I have mixed feelings for Heavy Rain.
The gameplay is aweful. The only thing you do is walk in slow motion and compete in quick time events. And some of these quicktime events use sometimes 3-4 buttons at the same time. That's not really good. So the gameplay is clearly the downside of Heavy Rain. Thankfully it is not very long so you don't have to break your controller too often.

On the positive side: The story is fine. This is mainly a story game (a walking simulator if you want), that tells a "ok" story.
It sure has some plotholes and if you replay the game some aspects of the story don't make sense (which is wild for a game that is almost about the story). But it has some memorable moments in it and therefor slips just about average.

This is the only Sherlock Holmes game i've played. And I really thought I would enjoy it more.
I just love Cthulhu based games/movies. But Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is just "boring". The gameplay is so painfully slow, the "mindgames" in which you have to put hints into order are not fun. I got to a point where is just checked walkthroughs because the game and my brain where not compatible. For example I thought "yeah use this hint. It makes sense." but the games wants another hint instead. And this happened all the time.
Therefor it robbed almost all the fun I had with the setting.

I can understand why these games have their community. But Sherlock Holmes games are not for me.

With a little more polish this could have been one of my favourite Indies.
It's all there: Nice music, Nice graphics, addicting gameplay.
The game wants to be challenging but this is also one of the downpoints I have with it. It tries to be challenging by putting you into arenalike fights with spawning enemies. This is lazy to me. And in this moment it needs more polish. Why can enemies hit through obstacles and I don't? Why does every enemy hit stagger me but I can't stagger them?
To put this into perspective: In these arena fights it is usually 1 vs 5/1 vs 4/1 vs 3/1 vs 1 (bigger enemy).
You can not heal. So you better play your A-game perfectly!

This is not the kind of game I want to play anymore. I'm to old for this stuff..

Well what can I say about a game that is almost everybody's darling?
- I start with the terrible understatement ending! I finished The Last of Us 3x times.. and everytime the credits roll I feel robbed of a better ending. In lack of a better word: It feels like the writer drank his/her chai latte while writing the ending and thought "How about that gaming world?!" -pencil drop-
But nobody except the writing person thinks it is anywhere near cool/fresh/satisfying. It leaves you totally unsatisfied in front of your tv. And sorry: Thats just garbage.

Then we have typical Naughty Dog "Arena Shooting Fest" where you enter a slightly larger part of the level. As soon as you see more than two objects to get cover behind you know that 6-15 enemies will spawn and you have to kill them all to progress to the next part of the level. This happens again and again mixed with story or stealth sections. So the overall game will play like this: story -> stealth -> shoot - > story -> stealth -> shoot,... and so on.
Does really not sound like a masterpieces, does it?
BUT the character development is so good, the story has so many good parts, the gameplay works totally fine for what it is. The game tries so hard to be "mature" and thank god it totally delivers a good, mature, experience!

To me Last of Us is a very good game but not the masterpiece almost everyone feels it is.

After replaying this my thoughts were "if this came out today on a mobile phone -just like it is- nobody would play this. Maybe for free.. but not if it costs any money". And I still think this is true. The idea is "ok".. you move on a fixed track and take pictures of pokemon. That's all. So if we really be honest to ourselfes.. this is even less gameplay than Pokemon Go.
BUT for 1999 is was fine to the kids we were. But today kids expect more. My Nephew played it and thought it is boring. He wanted to play zelda instead. And I really understood him.

First of all: I'm still playing it. So this is not a final rating.
BUT there are some things I just have to write down because they are so bad I don't understand why so many people like XB2.

- The dialogue with NPCs aside from the main quests are awful! Rex repeats the same sentence again and again. They don't add anything to the world, the people or the overall feeling.
- side quests don't respect your time! Neither are they interesting nor varied. There are three types of side quests: Fetch Quests, Kill Quests and Talking Quest. All of them are like this: Go somewhere, fetch/kill/talk, get back, get ANOTHER quest, go there, fetch/kill/talk, get back, get your reward.
- Enemies are tanks / "bullet sponges". If you fight 1-2 enemies that are ~ your level you will fight them for several minutes. EVERY ENEMY takes about 1-2 mins to kill. And you get almost nothing for fighting them. 40 exp when you need 4000 exp to level up. Let's assume 100 fights take about say 2min per fight. That makes 3 hours to level up. Sounds fun? Sure not. To be honest you get a lot more exp if you complete missions (yeah.. these "fun" side missions,too.). But should fighting enemies not be rewarding too?
- The Map is garbage. OMG is the map bad. It basically shows you nothing. How to get to your next quest marker? Find it out by yourself. The map flat, non texturized and way to small.
- The overall game menu is complicated in a bad way. Find your Missions in the Missionlog. But they are not shown on the map because first you have to activate the mission, then go to the map menu, scroll through all your map pages (yeah.. it has several pages) to find the correct one. Why isn't there ONE detailed map you can open by the push of a button? One that you can zoom in and out. A map so many other game did so much better.

I just can not understand why this game has so many fans. The gameplay flaws are so HUGE. I will wait for the story to unfold and i will finish it (i think...). Maybe i will have a clue then. Maybe the story is worth it. Maybe gameplay will feel better or maybe i will get used to all this stuff. Maybe..

My first goal was: Getting rid of all those new Pokemon and having my gang of 1st Gen. Guys n Gals.
After doing so (let's say about 15 hours in) I thought "now we're talking - let's Go!" Well.. how could I know that I already saw everything the Game has to offer?!
Sure.. I ended up at about 40 hours playtime or so but it repeated itself over and over again.
Go to those 5 places/ Go to those 4 caves/ collect these 3 items.. here you have 3 new caves to visit.
And then boom. Game over.

Sure we are talking Pokemon here..nobody really expected something revolutionary from this Game. And there are some new aspects I liked. But overall I felt a bit underwhelmed.

Oh and did I mention that there are far too many sidequests with really no useful reward?
- Yes you can waste your time with Well over 80 sidequests. But some of them are just stupid (hellalot of work for 10 pokeballs as a reward). Yeah, thank you but go find someone else who's willing to waste time for you little granny. Keep your 10 pokeballs... by the time is was able to complete your task I was already rolling with hyperballs.

What a nice open world that was.
Usually I don't really like open world games because they don't seem to "need" the open world but they "force" the game into an open world because it is hype.
BUT to me Hogwarts Legacy is not that kind of game.
To me Hogwarts and it's surroundings need to be discovered. They feel beautiful and interesting.
So to me Hogwarts Legacy has to be open world. Any other genre would have felt like a lacy movie tie-in game.

So now that we have this out of the way.. technical aspects first:
I finished the game on a windows PC and even with my specs (I7, 16GB RAM, RTX3060, 512 SSD) it looked stunning in fullHD and ran well. Had 1x game crash and 1x bug in about 50-60 hours.
Nothing to complain there.

I don't want to spoil anyting about the story or the world or even the spells.
So everything I can say is: If you like the Potterverse (without Potter) you can really have a good time here. If you read the books or saw the movies and thought "wow I wish I could explore this world" - now you can!

Who is the star of the game?
- not the story
- not the gameplay
- It is the world.

FF8 has not aged well.
Of all the older Final Fantasy games I think 8 is in need of a remake the most.
For 1999 it was groundbreaking with it's graphics, soundtrack and the cutscenes. But now it is kind of hard to explain anyone the magic we felt back then.
But the game deserves much better than looking at it and thinking "yeah it looks okay, but why would I want to waste my time with a PS1-Game? ".

Aside from the poor ending and the total garbage-design of esthar city this is a really good JRPG.
I liked most of the cast, almost every city/village design and the many hidden secrets on the overworld map.
Triple Triad has to be best mini-game in all of gaming. A card game which is absolutely addicting and it adds so much to the main game (you can transform cards into important items).

If the ending (and the last overall ~5-10 hours) was better and the game would not feel like a almost 25 year old game, it would be one of the best JRPGs.

Borderlands 3 has it's ups and downs.
I've put 55 hours into the game and mostly enjoyed it.

Positive:
+ Gameplay is super fluid and rewarding
+ the impact some new weapons have
+ the last cutscene and the credits
+ some of the humor was pretty entertaining
+ not a single gamecrash or "open world trap"

Negative:
- the Calypsos are so annoying to any grown up human being
- TOO MUCH loot for my taste
- not every joke is funny, some are aweful
- the last two missions: more of the same enermies, bosses became hardcore bullet sponges

If they will ever release Borderlands 4 I hope they cast a new writing crew. The gameplay is still rock solid, but with better writing and some new ideas for the final Boss Borderlands 3 could have been great.

Dead Island 2 is the game i've never thought i would play. After many delays it was doomed to fail. But suddenly it has been released and it is way better than the first games.
Everything looks, sounds and feels AAA although it is not a tripleA game. The world is interesting and packed with items, secrets and shortcuts. The voice acting (Amy) is superb.

I really enjoyed my time with it. The only upset was the finale. But Up until Chapter 24 it was a wild ride with far more ups than downs. Well done Dambuster!