Carmageddon 2

Not too bad (as long as you purchase some tougher vehicles along the way; also worth trying to find all the "golden" upgrades scattered around levels) until the very last level. I originally wanted to beat the last level with the classic red Max Damage car, but ended up using the white Degoryon(?) because the red car kept getting blown up too easily.

Fun game, I dunno about $5 for it though; if you have a decent disposable income you might get it but otherwise see if it gets down lower.

Cold Zero - Last Stand

I have soft spot for top down action games like these. Hectic and intense action, rewarding exploration, and micromanagements at best (but not on par with Apeiron's games).
There is a lot of guns but you only pick sniper rifles or SMG/assault rifles that allow you to use silencer+extended mag attachments, otherwise it would turn up difficulty even higher.
Camera is bad, enemies have bigger range than you with the same weapons, something like JA2 where enemy pistols have insane range...

Story is B tier action movie where mob boss hire us to clear his name.

Game is hard and you often get surprised by both enemy actions and technical miracles, like enemy cutting corners that start shooting instantly when they get into your field of fire.

Oh and you can pick and hide bodies, its so powerful you can pick sniper corpse from the tower even when there is no ladder, what a powerful PSI power it it...

Dracula - The Resurrection

A 'Myst-style' point and click adventure based around the setting of the Bram Stoker book. The game takes place a few years after the book, you play as Johnathon Harken, who has gone to Transylvania to locate his missing wife. The game uses a first person perspective, and you transition between scenes by clicking where you want to go. A symbol appears to tell you that an item in the scenery can be interacted with an item in the inventory, which theoretically means the game should be simple. However the biggest difficulty is locating the items to begin with, the environments are often dark, making small objects very hard to pick out from the scenery. The character models look like ventriloquist dummies and are the scariest thing in the game. It's fairly short, the puzzles aren't too difficult, but it comes as part of a trilogy that I got on GOG very cheaply, so it's pretty good value for money.

Dracula 2 - The Last Sanctuary

Same as the earlier game, except it's longer, the puzzles are harder and it's possible to get a game over. The game over's are the worst addition to the game, most of them don't have a cutscene explaining what went wrong, it's just a black screen with game over written on it, forcing you to go back to your last save point. There isn't much difference, the graphics still suck and there are a lot more dark settings (For some reason despite it being daytime, it's too dangerous to walk above ground to destinations and instead you must go via the sewers) and objects are still difficult to spot. I would say the 1st is probably the better game of the two.

Call of Duty (PC)

The original, back when the campaign was the most important part. A FPS set in World War 2, with 3 separate campaigns: American, British and Russian. The American campaign is pretty weak, set shortly after the D-Day landings, it see's you going across the French Countryside in a squad, clearing out chateau's and driving into roadblocks, that mostly serves as an introduction to the levels you are likely to come across and the different types of guns. The highlight is probably the bridge defence level (self explanatory). The British Campaign includes more 'stealth' missions, where you learn to operate without a squad, blowing up air defences or sneaking onto enemy ships. These missions are a step up in difficulty, but still quite good. The highlight is the Russian campaign, the opening scene alone is probably the most memorable part, the campaign itself is mostly you being ordered to do things that most people would describe as 'suicidal' and somehow making it out alive. This includes one particularly difficult level where you must defend an apartment building for a period of time while tanks approach from both sides, unfortunately your the only one who can use an anti tank rifle for some reason, and each sides rifle is on a different floor, meaning you have to constantly travel between the two whilst your squad slowly dies and the building gets overrun by a ridiculous number of enemy troops (I only won because the stairs got too overcrowded with enemies and they couldn't get past each other). This was a pretty good game that still holds out today and I would recommend it.

My plan is to buy it when it comes to GOG.

Prey (2006)

Turns out you can buy keys for this game fairly cheap and they still work. Prey has very little in common with its 2016 remake of the same name, you play a Cherokee former soldier, who is kidnapped by aliens along with his girlfriend and grandfather. The game is a FPS with some Portal style puzzle elements. You have a variety of weapons, each with 2 uses meaning as you unlock new weapons, you gain twice as many new ways to kill enemies. Portals and anti gravity walkways are everywhere, fighting upside down is a common occurrence. The setting is dark and creepy, the ship and enemies are biomechanical, part insect, part machine, providing a grim and unsettling atmosphere. One unique feature is that when you die, you are instead sent to the spirit realm, where you must fight the spirits of the enemies you killed to return to the real world, right where you died. Story wise, it's not the best, there are a fair few plothole's and the game ends with a 'Too be Continued' (Ultimately this never came to fruition). If you've played DOOM 3, this game runs on the same engine and plays almost exactly the same, so if you enjoyed that, you'd enjoy this. I would definitely recommend this game, especially for the amount I paid for it.

I loved this game: The music, the theme/setup(native american fighting aliens), the intro/outro(especially the ending music/scenes), etc....all good to very good imo. Too bad we never got a sequel, as I feel the game could've done good with one(or even a prequel concerning the alien sphere and it's origins or a spinoff with the same universe).

Just finished Rise of the Tomb Raider on PS4. To be honest I'm quite disappointed. I really loved the first game in the reboot series which I finished last year or so and everything I had read and heard about Rise suggested that is to Tomb Raider 2013 what Arkham City was to Arkham Asylum. Alas, in my opinion it is not.

First off, the story and location just aren't nearly as captivating to me as they were in the first game. I'm pretty much sick and tired of Soviet bases and as far as I'm concerned they are a pretty lame backdrop for a Tomb Raider adventure. Also the big mystery at the core of the story is kinda just stupid and too implausible for my taste. The characters are also lacking with only one of them being of any interest to me (even though I guessed his big secret the second he appeared on screen). And there's no character development for Lara this time. Ironically the 2013 game was the actual "rise of the tomb raider", here she already is and remains the character she was when the credits rolled in the first game. I just didn't care about anything going on in the story.

My biggest problem, though, is that the game is superbly unimaginative. It feels like it repeats the first game's formula to the letter. The first area is again a forest where I hunt deer, I'm again finding parts for the same guns, I'm again collecting items I had already collected in the first game. There's a few new items but they are so boring and unmemorable that I'm not sure which one of these are new. Take the knife, for example, which allows to cut ropes. It just unlocks a few contextual actions, that's it, it doesn't change the gameplay or how you have to think about solving riddles at all (it possibly also unlocks air attacks but I didn't care for those much anyway). Also when you finally encounter the obligatory supernatural enemies they feel like the exact same supernatural enemies you encountered in the first game, they are even introduced in a similar manner, marching in huge numbers as you're climbing around above them. What the hell? Finally add shit like some in-game trading cards which you can buy for microtransactions or (if you have those) DLC weapons that render the whole progression system for guns pointless.

Don't get me wrong: it's still a pretty great game, possibly better than Tomb Raider 2013, but honestly, if you still have somewhat fresh memories from Tomb Raider 2013 this one feels more like a second playthrough of the first game than an actual sequel.

The sequel sounded and looked amazing! Rumors say the whole thing fell apart because Bethesda was trying to buy HumanHead Studios out using incredibly shady tactics, but they refused to the bitter end. The timeline fits as they were acquiring numerous studios around that time period like id Software and Arkane Studios.

I liked the new Prey, but it had no business being called "Prey". They were only using the name for IP legal issues.

Yup....too bad it's as dead now as the Dead Space series(which did get worse with micro DLC over time but was still somewhat good imo and engaging plotwise) and other failed/halted series.

Stranger Things: The Game. I guess it's not bad for a mobile game :) It was made to hype up the second season of the show and uses a Zelda-like style in which you run around the town and duck into various buildings that become "dungeons" whose end-boss you need to defeat to get some important item that will let you progress further. There's a little bit of exploration but it's mostly fairly linear and it's not a particularly long game. If you get all the secret collectibles, your reward is that you can watch a trailer that you can just see on Youtube more easily. You collect characters as you go and each has a special attack (the sheriff is really good at punching things, Nancy has baseball bats, Lucas has the "wrist rocket", etc.). It has two settings, one which is basically no challenge at all and another that's supposed to be "1984 hard", but even on the hard setting I think I only died a handful of times and that was mostly out of carelessness.

You could quibble that it's more generically "indie-retro" than something that really looks like it came out of 1984 (1994, maybe...). Personally, I think it would be very interesting to see someone do a game based on the show that actually looks like a 1984-style game, like something that would have appeared on the Apple II/C64/Atari 800, but that probably would have horrified casual fans of the show who just wanted a game to make them smile and tide them over for a bit.

Noctropolis

A very early computer adventure game with FMV video, this game will not hesitate to kill you if you don't take it seriously.
aka Father Desmond blew my brains out with a .44 magnum revolver until I took the dialogue and my response choices seriously. Saving before entering new areas is advised, certain timed events will (eventually ) kill you while you pixel hunt and try everything in your inventory to progress.

Ran across one game-ending bug that required a game restart, which was visiting the Cygnus HQ building too early in game and talking with the receptionist which caused the correct response choice to never appear when later visiting the Cygnus HQ building.

Splinter Cell Blacklist (XB1X)

Another recent 360 game patched to 4K on an XB1X. This one really looks great too, since it came right at the end of the last console generation. With the upgrade it looks better than a lot of supposed remasters from this generation. Though I really don't like the overdone lens flare in the game. One bonus though is that pretty much all cutscenes are in engine rather than prerendered, so everything gets bumped up to 4K.

The game was better overall than Conviction, but still is a bit inconsistent. Some levels were great fun and others not so. My main gripe on a few occasions is how the game scripts in ambushes and makes you fight out of them, I'm not a big fan of this in a stealth game. Why try so hard to maintain stealth and play really clever if the game then just screws you anyway? I'd prefer the game always give you a way to play well and avoid getting ambushed in the first place. To it's credit though, outside of the reliance on scripting sometimes, the game at least let you play how you want overall. It rarely forces you to play "no kill" but you can. My preferred way to play is what the game describes as "Panther"- that is kill everything, but do it as quietly as possible. You can play "Ghost" (no killing) or Assault or just any mix you like and you get scored for each mission on each playstyle.

The story was pretty forgettable, which is how I see most Tom Clancy style conspiracy stories. Story doesn't matter though.

One big criticism that fan of the series have of this game is the change in voice acting from old Ironsides. But since I've only played Conviction before this I didn't really have time to get too attached to Ironsides anyway and possibly even preferred the new guy. Whilst these games aren't all time masterpiece material, they're good enough that I'll play other games in the series just the same. I even have the original Splinter Cell on uPlay (when they gave it away free). So that will be soon.

Grand Theft Auto III (PS4)
(This is the PS2 version of the game)

I don't deny that I have a lot of nostalgia for this game. It blew my mind when I first played it in 2001, and it fostered my love of open-world games which continues to this day.

Although GTA3 is a little bit rough around the edges in some areas, it still stands up today, is hugely fun, and I highly recommend it!

My first GTA game, and it can't be overstated how amazing it was for the time.