Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Feb 14, (3ds)- I'm not sure what to make of this game. Everything about it is ridiculous. Characters, plot, dialog all ridiculous. But it was an amusing time. Parts of it were very similar to traditional adventure games in that the player knows what the solution is but getting the correct dialog sequence can be challenging. Some of the cases were a little repetitive and all of them were predictable but that doesn't stop the game from being fun. It didn't quite live up to my expectations but it was still enjoyable. I got the trilogy so I am looking forward to more of these ridiculous cases and characters in the future.

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Army of Two (XSX)

Xbox 360 version under backwards compatibility. I've previously played the third game in the series- Devil's Cartel. Basically, it was EA's looking at Gears of War and its new style of cover shooter, and thinking they need to do one as well. It's a solid game, but not exceptional, though credit to them for working on a problem that many shooters have- where you have team mates. Army of Two, like Gears of War, is a co-op game that can be played single player and has an aggro system to draw enemy attention between the different team members. It makes no difference if your team mate is a human or AI, you can tell them to put down cover fire and they do and the enemy treats them like an actual threat. This then allows the player to use tactics like flanking or drawing the enemy into the fire line of your team mate. This works well and addresses an issue I have with so many modern games like Uncharted and even COD, where your team mates and sidekicks are just useless window dressing that get in your way and shoot bullets that don't do any damage- they're more a liability than actually useful. So kudos to the dev team for working on that issue, though I think the more organic way it works in Gears of War is still superior.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game is only average- but good fun for its short length.

Finished 3 more games and I recommend them all:
- Sword Legacy: Omen: A bit like The Banner Saga. The game is quite difficult but I enjoyed it.
- The Forgotten City: An investigation with a twist. A lot of dialogs (especially in the beginning) and very few combats. The game is very good.
- Jenny LeClue: Another mystery / investigation game in another genre (more cartoon graphics, humor, platformer controls). And this one is very good too. Too bad for the cliffhanger at the end.

Full list here.

Realms of Chaos. My main PC is getting repaired right now, but I wanted to play something short that would run fine on my work PC, so I went for this one. One of those Apogee shareware titles. It's quite good for the most part. Nice graphics and animation (I especially like how the guy sheaths his sword when he isn't using it), and decent controls. The main gimmick is that you switch between a swordsman (strong but short range and can't jump as high) or a sorceress (weaker but can attack at range and more nimble). The level design is creative and it's got some cool bosses.

I did run afoul of some bugs in episode 2 that would cause it to crash randomly, and the final boss in episode 2 is horribly designed - the pattern by itself isn't too bad but then the game adds randomly falling debris that your characters aren't fast enough to reliably evade on top of the boss bouncing all over the place, hemming you back under the debris. After banging my head against that one for a while, I caved in and used some cheats to beat him and even then only just scraped by.

Spyro Shadow Legacy, Feb 18 (DS)-There's an egg of a decent game here but it needed more time to incubate. The basic game play idea seemed good: go back and forth between the normal realm and the Shadow realm, fighting bad guys and saving your friends, while leveling up your abilities and gaining new powers. But the reality is pretty bad. The combat is a button mashing mess and very unsatisfying. The pathfinding is terrible and that causes the occasional platforming to be much more difficult than necessary. The writing was pretty awful too which was even more disappointing when I realized the Game was made by Sierra. Although I suppose it wasn't anyone from their adventure game heyday. It's also referred to as an rpg but it feels more like an action adventure very light metroidvania with some early areas locked behind abilities.

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Astria Ascending (XSX Game Pass)

This one is a bit all over the place. It's a non Japanese JRPG styled game, done in a side scrolling play style. You can see that the developers put a lot of effort and passion into this, especially with the hand drawn art style and unique world. But it's one of those games that balances every good thing with something annoying.

The world is good, but then the dungeons end up just being bland.

Combat is actually quite good. It uses something like Shin Megami Tensei, but its really hard to keep track of the enemies weaknesses/nulls/absorbs etc. Unlike most modern games it does not keep track of the weaknesses you already found from combat, except in the monster journal....which you cannot access during combat. So you have to just remember- impossible since there are 200 enemies in the game- or write them all down in a note book. Near the end I finally found out, when looking through the games options, that you can enable a cheat where any attack will indicate if your hitting a weakness or not right before you launch the attack. But that is a cheat, since it displays weaknesses even if you haven't found them through gameplay. However, for reasons of sanity, I advise anyone that plays the game to use that cheat option. Mainly because the games difficultly swings wildly. It starts out really easy, too easy. Then suddenly you're getting wiped by regular enemy groups without even getting a turn! Then you can fight the same battle again and just get lucky and breeze through. Then in the end, the final dungeon goes back to being easy again. The balance just swings all over the place.

It's a difficult game to recommend. If you're happy to just drop the difficulty at points in the game- or grind maybe- then it may be worth it for the good points.

Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside

I ´ve enjoyed like a child. What a funny game. It´s easy but the story is cute, to fight against the Dark. And graphically is a cartoon very well done.
PD: I found all the socks!

Games finished 2022

This might be considered a tasteless choice for a game to play right now but a mix of anger, frustration and powerlessness have led me to rebuy and replay Freedom Fighters - that and a desire to refresh my memory on the game's presentation of Soviet / Russian propaganda, something that my brother, a historian and Russia expert, commended this game for back in the day (with a few "buts").

Freedom Fighters used to be one of my favourite video games back in the day. Mostly because at the time I was quite obsessed with squad-based tactical action games, an interest of mine that started all the way back with Hidden & Dangerous and became quite permanent due to Operation Flashpoint, the game that I have perhaps poured more hours into than any other (well, perhaps with the exceptions of Dawn of War and Unreal Tournament 2004). Anyway, this marks my fourth or even fifth playthrough of the game.

Freedom Fighters is set in an alternate history where the Soviet Union singlehandedly won World War II by nuking Germany and then spent decades conquering most of the world until finally invading the United States in 2003. The hero assumes the role of Chris Stone, an average American who, together with his brother Troy, is a plumber. Troy is keeping track of politics and seriously worried about a potential Soviet invasion while Chris considers all of that conspiracy non-sense. But then New York is suddenly hit by the Soviets in a scene that echoes then-recent 9/11 more than a little bit. Troy is abducted by Russian soldiers and Chris is dragged into the resistance by accident, sooner than later becoming the face of the movement and a national hero.

It is easy to accuse Freedom Fighters of a certain naivete. It's a simple story of good versus evil. There isn't a hint of a single American sin in here, it's just all of America, regardless of race or gender, taking up arms against an evil empire invading their home. But even though you literally beat levels by raising the Stars and Stripes, this Danish game does not feel like a love letter to America but it rather feels like the American setting is used as the default option that can represent any democratic nation defending itself against a foreign invader. It probably helps that there isn't a hint of American politics or military tech porn here - the regular army is just entirely absent from this game, probably for that exact reason. Also Jesper Kyd's amazing soundtrack is focused on representing the Soviet menace and generic themes of heroism and tragedy rather than going full John Williams - even the most heroic themes have a choir singing lines like "rise, hero, rise" in Russian.

The game isn't quite as ambiguous about the enemy side, however. While a full on conflict between Russia and the western world might have felt entirely unreal at the time, the game's writers did their research. Even though the game is almost twenty years old, the insight we get into Soviet / Russian propaganda here is as valid as ever. In comically exaggerated cutscenes a sexy female Russian newscaster and a pompous Russian commander talk with fake sympathy for the Americans, telling the people who are now living in ruins that this is somehow for their own good, that they have been "liberated" from an evil regime and anyone fighting the Russian occupiers is actually a traitor to the American people. Sound familiar? Yeah, anyone who has played this game should have a better understanding of how Russian propaganda works than the average western democratic politician. The only inaccuracy which my brother already pointed out all the way back in 2003 is that in the game the Russians present their losses as great tragedies rather than diminishing them or denying any failure altogether.

Gameplay-wise and technologically the game has aged quite a bit, obviously, as impressive as the game was upon release. The PS2 graphics weren't mind-blowing even then and present a similar level to the Hitman games of that era (obviously, given that this is a game by the same studio running on the same engine) or the likes of The Suffering or The Thing and many other western multiplatform games from that time. Then there's the thing that third-person shooters really reinvented themselves with Gears of War - Freedom Fighters lacks cover mechanics (though, like in Call of Duty, AI-controlled characters can stick to cover) suffers from painfully inaccurate weapons (which were probably okay on console but suck a bit with mouse aiming) but is also missing regenerating health which is actually essential to Freedom Fighters.

The true core of the gameplay are the squad mechanics. They haven't aged too well but at the time it was amazing that you couldn't just give orders to combatants in a shooter but they also demonstrated an impressive ability to use cover and dynamically engage enemies on their own - also the enemies felt rather clever at the time and frankly their aggressiveness and sneakiness still manages to surprise me at times. Anyway, as Chris gains more and more charisma by taking back territories, destroying strategic targets like heli pads or saving POWs or just providing first aid to random injured civilians, he becomes able to recruit a growing number of freedom fighters scattered throughout the city. He can give him three basic commands: follow, attack / recon and defend - this feels quite similar to the later Brothers in Arms games, with the difference that using your mates here does not feel quite as forced. There isn't a situation in the game that you couldn't theoretically resolve entirely on your own but gradually you become able to command such large squads (as large as 12 people) that just by giving them sensible orders they can quite easily eliminate any threat - provided you don't leave them exposed in machine gun fire in the middle of the street. The super simple interface for commanding your squad works great while you have 2-4 people but past that things become a bit messy and they tend to move around ineffectively as a single blob unless you scatter them manually a bit which is awkward as you'd have to press either command key 12 times to do so (you can easily give the same command to everyone by holding down a command button, though - took me a while to discover that!). It also sucks a bit that you have no control over who is given an order, the game just goes through all squad mates in order - this already sucked back then and hasn't gotten any better. But frankly, even though the squad mechanics have obviously aged I still enjoy this part of the game very much and it makes me wish for a sequel where this stuff has been given a good update.

Finally, something that I actually always liked a ton about the game is its structure. You move from chapter to chapter in chronological order but each chapter consists of multiple areas, each of which constitutes one level. Importantly each level contains at least one strategic target which usually affects the other levels in the chapter - in particular whether there will be endless reinforcements or helicopter support. You can freely move back and forth between levels and e.g. farm charisma by doing objectives before actually trying to take an enemy base (and thus beat the level). It is a fairly basic system and the developers could have gotten more strategy out of it but honestly, in my opinion it at least amplifies the guerrilla warfare fantasy a ton and makes for a far more interesting structure to me than in most modern sandbox games where taking bases just feels like a meaningless grind.

Now, as I said, the game has aged a lot and if it were made today it wouldn't just look much more nicely and come with cover mechanics but it would probably play more like a Ubi game: there would be loot and crafting and skill trees - honestly, it would basically just be The Division with squad mechanics. And honestly I am glad that Freedom Fighters isn't like that because all that forced RPG stuff in sandbox games tends to water down the basic action and tactical gameplay and all strategy would be about abstract or silly shit like character builds or dressing up your dude. I know that Freedom Fighters is a bit repetitive but it's also short at 10-12 hours to beat. It becomes a bit of a drag towards the end but I recommend it for the first 3-4 chapters alone which I still find highly enjoyable if you can live with some archaic shooting and graphics. And Jesper Kyds soundtrack is still awesome - it's not as impressive anymore as epic orchestral soundtracks with choirs and whatnot have become far more common since but it's still some badass stuff.

Final note: what I didn't know is that the 2020 version was actually updated by IOI a bit. This version of Freedom Fighters comes with native widescreen support and does not seem to suffer from the speed issues that the original game (and Hitman 2 and Contracts) had. Sadly they did not solve other minor bugs like being unable to fire while crouched in certain areas (you will hit invisible metal or something - it's bizarre) or Chris aiming towards the camera when colliding with freedom fighters. That's a bit disappointing but oh well, it's nothing serious TBH.

Uncharted 2 Among Thieves, Feb 23 (PS3)-Still have a couple more games to catch up on. I really liked the original Uncharted when I played it a couple of years ago. Uncharted 2 was more of the same but bigger and better. I was pretty bad at it but that didn't stop me from having fun hiding behind cover while my companions distracted the enemy. Even though I was bad at it the game was rather easy. I only really struggled with parts of the train and the final boss. Everything about it felt really polished. The graphics and voice acting were great and it was just a lot of fun. It's my favorite game I've played so far this year but that said something about it was lacking. Maybe it's the aforementioned lack of difficulty. It's a great game but I'm not sure it stands up to my favorite games of years past. I'm not even sure it will be favorite game of this year.

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The Surge 2 (XSX Game Pass)

It's leaving Game Pass in a week, so I decided to finally get in and play it. It's an awesome game, improved in every way from the first game, which was a decent game itself. My main, and only serious, complaint of the first game were the bosses- they were all gimmicky God of War style bosses. This time the bosses are better, only one boss being a gimmick boss. The bosses are probably still the part of the game that are the weakest link overall, but everything else is so good that it doesn't matter.

First of all it runs so well, better than anything From Software manage. It is the last gen console version though, but when played on XSX it just brute forces the last gen problems away (namely last gen's bad load times and poor texture streaming). The world is much improved over the first game, it has a bit more variety and changes a few times during the story as a result of actions you trigger. It is all built over the top of itself and full of short cuts, plus this time introduced Metroidvania aspects to help you get around as the world changes.

The star of the show, and what sets this apart from other games trying to fit into the Dark Souls category, is it's scifi world and the leveling and crafting system that ties into combat directly. It's the games main strength. The way you find and construct armor and weapons is to target them and cut them off from enemies. It's a game play loop pretty much unique to this series and quite addictive. The options to tailor you weapons and armor to your play style are huge, even weapons of the same type have different feels to them- meaning you may end up using a spear like I did, but deliberately use one with lower damage simply because you like its feel better. My build used the second lightest armor- because it has good speed and bonus XP gain, combined with a spear for its speed. All of that with combined with implants that prioritized XP and healing/energy gain meant that I defeated the final few bosses by simply tanking them and just out healing their damage.

New for this sequel is the inclusion of a drone (well I think it's new, long time since I played the first game), very handy to pull enemies away from ambushes and finishing bosses when you have them down to a sliver of health.

After the end credits the game gives you extensive stats compared to the average of all players over the world. Something I found really interesting. For example, my play time was 8 hours over average- which reflects my slow and thorough exploration style of play for these types of games. This play style is probably why my death count was half the average of all players, as was my attempts to kill each boss- most late game bosses I killed on the first try because I had my build so well sorted.

I'll probably continue with NG+ tomorrow, for a simple straight run to get the other ending before it leaves Game Pass. This is one I'll also buy later on sale- maybe the GOG version.

NG+ Finished NG+, one of the few non From Software games I've decided to play twice back to back. NG+ plus has a few changes, the game starts from before the opening cutscene this time, rather than after it. Plus many enemies are replaced with more difficult late game enemies. But overall my build held up really well with some refinements. It took 17 hours for NG+ compared to the world average of 23 hours and I died 30 times compared to the world average of 63 deaths for NG+. Excellent game.

So I heard the game was fixed from the abysmal state it was in at launch. Can you confirm?

Age of Heroes. One of the newer C64 games published by Psytronik. This one is a sort of Rastan takeoff in which you can choose a male or female character to hack through a bunch of strange creatures to save the world or whatever. There are two modes. The default has you picking a level on a map and then returning to the map after you've completed the level, which means (and the manual encourages this) that you can return to easier levels if your health drops and farm health or level-ups. I found it easier to level up because the game is stingy with the hearts and they don't give you much. This mode is easy to the point that it can almost get boring outside of maybe the last couple of levels, but when you beat it, the game unlocks challenge mode, which is a straight run through the entire game in sequence, and that's definitely a, um, challenge.

The controls are alright although I found that the magic attack often didn't want to work. Music is pretty good. The graphics are fine, although there's something about color palette that I found off-putting, like it was too washed out or something. But then I've never been a huge fan of how C64 games look.

I've already beat Sniper: Ghost Warrior 1 and 2 here on GOG. VERY good games.

Been ages since I posted in this topic about specific games rather than just updating my list, but Ion Fury was just really fun so I felt like I needed to post about it. Brought me back to the good old days of playing Duke 3d, because this might as well be a proper Duke 3d sequel. The levels are huge, the secrets are harder to find than I expected - only got about 40-45% of them, and the weapons are fun (though no shrink ray-equivalent, unfortunately.) First run was on Normal for fun, will now try on the hardest difficulty for self satisfaction.