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Coffee Talk, Jan 5 (Xbox Game Pass)-Its pretty well written but the stories never really drew me in. It felt like there were probably a lot of personal experiences of the developers in it. It was a little annoying to be asked to make a drink with no indication what was in it but that only happened a couple of times. Usually you would get at least one ingredient and could try to guess. I didn't realize the names of the drinks were displayed after you made them until late in the game or that would have helped a bit.

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Star Wars: Dark Forces. I've played this before, but this time was with the new source port, the Force Engine (https://theforceengine.github.io/), which is based on previous efforts but with more accuracy and fewer glitches. It looks and plays great, and the game is better than I remember. It really is impressive the sort of stuff they were able to do with this engine, not unlike tricks that the Build engine could do but this came out a bit earlier.

There's a bittersweetness in playing games from Lucasarts of this era. They were such a machine of beautiful, high quality games and then the management turned over and it just sort of went away, never to recover.
So let's talk cats....

Cat Quest shouldn't require an explanation. If you like games and cats, one is a must buy.

Cat Quest II appears to have more than a few continuity errors in relation to the first game that will have you blaming the dogs until you find out what is actually going on here. An interesting thing with this game is that if you do a New Game+, the level of all enemies is increased by 50.

Blanket Cat is a very short visual novel about friendship that I got for free on another site. The few choices are about what the cat does (sleep vs exploring) and not dialogue. Although this one is short and I got it for free on another site, I'd only recommend it if you're really, really into games with cats.

Reigns: Game of Thrones has a black tom cat with a torn ear stalking the dungeons. You can only catch him if you're playing as Arya.

Democratic Socialism Simulator exists in a world of talking animals or maybe just the US is full of talking animals. While the only cat in this game is the civil rights leader, he does show up more often than some of the other animals.

GOG Store Links
* Cat Quest - https://www.gog.com/en/game/cat_quest
* Cat Quest II - https://www.gog.com/en/game/cat_quest_ii
* Reigns: Game of Thrones - https://www.gog.com/en/game/reigns_game_of_thrones
Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption - 3/5

The story was fine for an action oriented rpg and most of the characters were likable, but the writing was sometimes cheesy and long winded, and the voice acting could be over exaggerated at times.
The dungeons were mostly straight forward with a few interesting gimmicks here and there.
None of these were deal breakers for me and I saw them more as the game’s quirks, rather than issues.

However, I do have serious issues with the AI. The path finding is bad, the enemy AI is worse and your companion AI can be borderline infuriating at times. Often times I had to wrangle my companions by “parking” them around corners, and abuse the dumb enemy AI to draw one or two enemies into ambushes, just to avoid my companions dying every five minutes.

I had a reasonable amount of fun with this one, but I’m unsure if I can recommend it to others.
Exo One, Jan 7 (Xbox Game Pass)-One of the most physically painful games I've ever played. It hurt my eyes, gave me a headache, and made me a little nauseous. The game itself was like a 3 hour tech demo. Movement was difficult to get the hang of and the entire game is movement. The camera was a struggle at times. And there was a plot I suppose.

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I rarely played any games in 2022. I been watching animes & tv series. Just started watching JoJo. I don't know why playing games feels scary now?..
Include me
Thanks for the thread!

Finished:
None, so far.

Playing:
Conglomerate 451
Elden Ring
Yakuza 3
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KruhLatry: [...]and abuse the dumb enemy AI to draw one or two enemies into ambushes, just to avoid my companions dying every five minutes.[...]
Actually sounds like a valid strat of CRPGs ("Salami Taktik"). Thanks for the insight, always wanted to give that one a try. Don't know, when I do come around though.

--- o ---

Also completed:
[07.01.2023] Super Mario Sunshine (NSW / Super Mario 3D Allstars) - 19h 15m [with 94 Stars] - rating 7.0

At times I actually did enjoyed the game, especially when controls, physics and level design teamed up for a smooth experience (as felt while playing Super Mario 64).

But overall I was rather disappointed. You have to trust physiscs that change as designers see fit, at one time defying gravity, at others surfaces of wood are seemingly made of ice.

It especially surprised me, that a lot of bad game design decisions have been made. It's also very repetitive with it's reacuring missions and they overdid the coin collecting. I do not feel inclined to search the blue coins. From some surprise findings it seems to be very bothersome to collect, probably extending gametime by a massive amount while searching the episodes over and over again.

To top it of, I glitched quite a few times through geometry without reason and died while falling through the world.

Let's see how well Super Mario Galaxy plays. Though that might be for next year. ;)
Quantum Break

I think I like it better than Control; the story, the characters, the acting. The best live action video that I've ever seen in a game.
It's too short, I want more! It's the last Remedy game for me to play, for now...

And booo to Microsoft for not bringing this to GOG!
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teceem: Quantum Break

I think I like it better than Control; the story, the characters, the acting. The best live action video that I've ever seen in a game.
It's too short, I want more! It's the last Remedy game for me to play, for now...

And booo to Microsoft for not bringing this to GOG!
I'd love to see this come to GOG also.
Most of Remedy's stuff - except Max Payne 1 and 2 - are here.

Also, we'd need those Movie/Episodes b/t the main Chapters here on GOG to work offline and not-streamed also. It's a very important part of the game and its story, IMHO.
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kzadur: Let's see how well Super Mario Galaxy plays. Though that might be for next year. ;)
Just my opinion but I think Galaxy was a significant improvement on Sunshine. Sunshine has its charms but it's so padded with stuff like the random coin locations that you'd only find by literally washing every single square foot of the world.
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teceem: Quantum Break

I think I like it better than Control; the story, the characters, the acting. The best live action video that I've ever seen in a game.
It's too short, I want more! It's the last Remedy game for me to play, for now...

And booo to Microsoft for not bringing this to GOG!
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MysterD: I'd love to see this come to GOG also.
Most of Remedy's stuff - except Max Payne 1 and 2 - are here.

Also, we'd need those Movie/Episodes b/t the main Chapters here on GOG to work offline and not-streamed also. It's a very important part of the game and its story, IMHO.
Yeah, a GOG release would have to include the movies as a download option (at the least), or it wouldn't be a standalone DRM free game. On console, where you can download the movies, the install size is 190GB. That's a lot of GOG 4GB standalone installers, and the movies files would have to be broken down into smaller files or totally re-encoded to another format and maybe loose some quality. I really don't think this game is ever coming to GOG, even if Remedy were able to.
Horizon Zero Dawn

For a long time, HZD was the only PS exclusive I wanted to play, so I was pretty happy when it came to the PC. It took me a long time to actually get it, because of the price, but I eventually got it.

In many ways, this game feels like Assassin's Creed Dino Thunder or something like that. And I was having a lot of fun with it, until I got close to 40 hours of game. Then I just dropped it for about 8 months. It's hard to say why exactly. A friend called it beaultiful, but souless. I'm not really sure that that is the problem exactly.

Other than the visuals, this game has a lot systems, most of them very well designed, but there's almost always that slight detail that makes you feel like "if this was changed, this game would be better". Then, there's the matter of bloat. Not in the AC way where every activity is copy and pasted to exaustion, but there is a ridiculous amount of different armors and weapons, and even at the endgame, you still have to keep combining them in different ways for different enemy types. You have three different bow types with three different arrow types each. Why? Why? And each has multiple different quality levels to acquire. The same can be said about the armors. "Oh, I'm gonna fight the fire thingy creature, let me pause the game and change to the fire protection armor". It never really stops feeling like a grind, or, more specifically, a chore. The game generally wants you to be stealthy and it works well, but you rarely can eliminate machines in an effective way without completly breaking stealth, specially the bigger machines. You can carry health potions made from animal meat, and up to 4 extra health bars that are composed of herbs you collect that each fills a bit of said bars. But you never have an easy way of refilling these herb health bars. You have to always slowly rebuild them, a small herb at a time.

After returning to the game, I started noticing the pacing problems it has as well. The game has a lot of dungeon crawls through old lab ruins and they're almost always very empty. They're complex looking while having very little color and detail variation. And they want you to find a lot of logs, marked by purple lights in places where almost every detail is a purple light of somekind. These crawls go on and on and there's a lot of them near the endgame. There's also the shield armor, you get a mission to retrieve it early on, but you can only get it right before the final mission. As the slightly better lance, though it isn't hinted at early on. And... why? Allowing the player to retrieve it around 60% to 70% of the campaign would make a lot more sense.

There's also a lot of other small things here and there. You have a very limited inventory, even fully upgraded, but you can carry unlimited reward boxes. Many enemies randomly drop some types of these, but why not make all loot just these boxes? Why can't I pack inventory items into boxes like these anyway? That would be useful.

The world, despite being amazing to look at, very often feels too static. There aren't any breakable random things, or meaningless objects that you can touch and move. NPCs are always just standing there waiting for you, night and day, or walking set paths, very similar to Morrowind, actually. In what seems like a smart move, almost every store in the game is a random NPC that has no conversation lines. It just opens the store screen. And, save for a few special ones, they are all and always the exact same store. It didn't feel like a smart move anymore after a while. Just bland.

The Frozen Wilds expansion seems to recognize a number of these problems and try to solve them a little bit, with more powerful weapons (that eat through your resources quickly), a few extra armors, including health regenerating ones, a few unique and rather powerful weapon and armor modifications and so on. It doesn't really solve them, specially with the abundance of new harder to beat machines, but, overall, it helps the experience.

I know I sound too hard on the game, but I enjoyed it and it was worth my time with it. I just felt that it was always right at the edge of being trully phenomenal, but it never really got there.

As a final thought, the Brazilian dub was mostly very well done, with the occasional wrong voice for the wrong character here and there, nothing offensive, but I wish the director had given better directions for the actors regarding character names. Every other character, including Aloy, has his/her name said in a different way by different actors, sometimes in the very same scene. It gets a bit annoying.
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kzadur: Actually sounds like a valid strat of CRPGs ("Salami Taktik").
I agree.
But Redemption made it feel like it was the only way to properly play. Most times, when I allowed the AI to do its own thing, it did something stupid, like chasing after wounded enemies(that are surprisingly difficult to kill), or wasting half of their blood while fighting a single rat.
Post edited January 09, 2023 by KruhLatry
Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary, Jan 9 (Xbox Game Pass)-I hadn't played Halo in years and even then only multiplayer matches at my friend's house so this was my first experience with the single player campaign. It wasn't great. Gunplay never felt very good and I got lost a lot on nearly every map. All vehicle sections were incredibly janky and to end the game with one seemed like a poor idea. Everything about the game felt campy and sloppy except for the graphics which were updated for the remaster and looked pretty good. Actually I'm stunned this game spawned such a huge franchise because it seems incredibly forgettable. That multiplayer must have really carried it. Not my least favorite game of the year because I've already played some pretty bad ones but this gets close.

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