I was doing some "longer test runs" of Malcolm's Revenge - mainly because the game was giving me trouble on my machine, and all of a sudden felt like having real fun. After abandoning Hand of Fate in Volcania, I am finding the first chapter of Malcom's Revenge incredibly engaging for a quest-type game where I still remember most of the puzzles, and the sandbox feeling it has is just great.

Right now trying to see if nocd is an answer to the crashes I am getting once in a while, and how many points I can scrore before leaving the first island.

ELEX

Making steady progress in this game. I did a ton of quests in the Berserker settlement and eventually joined them. Which is kinda funny considering who the protagonist used to be, but it still felt right, given his current situation. I like the quest design here, since it's very reminiscent of Gothic/Risen. As in those games, there are multiple ways to solve certain tasks, and your choices can have interesting consequences further down the road.

I also like the joinable NPCs and their personal quest lines, especially Caja and Falk. You get to learn more about the world of ELEX while completing those, and some unexpected things can be revealed. From what I gather, only one NPC can follow you around at any time, while the others wait at the camp. Unsure if that changes later or not. I will say, their pathfinding is surprisingly decent, and they make good use of their jetpacks to keep up with the protagonist while moving over rough terrain.

On the less positive side, I feel that the gameworld of ELEX is unnecessarily big, and filled with mostly empty locations outside of the faction hubs and their immediate surroundings. As mentioned elsewhere, the Gothic 2 world size is ideal for me personally. Anything bigger than that starts feeling tedious to traverse. Though I will give ELEX credit for providing a nice fast-travel mode, which makes sense considering the protagonist's background.

Another thing that I'm not particularly keen on is the leveling system. Unlike in the Gothic games, you don't get a lot of XP from fighting monsters here. So you need to do a bunch of quests to level up. This would be fine, if ascending the ranks within your chosen faction didn't have a hard level requirement, in addition to the usual quest progression. For example, becoming a Warrior requires you to gain the approval of several people in the Berserker settlement (fine) and to be level 15 (not fine). This took a lot of grinding, and when I finally made it, the next rank had a level requirement of 25, which was a huge downer.

Overall, I do like ELEX, and I'm still having fun playing it. But it's not quite as good as Gothic 2 and Risen 1, which are my favorite Piranha Bytes games to this day. Nonetheless, I'll keep at it and see how things go.

I started again Chronicles of riddick escape from butcher bay, the original from 2004 and not the remastered from 2009 bundled with assault on dark athena. I do not want any postprocessing effects or motion blur so I stick with the original graphics.
This game is really tricky to get going, you need multiple patches and fixes.

Escape from Butcher Bay is a wonderful game and it still looks amazing I think. I haven't tried to play it on a modern machine though, I use a P4 with a CRT.

I play it on an Athlon 64 x2 4800 and a GTX285 and it runs like a dream at 1280x1024 maxed out. This game refuses to run on newer nvidia hardware and drivers such as GTX460 and 258.96 so I stick to the best nvidia drivers for Windows xp: 197.77.

I picked up Spellforce on GOG a while back. It looked in the vein of Warcraft 3 or Knightshift, and I have been feeling the itch for exactly that kind of fantasy RTS with a "hero" unit.

I'll tell you what, it's a pretty game! I really love the colours and the towns. I really enjoy the third person camera, even if you can barely play the game like that.

Unfortunately, I am not really enjoying the gameplay so much. I usually prefer better playing RTS games (I love C&C), but I can put up with a lot of nonsense for a hybrid. Still, Spellforce's RTS component are very underwhelming. I was excited when I could make big unit counts, but big groups are not particularly fun to control, they are hard to coral and don't really mob up in a fun way. There isn't anything interesting about the bases so far. The unit selection is alright but I get the sense it gets better with time.

I'm only maybe 6 levels in, at least, and I'm not giving up on it. The RPG mechanics are hitting my funny bone. I like the main character and I like the items quite a bit, even if they're mostly simple. I'll see where this goes.

badmojo wrote on 2026-09-10, 22:17:

Escape from Butcher Bay is a wonderful game and it still looks amazing I think. I haven't tried to play it on a modern machine though, I use a P4 with a CRT.

Both Riddick games are those that I found very enjoyable, yet at the end I don't remember them in great detail, just bits and pieces here and there. I do recall that they combine stealth and action quite well, and that there are multiple environment changes. Essentially a few times you lose all your gear and start from scratch.

I was replaying FEAR 2 and I got stuck in a room with no exit, glitch in the game.
Now I have to replay the level.

I tried to edit the savegame but I couldn't find anything about it on the net.
It's incremental I think, if you can find the previous checkpoint you can reset the bad part.

🙁

Now, which technique requests would these be, exactly? 😜

ELEX

Now that I have spent more time with this game, some of its flaws are becoming apparent. Melee combat still feels clunky, and just isn't as good as in the Gothic series. For comparison, in Gothic 2, dueling a powerful humanoid enemy (e.g. an Orc or a Skeleton Warrior) was an epic event, requiring precise strikes, well-timed blocks and skillful dodges. In ELEX, you just kinda waddle around the battlefield, swinging your weapon while trying to manage stamina consumption. Not exactly a thrilling experience. And the way your character reacts to commands feels delayed and imprecise.

Additionally, there seems to be some sort of level scaling going on, so you don't have a clear feeling of getting more powerful over time, unlike in Gothic. Enemies also respawn, and sometimes get replaced with more powerful versions of a slightly different name. So instead of a "plague rat" you get a "crystalline rat" which looks almost identical but has more health. That said, I heard ranged combat is supposed to be a bit better, but I haven't had a chance to try that, as my character is almost purely melee focused.

I still like most of the quests and the freedom provided to solve them in different ways. In particular, some of the missions in the Outlaw settlement have a bunch of twists and turns, with characters constantly trying to outplay each other, which I found very amusing. I also like the "coldness" mechanic, which serves as a sort of morality meter, and can influence some dialog choices. But there have been a couple of bad quests as well, which simply teleport you to a location where you're pitted against 4-5 strong enemies at once. Due to the aforementioned combat clunkiness, this just felt tedious.

After progressing further along the main plot, some interesting things were revealed through flashbacks. I liked that, as it made sense due to the protagonist's background. At this point, I see what needs to be done to finish the game, but it will likely take a while until all the pieces fall into place. This is well designed, as you need to build up your army and develop a viable strategy before attacking the enemy's heavily fortified base of operations.

Anyway, aside from the clunky combat, ELEX has been fun so far. You do feel that classic Piranha Bytes approach to world and quest design, though it's not quite on the level of the Gothic series. Still, it's decent enough to keep me invested, so I'll be pushing on towards the endgame.

Who can tell me where to buy Prey (2006)? I cannot find it on GOG nor on Steam.

Thanks

mtest001 wrote on 2026-09-12, 18:09:

Who can tell me where to buy Prey (2006)? I cannot find it on GOG nor on Steam.

Thanks

You can't, it's been completely de-listed thanks to Bethesda insisting that Arkane Studios call their game "Prey".

Ok, that's really sad. I guess I will look for it on archive.org then...

Edit: Found it, and it works great with Heroic Game Launcher under Linux.

I've recently bought a Spore Hero disk to play it on my Wii.

it's been pretty fun! The editors are surprisingly not that bad to use with a Wii Remote, although they're a bit more primitive than Spore's own editors.
You can't use morph handles or rotate parts as freely as in Spore, skinpaints are more limited and the body needs to be one of a few pre-defined shapes, but other than that it's pretty similar.
(and I'm pretty sure based on debug symbols that were found for Spore Hero a while back that its editor systems are based on the actual code from Spore)

the visuals are good, the sound design is about what I'd expect from Spore, and the gameplay is actually pretty good.
It's a mix of exploration, arena combat (which is very fun), rhythm-based dancing (not as fun) and singing that uses the Wii Remote's tilt sensor and. It's probably the worst part of the game I've played so far-

I've still yet to finish it, so it could turn out to have an awful later half, but right now it genuinely feels like a well made game that's a little rough around the edges.
Honestly it gets me wondering if Spore itself could run on hardware that's weaker than the minimum requirements, maybe it could run on a Willamette P4 or even a Pentium 3 if it doesn't use SSE2.

mtest001 wrote on 2026-09-12, 18:09:

Who can tell me where to buy Prey (2006)? I cannot find it on GOG nor on Steam.

Thanks

Look for it on Ebay. Check listings where you can see the authentication code and try to redeem that on Steam.
If it hasn't been activated yet, which is likely, because the game doesn't require activation and there is no indication on the box that it can be, then you'll get a legal copy on Steam.