Carmageddon 1 and 2..

Never managed it when I was a small lad back in the 90s, but now I know wtf I'm doing (sometimes) and managed it. Ending fmvs were a bit less spectacular then I thought they'd be but it's all about the fun in the end.

Also Star Control 2 .. was even more of an asshole back in the 90s then Carmageddon, was one hell of a relief to finally see the ending with my own eyes and not having to youtube it.

Been fun times reliving my old dos days ^_^

Battlefield 4 (XSX Game Pass)

The single player campaign was enjoyable enough, with all the usual plus and minus points for these types of affairs. The good for me is that it's just a straight forward go from place to place shooting the bad guys in a hollywood sort of story. The guns are good, the shooting is good. I cannot deny it is good simple fun.
The AI is terrible as expected, both the enemy and your own team. To make a team based shooter player focused brings the usual issue of the enemy solely attacking the player, which makes sense since the other team members are bullet proof so why waste bullets on them- they cannot die for story reasons. Likewise your own team shoots jelly bullets, they very rarely actually kill anything. The AI loves spamming grenades to a ridiculous degree, the bad guys must hand grenades out like jelly beans. All part of the hollywood charm I suppose. But as I said, I am still enjoying playing through these campaigns, but so far BF Hardline is by far the best single player experience in the series.

Shadowrun Hong Kong Extended Edition, Nov 26 (GOG)-Another good Shadowrun game, better than the first and about equal to Shadowrun Dragonfall. I liked the variety of the missions. It seems they tweaked the matrix gameplay a bit and added a hacking minigame. My only complaints are that a in a game with so much reading (it felt like half the game was either exposition or flavor text which I enjoyed thoroughly) there were quite a few typos and the reading to gameplay ratio was a little too high. The bonus campaign was good too for some higher level play. Unfortunately my characters were all basically maxed out by that time so there was no character or equipment development and I ended with ~14k in the bank. Still a good addition if you like these games.

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Hitman: Contracts

I never realised how useful those god damn coins are. Contracts are a series of unrelated assignments that Agent 47 flashbacks to as he recovers from a gunshot wound after a mission gone wrong. I tried for going pure stealth, only killing the target, but the game was showing its age and it became increasingly difficult. There's an escort mission in one level which completing without alerting anyone is ridiculously hard, especially as the only way you can distract an enemy is by shooting something near them, which doesn't even work half the time. Some levels felt a bit too railroady, particularly the 2nd one where there was really only 1 method to complete it stealthily. Still enjoyed it, but god I missed the modern improvements.

Admiral Sea Battles Campaign 1: Baptism of Fire
I don't usually say much if anything when I've only finished the first campaign of 3 of a game but OMG this GAME
OK it's a typical TBS with a wind based gimmick made by some company called Meridian 93 who went on to create a slew of 3rd tier cookie cutter hidden object games
First off I could NOT get it to run natively in Windows 10 so I ended up working out how to set up a Win98 Virtual Box VM just to play it in 2020!
Even then if I turned the super repetitive prerendered FMV firing animations it tended to crash!
It's littered with bizarre design choices - why squares and not hexes? Makes movement and firing ranges weird and seemingly random compounded by the fact that, I don't know if I missed it but there's no way to tell how far your enemies can fire except knowing what the unit ranges, estimating and save scrumming if you got it wrong!
Same goes for estimating how far you can move your own unit to get them JUST into range
Missions initially seem impossibly hard when you look at how many units the computer has compared to your own but then, when you work out what the hells going on you realise hey it's actually quite easy because the computer AI is a complete potato! (that last mission of the campaign was a doozy though TBH - they gave the computer ALL the money and he just pumps out 2 or 3 new units every turn while your finances are must more limited)
Then they made it so you carry your unit roster and bank balance through the whole campaign so if you just squeaked through one mission with 2 sail boats and a tug left then you're BONED
And the amount of save slots is really stingy - about 12 especially, as a I say, for the amount of save scrumming you end up doing
and I don't believe there's any way to restart the current mission so if you've gone so far and realise you chose fundamentally the wrong strategy then you probably over-wrote the save from the start of the mission long ago and now you're boned!
Unless , like me, you could see where this was heading and backup up the save game folder multiple times manually in Windows (again the Win98 VM at that!)
The whole interface is ugly and really clunky even for it's 1996 release date!

Buuuut... for all that, I dunno, TBH it has a certain naïve charm and I DO feel a sense of relief and accomplishment for beating the campaign even if I DID only get a weird broken congratulations screen / high score table that no-one ever seemed to have finished the bac-end of, for my trouble because of course I did!

Other than that? the sailing theme, wind gimmick amounts to RND movement allowance per turn with a weather forecast to give you some indication of the RND value for the next turn, in the end it's just more weirdness to get used to and more barrier to entry but.. you've gots to have SOME little gimmick for your elevator pitch I guess..

Anything else? Oh yeah Galleons with their extra range are WAY OP and their only downside is low movement allowance so you end up just CRAWLING across the map!

I HATE it but.. still.. as I say.. I kinda like it too, it may have given me Stockholm, syndrome! I definitely feel abused by it anyway!

Anyway - wrap this up - full list here:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2020/post56
Cheers!

Mages of Mystralia: great adventure/action game. You get to craft your own spells with ingenious rune combination. That's the kind of spell crafting I'd like to see in rpgs.

Prey (2017)

Good game. Probably the most recent Big Name AAA game I've played, unless you count Hellblade as AAA (I'm not sure if it counts or not myself.)

Had the game on hold for a year after running into a difficulty spike but came back to it after a conversation on reddit and played it to the finish over the space of 4 days (and nights).

Battlefield: Bad Company (XSX Game Pass)

Take a fire team of screw ups behind enemy lines after a shipment of gold. Sort of like a video game version of Kelly's Heroes but without Oddball. Very open maps where you can usually choose to flank or even avoid enemy positions on the way to objectives- though sometimes it railroads you as well. Mostly it was a really fun shooter campaign, though like always the enemy focuses on you even when your team is right next to them filling them with bullets. Also, there were a couple of really annoying sections near the end where you get swamped by enemy tanks or chased by helicopters.
It was quite good overall though, with the player needing to at least use something resembling real tactics to flank positions to gain advantage.

What I didn't know was that the game is console only, 360 and PS3- which of course can be played using backwards compatibility on Xbox. That's all for Game Pass Battlefields then, as the remaining two left to play, BF Bad Company 2 and BF 3 I actually own from GwG long ago.

Earth 2150 the moon project i just beat it with all three factions. It's funny how easy it got with ED by using two stolen grizzlies from the UCS by using the ion canon and repairers to steal their units, i also had 4 units stolen from the LC which were huge help especially the two electro units that disabled units or buildings when their electricity was fried.
Oh and still i needed some army to help them, before the last mission mobile artillery and choppers were of huge help, since the enemy also has some artillery.
Anyway not a bad game, but i think Eftbp was better, still an add-on that was worth playing for the missions and some new weaponry.
Though ED i really couldn't know what i needed to research since they don't get much resources for research until you get to africa.
UCS i think i used assaults much to destroy most of things again with little army to help.
LC was easy again since their energy weapons rule.
Now gonna try lost souls the final add-on for earth 2150.
This is now my 61th game beaten from GOG.

Quest for Infamy, Nov 28 (GOG)-I haven't played the Quest for Glory games but I've read a lot about them over the years so I had a pretty good idea what an RPG/adventure hybrid would be. I think Quest for Infamy fails at that or maybe the entire genre mashup is untenable. That doesn't mean I didn't like the game. I liked it quite a bit but I think it may have been better served as a straight adventure game.

I thought the writing and voice acting were excellent, really campy and tongue-in-cheek and sometimes downright silly. The plot was serviceable and didn't get in the way. As has been written many times elsewhere the combat is pretty awful. I think the game suffers quite a bit from opening too many areas for the player with only vague direction. I wandered around the world for a couple hours visiting dozens of mostly transitory screens and fighting annoying combats (and dying) at the start of the game before I gave up and consulted a walkthru. And as the game progressed I more and more liberally consulted the walkthru because I was less interested in struggling with puzzles and combat and more interested in seeing could be before his ultimate redemption at the end.

Don't get me wrong. The game is good despite these flaws. I think if I had a little more patience or was already a fan of the RPG/adventure hybrid this could be a modern classic. Even with my issues with the game the writing and voice work, especially of the narrator and Roehm carried me through.

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I just finished Anna's Quest. I wrote a lot about it but it's a bit unorganized to post. In short it's one of the best Deadelic adventures, and it holds well until the second last (fourth) chapter, where things get messy and long cut-scenes interrupt the game trying to explain things. The general impression is of a product left unpolished in many ways, like dialogues that don't match the current situation anymore and other problems that would take a lot to list, and would also be spoiler. Being a game from the Australian developer Krams supported by Deadelic, it's translated into German from English, subs only, and the subs have some typo, but nothing too bad. Differently from other Deadelic games the English voices are good. Many cameos from other Daedelic games don't break the fourth wall too much (the tone set is cartoonish and humorous anyway) and provide the connoisseurs with reasons to smile, but might leave other players wondering if an item is important when it's just a reference to other Deadelic characters that serves no purpouse in game. A few mini games can be skipped but I found them easy to solve. Drawings are nice but the animation is lacking. Characters are still and sometimes they only move their mouths when speaking. Not from the beginning but from midgame on, there are annoying repeated noises in some scenes that get old soon. Some characters look much alike an other. The main character will only take some items when she thinks they are useful, and same goes for carrying out some actions. So the player must go around to check if they can now do something that had no effect before. This leads to some back and forth but makes it so that the inventory doesn't clog with items that are not useful at the moment. In the second ultimate chapter there is some unnecessary compulsory back and forth that could have been avoided with better writing. The game mechanics the lets you use the heroine super power of telekinesis is fun. It would be nice to see if Krams manages to make a sequel though, or a whole new game.
Might be worth-mentioning that the game has in-game achievements that no one could be bothered to mention in the store page. You can find a demo on Steam. If you go on from there with the GOG version, you should make your own save (you will lose the autosaves) or download a "Steam savegame" from Deadelic website. The GOG version contains clickable commercials for games that sometimes are non even on GOG, and all open Steam pages links. I found that bad taste and telling of the general lack of polish. GOG should not allow games to open links to other stores, but hey, if THEY don't care...

Previously I had completed, after a couple of false starts in the years, the Whispered World. The beginning is extremely boring and slow, with too many useless items that have a description. The commentary is also improvised and unenthusiastic. But it was good for me as a German language learner, other people might be bored to death by these guys. The moon logic is strong in this game. It's also a pixel hunting fest. I can see why in 2009 this post-MI3 mix of Lucas Arts and Ghibli was successful but it has not aged well and I don't understand what a special edition is about when the game screen is still squared. Specially squared?

Unreal

It's supposed to be one o the best old school FPS games, but I don't really feel it. The maps are often either too vast and bland or two dark and samey. Most of the weapons just feel off. The best weapon being the flak cannon is at least consistent wit later Unreal Tournament games. I was shocked at how little damage the rocket launcher did.

I only started the expansion for a quick look and the presentation was already much better with a proper introduction cut-scene. But I am not sure if I continue with the expansion.

Bard's Tale 1: Just beat both DOS and Apple 2gs versions again. It's interesting how, in games of that vintage, there's so many subtle differences between versions (including version-specific game mechanic bugs), unlike with modern games where different ports of the game tend to be pretty much the same (aside from the occasional new feature or feature removal).

Super Mario Bros. (FDS): I beat the game (as far as the game is concerned) by using the Minus World glitch to reach world 36-1, then completed 36-3. These levels are actually treacherous; 36-1 (1-3, but underwater) will sometimes softlock if you hit the flagpole too high or at the wrong time, 36-2 (7-3 clone) will respawn you right over a pit (so you fall to your death again) if you die past the midpoint, while in 36-3 (4-4, but underground, doesn't repeat if you go the wrong way, and the enemies are all squids (yes, out of the water)) you can get stuck if you go the wrong way and possibly have to wait for time to run out. (Once you beat 36-3, you get the "princess is in another castle", but after a while pressing B returns you to the title screen, where you can press B to select a world and play the second quest, exactly as if you had beaten 8-4 normally, so I'd argue this counts.)

I liked the sequel, Silence, a lot better, although that might not be a common opinion among adventure gamers because it's shorter and much more streamlined, with comparatively easy puzzles most of the times.

I will try it out at some point, it's still too expensive for me expecially compared to my expectations. I understand that, together with the Pillars of the Earth, it's some sort of "interactive movie" as a review says.