Toonstruck - 4/5

Actually a surprisingly enjoyable and well-designed game. It's certainly not perfect, but I had a lot of fun playing it. Unlike Kalirion, I only had to look up stuff twice :P

Also, there's some great Christopher Lloyd moments.

Games finished?

Do people still finish games?

I thought people just collected games now.

Okay, I'm exaggerating, but not by much.

This year I finished Sleeping Dogs, twice. I also finished Fallout 4, Another World, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (does that count? :)), and the Black Moon Chronicles.

Deadlock - 3/5

What if this game isn't as good as my nostalgia goggles suggest?

The nostalgia goggles set the bar really high, perhaps impossibly high.

>:-(

Yakuza 2. Like the first game, just a bit moreso, which is fine with me because I quite enjoyed the first one. This probably took me longer to finish than it should have because I got sidetracked trying to complete the host club-based sidequests for a while before giving up out of frustration. Of the other side activities, I spent a bit of time at the batting cages but not much else.

Only thing I don't like about these games is that the camera during the fights can occasionally get really bad. I probably took more damage during the finale because of camera freak-outs than I did from the enemies hitting me straight on.

Ittle Dew

I love, love, love the graphics, the humour, the music, the general gameplay, since I played it the first time years ago. I just have this feeling that the balance is somewhat off in this game.

This was actually my third try, and the first two times I gave up more than halfway through because I got stuck or frustrated or felt lost. This time I discovered that the main game is actually quite short and rather easy if you buy all the items as soon as possible and preferably in the order proposed by the pricing (I think I didn't do that the other two times). The thing is, once you have all the items, puzzles that appeared almost impossible to solve before are suddenly super easy, to an extent that it feels like cheating to use your items. But it's never quite clear whether the puzzles are meant to be solvable without them or not, and I think that's what can make them a bit frustrating at times. Occasionally there is a warning that you need the items to solve a puzzle, so I'd assume that when there isn't, it should be solvable without them, but you never know.

Another problem I've identified is that the game tells you *most* of the basics you need to solve the puzzles, but not all. It tells you the ones that you can easily find out yourself but neglects to tell you about some rather obscure moves that you're a bit less likely to discover on your own. So you can feel lost and think a puzzle imposible to solve not because it requires you to think hard but because the game keeps stuff from you. Maybe a conscious design decision so the players have something to discover by experimenting, dunno, but that's something I didn't like at all.

And I have to admit, I didn't complete the game 100%. I'm still missing access to two rooms in the castle - I don't have any clue how to reach them - and I gave up on the Master Cave, since it was too brain-racking hard for me. After all, I just wanted to beat things with a stick! XP

Redneck Rampage + Route 66 + Rides Again

Decent shooter with humour that is completely off the mark with me. As FPS it was competent for sure but far from the other Build engine games.
Most enemies are uniteresting, too many of them are hitscan with too good aim to be fun and fighting them is often not much fun (hello, vixens and your teat guns). For some reason, while most enemy weapons gives you feedback of beaing hit, some of them don't and it is quite aggravating to suddenly note I am down to quarter of health without even noticing.
Guns were OK but nothing too interesting. I spent most of the time with shotgun anyway.
As for level desing it was not bad but I was not too blown away yet again. It made me to go back and forth a lot and it didn't help that all keys look the same and there is no way to tell which doors are open by what key. Also I wonder who decided to make the game about hicks battling other cloned hicks and aliens so puzzle-heavy. :-)

Redneck Rampage and Suckin' Grits on Route 66 is barely distinguishable but I have to say I liked Rides Again:Arkansas a lot more. The levels were better done and I enjoyed stumbling around in most of them. Unlike previous 2 in this one they also haven't tried to suddenly inflate difficulty in episode 2 by adding tons of hard enemies. In fact I found it bit too easy after playing previous ones.
I was afraid about driving mechanics but they are actually quite fun. Well motorcycle was, boat not as much as you could way too easily drive into own bombs. But god, if you give player one long canyon to drive through and murder everyone in badass fashion, don't hide keys along the way, forcing player to go back and look into every nook to find some dumb secluded area to crawl in.

I used erampage to play it and while it is not as well done as eduke it was serviceable and still better than playing it raw.
But there certainly were some bugs casued by the source port and some things were simply not working.

It took me some 8 hours on average for each of the games so some 24 total.
Overall fairly enjoyable experience but one I am not too eager to replay in the future.


List of my awesome accomplishments.

Good to hear you eventually found a design you liked! :)

Superman (Atari 2600). This game gets a lot of trash but it's really not that bad considering the limitations of the technology. It somehow manages to include a lot of the basic elements of Superman, which is more than can be said for some Superman games - you begin as Clark Kent, you witness Lex Luthor and his thugs destroying a major bridge and escaping, you run back to a phone booth and change to Superman. From there you have to reassemble the three pieces of the bridge and take the villains to jail, then switch back to Kent and go to the Daily Planet to write your story in the shortest possible time (I did it in 739 seconds or whatever). You have to avoid kryptonite satellites that can sap your powers, but hooking up with Lois Lane will return you to normal.

The trickiest part of the game is simply trying to figure out the city layout as that sort of sprawling environment was not the system's strong suit. Some games like Adventure or Haunted House managed to pull it off, but in a game like this too many screens just look identical except for a color swap.

Ghost of a Tale - stealth non combat game with cute protagonist, nice visuals, minimal rpg elements, sense of adventures strong and with quest to finish!

Broken Sword: Director's Cut (2008) (Linux)

Years ago I coudn't afford a lot of games - and it's just blessing for me today, it's kind of gaming paradise, when I realize that now I can buy such a masterpieces for $1 and play them for the very first time. Amazing experience!

I had some expectation and I was quite surprised with the game. What I've found is that BS1 is still:
✠ intresting story with mystery, conspiracy and danger
✠ quite nice and simple point and click gameplay being free of frustration
(with a few levels of Hint system to help you in case of any problem)
✠ no pixel hunting (great!)
✠ wonderful atmosphere of great adventure
✠ nice music
✠ fantastic sense of humour - subtle, sarcastic, ironic, hilarious - just perfect!
✠ great voice acting, which is important part of the story and creates a lot of unique characters (the game takes you to different European countries, protagonists are French and American - it's amazing how well it was used in the scenario; I usually bored with dialogues, but I just loved them in this game!)

OK, graphics is quite dated. I also didn't like some aspects of the story and some specific jokes and opinions (it's so French perspective!), but I must admit that the game is truly masterpiece.

List of all games completed in 2018.

Upon learning that the Diablo 2 Ladder Reset will occur in a few days, I overcame my laziness and finished Hell with my Fishymancer. Thankfully, I only had five more quests in Act 5 to go, and I managed to plow through them in a couple of days. I don't know why I made such a big deal out of this, as I'll most likely take another break from the game once the new season arrives.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (XB1X)

Finally got around to this one. Ended up doing full 100% completion and really enjoyed it. Just like the first game and the Uncharted games, it's basically the feel of an over the top action movie like an Indiana Jones movie, but as a game.

I think it was a bit better than the first game and way better than the Uncharted games which have great characters and overall meta story, but far too much poor combat. The Tomb Raider games strike a much better balance between exploration and combat...plus the combat is also way better.

The XB1X version is a good one. For a console game you get to select one of three modes, something that is becoming more common. High frame rate which runs at 60 fps and 1080 with higher settings than a standard Xbox. Or native 4K at 30fps which maximises image sharpness but drops a few settings down- like volumetric lighting etc. Or Enhanced visuals that runs at 1800p but locks all settings to pretty much the highest PC settings, but still at 30fps. After a bit of changing back and forth I decided that in a game that isn't really a twitch shooter, graphics were everything and went with the 1800p enhanced mode...though true 4K was definitely sharper, it was difficult choice.

Now I can start the 2 year wait for Shadow of the Tomb Raider to come down to $20 so I can play the next game in the series.