Dragonsphere.

I ended up enjoying this more than I thought I would. Good story, some fun puzzles, and a few pretty cool moments. Although, sometimes the movement felt super slow - mainly the climbing sections. Possibly related: I ended up looking up UHS a fair bit. More than I ever have for an adventure game.

One of the stand out things about the game is the way it handles death. Usually death in adventure games is a sign of poor design, but if you die in Dragonsphere, it quickly respawns you in the position right before you died. So, you never lose progress...unless the game crashes, which did happen to me once.

Also, allegedly, the game's going to stop being free soonish on Gog. So if you're interested, you should probably add it to your library. Although, having said that, the game is definitely worth money.

While I haven't played Dragonsphere, I can only assume that you haven't played the first Discworld game. I can't imagine any adventure game requiring more trips to the UHS than that one...

What is UHS.. Discworlds were awesome

http://www.uhs-hints.com/

A great hint site that gives you hints to adventure game puzzles step by step, instead of the whole thing at once.

I've only played the first Discworld, but while it was appropriately funny given the source material, calling many of the puzzles "obtuse" would be an enormous understatement.

That's why adventure games took so long especially discworlds.. We couldn't alt-tab

edit. i played those in ps1

Devil Attorney (android)

Somehow my mind tricked me into believing it would be a clone of Ace Attorney but in fact is more of a... rpg? You get some cases to defend bad people and the gameplay is basically a rpg, you have "x" action points to use your abilities and then it's the enemy turn but it's done in a way that some matches are more of a puzzle because if you want to earn extra cash (or even survive) you need to plan your attacks/skills.
The problem is that the attack damage is based on a random/luck system meaning that you get one attack that could do 2 to 5 damage and this will be important for that "puzzle" part that i mentioned. I had to retry so many times after the first attack (yes, "cheating") until it did full damage and removed one of the enemies (witnesses, evidence or the prosecutors) from the battle.
After you win you get some cash to spend on your house/acessories/etc to raise some of your stats or unlock new skills.

Meh, i don't know, i liked the humor and the voice acting but the gameplay was so bland that i was only playing to see more of the "cutscenes", the randomness of the damage output and quick battles bored me after a few battles...

Very good review, I agree with you completely. I have to admit that I simply reduced the difficulty to easy (you get more action points this way) to be able to quickly finish cases and watch hilarious cutscenes instead. The actual gameplay was too much luck dependened

Anomaly Warzone Earth Mobile Campaign

This one is essentially an inferior, dumbed-down quasi-port of the original game.

I say dumbed down because you no longer have the commander to move, so everything pertaining to enemies that affect the commander, or units' reaction to the commander, as well as the sometimes mad dash to retrieve powerups from the field before your units run into enemies without you, is completely gone.

I say quasi-port because now everything is clicking, there's no controller support, and some of the already flimsy story from the original was cut down even further into a bare bones, it's mobile so this will do experience that takes away from the enjoyment I had with the original game.

Also, the difficulty on this is downright strange compared to the original. I buzzsawed through missions 1 through 7 in no time, but from mission 8 onward I was getting my ass handed to me until I realized that the gameplay had been tweaked enough that if I used tactics of avoiding enemy clusters, advancing through weaker sectors and saving your resources for unavoidable fights, everything from the original game, I would never get through the level.

And so began the frequent need to systematically clear map portion by map portion in order to obtain powerups that were no longer semi-optional, but downright critical in order to complete levels.

Also, any mission where you have to keep some piece of shit unit alive that joins the party without so much as a menacing look to engage enemies with, clad in toilet paper for armor, can kiss the darkest part of my ass.

Seriously.

Ultimately, between the cut-down gameplay, the cut-down story (really not a good idea in my opinion, there wasn't much to begin with), the rehashed sound, the newfound requirement of clearing most if not all of the later maps of enemies in order to survive, the ability to clear half the game in less than half an hour, with an overall time of 5 hours from game start to credits, and the niggling feeling that my units on the last mission were all collectively suicidal due to their willingness to drive through what could accurately be called a murder ray, after seeing the ray cut swaths of destruction through a half-mile of buildings, I definitely can't recommend this one.

It feels like they wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so they mangled their game and put it out again to make more money off the mobile market.

And Anomaly Korea is looking to be the same way.

I'm starting to get a bad feeling about where this series is heading...

Yeah, i should have done that since i was wasting time with the retries, anyway, like i said, there was that "puzzle" element of choosing who to attack, who to "stun" (can't remember the name of the attack) for one round, when to boost the case points (life), etc, so eh, i guess playing it on normal gave that gameplay element.

gog perhaps is drm free but they will remind you of games with updates when they don't actually update or say what happens.. dragonspehre is a good game. hopefully people will get so many updates in stonekeep to get you playing. =)

Far Cry (PC)

Well, after so many years and recommendations I have finally gotten to play and finish this game.
First I was pissed because I always thought it's one of those generic FPSs and was so hard in comparison, then I realized, that it's a stealth game and began to like it. After a while playing on "normal", I realized, that it would get really hard later on and started again on easy. I actually enjoyed it and the only bad things are
a) that you get noticed in the bushes too fast in "normal" and have to lay down on the floor and rob all the time and pray not to get noticed, in easy it was ok
b) the end is disappointing. In the fight with Krieger you are locked in a tight room with him, lots of his minions and no real cover at all, which makes most stuff you learned in the game useless and for some reason, ignoring the others and shooting a few rounds in his leg did the trick for whatever reason while grenades to the head didn't do much. oO
In the final fight, the humans have a reaction time of about 0.01 seconds, which means, that they fire their rockets around the corner at you the moment they walked past it so you have reload and blindly throw grenades all over the place without any visual contact. The final confrontation afterwards was so short, that I barely noticed it.

I tried the Far Cry addon mod and it seemed nice, but crashed all the time on me, maybe it's more stable in Win7, I used WinXP.

Into the list it goes

Anomaly Warzone Korea

Yay, I saved the planet....again.

The commander from the first game is still nowhere to be found, the clunky mobile-based controls and mechanics are still present, there are only incremental changes from the original in regards to units or abilities (one new powerup that increases damage, range and rate of fire for a few seconds), an upgraded version of the tank that now has a charged AOE shot ability, and now you can pick which powerup the supply unit uses, rather than its ability being dictated by its level of upgrading.

That's it for the positive.

As for the negative, the levels have more enemies, the need for powerups to clear areas is still just as strong, the story is still just as flimsy as the Earth Mobile Campaign, and this time around, the developers' version of story enhancement is a badly voice acted support character who sounds like an American or European doing a really bad Asian accent.

I might be wrong, but either way, it gets very frigging old after a while.

In general, the sound takes a hit this time around. The voice acted bits are either annoying, hammy, or both.

Also, I now have a contender for "Who's most deserving of a kick in the crotch?"

The person who decided to include escort missions last time around is now facing stiff competition from the person who decided putting in a repeating sound clip of some jerkoff whining in my ear asking "What are we doing here, sir? Sirrrr!?!? while I'm being shot at until I want to set my own troops on fire and put them out with an air strike.

But, not to be outdone, the escort mission designer was evidently left alone to work on the project without supervision one day, and so they took advantage of the opportunity to make the biggest, shittiest escort mission they could - an escort mission in which I had not one, but four toilet paper clad suicidal bastards to contend with.

There are only six slots for units. I ended up with four morons to babysit. I actually had to sell off four of my good troops to make room for them.

Fuck. You. Game.

And for the final happy funtime, the final mission includes more and more respawning enemies, more enemies in general, and more of a pain in the ass to deal with.

Also, the checkpoint-based save system in these games is getting more than a little impractical.
If you get tired of playing? Too godsdamned bad. Either finish or quit and lose all your level progress.

Lastly, three games in, it's really, really showing that the designers don't have a lot of aptitude with the storytelling side of the making games thing.

Three games, no ending aside from text that's nothing special and okay to bad voice acting, then cut to credits.

You could definitely skip both the Earth Mobile Campaign and Korea and not really miss out on much, so I'm having a bit of a hard time recommending this one either.

It's not as utterly pointless as Earth Mobile Campaign, but it's still not great.

Screw it. Guess it's time to see if Anomaly 2 is actually a proper sequel.
Could really use another game in this series that I'd call good.
The game being longer than 5 or 6 hours long wouldn't hurt either.

Since I am interested in this title, too, may I ask you a few questions?
When exactly does an enemy become aware of your presence? Is tehre a precise distance you have to pass or being in their line of sight -no matter how far- is enough?

What about sounds? Do the enemies react to it as well, or you can safely run as long as they do not see you?

What about the save system? I heard that it relies on checkpoints...

I think you should be satisfied. At least I was, I also thought that Anomaly mobile ports were weak but Anomaly 2 was truly epic. Definitely my favorite from the series. Anomaly Defenders, on the other had, was a huge disappointment.