Asura's Wrath (PS3.) Have I 100%d this game? No. Have I unlocked everything my skills will allow me to without the fun leaking completely out of the experience? Yes. This is a good game, but I didn't like how some bosses required you to mash the circle button repeatedly to build up the burst meter. I get what the developers were trying for, maybe to add some intensity to the experience, but I think there's a better way to do it than this. *Spoilers Follow* Case in point: I beat Darksiders: Warmastered Edition, and while there were difficult sections, I never was made to mash any of the buttons on my controller repeatedly, and let me tell you, the fight with Tiamat was still super intense and I only got through it successfully after five attempts.

Assassin's Creed Revelations

The final AC2 game, it's quite small compared to its predecessors, but, by god, it is padded.

Most of it takes place in Constantinople, which is not a particularly huge map, but it's overflowing with stores and landmarks to renew, items to find and a bunch of side activities related to maintaining the brotherhood and expanding its influence over various cities. There's a new Den defense mini game, that is boring as hell and as soon as I could, I upgraded my "Brotherhood" out of it.

This padding creates a weird unbalance, where you can acquire the secret overpowered armors and weapons long before the highest level normal stuff become available to buy. There's also a small part of Constantinople that only becomes available after a certain point in the story.

The story itself is mostly fine. Most of its twists and turns work fine, and the new character Yusuf if nice, even if the story doesn't do him justice. It also did a good job of ending Ezio's story, while allowing him (and us) to visit the rest of Altair's life, though Altair's missions are all restricted to the same Masyaf map and his story kind of a bittersweet ending for the character. Desmond's side of the story is quite uneventful, since he's stuck in the Animus, but finally gives us who subject 16 is/was and there are a few first person puzzle levels that, while not particularly interesting from a gameplay stand point, offer a nice, if limited, look into Desmond's life.

I still have to play through The Lost Archive DLC, but from what I've seem, it's more first person puzzle levels.

Edit: Graphics aged somewhat poorly, due to the washed out colors that were common at the time. I was more offended by the UI and controls that, while still funcional, aged way more poorly. Also, fuck minor objectives for "100% Synch", those things suck.

Edit: For some goddamned reason, every single time I launch this game from Steam, Ubisoft Connect asks me to re-enter my password, even when the app is already open and logged in. Infuriating!

Post Mortem, Apr 21 (GOG)-Its ok but not nearly as good as I remember Still Life to be. Some highlights were the background art and the animated cutscenes. I thought both looked excellent even after so many years. Character animations and voice acting were pretty poor. Story was interesting but a little disjointed because of a branching dialogue system that didn't work too well. I'd choose dialogue options and accidentally lock out other lines of inquiry that I wanted to follow for no real reason. And due to the somewhat free flowing nature of the game I would be given dialogue options for subjects I shouldn't know about yet or for puzzles that had already been resolved. The puzzles themselves were generally pretty difficult and more of the read something on a scrap of paper and use it to solve a puzzle later in the game rather than inventory puzzles. Some of them seemed to require brute force (lockpicking) and after a while I gave up and started consulting a walkthru. I'm not sure I could have solved the letter ring puzzle without a walkthru. The witness composite sketch seemed to be more about what made the character look more nefarious than the witness statements. So excellent background art, interesting but flawed dialogue system, so so plot, generally difficult puzzles, and poor voice acting. You wouldn't be blamed for just playing Still Life and forgetting about this one.

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F1 2021 (XSX Game Pass)

Completed a full 23 race F1 season. First time I've ever done that in many years. Things have come along quite well, Codemasters brings out one of these each year with only minor tweaks, so they should have it all sorted by now. It ran really well, the graphics are good without being current generation cutting edge at the same time- but it's sharp and with great view distance which is what you want in a high speed racing simulator.

Obviously none of us have driven an F1 car, so who really knows how accurate the driving model is. But the rules are well simulated for the most part...unfortunate in a way since I despise modern F1 rules. The AI cars actually have self preservation and won't just crash into you if you're already on the racing line- unless you really leave them no where else to go. Also, when you lap cars they move over and let you pass just like they are meant to. All the stupid F1 rules like compulsory pit stops to use different types of tires and limited numbers of engine components are present.
I like how the season also simulates some car development over the season, which you contribute to at race weekends by running test programs during practice sessions- these gain R&D points to help push through new and improved parts.

Apart from the season mode that I drove, there is also an alternative season mode where you enter and drive for a new team. This 2021 edition also has a new story mode, which basically appears to be a championship with scripted story moments- this doesn't interest me at all. I think this also represents the first year that the game series is an official part of EA Sports, since EA purchased Codemasters. It's a solid effort, but as I get older I just prefer the car collecting game play loop of Forza or Gran Turismo these days- dirty casual.

THe favorite game I have finished in 2022 was Elden Ring

Stranglehold, Apr 25 (GOG)-I'm not a John Woo fan so this was just another generic shooter to me. It reminded me a bit of Painkiller and State of Emergency. Much better than the former and much worse than the latter. It was good fun just blasting away at countless enemies. I didn't care for the boss fights, the helicopter section was a highlight, and the parkour style moves felt awkward and poorly implemented compared to just randomly diving and using Tequila Time. This is also the second game I've played this year that included bonus content of a video on making origami paper cranes.

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Lost in Random (XSX Game Pass)

You see, EA does still publish games that aren't Battlefield or sports titles. The result here is basically a high quality indie game that obviously benefits from a bit more budget for polish. Set in an original world that has obvious Alice in Wonderland vibes. A kingdom called Random, divided into 6 regions where everything is ruled by a Queen using a living dice. At age 12 all children face a dice roll to decide where they get to live. You play as a girl, Even, who sets off to rescue her sister Odd. Along the way you find your own living dice that features in the combat system.

The combat features the dice roll as a random factor used to buy cards from your deck. It initially sounds complicated but soon becomes second nature. It is a good system and very tactical. Unfortunately it doesn't develop much over the 15 hours the game takes. And because the enemies are very damage spongy and fights have too many waves, combat soon becomes too slow and drawn out, and start to become annoying. But it's not too bad and the game length is just short enough that it's still worth playing, even after the combat novelty wears off, as the game is otherwise quite well done.

Crossfire X- Operation Catalyst (XSX Game Pass)

Very poorly rated multiplayer shooter. I cannot comment on that part of the game since I didn't play any multiplayer, it doesn't have any Australian servers anyway, so latency would be crippling. I played one of the two single player campaigns that are made by Remedy. It's no where near as bad as people say and basically just plays like it is- a medium budget short COD style cinematic campaign. Actually, making a campaign from an entirely multiplayer engine was probably quite a feat. Of course it wouldn't be Remedy without some radios to listen to for story background and of course it has the all important supernatural angle. The part I don't understand is all of the people complaining about how the game controls and shoots- it feels basically just like COD to me, except the weapons drift a bit more when you fire them and enemies go down with just a hit or two- no magic tank armor wearing soldiers here.

Basically, it's probably a hard sell just for the single player. But it's not the worst way to spent 4-5 hours if you have game pass and just feel like a short COD campaign.

Overwatch, it's one of my fav games. I'm gla that I found boosting service at https://overboost.pro/overwatch-boosting where pro players can play instead of me with guaranteed results. Now I enjoy the variety of playstyles and abilities, and the way that different roles can work together within a team.

personally i m waiting for vampire the Masquerade, swansong, and sniper.

Secret Files: Sam Peters, Apr 27 (GOG)-It's not too bad, just really short. Not as good as Lost Horizon or the original Secret Files Tunguska. But probably on par with Secret Files 2 or 3 if it was full length. The voice acting and dialogue in general were really eye-rolling and the puzzles were rather easy. Not much else to say.

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Chinatown Detective Agency (XSX Game Pass)

The idea of this game really intrigued me. I never played any of the old Carmen Sandiego games, but many say this is heavily inspired by them. The concept of real world locations and puzzle solving by real world research really appeals to me. The cyberpunk noir setting is good, though I'm tired of pixel art these days. The voice acting is really good, but more on that later. It starts off so well...

Some of the case solutions are good, the ones that require doing some research on history or geography or art/literature, for example, are the exact type of thing I was hoping for. Unfortunately, from my point of view, too many solutions were solving ciphers and codes- not as fun to me, but I accept that some like this sort of thing.

But that's not the games problem. It is one of the buggiest games I've played in a long time. Not so bad that anything stopped me getting to the end, but bad enough to force you to restart quite a few cases. The excellent voice acting just decided to stop working sometimes, along with other vital audio puzzle elements. For example, in one case I got an audio recording that I needed to listen to and decode- but it would not play, making solving the puzzle impossible. Sometimes clue items would not appear in the inventory for examination at all- and you wouldn't know if it was a bug or if you're just stupid and cannot work out what to do. These things all required restarts of cases. Most cases are short enough that it isn't too bad, but some are a bit longer. Then it felt like the game skipped an entire case right before the end...but I wasn't certain, since i was able to resolve everything to the satisfactory ending. But looking it up online it turns out that the game did skip a case, as some others have had the same issue. Also the bugs seem to occur across PC and Xbox versions, though i played the Xbox version- which does at least have the benefit of the system save state feature so you can leave the game mid way through cases and return without losing progress.
It's a shame when a good game like this is so buggy. But at the moment I would't buy it unless/until it is known to be patched to a better state. As of now the number of times the games bugs can dick you around and cause time loss is hard to ignore. But I did enjoy everything else about the game though, so if you're really patient...

It is on GOG and Switch too...but given the nature of the game at the moment playing it on Game Pass (it's on PC Game Pass as well) would be a better bet.

Escape from Monkey Island - 3/5

People (me included) often balk at the awkward control scheme & lacklustre polygonal graphics...and then never give the game a second chance.

Thankfully, I did end up giving the game a second chance. There's some enjoyable puzzles and a bunch of laugh out loud moments - you, um, just need to put up with the actual playing it part.

By the end, I did end up getting used to the controls, but even then, it never stopped feeling like I was fighting against the game to do even the most basic tasks.

For example: to examine something in the environment, you have to move close enough to the object you want to look at, then you need to slowly rotate until that item is somewhere within your cone of vision. If you have manoeuvred yourself correctly, you will be able to see the name of the object written at the bottom of the screen (listed alongside any other item that also happens to be within your current field of view), this means it's now time to button your way through the list and select the particular thing you're interested in. Once your desired object is highlighted, you can now examine it by pressing the specific keyboard key that is assigned to examining things (phew).

Basically, something that could otherwise be done in a fraction of a second with a mouse cursor.

I wouldn't hesitate in saying that it's a big step backwards from the previous games, but it's still a good Monkey Island game and I'd definitely say I'm glad I played it. Now I just need to play Tales of Monkey Island and I'll be ready for when Return to Monkey Island is released.

The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav

Pretty nice adventure game - beautiful graphics, great soundtrack and voiceovers (I played the original German version, still shamefully absent from GOG after all these years), good puzzles, not too difficult either. It's quite linear though, split into many smaller chapters of sort, and that means that often there are hardly more than two locations to deal with at the same time, and this limited scope also decreases difficulty. Plus, I played with Space as hotspot reveal key enabled which counts as Easy Mode in this game (a bit silly, IMO, but also irrelevant). This was my second attempt at playing through the game; I had already started a playthrough years ago but then abandoned it for something else, and now I realized I had forgotten almost everything again. I got stuck at the same spot as last time but eventually managed to find the solution. And I had high hopes of also solving the rest of the game without walkthrough, but in the end I got stuck on some puzzles for a longer time again, grudgingly gave in and looked for the solution online. That's always kind of disappointing, but I have to say, those two or three puzzles in the last parts could have been implemented better, with less obscure clues, and one time I managed to overlook a hotspot despite using the hotspot display key. I would have wasted a lot of time or just given up again without the help. Still, overall the design was good enough for me to solve almost all puzzles on my own. The story I thought was interesting, with some marginal DSA/Dark Eye flavour, though the ending felt a bit anticlimactic and abrupt. I'm looking forward to trying Memoria and comparing the two.