I'm glad I'm not the one not really liking it. :P And, speaking of seeking other people's validation:



<span class="bold">The Beginner's Guide</span>

With a backlog count way closer to 4 figures than 2, I still cannot help getting any new Humble Indie Bundle thrown at my face. And so I bought the recent HIB 17, even though I was only really interested in Nuclear Throne and The Beginner's Guide. Two weeks later I'm still learning the ropes of the former, but at least I've completed the latter. :)

As most of you will probably know (even if you haven't played it) this is One Of Those Games, were any attempt at reviewing it would inevitably result in too many spoilers. So suffice to say that it's a narrative-heavy, short-ish, interactive experience. It starts on a light tone and for a while it can certainly pass for an actual beginner's guide for game developing, but soon enough it starts drifting into... something else. Which, come to think of it, it's kind of something to be expected, isn't it? I mean, this is from the guy who created The Stanley Parable!

I've got not doubts that the usual crowd will accuse it of being a 'walking simulator' but, even though you'll spend most of the playing time pressing the [W] button, you can also flip switches and interact with the environment! Well, sometimes at least.

Visually, it's nothing out of the ordinary as it uses the aging Source engine, but it more than makes up for that in the audio department: the music is sublime, and the narration (arguably, the single most important aspect of this game) is also stellar. By the way, the narrator is voiced by Davey Wreden (the game's creator) himself, but am I the only one who didn't know it and thought for a good while that the voice actor was instead Wil Wheaton? Nobody? OK, I'll see myself to the otolaryngologist then... :P


My list of finished games in 2016

ALLTYNEX Second

Whoever is in charge of refusing SHMUPs from entering GOG catalog ("because it is a niche genre") should be FIRED. Yes, there I said it. GOG attracts retro gamers and a considerable amount of retro gamers do like Shoot 'em ups.

ALLTYNEX Second is chronologically the last game in the Tale of Alltynex trilogy, but the first game storywise. It is made by the master Japanese SHMUP developer SITER SKAIN and the game is simply awesome. You switch between melee and range attacks and you need to learn to use them well to survive. The game is filled with epic bossfights, colorful and very well designed graphics and even a nice scifi story if you bother to read it.

It was re-released thanks to a Kickstarter campaign a couple of years ago and what is more awesome is that my own name appears in the ending credits as a backer :)

This is a very good game, better than at least half of the GOG catalog and it should be on GOG. Make it happen.

For a good review by the best old school gaming site out there, please click here.

damien score: 8.5/10

List of all games finished in the last years with best and worst games played in each year

Include me >_______>

January:

Grey Matter
Hand of Fate

February:

Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring
X-Com 2

March:

Spec Ops: The Line
Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines

April:

Ryse: Son of Rome
Notch
Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened
The Deed
Deponia
Sleeping Dogs (+ all expansions)
Viking: Battle of Asgard

May:

Deus Ex
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

June:

Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis
Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper
Dyscourse

July:

Psychonauts
The Saboteur
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars (original)
Game of Thones (RPG, not Telltale's)
Eye for an Eye (DLC Campaign: TW)
Total War: Warhammer (Finished main campaign as Dwarves.)

August:

Moebius: Empire Rising
Shadowrun Returns.

---

Quite happy with that, a good mix of games, not so many filler titles.

Just finished TES4 Oblivion for the first time.
Before that, I had tried and quit twice(one of reason was that I was forced to be a vampire and could not find the way to cure it.lol) and finally I beat the main quest line(and other quest lines as well).
My favorite quest line is the dark brotherhood( as with Skyrim). It was a just fun.
My adventurer was sword shield and heavy armor warrior.and only heal and shield buff magic used.
I'd heard the game's level scaling was terrible, so I cautiously chose out of only warrior related skills to upgrading.

My 2016's list is here.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut

A wonderful gift I got from the community giveaway, donated by Elterprise, thanks a lot again

A good hack & slash game should have a replay value. The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut, after combining three parts of the game into one, has it. The main campaign is finally long enough to be truly enjoyable. You can choose six different classes and each of them has a complex skill tree so you can specialize in various battle techniques. For a modest price you can reset skill points within the game so you may experiment which build suits you best. You can also choose how to develop your companion - Lady Katarina. She has less complex skill tree but you can adjust her behavior so that gives you a lot of possibilities as well.

Fighting and looting system is solid. Nothing special but just good enough. Sometimes fighting can be a bit messy, especially if your enemies come from below as it’s hard to see them from a distance. The last part of the game is rather poorly balanced: just a few ornithopters were able to kill me rather easily whereas one of the late sub bosses - a three headed dragon - went down within five seconds. Five seconds!!! Story and quests are also rather typical for the genre with tons of popular culture references. They could have used a bit more of exposition though. I mean what’s the fun of killing a minor boss if you don’t get to know him or her before? Think about Andariel in Diablo 2 - you got to know a lot about her before your final confrontation. Similarly, some of your "moral choices" suffer from the same issue. If person A tells you: "Person B kidnapped our children" and person B say: "Kids actually asked me to help the escape" and you are given a choice to kill person B or let him go then it’s not a moral choice. It’s a random choice because you have absolutely no way to check who’s telling the truth. There are, however, a lot of side activities that keep things fresh: you can tinker with your items, enhance them, craft new artifacts etc., in some parts of the game you can position your troops to aid you, send your generals on difficult missions (choose wisely who is the most capable man for the task) or even send your pet chimera on a hunt. On top of that there are daily challenges and special missions that you can perform outside the campaign so there are a lot of things to do.

The game doesn’t contain anything revolutionary but all these little things I mentioned earlier combined with solid mechanics give you a very enjoyable game without too frustrating moments. One thing is excellent: SECRETS! There are tons of them everywhere. Sometimes it’s just a special item that you can find in obscure area, sometimes you have to solve a simple puzzle but there are very complex secrets that take a few acts to solve. I love them with my whole heart.

Full list

Life is Strange (Episode #1 - free on Steam)

Wow. Loved it.

Some of the best storytelling in a game ever. For a teenage girl at a fake boarding school (in a fake town in my state) who can reverse time, a lot of Max's emotional and mental response to what was happening to her felt real, nuanced, and complex. I was even a bit surprised in the credits that the writing team was all male.

The reference to the drive-in theater in Newberg (real) was also a nice touch.

Playing with the reverse time to see the different stories and make choices also felt really well developed.

Big thumbs up. The other 4 episodes go right on the WL hoping for a fall sale.


Edit - forgot to give credit to the voicing and to a lesser extent the music and art. Story/dialogue including the voicing are really where this game shines for me.

I can't pretend that the story is great, but it gets a bit more interesting once you "break out". Still, it's more about the humor than a compelling story. And yes, the animations are not very good.
I don't know if it makes sense to force yourself to finish a game you don't enjoy, but I'm currently playing the sequel: Harvey's new eyes and so far, it is a great improvement over The breakout in almost every way.

Well I just have.

Lost Window: The Secret of Cape West (DS)

This is the last game released by CING, who filed for bankruptcy a few months before the game came out, for those who don't know them one of their games was recently re-released on GOG "Little Kings Story". Anyway barring the name bares no similarity to the previous title, Lost Window carries on the story of Kyle Hyde. For those of you who hoped it would answer the unanswered questions from the last game, well you'll be disappointed. Kyle's quest to find his Ex-Partner is put on hold after he loses his job and is forced to leave his home, at Cape West Apartments, as the owner is selling it on. However he is suddenly contacted by an anonymous person to find a gem lost 25 years ago following the murder of his father. As he investigates, he finds that each of the tenants in Cape West seem to be connected to the events in some way, and so he starts his investigation.

You'd have thought being made by a bankrupt company would've meant it wasn't that good but I actually thought it was better than the previous game. The game works like a point and click, you look for clues, solve puzzles and try to squeeze information out of people. Where as the last game took place over about 12 hours, this one takes place over 12 days, however the way time progresses wasn't really examined properly in some instances, like when Kyle appears to spend 5 hours eating Pasta Carbonara. The story is excellent, and contains quite a few twists, as unlike the first game people can be interrogated more than once. The gameplay is very similar to the first game, some of the puzzles require mechanics I didn't think possible for a DS to do. One new feature is the ability to ignore certain lines of questioning, which you need to do to avoid getting a game over, though this is slightly annoying as you have no idea what your dialogue choices are when your given the option to ignore, which lead me to learn that it's basically a replacement for Kyle saying "No".

The bad part is it's a rare game, where as the prequel is quite common (I got a copy for £5), this one cost me about £30. It was also never released outside Europe and Japan, and as Nintendo never seems to make old DS games downloadable, it's only going to get more expensive. It also continues the tradition of the last game by not really giving a satisfying conclusion by answering all the questions. Overall I'd only recommend getting it if you brought the first one, and if you don't mind paying the price of a brand new DS game for it, but I thought it was a great game.

Legend of Grimrock

A great nostalgic throwback to the days of the EoBs and the LoLs. I had a lot of fun with this one. Played it on Hard, despite recommendations, and am glad I did, as I wouldn't have had the same sense of accomplishment otherwise. The tons of quickloads for the tougher sections did not reduce this.

Lucked out that I chose to focus my Mage in Fire, as that came in very handy both offensively and defensively. In the, referred to googling for solutions maybe 3 times, and found 63/71 secrets. Don't really feel the need to reload the save and go for 100% completion though.

Fran Bow

Excellent point & click adventure game. Pretty easy for the most part, though I did have to look up a couple solutions online. Loved the story & atmosphere, and overall it reminded me a bunch of Edna & Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes. But the ending was hardly conclusive. Where's Fran Bow 2???

Edna and Harvey: Harvey's new eyes
Just like 'The breakout', Harvey's new eyes is cartoony and quite nuts. The graphics are again odd, but this time they seem more "professional", the animations are also better. The story is more unique and the scenarios more over the top. Even the controls and "moving around" are greatly improved. And really, this game improved just about everything over The breakout.
Highly recommended for point and click fans.
9/10

Daisia

A great puzzle game made by our fellow GOGlin adambiser (btw. where is he, haven't seen him in a while). At first the game might look simple and childish, but after some levels it gets constantly more difficult and the last few levels were really hard. Good game and I wouldn't mind a sequel (maybe with three animals) or an editor, so people can make their own levels.

Just in case that adambiser reads it: There's a small bug. When you go to the menu and return to the game afterwards, the ok checkmark of the menu won't go away and stay on the screen forever.

Complete list of finished games in 2016

Bedlam

An all right throwback to 90s shooters, but the actual shooting didn't feel like a packed a lot of oomph. The reason to play this one is for the story and gamer references, not the gameplay.

LaserCat

A nice platform game. You play LaserCat and have to free your best friend Owl from an evil Spacefrog wizard. To do so you have to search 230 room full of monsters and traps and find 30 keys. Monsters can't be killed, you can only avoid them (no idea why the game is called LaserCat).

Game is similar to VVVVVV, but easier and more light-hearted. I liked it a lot. Game is very short though, I've completed it in two hours.

Complete list of finished games in 2016

And answer random multiple choice questions! ;)

I've played through this four years ago on a trainride and quite enjoyed it myself.

Light Crusader. This might be the least eccentric game made by Treasure that I'm aware of. It's a 16 bit Sega game in which you control a strapping Rutger Hauer-ish guy who rides into a kingdom whose residents are vanishing into the dungeon under the castle/village and some turncoat wizards seem to be behind it. It uses an isometric perspective and the gameplay is divided between combat and puzzle-solving. It's sort of a friendlier cousin of The Immortal, I guess. Just straight-on, naturalistic fantasy with a basic premise.

It has 6 levels you have to beat and save points and health restoration rooms are charitably placed on each floor. Enemies also frequently drop health items, too. The combat is pretty easy once you get used to it, so it's really only some of the puzzles that prove challenging. Unfortunately the puzzles are made more difficult because the controls can cause you to accidentally knock stuff out of alignment and force you to re-enter the room to reset the pieces.

Not unusual for Treasure's games, it's very nice-looking and has a decent soundtrack. They mix in a few basic 3D effects among the sprites to make it look all fancy for the mid-90s and to show that the Mega Drive could do cool stuff like that.