Oh, compared to the first two Gothics (didn't play 3rd to know), Risen combat was very manageable. Was going for mage, so saving points, NO combat skills in chapter one, and just about cleared the map. Ghouls are awfully fast and got me the vast majority of the time so a lot of save scumming with those, brontocs are a problem when meleeing, and ashbeasts and ogres were the only ones clearly out of my league in that no-skills situation. But everything else? Just fine thank you very much, just be slow and tactical. Could fight a war cricket for five minutes, but won. Even recall taking on two at some point, had to use terrain, choke points, positioning, being very very careful, but sure was a nice feeling when I got them.

But of course at the end I was using a 2-hander one handed (7 points in sword, which is max for a mage, plus two +sword rings, for the level 9 needed to be able to do that, plus all +str potions I could find and make) and just cutting through everything, with magic (mainly freezing) just there as backup, making me wonder why hadn't I done that from the beginning instead of first waiting to get all magic available and put points in it and only then dump the rest into fighting skills.

Well, if you enjoyed Risen (which I haven't played myself, I'm going by what I've read about it), you'll probably like the Gothic games.
Anyway, played a bit of the beginning of Gothic 2 yesterday...too early for any judgment, but it seems to me archery is more viable in that game than in the first Gothic (I managed to kill 2 goblins out of a group of 3 with a single shot each, so I only had to fight one goblin in melee...that wouldn't have been possible in Gothic 1). I'll probably still find the combat to be flawed, but maybe it isn't quite as bad (for me) as Gothic 1.

Dragon Age: Origins

It was alright. Better than I thought it would be, but not as good as I wish it was. They did a nice enough job fleshing out a completely new setting unrelated to D&D, even though they still put a lot of the old tropes and clichés in it, combined with a little Game of Thrones. The campaign was your average Bioware recipe, from zero to hero, assembling allies along the way and saving the day at the end. And it's very, very long, with several town hubs (which I found a bit boring) and huge dungeons (still fun, most of the time, but time-consuming). Music and voice-acting were good, the graphics were a mixed bag, some cool environments and pretty faces, but also a bit ugly at times, washed out colors and bland looks. Characters were partially fun and partially silly. And apparantly I got into a serious relationship with one companion without ever intending to or noticing it. Bioware's same old cringe-worthy dating sim routine, I guess, nothing new there.

I liked that your get your own origin story intro/tutorial to play through depending on your race, class and/or social standing, and that the game still acknowledges them later on in the game. I played through all of them before choosing which character I wanted to stick with, and it was fun - even though there were some similarities, there was no actual repetition and you actually learned quite different things about the story and setting in each of them. If replayability was always like this, I'd be in for it. Having played through all of these stories now, I have to say though that the balance isn't quite right. Some are definitely more exciting than others and present you with more varied opponents and locations and more opportunities to test the characters' skills than others. Curiously, I found two of the supposedly most popular origin stories to be the weakest of them (human noble, city elf). Another aspect I liked about DA:O is the combat system, at least if you're playing with mages who are really overpowered but offer a lot of tactical variety. In this game, a mage can actually duel a fighter even at low levels and win. There is no resting, no running out of spells, and no permadeath unless your whole party is defeated. Mana regenerates and HP do so as well outside of combat. Some might see this as dumbing down or whatever, I actually thought it made combat more fun and less tedious. So thumbs up for that, but some point deduction for pathfinding issues. I found that in DA:O it's actually harder than in NWN2 to block a doorway with two fighters. Somehow the opponents always kept breaking through, if I didn't stop them with alternative measures (earthquake, paralysis etc.).

And sadly, there were also a few things that seemed good at first but turned out to be somewhat problematic. For one, the camera: You can zoom in and look your characters over the shoulder (figuratively speaking, in truth their back is in the middle of the screen, slightly obsuring the view), moving with WASD and mouse, if you like, or you can completely zoom out into almost top-down view and enter a tactical mode which makes it easier to give orders via mouse clicks. This works quite well when you're travelling or in smaller fights, but as soon as you get into a bigger fight, and worse even when there is higher grounds terrain or high walls and gates etc. getting in the way, things start to get messy. Because you can't really zoom out enough to get a good overview or use tactical view in an angle slightly less top-down which allows you to see enemies that are a bit further away. So all of the sudden I felt like I was playing NWN2 again, constantly having to switch between camera modes, because none of them was really useful, and desperately turning the camera with hopes of finally getting that right angle to place my fireball.

The second positive feature turned negative is the way that lore books and logs and such are handled. Instead of cluttering your inventory, they go straight to your codex journal, sorted by categories. Which is really awesome in theory. And they each have their preset entry space already, so you can store them like collectibles and know when you're still missing something. But that's also part of the problem, because they are displayed as pages with numbers on it, instead of having indexed titles, and on top of that, their categories are inconsistent, too. Sometimes a message you pick up gets sorted into the "quest-related" category, sometimes into "notes" or "books" or whatever, and it isn't always clear why. Worse, you only get a short pop up on the screen telling you that a specific new entry has been added to the codex, and AFAIK it doesn't tell you where that entry was stored or what it's actually called in the codex. So unless you immediately open your codex and check out what's new, you'll soon lose track of all the new numbered, untitled entries, and after a while you'll probably stop bothering and hardly read any of them anymore, like me. Some of them are important for solving puzzles or learning what's going on though, and others are just lore dumps.

And the third surprise then disappointment is that you only have one inventory for all companions and you actually get access to all your companions' skills, talents and equipments screens in camp, which is very helpful, but it's partially underminded by the design that companions are removed from your party in camp, so while you can see their skills and talents, you can't use them. And you can't level up your companions in camp. So let's assume you've found quite a bit of loot and now you're going to your camp to check out which of your companions (including those not in your party right now) can make use of the new items. There is a very nice weapon among them but it has a strength requirement that the companion you'd like to give it to doesn't meet yet. He still has attribute points to distribute from the last level up though. So it's just a matter of giving him the lacking strength now and then equip him with the weapon. Only, you can't do that in camp. You have to leave camp, put him in your party, go somewhere else, distribute points, equip the weapon, then bring him back to camp. Or you have a companion you seldom travel with but who's good at potion making. You can't tell them to make potions in camp, for the same reasons. You have to take them with you first. Very roundabout. And in stores, you can compare items to those of a specific character, even if they're not in the party, which is cool, too. But only ever one character at the same time, and to check another, you need to open a drop down menu first. Also quite roundabout.

I noticed a few bugs, like the occasional wrong soundclip played to a line of dialogue, but all in all it was quite polished. I had fun, and I was a bit bored at times, too. Could have been shorter for my taste, and a bit more original, but the same can be said about almost every AAA RPG. I liked the three integrated DLC quests because they were shorter but well-rounded adventures, and on top of that, one came with a much needed party stash box and another with a cool new companion (if I had known that I would get this companion, I wouldn't have put off playing this particular DLC until I was almost through with the campaign). All the more shameful that these DLCs weren't initially included in the game but cut out to cash in on players. But fortunately there's the Ultimate Edition now. (I wish the same was true for the Mass Effect series or DA2, but that's probably a lost case.) The Ultimate Edition also includes the Awakening expansion and several smaller side story adventures, but after 100+ hours of DA:O, I'm not sure if I'm still in the mood for that now.

TL:DR
I see it more or less on the same level as Neverwinter Nights 2, as far as my interest in story and characters went. Some cool new gameplay ideas (e.g. shapechanging in the Fade, or reinforcements during endgame), some improvements in combat, but similar issues with pathfinding and camera, and some steps back as well (most notably probably the non-customizable UI - the single hotbar hardly offers enough space for a lvl 24 mage).

List of games finished in 2017

Bioshock Remastered - Challenge Rooms - Xbox One
First time playing this as it was a PS3 exclusive before I think. There's 3 challenge rooms, with the first 2 being puzzle based and the last one combat based. Lots of replay value with challenging gameplay. Highly recommended. 10/10

Bioshock 2 Remastered - Xbox One
First time replaying this. Gameplay is much better than Bioshock 1. Even though the story isn't as great as Bioshock 1, Bioshock 2 gets a lot of hate, unfairly in my opinion. Music, gameplay and art are still the same great things that existed in BS1. 9/10

Bioshock 2 Remastered - Protector Trials - Xbox One
First time playing this. You basically have to protect Little Sisters as they harvest ADAM. Doing all of them (regardless of score) gets you a special gene tonic that you can use in Minerva's Den. If it wasn't for that I most likely wouldn't have played this, because even with limitations it gets boring. 7/10

Bioshock 2 Remastered - Minerva's Den - Xbox One
Story telling of BS1 + gameplay of BS2 = 11/10. New tonics, plasmids, enemies, locations. This is a must play. First time I played this as well.

Just beat The Saboteur, which is like an Assassin's Creed game in WWII occupied France. You control a guy who's fookin Oirish, boyo (the voice acting is mostly hilarious), working with the French resistance, getting revenge on the Nazis for killing your buddy and generally just being Nazis. It's pretty much a cartoon portrayal of the setting, not that there's anything wrong with doing that in a video game. It's strictly Nazis you're fighting - I guess the developers didn't want to get into the thorny issue of French people killing French collaborators or whatever.

Like in Assassin's Creed, you can scamper up tall buildings like it's no big deal, and if you scale towering landmarks, the game does this panoramic spin around you, showing off the setting and you get some cash. Most of the missions are basically either assassinating someone and/or blowing up something, then escaping, which isn't hard because the guards in this game might be the dumbest ever in a game (at least on normal difficulty, maybe they're smarter and more tenacious in the harder modes?). You can steal cars and store them in your garage for later. There's a little bit of Hitman in there, too, in that you can melee kill a guard and steal his uniform to help you wander through restricted areas more easily. One nice touch is that if you shoot someone standing in front of another person, there's a chance that the bullets will pass through the first body and hit the person in back, so that's something to keep in mind if you're opening up on a guy in a crowd of civilians (I accidentally killed numerous innocent French people, although most of them admittedly were jaywalkers who stepped in front my speeding car, so they were sort of asking for it).

The game tends to be more fun when stuff goes wrong on a mission and you've got to start blasting your way through. Basically, whenever the game starts playing more like Mercenaries, it's a lot of fun; when it plays more like Assassin's Creed, it gets a little tedious.

There are an insane number of targets to hit on the map. I don't think I even scratched the surface of them while playing through the main campaign missions. I was happy to knock off whatever I passed by on my way to a mission objective, but once I was done with the campaign I had no desire to continue scraping the map clean. If I did, I probably would have been stuck on this game for another 30 hours or so.

I really had a blast with this game and loved the music as well. But the most fun I had was driving the vehicles through Paris. KB+M controls were really loose, so I generally ended up driving like I was piss drunk (which I guess fits the character...)

Reigns

I almost didn't grab this based on the gog reviews, but I am glad I changed my mind. The swipe left / right mechanic is ported to the keyboard well (two presses of either arrow) and the game unfolds as a line of rulers guides a kingdom. The whole thing is a balancing act, but has heart and humor and for the first half keeps adding more layers. The timed dungeon is annoying until you get used to it, and death is not always avoidable, but overall it is charming and fun.

It is certainly not a game to marathon play, and there's not a ton of depth, but as a series of bite-sized game sessions it was very entertaining.

Shadowrun Returns

Quite nice, however at first I was a bit surprised with gameplay - actually it's not cRPG. It's very linear and strongly focused on turn-based tactical combat. It also seems to be much easier then I've expected (I'm casual gamer, it should not be so easy for me;). Anyways, it was fun and I'm going to play Dragonfall for sure!

List of all 2017 games.

Bioshock Remastered

Played the original one back in the day, so I got the remastered one. Pretty much the same game, so it's still excellent. Got some unexplained crashes, though.

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

Finished both Kaptain Brawe: A Brawe New World and the mini game released to the Kaptain Brawe 2 kickstarter Brawe: An Unexpected Intermission.

The first one starts nice with flaws but ends with terrible flaws for a point'n click (objects to be picked up hidden in the background, obligation to visit locations repeatedly to see if an action somewhere didn't change something somewhere else...). It was tedious and was happy to reach the end.

The mini game is finished in 15 minutes and doesn't show anything remotely funny or interesting. Not a very good thing for something used to raise awareness to their kickstarter...

bound to finish Starbound in about a week's time, maybe two. 9.5/10, the screen couldn't zoom enough

Trine Enhanced Edition. It was awesome. Wonderful music and beautiful levels through and through.

Castlevania. It wasn't pretty - I needed a few continues - but I beat it. The key for me in this game is getting past the Grim Reaper. He's the hardest enemy in the game for me because if I don't get the initial timing right on the holy water, I'm probably dead meat.

What's really interesting about this game is that it's a platformer that demands you don't jump unless you absolutely have to, because once you're in the air your only option is to attack. You can't bend the jump. As a contrast, I've always found Contra to be fairly easy because your jumping control in that is so fluid that you can dodge between bullets in mid-air. With Castlevania, I have to be disciplined enough to not just go hopping all over the place like I do in most games of the genre.

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Rad Warrior/The Sacred Armour of Antiriad. This is a C64 game that sometimes get compared to Metroid, although the comparisons are kind of superficial. They're both sci-fi games about people powering up their armor to defeat the bad guys? In this one, you start out as a Tarzan-looking guy who throws rocks who needs to run through the forest until you find the armor. Once you get in, you can refresh your health, but the armor won't move unless you exit and track down the gravity boots to allow it to fly. So you go back to your armor, get flying, and then you need the laser gun to allow you to defend yourself, then you need a radiation shield, and an "implosion mine" to ultimately blow up the enemy HQ.

It's actually a very short game - look on Youtube and you'll find most playthroughs can be done in less than 10 minutes - but what makes it hard is learning where the enemies are and the most efficient route through the game, and then executing that route. It can be a challenge because the armor bounces off obstacles like it's made of rubber. You bump into a wall because you're trying to rush past a hazard, then you're bouncing back and forth between walls and meanwhile your health is almost totally gone because of the flames you were trying so hard to avoid in the first place.

The graphics are quite nice in that old ZX Spectrum sort of way. Big characters and your main guy is quite fluidly animated by the standards of the time. The controls are a bit of a bother, but as I indicated, that's kind of the point of the game - you vs. the controls.

I like this game a lot! I would say many C64 games can be finished within 15 minutes if you know what to do. Even so, I spent many hours on them because figuring out what to do was the trickiest part ;)

Do you know the game has a PC remake? You can find it here :)

Blood & Gold: Caribbean!
A gift from Doc0075, thanks a lot again

A decent sandbox game set in Golden Pirate Era. Sadly, the game lacks the depth and thus after some time it becomes repetitive. I think that creating a few storylines aka campaigns would make the game a lot better. Maybe it’s focused on multiplayer and that’s where it shines but I won’t check that.

Anyway, the game offers quite a lot of variety. You can trade, pirate (duh!), lead armies or fleets, govern, join factions, do a lot of quests, explore, escape from prison (I like it a lot!) and so on. Each aspect is quite interesting and entertaining but as I said before - it lacks the depth so after some time it becomes rather boring. Then you shift to another aspect (say, governing a town) and have a lot of fun until it becomes boring again. After a few shifts of focus you have a feeling you’ve seen it all, done it all. At that point you stop playing. Just like I’ve just done. I had a lot of fun with it but I don’t think I’ll play it again. Maybe if the add a proper campaign mode.


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