Gemas I finished so far in 2025

- Legends of Grimrock (highest difficulty, my second playthrough)
- XCOM enemy within (replayed many times)
- Lands of lore 1
- Eye of the beholder 1 (first time replaying it since finishing it in the 90s)

Currently playing Eye of the beholder 2 (at the last tower).

As you all can see I am on a bit of a first person dungeon crawl-bender. Love these kind of games.

I am currently on the fence of playing the Ishar games after I finish the Beholder series. I have wanted to play these games since I read about the second game in a Amiga magazine back in the day. I remember wanting an Amiga so so bad after seeing this game. I re-read that article and looked at those picture so many times.

This was intended as a joke but on the topic of reading the last novel I read was probably something by Jo Nesbo. The last book I read was probably some self improvement type for work.

Well, the game does get unfair sometimes.
* Enemies can instant kill you, and resurrection is unreliable and can cause (hard-to-reverse) aging.
* Ambushes, where the enemies get a free round of attacks, can be particularly dangerous.
* Most unfair thing that happened to me, twice in my previous playthrough: Ambushed by a Bransly (a strange mid-air fish), which cast Miracle during the surprise round and teleported my party into sold rock. Do you think that's fair? (On the other hand, this particular enemy, while having other dangerous aspects and resistances, at least has low summon resistance.)
* Found a youtube video where, at one point, the party got ambushed by a single Archer Polete, who in the surprise round successfully drew the Priestess card, poisoning the entire party, then proceeded to Pursuit Sweep (free attack at the end of the round on all opponents under status ailments) the entire party, wiping out the entire party before the player could enter any commands.
* Save system? You can save at will, but when you reload a mid-dungeon save, some time passes, which can cause your characters to age. Not nearly as bad as how classic Wizardry handles it, but that still means there's a cost to reloading.

I have finished the main game before, and have on my current playthrough; it's just that there's some post-game content here.

As for things the game doesn't expect me to do, looking on a Japanese site I've learned of some glitches. In particular, I have the ability to trade equipment with special party members (including summons), and that in tern has provided me with a method of item duplication. There's also the fact that certain monsters, once required with spirit pact, will auto-equip items given to them; there's only one such monster that's not a pain to recruit, but with other monsters it leads to the possibility of having a bishop wearing a Holy Sabre as her body armor (the slot that would normally have robes or plate mail).

Resident Evil Village (Steam)

With the announcement of the next Resi game, Village also got a new lower sale price of A$14. That was good enough for me to finally play it and meet Lady D's breasts. Yes, I know where her eyes are, but when she's 9ft tall then where else are you going to be looking?

It's a great game. It continues my preferred first-person perspective from Resi 7- which I much prefer for this type of game when you're talking about traversing a fully 3D world. It follows straight on from the events of RE7, and the story is just as bat shit crazy. The story doesn't matter because the game play is the perfect Resident Evil- manage your ammo, fully explore and defeat bosses that look like they were created by pulling an Elephant inside out through its butt hole. All of that is combined with an awesome interconnected map consisting of a creepy village, a Castle and the immediate surrounds. Perfect horror game settings.

Add to that the fact that CAPCOM's RE Engine runs better than anything else in gaming and the developer's talent for making excellent character models...it's no wonder that CAPCOM are the only AAA publisher that seems to be growing since the industry crash after the COVID gaming boom ended and everyone went back outside their homes again (well, most of us have). Rest assured this one is as good as CAPCOMS recent remakes, probably better. I've already started NG+ on Hardcore Difficulty for a quick straight story run.

Edit: finished second Hardcore playthrough as well.

Wizordum - 3/5

Catacomb Abyss might have been the very first FPS I ever played. So, when I first saw this game, it hit a very specific nostalgia point for me.

Well, ultimately, Wizordum turned out to be less of a Catacomb tribute than I imagined and hoped for. But, aside a handful of bugs and questionable design decisions, I still enjoyed it.

For whatever reason, they decided to go for a very maximalist design philosophy: there's two different playable characters (each with their own loadouts), nine weapons (most with alt-fire modes), four spells, ten kinds of consumable items, a special attack, and a grenade-like explosive. There's even an upgrade shop. And let's not forget the pig-hunting bonus minigame levels that exist...for some reason.

Honestly, most of the items feel like filler (no, I don't want to throw a bottle a few tiles in front of me that creates a small toxic cloud that perhaps an enemy might walk into if I'm lucky). And to make matters worse, there's no way to map a shortcut to any of the items. If you want to use two different items during a hectic battle (and there's a lot of hectic battles), good luck trying to dodge fireballs *and* navigate your way through a list of ten items one by one...

There's also several weapons I barely used, and for the most part, the spells didn't really feel worth bothering with. Really, they could have pared things down a bit. So much of the game feels bloated and under-tested.

Anyway, I guess I'm sounding very down on the game, but there's still a lot to like about it. Overall, the core gameplay is still pretty good; it's very satisfying freezing enemies and then smashing them into pieces. Also, there's some excellent-looking sprites.

It's actually good to see I'm not the only one have that kind of habit in gaming

Gal*Gun: Double Peace

It's almost the same as my previous games, with this game also installed years ago. Back then I looked at my Steam library and notice that I got some PQube games that I hadn't played yet. This was the oldest amongst them. The slight difference is that I actually have finished all but one main ending. But I abandoned them with the intent to get it and also aiming to complete all the achievements. Funny it took me all this time to finally get back to it.

I don't consider myself an achievement hunter and I don't bother at all if a game have them or not. But if they do have them and I think it's possible for me to get them (like it didn't have an outrageous skill needed or a dreaded co-op achievement) then I have no problems trying to get them all. A 100% marks for me is a kind of a sign that I have no longer to look back at that particular game and move on to my other games in my PC.

Gal*Gun: Double Peace is a light ecchi rail shooter. No nudity, just a little game straight out of a dream of a horny teenage high school dream. The Japanese VAs are great with Yui Horie, the voice of the original Fruits Basket here as one of the main characters. That manga series especially Honda Tohru have place dear in my heart.

The most tedious thing to do is getting the Data Gatherer achievement. My steps to get them is not really efficient. I thought it would be plausible to get them via the attack mode, but some of them only possible to get if you have leftovers doki-doki mode power-ups. But I only realize the best way was to keeps multiple saves from the true ending playthrough and by time I understand that there are only 7 characters to go. So it took me longer than what I would've like but I don't really regret it

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. This was fine. You control a space marine wandering a planet besieged by Chaos and you have to kill everything. It's W40K jumping on the retro FPS trend and I would say it lands somewhere in the upper-middle of the pack compared to some of the others I've played. It also takes some influence from the Doom reboot, mainly in the sense that each level will involve at least one prolonged arena fight in which waves of enemies beam in as you exterminate others before you finally either just kill everything or put down a greater demon that needs to be killed to stop fresh enemies from coming in.

The graphics are fine in that crunchy 3D pixelated way, although there is a bit of weirdness in how the in-game graphics are significantly better than the pixel art slideshow cutscenes the play between chapters. For all its hilarious grimness, Warhammer is quite colorful and I felt the game represented that very well. I do feel the game could have used a bit more variety in the audio. Enemies generally lack personality (especially when you compare it to something like the orks in Space Marine) and I often struggled to single out what was attacking me or approaching from my blind sides. Also, the soundtrack SUCKS. It's not very long and what there is of it just isn't very pleasant to listen to. It isn't catchy, and its attempts at epic moments fall completely short. It's the worst game music I've heard in quite a while.

I played the main game on medium difficulty and then moved up to hard for the expansion, and I would say the game probably plays best on hard, like many FPSs do. I am a bit embarrassed to say that for some reason I forgot you could sprint in the game, maybe because the game emphasizes how heavy your character is (you can squash enemies if you fall directly on top of them). I kept getting killed in the very last level of the expansion, not understanding what I should do, then I realized I could try holding the shift button down and suddenly everything got easier and I finished the game about 10 minutes later. D'oh!

No Response

No Response is a free game that I picked up several years ago and, to be perfectly blunt, I finally played it today because I wanted something to write about quickly… Though writing even such a quick little review, if the term may even be used, takes much longer than playing it, since that only takes about 15 minutes. But I guess that’s long enough to tell the story, despite the perhaps rather unusual manner in which it’s presented and the minimalist methods, making each word, sound and graphical object count.
That said, I wonder whether something like this can even be considered a game, being a walking simulator with just about zero actual interaction or player agency, and even that very short duration is in fact obtained because of the slow walking speed. I guess there is one possibly optional spot to explore, where the path branches off, but the message seen there doesn’t seem to fit with the rest… Not that those seen before that point make that much sense either, considering the context that’s pretty obvious from the unskippable intro and made so clear in the tunnel that there’s little point in the game not ending right then. And, at least for me, the menu, whether the one that shows up when you press Esc or the one at the end, couldn’t be interacted with either, so just use Alt+F4 to quit.
I do think that walking simulators and games whose sole aim is to tell a fixed story or convey a message have their place, that it may be a way to use the medium as an art form, and I’m also aware that games made for game jams, such as this one, shouldn’t usually be expected to be more than little demos, but I see little reason to even watch a video of No Response, much less go through it yourself, perhaps in good part just because it’s so obvious. Then again, I saw comments from some who were surprised by the ending, which I find baffling but probably means that a target audience does exist.

Killing Time: Resurrected. I'd played the 3DO version, but not the PC one before. It's a somewhat modest game but it's fun while it lasts. I especially like the way it uses FMV sequences - you just walk up to a hot spot and watch actors do their thing for a minute or two. It's a bit like the audio log trend in games but a bit more consistent with the story and setting. There's a bit of that hamminess you tend to see with FMV games, and the sense of unreality because of blue screen filming, but the actors are basically fine and the story is fun in a pulpy sort of way, involving you playing a hard-boiled guy getting caught up in ancient Egyptian curses and stuff.

I decided to turn off the high-resolution textures and generally make the game look more like the version I was used to because the new graphics just kind of weirded me out. For games of that generation and style, I prefer crunchy pixels. It plays smoothly and isn't very complicated in how it handles - you just switch between weapons and try to save ammo, open doors or throw switches occasionally. You can jump and crouch, but you hardly ever need to, which is good because the jump in particular is pretty weak. The most ambitious thing about the gameplay is how you have to search the grounds for various keys and items that will unlock the final boss, and then when you do that you have to run around finding more items to beat the game. It's not really Metroid style, but it is pretty non-linear and interesting for a game of its time.

I finished the main game of Warcraft 3. You all know the game, of course. A prelude and 4 campaigns, with the 4 different races (humans, undead, orcs, night elves). Each campaign features 7-9 chapters/missions. Each mission was, for me, about 40 min to even a bit over 2 hours long. I consider (for me, at least, again) as the best (strongest/easiest, whatever one wants to call it) race to be the undead. And the weakest to be the orcs. While playing the orcs, there were times I was thinking I was winning with them, only because they had the tauren (bull-men) on their side!

Impressive story. Admittedly sorrowful, but impressive. I guess that's why the credits cutscenes (…), to somewhat ease the sad feelings of the events that the player has seen.

There are 2 things I didn’t like. I couldn’t find a pause button, which is usually useful in strategy games. Maybe there wasn’t, because it isn’t mentioned in the tutorial missions of the Prelude. In other strategy games, you can pause to assess a situation and give your commands, when a situation is… pressed.

The second thing, is the last mission. As I’ve written before, the worst type of mission in a strategy game for me, is when you’re are told to hold defence against the opponents, for a period of time (or else “tower defence” games). This happens twice in the game. The first is for 30 min, in the undead campaign, and the second is the last mission. While I was able to beat that undead mission (I was in control of the undead… strongest), I couldn’t defeat that last mission. You are to hold for 45 min, but my base was overrun at 4 min remaining. I wasn’t in the mood to try again, so I used the known cheat for instant victory (all your base…), for the only time in the game.

Edit: I didn't mention that the last mission is against the undead. That also says it all...

Heh, never could do the last undead mission. Got to fail with less than a minute to go, maybe even less than 30 sec, but never could survive enough after dozens and dozens of attempts, so that was that, and never tried anything farther in the game as a result.
And no active pause, no. Quite an issue.

Sexbot (Steam)

NSFW (really, you can't tell from the title?) VN. You're the proud owner of an early prototype Amer-Zone Alexa Sexbot. The user agreement has the usual disclaimers like, Amer-Zone isn't responsible for any world ending event caused by this product. What could possibly go wrong? Unlike some of these VN's, this one has many paths, and the dialogue is actually genuinely clever and funny. It gets a bit repetitive since it's a time loop story, but it's almost 15 hours long- so well worth the sale price. Only problem is it ends on a sort of cliffhanger leading into part 2, which isn't out yet.

Arcarde Spirits, Jun 22 (Itch)-Work at an arcade and date your coworkers visual novel. I didn't hate it. I didn't love it. It wasn't really my jam but it wasn't very long and was a nice way to break up the longer games.

Full List

Finally tried my hand at the original Age of Wonders. I played the first 5 or 6 missions into the campaign before realizing that "winging it" with my leveling choices with my Leader and hero was not the way to go. Starting over and focusing on a build for them worked much better and got me through the game which was enjoyable. I feel the campaign is one or two scenarios too long, but overall it was fun and time well spent. I look forward to the second installment sometime soon.