Finished Mother 1 (i.e. Earthbound 0) ... a fan translation, since for whatever reason it was never officially localized.

Its undeniable charm, unfortunately, can't disguise its roughness. The random encounter rate was obnoxiously high, and the balancing was insanely bad; there was one huge spike in difficulty when you get your third character, and I went from being slaughtered by random mooks to effortlessly beating the last boss.

I don't remember if Earthbound had those problems; I'm planning to replay it sometime soonish, but not right away. Right now, I'm playing Eye of the Beholder and (sporadically) Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake, a Kickstarter game I backed.

06/08/2014 Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded: Enjoyable romp in the past, with just the right amounts of humour. Not that easy, not that hard, and the fact that dying doesn't mean game over does help with trying new stuff.

Full list here

Hydrophobia Prophecy.

I wanted to play this game from the moment I first came across it, but was put off by the poor reviews. Now that I have played it I can say I enjoyed it, I can see why it did not win game of the year, but much of the criticism seems overly harsh to me.

Here's my list for 2014 - I'm very slow completing games in general.

23/2 Gothic 1 (8 / 10)
25/2 Operation Thunderstorm (7 / 10)
7/3 Code of Honor 2: Conspiracy Island (3 / 10)
16/3 Armed Forces Corp (5 / 10)
3/4 Into the Dark (1 / 10)
23/4 Tomb Raider 3 (7 / 10)
31/5 Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - Teeth of Naros (8 / 10)
10/6 Section 8 (7.5 / 10)
29/06 Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (9 / 10)
24/07 Wolfenstein: Spear of Destiny (5 / 10)
31/07 Driver (8.5 / 10)
06/08 F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate (7 / 10)

I also played Stoorm, a skill arcade game.

I just finished Master Reboot. I originally quit this game a few months ago right at the last part of the last level despite liking most of the game. Getting the bad out of the way first, the platforming in Master Reboot is "not so bad" at best and downright terrible at worst, luckily you won't be platforming too often. The positives of the game include the great art direction, good sound design, a strong atmosphere, a unique setting, a well put together narrative and one very memorable character. It's not the best game ever but it is solid all around and well worth a playthrough.

Last game I completed was on 27 June. Crap, it's been a while. Anyway, this time, we have...

Alien Shooter + Expansions

When I encountered the ridiculous amount of enemies on the Serious Sam games, I never thought there would actually be a game that could surpass it. Boy, how wrong I was. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present you Alien Shooter! The game's title is very descriptive of what the game is all about; a shooter game with Aliens, but sadly you are not an Alien Shooter (that is, you are not an Alien who Shoots).

Anyway, Alien Shooter is an isometric shoot-em-up where your goal is to navigate narrow halls and sometimes open areas and shoot a countless number of aliens before you proceed to the next stage to shoot yet more aliens and that's pretty much the formula of the game. 1000s of aliens is not an exaggeration for one level and the game can become very gory as a result. Oh yes, it might not have the most detailed gore of all times, but when the whole floor becomes a sea of blood, it becomes a moot point. To help you in this task, you have an assortment of progressively more powerful weapons which you can buy with money, beginning with the humble pistols till you reach something like the flamethrower (sadly, thanks to the game's limited visual quality, the enemies don't burn, but just die), along with some environmental hazards like good old barrels and even some missiles. You can also buy or even find some equipment that increases your hp, damage, ammo capacity, speed and of course some good old armor, because you can't have a shoot-em-up without health kits and armor pickups. Alien Shooter can, indeed, become greatly cathartic.

Having said that, there are things that annoyed me with the game. First, the isometric camera along with the combination of narrow halls and the lack of wall transparency can make it difficult at times to shoot or avoid enemies. Speaking of enemies, the AI can be dumb as bricks, with the pathfinding being particularly terrible, resulting in enemies who keep on running in walls, rather than walk through the door next to them in their attempt to reach you. Becomes particularly hilarious, when enemies with ranged capabilities decide to keep shooting at the damned walls, thinking they can get you, and as a result end up killing their allies. XD

Finally, the inability to save mid-stage can be particularly annoying, especially with some levels from the expansions which can take a while to complete and if you lose all your lives, there you go back to the beginning of the stage. Extra finally, the second expansion can be particularly bullshit, because even when you have cleared the room of 1000s of enemies and proceed to the next one only to find even more and you decide to try retreat backwards to gain some distance from them, enemies appear from sudden nowhere so the game can get you in an incredibly cheap pincer attack.

Oh well, time to update the list. It's been collecting dust.

Peggle. Not much to say other than it's pretty damned addictive. Figured I'd finally fire it up after getting it for free on Origin a while ago. Stayed up way too late last night playing and started again this afternoon. Just finished.

Full list Here.

Mechanic Escape

Nice little twitch/punishment platformer. Took me about 5 hours to beat it, though I was only able to 100% the first of 4 chapters. I think I'd go insane if I tried the others.


Guacamelee! Gold Edition

Fun metroidvania, not as hard as I feared (though I didn't get all the secrets / orbs / etc, and have no intention of playing on Hard).

Donkey Kong Country (SNES) with my gf yesterday

True classic.

Great Greed, a Gameboy RPG

It reminds me of Earthbound somewhat in its feel, but its structure of "grind until you can easily beat all the enemies in a closed area; complete a few dungeons to finish the area and go to the next one; grind until you can easily beat all the enemies in a closed area; repeat seven times" was practically a parody of bad JRPG balancing. Except that parodies are funny, whereas this was just irritating.

On the upside, frequent autosaves. That's something you don't see in a lot of JRPGs; in fact, I can't think of another with an autosave mechanic.

Just finished Witcher. What a fine game. Loved the ambiguous moral choices. Loved the way the story developed. The only issue I had were the emersion breaking sex antics (oh, you bought me some gloves? lets root), but still, loved the game.

Finished up Battle Realms as far as I'm concerned. Completed the campaign and played around a bit with all the factions Skirmish mode. I really liked it when I started out, but as I played I just ran into more and more problems. It is a pretty unique RTS though, so that's worth something.

First was the overall slow pace of the game. Units walk super slow, and while you can run it drains your stamina, which is more useful in a fight. Units all have quite a bit of health vs. the amount of damage dealt, so things take a long time to die. And finally the peasants spawning on fixed timers mean that there's a lot of time spent waiting on things to build, and also that there's little to no opportunity to get ahead by playing better and faster.

Testing out each faction, they all felt very similar. More diffentiated that Warcraft 2, but not nearly as much as Warcraft 3 or Starcraft 1/2. Dragon and Serpent felt practically identical, while Lotus was probably the most different with its lack of healers. Still, they all boiled down to "Build your melee building, your ranged building, and your magic building. Then start sending peasants through any or all of them at random."

It bothered me that there doesn't seem to be any access to unit stats. It would have helped me to get a better grasp in each factions' identity. Maybe the Dragon clan has higher melee power, while the Serpent clan has better ranged attacks. Things like this would be nice to know, but since I can't see the stats I can't learn.

AI was very good at hiding workers and/or buildings in obscure corners of the map. Combined with no option to turn of the Fog of War, this made a couple missions in the campaign truly tedious to actually finish. Especially with the aforementioned slow units, making scouring the map a real chore.

And a couple minor-ish bugs here and there. Skipping a cutscene caused me to not start a mission with the units I was supposed to have. Sound bug where all the sound effects stopped except for the running-in-water noise. View got stuck in in some random spot on the map until I quit the game and restarted. Annoying things like that.

Oh, almost forgot. Hotkeys and unit control. The hotkeys in this game are some of the most obtuse I've ever seen in a game. It is actually easier to click the buttons than to try to remember these things. Not that you don't have the extra time to do so - slow pacing and teensy-weensy armies mean you've got plenty of free time. As for unit control, that was pretty sketchy. Tell my guys to move across the map, see some enemies along the way. Do the units stop to attack? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Order units to attack a specific unit/building - sometimes they do, sometimes they just attack anything in the general area. Units don't necessarily follow your orders, but they will at least do some semi-reasonable approximation.

So obviously I've got a lot of complaints. Battle Realms has issues. Despite all that, it is still a pretty good game. Some solid ideas, a nice aesthetic. Just not quite to my taste.

The 7th Guest
Overall I liked this game and I think the concept and most of the puzzles were fun. I wasn't able to solve all of them though. I needed a walkthrough for the can puzzle (which is impossible to solve for non-native speakers in my eyes) and I was unable to complete the microscope game (don't know how many times I tried, but the computer always beat me).

I'm also not sure that I completely got the story. Sometimes it was hard to understand what the characters said, because the music was too loud and the fact that there were no subtitles or other languages available didn't help. Also the order of the cutscenes was a little weird sometimes, but that probably depends on the order I solved the puzzles. But I really enjoyed the cheesy FMV sequences.

Complete list of finished games in 2014