I've been playing Fallout 1 a lot the last two weeks. I thought that the face of the character Killian Darkwater looked like someone familiar. I recognised him after a few seconds, it had to be MacGyver. I knew that it was him, it had to be - both his voice, character and face was familiar. I then learned that it indeed was MacGyver who voiced Darkwater. Interesting. I shall commence my first playthrough of Fallout 2 in a few days.

Cathedral, that is the level where I gave up on the game. I had sneaky suspicion that the Cathedral level was going to be similarly confusing and as tedious as that infernal Catacombs level with all the zombies. It's still a good game, but knowing that Thief II is so much better made it really easy to call it a day.

Yesterday i finished all campaigns of Age of Wonders 3 + add-ons and played Quake II. You know just mindlessly run around and kill stuff...

Now I'm reading the manual for Constructor. Let's see if it's fun.

I've now started playing Thief Gold (will pick up my playthrough of Thief 2 again later), on hard difficulty. I'm now early in the 10th mission (the one with the opera house). Good game, but as some have already written here, very confusing level design in parts of the game. Some levels aren't much of a problem, but in others I had to look at a walkthrough just to know where I should be going. Even worse is that there are situations where you could make a level unwinnable...in the 9th level there's a lava-filled chasm which you have to cross (there's an important item on the other side) and you need to have three (!) rope arrows to get over that chasm...if you don't have them you can't really proceed anymore. That's just bad design imo.
The supernatural aspects haven't bothered me so far, in a way the missions with zombies and ghosts provide some nice variety. Maybe I'll change my mind though when I return to the cathedral, that seems to be a pretty extreme level from what I've read :-)

EDIT: I think I'll put Thief Gold away, at least for now...I've seen about 2/3 of the game anyway. It's good, but the levels (for which you don't have any good maps) are too confusing for my taste, feels too much like work finding your way around. Maybe I'll finish my game one day, but not right now.
I'll probably play a bit more of Thief 2 though.

Nothing, sort of. Just finished Dragon Age: Origins last night; enjoyed it, and will likely play again sometime with a different origin story.

Need to finish Red Faction, that I dropped for some reason. I think I got frustrated when the mercenaries starting showing up in force, much tougher and tons more accurate than every other enemy up to that point. In other words, my prime FPS years are behind me.

Also need to finish Stalker: Clear Sky, which I also dropped because I got irritated with one fight. Some mutant that does this thing where you get snapped right over next to him, he stuns you, beats on you for a while, and then you get zipped back where you were. Rinse, repeat until dead. I'll get past that one - I didn't take but a couple stabs at it originally.

Beyond that, not sure what to play next. Might restart from scratch the Prophecy of Pendor mod for M&B Warband. Was taking my sweet time about things and hit the ~2000 day mark. After that, everyone just stopped fighting my faction. Musta hit a time limit.

Could also install the later Fallout games and give them a whirl.

Of the three new games I installed (Deus Ex/Divine Divinity/Gothic), I guess I started playing Gothic for now.

I just arrived to the old town or what was it called, and already I am overwhelmed by talking to everyone, many of which gave me some fed ex quests. One person wanted me to go buy him a decorated sword, I went to the salesman, he wanted 10 coins more than the first guy gave me, I went back to the first guy to get the missing 10 coins (ore)... but when I got back to the salesman, he was gone.

I guess it was because night had fallen, maybe he just went to sleep. Then I wander around in the dark town wondering whether I am supposed to just wander around until morning, in order to buy the damn sword. I bump into one guard who says I should go to sleep in an empty hut, "the one with the canopy", but I can't find the said hut. Instead, I go to another hut and just go sleep in the bed until morning, and in the morning some cook outside is angry at me because I was apparently in his hut. Oh well, he calmed down and gave me another subquest.

Then I ran into that damn MUD! The irritating guy who keeps following you and talks shit, he reminds me of that one guy in Baldur's Gate 1 or 2 which keeps following you around irritating you. I google who the heck this Mud guy is and what I am supposed to do with him, most seem to cause him an accident in order to get rid of him, and one FAQ tells that he will die in Chapter IV.

So I presume he is not useful for anything? Why did they add him to the game, just to troll the players?

Anyway, I guess I need to go see next if I can buy that decorative sword for that one guy, to get my first subquest finished. And I don't know about those two or three guys who keeps asking for "protection money", should I pay them? All of them?

Confusing... This is the part I dislike in many RPGs (also JRPGs), arriving to a new town and trying to talk to every townperson.

Currently playing:

Breath of the Wild - Switch
Stardew Valley - Switch
World of Warcraft - PC

Got a bunch of games I'm partway through that I intend on going back to, but right now I'm just playing what's fun instead of worrying about my backlog.

Maybe I'm getting confused with a different enemy (it's been a while since I played Stalker), but IIRC the best way to beat those guys is to rush them, although you do want to watch out for their melee attack when you close the distance.

I just started Doom 64 EX. I always liked the N64 game and this is even better since you can do mouse and keyboard control and jack up the resolution to make the game even prettier.

Pretty much, but if you beat him hard and long enough, you'll get a funny dialogue and he'll stop pestering you.
Regarding the protection money, iirc some of the guards will beat you up and take your money if you don't pay them, iirc it's best to avoid passing by them if you can.

Thanks - I'll give that a shot. I'd be finishing it from a completionist perspective; Clear Sky isn't as good as the other two, so I'm mostly playing just get done with the story.

I have been playing the original Tomb Raider throughout this week, and I am hoping to finish it this weekend!

As someone who played only the newer Tomb Raider titles, I was shocked to see just how exploration-heavy this first game is. It's unlike any Action Adventure game I've played, and that's mostly because of how it wants the player to take it all slow and steady. I am used to more fast-paced games where it's all about going in, but I am actually very fond of this Tomb Raider game :)

To me that sounds like some kind of moral test, can you endure an idiot (who was convicted for abusing animals?) or will you beat him up like the rest of the village? It would be nice if they gave you some reward for allowing him follow you around, but apparently not. Not sure if I can endure him until Chapter IV (where he is supposed to die anyway?), or if I will just run him into some accident (a fight etc.) to get rid of him.

He is truly as irritating as that one character who follows you around in one of the Baldur's Gate games, but that BG creepie was doing it only in one town, I think. I don't recally for sure how one could get rid of that guy in BG, was it just that eventually he got tired of pestering you.

I decided to give 10 ore to one guard... and he said that I am supposed to give the same amount every day. How about no? So I reloaded an earlier save game and decided to decline such "protection money" offers, unless I find out they really are beneficial to me.

Apparently because of that, one guy offered me a quest to fetch some amulet outside the village, but it was an ambush where they wanted to kill me because I hadn't paid that protection money, it was kind of a revenge I guess. I really much wanted to kick those three ambusher's asses, but for now I am too weak to fight them, so I guess I need to "accept" that amulet quest later in order to beat those three guys up, when I am a more proficient fighter.

At this point, I like how diverse the social structures etc. in Gothic are, having all those different factions and you are supposed to grow your social network to get up in the hierarchy. knowing the right persons and doing favors to them etc It really does feel like you're thrown into a prison trying to figure out how to cope with the rest of the people.

I guess I was expecting Gothic to be simpler, like you just fight monsters and occasionally perform tasks (subquests) to people in some villages. It seems it is more than that.

I also liked how "realistic" some conversations or subquests are, testing you how far you'd go. Like that quest to go buy the ornamental sword to one guy (he can't buy it because he is disliked by the shopkeeper). You find out he is asking 110 ore for the sword (instead of the 100 that the person gave you), so instead of taking the hit and paying 10 ore from my pocket, I did what I'd probably do in real life: I went back to the person and told him it costs 110 ore, not 100 ore. And indeed, he agreed to give me the missing 10 ore.

Also I don't recall if it was some other quest where you get the best reward by pushing it to the limit, up to saying that fine if he doesn't agree with your demands, he can forget about you doing the quest (even though he had suggested he can certainly find someone else to do it). If you go all the way, he finally agrees because he knows it is not easy to get some new guy to do the task. I think it was the task where Thorus wanted me to make sure some thief will not revisit the old town anymore (he left it open for me to decide how to achieve that, be it killing the thief, or talking to him...).

Playing The Witcher 1 for the first time. Yes, we do exist!

So far I've played like only the first five minutes of all the three Witcher games, mainly to see how well they run on my systems. I've been meaning to start playing that trilogy properly, but for now I am going through the Gothic/Risen and Fallout series.

I've completed W1EE this year and that was really nice 56 hours. Well balanced action crpg with interesting setting and quite good story. Have a nice play!
Well, that's my problem with W2. I have the game but no hardware strong enough to run it at reasonable settings :( But, as you see, there are so many great classics to play that there is no problem with waiting a bit ;)