T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been playing more Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.
So far, I’ve learned that turning down the damage reduction really hurts. Last time I played I had damage reduction set to easy, so I was effectively invincible with heavy enough armor. But now I have to learn what it’s like to take damage.
Also, since I’m not making most of my money from smithing, I’m having to actually learn how trade caravans and workshops work, instead of making one really good sword and having enough money to pay an army for a year.
Anyway, what’s everyone else doing this week?
Hardware Review
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
Started Xenonauts 2.
Plays as good as the first one, and once one gets used to it the air combat is actually fun, if accentuating technology gap at times (personally I’d suggest not bothering with missiles and staying with upgradeable autocannons).
That being said the game seems relaxingly easy on Veteran difficulty. Or I just spend too much time with the old Enemy Unknown and Terror from the Deep.
Either way being able to lose soldiers on missions without a single loss rewriting the whole scenario and lack of pod activation make Xenonauts light years above what Firaxis has made.
Picked up some old roguelikes and roguelike-adjacents this week.
Streets of Rogue is a game I’m not sure why I keep playing, but I do. Finally got tired of losing, and found out changing the settings doesn’t deactivate the unlocks, so just… turned off everything that could kill me, like disasters, and ranged weapons. Thereby got the character unlocks I was stuck on and am probably done with the game.
Crimzon Clover is an on-rails bullet hell. Three ships, no powerups, just bombs and Limit Breaks and lots and lots of bullets. Managed to finally beat the easiest difficulty without continues, right before I unlocked the fourth, overpowered ship. Tried the hardest difficulty*, was left wondering if it was even possible to dodge the patterns it was throwing at me, and then sat through the tutorial, which said no, you can’t dodge them and there’s a hardest-difficulty-only mechanic you need to use to deal with that. I think I’m going to just, not play the hardest difficulty. But I’ll probably go back for the medium.
There’s an interesting mechanic, where certain setpiece enemies will take a set length of time, and so if you kill them too early, they just throw another one at you. Fairly amusing when a lucky burst managed to annihilate a boss rematch, with the result that a second copy of the boss rematch showed up to finish the section.
*(probably not actually the hardest difficulty, there’s a conspicuous gap on the difficulty selection where a harder one would go.)
Fae Tactics finally got picked back up. My first save made it to Day 21; turns out the game gets much harder, like, RIGHT after that, the last optional battle seemed to require a dedicated blocker defending the whole team every turn, and the one right after was too tough for even that. I may have to do plot, level up and come back.
My return to Neo: The World Ends With You consisted of one fight, with an enemy that breaks lock-on who killed me about four times with no obvious way forward. Jumping in at this point, the game feels worse than Tales of Arise, which was worse than Strangers of Paradise. It feels like I’d have to restart if I wanted to get the feel for it again, but I’m like 15 hours in, and it felt it getting here the first time. I really wish more RPGs would go back to PS1-era lengths, those 20-30 hour games, those were good lengths. Remember when Final Fantasy 9 had a weapon unlock for reaching the final boss in 12 hours? I sure don’t, not after Act 1 of Neo: The World Ends With You.
Three Houses is on pause while I eat, I’m in the middle of the Remire Village mission. Classed Ingrid back to Peg Knight for a minute ’cause this map clearly needs a flier, but did not hand her a chest key. Which means when the Death Knight suddenly shows up, moving, with a whole posse, I’ve got no way to sneak behind and grab the last chest. Unless I fly her over to my MC to use the “convoy,” but the MC is the only one who can (usually) survive an attack from the Death Knight. . . but not the four extra buddies. Who are all cavalry and seem to be programmed specifically to hit the same target as DK, since they have no prediction lines. And also two of them are carrying weapon drops I want to investigate. And also the MC needs to steal a thing of him-well not really, but if I’ve already rewound damn near the whole mission to move them over there, I might as well do it.
Now, I have “casual” mode on and this mission has an NPC leader, so I can in fact just take the losses. . . but if the MC drops I can’t get a thief or pull a key out of nowhere. Indeed, one of the downsides of rewind is that instead of starting the mission over and handing out keys, one can instead keep doubling down on the sunk time trying to avoid a full restart.
The “there are actually multiple enemy masterminds” theory put forth is clearly being fulfilled, which kinda bugs me? Just how many traitors are there? Having multiple people look fishy so it’s not immediately apparent who bad guy is, is good. Having literally all of them be the actual bad guy is starting to feel farcial.
I’ve been playing Binding of Isaac again. It had been a while. It really is one of the best roguelites, gameplay-wise, though the aesthetics are, of course, really gross. And it has so very many characters now and some of them are extremely weird. It just came out with an update, which added multiplayer (not interesting to me) and apparently broke some other stuff, so I’m not going to use that until it’s fixed. I installed an item description mod, which I had never used before and which is incredibly convenient – newer roguelites have really moved away from obfuscation, and I can understand why. It can be interesting when you’re learning but after a while it’s either memorize things or go to the wiki all the time.
I also played The Rise of the Golden Idol. There’s a very simple way to tell if you will enjoy it: did you like The Case of the Golden Idol? It isn’t an identical game but it doesn’t really innovate on the formula. I loved Case of the Golden Idol so it worked perfectly for me. It’s great to look through a scene, gather all the info, and then search for the little details you missed to figure out exactly what happened and why.
I managed to continue playing my Smuggler in The Old Republic. The character can’t quite act as spacey as I’d like her to, but so far it’s pretty good. I still think my Consular worked best, but a lot of that was the character I chose to model and the fact that in TOR even the good guys are less nice than even she was, which allowed me, at least in my head, to call them out for being idiots, which fit the character.
Also continued playing Mass Effect 3, doing the DLC quest to get the Prothean. Not all that impressed by the Prothean himself yet, and the conversation was again a lot of cutscenes, but the mission also really drove home how much I dislike the mechanics of the later games. No, not the weight restrictions that I griped about in the past, but instead how they broke with RPG convention and disabled the map during the missions. Here, they did that while adding War Assets — an Eden Prime resistance — and so I had to go around looking for stuff while having no idea where things were, and with the maps looking pretty similar and also being a bit less linear. I THINK I got them all, but can’t be certain and didn’t care for the maps enough to go back. ME1 had the map be useful even in missions, and I think ME2’s maps were a bit more linear and so easier to explore. In the past couple of missions, at least, the maps have not quite been that linear and so I’ve had to explore more, but got tired of the exploration. In general, I find exploration in ME3 — whether of systems or areas — uninteresting, and find myself really looking forward to finishing this off.
Deathloop has its hooks in me completely. I love the puzzle box of figuring out how to maneuver the visionaries into the same place at the same time to better facilitate murder :)
Still on Vampire Survivors, of course, and I still haven’t reached the new DLC. It’s just crazy how much content there still is to go through. I mean, again, I could directly go to it, but I really just want to unlock everything else first.
Also still playing LEGO game. Man, these old ones had a really childish sense of humor. This one in particular is based on a movie (so you can discard the Batman game), and I get sometimes changing things in order to make them kid-friendly, and sometimes they do it just for humorous purposes (with varying degrees of success) but sometimes the changes to the story are puzzling. Nearing the end of the first movie and I have 2 more to get through later. The gameplay is fun, but sometimes I just feel like skipping the cutscenes. These games became funnier when they started to have dialogue (with the exception of the first Avengers game, that was somehow more cringe inducing).
Started playing Plague Inc Evolved and man, I really don’t know about this one. The gameplay itself feels reasonably fun (even though I feel it’ll get repetitive very quickly after a few hours) but how is it so hard? I played five scenarios, each and every time doing things differently but every time analyzing how to properly affect things. Every time I took longer, I paid more attention to the data and I picked every choice more carefully. And I lost every single time. The only way I could finally win a scenario was by following a guide, and I still had to luck out that a random event didn’t happen too early.
And just by looking at the instructions of the guide I can tell that a lot of it is less careful consideration and more trial and error. I’m really not a fan of games that rely on that, particularly when the gameplay is repetitive enough that by the time you finally get your bearings you’ll be bored of the whole thing. I’ll try a few more times and see how it goes, but I don’t have much faith I’ll continue with it for too long.
I have also retaken Baba Is You. I love that game, I think it’s one of the most clever and imaginative puzzle games in the last decade or so but man, at some point I got stuck in one of the puzzles and I could not continue because day after day for weeks I couldn’t solve it. I’m fully aware that the game doesn’t force you to solve all puzzles and lets you continue anyway by picking a different one in some areas but I do have that issue where I have to do everything in order. Anyway, picked the game back up after several months of not touching it, found the puzzle and solved it in minutes. Minutes. When I couldn’t do it in weeks back then. Have mercy.
I find Plague Inc Evolved frustrating because so much of it is just random: doing well on your run, but then Madagascar/Greenland/New Zealand decides to close it borders before you got a foothold in it? Oh well, time to restart! No, there’s nothing you really had control over that could’ve definitively prevented that. You can do everything right and it still always come down to when a bunch of random events fire. You can have practically a country’s entire population infected before someone finally gets on a plane and spreads it somewhere else, when as we learned from COVID the world is far more connected than that nowadays. On the one hand it’s a good representation of why it would realistically be hard for a pathogen to wipe out humanity (even with the crutches of “infections that linger ad infinitum in humans without being purged” and “magically being able to mutate all pathogens everywhere around the globe simultaneously”), but I just don’t find it very fun.
The board game version is pretty good, though. (I just wish the computer version would remember it’s being run on a computer and take advantage of that and go a lot deeper with the simulation, rather than having like 10 airplanes globally.)
Yeah, this was more or less what I noticed. In three out of five scenarios Canada was one of the last affected countries. Are you telling me that no one is traveling to that place until there’s a global pandemic? Particularly egregious in the one I started in the US. It should have been immediately infected, but no. And some countries for some reason decide to close their borders even before the disease is in any way considered dangerous. There really is no rhyme or reason to a lot of this stuff. Randomness is way too prevalent.
I think it wouldn’t annoy me quite as much if their Steam page didn’t prominently state:
Like, I’m no epidemiologist, but after going through COVID that’s like hearing someone say that Civilization on an Earth map is “so realistic” after you’ve played a Paradox game.
I’m between jobs at the moment so I’ve had a lot of time to play Terraformers, a sort of deck-based roguelike Mars terraforming game which came out a few years ago. You’re settling/terraforming Mars in a turn-based format where you get to pick one or more “projects” (cards, representing buildings or space missions) each turn, and there are several scenarios focusing on different aspects of the game: increasing your resource production, fully terraforming the planet (3 steps in each of heat, oxygen, water, and atmosphere), spending science on things, spending resources on space-based projects, spreading life, etc. Popular “Support” is essentially your hitpoints (since you lose if it reaches zero), and it naturally falls over time as people transition from “first settlement on Mars” energy to “I wish I had the quality of life they do back on Earth”, though there are a number of ways you can boost it/decrease that loss (such as the aforementioned terraforming).
Each scenario comes in a range of difficulties (something like 10 different steps), where you’re challenged to complete the objective in 65 turns or less for the platinum medal (the difficulty changing both in that the goal to reach becomes larger and your support falls faster). I’ve been working on the second-hardest difficulty lately, with some losses and hard-fought wins, though I recently crushed the “spend resources on space projects” scenario when I (to my surprise, as I wasn’t paying close attention yet) finished it in a mere 49 turns. I’ve always enjoyed building space projects in the game, but apparently I’m some sort of simplified space logistics savant.