I just completed Inside for Xbox One. It is basically like Limbo but with better puzzles. I really liked it and thought some of the death scene were funny. The ending was really strange.

PC:
+Touhou 6 - Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (ReimuA on 1CC Normal, Default Settings, 1 life and 1 bomb remaining)

My past self would be shocked to see me beating TWO of these games!

My other beaten games. None of which would shock my past self as this and the last Touhou.

Donkey Kong Country. It appears I finished with 49 percent completion according to my save just before the final boss. I looked up the 100 percent ending and it looks like you just get a couple of different lines of text as a reward, so I'm not sweating my slackerish play too much.

The funny thing about this game is that when you play it it doesn't really feel very difficult, but then you start running out of lives anyway. It's mostly pure memorization, and a lot of the deaths happen because of the designers anticipating how you might move and throwing some sucker punch in there to trip you up. For instance, I got to the end of one level and my focus drifted for one moment just before going through the exit. I ended up dying because a random enemy suddenly popped out at the last second. None of the other levels are like that, as I recall. Felt very cheap. The controls are also a bit floaty to me and the collision detection was sometimes hard to gauge.

While I'm being critical of this beloved classic, the pre-rendered graphics, such a revelation in the mid-90s, haven't aged very well. They just seem muddy compared to crisp traditional pixel art (Yoshi's Island - there's a SNES game that still looks pretty).

it's a fun game, though. Not complicated. You run and jump, knock out the bad guys you can and avoid the spiky things. Some creative gimmicks used, like the level in which you have to grab fuel cans to keep the platform you're riding going.

Halo Reach (360) and Halo 2 (Computer/WINE)

Got through Halo 2 a few days ago, then played Reach Co-op with my brother.
First time in over a year and a half I started my 360 and that was to play Halo 4, which I just very recently discovered even existed :P

I did take a while to say how different heavy rain is, so I did not play it a while.. Tomorrow most likely.

<span class="bold">Dracula - The Resurrection</span> - (Sept 17, 2016) - 6 hour playthrough

Review:
This game is the first in the trilogy it is a part of, which is part of a larger quintology (4 & 5 are bundled separately). This review is for the first game in the series only.

Let me start out with what I didn't like first. When I discovered this game series I had anticipated a high quality dark point and click adventure with decent graphics and a smooth well polished engine from the trailers and screenshots for the Dracula series. I expected the fun of the good old 90s point and click games with upgraded graphics and engine technology. Point and click games are rather simplistic overall and it is something that naturally should have been honed to perfection by the time this game came out.

Unfortunately, the game is greatly lacking in the technology department. The graphics are very poor quality and look very compressed and washed out. They have a look that would have been amazing in 1995 perhaps but the game was released I believe in 1999 and would have looked a little dated then I believe. After the opening cut scene when you are in control of your character, you freelook with the mouse and get the impression it is a first person game however it is not that, rather it is point and click to move jumping from one location to another with slide-show like transition, while traversing a stair case triggers an animation transition sequence reminiscent of Myst, The 7th Guest and similar types of games from years prior. While the cut scenes are rendered ok, the quality of the images are very poor. When moving around the game world any characters you encounter look like a still lifeless photograph, more or less because they are, and they look terrible. It's very immersion breaking, especially the hideous woman that runs the inn. The artwork for her just looks like a freak show. I believe the graphics may look so washed out because the game might possibly use 15bpp or 16bpp instead of 24bpp, and with compression on top of that the quality goes out the window.

Story: The story line is half decent but not amazing, it's more or less what I would have expected however it starts out rather slow until you've played for an hour and a half or so and things start to get a bit more interesting. As the end of the game nears it picks up a bit and I was looking forward to whatever climax the game might have finished with. It ended slightly earlier than I thought, but it still had a reasonable ending. If the other games in the series were not already available I might have felt that the game was a little short and lacking a proper ending, but since it is a multi-game series it stands rather to build suspense for the next game in the series, much like a end-of-season cliff-hanger in a television series.

Gameplay: The click zones you use to travel from one scene to another are not all very well placed, so you often find yourself moving the mouse in a circle after every step you take in order to locate all possible locations you could move. When you move from one location to another you have no sense of direction as it's a hard jump from one fixed location to another with no smooth transition between them except on stair cases. This is disorienting making you have to look around to figure out your place and where you think you want to go next. Again, very immersion breaking. The controls are somewhat clunky for my taste. The puzzles in the game vary from rather simplistic to hard to discover if you missed one object hidden out of the way a little which can be a little frustrating because you end up wandering around for quite a while only to discover something eventually that you missed by a few pixels with your mouse several times.

Voice acting and dialogue: The voice acting in the game is absolutely terrible. The actors voices just do not convince me they're the character they're portraying, and have a sort of childish amateur feel to them. They're not the worst I've ever seen, but definitely weak overall. The quality does vary throughout the game from terrible to average, and back and forth but overall I'd say below-average.

Overall I enjoyed certain aspects of the game but it wasn't anywhere near as good as I had thought or hoped it would be. This is a game for old-school 90s point-and-click die hard game collectors mainly, as I think the casual gamer would get bored or frustrated by the lower quality overall and that the story wouldn't make it up for them.

The story did interest me just enough to want to continue playing the next game in the series however which I read was about the same quality. I read the 3rd game in the series is much higher quality and gets some very good ratings, so I will probably play through the trilogy to judge for myself as I tend to be a more forgiving gamer than many, and perhaps even a bit of a sucker for punishment. :)

Rating: 5 out of 10

<span class="bold">My complete list of finished games in 2016</span>

Finished my second playthrough of Clive Barker's Jericho.
First time was back in 2009. Enjoyed it more this time around as I've aged enough to understand the theme and the story more. Of the six squad members you get to control, I still barely used Rawlings and Jones, but I know I used Cole more this time. Her and Billie are the funnest to use for sure. Good production, and great/gruesome enemy and art design make up for an extremely linear shooter and that horribly abrupt ending.
I like Mercury Steam games. Gotta find a good price for Lords of Shadow 2.

How long did it take to complete Jericho would you say? I briefly tried it but got sidetracked. Would like to do a playthrough of the whole game some day. Ditto for Undying.

No more than eight hours. I recommend reading the 'Extras' that unlock as you progress through the game / meet certain quota conditions. They supplement a bit of backstory and substance to the game. Playing on Hard unlocks the most. Hope you enjoy going through both games. Undying is great.

Thanks, I'll be sure to put it on the hardest setting then. I generally prefer to start all FPS games on the hardest setting and only back it off if I find the game impossibly difficult or not fun that way. Normally I do fairly well though.

Yeah, I started Undying 2 or 3 times now and only played for a few hours each time but loving it. It creeped me out which was pretty cool and quite unusual for games to do. :) For some weird reason though I never continued playing it each time and got sidetracked by other games or work or life or something. I've been saying for years that I'm dying to get back into Undying though so one of these days I have to put my foot down and just f'n do it. hehe. Maybe I need to get the guys in the Gentleman's Backlog thread to force me into it. :)

Never Alone, PS3

A puzzle-platformer where you play as an Inupiat girl and her companion, a spirit fox; you switch characters with a button press.

I wanted to love this game; lovely art style and narration, an interesting setting/backstory (Inupiat folklore) that has surely never been done before, a good atmosphere ... but this thing is rough in ways that seriously impacted my enjoyment of the game. Loose controls, hideous AI that sees you get repeated game overs as your moron companion jumps to their death for no obvious reason; incredibly dodgy physics as you fall through platforms to your death, incredibly frustrating bugs (for example, at one point you're supposed to grab one platform, climb onto it, and then jump up and grab onto a second platform; it wasn't difficult in theory; but one of the platforms (the platforms are spirits that spawn when the fox gets near them) just randomly failed to spawn on a regular basis, and when it did spawn, my character repeatedly grabbed onto the first platform, scrabbled up onto it ... and then instantly fell through it to the ground. Incredibly irritating. This kind of experience was seriously totally routine (along with, for example, jumping, grabbing onto the empty air, flailing around wildly for a few seconds, and then being hurled to the ground at something like twice the regularly falling speed), and if I hadn't known the game was pretty short, I wouldn't have put up with it. As it is, I have trouble recommending it. I suppose it's possible the PC version is fixed up, although at least one review suggests not.

The Playstation 3 version doesn't seem to have the "Foxtails" DLC, which is annoying in a sense, but in another sense, I don't actually want to play more of this game.

PC:
+Shadow Warrior (2013)

Give your main character a katana and a highly skilled array of katana swordplay and moves and the game is pure slicing and dicing fun. The main character is yet again Lo Wang from the original Shadow Warrior (although his offensiveness is probably diced, but I dunno how'd he fit in the setting in the game), and your goal is to stop the bad guy Zilla from obtaining the Nobitsura Kage, a katana of tremendous power. (The story is still nearly the same as the original, BUT EXPANDED to something beyond a line or two in the manual).

Sadly for a game like this, it doesn't have multiplayer unlike the original, but it sure has the gameplay, which allows you to slice and dice with the katana and add to it with a collection of weaponry of various kinds. Along with upgrades, THREE kinds of them in fact. Powers (extra abilities that you can execute), Skills (expansion to your base abilities) and Weapons (upgrades paid with money).

While the comedy and offensiveness is toned down massively (I don't see how could take the story and the setting seriously with all of classic Lo Wang's lines), it still does play on them. It even includes hidden pixelated areas.

And that's it for today's game.

Who wants some Wang?

Borderlands 1 as Brick
It has a slow start, but it was a pretty enjoyable romp. I actually like the story; its a simple tale of a quartet of mercenaries who go out looking for treasure and adventure, and end up getting caught up in corporate misdeeds (if you play the DLCs. The base game basically ends with them finishing their adventure empty handed, which has to be the best joke in the series)


Borderlands 2 as Mechromancer.
I don't know why people keep giving praise to its story; I found it riddled with plotholes and oddly reminiscent of a Michael Bay film, complete with forced and unfunny humor. The first game's story wasn't great, but it worked and didn't come across as overblown or trying too hard to be epic or cinematic.

Dragonkeep was surprisingly well written though, and the humor was passable.

The gameplay is ok, but it took away some mechanics I liked from the first borderlands

Hotline Miami
A very fast paced action game filled with much violence and a psychedelic feeling. The graphics and music are surprisingly well done, but the story and characters could have used a bit more work. You die easily and so do the enemies, but they do not have to replay the entire part of a level when they croak.
Overall: Very fun for the most part, but the trippy story and a terrible forced stealth level leave a mark.
8/10

Witcher 3, believe it or not. I took the main quest road and didn't let myself get too distracted by Gwent and the step-and-fetch-it quests.