What is it with me and third installments? First Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater and now this. They're definitely not bad games, but feel so unsatisfying compared to their respective second installments.

I know my exact problem with RE3: Nemesis, though. It's not a slow-paced puzzle box in the same way RE2 and RE1 are. It feels more like an action game and less like a horror game, so my expectations were subverted, but not in a good way. With RE4, my expectations were subverted in the best way possible because the third-person gameplay style lent itself very well to action. The tank controls and fixed camera angles don't suit this style, and are better suited to survival horror over action horror.

Also, as much as I love the idea of a horror game inspired by Terminator, where there's a menacing character tracking you everywhere, Nemesis is not scary most of the time. When he's stalking you, he's annoying, and when he's absent, there's a noticeable lack of horror. I know I'm being harsh on this game, but it's definitely a downgrade compared to the first two installments. I'm glad RE4 mixed things up a bit because I think the franchise would have died with more installments like this.

Guess I'll start Code Veronica soon.

You smell like bacon and oppression, man

An absolutely fantastic trip, if played with a guide and resistance against a lot of the quirks of 3D adventure games of the time.
I'm both to a certain extend, as I grew up with Escape for Monkey Island, although I did notice my patience growing thinner over the runtime of this one.

Young man, you are an enemy of the Department of Death! Welcome to the club!

The magic of Grim Fandango definitely stems from it's excellent, charming, snappy and rich dialogue. Never have I been bored by any conversation I had. Quite the opposite in fact. I would have loved to talk to the citizens of the land of the dead. Every character has so much to them, so much presence that works along with the music to create an atmosphere of cigarette smoke, swing big-band jazz, gangsters, everyday people and a sprinkle of love to top off the rich tapestry that is this journey.
One of my only critiques would be the love portion, which feels overlooked and unfocused. Gives the jokes and characters more room to breath, no doubt, but could have been nearly left out of the story, without sacrificing major beats of this tale. That's also why it's inclusion and execution don't diminish this games impact, it's just something I felt the least excited about.
What a revolutionary plot tho... I absolutely adore it. The doc-worker puzzle was my favorite in the entire game and the dialogue surrounding it is just marvelous. Grim Fandango gets a lot of criticisms of it's world and system of power VERY right and it's an absolute delight.
Yes you backtrack a lot. Yes the inventory is slow and clunky at times. Yes this is a game where pixel perfect alignment of cursor and object are necessary, without there being any way to distinguish whether parts of something are still the same object, or something else (vault door you damned thing).
Also the puzzles are absolute bonkers and next to Monkey Island 4 some of the worst I've seen in recent memory in any Point and Click. Playing this game with a guide is what I'd HEAVILY advice. That way you don't spend that much time in the beautifully pre-rendered backgrounds, yes, but I'd say there are too many screens in this game anyway. With travel times that can seem absurd between quest relevant item and it's use case. Also some of the "puzzles" are especially annoying if you don't know what you're doing and have to wait in order to try something again. (Underwater puzzle takes one and a half minute to restart). That's not a good joke, that's a waste of my time.
Oh did I forget? This is moon logic THE GAME™.

Okay yes, there is a lot in here I don't like. And if aspects of those would have been addressed in the remaster and there would have been a solid hint system (which is impossible, the least of the interactions you have in this game-world are of any logic whatsoever), my score for Grim Fandango would be a lot higher. It really reaches the highs of a Monkey Island in it's dialogue. However, it never reaches the comedy that MI delivers through interactions with the world and you interacting with it. That's a shame.
I'm really glad I finished this for the first time now, after having tried to play it so many times and always failing. It is a classic and rightfully so. It makes me yearn for more and so my Point-and-Click-Adventure Adventure of May continues. Highly unlikely that I will fall in love with another character in another game as much as I did with Glottis. He MUST be protected at all cost!

Viva la Revolución!!!

While there was one puzzle at the end of the game that's solution was kind of annoying, the rest of Blue Shift is one of the most consistently good parts of any of the gold source HL games. This might have been recency bias since this was the last gold source HL game I played, but I liked pretty much every aspect touched in Blue Shift more than I did in opposing force. The new additions and features in the game that made it stand out from the original, while having far fewer than OF, utilized it's new features a lot more than OF as the more grounded nature of Calhoun made me really think I was an actual security guard escaping the madness of the black mesa incident, more than Shepard in OF which just seemed like a less powerful Gordan Freeman. I also liked the atmosphere a lot more, as playing through the earlier stages and seeing more of Black Mesa, and then having to run around for the first few minutes after the incident played a lot into the horror aspects of the game which I really appreciated. Overall while both OF and BS are good games to play after beating HL1, I would strongly recommend BS over OF, as I simply just liked it more as an experience.

Huge disappointment. I was prepared to defend this, but nope. I liked this even less than Opposing Force. Barney is my favourite character from the HL2 games, so this was very sad.

Blue Shift simply has nothing going for it. The story's fine, and honestly it has a lot of potential (being a security guard during a containment breach in a top-secret research facility has certainly been the impetus for some awesome stories in the SCP universe), but the game is too short to take advantage of it. Halfway through, I got the sense that I might be evacuating people, unlike Freeman and Shephard who take a more direct approach to the alien incursion, but Barney only really saves a handful of people. There's little to differentiate the plot from that of the other two games. You get the guns, you shoot the military and the aliens, and you do what you can to get out.

Additionally, the gameplay kinda sucks. It has all the same problems that the other games do with the clunky controls but not enough cool combat encounters to compensate for them. There aren't even any new weapons. You get the missile launcher towards the end, but I didn't use it once because you simply don't need to. It's not even as if there are any interesting puzzles, either; just some annoying platforming sections that would fare much better in a game with smoother movement.

Half-Life: Blue Shift feels like nothing more than a tacked-on epilogue to Half-Life and Opposing Force. Hardly anything about it stands out (except for the brief trip to Xen), it's not fun to play, and the atmosphere is a step down from the other games. It's only worth playing through for the sake of getting Barney's side of the story (which isn't even referenced in the later games as far as I'm aware) and because it's so short.

More like "Project I'm Going to slaughter everyone like pigs"

It's impressive for its big open maps and realistic physics. But (and maybe it's just me sucking at stealth games) the stealth mechanics here are kinda unhinged. Most of the times enemies can't see you like 20 meters away, other times they spot you like 50 meters away. Some enemy camps have no alternative entry ways, so you're almost forced to break through the main gate with guns blazing. Most stealth games give you mechanics or pathways that let you avoid combat, but not here. Every single mission I tried to play stealthily, I'd end up just shooting everybody.

In fact, sometimes it feels almost like the game encourages you to do that, giving you packs of grenades or close-range weapons like SPAS 12 shotgun. Yet at the same time you die very quick. So the whole game ends up being just a needlessly difficult Delta Force clone instead of a stealth game.

There are no saves or checkpoints during missions, so if you fail, you have to start all over again. And like I can respect a commitment to realism, but how realistic is a game where you can shoot a guy without a silencer about 20 meters away from another guy and he doesn't even notice?