Yeah... The only way to play Darkseed is to treat it like some non-interactive thing: Walkthrough in hand, and enjoy the artworks. As a game it's one of the worst.

That's a very useful tip. I already uninstalled the game though, in this particular case (as in many others) I'm not blaming the game but the fact that I simply wasn't enjoying it. Even if I could summon the patience to fully learn all its mechanics, I'd still struggle with the time limit. No matter how much effort I'd put in, my paperwork secretary skills won't notably improve at my current age and I'll not be able to avoid spotting discrepancies in the NPC's papers. I quite enjoy leveling up a skill I'm not good at but not in this case, there seems to be a natural level cap for me with this kinda stuff and I don't intend to fight it. I've never been good at the "spot 10 differences quickly" quizzes etc.
If Paper Please would make failing more fun and entertaining then I might have given it a second shot but the atmosphere is rather serious and Stalin-esque. You screw up, you don't contribute to the glory of Arstozka, you'll be replaced unceremoniously. My life is not yet quite so boring that I endulge in depressing retro comblock fantasies.

Being dull and unforgiving is the entire purpose of the game. :)

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26527109

End my world

This must be the worst and most pointless game I've played in a while.All you do is avoid falling meteroids, rockets and other stuff and collect power-ups and coins. If you have enough coins you can unlock new characters (which are all exactly the same except for the appearance) and try to avoid falling stuff with them.

Could have been fun for a while, but unfortunately success in this game has nothing to do with skill, but instead completely depends on luck. Most of the time you'll die, because there's a situation where it is impossible to escape.

If that's still not bad enough for you, the game also has horrendous graphics and an awful and completely repetitive soundtrack.

I liked a lot of the mechanics, but the story was one of the worst and by th end I was just glad to be done with it. I totally fixed a lot of what went wrong in FC2.

In the Cry vein, I think it's time to admit I've thrown in the towel on Crysis 2: Maximum Edition. I think I last actually played it over a year ago. Logged in today just to see where I was in the story (about 2/3 of the way through), and to see if I was within 4-5 hours of finished. Nope.

The story is underwhelming, the environments well drawn but mostly sterile and linear, and the combat is mixed.

The nanosuit essentially is the entire story. For certain fights it's completely OP, and in others a bit frustrating. Rarely felt like it was the sweet spot I think they intended.

Just fired up STALKER: Clear Sky instead, and do still intend to play through Far Cry 2 & 3 at some point.

Painkiller Black

Bought it years ago at retail and couldn't get it to work.

Decent game for what it is but it is just not what I am looking for right now.

Shadow Warrior (PS4)

I got over halfway through the game (25hrs+ of gameplay, I like to take it slow) before quitting.

On the good side:
(1) Story is minimal and the cutscenes are not too frequent and fully skippable. The focus is mainly on the gameplay. I would have preferred even less story, but at least it’s not overbearing.
(2) No QTE :)!
(3) You can turn off checkpoint saves and only use manual saving. There is only one manual save slot per chapter though, which is not ideal but still workable.
(4) Secret areas, although they are mostly small and many are easy to find (when there is a fork or side path, usually it just leads to a secret area).

However, the gameplay itself I did not fully enjoy for a number of reasons:
(1) Use of combos (melee attacks and other special powers). I intensely dislike pressing a sequence of buttons to activate a special ability. So I played the game without using any of the special combos unless absolutely required.
(2) Boss fights.
(3) Linear levels, and invisible walls (the latter are especially noticeable when jumping). Often (but not always) your route is closed behind you so you cannot fully backtrack the level.
(4) Healing does NOT rely only on health pickups. There are health pickups, but the main character also has a healing power (combo) he can use any time, so it’s almost like regenerating health (if you choose to use it).
(5) Swarms of enemies. You walk through an empty level until you hit a trigger point, at which time all the doors behind you lock and you have to fight off a swarm of enemies who teleport in (no retreat, minimal strategic positioning). After the swarm is defeated the doors unlock again and you can continue exploring the level, which is again totally devoid of enemies until you reach the next trigger point and are locked in and swarmed again. This is just stupid and silly, why not spread out the enemies over a level (in rooms, around corners, on ledges, etc.) to discover and defeat as you explore?

What finally made me quit? I started playing Shadow Warrior (Classic) on my desktop computer and realised how much more FUN it is in every way, after that I could not bring myself to go back.

Despite I think Shadow Warrior (2013) is one of the best shooters in the last decade, your criticism is more than valid and all of your points are definitely good reasons to not enjoy it (or at least, not as much as it could have been).
I'll have to defend the developers on a couple of them, though: concerning points 3 and 5, you must take in consideration that the game was made with a very small budget; since the result is -at least, imo- both graphically and mechanically unbelievably superior to a standard AAA shooter of recent times, even those objective, forced limitations are a good display of talent.
Also, regarding 4, that was a main mechanic of the game, and (strange as it may sound, coming from al old school FPS purist like me) I found it very balanced. Imo, the way the game is meant to be played and where the chi-healing really shines is from hard difficulty to the top, the lower ones being there to allow more accessibility (or a fun berserking slaughter :P).

At cost of sounding "elitist", I would say that this game should be played on PC; having barely tried the console version out of curiosity my opinion is only marginally informed, yet it didn't really feel the same. Also, the gamepad doesn't definitely hold well the transition form mouse and keyboard like some other more famous big name shooters do.
It's the specular thing I would say about Darksiders (which I have recently completed): it is a console game trough and trough, and playing it with M+K would just be a pain while the pad controls are perfect.
I would recommend you to try it with mouse and keyboard, if you ever have the chance. Maybe it would change your mind!

I agree with your points, but I don't think I'd like the game any more on a PC. I wouldn't classify it as a "bad" game and I can certainly see why others would enjoy it. I did play it and enjoy it enough to reach the 2nd boss level (Chapter 11). I think it's just not my style of FPS: I just didn't enjoy the main mechanic of the game (Combos, including the melee/sword combat - I only used my sword to open seals because I don't enjoy melee combat). So without that, there was nothing really to pull me past the flaws.

Tales from the Borderlands (PS4)

PSN has a free demo of Episode 1, so I thought I'd give it a shot. What a huge disappointment. I guess watching an animated movie interspersed with (seemingly meaningless) QTE and dialogue choices is what passes for an adventure "game" these days? Maybe I didn't give it long enough (I "played" it for about 30 minutes) but I just couldn't take any more, it was torture.

Having recently discovered the pure addictive genius of <span class="bold">Hitman: Sniper</span> I went looking for .. anything to give me a fix of simillar satisfying goodness, only on PC, because Android touchscreen gaming sucks. I was not successful. At all.

Hitman: Agent 47 (GOG)
I game from the couch. With a controller. Trying to juggle a keyboard is simply not worth the effort. Especially since I could not work out why the "action" button did not .. action. Feeling like a total moron for not being able to get the elevator to move, or the door to open, or pick up stuff etc etc was the complete opposite of fun.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (GOG)
Could not even get it to work.

Hitman: Contracts
Worked fine. Played fine. Walking through that initial location was just as disturbing and goosebumpy as I remembered from all those years ago when I originally played it. Buuut.. No Gamepad support meant I was never going to play it for long, and likely never be played again.

Hitman: Absolution (Steam)
..is not a Hitman game. It still looked quite good tho, so technically this shouldn't be here as I .. might go back to it. maybe.

Sniper: Elite (GoG)
Didn't run past the menu. C2D when trying to start game. :(

Sniper: Art of Victory (Steam)
hahaha!! NOPE


I now have a decision to make. Do I redeem that code for Hitman:Blood Money I've had since forever? Or do I continue to resist, hoping it will... eventually... come here to GOG? I've waited this long...

Same issue, never got past the elevator in Hitman.

Redneck Rampage (GOG)

Played a bit of it, just didn’t appeal to me like I thought it would:
- Enemies too bullet-spongy.
- I didn’t find it funny (unlike Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior).
- Music was too loud and you cannot adjust the volume so I had to turn it off. Plus I had to go into the settings to turn the music off every time I loaded the game, very annoying.