Another slow week, only a single release! Revisited some older releases, and also some semi-recent ones from last month in this week's update.
First up,
Where is My Heart?, a PlayStation Mini from a few years back, which made its way to PCs last month. While at first I didn't find too many impressions for it, revisiting it now I can see it comes very highly recommended, people say it's an incredibly pure experience, a puzzle/platformer with a game system that takes some aspects of The Lost Vikings where you switch between characters with different powers, but goes a really different direction with the way it mixes around all the vignettes of different parts of the screen. People frequently say it's their favourite Mini, and also very high on their GOTY list.
A Story About My Uncle is next, and another entry making the list after getting a few more impressions. While this one has a bit more mixed impressions to it (I think some people didn't enjoy the first-person platforming), the people who do like it really find it to be a pretty unique game. Somewhat reminiscent of Mirror's Edge in the way you leap from place to place as quick as you can, but also not really. This game employs a lot more techniques to assist your jumping (grappling, rockets, etc). Some people did find the end segments to be a little annoying, falling to your death and having to start over, but overall they still enjoyed it a lot.
Now on to the two older releases making the list,
Neverwinter Nights: Diamond Edition is the first with, well, reservations indeed. I wasn't sure where to go with this one at first, but it made it's way in. It's sort of like that really horrible fast food that some people inexplicably like I guess, as despite being dumbed down in every way imaginable from the previous Infinity Engine games (worst of all is really the single party member restriction), there's still a bunch of people that enjoy it. The warnings are appropriately harsh though, so I don't feel too bad about including it, and it did actually have a pretty amazing editor which led to thousands of community created modules and all sorts of fun multi-player campaigns to join closer to its release.
Neverwinter Nights 2: Complete is next, and while the campaign of the original game also starts off horrible (as is the game engine), it lifts itself back to some degree of good fun not really found in the original NWN game (and NWN2 also has you managing multi-character parties, instead of a solo-party memeber, so that's a plus). The real draw of the package is the first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, which has pretty high praise from almost everyone. Great writing, meaningful choices to make, and easily worth the price of the entire package even if it's the only thing you play from it. Also worth noting there's now a ton of mods for NWN2, texture packs, UI optimizations for HD/Widescreen, Character model improvements (vanilla NWN2 characters look horrible), a mod that brings the entire original campaign up to date with all of MoW's improvements (for subsequent playthroughs, probably not best for a new player), and mods for adding additional character classes... as well as various engine improvements over the years. So things are a lot better now than at release for the game which helps the game out.
As for what didn't make the cut, a short list this week:
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Xenonauts (not enough impressions, revisit in a few weeks)
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Among the Sleep (not enough impressions)
The Summer sale sure makes for a boring release schedule! But I guess that can't be helped too much, given people probably don't want to buy anything not on sale at the moment.
Stay tuned!
