As of Sunday September 17, 2023, I am looking at the games I own, and it is clear that I will not be able to finish
or even play all of them in my lifetime. So I decided to make a list of games that I intend to finish or at least
give my best shot.
I have 111 games listed in my backlog. It
appears as if it will take 111 days of playtime to finish all these games. I am not sure how I am going to playthrough all these games, and also fit in Halo: Master Chief Collection, Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, and the next Battlefield game.
The stats show that the most single player games I completed in a single year is 17, in 2009. At that rate, if I play nothing else except the games on the list, it will take me six and a half years to finish this backlog. Probably right in time for Red Dead Redemption 3!
How can I ever justify buying any new games when the backlog is as massive as this? I still want to buy Halo: Master Chief Collection and do another playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 with Phantom Liberty.
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: Russia
Assassin's Creed Odyssey
Assassin's Creed Origins
Bastion
Batman: Arkham City GOTY
Batman: Arkham Knight
Batman: Arkham Origins
BioShock 2
Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain
BloodRayne
Borderlands
Borderlands 2
Borderlands 3
Borderlands: Game of the Year
Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood
Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30
Burnout Paradise
Call of Juarez
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
Cities XL Platinum
Colin McRae Rally
Company of Heroes 2
Darksiders II: Deathinitive Edition
Dead Space
Death Stranding
Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge
Desperados III
Desperados III: Money for the Vultures - Part 1: Late To The Party
Desperados III: Money for the Vultures - Part 2: Five Steps Ahead
Desperados III: Money for the Vultures - Part 3: Once More With Feeling
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Dishonored
Dishonored 2
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
Doom Eternal
Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
Dying Light
F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin
F.E.A.R. 3
Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition
Fallout: New Vegas - Ultimate Edition
Far Cry 4
Frontlines: Fuel of War
Full Spectrum Warrior
Grand Theft Auto V
Grim Dawn
Hard West
Helldorado
Hidden & Dangerous 2
Hidden & Dangerous: Action Pack
Hitman
Hitman: Blood Money
Homefront: The Revolution
James Bond 007: Blood Stone
Just Cause 4
Mafia
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Middle-Earth: Shadow of War
Mirror's Edge: Catalyst
Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition
Moto Racer 2
Murdered: Soul Suspect
Need For Speed Heat
Need for Speed: Most Wanted
PC Building Simulator
Planescape: Torment
Prey
Prince of Persia
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
Project: Snowblind
Psychonauts
Rage 2
Red Faction: Guerrilla - Re-Mars-tered
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Risen
Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood
Saints Row IV: Re-Elected
Saints Row: The Third
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition
Soma
Star Wars: Battlefront II
Star Wars: Empire At War - Gold Pack
Subnautica
The Darkness II
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Game of the Year Edition
The Lord of the Rings: War in the North
The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition
Thief
Titan Quest: Anniversary Edition
Titanfall 2
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Tomb Raider: Underworld
Torchlight II
Trine 2
Tropico 4
Tyranny
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II
Watch Dogs 2
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Yakuza 4
I am currently playing Red Dead Redemption 2 (absolutely amazing game) on my main machine, and Tomb Raider Anniversary on my auxiliary machine. I am making steady progress in Tomb Raider, and I think I should be able to finish it in a week or so. My next game is going to be Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. It appears that it doesn't take too long to complete this.
Alternatively, I just don't pay any attention to any of this and just play what I feel like, and not worry about the massive backlog.
A thoroughly functional game, which does not outlast its welcome. It tells a concise story, and it fills in the gaps of the main Half-Life game. It took me a little under 4 hours to finish Blue Shift.
Technically, it is competent, but the original Half-Life engine has aged poorly. It worked fine at 2560x1440 resolution, but the game looks dated. I found it hard at times to distinguish textures that are meant to be interactive, because of how blurry the textures are at the resolution I am playing. I had to refer to the walkthrough a couple of times because I missed a switch that was right in front, but I did not identify it because textures tend to blend with each other.
The story follows Barney Calhoun, a security guard at Black Mesa. The events of Blue Shift run parallel to the events of Half-Life. The player gets to witness the chaos from a different perspective. Those that care about the Half-life story will find the story of Blue Shift interesting.
After 17 years of first playing Half-Life, I finally completed all the PC releases (not including the VR title).
To fans of the Half-Life franchise, I recommend this game at a deep discount. I do not recommend paying the full price. It’s not on par with the other expansion - Opposing Force, from a gameplay and story perspective.
I heard about this game when it was released back in 2016. It looked interesting but I didn't want to buy it because I wasn't entirely sure if I would like it.
7 years later, as I was looking through my game collection, I saw that I owned this game on Amazon. I am not sure how. I know I never purchased it. Now there is no excuse, and I must play this very interesting game.
I am won't dwell too much on the story. I think its pretty good, which is rare for a video game. I often do not care about video game stories, but this is a rare exception. In terms of being memorable, it's up there with Portal for me.
From a game play perspective, I don't think another game like this exists. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Considering how saturated the video game market is, this is an achievement that must be celebrated.
Time moves when you move, it is as simple as that and this idea can be used to create a lot of interesting scenarios.
Superhot is a very minimalistic game. Only the bare necessities of what makes a shooter is kept, and everything else is discarded. The color palette is very minimal as well.
There are situations where the bright flashing lights is very jarring. I do not recollect seeing an epilepsy warning, because if there was ever a game that needed it, it would be this.
Scenarios can vary between easy and super complex, requiring several retries. Despite this, the game is not very long. I think I finish it in about 4 hours.
As of this writing, Superhot is on sale at a 70% discount for $7.49. I wouldn't not recommend this game for the price. Witcher 3 is on sale for $9.99...the gameplay time to price ratio is just not lining up for me, but sometimes, it might be OK to ignore the value proposition for a game that is nothing like any other.
Verdict - It's the most innovative shooter I've played in years.
I played the regular PC version of the game released on Feb 16, 2012 (according to Steam). I understand that this game is beloved by many, and I am not trying to be a contrarian. I enjoyed Alan Wake, but in my opinion, the only thing great about this game is the atmosphere. For a game that is released over a decade ago, the visuals hold up very well. I played this game on an ultrawide display (3440x1440) and I had absolutely no issues whatsoever. Fantastic.
Everything else is average at best.
The combat is the weakest part of the game for me. I don't know how Remedy went from the smooth combat of Max Payne to the clunky mechanics of Alan Wake. Shooting feels weak, movement is awkward, and enemies are boring. The game even gives up on the enemies and just starts throwing furniture at you - literally. The slow motion dodge got very repetitive and very annoying. I went into this game expecting something akin to Max Payne and I got this clunky mess instead.
In addition to this, their idea of creating an atmospheric game is to make visuals blurry to the point where it caused eye strain at times when I light a flare. Is this a deal breaker? No, but when combined with all the other things, it certainly doesn't help.
The developers try really hard to draw your attention to whatever it is that they want to show you, which results in taking the control away from the player, and showing you an in-game cinematic. As I said, this is a sign of things to come for their next game - Max Payne 3, which takes this annoying mechanic to a whole new level of awful.
I know I am 10 years late to the party, but it doesn't change the fact that there are things about the game that are annoying.
I would recommend this game if you can find it for under $5. I think anything more than that would be overpaying for it.
I did not like Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order. This review is going to contain mild spoilers.
Let me talk about the things I liked about this game.
Some of the level design and art work is absolutely amazing. It truly captured the essence of Star Wars.
From a technical perspective, there are no issues whatsoever, other than the fact that there is double DRM to have to
deal with - Steam and the horrendous EA App. There were no issues running the game at 3440x1440 resolution in
borderless Window mode (excellent), and I was consistently getting over 120FPS on the highest settings.
Platforming is quite well done, especially in the good levels of the game.
I should have loved this game but I don't.
Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order is a Souls like game, and this is the first of its kind that I ever played, and this
concept is completely new to me. What I realized after playing this game is that for a Souls like game to be
enjoyable, at least these two things need to happen -
The level design has to be very good. This is because there is a lot of backtracking involved. Under usual
circumstances, one or two bad levels can be overlooked, but in a Souls like game, this problem is compounded
because the player will end up revisiting the level more than once, and this can be very frustrating.
Enemies should be fun - not to be misinterpreted with easy.
The biggest problem with this game for me is that the game fails at both - the level design on some planets is not good,
and the enemies are not fun.
There are a total of 6 planets in the game, and two of those planets are fun, and the rest are not. Less than 50% of
the game that did not appeal to me.
Bogano - Decent.
Kashyyyk - The absolute worst.
Zeffo - Excellent.
Dathmoir - Could have been great, but ruined by enemies.
Ilum - Decent.
Nur - Excellent.
It felt to me that I spent most of the game fighting bugs, spiders in particular. As someone who has arachnophobia, this
was pure torture. It got so irritating that I played these levels at 1920x1080 in windowed mode, without sound.
Just to give an idea, one of the objectives on the wookie planet is to climb a tree, and you get to fight bugs on
the way to the top. It felt like Avatar Fallen Order. To drive the point home further, you even hitch a ride on the
back of a bird. It absolutely did not feel like a Star Wars game. Add to this, there is a part of the game where you
play without the lightsaber. It really made me question the intent behind this design.
After trudging through these levels, you get to play in a sci-fi setting with a dual lightsaber and it just reminded
me how much fun this game could have been. I kept asking myself why the entire game wasn't like this. Is there a
mystery audience out there that want to fight bugs and zombies in a Star Wars game?
Exploring a planet and looking for collectibles was out of the question because of the tedious design. Also, this
game has the worst map screen I have ever seen in a game. This over engineered mess is truly a marvel of awfulness.
In addition to the bad level design there are very annoying things about the UX, for example, saving the involves
mediating, which will is a painfully slow process of waiting for animations to complete. Its cool to look at twice,
and then it gets very old.
The story felt weak and contrived. Nothing about the voice acting felt convincing and the cliche dialogue did not
help. The game suffers from plot armor, a character that should clearly died does not because of this kind of lazy
writing.
I should have loved this game, but the bad level design, and enemies made me not enjoy it. If none of this bothers
you, then you will have a lot of fun, as it is a technically competent game. I paid $4.79 for this, and I am not
upset about that, but knowing what I know now, I wouldn't buy this game, but I did not have fun.
Where do I even begin talking about Cyberpunk 2077? It's a very divisive game, and while I believe it was somewhat redeemed by the developers, it is a cautionary tale about hype, false advertising, and misleading marketing. It was beyond disappointing because CD Project Red, who gave us the fantastic Witcher 3, failed so spectacularly. I intend to talk about the events leading up to the launch of the game, the disastrous launch and the redemption that followed.
Beginning
Cyberpunk 2077 was first revealed in 2012. There was a lot of buzz around the announcement at the time. I didn't have much of an opinion about this. I haven't played The Witcher, and CDPR was not on my radar. I was too busy playing Battlefield 3. With limited time to devote to gaming, I had to pick and choose my games and Witcher didn't make the cut.
It wasn't until the release of Witcher 3, that the series and the developer caught my attention. Witcher 3 was hailed as one of the best games of all time. The footage I had seen was very impressive. I wanted to get into the world of Witcher, so I proceeded to play all the games and the expansions. Witcher 1 and 2 had a lot of issues (both technical and game design), but Witcher 3 and its expansions addressed all the issues, and they remain the best single player games I played to this day, even better than the original Deus Ex.
After finishing Blood and Wine in June 2018, which I immensely enjoyed, I could not wait to play the next game from CDPR. Their games are released on GOG without any DRM, and this makes them an exemplary company, in my opinion. At this point, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 was a little over two years away. intended to buy the game at launch, which I rarely do for single player games.
The game was scheduled to be released at the end of 2020. However, the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 had a huge impact on game release (along with everything else).
Launch
I did not buy the game at launch. I decided to wait for the reviews, and that was a good thing. The launch was an unmitigated disaster. It goes to show that any company can succumb to release deadlines and cutting corners.
The game had so much promise and potential, but the disastrous launch disappointed many, and threatened the future of the game, and the franchise. On old gen consoles it was supposedly unplayable, which led to Sony removing the game from their digital storefront, and both Microsoft and Sony issued refunds to gamers who purchased the game through them.
Cyberpunk 2077 was lambasted in the media. It was quite clear that the game was launched to meet the holiday sales quota. The highs and lows of Cyberpunk are quite incredible. All the good will that CDPR built up to this point appeared to have been lost.
Some wrote this game off as a lost cause.
Redemption
Soon after the awful launch, CDPR issued a statement and went on to release some much needed fixes to the game. The December patch fixed some problems with the game, but it was nowhere near the quality we got to expect from CDPR. There are still a lot of issues with the game, especially with NPC behavior, graphical glitches and performance problems.
Patch 1.6 Edgerunners
Update adds some much needed features to the game. I started playing this game after the release of Patch 1.5, and during my playthrough Patch 1.6 was released. I did not have to put up with all the issues, but I still felt that there was some depth lacking in certain aspects of the game. The lofty claims of the developers were still not quite realized.
Open World
There is something surreal about the atmosphere of Night City. CDPR did something magical with the setting. The city is a wonderful playground.
To anyone looking to play CP2077, I would thoroughly recommend using bikes. There are some nice cars to be found in the city, but even the nicest car did not compare to riding a bike especially in first person mode. Weaving between traffic at high speed is an exhilarating experience. There some driving issues here and there with bikes, but generally speaking, they are a LOT of fun. I avoided using cars because I did not like the driving physics. I believe there are mods that tweak this, but I have not tried it.
There is no vehicle customization in the game and I think this is a huge missed opportunity. This would have elevated experience to a whole new level. I spent many hours riding bikes in Night City. On an ultra-wide monitor with all settings maxed out, the game is a fantastic experience. I am not sure there is any other open world RPG that managed to do what CDPR did with Night City. This is especially why the lack of any vehicle customization, cosmetic and otherwise is very disappointing.
The skyline in Night City is amazing. It appears photo realistic. Its a real treat to walk around Night City, with RTX enabled. The reflections, especially in certain areas at night where the lighting is just right, its so unbelievably beautiful.
Witcher 3's world is vast and expansive, and in contrast Cyberpunk's map isn't nearly as big, but its very dense, and there are a lot of activities. There are so many skirmishes that happen in the world which the player can engage in, and also a number of fairly interesting side missions. I really enjoyed the random assault encounters. They are a lot of fun. I would rate the world of Cyberpunk to be on par with Witcher 3. I love the open world in both games for entirely different reasons.
Weapons
There is a wide variety of weapons such as smart pistols, shotguns, ARs, sniper rifles, and plenty of melee weapons. I gravitated mostly towards LMGs, pistols and shotguns. I did not use any of the smart weapons in the game. There is room for character customization which allows the player to make a build of their choosing, which can specialize in a specific type of weapons.
Shotguns and revolvers feel excellent. The LMG also packs a punch. Combat can definitely get easy as you progress in the game. I switched the difficulty to Hard half way through the game. Once I leveled up enough, combat became a lot easier. My character was too powerful for most enemies. I could wipe out an entire battalion of enemies with every little effort.
I want to do another playthrough of the game and focus on other weapons, such as ARs, and sniper rifles. I also did not spend much time with melee and smart weapons. I have future plans to revisit the game and try a very different character. Perhaps when I build a new muchine in 2025. If I end up doing another play through, I will be sure to add an update.
Story
I confess I did not understand parts of the story. I cannot tell you why Johnny Silverhand is hell bent on taking down the Arisaka corporation. Nor can I tell you what exactly happened at the end, but the ride itself was quite enjoyable. While it was not an incoherent mess, I could not relate to the grievances of Johnny Silverhand. Keanu Reeves voice acting is quite excellent, but some of the lines he had to utter were definitely cringe inducing.
I loved the final mission. It was a lot of fun. Rogue was the stand out side character for me There weren't any truly bad characters, but I didn't think they were quite as memorable as the characters in Witcher 3. This does not make it a bad game or anything in my opinion, but as I look back, I dont find myself thinking about how great certain characters were, like I do with Witcher 3. We shall see if the DLC changes any of that. Witcher 3 DLC characters were fnatasitc, especially in Hearts of Stone. There are some pretty neat easter eggs thrown in.
The player gets to choose the starting point of the story. I played as the Nomad. To my knowledge, the consequence of this is fairly minor. This is not like Witcher 2, where choosing one option locks a whole area off to the player for the entire play through.
This was not well received by some players. I didnt bother me one way or another. I felt like I got the full experience of a nomad.
Graphics
I was fortunate enough to play the game on a very powerful PC. I am glad I waited to play this on my PC because the game looks fantastic. On a 3080Ti, at 3440x1440 with RTX and DLSS on, the game is truly breathtaking, no pun intended.
Without DLSS, the frame rate takes a big hit on performance with RTX on. However, RTX really elevates the game, so I recommend playing the game with a card capable of ray tracing.
Conclusion
This is a divisive game, and even after most of the issues were addressed, some folks feel that it is too shallow. I tend to agree that some of the mechanics are quite shallow. That said, the overall game is very enjoyable. Considering that it sells at a discount most of the time, I recommend it.
Do temper your expectations. Enjoy the game for what it is, do not go into it expecting it to be groundbreaking like Witcher 3, because its not, and it will be disappointing. However, it is a damn good RPG, and the graphics are up there with the best. This game realizes the Cyberpunk world extremely well. The crowd AI definitely leaves a lot to be desired, but I can overlook this because the enemy AI, and the world design is very well done.
I cannot speak for the console experience, but on a PC, especially one with a medium/high end GPU, this game is amazing experience.
