August - November 2021 Progress Jump to next post
Finished games:
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Blaster Master Zero
6.5 hours playtime
no achievements
★★★★☆☆
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BoxBoxBoy!
5 hours playtime
no achievements
★★★★☆☆
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Gears of War: Ultimate Edition
~9 hours playtime
no achievements
★★★★☆☆
GAME
PASS -
Gunman Clive 2
1 hours playtime
no achievements
★★★★☆☆
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Lara Croft GO
~8 hours playtime
no achievements
★★★★☆☆
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Mirror's Edge: Catalyst
12.1 hours playtime
no achievements
★★★★☆☆
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NieR:Automata
36.5 hours playtime
31 of 48 achievements
★★★★★★
GAME
PASS -
One Finger Death Punch 2
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PC Building Simulator
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Psychonauts 2
31 hours playtime
57 of 57 achievements
★★★★★★
GAME
PASS -
Rain on Your Parade
5 hours playtime
8 of 22 achievements
★★★★★★
GAME
PASS -
Rhythm Thief & The Emperor's Treasure
5 hours playtime
no achievements
★★★☆☆☆
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Risen
29.4 hours playtime
no achievements
★★★★☆☆
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Shadow Warrior
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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
68.2 hours playtime
no achievements
★★★★★☆
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Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward
29.4 hours playtime
no achievements
★★★★★☆
A third-person platformer. This was a long-awaited release, as the original game released in 2005 (and there was also a short VR spin-off that released in 2017, but it was more of a point-and-click), and many have waited for a proper continuation of the story. Now, after years of accumulating hype, the sequel is finally complete and honestly, it surpassed my expectations. It was an amazing experience to play it from start to finish.
+++ Well-written story with great comedy. I exhausted every single dialogue option I had.. the dialogues were so good, I didn't want to miss out on any of them!
++ Great soundtrack that surpasses the original game's music
++ Beautiful artstyle, modernized while still keeping the charm of the original art
+ Combat was OK, definitely not the game's strongest suit since you're not going to play the game just for the combat anyway, but it's serviceable
| Accessibility options available which can disable fall damage, enable invincibility or make combat sequences easier and faster to complete. There are also options for larger subtitles, easier-to-read fonts and color-blind modes.
| There are minor stuttering issues when breaking some objects, it doesn't really happen often though. Also that recent update might've fixed it but I'm not 100% sure.
- Having only 4 slots for 9 powers total made switching between a bit inconvenient. Fortunately, the game at least lets you enable additional controls that allow you to use a certain power without having it equipped, freeing up a slot for one of the 8 other powers.
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Psychonauts 2 deserves all of the praise it got in their entirety, and I think it has a fair shot at becoming the GOTY 2021. I absolutely would love to see more of the Psychonauts series, and if they need an another 16 years to make a game of such quality, then so be it. A must-play for anyone.
A comedy puzzle adventure game. The game calls itself an "unique blend between Untitled Goose Game, Donut County and Katamari" and I don't think that there's a better way to describe it. I found this game to be a good stress-reliever and it hasn't failed to improve my mood yet. I might just replay this game the next time I'm feeling down - I happen to love the kind of humor this game has :D
++ None of the jokes overstay their welcome, and the game keeps that up from the beginning up to the very end!
++ Creative levels, full with variety when it comes to objectives. At no point in the game I felt like the game was repetitive.
+ Lots of references to other games and various other media.
+ Simple, but cute artstyle.
| Starts out a bit slow, but it picks up after you gain the thunder powerup
| Short, but the game makes up for it by primarily focusing on quality over quantity
| Very easy, accessible for everyone regardless of their age or skill level
Heavily recommended if you're looking for a game to chill with and have some quality laughs while at it. There's also a DLC coming out for it this month with more levels and powers if you end up needing more!
Played on SteamRisen is an action-RPG, created as a spiritual successor to the Gothic series made by the same developers. Apparently there was a dispute that caused Piranha Bytes to lose the rights to the Gothic series temporarily, resulting in Gothic 4 being created by a different studio, while Piranha Bytes went on to start a new series. And honestly, this game should've been the true Gothic 4, as it inherits a lot of merits and flaws the Gothic games had.
++ Large, beautiful world, worthy of exploring every nook and cranny
+ Good replayability - there are 3 factions and you can choose to side with only one per playthrough, there are different fighting styles as well
+ While not without flaws, the combat is challenging and quite fun
+ Quests with lots of different ways to complete them
| Little to no handholding
| English voice acting isn't either particularly good or bad. It's just kinda there.
| The story isn't anything special, but it's good enough for you to care about it
- Choices don't really have any consequences in the long run
- Requires a lot of savescumming, as you'll die very often. Even if you don't mind that, it'll get annoying real quick, since...
- ...loading times are a bit long, even on a modern powerful PC with a SSD.
- Some bugs and general clunkiness is to be expected, especially without mods/patches. You need to cap the FPS to 60 (or 120?), as jumping and climbing tends to break if your frame rate goes higher than that.
I recommend playing this game if you like hardcore RPGs like Gothic. It could also serve as a good starting point for those who want to get into hardcore RPGs.
Thank you Cece09 for the gift!
Unfinished games:
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Baba Is You
~5 hours playtime
no achievements
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Cookie Clicker
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Dicey Dungeons
3.5 hours playtime
4 of 53 achievements
GAME
PASS -
Hades
37 hours playtime
26 of 49 achievements
GAME
PASS -
Kirby: Planet Robobot
2 hours playtime
no achievements
- Baba Is You turned out to be really good, even if it makes me feel dumb in some levels. GAME IS FUN!
- Damn it Cookie Clicker, I thought I freed myself from you already, until you showed up on Steam of all the places… and now I’m stuck in this rabbit hole again. Oh well, at least I can run it in the background while playing something else.
- I’m surprised to see Dicey Dungeons actually making RNG fun… or maybe I’m just lucky? I only completed the first episodes for all characters so far, so my luck may still change. Either way, I’m enjoying it so far.
- I thought I wouldn’t like Hades… which ended up being one of the biggest lies I’ve ever said. This game is a goddamn masterpiece. I already got to the credits but I’ll continue playing until I see the epilogue and complete a run with Extreme Measures 4.
- Haven’t played too much of Kirby: Planet Robobot yet, but it seems like more of the same, but with an extra gimmick. It’s still fun to play, though.
Current progress
does not include games from the "won't play" list and non-Steam backlogs
Notes
It’s been 4 months since my last post and honestly, I’m disappointed in myself that I’ve let procrastination take control of me again, so I’ll work on getting the monthly schedule back up and running to stop the blog post backlog from pilling up again. But hey! It was JUST 4 months since last post! Not 7 months like with the previous one! That’s still an improvement! xD And I’ll have to wrap up this year somehow so that’s a nice way to force myself into making a post next month :D
I’ve changed the way I write reviews, starting with this post. Writing reviews takes me too long, even if I want to write something short, so I’ve been looking for a way to make it easier - so I decided that I’ll now write the pros, mehs/neutral traits and cons of a game in a list. I found it faster to do it that way, and it has a nice bonus of being more concise.
Also I added the XGP and Amazon platform icons to BLAEO Generators yesterday. I didn’t bother making a changelog since it’s such a small update, but I figured I’d at least mention it here.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
Good to read from you! I wasn’t really active the last months either…well that just happens. It’s hard to stay committed to something for several years. Even if it’s something fun like BLAEO.
Great games on your finish list. I’m looking forward to playing Risen one day. About 30 hours of playtime sounds manageable. So far I’ve only played the first Gothic game though and since I like to play games in order…
I’ve changed the way I write reviews, starting with this post. Writing reviews takes me too long, even if I want to write something short, so I’ve been looking for a way to make it easier - so I decided that I’ll now write the pros, mehs/neutral traits and cons of a game in a list. I found it faster to do it that way, and it has a nice bonus of being more concise.
I like the changes. And I know what you mean. No matter how short I try to get my reviews, it still takes such a long time to write them.
Yeah, it is like that sometimes, some months you just get too lazy to write anything, but once you do manage to get yourself to work on a post, it does feel really good to finally get it finished and put out here to share your thoughts with others. And hey, you still made more posts than I did this year, so it’s not that bad :)
I’m sure you’ll get to play Risen one day. And Gothic 2 is still well-worth the time, so there’s no need to rush.
Thanks! I had some suspicions if writing reviews like that would bring down the quality, but that helps clear those doubts away. And yeah… if it takes too long to write reviews, a faster way to write them would be good. Then you can use the saved time on something useful, or just get some extra time working on the backlog.
It’s definitely great to hear some other thoughts on the games one played. And it makes games more memorable to write reviews about them, thinking about what was good and what was not so good in a game.
I’m looking forward to playing Gothic 2, yet at the same time I dread the thought of getting into such an old game. It takes quite some time to finish if I remember correclty, doesn’t it? Way longer than Gothic 1 I think. Did you have trouble getting it to work properly on a modern system?
Yeah, Gothic 2 is longer, especially since it has a whole expansion pack that adds a lot of content.
Gothic 2 runs poorly out-of-box on modern systems so you need mods to get it to run and not crash on you within minutes. I’ve installed PlayerKit and SystemPack for my playthrough, but I’ve heard about Union which is supposed to improve the game even further than those 2 mods. I highly recommend checking the game’s PCGamingWiki article or Steam guides (most of them are in either Russian or Polish, but there are some in German or English too).
If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also look into installing a DX11 renderer, which improves graphics and may or may not improve performance even, but there’s quite a lot of different versions of it, so you’ll may have to do some experimenting to figure out which renderer works best for you. This and this renderer seem like good starting points.
Thank you very much for your detailed explanation. PCGamingWiki is truely a blessing, I’m always checking a game’s entry before installing it, even for more modern games. I’ll make sure to look at your pointers before starting Gothic 2. Now I’m even a bit intrigued ;)
Woah, congrats on all of you assassinations this month! Someone has been busy! How was Nier? If you want all the achievements but don’t want to do some of them. (One in particular) there is a vendor that just lets you buy them.
Thanks! This is a post for 4 months btw :) There’s no way I could’ve completed all of those games in just 1 month, that would be insane haha
Nier was amazing! It’s was so fun, and the story was a huge emotional rollercoaster. Though it did get really easy towards the end because I had an EXP Boost chip equipped most of the time and I got my weapons to lvl 4. Can’t wait to play Replicant now lol
I know there’s a vendor for achievements but I was just too lazy to get them all.