T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m pretty much only playing Rimworld. I would also be playing Stardew Valley, but our internet is currently being very bad at its job. So I guess this week’s Rimworld highlights are: realizing that living in a mountainous ice sheet is bad when your only food, heat, and feed for your livestock comes from hydroponics. Nothing else could ever get done because if one person is out of commission, the whole colony would collapse.
So I started a new save and quickly learned that raiders can just take stuff and go if you live close enough to the edge of the map. They stole my couch and megascreen television. I liked that couch and I spent too much money on that TV. I also got a colonist with the traits too smart and fast learner, which skyrockets their learning speed for skills with a passion to 250% from 100% and skills without a passion to 88% from 35%.
Anyway, next week is probably going to be more Rimworld unless Armstrong remembers how to create internet. If they do figure it out, I’ll probably be playing the new Phasmophobia update.
What is going on with you guys?
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
I’m playing Dave the Diver.
I’m mostly loving it’s quirky sense of humour and art style, while slightly conflicted by the “Push X to Not Die” gameplay that I am so very very bad at. Because I’m a PC gamer at heart and this is probably the first game I’ve spent any real time playing on a console. So I don’t know where X is. And I die a lot. In a game about fishing, and running a sushi restaurant.
Oops. Shouty. Sorry. Wont let me edit.
Not a fan of QTEs either, but you really shouldn’t be engaging the aggressive fishes until you’ve improved your equipment. At a certain point QTEs won’t even be something you’ll have to worry about.
Finished the run of the fourth map in The Last Spell. After some more chaos in trying to figure out how to make some moderately crippled characters work, I managed to re-roll the shop enough times to get what they needed. Ended up with two berserkers (melee, more damage every time they’re attacked), my specialist tome user who I’d expected to be the trap early on but was one of my best (specialists get a big main damage boost to lean on, but only one weapon set, and two-handed weapons that tends to pair poorly, but they solved the problem by actually reaching like 80% crits), my under-damage longbow sniper who was just barely able to keep up thanks to a bespoke pair of hand crossbows and other perfect gear and also picking up fortress master to power up the catapults, the late poison orb guy, and the late sledgehammer turned multi-hit spear user.
With characters stabilized it was manageable until the boss. At which point it was a damn good thing I’d known what to prepare for, and even then only managted it because I happened to put a second teleport ability on the spear user, on top of the teleport pads I built. They ended up chain teleporting all the way across the map, twice, to hit the objectives, which the berserkers were too busy and just not fast enough to reach. But I made it through the first part much better than the first time I’d done the map, with only one small wall breach (instead of basically total destruction), the other sides actually getting under control once the boss appeared and the spawns slowed for a moment. And because I’d brought the exact items I needed, when the boss did their gank attack I survived, and could bring as many characters to bear as I could get in range. Which turned out to only need two: the berserker who’d barely held on during the wall defense, and the tome specialist I wanted to just crit hammer it to death. And they did, one-rounding it.
And unlocking the fifth map. Which I hadn’t been sure, but yup, there’s one more. Which I will probably just barely scrape to the end of a 25 hour run only to get wrecked by a new bogus boss mechanic, then have to do another run.
So instead I picked up the DLC, Dwarves of Runenburg, which is ranked at three skulls instead of the four and five of those other maps. And promptly forgot to equip what I consider one of the most important Omens (pre-run perks), making all my characters start with garbage gear that often can’t even 1-shot enemies on the first wave, instead of upgraded gear that can carry them while I build econ. Which has made for a more intense run than I intended, but still fun: the map is much smaller and more chokepointed so you can really chop through swathes of mobs, which spawn very close to the walls, and you start with an Inn so you can quickly go to four heroes. The dwarves are slower (and tougher, to an extent), but actually end up with a lot of movement options and stuff for working together, unlike the common crutch/trap Lone Wolf perk. The whole thing is very pop-cultury with “toss me!” and a canon with a rocket jump and a magic gauntlet where the basic attack is “snap.” And I also found out the omen I thought was for funz, making wood walls tougher so you could try to spend more on active defenses, is actually the gateway to omens for actually upgrading all your walls and defense, so maybe the last map will actually be possible.
I also played some more Deep Rock Galactic, but I might be skipping most of this season. I’ve got all the new overclocks already, and while I like the stuff for my main Driller, as noted previously, the pump shotgun doesn’t do what you want it to, and I don’t really care about any of the rest- either I don’t like the effect, or I tried them and they’re worse than my existing builds (though my existing builds were fun). So there’s hardly any new toys I want to play with, nor does the new mission type interest me. So it’s pretty much just more of the same. Still a good game, but one I’ve already played a ton of.
And just today I finally picked the Pokemon Blue hack I made for myself back up. I’d stopped before because there was a sound problem, with no sound you’ve got no atmosphere, and I was not enjoying it as much as I should have. Finally felt like picking up an updated emulator, sound issue fixed, couldn’t get it to figure out the old save file (googling no help), took the excuse to make another tweak and just start a new game. I consider it a minimalist mod, though I’ve made some more radical move, stat, and even type changes than others might. Couldn’t do all of what I wanted due to the lack of tools, but found a trick or two within those limits I’m interested to see in action (if they even worked).
I’m about to finish Saints Row 2022. Just some DLC missions left I got by buying the complete edition. It’s Saints Row. I don’t understand the negativity this game got. Maybe most of the bugs they were complaining about are fixed by now.
And Srew Drivers. A vehicle building and racing game with a building system that resembles LEGO Tech. Its free – but Early Access and constantly changing. The vid Scrapman did 2 weeks ago about this upcoming game is now completely outdated.
In coop we started Bellwright. A 3rd person survival game with a ton of Settlers elements like building your own village with supply and crafting chains for NPCs you hire for your village. Not bad for a first look.
Analog I played Dune: Imperium for the first time. In a 3 player game I came in second. Not bad, but I need to see more of the game as the cards didn’t seem to be thoroughly shuffled.
I finished the DLC for Talos Principle 2. Really enjoyed it overall. I appreciate that the premise for the puzzles in the second part of it was just “hey, we like puzzles so we made some puzzles”; the gameplay/story link in the series has always been a bit weak (even if both individually are strong) so that’s the most appropriate the puzzles have ever felt. The third part promised harder puzzles and it definitely delivered – some of those were very hard and some of them were very cool. I’m happy I didn’t need to look any solutions up for the third part (I did need to look a couple things up for the second part of the DLC, turns out I forgot a mechanic existed and also one of the Sphinx puzzles was very rude).
I’ve started playing Nine Sols. It’s a metroidvania soulslike, a genre I really enjoy. Big focus on parrying. Your character knows way way more than the player does, which has some upsides and some downsides vs the typical blank slate. Chinese mythological inspiration is a nice change from the more typical backstories of the genre. Also, while the character doesn’t tell me everything they know, the things they do say are comprehensible, which is really appreciated after things like Blasphemous, The Last Faith, Ender Lilies, Afterimage, etc where I knew less after someone talked to me than before.
Huh, interesting in that I always felt Talos Principle (the first one, I haven’t played the sequel yet) did overall a rather smart job of integrating the story and puzzles in comparison to the average of the genre.
In Talos Principle 1 the goal is to create a general AI and the tool to do that is laser puzzles. It’s… a bit of a stretch.
I mean, sure, although I would argue you are oversimplifying the idea just a teensy tiny bit. Also, I still stand by my statement that it’s more thought through than most of the genre.
Finished my first playthrough of Starstruck Vagabond, started a second to try and get the four crewmates I couldn’t get the first time
Also went with the “private egoist” personality where the first run was “upbeat altruist.” Both personalities seem to end up playing the straight man to the weird crewmates (which would probably be true for most of the selectable personalities) but in completely different ways: the upbeat altruist is a bit tactless but very determined to help them, the private egoist is serious and a little pretentious and mostly seems to go along with the crewmate’s antics out of curiosity
Due to [reasons] I haven’t been able to resume my playthrough of Doom 2016, so no news there.
The announcement of Metroid Prime 4 came with the release in NSO of Metroid: Zero Mission, and it got me in the mood to play it, which I did, until the end. Didn’t go for 100% completion this time, but I still had a good time with it. It’s a really fun game, even though it’s not my favorite of the franchise. Since it’s basically a retelling of the original game there wasn’t really much they could do with it when it came to add new stuff. Still had a blast with it.
I also took the chance to explore a bit more of the GBA offerings of the NSO, so now I’m playing Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, which I only played once and several years ago, so my memory of it was pretty iffy. But after recently playing Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario I’m certainly in the mood for more RPGs in the Mario series.
And almost in spite of myself I’m playing Batman: Arkham Knight. I’ve played through the first three games countless times, but I honestly couldn’t tell if this is the third or only second time I’ve played this title. I still love the non-Batmobile parts of the gameplay, but I detest the writing in this game. The existence of the Suicide Squad game is the only thing that prevents Knight from being the worst written in the entire series. It has a few good moments here and there but overall it’s more frustrating than anything else. I think I’m just gonna do my best to enjoy the good parts and try ti ignore all the bad stuff.
Got in a run of The Old Republic with my Sith Warrior, finishing another planet. I already knew it was coming because I’ve played that story a couple of times, but this time especially the “sudden but inevitable betrayal” is pretty obvious, at least from Baras. But the important one isn’t.
Also played another session of Mass Effect. I’m more engaged with it now, and am getting some decent scenes and opportunities to act a bit more Renegade, but this game reminds me a lot of why I often hate RPGs, which the focus on exploration. You have to look everywhere to get all the things and the planet exploration isn’t fun enough and isn’t clear enough to make that fun. I’m not as worried about it here and likely will go back to pick things up if I miss them, but it makes me more scared about ME2 and ME3 since their exploration was less fun and more necessary than it is in the first game.
I modded XCOM 2 to the point that it kept crashing, so gave up and bought Phoenix Point instead. And it’s…good.
Much more complex than XCOM – more like the originals, people tell me – but despite its engrossing complexity and good tactical gameplay, there’s a couple of weird design choices.
The enemy are mutated, ugly monsters that emerge from the sea to kill people. Finding out what they are and what they want is the central story of the game. So naturally, whenever you meet a new one the game literally pauses to give you a load of written information on what it is, what it’s stats / abilites are and what it’s called.
What happened to the mystery, game?
There’s also a nasty habit of forcing you to rely on the RNG for progress: you don’t get to choose where to set up your bases, nor which of the 3 factions you’re surrounded by. Were you hoping to ally with the nice space hippies who use sleek laser guns this playthrough? Well fuck you, you’re surrounded by settlements of the crazy religious people who mutate their own bodies. Best start learning prayers if you want to upgrade any of your gear from the basic starter stuff.
Oh, you’re exploring because you need resources? Well, have more faction settlements instead. That’ll be fun.
Plus, if you’ve got a story objective on the other side of the world, better hope that the game spawns in the right kind of exploration points for your aircraft to get there. You can’t just fly the damn plane in a direction, you have to jump from point to point based on the craft’s fuel range – even if the point you’re ‘refuelling’ at was literally a dead end that had nothing in it!
More than once I’ve had to just stop and turn around because the story mission was 10 miles out of reach or so. The RNG just said, ‘Nope, you can’t do that’.
The only thing I’m ever going to think of when I hear Phoenix Point is that time ARavingLoon named a character the entirety of Les Miserables. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzQcFnYAoCw
As a fan of the Firaxis XCOM games (1 and 2, collectively just “XCOM” here), I really wanted to like Phoenix Point because it has some interesting design choices, but there’s just so much jank.
In XCOM, you can switch team members with Tab and Shift including when you’ve sent a soldier off on a full sprint, which makes turns where you’re just moving soldiers around much faster. In PP you can cycle one way with Tab…but not back for some reason, and you are forced to watch every single soldier slowly running to their destination one by one.
Targeted overwatch sounds amazing (and would definitely come in handy sometimes in XCOM), until you realize it’s the only option. It might be interesting if there was, say, an accuracy trade-off for an increased cone of detection, but as far as I can tell there isn’t, and the way the visualization cone just ends hilariously highlights the maximum range beyond which guns refuse to shoot. (Also, humans have something like a 210-degree field of vision, yet somehow the best my soldier with an AR can manage is a less than 45-degree cone to hit something in?)
The action point system sound awesome in theory (and I do like being able to, e.g., move-shoot-move), but is just so fiddly in practice. All your soldiers in PP feel like they have the speed of asthmatic cripple, and even with copious investment in their speed stat rarely seem to be able to move to actually good cover and get a shot off at an enemy in the same turn. Plus, unlike XCOM where you can be sure all your soldiers have used all their actions, in PP you’ll often end up with fractions of a AP on most soldiers, but no I’m not going to move them one more space because doing so would put them out of cover, so you have to manually end pretty much every turn.
I fired PP up just now to check this, but why is there basically no music during missions? The music in XCOM is great, either darkly foreboding in the first game or bombastically motivational in the second. In PP, missions play out in this completely emotionally dead state of near-utter silence broken only by sound effects. It doesn’t make me feel dread (the music in XCOM 1 did that), it makes me feel like they forgot to hire a composer.
And I could go on. Targeted ballistic trajectories for bullets sounds fun…until your soldier refuses to step six inches around the corner to shot the Archon that’s right there. Enemies with destructible parts would be great…if being able to target individual limbs in any meaningful way didn’t require basically standing next to the enemy already. Having to manage ammo down to the individual shot for every single type of gun in the game is simply madness and busywork. And so on and so forth. I feel like there’s the core of a great game in Phoenix Point, but every time I’ve tried to get into it I’m reminded that there are more polished experiences I could be having.
Heh, a lot of this rings so true. There is so, so much jank in this game. Just like the Long War mod for XCOM, PP makes me appreciate some of the design of the Firaxis games: in particular, the way you always know what you’re trying to acheive, how to overcome the latest problem, and could make meaningful progress towards your goals almost all the time.
For a lot of what you said, I think the dev or fan’s answer would be ‘that’s the point’ – buying individual magazines for guns; having greater, finer control over your soldiers’ actions; and the way the game doesn’t really hold your hand while simultaneously giving you much greater freedom. Not that that makes constantly having to keep track of the different ammo for different guns or manually ending everyone’s turn fun…but it’s at least part of the intended experience.
Pretty sure the UI bugs that I’ve come upon aren’t part of the experience, though. Nor is the way that you will have to spend resources to set up bases in South America regardless of where you start – because the game WILL send you to Antarctica for a story mission and S. America is the only landmass close enough to let you fly there.
One time I had to go across the planet, to Antarctica, in order to plant some fucking seeds in the ground for a faction mission. Fuck you, game, and especially fuck your randomly-spawning RNG nonsense.
The Overwatch system also makes me want to strangle someone. Specifically the way that soldiers take turnsto fire in real-time. In XCOM, three people on overwatch meant that if the enemy moved they got torn apart in a blizzard of gunfire. In PP, this means:
First soldier shoots the target.
Second soldier shoots the cover that the target ran behind.
Third soldier doesn’t even shoot, because the target has moved beyond his overwatch cone before his turn came up.
The first soldier is then beaten to death by any enemy THEY WERE ALL WATCHING WITH GUNS RAISED.
It’s so stupid.
I’m now deep into Elden Ring, having reached the mountaintops of the Giants. I’m using wiki stuff to go back and progress some character quests; I want to know what happens to them, and for sure I’d never have worked some of this out on my own. As it is, I think I accidentally broke progression on several by just playing around.
It’s still absolutely gorgeous, and I may very well do at least a partial tourist re-play with Luke Ross’ REAL VR mod so I can experience it in immersive 3D. Shame it’s a From Software game, and the world is crumbling around you and your decisions mainly involve choosing how everyone in this world is going to die.
And it’s not a video game, but after having successfully printed and painted my first Warhammer 40K-styled gaming mini (a parody Catgirl of Battle), I’m seriously considering buying the Kill Team board game. I’m a tabletop Battletech player from way back, and this seems like a Games Workshop title I could actually afford to play.
The quests in Elden Ring aren’t as fail-able as those in some previous games, but there are bits. I would indeed recommend you stop and go clear out quests before finishing the Mountaintops, ’cause not long after you can start hitting quest breaks. If you weren’t already aware of that from wiki’ing of course.
I am also a getting tired of crapsack dying worlds. Particularly after the (painfully obvious really) realization of a not-insignificant amount of why I’d been drawn to them so long. I finally pulled Transistor off the pile a while back ’cause I wanted to play something new and I remember everyone saying it was good. And it was, but it was also yet another crapsack dying world, which was not what I needed at the time, and a blitzed through most of it in a couple sessions before just not coming back to finish the job.
It doesn’t need to be fluffy puppies and rainbows, and yes I get how the whole gameloop of the souls-like specifically resonates with the theme, but could we get some games that aren’t doomed reset worlds?
One Finger Death Punch 2 was a fun game. Had a couple of difficult levels in the back end, but also had a mechanic that trivialized them; the Revenge Tokens refill your health to full at pretty much any cutscene transition so you’ve practically got infinite health if you use one. Also some really rude levels, like a rush of ten Brawlers that each require a lengthy fight, so you’re basically just waiting for a screen clear to charge. Still a very good time, nice to see what else they’ve done with such a simple concept.
Tales of Zestiria continues despite the injured shoulder; this game’s dumb enough so far I have to see more of it. Barely any progress, but we get our… fourth?… scene of someone hiding behind a rock listening to the party’s conversations, when the party’s conversation is just… the most boring nothing. “We did it!” [cut to person behind rock leaving] Oh no, now that guy will know We Did It!
Bloons TD 6 is a game I have to play in very short bursts, the maps are long enough that doing multiple in a row causes headaches. Finished a questline consisting of three maps in a row, which consisted of about two hours of play. Too much, that.
Slay the Spire. Nothing more.
I always have to check which Tales games is which. Yeah, Zestiria is the second one I’ve played and after my somewhat negative opinion of Symphonia’s story, to which a bunch of people were reacting with “no no, the series is actually very smart. Symphonia deconstructs the JRPG tropes of ‘chosen one gathers the elements*'” I was waiting and waiting for the other shoe to drop in Zestiria but in the end it felt like it was a very, very straightfoward JRPG narrative. We also tried playing it in co-op with a friend but the way the camera works made it basically impossible.
*For the record, I agree that this is what the game is trying to do, though I do have some very strong “yes, but…”
Symphonia was one where I was sort of onboard with the story; it seemed pretty generic, but I was happy enough with it to see it continue. But I hated the gameplay throughout, and then they introduced an Emotionless Girl What Doesn’t Understand Feelings, and then a handcuffed man kicked me to death in the woods and I finally dropped it.
Zestiria is just a fascinating trainwreck. It’s a very generic story so far, but, just, every corner is a rough edge. I have never before seen a game give me a “reload from last save” button, and then fail to load the correct save. I am excited to see how incompetent this game can be.
And I still recommend Berseria, it’s cheesy but the heroes and villains have some solid dynamics. (Whichever ones are which.)
Symphonia was basically my FF7, but I wouldn’t have called it particularly “smart” either, just very competently anime, plenty of others must have done the same deconstructions. Let’s see, if you stopped just a short while after Presea. . . you probably still got enough of the story to get the jist. If you didn’t guess, she’s got no emotions because she was part of the same sort of experiments as what happens to Collette, you eventually get some help from someone complicit in said experiments to cure them both. Regal, the handcuffed man who kicks you to death, joins the party (pretty sure he’s featured in the intro), and is as ridiculously melodramatic as you’d expect for someone who could clearly remove, but has not removed, his handcuffs.
One of these days I’d like to play some more Tales games, but Berseria is exactly in the window of won’t run on my desktop, won’t run on steamdeck (and I dunno, for whatever reason the newest one just doesn’t stick in my interest as much). Maybe when I get a new rig. Well, actually what I’d really like to do is go back and finish Tales of Destiny, but that was PS1 and has no easy ports, though emulators have probably advanced enough to get over the problem it had bad in the day.
I didn’t make it too far in Arise, dropped it right before the second Lord fight. Arise has a lot of Dark Soul influence, at least in that you’ve got limited renewable healing and enemies swing very hard, which is not something I’m a fan of. The bossfight before, there had been a stronger-than-average fight before it that I had muddled through, and then the boss summoned that entire encounter, with the boss, twice. (Meanwhile storywise the guy with the “I’m definitely evil and will betray you shortly” design, was evil, and betrayed us.) Played it alongside Strangers of Paradise; I dropped both, but Strangers is the one I’d go back to, its fights are a fairer kind of mean.
I guess there was one after that? But it was mobile and shut down nigh instantly? https://toucharcade.com/2022/05/10/tales-of-luminaria-shutting-down-date-july-2022-servers-offline-ios-android-free/
I think there’s a strategy in RimWorld where you scatter some really cheap but stealable items near the map edges, and try to coerce raiders into opportunistically stealing them instead of damaging/stealing your much more valuable colonists. I haven’t tried it myself though so I can’t personally vouch for it.
I visited family over the weekend and predictably caught the latest COVID strain, so in between sneezing my chest muscles sore while staying home the past few days I’ve been playing RimWorld (continuing my VFE Empire/Anomoly playthrough), Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition (doing some campaigns and simultaneous achievement hunting), and Terraformers (working on getting platinum times in some scenarios I’d beaten a little too slowly before).
I’m still playing some shorter games and not starting anything particularly long. I just wrapped up Irong Danger which is an indie tactical real time game with active pause but adds a time rewind mechanic that lets you go back around 7 seconds (the time is measured in 0.5 second “heartbeats” so effectively this means you can rewind 14 “steps”). Effectively the rewind turns it into more of a puzzle game along the lines of “do I have enough time to perform this attack before that projectile reaches me, or alternately if I dodge this way will this remove me from the projectile’s path while simultaneously put me close enough to that enemy to stab them”. The mechanics work alright, especially if you manage to catch a sort of rhythm where the characters work in tandem juggling enemies and rotating their abilities, it does make the game feel very low stakes though. The story is frankly nothing to write home about, particularly since the game is left extremely open ended clearly in anticipation of a sequel that will never come. The devs are making another game that I think is in the same universe but far as I can tell is not directly following the story, probably because, as the devs themselves say, Iron Danger sold very poorly. I did enjoy one of the VAs’ performance a bunch though as he really managed to add a lot to a character represented by a static character model and a portrait.
My interest in Destiny 2 is degrading rapidly and part of it is the new structure for the seasons they’re trying. Before we were getting weekly story progression followed by about 3-4 weeks of catch-up time at the end of a roughly 3 month long season. If I understand it correctly now we’re getting more concentrated story drops every 6-7 weeks with maybe a trickle of minor extra conversations here and there in between. While I’d generally say the approach is more user friendly because it lets the player interact with the story at their own pace the lack of the motivating factor to open the game at least once a week is sapping my will to do so, especially when I have so many other things I could be playing. It doesn’t help that after all the buildup the confrontation with the Witness was something of a letdown. I suppose since I’ve paid for the expansion already Bungie still has a chance to get me interested in their post-“Light and Darkness Saga” story as I’ll at least be checking in on the story.
Finished Darksiders III. I’m not a big Souls guy and every time I play something that takes inspiration from the genre (which is growing increasingly hard to avoid these days), I affirm that fact more. The i-frames dodge centered combat of Darksiders III was generally enjoyable enough, but the obnoxious length between checkpoints and the dramatically punishing runbacks were not my jam. I want the fraction of my gaming time on a new game that I spend beating enemies I already beat and doing platforming I already did to be zero. Ironically, there’s a save point right outside just about every actual boss, so the major fights completely sidestep this issue and I fully enjoyed those while absolutely hating all the time between.
I have begun the Dragon Age Veilguard hype and preparation run with my fifth playthrough of Dragon Age: Origins, jumping into the only origin story I haven’t either played or watched someone play, the Dwarf Commoner. It’s one of my favorite games of all time and I’m enjoying it as much as ever in 2024. This is the first time I’ve ever modded the game and while the depth of modding available is miniscule compared to some contemporaries (you know the ones), there are a few nice ones that spruce up character models and it’s cool to have a minor fresh coat of paint.