Codename Outbreak / Venom

First game made by STALKER devs - GSC. Even though GOG version was more playable than my CD one it was still far from perfect - glitches, artefacts, random AI partner shut-down and one crash to desktop in one moment.

I found funny trick - you can shoot dead bodies to boost your stats. That way you get better rank and have higher carry weight limit = more ammo and meds + better gun and armor. Win-win.

Graphic is nice, it's weird but character models in STALKER games have fistful of polygons more than CO Venom. Weird.

Missions are all about sabotages of military installations, gathering informations, escorts and mowing down infected enemies.

It was ok

Niche - a genetics survival game
Thanks again adamhm for the gift
One of the best games I’ve ever played and absolutely the best I’ve finished in 2018 so far. I really love science-inspired games but this time it was far away from my field so I was not so sure if I would like the game. It turned out I had a blast playing it and I can’t recommend it strong enough.

There are two important parts of the game: one is turn based exploration of an island. You move around your nichelings, gather food and nesting materials, hunt, defend against predators, shake trees, catch fishes, dig roots and whatever not. If you believe you have enough of this island you can gather your tribe and travel to another one but you won’t be able to come back so think carefully before you leave a paradise island full of food. Better stock up first! Even though there is a decent diversity of various actions you can perform this part is a bit simplistic and would be boring if the entire game was about it.

The second part, the most innovative and interesting, is breeding. Each of you nichelings has a DNA with 21 gene types with two copies of every gene inherited from its parents. Each gene affects some body part and in turn affects abilities of your nicheling. That gives you tons of possibilities and I don’t think I’ve ever owned two nicheling that were identical. Many traits can be both positive and negative. For example a spiked body is good for defense but disable a tail which can, for example, increase your fishing ability. Of course some genes are dominant while other are recessive so you have to choose your breeding mates carefully. If that’s not enough you can choose to mutate a specific gene and hope to get something good, ask a roaming nicheling to join your tribe and thus increase your genes pool or even find an ancient being with some superior and very useful gene. In three words: thousands of possibilities!

The best thing is how well this part is executed. You have to really think carefully about genes you have in your tribe and try to not lose the most important ones. It’s not easy but genes diversity is very important: once I bred a pack of stealth hunters and I thought it would be easy to finish the game with them. I was so wrong! Soon I reached a different biome so my nichelings were not so stealthy anymore, there were no pray to hunt and my nichelings couldn’t fish nor gather poisonous berries. The starved to death very soon… the game also shows how brutal the nature can be: you can’t really afford to keep alive and feed a crippled, almost useless baby. Brutal necessity but you really have to get rid of it.

In the end I’ve reached the best ending but it took me a dozen or so of tries to manage my genes pool properly so that I was able to traverse the most dangerous isle.

I really, really recommend the game!


Full list

Anachronox. A pretty entertaining "western JRPG". Always nice to see good sci-fi RPGs and I like the concept of this one, which is like something out of an old pulp novel or maybe a Fantastic Four comic. Can't think of any other stories I've encountered in which one of the ensemble is a shrunken planet :p The storytelling is a lot of fun and has Tom Hall's usual quirkiness and charm. I know there have been many complaints that the game ends by setting up a sequel but as much as it would be nice to see the overall story completed, I still felt like the major character arcs were pretty well settled when it wraps up.

I think the game was based on the Quake 2 engine, which leads to mixed results. On the one hand, the environments are quite gorgeous, with a great sense of vertical scale, passages and walkways twisting about and around each other. The kind of thing you'd expect from guys that worked on Doom and Quake. Compare it to something like KOTOR or Mass Effect, which mostly stick to simple horizontal level designs with gentle slopes, and Anachronox comes off more impressive despite its earlier release.

On the other hand, the characters have that awkwardly animated, muddy textured look that you see in many early 3D games. And the combat never quite feels good. It's using a similar style as Final Fantasy or Chronotrigger but the battles always have this sluggish pace and the way the camera swings around during attacks often blocks you from seeing which enemies or move slots you're highlighting until someone else finishes their move. Speaking of Chronotrigger, I also feel it would have been ideal if the game could have included the option for combining mystech attacks with double- or triple-team moves, providing an extra tactical layer, but maybe that would have been too difficult to implement in the engine, especially for a game that had a difficult development.

Really liked this one. Still holding out hope for a sequel someday.

Age of Empires 3 Complete (including The War Chiefs and Asian Dynasties expansions)

Finally finished this, the Steam version. It was... quite ok. Not that much bad to say, it felt like an AoE game even if the characters and stories were made up (while in the earlier games they were at least supposed to be more based on actual historic events), but that didn't annoy me too much. Hey I liked Age of Mythologies too!

The fact you could pause for giving commands really added to my enjoyment of the game. I encountered some odd save game bug in the second last mission (the Calcutta mission where you rescue and release an Indian resistance leader). so I had to finish that mission without saving, but it wasn't that hard.

Some missions were very hard (on the Hard level) but quite often there was some event trigger you could exploit, like not doing something until you feel you are ready and have enough resources or units etc., something that starts some timer or enemy attack or whatever.

The very last mission felt hard as nails, pretty much impossible... until I figured out that I just fled my starting point town and started a new city quite elsewhere, on the very western corner of the map. The enemy just wasted time destroying my first city while I was building my defenses up on the secondary city, and I could avoid the hard enemy forces at the start completely, as they never seemed to come after me unless I went for them.

Somehow I still prefer the very first AoE game above all. I just like its simplicity, with AoE2 and especially AoE3 it felt they added some things just because they felt sequels must have more of everything, or at least something. Like in the indian campaign, what was the purpose of the Consulate or Monastery? The units you could order or build through them felt pretty much obsolete, better just build Barracks and the buildings where you get elephants. Having more of different kinds of units is useless if you tend to use certain units anyway.

By the way remember to enable vsync from the game's graphical options, otherwise your GPU will be running at full speed all the time for no good reason, and if you play on a laptop, it may severely overhead your GPU.

The creator said he planned to make 2 expansions or a sequel, but couldn't get the rights to the IP. I liked it, however I wasn't a big fan of the combat system either but I also wasn't a fan of how the story panned out. Whilst the story arcs were resolved, the only characters whose story went in to any detail were the ones who worked at the detective agency, you learn barely anything about any of the other characters.

Cognition GOTY Edition, Mar 26 (GOG)-I thought this was a pretty good game. Only one really hard puzzle (during the interview in Episode 1) and one really bad one (finding the audio cassette in Episode 2 I think). The plot was pretty good but got a little unbelievable towards the end. I liked the introduction of new powers as the game progressed and a second player character with complementary powers.


Full List

The Legend of Zelda II- The Adventure of Link (Mesen)

Yes, I really finished it, even have the screenshot. And yes, I cheated by using save states in the emulator...the main reason I used emulation instead of the VC version I have on my Wii. Well, that and also the fact that it's impossible to get old VC games on the Wii to display at the correct aspect ratio on my new monitor. With Mesen I can run it anything from pixel perfect to 16:9 stretched, I use the NTSC version of 4:3 as it looks the most correct as to how it was originally intended on CRT.
It is a hard game and not usually in a way I'd consider fair hard either. I'd say hard in a way to make a 2 hour game into a 20 hour game and encourage everyone to buy the old Nintendo magazines with the maps back in the days before internet- that sort of hard.

Anyway, I wanted to at least play through it in some form and it was hard even using save states...in the end I was outrageously save scumming. The first game is still a fun game even today, I don't think I can really recommend this sequel in the same way.

So of the Zelda games I have played I now put them in this order best to worst: Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess, The original Zelda and Zelda II bringing up the rear. That may change soon because the entire reason for my return to the series is the recent acquisition of Breath of the Wild for my Switch.

As for the Mesen emulator, nothing bad to say about it. It's the first time I've used it (it's relatively new)and I believe it has to now be the premier NES emulator- simple UI and all the options you really need and it's also meant to be quite accurate with its emulation. Better than the older options IMHO.

Septerra Core does that, speaking of Western JRPGs, 2-3 character moves (or spell-card uses, as it is). Plus team members that hate each other and will attack each other automatically until you complete some side quest to have them get along. THAT sure brought a different layer of complexity :))

Yeah, Mesen is the first NES emulator I've used (not that I've tried them all) that really felt like playing on the NES to me. I used to try Super Mario Bros. on other emulators and it never felt right, mostly because the turbo function didn't work as well as on the real hardware, but on Mesen I was pulling off moves that I hadn't been able to do anywhere except on the real NES. And it's got a number of other nice features, too.

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)
14. Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (PC)
15. Märchen Maze (ARC)
16. Ys: The Ark of Napishtim (PC, 2015 ver.)
17. Darksiders II: Deathinitive Edition (PC)
18. Vixen 357 (MD)
19. Master of Magic (PC)

Man, Vixen 357 feels really lightweight compared to MoM. This being basically a mix of Civ 1 and a proto-HoMM, there's a lot of customization you can do and a bunch of different systems to keep track of as you explore and conquer the game world. Coming from the perspective of playing HoMM 2-3 before it I think I would've enjoyed this more if the pacing was faster, the difficulty was less random and there was some sort of campaign mode with persistent elements from one scenario to the next. The game is also kinda buggy, I mean diplomacy is a complete mess.

I beat intro/default and easy without major problems, but playing on normal with the 1.50 patch/mod was a pretty tedious experience even with an OP build.

2018/27/03

Final Fantasy Legend III

So the short of it is, I was trying to get into Final Fantasy Adventures. (Mana 1) But this wasn't working out. (Turns out being pinballed after hits isn't a good combination.)

So I noticed Final Fantasy Legend III right next to it. Having played the previous two entries (and not getting that far), I thought I wouldn't like it. But...it turned out they had refined the game into something that was fun and not a slog! I even maxed out my wallet at some point.

Rather than having to deal with dice rolls for stat gains, there is a more traditional level system in place. The meat system had been simplified while introducing new categories; cyborgs and robots. Unlike the robots of SaGa II, these robots were more or less death machines if your pockets were deep enough.

Despite the visual polish, as gameplay goes I thought it was pretty overrated. But even a detailed explanation of why brought lots of downvotes - esp compared to reviews that say "This gamzz the best!!1$4!" that get tons of upvotes.

How did you know you got all the clips? I got most but after watching them all on youtube there was some insightful ones I missed.

[spoiler]

Interesting one, could there of been a twin or was it split personality disorder? I think that was left open
[spoiler]