After spending way too much time walking about doing random stuff, I finally bit the bullet and joined the Stormcloaks. Yep, I’m still playing Skyrim.

Being the guy who had to feed the whole 32 floppy disk stack to the wretched PC every time the user broke the Windows 95 installation pushed me to the *nix camp quite early, I can tell you that.

Each floppy had a good 10% chance of being faulty, so imagine the fun.

I saw the trailer. I’m down for some sword fighting, horse riding, dragon riding. What throws me off is the train. Why is there a train there?

Dishonored.

I’m having a lot of fun sneaking around.

Dishonored.

I’m having a lot of fun sneaking around.

Same, fun but crashed a lot.

Half-Life 3.

I’m still waiting, Gabe. No pressure. You do your thing.

It’s not hard. I loathe hard games, we used to have them in the 80s because, well, how much can you pack in 48 kilobytes? You had to kill the player over and over to get longer engagement time.

Nowadays, with the amount of storage we have available, it makes no sense to make the game hard unless you are targeting the masochisticcompetitive crowd. You can use it to tell a good story, or pull the player into an immersive reality.

It depends on your tastes in games, of course. It’s quite linear, it’s got some puzzle element, some boss fighting, but what it makes it good is the storytelling. Good characters, lovely scenarios, compelling writing.

Feels a bit like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, or the Amnesia series: there’s a story there, and some gaming elements thrown in to keep you going. I’m quite liking it, I want to know what happens next.

A Plague Tale, Alien Breed, Hellslave. Quite the mix, huh?

Yes, everything you like about the original is there. The storytelling, the philosophical undertones, the brain wracking puzzles. Except that everything is way larger, with much to explore, new gadgets to master and characters to interact. They dropped some of the stuff that annoyed me in the original, like the machine guns and mines.

The puzzle difficulty is spot on, so if you played the through the original you’ll find the first puzzles easy but then they ramp up.

I’ve finished the main story and now I’m going back to get the 100% stars, as one does. I’m sure I’ll buy the DLC for this one as well, as I did for the original. Its is that good.

Soma may be my favorite Frictional game, even though I played nearly all the Amnesia series.

I think I’ll install it again after I’m done with Talos Principle II.

I’m finally playing The Talos Principle II. It has been in my waiting list for a long time. I’m a big fan of the original and I’m currently hooked on the sequel. It has everything I love about the first one, only in a much larger scale. The storytelling is spot on, the puzzle difficulty is tweaked to make it easy for beginners to get the hang of things but gets quite challenging later on even for hardened players. There’s lots of new artifacts and mechanics to learn and some of the old classics like the laser connectors.

If you loved Portal and Portal II, this is for you.

I need this in my life.

It’s great fun.

I take that as a hint that I’m not in the site’s target demographic, and simply close the tab.

Just like the good old days when sites would force you to have Internet Explorer and Flash plugin installed to work properly. Amazing.

I know, I know, but I still miss it. It was just pure magic. A fast desktop in 1.44 MB. It doesn’t get better than that.

I’m still bitter that they discontinued the awesome 1.44 MB floppy disk version.

It was a little engineering marvel, that was.

And you get two great soundtracks in the deal. I’d call that a triumph.