DO NOT play the expansion. :P

I just quit after getting halfway through the first campaign. It's both really boring and really really annoying.

I finished Saints Row 2.

There are many ways that Saints Row 2 is better (I especially love how much more varied Stilwater and its people are compared to Steelport and how many more types of activities compared to SR3 and 4), but I love the wackiness of Saints Row 3 and 4 (especially Genki!). I hope Agents of Mayhem (set in the Saints Row continuity) combines the best of both worlds.

Noted thanks. When I do get round to playing an rts expansion it will be Yuri's Revenge. I hear tell that's excellent. Also, Kari Wuhrer, though sadly no Gemma Atkinson :(
Strangely all the other C&C expansions were pretty great.

Yes, and that's what pissed me off about this one.

Afrika (PS3)

I've been trying to get this game for a while, I loved Pokémon Snap and this is the closest equivalent to it I know of. You are a wildlife photographer, set up camp on the African Savannah. You must drive around taking photo's of the various wildlife, as well as taking part in missions requiring you to take specific photo's, such as an animal taking part in a mating ritual. There are 100 odd missions in all with around 50 different animals. The photography is very true to real life, with varying lenses, you are even able to change the settings, such as exposure. It even comes with a field guide, with a library of National Geographic footage to help you learn about the animals you find.

There are some minor issues: There is no fast travel, you have to start from your base camp each time and drive to the next destination, some animals won't appear on certain days, and a glitch that makes you unable to use a trap camera. Also there was another issue I had, which isn't the games fault: There are about 9 different types of antelope in the game including: Gazelle, Impala, Oryx, Dik Dik, Waterbuck, Topi etc, and they all look the same from a distance which made finding a particular species difficult to find. There is another big issue: The game was never released in Europe, I don't know why, though it might have something to do with the large amount of product placement (In one mission you must drive your Suzuki Jeep, to take a picture with your Sony Alpha Series Camera, to take a photo of a lion with a crittercam™ around it's neck and hand it in to National Geographic), fortunately the PS3 doesn't have region locking on it, however the game is considered rare so finding a copy for a decent price can be hard, especially if you want the US Version so that the text will be in English.

Overall it was a great game, probably my favourite Photograph based game... not that I can think of many. Also the difference between completing the main story, and getting 100% of the acheivments, is 4 photo's, so it's an easy platinum.

Ori and the Blind Forest Definitive (Xbox One)

Damn, did I ever have the wrong misconception about this game. The game I was playing was getting too grindy and I needed a break. So I got this on sale and thought it looked like one of those arty farty relaxing games to play before getting back to what I was doing. I never read any reviews, I had a general idea that it was highly rated. Well it's hard! It came as quite shock when I was expecting something easy and relaxing. But I committed to the game, got better (but not that much- I literally died hundreds of times!) and really liked it.

It's a Metroid style platformer and fine one at that. Great graphics, music and the difficulty was just about spot on for the main part, even if I did despise those chase scenes. Passin the harder section comes with equal parts elation at succeeding and relief that it's finally over.

Only one true negative, I did not like the save system. To start with, I do not believe "save any time" should ever be used in platformers. In this case it's the worst kind- one save that overwrites and consumes energy to use. It makes some parts too easy and yet still has the danger of accidentally saving yourself into an unwinnable situation when you have no idea what around the next corner. Two times I saved into a hopeless situation and was lucky enough to get out both times by temp reducing the difficulty to Easy- but it was touch and go. Normal difficulty is best and experts at these games can choose a Hard mode.

The definitive version has some extra areas, the above mentioned Easy difficulty and the ability to fast travel between the altar thingies. The devs also give you the regular version as well on Xbox and Steam...not sure about the GOG version. If you like Metroidvania games, get it.

Splinter Cell Blacklist

The best game in the franchise.It so good.The story is not as good as the conviction but overall it is great.

Finished both Alan Wake DLCs (not much to say as it is basically more of the same).

Finished also Edna & Harvey - Harvey's New Eyes. Quite a pleasant surprise as I didn't really like the first game because of its puzzles (a bit annoying for a point'n click). This one has almost only logical puzzles. I only got one major issue at the end where it made no sense and from I read on the forums, I am not the only one. Still I greatly recommend it to point'n clicks lovers.

Full list here.

Japanese School Life

A VN where - once again - you're an exchange student from America coming to spend a year in senior high school in Tokyo.

And again, you're a huge fan of Japan and when you actually arrive in Japan, you actually know about nothing about the country and it's culture...

You'll of course get acquainted with two schoolmates, a serious one with a secret and an extravert one.

Cliche, cliche and cliche again. Very bland even if nicely drawn and not badly animated.

If you feel the urge to complete every VN out there, why not, otherwise you may skip that one without missing much.

So far in 2017 : https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2017/post15

Shining in the Darkness (360)

The old SEGA Mega Drive dungeon crawler from around 1991. Probably not the best known game on the system, this gives a good description http://www.dungeoncrawlers.org/game/shining-in-the-darkness/ . It's a turn based first person dungeon crawler like early Wizardry, except with better graphics and a bit simpler. I played it as I plan to play through the Shining Force series and SITD is technically the first game in the series, even though it's a completely different style of game- Shining Force are top down tactical RPG's.

The game was pretty decent considering it's time period, the cartoon graphics are a step up from similar PC games of the same time. However it does get repetitive and the constant RNG'd encounters drag it down. I had to take a mid game break before coming back to finish it. Still it could be considered fun overall for people that miss the early Wizardry games.

I played it on Xbox 360 as part of the Mega Drive (or Genesis) Ultimate Collection. It's also available for PS3 if you can find it. For PC the DotEmu versions are gone, but it's on Steam- though I've read some views that the PC versions have some older crappy emulation. So mabye extract the ROM's and use RetroArch or something else instead.

Stasis is a point-and-click adventure played from an isometric perspective that pays tribute to a lot of 1970s/80s sci-fi horror movies and video games like System Shock and Sanitarium. You control a guy named John Marachek (pat yourself on the back if you recognize that reference) who's traveling with his wife and daughter across the solar system, which is done by going to sleep in a hibernation chamber while the ship makes the journey. Unfortunately, John wakes up on a strange ship in which the walls are painted with blood and his family is nowhere in sight.

The interface is very simple - if you put the cursor on something, you'll likely get a brief description of it, and the cursor will turn into a hand if you can pick up or manipulate the object. It's pretty linear, so you only have one or two puzzles going at a time and the puzzles are fairly easy to figure out if only because you only have a limited range of options at a given time.

The game looks fantastic in general, although the character animation is weird. Your character moves fluidly in a straight line, but when he changes direction he jerks like an 8-bit sprite. The pathfinding is all over the place; thankfully it usually isn't an issue but it's still kind of irritating.

It's a pretty hard-edged and downbeat story. It's quite gory - much moreso than a lot of the stuff it's imitating. I would say the game is more successful at creating a mood than telling a really good story. I enjoyed it to a point, but after a certain point it gets to feeling a bit too busy and fuzzy. The more I think about it, the more if question if I actually had it all figured out or not. Not in a fun David Lynch sort of way but more like, "Wait, what all happened now?"

I did really like that it's a game in which you can get killed. Having played adventure games almost since they started, I tend to be skeptical of the dogmatic insistence that the Lucasarts "don't worry, you can't die ever" approach is the only true way. Stasis hits a good balance in that if a situation looks dangerous, it probably is and maybe you shouldn't do something stupid like hang around a room while the big computer voice is ordering you to evacuate. If you do die, the game will automatically reload not too far from where you got killed, so you don't lose much. People who were traumatized by old Sierra games shouldn't worry, I think.

Chuck's Challenge 3D, Steam

Well, I liked this a lot. It's a successor to Chip's Challenge (which I also beat this year), and is a puzzle/action game; you move your character around a 2-D plane (name aside), collecting color-coded keys, pushing colored blocks onto colored pressure plates and into the water to form bridges, navigating ice slides and conveyor belts, avoiding enemies, etc, etc. If you know Chip's Challenge you know the basics of this game. I enjoyed it a lot; it sounds like there were technical issues at launch, but those were sorted out by the time I played it.

The game has a rewind feature, I suppose to make it more accessible than Chip's Challenge. To me, CC's difficulty (and occasional down-right mean-spiritedness) was part of the charm; no, I didn't enjoy dying in Blobdance thirty times in a row, but it certainly made finally pulling through exhilarating. I didn't use Chuck's Challenge's rewind feature, but still found it significantly easier (in fact, since they have the same number of levels, I can directly compare them: it took me about five times as long to beat all of Chip's Challenge's levels then it did for me to beat/get the gold medal in all of Chuck''s Challenge's levels). Still, it had some solid brain-teasers in it, and I recommend it to interested puzzle game fans.

Ghost Cleaner
It was a free game on game.giveawayoftheday.com two weeks ago and it looked like it could be fun. Unfortunately it's not. It's a Pachinko-like game (similar to Peggle) and while it is technically ok, it's too much luck based. And the difficulty of the levels isn't well-balanced. Some are very easy and you can't fail, some are complicated and you have to try over and over again before you are lucky and will succeed.

Soulless - Ray of Hope
The design of the game (graphics and sound) is great and yet it fails. Wants to be Limbo, but the controls are sluggish and so some sequences are very frustrating (especially the levels where you get chased and the second boss fight).

I got a bad ending. Have no idea why (the game wasn't very clear about it), but probably because I missed some hidden places or secrets. Won't play again to get a better one (and judging from the YouTube videos of this game also no one else did).

Complete list of finished games in 2017

Peasant's Quest

This is an adventure game from 2004, and is a parody of / homage to King's Quest. It's short, fun, funny, and recommended :)! (It's a free flash game which you can play in your web browser at the link above).

Space Channel 5 (Dreamcast)

I don't understand the setting at all, you're supposed to defeat aliens by copying their dance moves somehow. However foregoing the setting, it was a fun, albeit short, rhythm game which has more of a focus on memory then an ability to push 5 buttons 10 different ways in the space of a second repeatedly. Basically as the songs go on, the enemies will do a certain dance and you have to copy it (For ex: Up, Left, Shoot, Pause, Down, Right, Shoot), it is slightly more taxing than other rhythm games as you have to remember anything up to 14 commands while getting the timing right as well. If you mess up 1 command, the whole sequence is considered a fail, which lowers your rating or in boss stages, you lose a life. If your rating gets too low or your life reaches 0, you have to start the song from the beginning, which can be a pain in the ass cause most of them last around 10 - 15 minutes. There are only 4 levels, the last one being frustratingly difficult as it gets really difficult 10 minutes in. However the music is great and Michael Jackson also makes a cameo appearance as Space Michael (The names do not get much more original than this). Unfortunately it's not available as a digital download (But the sequel is for some reason) and for the length of the game, I don't think some of the prices of preowned copies are justified. However if you find a cheap copy, it's a great game.