One where I could not win no matter where I started from the point I chose. I turned that into a game once long ago.

Just finished Bioshock 2 [on normal] was a blast. shame I didn't get all the achivements. not as good as the first in my opinion. was tough halfway through, but later on the powers got a bit over the top. all I was doing was taking control of a daddy, and sip my tea.

But it was fun.

now onto BioShock Infinite

Have a great easter everyone.

[edit] PS I saved all the little sisters [I know I'm a kind soul!]

Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne - Great gameplay and an interesting campaign.

True. I didn't think it was that hard either. It's a game in which you can die a lot and very quickly, but you won't really get stuck on a level for long. The game is actually quite user-friendly with its quick restarts and small levels.

Previously, on Games Finished in 2015...

The other day I started playing the first few installments of the Mystery Case Files series, downloaded from a forgotten decade-old Big Fish Games account. Tonight I finished Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects, which is much the same as the first game in the series, with a little plus and a little minus.

Following on the tails of the runaway hit first MCF title, Prime Suspects feels like a proper and well-planned sequel that was slightly rushed. It is a bit longer than Huntsville, with 20 suspects to research and clear (we're looking for a short list of miscreants whose whereabouts are not accounted for on the night the giant Queen's Hope Diamond was stolen, and as before we do this not by seeking out clues, but by solving hidden object scenes), and one final brief puzzle to recover the diamond after we've ferreted out the culprit. It was released nine years ago this month, and was a giant best-seller for Big Fish.

Once again there's no functional plot, at least not any plot related to gameplay, and each suspect has a scene of snappy descriptive text before the puzzles begin. The new mechanics include different types of puzzles for the Crime Computer after each chapter is finished - some are games of memory, with tiles to be matched over a picture of the crime scene; some are title-swapping puzzles, some are word-search puzzles - and the introduction of dark or hidden rooms that can only be examined with the aid of a flashlight or x-ray scanner. Before searching these rooms, the player must first locate a battery in one of the other lit and open locations. It's the first appearance of meta-play in the series, which is still mostly a very flat execution of the hidden-object concept.

I thought several of the settings were darker and vaguer than in the first game, though, which makes it harder to find some of the objects, but not really in a fun way. Still, the two first releases in this series are very matched in most ways. Once again I realized that I had played this game, back in 2006 presumably, though if you had asked me about it last week I would have said I'd never heard of it. I think, but am not certain, that this is the last of the MCF games that I played back in the day, which means that the next - I bought four or five of them in 2006, for reasons that largely escape me now - should be a first-time experience. Though who knows, I might be surprised again.

Six and a half hours of timed play - I was slow at this one - left me in the lower standings on their list of famous detectives.

2015: the Year to Date

Half-Life 2

I have found this one overrated. I know I have played it more than 10 years after the release date, but I still enjoy FPS classics such as Unreal, Duke Nukem 3D, whereas Half-Life 2 was a "not bad" experience at best. I don't get why the story is found so spectecular, which in my opinion is not. Yes, the graphics are good, gravity gun is interesting but the game gave me the feeling of "hey, now we are using the gravity in our games and this is very innovative. so you should appreciate it as a classic". No... Half-Life 2 is not the best game ever made, it is not even a classic. It is, however, a fairly good game with good sound and atmosphere, average story and shooting physics and some spectacular graphics for its time. There are some chapters that are too long, such as the ones where you use an airboat, in which the game feels more like a tech demo where the devs are trying to impress. And the worst thing about the game, a huge minus, is that Half-Life 2 will likely give you nausea. In some chapters I felt sick and my face went pale. I have been playing shooters forever, never have I suffered a nausea in a game, which I believe indicates some serious design mistakes.


damien score: 7.5/10

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
A tech demo, for about 20 minutes of gameplay. I enjoyed it for what it is, with its great graphics and commentaries by the developers including Gabe Newell. I am not going to rate the game though.

List of all games finished in the last years with best and worst games played in each year

Hand of Fate

I love this game! The concept is so brilliant, I can't fathom how no-one had thought of it before. At its core, it's a "build-your-deck" adventure: but the combat is in real-time and plays like the Batman Arkham games. The weapons and armor you have depend on what you had pulled from your deck during the different encounters. Stuck with a rusty axe for long periods of time? Well, toss more weapons into the mix in the planning phase and you'll have a higher chance of scoring a weapon when it's time to play. But that, of course, will also mean you have fewer other stuff to pick from...

It was hard to put this game down. Every time you beat a level, you'll unlock more encounter and equipment cards, and then you wanna know what kinds of cards they are when you find them in-game, which boosts the addiction rate through the roof. The "game world" reminds me a bit of Dark Souls, with all the despair and such when you get a streak of bad luck. But that moment of hope when you get just what you needed from a certain encounter...the atmosphere is perfect.

I do have to point out a couple of negatives as well, though. Primarily, it seems the game could have been optimized a bit better (tech-wise). It's nothing remarkable to look at, but my PC was still struggling to run the game smoothly. The final battle in particular was a major slug-fest. It would also seem (though I might be wrong here and that it's only my own interpretation) that the later levels could be unavoidable dead ends for the player if he can't score any good encounters and / or loot cards. Even though it's a card game, sometimes luck plays perhaps a too big of a role in some cases. For example, I don't know how I could've gotten past the end boss if I hadn't had a very specific encounter card early in the level, and if I hadn't a very specific artifact with me (in addition to the awesome weapon, armor and shield I had). But like I said, maybe it's just me.

Anyway, I can't recommend this game enough, especially if you're into deck-building games in which you can influence the kind of fate you're facing. But a word of warning: if you don't have a high-end PC...you're gonna have a bad time. Its looks are deceiving, it demands much more from your PC than you'd think by simply looking at screenshots.

Some years back I stumbled across Defense Grid: The Awakening, a tower defense game by Hidden Path Entertainment which follows the course of an alien invasion of desolate foreign worlds - which I thwarted with my chatty Artificial Intelligence companion, Fletcher, who was given to reminiscing about when he had a body and used to love to eat raspberries.

It was my first-ever tower defense game, and I fell in love with it. Between the various modes and levels, and the (free) DLC map packs, and the additional content that came out free for Kickstarter backers on the way to the release of the second game, and the user-created challenge content, I've packed in almost 350 hours playing it on Steam. (There's even an expansion called You Monster, in which the player and Fletcher are pitted against GLaDOS - Hidden Path has worked with Valve on projects including CS:GO and Left 4 Dead 2, so there's a relationship there.)

Tonight I finished the twenty standalone chapters of Defense Grid 2 in Story Mode, with gold medals in all. The game is a spectacular success, and Fletcher is back, voiced once again by Jim Ward (joined by Jennifer Hale as one of the other AI characters).

DG2 is the best kind of revamp; it is built on the same principles as the first one, with niftier graphics, a sackload of tweaks, and no massive blunders - in essence, the studio stayed true to the shape of the first game, and added some bells and whistles to the second without making it into a different kind of game.

Defense Grid 2 is set in an occupied system of planets - the first game took place on derelict worlds in abandoned facilities, among ruins which Fletcher powered up to meet the oncoming alien front. There are a variety of voluble AI characters in the new game, with an entertaining secondary storyline in which several of the AIs are captured and damaged by the alien invaders. On each level towers can only be built on active pads, which forces the player to shift tactics in the face of increasing enemy waves: the aliens come in from one or more entrances and make for the cache of power cores, which they will try to take off the map. On wider, more open levels the trick is to manage the enemy paths, marching them past rows of blazing weapons; on smaller ones, strength lies in upgrades. In either case, losing all the cores means losing the level.

The progression of the learning curve is handled well, with new towers and new alien types introduced one at a time. Gone are the flying aliens, which in the first game could only be hit by a few types of weapons; some new aliens speed up when they are not making turns, or heal quickly when they are not taking damage. Everyone's least favorite tower type from the first game (picked on a little unfairly, if you ask me) has been revamped this time out, and there are skill-tree style tower upgrades that become available randomly as the game progresses. There are multiple play modes, as in the first game, and this time out there's multiplayer too, which I haven't tried yet. In some scenarios, dormant tower platforms can be activated from the command shuttle, which is a nice added element to the game.

I'm likely to play this one for ages, as I did with the first one.

Production values are super, with great environments, natty voicing, spiffy graphics, well-crafted scenarios, solid writing, and an interesting story. Defense Grid games feel different than many other tower defense games; after my first hundred hours in the first one I tried a few other games in the genre, but didn't like them as well. This one is built cleanly, and encourages attention to detail. Your mileage may vary, of course, but Defense Grid is one of my favorite games ever, and the new one seems destined to join it on my Best Of list. My first playthrough, on Normal Difficulty, took 29 hours, and I had to play some scenarios a few times until I made gold.

Our (games completed) story thus far

I... I just completed Pepper Panic Saga, a King.com match 3 Facebook game!
Go me!

It's April and I'm finally opening my account for the year with a Facebook game, ho hum

I did like Pepper Panic though (I must have to have played through all 460 levels!) it's got this whole 'explode peppers to grow other peppers' chain reaction thing going on - it's cool to make the world burn sometimes!
The cat who nicks your grown peppers is a dick though - HATE that guy!

Anyways - the list for the year, such as it is:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2015/post118

Me too! Happy to see I'm not the only one around here, it's such an underappreciated game.

I'm glad that finally someone recognizes the importance of cover and position on this game. It's quite crucial, especially in the newly added hard mode where you get shot to pieces if you let your characters stand around without cover. The amount of damage you take in the higher difficulty mode is massively higher. As for position, if I can't get a decent shot in then I'd rather spend my action points on doing other stuff (moving, healing, reloading etc) unless it's an assault rifle with plenty of ammo.

As for wasting stuff vs being conservative with it, I realized I was overly paranoid and stingy in both normal mode and hard mode, in both cases I had plenty of resources to spare. At one point around 5700 energy to spare during both of my playthroughs.
I realized that it's not necessary to ever buy a grenade (MK-I as the only purchasable type is kinda useless in hard mode in the 2nd half of the game), all one needs is some medium medikits in the first half of the game and a bunch of large medikits in the second half, especially if you use Thirteen as a tank. I didn't use him much, he absolutely aced it in the final mission though.
It's also necessary to buy quite a lot of ammo, not so much in normal mode but in hard mode I bought 80 mags of ammo total. I relied more on sniper rifles than on assault rifles so I did use more ammo that way since sniper mags have lower capacity. Fortunately, ammo is cheap and for most missions, bringing 2 ammo for every character is enough, unless you're using a 3 shot railgun in which case I'd bring more. I hardly used railguns because the low ammo is too much of a disadvantage, especially in hard mode where you have way more enemies. I've never run out of ammo but I have run out of medikits on some missions.

Amen to that! When I finished the game for the first time, I was so into it that I immediately restarted the campaign but aborted the effort due to lack of challenge since the first half of the game is a bit too comfortably easy imho.
But now that you can choose game mode+ in the mods tab, you can make the game much harder from the get-go.
I had considerably more fun with game mode+ and I highly recommend you try it out if you haven't already.

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

Vast disappointment for two reasons.

The first reason is that there's way, way too much emphasis on guns. What made the first Hotline great was the brutal melee combat and the number of choices (via masks) how to tackle each level. Now, there are either no choices or only a limited pool of masks and either way, the levels are packed with gun-toting enemies. This means you have to follow a strict pattern when traversing the floors unless you want to get shot in the face - often off-screen and there's no room for improvisation.

The second reason is that the story makes absolutely no sense. Sure, the first Hotline had a pretty trippy story too but this one takes it up a notch, or maybe ten. I can't even begin to understand what the big picture is supposed to be. This might be partly to the huge number of different characters, who don't seem to be related to each other in any way. It's almost like the developers tried to simultaneously do not just Hotline Miami 2, but 3 and maybe even 4 too and squeeze them under the same title.

Not all is bad though: the true star of the show, is the music. It is amazing. Thus, my suggestion to those who are interested in the game, is to keep playing Hotline Miami 1 again while listening to the Hotline Miami 2 soundtrack. It's much better that way instead of playing the actual Hotline Miami 2.

flow and flower.. playing la noire right now..

3 months are already over, and I just beat my first game, Medieval 2: Total War - Teutonic Campaign, as the Danes. I got my 45 territories with 90 turns remaining, and while I could continue playing and conquer everything, I decided not to . It would've just been a time-demanding grind. It was a lot of fun while it lasted though (which was a few months, I started playing it just before my exams in january) and it reminded my how much I loved, and still love, Medieval 2.

Full list

Melissa K. and the Heart of Gold Collector's Edition

With it's 3D (or perhaps quasi-3D) scenes that you can pan about, this one's technologically superior to the other HOGs I've played, and is longer than most to boot. The non-hidden-object puzzles were quite good as well. I played on Expert difficulty, which turned out to be quite unfair in that not only was there no hover text on hot-spots, but even clicking on some did not provide any indication that there was anything of importance there - you had to click on them with the right item for anything to happen! So yeah, ended up using the HINT button a lot (got the "50 hints used" achievement by the end...) during the normal "adventure" part of the game, but never during puzzles except a single hidden object scene in the bonus chapter.

Interestingly enough, instead of the bonus chapter being sort of an after-story/epilogue in most HOG "special editions", in this one it is actually part of the main plot, taking place at the same time but from a different character's perspective. And the entire story of the bonus chapter fits perfectly with the main game except the ending cut scene, which for some reason becomes an alternate ending.

Rochard

Nice little action/puzzle platformer which isn't quite as fun as it should be. The problem is that it's, for the most part, way too easy - both the puzzles, and the combat. Enemies seem to have 10% or less of Rochard's own health, and get taken out with a single punch or thrown crate. The Hard Times DLC, on the other hand, has 4 rather hard puzzle levels, and I'm currently hopelessly stuck on the 2nd one. The story's OK, but the dialogue is very cheesy, and occasionally makes not much sense in context.