Velvet Assassin - Was gifted this awhile ago, and finally got around to playing it through. It's a stealth action game set during World War II, and its main character was based on the real-life British agent, Violette Szabo. Unfortunately, the game is marred by several problems. The levels are generally split up into small arenas, which operate independent of the rest of the level. Meaning that if you're discovered in one area, you needn't worry about the remainder of the level as the alert is reset when you leave that area. The gunplay is challenging and only works when you remain undiscovered; trying to use the knife after you've alerted the guards is an absolute exercise in frustration.

Overall, the game is mediocre. It's not outright bad, rather just dull. The levels don't allow for much freedom in your approach. Additionally, most of the game takes place indoors (and many sewers). It's a rather good looking game, the art direction and lighting does add to the atmosphere of the game.

Finished Lego Marvel Super Heroes. I think I liked better Lego Batman 2, at least story-wise. Gameplay has not changed a lot compared to Batman 2 and it was fun but I think those games are mostly for fans of a license. I'll probably play a few hours more in free mode to unlock characters and do some mini-missions and then I'll move to another game.

Complete list here.

Ronin

Where do this awesome indie games come from? They seem to suddenly pop out of thin air: like this one, I had never heard of it before until I saw it here. The game is heavily influenced by Gunpoint and that's a great thing: I loved Gunpoint! The game is very stylish, and very brutal. If only it was longer...I bought it last night and finished it this morning. Oh well, luckily there's new game plus mode at least, definitely going to tackle that too. Fans of Gunpoint shouldn't miss this!

Just finished Legend of Grimrock 2 after a rather hard fought battle. Overall I like this game but the end boss is just too hard. Was pretty much save scumming at the end.

Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4
Are there really people who complete these games with 100%???I think I've played quite thoroughly and in the end I finished the story mode with 58%. Don't think I will go back to find the rest of the characters, golden bricks and students in peril. The game was fine as long as it lasted, but wasn't interesting enough to replay all the levels.

The action driving and running sequences were pretty bad, but fortunately there weren't many of them. Besides that it was good fun to visit the Harry Potter world again and even if I wasn't sure that I would like the Lego style (I hadn't played a Lego game before), it worked very well and didn't distract me from the story (which you should know to understand what's going on).

Complete list of finished games in 2015

Let me see if I can remember them all.

Anomaly Korea
NPPD Rush
Charnel House Trilogy
Defy Gravity Extended
Guacamelee
Pyrite Heart
Humanity Asset
Love at First Sight
Mark of the Ninja
Morphopolis
Never Alone
Out There Somewhere
Postmortem: One Must Die
POP: Methodology Experiment One
Richard & Alice
They Breathe
Unhack
Yury
VVVVVV

There were others, too. It's been a busy year of gaming for me.

Eye: Divine Cybermancy ('mentor' ending)

OK just 'finished' Eye, and wow, all I can say if anyone complains that modern games are 'dumbed down' just show them Eye's way - it's like they had a lot of different ideas for games but then tried to cram them all into one game, I mean do you REALLY need stats leveling AND a upgradable cyberware system AND item to research AND psi powers, I mean, yeah I can see that they were going to different builds and classes but jeez!
Especially as they they give it a weird single player deathmatch feel with hoards of respawning enemies that, pesonally, made me eschew by usual stealthy approach and go full 'tank' on their ass!
Plus I didn't care much for the hacking system / subgame - paradroid was fair better
Plotwise too - I mean being a strange, far future battle monk was probably enough to get your head around without all the 'what's real and what's in your head? Are you mad/ Are you dreaming? stuff
But still.. it was kinda awesome in a bewildering kind of way, I only felt I was properly getting a hang of it when it 'ended' but that brings me onto something I'll have to put spoiler notices around:

*Spoilers*
So you get to choose one of 3 endings and if you go through all 3 you, apparently, can get a 'true' 4th ending BUT once you're done one ending the only way to get another one it to do the WHOLE game again only with your stats, researches and purchases still in place in a 'New Game Plus' kind of way, which is a bit extreme, I would have probably carried on if I had to do that once but knowing that I have to do it TWICE?.. Well I've left it installed and I'll continue to dabble but it's not going to be my 'main' FPSRPG, actually I'm downloading Borderlands which I just bought from the Humble Bundle - see what THAT's like..

Anyway, full list:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2015/post118

Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, in about two months, or 120 hours. Each game had their own flaws, but holy shit that was an epic journey.

I had not been as much involved in a video game, since I completed Baldur's Gate 2 and Throne of Bhaal more than a decade ago.

Death Knights of Krynn

Back to my current retro gaming project for a bit, working my way through all D&D PC games. Only Dark Queen of Krynn to go now and that's it for the old Goldbox series. Compared to the earlier games the Krynn games have all the refinements that came with the later Goldbox games, but they are still a bit of a slog compared to modern stuff- just try moving items around from one character to another to see what i mean.
Story wise...something about a bad guy and some Dungeons here and there...i've pretty much forgotten it already! I still think Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds are the finest games in the series and the two i recommend to anyone that wants to try them. Though the two Savage Frontier games are a bit more user friendly.

One thing i like about the Goldbox games is, for better or worse, they are the D&D PC games that actually feel most like playing D&D- mechanics wise anyway. Goldbox games are like playing a Fighting Fantasy book, but with D&D mechanics. Obviously a CRPG, no matter how big it is, can only have a finite number of ways to do anything. Unlike playing with a real DM around a table where choice is limited only by the DM's imagination.. But the Goldbox games at least bring back the childhood feel of pulling out the miniatures and playing turn based D&D battles with mates after school in the 80's.
Sure later games like Baldurs Gate etc may be better video games set in D&D worlds...but they don't actually feel like playing D&D to me. The old Goldbox games do.

I'm lucky that i have physical copies with all the journals, though i've been playing the games through DOSBOX which works fine. I'm well past drawing maps in my old age, so i just found blank user made maps online and printed them to keep track of where i am. Purists may call that cheating, but the maps have no game info so i still have to work out where to go, what to do. It's a balance that works for me for these old games.

Loot Hero DX

So, yeah, want to finish a game under 15m? Here's one. Ok, ok, you can replay the levels in an higher difficulty so let's extend it to 1h~2h if you like to grind.

It's not that the game is offensively bad, it's just... a mobile game, if you want to listen to music (i had to turn off the music and sounds) and something mindless to do then here's this game, you run left and right (you just have to maintain the mouse button pressed, simulating the finger on the touchscreen i guess) collect some coins, upgrade your character stats and continue until you defeat the dragon ("last" boss of the game), rise and repeat until exhaustion (or you reach level 100 or whatever it is that has the same dragon as level 9 but does more damage and has more health).

Ground Control: Dark Conspiracy - Polished off this expansion this weekend. It's a decent extension of the first game, continuing the plot and eventually leading to further unresolved questions. However, from a story perspective, the number of fake deaths was a little silly. It seemed to cheapen any dramatic beats that happened throughout the campaign.

Also, it seems that RTS games should have a infiltration mission (must stay hidden) where you control a single squad. It seemed a bit out of place for this game, and it had two of them. Something that I wished was more widely adopted was the nice camera in this game (also in World in Conflict), you can altitude, direction and zoom in and see the action up close. It always seem limiting to go to a RTS where the camera is in a fixed perspective.

I'm actually getting pretty close (78% atm). I only have the very last chapter left to finish the game, but I'm replaying the other levels in Free Play mode first, together with my son. He just loves going through the same levels again and again and try all kinds of whacky stuff, like sticking everyone in those blue 'anti-pixie' bubbles:)

You can't get to 100% in one run, since you need a dark arts character for all the 'red sparkly objects' and a fourth year spell (Reducto) for the iron locks. Both kinds of objects already appear in the first few levels when neither the character nor the spell is available yet (besides, you can't play story mode with a dark arts character since in story mode the characters are predefined).

King's Quest VI. Probably the best in the series, or at least right next to it. It's just a very smoothly designed game that generally lacks the momentum-killing "what the hell?" moments of the prior games in the series, and it looks great. You can certainly sense the addition of Jane Jensen to the design team because this game is full of writing - it will happily serve you at least a paragraph or two of description or dialogue while most games would be content with a brief sentence. Thankfully, you can skip ahead by clicking the mouse if you like. Credit to Prince Alexander as a character: although Graham is generally thought of as the series' main character, IMO Alexander was the subject of the two very best games.

Duke Nukem 3D (Atomic Edition). Such a great FPS. So colorful with a good sense of humor about itself, great level design (I love how the Build engine allows the levels to change shape in some circumstances), and genuinely fun weapons to use.

Chroma Squad

Awesome game...for the first half, although I'm not gonna lie: the final Mecha battle was pretty awesome too. I had a real blast for the first two or three seasons: combat was fun, the story was funny, the humor often hit home-runs, the music was great, and everything had a certain charm to it, like how the studio had to use cardboard enemies because they didn't have money for anything more convincing. But as I progressed in the game, everything began slowly to take a turn for worse: combat started to get really repetitive, the story got (even more) ridiculous, the humor started to lose its grip, the unskippable cutscenes started to get annoying... it just wasn't as good anymore. Can't really explain why, because it was still the same game. Maybe that's the real issue: repetition. Nothing really changes after the initial phases: there's never nothing new. I find that's a real shame, because like I said: I had a really good time during the first half.

I'll give this one a careful recommendation though: I suggest you try it, but in hindsight, it would've been better to wait for a sale. Buy it, if you can get it for $10 or less.

One more thing I just have to mention: with this game, it's quite easy to make it even more humorous for you. You can name almost all things yourself, so since they are making a kids show in the game, naturally I just had to make all sorts of innuendos "the kids" wouldn't understand: like how I named my squad the "Bang Brotherhood", the Chinese lead was called "Wang", and the techie, called "Cracker", is a black person in all whites. Really had some nice chuckles because of this, until, like the rest of the game, it began to get old. Heh, good times, good times...

Games that I finished and refinished (tend to replay games a lot) :

-The Last Door
-Age of Empires 2
-Red Alert 1-3
-Anno 1404 & 2070
-Dead Space 1
-Lucius 2
-Dragon Age Trilogy
-Fallout Tactics
-The Last Remnant
-Mass Effect Trilogy
-Hektor
-The Nations
-Roller Coaster Tycoon 1
-KOTOR 1 & 2
-Spooky's House of Jump Scares
-Tropico 3
-Wolg among us
-Evil Within
-LOTR : War in the North
-Papers, Please (won't play it anymore)
-Assassin's Creed Rogue
-Calling
-Star Wars : Rebel Assault

Then there's a bunch of free indie stuff which can be completed from 5 to 50 minutes or so, won't mention them.