Just finished Call of Duty 3 on PS3.

What's interesting, when I first played it a few years ago I rage quit two or three missions into it because it was just too friggin' hard for me, now it was pretty much a walk in the park, not quite as much because my shooting skills on gamepad have improved over the years but rather because by now I've discovered that, like in a number of other console shooters, using the aim sight briefly snaps the crosshair to enemies, so by repeatedly pressing L1 you can easily finish off entire groups of enemies without doing much actual aiming. Having been exclusively a PC gamer most of my life this almost feels like cheating but oh well.

Anyway, I didn't have too high expectations but the game still kinda managed to disappoint me. I was curious why pretty much all my friends who had a console back in the day considered Call of Duty 3 so much worse than the earlier ones, now I can see why. The game just utterly lacks interesting locations and moments. It's as if someone had stripped the earlier CoD games of everything except the later Normandy sections which were utterly generic and all they gave in return were some ridiculous mini games. All in all it felt more like a third party clone (which it basically was) than a legitimate Call of Duty game. Still, it's far from being a bad console shooter, just very much unimpressive.

Edit:
Okay, lol, add Men of Valor. I had played it on my mom's laptop over at their place for the holidays when nobody else was home. I kept the saved game and just finished the entire thing. In all honesty, I enjoyed it more than Call of Duty 3. :P

BLACKHOLE

Without any doubt the best game I played in 2016! It's a perfect mix of challenging puzzles and hardcore platforming. Very hard but fair. Controls are very tight and responsive. Sure I died a lot but every time I knew it was me who made a mistake.

So what's the game about? In most levels you need to collect selfburns - little blowing bulbs with nanobots that may repair your ship and open portals to new dimensions. To do so you need to solve elaborate puzzles by changing gravity, using special abilities/blocks (they are slightly different in each dimension so things keep fresh). And trust me, these puzzles are pretty hard. Sometimes you may think it's impossible to get all selfburns. But then you may come up with another brilliant idea and voila! You can grab it. Or not. Because solving a puzzle is not everything. You need pretty good platforming skills to get what you want. Believe me again - it's pretty hard too! So usually in each level I first made sure that I understand how each selfburn can be collected. Then I practiced a bit to be sure that I can get it without dying most of the time. And then I had to get all of them without dying. Believe me once again - this part was very challenging too! Sometimes even frustrating when you get all selfburns but die on your way back to the entrance. Sigh... you have to start once again.

In the end I'm extremely proud that I got all of selfburns, including dark ones which come with DLC (they are even harder than the rest of the game) and all this without switching to the easy mode! Hooray! I've achieved it in less than 17 hours which I believe is pretty good too! I'm the best :D I missed quite a lot of collectibles and secrets of the overworld but to be honest I don't feel like getting them all so I think I'm done with the game (see attachment for my statistics). As I mentioned before - the best game I played in 2016. If you like puzzles and platforming get this game, you won't regret it!

Full list

HuniePop

All 100 Alpha Dates.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! :P

Return to Castle Wolfenstein. This was pretty cool, although I think I was having more fun in the early part of the game. Later on, probably around when I started fighting the super-soldiers, I was just ready for it to end. The game stopped offering surprises and increasingly just had more guys with heavier armor needing more bullets to kill ("I shot you in the head three times! Why won't you fall?!").

My final game of 2016: Minecraft: Story Mode

I heard all the fuss about the "unfinished story behind a paywall" DLC but really, it wasn't true. The game IS complete with the original 4 chapters. From chapter 5 to 8 it's a totally different story, although heavily linked to the first one, obviously.

My thoughts? I had a blast! Why? Because the moment I started the game, I couldn't play anything else. And that is what a good game is, in my book.

Yes, there are some rough edges, like a really bad translation in French (especially in episode 2, I think, where it seemed all Google Trad), but all in all, it's a really great TellTale game and frankly, the Minecraft setting is maybe the best setting ever for this kind of game, since there's a world but no backrground story.

In Minecraft: Story Mode, the scenario, although not really original, was well conducted, you can relate to the characters, the soundtrack scales from good to superb, so yes, it's a big win for me! Thanks Steam Sales ! ;)

So far (and final) in 2016: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2016/post46

Can't wait for somebody to start the 2017 thread and to go look for new adventures!

Candy Box

-My first attempt with it resulted in a "That's Cute" and then forgotten. So, at the urging of a friend who is playing the sequel, I played across 2 days and enjoyed the economic sim portion as far as it goes (nowhere near far enough), the adventure game side as far as it goes, the rpg side to the end.

As a free game, and a diversion, it is remarkable for achieving complimentary systems that are more than roadblocks. It always has a goal to work toward, and never leaves the player with more than about 200 seconds of nothing to do.

That said, the joy of exploring the game unfolds pretty early, and then the grind outlasts its welcome. The mystery is not that magical to me, and once you know that unlocks will happen, it is more about guessing triggers rather than whimsy. The cutesy early rpg levels focusing on gear give way to needing to provide inputs and then falls apart as the latter fights are all use a potion and then delay for a cooldown countdown to use a potion again. My favorite parts were the adventure-like encounters, but they are limited, exhausted quickly and early, and then while waiting to hit thresholds, I missed them. The crafting portion is well done, and both easy enough and well explained to be enjoyable.

Overall, I had fun (enough to play a second character through to try out a different sword). It's a great diversion that can be explored pretty thoroughly in an hour or two unless you want to finish, and is a nice diversion to have loaded in a tab for between other things.

And of course, there's Candy Box 2, the sequel that's the same and not. I'll get to it in the new year.

Blade Runner. I got an optical drive for my PC for Christmas, so I decided to break it in by seeing if my old Blade Runner CDs still worked, and they do (thanks also to some wonderful people that put an install patch online). I forget which ending I got when I first played this. The most interesting thing about the game is that you can get a wide range of endings based on the game randomly decided who is and isn't a replicant. This time I got a pretty crappy ending. Oh well.

The game does a very good job of evoking the movie without just making you recreate the plot. Like I said, it's somewhat randomized but the themes of the story, such as the ambiguity that separates the humans from the replicants, are portrayed well. It looks okay except that the voxel-based 3D graphics are pretty fuzzy when it comes to the chararcters, and the backgrounds are often pixelated. I think it came out in 1997? To be fair, it looks good by the standards of that time, although I would say that this game would be a great candidate for a remastering job instead of the "we upgraded a game that came out two years ago!" type the industry seems to prefer. Too bad that probably won't ever happen - we'll be fortunate if it gets released here on GOG at all.

Just finished Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. I had already played it in the past and it could never keep me engaged for longer, I cancelled two playthroughs at the exact same spot. I finally decided to force myself through it, hoping that it would get more interesting later on but sadly the game is quite lackluster to me. I don't like the combat mechanics, the locations are painfully uninspired, the characters are only okay but far from being MGS level and all the MGS stuff like the pretentious codec conversations just feels out of place. Too bad that the last game finished in 2016 had to blow.

i finish commander keen 2: the earth explodes

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice (3DS)

I saw this by chance, didn't even realise they released a new one. Completed it in 3 days though. Continuing the Ace Attorney franchise to it's 6th title (Not counting side games/Crossovers/Unreleased in Europe), this game is more of the same courtroom battles as the previous games but with half the game set in the home country of the spirit mediums, a country where defending a client and losing means death and where no innocent verdict has been declared in many years. However trials in this country bring a new gameplay mechanic, making it possible to view the last moments before a victims demise. When I completed Dual Destinies earlier this year one of my biggest complaints was when they got rid of video evidence and 3d examining of evidence in favour of standard 2d pictures, fortunately that is no longer the case. They also shortened the investigating segments and made the trial segments longer.

The cases are good, with the exception of one, lead by Athena Cykes, the playable character introduced in the last game who showed how useful she was by losing to Prosecutor Payne in the last game, and in this game, her only trial has her berating everyone in the court, and most of her breakthroughs only occur thanks to her assistant. The premise of the trial isn't that good either, based on Rakugo (a type of storytelling from japan) Noodle cooking and Multiple Personality disorder, that doesn't translate that well to a Western Audience and just didn't interest me at all, which makes it one of the worst cases in the franchise in my opinion.

Apart from that one little gripe, the rest of the game was great, the last trial has many twists, it's the longest game in the franchise and many characters from past games make reappearances. There are some minor plot inconsistencies (One piece of evidence has the defendants fingerprints on, and it is never explained how it got there) but apart from that I'd recommend it.

After reading Dracula by Bram Stoker I have bought Dracula Trilogy and finished Dracula: The Resurrection (there are really some funny ideas) and Dracula: The Last Sanctuary (this is not so funny, but generally more mature game). Last finished game this year is my favorite game from childhood Shadow Warrior Classic Complete.

Include me.

<span class="bold">Pretty Girls Mahjong Solitaire</span>

My last game finished in 2016. A bit short but fun to play.

PC:
+Touhou 14 - Double Dealing Character (SakuyaA, Normal, 1CC)

Darnations I couldn't save that replay. And this shall be the last game beaten for 2016, either way. Could have used a better art and story, but playing as Sakuya nonetheless is still full of pleasure even if she plays differently this time.

Your year is mine.

It's a bit early, but the new thread is up.

One more for the deadline :)

Zillion. I guess this was often regarded in its time as the Sega equivalent to Metroid - open-ended maze exploration, sci-fi themed, you get power-ups to help you explore further - which it sort of is, but Zillion is...kind of boring? The main action is that you enter a room and have to break open containers that each have part of that room's door code (randomized every time you enter until you do enter it). Then you enter that code into the room terminal and move on. I'm just not a big fan of "rummage through containers" as a central gameplay mechanic, I guess. There are hazards like automatic turrets trying to get you, and usually 1-3 enemies who are generally pretty easy to take out. You can switch off hazards at the cost of an ID card, but I found that at a certain point I'd leveled up enough that I could generally bulldoze through everything to get the codes and hasten onward.

It's not especially hard if you're diligent about noting down the codes and scrawling out a map to keep track of where you should be going. Harder in the early going because of health and ability limitations, but like I said, eventually your guys become tough enough to absorb a lot of cheap hits and still make good progress.