Original, I think it's the lack of any real music. The soundtrack sounds more like ambient music.

Oh well, this year only remember finishing Front Mission Evolved. To my shame I don't think I finish more then 1 game for the whole year......

The story sucks with overused plots, but the mecha gameplay is great for me.

the robot customization is deep and affect the gameplay a lot.

I can choose a floating legs that enable me to dance around like a acrobat avoiding enemy, but sacrificing carrying capacity thus I can only equip less weapon and less heavy armor.

I can choose spider legs that boost carrying capacity which enable me to blaze all 4 weapon, don the best armor and more support abilities, but move very slowly and dash evade eat up energy quickly.

I can choose to load all 4 weapon for maximum firepower, or take a shield to increase room for error, or charge in melee sword and shield style, or wield 2 shield and healing support to maximum toughness but little range damage.

I can also charge in shield and rocket / shotgun style or snipe from afar and add homing missiles to complement damage load out.

I can choose between auto locking homing missiles with limited ammo, normal rockets with bigger ammo capacity, AOE damaging grenade launcher that is harder to aim but can blast multiple enemies at once. Otherwise I can choose a Gatling gun with low damage but high rate of fire that I can equip a chance for stun ability to keep the enemy stun locked till my gun overheat.

I can also choose a temporary flying ability or healing ability or carrying capacity or stunning ability or increase ammunition load.

All these kind of customization change the play style greatly and make a satisfying mecha play.

Act of War: Gold Edition

If you want to spend your time with some real time strategy goodness, look no further: Act of War will give you plenty of content to play with, with both the very big main game “Direct Action” and the expansion “High Treason”.

First of all: the strength of this title does not come from innovation. You won't really find anything you have not already seen elsewhere, yet Act of War perfections an already winning formula improving and combining all those elements to make for an extremely varied and challenging experience.

In the single player campaign, you take the role of Major Richter, leader of the operative section of Task Force Talon, an elite military corp equipped with cutting edge (when not even a bit futuristic) military technology. Your mission: dealing with the World Energy Consortium, an international criminal organization of gigantic proportions composed by corporation leaders, traitorous generals and politicians who want to have the upper hand during the next elections.
Those guys will start attacking several major cities of the Western world with a precise plan in mind; uncovering and stopping it will be up to you.
In High Treason, you will be framed as a coup leader and killer of the US President, so you'll have to clear your name while saving the day once again... this time, with extremely limited forces and without any government's support.
This was probably one of the last games to use FMV cutscenes; while much effort has been put in costumes and environments, you already know what you can expect from the actors. They are not really awful, but they are not very convincing, either.
Anyway, this is not a game to play for the story, but rather for the awesome gameplay.

In single player mode, you can control both the regular US Army and Task Force Talon, while on multiplayer you can also choose the Consortium; each of the three groups owns completely different units for all the roles (workers, buildings, infantry, light and heavy armored mechanized infantry, aircraft, tactical weapons and -only in High Treason- navy), and each of them has its own strong and weak points.
To exemplify: the US Army uses ground workers and owns particularly powerful and sturdy heavy units both on ground and air, the Consortium builds its bases by deploying materials via helicopters and has clearly superior light units (with both deadly infantry and very fast, agile and stealthy vehicles), TFT owns multi-funcional units -by far the most versatile in the game- that allow them to always be prepared for any situation and surprising their foes by changing tactics on the fly, yet their buildings do not require energy sources but “consumable” drones (they can be recovered when dismantling them) that need to be placed near the HQ or a forward operation center to function; destroy those, and the base will freeze.

This wide variety of units is perfectly exploited in the numerous missions, each one starting with different premises and aiming to different objectives; you might have to stop urban chaos and eradicate a terrorist cell by using SWAT teams to surprise them and clear buildings for your snipers without causing damage to the city or the mission VIPs, you might have to assault an enemy base or hold your position, you might need to cut down enemy reinforcements by destroying or occupying strategic points or even survive by ambushes and stealing their tech, you might have to send a commando team to gather information while being surrounded and fighting a war of attrition against superior forces or disabling enemy AA guns by stealthily blowing up the generators to clear the way for your own bombers.
The possibility are many, and there is never a single way to reach your objectives. Also, I have particularly liked the fact that there are no unit limits and no additional costs of maintenance regardless of the state of your base and army, neither for you nor for your enemy, allowing you to concentrate on construction and massive attacks and making the game much faster rather than constantly trying to keep only the amount of soldiers needed to avoid wasting resources with too much taxes and forcing you to abide to a very slow and defensive pace until you gather enough resources.

The sound department is solid, and graphically the game still looks nice and runs well with very few hiccups here and there, with the expansion significantly improving that aspect with a native 1080p resolution and perfect smoothness.

My only complaint is the bugginess of the expansion: while I never had any problem with Direct Action, but unfortunately High Treason completely broke down after a while, freezing each time I used the quick load function and at the beginning of each new mission (forcing me to use the chapter selection menu); I also had to skip a mission on Cuba because the game needed nearly five minutes to reload the map... and that was one of the most intense levels in the whole game.
The base game is almost perfect, but GIG really needs to check the expansion again.

That said, I warmly recommend Act of War to any lover of RTS games; its crowded battles, fast action (building construction included), complex missions structure and sheer amount of options will give you plenty of satisfaction, imo without many of the typical drawbacks of the genre!
If military strategy games are of your liking, you would commit a crime against yourself by skipping it.

Finished Sacred Gold (with Underworld addon).

Technically, on paper, it should be good game.
Spend 3 Sundays + some time in the other days. I did that by running past most of the enemies.
Otherwise I could dig in with 50-60h by exploring most areas and doing all side quests + dragon slaying all of them.

Decreased dragon population by half (there is ~15 of them in the game iirc).

Before that playthrough I tried Sacred few times (in past decade and half) but dropped after dozen of side quests. Absolute chore fetchquest.
But some of them were cool, like the one where you escort lost girl to the grandma, and aforementioned old hag turn into
gargoyle and eat her alive. Nasty.
Best way to play the game is to avoid side quests and run past enemies, then burn them down when they surround you.
Don't have splash damage attacks? Too bad for you.

I found that melee skills are useless, just like normal melee attacks they often miss. Skills related to Dwarf's cannon on his back? They are the best. Not only because they don't miss.
It work as a flame thrower, mortar and just canon. Neat.
Dwarf can't use bows&crossbows, so they introduced rifles (muskets etc.) they are good for moonwalking enemies
Get the picture - they chase you for minutes, you go melee with them, and then they just moonwalk from close contact with you. How rude.

And yes there is level scaling, but it doesn't happen until you reach addon areas. In vanilia running around low level
goblins is safe due significantly lowered aggro field. I mean (who don't use MMO terms) - you need to actually touch them to start the assault (tsk). And then high level undead enemies spread over the map. Better that than boos lvl of the goblins.
Devs have Star Wars fetish. lightsabre as easter egg and tarantulas in last act of the game, shooting laser beams like blasters.

Playing aa a Dwarf for full pow(d)er gameplay. Can't ride the horse and can't use bow&crossbow, but he can wield
two-handed swords and axes, swinging them like a pickaxe. Looks pity tbh.
Then, after few levels and improving melee skill, he swing small axes like a rabbit in breeding session.
For some reason Hammers and Clubs count as a Axes.
After few level-ups money are not a problem. You only spend them on buying new weapons and potions, p.rare to buy armors.
I remember old version of the game was hilarious, when you could buy Mentor Potion that boost XP income.
I should note that experience income is already p.high.

And holy cow, the amount of enemies in addon - Underworld - is more ridiculous the closer you come to the finale.
You know how hard is to control the dwarf then you fight with the crowd of the giants?
Nice detail - character have animation, that play when you pick up items.
But not dwarf.
He just stare at the items for two seconds, then it land in the backpack. It feels like a lag in multiplayer or something.

Overall - feels good that I scratched that old game from my backlog.

Thief: Deadly Shadows (PC CD-ROM)

Installed and ran without any compatibility issues, bugs or glitches at all for the entire game. All graphics set to maximum and it looked just fine. I decided to install this http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138607 ,but only the minimum install as all i wanted was to run it in widescreen without any modded gameplay. I don't always use widescreen mods, if they simply stretch or crop the image, or mess with the FOV then i prefer to use standard 4:3. But the Sneaky Upgrade mod looked just fine so i used it, and highly recommend it.

As for the game itself, it was pretty good actually, and i can now say that i don't really understand the knockers that this one has among some of the fans of the first two games. Actually i never even liked the first game- it was a good idea, but ended up badly executed. The Metal Age fixed everything and is a classic. I think this game is better than Thief 1 easily, but maybe not quite as good as number 2.

If you want an easy play through mainly for the good atmospheric story, then play on normal mode, but it's not much of a challenge. I think most would prefer one of the two harder settings. The game play is still the same as earlier games though, it's about patience and sometimes even feels like a waiting sim, but that's like most stealth games. The missions were pretty good and i didn't think they felt that much smaller than the ones in Thief 2, i actually liked the mission maps, but not so much the town "open area" maps sections- they were a bit too small and did get a bit annoying with all the backtracking through them during the game. But the core story maps and missions were just fine.

The game had some great little touches that got me by surprise. Like the guards...they look like clones of each other, as did enemies in most games of the time. But if you take your time and pay attention during the game you will hear a lot of unique quotes and grumblings from them as they stand around talking to themselves. Some of it's pretty amusing. There is even a couple of specific guards that seem to keep cropping up through the game multiple times, and if you hide and listen they have their own little ongoing story about one of their ugly medical problems.

Anyway it was worth playing. I'm going to try out the new reboot soon as well, since i got that with GwG on the 360.

I'm a huge Michael Ende fan, read all his books as a kid. Any of his stories would be great source material for awesome adventure games. Jim Button, The Neverending Story, Momo and Der satanarchäolügenialkohöllische Wunschpunsch are my favorites. The last one would make a particularly ingenious adventure game.


I immediately put this on my wishlist when GOG released it here but kicked it off the wishlist a couple months ago when I wasn't in a strategy mood, at all. Lately, I've been playing a bunch of strategy games and even though I hardly ever finish any of them or it takes forever because I play in bits and pieces, I decided to put this on my wishlist again because otherwise I'm a criminal againt myself. I don't want to be a criminal against myself!
Running out of HD space though, currently I only have 14 GB of free space because I have more than 80 games installed several of which are lengthy strategy games that one can't finish in a weekend. My game purchasing addiction apparently morphed into a game installing addiction, I keep installing more and more and play a little here, a little there.

I've only read "Die Unendliche Geschichte" and "Momo" a few years ago for the first time in my life and they went straight into my list of favourites. :)
If there'll ever be a game about The Neverending Story though, I hope, that it wouldn't twist around its quintessence like those damn fantasy movies did. Michael Ende was directly opposed to the escapism of Tolkien and many others and wanted to inspire people to use their creativity/imagination as a drive to reshape the real world instead of escaping into fantasy or shutting one's fantasy down completely. After all that's what the book was all about and it seems to be a reappearing theme if I look at Momo too.

Just fyi, Act of War is pretty "heavy" on that side, considering its age. Both the main game and the standalone expansion use a bit more that 7GB of space each.

BLAAAAAAASPHEMYYY!!!!! XD
Jokes aside, I liked Thief: Deadly Shadows as well, yet I was also among the disappointed, as the game could have been much, much more.
Usually I'm not one of those people the internet would call "PC elitists", but this time I have to say it: imo, all Thief: Deadly Shadows' faults can be connected to its Xbox (the original, not 360) release.
Thief 1 and 2 provided enormous maps with no loading screens and an insane amount of potential ways to go trough them, on the same level of Deus Ex if it was focused on pure stealth. The best part was that each action carried consequences throughout the course of the mission; the fact that alarming the guards or making too much mess could always result in tragedy continuously kept the palyer on its toes, and the game always rewarded the daring explorer. In Thief 3, the console's hardware limitation forced Ion Storm to build very small levels and, like it wasn't already enough, to further divide them in two or three smaller areas that didn't influence the others. I remember that this was painfully evident in the first level: one second the guards were following you through a corridor, and the next, after a loading screen, you were undetected. Moreover, the secrets were a small fraction of what you could find in the first two games.
That limited the possibilities, allowing the player to navigate the level in one, two or three weays at best, and with serious limitatons for the already reduced arsenal of gadgets. There wasn't even the rope arrow any more, mostly because verticality was nearly erased.
Also, they recycled the City as a hub with minor changes at every new visit and loot respawning in the same places to increase the length, and that imo was very bad.
Still, Thief 3 is as atmospheric as the first two, it was graphically stunning (and the hd texture pack makes it still fantastic) and it was probably the best narrative-wise. I loved the conclusion of Garrett's story! :)

Finished episodes 1-4 of Life is Strange... and now I can't wait to play episode 5 which should be out next week, but I won't be able to play it until the week after.

Story is great, graphics are gorgeous and music great. Gameplay is good and original for an adventure game.

Full list here.

Resident evil Revelations 2
Neighbors from Hell 1+2
Homefront
Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time
Ratchet & Clank: A Quest for booty
Ratchet & Clank: tools of destruction
Ratchet: Deadlocked
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate HD
Devil May Cry 3 HD
Saints Row: The Third

You finished that on easy? I was flying through the air like a f**kin matrix ninja, still got my ass handed to me on normal by the fire and ice bosses. That game is tough. But maybe you have extreme ninja skill, or maybe they made easy mode normal on the HD re-release.

Yeah, The Metal Age was definitely a better game in all ways except for the the graphics and things related to that (the Unreal engine having more realistic lighting and shadows- which is nice in a stealth game).
The fans i was meaning, were more those ones that rant about the game like it's unplayable or it's a mess or something, when actually it's not at all. It is still a very enjoyable and decent game!

In reflection now, after some more time thinking about it since finishing it, i think the bigger issue of Deadly Shadows wasn't the reduced map sizes but the reduced AI. In number 2 i seem to remember multiple guards having quite long patrol routes- sort of like a 3D Commandos game. In number 3 they didn't even make use of the smaller maps that they had. It sort of made hiding bodies rarely even necessary and you could work out their routes and patterns in just a minute or two. I'm not convinced all of that was due to the Xbox, some of it was probably Ion just being lazy and wanting to get the games out. There's still no real reason they couldn't have at least joined some of the areas together without loading areas for the PC.

I cheated to see the game through, whereas unlike the previous games which i completed on the harder difficulties without assistance, i could not even beat the Cerberus boss and it turns i did not like the game anyway compare to the previous two. made me decide not to play my copy of 4 for the time being anyway

Also because i mucked around on a harder Difficulty i never would have had the patience to finish it anyway - it takes a while to kill some of them

During my little break from System Shock, I played and finished Little Inferno again. I love that game, especially later in the game where you...


...well, play it and find out yourself!! It's still at -50% discount.

Time to go back in SS and teach SHODAN some code.

Well DMC4 is easier, in Nero play through. Because you have a devil arm that can exploit the weakness of boss.and hit for huge damage.

It let me get S rank easier compare to Dante play through.