Devil May Cry 2 HD (360)

Everyone says number 2 is the weakest and in this is one time I agree with everyone- well compared to number 1 that I've played so far. To pinpoint the main weakness it's the combat, or more accurately the enemies. DmC 2 tends to throw large amounts of easier canon fodder enemies at you instead of lesser numbers of harder enemies. Basically you can win through most fights by holding down the gun shooting button! Also the bosses were a pushover, every single one of them. Keeping in mind here that I've only played the normal mode so far, hard mode may be different.
Overall though, it's not a terrible game- just not as good as the first one.

Even more than DmC 1, the story makes no sense. But it doesn't bother me in brawlers. Unlike 1, DmC 2 consists of one medium campaign where you play as Dante and one shorter campaign where you play as some random chick called Lucia. Though their paths cross at various points in the story. If anyone has played the Ada missions for Resident Evil 4, this is a similar. Dante is more about guns, whilst Lucia felt stronger in melee. You can play their stories in either order.

One thing I have to mention about these HD versions is the graphics. They look similar to taking an early '00 PC game like Gothic and playing it on a modern PC at high resolution. Simple textures and models, but everything is razor sharp and clear. It's actually a look I really like. CAPCOM gets a lot of criticism for all their HD remakes, but I like the way they do them. If you have the originals (PS2 in this case) and are happy with them, then you miss nothing by not buying these as the gameplay is identical. But if, like me, you're starting on the series then the HD remakes are the versions to go with and are the same experience just with sharper graphics.

I was actually going to play that next, but Silent Hill 2 was only available as a HD version to download, and it was removed from the PS store for some reason. Currently looking for a physical copy at a decent price

Indulge me, if you may. What would you consider a decent price for Silent Hill 2 2 Disc Edition?. Like the one in this image here.

I actually just managed to acquire the special edition for £7.50, which is cheaper than I imagined a high rated horror PS2 game would cost. I was imagining it was gonna cost around £15. 'Decent price' is dependant on how much I want to play it, if the game is common then I'll try to get it at slightly under what the game price websites say (For Silent Hill 2, this was about £11). For rarer games that might have only 2 or 3 sellers on auction sites I'm usually willing to go no more than £10 over what the game price websites say its worth. Still waiting on some games... one day Skies of Arcadia... one day...

Glad you got one at a good price, have seen them being sold for £20+ sometimes, the reason why I asked was, I have 2 copy's of that one, so I would of been happy to send one to you for a small price of course. Gotta help out a fellow gamer sometimes :). Enjoy Silent Hill 2, such a good game that one.

Crush Crush

On the one hand, this game was kinda addicting. On the other, for a F2P game, beating it took about 10 hours of playtime and 20 hours of compleeeeetely cheating by exploiting the 'idle' component of the game by constantly changing the CPU's clock forward 7 days at a time, since the underlying 'game' is mostly just trying to maximize the math and clicking...a lot.

Anyway, in roughly 3-4 weeks of real time, the game thinks I put it in 5 years.

The anime and dating sim components of this game are largely forgettable. Most of the 'dialogue' is beyond lame, and it consists of terribly thin female characters repeating the same 4-5 lines over and over hundreds of times.

Unless you plan to spend $10, the scaling of the game is also borked, and if you don't pay and make the mistake of using any of your gems towards time bars rather than maxing out your speed multiplier, then yeah, you're not going to beat this game without years of patience, or lots of effort put into cheating/clicking.

The game is also really not very balanced - if you do spend the money, the early part of the game will zoom by, but if you don't the end of the game will draaaaag out beyond belief.

Honestly I beat this game 40% out of addiction (as distinct from pleasure) and 60% from sheer stubbornness that I wasn't going to let this ***** **** get the better of me. Sticking with the fakey 'erotica' of this game (not well done at all, though occasionally mildly amusing), I'd say playing this game past 8-10 hours went from enjoyable to a hate-**** where you still have feelings for the game, but really are kinda pissed you're still spending time with it.

Which is too bad, because there are some good ideas here. If I had donated as a patreon, I don't know that I'd regret supporting the studio more for what they might do down the road than b/c of satisfaction with this particular game, but in terms of throwing $$ at this particular game (for boosts or R-rated patches), yeah...no.

The ^Even More^ Incredible Machine (Original Levels)

As in, I have finished the original 88 levels of 'The Incredible Machine' and am taking the 'Even More' levels as a expansion / DLC deal and calling it a win, I'll get to the extra levels at some point...

This is the (AFAIK original) one where you make 2D Heath Robinson / Rube Goldberg machines to complete the level goal, it's impressive that they managed to design all of those levels from the components available and they're kind of fun, there's a lot of red herrings on the boards and in your toolbox though

I could only really managed 2 or 3 levels at a time and, yes, I did have to check some of the solutions on YouTube, it's been a nice sorbet to clean the gaming palette over the last few years though...

Full List:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2017/post430

Infected: The Twin Vaccine (Collector's Edition)

Last night I was bored and not feeling too well, so I went through my collection of unplayed games looking for something casual and distracting, and I ended up installing this title. The first impression was surprisingly good for a Hidden Object Game. It does feature some nice FMV parts with real-life actors, the story seemed somewhat original and intriguing (a doctor looking for a cure to a mysterious virus), and I thought there was more logic to the puzzles than usually found in this genre, the objects in the HOG screens more or less seemed to fit the setting and it kind of made sense to pick them up and use them in order to get to other objects on the screen, adventure-game style.

However, after a while I had to realize that my first impression was wrong. In fact, the game featured some of the most nonsensical stuff I've seen in adventure games, HOGs included. Just to give an example, in the bonus chapter you assemble parts of a shotgun, so you can use it in a mini game to shoot 12 random targets in a shed which results in you getting a monkey wrench, for whatever reason. And in terms of the story, in that part you are a father looking for his daughter (which I take is a typical HOG trope), and the shed in which you go postal with the shotgun (not an airgun or anything, a shotgun with lead shot) is your father's shed. It doesn't fit the narrative and it doesn't make sense as a puzzle either. The story turns out to be very simplistic and silly, and it doesn't have a real conclusion either. I also felt it was kind of cruel in a casual, superficial way without leading anywhere that would justify this (e.g. it's about 6-year old twins, one of which has died, but I feel it wouldn't really have made a difference if it had only been one girl, the twin part is hardly relevant in this story, and the death of the second child doesn't seem to be more than a random B-movie plot device, treated with few empathy). All of that doesn't really make it a bad HOG, it's casual and distracting and exactly what you would expect from a HOG, but sadly not more, as I initially thought, so I wouldn't really call it a good game either.

In the end, what I liked best was the short Behind of the Scenes clip among the Collector's Edition extras which shows how the game was created with the help of photos from real locations, voice-actors and actors partially from the devs own family and circle of friends and which explains why they did some things like they did. That clip was very interesting and well done.

Papers Please

It accomplishes what it set out to do, limits player agency, passes along a story, captures the soul crushing work of documents checking. I am happy to have played it, but it really is just "eh" in terms of experience. Everything takes more clicks than it should, and interface as obstacle is not my favorite when the game is forcing you to play as straight as possible.

The Last Door: Season One
The Last Door: Season Two

I really enjoyed these games. The pixel art is beautiful, the sound design is excellent, and the creep factor is high. There's a jump scare early in S1E1, and it haunted me through the rest of the season. There's only 2 puzzles I can think of that I got stuck at all on, so it is not a brain twister. My biggest problem (mostly in 2) was getting to solutions/roadblocks out of order. Season 2 is prettier, has an improved interface, and the episodes are bigger, but I liked the story and lead in Season 1 better. Both were great and I am very happy with these.

Beyond Oasis (Genesis Classics)

Yep I just finished 'Beyond Oasis' (a.k.a. 'The Story of Thor', for some reason) on Sega's official, commercial Genesis (a.k.a 'Mega Drive', for some reason) emulator and yes I used (i.e. completely abused) save states and it was tough even so

With a game this old, from the 16-bit console era, one of the big questions is does it hold up? And, yes, despite some odd and / or sadistic design choices, yes I believe it does

It is very much Sega answer to the 'Ys' series (and if you haven't played those then they are a bit like Zelda, I guess) ARPG or maybe more like open world Streets of Rage with RPG elements, the fighting is good, the puzzles are fine, the gimmick of metrovaniaing up 4 helper spirits - healing fairy, fire efreet, shielding shade and err... 'Audrey 2' off of 'Little Shop of Horrors' that you can summon in the correct areas is different and fun, once you get the hang of it.

The platforming is probably the worst thing - collision detection is ropy and Prince Ali's (the main character, like I say, where did 'Thor' come from?) jumps have a delay to further add to the annoyance - this is why Zelda never had a jump button! Also, I guess because the Genesis controller only had 3 buttons, it's double-tap a direction to run - the amount of times I ran off a floating platform I was trying to stay on against the wind because it thought my correcting taps were the run command!

Funny thing was, I got around 3/4 of the way though my first playthrough and needed to consult a FAQ about something or other, looking through there were references to secret infinite mega swords and crazy mini-games like 'Efreet racing' so I decided I needed to give those a go, but I'd already missed them so I started right from the start again

OMG - those parts were REALLY sadistic - to get the sword you have to battle through 100 floors of random monsters and the Efreet Racing is as annoying as heck too, hats off to anyone who got those things WITHOUT the save states!

Oh, that was fun too, with the power of save states I got the ultimate infinite omega sword really early on so left any other, lesser, limited use swords alone only to find out that it is a fire sword that the boss dragon of the very next dungeon was immune to, because dragon so I had to fall back to the starter knife and so the guy was actually harder to beat than the first time!

But enough of my belly-aching - it's a good game if you like Ys and / or have an attack of 16-bit of nostalgia

Full List:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2017/post430

Real Boxing

Me again? Yeah, I just got 100% career progression on Real Boxing (the Unreal Engine boxing game from Vivid, not to be confused with the old Real Sports: Boxing from Cinemaware)

It was pretty short and easy, in fact I half suspect that the single player campaign was just meant to be an extended tutorial to get your char up to 100% on all stats before hitting the online multiplayer which, unsurprisingly, is completely dead now!

Boxing is ugly and brutal but as everyone in this game is a dead-eyed uncanny valley resident it doesn't really matter how much they get pummeled - there's no brains there to get damaged!

People say it's a bad representation of boxing and a button mashed *shrugs* I wouldn't know I'm not much of a boxing guy, it's fun to mess around with for a bit, especially if you feel like getting back to landing simple blows and not having to pull off a crazy, controller breaking combo every 2 seconds but I wouldn't spend money on it if you haven't already picked it up along the way somewhere...

Full List:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2017/post430

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. This is basically Assassin's Creed: Mordor, with a combat system influenced by the Batman games. It's an open world, you scamper up some special towers that highlight collectibles and missions in the surrounding area, and then you do those, but the missions pretty much alternate between killing orcs straight on or doing stealth (or sometimes a mix of both). You know that part in the Fellowship of the Ring movie when Aragorn walks around a corner and there's like 200 orcs standing there and Aragorn just starts hacking them up? It's basically a whole game based on that one bit, so it's good that the combat is pretty fun and the game handles well, although it does eventually get a bit old.

It's based on the movies' take on the story, and the game actually does a pretty good job of mimicking their style. The orcs look and sound very much like they do in the films and it's generally consistent with Weta's production design. There's a story which is essentially a Mary Sue fanfic inspired by the films. Your guy is like 100 times more badass than Aragorn and Legolas because he's possessed by the spirit of a creepy elf lord (like the movies, the game is rather cynical about the men and elves). From the literary perspective, it's inconsistent and stupid, but I guess they at least tried to tell their story earnestly and there are some nice bits of lore you can find that weren't covered in the movies.

The big talking point about the game is the nemesis system, which consists of various orcs of different ranks who rise or fall based on how successful you are at attacking them and sometimes if you choose to pass time at a tower, they might move up or down on their own. When I first read about the system, it sounded to me a bit like the crisis-management system used in Soldak's games like Din's Curse, but it's actually not that hectic. The orcs won't really do anything besides wander around unless you intervene somehow. The game will appoint one to be your main nemesis but it doesn't make a huge difference to the game outside of who you see in the final mission. And the orcs are supposed to have distinct personalities and attributes, but these really just amount to the game procedurally generating enemies and throwing them in the world. They're ORCS - there might be certain differences among them (e.g., one guy is impervious to stealth kills, the next is afraid of fire...) but they all speak in Cockney accents and want to kill you. The orcs are supposed to respond to whether they've seen/killed you before, but I found a couple of instances in which guys I'd never met were bragging about having killed me, so I guess there are some bugs? It does get a bit interesting when you're on a mission and suddenly you find yourself battling like 3 or 4 orc officers because some just happened to be in the area in addition to the guy you're supposed to be stalking.

There were a couple of DLC campaigns included with the game of the year edition, but I decided to skip those because I'd had my fill of the main game by the time it ended. It's fun for a while but it could have really used more variety in the mission design, the same issue I found with Assassin's Creed and every game I've played inspired by it.

Finished Little Nightmares. Beautiful, great music and an ok gameplay (lacks variety). A bit disappointed that the story is not more developed. A good but short (< 4h) game.

Full list here.

Just Cause 3 (PS4)

This months PSN Plus flagship title, so I decided to play it straight away since my subscription runs out in a few weeks and I won't be renewing.
JC 3 has an awesome and very scenic world that is full of fun stuff to do and blow up. I especially liked the wingsuit challenges, which took a while for me to get a handle on the controls- but once I did they were my favorite activity. Taking over the islands of Medici is fun and full of Explosions. I really did enjoy the world, probably as much as any open world sandbox I've played. It really is a stunning world to play around in.

Which is just as well, since the story missions are bad. Almost every mission consists of defending something that has a health bar, or escorting something whilst waves of enemies spawn up from magic enemy spawning holes in the ground. Basically it is an overthrow the evil dictator story line. But really, if you want story then play an adventure game or a tightly scripted linear shooter or something.

Then there is performance. The game is notorious for performance issues on all platforms. It's a 30fps game on consoles of course, but often cannot maintain it. I played it on PS4 Pro and overall it was perfectly playable, but not as smooth as most similar open world games. However the one aspect that is unacceptable and should be fixed by Square Enix is the games insistence on trying to connect to leader boards every time you open the map screen. It results in a 30 second delay! It tries to connect even if you start in offline mode, and the Square servers are unreliable. Having said that the last two days I had no issues...so maybe everyone else gave up and eased the server loads.
Oh yeah the load times aren't great either. All the above is too bad, since the game is great fun and deserves better.

Flight of the Amazon Queen

This point-and-click adventure is a FREE game offered by GOG, and I wish I had gotten around to playing it sooner! The graphics are very nice. The puzzles are (for the most part) pretty easy and straightforward, the fun in the game comes from the cheesy characters, plot, and humour, which are all done very well. Definitely recommended :)!