Driftmoon
It is a nice little RPG. Or to better say it adventure RPG. It has no deep or complex features in regards of skill system or combat, but it has a nice story and world to explore. If you want some light experience to play an hour here and there to relax this is a good game to choose.

Two Worlds. A underrated yet ultimately mediocre game is how I would describe Two Worlds. It has some positives, a beautiful and vast open world for you to explore at your leisure, an incredible amount of loot (literally hundreds of unique items to be found), a novel crafting system and a lack of leveling scaling means that there is always a challenge.

The world is incredibly large, just smaller than Oblivion's game world. You have large forests, arctic mountains, rolling grasslands and even a large dead forest. Despite looking great, much of the world can be described as "generic" and even uninspired, as the environment lacks the personal touch you can find in a Piranha Bytes or Bethesda game, and you can see places that exist for no other reason than to add size to the map.

There are numerous villages and a few large cities but every village looks alike and the two major cities look like one major city that was cut in half. The design of some cities make no sense, for example there is a single city that is Japanese inspired (right down to having Samurai), two cities that are Roman inspired (with legionnaire inspired characters) and every other place is generic ye olde England.

Each village and city is heavily populated with unique NPCs and with generic not worth talking to NPCs that would be named "Villager" or "Townsman" in most games but in Two Worlds each citizen has a name. Although each city has a large population only a few NPCs (example: 2 out of 30) will have a quest for you, luckily they are designated with a special icon.


The quests are 99% generic RPG "go fetch me this" "go kill these Orcs" style, but there are some that are fairly interesting. Most quests are completely linear but there are some that have branches, unfortunately nobody really cares which side you take in those situations.

The character building is well done, both for melee, archers and mages. There are plenty of ways for you to build your character and they're all viable though the mages seem to be the most underpowered.

Combat is also well done, if a bit shallow. My favorite ability was being able to fire 5 arrows at once, effectively allowing me to take out entire groups of enemies before they could pull their weapon. Melee is simple and is timing and rhythm based.

There is no (noticeable at least) level scaling on enemies, so the most dangerous enemies are in the world at level 1, just as the level 1 equivalent enemies are. This gives a great sense of progression, from having to run from Grey Wolves (the second type of wolf) to being able to fight giant golems with ease. Loot is tied to your level (to a degree) but you're constantly finding bigger and better items so you never experience the "what's the point" feeling that Oblivion or Skyrim gives.

Two Worlds takes a fresh approach to crafting. If you have two identical items such as Iron Swords that do 8 damage then you can stack them (which can't be undone) to create an Iron Sword that does 16 damage. The multiplier changes depending on how much you've stacked an item, the more you stack an item the smaller the multiplier gets. I found a bow early in the game that did 677 damage and by the end of the game it was doing over 2000 damage. You can also add charms to items that add elemental damage or add elemental protection. Weapons, armor, rings can all be improved.

The game's approach to magic works the same as crafting. If you have a Fireball spell card and you find another then you can stack them and increase the Fireball's damage. The same goes for all other spells. There is also booster cards that you can find/buy that increase the power/duration of your spells.

I would say the writing is generally poor. There is some nice lore to discover but it's presented in the worst fashion: poorly written lore vendor NPCs. NPCs are long winded, which combined with how poor the dialogue is written will make you wish they would stop talking, instead of making you want to learn more about whatever the subject is.

Voice acting is generally mediocre to poor. It has earned its reputation as being one of the worst voiced (modern) RPGs. However I did enjoy the main character's voice acting, even if it was mostly silly and overly dramatic.

I found the graphics to be extremely well done all around (environment, armor, monsters,etc etc), save for character models which are oddly proportioned.

I found the soundtrack to be forgettable at best and sometimes outright annoying.

Do I regret the thirty plus hours it took to finish Two Worlds? No, not really. However the first fifteen were far more enjoyable than the last fifteen. If you care more about finding cool loot and mowing down hordes of enemies all across a huge and beautiful open world then you'll probably like Two Worlds, if you care about story or cohesive world building then look elsewhere.

Dragonsphere is a pretty good point-and-click adventure game (see? I play my free games). Compared to most Sierra and Lucasarts games of the time, it's fairly serious in tone, telling a fantasy story about a young king who's destined to battle a wizard imprisoned in a magical tower. It's not badly written, which is good because there's a lot of text in the game - you can click on most objects and get unique messages even if most of it has no relevance to the gameplay or story. There's a big twist midway through the game's story, so try to avoid spoilers of this, er, 20-year-old game if you can.

I'm not sure I ever fully got used to the interface, which lacks a use or operate command like many similar games, but the puzzles are a good mix and the game mostly plays fair. I got stumped a couple of times and needed to run to UHS, and a couple of times I wasn't moving the pointer to just the right spot to figure out what to do; the game looks quite nice but one of my nitpicks about early 90s VGA games is that the more realistic the art is, the more the fine details get lost and become easy to miss because of pixelization.

The voice acting is terrible.

Yep! I had a hard time working out what to do sometimes because it's not always clear which verb to use. The game has:

Look
Talk to
Take
Give
Push
Pull
Open
Close
Put
Pull

but no "use" =/

Also, compare the graphics to Simon the Sorcerer to this, another fantasy adventure from the time. That game looked crisp because it's all pixel art. Dragonsphere can look pretty smudgy at times. Seriously, the first two Simon the Sorcerers are up there with some of the best video game pixel art (mainly the second though).

Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold

If I could describe Blake Stone in 4 words, those would be "Wolfenstein 3D in space". As prettier as it is than Wolfenstein 3D, the game is very, very reminiscent of it. Movement, shooting, the enemy sprites, the flatness of the surrounding scenery and other stuff in general are very similar to Wolfenstein 3D, which isn't surprising when the game is actually based on an enhanced version of the Wolfenstein 3D engine.

As such, you should expect a similar experience to Wolfenstein 3D; run around stages, looking for treasures and keys, gunning down a good number of enemies (aliens and space soldiers instead of Nazis), exit the stage, maybe find a secret level, finish the episode, tackle the next one and so on. Also like Wolfenstein 3D, all weapons are using the same kind of ammo and are progressively stronger, but unlike it, you don't necessarily discard the rest of your weapons when you pick the strongest one. The weakest pistol can be ideal to preserve ammo in some cases as it doesn't use it, while the chaingun (or its equivalent, anyway) can be used to shoot at turrets that the grenade launcher can't hit. Other differences include the addition of an automap (very useful, especially when the game starts becoming a bit too repetitive with its environments), some strange kinds of enemies (like lightning and water elementals, alongside the aliens) and having to return back to the beginning of each stage to proceed to the next one via an elevator.

It also carries some of the annoyances of Wolfenstein 3D, like crappy strafing controls (with the extra infuriating factor that you can't use specific keys like W and S without the use of an external program, because they are hardwired in the game), a tendency to place enemies in annoying spots where they can deal a huge amount of damage (because the closer they are to you, the higher the damage they can cause) and the overall feeling that the game lasts longer than it should (it doesn't help that the last 3 episodes don't offer anything new, either in the way of environments or enemies). Also, the game's low resolution can make it pretty hard to spot turrets in the distance and the inability to look up can sometimes prove fatal when you enter a door and fail to notice the turret looming upon you. Another annoyance is the existence of bio-techs. Those scientists can sometimes be useful by offering ammo packs and coins (which can be used on food vendors to restore your health), but at other times they can be highly annoying by blocking your way and standing in front of enemies. Killing them will net you a penalty to your score, which can be frustrating for those looking to get a high score.

All in all, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold is an OK alternative to Wolfenstein 3D, but there are better FPS games, new and old out there.

Full list.

Honestly, I thought it was better than Wolfenstein 3D.

As you mentioned, there's a map, which is a huge draw (especially for someone, like me, who is terrible at directions). But, also, I liked the atmosphere a lot, including the music. There's also a bunch of cool features that weren't seen at the time in other FPSs (vending machines, NPCs, and the ability to return to previous levels).

I would recommend playing the second Blake Stone game, which is think is superior to this one.

I have already started playing Planet Strike and aside a better variety in the environments, it feels like it's more of the same. We'll see, though.

FEAR: Extraction Point - This expansion pack is a decent continuation of the base game, and is overall much creepier and unsettling than the first. The story starts by undoing what you spent the first game doing; however, once the action starts going it gets better. Unfortunately, the first half of the game puts you into familiar environments from the first game, that can get repetitious. That's the one complaint I have about this series of games, the environments start to blend together after awhile. Recommended if you like the first game.

FEAR: Perseus Mandate - This expansion pack, however, trods over familiar ground. There's nothing new introduced in this game, apart introducing a new player character and some more complications on the story so far. The game lacks a lot of the atmosphere of the previous ones, I think that's because of the plentiful illumination throughout the levels. Overall, there's less focus on the horror elements and more so on the action, which weakens the game in my opinion. There's some recurring moments in the game that are not explained, so the game is left hanging. Recommended if you really like the first two.

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

Super Mario 3D Land (3DS)

Bought when it was on sale a while ago. Got to the last world and pretty much stopped playing it. Finally went back to finish it. Solid game, the final battle with Bowser was just ok. We really didn't fight, just dropping him into the fire off draw bridges.

Sine Mora

Great graphics, fun though often frustrating gameplay, interesting though often confusing story.

I enjoyed the sh'mup, but only beat it on Normal since Challenging was too ... challenging. And even on Normal I ran out of continues and had to restart from a chapter in the middle to be able to beat the game.

You gotta go through the game on Challenging to unlock the "true" ending, so I just watched it on youtube... nice stuff.

Lego Batman 2

41 Hours. 100% Completion.

I'm good for about 1 of these Lego games a year. It's fun to see these characters in their Lego forms, but there's not much of a story and the mechanics are repetitive. What's disappointing is that there are tons of extra characters to unlock, but they really don't serve any purpose in the game. Once you get about 6 or 7 key figures, you don't really need the rest. Oh well, that being said, as a movie/comics fan, I am glad to see GOG starting to sell these, and look forward to them getting more of them.

Return to Mysterious Island

I liked it - short, simple and sweet. Not the greatest adventure game I've ever played, but certainly unique, or in any case the first and so far only one of its kind I've played, as the story is very basic, but the puzzles have multiple solutions and a large part of the game is about crafting, which I haven't seen in adventure games before, and it was fun exploring the island with Mina. Surprisingly I also liked the art design, even though it consists of three quite disparate graphic styles thrown together (the videogamey intro and outro cutscenes with actual 3D models, the 360 degree view environment screens aiming for realism, and the monochromome intermission comics). Usually I don't like inconsistency in the art style, but here somehow I felt it kind of fit together regardless. There wasn't a lot of music, but what was there was very pleasant. The puzzles weren't difficult but there wasn't any casual handholding either.

My only gripe would be that while the objects you could interact with weren't so small that you could easily overlook them, the comparatively tiny mouse pointer and 360 degree view still caused me to miss some hotspots, and sometimes I would have liked a little more feedback, e.g. you can combine a knife blade with a handle, but some things you can only cut if you remove the handle again, and there is no logical explanation for it, nor is there a hint that it might work without the handle - if you try it while the knife still has a handle, the only feedback you get is that the game won't let you do it. This is not a general problem, in other cases you also get more helpful reactions and hints, but it's not that consistent, so despite the rather easy difficulty, I still had to check a walkthrough a few times. But that's only to say that the already good puzzle design could have been perfect with a little more work. And very few adventure games come close to perfection in this regard.

Last but not least, thanks to grimwerk who recommended it to me and an even bigger thank you to foxworks who bought it during the Insomnia promo when I was sleeping and generously gifted it to me the next morning! :)

Contrast

A great puzzle platformer with an interesting "be a shadow" mechanic. Neither the puzzles nor the platforming were especially hard, though I did have to look up the solution to one of them. I thought the story was very good, though it did leave a bunch of unanswered questions (mostly about the universe(s), but one about the main character as well.)

Super Mario World

That's right dammit. Scratch another game off my bucket list/shame list!

The masterpiece of yesteryear has aged amazingly well. It still screams quality that you appreciate no matter your personal taste. One look and you just know, that's the good shit!

KKND2 Krossfire

I'm surprised I played this for many months. Where did all that time go? It has basically three campaigns (or the same campaign three times with a different race), and completing the third campaign took me less than one week I think. Maybe I just learned to play it faster as I advanced...

Overall I really liked the game, more than I expected. A solid classic RTS game with surprisingly good level design, and quite good unit balance (e.g. there isn't one unit that does all, you need supporting units and switch between them, and surprisingly even infantry can be very useful at times, not the least for their ability to automatically heal themselves after they get some experience. I really liked that.

I consider it quite a bit better than the first KKND (Extreme), and it fixed a couple of annoying things from the first game, like that the oil wells are not the only source of income anymore (so you don't necessarily run out of resources at any point, only be slowed down), and I don't think the first game let you create remote bases either, right? Or then it just didn't usually make sense, as you'd want to save resources.

KKND2 wasn't also quite as insanely difficult as the first game at some missions was. I read beforehand nightmarish stories about the "Wall Of Death" mission which some even consider impossible (hence the developers even wrote an official walkthrough for that mission), but pfffft. You just have to keep your initial attack squad alive (not too hard, just take it easy and advance carefully), find a backdoor to the enemy base, and time it right to get at least your engineers through the gate. Then just rush your engineer to the enemy structure, and after that the mission becomes a normal "build a base and destroy the enemy base"-mission.

There were some odd imbalances between the races though, like the heaviest unit of the Evolved was quite a bit worse than those of the Survivors or the machines. Frankly I felt those units were almost useless (except maybe some long-distance destroying of enemy turrets), so clumsy and slow and inaccurate firing. Compare that to e.g. the Grim Reapers of the tech race, which were real killing machines, causing havoc as they went by. Luckily the Evolved had the special demon units though, those were pretty kickass and quite a lot made up for the inadequacies of the heavy units. The demons were almost like minitanks that could heal themselves (unlike real tanks could).

I liked the music quite a bit too. I am not too fond of techno, but it was quite suitable for this game, I liked listening to some of the tracks.

The only real problem with the game were the two (or three) annoying bugs, which I also encountered:

1. Inability to create more units: I didn't face this until the last missions of Evolved and tech campaigns, At some point you just can't create new units nor structures, even if old ones die off or are destroyed. Naturally you can't play that way, not sure if the computer enemy has the same issue at that point.

Anyway, for me the fix was to exit the game completely, and reload the save game. This always seemed to fix this problem.

2. "Mission failed": Sometimes out of blue this message comes for no reason, and after some waiting the mission restarts. This is more frequent and hence more annoying that the first bug, but this also usually happens in later missions which are longer.

I was able to get past this though by a bit similar method as the one above:

- Exit the game completely (to Windows desktop).
- Reload the latest savegame.
- Right after that, save the game again (preferably to another save game slot).
- Exit the game again.
- Restart the game and reload the newest save game.

Usually that fixed the problem. If the issue came back, just try again the same. Not sure what triggers this, but it seems to be more frequent if you keep reloading old save games often (save scumming). The longer you keep playing without reloading a savegame, the less often it seems to occur.

3. Someimes, usually around when issue #2 took place, some save game might even be corrupted completely. Ie. if you try to reload it, you just exit back to the game menu, or even the game crashes and goes to desktop. In that case the only option is to select an earlier save game, and use that instead (save over the corrupted save game).

So make sure you use several savegame slots, and keep rotating them. I think I used around 8 slots or so at all times, maybe keeping one of them as a backup from the earlier mission, just before I finished it (not sure if I ever needed that though).