Some games I've played in 2024, post no.346367
I played more than just these, but these are the ones I either finished or put in a decent amount of time, and wanted to write some thoughts on.
Master of Orion 2 Patch 2.50
I'll just talk about the patch since MOO2 is legendary, no need to outline it. I played like two dozen full games with the 1.50 patch. It brings not only a metric ton of fixes (as well as slight optional balance changes, and to the better, if you ask me), it solves a long standing micromanagement problem. In MOO2 there's a very large number of buildings and queuing them up colony by colony becomes a major hassle even if have only a couple of colonies past a certain point in your game. With 1.50 patch, you get a txt file (a couple of them, in fact) with a manually customizable queue that you can engage by pressing a key while hovering over a colony with the mouse cursor in the colony management screen. Or you press ctrl-q, and all the colonies will engage this custom queue. This speeds up the game dramatically. It's hands down my favorite 4X game now. You can easily meaningfully manage 2-3 dozen colonies now without breaking a sweat. Yes, there's still some annoying micro involved, refitting ships still suck, but holy crap, the entire game from start to end is a pretty fast game now.
Heretic II
A billion years later, I've finally finished it. I think I played it like 2-3 times over the years, but always dropped it less than halfway through. This time I finished it in a few sessions, and liked it a fair bit. Yes, the controls are massively flawed, the combat is jank, but the atmosphere, man, Raven knew how to make atmosphere. Heretic 1, Hexen, Hexen 2, Heretic 2. All flawed in their own way, but all premium fantasy old school style shooter games with S-tier atmosphere. Not much else I can add. Amusingly, I played it using 86Box with authentic framerate and resolution because I couldn't manage to run it natively. Despite the 86Box's choppy and laggy mouse, and Heretic 2's not so stellar performance (which is what you'd expect on a P2 250 machine), it was still enjoyable.
Descent 2
I love 6DOF, I love Descent, but every goddamn time I boot either D1 or D2 up, I always quit after the first 10-15 levels. This time's no different. The game's just too flawed - punishing encounter design, asinine weapons roster, ungodly enemy spawners that respwan a billion times, gigantic non-linear levels (I love this shit, but it does grind you past a certain point). Playing this time, I couldn't help but feel how cool it would be to have a Descent-like 6DOG Metroidvania. Shame it's not as polished as the other old school FPS classics, but still, it is a fun game, it just ends up being too frustrating past a certain point.
Disciples II
I can't believe I've managed to finish this one (just the base game, didn't touch the 2 expansions). I never was a huge fan of Disciples, and after putting some hours into the first one ages ago, the second game never managed to grab me. Turns out, these days there's a patch (Verok's patch) that has an option to crank up combat speed (yes, base game has instant speed option, but it ends up looking very confusing). Disciples is a weird game. It's really more of a turn-based dungeon crawler kind of game than a strategy game, as there's really not a whole lot of strategy involved. Your primary goal is to level up your hero, level up your army, and find badass artifacts. There's no unit attrition, so once you steamroll over enemy heroes - that's it for them. Similarly, if you lose your primary hero - game's over. Still fun, but seeing this game compared to Heroes of Might and Magic is just not even remotely correct, HoMM is a strategic wargame at its core (speaking of, there's Verok's patch for Win version of HOMM1 that has an option for combat grid and faster combat speed, a must have), it's closer to, for example, Warlords. While Disciples is far more of an isometric RPG game with turn-based strategy elements.
Cultic
It's a fun one. Bizarrely, people recommend it for Blood fans, but they're nothing alike gameplay wise. Cultic is much closer to 2000s style shooters with some tactical elements. Combat is overwhelmingly mid to long range, with headshot playing crucial role. I wasn't a huge fan of its level design, with long corridor-like sections appearing too often for my liking.
Amid Evil
Revisited it after dropping it early years ago, and I've managed to finish the entire thing + DLC. The game's alright, but every aspect of it feels a bit half-baked and hints at a better game that the devs didn't manage to make. Level design is all over the place in quality, monsters are repetitive, the gunplay is usually not very satisfying. The game itself is sort of a cross between Painkiller style and Quake style FPS. I reckon if you're more of a Painkiller/Serious Sam kind of person and you want bite-sized non-linear levels - you might enjoy it more than I did.
Warcraft III: Frozen Throne
I never was a huge fan of W3, when it came out I was disappointed because I was a big fan of W2 and W3 went in a completely different direction gameplay wise. I played the original W3 a few times, but only managed to finish around 2020. I thought I'd give FT a shot, but it's basically the same stuff - you'll probably love it if you enjoy W3, but for me it's a really slow, boring game that's never even remotely challenging.
GTA San Andreas
I don't think I've ever replayed San Andreas, so it's the first time since mid-late 00s. Finished about 80% of the missions before I got tired of the game. It's the most fun out of 3D GTAs for me, but it's still janky as hell with tons and tons of flaws. A very hit-and-miss game, but still fairly enjoyable. It's a shame this kind of game design is pretty much gone, as what I really would've loved to see is San Andreas taking an immersive sim route (sort of?). Alas, San Andreas x Morrowind x Deus Ex is not on any big publisher's radar.
GTA IV
It was really disappointing and I even wrote a post about it
Breath of the Wild
I really liked it despite its many flaws. The exploration and the overworld were hands down the most engaging aspects of it. It's interesting that despite how relatively simple the game is, and how relatively empty the world really is, it's still massively engaging. I don't think I was as impressed with an open world exploration since... I don't even know, like Might and Magic VI or something? That was ages ago. I remember Oblivion being very impressive as well, but it rather quickly became unimpressive due to an incredible number of issues, and the world wasn't really all that great either. It was mostly the tech with the drawing distance really, but once you got over that Oblivion plummeted for me. But Breath of the Wild was engaging for around 30-40 hours, with the other 20-30 being a fairly decent wind down (I've finished it in 60).