<span class="bold">Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey</span>

You need to reach a very important goal but there are several monsters in your path. How to defeat them? Forming words, of course.
The longer the words and rarer the letters the harder you're hitting your enemy.

Simple? Yes. Boring? Not to me because some monsters will be harder to vanquish.

You have a store where you can buy different upgrades with gems you can obtain by defeating monsters or by completing quests. Each one of the 40 battles has four modes and playing them all gives you stars to unlock certain items. Only one of the modes is timed and you are not so good at thinking fast you can also buy something to give you more time.

English is not my native language and I enjoy these word games that allow me to practice and improve my vocabulary. (You see the definitions of words you just used and you can check the ones you are forming)

If you are very good in english there is an expert variant you can unlock. I feel contented having finished the regular one.

Loved the game.


Thanks to my pal HypersomniacLive who decided to improve my monday of the past week by ninja-gifting me this game.

crysis 2

mleh game
just another fps and the design of the suit is ugly

but i can at least check this game off my backlog

Avernum: Escape from the Pit Extra Casual Mode.

nightSky (2nd April 4:15pm)

A nice little fun mobile game

My gaming history has always been a little vague: I remember my first PC game (Rogue, soon to become Nethack) and my first store-bought (King's Quest III, shared with the roommate), and there was a long time when I only had a very few games. Then there was some jumbled time - I'm getting to an age where some stretches of the past do jumble - when I was mostly very busy with other things, but still played games that came from - where? I don't know. How did I hear about them? Did I finish them? Gaming was not a focus then, and so I remember only bits and pieces.

Which I mention because the other day I stumbled across my old Big Fish Games account, from back in Nought-6 or so. I had forgotten that I had an account there; I think it came about because of Plants vs. Zombies (yay) and Peggle. I was very busy with arts stuff and needed casual games rather than detailed, engrossing ones, so Big Fish was probably a pretty good match. Surprise: the account was full of games I'd bought back then, for whatever reason. So I downloaded a few.

Mystery Case Files: Huntsville is a testament to how Times Have Changed. I guess it's one of the Ur-hidden-object-games, done by the Big Fish dev studios when the genre was young, and if the Wiki is to be believed it is one of the games that made the casual-play genre into a giant industry. After its release in 2005, MCF:H sold $1 million worth of downloads in under three months. There are 10 or 11 sequels in the series, each adding a new feature or plot device, so in some ways it's a history of the genre, writ small. There are spin-off series - there are even novels!

This first installment is primitive, and completely without a reasonable plot. It has 15 timed cases to solve, if by "solving cases" we mean to complete a set of hidden-object scenes in various locations around town. Many modern HOGs will give you an inventory item after each search, and that item will advance the story. Not so here - you do your hidden objects and finish within time, and then you are brought to the "Crime Computer," which is a switch-the-pieces jumble of one of the places you've been. When you reconstruct the picture, it will have a cartoony villain in the middle, with some adjacent and awesome alliterative affirmations activated by your avid attempts (these are quite silly, and entertaining in the manner of MAD Magazine).

And that's it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It's not fun, exactly, but there's something catchy about it, and if you're like me once you start one of these things, you'll finish it. The illustrations are complex and ridiculous - many later HOGs have gotten much better at plausibly and/or cunningly concealing their items, but here they just sort of dump everything into the picture without rhyme or reason, and hide it where it'll be tricky to see. Golf ball at the diner? Sure. Hamburger in the lawyer's office? You bet. It's a 2D conception of the game idea, without frills, executed pretty well.

I spent just over 4 hours in timed play, for a total of probably 5 what with reading and pausing and discovering that the game rearranges all the icons on my desktop every time I exit. It was concentrated and soothing, and all in all I enjoyed it. Not a challenge, really - the final "boss" map is short and brutally-timed, and I did have to do it three times until I finished it before the clock ran out - and not a thrill. But solid, with a comfy kind of focus.

Ancient history? You bet. I bought this game in August of 2006. Once I opened it up I realized that I had played it before - I don't have any memory of when or how often, but it was familiar territory. That's not a replay, precisely, more like a visit to a place you'd been before but don't recall.

The List

Wasteland 2 after 77.5 hours, what a great game. The last fight was a little tedious but the ending was excellent.

The Novelist

It's an interesting premise and it started well enough. However, the story is very plain, the choices skew in a way that betrays the author's opinions, and the game quickly turns into a chore - every "chapter" is: find documents oh so conveniently littered about the house, "explore memories", choose an item. Even though it took me only about three hours to finish it, I stretched it over the course of three days. At first, it was because the visuals were giving me a headache - the washed out, dimmed aesthetic of the memories view was causing eyestrain - but on the second day, I caught myself thinking "this again?" and "when will this end?". Today, I skipped collecting all the clues for the final two chapters, and just went with the earliest presented choice. In short, wouldn't play again, can't recommend to anyone else.

Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders
Not as long and as obscure as in my memory. But that was probably, because I still remembered most of the puzzles. Besides that it was great fun to play this classic again. I started with the FM-Towns version, but ended up playing the EGA Floppy version (which is also included) which I found much more enjoyable )guess it was because it was more similar to the C64 version I played as a kid).

Complete list of finished games in 2015

Pillars of Eternity.
I won't say more as I need some time to process it.

Hotline Miami
Quite a complicated game.It's frustrating,hard,rewarding and weird.
The story is a mix of Drive and Fight Club with some David Lynch thrown into.The plot is a violent and mind screwy one.
The gameplay is fun,strategic that rewards both clever thinking and run n'gun.The soundtrack is just marvelous that really sets the mood and makes the stages even more heart pumping with the violence from the OST. It complements the gameplay in a great way that it's enjoyable to see.
I loved the graphics and the pixel art makes the carnage more gruesome and it goes well with the 80s style.Overall,pick this game up,it's fun but don't expect a walk in the park in terms of difficulty.

May I ask you a few questions?
Freedom Planet is clearly inspired by Sonic, but how much of the actual game resembles the older Mega Drive/Genesis titles (which, btw, were the first games I played "seriously", despite having started with Doom, Wolfenstein and Raptor, back then a bit too complex for the younger me) and how much brings innovation?
If I was to ask you "what can clearly separate this game from its predecessor", what element would stand out in particular, in your opinion?

Edit: g-g-g-grammar!

Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut

I'm glad I didn't know anything about this campaign's epic length beforehand, otherwise I might have been intimidated by it. But I also didn't expect it to be this entertaining and satisfying from start to finish, even though I already liked Dead Man's Switch. But Dragonfall DC is even several times better, maybe just one patch short of perfection (the game got stalled both on my desktop and laptop a few times near the end, and I encountered one or two bugs and shortcomings, but all in all it was an extremely polished experience).

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the tactical turn-based combat, and I'm also quite impressed with the writing, including the richness of ideas (each side quest is a great story of its own), and it was fun to see a game take place in a (fictional) Berlin and actually take its setting seriously instead of exaggerating with the clichés. The writers really seemed to have a good idea of what they were writing about and quite a good grasp of the German language, too. Setting and story were full of moral ambiguity with no easy way out, and none of the hypocritical hero cult you find in many other RPGs (not that you won't momentarily feel like you've got the moral high ground, but the game quickly takes you down to earth again). Of course, it makes the stories quite a bit more bleak and depressing, but also more interesting.

The only criticism I can think of, is that regarding its structure it quite obviously follows the old Bioware formula of linear introduction to the main story, followed by long phase of freely doing side-quests to earn the required money and skills, regardless of how urgent the main quest is, concluded with linear showdown; with the same handling of your companion's backstories, told bit by bit between missions and only via conversations initiated by the player, until you unlock their loyalty missions. It didn't bother me all that much though, since the backstories were interesting enough, I liked the loyalty missions and side quests, and Harebrained Schemes had a comparatively low budget. They did their best to fill the formula with life. And I guess the long freeform side quest phase was also a reaction to the complaints about the strict linearity in Dead Man's Switch.

In any case, if I don't count all the high quality modules for NWN I've played, Dragonfall is easily in my top 5 of RPGs now, right next to Planescape: Torment and VTM: Bloodlines. Yes, I thought it was THAT good.

<span class="bold">Sam &amp; Max Hit the Road</span>

When I first started playing this game a couple of days ago I was struggling a little bit to get into it for the first half hour or so, but then it clicked and I found it much more enjoyable. Actually, my 7-year old started watching me play around this point, and then eventually took over the game himself for the second half, so I was mostly watching him play and offering suggestions for much of the game. I'm still putting it on my finished list :P! Overall it's a fun game, a lot of humour and also quite a zany/bizarre plot.

Tic-Tac-Toe

Boo-Yah! :)