I finished Diablo and its expansion. You all know the game, of course. No enemy respawn at all, you can save where you like, difficult last boss, etc.!

I would like to inform here those that probably haven't got the game on GOG, and thinking of getting it, that when you double-click the icon of the game on your desktop, you can choose among 3 choices: the Diablo version (it’s mentioned that this version features LAN connections only & high-resolution support), the Diablo (Classic) (this version features Battle.net support & original SVGA graphics), and the Hellfire version (which starts the game with Hellfire expansion & high-resolution support). I played the latter version, which is with the expansion.

Now let's see what's the mod about. I've read that it features saving system as in Diablo 2 (save & exit, only your condition is saved, not your location, so you have to return to where you were), and enemy respawn if you exit and re-enter. But the worst I've read is about a time restriction when you enter the last boss' floor. If you fail to kill him within the time limit, he'll become (even) more difficult?!! We'll see how that goes.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. The last of the GBA Castlevanias. In this one, you control a guy in modern times who's visiting Japan only to get sucked into Dracula's castle before an eclipse. It sort of makes sense because of the series concept that Dracula's castle is in its own dimension rather than being confined to Transylvania, and there's a particular reason why this happened to your guy.

I found it to be a relatively easy entry in the series and I basically finished it over the weekend. Besides the usual exploration aspects, which are modest because of the relatively straightforward map and fast travel system, the main mechanic is that you occasionally absorb souls of monsters you kill. You equip up to three of these souls for particular abilities, such as transforming into a bat to reach high places. There are a handful of puzzles you need to solve to advance, including one to get the good ending, but it's not like you're playing La Mulana or something.

A big part of the appeal of these sequels is how they take Symphony of the Night as a basis and somehow squish that experience down into a GBA cartridge and this does an impressive job of that even if the resolution is a bit lower and it lacks the modest 3D elements. I forget exactly how I felt about Harmony of Dissonance, but I would say this one is at least as good as that was.

Ichima-san (Steam)

The player, whose soul is trapped in an Ichimatsu doll, is on a quest to regain their stolen body. It's a 3D stealth game, where the little doll must stay out of the sight of humans (getting seen drains the spiritual energy that lets you move) or play dead if discovered, and traverse a huge Japanese house in order to collect items that will aid in their quest. You can talk to the numerous fellow possessed objects that live on the house, play some of the mini games, or maybe hitch a ride on a cleaning robot.

This game was so adorable and had such a relaxed feel. It's not long (maybe 6 to 11h on your first playthrough, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I discovered that all TimeSplitters games are available on PS4/5 via emulation. I've heard many times that these are supposedly some of the best console shooters from the PS2/Xbox era so I've always been curious about these. I promptly downloaded and beat the first one.

It's utter shit.

The moment I launched the first level I got covered in cold sweat and whispered "oh no". What I hadn't realized was that the game had been developed by some of the creators of GoldenEye and Perfect Dark (though they left a while before Perfect Dark was released) and it follows the exact same UX and design principles as those two. I can barely put into words how much I loathe these games.

The funny thing is that TimeSplitters came out in 2000, the same year as Perfect Dark. So that year two spiritual successors to GoldenEye came out but from different studios and on different platforms. The bizarre thing is that even though TimeSplitters is a PS2 game, it is much less ambitious than Perfect Dark (and perhaps even than GoldenEye, which I haven't played much). I can only presume that it was a very rushed project and to me the result feels like "we have Perfect Dark at home".

The game has a mode named "story" but don't let that fool you: There's no briefings, no cutscenes, no nothing. You are thrown into a series of random levels and the principle is the same one every single time: find an item and bring it to a red circle which is usually located near the level entrance. There's a ton of pre-placed human enemies (and on one level zombies) and once you have the item, infinite numbers of the titular "timesplitters" begin to spawn.

That "story" mode takes less than two hours to beat and it is bad shooter design incarnate. Seriously: think of any mediocre PC shooter from the late 90s or early 2000s and what pissed you off about that one and you can be sure that TimeSplitters actively does every single one of those things.

It's one of those shooters where all challenge is created by what I call asshole design. Enemies have very fast reaction time and good aim and they are intentionally placed in such a way that you can't be prepared or develop any sort of situational awareness. A common scenario is that enemies are intentionally spawned in multiple directions, so no matter which way you're looking when you enter a room, you will (at best) get one enemy in your sights but another one is going to shoot you in the back and/or from the side. The developers also loved spawning enemies at distant elevated positions where they are just several pixels in size or blend in with the background and due to bad audio and a lack of hit indicators, you may keep losing health without any indication of the direction where the attack is coming from.

I'm pretty sure the whole idea behind the game was (perhaps to make up for the ridiculously small amount of content) that it's really designed around replaying the levels , memorizing enemy positions so you know in advance where they going to be, and basically speed running them. So maybe the developers didn't consider all this bullshit a problem but 1. that's not a "story" mode and 2. that does not excuse all of the bullshit in this game.

One thing that really pissed me off is that even in single player you have a full hitbox where headshots deal a lot more damage and that some enemies (who look the same as all others) are armed with shotguns. So it's basically completely random how much damage they are going to deal. Sometimes you will pass a corner and a shotgunner is going to take you down at full health in a split second because multiple pellets randomly hit you in the head - at other times he will barely make a scratch. You can easily verify this unfair randomness with the rewind feature available in the PS4/5 release. And on top of that there's a lot of other crap like terrible GoldenEye style aiming, wonky hit boxes (which is a huge problem on the zombie levels where you must hit enemies in the head!), slow weapon switching and terribly placed health/armor items. Not to mention that even though there's what feels like dozens of guns, in practice they barely differ. Any gun is going to take down any enemy in almost any situation in a split second so what's the point in having like two dozens of them?

Anyway, so after about 90 minutes of this calamity the credits roll and "challenge" mode is unlocked. Funnily (and thankfully) that one actually largely provides much better content and gameplay even though that one appears to be cheaply slapped together from the "story" and multiplayer levels with various objectives and modifiers applied to them. It even provides more playtime than the story mode (though it still took me less than five hours to 100% the whole game).

They are very hit or miss but admittedly I did have a lot of fun during some challenge levels, in particular those that are the kind of bot match that you'd play in Unreal Tournament. Score-based matches with infinite respawns basically make most of the game's issues irrelevant. The unfair and random mechanics don't hurt when they just alter the score a little bit and affect enemies as much as they affect you. Though I have to question the sanity of whoever thought that it would be a good idea spawn players without ANY weapon during multiplayer matches by default. And sadly even in this mode the developers insisted on adding their trademark unfair randomness. So in some challenge levels it seems impossible to reliably achieve the goal (e.g. keep an NPC alive or rack up a certain score) because it's extremely dependent on how the bots are going to spawn and behave. Not gonna lie, I did abuse the emulator's rewind feature to manage this a bit but there's also a limit to how much that one can do.

Long story short: it's honestly a shit game with a few moments of fun. I mean, Jesus, it does seem that it was a rush job where a random assortment of assets was put together into a GoldenEye clone and then they slapped the word "time" on the box to justify that it's all one random mess.

Anyway, I am genuinely looking forward to playing the sequels. I'm sure that they retain a lot of the stuff that I dislike (like the terrible aiming system) but I know that they have cutscenes and whatnot so I assume that they are far more refined titles. Plus, the same studio delivered Second Sight a few years later, which I enjoyed greatly back in the day, so I can only presume that also the TimeSplitters games got better over time.

IIRC, the thing with TimeSplitters is that it was very much a multiplayer-first project, so the single-player "campaign" is indeed very lazily designed and only thrown in for the sake of having one. It was like the creators saw how much N64 players enjoyed the multiplayer on Goldeneye and just said "Okay, we'll make an entire game of just that."

Haydee (Steam)

You play as an Android with a big butt and even bigger breasts! What? You want more? It's modable and you can make her look like 2B From Nier Automata, but with a bigger butt and breasts!

It's really hard. Imagine the item management and key finding of classic Resident Evil, but without the actual horror (not that Resi has ever had any real horror) and with lots of platforming and incredibly convoluted level design all with an Android with huge butt and breasts...that bounce whenever you make the platforming jumps.

The funny thing is that I genuinely got hooked on the game and liked it. Most people complain about how hard the platforming is. It's not hard...it's like the original Tomb Raider...it looks hard until you realize that the world consists of standardized jump spacings and once you work out how it works...you never need to miss a jump, not ever.

The combat on the other hand- that is hard. Honestly though, the hardest part as the game goes on, is managing your inventory with the items needed to progress. Even the item box in the save rooms soon needs to be managed.

I admit that I needed to look up the excellent written guide on Steam in a few places just to find out where I needed to go to get the next item without running around for three days. But this is one of those games where using a guide occasionally doesn't destroy your enjoyment, as you still need to execute. I found the Cake!

I'll probably get Haydee 2 when it's on sale over the Christmas Steam sale.

Okay, several games today....


Zodiacats
Play Time: 2h 35m
https://www.gog.com/en/game/zodiacats

This is a short and cute Devcats game. Unlike their Full of Cats games, this one is just a tile swapping picture puzzle game. I left a longer review on the game's page with a 5/5 score.


Adam Wolfe
Play Time: 5h 27m

I did have to go AFK a couple of times, so that play time is slightly padded. I think the actual play time is probably more accurately in the 4h 30m to 5h range. I got this one free off IndieGala as one of their Gala Freebies, and it includes Episodes 1-4. Even though this isn't the first time I've played this one, I really can't recommend that anyone spend money on it.

The issue is entirely that the game came out in 2016 and chapter 4 ends in a way that suggests that there should have been a Chapter 5+, and there's no additional Chapters on Steam nor is the game mentioned on the developer's website.

If you've played Cat Quest, you'll understand what I'm talking about in that each game ends practically shouting that there will be a sequel. It's the same thing here... except that there are no more.

So, I'm continuing my run through the TimeSplitters games and just finished TimeSplitters 2. As expected, this one was an improvement but sadly only from shitty to meh.

In terms of singleplayer the most obvious difference is that this time the story mode is actually a legitimate single player campaign with cutscenes and sequences of objectives. It mirrors the formula of GoldenEye and Perfect Dark virtually to the letter and the first level even has you infiltrate a Russian military base at a dam which seems like a pretty obvious reference to GoldenEye.

I genuinely enjoyed the first couple of levels but honestly, when the game is at its best it just reaches the level of B-tier PC titles form that era - it's more Chaser than No One Lives Forever and I'm not sure it's even as good as the former. It does have some decent single player level design, keeps things somewhat fresh via the objectives and most of the time it's a far cry from the mess that the first game's "story" mode was. Apparently it even occurred to the devs that shotgun enemies who can randomly take you down in a split second SUCK in a single player game and they are entirely absent from the story mode.

But: Again the devs did the bare minimum required to make the "story" mode qualify as such. It's really just a series of completely disconnected scenarios. One time you're a random detective taking on some kingpin, another time you're a Flash Gordon wannabe fighting aliens and UFOs, in yet another scenario you're on some Indiana Jones style adventure and so on. Some stuff referencing the titular "timesplitters" is brutally shoved in and that's it. Supposedly all of these characters are inhabited by one time traveling bald guy but the game literally doesn't do anything with that stuff.

Also: I said that I enjoyed the first couple of levels. I suppose that's because they were rather easy. The difficulty goes up a ton in the final couple of levels and that's when the ugly side of these GoldenEye style shooters begins to really show its face. The gameplay can sometimes only be described as hitscan hell with enemies instantly landing perfect hits and you desperately trying to find out where the shots are even coming from as your health bar keeps shrinking. Seriously, even in Wolfenstein 3D enemies already announced their presence and Doom already did a ton of things to communicate enemy positions and attack directions. TimeSplitters 2 not only has none of that, it even fails to always show the health bar when you need it (I think it was supposed to get shown whenever health changes but sometimes it does not even get displayed even though you've taken damage). And somehow the game still has slow-ass weapon cycling... five years after Turok.

And just as I thought that I had gotten used to the shoddy aiming system of these games, the game suddenly gave me a million reasons to curse it again as the auto aim just refused to do squat in many situations and I had to awkwardly set up headshots over several seconds as enemies casually hit me again and again. And again armor pickups were ridiculously sparse and obscure.

At first it also seemed that the devs had finally learned not to squeeze unnecessarily obscure objectives or frustrating situations into their games but nah, two thirds in or so the bullshit started. Suddenly I was faced with environmental puzzles where I had to shoot objects that look like meaningless decoration. Or I had to defuse a series of bombs under time pressure in a convoluted complex with the nastiest enemy spawns, ultimately running in circles as I failed to find a bomb that I had missed like 20 seconds into the level and another that was located behind what I had assumed were decorative windows in a corridor that I had raced through while trying to beat both the clock and the enemies popping up everywhere.

So while I downright liked the game during the first couple of hours, it did everything it could to leave a sour taste in my mouth before the credits rolled. And admittedly I'm not sure if I would have had the patience to beat the game without the rewind feature available on PS4/5.

There's again a ton of other single player content in the form of Arcade mode and Challenge mode.

The Arcade mode basically mirrors the single player campaigns of the Unreal Tournament games and is just a large set of bot matches. And it is quite obvious that Free Radical Design took a lot of inspiration from UT with new modes that mirror UT's Domination and Assault (the latter is even called the same) and even some music that sounds as if it were taken straight from UT.

This mode repeats the pattern of the story mode, starting with some really good and solid levels that avoid anything frustrating but eventually the bullshit becomes unstoppable. This time you do spawn with a weapon... in the first couple of matches. Later on its the same bullshit again where you usually spawn unarmed and desperately try to get a gun only to find again and again that a bot just picked it up. And generally it feels like many matches were actively set up to be frustrating and unfun. Like that match where it's all flamethrowers. Or that Assault level where you finally manage to push through an endless stream of enemies with far more health than you have only find that inside the enemy base there's turrets that kill you 1-2 frames after entering their line of fire. Some of the matches were honestly super fun and but others are straight from hell and sadly I'll mostly remember the latter.

Regarding Challenge mode: meh. I suppose that in the first game I only really liked that one because it contained the bot matches that have been put into Arcade mode this time around. This time it's all weird stuff like smashing windows or collecting bananas under time pressure. Some of them were okay, others were a pain in the ass.

And I suppose that captures my general feelings about TimeSplitters 2: sometimes okay, at other times an utter pain in the ass.

But I must admit: I'm sure that back in the day I would have put dozens of hours into this game, making custom bot matches or playing it in local multiplayer with friends... if I hadn't been a PC gamer who had access to dozens of similar and much better titles.

Oh thank God, third time is the charm! I've finished my run through the TimeSplitters series with TimeSplitters: Future Perfect and this one is actually pretty great!

I can only presume that after the second game they hired an intern who went "uhm, have you guys heard of Halo?" and it suddenly occurred to everyone that they don't have to keep reusing design patterns and a control scheme that were originally developed during the days of Duke Nukem 3D for one of the first 3D consoles and an utterly ridiculous controller.

So, Future Perfect breaks with all of that GoldenEye baggage. If you launch it just after having played TimeSplitters 2, it downright feels like a next gen title. It controls and feels as you'd expect it from a good console shooter from that generation. Finally a crosshair is always displayed (I know!), it's always centered and turns red when an enemy is locked into the auto aim. Weapon switching is quick and responsive thanks to a weapons list, there's buttons for melee and throwing grenades etc.. The game does stick with the cartoonish visual style known from Free Radical's previous games but it's much more refined and detailed and I guess the result is one of the prettiest shooters from the PS2 era. Oh, and there's lots of real-time physics, including ragdolls and even a poor man's gravity gun (which is admittedly pretty useless for anything other than getting out-of-reach pickups).

Checkpoints and health + armor pickups also seem a lot more generous and sensible this time around. And there hasn't been a single time where the game needed me to do something so unintuitive or obscure that I felt inclined to look up a walkthrough.

And the entire story mode just feels fleshed out and "modern" (given the game's era). Everything is now actually tied into a genuine story, there's a lot of dialogue and cutscenes and scripted sequences, including a couple of vehicle sections. The bald guy from the previous game, Cortez, is now actually the game's protagonist and the various characters from the different time periods are now NPC sidekicks who constantly talk to you and also do lots of stuff in scripted sequences.

Now, the game doesn't really do anything particularly original or impressive. The guns and enemies are pretty basic stuff, as is almost everything you do during the missions. The time travel theme is only really expressed through scripted sequences where you run into yourself and are basically doing super short (and thankfully highly forgiving) escort missions from two perspectives in a row.

But: to me it was simply a super fun and often hilarious ride that feels like a blend of No One Lives Forever and the more recent Wolfenstein games with some Pixar style cutscenes thrown in. It is definitely mostly a comedic game with the developers missing few chances to make a joke. In some games (like Serious Sam 2 and frankly also in the NOLF games) this approach tends to quickly become tiresome and cringe to me but in this case I enjoyed it all the way through. There's just enough of an air of seriousness that I remained invested and determined to stop the bad guys. And of course not every pun is a winner but the game genuinely made me laugh out loud a few times. Some of the humour is surely antiquated and wouldn't fly today but that just made it funnier to me on some meta level. The game really is a relic from different times.

And this whole approach also results in a fun gameplay experience. There's always something new and fun around every corner, things remained fresh all the way through and there was no chance for me to get bored of the game. I kinda wish there had been a few fancier and more ambitious sequences with some stuff that I haven't really seen in any other game before but it was perfectly fine.

I guess if I have one complaint it's that with the improved controls and aiming the game is a tad too easy and I think I'm actually gonna check out how it plays on hard difficulty. It's actually possible that I'm gonna enjoy the game even more this way.

I've barely touched the Arcade and Challenge modes yet but from what I've seen so far I can only assume that it's about the same kind of stuff as in the previous two games, just with all the improvements and additions that I've already seen in the story mode. It also seems that there's some good mechanical improvements to the multiplayer portion but I'll have to play these modes a bit more to verify that. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to go for a platinum trophy again but I'm definitely going to play these modes for a couple of hours.

Anyway, this is probably the best PS2 shooter I've played. It definitely blows Killzone out of the water and I guess it's better than two other favourites of mine from that generation, Project Snowblind and Dredd vs Death (which is probably the most similar title I can think of). It's just a very solid PS2-era shooter and a very fun ride with some moments that I'll fondly remember for many years.

The Casting of Frank Stone (PC Game Pass)

I believe this is the latest game by Supermassive. What I'm certain of is that this is my least favorite of their games. It's not bad...but it lacks the B-Grade horror movie feeling of their other games. This one just never feels all that gripping...or that feeling of tension.

The game is set in the Dead by Daylight world apparently, and I'm not familiar with it at all- that may also be why it didn't do much for me.

It looks pretty good and ran okay. It did have one spot where it crashed for me- the start of chapter 6 I think it was. Checking online revealed a few people have the problem. After trying to get past the spot about 5 times I loaded the game with HDR turned off by accident it got past and autosaved. I quit and restarted with HDR back on it worked fine all the way to the end. I don't know if something about HDR breaks that scene...or if it was just coincidence.

Costume Quest
https://www.gog.com/en/game/costume_quest

Okay so you play as one of a pair of twin siblings (brother/sister) and whichever one you don't pick gets to wear the awful candy corn costume that causes them to be mistaken for candy then kidnapped by monsters. You go on an adventure to get your sibling back that includes a cat, costumes, trick-or-treating, and other stuff. The Grubbins on Ice DLC (included) adds an additional short adventure in the monster realm and creates a bridge between Costume Quest and its sequel.

Although I really don't like Halloween (too many spiders) and haven't said much about this game, I really would give it a 5/5 score. It is a fun and charming game.


Costume Quest 2
https://www.gog.com/en/game/costume_quest_2

For some reason, the GOG price for this game costs more than on Steam and Epic. ($19.99 USD on GOG vs $14.99 USD on Steam/Epic.) It would be one thing if the higher price meant that the GOG version came with the bonus pre-order costumes, but you still have to hex edit your game if you want access to them. Also Steam has a $19.99 USD bundle that includes both Costume Quest and Costume Quest 2, so GOG customers pay the price of both games bundled for just the second.

It's worth getting, but I would only recommend purchasing it while it is on sale because of the higher GOG price.

Journey (Epic)

I tend to play this one through every few years or so. It's only around 2-3 hours long after all. The unfortunate part of playing it on the Epic store is that this is the first time ever that I didn't meet anyone else during the play through. On PlayStation you always seem to be with someone else on the journey. The first time I played it on Epic when I got the game there were other people, but not years later. Still one of the better non-violence games out there.