Played in 2013

Status: Completed once
Playing Time: About 20 hours

I had wanted to play the newest Tomb Raider for a while, but I wasn't sure about it so I didn't want to buy it. Luckily I got it as a christmas present from my brother so I could test it out.

The first thing that stands out is the gore in the game. They have really over-done it by making Lara Croft get her ass kicked in almost every single cut scene. The death animations try to be very brutal and the roughness of the plot is just laughable in its stupidness. Too much is too much, but I had fun because of it this time.

The game mechanics are actually very good. Jumping around and hanging on to ledges etc. are well done and easy enough to learn when compared to the previous Tomb Raider games, where you would just hopelessly jump towards everything and hope that you can grab a hold of it before realizing that you can't and you'd end up dying over and over again. The cover-based shooting is ok. I've played better and I've played worse. The adventuring mechanics are by far better than the shooting ones.

I really liked playing Tomb Raider when I was just exploring the seemingly open world and collecting relics. I liked the challenge tombs, but it was a shame that there are too few of those and they only have one puzzle in them. I would have liked to see at least double the amount of those in the game as Tomb Raider is a very short game.

The single player campaign is over way too quickly. The plot isn't very good or memorable, but it works as an excuse to put Lara jumping around the island. The final battle was a big letdown, because it was only quick time events without you even being able to move yourself. The beginning of the game also has way too many QTEs, but luckily besides from these two parts, the game doesn't rely on those nearly as much as I feared it would.

Oh, and it is just way too awesome to shoot a deer in the face with a fully upgraded shotgun or a grenade launcher and get survival experience because, you know, this is how you hunt the big game.

Status: Completed once
Playing Time: About 38 hours

This represents the Android version of the game.

As I liked Final Fantasy III very much on Android, I decided to buy Final Fantasy IV for it too for 14,49€. Having played FF games from I to III and VI to X-2, liking almost every one of them, I wasn't expecting this. That's because at least the Android version of FF IV sucks balls. Heavily.

In FF III for Android the battle system was adapted to fit the touch screen. This meant a turn-based system where you had plenty of time to scroll through the touch screen menus. In FF IV the battle is real time and the menus are very slow and clumsy. This is why the battles were not casual or any fun. They have also added an auto-battle system, which fights much better than you do, because it doesn't have to scroll through the menus. This means that if you want to be good at the game, you can't play it. This isn't the right way to make, you know... A VIDEO GAME!

The plot is also terrible. It is again some bullshit about needing four crystals, and then needing four different crystals, and then realizing that you are the chosen warrior of light and that you are not fighting the real bad guy until the end of the game, because the final boss is something that you have never even heard of. Usually I don't care about this kind of stupidity, but when the combat is about as much fun as eating your own shit, you need to have at least something else that is good. The plot isn't it in Final Fantasy IV.

One thing that annoyed the fuck out of me was that in nearly every cave one or more of your characters die. After the boss of the cave you have to back track the whole cave complex, because Teleport spell doesn't work. This means that at some point of the back tracking process there is something serious that requires a heroic sacrifice from one of your characters. Not only do you lose them, they also take your items, and you always get a character that has a lower level to replace them. This is why there is no real point in even leveling up your characters, because you know that they are going to die.

One of the moments when I was ready to destroy my tablet computer was when I was going through a cave. The encounter rate of the game is RIDICULOUSLY HIGH, so walking through like five floors took me almost three hours. "Well at least I'm getting some levels", I thought to myself. At the end of the cave my main character was level 32. Then he decided that he has to change his character class. After that he was level 1. "Well, at least my two mages who are with me leveled up too", thought I. Guess what, they sacrificed themselves in the next cave by petrifying themselves. Of course I couldn't use Esuna to revive them, because they were DEAD. Oh well, at the end of the game someone else used Esuna on them and they were alive. Fuck you, Final Fantasy IV, for reminding me that you hate me.

Final Fantasy IV for Android is a horrible game that costs way too much and should be made illegal to sell. Normally I kill every optional super boss in FF games, but in this one it would require another playthrough on the New Game+ feature. I have no intention of playing the game ever again.



Oh, and on a side note: I usually use most of my free time on a game when I start it until it is completed. I bought FF IV in September and finished it at the end of December, because even the thought of playing it was so goddamn revolting. The final 15 hours of the game were played in two days, because I had promised myself that this torture would be over before 2014 begins.

Status: Many online games and half of the campaigns of the original game played.
Playing Time: 100+ hours

Heroes of Might and Magic III was one of my favorite childhood games. We put countless hours on it with a couple of friends, and when the game was on sale for $3,99 on Gog.com, I decided to re-buy it. Then came the Fall Insomnia Sale and the price was lowered to $1,99. The friends who I used to play it with over 10 years ago also decided to buy it. The old gang met again, first via Gameranger and then by using Hamachi to create online gaming sessions, even though the online servers of Heroes of Might and Magic III have been taken down a long time ago.

It is weird how Heroes of Might and Magic III is still easily the best turn-based strategy game there is. Everything is just so balanced, the game is easy to learn, and it is so addictive. Night after night we would suddenly notice that we have played like 8 hours straight and we should have been sleeping for hours. Yet we still had to take one more turn.

The most memorable game was a 3 vs 5 game with two friends against 5 hard computers on a ridiculously large map. The game took 12 hours and we played it in one go. For like four hours we were getting assraped by some of the overpowered enemy heroes having better stats than us, yet we wouldn't give up. Slowly we advanced and then I accidentally killed one of the greatest enemy heroes on the battlefield. Since the enemy wasn't able to retreat, I was able to buy the hero, who had so awesome spells, that it turned the tide of the game. The game ended with a magnificently epic battle with the last enemy hero having like a swarm of everything except for the best troops. When he was finally slain, we felt like we had achieved something big.

After a few games we decided to try the HD Pack made by fans. It really adds some very useful little tweaks to the game like the ability to split troop stacks by pressing shift. These minimal improvements are like the final addition that an almost perfect game needed. It also adds some more preferable resolution options, and when playing the game windowed, Heroes of Might and Magic III still looks great today because of its 2D visual style.

The only reason why the game doesn't get five stars is that it has a very limited number of maps, and most of them aren't designed for teams of 3 or 4 players. Of course there is the random map generator, but it is flawed and can create scenarios where one enemy is in a place where you just can't get to. Not being able to win a scenario is a bit of a turnoff. In 14 years the fans have made a lot of maps, which is good, but most of them aren't balanced well. One problem is that everyone wants to put the best artifacts and stat raising structures on the scenario, which makes the heroes too overpowered. But when you find that one great map, it gives you good times for a long while. The map editor itself is great and very easy to use, so it isn't a big problem to create your own maps either.

Status: Completed once
Playing Time: About 51 hours

The Saboteur is a GTA copy that has pretty much the same game mechanics as GTA IV has. However, the things that annoyed me like fuck in GTA IV, seem to be absent in The Saboteur. For example, escaping alarms is easier, because you don't have to hide after reaching the border of the alert zone. Your character can also do parkour style climbing in the vein of Assassin's Creed.

The setting is the strong point of the game. It doesn't take itself too seriously so it is just fun to kill nazis and blow up their buildings. There are a fuckton of those buildings, almost 1500 of them, but the main problem with them is just that the game is otherwise pretty short. It took me around 15 hours to complete the plot, and over 35 hours to destroy the buildings. If the game had like double the missions, it would be a lot better. It would have been nice to get something from destroying the buildings. Now it is easier to escape when there aren't nazi towers everywhere, but when you have destroyed them all, you sure as hell don't have any missions left. Something like a mega fucker super cannon would have been a nice reward.

Visually I liked The Saboteur a lot. The nazi occupied areas are in black and white, and that's an okay solution to add some hard grittiness to the serious points of the game. When you take over the areas, the colors come back. And the colors are very vibrant and lively, so the game is absolutely beautiful to look at, especially at the countryside. The small coastal town of Le Havre became one of my favorite locations in video games, next to places like Hong Kong in Deus Ex, Tarant in Arcanum or Vivec in Morrowind.

The shooting and stealth mechanics aren't really anything special, and at some points combat was really annoying, but the disguise system works much better than, for example, in the newest Hitman, so I just mainly played the game while being disguised as a nazi soldier. I liked how the game doesn't throw anything supernatural in your face which every new WW II game seems to do. The final mission was also something I haven't seen before, so I liked it very much.

Oh... and you can strap dynamite to cows! Every game should allow you to do that.

Status: A couple of seasons played
Playing Time: About 100 hours

Fifa 14 proved out to be a disappointment. Everyone hyped that it has gone through a shitload of changes and that it is now a real football game. I beg to differ, because even though it is now harder to control the ball, the game itself has become a lot faster and it depends even more on long through balls than before.

The AI of your team mates is also really flawed. They only think about running forward, and if you want to build your attack by passing backwards, think again. Everyone just runs to the goal full speed and you can't do anything but pass to them, even though there might be like 8 defenders and the ball has no way of reaching your players. The passing assistance is always just putting the ball to the box, even if you aim backwards, and when playing with manual controls, it isn't much better, because your team mates still run like idiots and don't go to the openings that are clearly there.

The manager career mode has become slower, because they have made every menu like a touch screen social media interactive shithole, where everything is hidden behind a screen that takes forever to load. The scouting thing is quite a nice thing to add nevertheless. I was also a bit disappointed that when I started to play with the team I played in Fifa 11, Goiás from the Brazilian league, I just couldn't get money from anywhere, so I had to start playing with an English team. A part of this is my fault, but it would have been nice to be able to get even some budget from the team owners after two successful seasons.

Co-op play has been improved a lot. When playing with friends, everything seems to go very smoothly, and I enjoyed Fifa 14 the most when played as a party game with the usual gang we have for playing Fifa. Manual passing is a lot nicer when your friend knows how to play football and doesn't just run to the goal if there isn't anything to be gained there.

All in all, I expected a lot more changes and slower gameplay from Fifa 14. To me, football isn't long through balls all the time and then just running after the ball. This is how the game was played in the 1880s, not in the year 2013. Of course the game would be a bit better if I didn't put so many hours to Fifa 13 which is pretty much the same game, but with some differences that I like more. My comments may sound like I hate Fifa 14. That's not the case. I just expected a lot more. As an arcade football game Fifa 14 is still a good one.

And what happened to the soundtracks of Fifa? In Fifa 11 we had great music from like Charlotte Gainsbourg, Dum Dum Girls and Ana Tijoux. In Fifa 13 we had to listen to shit like Flo-Rida. In Fifa 14 we have the same kind of garbage for ears as we had in 13. Because of this, I usually play the game with muted sounds.

Status: Completed once
Playing Time: About 8½ hours

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a point and click psychological horror game based on the short story of the same name by Harlan Ellison. It tells the story of five people who are trapped inside a machine who calls himself AM, voiced by Ellison himself. The machine has destroyed every human being on Earth except for the five and it has tortured them for 109 years, playing sick and twisted games with their minds.

The basic idea is very fascinating. AM makes the five people confront their worst fears, their failures as human beings and the atrocities they have done before being trapped in the machine. A former military commander who killed his soldiers, Benny, has been turned into a crippled apelike monster. An office-worker, Ellen, has to confront the man who raped her in an office elevator. Gorrister has to face his wife, whom he drove insane, Ted must stop being a dick who uses everyone to meet his own goals, and a nazi doctor, Nimdok, must face his human experiments from the camps.

Every character's inner struggles are very disheartening, depressing, unnerving and quite horrible to follow. The more you advance, the more you'll know about their wrong-doings. It almost starts to seem like they have deserved the fate they are suffering. Yet you must find the compassion and forgiveness to first forgive them, and after that find out if you have the heart to do the same to the computer. Everything you do seems to have an effect on the outcome, and even though you can die in the game, death isn't perhaps the worst possible solution to endless torment.

As a point and click adventure game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream isn't the best there is. Basically the puzzles are logical and you don't have to rub everything to everything all the time to advance. Sometimes the puzzles really make you think, but you'll feel that you have accomplished something when you crack them. It is just too bad, that sometimes you'll have to find that one pixel from the screen to do something with. For example, I used two hours of my eight and a half hour game time searching for a white thing that was on a white surface. The game mechanics are not annoying or anything, but as far as the mechanics go, there are better point and click games.

The plot and the characters are where the game excels. I didn't enjoy Ted's part as much as I enjoyed the other characters, but most of the time the game just haunts you. The agony of everyone and everything is almost painful to digest, because the computer isn't everything there is to blame, even though it is a horrible being. Talking to it and learning why it is doing all this is very interesting and everything in the game really makes you think about the nature of humanity.

I loved the game for the unique experience it offered so much that I immediately bought the short story collection where the original text is included. The short story is even better than the game. It was also nice to notice how the basic idea and the character names are the same, but in the game the things go very differently, and the characters have been changed, so there is a reason to read the story and play the game. They have included a happy ending to the game if you do everything right, and it is an okay choice, because after a game you want to feel like you have accomplished something. To be honest, I liked the unhappy endings more, because they were very agonizing, just as the game and the short story. Gog.com did a great service to gamers by releasing the game that I had never even heard of, because it truly is a forgotten masterpiece. Six dollars for it is a ridiculously low price to pay.

Status: My dream course completed
Playing Time: About 10 hours

This is again one of those games that I get an urge to play every now and then. Sid Meier's SimGolf is a forgotten gem that would have deserved more publicity when it was released as it is very much fun as a casual simulator. The goal is to build a golf course of your dreams and then go play in it. Everything is made in a tongue-in-cheek style and the game is fun to play in small doses.

Building your own course is pretty simple. Just put your tees and holes somewhere and start getting paying customers. However, played like this SimGolf isn't that great. When normally a basic golf hole costs you like 5000 whatever the currency is, I usually spend like hundreds of thousands, sometimes even over a million credits, on one hole because I want perfection. Normal trees are a no no and everything has to be very expensive scenic trees. Water traps also cost a hell of a lot of money and I usually create whole lakes from them instead of a small pond in the middle of the course.

The way you get money is also pretty weird if you think of it. Everyone pays you when they complete a hole. The better their result, the more they pay, usually around 1000 or so credits. They also pay 500 bucks for a snack at the bar and so on. Members pay you more for the right to play, and your gold members pay you almost double the money that normal players would. Why anyone would like to be a member in this system is beyond me.

My courses never even try to look like a normal golf course, but they have all kinds of weird and inventive things in them. The game likes these kind of holes more and you'll have to remember that it doesn't try to be a die-hard golf simulator, but something that even a novice can master. The actual playing in the course is pretty simple because you just choose one of five hitting styles and click where you want to hit the ball. Still it is a lot of fun.

The humor of the game is also funny. Sometimes the golfers start romances or business ideas together, and if your course is fun enough, the land magnate I. M. Picky comes to play in your course. If he likes it, he will sell you more land to expand your course to. The other visitors include a wealthy heiress Ivana Richman who donates landmarks and a millionaire J. P. Bigdome who will invest in a seat in the board of directors. You can also sell holiday resorts to celebrities like Britney Aguilera or Bruce Springstone. The staff you can hire are marshals who threaten slacker players with violence or guys who eradicate the weeds from the course with laser cannons.

Overall, the game is very casual, inventive, well balanced and fun. It is too bad that it is almost impossible to get anywhere nowadays. It also has some weird graphics bugs with Windows 7 and, for example, sometimes when you try to delete a hole you have created, the tee for the hole will not go away, ever. These bugs weren't present when playing with Windows XP, so it would be awesome if download sites like Gog.com would release the game fully optimized for Windows 7. I would definitely buy it.

Status: Completed once
Playing Time: About 20 hours

After the Fifa-shitstorm I had, I wanted to play something else. I had played the first Assassin's Creed about halfway through on my friend's Xbox 360 back when it came out, but I wanted to know all that happens in it plotwise before starting to play the newer ones, even though I think that the scifi memory machine plot is pretty much just crap.

The first game is not without its flaws. The gameplay is annoyingly repetitive, making you do the same mini games over and over again to get to the assassination target. The assassinations themselves are a bit of a disappointment since I would have liked to be able to do them while staying completely unnoticed. In this you always had to do high profile kills and after that run away on the epic escape sequences.

However, jumping on and off the rooftops can be amazingly fun. The cities are very beautiful and sometimes I just had to stop at the top of a tower to admire the view. The jumping thing is mostly done well, but sometimes the character would just choose to be a retard and instead of grabbing a ledge he was jumping to, he would kick himself 180 degrees off the wall and fall to his instant death. Acre became my favorite city because of the very nice harbor area, even though the assassination mission there was a pain in the ass because my character would jump into the sea annoyingly often. When I free-roamed the place before the mission I never had the problem for some reason. The horseback riding sequences were really awful, but I enjoyed galloping through big masses of civilian people at the gates of the big cities.

The combat can look very nice, but I would have liked it to be something else than just pressing the block button down and doing counter attacks. When fighting on rooftops and towers it became much nicer, because it was just fucking awesome to throw guards off a wall into their deaths. I even managed to accidentally throw one assassination target off a tower when he and like 50 guards followed me when I was just trying to escape and re-assess the situation. Then I was teleported to the ground to hear his last words and the guards were still up there. The easy escape made me laugh.

The plot itself (The one happening in past Israel) is so so. The ending twists aren't to my taste, but somehow the scifi memory thing started to make a little bit of sense at the end of the game.

All in all, I had some fun with the first Assassin's Creed. The parkour style gameplay was the best and the worst thing in it, because somehow the character ended up doing things I didn't order him to do. I really hope that it has been improved in the sequels. The lack of subtitles in the cutscenes was a disappointment, because the characters speak very quietly when compared to the death screams of the guards. I had to change the volume of my TV too many times while playing so it was annoying. Everyone seems to think that the sequel is much better than the first one, so I'll be looking forward to playing it, because I will definitely play through the series little by little.

Status: Many career seasons and countless games with my friends played
Playing Time: Easily 350+ hours

The Last time I played a football game for countless hours was with Fifa 11 so I'll be comparing Fifa 13 to it most of the time.

First, the manager career mode has become a LOT better. Now the player values are based on their performance as well as their attributes, so you can actually make money when selling a player who is at the top of his game. The players also have a morale which sometimes pisses you off when all they do is complain, but mostly it works well too as long as you give them the playing time and wages that they should get anyways and don't go on a long losing streak.

The only thing I missed on career mode when compared to Fifa 11 was the ability to be a player-manager. The lack of the whole Virtual Pro thing was a bit of a disappointment, because starting a new pro for every player career isn't the same thing as using your pro in everything you do to get his stats beyond divinity on the field.

The online game is also better because of the Seasons mode where you get the points if your opponent quits in the middle of the game. In Fifa 11 it was just awful that when you scored a goal, the opponent would just quit. In Fifa 13 this doesn't happen, and if it does, you still get the points, so there is still something to be happy about. The main problem with the online game is the Ultimate Team mode, which isn't my thing, and it seems that EA is focusing more and more on it every year. I also kept getting disconnected a lot when trying the mode out.

Of course Fifa would not be Fifa if your teammates did not act like retarded dickwads from time to time. Through passes go to waste because your attackers are too good to start running at the optimal time, your players always seem to kick the ball with the wrong foot even though you just changed it to the right one, et cetera. Sometimes the referee runs in front of the ball when you are starting a counter attack, and if you are going through the whole field with a midfielder, your attackers always remember to run in front of him, resulting to the loss of the ball. There is always something like this happening, so Fifa 13 still isn't the perfect football game. A lot of these problems go away when playing with someone on the same side, because then you can add some real tactics to the game.

I loved the Virtual Pro aspect of Fifa 11 so much, that I still think it is a better game than this. However, Fifa 13 is about the best game in the world when playing 2vs2 with full manual controls with friends who are about the same level as you are. Those matches are always so intense and the experience is far beyond anything I've experienced when playing against the computer or online. I will always remember a game with Jeju United against the Pohang Steelers which ended 1-1 after extra time as it was perhaps the most exciting gaming moment of my life with all the four players shouting their heads off and jumping around the room filled with excitement because there were no dull moments in that game. I'm still waiting for the rematch, because these kind of games can't be solved on penalties.



EDIT: At the beginning of June I started playing Fifa 13 too much. At first I played a player career mode for almost three seasons. I got really frustrated by the fact that my manager sold EVERY SINGLE ATTACKER from the team except for me. He played the team on a 4-4-2 formation and I was the only striker, paired with a fucking central defender on the attack. The manager also sold all the good players and bought no new ones to replace them, so when I had promoted Bristol Rovers from nPower league two to The Championship all I had were the original reserve players from the first season. Playing against three and a half star teams with a half star team sucked so much ass that I decided to stop playing that career, because I wanted to play with the same team, not go to FC Barcelona which seemed to be my only option.

Then I decided to start playing Ultimate Team, which I said that I didn't like before. I got hooked on it really bad, feeling like I had to play at least 10 games a day to grind coins to buy packs. At some point it started to feel like a job, but instead of getting paid, your boss would just smear shit on your face. The only good card I got from opening like 100 premium gold packs was Iker Casillas who sold for 58 500 coins. One pack costs 7500 coins and you get about 500 coins from playing one game.

I was so hooked on The Ultimate Team that I was planning on pre-ordering the Ultimate Edition of Fifa 14. At some point the EA servers didn't let me play some of the match types anymore, complaining an error, and then I started flying off from the servers in the middle of the games themselves, resulting in contract and stamina losses and adding to my DNF% even though there was never anything wrong with my connection. The closer the release of 14 became, the more problems I seemed to have, because EA couldn't be bothered to do anything on their old games. Then after realizing that the Youtube scene of the "best" players were guys who promoted coin farming sites, I got really fed up with the whole mode altogether and decided not to pre-order Fifa 14 at all, even though I know I'll buy the game at some point from a sale and play the career mode or something, but no Ultimate Team for me ever again.

Status: Half of my walls filled with stupid posters
Playing Time: About 10 hours

For some reason I get the urge to play Sims 2 once or twice a year. The life simulator thing isn't that rewarding, because you'll always end up doing the same things, and when you have well over 100 000 simoleons in cash and your life goals completed, you don't have anything to do.

That's why my Sims 2 sessions are usually the type where I fuck around with the editor to create the greatest dream house ever by abusing bugs and such to put the garage on the second floor et cetera. That is fun for a few hours.

I also usually start a new family on my existing neighborhood and do the stuff that the game requires for you to have enough money to last a lifetime just because I want to have my dream house filled with the stuff I want to. Usually I like to create my own posters and paintings and make them as retarded as possible. You'll understand from the picture here, more so if you speak Finnish.

Overall I somehow like Sims 2 in small doses, but it doesn't offer anything for long term hardcore gaming sessions. I play the game with Nightlife, University and Pets addons installed, because they are the ones that actually add something nice to the gameplay. Other addons are pretty much just shit, because the game gets really really laggy when all the addons are installed, even on new computers, so I only keep the ones that are required for my experience.

Status: Completed once
Playing Time: About 67 hours

I was planning on paying the 19,95€ that Okami HD costs on the PSN, so it was nice to notice that at the start of April they put it on for free for the PS+ users.

The game's visuals are stunning even on today's scale and Okami HD looks absolutely beautiful, like a mixture of animation and a painting.

Running around as a wolf in the stunning scenery is very relaxing and Okami HD is at its best when you are doing nothing and just enjoying the atmosphere. The fact that the game is piss easy is just a big plus, because this isn't a game that people should play on their upward leaning playing stance but rather half asleep on their sofa or very intoxicated, letting the spirit of the astral wolf flow through them while riding on their turqoise-purple orca whale to the mouth of the Water Dragon.

Okami would easily be one of the best games of the PS2 if it wasn't for one castle where you have to complete almost brutal racing minigames to advance. When a game is this easy otherwise, the sudden change of style and difficulty just doesn't suit it. There is also one annoyingly hard racing minigame you have to complete if you want to get a platinum trophy. Being the whore I am, I had to complete it and because of that one castle and this race the game drops down from easy five stars to a measly four stars.

One of the trophies also requires you to learn every single fighting technique. One of them is called Brown Rage and it costs 2 million yen, which is almost half of the money you'll end up with on a normal playthrough. I almost laughed my ass off when I learned that Brown Rage is the ability to poop exploding pieces of shit. So basically I paid a fortune for shit. At least it is quite soothing to poop on the Lord of Darkness in the final battle of the game.

You draw a lot of things in the game. Mostly in battles and cut scenes, but the game also lets you draw a mask in a mission where you need to deceive the guards of a boss monster to believe you are one of them. My spirit wolf ran around the place with a dick drawn on his forehead and nobody suspected a thing.

There is also the hardest memory game I have ever crossed my paths with. It requires you to memorize the exact locations and order of 8 little spots that you get to look at for like two seconds. My brain just could not complete this so I ended up videotaping the sequence with my cell phone. I felt like I had crossed to the next level in hi-tech cheating on games.

Status: Completed twice
Playing Time: About 80 hours

I was hugely disappointed with Mass Effect 2 because it has been dumbened down from the first one so much. First of all, they have removed almost all your powers. In Mass Effect your character could have like 10 different powers to decimate the battlefield with. Now you have one. And some different types of ammo. This makes the game an ordinary cover-based shooter and I'm not so fond of those. The fighting can be fun from time to time, but it is not anywhere near the way it was in the first one.

The level cap has been brought down to 30 and now you don't have much to choose from. Your character can pretty much only go one way in the skills department so that was a big letdown.

One problem with Mass Effect 2 is also that it has no plot. You just get people to join you and then you make them loyal. Then out of nowhere comes something that you have to destroy a... giant human larva reaper. A what? I might ask. It doesn't feel anything like a boss. In the first game you chase Saren across the galaxy until the epic showdown with him. Now you just find something in an enemy base and decide that it is the end boss of the game.

The characters are at least some good. Team mates like Miranda and Mordin are very well written and the look on Miranda's face after completing her loyalty mission is perhaps the greatest moment that Mass Effect 2 has to offer. On the other side of the scale there are characters like Jack who are just annoying and boring. When you have a cut scene where she easily destroys YMIR mechs you'd expect her to be any good against those in the game. So it is quite retarded to see that she can take like 0,2 bullets from one in a real fight when she easily makes them fly over the room on the cut scenes.

The resource searching mini game is what ruins the replay value of the game. I spent like 10 hours of my game time just searching for resources. In other Mass Effect games you can start a new game with your old character and keep the items you have, but in Mass Effect 2 you do not get to keep any items. This means that every single playthrough you have to search for the resources again. That is just awful. It also makes the new game plus totally unplayable, because the enemies are very high level at the beginning of the game and you have a gun that requires 50 head shots to kill one single enemy. This is why insanity difficulty was really insane at the beginning. When you got the upgrades and weapons that had some effect on the enemies, it became a lot easier. Not many games are brutal at the beginning and easy at the end.

And the person who decided that the Overlord addon would be a good idea should be shot. In Mass Effect 1 everyone hated the MAKO vehicle, so they removed it from the sequel. Now they decided to add a flying vehicle made out of cardboard that moves even more horribly than the MAKO. Then they decided that you'll have to destroy gun turrets with it. They put on missiles that never hit their target and topped it off with the fact that the thing can take like two hits before exploding, even on the mega easy difficulty where it is otherwise almost impossible to die. And if that wasn't enough, the thing would sometimes just fall through the ground. Overlord is by far the worst DLC pack on any game that I have ever played.

After all this bashing I still give Mass Effect 2 three stars because at least some of the characters are again good (although not as good as in 1 and 3) and the combat is sometimes fun. It's just not the style that I happen to like.

Status: Completed almost five times
Playing Time: About a week

I just love the first Mass Effect! Back in 2008 when I got my first PC in five years it was the first game of this generation that I played and the graphics were just astonishing in my eyes. At the time Knights of the Old Republic was one of my favorite games and this reminds me of it a lot.

The characters are very well written and every single one of them is interesting. I can easily spend countless hours just talking to them, listening to their stories and learning new things about them, watching them grow as a person. The plot is also very well written and from the start you know who you are chasing while a bigger threat is revealed on the way. The first Mass Effect surely has everything an epic start to something needs.

I like the combat in Mass Effect 1 the most in the trilogy because you have so many powers and so do your teammates. This makes the game really easy on insanity difficulty, but the way you feel like you are in total control of the battlefield when you know what you are doing makes you feel like a god.

I played this through many times on PC and got all the accomplishments back then so it wasn't a problem to do so on the PS3 also, even though it required a lot of playthroughs and mindless grinding. The main problem of the PS3 version is that it crashes a lot. On my insanity run I had to defeat Saren four times to get the trophy because the game kept freezing at the loading screen before the end titles.

Status: Completed three times
Playing Time: A bit over a week

I could not play Mass Effect 3 when it was released because my PC broke down before that and it doesn't work on my current PC. Then I kind of forgot about it, because Mass Effect 2 was a huge disappointment for me. This was for free on PS+ so I decided to give it a go with a great deal of skepticism.

I'll tell more about what bothered me in Mass Effect 2 in its own section, but it was a great surprise that Mass Effect 3 is something in between the first game and the second one. You actually have more than one power to use and the level cap has been lifted back to 60 so you can evolve your character in the way you want to.

The combat is like in the second game so you'll have to be precise and the cooldowns on your powers are merely a few seconds long. The combat is a bit slower than in the second game but not as slow as in the first one. I ended up liking it in this game because it isn't all about shooting your enemies in the face so there can be some tactics involved with multiple powers.

Where the game excels is in its characters. Everyone has a story and they are mostly interesting. I liked the game best when I was just talking to people. The plot is actually good again and it has a feeling of an end, which is great.

Many have bashed the ending of this game, but since I missed the release, I had the downloadable pack that adds something to the end sequences. I'm not sure what it does, but I assume it does something right, because I think that the synthesis ending is a pretty fitting way to end the trilogy.

(The first time I got the worst possible ending that is obtained by shooting a little boy in the face. Me and kids in games don't go well together it seems.)

I was so positively surprised by the third Mass Effect that I decided to buy the Mass Effect Trilogy almost immediatedly.

Oh, and I almost fell off my chair when I noticed that pressing select in this game is a quicksave! For some reason game makers don't put quicksaves on PS3 games even though buttons like select are rarely used on anything. This was like black magic to me, because it felt so new and intriguing.

Status: Completed twice
Playing Time: A few days

I got InFamous as a freebie in 2011 when the PSN was down for a couple of months and they offered free games to make up for it. I didn't start InFamous until now, because I always thought that it looked very dull and grey and that the main character had no personality whatsoever.

When I finally decided to start InFamous, I was positively surprised. Jumping around the buildings was actually quite fun. Up until a point when you had done that thousands of times. Then the game mechanics started to turn on me. When normally I could just easily jump my way on top of a building, now the character would just do something completely opposite. In missions where I had to chase something, the dude would just end up grabbing a train that moves 5 metres away and be on the other side of the map when I was trying to jump off the train.

I also didn't like that towards the end you would always have to destroy 3 or 4 of something. 4 aeroplanes, 4 balloons, 4 gun turrets... And it is always the same thing, just repeatedly. It got really really boring at some point.

The game tries to make you choose if you are good or evil, but the main difference is that you shoot good (blue) electricity or bad (red). The big decisions you have to make don't add up to anything and there is no point in the game ordering you to choose if someone dies or not because they die anyways, even if you try to save them.

This is why on the second playthrough the game is just horribly boring. There is no change in anything so there is no real point in having a karma system which orders you to choose what you want to be, because the end result is always the same regardless what you choose. Also the ending twist where it is revealed that the main bad guy is YOU FROM THE FUTURE is very stupid and reminds me of a certain Indian-born movie director whose films I loathe.

Still, I plan on playing InFamous 2 some time, because I got it for free from PS+ and when the game mechanics of InFamous work as they should, the game can be quite a bit of fun. So if the plot is better and there are really some consequences on your actions, the sequel has a chance to be a good game.

Status: Completed twice
Playing Time: One evening

One evening I was bored and noticed that the first Sonic the Hedgehog game was on PSN for a measly 4,45€. This was just what I needed to kill the boredom so I re-bought the first game I ever owned as a child.

To me, this was all about nostalgia. The first three Sonic games have always been dear to me, because I played hours and hours of them as a child on Sega Megadrive.

It was quite funny to notice how much monkey balls I suck at platformers nowadays. Back when I was 8 years old this was an easy game, and now I just kept falling into instant deaths over and over again. Luckily the PS3 version has the option to save the game whenever I want to so I could complete this easily (and get the no deaths trophy, hee hee).

Because of its 2D graphics and the visual style, Sonic the Hedgehog is still nice to watch. The PSN version is for some reason 4:3 letterboxed, even though the game itself is 4:3 already. This kind of picture manipulation is kind of an art. Thank God I could still zoom in the picture a little bit and play it as 4:3 with black bars on the sides instead of the horrible blue bars everywhere.

The soundtrack is still great and every level has a memorable theme tune that I have spent a lot of time from my childhood with.

Status: Completed once
Playing time: About 10 hours

I had completed the game once before and this time I played it just to get the platinum, which required a playthrough on a professional difficulty.

I thought that this was going to be a boring grind, but I actually had more fun playing Hitman: Absolution on hard than I had with the normal difficulty. I have been a fan of the series ever since the release of Hitman 2. That's why Absolution didn't feel like a Hitman game and it was a big disappointment for me when it was released.

Hitman games have been about performing assassinations on unsuspecting victims, so it is kind of lame that Hitman: Absolution only has like 5 assassination missions. The rest are the type where you are in a place and it gets attacked by something (the grindhouse nuns are one of the stupidest ideas ever) and you'll have to sneak or gun your way through the attackers, often killing their leader. It wasn't what I expected and by far not a Hitman game, but rather a b-grade Deus Ex copy.

The disguise system is completely flawed with the enemies spotting you from 100 metres away even though you are wearing a mask and then forgetting about you when you put your hand in front of your face. When you are wearing a disguise that no-one else is, you can do pretty much anything. It is just stupid that on a courthouse you can murder the judge and dress as him and then jump around the courthouse with no suspicion, but when you walk in a restroom with a guard uniform, it is full alert time.

This is why hard difficulty was more fun, because you just can't use the disguises for long, so you'll have to sneak everywhere and not take the easy way out by holding the hand on your face. This makes Hitman: Absolution an ok sneaking game, although not a good Hitman game that I wanted it to be.

Status: Played through the first mission
Playing Time: About 30 minutes

I was at a friend's house waiting for the Oscars to begin. We were thinking about what to do when my friend said that hey, I have this game I got as a gift from a person who tried to insult me. The he said that I had to play it. Okay, said I and started one of the shittiest games ever made.

Firstly, the game looks like ass. The graphics are absolutely horrible and the only positive thing I can say about them is that at least Cameron Diaz looks better in this than she does in real life.

Secondly, the controls are like ass. The characters never do anything you want them to, and when you have to do a simple thing like climb a ladder, you'll run towards the wall for 10 minutes trying to hit the one spot where one of the girls finally grabs a hold of the ladder.

Thirdly, everything else in the game is ass. The combat is so monotonous that I got bored in it after 2 minutes. You just whack the kick button and that's it. The camera angles are God awful and I did not have the slightest bit of fun playing this. One mission was enough and I'm never touching this piece of shit again.

Status: Completed all three DLCs and did pretty much everything in the core game that I hadn't done before
Playing Time: About 160 hours

I already had the platinum trophy and around 100 hours of game time from the time the game was released in 2011. This time I continued from my old saves and by the time I had done pretty much everything that is possible, the game counter was at a whopping 260 hours.

Skyrim is still one of the best games of the PS3 and it was great to finally get the DLCs on the console after such a long wait.

Dragonborn:
The first addon for PS3 is by far the best. At the time of its realease, Morrowind was The God Game for me, and the return to one of the isles from it was such a nostalgic trip that it was hard to keep my pants on.

The game adds some really great little things, such as the Dremora Merchant who is summonable at all times, so you can sell your stuff without traveling to the other side of the world every now and then. The plot was okay and there was quite a lot to play. The addition of the Ebony Warrior, the meanest son of a bitch ever, was great, because now I had a reason to max out all stats to get to the point where I can fight him. I spent countless hours getting the gear I wanted to finally be able to tackle him on the Master difficulty, and boy did he give a challenge when fought 1 on 1 without backstabbing. I'll have to say that I'm quite proud of slaying him this way.

Hearthfire:
The Sims addon of Skyrim was actually ok, because building the perfect house was quite addicting, and it only cost 2,49€ on first week sale. One of the trophies demanded that I adopt a child, so I adopted some human girl and she was an annoying little brat. She always wanted an allowance when I came home, and one time when my house was attacked by bandits she came out and wanted to play hide and seek. She was disappointed when I said no, taking hits in the head from the Bandit Leader.

The best Hearthfire memory for me is that after getting annoyed by the little brat I started beating the living shit out of her. She begged me to stop and started to run away. Then my trusty horse, Shadowmere started to run after her and kick her in the face. I just could not stop laughing when watching my horse kick the then-cornered girl for around five minutes. Then I turned off the PS3.

Dawnguard:
The vampire addon was quite fun, even though the new vampiric and lycantrophic powers were completely useless when compared to my power-leveled demi god character. The plot was nice and thankfully did not require you to play as the vampire lord you can transform into. I would have liked this one to be a bit longer, but as this was also 50% off for the first week after the release, I can't complain.

When I had been turned in to a vampire lord, I returned to my Hearthfire house. The annoying little brat had found a fox and wanted to keep it. Being the best dad in the world I let her do so. Then in the middle of the night, the girl soundly asleep, I turned in to a vampire lord and ate the fox. We never talked about it again.

Status: Completed once
Playing Time: About 58 hours

I actually played the Android version of Final Fantasy III instead of the DS version on the list. I'm not sure if you can add Android games, so that's why the DS version is here. They are pretty much the same game - the only exception being the removal of the online message mode of the DS.

This was my first experience with touch screen games, and Final Fantasy III works really well that way. The controls are simple enough and the remade graphics are much better than on the original NES version (duh).

The plot is once again about some warriors of light facing the ultimate darkness, and it is pretty much rubbish. The characters are ok, but not too special and all in all this is a typical Final Fantasy of the NES era, reminding me a lot of the first game in the series with the exception of the characters actually having a personality.

The combat is Final Fantasy at its purest and I happen to love it. The job system makes you do some unnecessary grinding, but for some reason I always like to grind levels in Final Fantasy games to be able to defeat the optional mega bosses. The addition of the Iron Giant boss in the remake is nice, and in the Android version you can get to him without the insanely stupid sounding online message minigame of the DS version.

As I played this with my Nexus 7, I could grind pretty much everywhere. And that was one of the best things about the experience with the game, because grinding became casual instead of performing. This is why I rate this game pretty high, even though the plot is really simple and silly.