I just completed both the Judgment and Aftermath campaigns in Gears of War: Judgment. It's a good game overall although I believe Gears of War 3 is far better. I will say that I enjoyed Baird's backstory and the interactions between the characters.

I finally completed Zeno Clash yesterday, but it's actually such a long time ago that I played the major part of it and the memories aren't that fresh on my mind anymore. I was only missing the last boss battle, which I had almost given up on, and I remembered it to be very annoying and frustratingly hard. I think I had already made one or two attempts to beat it after taking a long break from the game, only to abandon it again. So it's all the more surprising that yesterday I gave it another try out of boredom, being a bit sleepy already and not really expecting anything from it, especially since I wasn't that familiar with the gameplay and controls anymore, and all of a sudden it seemed really simple. I beat the boss on the first try, just like that, without even putting much thought into it, it seemed almost ridiculously easy and it really made me wonder why I wasn't able to do it before ... Or maybe I just got lucky? Heh.

Anyway, from what I remember I liked the game, even though it had some frustrating moments. The idea of a first person brawler is somewhat refreshing and fun; the novelty of it would probably wear off if the game was any longer, but it had just the right length. I guess the most noteworthy thing about it is the delightfully weird setting though.

Now onto ZC2 :D which I'd say is a better game.

It is? From what I read I always thought it was the opposite, people liking the first but not being convinced by the second, despite a promising concept. I think I remember something about not enough content and variety for the open world it tries to offer, making it feel a bit tedious and empty or something?

Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures. WHAT A SHITTY GAME!
OK, it's not shitty. You can blame the Nerd and his many, many deaths for my little outburst. Anyway...

Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures is a platform game starring the Angry Video Game Nerd (Thank you Captain Obvious!). This, being a licensed game, there are many references you won't get without some knowledge of the show, so I can't recommend it to people who haven't watched some AVGN episodes. If you have watched the show, however, then there are some pretty funny moments there.

The game plays a bit like Mega Man, in that you have a selection of 8 stages to play in any order you want and after you complete them all, the final stage unlocks. The stages are a parody of some old games, right down to the names themselves and they are based on your typical platformer levels, like snow, fantasy, space and hell, because why the hell not? Like the Mega Man games, the difficulty between the stages vary, but unlike the Mega Man games, you don't gain access to new weapons, which could possibly make some of the stages easier, but you can find some hidden characters, though, who each plays differently from the others (like the skeleton dude who can shoot through walls but can't aim anywhere like the Nerd).

That sounds peachy, but it isn't exactly. Every single level of this game is filled with damned death blocks. Enemies themselves are pretty easy really and don't pose much of a challenge, but the death blocks make this game a real frustration. I lost the count of how many times I lost from a fucking death block vs the times I lost from having my life run out and, suffice to say, it wasn't pretty. The game gives you a crapload of lives (30!) just for this purpose. Eventually, it becomes a case of severe memorization rather than reflexes, which is really disappointing. Did the developers run out of ideas and just decided to fill the whole stages with death blocks? Come on, you can do better than that! If it wasn't for the many references to the show, I would have given up with the game.

Well, let's just update the list.

finished the story mode of sleeping dogs
im currently mopping up the favors and the police cases but as far as i am concerned the game is done

now to figure out what to tackle next

Finished Bejeweled 3. I was searching for a game to play for 15-30 minutes and ended up playing it 2 hours straight. Damn addictive :)

Full list here.

Finished Gunpoint.

It was a fun game. There is a mission where they ask you something and one of your dialog choices is, "I stopped paying attention to the story at Mission 2. I just want the money." That was probably the truest thing ever for that game.

The List

Bejeweled 3 is better than it really has any right to be. I absolutely loved the shit out of it when I played it.

Artifex Mundi has a good thing going. They only do the one kind of game, adventure hidden-object puzzle mashups, and they do them well. They've got a good solid style and a creative team that clearly knows how to put this stuff together, and a subject range - they favor ghosts and things spooky, in exciting locales - that catches the eye. I assume they have a software backbone for these projects, and then they write and paint each one in turn but don't have to code each new release from the ground up.

Anyway, I love these things. I've just finished Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden, which I played a little too much - I like to get all the achievements, which usually requires two play-throughs, but I made a couple of mistakes along the way and had to go through it a final time again, which was dull but kind of interesting, because on the multipleth time through you start to see the bones of the design, and how most of everything is set in a sort of back-and-forth progression.

You're the capable wife of an undersea explorer by the name of Cousteau (no one ever claimed Artifex Mundi was a source of original ideas). He goes missing, and you go down after him, doing a solo dive at his last known location in the middle of a coming sea storm (um...). The trail leads quickly to a small undersea lab and from there to a sprawling utopian city on the sea bottom called Rapture. Eden! Not Rapture, it's called Eden. Can't imagine how I might have made that mistake.

Eden is largely abandoned, with cryptic and menacing signs here and there, and red-eyed demon creatures policing the empty corridors. This game does a good job of making the player feel pursued, and the level design is complicated and clear. You'll meet a few characters and chase a few rumors, uncovering and assembling and collecting and connecting along the way. The puzzles are good, mostly clear and challenging but not too hard; the voicing is clear, but rather flat after a while, and the art is fun to look at.

If you don't like hidden object games, this isn't likely to win you over, but if you're on the fence, you should really try an Artifex game before you decide - they're so much better than most of the competition. If you do like them to start with, this title will surely please.

Two notes of caution - three, actually. Usually the company gives you silhouettes in the hidden object scenes, and here they do not, which is a problem a couple of times when (as always) they come up with incomprehensible words like "Rusk" to describe simple objects that have better names in real life. "Sea rod"? What the hell is that? Also, the handy "hint" button sneakily transforms into a "Skip" button when you're in a puzzle, so if you're trying to figure out what they're after in one or two of the more elusive manipulation puzzles, clicking for a hint skips you over the whole thing (this happened to me twice).

Achievement hunters should know that the achievement for completing the game on Expert difficulty is slightly balky. Once you get near the end on Expert, you're best off being safe: do not skip any of the final cut-scenes, and keep in mind that you will have to finish the bonus chapter on Expert as well. If you play around with the other features before you go on to the bonus chapter, the game may think that you've started the extra chapter at another difficulty level, and hold back the achievement, and since there are no progressive save files, there isn't anything you can do about this except start the chapter over.

If you're not in a rush, and I like to play these games at a relaxed pace, the basic game will take you five or six hours. Each hidden-object scene can be traded for a game of dominoes, in which you must tag each of the lit areas on the board with a tile.

My small list of completed games

Freeedom Fall. A short and fun platformer, exactly what I expected and wanted.

Just finished Aarklash Legacy. Quite difficult, compensated by being really short. Or maybe that's the other way around. Point is, I like my games long and involved with anywhere from low to medium difficulty. That this game is not.

The tactical combat gameplay is fun though, I enjoyed it as something different from my normal fare. There's not really much else to say about it. This game is all about its gameplay - the world and story aren't fleshed out enough in the game to really be worth mentioning.

Oct 27 - Pharaoh's Tomb (all four parts)

A decent CGA platformer. Though levels tended to get tougher as you progressed, there were some simple ones thrown in that seemed somewhat out of place in the progression. Controls were sometimes slow to act. I hated that there are levels where one could end up becoming trapped by touching a tile that would cause walls to appear in front of the exit or all around the player. Game would have been better without the concept of lives. Collision detection could get annoying.

The Last of Us Remastered. Possibly the best TV series I've ever played. Yeah, that works. Not quite Metal Gear levels of Custscene narrative overdose, but still too much to make the gameplay sections feel like anything more than padding between the next important non-interactive event. Doesnt take anything away from how good it was. It was very good.

I don't remember when last I posted, so hopefully I'm not repeating anything. I recently played the three first Blackwell games as well as Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink. All games were played on my Nexus 7.

Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink is up to the normal standard of Artifex Mundi, but I'm probably tired of this style of game, and although I enjoyed it enough to finish it I didn't really love it. Plus it requires internet connection to start, which was annoying.

The Blackwell games together are a compelling experience. The Blackwell Legacy was somewhat disappointing, and I felt it was short, somewhat without a point, and with unsympathetic characters, but the next games build nicely on it, and by the third game I was really engrossed by the story.