T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been playing more They are Billions.
My opinion of the game hasn’t changed since last week, I like the game, but it’s frustrating when a mistake can lead to up to an hour of time lost. Also I’ve had the game crash sometimes when I change tabs, it might be due to having the game in full screen, but when it crashes it becomes stuck. Unable to be closed by task manager, or shutting down windows.
Other than that, I’ve not really done much.
Anyway, what’s everyone else done this week? Also, happy new year!
The Witch Watch
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
Happy New Year everyone!
I’ve been playing Soulmask lately, a great builder-crafter game like Conan, but with a bigger map and incredibly lively tribemen. I love the map, building, and tribal growth.
Still working on my Smuggler in The Old Republic.
Also still — and primarily — trying to finish off Mass Effect 3. Did a few of the main quests, including the Quarian one. There are some great moments in these games (I managed to bring the Geth and Quarians together). That being said, the game is not at all good at explaining it’s special cases. Here, with the Reaper and the laser targeter, I had to look up what to do for the first part — run to the shuttle — and then had to look up and then STILL figure out what it meant to “dodge” the main laser shot from the Reaper, despite having played it before. Fortunately, the “Resume” option starts at the beginning of the sequence, so I didn’t lose much, unlike the Hammerhead sequence at the Geth ship in ME2, where I could restart at the beginning of the mission but there was more to do and so I lost more when I failed it and got shot.
That being said, in ME2 I complained that if you didn’t use medigel to revive or heal characters — a common thing for me since I play on the easiest difficulty — you only got a very small amount of credits if you then grabbed the recharges. That’s fixed here in ME3 because now if you don’t need more medigel you get a not insignificant amount of experience for it, which is at least something that is desirable. How much it matters in the long run might be debatable, but it’s better than what I got in ME2.
I’m on pace to finish ME3 either by the end of next week or early in January, and am deciding what I will play next today.
Unicorn Overcoat is probably not meant to be played in the long sessions I’ve been playing it. The plot is very basic, and mostly one-off stories introducing new party members, most of whom are scantily-clad [weapon class] girls. This feels like it wants to be a porn game. But I really like squad-based tactics games, and while I couldn’t call the game challenging so far, it’s starting to ramp up to the point I have to actually, like, build specialized squads, instead of just intermingling troops like an army of Red Mages. And now I finally have more unique troops than spaces (with 40 spaces currently), so I’ve got to rotate people, or leave them to underlevelled squalor.
Combat is interesting; they’ve got percent-chance-to-hit, but when you select a unit to attack another unit, the game just tells you what the final numbers will look like, so there’s randomness but not uncontrolled randomness. It leads to some wonky results; it’s got to be just pulling numbers off a list, because a lot of fights swing from winning to losing on account of you making additional attacks. You would think those would always help, especially the free ones, but no, they go first and take numbers off the RNG list, and now maybe an enemy gets the critical hit instead of you. Likewise, the numbers they show before the battle don’t include enemy assist attacks, and I’ve seen those swing a battle from “you’ll destroy the enemy with no damage” to “you’ll take four times as much damage as their unit.” Still, certainly better than letting the randomness surprise you.
There’s a barebones town rebuilding minigame, consisting of dropping off inventory items. Rebuilding a town lets you station someone there; enemies never try to retake towns, so it serves only to auto-gather more inventory, and make the plot sillier. A character gives a big speech about putting their past behind them, not returning to their home town until they’ve proven themselves in your army — and then you station them in their hometown and they’re like “cool, this is the place for me”. And then they’re still available in battle because stationing someone doesn’t actually take them off the roster or anything. I’m not really sure why it’s a thing.
Not much time to play these days, I’m afraid. Between the holidays and my job it’s been tiresome and even when I’ve had free time I’ve spent most of it resting. That said, I did a couple things.
I’ve gone back to Balatro. After my Apple Arcade trial period ended I didn’t renew it, so I spent a few weeks not touching the game. In the end I bit the bullet and just bought it. Unfortunately, progress from Apple Arcade doesn’t transfer to bought games, so all my progression was lost. On the other hand, it was fun to unlock everything again. I’m not playing the game as often as before because harder difficulty levels are way more punishing, and losing so much makes me want to stop for a while. But then, of course, I go back.
I’ve stopped playing Harold Halibut and I don’t think I’m gonna go back to it. I reiterate: the game is gorgeous, but it is just so damn boring. While this wasn’t apparent at the start, once you have a few hours in and things don’t get better you realize what you’ve stumbled into, and it’s not a fun experience. The story moves at a snail’s pace, the characters don’t get any more interesting or varied, the protagonist is just not compelling and there are no puzzles whatsoever. Everything in the game is a repetitive chain of fetch quests. And considering the visual style, the game just doesn’t take advantage of it for storytelling. Even when a supposedly dramatic moment is happening, the background music stays the same cheery tune, the camera angles don’t vary and characters’ expressions don’t change. The art style can only go so far on its own. It needs direction.
It hurts me because I’m one of the biggest proponent of games trying something visually different rather than constantly go for further photorealism, and this game fits the bill perfectly but it is just not enough. The game needs to be entertaining too.
Looks like my giant post got ate by the filter- I played Spell Disk and Dicefolk and beat both final bosses without having seen/unlocking half the items/monsters, tried the Hellsinger VR demo and went nope, and need to fix the controls and such in order to actually try Skyrim VR.
They Are Billions‘ game design is kind of crap.
A single zombie can infect a house, which spawns a lot more zombies, which infect more houses, which instantly dooms your settlement.
You’d think this would incentivize you to compartmentalize and build multiple small settlements to hedge your chances, but the energy system forces you to build all of them in a single cluster. (You can only build stuff around power pylons, and IIRC power pylons are among the “spawns zombies if taken” buildings.)
You’d think this would incentivize you to patrol your camp with lots of sentries, but IIRC there’s a hard cap on your unit count and by the time it’s high enough to do patrols, you’ve basically cleared the map of zombies and the only threat is the scripted waves.
So what this incentivizes you to do is constantly pause the game and look for stray zombies on the map, micro-manage your units so that a scout doesn’t explore close to a zombie spawn and end up kiting a bunch of zombies back, aggressively attack and clear out zombie nests, aggressively clear out the map while constantly checking that your units don’t stray into an unwinnable fight, etc.
Basically, instead of being strategically careful, you have to be strategically aggressive and tactically careful to the point of obsession. It sucks. I want a game called “They are billions” to let me focus on building massive layered defenses, not obsessively manage the center peel of my 5-grunts unit killing zombies one by one.
Reportedly, the game also only features suspend save and not store save, which is part of the reason I never bought it. That one mistake means going allllll the way back to the start and starting a new game isn’t my idea of fun.
Over the holiday travel I have started another playthrough of Nier: Autotomato, for portability reasons on the Switch. It works, but I have to say that the switch-screen is a tad to small probably to be comfortable in the long run? Further studies needed.
I also only died once in the intro, which in my first playthrough nearly caused me to stop playing altogether.
Also on the Switch I somehow ended up with Baldur’s Gate, yes, the one without a running number for reasons of being the first, but instead of playing I started digging out character creation guides, so no actual progress there just yet.
The playing of ButtCreed: Origins continues with ignoring the main plot and uncovering the map and doing all the side quests. I might still come to regret that at some point, but OH LOOK SHINIEZ!
How is BG1 on the Switch, anyway? I feel like it’s very much a PC-controls kind of game, I’m not sure how well it’d work there. (Okay, admittedly I also played it only on PC to mod it to be gayer. But the controls thing was in there too.)
I randomly picked up the expansion to Civilization: Beyond Earth, Rising Tide, and have been playing a few campaigns now. It very much is SMAC’s little brother; the worldbuilding isn’t nearly as good, the leaders are not remotely as memorable, you can’t terraform to nearly the same degree and there is little unit customization beyond choosing from two mutually exclusive upgrades every time your Affinity reaches a new milestone. Speaking of which, managing your Affinity feels rather clunky since almost every tech adds to one of them, and you might need something from a tech that adds to an Affinity you don’t want.
I’ve found myself surprisingly fond of the hybrid affinities, especially Harmony/Supremacy – I kind of dig their aesthetics. I’m not fond of the way that having more cities slows your research and Virtue acquisition, but I guess that they needed to balance Infinite City Sprawl somehow. Health is kind of annoying, since it is near-crippling early on but basically stops being a factor in the late game but again, they needed to prevent ICS from becoming the dominant strategy somehow. Kind of not happy that garrisoning units into cities barely helps and outright nerfs ultimate units because their strength isn’t relevant to whether the city itself can hold off an assault, meaning that placing a Xeno Titan, ANGEL, or LEV Destroyer inside a small or medium city actually makes it much more vulnerable than it would be otherwise. And not being able to use planes to scout is just weird.
Still, it’s pretty decent. My current campaign sees me as Al Falah battling against the American Reclamation Corporation. The ARC controls a large portion of the planet due to having conquered three other factions, and are approximately equal to me technologically. However, I own most of the game’s Wonders which gives me a sizeable advantage, in addition to me having the resources to produce large numbers of Ultimate units, versus the ARC’s military consisting mostly of basic units and Battlesuits. But they do have a lot of cities and rough terrain, meaning that progress has been slow. The great distance between my cities and hers also means that bringing in reinforcements is very time consuming – I’m working on building Magrails to speed things up but it’s taking time. Which isn’t to say that things have been going badly; last I checked my warscore was about ten times of hers – eight thousand to eight hundred. Currently, my biggest problem is that I don’t have a good counter to the ARC’s navy, because the few ports I have are far from the front and I don’t have access to the inland sea they built their empire around.
I also picked up Earth Defense Force 6 during the holidays, and have been playing that as well. Man, I’d forgotten how awful the starting guns are and how slow you move when you don’t have endgame gear. 6 is also a bit tougher than 5 to start out since your starting enemies are Colonists who, while they’re weaker than the ones you face in 5, are still giant monsters with high-powered shotguns that knock you around and crude scrap armour which somehow manages to be completely impervious to damage. The twist – that it’s a time loop story – is pretty well done and would hit pretty well if I hadn’t been spoiled on it. I’m only about a third of the way through the main plot, but I installed a few mods that increase my armour growth rate and automatically collect all dropped crates at the end of a level, making the grind go faster so I think I’m in a decent place where armour is concerned… for Medium, at least.
I decided that I wanted some better guns than I have and started playing Visions of Malice, the second expansion pack. And it is brutal – the first level pits you against a swarm of common ants. Then a swarm of giant red ants, which charge you and try to catch and eat you, alongside a swarm of blue ants, which are almost as big as Ant Queens and fire huge spreads of acid. The last wave consists of a large swarm of Gold Ants, who are some of the most lethal common enemies in the game. And the only support you get is a short squad of Wing Divers who will probably die during the first or second wave. The next few levels were much easier in my experience, entirely because they don’t have any Gold Ants.
The second level of VoM does introduce Blue Spiders who are nearly as big as King Spiders and have graduated from using electric webbing to just shooting f*cking death rays out of their butts. The hardy Silver Spiders are barely worth mentioning in comparison, and if you can defeat the Blue Spiders, the pack of King Spiders who cap the level off seem like something of an anticlimax in comparison.
Funnily, Visions of Malice is depicted as a training simulator in-universe, designed to make sure that EDF soldiers never ever panic in the field by pitting them against hilariously lethal but mostly imaginary enemies and situations that verge on the unwinnable. The titular Malice is the managing AI who constantly condescends at you and tells you to play on Easy mode because you’re not supposed to aim for full completion of the simulator’s levels… I’m playing the expansion on Easy because I just don’t have the armour levels needed to survive on higher levels, but we’ll see how it goes in the future.
I remember hearing about Rising Tide and its new factions! Particularly that… certain suspects were asking for a German faction, the sorts of people who like to play Germany in WWII games, and the devs decided to technically answer that with INTEGR. I thought it was pretty funny, anyway, and by all accounts actual Germans thought it was great.
Dragon’s Dogma 2. Still one of the odder names for a game I can recall. So this is a game about the specific rules of dragon religions? Whatever. Stabbity-stab.
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Mildly humorous opinion
I recently played through Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s a pretty damn good CRPG, though I don’t like how the game caps you at level 12. Not that you really need to be more powerful than that to beat the game, but part of the fun of these games is levelling up and choosing how to make your characters stronger. And as the game is set up, that stops not too far into act 3, which itself is way bigger than the other 2 acts. So about… halfway? 60%? of the way in, you just stop gaining levels and power, outside of gear upgrades. It’s a tremendous game outside of that, though.
Also, I finally have a modern(ish) computer that can play games made after 2018! My old Dell XPS 8900 just wasn’t cutting it – a 6th-gen i5, an old-style HDD and a GTX 745 doesn’t quite hit the spot here in 2025. The specs of my new PC, for anyone who’s interested:
Mobo: Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite a/x
CPU: Ryzen 5 5600X w/ stock cooler
RAM: Silicon Power 32GB DDR4 3200MT/s CL16
SSD: 1TB Acer Predator GM7000
GPU: PowerColor Fighter Radeon RX 6600
PSU: 650w MSI MAG A650BN
Case: Montech Air 100 ARGB
OS: Windows 11 Home (bought legit, because I do NOT trust those shady key reselling sites)
Monitor: MSI G244F E2 1080p 165Hz (can go up to 180Hz, but that disables FreeSync)
So yeah, it’s a bit of a budget build, but I’m pretty happy with it overall. It helped that I bought all the parts during the black friday sales. Though the motherboard didn’t get delivered until 12/18, so for like a month I had a bunch of boxes full of computer parts laying around. Oh well, it all worked out in the end.