Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr (CD ROM)

I suppose playing the modern Bloober Blair Witch game made me dig this one out from my spindle of old CD's and give it a try. It came out in 2000 and has gained a small cult following and is considered the best of the trilogy from that time. It also has a reputation of having issues on modern hardware.

Well first I booted into my old Win 10 install and tried it there. It worked, sort of. But for some reason it has horrendous boot times. Initial boot up with the screen calibration took 15 minutes and I thought it was locked up. Regular boot up takes around 5 minutes! I looked around and it's a known issues and no one seems to know how to fix it.

So I plugged in my old Win XP PC that hasn't been used for 8 years- Core 2 Quad 6600 (the greatest CPU ever made!) and AMD HD7700. The 32 bit Windows did the trick and everything worked like it should- with the game booting in around 10 seconds.

It's a surprisingly good game. It uses characters from Nocturne's Spookhouse organization- mainly Elspeth Holliday with appearances by The Stranger. So it's a game with Blair Witch lore and set around Burkittsville, but it is also a sort of sequel to Nocturne at the same time. The characters are well enough done and well voiced for the time. The graphics are fixed rendered screens in the old Resident Evil style and it's quite well done and sets the mood.

As the name suggests the story is set in the 40's just after, according to movie lore, Rustin Parr turned himself in for murdering 7 out of 8 kids. The story centers around the 8th kid and why he wasn't killed.

Unfortunately, what could have been an excellent game is reduced to just a good one by the controls. This game is clunky even in a genre known for being clunky. In combat, you often have to change weapons to deal with different types of enemies- but it isn't just a matter of hitting a number key...you have to draw the weapons as well. And you have to put your weapon away to activate anything as well. Towards the end there is too much combat...so much so that it is often just better to run if you know the way. I persevered because the exploration and investigative parts of the game, and the overall atmosphere and additions to the lore, were interesting.

The other two parts are not rated as highly because they increased the combat even further- but I still want to play them. I'd love to see these get remakes in the same style that CAPCOM have been doing to all the Resi games.

Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (unofficial patch version). An infamously janky game but I had such a good time with it I probably played it too much, staying up extra-late a few nights to just finish a few more sidequests and such before finishing it last night.

I usually base my RPG characters on my pets, so my character ended up being a female Toreador named Freya, after one of my dogs who was hanging out in the room with me when I started. My instinct at first was to play a talky/stealthy character, especially since there's a lot of interesting dialogue and alternate solutions at first, but the game makes it clear pretty early that you really can't invest too much in combat, which ended up fine. By the time I was done my vampire was pretty badass at both guns and melee combat and was only really seriously challenged in a couple of boss fights, as well as being an above-average hacker, talker, and lockpicker.

I can't say I've played the TTRPG, and my main experience with the World of Darkness stuff is limited to playing the Hunter games on the original Xbox, which were pretty good, as I recall, and watching a couple of episodes of the Kindred: The Embraced TV show, which was kind of dull. So I can't speak with authority but I feel like Troika did a fairly good job of adapting it to a video game. Concepts like the Masquerade, maintaining your humanity, and the relations between vampire clans and non-vampires come across clearly and are smoothly integrated into the story and gameplay. The characters are interesting and memorable, even down to side characters like Security Guard Chunk. They basically nail the ending, which can't often be said for even very good games. Apparently the fan patch helped out with this by including various cut content. And it's mostly well-paced - in the early game my rookie vampire often felt a little overwhelmed and humbled by everything, but at some point midway through my character started feeling legitimately tough and that was right around the point that the dialogue options started having a lot more cocky/trash-talking options.

On the downside, even with the extensive fan-patch, it's still very buggy. I had to resort to the console noclip command at one point because my character somehow got trapped inside an invisible cube after leaving an important location. Physics bug out a lot. My character developed a weird habit of striking out with her katana every time she left a cab, which nearly got me attacked by a cop at least once. Just weird stuff but mostly not game-breaking, aside from that bit about being trapped in place for no reason.

The game feels a bit front-loaded in the sense that the most interesting situations are more frequent at the start. Around the point of the notorious sewer level/dungeon, the game seems to shift a lot harder into extended combat sections, which doesn't play to the game's strengths. Just one fight after another. At least enemies usually don't respawn. Somewhat related to my impulse to try non-combat approaches, and similar to my Alpha Protocol reaction, I feel like the game could have worked better and been less fraught with design headaches if the creators had gone for more of a pure imsim approach than RPG. It works, but perhaps it could have been made to have a smoother ride.

Edit: Forgot to gripe about the lack of character customization options. You can't actually change how they look beyond buying "armor" upgrades that give them fresh clothes, but otherwise you're stuck with specific male/female looks for each clan and that's it. Stripping out options to let you make your characters your own is a pet peeve of mine with modern RPGs.

Creepy Tale (2020) (Linux)

It has it's own charm. Unique graphics and atmosphere. Reminds me Knock knock a bit, but here we have probably a little more puzzles. I didn't like those based on timing, which is always frustrating to me. But all in all it's a nice little game worth playing. It takes 2 hours. Works well under Linux.

List of all games completed in 2026.

My obsession with the EDF series has reached terrible new levels. Having beaten EDF 4-6 with no sequel in sight, I decided to go back in time and check out their predecessors, two of which are available on PlayStation Vita. And I just beat the older one of the two: Earth Defense Force 2: Invaders From Planet Space

So, this one is a Vita port of the PSP port of the PS2 game released in the west as Global Defence Force which was the direct sequel to Monster Attack. Phew. In other words: it's basically a PS2 game from 2005.

My expectation was that EDF2 would basically be just a prototype of the series that we know and love today. Shockingly, EDF2 is already almost exact same game as the most recent titles in the series. The premise, structure, general mechanics and feel are the same. The aesthetics are almost the same. The maps are of the same size (I think). It even has almost all enemy types of the series, three playable classes (only the Fencer is missing), vehicles and numerous guns and other equippable gear that you will still find in the newest EDF games. And the Vita version also controls pretty much like the newest games.

I'm honestly kind of shocked by how little the series has changed over 20 years - but also impressed by how many things the developers got right on the first try (yeah, this one is EDF2 but lots of the stuff here was actually already in the very first game as I found out from the intro and mission briefings).

But of course there are areas in which EDF2 is a major downgrade compared to the later games. The most obvious issue is that there are no friendlies in this one and unless you're playing multiplayer, the only other humans you will encounter are panicking civilians. The narration often suggests that there are other EDF soldiers fighting the aliens at the same time as you and it does actually manage to create the illusion that you're not entirely alone sometimes (especially when you hear gunfire and screams over the radio) but yeah, this is the main component of the series that's entirely missing. And hat whole theme of camaraderie, that's pretty essential to the endearing style of the later games, isn't here.

At first I thought that the game would be boring and vastly inferior as a result but honestly, I got used to it soon enough and it soon struck me that the gameplay experience is almost the same in spite of this. Especially in the later levels, where you just get swarmed by dozens of enemies at a time, it hit me that I'm having basically the exact same experience as in EDF 4-6 since during such intense battles friendlies tend to be pretty useless and go down pretty quickly anyway.

Another pretty big problem is the loot. At first glance this part is also almost identical to the later games but it soon turns out that this is one area where the series has made great strides since. There are relatively few items, there are no upgrades and you will only find gear for the class you're currently playing as. The pool of items is simply far too small to justify the randomized loot system. I think that more often than not you won't receive a single new piece of gear after completing a mission and basically the main thing that the loot system does is introduce the possibility that you might not have a weapon that you should have at the given stage of the campaign because you randomly didn't get it (though that appears to be extremely unlikely if you keep collecting loot). So, in terms of gameplay I've felt that this is the biggest downgrade.

And finally: the mood isn't quite there yet. The soundtrack is almost entirely stock music (which you may actually know from numerous other games, like Nocturne) that pretty much lacks any heroic or optimistic tunes. There's not even a victory jingle! And with the lack of friendlies on top of that, the game really consistently feels more like pulpy sci-fi horror from the 50s rather than the "happy Starship Troopers" that we know the series as today.

But in spite of all of that, I've had a blast beating the game! It is already a true EDF game and provides like 80-85% of the fun of the later games in the series and going back wasn't painful at all. You get to massacre legions of ants, spiders, UFOs and giant robots (and more!) and casually lay waste to entire cities while dramatic narration over radio constantly reminds you of what's at stake and what an unbelievable soldier you are. That's EDF alright.

Oh yeah, and the Vita version specifically has one cool feature: you can use the touch screen to aim. Not good for regular aiming but (once you set things up well) it's fantastic for sniping and I made regular use of it later on.

Anyway, any major fan of the series should totally enjoy this one. And luckily beating the game once on normal shouldn't take longer than 12-13 hours, so it's honestly worth a playthrough with one class.

Moving on to EDF 3!

Finally get chance to play Silent Hill 2 (remake). After GoG got SH4, which is great game I had really high expectation and did not got disappointed. As well as SH4 game is extremely well balanced for normal difficulty, so most of the time I have felling of endangerment. As well as RE games, there are changes between peaceful and low action parts, which makes your feelings to go up and down, thus allow to keep tension high. Remake has great graphics, unfortunately, future HW is necessary to max every detail to best possible and play game at 4K. Playing on Linux with Lutris, I had no crashing or any other problem except for well know absolutely deteriorated performance in last boss fight. I do not want so spoil anything, so I can only say, if you hesitate, than buy it. ;)

Blair Witch Volume 2: The Legend of Coffin Rock

Made by a different developer than volume 1 and it shows. It's a different sort of game. This time it's quite linear and you just kill the enemies in each area of the map, find the item you need to move on and follow the story. Combat is what this game engine does poorly- hence I didn't enjoy it as much as the first part which had more investigative downtime.

The story is set in the 1880's, around the time that (according to the movie) Robin Weaver went missing and one of the search parties is found murdered/sacrificed at Coffin Rock. Even though it wasn't as good as volume 1, I still enjoyed it and it was short.

Just like the first game, I simply installed and played it on an old XP machine and it ran without issue.

And now I've beaten the next EDF game just three or four days after beating EDF 2. This time it's Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable, which is actually EDF 3.

This one's a bit of a bizarre release because originally this game was only released on Xbox 360 all the way back in 2006, which is a weird choice for a series that was exclusive to PS2 and only successful in Japan until then. It only came to PlayStation in 2012 and only on the PlayStation Vita.

It's the first "next gen" game in the series and I presume that it also had a significantly larger budget than its predecessors. You can immediately feel a far more epic scale, mostly thanks to the fact that there's finally friendly NPCs who fight alongside you (and who will usually start following you if you approach them) and who also talk a ton during combat - scripted dialogue but also combat commentary and random banter. It also has fancier locations and set pieces than EDF 2.

It also finally has a fully original soundtrack, which actually contains several compositions that still appear in the newest games, so the mood is a lot more similar to what you know from EDF 4 and 5 - quite a bit more epic and heroic. And importantly: there appears to be a lot more and better loot than in EDF 2 (though there's a chance that I just got a lot more loot because I played the game on hard difficulty, this time, which provides better weapon drops).

This one is actually already pretty close to peak EDF and I bet that it would have become my obsession if I'd gotten to play it back in the day. It's almost as addictive and provides almost the same emotional experience as the newest games in the series.

But: sadly it's not all progress here.

Oddly enough this one has far fewer enemy types than EDF 2 and it's sadly missing the most impressive ones, like the War of the Worlds style strider robots and the caterpillar enemies. You're left with just several types of ants (without any flying ones!), jumping spiders, one type of mech (but with different weapons) and several types of attack drones. Other than that there's just several bosses. The limited enemy roster did make it the most monotonous game in the series that I've played. I still had a ton of fun through most of it but during the final stretch I did get dangerously close to getting bored.

And what downright shocked me is that there's only one class in this game: the Ranger, a standard soldier. The Wingdiver class (still called Pale Wing at the time) is a bonus exclusive to the Vita version and only unlocks after beating the entire campaign. Wingdivers are not part of the game's canon, though, and as a matter of fact the only friendlies that you will encounter are fellow rangers with different weapons. And there's also no AI-controlled vehicles, and I guess that's the main thing that keeps the game from providing battles as epic as EDF 4 and later.

My guess is that, as the Xbox 360 exclusivity also suggests (and also the fact that this is a reboot), EDF 3 was the first attempt to make the series more suitable for the western market and that ladies in miniskirts flying around with jetpacks and multiple character classes were considered something that might be off-putting to American players at the time. As a matter of fact the whole game feels pretty mundane and grey by the series' standards. Even the dialogue, while still campy, lacks most of that over-the-top B-movie silliness of the other games and feels a lot more like your standard war shooter stuff.

Oh yeah, and one super bizarre thing about this game: for some unfathomable reason there's no manual reload here and the only way to prepare a gun for the next enemy encounter is to deplete the current mag. I don't know where that decision came from but it's friggin' weird. I got used to it eventually but I didn't like it.

So yeah, the game falls quite a bit short of the peak that the series reached with either EDF 4 or 5 (depending on whom you ask) and I suppose that all of that stuff I mentioned is the main reason why EDF only began taking off in the west with EDF 4. But I suppose that if you already understand the nature and appeal of the series, this is going to be a welcome extra dose of EDF.

And a few words about the Vita port: I had praised EDF 2's Vita version for being able to assign aiming to the touch screen, which was super useful for sniping. That's not possible here for some reason. The performance did break down at times when there were really many enemies present but as far as I'm concerned the game remained playable even during these extreme FPS drops. And an advantage over the Xbox 360 version, besides the addition of the unlockable Pale Wing (aka Wingdiver) class, is that there's more missions and the new missions were actually some of my favourites. So yeah, I guess the Vita version is a good choice.

Visions of Mana, Jan 26 (Xbox Game Pass)-This game is exceedingly average in everyway. I don't think it excels at anything but it doesn't really fail at anything either. Its just there. Somehow I still found myself wanting to complete it. Its incredibly easy on normal mode. Only a single boss (Vampire) was difficult and I ended the game severely underleveled but with no real difficulties after about 25 hours and completing almost no side quests. The story is generic Mana fare of saving the Mana Tree/Goddess from the big bad who used to be the big good and it literally caused me to nod off several times. There are a ton of cutscenes lengthy cutscenes some even separated by only a few seconds of gameplay.

Full List

Finished Quantum Break. I really enjoyed this game. The acts of the game are separated by live-action episodes that show what happens to the "bad" guys" while our main character progresses. Those episodes are quite ok and well done. Graphics are great and the actors good. There are visual effects that are a bit too much by moments. Difficulty is ok and there are backstory elements to find if you search a bit.

Full list here.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope (Steam)

I don't know what it is with horror games recently, I have a bit of a thing for them at the moment. I played all of these Dark Pictures on Game Pass and PS Plus when available. Now I'm picking up any for PC whenever I can find them for under A$5 each. So first up is Little Hope which I previously played on PS5- which is a fine version of the game.

Little Hope is a Ghost Town story, where Man of Medan was a Ghost Ship story. I like Little Hope better because of the ending twist, which you could work out yourself but was still pretty cool. It's a pretty good short horror experience if you know what you're getting into- as with all Supermassive games since Until Dawn, Little Hope is a cinematic low game play experience that aims to replicate the B-Horror movie experience, complete with a group of dumb protagonists that do all the usual stuff like get themselves separated etc. Good stuff overall and runs like a charm and has outstanding visuals.

Hollow Knight: Silksong. Well, it's done (well, 80 percent, as the game told me). I really liked Hollow Knight, so of course I was looking forward to this, maybe not as fervently as some folks, but I was very interested in playing it. Having now done so, I think it's mostly a well-crafted game and certainly feels like a successor to the original. It feels a bit off, though, in various ways and ultimately I'm not sure if I actually had all that much fun while playing it.

The main thing that everyone talks about is that it's just brutally, relentlessly difficult. It's a git gud experience, but the gittin' gud has no end or reprieve until you get the true ending. The game starts tough and then just ratchets upward from there. My overall feeling while playing was of exhaustion as I would spend lengthy amounts of time bashing against a tough boss, finally overcome it, and then anticipate the next boss who would kick the crap out of me for a few hours until I scraped by him, too. No matter how good I got at the game or how far into it I got, I always felt like a loser because my "record" against any given boss was like 1-53. It was more like an endurance test.

It's not that the game is unfair (although there are certain dick moves by the creators...e.g., hiding the one working bench in Bilewater). It's just very harsh and it demands constant patience combined with high-level execution and reflexes. You learn early on that you shouldn't take more than one shot at a boss because the openings close quickly and you'll get punished for trying too much. And everything hits very hard. So it's one hit at a time against spongey enemies. As usual for me, I seemed to actually do well against certain bosses or sections that a lot of people disliked, such as the Savage Beast Fly, while I would struggle mightily against parts that others found more doable.

The game is compelling, and I wouldn't have kept chipping away at it if it just sucked. But having gotten through it, will I ever play it again? I can see myself replaying Hollow Knight but this one I'm not so sure...I certainly don't care about whatever that upcoming DLC is going to be.

STYX: Master of Shadows

I FINALLY beat it after many years of a little playing here and there. I killed every Elve except the one I could not reach. Everyone else I dive bombed from a very high ledge. They should not have locked me up affter trying to prevent a war between them and humans.

Now I'm playing Aragami and will finish Assassin's Creed: Black Flag after that. All stealthy games.

WatchDogs Legion


I enjoyed this game way more than I thought I would, and it's a shame that it ended up killing the franchise.

The story is simple, the villains are evil, and they all are satisfyingly ended by the end of the game.

London is cool, cyberpunkish without going too far in that direction. I do wish it had less narrow streets, and less one way streets as well, as those make for annoying navigation following the GPS. It has a number of restricted areas that serve as main mission areas, but between main missions, secondary missions, and recruiting missions, I ended up revisiting some of them a bit too much.

This time around, the gimmick of the game is the "recruit anyone" mechanic: you start by choosing three random people from a list, and grow your team by recruiting any citizen in the city, even enemy soldiers. To do this, the game generates backstory elements for the NPCs as you inquire for them, and generates random missions for the recruitment process. Ocasionally, you may resolve the recruiting process by doing something random in the game, I once met a character I had marked for later recruitment being harassed by a guard, I killed the guard and that finished the recruiting process. Another, I was doing a recruitment mission and 3 other NPCs I had marked joined my team when I completed a certain hacking objective. Each NPC belongs to one of the various citizen classes in the game and may have up to 4 special traits. Those can be a variety of things, weapons, cars, special hacks, special tech powers, better health, fighting skills, etc. There are even a number of negative traits, like farting (which makes stealth worse). The recruiting missions do get repetitive eventually, but it took quite some time for me to start seeing. When I character is killed, he ends up either in jail or the hospital for a time, and you are forced to switch to another team member. Recruiting certain characters with special traits, can reduce these timers to zero.

The system is rather cool and, despite some level of jank, specially during dialogues, it works quite well. Once an NPC is recruited, you can change their clothes, hair, tattoos, etc, so when I didn't like a character's look, I could almost always improve them to my liking. You can also research a number of different techs to allow better customization of the character loadouts as well.

The thing is, it's all a bit pointless. You can end up with 50 plus characters, but other than experimenting with different powers, and maybe switching to the random agent usually placed next to the next place on the map that a mission requires you visit, you'll most likely to stick to a small number of favorites that better match your play style. Other than customizing the loadouts, agents are immutable, so you'll never get new traits or lose bad traits. While you can roam around looking for special people to recruit, and the game ocasionally generates a special NPC suggestion (that rarely is all that great), conquering each of the 8 boroughs in the city grants you a speciall high power recruit, and you end up focusing on getting those early. Most of the traits are also pretty simple things like cars, guns, uniforms, which makes the whole system feel very underdeveloped.

Another thing is the abundant special DLC agents the game offers. Right after the first mission post tutorial, you can find these characters, including Aiden from WD1, and Wrench from WD2, just outside your hideout, ready to be recruited. Aiden ended up being my favorite character to play as, besides the horny spy lady that I got from one of the borough missions, which sorta defeats the purpose of hiring 50 plus randos. There are also a few Assassin's Creed missions that end up with a special assassin agent recruited.

Gameplay wise, I felt the game simplified things in relation to the earlier two, with less things to unlock and all. Also, for a stealth game, it has a huge thing for "Survive the ambush" or "Escape the ambush" objectives in missions that annoyed me to no end, since you rarely have proper hiding spots in most of those.

All in all, it's a shame the series is dead, as I wanted to see the recruitment system expanded and improved in future games. For now, let's just hope Ubisoft survives itself... really.

Blair Witch Volume 3: The Elly Kedward Tale

Just like the other two games I played it using Win XP using the old school way of a CDROM. My current main gaming PC doesn't even have an optical drive in any case. The only issue I had with this one was the games refusal to save my settings and keybindings when quitting the game- meaning I had to reset everything every play session.

The third game is the one people dislike the most out of the trilogy. This time it's more like a linear combat focused survival horror game and makes little attempt at Blair Witch lore or even feel- despite the fact that the title mentions it's the tale of Elly Kedward (the Blair Witch herself!) it actually has nothing to do with her other than being set in the same time period when Burkittsville was still called Blair. That's why she's called Blair Witch and not Burkittsville Witch, see?

Taken by itself it's still an okay survival horror game in the Resident Evil style fixed camera style, but it's not great.

For the series as a whole, the first game was quite good with it's investigation and mood being the best. The following two games go downhill from there. All were made by different developers, so it's not surprising that they are all quite different. I really need to find where that Nocturne disc got to now.