carmageddon on android (2pm 13 April)

A great port to Android, controls feel great and they fixed a lot of issues

Still Life 2 (10:55pm 13 april)

Nit has good as the first one. The game gets way too hard in the mansion finding those clues. The murder is a bit weird (who is the first one). No gus and vic is badly written

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Never played a modern Batman game before. And I got to say WOW, really cool. Makes me want to go back and watch all of the movies again. Great story, atmosphere, action, stealth, you name it. I bought the next two games right away before the Humble store sale had ended. Be playing those soon!

Eradicator

A game I never knew that it even existed. Hell, judging by the limited info available on the internet, I am certainly not the only one! But what is Eradicator? Eradicator is an old-school FPS (or TPS, as you can change the view at will); find your way out of a maze, while moving fast like a train, carrying tons of weapons and facing many (but not too many) opponents. The circle could only be complete if objects and enemies were represented by sprites and, what a fucking surprise from a 90s FPS, they indeed are.

First impressions from the game and they are mixed. Nice intro, nice title theme and you can choose from 3 characters, each with their own starting weapon, prologue stage and quotes (which is a nice touch). Then, you are thrust into the game's futuristic world, which certainly looks nice but, thanks to the game's low resolution, can be hard to make out objects and enemies from a distance. More worrying, though, is the fact that you are going too fast and don't feel like you're in full control of the game. Then you realise that the game has enabled running by default, so you disable it. Afterwards, you'll start kicking some fine robotic ass with your weapons and once you complete the first level, you'll discover that the game has automatically re-enabled running, forcing you to disable it again (yes, you'll have to do it each time you begin a new level). Sigh, why doesn't it memorize your choice like every other FPS?

Speaking of weapons, the game's repertoire comes with the standard pistol-type weapon (which is, albeit, different for each of the 3 characters), a shotgun, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, a machinegun that fires darts instead of bullets and some less typical choices, like an arachnid scout, which can explode (also comes in a flying bat-like form), a boomerang and a poisonous grenade launcher. None of them feel particularly satisfying when gunning down an enemy and none of them is particularly good at crowd control, though it helps that there are not too many enemies in any given area, so even taking out all enemies one-by-one never feels like a chore by any means. Aside weaponry, you also have access to a simple inventory system, akin to Heretic/HeXen/Duke Nukem 3D. While some of those items are automatically used when picking them up (like health cores and invulnerability filters), others (like invisibility filters and gravity boots) are activated at command and last for a limited time. I'm still not sure about the effects of all the weapons and the items and would probably require a second playthrough to find them all.

While I did say above that my first impressions regarding the game's world was positive, it isn't something that lasts very long. Even if the mission objectives are different in each stage, don't expect much variety in the level design. Not only does it barely stray away from the futuristic laboratory with corridors, but it ends up incorporating futuristic sewers and overuses them a bit too much. There is also quite a bit of platforming involved, so those of you who hate first-person-platforming might want to give the game a wide berth. While each of those stages features about 60-70 enemies, you never end up feeling that they are too many. They are a mixture of robots, mutants, turrets, and assholes (specifically, self-destructive ones!). They like to position themselves in such a way that when you enter a room, they can attack you before you know what even hit you (especially the self-destructive assholes), which is probably for the best, as the game isn't really too difficult, even on hard. You can take advantage of your explosive scouts, so you can know beforehand what to expect and by using the hilariously broken invisibility item (which makes enemies completely ignore you for a while, even when you are shooting at them), you can easily turn the tables even on some of the most annoying fights (and even make the final boss a pushover).

In the end, Eradicator was certainly an enjoyable, but unremarkable and flawed game. A better level variety, more oomph in your weapons and more memorable music would go a long way into making this a real classic.

Full updated list.

SimCity 2000

This is a fun city-building simulation game. Although it has its illogicalities and limitations, there's still a lot of enjoyment to be had in growing your city from nothing into a huge metropolis. It definitely has that "just one more year" feeling, and you can easily end up playing longer than you intended. I have to say though that the disasters are not very well implemented (specifically the fire-fighting system), so I always play with Disasters turned off, and I don't attempt the various Scenarios. But really, the city-building is what this game is about, and where it excels. Although the game can never truly be 'finished', I grew my city for over 250 years and eventually had a number of Arcologies before I decided to stop.

I finished Uncharted, the first one. The very first game I bought and played on my PS3 was Uncharted 2. Normally going from 2 to 1 would be problematic, as you notice all the lack of improvements, especially since the second game was so good. But in my case it's been so long since I played the 2nd that this was not an issue.
Sure, I found things that bothered me, the checkpoint system could have been done better, the jet ski segments were really lacking and the final "boss" was annoying. But on the overall I really enjoyed the game. I think it took me around 7 hours to beat, give or take one. And I found that fine. Long enough to be enjoyable, short enough to not overstay it's welcome.

Good game, overall!

Teslagrad (WinXP)

Since the Linux port worked but was slightly stuttering in 1080p on my system due to the bad AMD driver, I used WinXP for this and that was the reason I had to pause it for quite a while since I didn't get to boot up Windows in a while.

For me this is one of the best platformers (maybe the best) and metroidvanias I've ever played. Replacing constant brawl with puzzles is working extremely well here and give the few boss fights additional tension which is well underlined by the music.
It's challenging and I wanted to bite the furniture a lot at some points but because you have unlimited lives you do not only level up your character but also yourself and get more skilled all the time and appreciating the challenges instead of just cursing them.
The design is flatout the perfect mix of 2D and 3D tech, it's pretty much flawless, very polished and beautiful.
The 2D elements are artfully drawn and the 3D elements look completely like they are part of it, the animations are just like in old animation movies, very lovely made. The Russian / East European setting fits perfectly to this animation style since this kind of animation movies more or less originated there (and not in Japan like most people think).
I had to get some help for finding a few scrolls in order to see the extended ending but managed to get most of it myself.

I highly recommend this gem, it does not have to be hidden behind Braid or other more popular titles at all and plays in the highest league of indie games imho.

I can't imagine playing this game with a keyboard though, you have to be able to use six specific buttons very fast and my Saitek p2600 gamepad did the job really well.

To the list:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2015/post68

Torchlight 2

The first Torchlight was an okay game. It was marginally better - or perhaps just more enjoyable - than most of the games that targeted
the same space. It was also rather short, featured only three classes, and didn't have multiplayer. That last thing always bugged me -
what were they thinking? These people were some of the same people who worked on Diablo, and even if that wasn't the case, they were
surely monitoring how the competition was doing - and Diablo (both of them, really) thrived for years past their prime solely due to
MP.

Torchlight 2 improves upon or fixes all three issues. It's about the right length, it has four classes, and it features multiplayer
(both LAN and Internet, though the latter requires registering an account with Runic). Graphically, it's more detailed, but they've
kept the same cartoony style, which I like, though I can understand it's not to everyone's taste. Oh, and there's a plethora of pets
this time around, which I heartily approve.

Still, there's things to complain about.

Customizing keybindings is unnecessarily restricted. There's only a handful of skills you may bind to the LMB, and though they've
implemented cycling between skills on the RMB, it's limited to two skills via the convenient Tab key, though the rather inconvenient ,
and . cycle through all of them. Modifier + digits for skill activation would have been nice as well.

For "casual" gamers, the big one is that it's way too easy and forgiving. At least on Normal. I've started another playthrough on
Veteran, but since I have some experience with the game now, I'm finding it even easier. In short, there's no penalty for
dying. Removing that removes some of the excitement. Did the big bad boss crush you? In the very unlikely case that happened, just
respawn in town free of cost. You don't lose money or XP or items. In fact, you now start getting frustrated because you forgot to
open that town portal and you have to walk all the way back. The audacity.

What I meant by "casual" in the previous paragraph is people who'll finish it once and move on. But the "hardcore" folks know this is
only the beginning. They too have things to complain about. Mostly game balance issue, but that's exactly the sort of issues you care
about when striving to max your character's power. High level gameplay requires you to chase down a certain randomly appearing
character in order to enchant your equipment. There's a number of useful spell scrolls in the game that also require you to get lucky
with the RNG. For example, in 25 hours of playing it, not once did I get the Dervish scroll. Two hours into a new character, it
drops. Yay. There's other balance issues I don't want to get into, read the official forums if you're interested.

Inventory / stash space is still limited. Why? With no concept of item weight, this provides no challenge other than opening a town
portal. Perhaps loading time should be considered as the punishment here? Combining gems into better ones is also confused - first the
game informs you the "ancient art" of it has been lost, then gives you access to a transmuter in the second town. But, the results
aren't exactly predictable or (usually) pleasing. Perhaps they wanted to shake this mechanic up a little, but I feel they didn't
really achieve anything except inducing frustration.

Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride

Pretty good Hidden Object Game by Artifex Mundi, which is of no surprise considering their record.

As usual, there are as many or more puzzles than there are actual hidden object scenes, and most of the hidden object scenes at least make little sense (why do I need to find all those other items here, when I only want one of them?), but that goes with the genre. Art was great, and the story was all right though I didn't find the plot as interesting as Clockwork Tales - though I'm sure that's personal preference.

And the kitten helper was very cute :)

Finished Always Sometimes Monster. An insteresting game about consequences with some dull sequences (some means to get money are really dull and repetitive). I recommend it even if it is some RPG maker game as the graphics are actually good looking and the story interesting.

Full list here.

What would you say how long it is and how much of an annoyance the repetitive sequences are? I got it from some bundle, but the negative comments I read about the dull jobs have put me off from trying it so far.

If I'm not wrong, the game told me that I played the game for 7h. Those sequences could be avoided most of the time (i.e. you can quit the job with consequences). The game is 20-30 days longs with time passing as you make some actions (either story-driven or job-driven) and you cannot have a job until day 2 or 3 I think. I'd say you should try the game to see. If by the time you have to do a job you don't really like the game, you won't like it better after.

Otherwise, here are two tips to minimize the length of those sequences:
- Choose tofu over pigs.
- Don't try to move 50 boxes, it is useless (~25 if you want to be highly regarded, less if you don't care)

Man, it had been quite a while since I had finished a game! Real life taking over, certainly...

But today, I finished LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham and by "finished" I mean "finished the main story" of course.

Great game, as usual with LEGO games, lots of secrets, lots of unlockables and even if you're not fan of the universe, if you like LEGO you can't be wrong with that game either.

But of course, it suffers from the same problems than other LEGO games: some heavy stuttering sometimes, some perspectives that make precision platform jumping a little difficult sometimes... nothing game breaking (I haven't experienced any of the bugs reported in the forums, guess I'm lucky), but sometimes I wish Traveler's Tales would learn from its mistakes and improve these areas...

Of course, now I think I'll try the DLCs and maybe try to have some 100% completion on that game, waiting for the Jurassic Park one! ;)

So far in 2015: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2015/post2

^ all lego games are by and large the same though

and i already have lego star wars
the hobbit
batman 2
lord of the rings
marvel superheroes

how much more lego games do i need ?

anyway i finished the dirt 3 career and im currently buys with mortal kombat 9's story mode
resident evil 5
and dirt 2's career mode

The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav is the kind of game I love to love. It's a beautiful and luxurious point and click adventure, solidly built and carefully crafted. This game is my first encounter with the German game system and setting The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge). It's a little chafing, in truth, to play a point-and-click setting of a role-playing-system, and at first I couldn't shake the feeling that the game wasn't giving me a proper range of choices and freedoms - but the game is the game, and though the base system might be all RPG, this Daedalic creation is not.

The story, which is revisited in Memoria (which I haven't played yet), follows young Geron, a down at heels odd-job birdcatcher who, despite clearly being drawn as a hero, is the scapegoat bad-luck character in his town of Andergast. We meet him being beaten up by local bullies, and the player's first job is to extricate him from his whomping. Soon enough his guardian, Gwinnling, starts growling about ominous signs and portents, and the King's Palace is beset by an insistent infestation of crows. Our hero is troubled by dream-memories of the mighty Seer, who was burned at the stake when Geron was a child, and who picked him out of the crowd and called him a doombringer. Clearly, it's time to get gaming and save the world.

Geron ventures out into the country and meets Nuridarinellavanda (Nuri for short), his fairy sidekick. Nuri is an adorable and infuriating stubborn Gaean flower child, drawn as a smoking-hot wide-eyed innocent and voiced wonderfully (in English, at least) by an actress called Nova Kane. <-- not kidding. The two set off into the world, or really the worlds, and there's a lot of toil and strife before the eventual conclusion.

Nearly every scene in this game is breathtaking - the painted backgrounds are detailed and full of atmosphere, though there is far more art than there is interaction, which always seems like a lost opportunity. In the standard manner of point and click adventures there are few bystanders; streets are mostly empty, and almost everyone is there to serve a plot purpose. That's the nature of the coding beast, of course; if you can talk to them, that means someone had to write them in and voice them.

Still, those who do exist in-game tend to be paper-thin, more characteristics than characters. The dwarf is concerned only with money and the state of his beard; the knight is all proud bluster, and later he is devastated and paralyzed by his loss of honor. (Though it is cute when he tries to pick up Nuri.) The king is crabby and bossy, the scholar is little but a vessel for exposition, the rogue is a rogue. And so forth. I had no sense that any of these folks were people, so much as designated roles. The worst of the lot is the ridiculous Minka, the attendant in the baths, whose speech is peppered with (poorly placed) Yiddish bits. Surely a German developer should have sense enough to refrain from sticking caricature Jews in their fantasy setting - it is pointless and a bit offensive, and Chains of Satinav deserves better.

In general, while the plot is solid, the writing throughout is not, and that's a crippling weakness in an adventure game. The game has been widely criticized for its voice acting, but I think that's unfair; I found the voicing to be quite good, overall. The lines, however, are rudimentary, and the actors are left with bland, undercooked characters and trite cliches. A major aspect of the story, for example, concerns a lie that Geron tells with terrible consequences; this ends up being an intellectual rather than a visceral experience, and the game has no chance to explore the hero's villainy. I wish it had done so - it's another opportunity missed.

But this is not a book, though if it had been approached as one it might have been a true classic. The gameplay here is a little primitive, but robust. Animations are not that great, and experimentation on some of the harder puzzles can wear away patience quickly. By now developers really ought to understand that giving players non-skippable animations as we try to flex our inventories into some sort of solution is a convention that needs skipping - it adds boredom to frustration.

Some of the puzzles in Chains of Satinav are complicated and weird, though I think all of them are in line with the mad conventions of the genre, and I was comfortable consulting a walkthrough for some of the tougher conundrums. For the most part the game put me in the right place to identify and solve what was set before me. I found many of the tentpole puzzles, perhaps half?, to be brain-stretching, and the rest were easier and fun. Only a few of the solutions left me baffled once I knew the answers, as in the devilish "Three Impossible Tasks" section. A couple of the variables there didn't seem to work as they were clued. But, as I like to say, that's why the Internet gods gave us walkthroughs in the first place.

I played this game for weeks and found it impressive - and, seriously, just gorgeous to look at. At the end of the day, though, I don't think I had as much fun as I wanted to have, and I think the problem lies in the writing. The brightest star in the game is Nuri, who will either make you fume or smile. Still, a lot of the experience is slightly laborious; the game is a story told, not a story experienced.

Howlongtobeat.com puts the game length at 10-15 hours, and honestly I don't understand that. I like to take my time with games in general, but I was in there for at least twice that and probably more (I played the GOG version, so my time wasn't tracked.) I missed a ton of the in-game achievements, some of which leave me curious, so I may go back for an informed second run at some point; achievements are slightly bugged in general, and oddly enough I didn't get the achievement for finishing the game, perhaps because I didn't watch all the way through the lengthy end-credits. I also missed the Easter Egg clip in which Geron and Nuri have sex, though you can find that on YouTube if you're curious. The game also tells me that two of the videos did not unlock, so I'll have to hunt for those.

This year's gaming to date

Thief Gold

Finally finished this yesterday (on Friday). I've earlier complained about the game, mainly about its level designs (huge maze-like levels where you constantly get lost), but towards the end, the game started to grow on me again, and I enjoyed playing it. Not fully sure why. Great atmosphere, and I'm happy I persisted. It is a true classic after all.

In the end, these things still bug me about the game:

- Why does it have to be so overly dark in many levels? I basically had to crank near the maximum both the ingame Gamma Adjust, and the brightness of my laptop, in order to see anything. Maybe this is a problem specifically with modern LCD monitors, and it looks better on old CRT monitors?

- Why is it so hard to hit the spiders with your sword, especially the overhead swing? I think those miss 9 times out of 10.

- The small frogs introduced late in the game are just annoying. Ok so they die from one arrow, but hitting a jumping small frog with one is quite hard.

Next either to Thief 2, or Deus Ex...