Sunrider Academy (2015) (Linux)

Sometimes I want to try something other – it may lead to discoveries. Or disappointment, as in this case. Seriously, I don't get it. This game is pure grinding. I considered making a script to play this game for me. If it was perfectly written, I'd probably consider it as a reading experience, but I don't know what exactly makes people to play VNs like this one / I don't understand the idea of gameplay here.

List of all games completed in 2021.

Just finished TimeShift.

My second playthrough. First time was probably ten years ago (I have the retail disc) - almost forgot I had this game. I think it's aged remarkably well. Great weaponry and sound design, some huge maps with some great set-pieces and runs silky smooth. Reminds me a bit of F.E.A.R. and N.O.L.F.

I think I'm going to be replaying a lot of games this year.

Hexen 2 - Portal of Praevus

Bit more linear in the first half, it feels way shorter.
I really like new class (Demoness) who have better spell and weapons selection compared to Necromancer (Mage).

Got some technical issues like crashing on map change (had to switch to different render, even though it didn't show textures properly).
New soundtrack was bit recycled but still amazing.
New enemies? Mostly reskins? Oh wait, there was a new one - camouflaged, explosive laser-spamming blobs.
How exciting...


Gothic 2 without Night of the Raven expansion

Found old DVD with the vanilla version, played out of curiosity to see differences and appreciate them. Turns out making melee+ranged was rather out of question thanks to weird training system where spending 10 LP (learning points, ten per level-up) was split between one-handers and two-handers. And same story with ranged weapons. Oh and crossbows in old G2 requires dexterity. Welp...

Went with militia->paladins only to find out that you don't have access to 1st magic circle runes. That means you can't use Heal Light Wounds rune very early (at the begining of Act2) and have to wait for paladin rune equivalent, which comes way, way later in the game.

Installed fan-patches and still had massive stutters in some places, they were caused by collision issues, felt like Sleeper in the outro for Gothic1 sucked into the portal D:

Finished on level 39, bit less than my latest NotR playthrough on 43th level.

Was surprised how big is monster's aggro range - beat the wolf at the cave entrance and the whole cave is coming at you o.O
For some reasons it's not happening in the wilderness?

15 Minute Maps Presents - The Quest for the Sword of Elemental Fury (NWN:EE, Review)
Fifteen Minute Maps Presents - A Chill In The Desert (NWN:EE, Review)
15 Minute Maps Presents - A Night at Crows End (NWN:EE, Review)

I1 - Dwellers of the Forbidden City (NWN:EE, Review)

Stronger echoes! ;)

Heh, if I'd have kept it like that, maybe I'd have finished it at some point too...

Yoku's Island Express (2015) (Linux/Proton)

This game has everything to be perfect, but for some reason I didn't want to continue the story after finishing the main quest. I think the reason is the game's physics. It's interesting idea to merge pinball with metroidvania, but the way the main character is controlled and inertia of moving was simply frustrating for me (also falling down and a lot of back-tracking, not enough beelines). I still consider it really good game for kids, but in my case it just used all my patience during a few hours of gameplay. I played Steam version, using Proton/Linux. It worked fine as long as I used iGPU mode.

List of all games completed in 2021.

Quick summary of my April conquests:

Cat Quest
Quite fun for what it is. Too many cat puns, too many useless items and not the most compelling story, but quite fun to play and it is short enough to not put me off.
7/10

Driftmoon
I admire the effort but I was not the biggest fun. It shows its indie nature in many areas. Doesn't look particulary well, story is quite jank, there is too many fedoras, there is a bit too much references to everything they could think of and most of all, the gameplay was not too good.
5,5/10, mostly out of respect to creators.

Mega Man 9
Return to 8-bit roots of the series but thanks to when it was created it is much smoother and plays better. It emulates MM2 but it offers a lot of improvements and I liked that. Overall one of the best Mega Man games I played so far.
7/10

Octopath Traveler (XSX Game Pass)

Don't have to buy it on Switch or PC now. It took me 75 hours and was a very satisfying retro style JRPG without most of the Japanese silliness that usually accompanies these types of games. The stories are darker and more adult than usual and there are no cute fluffy annoying team members. Out of the two turn based modern JRPG's i've played very recently, Octopath to me was much better than Dragon's Quest XI.

You play as 8 characters that each have their own 4 chapter story. Though they all travel together it's only out of convenience and mutual support, their stories are each pretty much stand alone- though you will pick up a common thread that joins them if you pay attention. You can do all the story, in theory, in any order and go anywhere except the story dungeons anytime without gating...but you will soon get destroyed if you stumble into a high level area. The intended order to do things is generally made pretty obvious. There are some difficulty spikes at the start of each chapter that may require a little grinding to level up characters that have fallen behind, but in all honesty it wasn't any where near as bad as I was l led to believe.

Whilst graphics, music and stories were pretty good, the highlight is the combat system. It's something of a holy grail for these types of games in that it is very simple to understand after a few hours with the game, but is still quite deep and requires thought in team building and equipment- which play a much bigger role than character levels. The system is halfway between Bravely Default and a Persona game. You have to uncover and then exploit enemy weaknesses to break their guard and open them to huge damage before they recover. On top of this it also uses a battle point system like Bravely Default. Each round you can save or use BP's but the more you save them the more times you can hit or the more damage you can do with a special attack. It results in a very tactical system where you have to decide to go all out with damage or save BP's to break through the enemy guard quickly when they recover. Add to this the fact that enemies never display their health and bosses a have mega shit load of HP, it all combines to make some very long tense and memorable battles- yet they rarely reach a frustrating level. I only had two party wipe outs with boss fights and both were resolved later when I returned with revised tactics.

If you have a Switch and feel like a 16 bit style JRPG, this is one of the best. Or use steam, or if you have an Xbox and Game Pass, even better. I assume it will come to Playstation at some point as well, though it's still not announced.

I have actually managed to finish two games so far this year, arguably three, depending on definition of "finished". Maybe even four.

* Return of the Obrah Dinn (fairly short, even for me, but satisfying to play despite really just guessing some of the answers and changing them when I realised I guessed wrong). The art style was what interested me to begin with, but I recommend it even if you don't find 1-bit dither appealing. The only thing I would like is the same style rendered in the native resolution of my monitor (i.e. 1 pixel in the image is one pixel on the screen while covering the screen, rather than having to scale it - it still looks beautiful at 1:1, but it's much too small to take screenshots of and use as a background image).
* Antichamber (took a damned long while, much of that time it just sat in an almost-forgotten corner of my storage, waiting to be launched, much of the rest was spent feeling more drunk that I've been in a long time as I tried to figure out how to progress). If you like having your brain twisted, try this one.
* Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (have started more times than I care to count, but can't actually remember having finished the main quest, either civil war quest, or the main solstheim quest). There are still a bunch of non-radiant quests to do, so not 100% by a long shot.
* Can't remember if I got through Portal 2 early this year or late last year.

Hard West and Scars of Freedom DLC, April 9 (GOG)-I had a lot of fun with this. The tactical combat was good. I liked the variety of weapons and card abilities. The overland map was a little confusing at first (not explained in the brief tutorial) and it didn't help that the overland mechanics changed with each scenario. But eventually the quirks of each overland mechanic grew on me. I do think in any potential sequel the developers should focus on just a single mechanic for each campaign rather than a new one for each scenario. The story was interesting but it was one of the weaker points of the game. I did like how all of the scenarios tied in together though. The DLC ramped up the combat difficulty and was rather stingy with the weapons and cards but still not too tough. I think I preferred the card acquisition in the DLC better than the base game though.

Full List

Fort Apocalypse. A classic 8-bit game in which you control a helicopter and have to fly around a cavern and rescue people while everything is trying to kill you. Like in Choplifter, to which this game could almost be a sequel, you either shoot in front of you, or you can turn and drop bombs to take out ground targets. It's actually pretty short, being only a couple of levels long (enter the underground, go down to another level and destroy a central reactor, then escape), but it's quite challenging.

As I've generally found with Synapse's games, I got on with the Atari version a lot more than the C64 because the Atari is a lot smoother to play. I just couldn't adjust to the choppy framerate of the C64. I do wish the game could have stolen Choplifter's controls. In Choplifter you switch weapons modes through deliberate action and stay in that mode until you want to change, but in Fort Apocalypse you switch based on how long you hold a direction down, which means that you come out of bombing mode as soon as you need to move, which you're going to have to do because stuff's always coming at you. It makes an already hectic game even more so.


Cathedral. Do you like Shovel Knight but wish it took after Metroid more? Here you go. It uses the same jacked up NES look and sound as you control an armored guy running around, collecting power ups to get to new areas. It's got a good challenge to it, hard enough to make you work and figure things out but not quite enough to make you yank your hair out.

I wish it had a better quick travel feature because I often found it advantageous to simply let my guy die to warp to the last save point, and I don't know if it's just my system but there's an annoying bug that would cause my controller to glitch out and go to the pause screen after I'd pushed the jump button occasionally. Also, for a game that uses this fake 8-bit style, it's weirdly system-intensive. I think my fans were going harder than they do when I play Prey or Bloodstained, which I've also been playing recently. But otherwise a very solid game.

Adding to the list

Uncharted Drake's Fortune (PS3)

Whilst showing it's age by the virtue of "have some guns. Now here's the cover, and no one is going to attack yo...HERE COME BAD GUYS" and also QTE, and pardon my french, fuck those, it's still a solid game. Shooting is fine, story is Indiana Jones meets Lara Croft inspired and fun, and I absolutely did not see the plot twist coming. I popped Uncharted 2 into my PS3 as soon as I finished this one.

Mortal Kombat Armageddon (Konquest mode) (PS2)

It's ARPG meets Mortal Kombat gore fest. Not sure what to add to it really.
Also
SPOILER






Ending is very...anticlimactic, in the NES games kind of way.

Gray Dawn
1st Person exploration game. It starts off as horror but it veers of that early on and it becomes more of mysterious and religious story with some disturbing elements mixed in from time to time. Aesthetically it looks quite nice although it is apparent it's not AAA game. I have to say it was a bit too colourful and the music was not something I'd enjoy much, though. The orthodox eastern christianity setting was nice as it was not something one encounters often.
Story was a bit too much confusing and trying to include too many things for my taste.
It wasn't bad game but it wasn't something that would make me think too much or feel many emotions and was little dull sometimes. I have to give it to it that in some other parts it managed to intrigue me and please me with some cool moments.
6/10

Postal 2
This wasn't game for me. I admit it can be competent shooter with some intriguing weapons but... no, thanks. Those are not things I would enjoy. The Weekend missions were incredible slog and made me gald it finally ended.
4/10

Full list

Well, I just completed a big nostalgia marker; completing a game I only had a demo of as a kid.

I completed SpaceKids, which as it turns turns out, went Freeware some time ago.

It's cute. Impressive for the era.

Mad Max

Tbh, from a strict gameplay perspective this is a rather poor game but the scenario and atmosphere sucked me in anyway and I'm even a bit ashamed of myself, but it's just too rare to find a proper post-apocalyptic scenario.

Car fights, hunting convois and everything around cars is great fun. Fist fights are effectful, but a bit too shallow and samey. Unfortunately the same is true for bosses, but liberating camps is still fun, especially spying them out and finding hidden ways in. Finding and disarming mines is time-consuming and endlessly boring. Overall it's too little content (and too much repetition) for such a long game.

The game is far too easy, because of permanent autosaves it is literally impossible to fuck up. For example even if you fail at liberating a camp and you die, you just can start again AND all enemies already defeated remain dead. Due to its formulaic structure the game also lacks suprising moments. It also trivializes much of its game elements due to the strong strongholds; I don't think I ever needed to refuel my car except for the tutorial where it is scripted because I could always do so in a stronghold, same for ammo after a few hours of gameplay. So, overall, this game does not demand any skill or investment at all from the player except for (a lot of) time.