Just remember to install Circle of Eight mod for ToEE! It fixes numerous bugs that makes the game unplayable.

I always play vanilla versions, but in case of Troika it sounds reasonable - e.g. Bloodlines comes from GOG already patched. I'll check that, thanks!

We'll see :) For now (not more than 1-2h into BS4) I'd rather agree that BS4 is better - but my opinion is based only on controls causing frustration. In BS4 you can just click destination point. However it seems to be necessary to use both keyboard and mouse, because it's impossible to make some actions with one of them only. Oh, well. I just love and miss good old 2D point&click scheme...

Elegy for a Dead World (2014) (Linux)

It's not exactly a game. It's rather kind of experience made of nice visuals (some hand-drawn dead-worlds you're crossing) and creativity (some poems or stories you should fill with your own content/observations). There is no way to actually beat the game or even finish it somehow. I believe it has potential to be something much more interesting, perhaps it's interesting for someone with story-telling aspirations, but I'm rather disappointed.

List of all games completed in 2018.

SUPERHOT

On the occasion of the *nice* outdoor weather we're having, I decided to stay indoors and play through this title instead. I don't have a lot to say about it, other than that I enjoyed it, that it doesn't overstay its welcome (finished it in one sitting), and: It's the most innovative shooter I've played in years.


Quiet City

I checked out a few of the Humble Trove games, and this was the first one I found interesting enough to stick to and complete. Granted, it probably took less than five minutes, and it's a very simplistic narrative experience, hardly a game at all, and depending on your view as deep as it is nonsensical and silly, with very crude stickmen graphics to boot. This is definitely not a must play game that everyone is likely to appreciate, but for me it worked just because I was curious as to what this is all about and what would happen next.

The game features several languages and after my English playthrough I played through it a second time, just to see how the German translation was, and ... it's pretty weird. At first I thought some native speaker made a creative effort to come up with some new text instead of translating everything literally, but it soon became clear that the weirdness was probably due to the translator not being a native and either not quite adept at translating or purposefully entertaining themselves by writing new sentences in German that don't always match the English ones. I don't think Google Translate was used as the sentences are mostly correct and do make some kind of sense, but the English version was definitely superior and more fun.


Hitchhiker: First Ride

Second Humble Trove game I played through. Riding Shotgun Simulator, you just sit and look and listen and sometimes get a choice between two answers or very restricted options to interact with the environment. I found it nice to look at and the sound was well enough, too. There were some interesting mystery moments, but it seems to be only the first istallment of a planned series, at some point (maybe after 10-15 minutes?) it just ends without conclusion, and all in all it's a bit too blatantly mysterious, which makes it somewhat less interesting. I'd probably play another episode though, just for the ride.

2000:1: A Space Felony

A game in which you have to prove that the murderous AI of a space station killed the crew. To do that you have to take pictures of evidence and confront the computer with it. Game isn't hard and also quite short (about an hour and you can't even save), but I think it was interesting and very well made. I liked the references to 2001: A Space Odysee and the ending that had a thought-provoking twist.

Complete list of finished games in 2018

Escapists.....kind of.

I finished the main missions but there are a few thousand DLCs starting with having to escape from Santa's Workshop.


Off to work I go! :D

SuperHot

I love the mechanic gimmick (world freezes until you move). But, the levels are smaller, and so it plays a bit more like a puzzle game. It is kind of the same action as Hotline Miami in the periods of analysis, followed by frantic action, and try, try, try again. It's good, but I was expecting more of a shooter vibe and many levels feel more like a puzzle.

The story is alright, it's well explored material in video games, but serviceable. I liked not having to know what to type in a terminal interface for a change. Presentation is mostly clear and easy to use. I had a ton of fun with the Tree Dude mini-game.

Expectations got in the way a bit, because what is here is very solid and deserves all the praise it has gotten, but I was just expecting something slightly different and so it left me a bit flat. It took just a few hours to run through the whole game, so I can see myself playing again later and liking it more (also like Hotline Miami).

The Stanley Parable

It's a walking sim, where the main draw is the interaction between the player and the narrator. There's some too cool for school subversive play with the medium, play with the genre tropes. It's alright.

Getting to an ending only takes a few minutes. Then it becomes a game of hunting for all the other endings. I wish the game overall was closer to The Confusion Ending.

The game got a lot of good press, and I can see why, but it did not resonate well with me. I enjoyed it for the first few endings, and then I was just trying to see it all so I could be done, because it was clear it was no longer going to advance the story any.

Action Henk

I thought this was going to be a platformer like Sonic, but instead it is time trial / head-to-head racing. The campaign was short, and I took a brief look at some of the cool tracks that the community has built. Overall not what I was looking for and did not grow on me.

Shining Force
My first console RPG, and way back when I played it with a friend. I enjoyed revisiting this game. It is very JRPG and a little bit Tactics RPG. The mannequin still stinks. Combat and the characters are the strengths while the story and art are serviceable. This is one that did not shatter nostalgia vibes and was plenty of fun.

Beat Dungeon of the Endless for the first time this afternoon.
Dungeon of Endless is a RNG dominated tower defense game with procedurally generated floors + heavily RNG monster mob spawns/item drops/recruitable heroes/merchants each time you open a door to a new room.
There is 12 floors in a normal DoE game, 2 different gameplay tactics are needed to win DoE.

Floors 1 - 9 you want to focus on harvesting as much resources as possible by opening every door on the floor, researching major/minor room defense modules/per turn resource buff modules/levelling up your heroes/equipping out your heroes with found items/replacing weak hero units with better ones if possible.

Floors 10 -12 you want to open the least amount of doors as possible/rush for the exit elevator asap, hero micromanagment becomes really critical as well as room power management and what kind major/minor modules are built in every powered up room.

Any update? :)

Fully agree. BS4 is the worst. I didn't liked controls and sokoban puzzles from BS3, but here are more serious flaws. The puzzles are completely different in style and totally illogical. Perhaps I'm just dumb, but I'm constantly checking the walkthrough. I also don't like the story as much as previous ones. The graphics and cinematic scenes are nice. And I still like its sense of humor, but the overall feeling is worse than BS3.

nah. the game was dumb.

Good luck completing it. I can also say that BS5 was pretty good, so much better than 3 and 4. so at least you have that game to look towards.

Broken Sword 4: The Angel of Death (2007) (Linux/Wine)

So - it was (as lukaszthegreat said above) the worst part so far. After finishing BS3 it looked much prettier and offered much better controls, so I was full of hope, but I really didn't like the gameplay. I'm not very good at adventures, but for some reason puzzles in BS1-3 was fair and reasonable. I liked them. Even if I got stuck somewhere, I didn't get frustrated. Probably BS1-3 was just much easier.

In BS4 there were a lot of moments when I knew what should I do now, but for some ridiculous reasons I coudn't find out a proper sequence of actions. It was some dialogue option left with person who I talked 3 times before. Or there was some action you just need to perform once more to proceed. Or there is an item between other items you've already checked. Some of puzzles need to be solved with some knowledge - and you need to study a wall of text to find a proper solution. I don't know how is that possible, but gamplay of first 3 parts was a nice fly and here I've got frustrated every corner.

All in all, I'm still happy I've purchased the whole series in last year GOG bundle. I liked the characters, liked the sense of humour and quite liked the story with all its twists and funny danbrownish ideas. I heard a lot of good things about BS5 here - so now it's time for my effort to be rewarded ;)

List of all games completed in 2018.

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. I liked it, despite some nitpicks. It plays like a Zelda game but with a gothic horror mood, which is perfectly fine with me. Kain is assassinated at the start (I managed to take down three of the guys before they got me) and then resurrected as a vampire, so you have to fight your way across the land to get revenge. There are also these mystical pillars set up in the middle of a forest that somehow represent the health of the land but they've been corrupted and you have to fix them. I wasn't crazy about that part of the lore but it's not a big deal. I did like how the game was laid out. There are 9 pillars, so you'd think it would be a straight "go to one dungeon for each pillar" set-up but the game instead has a linear structure and it's more about meeting the characters involved in the story (and then killing them). It has a pretty good plot by video game standards, with one development understandably leading into the next, until by the end you feel like Kain has gone through a novel's worth of adventures and arrived at a clear resolution. There's a good and bad ending, and for once I think either ending is justifiable (although the bad ending became canon for the sequels).

Compared to the 2D Zelda games, Blood Omen is much more ponderous. Link zips around nimbly but Kain just sort of moseys along slowly. A lot of encounters involve you meeting a bad guy, moving in close enough to provoke a swing only to back off and then hit him before he can wind up again. You also gain various sub-weapons and magic throughout the game, most of which I didn't use except the thing that looks like the Glaive from Krull (good for killing at a distance). Once you get the shield/repel spell, combat becomes very easy because you can cast that on yourself and it lasts long enough for you to clear out a good section of an area without worrying about taking any damage. You can also shape-change - bats for quick travel, wolf for hopping over obstacles, mist for walking over dangerous surfaces, and human for disguising yourself in towns. You also get weapon and armor upgrades you find as you go along.

The coolest thing in the game is the blood-drinking. It would have been bothersome if you had to walk up and chomp down on everyone's neck to refill your health meter, so the game allows you to raise your arm and the victim's blood leaps out of their body and into your mouth, like in Prince of Darkness when people start puking at each other from across the room but in reverse. A nice touch is that some creatures have green blood which will poison you if you drink from them (be careful if you're wearing the armor that automatically sucks blood for you).

The graphics are okay. The sprites appear to be pre-rendered on top of nicely detailed pixel art backgrounds. You can zoom in but I don't see why you would because the graphics don't get prettier and your view distance gets really cramped. Your status bar takes up a big chunk of the right side of the screen, which I suspect is why the "camera" tends to reorient itself every time you turn in a direction, to make up for the smaller playing field. I got used to it but it was off putting when I first started playing. The game is major showcase of colored lighting, though. Almost every location shows off with the lighting effects and it adds to the atmosphere a lot. At its best it's like you're playing a Mario Bava movie. There are some CGI cut-scenes that play in certain parts which are...certainly representative of their time.

The voice acting is pretty good but they really should have given Kain more voice samples. Hearing him yell "VAE VICTUS!" or chuckling evilly every other second gets old really fast.

Load times are pretty bad on the Playstation version. I could be wrong, but I do think the console version's gameplay actually moves slightly faster than the PC version but my memory could be fooling me.

The game gave me a final rating of "GIMP", I guess because I didn't kill enough people and/or find enough secrets (17/100).

Wasteland 2 Director's Cut (Xbox One)

Well, if it wasn't for the existence of Divinity Original Sin, this would be my favorite game of this decade. So it has to settle for second. Like a lot of big turn based combat RPG's it took it's time getting going, but once I got into it I REALLY got into it.
It's a real RPG, you have choices to make as to how to go about each area and the choices come back to you, even if it it's only in the end game summaries in some instances. You can take the time to do things the nice way and bring peace and harmony to the factions or you can just shoot everyone and the game lets you. Real role playing. The story is good, the characters are even better- you get attached to the recruitable npc's, they have quirks and charms. It's also very long, longer than I expected.

For character building I eventually settled upon each character specializing along three skills made up of one or two combat skills and one or two useful skills. In the end I wasted a few points on each character early on by beginning on a skill that ended up being made redundant by a recruitable npc. With prior knowledge a second play through would result in a more optimized party. But skill specialisation is key...low skill levels have very little value as the game goes on.

Anyway I went with my lead character for Assualt Rifle-Lock Picking-Perception-plus mid level Field Medic. 2. was Shotgunner-Demolitions-Safecracking 3.was Sniper Rifle-SMG-Mechanic and 4. Heavy Weapon-Energy Weapons-Leadership
I don't know what is normal, but my lot ended up level 40 at the end.
For most of the game I went with npc's Rose (for Surgeon-Computer Science-Alarm Disarming-Pistols), Ralphy (who I developed for all round combat support) and the ex God's Militia guy who name I can't remember (for Field Medic- Surgeon- SMG). The party balance worked out well...though with prior knowledge I'd do some better fine tuning on a second play...and anyone that has played the game probably knows how having Rose in the party goes in the end!

The game is awesome overall, but a few annoyances just slightly hold it back from the greatness of Divinity OS. I played the console version because my poor old PC is right on the games min spec and I rarely play PC games on min spec because the experience is usually poor. But I picked up a second hand Xbox disc for only $8. It worked well, but the UI and controls are no where near as polished as games with similar combat like XCOM and Divinity on console. You cannot just flick between targets using the bumpers for example- you can only select by moving the cursor around. Also in crowded places it would be useful to unlock the cursor and use it like a mouse like you can do in Divinity OS. To their credit inXile did make improvements in this area with Torment on console, so they learnt from this one.

Another thing I never liked was, no matter how good my character combat initiative, the game always seemed to cheat and have all enemies move before me. Combat initiative seemed to only really come into effect after the first round of the enemy onslaught. I know why the devs did it- it's to allow the enemy to get into cover. But I always felt like the AI was cheating. So the first round of most combats consisted of weathering the first enemy round, after that I would be okay.

Lastly, those fucking land mines. Everywhere. I think inXile suffer from some sort of Land Mine fetish. And the perception required to detect them always seemed to fall just one level below what my perception character needed to see them. Often I just resorted to detaching my first character (who had the hit the deck trait) and walking through the mines and healing as needed. These areas were too numerous, slow and tedious.

But overall a great game, one that I will come back to from time to time to explore different choices, get to know different NPC's, save the town instead of the Ag Centre and maybe not push the red button in the sewers.

Final Fantasy XV (PS4)

I originally put it off until the price became 1/4 of the original cost and after playing it I wish I'd started it sooner. The game see's you play as Noctis, who is yet another moody teenager, something not uncommon in Final Fantasy (Cloud, Squall, Lightning), the game centres around driving across a huge open world while on your way to get married and on the way take a load of gods powers. The gameplay is centred around a road trip vibe, and as such a lot of environments are similar to areas you might go on a US roadtrip, particularly inspired by Route 66. This part of the game where you explore, slay monsters and complete sidequests is by far the best part of the game. The main quest however, was a bit of a let down, you leave the open world about half way through after which the plot seems rushed, the gameplay isn't as fun and there is an absolutely awful survival horror inspired section which is more boring than scary.

Combat is more fluid, pressing a button makes you attack instantly instead of waiting for a bar to fill like in FF13, and it often relies on teamwork or navigating around enemies to back stab them. However blocking is simply done by just holding a button, you lose mp for every attack dodged in this way but I never lost it all this way. The game relies on item based healing similar to Rogue Galaxy, where you can buy potions cheaply that heal half your hp, these 2 combined means the game is incredibly easy, I was taking down enemies 20 levels higher than me and there is really only 1 enemy I struggled against (because of a time limit), the superbosses are just given insanely high hp and there isn't really any skill needed (Though this is usually the case for FF superbosses). The final boss fight was a big let down, with only 2 phases, the 2nd phase involving just spinning around spamming the attack button, which avoids all damage.

However Character Development was pretty good, which it needs to be when you only have 4 characters in your team, with the exception of 1 character who revealed something about him which doesn't make any sense, is followed by everyone else going "-shrug- who cares?" and they never talk about it again. Of course if you like a huge amount of side quests and exploration than this is a great game, I still prefer 4,6,7,8,10 and Tactics A2 but I did enjoy it enough to fully explore what it had to offer and get all Achievements/