Lucky, getting to just experience it now :) And always nice to see such confirmations, that certain classics do still hold up.

Batman: The Enemy Within (XB1X)

Sequel to the first Telltale series that I recently played. This one not only runs better, it's more polished and tells a pretty decent story- turning some of the Batman tropes upside down even. The portrayal of Joker is quite unique and makes you feel directly responsible for how he ends up.
Gameplay is typical modern Telltale though, in other words there actually isn't much. It's really just a movie with some input and choices. But at least a few of the choices actually feel like they make a difference here. I actually liked this one overall.

Genesis Alpha One

Rather too easy on normal settings. Would have taken much longer if I'd needed tier 2 or 3 clones. Overall, while the game has clearly received a lot of polish already, there is a lot of balancing to be done, especially in regards to the threats you face. The aliens that attack you head-on are too easy and the infestations that show up, well, cleaning them up is a never-ending chore and if they ever get you it's because they somehow managed to sprout well away from where you'd expect. Yet these gotcha moments are the result of cryptic rules regarding the infestations, nothing to do with player skill. This is a game with so much potential to be an awesome, dynamic, skill-based sci-fi horror experience but unfortunately right now it mostly comes down to playing pest exterminator while waiting for resources to come in.

Tokyo Xanadu eX+. Mixed feelings about this one. On one hand, the gameplay is up to Falcom's typical good standard. You run through labyrinths fighting monsters and then there's a boss at the end of most of them. You can take advantage of monsters' elemental weaknesses to give yourself an advantage and the gameplay rewards being careful and knowing when to roll through an attack instead of just mashing attack buttons. The graphics are nothing amazing but they're clean (almost too clean, really) and easy to follow. Good music. Controls are mostly fine.

The problem is that in between the gameplay you have a lot of cutscenes and a lot of "run around town, looking for sidequests" going on. This stuff can drag on quite a bit. The story is that a bunch of high school kids get mixed up in battling these demons from another dimension in an alternate history Tokyo (as near as I can tell, Japan wasn't nuked at the end of WWII but the outcome was similar, so the JSDF in this reality is stronger and uses mechs and a massive earthquake in 2005 is basically this reality's version of the atom bomb hitting). It has general similarities to the Persona series but it doesn't have the pulpy vibe of Persona (or the Megami Tensei games) - it's more like if you took Persona and did a wholesome, afterschool special take on it. The characters are basically all good-natured kids who constantly reiterate how dedicated they are to each other and they all want to do their best (THEIR BEST!!!) to be good, productive citizens. As the story goes on, it gets a bit silly with how many people are involved in the demon-hunting stuff, like who in the city isn't involved? And by the end, it turns into a lot of metaphysical/spiritual gobbledygook. If they turned the game into an anime series, it probably wouldn't hold my attention beyond one or two episodes. So it's a bit torturous that to get to the good gameplay, you have to endure a lot of storytelling. Admittedly, you can fast-forward the cutscenes and you don't HAVE to run around talking to everyone. I just have a weakness in that I feel like I should try to sample all the content if the developers went to the effort to put it there.

Finished Undertale as a pacifist. A very charming and original indie game, but somewhat overhyped imho.

Just finished Paratopic for the first time. I might replay it later to get rest of cheevos and try to make sense out of it.

I finished The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game today. It was very cute :)

Death Stranding. (PS 4).. Check! 110h in the game. Definatly was worth the money.. :D
Graveyard Keeper... Check! That was a fun dark humored trip

CAYNE - GOG

Enjoyed this game a great deal. I'm hoping the others from this dev come to Linux, so that I can play those also

We. The Revolution - GOG

This game had me reading books about the French Revolution to remind myself of what was going on during the time period of when this game took place. Going to play it again soon.

The Great Perhaps - GOG

Really enjoyed this one. The chase mechanic reminded me of Neverending Nightmare

Fantasy Strike - STEAM

I got all the endings for all of the characters and started playing this game at locals.

My current backlog is now 3 games.

They Are Billions campaign

It's great!

The main complaint about the campaign appears to be that it doesn't offer much new for people that played
the survival mode, which was the chief mode before the campaign came along. That and the hero missions, which can't hold a candle to the non-base missions of most other RTSs.
Still, starting off with the campaign as a new player was a TON of fun. Definitely very highly recommended for any RTS fan. It's not as cleverly designed as normal RTSs, so don't expect a lot of variety between the design of subsequent levels. Instead the variety mostly (not exclusively) comes from using better and better techs as you unlock them. Note though that these tech tree purchases are permanent unless you restart or load a manual backup, so don't research to over eagerly. By the end of the game you will however have researched by far most of the tree (but not all!).

The difficulty unfortunately might need to be upped as you progress to keep the game challenging, but that's painless to do. The only criticism that I'd really agree with is the lackluster hero missions. Anyone coming from Stacraft or Warcraft will be sorely disappointed. Luckily though these missions are few and far between, and are usually easy to complete quickly.

Entry 7: Haunted Legends 10 - The Black Hawk(Collector's Edition-Win10/64Bit)

(Full/main game list in Post#21)

Another decent enough entry to the series i've been playing a good amount of this year.....it is set sometime before/during(and maybe slightly after, in the case of the extra mission in the CE version) the 9th game, as some characters from that game make appearances in this one and talk about some events from it.

Essentially in this one a framed vengeful sorcerer takes vengeance on those who betrayed/accused him, and you play an agent tracking him down/trying to stop him(and as always Saint Germain is back as well)....very nice all in all and worthwhile for those into the series and HOGs in general.

Pros

Nice graphics/cutscenes, good music, decent enough plot.

The zoomed in smaller areas can now be scrolled by moving the mouse to the edges of the window as well now, which is nice.

Cons/nitpicks

Big issue: One need to click the word continue in this game to advance dialog, for some odd reason.

The extra level is a bit shorter than usual.

(Semi-spoilers: Also NOTE that one should try for the best/good ending in the extra mission.....as one has to replay the extra mission to get the other ending, and both ending movies are the same anyways)

Some of the achievements seem a bit harder to get this time around(compared to the last game).

The castle building mini game(similar to a few games that came before it...collect items in areas and use them to "buy" castle upgrades) is average at best(not much to do or see).

Overall I give it a 6.5/10....decent enough, but as with the other games I wouldn't pay 20 bucks for it(or most HOGs for that matter) & would advise one to buy it during Bigfish's sales.

(Full/main game list in Post#21)

Wut did you say about SS2? o.0 ;)

More serious reply: SS2 had problems due to lack of funding.....they literally had to race to finish it and couldn't even make a better ending cutscene due to having no money left(or so I heard)......so yeah, such things happened.

Still, for what it lacked or had as a negative it made up for in it's positives(imo).

As for games, Hexen 2 is much better imo so if you haven't played it yet i'd recommend that be on your "plate" at some point. :)

Beat Yakuza 3 on PS4 yesterday. That makes it the fourth Yakuza game I've finished.

Like many newer fans of the series I began my run through the series with the prequel Yakuza 0 and then beat the remakes of Yakuza 1 and 2 (Kiwami and Kiwami 2, respectively). So if you arrive at Yakuza 3 this way it's a bit awkward at first since Yakuza 3 is older than those. It was the series' first foray into full third-person on the PS3. So you will instantly notice less refined combat, a humbler open world with fewer and simpler side activities and even a somewhat different writing style - and of course also the graphics, animations, UI and audio are a bit worse here. Curiously the game is also much bloodier than either Yakuza game that I've played so far, heh.

I soon forgot about a number of these issues (and surprisingly Yakuza 3 had some fun stuff that was absent from the others I've played so far) but fact is: I did enjoy the combat less than in the Yakuza games I've played before and it utterly lacked major side activities that would notably extend the playtime. I did most "substories" (read: sidequests) but little more than that. It probably also doesn't help that Yakuza 4 and 5 are already waiting to be played.

The story is once again quite good but I feel that it's the worst I've seen in the series thus far. The game has a very slow start (which says a lot in the context of this series). The first ten hours or so take place in a new area, a town on Okinawa and its suburbs. It's a small and quiet place compared to Tokyo and Osaka and you feel it not only in the looks of the environment: everything in the first ten hours of the game or so feels kinda meaningless. You are slowly introduced to Kiryu's new life as the manager of an orphanage, which of course gets disturbed by the local Yakuza. I get what the developers were doing here, and it certainly feels different and introduces new characters in a way that makes you care about them. However, it also feels like the "real" game only starts when - of course - Kiryu gets sucked into issues far bigger than that which drag him back to Tokyo.

The main plot is decent but neither as spectacular as the stuff in some "earlier" games (as in: take place earlier) nor as emotionally engaging. A whole bunch of recognisable new characters are introduced and of course some of the series mainstays return (most notably former detective Date and the utterly insane Majima), but I feel that many of these characters didn't get as much screen time as they deserved. And sadly the plot relied on a number of cliches that wouldn't feel out of place in the cheapest soap opera and follows some of the patterns from the previous games. Those are the main reasons why I didn't enjoy the story quite as much as in the predecessors.

So, I enjoyed the game a lot but mostly because I got to experience more moments with characters that I learned to love in the previous games and also had some gripping moments related to some new ones. It is the worst Yakuza game I've played so far, though.

Game #101: Darq DLC: The Tower (Unfold Games) (2020) (WIN)

This is a short DLC for the main game which came out last year which I liked. My favorite game mechanic is solving puzzles so this is right up my alley. I found the black humour of the final puzzle/ending quite enjoyable too.

Game #102: Quest, The (Remaster) (Redshift) (2006, 2015) (WIN)
Game #103: Quest, The DLC: Islands of Ice and Fire (Redshift) (2016) (WIN)

I’ve been playing this on and off for about two weeks or so. I probably spent about 40-45 hours on it. I used to really like the Might and Magic CRPGs and this kind of looked like them so I bought it and gave it a try.

Overall, I was pretty disappointed. It captures some of the feel, but it was mostly just really annoying to me, with some irritating interface quirks and combat that is really repetitive. I made the unfortunate choice of choosing a character that has terrible magic resistance when that is a very important part of the game as well.

I don’t really want to spend too much time complaining about it, but there is a strong possibility that I just don’t like CRPGs very much anymore. It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed one, so perhaps it isn’t all the game. I just get so sick of the constant back and forth of it all. It’s so tedious.

Anyway, I’m going back to horror games. If they suck, at least they tend to be short. I have no idea why I forced my way through such a long game that I didn’t care much for...

Games Completed in 2020