I think I was still having fun with Xenonauts when I hit the 150-hour mark, but at this point I'm about to hit 300 hours, all in one campaign, and it's just a drag. I took a three-year break in the middle and it didn't really do much to reduce the drudgery. I just want to finish! I'm not sure even the modern XCOM games could sustain my interest if one campaign took this long (I'm not a Long War guy, of course), and Xenonauts lacks the extra depth provided by XCOM's classes and ability trees. My big problem is that there are so many UFOs. Every few days, five or so UFOs pop up simultaneously, and when you shoot them down they leave a crashsite for your soldiers to assault, which is your primary means of getting money (most of your funding from countries will probably go into base maintenance). There's also an option to just do an airstrike instead and skip the ground mission for an instant cash payout, but I've only just started using it to a significant degree because of how sick I am of the gameplay. There's an ingame hint that claims you get almost as much money from an airstrike as from a ground mission, but this is untrue, unless you consider $50,000 to be "almost as much" as $150,000. You'd run out of money constantly if you didn't do virtually every available ground mission. The way that hint is written suggests the balance is supposed to be you get about the same amount of money from either approach and the only reason to do ground missions is to level up your soldiers. I would prefer that design, but I guess they must've decided against it at some point after writing that hint. Or maybe it's the difficulty I'm playing at, I don't know. Don't remember if I chose a high one or not. Anyway, for what it's worth, the air combat is pretty engaging compared to XCOM EU and the original X-COMs.
The Dagger of Amon Ra was a favorite of mine when I was young. I've replayed it twice recently, once with my old floppy copy, and once after buying a copy on GOG. I bought this because I supected the CD version would have a higher quality version of the soundtrack, of which I'm a huge fan, but no such luck. Instead there's voice acting, and it is awful. Shame, considering how good the acting was in King's Quest VI, released the same year by the same company. Very different budgets, I guess. It is kind of fun to meet each character and marvel at how bad they sound -- almost every character has a different accent -- but it does clash with my nostalgia. Anyway, not a big deal, just put it on text mode and it's the same as the floppy version I love. Except... Bugs! The floppy version had one big bug, sometimes preventing you from interacting with things in the armor room (not an issue in this version as far as I saw), but I experienced several problems in my playthrough of this version. Music often goes missing, the options menu is inexplicably unavailable fairly frequently, and I did experience one freeze-up (not a total crash, but I couldn't interact with anything anymore). My rose-colored glasses for the underlying game have faded as well. The whodunit aspect is honestly not good -- you're quizzed on details/motives at the end, and for some of them you have practically no information at all. There are also several spots in the game where you can miss a clue or an item and be unaware until the final act when it turns out you need that item and you can't go back for it (the game actively discourages you from getting one such item, in a way that makes it seem like you're not supposed to get it). And the conversation system, where you ask characters about any topic written in your notebook, is interesting but ultimately very tedious. Still, despite the flaws, the game oozes character, and should be overall enjoyable for people fond of old point-and-clickers.
