T w e n t y S i d e d
This week should hopefully be the last super busy week.
We’ve been working on moving this last month with a deadline of the end of the month. So I’ve been unable to do anything, but aside from unpacking, I should have more free time this next week.
I played a little bit of Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. I’ve started getting impatient and just restarting when I don’t like the start of a run. Who knows how many perfectly good runs I’ve thrown away.
How’s everyone else this week?
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Civilization VI
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
I played through The Sexy Brutale, which is a time loop puzzley kind of game. There’s a party going on in a big mansion and for some reason the staff are killing the guests in somewhat wacky and also horrific ways. You’re given 1-2 at a time that you need to save. You get a fixed amount of time and everyone moves from room to room and has conversations and so on as it passes. You can restart whenever you want or it happens automatically when the loop ends. Helpfully, you can set any ticking clock as your loop restart point, so once you get to an area you can start it with more time available.
You can’t be in the same room as any of the guests or staff or else their masks come alive and try to kill you. This isn’t even vaguely threatening but it’s quite dramatic and while it’s happening you can’t interact with stuff and nothing progresses, so you generally want to avoid it but you can run through a room to get to the next if you want. You can peek through doors into rooms to hear the conversations and see what’s happening – generally that’s a good thing to do with each new person you’re seeing, listening to all their conversations and tracking their movements.
As you save guests you unlock new abilities which let you go to new parts of the house. Some of them are more interesting than others, and generally you only unlock a few new places to go each time.
The story of it was interesting but the puzzle parts were pretty basic, I think. There are generally very few things where interacting does anything – most of the interactables are flavor text and/or collectibles (playing cards). Still, it wasn’t super long and I enjoyed it.
I also played a bunch of Stellaris. It’s a game I come back to every so often to try something else. It does feel better than a lot of other 4X games but I do feel like the balance is really weird. Like, the game is supposed to go from 2200 to 2500 by default but by 2300 I’ve generally got the tech tree mostly done. And the way the game expects to end is by going to 2500 and checking score. I really appreciate the option to Become the Crisis because it gives you a way quicker win condition option. In this case I played as thermophiles (people that like living on volcano worlds) and picked the Hyperthermia crisis path, which is to say that I did, in fact, want to set the world on fire. All the worlds. Being the crisis does generally make you pretty over powered but it was spooky when some Fallen Empires declared war on me because their fleets were, uh, a whole lot bigger than mine. Luckily they’re very, very stupid and they will park their 400k fleet power over a random planet and bombard it into the stone age rather than blitz through everything I have with their unstoppable force. In the end I ignited everything and won, hooray.
Finally I’m playing Well Dweller. It’s a fairytale metroidvania. The queen decided she really wanted a lot of feathers and, uh, you’re playing one of the last birds around. The platforming feels pretty good, the bosses (on hard) are tough but fair, and also the bosses are visually horrifying (complimentary). Seems good so far. The first mobility upgrade you get is pretty unique, while you’re on the ground you can throw your weapon (a matchstick) into a wall and then use it as a springboard. Also you are a very tiny bird and are very tiny bird sized and when you encounter humans (or human skeletons) they’re real big.
I don’t know that I’ve ever played a game of Stellaris all the way to 2500. It’s mostly over when I feel like it, which is usually when the crisis has been defeated (either by me or the rest of the galaxy), or I’ve become the crisis and ended the game. I’ve done the original Become the Crisis from the Nemesis expansion, the Cosmogenesis one, and the Behemoth one (my personal favorite), but still need to get around to doing the Hyperthermia one. I should get back into Stellaris and try out a nomadic playthrough, I got that expansion but have been busy with other things lately.
Besides DiRT Rally 2.0, I managed to power through Song of Farca. There was 1 puzzle I needed a hint for (2 hints, actually, and then I realised it was a tree (as in the data structure)). The ventilation fan thing did throw me for a loop (pun intended) a couple of times, until I remembered that it was better to work backwards, like in Towers of Hanoi.
Metaphor continues. We’ve reached the TOB Hour, where Metaphor compacts the entirety of Tales Of Berseria’s plot down to a single cutscene and bossfight. That fight proceeded to kick my ass about a dozen times, and piss me off quite thoroughly. The boss has an obvious weakness, but blocks it every round. There’s a really strong Synthesis attack that makes short work of it, except Synthesis requires both party members to be free of status effects and the boss managed to land status effects on both of them every round. But it’s cleared again and I’m back to the home stretch. But we’ve also fought another, more disheartening foe; stick drift. I’ve had my ps4 for nine years now, and the controller is starting to go out. At least it’s not too bad yet, it’s only drifting when the stick is in default position. If I push a direction it goes that way. But that’s bad news for any game not turn-based.
Baldur’s Gate 3… well “continues” is a strong word. I reached the heart of the Githyanki Creche. I failed to convince Laezel to side with me, but it’s alright because I ticked off a god and she killed us all, including Laezel. Then I reloaded, accidentally stole a map, killed everyone in the heart without speaking to them, and found out that has no effect on whether the god shows up. Then I somehow broke the scripting by jumping to my death, which triggered dialogue that was clearly supposed to trigger after an event that hadn’t yet happened. Then I got ambushed on the way out, and they Feared Laezel, causing her to drop her weapon for the first time, even though it was soulbound and undroppable, also for the first time. But I guess that had been in the previous save that got godsmacked. Won that fight anyway, stumbled into the exit fight, and they Hold Person’d Laezel in the doorway, making her drop her weapon for the second time and cutting my team in half, and also the doorway somehow blocked Sacred Flame. Also if a character is in a doorway the game defaults to targeting the door. Also when I got down to one character with single-digit hp the enemy just refused to target them for like four rounds until I ragequit. So we’ve reloaded again, and now we’ve never been to the heart because I’m too pissed off to deal with any of that anytime soon. Really didn’t need this right after the Metaphor bossfight fiasco.
Turns out there’s a whole side passage in the Creche I hadn’t noticed. Wandered around there, ended up in the Hatchery, went to talk to the leader and he attacked us instead. Upon reload, I talked to the door guard, who told me to go talk to the leader. So I guess the first time my character falling off the ledge put them too close to the Hatchery treasure and that’s why the leader attacked. Also I’ve been fighting the camera especially hard in this area, it just does, not, want to cooperate.
So now Laezel’s weapon is properly soulbound and I’ve talked to an eggman, and that concludes this week’s progress in Baldur’s Gate 3.
4TheWords continues. The game has several nested quests, which are annoying because the first round has low requirements, but it auto-starts the next round every round, and the last round usually has quite long requirements. The current one had five tiers, which had progressively longer required streaks, and the last one is thirty days. So I’ve got to put 500 words up daily for another 15 days to clear the thing. I’m pretty sure writing that often is turning the storylines to sludge, that’s why I dropped the streak the first time. (I could drop the quest, but Finish What You Start has kicked in on this end too. Giving up is worse than failing.)
Also they redesigned the site and I’m not a fan of the redesign. The Writing page no longer defaults to all the files, I have to click a tab inside it to get there. And enemies are now stuffed up in the corner where it’s hard to see the timer. How am I supposed to fear the ever-ticking clock when the clock is trying so hard not to offend me?
Post attempt #3?
-Edit: okay, so the site just hates my Pokemon post, not me specifically.
IIRC, Sacred Flame still requires line of sight, just not line of effect- it doesn’t draw a hitscan or arcing projectile, but you do still need to see them. Most stuff that blocks other spells is actually blocking the ray/projectile, so it feels like Sacred Flame (and Toll the Dead, etc) are ignoring line of sight, but not quite. One of the things this game does which I quite like is actually penalizing people for being blinded (or in a Darkness or Fog effect which is supposed to effectively blind) by not letting them target things past arm’s reach, and that will shut down Sacred Flame like everything else.
I was sloppy to say line of sight last week, but in this fight I think the characters should have been able to see them through the open doorway. They were standing directly in front of Laezel smacking her to death with broadswords, but I couldn’t target them unless I moved basically on top of Laezel myself.
Hmmm. That does sound both annoying and familiar. I recall a similar problem from the very early game, but I believe that also involved some fog? I suppose it’s possible some tiny bits of fog spawned from fire/ice/water interactions, but I don’t think you have enough blasters around for that to come up, unless the gith did it. Shouldn’t be vision range either since that just gives disadvantage mody of the time, unless there’s zero light and you’re really far away. Game does get annoying around doorways, I just stopped fighting in them after a while probably for the same reasons and just forgot. Any position that actually body-blocks them from walking past tends to get you double-teamed like that, yeah.
I believe the back-end automatically redirects certain posts into the moderation queue (happened with one of mine a few weeks ago), they’ll probably be up in hardly any time at all.
I played some more Suikoden V. Basically recruitment and then the next story element which included a big battle where you had to manage both ship and army battles at the same time. The walkthrough suggested focusing on the army battle, but whenever there was a clash in the ship battle the game moved you there. So I tried to manage both and lost some groups but did manage a Victory+, but don’t know if I lost too many people in that battle. The walkthrough also told me too late that I needed to spend lots of money in the armour shop to recruit a character, but I’ll get another chance so hopefully I’ll remember to do that then.
I also finished off Knights of the Old Republic. The big thing here is that I wasn’t able to turn Bastilla back to the Light Side and so had to kill her, which I think is the first time that’s happened in all the times I’ve played it, which will make things interesting for Sith Lords and the KotOR diary on my block. Also, I ended up triggering the romance with Carth despite not finding his son and hardly flirting with him or mentioning it, but it didn’t matter to anything after that point anyway, so I guess I don’t have to care about it one way or the other.
Let’s see if it will post from here:
Slightly modded Pokemon Emerald has pretty much already proven the point I was wondering about: Yes, the game is in fact better than the sum of its parts. The map is just as good as I remembered it, which is to say it manages to spin me around enough I have no idea where I am and thus must crawl forward like a proper JRPG. I just got to Mauville and despite there only being 4 directions, one of which I just came in from, I still have 4 ways I could go. Because the elevated Cycling Road is a 5th exit from the town, and there are trainers in every direction. This is the non-linear feel people I’ve seen videos claiming G/S did, but no, not really. That said, one of those is just a backtrack, and it could be 2/3 of the other directions immediately terminate. But at this exact moment, and after previous bits showing oh there’s a spot you’ll want to surf later, there’s a ramp you need something to get up, etc, this is classic map design in spades.
Progression is interesting as well. I’ve never actually used Shroomish/Breloom before but apparently they’re quite good (though it should be noted they’re more effective here than they would usually be, as is Beautifly, because I’ve increased the damage of Absorb/Mega Drain/Giga Drain by 50%, but they would clearly function without), and holy heck do they level fast- only the starter comes close. And Gulpin of all things? Never used a Gulpin either (first form isn’t the worst, but the Swallot evolution just looks dumb) but apparently it also levels crazy fast, with very solid stats, and learning Sludge like two levels after capture: that’s a 65 power same-type move at a point in the game where almost nothing else can match it, and they have powerful status and setup moves. The beneath-cycling-road area has like 6? 7? different pokemon, which is possibly too many when you consider how quickly one will start avoiding random encounters in order to get through an area (I have missed pokemon I wanted in games because there were so many it looked like I’d seen them all but hadn’t), but is generally a good thing. The game is mostly running its new mons, but with just enough old ones sprinkled in to keep the overall count up, though their usefulness is questionable (Geodude is someone’s favorite with all the toys, I know I’ve been disappointed by Marill, and Zubat be Zubat as it should be).
I’ve also been seeing the effects of my move tinkering already, working as intended: the occasional miss of my own moves stronger than bottom-tier means fights can go off script and force a re-evaluation, and I have indeed been hit by Supersonic and Sing and then had to do a switch or take some hits rather than them just missing and getting KO’d without effect. I’m also back to playing in Set mode, since free switching would negate most of that.
Rolling back to the second gym, Brawly (guess his type), I recognized his grossly overleveled Makuhita (at +4 above my starter, after the starter got a level halfway through the fight) but had forgot its even more bogus Sitrus Berry (an extremely rare auto-heal item the player basically doesn’t get to use). As with most Gym 2s, this fight is the big test of whether you’ve figured out what you’re doing: a player with a dog and a rodent and a cool rock will get wrecked, but bringing a bug or even a plant lets you resist the overleveled foe with ease. It also does sort of the opposite of what you’d expect for the psychic matchup, as the Ralts many experienced players like to catch actually has completely terrible stats and can be squashed by this gym it’s technically super-effective against. Brawly’s first mon, a Meditite, also has a completely arbitrary Focus Punch move: this is technically a teachable move but normally gym leaders only get their signature move, and the way the move works (you go second and fail if the foe damages you, but deal massive damage if they don’t) punishes “setup” plans, another thing that more experienced players tend to do. I suspect this is not an intentional counter, but possibly a leftover from when the gym may have given Focus Punch as its reward, but who knows.
The full team list is Combusken, Shroomish, Ralts, Aron, Gulpin, and Wingull. Of the starters, the Torchic line annoys me the least, though I wouldn’t mind benching them if they weren’t carrying my Cut HM (changed to bug and 100% hit, as is common). Breloom is a weird punch lizard with mushroom highlights I could never make sense of back in the day, while Aron is a cute little metal thing that tuns into a kaiju eventually, love those. Ralts because it’s like if the Abra line didn’t punish you for playing solo. Wingull ’cause I’m gonna need Fly and Surf soon enough and don’t have any other plans, maybe Corphish could take Cut and replace starter. And Gulpin because why not, heck it’s already bailed me out of a rival fight- Brendan’s Slugma can rock my only two fire resists, but Poison doesn’t care. And yes, this team is half super weak to psychic, but then 2/3 of it also resists so ha (more reason for Corphish).
Hey, Fizban! Sorry this got missed. And I honestly don’t know why your comment got stuck in the spam filter. I pulled out the last one you made.
I’ve been out-of-pocket for the last few days and missed this.
Ah, thank you. Dunno if we’ve got any other Pokemon heads around, but I tried to include enough to make the analysis somewhat followable without.
I really like Pokemon… generation 2. I liked gen 1 back in the day, but gen 2 was so much better that I can’t really go back to gen 1. Everything after gen 2 I don’t care about at all, but it’s nice you’re having fun with the things that irk you fixed.
I was like 9 or 10 when Pokémon first released and it grabbed my attention hard. Gen 3 is my personal favorite, especially Emerald (c’mon Nintendo, stop with the forced exclusives and give us a complete game again!). So yes, I enjoyed reading this. :)
Picked up Dressmaker which released last week. It’s in the name; you’re a dressmaker, you make dresses for clients (or off-the-rack to gain practice and money). There’s an overwhelming variety of fabrics and accessories to choose from (thankfully you unlock them and more patterns as you progress through the story so you’re not thrown into the deep end at the very beginning), and some of things I’ve people create are mind-blowing. (Not me yet, I’ve got a lot of practice to do.)
Not a game, but computer related and I want to talk about it: this semester I started learning Typst, a relatively-new (2019) markup language that’s basically “what if we rewrote TeX/LaTeX from scratch for modern computing environments using the lessons we’ve learned from it over the past fifty years?” If you, like me, are a weirdo who finds joy in watching a bunch of arcane code compile into a beautiful document (especially math typesetting) then I’d urge you to check out Typst if you haven’t heard of it. It’s much simpler than TeX/LaTeX (while drawing a lot of inspiration from it) and streamlines out a lot of keystrokes making it faster to write, it handles Unicode natively (so no more workarounds needed for non-ASCII characters), and with incremental compilation it updates the output document basically as fast you can type. I’ve been using it to typeset the problems I’m going over in my calculus-based E&M recitation session for my students, and with how quick it is to write I can really go in-depth into problem solutions in a way I wouldn’t have time for if I had to hand-write everything out.
Onwards with Path of the Righteous. While I’m still not 100% certain that the game *cheats*, I am certain that it takes the piss. Twice now it’s sent enemies at me that have simply unremovable buffs: never mind spell resistance, never mind dispel magic checks, *this* character has 50% concealment forever. Enjoy missing half your attacks before you even roll to hit!
(I guess it’s ‘balanced’ in that I have a very similar ability as an Aeon mythic power. I think the argument is that my forceful stare can distort time and space, which, er…what?
It technically does allow the enemy a saving throw to resist it, but that’s only half the effect of the power. When I got it, I thought ‘that’s such bullshit’ but hey, if the enemies can pull these shenanigans, I’m clearly meant to as well…)
So yeah, sigh, the war of broken bullshit continues. I’ve got to the end of Act 4, where the final boss killed my main tank Sosiel and his pet triceratops in 1 turn. I had 51 AC, both of them at full health, and the only way the boss could miss was to roll a natural 1.
Oddly, that was the only really bad compulsory fight, though – most of the rest of the bullshit was relegated to side quests or exploring.
Avoiding spoilers, Act 4 sends you to a place where there’s a lot of being randomly attacked while you’re just walking around, and some of those fights are substantially worse than anything you face in the main story. Which I guess actively punishes someone who’s trying to, k’now, finish all their side-quests and companion storylines before advancing the story.
Hey game, you’re meant to put the harder, optional encounters LATER, okay? Or maybe somewhere out of the way so that random casual don’t stumble into them while trying to follow the story.
Might get some annoyed internet comments otherwise.
Or players swearing at their screen and shouting ‘I only came here for Greybor and I don’t even like him that much!’
Yeah, Act 4 has a pretty tricky encounter with
the black dragon, but if you want a really hard optional encounter,the fight against Cayden Cailean in Act 5will just wipe you, even on the lower difficulties, if you don’t know that it’s coming and buff up in advance. Granted,if you get wiped he just calms down and heals youbut it’s still one of the hardest fights I’ve had in an RPG.Ironically, it wasn’t that particular encounter that messed me up so much. The worst by fr was
an ambush by a group of vampires in Alushinyrra while you’re just going from A to B. I think it’s in part because I didn’t realise how important Improved Initiative would prove to be – at high levels, who goes first in a fight can make all the difference.Several times I’ve just had Ember or Nenio downed before they got a turn because a high-level archer got to go first and turned their target into a pincushion.
Improved Initiative definitely reduces reliance on the ultimate “reload” mythic power.
For main character pickpocket background is a welcome +2 initiative, and I usually grab whichever familiar adds to initiative on characters that get familiars (though natural armor may be a nice substitute there if initiative is acceptable).
I finally ran into something with a Displacement effect, and thus have been able to confirm that the Fandom wiki bug note is out of date: True Seeing does appear to have completely negated the Displacement roll (it does not appear in the combat log and the only missed attacks were low rolls).
I’m nervous because my Galactic Racer pre-order arrives on the 6th (next Tuesday), and I need to get re-hyped for it. It’s the only game I’ve ever pre-ordered, and by far the most expensive game I’ve ever bought, as I went for the Collector’s Edition which includes physical items, another first for me. I have the final boss of Jedi Survivor, and NKG and Radiance left to deal with on Hollow Knight, and I don’t want them hanging over me when I get to Galactic Racer, but I also don’t want to leave Galactic Racer too long and have it become just another part of the immense backlog. Extremely first world privileged problems. I bought a PS5 in part to play the game, and am looking forward to how beautiful it is going to look in lovely HDR on my 10 year old Samsung QLED.
Aside from that I’ve been playing Elli, a random mild platformer on Switch. Much like buying the PS5 while the price is still not as insane as no doubt it will become, I’ve bought the Switch 2, as there is a price dip ahead of some new model coming out apprarently. So my gf will (unbeknownst to her) be playing Mario Kart World quite soon, and maybe a little Pokopia. Damn you Nintendo and your games holding value… I’ve just put her onto Scritchy Scratchy, a scratch card organisational type game (whatever the likes of Good Pizza Great Pizza counts as, I’m not sure the genre term), which I came across yesterday. So no doubt I’ll also be playing some Mario Kart World as well.