Richard & Alice (22 June 00:50am)

An ok game but the main problem with the game is the huge amounts text. Puzzles are kind of easy

Half-Life 2

Started playing it again for the cards, continued playing for the achievements (the game didn't have any first time I beat it.) Managed to get 32/33 - the find all lambda caches one is more than I want to deal with...

After all these years, it is still a great game.


Constant C

One of the best puzzle platformers I've ever played. Extremely well polished, except for some crashes to desktop which cost me 0 lost progress due to the aggressive autosave system. I couldn't get the last storage device (you're allowed to miss 4 and still finish the game) - would be very interested to know the solution to that puzzle.

FTL
Awhhh yessss. Finally beat it. Now I just need to finish those achievements. Give me your ship weird mantis dude!

Neverwinter Nights OC
Never played it when it was new, so it was definitely time. Finally got this running on my mac. Kind of flat at the start, but had fun journalling throughout it which was an entertaining experience. Actually really like Act 2.

NWN HotU
Alright, this was just plain awesome. Now that's an expansion pack. Ran through it with my OC char instead of a SoU char so that was a bit jarring, but it still worked. Love, love, loved the ending. Especially as a LE Blackguard. MUAHAHAHAHA!

Avernum: Escape from the Pit
The Avernum and Geneforge series are made of win. Except for like Av4 (I think it was 4, the one with the weird and flat terrain). Anyways, this remake was awesome and fantastic and I am greatly looking forward to the remake of Av2.

Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten
Welp. Was not expecting a tower defense game (went in totally blind). It was a really amazing tower defense game, like seriously, the best one I've played so far. Love the storyline. Now to beat it in NewGame+!

Shadowrun Returns
Good music, great atmosphere, slightly annoying camera. Game is like a hybrid between an rpg and XCOM in that it has fun character creation, but an incredibly linear plot. Unfortunately the battlegrounds aren't quite as interactive as in XCOM which really is kind of bothersome. Where you would expect to have cover, you might be fully exposed, there will be no climbing or elevation here, etc. Also annoying is the lack of camera control in that you cannot do even quarter spins which would make it far easier to understand the grounds. Another issue is the lack of an "end fight" button as is found in most combat turn-based rpgs, which allows the player to return to an easier way of moving instead of mapping out action points when there is quite literally no-one left alive on the level. However, perhaps the most jarring aspect has to be all the blasted typos from simple misspellings and incorrect punctuation (a question mark instead of an apostrophe on the stats page?) all the way through sentence fragments repeating themselves in a single line. And then of course there is the complete and utter lack of a save function barring the autosave, which leads to difficulties if you need to take a break at any time during the end battles.

All that said it is still a good game and liable to really shine through in any expansions or likely in the fan mod community. It's rather solid and has extensive room to grow, it's just not quite there yet.

End result: I did like the over-all story and the dialogue was very well done. It just has some lackluster technical details. Also typos. C'mon guys, typos.

Fortix
Definitely worth a dollar. Fun, but short. I'll probably end up picking up Fortix 2 later. Base game takes maybe 40-60 mins. Then you can rerun on higher difficulty levels. Makes for a nice coffee break game.

Brütal Legend
!!!!!!!!!!!! ******!!!!! !!!!!!!
Hellasweet awesomefest of METAL. The voice acting is beyond superb. The over the top everything is fantastically over the top. I laughed. I laughed so hard. I felt like a badass. This may end up being my GOTY. Life is awesome and full of FIRE, NOISE, METAL, and BLOOOOOOD.

Downsides, the radial menu bites. The major stagefights could be a bit more complex in how you order troops. BUT I JUST DON'T CARE. WoooooOOOooo! \o/

Rune Factory oceans

Complete List
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2013/post118

In no particular order of when-beaten nor favoritism:

* Just Cause 2
* Warhammer 40k Dawn of War (as well as 2 of its expansions, Winter Assault + Dark Crusade)
* Caesar III (after a year of not playing, I finally went back and beat the last campaign mission)
* Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers
* Nox
* Duke Nukem I and II
* Thirty Flights of Loving (this game is so short; does it even count?)
* Cthulhu Saves the World
* Snapshot
* Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes
* Noitu Love 2 Devolution
* Far Cry 1
* Dungeons of Dredmor
* Botanicula
* Unmechanical
* Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
* Ultima I
* Eschalon: Book I
* Ys I Chronicles+
* Burnout Paradise
* Darksiders
* Sleeping Dogs
* The Sims 3
* Fly'N
* Treasure Adventure Game
* Bleed
* Maldita Castilla
* Unreal Gold
* Unreal II: The Awakening
* Unreal Tournament '99
* Renegade Ops
* Gemini Rue
* Flight of the Amazon Queen
* Painkiller: Hell & Damnation
* The Maw
* Sonic CD
* DR2: Case Zero
* Ittle Dew
* Mafia II
* Thomas Was Alone
* Dust: An Elysian Tail
* Hotline Miami
* Incredipede
* Electronic Super Joy
* Hamilton's Great Adventure
* Jet Set Radio

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
Seriously, just go out & buy the damn thing, it's amazing!

Splinter Cell: Conviction
I like it, it's pretty good

BioShock
Amazing, that's all

Divinity 2 and its expansion... best game I've played in a very long time. Didn't care for the dragon parts, but still worth it as those aren't a huge part of the game.

Just finished my first replay of Metal Gear Solid 2 in about ten years. Funny thing, it's not nearly as confusing now as it was then. Maybe simply knowing that there was a rational continuation to the story (I still need to play MGS4, though) or having more experience with post-modernist stories is enough.

Maybe I felt I was confused by the story because I was still at a stage in my life when the concept of an open ending was still relatively new to me (I was still not in my teens when the game came out). These days, if there's an open ending, I pick a conclusion I personally liked and stick with it, since the author obviously intended for the reader to do that. A lot of people seem to have difficulties swallowing this, though...

It took me more than three months, but I finally completed Might and Magic I - Secret of the Inner Sanctum. There are still two or three dungeons left I didn't cleared, but I think I can live with that and move on. Need a little break (and some shorter games), before I start playing MM2 though.

Finally got around to playing (and finishing) To the Moon.

Beautiful story, but not sure how I feel about the ending, and don't particularly care for the moral implication of the memory changing technology. Though I guess if you pay to have your life rewritten, it's your business and nobody else's.

Alan Wake's American Nightmare

Not quite as good as the original game but it does close off the story from the first so its a bit of a must play if you want to find out what happens to Alan wake.

This is a good topic to follow your battle versus the backlog monster, but I've got one nagging question.

When or how do you declare a game like Civilization, Fallen Enchatress, Master of Magic finished?

For me personally, any game featuring a campaign can be called finished when that's been done even though the game supports say skirmish play forever. In shooters with sp and mp I call it done when the sp is completed even though I may continue playing the mp indefinitely. When I play some MMO that never ends for years or even "just" hundreds of hours and I decide I am done, I call that finished. In the case of an MMO I would never call it finished if i hadn't gotten at least one character to level cap as of the time I decide I am done.

I don't think it really needs to even be about how long something is either. Some little indies can be finished in a matter of a few hours or less but they are still games one plays and finishes while at the same time not holding a candle to finishing the likes of say Baldur's Gate II complete.

It is only my own take and I imagine everyone makes their own rules to some extent but I just make my own call when I am finished with something although I wouldn't play some game halfway through and call that finished even though I am done with it. If some game, say some 20 hour game clearly has an ending point and I only play maybe 10 hours and toss it or whatever, I don't call that finished even though again in that case I am finished with it.

I just realized that I might not have answered your question well at all since I've not played those particular games and for all I know they don't have campaigns. I was reminded of this just now because there is one other category of games I like to take note of here just for myself and that is multiplayer games played this year, as in games that have no ending of any kind whatsoever, like mp only shooters such as Q3A. So I figure in any given year I'd like to just make note of the ones I spend time with as they are part of all that I play in a year's time and MMOs I play but which I am not done with fall into this category for me too.

If I played a strategy game with no campaign I guess I'd have to make a little category to put that under until such time as I'd had my fill of it. I forget now but I think Sins of a Solar Empire is like this? I've heard of some games which don't have campaigns.

Mass Effect 1 & 2. I skipped most DLCs since they are still not on sale. It has been two years since release and I am not paying 8€ for 3 hours of gameplay, no matter how good those DLCs are. The vanilla games are amazing anyway!
Also Batman Arkham Asylum and Assassin's Creed II.

In total I have completed the main quest/campaign of only 5% percent of the games I own! Damn sales. But I just dug up some old Bioshock and Mirror's Edge savefiles in an old hard drive, so those are next, along with The Witcher (at last!).

Edit: dirtyharry50 > I agree with your definition, I consider most games finished when the campaign is over. I don't force myself to play mp or to get 100% achievements before deciding I have beaten it.