Assassin's Creed 2, Dec 22 (PS3)-I loved the first game and this one was just as good. I really like unraveling the conspiracy as you progress. Plenty of side missions and collectibles there if you want them, too. I did have some graphical issues, frame drops and the like but overall a good experience. But man that ending. I think AC is at its best with historical conspiracies. The sci-fi and futuristic elements are pretty poor. Maybe they improve in later games but here they feel unnecessary.

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I can imagine that! :D
How could not Steam come up with that? They can still implement micropayments in the game to bring back original experience! ;)

Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp (1994) (Linux)
(thank you, Doc, for the game!)

Oh, this one is even harder; the sequences are longer than in DL1, which means there is more to repeat in case of death. But that's ok. The problem are treasures. I haven't done proper research before playing the game and I was a bit surprised that you cannot access the final scenes without collecting all the ~10 treasures throughout the game. These treasures are not on, let's say, "critical path" and are easy to be omitted, especially that you'll be extremely focused on pressing the right buttons as soon as possible to avoid death. It also seems that treasures' collection is wiped out with every "game over"; you can continue from the current scene, but with empty treasure chest. Therefore I don't think it's possible (at least not for human being) to complete the whole game with just five lives. It's nice that even without the treasures you'll unlock final sequence video, which means you'll not be able to play it, but you'll be able to watch it. More than enough for me.

All in all – quite interesting experience.

The game fine under Linux/Wine (I'm using v.4.15 x64). When watching the game as a movie it thrown me off the game once; no issues during regular gameplay.

List of all games completed in 2019.

Upward. Just a goofy old Atari computer game (one of those type-in games from Analog magazine) in which you control a guy at the bottom of a cave. You have to run, jump, and climb out while your air meter is running down and various hazards try to kill you. Succeed and you do the whole over again but harder. Nothing amazing but it held my attention enough to keep me trying until I made it.

Tanglewood. I tried the PC version but I wasn't crazy about the filters, so I played the Genesis rom through Retroarch. It's a puzzle-platformer in which you control a fox (?) that's running and jumping through a forest, figuring out simple puzzles and avoiding enemies (outside of a late-game development, you have no direct offense). Most of the work is done by pushing these little round fuzzy creatures into certain lights, at which point you can gain a special power for a short time. The power depends on the color of the creature; e.g., yellow allows you to glide through the air. There are also eight collectibles on each stage, so if you want the "true ending", you need to make sure you get all of them throughout the game. However, IMO, the non-completionist ending is actually the better one :p

It's not a game that pushes the Sega hardware to new heights or anything, but it's nice enough looking and has a decent, although intermittent, soundtrack. The controls are decent and there's no HUD. The game generally does a good job of allowing you to figure things out as you go along. That said, I'm not really a big puzzle-platformer guy and I found it a bit too sedate to count it as a new favorite. Despite the "new Sega game!!!" story of its development, it feels much more like a modern indie game in its sensibilities - if it had been released in the more hyperactive 90s, it probably would have been reasonably well-regarded but not a classic.

Ah video arcades.....the dlc/nickle and diming of it's day. :)

And people today think microtransactions are a new thing. 1978, Space Invaders- entire game paywalled behind microtransactions.

eden*, Dec 23 (GOG)-A sad, moving story. The first and second half felt like two different visual novels. The main characters were frequently annoying but that's easily overlooked if you like these types of games. I enjoyed it despite its flaws.

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Karmaflow: The Rock Opera Videogame

This was certainly an interesting experience. The gameplay is light 3d action/puzzle/platformer and while some action sequences (rail rides, chase sequence) could be a bit annoying at times they weren't too tough after you learn your way through them from a few failures. The "opera" part was very good, the story (stories?) intriguing, and the bugs not as numerous as reviews might lead you to believe. At least in my experinece. I did fall through the scenery a few times and got locked out of the next part of the level a couple times, but the nearest savepoint was always close enough that not a lot of progress was lost.

The performance though (frameratewise) was really awful. Rarely did the game achieve 60fps, 35-50 were the norm, and in some sections the framerate dropped into the mid teens! All the while both my GPU and CPU core utilization were really low. I don't know what kind of sloppy coding leads to that....

The depth of field was also rather overdone, even blurring the player character. And without the depth of field turned on, the anti-aliasing didn't work! Well, 4x/4k DSR had the AA covered if it came to that, but then the standard framerate dropped from an average of 40 to the low 30s.

Arcade Owners/game makers: Want some extra continues to fight the alien menace? That'll cost ya, it will. *holds out hand*

Halo Reach (XB1X)

The new MCC version. It's good that they added this to the game for existing MCC owners, they could have easily charged $29 as a HD remaster on its own- since Reach is not really a Master Chief game. Anyway it's a great version of one of the best Halo games made. It's 4K60 compared to the old 360 version at 720p30. I don't think there's a lot else that gets upgraded- possibly textures, but it's hard to tell for sure since the higher resolution automatically makes textures look a bit better. It still looks like what it is, a high resolution Xbox 360 game that runs at 60fps. But I'm fine with that.

It's still a great shortish shooter. The pacing is just about spot on in the way that the game changes things up to prevent staleness in gameplay. Your usual run and gun segments are broken up by vehicle stages, some traversal and even a well done space fighter combat stage (like Wing Commander). Then the ending leads straight into the story for the first Halo game.

Pilgrims

The presentation is very nice, great soundtrack, consistent style, the handdrawn art reminiscent of old picture books or East European animations, the characters' (Czech inspired) gibberish and antics amusingly weird, typical Amanita Games. The puzzles are very easy and the game is over pretty soon though (possibly in under an hour?). As others have said before me, the real challenge is to get all the in-game achievements afterwards.

But I thought that was the less enjoyable part of the game, because while the characters sometimes act different from each other, it's not nearly enough to encourage the player to try every possible combination of items and locations with each one of them. There's just too much repetition, different characters doing more or less the same things, too often they don't do anything interesting at all, and it's a bit of a hassle to experiment with depletable items and then having to procure a new copy of them by way of the same chain of adventure game puzzles again and again. It also doesn't help that the same animations are repeated so often. Every time you enter a location with a character, they're played again, regardless of how many times you've seen them already, and while there's a Fast Forward button, it still gets a bit tedious after a while.

Also, there are no hints about the achievements, no clues what you have to do to unlock them. So I did try a bit on my own but in the end gave up and used a guide to see what I was missing. Following the instructions lead to somewhat amusing, but never really all that exciting results, and unlocking all achievements did not trigger a bonus animation or something similar either. It basically just shows you that there are several different ways to solve many of the puzzles, but I'm not sure if that actually justifies a second playthrough and if getting all the achievements was really worth my time.

To summarize, I thought playing the game for the first time was fun, but that fun was pretty short-lived, and replaying it and trying to find everything I had missed on the first playthrough wasn't all that entertaining, because there just isn't enough variety in the characters' behaviour and the items' uses for that and too much repetition.

The Witcher 3, Fallaut 4 and that's it:)

Blade Runner

Just finished this game. Obviously it's one of the best adventure games ever made. I can't even recall if I ever played any other game with so many story branches. And the game worked flawlessly for me, like it was back in the days when I had it on CDs (thanks to ScummVM team!).

The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit (XB1X)

So I was playing Life is Strange 2, when the game recommended I play this one before episode 2 to experience the story the best way. So I did exactly that, since it's free anyway. Captain Spirit is a short stand alone episode about a different character, that you meet up with in Life is Strange 2, apparently what you do in this one can have some effect on the main game- so we'll see soon enough.

Basically Captain Spirit involves a set of simple activities to complete optionally. I think you can also move pretty much straight to the end and ignore everything too, but I did all activities. Some things require very simple puzzle solving or exploring the small environment. But like everything in the series it's really about story telling. By itself there's really not much too this one, but I'll see soon how it ties to Life is Strange 2.

The World Next Door, Dec 24 (GOG)-I didn't like this. Everyone talking like Sims is not good. The singular game mechanic of realtime match 3 is not something I enjoyed. The first couple of encounters were quite difficult but once I figured out a strategy it quickly became very easy. But it was still annoying with frequently 2-3 enemies to defeat on a small map. I actually found the boss battles easier than the regular ones because there was only a single enemy to focus on. Also did all those items I collected from the sidequests do anything? And was I supposed to actively use my friends' abilities or did it just happen? I didn't mind the plot and I genuinely enjoyed the characters especially Horace, Vesper, and Lux. Those three added some decent humor to the game. The game itself is very short. I think the designers could have had a shrine that focused on each friend's ability (if I knew how to work them) to pad it out a little. But I guess since I didn't enjoy the game I'm glad they didn't pad it out.

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