Question: Are these short games or games you started in 2019?...because I cannot fathom how one could finish so many games in such a short time. o.0

Her Story, Jan 16 (GOG)-I like narratives like this that aren't straightforward. The story was good and so was the presentation. It takes some lateral thinking to come up with keywords for questions based on the woman's possible answers. Witnessing all of the interview segments is a bit of a pain though. Its worth a look just for the uniqueness of it.

Full List

A lot of the games were really short. I would guess it took me about 90-100 hours to play them all, so it looks a lot more impressive than it actually is. It can take more hours to beat a single CRPG than I spent on all 33 of those games.

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Game#34: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Sacrifice (Beast Studios) (2009) (NDS)

I was in the mood for more vampires after the last game so I decided to play this Nintendo DS game. It takes place directly after the end of the last TV season and is supposedly written by someone from the show, but quite frankly you’d never guess it. There was nothing remarkable about it.

The gameplay was even less interesting. The AI was terrible to the point that all you have to do is hold block and time your counterattack right and you’ll almost never take any damage in the 3rd person parts. Or if you get bored, you can do a special attack and insta-kill them by doing a QTE that is so easy you will never fail at it. Even when being attacked by groups, they just sit there and attack you one at a time. The screen relative controls and the changing camera angles also made navigation annoying.

The 1st person parts, OTOH, were harder and kind of irritating to be honest. The changing perspectives was simply a bad idea. I didn’t really care for the game. Thankfully it’s rather short. It couldn’t have been much more than 3 hours, if that.

Game#35: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Quest for Oz (Indiagames) (2004) (J2ME)

Since I finished one Buffy game, I figured I would try and knock out this old cellphone game as well. The story basically is that Drusilla has kidnapped Oz and you have to rescue him by fighting your way through her mansion.

This is a straight forward platform game, but the controls are kind of annoying due to the fact that every time you turn around you have to wait for the screen to scroll all the way in the other direction before you can move again. That combined with the less than ideal collision detection and response can make it kind of frustrating at times. Fortunately, there are checkpoints that you can save at whenever you want, and they aren’t that far apart, meaning you can sort of save-scum if you want.

Game#36: Terror's Seed (Zed) (2008) (J2ME)

Since I was already playing one phone game, why not another? This is a short survival horror game that’s maybe 1.5 hours long and is completely and utterly devoid of any challenge. I think I only got hit like 3 times prior to the final boss of the game. You have a gun with infinite ammo and the creatures don’t move until you are right next to them so you can just shoot them from the edge of the screen and never be in danger. The only threat is when going through doors and even then, if you just spam the fire button, they have no chance to fight back. It’s not worth playing if you ask me.

Games Completed in 2020

Just checking, as my mind was reeling at the idea one could play so much in so short a time.

Have a good one. :)

Still quite shocking, 90-100h of gaming in about 2 weeks!

Blue Star. This a Commodore VIC-20 game that was made in 2008. It's basically a Metroid clone - you run from one screen to the next, backtracking occasionally, dodging enemies and trying to find power-ups that will let you progress further, until you can destroy a master computer and win.

It's pretty short. I started playing it around 1 a.m. and finished it probably 25 minutes later. I came close to dying a couple of times but the game is pretty generous about leaving health refills in certain screens. You have to find a jetpack that will allow you to double-jump, then you find a weapon that lets you kill enemies and open doors, and then you have to find a couple of codes that will open the last door. The graphics are simple - not much more advanced than an Atari 2600 game, for instance - and it has some very basic, repetitive music.

It probably won't seem like much if you're not familiar with the VIC-20 but technically it's quite impressive for the unexpanded version of the system. Even if you don't care about that, it's fun for the time it lasts. Can't complain about stuff you can download for free :)

Wait, you have a working VIC-20 still? Or emulation? I think my school had a few VIC-20's...I remember making fun of the computer nerds at lunch time. Now look where I am. They soon got replaced by the Apple II I think.

Emulation. I'm using the VICE emulator.

Dark Messiah: Might and Magic (360)

The Xbox 360 is not really the version to play, it looks like crap and doesn't always run great, though it's mostly okay. But I wanted to play it for comparison. It's different to the PC version in a few areas. For a start the first chapter (the tutorial) is totally different. There are also some extra content as well, like an arena segment where you fight to earn a key off of a Goblin called Rubby, to continue a level. The progression is different as well. On the 360 version you actually select a class and your progression locks to that, on PC you can spread points across different classes as you see fit- though it's probably best to specialize in reality.

The game was okay. It's not much of an RPG really, character progression is pretty much baked in to the game. Think of it as a FPS with a fantasy theme and it's not too bad for it's time. Some of the chapters drag on just a bit though, with nothing new being introduced, but it's only about a 12 to 13 hour game, so doesn't outstay its welcome. It uses the Source Engine as well and you can feel it with the way overdone physics...brushing against an object results in it flying across the room, and using telekinesis is obviously the Gravity Gun from Half Life 2. You sometimes have a companion and she is also as useless as Alyx in Half Life and mostly just gets in the way. But the game was mostly good fun, just play it on Steam though unless you just want to complete your Xbox 360 library. The PC version has a reputation for being crash prone...well all was well on 360 until today when the game froze the ol' 360 solid four times and required hard rebooting each time.

Still wondering why Ubi didn't bring it to GOG too. And I mean years ago, along with the others, not now.

Seems like Consortium also uses Source?

Halo: Reach, Halo Wars, Halo: Spartan Assault and Halo: Spartan Strike.

Thank you Microsoft for releasing incomplete Masterchief Collection with only 1 game in it.

Kids of Hellas - Back to Olympus
It's a spin-off of the 12 Labours of Hercules series, but unfortunately it's not as good. It feels really slow (which is really bad for a time-management game) and it is missing some basic functionalitiy (e.g. the ability to prioritze or make an order for your next actions).

The story and the cutscenes were ok though, but all things considered it wasn't a good game.


Princess Evangile
I've completed the last storyline (Ritsuko) and now I can say that I've really completed this game. Ritsuko's story was quite good (even if it had some weird twist near the end) and once again the game dealt with some serious topics (e.g. breaking free from other people's expectations, religion, tradition vs. progress) which you wouldn't expect from a game that is about a single boy at an all-girls-school.

Artwork was nice, music and voice-acting was great.

When I compare all four storylines I have to say that the two which were more about personal matters (Chiho and Ritsuko) were more interesting than the ones which were more about the history of the school (Rise and Ayaka). None of them were really bad though (except for the fact that Ayaka's story had some very weird twists and out-of-character moments).


Little Bug
A very good puzzle-platformer with great design, music and a nice atmosphere. The game is very short though (I've completed it in a little more than three hours), but with my huge backlog nowadays that's not a bad thing.

In the end I've encountered a strange bug. After I've closed the game at the last level and returned to it later, I could no longer be hurt by the environment or the spirits. That made it annoying when you missed a jump (because I kept falling through the floor and had to return to the main menu to restart), but also took away the time-limit of the sprits chasing me. In the end it made completing the game easier, because I only had to concentrate on getting the jumps right.

Haven't played the unlocked bonus levels yet, but according to the developer they are a lot harder than the normal game.

Complete list of finished games in 2020

I finished today:
Doki Doki Literature Club - I liked its gimmicks
Devotion - it was really nice P.T.-esque game and after reading interview with devs I'm even more pissed that they had to remove it from steam due to China being grumpy :V