Billy Masters Was Right

https://postmodernadventures.itch.io/billy

A great PnC adventure game, in the save vein as Maniac Mansion, only shorter and easier. Free and indie.

"Nobody believes Billy Masters. He's been accused of taking drugs in high school and accusing his teacher of serious crimes. Sick of his attitude, his parents have imposed a curfew on him until he apologizes to his teacher. Now Billy thinks a sneaky psycho is at work at his neighbors and he will do anything he can to convince the world that, indeed, Billy Masters was right.

Billy Masters Was Right is a short adventure game in a Maniac Mansion graphic style and a plot inspired by movies like "The Burbs" or "Disturbia".

Winner of 3 AGS AWARDS in the 20th Annual AGS Awards 2020:

-Best Character.

-Best Short Game.

-Best Puzzles."

Death's Door (XSX Game Pass)

Excellent game. Many liken it to Dark Souls, but it feels completely different to me, it's more like a Zelda crossed with Metroid. It does have the From Software style of level design though, you always loop around and open up shortcuts- but that's the only real similarity. You don't loose any currency when you die and I'd often die deliberately because it was just the fastest way to get back to one of the fast travel doors that serve as checkpoints.

What is so good about the game is it's balance, a product of a small team that knows exactly what they are making and who it's for and also know their limitations. This is one of the better Indie games in years. It deserves its high ratings. Plus, I cannot think of any other games where you play as a Crow.

Doom Eternal - The Ancient Gods part 2

Unlike the previous one that felt like they decided to take the difficulty up to 11 (though as I said before, I didn't think it was as hard as I thought it would be), this one dials it back quite a bit. It's still challenging, but never pulling my hair in desperation challenging. Still, its way easier than some of the most intense fights from the main campaign.

The levels are still amazing to look at, but maybe because there's less of a focus in intricate secrets and hidden challenges, they feel smaller and quicker to traverse. In fact, every level has only codex entries, extra lives and BFG ammo as secrets. Slayer Gates and Secrets encounters were replaced by a couple of special encounters where you only need to beat one to continue (and get a hammer upgrade), but I ended up beating both in all levels.

Combat wise, they added a special hammer that dizzies everyone in the vicinity which is quite nice, better than the one hit kill sword from the campaign. There are a bunch of new gimmicky versions of various enemies, and while they're interesting, they never really impact the gameplay too much.

On the other hand, the story ends up in a bit of a whimper, despite the awesome battle going on in the background in the 3rd level. It's fine and all, has a couple of good beats to it, but it could be so much more.

Overall, my impressions of Doom Eternal improved a lot throughout the expansions and, while I still like Doom 2016's gameplay and balance better, I think the game earned a larger space in my heart. :)

Include me

Mortal Kombat XL (Story Mode) (PS4) - 22.1.2022.
Ratchet and Clank - Tools of Destruction (PS3) - 20.2.2022.

I'm probably a minority but I've preferred when story mode was an ARPG, as was in Armageddon. Other than that, it's Mortal Kombat. You mash buttons, and think you know what you're doing, then get your ass handed to you, then try again.
Final boss was much easier than in (never completed) MK9.

The Dig

If the graphics had better resolution would be perfect. Sadly, the long production affected the final release. Great story and music, but the shadow of Myst was very long. Played in about 15-20 hours.

Full_2022

Hitman (XSX Game Pass)

Played as part of the Hitman Trilogy, which is all three modern games in the newer Hitman 3 engine. I actually own Hitman and Hitman 2 on disc, but the coming of the trilogy to Game Pass allows me to play them all with enhanced graphics. The six levels of the first game (2016) are the star of the show. The levels are open and let you explore and advance the mission as you like, and the AI is mostly quite decent. The levels are so open that I can see why they originally liked the idea of releasing them episodically, as playing through a mission once will have you only seeing about 30% of what a level has to offer and then people move onto the next mission. I guess releasing the missions months apart the devs would hope people would take the time to replay and see everything whilst they wait for the next mission. But people didn't like it.

The game play within the levels is a bit harder for me to make a decision on. I enjoyed all the missions, especially Colorado. But i also think the levels are overpopulated with guards for no logical real world reason. The final Japan hospital level has way more guards than patients and doctors. I think this is a design decision to go along with the new ability to save unlimited anytime. The old games with limited saves, had lesser enemies and seemed easier to me, and would have been trivial if they allowed you to save anywhere as much as you wanted- and made you think very carefully about every decision. These new levels have wall to wall guards and require lots of trial and error and saving and reloading, since even wearing the correct disguise doesn't work on every guard. This also means you walk around constantly using your magic Batman vision to pick people that can see through your disguise.

The game is still great though, and craps all over most other modern stealth oriented games. I just like the older games better still. I'll be playing parts 2 and 3 very soon.

Hitman 2 (XSX Game Pass)

Just like the first part, but better maps and missions in my opinion. The overall story is getting interesting as well. These are missions I'm more inclined to want to replay to explore different options, once I've finished the overall trilogy. Just like the first game, I played it within the Hitman 3 engine with that versions slightly enhanced graphical settings. I'm now glad that I kept setting this series aside over the years and waited to play them in their final form.

Hitman 3 (XSX Game Pass)

Third part of the trilogy and what a way to finish. The levels just keep getting better as the trilogy goes on, each , map is different and the play style mixes up- from the predatory stealth of one map to total ghost stealth maps...yet you don;t have to play in any particular style if you don't want. IO Interactive are probably only beaten in level design by From Software. It's also a great overall story too, and 47 is the best protagonist in gaming and one of the best voiced. And Diana would also be one of the best support roles in gaming. After the first part of the trilogy I thought I still favored the earlier games slightly, but the series improves so much as it goes that I now like these new games better.

The entire trilogy is an obvious candidate for replaying too, due to it's many different ways to deal with your targets. But for now I've got other games to play. But right now I have this growing urge to go right back to the original Codename 47 and start the entire journey again.

--- Minor Monthly update ---

Fellow gamers,

While lacking the stamina and focus of some, January managed to turn out to be a great gaming month. With no games finished thus far, I still managed to log about 60 hours of quality gaming. Both 2point Hospital and Konan - Immortal Sovereigns take up the brunt of these hours, with minor roles for RPG/Action titles such as Greedfall and Jedi - Fallen Order.
The Chinese new year celebrations also gave room to expand on the DLC for Battletech and Total War - Three Kingdoms (of course).
I expect similar behaviour for February, though with fewer hours, January knows one week of holiday and that, of course, counts for something too.

It is nice to read about all the progress made by the other 'gogamers' {thumbs up}
Let's make this one exceptional year!

2021

Stasis reminds me good old nineties, especially demo part of
Sanitarium. Although it is presented as a horror I would rather say, that it is a thriller which sucked me into the story at the beginning. Apart that, game is based on atmosphere. I saw a lot of minor bugs which does not affected game play, but once I did not take important object (holographic emitter) and theoretically I could not return for and have to load game. A few times I had to look into walk through to find out, that I totally overlook something in the dark or that I used proper object from inventory to proper object on background, but on bad spot. Very often entering new area I did not know where I was standing… Considering, that this game is a few people work, it is good and also price fits, but this game should not be compared to “big” games. I will definitely consider other games from The Brotherhood despite the fact, that I do not enjoy so much point and click adventures. There is huge potential for future games. I only hope, that in the next games will not be so much texts as in PDAs here. At the end it was very inconvenient to read another PDA...

Yes keep up the great gaming! I'm currently playing through Tyranny so it will be awhile before I finish that one. Also started Prince of Persia (2008) and Freedom Force but those two haven't drawn me in as much.

Jade Empire: Special Edition - 3/5

I appreciate the Chinese mythology-inspired setting; something I feel is super under-represented in video games.

Something I can't say I appreciate much though is the gameplay - at best, it's acceptable. A martial arts-based RPG is definitely a cool concept, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The camera angles especially can get pretty annoying. And I'm not even going to mention the minigame sections...

Narrative and story-wise, it's fine, I guess. The dialogue choices are what you'd probably expect - a lot of boring black and white moral decisions. And for the most part, your companions are nothing more than one-dimensional stock characters

Ultimately, I'd say the game's enjoyable enough. But let's just say there might be a reason why Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, KotOR, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age have all received sequels/expansions/tie-ins/etc... and Jade Empire was just a one-and-done thing.

Sheesh, went two months without beating anything because I didn't play much and when I did it was longer games like Monster Hunter which I still haven't finished. Anyway, I just completed my collection of Star Trek games during the current sale and started playing Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force right away. And one day later I'm done!

I was barely aware of this game back in the day, also because I didn't like Star Trek until the last couple of years. Plus, with this being a licensed game I expected it to suck anyway. Only when the game arrived on GOG did it occur to me that it's from friggin' Raven Software and may in fact be a good game.

Well, in my opinion it is, though it helps that by now I am quite the Star Trek fan and I even belong to a tiny minority that prefers Voyager over TNG. It is an early story-driven shooter, like Aliens Versus Predator 2, so it suffers from all the things that that entails like corridor-like levels that make for meh combat arenas and the obligatory stealth section without working stealth mechanics that nobody asked for. Generally these kinds of games sacrificed a lot of what the likes of Doom, Duke Nukem and Quake had already mastered about shooter design in favour of "realism" and a "cinematic experience" - things that were still very rough.

However, I feel that within that awkward family of early scripted shooters Elite Force stands rather strong. Already the first mission where you infiltrate a Borg cube introduces a suspenseful mood that persists throughout most of the game - in this regard the game is more Aliens than Star Trek. And the combat, while not even remotely as great as in earlier more arcadey shooters, is heck of a lot better than the hitscan hell of most other early scripted shooters (including Raven's own Soldier of Fortune II). Sadly you'll spend more time killing melee enemies in narrow spaces than engaging in firefights against humanoids in open combat but it's all in all solid fun. It's a somewhat weird title in that it is often more Quake or Serious Sam than anything else, where you strafe around like crazy while avoiding melee monsters or the projectiles of the occasional humanoid enemy, but ironically that makes it better than many shooters from that era by default.

And the overall quality of the game is rather high. You get a decent (if generic) story that mostly revolves around a new "hazard team" consisting of mostly entirely new characters (but some had brief appearances on Voyager) but the entire main cast of Voyager also makes an appearance here. Especially Tuvok and Seven of Nine are heavily featured (incidentally Jeri Ryan did not provide her own voice originally but her voice was added in a free "expansion pack" that the GOG version comes preinstalled with). Characters and environments from the show are captured very well for a 2000 game and generally the graphics and audio are pretty nice (though the music tends to drown out the dialogue). Also, it's a rather casual game. There's ample ammo, enemies deal rather little damage - something that I welcomed as I wasn't in the mood for a hardcore retro experience.

So, it's actually a pretty good early story-driven shooter. It's not quite Republic Commando (though incidentally both games are quite similar in concept) but it's hell of a lot better than the likes of Fire Warrior.

Edit: Oh yeah, also, I can't stress enough how much fan service (of the non-sexual kind, obviously) there is in this game. Another thing besides Jeri Ryan's voice (and multiplayer maps) that was added in that free expansion pack was a Voyager tour. You not only walk around the ship there but also get a growing list of random objectives that unlock new areas riddled with easter eggs and lore content. And additionally to that there's an encyclopedia that can be accessed from the main menu. Good stuff.

Finished Lego Batman. It's one of the first Lego games and it definitely shows: no voices, some sections are not very well thought and it's very repetitive. I enjoyed it but there are lots of other Lego games that deserve to be played instead of this one.

Full list: here.