Ollie & Bollie: Outdoor Estate

Tried another Humble Original from the Trove. Cute though very short (15-60 min) playground / adventure game based on clunky physics. You have to fix four things on the estate, with the help of your friend or brother (although more often than not, he actually gets in your way ...). The game is non-violent and calm, with a pleasant enough soundtrack, and should be suitable for (patient) kids. It comes as standalone exe, no installation necessary, though be warned that you can't save mid-game, which isn't a big deal considering how short it is, but still a slight annoyance, especially since the game doesn't inform you about not saving your progress when you quit. Not as good as A Short Hike and it can be a little buggy, but other than that it's quite alright for passing a short bit of time as well.

Mini Metro (Steam GA)

A really nice but challenging puzzle game. I didn't complete all the achievements by any stretch. Even on normal my scores ranged from a low of 441 (Hong Kong) to a high of 2,000 (Osaka).

This is a game one could either steadily nibble away at, or play a lot at once if you were really trying to improve. I'm sure there are tricks I didn't unlock, but at some point it does stop being a puzzle about design/layout, and instead about constantly pausing to move trains and carriages around to avoid the inevitable station overload.

And I will confess, that part of the game interested me a lot less. Thus I'm pretty content with at least <most> of my completions. I will probably keep it installed for a while and tinker with it now and then.

I do highly recommend it, but it's a game that (outside of achievements and daily leaderboards/challenges, and I suppose the sheer baseline of needing minimum scores on one board to unlock the next) for the most part you're just playing against whatever standard you set for yourself.

Batman: Arkham Knight. When I started playing it, I was encouraged by how smooth everything was and thought maybe it had been patched up since its original release. Haha, nope - once it opens up the city to you, it becomes prone to turning into a slideshow, especially while driving the Batmobile, and no amount of knocking down the settings really helped. Sometimes the game behaved and played mostly fine, sometimes it decided to be difficult and run like crap. So that was disappointing, but I somehow persevered through it.

Getting past the technical issues, it's basically the same thing as before, with not much in the way of real gameplay additions aside from some more enemy variety. I liked the sections in which Robin, Nightwing, or Catwoman would fight beside you and you could switch off to controlling them and do a double-team finish sometimes. That's classic Batman stuff there. The main new thing, of course, is the Batmobile, which is very fast and handles well enough, and it has a tank mode that the game wants you to use quite a lot, to the point that some of the major boss fights in the game are entirely based on the tank fighting. I found these battles mostly easy, but it just got old after a little while and it's not very Batman-like to me. By the time the game ended, I felt that although the basic style of the game is still fun, it's not bringing enough new ideas and I hope the rumors of yet another Batman game from these guys aren't true. That's not even getting into how stupid the story was...

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Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. The game picks up on the assumption that the bad ending of Blood Omen is canon, so the world is now an apocalyptic wasteland ruled by Kain and his vampire goons. You control a vampire who's getting too big for Kain to feel comfortable around, so he shreds the wings you sprouted and throws you down a well to lie in forever, but you miraculously survive and have to get revenge by killing Kain's vampire gang and absorbing their powers, which let you access more areas, and eventually battling Kain.

It's a cool game but it's showing its age a lot, too. One of those relatively early 3D games with a really twitchy camera and controls. Also, puzzles in which you slowly slide very large blocks around.

One of the things I liked about Blood Omen was how you could suck blood out of victims but unfortunately this game switches over to you vacuuming up enemies' glowing lifeforce after you kill them (probably because the 3D engine couldn't render liquid very well). It loses a lot of the gothic horror/sword-and-sorcery vibe that I liked about the original game in favor of the more generic fantasy gobbledygook that you tend to get in a lot of video games. I also didn't like that, because most of your enemies are other vampires, you have to kill them by beating them up and then staking or burning them with something in the environment (unless you have your soul sword, so don't ever get hit!). It's not difficult - I'm not sure it's actually possible to straight out die in the game - but it gets annoying having to beat down an enemy and then slowly carry them over to a bonfire before they wriggle free and you have to beat them up again.

Finally I could get my hands on a game since ... well... more than 1 year? (Almost the same time I got absent from the forums), since I started my endeavor of taking PC and mobiles repair shop seriously.

Well, to the point... recently Asus (ROG brand) gave away 1 month codes for Origin Access, so I went ahead and tried some games available on it.

The first one was Battlefield 1, which I finished yesterday after a week on hiatus (because work! remember...), historical accuracy aside, I had a f***ng blast with it! the scenarios and beautiful landscapes powered by Frostbite, amazing ost and good campaign.

But the one which got me more impressed is Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2017), I got so hooked that after finishing Battlefield 1 I fired this one up and didn't leave the computer until I finished it (yeah, I did it in ONE sitting, thing I haven't done in years!).

Graphics are so amazing that I felt like I was inside a freakin' Star Wars movie! OST as I expected, was AMAZING,and campaign was a lot fun, and well connected to the movies.

Both of them running at 60FPS minimum on my setup (everything on Ultra), Frostbite is amazing!

Next one: Quantum Break (which I have already spent 3 hours on, most of these time configuring things to get a decent framerate lol).

God of War 1 and 2
For PC gamer (with some dose of handheld influence) like me these games made thunderous impression on me.

Some PS2 were considered a "peak" for this console, while Black was not that great game (it got old really fast) GoWs are still massive piece of art.

But frankly, GoW2 didn't felt that great even though it bring some improvement. Story felt like soap opera compared to first game which was nice modern interpretation "greek tragedy" and Kratos was way more insufferable character, plain unlikeable.

Game was doable but holy cow - QTE were a nightmare and reason to repeat sections and boss fights.
And there were sections with moving blocks under pressure, either time or respawning enemies, those were awful, had to restart them more often than final bossfights.
Speaking about final bosses - both were doable but Ares QTE still gave me nightmare. Even shared HP bar and Kratos clones phase wasn't that bad.
And Zeus fight in GoW2 was neat but then it turned into sequel hook that needed next console generation to happen. Meh.

XIII
Amazing game yet at the release it had scores around 7/10. I don't get it, it have a great style, great music... on the contrary - sneaking parts with no alarms and else can get on your nerve, especially with checkpoint system.
There is cliffhanger sadly... oh and turns out - XIII is voiced by David Duchowny. But he was still "silent protagonist for most of the time". What a waste.

I have just finished Earthlock from GOG. European made jRPG. The game is nice in the combat area, but the writing is not the best point of the game. Still, not bad, and I have enjoyed the game more than enough to recommend it further. I was also able to get 100% achievements on GOG Galaxy for this game (in 40 hours).

Complete list of my finished games in 2019.

Now that I have finally given up on World of Warcraft I intend to go through my gog library. I went back and played through the original Splinter Cell now that the shadows are pretty much fixed and it inspired me to go through the first 3 games. Obviously Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory are not on gog but you can get them easily enough.

Splinter Cell - Fixed w/ dgVoodoo2
Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow - Fixed w/ dgVoodoo2
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

1 down, 219 to go!

Jill of the Jungle: The Complete Trilogy is free, so I can recommend this nice piece of history, but if you take Bio Mence it will be much better choice . On the other hand I totally agree with opinion in comments on game page, this game is mediocre. All what came before Duke Nukem 2 is probably mediocre (at least based on games which I have played). In later games I miss possibility to transform main character.

Grim Dawn - Forgotten Gods

So my journey into Grim Dawn is now complete since I tried The Crucible and I don't really care about it.

Forgotten Gods was very good, but maybe a bit on the short side, plus not very difficult (on normal difficulty). I still have some remaining quests and some dangerous/treacherous domains to explore, but for the moment I'll take a break from Grim Dawn and try to finish one or two other big games in my library!

So far in 2019: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2019/post24

Dark Souls III (XB1X)

This one is another masterpiece. I finished my first play through last night and am already about 1/4 the way through NG+ (amazing how fast you can go with familiarity), I have to really love a game to immediately restart and play again- the only other games I can think of where I did that were...Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Borderlands 1+2, Jagged Alliance.

Anyway- I played the worst version. The Xbox version runs at only 900p and has no enhancement for the 1X...though that has one big advantage in that there is so much excess power that it brute forces it way through and gives a perfect paced locked frame rate at least. That's something the other console versions don't have. Anyway, this is a rare case where I like the game enough that I'm going to buy it on Steam next sale, and play it a third time.

It has the same gameplay loop as usual. Despite the series rep for difficulty it isn't really the enemies that kill you the most, it's carelessness, laziness and lack of concentration that get you killed. Apart from 3 troublesome bosses most of my deaths came from forgetting to call the elevators and falling down the empty shaft or falling off other ledges or platforms. The online for Xbox is now a bit dead, so I had to solo the bulk of the game and still managed to get 5 of the bosses on try one, most of the others took between 2 to 5 tries. And then there was the hard ones that gave my caster build real trouble- The Dancer, The Brothers and The Nameless King...all took me over 10 tries due to their ability to instantly close distance and give my poor squishy Pyromancer no space and time to get the nukes off. In fact I was seriously thinking I couldn't get The King...but as luck would have it another player joined in to co-op that one with me and we got it first try. I really love these games and the community around them. Even the occasional invaders are usually polite, waiting patiently for you to prepare or re-equip for PVP before starting.

I did my usual style of hanging around to help others co-op after each boss fight, especially the one where someone helped me. It's an easy and safe way to get quick souls and embers without any risk, and when others receive help they are far more inclined to help others in turn.

The weird thing is about DS3 though, is that despite how good it is, I'd only rate it the third best in the series after DS1 and Bloodborne. I still prefer the level design of the previous two games. But it's a pretty special series when the third best game in the series is this good. I really want Sekiro now...but I don't want to pay full price so I'll wait. I can get Nioh on the next PS4 sale in the meantime, and I still have The Surge to play as well.

Assassin's Creed Unity (PS4)

Pretty good Assassin's creed game. Not my favorite for story, that's probably Rouge, but still pretty fun to play through. And apparently The Dead Kings is a free expansion so onto that!

Red Faction 1

Decent fps but nothing all that special. Against the mercs, in some sections I had to save every 5 seconds even on Easy. The last boss was some bs imo but the very last "guess the bomb code" was maybe the worst part.

The destructible environment is of course really cool but you don't get enough rockets (unless you cheat of course) to really have fun with that.

Alan wake

The 2 DLCs (included in the GOG version) are pretty great and always should've been included in the main game from the beginning.
Pretty great game! A few times I wished it had manual saving. Playing the same part over and over and over... again is not fun.

The Blackwell Bundle, Apr 21 (GOG)-This was an interesting series of games. The first was rather underwhelming both in terms of story and puzzles and I was worried I would ultimately be disappointed with the series. But each subsequent episode was better than the one before it especially the last two. I really enjoyed the mystery/detective feel of Blackwell Deception. I'm looking forward to the final game and hope it wraps up the series nicely.

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