Circle Empires is just the RTS I was looking for. When I want to play an RTS, most of the time I'm looking for a quick skirmish rather than a prolonged single-player campaign--and if Circle Empires weren't such an apt name given the map design I'd say that Circle Empires ought to be called Quick Skirmish. Circle Empires boils the genre down to its essentials. I wouldn't want every RTS to be like that, but I'm glad this one is. If, like me, you're looking for a game to scratch your occasional RTS itch and you want one that'll give you a more or less complete experience in under half an hour, Circle Empires could be the game for you.
I wasn't sure about Fell Seal at first. I love games in this genre, but I wasn't enthusiastic about the art and the reviews I'd read didn't give me a good sense of the combat. Fortunately, there's a demo available (on itch.io). And thank goodness for that! After a couple of hours with the demo, I realized that I was hooked and bought the game. I'm still not enthusiastic about all of the art, but I love just about everything else in Fell Seal. The classes are varied and interesting. The combat is straightforward and engaging. The game is difficult (in Veteran mode) but not punishing. In any given fight, there's a pretty good chance that at least one of your characters will go down, but this isn't a perma-death game. That character is injured, not dead, and will be available to use again once he's had time to recover. To me, the most novel and interesting thing about Fell Seal is the way the game awards experience to your party. The game makes a distinction between experience points, which affect your characters' levels (and thus their stats), and ability points, which are used to unlock abilities. Characters who don't participate in combat can still gain class-specific ability points based on the classes and actions of the characters who did participate in combat. I also appreciate the story. It's a little on the sparse side, but I consider that a virtue. What's there is interesting and it doesn't over-stay its welcome. It also respects the player's time. This is a game that knows that most people are going to play it more than once. Dialog is presented one sentence at a time rather than one word or one letter at a time the way it is in some JRPGs, making it much faster to get through. All the cutscenes are skippable. All in all, I'd say that as long as you can deal with the character sprites, Fell Seal is a must-have tactical RPG.
The best thing about Hard West is that it has some novel and interesting combat mechanics. The worst thing about Hard West is that it has some serious bugs. I like Hard West--there really aren't enough Western games out there--but there are too many problems with the game for me to enthusiastically recommend it to anyone else. The combat is great. It looks a lot like XCOM. It plays a lot like XCOM--in fact, I beat the first two campaign scenarios before I realized that it wasn't just XCOM with cowboys--but something very different is going on under the metaphorical hood. Unfortunately, the in-game tutorial doesn't explain it very well. This is a game where you absolutely should read the manual. The thing that distinguishes Hard West from XCOM is that combat is non-random. Instead, all characters have Luck points in addition to hit points. Each shot you take at an enemy reduces his Luck and when that's gone it's the hit point's turn. Characters regain some Luck when they get shot or when they use certain items. Luck is also the fuel for special abilities, so there's a tension between saving Luck for defensive purposes or spending Luck to kill enemies. I really enjoy games with novel approaches to turn-based tactics. Unfortunately, Hard West has some serious bugs. The game crashes to desktop a lot. It happens most often at the end of a mission but can happen mid-mission as well. I almost gave up on the game at one point because it crashed to desktop mid-mission four consecutive times. I ultimately had to restart the entire scenario. There's also a bug where important elements of the UI will simply fail to appear at the beginning of a mission. The most reliable way to get them back is to deliberately fail the mission--using the menu to restart doesn't work for some reason--but it's also possible--if frustrating--to beat the mission without them, in which case they'll usually be back for the next mission.
As strange as it might sound for a game released in 1998, Street Fighter Alpha 2 does not play well with older hardware. The first machine I installed it on was an older computer running Windows XP machine with Intel integrated graphics. I want to stress that that despite the machine's age, it actually exceeded the game's minimum system requirements by a significant margin. The game was almost completely unplayable, as it tended to crash whenever the screen faded to black. I thought installing a dedicated GPU would improve matters, but it actually made things worse--the game always crashed on the black screen right after launching. The good news is that the game seems to function reasonably well on Windows 8 and 8.1 machines. I was also finally able to get it running on the original machine's Linux partition (Lubuntu 15.04) by using WINE to mimic Windows 8. The trick there is to ignore the default GOG launcher and use WINE to launch the file ALPHA2.EXE directly. As for the game itself . . . Well, it's been almost 10 years since I last played any Street Fighter and it's hard for me to evaluate the gameplay when I'm so rusty. Ken seems to play as intended, for what that's worth. The game runs in 640x480--which I suppose is to be expected from an older game. The character art is heavily pixelated, but not bad otherwise. The backgrounds, unfortunately, look washed-out and dreary. I can't be certain, but I think that Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the GameBoy Advance may have actually been prettier than this. Finally, I have been playing with a Logitech F310 in Xinput mode. It works fairly well but does not recognize the Start button, so I use the Enter key instead.
