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This user has reviewed 12 games. Awesome! You can edit your reviews directly on game pages.
In Other Waters

Just no

It's hard to appreciate the wonders of nature - above or below the waves - when all you see is a monochrome HUD. OK so there are usually 2 or 3 colors. WOW. and everything looks like a triangle or a spinning cog or some other weird geometric form. This is essentially a walking adventure with no graphics. Of course the AI can't appreciate the beauty of nature. It, and you as the player, never gets to see any of it. At all.

18 gamers found this review helpful
FoxTail

Just not going anywhere

As one who lived through the beginning of gaming and and low res graphics, I don't get the nostalgia for pixel art. Give me something I can see clearly. I'm good with cartoony type graphics like Night of the Rabbit and a host of other similarly not-crippled graphics approaches. I tolerate pixel art. I do NOT look forward to it (nor back with nostalgia). Then the entire first quest is a waste of time. You end up throwing the whole thing out, which begs the question - if it was important enough to spend the entire opening sequence of the game hunting that crap down, why is it so inconsequential that you end up tossing everything you gathered? That's a failure in story telling and a HUGE slap in the face to the player. It would have been simplicity itself to have the old fox wizard guy give her the last ingredient or tell her specifically where to find it. But no. Let's just throw that all away. There is still not a single walkthrough. Videos of playthroughs are NOT WALKTHROUGHS, and if I have to spend an hour - or three, lord help us - watching one I'm not going to bother playing the game afterwards. Devs can't be bothered? You shouldn't bother spending your money on this slow-walking piece of trash. After being screwed over AGAIN by the very first quest, I remembered why I never revisited this game for years after the last playthrough. Because most of the puzzles make no sense, are not intuitive, involve a lot of pixel hunting, and your reward is to have the rug jerked out from under your feet. And still the game is not even finished. AND NO WALKTHROUGHS OR HINTS. I regret whatever I spent on this game. If I had gotten it for free, it would still be a waste. I play games like this to waste time - and this game was a waste even when wasting time IS the goal.

8 gamers found this review helpful
Driftmoon Enchanted Edition

Fun breezy adventure game

Personally I don't see the link to Ultima VII but whatever. Maybe its just been too long since I played that game. I'm actually on my second run through of this game as its been long enough ago since I did the first run that everything isn't in the forefront of my memory any more. Sure, the graphics are not perfect, but they're better than a lot I've seen coming out as new games. It's 3D for one thing, and I really love the way they've implemented movement. The controls are easy to remember and you can reassign the key bindings if you want to. I'll take this style of graphics over most any 2D style graphics. I've got another new game that was made totally top down so that all you see is people's hats in a little circle. Guess which style I prefer? (HINT: Not the one where all you can see is the tops of people's heads). Plus, what the heck do you want for $6 full price? Eggs in your evil berry beer? The characters move very naturally and easily with the mouse. The storyline is engaging, doesn't drag, and progresses in a logical fashion. It's easy to play without being braindead. The only gripe I really have about this game is the insistence that the player avatar be MALE. That's just stupid, especially with this sort of game, but it appears to be enforced because they want a heterosexual romance option later in the game (which I DID NOT allow to trigger on the first play through and won't ever, I think game romance is STUPID). There were ways not to end up there but the developers chose the most backward path possible (hetero romance only and main char has to be male). I did not get the whole "OH NOZ XTIANS" thing. Influences like that are cultural more than actually religious. It's sort of like griping that a game from India has references to Hinduism. Not an xtian here either. Recommended. It was enough fun that I'm going again. I'd buy a sequel if it ever were to appear.

4 gamers found this review helpful
The Inner World

Better than usual point &click adventure

WAY better than usual, in point of fact. What's more, this game is NOT misogynistic. I don't know where anyone came up with that idea. The girl in the story is OBVIOUSLY way smarter and more practical than the guy with the whistle nose to start with - AND HE IS CONSTANTLY SAYING SO. My particularly "liberated" mother doesn't find this game objectionable, and she is definitely observant/aware enough of such issues to tell. When asked, she was not only incredulous that anyone had labeled this "misogynistic", it is her stated opinion that only a feminazi's feminazi (amongst REAL feminazis, which is a vanishingly small population to begin with regardless of Rush Limbaugh's opinion on the matter) would find it so. Honestly, the real brains in this game belong to the woman and the guy is pretty much of a dumb bell, though a nice, pleasant, KINDLY dumb bell. Get real. IT'S A GAME. Expend your energies on things like professional women (and I DON'T mean street walkers) on TV portrayed with their boobs falling out at the office and nonsense like over endowed scantily clad female warriors who ought to be a mass of scars or, more likely, DEAD, if they actually went into battle wearing only a chain mail bikini. There's nothing in this vein to see here. Move along now. (Have wishlisted the sequel).

3 gamers found this review helpful
Gorogoa

visuals lovely mechanically frustrating

This game is more an exercise in frustration than anything else. Firstly the mechanics are odd and definitely not easily understood. I'm halfway through and STILL can't really describe the game mechanics. In the second place I absolutely HATE "silent" games that purport to tell a story. 9 times out of 10, this is motivated more by laziness or an unwillingness or inability to pay to have the game localized while also being unwilling to limit the game to a single language. Hence, said unwillingness/laziness is represented throughout the game. Let's just say this is NOT that 10th game. If you're into the story, you will hate this game. HALFWAY THROUGH the game and I have no real idea what the story is and am unwilling to waste more time crashing through the unnecessary obstacles the game mechanics enforce that obscure the actual story. There is a kid. Same kid in a wheelchair. Probably same kid in a bombed out building. You want me to play the whole game before I get any coherent sense of the story? SERIOUSLY? Well **** you. By the time you get this far into the game you are probably going to want a hint. Well, forget it. Nearly every single "walkthrough" I've encountered is a "watch me play cuz I'ma great" VIDEO that will absolutely spoil the entire game for you. If you're into that, just watch somebody else play it on youtube and save your money, because once you've seen the game played there is nothing left for YOU to do. By the time you've hit Chapter 3, the "puzzle" solutions have become increasingly complicated, to the point where you are likely to have trouble remembering the order in which to do things EVEN IF you've read an actual walkthrough (in written form, not freakin' videos that spoil the whole thing). So honestly - hints won't help. I'm not likely to ever finish this game. It only gets worse. Sure, it's beautiful, but if all you're into is the "Art" just go watch it on youtube and save your $$$.

5 gamers found this review helpful
Inherit the Earth

Nostalgia is not enough ...

This game is awful. I don't understand the love for it - except that some of these people must have played this crappy game as children and have some sense of nostalgia for it. The story is fine but getting around in the game is annoying and frustrating. The field of vision is tiny. You're told to talk to everybody but most of the other characters in the game move too fast to chase down. The cursor won't keep the function you last selected, such as "talk to" - it will turn it back into walking or looking, in a random sort of way. Which makes it EVEN HARDER to talk to anyone. I can't find ANYTHING, even with a walkthrough. At one point you're supposed to go find the King of the Forest - but FOREST is not on the map. You have to know to walk to the end of one of the paths and then pixel hunt until you find the entrance to the actual forest. You need to find the hardware store in the Ferret Village, which I only know from looking up the walkthrough (again) - and I had already wandered all over that part of the map as best I could, given that I could NOT TELL where I had already been and where else I might go because so little is shown on the screen. You'll be better off to watch someone's playthrough on youtube. Frustrating doesn't begin to cover what's wrong with this game. I love older games - LOOM, the Hero's Quest games, and similar - but this one is just so badly done when it comes to mechanics. Not fun. Not fun at all.

7 gamers found this review helpful
The Settlers® 2: 10th Anniversary

Terribly disappointing

I was strongly inclined to love this game - that's why I bought it. However there is almost no support for it or useful user guides or anything else. The road system is entirely bonkers. I can't build a straight road to save my life, and I didn't buy a game like this so I could spend hours clicking around trying to get roads where I need them. Place a building, try to connect it with a road to the network - pretty soon you have the weirdest loopiest worst possible roads ever. Or you spend hours trying to find better ways to place them. If I wanted Road Builder 1982 I'd go looking for that. I don't know, maybe the road system is better in the "Gold Edition". They sure look straighter in pictures I've seen. But the whole road thing is just completely broken and it makes me rage quit every time I try to play. I want to BUILD, not try to make sense of the stupid road system. I have never been able to find any kind of strategy guide to help with that at all. Thus I have removed all settlers titles from my wish list. This was supposed to be the "best" title but it is unplayable for anyone who doesn't want to nanomanage the roads.

6 gamers found this review helpful
Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (2008)

Freakin' tedious

I love Sherlock Holmes. This isn't Sherlock Holmes. At first the game seemed interesting but I soon discovered this was only a thin patina overlaying a jumble of problems and shortcomings. First there is the issue of mobility. For some bizarre reason they decided to have the camera angle swing around at all sorts of crazy angles so you're never quite sure what direction you are going. It's not hard to end up accidentally backtracking because of this. It makes finding anything ridiculously complicated. And the map doesn't help at all because you can walk right by a place you will need to visit and if its not "time" to visit it yet, it won't mark it on the map - so you'll have to wander around until you find it again later. And I do mean "wander" - fully 3/4ths of this game is just wandering around until you accidentally find what you don't even know you're supposed to be looking for yet. Then there are the game mechanics which you only find out by trial and error and accident. For instance, there is a "look around you" view that has to be implemented by pressing the middle mouse scroll wheel (on my mouse, at least) and which is exited by pressing the scroll wheel again. Once something is in your inventory you CANNOT examine it - there is no "look at" feature, which is freakin' crazy in a game that is all about finding and examining clues! And to "use" an item, you click on it in the inventory, exit the inventory, and then click around trying to figure out if it has a use in your current location. It gives no signal that you are "using on", you just have to hope you accidentally come across a hotpoint you can "use" it on. The cursor doesn't give any indication what mode you are in. Sometimes it shows a pipe - I have no idea what that is supposed to signify. Sometimes you move by clicking with the pipe and sometimes it turns into footprints - either way you walk. It seems to have 3 forms - pipe, footprints, and magnifying glass - there is no special cursor indicating you are currently trying to use an item as there is with EVERY single other point-and-click game I have ever played. As for the so-called "puzzles" around the clues themselves, again, you end up solving them mostly by accident - not even by guess and by golly, just pure accident. At one point I knew what the intent of a puzzle was, but in no way could I actually get things to line up in order to actually SOLVE the puzzle, in large part because I was presented with a new game mechanic - an inset of the full scene down in one corner superimposed there, and no amount of clicking helped me to figure out what mechanic I was supposed to be using at that point. Even reading a walkthrough of that part didn't tell me how that mechanic was supposed to work. There are major discrepancies within the game itself. At one point Holmes finds a passport and states that the man is 36 years old, yet the birthdate (1852) on the passport and the date of entry into England (1894) makes it clear the man is 42 years old. The only way this could be true is if the man traveled 6 years into his own future before traveling to England - either that or our supersleuth has no mathematical skills to speak of. Some of the voice acting is good and some is just awful. Holmes himself is well-voiced. Watson seems OK. But an awful lot of the other voices are execrable. Especially the awful voice for the Baker Street Irregular posted outside Holmes' front door. Whoever did that should never be allowed to do a fake child's voice ever again, and whoever approved it ought to be shot. Or at least horse-whipped a little bit. I suppose I should have known to expect little from a game that mixes Holmes up with a cult of Cthulu. I never did get what was so awful about the whole Cthulu mythos - all that tommyrot about stuff man-was-not-meant-to-know-wot-of and the-knowledge-that-drives-men-mad. The idea of deep sea creatures feasting on human sacrifices may be grody but not particularly existentially terrifying. And Holmes' reaction when the little Cthulu-grubs come crawling out of that corpse was not "SHOOT THE BLIGHTERS, WATSON!" but "Well we should mosey on back to Baker Street now". Seriously. The one reason Holmes used to drag Watson around with him was so he could shoot things that needed to be shot, and if ever anything needed to be shot, it's meter long maggots crawling out of a corpse. Oh, and no sign of Holmes having called the coppers even up to and including the point where they leave England to travel to "the Continent". Yeesh! By the time the game crashed (at the cut scene where they are apparently on a train somewhere in Europe) I was thoroughly fed up. I won't be bothering to start over (no autosaves and I had covered so little content I hadn't thought to save since the bookshop). Even if I had a save near the crashpoint, this game with all its wandering around, the weird way the camera swings around, and the only real mystery being the game mechanics themselves, is just too tedious and no fun whatsoever. Plus being uber predictable. It's like being forced to read through a choose-your-own-adventure where someone else has already made all the choices. I specifically skipped the first game in this series because of its many problems. I don't know if any of the future games in this series are any better, but they're all coming off my wishlist at this point. This game is just so seriously flawed its not even worth the $2.50 I spent on it, and I don't feel like plunking down another $2.50 only to find another tedious wanderfest on my hard drive.

29 gamers found this review helpful
Banished

Banished - to the bitbucket

This is the SECOND GOG purchase I truly regret. I SO wanted to like this game. I've spent all day every day since I bought it trying hard to like it. But ultimately, not only do I not like this game - I HATE it. It sounded so perfect. A city-building game where there was no annoying combat to deal with. No zombies. No werewolves, vampires, or hideous mutants. Just you and your people, building up your town and civilization. HA! Death stalks you at ever turn. Heck, there's a review over at Rock Paper Scissors that says everything about that particular part of the game that needs to be said. But ultimately it wasn't the arbitrary things that were constantly leading to death that was the problem. There are tons of mods to get around the worst of those imbalances. What finally broke the camel's back for me was discovering just how tetchy the game is about object placement - say, roads, for instance. I got sick and tired of trying to lay down road across what looked even close up like dead level terrain, only to have the road tool tell me it won't put a road on a 3 square long section. Or trying to place building on anything even faintly resembling some sort of rational plan only to have the AI refuse to place a building in line with all the rest of the street because of some minuscule undetectable by the human eye difference in the level of just one square in the footprint of the building. Or even worse, not being able to lay down an entire field because of said invisible terrain level difference. (There's a mod for that last one, but nothing to be done about the rest) Seriously. These guys can allegedly mine iron ore out of deep mines - but they can't handle one bump in a 20 acre field? Annoying. That's what this game is. Just freakin' annoying.

6 gamers found this review helpful