Bard's actually more useful in IWD1, IMO (and can fill the INT+WIS need quite easily), but they're good in IWD2 as well. I'm a bit of a Bard and Rogue fanboy though, so take my comments with a bag of salt. Just be sure when you play IWD2 that you have one character with both Bluff and Diplomacy as your party 'face' and you'll be golden. Toss a thread in the IWD subforum if you want any party advice. I and a couple others hang out there regularly and we're always glad to lend advice (or just pretend we're good at the game, depending on your outlook! :P )

Here's my list.
Newest game: Gone Home.

Gone Home is an interactive story. However, it is a story which would lose it's entire impact if done through any medium. The scattered papers around the house give mere glimpses of what has happened in your absence, yet combined they form a HUGE backstory of your entire family, yourself, and even your dead grandfather(?). The scraps written by your sister, however, are different. They reveal her social interactions, allowing your first glimpse into her life to be entirely your own analysis. This juxtaposes fantastically well with the fully voice-acted snippets that follow those scraps, which tell you the sister's (Sam) side of the story. What you originally would discount as simple teen angst becomes a truly impactful, emotional story of a girl discovering forbidden love. The writing is top-notch, but the main impact comes from Sam's perfect voice-acting, which is so organic in its portrayal of desperation, confusion, and wistfulness that it makes you feel the story is entirely true.

If you aren't opposed to a game with a solid story but no gameplay, give it a go. Unless you just really hate teenagers, in which case you should remember your own experiences.

Little Inferno

No, I did not buy this game on its own. It was part of the Humble PC & Android Bundle 8 which I got mainly for Anomaly 2. Anyway....

One good thing I can say about the game is that the things available for purchase burn nicely. Yeah, that's a pretty nice fire. Another good thing is that it lasts 3-4 hours. Despite considering itself a parody of the phone/tablet/facebook games, I can't shake the feeling that it really isn't much different from them. And the ending sequence is just... strange. The game also lacks any kind of replayability. Once you finish it, there is little reason to go back. Too bad as they could have made a splendid pyromaniac game.

Anyway, the list.

I just finished Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded, my first GOG game this year.

It's a fun and simple game. Get a weapon, kill everything, get a bigger weapon, kill bigger things.
The game has a few RPG elements, like experience points, attributes and one decision. I might replay the game one day to get the other end.

On the bad side: Three times I got stuck inside a wall. Everytime very close to the end of the stage, this is incredible annoying because you have to run into walls to get some of the secrets.


Here's my list.

Persona P3P. I think it's some sort of work of insane genius, but I was glad when it was over--eighty hours in. Two-hundred fifty-floor randomly generated dungeon, for fucks sake; if they'd scaled that back, the game would have seriously benefited from it.

Gone Home--A brilliant game, and also short. In fact, some people complain about how short it is, but after Persona P3P, I badly needed to recuperate with a short game.

The next game on my list, Slender, is also supposed to be quite short*. After that, I might have recovered enough to have another go at Arkham Asylum, which I loved but never finished due to GFWL deciding not to let me log in to my account any more.

* Also quite bad, but I've enjoyed badly-reviewed games before, so we'll see.

Finished up another classic NES game: Dragon Quest 2. A marked improvement over the first one, but still not as good as the old Final Fantasy's IMO. Still interesting to see the humble beginnings of such a long-running JRPG series.

15/50 NES games down, although 7 or so of the remaining ones will be replays.

Just finished Might and Magic 3. I like free roaming RPG. Might and Magic series rocks!

My List

Done: Arkista's Ring, Castlevania 1-3, Chaos World, Contra, Super Contra, Contra Force (Didn't complete, but I'm "done" with it), Crystalis, Dragon Quest 1-2, Metroid, Mega Man 1-3.
To Do: More than I want to type right now. Mostly old RPG/Adventure games and some platformers.

I completed my first game of 2014 this afternoon, and it was Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. In the beginning, it was okay enough to continue and have fun, but after a while, I started to really like it. In the end, it was a good game, but I'm unsure whether I will ever replay it or not.

Finished:

Deponia 3: Goodbye Deponia - Had quite a lot of fun with this one until I got to the end. The game fitted very nicely with the rest of the series in all aspects, but personally I found the ending to be a great letdown ( it greatly diminishes the replay value of the entire series as well imo). Too bad really, if they had just made an ending that was proper and in the light-hearted vibe of the rest of the game(s), it could have been a very fun last part to the series.

Complete list: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2014/post44

Finished Retro City Rampage.
I didn't like this game at all. In fact, I thought it was pretty much garbage. The positives: spotting and identifying references to old games was interesting. The music was also quite good, and I even noticed that some of it was made by one of my favorite video game music composers, Jake "virt" Kaufman. But everything else was abysmal, in my opinion. The game is unbelievably hectic and the plots constantly jumps all over the place, like a kid with ADHD that has drank 10 cups of high-caffeine coffee and fifteen spoonfuls of sugar. Really hard to follow everything that's going on. And the game tries soooo hard to be funny...but I did not laugh a single time, or even sneer. Though the game has a sort of an NES-look, the gameplay reminded me of something that could've existed on the Game Boy Color. It was not fun at all to play this game. And how come, near the end, after we've gotten used to the overhead GTA-stylish gameplay, the game suddenly turns into a 'Splosion Man clone? For fuck's sake, that game was released less than five years ago: that is hardly retro (by the way, I reeeeally hated that stage in particular). And then it turned into Rad Racer. It definitely felt to me like the developer was way addicted to nostalgia, and wanted to make a game that would reference every single pop culture phenomenon and video game he has run into during his life, but when it comes to gameplay, that just doesn't work. The whole thing is an utter, complete mess that has no idea what it tries to be, or wants to be. I really can't recommend this to anyone - not for GTA enthusiasts, nor for people looking for a trip to the past. There are better games to play if you're seeking nostalgia: like for example the original games this game tries to parody so hard.

Finished Eversion. it was fun but I didn't want to collect all the coins (too difficult / too much die & retry) so I got the bad ending.

Full list here.

Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons

A single player co-op? Madness! Actually, that works pretty great. It wasn't that hard to control the boys. I really fell in love with this game: it's very emotional, for one thing. It's amazing to watch the brothers care for each other and work together to overcome the obstacles. I really liked them both and got attached to them, despite them ever speaking nothing but gibberish. There were a couple of scenes where I was really close to shedding a tear. The gameplay is very fun, although the puzzles weren't really that challenging. The environments look great, and the music fits the atmosphere perfectly. Easy recommend, as it was engaging enough to make me play through it in one sitting - just make sure you own a gamepad. The game's not that long (a little less than 3 hours for me), but it was quality time from start to finish.

list

I just finished To The Moon, and holy shit... Music was perfect, writing was fantastic, and the tragedy is so perfect that I still am unsure whether to consider the ending good or bad (Emotionally, that is. As far as quality goes, it was nigh perfect.)

I know this game is sad to most everyone who plays it, but it really hit home for me. As for why that is, I won't say. But it's not related to the plot twist in Act 3.