Max: The Curse of Brotherhood

The happy 'Disney' version of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons! ;) Joking aside, this is a pretty good, original and criminally overlooked game, a follow-up to Max & the Magic Marker, but not a direct sequel and therefor enjoyable by everyone. It's also much better, more polished and professional, with attractive colorful 3D graphics, a cinematic story-telling approach, good voice-acting, sound and music, and very solid platforming controls. In presentation and story, I thought it was reminiscent of the good old Heart of Darkness game (sadly still not on GOG), but without the shooting.

The concept is similar to its predecessor, in that it's still a puzzle platformer in which you have to use your magic marker to overcome obstacles, but you can only draw in specific spots and depending on the color of those spots you'll get to draw with different materials (branches, vines, water streams etc.). So it's a bit more limited than in the first game, but at the same time also more varied and more fun, less open but more focused and still leaving lots of room for experimentation.

It's not terribly difficult, but not without challenge either. I mostly played with a gamepad, but on a few occasions I switched to mouse and keyboard because while drawing with the gamepad usually worked well enough, under time pressure the mouse allowed for quicker movement of the magic marker. Checkpoint placement was (mostly) spot on, so that the game never really felt tedious or frustrating to me even during the slightly harder sections (it even had checkpoints during the boss battle, which is something I miss in many other games). If I was to criticize anything, it's that occasionally the camera can get in the way of interacting with things at the edge of the screen, that the game often doesn't allow you to go back if you missed something, and that the hotspots for pushing or pulling things are rather small, so that it's easy to miss them if you move too fast and you have to take small steps to target them. But that feels like nitpicking, considering the game is so well made overall. It's quite long, too, took me about 8 hours to complete.

I can definitely recommend it to fans of puzzle platformers or those looking for a cute (but challenging) family game! Vote for it here (unfortunately published by Microsoft, but who knows, maybe GOG can pull of another Elysian Tail).

Spirits of Xanadu

The gameplay is...well...just passable. The gunplay isn't very well done and the enemies are either sitting ducks or destruction specialist, depending on whether or not you're stuck in a narrow hallway. The enemies can be made nonviolent thanks to a "Peaceful" mode, which is what I ended up using. There are a few puzzles but they all seem to hinge on either 1: go find this thing that is scattered elsewhere or 2: decipher this picture/audio log to find a numeric code.

The story is solid enough, with good writing all around, unfortunately it relies on a few tropes and isn't as mysterious as you would be led to believe by the game's description. There are only a handful of characters to discover and you learn about them exclusively through scraps of paper and audio logs, but you get a good sense of them.

The sound design is pretty basic, no notable sounds are to be found here. There is a bit of traditional Chinese music feel to the soundtrack, which is a nice change of pace. The voice acting is all very well done. The sounds overall did not immerse me into the game, in fact it often sucked me out as I thought "I wish the robot would go away, why does it have to be so loud?".

There isn't much to see graphically, it does look decent enough in its minimalistic style but it's not great or memorable or anything.

All in all I would have a hard time recommending Spirits of Xanadu. The story is the only part of the game that I would rank as being above average and I wouldn't go so far as to call it "great". The game as a whole usually had me feeling just a tiny bit above bored and disinterested which is a shame, I was quietly excited about this game.

Crysis

Played at normal difficulty, wanted to beat the game with autosaves only, but it was too frustrating so I did some manual saving.

Race the Sun PS Vita version

Reached the max level, unlocked the Labyrinthia levels and since I don't care either for Apocalypse levels, Labyrinthia levels or world ladders, I consider that game finished.

Got it in fact multiple times, Once on GOG, once on Steam and once on Vita as part of the PS + program. So I ended finishing the Vita version the first, go figure.

Very good and original racing game, I have had a lot of fun playing it, it's just the right amount of frustrating, try-and-die levels to keep me playing it, in fact. I absolutely loved the visual atmosphere.

So far in 2015: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2015/post2

Alien: Isolation

Great game, very atmospheric and immersive! Not to mention how beautiful it looks - my god, it's one of the prettiest games I've ever played. Even though I usually play games on Normal difficulty, I completed this game on Hard difficulty, because that is what the game recommended. I'm glad I did, because in my opinion, survival horror is pointless if you can easily breeze through every level. The Alien is very deadly, so careful steps, hiding and planning were a must. I had some difficulties early on, but things got easier as I became better at these things.

The game was surprisingly long: Steam says I played for 17 hours, which is quite nice for a game like this. Every minute was gold and there weren't any boring sections, so kudos for that. I was constantly on the edge, thanks to the ever present threats: but unfortunately I can't say I was ever genuinely scared. I think it's because of two reasons: one, the Xenomorph is such an iconic and well-known character, thus I feel there's not much mystery surrounding it; and two, as a huge consumer of horror movies, I've pretty much made myself immune to all but the most mindfuck psychological horror - but that's not to say I still didn't have a great time! I would even say that an Alien game presented this way, is much more interesting to me than the shooter Alien games, such as AvP. After all, Alien is a horror movie, and there's no better way to make a horror game than having the player be forced to evade the monsters, rather than going in guns blazing (I mean, yeah, you do get some weapons, but they will never kill the Alien, so you're never not vulnerable).

The only thing I'm going to criticize was the ending: the events leading to it are great like the rest of the game, but I feel that the very, very last scene was a minor letdown. Obviously I can't explain in detail what happens in it, but let's just say I would've like some more closure. After all, I did spend almost a day's worth of time solving the Sevastopol's incident: therefor, I didn't like how things were left hanging a little bit. But yeah, that's the only problem I had with the game. Superb survival horror, right up there with games like Amnesia. Pick it up if you like the genre!

Fallout: New Vegas - After having played the first 2 Fallout games, and hearing that New Vegas hewed closely the originals, I was a little disappointed by this one. Whereas the originals had a wonderful sense of place and fantastic atmosphere, New Vegas is dull by comparison. The wasteland looks impressive; however, the size of the world makes it tedious to actually walk in it instead of fast traveling, especially with the constant traveling needed for many of the quests. The overland map of the originals made fast traveling seem more grounded, and less like teleportation. Another thing I noticed was that the sound design was disappointing, I turned down the music and didn't hear much other than some occasional bird sounds.

The quests were generally interesting, and you could make some interesting choices. There was a lot of content that I'm sure I missed out on, but I enjoyed the time I spent with this game.

Paper Sorcerer

What is Paper Sorcerer? Well, it's an indie dungeon Crawler with turned based combat. What can i say about the game? Uffff, buggy as hell and i was "lucky" to have played it all this months later with some patchs in.

I played for 15h so i can't say it's a bad game but god damn if the bugs don't ruin the experience, i mean, it's the damn room (the place where you recover your life) that has bugs, either has some framerate problem or ir freezes (so you better have saved previously because there isn't any auto save), i made some puzzles during mid game that would allow me to fight a boss near the end, that boss would give a special key that would allow me to pick one of three doors to get a really powerfull spell. So, what happens? I defeated the boss, got the key and... the option to select that key and open the door doesn't appear. Sigh...

A quick search reveals that it's indeed a bug... i tried to use an older save but it happened again, i tried to go to the sanctuary, then return to that area and now the door that gave me access to the boss area (and the three doors) is closed and the key is gone. WHAT THE HELL DEVELOPER??? Ok, calm down, it's not important, i'm enough strong to finish the game and indeed i have.... ok dumb ending, credits... Oh hell, do i have to see all these names from the kickstarter? Enter, enter, enter, enter, enter, enter, enter, "Thank you for playing"... FINALLY, so now i wil... wait what? WHY THE HELL IS THE KICKSTARTER LIST REPEATING???? ARE YOU KIDDING? Ok, enter, enter, enter, enter, enter, enter, enter, enter... "Thank you for playing"... and again the list repeats. Esc doesn't work. Alt+F4 and i'm done with this garbage.

I mean, i can understand that the game is done by a small team with low budget so i have forgiven some minor complains like the lack of information (enemy status, enemy skills, etc), the broken shop menu that doesn't show you what items your team has equipped (i have to go to the freaking glitched room and risk the game crashing) and the weird clicking that would make the page go up for no reason, i had to use W/D/Spacebar in the menus, the boring enviroment black and white (yeah, yeah, i know it's the paper sorcerer), the combat that turned a bit boring with the grinding, and so on...

But not everything is bad, i enjoyed the characters design, some part of the combat (i like turn based combat and getting loot or money to buy new equipment), the minimalistic levels and the story was decent (minus the ending).

I don't know how to feel with this one, on one side it's cheap and was developed by a small team so i can't really expect much of it but it's just infuriating to deal with these bugs and see potential on this game, it could have been something amazing and make me desire for a sequel but honestly i'm not interested, i wasted 15h hours and i don't feel like it was worth it.

That is really strange. I played this game last year and I only encountered one bug and also never had any problem with low framerate or freezes o.O

I guess that it depends of the machine, for example, i'm guessing that you never heard about framerate stuttering problems with Shadowrun Dragonfall and yet there is a really nasty one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PWFRFZkOEM

https://steamcommunity.com/app/300550/discussions/1/617321352201830845/

Since I never played Shadowrun I could not even have heard of a problem. But yeah, you are right, such things are often not happening for everyone. Like the crash problem of Witcher 2 for some Win7 users that I also have.

My playtime was actually just shy of five hours, but I'm estimating about four, based on interruptions and walking away to take care of things a few times. It'd be nice if there was a way to show 'finished time' on Steam as well as 'overall time,' but that's not something you'd be able to do automatically.

And you can import/set up wishlists and game collections from other sites and have it send you email alerts for price drops, sales, and bundles. XD "Dangerous" probably doesn't begin to cover it. I end up deleting probably 99% of the emails I get after glancing at them, but there have been a few that alerted me to very nice deals indeed.

It's a trap!

I also did not remember encountering bugs, except when hacking for the kickstarter exclusive playable characters. After hacking properly it seems to work fine.

Just finished Bioshock Infinite.
...Now off to slam my head into my keyboard and try figure out that ending :P