It seems that you're using an outdated browser. Some things may not work as they should (or don't work at all).
We suggest you upgrade newer and better browser like: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera

×
Huniepop

Beacuse I, huh, ummm... like match-3 games. It is actually quite decent match-3 game where one has to think about what they are doing.
Still I got bored by its matching after a while. Also there are some girls I think. But I played it for story, of course. :-)
It was quite decent but all those girls were too 1-dimensional and I hated them and the match-3 part could use some changes from time to time as it became too samey and when I had one correct way to play it I quickly became bored.
It took me some 12-15 hours I would say and I completed around 80% of the game. That means I got 5 hearts with all girls and I couldn't be bothered to give each of them their missing items as it would be just grinding for the sake of rising percentage and I wasn't up for that.

List of my 2018 games.
Finished Dragon Age: Awakenings for the 5th time. Last week I finished Dragon Age Origins for the 11th time. I like both games a lot, even though even on Nightmare difficulty they're too easy with all the bonus gear the Ultimate Edition throws at you, but I want to move on to playing and finishing other games, so I deinstalled DA:O after playing it continuously for 7 years.

The only thing standing in the way of playing lots of other games is 12 Baldur's Gate campaigns I'm still busy with (I always have lots and lots of games installed and going on at the same time, I treat games like tapas dishes).

*edit: the full list
Post edited March 02, 2018 by DubConqueror
Grim Legends 2: Song of the Dark Swan (2014)

Continuing my adventure with Artifex Mundi series based on brothers Grimms' fairy tales. I think I liked the story and the game more than the previous one, however G2 is a bit shorter. On the other hand I didn't liked bonus story (in G1 it was full hour of nice content extending the main storyline).

List of all games completed in 2018.
Finished a few games lately:
- Skyshine's Bedlam REDUX: The game was too difficult due to the random aspects. I managed to get to the end by cheating. I do not recommend this game.
- SOMA: A masterpiece. A bit scary but the story is great, graphics and sounds too.
- Thimbleweed Park: A good point'n click but a bit difficult. Due to too many locations at the same time, I did not always know where to look. There were a few times when I knew what to do but did not find how to do it. I think a second playthrough would be more fun. Story, dialogs and graphics are top notch though.

Full list here.
Dungeon Keeper

Replayed the classic again. I remember playing this a ton when it was new and loving it, which had me worried this would be a case of nostalgia. So, I was quite surprised that it is still a great game. DK series is probably most loved for the art and humor, which is still good, but has lost something to time.

Gameplay wise it it is all about building the dungeon and exploration. That is still the big hook, and the best part of the gameplay, and I would carve out rooms and try and recruit new minions for days. Unfortunately, there is a cap on this aspect, because the super fun dungeon building/management game is paired with the simple RTS side of the game.

Combat is weak, and boils down in almost every map to picking a choke point and spamming lightning and bringing more creatures to the fight than their are opponents. Sure, there are some advantages to be found in matchups and levels, but for the most part recruiting as many creatures as possible and having them train as much as you can, and then dumping them on the enemy all at once will win the day.

That said, combat is usually over pretty quickly, and on most maps is the climax of the map, so I rarely had time to get bored with it on any single map. Overall I had a lot of fun revisiting this game and was pleased with how much I still like it.
Got Rare Replay for my Xbox One recently as there's a whole number of games in there that I've always wanted to play, some of them genuinely improved ports of N64 classics. The first game I finished was Perfect Dark which is actually the X360 version which has some seriously improved graphics and controls over the original version. Like its predecessor GoldenEye It's to this day praised by many, keeps popping up on lists of the N64's best games and as an example of an early console FPS that doesn't suck. Well, it does.

I understand the nostalgia of the people who first played the game on the N64, just like I myself have a soft spot for Turrican and some other Amiga classics which, looking at them objectively, aren't all that great. But let's put it out there: it's a very mediocre game. The big accomplishment was to work around the limitations of early consoles and make an FPS that appears to be similar to the classics on the PC available at the time even though in many ways it's not. Sure, it was brilliant to create an auto aiming system to even out the clunkiness of the N64 controller that also looks great, with the gun swinging around automatically and a crosshair following targets. However, it removed almost any need to aim and made combat almost entirely about maneuvering. Bottom line: it wasn't satisfying to me because I didn't feel in control. The fact that aiming wasn't really part of the challenge removed a pretty important aspect of shooters and contributed to all fights being the same, regardless of enemy type. Just wiggle a bit around with the left stick to avoid attacks and the auto aiming will do the rest. It was like this in the first level, it was like this in the final one. As a counter-example I'll mention Medal of Honor on the PSX which is a lot less elegant than Perfect Dark but far more satisfying to me. They evened out the digital controls of the original PSX controller with ridiculously long pain animations that gave you time to engage in an aim mode where you can target specific body parts. It was abstract and silly but it was fun to me. Maybe it took several seconds to deliver a headshot where with a mouse I could deliver those in a heartbeat but I did get that satisfaction of precise shooting. Incidentally, a bit like Medal of Honor, Perfect Dark does also have a mode where you can aim more precisely but in that mode that controls are so terrible that I used it only the several times it was pretty much required.

But okay, enough with the controls. The game utterly lacks style, the plot feels like it was written by an eight-year-old and its delivery is made even worse by absolutely dreadful voice acting. I just can't take it seriously and was also pretty put off by the sole idea of this young hottie slaughtering people like it's nothing. It's one thing to have something like that in an intentionally gritty and trashy title like BloodRayne, it's something entirely else in a game that's so oblivious to the ethical implications of the shit going down in it.

But that's still not the worst. The game's biggest problem is that it's not one of those highly abstract twitch shooters like Doom or Quake, it's one of those story-driven "realistic" shooters which means that the levels are supposed to look like real places, the player is supposed to do more than just kill bad guys and make it to the exit. There's a variety of objectives and a crapload of gimmicks that may sound cool on paper but only hurt the game and underline the limitations of the platform. For starters, the levels. Doom did not have much diversity in its wall textures. What it did have was distinct level geometry that was recognisable and offered tons of unique challenges. Perfect Dark has neither. The levels are hugely samey corridors and boxy rooms that you just can't tell apart. Not only are these "realistic" surroundings pretty lousy arenas for the gunfights, they are a nightmare to navigate because everything looks the friggin' same. And now add objectives to these terrible levels. For starters, there's stuff that you have to interact with somehow. The objective list provides only a minimal amount of hints as to what you have to do and when you stumble upon the stuff you have to interact with there's almost never any feedback on that. Once or twice in the game the "cleverly named" Joanna Dark will say something when you're close to the objective but most of the time you have to guess what you have to do. A trivial objective like "disable the xyz system" can be anything in this game. One time you're supposed to push A when facing a specific computer that looks like dozens of other computers, in one case you have to blow a computer up with a wall mine in yet another you have to shoot multiple alien consoles which look like a cosmetic part of the environment. And if you don't figure that out soon enough you will walk all the way to the end of the level where you will hit a dead end. Then you will experience the joy of backtracking through the identically looking rooms and corridors until you find that one thing that may or may not be interactive, if you're particularly lucky you have to first select an item from your inventory that has no right to be there as you didn't have it in the previous mission and there was no feedback of it being added to your inventory. Oh yeah, and several times you have to guess what the level designers wanted you to do under pressure, as there's the occasional time limit. And of course usually there's no logical connection between objectives and unlocked access to later portions of the level (for instance disabling the anti-air defenses of a military base will open up a gate in a warehouse in a totally different corner of the level).

Oh yeah, and there's 32 weapons in the game which can be put into two categories: practically identical projectile weapons, all of which are in practice almost identically useful, and gimmicky shit that is either useless or so rare that you won't get to make much use of it anyway.

Bottom line: it's a pretty terrible game and it's ridiculous that it keeps popping up on "top 10" lists and whatnot of any kind, sometimes alongside masterpieces like Half-Life. What Perfect Dark wants to be is No One Lives Forever while it doesn't even get close to many forgettable shooters like Devastation or Chaser, it actually commits all sorts of design atrocities that even some old and awful low budget shooters have managed to avoid.

Now, a disclaimer: I've finished the game on Agent difficulty which appeared like the default difficulty mode at first. As it turns out, it's not. Agent is actually a clearly dumbed down version of the higher difficulty levels. Not only was it ridiculously easy (I've died one time and that was by falling into a pit) but objectives were removed. Sometimes cutscenes will mention something you don't even have to do or you have to do things in an even less obvious way and you will often stumble upon things that have no relevance to that particular difficulty, only confusing you even more. On one hand it deserves praise that the game changes a lot on the different difficulty levels, on the other, the game as a whole gets even worse by how half-assedly the easy mode was designed. After finishing it I actually replayed the early levels on Special Agent difficulty, where the game actually becomes a lot more difficult and interesting, genuinely better, even, but then again: guessing what to do and running aimlessly through the levels was bad enough, if I had notoriously died while doing so I would have thrown the controller at the TV.

Oh yeah, to avoid any accusations of me just hating on N64 games or Rare: I've moved on to Banjo Kazooie and I'm absolutely loving it. I've already finished about two thirds, judging by the stats screens, and I can honestly say that it's one of the best 3D platform games I've ever played. I may actually be enjoying it more than Mario 64.
Post edited March 03, 2018 by F4LL0UT
Earthbound, Mar 3 (SNES Classic)- This game started off slow, inventory management was terrible, and the last dungeon was obnoxiously difficult but I can see why so many people like it. It's funny, quirky, touching, and sometimes downright bizarre. I don't know if it rises to the level of one of the best RPGs ever made (it might not even be the best one on the Classic) but it's pretty darn good and if you have even a passing interest in RPGs you should give it a shot.

Full List
Post edited March 04, 2018 by muddysneakers
avatar
PaterAlf: Jotun
Still thinking I may give it a go, but if they'll ever get around to putting the 32-bit edition here too. It does exist, but not on GOG, and asked them about it when it was made free and they said they were busy with their new game at the time but will get around to it eventually, though if I was really interested they could look into just uploading the file somewhere and giving me the link. But since at that time I knew I wasn't going to jump on it said nah, I'll wait, and seems like nothing changed since.
Grim Legends 3: The Dark City (2016) (Linux)

That's interesting - the third part is totally different in this trilogy. And much better, I think! There is no obvious inspiration by Grimms' fairy tales and atmosphere becomes much darker. Protagonist is not a sissy, there is more action (even fights, however I'm not sure if it is possible to lose them) and once again a lot of puzzles based on some well-known schemes, but once again I was surprised with their variety. There is also bonus story, as usual, and it's really nice and nicely completes the main story (which is not-so-usual).

All in all, I really liked the series. It's as good as Enigmatis and Nightmares from the Deep series, which are considered the best of Artifex Mundi HOPAs, but, let's be honest, they also has their flaws.

GL1.
GL2.

List of all games completed in 2018.
Post edited March 04, 2018 by ciemnogrodzianin
We Slay Monsters

A neat little roguelike with a card battle mechanic, not to be confused with Monster Slayers, which is a completely different and unrelated roguelike with a card battle mechanic.
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (Xbox One)

I started this one about this time last year and finally finished it after leaving it and coming back to it two times. Like most connect 3 (or whatever they're called) games, it starts out a bit addictive but gets stale after some time. Which is why I played it over a year in three chunks.

It has more depth than you would think whilst still containing an element of "luck of the draw". I think most people are familiar with the basic game concept. This one adds a simple story to give you a reason to visit all corners of the map and fight battles. Matching certain colours or skulls does various things like damage your enemies health or recharge your own coloured mana pools, which you can then use to cast spells. When you level you choose the areas to specialize in. Simple and fun for the most part. The main aspect that makes it tedious after a while is the games habit of sending you off on quests all the way back across the map, forcing you to fight too many trash mob fights along the way.

Fun overall though if you break it up and don't play it all the way through in one go. It's pretty much available on every platform known to man from about the PlayStation 2 onwards. I played the Xbox 360 version on Xbox One.
Press X to Not Die

"Cheesy-acted QTE scenes in FMV: The Game", this is Press X to Not Die in a nutshell. Its cheesiness is totally in purpose though, and in fact the game makes extensive fun of the first-person FMV adventure genre in general, and of the QTE mechanic in particular. I liked it a lot, even though I ostensibly groaned at a couple of its jokes and references.

It's a pretty short game: each playthrough takes less than half an hour, but you'll need to play it a couple of times in order to watch and experience all the scenes (and different ways to die) it has to offer. However, the ultra-short completion time is only true if you play on any of the two lower difficulty settings, otherwise chances are you'll die time and again in many different QTEs. I nonetheless struggled to complete it in 'Hard' mode as it was a requirement to unlock the extra content. Unfortunately all the suffering was ultimately for nothing, as the extras need the Steam client to be running in order to be accessed in-game. So if you do like me and plan to play this game without Steam, don't bother with unlocking the extras and go find them directly among the game files.

If you use Windows and want it completely Steam-free, you can get it on itch.io. But it you use macOS or Linux, you've got no other option than to jump through Valve's hoops.


My list of finished games in 2018
1. Ys IV (PCE CD)
2. Exile (w/ Unworked Designs patch)(PCE CD)
3. Macross 2036 (PCE CD)
4. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (PC)
5. AM2R (PC)
6. TaleSpin (NES)
7. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (PC)
8. Super Mario 64 (N64)
9. Star Fox 64 (N64)
10. Thunder Force V (US ver.)(PS1)
11. Kirby's Adventure Wii (Wii)
12. Caesar III (PC)
13. Final Fantasy Adventure (GB)
14. Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (PC)

I've said earlier that it holds up well and I still think so, although it overstays its welcome a bit towards the end with a couple of duels in a row and mostly repeated enemies and puzzles. This is perhaps the earliest 3D platformer (/TPS/FPS) that does, which is certainly an accomplishment.
Crime Cities

Glad GOG bring back this game to their offer. You know that moment when you want to play old game again but are too afraid that remove good old memories? Not in that case, it's still good game!
I remember it was one of the first game to test my first 3D accelerator, then gave up later due difficulty.
But it was both easier and harder to avoid enemy attacks in CC. Easier because you can hide behind building. Harder because you often collide with other vehicles and buildings.
Even though you can restore shields after ordering renovation service - it hurts your budget.

Not much mission variety for missions - fly there, shoot this and that, escort or defend this which mean fly'n'shoot enemies before they reach you and some collecting, racing and taxi job.
And what's bad on 3rd final planet - most side missions are plain scam so even though enemies are not that hard - you will have difficulty time with credits scarcity.
Nine Parchments - awesome! Definitely my new favorite game.