T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been playing Call of Cthulhu with my friend group. It’s going pretty well, I’ve managed to not go insane or receive any major injuries. The only time I’ve actually gotten injured was from another player that missed a shot so badly that I got hit in the arm.
I also by chance happened to stumble upon the Necronomicon. Luckily I didn’t try to read it because the player that did try to read it went through the nine layers of Hell. Amazingly he managed to escape with only amnesia, a fear of the dark, and just barely avoiding permanent insanity.
Other than that I’m still playing Rimworld, but now I have the Ideology DLC. I didn’t realize until I got the DLC that it contained a bunch of features that allow me to play the way I kept trying to play, e.g., trying to live underground, collecting as many bionic parts as possible, having a group of bandits that don’t get really sad the moment a prisoner dies. I haven’t even gotten to experiment too much due to the fact that making a religion from scratch takes a while.
So anyway, what are you guys doing this week?
The Biggest Game Ever
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Brotato is a Vampire Survivors-like, but with shops and stat upgrades and distinct levels (and, like… art). It’s been fun. Beat level 5 with a character and decided level 4 is the one to actually play on, 5 ramps up just a little too annoyingly.
Only have an hour in Slay the Princess, but am happy to see there are more chapters than I’d seen while watching other people play it. Hoping it goes somewhere unexpected, but… I mean by definition I don’t expect it. Although I notice I somehow got an achievement for doing a thing I didn’t actually do, which… I guess makes it more likely?
Well, hit the ending to Slay the Princess, and… don’t know how I feel about it? It’s a weird story. One thing I can say for sure is it could stand to be less fetishy, that final form is even moreso than what came before. Also the game locks you out of endings you already saw, except I didn’t actually see one the first time and got locked out and cheevo’d for it anyway.
The Razor route was hilarious though. Who knew initiating a duel to the death and then showing up to it without a weapon would end poorly.
More Elden Ring. Finished cleaning up the last couple zones I hadn’t done, Mogh and Melania (I figure most people are plenty spoiled on those names). Though I did Melania first so Mogh was more of an afterthought. And then into the DLC. Now granted, it’s been a bit and there have been some balancing changes, but I really don’t get all the whining people were doing about these enemies being too hard for endgame. The enemies were fine even before I’d collected hardly any of the thingies.
The non-invasion NPC, NPC boss, and NPC-styled boss, those were the bs, mostly because the first two didn’t allow spirit summons. But the normal enemies, probably not any worse than the stuff on the way to Melania.
Of course, I’m playing a greatshield/smashy/faith build, so I actually do things like block attacks and use magic when it’s easier. Even so, what I’ve called an NPC boss took probably dozen or more tries thanks to its bogus weapon, poise, etc, before I tried using a particular weapon skill it apparently had no AI for dodging.
I’m looking forward to the DLC. I’m a little broke right now, which is why I’m finishing up older games in my library, but if the world’s as pretty in the DLC as it is in the main game, it’ll be worth the money.
It’s. . . alright? I dunno, don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but I haven’t been very impressed so far. It’s fine, quality, good enough gameplay, but I’m not feeling as wowed as previous DLCs. Looking down the cliffs to some later areas there’s definitely at least one that looks like it could be quite pretty, but I’d call the first areas. . . accented bland. If you’re in it just for the eye candy and are short on cash anyway, well it’ll be quite a while before it starts getting discounts.
Still being extremely intimidated by beginning Act III of Baldur’s Gate III, I went back to the backlog and into Horizon Forbidden West: the Burning Shores. Yes, I finally started the DLC, quite some time after finishing the main story line. Muscle memory came back relatively quickly, however I noticed again how the sheer amount of weaponry this game hands out with its millions of status effects is, for me, a downgrade to Zero Dawn. That aside, it’s still fun, and I am very much looking forward to do more.
Oh yeah, I can see the intimidation factor of BG3 act III, especially after act II gets pretty streamlined. It’s also where some of the seams show and a couple quests feel inelegant or are seeded almost right as you start with little to no ways of knowing where and when you’ll resolve them.
Having said that my advice would be to go wit the flow. A bunch of the quests overlap in certain ways meaning to lead you in similar directions or to the same events from different angles and while it is possible to lock yourself out of certain resolutions to certain situations I think it’s part of the game’s strength that you can get these differences depending on how you stumble upon a quest and the game is generally non-judgemental about it.
Ironically, for being an Act with SO much to see and do, Act III feels paradoxically a lot more hollow than previous Acts. There’s plenty of sidequests, but most of them are just one-note encounters that don’t leave the same kind of lingering memory that stuff in Act 1 or 2 did. The Companions are also a lot more quiet than before and don’t have as much to say outside of their personal quests. All of it results in a feeling that Act III was kinda rushed and not given the same kind of TLC that Act 2 and (especially) Act 1 did.
Also, I LOOOOOVE Call of Cthulhu games. :D I like to run mine as a mixture of classic Lovecraft and Hellboy-inspired adventures. My favourite campaign was one where, after a few initial adventures where the players had to encounter and battle the Mythos on their own, they get approached by a paranormal investigation society that was set up precisely to combat the Mythos as best they can. Of course, plots run deep and the society is not QUITE as benevolent as it originally appears to be…
The “act III didn’t get as much love and attention” seems to be the community consensus but I personally disagree with the “one note encounters” opinion. There are some incidental quests but a lot of them either tie into the larger framework of the chapter or are signposts for larger questlines.
They kind of do, but also don’t? For example, the Open Hand murders quest. It obviously ties in to the Temple of Bhaal and thus to one of the big baddies, but once you find and deal with the murderer, if you go back and talk to the initial NPCs that started the entire thing, none of them have any updated dialogue about it. That’s what I meant by “one-note”, it’s like they’re just there and once you move on they have nothing further to add. To be fair, this COULD simply be due to a lack of polish caused by a lack of time (although it certainly doesn’t sound like Larian was under pressure to ship. It MIGHT be that the devs were just getting sick and tired of working on BG3 after nearly 6 years of development though.)
I’ve been playing Trails of Cold Steel 3, replaying Fallout New Vegas and Dark Souls Remastered. It’s been a blast, after spending some time getting the right Linux distribution installed. ToCS3 used to actually turn off my monitor for a second or two every so often on Windows, but under Linux it just chugs for a moment at about the same interval. I think this is better for my hardware.
I finished all the Speed Duel life goals in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duell Links. So I should be done with this game – we’ll see.
In coop we played a survival game with settlers element called Bellwright. Our village has now 3 npc-inhabitants. Progress is slow, inventory space is very limited and the stamina-system is as annoying as ever. The fighting system tries to be “For Honor” but fails because it’s a big open survival world with enemies glitching into each other and not a fencing simulator.
Analog games of the week were Imperial Settlers – Empires of the North and Canvas. The first one being a euro-game with resource juggling and empire building. The art is charming, the tactics are varied with six different clans. In Canvas you combine 3 semi-transparent cards and a background to create art to earn ribbons which translate to points. Unfortunately it’s not the best art that earns the most points.
I didn’t get in a run of The Old Republic this week, but did get in two sessions of Mass Effect, exploring pretty much all the non-plot related sectors and doing Feros (I did Therum first to get Liara). The most interesting thing about Feros is that it ended up bumping the Paragon score for my character whose tagline is “I’m not a nice person!” up really high. All I did was go into the tunnels and fix the things they wanted me to do (which I needed to do anyway) and not slaughter the colonists that were under the control of the Thorian and use the grenades instead, which would be too mean even more my character. I don’t recall my first character having this much trouble being Renegade …
The other thing about this game is that it’s pretty much the only RPG that I’ve played where I’m not cash-strapped on a first run. The reason is that I’m playing on the Story-mode difficulty and so so far haven’t had to worry too much about equipment, as the drops give me enough to fill out the three characters that I am consistently using — Shepard, Tali and Ashley — and I don’t have to have the latest and greatest equipment to win the fights, so I’ve been mostly ignoring it. This contrasts with games like Dragon Age where it is far easier to change your equipment AND the game tells you what each character specializes in so you can easily look for heavy armour for Alistair and look for swords and shields for him, while for the main character you can easily specialize in a form and simply look for equipment that matches that. Here, you always get to choose everything for every character, which meant when I finally wanted to upgrade their equipment I had to look at the character sheet to figure out what weapons they use best, which is also encouraging me to stick with these two characters now that I have them set up. So I don’t even LOOK at what vendors have anymore, and still get lots of credits. It’d be nice if this would carry over to Mass Effect 2 since I will need more credits there for fuel and probes, but somehow I doubt it.
So far, I’m enjoying the game, but I think I’m hitting the point where I’m looking forward to moving on from it … even if that’s to Mass Effect 2.
Continuing Dragon Age: Origins playthrough #5 as a warmup for the new game. The mid-game DLCs are less substantial than I remember. I deliberately went in the oddest order of main quests I could muster, and it’s paying off as I comically steamroll everything in the Brecilian Forest level with my endgame party. Still greatly enjoying it – it’s utterly nostalgic as this is the game that got me back into gaming after I pretty much quit for all of college, but I do think it holds up well as a modern-enough exercise in game design and storytelling.
Coming back to Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, a game with much better writing than Borderlands 3 even if it doesn’t reach the level of the second installment. I’m a little tired of how freaking bullet-spongy all the enemies are in these games. It just feels wrong that I have to empty a magazine to deal with a single lower-middle level mook. Luckily, the same mod that made Elden Ring playable for me can up my weapon damage a bit, making the game more fun. Heck, I might even go back and finish B3 with this.
I’ve been really looking forward to the Borderlands movie because of the amazing cast, but someone online pointed out how badly directed the action is in the clips we have, and now I’m worried. Still planning to go see it or stream it for now.
I tried Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands when it came out and went in figuring I’d try doing melee, since that was the big new thing of the game. Unfortunately it was literally worthless compared to guns and that really turned me off the game (plus I think I got pretty burned out on Borderlands).
I keep seeing Wonderlands on super sale and being like ya know, that DLC was so good, I should really try the whole game they made in its image. But then I’ll read all the reviews that are like “ehhhhhhh,” and think about how much of that DLC was lightning in a bottle and my emotions were just perfectly targeted from the main game’s story, and it just doesn’t seem like it could measure up.
Oh yeah, the DLC was great and it honestly had some excellent writing.
Wonderlands… I played it in co-op with a buddy so that certainly affected the enjoyment in favour of the game. I didn’t feel the “bulletsponge” problem that much through most of the game but it may be something that I’m not as sensitive to or multiple characters might synergize better in applying buffs/debuffs. Writingwise… it has its moments, definitely gave me a bunch of chuckles and a couple laugh out louds but it is not Dragon Keep, particularly the “deep” story layer is kind of predictable past a point. I also hope you like the “Tina doesn’t have an answer so she yells ‘random ambush!’ or something to that effect” joke because there’s a lot of it.
Agreed, you only get Dragon Keep once and I’m glad we have it. But I’m still having some fun. I just finished the
gay skeleton piratequest and it made me happy – no mockery, no punching down when it would have been so easy. At least Wonderlands didn’t have a rape scene in the early hours of the story like Borderlands 3 did.Still going through Batman: Arkham Knight. Still the same: love the melee combat and predator sections. Hate the batmobile. Loathe the writing with a passion.
Also continuing with Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. This game is longer than I remembered. Not a complaint, but it’s a bit of a whiplash after the last GBA game I played, which took like 3 hours. Not much else to say. It’s still a fun game.
And now going through The Case of the Golden Idol. Now this is an experience. Very recently I played through Duck Detective: The Secret Salami and said I wanted more of it, and, well, this is it. I mean, it’s not exactly the same, but major part of that game’s investigative puzzle gameplay is clearly inspired by (read: blatantly copied from) Golden Idol, which is older. The basic gist is that you’re presented with scenarios where a crime or accident has occurred and you have to try to figure out how and why. You do this by looking around the scenery, which provides you with keywords (such as names or objects), which you then have to fit in predetermined slots to figure out the case. While you can potentially brute force the solutions by trying every combination that’d not only be frustratingly long and boring, it’d also ruin all the fun you’d get by trying to find the solution on your own, not to mention the satisfaction of getting it right. Lots of fun and also longer than Duck Detective, so I’m having a blast.
Also started Justice League: Cosmic Chaos. It’s a kid-friendly game, so it has a cartoonish style and simple gameplay, but it’s fun to play and by God it’s so much better written than Arkham Knight. It certainly doesn’t make Batman look like a complete and utter idiot every 5 minutes. I got it on a whim expecting some time waster, but it’s clear the writers are big DC fans. I’d compare it (positively) to the LEGO games, but there are a few key differences. For one, the game is genuinely funny, while humor in LEGO games tends to range from “alright” to cringe-inducing. There’s also not much in the way of scenery destruction (which makes sense in this context). And instead of having dozens of playable characters you get a few, but you can customize them. It’s genuinely good so far. Gonna see how long before it becomes repetitive in comparison to LEGO games.
Ideology is basically the “play how you want” DLC for RimWorld; want a group of men-hating cannibal transhumanists? You got it! A group of darkness-loving tree-worshipping people who think animals are also people? No problem! A group of vampiric thralls who revere the blood-feeders in their midst while getting a mood boost from pain? Well, that requires Biotech as well, but it’s possible!
I know what you mean about it taking a while to create an ideoligion from scratch, though. I like to play with a fluid ideoligion, where you start with just a few memes (I think the default in vanilla is one, but I have a mod that just makes all ideoligions fluid upon game start) and then as you do rituals or perform other things in accordance with your ideoligion you gain reform points which you can use to reform it later to add or remove memes, precepts, rituals, etc.. It makes starting a new colony a little faster, and it’s fun to imagine your colonists’ beliefs morphing over time in response to the things they encounter.
Once you’ve gotten familiar with what it has to offer, if you’re interested in mods Vanilla Ideology Expanded nearly doubles the amount of memes available (with ones like Fire Worship, Blood Court, Emancipation, and Fleshcrafting), and Alpha Memes contains some even more out there ones like Vow of Nonviolence, Gauranlen Supremacy, and Psychic Vampirism (which requires Royalty, I think). Both also add a bunch of new styles, if you want to have (say) a Neolithic, Corporate, or Steampunk-looking colony.
I started Cryptmaster, since Fully Ramblomatic had such nice things to say about it. It is a cool game but I do really wish it had a broader map, it’s easy to get lost and annoying to find your way back to places you’ve previously been. A game based on typing is a pretty niche genre these days, but it also has riddles and word guessing, and that works for me.
Tried the demo for Mind over Magnet, a puzzle platformer being developed by Game Makers Toolkit on YouTube. Pretty fun experience; the demo puzzles are pretty easy, but the controls are smooth and simple, and the core concept of using magnets to navigate the level gives it a strong identity
Going to be a little while before the full game is released, but I’m pretty hype for it now; i beat snake bird a while back and haven’t really found another puzzle game that’s quite as satisfying
Smashed through Animal Well this weekend with a friend, now for the more arduous level of secret hunting and final final endings and the like, until it becomes too much of a drag. Have 20-25h in it now. Seems I’ve done most of the optional areas / content already.