[BlueFlames]

Up until about five minutes ago, I was playing Legend of Grimrock II.  Then, I realized I set a key item down somewhere.  And then I realized that somewhere wasn't one of the caches of excess items that I left marked on my map.

[edit] Found my item; opened the door that I needed it for; left it in a niche beside that door; got halfway into the dungeon and found out that I needed the item again.  FML [/edit]

[Det. Bullock]

X-wing vs Tie Fighter: Balance of Power
I've finished the imperial campaign and I can confirm that it is a pushover compared to the Rebel one.
While many missions in the rebel campaign were still infuriating on medium, I've been able to complete about a quarter of the imperial missions on hard without sweating too much and never had to scale down to easy just to be able to get to the next one.
Of course plenty of missions on hard were infuriating as usual (mostly because by the time you fight off the AI fighters ganging up on you one of your command ships has been forced to retreat), but the difference in difficulty between hard and medium was often staggering.
I think I have more or less completed the game, I have just to try the fancier melee missions, the rest are just tournaments and battles that essentially take a bunch of melee and combat missions respectively and string them toghether.

[Det. Bullock]

X-wing Alliance
I've been playing it this weekend.
I did the first few missions on hard then switched to medium when I noticed that even mission hints took for granted you weren't playing on hard (on hard you cannot destroy Star Destroyer shield generators for example, but you can on medium and easy).
I cannot shake the impression that most rebel crafts have been somewhat nerfed, they seem to take less hits and laser cannons seem not to be able of sustained fire as long as in the older games in the series.
Fortunately while standard points for rank are lower, bonus points are the same amount so my main objective of trying to obtain the Kalidor Crescent (the medal given to Luke in epIV, here it's a series of optional medals given once you accumulate enough bonus points) and its variations should be doable.

[niffiwan]

... even mission hints took for granted you weren't playing on hard (on hard you cannot destroy Star Destroyer shield generators for example, but you can on medium and easy).

QFT, as hard as I tried I've never been able to complete all of XWA on hard, rescuing the defector being the one I recall wasting the most amount of time on. Did TG even playtest on hard? 

[Det. Bullock]

... even mission hints took for granted you weren't playing on hard (on hard you cannot destroy Star Destroyer shield generators for example, but you can on medium and easy).

QFT, as hard as I tried I've never been able to complete all of XWA on hard, rescuing the defector being the one I recall wasting the most amount of time on. Did TG even playtest on hard? 

The rescue of the Hoth prisoners made me switch, after the third attempt in which the Y-wings couldn't even hit the effing dreadnought with their ion cannons I looked the hints in the debriefing and said "try shooting the weapons systems" which cannot be done on hard until the shield have dropped.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were on a tight schedule/budget with this one, also there's the thing that the rebel missions in the other games tend to become always stupidly difficult (in the XvT: BoP rebel campaign I had to drop to Easy in a couple of missions including the final one).

[deathfun]

2016 Election Fallout: The Game!
AKA Death Road to Canada

Nothing is quite as hilarious as creating people you know that are Americans and having them try to escape to a country you live in from Trump Supporters, aka Zombies

Entirely too much fun, and entirely too hilarious

[Det. Bullock]

... even mission hints took for granted you weren't playing on hard (on hard you cannot destroy Star Destroyer shield generators for example, but you can on medium and easy).

QFT, as hard as I tried I've never been able to complete all of XWA on hard, rescuing the defector being the one I recall wasting the most amount of time on. Did TG even playtest on hard? 

I got to the rescue of the defector: it is indeed quite an infuriating mission (especially trying to get bonus points like I did), I found out that even if you find the defector immediately you are to inspect also all of the other shuttles otherwise the mission fails, later when protecting the Redemption you have to avoid going for the fighters (you'll end up shredded sooner or later and the Redemption cand hold its own against the bombers) and just go for the ISD shield generators reloading on the Liberty until they are down then dumbfire torpedoes (missile lock is essentially useless against most ships with turrets, another change from XvT) at it until it's down and then hope the Liberty does go into hyperspace in the next two minutes or so otherwise the mission is bugged and cannot be complted. *sigh*

I cannot imagine how it must be on hard.

[niffiwan]

Yeah... I tended to lose all my initial wingmen in the 1st furball, then the multiple TIE Advanced Squadrons from the ISD-II make it impossible for me to simultaneously stay alive & distract the ISD-II from wasting the Liberty. A reload-torpedo-spam approach doesn't help either as the Liberty tends to die too fast. Oh and of course, no taking out the shield generators or nearside laser batteries on hard

[Det. Bullock]

Yeah... I tended to lose all my initial wingmen in the 1st furball, then the multiple TIE Advanced Squadrons from the ISD-II make it impossible for me to simultaneously stay alive & distract the ISD-II from wasting the Liberty. A reload-torpedo-spam approach doesn't help either as the Liberty tends to die too fast. Oh and of course, no taking out the shield generators or nearside laser batteries on hard

The thing (on medium) is I managed to get the Liberty destroyed only when I tried pure torp spam (without taking out the generators), but the first time I managed to get everything right the liberty glitched out: it went into hyperspace ten minutes after The Redemption hypered out and everything imperial in the area was destroyed, but never reappeared at the fleet and of course the mission result was still "unresolved" so I couldn't even quit manually intead of entering the hangar.
Fortunately the glitch didn't reappear the next time, once both INT and ISDII were destroyed it went into hyperspace in a couple of minutes.

Mostly it was me getting overwhelmed once my wingmen got killed that made me fail the mission in the second part, I started getting out alive only once I decided to stick near the Liberty.

And again: I never even tried playing this one on hard, I wonder what whoever designed this mission was thinking.

[Det. Bullock]

X-wing Alliance
So, I got to the mission where you have to get the shuttle Tydirium of Return of The Jedi.
This mission is incredibly infuriating, to the point I never completed it before now (it was even bugged on easy at launch).
It's still incredibly infuriating, mostly because the first part (where you have to pass through umperial customs without being identified) is tense the first time but excruciatingly annoying all the times you have to repeat the mission.
After that part you have to enter the space dock to drop the commandos that have to seize the shuttle but it's easy to bump into something (which kills you, it happened at least three times), if you get IDed before entering the mission fails, when you dock you risk breking the mission script if you undock manually when the commandos give the signal instead of waiting a couple more seconds for the automatic undock procedure, which means Rogue Squadron doesn't show up and the captured shuttle won't leave the station (I did the same mistake twice before catching on).
Then once the Rogues arrive you should normally juggle scores of Tie Fighters and Tie Interceptors while making sure the shuttle doesn't get smashed into pieces by Tie Bombers which inevitably happens.
But there's a trick: you need to call the rogues manually to trigger the shuttle leaving the station but the Tie Fighters and Interceptors are already there, so I just called them only after destroying them all (some 3000 points plus 1000 bonus points) so that I could concentrate on the bombers by using the turret in autofire (the mission was with a standard YT-1300 transport so only the turret above unlike the Millenium Falcon) and being careful in keeping them above me.
Then I decided to take on the Imperial Star Destroyer that launched the Tie Interceptors, so I gain set the turret to autofire and ran circles around the ISD until it exploded ending up with almost 7000 points total and the rank of general.
I Havent got the last Kalindor Crescent though, I just hope it doesn't require 25000 points, if I remember correctly even if I get all the bonus points on the remaining missions I shouldn't be able to get more than 24000 total.

[Klaustrophobia]

Finally got around to starting Far Cry 3.  I've heard so many great things about it, but through the first couple of intro missions, I'm a little let down.  It's console heritage is showing.  I have detail settings maxed, and it only looks a little better than the original Far Cry from 8 years prior, and definitely inferior to FC2 4 years its senior.  There's weird shadow/dark halo things surrounding character/animal models.  Very immersion breaking.  Controls are clunky, but I haven't messed with the settings much so that may be somewhat fixable.

[Det. Bullock]

X-wing Alliance
So, I managed to get the last Kalidor Crescent medal (barely) before the Endor missions, having reached the rank of general in another mission now I can play these missions without worrying about points.
I got it at 21835 points by the way, for some reason neither the official game documentation (manual, readme) nor any walkthrough I could find on the 'net say how many points were needed to obtain it.

Since I've been playing with XWAupgrade, I had a question: does it change the difficulty?
I've been playing on medium (first missions on hard) and some missions that I remember being very hard on "easy" were if not outright easy at least much more doable than I remember on medium, though to be fair last time I played the game to completion it was almost twenty years ago.

[Venicius]

Finally got around to starting Far Cry 3.  I've heard so many great things about it, but through the first couple of intro missions, I'm a little let down.  It's console heritage is showing.  I have detail settings maxed, and it only looks a little better than the original Far Cry from 8 years prior, and definitely inferior to FC2 4 years its senior.  There's weird shadow/dark halo things surrounding character/animal models.  Very immersion breaking.  Controls are clunky, but I haven't messed with the settings much so that may be somewhat fixable.

I only played FC3 unmodded once, all other playthroughs I use Ziggy's Mod, takes away the weird halos and makes the guns more realistic. You might try that. I hate the intro missions too, once I get past the obligatory ones I just go do my own thing and never do any more campaign missions.

[Det. Bullock]

X-Wing Alliance (PC)
I finished the game for the first time in 15 years or so.
I played with XWAupgrade so the last mission was way too difficult because of the rescaled Millenium Falcon (in the vanilla game it's smaller than it's supposed to) so I did it with collisions disabled and invulnerability activated after several hours of trying to get through the goddamn tunnel without crashing, it's not like I was starved for points anyway.
It's not as carefully balanced as Tie Fighter and sometimes the difficulty spikes are downright infuriating (which is why I only got to the end when I was in high school and that only playing on easy and choosing to skip at least two missions), and the design resembles the first X-wing more closely, in particular the Kalidor Crescent doesn't have the same cool story context of the Secret Order in Tie Fighter and like in the original X-wing is awarded by doing incredibly daft stuff like felling Star Destroyers in a single y-wing after destroying its entire complement of fighters instead of hypering out at mission completion like all the pilots with some sense would do rather than having true optional objectives like in Tie Fighter.
There are audio snippets where the mission officer aknowledges your promotions before mission briefings though.
The 3D cockpits while fancy for the era forced the developers to use a universal HUD that's not very good looking and doesn't really fit Star War that well, and sincerely I prefer the 2D cockpits of X-wing vs Tie Fighter and the older games in the series for immersion.
The Battle of Endor is an excellent climax on paper, but the last mission is clunky because of the padding: there are MANY parts of the Death Star II tunnel that just weren't in the movie, a pity because the other parts of the battle actually fit really well, the "it's a trap" moment was awesome even when you know what's going to happen, though probably the hi res backdrops and the rescaled Executor and Home One helped a lot in making the final battle feel grandiose, until you reach the DS2 tunnel and then you have a lot of stuff that doesn't really fit like shooting random pipes, encounters with zero-G troopers and an optional objective that will leave deamaged to the pointbarely grazing the tunnel will destroy you.
It's a pity there wasn't a sequel or at least an expansion, the family story while sometimes frustrating was a nice touch without necessarily delving in anything new and is kinda left hanging.

[0rph3u5]

Tyranny
It's very similar to Pillars of Eternity gameplay wise but with some good improvements (skills now develop by use, similar to the TES-style); the story I am still kinda undecieded about because this kinda seems made for me (I kinda like the "ant-view" as a narrative device)...

[Black_Yoshi1230]

Comanche Gold.

Decided to spend some time and film most of the missions (note: I did it in a sort of speed-runner-ish way, and not a "how a proper pilot would do it way," you can tell because I neglect Hellfire guidelines on this). I hated filming every minute of the Sakhalin Island campaign.

[Klaustrophobia]

Finally got around to starting Far Cry 3.  I've heard so many great things about it, but through the first couple of intro missions, I'm a little let down.  It's console heritage is showing.  I have detail settings maxed, and it only looks a little better than the original Far Cry from 8 years prior, and definitely inferior to FC2 4 years its senior.  There's weird shadow/dark halo things surrounding character/animal models.  Very immersion breaking.  Controls are clunky, but I haven't messed with the settings much so that may be somewhat fixable.

I only played FC3 unmodded once, all other playthroughs I use Ziggy's Mod, takes away the weird halos and makes the guns more realistic. You might try that. I hate the intro missions too, once I get past the obligatory ones I just go do my own thing and never do any more campaign missions.

Looked into this, but it changes too much stuff for me.  I really hate changing the 'intended' gameplay.  Early unlocks, mechanics changes, changing content, these things are "absolutely not" things for me on a first playthrough.  I didn't really see anything else while briefly poking around the mods that falls firmly in "fixes only, no changes" territory.  If I play through again, I'll give it a look.  But hey, I did at least discover SSAO was responsible for the "dark auras" as someone else complaining of it on the internet put it.  Now if only I could run this frankly not-that-impressive-looking game at high enough framerate to look perfectly smooth on my GTX 670....

[Det. Bullock]

Dark Forces
I was finally able to finish it on medium without the supershield option on.
The last level is something purely sadistic, dark troopers of all kinds essentially everywhere and while some can be killed easily once you know where to position yourself others cannot, and being a 2.5D fps circle-strafing is very difficult to pull off (especially playing keyboard-only like I'm used to play these old shooters).
Fortunately there are a few well placed secrets that help a lot in getting through the level with as many lives as possible (did I mention that this is the only vintage PC FPS that uses lives instead of quicksaves?), because the final boss is brutal and you will probably die at least two or three times before finally killing him.

It was also the first time I played it in english, it was one of the few PC games that were fully localized in Italian at the time and I still have the game disc, of course they forgot to add the filter to the stormtrooper voices and for some reason "Lord Vader" is pronounced with Italian phonetics (which makes it sound a bit like "lord toilet" in Italian), but those were simpler times and CTO was still alive and didn't go bankrupt yet leaving Lucasarts games distribution in a limbo for several years in my home country.

[Colonol Dekker]

Is that the one that finishes on the SSD with twin towers?

[Det. Bullock]

Tachyon: The Fringe
It was a while I wasn't playing it and I literally devoured it in a few days.
It's a nice little spacesim, largely linear (there is a faction choice shortly after the beginning but it's binary) but with sidemissions and cash to buy your weapons since you are a mercenary pilot.
Also, Bruce Campbell voices the protagonist, at the time I didn't know who he was, now that I watched the Evil Dead trilogy I can appreciate his "Ash Williams with a brain and IN SPACE!" routine, the plot is occasionally very tongue in cheek (it's very much a "Robocop future" with corporations that do whatever they please and shallow newscasting) with some deliciuosly hammy side characters here and there and his snarking at them brings a few chuckles.
The gameplay is largely Wing Commander style at first but the late game weapons require some power transfer shenanigans to work consistently since they drain your laser energy reserve quite rapidly, fortunately there are plenty of shortcuts to do everything in the split seconds necessary during the most intense furballs.

I sincerely wonder why all the games that do the Wing Commander gameplay do it better than Wing Commander itself, and I'm including the later installments as well.
For some reason Roberts has always been in love with stupidly complicated/unintuitive hidden menus for the power management of the ship and power transfer between systems instead of the practical keyboard (or joystick) shortcuts employed by essentially any other developer.

Rants against Chris Roberts aside, since I did install it from the original CD with localized boxed copy (not the game itself, just manual and refcard) I did meet a few issues, I had to install Nglide for some effects to work properly like the fog in the nebulas and to get my monitor native resolution (1280x1024, the original was limited to 1024x768) working, also it seems that the game doesn't cope well with Inon-US keyboard layouts to the point that I couldn't program to my HOTAS the commands that used the most esoteric characters and had to leave a few buttons in "direct mode" and map them in-game instead of creating a complete profile like I usually do for older games, the "localized" refcard didn't help at all since they didn't bother adapting it to an Italian layout.

Is that the one that finishes on the SSD with twin towers?

The Executor is the second-to-last mission, the last mission is the Dark trooper mobile factory, the Arc Hammer, which looks a it like a stylized pistol.