I finally decided to sit down and play all these mods for Thief I've collected. But I haven't played in years and what better way to relearn the game then to replay the core game. Only to discover that I've forgotten nearly everything about the game making nearly brand new to me again and nostalgia didn't ruin it ... mostly. It seems thief 2 has two levels that instantly fail you when you get caught.

With that said, this year I've played and finished:

1. Thief Gold
2. Thief 2 The Metal Age
3. Thief Deadly Shadows
4. T2X Shadows of the Metal Age. - pass on this. Something about it corrupted the video card output. Thought it was the VP3 codec it required but upgrading to VP8 didn't help. It eventually triggered a blue screen of death.
5. Thief - a decent 4th installment to series that wrapped up nicely with the 3rd game.

6 Broken Sword 5 - a good addition to the broken sword series.

Hey I'm curious if anyone does this, because I've definitely been guilty of this. Does anyone start playing a new game, realise they hate it, but become determined to finish it just so they can rant about it on this thread?

Now and then.

There is also a https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_quit_in_2018 thread, though. So if I only want to rant, i can quit and still rant there.

With some games seeing it through is kind of like the gaming equivalent of hate-*******, which I don't care for IRL, but games are not people, so...

yes, sometimes.

Definitely agree. I've already played E2 and finished the trilogy. E2 is the best, indeed.

Invisible Inc.

Invisible Inc. is a turn-based squad game with focus on stealth. As that it works pretty well and yet it suffers from a very dubious design choice. The game is meant to be played on hard difficulty. You should fail on your missions, unlock new characters and stuff and start over again with new strategies. This would be interesting and there would be a lot of replaybility.
Unfortunately the game encourages you to start you on easy to learn the basics the first time you play the game. And instead of suggesting a change in difficulty after a few missions it will keep that difficulty and the player will (probably) see the end of the campaign on the very first playthrough.

I can only speak for me, but after I've seen the end I didn't really feel motivated to play again just to try the new stuff and the new strategies. So it was a good game for me for the time that it lasted (10 - 12 hours), but somehow I feel like the game didn't show its full potential to me.

Complete list of finished games in 2018

Not just to rant about it here, but out of sheer stubbornness, yeah, can happen. Even more so if I actually purchased it.

By the way, fitting question for the questions thread, which seems to have rather stalled, nobody seems to want to answer that merch question that was the last one asked.

Hm, I played through DD twice and don't remember such a bug, at least I was able to finish it both times. But it's been five years since I last played it, so I can't really help you very much. I did play it on Windows 7, though, if I remember correctly.

OK, thank you very much.

The Last Door: Season 2

This game is a point-and-click adventure with pixel art, it continues the story from “The Last Door” but with a new character.

The gameplay is very linear and story-focused, which I normally do not enjoy but I do enjoy this one. I think part of the reason is that the story is told in brief snippets which do not overwhelm the player. The game is also extremely good at creating an eerie, lonely atmosphere. The puzzles are quite easy.

The game consists of 4 episodes, the first 3 are very good but the last was a huge disappointment, it seemed to lose all focus and coherence and descended into pure weirdness. (I had similar complaints with Season 1 as well).

Overall though it’s still fun, and I would recommend it if you’re into atmospheric horror and/or point-and-click adventures.

Carmageddon: Max Damage
Could be better. Not sure if worse than TDR 2000. GPU vent spinning at full speed because optimization is better but still far from good. Loading times are worse. Unbalanced as hell, after upgrading your car a little you can fight toughest opponents without problem when in old Carmas you need better than average cars (ie. trucks) and almost full upgrades. I was really surprised how powerful our vehicle is and that was Hard difficulty for goodness sake!
You can't upgrade your vehicle with best parts because you have limit for upgrades - 12/12 slots (best armor/engine/offense take 5 slots, I went with 3/5 armor, 4/5 engine and 5/5 offensive systems). You can upgrade cars by finding upgrades tokens, big shiny coins spread across the maps. Some of them are well placed (like Carma2), some of them put in plain sight and these are enough to upgrade 2-3 cars. They don't respawn with every new race and I have suspicion that when maps are recycled - they share upgrade tokens pool.

Music is awful, only Fear Factory tracks that play from time to time are noticeable, other are meh.
And while you can put your own music in (by extracting game files, changing them and pack again) it's considered as a game files violation and disable multiplayer. WoW.

Police cars were impenetrable in old Carmas until very late, here you can wreck their car from the beginning. That remind me... if you wreck their car you get massive amount of points, enough to unlock 2 new levels. But guess what - they will be wasted. If you gathered 250000 points and you need 100000 to unlock next level and 125000 for another - it will only unlock first one because points counter is locked on one level, it won't jump to next one after you gather enough points to unlock first one.

There are 16 levels, each one of them (except final one which is another Classic Carma race) have up to 5 special races, they are not mandatory to unlock next level, like it was a case in Carma 2 and TDR 2000. They are not particularly difficult yet I still couldn't bother myself to play them.

Now time to try TDR 2000 and see if it's as bad as I remember and how is time limit in special missions.

If it's not too long and doesn't require too much effort to beat, yes, I guess so. Also because I want to make sure it's not getting any better and I have good reasons for hating it, so I can stand my ground if I ever need to talk about it again. :D

Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves

A spiritual successor of an old game The Horde. The gameplay is divided into two parts: during the day you can see a map of the region, analyze enemy’s forces, see where and when they spawn, what will be their main target and most important of all - set traps and other contraptions that will help you defeat them during the nighttime. This idea works perfectly! There are many different types of enemies, each with different resists and vulnerabilities. There are many traps that you can use and chain them together for maximum effectiveness. You can’t, however, put as many traps as you wish. You are limited by cash and action points. The former is also used to upgrade your equipment while the latter is recharged after every night. Furthermore you can spend you action points on work and thus earn some cash. So it’s important to use your resources carefully. I must admit this part of the game was also very well balanced and you can really feel that creative thinking is rewarded. So in general daytime part of the game is very, very good.

Sadly, the nighttime is more or less average. Combat is a bit clunky and chaotic to be truly enjoyable. And it’s a shame because the devs introduced a nice feature to make it better: fear factor. If a beast is afraid of you it won’t attack immediately but try to circle you around and get accustomed to your presence. Only when it gets confident enough it will strike. Of course if you move to closely it will defend itself. This is a nice feature, because with some ways to intimidate your opponents like shouts and bonfires you can really plan where to make a stand against a pack of enemies. So what’s the problem? Well, all you can do is to swing your axe at enemies. And occasionally dodge. You can also use your gun but, as it should be, it takes a lot of time to reload so you’ll be mostly using it to activate some traps. Really, the game would be so much better if melee fighting was more polished. At the moment it’s barely acceptable.

Missions are rather difficult, because you have to defend some strategic buildings. In theory you can try to attract every enemy on the map but then you’ll have a hard time dealing with all this werewolves, Wendigos, Will-o'-the-Wisps and other beasts. You can however set some traps that will eliminate at least some of your enemies, slow down others and attract the remaining beasts and finish all of them sequentially. There are different ways to attract monsters, like making a lot of noise or allowing them to pick your scent (it can be both a blessing and a curse!) so really a lot of ways to deal with your enemies. If only this melee battle system wasn’t so bad…

The story, cutscenes and voice acting is laughably bad but you can live with it. In the end the game can be very satisfying and even though it could have been so much better and don’t regret I paid for it. Since it’s free now you don’t even have excuse – go and play it, it’s really worth your time.


Full list

1. Ys IV (PCE CD)
2. Exile (w/ Unworked Designs patch)(PCE CD)
3. Macross 2036 (PCE CD)
4. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (PC)
5. AM2R (PC)
6. TaleSpin (NES)
7. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (PC)
8. Super Mario 64 (N64)
9. Star Fox 64 (N64)
10. Thunder Force V (US ver.)(PS1)
11. Kirby's Adventure Wii (Wii)
12. Caesar III (PC)
13. Final Fantasy Adventure (GB)

This is a pretty solid early action adventure for the GB, and I actually prefer it to vanilla Secret of Mana (with zhade's hack it is a bit better than this one). It keeps the pace up, the stamina meter is better balanced for solo play and there are some decent puzzles here and there. Will probably play the GBA remake too but I'm curious about the mid '00s mobile version, has anyone played it? Can it even be played anymore?

So, my pretty good run this month is continuing with another finished game. I finished the Tomb Raider 2013 reboot on PS4 yesterday. I had played the game a little bit a few years ago but decided to wait until I upgrade my PC as it was very promising and I didn't want to waste it playing it with bad performance or on at low graphical settings. Well, incidentally I snatched it quite cheap for PS4 rather recently and that's the platform I finished it on now. Anyway...

I must say, it was pretty damn glorious. I'm one of those guys who couldn't really stand the original Tomb Raider series by Core design but I really loved Legend and as expected the 2013 reboot is even better and I loved almost every minute of it. I'm also very glad that TR got the stuff right that I very much didn't like about the Uncharted series. There's lots of exploration, there's riddles, there's just the right amount of combat and I really appreciated the new style which is pretty serious and gritty but kinda also doesn't overdo it. And they really did a good reinterpretation of the character that made things feel fresh. I was kinda sceptical about this young vulnerable Lara at first, getting flashbacks from the kinda silly Chronicles, but they did it pretty great. Sure, the transition from innocent vulnerable girl to killing machine was quite abrupt but it worked, it was kinda convincing and I can't wait to see how the character develops in Rise of the Tomb Raider. I certainly appreciated seeing a more humanised Lara that's more than just boobs and guns.

Anyway, I really liked the format with the semi-open world. The mix of a slightly AC-style sandbox world mixed with dramatic linear sequences was pretty perfect. Sure, it doesn't make much sense that you can freely revisit earlier locations when the story suggests urgency and trouble travelling but it made for a very satisfying and varied experience with a nice level structure that is pretty great for exploration and provides great platforming challenges and memorable views and places, in this regard the game reminded me more of Darksiders than Assassin's Creed or anything. And I was really positively surprised by the combat which kinda reminded me of The Last of Us with a rather seamless blend of stealth and solid third person shooter action. It got a tad too easy towards the end, when all your equipment is fully upgraded but things were at least quite varied.

Oh yeah, and for some reason I really loved the feel of the movement and platforming. There's been few titles that did genuine 3D platforming since Assassin's Creed and the first Uncharted came around. There's so much automation going on in these games that I don't quite feel in control over the character there. Particularly in Uncharted climbing sequences almost feel like cutscenes that play out all by themselves. I was pretty surprised by TR's approach which is a lot less realistic than in many other games, with lots of air control and whatnot, but what matters is that I felt in control and successful jumps were pretty satisfying and that's what matters to me in a game like this.

The one thing I'm not entirely sure of is the story. On one hand it's extremely by-the-book and predictable on the other it's pretty much perfect for the first adventure that's mainly supposed to introduce players to a new style and gameplay. The writing wasn't jaw-dropping in any way but it was kinda just right and actually the myth you're uncovering is a pretty cool story. So, not complaining at all but also not something to write home about.

Not knowing what to do with myself I also checked out the multiplayer after finishing the singleplayer campaign and finished one whole match (that's three rounds, took me about half an hour, I guess). I still think it was absolutely unnecessary to create a multiplayer mode for this game but I guess it's pretty fun and will probably play a few more matches but doubt that it will entertain me for very long.

Anyway, all in all a fantastic game that I've certainly enjoyed more than any Uncharted game I've played so far. Really can't wait to get my hands on the sequel.

Oh yeah, and I had to jiggle at that subtle homage in the final cutscene where Lara grabs a second gun and holsters both of them, even though you never get to dual wield in the game. I kinda loved the cleverness of it as through a sutble homage to earlier titles in the series they delivered character development in this new unrelated story. Honestly, I thought that was brilliant.