Nehrim - At Fate's Edge

A huge independent total conversion mod for Oblivion, which has its own lore and more content than many commercial RPGs. This might be only the second open world RPG I managed to complete after Gothic, even though I tried a lot of them, including Skyrim, Oblivion, Gothic 2, Risen and Kingdoms of Amalur. I tend to lose interest in them after a while, feeling either bored or overwhelmed. Not so with this one, and I actually did a completionist playthrough, to which I lost countless hours of my life without really noticing (easily thrice the time I put into Skyrim or Gothic). So what was so different about it, compared to the others?

It's not the story. There is some potential in the main quest, but in the end it left me pretty unimpressed, also because the writing could have been a lot better. The main campaign was actually my least favorite part of the game, I think. At its worst it made me recall that of Neverwinter Nights (e.g. a bunch of unsympathethic NPC using the PC as their pawn to move the plot along, even though the PC has no real connection to what's going on and no reason to really care). Then again, I've yet to see an open world RPG with a story I'm really interested in, and I guess for an amateur fan project it's still a good effort. In any case quite ambitious.

The actual fun for me though was in the fantastic world design. The modded Oblivion graphics are so beautiful and full of color and there's just so much unique stuff to discover in Nehrim that exploration is a real joy. There's nothing random about it, the whole huge world is handcrafted and many of the dungeons have excellent level design. Even after exploring the umptieth cave / mine / vault etc. and despite recognizing a few reoccuring assets, each dungeon was still special enough for me to incite that childlike sense of wonder and adventure. And most of them held special rewards and also gave me a sense of achievement: It ain't over till I've found the treasure! A great incentive for exploration are also the numerous collectibles, like rare plants, magic symbols, spells and skill books, all with rewarding effects. There's also a few easter eggs and mini games to be found. Not to forget the environmental storytelling and cinematic effects, which contrary to the actual writing were really something. The game has top notch atmosphere.

And apparantly it managed to find just the right balance between Elder Scrolls and Gothic for me to enjoy it more than both of its paragons. I liked it better than the Elder Scrolls games because it felt more rewarding to get experience points and take on monsters higher than my current level, or avoid them and come back later after I had grown more powerful, which again adds to the sense of achievement. I also liked that the cities were a bit less intimidating and that they cut down on citizen chatter and individual merchants. Most of the time, I could just sell all my stuff to the same guy without having to go on a shopping tour through several stores. There are a lot of side quests in Nehrim, but I guess not nearly as much as in the TES games, and I don't remember any simple fetch quests. I liked the graphics and scenery of Nehrim more than Skyrim, because they had more color and variety. On the other hand, I also liked it better than the Piranha Bytes games because it wasn't as hard and uncomfortable. I like feeling a little scared on a dungeon crawl from time to time, but I don't like the constant danger of being killed by a single measly critter all the time, or being hurt bad enough that I first have to find a place to sleep or a barrel to drink from before taking on the second measly critter.

The challenge in Nehrim felt quite fair, or admittedly rather on the easy side, but with the positive effect of not really obstructing my world exploration. The skill system is a mix of Oblivion and Gothic, which probably makes it even more of a mess than that of Oblivion is said to be, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the game either. As a completionist, I could almost ignore it anyway, as I ended up overpowered even with half of my skill points unspent.

I'd definitely recommend this to anyone who's mostly in it for the world exploration and dungeon crawling, and anyone who's intrigued by the very idea that there's a slightly flawed but very charming bastard child of TES and Gothic. Just be warned that it crashes A LOT - among all the achievements that I got playing the game, I half expected one for 100 crashes to desktop or so. But I never lost any significant progress because I'm used to quicksaving all the time, and I thought the merits of Nehrim make it totally worth it to put up with this annoyance. After all, what's that compared to 100+ hours of fun. ;)

PS: Thanks a lot to Fenixp for bringing this mod (I prefer to call it game) to my attention!

PPS: I played the original version in German, but it's also available in English (possibly with German voiceovers and English subtitles?).

Might and Magic II - Gates to Another World
It's finally done!!! I started in august last year, played more or less every day and I've finally completed this classic today.

This game has really aged very well. It's still great fun to play and an excellent RPG experience. You shouldn't expect a very epic story or a game that takes you by the hand, but exploring the land and figuring stuff out is very rewarding. There's rudimentary auto-mapping, but it's much better to draw your own maps (I consider it part of the fun). Sure there are some flaws (e.g. non-working spells, monster scaling and a rather obscure end puzzle with a ticking timer), but overall it's a must-play if you love classic RPGs.

Complete list of finished games in 2015

I finished another playthrough of Dragon Age: Origins, this time with a character created to unlock the Elementalist achievement, named without much imagination on my part, Elam. It was the first time I finished an RPG with a character I gave evil intentions. He was power-hungry and made sure Alistair became king to act as a puppet-on-the-throne for himself. He also had the Circle Tower razed to erase competition. Ended up with a smaller party than usual as both Wynn and Leliane left in rage at my actions.

Earlier this year I finished Dragon Age: Awakenings with my dual-wielding dwarf warrior Björn.

The long list of ongoing Dragon Age campaign is at last getting smaller, with (also this year) having finished the Golems of Amgarrak DLC with my first DA mage Thalinxas, though I'm not completely finished with him, as I started chasing Morrigan with him in the Witch Hunt DLC.

The number of Dragon Age campaigns still going on has thus been brought down to 7 (6x Origins, 1x Witch Hunt), so I'll be posting about finished Dragon Age campaigns for some time still ;-) .

Holy @#^$

I just downloaded it.. Basically I asked in another thread if you can turn off the German Speech and just read the Subs.. Can you or do I have to play with ini or something....

Here's the deal.. I just built yet another desktop and modded Morrowind , Oblivion , Skyrim , Fallout NV , Fallout 3 ,NWN 2 , Both KOTOR's and I am burnt.. But I have the disc version too of Oblivion and wanted to put that on another HD with Nehrim.. just wanted to know if it's a pain or buggy I guess.. Thanks in advance

Funny you mention NWN 1 .. I was just also forcing myself a few hours a day through that game.. feels like a chore.. I'm in Chp. 2 with lvl 7 Dwarf Fighter / 2 Dwarven Defender.. yeah it's kinda boring but I paid for it and damn it I will finish it.

I gotta call you out on this... How exactly did you finish both IWD's , Darklands and M & B in 3 weeks??

So i have been trying to track down a copy of the first Diablo and it's not hard to find but the question is .... Does it run without issues on Windows 7? I know DosBox very well and was looking at some disc's on Amazon but just wanted to know if it's not a pain to get running.. Funny thing is I have Diablo 2 and 3 ready to play but my OCD will not let me until I play the 1st.. really I'm sick like that lol... Alcohol helps...... yup

Sorry, I have no experience with the English version and don't know much about it. Can't you just turn down the speech volume in the Audio options to zero? I guess it won't work for the intro and outro video, but it might for the rest of the game.

Nehrim is easy to install and I didn't notice a lot of bugs on my playthroughs. On one or two occasions I had to reload a game because a scripted event did not occur, but replaying the little sequence solved the problem, and a few times I got stuck in a wall or a spot I couldn't get out of anymore, but I was also asking for it, always trying to abuse the jumping and riding mechanics for shortcuts through the mountains. Considering how many scripted events there are and how often I jumped around where I wasn't supposed to, 96% of the game ran smoothly, so in that regard, I wouldn't call it buggy. The Mass Effect series, for example, was much more buggy than this fan project. But like I said, it's very "crashy" - "Oblivion has stopped working", back to desktop, relaunch game, reload last save game. It's no game stopper, it seems to occur at random occasions, mostly during transfer to another area or when running around, as if the game was unable to cope with all the loading and calculating or something. Sometimes it happened only once in 3-4 hours, sometimes 3 times in a row. It is a pain, but I mananged to block it out of my mind most of the time, because the game was just too awesome to pass on. Quicksave is your friend.

Buying NWN was an excellent decision on your part, don't consider the money wasted, but don't waste your time on the main campaign either, if you don't enjoy it. Just skip forward to Hordes of the Underdark, or even better yet, try out some of the top rated community modules. Just like I enjoyed Nehrim more than Oblivion, I love NWN despite its tedious campaign, due to all the excellent custom campaigns. If you haven't done so yet, check out Jarmo's thread for recommendations. And don't hesitate to ask questions on the forums or via PM if you need help finding a module that's more to your taste or installing custom content (it's usually quite simple and easy if you have a basic knowledge of working with the Windows Explorer; all about moving files into the right folders).

Since I played and finished LOTS of games last year, I want to play much less this year ^^
So far I finished the following this year :

Far Cry 4


After "Far Cry 3" had surprised me in a very positive way (I didn't liked the first 2 games), it was a no-brainer to buy the new installment. And this was a good decision, because Ubisoft improved the gameplay a lot. Sure, most of the time you still climg towers, attack outposts and do all kinds of side quests, but especially the latter are so much more interresting this time. And then there's also the Shanghri-La missions, which are visually amazing and give the entire game a very mystical touch. You can even ride on elephants, which is very awesome. Many people were complaining about the graphics, while I personally think that the game looks very beautiful. Some places of Kyrat are visually just breathtaking and turn Kyrat into one of the most beautiful places I've ever visited in a ego-shooter game. Sure, it's no Columbia, but Kyrat also has it's own unique charm. It also ran very well in 4K on my computer, which is for a new Ubisoft game impressive, because they are usually optimized very badly. So in total I'm very happy with the game, even while I hope that Ubisoft will drop the tower idea in the next game. The only downside of the game (in my opinion) was the story, because I honestly didn't understood why the main character joined the rebels to kill Pagan Min. Sure, Min was evil, but he never was evil to the main character For some reason this bothered me until the very end, but damn is Pagan Min an awesome villain.
So yeah, in total one of the best shooter games of 2014, if not even the best !

Super Mario World (SNES)

In 2 player mode with all secrets again.
I don't know how often I've played through this game by now.

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Devious Dungeon (Android)

Played the Humble Bundle version where you got the coin doubler from the start.
Seems to be made for (in this version removed) microtransactions.
Although nice at the beginning, it's repetitive, uninspired and abusive. The whole mechanic makes you gather as many coins as possible and I can imagine that you have to grind a long time or pay a lot to move on in the regular version.

Full list:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2015/post68

Not finished, but I think I'll stop playing Type:Rider (Android). The platforming isn't that interesting, and neither is the art, IMO (although it's unique, and nice in a way). The history pages are interesting for the information they provide, but I didn't find them particularly well written. All in all, it's a game which I feel has promise but doesn't execute on that promise, ending up somewhat boring.

LYNE

LYNE is a beautiful casual puzzle game that is neither boring nor exciting. It puts you in a strangely cleansing Zen-like state with its soothing minimalist graphics and sounds and gently engages your mind with wonderfully fluid gameplay. Styled to perfection, it doesn’t get any more abstract than this. Pure relaxation with just enough trickiness to keep you going.

At first sight, it looked like yet another lowest common denominator i-phone game and if LYNE didn’t have such overwhelmingly positive reviews, I might not even have tried the game for free. In fact, if you had told me a couple months ago that I’m going to write a review for a casual indie puzzler, I’d have laughed you out of the room as this isn’t my genre of natural preference. While I did play Minesweeper and Tetris back in the day, the only puzzle video game I fondly remember is Lemmings.
LYNE has neither the complexity nor the challenge of other puzzle games. It’s incredibly easy to learn and the first couple sets of puzzles are of insulting simplicity - so simple that a three-year old kid is more likely to solve these puzzles than remember the unlock pattern of your touchscreen phone/tablet. Compared to SpaceChem or Toki Tori, this is literally child’s play. But you won’t feel insulted by the lack of challenge, just oddly at peace and therapeutically hypnotized.

The gameplay is very basic, you connect shapes of one color with each other by connecting a line (hence the name of the game) through other shapes of the same color. You can also thread your line through octagonal gates that can be passed by the other colors and must be passed between two to four times. Lines aren’t allowed to cross each other. Despite the clear rules there is a comfortable amount of leeway that allows for multiple solutions. It’s all about pure logic, bare to the bones. Sounds easy and is easy most of the time.
In total, the game has a set of 25 levels for each letter of the alphabet so that’s a whopping 650 levels for the base game. If that isn’t enough for you, there are daily challenge sets with 25 puzzles each. Some of the daily challenge levels are quite tricky but it’s never a matter of if you can solve a puzzle but when so the challenge comes more self-imposed in the form of how quickly you can solve a puzzle. The game itself has no time limit whatsoever.

LYNE is a perfect game to play in short bursts. The easiest puzzles take only a couple seconds to solve, the intermediate ones between 30-40 seconds and the more tricky ones between 1,5 to 2,5 minutes. It took me 26 hours to get through all the 650 puzzles of the base game so I spent an average of 2 minutes and 24 seconds per puzzle. The actual time is shorter as the game was running while preparing meals and reading the forums and news. But even if I subtract idle time, the result is still an average of around 2 minutes per puzzle. One must point out that this is very slow, some people have reported in on completing the game in only 13 hours which means they spent an average of only 72 seconds per puzzle. After the first couple sets, I started to listen to symphonic power metal while playing the game because things started to become a little too peaceful.

Whether you’re fast or slow, the game absolutely has more than enough length to justify its price. What LYNE does not have is variety. This is the one and only negative thing about the game and the only reason why it falls short of being a masterpiece. A masterpiece achieves variety despite simplicity. Games like Lemmings or Toki Tori achieve variety by continuously adding new gameplay elements as you progress but despite the increased complexity those games don’t become more convoluted to control, just more difficult to solve. In LYNE, the game reaches its full complexity quite early on. Once you encounter puzzles with three different colors and some octagonal gates that must be passed 4 times, you’ve seen all the game has to offer - with hundred of generic levels remaining. Unsurprisingly, only 37% of the players make it past the first 75 levels and only 7% have completed the base game so far. While that seems like an exclusive club, it’s more a question of persistence rather than intelligence.
LYNE is a game that makes people falsely believe they are becoming smarter. It’s just that your brain gets re-wired to solve this particular type of puzzle increasingly well, in German this is called the Übungseffekt and has little to do with increased intelligence. More like mild brain jogging / brain marathon where you just zone into a specific state of mind. People who generally score high on traditional I.Q. tests will blast through LYNE at the speed of light but it doesn’t mean you can tie your shoe laces.

Despite its lack of variety, I wholeheartedly recommend LYNE to anyone who instead of great challenges would like a meditative experience to distract your mind. In that regard, it is a perfect game.

Full list

Diablo never had a DOS release, so you won't need DOSBox to install it (Interestingly enough, despite being such an old game, it uses a 32-bit installer, meaning you won't have to go hunting around for a 64-bit installer and can just install it like every other Windows game). The problem you will encounter is the messed up colours. One way to fix this is by creating an explorer-killing .bat file (you will find the instructions to do so ). Another one is the [url=http://steamcommunity.com/app/38400/discussions/0/648811670613303699/]ddraw compatibility tool.

Space Quest 3. Oddly, the thing that stumped me the most about this game was that I sometimes didn't understand that certain screens had exits and I would be wandering around for an hour, not realizing that there were entire areas with important things to do that I was overlooking. That Astro Chicken game sucks, too, although I gather that the puzzle it conceals is really optional. Otherwise this is another very good adventure game with nice graphics.

Space Quest 4. I'd say I miss the text parser, but really Sierra's text parser was never the best around, so the shift to point-and-click is fine, and this game might be the best SQ game yet. If anything, I just wanted it to be bigger, with even more timelines to visit. The graphics are really lovely, and getting Gary Owens to narrate it was a genius move.

Just now I finished another part of Dragon Age: Origins, the Witch Hunt DLC. There's nothing more left to do for my mage Thanlinxas. He finished Origins, Awakenings, The Golems of Amgarrak and Witch Hunt. The last two DLC's, Leliane's Song and the Darkspawn Chronicles I haven't played yet, but they will not feature the Warden but are standalone adventures.