Completed Max Payne 3

Hilarious! :D

Star Wars Dark Force II: Jedi Knight. Dark Forces was a good game but this is a massive improvement in almost every way. The levels are huge and generally a lot of fun to explore, the graphics have been improved to real 3D, and there are enjoyably cheesy cutscenes in between each level. I think if Lucasarts had decided to make a cheap syndicated Star Wars TV series in the 90s, it probably would have looked like the cutscenes in this game.

The one area in which the game is pretty rickety is in the addition of the lightsaber. Good melee combat is still uncommon in first person games and they sure as hell weren't ahead of the curve with this game. The lightsaber ends up being kind of fun when you're jumping around corners and wrecking stormtroopers with it, but the duels against the dark Jedi are tedious at best and nearly ragequit-inducing at worst (I recently ranted about one of them on the "games playing" thread the other day; fortunately none of the remaining ones are as quite bad as that one).

Star Wars The Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition (PC).

Not a bad game, and I had fun with it, but for me, at least, it was a pretty big button masher.

I didn't collect all the holocrons, as there were a few I just ended up wasting too much time trying to get, so i said 'screw it' and moved on. Lot of abilities and powers to choose from, but I found it impossible to remember all the button combos to perform them, so ended up just going with a handful of standard moves.

I still hate QTEs with a passion, so that aspect wasn't the most fun for me. And I especially loathed the way the perspective changed during boss fights. I found it very difficult to position my character and figure out exactly where he was facing sometimes during the boss fights. This was because they locked the camera at a specific vantage point and I found no way to adjust it or free it up. So, while some of them were fun, there was a lot of frustration in them as well.

Having said that, I still found the game enjoyable enough to finish, although I doubt I'll play it again. It was fun kicking Vader's ass as well as mopping the floor with the Emperor. But yeah, once is enough.

I finished The last of us in PS3.

It was worth my time. =)
It got better towards the end, the snow places and stuff, when you controlled Ellie. That was pretty epic.

Nearwood

This one was a positive surprise. I expected a pure HOG and got a light adventure instead (there were just 5 or 6 hidden object sections). The puzzles weren't hard, but there was a great variety and some of them were really good. I also liked the story, the graphics (especially some of the effects) and the music.

I think Nearwood might be a very good game to introduce kids to the adventure genre.

Longest Night

A small supplemental game for Night in the Woods (a Kickstarter game that hasn't been released yet). There's not much content. All you do is find star constellations and when you find one the characters will tell you something about it (and that will also tell you something about Night in the Woods). It's not really exciting, the atmosphere is great though. And I absolutely love the music.

I really enjoyed this one as well. I look forward to playing the sequel some day.

Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold

I got this one long ago and started it many times but every time I abandoned it quickly. It looked too pixely, couldn't find my way around, I couldn't tell difference between informants and enemies and died very quickly.
Now, after playing Wolfenstein 3D with source port and I decided to try it again. I looked around and found there is now source port available as well and with it, reinforced by Wolf experience, I was finally able to play through it. Big reason was mouselook again.
And I quite liked it. In fact most of the time more than Wolfenstein. I liked the weird colours of the game better, the enemies are more variable, weapons are more interesting than in Wolf but that's almost solely thanks to plasma grenade launcher.
Also I find the map layout much more reasonable than in W3D even though it (and enemy placement) would make no sense at all for any actual base.

There are things I disliked as well. Some weapons are useless. I actually regularly used only 2 of them (sub-machine gun and grenade launcher). Rest is not worth using most of time. Also sometimes I wasn't able to hit enemy even from point blank and I have no idea why. Also I could be easily hit for few points of health and then for more than half of my health on following shot and I am still not able to tell why. If it was ruled just by some random roll or what.
Then there are informants. My god, how I hated them. I tried to get 100% completion and they were the biggest pain in the ass I can imagine. I cheered every time there was floor without them.
I got constantly hurt by scientists thinking they are allies and even more often I kept killing them by accident. They like to parade in the biggest firefights and it is incredibly easy to hit them with grenade, stray shot or just shot misdirected by autoaim. They love to get killed.
I loathe them.

The game is quite big with 66 levels (22 of them secret, non-mandatory ones) and I felt at the times that it's little too much but then, I also searched for every secret, try to kill everyone and to clear all secret floors, so I made it longer myself and the game could be completed way faster than I did.

Overall I certainly enjoyed the game more than it pissed me, don't feel like I wasted my time with it and plan to eventually get Planet Strike as well. Not right away, though. I need break from it.

Onwards to next game! (I actually already started Rise of the Triad few days ago, as I report this late and don't like it so far)

Just finished Pine view Drive the other day!

A Vampyre Story

Had this one on hold for almost a year, but finally got back to it and finished it. Embarrassingly enough, I only realized near the end that TAB was the hotspot highlight key. Would've saved me a few trips to the walkthrough....

Not a bad game with a lot of clever dialog, but not truly special. Unfortunately it ends on a cliffhanger with no sequel in sight.

Knights of Pen and Paper 2

Finished it on my android tablet. Very good sequel of the first game. In short, more of the same, but with some welcome twists. maybe a bit short, but the two DLCs (on android at least) are nice.

So far in 2016: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2016/post46

Finished Lilly Looking Through a short point'n click adventure game. Graphics and music are good. Animations too but they are a bit slow: every action in the game is painfuly slow. Puzzles are ok and on the easy side. The story is not developped a lot and it ends on some kind of cliffhanger.

Full list here.

I've played through or finished quite a few games recently, but I didn't feel like making individual posts for each and every one of them, so I held off on commenting until I had accumulated enough. I fear that now I've actually accumulated so many though that it will completely spam this thread ... XD

So here goes:

Her Story

The gameplay consists of nothing more than using a search engine to find videoclips, watch them to find more key words and put the story together in your head. It's a very simple idea, but surprisingly enjoyable, especially since you can play it in very short sittings (e.g. if you have a few minutes in between doing other stuff), and with a length of 2-4 hours it doesn't overstay its welcome either. I had most of the story figured out after watching half of the videos already, but that's because the game is non-linear, and I guess the most interesting thing about it is how different players approach it. Personally, I found the UI too simple and limiting. The old computer interface that the player character has to use for the research on this criminal case is a nice touch, but it doesn't really justify that you have no convenient in-game options to sort and arrange the video clips you find. You can only make individual clips switch places by dragging and dropping, but that quickly becomes cumbersome when they're all just lined up in a side-scrolling window, in one long single row. You can't make in-game notes either. And your search results are artificially limited to 5, unless you remove the limit with a cheat command. In the end, I resorted to playing the game in a window and using a text editor for notes and keywords, and I think this could have been resolved more elegantly, with in-game solutions. And when I eventually used the cheat commands in order to unlock all videos that I hadn't found yet, they were all just variations of the suspect saying "Yes" or "No". I doubt you'd be even able to find these clips without the cheats, and they're completely pointless on top of it, which was a bit disappointing. Anyway, despite these minor quibbles I enjoyed the time I spent with Her Story, but then again, I enjoy non-linear storytelling, googling and my OCDs in general. ;)


MISSING: An Interactive Thriller - Episode One

Interesting game, like a HOG without hidden object screens, or in other words, a casual puzzle adventure, framed by a FMV thriller. I liked the actors, even if some cutscenes were longer than they'd have to be, considering how few happened in them (e.g. a detective examining a car, without really finding much). Puzzles were a bit too easy but still fun. The FMV scenes and pacing promise that the game could develop into an entertaining diversion, but Episode One is hardly more than a demo, completable in 20-50 minutes. It doesn't cost much, but I'm glad I got it in a bundle and wouldn't recommend buying it before all episodes are out.


MechaNika

Nice little time-waster of a point and click adventure. Took me about 4 hours to play through (and I'm a slow and thorough player). The puzzles are mostly easy to solve, some immediately, some after exploring some more, but you get access to all of them pretty soon in the game and can work on them in any order, so there is constant progress, which is a plus. Setting and story aren't all that special but there are some unique characters and ideas in the game. It's a bit of an odd beast in that the humor and overall tone oscillates between harmless and seemingly family-friendly on the one hand, and gross and crude on the other, without really settling for one. It's neither a nasty game under the guise of cuteness, nor a nice game with occasional slips into nastiness. Both sides seem deliberate but not really held together by concept. And sometimes it works well regardless, other times I felt it missed the mark somewhat. I guess it's just a special kind of humor that the two indie designers share and that they didn't try to change in order to appeal to a larger audience. Which is bold and commendable, in a way, even if it means I didn't fully agree with it all the time. I liked the weirdness for its curiosity though. Some reviewer wrote that the game ends when it gets interesting, and on a cliffhanger, but that's a matter of interpretation. I thought the ending was satisfying enough. The devs actually do mean to create more games with their characters, but in different genres, and I think that's fine.


Grow Home

Good game, for what it is. You're a wonky robot climbing a starplant, growing and riding its shoots, in order to get higher up and collect crystals, scan plants and wildlife. It's strongly reminiscent of the free DigiPen student game Dreamside Maroon that won an IGF award in 2010 (and I hope that those former students had some part in the development of the Ubisoft game, not just getting their idea copied), but I found Grow Home a bit more motivating to play due to the collectibles and upgrade mechanics. The climbing also made me think of Octodad, but fortunately it was a lot easier to get used to the controls, and my worry that the game might be more frustrating than fun to play didn't come true. I guess you can play through it in 2-3 hours, but I spent 6-7 in it, just for fun, and to reach 100% completion. I eventually gave up on the latter though, with only 95% of the crystals and 6/8 of the bonus collectibles founds. Motivating myself to waste my time on silly stuff like that gets harder when I've already finished the main objective, and rewards are low or unclear. ;)