I hope that everyone is excited for at least two more weeks of me just playing Infinity Nikki.I can never remember what type of formatting to use so I am just running amok using whatever.
Not much to say except that I keep playing, thinking that I’m going to run out of content, but than the game just gives me a whole new thing to work on for a few days.
What are you guys doing this week?
Footnotes:
[1] I can never remember what type of formatting to use so I am just running amok using whatever.
Overused Words in Game Titles

I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3

I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
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.
Self-Balancing Gameplay

There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Borderlands Series

A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
I’ve been playing Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. It’s a scifi game where you’re playing as an escaped slave, basically (but with a scifi twist). So you’re trying to stay alive and free and maybe help people while you’re at it. You roll 5 dice each day and can slot the results into various activities, so you’re incentivized to use high rolls on important things and low rolls on things where failing isn’t too bad (or don’t spend the low rolls at all). I enjoyed the first game, and the second is a similar vein but with some new mechanics and a broader world. The first one you were on a single space station the whole time, and you had a ticking clock because of a hard to get thing you needed to survive. In the second, you have a ship and the ability to travel to several different places, and you don’t have a clock in the same way.
Overall, I’ve been enjoying the game, but right this moment I’m kind of salty because I died. To be fair to the game, it’s only even possible to die on the highest difficulty (and it lets you play on at a lower difficulty). But I still think the way I died is kind of lame.
I mentioned the dice before, and they actually each have health. You die if all of your dice break, which they do after taking 3 damage. Damage has a chance to happen each day based on your anxiety. You get the ability to fix broken dice, but if a dice is damaged there’s nothing you can do until it actually breaks.
Spoilers for a plot-related contract:
I had 4 dice on 1 health each, which is super rough, and I triggered a contract to go to Darkside. Notably, once you visit the system which offers the contract, you are locked into doing it and can’t leave, and I don’t think there was a warning of this. During that contract, you have a friend with the Engage skill, which was great for me because my character class literally can’t have it. Then that contract takes away the friend with the Engage skill. Then the contract takes away all of your food. And offers you a way to get it back… by using the engage skill. Things cascaded downhill real fast from there (without food you gain a ton of stress, and you also get it from failing at trying to get food). There were ways I could have played differently to do better, particularly if I knew what was coming and brought someone else with Engage, but overall it was just kind of lame.Whole bunch of Final Fantasy.
Final Fantasy 1 has a very laidback fantasy feel that I realize I’m really missing. There’s just a bunch of fantasy folks hanging out. There’s a series of holes, and you go down the holes, and there are dragons in the holes, and all they want to do is talk about dragon sports. No worries, just dragon sports. Such a chill world. I should look up more of those, and less political superdemon prophecies and whatnot like the big boy books have. Get some oldfangled Oz or something,
Final Fantasy 2 is a very different game right away. Finished the first dungeon at a lower level than normal, actually taking advantage of the option to buy a bunch of potions. Very hard not to powergame, and I don’t think I’m really going to try.
Final Fantasy 5 is going slow; apart from jumping the order, the ATB system is stressing my bad arm, which has decided to go full useless again. Controllers are heavy, but survivable with turn-based. This is not turn-based. At least not enough.
Final Fantasy Tactics hasn’t been played in maybe a decade. The first optional Save The Person mission is a hilarious reminder of how little thought went into those; they died on turn 2 before I got even halfway across the map to reach them. Just, no chance whatsoever. Just cleared Dorter, taking a permadeath. Not sure how many of those I’m willing to do, but this early I’m realizing I don’t much care, especially when it gets me past Dorter. This is probably going to be a low-level run, and maybe low-class. Everyone’s still Squires.
Final Fantasy 15 has some wonky controls that are not remappable; either you swing with Circle and dodge with Square, or you swing with Square and dodge with L1. This might be less obnoxious if my arm were working well enough to hit L1; as it is, this one’s really got no chance.
Torchlight 2. I finally bumped the difficukty down to Normal, and oh wow, the game is fun and not a meat grinder. But now I’m in World 2, and enemies have decided they’re going to use abilities that mess with movement. Movement is the weakest mechanic in the genre, and making it worse is not a fun or interesting challenge. Grim Dawn had constant damage panels on the floor, and Torchlight’s got push-pull-freeze enemies (plus dumb terrain that stops movement randomly) and here I am moving a character by clicking on the ground and trusting their pathfinding to get there and it’s aleady a pain to dodge and whatnot.
Super Auto Pets is quite relaxing. They nerfed the Hippo. They did not nerf the Hippo enough.
What version of FFV are you playing? Cause the Pixel Remasters tend to be at least decent with quality of life features and I’d be surprised if it didn’t have the option for things to pause when someone’s meter is full and you’re making choices. For the record I have not played the pixel remaster of V yet, I find the prospect of juggling the classes somewhat annoying so I keep stalling),
Everything but 15 is on emulator for the original system. Have the PS1 versions for all of them but the PS2 isn’t playing PS1 games anymore.
It probably does have Wait mode. Been a long time since I’ve thought to check.
A couple of early losses for FFT is probably fine. You lose the least early on (since really the biggest thing you’re losing is learned abilities) and you have some characters who join later you’ll probably want to use anyway. It’s late-game when that’s really nasty, but you have lots of tools by then.
Yeah, this was a Squire that hadn’t even hit level 2, and the archer focus-fired them so saving them would pretty much require using a different team.
But I don’t think I’ve ever tried a Hardcore run; might be interesting to just let the bodies hit the floor the whole way through.
Monster Hunter World Continuing as a single Hunter doing some optional hunts before diving into Iceborne.
No Mans SkyIn Coop. For now. My buddy fell into a simple Hacker trap while playing yesterday, as “a friend texted him to vote for his team via this link … Entering his Steam Account wherever” Kind of fun listening in via Discord, kind of not.
Immortals Fenyx Rising A second play through. I like the world design. Kinda like Brütal Legend but with a Greek theme. And discussing the ancient Greek sagas from a modern perspective is also fun. Ubisoft can do good – if the want.
Tell Me Why is a game I got for free a while back. Can’t remember why, maybe it was a marketing stunt or something?
Anyway, its a scripted story game in the style of Life is Strange* (thankfully no time travel), with the player running down a linear story with little-to-no input. So about an hour in, my obvious question was ‘Not bad, but why is this a game instead of a movie?
But then the game presents you with two different-but-similar memories from the game’s twin protagonists, and you have to pick which one to go with, which naturally has consequences for the ending. Hey, a simple, effective metaphor for saying how you view the past changes the present! Neat.
Is that christian lady a caring friend or thoughtlessly judgemental? Well…both, but you’ll get on with her better if you can put it in perspective.There’s also a few puzzles in the game, which have hints in a homemade book written by the twins’ mother – which means almost nothing at first, but makes sense the more you discover.
Hey, you’re pushing the player to get into the mindset of someone else and see things from their perspective, just like the twins are doing. Fun! It actually turns the experience of reading the book from ‘What the hell is this!?’ to ‘Oh, this is actually about…’
It does suffer slightly from being a game, though. When told to do something, I know that’s going to advance the story, so that clearly is the last thing to do – meaning that when I get told to fix the fuse box I immediately sprint past it and start poking everything else around. Don’t want to miss any secrets, story pacing be damned.
I’ll fix the fuses in a minute, Tyler, got to rummage through every part of the toolshed for little wooden statues first.
One thing that sucks, though, is the lack of control. 15 seconds of unskippable logos and a content warning every time you start the game. Then, the game insists on conneting to Xbox LIVE. Why? Because fuck you, that’s why, and naturally there’s no way around it.
I could be surprised at how much this annoys me – I mean, it’s 20 seconds of my time before the game gets going – but it’s the sheer contempt it shows. You don’t own this game. Your time doesn’t matter to us. We want to track what you do for marketing purposes and cram other products into your face, and we don’t even respect you enough to hide it. In fact, we’re going to actively inconvenience you, for our benefit, and not even pretend to care.
Ugh. This, apparently, is modern gaming.
*I think. Never actually played Life is Strange. Heard bad things about the time travel.
Oh yeah, the game was given away for free at some point. Not entirely sure why, maybe because it got very little traction compared to Life Is Strange. Also, I have personally enjoyed the LIS time travel most of the time, it lets you do some experimentation and compensates a bit for the “not 100% sure what or how the protagonist is going to tell”. The game does cheat a couple of times either giving you an autosave immediately after making a choice or disabling the ability narratively so it’s a question of how much patience you have for that. The overall narrative handling of it though is… divisive.
Tell Me Why has actually been given away free for Pride Month every June for several years now. I haven’t played that one, but I can certainly believe it’d be in some ways similar to Life is Strange since Tell Me Why has the same developer as LiS1*, Dontnod. Life is Strange I have played, and personally I’d say the time travel works as long as you accept that it’s very much an emotions- and character-first sort of story.
*To be clear on the comparison, Dontnod developed Life is Strange 1 and 2 as well as Tell Me Why, while another studio (Deck Nine) developed Life is Strange: Before the Storm, LiS: True Colors, and LiS: Double Exposure (the last of which I ranted about in one of these a few weeks ago).
Still hobbling along at Marvel Rivals. Clawed my way up to silver but stopped there ’cause I’ve wanted to chill and try other characters this week.
-Captain America is. . . playable. Really relies on getting that second hit to connect to trigger the ranged stuff, but being a tank that’s actually fast and doesn’t have to use wacky swinging mechanics is nice. If you’ve got the team to back it up, but that’s the whole game. Found out his shield is actually quite fragile with half the health of Strange’s, and has like a 2 second cooldown after you drop it so you have to commit.
-Played some Luna Snow grinding some of the points for her achievement (finish a game on maps with 5 different theme songs), very swingy- she needs to be more accurate on basic heals and her ult shuts her own offense down completely, but when she does connect attacks she deals more damage than most healers. Thus, sometimes you feel useless, and sometimes you’re the one getting all the kills, depending on team efficacy.
-Punisher has gun, shoot gun until bad guys fall down. Particularly effective if all their heads are at the same height as they run down the hall. Turret almost seems like it has *lower* dps, so sure it gives you a shield and doesn’t need to reload but by the time I feel like I need a turret it’s usually too late, and also now I can’t move to help keep shots lined up.
-And Loki, is very interesting. He drops clones of himself with more health than most placeables (equal to his own in fact), which will fire at the same point he is firing at, with the same little explosion that damages foes and heals allies. Even more so than Iron Man or Punisher he has to know the lines of fire, but where they only have to line up themselves, Loki has to line up himself and all his clones. If you only have one shot landing in an area you’re failing. But, due to people running around, carts moving towards points, Groots putting up walls, terrain falling apart, and maps just changing their terrain, those lines are often in constant flux. You can on occasion stack up your maximum three clones plus yourself all in the same spot and just blast a spot with quad damage/healing, but doing that basically leaves you a sitting duck. But spreading out means you’re often only able to get two shots to land on a given area, which just isn’t enough. And being a quasi stationary control system, he’s got seriously problems with moving carts/people not being on the point. Also found out that you *can* mess up his healing field, by shooting the little crystals that appear above them, which means for savvy players it’s a heck of a lot less invincible.
Got in another session of The Old Republic, working on my Smuggler story. I’m having fun with it but every planet I finish moves me one planet closer to finishing off my run to do all eight class stories for my TOR Diary at the blog, which will force me to decide if I want to keep playing it, but will also let me move on to what I’m going to write about next, so it’s a mixed bag there.
On my front I’ve picked up tactical breach wizards and… I’m having a blast.
It’s essentially into the breach with a campaign and fixed levels and a story, it’s fun!
Is it relatively easy on “normal”? You bet. Am I still having a lot of fun with the world and characters? Why of course!
And yes, I do spend far too long trying do maximise my defenestrations… Look, you allow me to throw people out a window you should know that I’ll spend my time doing it like a loony toon villain!
Tactical Breach Wizard’s campaign is amazing.
A game about defenestrating people really shouldn’t have a story that well-written. It was a huge surprise.
If you like TBW I recommend the other games by the same developer: Gunpoint and Heat Signature. They’re both entirely different but also a blast to play.
Well, since we’ve had some shakeup in my workplace I’ve had to work more than usual these days so I’ve had less time to play. That, plus the fact that I’m still trying around what games work well in this mini PC means I haven’t really dedicated any considerable time to anything.
The only thing I can really count is Detective Grimoire. It’s a very short adventure game, clocking in at about 3 hours at most to 100%, less than what I’ve spent trying other games, which is why I could finish it with such little free time. It’s a cute game, with very nice animation and really good voice acting, but I solved the main mystery and figured out who the culprit was less than 10 minutes in, yet I still had to go through the whole game so the protagonist could do it. That was a bit annoying, but otherwise it was an interesting experience. The game has a sequel already out (which is in my library, so I’ll be trying it soon) and an upcoming third chapter. The developer of these games also made the excellent Crow Country, so it’s clear they’re getting better at their job (though still struggling with predictability issues).
I started playing Mini Motorways, I heard it’s cozy and fun. It’s not, it’s frustrating timesink. I’m gonna play some more.
Still playing Torment:Tides of Numenera. It’s a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand the game is very, VERY verbose, the OG Planescape:Torment was known for a lot of reading but in my memory it flowed better, could be nostalgia goggles though as it has been a couple years since I’ve replayed it. On the other hand a lot of the descriptions are evocative and a lot of the dialogue tries to introduce nuance which sorta requires getting into the nitty gritty of it. On the one hand I don’t really enjoy the combat, particularly my options of minimizing damage appear very limited if I have to go through a series of encounters. On the other hand the game allows me to avoid almost all the encounters so far with dialogue options and skill checks, even the ones that caused me grief during my last gameplay session were technically optional with the game implying taking the non-combat option could have consequences. I think my final verdict on the game will very heavily depend on if it manages to deliver an interesting resolution to the story.
I did install No Man’s Sky with the intention of starting a fresh playthrough to experience the new world generation, maybe follow up on the new story bits if I had enough patience. Turns out they are rerunning one of the expeditions I haven’t done, the eldritch themed “cursed expedition”, and the completionist in me felt compelled to go for that one. I managed to complete it yesterday evening but I’m not sure how much goodwill I have left for the game as it reminded me of what the heavily structured early parts of the game and following the storylines feels like. If you abandon the storylines or once you’re free of them you can do some flying around and just enjoy the exploration, but if you want to jump through the hoops it’s a lot of looking for particular planets or resources, doing particular activities and encounters whether you like them or not, redoing the tutorial for every vehicle you unlock…
In co-op we have finished the Planet Crafter: Planet Humble DLC. The beginning is quite fun as you get to explore a new space, discover new secrets, experience at least some of that setting up for survival pressure especially as you discover the idiosyncrasies of the new map and the differences in the supply chain but once you hit stability and are done with most of the terraforming (which is still very satisfying to watch) it sorta devolves into a “same old, same old” push to complete the counter. They’re planning one more DLC this year and we’ll probably get it but I hope they put a bit more of a twist on it.
Was playing Stalker 2 last week. This week, so far nothing. Stalker 2 has enough problems that I don’t feel particularly motivated to play it. Been thinking of getting back to playing Megaman battle network. Or trying to finish another character build in Dark Souls.