasy - American/Halloween Edition. The combat and finding everything is quite easy and it's overall quite relaxing. The story is cute, the graphics look like a PS2 game but it doesn't hurt the childish comic style.
For someone without a cultural heritage that included those rather silly modern customs, the setting is strange and so is seeing children's pics of the devs in their halloween costumes in the end, but I guess it specifically appeals to the child in American adults.
The game has three problems though:
1. The framerate is worse than in Shadow Warrior 2015 and many other later games, maybe it's locked to a certain rate.
2. The controls. Again although there is actually button mapping, there is no native support for my normal USB gamepad and I had to make a profile for QJoyPad again. The problem is, that not everything is turnbased and the timed combat actions use different buttons every time, so if there is a "press Q / Space / Alt, etc..." NOW, you'll have to think about where they are on the gamepad and time's over, so I had to remap the keyboard bindings to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and set those to the same numbers as are written in the buttons on my gamepad. This way it was properly playable, but it can't be played completely via gamepad, since you still have to choose the costumes via mouse.
It does seem to specifically support M$ gamepads and this habit is unacceptable. It's like building non-apple MP3 players that are only working with Apple earplugs... My PC is no XBox, it doesn't even run on Windows most of the time.
3. It's quite repetitive, but that's the case in many of those Final Fantasy like games and kind of a standard.

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