Did you play the GOG version. Just asking because I've read several comments in the past that it has a game-breaking bug and can't be completed.

No, the Steam version, sorry. Must have gotten it in some bundle or trade.

Old Man's Journey

This is kind of tough to review. It's evidently a game for the tablet, but since I don't do tablet gaming, I played the PC version. The game is like an interactive animated cartoon in a picture book style, about an old man taking a journey and reminiscing on his past life. The interaction involves getting the old man from point A to point B by clicking on the screen and moving parts of the landscape for paths across hills and mountains to connect. Occasionally it comes close to a puzzle and requires some thought, but most of the times the solution is very obvious and easy, so as far as the gameplay is concerned there isn't much to get excited about. The game's strong points are the art and the music which fit together beautifully, and I guess the story-telling is well done as well, even though the plot is a rather simple affair and by now I've probably seen and played too many similar stories for me to still be able to appreciate that aspect of the game, so I find it hard to judge whether it's actually moving or too much by the book to evoke serious emotions. Took me a little under 2 hours to complete.

+ Indianna Jones Fate of Atlantis
+ Flight of the Amazon Queen

I don't think I need to review these.

Unreal Gold main campaign.
First older shooter I've finished. No BS fun.
I'll get around to Return to Na'Pali later.

Any suggestions for similar games?
I have my eyes on Turok 2, FEAR, and Ion Maiden. Maybe Soldier of Fortune as well.

Oy, I need to get past all these mercenaries so I can also finish it. When the mercenaries shine, does that mean they have some shield on and cannot be harmed? These guys are giving me trouble due to their amount, two are alright but three or more give me trouble. Did you play with the fan patch? I do.

The only protective shield I've seen are those hexagonal shields. I think some have weird energy cloaks on them as buffs, but they DO take damage i think. I know for sure one of them had an orange cloak, that ate up a ton of damage, but died with the cloak still on.

I usually use the flak cannon's normal and alt fire as well as the bio gun. Unless i got some minigun ammo.

Also yes on the patch i think. something something 227i or whatever. I don't remember the difficulty, prob normal or hard, definitely not the insane mode.

Mortal kombat 1 from gog, activated free play right away and am glad i did, i sometimes feel like the cpu is cheating when figuring out my moves though not always, also didn't play as reptile since i couldn't get 2 flawless victories with fatality on the pit stage that has something flying past the moon. Anyway beaten the game with all other characters though, it's not that easy and 4 continues aren't enough with the spiking difficulty. Remember this being easier on sega mega drive though.

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic

Good game, but I think I played it on a difficulty level that made it hard for me to enjoy, or maybe I just played it incorrectly. I had to quicksave after almost every fight because enemies tended to kill me in 1-2 attacks (especially the ghouls), and it too me too long to kill any of THEM, without environmental hazards at least. Watching some videos made me realize I should've probably taken the ice spell and made everyone slip. Ah well.

I've been thinking of playing this soon. Which version did you use? Steam or do you have an old physical disc version? I ask because reading the Steam comments seems to suggest the game has technical issues on newer systems. I have the Xbox 360 version, but I really think it would be better on PC...as long it works.

Edit: actually scratch that, I checked again and must have confused it with some other games I was looking at on Steam, this seems to run just fine and is only $5.80, so PC it is then.

I played the Steam version, and my system is hardly modern. I was actually disappointed that my HD4850 couldn't comfortably max it at 1080p, and even after dropping AA to 2x it would often go below 60fps in outside areas, and certain weapon effects would push it down into the 20s sometimes.

The game also crashed occasionally, and one time it crashed my graphics driver 3 times in the same session (it recovered without having to quit the game, interestingly enough), but never happened again so maybe something was going on with my system at the time.

Just finished Army Men: RTS. I think this means that I've now finished every single Army Men game that has ever been officially released on PC. In my early teens I actually used to be a total fanboy of the series. However, in spite of that I'm perfectly able and willing to admit that the games in this series aren't great, with maybe one or two exceptions.

Army Men: RTS was released just after my fanboyism had kinda died down and I ended up never playing more than the demo until the game was released on GOG. I actually did enjoy the demo a lot and I kinda always assumed that this may have been the best game in the franchise, also because it was developed by a renowned veteran studio that had developed some great games before this and also delivered some great titles afterwards. Alas, it seems that this series is kinda cursed.

So this is your typical Command & Conquer clone. It's mostly base versus base, there's more than a dozen of unit types that are good against specific other units. The only "special" thing the game adds to the formula is that units leave behind puddles of plastic that can be harvested and used for building more units. The campaign also doesn't do anything interesting, it's mostly the aforementioned base versus base with the occasional awkward hero mission. And while there's some of that charming Army Men humour with its movie references, some black humour and whatnot, this one is pretty unimaginative and unambitious in this regard. The story and cutscenes just can't compete with some of the stuff in other Army Men games and the missions barely utilise the setting. It's really little more than a child-friendly re-skin of your typical military RTS.

The big problems lie in the gameplay of course, though. Army Men RTS kinda messed up stuff that even the first RTS games (and especially some of Pandemic's earlier games) got right. For starters: unit behaviour is dreadful. The pathfinding is simply unable to handle other units and you constantly end up with ridiculous situations where units try to push each other out of the way, going back and forth etc.. An order that should take a few seconds to execute can well take up to twenty. Sometimes a unit will seemingly decide that a move is too hard to execute and will just tell you to shove your order up your ass. This is such a fundamental problem that even if everything else were great about it I would have a hard time recommending the game.

But of course the other stuff isn't great either. There's no interesting units (and as I mentioned: both sides have the same units) and just a few missions in you've already seen it all and you will probably finish the whole game using just a handful of unit types, especially since, due to the pathfinding problems, any tactics that require more microing are a nightmare to use. The base building itself is also very dull, with only four types of buildings plus a few defensive structures. You basically have your base set up in two minutes and then it's just a matter of slowly pushing forward as you constantly heal your units. What really hurts in this game is that the second resource type, energy, is quite rare most of the time and a requirement for all vehicles. The effect this had on me personally was that I played the game very carefully, preserving vehicles at all costs, which brought this already rather slow RTS to a crawl. That sucks. The only thing that makes this game remotely challenging is that (luckily) some units are very resistant or even invulnerable to certain other units. E.g. tanks are pretty much a universal unit unless you encounter mines or helicopters, which they can't even fire at.

Additionally the game suffers from some serious UI shortcomings. For instance, you can only create four numbered groups which is pretty much inexcusable. You also can't select all units of a single type by double-clicking them. It's just weird. And even the mini map doesn't work properly. Once you've selected a unit you actually can't scroll around using the minimap. Heck, even if no units are selected you can't actually use the minimap properly because dragging the minimap results in box selection of units - I honestly think this is the only RTS I've played that does this. They inserted this useless feature there and rendered one of the classic tools of the genre useless in the process. It's crazy!

Anyway, so Army Men RTS isn't just very generic, it's actually pretty bad and sadly does, by the series' standards, very little to compensate these shortcomings via fun content. I can't honestly recommend this to anyone, even people who have a soft spot for this series like me.

I've played through the GOG version of Scanner Sombre about 3 months ago without problems. Haven't found any mention of a game-breaking bug in the Scanner Sombre subforum either.

Maybe you were thinking about the game Perception instead? That was removed from sale on GOG some time ago because the developer never fixed a game-breaking bug in the GOG version.

Oh yes. my bad. You are correct, I was indeed thinking of Perception.

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

The gameplay is servicable, but heavily scripted and mostly there to move the story forward: shoot everything that moves, and if you get hit badly just take cover and wait two seconds and you're good to go again. It's not really challenging unless you care about your performance (you get detailed statistics about your accuracy with weapons after each mission). Duels are the among the worst mechanics I've ever seen in a game. Once you've figured out how they work, the duels are always the same and not really challenging either, but they're so boring and it's so frustrating that the game never properly explains these mechanics to you.

Other than that, it's still similar to the first game, in that it splits the action between two characters, only this time you often get to choose who to play (one brother has the benefit of being able to handle dynamite, the other one can use a bow and a lasso; I mostly played the second one, because I considered him more fun). The story is also related to the first game, it keeps the themes of revenge, gold, and faith, and adds love/lust to the mix. The interesting part is that the characters you play are actually assholes most of the time. It's alright for a B movie western, and the atmosphere is great, good music, good voice acting (within the genre). All in all a passable game, mediocre gameplay but fun for its setting. There was an issue in the Steam version with the intro videos being played upside down and mirror-inverted, but it doesn't affect the rest of the game and can just be ignored.