Ever play Corridor 7 or the one about the skyscraper where you need to rescue the president on the top floor?

I played Corridor 7 a little long time ago. I still hope it comes here (and a bunch of other lesser known 3D shooters of that time). The second game I don't know. It sounds a bit like one of the games on Pie in the Sky 3D engine.

It started in a sewer and once in the building you needed to go up each floor via elevator like Blake Stone. I liked Corridor 7 better but that other game was also good way back when I played it.

I also played a weird game called Chub's Game 3D(chubgam3d)...made by this small dev for free or some such...it is very rare but was fun & wa about crash landing on an island full of weird sh*t run by one crazy "guy".

That one sounds like Operation Body Count. I did play that one but never got that far.

And I have boxed copies of two of the Pie in the Sky games, Lethal Tender and Terminal Terror, I did like those actually. :)

Albion is another great RPG with its own style, deep story and game technics which were way ahead of much later games. Simply fantastic game!

I think the lack of those damn energy plasma whatever alien generators is the main thing that might have made it easier. Having the secret-finding minimap helped too. On the other hand, the final boss fight was really hard. And in PS, both the bomb bots and your own plasma gun actually explodes the ammo lying on the ground, dealing you damage if you're nearby. This includes ammo being dropped by enemies you plasma in the face from point blank range.

All told, there were 3 levels on Planet Strike where I broke my "no saving in the middle of the level" rule: the one level with those energy alien generators, the secret level you can teleport to from level 19 that has a metric tone of those "Alien Protector" (PS's version of AOG's green STAR Troopers), and right before the final boss fight.

It's possible that the difficulty I played on was affected by using the Bstone source port. Aside from the the far better controls, it might also have messed up the difficulty of the game. I noticed back in Aliens of Gold that in some episodes on the second difficulty setting, almost all enemies died in 1 shot - obviously a bug. I did my playthrough on the 3rd difficulty for that reason.

Having said that, I think possibly the hardest part of both games (not involving running gauntlets of constantly spawning energy aliens) was the secret room early in AoG E1M1 which has IIRC 3 STAR Trooper and which you would likely come across without a stronger weapon than the pistol you pick up from the first guard...

Yeah, that's it....decent game, but of course Corr 7 and some other games were better.

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VR sounds nice and all, but for me with some VR titles(I don't play them as I cannot afford VR) it is the opposite, sadly: VR only titles cut me off from some games, like the Psychonauts expansion/sequel for PS4/etc, which is only(afaik) VR.

Forgotton Anne

+ Great presentation, beautiful animations, backgrounds and music, like an interactive Ghibli-style anime
+ Not all voiceovers are great, but I loved the performance of Rachael Messer who voices the main character Anne
+ Quite original setting
+ Occasional binary choices & consequences or roleplaying Anne, two different endings

+/- Somewhat predictable plot, although that doesn't mean it's a bad story; just that you've likely seen similar before
+/- Mostly simple and easy puzzles
+/- Very linear, gameplay mostly just serves to move the story along (it's more of an adventure than an action game)

- Platforming is servicable but not great, controls can be clunky and a bit imprecise
- A few puzzles that require timing can be frustrating due to the subpar platforming or lack of transparency regarding the rules (e.g. for one puzzle you suddenly have to pump a lever several times instead of just pushing it once as usual, and the game doesn't tell you that this is possible and even necessary)
- The endings aren't all that satisfying (and that's a nice way of putting it)
- Only few cutscenes and none of the dialogues are skippable, which didn't bother me during my first playthrough, but seriously decreases motivation for replaying, even just the ending or shorter sections (you can freely select them after finishing the game). IMO it's just not worth putting up with this repetition just to choose a few different dialogue options or get an achievement for finding all collectibles, unless you're a total fanboy of the game.

TL:DR
To me the awesome presentation, including Anne's voiceovers, as well as the nice story-telling were enough to offset the mediocre platforming, somewhat lacklustre puzzles and the predictable plot. Took me 8-9 hours to play through and I enjoyed the ride, but I don't see much replayability in it, regardless of what the game designers may have thought.

Neverwinter nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate.

On the whole this was pretty enjoyable, a nice little module which isn't too time-intensive, good if you want to play something, but don't have time for an epic game that will take dozens of hours. Reminded me a lot of the Athkathla sections of Baldur's Gate 2, with a lot of nice touches like little events on the streets. Quests weren't overly complex, but had a few nice options; the three companions you can enlist were also well-written imo.
Ending was a minus for me...actually there are two, I picked the good one, and it's one of those endings where you don't really defeat the evil antagonist, but merely set his plans back somewhat. That soured me somewhat on the game, though most of it was pretty fun.
If you don't expect too much and want to have a bit of rpg fun in the Forgotten realms setting, definitely recommended.
My rating: 4/5.

Dark Fall 2: Lights Out, Oct 28 (GOG)-Somehow this game is worse than the original Dark Fall which I thought was pretty blah itself. And this isn't just worse, its much, much worse. The original at least had some good puzzles with all the puzzle boxes and such. For this game I did not like the puzzles at all. I also felt like I played for an hour or more at the beginning and only saw one puzzle. Then things got weird with the time travel which shattered any real feelings of tension and dread.

I think all of the issues I have with the plot and the puzzles can be forgiven, not by me but by other players. This just wasn't going to be the game for me. But it gets worse. There are a ton of typos. They are everywhere and in a game with so much reading to do that is inexcusable. All of the audio is also really difficult to understand. I think this is due to a combination of voice actor accents, intentional effects like static, and just generally poor recordings.

The hotspots that you could click on for either movement or interaction were also annoying to find. There were a lot of scenes that served no purpose other than making you click more and just seemed to pad the game a bit. There were also a ton of useless interactable objects especially in the early game that added a bit to the atmosphere but really made you wonder if there were going to be puzzles in this puzzle game. Lastly, there were a couple of what felt like forced callbacks to the original game.

Overall I was more bored than scared due to the bizarre plot.

Full List

I finished Neptunia Re;birth 1 not too long ago.

I regret it inmensely.

Long story short, the game ticks every single box of bad JRPG design. An obscure upgrade system, playstation 2 era graphics, lack of environments, endless repetitive grinding, and visual novel style narrative with unfunny boob jokes.

I finished it out of sheer stubborness, and hoping against hope that maybe it had a semi-decent ending.

Nope: A winner is you!

Shadowrun Returns

So after quitting Shadowrun: Hong Kong earlier this year, I wanted to replay Returns to see if I still enjoyed it... and yup, it's still a fun game.

Warlock Revenge

The latest of the Raycast Engine Maker games I played for some reason. Actually bought this one on Steam for $0.49 during the Halloween Sale due to it's "Mostly Positive" review rating. Well, I'm not "Mostly Positive" about this one, though it's better than some of the other REM games I've played for sure. But hey, you get what you paid for.

Deadfall Adventures

Now here's a game I liked far more than I expected given its own "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam. It's like a FPS version of (classic) Lara Croft meeting Indiana Jones. I see in the reviews that some people didn't like it because its co-op doesn't work (understandable if that's the reason they bought it) and others don't like it because they expected more of FPS and less of a puzzle solver. But I don't care, I had a blast. Though some of the puzzles I did look up solutions online too, and some of the undead waves towards the end got kinda tiresome.

Neon Shadow

A fun little FPS. Keyword little. Takes less than 3 hours to run through the single player campaign, perhaps significantly less if you don't die. Just don't choose the hardest (Nightmare) difficulty - it's ... not fun unless you're a masochist.

NAIRI: Tower of Shirin

This adventure has the look of a mobile port, but surprisingly it's only available on Nintendo Switch and PC. At first it seems as if it's just a kinetic novel which has you clicking through a lot of dialogue, but eventually you also get to explore by clicking around various screens and solve simple puzzles, a bit like those Escape-the-Room Flash games (but with several screens) or Hidden Object Games (but with actual, story-relevant adventure game puzzles and inventory instead of gaudy HO screens). In the last part the puzzles get a bit more challenging to figure out (in a good way), but the only time I had to use a walkthrough was because I missed a hotspot.

The main attraction of the game, of course, are the cute graphics with the hand-drawn picture book or cartoon look, and they might suggest it's a kids' game, but despite the lighthearted, mostly harmless tone, easy puzzles and simplicity of the story, not all situations were that well suited for children. The story wasn't totally original, but interesting enough to play on, also due to the characters.

NAIRI is surprisingly long for what you'd expect of this type of game, at least 4-5 hours of content, and personally I actually played it for 6-7 hours even. It's also a bit more complex than I initially thought, though not overly so. What's a bit of a disappointment is that after all this, the game still ends on a cliffhanger and does not conclude its story.


The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game

Another casual adventure game with cute graphics. This one is only an hour long at max, and contrary to the mostly static 2D environments in NAIRI, it has you moving around freely in 3D, but only in, like, 3 small areas. The dialogues are somewhat quirky and funny, the story is predictable, the puzzles are hardly existent. You mostly just talk to everyone and the puzzles more or less solve themselves in the process. But it was entertaining enough while it lasted. This one might be suited for little kids, even if some of the jokes might go over their head. There was one instance at the end where after a cutscene you couldn't click through the dialogue as usual but had to wait for it to advance automatically, and the breaks were very long, so that I wasn't sure at first whether something was broken, but fortunately it's just for three speech bubbles or so.