Generation Zero (XSX Game Pass)

This year's biggest surprise game for me. It's been around for a few years, but I'd never heard of it until it appeared on Game Pass this year. The game has its devoted fans, but also plenty of detractors. For me, a person that generally dislikes the modern forced direction of "modern cinematic experiences", this game is a hidden gem for its freedom of game play. It has the same sort of AA feel of the State of Decay games. Not a single cut scene to force your direction in this huge open world.

Set in 80's Sweden, during some sort of machine-driven apocalypse, where almost all the people have gone missing. It plays as an open world shooter and gives you pretty much total freedom to approach the open world and uncover the story behind the machines. The shooting feels great, the weapons have great feedback, feel powerful and make awesome noise. The machines have quite good AI, they move fast and try to flank you, plus they also can track you to places on the map that you would normally expect AI to have trouble with. Stealth plays a massive role. I developed my character along the stealth build tree and spent a lot of time crawling on my stomach to avoid the larger machines- which are very much a waste of ammo to fight.
The map actually looks great, very organic and the sound is awesome at conveying the atmosphere of being in a warzone.

It is an AA game and shows it in places. Everyone in Sweden lives in one of a handful of house designs apparently, and they drive either a Volvo Touring or SAAB 3 door car. The military bunkers all look the same- though that is probably realistic as they would be built to a specification for the military, and all done by the same contractor. The handful of actual people lack that AAA animation and model quality and probably B-grade voice acting in parts.

The small negatives never got the better of the experience for me, I enjoyed it to the end. It's now my favorite open world shooter with Far Cry 2. The Xbox version is actually last generation Xbox One X enhanced- though it runs at 60 fps...which I doubt was the case last gen. I'm guessing that the game has an unlocked frame rate, or they unlocked it for new gen consoles. It ran fine for me. The game has a reputation for being buggy. Well, it was almost bug free. Only at the very end did I find one of the quests "A Wrench in the Works" could not complete- it is apparently a known glitch on all platforms and was introduced in a recent patch. It did not prevent finishing the game though, just prevents me getting the achievement for all main quests completed. I may return when it's patched to get that achievement if I remember. The game is on the Steam sale right now for only $5, it has lots of DLC but it's mostly just cosmetics, the base game is fine.

Tex Murphy - Mean Streets

The first game in the series. A good story and a mix of simulator/gun/interrogation phases and screens to search. I've mostly played with autopilot and the weapon is simple. I like it so much that I have bought all four books in the series to read after finishing each respective game.

Next parade: Martian Memorandum.

Quake (Remastered - PC)

Finally, I was able to finish this one! this good old Quake 1 (only the base game, not the add-ons), I won't miss the Vores, the Fiends and the Ogres at all.

Anyway, I almost finished it on Normal difficulty, but I lowered the difficulty a notch and I had fun finishing it, that's what counts for me.

I did it by starting to finish the hardest episodes, i.e. the 4th and the 3rd to finish without stressing by the first one.

I look forward to finishing Quake II.

New Day: Cataclysm (Day100)

New Day: Cataclysm is an obscure student project game released on Steam, It's a defence game where you have to shoot ever increasingly tough waves of zombies that attack your settlement every night

In the day you get to scavenge for material and build defence and support structures (you don't get to see much here though - it's all menu based) It looks like originally the plan was for your base to start off empty and things to appear and get fancier as you build and upgrade them but this was never implemented making a the 'base' screen a but pointless as you can do all the daytime actions from the 'wall' view anyway

The main crux / difficultly spike comes on day 23 when heavily armoured 'knight' zombies start appearing, basically it mean you need to have got your crap together enough to have unlocked the machine gun weapon by then, if you haven't you have maybe a day while your defences hold enough and then you're dead but if you have it's pretty plain sailing from there on

I'm not sure if they ever actually implemented a 'win' state, if, by some chance, I find out that day 120 for example, is the end I'll give it another go but as has been over 75 days since that knight hump now and 100 is a nice round number I'm calling it there anyway

The game is nicely presented but very repetitive and probably poorly optimised - I didn't notice any slow down or glitching but my computer sounded like it was going to take off and others have said the same thing

What do you expect for a free student project though? - Pretty good for the price point!

Full 2022 List

Decided to go with something exciting and mindless after having played lots of builders recently so I now beat High on Life on Xbox Series X.

It's the newest game by Justin Roiland and it instantly established a reputation as "that weird-ass shooter with a talking gun". Honestly, whether you're gonna enjoy this game will entirely depend on whether you enjoy Roiland's sense of humor - this game is so much like Rick & Morty that I kept forgetting that it's in fact not Rick & Morty, especially since the first gun you obtain literally speaks with Morty's voice. It has all of that rambling, absurdist and usually cynical humor and lots fourth-wall breaking and puns on sci-fi tropes and whatnot. Oh, and lots of cursing and toilet humor. It so happens that I rather enjoy this stuff but I most also admit that I've gotten quite accustomed to it and it's not nearly as funny to me anymore as it was when I first discovered Rick & Morty. The game has made me laugh quite a few times but I surely would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't watched Rick & Morty before.

The premise is as simple as it is insane: you assume the role of an American teenager (or a twenty-something I guess) who witnesses an alien invasion - specifically an invasion by a drug cartel that has discovered that humans are the ultimate drug. By accident you find Kenny, that talking gun, who just barely manages to teleport your suburban home along with you and your sister to safety and then you become a bounty hunter. So you start taking on bounties to eliminate the leadership of said alien drug cartel and save mankind.

In terms of gameplay it's mostly a shooter but it does come with exploration and Metroidvania elements and it has rather extensive sections without combat which are all about delivering absurd dialogue. It's honestly neither great nor terrible. The combat is clearly inspired by the new Doom games and maybe a bit by Halo, but it lacks the elegance and precision of those. Usually you just walk around the world towards a marker until you trigger a combat encounter and lots of enemies come spawning in. You have a growing set of moves, like a grappling hook and dashes and kind of glory kills and enemies drop shield boosts that disappear after a few seconds, so you're highly encouraged to move around a lot, often directly towards the enemies. Ironically the gunplay is kinda meh, though, as are the enemies and the combat arenas. The guns are imaginative on paper and can do stuff like throwing enemies in the air so you can "juggle" them with gunfire, firing little guys who do the fighting for you or creating bubbles that slow down enemies and explode if you fire at them enough but in practice it's all just okay. And between those encounters you get quite a lot of exploration, platforming and a little bit of puzzles. Again, this stuff is just okay.

Honestly, it's a game driven entirely by its content and the content is peculiar and polarizing. If you know and love Rick & Morty you're probably gonna enjoy it. Ideally you're the kind of person who hasn't watched Rick & Morty yet but would enjoy Rick & Morty (but then there'd of course be no way to tell if you'd enjoy it, heh). In all other cases this game might actually turn out to be pretty darn obnoxious to you. Oh well, if you have Game Pass: just check it out. But it's probably not a game worth getting Game Pass for.

The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel. The company that did the early 90s Call of Cthulhu games also did this Sherlock Holmes point-and-click game. A young actress is murdered in an alleyway behind her theater and the dumb cops think Jack the Ripper did it, but Holmes and Watson immediately understand that it's not a Ripper murder and set about solving the case.

This is a pretty good adventure game. It gets the interface mostly right, which is probably the toughest thing for P&C games. Clicking on stuff will usually default to the look command, and the other commands are mostly self-explanatory, although it can get a little awkward when using your inventory occasionally. There were a couple of instances when I got tripped up by stupid stuff, like in one situation where I had to retrieve an item from a pit that had a ladder leading down into it. In every other part of the game, entering a particular spot like that would require you to operate a gate or something, so I was wracking my brain trying to figure out why Holmes couldn't mount the ladder, and it turned out I just had to click pick up on the item and he would do everything needed to get it. It's always something like that that stumps me the most on these games...

The puzzle design is mostly fair and involves you looking at everything and asking people stuff, which is thematically appropriate for a Sherlock Holmes game (pixel hunting is just fine here). I don't recall any instances of moon logic in the game. There are a couple of proper puzzles, but nothing too outlandish. If the game locks you into a particular spot, you can be assured that the solution is present and just requires you to click and use everything there. The one downside is that the middle part of the game bogs down a bit in Holmes and Watson simply trying to figure out where several persons of interest live, so you can finally go to those places and investigate them. I was so caught up in trying to uncover addresses that I forgot why I was doing anything or why I needed to go there. There are some red herrings and the game is actually bigger than it might seem - looking at walkthroughs I was surprised to see that there were some locations I never visited on the way to finishing the game.

It represents the source material well. Holmes and Watson are characterized reasonably well. Visually, they went with something like the classic Basil Rathbone movies with Holmes in his deerstalker hat. You have to do some simple lab work at Holmes's flat a couple of times, you send the Irregulars out on an errand, have to get Toby to do some bloodhound work for you, etc. The graphics are quite nice in that early 90s VGA style. I never had any trouble discerning important details on the screen, which is an issue I've had with some adventure games from this era. And the Roland MT32 soundtrack is quite good.

Borderlands (XSX )

I didn't mean to play it, I just started it up for a look at how it runs on XSX, and I just forgot to stop. This time I played as Lilith, as I'd already played the game as Mordecai (including NG+) and Brick. Lilith plays different to the other characters, her special phase walk ability is not all that useful for offence- though its healing ability pretty much makes her un-killable if you save it for emergencies. The few times I died was simply because I got lazy and wasn't paying attention to my health bar.

People love hating this series, it's just one of those series that some people are too cool to like. I think it's still as good as the day it released. Quake and Blood may be my favorite classic style save scum shooters, Far Cry 2 and Gen Zero the best open world shooters and the Halo series the best modern shooters- but Borderlands has absolutely no competition when it comes to looter shooters.

I only bought this newer Definitive version because it was cheap, and I only needed a few dollars more in the winter (even though it's summer) sale to get 2.5K bonus reward points...and yet another free month of game pass (it's out to May'24 now, just never seems to go down). However, this version is vastly better to play than the old Xbox 360 version that I'm used to. Not sure yet whether I'll keep on with the DLC's, maybe just a quick look.

I did go on and complete all the 3 main DLC as well, didn't bother with Moxxi's Underdome though.

Scarlet Nexus, Dec 25 (Xbox Game Pass)-I had fun with this game. Its got an interesting story and excellent voice acting up and down the cast. The combat is tedious and repetitive and a little difficult at times so I turned it down to easy and just enjoyed the story. The final couple of chapters the game throws wave after wave of enemies at you and it gets really bad and rather boring. I would have liked it more if the majority of the cutscenes were animated rather than presented like static manga or graphic novel panels but it wasn't a deal breaker. And man that voice acting was top notch, can't say that enough.

Full List

Outer Wilds, Dec 28 (Xbox Game Pass)-I tried to like this but I kept asking myself when is it going to get fun and it never did. I didn't have issues with the movement or the 22 minute loop as most people who disliked the game did. I just wasn't all that interested in the story it had to tell. I tried for over five hours to get the 'true' ending but had to settle for a You Are Dead credits roll. Then I watched the ending on youtube and I don't think I missed much. One of my least favorite gaming experiences of the last several years. Its too bad because on paper I should have at least liked it a bit.

Full List

Here's the list of games I finished in 2022 (not quite complete, actually - I left a few out):

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Bioshock 2
Prey (2006)
The Silent Age
Pandemonium!
Gateways
Far Cry
SWAT 3
Limbo
Doom (incl. Episode IV “Thy Flesh Consumed”)
Incubation: The Wilderness Missions
Gorogoa
F.E.A.R. Extraction Point
Crusader: No Regret

Wow, this really was the year of stressful games! What with Pandemonium!, Far Cry, Crusader: No Regret and The Wilderness Missions all played in quick succession, or sometimes even side by side. And I've recently started Descent to boot...
Biggest disappointment of the year: I'm really sorry to mention Silent Hill 4: The Room and TRI: Of Friendship And Madness in this respect. Not because I didn't like them, though - quite the contrary: I think they're great games, and I was having a good time with them... until I got stuck. In both. And not far from the end, I think. I don't want to use walkthroughs, so the only thing for me to do would be to revisit them, hoping to notice or come up with something I didn't previously - and who knows if I'll ever be able to. How irksome it is, not being able to include them in the list...
Apart from those, Crusader: No Regret felt a bit tiresome at times, and needlessly punishing, like they made it difficult just for the sake of it. I certainly didn't like it as the first one, and personally I don't think it's in the same league, but you could still say it's good.
Extraction Point does not add much to the base game, but this is certainly not unusual with DLCs and some parts of it are very well done.
The Silent Age and Gorogoa are quite short and relatively simple, but score highly in terms of style.

Also:
- games I started in 2022, but (hopefully) will finish next year: Descent, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Diablo 2
- first new game I'll start in 2023: Return To Castle Wolfenstein or Inside


*** I wish a great 2023 to all GOGers! ***


PS
The final battle in Pandemonium! left me puzzled. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that I don't really understand how I defeated the final boss - I mean, if it was really meant to be done that way, or it was sheer luck, or even a bug. I was reminded of the time I finished Quake - essentially winning by pure coincidence. What a troll game, robbing you of any sense of accomplisment, even...

YOU ARE EMPTY ---- published by 1C Company for PC in 2007

Rare overlooked FPS by russian developer. I enjoyed the game. Old Soviet city setting. Nice level designs. It is not for sale anywhere. I got my copy from a 1C bundle from GamersGate over a decade ago. If you really want to play it, you could probably find it on an abandonware website.

God of War: Ragnarök - a very good game but long, boring with a weak plot and the worst menu / UI I've ever seen in my life. I think devs should be nominated for creating such a cumbersome menu with lots of submenus.

And there are so many different settings but of course there is no way to adjust FOV at least a bit, and FOV was very annoying for me.

Boss battles and graphics are good though. Everything else is 5 times better in God of War (2018) game. Good riddance.

The Uncertain: Last Quiet Day (2016) (Linux/Wine)

I thought "why not?" as it's quick little game to experience and does not need a lot of time and money. But this one is very disappointing. The setting and story are quite interesting (as I like sci-fi and dystopias), but the gameplay is so terribly boring and the main character is so annoyingly slow. I'm also fine with plots with no clear ending, but this one is simply like something unfinished, it should not be played as a stand-alone game.

Works fine under Wine/Linux without any additional tweaks.

List of all games completed in 2022.

Beacon Pines, Dec 30 (Xbox Game Pass)-I liked this one. It played out a lot like a simplified, smaller scope Nonary Game title but without the puzzles which always felt very ancillary to me although I still liked them. The plot was typical small town mystery. The writing was good and so was the narrator. It was short but didn't overstay its welcome and scratched the same itch as the Spike Chunsoft games while I wait for Zero Time Dilemma. It did feel like a lot of the loose ends that were tied up for the player on failed runs were left unanswered for the characters for the true ending but that's a minor quibble.

Full List

Somerville (XSX Game Pass)

This game generated a lot of interest due to being produced by one of the founders of Playdead of Limbo and Inside fame.
I like both of those games, so was looking forward to playing Somerville a lot. Unfortunately, it has let me down. It is very clumsy to control, partly due to the screens having depth to them and depth of field being hard to judge in what is still a 2D side scroller at heart. Also, the game has this annoying habit of getting you stuck on small items of scenery, like small rocks that you should just step over or around, it's very frustrating.

The mood and basic idea of the story is quite good. But ultimately, it made very little sense in the end- or I'm just too stupid. I think it's trying to be deliberately mysterious or maybe even philosophical- but I don't even know where to start with thinking it through. None of the endings made much sense and the "good" ending...well I would never have found it without looking at a guide after getting one of the other endings first.

The game does have good visuals and presentation for its style of game, which makes me think that maybe this guy was mainly responsible for Playdead's art direction, whilst the other guy was gameplay and level design dude. It's only about 4-5 hours but felt twice as long.