Been a few months since I last finished a game, due mainly to the Crunchyroll subscription I picked up in August...

Heckabomb

Fun twin-stick shooter with upgrades, and some issues. Biggest one - the shop where you purchase upgrades and shields (think health) and switch between secondary systems (of which you can only have 1 equipped) is only accessible between levels, and if you die and use a continue you start from the beginning of the current level. Which means that if you happen to make a bad decision, you could easily waste all your continues on that one level even if you have a fortune in the bank.

Anyway, I managed to beat campaign level 50, which is where the last boss shows up. After that I think the game goes into endless mode. Also beat the Duel mode where you fight against an overpowered enemy fighter.

Nimble Quest

Very fun and addictive and unique (AFAIK) snake-inspired game with "snake fragments" reminiscent of tower defense style tower. Sure it might be a mobile port, but I never felt like it was missing anything (with the notable exception of achievements.) Finally managed to get far enough to unlock the final class (character/tower/snake fragment), and as the game is essentially endless I'm calling it "completed" now.

Finished Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It was a great game and it still is ! Great gunfights with some difficulty but nothing too serious. Really enjoyed playing it again.

Full list here.

Aside from the fact that the final boss is ridiculously hard it's a great game.

It was quite easy in fact. I had more challenge to beat the uber soldiers earlier in the game. For that one, I managed to beat him quite easily by circling around with my venom gun and my tesla (?) gun. I had more than half of my life at the end of the fight.

Weird I never beat it aside from using cheats. :P
Although I was younger when I played it and much less used to shooters.

IIRC the enemies that gave me the most trouble were the uzi-wielding femassassins. It felt like as soon as they were in sight, they'd headshot me with a full clip at long distance.

Momodora III

Fun little action platformer, but nothing very special. Do not expect the likes of Cave Story from this one, despite the two having similar art styles.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena

I finally finished the main quest, meaning that Staff of Chaos or whatever, and beating the baddie + freeing the king. I played as a mage, at the end I had just leveled up to level 21.

The main quest was quite drawn-out. So you have to find eight pieces of the staff scattered around the realm, and visit two dungeons to get one piece... I have to say it could have just as well been just 3 or 4 pieces. The game didn't really seem to have much more to show after I got the first piece. I think I got all the spells at that point already, and there wasn't really much interesting to see in the world. Ok so it is snowing in the north and more sunny in the south, but other than that, everything seemed so similar. There wasn't much incentive for me to examine and search the world or dungeons, no interesting places to visit as far as I could tell.

The subquests were also quite ho-hum, so I didn't do much of them either. So the basic problem with Arena is that while it gives you freedom to do your stuff and wander around freely, there's very little reason to do so, as there is hardly anything interesting to do and see.

Also I am unsure about the difficulty level... Are the enemies auto-levelling with you, or why am I still struggling with many enemies even though at level 20-21 I am fully maxed up, meaning pretty much all my skills are at full 100 (besides Personality (55) which doesn't affect combat), my health points are at 231, my armor ratings were all -29, etc.

Yet, it seemed that a couple of Stone Golems, Liches, or even mere Hell Hounds could kill me in a matter of seconds, unless I quickly cast some protective spells etc. It seemed that even though I was pretty much as powerful and protected you can become in the game, still I constantly felt very vulnerable. What if I had not finished the "+50 skill points" artifact quest four times in a row, or carefully made sure that at each level up I get the max extra health point (+11)? If I had faced the same enemies as half as powerful weakling, I think the game would have been impossible... UNLESS it was just a case of autoleveling, ie. the game made the enemies more powerful and more numerous just because I was more powerful too.

I guess it also made the game easier that I played as a mage, because Passwall, Leviate and Medusa's Gaze/Force Bolt spells are damn useful throughout the game (I was even able to paralyze the end boss with the Force Bolt a couple of times, even though it took several retries). Otherwise I would have had to use massive amounts of money to buy those spells as potions.

This was the patched up "Arena Setup EN" version of the game, not the GOG version. The game crashed sometimes, but it wasn't too bad, you just rerun the game and reload a save game. I didn't face any real game breaking bugs, even though sometimes I got stuck to some walls when descending from a platform (solution: do a running jump, Shift-J, and you are free again), and for some reason that divine chick didn't appear to me in a dream anymore to give the last quest (this is apparently a bug in the 1.06 version of the game; no matter, you can still go to the castle and do the quest, even though you were not specifically given it in your logbook)

I'll come up with a couple of good sides for the game:

- I liked the way the game directed you to your objectives, or the inn/store you were looking for. You'd originally get some fuzzy directions like "go towards NE, it is somewhere there", but when you got close enough, people would tell you the precise location.

- I liked the day/night cycle in the game. I recall wandering around in a city looking for an inn at 5 am, fighting enemies which come out at nights, and slowly seeing the day break, the sky slowly becoming alight so that you could see something, windows on the houses being lighted up, more and more people walking on the streets... for its time, that seems quite well implemented. I seriously felt relieved when I saw the day break finally, shops would open etc.

- If you have a good General MIDI sound card or soundfont, the music is occasionally quite good (e.g. in the palaces and stores). In dungeons less so, but meh.

Next to TES Daggerfall I guess, I hope it is better...

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (360)

Just over 100 hours on the final save. As far as i know i did all quests, but i admit i did rush the final few areas of the game, after i hit the level cap- so i may have missed a quest or two near the end for that reason. But it was an enjoyable huge world Action RPG overall.

When i first started it the graphics felt a bit low res for a modern game, but the longer i played the more i liked how every thing looked. It's more stylized in a similar way to the Fable games or even WoW. And it ran perfectly smooth all the way through too. Whilst it's open world, it's not in the same way as Bethesda games- areas are neatly and obviously defined when you look on the map and you always tend to know when you are going from region to region.
Voice acting is quite good as well for the most part.

Character building is better than most action RPG's and has some neat touches factored into the games "fate" mechanic which is your characters special ability (it's a story thing). Whilst you can specialize towards one class, spellcaster, warrior etc, for those that like to spread themselves out across more than one class you can then select applicable "fate cards" that give abilities tailor made to balance out the lack of specializing this path causes.

The combat system is also notable for going a step further than just simply spamming the attack button like most ARPG's. Amalur uses talent tree abilities to unlock simple combo moves. Nothing near as complicated as any dedicated fighting game, but it suits an action RPG pretty well. Unfortunately though, the highest tier abilities on the mage tree that i played seem grossly overpowered...for the final 20 hours or so i was mostly just spamming the meteor shower spell and leaving it at that. So maybe the game lacks some balance in that respect, i'm not sure how the other class builds fare in that regard.

Writing and story telling and quests vary, like most of these large RPG's, from excellent to mundane run of the mill fetch questing. But lets face it, it's probably not easy to come up with 200 unique and interesting side quests all for the same game! But i liked the main story and how it unfolded and the five main "faction" quests are also self contained developing stories in their own right. Overall the devs of this game obviously made far more of an effort than for something like Oblivion or Skyrim.

In over 100 hours of play, i didn't have any crashes, glitches or bugs at all. Considering the size of the world and the number of quests...that's actually quite an achievement in it's own right.
Most of my negative points for the game are so minor given the games size and scope that they are not even worth mentioning. The only thing i'll say is that combat became too easy overall, despite the actual combat mechanics being good. I'm not sure if that is just a balance problem for the spellcaster i played or the game overall. Not sure how to fix that really, as i don't like games that simply throw damage sponges at you either- as that would really become a drag in something this long.
Also, whilst i'd consider getting the DLC sometime, as they each add another 10 hours or so of play...i don't think i will bother since they didn't raise the level cap at all- who wants to play a character building RPG for 20 hours without being able to level? The other problem with the DLC is that each one of them individually costs more than i paid for the entire base game (which was AU$8 on sale on XBL)...so yeah, think i'll pass on the DLC.

Overall it was great open world action RPG and it's too bad the devs didn't get a shot at fine tuning their formula for a sequel.

Emily Is Away
I saw this mentioned in this thread, but can't find it now. A nice little experience. I ran through it twice to confirm that the totally different decisions you make bring you to the exact same place at each stopping point (5 "scenes" in total). I liked the setup of telling the story only through an IM interface.

Tourist
Game jam entry by Owl Cave, the devs that did Richard & Alice and The Charnel House Trilogy. It's about 15 minutes long. Nice visuals I thought with an attempt at a wonky or surprising story that fell a bit flat. It's available at itch for a voluntary donation, but I'd rather recommend you support them by buying the games mentioned above. I didn't find this a waste of time - some real interesting stories when you look at the photos in your hotel room - but don't all go rushing out at once to download or anything.

---

...sigh...

Zugenruhe
Now I know I shouldn't get all incited by game jam visual novels that I didn't pay for, but this is horrid. I wrote up a long review (wherein I kinda offer to fight the dev) but it's not worth the time to type it here. The author of the story, Morgen Boulton, should seek an education. This is insipid Nazi apologism at its worst. Fuck you, Morgen. My great-grandmother's family was killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust. But it's truly awesome that the great-grandfather in this got to publish his story about his adventures shipping genocide victims to camps. Well done. P.S. The deeds of the war criminals are not forgiven, as you so fucking idiotically suggest.

http://www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277%7D/SWC_130703_FINAL.PDF

I forgot to mention this.

A couple of weeks ago, I completed the campaign for Dawn of War. I really enjoyed it. I might play through Dawn of War II soon since I didn't get that into the expansions (Steam deal).

A Golden Wake

A bit underwhelming at first when compared to other Wadjet eye titles. The setting is unique and well though out. But the scale of your character seems out of place in most of the locations in which some are missing some obvious details in the environment.

The puzzles are straighforward for the most part., even if they don't make a of sense.

I think the story could have been fleshed out much more. When a major event happens it seems amost rushed. For such a short game it takes too long to really get going. This may have been enevitable given the setting and story structure though.

I still enjoyed it and woud recommend it.

Battlepaths

Started it a long while ago, and finally got around to beating it. Fun game, but while it looks like a roguelike and controls like a roguelike, it isn't a rogue-like because the maps and enemies are all static - only the loot is randomized. The last map was an enormous pain until I found a couple great items. Dunno how much level grinding I would've needed without them. The final boss was an even bigger pain, since he dealt damage at about twice the rate as my best healing potion could heal. Thankfully the boss room had a few places he couldn't reach me, so I could heal up a bit there - but he had a ranged attack while I didn't (except for a few very expensive potions) so the 5 or so steps needed to exit the hiding place and close into melee range were very very painful (as were the 5 steps needed to retreat back.)

I've played through the first two maps, I fully explored and I quite enjoyed them, but the difficulty spike in the third map made the game more of a slog than fun to play. I suddenly felt less powerful than when my character was still level 1 and I often had to run from regular enemies even when they were on their own, in order to heal up in the town. Seems like there's a huge gap in balance that would require you to grind a lot by replaying the previous maps. From what you write it sounds like it doesn't get much better and it isn't really worth it to try and complete the game?

Grim Fandango

After a few months break I got back to playing it again with the aim to finish it, last time I was going to play it my save file was gone so I wasn't sure if I'd bother to play it again but I'm glad I did since it worked flawlessly this time around! Some puzzles were pretty difficult and the ending "boss battle" was a bit disappointing but otherwise it was really good, the puzzles never felt like they where in the way of the story, all the characters felt unique and it's definitely a game I'd recommend people to play! It has held up surprisingly well, gaming classic without a doubt.

I'm considering to buy the Monkey Island series during the sale to see if I'll like them too.