Vampire: Bloodlines.
I was ok with the game until I hit the Nosferatu warrens, then V: Bloodlines became a unfun chore to play.

Eh, can consider that as the game's "dungeon". It still is quite a moment when you do find the guy at the end of it.

Wide Ocean Big Jacket

I tried a couple of games from my collection, some gameplay focused, others with emphasis on the narrative, but I didn't have much patience with either of them and got bored quickly. For some reason, that was not the case with this game, even though it's essentially "just" a mix of visual novel and walking simulator. But I thought it was a very clever mix, and I'm going to try and say why, but I did not know anything about it before I started it, and I think that contributed to my positive experience, so read on at your own risk. No big spoilers though.

I think what made me more interested in this game than in your average visual novel was this idea to alternate dialogues with actually controlling characters and moving around in the gameworld (regardless of how limited the actions and areas are). Because clicking through dialogues in visual novels really is rather tiring to me after a while, but here the dialogues were comparatively short and then you got to look around, take in the scenery and move a bit of your own accord again. What I found remarkable, too, is that the character perspective constantly changes; you don't stick with the same character all the time, and sometimes you even control two of them (like the typical third person 3D chase cam, but two characters walking together, instead of just one). And I liked that while the graphics and mechanics are very minimalist, they are used to good effect. Because the dialogues are displayed on a black background, they can serve the same function as a cut between two different scenes and allow for a change of scenery or positions without the need of actual animations. And yet, to me it did not feel cheap at all but ingeniously vibrant and involving, because you never quite knew what to expect next, but it all flowed together perfectly, and IMO it was well paced, like an interactive comic book or indie movie. Maybe a bit like Virginia, but a lot less cryptic.

Not to say that the plot is full of excitement and surprises, on the contrary, it is a rather simple and calm story about a cheeky teenage girl and her nerdy boyfriend going on a camping trip with her uncle and aunt. The dialogues were written in a very colloquial style that reminded me of internet chats, they felt slightly sloppy and at times they could have done with some more spellchecking, but all in all, they managed to get me immersed and made the characters grow on me. There is beauty in all those small things, even in the imperfections. The music was pretty good, too. I think it takes about 60-90 minutes to play through, and it's divided in many small chapters (scenes) that you can continue from, if you need to quit in between. Relaxing and entertaining narrative experience. I give it a thumbs up.

I just finished Sherlock Holmes Nemesis (or Sherlock Holmes Versus Arsene Lupin) and it was a really enjoyable, cosy mystery filled with puzzles. Without the in-game hint system, I'd have definitely struggled with some of these puzzles as they can get very complicated very early on! I'm actually really impressed with the puzzle designs in this game, which'll have you exploring vast areas for items, or solving equations, or research a certain topic before you can solve it. It a genuine challenge but I think I'd be rather happy to play it again in the future!

I've just finished Star Wars Jedi Knight, light side.

I found it rather imbalanced towards the end. Just spam force protection and hack at everyone with a lightsaber.

I'm not going to be replaying just to get the dark side cutscenes and the one different level.

Inspired by PC Gamer's recent article that ranked all Sierra adventures I felt like playing some of those - especially since the article was super critical of many games that I've always loved... well, besides being too difficult without a walkthrough. I chose to start with AGD Interactive's King's Quest: Quest for the Crown VGA Remake.

First off, the quality of the VGA remake is impressive to this day. It believably imitates the visual style of Sierra's own VGA adventure games, competently replaces the text parser with a pure point & click interface and even offers the option to play with a safeguard that makes it impossible to run into dead ends. The remake is also fully voiced although the voice acting is a mixed bag. The acting clearly isn't professional but to be fair, neither was the acting in many commercial games from the era that the remake imitates. The kick in the nuts, though, is that they got Josh Mandel to reprise his role as Graham and not only is his acting completely awful here (which may be rather due to a lack of direction than bad acting skills), his voice also sounds like it was recorded with some terribly cheap 90s microphone. Luckily there isn't much dialogue in the game and especially Graham barely says anything. Sadly they didn't offer the option to just keep playing if you die, as it was the case in later Sierra games, and you should still save regularly if you want to save yourself a world of pain.

As for the game itself: the premise is pretty much as basic as it gets. You're a knight sent on a quest to retrieve three magical items, else the kingdom is gonna have a bad time. There isn't really any story here and the kingdom of Daventry is perfectly generic - just a castle surrounded by forests and meadows which are inhabited by a few fairy tale characters. And the game really doesn't take itself seriously. What I kinda appreciate is that it's a bit of an open world game. For the most part the world is a grid of about 50 screens that wraps around at the borders - there isn't really any guidance and you're just free to explore the world at your leisure. Frankly I dig this format. However...

Ultimately it's still a very early adventure game (the original is from 1984!) and on one hand that obviously means that all in all the design is quite rough but on the other hand...the game is shockingly playable even today and barely differs from far more modern adventure games - heck, in some regards it's a LOT more bearable than many newer adventure games I've played. I've written down all the riddles that were too far-fetched in my opinion, some of which made me glance at a walkthrough, but it's really just three cases, one of which was optional and another one was about defeating a "boss" so I can kinda forgive the developers that they wanted the player to put a lot of effort into it. Admittedly the riddles aren't particularly clever nor elegant and there wasn't a single one that made me go "wow, that's clever!" but as someone who has usually very little patience for most adventure games I really want to focus on the small amount of bullshit in this game (plus, a few times there's multiple solutions to a problem which I find pretty amazing). Sure, some of it can be explained with the game being so short (I bet you can beat it in like 20 minutes if you know what to do) but given that I just wanted to revisit an ancient game that I haven't played in almost twenty years and could legally do so for free I ain't complaining. There were a few more things that I didn't manage to figure out - like what the fiddle or pebbles are for - but clearly their use is optional.

Anyway, I genuinely enjoyed this game and the VGA remake has allowed me to really appreciate how much was done right in this game so early into the genre.

Huh. Quite a list there. I'm of course frowning at QfG 2 and 3 being so low.
But they're taking up quite an undertaking (that sounds odd) if they mean to keep making such thorough lists. Rather curious what they'll tackle in them next though.

That's what I thought as well. I started reading the list, but stopped after the I read that several games were racist because they had a slit eyed Chinese person. And the LSL games were aimed at "weird middle aged men". So the majority of men that are really attracted to women as nature intends, are weird now? Benny Hill is lucky he isn't trying to do comedy today. Taking classic old games and reviewing them using today's political agendas is not what I wanted to read.

Don't Starve: RoG

Finished all the sandbox content long ago, but the adventure mode remained a real challenge to beat. In the end I had to cheat my way through since right at the end of the final level the RNG seriously screwed me, by placing a ridiculously large, and insanely densely packed hostile clockworks biome in such a way that I had to cross it THREE TIMES to finish the level. With loads of preparation and even a chance discovery of a mandrake I barely managed to cross it once. Other playthroughs I've watched only had to put up with a, by comparison, measly spider biome which needs to be crossed once ]:\
Instead of throwing away an 8 hour game up to that point, I just cheated for the final 5 minutes. If I ever want to beat adventure mode again I'll take the more tanky Wolfgang instead.

All things considered though, it's an absolutely awesome game. I'd be seriously tempted to consider it one of the top 5 games I've ever played.

Next game down: Terminator: Resistance on PS4.

I think the game can be summarised as "painfully not bad". It's utterly amazing how the game manages to be consistently okay. It's a highly ambitious game that fails to quite achieve what it's aiming for in a single area but at the same there's nothing seriously bad. I never got frustrated and I never got so bored that I had to force myself to keep playing - which is something I wish I could say about all those universally praised AAA games.

It's a low-budget shooter that aims really REALLY high. My expectation was that it would be a very basic but enjoyable corridor shooter - instead it's a bit of a half-assed RPG. The developers did not just slap on experience points and unlockable skills, there are actually dialogue choices, quests, a few important decisions to be made and - most importantly - many of the game's levels are tiny sandboxes and feel like a downscaled Bethesda RPG (which is kinda ironic considering that Bethesda did in fact make Terminator games in the early 90s). In true immersive sim fashion you can actually access many places in one of several ways, e.g. using lockpicks, explosives or just by crawling through a vent. And I honestly can't emphasise enough how much it feels like a Bethesda game at times. The sterile visual style, the awkward movement and aiming - even the lifeless faces and their animations look like something from Skyrim.

So, the thing is that the game is terribly-paced and exploring the levels is quite boring, there are too few enemies, combat is not only extremely basic but also ridiculously easy and I can't believe how ridiculously unbalanced the game is. A few hours in I was running around with thousands of bullets and dozens of medkits in my inventory as well as a sniper rifle that could down terminators without them even noticing me. And yet... I never got genuinely bored. I enjoyed exploring every corner, I enjoyed picking locks and hacking turrets in mini games that were blatantly carried over from other games. I even enjoyed downing enemies with my ridiculously overpowered plasma sniper rifle that uses only one bullet per shot even though it deals several times as much damage as other weapons that use the same ammo type. The writing is crude but the plot wasn't that bad, the voice acting is only passable but I did care about the characters. The music is of pretty low quality but the familiar themes from the movies did give me goose bumps. And the first appearance of terminators was genuinely chilling and the best encounter I've ever had with them in a video game.

As for the graphics... when the game started my first thought was "hey, I didn't know that this game has stylised graphics!". Yeah... it does not have stylised graphics. But oh well, after 30 minutes or so I got used to it and didn't care. And at times it even looks pretty great.

Anyway, so in the end it's kind of a game that somehow gets everything wrong yet still manages to be enjoyable. And honest to God, it's the best Terminator game I've ever played and I've actually played quite a lot of them!

Oh yeah, it also has one of the easiest platinum trophies I have ever seen. I guess it's becoming a pattern for Terminator games. And oddly enough the PS4 version has a much lower Metascore than other versions - only 47! - but at least in the current version 1.05 this port is perfectly fine in my eyes.

Medal of Honor Allied Assault War Chest

What most surprised me about this game is the fact it wasn't very graphically advanced for it's time. I can think of several FPS games released in the 2001 and 2003 window that feature more impressive visuals than MoHAA.

Instead, the most distinguishing feature of this game as a AAA FPS is how smooth and balanced the gameplay is. There is no broken or janky game mechanics here.

This game was clearly playtested for hundreds of hours - at least the base game. The expansions are a bit less polished.

Unfortunately, it's also a game from the time when turret sections where still cool, so you get a few of those. Every moment spent on foot, just going around the battlefield shooting nazis and fascists, was awesome. But whenever you are on a turret on top of a jeep, or on a tank, or something like that, it's just not as fun.

My favorite levels in the base game were the Command Post level in Mission 4 and the Communications Blackout level in Mission 6. Both feature a combination of light stealth and slightly less linear level design that together make things a bit more interesting.

The expansions commit two sins. Being shorter than the main campaign, the regular level x turret or vehicle section ratio is almost 50-50 - which sucks - and while trying to make the game more challenging they made it less balanced. This is especially true in the second expansion, Breakthrough, where ammo and health scarcity alongside enemies that take more hits to kill can easily lead to virtually unwinnable scenarios if the player isn't careful.

The first expansion, Spearhead, features some really neat VO work by legendary actor Gary Oldman. Basically he reads some poetry written by war veterans in between missions, and it fits the game super well.

My favorite moments in the Spearhead expansion were the opening level in the first mission, where you drop in occupied France as paratrooper amidst a big fire fight, and the first part of the third mission, where you are moving on foot through the wreckage of a war torn Berlin.

In the Breakthrough expansion, I was very impressed by the first level, where you rush through enemy lines during a sand storm in Tunisia. This expansion also has what might be my favorite level in the entire game, the Bizerte Harbour, where you have to board a Nazi ship undercover, plant some bombs, exit the sinking ship and fight to escape the harbor.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with this game. It's easy to see why it got so much praise back in the day.

Conglomerate 451

It started great, but in the end it was rather disappointing. On normal difficulty everything important will be done after 35 - 40 weeks. After that you have to play till week 75 to see a very lazy and uninspired ending sequence. And the missions get repetitive very fast. It's always the same enemies in the same surroundings and once you've found a good squad, you will have no problems to beat them. Think in the whole game I've only failed two missions. And that was in the very beginning when I was still figuring out which skills and classes are good.

Not everything is bad though. The setting is interesting (even if the story is just an excuse for the battles) and combat has some interesting options (like hacking the enemies). And you've got a lot of options to build and upgrade your squad.

But in the end I can't help to think that the game was quite boring and wasted its' potential. If you are looking for a good Sci-Fi Dungeon Crawler, you should play StarCrawlers instead.


12 Labours of Hercules IV: Mother Nature

As expected from part four of a series, you get more of the same. Casual time-management game with good level design. It's quite relaxing and only gets challenging when you try to beat the developer's highscore.

Complete list of finished games in 2020

I ended up spending a chunk of yesterday playing through Star Raiders, starting at the lowest difficulty to re-familiarize myself with the controls and eventually grinding out a win on the highest level. It's one of my all-time favorite games but it had been a few years since I seriously played it.

It's really the Ur-game of the space sim genre. They took the basic concept of the text-based mainframe Star Trek game and gave it an action-oriented twist inspired by Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. You have a ship that you pilot from a first-person view and have to warp around a galaxy map exterminating threats to your starbases before they can surround and destroy them. The ship is relatively complex by the standards of 1979, with various systems that can be damaged or destroyed (e.g., damaged shields will start blinking on and off and if you're hit while they're down you die), fuel/energy you have to manage, radar showing distance and direction to objects, and starbase docking for refueling and repairs. You can switch to an aft view from the ship and use guns if an enemy is behind you, although the controls are reversed, making this something you either need to practice a lot or just leave for a last resort. There's also a 3D long-range view that can come in handy if you need a better glimpse of a sector. If you want to pause the game, you hit the pause button because the game never stops regardless of what you're doing. You could technically crash into an asteroid while checking the map, although the odds are low. If find, though, that the game hits the sweet spot in terms of complexity and arcade-like pacing. Once you know the controls, it's easy to quickly check the map, pick a destination, do a warp, start battling, and then repeat the process until you either win or are killed.

The graphics are primitive but effective. It's a space game, so all you really need is a black background with some stars moving by and you're good. The enemies are basically TIE fighters, little nimble ships like the Cylons flew (I hate these guys the most), and the glowing battlestar capital ships. It's a good feeling when you finally get an enemy completely locked and your guns switch to a rapid double-fire mode, like when Luke got his proton torpedoes down the exhaust shaft, and I'm sure that was the inspiration for it because the game is not ashamed of stealing anything cool from 1970s space opera. The only major technical hiccup is that the game does slow down at times, particularly after you blow up an enemy and the debris is spreading around the screen.

Final Fantasy VII (XB1X Game Pass)

Very much a game that does not live up to its legendary reputation, unless you played it back on PS1 and nostalgia is a factor. The story is okay but not as good as so many make it out to be. Plus the games major plot development has been spoiled by gaming media and fans long ago, and is common knowledge even to people like me playing it for the first time. So I never bothered having a certain person in my party for character development because I knew it was pointless.

Combat is okay but the constant random encounters out of thin air soon gets obnoxious. Graphics are not great even for their time. The simple 3D is now razor sharp, but the backgrounds are the same blurry 2D backdrops...and they are infuriating to navigate sometimes despite being quite small. It's also VERY linear, whilst still occasionally giving very little indication as to where to go next sometimes. Like how the hell was I supposed to know where to look for the key of the ancients with nothing more than the clue "where the sun don't shine?" Yeah that narrows it down. I looked that one up online.

It's part of RPG history and I'm glad I've finally played it for that reason alone. But I liked FF IX better, but without the benefit of nostalgia they are only okay games...XV on the other hand, I really did enjoy earlier this year. I am looking forward to playing the remake of VII in a few years when it hits either the Playstation classics label or other platforms (it's definitely coming to PC at very least, possibly even Xbox).