Dreamfall chapters Final Cut

The game started really strong but as normal with episodic gaming it peters out by the end. Second half of fifth episode is just cutscene after cutscene with lore and story exposition.

Was a little tiresome.

On other hand i did enjoy it and was fun from most of the game. Brought some nostalgia of playing tlj and dreamfall. I have both but can I really justify the time on the replay when I have so many great unplayed games in my backlog

Heroine's Quest The Herald of Ragnarok

An adventure game I spotted on Big Blue Cup (built using AGS), downloadable for free, and now available free to play on Steam.
Graphics very reminiscent of the VGA versions of the original Quest For Glory series, but suffers from an overly long plot, and some puzzles a ltttle too ambiguous to solve without help. Combat system was painfully clumsy.

I really wanted to like this, but found myself struggling to find the effort to finish it. Finally completed it using a walkthrough and immediately uninstalled. I've played worse though. 2.5 out of 5.

darkSector

Just finished darkSector (and yes I believe rendering its name that way is the only thing saving it from instantly forgettable generitude)
It's a modern 3rd person shooter in the truest sense - regenerating health, can only carry 2 guns at once, checkpoint saving etc etc. but at least, at least it's WEIRD - you get sent into a fictitious state of the USSR that's gone to shit because there's.. a virus that turns people into zombie super-soldiers or something and you get infected and your arm somehow generates a cool knife-boomerang thingy called a 'glaive' but all enemy weapons can sense you're infected somehow so can only be used for a short time but you have a friendly black market contact who lives n the sewers and sells you hardware that's got the virus-mutant-zombie sensing turned off.. And there's also upgrades you can find that he'll fit for you - like I said - WEIRD!

There's rudimentary puzzle elements mainly based around the fact that you can power up your glaive with fire, cold and electricity for short periods and most boss fights are puzzley, and most can be fun once you know what you're doing but I really feel there should be a boss energy bar on screen because so often you have no idea whether the bad guy is being a huge bullet sponge or if you're being completely ineffectual and you're supposed to being something more clever then just emptying all your clips into them!

So much checking of the walkthough and even YouTube vids was needed
People are saying good things about the 'Brutal' difficulty mode you unlock when you get through it - much improved and more cunning enemy AI but I'll probably not play through the whole thing again only HARDER, but I think that says more about me than anything else!

All in all worth a look even if you hate modern shooters for the WEIRD parts, mildly clever parts and the (brief) parts where you get to stomp around in odd mech-like vehicles!

Full list for 2018: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2018/post99

I needed something relaxing to play, so I did a run through Batman: Arkham Asylum again. I had last beaten it a couple of years ago. It's still quite an enjoyable game to play and even if you're going for all the Riddler trophies and stuff, it doesn't take too long to beat. I do think the game starts to drag a little after the plants start going crazy leading up to the Poison Ivy bossfight, and maybe during the Killer Croc episode, too. The killer plants that pop up that spit out the homing bullets or whatever are a chore to deal with. Just walk up and punch them, avoiding the attack if necessary, and your reward is a bunch of fluid splattering against the screen to give you a little touch of eye-strain. The straitjacket guys are boring, too, since you mostly have to wait for them to rush you and then tackle them and do the knockout move.

As a Batman fan, I have generally positive feelings about the game, but also some quibbles. It's certainly not the first good Batman game, but it is the best one at generally capturing the overall feeling of the character. What really won me over the first time are the predator sections in which you stalk the criminals and take them out one at a time, increasing the stress levels of the survivors and generally screwing with their heads. That never gets old for me.

The graphics are nice but I'm not wild about the grungy art design - I would have liked something more like the comics, maybe even cell-shaded. The story isn't anything special but it gets the job done in terms of running you up against a good selection of villains. I do not like that Batman is repeatedly made to look stupid and ineffectual by rescuing various people only for those people to turn up dead when you pass back through the area, and in a few cases people are murdered right in front of you in a cutscene and Batman just looks on like a jackass. It's also yet another case of Bane not being portrayed right - aside from his creators, no one ever seems to get the right mix of intellect and brawn. In this game he's basically just a roid-raging tool. At least they remembered that he's Hispanic...

Vikings: Wolves of Midgard (Odin / Skathi build)

On the one hand, the good things about this game seem to be buried in a flood of negative reviews. On the other hand, there are some questionable design choices, and a number of significant bugs to boot.

Story:
As aRPGs go, this one actually has a pretty decent story, offset by a super annoying main character, who is short-sighted, selfish, and often just a straight pain in the ass.

The main character, somewhat fairly for the genre, just wants to mindlessly kill stuff, and any actual "plot" comes from either the narrative or the NPCs who attempt to advise the new chieftain. Yet despite this, the narrative talks about this character's "great leadership."

Art:
On the whole it's quite good, though definitely grading on a curve given character models are limited, some pieces of armor fit awkwardly, certain textures get a lot of re-use, etc. But on the whole there are a decent range of environmental palates, a range of armor/weapon designs, and some nice (albeit static) cutscene art.

Gameplay
Really pretty mixed. The game hypes up the breakables ("Smash everything!"), but the reality is that some things that look breakable aren't, and worse, in many cases breakables sit smack dab in the middle of combat areas. Think you are attacking that caster who keeps blasting you? Ha ha - just kidding, you targeted a tree, somehow!

Worse, there are some mobs that jump out of frame into the game to attack you, which sounds great except the game tracks where they WILL be and gets completely confused when you click on that spot, sometimes neither moving nor attacking.

And worse worse, there are any number of places where the elaborately designed environments themselves are out to get you. In one case I was trying to roll away from a giant down the path I had just walked up, and the game apparently decided there was a pebble or something and rolling through that space was not allowed.

Certain design choices and lack of playtesting do make combat (or even just plain walking) frustrating at times, for sure. And if I'd paid full price, I'd definitely feel like I bought a game that just wasn't quite finished. The game dabbles in puzzles, for example, but they're so few and far between you won't know you should have been watching for hints on how to solve it until you're long past them, for the 2 in particular that can't be solved via trial/error or brute force.

And some classes feel easier to play than others as a main, given that you'll often be undergeared on your first playthrough (vs. fully geared for any alts that follow via shared storage).

But on deep discount, I'd say it's actually (mostly) worth it. The zones where the game succeeds (and they are instanced zones, a la Torchlight 2), I found the combat to be quite fun, and the exploration to be interesting enough.

I will probably finish playthrough as a tank, and maaaaaybe as an Archer as well. As a last complaint about a game I did actually (mostly) like, the game has 5 classes, but only 4 character slots. Whaaa?

Still, if you can handle a bit of frustration, like your genre to have a bit of story and/or have a viking fetish this game is distinctly not terrible! Mostly. So a qualified thumbs up from me.

Finished Melissa K. and the Heart of Gold. It started as an average HOG game (hidden objects) but turned to a very bad one as I went further in the game. Objects were too difficult to spot, some things had no sense. I prefer also not write about the quality of the story, dialogs and cinematics.

Full list here.

Ōkami HD (XB1X)

If you've ever wanted to play a Zelda game with a story based around Japanese mythology and art, then this one is your game. The entire game is 3D, but in a Japanese style of watercolor painting with heavy black outlines...it looks quite unique and even has a canvas type filter so that the entire game looks like a painting.

You play as Ōkami Amaterasu, the sun goddess embodied on earth in the form of a White Wolf. The game involves the quest to return to the Celestial Plain from which you originally came.
In the end I interpret the point or moral to be along the same lines as Terry Pratchetts story "Small Gods", in that the power of a God truly comes from his believers and not the other way around.

Your main power are brush strokes that you unlock throughout the story. You unleash the power of the brushstrokes by drawing a pattern onscreen. Combat is very simple- I did not die during the entire game. The puzzles that must be solved to progress are mostly easy enough, except that I found some of the platforming stuff near the end to be very tedious.

I liked the game a lot and felt that it was well worth playing and I'd rate it better than all Zelda games except Skyward Sword. However there are some annoyances. The main one being Issun and the way he just keeps on popping up with helpful advice that I didn't need. He's more annoying by far than "what's her name" in Twilight Princess. And when I really needed some guidance, he was silent and no where to be found. You can skip most conversations at least. And really, far too many characters in the game just waffle on way to long. In the end I also just felt it dragged on just a bit past it's use by date.
Only one technical annoyance, I preferred to use the camera zoomed out rather than the zoomed in option. But for some reason whenever you do almost anything of consequence the game always returns to the zoomed in camera and it felt like I was forever resetting it. I wish it could just stay put.

The original is on the PS2 and good remakes are on Wii, PS3, PS4, Xbox One, PC and Switch. So everyone has something to play it on. The current PS4 Pro and XB1X are in 4k and any average PC will also run it in 4k easily enough, it's not a demanding game. The art style should look good no matter what.

Blood: One Unit Whole Blood - 4/5

Played via BloodGDX. A fun Build Engine game; I'd consider it to be much better than Duke Nukem 3D. Although, the Cryptic Passage episode is a bit lacklustre - it was made by a different developer...and it shows...

I tried it recently, since it's one of my favorite old shooters. But I was getting terrible frame pacing issues that made it a bad experience. My framerates were locked to 60, but bad frame pacing. Dropping resolutions, turning v-sync on or off and a whole lot of other things I tried made no difference. Too much stuttering. It seems to be just something I have, since the BloodGDX forums don't seem to mention the problem.

Maybe try turning vsync off? Also, maybe borderless mode on?

The Flame in the Flood - steam
Nothing I could say here can do it justice. It's nothing in particular that makes it the best game I've played all year, it's the sum of its parts blending so well together. It moves you. The rating I give is only negatively impacted by the small number of bugs that still exist that I found during gameplay. Managed to get 29 of 36 achievements so far, including River God, Speed Boat and Animal Friend. lol.
4.5 out of 5. Recommended to anyone.

Gold Rush Classic - steam (yuck)
Just as I remembered it years ago. A time limit in the beginning unforgiving to the uniniated. The old Sierra system of not pausing the game while typing...but a fine adventure game nonetheless. A classic worth revisiting.
3.5 out of 5

Memoranda (2017) (Linux)
(thank you, misteryo, for the game!)

Oh, man, this one wasn't easy. The game tempts with beautiful art, intriguing music and story inspired by Murakami books. What you've got is classic point&click gameplay full of very challenging puzzles. A lot of them are quite abstract and many times you don't have the foggiest idea what to do next. A lot of solutions are burried in dialogues (also quite abstract, by the way) and requires some insanely designed sequences of actions. From time perspective it may even make some sense, but, well, it comes after ;)

What I liked the most? Nice artwork, a bit psychodelic atmosphere, feeling of classic, unforgiving point&clicks of the Golden Age. The game comes with Linux installer and works well on low-spec hardware. I also really appretiate it's uniqueness. It's like Blackwell series - I'm not sure if the game is exactly the style I like, but it's so unique and (nomen omen) memorable that definitely worth trying.

List of all games completed in 2018.

If I was embarrassed when I finished a first mobile game this year, since it was free on my new phone, this is worse... Was poking around, figured out how to get rid of a demo I had downloaded once, but since I was poking around I downloaded another too, Dungeon Hunter 3 (MRE / Nokia 230 port, apparently not free, unlike what I see about the proper version)... and then ended up accidentally purchasing the game. Awfully rotten practice, 90 sec demo, no countdown that I could see, when 90 secs are up the buy screen shows up, with the buy option highlighted, and I was pressing the button to strike something, and guess what that does when that screen shows up? Suddenly saw a message saying processing payment or smth of the sort, went what the <bleep>, and saw I had apparently spent 0.99 EUR. Then again, I am on prepay, just activating now and then and hardly ever using it for anything, so the credit just piles up there unused, but I could at least donate it now and then (what I did with 120 EUR gathered over all the years since I got the old phone (think it was 11 at the time?) after the Colectiv club fire...).
Anyway, fumed for a moment, wondered how I could contest that, then said whatever, might as well give it a go if I paid for it. So started it, got to 2nd area, quit... and apparently it failed to save, because when I tried again my char started from the beginning, with no gear or gold or potions or skills. So started over... and finished it in one sitting of about 2h. Do note that it has pretty much nothing to do with the "proper" version you may find if you search for the name, being the non-smartphone port. Attempting to make a basic ARPG for such a phone and stuff it in 500k is something. Charging for it is low though. And tricking people into buying way more so.
But I guess it counts as game #5 finished this year. And now I can take it easy with Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic and Lords of Xulima (for this latter one want to once again thank Doc0075, and also dr.schliemann for passing on that special not-initially-announced prize in Doc's giveaway, which apparently made for another draw and led to me getting the choice of a game). May have a shot with AoWSM, but since I jumped on LoX after receiving it and doublt I'll be finishing that, thought I'll be left with 4 this year... 4 out of which only two were proper games, and one was started last year, with the actual campaigns finished then. Now, we'll see.