Also incase you missed my edit. Crysis is the proper Crytek sequel to Farcry 1. Not Farcry 2 or 3, they are imitating.

Thanks. Will look at that also.

Simon the Sorcerer (GOG)

Although I really enjoyed Chris Barrie as the voice of Simon, overall I found the game very slow paced. There was too much spoken dialogue, the areas seemed rather empty (there are nice graphics, but most of it is not interactable) and at the routes felt long and tortuous. Overall it was just not funny enough. Also the mouse locked up at one point, that was the last straw so I called it quits.

Blake Stone: Planet Strike (GOG)

Although this game is big improvement compared to Wolfenstein 3D in many gameplay features, unfortunately it still uses the same control scheme. The levels are also a lot darker, by which I mean darker coloured walls/ceiling/floor, which makes it much harder to see enemies around you. Overall I found it a bit too old for my liking. If there was an easy to use source port for the mac where I could customize my own control scheme (forward/back/strafe with keys, turn/shoot with mouse) I'd give it more of my time.

I've added another two shooters to my list of FPS-campaigns that I've quit:

Return to Castle Wolfenstein: I've had great fun with the game and did almost finish it, however the fight where you finally meet Deathshead and his Übersoldat comes raging at you was too overwhelming for me. He does such massive damage and the door slams behind you so there's no way to run back and catch your breath for a while. Normally when a fight gets too difficult, I try again and again before quiting but this one was so overwhelming, I only tried twice and daren't go back again (as I wrote in age limit for playing games I'm having a hard time getting myself into difficult games which - I conclude from the discussion - has far more to do with my mental illness than with old age.

7554 is the other game that got too tough, but this one even in the beginning. 7554 is a Vietnamese-made shooter with a Call of Duty-like gameplay that tells the story of the uprising of the Vietnamese against the French colonial occupation of Vietnam. However the first battle, taking place in a big building in Hanoi (the palace?) has you fend of a wave of French soldiers with a machine-gun - which is already a hard fight - than run upstairs to defend yourself against enemy soldiers that entered the building, getting stuck with just one fellow Vietnamese against waves of Frenchmen. They storm the room from 2 sides: 2 barricaded openings from which they shoot at you from one side, the other side a hallway from which they can enter the room. And for each soldier you shoot down, 2 more appear in the time it takes to shoot down 1 soldier (no fast-firing automatic weapons in this era, at least not in this fight).

These games got added to a list of shooters-I-quitted-because-they-are-too-hard that already consisted of:

Battlefield - Bad Company 2 (pesky helicopters)

Brothers in Arms (getting shot down while searching the next save-point after just having won a very difficult fight it took countless of tries to win - then having to redo it as I didn't find the save-point yet is no fun)

Operation Flash Point - Red RIver (waves of Chinese)

Operation Flash Point - Dragon Rising (too detailed controls, too much military tech-jargon)

Plus Medal of Honor - Airborne that kept crashing and Battlefield 4 that slowed to a halt halfway the campaign as the frame-rate dropped to 1 every few seconds on a map that my rig obviously couldn't handle no more.

I have no trouble consulting a walkthrough when I've been stuck for considerable* time. Even better is UHS, if available for the game.

* That depends on the game really. If the game has overall fair puzzles and no pixel-hunting I will really try to solve it myself. If on the other hand either the game has a lot of very obscure puzzles or the chance that me being stuck has its reason in some 2px sized thing I missed in one of the screens, I'll take a look at some hints pretty quickly.

Never heard about this game but it looks interesting, like a mix between Expeditions Conquistador and Monkey Island goofiness. Renowed Explorers has this slightly ugly mobile app flash graphics look which I find artistically questionable.
Is it similar to Expeditions Conquistador in depth or is it more like Braveland Wizard in comparison to HoM&M?

I like Expeditions Conquistador a lot, comfortable to get into but complex enough that one soon realizes how screwed up one is if the party members weren't selected with close care. Normally, having to restart a campaign due to gameplay mechanics one couldn't fathom would greatly annoy me but my current impression is that Conquistador makes up for it with RPG qualities not easily found in other games, and the interface and controls are easy to learn so I'm fine with a little trial and error, just as long as I won't have to restart the game again at a later stage. Fortunately, I realized very quickly that my stupidly pious characters wouldn't jive with my plan to chill with the natives on the long run so I decided to start over before anyone's morale hits zero and they probably take off or something. Altruistic characters suck as well because they strongly object to bargaining and anyone who travels and can't handle bargaining should better stay at home. Saying this with a good amount of RL travel experience. I personally hate bargaining but there's no way around it, gotta do it and in Conquistador it's a great way to squeeze people for more gold.

What I like best is when a game allows you to rebound from mishaps so that one can just go with the flow from start to finish without having to know which skills/stats are useless and so on. Ideally, a game shouldn't allow me to screw up my build so much that I can't finish the game. Therefor, games where failure and bad decisions -don't- carry from one mission or stage to the next until the accumulated mistakes shut you down entirely are my favorite, they can still be challenging but it removes all worries about being stopped in your tracks and having to restart close to the finishing line. Who wants to put in two dozens hours or more of playtime and then have to restart? Because of factors you couldn't know? That's the most unforgivable thing a game can do and it leaves a sour taste for anyone who remotely values their time.

An example of a game I highly enjoyed is Defense Grid: The Awakening. Super easy to learn but it takes a while to figure out how to get gold medals so once one has beaten the game, you realize the wide range between simply surviving a mission and acing it. I got crappy bronze medals on most missions but once I finished the game I got the hang of things and even replayed some missions. Usually, I don't care about medals and that kinda crap but Defense Grid makes it fun to retry a mission with a more efficient tower defense setup. Perfect example of "easy to learn, hard to master", a game one can recommend to just about anyone.

I agree, these are indeed glorious times for playing games. The palette has ever been richer, everything is readily available ranging from the oldest games across all platforms to a myriad of new games including indie games with surprisingly high production values. Stasis has very impressive environments that don't even remotely make you think "indie", and Ben Chandler's backgrounds for Wadjet Eye adventures are prime time eye candy. Although both of these examples are hard to understand for younger people with 50" screens and 60 fps fetishes.

It's also true that when we were kids, we played what we had. Games were expensive and it was possible to keep track of all the releases every months since there weren't remotely as many releases as nowadays. Reading 2 magazines and you had everything covered. By trading with every gamer at school it was possible to have a surplus of games but the limiting factor was hard disk space. Sometimes, a game's full installation took over most of your free HD space.
Daggerfall was a real challenge for our 486 DX2-66 with a 500 MB HD. It was impossible to install any other games at the same time, especially considering my dad used that PC for work on weekends and wasn't supposed to notice that 80% of the computer was now hosting the entire Iliac Bay...

UHS is definitely a good thing because it compartmentalizes each problem and further divides each puzzle into separate steps so the risk of accidentally reading too much is much smaller than with a regular walkthrough where one might accidentally read the solution to another problem while searching for your particular problem. It's still possible to stumble upon spoilers because the bullet point questions themselves can be spoilers.

I wouldn't feel bad about consulting UHS if it turns out I got stuck due to an unclued illogical puzzle or unfair pixelhunt but I can't know beforehand what the nature of my hangup is and if it turns out it was something I should have been able to figure out myself had I paid more attention and proceeded logically in full accordance with "adventure game protocol" then that leaves a very sour taste.

If I could get past that sour lemon problem (= stubbornness/ego) then that would do wonders to my adventure game backlog. I'm currently playing 70-80 games several dozen of which are adventures games and I'm mildly or badly stuck in 17 of them. Taking a break and returning after a while can occasionally help but most often I'm just as stuck after returning regardless of how long a break I take. It can even be counter productive to take breaks because if you don't take notes you'll forget what you need to do and run around like a headless chicken.

I can play maybe 5 different games at a time, and that's if they're vastly different...

Admit it: You're Sheldon Cooper.

Of course, I'm not playing all those games at the same time, they're just the ones I have installed right now. It's not a carousel type of rotation where every game that's installed gets played with equal frequency. It's more like a pyramid with 2-3 games in "enemy contact" at the top, 10-20 games in active rotation and the rest sometimes doesn't get any play for several months. Some games are benched and some are on death row, meaning I haven't yet uninstalled them but it's unlikely I'll finish or even continue them. I usually don't carry out death sentences too quickly, unless I completely dislike a game. But due to too much backlog, I'm planning to think more like King Edward I. --> "The problem with backlog is that it's too full of backlog." Meaning I'm going to uninstall games faster, this will increase the abandoned games pile but it's the only viable way to proceed. I'll give every game a fair chance, play it as long as I'm having fun and then throw it out the window.

Yesterday for instance I installed Heretic Kingdoms: The Inquisition and I was entirely unimpressed by it. Can't fathom why the game has such high ratings, it's incredibly bland and uninspired. Gave it an earnest try for a little more than one hour but then decided to uninstall and permanently abandon it since the game had nothing to offer to me in terms of entertainment. Strong initial dislike rarely ever changes for the better and there are games that require far more than one hour before one can pass judgement but with this game it was crystal clear that I won't enjoy it even if I persist for a couple hours longer.
So where can one buy this amazing crystal ball that predicts the future and tells you if a game is good or not after only one hour?? I think it's not clairvoyance or any doodoo like that, just a combination of having played enough games and knowing your own preferences more clearly after several decades.

Sheldon Cooper sucks and the TV show is even worse. Steve Urkel is much better!

Two words: Carlton Banks

Marathon Trilogy

These are all open source FPS games which are available for free download at https://alephone.lhowon.org/

Although the exploring portion of these games was fun, the combat felt weak and you can only save the game at certain points, so my verdict was: pass.

Rise of the Triad: Dark War (GOG)

Very fun fast-paced over-the-top FPS, based on the Wolfenstein 3D engine but with many huge improvements.

I got over half way through the game (enjoying it a lot) before I quit. The reason I quit is the appearance of invincible enemies and the levels seemed to start requiring that you find certain secret areas (previously they just contained bonus extras, not necessary items). So the gameplay switched from a fast run’n’gun to a more slow and methodical pace, which I did not enjoy in this particular case.

Osmos (Linux)

Although it is a very nice game overall, the orbital levels are a pain in the neck and after having finished most of them, I aborted, since they were no fun at all, the other levels are great though and I like the mechanic as well as the minimalistic but relaxing audio and visual design of the game.

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Scoregasm (Linux)

Everything is happening in a very small area and extremely fast, I was completely overstrained.
In addition to that, the music glitched out very badly the moment I wanted to quit anyway.

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