Progress update on Baldur's Gate: The Original Saga
Assigned by yoshino

I made some progress and arrived at the city of Nashkel. In its mines the source of the current iron shortage on the Sword Coast seems to be hidden, which I plan to investigate soon. In Nashkel, I also met Minsc and his pet hamster Boo, who joined my party in favour of Garrick. They seek my help to rescue Dynaheir, Minsc' life companion, who is being held prisoner in a Gnoll Stronghold to the west, which will be my next destination.
But currently, I am at the Carnival to the east of the city, looking for new equipment ;-)

I will take a short break from this game, as I am travelling to Rome and will stay there until next week. But so far, I am really enjoying playing this title! :-)

Cheers!

Minsc and Boo were my favorite characters in the game, you should go to rescue Dynaheir soon.
And, enjoy in Rome!

Progress update on World of Goo:

I've completed chapter two, chapter three and half the levels of chapter four. And I have to say that World of Goo really is an amazing puzzle/building game with some great ideas. Even in later levels new elements get introduced and so the game never gets boring. And on top of it there is also an interesting, consumption-critical story (that is a little vague though and reminds me of Little Inferno).

In free-play my Tower of Goo is about 20 metres high and I think it will collapse pretty soon. :)

Progress update on World of Goo:

Mission accomplished, World of Goo Corporation destroyed!

The last few levels were very good fun and the end of the storyline was quite interesting.

In sandbox mode my tower reached a height of 21 metres before I ran out of Goos. Could have tried to build it higher by removing some Goos from the structure and put them on the top, but I liked what I built, didn't want it to collapse and so I left it alone.

Think I will concentrate on Stardew Valley next, but you can still choose another game for me:

Teslagrad

Edit: Forget about the list. I forgot that I already promised to play Teslagrad next.

Progress update on Stardew Valley:

Not much progress at the moment. My main problem is that I have a nice farm with several fields and animals. So I need half the day to take care of that. After that it's normally to late to go to the mines to search for gold ores. But I would need gold ores to build better sprinklers, so that I won't have to spend so much time on the farm...
So right at the moment I'm happy about every rainy or stormy day (but there are not enough of them).

Completed another part of the Community Center though and got a greenhouse as reward. I also got more popular with most of the citizens (giving them beer does a pretty good job), but sometimes my wife is jealous when I give presents to the other girls.


Progress update on Teslagrad:

This is an great platform game and I really enjoy playing it. It is challenging, but always feels fair and has excellent level design and puzzles. Even the bossfights are fun (in many games they are just frustrating).

I also llike the way the story is told (completely without words). Think I missed several cards, but some where impossible to get at first and I don't felt like replaying every room just to get them when I finally had the upgrades I needed. I still collected enough to get to the other castle. I arrived there and the king threw me into the dungeon. Haven't found a way out yet.

I felt that the middle period of this game became boring routine work day after day, but it is kinda charm of the game.
So maybe this game was just not my cup of tea.

I'll pick one for you:
Just don't get discouraged at the beginning when you may get a feeling "wtf it's all about?!". I was very surprised how much I enjoyed this game after the initial stage.

Challenge accepted. I will play Reus next. :)

Spotted the thread in the list 20 minutes ago and decided to attack my long standing backlog game on file here as it's been a while since I tried to finish it. I'm at the very very end of Hydrophobia Prophecy on the very last boss - Sara. I've tried to fight this robot like 50 times and she just blows me up and laughs about it, very annoying. There's nowhere to run or hide really, and it is impossibly difficult. I've made so many attempts to attack her but the controls are so non-intuitive and awkward that I have to mentally think of each keypress mechanically with no immersion in order to try to pull it off and it's become extremely non-fun at this point.

Basically, there is this big room with water on the floor with a number of raised areas that are not covered in water. A huge floating robot in the middle of the room named Sara can launch bombs at you, fire some kind of plasma/laser type weapon at you and a barrage of machine gun fire all while laughing and taunting you. Your weapons on the other hand have no effect whatsoever on her. The only way to take her down is to wait until she opens these side panels that explose her bomb launchers, then switch weapons to the energy ammo and fire a single round through the open panel all while she's launching World War 2 in your face and killing you like 9000 times. Once you are lucky enough to get an energy round through her open panel, then you have to use your magic water manipulation skill to pick up an explosive barrel with the water and launch it at her within a short timeframe where she is temporarily disabled by your energy round. To do this you have to press 4 to select your water skill, then use the right mouse button while pointing at one of the nearby exploding barrels if there even is one near, then wait for the barrel and water to raise up, manipulate it in front of her then press V to launch it at her all within a very tight timeframe. If you take too long or screwup, she recovers from the temporary stun and you have to do it all over again, probably after getting killed again. Also, while she is active, if she's not dropping bombs on you, hitting you with machine gun fire or lasers, she can also fire an electric charge into the water and if you happen to be touching water you fry.

If you do manage to stun Sara, then launch a barrel at her it explodes and puts her temporarily out of commission for some time. When this happens, all of a sudden magically the previously locked doors that prevent you from leaving the room open up and 3-4 security guards come in the room from all angles attacking you with machine guns. Your gun has the worst aim and ballistics ever, so they're hard to hit without taking a lot of flak yourself. While you're trying to take care of these bad guys by switching ammo using the awkward user interface, Sara eventually springs back to life and if you haven't killed all of the soldiers then you have to contend with both them and her barrage of weaponry as before.

You must repeat this process I think at least 3 times hitting her with exploding barrels successfully without getting killed at all. You can not save the game when it is going well and reload to retry from there as the game is checkpointed, so it is an all or nothing from start to finish, you either hit her with energy to stun, toss an exploding barrel and hit her, take out 3-4 guards, then repeat that at least 3 times successfully without getting killed, all while dancing around trying not to get hit by all the firepower coming at you, or you die and start all over again, totally unforgiving and brutal.

The entire rest of the game was not like this, it was a decently fun game up until this final "boss monster". The difficulty reminds me of impossible to defeat final bosses on old 80s console games. It doesn't feel like an immersive experience nor fun anymore, but like it is stacked up against you to be impossibly difficult if for no other reason than to piss you off and want to smash the game over your knee, but you can't snap a digital game in half.

I've watched a few playthrough videos on Youtube showing people defeating Sara and they certainly make it look easy enough, but after how many hours of play did it take them to do it? I dunno, but I for one don't find repeatedly trying the same endless non-immersive impossible boss fight over and over again to be remotely fun.

So... I'm going to spend a bit more time trying to defeat this stupid robot, but if it doesn't happen soon then I'm going to just write this game off rather than finish it. It's more important to enjoy playing a game than to get a gold star for finishing it in my eyes.

Ok, I took 3 more attempts at defeating the stupid robot and the controls in this game are just too clunky and buggy. I'd have a chance to shoot her and try to aim and fire and the gun wouldn't go off, stuck. Then the opportunity was lost and I would get killed. That happened several times, or there being no barrels to launch at her because they got blown up etc. Just totally not fun at all. I rarely ever get angry playing video games, but this boss fight is just one of the most frustrating non-fun things I've ever played in a video game in a very very long time. It's really too bad as I rather enjoyed most of the rest of the game even though the weaponry latency sucked as did the ballistics. All of the weapons feel like you're shooting bullets or whatever at a speed about 5 times what you could throw with your bare hands. It just has a very poor unrealistic feel to the weaponry.

At any rate I got so fed up with repeating all of this while the stupid robot laughs at you that I just simply don't want to go through this all again when I've already seen the video of the ending of the game which is less than amazing anyway. Apparently defeating the game unlocks challenge missions. They might possibly be fun, but not worth wanting to punch someone in the face over being angry at a stupid non-fun game ending. As such, I hereby accept defeat from this game and don't want to play it anymore.

Next!

Update: Here's my Steam review of the game:

http://steamcommunity.com/id/skeletonbow/recommended/92000

First progress update on Reus:

So far I like it. I've played the three tutorials and they do a pretty good job to explain the core mechanics and tell you what this game is about. The four gods have interesting abilities and it good fun to try different combinations to watch what kind of results will come out.

After that I played my first 30-minute era game and I found out that the game is a little more complicated than I thought at first. Itried to achieve several goals at once to unlock as many things as possible, but one of my cities grew to fast and got really greedy. So they went to war and attacked another city that was really doing well. In the end I had to destroy the first city to at least achieve anything.

But I still unlocked something and I guessed that I've learned a few things, so I can do better in my next try. :)

I made good progress with the two games that I'm playing. :)

Stardew Valley
I finally made it to level 100 of the mines and on the last few levels I found a lot of gold ore. I could build several sprinklers because of that and so I don't have to spend half the day with watering the plants any longer.

Instead I searched for enough hardwood to build a nursery. I did that and now my wife is pregnant and we will become parents for the first time (because you can obviously only get pregnant when there is already a nursery ;-)).

I also did some fishing and foraging and completed the rest of the bundles in the the community center which is now completely restored. All people are happy now and we drove the evil global supermarket corporation out of town.

I guess that means that I've beaten the "main quest", but I will keep on playing and try to become best friend with all the other villagers (there are still some of them that don't like me) and to get all possible farm building.


Reus
I've played three more games. The first one wasn't very good and I achieved next to nothing. Helped me to understand some of the mechanics a little better and so my next try was great. In that game I got six or sevven achievements at once and I unlocked the next level, which means I can now play 60 minutes era games.

After that I've tried to unlock some more stuff from the one-star-level, but I wasn't very successful. Guess I will play a 60 miutes game next.

So far I really enjoy this games. Of course you start over and over again with the same giants and the same abilities, but it's interesting to try out different combinations and to see the results.

I am glad that you like it. The game is charming even though you start from the beginning every time. And even unsuccessful runs can teach you how to play the game better