Batman Arkham City PC

Pretty good game and if you liked Asylum then you will probably like City since it's more of the same but bigger. The combat is the the free-flow form of pinballing between enemies and getting your combo score up but it works. I didn't like the map and how navigation could be a pain in the rear from time to time. But overall it's a damn good superhero game that makes you feel like The Dark Knight and it still looks pretty good too.

Castle Wolfenstein (DOS). I played my way through the whole ranking system, which is eight levels starting with Private and ending at Field Marshal. Escaping the castle counts as a win, but to advance in rank you have to escape and have the war plans. It's kind of an annoying system because not giving you a choice of what difficulty to start at means you have to deal with the almost complete lack of challenge in the early levels before things start getting more interesting around Colonel or so. Once you get past the halfway point in difficulty, the game starts throwing more SS officers at you and the chances of you getting shot down despite having a bulletproof vest go up.

It's a very early stealthish game. You start out in a prisoner's uniform but you have a loaded 10-shot Mauser. Basic German guards (recognizable by the crudely rendered, backwards swastikas on their chests) won't see you if you're not within their line of sight, so you can sneak by them if the room layout allows, or you can shoot them, or if they run into your unholstered gun they'll surrender and you can search them for ammunition or keys. They do react (stupidly) to gunfire or explosions. If you run out of the room, they can't chase you and they'll have forgotten you if you re-enter, even if you've killed some of their buddies. If you put on a German uniform, they won't react to you unless you cause a disturbance. The SS wear bulletproof vests, so your options for fighting them are usually to either hurl grenades at them or try to hold them up, at which point you can remove their vest and gun them down. They seem to have a wider vision than the regular guards, they can see right through your uniform, they're slightly better at changing direction toward you, and if you leave a room after they've seen you, they'll chase you from room to room like the Terminator.

It's one of my all-time favorite games and I still find it very fun to have a go at it periodically. It's superficially similar to Berzerk or Frenzy, but like a lot of early PC games inspired by arcade games, it gives you a bit more to do and has a more generally sedate and thoughtful vibe to it. It's just complicated enough to make you ponder situations a bit, but plays quick enough that a full game doesn't take long. The path through the castle is always the same (although I'm too lazy to make a map of it), but the location of the war plans and room layouts are always random. The biggest problem that anyone who's played it will attest to is that you're stuck waiting a lot. Picking locks on chests takes "x seconds!" and even when you hold the space bar to speed up the clock, you still have to hang around for the timer to wind down, and then you'll be irritated when you've waited all that time only to discover some bratwurst or schnapps. The controls also take some getting used to - I used to play it with a joystick when I was a kid but keyboard probably works better overall. Either way it's not a perfectly smooth-playing experience. Also, no matter how smartly you play, you'll inevitably have a good run cut short by the dumb luck of entering a room with an SS one step away, so he grabs you before you can even react.

I do recommend the DOS version over at least the Apple II because the Apple version has an awful glitch that causes the screen to freak out whenever you collide with a wall. In the DOS version, your guy just shakes his head and moves along.

While playing MediEvil I was also listening to an Exo Paradigm Gamer review where he talked about how he thought he was harsh on the original Jak and Daxter game. I don't talk on here that much anymore but I have played a few Naughty Dog games (even if they are not recorded here/ finished) but I sometimes am able to convince myself to give them another try. I thought Uncharted Drake's Fortune was a fun game until I played it to beat it/ any subsequent time I play it; Uncharted 2 was better but not good; and Uncharted 3 was the closest I thought they came to being good while still not quite getting there. Some devs lose their touch though so, what the hey, I gave them another shot. (Not talking about Crash or Last of Us because I have not finished them)

Humorously, after I got a PS2 I grabbed Jak and Daxter as well as Ratchet and Clank thinking I would enjoy them both but I had a slight preference towards Jak. Unfortunately, while I played a little bit of both games I did not really take to either. So, fast forward and I'm borrowing a PS3 and I grab both Uncharted and Resistance Fall of Man. I had heard great stuff of the former and meh about the latter. I was really looking forward to Uncharted but irony crept in again and I just love Resistance and do not like Uncharted and I do think it is a bad game. Recently I saw a review for fun of the new Ratchet and Clank movvie/remake game and thought I'd try that out again. I did get through it that time but the final stretch of the game is painful and unenjoyable so while I liked it I did not like it very much. If I gave number scores it's a 6/10.

On Jak and Daxter, I remembered not really liking it but I was also on a Playstation kick so I decided to give the mascot game another go. Honestly, the reason why Naughty Dog kinda stopped with the 3D platforming might have been because they were not very good at it. The only thing I liked about the game was how it looks, since they do not make games like this anymore. The game was actually kind of fun for the first are or two and I was enjoying myself, but it has a forced tutorial that not only is annoying (the humor really never lands in this game, sad to say; contrast R&C which is actually generally better) but it also does not inform you of two moves you need to know at least to do the first couple areas. Also, Jak's jump is lame and that is all there is to it, it's like he's being sucked back to the ground (freaking gravity). I know that he should come back to earth after jumping but it is a collectathon cartoon platformer and his jump does not go very far forward which means a fair amount of jumps are precision jumps as well as abusing the game's physics/ i-frames. As long as the game does not wonk out, that is. Jak controls kinda slippery and often times it's like he's being repelled by the edges of platforms. His attacks are also bad. Calling them clunky sounds like they are inelegant but mostly functional, whereas the truth of it is he just plain is not. The punch leaves you very vulnerable and usually falls short when it is inconvenient. The spinning attack is also relatively slow to follow up so when you are mobbed by enemies neither attack is actually all that useful and you just have to run away and try and pick the enemies off. If the game did not force you into combat as much as it does this would not be a big dead, but it does in a similar annoying Crash Bandicoot PS1 kind of way.

While I'm at it, Daxter is completely unnecessary. He does nothing, which may be a blessing in disguise given the way Jak already controls, but aside from being the closest to a funny character in the game (I assumed the sage would be funny the whole time but he was not at any point) he serves no purpose. Even his advice usually only comes after it would have been useful, which leads into the next problem: the game has way too many points where all it's doing is screwing with a first time player. So you have to either adapt on the fly (which, evidently, I cannot) or just remember after you die and respawn. Actually, alot of the time that's preferable to returning to the beginning of an area the way the devs designed it. Speaking of design, the world borderlines on being unique but it really is not. The island theme runs thin in no time and you are doing Cave World, Fire World, Grass World, Snow World in no time. The design of the world is also not particularly fun or enjoyable. There were not a few areas where it looks like it was designed for you to jump there (there's is a spot in the lava area hub as well as in the caves near the dormant robot) but an invisible wall keeps you from landing, resulting in a cheap death or lost progress.

Also, it is a platformer but in addition to the writing not being funny I have no idea what the story is and I do not really care. Getting Daxter back to normal seems like motivation but the whole game long it feels like even if everyone could have they wouldn't. The bad guy and gal are just kind of there and aside from being the only characters I thought had fun voice acting they are pretty much worthless.

Other problems include the occasional moment the game has no idea what to do with the hit detection when you land and just tosses you into a pit (and I mean toss) and the controls being imprecise and often not very good; and for how often you'll need to use it the first person shooting controls are trash.

Overall, I can't really say it's a bad game but I don't like it but I am glad I played it through. It's one of those games I've meant to play for a long time and even if it's not one I can like it's good to at least have it under my belt.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, Nov 13 (GOG)-A really fun detective game. The writing and voice work were very good. The puzzles and deduction were fun if a little bit on the light/easy side. Cases were interesting and varied but its a little disappointing there wasn't a common thread among them. Only a couple of graphic issues and occasionally getting stuck on the scenery or Watson to complain about. Overall very enjoyable and looking forward to more like it.

Full List

Well, there's also the two spin-offs that were actually released in the west, the zombie-themed Dead Souls and the more serious Judgment. That actually leaves me with four more Yakuza games for now. I'm also still hoping that the fan translation of the PSP spin-off is gonna get done in the foreseeable future - the guy who started the thing handed the project over to a larger team so I guess chances of the thing getting actually done have skyrocketed.

Oh yeah, and then there's Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise which was made by the same studio and apparently plays like a Yakuza game. It's an entirely different universe based on some manga I've never heard about but it sounds interesting and I almost feel obligated to play this one as well, lol.

Bioshock 1 (Remastered)
I played the original many years ago (10 hours or so)... Maybe this time I'll finish it!
Strange that I need a "mod" (BorderlessGaming) to alt-tab back to Windows...

I'm playing it with a controller this time (I don't care about "accurate shooting" or twitchy action).

It still looks pretty good, for a 13 year old game.

Beat Kirby & the Amazing Mirror (GBA) yesterday. It's basically an expansion on the Great Cave Offensive mode from KSS with 2 more allies thrown in and seemingly a focus on MP coop - the three CPU allies are pretty underused and even work against you at times, screwing up puzzles and stealing forms.

Despite the more interconnected world and mostly good level design and forms, the semi-MV design constantly works against itself and makes focusing on exploration tedious and mostly unrewarding, with boring collectibles, inconsistent world persistency and various one-way paths (you can teleport to the hub area at any time and there are a few more doors to and from it within areas but it's not enough and sometimes feels very unfinished, like when you find the ability you needed only after locking yourself out of a path in the same room and then have to re-enter the area, as if they planned to fix the persistency but didn't get around to it). On top of that you also have to find the map in each area, and when you do it still doesn't show room topography, chests or a mini-map. Also you can pretty easily lose a needed ability while getting to it or somewhere else (as before you drop it as a star that bounces away and disappears, and there's also off-screen respawning of every enemy so you can never relax), so with all the things mentioned combined the exploration can become a bit of a chore. Bosses are also trivialized if you call on the allies (you can only call on all of the ones available it seems) though the final one is still a challenge and if you don't get assistance then some are pretty fun.

However if you just go for the life bar upgrades and bosses and maybe look up how to get to the maps in some areas, it's still a pretty solid Kirby game with mostly great presentation for the series. Try to play it in MP instead though.

Latest updates to my site besides this game:Clash at Demonhead (NES), System Shock 2 (PC)

https://platformadventure.weebly.com/

The Quest : Islands of fire and ice. Pretty good story line and good plot. Too bad we don't get the other expansion on gog.

Gears Tactics (XSX Game Pass)

Again, this time the new console version that just released. This version has a new version of the campaign where you get Jack the utility bot as a permanent squad member, plus new harder Deviant versions of enemies to balance out having Jack. I'm glad I took the time to play the new campaign version because Jack actually mixes up the tactics quite a bit, for example he can cloak and stealth behind the enemy lines and even mind control and enemy for a few turns. Plus he has awesome crowd control measures if you choose to develop that side of his skill tree.

The controller works well for this game, especially since when I played the PC version I found it quicker and easier to use hot keys anyway- so basically it controls just like on PC except with buttons replacing the hot keys whilst the sticks control camera, including zoom. It's a pretty decent game to launch with a new console, but the negative points are still there- the lack of any big variety in mission types beyond the first Act. But the combat is still great with plenty of scope to radically change tactics using the skill trees. This game was also the first one I've played using the new console quick resume feature. Anyone that uses emulators a lot knows how save states work. Well this is the same. I booted the game once 4 days ago and then used quick resume to get back to the save states until I finished it- this game takes 5 seconds to get back to where you left off! No splash screens or intro videos ever again after the first load- just straight back to the where you were, even if it's mid turn. Add to that the fact that, with only two games installed on the SSD my new console only takes 10 seconds to boot from cold power off. So 15 seconds from power on to playing the game every time.

Bright Memory (Xbox Series X)

It's a very nice.. foundation for a shooter. It took me 30 minutes to complete it. The gameplay is very fun, and the graphics really take good advantage of the new Xbox's horsepower. It also has a pretty good soundtrack. There's occasional minor graphical glitches, and there is some slight jank to the gameplay sometimes, but overall this is not bad at all for being developed by one guy. Hopefully the full release isn't too far away.

Just beat Vampyr on PS4. I knew that the the game's reception was pretty meh but hey, I've often greatly enjoyed games that were heavily criticised by reviewers and users alike. I kept telling myself that this one would be one of those games. It is not. Something I heard people say about Vampyr in its defense was that people expected another Bloodlines but there's no reason to expect any RPG about vampires to be like Bloodlines or Vampire: The Maseqerade in general. And that seemed like a good argument - the problem is that Vampyr is already a lot like Bloodlines in a few ways and it would have benefitted a lot from being much more like it.

So, it's an action ARPG where you assume the role of a vampire in London. What caught me a bit off-guard is that it's set during World War I (I was sure that it has a Victorian setting) and it definitely makes the game quite unique. What caught me even more off-guard was that the main character is a doctor. I must have read that in a review but I totally didn't remember this little nugget and it's perhaps the one thing that I genuinely loved about the game. When I started the game I was like "man, the hero sounds kinda phony" but soon I learned that Jonathan Reid is this brilliant doctor and suddenly his voice and mannerisms not only make sense, they make him an exceptionally interesting and charismatic character that I just loved to play as. And this role also puts an interesting twist on the whole setting, with the protagonist being a rational person who tries to scientifically approach and resolve supernatural matters. I felt that a consequences of this was also that the he believably worked as a genuinely good person with utter respect for the Hippocratic oath or an utterly devious charlatan depending on the player choices.

And from here on things go downhill. The thing is that in my opinion Vampyre is not a good RPG at all. The main feature of the game is that there are over 60 unique NPCs in the city whom we can "embrace" which means killing them by sucking them dry. That's - according to the developers at least - the main way to get experience points in the game. At least on normal difficulty that is not the case - just by doing quests I was doing fine XP-wise. Anyway, the idea is that you must kill NPCs to evolve but killing NPCs has major consequences for the city - so there's this whole thing where you get more XP the more you know about the person you embrace. Talk to the NPC, related NPCs, collect evidence, eavesdrop on them - that not only gets you more XP, I guess that's also supposed to help you decide whom you should kill. Sounds super cool but it's not.

I feel that a side effect of this is that the developers neglected what makes "normal" RPGs good. The first issue I have with the game is that there are very strict patterns. All NPCs have the same categories of dialogue choices ("tell me about yourself", "tell about your life in London"), so almost all interactions in the game feel like interviews you just go through to decide whom to kill. Sometimes you get a little side quest for a certain character but those are pretty basic and generic stuff. What perhaps frustrated me the most was that the NPCs feel like they are frozen in time. NPCs tell you about what's going on in their lives and it never happens. For example some of the first NPCs I met were patients waiting for surgery and they were still waiting for it by the time the game was ending - it was just part of their background story that's supposed to help you decide if they deserve to die. Generally nothing ever happens to anyone unless you kill them. Then the thing is that I had more than enough XP just from questing alone - I did end up killing three of the worst NPCs I met but it did virtually nothing. The first two NPCs I killed had literally no effect on the world, the third one caused another NPC to stand on the street instead of inside a shop. Wow. From what I've read more interesting things can happen if you really slaughter a ton of people but why would I?

The biggest impact came from several choices at key moments in the story anyway, much like in any other RPG, and even those didn't have all that much of an impact. Some of the characters whom I could have killed directly actually died anyway because of these choices - which are intentionally designed to be vague and unpredictable. The game's entire concept falls flat. And even after these key moments in the story which were supposed to change the fate of the entire city all that seemed to happen was that specific buildings became abandoned and I could ask NPCs how they feel about recent events. Hearing a bum say "Man, London's going down the drain" was pretty much the extent of things. And from what I've read now only the number of people you've embraced seems to affect the ending, so these key choices don't actually matter anyway.

Besides that: there's a ton of combat, as the story progresses more and more vampires and vampire hunters appear on the streets. Combat is okay, it's some cheap clone of Bloodborne, but it gets old and by the end of the game it was annoying as hell since you can't even effectively farm XP this way - any enemy, regardless of their level and type, gives you 5 XP (versus 1000-6000 or so XP for embracing someone). Combat just felt like a heck of a waste of time and its main purpose must have been farming components for upgrading your weapons - and you get more than enough of those quickly. A side effect of the upgrade system is that I basically stuck with one of the first weapons I found as they all have similar strength and the combat system isn't deep enough that I'd want to genuinely experiment with different types of weapons. My saw was perfectly good enough to strike down any beast I met. Oh yeah, and Vampy'rs London is just a very generic and boring map that's repetitive and hard to navigate - killing the same enemies over and over in the same boring streets was not fun.

NPCs also get sick and you can treat them by crafting appropriate medicine - healthy NPCs get you more XP if you embrace them so that didn't really matter to me as I only embraced three of them. The average health of NPCs in a district somehow affects the state of said district but as I kept treating them for pathetic XP rewards (25 XP per treated patient - that's the same as killing five enemies >.<) no district ever reached critical levels and I honestly didn't notice any effects of this system.

As I mentioned before, I loved the protagonist and the dialogue was written very well in my opinion and the game's atmosphere is generally amazing. The city looks nice and the music's just beautiful. Genuinely interesting NPCs are pretty rare though and the game's lore and main storyline are pretty unimaginative. The lore genuinely felt like a weak rip-off of Vampire: The Masquerade and the plot - while it had its moments - lacked genuine surprises. The ending was actually frustratingly dull and anti-climactic and made me question it if was a good idea to invest like 30-40 hours into this game.

Admittedly I've made Vampyr sound a lot worse than it actually is - for the first couple of hours I was genuinely mesmerised (though interviewing tons of NPCs in a row resulted in awful pacing). Alas, the big disappointment after such a promising start overshadowed all my good impressions by far. For me it's a 6/10 game at best.

Because they have different ownership.

Good to know I didn't miss much. I gave up on the first boss already because apart from not really enjoying boss battles in general, I didn't get along with the combat system and how spongy the boss was. But before that I already had mixed feelings, similar to you - good atmosphere, interesting premise, not so great gameplay.

Because 2020! :)