Sepia Tears

For a 1. free 2. ren'py 3. visual novel 4. from Desura, I really couldn't have asked for a lot more. I thought the writing style was pretty adequate, somewhat at the juvenile end of things but not really amateurish. Certainly not written by a Nabokov or Tolstoy, but it wasn't cringe-inducing. The plot wound up a little bit pointless at the end - where it was leading could have had a different payoff and been more rewarding. The music was light jazz/lounge-y and decent, though a few pieces didn't fit the overall feel. The painted photos as background were hit or miss, some bland and suburban, some really pretty. The mood was winter, and achieved fairly well. Only a couple of typos - and they were actual words, so at least a spellcheck was used.

Yet despite all of that, it just wasn't compelling to me at all. After playing an hour or two and putting it aside in late December, I started it over in early January. And it took me until mid-February to get through it. All the pieces seemed to be there, but they didn't fit together for me.

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Chaos on Deponia
The beginning doesn't felt right to me. It was a lot of running around and picking up various items without a clear idea what to do and without the game giving me a direction. I also didn't recall Rufus being such an unlikeable character and egocentric prick.

But fortunately the game got better the longer it lasted and in the end I had good fun playing it.

Most of the puzzles were ok, not too easy, but always fair and you could solve most of them without the good old use-everything-on-everythng tactic. One of the puzzles was bugged though (at least in the German version text and sound wasn't the same which was really bad, because the puzzle was sound-based) and I had to use a walkthrough to solve it.

Complete list of finished games in 2015

Dungeons and Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara

This one is nostalgia bait, through and through.

It's from Capcom, though, so I shouldn't be surprised.

This double-pack of arcade games are a port of the originals, only with extra so-called challenges included to pad out what are otherwise straight quarter-munchers from years ago.

Difficulty is nonexistent, considering that you have unlimited continues. But they have to do that, because otherwise they would have had to go back and balance out the difficulty.

Wouldn't recommend it as anything but a deeply discounted purchase since I was able to clear both games with next to no effort in less than 4 hours.

It might be enjoyable with multiplayer, but the singleplayer isn't worth anything apart from a trip down memory lane.

Feb 16 - Left in the Dark: No One on Board

This is a pretty short game that is fun, but not too much of a challenge and nothing that really sets it apart from others.

The artwork, sounds, and music are good and the cutscenes are animated well. The voice acting is nothing spectacular. It's decent except when the characters express shock or surprise, which comes out sounding pretty flat and forced. The storyline is OK. The game allows you to skip through lines in cutscenes instead of the entire cutscene.

The hidden object scenes are fairly easy with only a few objects being very difficult, but none requiring a hint. The adventure "grab-an-object-use-the-object" type puzzles were pretty straight-forward. There is a particularly silly one near the end though, but I won't give it away. The onscreen puzzle scenes are not very challenging either.

As usual, the in-game map and notebook are very useful, so definitely use them.

It's worth noting that there is no bonus chapter.

Started and finished The Bureau: XCOM Declassified this weekend. On the whole, it's an average third-person shooter with some tactical elements tacked onto an okay science fiction story. As someone who hasn't played any of the X-COM games, I approached it as a 60's X-Files game. However, that description sounds more exciting than this game, where your entire interaction with the game world is with a gun. There is a dialog wheel in it; however, this isn't used to advance the game but only to get more information about what is happening. The tactical aspect of the battles can get rather tedious as your AI squad has to be told to use their abilities, as opposed to something like Mass Effect, where they can generally hold their own. The 1960's setting is cool at first, but the veneer wears and you're faced with corridors of chest-high walls to hide behind. Not a bad game to play through for the main storyline, but skip the side missions which are just more of the same.

So far:
Kingdom Rush: Frontiers
Kingdom Rush
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified

Just finished Wizardry 8 which was almost a year's struggle.
The game was so grinding, about 80% of playing time was fighting monsters.
But turn based fighting was quite fun, perhaps one of the pinnacle of turn base battle system of all RPGs.
Some puzzles are very difficult. I couldn't beat the game without a walk-though on the net.
Also I've experienced a nasty script bug which almost ruined the game, I only get over it by this sub forum thread (Thanks!).

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The Banner Saga

The last gift from my Secret Santa, thanks again :)

I really like the story of this game, settings, the way it's told, decisions you have to make even though a lot of them are rather superfluous. I did enjoy battles because they were challenging enough to keep me entertained. But the battles have a very unique mechanics and apparently "unique" is not always good. The thing is that if both parties have more than one character alive your turns will ALWAYS alternate. You can have two characters and fight against eight and it'll always be you-enemy-you-enemy playing. Combine it with a fact that your strength is always directly proportional to your hit points and you get the most ridiculous battles I've ever seen. A winning strategy is to hurt an enemy who hasn't moved yet and drop him to 1,2 HP but without killing him. This way he'll always be in line to play an enemy turn end thus block healthy and more dangerous character. Who could have thought that it would be a good idea?! That was so unrealistic and immersion breaking that I had to play the game in small portions. Fortunately there were other nice aspects that I truly enjoyed and I can still recommend this game.


Full list

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

Yay:

+ character customization
+ well-written (interesting quests and characters)
+ well-designed (multiple play styles viable)
+ atmospheric
+ music and sound design


Meh:

+ even with a fan patch (True Patch, because yuck unsolicited modifications), there were still issues
+ voice acting (ranges from decent to atrocious)
+ too easy (finished game with way too many points left)
+ too short for a game this good (~45 hours for first playthrough)
+ can't join Sabbat (Tzimisce best clan :p)


Nay:

+ poor performance / FPS drops (old computer, but not that old)
+ combat (ranged is fine, but melee...)


Conclusion: Troika/3. Off for another playthrough.

Fallout: New Vegas.

That was a fun fifty something hours. I'm not going to write my usual novel length review, but here is what I liked and didn't like about it.

I enjoyed the writing (dialogue and general writing), the voice acting was well done, the combat itself (both melee and ranged) felt good and balanced, the characters were well done and I enjoyed the overall greyness of both the game's overarching stories, morality and characters. I know that doesn't give much info, but I basically enjoyed everything the game offered.

I didn't like how many artificial barriers there were, despite it being open world there are certain paths you have to take, lest you run into an invisible wall. Often times these invisible walls are in places that don't make sense and serve no purpose other than to pad the game length, forcing you to walk around obstacles that you should be able to cross. It's easily the buggiest game I've ever played, and I played Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines without the unofficial patches! At one point it was crashing every time I tried to fast travel, or entered certain areas, and my saves were constantly being corrupted (though they were easily fixed). Graphically it's fairly ugly due to a bland (though setting appropriate) art direction.

All in all I really enjoyed it and I'll probably give it another playthrough in the future so I can side with a different faction and get one of the other endings.

That's strange... during my playthrough (notice that I bought a physical copy of the Ultimate Edition year after the game was initially released), the game crashed onIy twice and I stumbled only in one major bug: somehow, probably due to a bug in the uniforms system, all the NCR members started to attack me for no reason (I was even idolized by the faction)!
I solved the issue by loading a save before entering Vegas and chenging my outfit to a non-faction armour.

By the way, spoilers allowing... which faction did you decide to support (*if* you supoorted one, of course)?

And Yet It Moves
I absolutely loved the art style and the concept of this game, but I'm not completely happy with the level design. Most of the early levels were quite boring and the fact that you have to solve the (mostly) same puzzles over and over again doesn't help.

Later levels were better though, but I can't help to feel that one could have made a much better game with such a good concept.

But I have to admit that the playable credits were a great idea. Had much more fun with it than with most of the real levels.

Complete list of finished games in 2015

My version is Steam's Ultimate Edition. I ran into a LOT of bugs besides the crashes, including friendlies attacking for no reason (reload fixed that) and one bug that would've made the main quest impossible to complete if I hadn't been on PC.

I sided with Mr. House, had Messiah level karma and got the good outcome for almost everything (I ignored the companion's quests due to never really using them, and never got around to clearing out the Powder Gangers), my next character will probably be a vilified bastard who supports the Legion haha.

TypeRider. I'm not sure why but for some reason I had the notion that this was a typing challenge game, like Typing of the Dead, but it turns out it's a physics platformer with the gimmick that it gives little lessons on the history of typography. I'm not really big into physics platformers, but thankfully this one was fairly easy and I knocked it off after a couple of days of casual gaming. The graphics are pretty good and some of the levels have cute touches like the western-themed level in which a crosshair follows you around as tries to shoot your little dots. I wouldn't necessarily recommend going out of one's way for it, but it's not bad if you got it in a bundle like I did.

SPOILERS

I decided to side with the NCR. It was not exactly pleasing, as they are your standard corrupt "democracy", yet I always sided with them in the rest of the series (I actually contributed to their birth!) and they seemed the best choice to keep order in the wasteland while stopping the Legion vanguards (which I admired for the principles but not for the methods).
Everything had the best possible "cooperative" outcome, and now the New Vegas territory should be under the relatively peaceful NCR rule. All bandits have been... pacified. Fear my .50 rounds!
One of these days I should try to follow Yes Man's suggestions... it sounds like total chaos! ;)
Also, I love the cheerful and slimy way he uses to talk about abuse of power!

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