MDK

What a nice surprise! I've taken the game with one of memorable Interplay bundles (when their prices was awesome). I remembered the hype when the game was released and I had never opportunity to play, because back than it needed almost space technology to run. Now, GOG giveaway reminded me the game and I've decided to try.

It took me about 9 hours to beat the game. What I loved is level design and wonderful imagination. Actually I don't like sci-fi settings in games, but in this case it's fresh and interesting. I didn't liked humour - for me it was disadvantage. The whole flying dog support... I think visuals do not correspond with the way enemies and bosses are designed. There are a lot of beautiful, intriguing levels full of shooting clowns. Sorry, I don't buy it. But I must admit that probably these kind of inconsistencies creates unique style of the game. Oh, and there is awesome outro!

You have probably got the game during the last giveaway for free. Go play it. Perhaps it's better then the games you've paid for ;)

List of all games completed in 2017

Just finished Ys: The Oath in Felghana

Amazing JRPG, hard on some bosses, and sweet gameplay, pure action, almost hack & slash and platforms.

Beated on normal difficult, for 30 hours gameplay.

Great game! ^_^

Grim Legends 2: The Dark Swan

Loved the art, music was pretty good. Plot was reasonably good other than that the major plot "surprise" is clearly obvious in the very first minute, and you're incredibly smart heroine/protagonist somehow manages to be fooled by pretty much everyone/everything.

But my main gripe is that several of the environmental puzzles are nonsensical. There are a few cases of this in the main story, but the absolute worst is in the bonus chapter.

There's a hostile fire-breathing dragon sitting on top of an item (a very large stone) you want to grab (though not yet clear why you need it, it's necessary to unlock the next step in progression), and you don't like, district the dragon, or barter, or trick the dragon or anything that might make even at least pretend sense.

No, you put a crappy rake together held together with ribbon, and drag the very large stone out from under the dragon. The dragon just lets you. For some reason. The tied together rake stays together to pull the stone out from under the dragon. Somehow.

It's just...dumb. I lost patience for trying to do the game's puzzles. I don't normally skip any puzzles in a game, but here I skipped 3-4. Enjoyed the plot despite the obvious villain(s) being obvious. Enjoyed the art.

But the gameplay...let something to be desired.

And the bonus chapter...arguably even more inane gameplay, and a wholly nonsensical plot. And worse, the faerie voices (annoying after the first few lines in the original game) feature heavily in the bonus chapter. Blergh.

And yet, for fans of the genre I...don't not recommend it. Maybe. Some charm married to some major flaws.

Crypt of the NecroDancer

One of the weirdest games I’ve played recently. It looks like a standard pixelated dungeon crawling roguelike. The catch is you can only act with the beat of your heart/music. And that makes the game totally different then you may have expected. Quite surprisingly this rhythm based mechanic works very smoothly and makes the game extremely interesting. Yeah, and extremely hard at the same time, at least for me because I’m not all that good with "feeling the beat". So at first I was having a lot of fun but failing miserable every time a dragon appeared on screen. But then I had a small revelation: your enemies’ movement is not random, it’s fully scripted and it depend on your and their position. In other words you can know every move they are about to make. In other words again, each and every enemy should be seen as a puzzle. Some very easy, some more complex but still a puzzle. So then I trained how to solve said puzzles and the game became doable. Still hard but definitely doable. Up to one point, actually. In the story mode you get to play with three different characters, the latter two with unique abilities and limitations. It seemed fine but the last character is insanely difficult. Having one health I can handle, made perfect runs with other characters relatively often. But dying when you miss a beat is too much for me to handle. As I said, I’m not that good with rhythm based games. And that left a bad taste in my mouth. I like if the devs add an extra difficulty for those who enjoy such things (like über-hardcore mode in Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams). But putting it in the story mode? Really?! Nope and nope, I won’t even try to finish it. Just watched it on youtube. So yeah, a very good game, spoiled a bit by a questionable decision. Anyway, I really recommend it, it’s pure fun (up to that point of course)


Full list

Silence

I liked it. It was much better than I expected, even though the criticism directed at it is not unjustified. It's got a wonderful setting, fantastic art direction, great graphics, a very nice soundtrack, some very likable main characters (this time you get to play several characters, and I found Renie and Spot a lot of fun), several funny creatures, good voiceovers (the little girl Renie is actually spoken by a girl with talent, not an adult disguising her voice; I played the original German version, but in English it seems to be the same), the writing is nice enough (I often enjoyed Renie's childlike comments, they felt refreshingly authentic and funny in a cute way), and the story, while not the most exciting, was a good one for a sequel, familiar but also new and different enough.

They also experimented with several new features to distinguish it from its predecessor, The Whispered World, and keep things interesting, and these are hit or miss. If someone prefers the traditional classic point-and-click adventure style to some features of newer games, I can see how they might actually hate them. The puzzles are simplified, there are no more inventory puzzles, and if you pick up and hold an item, by default there are even on-screen hints with what you can use it sometimes, although I think you can turn off that option in the menu. It doesn't mean that there are no puzzles or that they always solve themselves, it's just that after examining your surroundings and trying a few things you're quite guaranteed to find the solution, and there is hardly a challenge of having to think outside the box anymore, and hardly a risk of getting stuck (pressing Space also shows all hotspots and gives hints). Personally, I have to admit that the absurd puzzles were never my favorite part in adventure games, and getting stuck badly enough to have to quit and maybe even consult a walkthrough is something that ruins part of the fun for me, so I didn't mind this game being easier than The Whispered World.

I did get stuck one time though and actually had to check for the reason on the internet, and it wasn't due to me not being able to figure out a puzzle - it was because I overlooked one of their other new features: the on-screen display for a balancing mini-game, in which you have to steer the mouse in the direction opposite to where the cursor is pulling, and then switch quickly if it changes. They also introduced a mechanic that instead of you just telling the character to push or pull an object it makes you pull the mouse in that direction while keeping the button pressed, and this was a very awkward way to control the character's actions, because as simple as it sounds, I never quite figured out how it's actually supposed to work, how far I'm supposed to pull the mouse etc. I always got through it somehow, but it was no fun. Both of these new mechanics seem to try imitating QTE style controls, and that's a direction I don't really like adventures to take because I have yet to see the game where this actually makes the action more engaging instead of more frustrating and annoying. Fortunately it's not as bad as to ruin the enjoyment of the game, just a minor annoyance. Something else they tried to copy from other modern adventure games is choices. I thought that was a nice distraction, if somewhat pointless most of the times, and with the choice at the end, (just like in Life is Strange) I got the feeling that there is one "right" ending and one "wrong" ending, even though there is still enough room to debate and defy that.

My main points of criticsm of the game, apart from the minor QTE-like annoyances, would be the long loading times between screens - it's almost like we're back in the late 80's / early 90's again, when you had to switch disks every time you entered a new room - and the savegame system, which only gives you one save slot per playthrough, and autosaves in it. Maybe they did that because of the choices, so that you can't just try all the choices but have to pick and roll with it, although there's always the option of quitting the game and restarting from the last autosave, so in practice you could still do that, it's just really tedious to go through it all again, listening to the same dialogues etc. And the choices aren't interesting enough to replay the whole game; just like in the Telltale games, they're often just a choice in what spoken dialogue line you will hear next before the game continues the same regardless of your choices. So I thought this savegame system is inappropriate for an adventure game.

TL:DR
I thought it was a good sequel to The Whispered World, and one of the reasons for that, apart from likable characters and superb production values regarding art, sound and setting, was that they tried to do things a little differently this time. Not all the changes were great though. Personally I actually liked the easier difficulty, but I disliked some new QTE-like mechanics and the one slot autosave system. And the loading times felt prehistorical. Oh, and it's short (maybe ~6 hours?), but that's something I welcomed, and as I received it as a gift, the price was no concern for me. All in all, I think I liked Silence even better than The Whispered World.

Lunar: The Silver Star. This is the Sega CD version, with a patch to undo a lot of the changes Working Designs made to the game while localizing it. Only gameplay, that is, not the translation itself.

It's a pretty good JRPG, with a nice soundtrack and anime-ish cutscenes from back when those sorts of things were a big deal. It's funny because games now are overloaded with cinematic stuff, to the point that I can't stand having to watch too much instead of playing, but I still get a charge out of such things in older games because when they do appear it's because you're seeing something very important and not just minor plot nudges. They feel like a real reward for progress.

The random encounter rate can be annoyingly high in parts. One of those in which you're sometimes literally fighting one step at a time. I also wasn't wild about the battle system, which doesn't give you a lot of precise control over your characters. For instance, if you use the "flee" command because you want to play defensively and put some distance between a party member and an enemy, the character will just run in a random direction, often straight at another enemy. Usually best to just go at the bad guys aggressively. Spells are also confusingly named (e.g., Psychotron is the "exit dungeon" spell).

The characters are basically all kids and act like it but the story has a couple of interesting developments.

Game of Thrones - A Telltale Games Series

Since I got into the TV series last year or so and finished Season Four a few months ago, I went ahead and also played this adventure game that I already had from some bundle, since it's recommended to be played only after Season Four to avoid spoilers. Because the thing is, with Game of Thrones spoilers are lurking everywhere, and it's also kind of hard to review the game without spoiling it, not because I intend to talk about the story, but because of the observation I'll have to share about the game in general - which are nothing new, since almost every other review has already mentioned them, but still, read on at your own risk.

The game is both:

Great
... in that it's a complete spin-off mini series that's as long as or even slightly longer than a whole GoT season (6 episodes, 12 hours), with a whole new House from the North that has its own spectrum of different characters, and while some appeared a bit bland at first, most of them soon grew on me and by the end, they were almost like they were characters from the actual series. And it doesn't just feature some of the main characters of GoT as well, but also their original actors doing the voiceovers for them. I thought the production value of the voicing, sound and music was almost on par with the TV series. In part, the graphics would look pretty good, too. The story and dialogues were interesting enough, and the choices weren't easy and gave me the feeling of shaping my very own GoT-like story. Certainly not George R.R. Martin, and not quite the GoT from TV, but a close enough imitation of the latter to be fun as fan service (unless you regard the source material as sacrosanct).

Disappointing
... on the technical side in that the graphics could also look very washed out, blurry and primitive at times, that there was the occasional crash on loading a savegame (one time it even seemed like the savegame had gone corrupted for good, but thankfully it was no game breaker, because I could still rewind and replay the last scene instead of loading the corrupted one), and also disappointing in that the general idea of the story and even some character constellations are rather close to the story of the Starks in the TV series, and also not that good in that while there is no sex like in the TV series, the explicit cruelty and violence doesn't just rival the TV series but sometimes even surpasses it, as if the developers were so proud of their tools that they thought that meant they should not hold back and show everything they could. Not that I'm squeamish, on the contrary, I think I've become rather dulled towards it in fiction, but I still thought some scenes were gratuituous. (To make up for it, they put a nice song at the end of one episode that made me think I was watching Disney rather than GoT; the amusement lifted my spirits in a situation that otherwise would have been really bleak, haha.) The gameplay is your usual half annoying, half entertaining Telltale QTE nonsense. I was surprised to notice that sometimes you can just do nothing at all when there is a prompt, and the game will still act as if you pressed a button and succeeded in the QTE ...

*SPOILERISH*
And they also adhere strictly to what they might have thought the essence of GoT, namely that no matter what you do things can (and will) always get worse. I thought this was a bit of a problem here, seeing how Telltale games usually work. They are great as long as you go along with the illusion that your choices matter, and they do matter (for you) because they are still *your* choices, but more often than not, they don't really change the story. At some point in Episode 3 or 4 I was unhappy with my last choices and I replayed two entire sections with several choices that had seemed important, only to find out that they didn't actually change anything.

I think in this game this known fact can cause even greater frustration than in their other games, because the choices are so severe as if the fate of your whole House depended on every single one of them, and when things go from bad to worse it's hard enough to live with the consequences of your own choices, but it's even worse when you realize the writers always meant this to end badly no matter what you do, and you're really just being toyed with as spectator to all the sadistically elaborate despair and cruelty. It's no surprise then that Roose Bolton plays a rather significant part in the story as the predictably unpredictable psychopath who's made the most annoying but least interesting character here. Frankly, the game wouldn't even have needed him for things to complicate or go awry. He's just a devil ex machina that ruins some plots that wouldn't have been less dark but more convincing and satisfying without him (satisfying with regard to the story-telling, not the outcome). Anyway, there *have* to be some things that turn out differently in the end, depending on your choices, but I don't feel like finding out which ones they are, among all the fakes, so I'll just have to live with my story (which I bet is still 75-85% of what every other player experienced, at the very least).* END SPOILERS

TL:DR
At times I loved it, at times I hated it. Production values are high on the cinematic side, a bit lower on the technical side (consistent quality of graphics and gameplay). Some of the plots were interesting and fun to play through and remember, other parts were too gratuituos, brutal and bleak just for the sake of trying to imitate GoT, I felt. When asked whether I would recommend others to play it, I fear I wouldn't really know what to say. The answer would probably have varied on what stage of the game I was currently in, but now that it's over, I guess I'm tending towards NO, unless you have to try everthing related to GoT or Telltale. Which is a shame since it had so much potential, but it left kind of a bitter aftertaste.

Do you mean Legends or Legend?

I hope noone ever quotes the entire text of *my* reviews, just to ask a question about one word. ;)

Don't you know the answer to it already? To my knowledge there is no "Tomb Raider Legends", but there are plenty of typos out there on the world wide web. ;P

I KNOW. XD As soon as I posted and thought "Oh shit!"

In my defense, because of a major fuck up at the pharmacy I've been off my meds for four days.

Well, instead of thinking "Oh shit!" ... you could also just have clicked EDIT and fixed it. ;)

Anyway, I'm sorry about that medication issue!

EDIT: Oh, you already did now. :)

Beat Shogo: Mobile Armor Division this weekend.
A fun FPS game with a unique health mechanic (critical hits on enemies healed damage on YOU),
overall a good FPS experience.
Enemy-wise: In a MechSuit, human opponents were the trickest enemies encuntered (because they were so tiny & blended into the background), when out of a MechSuit shotgun equipped enemies were the deadliest enemies encountered(Shotguns were 1-hit 1-kill weapons in enemy hands).

Oddly enough the shotgun was the worse player weapon. Slow shotgun firing speed + swarms of enemies meant that the shotgun was less useful than the joke MR. CLAW squeaky-toy in my Shogo play-through.

Steamworld Dig 2

Probably my Game of the Year. Just like the Steamworld Dig I loved, only this time bigger, longer, more puzzles, more platforming, more upgrades, more abilities, more metroidvania, more secrets and collectables, more characters, more boss fights - about three times as much as the first one! ;) -, still good soundtrack, even better graphics & art, and a level up system, which is a bit superfluous and pointless, to be honest, but it doesn't hurt either.

I bought it at full price and It entertained me for about 17 hours - the game ranked that bronze, so I guess it was calling me a slowpoke, but who cares, that was great fun for 1 EURO/hour (howlongtobeat says it takes 7-12 hours). I left a few puzzles unsolved (secrets 77%), not sure if I'm still motivated enough to try and solve them, now that the game is over. I don't quite remember how the first game worked, so maybe something worth noting is that the resources are limited. I managed to buy almost all of the upgrades in the end but I lacked the money for the last three or so. Which wasn't a problem since these last three weren't necessary or all that interesting anymore, just a heads up that your choices in what to buy first do matter a bit, and that if you're a completionist, you might want to be extra careful not to destroy a single gem (falling boulders can crush them). Anyway, I don't have much more to say, for what it is, it was next to perfect. Addictive and very smooth gameplay and controls (played with gamepad).

StarCrawlers - 3/5.

A generous 3/5.

So, I bought Hellblade from the recent Gog sale and got StarCrawlers for free. Over the last 2 weeks or so, I played about half an hour of Hellblade and ~70 hours of StarCrawlers. So, I think it's fair to say I got a fair amount of enjoyment out of it; but on the other hand, it is not a good game.

The game definitely should've spent much longer in Early Access / In Development. It's filled with so many issues: from benign stuff, like keypads floating in front of walls or doors not animating properly; to annoying stuff, like tooltips covering the screen, even after you've moved the cursor away or keyboard shortcuts not working in certain situations; to serious issues like game crashes and softlocks. And that's not even mentioning weird design choices, balance issues, and poor procedural generation.

Overall, I'd still recommend playing it if you think can put up with a whole lot of shit.