Finally completed Life Is Strange Before the Storm. Such a disappointment after the first game.

I loved the original game but didn't get around to playing the prequel.

I love the setting, the characters and the atmosphere so much I'm willing to look beyond some bad dialogue as long as I get to walk around Arcadia Bay again.

True Colors looks promising. Also, I'm psyched about Life is Strange Remastered.

And finished Shank. It's short, but pretty fun. Guess I'll try Shank 2.

Recently finished Pale Echoes. It allows you to enable developer commentary. The developer appears as an additional NPC on various screens. You can talk to him to get the developer's commentary. I really like the feature. It would be hard to implement in some games but it is an interesting addition.

Already remastering it?

Life is Strange is six years old. It took 21 years before Gabriel Knight needed a remaster. I guess games age faster these days?

Already remastering it?

I guess games age faster these days?

They're just sprucing up the visuals and facial animations a bit.

The game still looks beautiful to me. I don't think it necessarily needs a remaster, but I don't mind.

I guess it’s relatively little work to get a “new” release out, create some buzz and get new sales. Not a bad idea by any stretch, the game is great and probably hasn’t sold very well, so the more people play it the better.

Alwa's Awakening

A fantastic game, start to finish. It starts off easy enough, gets really tough later on. Graphics and music are spot on. Don't get put off by the silly intro (looks good enough, the description is nonsensical), it goes from strength to strength afterwards.

Quite lengthy, too. I needed over 26 hours to 100% it, with 750+ deaths (the game helpfully keeps count for you).

Highly recommended.

8/10

I have recently finished Iconoclasts.

I had such high hopes for this game. I was in a mood for a quality platformer, heard so many great things about it, read excellent reviews - but ended up disappointed.

I have the utmost respect for the developer. It's a fantastic solo effort. The visuals and the character animations are great. But I have issues with some of the most praised aspects of the game, which surprised me.

I didn't enjoy combat. It's all about the boss battles, which are frantic affairs where it's hard to figure out what to do, even when the opponent's intentions are telegraphed. There's simply way too much stuff happening on the screen.

Fighting ordinary enemies is supposed to prepare us for boss fights, but it does a poor job at that. The basic movement and fighting mechanics are not properly introduced nor explained. That causes a lot of difficulties and head-scratching later on.

The puzzles are a mixed bag as well. Some are satisfying, but some don't rely on you being clever - they expect you to come back after 10 hours when you unlock the necessary skill. I guess that's normal for a metroidvania, but I didn't get that memo.

In the end, I don't think the story is really interesting or well told. I found the writing rather poor, and the characters are all unlikeable (and some of them utterly annoying). That was probably the most disappointing thing.

Just redid Wolfenstein Old Blood + New Order and Wolfenstein 2.
All back to back.
Just had an urge to kill Nazi's!
My opinion the New Order is defo my favourite.

Just finished Factorio. First I played it since it's release. It was really fun. After you "win", you can keep going and keep building your base. It was fun, although before I stopped I realized it felt like it was becoming more of a chore to keep everything running instead of being creative and building.

Would absolutely recommend.

Also played Remnants of the Precursors this weekend. It's Master of Orion 1, but updated. It plays great and looks great too.

Would also recommend.

Completed Doki Doki Literature Club last week (including the 'deleted file' ending). Now that is one messed-up game :-)
Currently getting back into Dead Cells with the new DLC. Highly recommended if you like platformers with tight controls and lots of action!

Last edited by robvv on 13 January 2022 at 9:56 am UTC

Finally completed peaceful campaign in Caesar 3 thanks to Augustus and roadblocks, after 23 years of on and off playing! Going through the military campaign right now. Augustus is exactly what this game needed and I would definitely donate to them if they had and option on their page. Unfortunately I did not see any donation link to do so.

Last edited by levellord on 13 January 2022 at 1:57 pm UTC

Currently getting back into Dead Cells with the new DLC. Highly recommended if you like platformers with tight controls and lots of action!

I'm trying out Dead Cells. After 3-4 hours, I'm enjoying it much more than Iconoclasts.

Ended Little Nightmare II, Jupiter Hell, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Underhero and Lenna's Inception.

The only game I'm currently playing with any consistency is Basingstoke.

Last edited by Mezron on 16 January 2022 at 8:10 pm UTC

My most recently-finished game is !Tanglewood. I did two playthroughs - one for each ending. It's quickly become one of my all-time favourite games.

I had to make !the small tweak outlined here to get it running on Xubuntu 21.10. I bought the game on GOG.com, so I don't know if this also applies to the Steam or Itch.io releases.

If you're not familiar with it: Tanglewood plays like what you would get if you combined 1990s puzzle-platformers (Another World/Heart of Darkness/Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee) with various 1990s mascot-platformer/action-game series (Sonic The Hedgehog/The Lion King/Ecco the Dolphin/Yoshi's Island/Kirby/Donkey Kong Country), but it never uses elements from these games wholesale - they're all given their own unique spin here, and it all mixes together very well as you play out the adventures of a lost and helpless wild animal who's looking for a way back home. It takes the audio approach of the former group of games rather than the latter, so it uses both silence and appropriately-timed music to set the tone (and the music is fab, too). Handling is like a mascot-platformer rather than a realistically-weighted puzzle-platformer, and deaths are one-hit kills as is typical of the puzzle-platformer lineage - but you get infinite lives, and restart-points are well-placed and reasonable.


You can almost feel the chill coming off of the wind sound-effects that accompany this stage.


Tanglewood's protagonist, Nymn, takes a walk in the woods.

The narrative is, as you would expect from a 16-bit game (which this is - though it has a native Linux release, it was actually designed for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, and comes with a ROM-file so that you can play it on real hardware or using an emulator of your choice), more-or-less silent, but personally I found this to be simple but effective. As is typical of many of the games that inspired it, it has two endings - one that you get if you didn't grab all of the 168 collectible fireflies that are hidden throughout the game, and one that you get if you grabbed them all. This also slightly affects how the endgame plays out, so the events in a playthrough for the good ending aren't quite the same as those for the bad ending.

I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the game - even the slightly frustrating ones trying to grab hard-to-reach fireflies so that I could get the good ending!

Hopefully the same studio's !next Mega Drive project will offer a native Linux version, too - it sounds interesting so far.

My most recently-finished game is !Tanglewood. I did two playthroughs - one for each ending. It's quickly become one of my all-time favourite games.

I had to make !the small tweak outlined here to get it running on Xubuntu 21.10. I bought the game on GOG.com, so I don't know if this also applies to the Steam or Itch.io releases.

If you're not familiar with it: Tanglewood plays like what you would get if you combined 1990s puzzle-platformers (Another World/Heart of Darkness/Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee) with various 1990s mascot-platformer/action-game series (Sonic The Hedgehog/The Lion King/Ecco the Dolphin/Yoshi's Island/Kirby/Donkey Kong Country), but it never uses elements from these games wholesale - they're all given their own unique spin here, and it all mixes together very well as you play out the adventures of a lost and helpless wild animal who's looking for a way back home. It takes the audio approach of the former group of games rather than the latter, so it uses both silence and appropriately-timed music to set the tone (and the music is fab, too). Handling is like a mascot-platformer rather than a realistically-weighted puzzle-platformer, and deaths are one-hit kills as is typical of the puzzle-platformer lineage - but you get infinite lives, and restart-points are well-placed and reasonable.

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You can almost feel the chill coming off of the wind sound-effects that accompany this stage.

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Tanglewood's protagonist, Nymn, takes a walk in the woods.

The narrative is, as you would expect from a 16-bit game (which this is - though it has a native Linux release, it was actually designed for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, and comes with a ROM-file so that you can play it on real hardware or using an emulator of your choice), more-or-less silent, but personally I found this to be simple but effective. As is typical of many of the games that inspired it, it has two endings - one that you get if you didn't grab all of the 168 collectible fireflies that are hidden throughout the game, and one that you get if you grabbed them all. This also slightly affects how the endgame plays out, so the events in a playthrough for the good ending aren't quite the same as those for the bad ending.

I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the game - even the slightly frustrating ones trying to grab hard-to-reach fireflies so that I could get the good ending!

Hopefully the same studio's !next Mega Drive project will offer a native Linux version, too - it sounds interesting so far.

The MegaDrive cartridge is a bit expensive, but I'm saving the page for later

The MegaDrive cartridge is a bit expensive, but I'm saving the page for later

If you already have a flash-cart, you could grab the digital release and use it with that, too! ;)

They also released it on cartridge (along with another game, Xeno Crisis) !for the Blaze Evercade.

The MegaDrive cartridge is a bit expensive, but I'm saving the page for later

If you already have a flash-cart, you could grab the digital release and use it with that, too! ;)[..]

I don't. However, there is something to buying a Megadrive cartridge in 2022, that cannot be matched with a simple "digital rom" download

I don't. However, there is something to buying a Megadrive cartridge in 2022, that cannot be matched with a simple "digital rom" download

Very true! I still love seeing this sort of thing every time when it comes to the old cartridge-based systems, though the digital versions suit me better due to the convenience, these days.

And that brings me neatly to the game that I finished today: !Micro Mages, which is a modern NES game, available on cartridge and also digitally from Steam and Itch.io (I grabbed it on Steam). It's a vertically-autoscrolling platformer for up to four players who take on the roles of four brightly-coloured mages on a rescue-mission, and has the interesting twist of restricting itself to the capabilities of launch-window Famicom/NES games - !it fits into only 40KB, and doesn't use any memory-mappers or other on-cartridge hardware that allowed for fancier games.

There isn't a native Linux version of Micro Mages, but the Steam release works fine with Proton. However, I found that the best Linux experience for this game is to take the NES ROM that they provide you with and run it in your native emulator of choice - that way, you can make save-states between worlds instead of having to write down passwords.


Micro Mages via Proton (windowed).


Micro Mages on an Anbernic RG351MP - an ARM-Linux handheld that's focussed on emulation and source-ports (this one is running the 351Elec custom firmware).

Micro Mages is short-but-sweet (it's made up of eight bite-sized worlds, with the latter four being "hard-mode" remixes of the first four), and I thoroughly enjoyed it - the mechanics and handling are all well-designed and fun to play around with, and the character-designs (though tiny, as implied by the game's title) are all packed with personality; I particularly liked how holding down on the d-pad (or whatever you've mapped your directional inputs to) will simply cause your mage to dance on the spot. There are a number of references to genre-defining NES games, too, all of which made me smile.

I haven't gotten to play the game with multiple people yet, but it's clear that it should be a chaotic experience that's quite different from playing it solo, since with more people you'll be competing for power-ups and trying to work together to take down enemies and bosses.

Definitely another one that I'm glad I picked up.

Last edited by Pengling on 6 March 2022 at 11:04 pm UTC