Ha, I don't generally suffer from motion sickness, but I have to admit I did feel queasy at times playing JoaR...so much ceiling/wall climbing :|

Y'know, I thought the same thing myself after the first time I played MP2, but then a couple years later I played through both of them back to back and came out of it liking the second one way more. The first is still absolutely wonderful, of course, but I felt the action was handled a bit better, the story was carried way better, and the decision to leave out the baby-scream-laden frustration mazes was a much better design choice.

Plus the actress for Mona Sax from the first game was replaced by Wendy Hoopes, whose voice makes me meeeellllt. It's like sinfully delicious chocolate for the ears. Even her singing!

PS, if you haven't played Max Payne 3 yet . . . I would highly suggest don't. I picked it up and played it earlier this year just to see if it could really be as bad as I'd heard it was, and it was worse. I only paid about three bucks for it, thank goodness, so I don't really consider it an enormous loss financially, but mentally it was like a wheat thresher applied directly to the brain.

Really? I heard it was all right, at least action wise.

Compared to the other two games, the action has changed. It's slowed down, but not in an awesome bullet-time sorta way. Max has really gotten to feeling his age, it seems, as he has to either hide behind every available piece of furniture or insta-die. They took a run-and-gun bullet-time ballet and turned it into a cover-based shooter, a move of which I do not personally approve. I tried running around like crazy, taking out every suckah in the room in a rabid frenzy of shoot-dodging and wild sprays of automatic fire, and all it got me was dead. So eventually I gave into the game's pressure tactics and started moving from cover to cover, slowly advancing bit by bit until I could finally take the bad guys out without them putting a bullet between my eyes, hoping desperately that they weren't about to flank me (which they always tried to do) and murder me horribly (which they almost always ended up doing).

And that leads to my second big problem with the game's action. The difficulty settings in the game are ridiculous. I went with the standard difficulty as I usually do for a first playthrough, and it was like starting in the final stages of either of the first two games right from the start. Even after I switched to the tactics the game wanted me to employ, I was still getting killed repeatedly. So I decided to hell with it and set it on easy difficulty, and almost immediately I was yet again disgusted with it, but this time because the game had become insultingly too easy. I was waltzing through bad guys like they were standing still, and for me that's not any more fun than getting gunned down every five seconds. The difficulty settings in MP1 and 2 weren't slouches, that's for sure, but at least you could find a middle ground in 'em instead of definitively being one extreme or the other.

I briefly (very briefly) considered just soldiering through anyway, but by that point I was just so frustrated and the awful story and visual design had worn me down so much that I just couldn't see myself enjoying even what few good parts the game might contain once I managed to run across them.

There might be folks who dig the game for its mechanics, I dunno. But I kinda doubt that very many of them are folks who loved the first two games. MP3 is a very different animal.

Just finished Eleusis (which I said I'd play right in this thread...or was it the one from last year? :D) - gotta say, was pretty bored. Okay, the atmosphere wasn't tooooooooooo bad, but meh. I think it was also the first adventure game I ever played through. But I guess for that small of a team it was okay. The ending's okay too, I guess, but they could have done more there.

And I finished my x-th ME3 playthrough a few weeks ago. Still as many to go, lol. Should take a break from it first, though :D

I spent a lot of the time in the first game hiding behind doors. Occasionally I'd do a bullet-time leap that would end with me lying on my stomach while people shot me. Then I'd go back to hiding behind doors.

Not sure my brain can think back that far, but here goes:

Valiant Hearts, GTA V, Latest Tomb Raider, Watch dogs, Child of Light..I know there's more!

How did you like them? I'm curious about Valiant Hearts and Child of Light, and I read mixed reviews about Watch Dogs.

Finished Peggle and Murdered: Soul Suspect lately. The first is a nice casual game. Murdered is a very good game for those who enjoy good stories with many secondary story/world elements. Gameplay is a bit flawed but it didn't annoyed me much.

Full list here.

Admiral Nemo
A mindless shoot 'em up game with pretty graphics and not much more to offer. There are 60 levels and the difficulty stays exactly the same all the time. You can upgrade your city, but it doesn't matter, because it won't give you better weapons. I doubt that you can fail or lose the game. There are ships, you shoot them up and after a while the level is over. That's all.

Thank you to xckx who gifted me the game!

Complete list of finished games in 2014

Guacamelee! Gold Edition

I've finally finished this game and man, what a relief... At the beginning I thought I would love it but alas, it turned out that playing it for more than half and hour was too tedious. I'm not saying it's a bad game, the devs put a lot of work and love to create it but I didn't enjoy it much. Why? Well, the game tries to mix three genres: metroidvania, hardcore platformer and a brawler. Unfortunately they do not mix well:
- metroidvania aspect is not well developed. There is a lot of backtracking but not so many good puzzles and in most cases they are straight-forward like "you can't go there because because you haven't learned double jump yet".
- hardcore platformer aspect is really well done with a popular "switching the worlds" twist but doing the same complicated jumping sequence over and over again (due to the backtracking) is frustrating. Don't get me wrong, I do like hardcore platformer games, Giana Sisters comes to mind, but there every level was different and I was not forced to repeat the very same sequence every five minutes.
- brawler aspect is badly designed. Perhaps it's subjective as I'm not fan of beat'em up games but I didn't find those fights enjoyable (almost) at all. And sadly, there were a lot of them. More objective criticism: some enemies had shields that can be destroyed only by a very specific attack. To me it looks like that they couldn't balance attacks/combo system well so they added this feature to prevent you from button-mashing. It felt really artificial and stupid.

So yeah, the game is finished (with a better ending I might add) and I have no intention to ever come back to it nor get the upgraded version.

Full list

Finished American MacGee's Grimm. At last, I must say.

From the creators of Alice and Alice: Madness Returns, this was originally an episodic free game, featuring Grimm, a character who loves to defile classical fairy tales. He does so by "painting" the world in dark and disgusting ways, which in return twist the people and turn the fairy tales to almost horror stories.

It's 3 seasons long, each season being eleven 30 min-1h long games, each about one fairy tale (Thumbelina, Mulan, the Pied Piper, etc...)

At first, during the first season it was really interesting and the humor, while often scatologic, was often entertaining. But one piece of advice: if you want to love that game, don't play each game too close to each other. That's because the game mechanics are always the same and also because the real platform moments are imprecise and unnerving at best...

Grimm is the archetype of a "casual" game, in the meaning that you play one game, then let the series sits for a good while, then play another game. But don't play them back to back.

That's what I did for season one and boy did it turn seasons 2 and 3 tedious!

so far in 2014: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2014/post132

Interesting! I have American McGee's Grimm but only played an episode or two before moving on to something else (I had fun but not "that" much fun). Are there any standout episodes that are worth a playthrough?

Games of Thrones
Yeah, just finished Game of Thrones, actually, technically I finished it Yesterday but I was going for the other 2 ending today LOL there is no really 'good' ending they're all pretty grim but that's Game of Thrones and that's why we love it!
I thought it was a properly good, if slightly linea, 'story rich' 3D RPG, I'm disappointed that the metascore is only in the 60s because I think it deserves more than that, the combat system is a little odd, being a weird cross between infinity Engine pause/go and jRPG attack selecting, it doesn't quite work, but at least they tried something different, especially in a licensed title, the Mor's dog parts are different and innovative too
Story is really good and really lives up to The Song of Fire and Ice heritage, maybe people downrated it because they wanted more characters from the source material (and TV show with the actor likenesses) but I really like the way the story of your 2 guys is wound around and threaded through the narrative of the books/TV series as stuff that's happened to 2 of the houses that don't feature in the main storyline while the story from the books is going on somewhere in the background

Full list:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2014/post64