As said in my original post, beat some games over the break. Mighty Switch Force 1^2 were both great, Shantae as well, Dragon's Dogma was... I wanna say it was fantastic but the ending... the "good" one that is (originally got the bad one by accident and went back and tried again)... it was well done indeed and it was great, but it left me frustrated at the same time. It was an incredibly fun game with lots to do (I only did the more story important side quests) and was very fun. I wish it ran better, sometimes it went don to a slide show, but overall it was well worth the time I delved into it (which it won't tell me how much I did put into it, so I guess somewhere between 40-50).

You lucky, lucky man. The first SP game you play is actually good. But some of us played the FPS and the kart racer. I was quite happy that The Stick of Truth is a pretty good game. Probably the best jRPG I've ever played :)

Hm, now that you mention it, the first SP game I played was actually Cartman's Authoritah, but ... that doesn't count. :D

Frail Shells. A neat little (as in short) FPS/art game. To sum it up, it's a game (presumably) about PTSD, in this case the PTSD of a soldier.

At the beginning of the game you're tasked with saving a fellow soldier behind enemy lines, you have to fight your way through the enemy lines in a surprisingly fun (if incredibly simple and short) FPS segment. Later on you battle (brief) flashbacks as you try to get back to a normal routine and a normal life.

The art, audio, writing and gameplay is all very basic, and the game is short (as mentioned), you can finish it in ten to fifteen minutes I would imagine. I don't know if there are multiple endings, the ending I got was rather depressing. I personally enjoyed Frail Shells, it's a nice change of pace type game.

Red Entity. Red Entity is a short sidescroller action game which was made in 72 hours for a game jam.

Gameplay is simple, destroy a set amount of enemies and wait for the next wave, repeat until the end of the game. The actual destruction is accomplished via several guns of typical sidescroller action games, your single beam machine gun, your three beamed machine gun, etc, however it does give you the ability to switch into mech form, which gives you increased health and damage. Enemies include floating robotic eyeballs and other mechs.

Graphically it's actually a really pretty game, retro looking (as in an arcade sidescroller) but crisp and clean, with a nice variety of colors. I don't recall a story, and the sound design did what it was supposed to, nothing more nothing less.

It took me maybe ten minutes to beat, and I was actually left wanting more, I'd love to see a full length (hour plus, or infinite mode) version.

Tomb Raider 2013, Assassin's Creed 3, Assassin's Creed 4 (yeah, i finally got to those).

Just finished Lords of Xulima, and it's a bit of a mixed bag.

It's a good game, but the overwhelming feeling throughout is that it's good but not great.

The combat is fun to start with, but becomes repetitive very quickly. The various effects you can inflict on your foes (bleeding, stunning and wounds) are all quite useful, but bleeding is by far the most useful and I spent the whole game spamming bleed attacks, particularly during boss battles. The enemies start off quite hard, but it doesn't take long to work your way through the easier parts of the opening few maps until you can start clearing most areas and beating most available enemies. Apart from the obviously overpowered enemies who are clearly designed to halt your progress in a given direction, I didn't struggle with a battle after the opening few hours. Even the last stretch of the game was easy as my characters had far outpaced the difficulty of the enemies.

Levelling up and character building is similarly fun to begin with, but by the end of the game assigning points to stats seems to make little difference, and most of your skills and attacks are ignored in favour of one or two which do the most damage. The different classes do however come across as different, each with their own strengths and weaknesses which is nice.

But there are other flaws too; the character movement is appalling. The animation is awkward and annoying, the movement is jerky and you're constantly getting caught on the scenery as there are no clear visual cues of what is and isn't impassable. It's also buggy and it's possible to get caught in the scenery and be forced to reload, or the screen just jumps and jolts about as you try to move before righting itself.

The story is passable, but it's nothing special. The twists and turns aren't so much hinted at as they are repeatedly slapped in your face until the ending is so predictable that it has little impact at all. They've clearly tried to create a world and a history, but they've failed to make it really grab you. Much of the time your next step isn't signposted and it's hard to know what exactly you should be doing. After the initial sections you get a lot of freedom, but this can actually be a hindrance as you don't know where to go and enemies who have blocked your way disappear after conditions are met, but you are given no warning so you wander around the map trying to figure out which previously impassable route is now clear.

I started off really enjoying Lords of Xulima, but by the end I found it a bit of a slog, each temple and boss was the same and just felt like a rehash of the previous ones and I struggled to stay interested. It was only my completionist tendencies that made me follow right through to the end and finish everything.
That being said, it shows promise, and if they made a sequel (and it looks like that's a possibility) I would definitely consider it.

All in all it took about 60 hours to play through the game, including all (as far as I'm aware) of the side quests and extras.

You haven't played many JRPG's have you? :P
I do like the Paper Mario inspirations for the combat though.
So what's your opinion on TR?

Not a big fan of the reboot. The logic holes, the relatively generic story, the dumbed down gameplay, just a few things that stuck most.

Than it comes to: there is not much tomb raiding in this Tomb Raider game. And that's my main problem with the game. Yes, it has a few moments, but this is not the game i was looking for. Might sound insane, but i was never into Lara looks. What fascinated me in the series was the Indiana Jones aspect: raid tombs, beat some rivals and archenemies to the treasure, solve a ton of puzzles. I loved the first three games, loathed the next three, liked what Crystal Dynamics did in the soft reboot they've started with Anniverssary, hated this 2013 edition (well, not really hated, but disliked), as there are almost none of the elements that are part of a TR game. Funny thing, i'd still recommend TR2013 for a week-end play. But if you own a console, plese go and play Uncharted. TR 2013 is a weak clone of that game.

And so strange: all the enemies in the game are male, that are killed in the worst imaginable ways. I should start a movement for that, right?! ;)

You should. Sexism is supposed to be a double-edged sword.

The best parts are in the first hour, most of your gameplay consists of QTE's. ;)
If only things worked that way.

Pixel Puzzles: Japan - A straightforward jigsaw puzzle game, using different photos of Japanese buildings and areas. It was more interesting than I would have thought, since some of the puzzle shapes are downright evil (everything from triangles to arrowheads to lines to bird's heads). Not exactly a quick game, since the later puzzles can take quite some time due to the small 'preview' size of the pieces as they float around in the unused area (and they do float, as it's a 'koi pond,' where the pieces float and move around) and there is no way to magnify them. It is, however, a nice way to kill a few hours here and there. I'd recommend it if you like jigsaw puzzles, especially if you can pick it up for a low price.

I agree with what penumbren says.

I'd add:
* Be aware that there's no way to save progress in the middle of a puzzle.
* Sometimes the weird shapes made it easier for me, particularly in plain colored areas.
* In the later puzzles, picking a particular piece was sometimes hard. The game kept giving me other pieces and I felt I was literally fishing pieces out of the pond.

Oh yes. The no saving thing is irritating, but was not a game breaker for me. The picking up pieces thing, however, made me want to scream at times. I spent over a minute randomly clicking over 20 pieces to try to get a particular piece more than once after the first half of the game. I actually forgot because I finished the game around 4:00 a.m. today and then went to sleep.

I actually quite liked several of the more creatively-cut pieces, once my brain wrapped around how the white space looked for them. (The straight lines, sort of Russian-tower-shaped ones, and the waves were quite fun, I thought.)