Crimsonland

A purist would say I didn't really "finish" it since I only played through the normal quest level, but I messed around with all the survival modes.

Would say that a few levels are pretty subject to RNG, particularly the final board. On each level you start with a pistol and get a random weapon off your first kill. If it's a weapon that fits the mobs on a particular level (power, rate of fire, spread, reload speed) you might coast, or struggle, or have a Goldilocks-inspired "just right."

I think that's a bit of a flaw - while a lot of the game is RNG + skill, I think they should have just balanced each level around a particular starting weapon. Took about 10 tries to beat the final board, and twice as soon as I picked up my first kill RNG weapon I knew it was a loss.

As someone who doesn't play a lot of arcade games or shooters, this was a nice change of pace, but at least with KB+M I'm not particularly interested in trying to "master" it. For $.50 in a bundle, however, it was definitely an enjoyable 3-4 hours, and will probably leave it installed to mess around with when I need something to either relieve (or sometimes induce) some stress.

I've been on an ARPG kick, so I re-installed the D3 demo last week and played for about 10 min before getting bored. Bright and shiny but feels...hollow?

Appreciate the review though - I'd been slightly tempted by the "maybe it gets better at higher levels!" succubus on my shoulder, but I think you've talked some sense back into me.

For $40 I could buy a whole lot more and better games, I think.

Super Star

A VN/raise-your-character game, certainly from Hong-Kong/Taiwan/China. English used in the game is understandable but nowhere near a native-level standard. I'm not a native english speaker and still found the texts ridiculous at times.

Very bland game. You're a failed producer, play too much VN and one day, poof! the girl from your VN comes to life and you have to guide her to a breakthrough in a showbusiness. So, you'll have to balance her activities between learning, working and special events since you have a countdown of 3 years (1 action in the game takes 1 or 2 days).

The best I could say about that game is that, if you're into the Korean/H-K/Taiwan showbusiness scene, you could be interested since some celebrities make an appearance (of course as drawings, but very well done ones). The visuals are quite bland, not bad, but nothing working waking up at night.

All in all, I'm not really sure it was worth playing, but after all, it took me only 2h30 to complete one path, so why not...

So far in 2017: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2017/post15

<span class="bold">Watch Dogs</span> (PS4)

I understand this game caught a lot of flak when it was released, but having just finished it I really cannot see any reason why.

I found it to be a very fun open-world game. The city feels alive with people and with distinctive regions, there are a lot of different activities, the hacking is quite unique and fun, and I even enjoyed the story!

My main complaint is that it’s pretty easy, after starting on “normal” difficulty I quickly raised it to “realistic” (the highest) but it was still very easy for the most part.

I didn’t 100% the game but neither did I want to (some of that 100% is for online activities in which I have absolutely no interest, I only play single-player). It’s also not necessary to complete all of the open-world activities, I actually did most of them before I progressed very far into the story and I ended up maxing out my character’s level and having over $1M cash before I was even halfway through the story.

I definitely have no hesitation in very highly recommending it if you enjoy open-world games!

Finished Alan Wake. A good game but combat is actually pretty weak. The game is divided in 6 episodes and the second one almost made me quit (too few ammo & light, too much combat and nothing really interesting going on). The others are much better.

Full list here.

Games I beat in 2017 so far, in reverse order:
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (PC)
LittleBigPlanet (PS3)
Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield - Gold Edition (PC)
Tony Hawk's Underground 2 (PC)
Fallout 4 (PC)
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (PC)
Red Faction: Guerilla (PC)
Half-Life 2: Episode 1 (PC)
Half-Life: Source (PC)

they were all good to great, otherwise I wouldn't have beaten them, hah! My favorites among them are Fallout 4, HL:S, FC: Blood Dragon and LittleBigPlanet.

Include me !

Hexcells Infinite

The last game in the series. More of the same but some of the hand-crafted levels are really good and it took me a while to beat them without any mistake.

When you're done with them, you can go on playing with procedually generated levels. Can't really recommend that, because these levels are much easier than the "normal" ones and once you've beaten the game they are no longer a challenge. Might still be fun to play one or two once in a while, so I will keep that game on my "nightshift" HDD.

Complete list of finished games in 2017

Finished the last episode of The Walking Dead - Season 3. I have mixed feelings about it. I would have prefered more of Clementine but the new characters were interesting. It had ups and downs. I'd say it is as good as season 2, maybe a bit better.

Full list here.

<span class="bold">Ben There, Dan That!</span> (GOG)

This is short point-and-click adventure about two guys’ dimension-hopping adventure. The game is pretty funny, and the puzzles are simple and logical. It’s not one of the best point-and-click adventures I’ve played, but it was certainly fun and I’d still recommend it :). (I have not yet played the sequel, Time Gentlemen Please!)

I finished The Adventures of Willy Beamish [1991] back in march
I beat Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 [2005] back in April
And just recently I completed both Half Life [1998] and the first expansion for it Half Life Opposing Force [1999]

Partizan

I'm surprised for finishing it that fast on Hard.
It not balanced, that's for sure. Hard setting make enemies more resistant and give 150% more XP which make you even more powerful few maps later. It's ridiculous... and begining is not that rough, just shoot nazis one by one. If you set camera right you can make them unable to act when you shoot them at the edge of the screen.

You have pistols, rifles, SMGs, MGs, knives and grenades with skillpages for them. But you better focus on one melee option and either go with SMGs or MGs. Rifles would be ok if not their animations that keep you immobilized while you shoot. Not cool. And pistols are weak and slow to shoot down stuff.
Later in the game nothing can hurt you except officers and their pistols. For some reason they deal more damage to you than rifle or concetrated fire of 6 MG wielding troopers. Weird.

And they put Wolfenstein elements here - supersoldats (made from our comrades, after all we are captain in former penal battalion), weird experiments and zombies. These power armors remind me Planet Alcatraz but that game was better. And you could sneak and crawl in PA but not here despite the name ("guerilla").

And my favorite scene - I hide behind the halftrack, some enemies come close and crouch on the other side. Patiently waiting, nothing happening for a minute WHEN SUDDENLY some dork starter assaulting my position.
He jump out of the corner AND THEN
*click!* *click!*
he forgot to reload...

Claw

Played demo on my first PC. Pretty cool. It was weird playing it after Blood. Same voice actor, same composer with some tones giving you deja vus here and here.
Some moments were so hard I got to restart them at least 50 times (yes, played with unlimited lives cause I'm bad in it).

Blackwood Crossing

Hm. I guess I'm rather disappointed with it as a game. It has top-notch art direction, good soundtrack, great voice actors, it looks very nice, it sounds pretty cool, it's got charming animations, eerie, sad or joyful atmosphere ... But I felt it seriously lacked in the gameplay department, and the story didn't impress me that much either.

Now, I'm aware that it's a "walking simulator", and I've already played several other titles in the genre, so it's not that I'm against simplified gameplay in general. But Blackwood Crossing is very much on rails, there's hardly anything to do or anywhere to go beyond the linear main path, and it is so guided that one time I was told to pick up two objects and I already knew where they were but the game wouldn't let me pick them up before I had asked the little brother for directions, which is pretty bad game design even for a walking simulator. There were some sort of puzzle elements, but they were so rudimentary and there was so little room for experimentation that you didn't really need to use your brain to solve them, just go for the only option available or do what the game tells you. You can pick up items and store them in your inventory but only few of them have an actual use in the game. Then there's the occasional use of a dialogue system similar to Telltale Games which feels just as crude and pointless, because I think the only difference your choices make is what short and insignificant sentence you will hear voiced next by the main actor. I hate to say it, since this such a nice, creative offering - but it's sadly not a creative game, and I fear it actually kind of bored me to play it. I wanted to see where it would lead to, but the gameplay was not really fun. It felt more like the prototype of a game. Regarding the technical side of things, it was often a real pain to try and interact with hotspots, at least with a gamepad.

As for the story, maybe I've already played too many of these games, but I felt it didn't bring anything new to the table. When I read that others were moved by the story and that it's supposed to treat a mature theme or something, I was actually hoping for more, not the same kind of story I've already seen in other games of the sort, and told in a rather predictable way, although I'm not even sure if it's actually meant to be obscure or have a twist or something. I liked the two main characters well enough, because of their looks and their voices, and maybe because I have siblings myself, but I wasn't moved by the story one bit, sadly. It was neither very deep nor very intriguing, rather a bit messy and confusing and a bit boring, but maybe that's also because the gameplay is so tedious and therefor immersion breaking.

There is so much to love here when you just look at and listen to Blackwood Crossing, but as a game it's really disappointing as it could have been so much more engaging. I liked Firewatch a lot better, I felt a lot more involved in the story, probably because I was also lot more involved in the game, playing a real character, not a puppet on rails ...

Sleeping Dogs. This is a pretty good open world game in which you play an undercover cop in the Hong Kong underworld. Rockstar never bothered covering this ground so this game filled the void, which makes me happy. It doesn't really do anything extraordinary and I would say that it feels like it's holding back a little with respect to the activities you can do (e.g., no jetpacks or ice cream trucks or anything too out there). There's a cockfighting minigame but I wanted to shoot the ringleaders and free the chickens and the game wouldn't let me. Come on, now. There is a cute little side-mission in which you participate in an Enter the Dragon-like fighting tournament on a nearby island, complete with 1970s opening titles and "old movie" filter. I wished that part was longer. I know the development was apparently somewhat troubled, so maybe they had ideas for more content but couldn't implement them?

The story is fine for what it is but what the game really cries out for and doesn't have is more choices for you to make. You're supposed to be this guy who's so far undercover that your loyalties are getting fuzzy but the story never really puts Wei Shen in a position where he has to make any serious choices. After you do main story missions, the game often shows you having troubled sleep but I kept thinking, "Why so upset? Everything is working out fine." The secret villain is really predictable, too.

It does have a pretty good fighting system, sort of a rudimentary version of the fighting from Rocksteady's Batman games, so it's fun to really knock dudes around and you can do some brutal environmental kills like hanging guys on meat hooks, shoving them into power saws, or slamming car doors on their heads. The gun fighting isn't bad, whether on foot or in vehicles. I also enjoyed doing the auto races, which is rare for me in these sorts of games. It just feels good to play.

The camera gets a bit weird at times, especially while driving. I thought developers had pretty well standardized third-person cameras in games by now? And some of the crappier vehicles have ridiculous, Deadly Premonition-like turning radii, but fortunately it's not long before you get the better cars.

The definitive edition includes a couple of expansions. In one you're busted back to being a beat cop and have to stop an apocalyptic cult from planting bombs around the city. Nothing too interesting aside from the all-cop angle (pummeling rioters with a baton is kind of fun...). The other is the now-common horror-themed DLC - in this case the city is overrun by ghosts. This one was rather more interesting if only because I've enjoyed some Chinese horror/fantasy movies and I can't think of any other games that let you beat up hopping vampires. Both DLCs are very short and can be cleared in a couple of hours at most.

Machinarium

I played Samorost 2 years ago, and this game is very similar in terms of gameplay and design. It's a point and click, but it's slightly easier as you only interact with click's, not selecting 'pick up' this or 'taste' that. It's short, I did it over the course of about 2 hours. There are no words, the dialogue is portrayed as a series of pictures in speech bubbles. I didn't find it too difficult, though there is a hint function and a walkthrough function in the game itself. Music is very good, story was good.

Only bad point was there's a point where you need to move your mouse in a circle repeatedly and it killed my hand.