Finished both To The Moon minisodes. Not much to say about them: they are quite short (~20 minutes) and didn't add anything significant to the story. Not very interesting.

Full list here.

Dragon Age: Origins

I finally completed it, after all these years :P I played a dual-wielding human warrior on Nightmare difficulty. It is one of the best modern RPGs I've played. The story and characters are top notch. The combat is very similar to the one in Baldur's Gate, which I appreciated. Clever tactics and magic buffs were often required to get through the hardest battles. I wasn't entertained all the time though, in my 40+ hour playthrough. I didn't mind the infamous Fade much, but The Deep Roads took such a long time to get through, with waves upon waves of enemies in every corner. It became too much of the good I guess. It was here I burned out previously in my playthrough. I also completed most of the in-game DLCs (Soldier's Peak, Return to Ostagar, The Stone Prisoner, and so on), except when the golem asked me to head back into The Deep Roads. That will be a quest for another day :P

I'll start my Awakening-playthrough today. After that I'll play the mini-campaigns (Leliana's Song, Witch Hunt, Golems of Amgarakk). After that.. Dragon Age 2. I've heard that it is literally the worst game ever, but how bad can it be? :P I'm optimistic.

Dragon Age 2 isn't all that bad. It's just missing obvious stuff because it was rushed.
Every cave is the same cave with certain part closed of or opened up.
Same with warehouses.
The cave map even shows you the complete cave. :P
No overhead view can screw you at times.
Preparing before battle is negated a bit by enemies spawning in waves from nowhere.

Alright. I'll play it with an open mind, not expecting game of the century :P Sounds more like a hack n slash than a deep RPG, but that can be good too :D

Yeah pretty much.
It's decent at the least.

Omega64 pretty much nailed it, although I'll add that every battle has a second wave that shows up, so be prepared for that. As well, enemies (usually the second wave) literally drop from the sky/ceiling. You'll be amused at first, then less so as the game wears on.

Finally, the disappointment comes mainly from expecting the game to be a true sequel in the sense that the gameplay is similar. They changed so much in DA2 that it doesn't feel the same at all as DA:O.

Still, if you go in with that in mind, you'll probably find it's no that bad.

Alright. I'll keep that in mind. Sounds like it is a good game on its own, but a terrible sequel. It is hard to make a worthy sequel to a game as great as Origins I guess, so I can understand that fans of Origins were disappointed when DA2 released. I have finished Inquisition though, and I think it's pretty great (though still not as good as Origins). I also started playing Awakening today. I'm a few hours in, and find it excellent so far.

Finished Outlaws ( main story , difficulty : good ) 5 minutes ago . Good game . Will replay it in later .

I really loved Origins. The ending got ruined a bit by the battle crashing every few minutes and not being able to save at all in battle. I just had to keep trying put it down to easy and hope I would beat it before it crashed. >_<
Weirdly never had any technical issues before that point.

Shadow of Mordor (Xbox One)

It's Middle Earth flavored Assassins Creed. It really is. The same control scheme and pretty much the same game structure with a sort of boss system tacked on (the nemesis system). It's difficult to talk about this game without comparing to the game series it's cloning- that's probably unfair, but when a dev clones this closely and obviously, then it's inevitable to compare.

Though it's not a bad game, i think in the end maybe the devs picked the wrong aspects of AC to use. Almost every year i spend about 2 weeks playing the AC game from 2 years ago , and it always provides me with a decent 2 weeks or so of open world gaming in an interesting historical based world. It's the huge historical open worlds i enjoy about AC games- they are almost unique in that. Shadow of Mordor replaces the historical based AC worlds with...Mordor. Honestly, it's a bit of dull setting for an open world! The two main areas are pretty much the same, except one looks brown whilst the other looks green. The graphics are good quality, it's the world that just looks dull and unexciting.

Game play was a bit tedious at times. It's like playing an AC game all the way with the guards on high alert. Basically if anything sees you it chases you. In AC you are anonymous until you decide to make the shit hit the fan, or enter certain hostile areas. Everywhere in Mordor is a hostile area. It makes getting from point A to point B for the 15th time a tad tedious, when it's just more of the same Orcs getting in your way over and over.

Unfortunately the negative control aspects of recent AC games are also present. Ubi pretty much had the controls right way back with AC2 and have been screwing with them and making them worse ever since. For Mordor they took the bad recent "sticky" controls and copied those as well! Why is it so fucking hard to just let go of a ledge? Why do i have to hit the button 3 or 4 times to make it happen? Why can't i just run in a straight line without accidentally running up walls and jumping on posts like a lunatic? What was so wrong about having to hold a second "free run" button like back in AC2?

Combat is slightly better than AC games and controlling and riding some of the local wildlife is fun too.

And finally, for die hard Tolkien fans, the lore in this game seems to take a few liberties. Overall it's an average game, definitely not a bad one. But i don't feel like i need a sequel. Personally i don't believe making an AC game in Middle Earth was ever a world beating idea to begin with. The game had no technical issues and ran ultra smooth all the way.

Alien Isolation (PS4)

It's "Waiting Simulator 2015". Well it often feels like it anyway. Of course stealth based games in general often involve lots of waiting, it goes with the territory. And when the main enemy is actually invincible and predatory stealth is not an option, you need to be aware upfront that waiting is compulsory and not just an option.

But if you have the patience to accept the mandatory bouts of waiting under tables and in lockers for that Alien to bugger off, then you may just find this game to be one of the tensest and most atmospheric stealth games ever. I really did enjoy it all the way, well...except for those annoying insta-kill facehuggers. The compulsory Alien stealth sections were broken up just enough by more traditional predatory stealth segments where you main enemies are androids and humans- those you CAN eliminate if you choose and assuming you have the right tools and ammo. You rarely feel safe in this game, or feel like you are adequately equipped. Everything can kill you more easily than you can kill it- in other words this is real stealth and not optional stealth like in Dishonored for example.

The mood, look, feel and lore of the first Alien movie has been nailed by the devs of this game. Honestly, it feels like more of a sequel to the original movie than the actual movies that followed. The tech and the enviroments looks spot on, as though they've been lifted from the movie itself. In this respect i give the game full marks as a licensed adaptation.

About the only down side i had was the save locations were sometimes too far apart for my liking...though i'm sure this is built into the game as part of winding up the tension. Allowing save anywhere would totally destroy the fear and tension aspect that this game achieves so well...i'm just saying i would have liked some of the save locations a bit closer- even from a practical time aspect, as sometimes the play time between save machines would become a factor and i'd have to quit the game before finding a save point and then start again when i came back to the game later.

But overall i cannot understand why this game hasn't received more acclaim. I played it on medium difficulty and fully plan to play again on the hardest setting at a later point. I may also play again on easy as well, to see if i can get the no death in a play through achievement.

The game was perfectly smooth and looked great. I encountered one bug that made me restart a chapter (can't remember which one), an essential key card drop by an Android did not drop in my game which required restarting the chapter. I looked it up and it's a known bug that doesn't seem to have a fix. But otherwise bug free.

Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons

An early 90s platformer without any music and only blip-blops (like the first Duke Nukem), where your goal is to guide the young hero Commander Keen to the end of each stage, while being hampered by aliens and environmental hazards with just his trusty pistol (with limited shots) and his pogo stick (which allows higher jumps, but at the expense of precision). In your journey, you will go from Mars to the insides of a spaceship to the Vorticon homeworld itself and I was quite impressed at how different each episode felt, both in the variety of stages and the types of enemies. But, that was the extend of what I liked about the game.

No, I didn't think Commander Keen had any chance of stealing Mario's thunder or anything like that, but I supposed that it could provide some entertainment like Duke Nukem or Secret Agent. Unfortunately, it doesn't. The biggest problem that Commander Keen suffers from is frustration. High levels of frustration, indeed. You see, not only does the game sport some pretty lengthy levels at times, but also makes Commander Keen a one-hit-point wonder. Get used to the idea of passing some stressful parts, only to be confronted with a danger below that you had absolutely no way of knowing beforehands as the game has a nasty tendency for leaps of faith, so you end up restarting the level, tossing yet another 5-10 minute chunk of your time down the drain. And nope, there is no quicksave here, sir.

Not helping the situation at all is that the game gives you almost no chance to react properly against projectile-shooting enemies, as you can't crouch and attempting to jump might either be be a case of too little, too late ((further worsened by Keen taking some time before he jumps) or giving you no room to jump above it. In many cases, you'll feel that the game is overdoing it with its trial-and-error approach, which results in your reflexes having little to do with success, while memorization and positioning play a far more important role. A role that I don't like at all. Hopefully, Keen Dreams and the other two episodes will do a better job at that.

Full list.

Include me?

Just finished the original Bioshock the night before last, and I guess I felt the urge to brag :D.
Interesting how you can see the evolution of the FPS genre even with such a recent game. For example, the constant "fire plasmid, switch to weapon, fire weapon" gameplay got frustrating very fast, and even small things like not being able to use the mouse wheel to zoom in the map are noticeable. Honestly, I felt the story, arguably the main reason to play it, was just okay. Perhaps the years of hype built my expectations too high. At least now I'll be able to pick up on all the "Would you kindly" and "A man chooses, a slave obeys" references :D.

I know I had a thread about what game to tackle next, but I was thinking of doing Minerva's Den dlc from Bioshock 2 first (haven't played 2, but I hear the dlc is better anyhow).

le Tour de France 2015 (PS4)

If there is ever a case of a "special interest" game, then this is it. I took a chance on it when it came up on the Sony January sale for about 66% off. I do follow cycling, in fact i race bikes myself at club level (a video gamer that does real physical sport as well!). So my interest in the subject matter is already settled, it's a just a question of whether this actually does the subject justice.

Lets get one thing out of the way, if you do not like the subject then i doubt you will get anything at all from this game. It is niche gaming almost to an extreme. The manual does a basic job of explaining the rules and objectives of cycling, but a person that doesn't understand the depth of tactics will find this entire game a mystery. It's not like playing an Ice Hockey game where everyone knows just to put the puck in the net.

What follows is only of interest to fans of the sport.

So took control of the Etixx team for a full Tour to see how the game would go. Now the Etixx team has no illusions as to winning the race overall. They are a TT and sprint team aiming to win stages, maybe grab the yellow jersey for a few days and with one the most gifted young riders, the white jersey was also an option. With the worlds best Time Trialist in the team, the teams first objective was to win the opening short TT and be the first holder of yellow. This i managed by the smallest of margins. So yellow on day one. This raised the problem over the next few stages...keep the yellow jersey or try to win the sprint stages...after all we had one of the best sprinters in the world. I decided to hedge and try to win the stages with a reduced sprint leadout train whilst protecting the yellow jersey. We kept the jersey but our reduced sprint train got smashed by the Lotto Soudal team and the Gorilla. So no stage wins. First medium hill stage i decided to attempt swapping the yellow jersey onto our young superstar all rounder. Finished second on the stage, enough to get the jersey onto a more suitable rider in an attempt to hold it until the first real mountain stages.
Come the mountains and with only one real genuine mountain climber i decided to aim for a top 5 overall finish, and the young rider white jersey, with Kwiatkowski who i would control and see if we could grab a few more stage wins. As expected we lost the yellow in the early mountains. But we had the luxury of three riders in the top 10, so i sent them out on attacks to make the leading Sky team chase them and wear them out, whilst i simply followed in their slipstream. This tactic consolidated a top five position and the white jersey overall, but the team was fatiguing. So in the third week i rode to maintain the top five with the white jersey as well. I then came up with the cunning plan of sending our only mountain guy (Uran) out into the break aways for the final week to see if he could grab the polka dot jersey. Since he was back in 27th place he was far enough behind the race that the Sky team allowed him to go and do his his thing as he was no threat to the overall race. It worked, by Paris we just scraped into the lead for the Polka Dot jersey.
Come Paris we had one last aim. Hold the White and Polka Dot jersey and go for the most prestigious stage in cycling with our under performing and starved of opportunity sprinter. This time he came through.
So in final wash up, for the 2015 edition of the tour, we won three stages, held the yellow jersey for much of the first week and won (as expected) the White young rider jersey (and finished 5th overall) and surprisingly won the Polka Dot jersey. In real life the Etixx team would consider this a successful result- though maybe a few more stage wins would have been nice.

I found the game simulated the overall tactics of cycle racing surprisingly well, better than i would have thought going into this. Real world tactics actually did what was expected and produced mostly believable results. My team had no true overall tour contender, and as expected we did not win the yellow jersey. But i did achieve results in line with what the real team would aim at and to get there i used real world tactics. So in the most important aspect, the game is a success it seems.

It could be improved quite a lot still. Licensing issues mean that some teams don't have the real life rider names. The game has an editor to amend this, and the fantasy names in the affected teams are named as to be obvious who they are in real life. But fixing it is still time consuming. Luckily i had the official race program with all the teams at hand. On the plus side, the teams full rosters are available for you to select your own team- you don't just have to use the riders that were selected in real life.
The in race interface is a bit clunky and not explained as well as it should be. I'd like to see improvements here in future.
Graphics are fine for what the game needs to achieve. Frames are smooth, but some terrain often just pops in a bit.
I don't like the commentary. I'd prefer a voiced team director that could give better real time race info, as seeing whats going on in breakaways and if we need to chase it is hard to workout from the in race displays.
Some aspects of racing are simplified (understandably), such as feeding and feed zones which are barely simulated at all.

Overall, this game did exactly what i wanted. Odd to find such a niche product as a console exclusive. The devs do a cycling management sim for PC which i have no experience with. For this more hands on game it's console or nothing- which is odd as i think PC with a mouse menu system would be much more suited to be able to issue all the complicated commands needed during racing...i think PC in this case would make a better product.