Higurashi Ch5 Meakashi, Jul 16 (GOG)-I liked it better than Chapter 4 because it started answering some questions unfortunately the actions and motivations of the main character felt very forced. Once again it takes a very long time to get going and the last third feels like it goes completely off the rails. I don't think we're going to get back to the highs of Chapters 2 and 3 when things were still bizarre and the potential explanations limitless. I think as happens in most mystery stories the anticipation and wonder are more interesting than the actual answers.

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Sex of Thrones (Steam)

It's exactly what it sounds like, a NSFW piss take on Game of Thrones. Whilst the writing isn't exceptional...it's still probably better than the final season of GoT.

Shadow of the Erdtree. What an expansion to an already amazing game.

The Supper (2020) (Linux/Proton)

Nothing spectacular, just a little point&click adventure you can complete in half an hour. But it has it's interesting atmosphere, great pixel graphics, decent music and some plot twist, so – why not? Works out of the box on Linux, I've played with Heroic Games Launcher.

List of all games completed in 2024.

Botany Manor, Jul 17 (Xbox Game Pass)-A solid puzzle game about identifying and growing different types of plants. I felt a little clever whenever I could successfully grow a plant based on the cryptic and scattered clues. Started it with the girlfriend but she got motion sickness very early on so I finished it myself. I realized too late in the game that the clue titles also told you where to find them and the clues were grouped by location so if you were missing some you knew where to look. Only complaint is that you only recorded the clue title in your notebook so you had to do a fair bit of backtracking to read what the clue actually said.

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Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

or Prince of Persia: where the Prince and the Game itself have a personality disorder

Well this is a mixed bag. Compared to Warrior Within its platformer are more enjoyable but the combat is underwhelming. Ubisoft managed to clear out annoying things like the drab and dull environment and ear-shattering metal music at the cost of boring fighting scenes and lackluster traps. The graphic somehow getting worse and the Prince now appears like a grasshopper rather than the already good character design of WW. Also Ubisoft, chill out on the hair animation ok, its ludicrous the see so much flow in one head. The movement animation also felt stiff for me. And while WW's Island of Time design can felt grand at certain section, the city of Babylon seems small in comparison.

This game is also a short and easy one. The only hard-ish combat is the Axe - Sword duos. Even the only difficult part of the final Boss battle is knowing where to go in the last platforming section before the coup-de-grace. The platforming sections are really enjoyable without the sense of lost of directions in WW. The story also feels like a good wrap of the overall trilogy saga

The GOG version is censored, there's a patch apparently but I just play it vanilla oob. I also choose to playing it straight with m+kb like the other 3 so I'm not bother with the controller settings in the options menu. Only 1 crash that I recall and sometime there's a graphical glitch in a form of square-ish white artifact that's occurred.

I bought both Two Thrones and Warrior Within in 2021. Just want to shout-out to Doc0075 for gifting me Sands of Time in 2018 and P-E-S for Prince of Persia 2008 that I won in a giveaway. Now that there's no more PoP games in my Gog backlog, my personal ranking for the PoP games sold here are:
1. Sands of Time
2. Prince of Persia 2008
3. The Two Thrones
4. Warrior Within

Terminator: Resistance
+ Annihilation Line DLC

Best Terminator game that I've ever played!!
Actually, the only other one was 10 minutes of a Bethesda demo in the 90s. :-P

Oh, and I got many rare achievements - must be the lack of discounts here.

Halo: Reach (Steam)

It felt pretty rewarding completing the campaign on legendary difficulty. Now I'm kind of traumatized to start Halo: Combat Evolved on legendary knowing that I died so many times playing Reach on that difficulty. So I still went on to play Halo: CE on legendary, but decided to take a break from the game after the second mission.

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. Finished in the sense that I went through all the documentary material and played every game included. Most of the games aren't the types you finish, considering Minter's arcade sensibilities. I really enjoyed this as a Minter fan. It starts at the beginning of his career, making very simple games for the ZX-81, then transitioning to more complex ZX Spectrum and Commodore VIC-20 games. The big breakthrough comes when he creates Gridrunner for the VIC-20, a really fast-paced and abstract Centipede variation, and then the next major shift is when he creates Attack of the Mutant Camels, which establishes his trademark of hairy critters, so you have his primary style of creating fast-paced arcade games that are heavy on sensory overload while incorporating benign farm animals and Python-esque humor.

The set includes most of his output from the 80s and 90s, although there are some omissions. I'm not sure why Traxx, an Amidar takeoff, isn't included. Defender 2000 for the Jaguar doesn't make it either, nor does Llamazap, his one Atari Falcon title, which would have been nice. A Mutant Camels demo for the aborted Konix Multi-System is included, which is quite an inclusion.

The pattern is that games are usually accompanied by artwork, design notes, memories from Minter, magazine reviews, and then the build to the next game is filled with context on the games industry and what Minter was up to (lots of nice vacations). I enjoyed reading the issues of the Llamasoft newsletter included, seeing what games and music Minter was enjoying at the time (this Marble Madness game sounds like it's going to be pretty good!). You get a sense of Minter developing from a tinkering school kid who was selling games to publishers at 16 to a full independent developer and the turbulence he goes through as bigger money starts pouring into the industry. It occurs to me that although the British scene didn't have a crash like the U.S., there was a clear shift against the original form of the industry there. The bedroom coders all had to clean up and accept "real jobs" from big publishers if they wanted to survive. Minter is an exception in his longevity, but even he had to start working with publishers as time went on.

The emulation quality is very good, especially as the games are modified to play nice with a gamepad. Only his first couple of light synthesizer titles are included, despite being a major focus of his throughout his career. Of the games included, the Gridrunner series is a major highlight, and I quite like Laser Zone and Hell Gate as interesting variations on Space Invaders. Hover Bovver is a nice change of pace and it's kind of sweet how he developed it with his dad. Despite my efforts, I've never quite gelled with the Mutant Camels games, although I appreciate their style. Around the mid-80s, he goes through a phase where he's really into gravity and inertia-based gameplay, and he starts including some basic strategy elements, which is probably a "mileage may vary" situation. Mama Llama is generally considered an ambitious failure, although Minter stands by it. Iridis Alpha stands out as a serious masterwork, though, showing how it's possible to design an extremely fast shooting game that requires a lot of mental dexterity and decision-making that doesn't just boil down to the standard risk vs. reward basis used by most game designers. That one should be taught in schools.

The late 80s and early 90s have Minter struggling, reverting to 16-bit Atari ST updates of some of his classics and having to use shareware to stay afloat, before hitting on Tempest 2000 for the Jaguar, which obviously didn't do well commercially but it was memorable enough to become a big cult classic. The material basically ends there, aside from a brief video clip covering the next 30 years of his career - it would have been nice to get more on how stuff like his Xbox 360 indie titles and Polybius for Sony VR came about, and how he got a bit screwed over by Apple iOS. Maybe they felt they were already running a bit long or something.

I really liked this concept - I haven't played the Atari 50 or Karateka titles yet. I was thinking over what other subjects could be good for the series and I kept thinking how a Bill Williams overview would be fantastic, or maybe Dani Bunten, Mike Singleton, the original Activision games, Eugene Jarvis...lots of possibilities.

Yu Crossing Animals (2021) (Linux/Proton)

What. Was. That. :|

List of all games completed in 2024.

Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of The Baskervilles (2010) (Linux/Proton)

Well, a mediocre HOPA game. Old one and thus a bit unpolished. The story isn't fascinating and also, I'm afraid, goes a bit against the Doyle's book. There are probably much more interesting and better designed hidden object adventures out there.

List of all games completed in 2024.

I just finished Halo 2 for the first time, and wow, what an experience it was! The game was phenomenal in every aspect: the story, characters, soundtrack, and combat. I can't believe how high-quality the cutscenes were. Everything about it was perfect.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (GOG)

This game probably had the distinction of being the longest serving game on my "must finally get around to playing it list". Year after year I keep putting it off for various reasons. With the new game coming out in September, I finally decided to get the first game done for reference. Now that I've finished it, I'm glad it's over.

The game has its moments for sure, but too many problems and too many things that just don't really make any sense, make it a very tedious game. I know fans of the series are going to say I played wrong because I didn't mod it (apart from a larger font mod so that I could read the text at 4K). I've never been a modding fan. If you have to mod a game to the point that it becomes a different game, then you may as well just play a different game to begin with. I really don't like game play mods at all.

The shooting feels really odd. Almost like one of those old RPG's where you swing your weapon, but whether you hit or not is governed by dice rolls. It isn't dice rolls of course, but it feels like it in the way you can miss with a shotgun that is literally poking in the someone's stomach. Then make some miraculous snap head shot at 100m the very next moment. I never really got to grips with it. The only reason I got better over the game was because of better weapons. Also, the enemies are massive bullet sponges...and ammo is heavy (realistically I might add) and you go through a lot of it. The weight of ammo is realistic, but the number of shots you need to drop someone is not. The end enemies...well, you may as well not even bother with anything but head shots and just keep save scumming unless you want to run out of ammo. I was carrying over a thousand rounds, and almost ran out. Oh yeah...there is no weight to the impact of shots. The enemies just stand there taking shots whilst they shoot back at you. In 2007 there were games that did shooting way better than this.

The world. I'm not sure that I really understand it. The area of play is only a few km's long, yet it's like Trafalgar Square at peak hour. The closer you get to the deadly radioactive reactor...the more people there are! I think I had to kill like 50 of the heaviest armed soldiers inside the reactor itself. WTF were they even doing in there? People laud this game for atmosphere, but I couldn't get into it with there being literally hundreds of other Stalkers and soldiers running around like they were out on picnics.

I only got one of the regular endings, not the real secret final ending. That's enough for me. An ending is an ending. I'm glad I finally played it and finished it, as the game is talked about a lot as a classic, so now I can form my own opinion through experience. I am looking forward to playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 later this year- it does look amazing and hopefully will be great game, even if I didn't like the original all that much.

Lumo

or Lumo: if you quit on a game try come back 6 years later with a mechanical keyboard

Some background first. This is one of the first game that I get from Doc0075 from a giveaway back in 2018. I played them and quit around halfway as it was one of the most frustrating experience that I can remember. This is an old school isometric platformer game and playing them with my old membrane keyboard was just terrible.

The part that made me quit was back-to-back chain jump over water. Just terrible. Fine then i said, I'll come back when I'd get a gamepad. But apparently when I try it, my generic 360 controller was not recognized. Freaking hell, maybe finishing them was not meant to be and I let it rot till a couple days ago. I now using a mechanical keyboard and said to myself maybe it would be better this time.

And I still suck and died a lot in my first 2 hours of playing (and still died a lot afterwards). Coming from Two Thrones to this is a real shock as the perspective is totally different. But I persevere and after reading some hints on the game (you actually have to keep pressing space to bounce of the damn duck and not double clicking!) it finally feels that I can finally finish the game. Ended up with complete 32 ducks collected, 38/50 cassette and 3/6 warp zones.

Rather than feeling good and happy I just felt relief. Phew, finally. Will I ever play Lumo again to try a complete cassette and Extend Warp Zone? No I don't think so tbqh. But watching the director's commentary playthrough on Youtube made me appreciate this game more. The creator really love those old school games so much and it shows on the game design.

Skald: Against the Black Priory. This was pretty good. It feels like playing a D&D module with a really heavy Lovecraftian horror influence. You control whatever hero you create as you're sent on a mission to bring home a woman of the lord's court who took off on a strange trip to "the Outer Isles". As you arrive, a giant Lovecraftian tentacle monster tears your ship apart, leaving you stranded on a beach, so you pick yourself up and get to the mission, assembling a party of supporting characters and building up everyone.

The graphics are retro C-64-influenced and they work alright except for the fact that it's easy to miss details, making holding the shift key to highlight interactable stuff a welcome function. Music is pretty good. The combat is grid- and turn-based and I found it good enough once I got used to stuff like not being able to attack diagonally. It does get pretty slow in places with lots of choke points.

The thief's backstab ability (which also works with bows) is incredibly powerful when you really level it up. The thief is also amazing at shoplifting - you can rip off lots of really expensive magical items, like entire suits of armor, and all it does it mildly increase the merchant's suspicion rating. You've already got all the good stuff before it gets too high. I never did get a magic-user in the party - my guy was a fighter and aside from the main recruitable party members, I hired an officer as a mercenary. The cleric is pretty standard D&D - okay but not great in a fight, can only use blunt weapons, does a lot of healing and protection spells.

The story is pretty on-rails, without a lot of meaningful choices. It's more about making skill checks that determine how stuff plays out in the details, or finding alternative solutions to certain encounters, but the outcome is basically always the same because the game has a specific story it's telling and the ending is the same for everyone. It is a decent story, albeit on the grimdark side.