Only 200 hours? Lightweight... ;oP Did ya run from one end of the map to another without fighting anything? :)

*runs*

Driftmoon
The game was made by two people. And it shows. Driftmoon is one of the most amateurish games I have ever played.
Every time it does something promising it's followed by something bland or cringe worthy. Like a Monty Python sketch in the middle of a dungeon. The game constantly throws silly jokes at you which doesn't help with the cliché story and the cliché twist at the end.
The graphics, music and the humorous writing are good, but everything else just feels underdeveloped. The maps are small, the puzzles are childish, the combat system is in my opinion just boring and bland. The item/potion crafting feels useless and forced. There are so many little things I could criticize about the game, but I will summarize it all in one sentence: It feels like a game, that was made in one week.
5/10

well no, I did play all of the sidequests and mostly boring questionmarks and it was blood and broken bones. Few gwents remained. skyrims stealing was better, in witcher you basically loot what ever you see without nobody batting an eye. Also I think hearts of stone had more interesting main quest than in blood and wine. Also I hoped to hear more varied music but perhaps I'll listen that soundtrack.

God Hand

This is an action brawler where you play a hero bestowed with the God hand, an arm that bestows you huge strength and the ability to punch people into space. The controls are simple, you don't have to learn combo's and you can get by most of the time spamming one button, but you get to choose what moves are performed with each button press, allowing you to finetune a killer combo that can be performed with only one button. The game is ridiculous, and I say that in a good way, the enemies tend to be dancing or whipping hostages (Some of whom enjoy the experience) and consist of things from fat ninja's to huge tribal women dual wielding battleaxes. The bosses are even more ridiculous, ranging from gorillas to a power rangers rip off. Enemies can be finished off in a number of spectacular ways, such as being spanked into space or if an enemy has 1hp you can poke him to death. The game is difficult, and is very frustrating. During boss fights there are boxes lying around to give you power ups but its random as to what is actually inside them, usually a coin instead of health. If you fight a group of enemies bigger than 2 then it also becomes incredibly difficult. Anyhow it was an enjoyable game, the story is only there to add humour (I never learnt what the protagonists name is) and it took about 12 hours to complete. It's a great game and despite being difficult the checkpoints tend to be numerous and you respawn with full health so you just need to get the hang of it. I'd recommend this.

Finished Seasons after Fall. A great platformer with gorgeous visuals, great music and great voice actors (in French). Difficulty does not come from combat or pixel-perfect jumping but from puzzles related to the seasons. The game lacks directions in a few places, other than that it was great. Going back to previously visited places did not bother me a lot, contrary to professional reviewers.

Full list here.

<span class="bold">Wooden Sen'SeY</span>

I chose this game from among my backlog because I read it was relatively short and I wanted some not overly complicated platforming action. And Wooden Sen'SeY certainly delivers in both regards: it took me around 3-4 hours to complete it, and it is a good looking enough 2.5D action platformer. Though as many other 2.5D games it sometimes suffers from a confusing perspective and a lack of depth definition. Case in point: there are some environmental hazards (cannonballs, giant swinging blades...) that move from the background towards the foreground, and it's extremely difficult to accurately judge when it's safe to move in front of/behind them. The shaky camera and its sudden perspective shifts doesn't help matters, either.

The story is as barebones as you can get: bad guy sacks old traditional Japanese village and steals all of their sake; brave (and wooden, as it seems) warrior chases bad guy in order to exert retribution and recover the stolen alcohol. And that's the long and the short of it. Said chase takes place throughout 10 levels (an introduction and 9 regular ones) which are surprisingly varied, both in terms of gameplay, enemy types and art style. Pity that the most beautiful ones are, by far, the first 2-3 levels. It almost feels like the artists did the art for those levels first, and then they got bored (or more probably, were rushed) and didn't put as much effort in the later levels.

The controls and gameplay is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the hero is equipped with truly versatile weapons: he wields two axes with chains which serve both as close range melée and semi-throwable weapons, but they can also be thrown downwards while in the air, allowing him to do a sort of double jump at the same time. Oh, and they can be used as grappling hooks as well, in order to traverse bottomless pits. But on the other hand, the controls are too cumbersome or unresponsive as to reliably perform all the actions and movements at the player's disposal. This becomes painfully evident in the last level: at first the baddy appears mounted on a deadly flying machine, Dr.Robotnik-style, and starts chasing you so you must start moving to the right if you don't wanna insta-die. In order to survive you must keep moving right, and every now and then you must perform the downwards-axe-throwing 'thrust' movement. Well then, I found it very hard to perform the "right-thrust-right" combo and I failed more often than not. At the end I was forced to switch from my gamepad to keyboard+mouse in order to get past that section, otherwise I might still be there.

Finally, even though the game has actual lives, it is not too hard: running out of lives only means you must re-start the level. Plus, most of the time just before a particularly difficult section (like e.g. the final boss fight) there'll be a checkpoint with an extra life next to it, so you'll be effectively getting infinite tries in order to overcome the challenge. I guess the real challenge in this game is to nail all the levels (killing everything, collecting every sake bottle, and beating the dev's time), as well as completing the extra 'time attack' levels. I didn't enjoy the game enough as to bother with those, though.


My list of finished games in 2016

Shadowrun: Hong Kong Extended Edition

Another good Shadowrun game.

I think overall I liked Dragonfall better, but this one is pretty solid. I read a number of complaints about the new matrix design, but I liked it a lot, and hacking was great, IMO. Good fun there.

The game design itself was pretty good, but one drawback I found was that there really wasn't much to interact with except things you really needed. In other words, it was pretty telegraphed that you would need 'this' thing at 'this' time if you could interact with it. The devs did, however, provide you with a number of ways to accomplish your mission in almost all of the runs (ie, you could go diplomatic, guns blazing, or a combo of those). Since you don't get XP (or Karma points) for combat, this really made all options viable.

A couple things I didn't like: You couldn't really give your companions any gear, as they have their own that levelled with them and you couldn't swap it out for something better. Some of them also had consumable item slots locked as well, limiting the customization of your load-out for different missions. You also don't get to level your companions' stats. That's all done in the background and you only choose one of two options for abilities/talents as they 'level' up. Despite this, they were all pretty effective anyway, so it wasn't a game-breaker by any means. Oh, and for some reason, no matter how threatened they were by other party members or other hostiles, the enemy units almost always seemed to go straight for my character. Didn't matter where I was positioned, or what threatened them, they almost always went right for me. In some cases this made sense. In most, it didn't. A lot of spelling errors and missing words in the text. Not sure how so many of these got through final QA and patching.

Things I did like: Story was okay, and unfolded in a fairly good manner overall. Some of the characters you meet are pretty solid, and there's lots of flavor convos to fill you in on things around Hong Kong, as well as things relating to the story that really flesh it out. I liked the companions, and it was interesteg finding out their stories. Companion-related missions were fun and for the most part well done, too. Money was in tight supply, which is good, as it makes you prioritize your wants/needs. I never felt it was truly a big problem, but I did have to carefully consider what I was spending my nuyuen on.

So yeah, pretty solid game, and a good offering from HBS. Hope they decide to do another in the future, although I'd love to see it done with a different game engine, if possible.

Full List

Finished Gone Home. More of a walking simulator than a true adventure game but it worked for me. Story was nicely told and I liked it. It's short (2h) but it's enough I think.

Full list here.

I've just beaten Daxter (PSP).

It does what it's meant to, and it does it great. It's a proper shame I didn't get to play the other Jak and Dexter games for some extra clarity on the story.

Android:
+Lifeline 2 Bloodlines

Unlike the original Lifeline and its sequel Silent Night, this one is not only much easier but also set entirely on Earth with a different theme. You guide Arika (spell it like this: Ar-uh-ka), a mage, and help her on a quest to see her brother after years of separation, however, that task is far more treacherous than it sounds.

You have to help her confront all sorts of people both good and bad alike in order to get her to her brother through decisions, and when they do matter, the tension of whether you let her continue on her quest or failed her horribly will get to you and will worry you whenever she is doing an action that demands you to wait and see the results. You have to wait that time in real time, so if she walks for eight hours, the game will be suspended for eight hours or earlier.

No, this Lifeline like the ones I played before do not have any IAPs to skip the waiting. In fact there's no IAPs. You have to finish a route (bad or good) in order to get the timeskip and rewind functions which do exactly as is said on the tin. The waiting isn't a part of a scheme to force money out of your wallet but rather the element that adds tension into the story, especially when Arika doesn't get back to you in a short while.

And that's it. This is a text based game so it heavily relies on the story to get its point across, so there are minimal graphics (or art actually), but there is a soundtrack that differs based on the situation.

Pooka is waiting for you to see his games.

Super Mario Galaxy 2

Like the last one but with more levels and Yoshi. Pretty good.

I've had an interest in that series for eons but never seen them first hand. The series is old enough now that it might be a nice surprise to drop in here on GOG some day, at least the original game(s) in the series. They've been ballied around the bundle sites for a while IIRC, so the next logical step is next Thursday's release here. :)

Finished Walking Dead season 1, 2, and 400 days.

I'm gonna disagree with, I guess everyone, and say this game is as much bad as it is good. Which is bad, because I think the game is really good. (meaning its also really bad.... ;) )

Story is great. Voicing good to great in areas. Visuals are ok. Overall had a pretty good time playing it.

My problems are multiple.

1. Its a walking sim with quicktime 'gotchas' ready to punish you for letting go of the mouse after 20+ minutes of dialog. Walking sim is ok, but the QTE's are a joke given how much time passes in between actual inputs.

2. Decisions are far too punishing far too frequently (and often don't make sense afterwards). I get it. Its bad times out there. But EVERY decision doesn't have to be choosing who lives and who dies. And often, the decision you make turns out the opposite of what you wanted. This goes into the territory of realism. If you make games too realistic, they cease to be fun. Giving me the finger every time I choose a response is not fun. (their one trick pony seems to be, lol, let him choose an option and really sweat over it, and then we will screw him anyway).

3. Depth is limited. From what I have gathered (and based on the games own stats) you really can't save certain people anyway. At best, you can prolong their life. If a game's sole feature set is on choice, I would have liked to see more control in the player's hands.

4. The plot is so dark and disturbing, it crossed a line for me. It wasn't just the subject matter, I'm familiar with the show, its that it became extremely repetitive. Horrible things happened. Up next is horrible things X2. After that, horrible things X4, etc. Across all genres of entertainment, I hate this assumption that things have to always be bigger, better, louder, etc. more explosions, more blood, more body count. Good writing doesn't have to fall on that crutch. But in these games, they do.

As a game, I enjoyed it, but glad it was over and never plan to play it again. They had some good ideas and executed a few of them. The frustrations are pretty big ones. Granted, they are personal opinions. I'm torn on getting the Michone game. I like the series, and the games had their moments, but I'm not sure if I want another 8 hours of what i would call, funishment. A little bit of fun, a whole lot of pain. And most of what is memorable about the games, are things I don't want to remember anyway.

Not really, that's pretty much in accord with my own thoughts on the game (I only played the first season though).