Knights of Pen and Paper 2

A short turn based RPG based on D&D, you form a party of 5 characters based on a variety of classes and attempt to save the world from the evil Paper Knight. There's plenty of jokes, their not good jokes but still jokes, and the game is pretty short but it was a good little game.

Unterwegs in Sachen Liebe (NWN Diamond 1.68 German)

The sequel to "Nahende Finsternis", also quite good. (Review in German)

The Bard’s Tale ARPG: Remastered and Resnarkled (XB1X)

Recent Game Pass addition. Not sure if anything is really remastered, probably more of a port of the PC original at 4K on consoles. I installed my GOG version to compare, I think it's possible they touched up the textures to better suit high resolution. But not much in it. What definitely works better on console is the controls.

The game is okay, focusing mainly on the use of an anti hero that says exactly the type of comments I find myself saying (to myself) when playing regular RPG's. So that part was good. The way you compose you party by summoning was good as well. The combat and exploration were okay initially but didn't develop enough as the game went on- eventually by the end it was getting a bit old. But still good fun for about 75% of the game. Best of all the game gives a certain choice at the end that I wish more games gave...basically it's the "I just don't give a fuck anymore" ending. It's the ending I chose because it was the truth and therefore felt like real roleplaying.

Well...

I've really got to get around to playing that game. I remember the ending I chose in Deus Ex Invisible War was similar. I got the shits with all those factions trying to manipulate humanity...so I just shot everyone and to hell with the consequences. Which sent the world into an anarchistic dark ages, after which it could recover, rebuild and try again. Awesome ending.

Yes, it used to be less than 10000 characters, but I think it has been reduced to less than 7500 recently.

I finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

I think Eidos Montreal accomplished their task well. I have read pretty much everything written about this game since it was first mooted, but was resigned to perhaps never playing it (since I would never purchase it from Steam).

I found it a good game, per se, and a very worthy successor to the original. They also demonstrated that they were, collectively, fans of the game when they managed to extract the best ideas from earlier the sequel (that bombed) and create a re-imagined, more human exploration of transhumanism. (The original protagonist, JC Denton, was always more machine than man, and a Rückenfigur device; this protagonist, Adam Jenson, is a man robbed of his human life and gifted a surreal, new transhuman life.)

I think the developers have crafted worthy investment for your time. :)

I recommend it.

Nope, just tested, still 10k characters.

Nina Aquila Legal Eagle Chapters 1 and 2, June 26 (Itch)-A charming visual novel with some light dialogue puzzles. I imagine this might be like an indie version of the Phoenix Wright games. Chapter 2 was quite good with a bit of humor and hints of a larger conspiracy in future chapters. Plus it has a fun mini-game that could reasonably be developed into its own game.

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Megadrive/Genesis Mini:

Landstalker. I owned the game back in the days and unlike the cartridge version, saving any time you want sure makes a huge difference.

Cool anecdote regarding Landstalker: this title was originally designed to be a Dragon Quest spinoff game but the project was denied by Nintendo and Yuuji Horii.

Okay, I must have had a uneven amount of quote tags, then. :/
Thanks for the correction. :)

OT:
I completed XCOM Enemy Unknown and the expansion Enemy Within, and now I'm playing the Long War mod.

Pro
Enemy Within adds a fifth-column element, with a group equal and opposite the player's trying to use the alien technology for their own gain, rather than helping to defeat the invaders (which may or may not be a goal, too).

For gameplay, it adds a number of improvements, like a new resource to collect (Meld, which is used for genetic augmentation and also for soldier cybernetic enhancements) voiced banter in a half-dozen languages (colloquial phrases in German, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian as well as English, which make a huge difference to me).

Contra
It does reverse the camera orientation buttons (the camera can be spun clockwise and counterclockwise, but the buttons were right and left and now they are left and right, with the same arrows, so now I am forever hitting the button three times to spin the screen orientation to where it would have been if I had pressed the other button once), since the game allows for four perspectives of the tactical map.

The Long War extends the game (since research of the technology tree will be complete well before the final battle) and adds a number of changes to the combat statistics. As I noted, I'm only part way through the mod, so I can't comment on it properly yet. The combat is certainly much more difficult, but the difficulty is well managed and not too steep.

Just beat Deadlight: Director's Cut on PS4.

I first gave it a run two or three years ago but I only checked it out because it seemed like something my wife would enjoy. It didn't quite grasp me and I stopped after 20 minutes or so because I was actually playing something else at the time but it seemed like the game deserved better scores than it got. Well, it does not.

First let me get it out of the way: the presentation is pretty great, even though it's just an indie game originally released all the way back in 2012. It looks pretty amazing for a 2.5D platformer - it has a lot of detail, great animations and so on. The sound design also struck me as very good (most of the time) and the music isn't bad either. Also can't complain about the voice acting although the protagonist's voice actor was apparently told to sound like Normal Reedus as hard as he can - for a while I was actually sure it's him. And that kinda points to one of the game's problems.

It feels like the developers just wanted to make a Walking Dead platform game. In a post-Walking Dead world it's as generic as it gets and I couldn't care less about anything going on there - it's one cliche of the zombie-genre after another. There's a diary that describes how the zombie outbreak happened and lots of other stuff that's supposed to do world-building - but there's literally not one surprise there. Zombies ate people, now people kill zombies and people, military pretends to be saviours but are the biggest assholes around. The end. Of course bland lore can be enough if the actual plot is good but also this one is as generic and cliched as it gets. Frankly I facepalmed when it made it to the end.

Oh yeah, there's also pretty hilarious oversights and inconsistencies. For instance at a key moment Randall (the protagonist) gets his guns taken away by another guy but is promised to get them back if he does something for him. Okay, so Randall does that and an hour later they are best pals but apparently the developers just forgot that the sole reason Randall moved out was that he was promised to get his guns back - but he never does, lol. The same happens later: Randall is unarmed, fights armed enemies but is not able to get their weapons. He eventually recovers his gear but for some reason his guns aren't among it. One level later he's magically armed to the teeth. What the heck. It was especially jarring to me since whether you're practically defenceless or not is a pretty big deal in the zombie apocalypse, lol.

Anyway, so what about the gameplay? My first impression was that it's as good as it gets in the cinematic platformer genre. There's "realistic" running, climbing and jumping with a stamina mechanic - there's okay melee combat and shooting - there's an interactive environment that allows you to kill zombies in original ways and a few puzzles. Okay, cool. But then it turns out that no, Daryl Dixon, sorry, I meant Randall Wayne, does not behave "realistically" - the controls just are pretty bad and the harder the game gets over time the more you can feel it and you will get more and more deaths caused by Randall doing something he simply shouldn't have.

It turns out that there's shockingly few puzzles and the ones that are there are super simplistic and repetitive. There's a few sequences that should have been super exciting but are just terribly designed. And the closer you get to the ending the more you notice that the only truly challenging moments are those where the game fails to properly communicate what to do. By the end there's a few moments where you have to pull off a fairly complex sequence exactly as planned by the level designer to the letter and you simply can't get there without lots of trial and error due to how arbitrarily it is set up.

In the end I was just glad that the game is only about four hours long. Admittedly it never got too frustrating due to (most of the time) generously placed checkpoints but I pity the fool who tries to beat the game in its permadeath "Nightmare" mode

Anyway, so that's Deadlight for ya. A brief 6/10 game at best for me. It does have production value but very little else.

Dead Space 2

What a ride. Absolutely stellar game. I'm not really sure which I think is better between it and the first Dead Space. This one has a more satisfying final boss encounter, and arguably better gameplay, but I think the pacing in the first game is a little better. I restarted at one point to deactivate a ton of starting dlc items, so I estimate the playthrough took just under 20 hours, on zealot difficulty. Though admittedly I did take my time.

some screenshots from playthrough:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/take_and_post_a_screenshot_of_what_youre_playing_right_now/post3669
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/take_and_post_a_screenshot_of_what_youre_playing_right_now/post3684

Knights of the Card Table, June 30 (Itch)-I really enjoyed this for the first several hours. Unfortunately it dragged on for many more hours after that and the levels were far too repetitive and tedious. The level ups were lackluster and far between and I ended the game with far more money than I could have spent in it. This could have been half as long and there still wouldn't have been enough fresh content for it.

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It took me over 80 hours (including leisure time of not playing but having the game on) but I completed everything I could in Batman: Arkham City. Main story, all side quest, DLC, NG+, all achievements and all challenge maps and riddler challenges. Challenge maps took by far the longest time of all. For comparison, previous time I played it, in 2014, I did 100 % of the main campaign, DLC and some challenges and it took only 30 hours so the difference is huge. When I did NG+, it took only few hours to push through it.
It was in my top 10 of best games and I still enjoyed it immensely. Nowadays it already shows its age a bit and can be somewhat clunky sometimes but it was still a blast.

Sure, I could list few of my grievances but I don't dare to do it to this game. It's too precious. Sure, characters sometimes don't do what I want them to do and behave strangely but most time they do and when they do, they provide great feeling of being in Gotham and fighting crime in that fictious strange world.

I played it because I recently finally got Arkham Origins and wanted to first remind myself this one, but I got too engrossed into it and now I am spent so I don't plan to paly Origins anytime soon. :-)