Alright, thanks! And I look forward to reading about the next games you play through. :)

Unfortunately, I won't buy this until it gets stripped of U-Play.

If Ubi wants to delude themselves into protecting their big franchises with DRM, fine by me, as I generally find blockbuster games to be really boring. (See Assassin's Creed, Rayman, etc.)

But put it on more niche games ... grrrrr

That's the first time I've heard anyone say that Rayman was boring. Only played the first 3 myself, and #2 was my favorite (also never finished the first one due to difficulty.)

Different strokes for different folks, then.

I'd say of Rayman 2, I find the design to be very imprecise.

Like... a Japanese-designed platformer would have chasms that are specific lengths to force you to jump at the right speed / distance etc. to get across. And as much as some people hate the tank-controls of the Core Tomb Raider games, that's one thing that they did very well. Every jump is meticulously planned.

But for Rayman 2, you can almost start a jump anywhere, do the float-jump thing and land on the other side. To me, it's like ... why did you even bother making this game an action-platformer, if the jumping has so much leeway. It just becomes something to do, rather than a challenge to overcome.

I got the supposed to be 'best ending', when you threw the head into the portal.
Is that the ending you liked? ^^

Actually, no. (SPOILERS) The ending I liked was the "neutral" ending. If I remember correctly, you achieve it by knocking the pillars over. There is a cutscene after that with Daniel leaving the castle, narrating. It felt final and fulfilling, certainly more fulfilling than the "best" ending. (END SPOILERS)

The neutral ending was the one I got on my first playthrough, and it wasn't until a little after that that I discovered there were two more endings. When I played the game the second time, I got the "best" ending, and was left a little underwhelmed. That's why I was curious as to which ending you got.

And Blackwell Convergence makes three, wrapping up the first stage of this Wadjet Eye point-and-click quintet. This third in the series is the best so far, to my mind. It continues the story launched in the first game; while they are not strictly linked, and can be played separately, there are links from this game back to the first two that would really twist the whole out of shape for players who don't begin at the beginning. It took me about three and a half hours to finish this game, and another couple of hours to go back and wrap up all the achievements.

This Blackwell is the most sophisticated of the bunch so far. The chunky pixel graphics remain firmly entrenched in the mid-80s, but the ease and flow of the game mechanics show the benefits of lessons learned along the way. This is a consciously cinematic game, if I can say that about an adventure that plays out at 320x240 resolution: it isn't grand and scenic, but it is a story that plays out the way we'd expect to see a story roll out at the cineplex.

My friends Abe Goldfarb and Rebecca Whittaker return as Joey the Ghost and Rosa the Medium (this was actually Rebecca's first Blackwell game; she later re-recorded Rosa's dialogue in the first game, replacing the earlier actress who first voiced the role), and several other Wadjet regulars are back in the other roles. Recording quality is mixed, but the voicing this time is particularly excellent overall.

Banter is easy-going and fruitful, and the puzzles are so native to the environment this time out that I did not get seriously stuck along the way even once. I had to backtrack and experiment a bit, but you know the part of the adventure game when you walk around with, I don't know, a candle and a slice of pizza and a quarter and a boot, and you spam them all over everything in the fervent hope that something will dislodge a clue? This game doesn't have that part. Instead, detective-like, you figure things out, make a few connections, interview all the suspects, and then make it to the end on your own steam. Or you do if you're me, and if you're me, that doesn't happen much with other games, because usually I'm never thinking that if you glue the pizza to the boot with the candle, the cheese will harden so you can use the sticky soles to climb walls. BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE STUPID. And it doesn't happen in Blackwell Convergence.

While ghosting and detective work and salvation are the main scenarios here, it's becoming clear that these first three Blackwell games are also a love song aimed at a certain vanished heart in New York City. We were once a spunky city of incalculable characters, unkempt and idiosyncratic, unvarnished and unpredictable. As the city has been leveled and rebuilt for the rich, some of its famous loose-cannon soul has rolled off the deck and been lost in the waters. Wadjet creator Dave Gilbert still remembers a New York that wasn't populated by the rude crude fratty nouveau riche - where the workingman (or workingwoman) was king, the sawdust was on the floor and the pressed tin was on the ceilings, and most of us were honest good people at heart.

My list

A few more for the list:

Finished Kanon the other day, an old romance VN. One of my favorites, it also has a great anime adaptation.

Got a little tired of Sacred 2, so I loaded up the first Sacred instead. Personally I think they are both about just as good overall. The first has more interesting classes, while the second is a better designed game (I almost said "polished" but I can't say that would be accurate considering the large number of bugs without the community patch). Great hack and slash RPGs.

Last, I just finished playing the campaign for Starcraft and the Brood War expansion. Blizzard has spoiled me on RTS games. I keep looking, but nobody makes an RTS that I like nearly as much as the Starcraft games.

Have you tried the Meridian New World demo?

I'm actually beating a lot more games than I was expecting to.

Next games to beat will be the rest of the blackwell bundle and Dead Island riptide. Probably resonance after that.

Riptide GP2

This is a very fun arcade racing game, though only if you're interested in the single player or have friends who also play it, as the multiplayer community seems practically dead.

I had a great time completing the single player campaign. There is a real sense of speed here, and while the graphics are nothing to write home about, they are pleasant enough and run great on my Radeon HD4850. It took me many tries to score 3 Stars in quite a few of the events, and some I had to come back to later after a few level ups and with a further upgraded hydrojet. The AI is decent, and I didn't notice any rubber-banding.

Crashing into other players or even the scenery only slows you down a little (or a lot if you actuall hit the scenery head-on), and the only way to wipe-out is to land back in the water in the middle of performing a "Trick". In that case, you lose precious seconds while your hydro jet resets back on the track, and then has to accelerate back up to speed. Which is important for me because I'm not a very good driver :)

There are four types of events. "Race" is self-explanatory. In "Elimination," every 15 seconds the racer in the last place is eliminated until only the winner is left. "Hot Lap" has you race a single lap against time, and "Free Style" give you 60 seconds to score as many points as you can by performing Tricks. The first 8 event series all contain a mix of these four event types, while the final "All Stars Cup" only has Races.

I 3*'d all the events and got all the Single Player Steam achievements. The character progression system is a detriment to actually finding online opponents which are a good matchup. When I looked online, there were only 2 people playing, and they were were lower level. That makes for rather one-sided racing.

Also the game only seems to support 360 controller and keyboard for racing, and only the 360 controller is supported for split-screen. Furthermore, only the 360 controller gives the option to disable "auto-acceleration".

No I haven't. I did go check it out and the video looks pretty awesome, but it doesn't look like the game is available anywhere but Steam (which I don't use). I figured I'd try the demo anyway and maybe request it here if I liked it, but said demo crashed on startup.

That's what I did too. Worked for me. :/
http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/meridian_new_world

Are you on Intel integrated?

Intel i5 3570K with an AMD Radeon HD 6870.