A game I played with my kids. Like often in point and click, it forced me to go back and forth repeatedly when I didn't understand clearly what was expected to unravel the story, exactly why I don't like this genre. Overall, it's basic, in animations, voices, sound, music or story but it's a nice modest introduction to gaming for kids I'd say.

V (yeah, let me spare myself some Vs) is a 2010 classic where you have to travel across a spaceship to rescue your partners. The trick is gravity messes with you. The short levels are never too mind-boggling and I finished the game in just 2 hours (but most of achievements are really hardcore and for PGM). With its big pixels and savvy gameplay, I feel like V can withstand forever the test of time.

A simple (even if wacky) concept : blocks fall through the sky while lava (or whatever) forces you to go up, so you have to use the falling blocks, sliding atop them or on their sides, to escape death. Of course, some enemies and a couple of bosses come uninvited to make it more difficult, but on the other hand, you can also pick up bonus (shield, higher jumps, dashes, higher start point…), some time-limited others permanent. It's the perfect game for short sessions of 10 or 15 minutes, and when added, I spent 10 hours until I finally beat the last boss, and I kept fond memories of this game.
And there's only 3 games left on my ABC list !

I dropped this game after 1 hour because of the way it deals with stealth and gunfights. I felt like in every level, the game forced me to always approach situations in the same way : come closer to a lone enemy, kill him stealthily, repeat with the next bad guy and when there's just a couple left, you can kill them with loud shooting. I thought the game would more look like X-COM but it's not even a distant relative, so not for my taste.

What a good game ! (CAUTION : little spoilers ahead)

Like some CD Projekt games :wink wink:, I heard this one was released in a pretty bad state, with buckets of (sometimes game-breaking) bugs. There remains some (the erratic pathfinding of NPC) but KCD's still a gem : you start as an ordinary Middle-Age fellow, son of a blacksmith in a small Moravian village, who finds himself entangled in war and a broader story, and I really felt the slow evolution till you're some sort of a knight. And yet, even when you're more powerful, you're never OP and even often helpless in a way, because for example, it's hard to win when you fight alone against more than one enemy at a time. So, all the game long, I kept that feeling of vulnerability while going through the woods. The scenery is BTW magnificent, lively and feels real, especially in the wild.

I enjoyed the different junctions in the story and different outcomes depending of your choices and the way you play : you can focus on building your character, leveling up in hunting, gathering herbs, alchemy, theft, fight, etc thanks to side quests or "free play", or you can just ride the main quest. The plot and the twists are interesting. It's rare a game makes me want to learn more about real history but I wanted to do so with Middle-Age Bohemia.

Oh how much I loved hunting in the woods, stealing and slaughtering poachers, walking the countryside always on alert after a couple of early deadly encounters with bandits (or worst, Cumans). My best time was when Black Peter set a revenge ambush the day after I managed to beat him during the tournament. Or maybe that quest with the bon vivant priest, where you share good food and good girls, and finish drunk together naked in fields at sunset. All in all, I'm full of such nice memories of the game so it's hard to retain my best one.

A special facepalm to myself when I understood only after 30 hours how to "perfect block". Well actually I knew how to do it because I had read it on forums but it didn't work and I was puzzled : the point was I had not triggered the appropriate quest (which kind of end the fighting tutorial) and so, perfect blocking wasn't yet possible… After that, duels became much easier and entertaining !

June and July 2020 were Terraria months, with around 90 hours spent (and the end of the game yet to overcome).

I will not present this gaming behemoth, just say that I managed to progress till the Lunatic Cultist but then stalled against him, and decided Terraria months were over. If anyone has a couple of hints for this lunatic guy, I'd be happy to beat him (and later the game).

Just another HOG game, with nothing wrong in the mechanisms but always the same dull story of love, hate, good and bad guys, malediction and patronizing divinities.

The last Teddy Floppy Ear game was not the best of the series. OK, it's a game catering to children but the driving feeling is really bad, the power-ups vary from lousy to impenetrable and the tracks seems to date back to the Nintendo 64 era. Moreover, it's not an easy game and I doubt a kid could win by himself all the races in different modes. It's as much a chore to win a string of championships, as to pick up stars on tracks or to beat time trials. Kudos to the people that got all the achievements of this game, must not have been a sinecure.

After my summer Terraria marathon, I followed with a big BB surge.
I succumbed to 2 DLCs (Beast and Exploration and Warriors of the North), unlocked a couple of tricky achievements, and like for Terraria, I realized I was over my whim after 111 hours between August and September !

Like many (all ?) simulator games, this one is getting repetitive once you've grasped the gameplay loop. It's interesting if you want to learn how to build PCs (I already knew most of the basics) and it's a technical feat to render every PC components and emulate how they come together in a machine, but as a game, it's not very fun to me.

One more LEGO game completed. This one is as buggy as former games : I had to start a second campaign on another save slot to unlock one achievement (fortunately unlockable in the first level), some jumps have to be done in diagonal with the pad while your character jumps straight onscreen. Many achievements required quite some grind. Finally, I'm not really keen on LOTR, and the universe is a bit too dark to fit LEGO but I enjoyed my time.

I managed to see through the end of HCT campaign and I think I'll try to unlock every achievements (not sure I'm patient enough to persevere through the endurance races though).
I have mixed feelings about this game : I regret you can keep almost always the same car, whether the track is twisty or straight and speed-oriented. Once you get the power-ups, your car is way better than your opponents' and beating them in the first levels in order to get all gold medals becomes casual. The weather or tracks variations are nice but I would have really loved if they had also implemented variations of AI behaviors, or completely different modes, because every single race feels more or less the same : you start last, catch up many cars in a glimpse and then you try to overtake number 1 and 2 rubber-banded cars, which are always miles ahead in front of others, and you usually manage to do so near the end of the race. It's often more challenging to pick up the badges scattered on the track than winning the race.

Some 15 or 20 years ago, touted by football-loving friends, I had played a version of Football Manager, when it was still called Championship Manager. But after a short time of play (with Bordeaux, this I still remember), I had dropped it because of the lack of control on the team and the lack of feedback on what happens : I felt frustrated not to know how my choices and actions (recruitment, training…) were taken into account to make my team win or lose a game and a championship.

When EGS offered FM2020, I thought it was time to give it another try. But in spite of all the tweaks and adds of this modern version, the symptoms remained. There's at once too much to grasp (and it's a blessing you can delegate many tasks and chores to different AI people) and too little hints for me on why you lost this particular game. Although I know well football, playing FM still feels like a slot machine where after you chose your tactic and tickled a few cursors, your most common task is to repeatedly click "next day", and watch your team win or lose games : some players seems to enjoy looking for golden rookies in hidden places, scrutinizing endless columns of numbers, or even cheesing the game with OP tactics but after all these years, I still don't.

This game recalled me of a small and old game I played on Windows 95, where you had to split the screen while avoiding bouncing objects to touch your cursor. Therefore, PGP has not an innovative gameplay, it only adds moe girls pictures in the backgrounds you unveil, hence "pretty girls" name. Once you've caught the different enemies patterns, it's quite easy to complete and get all achievements.

This is the little brother of Hexcells games (same dev), but a bit shorter and easier than these. There are 50 levels of increasing difficulty, and the learning curve is very progressive. It took me less than 3 hours to complete all the puzzles.

I'm not the biggest fan of rogue-like but 2 of them captivated me recently and I can't help comparing Hades with Dead Cells and the former makes almost everything better. So why is Hades better than Dead Cells ?

• Hades is shorter : my main grief about DC is the long runs. You can spend up to 1 hour on a run and lose it all in a few seconds against a nasty enemy or a mid-run boss, because of a bad weapon drop or a personal blunder. In Hades, I'm much more tempted to try another run because they take only around 30 minutes. The backlash is Hades only has 4 worlds while there are many different levels in DC (especially with DLCs) and therefore a greater variety of foes. But even if Hades first ending can be easily attained, if you want to complete all the side quests, unlock every trinkets, etc, you can easily play 100 hours and still have a lot of fun.

• Hades is easier : I managed to reach the end for the first time in around 35 or 40 runs. Since there are less different enemies and bosses than in DC, their patterns are easier to memorize. The best idea of Hades is the way you can adjust the difficulty level once you've beaten it, hence lengthening its life-span with potential tens of hours ; DC introduced this idea too but the tuning felt less astute than Hades' and more punishing with only stronger enemies and a weaker protagonist. Hades is sometimes too easy with certain combinations of boons and weapons, and sometimes on the verge of being muddled when there are a lot of simultaneous (positive and negative) visual effects. But these are petty flaws.

• Hades has a great background story : DC has some sort of narrative but it didn't really catch my attention while in Hades, unveiling the story and the characters, understanding their motivations was my main reason to keep on playing till the epilogue. The gameplay is great but coupled with a compelling story, the game's even more enticing.

For all those reasons, I understand Hades is 2020 GOTY of many, and it certainly is mine too.

Who could have thought I would play and like a hunting game, where you mainly walk in nature and occasionally shoot a bullet every 10 or 15 minutes ?

I'm not a hunting or weapons aficionado, quite the contrary in fact. But I, as many, experienced 2020 lockdowns and this game (a bit like American and Euro Truck Simulator I found out during Spring 2020) offered a nice alternative to real walks in the countryside, holidays spent in nature or finding out new places. It's calm and contemplative, it's more of a hiking simulation in beautiful natural areas than a hunting one, even more so if you decide not to shoot animals but only take them in pictures for example.

I played this for a couple of days, around the end of 2020. I had not put my hands on it when it got released, back in 2009, only had heard good things about the game back then, which got me to buy it on GOG a few years ago (it's not on Steam, you can only buy it on GOG and Origin).
After playing it a couple hours, I went to read reviews on GOG : most of them were praise and once again, they sounded to me more like nostalgic memories than objective evaluation of a game you play 10 years after release. The point is : can you like such a game today if you haven't played it at the time of its release ? I'm not sure and it applies to a lot of genres whose gameplay greatly evolved in 10 years (while others are timeless classics).

The real strong point of The Saboteur is undeniably the ambiance : if history must keep something from this last game of Pandemic studio (they were shut down by Electronic Arts even before the game was completed, hence the lack of polish in the story and fixing some bugs), it should be the use of mostly black and white graphics - with pinches of red for swastika flags and blood - in the zones you haven't yet liberated from the Nazis while freed districts get a new lease of life embodied by the come back of colors. The idea and implementation are both great, it gives a nice to WW2 Paris. The map (mainly Paris and some countryside) is reasonably big, with notorious landmarks and architecture, and the graphics are still OK under today standards. On top of that, music broadcast while driving is great. That's it for the good things.

As for the bad things, they are plentiful.

First, the story, characters and acting are really mediocre and stereotypical, while taking themselves too much seriously : the worst thing I saw was the bad guy, a blond Nazi being at the same time a crazy race car driver and a psycho torturer, supported by some sort of female bodyguard with prominent bosoms showcased in a black leather outfit, in a kind of representation you expect more in Saints Row. The 3 or 4 hours I played were full of such clichés. All women seemed designed to appeal to average male teenagers (for instance, you can enhance a nude mode where I think in the devs mind you're supposed to take full advantage of the HQ being located in a cabaret, crammed with topless dancers, oh, how convenient) and the protagonist acts like a "chick-magnet", eventhough he's a total jerk. These flaws have nothing to do with the fact the game is 10 years old : a lame story with crappy characters and bad acting remains forever a lame story with crappy characters and bad acting.

The gameplay, a mix of Assassin's Creed, Just Cause and GTA, was maybe OK in 2009 but it felt to me limited in all these three aspects. First, it's hard staying stealthy because enemies always peep on you, see you from miles away, even with disguises ; anyone of them can blow his whistle in a second and attract infinite waves of soldiers until you manage to escape the area. No matter how stealthy you are, you'll almost always have to pull your guns and shoot like a damned anyway, so why bother losing time trying stealth in the first place. The easiest way to escape is then to climb the roofs of Paris but parkour felt mostly unnecessary ("let's follow this AC fashion" must have thought the devs) and clankier than in AC. The main missions ("kill this man", ""help this guy", ""blow this up") recalled me how stiff old AC's missions were and how much I hated them : make one step out of the tracks and you're doomed to replay the mission from the last save point (no free saving points BTW, it's 2009 and a console game ported to PC). Like in JC, you have a gazillion things to sabotage but there's little interest doing so since the punishment of having to escape the zone after the explosion is worst than the reward. And it's unsurprisingly repetitive. Like in GTA, you can carjack the poor old passers-by without anybody (especially German soldiers) raising an eyebrow, and you even have to do so since you don't have any personal car : harassing and occasionally running over innocent people is funnily ironic since you're supposed to help liberating French people from brutal Nazi occupiers.