Persona 5 Strikers

Will probably write about it later, but for now I'm going to jump right back into it again. :P
Going to be my game of the year most likely. :)

Layers of Fear (2016) (Linux)

What a disappointment! It's scary at first, when you don't know what to expect, until you realize nothing hurts you and nothing actually happens here. Then it turns out to be walking simulator with thousands of doors to be opened. Terrible gameplay.

List of all games completed in 2021.

Star Wars Battlefront II (XSX Game Pass)

I played the single player campaign including the 3 mission free add on DLC. Up until a week ago I didn't even know it had a single player campaign, it was only by chance I found out.
It turned out okay actually. It feels and sounds very Star Wars and took me about 10 hours with the Resurrection add on. It's just like a single player Battlefield campaign- like BF 4. It's mostly played as a shooter in either 3rd or 1st person, plus you often control vehicles like Ties, X-Wings and AT-ST's. The story is set during and immediately after the events of Return of the Jedi. It is a little bit funny with modern inclusive "woke" game design to hear female Storm Troopers yelling out...but you soon get over it.
Overall I enjoyed it, except for mission 8 which feels a bit broken. It contains a massive difficulty spike which is said to have been introduced after a patch. It results in every Storm Trooper in the level suddenly bum rushing you. After about 8 attempts I finally got through it by exploiting the AI- getting them to fix on my bullet proof team mate whilst I lobbed in a thermal detonator and taking almost all of them out in one hit.
As always with all these multi payer games with single player campaigns, it is good short fun, but not worth the full price if the campaign is all you're after.

That's actually what I liked about the game. And I turned "harmful" off in LoF2 too (which actually has a few puzzles, so not only walking).

What ending did you get?

Ys chronicle I+
Was a nice game, though i didn't notice there was an update in 2020 for this game and played the 2018 version which i only noticed now.
Final boss i needed even more retries than the Bat, but beaten him anyway.
Now to try Ys II.
Also does anyone know what Ys I and II had for updates?

I suppose "wife" one, as it is the easier one to achieve. At some point my gameplay looked like speedrun – I was just bored and focused to get to the next door as soon as possible... :|
And it's worth to mention that this game was quite scary for me at first. I liked the atmosphere. It's just the same as in horror movies – usually the best part is the first part, where you don't actually know what to expect, who's the bad guy and where's a danger coming from. And when you finally see the monster the whole thrilling atmosphere disappears.

Yeah, I think the game is just not for everyone. I found it very atmospheric, but not scary. I loved all the "impossible architecture" stuff. To me the game is like a painting to walk in. Which is cool, but probably disappointing if you expected something else.

Finished Shadow of Mordor's two story DLCs.

They were basically more of the same, even though they added some nice features/abilities.

I just wish both DLC didn't focus so much on the "defeat 5 warchiefs" frame since it's what made it feel very repetitive after the main campaign.

The Bright Lord one felt to be made a bit harder very artificially, but the battle against Sauron was rather fun, even though his health bar lied a lot, for some bizarre reason.



EDIT: Fun fact: I only saw the HD textures DLC when I was midway through The Bright Lord. XD Though I don't think I noticed a lot of difference once I got it.

Dirt 5 (XSX Game Pass)

First of all, who makes games these days with no gamma adjustment in the menu's? Unless it's hidden somewhere that I didn't look. I moved my console onto my PC monitor to use my steering wheel. The problem is the console is calibrated to my TV which is way brighter and with HDR and I really don't want to re calibrate just for one game on my monitor. The result is the game is too dark and had to be compensated using the brightness setting on the monitor. All games, even on console usually have at least a gamma adjustment, so I don't know what the story is here.

Anyway, once my wheel was set up right it was otherwise good fun. It looks pretty good with massive amounts of particle effects and runs extremely well. It's a very arcade driving model which sort of makes sense since Codemasters make the Dirt Rally games as their hardcore sims. Dirt 5 was good fun while it lasted, especially the gravel Greece layout. I may have a look at the games circuit builder tomorrow as well, but for now the "campaign" is completed, I even did the boring Gymkhana's.

Alien Breed 2: Assault

Washed up colours, unprecise aiming, uninspired in all aspects, weird boss' placement and they were bland too and also it is boring.
It was quite hard at times and often I feel not for good reason.
I certainly don't plan to play 1 or 3.
4/10

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Sure. Thanks for sharing your opinion. I definitely agree that objectively it's not a bad game – and it may be definitely interesting for others. I also appreciate how different it is – it's theme and visuals are unique, for sure.

Glass Masquerade (2016) (Linux/Proton)

Nice, chilling game. I couldn't stop thinking about Brandon/BJGamer, who recommended me this one long time ago... Wonderful, melancholic music, interesting puzzle, challenging enough to not be boring, beautiful artwork. I like puzzles like this one, nice relax after week in a hurry.

List of all games completed in 2021.

Beat Earth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of New Despair on PS4 yesterday. It's an extended remaster of EDF 2025 which was originally released for X360 and PS3. I actually played 2025 on PS3 a few years ago but for whatever reason I never played it much. Well, this time i beat the whole thing and I loved it.

The game (and probably entire series) is a bit like a third-person Serious Sam in a setting that mixes Starship Troopers with the dumbest of Japanese disaster films. You play as one of four classes of the titular EDF soldiers and take part in military operations with the goal of stopping an invasion of "giant insects" - that's literally what the game calls them and you'll hear the term thousands of times. But the giant insects are just the beginning and soon enough you'll also meet machines and even godzilla-like creatures.

The game is trash of the best kind. The graphics are kinda crappy, the insects' movement looks like something from an amateur Unity project. The giant ants' ragdolls block your gunfire and movement until they just pop out of existence. Buildings crumble from explosions but won't hurt anyone and you can just walk through them before they have actually imploded. All the characters - be they the EDF soldiers fighting the monsters, helpless civilians or the people giving you instructions over the radio - take this ridiculous scenario as seriously as they can and everything is utterly overacted. The soundtrack mixes cheesy parade music with epic guitar riffs. Especially at first it's hard to determine how much of this trashiness is intentional but the moment you find a grenade that has a larger are of effect than throwing range things get pretty clear.

In my opinion it's a brilliant game - alas, brilliant in a similar way as Dynasty Warriors. To one person it's going to be painfully monotonous garbage but to me it's a surprisingly smart and very satisfying game that made it hard for me to put the controller down. It helps that you constantly find "armor" that steadily (and permanently) increases your HP and crates that randomly unlock new weapons, I always felt like I'm about to find some super cool - e.g. a missile launcher that can lock onto dozens of enemies at once or a sniper rifle that holds only one bullet but will take down virtually anything in one shot. And you will desperately need that armor and all those weapons as you encounter increasingly large swarms of increasingly powerful enemies. The missions are quite basic but their design is very playful. At one moment you're rescuing flying soldiers from spider webs, another you're defending a beach from giant mechs coming out of the sea, in yet another you're hunting down a queen in her undergound nest. And of course things only grow increasingly desperate and epic.

What deserves special mention is that the four classes play very differently. The Ranger is your standard soldier who plays like any third-person shooter. The Wingdivers have jetpacks that allow you to relocate very quickly and bombard swarms of enemeis from a safe distance but you need to monitor your power level so you won't accidentally drop into the middle a swarm and get torn to pieces. The Fencer is a slow and heavily armored trooper who carries four guns, most of them with two functions and the game feels more like a mech simulator when you play those. Finally there's the Air Raider, a support class that can request vehicles and air strikes but has limited offensive capabilities of its own. I'm sure the last two classes are mostly meant for coop but some fun is also to be had with those in single player. Anyway, if definitely increases the game's replay value a lot.

It took me well over twenty hours to beat the almost 90 missions (though sometimes I replayed missions with different classes or on different difficulty levels). And really, it was a blast for me and I'd actually gladly play it some more if only to find some more wacky guns or see how I would fare on certain missions with another class. And I'm sure that I'm gonna check out more titles from this series. If you love campy stuff and enjoy highly arcadey repetitive games, be it Serious Sam or Dynasty Warriors, EDF is a really nice choice. And I presume it only becomes more fun if you play it in four-player coop.

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure

I streamed it for the kids in the family (aged 7-11), letting them decide where to go and what to do via Skype, and they loved it. Not only because the graphics are cute and offer a beautiful impression of a (fictitious) Mediterranean island in the summer, or because the kids don't usually get to play or watch many videogames (this was the third game I showed them, after Rex: Another Island and A Short Hike), but also because of its environmentalist themes of saving animals and conserving nature, which coincided with their own interests.

For an adult, I'd say this is a bit less fun to play than A Short Hike, despite some similarities, because the story is rather tame (even though it features some tension near the end and a cliché villain which the kids loved to hate), the gameplay is simpler and you only progress in terms of story/quests and collectible count. There are no optional secrets to find through exploration and hardly any new abilities to gain or improve that would change or add to the gameplay; if you ignore the addition of a toolbox so you can repair broken things on the island, the gameplay stays the same from beginning to end. The heroine of the story also can't jump or fly or anything else but run (or sneak, which is just a funny animation, not an important mechanic), she can't hop or fall off ledges or climb over small obstacles unless there is a ramp or bridge. So you basically just run around the island, talk to people, and work on quests like "help 5 animals", "clean up 4 places", "replace the photos on the info sign in [insert region]" etc. which is all done by just pressing a button. And you take photos of different animal species and scan them, very similar to the mechanic in Beyond Good & Evil. It's all quite nice, but if I had played this game on my own, I might have become a little bored. It's really more aimed at children, and for them it was exciting enough. They almost felt overwhelmed even, at times, with "all the things to do". ;)

There is definitely more text than in A Short Hike, and the kids weren't always in the mood for that and often ordered me not to talk to next NPC and just run past them. But even though we might have missed some lines because of that, it didn't really matter. I think we solved some quests before we even got them from NPCs, and it was fine and did not disrupt anything. And in general they were invested in the story and ready to hear what people had to say, in smaller doses. We had to play without sound (despite the game saying that it's best experienced with sound), and that was okay, too. Since there are no voiceovers, I had them read the text aloud, so that I knew when they were done with reading it, and they did so without complaining. Even the youngest one tried to read the sometimes long and complicated names of the animals out of their own accord, without feeling like they were in school. So in that regard, the game even had some value as edutainment. (We played the German translation, and it was competent; there were some Spanish words inserted in it due to the setting that were unknown to the kids and hard to read for them - abuelo, paella etc. -, but since I was there to help and explain, that was alright, too.)

The game is split into several days, and one thing that was a bit confusing for the kids is how fast the days were over, without us having really done that much. And that's because the length of the day is determined by how urgently you follow the main quests. Once the main quests are over, the sun goes down and you are called back to your grandparents' house to have dinner. You can still choose to ignore it, take your time and continue to do side stuff on the island without any consequences, but it felt a bit weird to rush through the day like that and then stretch the evening so much when you're grandparents are supposedly waiting for you with dinner. The main quests were comparatively linear and short and could be finished in a matter of a few minutes, but they always had some sense of urgency to them, so of course the kids would choose to prioritize them. And near the end of the game, when we suspected we would have no time left for getting the remaining collectibles if we moved forward, the game locked us in and gave us no choice but to play along, and indeed, as feared, the credits rolled before we could take care of all the loose ends. Some kind of warning would have been nice there. But the disappointment didn't last long, as the game still allowed us to roam the island even after the end. We didn't manage to photograph all animals though, two of them were really hard to find and it was getting boring searching for them, especially since it seemed a bit pointless now that the game was over already.

Apart from that, the only criticism I have concerns the mechanic of nodding or shaking your head in reply to specific NPC questions. The camera focuses on the player character's face, and the controls for doing one or the other are displayed on screen. But the game wasn't very reactive in these parts, in my experience. It never really worked smoothly. Sometimes you had to nod or shake your head again and again, until the game finally registered your answer. Sometimes it didn't even react to your input at all for several seconds, for no discernible reason (I played with the Xbox360 controller, no idea if playing with M+KB has the same issues).

All in all, I'm glad I bought the game at release and played through it with the kids, it was a nice experience for all of us. I'd still advise some caution if you mean to play it on your own, as an adult. It's really more of a children's game, IMO, but a very good one. And I wish there were more like it.

I flew through AER: Memories of Old on Saturday. While it looks quite nice, it felt a bit empty. I spent some 40 minutes flying around, exploring literally whole map before I found out what I am supposed to do. When I found out all that was left was to visit designated places and do there some minor puzzle pltaforming, but only very easy. There wasn't anything else to do in the world and not much to observe. The ending was disappointing and didn't help to improve my opinion at all.
There is some lore but I never got much into it and it wasn't al lthat interesting and it fairly scarce IMO.
It all took abount 3 and 1/2 hour, including the aimless exploring at the start.
I got it for free on Epic and it was worth to play it for that price but I wouldn't pa for it much if I had to.
5,5/10

Oh, I just remembered we also finished Grim Fandango Remastered on Friday.
Nice game. It is funny and has very good music, but sometimes puzzles were not that logical and the game was buggy in some instances. We played on mouse and if we haven't tried the keyboard controls several times, we would never be able to finish it or get out of some areas.
It was enjoayble but partly because also because we played in 2 people and got entertainment out of it. BUt the game was also fun in itself, only bit frustrating sometimes.
7,5/10


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