Ask and you shall receive. I was complaining of Alien: Stasis Interrupted about how the game switched from a claustrophobic survival game to a shooter. Then I watched Alien: Isolation, all the cinematics. A whooping five hours of it. And the entire game is about trying to survive! In truth, there is little difference between the gameplay and the cinematics, but the video was of all the actions required to finish the game in order and done perfectly, so I consider it a film.

  The main character is Amanda Ripley. Hey! Ripley is that woman from the first movie! Anyway, that's her daughter, still trying to find her mother when the flight recorder from the Nostromo is reported found. They go to the space station Sevastopol, where the ship that found the recorder - and also made a quick stop on LV-429, is docked.

  I loved that there is just one alien in the first half. In fact, I decry adding more of them later. But the beginning is great, with an alien that is murderous, cunning and unstoppable. There are also crazed androids, paranoid people and a lot of retro looking equipment like tape recorders and big hard electrical switches and hand-made weaponry towards the end.

  In Isolation, the enemy is not really the alien - well, one might argue that this is the general theme of Alien - but the humans and their smallmindedness. One motivated person almost fixes the entire station while evading aliens and synths, so imagine what all the people on the station could have achieved if they worked together, not selfishly thinking just of themselves. This idea is very strong in the game.

  This may be the most satisfying game entry in the Alien universe. And of course, being the most cinematic, the scariest, the one with the least shooting and the most difficult to finish, people meh-ed it. Anyway, I liked it a lot.

  Aliens: Colonial Marines - Stasis Interrupted is actually a prequel DLC pack for Colonial Marines, which I already covered. I felt this one was a lot nicer.

  You wake up from stasis in full chaos: people are dead and dying, either from chest bursters, mature xenomorphs or soldiers with flamethrowers killing human and alien alike. You find people along the way, allies, amongst which there is also Hicks. Hey! He's from the Aliens movie!

  There are actually multiple points of view as you play multiple characters. The sounds and music really bring you into the story, it feels like you are there or at least a more cinematic story. The emotions of the characters are much better expressed, adding more to the stakes.

  If I were to criticize something, and maybe this is a problem with a lot of more recent Alien productions, is how many aliens there are and how easy it is to kill them. The player can kill one adult xenomorph with a small burst from a flame thrower. Considering this is a prequel to a movie where the alien survives falling into molten metal, I would say that's a mistake. Also the adult aliens move too much like humans.

  I loved the beginning, though, the part where you wake up without any knowledge or weapons into total pandemonium and you must survive. I would have liked the entire game to be like this, unfortunately once guns come into play it turns into a classic first person shooter.

  Bottom line: it's one of the nicer additions to the Alien universe. I liked how it made me feel I am watching and am part of a movie.

  There is no story. In Aliens: Fireteam Elite you are an elite colonial marine commanding a team, killing aliens and discovering what evil Weyland-Yutani has been up to again. It's a straight out shooter.

  There are some positives: the sets are quite nice, the idea of the AI run science station and the alien ruins are good. It is more of a bait and switch, though, as all that lore is not used in any meaningful way. It's a very short game, too, with just four missions that you execute flawlessly, then the game ends.

  Darksiders is a very beautiful game. All of the characters are meticulously crafted, with wings, shiny eyes, sculpted swords scythes, rods and hammers with flames coming out of different orifices. The story is not bad either, inspired from Christian mythology of angels and devils and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It's basically Constantine without the people and much more fun, as the main characters and heroes are the aforementioned horsemen.

  This first game shows the story of War and Death. I say the first game because obviously there should be two more horsemen, although hard to understand how Famine could be a positive character, while Conquest is overlapping too much with War. But anyway, in the game the characters are just overpowered fighters that have a distinct style, rather than actual personifications of anything.

  If there is something that might rub people the wrong way here, it's the moral relativism of the story. I mean, it's a fun story, but it portrays all of the characters of Heaven and Hell as opportunistic asses who spew around words of honor, purity or balance, but they only care about themselves most of the time. Also, humanity has been destroyed already and everybody is fighting with everybody. The guy I liked the most was the demon scheming to overthrow The Destroyer and The Destroyer himself was not who you would think he's be.

  To be fair, it was extremely ballsy to create a game that makes angels and devils look and feel cool, considering they are basically Asian anime characters with big weapons and light effects in a story invented by a Christian fan boy in the first century. I can't say I admired the complexity of the story a lot, because it's basically a series of quests where you have to battle some guy or another to get a McGuffin that allows you to proceed to the next state, but boy did I enjoy the visuals and the voice acting!

  Bottom line: I don't know much about the gameplay, but I can tell you right now that I enjoyed the "movie" a lot.

  Again I watch the full cinematic story of a game, without playing it, to examine its story. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a first person shooter, so you move around ships and compounds being hunted and attacked and killing stuff. There is a plot, but it is quite simplistic compared to the action, which is a good thing in a game like this. No need for complications as the hapless marines need to kill everything while slowly learning what we, as Alien fans, know already.

  The graphics are that of a 2013 game, nothing to be very proud of, either. They do the job. The story is about a ship of marines that encounters the Sulaco, sometime after the events of Alien 3. There are aliens, and mean Yutani-Weyland people and chest bursters and all kind of mad frantic action. Hicks makes an appearance, in the era when anything Alien had to have some personal connection with movie characters, but he is basically a cameo.

  At this point I would say what I liked about the story and what I would change, but there is no need. Even if much more streamlined than Dark Descent, I had more fun watching this one. There are multiple chapters, each feeling like a standalone story. And in every one the phrase "Leave no man behind" is repeated obsessively, while most of the time someone runs through hordes of xenomorphs to save some person or another. It gets old, but the action provides compensation. And what I liked is that most "command decisions" are taken when talking on the radio with someone while being attacked by aliens. No people slowly walking in a room to confer. That could have been an email!

  Bottom line: I would much more enjoy a modern Alien game that is based on the same concept as Colonial Marines than the Starcraft-cloney Dark Descent. The new graphics card power and AI graphics would bring a lot of value to a game such as this, even for someone like me who would rather play the alien.

  After watching another YouTube video with the full cinematics, I can tell you that I liked the story in Aliens: Dark Descent, but the same formula is starting to get old.

  You see, I loved the movies, I like the universe - especially if you consider Blade Runner as part of it, and I've also read a couple of books in the Alien universe and my impression is that with whatever you start with, even Prometheus and that crap, you will probably like it, too. However, you will start losing enjoyment as you go along, as almost every Alien story is exactly the same. You have to appreciate the Alien: Resurrection movie because, as weird and euro as it was, it felt different. I know it's an unpopular belief, but I really liked that film.

  Anyway, back to the game: aliens gets loose in a closed environment - even if it's big as a planet, there is no escape from it, and people try to survive, helped by marines and hindered by greedy psychopathic corporate shills. There, that's almost every Alien story. Sometimes they throw a Predator in there, for good measure, and lately they put Engineers in there, too, but the plot is the same. Dark Descent is no exception. There is a downed ship, some towns, a corporate tower, synths, automated turrets, APCs, marines, corporation stuff, Weyland Yutani and so on. The only difference might be the appearance of Cassandra, a woman that seems to be able to communicate telepathically with the aliens.

  Now, in the lore that is not movies, there is an extended version of the story described above where the aliens are not just mindless creatures, but somehow project this mental field that can sometimes attract some people to their side. There is also the royal jelly, a substance only the queen makes and that has great effects on humans as well. In the game there is no jelly and Cassandra's gift seems to be a genetic fluke. Whatever her abilities mean will have to wait for a sequel to the game.

  I can't say anything about the gameplay. Seemed to be mostly top down, like those cheap horror survival games that sometimes you play online, only slightly better. The cut scene animations, though, were pretty good and amounted to about two hours put together. It's funny when game companies just make full movies as an afterthought, to enhance the experience of the game proper.

  Now, about the story. There is this woman administrator in the corporation that sees aliens killing everybody and initializes the Cerberus protocol, which means satellites around the planet will stop anything from escaping, shooting everything down. Nothing in, nothing out. Even synths will make everything possible to enforce this. She ends up on a ship that gets almost shut down by the satellites, but it's a military vessel, so it survives reentry. It is her job (yours) to collaborate with the marines to save as many people as possible, get to the bottom of the mystery and, of course, live.

What would I change so that story feels fresh? Well, it's now canon that you have to have a sleazy corporate ass making everything harder. In fact, the main character of the game does start as one, only she's a good woman. I wouldn't do that. I would let the player decide the level of sleaziness and if they want to play it psycho or good guy or something in between. Basically Witcherize the game (talking about the game, not the books, where Geralt is a boyscout). Increase personal stakes, give her some competence other than "administrator" - which means she gets to move around talking to people all the time - and a secret to protect. Basically combine the main characters in the game: the admin, the father of Cassandra and the scientist.

  What if the main character is the mother of Cassandra? Maybe she's not her biological mother, to add some distance, so she could conceivably save her ass and sell her to the company. What if she is afraid something would come up and destroy her life, so she has incentives to leave everybody else behind, maybe even this Cassandra stuff. What is she is indebted to the company and she needs a way out, to add to the desperation? You could add a bit of romantic tension between the soldier and her, making an eventual death more meaningful. You could manipulate people, seduce them, intimidate them or even shoot them, kind of like Vampire: The Masquerade, adding to the agency of the player.

  Because in this game you only run a linear story. There are no alternative outcomes. You fail a mission, you die, and if you played the game already you know what's coming but you can't stop it. Just add a diversity of choice. And I know you will say that this would make the two hour cinematics be 10 hours. Not necessarily. Olden games managed to do wonders reusing parts of animations to construct multiple stories. The knowledge is there.

  Bottom line: a true Alien story, but bringing nothing new to the table. A linear gameplay, that provides little choice other than just go with the flow. The top-down thing, as well as the "command room decision" animations makes it look like a rip-off of Starcraft playing the marines, so it didn't really captivate my imagination. A decent game, but nothing more.

  XCOM was one of my favorite games from when I was a kid. I didn't have the personal time resources to play XCOM2, though, and besides it felt quite different. You see, in the first game I liked collecting alien stuff and researching it. The tactics were fun, but I was all into the research tree. So I though, after playing the beginning of XCOM2 a few times then forgetting about it, how about I watch the entire storyline on YouTube, like a complete ass, and then comment on the game like I know what I am talking about?

  So here is goes. I think one of the major things going against XCOM2 is its timing. XCOM was first released in 1994, when telling a story like this felt fresh and being able to play through it amazing. XCOM2 was released in 2016, 22 years later, with so much sci-fi content in the form of TV, movies and games having been released since. There were a bunch of TV series covering the alien invasion and resistance angle, all of them devolving into the lazy German vs French resistance with ray guns tropes, and having yet another thing like this wasn't awesome. Add to it that the mystery was already revealed and it would explain my lack of interest at least.

  Anyway, the story here is that 20 years later "the commander", meaning you, is rescued by the resistance from an alien device that was using him as a hub for tactical information. With your brilliant leadership, they can now fight against an enemy that has conquered the world and controls it via propaganda, empty promises and ultimately violence. Somehow, after full control over the planet for 20 years, the aliens still have a lot of trouble locating and fighting you.

  The tactical fighting and upgrade system was improved dramatically. It's so complex that... it bored me to death. Tactical games afficionados loved it, though, and for good reasons. You can do all kinds of things, based on the enemy, the team composition, the tech tree, etc. However the story felt lackluster to me. A new McGuffin every stage of the game and the ending... how do American stories end? You find the source and you blow it up!... did nothing for me. Really, it felt like they were rehashing the Falling Skies story, even the end scene.

  Bottom line: if you love turn based tactical games, this should be one of your favorites, but the story is simplistic and derivative.

  P.S. and if you're wondering why XCOM3 is not out there, it's because of Marvel.

  P.S.too - "so if you are so smart, how would you have written the story?".

  Well, I am no writer, but I can tell you something after decades of consuming popularized science and a lot of Dunning Kruger: any space conquering force would have two characteristics. First, they would have limited resources. Without some very cheap space travel option that seems unlikely, it should be very expensive to come to our planet. Second: it's so easy to destroy anything on Earth from space. It's ridiculously easy if you have mastered interstellar travel. So the story would have to take that into account. XCOM2 actually used that, with the discovery of the final McGuffin, to explain and then solve the game, but it was a lazy solution.

Here is my take: alien intervention is being suspected, so X-COM is created. They have to solve the mystery of what is going on, considering they are an organization working on a hunch. This is more like X-Files than X-Com. Then the aliens are not all powerful, they are a bridgehead force, if not fugitives or a small team stranded here. They may be not malevolent outside considering humans a bunch of stupid monkeys to be used to further their goals. And when people are stranded amongst aliens, they tend to be terrified and act more psychotically than normal. The advantage of this take is that you can play both sides. So this would be more of an adventure game than a tactical shooter, although the horror of fighting what you thought were aliens, but in fact were human and animal chimeras should be there.

For the sequel, continue from the last scene of the first, when you discover that the small force on Earth is actually a small tactical team that operates behind enemy lines. The alien ship and their main force is located on some large asteroid in the Asteroid Belt or maybe a moon of Jupiter. With their presence and their source location revealed, now humanity must race to build the infrastructure required to defend and attack in space, when at any moment the desperate aliens might throw an asteroid or two at us. This would be tactical, but also strategic. We switch from a mystery adventure to a tactical space exploration and warfare game, akin to The Expanse.

Bonus: the third part, a continuation of the second where you have discovered the aliens themselves, which you may have seen as desperate and sympathetic, were actually just another version of chimeras, made out of organic and machine parts by the real culprit, a semi-sentient machine intelligence that has the mission to explore, exploit and contain any threat to its original builders. Now the enemy is a bunch of von Neumann probes that have no qualms in capturing and using for parts any of their human prisoners or craft.

The whole idea of the series is not that some malevolent Elders want to rule the world, but that a very small and resource poor alien presence can wreak havoc and endanger our very existence. It's you who has all the resources and they have the technology and relentless cunning. The terror is just as for someone with cancer. Even when you get rid of it, you don't know for sure and must remain eternally vigilant. We are the sheep and they are the wolves in the night. In each of the games you can choose to play the humans or the aliens. DO NOT create the common enemy that we would join forces to defeat, a la Starcraft, it's not that kind of story, although you can play around with altered humans and manufactured alien forces that escape their control as a third wildcard faction. And of course, as any good game, the story would change based on your approach.

This would be it. It's not like my ideas are not derivative, but they would be more fun to play outside the tactical shooter, mystery adventure or space RTS mechanics. At least they would make a good YouTube cutscenes video.

 I don't know if I want to play it more, but I've had fun for a few hours playing Sail Forth, managing my fleet and talking to the weird characters of the game, while navigating by hand a small sea full of islands.

  You start off as a guy with a boat, you find other stranded people, you upgrade your boat, buy cannons, fight pirates, do errands, buy new boats, create a fleet and so on. It's really entertaining! Plus it's a relatively small game that requires no hardware resources to speak of. Recommended!

  Doors - Paradox is a game where you solve puzzle to open doors, but the doors only lead to other doors. The whole concept is rather ridiculous, but one can get into it if they want to waste some time.

  The thing that really pissed me off was the messages you receive in each puzzle, suggesting this is some inner search for meaning or some comatose dream state or something like that, only it doesn't bring anything at all to the game. It doesn't have a story plot that gets resolved somehow, it changes nothing for the game play, it's just another cliché that became popular in this kind of games and we can't get rid of it.

  The graphics are fun and I can't help but think that with a good design this could have been something special. Alas, the puzzles are either ridiculously easy or annoyingly time consuming, like sliding puzzles. It gets old really quick and there is no resolution or anything for the time you spent opening stupid doors. An opportunity missed.

Beyond Blue has a short and silly story that has no consequences and leads nowhere, but the main point is that you can free dive in several ocean stages and look at and swim with realistic looking and swimming marine creatures, which is very relaxing, but gets old soon.

It's apparently inspired by Blue Planet II and partially financed by the BBC and OceanX, the Dalio brothers' "ocean exploration initiative".

I didn't really understand the point of the narrative, though. While it gets the main character where it needs to be to explore the ocean, there are at least two other characters that bring absolutely nothing to the game other than a waste of time and several subplots that end up nowhere than a footnote in a conversation.

I enjoyed the swimming around part, though. You can finish the story in a few hours and then you have the option to free dive in any of the stages of the game, tag animals and look at logs to learn about the ocean, which is pretty cool. But it gets boring quick if you don't already have an interest in oceanography.

  This extension adds a lot of functionalities to your Lichess web site. It has so many useful and powerful features! I am very proud of it. The extension is always going to be free, ad-free, donation links free, etc. Yet the only way for it to do what YOU want is feedback. Any feedback! Praise, curses, bug reports, feature requests, use stories, anything. The more you tell me, the more I can improve on this!

  I have also written a different page that will function as a user manual, with all the details on features, preferences and what they mean.

  If you are just interested in the list of features, in reversed chronological order, you might want to check out the history file.

  Join the LiChess Tools user team to get updates as they come, ask for features, give feedback, tell your stories! There is also a dedicated Discord channel here: https://discord.gg/5PUycBFpzq

  Help translate the extension in your language on Crowdin.

  Get it for:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Edge (or you can get it from the Chrome store above)

  Other stuff:

• all features have been encapsulated in "tools" in the code
• ideas for the future can be found as issues on GitHub, where you can also put feature requests and bug reports
• the extension requires Chrome version 111 or higher or Firefox 130 or higher

And now back to what makes LiChess Tools great:

  LiChess Tools (ver. 2.3.202) adds the following features to lichess:

• play ALL variations in Interactive lesson study chapters!
  • computer is going to play a random move (configurable probability), so you don't need to create a chapter for every small variation
• PGN editor to merge, normalize, split, count, upload, download, copy PGNs.
• merge multiple PGNs in analysis import
  • I merged 1000 PGNs with 25000 moves and it worked!
• automatically open/hide/convert to menu or button the Friends box at page load
  • having the friends box as a menu/button item is really neat
• sound alert when one of your friends starts playing a game
  • also reading the type of game, so you know if you even want to look at it
  • now there is an option to mute this for individual players in the enhanced friends list
• ability to randomly play one of the next moves (with configurable probability in comments i.e. prc:66) with Ctrl-Right and go back with Ctrl-Left
• play against the Opening Explorer (either masters, lichess players or a specific player) in Analysis
• evaluation of Explorer moves, as well as telling you what move leads to gambits
• Missed Timeline posts or comments to posts you follow notification
• screen lock on mobiles while playing (scroll and zoom)
• find interesting/brilliant moves and allowing cycling through interesting/good/brilliant moves just like with blunders
• highlights for the last move of variations (special case for the ones that have no comment and do not end in checkmate) in the analysis/study board
  • you immediately see not only where a variation starts, but also where it ends
• highlights for the transpositions to the current move in the analysis/study board
  • you won't ever have to worry that you are analyzing the exact same variation but in a different order
  • also you can now show all transposing positions in the PGN
• new shortcut for playing the next best computer move from Space to Ctrl-Space
  • always annoyed me when I accidentally pressed the key
• a custom chess engine level
  • if it is idle in a lower state, it runs until it gets to that level
  • this is also used as the required engine level by the study context menu option of commenting all last moves with a computer evaluation
• custom chess engine options: never use cloud/tablebase, use engine in Practice mode
• sticky Interactive lesson Preview mode
  • you can now play chapter after chapter without hassle
• use keyboard shortcuts (i, m, b, Alt-i, Alt-m, Alt-b) for inaccuracies, mistakes and blunders in all variations
  • note that this is a native feature of lichess, but only in your game analyses and only the mainline moves
  • added g and Alt-g to cycle between "positive" moves (good, brilliant and interesting) 
• show player country flags next to their names
  • if they have their country specified in the profile
  • now you will see flags everywhere. It might break some stuff, so let me know.
• show the order of circles and arrows in a study/analysis.
  
  • this is great when you want to understand the order of moves/hints
  • option is off by default
• a new menu item to open the last viewed TV game
• show opening names in TV and mini games, as well as Analysis board and Studies
• many TV options:
  • show history section in player TV (just like for category TV - the two latest games of the player)
  • friends and streamers section in the Current Games tab
  • link and bookmark the current TV game
• quick button to switch to your player and back in personal opening explorer
• copy to clipboard branch and continuations from a certain position in analysis/study
  • you can now just pick a variation, copy it in its own chapter, with just a few clicks
  • Shift/Ctrl/Alt change the way this item works
• available languages: English and Romanian
  • ask for more! I will provide you with the English sentences and the context and you can tell me how it is in your language
• the options for the extension are in the lichess Preferences section
  • complete integration. The extension popup has no functional role anymore
  • this also means that I will be able to port this to other browsers with minimal effort. Ask if you want this!
• move options from transpositions to the current position
  • the Extended Interactive Lessons and the Ctrl-Arrow functionalities are also able to choose moves following from this list, as well as the variation arrows
• automatically evaluate last moves in every variation and store it as a comment
  • the engine level for the evaluation is the same as the custom chess engine level in Preferences 
• buttons in the study chapter edit form to quickly set the title to the content of the Event or of the White/Black PGN tags
• set colors/styles to study comments
  • note that these will only be visible to people having the extension installed
• study chapter navigation controls, including random chapter button (also with keyboard shortcut)
• auto save and button to reload PGNs in Analysis mode (recover from accidental reloads) 
  • now it automatically copies the last PGN in the PGN box, but you have to manually import it by pressing the button
• show all transpositions in the analysis/study move list
• hide the score tally while playing
• live friends page will update automatically and allow TV view, mute playing alerts and much more
• global switch to enable/disable extension
• ability to selectively remove artifacts (comments, shapes, glyphs and PGN tags) from the current study chapter
• custom chat buttons at beginning and end of play
• one button delete PGN tags
• draw arrows and circles on mobile devices (analysis and in-game)
• extra lines on the game analysis chart and local engine chart in analysis board
• menu entry to go to last opened Study
• study options: persist settings, create chapter after current, show chapter PGN as in Analysis
• move list options: indented variations shows all variations as tree branches, not inline, expanded move list uses all the space available for the analysis move list and hide left side hides the left side of the analysis window for even more space. Open in new window lets you see the move list in another window that you can move to another monitor. You can have the computer evaluation toggle back on the right side.
• bookmark study moves, which allows for collapse/expand variations, linking to position, highlight in the move list, getting the bookmark URL from a context menu and split the chapter from any bookmark.
• Option to not see cloud values in computer evaluation
• Wiki pages will now load in Analysis regardless of move order
• Variation arrows for transpositions
• Show pawn structure names in TV games, mini games, Analysis board and Studies
• Click on Explorer total row to get a random move
• Toggle between different Explorer lichess tab settings
• Custom mini-game size
• Play again from same position you entered Preview mode in
• Learn from your mistakes in study chapters
• Pin studies and broadcasts to home page
• Community forum
• Freeze board keyboard shortcut in Analysis/Study
• Player lag chart next to player names during play
• Link to download all studies of a user
• Show profile chart time range dates in a label
• Outside board coordinates, even in Analysis/Study, and bigger font.
• Puzzle statistics in Profile
• Move assistant shows the evaluation of your selected piece legal moves
• Mirror button in Board Editor
• More decimals in computer eval
• auto unselect piece after a few seconds
• Study flairs
• Customize lobby page elements
• Explorer resize
• Custom sound options (just disable move sounds, keep the rest)
• Back to current position in correspondence
• Hide chat during play
• Broadcast OBS support
• Hide header shortcut
• Next move behavior for variations (like Chessbase)
• Autosave blog and/or button to manually save it and continue working
• Active tab icon to see when a game move is made on inactive tabs
• Keep screen active when watching TV
• Themes to improve piece grab mechanism and visuals for both 2D and 3D boards
• Fast interactive lesson moves
• Paste images in chat/forum
• No annoying chat warning about leaving Lichess
• URL/image detection and unlimited text size in the team/study chat
• one click moves in Analysis/Study
• show common teams of you and your opponent
• disable automatic collapsing of variations
• video support in studies (so you can create courses)
• external engines options
• daily chess quote
• copy puzzle PGN
• game list filtering and selection
• puzzle stats in the Puzzle Dashboard - chose your theme, replay failed puzzles, time interval chart
• see which blog posts you visited/liked
• better time alerts during play
• persist last blog view
• puzzle timer
• show puzzle total points per session
• extra piece sets
• a followers page
• quick actions: flip board, request server analysis, chat emojis
• up to 10 computer evaluation lines
• fast board flip for mobiles
• show total game duration
• tournament top board auto switch
• /commands! Type /help to get a list

  I couldn't wait to share it with you guys. I will be happy for any feedback, suggestions or help.

  I've started a series of use case blog posts, they might show you how to use the extension in real life:

• Play the Elephant Gambit like Jonathan Schrantz
• How to learn and test any opening in hours with LiChess Tools browser extension
• Are you shy? You can grow at chess without actually playing anyone!
• Training your chess with the Move Assistant feature in "LiChess Tools"
• Using the PGN Editor feature of LiChess Tools
• LiChess Tools used for the Lichess Sharjah Masters 2024!
• My lichess blog
  • Play the Busch-Gass gambit like Will Graif
  • Play the Caro-Kann like Stjepan Tomic
  • Play the Stafford Gambit like Eric Rosen
  • Play the Scandinavian Defense like John Bartholomew
  • Play the double fianchetto system like Oleksandr Bortnyk
  • Play like Jerry ChessNetwork
  • Play the Spanish game as Daniel Naroditsky
  • Play the Orthoschnapp Gambit like Marco Riehle
  • Play the Grünfeld Defense as Peter Svidler
  • Play the Smith-Morra Gambit like Niclas Huschenbeth
  • Play the Latvian Gambit like NM Nelson Lopez
  • Play the Von Hennig gambit against the Caro-Kann like CM Kingscrusher
  • Play the Van 't Kruijs opening like IM Kamran Shirazi
  • Effortlessly reach 2000 ELO with a complete Zilbermintz gambit repertoire
  • Brilliant/good/best move detection on lichess.org!
  • Accuracy should be shown by Lichess natively
  • All the gambits ranked by Lichess Explorer statistics
  • Creating an interactive lesson from your favorite player in minutes
  • The costliest move in chess
  • How to train against your worst mistakes using LiChess Tools
  • LiChess Tools local file support!
  • A better way to visualize puzzles and improve
  • Full repertoire using PGN Editor, Explorer Practice and Bookmarks
• Dsoul20's amazing list of opening studies

Here are some screenshots, but they don't really tell you the story. You just have to try it.

Good luck using my extension. I am sure I am going to be tinkering with it a bit. Let me know of any problems you have with it.

Other ideas

For readability sake, I've removed all the old ideas from here and moved all of the new ones as GitHub issues. You can go there and add your own!

Q&A

Q: Can you publish your extension code on GitHub?
A: Yes, I did. I could. Probably I will be starting with version 2, which will be a rewrite of a version 1 that has been in use for a while and that people have given me feedback for. As much as I like sharing my code, I really don't want to have to deal with all the GitHub complications right now.

Q: I looked at your code and it sucks balls!
A: That's not a question. And I agree. But right now I am focusing on features, not quality control.

Q: How do we contact you with new ideas, bug reports and general roasting of your coding skills?
A: This is my personal blog and on the top-right of the page you can see a lot of links to various methods of direct communication with me. Comment here, use Discord, chat on Lichess with TotalNoob69, use the GitHub project. Any of these are perfectly acceptable.

Q: I am addicted to LiChess Tools and I am afraid later on you will fill it with ads, premium features and EULAs that allow you to remove my kidneys. Can you address my fear?
A: Like everything on this blog, it will always remain free. And not free as in "until someone else buys it" or free as in "watch videos and it's free" or free as in "I will fill your screen with junk", but completely utterly free. Like LiChess, I guess. Also, it doesn't connect to any external services or capture any user data. For now! Muhahahaha! Later on it might need some external services for extra features that you ask for, but I hope it won't have to.

Q: There are so many options that my brain hurts. And every time you add something new, my Lichess experience changes. I don't like this!
A: I am currently considering building a wizard that will adapt to your usage of Lichess and ask questions that will customize the extension for you. But in the meanwhile, on the bottom of the Preferences page there is a button that can turn every feature off. Then you can opt in to any feature you want.

Q: How long did it take you to write this?
A: Mostly a week. Following the 80/20 rule, now I have to work at least one more month to make it good. In the end it probably took two months to start and I am still tinkering, but I can only work on it when I get the time. This has been published since the 10th of May 2023 and I am still adding or fixing or changing things. For the cause!

Q: You should write a tutorial on how to use it. Could you make a video of it?
A: I am not a video person. I hope that this post can convey the basic ways in which to use the extension and that the extension itself can be used without the need of a tutorial. Let's work together to make this clear and easy to use for everyone instead. Also, there is now the user manual page. However, I am not adverse to someone who knows how making videos to make some about LiChess Tools. In fact, that would be absolutely amazing!

Q: Your Extended Interactive Lesson feature is all I had ever wanted from life! But when I am editing the study, I get the same interface as normal studies. Can you fix it?
A: Some parts of LiChess are easy to change, some not so much. Anything related to rendering is a mess to hook to. Additionally, I wouldn't want to have studies that can only be edited and used with my extension. There is a move context menu that allows setting the "explain why any other move is wrong" now. Also you can collapse the controls now, so they don't bother you at least.

Q: So how do I mark the good branches from the bad variations in Extended Interactive Lessons?
A: Any move that is not in the study will be bad. As for the branches that you want to explore specifically, use the annotations (Mistake, Blunder, Brilliant Move, etc) and comments. You can even explore the bad branches in Preview mode this way and learn why they would be bad.

Q: Can you add features to show me what moves to make while playing?
A: LiChess Tools is not a cheating tool. However I try to add as many tools as possible to help you analyze your games after you've played them.

Q: But can you add some features that don't involve cheating for the games that I am playing/watching?
A: Most of the features of LiChess Tools are analysis oriented because analysis is much better exposed than the game code. Because there are a lot of private variables that are not made accessible, it's difficult to selectively change parts of the game interface and any features would have to brutally copy paste and replace some legitimate code bits. I am afraid that until that changes on LiChess, I will not touch that part, mostly because that means I would have to keep score on what they change on the web site and update my extension accordingly. Also, there are some guidelines that expect one to not change the playing interface at all. It makes sense, as any edge LiChess Tools might provide to a player could be construed as cheating.

Q: How about changing the way LiChess looks?
A: I am not a good visual designer, nor do I do a lot of work on web frontend. There are some extensions that are doing that (like Prettier Lichess, which I used myself), and perhaps you should ask those people for help instead. Also, I am avoiding as much as possible changes to the visual elements of the website specifically because it might interfere with some such extension or custom CSS tool. BTW, if you are working on something like that and find LiChess Tools is interfering with your stuff, let me know. We can figure things out. In v2.0.14 a new Themes tool has been added. I can publish CSS themes this way, but I don't intend to maintain them myself. If you want to see your theme there, contact me. 

Q: OK, you're my new hero. How can I help?
A: Contact me and let's talk. I despise doing anything UI design related, as evidenced by this blog and the extension popup, so maybe you can help there. You can help with algorithms to analyze games better or find useful information from the tidbits that Lichess exposes. Anything, really, just as long as it's fun for you.

Q: Yeah, but I can't code. How can I help?
A: Help me by making this extension known. I don't want "marketing", just spread the word. Let people know and if they like it, they will use it. Can't use it if they don't know about it, though, and I am always afraid people think I am spamming them when I try to advertise my work. Make this famous, is it too much to ask?

Q: I use LiChess in my own language and the new features are jarring in English
A: The only languages I personally support are English and Romanian. Other languages are supported via Crowdin. Unfortunately, Crowdin has a limit of words that can be translated for free, so that limits the number of languages available to about 10 more. I configured the ones that are used most or have the most potential in terms of active speakers on the Internet. Crowdin gratiously upgraded the LiChess Tools project to unlimited words and languages, so if you want more languages go to Crowdin and ask for them, - however be ready to help with the translation. You can help translate there, because for each of those languages I started with the default machine translation which I am pretty sure sucks.

Q: Chrome sucks! Microsoft sold out! I hate Firefox! Can you make this work for my favorite browser?
A: Short answer: no. Long answer: I want to help people, so the more the merrier, but I also don't have a lot of resources to maintain code on a browser I don't use. Safari is a mess and extensions on it require to have a tool that only works on Macs and they ask you for money. Firefox has less than 5% of the market and refuses to implement the feature that makes LiChess Tools work. Firefox is supported now. Opera already supports Chrome extensions. To be honest, it is not reasonable for me to bother with anything but what is supported now. So long answer is also no :)

A: That's not my bug, it comes from LiChess. They have bugs, too.
Q: How could you possibly have answered before I asked the question?

Q: Did you actually think people were going to read this far down?
A: No.

Q: I told about this to all my friends, I came with feedback and constructive criticism and it feels like you ignored me. What gives?
A: For sure I want to take everything into consideration and act on requests as fast as possible, but it might be that I am caught up with something else. I thoroughly intend to give you and the extension as much attention as possible, so maybe make sure I got your message, first.

Hope it helps!

  Only after downloading 11 GB of game, playing for a few minutes and uninstalling it in frustration, then searching the web, did I understand Chess Ultra is a Switch game designed to work in VR. For a PC game, though, where I was playing it, it was a slow bloatware that lead to a 404 page when you wanted to switch the chess board style.

  Imagine coming from Lichess and trying to make sense of something that requires so much space to function, has only 3D pieces and uses all of your video card to display a chessboard and some coffee on a table. It was unbearable. Perhaps it would work on a Switch console, with VR glasses, if you want to enter the mood of playing over the board in a smoky chess room, but I have no idea who would want that.

  And then I looked on the Internet to see what other people were saying and everything was great! Oh, the multiple options, the varied puzzles, the recreations of classical games. Jesus, that's basic chess web site functionality! And "critic ratings" are 85% while the normal people rate it at about 60%. Really? Am I crazy for thinking it's a badly constructed game? I hated it.

  

  Submerged: Hidden Depths is one of those relaxing games that require no effort and no skill. You control a couple of unreasonably athletic teens in a future time in which the world is covered in water and strangled by a huge vine-like plant. The two youngsters travel on a boat, retrieving and returning the plant's seeds so that it won't be angry and discovering on the way relics of Earth's past and journals that explain what went on. Each stage is almost linear, easy to go through, devoid of danger and marked in multiple ways so that you don't have to think your way out of anything. In other world, it's a visual feast of a fantasy world in which you just discover stuff.

  At first attracted by the concept, since I usually enjoy the story, exploration and discovery part of RPGs much more than the fights, I got bored rather quickly. It's the same thing again and again, even if "the world" is practically a small sandbox. I liked the design, although the graphics are really simplistic. The occasional proto language words they use are fun and the soundscape puts you in the mood.

  What turned me off a bit is that occasionally the video card would throw an error and I would have to forcefully close the game and start it again. Also, there are ways to skip the animations, which is good, but it skips the good parts as well.  There is one of the most satisfying activities around: finding relics, where the repetitive animation of the boy throwing an anchor and pulling it back gets rather old, but the "strange things" they recover, like typewriters and sextants and so on, it's new every time. And of course when you skip the animation you skip the entire thing, not just the repetitive part. Such a small thing to think about and fix and they wouldn't do it.

  Every time you save a seed there is a storyline that gets advanced and at one time I saw a large black vine hand coming out of the water. I said "We're gonna need a bigger boat!" so I collected all boat upgrades first and stopped saving seeds until I understand the journals, but the upgrades just add extra boost to the boat and the journals are mostly in the seed parts, so not something particularly satisfying. I am going to continue to play it to the end, because sometimes I just feel to turn my brain off, but other than that it feels more like a demo than a full game.

  Playing hint: if you don't like the weather (fog, rain, whatever) you can just save and return to the menu then continue the game and it starts from a sunny mode again. Same if you get stuck in the map and can't move.

  In the end I've completed the game. The ending was quite underwhelming.

Ancient Enemy is one of those card games that abstract a journey of discovery and battle. You charge your magic by playing Solitaire "combos", then fire at the enemy. The choices you make on your journey don't matter at all, they are just levels to pass through that barely differ from each other. That's the entire game!

So why did I play it? Well, because the sound and the texts that my character was "saying" were intriguing. Ironically enough, the game had a "Skip story" button, when in fact that was the only thing that interested me - I wanted a "Skip game" button. Alas, the end of the journey was a complete let down, with a generic enemy that presented no challenge and a blunt and uninspired story ending.

Honestly, when I was playing it I thought: anybody can make games and sell them if this is a Steam game that people pay money for. Just look at the official site of this 2018 game: it looks like it was made in 2000.

Bottom line: fascinating how soundscape can make even the most boring games hold one's interest. Here is a gameplay video:

[youtube:dcglX1KP4XQ]

  Recently I've been to Madeira, a Portuguese island colony with a powerful blend of nature, culture, feudal interests and overall corruption. The game Alba: A Wildlife Adventure made me feel like I was back!

  First of all, this is a game that was clearly done with a lot of heart. Every aspect of the gameplay is fun, positive and well crafted in all the things that matter. After playing the game, not only was I happier and more content, but I felt refreshed by imagining the pride the creators must have felt designing and finishing development. There is NO sense whatsoever of cutting corners, trying to money grab or following any political agenda (other than wildlife conservation, if you count that one). In spirit, it reminded me of the Sierra Entertainment Games.

  The plot is also very refreshing: you are playing a little girl who has grandparents interested in nature and which inspired her to care about life as well. Returning to a fictional Spanish island of her early childhood, Alba will clean up the island, photograph all kinds of animals, help them survive and thrive and fight commercial interests that threaten the island's wildlife. It is a casual gameplay - to the point that whenever you don't find something you are looking for, it means you just have to end the day and it will magically appear in the future for you - in which you explore a lovely island filled with birds, beautiful flora and tropical climate.

  What amazed me most was that there are 51 species of animals portrayed in the game and every one of them is behaving like the actual live species. The walk, the flight patterns, the speed, the sounds, they are all very precise (in the confines of a pretty simplistic graphical interface). Then there are the little things like when you have to make a yes/no decision you use the mouse to bob the head vertically or horizontally. There are no places where your 3D character gets hung up in some wall or caught between obstacles or  seeing/passing through objects. Even the interaction with objects take into account where the player is looking, it's not just a lazy area effect where you can just move around and press the action button aimlessly.

  Another nice thing is that I can imagine small children playing this game and feeling inspired and empowered, while at the same time adults understand the ironic undertones of some of the scenes. Stuff like the little girl gathering garbage from the ground and putting it in the bin, then talking to a native of the island sitting on a bench nearby and complaining about random stuff. Or everybody condescendingly commending the girl for her efforts, but mostly doing nothing to help. Or even phrases like "oh, yeah, it was a great idea to fix the stairs. Why didn't I do it before? Oh, well, it's good you did it".

  The only possible complain I might have is that the game is pretty linear and the replay value is small to nonexistent. But for the few hours that it takes to finish (which was good for me since I am... married  ), it was refreshing and calming.

  I admit, I am not a gamer. This might be just one of a large category of similar games for all I know, but I doubt it. I worked in the video game industry and I am willing to bet this game is as special as I feel it is. I warmly recommend it.

  Here is the gameplay trailer for the game:

[youtube:a-Eu9WE3grA]