Day Of The Tentacle Remastered (Jan 4th)
Ratchet & Clank: Tools Of Destruction (25th Jan)
Ratchet & Clank: Quest For Booty (26th Jan)

Ratchet & Clank: A Crack In Time (7th Feb)
Abzu (23rd Feb)

Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One (2nd March)
Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault (10th March)
Ratchet & Clank: Into The Nexus (20th March)

Rayman Origins (21st April)

Rayman Legends (6th May)
Hitman 2016 (24th May)
The Order: 1886 (25th May)

Uncharted 4 (7th June)

Until Dawn (19th July)
Ratchet & Clank 2016 (28th July)

Inside (4th August)
Game Of Thrones Telltale Series (4th August)
Titanfall 2 (29th August)
Stikbold (31st August)

Rime (14th September)
Octodad: Dadliest Catch (22nd September)

Guild Wars 2: Path Of Fire (10th October)
Crash Bandicoot: Warped (16th October)
Crash Team Racing (26th October)

Bound (7th November)
Yakuza 0 (25th November)

Little Nightmares (29th December)
Little Nightmares: The Depths (29th December)
Little Nightmares: The Hideaway (29th December)
Yooka-Laylee (30th December)

Include me, please!

01-01/03-Outlaws
02-01/13-Shadwen (+escape from the castle)
03-01/22-Remember Me (PS3)
04-01/24-Spec Ops: The Line
05-01/31-Guacamelee Gold Edition
06-02/07-Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition
07-02/07-Shantae: Half-Genie Hero
08-02/12-STASIS
09-02/15-Grim Dawn (Elite difficulty)
10-03/03-CAYNE
11-03/04-Shadowrun Hong Kong
12-03/13-Mirror's Edge
13-03/18-S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky
14-03/23-Torment: Tides of Numenera
15-03/29-Crysis
16-03/31-Crysis Warhead
17-04/02-DROD: Gunthro and the Epic Blunder
18-04/03-Another World (20th Anniversary Edition)
19-04/16-Wolfenstein 3D
20-04/23-The Ultimate Doom
21-04/27-Wolfenstein: Spear of Destiny
22-04/29-Saints Row 4: Game of the Century Edition
23-05/10-Doom II
24-05/20-Men Of War: Red Tide
25-05/24-Ether One Redux
26-05/28-Shardlight
27-06/02-Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell
28-06/05-Freedom Planet
29-06/26-The Marvellous Miss Take
30-07/02-Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment
31-07/11-The Saboteur
32-07/27-Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
33-07/28-Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers
34-08/02-Advent Rising
35-08/05-Divinity: Dragon Commander
36-08/10-Return to Castle Wolfenstein
37-08/25-A Boy and his Blob
38-09/04-Final Doom
39-09/12-Vampires the Masquerade: Redemption
40-09/17-Doom 3 BFG edition
41-10/04-Divinity Original Sin II
42-10/04-Duke Nukem
43-10/06-Deadlight Director's Cut
44-10/12-SOMA
45-10/19-Duke Nukem II
46-11/01-ELEX
47-11/02-Hotline Miami
48-11/04-Deponia Doomsday
49-11/08-Capsized
50-11/08-Journey of a Roach
51-11/11-Star Wars: Dark Forces
52-11/15-Dead Space
53-11/20-Broken Sword 3
54-11/22-Rogue Trooper
55-11/30-Expeditions: Conquistador
56-12/04-Alan Wake
57-12/09-Wolfenstein: The New Order
58-12/14-Legends of Eisenwald
59-12/23-Necrovision
60-12/27-The Book of Unwritten Tales

Games finished in 2016
Games finished in 2015

Pillars of Eternity

Without getting into much detail, PoE certainly is a great game. Some key points:

• Graphics: Just awesome. The artwork is great (it reminded me of BG & IWD at some places which was nice), the details are breathtaking and the effects are greatly rendered. While graphics don't usually make a game (it's the gameplay that matters), they do elevate it and make it a great sight to behold.

• Sound: Effects sound good, soundtrack is stellar, voice acting is very good.

• Story/Lore/Quests: I enjoyed the story throughout and the ending was satisfying. The characters were great, especially a couple of them who weren't the usual clichés. Their banter offered some smiles that were much needed but i would like to see more of that. The quests were nice, although I didn't see everything since I'm going to replay it at some point. The lore, while good enough, felt like "too much" in the beginning. Even at the character generation screen there were lore text all over the place that made me skip some of it for later.

• UI: Very good, both in appearance & function but while nowadays I always use a stacking mod for BG (for arrows etc), PoE's omnipresent chest, ban of encumbrance and no ammunition for bows/crossbows & pistols felt a bit like cheating.

• Gameplay: Stellar. I dig the Health/Endurance bar combo, the camping supplies, the skill checks at various points of the game, the levelling up.

In the end, PoE left me satisfied for the hours I put into it; it was a great cRPG experience. Sure it has some less than stellar features (the whole castle thing felt uninteresting to me) and the writing, while generally solid, it was somewhat tiring at some points (I skipped quite a few NPC "soul peeps" that didn't help with the pacing of the story) but those can't detract fron the whole experience.

Highly recommended to all cRPG fans, especially to anyone who loves Baldur's Gate & Icewind Dale; PoE it's not only about nostalgia for them -- it's a great game on its own.

..:: 2017 list ::..

Finished Alum, a rather good point'n click. Puzzles are medium difficulty (though there are some hard/impossible puzzles near the end), graphics are good, voice acting & music are ok. Story starts interesting but gets overly complicated and a bit dumb in the end. I recommend it though.

Full list here.

Megami Tensei II ( Kyūyaku Megami Tensei remake), SNES

The second game in the Megami Tensei series. You can really see the series pick up here. In spite of its demon-summoning mechanic, the first game was a fairly pedestrian dungeon-crawler. This game ... well, it's also a fairly pedestrian dungeon-crawler, but it features multiple endings and the law/chaos conflict that would become a hallmark of a lot of games of the series. I'm glad I beat it (and I plan to eventually beat the SNES Shin Megami games), but it did rather wear out its welcome, in my opinion. The story sometimes did interesting things, but too much of it was a collectathon--first pillars, then orbs, with no real notion of why the character is doing this collecting. More story stuff with your friend, less of that, would have been my advise to the developers.

Not totally sure what will be next. Maybe I'll get off my ass and finish VA-11 Hall-A.

1. Doom 3 (Redux mod)
2. River City Ransom: Underground - SP with Provie
3. Little Nightmares
4. Prey (2017)
5. Final Fantasy VI (snes)
6. Dark Souls 3
7. Transistor
8. Sonic the Hedgehog (Genesis)
9. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Genesis)
10. Darksiders Warmastered Edition
11. The Lab VR
12. Wolfenstein TNO
13. Dishonored 2
14. Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus
15. Castlevania: Dracula X (snes)
16. Deadspace 3 Coop
17. Doom VFR
18. Costume Quest 2
19. Cuphead
20. Super Castlevania IV

First game completed this year!

Thief: Gold
Imagine dishonored but you've got no powers, it's very similar, right down to the same voice actor. I like stealth games, and this was a pretty good one. Your a thief, and most of the time your mission is to steal a load of stuff, but like most videogames with an antihero protagonist you wind up having to save the world at some point. There were some good missions, and some terrible ones, my main problem with it was that it can be difficult to learn how to progress, some require you to overhear certain conversations or read 5 different books that are scattered around a map. At first I tried to do a no kills playthrough, then all those monsters appeared and that plan went out the window. Anyway, fun game, would recommend, can't wait to play the sequel.

Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut

“Wasteland” (1988) was one of my all-time favourite cRPGs, however I was not nearly as much of a fan of Fallout/Fallout2, so I had some reservations coming into this game and I was not sure I would enjoy it.

But once I started playing the game really kept pulling me along and kept me interested. Big maps with many different areas to explore at your own leisure, and there are often a few different ways of completing each area so you get the feeling of freedom.

Conversations are easy to navigate, and to be honest I tended to speed-read them and skip through them pretty quickly but I was still able to pick up all the important points (and there is a Logbook containing info about all the quests in case I missed something or I forgot).

Combat is turn-based, the best/only kind of combat for an RPG :).

There are different NPCs which can join your party, but I cannot comment on this part of the game because I dislike NPCs in my party and I didn’t let any join.

I only have a few nitpicks, for example I didn’t like the Quirks and Perks (which were added in the Director’s Cut apparently), so if I were to play again I’d try to just ignore them completely (and Trinkets too).

Overall I felt it really did have a “Wasteland” feel/vibe, which was great. I didn’t keep track of my time played, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was up near 100hrs. Definitely very highly recommended if you enjoy cRPGs!

Evil Pumpkin - The Lost Halloween

Thought it wold be a Hidden Object Game. But I decided to play the adventure mode and the hidden object sequences were eliminated. Got a real adventure game instead and it had a surprising variety of puzzles (not just the ones you would expect from a casual game).

Story started well, but got more and more confusing and nonsensical the longer the game lasted. The last chapter was the worst and the last section with the final puzzle was so illogical and senseless that I had to use a walkthrough to solve it. Guess you have either be crazy or a genius to figure out what to do on your own.

Graphics and music were fine and I liked the voice acting even if it was cheesy at times.

Complete list of finished games in 2017

Include me!

I finally completed the campaign in Gears of War 4. That foreshadowing at the very end was awesome, I will have to admit.

Heavenly Sword

First played it several years ago, barely got through the first boss fight back then and got hopelessly stuck on the second one, though. Just did my second approach and due to a lot more experience with these kinds of games I got through most of it without much trouble, other than a few headaches during some boss fights, especially the last one.

Anyway, I was quite let down by the game. The writing, acting and the cutscenes remain fantastic to this day (even though the plot itself isn't particularly deep) and Bohan has got to be one of the greatest villains of all time, but the game was really missing memorable mindblowing moments or places and I can't shake the feeling that they could have gotten a lot more out of the characters. Most importantly, though, the gameplay is really lackluster. Despite the game's focus on story there is basically nothing other than combat and the combat is pretty bad. What really sucks, the combat system is not particularly deep but has a number of nuances that are hard to figure out and not explained well at all. Oh yeah, and there's an abundance of quick time events, some of the most frustrating ones I've ever seen.

I kinda forced myself through the game, not quite grasping some of the concepts and discovering some mechanics far too late and even once I figured them out they seemed awfully unpolished compared to what you can find in games like God of War or Devil May Cry. Enemy attacks are not announced, you only really know the attack type (speed or strength) once it's already too late to respond and it boils down to button mashing and randomly switching attack types, hoping that something will get through the enemies' blocks. What really sucks, there's dozens of combos but it seems that there's literally no reason to use more than two of them, one per attack type.

Anyway, still glad that I finally beat the game, it was worth it for the cutscenes alone.

Def Jam Vendetta. I'm a huge fan of Aki's wrestling games on the N64 - they're still the best wrestling games ever made, IMO - so I was really bummed out when they were passed over in favor of Yukes when it came to creating post-N64 WWE games. Fortunately, even though I'm really not a hip-hop/Def Jam fan, Aki did sort of find a way to keep making wrestling games. It's just that they weren't games based on any real wrestling promotions.

This one was released under the EA Big label, the imprint for EA sports games that were a bit more on the arcade side. In contrast to Aki's "official" wrestling games, in this one the most likely way you're going to win isn't through pinfall or submission but by building your heat meter up enough to perform your finishing move while whittling the opponent's health down to "DANGER", at which point if you execute your finisher you'll score an instant knockout. The finishers are basically real wrestling moves (my guy used a vertebreaker) except they're more exaggerated, with the guys jumping much higher in the air and making heavier impacts than you'd see in a regular match. Otherwise it's pretty much a direct extension of Aki's prior work. If you played WWF No Mercy or Virtual Pro Wrestling, you should be able to feel right at home with the pace and controls.

The opponents are mostly Def Jam rappers. If you've ever wanted a chance to beat the crap out of DMX, here's your chance (good luck, though, because DMX totally cheats in this game).

Tag matches are mercifully rare because they tend to collapse into chaos too quickly and for too long. Most of the matches are one-on-one, except for a ballbreaker of a 1-on-3 handicap that occurs late in the game.

The sequel, Def Jam Fight for New York, is basically better in every way (e.g., greater character customization), but this was fun, too. Can't go wrong with an Aki game if you're a wrestling fan :) I'd love to see a Lucha Underground game made in this style.

A Fistful of Gun

An arcadey game with a nice selection of playable characters set in wild west. Sounds good? Perhaps but the game is rather meh. The gameplay is shallow, sure, the diversity of characters is entertaining but the game is very repetitive and boring. You just have to clear each area and continue to a next one. There are some small differences (various obstacles, special missions like rescuing hostages) but they don't add much. The first boss battle is pretty hard, the second is much easier and the last one is very easy (I didn't die there even once).

I have a feeling that the game might be better when co-op but I'll never know as I intend to uninstall it and never play it again.

Frankly, I think it would be more appropriate as a browser game. Not a good start of a year but oh well, there are other games waiting for me.


Full list

1) WarioWare: Touched! (DS)
2) Pokémon Moon (3DS)
3) Pokémon Red (GB)
4) Fallout: New Vegas - Honest Hearts (PC)
5) WarioWare, Inc.: Minigame Mania (GBA)
6) Fallout: New Vegas - Dead Money (PC)
7) Pokémon LeafGreen (GBA)
8) Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues (PC)