First playthroughs:
Pathfinder: WOTR
- Similarly to Kingmaker, it starts off very strong but goes on too long for its own good and fighting endlessly copypasted hordes of the same handful of demons becomes boring. I enjoyed the Midnight Isles roguelike mode more than the main campaign.
Age of Wonders
- Played the campaign for the first time. Game is still very fun and has a lot of charm and its campaign has the best structure in the series, however the campaign missions themselves were not very good and having played some of the later entries in the series this one felt a bit too simplistic.
Age of Wonders 2
- Great game, but the campaign is worse than in 1. Made pretty much obsolete by Shadow Magic.
Sorcerer King
- Weird 4X where the entire campaign is 1 ultra long map. Starts of interesting but like most 4X games the late game turns become a boring slog.
Undecember
- A shittier Path of Exile on mobile. Played co-op with a friend. There were some things I liked about the game but overall it was pretty boring and felt like shovelware.
Brave Fencer Musashi
- This year I decided to play a bunch of old console games I remember playing as a kid, a sort of nostalgic trip down memory lane. I remembered HATING this game. Turns out, I was simply too young and retarded to appreciate it. It's a pretty unique 3D action RPG-metroidvania where most of the challenge is figuring out how to explore the map and solve puzzles. You can steal the abilities of most enemies in the game and they can be used in combat but usually their primary use is in puzzle solving and opening the way forward. I guess my drooling 10-year old self just wanted to shoot and kill stuff instead of actually thinking a little that's why I used to hate it. It does have some issues - the combat is a bit shallow, the platforming challenges become far too obnoxious for my liking and the final boss can choke on my balls. Still, would recommend to people unaware of it to check it out. You can emulate it with a PS1 emulator.
Paper Sorcerer
- Pretty cool Wizardry 4 inspired dungeon crawler. You play as a villain and your party consists of various summoned monsters, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, it's very buggy and there are some glaring design flaws, like having access to a small subset of your bestiary per playthrough, that get in the way of having fun.
Witcher 2
- Cool movie, but pretty shit game.
Romancing Saga 2
- Very unique JRPG that was ahead of its time. You play as an immortal emperor who reincarnates every X years and over a long period of time you lead your country to prosperity and hunt down the villains. Unlike most JRPGs that lead you from cutscene to cutscene, this one is very open and has minimal hand holding. You're free to go in any direction you want, although some zones only open up when enough time passes. This game has the best city building component I've every seen in an RPG because it's very closely linked with the core gameplay. Your empire feels like the actual player character, because depending on your choices in various quests and how well you explore the world, your available retinue of soldiers you can take on missions, skills, spells and equipment grows. My main complaints are the inability to change your party without dying and the obtuseness of some of the game mechanics.
Strange of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin
- Enjoyed this game way more than I thought I would and it's now my favorite Final Fantasy game (the only other one that I played is 7). Fuck Chaos, all my homies hate Chaos.
Jagged Alliance
- Wanted to play JA2, but then I realized that I've never played 1 so I decided to try it. While I enjoyed it, there were a lot of things about it that annoyed and bored me. The combat mechanics have a good amount of depth, but the actual combat consists mostly of fighting in samey looking forests where sometimes you need 20 turns to find the last cunt hiding behind some tree in the corner of the map. Variety of different weapons and equipment is very small. The game is also increidbly difficult but not in a fun way. It is very easy to lose soldiers (sometimes just entering an adjastened enemy sector is enough because you can get shot and bombarded with grenades as soon as you enter before you even get a turn) and you get penalized for losing them harder than in modern XCOM games, because other soldiers will be less likely to want to be hired, and the higher tier ones are the ones who are the most critical of your performance, and you need to have them to have any chance of doing anything in the late game. Even simply changing your team composition (something you tend to do a lot in most tactical games) can lead to dire consequences, as your roster is very small, so you have to fire people to get better people, but when you fire people you have a chance to piss off other soldiers. I lost almost my entire team before the final few missions because I fired a couple of low tier shitters, which caused some of my best mercs to complain and leave with them, so I had to hire the least bad replacements which made the few final sectors a boring, nightmarish slog with tons of save scumming. I still had fun with the game and it does have a lot of charm, but no amount of Solid Snake-sounding guy reading aloud every item description can compensate for tedious gameplay.
Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games
- Fixes some of my issues with JA 1 (bigger variety of equipment, easier to fire and re-hire soldiers) but introduces a slew of new ones to compesnate, on top of removing the global map strategic layer. Now you just pick missions from a list. Also every one of them has a timer and sometimes it's incredibly tight, so tight you have to use cheese strats to do the mission in time. Meh.
Control
- Doom 3's spiritual successor I never knew existed. This game at least has better shooting and map exploration and some of the traversal powers are fun to use.
SMT: Strange Journey
- Cool dungeon crawler in the SMT series. For those who don't know, SMT is a very old JRPG franchise that's like Pokemon, but instead of enslaving colorful animals you enslave various gods and legendary creatures from real world religions and myths. I think this sort of gameplay mixes pretty well with a traditional blobber because while your overall strength keeps increasing, your party comp changes constantly so you get to try a lot of different things in 1 playtrhough. Still, I feel like this game is a bit too long for its own good, towards the end I was waiting for it to be over. I wish there was a bigger variety of dungeon gimmicks, I feel like I've seen all of this stuff already but the numbered door puzzles on the last floors were cool.
Far Cry
- My first Far Cry game. Starts off as a good semi-realistic open-ended shooter but gradually turns into a mess of bugs, shit design decisions and technical ineptitude. I was reminded a lot of Crysis (both in the gameplay and how the game also turns to shit as it goes own) and was surprised to learn that both were made by the same dev, before they handed the franchise over to Ubisoft.
Diablo 2 - Median XL
. Diablo 2 mod that adds a lot of new content and changes pretty much every skill in the game. Was interesting to experience but at this point it's hard for me to stomach Diablo gameplay. Some of the things they do also don't work very well on Diablo's crusty old engine, so you get stuff like a boss spawning instant kill damage zones in the room, but if he spawned them before you enter the room, you can't see them, so you get oneshot by invisible shit.
Replays:
Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic
- My favorite AoW game and possibly my favorite turn based strategy game of all time. It sucks that the campaigns are so short but the missions are actually quite elaborate, more so than they have ever been in the series.
Age of Wonders 3
- I think after all the updates and DLCs, this is my 2nd favorite AoW. The combat and city building is the best they've ever been in the series, but I dislike some of the changes like reducing army stack size from 8 to 6 and nerfing the shit out of magic. Campaign missions are actually quite good, but the campaigns are fucking tiny and also they give you a new faction almost every mission so you don't feel the progression between missions. It sucks that AoW 1 is the only AoW with a proper lengthy campaign with persistent progression between missions.
Dune 2
- Aged like milk, but I can't be too hard on the great grandfather of one of my favorite genres.
Armored Core: Master of the Arena
- Old AC game I played as a kid and decided to replay to determine if I should give a shit about AC 6. The answer was no. Game is mediocre. Building your robot and fighting in the arena is fun for a bit but campaign missions are terrible with like 5 different enemies and samey looking maps. I'm sure AC6 is better thant this so I'll play it some day when it's very cheap.
Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds
- Age of Empires with a Star Wars skin. Basically no reason to ever play it other than nostalgia. It's annoying how many missions in the campaign don't feature base building in a game where microing individual units is not fun in the slightest.
Grand Theft Auto 1
- Remember when GTA was a wacky top down arcadey shooter instead of a serious realistic crime drama? Unfortunately GTA 1 feels more like a tech demo than a proper game because everything works and controls like shit.
Grand Theft Auto 2
- A proper fun game made from GTA 1's base. Shame that the series lost its vibe of wacky over the top violence in the sequels that Saints Row tried to preservre until it became TOO retarded.
