Transistor (Linux)

Since I've played through it two times in a row and have collected all the info and skills as well as passed all the tests, I finally consider this game as finished. It actually was a lot like Bastion, even the whole calamity topic but with another more technocratic and actually romantic angle.

First the negative things about it:
- Completely linear, all the variety is in the fighting/skill system.
- Although you can unlock many tracks from the soundtrack in-game and listen to it in the "sand box", you still have to buy it in order to hear it outside of the game

That's about it, now to the positive aspects of the game:
- The brilliant fighting/skill system: It's actually so good that it would deserve a multiplayer mode. It's a very good mix of real-time and turn based and once you get the hang of it, you'll just have to try all the different skill combinations and create different tactics
- Graphics: 2D in high resolution with smooth animations and nice visual effects are exactly my cup of tea, I'd always prefer this to 3D objects when it comes to the isometric perspective.
- Narrative: Having a voice talking to you in a calm way all the time was already used in Bastion but it's still working well for maintaining the immersion.
- Soundtrack: Brillian. Bastion's soundtrack was awesome already but this one seems to have been made with equal effort and a great result.
- Theme: The distant future of city life complete with the whole technocracy and trends resulting in ever changing environment with too few constants

Conclusion: Highly recommended for everyone that likes tactical combat, isometric 2D graphics, a nice narrative, sci-fi, melancholy and some romance. I won't say much about the end in order to not spoil it, but it's something most devs and your average hero wouldn't do.

List:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2015/post68

AC IV Black Flag- Freedom Cry (Xbox One)

I actually played Black Flag back in January to 100% sync. I wasn't going to bother with the Freedom Cry DLC, but it came up on a half price sale last week so i decided to do some more pirating. Freedom Cry probably represents, for me, the preferable side of DLC in that, though it requires the base game, it is pretty much a stand alone product- it has it's own separate story, map, and you play as a different character. So you can ignore it completely and not feel you've missed anything in the main game, or you can buy it if you feel like some more of the same thing. The story revolves around Adewale, the ex slave.

It took me about 9-10 hours to achieve 100 percent completion. I'd only rate it an average expansion overall. Unfortunately, for me Freedom Cry consists mostly of the type of story missions i hate the most- tailing and eavesdropping. I mean does anyone really like those? Otherwise I'd rate it higher, as the better parts of Black Flag are here in smaller doses as well. Plus the side missions where you sneak into plantations and free slaves are okay. So if you feel like a bit more Black Flag then by all means pick it up on sale, but don't feel as though you'll miss anything if you pass it by.

Blackguards

I heard a lot of criticism about this title, and often reviews are in direct contrast; sometimes the game is loved, sometimes it is hated with fury.
I belong to the first category, and I believe Daedalic should be praised for being able to craft an RPG of this kind without any prior experience in the genre.

During your adventure, you will take control of a character who suffered from torture and some kind of brainwashing, and after breaking out of prison to understand what is really happening and punish those who inflicted this to you, you will have to join a few not very reputable fellows -all of them tied to your quest for their own peculiar reasons- to survive the escape from your country and stop your enemy's plans.
The plot is good enough, yet unfortunately the incredibly rushed ending spoiled it a bit; also, even if during the five chapters you are presented with several choices, almost none of them has any effect.
I can praise more the art department: the game is in my opinion by far the best looking Unity game yet, and character and monster design are great.
Also, for once Daedalic has hired very good voice actors, making the whole non-german dubbing work very convincing and appropriate, unlike their usual English standards. Alas, once again it is not possible to select German audio without having to play the entire game in the same language as well.

Keeping an heavily modified “The Dark Eye” ruleset as a base, character development is articulated in attributes, weapon talents, general talents, spells, special abilities. To have a clear idea of how they work, I suggest you to read this awesome guide (I hate to post a link to the Steam forums, but it seems the guide was removed from the official site and it is now only available there) explaining how the system works in detail, especially if you are not familiar with the pen and paper RPG rules.
To improve the values you set during character creation, you will have to spend a progressively increasing amount of ability points; the game does not have any kind of “static” system allowing you to to spend an arbitrary amount of points or acquiring new feats after leveling up (like in D&D, for example), but treats the experience you gain after each fight or successfully completed mission as currency, allowing you to spend it whenever and wherever you see fit.

All those elements will determine your effectiveness in combat, by far the main focus of the game and a shiny example of turn based fights done right.
With the obvious exclusion of the dice rolls, Blackguards does not leave anything to chance: each of the many hex-grid based encounters is unique and studied to force new approaches and strategies, often requiring interaction with the environment and well thought moves, erasing from the equation any kind of random encounter and thus supplying you with limited resources and experience.
Whenever you make an error you must live with the consequences; if you spend a lot of experience in one specialization, there is no way to redistribute the skill points or gather enough to specialize in another branch of the skill tree; if you spend all your money for nothing, you won't have enough to buy the equipment you really need when necessity arises; the developers purposely omitted to add an item stash, and your runaways will have to cleverly pick only what they require while personally carrying any object, limited by the sum of their strength attribute -so beware, as gathering everything you can find will severely limit your combat effectiveness in case of overburden.

Many reviews criticized Blackguards for being “too tied to randomness”, for “having a convoluted system”or because “each battle has been designed to be beaten with a single specific strategy in mind”. I'll be straight: they are all, with no exclusion, outright lying. During the whole course of the game I made many mistakes on all fronts, yet I never felt that things were out of my control and I have personally tried to win the same battles with multiple approaches: they all worked, even if some clearly better than others, and I could recover from almost every dire situation I put myself in due to my lack of foresight or risky move ended badly.
The only real criticism I can make is that the system, especially for what concerns spellcasting, can seem a bit obscure for those who didn't inform themselves on how things work; like any proper game of old, you have to read the manual. Understanding is very easy, but first you need an explanation.
I know I'm probably sounding polemic, but I'm certain that this kind of undeserved complaints come form people way too accustomed to the modern self proclaimed RPGs, games that often do not leave dead ends even for people who didn't think about what they were doing for a single time throughout all the gameplay time, allowing you to rebuild you character from scratch at any time and to adopt cheap tricks or spam a button to always succeed.
I think all vidogame genres steadily declined during the last decade, sacrificing any kind of complexity for idiot-proof accessibility, and RPGs along with FPSs probably suffered the worst injuries; while everyone can understand this form a business point of view, this led me to find the vast majority of games dull, repetitive, sometimes even insulting and simply not fun anymore. Thankfully, Blackguards rows steadily upstream, without even glimpsing once towards the average audience.

In my opinion, the entire matter boils down to just one point: if you like a deep, structurally solid, open to alternatives and complex old-school system that requires an actual display of intellect to be enjoyable and respects your intelligence as a player, then Blackguards is definitely a game you shouldn't miss; if, on the other hand, your enjoyment does not come from overcoming clever challenges but rather from more relaxed and effortless experiences, then you have no reason to even consider a purchase.
If your usual RPG is checkers, Blackguards is chess.

Allied General

This is my absolute favorite of SSI's old 5 Star General series, though Fantasy General is good too. I've been playing it on and off, a mission at a time for about the last 18 months and finally finished the last of the 3 campaigns again- i've actually played this game quite a few times, as it's one of my all time favorite games.

The 3 campaigns are played as British, American or Russian. The British and American campaigns are pretty similar and mostly consist of the same battles, the main difference is where you start the early battles, and your core group of upgrade able units are either British or American depending on which you play as.

But the highlight of Allied General and why i like it best of the series is the Russian campaign. As the Russians you are really up against it and on the defensive early and it takes entirely different tactics to the Western Allies. For example i've never been able to build up a Russian airforce that could survive getting mauled by the Luftwaffe, so i always end up having to rely on a rolling ground defense system to protect the soft artillery units that are so crucial to the Russians.

Allied General also has the advantage (yes really) of being a Windows game. The reason this is an advantage is, that providing you can get it going, you can use up all of the real estate that have on your wonderful modern 28" widescreen monitor. So where you had to scroll around the maps back in 1996, you can now often have the entire map displayed PLUS the little pop up windows with your strategic maps etc, off to one side and not covering up part of your map.

Anyway, great turn based strategy game even now. Surely with Fantasy General and Pacific General on GOG now it can only be a matter of time before this one turns up.

System Shock 2 (1999)

Finally finished it today. It was always one of my favorite games but I never beat it before because always something prevented me like hard disk crashing halfway through the playthrough. The game gave me nightmares when I was a kid (especially those psychic monkeys) but now I didn't find it scary anymore. I played it on the impossible difficulty and I was always low on ammo so I felt very vulnerable throughout the game. It was a great survival experience, always trying to scrap something together to make it to a next level. And the game is very, very long with a lot of backtracking. The level design is incredibly complex. Just like a Citadel station in the previous game, the Von Braun ship is a character on it's own. <span class="bold">Read my full review here</span>

I give it 9/10

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New York Mysteries: Secrets of the Mafia (HOG)

Really enjoyed it. If I had one critique it's that several of the puzzles which rely on getting the right sequence could have used a 'reset' option.

Pros:
Good voice and story
Good art
Good puzzles on the whole
Nice interface

Admittedly I've only played 2 HOGs, but so far this one was my favorite.

How do you rate the platforming difficulty when compared to other games? Is it harder than Escape Goat? (I can manage the normal levels, no patience for the extra challenge ones).

Almost bought Shuggy during the summer sale as it looked exactly like the kinda game I was looking for at the time. However, after watching some gameplay videos I had the impression that the platforming looked too twitchy for me with too much action going on at the same time so I didn't buy the game but I still have an eye on it. I like puzzle platformers but ADHD platforming is definitely not my forte at all and my patience for it is very limited. Even games like Limbo which are widely regarded as easy are stressful enough for me in terms of reflexes required so I prefer to stick to puzzle platformers where reflexes aren't important such as The Swapper, Toki Tori, Tetrobot & Cho or Unmechanical. These go a bit too much in the other direction for the most part so it would be nice to find puzzle platformers that find a perfect balance between puzzles and platforming. Chronology was a good fit but sadly very short and a bit light on both puzzles and platforming but when in doubt, I prefer an easy game like that over an aggravating one 9 times out of 10..

Hmmm... difficult question. I have not played Escape Goat, so can't compare it to that. But I did not find most of the levels very difficult. Many were easy to solve on first try and with others it was mostly getting to know the level and your way. Only a few were stressful because of lots of things going on at the same time, but with almost every level you could stand at the starting position and get a feel for the level by having a look at it (with only a few exceptions). All in all it goes more in the plattform direction than in the puzzle direction, especially when comparing it to Chronology.

I’ve been taking a stroll down Nostalgia Lane, replaying my C=64 favourites from the early- to mid- eighties. I won’t even try to give unbiased reviews, rather I’ll simply list the games I’ve finished recently although I’d be happy to comment further on any particular games if anyone is interested.

Artillery Duel
Battle Through Time
Bigtop Barney
Bruce Lee
Choplifter
Conan
Defender of the Crown
Dino Eggs
Evolution

Thanks for the input, I decided to download and play the well made free demo which is only 115 MB and gives a good basic impression of the game, certainly enough to make a decision. Even though the demo levels are probably among the easiest ones, I died too many times for it to be fun and had to try the last demo level about 20 times before managing to complete it. That's a clear no-go to me because I don't get a kick or any enjoyment out of repeat challenges of that quantity, I'd prefer a more strategic challenge but this game is definitely too twitchy for my taste.

Even if you observe the room before going into action, in that last level with 7 enemies there was too much going on at once and I'm sure this isn't even one of the hard levels. I accidentally bumped into enemies due to the annoying acceleration when one runs, banged my head into the ceiling while trying to jump and then landed straight down on an enemy, fell right onto enemies while rotating in the wrong direction and so on. None of this is a deal breaker for people with good platforming twitch reflexes but it most certainly isn't a relaxing game, there is too much action. If platforming is second nature to you and it doesn't require too much conscious effort to avoid enemies and make accurate jumps then it might be a relaxing experience but if those things aren't second nature, this is a stressful game where the puzzles take a clear backseat.

The puzzles are simple and have a nice variety from what I've seen so far but the platforming is what kills this game for me. Controls are floaty, when you run you become exponentially faster and I've run into deadly spikes and off ledges numerous times even in those few basic levels. And when you rotate the map to the left, you have to hit the controls very precisely or else the map rotates to the right which is the standard rotation unless both the action button and left key are pressed. I played the game with an XBOX controller which I recently bought and for which Shuggy has native support.

On the technical side, I found a few minor bugs like getting stuck in the wall when picking up a shrinker/enlarger powerup and I had one incident where the entire game crashed . It doesn't make a particularly good impression when one finds such bugs even during the short experience of a demo.

The music and graphics are lovely, those are what attracted me to the game in the first place but I'll give this one a pass because the aggravation from too much twitchy play outweighs the enjoyment of the puzzling. It would be great if all games had a demo like this one, it really helps with making a purchasing decision. Sadly, the adventures of awalterj will not include the adventures of Shuggy the cat. He'll have to collect the gems by himself, I'm on strike!

This is not happening in the complete game. There the room rotates when you press the action buttion and always in the direction Shuggy is looking. So there is no standard rotation or second button you need to press.

And yes, the way Shuggy jumps takes a bit time to get used to since it is a very long floaty jump which is quite unusual.

The Book of Unwritten Tales 2

Great game, but not quite as polished or inventive as the first. (much better than critter chronicles though)

I still consider this series one of the best in the adventure game genre, but also one where the original title is still the example the others are held by.

Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space

In a way, it's more of the same as Save the World. It does try to improve a bit by not having each episode feel like a routine, but in the process, it seems that the backtracking has grown worse. Also, the game's humour is more miss than the previous one and borders a bit on the bizarre. All in all, a bit worse than Save the World, but an OK point and click, otherwise.

some doom thread reminded me that i did beat the shareware version of heretic early this year, if that counts. guess the heatwave burned out my memory cells.