Brütal Legend (WinXP)

I'm pleasantly surprised, it was a funny game with an extremely cool cast and soundtrack, I wish there'd be more metal soundtracks in video games, the choice of tracks from all those well known metal bands was quite good too and the tracklist is extremely long.
Of course it's like a console game through and through, but a fun experience after all and the graphics look nice and don't run too bad on my old system.
Still searching for the last stuff I didn't find in the game but it's only a matter of time now.
Having Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Jack Black etc... doing the voices and appearing ingame at very many occasions was really cool.

It took me 12,5h to complete.

The multiplayer mode is actually quite fun (micro strategy game where you can fight alongside your minions in many different ways) and it's cool that you can play the gothic and demon/deathmetal faction too, too bad it's not LAN compatible and only possible via steam, but at least it has an offline AI mode. :)
I may keep it installed and play a few more rounds with it.

Spoiler:
I was laughing hard when I saw that the girl becomes a goth and founds her black tears faction with zombies, corpse brides etc... after she felt betrayed by Eddie, that's exactly what I've seen from many girls that always clinged to metalheads.

Full list:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2014/post695

Finally finished Legend of heroes-Trails in the sky after a good 34 hours run.Likeable characters,nice story,great music,colorful landscapes and lively towns,interesting battle system,difficulty is just right and no grinding required so that's a plus too,a small negative would be that the side-quests can get repetitive and too dull for some.Highly reccomended for RPG and JRPG fans.Waiting impatiently for the next one!

After I've neglected my list for far too long, here's the second big upgrade. I intent to get the list up to date this year and I hope I won't neglect the 2015 list.


Mega Man II (Game Boy) 1:54h
Not nearly as good as the first Game Boy game but still fun.

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (Game Boy) 3:50h
The best game of this series and it's still as fun as when I played it as a kid.

Kirby's Dream Land (Game Boy) 0:33h
Short and simple. In my memory the game was harder...

Operation C (Game Boy) 3:17h
The first Contra game I ever managed to beat. Luckily you can farm extra lives in this game.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan (Game Boy) 0:29h
Short and very easy. It's not really a good game. Somehow all weapons have the same reach...

DuckTales (Game Boy) 1:24h
It's a fun game and I'm happy I finally managed to beat it because I failed as a child.

Wario Land II (Game Boy) 14:22h
I didn't like this game as a child and I don't really like it now. I'm glad it's over and I hope part three is better.

Mega Man III (Game Boy) 4:59h
A good game. Better than the second one.

Kirby's Dream Land 2 (Game Boy) 5:15h
Much better than the first game. I finally found all the rainbow parts and killed the final boss. I never would have been able to defeat him as a child. He's MUCH harder than the rest of the game.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers (Game Boy) 3:02h
MUCH harder than the first game, I nearly gave up at the end. The last two levels... ugh...


Here's my list.

Fallout 2 - Been playing this over the past couple of weeks, and I've really enjoyed it. After playing many first-person shooters over the past couple of months, it was refreshing to play a game that takes some time. I'd played the first one several years ago, but it didn't click with me. However, this one grabbed me after a couple of hours with it.

The world is quite fascinating with the different types of people and communities that emerge to survive in the wasteland. The freedom in this game is also refreshing, I tried to avoid combat where I could and the game supported that.

Gems of War

Finished all the story quests. Nice little F2P Puzzle Quest clone, interesting gameplay, but you have to keep hitting (and winning) the "single player" PVP battles in order to earn gold to unlock new kingdoms and do quests. Still, after a while you'll get enough money from your kingdoms and the "daily reward" to keep playing for a few hours every day. Might need to skip a day or two at some point to unlock the next kingdom though.

I'm back with my late mini-reviews, this time with the Deponia Series!

Let me start with a phrase that can summarize my thoughts about it: the Deponia series is NOT for everyone. I will give a better explanation in a moment.

The three games put you in the role of Rufus, a resolved but clumsy and * very* self-centered inhabitant of the wasteland planet Deponia.
Your objective: reaching Elysium -the apparently perfect land suspended above the planet- and live your whole life in luxury, far away from the smelling garbage planet. Everything seem to turn for the best when with one of your werid means you reach an Organon (a military regime imposed by the sky citiziens) Cruiser and meet an Elysian woman, yet nothing goes exactly as planned.
This is the beginning of a delirious and (potentially) very funny storyline, where everything will repeatedly take unpredictable ways due to chances, absurd choices, more or less serious schemes and sheer stupidity.

The three games are practically identical in terms of gameplay, and they bring nothing new to the table: the old point'n'click mechanics we all know and love are still there, unchanged (except for the minor -but very welcome- inventory activation by the mouse wheel) and flawlessly working, so if you have ever played an adventure game you already know what awaits you. The expectations for the genere are met and exceeded, so if you are searching for a good gameplay you need to look no further.
The puzzles are almost always well-balanced, and most of them adopt the same comedic approach as Monkey Island, soemtimes breaking the fourth wall and reaching real brilliance; you don't have to follow a strict cause-effect logic: if reality is flat and uninspiring, it will have to adapt to your style!

Graphically speaking, it is nice to see an high-resolution adventure game, for once. Despite my love for pixels (my avatar can confirm that), it is refreshing to see such a well drawn and compelling art-style in full 1080p glory, like an high quality animated series!
The music score adds a lot of value to the whole product, perfectly fitting each situation from start to finish.
Also, the sheer lenght of each of the three games can grant you good value for your money: the good amount of hours are never tiring, always granting plenty of action and variety and banishing boredom to another realm.

Many have said that often the series drown itself in sexism, racism and bad-taste jokes. Personally, I think that most of the accusations it received are just the usual ramblings of the White Knights of Social Justice: the fact that the developers purposedly used provoking exaggerations and threw the political correctness out of the window is blatantly evident, so criticizing the games for this is absurd. That is the meaning of my initial statement: you can find the humor in Deponia either great or incredibly bad, it all depends on your thoughs about cynical, "sick" and sometimes even brutal humour.
I must say that in certain occasion the critics may be right, though: while it is -at least imo- clear that the writers did not base the jokes on their deepest believes about the world, sometimes (especially in the third chapter) they tried a bit too hard to break every polite convention with overly emphasized episodes that even under the above mentioned point of view overstay their welcome.
Those cases are very rare, though, so they don't take away much from the overall experience.

I have only one real issue with Deponia: the translation. While it is not bad enough to ruin the games, it is evident that it cannot match the original language: using the English subtitles under the -excellent- German voices, even a non-native speaker like me can easily undertsand that the meaning of several statements have been slightly mistranslated, losing the much, much funnier implications of the originals.
My Deutsch-speaking sister also made me notice that almost every line of the original text is full of puns and double menaings that can significantly improve your playthrough.
My recommendation: if you can speak German... definitely choose that language.

All in all, I think that the Deponia games are really worth your time; even if I appreciated them just as much as many of the best games I could mention, I will not give them my "Seal of Approval" due to the fact that, while perfectly fitting my tastes, I can understand why others may have an diametrically opposite opinion.



P.S. I am probably one of the very few who actually liked the ending. I will not enter in details, though, as everything I could say would be a massive spoiler!

Just finished The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. I can't remember why I picked that game in the first place, I thought it was an Action-RPG. I couldn't be more wrong: it's a Diablo clone!

But it's a pretty good one. In fact, good enough that I ended playing almost exclusively that game, which is always the mark of a good game, in my book. Plus I've never played any of the Diablo games, but I've found that I really enjoy that kind of game, from time to time: Titan's Quest was my first, then the two Torchlight. All of them, I enjoyed a lot. But it was a while since Torchlight II, so Van Helsing came at the right time!

Very nice graphics, with lots of visual effects. The bestiary was especially enjoyable, since it's an homage to classic horror stories, so expect vampires, werewolves, Igors and lots of other traditional... and less traditional monsters!

As usual in that kind of games, the story is accessory. Nevertheless, in Van Helsing the dialogues are well written, with witty retorts from your ghost companion and lots of winks to movies, games and books (like "contact the Professor Wenkman at Hotel Borgova to join his ghost hunting!" ^_^)

The only downside is that the artefact creation tool is pretty useless, and that you have to really pay attention to where your mouse pointer is, if you want to hit the right enemy. But that's really minor!

TL;DR> loved that game, will play Van Helsing II soon!

So far in 2014: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2014/post132

*confirm*

In some games it doesn't matter, but Deponia and Gothic are impossible to translate properly.
Deponia because of the constant puns and Gothic because of the funny crude language that sounds more "mean" than "nasty" when translated into English.

Psychonauts
What can be said about this game that hasn't been said yet? Perhaps one of the most original,charming and well written games ever made.We need Psychonauts 2 Schafer ASAP!

I tried to play Gothic 1 & 2 as well as Risen (Risen in english and german) and it's manily the language that keeps me away.

Reading your post I remembered a post from RPGWatch. Quote from JonNik:
Following the theme of discovery and exploration you may enjoy the Gothic games. At least, you may if you can get past the adolescent macho bleep permeating everything in the setting and if you are one of those who believe brown and run down is the new pretty. And then there's Risen… Still brown, still run down, still full of ugly people, still macho, still full of character who sound like they are going to stop every five minutes to brofist each other. Not my thing, but it seems a lot of people do enjoy them. Don't ask me why.

Risen is one of the games which makes me notice that I'm getting old... I'm sure I would have enjoyed it (and Gothic 2) when I was a kid.

Maybe not your kind of humour. I think this over the top medieval macho clichee is hilarious.
I sometimes say extremely chauvinist phrases jokingly too and am glad, that my girls know me good enough to not take them seriously. :D

Well then again some people don't have humour at all or lose it along the way, especcially when they'd need it most.
"Humor ist, wenn man trotzdem lacht" ;)

Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Batuta.
Better than I expected, shorter than I expected, as buggy as I expected :)

Serious Sam HD The First Encounter

A good old-school shooter, although I preferred the shorter levels at the start of the game to the larger levels later on, and the kleer herds were more annoying than fun to fight. I will probably play The Second Encounter soon, but I want a change of pace/genre first.

I'm sure you are referring to the "great ride" in Mepmphis, am I right? :)
That part whas absoluteli insane... but that is precisely why I love Serious Sam! The Perfect run does not exist, and each time you play you have to face an unpredictable horde of monsters! This also eliminates the possibility of save-scamming: you can never know how a battle will turn, and if you quick-saved in a wrong moment your defeat could be assured. At least, on hard: I have never played it on normal.

The Second Encounter is my favourite shooter ever: it takes the best form the first and -imo- rebalances it to be just as challenging but more fair, while adding a good dose of weird humour and a greater variety of environments. Plus, the flamethrower is perfect against those damn kleers! :P

It seems my list reached the maximum of allowed characters. Well... for the last bit of this year, here's part two.

52.
08.11. - 18.11. / 9:08h / 0,55 DPH
Soul Blazer (SNES)
A nice little Action-RPG. While the gameplay was repetitive I never got bored.

53.
20.11. - 23.11. / 10:36h / 1,32 DPH
Illusion of Gaia (SNES)
The follow up to "Soul Blazer". I think the gameplay is a bit more boring but the story, music and graphics are better.

54.
10.12. - 11.12. / 2:17h / 10,51 DPH
DuckTales 2 (Game Boy)
Overall it's better than the first game but the first one had a less linear path through the levels and more secrets.

55.
24.11. - 14.12. / 45:47h
Fate/hollow ataraxia (PC)
The sequel to "Fate/stay night". This game is mostly comedy but it also gives some background informations to some of the characters. It's more or less the same as "Kagetsu Tohya" which is also made by Type-Moon.

56.
14.12. - 16.12. / 5:28h / 11,34 DPH
Mega Man IV (Game Boy)
So far it's the best Game Boy Mega Man I've played. I'm looking forward to the last one.

57.
17.12. - 20.12. / 2:26h / 6,99 DPH
Gargoyle's Quest: Ghost 'n Goblins (Game Boy)
This game was one of my favorite ones during elementary school and it's still fun today. There are a lot of slowdowns though.

58.
25.12. / 3:37h / 21,57 DPH
Mega Man (NES)
A fun game but later it's too hard. Besides that: Good graphics, good music and mostly good controls which are a bit too slippery for my tastes.

59.
31.12. / 1:11h
A Bird Story
A short story about a boy and his bird. Pretty boring.

60.
23.12. - 31.12. / 13:15h / 0,53 DPH
F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon
A great horror 1st-person-shooter. Good till the end.
The fights against the soldiers reminds me of Half-Life.

Part 1