I didn't finish that many games any more recently, but today I finished the Fox Tales expansion to Never Alone, together making up the Never Alone Arctic Collection. Endearing game, though too much platforming for my liking. I liked the cultural insights you can unlock about Inuit life though.

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Lieve Oma (Dear Granny)

My craving to play something similar to A Short Hike ultimately lead me to itch.io and this free game that I've been aware of for quite some time now (memorable Dutch title, though the game is in English). I've always meant to try it but then forgot again, so this time I actually played it for real. It's a short narrative about a kid and their grandma walking through the forest looking for mushrooms. It's quite different from A Short Hike, older, by a different dev, and technically a walking simulator with hardly any exploration (straying too far off the path is discouraged by the running button not working anymore so you automatically slow down to walking speed).

But I thought it did have the same kind of sweetness to it, like a children's book that's cute and a bit serious at the same time, because it acknowledges that children have worries, too. It is touching, a little bit sad, but it's not depressing and chooses a positive outlook instead. Don't expect anything spectacular, this is as down to earth as it gets, and maybe it could have been a little shorter still, given how sometimes you just wait for the story to continue while walking on and on (there is no save option, btw, so you have to invest 10-20 minutes to play it in one go). The longer stretches between dialogues are not pointless though, they support the calm, slightly melancholic atmosphere and give the words in between more impact. All in all, I liked the experience.

Bravelands: Pirates on GOG

The third and last installment of the "Bravelands" series. It's a Heroes-veeery lite, in that there is no castle managing but you still have a hero with loot and troops that can be upgraded and a skill tree. It's not bad in that it's short (7 hours) and the tongue-in-cheeks dialogue are quite nice, but still I find it drags a bit too long compared to the two other games of the series. And if you do everything on the map, you almost can lose the last battle. I think I lost a battle only once during the whole game.

All in all, a nice "small size" game, but not a masterpiece, in any way

So far in 2019 :https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2019/post24

Skies of Arcadia: Legends (Gamecube)

Took me a long time to find a copy of this game at a decent price. Skies of Arcadia is a JRPG originally released for the Dreamcast but had a rerelease on the Gamecube. The game centres around a world of floating islands suspended in an endless sky, people travel between islands on flying boats, one of the most common types of travellers on the skies are Sky Pirates. You play as Vyse, son of the Captain of a Sky Pirate group called the Blue Rogues, a mostly benevolent group who follow the Robin Hood philosophy of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. He is joined by his childhood friend Aika and a mysterious stranger, Fina, as they go in search of 6 crystals in order to save the world (Classic JRPG stuff). Combat is a cross between Grandia and Dragon Quest, characters make 1 attack per round, moving around independently on the battlefield, certain attacks can hit multiple enemies in a line, meaning position can give you an advantage. The other interesting element in the game are the ship battles, which follows a similar style to the normal battles, but with a few more tactical elements.

The story is fairly good, though does contain a few tropes, the dialogue can get fairly childish, but then again the characters are young so it's understandable. Difficulty wise, the game starts off quite hard, which is mostly down to poor balancing in the first dungeons, but eventually follows a steady difficulty curve (Until you unlock the OP abilities which renders every fight easy). Music is good but certain tracks can get repeated a lot. The characters are good and develop well, with the exception of Aika, whose contributions consist of saying 'YAY!' and not a lot else. The game can be slow in place, which isn't helped by the 'Swashbuckler rating', a rank determined by how 'piratey' you are, is required for certain side quests, and decreases if you run away from battles, so you have to fight every enemy you come across making journeying from one side of the world map to the other incredibly frustrating. Overall the game was pretty good, especially the last 50% of the game where it starts to pick up. Unfortunately the game isn't downloadable, and it didn't sell that well on release, making preowned copies pretty expensive, but if you can get a cheap copy, I'd highly recommend it.





Addendum:
Just under 5 years ago I came across a book called 1001 games to play before you die, being curious I brought it and showed it to a friend. He asked me how many games in the book I'd actually played and it turned out to be 81. I expressed an interest in playing what were apparently THE games to play before I die, and so made a bet with a friend that I could play 500 of them in 5 years time. Just under 5 years later I finished playing Skies of Arcadia, the 500th game. I actually found out about GOG from the book itself, and 100 of the games I played were brought from GOG. I'm glad to have accomplished this feat, as it's introduced me to many games I really enjoyed. Unfortunately it's impossible to play all 1001 games from scratch as several games are no longer playable: City of Heroes was shut down a few years ago, the Apple Istore update got rid of quite a few iPhone games in the book and the removal of the old Nintendo store has also meant several download exclusives are gone for good. Now that I've played those 500 I can finally start playing all the games I missed out on. Oh yeah, for those wondering the cost of doing this challenge was about £1700, but that does work out at £3.40 per game, which I think isn't that bad.

Supposed that you had fun playing these games and it didn't become a chore - amazing :-)

Finished whole trilogy. ME1 is still the best of all in my opinion. Even romance is much better. Pinnacle Station DLC was weak but the very last mission changed my perspective for soldier class, because only with 3 soldiers I was able to complete it.

Personally I liked Pinnacle Station more than Bring Down the Sky. BDtS felt too much like the stuff going on on generic planets in the base game. Pinnacle Station at least felt different with its whole combat VR theme and arena gameplay. I was pretty bummed out when it turned out that Pinnacle Station isn't available for the PS3 version (supposedly because it was done by a third party and EA / BioWare didn't have access to the source code, making them unable to port it to the PS3).

I liked 2 best for the better side missions(less generic bases and such) and some of the companions/other DLC missions(shadow broker).
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I love fluff, myself....I loved most of the big DLC for 2 & 3.

As for sim DLC....ME3 has a nice combat arena in the citadel DLC. :)

Spyro: Year of the Dragon

The final game in the Spyro Reignited trilogy. Found myself enjoying this one more than the first two, and I'm not sure why. The flying/swimming controls didn't get any better, but maybe the level design did? And the sub-levels which you play as other characters are a nice diversion, though the gameplay/controls there aren't as realized as Spyro's for obvious reasons. The FPS level worked just fine with mouse and keyboard ofc. Ended up getting the highest completion of all 3 games on this one - 98%, as I went back to the previous levels to collect all the Dragon Eggs. The remaining ~640 gems were too much of a bother too look for though.

Speed Busters: American Highways

This is a fun racing game with some twists. Primarily various interesting hazards, like avalanches, dinosaurs, UFOs and angry military personnel, which make each of the 3 laps of a track different, as well as the "radar busting" mechanic where even if you make first place in a Championship race, you get no rewards unless you blow through the police checkpoints at certain minimum speeds - the faster the more money. Your finishing place in the race does act as a multiplier to that reward though. And this money is very important because it's needed to fix the damage done to your car after each race, as well as purchase upgrades and refill the all-important nitro.

I typically suck at racing games, and this one's no different. But as you progress through the championship it lets you retry each race, which I did a-plenty until I'd get a good placement (and good rewards), so eventually I managed to finish the Championship in first place. There's plenty left to do in this game - for example the Arcade mode with different cars, different track modes, and different difficulties, but I don't know if I'll bother, at least not at the moment. I'm just happy to have "won" (even though the game then told me to try to finish 1st in each championship race for a "surprise", which I believe is the unlock of the hidden 7th track.) I'll keep the game installed tho for whenever I need a quick racing fix.

Played this 1998 title in 4k (4x 1080p DSR anyway) just because I could. Even though it stretched the 4:3 game to widescreen, I still liked it this way.

Diablo 3

Better late then never I suppose?

I really enjoyed this one but it was far too easy, so much so that I only died once even at the highest level you could originally play though the campaign at. I mean, sure, you could retry on the added Torment levels but it all felt so pointless at that juncture: I'd already completed it on the highest setting I could whilst playing the game (you can adjust it on the fly and I think the reason why you could is because Blizzard realised how pathetically easy it all was. I don't remember D2 being this way and that was more fun because you played through it at least 3 times on 3 separate levels and that was both something to aim for and an achievement when you finally go there).

It does have Adventure mode in it after that but it all feels so pointless now and even a bit boring so, after just one character, I've uninstalled this title.

Well, it did keep me occupied for a good week or so, but D2 did the same thing for years,

I just finally did it and beat Dungeon Siege. Until I beat this game I thought that "dying of boredom" was just an expression. I kinda knew that it was gonna be this way, having had the same impressions every time I approached the game, even all the way back when it was released, but I was still in denial and telling myself that it would get fun later on. It does not. And honestly, it frustrates me that the game was so well-received. It was shit even when it was new.

Everyone here probably knows that the game is infamously monotonous and automated. The whole idea here was to streamline Diablo's ARPG experience and get rid of all the "annoying" things like weapon durability, poison effects, character skills, direct controls, fun... Simply put the whole game is one long tunnel (you can literally run all the way back from the last boss fight to the starting location without any loading screens!). You just move ahead, kill monsters, pick up and equip loot and that's pretty much it. Often you can deviate from the main path a bit but never too far. Occasionally you meet characters who can join you and sooner than later you end up with a party of eight samey fellas. "Party-based Diablo" is basically the only thing the game has going for it and frankly it doesn't execute that formula well at all.

Dungeon Siege sadly stripped the ARPG formula of all the little things that make Diablo fun to play - I'm not even talking about advanced character customisation options but rather the little things like all the geometric dependencies during combat and resistances etc.. Either the developers assumed those were unnecessary banalities or believed that the party management would make up for it. Well, it did not. The one nice thing about the party management is that you get to decide how to configure your party: how many melee fighters, how many healers and so on. Famously Dungeon Siege introduced the pack mule as an optional party member which has several times the inventory space of regular characters, saving you regular trips to town. The irony is that the only reason you'd need such a big inventory here is that the dungeons drag on and on, shops are rare and there is no such thing like a town portal here. And once you finally arrive at a shopkeeper you're left with hundreds of items and equipping your whole team can easily take 30 minutes, one time it took me a whole hour to clear my inventory. For frigg's sake.

The combat itself is just a boring mess. The only tactical option you need or even have is to pull back when you attract too many enemies at once and the one thing you generally have to do yourself is to cast healing spells the right moment because among all the automation and configuration options the one thing the developers didn't think of was allowing you to set when healing spells should be cast (they are usually cast far too late). The game also does everything possible to keep you from utilising its party-based nature. There are formation options but enemies have no trouble walking right past your row of melee fighters to your healer. You can give orders to individual characters but as soon as you order a move to a location that's five feet away from your other party members they automatically follow this guy which renders the active pause a bad joke and blocks any sort of advanced tactics. It's just awful and makes the combat of Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption look like a masterpiece.

And content-wise the game is just a mess. It's the most generic of generic high fantasy worlds and stories and the delivery doesn't help. The dialogue that's there is mostly badly written and acted, the plot is as basic as it gets. Your dying friend tells you to warn Gyorn. Gyorn tells you to warn the Overseer. The Overseer tells you to check on the guys at a fort. At the fort they tell you to go to the king. The king tells you to kill the bad guy. And not once does the game acknowledge that it's odd that this farmer without ANY form of known military or magic background is the one to be trusted with any of this. What is also awful is that the moment a character becomes a party member they lose any form of personality. The moment you hire Gyorn or the sorcerer Merik (who is key to the game's plot) they will never talk again - NPCs you meet later talk about Merik as if he wasn't present even if he's still in your party. What the heck.

I could go on and on but briefly put: it took me "only" 30 hours to beat this game but it feels like it was an 80+ hours game due to how boring, repetitive, shallow and badly paced this thing is.

And the worst thing: I'm totally gonna beat the expansion pack too.

I liked your review. And if I ever grow some masochistic tendencies like you... I'll definitely try out that game too! ;-)

Haha, I'm glad. Sadly I already am a masochist and started playing the expansion pack right away. Interestingly it tackled a whole number of things that immensely frustrated me about the base game. Thus far it seems to be much better in virtually every regard.

The punchline: I played the base campaign through the base game's executable. Turns out that you can also play it through the addon in which case you get to use many of the addon's improvements, especially ones in the UI. God dammit... the reason I didn't notice that you can play it this way is that the window for selecting the campaign only appears after character creation. Motherf...

Way to go...
and it even got two movies...

I'm really impressed by your willpower to go through this.... and the expansion too (maybe it is better).

Great review! You forgot to mention that the combat is not only very basic and repetitive, but also incredibly slow. At least that was my impression of the first hour or so, no idea if something about it changes later on, but it felt like a 'turn-based real time' RPG, a bit similar to Neverwinter Nights, but less tactical and story heavy, and even slower. Not hack-slash-hack, but hack, wait, slash, wait, hack etc. Or do I remember it falsely?