Why not - only I love Valen Shadowbreath and Deekin and could game no other way, and must take them with me, even if they possibly might "drag me down."

Out of all the Apogee platformers I have completed, I found Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures to be the worst. Quite a few things conspire to bring it down.

There is some mildly annoying stuff like the grab function's tendency to latch everywhere and the lack of a projectile weapon (like a raygun) which could have helped to deal with enemies above you, but these are really not a big deal. Oh no.

For starters, the game's garish colours can make it hard to discern an upcoming projectile or whether an object is interactive or just part of the backgrounds, which can lead to quite a few hits/deaths. Then, the game is zoomed-in a bit too much, which means that you might not spot enemies above/below you before it's too late to avoid their attacks. Sure, you can look up or down and it helps, but unlike Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy!, the game resets your view to the previous state once you let go of the look button, forcing you to constantly stop and look again, making progress in vertical stages a pain in the ass. Finally, there are no checkpoints or mid-level saving in the game, so if you die in one of the lengthy stages, you'll have to do it all over again. At least Cosmo won't die in one hit, but there are still the pits...

I personally can't recommend Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure. There are much better platformers out there, Apogee or not.

Full list.

Def Jam: Fight for NY (PS2)

You are a rookie hoping to make your way through the organised street fights and gain some money and respect. However your clubs are threatened by the evil Crow (Played by Snoop Dog) and his gang as they expand their territory across the city, you must fight back and take back the streets. Def Jam is a series of fighting games, though more similar to the WWE style of games. All the fighters are played by over 40 different hip hop stars who fight with 5 different styles: Street, Kickboxing, Martial Arts, Wrestling and Submission or a combination of 2 or 3 of them. The methods of beating your opponents are often brutal, usually involving smashing their head into a stone pillar or breaking a pool cue over them, though in other levels you may have to throw them onto train tracks or through a window. The fights are epic and multiplayer was really fun.

One annoying thing was a crappy tutorial and instruction booklet, which don't mention anything about countering attacks yet your enemies start using reversals after the 2nd fight, you actually learn this is a thing about halfway through the game when your trainer mentions it to you. This was one of the reasons I really struggled in the beginning and had to look it up in a walkthrough. The game is hard at the beginning but as you build up your skills it gets easier. I would recommend it for anyone whose a fan of the wwe games, or just wants the pleasure of throwing their friend into windscreens or fire.

Orion: A Sci-Fi Visual Novel
Orion: A Sci-Fi Visual Novel is a fully voiced interactive visual novel revolving around a protagonist with time-warping capabilities. There are 9 total endings (1 is hidden/true ending) that vary quite a bit.

I definitely enjoyed the voiced narration and soundtrack. The artwork has a Western illustration style with plenty of Sci-Fi elements (as opposed to the traditional animu) and do a great job portraying the story. One major gripe I have about this game is the rather abrupt and shallow endings. I really wish there would have been more detail or follow up of each ending. They were clearly designed in order to help you (as a player) gain information in order to understand/discover the true ending.

Traditional VN options are present: text speed, window size, skip commands etc. Full save and load states are supported alongside qs/ql.

I enjoyed my playthrough of each ending (~2 hours total). There aren't that many VN's on Steam anyways, so this is definitely worth a shot.

Good
- 7/10

Loved this one. I'm one of those guys who still plays the wrestling games made for the N64 and I've never gotten over how Aki was pushed aside in favor of Yukes and the Smackdown series, which is still continuing to this day (to the consternation of many wrestling fans). When I found out Aki was making the new Def Jam games, I had to check it out and wasn't disappointed even though I'm very much not a hip-hop fan.

The Last Door (season 1). This has a nice horror mood to it. It's often said to be paying homage to Lovecraft and Poe's writing, but I thought it sometimes seemed more like a Dario Argento movie with the seemingly random bits of weird crap and the way that a lot of the characters felt vaguely off, giving the whole thing a nightmare-like vibe.

The music and sound effects are great. The graphics...I think I know what they were going for with the extra blocky pixel art, which made me imagine someone trying to make King's Quest on an Atari 2600, but the graphics are so blocky that it's often hard to tell what I was looking at. You sort of click where the magnifying glass or hand appears and wait for the game to inform you what you're interacting with. I like pixel art but I daresay this was a tad too far, going from atmospherically vague to "what the hell?"

I enjoyed it well enough that I think I'm up for seeing where the cliffhanger goes in season 2. It's pretty easy and short for a point-and-click game - I think my total game time ended up just over 4 hours - but I especially like this kind of stuffy Victorian horror, especially when I got it on sale.

The Witcher 2 (Xbox One)

I installed the PC version first, since my PC is more than capable. I played through about 2 hours into chapter one, but I was not really happy with the controls- KB and mouse just does not suit this type of thing to me, with there being no aiming the mouse isn't essential and analogue movement of a controller beats digital keyboard movement any day. Plus I also had a few game freezes early on.
I could just use my 360 controller on PC, but I got the 360 version for free some time back so installed it on Xbox One just to compare. Well I never went back to the PC version- there was simply no reason to. A good movie is a good movie whether you watch it on DVD or BluRay and a resolution drop doesn't make a good game bad.. The 360 had a lower resolution sure (720 I assume), but the difference to 1080 on my PC wasn't as big as you may think. It still looked outstanding, controlled better with the Xbox One controller and ran perfectly smooth and was glitch and crash free the entire game- pretty impressive considering it was running under emulation from an external drive.

I didn't like the first Witcher game at all really. Too much getting dragged around by cutscenes, and an elite monster hunter character that can't step over a 2 foot high fence and a combat system that was just a rythm game. The Witcher 2 had a more suitable (for an action RPG) combat system but was pretty easy on normal difficulty. Otherwise the game shared some of the things I didn't like about the original. Some of the cutscenes chained together into dialogue sessions and then more cutscenes that could go on for 15 or 20 minutes with barely a shred of gameplay. The roleplaying aspects almost border on pseudo role play, in reality the game is quite linear apart from the two basic paths you can follow. Take out the cutscenes and dialogue there isn't really much actual gameplay. The world is not open at all and is a series of corridors with foilage. And that voice acting of Triss (well the English version of her anyway)...they may as well as just put up the blackboard she was reading off.

So it sounds like I hated the game. But the more I played the more I got invested and I ended up actually loving the game. Make no mistake I think it's a very average RPG, but at some point I stopped thinking of it as an RPG and started playing it as a cinematic action adventure game, and as that it really was awesome. I really am now looking forward to seeing the story go forward in The Witcher 3. Though I hope they got someone else to voice Triss.

So if the aim of giving this game away for next to nothing in sales (and for free on XBL) was to get people invested enough to buy into The Witcher 3, then it worked in my case. I need to play the sequel now for sure.

Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet - 2/5

There's some good moments, and the game certainly has promise, but it also feels very rough. A lot of the backgrounds are a real woeful mess (example), the controls are incredibly cumbersome, a lot of shitty deaths, some completely nonsensical moments, and just a general wealth of bugs and jankiness.

I'm a little hesitant to start Prisoner of Ice now...

Liveza: The Death of Earth

Not quite sure what to think of this one. The default control scheme is kind of a pain, and it's also the ONLY control scheme because it can't be rebound. No gamepad support either - it's strictly keyboard for the gameplay, and mouse for menus. Well, Joy2Key to the rescue! Other than that. this platformer/gunner is cheap, short, buggy, annoying enemies and sometimes psychodelic levels. The music's mostly good, the sound effects are awful. Still can't make heads or tails of the story.

Clive Barker's Undying

My first time playing this classic, and I really liked it a lot. Except for the painful weapon/spell selection wheels (who the hell thought an mouse-based invisible virtual joystick selection menu was a good idea??), the tendency to load a new area and lock you out of the old one once you go through a door (not good for exploration), and the final boss. Not quite clear on the story though. Or if the "dispel" spell spell had some uses I didn't think of - it seemed virtually useless to me, acting as a key to a single door, and maybe a way to dispel the shields on the very few enemies who had them.

Hector: Badge of carnage
This game has TellTale written all over it (despite being developed by Straandlooper), and by that I mean it's short, easy, overpriced and quite funny.
I would definitely not recommend buying it at full price.
The graphics, animation, music, voice acting and writing are all good and contribute to the cartoon like look and feeling. The story is a chain of weird events that form a simple but enjoyable detective story.
The humor is not politically correct which is a very good thing if you'd ask me.
At the end I was expecting a bit more from this game, but I definitely hat a lot of fun with it.
8/10

Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm - I absolutely loved Die by the Sword back in the '90s, but I never really got into this spiritual successor, despite owning it for many years. I finally gave it a shot and I was pleasantly surprised. It's a little rough around the edges, but it was definitely a fun game.

Ratchet & Clank (2016) - I'm a big fan of this series and this is one of the best ones so far. Sure, it's a reboot, but the gameplay was fast and furious, just the way I like it!

Gunman Clive - I knew nothing about this game, but decided to randomly load it up on Steam. It was a pretty neat little game that had me hooked the whole time. Now I need to pick up the sequel.

Sakura Swim Club - I played a couple of visual novels waaaaay back in the day, but it's been a long time. It was fun to play one of these finally, considering Steam is loaded with them nowadays. But I don't think I picked a good one. It was just okay and nothing special. I need to try and play one of the better ones now!

Full list + completion times

Deadlight (Platformer-Adventure)

Options include sliders for Music, Sound Effects, Dialogue, Graphic Quality, and Gamma (Brightness.) Resolution goes up to 1920x1080 for me. You can turn on/off Object Highlights, Hints, Vibration (for controller,) and Subtitles (under Audio Settings.) Keyboard and mouse controlls can be re-mapped, though I used the controller (which cannot be re-mapped.)

I was immediately sucked in by how atmospheric the game is, reminiscent of a cross between This War of Mine, I Am Alive, Mark of the Ninja, and Zafehouse Diaries (because ZOMBIES!)

The game is really an action-platformer at heart, but the driving story and deeply environmental graphics, sounds, and voices make it feel much like an adventure. Cinematics can be skipped (but why would you want to do that?) and consist of sepia-toned images with voice overs. You will play through flashbacks, and there are diary entries you will find which add to the story, as well as little extras like the ID of strangers, newspaper clippings, first aid kits... Oh, and don't forget bullets! There are also a few "handhelds" to be found, which are games to play within the game.

The controls for run-jumping can be a bit sticky at times, but the auto-save function ensures that you don't have to repeat too much if you die. Speaking of running, there ARE running sequences similar to -- but not as hair-pullingly frustrating as -- Ori and the Blind Forest. I had to repeat these sequences three to five times, max, and they're not very long.

Some areas are puzzle-heavy, whilst others are action-heavy, depending on where you are in the story. You can always go back to the main menu and choose 'Select Scene' if you think you've missed something. There are three chapters to choose from, and each chapter has specific scenes you can go back to, complete with information on how many secrets you found; ie. 2/3. Great for those who like to 100% their games!

Finishing the game unlocks Nightmare Mode, which is the same as the standard play, except that the game only saves between each chapter. Nightmare indeed, especially when you consider that the controls for jumping WILL mess you up, and you WILL die. I think I'll just skip this part.

There are achievements to be had, but I can't see getting all of them. For one thing, you'd have to meet a friend on the leaderboard for one of them (solution HERE -- Thank you, P0nz!,) and you have to complete Nightmare Mode, sooo... Yep, I won't be getting all of them!

I absolutely loved most of the game, but the final area of the game was too much action and not enough thinking for my tastes. Overall I'd say it's absolutely worth playing!

On sixth of may I completed endless space. While it's a 4x which can be played endlessly I can say in finished with it and won't be picking it up ever again. I can't say something like that about moo 2 but es, yes.

Fun game, beautiful looking and in first fifty turns is very good. Late games don't have much too offer though. Just not enough options I believe.
The weapon tech lacks something as well. excluding fighters and bombers the battle always relies on those same weapons. Just your laser can be +3 instead +2.

Still enjoyed combat. Enough options for it to be fun and feel like you are in control but does not demand micromanagement.

Just finished The Witcher 3 : Wild Hunt - Heart of Stone

An excellent extension to the base game. Took me around 15 hours to complete it, nearly at 100%. Still very interesting main quest and side quests.

Still some of the things ticked me off a little, like annoying boss patterns (time consuming and not really entertaining), and the story with the meeting with an old acquaintance. Unfortunately, I can't tell more as it would be major spoilers and there are certainly many people here that didn't complete it yet. So I'll remain silent, but some of the lines made little sense, given what happens (at least for me) in the base game.

Can't wait fot Blood & Wine next monthe maybe!

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