Might and Magic II - second time completing it, over 30 years apart! It's great when a good old game lives up to your memory of it. Still an all time classic!

I'm still fighting through this one :D
In my case I was intrigued by the game at first. And the system of "free text questions" was also nice.
But at some point it becomes tiring, especially when you realize that some expected questions you've actually asked, but a bit other way, which means incorrect, which means with no result. That caused I've started to use drop-down list in questions window. At this point the game is not frustrating anymore, but it loses some of it's charm for sure. But I still think it's not a bad one and may be enjoyed.

Zniw Adventure

I'm just dropping this one. After long hours of play my kids surrendered. I've tried to finish the game myself, but I find it extremely inconsistent. I completely don't understand its high rating and reviews. The game seems to be targeted to young kids, but it has quite complicated story, a lot of locations, at some point even navigating a map may cause troubles. The game is also extremely wordy:
– no dubbing here, so you need to read everything
– every time you select dialogue option, it's repeated in other words
– a lot of conversations lead to nothing, but last forever
– when you find something it'll be commented by Zniw and also communicated by pop-up
There's also a lot of walking from one place to another and even some form of grinding (as you need money to purchase items). All of these make the game really tiring and believe me, I've played a lot of p&c adventures, I love them, many of them are too hard for me, but I often continue with walk-through because of a story I want to enjoy. In this specific case I couldn't force myself to continue...

Really? Congratulations! Impressive :)
Do you have any idea how many hours it took you finish the game? HLTB reports min. 40h for M&M 1 or 2, but some aspects for the gameplay (e.g. no map) may lead to much longer playtime or even may make the game unbeatable for some players :)

Escape Academy, Oct 9 (Xbox Game Pass)-Its a pretty good, challenging escape room style game. Also, good for local coop. I would have a much more difficult time had I not been aided by my very smart partner who is definitely standing over my shoulder dictating this.

Full List

In my case it was the lack of free saving. Way too wary to get out there and do much of anything, so eventually gave up on the first, and since second doesn't have free saving either I didn't even bother to try.

My timelog on Galaxy says 66 hours. I didn't completely play through everything in the game, and I hate losing fights, so I did a lot of grinding to level my party up along the way. By the time I got to Dragon's Dominion I wiped the floor with everything in their easily. LOL It was a lot of fun. I jumped over to Pools of Radiance now (again over 30 years since I last played it!) but soon I'll swing back to Might and Magic III.

Envy! I feel that I have to find several dozen hours off and follow in your footsteps :)

Good luck! Got a dumb side question for you, how do you reply to a post without it keeping all the previous thread as quotations? Whenever I try to delete some or all of it, the system hangs up and won't post my reply.

Well, I'm just removing everything between tags and replace it with "...". I've never tried, but perhaps it's the dots what makes this work - perhaps removing everything causes your problem? Also incorrect tags may cause problems; any syntax error causes that sending reply hangs infinitely :)

You need to make sure you remove the right tags.
If you just want to keep the quoted post but not one quoted in it as well, remove the part in the red box in the attached image, including its end tag, while keeping the start and end tags for the post you're quoting.
If you want to remove all of it, you do need to leave the start and end tags on the same line and put at least a space between them. It won't hang with nothing between them or if they're on separate lines, but it'll result in gibberish showing up instead of a quote mark.

Ok let's see if I got it, thanks!
Looks like I did!

Halo 2. It's more Halo. The biggest changes are that you can dual-wield many weapons now and they've got some extra vehicles to use, and the big one is that you also control an alien guy called the Arbiter who is screwed over by the Covenant and gradually comes over to the humans' side. The Arbiter is more agile than Master Chief and he has a cloaking device to be like the Predator for brief times, although overall I prefer MC because he's a bit tougher. There are new enemies called Brutes who are basically evil apes. You end up fighting them almost exclusively in the later stages and they're total pains in the ass to kill. For a good while they game resists the temptation to recycle levels like the first one, although towards the end the temptation wins out and you find yourself going through the same hallways again. I didn't clock my time on this one but it feels a bit shorter than the first - as I recall, this is right about when Halo had broken out as a multiplayer game and the industry in general was half-assing it on single-player content wherever possible. How dare you try to play games to get away from people for a little bit, you selfish sons of bitches! Then the game ends on a lame cliffhanger.


Thief: The Dark Project. Note that although I do have Thief Gold on GOG, I played the original version from my CD copy with the tfix mod installed. I don't care for the extra levels that Gold includes. This is still great, although it has some rough spots such as some of the level design (Return to the Cathedral starts out so well and becomes so obnoxious by the time it ends), and in the later levels it feels like the game is trying to funnel you toward combat even though combat in the game sucks. The AI is a bit silly at times - it can key in on you really well in some cases and yet miss incredibly obvious stuff. But overall it's held up really well, and is still better than most stealth games that come out today, and it's better than most games in general in how it creates a sense of immersion and trusts the player to pick up details about the setting as it goes along. I love for instance that Garrett's maps are so vague and how you sometimes to have just use the compass to orient yourself.

Finished a few ones since last time I posted:

- Supreme League of Patriots - Episode 3: Ice Cold in Ellis: It was an ok point'n click series. Average but funny.
- The Procession to Calvary: An highly recommended point'n click game !
- Mad Max: A very good open-world with lots of different activities. The story is a bit average though.
- Bonbon: Don't play it, it's a waste of time.
- Monkey Island 2: Still one of the best point'n clicks of all times.
- Nightmares from the Deep: The Siren's Call: A good hidden objects game.
- Nightmares from the Deep: The Siren's Call - Davy Jones's Book: A very short DLC.
- The Search: Don't play it, it's a waste of time.
- Rusty Lake Hotel: A short and interesting puzzle game.
- My Friend Pedro: A fun run & gun. I enjoyed it but I was not interested in the scoring part.

Full list here

Far Cry

First thing that comes to mind when I hear "Far Cry" after beating it is: difficult. Obscenely so. Unfortunately difficulty in this game isn't derived from AI being smart or anything like that. Instead it comes from sheer amounts of damage AI can do and its magical abilities like seeing through some walls (although it doesn't happen often, thankfully). I beat the game on easy because I heard about its difficulty beforehand, I don't even want to think about how hard it is on higher difficulty levels.

Other than that It's a good, solid FPS. I definitely don't recommend going higher than normal difficulty on first playthrough.

The Secret of Monkey Island (Ultimate Talkie Edition)

Probably the third or fourth playthrough, but the last one must have been over 25 years ago (yikes, I'm old!). I'm very thankful that this edition exists, even though it's a bit of a pain to set up, as all the step-by-step guides I've found were kind of lacking, and on some sites the links to required files were dead already. But when I finally managed to built it, it was grand. The pixel art of the classic version still looks great, much better than the flat ugly comic graphics of the Special Edition (which actually make some items harder to spot, because they don't stand out against the background anymore). And ironically, the controls are much less roundabout in the classic version, too, even though the plan was to make them more user-friendly in the SE (they're not, at all). The new voiceovers are fantastic though, and the new music is nice enough as well, and since the SE doesn't allow to play the classic version with the new voiceovers, setting up the Ultimate Talkie Edition was totally worth it. It is the true "Enhanced" version that Monkey Island deserved, and I don't regret buying the terrible SE in order to be able to experience this.

The game is more or less the same as it was back in the days, apart from using the inventory from Monkey Island 2 now (if I'm not mistaken), with pictures instead of just words, and that was a welcome enhancement, too. The puzzle design was never the greatest; there is quite a bit of repetition and running to and fro involved, but it is a classic nevertheless and for such an old game, it still holds up well enough. Also rather short, especially if you still remember at least part of the puzzles, like I did. I estimated it would take me 3-4 hours to play through, and I wasn't that far off, I think.