Section 8

Played the short (4 hour for me) single player campaign of this game that you can't play MP of anymore because it's tied to GFWL. Not that I really mind, not being a MP gamer. It was ... all right. I saw a review mention that the campaign is basically a long tutorial, and that makes sense. You even get unlimited respawns during missions, though the mission restarts at checkpoint if you actually fail an objective. Which made the escort mission really REALLY hard. Seriously, why do escortees always make sure to charge ahead without waiting for the way to be made clear first?

Finished the 2017 season in Out of the Park Baseball.

In my Women's Baseball League I had 1 offensive player of the year, 1 defensive player of the year, and I also had pitcher of the year. I won the Women's World Championship for the 2nd straight year in a row.

I also won manager of the year with a record of 115 wins and 47 losses.

Now onto the 2018 season! Who will I sign to big contracts? Who will be let go? So many questions in the WBL :).

Titanfall 2 (XB1X)

The single player campaign. Whilst primarily a multiplayer shooter with the focus on piloting smallish mechs, plenty of people have said to me that the single player campaign is quite good. They're actually spot on. It will be over in 10 hours or less, but there's never a dull moment. Lets face it, there are single player only shooters out there that don't give much more than 10 hours of play as well.

The controls make this game work, smooth perfectly balanced and natural. Even though I don't really like platforming in FPS games a lot, that's mainly because the controls never work well for it. Titanfall 2 has a lot of platforming, but the controls and the feel are so spot on that wall running and jumping just work perfectly.

The story works as well, it builds your bond to your Titan as part of the story and introduces new elements all without stupid mid mission cutscenes and scripting to break the immersion- including plausible reasons to get out of the Titan for the on foot sections. Rest assured this not one of those multiplayer shooters where the single player campaign is just a dull disguised tutorial for the multiplayer.

And did I mention how this game looks? Well forget Doom and Wolfenstein and their overdone post processing. Titanfall 2 (I assume it uses EA's Frostbite engine) is stunning, at least a match for Gears of War 4's use of the Unreal 4 engine but at a higher frame rate.

It was on sale for only $7 a few weeks back. Bargain. At the sale prices it goes for it is worth it even if, like me, you only want it for the single player.

After few attempts through years (since their release on GOG) I managed to finish Wizardry VI - Bane of the Cosmic Forge.

These Mines will haunt me for years, even with automap and handdrawn map I was lost and going through the same looking staircases to the same looking corridors exhausted me (nothing that can't be cured with can of beer, or few).
You can imagine my face when I managed to get to the surface (finally we're free!) only to find out my team have to go back and wander around even more to crush some big diamond from 4 sides with some wizard inside...

Pyramid was similar but somehow faster to deal with.
Last level was not that bad? I admit to restart the game to get easier encounters (they always happen in the same passages) because my low level characters (lvl11) had no protections like Magic Screen (I hate that thing in Wizardry, can't choose spell because I wasn't spamming spells from one school) and fights with Pharaohs, small devils and Priests of Ramm was death sentence.
I also got my first serious bug when my ninja was paralysed(?) had status icon of crossed manequin but no way to cure it. Automap have an option to tell you about condition of your teammates are now but not then, when that bug happen. Weird.
Mad wizard went down quickly, his minions did not killed us, luckly.

Now here is a thing - I tried to get both Diamond Ring and Cameo Locket but some reason I could not fly away in Bela's ship. It wasn't in the next room. Consulted few sources and guides but none of them had that problem.
Weird. I had to use editor to give myself the locket and fly away with Bela (cause you can't go back to grab the Cosmic Forge, unless you want to fight with the Temple of Ramm monsters again, NOPE).
Also - I had to play without any sound because it was prone to freeze. Not a big problem because there were little to no sounds here, but hope there would be no such problem in next Wizardry 7.

Next one - Might&Magic X - Legacy
It was ok, but I dare to say in some places it was worse game than M&M IX Writ of Fate.
Pretty small world with 3 cities, some places locked behind by gods, forcing you to find elemental crystals and some puzzle solving+boss battle in Forge to get their blessings.
Game had performance issues outside (Unity engine ftw) in open fields, also some weird graphical issues, like you walk near the trees and turn around and they start twitching and twists.... I can't explain it. I guess that's the results of reused assets from HoM&M 5+6+Dark Messiah?
Reward for Obelisks puzzle was a slap in the face with one mediocre relic sword. Pffffff.

But the biggest sin of M&M X - there was no teleportation spell in the game. I mean - there is some Llyod's Beacon-like spell but you can't use it in the dungeons.
Yes, you have to get your team from the depths of the dungeons, often through the multiple levels and multiple loading screens (loading screens on Unity engine takes a minute or more).

Final area is just one big dungeon crawl through hordes of enemies, took me few days to get through because it was exshausting.
Class promotions give nothing beside skills unlocking to get Master and Grand Master degree. No HP/MP boost, no new portrait, nothing else. Even M&M IX give you that and new portraits and they were under way bigger pressure and deadly deadlines.

Hotline Miami 1 and 2 which were fantastic, though the first is better than the second.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein, i have nothing to add

Far Cry 2, interesting ending and stuff, really makes me think about trust.

Bleed, fun shooty cutesy action platformer

Red Faction, the sections that weren't stealth were fantastic with some of the most interesting weapons I have seen in an fps.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Directors Cut, great game, one of my favorites which has now gotten me into system shock and other immersive sims(yes I am working on beating the original)

Im sure theres more I can't remember at the moment

Streets of Rage (Xbox One)

More SEGA retro stuff, this time the classic side scrolling brawler from the Mega Drive, running under emulation on Xbox.

I've never played it before and started off on normal difficulty playing as the black guy (Axel is his name I think). I got all the way through to the boss fight of stage 5 thinking "this game isn't all that hard for it's time". Then I lost all my lives to Mona & Lisa in the stage 5 boss fight. I don't think I even got a hit on them.

So I started again on easy and tried to learn the boss fights this time. Got all the way to the final level, but with only 1 life left so soon died. But I learnt a lot about fighting the bosses. Started again on easy and made it all the way, chose to not join with the final boss and got the credits. So finished, though only on easy so far! More play throughs to come though, to try and beat normal difficulty and try the other two characters.

Classic game that pretty much epitomizes the old arcade brawlers, and that is the area where Nintendo was never able to quite match SEGA.

Spirits of Xanadu

An indie FPS/Adventure/Horror story (sorta) hybrid. Not all that great (though not terrible) at the FPS part, the adventure part's better and the story's pretty immersive. One thing I didn't like is that once you get one of the 3 endings your saved game gets wiped so in order to see the others or to work on some achievements you gotta start from the very beginning. Yeah no, I don't got time for that crap, so I just looked up the other endings on Youtube.

For a game with graphics that simple, it sure performed badly on my aging 4850. I mean why on earth would it run that much worse with all settings (except resolution) on minimum, than Bioshock does maxed?

Wild Frontera

A short (2.5 hour), decently fun Wild West themed twin-stick shooter that I played with Mouse+Keyboard. After beating it on Normal a harder difficulty unlocked - started playing it but quit after 1.5 levels. Never did try out a shotgun weapon. I'm curious why the game is no longer sold on Steam though, it's not one of those non-functioning low effort asset flips that usually get removed.

On the one hand, I envy you finishing these games (a lot of time, determination and patience needed, I suppose). On the other hand, your opinion isn't actually encouraging... ;)

Most (if not all) of these games are just returns to old saves (most of them abandoned halfway through), also playing on Easy helps to reduce trash mobs encounters (and saves time), using both printed maps+automapper helps a lot.
It feels more like bulldozer ride but still feels good. And guide at my hand to help with some nasty puzzles, like (in)famous bean puzzle in New City in Wiz7 for example.
Plus some outside and real-life time management (not wasting time of whatever) helps a lot.

Also - recently I took strategy to keep only one game on HDD to focus on one title at time. Well, two if we count action RPGs like Diablo The Hell (already bored with it) or Path of Exile (still waiting for a new league).
Results? My current backlog is a shadows of itself. With lack of impulsive buying (because games are helluva expensive these days) I can smile at people crying at their own backlogs :)

Kathy Rain (Steam)

This is more like an interactive mystery story than a game.

The graphics are OK (except the character portraits, I wish there was an option turn them off!). The story is OK, it’s definitely able to pull you along, but the main flaw of this “game” is the linearity (at each moment in the game there is basically only one thing productive you can do, it’s up to you to figure it out though, although most of the time the game makes it very obvious).

I did have one technical problem: my mouse cursor got continually stuck to the edge of the screen whenever I moved the mouse close to the edge (I was playing the Mac version of the game), thankfully I was able to free it quite easily by pressing the spacebar or the escape key, but it was still pretty annoying because it occurred throughout the entire game.

Overall the game is pretty “meh”, I’d hesitate to recommend it unless you’re really into story-driven mystery point-and-clicks.

This one seems to be the most important. However these games are still extremely demanding in terms of time. Do you know pehaps how long does it take you to complete each of them?

In my case finishing 50-60-hours-long crpg means usually around 2 months of gaming focused strictly on this one title. It keeps me from playing old-school crpgs. I love them, I love investing these hours and drowning in game's world, but most of longest games are awaiting some better times...

Finished A Story About My Uncle. It was nice but controls & physics were a bit weird sometimes. I did no try to find all collectibles.

Full list here.

Streets of Rage 2 (Xbox One)

A sequel that improves on the first game in all ways. In particular the hit detection and overall controller feel is better. Also this time there are 4 characters instead of 3 and they feel different to each other and have very different special attacks, where as in the first game I found all the characters felt pretty similar in play. Graphics are improved as well, and I prefer the larger character sprites.

Otherwise the same type of gameplay, beat 8 levels before you run out of lives. Easier said than done, but with trial and error you soon work out the enemy patterns and how to exploit the openings they leave. Another pretty good classic SEGA game.

Alaric's Goldmine

A bit hard to rate this one. Viewed as a first-time side hobby project it's solid, with pretty good music, no bugs that I experienced, and at least the basic foundations of a clicker. Well done.

As a commercial product, well... it's properly priced. I won't go into detail, since Alaric has said he views it as a learning experience.

Would note for any prospective players who've been around the genre this one really doesn't have any meaningful "idle" component. It doesn't operate offline at all, and even online if you aren't actively clicking it's very slow going. For better or worse, this one also doesn't seem to want to steal your soul for a multi-month commitment.

Despite having earned all 10 prestige levels, it's also not entirely clear to me what triggers them. Might be total gold accrued (or clicked?), might be total allies purchased. Feedback in the UI is fairly limited, generally, though the summary of gold/unit, total gold earned, etc., is built in.

So if you want a casual clicker that you can "finish" in about/under 9 hours of mixed clicking/idling (but mostly clicking), this might be your game.

Wizardry VI took almost month, looking at Wizardry 7 walkthroughs it take 2-3 months easily.
Other 30h games take like 2-4 weeks, playing on Easy to reduce grind requirements helps a lot. Depend on the amount of real life work (freelancing and workhome ftw, no need to sit all day at job even when there is no work, I hated that thing, that part of the job is the biggest time waste of life. With that gone - backlog smashing is smoother and faster.
I don't want to get into details about social life but I'm sure it's unavoidable. Let's just say that contacts are falling off because responsibilites and lack of time, only few good ones remains and they don't have much time on their disposal, to put it mildly.