System Shock (remake). TL;DR: This is a generally faithful remake of the original and is therefore very good and worth playing. It's close enough to the original that you could almost use walkthroughs of the original to get through this if necessary, although there are some distinctions. With that said, it's more fun to look at how it occasionally differs from the original and ways in which it's actually worse.

The graphics are basically nice-looking, although there's a lot of "noise" in the form of bright colored lights dotting everything. It took me a little while to get used to it and early on I was double- and even triple-checking my surroundings to make sure I didn't miss anything important. This was good because a couple of times I did indeed miss some stuff. The original, as primitive as it is, is much easier to read at an instant. The noisy look also affected the puzzles and I quickly restarted the game and switched the puzzle level down to easy because it was just too much of a pain to interpret where the interactive elements were facing. I don't feel bad about it at all.

I do think the game captures the vibe of the station, for the most part, although it goes for a grittier style than how think of the original. The original game has always had a very 1970s cold sci-fi feel to me, especially levels like the research level with its solid bright red and white everywhere. The maintenance level took me aback with how well-lit it was - that's not a bad thing, just one of those little differences. There's a lot of glitchy ragdoll physics and it would weird me out to see enemies I killed ages ago still twitching on the ground every time I passed by. General crew carcasses often seemed to default to lying on their faces with their butts sticking up, which gave me the impression that SHODAN was having her minions sodomize the residents, likely after they were already dead, which I guess would add something to the horrific atmosphere, although perhaps not intentionally.

I was not surprised but a little disappointed that the bridge level looks completely different. In contrast to the gross pulsating bio-mechanical look of the original, the remake has SHODAN reshape the bridge into a sort of electronic cathedral to herself, with long strings of LEDs that resemble stained glass and such. I see the logic behind it, but I just feel the original style is more of a shocking contrast and just more revolting to look at. Perhaps the Unreal engine wasn't up to rendering more organic, moving surfaces without bashing in the performance or something.

I do absolutely love how you can look through windows in this, both to spy through doors to see if enemies lurk within, and the gorgeous views of the station orbiting Saturn. Also how you literally ride trams to the groves and you get to see the Beta grove being ejected in real time rather than a cinematic. It's all quite beautiful.

Musically, the remake goes for the usual modern background ambiance. It's so ambient that I often failed to notice that music was even playing at all. I realized after listening to the soundtrack online that some of the songs include beats from the original but usually as deeply underlying elements. IMO the score for the original is quite superior and if I replay this I'm definitely going to install the mod to replace the music with the original's score.

The voice acting I feel went from one extreme to another. We had random non-actors just reciting stuff off a sheet in the original, and now we have proper actors who all seem to have been told to go as melodramatic as they possibly could. I think the idea was to really stress the horror of the situation, but the early entries you find in particular go overboard on the sobbing and "Oh God help me...!" and such. I wish they had turned the dial down just a bit. Terri Brosius is still fantastic as SHODAN and her new dialogue fits in with the old stuff fine.

It plays a lot faster than the original, which makes it harder or easier depending on situations. For some reason I found the groves a lot easier to get through. The security level is a lot easier simply because of your greater ability to look up and shoot enemies in high places. At the same time, if enemies get the drop on you, you're going to pay for it much more quickly because you'll be losing a lot before you even turn around. The game does a good job of making you feel vulnerable the whole way, so you can't ever get too cocky.

Weirdly, for a game that's so motivated by making the gameplay more accessible, the inventory system is a lot more fiddly. I'm pretty sure they did this because Night Dive are a household that prefers System Shock 2 and they basically just swiped its inventory system for this, but it's weird how the original game just let you grab stuff and not worry too much about it and now you have to think about picking up stuff, fitting it in your inventory space, vaporizing what you don't need or hauling it to a recycling unit that's probably far away from your position (why didn't they put more of those things on each floor...?), wondering how many weapons you can squeeze in, dropping stuff so you can pick up stuff just to vaporize or recycle then pick back up what you dropped...it isn't much fun. I never bought any extra ammo or derms...just saved my money for weapon modkits, which did come in handy.

Cyberspace is a very mixed bag. The Descent-like style is certainly easier to handle but the shooting can go a bit (the lack of a cyberspace time limit seems like an acknowledgement of this) and it feels one-note and barren beyond enemies. In the original, for all its faults, you would still find cool stuff like extra logs or those silly minigames you could play but none of that is kept in this. The lack of saving within cyberspace is also a pain. I probably should have also dropped the cyberspace level to one like the puzzles, considering what a slog the reworked final SHODAN fight is.

About the story, it's essentially the same, which is good, but ever since I played the demo I've never liked the slight reworking of Diego and the hacker's intro. The original is very fast to get you in the action, but the impression is that the hacker is caught hacking TriOp and Diego offers him a deal to get him out of a prison sentence in exchange for a job on Citadel. The hacker is at a disadvantage but it doesn't seem like he needed his arm twisted to take the deal, and Diego is almost chummy in how he observes the hacker work on the job, placing his arm on the back of the chair and such. These are two shady guys making a shady deal with each other in which one or the other is going to screw the other guy. Classic cyberpunk storytelling taking after classic hard-boiled crime fiction.

The remake's take on this involves a lot more violence and coercion. Diego bullies the hacker with a goon squad (where were these guys when the shit started hitting the fan...?) and doesn't even meet the hacker personally. The hacker only does what Diego wants because he's threatened and smacked around. And instead of a real hacking job that turns SHODAN evil as an unexpected side effect, the hacker basically just breaks into a settings menu and switches all the toggles to OFF, like how the killer Krusty doll in the Simpsons Halloween special had his switch set to EVIL. Diego himself is also cast as a more nakedly villainous personality, complete with posh South African accent, rather than the smarmy corporate shit weasel he came off as in the original (e.g., Carter Burke in Aliens). It feels like the remake's creators wanted to counter the moral ambiguity of the original, reducing the hacker's culpability in the Citadel tragedy and shifting everything to Diego. One of the things that hits you in the original is how there truly isn't a good party anywhere. TriOp is bad, Diego is bad, and the hacker is only ever looking out for himself, with the entire game essentially just amounting to a remarkable act of self-preservation that involves saving humanity as a bonus...but of course the whole reason there's a threat at all is because the hacker didn't really give a crap about what he was doing in the first place. This is basically a long-winded way of getting around to saying that I really missed an in-way-over-his-head Diego ranting into his audio logs as his little side-scheme collapses around him. There is no "investigate me, Rebecca! Investigate MY BUTT!!!" in the remake and it's quite a bit poorer for it.

And I wanted to ask someone, since I read the game's page on GOG this morning! It says that mouselook support is added in the Enhanced Edition. That means the mouse isn't used in the included old version of the game?

IIRC, you can use the mouse in the original game, but it's not like modern mouse-look, more like a lot of clicking and dragging on UI elements. I've often said that you feel more like you're controlling a mech than a human being, which became even more appropriate when Terra Nova used a very similar control scheme. The System Shock Enhanced Edition reworks the controls to get you closer to modern WASD/mouselook controls although you still push a button to toggle between the environment and UI. It works pretty well, IMO, especially compared to the original release.

Succubus (Steam)

Gory NSFW first person slasher. Made by the same people as Agony, it's way better than Agony. For what it is it plays really well, looks quite good too. I wouldn't pay full price for it, but on deep sale I got good value from it.

Finished Sonic & Sega All Stars Transformed, well, kind of. You have to earn stars to unlock modifiers and characters but also to unlock sections for the career mode. And it is difficult. It stars quite easy but you quickly have to grind races to earn more stars and unlock the next sections. Wining in normal mode is not enough, you have to win in hard mode to have enough stars for the races near the end. I had to try and try again to earn 120 stars and unlock a section. And now I need to have a total of 165 stars to unlock a character and/or the final race. It started good but I hated that grinding. The previous Sonic & Sega game was more enjoyable.


Full list here

Metro 2033 Redux (Epic)

I've decided to replay the metro trilogy. My previous play through of the first game was the Xbox 360 version. Even on 360 the game looks awesome, though didn't run all that well which made it more difficult. No such problems now as even the Redux version runs easily on pretty much any hardware that is remotely current.

At max settings this game still looks better than most newer games. I used the EGS version because that's what I have- it was a free EGS game way back. The most important thing to enjoying this game is to not play it as a first-person shooter. It's a first-person cinematic survival horror game. Some of the scripted segments that the game drops you into are a pain in the ass to get through and require a few tries. The tradeoff is one of the most atmospheric experiences out there.

This time I made an effort to do good stuff to get the better ending- so I had to curb my natural instincts and only knock people out instead of killing anything that moves. Honestly the good ending is just a little cutscene that makes no difference anyway- since the bad ending is cannon and is what leads into Last Light.

Planescape: Torment (Enhanced Edition)

I decided to play the EE-remake because the original gave me some graphical artifacts at first so instead of trying to fix them, I chose EE as I had it already. I think it was a wise choice because the EE version apparently has some pretty good quality-of-life enhancements (like you can select to get max extra HP in level up, no need to save scum to defeat bad luck; also not sure if the zoom-in effect was in the original either?), and apparently they had also fixed many quest bugs and exploits present in the original.

Overall if left a positive impression on me, but for the reasons I didn't expect. I was expecting to be fascinated by the story, characters and the world (because that is what everyone seems to be praising in PS:T), but I felt they were merely... ok.

Instead, I was impressed how e.g. each party member had its own "system", ie. they were not merely generic fighters or mages or this and that, but e.g. each fighter type seemed to have its own set of weapons (Morte had different kinds of teeth, Dakkodh(sp?) had only one weapon that kept improving with him, Nordom was the only ranged fighter in the game etc.

It felt every party member had their important role, like Annah was the only thief-type for you (unless you wanted to become a thief yourself), Grace was the only cleric option etc.

What I found negative about the game as a RPG was that it didn't make much sense to play as any other class but mage. And, if you didn't pump up your Wisdom (and maybe Intelligence and Charisma), you'd miss a great deal of the game, both story and important dialogue options that would give you massive amounts of experience points. Plus, you couldn't e.g. choose to play as a cleric yourself.

So as an RPG, PS:T was very restrictive IMHO. It just doesn't seem to make much sense to play as any other kind of character but a mage with high WIS/INT/CHA (in that order). You would maybe occasionally change to thief or fighter in order to get some extra experience points, but most of the time you'd play as a mage.

Also, I have to admit I was constantly reading a walkthrough as I was playing the game (where to go next and what to do there etc.), and I am kinda glad I did because I am sure otherwise I would have missed most of the game.

For instance, it would have never occurred to me that you should initiate dialogue with your party members every now and then, as there is lots of experience and extra perks to be had that way (your or your party members stats increasing etc. through mere dialogue), and sometimes it seemed important that you initiated that dialogue in certain parts of the game.

Frankly I don't think I would have ever thought of that, initiating dialogue with my party members every now and then just in case something important can be achieved that way.

Also, I kinda dislike there's so many items in the game with which you don't know if you need them at all, or whether you should keep them after using them once. Like there is certain object that is needed as a "key" in one part of the game, and it isn't apparent that you should keep it with you near the very end of the game as using it at certain specific point of the end-game will suddenly grant you massive 2.000.000 amount of experience points. Without a walkthrough, it would have never occurred to me I should have that item with me at the end, I thought it had already served its purpose.

Similarly, I learned about another item I had acquired earlier, which one person will ask for much later in the game, but only if you have it with you (in your inventory). I learned that too from the walkthrough and remembered I had sold it (them) away to some store to free up inventory space, and now I couldn't find the store anymore where I had sold it, or the item had disappeared with time from that store's inventory.

Also, there were LOTS of items in the game which apparently serve no purpose whatsoever, you can't even sell them. It is like the game is trying to troll the player "should you hoard all this stuff somewhere, just in case it is needed later in the game? Hmmmmmm?".

I personally prefer a RPG would be more frank about which items are important quest items to which you should really hold on, and which are just useless crap you can throw to trash.

Oh one more thing. I wasn't impressed with the music, but then I had high expectations as other Infinity engine games like Baldur's Gate 1-2 and Icewind Dale had such great and unforgettable music. PS:T music was merely... ok, serving its purpose.

Still, it was not a bad experience. I give it 8/10.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena - 4/5

In my mind, I played the first Riddick game recently - but, as it turns out, it was actually 12 years ago. I'm sure my standards have changed over the years. But, I think I'd probably consider the first game to be the better one.

Some parts do feel a little rough; what you can interact with often feels inconsistent and arbitrary, and I can't say I'm the biggest fan of the game's pacing.

And then there's the questionable collectibles. They are all 'bounty cards' that show a picture of a person with a description of the crime they committed. As far as I can tell, they're supposed to be comedic, but a lot of them lack the comedy. They feel like those videos of Ross from Friends with the laugh-track removed (i.e. uncomfortable and/or psychopathic). Example: "Nedrick Veran: wanted for imprisoning two people in his basement for 26 years". Like, there's no joke there. It just feels like something very weird to put in the game as a collectible. They are all optional, though.

The game is overall still pretty good. It kinda makes me wanna rewatch Pitch Black. It's been 25 years since I saw it, and I barely remember anything.

Time makes fools of us all...

Metro Last Light Redux (Epic)

Just like the first game, this time I made an effort to do good stuff so that I could get the moralistic do-gooder ending. I think the second game improves over the first game- it retains the outstanding atmosphere and tones down the BS scripted segments a little bit. This game has more stealth vs human segments and less mutant horde mode survival segments.

It's still a graphical masterpiece, not just for its time, but even now. It came from an era of games where devs had worked out graphics for the current hardware better than ever with games like this, Ryse Son of Rome, 1886: The Order, Mirror's Edge Catalyst- not all great games, but games with great character models and graphics that still rival today's "just turn on ray tracing and use upscaling" era.

Untitled Goose Game. This was a fun little time. It's kind of like a Hitman game, except instead of playing a hitman you're playing a goose bent on terrorizing some quaint villagers. You have little checklists for each area you enter and have to figure out how to cross off those items with only your beak and your honking. If you want to make someone fall down, pull on their shoelaces and then get them to chase you until they go over.

The graphics are simple but effective and the goose is rather realistically animated. My wife said the goose reminded her of our old lovebird in the sense of being really cute but full of attitude. It's not a very long game and I finished most of it in an afternoon and then did the bonus objectives another day.

Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii (Xbox Series X)

Finished on professional difficulty. Really took my time with this one, and got 100% achievements. I'm really a hound for those Yakuza games. This spin-off follows the same formula as the mainline games in the series, with open world exploration and lots of side content to do. I could lose myself for hours at a time, gambling, karaoke, sailing the seas, collecting bounties or just doing whatever. There's a lot to do here. It took me just north of 40 hours to get every achievement, but there were still some sidequests left.

The ship combat and exploration is very good. You can upgrade the ship and change out the cannons, and the main character also has upgrades of course. Like the older Yakuza games, this one is real-time action-based combat, not turn-based.

I gotta appreciate how the Yakuza series has become the next Saints Row. It started off as more serious gangster-games, but it has gone completely off the rails with the concept. Pirate ships in Hawaii? I look forward to seeing what they will do next. I had a lot of fun with this one.

I finished Call of the Tenebrae, the last single-player expansion for Two Worlds 2 that GOG has got (GOG hasn't got Shattered Embrace). Thus, I finished the whole series of Two Worlds games, for the second time.

Now that I’ve finished this series again, I would like to say that I’ve found some major inconsistences regarding the timeline of the games (comparing to the timeline found on the internet). Unfortunately, I can’t write them in a detailed way without mentioning quest spoilers. If you are currently playing the games, or intend to in the future, you can find them too. I will just say that the timeline you can find on the internet, mentions that TW1 happens in 345 and TW2 in 350. The 5-year span between the two games is certain. Your hero mentions it at the ending of Ch. 2 of TW2, as well as at the post-credits cutscene, at the end of that game. However, regarding the specific year of the games, I have found the following:

1) In TW1 an NPC (not involved in any quest) tells you that something happened in 340 (so, it is implied that we are currently after that year). This is really the only reference I’ve found, in all the series, which implies that we are after the year 340 (and even that reference doesn’t mention the specific year we are in)! I haven’t found anything else!
2) On the other hand, I found two journals in TW2 (one of them for a side quest, while the other is for the main questline, mind you), where their last entry has the year of 317, as the date (with the month and day). And the things that are described in the last entries of those two journals are exactly what our hero is facing at the present time!
3) Also, in Pirates of the Flying Fortress expansion, you find another journal for a quest. In that, you read that a ship crashed on some reefs in 307. Another NPC had told you earlier that the wreck happened a decade ago. So, the current year is implied to be 317 too!

Thus, it is repeatedly mentioned, or implied, that TW 2 takes place in 317, so TW 1 must have happened in 312 (so the relation 345-350 proves to be invalid)!

Apart from that, I would like to say that the end of “Call of the Tenebrae” would make a very promising Two Worlds 3!

I beat Elite Force for the second time in two days.
I beat Crysis last week.
I beat Dark Forces 2 for probably the ninth time this year.
I beat XIII for the second time this year.

On to the next...

Metro Exodus (Steam)

This time I played the Enhanced PC version with both DLC's. The first time I played it on Xbox One X as part of Game Pass. Surprisingly this is an enhanced edition that actually appears to both run and look better than the original- buying the PC version basically gets both versions to choose from.

The game play is pretty much my favorite story-based shooter. The game strikes a great balance between the story telling segments mixed in with some medium sized open segments that let you choose your approach. The cast of characters is some of the best in the genre- I really grew attached to them and the downtime segments between the main maps lets you get to know them.

As per my series replay, this time I played really slow and saw everything there was to see pretty much- and got the good ending by saving the entire crew. Excellent series overall, even though some don't like how the game play evolved from survival horror to more standard FPS experience, I personally think they nailed it perfectly in the final game. The entire series is so cheap now (even Exodus sells for A$8 on sale) that anyone should at least give the series a try.

The Two Colonels

The first DLC is a short and simple story where you play as the father of Kirill from the main game. You learn what happened to him and how the "Dead City" became dead. It's short but good.

Sam's Story

The second DLC has you play as "Uncle Sam" the ex US Marine Embassy Guard that happened to be in the Moscow Metro when the bombs went off. You learn the story about how he became a part of the Spartans in the main game if you listen on the train. In the DLC you play his story after the events of the main game, where he attempts to finally find a way back to America after more than 20 years. It's around the size of one of the larger chapters from the main story.

Shadowman Remastered. I remember playing this on the N64 when it was first released and thinking it was pretty decent, although my enduring memory of it was fighting the final boss and just running back and forth, blindly firing into the air whenever Shadowman looked up, eventually killing the end boss even though I never actually saw what I was doing. It might have had something to do with the N64's peculiar controller - this time around I just did a lot of strafing and jumping around and beat the game without too much issue.

This has actually held up quite well, and the remaster job is nicely done. It's based on the Acclaim Comics reboot of the character that Garth Ennis designed, which is why there's a snake in a top hat with an Irish accent present. It could be described as a 3D Metroidvania in that you spend a lot of time trying to find upgrades that allow you to enter previously blocked areas. It has the pacing of that genre, in that the early going is a bit of a grind for items and collectibles until you reach a tipping point and are able to access tons more areas and really clean up the rest of the map. The graphics are decent, although you might want to brace yourself for earth tones and Cliver Barker-esque creature designs. The game moves pretty quickly, but it does feel a tad long, especially as Night Dive restored a couple of cut levels. I would say this is definitely one of Night Dive's better restoration efforts and I'm glad I picked it up after waffling on it in the last few sales.


Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Another one I played a while back, this one on the original Xbox. If you like Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, this game is very similar because the engine used for that one, the Slayer Engine, was designed for this Buffy game. It's a well-made licensed game that includes most of the show's cast, with the notable exception of Sarah Michelle Gellar, who apparently had too much an ego to bother voicing her own character in a video game, but the replacement actress turns out to be really good and you barely notice the difference.

The game seems to be set somewhere around early/mid-season 3, with a story involving the Master somehow coming back to life so Buffy has to kill him again. Many of the locations are out of the show, but there are also some generic levels like having to fight on a waterfront or in boiler rooms, which unfortunately are the levels that seem to go on the longest. It looks quite good, especially if you use an emulator and upscale the resolution.

The brawling engine is fantastic in many ways, letting you pull off cool moves like staking a vampire and then doing a backhand staking of a guy behind you, and you can improvise stakes by breaking furniture. As you go along in the game, it becomes increasingly wise to simply grab and throw vampires into convenient environmental hazards like protruding wooden beams or bonfires. I seem to recall that you can also create pools of holy water by tossing a vial into a pool but I don't think I got it to work this time around, so maybe my memory was playing tricks on me again.

The downside of the game is that it can be pretty difficult and checkpoints are sometimes spread far apart. Despite Buffy being a super-powered heroine, the game has no respect for her recuperative skills and you almost never get a health refill just because you beat a level - I probably spent about 5 percent of my playtime at full health. Enemies occasionally drop health pickups, but rarely, so it's not something you can depend on. Scouring for secrets so you can find health potions and items to increase your health bar is almost a necessity. The game also makes it clear that whatever you can do to your enemies, your enemies can and absolutely will do to you. I've never cared for things like juggling as gameplay mechanics and it can be infuriating when bad guys do it to you, taking huge chunks of your health bar away while you're helpless to stop them. Enemies also get really block-crazy in later levels - people who complain about blocking in Yakuza 3 have no idea what abusing blocks means - and the game also features a particular turn-off of mine in that hitting enemies also moves them backward, so by the time your combo is finishing you'll be swinging at air because the enemy drifted out of range unless you happen to be cornering them. The game also includes platforming sections that can result in instant deaths if you blow a single jump, so that can be a pain, too. Despite all the rough edges, though, it's quite good and another example of a respectfully done licensed game.


The Secret of Monkey Island. I had an itch to replay this since I keep seeing the new one on sale. Figured I should refresh my memory before taking a chance on that one. I played the Ultimate Talkie Edition this time, which works pretty well for the most part, aside from a couple of buggy audio bits that either didn't play or created a burst of static.

I can't say I've ever been a particularly huge Monkey Island fan as I usually go more for the Maniac Mansion games, Sam & Max, or Fate of Atlantis as my SCUMM games of choice, but I do like the Monkey Island series, and this one is still really good. A couple of the puzzles struck me as being kind of obnoxious in their moon logic but it's generally fair and the dialogue is still funny as hell. It also still looks very nice and the animation is kind of underrated, I would say. It's better than a lot of cartoons that aired when it was first released, in its goofy pixel-art sort of way.