SirNiXXon

It's astonishing how boring and badly designed Talisman is. I've played the tabletop version of Talisman before and always thought it was an awful game. I love boardgames, have dozens of them, but Talisman... It takes the features of games like Monopoly and other trail games and try to entice you with a mildly interesting (though generic) fantasy setting - but the truth is: it remains as boring, flawed and outdated as Monopoly itself. The game may drag for hours and hours without an ending in sight, stalemates aren't rare and everything is about randomness. There's no skill involved playing in Talisman, all you can do is try to push your luck in a general direction and pray for the best. I understand why a game like this would be popular 20 or 30 years ago, but today we have plenty of better board (and digital) games to play. Maybe *huge* fans of Mario Party would enjoy playing digital Talisman (or old fans of the original iteration feeling nostalgic), but I just can't recommend this game to anyone else. You want to play "digital boardgames" on your PC? Try Smallworld, Ticket to Ride or anything else, but stay away from Talisman.

An amazing little gem. Winterbottom is loaded with black'n'white-old-school-cinema humor. How often can you play a *good* game in black and white? The graphical style is really great (artsy stuff!) and soundtrack is really "old-school-movie evocative". Winterbottom consists various of short stages, each a puzzle of it's own. It's not a long game, but it's quite inexpensive, and it has good replay value. A great game for anyone who's into indie games, old movies or just wants a blast of "different" gameplay. It's also available for PC.

I think "Orcs Must Die 2" didn't improve on the first "Orcs Must Die" on every aspect: I miss the "Weavers"; I think the "Halls" of the first game were more interesting than the "Dwarven Mines" used as scenario in this new game; I liked the orcs design of the previous game better; and I think the "ragdoll" effects in this new tittle are a little exaggerated... Still, there are amazing improvements: one more character, better upgrades structure, more weapons and traps and guardians and, the best, the co-op mode. Co-op was exactly the major flaw of the first "Orcs Must Die", lots of people started playing "Dungeon Defenders" instead just to play co-op. Still, "Orcs Must Die" single-player manages to be (against all odds) yet more fun than "Dungeon Defenders" multiplayer, and now that we have co-op in "Orcs Must Die 2", well, there are not many reasons to go back to "Dungeon Defenders". In the end, I think "Orcs Must Die 2" is as good as the first one (meaning: it's amazing!) and also very cheap. Insanely recommended.

When most people think about a "beat 'em up game, from Xbox 360 Live Arcade, allowing 4 players to play coop", they think about Castle Crashers. They should, instead, think Scott Pilgrim. It's better than Castle Crashers in every aspect (except stability - Scott Pilgrim does freeze sometimes - and size - Castle Crashers is bigger). The graphics are old school and true the Scott's comics; the music is also old school, and catchy; the gameplay is old school, but it has level-up-learn-new-moves-get-money-buy-items-buff-stats mechanics; you can grab lot of things from the scenario e use as weapon and the game is pretty challenging... The game has a very strong character and is lots of fun - even more if you go local multiplayer with your friends.

I love "Tycoon" and "SimCity" type of games and really wanted to like Cities in Motion, unfortunately, bellow it's nice graphics, good presentation and interesting premise, it's a bad game, not an awful one, but still bad. You can struggle for hours micromanaging every detail of the game just to squeeze a few bucks, and those few bucks won't be enough to build your efficient transit grid. The game is very, very slow, in various points I had to put the game on fast forward (a pretty slow FF) and go take a bath, have lunch or whatever, so when I got back on the PC I could buy a new metro station or build a new tram line. Also, the traffic simulation ain't realistic, you'll find out that building lots and lots of small, interconnected, bus lines is the way to go because: a) long lines became quickly became too chaotic and problematic to manage, and b) your passengers don't mind paying and six or eight different buses just to get to work; is just doesn't make any sense, making the game really counter-intuitive . And, to worse things out, the developer seems just greedy: there are 10 DLCs for Cities in Motion already, none of them adds much to the game or are fairly priced (their formula is to charge U$4,00 for five vehicles to use on the game, which is pretty ridiculous). Avoid the mistake I made and stay away from Cities in Motion.

This is certainly an interesting and unique game. Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble feels different from most game out there, mixing up elements from RPGs, point'n'click adventures, board games and (for the lack of a better term) "mini-game-based games". It has a deep and, at the same time, goofy story, funny dialogs, different endings and a lot of content for the price asked (it took me 11 hours to get to the end of it). Still, the presentation does not live up to the game content (example: if you play on a standard widescreen monitor, you'll have to deal with stretched low-res graphics, or you'll have to play it on windowed mode) and the in-game challenges are often too luck dependent.

In short: The game is fun, but be warned! It has a really bad case of annoying load screens and it's last campaign is awful. Not so short: Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is a bit like a Puzzle Quest "light". I always loved the Heroes of Might & Magic series (but never gave a shot to the actual Might & Magic RPGs) and this game follows a similar pattern: you'll have your hero (Wizard, Necromancer, Elf, Demon or Knight) running around with his troops and will fight in a turn based combat - only the combat this time is puzzle-inspired. If you do all quests and fail one combat of another, it ain't difficult to spend about 25 hours to finish the game. That's a good amount of content for the price. However, there are a few problems... The worse is a very simple and incredibly annoying one: loading. There are loading screens for almost everything in the game, and they take take much more time than what's expected to reasonable. Be warned, you WILL be pissed about the loading in this game. the other problem is with the content per se. When you reach the fourth campaign you'll notice the developers cut some corners to be able to finish the game in time - it's noticeable smaller, rushed, but sill very fun. The fifth and last campaign however, suffer from the same problems than the previous one, but in a bigger scale. Is clearly lackluster - annoying even. You'll play four good campaigns and will meet a big turnover on the last one - and you'll have to face it anyway if you want to finish the game.

The thought of a traditional point'n'click adventure where your take your journey into the mind of a car crash victim sounded intriguing. Experiencing dreams, subjective memories, looking at hidden allegories while trying to understand, piece together a traumatized mind is a great idea - I was instantly reminded of how great was the old adventure "Sanitarium", so I decided to give Trauma a chance. Unfortunately, the game is too ambitious for what it delivers. You don't really piece together anything, you're more an spectator than a player or an explorer. The main character ain't properly explored, you don't get to know her. The game feels unrewarding and, really, is very short. As a game, Trauma isn't awful, but it's lacking. Had some great ideas, but didn't use 'em well.

An amazing little gem. Winterbottom is loaded with black'n'white-old-school-cinema humor. How often can you play a *good* game in black and white? The graphical style is really great (artsy stuff!) and soundtrack is really "old-school-movie evocative". Winterbottom consists various of short stages, each a puzzle of it's own. It's not a long game, but it's quite inexpensive, and it has good replay value. A great game for anyone who's into indie games, old movies or just wants a blast of "different" gameplay. It's also available for Xbox360.

If you're too lazy to *read* a good story, then you should skip The Longest Journey. However, if you have a bit more common sense than that, you'll like amazing stories and know that reading those stories is, well, amazing. If you like the idea of following a plot that transcends what you could expect to find in a game, then The Longest Journey is for you. It's the best "point 'n' click" adventure I ever played (and I played more than 40 games of the genre): it's filled with great written dialogs, puzzles, characters and worlds. Yes, it's so good it stands up when confronted with other gems like Grim Fandango, Gabriel Knight and Sanitarium.

I didn't get the full collection, but one of it's games: Space Channel 5: Part 2 (yes, each tittle is available individually). SC5:P2 is an amazing game, straight back from Dreamcast times. Unfortunately, this PC port is downright awful, a shame for SEGA, it's broken to the point of being unplayable. I'll list a few problems: a) there are frequent audio/video sync problems (and that alone is enough to kill a rhythm game); b) the graphics are glitched, you'll see a lot of random polygonal bars popping on your screen, obscuring what you need to see; c) the game won't even save your configurations manually copy it's **** file to an specific folder and manually enter your configurations through a text editor (if you don't do that, the game won't even run in full screen mode). Unless you're pretty sure SEGA solved all these problems in a path, avoid this tittle like the plague - if if they didn't fixed those bugs in the last six months, I really doubt they ever will

Space Channel 5: Part 2 is an amazing game, straight back from Dreamcast times. Unfortunately, this PC port is downright awful, a shame for SEGA, it's broken to the point of being unplayable. I'll list a few problems: a) there are frequent audio/video sync problems (and that alone is enough to kill a rhythm game); b) the graphics are glitched, you'll see a lot of random polygonal bars popping on your screen, obscuring what you need to see; c) the game won't even save your configurations manually copy it's **** file to an specific folder and manually enter your configurations through a text editor (if you don't do that, the game won't even run in full screen mode). Unless you're pretty sure SEGA solved all these problems in a path, avoid this tittle like the plague - if if they didn't fixed those bugs in the last six months, I really doubt they ever will.