Finally! I am free! I just finished Starfield.

Honestly, I could write an entire book about how I feel about this game but luckily GOG has a character limit.

You'd think that "Skyrim in space" is a formula that Bethesda couldn't possibly mess up but they did. Bethesda kept everything that they suck at, sacrificed everything they are good at and awkwardly slapped on various components that we know from many other games but executed every single one of them either badly or meh at best.

Now, Starfield isn't a terrible game. Nothing about this game is unforgivably awful but it also isn't good at a single thing - well, other than gunplay, oddly enough. It's simply mediocre from start to finish. And I have zero sympathy for games that offer dozens of hours of mediocrity. A bad game I can turn off after 20 minutes. Or maybe I will beat it but at least I will have something to laugh at with friends. But a game that pulls you in with a promise of greatness and then keeps you in a state somewhere between life and death for a hundred hours, like you're on life support in a coma that you may never awaken from? Now that's truly awful. And that is what Starfield is.

What you get here is bad space exploration, a bad space opera, bad space combat, hints of a bad immersive sim and a bad stealth game, bad quest design, a bad progression system, bad loot, a bad economy, a bad story, mostly bad characters, a bad companion system, bad pacing, a bad universe, bad crafting, often bad graphics, bad optimization, really bad load times (and lots of 'em)... I could just keep going! It's admittedly not ALL bad. As I said, the gunplay is good - almost shockingly so. Once in a while you do get a beautiful sight. The music has its moments. There are some really nice lines of dialogue. But also, and I'm not kidding, only one quest in the entire game is genuinely good.

What really fascinates me the most is how unimaginative the game is. It's like this big active effort to create the most generic sci-fi game imaginable. They hide this under a gown of supposed hard sci-fi but then they also give you space cowboys and space magic. Of course the largest city in this game is a utopia that's a mix of white sterile architecture and greenery because that's the first thing you'd think of for the peaceful capital of mankind. Of course there's also a planet that's a cyberpunk dystopia with gangs and drugs and evil corporations. Of course there are also ancient alien temples because you can't have a sci-fi game without those, can ya? And then the game fails to do a single original or ballsy thing with any of those. Yeah, the corporations break the law sometimes but they aren't actually truly evil. Yeah, there's a drug problem but nobody's really suffering because of it. Yeah, the supposed utopia is led by a kinda fascist government but the people at the top are basically your average Starbucks customer. There are also some oh so deep philosophical ideas that are supposed to shatter everyone's concept of reality but it's just kids stuff that makes you go "eh". The amount of parallels to No Man's Sky's narrative is also just hilarious given the parallels in overall concept and gameplay.

And I wish to stress that wherever Starfield overlaps with No Man's Sky, it is worse than No Man's Sky - in its systems and gameplay and the overall sense of exploring the universe and discovering fascinating new places. Heck, the truth is that I had more fun and experienced a stronger sense of wonder and grandeur while driving the Mako around the barren landscapes of Mass Effect 1 than I had landing on a single planet in Starfield.

Anyway, I'm just glad I'm done with this. Jesus Christ.

The original?

I had to free up some space on my PS5 and looked at the games I could delete. One of them is Forspoken which I kept installed because I'm a weirdo who actually enjoyed the game quite a lot and I was planning to get its In Tanta we Trust DLC at some point. So I figured that I'm just gonna get it over with and I beat it in a few hours.

I was really hoping for more post-game content and a continuation of the base game's story but sadly the DLC offers neither. Instead it's a prequel chapter set in a new location which you can launch as a quest in the post-game or directly from the main menu. Also, rather than allowing you to master the ridiculously large set of powers that you have by the end of the main game, the DLC replaces all of that stuff with a new basic skill tree with just a handful of attacks and support powers.

That said: I enjoyed the DLC, even though it's theoretically pretty much the opposite of what I wanted. Like most prequels it doesn't meaningfully contribute to the main story but I found its plot surprisingly enticing. It does have the kind of spectacular emotional moments that I appreciated in the base game and you do get to magically parkour around a nice landscape and engage in hectic arcade combat again. Yeah, the ability set is rather basic, you meet just a handful of enemy types and most of it is remixed stuff from the base game but that honestly didn't bother me as I was returning to the game almost a year after beating the main thing and just for a few hours.

The sad thing is that the DLC was clearly meant as a bridge between the base game and a sequel or at least a major expansion that we will quite surely never get, given that Forspoken scored and sold badly and the development team has since been disbanded. At the end there's actually a hint at what we could have expected there. Oh well...

Anyway, the DLC is a bit expensive given that it's just about three hours of additional gameplay but if you're one of those freaks who actually liked Forspoken (like me!) and is looking for any excuse to play it again, I think it's a good idea to grab it on sale.

Yes.

Dead Space 3, Nov 19 (Xbox Game Pass)-It was fun time but a little worse than Dead Space 2 which was a little worse than the original. I was a little lost on the plot because I started it about 8 months ago. Some of the mini-game activities like hacking, climbing, and flying were not great. It felt like the developers had only a couple of moves (I can't call them tricks anymore after 3 games with minimal gameplay differences) and they kept using them over and over. The game quickly got predictable with the encounters and rather than rely on a quick jump scare to set the atmosphere they would dump dozens of enemies at you every chance they got. The game leaned much more action than survival or horror than I would have liked. But I enjoyed it and wanted to finish it before I tried Dead Space Remake.

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Maybe this one shouldn't count because it's practically just a demo but screw it, I'm willing to make an exception due to how significant it is: last night I beat Half-Life Uplink for the first time in almost 25 years.

This one's a pretty interesting piece of gaming history because it's a free standalone chapter that was released a few months after Half-Life that served as a demo but was not part of the main game. For many, including me, this was how they experienced Half-Life for the first time - to me that was honestly an almost life-changing experience that I remember vividly a quarter of a century later. And like probably most players I never revisited it after getting my hands on the full game. So now that Uplink has been officially implemented into Half-Life via its 25th anniversary update, I figured that it would be a fun thing to give it another go.

So, what I find pretty fascinating in retrospect is that Uplink is in some ways the opposite of Half-Life. Half-Life is pretty famous for its slow beginning, gradual progression and uneven pace - Uplink, meanwhile, is this super condensed experience where you will see a lot of what Half-Life has to offer within a 15-20 minute chapter. It starts with a bang and within five minutes you have already had NPC interactions, bashed your way through boxes, been surprise attacked by headcrabs and zombies and even have a shootout with marines in a warehouse which is followed by a simple environmental puzzle. And things actually only get more intense from there.

Revisiting levels that I'm not as intimately familiar with as the main game (which I've beaten several times over the years) has perhaps made me finally appreciate what may have been the single biggest strength of Half-Life all along: suspense. There's the obvious cinematic scripted stuff and surprises in the level design (like, you've just broken down the last part of the box blocking your path and you get surprised by headcrabs behind it) but what really struck me this time, especially having played the Quake remasters rather recently, is that so much of the combat design is also about suspense.

I mean, everyone knows about Half-Life's smart marines but later on you fight vortigaunts in a simple corridor - the level geometry is about as one-dimensional as it gets and even that scenario manages to deliver a fundamentally suspenseful experience. You walk around the corner (which you had passed earlier) and there's a bunch of vortigaunts there - you instinctively deliver a few shots and pull back. And what now? Should you just wait for them to come around the corner? Will they come all at once, forcing you to pull back further? Are they even still there? So should you try throwing a grenade around the corner? Have they maybe retreated deeper into the corridor? Oh, maybe this is a good moment to reload your gun but of course that's gonna be the moment when they finally attack, right?

So I did throw a grenade and I managed to kill one vortigaunt with it but another one fled just in time and yet another one had already disappeared before. When I chased after them I again had to pull back because of their slowly charging ranged attack. I mean, it's the simplest corridor and yet there are so many uncertainties and exciting potential scenarios and it also all just feels so natural. It's just friggin' genius even by modern standards.

I was going to write a lot about the nostalgia and how many details I remember almost 25 since the last time I played Uplink but ah, nevermind. But what I want to say is that it's really just an amazing Half-Life experience and I'm very glad that Valve has brought it back and so many players will get to play it for the first time. It won't be the religious experience that it was almost a quarter of a century ago but especially big fans of Half-Life who never had an opportunity to check out this forgotten piece of gaming history should appreciate it a ton - almost like it's a new mini expansion from the geniuses who made the legendary original game.

Rage 2, Nov 24 (Xbox Game Pass)-I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this game. There was enough variety in the missions to keep it interesting for about 15-20 hours but much longer than that and it would have started to get grating. It also helped that even though it was open world, completing missions advanced a relationship meter with one of three quest givers which was required to progress. There were a couple mission types I didn't care for but you could typically avoid those. The upgrades felt pretty good too. It was a tad on the easy side especially the final boss and it really wants to come back for a sequel. But for 15-20 hours its a good amount of shooter fun.

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Elex (XSX)

This game takes the old Pirahna Bytes formula and cranks it all up to 11. Unfortunately, they cranked up the bad stuff along with the good stuff to 11. Overall though I enjoyed it, knowing from past experience what games are like from the developer really helps.

A lot of people complain about the combat. That wasn't a problem for me, I knew it was going to take a long time before I could reliably kill anything, and once I got there it became easy. The only real problem was the scale. Way back in gothic, the world was open, but small. You would set off on a quest with no idea if you'd be able to conquer it when you got there. If an enemy blocked you that was too difficult, you simply ran away and didn't waste too much time- everything was only a few minutes from everything. In Elex the world is so much larger, and you can spend half an hour or more making your way across the map, only to find you have no chance of completing your quest after you get there. Sucked in! Along the way you may or may not find some fast travel portals to make it easier when you venture back...but they are quite easy to miss.
This all makes the early part of the game really slow and frustrating as you wander around the world just vainly hoping to find that one of your quests can actually be completed.

Then, you get over level 15 and suddenly the game clicks into gear and becomes great. This game should be in the dictionary as the definition of "slow burner". The first chapter, because of the reasons above, took me around 30 hours. The remainder the game took me about the same!

In the end I really enjoyed it, it's been a long time since I played a real successor to the Gothic series and the good stuff is still here- the awesome feeling you get as you power up and become a killing machine. The way the game keeps the same enemies all the way so defeating them is a measure of your progress. The game rarely relies on cheap respawning.

The story was okay, though all your choices end up being deflated by the fact that you learn it means nothing for the sequel. All the choices you make, who lives and dies, does not carry over into the sequel.

In a technical sense it's the best PB game ever. The XSX game is actually the Xbox One X enhanced version- which has an uncapped frame rate even for the quality mode. So that meant 1800p at 60fps. It ran perfectly and actually looks way better than I was expecting- with the exception of the character models. It's not that the characters look terrible- it's just that there are only a handful of different models. So, most of the females look like Caja and most of the men look like Durant. The game had no issues or crashes except for on strange one- whenever I tried to set my loadout for the quick select when in high resolution mode, the game would freeze. Luckily it wasn't huge deal because you change equipment so rarely and it only takes a second to change to the high frame rate mode (which runs at the same frame rate!) and then change back once changing my quick selections, no game restart is needed or anything. One nice thing for the Xbox version exclusively is the AI applied HDR implementation- it works really well here with the games excellent native lighting.

So overall, despite a bit of Jank, it's a great game. I will be playing the sequel soon before the story fades too much, Elex 2 is on PS Plus...and since none of the versions carry over your saves or story choices, then changing platform is no penalty at all.

With the defeat of 6-winged Ethereal Queen, and unlocking of last character ending for Emmerson, my PS4 Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness Universe difficulty playthrough has been finished on 100% today. During my way to 100%, I had to unlock 4 ultra rare Trophies, which have been acquired by less than 1% of game owners. One for crafting all recipes, one for finding every single item, one for finding every single enemy, and one for fulfilling the prerequisites for all of the in-game Battle Trophies. The hardest Trophy, as always, was the Battle Trophy one, as it included the infamous one for 1 million hits. To get this one, I had to spent more than 30 hours fighting against Bloodbane over and over, but I left the last hit for this Trophy for the EQ fight :) . The game got a lot of bashing when it was released, mostly due to the Fiore’s dress, but IMHO, it was one of the best JRPGs released in 2016, as it stayed faithful to its Japanese roots without trying to appease western Skyrim audience, unlike FFXV.

List of all my finished games, can be found HERE.

Two more Wales interactive fmv:

Mia and the Dragon Princess

Another movie with good action fights and a decent story. You should play several times to see the full story but is pretty short. Nothing more relevant. Looks good, plays good, no bugs.

Bloodshore
The worst fmv of the Wales bundle, an island with a bunch of stupid youtubers. The story reminds the Hunger Games films or, better, The Running Man, of Arnorld Schwarzenegger, underrated film.

The better is the showman, similar to Megarace.

Yakuza 3. This is kind of an adjustment coming off the 0-Kiwami games, although you get used to it and compared to the original two games it's certainly quite a graphical upgrade. I read several things about people disliking the game because the enemies are too strong at blocking attacks, so maybe with that in mind I was pleasantly surprised to find that the combat wasn't really all that far off from what I was expecting. It's still very much a Yakuza game in which you smash people with bicycles and stuff and most encounters get resolved quickly and often with me not taking much damage. It helps that you can learn some techniques that can really put a hurting even on bosses if you get the timing down right. I did feel that the combat was slightly less hard-hitting compared to the ones I've played, though. It just seemed like the sound effects and sense of impact was blunted a bit.

As a story, it feels a lot more chilled out than the others because you spend long stretches mentoring the kids at the orphanage. That all pays off late in the story when the bad guys start coming after the orphanage and I felt honestly outraged at how pointlessly evil the bastards were for doing that. Otherwise the story is still a Yakuza thing, where it's ridiculously convoluted and melodramatic in the main plot while getting quite silly in the substories. I stuck with my usual routines in the series in that I didn't bother with the gambling activities. I did a bit of the bowling and golfing but not much. The physics in the bowling in particular didn't feel satisfying to me. I lost interest in the hostess minigame pretty quickly, and I also lost interest in the colosseum because they were just too grindy to stick with. No wrestlers in this game, unfortunately. I kind of want to continue to the next game (I have up through 6), but I'm going to force myself to take a break for a little while and finish up some other stuff before getting into it.

Venba, Nov 26 (Xbox Game Pass)-A touching narrative story where the gameplay compliments the narrative nicely. Its kind of in the vein of Unpacking and there are some subtle clues foreshadowing future dialog and events. Keep a box of tissues nearby.

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Detroit Become Human, Nov 28 (PS5)-This was a lot of fun. I liked it about as much as As Dusk Falls which was also very good. DBH might get docked slightly because the choices were pretty clear which was good and which was bad and I recall them being more ambiguous in As Dusk Falls. There were a handful of occasions where the choice keyword did not lead to the exchange I was expecting and also a few with unintended consequences. Game played well except for some stuttering in a few of the later chapters. I enjoyed the stories of each of the main characters. My first ending was rather bittersweet with some characters not making it at the very end. I replayed the last couple of chapters to try to keep everyone alive but I kept failing and the endings seemed to get even sadder. Kara's route seems like a minefield. Not sure if I'm going to keep trying but I might because I haven't gotten the ending I wanted yet.

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Gotham Knights (XSX Game Pass)

Another "bad' game that turns out to be decent fun. It's not as good as the Arkham games, but it's not terrible either. Reviews make the game sound like it's a disaster, and reading them after playing the game myself, makes me realize that many people didn't play it for more than an hour- as they are full of critiques that are not even factually accurate.

Anyway, you get to play as either Nightwing, Redhood, Robin (as if) or Batgirl. You can change characters at base anytime or play the entire story as one character. Since it's a third person game and you spend around 30 hours looking at your characters ass- that left Batgirl as the only real option. Or if you're that way inclined and like to look at 16-year-old boy's asses for 30 hours, then you could play as Robin I suppose. Your choice.

Gameplay is like the Arkham games, but probably easier...though it's been some time since I played them, so that may not be accurate. Unlike the Batman games though, you do not get all of your traversal abilities straight away- for example it takes a few missions before you can glide, and you have to complete tasks to unlock the fast travel points around Gotham.

The story is quite decent- a bit predictable, as are pretty much all Superhero stories. There are also some lengthy side stories that are optional, involving well known Gotham villains.

Gotham City is looking fine in this game. The nighttime lighting is awesome and a terrific view distance that extends all the way across the city. Overall, I wouldn't say it was a wase of time at all- not as good as the Arkham games, but if you've finished those already it's worth it, depending upon how much you get it for.

Finished a few games recently that I didn't feel like writing long reviews about:

A Little to the Left
A puzzle game about bringing order to chaos. The special thing about it is that it doesn't tell you anything about the actual goal in a puzzle, what kind of order it expects from you, you just need to figure it out all by yourself. And sometimes there is more than one solution. It was an enjoyable little distraction, partially relaxing, partially also a bit frustrating sometimes, when the goal was rather obscure, and the music while nice enough, occasionally added to the stress because it could get a bit repetitive and intrusive. It could have used a little more variety in the music department, and more relaxing one as well. I did appreciate that you could skip puzzles and come back to them later on. There is an in-built hint system, too, but I didn't find it particularly helpful, especially not in trying to 100% everything. It just allows you to uncover one solution, and often the most obvious one that you already figured out yourself. In the end I failed to find all solutions and left 3-4 puzzles half solved only, but I didn't see much sense in racking my brain any further or look up the solutions online. All in all the game was quite nice though.

The Spirit and the Mouse
It was a little different from what I expected, less about solving actual puzzles and doing actual platforming, and more about doing simple mini-games (chores) and finding collectibles in a small semi-open world (and exchange them for power ups / abilities). But since I like the latter genre, it was just as much a positive surprise as a disappointment, and while the whole thing was a bit forgettable gameplay-wise, I still enjoyed it very much. It was also cute, even though the story was a bit odd and naive. Somewhere between kids and adult, just a feel good family game, I guess.

The Forest Quartet
Short narrative game with simple puzzles, about a ghost bringing back together the members of her former band who all suffer from different mental illnesses, by helping them fight their inner demons. Though fiction, it seems to be based on real life experiences with actual musicians and in memory of someone deceased. The voice acting is amateurish (possibly by some of the actual musicians?) but passable. I played through it in one session (1-2 hours?) and mainly enjoyed graphics and relaxing gameplay, but will probably forget about it again soon.

A Way Out (2 player co-op)
The second game by Swedish writer and movie director Josef Fares (Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons), once again a cooperative action slash puzzle adventure with a twist, although this time made for two actual players, not just two characters controlled by one. Gameplay is more like Quantic Dreams games, very simplistic with restricted environments and only few hotspots to work with, so that most of the times, it's pretty evident what the game wants you to do, as there aren't any alternatives to it. The linear cinematic narration definitely takes precedence over gameplay. So we were not too impressed with the latter, despite some action scenes in between the simple puzzles. And there were some plotholes and clichés in the story, too. But it was written well enough regardless, and I will say that in some parts it was pretty cool how cinematic presentation and gameplay were intertwined. Something a bit odd but intentional about the game is how it's using split-screen for the two players all the time, even if you play online. So at any given moment, both players will see the same, even if their characters are apart, and while the two cameras come with the risk of confusing inattentive players like me occasionally, they also allow you to witness (or spy on) what the other character is seeing and experiencing at the same time. It wasn't the greatest co-op game I've ever played, but for the 6 hours it took to play through (2 sessions in our case), it was entertaining enough, with some interesting scenes and developments.

Borderlands 2 (main campaign, 2 player co-op)
I guess my biggest gripes with it are the clunky, roundabout inventory management and item comparisons, in a game all about loot, and that some of the frequent voiceover narrations and wordy jokes are triggered right in the midst of hectic gun battles, making it hard to concentrate on what is being said. Other than that, we had a lot of fun with it.

Zortch (Maxinum against the Alien Brainsuckers)
Great underrated retro shooter running on a custom built engine, with lots of secrets, cool weapons and opponents, and some fun new mechanics, too. Feels just like the classics. And is sold at a very low price as well. Recommended!

Quake 2 Enhanced (main campaign, Quake 2 64 + The Reckoning so far)
I might still like Quake 1 a little more due to the setting and graphics, but the Enhanced edition of Quake 2 makes me love that one almost just as much. Just like with the first game, I initially disliked it trying to get into the original version, but the EE makes the experience so much smoother, bringing it to a level that can be enjoyed on modern devices even after all these years, plug and play, while still staying pretty faithful to the original game, I believe. As someone who didn't play the Quakes back in the days, I noticed that what is new in the sequel is that there are interconnected levels now and you can move between them, plus you get objectives a bit more involved than finding keys, even if they still boil down to 'push this, shoot that'. But occasionally I actually got stuck and didn't know what to do exactly, though never for long. The included extra mission packs so far are even better than the main campaign. Quake 2 64 consists of many rather short levels that motivated me to play through it very quickly, and the only thing I liked a little less about it is how often it resorts to spawning enemies right behind you for no other reason than to make you jump (they just wait in hidden compartments in the walls, DOOM-style). The Reckoning even introduces new enemies and guns, and the themes of the levels are a bit more interesting than in the main campaign. I don't have much more to say about it, it's just an awesome package of retro shooter greatness, and I'll continue to have fun with the extra mission packs (4 or 5 in total, I believe).

Caves of Lore
Biggest surprise of the year, bought in a sale on a whim, without me knowing anything about it, and I absolutely loved it. Nice retro RPG that doesn't hold your hand, very enjoyable turn-based combat with fun abilities that partially reminded me of modern tactical RPGs like Divinity: Original Sin (although the dev said he hasn't played that one yet), and with very interesting ways to level your characters. It's also made by one guy only, and he is incredibly friendly, helpful and open to feedback. Offers continuous support and fixes issues very promptly, even though it's almost a year since release now. The only downside is that the story ends on a cliffhanger, but apart from that it felt in no way like a simple "part 1" but like a full blown RPG of 20-30 hours playtime. Also highly recommended! Looking forward to the sequel.