Include me.

1. King of Dragon Pass (classic) | post | successful playthrough: Jul 21 - Sep 04 | time unknown | Review HG or blog
2. The Stuff Fairy Tales Are Made Of | post | Nov 13 - Dec 3 | in-game timer: 21.5h | Review: MG or blog
3. Jazz Jackrabbit 2 - The Christmas Chronicles | post | Dec 5 - 6 | time unknown | Quick review also on blog

2021 list
2020 list
2019 list
2018 list
2017 list
2013-2016 list
2012 list

Incomplete 2011 list. Add Tropico 3 Gold Edition (finished: Dec 16, review on blog and MobyGames) to it. Also played Forsaken World for a while earlier that year (review on blog and MobyGames), and briefly poked at Perfect World International again after the Genesis expansion launched.

At least I finished a second game this year, so there's a small point in making a list post and asking to be included...
That was an RPG Maker game, The Stuff Fairy Tales Are Made Of (free on itch or Fireflower).
There are some limitations that I guess have to do with RPG Maker, but it does do some interesting things, like the lead character learning spells from scrolls instead of on certain levels and being able to attack weak spots of enemies after learning about them either from books or after defeating 10, having a journal that lists information about enemies (and bosses and quests), and an emphasis on learning in general, there's also potion making, but just by NPC, requiring ingredients to be brought and producing potions that can't otherwise be bought...
Other than that, the first part is rather what you'd expect, the annoyance being that many enemies poison and it's a long time before you get the spell to cure poison, but healing spell is low MP and difficulty is generally quite low, so it's manageable.
But then you have an 100-floor dungeon... Small floors, yes, and there is some attention to detail, though after a while the rooms repeat (characters will comment on it several times, but that doesn't really excuse it) and there are spots where the dev seems to have gotten bored. There are a few shortcuts that allow you to skip many levels ahead, but there are also secrets in there if you really search everything, some of the items only revealing their use much later.
And at the end of that dungeon there's quite a difficulty spike, and then at the next boss fight too, though once the paladin gets Heal II the difficulty drops sharply, so level up to there first if you want to spare yourself the headaches. And there is some effort put into boss fights in general. And then things get actually interesting after defeating Death, the game turning rather into an adventure game until you can fix that problem, which will take quite a while. Gets back to "normal" after that, but still reserves some twists, albeit rather expected ones, and a section you'd better play differently than how you normally would in such games.
Overall, decent effort, pretty nice for a free RPG Maker game.

Tunic (XSX Game Pass)

The epitome of a game that starts out awesome but turns to shite for the last act. It's that cross between Zelda, Metroid and Dark souls that everyone just knows they want. The world design is incredible, the combat serviceable to begin with and the way the overall clever puzzles fit into the game is so well done- such as how you have to find the games manual in the world, which actually ties to everything.

It's a difficult game though. Way beyond Dark Souls difficult, even on the easy combat setting. It's deceptively easy to begin with, but after the halfway point it suddenly spikes. You get swarmed by enemies that not only are faster than you, but they hit you and drain your maximum health which prevents you healing. Plus, some of them fly. Most of your hits knock the enemy away, and so do their hits- meaning combat just doesn't flow well and it feels like you're endlessly chasing these damage sponge enemies all over the arena. Not fun at all. By the end I despised the game, which is tragic considering how much I liked it for the first 6 hours. Unlike Souls games where you can play with builds, tactics and level up to find a way through anything- Tunic is an action-adventure game with baked in Zelda style progression. You can simply get stuck, unless you use the god mode cheat in the options menu, but that makes the game pointless really. Tunic is one of those games with great reviews from many people, yet if you look at the completion rate- very few have finished it. I wonder why that is?

Tunic is very similar in concept to Death's Door. Play Death's Door instead, it is ten times better and is an awesome game all the way through- plus it's cheaper.

Firewatch, Dec 2 (Xbox game pass)-It wasn't bad and I don't regret playing it but I just never found it very engaging. Voice acting was quite good even if I found the plot rather lacking. Some of the walking and climbing and things were a little buggy too.

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The Wild at Heart

A nice surprise. I had only seen screenshots - which appealed to me - but I had no idea what the gameplay was about before I tried it. It turns out it is somewhat of a Pikmin clone, I think, except that I don't really know Pikmin games. But the idea is that you command an ever increasing group of small spritelings with different abilities and use them to fight opponents, farm resources, solve puzzles and open up new areas of the mostly open world map which is divided into a couple of different biomes/areas. Your characters (boy and girl that you can switch between at all times) don't really fight on their own, they can only kick objects (though letting your sprites hack at them is faster), throw sprites, use lantern and vacuum cleaner thing in order to activate switches or gather up sprites and resources, and craft and apply inventory items like potions, bombs, lights or food. It was very cute and relaxing fun, not too challenging most of the times but quite entertaining. I loved the art style and sound design, and the enemies (though limited in variety) were pretty nice, too. The story was simple but charming.

I had a few gripes: The map allows you to mark spots with different symbols and you should do so from the start, in order to remind you of any obstacles or weird things that you can't make sense of yet and should come back to later on in the game, otherwise it's easy to lose sight of them. So this map feature is helpful, if you realize it early enough. But it would have been even better to allow custom notes. There was no way e.g. to adequately mark an object blocking the way and write down how many sprites are required to move it. That caused me to forget about one such object and I got a bit frustrated because I was missing one type of spriteling and thought I needed it to open up one area, when in reality they were to be found in that area. But since I had forgotten about the obstacle, I never went there again until I checked a walkthrough; otherwise I would have realized that I already had everything I needed to continue there. So the lesson is: Make notes of everything and ideally also on paper, for the things the game does not allow you to write on the map.

And I also got stuck a few times due to other reasons, like inconsistency in the design: usually a board at the end of a cliff means you will jump down from it to the level below, but there was one area where it suddenly meant your characters and sprites would jump to other plateaus across a chasm. And I never tried it of my own accord, because the chasm was filled with stuff that might have killed all my sprites, so excuse me if I don't jump from the board above it when it's always meant jumping down before, not across a chasm. And some things were so hidden, that even when I knew where I had to look, I did not always find things myself. Plus, sometimes you throw the sprites not quite at the right spot and they remain inactive because of it, that's also caused confusion sometimes about whether they would actually interact with something or not. And I needed to keep a close eye on my sprite numbers, because some of them would always stay behind or get lost for some reason or other. This could be a bit annoying, too. And some enemies could be rather mean and intimidating for a relaxing game all of a sudden, especially the flying ones I had trouble figuring out on my own, and I disliked how they respawned in great numbers the next time even if you detroyed their hive, and then a while later their hive would respawn too. And there is a day and night cycle, with the night being more hectic and dangerous, but the time display was rather vague (morning, midday, evening, night) and sometimes it got a bit stressful and tedious when I was in the middle of solving a puzzle but then had to retreat to the next camp for the night (only for all the monsters on the way to the puzzle to respawn again). I also didn't make much use of all the collected and craftable items and hold on to them for most of the game because they didn't seem all that useful except for very specific situation.

But it's always easier to list points of criticism than to expand upon praise, so this might give a wrong impression. All in all I really enjoyed The Wild at Heart, so much that I played through it in a matter of a few days. And there are not many games like this on PC. The closest comparison I can think of is the Overlord series mixed with a little bit of Don't Starve, but I thought The Wild at Heart much more fun than either of those (less tedium, less frustration).

Transformers: Battlegrounds (XSX Game Pass)

Low budget Transformers turn based tactics. It may be low budget and relatively easy, but it is only 8 hours long and not really aimed at hardcore strategy fans. It's okay for what it is and does feel like an episode of the old cartoons, with cheesy dialogue and acting and dumb ass protagonists that always let their arch enemies walk away so they can come back and try to destroy them again over and over. This game won't replace Jagged alliance or XCOM or even Gears Tactics anytime soon, but it's okay for a short diversion.

Lake, Dec 5 (Xbox Game Pass)-A relaxing game about delivering mail in a small town. Not nearly as good as Yoku. This one didn't really have much going on. Encountered a game breaking bug after delivering a package to Jack on the 10th and again on the last day. Managed to get past them though. Some of the aminations and other things were buggy too. Soundtrack was pretty catchy though.

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Chinatown Detective Agency, Dec 5 (Xbox Game Pass)-I liked this game but it fought me every step of the way. And I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone in its current state.

The plot was interesting if a little confusing at the end and I only played one path so I'm not sure how the other two tie in to the overall conspiracy.

The puzzle mechanics of using search engines outside of the game to decipher clues was generally fine. I found identifying the clues relatively easy but applying them to the actual puzzles nearly incomprehensible. Even when I looked up the answers, I occasionally still didn't understand them. A lot of the puzzles were just too difficult for me.

Also, the voice acting cut out very early in the game and never came back. When it was actually there, the voice acting wasn't great so it wasn't sorely missed. However the written text had a lot of typos which were more painful to read without the voices.

The game felt very ambitious but poorly executed. Hiring an assistant and paying bills felt like a really underdeveloped and unnecessary mechanic. The difficulty of the puzzles and the bug that caused me to lose the voice acting really hampered my enjoyment of the game. But I did like it and I'd like something a little more polished for the next go around.

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Stray (PS5 PS Plus)

6 hours of watching a Cats ass. Full disclosure, I hate the common house cat with a passion. The only animal on the planet that I would make extinct if I could just work out how to do it. But it's just a video game, so I tried it out. It has high production values and runs perfectly. It's a very easy action-adventure game. It's actually quite good if you overlook the horrid fact that you're a cat, but it's also not as great as its reputation suggests either. If you took this game and replaced the cat with an ugly Cane Toad it would not be anywhere near as popular.

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 - The Christmas Chronicles

This is supposed to be a rerelease of Holiday Hare 98, the notable difference in single player being that Lori is added as a playable character, but if I ever played a Jazz Jackrabbit game it was probably only for a few minutes and almost certainly not one of these “specials”, so it’s my first actual experience with it and I just finished its three levels with Spaz, whose double jump makes him so much better at platforming that trying to use the others felt like choosing the hard mode, and I don’t see how they could even reach all the places.
It’d have been frustrating if I’d have had to just rely on the checkpoints, as it’d have likely meant missing some areas and taking a long time to finish, if I’d have even finished it at all, considering how quickly the end boss initially wiped away the six lives I had accumulated by then, so it was such a relief to see that you can save anywhere. Otherwise, it’s pretty much what I’d expect from a platformer of that time, just with a Christmas theme and probably intended to be on the easy side.
However, since I mentioned saving, it’s strange and rather annoying that the selected weapon seems to change whenever you save or load. But at least you can plan for that, once you realize that it’s happening, what’s more frustrating, especially early on, being the fact that when you first pick up a new weapon it’s automatically switched to. And another issue is that you can’t store over 99 shots for any weapon, and since picking up ammunition also grants points, you’ll eventually need to waste shots just to be able to pick up more. And then there’s the matter of the hidden items, some requiring you to know where they are without really having a way to find them on your own. And you also need to either already know or just happen to stumble upon the the characters’ special abilities, since they’re not explained in the game, though the basics are.

Amnesia: Rebirth (XSX Game Pass)

First of all, I just love all the reviews for the amnesia games where the reviewer says something like 'this is not an Amnesia game". They make it sound like it's a long running series that has gone off the rails. There are three games by two different developers and each game is a slightly different style- so how can anyone say what an Amnesia game is?
Rebirth is probably closest to SOMA, but with a more personal selfish story instead of the deep philosophical story of SOMA.

Some of the environments were quite good, especially the Foreign Legion Fortress- which is not a game location you get very often. The early parts of the story had me hooked and wanting to go on the see what is happening- a sign of a good game. Even the puzzles were just involved enough, yet without slowing the pacing too much. Unfortunately, the experience faded out as the game drew closer to its resolution. I think the final third felt like padding. You looked to be getting close to your goal and then wham, the earth falls from under your feet (sometimes quite literally) and you're back to square one. These setbacks just felt too random. After three or four times of this trick, it gets a bit old and predictable and feels like just trying to make the game longer.

So, it was okay, especially early on. Just not one of the greatest of the genre. I think SOMA is easily the best Frictional game I've played- not due to game play or anything, but just a story that really hooked me, which is quite rare for video games.

Edit: almost forgot, Rebirth takes the award for most ridiculous "just there for game play" mechanic ever- you can only carry ten matches at a time. Seriously. Just ten matches. Tiny little wooden sticks. A 6-month-old baby could hold a box of 30 matches in their little hand and this grown ass woman can only carry ten. Just so you have to constantly keep looking for them.

Beat Spacebase Startopia on PS5 two days ago. Honestly, I can't even remember the last time that I beat a game this bad.

It has admittedly been about twenty years since I played and finished the original Startopia but I think I have a relatively accurate memory of it and truth be told, even though I loved Startopia back in the day, also back then I was aware that it's a pretty flawed game which can't decide if it wants to be Theme Hospital or Dungeon Keeper and fails to live up to either. And frankly I'm under the impression that rather than somehow ruining Startopia, Realmforge made the mistake of not changing enough in this remake and many of my biggest gripes were inherited from the original. But admittedly, it seems that they added new problems of their own.

Anyway, it's honestly one of the worst builder/manager games I have ever played. When it works it's boring but oftentimes it's barely even functional. Like the original game, Spacebase Startopia is mostly a "civilian" builder/manager game where you just have to meet the alien visitors' demands for things like hygiene and entertainment by building the corresponding facilities and hiring staff for them. The main problem is that the game isn't nearly complex enough to work as a peaceful builder game. You just linearly advance through multiple tech tiers which unlock visitors with more sophisticated demands and the rooms to satisfy them. Build the corresponding facility and hire a few workers for it and you're good. Since the map is always the same empty ring-shaped space station without any strategically valuable points and there are also no complex mechanics that would require careful placement of facilities, there is virtually no challenge here nor anything else to put much thought into. You can accidentally cause a little crisis by making a dumb mistake which will spiral into a negative feedback loop but once you've learned to leave room for air filters and always hire far more workers than you actually have jobs for them, it feels like there isn't really much you can screw up here.

Sadly the execution of this pretty basic idea is pretty darn awful. Basically the game works like The Sims but at a much larger scale. Every visitor and employee has multiple bars that must be satisfied, else they will have a foul mood and vote down your station's rating or quit their job. One problem is that the aliens are shockingly incompetent at satisfying their own needs. More often than not when I checked on an angry alien it just couldn't be bothered to actually go to the facility that would improve the stat that is making them so mad. I've often seen aliens walk right past the facility that would satisfy their most urgent need in favour of a facility that will improve a stat that is in an okay state already. If you unlock larger areas of the station, aliens also have the habit of just walking off into empty areas far away from any facilities and get mad in the process. You also don't get even the most basic tool for tracking finances. Eventually you get a lot of expenses and income but it's nigh-impossible to observe the current trend based on that single currency counter at the top of the screen and the game generally doesn't communicate expenses well. And unlike in Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital you can't lift the aliens. The only thing you can lift and drop are the Fuzzies, the basic worker unit in this game, but you can't really control what they will do by dropping them anywhere and often takes forever until Fuzzies will handle what you need them to do most urgently. Oh, and employees aren't assigned to specific buildings or shifts, they will just approach an empty slot that fits their species when they feel like it and leave when they don't feel like working anymore, always leaving their station unattended until someone else happens to fill it at random. The game neither allows you to create a well-oiled machine that works fine on its own nor does it give you any tools to quickly fix things manually other than grabbing garbage or resources and dropping them into a recycler or storage unit (something that your Fuzzies should be doing but generally suck at).

And the campaign does nothing to add variety or any actual challenge until the last couple of missions. Basically the game sends you through the same technology "tree" (more of a line, really) ten times, always adding one more tier. So yeah, basically you're doing the exact same things over and over - by mission 5 you will have to repeat all steps from missions 1-4 plus another one and since maps are identical you can even keep building the exact same base every time. This is pretty damn dull and boring. They tried to add a few variations, e.g. the mission that introduces health care has particularly many sick aliens, the one that introduces security has particularly many criminals (I think) but the answer is always to just build whatever facility has just been introduced - you know, what you were going to do anyway. Oh, and on many levels bombs will just randomly spawn in your base which you have to grab and drop into a recycler quickly which is just a trivial nuisance. Anyway, the campaign never quite stops feeling like a tutorial (which is actually a problem I also had with the original Startopia).

And finally there's the competitive part. Again, it's something that always felt out of place to me in Startopia - I just find it grotesque that in a game about building civilian infrastructure on a space station there are multiple competing managers literally warring over limited building space (and nothing else). The game only introduces this in the last two or three missions and it just feels so wrong and execution is even worse than for the building and management stuff. The battling is almost entirely done with the help of massive mech units which are built in a painstakingly awkward crafting process and eat up a lot of your "energy" (the main currency in this game) while active, unnecessarily putting a damper on the civilian building part. There are also no defensive structures and you can't look into the enemy's space so the attacker always has the advantage. There are just three mechs with similar strength and security drones which are constantly being built automatically and are generally useless against mechs. The actual RTS battling is just laughably bad and the key to winning is really to exploit the extremely dumb enemy mech AI. Anyway, long story short: once enemy commanders get involved, the key to victory is to just focus on getting a few mechs quickly and overrunning the enemy with an underwhelming force of 2-3 ridiculously slow mechs.

Oh yeah, and finally: they added a kind of GLaDOS style arrogant narrator who is the only "character" in this game. She starts out as a particularly annoying system voice that is far too talkative and comments on everything in a condescending manner butt also increasingly becomes the center of the really awful "story" of this game. An annoying computer voice that keeps telling you that you suck is a really bad choice for a painfully mediocre game.

Anyway, long story short: it's a pretty awful game that is boring when it works and frustrating when it doesn't and frankly not worth anyone's time (unless you're a game designer who wants to learn how not to make strategy games, I suppose). I suppose the only things I liked are some of the alien designs as well as the music.

PS: the console version has some of the worst controls I have ever seen.

I played Splinter Cell for the first time since I had my original Xbox. It's still a pretty good game, especially after you patch it to make sure the shadows and spotlights work correctly. I don't think I ever fully appreciated how much like Thief it is - in many ways it's basically a Tom Clancy-fied take on Thief, where it's all about sticking to shadows and paying attention to surfaces so you'll make less noise. You can throw stuff to distract guards and put out lights to create hiding places, but you do have a bit more competence in combat. It has pretty good graphics for the time, especially in how it portrays shadows and light, although even at the time the animations felt a bit janky as Sam sort of floats across surfaces and up stairs.

Its biggest downside is that it's one of those stealth games in which the moment you're seen, alerts start blaring and every single guard around you immediately goes into murder mode and knows exactly where you are. It can get silly at times. During the CIA mission, a security camera caught a glimpse of my elbow barely poking out from behind a corner, so the alarm went up. It was a freaking elbow! I could have been an employee taking the stairs instead of the elevator! It's a great idea to save before you have to jump off a climbable object because Sam often will fail to grab or move to the ledge properly. More of that weird jankiness. And grabbing moving guards from behind is often a pain because it's hard to gauge distance when you're so close and it's easy to bump into them, causing them to flip out and start shooting immediately. I'd hate to work at a place like that, where everyone is so on edge all the time.

The story has that Clancy-style dryness and is mostly just there to explain why you're in all these places, but Michael Ironside is absolutely great doing Sam's voice. Even by Ironside's standards, it's a really hardboiled character and his dialogue is excellent.

On the whole, it still holds up and it's just the right length, not too short but not overstaying its welcome, either. I'll probably see about playing the next one before too long since I've never played the rest of the series.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales (PS5 PS Plus)

Spider-Man BLM edition. It's okay, it feels like it was meant to be a stand-alone DLC that became a PS5 launch window game. It ran awesome, I used the games 120 mode- which isn't actually at 120Hz, it just unlocks the frame rate if you have such a TV with VRR. Inside Spider-Man's bedroom it actually does get close to 120Hz, otherwise it usually runs at around 80fps out in the city. So, with VRR it's really smooth to play. Of course, that mode means turning off Ray Tracing and lowering a few other settings- but I still have yet to see anything ray traced that is a game changer, especially if you have to drop to 30fps like here.

The game play was okay in the world and for the proper side missions. The traversal is just as good as the first game and Sunset Overdrive, Insomniac are masters of this type of thing. I didn't like Miles Moralis as much as Peter Parker, but not a deal breaker.

The thing I really did not like was the exact same as the first game. The side missions/stories are okay and give you some freedom in how you tackle them. The story missions though, are just as bad as ever. They may as well be on-rails, it matters not how well you do something the game has to fudge it to make it to the next story cutscene. So, all the main mission segments are just press Square to make something awesome happen at the right time. The boss fights are the real issue. For example, the final fight has about 6 phases. First phase I was doing so well that I never even took a hit and was laying the smack down- then got my ass handed to me in a cutscene with no control. Second phase I also took no hits and was easily smashing her, then got smacked down in a cutscene. Repeat for the next however many phases. It feels like the developer just cheating. I hate it, it's cinematic BS.

So overall, excellent graphics, world and traversal, some decent fun in the side stories and world exploring and terrible boss fights and story missions. It all evens out to an average game, that does have some good fun at times.

Telling Lies, Dec 11 (Xbox Game Pass)-I thought it was a more refined, polished experience compared to Her Story. The acting was a little over the top but it probably had to be when you're only hearing half of the conversation most of the time. Starting videos at the utterance of your keyword search and not at the beginning was pretty annoying. The plot wasn't that interesting but unraveling it was fun. I also liked how the developers dropped hints for keyword searches.

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