Some games are longer or harder to finish(especially to see everything) so bigger numbers aren't always better. :)

I have 5, one of them gotten close to the end in 2017 and just completed this year and another very short.

Dragon's Lair (1983) (Linux)
(thank you, Doc, for the game!)
(thanks "Pixel" magazine for helping me to discover the title)

Wow, this one was a bit crazy gaming experience. I've never played the game before and it was quite different. The game is basically animation you try to push forward with pressing a right key in a right moment. As simple as this. The game is very dynamic and to be honest it's hard to imagine how is it possible to finish it on hard; I don't remember me as a gamer dying so often ;) However be sure to avoid one of easy modes, which allows you to skip the scene if you die – this one makes no sense and you'll not be able to follow the story in this mode. Take "Easy", but with scene completion required to go forward. The only part that can make some trouble is the final battle (as it's quite long and makes you repeat a few minutes if failed), but it's worth it.

The game works perfectly under Linux/Wine (I'm using v.4.15 x64).

List of all games completed in 2019.

I want everyone to play more games. And I play so many because I don't have many other hobbies. Also I like using this thread for game recommendations for myself.

The deed is done, now I've also beaten Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna and never playing Dungeon Siege 1 again will still be too soon. But in the developers' defense (Mad Doc Software, so not the developers of the base game): it is a good tad better than the original.

My first impression was that they had addressed many major issues of the base game. For starters, they made numerous UI improvements. For instance, item tooltips finally tell you the DPS (originally it was impossible to get those), sell prices are always visible, knocked out characters do not get deselected anymore (so if they get revived they are still selected). If there's enough room in your inventory and just the item placement is wrong, the game will automatically sort the items to make room for new pickups. There's a button for automatically distributing potions (although the joke is that I almost never had to use any potions, gah), they also added a "sell all" button with several different settings and... all of them are useless because what takes up most of your time is not the selling but equipping the best items and that one is still a ridiculously tiresome process. Even worse: they added backpacks that can store even more items and it only makes the whole process EVEN MORE tiresome, especially since backpacks are automatically closed in shops and so the process becomes even more frustrating since you will have to first sell the stuff in your inventory, then transfer stuff from the backpacks to the inventories and only then will be able to sell everything. For frigg's sake.

And the game is still missing something as basic like opening two tooltips for easy comparison of items, not to mention colour coding or anything like that to quickly tell you which one of two items is better. And even though they added an option to bind more than two spells to hotkeys the process is still too awkward to use in a combat scenario where you have eight characters - as a matter of fact the method of binding more spells feels like a dirty hack. So while I did experiment a bit with different spells in the very beginning I stopped doing that when I reached four or five party members.

My first impression was also that they took care of how cheap and artificial Dungeon Siege feels. A lot more dialogue is voiced this time but sadly still not all. Your allies also finally have vocal responses to commands, finally giving them at least some personality and extending the audio beyond monotonous combat sounds and the occasional nice orchestral piece. And most importantly: it seemed that they had abandoned the tunnel design of the world and there's finally some actual quests here - heck, they even added a world map this time! But soon enough it turns out that nothing has really changed. The "world" is just an illusion that bursts very quickly and it soon turns out that the game is just as linear as the base game. And the quests are still utterly pointless - they tell you to go to places you have to go through anyway and to kill enemies you'd kill anyway. What's the point?!

What did improve A LOT, however, is the level design, especially in the dungeons. Dungeon layouts finally feel like plausible places, rooms differ enough that you recognise their original purposes and you feel like you're actually exploring places. And some locations are quite nice to look at, much more graphically advanced and visually original than anything in the base game. There's also more bosses this time, one of them even has a fun twist to it in that its tail spawns enemies and you should destroy that one before smashing in its face. Bosses also talk to you as you explore dungeons and you get closer to confronting them. It's still not great but it's helluva step up from the base game that makes the experience at least a bit more immersive.

There's also various other classic additions like new items, unique item sets (which actually reward checking out every corner of the world), special effects for weapons (like stunning weapons which are very effective) but ultimately that doesn't change the fact that it's same old Dungeon Siege: a very shallow, monotonous and boring ARPG that's far more primitive than even the original Diablo.

So while Legends of Aranna is a vast improvement over the original Dungeon Siege, in my opinion, I still feel that it's a pretty awful ARPG that's not worth anyone's time today. So please appreciate my sacrifice.

BioShock 2 + Minerva’s Den DLC (not the Remastered version)

Beat about 2/3 of the game in January 2018, then put it on hold. Now finally got back to it and finished it. I had an all right time with Bioshock 2, but, playing on Hard, got kind of frustrated that none of the guns seemed very powerful when it came time to taking down the big boys. In the main game, about 2/3 of the way through I went full Drill-happy - all the Drill tonics equipped, including the one that makes plasmid powers far cheaper at the cost of disabling all the guns. So I ran around with two summoned flying sentry bots at all times, electrocuting things and then wacking them in the head with the drill. What really made that work against the tough opponents like Brutes, Big Daddies, Alphas and even Big Sister, was the tonic which gave you a high chance of freezing enemies. By the time they sawed out, most of their HP was gone.

But I never found that tonic in the Minerva's Den DLC, which means I had to make do with the underpowered guns. Maybe I just didn't know how to use the guns and plasmids properly. Things improved a bit when I upgraded Hypnotize plasmid to level 3, allowing me to "befriend" the big boys that gave me so much trouble, but that was only towards the very end of the DLC.

Another frustrating thing is that the game rearranges your plasmid order every time you upgrade or switch one of them. You're used to lightning being on F2? Well now it's on F1 or F3 or F4! Don't like it? Too bad, nothing you can do about it!

Also the game crashed. A LOT. In one of the later levels crashes came so constant it was unplayable until I upped the texture streaming limit to 1GB in the ini file, but even then the occasional crashes till continued.

Mirror: The Lost Shards DLC

I've now 100%d the game. The less said about that the better.

Oniken

Based on achievement unlock times, I beat the first 3 missions in October 2014, put the game on hold until July 2015 when I beat to more missions, and now finally got back to it and beat the final story mission plus the bonus mission. Well made 8-bit style action platformer, but very hard. You get 3 lives to get through any level. The levels are often multi-part, and each part might have a boss. If you die, you start at the beginning of the current part. Lose all lives, and you have to restart at the beginning of the level. This is the reason for all the frustration-holds.

The bonus mission is Contra-style (though you don't die in 1 hit) and it wasn't until I watched a youtube video of the parts I had trouble with that I figured out you can shoot diagonally too! It's simply impossible to do when using an analog controller stick for movement, had to switch to my 360 pad's sucky D-pad (keyboard was also an option, but I couldn't quite get used to such a radical change in control scheme.)

Hardcore mode and Boss Rush are unlocked now. Boss Rush is just as it sounds - 1 life, no health regains between bosses. Hardcore mode - 1 life to beat the whole game. Gave each of them a short try and called it quits - this ain't for the likes of me :)

Broken Sword 4: The Angel of Death

With the reviews being what they are, and the reports of the game not working on modern systems, I've avoided buying the game even when it was going for $1.50 on Steam sales. But then it showed up in Humble Trove, so I tried it and it worked. And it is definitely the worst Broken Sword I've played (the first 4 now). The writing is bad, the ending is stupid, and the puzzles range from obvious to obtuse "how the hell was I supposed to know that?" to logic or pattern puzzles that you probably need a 180+ IQ to solve without hints (those damn hacking minigames and ancient manuscript puzzles...). Well I used hints. Lots of them. And I'm not ashamed.

Still, on occasions it was enjoyable (I did the Phoenix piece without looking up any solutions outside of the hacking one), and it ran well on my Win7x64 box. In fact the reason I played and finished it now was because I'm going to be upgrading to Win 10 soon, and there's far less of a chance of the game working after that.

Rocko's Quest

Put it on hold about 1/2 to 2/3 in 4-5 years ago, and got back to it now. I wouldn't recommend this old 3d hack&slash&platformer to anyone, but I still had fun with it. It's hard, and there's a real filling of accomplishment. And then when you get close to the final boss, it crashes. Every single time. So technically this entry belongs in the Games Quit in 2019 page.... but I got to the bastard with 7 lives, and given that enemies in the game don't heal back up after you respawn at checkpoint, that should've been way more than enough to finish him off. So I watched the final boss fight on youtube (the only place online I've seen evidence that the game was actually completable at some point) and am calling it done.

Apparently pirated versions of the game don't have the crash bug that Steam's version does, but I'm not risking a virus just to fight the final boss.

Persona 5 (PS4Pro)

My first Persona or Shin Megami Tensei game, what an experience. Shin Megami Tensei are viewed as being at the hardcore end of the JRPG dungeon crawler spectrum, whilst the Persona games are a spinoff that brings in extra layers of social and personal development between dungeons- sort of like Princess Maker meets a dungeon crawler. All of that with a huge amount of story telling. 120 hours, in fact, is what it took me to finish this entirely linear game. Most of that is story, a story that could easily fill a novel trilogy or a TV mini series.

You play as a teenage school student, on probation after being wrongfully convicted of assault. You find that you have an ability to enter another dimension called the Metaverse which is the games dungeons. Within these dungeons, you and your growing list of friends, can track down and steal the treasure of bad people and cause them to have a change of heart and confess their crimes. After a hundred hours and countless twists you end by attempting to steal the corrupted desires of humanity itself. It's a great story and an amazing journey, with very likeable companions. And that's from someone that usually values game mechanics over story telling in games.

Not that the mechanics are bad either. On the surface it's a simple turn based JRPG. But the longer the game goes the more depth is introduced. You not only level through combat in the dungeons, but also through social and personal development outside in every day life. Developing relationships brings all sorts of powerful bonuses. It's not an eroge game at all and has no nudity or anything, but still has some of that Japanese oddity- like being able to have an affair with your female school teacher, and being able to call her to your place for a special massage after a visit to the dungeons. Outside dungeons, each day is broken up into blocks of time that can be spent in various ways to develop stats, relationships etc. Plus there's personas themselves- where you get your actual combat abilities from in the dungeons, and another entire layer of character building.

It all adds up to probably the best JRPG I've played, even better than the Xenoblade series. The only real problem is that the game just begs to be played again to explore other character build options and explore more personas, but I honestly cannot see myself ever playing a 120 hour game again- for the exact same story, it would be just too much. It has three endings, bad- which I didn't see, the good ending sort of- which I did just to see it then reloaded my save and went for the true ending that requires at least another 10 hours of play time- but is worth it. The final true ending boss took over an hour to beat. Another game that proves how the best PlayStation games by far, are the third party, not first party games.

Include me

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1986
Out Run (NSW Sega Ages version)

1992
Dragon Quest V (SNES)

1996
Metal Slug (PC)

1997
Final Fantasy VII (NSW)

1999
Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! (PS1)

2002
Metroid Fusion (GBA)
Utawarerumono (PC)

2003
Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim (PC)

2004
Pokémon Emerald (GBA)

2009
Machinarium (PC)

2013
Tales of Hearts R (PSV remake)

2014
Puyo Puyo Tetris (NSW)

2015
Yakuza 0 (PC)

2016
Owlboy (NSW)

2017
Gravity Rush 2 (PS4)
Rime (PC)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (NSW)
Splatoon 2 (NSW)
Nex Machina (PC)

2018
Kirby Star Allies (NSW)
Valkyria Chronicles 4 (NSW)
A Way Out (PC)
Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum 'n' Fun! (NSW)
Stray Cat Doors (NSW)
Chuchel (PC)

2019
Devil May Cry 5 (PC)
Team Sonic Racing (NSW)
Slay The Spire (PC)

I played more recent games than I thought. I hit hard the jrpg backlog and finished a few very high priority titles. Next year I'd like to do the same with wrpg. I never finished Deus Ex.

i finish chasm: the rift ok?.. :s it was very much like quake 1 and the level design was good - until the last levels when enemies teleport all around u, or when u start a new level and have 5 enemies attacking u all at once from behind, the sides, with no way to run or hide, etc.. all in all it was pure metnak.. :-/

I got Oxenfree
during some giveaway and I am glad, that I got it this way. Oxenfree is based on great idea, unfortunately game is too linear, not an horror and what is the worst at all it needs open communication to internet to send and receive some data (e.g. statistics how you decided during game), so this garbage is not DRM free game! There are some "puzzles", but no matter what you do, it simply does not matter at all! You just go from one point to another point, listening boring comments from your mates and very often repeating same things again and again in time loops.

In sum it is poor game, which had some potential, but left unused...

I am jealous, hope that this game arrive to GOG one day! :)

Killzone Shadow Fall (PS4Pro)

First impression: runs like shit. Who thought it was a good idea to make what is basically a linear tunnel shooter this generation, and make it run at 30fps? You can uncap the frame rate, but it gets no where near 60fps and is so jerky I had to set the 30fps cap. That mode still has what seems to be a few frame time stutters but is a lot better. No wonder all the reviews I read years ago went on about how nice it looks compared to Halo 5...that's because Halo 5 runs at 60fps you knuckleheads! Funny how none of the big reviews mentioned the frame rate- only the visuals.

After I got over that shock I found the first 6 levels to be pretty enjoyable. Then the remaining 4 levels to be a bit poor. It's a short game- only 8 hours and it felt like they knew it was too short, but they had to get it out for the launch of the PS4...so they padded out the final levels with a few crappy difficulty spikes to slow you up. If the early levels got anything right it was the good pacing, but even that went out the window in the end. I was a bit underwhelmed by the weapons, a lot of weapon types that seem to do pretty much the same thing. I did like the ending though, and not just because I was glad it was over- the story end was pretty good.

It's really cheap these days, so despite the fact that I don't think it's a great game- it could be argued that it's worth a try if you have a PS4. I haven't played any of the earlier games, from what I've read though, most fans seem to think this one is the worst. I suspect the game was rushed along as a launch title, with the emphasis being on graphics first and foremost.

And that's it, my last PS4 game done. I can't think of any other exclusives left I need to play, so will probably sell it now- since the PS5 apparently will play all PS4 games anyway and it will be at least a year or two before I buy next years Ghosts of Tsushima and Last of Us 2. So goodbye PS4.

I remember Jazz Jackrabbit + Holiday Hare 94' + Holiday Hare 95' from my childhood. Some levels are fantastic, some of them tested my patience and calmness, but generally it is a funny game!

Just beat Flashback: 25h Anniversary Edition on PS4 (so the same version that is on GOG). I picked this game up at a video game expo a few months ago. I just had to buy it when I saw the badass box - and I'm pretty sentimental about the game as I played it a lot as a kid and always loved it, although I never got far into it until now. Incidentally what made me play it now is that I just got a PSX copy of its sequel, Fade to Black, dirt cheap and when I saw that one's intro I just really felt like beating its predecessor first.

Anyway, I guess Flashback is a game that needs no introduction. It's one of the big three early cinematic platformers, together with Prince of Persia and Another World. This 25th Anniversary Edition is for the most part a straight port of the original game just with some basic additions. The obvious ones are some optional retro shaders and likewise optional remastered audio (and the remastered music is pretty badass IMO). The most important addition, in my opinion, is one of the features available in its "modern mode": the ability to rewind upon death. In the first levels this feature isn't quite necessary but halfway through the game there are sequences that would have made me ragequit so I'm very grateful for this and it's what allowed me to beat this game - I wouldn't have had the patience to go through the unforgiving original version. And I appreciate that (unlike in the Mega Man games on PS4) the rewind feature has an upper limit here: one minute of rewinding per level. It's more than enough time and I didn't even get close to using up all of it a single time but at the same time I didn't feel like there was no pressure or challenge left. That's great!

Anyway, I enjoyed Flashback more than I thought I would, to be honest. Exploring the worlds was fun, solving most of the puzzles was fun and some of the combat was fun. A bit like in Metroid you gain new items that help you overcome various obstacles and there's this satisfaction upon returning to an earlier screen and finding a way to get past a door or huge pit - here these items are indeed just items, not permanent upgrades to your hero, but the pattern still works. And some of the items are surprisingly original (like the throwable teleporter). I also enjoyed stuff like the hero getting random jobs from a job-dispensing machine (just so he can earn enough money for a fake ID) which send him all over a pretty dystopian city - that chapter almost felt like a genuine sci-fi RPG with some Bladerunner influences (and there's actually a pretty obvious joke reference to Bladerunner).

However, the game is not without flaws. The typical unresponsive controls of cinematic platformers make some action sequences pretty frustrating, especially later on in the game when you sometimes encounter several humanoid enemies at once (and the rewind feature has the nasty habit of making the hero put his gun away for no comprehensible reason). Some of the later sections feel rather unimaginative and hard for the heck of it (but luckily perfectly doable with the rewind feature). And the story really isn't something you can seriously care about today. Still, the bad sections don't undo the greatness of some of the best and most fun ones. And while there's the occasional section where it's a bit tough to guess what you have to do there's no sections that feel unbeatable without tons of guesswork or looking up a walkthrough.

I'm really glad that I finally beat this classic and all in all it holds up surprisingly well. If you want to discover why this game blew gamers away back in the early 90s or just want to give it another shot for old times' sake, this edition is probably as good as it gets.

I remember watching a guy beat this in the arcade when I was kid. It blew my mind not just that he did it, but to wonder how much money he must have pumped into it to learn all the sequences.