I was originally going to wait until Saturday, but we're having another atmospheric river here.


It's been a while since I made a cat report due to getting caught up with Balrum again. It's a fun game if you don't mind the lack of cats in that the only thing resembling cats are undead skeletal enemies.... so, no cats. The biggest time sink for me with this game is building the safeplace and the crafting system. I'd go more into it, but I think I've said enough about a game with no cats.


To Duel List - This is an extremely short game, but it also was free. The only cats in the game appear in the sister's bedroom. One is a picture on a calendar, and the other is a plush toy on a shelf. After an entire month playing a game without cats, this was a nice side diversion as a short break from Warcraft 3.
https://imgur.com/CuoPsMe.jpg


Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos as in the old disc-based version that also includes The Frozen Throne. This actually works on Windows 10 with no issues due to the fact that Blizzard released a patch themselves that either strips out or bypasses the disc check.
Community Wishlist: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/warcraft_iii_frozen_throne

Anyway, cats in this game are big cats that night elves ride around on as mounts... which is also the only reason I even own this game after seeing someone else play it, and my reaction was pretty much "OMG cats!!!!" Okay, I enjoy the story for campaign mode. This also means that they don't show up until you get to the night elf campaign if you're not doing online multiplayer, but it also means that the best campaign (as in the one with cats) comes last.

https://imgur.com/CZJsDnb.jpg

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne is more of the same where the only cats are the ones that the night elves ride around on. This is an add-on / expansion and not a stand-alone game even if it does create a separate executable. I find this one less satisfying than Reign of Chaos primarily due to it ending with Arthus, who is a character I don't actually like, winning. I would have enjoyed it more if you had the option to play the night elves in the final battle thus end the game by defeating him. However installing the same patch that updates the game to only require CD Keys and not a disc present also updates the bonus campaign to include all three parts, which has become my favorite part of The Frozen Throne.


Sudocats is a fun game and fully featured sudoku but with cats instead of numbers. A lot of love was put into this game, both in terms of sudoku features (like being able to insert notes) and being informative about the cats featured in the game.
Store Link: https://www.gog.com/en/game/sudocats
https://imgur.com/3WZyR53.jpg
https://imgur.com/hid9Vo1.jpg

Arx Fatalis with "Arx Extended 2.3.4"? or at least that's what readme says, even though mod archive is marked as 2.3.5? There's quite a mess with recent releases of this project.

Was surprised how quickly shadow beast died in Level 8 - you just have to reach the press room, pick the key from the office nearby (and pull one level here), run behind the corner and somehow pull the lever while beast is on the movable plate that covers the lava.

Tried to test other offensive spells, sadly none of them compares to Fireball even when they consume more mana.

Crafting armors is only a curiosity - you can find/buy dwarven tools and with experimentation (or studying readme) create something that can be beat by anything found in the shop. Unless you really care about debuffs for casters/sneaky characters. New bow (+12 dmg, +9% crit) have a lot of potential - with decent investment you can avoid Ylsides even with single fireball in your memorized spell bar.

Only food and alchemy remains useful - all that raw rat&fish meat grinded for oil. You can get cheese sandwich, neat. Spend more time in the kitchen compared to forge.
Somehow iron rations (with spices) gives less satiety than loose bag of food, cooked or not....
Mana regen feels way slower - you can literally starve twice (HP orb starts depleting its content) waiting for the blue ball to refill.
I've tried to not sell everything (you really, really have to try NOT swim in gold in that game), but run out of containers, and I don't trust game physics and collision system to drop them on the ground. Not sure if this is mod or vanilla, but you can save the game near dead enemy and it drops his weapon after quick load, if that weapon dropped under textures. Even get the message for that occasion.

Tried some pickpocketing - it's weird. Everyone starts screaming that they can see me rumaging in their pockets (even snake gals), but still give you like 1-2 seconds to snatch what you want, mostly keys. It's best to switch to small windowed mode to grab the item before NPC get mad.

Some items got "?" triangle icon looking like a rune or something, no idea what skill affects it, tried to raise some to 100+ but nothing changed. Trader in the undergrouns caves have two chests - when you open one and side step to other some items gain this "unidentified" icon for some reason. Not sure if city traders get one too.
And is it me or traders does not restock after awhile?

Still no Arx Insanity release, after one demo it went vapourware?
Now time for a replay with "Second Life" mod...

Alien Breed: Impact is short Alien Shooter like game, which is more advanced, but action for moment when you do not want think. Good if you look for something short. Game can be saved only on special places, so it is not play 10 minutes today and continue tomorrow. My verdict it is not bad, not great, but for one afternoon relax appropriate.

Mafia 2 DE

I'm a huge fan of the first Mafia but getting into Mafia 2 took me a while because I'm really not a fan of cover shooters and it felt so bad already in the tutorial to me that over the years I sometimes just started that one and then thought "nah"... But now played through the "Definitive Edition" which probably (?) was a mistake.

What I liked: The attention to the small details just like in the first game and just like Lost Heaven Empire Bay is a fantastic place and they mostly nailed the atmosphere.

What I disliked: Well, everything else. Story is alright, I guess, nothing compared to Mafia 1 though, often too chaotic and too "hasted" as well, they just didn't take their time to develop characters like in the first game, mixed too much together in too little time and the ending is a big disappointment which is just bad for a story driven game.

Gameplay is completely disappointing ... well there isn't much gameplay anyway. Gunplay is not my cup of tea. Then there is an awful lot of fist fighting that feels strangely out of place and is mechanically completely uninteresting. But my biggest gripe with the game is how stiff everything feels, the boxing, the cover mechanics, a lot of lazy and inelegant scripting ... and then there were also quite a lot of glitches bugs and other technical shortcomings, but for these parts and the stiffness I'm not sure if it is mostly the DE or if the original was that bad as well?

Edit: I totally forgot about the police! But tbf it's easy to forget about the police because except for one short bit in chapter 14 it was just as if they didn't exist anyway. If something went wrong just accelerate in any car for 15 seconds and everything is fine again.

I'm surely disappointed and towards the end started to rush through. 5/10

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen. Star Trek as a third-person action game. You run around, you shoot stuff, you do some platforming. Thankfully, you don't have to push any very large, heavy blocks around. You take control of Sisko, Kira, or Worf, each one having a different perspective on the story that's going on. Sisko's track is basically the main one, while Kira and Worf will be able to access areas of the levels that were inaccessible to Sisko, and Kira even has a couple of totally unique stages. The campaign isn't too long, which is nice since after the third time through I was growing a bit weary of it.

The story is based on some DS9 books the Reeves-Stevenses wrote a while back. Perhaps the books were better written than the game, because having played the campaign with each character, I feel comfortable saying the story is little more than the usual excuse to go places and shoot people and blow stuff up. There's something about a Bajoran fanatic using some artifacts in some destructive manner, and it kind of turns into the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but there's no emotional hook to the story at all, it's just some stuff that happens. The usual Star Trek technobabble. I never liked the Bajorans...I dislike modern Star Trek's approach to alien design and the Bajorans, with their dinky little nose appliance, are possibly the most lazily designed alien race ever.

The game plays pretty well, though, and it totally gets the Star Trek feel. Most of the original cast, except for Sisko and O'Brien, voice their characters. Sisko I recognized from several games, such as being the Baldur's Gate narrator. In between levels, you can walk around DS9 and talk to the supporting cast before heading out on the Defiant. You pick up a variety of ranged weapons, and Sisko and Kira have a rechargeable hand-phaser (set only to KILL!) that can be tuned to bypass shields in some areas. Worf gets his Klingon blade thing because he apparently thinks hand-phasers are for pussies or something. The tricorder is also important for scanning stuff, although it makes an obnoxious tone when it locks onto something.

There's a lot of auto-targeting in the shooting, but it generally works well enough. Having to wait for your phaser to slowly recharge can get a bit irritating at times, though. Worf is probably the most fun character to actually play, although he has the least interesting part of the story. In two levels he's dispatched to set explosives in certain places - it feels like setting bombs is what they make the poor guy do when they've got no better ideas for him.

It's pretty solid, overall, and GOG should try to get it if they haven't already, with so many other Star Trek games on the store already.

Dracula: Love kills

As a whole, it’s a fairly solid Hidden Object Game. I know some think of HOG as “adventure light” and in this case, it’s certainly true.
There isn’t much difficulty in this game, nor are there any mechanics that would awe you; as far as HOG goes, its rather standard, even the vampire powers act just like extra reusable items. Everything is well put together and explained, the hints are numerous for those who need them and puzzles can be skipped entirely. Again, all standard fare for HOG.
The story and characters felt to me almost like Dracula fan fiction, but it served its purpose of keeping the gameplay moving.
The game unfortunately suffers from, what I like to call “The adventure game ending syndrome”, where the run up to the climax is usually more exciting and challenging than the climax part itself.
Like I already mentioned, it’s a solid HOG if you’re into that thing.

A Plague Tale: Innocence, Mar 14, (GOG)-I really enjoyed this. The plot was interesting but I really liked the growth and character development of Amicia and Hugo. Gameplay was fun if a little simple and a little easy. Voice acting was excellent for the main characters, animations were only sometimes janky. Crafting which I typically hate was handled pretty well here and actually a core game mechanic to create ammo. I do think the crafting resources were a little too plentiful which directly led to the difficulty being a little too easy. Maybe it was possible but I didn't see too many opportunities to sneak past guards. I think it may have been better narratively to include more stealth sections at least early on and giving more weight to Amicia's first kill because by the end of the game you're a killing machine with a sling. But I had a lot of fun with it and I'm looking forward to the sequel.

Full List

Weird West, Mar 15 (Xbox Gamepass)-This was a solid game but a pretty poor RPG. Combat and character development, two big things I look for in an RPG, were sorely lacking. The real time combat was a chaotic mess, companion AI was pretty terrible, and the random encounters and even the main quest fights were a bit of a chore. The combat was usually not too hard as long as you didn't run out of ammo so I rarely need to use my special abilities.

All of my complaints about the combat could all be mitigated if character development and level ups were interesting. Unfortunately there is no XP in this game. All character improvements come from equipment upgrades and found special objects that imbue powers and special abilities. Since you're not gaining XP, the typical encounter is just a waste of the player's time and the character's resources. Not that resources were hard to come by as I was drowning in gold by the end of the first journey but the inventory management was so cumbersome I wonder if it was worth it. This really discouraged random exploring because the rewards just weren't worth the time invested.

The overarching plot was interesting as were each of the five journeys/characters. Some of the side quests were fun but they did get repetitive after a while. I really liked that characters reacted to decisions and actions you took not only in that journey but previous journeys as well so it did feel like you were influencing events. So actions and dead characters persisted throughout the game. It would probably require a couple playthrus to see just how much this actually changes the game but the different NPC comments and reactions were a nice touch. The narrator's voice actor was good unfortunately the rest of the game was very quiet. Overall a good but flawed game with a solid story and some clunky gameplay.

Full List

It's always exciting to hear about the release of a new game, but what's even more thrilling is when we get to know about its planned finish! The year 2023 may seem far away, but for gamers it's a date to be excited about. !

Dracula: Origin

Only after I had started this one, have I realized that ‘Dracula: Love kills’, which I finished a few days ago, is this game’s sequel and I played the two out of order ... oops.
Oh well, it’s not like it matters, they aren’t really connected besides having the same models for Dracula, Van Helsing and, the almost irrelevant Igor.
Origin, unlike Love kills, is a more traditional point and click adventure and a fairly decent one at that. It focuses more on the puzzles while having a more ‘basic’ story and characters.
The puzzles are mostly fine, some rather fun to solve, and a few on the more frustrating side due to a lack of proper explanation of what is expected of the player. The game is supposed to have a hint system, but I didn’t notice any such system at all. In fact, I find the game could have benefited from having an ‘examine’ function which was missing, making me sometime guess what I’m interacting with.
The story is nothing special, but there are a few moments that made me question what the developer was even going for: such as tying Nyarlathotep to the story, or a ‘The wizard of Oz’ reference that came out of nowhere during a single conversation.
The tone of the game is incongruous. It’s Dracula, so they attempted to make a few horror scenes, but then they ruined all the atmosphere with the voice acting; my favorite bad line of the game is Van Helsing saying “closed” – it sounds so emotional and wooden at the same time.
As a whole I found the game to be enjoyable, with a few hiccups here and there. If you like point and click adventures or puzzle games, give it a shot; once it’s discounted.

Beat the PS4 version of Elex on PS5 yesterday. I love the original Gothic, I also very much like Gothic 2 though I never actually beat that one. Anyway, concerning Elex I always thought "sci-fi Gothic? what's not to like!". The meh reviews didn't scare me off because I know that Piranha Bytes' games have always been rather polarizing - I figured that if anything it's confirmation that it's good ol' Gothic. Well, no.

I never played any Piranha Bytes game developed after Gothic 2 so I don't know how much Elex has inherited from the Risen series but when comparing Elex to the first two Gothic games I can say this: it feels like they have learned almost nothing since Gothic 2 and also forgot a ton of things that made Gothic so great.

Superficially Elex has inherited a lot of things from Gothic like starting out as a wuss who can barely even handle the weakest critters at first or the need to join one of three factions, all of which ask you to perform a number tasks before they let you in and so on. I do appreciate some of it. Just earlier this year I beat The Witcher 3 and even though TW3 is a better game in almost every regard there are areas in which I actually prefer Elex. For one: in Elex there's actually a steep progression and substantial challenge. Witcher 3 was a game that I, with rare exceptions, kinda just floated through without any hiccups. The narrative kept things interesting but other than that it was a pretty boring experience that did not require much focus or thinking. In Elex I did regularly have to make a fight or flight decision, learn which enemies to steer clear of until I've substantially grown in strength - in some quests I actually had to sneak around or make a run for it because the enemies guarding the area were just too powerful. And while many enemies are reskins of other enemies, their strength is generally determined by their species or rank and not some totally abstract level. And exploration did feel quite meaningful here - even in the early game you can find some powerful endgame weapons just by exploring random locations (though you won't be able to equip them for a long time). GREAT!

But sadly other than that I have trouble finding any redeeming qualities in this game. Almost all of its content is utterly devoid of any originality or personality. It follows the most generic fantasy and post-apocalypse tropes just with a very thin and equally bland sci-fi layer slapped on. That could still work if the more personal content like the individual NPCs and their dialogue were interesting but they aren't. All of it made me feel like I'm playing a generic mid-tier fantasy RPG from over twenty years ago. Gothic also suffered from these things but made up for it with wittiness and black humour which gave it its personality and made it fun. Elex does not have those. It takes itself so seriously that it isn't fun but it also just isn't clever enough to work as a serious sci-fi epic. The quality of the writing and the voice acting and also the overall production quality made moments which were supposed to be epic and emotionally engaging underwhelming at best and cringey at worst. I probably could stomach the barely animated generic looking unemotional NPCs if they told interesting things but they don't. There are a few interesting ideas in the game's world and lore but they are utterly underdeveloped, instead you're almost entirely busy handling tasks that feel like you've done them in hundreds of other RPGs already.

And also the actual gameplay and overall execution are shockingly bad for a game from such a veteran studio. The melee combat is about what I expected, a very poor Souls wannabe which neither got the stamina economy nor collisions quite right but the shooting combat is just barely functional. The quests are unimaginative, there's no sensible flow to them, the quest log is the most clunky and confusing thing I have ever seen, the balancing is just all over the place. Especially in the beginning it's just a vicious cycle where you have neither the stats for solving quests with combat nor peacefully because also the peaceful solutions are practically always based on personality tests which require you to level up your character first. As a result Elex is the first RPG I've played in ages where I literally had to spend a few hours farming XP and money by slaughtering generic mobs scattered throughout the game world without making any other meaningful progress. In retrospect I know a few strategies that I could have pursued for smoother progress in the early game but I think it's quite easy to end up in a situation where you just need to grind.

Visually it's very meh, there are very few character models (there's only one female face, everyone is white and dressed in a tiny set of clothes), the music is bland, the sound design is bad and also technically the audio is botched with some sounds just missing. Technically it wasn't that terrible, it crashed only once or twice for me, but there were some serious issues here also like textures taking ages to load (often I would literally talk to floating toupees because the faces haven't loaded yet) or the inventory / map menu taking longer to open over time - without restarting the game once in a while opening the panel would eventually just freeze the game for somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds.

Now, I didn't hate the game. There were quite a few frustrating moments but nothing so serious that I would ragequit. And the steep progression, while not nearly as steep and satisfying as in Gothic, kept me motivated and going. While not particularly original or pretty, I did enjoy exploring the world. While the characters were underdeveloped and not particularly well-acted or written, I did grow a little bit attached to some of them. And even though the plot and lore were bland as hell, I did want to get to the bottom of the different mysteries and find out how it ends. It's just so much less than it could and should have been. I was counting on Gothic but got sci-fi Two Worlds.

You never touched Gothic 3? Most people fell off after playing Gothic 3.

As I wrote above, I never even beat Gothic 2. I've approached it many times over the years but every single time something else kept me from beating it. On release it just ran like ass on my computer, later I ran into a game breaking bug, yet another time I took a break from it for some reason and never went back to finish it. But I also never quite liked the change in mood and style compared to the first game (which is supposedly also the reason why one of the original game's developers left during the development of G2) and that kinda kept me from truly enjoying the game. But I keep telling myself that I'll beat it one day. The hinted Switch port might just be the push I need (I know, that picture is from G1 but there have also been signs that they are working on a port of G2).

Didn't touch Gothic 3 either, said I only will after finishing Gothic 2, and never did because NotR just makes it too damn hard. Plus that the tablets mean that plenty of the character development is fixed, and even what you can customize needs to be done while following a guide, to keep track of the fixed bonuses and not waste LP.
Did play Risen on the other hand.
In terms of mood and style between G2 and G1 though, G2 always struck me as both more and better, the atmosphere, the game world itself, how "real" and lived in it feels, even more so compared to other games of the period.