T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been sick, so mostly just sitting on the couch and watching YouTube.
I hope everyone else has been having a better week.
From The Archives:
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
PC Hardware is Toast
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
Haven’t stopped with Marvel Rivals, but I’ve probably slowed down? Hard to tell when sometimes I’m just using it to scrub my brain instead of thinking. Still playing Jeff, Strange, and Punisher mostly. While I know I *can* play more complicated characters, those obviously require more effort which I do not feel like.
Mostly I’m impatiently awaiting the next DLC and update for The Last Spell. Ready for some just me in the tank tactical grid fantasy character optimization. I think. Hearing that actually the most powerful way to play is to ignore the normal wall placement and city panic system to build a perfectly calculated tiny little ball is somewhat demoralizing.
Hey, if the optimal way to play doesn’t interest you, don’t do it. The point of the game is for you to enjoy it.
Playing Imortals Fenyx Rising most of the time with a tiny bit Balatro and Master Duell on the side. Was Athena child version always that badly dubbed? It’s totally a 40 year old woman trying to sound like a little girl – plus the screenplay and dialog are bad. Hepheistos and Ares are done much better.
But I still enjoy the puzzle design and all the Greek sagas mentioned. Now at the temple of Eros, learning about the relationship of Psyche, Aphrodite and him. Combat is almost trivialized with the gear I have on me right now. Gaining health with attacking, dodging and parrying and having a ridiculous long health bar – only blind spot attacks, that do massive damage are close to dangerous.
I think the only way to still have it be a challenge in the late game must be to avoid getting most of the powerups and gear. On my second playthrough I upped the difficulty, which is rare for me, and although it started out as a slog I still ended up pretty overpowered by the time I’d done a couple of the gods. I wouldn’t enjoy not doing the exploration and optional puzzles though, so speedrunning for the sake of difficulty doesn’t appeal
I enjoy the game for the puzzles and exploration not the combat – so being overpowered isn’t a negative for me. Last week I stopped trying to beat Ozomene (The big Harpy). My weapons were to weak and damage to low, so the boss fight took ages, but getting close for too long or getting hit by her charge attack almost killed me everytime. When both came together I was dead. No thanks.
Yesterday with maxed out swords I beat her no problem. It still felt good.
The last two times I played Ubi openworld games I went straight for hardest difficulty. To be clear, I’m not trying to make myself as some kind of hardcore player but in this particular case my experience with previous games told me they’d be too rote without bumping it up.
With Far Cry 3 I was really happy with that choice because I wanted the feeling of having to play tactically, use the tools in my arsenal, dismantling the outposts one enemy at a time and so on rather than being able to rush in, stand in the middle and gun everybody down (and I could still do some of that in the lategame).
AC:Origins was a mixed bag (and I haven’t finished the game), I like the higher difficulty when I can stealth in and actually play an assassin because it exacebrates the costs of failure but the game has A LOT of “forced to go out into the open and fight waves of enemies” sequences which are just annoying both mechanically (until you get some some abilities) and thematically.
I played the demo of Void War. It’s FTL with a 40k aesthetic. By that I don’t mean “similar to FTL”, I mean it has wholesale taken FTLs systems. It has the same systems and subsystems (more or less), the same power distribution, the same crew positioning, the same weapon targeting, the same ship upgrades for the same amount of scrap. It would be hard to convince me that it didn’t start out as a mod for FTL.
That being said, FTL is awesome so that’s not a total dealbreaker. But it does kind of weird me out. There are differences in how boarding works that make it seems ludicrously powerful, and it traded FTLs system map and fuel for the slay the spire-esque slightly branching paths. And you can put equipment on your crew. But yeah, it’s FTL.
I also played through Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. It’s a puzzle game with mild horror elements. You’re exploring a mostly abandoned hotel and trying to understand what’s going on. It has a whole lot of puzzles, and a lot of doors locked with keys or puzzles which you unlock so that behind them you’ll find more keys and/or solutions to more puzzles. The puzzles have some odd pacing decisions, like fairly early in the game you’ll find 5 posters and they are used
to solve a part of the literal last puzzle in the whole game. It occasionally messes with the 4th wall a bit. The game is genuinely in grayscale but that makes the uses of color (like, say, laser eyes, or red paint) really pop. The puzzles often have year themes.Overall I quite liked it. I generally enjoyed the puzzles, though I had to look up a few solutions (there is no real ingame hint system). One slightly annoying thing is that there are often quite a few different things for you to try, and you’ll only actually be able to progress a few of them. Notably, anything that requires you have an actual key (or equivalent) is not subtle about it – if you have the item for it in your inventory, you’ll know. No randomly trying stuff from your inventory required. Knowledge puzzles are less clear about whether you know enough.
I also started Another Crab’s Treasure. It’s a soulslike with a not-very-subtle environmental message. Seems cool so far. Putting on shells to get armor and magic powers is snazzy.
MATN’s video on Another Crab’s Treasure is hilarious: he spends much of the time going on about how it’s so nice to play a soulslike that isn’t an apocalyptic hellscape. Then he finally finishes the intro.
Oh, one complaint I didn’t mention about Lorelei – the control scheme is goofy. You have your directions for movement as usual, and you have escape to quit, and otherwise you have one button. That one button will interact with a puzzle, open your menu, etc. Which means if you are in your menu looking at stuff and want to back out, you get to find and select the X. If you’re doing a puzzle and you spin something one step too far, congrats you’re going around again. It’s very silly, and I think they could at least have found a second button, we’ve advanced that far.
Just this morning I got in another run at The Old Republic. What the game had done recently is add some events that you can participate in like Shamus talked about Champions Online having, and today due to them being right along my path I did a couple of them on Hoth. I’m not sure they work as well as the ones in Champions, though, because they pop in and out but due to low populations you’re mostly going to get one person doing it, and the ones I did end up requiring killing at least one or more Champion level opponents, and I only ever managed to do that because someone else came along and did the heavy lifting. Basically, I am playing a Smuggler character which is ostensibly DPS, but whenever I did that the opponent would focus on me and keep attacking me so that I had to get out of the way — which ended up causing it to restore all its health and back off completely — or spend a lot of time healing (with a healing companion). For the first one, it was outside the main Republic base so I had some NPC help, but things didn’t go well until I popped my Heroic Moment and just kept healing myself while it shot at me and the other Smuggler helped take it down. For the second one. I was just killing pirates to see if I was going to get a bonus mission for my own missions and decided to keep trying, but couldn’t figure out how to disable transports but the other character did that, and I got sucked into a fight with one of the Champions and did the same thing: get targeted and keep healing as much as I could. So, essentially, as a DPS I acted as a tank. But there was no way I could have done that on my own. I wonder if some of the other ones are more soloable being more gathering and the like, as one of them that came up as I was leaving Hoth was to collect toys and the like for the napping kittens, and one of them also was getting you to activate elite combat droids which then might help you, but I’m not sure it’s worth looking into them to see if there are ones that I could indeed do solo.
For me, that’s a big thing with TOR. There are a number of extra things in the game that I could or probably should explore, but I’ve always been so focused on finishing the stories — first to finish all of them, and now to write about them — that I never wanted to take the time. Maybe once I finish the TOR diary I’ll explore it a little more.
Also, I ended up discovering that my character has stealth! I knew that Smugglers got it, but didn’t think my character’s class had it. So I’m using it now to get places when I don’t have to kill things for a bonus mission. It’s slower walking, but avoids the combat, and TOR’s combat isn’t exactly thrilling. From what I’ve heard, it’s similar to that of World of Warcraft, but I didn’t play that game long enough to tell.
I reinstalled and player Pillars of Eternity for a bit, thinking ‘it’s been a while, I remember liking this game a lot!’ …and I barely lasted an hour.
It’s the combat. Good god, I’d forgotten how bad Real-Time-With-Pause combat can be. Dull enough to be boring, but complex enough to require you to pay attention. In theory tactical gameplay, but you work tactics out very quickly and they don’t fundamentally change over the next fifty very, very, very similar fights ahead.
(Probaby didn’t help that I was playing on ‘Story’ difficulty, i.e extra easy mode for lazy people, and my tactics never got far beyond ‘stop standing there like a dimwit and just hit it already, Eder!’ But if having the fights take longer solves the fundamental issue here, I’ll eat my keyboard.)
It…really makes you appreciate the effort a company like Larian Games puts into their combat system and encounter design.
Which is sad, because otherwise, Pillars of Eternity has a lot going for it – solid storytelling, roleplaying choices, the reputation system – I could talk about the themes of the story for ages. But you know what? In retrospect, I want this story as a book, or maybe to play some no-combat version. This is like having a book that forces you to eat packaging peanuts between every paragraph.
Anyway. I quit Pillars once I noticed I was gaining a pavlovian response to the opening bars of the combat music and reinstalled Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. Now there’s a combat system that has aged better. And Mark Hamill is great fun as a scenery-chewing Joker.
So far, so good. I was really up for the Riddler challenges, too, in the first game – but in the second, he’s branching out from ‘riddles’ to ‘skill challenges’. Flying a remote-control batarang through an obstacle course is not a riddle, dammit! And it’s also really fiddly and annoying, so I’ll pass.
Real shame the studio behind those games was told to make a shit live-service game, then shut down after said game flopped.
I appreciated that Pillars presented a world that seemed to be in cultural motion rather than the usual fantasy stasis, but yeah, I did not love the combat. It’s especially annoying because there is a lot of fun abilities that rely on positioning, control, targetting the correct defense etc. but in practice there is a lot of clumps of characters wailing at each other and the player trying to figure out whose buff/debuff shuts down when.
The sequel has turn based combat, I’ve heard opinions it becomes tedious and that there may be some oddities since it was designed “real time first” but I’ll see when I get to it eventually.
Also been sick, so not much playing.
While trying games that can work in this PC I started Citizen Sleeper. It’s still too early to be sure how I feel about it. There’s a very deliberate element of randomness to the gameplay and it’s really more of a visual novel than a game from what I see, so the writing is going to be a key element to my enjoyment of it. I’ll have to wait an see.
I have also, after years of having the box sitting in my shelf unopened, finally started the Devil May Cry Trilogy HD. My only experience with a Devil May Cry game in the past is the failed reboot DMC, which I truly enjoyed (I understand people don’t like it for how it treats the established lore and characters, regardless of gameplay), but I played back in the PS3 era (that game was indeed the entire reason I chose to purchase the HD Trilogy, btw) and haven’t touched since. I am, of course, starting with the first game. For better or worse this is unequivocally a PS2 title. Maybe less immediately rewarding than later games, but still reasonably fun for now. We’ll see if I can maintain interest.
I’m told DMC2 is terrible and 3 is a return to form, so keep that in mind.
(3’s the only one I’ve played, and it’s not a genre I much care for. But hey, it’s got pizza explosions and rocket surfing, so it’s not all bad.)
Played anther several games of Ark Nova (the Steam version). I think I’m finally starting to do more than randomly flail, as I’ve managed to beat the easy AI a few times without it feeling like a fluke. I played Terraforming Mars in person with all the expansions over the weekend, and I’d forgotten how much complexity Turmoil adds (I’ve played with all expansions only twice before, something like four years ago). I now feel like AN sits somewhere between base TM and TM + all expansions in complexity, which isn’t as hard as my initial playthrough or two felt, but is still fairly complex.
I’ve also been tackling the hardest version of each of the scenarios in Terraformers*, and have actually managed to beat three out of…nine, I think, with the two from the DLCs included. As a quick recap, Terraformers is sort of a roguelike card-based colony builder, in that you get “projects” (cards) each turn and have to use them to colonize Mars (with the exact win conditions differing for each scenario) without running out of “support” from the population, which is essentially your HP (and you unlock some projects between runs, though I’ve long unlocked everything there is). There’s an interesting dichotomy at this high a difficulty level where I either fail nowhere near the 65-turn limit for getting the best time, or I absolutely dominate the game and win handily well in advance of the limit with thousands of support banked and able to do pretty much whatever I want. Some of that is down to luck (like whether or not I get one of the major crises that can happen in a run), but I’m starting to consider that I might actually be getting good at this game.
*Why yes, I do have…*counts*… at least four different games that include or are directly about terraforming Mars in my Steam library.
I picked up Civ 7 – it’s getting fairly bad press overall but that was expected: every new Civ since at least 4 has been complained about on launch for being worse than the previous, and then it gets more content and expansions and people get used to the mechanical changes and by the time the next one comes out, most people have come around to it and are ready to explain why the next one is terrible.
So I knew I was going to pick it up pretty much regardless of what I heard about it… and, yeah, I’m liking it. I will say there are some genuine UI glitches in here (and probably more that were patched out in the ‘pre-launch’, which I did not pay for), and some places where it probably needs better explanations (I had to google to figure out how to build ships on a city not directly on the coast)…
… but I have little fear that the UI quirks won’t be ironed out, and in terms of the actual mechanics it seems quite strong. I think they had a clear goal here in making the game more consistent: a common complaint about Civ is that it starts out fun and simple and then you get into it and you end up managing a dozen cities and a hundred units and each turn becomes a slog and probably you get to like the middle ages and shrug and say “yeah, I’m probably winning this” and move on or start over.
They addressed this with the big headline feature: each “age” is a soft reset where you pick a new civilization, units reset, a lot of buildings go obsolete, etc. I’ll see if I end up liking this *more* than the previous system, I do think there’s some downsides here, but I do think it meets its goal of keeping things interesting and more consistent.
And a lot of the design, in general, seems to be ‘anti-micromanagement’ to deal with the ‘dozen cities and hundred units’ thing. Units themselves are now more replaceable – they don’t level up and individually upgrade, you have “army commanders” that level up instead and can contain groups of units that move as a unit (reducing micromanagement in deploying troops).
And instead of just having cities, your settlers now make “towns” – instead of having a build queue their production just turns into money and you have to spend money to convert it into a full-city. This is both an interesting choice – which settlements are worth spending the money to upgrade to cities – but again, also reduces the ‘micro’ – you can spread out and cover the map, but you won’t have every single city constantly asking you for build orders. (Though you can, and probably still should, be buying things in those cities, just with gold, not production).
—
Anyway, TL;DR, I like it. I still think Civ 6 + Expansions is probably the better game overall, and certainly the better *value* if someone is thinking about getting into the series. But I do like Civ 7, I think it has a good shot at surpassing Civ 6 in the long run, and enjoy the variety from Civ 6. So if anyone was hesitating because of the bad press, and doesn’t mind some minor visual glitches, I say come on in, the water’s fine.
I haven’t picked it up yet due to my financial situation (and letting launch bugs get ironed out is a nice bonus), but I’m planning to. Most of what I’ve seen and heard sounds interesting, and I think the anti-micro changes will be good for the series going forward.
Though having been playing since Civ III, I love everyone acting like “army commanders” are some revolutionary new thing and forgetting about armies in that iteration. :)
Nothing but casual stuff.
Torchlight 2 continues, for some stupid reason. I still really like this kind of game, and I do like Torchlight’s stat-or-level requirement system, but man, the absurd hatred of letting you move is draining all the fun away. I need to find another game.
Brotato, trying to clear Level 5 with all the characters. Jack’s bossfight is a real problem, it’s very hard to get enough damage to kill two near-double health bosses. Cryptid’s also failing despite getting like five items every round. I just don’t like to play Cryptid.
Super Auto Pets. I think I was wrong, the hippo nerf was pretty significant.
Everyone seems to be ill this week. I’ve downloaded Ghosts and Goblins Resurrected after watching an old stream of Dunkey playing it.