Where to start, where to start...

Guess I'll just go sequentially and respond to each statement in order.

Let's begin.

To start, I made it clear that I had more complaints about the product, but given that it was rather late at the time, I didn't feel like running through every single one.

If I was getting paid to write the review, that would be a different story. But I wasn't.

Also, it has to be said, I'm not under any particular obligation to dissect every single game I list here, nor do I have to defend my opinion since you liked it and feel you need to defend it, as if you're going to change my mind about it somehow, convincing me to sing the praises of some shitty game rather than tearing it apart.

Not going to happen.

But I digress.

Two "minor" complaints, both of which speak to the overall poor quality of the product.

The art assets issue speaks to the general laziness, the need to pad because the product is ultimately extremely flimsy, with the cliched story, ridiculous premise, boring characters, almost nonexistent and exceedingly poorly implemented relationship meters, the writing being bad not only in a storytelling sense, but bad in regards to basic spelling and grammar, the same boring recycled sound being used over and over again, the same pictures being used over and over and over until any polite thought you have regarding their quality is replaced by the cold knowledge that it was all ugly from the start, the near complete lack of animation which made every already boring fight even more so since it was less visually appealing than staring at a wall, the continued monotony of "exploring" each sector, which is ultimately as exciting as clicking a mouse to fill spaces on a bingo card.

The problem with the final boss is a continued reminder that the difficulty, the flow of the turn-based combat is ultimately broken.
With a final boss, you're supposed to have a sense of accomplishment after defeating it, that feeling of a hard fought battle won. It's the last thing the designers are presenting to the player on an interactive level, so it needs to be good. It needs to be memorable.
But between the combat system being poor to begin with, the encounters being boring and the characters' abilities being lackluster at best and badly presented to boot, it was a continued example of the "well, if we add more hit points to the boss to make the fight longer, that makes it better" approach.

It doesn't, though. It doesn't serve to provide a good experience. It only draws out a bad one.

Now, onto the next attempted point.

Yes, I did spend 13 hours running through it. Was it fun? No. Was it enjoyable? No. Was it compelling? Pardon me a moment while I turn my head to avoid spitting coffee on my monitor while laughing.

I spent 175 hours on Soulstorm, a game that makes me happy THQ is no longer in existence.

Some games aren't played because they're good, or enjoyable, or fun.

Not by a long shot.

I would say there are a grand total of two good, pleasantly memorable things about Planet Stronghold.

1. The game saying I might want to save after the final boss fight so that, if an add-on or expansion comes out, I could play them with my current character.

I laughed for a solid 5 minutes at the absurdity of that notion.

2. I got a foil trading card that I could give to someone. The garbage I slogged through will allow for someone else to hopefully get a game that they enjoy.

That's a hell of a lot more than the actual experience of the game provided, and that was pure luck.

Next - my negative opinion of the game stems from it being a boring, poorly made piece of shit that happens to be overpriced as well.

No more. No less.

And yes, I could have gone with a demo of it. But given that I saw a bit of Let's Play video with it, I had a small amount of preexisting knowledge about it.

It already looked bad, but I thought that maybe it would improve, or at the very least be awful in an amusing way.

Turns out my sliver of potential optimism was horrendously misplaced. That happens sometimes.

But I finished it because I'm not buying or renting games for them to sit in a stockpile that will never be cleared.
If it's ended up on my plate, for whatever reason, I'll eat every last bite. Even if it's rancid shit.

As for the argument of whether or not 20 dollars for 13 hours is overpriced?

Well, you used a word that I absolutely would NOT - entertainment.

If it was actually good, it'd be a different story.

This is the whole inherent subjectiveness of opinion thing. It's why we call them opinions and not facts.

You liked it. That's fine. More power to you.

I still think it's a piece of shit, and more power to me for thinking so as well.

Kinda wish I could have had your experience, honestly, because I have to keep wondering why in the holy fuck I spent a night running through Planet Stronghold.

Very bad judgment/masochistic tendency on my part. Thankfully, I don't have too many more games with a high chance of being awful.
They're getting a bit tiring.

Lastly, in regards to standard? I figure someone at GOG had the same thought I did - that if Planet Stronghold is an indicator of overall quality, they might want to pass since it'd be laughable to put that up on the front page and attempt to hype it to consumers.

If GOG put Planet Stronghold on the front page, I'd be wondering what kinds of illegal drugs the good people at GOG Central were indulging in at the time that business decision was made.

Feb 20 - Quest of Dungeons - warrior on easy

Big thumbs up! I highly recommend this game! It's great to play no matter whether you have 10 minutes or the entire evening.

Gameplay is pretty simple: move around, attack, pickup objects, etc, but the simplicity can be deceiving at times. You'll need to manage your resources, decide what equipment is best for you and pick your battles (sometimes). Luckily you can run away from boss battles if you aren't ready for them, though this becomes more difficult the closer the boss gets to you.

There is a good variety of monsters. There are many types of weapons and equipment and these can also have ability modifiers on them to make them unique. The dungeon generation is pretty good with only the rare graphical glitch (like a carpet missing a section).

The opening cutscene certainly sets the tone for the game. It's generally pretty funny with a heavy dose of light dark humor. The monsters taunt you and the shopkeeper sometimes seemed a bit shady to deal with. This really gave the game some character to it.

Animation is minimal, but that's OK. The characters bounce along as they move and that works out. I really didn't miss having more complex animation sequences.

The soundtrack fits the game nicely. The shopkeeper has his own theme and it helps rotate the music. A new song starts when you leave the shop.

Some things I wish it had:
- Bottles of water, food, etc that stack in one space like gems do instead of taking one space per item.
- Ability to rest/regain health and mana without moving around. (Maybe the Enter key.)
- Ability to see item information by hovering the mouse over it (instead of needing to click).

I have only finished it with the warrior on easy, but I will keep it installed to play the other characters.

-Rogue Legacy-
Love:
.-The Meta abuse for states made feel awesome when playing a knave or assasin, it's fucking awesome!
.-The Classes are diverse and there too many to love to not put here
.-It's a roguelike, a fucking challenge man, specially the second set of bosses (but thank god I don't get to replay them, they put my ass on a salad chudder one time, I am not gonna repeat that)
Meh:
.-There are bugs from bosses that do weird me the fuck out, some times I am teleported above the boss area or down, I am going in the other room through a wall!, it doesn't help some bosses' attacks can go BEYOND the walls!
.-The animation are so good!, but they often ralentize time reaction and if you don't get it right where as soon as you see an enemy you could get blasted across the room, specially with some quirks the characther might have, so you have to spam the attack button to optimize results
.-the lack of challenge before end game (since you will adept to the system rather well, to the point you don't even get damaged) makes the experience rather dull, but thank god for new game plus
Hate:
.-The final boss and the second set of that boss, I hate them, so bad, I would make my own characther a dragon so he could scorch his dick off in front of said last boss to show what he has put me through, and proceed to do it to him as well -_-
.-The map design may really get to you to understand by the 15th hour, so not only it gets boring to get all the items and equipment, it's a fucking hassle to even try except when you are in the beggining game!, when you don't even need levels, but actual gear, which there is a lack thereof in the map do to the engine!, which could lend it to you easy, or be the hardest thing there ever waas besides seeing that video of 4han in which a guy cutted his dick in half

Oh my God Crow I spent a few nights in agony along with you in the Free For All thread just reading your Soulstorm suffering. If I had known the grand total was 175 hours I might have actually been the first person to die from self inflicted hanging due to proxy video game torture!

I like you. Don't hang yourself, no matter how bitchy I get. -laughs- =)

Star Wars: Mysteries of the Sith
I stil love it. Dromund Kaas levels are still creepier and more oppressive than most of today's horror games. And it was great to watch the cutscenes on full screen unlike in the Steam version :)

*after reading the last page of posts*

Wow... I love this thread so much! lol~

Finally finished The Cat Lady! Great game. VERY dark! Cool atmosphere with an emphasis on dreams/after life. Highly recommend if you have the stomach.

Started Costume Quest more than 2 years ago. I finished it today :)
It was not a bad game but after not playing it for a while I did not feel any need to go back to it at the time. After finding out I was about two thirds done, and those two thirds had not taken long, I decided to give it a go and get it off the backlog.

I liked the look of it, the premise, the idea behind the gameplay. What I did not enjoy was that the fights were way to easy. As I got farther in the game I was hoping for less fights because it was all easy and repetitive. Boss fights were ok. Maybe the difficulty had something to do with the fact that this is a very children friendly game.

My final issue is: Why is Costume Quest 2 not available on GOG?!?

Anyway, I also beat the final boss of FTL again after a number of failed attempts.

Lost Chronicles of Zerzura (Adventure)

There are three tabs in the Settings panel: Game, Graphics, and Sound. Options include subtitles, game cursor, additional help, and hotspot indicator under Game; screen resolution from 640x480 up to 1920x1080, gamma (brightness), and quality under "Graph."; and separate sliders for general, music, speech, effects, and environment.

This is a classic point-and-click style adventure game, hence you'll need to save manually. I completely forgot about this until the moment I got killed, and that sinking feeling of, "Oh no... do I have to do all of that again? *faint* " was quickly dispelled by the game's auto-save (blessed be!) Still, to be safe, I HIGHLY recommend saving often!

One irritation that I frequently see voiced about this kind of adventure is that the characters walk. so. slowly. Not an issue in this game! Your character automatically runs anywhere you click on the screen, and you can double-click on exits to skip the running altogether.

The game progresses via voiced-over, simple cutscenes, whilst the rest of the graphics are quite detailed and lovely to look at. The voices are done well, but the music annoyed me. Good thing we have those sliders for the sounds!

There are a few issues with the subtitles, in that sometimes the actors aren't saying exactly what's written on the screen. It's a bit jarring when it comes up, but not so much that I wanted to turn off the subtitles.

Interactions with other characters are pretty straightforward -- click on them to talk to them, then choose an image that represents what you'd like to talk about. Our character's text is white, whilst other characters have their own colors. Very nice, as it helps you distinguish who's talking, on the off chance that you don't recognize their voice. You don't have to wait for the people to finish speaking if you're a fast reader -- simply click anywhere to move the conversation along.

Bring your cursor to the bottom of the screen to see your inventory, and to the top of the screen to see the options there: Magnifying glass (hotspot indicator), Papers (save/load game), and a Book (your diary.) Sadly, the diary sometimes mentions things that you haven't discovered yet, so I only read it occasionally.

Your inventory is easily managed. Hover your mouse over an item to see the object's title (ie. carved stone,) and right-click to examine it more closely or to consume it. Grab something from your inventory and drop it on another item to combine them. If you'd like to save some time, anywhere you can use an object -- whether it's a specific place on the screen or by combining it -- the cursor will gradually turn red when it's an action you can take. For instance (completely made up, this isn't a spoiler,) say you have a loaf of bread and a knife in your inventory. Grab the knife, hold it over the loaf of bread, and if if you need sliced bread for something, the cursor will start to turn red. You could just drop it on the loaf of bread and skip that entirely, but when you have 15 things in your possession, and you're not sure what you're supposed to be doing, it's a real time-saver! :D

I played without extra help (although I did have to use the hotspot indicator), and all of the tasks I was able to figure out eventually. This is a game with mostly-logical actions, which is something I highly appreciate! My one point of contention is that sometimes I would find something I KNEW I needed to interact with, but nothing in my inventory worked! Save yourself some frustration, and click on interesting areas more than once to see if anything changes. Wish I'd known that sooner!

This, like most point-and-click adventures, is a slow-paced game, though it does have its moments. The story is interesting enough, and the devs did a pretty good job keeping anachronisms out of the game.

This was a nice stop-down from the action-adventures I've been playing lately. I'd say it's definitely worth playing. :)

Anomaly Warzone Earth

This one's a short but interesting game.

The story's cliched and not exactly in-depth, but the gameplay I've seen described as tower offense is one I hadn't played through before and enjoyed quite a bit.

The sound is acceptable, nothing outstanding, nothing abysmal, and the voice acting is on a level of "you might be able to tell that we're not exactly old hands at this, but damn it, we're at least trying our best to not embarrass ourselves".

Really, the gameplay is the primary reason by far to check this out.

The combination of controlling a commander who tells the units which route to take, supporting them, gathering support power-ups while trying to make sure the troops didn't get annihilated, collecting currency and deciding what army composition I wanted made for some hectic moments later on in the game.

Granted, I did get a bit screamy when my units would target certain low-level threats rather than the huge murder machine-level threats, even as those high-end dangers did their best to tear my units to pieces, but even then I never reached a frustration level that would cause me to quit.

The difficulty curve on this one is gradual up to a point, but the final boss fight might make you want to quit at first.
Or in my case, it made me curse quite a bit. But a few attempts and it was done.

Will finish with a word of advice for that last level. It contains one of my most hated phrases in video games - respawning enemies.

Leisure Suit Larry 6: Very enjoyable, the most fun I’ve had with this series since LSL1 (1987). Just the right combination of humour and difficulty.

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

Excellent story, writing, atmosphere and voice acting (with one notable exception) making up for the meh gameplay - puzzles are too easy, combat is too awkward, stealth sections too annoying (but I always find stealth sections annoying, so maybe these were just fine.)

Anyway, I really enjoyed the story, and am glad that Dreamfall Chapters are coming along to tie up the story.

Oh and the notable exception from above was Na'ane's voice actress. No surprise that this "Hadeel Alwash" doesn't show up in the credits for anything else known to IMDB or MobyGames - she must've been a relative of somebody with influence over the game... I really hope that if the character shows up in Dreamfall Chapters, they pick a VA with some actual skill to voice her.

Detective Grimoire

Quite alright for an interactive story game. There is no real challenge to speak of, the few 'puzzles' found in it are a joke, even more casual than casual, and the plot isn't all that spectacular, but the storytelling is good, I liked the graphics and the voice acting was great. And it was short. I don't have anything else to say about it.



Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

I loved Arx Fatalis because of its gameplay and atmosphere, and Dark Messiah doesn't disappoint in this regard either. The gameplay is deeply satisfying, allowing for all kinds of tactics and action, stealth, sniping, magic (inlcuding nightvision and telekinesis as well as offensive spells), great melee with all kinds of weapons, exploiting traps, kicking enemies into spikes or off bridges and cliffs, throwing all kinds of things at them to put them off balance, using rope bows to climb, finding secret areas etc. And I enjoyed that you don't really have to choose between different approaches - you don't get enough skill points to learn everything there is, but you can still be good enough at several things at the same time (melee, ranged, magic and stealth), so that you can always adapt to different enemies and situations, if you want to. The setting is dark again, exploration and dungeon crawling is exciting as ever. Arkane Studios is among the best when it comes to all this.

Regarding the story, I'm of two minds. It has an interesting premise, but is rather simple in the end. Partially I liked that it is told in a weirdly unusual way, so that it isn't always clear what's going on and the people around you act quite strange, which at first seems mysterious and exciting, but then it mostly stays that way until the ending and you realize it's not really all that clever but actually just a bit awkward, the character-painting remains very superficial, especially Leanna is quite the offender in this regard. And part of the story is told in some kind of journal entries displayed on the loading screens at the beginning of each chapter, and that might have worked in the past, provided the loading times were abyssmal back then, but on my current PC the levels loaded too quickly for me to comfortably read these texts, as there was no pause button - when the level was ready, the text vanished. Not that the texts appeared to be very insightful and that you wouldn't understand the story without them, but since they included these texts in the game, I would have liked to read them all the same.

I was glad that I did save often and that you can have two quicksaves and several autosave files at the same time, in addition to the unlimited regular saves, because occasionally I also ran into bugs or glitches that forced me to reload an earlier savegame. So the game could have been a bit more polished and the story a bit more interesting, but all in all it's still a great game due to its awesome gameplay.

Tesla Effect (22nd feb 1:25pm)

It was enjoyable game. some of the puzzles are meh and sometimes you will get lost. Plus being a fmv games it 10 ties better