T w e n t y S i d e d
This week has been a whole lot of nothing.
But as of writing this, I was looking at steam and saw Heroes of Hammerwatch II. I don’t know anything about it other than it released today and is a roguelike. I’m very fond of roguelikes, so I’m going to try the demo later.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
PC Hardware is Toast
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
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?
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Satisfactory Tier 9 is reached, finally. But I haven’t done anything in it, yet. Monster Hunter World We beat the Beelegeuze and the Vaal Nazuk. Two more Elder Dragons to go.
In Subverse I recruited Blythe and completed the devotion quest of Killi. Blythes dogfight recruiting mission was the first mission I skipped, because I had no idea how to open the first door and was automatically killed 20 seconds in figuring it out with a 30 second cutscene at the beginning of every restart.
Guitar Hero Live is done. The last 3 song by The Who, Rolling Stone (a strange cover version of Paint it Black) and Queen were a highlight. To little to late. 6-8 good songs out of 42 is a huge disappointment.
And Ballatro Lots and lots of randomness. Meh. I learn to mitigate that as best as possible but then … Two decks are done, with a third I was defeated on the last boss blind twice.
Unicorn Overlord has a godawful final boss.
Enemies on garrisons usually heal about 20 health every five (unpaused) seconds or so. This motherfucker heals 150 health after every single engagement, and also heals 150 health every three seconds or so. He’s also got damn near triple the health of any other enemy in the game. You basically have to build a unique team around killing this one guy, at the very end of the game. Also he cheats and can just drop your whole team’s health to 1 hp. And he’ll do it after poisoning them so they immediately die of poison. And guess how long his level is, that’s right it’s the longest in the game.Abject horseshit. What the everloving fuck.And then
there’s another boss after that, who’s gimmick is they don’t fucking die. You might think, once they survive a fatal blow and murder your team by fiat, that you have to kill them with the character holding the plot item, but that’s only half correct; you have to kill them with the ability granted by the plot item, which I didn’t even notice existed until I looked it up online, because it’s been pointless to mess with character abilities for nearly three quarters of the game. And hey, if you restart the stage on this second final boss, it puts you all the way at the beginning of the longest level in the game. (Thank God you can save during it, but I didn’t the first time because you can’t save at the very beginning, only after characters have moved a bit, so I just thought you couldn’t save at all.)For a game that was thin on plot but quite mechanically pleasant, to have this kind of mechanical Fuck You at the end is just awful. Nothing in the game up to the very end had been remotely this unfun. I’d say the worst level prior had simply been long enough to become boring. But this might well kill any desire to ever replay this. Off the high board, onto the pool rim, that ending. (At least the thin plot worked, it had a couple of decent developments as it went.)
Restarted Yakuza 0. My last save was in 2019. I’m surprised, it didn’t feel that long since I’ve played it. Having not skipped the opening cutscenes, I’m feeling the length of this prologue. I don’t think we needed two separate tutorial fights, did we?
Brotato is fun. End comment.
Reminds me of when I hit the final boss in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. I don’t recall if they did anything similar in Sacred Stones since it’s easy enough you can kill the boss in a single turn, but the final boss of Radiant Dawn is not a person, or even a monster: it’s a video game boss. IIRC you have to destroy a bunch of pillars, which all perfectly reflect damage at you unless you have the one specific skill which turns off all other skills and is normally useless, and also screen wide AoEs will go off in a game that doesn’t have any amount of AoEs. Add to that how I’d gone in with *my* characters rather than swapping half the team for the sudden super NPCs, and I had characters that literally could not survive standing on the field (I later realized I could hide some of them with the rescue mechanic, but by that point I’d have to restart the whole fight). I’ve never actually finished the game since, dropped my big back to back (previous game and this game) run when I got to the final tower climb.
Oh my!
You’ve reminded me of my personal bugbear in the “nonsense boss” world! I have to admit i hate the FTL boss with a passion….
I know, i know: if you know what’s coming, if you know how to prepare… Then it is perfectly doable (if you aren’t screwed over by the RNG), but god do i hate it’s cheating ass! I’m ok with bosses being more difficult than expected or bringing out unusual tricks but…. well this one cheats in ways that if you don’t know what to expect your whole run can be killed just because your strategy (which was perfectly viable up to then) is wrong for this one unique enemy.
What was worse for me was that as it’s a roguelike and you build your strategy throughout the whole run you are forced to restart a run completley when you are gimped by it’s “surprises”… sure it’s not a massive time investment, but it is what made me stop playing the game for months intially (and then permanently as i was clearly unable to build myself a strategy that would get me to the boss and also be strong enough to kill it).
I’d be thoroughly interested in an article (or two?) about the subject of “Cheating bosses/ai”. I get that in some situations developers probably need to cheat because it’s very hard (or beyond the manpower available) to have an AI capable of winning against human players of vastly differing skill levels (especially the ones that know the game so well that they have mastered it’s challenges) … but it does kill the fun as soon as the player sees through the trick (rubberbanding, cheating bosses,…).
I’m trying to figure out exactly what makes me think a boss is cheating, instead of just mean. Obviously if it’s the only hard part of a game, it’s going to get a lot more hate; if this boss was in Bravely Default 2, where damn near every boss is That One Boss, it would be mostly fine. (In fact Bravely Default 2 has a boss that, upon reaching low health, will attack with ten team-wide full-strength attacks as an automatic action, but because that game’s so mean in general I like that fight more than Unicorn Final.) FTL’s boss didn’t bother me that much, and I think it’s because the rest of the game was already killing me pretty hard.
The biggest thing seems to be shrugging off player actions. Auto-healing, percent chance to hit, unannounced reflect abilities, heavy invulnerability. Timers suck; blitz strategies should be player choice. FF13’s Eidolon fights come to mind, where enemies don’t take normal damage and also you have to kill them in a time limit. And my least favorite Triangle Strategy map was the one where sudden-loss enemies keep spawning in all the corners and you have to spread your troops across the whole map to survive. (Then action games with super fast enemies, but I think that’s just because I can’t keep up. But man, I swore my way through 80% of Scarlet Nexus.)
I think we can have three categories here: Cheating, Unfair, and Tough.
Cheating would be reserved for bosses that completely violate the rules and expectations of the game so far without any kind of explanation. For example, in “The Old Republic” expansion “Knights of the Fallen Empire”, up until that point the strategy for bosses was pretty clear, with some variations: damage them, watch out for their big attacks, and use your interrupts to interrupt them. Use Heroic Moment to increase your healing and the like at the right time. In “Knights of the Fallen Empire”, suddenly your interrupt abilities don’t work and you have to use environmental objects to dodge those attacks. If you count the expansion as part of the normal TOR gameplay, they cheat because they break the rules for no reason and in a way that you couldn’t predict beforehand that goes against the way you’ve played the game.
For unfair, it’d be that the mechanisms were already there, but they are combined in a way that you need precise builds or abilities to overcome, without knowing past a certain key point that you needed them. An example of this would be the reworked Okumura fight in Persona 5 Royal. The first fight had you facing a number of robots that you had to clear out in a certain time to get through. Introducing the time limit was a bit odd, but gimmicks were already established as part of the fights, and only someone with incredibly bad builds wouldn’t be able to get through it. But in the reworked fight you have to clear out each wave in a certain number of rounds, and if you don’t get it in that number of rounds the wave starts over at full health. Even on “Easy”, this requires maximizing your all-out attacks and weaknesses … and if you picked the wrong set of characters or don’t have the right abilities on your Personas you can get caught out being unable to finish off a wave before it resets, and so being unable to win the battle in the time limit. Since that wasn’t clear from the start and the previous save point — and ability to reshuffle your team — could be quite a ways back, it’s unfair.
Tough would be a boss that uses the existing abilities, but does more damage or has more healing or has a combination of those abilities that require some thought or extra time to beat. Players with really bad or specific bad builds might get stuck, but most can work their way through it with persistence or strategy. The final boss of Persona 5 strikes me as this kind, as the arms use abilities that are already in the game, provide a combination that can be difficult, but if you have enough SP healing items you can eventually whittle it down, and if you have the right characters with the right immunities then you have an easier time of it.
I was thinking ons how to best define things but I think you beat me to the punch!
I’ve been playing Starcom: Unknown Space. Top down 2D space game, kind of along the lines of Escape Velocity or SPAZ. You explore star systems, you investigate planets, and you fight enemies. There’s a research tree and you can customize your spaceship by placing parts on a hex grid. Individual parts of ships can be damaged, so it’s good to plan your targets – if an enemy damages your ship the part starts working again after a bit of time, but enemy ships just lose parts so it’s satisfying to blow off an entire wing. Overall I’ve been enjoying it, it has a really powerful “just one more” thing going on because there’s always another system to check out. That being said, I have some complaints.
Traveling – there are wormhole gates which are instant fast travel. They’re wonderful, but not every system has them. There are also sometimes platforms which will send you to another star system quickly (but not instantly). They generally come in pairs so you can go back and forth. And then sometimes you just need to take your ship the long way. Sometimes you see a star on your map and you can head towards it, sometimes you’re given a clue by the game, sometimes you just set off into the middle of nowhere in the hope of finding something. This method of travel isn’t great. The game does increase your ship speed when you’re in the middle of nowhere, but it can still take an annoyingly long time and generally nothing happens – occasionally there’s a derelict or a probe or something on the way but mostly it’s just time to use your phone or whatever. That’s not something I want from a game.
Also, the game has an autopilot functionality, where you click on a location and it will get your ship there. In some ways this is very clever – it’ll pick the best path using all the fast travel things I just mentioned, plus it also knows about the one-way wormholes (there’s no indication of where they go on the map and I don’t remember because I just use them once). However, it tries to be too clever in some annoying ways – it will steer around ships and stars which are in your way, and fair enough, both of those hurt you if you collide with them, but star damage is trivial and it gives ships too much free space to the point that it’ll go backwards sometimes to avoid them.
Trading – the game has like 20 resources. Any time you have the option to trade with someone, they have all of them. And they use one of the resources as their currency, so all the prices are in multiples of that resource. This is an incredible example of why money is a useful thing. I can’t evaluate the relative values of gold vs silver vs titanium vs uranium and so on for different traders. You do get an upgrade eventually which tells you percent deviation from some hypothetical base price, but overall it’s just too complicated. Give me credits or whatever, I’m sure you can make it fit the lore.
I mentioned the “one more” feeling and always having more stuff to do, and that’s powerful. But the game does suffer when you run out of clear places to explore and still clearly have more things to do – quests to complete, items to find, etc. The game does give hints about places to go, and it logs all of its text, but it logs ALL of it, so good luck finding something useful if you didn’t notice it when you first read it. At one point I was there for a start of a war and picked a side and I have no idea if there’s a way to bring it to a conclusion that I’m missing or if that’s all (since the quest did complete).
Also, the world feels a little barren compared to, say, Escape Velocity. There are several factions, and you can chat with their ships and sometimes do quests for them, but every ship of a given faction has the same things to say and planet visiting is generally a one time thing that gives you some resources or research or whatever and then you can’t go back, so it doesn’t actually feel like the species have worlds associated with them.
My time with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was temporarily cut short due to the fact that my one month of GamePass Ultimate ended and I had turned off auto renewal. Thing is, rather than just renew it I want to buy the game. I really, really enjoy it and I want it to stay in my library, so I’m gonna wait a few days, save some money and make the purchase.
Meanwhile, despite my misgivings, I’ve been playing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which I got for $5. A fair price, I think, all things considered, particularly since an offline mode was finally added. The more I play the more I’m convinced that what truly destroyed this game was the stupid decision to make it live-service. Unlike Gotham Knights, which did everything it could to remove the live-service elements before release, Suicide Squad kept them, to its absolute detriment. So, like Gotham Knights the gameplay, while fun on its own right, becomes repetitive and grindy and noticeably relies on having more players to counter this problem. And, of course, characters you’re not playing with don’t earn experience, so if you want a good team you’re forced into even more grind. But, unlike Gotham Knights there’s the always pestering presence of Season Passes and the immense majority of the cosmetics are buy-only.
All in all, taken in relatively short burst is perfectly playable. The humor is hit or miss, and a few characters are insufferable, but at least it maintains a steady rhythm, unlike Gotham Knights, which was great at parts and nearly unplayable the next minute.
Of course, from a story perspective the very premise of the game is unappealing. As we all know, there were really only two places to take it: a) playing it straight, which would not only end up with a nihilistic story far worse than anything Injustice ever did while also severely clashing with the humorous tone of the game or b) reveal they were clones/drones all along, which would not only make the whole narrative pointless but also would not solve the deaths of other important characters that weren’t mind controlled by the enemy. Neither option was good, but only one would allow for more games done in this universe. A shame that’s unlikely to happen either way. I’ll be surprised if Rockstar is still around a couple years from now. Damn WB executives and their brainless decisions.
I am making progress with my Smuggler in The Old Republic, turning one short 1 .5 – 2 hour play session into three TOR Diary posts on my blog, which is an efficient use of time and also helps me get things under control — and a bit ahead — after my vacation and other things had me running right to the edge. This should also help me get other things in since I won’t have to set aside more time than I have already allocated to write blog posts, as long as I keep up.
Also quickly started The Age of Decadence. I am going with a complete non-combat build, and do somewhat like the skill check model it uses, but don’t like how early on in at least the Loremaster’s arc failing one test seems to lock you into having to pay quite a bit for an item even though you already suspected that the deal is shady. Assuming that’s right, of course. Anyway, the skill checks and conversations remind me of Disco Elysium which frustrated me, but because they are checks and not seemingly aspects of your personality I find them more tolerable.
However, I was trying to play it on my laptop in the living room, and even with the window set to full size the text and other things are a bit small for me to see. Other games like Dragon Age Origins work fine, but not this one. So I need to install the game on my official gaming laptop that is connected to a larger screen. Not much of an issue since the best reason to play in the living room is to be able to see the TV while playing — I have a big folding table set up in there so that I can at least have the TV one while writing and playing small games like that — and I can still see the TV from my official gaming laptop in the office, so it’s all good. I probably should have been playing that way in the past, to be honest. I won’t do that this week, though, because the time block where I play those games clashes with curling, which I like to pay attention to (unlike pretty much anything ELSE on TV).
I’ve not returned yet to Total Warhammer 2, not sure if I want to make the effort of finishing the zombie pirate campaign I was on. Instead I’ve been flailing around trying to find something I do want to play.
I tried Mothergunship, by the same people as Tower of Guns, but for a game that’s supposed to be about building big wacky guns you sure don’t get to build very big or wacky. A shooter roguelike where you can do side missions to collect parts to take into the next main mission, but you can only take a small number in and that number has been decreasing since the start of the game- and if you fail, you lose what you took. Add to that a number of enemies that deal way too much damage, a system where you have no defensive upgrades aside from a bit of max health (and no room for that ’cause you need the hazard resistance so you don’t just die to hazards instead). Also they added a bunch of story dialogue which was funny for about 5 minutes and then just becomes oppressive.
Children of Morta was supposed to be great, but I was not vibing. Black Book had looked interesting, some sort of card-based demon summoning game that’s supposed to have lots of research to historical witch stuff in it, but what that actually means is learning a whole new set of words in the card titles and I did not feel like doing that. Also apparently I do not like hearing biblical or bible-esque recitation in my games. I played all of 9 minutes of Severed Steel, which has sliding and bullet time and stuff- indeed, seems to be far more about sliding and parkouring than actual shooting, another miss. I did manage to play a couple hours of Fictorum, a first person wizard rogue-ish? (random level terrain but it’s all just variants of kill all enemies, with a spire/ftl map that has events and battles and shops) which is just polished enough to not feel entirely like a low-quality asset flip, but I feel I’ve already seen all it has to offer: find spell, find runes that work with spell, shoot dudes. Sure putting Chaos on something so that your fireball drops fireballs like a bombing run feels badass, but the random blasts don’t hit much and you’re better off just bunny hopping around manually spamming instead. If you can’t just snipe them before they get close. Weirdly high amount of effort in the dialogue, pointless tiny bonus diablo random items, and a character creator that’s basically just colors and length of hair. But generally inoffensive and unlike say Skyrim you can just blast people constantly. And finally I played about an hour of Our Darker Purpose, an Issac-like with spire progression so old it barely has controller support. Run ended because I failed to realize the terrain that was popping out mobs was actually a boss I was supposed to be shooting, whilst the game makes the same mistake The Binding of Issac did by going bullet hell. Except The bullet hell bosses in BoI do follow some bullet hell ethos of having knowable patterns you’re meant to be able to dodge through, rather than projectiles just spraying everywhere.
Still playing Dragon’s Dogma 2. Enjoying it for the whole “climb up a cyclops and bash him” mechanic. Struggling with some of the weird choices in the RPG elements. You level up and get new, more-powerful skills… until you quite quickly max out your level. At which point you either stagnate, or switch classes and start over completely, with essentially nothing carried over from the other class. It doesn’t feel like progression, it feels like starting a new character but continuing the plot.
A bit over a month ago I decided that my options were PoE 2 early access or finally finish Underrail. I opted for Underrail. This is a game that I tend to restart over an over again (partly because I am too stubborn to play any difficulty besides dominating).
In any case, don’t want to jinx it, but I am getting close to the end. Much closer than I have ever gotten before. Awesome game whether I finish it or not.
Maybe Paths of Exile 2 after that.