Well you were around when they were

Respect your elders young lady

lol. The squirrel/cat was real... it's name is Thylacoleo. As for dangerous enemies... there are not very many any more. There are some boss fights/raids and caves/dungeons, so those are more difficult.. either special monsters or really high level ones. Oh... it's an RPG, so everything has levels. The higher the levels the more dangerous. There are also gigantosaurs and titanosaurs that are dangerous even now to me. And some crazy things in the ocean that are dangerous.

Haha yeah those sea dinosaurs are pretty crazy! Like the mosasaurus in Jurassic World. I love the feeling you get in an RPG when you grow so strong that you can crush underfoot all the stuff you couldn't handle before.

I'm still going through my games catalogue and discovering some great games! I finished Thief 3 which was good but not as great as Thief 1 & 2. I also played through the original Ultima Underworld which was only borderline playable anymore but thanks to a Unity port I managed to do it. I had more trouble with the controls and gameplay than with some of the other (very) old games I've been playing but it was still worth it for the sheer vision and ambition the game had. It had a (useful) automap that you could annotate and even just scribble random notes on, for chrissakes! in 1992! And Y-axis movement in the levels. And it had skills like trading, appraising, stealth, etc apart from the usual combat ones. And a rune-based magic system. It's laid the basis for all the system shocks, bioshocks, deus exes and other related games that came later so it was interesting to play the granddaddy of them all.

After that I played Never Alone, a platformer about an inuit girl and her pet arctic fox with interesting cultural information about the lives of the inuit peoples. I also started playing Life is Strange: before the storm but haven't gotten very far in it yet.

Looking to finish Toonstruck today, an old-school adventure game with hand-drawn graphics and a lead role for Christopher Lloyd of Back to the Future fame. It uses the mix of cartoons and 'real' actors that was so popular in the 90s for some reason. Apart from some typically frustrating puzzles the game actually holds up really well! In large part due to its hand-drawn graphics I'd say, but it's also really well-written and funny. And a little dark.

And last but not least, I'm getting obsessed with Underrail. It's an RPG that mixes up old school fallout with the metro games. It's hard as nails and I have to admit I'm struggling a lot. There is no indication of enemy 'levels' and little in terms of zoning off areas so you can easily walk into enemies and quests that are way above your current abilities. Things like trading are also pretty hardcore, as merchants won't just buy any old thing off you. They are looking for specific things to barter and won't buy anything else or more than what they need at any given time. This has some frustrating aspects to it but it also discourages you from doing the usual 'grab every last thing you find' RPG stuff. Oh and the leveling system is pretty cool too. You can opt for a classic RPG system where you gain XP for killing enemies and completing quests if you want to, but the way the game is intended to be played is with a system that levels you by finding 'artifact' items. It sounded a bit dodgy at first, but the game does a good job spreading these around and it's basically a way to reward and encourage you to explore. It works a lot better than I expected! Because you can find these artifacts in a lot more situations (on an enemy, in a container, out in the 'wilderness') than just combat ones it spreads out your progress a bit more smoothly. I'm really digging the game but I just hope I won't get to a point where I won't be able to handle the enemies anymore. This game is pretty hardcore so I think it's entirely possible to gimp your build, and there is no respeccing as far as I can tell.



Oh and I bought RealMyst (a remastered version of the original Myst but with free movement) and I bounced off it pretty hard. The puzzles felt way too obscure and trial and error for me. I haven't deleted it yet but I'm not sure I will be able to get over it...

I got addicted to Hades. I'm playing on Switch but it's also on Steam right now. Other consoles "at some point".

It's the guys who did Bastion and Transistor - I never played those but Niall did. It's a rogue-like but based in... well... Hades. You play "Prince Zagreus" who is trying to escape his father's realm and gets the aid of random gods such as Zeus and Poseidon. There is some narrative that unfolds randomly. You have different weapons to unlock and different boons from the gods including duo boons (a mix of 2 gods for more powerful effects) and you can also upgrade both yourself and your weapons. Each time you die you start over again but save up 'darkness' that you collect to boost yourself. There are other currencies to unlock other permanent boosts as well.

I'm not even going to try to go into all the detail I could. It's incredibly fun and easy to pick up but once you delve into it, it can get quite complex. I nearly escaped last night, on something like my 19th attempt. I got to what I assume is the final boss and got splatted. There are higher difficulties once completed so it's a good, never ending game. It looks and sounds beautiful. I've noticed no framerate issues at all on Switch. No clue how it plays on PC but it's been on there in early access since late 2018 apparently.

I got another friend who is obsessed with Hades too Pev, it does look really good! I actually own a copy on the Epic store (it was 5 euros during one of their '10 euro off every item over 15 euros' sales) but I haven't played it yet as I'm worried this laptop won't be able to run it in all its glory. So I'm holding off on it for now. Have you played Pyre, supergiant's last game before this one? Also great!!

I'm currently playing Dreamfall, the sequel to the classic adventure game The Longest Journey. The story is great and the world very interesting and I'm really digging it. I also finished and loved the prequel to Life is Strange last week, Before the Storm.

Had a few misses too: I tried the remastered version of the original Myst and I bounced off it hard. The pixel searching puzzles were too obscure and the controls too annoying. Considering how tolerant I am for older games in general it's probably unplayable for anyone who hasn't played the game when it first came out. Or maybe autistic people who don't mind endless trial and error. You can tell it's a game from a time where people didn't have access to a lot of games at once...

Underrail turned out to be too needlessly frustrating in the end, and I uninstalled it. It's really a shame because it had so much going for it, but it's ruined by things that could have been solved relatively easily. For one there isn't a good map in the game and directions are pretty vague. If you take a quest from an NPC he will usually give you detailed directions on how to get to your goal, but in the log it just says "North East of X" or something. But that doesn't help much as the map is so shit, and there are so many interconnected areas and there are level differences too. The main madness is the walking speed though. You cannot 'run', and there is a LOT of backtracking and exploring to be done. Is it so fucking hard to add in a double click to run option, out of combat? I have better things to do than watch my character slowly mosey all over the map that I have already passed through 10 times before and completely cleared of enemies. I was putting up with it at the start because I liked so many other elements of the game but it became too much.

I also tried ATOM RPG, a similar game that tries a bit harder to be a fallout clone, and bounced off that one even harder. It wasn't bad, just...slow and cumbersome. After I'd played 2-3 hours in the hope that the game would 'click' for me I had a peek at HLTB.com and found out that the average playing time to beat the main quest was 38 hours. And immediately realized I would never get there. So I asked GOG.com for a refund and got it. Classy!

Glad to hear you have Hades Ox, once you get your PC back you'll get hooked, I'm sure! It's like a very upgraded Castle of the Wind I personally haven't played any of their games actually before this, but Niall played Transistor and Bastion, he doesn't have Pyre though (I think our friend does). A lot of people have been saying Hades basically takes the best bits from all their previous games and sticks them together.

The Myst games and others of that style have never appealed to me. I think I maybe tried a demo for Myst 4 years ago and just said nope. That was good of GoG! Is it something like if you've played less than so many hours they'll refund? I know EA does that but it's something like less than 2 hours which in some games wouldn't even get you out of the tutorial so is clearly designed to avoid refunds as much as possible.

Updated Castle of the Winds sounds amazing! Maybe I should play that again for the heck of it haha. Plently of time anyway.

GOG is super cool about refunds actually!

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/2115 ... ket-policy

As long as you don't abuse the policy (like, constantly buy games, play them and then return them) they are very flexible. See how easy it was makes me want to buy games on their platform more often tbh.

They are proof that being a good company will get them money. If I want a game and it's on both Steam and GoG I'll buy it on GoG every time, even if it's slightly more expensive (obviously if it was a big difference, Steam would win).

Yeah same for me. Of course I will still buy stuff on Steam if there is a good discount or something, but if it's a tossup I go with gog. Too bad they don't have as expansive a catalogue as Steam, or the exclusive rights of the Epic store. That last one is a piece of shit compared to gog and steam btw - the store search and library management is terrible. But they got a lot of free good games so hey...can't complain too much I guess!

I don't think I've ever gone to the Epic store. I'm still not a fan of digital versions of things anyway, unless I have to get it in that form. It took me years to get Steam (can't even remember why I did now) and I still dislike it though a large number of my games are on it. I confused myself recently as you can now link Steam, Origin and your Xbox games to GoG so I did. Which means I now try to do stupid things like click on Assassin's Creed and wonder why there's no 'play' button...

Haha! Yes gog is really doing some cool stuff with their store and platform. With all the different clients I use now it's the perfect place to get all my games in one place!

If i recall correctly I ended up installing it because it was required for certain games. In my case it was Counterstrike i believe. Good old 20th century memories.

For me it was the Orange box, no doubt. I mean looking back...HL2, TF2 and Portal? That was ridiculous value for money. If there ever was a way to get people to install Steam, that's the one.

Yeah there'll have been one specific game I had to have it for... stupid manipulative games.

I'm now playing Rise of the Tomb Raider, got it years ago when it came out, went to 25% then stopped. So I've restarted and am now up to that (and a little past) again. I've got the season pass too so I get all the extra stuff. I've just done some super creepy bits for the 'Baba Yaga' section.