Finished Banjo-Kazooie a few days ago, specifically the Xbox 360 version that was included with Rare Replay for Xbox One. I had tried the N64 version in the past but during my first approach when I was in my early teens I was struggling too much with the whole 3D platforming thing, I guess, and during a more recent approach I was really put off by the camera controls. Luckily the Xbox 360 version has mostly fixed those by introducing a more modern twin-stick control layout and I gladly played through that one.

Anyway, it's a friggin' great game. I enjoyed it so much that I actually finished it 100% and that's something I really didn't expect (admittedly I did resort to the Wiki once in a while, when I had already searched every corner of a level and still had not found everything). The design of the whole world is just so inviting, whether it's the characters, the enemies or the levels, the platforming itself is most of the time excellent and the game's structure, which is obviously heavily inspired by Mario 64, kept me hooked and entertained for a long time. So you have a hub world which leads to many smaller thematically distinct worlds where you have to perform a variety of tasks which grant you puzzle pieces and musical notes which you in turn need to unlock more worlds in the hub world. Even though the worlds couldn't be more cliche (e.g. beach, swamp, snow, desert) I felt hugely rewarded whenever I reached a new one as the developers really used the themes in an original manner. The amount of collectables (both their distribution and the types) is overwhelming at first but it soon turns out that it's just fine, largely thanks to the compact design of the worlds with rather few obscure corners and because they have very distinct purposes. The fact that I was able to collect 100% of collectables on most worlds even without a guide is proof of that.

The style and story are also pretty nice. I mean, it's not something to write home about, it's just another variation on the Mario theme with a bad guy (well, in this case gal) abducting your girl (well, this time sister) but the game really stood out with its huge dose of sarcasm. Even though the game is rather targeted at children I got a chuckle out of many of the jokes. There's a tad too much toilet humour for my taste (and apparently Rare went all in with that one in Conker's Bad Fur Day a few years later) but all in all it's a very nice mix of childish innocence and attitude, which actually becomes clear the moment your sidekick begins insulting the tutorial guy for no reason other than being a bit of a bitch.

The graphics, which apparent'y weren't retouched at all besides a higher screen resolution, don't really hold up well, just like in case of most N64 titles, but luckily they aren't eye-cancerous either and didn't annoy me. What does hold up, though, is the music which is filled with nice little details as it fluidly changes depending on where you are - not only in which level but in which portion of a level. The game is just another title that demonstrates how you can constantly have distinct melodies without going on the player's nerves.

I do have some complaints, though. As I mentioned, the camera controls were improved by moving them from the N64 controller's buttons to a stick, which makes the game feel rather modern most of the time BUT the camera's behaviour is still clearly from a different era. Not only does it require more manual readjustment than it should, it has a habit of suddenly changing angles, which can really but you in your ass once in a while. It didn't happen that often, though. I also really hated a difficulty spike in the last two worlds. Throughout most of the game the difficulty level is pretty low compared to many other 3D platformers, it's almost casual compared to Mario 64 but in the end there's suddenly a crapload of examples of what I like to call asshole design. The worlds become much more convoluted than the earlier ones with quite a few spots where one bad jump can instantly kill you or at least require you to redo a major portion (even though there's almost no such stuff in the earlier levels), there's suddenly enemies who take away 2 hitpoints instead of 1, some enemies are placed in a really evil way and you may not notice them until they hit you etc.. And finally one of the final challenges is a trivia quiz which was possibly the hardest portion of the game for me and it kinda blows my mind that something that differs so much from a game's fundamentals can be an obligatory challenge towards a game's ending. Still, somehow I made it after a few attempts so I guess it's not as bad as it seems at first.

Anyway, all in all I loved the game and I'm really looking forward to Banjo-Tooie. Among the 3D platformers and mascot games in general Banjo-Kazooie may very well be in the top 3.

Oh yeah, I'm kinda frustrated by the fact that even though I felt that I had achieved 100% in a decent time I'm on a spot somewhere around 115,000 on the leaderboards. God damn.

Moon Hunters - steam

TBH, I'm not sure when the game ends, but main campain is finished. It's bit peculiar game, and well worth it's price.

Kingdom Rush

A tower defense game with some nice features that are uncommon in this genre. One of them is the hero that you can control directly and that you can move around on the map to help out wherever help is needed. Another one is the barracks that you can build. They produce soldiers that can stop enemies for a while, so that your other towers can take care of them while they are occupied fighting the soldiers.

Campaign levels were fun and had a decent difficulty. Levels that were unlocked after the campaign is over were frustrating, because they are extremely hard and you have to find the exact same combination of towers and upgrades that the developers had in mind to succeed.

Complete list of finished games in 2018

Finished MIND: Path to Thalamus. A puzzle game but not a really great one. Puzzles are not very good, story neither and there are subtitles bugs. It is quite short.

Full list here.

I think you have missed "not" in the second sentence ;)

Fixed, thanks !

I recently snatched Halo 5 very cheaply (less than 20€ for a still wrapped limited steelbook edition no less - go figure). On that occasion I finally played and finished Halo 4 from the Masterchief Collection on Xbox One. I had done a run through almost the entire series last year, up to and including Reach, but was too burnt out at that point. I figured I'll have to finish that one, though, before moving on to Halo 5.

So, Halo 4 is the first game in the main series not developed by Bungie but rather 343 Industries who had previously made a name for themselves with the excellent remaster of the original game. Halo 4 kinda promised a huge change in the series by FINALLY introducing another faction after five games but in spite of that they of course played it safe. Surely they were under huge pressure, being the new guys trusted to handle the Xbox' flagship franchise with its gigantic fandom and I guess that shows in the game's overall design. I think they tried so hard to be faithful to the series that they avoided any changes of the kind that Bungie usually introduced but meanwhile they also somewhat failed to keep everything intact that made the previous games as great as they were. So, it's kind of a meh Halo game but the rule holds up that even a meh Halo game is a great game (well, unless it's some twin-stick shooter spin-off, I guess). Anyway...

First off, I felt that the game lacked the scale of the earlier ones. Even though according to the plot the stakes are as high as ever in the series, maybe even higher, it just doesn't feel like it. It feels a lot smaller and more personal than either major Halo game before that. I think it has a lot to do with the scenery they've chosen, fewer large-scale encounters as well as fewer or less developed characters besides, of course, Masterchief and Cortana whose relationship was certainly brought to new levels in this one. Even though technically the visuals of the environments certainly surpass everything in the earlier games (I guess Halo 4 was indeed the best-looking game on the Xbox 360), their design just isn't particularly original or breathtaking. There's again some greenery, some rocky desert, a bit of jungle and of course tons of alien structures but frankly there were no unreal places that had me just look at them in awe. There were a few pretty spectacular sights and moments but I didn't feel that they surpassed some of the more exciting and memorable moments from the earlier games. But I think the main reason the game lacked scale was that it didn't link enough with the franchise's massive lore. There were very few obvious links to events and characters form the earlier games that made this one feel rather detached. A kick in the nuts was the fact that you not only go straight back to killing Covenant again, in spite of the peace achieved at the end of Halo 3, but the only way the game justifies this is Cortana's statement: "a lot can happen in four years". There's no further explanation, there's no Covenant characters who give these guys more background, just tons of cannon fodder because it's Halo. That feels utterly cheap and a bit like the kind of betrayal of the series that 343 Industries actually tried to avoid.

Gameplay-wise it's just good old Halo. You have your shield, two slots for guns (most of which are the same ones as before), several grenades and of course melee attacks. And that "rechargeable special power" feature from Reach makes a return, allowing you to equip one special ability at a time that e.g. allows you to hover a bit, deploy camouflage or a shield etc.. There's of course some new guns, a new grenade type and a new "power" and while all of them are more or less useful, neither one of them is particularly imaginative. As a matter of fact most guns feel like reskins of ones that were already there. There already were assault rifles, there already was a shotgun, there already were precision rifles, there already were explosive super weapons. Luckily the new robotic enemies are in terms of behaviour a lot more interesting but they also don't really do anything particularly amazing. The dog-like ones can climb walls, others teleport around and can be revived by "combat drones". Nice additions but nothing to write home about. Luckily the enemy behaviour is still great, though, and made the combat generally as fun as in the earlier games.

Finally there's a few things that really disappointed me. The soundtrack, this time not by Martin O'Donnell, is well-executed and has its moments but it's not nearly as ballsy as the stuff O'Donnell did. There were very few memorable melodies, the majority of it was symphonic stuff, I think. It lacked O'Donnell's ballsier sounds and ideas which had always made the Halo soundtracks really stand out and hugely contributed to the series' alien atmosphere. And somewhat crazily it's by far the Halo game with most technical problems. I think not once had I run into any major technical issues while playing through the whole series and here I stumbled upon quite a few of them, some of them serious. First the game created a corrupted checkpoint that made the game crash when trying to continue from there, which forced me to replay half a mission. Then the game crashed just after finishing a mission (luckily progress had already been saved and I could continue from the next one). But by far the biggest problem was that towards the end of one mission there was some error in the mission logic that kept an important ship from spawning and the game had created a checkpoint after that error. I wasted half an hour trying to figure out what to do (because I didn't know why the mission wouldn't proceed) and was ultimately forced to start the mission over. And, remarkably, on two occasions the game broke something that had never really failed me: it had created checkpoints in nigh-hopeless situations. One particular checkpoint was generated just as artillery was about to hit me and it took me dozens of attempts to survive that inevitable hit. Also: the final challenge was kinda lackluster as it just had you fight swarms of standard enemies followed by something that was apparently a QTE which I still don't understand. The game displayed a prompt that had nothing to do with what was going on on screen, pressing that button did nothing, and I still have no idea why desperate button mashing eventually made the scene play out differently.

Anyway, despite the shortcomings I enjoyed the game. It is a rather genuine Halo experience and I'm actually really curious how the new plot-line will develop in Halo 5 which I'm already installing. And which is 100 GB in size. For frigg's sake...

I just completed all 50 waves of Army of Darkness Defense, which I installed on my phone a number of days ago. Quite a few of the later levels required many, many replays before I could beat them, but the game was addictive enough to keep me motivated. I've currently unlocked the "endless" mode, which I intend to play from time to time for fun. For all intents and purposes, though, I consider myself finished with the standard game. I never watched Army of Darkness, but I'm very familiar with many of the quotes and references thanks to Blood. I was also pleasantly surprised to notice Aubrey Hodges's name in the end credits; I'm a huge fan of his Quest for Glory IV soundtrack.

little nightmares. main game is good, dlc aims to meet people concerns about the main game by adding additional game time by adding puzzles and answering story based question. also lack of new enemies and low quallity textures. dlc is not so good. overall - average.

Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams

I think I am done with it. I went through all the levels trying to get as many gems as possible. I collected all in about half of the maps. Then I collected all big games to unlock artwork. I also did Time Attack mode for each map. I only tried Score Attack and Hardcore mode for map 1-1 and while it is nice to have the level marked as fully completed, I think I wouldn't enjoy it that much and I don't want to ruin myself the whole experience by getting frustrated and "wasting" a lot of time.

I would say it is good game and I had fun with it most of the time but there certainly were some rage inducing parts.
What made me angry sometimes was that the game is "unforgiving" in certain aspects. Most good platformers secretly cheat in favour of player. They let them make jumps that they should have failed by few pixels, hit someone they were to miss barely, grab ledge they were bound to miss, etc. It makes for smoother experience and make player enjoy the game more and feel better.
I felt like this game doesn't do that and it was source of frustration sometimes. What irked me even more about it was that it felt inconsistent. Sometimes I felt like a jump or hit were precise and yet they failed and other times I saw myself missing and yet it worked.
This made me fail more than I should have and I wasn't happy about it.
Otherwise I have little to complain about. Maybe the fact that it introduced some gimmick and then it was sometimes abandoned only to appear 6 levels later (like bubble or fans and blade from first boss abtlle never appeared again).
But the game played well. It ran quite smoothly for Unity game and the 2 worlds mechanics was fun to use and for the most of the time it was well done. Time attack showed me most levels had good flow and while I like collecting it was nice to not bother with every hidden corner of the map and just racing through the level.

I was not the biggest fan of the bosses but they were passable. The last bost was quite hard and it could proceed in the way that made hits from his attacks unavoidable (at least for my feeble mind) making it a bit luck based.
I spent quite a lot of time with the time, maybe some 20 hours or more and remaining modes could make it even longer so it offers decent amount of gameplay but it one wants just through blast through levels without paying much attention to anything else, it can be considered as much shorter game(5-6 hours perhaps) and I like it can cater to both.

I am not going to play Rise of the Owlverlord right away as I had my fill of Giana Sisters for now and I need a break for at least few weeks.


Full list.

1. Ys IV (PCE CD)
2. Exile (w/ Unworked Designs patch)(PCE CD)
3. Macross 2036 (PCE CD)
4. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (PC)
5. AM2R (PC)
6. TaleSpin (NES)
7. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (PC)
8. Super Mario 64 (N64)
9. Star Fox 64 (N64)
10. Thunder Force V (US ver.)(PS1)
11. Kirby's Adventure Wii (Wii)
12. Caesar III (PC)
13. Final Fantasy Adventure (GB)
14. Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (PC)
15. Märchen Maze (ARC)
16. Ys: The Ark of Napishtim (PC, 2015 ver.)

Pretty good game and I'm glad I played this later version where you can teleport between visited save points. Still it was a bit disappointing as a later entry in the series and as a 00s game. Beat the final bosses on my first try.

Deus Ex Invisible War, Mar 12 (GOG)-A lousy sequel but an ok game. Like the first one I consider the RPG elements to be lacking: a bare bones economy, character improvements based on plot, and the bio-mods themselves again an interesting concept but poorly implemented. I'm not sure why I liked the first one so much more, possibly the novelty of different playstyles being viable that was missing in this game.


Full List

Does it continue the story from the first one, or can it be played independently, without prior knowledge of Deus Ex?

Huniecam Studio

Very bad game. I had no intention of playing it but then I noticed how short it is so I decided to finish it and get rid of it.
I playe dit for less than 4 hours and I still feel like the time was wasted. I played it twice, once not knowing what am I doing and failing miserably. Next time I read short guide on Steam and breezed through it. Still had no fun.
It's all about hectic shuffling of girls to correct locations. It is real-time and it certainly doesn't offer relaxing gameplay of something like match-3. It also doesn't offer very little in terms of sexy girls. It wouldn't make any difference if I was shuffling hot babes, burly lumberjacks or tokens.
The game is very obviously made for touch-screen devices and it shows and doesn't help.
Overall bleh.

Complete list

It can definitely be played without prior knowledge of the original Deus Ex. There are some references to the original and some familiar characters but that is about it.