So beaten 2 rpg maker games one is vampires dawn 2 english version and nocturne rebirth english version
Also beaten return to castle wolfenstein for the first time and it's a pretty fine shooter i must say, too bad the germans can't play it.

FINALLY! My first game finished this year. And all of that just because of The Witcher 3. I had started playing that one just before New Year's and as far as I can tell I hadn't even finished one third of it after three weeks or so. Anyway, so I took a break from that one and just finished Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun on PS4.

So, to me Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines is one of the best games of all time, I finally finished that one in 2013 or so thanks to rediscovering it through GOG. I kinda enjoyed some of its clones but for some reason never ended up finishing either one of them and I don't think either one of them quite understood the brilliance of Commandos and what made it tick, including its own sequels. Shadow Tactics, on the other hand, is the first attempt at a Commandos clone I've seen that basically did everything right. And it also chose the perfect setting for this kind of game.

So the game has just five characters and each of them with rather few abilities, the only one I haven't used even once was the medkit since, obviously, I reloaded the last save every time I got spotted. So yeah, that's one thing that sadly hasn't changed but should have: the game pretty much requires you to scumsave and is not only one of very few console games I know that has quicksaving (incidentally the only other ones I can think of are the Splinter Cell games in the HD Trilogy), it even comes with a HUD element that reminds you if you haven't saved for more than a minute. I would have preferred if they had taken the Metal Gear approach where being spotted just temporarily changes the dynamics rather than brutally screwing you but oh well, it was still fun.

Anyway, I'm happy that they downsized the formula compared to most Commandos clones which suffered from bloated mechanics and overly convoluted mission logic. Shadow Tactics keeps it clean and simple, you soon have all the characters and abilities and then the game plays around with that, like a good puzzle game which, let's be honest here, Commandos and Shadow Tactics are at their core. I was a bit disappointed that there's not really a single ability that stands out as something truly original, most of them are reskins of stuff from Commandos, others are something you'd find in a hero unit in an RTS. The same goes for most features related to enemies and the environment (like traces in the snow). I guess the biggest surprise was that three of the characters can kinda do platforming, jump from roof to roof, climb up vines etc. - and it was pretty great, I wish they had utilised that a bit more. And I was also a bit disappointed that the characters play a tad too similarly to each other with four out of five being able to perform stealth kills and carry bodies so you only switch them when you need a special ability - then again, that's probably better than Commandos where the Spy and the Green Beret easily did 95% of the work, the others coming only into play when the level really required it.

Anyway, thus far the game may sound just like a decent clone at best but it's really riddled with small great stuff, besides doing the stuff that Commandos did a lot better and solving readability problems that Commandos suffered a lot from. When you're seen, the game slows down, making it easier for you to make a quick decision that will allow you to avoid being spotted (like in Metal Gear Solid V, I know), the cone gradually fills up, making things even more fair and comprehensible. You can create "accidents" that will keep enemies from raising the alarm if they spot the victim (like in Hitman: Blood Money, I know). You can crawl through bushes, where you're invisible while crouched (like in Assassin's Creed III, I know). And my favourite, during night missions enemy view is heavily reduced but next to light sources you're perfectly visible even at high distance (like in Thief and Splinter Cell, I guess...). Okay, so none of the mechanics are too original but the point is that they are perfect matches for the Commandos formula and mix things up very nicely. What I probably appreciated most was that enemies belong to three distinct categories that have their own behavioural patterns and that can be easily distinguished just by looking at them, something that was a pretty big problem in Commandos. A particularly nice touch were the tough-as-nails samurai enemies, who are hard to manipulate, pretty aggressive once they suspect something and are pretty hard to kill as only your own samurai can perform stealth kills on them. Otherwise you can only use a grenade (which you never seem to have more than one of per mission) but usually it will take two characters to take care of them, one firing a gun at them and the other one hitting them while they are weakened. Plus they can see through disguises so taking care of them was among the more fun challenges and I just wish there had been more enemy types to diversify the gameplay towards the end. Anyway, besides getting a bit monotonous towards the end I enjoyed the game very much.

Oh yeah, and finally: Shadow Mode. THANK YOU! I remember that Desperados kinda played around with tools that allowed you to make multiple characters perform specific actions when you give a signal of sorts but I never quite got the hang of it. If memory serves it was too clunky and complicated. Shadow Tactics' Shadow Mode isn't perfectly executed but it's very close. Dozens of times I've set up three or even four characters to perform certain actions at once and I orgasmed each time the plan worked out, with multiple enemies going down at the same moment. It also made it easy to have one character generate a distraction while another one is taking killing a single one and dragging them into the bushes. Awesome. And as I mentioned, I played it on PS4, thus on a gamepad, and they solved the interface for this feature quite well with a "shadow" of your character basically serving as a cursor - that made setting up ambushes and such no more awkward than performing the moves manually. Bravo!

Now, I said that the setting is a perfect match for this kind of game but frankly I also feel that the developers didn't make the best out of it. I guess the format the story is told through, just very basic montages and simple scripted sequences in the game view, was a tad too humble but the bigger problem is that the story wasn't particularly interesting nor the characters developed. There's literally no big surprises in the game (well, except maybe one). Everything's very by-the-book. It's not historical enough to make me feel like I'm experiencing history (something that the Assassin's Creed games did a lot better, even if they are riddled with conspiracy bullshit) and the characters were all too simple and innocent to be believable or make me wonder about their actual motivations and such. They kinda tried to make the ninja the cynical one who doesn't quite fit in but of course his nihilism is disproved again and again. And Mugen, the samurai who is holding the group together, isn't nearly as charismatic as he should be. The style of the English voice acting didn't help either (maybe I'd feel a bit differently if I had turned on Japanese VA, which is actually an option) although I'm pretty sure it's exactly the style the developers went for and I respect that, it's just not what I would have preferred. I was also disappointed that there was nothing in the game that made me learn anything new about the era, samurai etc., something that I generally expect from a game in a historical setting that I'm not particularly accustomed with.

And that's pretty much it. Music's not mindblowing but good, graphics are good if similar to tons of games in the post-Borderlands era and... oh yeah, the game plays fantastically on a gamepad where you control the characters directly. I can't imagine I would have enjoyed it any more if I had played it using a mouse and keyboard.

I wholeheartedly recommend the game to anyone who enjoyed Commandos or any of its clones.

Sorry for the long post.

The same day I finished Combat Wings Battle of Britain I finished Crysis 2. For these last 10 days, I have been busy finishing games that I have been playing for a long time (well, at least some of them). Next to finish is my umptieth campaign of Dragon Age: Origins and then Dragon Age Awakenings and after that I'm gone quit playing Dragon Age campaigns and focus on other games.

full list

It's really hard to get into, but I love this game. If your can get it, play Portal of Praevus too, the balancing is a lot better.

Doom 2

It's like Doom, but tougher, longer and with more explosions. Enemies with homing missiles, reviving dead enemies and at one point you have to face the 2 bosses from the last game, at the same time. It feels like, especially in the later levels, that the main path is hidden by multiple secret doors, which can get immensely frustrating. At one point I did have to consult a walkthrough, turned out the lift I needed was glitched and wouldn't go the right height, and that was quite frustrating. Overall good game, though play the first one first to get used to the gameplay.

The Bard's Tale 2004 version, Feb 11 (GOG)- Excellent voice acting and snarky dialogue mask an otherwise forgettable game.


Full List

One campaign for each origin story?

No, more. Most origin stories I played only once, but there's two that I did multiple times. I've had two human nobles, a dual-wielding rogue and a two-handed warrior and I've had five mages: My first mage was a general mage, picking the spells I found most useful, but then I built four specialist mages for the achievements: a conjuror, a hexer, an elementalist and a thaumaturgist.

*edit: and one other game finished today to add to the list: Wings of Honour - Battle of the Red Baron. A fun little dogfight game that can be finished in two evenings: one for the allied campaign and one for the german campaign.

Regency Solitaire

A solitaire game with a minimalistic story. In the beginning it was to dependable on luck, but it got better once you got all special abilities and a higher probability to find wildcards. Nothing special, but it was ok to keep me awake during some boring nightshifts.

Complete list of finished games in 2018

Crash Bandicoot - PS1

I think perhaps Crash's struggle to jump somewhere and then explode is symbolic of the moral and ethical decline of western civilization.

I might add, not everyone has the athletic ability to be a successful Bandicoot, you have to get up early and jog and train so you can jump better.

Total Overdose - A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico

I recently got some of the old GTAs from Humble Bundle and gave them a try but couldn't get into them, because while they played kind of okay, there was nothing that really invited me to stick with them; being a fan of the Saints Row games, I felt they either took themselves too serious or just sucked at trying to be funny, and I was craving for something a bit more like SR. Total Overdose is not quite on the level with Saints Row, but it's much closer to what I was looking for.

Not that the story or the characters are any more interesting and less cheesy than GTA (and the story ends a bit abruptly, probably because they were planning a sequel that got canceled), but the gameplay and the whole over-the-top mexican cliché theme immediately clicked with me. For one, it's a lot more game-y: It has score tracking, collectibles spread all over the city, upgrades, lots of trick shots (similar to Max Payne's slow-mo jumps) and "loco moves" like El Toro, Mariachi, Explosive Piñata or conjuring Sombrero of Death or a mad luchador to assist you, as well as silly side missions and minigames. The soundtrack, which consists of Mariachi folk, spanish language hip hop and crossover (Delinquents Habits, Control Machete, Molotov), is put to good use and adds a lot to the atmosphere. And it's very short compared to the GTAs or SR, which I appreciated, as I was only looking for a shorter distraction (took a few evenings - maybe 6-10 hours? - I didn't track the time).

The thing about the open world gameplay is that it becomes old pretty quickly. In the beginning I had fun collecting stuff, driving around the city, doing car stunts and side missions, but after a while it became a bit repetitive and felt pointless, as the upgrades you can get by collecting things and completing missions are not really all that impressive or necessary. In the end I resorted to mostly just doing the linear story missions. Unfortunately you almost always have to do at least one side mission to unlock a new story mission, but since they are usually short and easy, it wasn't such a big deal, even though I dislike that design choice.

The game is easy in general; you can manually save only at certain points, but you can pick up up to 9 rewind tokens which allow you to continue if you die, and the game also makes autosaves if you reach certain points during a mission. Only during the last missions it became a bit more challenging because neglecting city exploration and side missions, I found myself without new rewind tokens for a while, so I only had one life and on dying it was back to the last save/checkpoint. On the positive side, this caused me to make more use of the loco moves which you get a ton of as well. With me being a hoarder and finding the game easy as it was, I had often forgotten about using them before. And it was similar with the trick shots; in the beginning I thought it was cool that you can do all that, but in-game I often neglected all but the most basic one. Not sure if that says more about me or the game. Of course, you get a range of different weapons too, that you can constantly switch between (only the usual suspects though, pistols, guns, grenades and rocket launchers, nothing fancy or funny), and you can upgrade your character to double wield some of them.

I noticed a few slight inconsistencies, like the auto thefts in which the dialogue of the character and his victims suggests he's taking the car away from them and kicking them out (like in GTA and SR), but instead, the former driver stays on the passenger seat. Or the text of the side missions ignoring the progress of the story, becoming outdated. But the whole game is silly anyway, concistency and immersive story is not really what I was looking for in it. Also: Mexican police apparantly turns a blind eye on shootouts and hit-and-runs in the streets. ;) I think the city exploration would have been better if the game actually had a minimap showing the streets, instead it's just a grey circle telling you the direction for finding missions, and often big housing blocks or long walls are in the way and you need to find a way around. To the game's credit, I have to mention that contrary to GTA and SR you can directly jump to any mission from the menu screen. Apparantly they already anticipated that players would lose their patience trying to navigate unmapped street mazes just to get to the next mission.

All in all, while the gameplay can get a bit repetitive after a while and the open world is a bit lacking, I found Total Overdose more motivating and enjoyable than the old GTAs and I had enough fun with it to complete it. I got it a long while ago from Sachys in a giveaway, but then almost forgot about it. I'd like to thank him again for gifting it to me; a pity he probably won't read this, as I take it he doesn't frequent these forums anymore. :(

Just finished Doom (2016) on PS4. Well, that was something. I'm glad to see that the hype was well-deserved. Until now Painkiller was my personal favourite among singleplayer "twitch shooters", now it pretty much has to share that title with the new Doom. And actually I'm pretty sure that id Software drew at least some inspiration from Painkiller as the new Doom has a lot more in common with that one than with either id Software classic gameplay-wise.

Anyway, what can I say - the level design is fantastic, the combat mechanics and enemy behaviour are pretty much perfect and the game is just oozing style. Not too thrilled by some of the new interpretations of classic enemies (particularly didn't like the new imp design and their puny fireballs which reminded me of Super Mario's) but other than that it's pretty much exactly the game we needed and that everyone doubted a major veteran studio would be able to make these days. That's helluva comeback for id Software.

Personally I also appreciated the way collectables and such are implemented into the game. Purists probably won't like it but personally I had a lot of fun carefully exploring the maps and performing the challenges and I'm pretty sure that I'll replay the levels until I hit 100% - I think that kind of thing worked perfectly for Painkiller and don't mind that they did something like that here.

If there's something I was actually not too happy with it's the ending. Everything towards the end was rather anticlimactic. The last hell levels were actually kinda less impressive than the first one, they also weren't harder, the final bossfight was a bit of a joke, especially compared to the Cyberdemon (which was a pretty great bossfight!) and the cutscene in the very end left me kinda unsatisfied.

Also: ironically the game didn't quite blow me away graphically. There isn't quite anything that looks bad but the game also fails to really take my breath away with its visuals, excluding a few of the vistas.

And what I was positively surprised by was how the game plays on a pad. I was worried that a shooter like this would be the worst-possible choice to play on console instead of PC but ironically I didn't mind playing on a pad at all, I've had much worse experiences with the slower and more "realistic" shooters in this regard. In the end Hurt Me Plenty difficulty has actually turned out to be a lot too easy for me despite playing on a pad.

Doom 3: BFG Edition

Normally, I think playing a sequel directly after playing the first game is a bad idea, especially if you enjoyed the first game, for example my least favourite Final Fantasy game is X-2, which I played immediately after X. But generally this rule only applies if there's a significant difference between the 2 games. The last game I played was Doom 2, a fast paced action shooter, I moved on to Doom 3, which is essentially a fps/horror game. The game is basically half life, that is the best comparison, the 1st dlc even has a gravity gun. Every enemy from the previous games makes an appearance with the exception of the robot spiders (replaced with normal spiders and a spider with the top half of a woman attached) and that thing that spawns lost souls from doom 2. New enemies have been added too. This was a new direction for the series, and not one I'm particularly a fan of as I was a big fan of the soundtrack in the previous games, something you lose with survival horrors. Being doom, the enemies don't really create a sense of fear, more of an annoyance, an obstacle in your way. The game is uncharacteristic of previous games in the franchise, though still works well as a game itself. If your a fan of the series, you may not like the direction the game has taken, but It's a good introduction to the survival horror genre as the jump scares are predictable, minimal puzzles and basic ammo saving. Normal difficulty is barely difficult, so much so the only times I died were during annoying platforming segments, in fact my health never dropped below 30. I plan to finish the dlc and would recommend this game.

doki doki literature club finished last night