Epic Pinball: The Complete Collection (1995) (Linux)

I didn't liked it. For the best pinball experience take Pro Pinball series from GOG. Big Race and Timeshock are amazing. This one – not.

List of all games completed in 2022.

Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling, Aug 23 (Xbox Game Pass)-Wow this game was hard and I really struggled with it although I was playing on hard mode. I never quite got the hang of the timing based combat and even at the end of the game the original enemies I fought were still chipping away damage. I never felt that level ups significantly increased my power compared to my enemies. About 3 chapters in I basically gave up and used a walkthru for strategies. The difficulty did sour my experience a bit but it was still enjoyable. There's a lot of end game and side quest content that I skipped because I couldn't bring myself to keep playing such a difficult game. The music and visuals were pretty good and the game has a lot of charm, too. Just turn down the difficulty for a less frustrating experience.

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Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (XSX Game Pass)

The highest rated of the Spike Chunsoft VN's. Originally a PSP title, the remastered version is great overall except for the jarring cutscenes where the sound quality takes a dive- obviously they just used the unmodified PSP assets.

You play as one of a group of high school students locked within a special school and forced to murder fellow students by a remote controlled robotic teddy bear called Monokuma. The game has a funny atmosphere with its colorful graphics and upbeat music in the background whilst you investigate brutal murders. The characters are some of the best of these Spike Chunsoft VN's and voiced as well as always- especially Genocide Jill, your friendly neighborhood serial killer. Oddly the only character I didn't like was the protagonist who comes across as a bit of a whiny dweeb.

There is no story flow chart in this game, but you do get free time to build relationships with other students. This is where you can increase skill points and learn abilities for the games real game play segments- the trials. After each murder the surviving students have to attend a trial to decide whodunnit. The trials contain many phases and different game play types- logic puzzles using evidence you found and also action segments. The trials are harder than I expected, though they do get easier depending upon what skills you decide to learn through your relationships. I suspect these trials play out similar to the Ace Attorney games.

Overall it was a great and bizarre story and probably my favorite of the Spike Chunsoft games that I've played- and that's saying something because they've all been awesome so far. It's between 30 and 40 hours long.

How do you complete that one though? :)

For games without obvious ending I take a liberal approach and consider "completed" as "explored everything I wanted" :) In this specific case - I've just played all the tables at least once. I agree "completed" sounds weird, but the only alternative status in my system is "dropped", which is even worse (:

That's my plan for that one at least, to consider it abandoned eventually, probably when I'll finally get a new computer and not reinstall it on it, since otherwise I can have a quick game when bored and not feeling like actually playing a "real" game.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein (PC Game Pass)

Decent old school shooter, I remember playing it back when it first came out. The Castle and town levels are a lot of fun, but the catacombs and their bullet sponge undead are not. The games attempt at enforced stealth in a couple of places was also crappy. It's worth playing for the ten hours it takes if you want a shooter experience from that era.
I almost went straight on to the second game Goodbye Despair, but another similar 35 hour VN back to back may have been a bit much.

Have you ever played Psycho Pinball? IMO the best 2D pinball game, even better than Pinball Fantasies.

Never heard of this one, but (as I look at screenshots) those tables look awesome :D

Just finished Wizardry 6, which is my second playing.
The final bosses, vampires were tough nuts to crack. They can be only beaten by wooden stakes and holy water, so my samurai could not use the strong Muramasa blade, and my fighter un-equipped the Avenger sword.
After a dozen tries, finally beat them, and then I fought the true boss...a dragon, which had a strong attack, and only one fighter survived when beating him...

I will transport my adventurers to Wizardry 7. but before it, I will grind them a bit, I want at least 3 fighters to have learned Kirijyutu (decapitate) skill, which only the samurai had learned so far.

(By the way, there is no word for Kirijyutu in Japanese. Perhaps the devs would want it to be "斬り術" (an art of killing with a sword?), but no such word exists, the closest words would be "剣術 (Ken Jyutu. an art of sword fighting)" or "居合術" (Iai Jyutu. an art of quick-draw sword technique) I think.)

My list is here

Moto Racer 2 (1998) (Linux/Wine)

Physics makes no sense here (especially cross ones, but also 317 km/h of snow race is a bit unrealistic), but the game is still fun. I was looking for something with no thinking required and it was a good choice :) The races are quite interesting at first – with various scenery, weather, even night races, however after finishing all championships it's obvious that there's only a few landscapes reused here and after a few hours of gameplay MR2 does not offer anything more.

It runs like a charm in Wine.
Unfortunately I was not able to install Moto Racer 1 – it requires some limited color display mode. I've tried Xephyr to emulate a proper display mode, but some other issues appeared (rotated screen), so I've dropped the first part and installed MR2.

List of all games completed in 2022.

Shelter (2013) (Linux/Wine)

Long time ago I had some problems running this game – white screen that could not be fixed. As I've changed my hardware some time ago, I've decided to give it a try and the game finally works. It's still possible to get the problem back (e.g. which using dx libraries), but on clean vanilla Wine it now works just fine, out of the box, in my case (Nvidia GPU).

Nice little game. Close to walking simulator idea, but in this case there is some actual gameplay and you're walking badger, taking care of your cubs :) It took me more than 2 hours to finish because I couldn't find way out in the night chapter. I didn't like the graphics, it's really annoying when you fight to see where to actually go.

List of all games completed in 2022.

Hades, Aug 29 (Xbox Game Pass)-I think I've wrung out all I can reasonably get from this game but I'm still probably several dozens of hours away from 100%. But I was still having as much fun on the 100th run as I was on the first. Its a shame this game isn't available on GOG.

I loved everything about this game. The voice acting was excellent. The music was excellent. The humor was excellent. The character progression and gradual plot reveals were a lot of fun. The plot itself was somewhat of an afterthought because the entire game felt like flavor text the game which was a concept I loved. Developing the relationships one interaction at a time kept me interested in the next bit of text and lore and always looking to keep progressing. Everything you do in the game is commented on by the other characters and even after 100+ hours I think I only got repeat dialog from the narrator, Megaera, and Charon.

The mechanics and combat of the game were good and provided a nice challenge at first. By the time you're able to finish the first run you're ready to increase the difficulty as well and the game gives you lots of options for that. The weapons provided a nice variety although I struggled with the rail and the bow quite a bit.

If Pyre was an excellent epic story, then Hades feels like an incredible series of short vignettes with a great cast of characters.

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Doom (1993) (Linux/Wine)
(played Enhanced version made in 2019)

Finished 3 episodes: Knee-Deep in the Dead, The Shores of Hell, Inferno. I'm not a big fan of FPS, but played Doom as a kid, of course, and I liked this time travel :) What I've never known is home the atmosphere of the game changes in the next levels (I guess only shareware version and only the first episode was available for me years ago). Also the difficulty level increases like hell. Fighting Inferno was absolutely above my abilities, I've used cheat codes a few times to get more ammo, because it's crazy how many monsters you face with the ammo found.

I played "Enhanced" version. At first I liked the modern controls, but it was extremely weird to play with WSAD and mouse and still have Y-axis locked. After a few levels it just become normal and wasn't a problem. The game works almost perfectly under Wine – I only had some issues when switching between windows – just don't do that, keep yourself focused ;)

List of all games completed in 2022.