Some of them had a really big impact on multiplayer, medics drastically changed Terran gameplay (made marines using stimpaks much more viable), and dark templars and lurkers allowed for some seriously devious gameplay, making detecting invisible units much more crucial.

Re Duran: He's actually quite memorable imo...did you play the secret mission?
Pity they messed it up so badly in Starcraft 2.

Yeah, it's in line with how friends described their impact on multiplayer back in the day (like, during the months after Brood War came out). They really weren't thrilled.

Secret mission? Oh God dammit. Just googled it. Not only is there another mission I have to beat, I have to repeat one I had already finished to unlock it, lol (and I got pretty close to unlocking it the first time, as it turns out).

So... the Wiki says there's some big revelation on that mission. You think it's worth it? :D

Oh yeah, and the Wiki also says that there's some "Stukov" series of missions. Not sure how you get those, though. I guess you have to load them as custom maps or something?

What do you mean exactly? The general writing?

Edit: Okay, read some more about the Stukov missions. Not interested in them at all. The "secret" mission you mentioned has me intrigued, though.

Oregon Trail on ClassicReload

I mean, it is an icon. Load up the wagon, and try to make it across country while feeding and tending to the needs of your party. Best part of the game is the meaningful choices along the way - doling out rations and needing to hunt, where to rest, splits in the trail, etc.

Played with the kid, and we had a blast. Started 4 voyages and made it 3 times. Looking forward to playing again sometime.

Well, it gives more depth to the Duran character at least. Just use cheats to get it. Or watch it on youtube if you're just interested in the story (mission design isn't that great iirc).
Re Starcraft 2: imo they totally ruined the universe, by the end of Legacy of the void I had lost all interest in it (and I quite liked the original Starcraft/Brood war). Got really weird with mystic prophecies etc. which didn't make much sense imo, also very similar in some ways to Warcraft 3's story, quite unoriginal.

Crackdown 3 (Xbox One X)

This game was not worth five years of development. Crackdown 3 just ends up being "okay" in the end; it does most things well-enough (though the driving stinks, which is weird from a developer who has worked on a lot of racing games), but it doesn't do anything that we haven't seen before. If you have played the most recent Saint's Row games, then you have played Crackdown 3.

While I might sound negative in saying this, I had a great time with the game. It was nice to be able to play a brand new game and not have to be assaulted by pleas for more money. The AAA gaming industry is horrible with how much they try to push season passes and microtransactions, so it was nice to boot up Crackdown 3 and jump right into the game without worrying about having a lesser experience. Crackdown 3 sticks to the same formula as the original game, and it made me feel the same way I did back when I play that installment in 2007. I got lost in the quest for agility orbs and the development of my super powers. By the end of the game, you're scaling a massive cyberpunk tower with a highly destructive arsenal and fists that tear enemies to shreds. Overall, it's a solid time-killer, but it isn't worth a $60 asking price and it doesn't do anything ground-breaking.

It's an interesting point, one that I've been telling people for a long time. I was also in the military, and shooting guns is difficult- the average person has very little chance of ever hitting a moving target with a rifle at 100m- and I'm talking about actual trained people here, let alone the remarkable headshots people pull off in games. Using a mouse to aim in any shooter is way too easy to be realistic. Whether you want it to be more realistic or not is another matter.

The real thing that annoys me though about shooters pretending to be realistic is the conditioning of players to make headshots because of higher damage. Only elite assassins, who are gifted marksmen, train to make headshots- because they need to make certain of the kill. Everyone else is trained to shoot for the centre of mass- the chest area. This is to ensure the best chance of a hit. We were taught that any hit is a good hit, modern rifle rounds will usually disable anyone they hit...grazing a bone breaks the bone and incapacitates. And if you only wound then great, the soldier lies there screaming and his friends may try to rescue him and then you can shoot them too. If not then they still need at least 2 people to carry him out, that's 2 that can't shoot at you. Any hit is a good hit. Headshots are bullshit and the vast majority of marksmen couldn't do it over 100m even for a stationary target anyway.

But hey, they are games and they are fun. Just don't listen to the people claiming that that any are realistic.

I'm about half way through it. I'm actually having a great time with it. I'd say it's not as good as Sunset Overdrive as far as similar games go, but I like it better than most others. Saints Row 4 and infamous Second Son were fun, but missed the point by making traversing the world as easy as pushing a button to fly or run up a wall. At least Crackdown 3 has you needing to do platforming skills to get places. It's getting rated by a lot of sites around 50% which is bullshit and puts it along side games that are broken and bugged or flawed, Crackdown 3 is none of those things. But yeah the price is a bit high at full price, but I'm using game pass.

I put 7 hours straight into it yesterday because I didn't want to stop, I still love how I'll be going of to do something and then ...ohhh a green orb! I better get that!

Include me!

Batman Arkham Origins - Steam - 3/5
Why so low? Because this is the 3rd Arkham game in which Joker is the main villain. It's repetitive and lazy at this point. I haven't played Arkham Origins Blackgate or Arkham Knight but fully expect those 2 to somehow make him the main villain again.

Gameplay and graphics are of course top notch but for crying out loud, use the rogues gallery to better use.

Tearaway - Vita - 5/5
This truly is the Vita killer app; it involves the touchscreen, touchpad, mic, camera, accelerometer. It's easy yet fun and there's surprises to discover the entire time you're playing this beautiful and polished game. You essentially create the game's story through your actions and the end result is thought-provoking. It deserves it's rightful place among Flower, Journey and Bioshock as examples of video games as art.

I actually played this in 2018 but decided to replay it this year and truly appreciate it by going slower and enjoying the experience.

Oxenfree - Switch - 5/5
I recently learned there was a New Game+ which is actually necessary; if you have played the game at least once, you might understand what I'm talking about (I don't want to spoil anything here). So I decided to replay the entire game from the beginning and then do a New Game+. It was worth it. The story wraps up pretty nicely.

Severed - Vita - 5/5
This is the 3rd game this year I'm replaying from a previous year. Last year I played this on the Switch in Easy mode and beat it. I wanted to try it on the Normal mode and bought the Limited Edition because I love this game that much.
Finally beat it on normal. Though I've never played a dungeon crawler before Severed, it was super fun and easy to pick up and master despite having a requirement of mandatory touch screen controls. Don't be put off by that! The touch screen controls are not gimmicky or unnatural in anyway shape or form. There was a lot of thought put into every inch of this game and it shows. Even the soundtrack is brilliant.

Thanks for the tip. I'll keep that in mind when I play it.

TRI: Of Friendship and Madness
I won it in adamhm’s giveaway, thanks again!

Ladies and gentlemen we have a masterpiece here! The game is a brilliant 3D puzzle game and I’m in awe how creative its devs are! In theory the game seems to be simple: with a power of TRI you can create triangles that allow you to walk on them (including wall/celling walking), reflect beams of light etc. Sure, there are several powers to acquire but I thought that puzzles would become repetitive rather sooner than later. But no, everything stays fresh! Sure, there are some similarities here and there but I have never actually had a thought "Do I have to do it again and AGAIN?!" So it’s really amazing how many puzzles the devs were able to craft.

Speaking about the puzzles they are not only creative but rather hard. The middle part of the game was particularly challenging for me because later one I got accustomed to the game’s mechanics and the fact you are supposed to break every possible law of physics ;)

I don’t think that there is anything else to say, the game should be experienced not spoiled by anyone else so I don’t think I can talk about its glory anymore. So I’ll briefly mention two things I didn’t like: at first you can’t die no matter what you do but later in the game dreaded pools of acid get introduced. That wasn’t very nice.

My second complain that while the game’s visuals have some particular charm the game is a bit… ugly and empty. Sure, it’s a different dimension and yadda yadda yadda but too often you are set in a cubic world without any decent diversity. Besides, your vision tends to blur a bit while you walk which is very weird and completely unnecessary.

Anyway, the game is definitely one of the best 3D puzzle games I’ve ever played and I can wholeheartedly recommend it!

Full list

Just finished Frostpunk, well, more specifically the A New Home scenario which, from what I understand, constitutes the game's main campaign while the other scenarios are just additions. I'm pretty satisfied but left with some mixed feelings. I did not like This War of Mine and much of what I disliked about that one returns in Frostpunk. I honestly feel like the developers have some weird obsession with making their games "hardcore" and will make bad design decisions for the hell of it.

Now, I'll get the good stuff out of the way first: the concept, setting and presentation are utterly amazing. I also can't really complain about the fundamental mechanics which aren't very different from other city builders. Building the city and unlocking new stuff is as satisfying as it gets and the temperature thing with the huge generator at the center of the city is a nice touch, as is managing hope versus discontent. And there's a lot of stuff here that gives the player's decisions a sense of gravity.

What I utterly don't like is how much the game depends on a lack of guidance, unexpected situations and even some design decisions that make the game less forgiving than they logically should be. The first hour with the game was a nightmare to me. The first thing that happened was that I positioned my first buildings terribly, built the wrong structures etc.. The fact that many tutorial messages only pop up after the fact kinda captures the absurdity of it all. Seriously, the tutorial on streets only appeared on day 4 when I had already built a ton of them. I get it that the game is about putting the player in a position of responsibility at a time of utter chaos and uncertainty but come on, does that really mean that tutorials and explanations should be less helpful than in games from almost twenty years ago?

And intentionally keeping the player unprepared and making him unable to plan ahead is a consistent theme throughout the whole campaign. It is of course good if a management game sometimes throws unexpected stuff at you that forces you to improvise and adapt but here it often feels forced. An extreme example is the information you get about an incoming storm. At first the game only says that it's coming, of course I figured that I probably won't be able to send out hunters or scouts during the storm but only moments before it hits the city the game tells me that I also won't be able to grow food inside the city - "the earth is gonna freeze". Then what the hell is all the extreme heating for that I've installed in the city? The UI says that the temperature inside the hothouse is perfectly fine but just to get their shitty point across the developers decided that you should not be able to gain any more food during the storm even if it goes totally against the game's logic - and they decide to inform the player about it when it's pretty much too late to stockpile tons of food. And the game is riddled with such shit.

Likewise, there's a number of, in my eyes, illogical mechanics that are there only to make the game more "hardcore" and in the end quite pretentious. The biggest offender is the "book of laws" which is basically a skill tree. It's not a constitution, it's a set of laws, and many of them are designed to help you deal with temporary crises. Yet, guess what? You can't undo laws. For instance, I allowed for child labour during a particularly tough period early on, when my work force was very small. I quickly managed to gather more people, making child labour utterly unnecessary, yet I could not undo it anymore, even though I did not employ a single child after that point - that makes zero sense, at least allow me to change existing laws at the cost of increasing discontent. It wouldn't be a big deal if this early decision had not blocked a useful later law. And in the end you get a "was it worth it?" displayed on the screen for all the shit you've done and it seriously feels like it was the developers' priority to get a pseudo-philosophical point across rather than make consistent, logical or just good mechanics.

The irony is that during a second playthrough much of what frustrated me this first time would probably not be an issue anymore, making the mechanics work better but at the same time the game would be missing many of its initial strengths, namely all the surprises it throws at you and the feeling that it's "real" and you're trying to take care of real people here. I kinda feel like the experience they were going for with this game goes against the fundamentals of its genre. It's a management game yet it does everything it can to make efficient managing as hard as possible and partially impossible during the first playthrough. And if you come back with the experience necessary to manage efficiently you'll be missing the game's core experience.

And I guess I should mention that in spite of everything I did pretty well as far as I can tell even though I messed up tons of things due to the stuff I mentioned above and I don't know how to feel about it. It certainly reduces my motivation to try again since the result would probably only be a marginally bigger success.

Anyway, I know that this was quite a mouthful and may sound like I'm bashing the whole game over, in the big picture, trivial things. In spite of everything (and I certainly have not mentioned everything) I enjoyed the game a lot, I went to bed six hours later than I should have because I was so mesmerised by the game, it's at least a solid 4/5 game that sets new standards in some areas and that I will think a lot about. I just really feel like they were super close to making it vastly better without compromising their vision.

God dammit, I figured I'd be done with this game at this point but I think I'm gonna play the other scenarios now.

Edit: Oh yeah, and there's one thing that this game is utterly missing: some sort of high score table. I think I know why they didn't introduce one - I guess it would be contrary to their vision which is supposed to be a believable human experience rather than a game about numbers and whatnot but come on, they could have at least dressed it up as a chronicle or something. I would be certainly a lot more motivated to give the main scenario another go if there were something like this here.

Aztec Challenge (C64). A tough old arcade-ish game in which you control some Aztec guy who has to run a seven-level gauntlet involving a pyramid. On level 1 you're running toward the pyramid and guys are on each side of the road, throwing spears at you, so you duck the high ones and jump over the low ones. On level 2, you've reached the steps of the pyramid to climb up but now the jerks are trying to knock you off by throwing rocks downward so you dodge from side to side. Level 3, you're inside and have to avoid a lot of Indiana Jones-like booby traps. Etc.

A nice move is that the game gives you five lives per level, not for the whole game, which is good because the game is quite hard even if the difficulty doesn't build consistently. I actually found most of the game relatively easy but level 1 and level 6, featuring you swimming up a piranha-infested river, gave me a lot of fits. After you beat all seven levels, the game loops around and is even harder.

The graphics are serviceable, although a big reason why level 6 is so difficult is because it's so hard on the eyes. Remember old antenna-based TV, when you'd sometimes lose reception and you'd have to watch an image through a lot of static? That's how the designers chose to do that level - you have to make out the piranha under the layer of "snow" on the river.

*******************

Future Wars. A French adventure game in which you control a window washer who gets caught up in a time travelling sci-fi plot. The interface is entirely mouse-driven. It's usually not a problem to use but movement can be a pain because the guy has a way of getting hung up on parts of the environment.

Most of the game is relatively easy because you generally don't have a big inventory on hand and the settings aren't too big, so there are only so many things you can do at a particular time. To seemingly compensate for this, the game inflicts some pretty nasty pixel-hunting on the player. At one point, I ended up in a dead-end and couldn't figure out why so I checked a walkthrough and found that I had missed a critical item, but even after reading that and restoring I couldn't figure out how I'd missed it because I was clicking on the thing that supposedly contained the item and was getting nothing. I thought maybe my copy was bugged until I I realized I wasn't clicking on the tiny part of the object the game wanted me to click on to get the item. Bleaugh...

Saving often is advised, mostly because of some sections that are very tight with time restrictions. You find this out in an early puzzle in which the ceiling of a room is closing down on you, so you need to input a key code on the door to escape. You need to execute the code one digit at a time and with perfect swiftness and accuracy because you literally have maybe 1 second to spare before you get squashed.

The game is mostly quiet but what sounds and music are present are quite nice for the time, and the graphics (credited to Another World's Eric Chahi) are very nice. If you know the adventure game genre, you've probably at least seen the game's opening scene, in which you're standing on an outdoor elevator in front of a skyscraper, the rest of the city's skyline reflected in the windows. The story is actually fun and I wouldn't have minded seeing it continued in more games, or even a French comic, but I guess it didn't quite sell well enough to justify more.

Sam & Max Save the World, Feb 19 (Telltale)-The last of the Telltale Sam & Max games and another good one. I forget why I didn't play this one first but it was still as enjoyable as the others and I really liked chapters 5 and 6. Only a couple of the puzzles felt unfair and if you like the other Sam & Max games you'll probably like this one too.

Full List

Crackdown 3 (XB1X)

Played using Game Pass of course. It's more Crackdown, which is a good thing since there has only been 2.5 games in the series in 13 years- so not a heavily milked series. I really enjoyed Crackdown and other games of the same type that came along after it- the super powered open world traversal games.

The game is getting heavily criticised for not advancing the original formula much. It's funny that though, since a lot of other games just pump out rehashes and don't seem to have it used against them. It has the same gameplay loop, same narrator etc. Anyway, it has made a few welcome changes in the most important areas- the traversal. Crackdown was very simple in that pretty much all you could do was jump, grab and mantle. The world was built around that and you levelled up how high you could jump by collecting the power orbs. Some are easy and some are hard to get to. Crackdown 3 brings in some of the ideas from Sunset Overdrive, double jumping, triple jump, air dash and a quite a few updraughts to ride up on. The world has been built around this expanded move set and is more vertical in nature. Other than that, the game has more comic story cutscenes, much better quality comic book style graphics- especially color (the original was very washed out) and it runs much smoother than the original.

The driving is the worst part, it was bad in the original and it's the same here and I mostly ignored it. Why drive when you can leap across rooftops and run almost as fast anyway. And that's the only actual bad thing I can come up with other than I would have liked it to be longer...at 15 hours I was just really wanting more of it. An extra tier of bosses would have done the trick. But what is there worked.

Most important of all, I really enjoyed it. As far as rating it against similar games- It is better than Crackdown 1 overall, Crackdown 2 was really more of an expansion and doesn't really count. The game is not as good as Sunset Overdrive, but about on par with Just Cause 3. It's quite a bit better than Saints Row 4 and infamous Second Son. Whilst I've enjoyed all those games, SR4 and infamous bring up the rear because of the lack of substance to the traversal...just hold a button to glide/fly or run up walls trivialises the most important aspect of this type of game for me.

If you like this type of game, don't listen to the haters. Play it at some point, it's good fun. It ran quite smooth and consistent and I had no bugs or technical issues at all. I'll be playing it again sometime for sure, maybe on PC next time and see if I can get it to hold 60fps at 1080p. It's an MS play anywhere title- so it has a dual license for Xbox and Win 10, yes that even includes Game Pass...or in other words a person with no Xbox but uses Win 10 can sign up for the trial Game Pass on their MS account and play PC games on it like this one and Forza Horizon 4, basically any game listed as "play anywhere" will install to Win 10 or Xbox (I should add, this is for digital only- not physical discs). Not everyone knows that.