I thought GOG had fixed that bug but if not, there is a fan patch that does the job, which without I never play.

Beaten Dungeon Town at 54 hours for the main story segment but there is still a little more story after beating the main game so guess i an not fully done with this.

To someone like me used to playing rpg maker games which the free ones were great, also paid ones like Hybris pulse of ruin. This game did have some interesting things like selling materials to get better weapons and items. Completing quest for fame to then get access to better items, weapons and armor. And there are many different skill mechanics.
The girls personality i liked very much.
Dungeonering is usually on random generated maps but at least you see the enemy on the map, the main character can carry many different weapons in battle at once and use one of them when attacking also with some weapon skills.
Also protip use the find item skill and bomb wall skill to get usefull treasure chests for money and other things.

The down side is it's just an image of an enemy in battle that attacks and gives you numbers how strong you will attack or the enemy also the chance of criticals. Your companion can also be with you which the companion can help you in battle or help you carry stuff or use skills on you to help you. Except if you go into dungeons at night then it's the only time you can enter a dungeon alone for better items and harder enemies.
You can use as many items as you want in battle, it's not like most rpg maker games where you can use only one item per battle turn.
Now the sex scenes are nothing special, just a little warping no actual movement. It does have a unique mechanic that you get drained by the succubus and have to regain your levels in dungeons fighting again, but the bonus points you used in stats stays there. Also you can excange items, skills and dreams and probably refight other succubus for macca which is the curency for such things
Also Sildoria is hot lol.
In all it was a unique rpg maker game to me which i enjoyed.
Hope they release the dlc also someday if they will translate em

Torment Tides of Numenera, Oct 14 (Xbox Game Pass)-I haven't played many western style RPGs this year so I was a little desperate for one. This is a good one but it didn't like up to its predecessor nor the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights games.

I liked the plot quite a lot. Or at least I liked the concept of it. I don't think it was explored as in depth as I would like. The ending I got and the other endings I declined also didn't really come together satisfactorily.

I really liked the leveling mechanics and the allocation of skill points to complete objectives. It felt a lot like a resource management table top game.

Combat was one of the worst parts of the game which is unusual for an RPG. It just generally boring. Thankfully there was very little of it which is also unusual for the genre. My character could talk his way out of most encounters so that probably helped my enjoyment.

The meres were an interesting choose your own adventure/visual novel type mechanic. I liked them quite a bit but they felt very out of place in the game. I think I would have preferred if they were cut entirely. I think the meres could have been developed into their own series of standalone content unrelated to the game. As it was most of them were barely related to current gameplay and plot points.

The various mechanics were a little disjointed and didn't all quite come together how I would have liked. Normally strong RPG mechanics that I enjoy like combat and plot were lacking and others like the unique leveling and the meres weren't enough to make me fall in love with the game. But still I haven't played many games like this this year and it was still a pretty good experience.

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Fight'N Rage

After countless of try I finally beat it in ..... normal difficulty. I have no idea if the game is indeed hard or I'm not good at games that needed a good combo-on-gamepad skill. FWIW 18.9 % of people beat it according to Steam global achievement .

The boss fight is easy, it was the 3 Doberman and 2 Jaguar that's really-really tough for me. Maybe I'm already at good enough level to beat the game normal with no continue if I want to pursue the achievement. But I really don't want to waste time, there are other games to play.

Been a slow year so far, I've been able to complete Mafia III at this point. And that's just because so much of the game is repetitive tasks that I could drop in and do a few while zoning out and then quit when I ran out of time. Still fun though.

Oh, that IS from back in the days.
At the time there was the original EGA release, then the VGA version, and finally the CD-ROM one (in 1992, I think). One of the changes added by the latter was what you are pointing out, they used pictures in the inventory instead of words.

I see, thanks for enlightening me! I guess I just played the VGA version back then. The voiceovers were made exclusively for the special edition though, right? They were not in the CD version yet?

Yes, the voiceovers were made for the modern game.
The big feature of the CD version was the enhanced soundtrack, then there was also that change in the look of the inventory... and actually I think that's it, I don't remember anything else.

Genesis Noir, Oct 15 (Xbox Games Pass)-Try as I might I just couldn't enjoy this game. The visuals, music, atmosphere, and writing were all really good. But the gameplay was tedious and confusing. I frequently wandered around not really sure what I was supposed to be doing. And when I figured it out I was mostly disappointed. The last hour or so was also very jarring compared to the rest of the game and I enjoyed that section even less. Took me several months to beat what I should have been able to in a weekend.

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Finally I got opportunity to beat this jewel. Chasm: The Rift (incl. addon) is great FPS based on tension due to small rooms and later in game also not so much ammunition. In 1998 I had demo on CD included to one computer magazine and it was great, now I can tell, that Chasm keeps quality level from the beginning to the end. Moreover here are very interesting boss battles. This year, this is the best shooter which I played! (Btw. I never like quake.)
Note to 2022 remaster, since I played new version, I can tell that version 1.0.1. is good with only some invisible barriers, otherwise I had no problems with, thus can recommend it.

Ni no Kuni Wrath of the White Witch (XSX Game Pass)

Excellent animation and art. But a pretty average JRPG in all other aspects. I think it tries too hard at trying to be everything at once. For example, it has monster collecting like Shin Megami Tensei (or that other well-known series)- but you have no real control over it, getting the chance to capture anything is pretty much random.
Combat is okay early on, but degenerates as the game goes on. Story and tone are straight out of Dragon Quest- it's all that cliche stuff about following your heart etc etc. Characters are the same do-gooder tropes.

It's definitely not terrible though. Near the end I was over the amount of grinding that was becoming necessary to stay in the fights, so I dropped the difficulty to easy to speed the game up- then found out I was right near the end anyway.

Halo 3. Hey, it's more Halo. They had a successful formula going and they certainly weren't going to mess with it. A few new weapons, new vehicles, new enemies, make sure the graphics are up to date...that's about it. It's still fun, and they were further reducing the recycling in level design, although fighting the Brutes and the Flood does get a bit old by the end. At least the campaign wasn't overlong again.

From a storytelling perspective, Halo is pretty good overall, but the major supporting character deaths in Halo 3 didn't seem credible to me. According to the Wikipedia page, they did it because the game's writer watched the Firefly movie was apparently inspired by Whedon's "just kill people randomly" style. Halo also makes the same mistake with the Flood that Star Trek did with the Borg in that revealing that your inscrutable collective race actually does have a single ruling mind that will even converse with you greatly reduces their sense of Lovecraftian alienness.



Halo 3: ODST. This is where they tried some things. It's Halo 3: Gaiden. Instead of a totally linear campaign, they used a hub structure. You control "The Rookie" in an ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper) squad during the Covenant invasion of Kenya. Something goes wrong and the squad is scattered all over the city, so you have to wander around until you find a clue about what happened to a particular soldier, which then unlocks a flashback mission in which you control that soldier, then you return to the Rookie and track down the others. I'm guessing the designers saw Black Hawk Down and were like "We should do that with Halo!"

The campaign is very short, and it's pretty easy overall. I found it simpler when using the Rookie to stealth about as much as possible, avoiding the Covenant patrols unless there was no getting around them. Since you're not controlling a super-soldier in this one, the ODSTs are pretty tough but a bit more delicate, so you have to be more careful in terms of just running into an open firefight. They brought back the "rechargeable shield/limited health" system from the first game, although the game calls it stamina instead of a shield. It basically works the same way.

I wasn't quite feeling it for a while but it grew on me as I went along. I think I mainly just enjoyed the flashback missions because they're more like regular Halo gameplay and the hub area just made for some tedium in backtracking across areas I'd already been multiple times. There are some collectible fragments that combine into a side story that is supposed to illuminate some part of the story, but I wasn't sufficiently gripped to bother trying to track them down.

Finished River City Girls for the second time today, now with a friend!
...Then I noticed we were still on the update 1.0.0, then I updated it to 1.2.0 real quick and we beat the NG+ boss again, now seeing the retconned ending. oopsie...

I just beat Scorn on Xbox Series X. I honestly never had particularly high hopes for this one. Even when I saw the first trailer like a thousand years ago I immediately suspected that it would end up much like Inner Chains. Recently the game got hyped up a ton, though, and when I saw that I have it already thanks to Game Pass, I decided to just give it a go. But frankly, after beating it I feel that my guts were right all along.

So, gigeresque aesthetics aren't anything new in video games, especially thanks to the millions of sci-fi games inspired by the Alien franchise. Scorn is the only game I know, though, which tries to deliver an entire interactive universe that could have been designed by Giger from start to finish - that actually makes the game more gigeresque than even Dark Seed, a game the guy was directly involved in. And, well, Scorn is indeed visually goddamn impressive, both aesthetically and technically. Generally the production value was higher than I thought it would be, the audio is also decent, with many well-designed sounds, though I found the ambience to be very uninspired compared to the visuals and it didn't quite create a sense of being there for me.

Anyway, I found the game to be underwhelming in every other regard. It appears to be a deeply polarizing game and frankly I find the arguments of the game's defenders quite empty. Something that keeps popping up are comparisons to Myst. The thing is that Myst had substance while Scorn, in my not so humble opinion, does not.

Scorn is a walking simulator. That's not a problem in itself but let's not pretend that the game is more than an interactive Giger museum. The main point of the game is to navigate and absorb the impressive (and overly convoluted) environments and watch the occasional disturbing animation. I sometimes see fans of the game ridiculing some players for expecting something like Doom just because Scorn has guns. Well, frankly there's as much Doom in this one as there's Myst because the puzzles are frankly not much better than the combat and the combat is awful. Think of any barely functional shooter you've ever played and you get the idea. The game would have been better off without any combat because it's not good at all and ultimately the only thing it does is potentially scare off people who actually appreciate everything else about the game - the combat (besides the difficult navigation) is the main reason I can't recommend the game to my wife and sadly there isn't an easy mode. I honestly hope that they will patch in a "story mode" sooner than later.

As for the puzzles: well, there's a few functional minigames in here. They aren't great but they work. They aren't frequent either, though (there's like 10 such interactions in the entire game?), and frankly outside of them the game doesn't have any particular gameplay. The environmental interactions barely require any thinking. You just walk around the world and if you can use something, you do. If you can't use it, use something else first, go back and then use it. That's honestly all there is to it.

So, what's left is a walking simulator. Is it a good one? Not in my opinion but I do see how some might disagree. My problem is that as impressive as the environments are, they aren't particularly fresh nor interesting to me. I have walked through biomechanical corridors many times, I have seen many of Giger's illustrations and I have also seen quite a bit of body horror. Admittedly the imagery in Scorn is a bit more ballsy and risqué than in most games with gigeresque content - once in a while you get a good glimpse of the more sexual aspect of Giger's work here which is pretty cool to see in a video game. However, those other games usually put gigeresque imagery in a context where it makes me care and think. I still find it quite powerful that in Warhammer 40k the elite of mankind, including its god emperor, are barely human biomechanical abominations - that says something.

In Scorn it's just seemingly random biomechanical imagery from start to finish without anything to hold onto. There's no clear narrative or motivation for the protagonist here, the game is more like a gallery and when I try to make any sense of it it's just noise. I just don't find that particularly interesting nor engaging. And the sad part is that once or twice the game did manage to seriously engage me emotionally by confronting me with such powerful and disturbing sights that they did move me - and it helped that they were the result of something I did. Now that's quite stimulating! At those moments I did see the appeal of the game but sadly also all its wasted potential.

Now, maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe, if I carefully studied every little detail here or just had more of some critical knowledge or put in a bit more effort, I could make more sense of it and actually care as a result. But: at this time I honestly don't think that that is the case. Frankly I believe that everything in the game is as arbitrary as it seems and is indeed - as I said above - devoid of substance.

If bizarre imagery is all you need or you enjoy making up your own interpretations where the creator hasn't actually left you with anything to go on: good for you, you will probably love Scorn. As for me, though... to me it's just a bad game as well as an uninspired piece of interactive art. Technically impressive for sure but nothing more.