Metal Gear Solid. This is basically a glossed up remake of Metal Gear 2, with the strengths and weaknesses you tend to see in series that transitioned from 2D to 3D. On one hand, there's an impressive soundtrack, full voice acting, cutscenes (lots and lots of cutscenes...), and 3D graphics allowing you to switch to first person viewing in certain cases. On the other hand, the game feels small compared to its 2D predecessors, as the 3D environments aren't especially large once you get over their spectacle (although this also has a benefit in that it takes a lot of the hurting out of having to retrace your steps for a particular item, an annoying Metal Gear series trait).

One slightly surprising thing that Metal Gear got way ahead of other stealth games is a sense of speed. Most stealth games of that era require you to creep very slowly around, which can get very annoying if you get caught after a long bit of sneaking, but once you get a handle on how enemies work in Metal Gear, you can just sprint everywhere. As long as you pay attention and don't run on loud surfaces, you're safe. The enemies are pretty dumb in terms of seeing you - if you're standing on a staircase and the minimap indicates an enemy is still counted as being on the next floor up or down, they can't see you no matter how obviously visible you are. They can see and track your footprints in certain cases, but after the first two screens this ceases to be a factor. Definitely something the game could have mined for more suspense.

Boss battles tend to be on the easy side. If you're really stumped, you can use the codec to call buddies and get hints on how to win. Most of them I beat on the first try, although healing items came in handy a lot.

The game is easygoing fun while you're playing it, but then you come to the cinematics. The first two MSX games had stories, but mostly just in the sense that they gave a context for your goals and actions in the games, and they just felt like simple action movie fun. With this game, Kojima REALLY wants you to sit and hear what he has to tell you. The story features a lot of garbled messaging on nuclear proliferation (not hugely surprising from a Japanese product) and genetic engineering/heredity. The game sort of wants to talk about both and often awkwardly lurches from one to the other and back again, while still telling a typically convoluted espionage story in which almost everyone has at least two faces. And it does it with "badly dubbed anime" level voice acting (at least in English. I would love to hear how the Japanese version sounds) for goofy characters that feel like they were designed for action figure toylines. The cutscenes are quite lengthy (but they are skippable!), and characters tend to repeat themselves for no reason. Solid Snake's dialogue is hilarious in that he often responds to people by repeating something as a question.

"Snake, you have to do the thing!"

"Do the thing?"

"Yes, but to do the thing, you need another thing!"

"Another thing?"

"And to get that you need go over there!"

"Over there?" Etc.

The graphics are the sort that look more impressive if you're not looking at them up close? The environments are kind of okay, but the characters are pretty blocky and look like unfinished sculptures. It's a PS1-era game. It's just how stuff looked back then. You're a bit more zoomed in than in the 2D games, but I would say they did a fairly good job of making it easy to get around without being detected in most settings.

Gladius, Warhammer 40k, Relics of War

Not so much finished in playing but i did just finish the Imperial Guard story.

I wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone who only spends his time in civ to wage war

Warning : the first image contains a spoiler
the 2d one is just a graph showing how i as a mediocre contender to this game managed to win the story branch
( following the story is optional )

I got one of my dream games, Ghost of a Tale, through the great kindness of Schlaumayr.
So, so...I am torn over this. I enjoyed it immensely. It also frustrated me with a buggy savegame in the already rushed ending. It made me feel like all the sub-quests were almost for nothing and the aquired powers under-used. It felt incomplete afterall. Because I had to reload an older save to end the mainquest I couln't get some achivements. The last battle was poorly thought, had a badly located save point, and was broken for me. I felt so disappointed last night when I saw the ending titles. But now, I am just so happy I got the chance to play this little gem, and also more polished than it was at release, even so still bug ridden and with many things left to a sequel that might not ever come, that a player might have wanted to see in this game.
Despite having a stealth component to it, that becomes more optional in later gameplay, and not being bad at it, I think this is more of an exploration adventure game. The locations are labyrinthine and I took great pleasure at getting good at moving around remembering the best way and the secret passages to get to my destination. There is a night and day mechanic that can be annoying for many reasons, like the fact that the only way to know the time is to find a bed to sleep. Sometimes, seeing my rodent hero trotting around in heavy armour in a dark dungeon or in the keep, I had a feeling I was in a sort of "Dark Souls, but you are a mouse who can't fight" experience. Hopefully after the Switch release there is space for a sequel or a new ip, I really like the work of the main author and artist Lionel Gallat. Meanwhile I will have to rely on that not so acclaimed Redwall game for my mousely joyrides, being Moss VR-only.

Wasteland 3 (XB1X Game Pass)

Slow to get going, but an excellent game in the end. An RPG that really is one. I made so many decisions that have ramifications and I made them all by doing what I felt, not what some developer felt I should do. Just like Wasteland 2, I really have to play this again some time to see the differences that some of the main story choices make.
The world and its themes are really dark, brutal and some times funny- sometimes all at once.
I loved the combat and character building, I was able to build a balanced team that had all skills covered except the weapon and armor modding. The skills make a huge difference to the results of encounters and exploration. It's really an RPG as I said. I know that some people don't like the shared non equipped inventory, but I'm okay with it- it even makes some sense int this game. You drive around the wastes in a huge tracked ATV that can obviously carry any amount you would want. It's parked just outside. I view the shared inventory as all the stuff you would be shuttling back and forth to your vehicle. The game simply abstracts it, since it doesn't track time out of combat. The other option would be to manually run your squad back and forth 20 times between combats just to transfer your loot...I prefer this abstract method.

As great as the game is it has a few problems. The load times are around 40 to 70 seconds depending upon area. The loading is also more common than I'd like. This is on console...but doing some research seems to show that PC times are quite bad as well. Once the maps were loaded though, it ran quite smooth.
Also two bugs, one just annoying and one really annoying. More often than not when using the targeted mode in combat, the enemies will turn invisible except for their weapons. Very common, but not game breaking as you can still see the weapons and the usual details when you move the cursor over them.
Quire rare but more annoying was when the enemy would get confused and never finish its turn. It was uncommon and usually happened when I retreated my squad a long way from the enemy trying to lure them into an ambush. When it happened it required a reload and I've already mentioned the load time.

Despite the annoyances I don;t regret playing it at all, best 2020 release I've played so far- just edging out Gears Tactics.

AER - Memories of Old

A game in the same vein as Journey and ABZÛ, except that it also uses text in order to tell its story, not just environmental story-telling without words. The story is nothing to write home about but alright, consistent in what it does, and revolving around creation myths, spirituality and (human) nature. Gameplay is all about free exploration (via bird flight or walking), discovering the background story / lore and solving a few light (switch-based) puzzles. The game is rather relaxing once you get the hang of flying, there's a bit of trivial platforming but it's more like a walking simulator, no fighting, no death (only if you fly 'out of bounds', you get teleported to the nearest checkpoint), and the game is also non-violent (although it does show some violent stills from the past). Areas are beautiful but can also feel a bit empty; there is not much to discover apart from scenery, lore and what you need in order to progress anyway - no power-ups, no collectibles, and secrets only in the form of (client-side) achievements. I don't have much to say about it apart from that. It was nice enough. Took me about 6 hours but should be completable much faster, maybe 2-4h on average?

Just beat Days Gone. Well, briefly put I loved it. It kinda restored my faith in sandbox games after Asscreed Origins.

Honestly, the game is so massive and there's so much to talk about that writing a review as I usually do would utterly surpass the walls of text that I usually write - trust me, I tried. So I'll try to keep it relatively short: at a first glance it's as generic as it gets - just another sandbox game with crafting and zombies oh yeah and there's a bike. But two or three hours in it turns out that the game stands out between all those modern sandbox games that rarely amount to more than glorified checklists due to how organic it feels - it genuinely reminded me a lot of Stalker. And it manages to get there without becoming as tiresome as Red Dead Redemption 2. It's not a complicated game and don't expect anything as systemic as State of Decay. But it also isn't a super simple and accessible game - you have to be clever and learn a bit how the world works. Over time you go from carefully stealth killing one zombie at a time to obliterating hordes of hundreds of zombies with all the tools at your disposal. Oh yeah, and the gunfights against humans were also surprisingly tactical, allowing for some serious guerrilla tactics where you do hit & run, draw attention to one spot, then stealthily eliminate stragglers in another. I friggin' loved it. As it always goes the game eventually became a bit repetitive BUT luckily the narrative kept me going.

Honestly, the game starts out almost bizarre with two biker dudes putting an injured hot scientist woman on a helicopter - and she happens to be the wife or the biker protagonist Deacon. And she has tattooed arms. Dear game, are you gonna acknowledge how weird that image is? And the answer is yes, the game does acknowledge it and it does so very maturely. The story starts out pretty slow and the first characters you meet feel like stock characters from any zombie game or flick. But over time it turns out that Deacon is a pretty interesting character who walks a fine line between being a lovable rascal and a cynical asshole and many hours in, the story moves from being some mundane survival stuff to much grander things without ever quite becoming pretentious. Briefly put, by the end of it there was a whole bunch of characters that I loved, ones that I hated (but in a good way!) and I genuinely cared about what is going to happen and honestly, all of this lead to hell of a satisfying ending in my opinion.

The game is a bit uneven but ultimately I enjoyed the hell out of it and it almost hurts that it good pretty mediocre reviews. At least in its current state, after tons of patches, it is easily one of the most enjoyable sandbox games I've played this generation. For me it's easily an 8/10, were it a little bit less repetitive it would totally be a 9/10 game for me.

AMID EVIL

This was really fun! I felt motivated to play 1-3 levels almost every day, and if I wouldn't have had to take a break for a couple of weeks due to being on the road, I'd have finished it less than two weeks after winning it in one of Doc0075's generous giveaways last month. It's fast-paced but not too difficult on Medium, a little on the easy side even, yet very entertaining, because the levels and opponents are quite varied. There are seven worlds, or mini campaigns, consisting of 3-4 levels each, and every one of them has its own distinct look and unique enemies. The story is average, but the visual themes and the level design can get quite creative. Exploration can be rewarding as well, as there are a few secret areas to discover in each level. The graphic style seems a bit weird at first, a curious mix of old and new, high resolution and pixely textures, but it actually works and can even look quite beautiful at times. Music and sound effects are very cool and satisfying as well. I also liked the choice of medieval and magical weapons (using four different kinds of mana 'ammunition'), it felt classic and refreshing at the same time. At first, I thought some weapons were clearly better than others (the green sword blades being my favorite), but later on, I learned that they all have their uses for differnt situations and opponents, and I cycled between them frequently and got along well with all of them.

I was very thankful though that the game allows quicksaving anywhere you want, because there also is quite a bit of first person platforming involved, and while the verticality of the levels is great as well and there is no fall damage, quickloading can come in quite handy in this context, because the movement is so fast and fluid that it kind of feels as if the PC is skating, and you can quite easily jump too far or glide off edges if you don't watch out, and then you'll be glad you don't have to backtrack all the way up again (and sometimes you can still fall to your death, if there is no ground to fall on; in that case you get teleported to the last checkpoint). And there are traps, occasionally. Some might consider it a downside that the game features no map, although I guess that's a conscious design decision, and most of the times I didn't really need one either, despite the levels being somewhat open and complex. But AMID EVIL usually has a good way of letting you know where to go without actually pointing to it, which is admirable, too. I felt a bit lost only once or twice, I think. So the only real complaint I have is that you can fall off elevator platforms too easily, if you stand too close to the edges. I'm pretty sure I sometimes fell right "through" them. But it's not bad enough to actually call it a serious bug either.

So all in all this was a really nice surprise. I was interested in trying this game, but I didn't expect that I would love it this much. So I'd like to shout out a huge thank you again to Doc0075 for the gift, and also to Pater Alf for picking me as the next trustworthy winner. This game was definitely not wasted on me, I fully enjoyed my time with it! :)

I finished Final Fantasy 3 (PSP version). This version is basically the DS version with a few minor differences:
* Load times, unfortunately, though they're at least not horrible.
* There's only one screen. The main effect of this is that the world map is not always visible; you need to press Start (IIRC) to view it. Fortunately, if you access the map more than once without loading another area, the map comes up instantly after the first time. (There's one part of the game where you really do need the map.)
* Auto-battle. By pressing Select, you can have your party repeat their last action and double the battle speed. Personally, I feel that these should have been separate options. (I had at least one party wipe due to not turning off auto-battle in time.)
* The quicksave feature from the DS version is absent. (This is a major issue in the final dungeon; I just used emulator save stats there. On the other hand, I heard that the PSP does have a sleep mode that's like hibernation, but you still can't play other games in the mean time.)
* There's the option to play with the original sound track. With that said, the re-arranged sound track is so well done that I generally prefer it, although there are a couple issues (one track is missing a bit of harmony, and one is missing an octave jump). In addition, there's a music player on the title screen, so no more keeping a back-up save to listen to a certain music track that only plays at one specific point in the story.
* Mognet has been re-worked; no more need to communicate with other players to access single player content! (Probably the best change, and my main reason for playing this version.)

Vind (Demo)

After playing through AER earlier this week, I learnt that they had a sequel planned - Vind - which unfortunately will never come to pass now because the studio was dissolved. But you can still see what could have been, because they released what was meant to be an internal demo to the public for free on itch.io. And it's such a shame, because it looks like it would have been a very nice game; same formula as AER but such an improvement: graphics are beautiful, soundtrack is memorably good, gameplay was enriched by quests, simple crafting / base building and more interesting puzzles, exploration feels a tiny bit more rewarding, there is a day-and-night cycle now, and NPCs move about, which makes the game feel more lively and immersive. Actually, compared to this it's almost like AER was the demo and this the real thing, it felt more well-rounded and satisfying. And it's a pretty generous demo with about 40-60 minutes of gameplay, containing a full chapter, so to speak, so despite being a demo, it could be considered as a tiny little game in its own right.

There are just two potential downsides - the demo is not catering to M+KB players, you better use a gamepad, and you can't save. I didn't dare to try and find out what happens if you leave the demo mid-game, but I suspect you would lose all of your progress. Oh, and the mechanics are not explained in-game, so it's recommended to check the controls in the menu and experiment a little with the two new abilities the shapeshifter now has in Vind.

Down The Well (Demo)

Found out that there was another game planned by the AER devs, which also has a free playable prototype demo of about 10-25 minutes length and promised another interesting game with nice graphics, atmosphere and lore that will probably never be finished now. The gameplay mostly consists of exploring and collecting ingredients to craft items needed for progressing further in a little girl's quest to get to Midgard through the domains of otherworldly wardens, which is helped by a troll. It's an early build, so once again, it requires a controller, and the prompts are for PS gamepad most of the times, but not consistently (sometimes X means X on the Xbox360 gamepad, sometimes it means A). And in the last cutscene, the girl model was lacking its hair, but otherwise it was a nice little demo. I would have been curious to see more of the setting and artistic vision behind it.

Anyway, that reminds me, I've also played through Double Fine's Black Lake prototype earlier this year, which was a bit simplistic but fine, and I played a bit of The White Birch prototype, but I think I gave up on it before completion. The presentation was nice enough but the clunky platforming combined with checkpoint system and linear platforming puzzles eventually made it too frustrating to play in one go, and IIRC, you could not save the game either.

Ni No Kuni: The Wrath of the White Witch (switch). Excellent story line, fun world to explore, not fan of the battle system though.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

It was alright. Some good stuff, some less good stuff.

It's very cinematic, even though story and setting are very much like an action exploitation B movie. I loved that pulpy angle as far as all the overblown nonsense was concerned, the moon base, the Panzerhunde, the Supersoldaten, the Sonnengewehr, the Spindly Torque, the music singles. I loved it less with regards to the explicit, exploitative depiction of nazi cruelty and brutality. And I have somewhat mixed feelings about the combination of cartoony nazi-villain entertainment with 'realistic' but fictitious nazi cruelty and serious tones anyway - it's certainly not in good taste, but then again, that's not what you'd expect from this kind of game after all. There aren't that many surprises in it either, for all the creativity in the details, the main plot is rather simple and full of tropes. All in all, I found some interesting aspects in the setting, but I didn't really care that much for the story.

Voiceovers are a mixed bag, too. Mostly very good and professional, and contrary to other media of this kind, they actually used native speakers for almost everything German, which was great. It also made it stand out more though when someone who's clearly not a native speaker tried to impersonate one, and ironically, the main villain was among these few exceptions; his accent when speaking German is even stronger than his faked accent in English, which was a bit weird. In general though, they took great care to make everything seem authentic, whenever there was something written in German is was either perfectly fine or creatively funny, in a good way.

The gameplay is the same as in your average story-oriented FPS, for the most part; you are guided through a series of encounters, gun everything down, collect ammo, health and armor, and continue to the next section. There is no manual saving, just checkpoints, but I didn't run into any serious issues because of that. The placement is mostly generous and fair, and I hardly ever had to repeat something on Normal difficulty (and if I did, then hardly ever more than once). You can backtrack a bit, and in the individual sections you have some freedom on how to approach things, including sneaky vent crawling and stealth kills instead of direct attacks, but these system-driven parts are still heavily restricted by the linear level layouts, which is a bit of a shame, because those parts were what I liked the most, but I always felt that there could have been more of them or that I didn't get the chance to fully exploit and enjoy them. It was still kind of fun though; I took a long break during my playthrough once, but when I was actively playing it, I was always driven to continue and deal with the next batch of nazis.

These straight-forward sections are repeatedly interrupted by, let's call it "the hub sections" in the Resistance's hideout though, in which there is more talking and doing minor quests for the other characters, and this includes such minor side quests like scouring the whole place for a tiny ring. That felt a bit odd, and in that case I just looked up the solution in a walkthrough. In the hub you can also play Wolfenstein 3D, but only there, and only once every time a hub section is inserted into the story, so not whenever you feel like it. I thought things like these as well as all the collectibles stuff unfitting for such a linear, level-based game; to me it makes more sense in an open world game, but oh well, that's just a pet peeve of mine. In the end, the collectibles are meaningless anyway and only unlock additional difficulty modes, but I'm fine with playing through such a game once only.

Another somewhat awkward thing is how in some parts of the game you repeatedly unlock voice recordings that have no clear connection to the things you are doing at the time. It's a second narrative (and it does relate to characters in the game and is not unimportant), but the way it's integrated feels clumsy, because if you want to listen to them at the time you unlock them, you always have to interrupt the gameplay annd go into the menu in order to do so and then wait for them to finish, as leaving the menu again will cut the sound off. It's even worse with the music singles - if you want to listen to them completely, you can't do anything else in the meantime, just stare at the menu and read some short texts for the whole length of the song. Also, you can't fast forward or rewind the songs and you can't change the volume either, even though the default volume is pretty low compared to the rest of the game.

Anyway, the game is not a true masterpiece, IMO, but it's very entertaining (if you can stomach some crude scenes), and even slightly creative within the boundaries of the genre. I think what I will rememeber most about it is the Laserkraftwerk tool/weapon, the moon base idea, and the funny (and well pronounced) German language stuff.

Not sure I would call it a mixed bag due to a single character not being a native speaker of their character's supposed native language, especially when they don't speak said language much in the game - and I like to think that besides that Dwight Schultz' performance as Deathshead is on point.

Incidentally the next game I played after The New Order was Call of Duty: WWII and there the problem you're talking about was much more striking in my opinion. Not sure if you played it. There you actually get a longer dramatic conversation with one German officer and not only is his accent off, he also makes terrible grammatical errors and exclaims entire sentences that make no sense whatsoever while all the minor German characters appear to have had German actors. What makes it even worse is that in that sequence you play a spy who is not a German native speaker and she responds to his butchered German with perfect German, lol.

Oh yeah, and fun fact: curiously in Wolfenstein the Polish characters don't suffer from all that stuff. Most importantly Anya Oliwa's voice actress is Polish actress Alicja Bachleda. Machine Games really deserve some credit here as Polish tends to get butchered even more than German in WWII-themed games and movies.

This reminds me of when I watched Shin Godzilla recently and there's one character in the movie who is supposed to be Japanese-American but she speaks with far too thick an accent and too many grammatical errors to be believable as someone raised in the U.S. (The movie also commits a few basic errors with respect to the U.S. political system.) I don't hold it against the movie too much since I figure finding an actor with the right qualifications is probably pretty tough and more work than they figured was necessary for something primarily aimed at an audience that wouldn't care :)

Doki Doki Literature Club, Oct 11 (Itch)-For some reason I thought this had Cthulhu. It doesn't have Cthulhu. But its still pretty disturbing and good. If you liked this, you might also like Metaware High School (Demo) which feels like a less overtly horror but similar experience.

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