Larva Mortus (Replay)

This game has its bugs. This was worth a replay as I wanted to put a dent in those random achievements (all achievements are random spawns. You may not get any, you may get one you already had, etc). But, more importantly, a level can be played in 5 - 15 minutes which lends it to all kinds of situations where I can't get into anything else.

Be prepared for mission ending monsters to spawn outside of the game world (forcing you to quit and start over), one-shot bugs, and a lack of manual. But for a bundle price, it was well worth it. A tad bit of polish and this would be a highly recommendable game. As it extremely unlikely, this game will ever be dev-touched again, consider in a bundle or 90% off deal.

The 39 Steps

I mistakenly thought that The 39 Steps was going to be a point-and-click adventure game, based on the eponymous book by John Buchan. Having already read the book beforehands, though, I found the digital adaptation to be pointless and disappointing. They didn't even make an attempt to change or add something to the material; it's just the book itself (exact words and stuff), with images, music and voice-acting wrapped around it. Oh, in some cases you get to make gestures with your mouse in order to perform an action (like opening a door), but the majority of your time is spent clicking and watching the text stylistically and slowly appear in your screen. Not particularly interactive and I'd have rather read the book a second time than continue with this. At least, it was short, just like the book itself. In case you haven't happened to read it, the book is in the public domain and freely available to download from Project Gutenberg. As for this, well, I wouldn't really recommend it.

Full list.

Finished 1953 - KGB Unleashed. It was a really bad adventure game:
- Myst-like exploration (I don't like it, but that is only a personal preference)
- Few objects to interact with and difficult to find
- Lots of documents to read, most of the time with not so useful information
- Even with all those documents, the story does not makes any sense

At least it doesn't lat more than 2h...

Full list here.

Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams + Rise of the Owlverlord

Despite being separate entries the two games are fundamentally identical, and you should consider them as a main one and a small standalone expansion.
Unlike with the old “The Great Giana Sisters”, a deliberate clone of super Mario Bros. (I still wonder how that game has been allowed to be released, so blatant are the similarities with the Japanese icon), this recent platformer game has found its originality and aside from the name it borrows nothing from its predecessor.

Controlling one of the two sisters, you will have to scout the dream lands in search of your sibling, kidnapped by the dragon Gurglewocky. Fact is, your playable character clearly suffers from a split personality syndrome, allowing her to turn from a “cute” girl capable to double jump and fall slower to a “punk” one able to dash and destroy walls.
The entire game revolves around this duality: each time Giana changes her personality, the rest of the world changes as well, and each level will force you to combine the usual jump mechanics, your abilities and the two different environments to succeed.
The art department is particularly fitting to the theme: each time you switch, both the aesthetics and the music will change as well while maintaining contrast with the current personality, a creepy and decadent world with vidoegame-y sounds for the “cute” girl and a lush, green fable one with the same tracks revised in a metal key (from the band Machinae supremacy, nonetheless) for the “punk” one.

Don't let the art deceive you, though: the cartoonish graphics hide a very high level of challenge.
Each of the low in number but wide in dimentions stages will require a clever use of your abilities and a good timing for each action, still all of them are very reasonable and feasible even for not very skilled player with a few retries. On normal, you will never feel like the game is cheating you or that you have to be surgically precise to pass the hardest sections; on easy, you'll breeze though every level without any kind of problem.
The game gets really hard only with the optional challenges, being them gathering all the crystals (the equivalent of coins in Super Mario, they will help in gaining the stars that will unlock the boss stages -don't worry though, to progress you'll need just a few, not all of them) the rare giant gems or the score or time attack modes. Those side objectives will put you to the test with no mercy, and some of them are really cruelly hard.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for boss stages: each big monster must be hit three times, mostly after they leave their defenses open following a series of progressively harder attacks completely based on randomness. That means that if you are lucky, you can almost stay immobile and avoid them; if you happen to be in the wrong side of the screen, though, you are doomed. This makes those encounters extremely frustrating, unfair and entirely based on chance -the last boss is so insanely hard and luck based that I simply HAD to lower the difficulty.

I can certainly recommend the game for its excellent levels to any platformer lover, but rest assured that the bosses will make you rage quit at least once.

Trine 1, Trine 2, Huniepop, Hotline Miami 2 Wrong Number, GTA V, Deponia, The Witcher 3 and we'll see what else :p

Metroid Prime (Wii)

The Gamecube classic and simply one of the most outstanding games ever made. I played the Wii trilogy disc version (though i played on WiiU). Though anyone that has a WiiU should now just buy the digital version which is sold for the bargain price of AU$26 for the trilogy- you would be lucky to find the disc version for that price, though if you only have a Wii then disc is the only option. I finished at 92% items found and log entries scanned...so i missed a couple of missiles and logs despite being pretty thorough in my play through, i think i did good still! I'd need a walkthrough to 100% this one.

This may be a 2002 Gamecube game, but it looks amazing even by today's standards. Sure the models don't have the poly count of current stuff, but the game really still holds up well and easily matches Xbox and even PC games of the time and stomps anything the PS2 could do. Some of the little things about the graphics are what set Prime apart...the way your visor fogs, or in certain lighting conditions you see your own eyes reflected inside the HUD.

The sound and music is even better than the visuals. The composer knows the difference between sci-fi and fantasy, the themes are hard to get out of your head from the menu music, the main theme to some of the battle music...which sometimes reminds me of the Industrial Metal style of Descent 2.

But even better than the sound and visuals is the gameplay. One thing about Nintendo...they know how to do gameplay, and they know how to stick to a successful formula (okay except for experiments like Other M). You can never accuse a Metroid game of being a dumbed down casual game. Combat is easy, except for frustrating final couple of bosses- but it is not a FPS anyway. It's a game about exploration and solving the games overall puzzle of collecting all the power ups to access previously unreachable areas and then find 12 artifact pieces. Anyone that has played a "Metroidvania", well this is the real deal. It's starts out easy, but getting to and just finding some things can be hard and frustrating towards the end. Overall the gameplay in Prime is just pure gold.

Some don't like the Wii controls, i think most of those people probably haven't used them in this game. For me the Wiimote/Nunchuck was better in some ways than mouse and keyboard. It has almost the same accuracy, but allows you to strafe whilst locking your view and still aiming freely within that view- something you cannot do with mouse control where moving your aim moves your view. I quickly came to love how it controlled, except for how you fire beam/missile combos- having to press the "A" button and down on the pad, both with the same thumb was something i never quite got to grips with.

The only downsides to the game at all are both things that come with the territory. Unskipable cut scenes, which is a longtime Nintendo trait. And the game has lots of backtracking, but ummm...that's Metroid, it's one of the very things that makes a Metroid game what it is.

Metroid Prime is simply one of the best video games ever made, and represents Nintendo at it's best. If they'd now get off their lazy asses and actually make a new gen Metroid Prime (and a Zelda) for the WiiU they may even sell some of their consoles.

Just finished Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

Certainly the worst - no, the least good of the Borderlands series, including the yet-to-be-completed Tales from the Borderlands.

I mean, it plays exactly like the 2 other Borderlands - which in my book is a plus - but they added the microgravity effect. While it can lead to cool attacks and combos, I really hated the "jumping puzzles" they included. I mean, I hated them in Guild Wars 2, and I still hate them in this game. I felt lost at times, which in a FPS is a bad thing for me (and I'm speaking only for me). I'm not against multiroutes, but I like my FPSes pretty straightforward.

Side quests were also not as attractive as in the other games and I didn't feel like I'd like to complete them. So, now that I've beaten the final bosses, saw the credits rolling and played the final sequence, this game is finished and shelved as far as I'm concerned. If my friends want to play coop, I'll play Borderlands 1 or 2 instead of that one.

Very revealing is that I had a long hiatus playing this game, starting it in november 2014, stopping playing it for other games and just completing it now.

Still, it's a very solid game, you really feel it when you have powerful weapons... and also when you're underpowered! Which is a good thing. Lots of whacky characters, whacky humor, which is also a good thing.

So far in 2015: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2015/post2

Now I have to tackle my list of other already started games, so I can make some space on my HDD... T_T

The NES rescuing-the-mermaid one was Goonies II. Somewhere I still have that game. My NES came with a large "Player's Handbook" instead of Super Mario Bros., and it included maps and helpful tips for games ranging from Legend of Zelda to... Goonies II. :D There came a point where I didn't need to refer to that map, because I had all of the front and back of the Goonies II map memorized.

I, um, played it a few times. It was loads of fun, IMO.
I was unaware of that tidbit! That just moved it up a bit in my backlog, since I just finished watching his run of Doctor Who episodes.

Lost Lands: Dark Overlord

Favorite HOG so far. Puzzles are a mix, some quite easy and some harder, though many of the tougher ones can be brute-forced if you can't logic them out.

But really liked the art and environments. A very good value - price in bundle was $0.25. :)

Jagged Alliance

JA is my all time favorite video game, from the day i first played it back in 1995 until now i haven't found anything to match it. So i play it again at least once every 2 years or so. This time i wanted a quick easy play through, so played on easy (which is still harder than most newer games still!). I also wanted to try out a game with all of the nut-jobs and fruitcakes like Skitz and Haywire.

I love JA2 as well, but that is only my second favorite game...for whatever reason i still prefer the first one.

It was allowed to be released (no idea why Rainbow Arts thought it would be a good idea), but after a few weeks they were forced to pull the game from the stores. I guess it became legendary, because it was one of the most copied games of all times (but it also was a lot of fun to play).

I have to agree. For me the first boss monster was ok, the second was a pain in the ass and the last one was impossible to beat on normal difficulty. I tried for hours and in the end I quit, because easy difficulty wasn't implemented when I played the game. Maybe I should try again now, but I fear I have to replay all levels just to beat boss (don't think I kept my savegame).

Finished my first game of the year:

Fallout: New Vegas

I was going to play the Honest Hearts and Old World Blues DLCs after the main quest, but that turns out not to be possible, so after 241 hours, I'm done.

Uncanny Valley

Really good story telling in this short little SH inspired sidescroller. Atmosphere was very important to the dev's and it shows.

Buggy as hell though. Lost save files and event triggers not activating were some of the ones I came across.

Not knowing how to use items was also really annoying. Not to mention the use of a certain fire extinguisher is both moronic and tedious. It's implementation is baffling.

The environment seems larger than it is through the use of a sprint meter that drains very quickly. Making traversal more tedious than it has to be. The area is as big as the game is short. You will blitkrieg through this in about the same time as it takes to cook dinner.

Worth checking out if the price drops and they fix the bugs.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 - An excellent racer with interesting environments and tracks; however, it's let down from unchallenging AI. I had started this game several years ago, but never got around to finishing it - for some reason, I found the game difficult at the time, not sure what changed since then. The 4 environments are interesting with excellent tracks, that have elevation changes and several shortcuts. There are a lot of events; so many in both the Hot Pursuit and Championship mode that the environments can grow stale. This wouldn't be a problem except for the lack of challenging AI, the only way to lose is to continually crash. It only starts to present a challenge when you reach the supercars.

That being said, it's still a good racer.

Hotline Miami -- My only game finished so far this year. Actually, the only game I've beaten, period, since I got this PC more than a year and a half ago. (Well, unless you want to count "You Have To Burn the Rope".) Yay for me....