Been playing this one and I'm enjoying it quite a bit too.

Amnesia Rebirth, Sept 25 (Xbox Game Pass)-The first Amnesia game I've played unless you count Soma so I can't comment on how it compares to others. It was suitably spooky. Some of the puzzles were really irritating (tank and maze). In some areas even with a light source I could barely see but that might have been on my particular settings. There were a couple of graphical issues where containers or found notes would disappear in the environment. The story was interesting but I felt it should have been two separate stories and games, one game for a desert survival game and one game for a weird other worldly portal game. Mashed together they just didn't seem to work very well for me.

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The Big Con, Sept 27 (Xbox Game Pass)-Its not a bad little game. It's a little shallow for mechanics with pretty much just a pickpocketing minigame. It's got some humor and rad 90s vibes. You wouldn't miss much if you skipped it but it might be worth a few hours to you.

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The Broken Sword 4. I try to play less well-regarded games with an open mind, and having done so with this game I find that its reputation as the series low point is quite well-deserved. George is now working as a bail bondsman in New York when he's approached by a woman who isn't Nico who's being pursued by the Mob because she has a treasure map of some kind. George and Anna head off to do some Indiana Jones stuff and eventually Nico gets involved and the Ark of the Covenant becomes important to the story.

The game is once again 3D, but in some ways they walked back a bit on the more action/platforming/stealth/block pushing elements to reorient the gameplay toward point-and-click puzzle-solving, but weirdly it doesn't entirely work. The game feels torn on what it's trying to be, and for puzzles it over-relies on stuff like the hacking minigame. The game appears to be heavily truncated, too, as there are numerous locations on the city maps that you expect you'll be visiting at some point but you never do, and the game's ending is very abrupt and leaves several unanswered questions. The overall story is rather ridiculous even by the standards of the series.

It does have some of the old style of the series in terms of fun dialogue and amusing side characters. It's just that they feel like glimmers of something good that never coalesces into a better overall game.

Warhammer 40000 dawn of war goty.
Since the game is divided in 4 games i beat the first one campaign of 11 missions and seen what was happening with the twist at the end of story, which was rather interesting.
As a strategy game i think it's decent, haven't tried the other games yet.
Also this is also the first warhammer 40000 game i beat.

I have the feeling that this one may be leaving Game Pass soon (it's been around 12 months)- so maybe worth prioritizing this game if that's how you're playing it.

Just beat Just Cause on Xbox Series X. It's one of those games that I've approached like a dozen times over the years but never finished and where I could never put my finger on why I always gave up several missions in. Well, now I know why: because the game pretty much sucks. Not offensively so but pretty badly.

Don't get me wrong, I remember how impressive that game was back in 2006 with its gorgeous graphics and all the action movie stuff like freefalling, paragliding, using a grappling hook to enter a helicopter or jumping from one car to another. The thing is that practically every single element of the game except its graphics ranges from bad to mediocre at best and the result is a particularly boring, repetitive and also janky sandbox game.

It's difficult to even wrap my head around everything that's wrong with the game. No individual element of the game is done right but together all of these things somehow still manage to create a strong illusion of a decent game. I mean, sure, the cutscenes immediately make it clear that the game was written by a horny teenager, the car physics are some of the floatiest shit I have ever seen, the shooting screams "PS2-generation console shooter" and all the cool stunt stuff is barely usable thanks to abysmal controls that make the stunts work maybe one out of ten times but still... there's lots of explosions, you get to liberate villages with rebels which is accompanied by lots of explosions, capture a helicopter and cause even more explosions and unlock vehicles and weapons that will hopefully somehow lead to more explosions. There are also cool gimmicks like being able to request a vehicle drop to your location or an extraction to one of your unlocked safehouses (which sometimes inexplicably just didn't work).

But between the explosions it's a really lousy game. Badly designed and unimaginative missions, utterly boring and repetitive side activities and driving along identical roads on identical islands which are unnecessarily difficult to navigate and will have you open a map screen all the time. The only reason I managed to beat the game this time is that I decided to just skip as much as I could and just used the extraction feature to quickly move from one story mission to the next and I don't regret doing that. This way the game was over in just a few hours and thankfully it was also a very easy game, excluding 1-2 difficulty spikes.

Anyway, it's really not a game that's worth anybody's time these days. Back then any GTA-like sandbox game was a gift but now there are so many to choose from that there's no reason to play the original Just Cause. I'd argue that even Total Overdose has stood the test of time better than this one did (but I'm not sure I'm willing to verify that theory).

I played that one five years ago for the very first time and managed to finish it, while I never bothered to finished Just Cause, so I guess you're right. ;)

I did finish Just Cause 2, the year after Total Overdose, but that's the only one in the series so far. Have you played any of the others? Is your negative verdict mostly for JC1 or the whole series?

Yeah, I started playing this one a while back and just stopped a little ways into it because I was bored. The map is huge but it's huge in a way that's almost too realistic. The appeal of open worlds is that you head off in a direction and find something interesting, but in Just Cause all you'd find is a bunch of nothing and end up feeling a bit lost.

Only JC1. I haven't really played any of the other games (because I stupidly insisted on beating JC1 first). I only played a little bit of JC2 on a friend's PS3 soon after release but it did make a much better impression all around other than the fact that like almost all AAA games from that era the developers went for that "gritty" desaturated look there (at least compared to JC1). However, I have beaten the same studio's Mad Max game and I pretty much loathed that one so I'm not sure the later JC games are really gonna be up my alley.

ANYWAY

I just beat another game today, namely Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories, specifically the PSP version on PlayStation Vita. Sadly the censored version even though it was in English, welp. Started playing it while on vacation and just finished it at home. So incidentally I beat two sandbox games from 2006 in as many days and luckily I found this one much better than Just Cause, though I still have serious concerns here.

Vice City Stories serves as a prequel to Vice City and here you assume the role Victor Vance, Lance's brother who dies in the intro of Vice City (though he looks and sounds completely different here). Unlike Liberty City stories, which really felt like a silly little spin-off, Vice City Stories basically feels as big and serious as a mainline GTA game to me. It does reuse the Vice City map (with some alterations) but as the final GTA game in the "GTA 3 generation" it also incorporates some features from San Andreas such as swimming. It also has some stuff reminiscent of SA's turf wars but does omit all of its life sim stuff (which I'm personally happy about). And most importantly it does feature a pretty serious story. Victor gets a full story arc with many serious moments and similarly to GTA IV's Nico Bellic he has a bit of a conscience. In both cases I feel that that stuff doesn't work very well in a GTA game but still, unlike with Liberty City Stories I actually cared about what was going on and was eager to find out how it ends.

If you've played any GTA game from that generation you kinda know what to expect. You get pretty shitty shooting with a terrible lock-on system (perhaps made even worse here since the PSP had only one analog stick) but you also get awesome driving. Honestly, in that generation car physics just felt right to me (excluding the occasional crazy reaction to collisions) and I prefer them over that "realistic" stuff in GTA IV. The missions and side activities are also pretty diverse, perhaps not as much as in the mainline games but still better than in most sandbox games out there, including most much newer ones. I mean holy crap, in one mission you hack a robot and have to perform custodial tasks in first-person while you're actually trying to crack a safe. As a bonus texts parodying Robocop keep flooding screen. You also get to save the actual Phil Collins' life during a performance of In the Air Tonight. Yeah, the guy lent his voice, likeness and name to this game.

Now, I mentioned that VCS has some stuff reminiscent of SA's turf wars. VCS' big feature is a mini game where you build businesses that then generate a passive income. The thing is that all lots are already taken by other gangs, so you need to first attack and destroy their businesses which will temporarily make that gang attack you and your businesses. There are several types of business which unlock with story progress and generate different amounts of money and each one features a set of new "job" missions (similar to e.g. the taxi and ambulance missions in earlier GTA missions) and doing them upgrades the corresponding type of business. For a moment all of this seems pretty promising and even addictive but soon enough you will notice that this whole business game is completely trivial and all it does is generate so much money (even with only a handful of businesses) that money becomes completely irrelevant. Stupidly that is in conflict with the story where Vic just wants to raise enough money to take care of his family. According to the story Vic also hates drugs but he's all too willing to make millions through the drug trade in this mini game. Anyway, frankly almost any other sandbox game from that era, like Scarface, The Godfather and also GTA: Chinatown Wars had a much better business mini game than this one. Honestly, the best thing about this feature is that with each business you get a new safehouse where you can save your game. And that's important because...

Like all GTA games of that generation VCS suffers from terrible balancing or rather a lack thereof. Many missions feel like they've never been tested. They often feature a ridiculously tight time limit (sometimes completely unjustified by the mission's context), the difficulty of some of them is inherently random and often a mission is scripted in such a way that you will inevitably cause cops to chase after you on top of the enemies that the mission is about even though it makes no sense. The first time I played the game a few years ago I actually rage quit because of one bonkers mandatory mission that I couldn't beat after maybe twenty attempts and this time I somehow did it on my first try. And this is made even more infuriating by the fact that some missions have several stages but no checkpoints and every time you fail you will have to load the game, drive to the giver of the mission again and start over. You may spend several hours trying to beat a single mission.

Rockstar was nice enough to spawn a taxi in front of the hospital when you die during a mission which brings you straight to the mission giver but that's like giving you the middle finger because this way you will start the mission without any weapons or armor and it will only be a lot more difficult than on your first attempt. Honestly, some missions make you imagine a Rockstar employee going "you know what? I feel like doing a really shitty job today!" and it's insane that they didn't come up with checkpoints until GTA IV or RDR1. So yeah, the fact that in VCS you have safehouses all over the city is very welcome because this way you will at least save yourself a ton of driving back to mission givers after failing a mission again and again.

That said... there's still something magical about this game (like any GTA game) that makes you forgive Rockstar everything once you've finally managed to beat a mission. Whether it's the tight driving, the lovable characters, the highly diverse activities, the amazing radio stations... it's just GTA baby and you just can't stay mad it for long even though the graphics will make your eyes to bleed even on the small screen of a PSP or Vita. And if anything it's super impressive that they practically managed to squeeze Vice City onto the PSP. Not the real Vice City, of course, but it's close enough.

Ah. I've played a bit of that one but didn't even realize it was from the same studio as JC ...

Lies of P (XSX Game Pass)

Pinocchio Souls. I finished it to the "Rise of P" ending which is the best ending. I'm now playing NG+ to get one of the regular endings and pick up a few collectibles that I missed.

This one very much copies the look of Bloodborne to some extent and makes no effort to hide its From Software inspirations. It doesn't feel like Bloodborne though, this one has its own combat feel- you need to be more precise and use better timing due to the roll mechanic being toned down. Many will tell you that you need to learn to parry perfectly...I did for the early couple of bosses but gave up after the they started becoming too fast and thrashing around the arena too much. So, I went back to using dodging and just running in for hit and run attacks. The level design is some of the closest I've come across to matching From Software. It has short cuts to unlock, though more linear and less maze like than Dark Souls.

It's an excellent game, the best release this year that I've played, edging out Wo Long Fallen Dynasty for the moment. It is more difficult than most, but not as hard as Sekiro for me. The lack of any sort of spell casting means you really have to learn to melee for this one, just like Sekiro.

It's a very well-polished and optimized game. It looks better than most of its competition and runs perfectly fine at the same time. Almost instant load times as well. The story is dark gothic Pinocchio and the mood is spot on. Support characters are really good, and all have their little side stories to uncover by exploring well. I especially liked Red Fox and Black Cat- so much so that I chose to not fight them, which is very unlike me. I built my character along the "Advance" path- which specializes in elemental damage weapons. It worked well for me and, like always, I came to prefer faster weapons and light weight equipment.

It's one of the best "Souls Likes" I've played that isn't made by From Soft. As I said I've immediately restarted a NG+, and I only do that for games I really like a lot.

Edit: finished NG+ to the "Real Boy" ending, which is the evil ending. I have to reappraise this game- it's better than good, it's one of the best games of the modern era after From Software titles and NieR: Automata. The story and characters are tragic and the music records that you collect are the best collectibles in a game since the Playboy magazines of Mafia 2. It's tragic that it gets reviewed as too hard and poor controls. It controls perfectly, runs perfectly, looks amazing and if I can finish it (twice) then you can finish it-I'm no leet gamer, I'm sure. I really hope Neowiz's sequel teaser is real...what famous story has a character named Dorothy?

Valiant Hearts Coming Home, Oct 4 (Netflix Games)-An interesting little puzzle game. I haven't played the first but I believe the gameplay is similar. I was constantly fighting the touch screen controls but that may have been my phone more than the game. It's got a bit of edutainment with historic facts and photos and collectibles. The story is alright but man the ending is a downer.

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The Scorpion King: Sword of Osiris. This is a Gameboy Advance game based on a mediocre movie I barely remember aside from thinking Kelly Hu was really hot (looks it up...holy crap they made four more sequels!), but it was made by WayForward right before they did Shantae and it reflects their particular style of doing decent retro-style licensed games with nice pixel art and animation. You control the Rock as he runs, jumps, and chops through belligerent animals and undead. The game is fairly easy for the most part - even if you die a few times, the game is pretty free about giving out extra lives and there's a password-saving system - but it's one of those where you need to find the hidden secret in each level to unlock the true ending. I spent an afternoon playing it and had a good enough time.

Evoland legendary edition
There are 2 games in it Evoland 1 and Evoland 2
While Evoland 1 is pretty barebones and i think it was a game made in 48 hours it still was interesting to experience.
While Evoland 2 was pretty exciting at least to me i mean i recently bought it and already finished it though it did take 25 hours and this game alone can be worth it.
Many different mechanics in the game and i did like the game as a whole. Nice characters, story is connected with time traveling but this gets presented in the game pretty soon at the start. This one i finished 100% with the collectibles.
Also nice card game. Some parts you had to figure out to get on or there were some questions in the game that were tied to figuring it out to continue the game.

Not many times it happened that i beat a game which i only bought recently.
I think one game i beat right away after getting it was called Rune classic which only reason i played it was to play the gold edition in the past.
Also this is my 85 or 86 beaten game on gog but it's 85 due to counting as one entry in library.