In Arena I tried to limit myself to riddle answers, without looking on maps, although in some circumstances it was just too much work so I caved in a few times. I also learned how to defeat Jagar Tharn from the guide after several botched attempts at fighting him directly. I plan to spend some more time with it in the future to do artifact quests at least, this time I was in too much hurry to play Daggerfall which I find way more enjoyable and immersive to be honest.

Some would consider it cheating but I always take 3x int in mana and 30 hp per level as perks in Daggerfall, which I outweight by prohibiting my character from using most basic materials (and then proceed to name my class "Battlemage" because I don't want to break immersion...).

I agree that Arena and Daggerfall are both great games, especially for fans of the series. Battlespire not so much, I tried it once and it was just too clunky for me. Still, I plan to complete both it and Redguard after I complete Daggerfall. Redguard had serious performance issues in the past, though it seems they either fixed it or my stronger PC is working its magic since I checked it recently and it runs smoothly now.

I bought Morrowind a few weeks ago, and Arena and Daggerfall were included in the purchase. I wonder if you could clear up some doubts I have.

- Is combat stopped when using spells?
- Does the spell absorption system using the "intelligence" stat work well? It is a bit weird.
- Is the "personality" stat worth investing in?
- Is it important to invest heavily in the "endurance" stat at the beginning or does the game increase hitpoints retroactively when increasing the "endurance" stat during the game"?

- Is combat stopped when using spells?

Arena: seriously I had to recheck it because I didn't remember... It pauses the game until you choose a spell, but if it's a targeted spell it unpauses it after clicking on it, which means you have to target it in the heat of combat.

Daggerfall: Same as above.

- Does the spell absorption system using the "intelligence" stat work well? It is a bit weird.

I never played sorcerer in neither of the games, maybe someone else can clarify that.

- Is the "personality" stat worth investing in?

Arena: not really, there are no personality checks in the main quest whatsoever. It increases the amount of gold merchants offer for you wares I think, but you will be swimming in gold before long anyway.

Daggerfall: Same as above, though there are some NPC checks I think, although nothing that will bar you from completing the game.

- Is it important to invest heavily in the "endurance" stat at the beginning or does the game increase hitpoints retroactively when increasing the "endurance" stat during the game"?

You have to increase it for +hitpoints to work, it doesn't give you hp retroactively. Again, you can complete the game without maxing it, I always go for 70 in the first few levels in both games and leave it at that.

Armed and Dangerous (XSX)

It's like if Monty Python did a shooter. It's an original Xbox game published by LucasArts and developed by the same studio that made Giants Citizen Kabuto. It runs really well under backwards compatibility at 16x resolution (so letterboxed 4K widescreen) and 60fps. The graphics do not hold up as well as some OG Xbox games such as Panzer Dragoon Orta or Black- especially the cutscenes.

As a shooter it's about as crazy as it gets. Very fast paced run and gun style of play with objective based levels. Regular levels are broken up by occasional fixed gun turret shoot em up Beach Head styled levels. The story and characters are like something from Monty Python's Holy Grail. Some of the weapons are totally over the top too- what other shooter has a weapon that turns the world upside down so all the enemies fall off?

It's actually a fun game, only about 5-6 hours long, it is also cheap. It does have a PC port on Steam for less than $10 even without a sale and the Xbox version is still sold digitally and can play on any Xbox from a 360 or later.

Another difference (not sure if it should be taken as a disadvantage) is that the remake removed or changed quite a few songs from the original soundtrack.

Thank you very much. I will give it a try sooner rather than later.

Say No! More

This is a really strange beast. For one, it's a game that's trying to teach you to say "No!" more by making you follow exactly what it expects from you at any given time, without any room to stray from its extremely linear path. It's not even a walking simulator as your character is moved automatically, and calling it a talking simulator would be a stretch, too, since all you ever do is "attack" by saying "No!". Granted, you can use it in four different styles, similar to elements, you can double or triple charge it, and you can lower the target's resistance and gain back confidence with four different distraction tactics, which you learn all throughout the game in short tutorial sequences. Only, that hardly ever seems to matter. Everyone can be defeated with a simple or a charged "No!" at all times, regardless of the style/element you use, and it also doesn't make a difference what distraction techniques you apply, which is baffling - why introduce all these things so prominently if all you ever need to know is when to press or hold a random button? And whether you reject everything outright or patiently listen to every dialogue until they're almost finished, the consequences are the same - even during a chase. Time does not matter and I'm not even sure whether you can actually fail at anything, letalone lose the game.

Secondly, the game is made by a German studio, and at character creation, you can select your "No!" from a long list of languages, male and female voice variation for each of them. You can even say it in Gaelic or Korean - very nice! But all the voiced dialogues in the game are English only. Understandable if you consider the costs, I guess, and there is some great English voiceacting in the game - but also a lot of mediocre German-accent English, because many characters are voiced by at least one of the devs themselves.

And last but not least, the game has all the ingredients for being hilarious - from the general slapstick idea of knocking people over with a "No!", the wacky graphic style and anime-like animations, the console JRPG type music, the over-the-top characters and corporate culture parody, the delightfully silly unicorn lunchbox theme. But at the same time, it seems to be dead serious about its message, to the point of preachiness, and it's hammering it in without any subtlety. That makes it seem unintentionally ironic in how it's trying to adress corporate propaganda in such a blatant, superficial and black and white way that it feels very much like propaganda itself ...

The game is a little under two hours long and I played it in one go, because I expected it to be short and it was kind of fast-paced, but in hindsight, while the cinematic presentation was a fun ride, the gameplay, if you can call it that, was rather boring and the story ... meh. It's a pity they didn't do more with this and instead went with some really questionable design decisions.

Martial Law (2021) (Linux)

It's not even an hour of gameplay, with no actual gameplay, to be honest. Interesting experiment, it tries to show some aspects of life in the country ruled by communists. Tries to be sad and melancholic, but it's rather mawkish. Too short to build an atmosphere, I'm afraid.

Postal 2 (2003) (Linux/Wine)

Works great under Wine and looks surprisingly good (high resolutions available). Unfortunately it's definitely not my cup of tea. I've completed Monday, collected signs for petition and dropped the game shortly after Tuesday's confession. Crapy game and I totally cannot understand its phenomenon.

List of all games completed in 2022.

I beat Portal 2 on PC last night. I'll simply summarise my experience as "it's more Portal but still not enough Portal".

The Sexy Brutale, May 8 (GOG)-A little murder mystery game with a quirky cast of characters. The timing based puzzles were fun and not too difficult. The controls and movement were both a little clunky. I liked the different masks abilities you acquire but I felt they were used only once or twice for progress and all other uses were for flavor text. I would have liked a bigger puzzle at the end incorporating more of the abilities together. The music was very good. The story is suitably mysterious and is slowly building up to something. But what that something is doesn't quite payoff. There's a plot twist at the end that was ok but I felt the ending itself didn't really come together and was a little dissatisfying. The last hour or so was also a lot of exposition with not too much gameplay. It's also quite short. By the end (~8 hr) I wanted to save more characters or save these same characters in different ways.

Full List

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine. If you wanted a more action-oriented, up close take on 40K stuff, you could do a lot worse than this. You control a space marine fighting orks on a war-torn planet. Along the way you meet a psyker who's obviously been conducting experiments he shouldn't have and then you end up also having to fight chaos forces. It's quite standard for the setting but it does nothing wrong and it's fine for providing excuses to hack and shoot everything in sight. It's fairly short but in the "doesn't overstay its welcome" sort of way. The game looks pretty good and it controls well.

The main twist in the gameplay is that you don't have health packs so to recover you need to kill everything even harder - you have to find an enemy and perform a stun move and then hit a button to do a fatality that will give your health meter a big boost. Alternatively, you can fill up your rage meter by killing stuff and then go into rage mode, which will fill up your health as long as the mode holds out. The only problem is that doing the fatality can take an agonizing long time, so there's often a risk that you'll be killed by other enemies before you can finish off the first guy.

I don't know why this game wasn't a hit when it originally was released. Yet another good game that just fell through the cracks, I guess.

Assassin's Creed Revelations The Lost Archive

Someone over Ubisoft thought the best way to explain why Lucy was killed at the end of the last game was through more of the boring first person puzzle that featured in the main game telling the story of Desmond. This time around, it's the story of Ray, subject 16, who "helps" Desmond through the main game as well.

Storywise, it adds a few nice bits here and there, but the big twists are as straightforward and basic as they can be. Gameplay wise, it works as a continuous loop, with you having to find all pieces of defragmented data over the 7 levels to find a secret exit in one of them. Once you have everything, you can use the DNA menu to go directly to the right level and find the said exit. There's not much there. Just a couple of obvious lines by two characters and an email from Ray to his father, before the overly long credits roll.

Overall, playing through it is as effective as reading a Wiki about it, only longer.

Space Marine is one of my favorite 40K games ever released. The action is just spot on. Unleash what you can into the incoming horde with your ranged weapons before wading into them with melee. It really nails the feeling of being basically an unstoppable machine of destruction.

As for not being invulnerable while performing finishers, it was the main thing I liked about the game. You have to think about when to perform them and play smart instead of just spamming them whenever, killing everyone while being untouchable. You have to judge the current situation correctly instead of just "let me press this button to get a free breather".

Ever since playing it, I consider invulnerability during animations a bad thing in action games.

I decided I should finally play through some of the classics after all these years so I finished...

Duke Nukem 3D
Doom
Wolfenstein 3D

Then I played (and finished)...

Broken Age

I've started Tales of Monkey Island (getting ready for Return to Monkey Island. I can't wait!) and Blake Stone (which is a lot harder than Wolfenstein was). After ToMI I'm planing on playing Thimbleweed Park.

The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet Of Chaos (XSX Game Pass)

Turn based tactical RPG dungeon crawler with characters that feel like they are out of a Discworld novel- though it's actually based upon a French audio series apparently. It's actually really fun. The snarky commentary and party banter and bad language won't be for everyone, but I liked it. It's basically like the dialogue you get with a group of real players playing a table top RPG, lots of banter and smack talk. As expected with something so narrative focused, you do not build you own characters. You play seven fixed characters with the option of adding one of three others as part of the story- I chose the foul mouthed Paladin.

The combat system is actually really good. However it is a quite difficult game and early on, on normal difficulty, it won't be long before you need to do a bit of the save/reload cycle. As the game goes on and your crew levels up, it does start to feel easier due to some really great special attacks you can get via the skill trees. My favorite was the Consensual Dwarf Toss, where the Ogre can toss the parties angry ball of hate (aka the Dwarf) into the middle of a group of enemies and do serious AOE damage. The difficulty always stays high though, i imagine the higher difficulty levels would be for genuine save scumming masochists.

It was great fun overall, the only downside was the nature of the encounters. Every encounter is a story scripted battle where you walk into a room and get ambushed- you have no real control over how a fight ever starts apart from minor positioning of your characters. I much prefer these types of tactical games to be like Temple of Elemental Evil, where the way a battle begins is up to you as long as you see the enemy first. In this game the developers just drop you into a situation of their choosing and you just fight your way out of it the best you can. Otherwise this is a really great game.

Ruins of Limis - The base games first DLC, which I found out is bundled with the version on Game Pass. It's very short and follows right on from the main game ending. If you have a version of the game that comes with this you may as well play it.