Finished Sweet Volley High, a VN about... volleyball, of course! The twist here is that you play a girl, and it's mainly lesbian love interests (there's only one guy in all the game).

It was really meh. Your character is a really spinless, boneless, not-interested-by-anything bland girl. Even when she finds an interest in volleyball and gets tougher and more decided, she's just generic and bland. The dateable characters are bland too, with your usual stereotypes: the too-serious-for-her-own-good one, the big boobed party animal one, the young-but-already-reliable one... etc.

One run took my a little less than 3 hours with the grand total of... 3 choices until I reached the end. Not enough at all in my book. I've played shorter VNs that had more choices. So, lazy design, I'll say.

I'm happy I got all for almost nothing at a Steam sale, otherwise I'd really have regretted my money.

Not bad, but not recommended.

I've been doing a lot of casual games recently, time for me to re-focus on bigger games.

So far in 2017: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2017/post15

That's true, Jedi Outcast was fun, but the level design had a few too many puzzles, also some annoying sections (e.g. a Nar Shaddaa level with snipers everywhere). And the lightsaber combat wasn't as refined as in Jedi Academy.
I didn't really like Jedi Academy when I first played it (and the story is pretty stupid...not that Jedi Knight or Jedi Outcast had good ones), but when I replayed it two years ago, I really enjoyed it...great fun using Force Grip and dropping enemies down into chasms :-)

Loved the whole series. My favorite trick in Outcast & Academy was when you got level 3 force pull you could jump over someone's head and then force pull them literally hundreds of feet into the sky!

I never did that and probably a lot of other cool stuff as well (like running on walls)...but yes, those games were great, I really enjoyed them, even Jedi Knight - which is obviously extremely dated in graphics and AI and doesn't have as good lightsaber mechanics as the later games - still can be fun to play because of the excellent level design with its varied environments. Too bad that we'll probably never see another Kyle Katarn game since he's no longer canon.

Back to the Future: The Game

Telltale & Back to the Future. It is like a continuation of the movies, pretty well written with the same flamboyant style and disregard for hard science. Models, voice work, and art are all very good and convey what they need to.

It's a very P&C adventure game, with inventory puzzles, correct sequences, and people who let you try again and again. I mean, the other option is to have a wrong move result in a game over, or perhaps to forbid all but the correct actions, so I'm fine with it, if I did run into a couple of out-of-sequence issues - one big one in the last episode that's my fault but still.

Overall, it's a good story, I originally played the first two episodes a while ago, so this time I replayed the whole thing and finished it. My one complaint being that the story is so very Hill Valley and McFly centric, but again that's in line with the source material, so it is a minor gripe.

Plenty of interactive things, lots of jokes, tons of love for the series, and a pretty compelling storyline. These are solid adventures, and each episode is about a movie length investment. If you're a fan of the movies, I can easily recommend it.

I recently finished King's Quest Chapter 1: A Knight to Remember [2015] and Uncharted: Drakes Fortune Remastered edition [2015].

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the fathers 20th anniversary edition

Got this for free during a sale, played it now since I had missed the original. Pretty good adventure game, nice graphics and good voiceover. Puzzles were generally good though I had to make liberal use of the integrated hints system and look in a walkthrough a few times, but that was more due to my impatience, most of the puzzles were logical. Story was pretty stupid imo and could be seen as somewhat racist, but by the standards of pc games it was ok.
On the whole worth a playtrough, I'd recommend it, though perhaps you should wait for a sale, full price is pretty high.
My rating: 4/5.

List of my finished games in 2017:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2017/post77

First game of the year.

Tropico 4.

last mission is silly. makes you increase wages to 20 so i almost got bankrupt but it makes you build expensive buildings.

so i destroyed everything which was not making me money or used to support making money. no churches, no entertainment, no schools.

then i won the map on election day with 90 to 300 votes. I had 90 votes only :)

unfortunately your links are broken. :) just noticed it myself as i tried to link to my own old lists.

Kinda unsatisfied with having only finished Master of Orion (1993) on easy difficulty I decided to make another playthrough on normal difficulty. God dammit, took me a lot longer than I had anticipated and got quite exhausting after a while. Still, good game, good game. And thank God the AI is apparently unable to capture Orion, the technology received by capturing it sure as hell saved me a lot of time and effort towards the end.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena

This is one of my adventurers in old school western RPGs(so far finished M&M1-8, Ultima4-7, Wizardly1-8, Bard's tale 1).
I had played later Elder Scrolls series, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, but I had not tried early games,so here go.
Arena is very similar to Ultima Underworld formula,but not so polished than the original I think.
The game has vast world (entire Tamriel continent!) but randomly generated city/dungeon/outdoor were not so interested,.
I concentrated my game on the main quest dungeons,which are fixed.
The dungeons are also huge. I often used the breaking wall spell( which is the coolest spell by the way) to short cut a bit.
I played my hero as battle mage because I realized in a test run that the fighter classes were vastly under-rated compared to the magic user classes in the game.They were soon died by monsters such as Litch's spell.
All in all the game balance was rather broken, not a polished RPG. but I like the unique and vast dungeons in the game.

Now I'm playing sequel TES:Daggerfall, which is vastly updated in entire games features, but I felt that it lost the fixed fun main quest dungeons in the Arena (Daggerfall's 3D auto-map is mess).

Full list

First games completed in 2017:



<span class="bold">Dingbats - Between the lines</span> (Android)

Excellent game of linguistic puzzles where you are given a sort of hieroglyph/calligram representing something (usually a set phrase), and a bunch of letters you need to rearrange in order to get the solution. The puzzles are grouped in collections of 21 to form a level, and there are levels in English as well as in French. Right now there are twice as much French levels as English ones, but they seem to be adding new ones occasionally so it's a good idea to keep the app installed for new content every now and then. Highly recommended to any language puzzles lover out there.



<span class="bold">Perplexy</span> (Android)

Another puzzle game with good ratings in Google Play, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the previous one. In this case the puzzles are more focused on logic, riddles, and numbers. In fact, they are splitted in these exact three categories: 'Logic puzzles', 'Riddles', and 'Number sequences' (i.e. find out the rule behind the sequence and continue it with the next element). Each puzzle poses you a question and gives you four possible answers. If you pick the right one, you earn a few coins (valid for buying hints or even the whole solution). If not, the question gets locked and you have to buy it for it to be available again (didn't like that one, but I guess it's understandable because otherwise one could 'brute-force' the answers by trying all the options one by one).

As I said I didn't enjoy it that much, as most of the puzzles fell into one of these two categories: either I already knew their answer, or their questions were quite ambiguous and left room for different interpretations. Of course, most of the 'number sequence' puzzles were of the latter kind, as more often than not I thought I had deduced the rule behind the sequence only to find that the puzzle creator had thought of another one. Rather frustrating indeed. This one I'd only recommend it to inveterate puzzle addicts that will play anything puzzle-ish coming their way.



My list of finished games in 2017

Finished Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Way better in terms of design than The Last Crusade. Still there are some difficult/tedious things near the end. I had to use a walkthrough three times during my game. I chose the team path.

Full list here.

Catch Canvas

Once again, a VN... ^_^ Well, this one is about art and artist and was significantly better than the former one I played this year. Okay, it's nowhere near a masterpiece (badum-tss) but at least the drawings were nice, the story quite enjoyable and the characters interesting. Still lacked a lot of choices which could have easily been implemented, but oh well... Lasted a little more than 2 hours for one road and as usual I don't plan to play again to see the other endings.

So far in 2017: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2017/post15

LIMBO
A gift from Wildhobgoblin, thanks a lot again

A very atmospheric puzzle platformer. Both parts were quite challenging, maybe not the whole time but there were surely a few moments when I was stuck for some time. In the end it's a very solid game but nothing really special. Killing a nemesis was very satisfying though. My only complain is that sometimes the great atmosphere were destroyed by scripted events - sometimes you have to die just to see what you enemy may trigger while trying to chase you. I know that it's common for the genre but in this case it was ruining the atmosphere so I had a feeling it could have been done better. Still, I can really recommend the game.


Full list