Shadowrun Hong Kong - Extended Edition

I've started this up to the City of Darkness part of Act 1 a couple of years ago but stop playing as it didn't really catch me. Maybe because becoming a triad errand boy is a bit boring. But now I've finished it and yes story wise it was weaker than Dragonfall.

But I do laugh when Captain Jomo sang "Aku Seorang Kapiten" in the storm. That''s a fun one.

Vampires Dawn: Reign of Blood

Another case of having a huge pile of notes for a review, but I'm yet to even write the one for Diggles, finished 3.5 months ago, so... I'll again try to quickly summarize.

Impressive amount of customization, quite a few things that I didn't think were possible in RPG Maker 2000, but it does crash against its limitations in some places, on top of the problems inherent to any games made in it, largely having to do with the battle system. Also nice that silver (money) flows in real time if you have the workers, and that you heal in real time too, so can just wait between battles and you'll be fine. And the blood and souls mechanics are interesting, but there are a few bugs even about those, and while it may be that those couldn't really be avoided because of the engine, that excuse doesn't apply in case of others, which should be fixable and which you'd have really thought would be fixed in a game released over two decades ago but which got the English translation far more recently, so someone went through it again (but said someone even missed translating two lines in a pretty important place)...
But what's really frustrating is the save system. Looking at the remaining savestones at the end and the number of saves listed in stats, I'd have probably made it without using souls to save, and there is a savestone merchant you can activate relatively late in the game, and eventually you'll just drown in money so buying them from then on isn't an issue, but I was wary of using the savestones once I could regularly save with souls, leading to thousands of souls used in that manner instead of to improve characters, and either way I was as frugal as I could with saving, which is frustrating and means a dev with no respect for the player's time.
That said, it does keep you playing, interested in what's next, exploring the basically fully open world, developing the characters in that manner that's really unexpected for a RPG Maker game... And pretty nice music too, really nice in some places, though the standout moments tend to be front-loaded, and maybe again right at the end. But so many secrets get tedious, all those random tunnels in walls (there is that spell eventually, but even so it's tedious to keep casting it), all those random unmarked map tiles that lead to places, the ghosts that only appear at night... And the dungeon in the tomb is such a pain to navigate, and the ethereal plane is tedious too.

Sea of Stars (XSX Game Pass)

Small studio JRPG that isn't made in Japan. When this came out it was compared a lot to Chained Echoes. They are actually quite different types of game. I prefer Chained Echoes.

Sea of Stars is much more linear in the way all progression is baked in. The combat starts of okay, but soon becomes a bit of a drag. The animations are slow, mainly to confuse the player as to when to time active inputs. Just like South Park the Stick of Truth, in Sea of Stars you want to time button presses to do damage or reduce damage taken. It's touted as being non-essential, and I guess it is...however ignoring doesn't speed up animations. The pacing feels to slow.

The story is very tailored around the main characters as well. Again, I felt it went too long and became boring.

The game looks really good though and has nice cutscenes for a game that is trying to mimic the 16-bit SNES era. The other aspect of the game that really shines is the way the game handles difficulty. There are no difficulty levels. Instead, the game lets you equip talismans that you either find or buy. These talismans then modify the games rules in some way so that you can tailor the experience. For example, one talisman heals the party after each battle, for players that don't want to be micromanaging healing items and trekking back to the campfires. This is a much better way of letting a player set difficulty than just globally adjusting hit points and damage.

So, some very good ideas and high production values, but I felt parts of it dragged too much and progression was too baked in.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/hardspace_shipbreaker

Thoroughly enjoy breaking up ships. Very clever ship design, they felt plausible and well constructed. Campaign's story is linear but nicely written.

Qvadriga (Steam)

Everyone has seen the movie Bun Hur and remembers the Chariot Racing scene. This is the game of Roman Chariot racing. Turn based, top-down Chariot Racing. You start with a team in an outer province (I started in Egypt) and work your way to eventually get to winning at the Circus Maximus in Rome.

The game is quite literally a video game adaptation of a board game. I have the two games that it's obviously inspired by. Qvadriga is very close to the board game Circus Minimus by The Gamers. I bought the board game in some shop in Duesseldorf called the Mage Shop back in 2008. The shop is still there, I just checked online. Circus Minimus itself is really just a newer version of a much older Avalon Hill classic- Circus Maximus. I have that game too, I collected board war games long before I was a really a video gamer.

So, Qvadriga has all the hallmarks of a video board game adaptation. You face RNG at every turn and it is up to you to play the odds and minimize the risk so that the RNG works in your favor. In that respect the game is a lot of fun. I got addicted briefly and played 120 races in two days! finally making it to the leader boards at the Circus Maximus. Hail Caesar!

Karateka. Completing this for probably the first time since like 1986. It's really not a very difficult game. Most opponents can be defeated by patience and getting the timing down on when to be aggressive. If you get in trouble, just hang back for a minute and your health will regenerate for a bit (although the same will be true of your opponent). The most challenging parts are figuring out the trapped instakill gate at the end of the second level, and getting the timing down on fighting the eagle so it doesn't wear you down. And of course make sure you're not a combat stance when you greet your lady. Prince of Persia was an improvement on this in every single way, but I still enjoy it.

Call of Juarez

Got the Prime Gaming Gog code by W3irdN3rd via the Community GA

It's shorter than I expected, but after looking howlongtobeat I finished it about the par time, around 8-10 hours.

The stealth/jumping around by Billy was kinda annoying, but shooting the bow and arrows feels good. The Reverend bit are where the fun is and no doubt the highlights. The first part when I still learning the shooting game (and to not just running around fast) was awkward but after the cave sections it feels more natural. The train episodes are good and the last episode when The Reverend attack the Fortress are whole lotta fun.

Tower of Cats:

More fun finding hidden cats, having a replenishing hint meter instead of limit number of hints made it a little less frustrating and I didn't need to go online to find the last few missing cats.

Harold Halibut, Jul 2 (Xbox Game Pass)-Its got excellent voice acting and a unique visual style. But the gameplay is slow and the story even slower. There are almost no puzzles to speak of the and story just plods along until it reaches an unsatisfying conclusion. There were a handful of graphical glitches during cutscenes and the game crashed twice in the last 15 minutes which was annoying. The excellent voice acting couldn't save this for me and I really thought it was rather bland.

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Sniper Elite III (Steam)

Finally filled in the gap and played the one game in the series that I haven't experienced. It fits right in. It's better than the first two games, but the 4th and 5th games made enough improvements to the relocation mechanics to make them superior.

Still, the 3rd game has good maps and is fun- it's just the relocation system is rigid and easily exploited. All you have to do here, is shoot someone, then back off 30m and come right back and the enemy forget all about you. The graphics are still really good for a game that is 10 years old. The missions take me around 2 hours each, that's because I insist upon eradicating the map of every single enemy whether I need to or not. It's against my beliefs to leave an enemy alive.

A decent game for the $4 it sells for on sale, but the next 2 games are better.

So, I beat the System Shock Remake on PS5 last weekend. I'll be honest: I did not enjoy it much.

I have played the original game and I enjoyed it quite a bit but admittedly I never finished it because it is pretty darn archaic. I do of course respect it a ton but let's be honest: it was like a prototype of the immersive sim genre and probably every single immersive sim that came after was better than this game. So in my mind it was a perfect candidate for a remake: take the content and style from this legendary title and make it one of the best immersive sims out there by modern standards. That is not what happened.

I find this remake pretty bizarre. I realize that my tolerance for old games may be a bit higher than for the vast majority of gamers because I didn't actually mind the original game's graphics and audio at all and in the Enhanced Edition the controls and UI were good enough for me. Sure, it's cool that the remake looks and sounds and feels like a modern game but incidentally is has addressed ZERO of my problems with the original game and perhaps even added some new ones.

So, going into the remake I knew that it's very faithful to the original game in terms level design and also in its approach to guiding the player. I do feel that these things are a big part of how the game has aged badly and in my opinion they should have been changed in the remake but oh well, I went in prepared: this time I would pay very close attention to all the hints. I still got stuck. I honestly underestimated how subtle and cryptic the communication of the objectives would be (at times). But part of my preparation was also a willingness to resort to walkthroughs and stuff as soon as I get stuck (which is something I generally avoid but my patience was very low in the case of a game from three decades ago that I already abandoned two times because of this stuff).

And yeah, I know that apparently there's a system that guides you to objectives but 1. I wanted better hints or just a quest log, not the game eliminating this part of the gameplay entirely and 2. that feature is apparently tied to the difficulty levels which cannot be changed afterwards. You know, like, when you've been doing well for 6 hours and then you get stuck and finally figure out that you would really appreciate a hint.

However, I can live with all of that.

The serious problem is that after about 3 hours it hit me that I'm utterly bored and that didn't really change until the credits rolled almost 20 hours later. It's simply that you don't do anything interesting in this game. Like, at all. Yeah, the levels are convoluted mazes with buttons and keycards and secret doors but it's honestly an utterly mindless gameplay experience. It's basically just a maze game. Just keep uncovering the map room by room, hit any buttons and pick up any keycards you can find and then check if a former dead end is not a dead end anymore.

You have to be attentive and a good memory can speed things up but there's practically no problem-solving in this game whatsoever with very few exceptions that come out of nowhere. Like, when you eventually run into a single number pad whose code is scattered over several audio logs. Okay, cool. What's not so cool is that there's no audio log for the third number and the correct way of solving this riddle is to just guess the third number. And incidentally that room contains a pretty darn important item. Jesus Christ.

And that also makes it particularly infuriating that the map is utter ass. It's hard to read with walls and doors being like one pixel thick and having very similar colours, it contains only a fraction of the information that it should (like, key cards are colour coded but doors are not), it's utterly unable to communicate the 3D geometry of many of these levels and sometimes it downright fails to show doors because they somehow overlap with a wall or something and so the only way you're gonna find that door again is by actually walking through the entire map again. Jesus Christ.

And sure, there's more to this game than just uncovering the map - there's also combat (and frankly not much else). But the combat is in my opinion quite awful. It is extremely basic without any interesting dynamics or tactical options. Most of the combat I've had in this game was just leaning out of cover to fire a few shots, waiting for the enemy to finish shooting back, and repeat. And lines of fire are absolutely atrocious in this game. Bullets actually come out the physical positions of the guns' barrels and enemies will apparently shoot at any exposed body part. I can't count the number of times I wasn't able to shoot past the object I was using for cover even though the crosshair was on the enemy while the enemy could hit the top of my head or legs just fine. There are a few other options like grenades and mines but seriously, it rarely felt like the right opportunity for those to me and at least on normal difficulty there was also no economic incentive to use them.

Finally, the controller implementation in this game is terrible. The aiming is somehow some of the worst I've seen in ages and the UI was not adjusted for controllers at all. Inventory management is utterly slow and clunky and also a bit glitchy. Items are selected from a hot bar which is anything but on controller as you always have to cycle through it step by step using the D-Pad (I have no idea how they could possibly not add a radial menu for the console release). And even though I found commands that promise easier access to body mods and grenades in the settings, I could not figure out how they work (if they do work at all). So the only way of turning on mods I've found was by opening the inventory and manually moving the slowest virtual cursor in video game history to the mod's icon near the screen border. The game is playable on controller but seriously, the implementation is incredibly low effort. I expected a lot more from Nightdive.

Now, don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed some of it. The presentation and atmosphere are pretty great and I did enjoy the narrative, even though it is a bit cliched by now. But sadly that is literally all that kept me going. So to me it's just a meh game all in all.

Prince of Peris: The Sands of Time

I'll admit off the bat: I've only played two Prince of Persia games to completion and this one is not my favorite of the two. The other game I played was Forgotten Sands on Wii which, in ever way I can really imagine, is just better for me.

First thing: this is the first PoP game by Ubisoft. In spite of the fact it was released in 2003 the game feels like an oddly early game for the consoles of the time in certain ways, mostly the visuals, but even in its slightly simplistic gameplay approach (the game is not mechanically simple, per se, it just has a relatively uncomplicated approach with a clear focus on acrobatics and combat).

I like the game in general but it errs constantly into mildly infuriating territory and then crosses into aggravating semi constantly. The rewind mechanic, for instance, I more likely than not activated purely by accident. I'll not blame the game for me being trigger happy but I never really thought the game was helping me through my mistakes as much as I got another chance to do the exact same thing again and then wonder aloud "well just what did I do different that time?" Wall running is a good example. Sometimes you'll be approaching a wall as you ought to only for you to perhaps have turned too much into the wall (or not) and then he does a wall flip instead of a wall run. The wall flip by the way only exists to tell you that you did something wrong, it's not used from what I can tell in game since the only time it could be useful is combat and you cannot scale walls during the fighting. Jumping is also a highly finicky business since there is no real jump button as much as a context sensitive obstacle traversal button. Ordinarily the prince will roll if you hit A (on Xbox) in a direction without a ledge nearby. It often does not work very well and sometimes leads to your untimely demise, but more likely than not you just hang from the ledge when the cue is not recognized. Actually, all of the acrobatics and platforming mechanics are best understood as being context sensitive which does hurt the idea that you are a man with a bag of tricks and knowledge at his disposal and rather you are just ensuring the prompts happen within a certain window. Yes, technically that is what any game more or less is but it should not feel like it this much.

Oh, the camera is horrendous 90% of the time and there is no other real way to put it. Just fight it and occasionally take a leap of faith to varying degrees of success (sometimes doing the exact same action only for the same thing to work this time).

These issues are no more apparent or problematic than in combat which is just the absolute worst aspect of the game. It is never really fun at any point in the game and I am not joking, it just is not. When it works it is boring (guard, possibly roll, wait for an opening, attack until enemy is knocked back, finish them) and when it does not really (as is often the case) it is frustrating. The lock on is poorly implemented and often leads to baffling choices by the prince (hey, this dude in front of us is down for the count, let's finish him! No... we're going to thrust the dagger at the other guy several feet away... which gets us knocked onto our back and jump attacked in tandem by two sword dudes which puts us in an inescapable loop that leads to our death... great...). Sometimes you'll tell him to flip back and away only for him to for some reason decide we wanted to vault the guy in front of us, which stops being a viable option in combat at the halfway mark. Often times the enemies will block everything for a while. Like, they could be facing the other way, but whatever they blocked it. This would not really be that a big of a deal except that most the time you are fighting enemies that are not trash enemies in trash size mobs. Never more than four to my recollection at a single time but often times you fight more than a dozen enemies in a game with no health pick ups or any real way to replenish your health in the middle of a fight, all while being forced to perform execution on nearly every single one of them for literally all but the last seven or so percent of the game (the game also is weird about percentages: twenty percent of the game near the end does not feel like twenty percent at the beginning or middle did to get through). No real help comes from the lack of meaningful enemy variety (visually or gameplay wise). What is there is mostly good to fine but there is not much there.

All that seems awful negative I'll grant but when this game works it feels so nice to see the prince vault multiple bars and then wall run to a switch that you jump against to grab a ladder to escalate to salvation. Those moments are really, really cool but I don't think there were quite as many of them as I would have preferred. Puzzles tend to take way too long even if I only needed help on two of them (and in retrospect I was just stuck on stupid for a minute there, and the other was the one where you listen for water sounds) and platforming/ acrobatics tends to be tedious busy work (lots of shimmying, vaulting from platforms when the only reason you used the sands was because of a bad camera, which will hurt combat also I should add). Lastly complaint, and it is a big one: the sound mixing is just purely bizarre. The voices are way too quiet, sometimes I turned the TV well past what any other application would have considered too loud just for the voices to be understandable. I would say I probably caught only a quarter or less of the dialogue in any meaningful way. Anyone doing anything nearby will muddle what the characters are saying. This would have been easily fixed if there were subtitles but for no particularly good reason there are none in this game. I mean, this was not some unheard of thing at this point in gaming for games to come with subtitles, in fact reading dialogue would have still been the norm for most story heavy games at this point.

The game looks rather good due to decently strong tech for the period and very well realized art direction (even if I think it gets better in most future games), what music can be heard is good as well as voice acting, and when the game works it really is something to behold. If you were to ask me if anyone should get and try this game I would say easily yes. It is fun even when it is working less well and is undoubtedly incredibly charming and possesses a certain appeal that games miss out on (health upgrades are missable and exploration is rewarded with them, as a single example). I am glad I played it even if it was not the best experience.

Figment 2 Creed Valley, Jul 4 (Xbox Game Pass)-This felt like a fun mix of It Takes Two and Pyschonauts with more musical numbers than I was expecting which was zero. The puzzle solving and combat were quite easy and it felt kind of like a mobile or DS game but it was fun for a couple of hours.

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Commander Keen. Fun game overall, but very frustrating in parts. There's an element of randomness in how the game behaves that makes some enemies hard to deal with, but then again the game also usually has some secrets you can take advantage of if you're paying attention. It's a well-made platform game for a system that didn't have anything like it at the time and it mostly holds up reasonably well.

One thing that isn't necessarily the game's fault but is still a negative to me is that it's an old PC-speaker-based game and DOS games from that era can be really tough for me to deal with. There were times I had to take a break from this game because I was simply getting a headache from the grinding of Keen's footsteps and the blaring of the weapons and jumping noises. Hearing metal scraped against metal might be a worse noise but not by much.

Hi-Fi Rush (XSX Game Pass)

I'm terrible at rhythm games, but I managed to get through this one on the normal difficulty. I actually found the combat to be quite good and easy to get the hang of- especially for the levels where the music had a fast beat. The slower the beat, the harder the combat as far as I'm concerned. Basically, the combat is like DMC with the added aspect of getting advantages from timing combo's to the music.

The part that I found a lot more frustrating sometimes was the platforming. Many segments have parts where platforms drop away from you, and you don't really know until it happens. So, it can be a bit trial and error. The reason why this is more frustrating than usual is because of the games health tank system. When your health is maxed out, any extra health goes towards filling the reserve tank which works like an extra life. Because I kept falling off ledges and loosing health...I was only able to fill the health tank once during the entire game! Still, I got through without the extra lives...but I bet it would a lot more frustrating on higher difficulties.

Otherwise, the game has great art and sharp visuals. Music is mixed, some of it was awesome and some of it didn't feel like it suited the pace of the game- too slow. It's not a long game though, so well worth trying out. I liked the little easter egg in one area where you find an antique looking little mirror that briefly plays the music from the safe room in The Evil Within.