 |
|
Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer (DS) by jp (Apr 19th, 2026 at 15:10:00) |
It seems strange to note how this game is pretty old, but it's a rogue-like, and it was old, and series, even before the semi-recent rise in popularity of rogue-like games.
It's hard, and you have to start over, and you can't really be careless (I've died in the first area), but there are some systems in place that seem to work as a meta-progression of sorts?
For example, there's a woman I ran into who made me blind! She did it again! (on a different run), and on a 3rd run she was in a town being accosted by some NPCs (angry because she's been blinding them). So, I stepped in, and she joined my party! I have no idea what'll happen next, because I got pretty far and then died - and when I came back she was gone! Do I need to get blinded three times again? Will she show up and join in the village later? I have no idea!
It also seems like I should be "cheesing" some parts? So, there's a storage system where you can leave items behind. When you die you lose everything you were carrying, so it's a way to leave stuff for "future you" - but you can also run backwards! (to previous areas) Oh, and you can also - if you get the cash, upgrade items at a smithy! So, I could do a run, upgrade an item, then run back, drop it off for future me, do the same, upgrade, run back, etc. The thought makes me kind of tired to think about it, but doable? There's always the risk you'll die and lose everything of course!
So far I'm having fun, but we'll see how long my patience lasts...
read all entries for this GameLog 
- add a comment 
|
|
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth (PS5) by dkirschner (Apr 13th, 2026 at 09:37:34) |
Just a quick mid-point update for this one. Or, at least I think I'm around midpoint (40 hours, chapter 7, Costa del Sol). I forgot to add this a month ago when I began.
FF VII Rebirth improves on Remake in every way. It's bigger, funnier, more polished, has better pacing, and has way more systems. It even has a charming kind of open world (initially to my chagrin, as I had just come off an open-world game and chose this specifically because I thought it wasn't open-world).
Remake irritated me a bit because a lot of the new story, deeper character exploration, and overly long dungeons felt like padding. I don't find that here. All the main quest beats have been interesting so far, streamlined--no slogging it through the sewers this time. I suppose you could say that the open world is padding, but Ubisoft this is not. There are standard tasks and challenges in each of the game's zones, but this is carefully designed such that everything provides a reward and works toward something greater, namely, Chadley's research. But, this is how you level up your party more, get summons, find recipes, discover rare shops and items, and so on, and it is a joy to explore the world.
The side quests are also FAR more interesting and usually multi-step. I am doing one right now where Yuffie accidentally cloned an NPC in Costa del Sol. The NPC is this surfer dude bro who bought an old inn and is renovating it. So there are all these "bros" who recognize that they are bro-clones and are gathering supplies to improve the inn. You find some items for them (which involves finding and getting to the tops of ziplines), clear out some monsters, then find a unique recipe to craft a part they need. The NPC clones are funny and their asks are varied. Another one I recently did involves one of the many great mini-games, challenging gym rats to a sit-up competition (after clearing out some monsters for them). I have yet to beat the hardest sit-up challenge. It's 90 seconds of repeating a button pattern with increasing speed and precision, and I haven't made it to 30 seconds before messing up. It seems like you have to do it perfectly to win on hard.
I am finding Rebirth to be so CHARMING. It's funny. It's quirky. I am smiling a lot while playing. OH, and there is a card game, which is strategic and fun. Final Fantasy card games are always solid.
The only thing I dislike is how complicated the combat is. I have six characters right now (three in a party), each with a different play style and unique moves. Cloud is a melee fighter and can switch stances from "regular" to a slow and powerful one. Barrett is a ranged fighter and has an overcharge ability that builds up. Aerith has "wards" she can cast on the ground that give different buffs, as well as a little familiar she can summon. Etc., etc. Then, of course, they have weapon abilities and all the spells from materia. And there are like partner abilities (synergies). Skill trees. Blocking and countering mechanics. Air and ground combat. Summoning. Limit breaks. Special synergy abilities. And you can manually use each characters' abilities and control any of them, too. It's too much for me to keep track of! Combat is fun, but feels chaotic.
That's it for now. Looking forward to seeing where the story takes me, remembering nostalgic bits, and continuing to learn the combat.
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
Farming Simulator 19 (PC) by jp (Apr 5th, 2026 at 14:38:00) |
This was sort of what I was expecting, but also not. I mean, I knew this wasn't farmville style farming, but I wasn't expecting as much technical detail as I found. Different machines, different phases, needing the right equipment, etc. It's pretty interesting and I was most surprised that you can (and probably should) hire people (NPCs) to do a lot of the "menial" labor - here mostly driving your machine down the field to either harvest, plow, etc. You kind of need to do this to save time, because with, say, three fields to work on you need to be moving from one to the next.
What I was most surprised by is that there's a whole town with locations you need to (slowly, AFAIK) travel between to deliver your crops (and buy stuff you need)! Driving my FIAT tractor at 25 mph down a lane, waiting for a train to pass, and trundling on, was not something I imagined would be important to this kind of game.
To be fair, there's a lot MORE to it that I have not experienced (livestock) and I stopped playing before delivering my first harvest - and I'll blame the tutorial here because it absolutely fell apart. I think I figured out a bunch of things, but this is definitely the sort of game you need to be reading guides/the manual/etc. in order to get the most of it?
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
Road Redemption (PC) by dkirschner (Mar 25th, 2026 at 10:00:19) |
This was actually great! I was skeptical because I'd never heard of this random Epic freebie and because of low-ish reviews. It's like a spiritual successor to Road Rash, which I loved as a kid. It was nostalgic playing this, remembering being 10 years old, kicking other bikers and whipping them with a chain, that straightforward racing violence.
Road Redemption channels the same energy. You play as a member of the Jackals biker gang, and the game is basically you progressing, in rogue-lite fashion (which was a surprise), through three other biker gangs' territories, racing them to kill an assassin with a huge bounty on their head. You get there first, your gang gets the cash.
You choose a motorcycle and a rider. The default motorcycle is actually the best through the entire campaign, perhaps until you unlock some others late in the skill tree, but at that point I had beaten it already. Riders have different bonuses, penalties, and weapons. Once I unlocked the one that gives bonus money and experience and gives you a heavy melee weapon to start, at the cost of 50% health, I kept him the entire time. Once you learn how to play well, you won't miss the health.
You have four weapon types: sword, other melee, gun, and explosive. Sword is a sword. There is only one, but it can be upgraded for more damage (as all weapons can). The point of the sword is to attack enemies who don't have a helmet. You decapitate them, which is endlessly entertaining. If you get a sword kill, you get double cash (and maybe double nitro). "Other melee" is a heavy weapon and a long-range weapon, which you can cycle between. Once I started using the rider who starts with a heavy weapon, I never used the long-range one again because, around then, I had learned how to avoid damage, so I didn't need the protective range; I could get up close with the wrench or the bat with spikes on it. Guns include a pistol, a shotgun, a grappling hook (slows enemies down?), and a machine gun (the best). Some levels feature a lot of ammo pickups. On those levels, you can go crazy with guns, which is fun. Then, explosives include mines that you drop in the road, C4 that you attach to enemies (endlessly entertaining watching them blow up), and like a grenade launcher or something that I never really used because you get access to it in the final area.
The key to using all the weapons well is memorizing where they are on the D pad and learning to see which one you have equipped at any given time without ever looking at the weapon selector icons. There is a lot going on in Road Redemption, and if you are busy looking at the bottom lefthand corner of your screen choosing weapons, you will (a) get annihilated by other bikers, (b) get annihilated by oncoming traffic, or (c) otherwise run off the road.
Enemies are no joke, especially later on. The first gang is easy. They are slow to attack and don't have special gear. Lop their heads off with the sword, or bash them with other melee weapons. By the end of the first area, I believe you also have a gun and some C4. In the second area, enemies are more aggressive and have more weapons. A slip-up here can end your run. By the third area, they are vicious, some have extra armor, and there are various types who come out in force to annoy you, such as the mine dropping guy and the "shield" guy who blocks all melee attacks. You have to shoot him, blow him up, or kick him (kick with B, endlessly entertaining) into oncoming traffic/into a light post/off a cliff/etc. Once you get good at dispatching enemies and avoiding damage, you will be golden. When you kill an enemy, you get cash, nitro, and health, so killing more enemies if you can is always a good thing.
Each gang's area has maybe like 6 or 7 levels. Levels are randomly generated and can vary among objective type. In some, you have to place third or better. In some, you have to kill x targets. Some are a time trial. In some, you just have to survive till the finish. At the end of each gang's area is a "boss fight" where you have to kill one especially tough enemy, and then after that is a "rooftop escape" where you flee that gang's territory and go to the next gang's territory. The bosses are easy enough, usually just heavily armored. I fought the last boss two times. The first time I got to them was after like 3 or so hours of gameplay. I got my ass handed to me, then didn't see them again until nearly 5.5 hours, at which point I handed their ass to them.
What happened between 3 and 5.5 hours that changed the last boss difficulty? I learned how to play better sure (Don't ride right next to enemies! Use "A" to block! Swerve to enemies and attack, swerve away, swerve back and attack, swerve away! Slow down or speed up [and save nitro to do this] if you get stuck in a pack! Or just put some C4 on someone and watch the pack explode!). But I also dumped tons of experience points into the persistent skill tree, so I had more health, more ammo, more damage resistance, more money (you can purchase items after every race), started with better weapons, etc., etc.
After you beat the game, there is a campaign + mode and a campaign ++ mode, which I can only assume is horrifically difficult. This was definitely fun, a straightforward callback to Road Rash, and it scratched that Burnout itch too. I love vehicular destruction. And I got my completion in for March! Back to Divinity: Original Sin II, which I might be able to finish in April.
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
The Falconeer (PC) by dkirschner (Mar 22nd, 2026 at 16:40:50) |
This is an aerial combat game. Admittedly not my favorite genre, but The Falconeer won a BAFTA, despite receiving lukewarm reviews, and I got it for free or in a Humble Bundle, so I decided to try it out. It apparently had a remaster, so I was hoping that whatever issues it previously had would be remedied. It nails a visual style and commits to political-military worldbuilding, which I respect. Unfortunately, that’s about all it nails.
The amount of things the game doesn’t bother to explain to you is perplexing. It begins with a prologue and combat tutorial, the first and last thing the game explains. I appreciate figuring things out on my own, to an extent. When I decided to quit, I noticed some text on the menu screen that said I’d leveled up and saw that I was level 3. There are levels? Are there experience points, too? What do the levels do? Do they improve my stats? The stats are AG, SPD, ENG, HP, RGN, DMG, and ROF. What do these mean? Some I can interpret—SPD must be speed, for example—but others, I am at a loss. ENG? What is this? English? Engineering? What is AG? Agility? What does that do? There is no tutorial for this, no tooltips.
I also discovered shops. What is the point of shops? I played an hour without buying anything and it didn’t hamper my mission success. Do I have to buy things? What are these different categories of things I can buy? I stumbled upon an inventory of sorts, I think. Do I equip things? Some things are damaged. Can I repair them? Speaking of the difficulty, it seems to be random. There are skull icons indicating difficulty of each mission. In the hour I played, these ranged from 1 skull to like 6 skulls (out of 10?). I didn’t notice a difference. It would go like 1, 2, 6, 1, 4, 2, 5, 1. What does the difficulty mean? Why was there a “6” difficulty mission 15 minutes into the game? And why was it easy? Why are enemy names re-used over and over? I killed the same named enemies, blew up their falcons, sank their ships, and yet they continued reappearing. What is the point of the shrines? Are a lot of the open world locations just places to discover, but you can’t interact with them? What’s the point?
Related, the story is a dense political-military slog. There are a bunch of different factions, or countries, or organizations, and they are all fighting, allying, betraying. Some guy keeps barking orders at me to take main missions. I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t really care. It seems like the developers built a neat world here, but the narrative isn’t presented in an interesting way, and exploring the world on your falcon is boring, too. There’s a big map, but there’s nothing to do. The open world is empty, just an expanse of sea with islands and cities here and there, and various shrines and other “open world” boxes to tick off, but there isn’t much substance to any of it.
The controls are a hot mess, too. You can fast-travel immediately, which begs the question of why there is an open world at all, especially since there is not much to do it in. Actually, fast travel only works sometimes, though I cannot discern when or why. Sometimes, you can press “A” to fast travel and sometimes it doesn’t work. Other times you press “A” to fast travel, and the fast travel indicator doesn’t appear, yet you will fast travel anyway. In missions, you press “A” to target enemies. Sometimes “A” will target them and other times it won’t. It was very irritating. Occasionally, in combat the camera swings up for no apparent reason or the bird ascends, which is disorienting.
I gather I am not the only one turned off by all these issues. On Steam, 57.8% of players completed the prologue. Then just 10.6% completed the first chapter! That’s a huge attrition rate. Then nearly half of those bailed before completing the second chapter, which just 5.9% of players did! It looks like it’s not until the third chapter that players committed to finishing (4.7% in chapter 3, 4.3% in chapter 4, and 4.2% completed the epilogue).
I was just trying to knock something out in the next week so I could have a completion for March (because I’m in the middle of two long games), but this ended up being a retirement. I’ll have to pick something else to beat this week.
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
|
|
|
GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter
if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
for that game. Call it a weblog of game playing activity if you will.
[latest site fixes and updates]
[read more]
|
view feed xml
|
 |
|
2323 registered gamers and 3354 games. 7891 GameLogs with 13381 journal entries. 5128 games are currently being played.
More stats
|
 |
|
Drakan: The Ancient's Gates (PS2) by dsj49 |
| No comment, yet. |
|
most recent entry: Wednesday 30 March, 2011
|
Drakan: The Ancients' Gates
Drakan is an 3rd person action adventure game with a few RPG elements. It was developed by Surreal Software and published in 2002 for the Playstation 2.
Story:
Drakan: The Ancients' Gates is a sequel to Drakan: Order of the Flame but the story is not dependent upon the first game. You Play as Rynn, a dragon rider who is bonded to her Dragon Arokh who is a Dragon of the Elder Breed, which turns out to be very important. To Summarize Rynn and Arokh are summoned to the City of Surdana where they find out an evil race of demons know as the Desert Lords are gathering monsters from around the world and enslaving humans cities. They only way to fight back is to awaken the rest of the Elder Breed, who have the power to save them. They are told the only way to do so is to Activate several Gates that are scattered around the world. Arokh alone posses the ability to reactivate these gates so the task falls to you the only Dragon Rider.
World:
The World of Drakan is very large, and filled with places of interest and things to do. The Game is basically broken into several zones that each have a main quest and several minor quests. Each zone has a different theme, such as Forrest, Coast, Arctic, and Desert, this variation of scenery helps keep things fresh and gives a sense of progression. You begin only being able to travel in one zone, but as you progress through the game you are given opportunities to travel to new zones and once there you then must find and unlock a Gate in that zone which allows you to travel back to the zones you have previously been, by traveling through the gates. You do most of you large scale travel with the help of your Dragon Arokh who will go anywhere he can fit, but as he is quite large this leaves you to explore all those dungeons, caves and Buildings on your own. In general the world is very pretty for a game of its time, and the environment are generally interesting to traverse.
Dialogue:
The game is fully voice acted and you can talk to everyone you meet. Overall it is acted and written fairly well. Most of the dialogue is actually worth listening to and there is a definite humor is some. I found that I especially loved the back and forward between Rynn and Arokh.
Controls:
The controls are well thought out and map well to a console controller. I did find the movement to be a little stiff, this is due to the lack of sensitivity setting options that I am used to modern games. Instead of newer games where you press the stick in one direction and that is the direction you run, Drakan uses the scheme: press up move your character forward and Pressing left or right turns Rynn at a set rate left or right. This probably sounds worse than it is as the camera stays behind Rynn so movement end up working like most games Its just turning is a little to slow. The game does allow you to change the control scheme to duel shock but there is still no sensitivity so it didn't really help me. However even with this issue I was able to get used to the controls fairly quickly.
Combat:
There are basically two kinds of combat in Drakan, ground combat and aerial combat. More of the Game takes place on the ground so ground combat is more complex. For ground combat basically you can have a one weapon and optionally a shield. You are able to perform a 3 hit combo with melee weapons as well as 8 different special attacks. Each special attack has a different range and a different swing, you learned to chose which special to use based on the enemy you are fighting and the position you and the enemy are in. This special attack can have a variety of effect such as staggering your opponent, knocking them down, and even disarming them. To perform a special attack you press a combination of up to 2 buttons on the direction pad followed by the attack button. This allows you to very quickly choose the best special attack and execute it in combat. This system felt great to me, it was like mixing a simple fighting game into an action game. It added the tension of making you be careful not to mess up a special attack under stress. It was also a great way to map more attacks then would fit on a normal console controller. In addition to the melee option Rynn is very maneuverable, she is able to dodge attacks by rolling or Flipping out of the way, which is very important as her health does not recover over time. In addition to dodging Rynn is able to parry or block (if she has a sheild equiped) incoming attacks, this however requires timing as you can not simply hold down a block button.
Arial combat is actually done well in Drakan. The controls to fly Arokh feel pretty good and he is responsive. Basically Arokh can fight other flying enemies and enemies on the ground. He starts with fire breath but you can find other breath weapon types. Each breath weapon type has two attacks which generally fall under the categories of ranged and close quarters. Arokh is able to make may breath attacks quickly but each attack takes energy. The energy bar regenerates fairly quickly but it is slow enough that it is better to only attack when you are sure you can hit. In order to dodge incoming attacks you can try to dodge by quickly flying up or diving down. I found that i tended to strafe enemies while zig zaging up and down to avoid incoming fire.
Gear:
In Drakan you have a fairly small inventory that contains all the weapons, armor and items you are using as well as what you are carrying. The inventory is slot based so larger items take up more space. Due to the size of the inventory you cannot just carry everything you ever find with you, choices of what is useful have to be made and everything else should be dropped or sold. In addition to limited space your weapons and armor all have durability, where each hit you deal (or take for armor) reduces the durability of the item by one and when the item has no durability left it cannot be used. Items that are broken in this way can be repaired but when this is done the total durability of the item is cut in half. This imposes a natural limit on how long you can use any particular item and forces you to change your gear as you find new things.
Leveling:
This game has a very simple leveling mechanic, when you gain enough experience you gain a level which gives one skill point. You may spend a skill point in one of three categories: Melee, Archery, or Magic. You can not every reset your skills. And based on your skill you are able to use different and better items and magics.
Overall:
Basically I remember loving this game as a kid when I first played it, and now when I come back to it so many years and game later I find I still find the game quite enjoyable. I even like the combat so much that I wish other newer games were like it. It has its flaws but Drakan has aged very well.
[read this GameLog]
|
|
|
