Last game you finished, tell us about it

Half-Life 2
I believe this game needs little introduction. Released back in November 2004 with huge expectations as it was a follow up to one of the most defining FPS games ever. Reviewers seemed to agree that Valve had made another hit even though it might not have made the same impact that the first one did. I bought the game when it came out but in two tries wasn’t able to finish it (more on this later). First of all I have to underline that I haven’t played the original for the last decade and therefore can’t really compare the two. I’m patiently waiting and hoping for the Black Mesa mod to be completed before going back to HL1. So following JemyM template let’s continue…

Story
In Half-Life 2 you again take on the role of Gordon Freeman, the same silent protagonist you played in the first Half-Life. In today’s marked many will probably feel that HL2 has very little to offer story wise. There is no epic cinematic introductory to set the stage and there are no cut-scenes. Everything is seen from Gordon perspective but in reality Gordon has so little personality that you’ll easily immerse yourself in the game and feel it is your story and not Gordons. Even if you have played the first game you’ll have very little background information to what is going on. For the most part of the game you are on the run from a group called the Combine and will eventually hook up with a group of resistance fighters and aid there cause. The resistance fighters will constantly refer to you as the great Gordon Freeman but it is a little difficult to actually connect yourself with the role of being a living legend when you don’t really know why these guys are cheering for you. The story ends with a cliffhanger and does leave a lot of questions unanswered.

Engine
HL2 is a FPS and namely that genre is known to push the graphics evolution. The Source Engine powering HL2 is around six years old by now so you could very well fear that it hasn’t aged well. It may look a bit dated if compared to one of the engines created in the last couple of years but on it own I still think it can deliver a solid visual experience. To be honest it has received a couple of updates, like HDR support, since its original release but this is just extra bells and whistles to an already capable engine. What people may not remember is that the Source Engine was one of the first engines to implement and employ physics as part of the experience.

Gameplay
HL2 plays out like any odd shooter which boils down to it being a linear experience. There is very little free roaming and usually there is only one valid path to follow. The weapons available are also pretty standard from the Half-Life trademarked crowbar to assault rifles and rocket launchers. One weapon that does stand out is the gravity gun which can be used to grab objects, like saw blades, radiators etc and throw them at enemies. Likewise will you need to use the gravity gun to solve some of the puzzles you are faced with during your adventure. Another unique weapon is the bug bait which allows you to control creatures called Ant Lions. While the idea is fun it tends to be too powerful a weapon. The Ant Lions will basically kill all the enemies for you. Its use is limited though and you’ll only be able to use on certain “levels”. Concerning levels, HL2 does not feature levels as the game is basically one continuous journey from start to finish. Unfortunately you will occasionally experience short loading times when you enter a new area. It would have been great if the game featured better level streaming as it break immersion a bit. I believe it could have been done, even at the time, as Dungeon Siege (albeit a different paced game) had done it a couple of years earlier.
My only real gripe, and the reason why it took me so long to be able to finish the game, is that the first part of the game feels a lot like a tech demo trying to show off what the engine is capable of. Here I’m primarily referring to the parts were the game shift to being more of a racing game. In the first half of the game you both drive a hovercraft and a buggy and to be honest these parts drag on for too long a really doesn’t do much good. The only thing I can think of is that they make the changing scenery more believable as Gordon is transported greater distances than if going on foot. The engine’s main weak spot, the area transitions, are also more exposed in the driving parts where you will be hit by it more frequently.
The game starts to pick up when you’ll travel through a trap and zombie infested town, which puts you a bit on the edge. Likewise is fighting alongside fellow soldiers in the last part of the game satisfying. Your sidekicks won’t do much good and you might not care much for their fate but it is a nice change of pace since you’ll for the most part of the game be on your own. The ending feels a bit rushed as you for the first time really feel overpowered but still it’s nice to finally feel a bit hero like.
The types of enemies you face differ a great deal and the A.I. generally feels believable. That said the game is not too difficult so you’ll seldom face a situation were you’ll be stuck for too long. You will from time to time be facing a kind of “end of level” bosses mainly in the form of a chopper like vehicle which has to be destroyed by rockets. Luckily there always seems to be a crate of rockets nearby so you’ll never end up short.
The game will auto save at checkpoints which seems to be quite frequent and always before a fight. Rarely will you have to start from too far back in case of death. The loading times are short and you’ll quickly be back in action.

Conclusion
It took me 16-17 hours to complete the game which actually makes this a long game compared to many other FPS. Some parts do feel a bit unnecessarily long but all in all I feel it was an interesting journey. Especially after leaving the driving parts behind I didn’t feel bored and was anxious to see what would happened next. I may not be left with the same feeling as I did more than ten years ago with the first Half-Life but looking at it six years after its release I think HL2 is a solid game and still has something to offer in todays marked.

Nice review stealth. I love HL2, and I've finished it at least 3 times. I replayed it from the beginning when Episode 1 was released, and then again with Episode 2.
I was a big fan of HL1 as well.

My patience is starting to wear thin regarding Episode 3 though. I'm beginning to wonder if Valve has abandoned the series that put them on the map.

I hope Episode 3 comes out, and then I'll get thefirst 2. I've been waiting until I have all 3!

Might& Magic: Clash of Heroes (for the DS)

Outside of a few references to names and locations from the M&M lore, there's no link to M&M in this game. It's not an RPG, either. It's a puzzle game with some rather minor RPG aspects. Although the mechanics are a fair bit different, this game shares a lot with the Puzzle Quest series. I had a very good time with the game. It got much easier once I realized there were random encounters that could be farmed for XP (and once I decided to invest the time doing said farming), but there were still some nailbiter fights and a couple of the bosses were very challenging requiring some in-depth battle plans.

I got the recommendation for the game from Mike, and as usual it was excellent advice. If you enjoyed PQ and don't mind gaming on a DS, this game is worth a look. It's been out for a year or so, so it should be available on the "used" shelf at many Gamestops, me thinks.

Undercroft (iPhone)
Undercroft is free on iPhone to promote some MMO. Ignore the MMO and grab this RPG instead (appstore). It was originally developed for Pocket PC 2006 and there's also a PC version (1.20) floating around, but the iPhone version is an enhanced edition.

Story
The game got six levels but the final level is much larger than the previous ones. Each level of course contains plenty of sidequests and loot.

The story in Undercroft is not on the serious side. After betting on a tavern that you can steal a dead kings treasure, you drink too much and end up in a jailcell in another village. Your very first mission is to recover hens which you appearently set loose when you are drunk. After that you must find the graveyard where the grave is located. Naturally it's not that easy and once you find the treasure you are less than half through the game. This is just not a story you are going to remember after playing the game.

Engine: Graphics & Sound
Undercroft is a Dungeon Master clone (Eye of the Beholder, Ishar etc) that is seen through a first person perspective. As a such the artwork is well drawn, both monsters, backgrounds, character portraits and equipment. The sound is decent. The game have continous background music that I felt to often be out of place and repetitive. Monsters have their own sounds which may also warn you that they are attacking you from the side or behind.

Gameplay
This is a turnbased partybased RPG, which means you are likely to have a fighter, a mage and a priest in your party, filled up with the the two odd classes assassin and summoner. For my game I used the assassin that when boiled down was a ranged damagedealer. Each class have around 12 unique skills and three basic abilities (strength, dexterity, constitution). Strength gives melee damage and hitpoints, dexterity gives ranged damage and defense, constitution gives stamina (and mana) and resistances. Naturally the mage have spells, the priests have healing and protection spells, the fighter have strong attacks and weapon specializations and so do the assassin.

As a turnbased rpg your party attack one at a time, then the monsters attack. You attack by pushing an attack button and the selected character will make their attack against the selected monster. I rarely found the need to complex things, clicking the attack button repeatidly was the fast route, strategy just took time and you had no alternate skills to mix things around with either.

Now due to one significant design choice, the variation in skills is a waste. You just get TWO skillpoints per level. Unless you pump your primary abilities every level they will lag behind, causing your fireball to deal almost no damage at the end. I toyed around early at the game to try different skills and ended up severly crippled because of it at the end. The only route to take is to put one point in your primary weapon (or spell), then the other in your primary ability, thus ignoring 90% of your skills. This is too bad, as I do not believe having a few extra points would have hurt the balance much, but improved variation and strategy.

Conclusion
Being the best and free on iPhone doesn't mean Undercroft is great compared to other platforms, but at least it's decent enough to make a seasoned RPG fan to want to finish the game. I have to say though that Redshifts Legacy on Pocket PC was a much better game in all aspects, both gameplay and story.

Mass Effect 2: Arrival
Arrival is the final major DLC for Mass Effect 2 and a preparation for Mass Effect 3. Does it deliver, or is it just another Witch Hunt?

Story
Admiral Hackett sends Shepard alone into a batarian outpost for a rescue mission. Dr. Amanda Kenson, a deep-cover operative and scientist, claims to have proof of an Reaper invasion but she must be rescued first.
There's really no further interaction with NPC's than those mentioned. This is a solo mission and it serves as a story filler between ME2 and ME3.

Gameplay
Arrival provides little in terms of new gameplay. There are some brief moments where you control droids and there's a minor crane puzzle. None of it stands out like the content in the earlier DLC's. Kenson temporary acts as a new NPC but most of it you have to survive on your own. It might be an interesting challenge to play without any backup for once. There's a lot of enemies to defeat, interestingly without armor most of the time, so if you are optimized to break armor then too bad for you. There is an achievement that can only be gained through surviving wave upon wave of enemies that took me quite awhile to finish on insanity since I had forgotten to reequip my armor and had my skills optimized for teamwork. Somewhat inspired by Metal Gear Solid perhaps you also get an achievement for not alerting any guards. Interesting but could have been fleshed out a bit more.

Final Verdict
Arrival is the weakest DLC for Mass Effect 2 but that doesn't mean it isn't worth it. This is not Witch Hunt for Dragon Age that uses almost exclusively rehashed content and ends with a slap in the face. There is some new content here. The promise to set things up for Mass Effect 3 is really there and with Arrival you can see what's coming (more than the Reapers that is). With that it's probably time to allow ME2 to rest for me, having finished all major missions, earned all achievements, bought and researched everything in the game...

Dawn of Magic 2
Hm… while I expected the game to be a real drag after being forced through the very unispired tutorial, it turned out to be quite entertaining after all.

In short: Quick, mindless action, meh story, boring side quests, four somewhat absurd main characters, twelve schools of magic, specializations tend to give the character a new exterior.

While enemies tend to come in large groups that happen to obliterate you time and time again, playing in respawning mode somewhat counters the effect (if you don't play in respawning mode, the game is over once you die. And I mean over).
The only problem is that you lose all your money when killed (except in boss fights), and some items. That's not too aggravating, though, because you can always come back to re-collect all your loot… but there's actually a 'but', and it's the inclusion of so-called Looters. They are non-combatant 'enemies' who collect all the stuff others - mooks or players - drop on the battlefield. And since these guys are fast, heal quickly and teleport around quite a bit, it might become a favorite sport to hunt the Looters down before you clean out the rest of a horde of mooks.
Although… while money's somewhat tight in the beginning, I carried around tons of money during the last third of the game, and I never even thought of buying anything for it. I still made it to the end.

Don't expect logical spell effects. Fire enemies aren't allergic to water spells, for example. That is, they might be (as individuals), but it's not a given fact for a species. So you need to experiment quite a bit, unless you decide to mop up using close combat only.

Boss fights are usually easy wins even if you manage to specialize in all the wrong magical skills (like I did).
Example: I specialized in 'Rock' (school of Earth Magic) because throwing rocks is fun, and those hurled rocks keep enemies at bay. I mean, if they burn, they burn, but it doesn't keep them from advancing on you. Throwing rock does.
Well, I honed my rock-throwing skills which helped me survive up to the point of the last boss fight who unfortunately was able to summon so many goons that it really didn't help at all (some Light spells might have worked wonders there - Light equals radiation in this game, and there's one spell that has all enemies in a certain radius affected by radiation sickness. While I had learned some Light spells, that one included, I hadn't spent enough spell points on them to make them really effective against higher-class enemies.) But to get back to why it's easy to win a boss fight: bosses have weaknesses. It's usually easy to figure out which because they - being masochists - happen to keep harmful stuff in their vicinity. There's always one certain (best) way to get rid of a boss though pure violence may help in some cases, too.

Music is repetitive, but I tend to play with sound turn off most of the time, anyway - a habit going back to my time without a sound card. With DoW2 it's not too bad, anyway, because they really botched localization. Even though there's a patch addressing the problem, spoken/written language happens to switch between Russian, English and German (my localized version) all the time.

Now to the ending… erm, well, let's not talk about it. Or let's say 'Heretic'.

Okay, the result: seen objectively, DoW2 is a trashy pile of crap… yet it still is entertaining. While DoW2 is a rather imperfect and uninspired Diablo clone, it provided me with a quick action fix. I do think my 3 € were well spent.

In fact, I chucked in Drakensang five minutes after finishing Dawn of Magic 2, and guess what? While I liked what I saw of Drakensang right after installation (which was before I fired up Dawn of Magic 2 for the first time), straight after playing DoW2 Drakensang felt like a real drag: slow, with horrible camera controls and a clunky interface. I left the game after accidentally recruiting my first party member because I had all about forgotten that Drakensang is DSA and thus features a party!
Perhaps I'll get into Drakensang after all one day, but I'm pretty sure I'll return to the bargain bin tomorrow morning to see if they still have the copy of ME for 5 € I turned down in favor of Drakensang last week.

EDIT

Just bought ME and ME2, but I also got used to Drakensang. Like my character . Now that I finished my manuscript and have a week off I have lots of gaming time on my hands.

I just finished Realms of The Haunting.

The graphics and UI haven't exactly aged well (1996), but I still really enjoyed it. It has some truly great puzzles to solve, and that was definitely its strongest aspect. Combat is a mixed bag, as the enemy AI is nonexistent, and the controls aren't well suited for action anyways.

It uses FMV for cutscenes, but they're not very frequent, and were generally well done. I thought the story was well written, although a few things were never fully explained, and the ending didn't exactly blow me away.

Overall it's still a very good game, imo. Some of the puzzles had me pulling my hair out, and I had to resort to looking at an online walkthrough for a few of them towards the end. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who likes action-adventures, especially since it's only $5.99 at GOG.

JDR13 said:

I just finished Realms of The Haunting.

The graphics and UI haven't exactly aged well (1996), but I still really enjoyed it. It has some truly great puzzles to solve, and that was definitely its strongest aspect. Combat is a mixed bag, as the enemy AI is nonexistent, and the controls aren't well suited for action anyways.

It uses FMV for cutscenes, but they're not very frequent, and were generally well done. I thought the story was well written, although a few things seemed a bit muddled to me.

Overall it's a very good game, imo. Some of the puzzles had me pulling my hair out, and I had to resort to looking at an online walkthrough for a few of them towards the end. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who likes action-adventures, especially since it's only $5.99 at GOG.

Click to expand...

Yup, I clearly remember much of the final game being puzzle-heaven.

Crowther was something of a genius - based on Captive and RotH. I wonder what the hell happened to that guy.

DArtagnan said:

Crowther was something of a genius - based on Captive and RotH. I wonder what the hell happened to that guy.

Click to expand...

Apparently he works for Electronic Arts. His most recent project was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1963854/

JDR13 said:

Apparently he works for Electronic Arts. His most recent project was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1963854/

Click to expand...

Sigh…

I bet his next game is either for Facebook or an iPhone app

Last game i was finished i.e Gothic 3. My rating about this game 8/10. I enjoyed this game very much when i was play it on mine PC. I would say that Gothic 3 superb game for me.

Just finished Portal 2.

I have to admit, it was a lot better than what I was expecting. I figured all those 9/10 review scores were just the typical AAA treatment, but I must say it's actually deserving. The gameplay was great, and the story was actually very good as well. Not crpg standards, but about as good as that type of game could be.

I really can't think of a single negative aspect. The puzzles are challenging, but almost never frustrating. The voice acting is superb, and the graphics and animation are surprisingly sharp considering the engine. The plot does a great job of making you want to keep playing, and the ending was actually satisfying for once.

Good job, Valve. Now where the hell is Half-Life Episode 3?

Bar Oasis (iPhone)
A bartender game with a warm story.

Story
Vic takes a job as a bartender at Bar Oasis and soon finds himself to be in charge when the boss drop out. Among the regulars are Mark the womanizer, Sheila the Irish actor and the mystical Desree who works too much. The story is told mostly through dialogue with funny and emotional scenes.

The characters do remind me a bit about Phoenix Wright on Nintendo DS as they are usually fun and odd.

Graphics & Sound
The game looks good and have decent music and sound effects. Characters are painted well with a hint of manga to them. All the booze uses original photographs of bottles, including a wealth of famous brands.

Gameplay
The core gameplay in Bar Oasis is to serve drinks and the game have a host of real recepies. You can simply follow the recipe or you can go without like a pro. This involves knowing the right glass, when to use the mixer or the shaker and of course what liquids to have in it all. The game uses the phone itself, pouring means "pouring" the phone, using a shaker means shaking the phone etc.

Unfortunately this get a bit repetitive after awhile, but it is fun to learn the recepies of famous drinks if you are into that sort of thing. The interface sometimes feel clunky and slow. It's also a shame that you do not get to pick soda, salt, pepper, sugar, lemon, lime, oranges or ice, the game add these ingredients for you even as a pro. I think that if the game really demanded you to add all the ingredients of a Margarita yourself you would learn more while doing it.

Verdict
The characters and the chance to learn some drink recepies is the good stuff that comes out of Bar Oasis, but if such elements do not appeal to you then you might want to sit this one out.

Cause of Death (iPhone)
Cause of Death is a storydriven game where the only gameplay mechanic comes from picking the right dialogue option, usually on time. The game comes free and extends with free episodes each week but you can also buy older episodes or one episode ahead. Since this is the "last finished" thread, let me add that I finished all the episodes so far (first three seasons, 3 episodes in season 4 and the bonus missions).

Story
The story circulate around Mal Fallon of the San Francisco Police Department and Natara Williams, Special Agent of the FBI. In the first season Natara is called in to solve the case with the Maskmaker, a murderer who plaster his victims faces with a mask that causes suffocation. Natara is the intellectual with plenty of skills in psychology, where as Mal Fallon is a street cop who follow his guts. Nothing really original about the characters but they grow over time.

The stories are really the driving point of the game as they are fairly well written for this kind of game.

Graphics & Sound
At first the game looks really good. Much of the backgrounds are photoshop composures and faces are very well painted. Eventually you will begin to see the same backgrounds reused over and over again and even the portraits are getting reused. The same with music, the game mixes between a few tunes without adding new ones, such as sad music, horror music, action music etc.

Gameplay
There's really not much of gameplay to be had here, usually it just takes picking the right dialogue option out of 2-4, sometimes on time. You can actually die in the game, but that usually means an instant replay from the latest checkpoint a few lines back. Picking the right most of the time usually involves a bonus cutscene at the end of an episode. There might be some replay value in trying to get right most of the time to see this cutscene.

Verdict
If you enjoy an interactive story you might at least wish to check the free game out. Sometimes picking the right choice is a bit of trial and error however which I found to be a bit frustrating. After almost 30 episodes you might wonder if there are some new gameplay coming up, and you wish they used more new stuff, but you might push on just to see what happens next with the main characters.

Drakensang.
Okay. In short: great fun. After most characters in my party had passed level 12, things got rather easy IMO.

One thing, though: my old comp had serious problems in the end when all those spawned and spawned and spawned, so I had to play through those events in Lego style resolution.

One other thing: I must admit I'm not used to playing games of this length anymore… Sheesh, towards the end I thought I'd die from old age before finishing this one (yeah, it really was a little too long for my taste… it might very well have ended in . That would have been a not-quite-so generic ending, too).

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
My verdict on the popular lawyer game that have been released on numerous platforms (most recently the iPhone). I ended up playing the NDS version with it's fifth trial which I am going to speak about in this mini-review.

Story
Due to major twists early in the game I will keep this as spoiler-free as possible. Phoenix Wright tells the tale of uh... Phoenix Wright, a new defense attorney. The game is set in a futuristic fictional universe within a court that have some specific rules on how cases must be carried out, such as all cases being solved within 3 days or else... In this world it's up to Phoenix Wright to believe in his clients and make sure they end up Not Guilty by making sure that holes in the prosecutors witnessaccounts are exposed and evidence is presented that proves that his clients did not do it.

There are five cases in the game that usually begins with a murder, followed by sessions of evidence collecting and finally in court. The fifth case was added to the NDS remake. It's almost as long as the rest of the game and quite epic.

Beyond Wright there are plenty of reoccuring characters such as Wrights young coworker and spirit-medium Maya Fey, the principled but tormented prosecuter Miles Edgeworth and the dimwitted but warmhearted cop Dick Gumshoe. The game is filled with humor and the characters you meet are often odd or eccentric in some way or another. The cases can often get very personal, where not winning means loosing more than the case. Some of the cases are also connected, providing some story progression and build up the main characters and reveal more about their backgrounds.

Since we are dealing with fictional cases, where evidence pops up once in awhile that completely change the situation, there are loads and loads of twists and the stories are unusually advanced for just being a game.

Engine: Graphics & Sound
Almost the entire game uses static character portraits layered on top of static backgrounds, then a dialogue window on top of that. The characters are well drawn, but it's obvious they were handpainted and scanned into the game. If a portrait is ever animated it's animated with just a few frames. While the characters are nicely drawn, some of it's features have been lost due to the lowres pixels on the GBA which the game was originally made for. The portraits used in the fifth case of the game is of somewhat higher quality.

Sometimes the portraits are a bit odd, because the portrait carry features that doesn't fit with the situation. For example there's a kid that was drawn with a camera that is obviously evidence, and a sword on his back which he draws when he gets angry. It happens though that the game explain these contradictions out loud with some humerous remark.

The music cycle through a few tunes depending on mood (rushed tune, happy tune, danger tune, celebration tune etc). There are some sound effects too, but nothing spectacular. There are no voice acting beyond screams of "Objection!" and "Hold It!" during trial.

Gameplay
The core gameplay in Phoenix Wright is to spot contradictions in witness accounts. You get the witness story, then scroll to where you see a contradiction, then either press or present an evidence to expose lies or freshen up their memories. Between trials you go around and search for evidence, often by talking to people or examining scenes for items that the police might have forgotten. To do this you as a player need to have a good memory, since you need to keep all the evidence in your head if you aren't just going to do trial & error (which might lead to game over).

The fifth case was added to the NDS remake. The fifth case takes advantage of the NDS with crime scene investigation, namely rotating items around to find hidden stuff and taking fingerprints which requires you to pour dust on the bottom screen, then blow into the mic to remove it.

And the Verdict
Beyond being good at perception to spot contradictions and hidden items, there isn't much in terms of gameplay to be had here. It is an adventuregame after all. Usually you just go around and exhaust dialogue options. The story and fun characters is the strong point in this game. The complexity of the storylines, many laugh-out-loud sequences and characters that you remember is what Phoenix Wright have to offer. It took me a few days to finish the game. It's much longer than I had anticipated, at least if you include the 5th trial that almost double the length of the game. Most of the game is text, text, text so be sure you enjoy reading.

Phoenix Wright 2: Ace Attorney: Justice for All
The direct sequel to the first game.

Story
I will not go too deep into the storyline of the second game in order to not spoil the first. It is a direct sequel. It shouldn't be surprising that plenty of the characters return from the first game, including people who were in past trials.

Phoenix Wright 1-3 was originally developed for Gameboy Advance. When the NDS version of PW1 was released it was extended with a fifth trial that is supposed to take place between PW1 and PW2, however, PW2 ties very strongly into the events of the first four trials and is especially a direct sequel to the fourth. As a such, playing PW2 after playing the now added fifth PW1 trial adds some inconsistencies even if they tried to wedge in the fifth trial so it still fits the story.

That said, I found the story in PW2 to be much stronger than PW1, probably thanks to now knowing the main characters and being emotionally invested in their peculiar personalities. In fact, this is one of those games that I just couldn't put aside and pushed on just to find out what happens at the end and it's also one of those stories that made my eyes wet in the ending.

Let's just say that Phoenix Wright 2 isn't just about Phoenix Wright himself, there is at least one other character who play a such vital role that I kept pushing forward just to uncover the mystery regarding another character.

Engine: Graphics & Sound
Please read my comments on Phoenix Wright above on engine as it haven't really changed. Like Phoenix Wright, PW2 was originally made for GBA and there's no NDS bonuslevel this time around. This means no forensics.

Gameplay
Most of the gameplay in PW1 is the same as in the first one. Read my comments on Phoenix Wright above.

There's no forensics in PW2 but there have been at least two enhancements. First I do not remember ever having to show a profile during a trial in the first game. Now you get a character portrait for everyone involved and once in awhile you are asked to present a name and you can do this by using these profiles. An essential addon if you ask me. The second addition is something called as "Psyche-Lock", while having a somewhat supernatural theme it could simply be renamed "interrogation". You push a person with evidence in order to make them cough up their secrets. This also feels like an addition that makes sense. Finally you have a healthbar now, where doing screwups might cause you to loose different amount of health. In the first game you always had five chances.

Final Verdict
Adventuregames usually stand and fall on their characters and the story and this is one that stands but probably not stand-alone. Having played PW and gotten familiar with the characters allow you to appreciate the continuation of their individual storylines even more.

Finished Dragon Age: Origins last weekend, just in time before The Witcher 2. Overall it was a great game. Been playing it since christmas. It took me 105 hours - quite an achievement to get through such a sprawling game for me these days, with little time and often weeks without any gaming at all. To me looking back, the Origins, Ostagar, the Landsmeet, and the ending really stand out, these sections gave me a great feeling of agency, of freedom to shape my own story. I browsed the wiki a bit after I finished on the endings, and was impressed on how many different ways the game ends and how many different ending slides there are. I also noticed that I had done only a single personal quest for my characters...

The main part of the game is quite a bit weaker compared to these bits, IMHO - the epic feel that is built up in Ostagar does not carry through in this, although it is all solid, and there were always some memorable moments.

What always dissapoints me to an extent in Bioware games is the non-interactive environments. It alwyays ends up feeling a bit like running through a film set. Also I thought the loot drop system was really weak. I don't know how many times I picke up elfroot and deep mushrooms out of treasure chests (!), but I don't remember finding a single distillation reagent, for example.

So I need a break from bioware now, although I still have Awakenings and ME2, unplayed on my steam account.

Some additional random thoughts: I thought they did too little with the Archdemon. While Loghain makes a great opponent through most of the game, the final adversary IS the archdemon, and he is interesting - it would have been nice to use the "Witcher Sense" more to flesh him out a bit.

Magic felt really powerful in this game, awsome AoE spells. In comparison, the melee characters felt mostly like movable roadblocks that are there to keep enemies from rushing the mages - Is it different if you play a melee character?

The codex is terrible to navigate, which is unfortuante since there is some nice background in there. They did a much better job on that in ME.

Still, the game ranks quite high with me, and the ending was really moving. Too bad that the sequel doesn't seem to be on par, from what I am reading.

Phoenix Wright 3: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations
The third and final episode with Phoenix Wright as the main character. Like the former two games it was originally made for GBA and was later ported to other platforms. I played the NDS version.

Story
Not as a direct sequel as PW2 was, PW3 does focus on a single question that left unanswered in the first two titles. I won't spoil the whole thing by revealing that question here, but in order to do so the backgrounds of some reoccuring characters will be heavily expanded on. There's also the addition of a new prosecutor with as great personality as the former ones.

Engine
No change from the former two. No added NDS level either. Read the former reviews I written on the engine itself.

Gameplay
The gameplay from the first two games returns in this sequel, there are only two minor things that is still a breath of fresh air. First the defense can be called as a witness, so you will have to spot contradictions in the testimony of someone you should defend. The second is that there are several occasions you will play as a character different than Phoenix Wright.

Verdict
Adventuregames stand and fall on their storylines. The fact that I was moved to tears a couple of times and dumbstruck from all the twists that was hailed at me like tropical rain should be enough for me to recommend PW3 once you played the first two of course.