I just completed the campaign in Halo 5 on normal. I really enjoy this installment and it feels a lot smoother than the others. I intend to try the multiplayer soon with the Gold code that came with it.

just beat dark souls 2. The dlc is really great but the base game is weak. Beat max payne trilogy and gears of war 1.

At least you didn't spoil it you made me to hurry to play that series.

It's both dark and sweet, switching between the two. Can't say how long exactly, as I played it off and on, whenever I felt like it, as long as I felt like it, from a few minutes to 1-2 hours, over several evenings. Howlongtobeat says about 8 hours, and the average recorded playtime of users who wrote reviews on Steam seems to confirm that, something between 6-10 hours, probably depending on how much you examine your environment and how long you need to solve the puzzles. In any case it's got 5 chapters, and one or two of them are split in two as well. I expected it to be half as long, at best. Not a One Day Game, unless you don't do much else that day. ;)



Do you know what's the difference between the episodic release and the commercial version? Just the language? And do you know by chance, which language the original version is in (assuming there is an original language version that was translated to the other langauge afterwards)?

Go Go Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~ is my first visual novel, so I can't compare it to others. As a standalone experience, it's interesting. You play a tourist coming to Japan for the first time, staying with a couple of brothers you met on the Internet. The brothers turn out to be sisters - shocking! and also, you forgot to ask and apparently never shared a pronoun - and in among the inevitable progress to seduction (you only get to fall for one of them per game) there's a lot of first-time tourist information about visiting Tokyo and the environs, along with light language lessons and some good practical advice about tourist mistakes to avoid. Which is actually pretty cool. I've never been, but now I'm quite curious.

There's no nudity; the Steam game tag is wrong on this score. You manage to catch each sister minus some clothing by forgetting to knock and then forgetting to look away or close the door, but the pictures are PG-13 in nature, if not intent. Apart from that it's all about True Love, and in fact the game gets embarrassed pretty easily, like if anything ever even remotely suggests that people might be physically attracted to each other. The number of awkward-pause ellipse screens to click past [...] is staggering.

No achievements, two endings (one each for matching with each of the sisters), and if you check a game guide, as I did after my first play-through, a couple of judicious saves and liberal use of the "Skip" button will let you play quickly to the other ending and give you the couple of scenes you missed by choosing this restaurant instead of that one, and so forth. Acing one or two of these alternatives unlocks extras that will let you look at the pictures of your times with Makoto and Akira, replay scenes, and give you an index of information about the sites you visited - you can also click through in-game to Googlemaps pictures of the places you go.

The game definitely wants you to end up with one sister rather than the other, or so it seemed to me. They will both fall for you if they're called on to do so, but one harbors an intense and quiet crush and the other is all "Hi, I'm the hot one but don't let me near the kitchen." Goofy, but absorbing. The game is unvoiced, and there's an expansion which apparently renders the game in widescreen with improved animations, as well as adding more content; I only played the base package.

My small list of games finished this year

Re: differences between versions, here you go.

About the original language of the game I really couldn't tell, but since it was produced by ARTE, I'd guess either French or German? (or both?)

Telepath Tactics.

The first play thru was abandoned due to many bugs, came back many patches later and have now completed it.
Tiny text in game, options on the main screen are scarce, so no screen reso options.
No text size option sweet FA, abysmal music, cutscenes between missions are laughable.
The story is badly written, so what's left is a game that has a fairly good tactical combat, but this is not it's saving grace.
Many better games exist so no need to bother with this one.
Only hit one bug this time, not sure if it is a bug or was on my end....
The final mission in the mine became very difficult due to large amount of slowdown.
The ending was utter rubbish too, i have no wish to play it once again, once was more than enough.

One small positive was finding the clear background for the GUI box in one of the game folders.
Useful to kill the shitty patterned background.....woot.

A couple of 2's finished.

Unreal II: The Awakening - This was a game I had started playing several years ago, after having finished and enjoying the first one, but aborted that playthrough because it was so drastically different from the first. The first Unreal is a fantastic explosive romp through an truly alien world backed by an excellent score. This one; however, has almost nothing to do with the first. It also has a story, wherein you have to find alien artifacts that may or may not be a superweapon (Major Sarah Parker may know something about this). Your interaction with your crew (Ne-ban is the best) is the highlight (albeit low bar to pass) of the story portions, and although underdeveloped, leads to a quasi-emotional moment at the ending. The combat, on the other hand, is just boring. With a running speed barely faster than crawling (I wonder why the player character is not let back into the Marines), any action moments are an exercise in slow motion dodging against the much faster enemies. Which is a shame because the environments are imaginative, colorful, and look great. The music is composed by Jack Wall, and could be considered as a predecessor to the Mass Effect series.

Overall, the game is a massive letdown from the first, and frankly even if you hadn't played the first one, I wouldn't recommend this. It's boring and the crew conversational bits can be viewed elsewhere.

Screamer 2 - An arcade racing game that is quite intense, and quite challenging. The biggest challenge of this game comes from the tracks, especially the dirt and snow ones. Running in DosBox with the NGlide really makes the game pop graphically.

Enslaved:Odyssey to the West

A solid 3rd person action/adventure/platforming game. While the gameplay is a bit simplistic it is fun and it's got a great presentation to boot with good characters. The biggest flaw is probably the underwhelming score combined with bad sound mixing.

Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna)

Never Alone is a puzzle platformer, in which you get to control two characters, this can be accomplished, in solo or in local co-op. I played the game solo, where you get to control one character at a time. Most of the time, the other character follows the player, but there are a few sequences, in which the player has to switch between the two characters pretty often, so the amount of work is doubled, and it's pretty hard.
I still like the solo feature, even though the difficulty is pretty high. I would've loved to see something similar like this in co-op only games such as: Foul Play and ibb & obb.

Never Alone: Foxtales DLC

Never Alone: Foxtales is a short story, and an improvement to the main game, with more stable gameplay for the solo mode. This time, there are more puzzles, and you don't have to rush, changing between the two characters.

Complete list of games finished in 2016.

Games beaten in 2016: 13

PC:
-The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC
-Grow Home
-Braid
-Super Meat Boy
-XCOM: Enemy Unkown
-Deadcore
-Escape Goat
7

Wii U:
-Super Metroid
-Donkey Kong Country
-WarioWare: Touched!
3

PS3:
-Shadow of the Colossus
1

Android:
-Horizon Chase: World Tour
-Dark Echo
2

Thanks!

24.03 Civilization IV: Colonization
21.04 Sunless Sea
26.04 Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge
04.06 Warlords Battlecry 3
09.06 Shantae: Risky's Revenge Director's Cut
22.06 Caesar IV
04.07 Invictus: In the Shadow of Olympus
28.08 The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut
22.09 140
03.11 Schein
07.11 Bastion
28.12 BLACKHOLE

Damn, just realized I still haven't finished TitS after starting months ago.