The Typing of the Dead: Overkill is a rail typer; a rail shooter in which you kill z̶o̶m̶b̶i̶e̶s̶ mutants by keyboard-typing. That's right, imagine your typical rail shooter (like House of the Dead or Virtua Cop), but instead of shooting enemies with your mouse, lightgun or gamepad, you instead type words on keyboard like "Sandwich", "Sexual Tyrannosaurus" or "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and other stuff from popular culture, memes and idioms.

Don't like those? No problem! You can substitute them with words out of Shakespeare's finest works. Want something more modern? How about some of the most memorable quotes to come out of the cinema history? Maybe you hate all this eloquence and politeness crap and want to kill mutants with the power of swearing? Yes, you can totally kill mutants by typing "Furious Penis", "Asshole" and "U R shit at this game". What? Still not satisfied? Fine then, the game allows you to create your own dictionary, so here's your opportunity to kill mutants by typing quotes out of your favourite book/movie/music/video game.

Alternatively, you can just forget about all this typing nonsense and just play the original House of the Dead: Overkill; a typical rail shooter like its predecessors with a grindhouse/B-Movie atmosphere, in which you take control of two wise-cracking cops in a quest to stop a madman. It's pretty funny, but there are a bunch of things I don't like with the game.

For starters, I found the game a bit too easy on normal mode. This complaint is true both for the shooting mode (which is made even easier with the ability to buy/upgrade new weapons) and for the typing mode. It's significantly easier than the first Typing of the Dead. Hell, the bosses are some of the easiest parts of the game (whereas in the first Typing of the Dead, they were among the most difficult). If you are good at typing fast, I suggest you play at hard mode.

My biggest complaint about the game, though, is the quality of the PC port. While 60 fps is certainly juicy when compared to the Wii's 30 fps, Sega dropped the ball by locking the game's internal resolution to 1280x720. Attempting to go higher than that will just upscale the game in a terrible manner, where the cursor's actual position will be different from the one shown on screen. The only reported way you can increase the internal resolution is by disabling post-processing, which also removes all the Grindhouse-like effects, but it didn't work for me. Also, the game has issues with AMD cards (much surprise) and won't properly display enemy models; sometimes, a head will be missing, other times the arms and other times, the torso. The one solution that worked for me resulted in frame drops and the issue has yet to be resolved, even after 3 years.

Embarassingly enough, one thing that the PC port is unquestionably worse than the console versions is the omission of local multiplayer, even for the shooting part of the game. Come on, this is House of the Dead and you're telling me it has no local multiplayer?! What's next? New Metal Slug with no local multiplayer? Seriously, what were they thinking?

Probably that it was too much of an effort and it shows; the Typing version of Overkill is barely different than the original version. Contrast this to the Typing version of House of the Dead 2, in which the developers made various changes to make the game sillier. Changes such as exchanging the characters' guns with keyboards and Dreamcast backpacks, switching the enemies' weapons with toy hammers, fishes and plungers, adding some in-game typing challenges, adding items that affect the types of words/phrases that will show up, editing the original endings into something funny and even featuring a typing credits sequence. Sure, probably small and cosmetic stuff, but it still gave the original Typing of the Dead its own distinctive charm.

This one, though? Disappointingly flawed.

Complete list.

Wikipedia link:
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Dead:_Overkill#The_Typing_of_the_Dead:_Overkill]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Dead:_Overkill#The_Typing_of_the_Dead:_Overkill[/url]

Thank you for the link! I'll check it out.

Freedom Fighters is essentially Red Dawn the video game. It takes place in New York instead of Colorado (or wherever the movie was set - I haven't seen it in years), but the premise is roughly the same: the Soviets invade the U.S. and your guy has to lead a resistance movement. It's a bit more tongue-in-cheek than the movie, though, and the between level TV broadcasts from the new Soviet news service can be pretty funny in how they mock life under communism. Not to get political, but the game is pretty flexible in that if you lean left you can imagine it as a smug Cold War satire; if you lean right, well, I can't think of any other game that lets you stick it to more pinkos than this one.

It's a run-and-gun shooter but the gimmick is that by accomplishing objectives and rescuing wounded civilians, you level up your charisma meter. As you level up, you get to command more and more soldiers (10 maximum) and give them simple commands to help you out.

As might be expected from the Hitman developers, level design is excellent. Each level is broken down into separate neighborhoods you need to liberate, but you can use sewers to hop from one neighborhood to another and the game is easier if you mix things up. So if an attack copter is killing you in one place, warp over to the other place and blow up the helipad to make it disappear, for instance. Each stage will have a straight on path you can use, but that one is usually the most well-guarded. You can re-enact Pickett's Charge if you like, but every location has at least one or two alternate routes you can use to find good items and generally make things easier.

It felt somewhat short to me and I would have happily played it for at least a couple more hours. I think what threw me is that it doesn't really have any boss battles. There's a slight story running through it but mostly you're just playing one level after another and then you hit a big fortress and when you clear that, you get "Game Complete!" and a cutscene/credits. Too bad they never made a sequel.

ZOMBIE NIGHT TERROR

Some of the levels can be VERY challenging and VERY nerve racking but still a HUGE A+!

Worth every penny and then some.

I've just finished Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos and I would say it's definitely worth playing. Please, keep in mind however that the game is dungeon crawler with all its advantages and disadvantages.

Some of screenshots may fool you that you'll explore some open world with forest full of creatures and secret paths. Well, nope. Most of time you'll crawl through the mines, caves, castles and labirynths with very specific game mechanics known from most of classic dungeon crawlers, i.e. traps, keys, pits, secret walls, levers, chests and a lot of monsters to be killed.

The game may not be hard (especially if you choose to play with "wimpy" enemies), but it still makes you worry about keeping the crucial items, using them in a proper order and not crossing some borders before all the tasks are done. It is possible to stuck in dead end here, unfortunatelly. This makes the game not recommended for most of today's players.

Regarding sound and graphics - the game looks IMO really nice (relatively, of course; we're talking about the game from early nineties), it's reach with a lot of NPCs, monsters and landscapes. Sound lag behind, to be honest. Especially midi music may be really irritating from time to time (White Tower!).

The story may sound boring (save the kingdom, chosen one!), but the plot provides some interesting twists and I would say it's really captivating with it's atmosphere. However, please, note that there is no real choices here and all quests are placed in the main story line - the game is perfectly linear.

[all my games finished in 2017]

The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall

I finished one of the main quest lines in TES:Daggerfall.
The game has 2 objectives, but I can't finish one of them (I accidentally sold the quest item. Ouch!). Instead I made the king's ghost rest in peace.
When finished My hero was level 11, Str86,Int80. Whatever reason Personality dropped to 28(curse?). I can't recover it by spell or temple.

Most tough enemies were magic users. Their paralyze spell almost always killed me.I could cast the cure-paralyze spell, but it cost a lot(160mp). my max-mp was 300, so only one chance had, if it failed, the game was over.

The game has vast dungeons, and the auto-mapping was mess, because dungeons was 3D unlike the previous one, Arena,which was only 2D.I don't like dungeon parts of the game. I had to use a walk though to finish some nasty dungeons.

All in all, I enjoyed the game.I'll play it again with another character, perhaps a thief or something to finish other quest line.I only scratched surface of the game.I hardly finished guild-quests.

Full List

Toki Tori is a puzzle/platformer with a heavier-than-usual emphasis on puzzle-solving. Your goal is to help the eponymous bird collect all the eggs that are scattered throughout the game's 4 worlds, each comprised of 12 stages (for a total of 48 stages, plus more on hard difficulty and there are also bonus levels). It won't be easy, though, because Toki Tori can't jump and most times, he won't be able to defend himself against the game's enemies. In your disposal, you only have a limited amount of items and you'll have to make each of them count.

The items in question vary and can be anything from a small bridge, a stone block, a freezing bazooka and a short-range teleporter. Early stages are pretty straightforward and won't pose too much of a challenge. About 3/5 in the game, though, the game's difficulty ramps up and you'll have to start considering every possibility to progress through it. Maybe you'll need to actually put the stone box a bit more to the left or right, or build a bridge to prevent an enemy from falling below to where an egg is, or even not collect one of the eggs right away, as they act like walls to the enemies. It's good that that there is a rewind button, as having to restart the stage every time you made a mistake would have been a major pain in the ass.

Not that it's impossible to happen.The need to be precise can be annoying, especially when you'll have to do a bit of trial-and-error to see what works and what not. Sometimes, you might have made a slight miscalucation/mistake at the beginning of the stage and by the time you realize what went wrong, you'll have to toss all the progess you have made and restart the stage, as rewinding it will actually be slower.

As for other things I didn't like, I found the third world to be very dull and unpleasant to the eye, what with it being comprised exclusively of sewer levels. Yay for nauseating greenness! I also found the mouse control to be a bit lacking at times, when I wanted to be precise and fast; the keyboard was definitely a better option.

Overall, Toki Tori was a good puzzler, even if it could stand to be less dull at times.

Complete list.

Link to the official site:
http://twotribes.com/message/toki-tori/

Tales of Monkey Island

I feel it captured the spirit of the original game quite well, a few audio and graphical bugs though.

Uncharted 2 in ps3.

A few screenshots of my civ 1 emperor game as the romans : http://imgur.com/a/LV35v
My only regret is that I didn't manage to max out my palace. I needed 4 more (of 37) upgrades. I would've built a bigger spaceship too for a better score, but unfortunately I had to rush it because the AI was starting to build its spaceships, and it only ever builds the smallest possible space ship before launching.

It's ridiculous how addictive this game still is after all these years.

It'll probably be back to the regular very poor showing from here on, but after this start of the year and a review written now too...
Include me

1. Torchlight | post | Jan 1 to Jan 12 | in-game timer: 32h
2. Driftmoon | post | Jan 15 to Jan 26 | in-game timer: 17.5h | Review: blog or MobyGames
3. Games released during the massive early 2017 Romanian protests | post | Feb 7 to Feb 16
4. Disciples: Sacred Lands Gold (counting as having finished the base game)
- Original campaigns: Jul 17 to Aug 17
- Divine Empire series of scenarios: only finished 5 of 21 by the end of the year

2013-2016 list
2012 list

Incomplete 2011 list. Add Tropico 3 Gold Edition (finished: Dec 16, review on blog and MobyGames) to it. Also played Forsaken World for a while earlier that year (review on blog and MobyGames), and briefly poked at Perfect World International again after the Genesis expansion launched.

Sanitarium is an isometric point and click game, in which you take control of an amnesiac who wakes up in an asylum and has to go on a weird, creepy and terrifying journey in order to both find out who he is and what's going on. Despite being released back in 1999, the game still looks gorgeous. OK, perhaps not completely; the character models and the cutscenes look dated and the resolution is pretty low for modern standards, but the environments of the game still look great and have a lot of attention to detail. Since each chapter takes place in a different environment, the game never feels repetitive and there is always something interesting to look forward to, both visually and plot-wise.

Compared to other point and click games, Sanitarium is pretty simple. You move by holding down the right click in the direction you want and you interact with the game's world (talking to characters/examining scenery/taking items/solving puzzles) with the left click. By left clicking your character, you can also select one of the items in your inventory (if you have any) and that's pretty much it; no separate open/look/read/talk commnand or need to combine items, or something like that. Puzzle-wise, I never found myself asking "how the hell am/was I supposed to know that?"

There were some things that I didn't like about the game. The first was trying to move in cramped places with stairs; a lot of times, the character would just annoyingly go up and down the stairs, instead of navigating the cramped place. The second issue is the lack of a run button, which will make traversing large areas (particularly when you need to go back and forth), tiresome. The third issue is that the game's pathfinding is wonky at times and you will sometimes have to move closer to an item, before you can interact with it. The final issue is that the game doesn't highlight what areas can be interacted with the left click (neither an outline, nor a text pop-up), so you'll have to go clicking every potentially interesting object you might see, which you might miss or dismiss as something unimportant, thanks to the game's low resolution.

But, those weren't enough to detract from the game's awesomeness and I'm happy to have finally played Sanitarium after all those years of wondering what exactly was the deal with it.

Full list.

Link to the game:
https://www.gog.com/game/sanitarium

Just finished Armed and Dangerous. To be honest I was quite let down. The gameplay and technical execution are simply mediocre, the game utterly lacks original ideas like Giants - Citizen Kabuto had and sadly even the game's strong point, its writing and style, fall flat in comparison to Giants with far worse timing and delivery, feeling practically unfinished at times. Too bad, the universe the developers created for this title really deserved a much better game.

The Charnel House Trilogy

A good start for 2017, because I guess it can only get better from here. :P

To tell the truth, I didn't like Richard & Alice at all, but I thought I'd give this other point-and-click adventure by Owl Cave a try nevertheless. It was pretty meh. The pixel art by Ben Chandler and Ivan Ulyanov is nice enough, and there are some short atmospheric animation sequences that might have been cool and exciting in a better game, but the story and characters never really managed to draw me in that much, the plot was silly, some dialogues were quite long-winded (although not as terribly as in Richard & Alice), and the writing was so-so, at times also cringe-worthy.

Which is bad, considering that it's so focused on the storytelling that it's really lacking in the gameplay department. It's almost more of a visual novel than a point-and-click adventure. Everything is pretty much on rails, sending you from here to there and back again, constantly locking doors to any other areas you might have explored otherwise, so that you always know where to go since there's no other option, and most of what you do is examining and talking. The few puzzles in the game have blatantly obvious and simple solutions. The game takes about two hours to complete, and at the end a continuation of the story is announced for 2016. As of yet there is no sequel, and the last post on Owl Cave's website is from decembre 2015. Not that I'd really want to play more of this, so that might actually be a good thing.

It looks a bit more like a professional Wadjet Eye adventure on the outside, but under the surface it's still Richard & Alice, with all its amateur flaws.