Circle of Eight 8.1.0 New Content edition for Temple of Elemental Evil

Yeah I know, mentioned this mod more than once in "What are you playing right now" thread but this time - it's over.

This new post Zuggy (final boss) content had promising look. In reality - this humongous city was even more painful to walk around than Hommlet, ugh.

Combat encounters were either supahard or tedious.
Former will be final fight (just see attachments, those are four avatars of evil god, when in vanilla ToEE you fought one and other god (good) had to intervene because he kicked our butts that hard.
But this? This is "to hell with this, time for exploits/cheats/uninstall" situation.

What were the tedious fights? Hickory Branch easily, more enemies on the surface than all levels of final temple (including outside areas and tower) contains,
30% orcs, 30% bugbears (not them again) and 30% giants. There is engine limit with max. 32 creatures involved in fight and you often reach that cap here.

Oh and new content starts with a quest to slay a dragon.
Like in Hitchcock movies - first earthquake and then more intense.

There was a quest to solve kidnapping case. Three suspects, all loons, and right one is randomly choosen with each playthrough, collecting evidences...
Thing is - whole quest takes place in the sewers. Really big one, mind you. And you have to wander around a lot, slowly driving you insane, no joking.

Low Magic Age
I got it from the community giveaway, donated by Doc0075, thanks a lot again!

The game is still in development so it's kinda hard to say I've finished it but after spending so many great hours with it I would say it's time to move on. I'm sure I'll play it again in future, especially when new features will be implemented. But even at this moment the game is very impressive with a large variety of things to do and very detailed turn based combats. That's probably the strongest point of the game: you can simply attack with your characters with their most efficient attacks/spells or you can be a tactician and use flanking, traps, enhancements... the former approach is enough for easy monsters and may even work against stronger enemies but it's an amazing feeling when you outsmart your opponents and win with only a few scratches against a tough horde of enemies. Seriously, the battle system is very detailed and, when used properly, can give you a serious advantage. So at this moment the arena mode is highly recommended.

The adventure is still not finished. There are a few basic quests at the beginning but after that you can only take on typical quests like fetch this, kill that, go there... a few people compare it to Mount & Blade but I think at this moment your options are a bit too limited and after some time things get too repetitive. The game is constantly updated so it gets more interesting but I believe I'll still wait a bit for more changes to come before playing it again.

The good thing is that you can use pre-made characters (or create your own with a pre-made specialization) so that you may start the game quickly without knowing many detail about the rules. Furthermore these pre-made characters will level up on their own, meaning that the most efficient feats and spells will be picked for you. These builds are very efficient and I can recommend to pick them at the beginning. Of course you can create your characters manually and level them up as you wish. I'm sure that many people prefer it this way so it's totally possible. In my last play-through I created my party and picked only magic users. As it can be expected it was a bit difficult at the beginning to keep them alive but after some time the party became very powerful. Next time I'll experiment with only fighters...

It's amazing how much value the game already has and given that it's constantly developed I can wholeheartedly recommend it to every RPG fan.



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Keep In Mind Remastered

Another "horror" game about tragedy, depression, and self-loathing. Gameplay just consists of scouring several up-, down- and sidescrolling screens for the next exit or character to talk to. The graphics are very crude for the most part, which conveniently fits the theme though. Writing and sounds are servicable. The game is not freeware, but sold commercially, even if it's just for 2 bucks. (Personally, I got it as Twitch Prime Loot, so I didn't directly pay for it.)

Frankly, I don't really know what to make of this. It's not much of a game, more of an artistic, maybe therapeutic creation, or a simple lesson in psychology. I'm not sure if it's helpful to play it if you suffer from depression, and if you don't, but you've read a bit about it or you've already played similar games, there's hardly anything new to find here either, IMO, but YMMV. In any case, it only took me about 10 minutes to play through, so whatever.

Anno 1404: Gold Edition

More than a year ago I wanted to play an Anno game and since I previously played all of these available here I decided to pick Anno 1404 as it was the one which I have played just a little bit. Please note that in case of Anno games "just a little bit" translates to about 20 hours or so. So yeah, now I spent about 150 hours with it and I think it's enough. For now.

The game, as the whole series (at least the first four games which I own) is absolutely brilliant: a city builder set on several islands that you have to colonize in order to get your hands on as many natural resources as possible. Obviously a single island has just a few of them and since your citizens requirements are quite enormous you have to expand and build lesser colonies on several other islands.

Most resources need to be processed into a final product and these production chains can be quite complicated and overlapping with others so it's always nice to have multiple resources available. Sadly, that's rarely the case and thus you need to think how to distribute your goods efficiently. If that's not enough many resources are not only needed for your citizens but other tasks (like building ships) as well so you really need to think how to spend them. If that's still not deep enough you can construct two different type of colonies - occidental and oriental, each with its own production chains and needs to fulfill. Of course you need goods from both types to satisfy your most demanding citizens.

Even though the game is focused on building there is still some battles, both naval and land. While the former tends to be a bit messy, the latter can be surprisingly entertaining. First, you need to build an encampment and then you can move it around and issue orders. The nice thing is that you can take over a colony by capturing market buildings and marketplaces and thus it's not advisable to destroy everything in your path as you may gain control over the whole city so it's better to preserve as much as possible.

Sure, there are some drawbacks or annoying simplifications like market buildings teleporting goods without a road connection or industry buildings working fine without any people living nearby. My biggest complain is that the add-on, while cetrainly entertaining does not allow you to actually construct Venice buildings (it's just a neutral faction) and doesn't contain any campaign. I know that in this type of games they are not very crucial but I did enjoy the original campaign even though most of the chapters can be seen as a tutorial - hence I miss an epic campaign that requires a lot of knowledge of the game already.

All in all I can wholeheartedly recommend it. It's a great game, on of the best even!


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Ys: The Oath in Felghana

Charming game. Enjoyed it without a hitch really.
The characters and the story are definitely the strong point. Some great twists too, that I did not see coming.

Gameplay was decent as well. Not very deep. Kill stuff until you can't hit hard enough, buy/find/upgrade your equipment, kill more stuff. The magic system was cool though. the right number and variety too. Felt a bit like a metroidvania, using different magic to open new areas and secrets.

For the most part the boss fights were fun as well. I think I was only really able to tank through one of them, don't remember which, but they all were pretty fair in how they fought. Sometimes I got hit by moves that didn't really show the hitboxes really well and got frustrated, but most of my deaths were because of impatience or i had not learned the right way to fight. This also goes for normal enemies as well, until you are able to one hit them.

Overall pretty fun, would recommend to people who like top-down zelda games and interesting boss fights.
Also charming characters.

I'm looking forward to playing Ys Origins at one point as well as restarting Xanadu Next.
This also gives me more drive to actual immerse myself in the Trails series. I'd been intimidated by the length, but I should just play and not worry about that.

Oh, Deer!

A short little Humble Original deem manslaughter simulator. I "beat" it by successfully getting to grandmother's house without caring about points. I'm not the score chasing type, so that's enough for me.

A Short Hike

Another short Humble Original. A pretty neat and relaxing explorationvania.

Cat Girl Without Salad

Yet another short, very short actually, Humble Original. A 3 level bullethell shmup with great humor and a unique powerups which work based on classic games/genres (pac-man, rhythm games, jrpg combat, etc.)

Woten

Yup, another Humble Original, a very short and very easy puzzle/platformer that's ... all right.

Copoka

And another Humble Original, though this one's also on Steam. Not much of a game, though the story's all right. Poor performance and a really annoying bug caused me to spend far more time on this one than I should've. Dunno if the Steam version's fixed unlike the Humble DRM Free one that I played.

Well, there's Resistance: Retribution on PSP and Black Skies on PS Vita if you want more (and haven't played those yet). I haven't played either one myself but at least Retribution is supposedly really good.

Sounds good, but my PSP is on the fritz, and tbh i'd rather continue form the end of Resistance 3 or see such come about.

Finished Assassin's Creed: Syndicate on PS4 yesterday. I assumed it would be the worst Assassin's Creed game yet. It was the one that forced Ubisoft to take a break from its yearly release cycles and to overthink the whole direction of the series, it got meh reviews and underperformed sales-wise. And honestly, I always hated the idea of an AC game in such modern times. The first AC games had this cool "oh yeah, this could have happened" thing going on (well, minus aliens) but with each additional game the idea of assassins affecting global events and meeting historical figures just became dumber and less believable. Syndicate, set during London's age of industrialisation, really takes the cake in this regard.

So I finally gave Syndicate a go and... I loved it. Seriously, it's a really good game that undoes all the harm done by Unity. First off: the characters are great. The two ridiculously attractive protagonists, between whom you can switch at your leisure (excluding specific missions tied to a specific character), are both pretty cool and complement each other, with Jacob being a bit of a hot-head while his sister Evie is the calculating (but still likeable) one. It's especially their interactions during cutscenes that result in them being more fleshed out and human than possibly any earlier protagonist in the series. The same goes for many other characters in the game: traditionally you meet a whole bunch of historical figures like Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Dickens and Darwin and even the most minor characters deliver some fun or interesting dialogue during cutscenes and missions. There's also some decent villains. We only meet the main villain, Starrick, towards the end but he regularly appears during cutscenes and he's a pretty interesting and intimidating fella. Oh yeah, and we probably get the best boss fight in the series here (at least until this game). Not a great one but a decent one. It's actually the first time in ages that I was really satisfied by an AC game's ending.

And well, mid-19th century London is actually a great location for an AC game and they did manage to make it work with the AC setting, largely by making the game not take itself too seriously. The atmosphere is great and it's quite amazing how much the world is riddled with little details like choirs or people getting their shoes polished. Oh yeah, it's also the first AC game to feature children which makes the world a whole lot more believable.

There's also tons of other improvements in the game. Missions and levels are infinitely better-designed than in Unity, with only few stinkers and a whole bunch of really great missions. Even the filler content is a lot more refined than before. Instead of having the map overflow from shitty assassinations and escort missions here the majority of side activities is about liberating London from the Templar's underlings. That pretty much always involves infiltrating a major and rather heavily-guarded compound and achieving several objectives - and that utilises the game's core mechanics almost to its fullest extent.

Horse-riding still isn't back but instead here we get horse carriages which are actually even better. The biggest addition is a grappling hook, though, which really speeds up climbing. To be honest the grappling hook is a tad underwhelming and pretty hard to use, especially compared to the Arkham series - it took me ages to figure out how it actually works - but it's still a very welcome addition. And even the combat, which is based on Unity's shitty model, works much better here. I'm not sure how much it's a matter of better explanations and how much of refinements to the system but here I enjoyed combat quite a lot (while I loathed it in Unity) - so much that I got tons of joy out of the fight club side activities.

If I have complaints about the game it's that the balancing is all over the place. First the game was almost too challenging to me but then I not only get the hang of it, I also got end-game equipment and abilities about half-way through the game, making it pretty easy. The biggest offender are throwing knives which allow to silently pick off enemies from a distance and even if their bodies get found there usually won't be any repercussions (enemies will only raise the alarm if they actually see us, which is pretty dumb). Also, Black Flag's whistling ability is back which is awesome and gives us far more options to work silently but also often makes the game too easy. Oh yeah, and the protagonists barely differ gameplay-wise. They only get a few unique skills each and they barely make a difference as far as I'm concerned.

Well, I could go on and on but the bottom line is that Syndicate is in fact one of the better AC games as far as I'm concerned and it's kinda sad that this is the AC game that will forever be linked to the series' downfall before it redeemed itself with Origins (well, allegedly, since I haven't played that one yet).

Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth (2017) (Linux)

What a terrible disappointment! The book written by Ken Follet was really good. The TV series based on the novel was still quite interesting. But this game... It closely follows the same story, but for some reason gameplay is just flawed. The game suggests and exposes some choices, but at the end of the day you can see that whatever you choose the result is exactly the same. There are often 4 options in dialogue and you're avoiding one of them just to realize that at some point the rejected one is exactly the last and only option you're made to take. There is a lot of long sequences of events with no gamer involvement. You can clearly feel that nothing is up to you in the game, which is, I believe, quite against the whole idea of gaming. There is also no challenging puzzles here. Only obvious and boring actions to be made, to push the story.

It's really sad, because it is still a game based on amazing story. There was clearly a lot of work to make it beautiful, graphically it's just masterpiece. Also music, with gregorian chants here and there, is awesome. But without a good gameplay, there is just no fun at all. I really hope that the future of point&click gaming is different that this.

List of all games completed in 2019.

Demon's Souls (PS3)

I got a PS3 again. A$50 with 4 games and hardly used. Still don't like it as a console, but I really want to play a few games like MGS4 that are no where else. But first up is Demon's Souls. I sold my old physical unused disc 5 years ago for $100! This time I just bought it digital from PSN for $24.95. Bargain. Of course, tomorrow Sony will probably announce MGS4 and Demon's Souls remasters for PS4, because that's how the world works.

Playing Demon's Souls is still a great experience. You can clearly see where all the traits of the following Dark Souls and Bloodborne came from. It's absolutely worth playing.

But it isn't as good as the later games all the same. Primarily the world is much simpler, just linear tunnels that do not always feature shortcuts back to the archstone. Also each level only has one archstone. It's a far cray from the elaborate interleaved world of Dark Souls that folds back on itself as well as over itself and features many shortcuts and bonfires.

The other thing is the balance is off. Well it is if you play a dedicated caster anyway. People in that other thread are complaining about these games not having an easy mode. Well, this one does- it's called playing as a spell caster. Playing a ranged class made most of the bosses, and regular world play, a pushover. None of the bosses had any real tricks against magic users or the ability to quickly close down the distance. It's made even easier by the fact that you can save souls and stock up on as much healing and magic point recovery as you want. From Soft obviously addressed this in later games by bringing in the limited Estus flask system and giving a lot of enemies defences (both passive and tactically) against spell casters. So if you want the usual From Software challenge in this game then you may want to play a melee build.

It was still a great game though. I think it's the lesser of the series, but it's a great series when the worst game is this good.

Conan: Hall of Volta. An early single-screen platforming game in which you have to defeat a wizard by going through his seven-level castle. Each level has a different gimmick but it basically comes down to avoiding or defeating enemies while picking up gems and placing them on pedestals to shut down obstacles, or getting keys to unlock doors. You've got a limited number of swords to use, except you throw them and they act like boomerangs. It's made by the same company that made Bruce Lee and has a similar kind of vibe. I guess you could say this game, Bruce Lee, and Zorro form a sort of spiritual trilogy.

I mostly played the Apple II version, but I got frustrated with it crashing too often after beating the sixth level, so I switched over to the Atari version and beat that one. I still prefer the Apple version because the game's graphics, crude as they are, feel more natural on the Apple (the Atari version has kind of a green and purple murkiness) and it uses separate controls for jumping and attacking. The Atari joystick only had one button, so you have to push up to jump, which gets awkward when you're climbing ladders. On the plus side, the Atari version has nice music that constantly plays.

It's a pretty tough game in that way that really old, pre-Super Mario platformers tended to be. The controls are often janky and you sometimes make a short jump when you need to make a long one, enemies in one level sometimes spawn right on top of you, and most of the levels require you to stand around and wait for the random elements of the levels to go your way, which can get especially tough when you need to escape from enemies. OTOH, you can find extra lives hidden in various places and there are certain tactics you can use to make the game easier; e.g., level 6 is really freaking tough...but there's a spot on the left side of the screen in which no enemy can harm you.

As a Conan game, I suspect this was an early case of a game being designed first and then having a license slapped on it. Aside from the general fantasy/"kill the wizard" theme, there isn't really anything specifically Conan about it. Conan didn't throw swords like boomerangs and he certainly never had an "avian ally" to help him out. I think the victory screen in the Apple version even has a shot of a generic armored knight rather than anything that resembled popular depictions of Conan.

Finished Tormentum - Dark Sorrow. A point'n click in a weird world but really good. Story is interesting and puzzles are well throught. I recommend it.

Full list here.

Two Worlds 2: Pirates of the Flying Fortress (DLC)

Well, I don't quite know what to say.

On the whole, the DLC is both tighter story-wise and more balanced in terms of combat, and with a much less gimmicky final boss. Those are pluses. I still quite like the lockpick minigame. Levelling becomes a bit more irrelevant since you've probably maxed or gemmed out most of the skills you'll bother using pretty early on.

On the downside, even though my save game says 9 hours, because of the way it counts time (i.e. doesn't appear to count time while you are in the map or inventory, which you will be doing a looooot), I suspect it was actually at least twice that in real time. And especially the later quests in the main storyline, while somewhat creative, start to drag in practice.

This DLC also forces you to use certain things you may not have bothered to use in the main story (the Oculus, for example) and may have forgotten they exist.

Between the base game and the DLC, there were definitely some fun moments to be had, and at times the writing was pretty good. But the combat still sucks, and the game drags in stretches.

One thumb mostly up? It lies in sight of greatness and there was potential here, but it doesn't quite deliver.

Worth playing, probably, if you're a diehard RPG fan, but there will be times you consider why you aren't investing allllll this time in a better RPG, or perhaps just a good book /movie / tv series.