T w e n t y S i d e d
Last week I did two silly things. First, I put the wrong date in the title for last weeks Wednesday Action Log, and secondly, I thought I had beaten Cult of the Lamb. It turns out I was wrong. There’s more of the game to play then I thought, I just had to walk a bit farther than I did to trigger the next part.
I really don’t have much to say this week because I am recovering from food poising, so I’m kind of writing this last second.
So what’s everyone else doing?
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
The Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Tales of Berseria is a far more relaxing game than Brotato. I’m subjecting myself to a “scrape-the-bones” run, where I’ll try to actually hit the end of the game’s various grinds, the most prioritized of which is getting every equipment item to +10 and unlocking the special names for their Codex entries. The ‘Double Materials’ ability has sped it up more than I thought; it doubles the high-grade bottleneck items too, which require making and destroying various tiers of equipment, so the doubled materials are effectively quadrupled. That said, I’m seventeen hours in and have yet to finish leveling up the tier 1 equipment. And that’s ignoring the sixth party member’s equipment, as they haven’t joined yet. This is going to be a very large time sink. Perhaps a time bathtub, or time swimming pool.
Started Runner Duck’s Badlands Crew. From what I’ve seen so far quite similar to their previous titles (“Bomber” and “Space” Crews), except now we’re riding a truck with gunners and crate for loot on the lorry and giving far more attention to piloting. Erm, driving. And looking up the secondary objectives ourselves. Also, the fuel limit is back. Also also, there appears to be less chatter in simlish during missions, which isn’t exactly a good thing imo.
All in all, anyone who enjoyed previous two Crews will have great fun, anyone who didn’t play it has a chance for some madmaxian fun driving.
I was out camping on the Hexentanz Festival to see Orden Ogan, Subway to Sally and many more and visiting friends, so I hadn’t much time to play games. Just a little bit of Lemmings and Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced on my Anbernic. I also tried to play Doom and Quake on it – not recommended. The analog sticks are much too stiff.
The Last Spell continues. Finished the dwarf map, started the elf map, finished the elf map. Note that since I spend more than 2 hours per wave optimizing my options, that’s a 20 hour run. The elf map has highways into the center you can’t build normal walls to block, I expect in attempts to teach the player about other possible tactics, and you get a bunch of the new “seed” type defenses scattered around the forest for free, and also walls will grow at random around the map (some of which are also turrets). Since you can’t just hide behind the walls this necessitates a more active defense, so I ended up maxing out my ballista count and leaving the walls at reinforced wood so the ballista can shoot through them. Had one of my heroes using the new claw weapon, which only took me about half the run to figure out how to use properly (newest patch says they’ve clarified the description). And then on like the first turn of the final night I send him to multi-hit ninja step at a boomer, expecting him to bamf to the final hit before it explodes, but apparently in this case the sequencing is halted and he just explodes. Instant death. Made it through anyway thanks to the power of poison (two poisoners in fact) plus all those ballista. The boss’s gimmick was interesting
the boss monsters fly in and continusing the theme of active defenses, you get four mega turrets that will only attack the bosses, except it didn’t seem to work? Saw it happen once but for no discernable reason it seemed to stop. So I brute forced my way through anyway.I now have a run going on the final mission, which Is kindof anticlimactic? The second to final mission was the longest and largest, but the final mission is shorter and I think the haven you have to work with is smaller. Its gimmick so far is that the terrain outside changes each day, you start with zero buildings but a big pile of resources, and instead of the first wave being like one level up, I had 2/3 of my characters get three levels. I also turned off all the weapons that I’ve already ground all the achievement/upgrades for, so I have to use other stuff. I was expecting a much longer map for the finale but we’ll see if I even make it to the end-with no free starting buildings I’ve basically just gone all-in on whatever weapons I can get. The two two-hand sword users are doing fine so far, but I’ve got one person in melee with an axe while their traits are all max health penalties.
Continued with my Imperial Agent in The Old Republic. Making the standard progress there, but the early planets are a lot shorter than the later ones, at least if you stick to the class and planetary quests.
Also played more Conception Plus. I’m finding it surprisingly fun. You have to form a team of yourself and three sets of four “Star Children” that you “produce” with the twelve “Star Maidens” that you can talk to and build bonds with. However, these Star Children are limited to a maximum level that I think is mostly dependent on what level you are (and partly, I think, your relationship with the specific Star Maiden) and so early on they hit their max level pretty quickly. This means that you should produce new Star Children and swap them out because you waste XP if you keep the old ones and if you make them independent it will improve your city, but the new ones all start at level 1 and so aren’t all that effective. There is a store that will train some of them up to a certain level, but it claims to do it by giving them a portion of the XP you earn, so they level up relatively slowly. The nice thing, though, is that if you’ve outleveled the monsters in an area you don’t even have to fight them and get the XP and items anyway, so I was able to spend most of my time running around the earliest dungeon and level them up that way, which was most effective.
However, the game is worrying me because I might need to be more efficient at the levels than I am. After pretty much all of the monsters on the first five levels were “runthroughs” after I beat the boss, I was not only not getting ANY groups that were runthroughs on the next five levels, I also had to use skills a lot to beat some of them. They were getting easier, but the ones at the end were still tough and so drained resources, so I finally just bailed and tried out the boss monster of those levels … who was surprisingly easy to beat, given that the first boss monster wiped the floor with me the first time while I beat this one the first time without much trouble. So I seem to be better placed wrt the bosses, but not so much wrt the normal monsters. Given that the dungeon has split in three and the monsters are supposed to be more difficult, that doesn’t fill me with confidence, although if the monsters don’t change in difficulty between the final three dungeons that might be intentional, in order to make it that unless you grind you will still have a challenge. That being said, I’m now in May and these are “Spring” dungeons, so I might have timing issues as well.
Also, there was a Spring Festival competition that you can win if you have high enough bonds with your Star Maidens, and despite picking the ones who were really happy with me and had the highest bonds, I lost both competitions. I have to wonder if I’m missing something wrt advancing the bonds. Still, the game has been surprisingly fun and less annoying in terms of grinding than Conception 2 was, and the links with the Star Maidens show potential. Persona’s combat and grinding is still more fun, though.
Read an LP of Conception; I think the Spring Festival requires maximum bonds, so the first one is basically impossible to win. Better luck next year.
I didn’t think the game would go through more than one year, so it might be something you need to do on a NewGame+. Either way, it’s nice to know that I’m not just behind on bond progression …
Been playing more Blue Prince. I reached the credits, which very much doesn’t mean the game is over. There’s a whole lot of things to figure out in this game, it’s cool, so far I get stuck on some areas but there’s still a lot of other options to progress.
That being said, I really wish that the game saved documents you’ve read somewhere handy. Like, yes, I can write things down, and I can take screenshots, but that’s just an additional layer of inconvenience for no reason. I miss Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which saved every single doc you ever read so you could go through them from your menu (and unlike Lorelei, getting back to some of the Blue Prince docs can be quite time consuming, so good luck if you didn’t take those screenshots).
I’ve also been playing Stellaris. Been a while but I got the itch. It really is a quality 4X game.
Yeah – I’m in the same boat – got the credits. And there’s definitely more to figure out, though, if there’s a clear goal for the post-game, I haven’t figured out what it is. Red letters, I guess, but why?
And yeah, I really wish you had an in-game camera or way to keep documents. I guess you’d probably need to keep notes for some other things and it’d be a bit odd with the magnifying glass; but yeah the part where I tab out of the game every minute or two to copy screenshots into my notes app is not exactly immersive.
And the game will ‘punish’ you if you skim on the obsessive note-taking – I think
the sheet musicpuzzle is a good example – if you only take the minimal noteswriting down the bold words, then you’ll have to go find the sheets all over again to get the real answer– it didn’t happen to me, but I coould very easily see it being a point of frustration.For me it’s not actually even screenshots, I’m taking photos with my phone. It’s really indirect problem solving.
I will give one fairly simple hint, if you want direction post-credits (feel free to ignore, of course) –
the credits only play the first time you visit.I appreciate the hint – that’s something I had been meaning to check but hadn’t yet due to the inconvenience and the risk of just losing the run if it did the thing again.
I have only a few days left on my month of GamePass, so I put everything on pause to try the recently-launched Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I’ve been avoiding long RPGs for a while but I think this one has sucked me in. I’m only a couple hours in, but I’m loving everything so far. The story is intriguing, the characters are likable and the turn-based combat system is fun. It also looks gorgeous and has a beautiful soundtrack.
Tangentially related to it, I’m very intrigued by something about this game’s development. The main character, Gustave, is played by Charlie Cox (of Daredevil fame) but it’s very clearly, almost distractingly designed to resemble Robert Pattinson. It is not possible this is a coincidence. You could argue that there are similarities between both actors that could be played up by issues with the 3D models, but it’s not just the look of the face. It’s the expressions. Also, the build of Gustave’s body’s is Pattinson’s, and so is his starting hairstyle. My headcanon is that they intended this character to be played by Pattinson at some point but something happened and the developers ended up having to replace him at the last hour, without having the time or resources to change the model. Who knows?
I’ve started Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 / PS4 Pro. I went over to my mother’s house for which I’ve purchased a PS4 Pro, to play games there. I have also purchased a subscription of PS Plus so that I can have cloud saves, and play games in both houses without interruption. But the system is so poor – for one, it works automatically only on your “primary console”. (Learnt about Primary consoles again recently when it turned out that I can’t play my games on the shared Switch with my gf, if offline, because I guess my Switch Lite is my Primary Switch – that was a fun revelation when on holiday. And secondly, because the automatic upload of save files from my Primary PS4, apparently doesn’t actually bloody work. So, instead of playing Jedi Survivor, or Gravel (rather fun rally racing game), I started again the free copy of HZD Complete Edition that Sony gifted us during the pandemic. And this time I got past the boring introduction, found it a little less boring perhaps, and got into the story even. It looks gorgeous, and is quite fun. But the controls are so weird on PS4, in my opinion. Having trouble getting used to them. And the visuals are so cluttered that I can’t even see where people are when they say “hey, can you help me?” or similar. Regardless, guess I have another big map game to play and complete now. I had actually said to my mother “see what you think of these cutscenes” intending to show her how bad the storytelling is in lauded cinematic games (I know, HZD is not necessarily a standard bearer for that), but actually you know what, I really like Aloy. Didn’t expect that from a AAA game. I thought the starting area was the whole game map, and then zoomed out to find it’s barely 10% of the whole map. Guess there is much yet to see, and to discover in the story, which does intrigue me!