Dying Light: The Following - Enhanced Edition

I have to admit that I went into this game with low expectations, but ended up really enjoying it. I've never really liked games which focus on leaping and jumping around, like 3D platformers, but as parkour is an integral theme of the gameplay, it works really well once you get the hang of the controls. The freedom of ways to move around such large open spaces is great, along with how you can interact with the environment.

The main campaign story was okay, although in The Following, the story conclusion kind of contradicts the persona of your character, even though I grasped the idea for the two respective endings. That said, I actually found some of the side quests to be better written and more interesting than the main and DLC story arcs.

I'm on my second run through the game and the DLC now, and might try some of the challenges, which I avoided in my first run because I've never been too fond of that kind of thing in games. Drop-kicking zombies off tall buildings never gets old, though, along with a wide variety of creative ways to kill them. As zombie carnage goes, I've found this game much more entertaining than Dead Island.

As for the DLC 'bundles', they're not really worth buying unless heavily discounted. For example, different outfits... Given this is a first-person game, you only occasionally see the gloves or boots of your outfit, and as far as I can tell, they don't give your character any buffs. The different vehicle skins for The Following are mostly meh, making the additional weapons the only things vaguely worth having. That said, I ended up using mostly weapons that I'd found and enhanced, rather than the DLC additions.

The Ballad of Gay Tony

Street Fighter V.

I'm getting my ass kicked, but at least I'm improving.

Stay with it! That guy's hands have got to be killing him!

Resident Evil 0 on xbox one. Love this series.

FFS... I am now like in the 4th mission of the final expansion pack of Age of Empires 3 Complete (Steam-version)... and I've encountered some save game bug. It is the mission where I am supposed to release an Indian resistance leader in Calcutta with a small task force.

Now if I try to save a new game, it won't load anymore, I get an error "Can't load savegame" or something. All the previous saved games still load fine, but after this point, no. I tried googling for it but found pretty much just one person with a similar problem, and he received no replies.

Yes I still have like 5TB free space on the hard drive where the saves are saved, and I just ran a deep checkdisk scan for the partition to make sure there are no dead sectors or whatever.

FUUUUU.... I'd like to finish the game, only few more missions I think, and I haven't had these kind of save game problems with this game before. With the first Age of Empires (retail version), I DID have a bit similar save game bug where all save games after a certain point could become corrupted. In that game there was a specific bug where saving a game while there were any projectiles flying on the screen (like arrows) could corrupt the save game, so the workaround was to save only when things were quiet and no combat was taking place.

But I have hard time believing AoE3 re-release on Steam would have the same bug...

Let's see what I can do. Maybe I try to start this mission from the start and see if it saves ok, but the other guy with this problem tried that already and said in his message (from 6 years ago) that the same problem would occur later in the mission anyway.

Last possibility I guess is to try to finish all remaining missions without saving during missions, but I am no Iron Man!


While we are on the subject, I dislike how the save game system works in AoE3 (and IIRC this was the problem with AoE 1-2 as well?). It is not meaningful to try to rotate e.g. 5 save game slots because they are not timestamped, so you can't tell which save game is the latest one. It always sorts the save games by their filename.

So I keep creating new save games from time to time with an increasing number in the filename, which means I have looooots of old save games. There is no way to delete old save games from within the game either, so the only way would be to delete the files with Windows Explorer while outside the game... but then there are not only save game files in the savegame directory, but also some extra xml files and such, so I am unsure if it is safe to manually remove the save game files, or can you delete also xml files, or do you have to edit the xml files if you manually delete save game files, or what? There seems to be one xml file per mission, I haven't inspected that much what the xml files contain.

I guess I got over the Age of Empires 3 save game bug. I just played rest of the Calcutta rescue mission without saving (or at least loading any newer save games). Fortunately rest of the mission wasn't that hard as long as you advanced carefully and systematically, it was one of those "special missions" where you can't gather resources nor train new units.

At least the next mission lets me save and reload normally, hopefully it stays that way.

I think you need to ring up this guy

thanks but I'm actually really pissed off about it. All the bugs I've managed to work through ,and I'm almost done with the game, and now this. Bullshit.

AND NOW it's back to normal. XD

I can't wait to finish this thing, get it off my PC, and never see it again!
I have never, EVER, come across a game this buggy. What's worse is, a lot of the mods and patches you need to fix the bugs have bugs of their own so it's a snowball effect.

I've been playing Shamus a lot lately (the Atari version. The C64 version is really not very good). Making slow but steady progress. Just need to be a little more patient in some rooms and learn the map better because I keep losing lives taking the long ways around while search for keys.

I finally decided to finish Vaporum. It was enjoyable while it lasted, but it got nothing on Legend of Grimrock 2 (or 1 even). The puzzles were quite simplistic, and the combat became a bit repetitive/tedious after a while. I did like the environment design and soundscape though.

I've also been playing Halfway on and off, but I think I'm ready to call it quits with that one. It's like I've just run into a brick wall; in this mission, no matter who I pick or how I position my squad I always end up being wiped at the second half. Extreme bullet sponges and flaky RNG just don't mix. It's kind of too bad since I've been enjoying the story quite a bit so far. =/

Stalker: Clear sky
I'm a bit torn about this one...on the one hand gameplay can still be great at times...but there are a lot of questionable design decisions and the difficulty is frustratingly hard. Shadow of Chernobly was more balanced and more fun.

Replaying Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, another classic from my childhood.

After finishing Age of Empires 3, I again kept thinking what single-player game to play next, pondering between Divine Divinity and Dungeon Siege 2 (+ the Broken World expansion), both of which I've barely started (created a character and played a bit).

For some reason I keep forgetting to play Deus Ex (with the GMDX mod) which is there waiting as well, so I went back to it. The more I play it the more I like it, and I start understanding why it is considered as a classic and admire how many branches there seem to be due to your decisions and actions to the story (***). I guess one just becomes more familiar with the gameplay system and mechanism, and also now that my rifle skill and the weapons themselves are getting many upgrades, the shooting part in the game isn't as cumbersome and irritating as it is in the beginning. (yeah try to snipe someone when the aiming goes all over the place all the time!).

I just arrived to Hong Kong, and damn this game seems long. I feel like I've been playing for ages and I am sure I am not even half way there yet, good if even one third. This is not a problem as long as I enjoy playing the game, and it is also positive to think that apparently there are still lots of skillpoints to be acquired and lots of weapon upgrades and augmentation upgrades to be had since there is so much of the game left.

(***) Two examples of these actions of yours affecting parts of the story (SPOILER WARNINGS TO SOME EVENTS IN THE GAME). So there is this hotel where the hotel keeper has problems with his daughter who is a prostitute. Already earlier I was able to rough up a bit the pimp and "save" the daughter, even though her relationship with her father seemed a bit problematic, but at least I could get her to go back to see her dad at the hotel.

Now, later, I saw them again in the same hotel and they were arguing about her working for another pimp now, who even lives now in the father's hotel. So I get to decide what (if anything) to do about it as the father seems a bit scared of the pimp, and partly due to luck I got to see several possible outcomes:

1. The dad asks for a weapon so I give him one. A firefight starts between the dad and the pimp, and the daughter gets accidentally shot by a stray bullet. Conclusion: the father is weeping over her dead daughter. Not good.

2. Next time, I don't give a weapon to the father, but instead wait for the pimp to come and as soon as they start the argument with the father, I knock the fucker (the pimp, that is) down from behind. The father thanks me, but the daughter feels her father is a wussy who can't fight for himself or his daughter, and leaves her dad for good, leaving the hotel. Not good.

3. So, next time I do give a weapon to the father and let him have the first shot at the pimp, but shoot the pimp down myself right after that to make sure no more casualties. Now the daughter is impressed by the courage of his dad, and all seems well between them, the daughter agrees to stay at the hotel to get closer with her father. Wow!


Then, another case, a question to Deus Ex veterans: is it really possible to save your brother back when you meet him at his apartment? One walkthrough suggests that yes it is, you just need to hide in a closet yourself and let your brother handle all the incoming forces (which are way too overpowered for you to handle), suggesting even that your brother is made invincible against enemies in that part of the game. Just let him shoot all enemies and stay behind him, and you will both make it (you become captured etc., but that's beside the point).

However, when I tried this, nope, didn't work. My brother fights valiantly but dies quite soon against the hordes of enemies, definitely not invincible. I also tried to fight with him against the enemies, but there just are too many of them coming through the door. I am wondering if the GMDX mod has changed it, ie. in the vanilla game your brother is invincible, but not in this mod?

The other option is for you to flee through the window just like your brother suggests, but that will get your brother killed. This is what I ended up doing then, and now the story goes on without my brother. So, should I have been able to save my brother, and how? Maybe I'll try it again at some point...