Just finished Uncharted: Golden Abyss on Vita. So, it's an Uncharted game, for better or worse. I'm not a big fan of the series and the only game in the series I've genuinely enjoyed in the past was Uncharted 4. Surprisingly I enjoyed this little spin-off a lot more than any game in the original trilogy.

First off: it looks and sounds amazing - I'd dare say that it looks a lot better than the original Uncharted and is perhaps on the same level as Uncharted 2. Of all the big Vita games I've played this is by far the one where you feel the least that it's a down-scaled version of games you know from the "big" PS3. The developers knew exactly how to work with the Vita's limitations.

What I really appreciate here is that, a bit like Uncharted 4, this game does not feel like a non-stop bloodbath which I always hated about the original trilogy. Sure, a massive chunk of the game is still a cover shooter but I feel like a much bigger chunk of the game is just running around, climbing and exploring - you know, the kind of thing that adventurers do. It probably helps that to support the Vita's touch capabilities the developers added a bunch of small activities like rubbing the dirt off relics and a few (admittedly trivial) puzzles. Literally: put pieces of pictures in the right places. Sometimes you also have to take photos of important locations. The stuff isn't great on its own but it made this game feel so much more like what I've always wanted Uncharted to be. It actually made the exploration and relics feel meaningful to me, it was the only time in the series that I actually bothered to actively search every corner of the levels. Of course that changed a bit towards the end, as the game gradually changed into one intense shoot-out, but for many hours Uncharted actually felt like an adventure game to me and that's something. And the final stages did feel fitting for the finale, if a tad underwhelming.

Generally the developers really seemed to struggle with how to handle touch here, though. All sorts of actions can be alternatively executed using touch and as soon as the game starts you get BOMBARDED with tutorials that tell you that you can do stuff that you've been doing since forever using a regular controller in two or three different ways. You can actually tap on ledges or even draw a path over them to make Nathan climb them automatically. There's actually TWO touch options for hitting enemies in addition to just pressing the square button. It's really all over the place. Luckily traditional controls work just fine for most actions and I began enjoying the game much more when I started ignoring most of the touch stuff (although you WILL have to do touch-based QTEs).

I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about the story, I honestly can't tell if I enjoyed it more or less than in the first three "big" games. Since it's a prequel you won't meet most characters from the series here, which is a tad sad, but to me this game's cast got the job done just fine. I think the new villains were pretty great, I liked the new sidekick. The main mystery didn't feel as significant or interesting here to me as in the others but it did keep me going and I did want to know where I would end up. Ironically the game apparently tried to address the issue of the series' ridiculous amount of violence by having the sidekick despise guns and violence but it kinda only highlighted the issue that Nathan Drake is a psychotic mass murderer instead of tackling it in any sensible way.

Aaanyway, as far as I'm concerned it's a very good Uncharted game and I'm really glad that I played it. Fans of the series who did not play this one should really consider getting a cheap Vita or PlayStation TV.

Hob, Aug 26 (GOG)-The one word I'd use to describe this game is handcrafted. It reminded me of Rime in a lot of ways but I felt it surpassed that game in all respects. I really enjoyed slowly unlocking areas and transforming the world. And there were plenty of powerups and collectibles hidden throughout. The combat was pretty lackluster but it was never really the focus of the game. The game was pretty glitchy, crashing 10 times including about 5 in a row. But if you can work around the bugs there's a terrific game here.

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crossroads is humongous large, still i recently started there 2. First with the princess as a paladin, not sure if i will finish the other 3 campaigns in time though the arena might not be very worthwile.. and neither are the orcs.

i do agree with your on the forces point, notes worked a lot too by precisely specifying on the map which store sold wich creatures or where you decided on leaving a stack of creatures in favor of other creatures, not to mention the reserves filled with creatures that you loose a lot in battles

nifty little game, i do wonder what the new installment will bring to the series, so far, from watching a few dev vids i wans't that much impressed, also, i'm very curious about what that cross worlds pre order is doing hanging around in my steam library. this suddenly appeared a few months ago, right after the release of maffia 2 remastered, can't imagine that crossworlds will receive a remaster of its own

Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, Aug 29 (Wii)-This game appears fun and cute and it is for the first half or so. The problem is that in the later levels when the puzzles are getting harder and more complex you're punished for experimenting with solutions. In the later levels if you get a puzzle wrong you won't be able to successfully finish the level or you're die instantly and have to start the level over. Having to restart the level because you wanted to see different item interactions seems a little unfair in an adventure game. Add to that the rather finicky motion sensor and the incredibly small hit boxes on interactable areas and I found myself fighting the interface more often than not. It wasn't all bad though. In the early levels when the consequences of getting a puzzle wrong were just a lower score and a second chance it was fun to experiment and play with the different items and characters. That feeling just didn't last though.

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Decay: The Mare, Aug 29 (Humble)-I wasn't sure what to expect with this. Online descriptions suggested an homage to Resident Evil and Silent Hill so I was hoping for an indie survival horror game. What I got was rather dull escape room type game.

This was like a poor man's Forever Lost series. The puzzles were shorter and simpler than that series. The puzzles mostly consisted of finding the key labeled "bloody key" in an adjacent room and using it to open the bloodstained door. At one point you even get a camera which was a prominent feature in Forever Lost. In Decay the camera is used for puzzle solving instead of notetaking and those 2-3 puzzles were some of the better ones in the game. The underlying plot was not great either and also felt similar to Forever Lost. But while Forever Lost felt like it had a rich backstory, Decay felt very shallow. Something Decay did better than Forever Lost were the jump scares but unfortunately the overall tension and atmosphere was still worse in Decay. I only paid about $0.50 for it and I did manage to get a couple hours of mild entertainment from it so its not a total loss. If you like these types of games, the Forever Lost series felt much more polished. This is only really necessary if you've exhausted the other options available.

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Itta, The Vagrant, Synergia, Ara Fell, Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II.

28 I have finished Broken Age. Expecially the ending was frustrating and required a guide, and many puzzled were more repetition of trial and error than fun. It does not have a load game option so one must go through the same sequenses over and over. The story didn't make much sense and the ending is underwhelming. Had they finished the backers money?

Finished a "few" games since last time (May):
- Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4: A good LEGO to play in coop with my daughter.
- Minecraft: Story Mode: An ok Telltale game.
- Layers of Fear: Not very interesting...
- Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure: For point'n click lovers only, but still nice to play.
- Tembo The Badass Elephant: Starts good but ends with too difficult levels, quite repetitive.
- Little Nightmares DLCs: Ok but not as good as the main game.
- Wheels of Aurelia: Not very interesting...
- The Banner Saga 3: A great conclusion to the trilogy.
- Batman: Arkham City and its DLC: Excellent follow up to Arkham Asylum. Too bad there are way too many riddles.
- 11-11 Memories Retold: A great interactive story on the war.
- Alice: Madness Returns: Good but with some lengthy levels that feeled a bit too repetitive.


Full list here.

ShadowRun Returns

Nice little story, enjoyable combat and interactions. Finished the game quite soon but all in all it is deserving in the way its setup. Maybe i will crank up the difficulty level for the next one i'm playing "Hong Kong"

Decided to go at it as a drug fearing cybernetic rigger with a smg fetish, a first, but a nice build all together. Switching your robo friends on and off to get acces to more or less ap. All in all you fight like a leader from the backline, i guess a longer ranged weapon would have been a better suit but i never really felt troubled with how things played out

29 Just finished Little Nightmares I kindly obtained from a giveaway. It's like 2.5 D Limbo in a yellow raincoat, grabbing influence wiith full hands from Coraline and Spirited Away. Some frustrating moment was probably my fault for being too sleepy last night. It was impossible to see an item and I needed a walkthrough just for that. Short and enjoyable.

Legend of Zelda: Link Between Worlds (3DS)

Been suffering a burnout from playing games the last few months, but when I saw a preowned copy with a decent price, I snapped it up and quickly played through. Link Between Worlds is a remake of Link to the Past, but it has changed a lot from the original game. Probably the most noticeable change is the ability to merge into walls, allowing you to traverse gaps or hide from undodgeable attacks, the mechanic is used often for puzzles and is pretty interesting. One big change of a series staple is that you rent key items instead of getting them from dungeons, which means any sensible person would just rent them all immediately. The dungeons themselves require a lot of 3 dimensional thinking as you'll often have to drop from higher floor to lower floors. I thought it was alright, albeit a bit short, but I'd recommend it.

Outbuddies DX. A Metroid clone impressively made by one guy. You control a scientist who gets sucked down into a subaquatic Lovecraftian realm and wakes up with a robot who helps you navigate the place (I guess this is why it's called Outbuddies? Seems an odd name to me). You explore, find power-ups, fight bosses, the usual thing. Eventually you meet a tribe of friendly residents (they look kind of like Jawas) who believe you to be a prophesied savior, so you also can rescue small groups of them who have been imprisoned by the bad guys.

By the standards of the genre, it's a pretty big game. It's not Hollow Knight big, but it's only a couple of rungs below it. A significant detail is that you can't expand your lifebar, so beating the tougher bosses mostly means you need to git gud, although by rescuing your Jawa pals, they'll start dropping health refills for you during the fights, so that can help a little.

The controls are pretty okay, although I did have an issue with sometimes accidentally coming out of my rolling form while I was in lava, getting myself instantly killed. I do think the game has a slight issue with pacing. There's a large chunk of the game that has you swimming underwater and despite having a dash function, you still can't swim very fast, so having to go back through the underwater areas is always a chore. And when you have to go through areas heavy with environmental hazards, you have to go slow for those, too, or risk instantly dying. In the game's defense, though, dying just sets you back to the beginning of that screen, so you don't feel too far set back.

The graphics aren't bad and it's mostly fun to explore. I did feel a bit fatigued at points while playing it, but I don't think that's the game's fault. I've just been playing too many of these over the last couple of years and now I think I'm starting to get a bit worn out with the genre. I would definitely recommend it for people who want to play a good one, and it deserves more attention.

Wasteland 2. . It took me 3 years to complete and close to 100 hours.

Overall I thought the game was OK, and would rate it 3/5.
I liked the combat and the settings, that was the main pull for me.

There were a few things that forced me to take a break after a while, hence the 3 years to complete it, as I was playing it on-and-off.

The main issue was with the duality of the side-missions. Each of them followed the exact same formula: you're presented with two sides and have to choose which of them to help. This in itself was OK, but I felt that regardless of which side I picked, it did not lead to the outcome I expected. Even when I expected a positive outcome, it still lead to something bad or indifferent, that my actions did not really change anything. The result for me, is that towards the end of the game I did not care at all about who I helped, I just wanted to finish the game.

I also did not think the side-missions were designed that well, they felt borderline buggy and rushed. At least when I compare it to something like Pillars of Eternity and Divinity Original Sin. I felt the "interconnected-nes" of them to be lacking.

Also, the bad ending, which I got initially because I did not understand what to do in the finalé, was just insulting to someone who had spent close to 100 hours on the game. It was not a proper ending, just a hastily put together "game over" screen. Absolutely ridiculous. Re-loading and re-doing the finalé led to a good ending, that at least offered me some sense of closure with the game and a sense of accomplishment.

I encountered a few side-mission bugs and inconvenient game design choices, but nothing that annoyed me to the extent as the above issues.

All-in-all I'm glad I played the game, but I don't feel compelled to buy and play Wasteland 3. i'm more inclined to try something like ATOM RPG, Planet Alcatraz, or Encased. I also can't see myself replaying Wasteland 2, as I feel there are more well-designed cRPGs on the market that I could spend 60+ hours on.

Storm Boy

An interactive version of a popular Australian children's book about the friendship between a boy and a pelican. The illustrating graphics and animations are beautiful, the sounds are calming, the music is alright as well, though also a bit sleep-inducing (but maybe that's just my current mood, heh). Gameplay is next to non-existent, you just move from left to right across a side-scrolling landscape, read the accompanying text on the way - sometimes you need to stop or retrace your steps because otherwise the text might vanish more quickly than you can read - and do occasional mini games without goals or challenge on the way. I guess it might be fun for imaginative and patient children who are more in for the experience than any action. But whether a child would love the game (book) or not, also depends on how sensitive or realistic the child is. The story is sweet, until it's not, and then it tries to be reconciling again, but I can imagine that it could be a little too sad or even traumatic for some - and that effect might be increased by the multimedia presentation (suspense, sound). It's definitely not an escapist story but also teaches about (violent) death and how the world (or humans) can be cruel. I know I would not have liked it as a child at all, but other children might. Judging by the mini game controls it seems rather obvious to me that the game was made with the touch screen of mobile devices in mind. You can still control it with mouse and keyboard or gamepad, but the instructions are only for M/KB, not controller. I only paid 80 cents for it in a sale, and I got some beautiful animated illustrations out of it, so that's okay, but I'd really only recommend it for patient children who are not too squeamish.

Tell me why chapter 1
yeah chapter one only ,cause for some reasons these story games love splitting up it into chapters ...
Does anybody like this?
Now I have to wait for another chapter.

About the game, you play 2 siblings remembering their tragedy 10 years ago when their mother attacked them and the mother died as a result.
It started okay, but then it brought in transgender things in a preachy way. Why? why every game has to push these agendas now?