Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Look at that, 2 semicolons in the title. Anyway, the game carries on from Star Wars: Dark Forces 2, you play once again as Kyle Katarn, who, like the last game, is on a revenge mission against a Sith Dinosaur. This plays similar to Dark Forces, except this time you don't face enemies who take about 50 hits from a lightsaber to kill, even the final boss doesn't take many hits to kill. That doesn't make it easy though, this time even regular enemies can have lightsabers, and sometimes you will have to face 3 at once. The game is part FPS, part Third Person Action and part Puzzle solving adventure game. Gun play is done in first person, lightsabre combat is done in third person, and once you get a lightsaber it's unlikely you'll be switching away from it, as unlike Dark Forces it is actually fairly decent at deflecting attacks. You're morality also doesn't affect what force powers you learn, and all powers get stronger automatically instead of having you pick which ones to improve. Music is great and Billy Dee Williams also makes an appearance as Lando. I thoroughly enjoyed it,

How is the continuity between those games? Would I miss something important or fun when skipping previous titles? I've played through half of Dark Forces before getting stuck somewhere, and Dark Forces 2 runs terrible on my rig for some reason, it makes me nauseous. I'd love to try Jedi Academy though, and maybe Outcast before that, if that's recommended.

Heart of the Swarm

Pretty good but WAY TOO MANY timed missions and achievements! Including the last one.

I beat the final mission just now but god know if I 'll ever do it in 25 minutes or less.

I went from Dark Forces to Jedi Academy originally before going back and finishing Dark Forces and Dark Forces 2 (still need to play the expansion and onward). There are references to previous games but nothing too hard to grasp. What struck me about going back to the beginning is that I like Kyle a lot more in the early games, but that doesn't mean the games aren't still fun :)

I never played Dark Forces 1, but I didn't think it affected the story of Dark Forces 2 that much. I also never played Jedi Academy but I didn't feel like there was anything integral to the story of the sequel in there. I would say if possible, play DF2 before play Jedi Knight 2. The plot of JK2 revolves around using an artefact which is the main focus of DF2, however it's not integral to the plot of JK2. You could quite easily play JK2 as a stand alone game, in fact the relationship between the 2 main characters isn't really drawn on that much in DF2 but is much more fleshed out in JK2.

Ok, thanks!

Yeah, there are some references here and there but at the end they are just FPS so three is not much to worry in story department. :-)
Very little references if I think about it.
I think in 3D ones no references at all toward the older 2D titles.

Anyway I beat Hexen II yesterday.
I didn't like it at all at first but it kind of grew on me.
Still I liked both Heretic and Hexen quite a lot more.
I didn't think focus on melee here worked too well, weapons use too much mana and enemies are too "bullet" spongy for my taste. One can easily spend quarter of mana on regular non-boss enemy.
The game also features RPG elements but those are not good as well. There are stats but half of them does literally nothing at all and the other haf doesn't improve with leveling. Only thing that changes is mana pool and HP but not in a way that would make the game more appealing.
It was decent experience but I am quite happy to move onto something else.
Took me some 8-10 hours on 3rd difficulty (out of 4).
Didn't play expansion as Steam doesn't have it.


2018 List.

The plot of Dark Forces 1 is hardly referenced in the later games. Kyle makes one short comment in Jedi Knight: Outcast which may be a reference to the first game, but nothing else iirc.
Dark forces 2: Jedi Knight/Mysteries of the Sith and Jedi Knight: Outcast do have quite a few connections though...if you could play Dark forces: Jedi Knight, I do think Jedi Knight: Outcast would be more enjoyable. But you could just as well read up on the plot in Wikipedia or watch the cutscenes on Youtube.
Jedi Academy also has some connections with Jedi Knight: Outcast, e.g. its main villain already plays a small role in the previous game. But Jedi Academy's plot is rather weak and doesn't matter much, and you don't play as Kyle Katarn anymore (who appears only as a kind of mentor to your Jedi apprentice), so it can easily be played without much knowledge of the previous games. If you're especially interested in the lightsaber combat, Jedi Academy has the best of the series imo (though its level design is weaker than that of previous titles).

That's helpful, thanks!

Speedball 2

The brutal future sports game for Amiga, not on your phone, is now on Steam, for some reason!
I remember this on Amiga, but I guess I never really got to save my progress so it was nice to finally get through it and win all the cups!
It could do with separate 'shoot' and 'pass' buttons as well as some kind of 2 player mode (although they WOULD always degenerate into fights over the score multiplier!) and is showing it's age generally but *shrugs* nostalgia, init?

Full list: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2018/post99

Yeah, I can certainly understand why ;) Anyway, I'm glad I did finish it. I had some fun and I don't like quitting games.

I just had a couple thoughts I wanted to share about the games I beat this year thus far:

God of War 1 and 3: I beat the second game in the early part of last year (after beating Breath of the Wild and getting into games like Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry for action game history perspective). I liked that game, I thought the plot was okay if kinda stupid, the game was occasionally frustrating and was too long but the combat was fun. I did not like Kratos as a character. He was one dimensional angry and had no elements to him I would call badass (definitions may vary). So, last month, I played God of War 3. I found a nice black label of it but the copies of the first game were that ugly greatest hits label. I thought that Kratos had exactly one moment of character development in the entire game and that was at the very end (not that stupid hope clip they played repeatedly, but that moment he realized his whole revenge trip did nothing but ruin everything for everyone). The gameplay was fun with still very fun combat, but it felt too cinematic with stuff happening far too often to the point where there is no bite when you kill Hermes or Helios (Helios' death in particular like it was written by an edgy 14 year old). Platforming in these games never worked with 2 and 3 having in addition leap of logic puzzles constantly.

Fast forward, find a nice black label GoW one. The game Rise of the Argonauts feels like while it is not faithful to the myths it is respectful, GoW didn't feel respectful but it was not disrespectful, unlike the latter two. The game feels better as adventures and the combat was pretty good. Visuals were not as good as the later games (duh) but that was a really fun era for graphics in action games (NG, DMC3). Oddly enough, the story was decent in this game, a marked improvement from my point of view. Actually, the way this game ends the way they continue the story was the dumbest way possible. Kratos wasn't fleshed out but he was at least not an overtly dumb, willful ignoramus like he feels in the later games. Overall, the first big three games were actually pretty good. That said, 3's plot still baffles me. I thought that playing one would clear up some stuff with why Zeus acts the way he does and what Pandora meant to the series but nope. Oh well.

Uncharted 2... I hate Uncharted one, even revisiting it I hate it. Uncharted 2 (which I bought only because it was a nice copy for 3 dollars, along with 3 and because I feel like it'd be important to know for the development of 3rd person shooters. And finally a game everyone thought was perfect had to be an improvement over the first one, right?) is not bad. It is good in fact. It is not very good, it is not even particularly good. They fixed some problems from the first (Drake falling off of everything as often as he did. He still is unwieldy but better). The gunplay is better with the camera working much, much better. However, the game still has a plethora of issues and the only reason I beat it was because if I didn't do it right then I never would. The devs still have no idea how to design a firefight, there are way too many unfun to kill mooks from the halfway point on and Drake is only a decent character. He is a funny guy but he gets on my nerves easily with all the moments he's supposed to be witty or chummy with the others. Elena was less annoying and Chloe was not bad as a character. Lazaravic was an awful bad guy with a lot of informed bad qualities about him (he's a war criminal, he tortures...) but aside from a handful of jerk moves he just isn't much of an antagonist. The platforming still doesn't work worth crap and the climbing is still bad, it's just harder to fall to your death. If you like this game that's fine but I couldn't wait for it to be over by the 2/3 point. Oh, the plot was really generic and full of holes (sap? that's it? he wanted to become some kinda sap junkie?). That's all I had to say.

Skyhill

RPG-lite roguelite influenced survival game. You wake up on the top floor of a hotel, and have to fight through 100 floors of monsters. Hunting for bits and pieces to craft into weapons and contraptions is the best part of the game. The combat has pretty much no strategy to it, but is usually pretty quick. There is a nice variety of baddies. As you play (and die) you earn perks that change up the game a little.

My winning run was an oddball. There are elevators that act as fast travel, but if any floor above that elevator is out of commission, then all the lower floors do not work. One of the first broken elevators needed the last tier part to fix it (upgrade the crafting table, multi-components) and the whole first half did not have enough parts to do all the upgrades. So, I returned to base from level 50, cooked all my food, upgraded my weapon, and marched down. I got lucky in that when I opted to use the change I found it was on a vending machine that gave out components for antidotes.

So, I was able to field craft almost enough antidotes to get me through the last half of the game, and skipped as many fights as I could. Since I was not repairing elevators, I didn't have as much need for materials, and stuck to the stairwell for about 20 levels. I did run out of antidote and food, and it was touch and go for the last 3 floors, but I made it to the end even if just barely.

I may switch up my perks and try another run, but I have seen most of the game by this point. The lore and world building is generic and forgettable, and the game would be better if it was 20 floors shorter, and the RNG dictates the success of the early game which influences the distance to the tipping point. But, it is pretty fun to play post-apocalyptic pack-rat without the demands of some of the more serious survival games.

Neverending Nightmare

A game long on atmosphere, that does not overstay its welcome. It's short, but that fits because it is has limited gameplay. Mostly, you walk until you see something that is colorful and you then push the button to interact with it. There's a story, and branching paths to the different endings. Death is a minor annoyance as you always restart on the same level as you died, and 2-3 deaths should have you figuring out the patterns for the enemy.

I love the art style and had been put off by the reviews, but it was a nice short game with a bit of story and a heaping of atmosphere from the graphics and sound. Glad I finally picked this up, well worth the sale price.

I finished Combat Wings Battle of Britain that I got for just 1 euro in the Gamersgate christmas sale. It's the same make but somewhat more polished than it's World War I predecessor Wings of Honour Battles of the Red Baron. In the same series there's 'Combat Wings' and 'Wings of Honour' on Gamersgate, all from the same developer CI Games. But those last two games - without the suffixes - I couldn't get to run, not even on Windows XP. Combat Wings crashed and Wings of Honour gave a runtime error, despite my numerous attempts to fix the problem.

But back to Combat Wings Battle of Britain: it's a nice dogfight game about the Battle of Britain from the perspective of a Polish pilot in the RAF. The RAF had several Polish pilots, that fled from their homeland by various routes when their country fell to the nazi's and that became quit accomplished pilots. In the game, controls are easy, though in these kind of dogfight games if I set the difficulty on normal, things go wrong if I need to defend things on the ground like a factory or a British convoy at sea.

So I played and finished the game at Easy. At Normal, it takes me to long to shoot down the enemy planes to save the defended objects on the ground. At easy, it's fun chasing the enemy planes but there's a bit of a lack of challenge as you can take a lot of hurt in before you're plane gets dangerously damaged. But I had a lot of fun because of the arcade-y feel of the game, though the voice-acting is lacking. Especially the battle calls of the Germans are cringe-worthy in their simplicity and repetitiveness. Still, I'd give the game a 7 for the fun that I've had.

Too bad this part of the series was a Steam-code instead of a DRM-free download like the rest and Wings of Honour and Combat Wings failed to run. Still I will have fun with Wings of Honour Battles of the Red Baron that I'm playing as well. Unlike Combat Wings Battle of Britain, you can fight as the Germans as well in Battles of the Red Baron.

full list