T w e n t y S i d e d
I haven’t had a lot of time for games lately. I have a Jedi: Fallen Order playthrough I plan to start soon, and Doom Eternal will launch this Friday. So I expect to do a bunch of gaming Real Soon Now™. In the meantime, we’re house hunting and I’m trying to find enough time to balance my usual work with video production.
Is cloning a thing yet? Or time travel? I’ll take either one. I just need a few more hours in the day.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve been playing…
Grim Clicker
I’ve been playing Grim Clicker. Well, “playing” is perhaps overselling what this game has to offer. Like a lot of clicker games, there’s an initial period that requires some furious clicking, but then you eventually unlock ways to automate it, then automate it more, then more. Once you’ve got things moving, you just need to check in every half hour or so to buy upgrades and make various investment decisions to optimize your progress.
The hook with this clicker is that it’s supposedly an RPG that plays itself. You’ve got a little character that runs continuously to the right. A monster / enemy is positioned every few steps, and must be defeated before your dude can continue moving rightThe foes attack, but it’s purely cosmetic. Your dude can’t die until you choose to sacrifice him.. Once he’s covered enough distance, he jumps through a portal to a new realm with new enemies.
Like most games that revolve around watching numbers going up, it’s built around balancing the growth of A against B, against C, and so on. For example:
Every time you buy an upgrade, your damage output goes up by (say) 10%. On the other hand, every time you go to a new level, enemy HP goes up by 25% or whatever. You start off way more powerful than your foes, but eventually you fall behind and each level takes drastically longer than the one before. At this point, you can sacrifice your dude. He dies, and you take the stuff he collected and use it to buy upgrades to make future dudes stronger. For the two curves above, you can either boost the starting damageThat damage line will have the same upward angle, but it will be positioned higher overall. Foes will still outpace you, but it will take slightly longer to hit the crossover point. or make it easier to upgrade damage more frequentlyYour damage line will get steeper, meaning it’ll take longer for foes to get ahead.. There are a ton of growth curves like this that interact and interconnect in different ways, which means it’s not initially obvious where to spend those between-game upgrades.
Getting stronger makes it easier to get more ways to get stronger, which makes it easier to get more ways to get stronger faster, and so on.
It’s not a deep game, but it’s enough to keep me amused without cutting into my work time. It’s free to play, so if you’ve ever wanted to play a clicker on a PC, then this might be worth a look. There’s also a cash shop where you can buy your way to victory, but I’ve never touched it and never felt like I needed to.
Thief Simulator
I’ve only spent an hour or two with this one, and I get the sense that I’ve barely scratched the surface. Thief Simulator is a stealth game along the lines of the classic Thief titles, except with less story and more sandbox. It’s by the same team that created Car Mechanic Simulator.
Everything is set in the modern day. You play as a nameless dude who just got out of jail thanks to organized crime pulling the strings on your behalf. You travel between your hideout, a small neighborhood of a dozen or so houses, and the pawn shop. You can take jobs to swipe specific items, or you can self-direct and go from house to house looking for valuable goodies.
I’ve only just cleared the tutorial levels. I’m not sure how much the game has to offer over the long term, but my initial impressions are very favorable. Sure, there’s a bit of design jank around the edges. There are some gameplay systems that don’t seem to add much to the game and the art and interface are unmistakably indie. Then again, it’s overall better-looking and more polished than the original that created the genre and way better than the last game with “Thief” in the title.
The game is normally only twenty bucks on Steam. That’s already a pretty good price, but this week it’s on discount for $11. This genre doesn’t get a lot of love, so if you like sneaking around and taking things that don’t belong to you, then it’s definitely worth a look.
Wallpaper Engine
This is not a game, obviously. It’s basically live desktop wallpapers. The wallpaper is rendered realtime, optionally capped to a low framerateSlow-moving scenes are best anyway. Who would want a busy image on their extra monitor when they’re trying to concentrate? if you’re worried about wasting CPU / GPU cycles. I’ve got power to burn and then some, so this is a fun thing to keep all those extra cores busy while I’m writing articles.
The game comes with a few wallpapers to start, but you can download literally thousands more community-made wallpapers for free from the Steam workshop. Some of them – like the glossy cars – are animated 3D models, while others are static 2D images with a few lighting / reflection / distortion effects on top. I even saw a couple of music videos, but I can’t imagine how that makes sense. Seems like that would be way too distracting, but I don’t know.
The Workshop has cars, space scenes, nature scenes, memes, abstract images, retro 80s synthwave / vaporwave stuff, and a metric wankload of dancing anime girlsThere’s also a category called “guys” if that’s more your thing, but I did not investigate. You’re on your own if you need to know about that..
I downloaded everything in the “Cyberpunk” category and I’ve been enjoying various moody rain-slick cyber-cities. Yesterday I was sitting in my neon-lit home office and glanced over to my second monitor where a glowing city pulsed in time to the Distance Soundtrack playing in the background and realized, “Holy shit. I’m living the life, here.”
Your Turn
So what have you been playing lately? Also, what games are you looking forward to in the short term? Don’t limit yourself to AAA titles. Indie, retro, mobile, sports, whatever. It’s all good. Just tell us what you’re putting time into and what you think of it so far.
Footnotes:
[1] The foes attack, but it’s purely cosmetic. Your dude can’t die until you choose to sacrifice him.
[2] That damage line will have the same upward angle, but it will be positioned higher overall. Foes will still outpace you, but it will take slightly longer to hit the crossover point.
[3] Your damage line will get steeper, meaning it’ll take longer for foes to get ahead.
[4] Slow-moving scenes are best anyway. Who would want a busy image on their extra monitor when they’re trying to concentrate?
[5] There’s also a category called “guys” if that’s more your thing, but I did not investigate. You’re on your own if you need to know about that.
Skyrim Thieves Guild
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
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.
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Philosophy of Moderation
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Mostly CS:GO and finishing Neverwinter Nights’ Hordes of the Underdark expansion for the final time. And dabbling in various others for an hour or two at a time.
Since I can’t edit anymore, does anyone have any decent recommendation for an old school, scroller beat -em-up, that feels as good and fluid to play as Cadillacs and Dinosaurs?
I enjoyed Mother Russia Bleeds.
Never played Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, but maybe the Capcom Beat’em Up Bundle over on Steam?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/885150/Capcom_Beat_Em_Up_Bundle/
Contains Final Fight, Captain Commando, The King of Dragons, Knights of the Round, Warriors of Fate, Armored Warriors and Battle Circuit.
Can only really vouch for Armored Warriors personally, but man, I burned A LOT of Pesetas on that arcade cabinet as a kid on vacation once. Would honestly recommend the pack for that game alone.
Seconding the Capcom bundle for Final Fight and Battle Circuit! Especially the latter is deliciously absurd. They’re unreasonably difficult though, with some bosses getting unreasonable dodging abilities when they’re on low health. Not too surprising, considering they’re arcade games. But you have unlimited continues.
There are some duds in it though. I like the idea of Knights of the Round more than the actual game. The artwork and promotional material they show in the gallery is funny though. Apparently, Sir Lancelot is more agile than the other knights because he trained with a Japanese sword master.
Other than that, I’m also a fan of Streets of Rage 1 and 2 (2 is better). They should be available in one of the Sega Genesis collections on Steam.
Think Knights Of The Round’s biggest crime is just being dated and playing things too safe, honestly. It was a decent enough slightly above average game back on SNES, but in pure game-play it just doesn’t have any of the crazy and cool stuff the other Capcom Beat’Em Up games have.
You kinda just… walk to the right, punching people, but as an Arthurian Knight style character, instead of a big crazy mech, a shirtless mayor, and so on, with little of the crazy awesome stuff that made that era of those games so endearing.
Still, yeah, it’s probably the single weakest game in that collection. It’s just… fine, in that kinda sad and boring uninspired ‘so OK it’s average’ way nowadays.
I wouldn’t even rate it as the weakest. I found King of Dragons utterly forgettable. Knights of the Round is at least interesting enough that I want it to be better. There are very few games about Arthurian knights (compared to random D&D knockoff, like in King of Dragons). To Japanese people it must have been very exotic, so I wanted to see what they’d make of it. In the end, it was just a bit less weird than I hoped. I mean, it has some over-the-top armors as you level up, but it’s over-the-top in a way that we’ve seen over and over by now. It also has parry and riposte mechanics that I haven’t seen in any other beat’em up, but parrying should really have been a separate button. It should not be possible to accidentally turn your back to an enemy instead of parrying! So I mostly ended up avoiding it.
But please ignore my negativity, Galad, there are some really good games in the collection!
By the way, I discovered Matt MacMuscle’s channel on YouTube because someone linked it in the comments, and he has some fun videos where he fanboys about Final Fight.
Violent Storm and Alien VS Predator stand out to me as Mame arcade games worth giving a shot, but I don’t have personal experience with them.
On the PS4, my favorites are Dragon’s Crown and Ninja Saviours, which are both cool recent beat ’em ups made by the dudes that made old ones during the 90s. Dragon’s Crown is as much an evolution of the DnD beat ’em up games with their rpg trappings around the edges as it is a continuation of The King of Dragons though. Meanwhile Ninja Saviours is an enhanced but faithful remake of an SNES beat ’em up(that the same devs made originally), which doesn’t play that much like many other beat ’em ups.
They’re very cool, but they probably won’t give you that out there arcade feel.
Been playing Hades. All of the Hades. Just a fantastic roguelite game from top to bottom that doesn’t seem to get old. Also tried Borderlands 3… I met Vaughn… And I haven’t touched it since.
As for what I’m looking forward to, Persona 5 Royal and the FFVII Remake. I never actually played the original FFVII so this’ll be me catching up on gaming history a little. Honestly looking forward to it despite my distaste for Final Fantasy in general, it looks amazing.
Same. I finished four runs on Sunday alone and I’ve been doing a run a day ever since. I think I’m almost getting competent at the game: I expect I’ll try a heat run soon. Hades is *really* good for a roguelike hack-and-slash, and I say this as an aging fourtysomething with failing hand-eye coordination.
Yessss. Super massively impressed and addicted to this game. Picked it up 3 weeks ago and played way too much.
short term i’m pretty set, there’s no notable release i’m interested in. Doom is cool, but i’m not a big fan of fps. Animal Crossing i’m not sure, because i’ve already bought two nintendo exclusives i thought i would love and instead i ended up wasting 60 bucks to then never play them.
Right now the only two games i’m really waiting are Silksong and Xenoblade DE. Cyberpunk 2077 is also on my list, but i’m a bit cautious, it just seems too good to be true.
Right now i’m playing and monstruosly enjoying Death Stranding. I went in knowing jack squat about it, except it had quite a poor reception and that it’s a fetch quest simulator.
Yet in the 20 hours i played i never got bored once, not even when i had to do an extremely long trek up a mountain twice in a row (each trek taking me one hour irl). There’s just something about this game, it’s amazingly polished and it’s such a refreshing new idea.
Kojima has made the act of walking fun somehow.
Tho i can see why many didn’t like it, it’s a niche game that sadly has the production value of trpleA and so it flopped. But even if i hadn’t liked it i still would have respected it. In an age where most tripleA games seems to devolve into a soup of the same ideas with various level of quality, Death Stranding tries to be something new. It really offers an experience i can’t find somewhere else
Death Stranding definitely has fans. The people who enjoyed it got drowned out in the upvote driven ‘Good or bad’ culture.
It looks like it didn’t sell well though. I hope Kojima keeps getting funding somewhere.
well, people who are content usually have less drive to vocalise. thus, the critics always ring louder.
To be clear too, I think Death Stranding probably has more critics than fans. But things like Reddit remove the nuance. The majority opinion is the only opinion that gets seen.
Perhaps it will perform better when it releases on PC in June. Metal Gear V seemed to have been well-received on Steam, with a certain amount of sales (going by the number of reviews).
MGS5 was the least Kojima Kojima game though. Still great, but not particularly weird or creative -at least compared to his norm.
I enjoyed playing MGSV but I’ve also been able to put it away again, which wasn’t true of any of the previous games.
It’s probably going to get a second wind once it comes to PC.
Hope so.
Death Stranding was darn close to my personal game-of-the-year last year, only barely beaten by Resident Evil 2. And I’d love to see ‘strand games’ becoming an actual thing, with other devs chiming in on the subject.
Heck, I Platinumed that sucker on PS4, and I’m still tempted to go double dip for the PC version. That’s how strong an itch I got from seeing fetch-quests done right as the entire focus of a game for once.
I’ve been playing the GTA 5 R.E.A.L. VR mod. It’s definitely not for anybody prone to motion sickness, especially not when riding motorbikes in first person. In fact, it’s probably not for anybody who doesn’t have an Index, because it uses alternate-eye rendering and hence refresh rates below 120 Hz are Very Rough Indeed.
It is, however, absolutely incredible to look at.
need to try that out one of these days.
So Borderlands 3 finally released for realsies, and with a nice 50% discount, so I jumped on that, and I was VERY plesantly surprised! It is a ton of fun, very Borderlands in all the right places, I find the level design more enjoyable than in 2 and Pre Sequel and the story, while inferior to 2’s, advances in a more satisfying manner. I don’t find myself experiencing the slog of the mid 2’s campaign. My Siren is very talkative which I love, many jokes land squarely (the discussion with Rhys at the end of his arc had my laughing out loud!), the villains are lame but not too present and not any worse than 1’s. And I didn’t experience the bullet sponge effect you talked about Shamus, maybe it got balanced?
I love that each tree has various special attacks with mix and match effects too.
My only complaint is that they (as far as I can see) are not exploiting the best Boderlands characters to their fullest. But I’m not finished with the game yet. And I really wish they had implemented a variant of Diablo 3’s adventure mode. It’s insane that it never became an industry standard.
I started a replay of Neverwinter Nights 2, after the BG3 reveal got me in the mood for some more party-based D&D adventures. Ironically I’ve spent more time downloading mods and trying to get them to work seamlessly with each other than playing the actual game. :P
What a coincidence, I’ve been playing a bunch of modules from the NWN2 Vault. The Wizards Apprentice is really good.
I’ve also started another playthrough of Ultima IV, planning to take the Stranger/Avatar all the way to Serpent Isle eventually.
And I’m also playing a bit of Dragon’s Dogma through it all, which is my favourite activity to fill a Sunday with.
Right now, I’m meandering between a few games:
Ori and the Blind Forest (https://store.steampowered.com/app/261570/Ori_and_the_Blind_Forest/), as the sequel’s release made it have a serious discount. Liking it sofar, so I might get the new one too, once I finish this one. Unless I am burned out on cutesy indy metroidvania by then.
Synthetik: Legion Rising (https://store.steampowered.com/app/528230/SYNTHETIK_Legion_Rising/), a cyberpunkish rogue-like with coop. Right up my alley, even if they have some very questionable controls, which make it feel awkward until one gets used to it. makes it unique though.
And as always, I do play most of the time in VR:
Dirt Rally 2.0 (https://store.steampowered.com/app/690790/DiRT_Rally_20/), I love this in VR. Tough as nails, but I am at the second to last single player difficulty, using the tough as nails Group B RWD Opel Manta, and doing the occasional daily challange.
ViKubb (https://store.steampowered.com/app/681790/ViKubb/), a 20$ lawngame simulated on several grand worth of high tech equipment. very small, but the devs are nice, and every sunday there’s a community tournament organized on their discord. Fun and simple.
And right now, being a bit isolated due to corona, I am very hyped fopr Half Life: Alyx (https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/) which omes out monday!
Since I cannot edit anymore, isn’t Mount and Blade 2 about to hit EA in March aswell aswell?
Man, the best time to be stuck in curfew!
Still on Dragon Age: Inquisition and Rocket League. The Jaws of Hakkon expansion captured almost everything that is good and awful about DA:I.
On my phone I started playing Polytopia! It’s a mobile stripped down Civilisation where games take ~30 minutes, capped at 30 turns. And it’s free without obtrusive ads or microtransactions. I love it! I don’t know how deep it is, but the stripped down nature makes every decision feel important and calculable.
I recommend this to everyone. There’s no cost in time, money or irritation, and if nothing else it’s interesting to see how a minimalist Civ works.
Game wise, I’m interested in the FFVII remake after being sold by the demo and Persona 5 Royale (although I don’t know if this is for me as I own Persona 5)
First time posting to comment that Polytopia is pretty great! (and I believe it’s available in steam also)
Have been playing it since several years ago
And it has a pretty active multiplayer community
It actually does have microtransactions but only for additional playable races, besides that no ads or anything (do you need to purchase at least one to be able to play multiplayer though)
My gaming lists don’t change as quickly as others, so:
Steins;Gate – I’m 13 hours in and it’s finally in the section where the plot, at least, gets really interesting, along with the character interactions. There’s still limited player choice, however. Again, I lament having watched the anime first because a lot of the plot twists were spoiled by it, although there are differences that are really just coming to the fore now. I’m not sure when I’ll bail on trying to change things just to get to an ending.
Everybody’s Golf – Managed to get a round in and played an eighteen hole round. Due to a complete screw up on my part, I took a +7 on one hole and STILL managed to end up in a tie for the win. Still, it made things interesting.
Date Alive Rio-Reincarnation – It’s supposedly a cross-dimensional dating sim, but the first part of it is a straight visual novel. I haven’t been back to it since my first shot at it.
Blazblue Cross Tag Battle – Done by the team that did Blazblue and Persona 4 Arena, and includes at least some of the Persona 4 characters. Not a bad game, as the story mode isn’t very difficult and the character interactions are relatively interesting. I hit the final boss in the Persona arc, however, and am sure there’s a trick to beating it, which I haven’t learned yet.
Looking forward to Persona 5 Royal, and also tried to get Ring Fit Adventure but it’s all sold out in my area. I’ll see when or if Persona 5 Royal comes to North America.
(As an aside, I envy the people who are talking about how they have much more time now because of the social isolation. If anything, I have LESS time because I’m doing all the things I used to do but have to add on other things that are also more complicated to do the way things are now.)
This weekend I started playing Alpha Centauri again, this time with the Alien Crossfire expansion. Having spent most of the last twenty years playing without the expansion, it still feels a little weird to me. Overall, I like the expansion. Some of the expansion factions are great, the Nautilus Pirates foremost among them. Others not so much. The Cult of Planet isn’t terribly distinct from the Gaians, for example. The expansion is, unfortunately, buggy in ways that the base game is not. Sometimes, usually in the late game, all of my cities will just vanish for no apparent reason and I’ll be left with a random assortment of colony pods and military units at what used to be the site of my capital. I thought it was a Pirates-specific bug, but it happened to me this weekend while I was playing as the University. I have no idea what’s going on. Sometimes I can avoid the vanishing by reverting to an older saved game and sometimes it happens no matter what I do. I am occasionally tempted to just keep playing and see what happens, but then I think of all the Secret Projects that I no longer have and I lose the will to continue.
The pirates are my favorite faction of the expansion, but they are way overpowered.
They really are. They’re also perfect for the way I like to play, which is to expand like crazy in the early game. Being in the water from the get-go means that their expansion is never blocked by another faction. In some ways, playing as the Pirates feels like cheating. I enjoy it tremendously.
alien crossfire is pretty neat but a lot of the extra stuff feels really tacked on. My favorite new faction are the free drones. Industry can be a really underrated statistic and due the way additive percentages works their output is just broken. having a shit nature stat is annoying when exploring early on though, you just get wrecked by wildlife.
I had one very successful game as the Drones, but I’ve never really been able to wrap my head around their hook. Last I checked, their agenda was Eudaimonea, which makes a certain amount of sense, but is nevertheless odd because Eudaimonea isn’t even available until late in the game.
Thats just flavor and only is useful if you want to ally them (using the same social engineering option as the faction loving it makes them like you). You just have to abuse their industry stat to push out a lot of troops.
Persona 5 on NG+. The only thing I’ve got left is the final dungeon. I’ve managed to max out all social links but two, which on the one hand is a pretty good result without using a walkthrough or strategy guide. On the other hand, it’s rather annoying. Only seven steps missing!
I made it a couple in-game months into my first run of Persona 3 FES before I realized how efficiently you needed to spend your timeslots to complete social links. That run might’ve been the most interesting, as when I looked up a guide I wasn’t following a preselected course of actions directly (having diverged a lot at the start) but instead using the lookahead on known date opportunities and advancement required per social link level to plot out how to spend the time. Despite being caught over the winter break with few people available to interact with, the extra month added in FES to allow maxing the new Aeon link gave me just enough space to squeak through with everything in the end. I’ve stuck with guides since then, which is a little less fun but worth avoiding the regret of running out of time.
This is mostly as I’ve yet to really use NG in any game that gives the option. I started a continue with Persona 5 as that’s the only way to unlock the last persona, but I got bored before reaching the compendium again when endgame equipment trivialized all the fights in the dungeon I’d already seen, plus the first guided completionist playthrough didn’t leave anything else new. There’s a lot of games out there, playing the same one twice is a lot to ask even when the game is really good. Still, looking forward to Royal, might try this one guideless having already seen the majority of events… maybe.
Speaking of guides, been playing the Tales of Vesperia re-release for the first time. Using a guide, as apparently it’s infamous for missable quests. I’ve found a reasonably spoiler-free option. The combat still feels pretty frustrating, I’ve had one or two cases where I got animation cancelling working correctly which felt way more fluid but more often than not I have a guard button which takes half a second to respond which makes it useless.
Started poking at Kuva Liches on and off in Warframe. I was wary of them as they pressure you to finish them off by taxing a percentage of your drops on unrelated missions while they’re active, but since everything is returned after finally finishing them off, that isn’t a big deal.
Took a break from Pokémon Go, still toying with Fire Emblem Heroes.
There’s one superboss that’s only available on New Game+. I think that’s true of all the Persona games.
europa universalis 4. The problem is that a huge DLC is about to hit so i dont want to play a country that will get changed a lot soon. But everything i think i got something they announce they will change that country too.
I’m still slowly working my way through Bioshock. I think I’m getting close to the end; I’m about to confront Andrew Ryan. (Yes, I know the twist. I’m not worried about spoilers.)
The game scratches a lot of itches when it comes to setting and aesthetics. Very well done there. I know it was the fashion of the time (then and now, I suppose), but the story-telling through audiologs is really contrived. And there’s a good bit that just feels extravagent; the entire section of Fort Frolic could have been removed from the game with very little impact.
More concerning to me is how many little details there are that make me say, “Wait, I want to know more about that.” And if you go to the Wiki, there’s a whole bunch of stuff there. Except . . . why isn’t that stuff in the game? Makes me feel the same way as when people say that the Star Wars novels tie up the loose ends that aren’t explained in the movies. That’s a terrible way to tell a coherent story!
There’s actually a surprising amount to go after Ryan (which in my opinion was a mistake – its would have been better to end it there).
I know what you mean about Fort Frolic – it really is the definition of a sidetrack. But it is also so good… arguably the best section of the game in my view.
I’m also playing a stealth game, named Budget Cuts 2 (in VR). It’s somewhat basic, but nicely done with a great design.
And Black Mesa, while waiting for HL: Alyx. I didn’t play HL again since it was released, so it’s quite like my reconstructed memory of it. Some nostalgia without the “wake-up, it’s not that great” part.
I’m still mainly playing Brawl Stars (a stellar mobile game; if you’re interested, I talked about it last time). We’re getting an update soon that’s going to a lot of depth to the game, and I’m psyched.
On the PC front, I’ve been on a bit of a retro-style shooter mood. I started reaplaying Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast on the highest difficulty, and I’m having a blast, and I’ve been playing two new-ish games: Amid Evil and Project Warlock.
I started playing Amid Evil a bit after it came out on GOG, but I stopped once I was about 2/3 of the way through. Today, I picked it up again, but I’m stuck at a boss who is harder than he needs to be due to a bug. That won’t stop me, though! I’ll be working from home the next couple of weeks, and he is going down!
I don’t actually remember when I bought Project Warlock, but I started playing it a couple of weeks ago, and I’m having a very good time. It’s a shooter made in the style of Duke Nukem 3D, and it has a couple of easter eggs with references to shooters of the time. With one or two exceptions, all the weapons and spells feel very meaty and impactful, and it has some RPG elements. You can upgrade your stats, as well as your weapons and spells. But you need to choose wisely, because the points you use to upgrade weapons are the same you use for upgrading spells, and you need to find them scattered around the levels. Some of them are really well hidden.
It allows for repeat playthroughs, since weapon upgrades are mutually exclusive, and change the way the weapon functions (e.g. do you want your crossbow to become a ballista that can pierce multiple enemies, or a triple shot crossbow that has a higher rate of fire).
Another game I started playing again is Enter the Gungeon, and I love the art-style, tight gameplay and the overall gamefeel. But it’s always kind of depressing how bad I am at it. I manage to get to floor two or three, have a pretty good run, and then get demolished by a boss I have little or no experience fighting. Back when the game was new, I had the time to play a lot of it, and often managed to get to floor 4.
Howerver, nowadays, I really feel irritated by the fact that a couple of small mistakes mean I have to spend another 20 or 30 minutes getting to what just killed me, just so it can kill me again, and I can repeat the process, so that one day I might be able to get past this hurdle so I can bash my head against the next one. I find that as I get older, I get less and less patience for games that have little or no respect for my time.
In terms of what I’m excited for, I try not to look at the release calendar, because there are so many games I want to play, including the ones I have in my library (e.g. I recently bought Beautiful Desolation – a story-heavy post-apocalyptic RPG that doesn’t look like any other post-apocalypse game I’ve ever seen, and I can’t wait to play it)!
So, the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Hollow Knight: Silksong and Cyberpunk.
EDIT: Sorry for the novel-sized comment. Believe it or not, I tried to keep it short :/
EDIT 2: Important PSA: GOG seem to be taking advantage of the lockdown in many countries, and are raining down discounts! So, take a look at your wishlist: there’s a good chance of finding a bargain!
It’s also officially their Spring Sale, so that explains part of the price drop.
Which boss are you stuck on in Amid Evil? I didn’t get much of a chance to see the boss mechanics (Still, I like the tornado guy) due to mace soul damage being so effective, so missed if any are bugged and on Evil difficulty waiting around for bosses to do something was prohibitively dangerous. I’ll probably go back and play it on a lower setting some day for a more relaxed playthrough.
The Forgemaster. The bug is with the switches I need to press in order to activate the spray that makes him vulnerable. Sometimes they’re easy to press, other times they don’t activate at all. There’s a brief thread about it on the Steam forums, and even though the dev had fixed it, the most recent comment confirms that the bug persists (so at least I’m not alone in my bad luck).
I’ve tried running on them, sprinting, jumping, standing on them, and 9 times out of 10 nothing happens… But I do manage to press them on occasion, so I guess I’ll just have to hope RNGesus is on my side.
Forgemaster notwithstanding, I love what I’ve seen so far out of this game. Just out of curiosity, I’ve already beaten all the other areas. Will there be much left after I beat the Forge?
Ouch, not having those buttons work properly pretty effectively walls the fight.
I can’t remember which episodes unlock with progress, you get a bunch to choose from in the hub-world after the first episode. You have at least the final episode and possibly one more if Arcane Expanse hasn’t been unlocked yet. The final episode looks beautiful. Lot’s of strange geometries and directions, it’s very visually distinct.
I really enjoyed my playthrough. It was good to take on in small chunks, each episode is fairly short. The weapons felt good to use, I like that the axe can still find use even in the final episode and isn’t relegated to “the useless melee/pistol slot” many older shooters fell into. There wasn’t an over abundance of monster closets opening up directly behind you compared to general fighting.
The few small things I noticed was that I never seemed to find a good use for Whisper’s Edge, although that might just be because it shares the same ammo pool with the Star of Torment. The Celestial Claw projectiles are also quite large (they are planets I guess) so they have a tendency to clip the edges of a ledge or corner and you planet yourself in the face. Once I threw myself so far out of the level trying to reach a secret I missed the death plane and had to reload but that was definitely on me.
There was a run at the last GDQ which I would recommend if you like colourful commentary. The developers were on call during the run and were poking fun at each other with just how much out of bounds there was going on.
I just lucked out and beat him, and it turns out I still haven’t done the Solar Solstice yet, and I’m loving it (those sunsets, man)! I think it’s tied with the Sacred Path as my second favourite area, with the Arcane Expanse being my favourite so far. The only area I don’t like is the Forge, it’s got to be the most boring-looking, and I really hate first-person jumping puzzles.
In terms of weapons, I always have a hard time choosing what I want to use, because all the weapons are amazing! I find the Whisper’s Edge useful in a lot of situations. Most recently, againt the flaming-spear-shield dudes in the Solar Solstice, as you can easily hit them in the head. It’s also useful against the teleporting dudes, and against fish when you’re underwater.
Gungeon’s pretty good, but the difficulty is the part that makes me not come back to it. I’ve actually completed a bunch of the “normal” endings, and done some of the endings to get the alternate costumes, but after doing that, I came away with a strong feeling of “why am I playing this?”. The actual moment-to-moment gameplay is usually pretty good, and the art style / aesthetics of the game are adorable, but the difficulty of the game kills it for me. I don’t feel like I’ve mastered the game when I’m finally successful; I just feel like my crappy old laptop had enough framerate, and I got lucky enough with the items, and I happened to be having a good day where my reflexes were up to snuff. I mentally know all the things I need to succeed, but I can’t consistently execute them, to beat the game without spending an entire weekend playing it.
My biggest issue is that you have to start from floor 1 if you want to have a chance at a proper run. So far, I’ve only unlocked the elevator to the 2nd floor, but starting from there is even harder. In one of the recent patches, they also give you a crappy gun, if you decide to start from floor 2, but not only is it of very little help (because it’s EXTREMELY crappy), but even a bad run of floor 1 can give you a better weapons.
And it’s very demoralising when you die, and have to start all over again. I like floor 1 a lot – it really makes the artstyle shine, but floors 2 and 3 are very same-y, and not distinct enough to motivate me to push through. I just want to beat them so I get to see the cool-looking 4th floor.
Whenever I die in a roguelite, subconsciously, I always contrast it to my gold standard – Spelunky, where each death brings bitterness, but also excitement for what wacky situations the next run will bring.
Yes, you managed to get a jetpack and a shotgun, and you died after you stupidly fell into some lava, but maybe next time you might clear the entire level with an unpredictable, yet well-timed chain reaction! And hey, at least you managed to reach the Shortcut Man! You’re one step closer to making that shortcut, because you were greedy and got a lot of treasure!
And that right there is Gungeon’s problem – death doesn’t add anything to the game. It only leaves you lamenting all the things you lost. It’s only an obstacle that feels all the more insurmountable the more good runs it ends.
From your description of Spelunky, it seems about the same as Gungeon – the only difference seems to be the (implied) difference in difficulty, and the feelings upon death. Like, both have jetpacks, both could have chain reactions, both have shortcut-men, but Gungeon is the one that feels bad.
To me, the difference comes down to genre – Spelunky’s a platformer, while Gungeon is a bullethell/shmup. Both use many preset rooms connected in randomized ways.
In Gungeon, I know when I’ve seen a room before. They all exist in a vacuum, and the state of one room doesn’t really affect the state of another.
In Spelunky, however, it’s much harder to see the seams, and it’s much easier for the interactions in one room to bleed over the ones in another. Also, shortcuts only take money, rather than Gungeon, where they’re much harder to make. Both games require a lot of runs to unlock a shortcut. But in Spelunky, every time you reach the Shortcut Man (which is easier said than done) means you’re making progress. Also, starting at a later floor is hard, but you’re not as gimped as you are in Gungeon (in fact, I love starting at later floors, because I like the challenge of having no items).
Of course, if you want to get the True Ending, you do need to start from Level 1 every time, but that doesn’t really concern me, since they added that ending in the HD version, which I’ve never been too keen on…
The issue I had with Gungeon is that it feels really stingy. At least half of the equipment available in a run will be locked in a blind-box, and keys are a highly limited resource. Of the rest of the equipment, you can either find it or buy it, in the latter case needing to use another highly limited resource, money, which is also needed to replenish health and ammo, for meta goals and of course, keys.
It’s weird because the spending of resources (keys or money) suggests strategic choices, which could be fun, only you’re spending keys for randomised rewards (effectively a null choice) and money on highly limited selections in shops. That seems backwards to me – the selection of choice should be greater for intentional purchases, and the random rewards should be more freely given. That’s how other roguelites give you the sense that every fresh run has a fun, unpredictable build up its sleeve for you.
The moment to moment gameplay is polished, but the roguelite systems they’ve built around it really didn’t do anything to make me excited to keep starting over. I gave it five hours and didn’t come back. Even Rogue Legacy, that most perfunctory of roguelites, managed to keep its hooks in me for much longer than that.
Yeah, that’s a big issue as well. The only thing that makes me come back from time to time is the moment-to-moment gameplay, whereas in Rogue Legacy (which I’ve beaten several times) it was the huge amount of classes and modifiers that made me excited for the next run. Of course, if you compare it to something like The Binding of Isaac, then the variance of the runs in both Gungeon and Legacy looks laughable, but Isaac’s never managed to hook me, even back in the day when you didn’t have much choice when it came to roguelites.
I think Project Warlock is a bit too retro for my taste, I’d compare it more to Doom than Duke3D in that I rarely felt non-mechanical incentive to explore the levels. To clarify, they do differ even within the same tileset, within the arctic there is a clear difference between going through a cave and a base, or the factory and the skyscraper in the city, it just doesn’t feel very visually exciting and, except for some easter eggs, lacks those memorable moments of finding something really cool.
That said, the weapons are quite satisfying and have a nice variety and the use of spells adds an extra dimension to the game so if someone longs for that strafey-floaty combat it probably hits just the right spot.
About halfway through Trails of Cold Steel, which is losing my interest. The fights are still fun; even normal enemies have status-inducing AOEs that can mess you up if you don’t win fast, and bosses have been pretty uniformly rough and involve chugging lots of consumables to stay upright. I like all the mechanics, combatside and townside. Plot’s alright, very similar to Sky; local problem hinting at widescale problem, resolve local problem, move to new location. Characters are archetypical but generally not bad. (but some of them are.)
I think the biggest problem is a lack of dialogue efficiency; someone recently mentioned good dialogue will further several goals at once, but here I’d say it’s only forwarding one. There was a scene where about a dozen characters were alternating delivering exposition, but they weren’t putting a character spin on it, so it felt the same as one character giving a really long exposition. Exposition is a huge part of the game, so it’s a constant thing. You get characterization and you get worldbuilding, but you get them separately so everything takes twice as long as it could. Plus there’s lots of pointless reactions to what people say, “I’m surprised you said that” style redundancy.
Sexualization has ramped up; butt shots on a ten-year-old in skintight pants, and girls bending over get a behind-the-back camera angle where boys bending over get a from-the-side camera angle.
Also, ‘turn initiation’ dialogue can be fun, but whoever decided “my turn” should be a turn start quip for every single character should start taking their meds again. I think they only have two quips each and one of them is “my turn”, you’ll hear it seven turns in a row and it’s like “I know who’s turn it is, shut up”. Maybe this was a protest at having turn start dialogue. I don’t know why I haven’t muted the game yet.
Not playing much else. Tried Atelier Sophie again, decided it’s still mediocre. Tried FF15 again, decided I still don’t care enough to finish it. Thinking about another run of FF9, but that would require buying it again. Basically just playing Chess, and watching LPs.
Looking forward to the FF7 remake after seeing the demo. Definitely going to wait for an LP first, but that’s a good looking demo. Don’t even know what else is coming out, so not looking forward to anything else.
That redundancy isn’t something XSEED could do anything about, unfortunately, it’s just the way Japanese games work a lot of the time. And anime. Japanese media in general actually.
> Crazy thing happens
Char 1: “What the hell? What was that crazy thing that just happened?”
Char 2: “Wow, that sure was a crazy thing that just happened, huh? I wonder what it was?”
Do we need the second character’s line? Nope. But they do it anyway ;_; Japanese writers can be annoyingly verbose too, which just compounds the issue of redundancy even further.
This, it’s honestly something that we just have to cope with linguistically. I do wonder if the repeating quips, one liners or post-battle conversations also somehow factor into it. Like they don’t mind repetition that much. For example the last “big” JRPG I’ve played was Tales of Zestiria and it has those little dialogues at the end of the fight, some of them are pretty fun but having it repeat for a 50th time becomes really grating. It’s something that you’d think would become a recognizable issue in a genre that is known for having a lot of combat.
It’s weird, but going back to the old JRPGs is actually quite a relief for this specific issue (although perhaps only this one). Technical limitations kept dialogue much briefer and cut-scenes much shorter, which had the effect of forcing what I assume would otherwise have been typically verbose and redundancy-laden JRPG scripts through a tight editing process.
I found Breath of Fire II had a particularly gripping tale, and brevity is the watchword of that game’s dialogue – although it’s possible that relative unfamiliarity with JRPG tropes also contributed to my enjoyment of it.
Please tell me you’ve played BoF3 as well? It’s one of the most underrated and fantastic JRPGs ever made. No saving the world bullshit trope here, you’re just on a personal mission to find god and ask her ‘why’. It’s one of my top 3 games of all time in no small part because the story is so damn good and refreshing in a genre otherwise inundated with saving the world from some great evil.
BoF4 is great as well, the setting is very original and the story delivers a truly amazing soul-wrenching gut punch. I would even go as far as to say that the mainline BoF games (excluding Dragon Quarter) are among the best representatives of the jRPG genre.
Oddly enough, I never got around to that one. I tried it a few times and I’ve still got it here somewhere, but… I dunno, I think the move to a completely new world spoiled it for me. I love how the first three games are the same world and you can see how things advance (or not…) in each. I won’t say more because spoils, but that’s another aspect of why I love 3 so much :)
As for 5… yeah, it was a weird game and another departure from form that I didn’t really appreciate. But it’s also a really interesting experiment and can be considered one of the forefathers of the whole roguelite genre, considering you’re supposed to replay the game again and again.
I’ve only played the first two Breath of Fire games. They may technically be set in the same world but it honestly doesn’t seem to matter very much. Breath of Fire II could easily be the first game in the series without losing anything of value.
Between 1 and 2, sure. 3 is a different matter.
I played through Tales of Berseria and Yakuza Zero*, which may not be as verbose but certainly like their words, and those didn’t wear on me as much as ToCS is. Maybe it’s because they’ve got simpler settings, but I think they’re better about explaining the world through the characters within it. ToCS likes to get lore-heavy, and the characters don’t really have character-specific opinions on the lore, it’s just: “This Thing happened.” “I heard about that. That was at Past Time, right?” “While this Other Thing was going on.” “Right, everyone.”
*edit: Oh duh, and Persona 3, 4, and 5, the “if you mash the skip button you can cut the dialogue down to fifteen minute stretches” games.
I don’t have the same issue in Persona at all, it’s one of my favourite series (P4G is also in my top 3 games of all time, and P5 is in top 10). Probably because with those it’s all about social links and they’re fairly short and easy to zip through between doing other stuff.
That, and the characters are so fun that I don’t mind it being a bit longer on cutscenes :)
Been playing more Rimworld. An expansion just came out, and it still has the core problem that the game’s challenge is defined by fending off waves of raiders that scale to your colony stats in ways you’re pressured to optimize, but they’re moving it towards a more quest-based model and I think that’s really good. I hope this trend in the game’s development continues. Also it turns out even the highest difficulties can be cheesed pretty easily by keeping your base small and using cheap wooden deadfall traps.
A new Gemcraft game (tower defense series) came out in 2019, so I picked that up. It’s… more Gemcraft. The series innovates as little as the Pokemon games, but if you like that kind of thing, this is more of that thing.
Looking forward to the Stellaris expansion (because even though I think the game is pretty bad, it does a good job of lighting up the fiddly minmaxer parts of my brain) and One Step From Eden.
Do enemy raids still scale with time, with the DLC / expansion? I used a mod that removed that part from the original game, since my play-style is apparently too slow for what the game’s trying to get me to do.
WTF, an expansion? I thought Tynan was done with the game now, barring minor hotfixes.
That’s annoying. My PC died a few weeks back and I can’t afford to repair it, so… great, new Rimworld that I can’t play ;_;
I don’t think Stellaris will ever be a good game. I played it at launch and again about 8 months ago and was pretty disappointed at the progress they had made. All their focus seems to be on MOAR. More content, more systems. Ignoring the fact that the game is badly balanced, arduous to play, and has a million little niggles that would be simple to solve and make the game take far, far, far less micromanagement and clicks.
Don’t forget the ABYSMAL performance when you start getting towards late-mid-game and end-game. But no, let’s have moar DLC! Performance isn’t important or anything.
The new patch allegedly fixes some of that, though I have my doubts.
I think they fundamentally don’t understand how to balance a 4X game. There’s virtually no expansion penalty (the latest expansion lets you mitigate it entirely), and scouting is virtually free, which turns it into an extremely snowbally game of grabbing up as much territory as possible all the time. Most of the megastructures are worthless because the return on investment pales in comparison to investing in more ships and using them to seize territory. I’ve been following the devblog for 2.6, and the AI designer just figured out that the most effective thing for the AI to do with its fleets is to gather them up into one giant doomstack and roll it around.
Oh. Great. The one thing that actually made it bearable fighting the AI (their tendency to be stupid) is going to be exchanged for basically the only tactic a human ever needs (doomstacks)? *sigh*
It’s a sad state of affairs when a mod maker creates better AI than the actual devs.
The worst part is that way back they introduced a massive slowdown to fleet movements to encourage you to cover multiple fronts, except it was still tactically best to doomstack, so now you just spend four years flying from front to front.
I’m pretty sure they’ve done a complete rebuild of every subsystem in the game, and it’s still not great, though I love playing it neverthless. As of pre-Federations, the laundry list:
1. There’s some critical balance issue with having the ability to settle every planet. When I play machines, robot-focused people, people with Extremely Adaptive, or Lithoids, I become the insurmountable breakaway leader by midgame.
2. Pop assignment and distribution is presently such a mess that when I go Bio-ascension I just make a super version of each species and call it a day
3. The AI almost never takes Ascension Paths, so things are a little bland
4. The fleet manager explodes if you poke it funny, so I don’t like to customize ships
5. Psionic ascension is hard to get and kinda sucks because the good stuff is behind a slot machine
6. The L-cluster is a gamble where you get tons of cool stuff or an endgame crisis
7. The AI absolutely cannot handle cooperating against the Great Khan, the War In Heaven, or Crises.
I could go on for a while longer, but I might as well get on to new federations and the GC. I like their laws and upgrades systems and the like, but they’re missing the fairly important feature of being able to actually persuade people to change their position on issues. They vote in their percieved interests and your only option is to find various ways to make your vote count extra.
I finally finished Hard West. It gets repetitive at the end. Or I got skillz. I don’t have the urge to repeat it on hard. They did a great job with the tactical part (luck, cover, damage, perks). The strategic part barely exist. For that, I should finally start with XCom 2. It’s on todo for a few years.
Next, I’ll try to finish AC4: Black Flag
I played Hard West a year or two ago. I thought it was pretty good, though I suffered a lot from bugs and corrupted saves. My biggest complaint about Hard West, however, is that I feel like the special abilities that you give to your characters via the, uh, magic playing cards mostly don’t matter. The passive stuff like extra hitpoints or extra movement is fine, but the trick-shot abilities are, in most cases, not really worth the bother, since you have to spend Luck to use them. Some of them also require you to leave cover in order to use them effectively, which is generally speaking a really bad idea.
The one that lets you guarantee a hit on any enemy on the map combined with the one that guarantees a crit, both without leaving cover are usually enough to 1 shot dangerous enemies. Ricochet can be used situationally. The ones that keep you permanently stealthed while in shadow help a lot in the stealth areas. Other than that not a ton of useful abilities you are right
Really wanted to love Hard West, and been meaning to go back to it, but the forced Iron Man stuff turned me off HARD.
That, and that first campaign with the miners. Ugh.
I could have dealt with one ‘now everything slowly start sucking due to stupid’ campaign, the iron man stuff, OR the weak first episode coasting on theming alone… but all three at once just made me drop the game like a hot rock.
I finished Shin Megami Tensei IV and for a change of pace decided to start… another JRPG. One from waaay back, this time; the original Phantasy Star on the Switch.
The Sega Ages re-release has an optional modern mode that lowers random encounter frequency while increasing the gold and xp reward. I’d quite like to play the game straight to have more of a sense of the authentic experience, but man, I hate overly repetitive random combats. To my surprise you can switch between the settings at will, so I suppose I’ll persist with classic for as long as my patience lasts then tap out to modern. They’ve thrown in an automap feature which will be a serious boon, although I suspect I’ll still need to keep a lot of notes of hints from NPCs.
My 3DS is host to the truly weird Gurumin 3D, a port of a fairly obscure Nihon Falcom PSP game. It’s a vaguely 128-bit, Jak n Daxter-y sort of era 3D platformer, albeit somewhat more limited by technical constraints than even PS2-era tech. But rather than drawing back on scale it works around its limitations quite cleverly with draw distance tricks (only the visible playfield seems to be rendered) and other shortcuts (framerate animation on every model except the main character is halved, which is weird but you kind of get used to it.) It’s just an odd game all round, with a story clearly intended for children and some hilariously cheap localisation and voice acting. But I somehow find it charming as hell. Oh, and apparently it’s on Steam, too, where I expect it runs much more smoothly.
Stoneshard is pretty good, for an early-access indie game. It’s a Diablo-esque RPG with randomized world, quests, dungeons, and where you can put skill-points and physical-points wherever you wish (no classes). You have to manage thirst, hunger, intoxication, sanity, pain, and loot-space. There’s an update coming later this month, that will add two more skill-trees, and a few more items, and other bits. Pretty dang good, I think! :)
Playing Hellblade, looking forward to Persona 5 Royal.
I was continuing the replay of Thief Metal Age. Want to finish it before both Doom Eternal and 20th Anniversary. Three missions to go.
Also, a little of Black Mesa. Played through Questionable ethics and Surface Tension chapters. Basically, my favorite segments in the game and OG Half-Life
Cloning is indeed a thing, ethical questions aside. What’s not a thing is memory/consciousness duplication/transfer.
You’d just get even more ethical quagmires with memory backups / transfer. Is a copy of you stuck doing manual labor in a horrible nightmare scenario? Do clones get access to your accounts? Should they have their own? How do you handle things, when someone could just torture a copy of you to get secure information?
Well I also failed to mention the lack of accelerated aging, which would presumably make the whole thing moot, as a hypothetical Shamus clone would useless unless he’d prepared one ~20 years ago.
As to the consciousness/memories transfer thing, that seems like a dead end anyway. My take on it is you just want a couple of clone bodies that are “empty vessels” that you can store in some tanks somewhere to harvest for parts and eventually transplant your brain into once your current meat sack outlives its usefulness. Of course that sort of thing is no doubt a long way off, and would purely be the province of the rich. I’d settle for a robot body personally, but that seems even less likely, both scientifically and financially.
Currently:
Shadow of the Tomb Raider – it’s good gameplay, in that it is blatantly cribbed from Rise of the Tomb Raider which I liked, with some decent stealth mechanics bolted on. But the story is driving me a little insane. It’s peak “I must stop this villain’s evil plan, whatever the hell it is.” The villain even calls out Lara for stealing dangerous mystic artifacts just to see what they do, and she keeps plowing ahead with it anyways. Meanwhile, the entire villainous army seems equipped with teleportation devices so they can just suddenly be ten feet away whenever a setback needs to happen.
Cook, Serve, Delicious 2 – engaging little restaurant game. I think they overcomplicated it a little compared to the original, I don’t need a 3-page list of ingredients to make cannoli. Fun to play moment-to-moment but I often end it thinking “why did I play this today?”
Recently finished:
Oxenfree – good short story game that excels in writing snappy, amusing teen dialogue. It only took an hour or two with these characters for me to like them. Gameplay-wise, it was nothing worth writing home about, but a brief, well-written game like this doesn’t need to be super exciting mechanically for me to be into it.
Ara Fell – It was a cool little blend of JRPG with some very American sensibilities and writing. I fell in love with the characters very fast, and it had some great boss fights. I’m a natural grinder and in this case this made normal encounters way too easy, I practically took no damage outside of bosses. Very interesting world setup – it was a mix of fantasy elements I had never even considered together before. Elves, vampires, and a city in the clouds.
RE Shadow: I ranted about the game in the previous post I think so I won’t do it again, also in part not to yuck your yum, but be fair about the “stealing of dangerous mystical artifacts” she beats the villain by some 5 minutes as they are literally blasting their way into the place where the macguffin is held, the primary difference between her and the villain is that he INTENDS to unleash the same disasters she sets loose obliviously. The fact that he repeatedly tries to call her out on this is one of the many things that annoyed me with the writing.
I have been sticking with Witcher- Enhanced edition. I certainly understand what critics have said about its combat system, particularly given play mechanics in modern games. But I have found myself really enjoying it. The wit, humor, and story have all been a joy to play through. Still no multi-hour gaming sessions, but so far, that hasnt seemed to matter. At this point, have just gotten out of prison in Vizima, so I am pretty early in the game yet.
Thanks to the Coronavirus, I’ve got all the time this week to play video games. I first tried out the AGOT mod for Crusader Kings 2 and I found it to be significantly more addictive than base game, probably because of the ASOIAF lore.
If youre into warcraft you should check out the warcraft mod as well. Although the scourge tends to get whipped quite often.
Wow, I didn’t know it had a WarCraft mod! I guess I have to find a good Let’s Play of it, as it’s not the kind of game I enjoy playing.
I’ve been playing Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark lately. It’s good – actually way better in terms of communication and clarity than the games it was based on. (Which, it should be.) The plot is good, the graphics are well-animated if on the lightweight side, and there’s just a bit more depth to the significant characters than I guessed at first.
So far, my only complaints are that the main character portraits aren’t very good and look shabby next to their in-game models (which is rather silly considering those are basically PS1-quality sprites), and that the enemies almost always rush you so that every battle turns into an irritating back-and-forth in the map.
I really like Fell Seal too, though I prefer the style of the character portraits to the style of the in-game sprites. (For those who haven’t played the game, the portraits look like paintings while the sprites are more cartoony.) Sometimes I wish that the game’s backstory were a little more fleshed out but, ultimately, I think it’s to the game’s benefit that the developers exercised some restraint when they were working on the exposition. I play on Veteran difficulty, and I can attest that the enemy AI gets a little better as the campaign progresses. The AI will occasionally use certain class abilities to devastating effect, though that’s mostly an end-game and optional content phenomenon.
Picked up Fell Seal last night, and am having a lot of fun with it, very Final Fantasy Tactics; get the feeling I’m going to be replaying it a lot with various difficulty settings and class restrictions. Only issue I have so far* is that the character sprites and portraits don’t change when the character changes class, so it’s easy to forget you changed out of a class. Especially for the starting characters whose sprite is exactly the same as a class’s sprite.
*Well, I also have a problem with them recommending using a gamepad; I did, but the gamepad’s cancel button was all wonky and kept pretending it was the up arrow. Game is much better with mouse and keyboard, or just mouse.
Well, a week or two ago I played The Sexy Brutale. That is, a brilliant game. None of my friends have it or have played it, which sucks because I’d really like to talk to some who’s played it, about how it makes you feel. Especially by the end, and after, when I was thinking about it, and starting to think more about what the things that’d happened, and the things I’d been doing meant, it became one of the saddest and most melancholic stories I’d ever experienced. And that’s all through extra meaning I drew out of the subtext, not just the overt story the game is ostensibly telling. I really can’t emphasise enough how brilliant that game is. Also stylish, swanky and dark with it’s art style, humour, and music.
Besides that, currently today I’m playing Fallen Enchantress. This is, as I understand it, the second in the Elemental series of games from Stardock, which has at least 2 games released subsequently. I like Fallen Enchantress because it’s an incredibly broken game. Just saving the game, and loading that save, is enough to break it, amongst a lot of other things. By broken there, I mean exploitable for unintended progression and advantage.
The game itself, is a vaguely Civ-esque turn based strategy, but with hero units and quests and stuff. The enemy AI is bad, a few games in and you’ll be stomping the floor with the “challenging” AI, and anything higher difficulty than that gets stat and economy bonuses that render the game unfair in an unfun way. And that’s coming from me, who plays the game to break it.
I loved Brutale. I convinced a few friends to borrow it through my Steam library just long enough to get them hooked, and a few have tossed it onto their wishlist.
Sexy Brutale was pretty awesome. I was slightly annoyed by the fact no one you save on a loop actually ends up sticking, but in light of the ending it makes sense.
The Sexy Brutale was pretty disappointing to me. The puzzles were pretty simple and there was never a moment where everything seemed to come together. It was really begging for a moment where they let you off the leash and you need to really learn everybody’s schedules and save them all in one run, but that never happened. It also doesn’t help that it contains one of the worst tropes in fiction, and has a pretty dumb ending to boot.
I’m gonna split the difference between you all. I adored the style and setting, didn’t mind that the puzzles were simple, liked where I thought the gameplay was headed (the single day ‘save everyone’ run that you never get to do), and was disappointed with the (not very original) twist ending. It’s a game I thought would have been better playing the story it makes you think it’s telling you straight.
Overall I still think it was a worthwhile experience. But I got played it on one of those subscription pass type services, which I’m sure has a bearing on how I perceived its value.
I’ve been playing a lot of Hearts of Iron 4 with the Old World Blues mod that turns it into a Fallout game. I also started playing Crusader Kings 2(and I’ll probably try modding it soon, too). At first I tried getting effective immortality by worshipping satan, then I discovered the joys of being a pagan, joining a warrior lodge and becoming a legend(plus, someone just handed me Mjölnir).
I’m not quite sure what to think about these Paradox grand strategy games. On one hand I’m not really having that much fun with them. On the other hand whenever I start playing, it always takes a few hours to disengage. And they do have fantastic soundtracks.
I also picked up Cultist Simulator from GOG sale, but I’m not really feeling like playing it right now after trying it out yesterday.
I tried that one over a year ago. At first glance, it seems like it’s a reactive game, where events pop up and you have to put a card into them quickly (as they fade away) but it definitely ends up requiring more thought and strategy than you’d expect, as where you put things really matters, and reacting quickly without thought is a good way to lose the game. At the time, I didn’t have the time for that sort of gameplay, which is why I stopped playing it.
I’m currently planning a speedrun route in Infinifactory, a puzzle game in a block-world like Minecraft. The gameplay involves using factory blocks to convert inputs into the desired outputs and deliver them to the right location. With a good variety of factory blocks and 3 dimensions, there’s a lot of room for creative solutions, leaving me a good deal of room to optimize a combination of low placement time and fast assembly time (to minimize overall time spent on each puzzle).
Ahh, Zachtronics games. They’re hard! But at the same time these are probably the games I’d like the most to be better at and where whenever I feel like I am stuck I would rather not play them than use a walkthrough, even though I normally don’t shy away from that for puzzles.
For me it’s mostly beloved classics these days. Being a recent father my gaming budget is sparse. I’ve been playing civilization 5, darkest dungeon and some thea 2: The shattering. That last one is a pretty cool strategy/card battler/rpg hybrid. The recent free naval (!) DLC improves it a lot. I’m looking forward to the next Europa universalis 4 DLC, although a campaign might take me half a year to finish at my current pave.
Funnily enough, I’ve been playing Jedi: Fallen Order.
The gameplay is Dark Souls, the story is mostly forgettable but at least rarely takes too much time (I do kind of wish you had the option to skip the cutscenes but at least if you die you don’t have to rewatch them), and the chests have literally only cosmetic items, most of which are worthless even for cosmetics.
I’m enjoying it a lot, because it’s mostly gameplay and that’s good. The metroidvania aspects are cool, too.
I’m hoping to finish it before Doom comes out because once I have Doom I will be playing that and nothing else for a while, unless they really screwed up, because Doom 2016 is the best gameplay I’ve ever experienced in an FPS. Mostly I just want more of what that had, and maybe for them to fix some of the dumber challenges like “kill two enemies in one shot 50 times with the super shotgun to unlock it actually being useful”.
I’ve been slowly working through The Talos Principle since it was free on Games With Gold. I recently got a PS4 and have started Spider-Man. I’m maybe about a 3rd of the way through the campaign (Peter just got evicted) but I’ve already completed the backpacks and landmarks and am a significant way through the Black Cat and Harry’s Science Projects collectibles. M’thinks the game and I have different priorities.
On the tabletop side, I’m running Chronicles of the Gatekeeper for one of my gaming groups and we’ve started playing Star Trek Adventures in my other.
I’ve been playing Graveyard Keeper, which is clearly heavily Stardew Valley inspired. It’s got more systems, more progression, more automation, and a lot more crafting.
It’s a lot of systems and crafting – it’s somewhere between “Stardew Valley” and “Minecraft modpack” in terms of complexity: in addition to the “genre staple” systems of farming, fishing, mining, dungeoning, logging, gathering, cooking, and NPC quests, you’ve got the titular graveyard, (where you bury corpses and build gravestones), and the church in the graveyard which you improve and hold weekly services in – (better graveyard and church means more income from services) and a writing/crafting system which can be used to make specific prayers that provide specific benefits. And a “science/alchemy” system for making various chemicals and potions, which may involve stripping corpses for “useful parts” and burning them instead of burying them.
To help with the tedium (and there can be a lot of tedium in such a crafting heavy game), there’s also a system where you can reanimate corpses as zombie workers that can take care of some of the “grunt work” once you reach a certain point, which is a really nice feature.
Compared to Stardew Valley, the game is less charming, the aspect of Stardew Valley where you get to know the NPCs, learning their schedule, their likes/dislikes and life story is mostly absent. NPCs are much more static and have quests that largely function as the main progression in the game. And it replaces that “charm” with a bit of “edge” between the fairly macabre subject matter (and a very cynical treatment of religion).
But overall, as someone who liked Stardew Valley but wished there was more to it, mechanically, this game seems to basically be exactly what I was looking for. Definitely recommend it for fans of Stardew Valley and crafting games. But someone only coming from Stardew Valley might find it too crafting heavy.
I wish I didn’t have to reference the wiki so much, but otherwise I’m enjoying it. There’s a few UI hiccups where it’s hard to tell *what* you get when you research
Ah, yeah. There’s been more “guide dang it moments” than I generally like. Mostly the technologies need better descriptions – an example for me was researching the technology that lets you collect moths, but doesn’t tell you *how* to collect moths. (Pick flowers at night)
Wrapping up Tokyo Xanadu eX+. (I’m in the final chapter now.) After that, I’ll be playing Trails from Zero with the newly-released Geofront English translation patch.
I got a pretty decent amount of amusement from One Finger Death Punch recently (it’s not a new game, but was new to me).
OFDP seems like a success in minimalist gameplay. The input is functionally very simple but it just absolutely nails it in tone. When you zone out, reach that big combo going and all the stickguys are falling it feels so good.
Graveyard Keeper, Tabletop Simulator, and UBOAT.
I wish GK developed some UI features so I didn’t have to keep cross-referencing the wiki, so it has a way to go before it’s like Stardew Valley, but I like the premise.
TS, with the COVID limitations in Canada affecting schools, we bought a few copies so the kids can play some board games with their friends.
UBOAT is in early development, but I like that it’s trying to be both a sub sim, but with resource management. It still has a way to go, but the devs seem to be updating things regularly, both fixing bugs and slowly adding new features.
First thing that sprang to mind for me was this https://www.mobygames.com/game/cpc/hunter-killer
Showing my age, lol.
Basically, only you also have to worry about the crew morale, and how best to provision supplies to make a successful run.
I’ve been devouring Nioh 2 since it came out on Friday. It’s pretty damn outstanding. For whatever reason Nioh 1 never grabbed me, but I got very involved during one of the beta weekends for 2 and was eagerly awaiting it.
If someone’s enjoyed the Souls combat over the last decade but wants to take it to the next level, I can heartily recommend Nioh. It’s not a particularly balanced experience – I wouldn’t say it delivers a gorgeous game on a technical level, it etirely lacks the atmosphere of a Fromsoft title, the story is fairly unengaging and suffers from being so closely based on real history that it explains little of, the Diablo loot and RPG mechanics are largely a hindrance, etc etc. But it’s got stellar sound design and beautiful music, the characters are likeable and goofy in the cutscenes, the animation and visual design work is all-around cool, it loads faster than just about any other game I’ve played this generation, and the combat is excellent.
You have way more moves and manouvers available to you than in Dark Souls. You’ve got a stamina meter with an active reload mechanic. You have style changing that allows for many more attacks and dodges all at hand at once, each having a different balance between defense, attack and speed. You can swap easily between all these sets of equipment and items. A variety of buffs, magic moves and ninja tricks are available with few upgrades for every build. For the sequel here specifically they’ve added several different Devil Trigger-style super moves as well as an Aria of Sorrow-type soul system where you gain the abilities of enemies. And they’ve tweaked it all so every enemy can kill you easily, but similarly, you can devastate them quickly yourself with only a few attacks. So you’re always on the edge of your seat, your mind racing with all the possibilities at your disposal.
It’s just plain exciting. So far, a very fun game.
Is Sloth Talisman spamming still a thing?
I couldn’t tell you what the meta is like but there’s totally a talisman that slows down enemies in the skill tree here.
Personally I’m basically playing ranged for my cheap stuff. Using the special move you get from the snake boss, the hatchet’s throws, the long-range magic and bombs…
I put on that sweet-looking Miko set and it’s like I’m playing Pocky & Rocky with all the running and gunning I can do.
I have been playing Wolcen… well, until they recently announced to only do bugfixing and balancing for the next few months (which is direly needed) and afterwards, new content would come in the form of seasons where you level a new character from scratch. I hate this approach, level and gear up from scratch every few months to get some FOMO-powered prizes (especially when the game doesn’t have the decency to restrict those prizes to stuff like cosmetic pets – looking at you Diablo 3 that I uninstalled when you started tying bank tab unlock to seasons). So I’ll have to wait and see if there will even be a point to playing the game if I keep playing my main character in the regular game. At best I will be a 2nd class customer and have to wait months before new features and content is unlocked for me, too. At worst, that stuff will never reach the regular game and then that will be yet another promising indie ARPG down the drain.
So for now I put the game on ice until I know how this will all work out.
Besides that, I’ve been playing Warframe, repeatedly thinking somebody ought to make a high fantasy* version of that.
———————
*For some reason, fantasy games recently tend to all go into the steampunk territory to some extent. While I don’t mind that kind of setting, I generally prefer my fantasy without guns and steam-powered robots.
Oh. That… is unfortunate about the seasonal structure. This might literally be the sole reason to knock the game off my wishlist.
I just “finished” Assassin’s Creed Unity this week. I gave my assessment on the last thread like this. I say “finished” because I completed the main quest, but there are tons of side missions that I’m just not going to do. It’s too much.
I’m trying to clear my backlog of things and for some reason decided to finish Mafia II. I had just started Chapter 5 of 15 the last time I played. I’ve been clearing about 2 chapters a night, so I should be done fairly soon. It’s an interesting game. I really like the aesthetic of the city (1940s to early 1950s New York). I believe it’s supposed to be open world, but there really isn’t anything to do except for the missions, so it’s really very linear. It seems like there’s a ton of detail in the city that just goes to waste. Especially if you just follow the GPS to the next location. There’s no discovery.
I had the same feeling about LA Noire. They built this amazing period city, but there really isn’t much to do in it except drive from quest to quest. It’s kind of interesting to explore but it gets boring fairly quickly.
I had to start working from home this week, so this finally gives me an excuse to buy a nice desk and a second monitor, which I’ve wanted to do for a while. I just got an RTX 2060 a few weeks ago, so I’ve been looking at getting a 4K monitor (even though it probably isn’t powerful enough to get a good framerate at 4K)
Mafia II was hit with a fair bit of troubled development, it was originally envisioned as a game much closer to GTA in style and scope, with Vito driving around, doing side missions etc., but when that failed to materialize the developers eventually had to drop all the extra features and just double down on the story. You can see quite a lot of original ideas as half-baked stuff in the game, like how you are introduced to the car scrapyard early and how the game clearly intends for it to be a recurring thing for Vito to deliver cars there for cash or how it introduces a bunch of NPCs that then are barely seen again.
If you look around the internet you can find some of the old interviews with the devs where they talk about all their visions and a few post-mortems on what went wrong. That being said, I think Mafia 2 holds up fairly well if you think of it as nothing more than a linear TPS with a decent story.
I can see that. The gameplay isn’t super sophisticated. Drive from here to there, usually get into a shootout, drive home. It makes sense that there was meant to be a bigger scope that had to be reduced. Even money seems kind of pointless. Like you have to spend a couple of bucks to fix your car (if you even feel like it, you can always steal a new one somewhere). I bought a hot dog from a guy with a cart just for fun. There are gun shops, but I haven’t had to buy any guns.
I am enjoying the story, so it’s worth it to me to finish it. I have some ideas for how it’s going to go (mob stories tend to be pretty similar).
Recently beat The Inner World, a German adventure game. Not much to say about it, though it is good.
Started playing the new season of Path of Exile, but the fan on my video card started acting funny, so I’m currently on integrated graphics while I wait for a replacement fan. It might actually still work, but I’d rather wait a couple days for the new fan to get here.
Started The Journeyman Project 3 while I wait. (Beat the first game back in the day. Tried the second recently, but it hasn’t held up all that well, so I skipped ahead.) It’s interesting so far, though your AI companion cracking jokes while you’re going through a disaster area isn’t the best start to the game.
I Recently replayed JP3 and it feels a lot smaller then I remember and the 3D graphics don’t feel nearly as lifelike as I remember them either. However, I do appreciate how the various places look like you’d expect a city of that time period to look, or at least within the realm of possibility. The big overall plot felt a bit off from the rest of the series and it felt like they were setting up a 4th game that we’re never see.
When I played the demo back in the day, I thought it was using an actual 3D engine. Now, it’s obvious that it’s pre-rendered 3D with video between nodes.
Any relation to The Cave World? Or do German devs just love naming things similarly?
I doubt it.
I’ve been playing Dark Souls 3 and 2 (started a SL1 run on DS2) and as someone who was (and still is) very much in the ‘Dark Souls doesn’t need an easy mode’ camp, I’m coming to the realization that I no longer enjoy them.
With the PS4 coming to the end of its cycle and me not owning one, or really feeling the desire to buy one given the size of my PC backlog, I finally accepted that I’m never going to play Bloodborne and watched a let’s play (Prepare to Try) and just… all the nonsensical, downright unfair stuff in that game, when I was watching the guys stuck on Laurence for 12 hours all I could think was ‘I’m glad that’s not me, I couldn’t imagine anything less fun than smashing my head against that brick wall for an entire day’. It made for great let’s play drama but I don’t think you could make the game look less appealing if you tried. And the story was utterly insane. People have always praised the storytelling of the souls games but backstory and a few hidden clues does not a story make.
One of the things that I’ve always maintained in the endless Dark Souls difficulty discussions is that despite challenge being an integral part of the vision of the game, they exist to be more than difficult. Except now I’m not sure I believe that. Or at least the balance has shifted too much towards prioritising challenge over everything else, rather than using challenge as the cornerstone for everything else. It’s clear that each game is designed with the question of ‘how do I make this still challenging to experienced Soulsborne players?’ at the forefront of developer’s minds. Which is why Dark Souls 2, IMO the last good one, was what it was, and why Bloodborne was what it was, and why Dark Souls 3 was what it was. And why Demon’s Souls is the best of the bunch, because every player came to that game as a blank slate.
I guess it sucks to fall out of love with a game, but to fall out of love with an entire genre is kinda saddening.
The bright side is I’ve been playing Yakuza Zero. I’ve heard people gush about the series before and my only experience was playing a little of Yakuza 3 on the PS3 years ago, and it never really clicked for me. But Zero? I’m like 3 hours in and I’m hooked. Sometimes you need to give a game a chance to click for you, and once it does it’s a great feeling.
Yakuza Zero is great. While I’m normally lukewarm about prequels this is the one time I think it really works as a “zero” chapter for the series. It is perfectly enjoyable without pretty much any knowledge of the franchise (in fact I’d say it benefits from not knowing the events of the first game because you’re not sure which of the characters are relevant later) and it makes the first game better because it really builds up these characters you’re going to encounter. In all honesty, having played the first game after Zero, even the Kiwami edition, it is quite visible that at this point the game didn’t quite find its legs yet, or it was aiming for something different than the series is known for nowadays, and Zero really helped me power through it because I was from the start invested in the characters.
I think a big part of why I feel so much more connected to Zero than I did to 3 was that Kiryu’s younger and more naive. Sure, making the protagonist a rookie is storytelling 101 but it’s one of the things that’s done a lot for a reason: he’s immediately more relatable in Zero than what I assume is the much more experienced character in 3. In 3 Kiryu seemed much more like how Kazama appeared in the opening of Zero: distant, aloof, accomplished, and for lack of a better word, complete. Here he’s got a lot to learn and he knows it. The core of the character – the code he lives by – is very much there, but he’s still rough around the edges both as a Yakuza and as a person.
But I really have just fallen in love with the game. The way the city is realized, sure it lacks a lot of the bells and whistles of GTA (the most obvious comparison), but it feels so much more earnest: so much of GTA’s realism and parody is either juvenile, mean-spirited or both. Whereas Yakuza feels purely like a labour of love. There’s stuff like a genuine story about a dominatrix who needs to learn to be more, or a schoolgirl whose been roped into a ‘burusera’ ring (so, selling used underwear) or a string of muggers who steal a videogame from a kid that are told without judgment and which put the humans of the stories in the spotlight and that’s something that GTA could never, ever do with these subjects, regardless of seriousness or tone. I don’t know who made the game, I’ve never been to Tokyo and I wasn’t even alive in the 80’s and yet I can get this wave of second-hand nostalgia from playing the game and that really is a testament to the amount of soul that went into it.
I will admit I was somewhat surprised to see a green glowing item on the floor, only to interact with it and pick up a card of Emiri Okazaki… I certainly didn’t expect to see her in the game.
Exactly this, Zero does a really good job of showing where Kiryu,
Nishiki and Majimacome from, and the great thing is if you play Zero first that connection carries over.Regarding the city’s feel. You might want to google “Yakuza reviewed by Yakuza” (can’t link it since I’m at work), it’s about the third game and offers some interesting insight into both the city and the characters.
Recently I’ve taken to playing Fallout 4 Survival Mode. It’s been a long time since I played FO4 at all and I figured I’d see how well I can enjoy it if I just remember the story is a lost cause and try to focus on the parts that work.
The settlement building is kind of fun for me, although I’m not really into customizing them; I just like building the most utilitarian structures and seeing how far I can build them up. The only part I really personalize is my apartment in Diamond City, which is currently where I’m keeping bobbleheads and magazines and mannequins dressed in outfits I like.
The biggest problem with this playthrough is that I’m currently stuck on level 17, having dinged 18 6 or 7 times but losing one of those times to an unexpected death and the rest to crashes. I am still awestruck that someone thought “you can’t save” was a reasonable restriction to build into any mode in this game, for real. At the very least it could have given some limited way to save that didn’t involve sleeping given sleeping when you’re not tired is also something that the game punishes in various ways.
Recently I saw a comment on one of the Rage posts where someone summed up this game’s story as “puppy kicking is bad.” Now that I’m looking at it right now (I’m trying to disinterestedly pay attention to the story rather than ignore it completely) I must say that I wish the story thought puppy kicking was bad. Instead it feels like someone heard that moral ambiguity is cool, but they still filled it with puppy kicking while not having the conviction to say “this is bad.” The supreme puppy kickers being The Institute who have essentially no displayed sympathetic motivations but the game stacks the deck by putting previously-sympathetic characters on their side solely to pretend they have a purpose. At least in Fallout 3 they just made the Enclave fanatics and called it a day.
I mean, I don’t love Good/Evil points either, but I doubt anyone would have, say, written a sidequest whose objectives include “you aren’t allowed to turn down the prospect of violently robbing people who commited no crime other than tax evasion” if someone had to decide how the Karma meter would react to that.
Fallout 4 is such a mixed bag
I definitely feel the same way about survival mode. The increased weight and damage are great because they actually get players to make the kind of decisions people would make in a post apocalyptic setting. ‘Do I pick up this or that? How much water do I take with me? Do I sacrifice rads to drink from a dirty puddle, or take the pehnalty of going thirsty?’ The hunger/thirst/fatigue meter was great too, because you couldn’t just endlessly slam stimpaks without consequence. But the game, especially the radiant quest system, is built around frequent trips to and from hubs like Diamond City. You don’t exploire an area, get every quest, and then go out and complete them in one area and return, so to not have fast travel really ruins the experience. I only played suirvival mode because I could mod in fast travel (between settlements) and quicksaves.
And the story has the same problem the ending of Mass Effect 3 has. In Mass Effect 3, the obvious ending choice is control, because you can use the reapers to rebuild and finish off Cerberus and then just command them to self-destruct, saving the Geth and EDI in the process. Ihn Fallout 4, the Institute is clearly the most advanced faction in the Commonwealth and if only they turned their focus to doing good rather than aimless villainy they could save the world. And yet you don’t have that option. No matter who you side with, blowing up the Institute is a nonsensical choice that primarily exists because the game wants a big set piece at the end of the main quest. The choice should have been how you would use the Institute to fix the Commonwealth, not whether or not you’d destroy them.
The fast travel thing doesn’t actually bother me in principle; I’m fine with the idea that I have to prioritize my goals based on distance from where I am and where I want to be, and the time limit for things like rebuffing a raider attack are actually generous enough for me. That said, it really does drive home just how dumb some of the radiant quests are. Like a new settlement will tell you how nervous they are about a feral ghoul dungeon on the other side of the map and I end up thinking, “What, you’re afraid they’ll master tool usage and refurbish a car just so they can drive here and run you over with it?”
That spin on the Institute would indeed help the ending choice, if not everything else. My bigger complaint is that they appear to have no goals at all. I’ve complained that Caesar’s Legion beggared belief at times, but at least Caesar himself was an unrepentant wannabe dictator. The Enclave’s desire to poison the Capital Wasteland was questionable but I could accept that as the Remnants of the US they wanted to take back “their” homeland on principle. The Institute says they’re redefining mankind, but they don’t consider Synths people and they’re also not effective transhumanists (given the way they apparently used
Kelloggto spackle over a plot hole and then pointedly refused to ever explore that technology again)I would definitely be happy to take over their stronghold and do something useful with it, but it would still leave me wondering why they were so reluctant to do anything useful with it.
To me, the entire plot is already failed from the start. There’s no reason why your spouse has to die and honestly your spouse surviving would be both more interesting from a story perspective and in hitting home the importance of the follower/settler system by giving you one from the start.
Instead, you just get wave after wave of immersion-breaking dissonance. I don’t care much about my spouse because I’ve only known them for a few moments,m and I struggle to care at all about Shaun, so when my character supposedly has this raging desire for revenge that I don’t share it just creates an emotional distance between what I feel as a player and what the character of Nate or Nora supposedly feels. If they were going to do the spouse-killing and child abduction, it should have come far later in the game.
So Kellogg just doesn’t work on any level. I don’t hate him as a player because he hasn’t taken anything from me because I never got the chance to develop a sense of attachment to my in-game spouse and child. As a character, his backstory and motivation do make sense but his role in the plot doesn’t because it doesn’t make sense that the institute need Shaun to make synths when we have confirmed syunths made before Fallout 4, or, if they do, why they don’t take everyone from the Vault and instead suffocate everyone but you. And hey, rebuilding society except with that neighbour you can’t stand is even more of an interesting scenario than rebuilding it alone. I suppose that’s what frustrates me most about Fallout 4’s story: not all the ways, big and small, that it doesn’t make sense, but that often doing what would make sense for the story and characters would also lead to better, more interesting gameplay.
It really is perhaps the best example of what Shamus talked about in his recent ‘the Story is the Gameplay’ article. Clearly the concept of a shadowy super-advanced cabal of scientists who infiltrated and controlled the Commonwealth with synthetic doppelgangers and roving squads of robots (and runaway synths) came first, and a compelling reason to why they would do that or to what end came second, which is why it doesn’t really make much sense when you think about it, when New Vegas’ (and I didn’t even play NV) factions made sense because they were simple and realistic: people trying to bring peace and order, one as a warlord and the other as a (albeit imperfect) facsimile of American republicanism and democracy.
Indeed, if I had to name my #1 beef with this game’s story it’s that it’s written as though whoever wrote it didn’t know it was going in an open-world game. Which is pretty crazy given the company and franchise.
This is one of those times someone really could have learned from the first game. In the original Fallout, the leader of the Water Merchants (who you meet after having explored probably about 1/3 of the game’s points of interest) gives one of the strongest clues to the location of the water chip. But she presents it in such a way that she’s not really sure and it’s just an educated guess (while making it crystal clear what that guess is) so the player can decide how seriously and urgently to take the lead. In Fallout 4, we get a psychic, who you meet during the tutorial, who uses her psychic powers to tell you where the next leg of the plot is, and no joke even has a line saying “you don’t need a psychic to see going there is a good idea” (so why did you write one???) and then if you stick around there’s even a followup argument between Murphy and Marcy whose sole purpose is to rub it in that Murphy’s a psychic and her advice is correct. But now go ahead and put that on hold for awhile because “another settlement needs our help.”
Yeah, if there’s one thing that ruins Fallout 4’s story it’s that it’s way to complicated. Survival games tend to work better with very simple objectives diorectly tied to survival: in the case of survival horror, it tends to be ‘escape’, in other games it’s resource acquisition, and in the original Fallout, it was ‘get water’. Of course there’s a lot of room for complications and obstacles but I don’t think a survival game needs to introduce all these abstract concepts. Or, at least if they’re going to, to create
One thing about Fallout 4: I thought the player was going to be a synth. It would make so much make sense: the idyllic memory of just before the war when every lore detail (including the damn opening cinematic which directly precedes that gameplay section – along with the subsequent tonal whiplash) tells us that the world was going to hell in a handbasket before the bombs fell suddenly makes sense if those memories are fake. Or why nobody has discovered the Vault despite Vaults being known as places filled with valuable pre-war tech and it being so close to a pre-existing settlement. Or how a lawyer with no combat training that we know of can handle and maintain a variety of firearms and weaponry. And it would definitely add a new dimension to the player’s view on the Institute, or the Brotherhood. It could change the way characters interact with the player, for better or worse. That ytou aren’t looking for your son because he never existed: you’re instead being tasked with finding the Institute for whatever reason.
As bad as the opening of Fallout 4’s story is, and as completely incongruous the whole thing is with its weird transitions like Mama Murphy, at the very least the motivations of characters still make sense as the game presents them even if they’re not in line with the player’s emotions. Once you get to the Institute things go from sorta not making sense to aggressively not making sense
And yeah, the dissonance between the game mechanics and the story is pretty unforgivable. The game is designed, with its numerous waypoints, environmental details and reward systems to encourage players to vacillate and explore, when the main plot is about finding your lost son, something you obviously would prioritise if it was real. Having not played the isometric games I can’t say how it’s done there but Fallout 3 and 4 never really reconciled the open-world gameplay with the urgency of the main plot which, to me, suggests that problems in the narrative and narrative design run essentially from the top down. They aren’t just bad stories, they’re fundamentally broken.
It’s done there with hard time limits; you get a cutscene every thirty in-game days about the escalating problems back home, and the third or fourth cutscene is “everybody died because you took too long.”
See that makes a lot of sense to me. As much as Shamus hates Mass Effect 2 (perhaps where I disagree with him the most on, well, anything) one thing the game does very well is it makes players work for the ‘best’ ending.
When
the Collectors capture the crew of the Normandy, you have the option to immediately pursue them or to wait until you’re ready. Go too soon, and some of your squad members will die. Take too long, and your captured crew dies instead.There’s a good balance there where the ending isn’t just a dialogue option the player chooses but the result of the way they play the game as a whole.In Fallout 4, maybe the game could have done something similar. What if your relationship with Shaun changes depending on how long you leave trying to find him, or if you have your spouse survive maybe they get antsy if they think you’re not making enough progress and, if you leave it long enough, leave to find Shaun on their own, and iof you leave it too long to pursue them they end up dead.
This is actually another thing I love about FO1. There is a Speech check route through the final boss fight, but it’s not a matter of just showing up with the right stats. You actually need to prove his plan won’t work, which requires evidence found on optional sidequests. I found it far more satisfying than the Hero just “nope”ing the villain off the top of their head. The only other game I can think of that does quite the same thing is Shadowrun: Hong Kong (where you can essentially rules lawyer a demon if you paid enough attention to the lore throughout the game)
I don’t think you’re missing anything when it comes to Fallout 2. It basically starts off as “Fallout 1 except it makes less sense” then expects you to screw around for almost the entire game. There’s seriously an overworld encounter where the final boss walks in front you, shoots some innocents, then doesn’t bother to attack you even though he’d handily win and his employer is highly secretive. If it weren’t for that encounter and the opening cinematic, it would be easy to not even notice the enemy faction even is until the very endgame.
Fallout 1 also had an urgent task (and in the original pre-patch version, a time limit at every stage of the game, which would make it about as bad as searching for your child). I think the difference mostly comes down to how the “quest arrows” are presented. Fallout 1 always either puts you in a position where the most obvious lead is the correct one, without explicitly saying so, or if it does have NPCs drop hints it’s usually in a plausibly deniable way where the player probably knows what’s going on but can roleplay someone who doesn’t without having to be apathetic or a moron. The Water Merchant doesn’t say “I heard there’s a working vault under the Necropolis,” she says, “There has to be some reason the Ghouls aren’t buying my water, so maybe they have some technology of their own.” When the designers wanted to make sure you encountered Super Mutants before turning in the Water Chip, they didn’t involve them in any quests; they just placed a party of named Super Mutants in the Necropolis and designed the town such that you couldn’t not see them. You don’t even have to fight them, you just have to get around them in such a way that your character definitely knows of their existence before speaking with the Overseer. There’s never a quest to go to Shady Sands, but the town is placed in such a location that you can’t not see it. Also, practically nothing is mandatory; the reason the game can be speedran in 10 minutes is because you can just head to two key locations if you know exactly what you’re doing. If you wandered through the rest of the game, it’s partly because you wanted to and partly because you didn’t know where the end was and how to approach it until after all that exploring.
For some mild examples of how I’d apply this to FO4: There wouldn’t be a psychic pointing to Diamond City because that’s unnecessarily heavy-handed for no reason. The player will eventually investigate such an important settlement out of sheer curiosity if nothing else. Just have several characters mention the big settlements, and add map markers when they do (similar to what the game already does for other big locations like Goodneighbor and Vault 81). Maybe also drop a marker if the player listens to Diamond City Radio. If you must have a freaking psychic, have her foreshadow something interesting about the Institute instead of just dropping a quest marker and saying nothing else of note. Make Fort Hagen some sort of Institute safe house and drop some kind of hints in other Synth-heavy locations that the player might stumble upon. Don’t require the involvement of Nick Valentine (with inexplicable plot-wall rubble), but maybe include some way to use the fact that Nick is a synth and/or a detective to track the place down (instead of that whole business with the dog)
The other thing that differentiates the side-quests of FO1 is how sidequests are typically local. You arrive in Junktown, and there are a bunch of quests to do within that town. It takes weeks to cross the wasteland in the overworld map, so spending one or two extra days in Junktown isn’t a big deal. A normal person – even someone in a hurry – would probably spend a little time recuperating before starting a two-week hike to their next destination. You do some quests, improve your gear, learn about the world, get some fresh leads, and as a result you end up doing some sidequests. It all follows naturally.
In Bethesda’s Fallouts, side-quests often have you going huge distances out of your way. I’m supposed to head for Diamond City to find Shaun, but the quests have you assaulting out-of-the-way bandit outposts and travelling to remote villages. These are not jobs you do “along the way”.
It’s funny because Fallout 3 was great at getting players to naturally go to frokm the Vault to Megaton, and Fallout 4 guides players from the Vault to Sanctuary all through environmental design, but then 4 drops the ball massively. Goodneighbour is honestly hard to find even when you’re looking for it, and Diamond City is in no way somewhere you’d logically end up if you followed the paths the game guides you down through level design alone.
Maybe it’s because there are too many locations, or maybe it’s because they’re too tied to recreating Boston rather than creating a version themselves that works as a game environment first but Fallout 4 is perhaps the most dependent on fast travel and quest markers of any game I’ve ever played.
Assuming you don’t care about cheevos (or you don’t mind using the cheevo enabler mod), you should pick up the holotape saving mod. You can find blank holotapes in desks and other containers and they’re one-time-use items that allow you to save wherever you are. It’s a good compromise because it still necessitates some resource management, but it also lets you save on your terms (especially before something like the final room of Automatron, which is a NIGHTMARE on Survival, especially if you leave it too long and have to fight the really high level bots).
I imagined something like that exists. I’m not sure if it exists on XBOX (I got a disc copy of GOTY edition for free, and I’m really not willing to pay for this game, especially if the reason is “I literally can’t play it due to bugs”)
The crashes are likely to end my playthrough for good at this rate; I lost all progress twice today, and in the same area. And then found a bunch of people online who had the same problem, in the same area. Said area is near the Boston Commons/Goodneighbor/Railroad area which obviously cuts off an unacceptable portion of the game if I can’t get this to stop. Funnily enough, the most plausible explanation I’ve seen for the error is that it’s somehow crapping itself when trying to connect to the Creation Club, and that some people have been able to avoid it by disconnecting from the Internet while they play so that the CC can’t log in. If this is true it may be the first time a game was literally ruined by the mere existence of a microtransaction store.
I’m locked in because of Coronavirus, but it has barely changed anything, since I still have to work remotely (and it’s not going very well, I don’t think I’m cut for it) and I’m not even saving on commute time since I live 10 min away from my job. But I’ll have to avoid complaining too much, compared to my sister-in-law, who’s a nurse (and they’re lacking face masks at the hospital, apparently from people hoarding them).
This week I’ve been playing the first Fear expansion, it’s still fun, but the horror sequences are still a drag. The additional stuff is nice (auto turrets, laser gun, mini gun, new environments), but not groundbreaking. The most fun weapon to use is still the rifle with explosive ammo and there’s never enough ammo to go around.
I also went back to Rance 6, I’ve found how to use the cheat engine to avoid having to grind for Friendship, which is part of why I had stopped playing last year. The story is, well, interesting, not necessarily the parts with the main character, Rance, who’s just an enormous egocentric asshole, but the rest of the story, with political intrigue, class warfare a revolution and what happens afterward, all seriously told and I’m finding this more interesting than Rance’s personal story. It’s not the greatest story, but it’s really at odds with how Rance is written, which makes for an interesting combination. The gameplay side of things is still fun, some dungeon crawling, not too complex system-wise, so I can handle it.
I’ve also played a little of an old action aventure called Drakan and man, the resource scarcity is hard in that game, since all equipment pieces can and will break, potions are in a limited supply and there’s no way to buy anything more. But the phases on dragon are fun.
I’m playing Borderlands 3 now that it’s on Steam. This put Pokemon Mystery Dungeon on the backburner, which put Rune Factory 4 on the backburner, which put Subnautica on the backburner….
Current game-on-the-go is Miitopia but I just started it recently.
I myself have been playing Tokyo Xanadu Ex , which is basically an anime distilled into video game form. Yet another JRPG originally released for PSVita that received a later enhanced console port, it’s my introduction to Nihon Falcom and their brand of making surprisingly good action RPG’s on a budget. After having played Caligula Effect: Overdose and Crystar last year, preceded by Akiba’s Beat and Akiba’s Trip in 2017, I’m pretty shocked at the level of quality present in the game.
That said, I’m still feeling it wear on me a bit. I tend to play games with a semi-completionist approach, and while I acknowledged the impossibility of that in terms of the “social affinities” within this game, I screwed up by forgetting to hand in a quest before closing out a chapter. So I can do no more than 99% of all side quests, basically. There’s a degree of formula to the game as well, with “social exploration/shopping” that can take several hours to progress through before that chapter’s story arc kicks in. It’s largely why I’ve continually checked the play clock and been shocked to see just how much it has advanced. 10 hours became 24, became 34, and now I’m past the 40 hour mark.
It’s about all I’ve been playing, though, and now that the coronavirus situation has robbed me of a coffee shop to sit down at and get work done in peace, concentration at home becoming a major obstacle, I’m probably going to keep pumping more and more hours into it. The advantage to long, 40 hour games is that, by time they’re finished, you’ve spent enough time with them it’s a lot easier to write a coherent piece on it than 10-12 hour games where you know your verdict, but not so much the reasons behind your feelings.
In regards to upcoming games: I’ve got Persona 5 Royal, Resident Evil 3 Remake, and Final Fantasy VII Remake all pre-ordered digitally. The RE3 demo lands on the 19th, so that ought to be a fun little peek into the game. I’ve already played the FF7 Remake demo, and while it has confirmed that they’re totally going to George Lucas the crap out of the story, I’m a big fan of the combat. There’s plenty of other games I’m interested in, such as Sakura Wars, Trials of Mana, and Gears Tactics, but I need to see how much time I have available first with my guaranteed purchases.
I’ve been on an I, Claudius kick lately, so of course I had to look up the game. Goodness. Trapped forever in an “ideal” virtual high-school. How very, very . . . anime. Wow. Not sure what the title has to do with the content of the game, though. Emperor Caligula certainly doesn’t seem to be involved in any way.
Fun history fact: Caligula was Emperor Caligula’s childhood nickname. It means “little boots”, and was given to him by his father’s soldiers. Despite what I, Claudius would have you believe, nobody called Emperor Caligula that where he could hear them.
From wikipedia:
—
And, yeah, the vast majority of Emperors never went by what we call them. Especially given the tendency to recycle names… like half of the Roman Emperor’s actual first names were “Marcus”.
Yeah, the game’s director/writer was a psych major and sought out to make the Anti-Persona in terms of narrative. Rather than a group of people that come together and become best of friends, they’re only operating together because of a common goal and don’t necessarily even like one another. Overdose is a console enhancement of the Vita game and introduces gameplay with the antagonists as well, and makes it a bit more of an interesting game story-wise.
The director/writer also noticed how JRPGs are all about killing God, and in modern Japanese society there’s nothing worshipped as an idol more than Hatsune Miku, so he decided he’d make a game where you kill Hatsune Miku.
Unfortunately the narrative and writing is far more interesting than the gameplay, though it didn’t need to be that way. On Hard Mode, if you battle a group of enemies then things can get really interesting. But most of the time you’ll only be fighting one or two foes tops in over-long dungeons. So it’s one of those games that I’m glad I played but struggle to figure out if I’ll ever play again.
I always thought the name was an incest reference! This is much better.
Going to start by coming out clean and admitting I went back to Destiny 2, the previous season was ending and I thought “eh, might drop by to get those last couple ranks to 100 just so I don’t regret missing them if I decide to come back”, then of course the new season started and “well might as well see what the new grind is about”… I still consider myself a fairly casual player with my goals for a season being basically “get to season rank 100” (fairly easy if you do even just some of the weeklies) and “do story quests that do not require high level raiding”.
I started Nier: Automata, at around 10-12 hours I didn’t get too far in the game because I got hopelessly distracted by sidequests. I’ve very purposefully avoided spoilers but from what I know I have high hopes the game is going to get all sorts of weird in that typically anime way, so far I dig a lot of the visuals and audio (oooh, that funfair background track) and the combat is getting much more enjoyable as I’m getting the hang of it and getting chips that are actually useful.
Finished Project Warlock, got it from Humble Choice and thought it could be fun to play when I was not playing Destiny 2. Didn’t really scratch the same itch but I think it achieves what it sets out to achieve, which is being a very oldschool shooter. The floaty movement and combat style definitely harken back to the original DOOM but someone put a rudimentary experience stat/perk and upgrade system on top of it and the visuals are even more stylised than Doom to the point where they might not be everybody’s cup of tea and I think maybe it was just a touch too simplified for me and my preference probably falls somewhere closer to the Blood/Duke3d variety in level design.
I’ve just finished The Return of Obra Dinn – it sucked me in so hard I did it in two seatings, and fell a bit behind in my reading schedule. It’s a really amazing game. I like the artstyle even though I’m not much of a retro gaming fan, and I think that it’s the first game that really made me feel like I’m doing detective work instead of pretending I do (and I don’t even realy like detective fiction). Maybe my feelings will mellow out with time, but for now it earned a place on my GOAT list.
I’m also interested in reading more of Shamus’ thoughts on Thief Simulator – I’m on the fence with this game. On the one hand I always like a good stealth/sneaking game, and stealing stuff is always the best part of it (like easily my favourite bit in Dishonored), but on the other I really don’t like the artstyle, which reminds me of those weird plasticky looking games from the late 90s.
Well, then you’re doing it right! Every thief needs to have a good fence!
Ba-dum-tsss…
I’m still playing Pumpkin Days. Apparently I’ve sunk well over 100 hours into it so far. For a ‘still in Early Access’ game, that’s gotta say something. Or I’m easily amused. One of those.
Wallpaper Engine looks really neat! Any chance you’re going to be writing a procedural city generator in Unity that is compatible with it?
Thief Simulator looks cool! I still didn’t get around to play much of Thief 2 and 3, though. One weird thing about the graphics in the first two Thief games is that … I don’t dislike them as much as I normally dislike old 3d graphics. Probably it’s because, due to technical limitations, they couldn’t drive as far into the uncanny valley as they wanted.
I’ve been playing a lot of Star Realms online lately. My favorite deckbuilding game! (Even though I’m just coming off a massive losing streak right now.)
Because of reasons, I also remembered that I got Pandemic from a HumbleBundle, I already forgot how long ago, and never played it. It’s a cooperative board game and the digital version is intended to be played in couch-coop. I played the whole team and it was a bit dull, but that’s not the intended experience, so I can’t really complain.
What I can complain about is the nonsensical tutorial that doesn’t explain basic things and actually has DIAS (do it again, stupid!) gameplay. In the tutorial! The decks aren’t randomized for the tutorial and I could only beat it after memorizing the cards. The UI assumes that, because I have an XBox controller plugged in, I must want to use it and displays the button prompts everywhere, and I saw no option to disable it. The mouse still worked which is good because the controller is plugged into the back of my computer and I don’t want to crawl under my desk. To say some nice things, it has good music and it has a bit of a futuristic style; no cyberlimbs or space ships or anything crazy but those strange translucent blue touchscreens that are somehow projected into thin air. I like those!
Still hung up the final boss of Sekiro, due to not having much gaming time this past few weeks, at least not enough to really get
Sword Saintdown enough to take him down.In the meantime, I’ve been working Divinity Original Sin 2 because I can pretty much pick up and drop that when I need to. The plot is ok so far(I just reached Driftwood) but the origin story thing and being able to spec any character for anything is pretty cool. I also kinda like the combat system being heavily tied into the environment.
The downside is that juggling the inventory feels like it takes a lot more time then it really should and I’ve spent more time deciding where to put my points upon leveling up then I probably need to(because I just recently realized I can respec with the mirror).
Right, forgot about D:OS2 because I’m playing it with a friend and we don’t have much free time in sync so it’s been going slow, basically a couple hours a week. I love it to bits, even if there are some slight caveats. The origin characters are interesting and have a bunch of special dialogues (and there’s an option to play a blank slate character if you want to which is probably good for multiple playthroughs), combat is fun*, the world is quite big with a bunch of little touches hidden in different corners**… I’ve said it before, I don’t much care for a third Baldur’s Gate title but I am stoked for another game from Larian.
Also, depending on whether you care or not about achievements, there is a bunch of options in the “gift bag” menu some of which will really improve your quality of life, like faster running outside of combat or permanent spirit vision, Among those is a set of actual bags marked with different item icons (books, quest items, arrows, food etc.) that if you right click on them and pick the “pack” option they just suck in all items of a given type from that character’s inventory so that might help your sorting woes. I’m lucky in that the friend I play with happens to enjoy crafting systems AND handles our archer/rogue so I basically send all the crafting components, arrows and most grenades and scrolls to him.
*if occasionally plain unfair if you don’t know what you’re getting into ahead of time.
**if perhaps a touch too open, we’ve been backtracking a lot, to be fair it’s quick and easy thanks to the teleportation system but there are quests we literally forget between our play sessions.
I’ve been trying to work through games before starting anything new, so…
I’m still playing Dragon Quest Builders 2. One little quality-of-life addition I love is that when you start placing blocks off of a surface, the game will remember what you’re doing and let you keep adding onto that side. So if I’m building a wall, I can just build up the ends (by looking at the ground and pressing the button a few times without having to move the camera or jump onto the blocks) and then look at the sides and start pressing the button and it’ll just place blocks off of that face.
It’s still a very well-crafted game with a lot of care put into it, and even some nice environmental storytelling that goes unspoken but was definitely noticed by me. Still the best thing done with the Minecraft formula.
On stuff that I hadn’t finished, Kirby: Star Allies for a few stages. Enough to remember that Suplex is in this game and Suplex is probably the best Kirby power. Yeah yeah yeah “but Spark” well you know what Spark doesn’t let you suplex a baddie all the way across the screen.
Warframe. It has 3 major advantages: 1.) that each mission is short, and often of timed duration. Knowing that I can stop playing in 10 minutes is really helpful. 2.) The load times are really short, so i don’t get interrupted before I can even start. 3.) I have friends that play it.
Thank you for suggesting it back in the day, even though you didn’t like it very much.
Well, this is going to be an odd list, because it’s going to be a rundown of the whole family’s gaming habits. Starting with myself, I’m playing Alien Shooter: Galaxy Attack (a freemium mobile game), Pokemon Shuffle, the 3D remake of Final Fantasy IV, and I recently finished Epic Battle Fantasy 5 and the remake of Link’s Awakening. My wife is playing the demo of Final Fantasy 7 Remake and the HD version of Final Fantasy 8. While my son is playing the original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II on the NES mini, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, and probably some Minecraft. Lastly, my son and I are playing a co-op game of Super Mario Brothers 3, in which we battle one another after every stage, and whoever wins plays the next stage. In the near future, my wife will be playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, along with the FF7 Remake, and she’s trying to talk me into playing Nier: Automata.
Well, I finished New Vegas last week. I’m really glad Shamus guilted me into firing the game back up. I loved the fact that I strolled through the endgame with a Stealth Boy and ended the battle with a big slice of Conversation Pie. It really took me by surprise that I could completely circumvent the final-area slog.
I was going to start the DLC, or maybe look for someone to play Monster Hunter or Dark Souls II with on PS+. Then coronavirus measures kept increasing in intensity, and it looks like I’ll need every waking moment turning my face-to-face classes into online classes. I know it could be worse, but it still feels lousy.
If you like sneaking around and bypassing fights with stealth and skills then you’ll like Dead Money.
Lonesome Road and Honest Hearts are great for exploration but the DLCs can get a little bit on the “tough” end in a few spots as well.
I mean, I can fight; I just prefer not to do so when possible. My tag skills were Sneak, Speech, and Guns. I also beefed up my Explosives skill when I first encountered the level-jacked Legion assassins.
It probably won’t matter for a while, though, as I don’t have the patience for much more than waffle-stomping monsters in Diablo III after a day of work.
Trying this again after killing the tab and reloading the page in a new one since it attached to another comment.
I finished Duke3D, which was decent? General shooting gameplay is good, except at long range where things seem to stop registering properly on unactivated enemies. Getting levels that could look like actual things was a huge step up from what came before but overall it’s very “Build” in feel. The enemy variety was a step down from doom 2 and like other build games the most deadly thing around is groups of hitscanners. It tends to promote strong cover (or indirect fire) based approaches on higher difficulties as leaving cover chips you with unavoidable damage. It also makes the devastator (late game rocket spam weapon) terrible vs battlelords since they can win the dps race and the standard launcher or shrinker are better for peeking. I reserved it for killing octobrains quickly (which it one hits for some reason as a rapid fire weapon) because the noise they make is just awful.
I played through Scythe for Doom, which is a collection of shorter maps intended to be more difficult. It was great until the last episode where a few levels (map 26 in particular) turned into pure slaughter maps I just ran through. I got to the final level and just couldn’t be bothered grinding it out, 500+ enemy levels aren’t what I’m looking for.
I started Ancient Aliens, which was released in 2016. Doom modding just keeps on trucking. The palette changes make it feel very different, lots of purple. I don’t know if I’ll continue though, “traps” are astoundingly frequent. Any time you do something important the best thing to do is turn around and see what’s trying to kill you now. Spawning multiple revenants behind me when I press a switch or get a key gets old fast and changing that to multiple archviles in later levels isn’t helping.
I’ve found myself in an odd nexus of survival-crafting games.
On YouTube, a guy I follow has started into a Rust server. I’d never known anything about Rust except for memes and hearsay. From what I’ve now seen, I’m starting to think this is what FO76 was meant to be the big budget version of. Its quasi-realism makes it very strange and uncanny to me. All traces of civilization are in ruins for seemingly no reason, as though everyone suddenly dropped what they were doing and fled on foot. Everyone and everything is mindlessly hostile. Supplying yourself to stay alive depends not on planning and cooperation, but on looting ruins for preserved food and spare parts. There’s some kind of arcane device called a “recycler” that turns scrap into useful materials, something I’d only heard of previously in Startopia. The video maker at one point made sure to feed their horse a pile of cactus bits so it wouldn’t die of starvation after parking it in the middle of a meadow.
On Twitch, I’ve been watching Armco community streamers playing Atlas. The game launched remarkably poorly, but it seems this community overcame any challenges by closely managing their own server. Last night, I watched one of the leaders, W4stedspace, humbly sailing around the various player-held islands of their world in search of trading partners. Despite having pretty much the same unchecked pvp rules as the aforementioned Rust server, this Atlas world seemed full of friendly people having a grand old time working and trading together. It’s the first time one of these games looked to me like something a well adjusted person would enjoy doing.
I myself have been exploring the latest iterations of the mechanics of Empyrion: Galactic Survival. I’ve been sussing out efficient design ideas in contrast to the prevailing attitude that every ship needs to be either the Last Starfighter or the Death Star. I discovered a video by a YT channel called Military History Visualized about WW2 naval ship classifications to know what to call my latest ship design (light cruiser, as it turns out). It ended up being something of a game breaker having a large shielded cannon platform hover over a fortress, blast apart all the defense turrets, and knock out the generators before strolling in to loot the place.
All this got me thinking about crafting, manufacturing, logistics, and economies in games. Crafting systems are very familiar. We’re used to getting by with found weapons, picking up scrap items and rare materials so we can make the infinity-plus-one rifle or ultimate ship upgrade when we get back home. What’s very strange is how all this is turned on its head in multiplayer when you start scaling up. There’s a strange changeover point somewhere, when you stop needing The Best and start simply needing Enough. Sure, you can equip a single player easily with the best stuff. What about five? Ten? Fifty? What hope exactly does the ultimate doom ship have against a fleet of more modest vessels made from the same cost in mining time? Is the super sniper with the custom elite anti-materiel rifle really of any use against a platoon of guys with outsourced Kalashnikovs? I think this may be the real crux of these persistent survival-crafting games’ appeal as virtual communities. It’s that team aspect that turns mundane tools into something special. It’s not just some crappy vendor loot saber. It’s one of the sabers FatBob87 made for us to deal with naked griefers and animal attacks. It’s not just passable armor you found on a dead bandit. It’s the breastplate we all wore when we barely held off a raid by that rival community until the siege timer ran out. It’s not just a low tier space fighter. It’s the miraculously decent design we cobbled together because we still needed an interceptor after losing access to our cobalt source planet early that season. These mundane things become special because of the work different people put into them. Compared to that, some golf club that causes bleeds because it dropped off a bog beast with a star next to its name just seems utterly disposable.
I used to think unstructured pvp was just a lame excuse to gank people. Now I suspect the gankers and I may have both been missing the point.
Good Robot on Linux… I was playing round with Steam and Proton and decided to try Good Robot and it worked flawlessly on Ubuntu.
I think I might actually be addicted to Noita at this point. I’m obsessively checking for new mods every day, I’ve started looking into modding myself, I just got the new Stellaris expansion and want to try it out, and still I find myself firing up Noita and delving into another run to see what insanely awesome wand I can cobble together from the randomly-placed spells in the wand-making mini-programming language and what interesting interactions I can get between the game’s physics and the many perks and spells you can get (especially with mods). My last run I created a safety wand that would teleport me back after a few seconds into a simultaneous healing field and another field which turned all projectiles into harmless critters, and then a wand that cast multiple homing clouds of slimy mist with damage fields attached which phased through walls to kill enemies.
Basically, get the right combination of spells, and Noita is the closest experience you can get to being Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy and it is amazing.
Well, I will be playing Phantasy Star Online 2 when it is done downloading
Main Assambly is out in a month from now, until then I have Yakuza 5 and the latest update of the diasappointment engine to care about – with a tiny bit of Sea of Thieves and Anthem.
That’s a funny way to put it. I realize this kind of game is more popular in mobile, but I figured the reason they’re called “Clickers” is that they expect you to use a mouse. They did start as flash games on the PC, after all.
Clickers rarely “click” with me (tee hee). I find them fun for a couple of hours and then the charm is entirely gone. There comes a point where they become too uninvolved for me to keep caring about them.
I also have Wallpaper Engine. There are even some full movies in there. That’s going to be causing trouble if not properly regulated.
Anyway. Currently I’m playing yet again through Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I’m trying to get all the achievements. I finally got through the hardest one, Factory Zero, which is playing through the entirety of The Missing Link without any augmentations or weapons, so I’m pretty much golden. Last time I played the game I tried it but didn’t get it, and it turns out merely taking a gun out with the fire button, even if you don’t actually fire it, counts as using it, so one of those moments I accidentally pulled a gun out killed my chance. As it turns out, though, I just realized I’m missing one achievement from the middle of the game, so another playthrough will be in order later. Not that I complain, I love the game.
I’m also playing Resident Evil 2 in preparation for the sequel. I know you don’t care about this franchise, but hey, it’s not like I’m gonna be a Dark Souls style fanboy about it.
I’m playing (surprise!) DDO until New World comes out. I think I’ve finally figured out the new Alchemist class well enough that I’m enjoying playing it.
I’ve been playing Darkest Dungeon on my tablet, which is really surprisingly good. On the easy (“Radiant”) difficulty its not that punishing (which was why I never played it before) and its pacing suits a tablet very well. Also, of course, its basically 50% party management and 50% turn-based combat so that fits pretty well with what I like in RPGs.
I’m also gradually replaying Kentucky Route Zero, prompted by the recent(ish) release of the final Act; I’ve just finished replaying Act IV which is my favourite (so far, at least). It really is a thoroughly brilliant game which I’d encourage anyone to try if they don’t mind reading text. Some of its sequences are among my best gaming memories, and its one of those rare games that really does subtlety and does it extremely well – characters do not just tell you what they’re feeling and you are rewarded for intuiting things.
I had a rant about Darkest Dungeon that got ate- short version is that with the power of mods there are enough classes the game is way better, but the endgame is still bogus and everything takes forever. It is a fantastic engine of carefully assembling for, preparing, and executing dangerous dungeon delves, which it turns out is not an occupation that respects one’s time.
So what am I probably going to move to next? Oh hey, Stellaris has a new expansion which I’m going to buy even though I won’t stop complaining about how much money that game has sunk and how I don’t like the endgame. . .
Been playing Alien Isolation, only this time, it’s on the Switch! It is genuinely astounding how good this game looks on the hardware it’s running on. Apparently there’s some graphical concessions that have been made, but I sure as hell didn’t see ’em! This is all the more impressive considering how consistent it keeps its framerate. The only real concessions I could see to the game at all was the slightly longer load times, but for the loading screens and delays when approaching a door.
…and the input lag.
Upon first starting up the game, the first thing to immediately become apparent was some severe input lag. I could nudge the stick and let go of it before the actual input was registered on screen. It was so bad, I was afraid I’d gotten a bugged game, however a quick search made it clear that not only is this a known issue, it’s so well known, the developers responded personally to say they won’t be fixing it. Apparently, in order to avoid screen tearing, the developers included triple buffering in the rendering pipeline, which causes the lag and have determined that to be an acceptable sacrifice. I guess its not an issue for most people, but having grown up on PC Master Race mouse inputs, it’s…well, it was an adjustment.
But adjust I did and it’s not too much an issue since snap movements are typically to be avoided in the first place, however it does still become an issue when the game asks for a bit more finesse, such as centering your view on an elevator button while under…ahem…duress, or especially during it’s more precise hacking mini-games.
I ran Wallpaper Engine for a bit, then *something* happened that made me wonder, “How sandboxed is this? Is this just a vector for running arbitrary, unscanned code on my system?” *delete*
Paranoia? Justifiable?
I have the same questions myself.
What makes it more risky than running a game with mods?
Like pretty much always I’ve been playing sryth. Its a choose your own adventure book purely text base rpg.
I’ve also been playing Dragon Quest 11, It like Main line dragon quest game always are. It wins points from we for all the monsters in the bestiary having little descriptions.
As for future games I’m find the Trails of Mana remake a lot more exciting to me then the FF7 one. 1. it actually a full game. 2. I won’t have to buy a new console to play it 3. Since I’ve played it off the grid a lot when it was only available fan translated and emulated exactly buying it seems fair now the options is there. 4. Its crazy replayable.
Trials of Mana demo just dropped!
I’ve only been waiting for this since the Snes…
I’m on my second playthrough of A Short Hike, which is balm in these times of high anxiety. The cartoon visuals, simple art style, and conflict-free gameplay remind me of GameCube favorites like Animal Crossing or Windwaker, and the soundtrack is just perfect. Got it free on the Epic Store, but it totally would have worth whatever it’s nominal price is, just for the calming effect it has had.
Playing a new survival craft game with a buddy called Eco. It’s a game where you try to run and preserve a world together. It actually manages to reinforce these themes and there’s a real, almost Civilization style progress through it. So far It’s definitely a lot better one of these than expected. If you want a less combat focused version of a Rust or a 7 Days to Die, do check it out :)
I just started playing Wasteland 2, which I somehow have 2 copies of from 2 different companies giving it away. I’m playing the Director’s Cut I got from GOG.
Really enjoying the game and it’s scratching that X-COM/Fallout itch. I’m nearly done with the first mission and I’m impressed with how the combat and story play. The sense of humor is also pretty good. My only complaint is the camera stutters to follow my squad when it’s pulled out past a certain point, but that’s not too big of a deal.
I am still stuck in my first Fallout: New Vegas playtrough. I have beaten the base game and I am now playing the DLC in chonological order. Just started Old World Blues.
But I am getting a bit fatiqued with the game now. I think I will start up Europa Barbarorum again. It is a mod for Medieval II: Total War that totally converts the game to ancient times. The aim is historical realism from 272 BC to 14AD. It is awesome. Historically informed performances lf ancient music while your Celtic warriors ambush a Roman army and sent them of screaming ‘ite!’. Back to the campaign map and each building has a historically researched description. Each faction is a history lesson, the music is great and the gameplay is very enjoyable.
I’ve been playing Pathfinder Kingmaker since I kinda want to actually finish it before the expansion/sequel Wrath of the Righteous and got pleasantly surprised at the truckload of quality-of-life stuff they’ve added (like the disclaimer in item descriptions that tell you where you got them, which is surprisingly useful, new view modes on the map so you actually know the borders of your realm, etc…)
But the thing that helped the most getting back into it was the Turn Based mod. What burned me the first time was that battles were starting to get too chaotic as you had to babysit every single character through every action, unpausing in slow motions for half a second, and then reassessing the whole thing again. It also got a few original mechanics back like surprise hounds (though sometimes you can initiate combat and be surprised? How does that work?). It just increased my enjoyment of the game 500% and I wonder why can’t these CRPG leave real time with pause or turn based as a toggle. I mean, Might & Magic figured this out over two decades ago with its first quasi-3D titles.
The second is Total War: Rome 2. Finished the Rome campaign and started an Athenian one. Then, 50 turns into the Athenian One, I discover I was leaving my most profitable AND most food-producing province not paying taxes because 30 turns ago it was eating too much food… (when you waive taxes in a province it neutralizes food completely, either if you’re producing it or losing it, while not collecting any money). It was probably a hundred thousand gold lost… but heck, now I noticed it and can actually recruit more people for my two lonesome armies.
I tried Grim Clicker. Here are my thoughts:
THE GOOD
Clicker games are really addictive (to me at least) because you get a lot of rewards and progress for not a lot of work, and Grim Clicker has an added element of experimentation. There are three skill trees (Strength focuses on raw damage, Agility focuses on chaining critical hits and getting extra bonuses from doing so, Wisdom focuses on magic) but you can only see the text for an ability on the tree AFTER you’ve reached the pre-requisite rank in the skill. For example, I can’t read the text for Fire Sword to know what it does until I upgrade my Strength to 9. While this isn’t great game design, it does lend to a lot of trial and error of combining different comps to see which effects play well together.
There’s also a pretty deep system of upgrading weapons with both raw materials to give straight bonuses as well as charms to give them unique effects (e.g. “gain 2 mana anytime you kill an enemy”), a variety of upgrades you can buy with both black wax (which you gain by killing bosses and then resurrecting) and purple shards (which you gain for completing quests and buying them for real money,) plus a few other systems. It’s fun to play around with different combinations to see what works.
THE BAD
The game clearly was not written by native English speakers, which hurts something with so many interlocking systems. Many mechanics are poorly explained if at all. The skill Wind King’s Mask claims that it gives you “twenty times faster progress on the soul bar” which sounds good, except that what the “soul bar” is, I had no idea. I couldn’t find it anywhere on the interface. Turns out it’s a system where you can have effects occur automatically when a meter fills (such as generating some money or clicking once.) This makes that bar fill much faster.
Skill trees are completely fucked. It costs 1 to increase Strength to Rank 1, 2 to Rank 2, 3 to Rank 3, and so on. Pretty reasonable, except there are skills at Rank 10, 12, 15… and you gain 3 points every time you level up. The benefits you get for increasing Strength, Agility, or Wisdom are pretty much negligible- it’s the skills you unlock that you’re after. But for the most part, you’ll only want to use the handful of skills that are unlocked at the lower ranks of the three trees, because it’s prohibitively expensive to get the rest. Your options are much more limited than these giant skill trees make it seem at first.
THE UNFORGIVABLE
At a certain point in the game, I beat a boss and was told that I had unlocked additional “galaxies”. Great. I hopped into Galaxy 2 to find… I had lost basically everything.
The Black Wax I was hoarding to buy a coveted upgrade? All gone. All the upgrades I had already purchased with Black Wax, such as 10x damage and 10x experience? Also gone, and with it most of my character’s overall power. My skills and weapons were reset as though I had resurrected, but other than the weapons I had picked up over time (not very many, you don’t get a lot of weapons and the ones you do get are mostly trash only fit to break down into raw materials) I had lost all markers of progress. The game “rewarded” me by erasing all of my hard work to make my character stronger.
As I watched my character slowed to a crawl fighting the same pathetic enemies he had fought when I first opened the game, I closed it in disgust. I don’t know if I’ll open it again. It’s still in early access, so I’ll give it a look in ~6 months.
I’ve been playing Stellaris: Federations, because I do really enjoy the game, and I’m having fun trying to subvert the democratic systems of my chosen Federation and the Galactic Community to suit my own tastes. I really want to be able to sit back at the end of the day at some point and say “I am the Senate!” (I made a play at making my seat on the Galactic Council permanent earlier today, but I didn’t have the influence I needed to pull it off. Got too impatient.
I tried out Thief Simulator since it was on sale, and it’s fun. I’m seeing a lot of hilarious situations, like the cops getting called to the same house every hour as I get spotted tossing a giant screen TV out a back window of the 2nd story over the fence so I can grab it later before jumping into the closet to hide again, only to emerge once they leave to grab the stereo and do the same.
There is a bit of grinding though, to progress the story missions you need to go back and rob the same places over and over, although your approach changes as you get new skills and tools (no longer hopping a fence because you can pick the front door for example).
I haven’t seen anyone mention it yet (I’ve not real all 190+ comments but a quick search yielded no results), but since Shamus played Thief Simulator I feel obligated to tell y’all about The Dark Mod: It’s a fan project in the Doom 3 engine and it’s basically old school Thief with 2004-ish graphics. It’s not a campaign but instead a bunch of stand alone levels you can play. As the name suggests it started out as a Doom 3 mod but since the engine is now public domain they released it as a stand alone project. I was never a Thief fan in the 90’s and I haven’t caught up on them yet so I can’t tell you how good The Dark Mod is in comparison. But I can tell you that it is much better than that attempted reboot / re-imagining / sequel / whatever they tried to do in 2014. It’s easy to find. Just google “the dark mod”.
Since I’m here I might as well tell you what I have actually been playing. Since I’m visiting a week from the future (it terms of this article’s publishing date) I can mention Doom Eternal, but everyone seems to be playing that now so I’ve got nothing to add to the current hype. While we’re talking about Doom, I’ve recently played Pirate Doom, a total conversion mod for the original Doom II. As You may gather from the title you play as a pirate. It was fun. If “Doom but Pirates” sounds fun to you, give it a try, it’s free.
Other than that, I have a game of Legend Of Grimrock II that’s close to the end. If you’ve never heard about it: Legend Of Grimrock was an old school tile based dungeon crawler like Eye Of The Beholder or Dungeon Hack. I claim that LoG2 is better than the first in every way. I recommend it. If you have heard of it, I’m playing with 4 ratlings for all the mutations and I’m about to enter castle nex.
I’ve also just picked up Stellaris for cheap on GOG (the spring sale is still going on until 30 March). Well, I say cheap but with all the DLC I picked up alongside the base game that’s not really true. Because I’ve just started out I’m still really bad at it. But it scratches that Master Of Orion 4X itch – but this time it’s real time with pause and that works surprisingly well. From what I’ve heard Paradox really does a lot of patching and adds in tons of features for free every time a new major DLC is released. So far the game looks really good.
My favorite clicker game is Progress Quest. You almost never need to actually click.