T w e n t y S i d e d
It’s funny that this series wound up being called “This week”, since they’re not even monthly. I could go back and change the branding, but… nah. “This Fiscal Quarter I Played…” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
So here’s what I’ve been playing since the last one of these…
7 Billion Humans
I needed some footage for the next video, and Tomorrow Corporation‘s 7 Billion Humans seemed like a thematically appropriate game to use. I fired it up and got the requisite half hour of footage, but along the way I realized that I’d forgotten just how good this 2018 game is.
Also, I went to see what I’d written about it previously, and discovered I’d left this game off of my “Best of 2018” list. Outrageous! This thing is a gem! What sort of dim-witted hack is running this site? Whoever it is, they have no taste!
If you missed it, this is a game about coding.
A lot of the early attempts to teach programming (like the BASIC programming language) were just regular programming languages, except designed to be a little more readable. But 7 Billion Humans has you directing a group of employees around the room using simple movement commands and some basic flow control tools.
This game teaches a lot of core concepts:
- Variables: Store information in a variable, perform arithmetic on that information, and retrieve that information later.
- Branching logic: If (some condition) is true, do A. If not, do B.
- Program flow: Control which operations are performed next.
- Each employee executes the instructions on their own, independent of what the others are doing. This gives the player a really basic view of threads and multi-core processing, which are tricky concepts that didn’t even exist when I was a kid.
Best of all, it does all of this within a drag-and-drop interface where there’s no such thing as a syntax errorA syntax error is when the compiler can’t make sense of your code because you spelled something wrong, used incorrect punctuation, or offered information in the wrong order.. That’s important because syntax errors are often the most exasperating problems that newbies have to tangle with. It can often be demoralizing to have the computer repeatedly reject your commands for reasons you don’t understand. The setup in 7BH allows you to jump right to the programming without needing to spend an hour slamming your head into confusing and unhelpful error messages. This allows you to learn “programming” without needing to first learn syntax.
The game also teaches some really advanced concepts. Most puzzles have bonus goals. You can try to figure out how to solve the problem in the fewest lines of code, or how to solve it in the fewest cycles. This maps to important ideas like memory usage vs. execution speed, and why the two are often a tradeoff.
Fall Guys
Back in August, I was really into watching people play Fall Guys. If you missed this craze, it goes something like this:
This is a battle royale game, except it’s about traversal instead of overtly killing each other. You’re placed into a game with about 60 other people, and you all have to run an obstacle course. The characters are all short and stubby and graceless. Imagine a field of Ewoks trying to run a slapstick obstacle course while wearing ungainly mascot costumes, and you’ve got the basic idea.
Each round is designed to cull the herd. Like, the round ends when 50% of the people cross the finish line, and everyone else is eliminated.
I loved watching highlight reels on YouTube. It looked like fun. What I didn’t realize is just how much these videos were edited down. There’s a lot of flow-breaking downtime in the game. I’m willing to bet you spend half your time idle, either waiting for other people to finish the course, or sitting at the results screen, or waiting for everyone to load into the next level.
While it’s delightful to watch, the downtime was a huge killjoy for me.
I obviously wasn’t very good. I was new to the game, and I’ve never been any good at platformers. So what would happen is I’d play for 30 seconds and get eliminated. Then I’d have to shoulder my way through the results screen and some other nonsense to get back to the main menu. Then wait to get placed in another game. Then wait for that game to fill up, then wait for everyone to load in the first map. Then I’d get another 30 seconds of action before I got sent back through the wait-o-tron. In the end, it felt like I was playing a game with 30 second levels and minute-long loading screens.
I’m not saying it’s badly designed. Matchmaking on this scale takes time. But I don’t enjoy the waiting around, particularly after I’ve failed and I’m eager to get back on the horse. This is a brilliant and charming game, but it’s not for people with my temperament. I need to stick to watching highlight reels on YouTube.
Despotism 3k
I love the premise of this game. You’re basically Skynet. You’re a rogue AI that wants to kill all humans. But you also need humans to run in the giant hamster wheel to supply you with electricity. So you need to feed them and breed them, giving them rest when their endurance runs low.
That sounds like a fun strategy /. management game. Unfortunately, that’s not really the game. The REAL game is the popup choices you get every X days. These usually take the form of, “Oh no, [thing] has gone wrong, how should we handle it?”
The problem is that these choices have objectively right/wrong answers, and there’s no way to know or intuit the correct answer.
- Many of them are cringy pop-culture references. Maybe a random guy will wander in, and you can tell by his description that he’s (say) Wolverine / Indiana Jones / The Terminator / ShredderNinja Turtles. or whatever. You’ll get some possible responses. Sometimes one option will indicate you get the reference, and that’s the one you’re supposed to pick. Other times, “getting” the reference is the wrong answer.
- Sometimes you get three options, but they’re all identical. (And result in something bad.)
- Sometimes the dialog is a no-win scenario, where all choices create setbacks.
The thing is, most of the setbacks are a death sentence, like a permanent X% reduction in turbine output, breeding speed, or food production. When that happens, you’ll enter a slow death spiral. You won’t notice it at first if you’re a new player, but you’ll end each day with a little less of $resource than the day before. You can pull slaves from other tasks to try and balance it out, but that just spreads the problem around. You fundamentally don’t have the output to keep up, and you’re just waiting until everything bottoms out.
So despite all this fun gameplay where you shuffle your human slaves aroundDon’t judge me., the only part of the game that actually matters is the pop-quiz feature. You need to memorize which random answers are correctOr look them up online., and hope you don’t get stuck with any of the no-win scenarios.
So it LOOKS like a strategy game, but it’s actually based on luck and memorization. Sadface.
Gunfire Reborn
This seems like it should be right up my alley. It’s a shooter with a colorful art style where you level up your powers and hunt for randomized guns. Where have I heard that before?
I bounced off this game really hard. I found it relentlessly boring, and I’m not sure why. I want to offer some wishy-washy “The gunplay didn’t feel good” kind of answer. That’s true, but I can’t describe WHY the gunplay didn’t feel good. I can’t make any useful suggestions because I can’t even diagnose the problem.
I don’t know, but this one didn’t click for me.
Wrapping Up
So that’s what I’ve played since July. That’s not a lot for a three-month stretch, but we’re just about to enter the crazy season where there will be more games than I can hope to play.
Tomorrow is the launch of Amnesia: Rebirth. I’m preloading it now. I hear good things about it. Fingers crossed.
So what have you been playing lately?
Footnotes:
[1] A syntax error is when the compiler can’t make sense of your code because you spelled something wrong, used incorrect punctuation, or offered information in the wrong order.
[2] Ninja Turtles.
[3] Don’t judge me.
[4] Or look them up online.
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Bought all the Jackbox Packs during a sale and I’ve been having a blast. Beat Human Revolution, it was alright.
We’ve been having a lot of fun with a few Jackbox games (mostly Faking It) this pandemic, too — get 6 people around a TV and all pointing and/or arguing with each other.
I’ve been playing Ghosts of Tsushima, but I still don’t know how to feel about it. On the plus side:
* This might be the most beautiful game I’ve played yet. Every landscape and time of day has been designed to feel like a gorgeous shot in a martial arts film.
* I love all the little touches they take to make the game feel like a real Samurai film. Every mission starts with a title card in front of a pretty still shot. You can do the thing where you swipe your sword down to make all the blood fly off. A lot of the missions are structured as classic samurai scenarios – invaders coming into a village so preparing the defences. Collecting a rag tag band of eclectic personalities etc. There’s a bow emote. You can play the flute. You can start each fight with the thing where both warriors are hovering near their blade waiting for the other to draw and then kills the other in one blow
* Whatever games has composing (mostly bad) haiku’s as a mechanic?
* The combat is fast, intense and fun. You can die quickly but the enemies die quickly too. There’s almost no reloading time after death.
* You have boss battles in classic samurai situations – a duel in the middle of a field of blossoms. I adore these.
* They do a lot to remove UI elements, which I always want in game. Where you need to follow a trail, you don’t go into detective vision, because you can literally see the trail of footprints in the game and follow those. Instead of objective markers you can set the wind to blow in the direction of your objective. Birds and fireflies alert you to items and rewards nearby.
But on the negative side, the game just doesn’t do enough to stop itself from becoming an Ubisoft icon-a-thon. The missions are set-up well enough, but there’s not enough character or writing to make them feel special. And nor does the game simulate enough to make you feel like you’re in a land during the middle of the invasion. If there were mechanics for capturing territory, cutting supply lines, building armies, impacting the landscape of the world, perhaps that would have been enough. But it’s mostly random encounters (which can be moderately well disguised at first) and enemy camps to clear out.
I hope they make a sequel. I need the best version of this game.
Poly Bridge 2. Saw some Youtube videos and snapped it up. It’s a fun diversion, and once you’ve done enough sensible bridges you can start going with the janky versions instead. The best feature is it tells you how well your bridge compares to the % of community solutions, and you can look at those community solutions. This is the best kind of social mechanic. With these games though, you begin to repeat the same strategies in different puzzles.
Two Point Hospital. Was I too young to notice that Theme Hospital was this straightforward? There’s a lack of perpetuating chaos, which makes this kind of dull
Fall Guys. It was good fun with a friend, and it was nice to get good at some maps. Splashing Battle Royale’s into new genres is fun. But it gets repetitive after a while.
Fortnite. I don’t like that it starts you off against bots without telling you. When it successfully recreates the Battle Royale (Japanese film) experience of travelling across a hostile landscape scavenging resources, it really works. But when you don’t know enough about the game, or know too much the feeling goes. Particularly as there’s always a couple of really good people who stomp everyone at the end. Also they don’t give out a single skin to people who don’t pay. What BS. I just wanted something that wasn’t the default.
Rocket League. I used to be in to Rocket League. Now I’m _really_ into Rocket League. This might be a perfect game, it almost feels as good as playing real life football, and for similar reasons. However Epic have messed up a bunch of things going F2P and the game is now much jankier – even collecting your battle pass rewards fails more often than it succeeds. And they removed the “quick play next match” button. Why?? Also ever since the season reset, the competitive tiers have become much much easier, and I’m worried they’ve interfered like they did with bots in Fortnite.
Sucker Punch Studios has fit that “Ubi-world” brand of design ever since inFamous (I imagine Sly Cooper was different since they pre-dated Assassin’s Creed), but I always found them to do a better job of it. Ghost of Tsushima lacks the freedom of Breath of the Wild for me, but it is still more free than most open-world games offer these days (especially when placed beside Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game I played after Breath of the Wild and felt incredibly linear in comparison).
My buddy and I did a podcast on the game recently, and one of my big takeaways is that the game has a lot of good ideas in its sidequests, but they aren’t really given the time to properly develop or be thoroughly written out. There are some Witcher-esque scenarios in the game, but they have a total of three minutes of dialogue and pretty much play out like any generic side quest that requires you to go kill bandits. As an example: there’s a mission where a woman tells Jin that bandits stole her rice. It turns out they didn’t, she was just trying to get him to kill the bandits and get her their rice. After the player dutifully plays the part of the murder machine, Jin tells her “don’t lie to me ever again” and that’s it. In The Witcher 3, this quest would have offered the player so many more options in how to handle the situation.
Some of this is due to limiting who Jin’s character is, but some of it is just that this quest was clearly designed to be one of many check-marked off. It’s a scenario with potential, but the presentation and execution feels generic and bland.
Ghost of Tsushima is greater than the sum of its parts, but so many moments such as that cause it to feel like it’s not as good as it could be.
I found they hid it a lot better in the inFamous games. Because the map was a city it felt less artificial, and they did a lot more with changing the amount of enemies / allies you see on a street etc. The little details like the fights where different factions would fight each other in inFamous really sold me. They have multiple faction fights here, but it feels messier because ‘bandits’ aren’t really a faction and half the time I feel bad killing them.
I think you absolutely nailed it that a lot of the side quests are structured to be interesting but lack the writing / detail / options to fill them out. In that same example, The Witcher 3 would not only have given you choices but the woman NPC would have had a name and a fairly detailed character model and voice. Because Tsushima has ‘generic NPC’ in that role, it really doesn’t fit.
I much preferred Horizons approach though. I assume that is a different in tastes between us. I don’t prize openness at all, if anything I consider it a disadvantage because it leads me into bad play patterns (I’ve unlocked most of the techniques in Ghosts before I’ve finished the first act. If it were more linear the story would have felt based better). And I also prioritise the realism of the world more. Horizon does a lot more to make the game map feel like a place instead of just a ‘game map’ and it’s that kind of gaminess that really puts me off games. In Horizon you’d have large settlements, with farmlands and meaningful hunting grounds, and it would be clear who is in charge of what territory, and what that territory used to be before the disasters, and even sometimes how that territory influenced the politics of the area. Ghosts doesn’t really have any of that.
I’m guessing your tastes are the opposite way round, and you value the gameplay openness more. It’s a bit of a Fallout 3 map vs New Vegas map situation, where Fallout 3 was a lot more open about what route a player could take, but New Vegas was more thematically cohesive.
Oddly enough I tend to prefer linear games because you feel that artificiality a lot less. I noticed real quick in Ghosts that the houses were very, very copy-paste. In fact, not very. They are all copy paste. Only maybe a half-dozen with the same internal layout.
But I think the narrative as told in cut-scenes and the moment-to-moment gameplay ultimately matter more to me. I bring up Breath of the Wild a lot because it had so much freedom, and its “story” all takes place before the events of the game, meaning your wandering around willy nilly has no impact on what happened. The game has its story, it carries its thematic meaning through, and it doesn’t clash with the mechanics in any way. Similarly, Final Fantasy XV is an incredibly broken game, but for at least 2/3rds of it, I enjoyed hunting down monsters, and avoiding the main story actually fits with the protagonist and his own motivations to avoid responsibility and the inevitable.
With Ghost of Tsushima, I really enjoyed the main story and I enjoyed some of the side quests (Ishikawa’s is the MVP of the side content), but I appreciated that I could also just avoid Mongol patrols if I wanted. It helped make the moment-to-moment more rewarding, to be able to just take a slightly longer route so I could avoid yet another standoff, then sneak around a camp assassinating everyone in sight when I wanted, or to challenge a horde of foes to a standoff just because I was feeling confident. With Horizon, I liked the giant monster fights and some of the platforming in the underground locations. I hated just about everything else and was not very invested in the characters or story (and at times was groaning or rolling my eyes).
On the whole open-world is not my favorite genre, but I do have a particular set of preferences that can determine what makes me enjoy the game more.
I feel like HZD had the same thing going for it that BotW does–the only interesting story is in the past, and the present is just about running around revealing it. The main plot is definitely worth eye rolling but the holo logs are interesting.
Typo: “Whatever games has …” should be “What other game has”
Sorry, I’m pretty awful with my typos. I know what the sentences should say, I just can’t type them like that!
The answer about Theme Hospital is “probably yes”, sometime this or last year I fired it up from my GOG library because of nostalgia, got through a couple levels and was like “yeah, okay, that scratched the itch but there really isn’t a lot of depth here”.
Grabbed Noita, just a day or so before your latest podcast where it is mentioned, oddly enough. I like it, I just wish it wasn’t a roguelike. The fact that I can play for an hour, die, and be left with flat out nothing to show for it – besides some updated high scores and some new entries in a glossary – really ruffles my jammies. I can’t imagine the often hilarious ways I manage to kill myself because of poorly explained spell interactions will remain hilarious a few days from now either.
“Summons a large, serrated disc, with a curious flight pattern.” That’s the description you get for one of the skills. Note, please, the total absence of anything like “this can and will fly right back to where it was shot out from, like a boomerang, and gleefully oneshot you.” R.i.p one hour of my life, thank you developers. Hmm, I guess in reference to the last sentence of the above paragraph: it’s already stopped being funny.
You’ve got to watch some gifs of a rapid fire sawblade wand.
Also, if you don’t want to waste your time, back up your save files so you don’t loose your progress. That’s how I beat the game. It also makes experimenting with new wand ideas a lot more enjoyable. It’s not a defense of the game design to say that you have to hack in your own save system, but it is a way to enjoy the game more, so I recommend it.
Oof, I had sorta contemplated that. Is it as simple as finding the save file and copying it somewhere else?
Or, on another note, is there just a mod that enables the ability to load a save after you die?
I used the same hack to git gud at Tales of Maj’Eyal. Unless the game has intentionally bound the saves into the game’s exe or something you can’t reach, it should be that simple: find and open up the game’s save directory, make a folder somewhere to store your backups, and then just alt-tab and right-click-drag-copy as desired.
(Haven’t actually picked up Noita myself and don’t know anything about mods though).
It requires copying a folder. Be careful to drill deep enough that you’re not getting your stats file, or you won’t maintain your unlocks. I’m pretty sure there are also mods that do it, but then your run is marked as “mods enabled” and who wants that?
There’s a mod called Dead Isn’t Dead on the Steam Workshop that respawns you automatically at the last Holy Mountain you visited, and there’s this 9-month-old mod on Nexus Mods that binds the save file backing-up and restoring to hotkeys (note that I haven’t used either, so I can’t vouch for them personally).
Nooo that’s savescumming!
Interestingly, the RNG for levels and loot is based on world-seed, so you can’t scum in the traditional sense of trying to get the best equipment or anything. One can still abuse it, of course, but limiting oneself to saving at “Holy Mountain” locations was natural enough, and forestalls the worst abuses.
I have been watching videos of a man play through the PS2 classic Star Ocean 3.
In ‘Star Ocean 3’, you play as Fate Linegod who was genetically modified by his father Bob Linegod (with the help of his best friend Dick Traitor) in order to kill God. No, I am not making any of that up.
Overall it is not a good game, but I remember really enjoying abusing it’s crafting system.
As to why I am watching rather than playing it myself – dragon flute.
As soon as i read “dragon flute” all the memories came flooding back. This was the first time i realized that the face buttons on the PS2 were somewhat pressure sensititve.
I’d argue that referring to Star Ocean as a classic is . . . generous. I didn’t get too far into it, and my only memory is of a woman asking Fate to go out for a ‘drinky.’ His reply matched my own — “Uh, drinky?”
I played the PS1 edition of Star Ocean for days, though, back in college. I remember fighting the final boss for over an hour. My roommate was the only spectator at first, but as the battle wore on, eventually our whole fraternity house was watching. Sadly, I lost, and my playthrough died in the bonus dungeon looking for gear to help me kill that bozo.
I have never played a Star Ocean other than 3. What was it like? Was it also really bad about remembering to be Sci-Fi?
Keep in mind that my memories date from the Clinton administration, but I recall Second Story as remembering what genre of game it is. It does feature a tech drop, as the protagonist gets stranded on a Renaissance-level planet with fantasy magic (the female lead says ‘ma-sheen’ a lot). However, there’s a steampunk-inventor character who fights with robo-arms, and another character is from a different planet and wields pew-pew guns.
Also, the party eventually travels to yet another planet way up the tech tree and fights villains playing by Clarke’s Third Law.
In other news, screw you, Indalecio.That’s pretty much Star Ocean‘s setting: Star Trek slumming in the Forgotten Realms.
I’ve finished Kingdom of Amalur : Rereckoning in hard mode, pretty much all finishable quests done, 90 hours in a might/sorcery build. I find it to be a more competent Skyrim. It’s not as detailed graphically but the environment are more varied. The writing is not amazing but it’s a lot more competent. The progression is very fun, you can mix and match strength/magic/finesse and get special bonuses depending on your build. Combat feels good. The best part is the exploration, the quests are scattered very well so the main quest will bring you to a zone, you’ll get a bunch more quests to explore all around, learn and solve the local challenges, and then naturally move on to the next big zone.
It’s the perfect game to play whilst listening to good podcasts whilst exploring/fighting.
I’ve also played Star Wars Squadron in VR and it’s absolutely sweet! I still find dog fighting hard, my target always seem to be circling around me, but it feels amazing. I just now live in fear that my facebook account won’t be randomly banned and my headset bricked as it happened to other people…
Are you using controller or flight stick? My computer isn’t quite powerful enough to run Squadrons, but I could run it on the XBONE. But I’d have to do it with the controller -and I’m not sure how I’d like a flight sim without a stick and throttle.
Something you may not be in the habit of doing if you’re a veteran of the X-Wing series of games: You need to cut throttle if you want to do a tight turn in a dogfight. The old way of only reducing throttle (directly or through energy management) when dogfighting a craft with inferior speed will not work with this game.
Recently, got a new computer so here’s stuff from my backlog.
The Talos Principle, philosophy seems shaky (not liking how the game is trying to say that humans are like machines because some machines are like humans) but the puzzles so far are very easy and the game is going more into theology rather than philosophy, which is more my strong suit.
Kentucky Route Zero, finished act 1 and the demonstration mini level. I like it, but I’m not sure where all the hype is coming from.
AAI2: All the cases were at least good, all killer no filler. My only problems were that case 2 got a bit too complicated, case 4 did not do good things to Kay’s character, and the final boss was underwhelming. But this was fantastic and I encourage everyone to pick it up.
…Ace Attorney Iowa?
Ace Attorney Investigations 2.
Probably one of the best Ace Attorney games, really. Pretty good stuff.
I love Kentucky Route Zero but you *really* have to be in the right mood to appreciate it. And being told it’s an amazing game that you must play probably doesn’t help you enjoy it (or anyone enjoy anything, really)
In regards to Fall Guys I was also watching a bunch and nearly bought it but the craze died down real fast. Pubg stayed around long enough that I did break down and bought it but after a couple weeks I was done with Fall Guys. It’s interesting to look at the Fall Guys Highlight channels on youtube. The game hasn’t been out that long so you can easily compare their views. In the first month I saw a video with 7.8million views. This month they almost broke a million a few times but mostly sit at around the 200k mark. It came and went very fast. I honestly attribute the decline to the mandatory team matches. It doesn’t feel good losing because your team that you can’t communicate with are playing poorly. The great part of battle royales was that you could solo or go in a team. Here even if you’re in a team with friends you still get matched up in larger team matches.
As for what I’m playing after 3 years I broke down and bought another month of WoW. I haven’t purchased an expansion since Cataclysm but saw I had up to Legion free and with the level squish coming with the newest expansion release I went in to mess around. Did some archaeology, leveled some characters, discovered that I have access to some allied races with the Legion expansion so I unlocked them and made some new alts. Solo’d some old raids since I’m not a raider but do like going through and seeing them with my overpowered characters. And now there’s even a Halloween event. When I do play I come in like a whirlwind do a whole bunch of different things, quickly burn out, then put it aside for a few more years. It’s just nice that I don’t care about “current” content so I only need to pay my 20 dollars for a month without needing to shell out for the new expansions as well. And clearly at some point Blizzard just gives accounts old content for free so you won’t find me complaining.
I think another reason that contributed to the fall (ba-dum-tshhhh) of Fall Guys is all the hype surrounding Among Us. Which is – in essence – the most streamable game we’ve ever seen. It’s easy to understand, has constant tension, AND is perfect for streamer collaborations (which is one of the fastest ways of gaining traction in that market).
I feel fallguys failed because of a lack of complexity. This does make it easy to get into the game. But after a while you cant really do anything but run forward. The movement is pretty basic and it didnt feel like you could get a lot better. It would be like you’re playing Mario 64 but you walk more slowly, cant walljump, longjump, sideflip, backflip or climb.
I’ve only had access to my Switch for the last couple of months, so it’s been a limited selection:
Wonderful 101: it’s like Bayonetta and Pikmin had a baby. I don’t know if it’s just encroaching old age, but It’s possibly the second least visually readable game I’ve ever played.
Astral Chain: the first least visually readable game I’ve ever played. Platinum seem to be on a roll for games where I can’t tell what the hell is going on, which is a major disappointment after Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising.
Luigi’s Mansion 3: perfectly serviceable gameplay aside, this one looks gorgeous. Definitely a case of a strong art style overcoming hardware limitations.
Mario Sunshine: 30 fps. Why, Nintendo? Also the camera sucks.
Ring Fit Adventure: Lockdown + Quarantine following travel = I am fat. This may not have helped much, but it is fun.
This comment hurts me because I adore both Wonderful 101 (which I fully understand issues with reading it) and Astral Chain (which… okay I understand that, too, but I don’t have to like it!)
I need to get back to Luigi’s Mansion 3! I was about halfway through.
I was looking to actually get Ring Fit Adventure early in the year, but couldn’t find any, and haven’t been able to find them recently either.
EDIT: Looks like it might be back in stock, so maybe I should look into it again.
Oh, so it’s like FT-[BALEETED FOR COMMENT THREAD TRANQUILITY]
We’re self-censoring unpopular discussions now? This site is going the way of Tw-[BALEETED FOR COMMENT THREAD TRANQUILITY]
This seems like a great thread to talk about Da-[BALEETED FOR COMMENT THREAD TRANQUILITY]
Man, I can’t stand this internet censo-[BALEETED FOR COMMENT THREAD TRANQUILITY]
Talking about * * *. I recently played another game called trails of fire, which also has these kinds of events. But you can flip a switch on the options menu and it will give you the results of the different options between brackets like
>you see a roof with a pot of gold on top
>>>climb up (40% chance to fall and get minor injury, 60% to get 50 gold)
>>>leave it be (nothing happens)
Satisfactory and Rebel Galaxy Outlaw got their Steam releases now. I’m playing the first a lot and rage quit the other every other day.
And Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1+2 on PS4 gets a few rage quits after an hour playing.
I played a decent amount of Satisfactory. Then I started playing Factorio again after its 1.0 release and realised that Satisfactory is just Factorio but far slower and with more survival-game bullshit.
The only thing I’m playing now that I wasn’t also playing back in July is Fantasy Strike, a 2D fighting game in the vein of Street Fighter. The thing that distinguishes Fantasy Strike from other games in the genre is that it has vastly simplified execution requirements. Most attacks, including special moves and super moves, require just a single button press. The most complicated input that the game will ever ask you to make is to press a direction and a button at the same time. It also has simplified movement compared to other fighting games. There’s no crouching and no dash mechanic. Otherwise, it is very, very Street Fighter, which is not surprising as the lead designer was also the lead designer on Street Fighter II HD Remix way back when.
I got into Fantasy Strike in September when the game went free to play. The free to play version of the game is limited in certain respects. While all the characters are accessible, most of the single-player content from the full version, which they’re now calling the “Core Pack”, is not. Cheapo freeloaders like me get access to Training Mode, Single Match against an AI opponent, and the Daily Challenge, which is sort of a Survival Mode against a series of AI opponents. There are microctransactions, but they’re all for cosmetic options like alternate costumes and victory poses.
So why am I still playing Fantasy Strike in October? Because the free to play version gets full access to the multiplayer. Because the matchmaking is pretty good. Because the rollback netcode–and, boy, does auto-correct ever hate that word for some reason–is excellent. Because I’ve been playing in ranked matches and somehow, don’t ask me how, on average I am winning. I’m so confused.
Here are two facts about me. First, I love fighting games. Second, I am not good at fighting games. And yet I find myself a Gold-ranked player in competitive Fantasy Strike. To be clear, that’s less impressive than it may sound. Gold is only a middling rank, and is itself divided into five sub-ranks. I have the lowest one of those. But nevertheless, to get as far as I’ve gotten means that I’ve won more matches than I’ve lost which is not something I ever expected to happen. When I started playing online I told myself I’d be happy if I found opponents near my skill level, played some close matches, and maybe won occasionally. My intention was to play mostly casual matches. I only dipped a toe into ranked out of curiosity.
It makes me wonder about the people I’m playing against. Some of them clearly have no idea at all what they’re doing. (I’m sure I must seem that way to some of my opponents. I still lose badly some of the time.) Are they totally new to the genre? Are they kids? I hope they’re not kids. I play Fantasy Strike on PC–it even has a native Linux version–but the game is also available on PlayStation 4 and Switch and it supports cross-play. It’ll tell you what platform your opponent is on before a match. Most people seem to play on PC, but from time to time I get matched against a PlayStation or Switch player. Playstation players seem pretty good. Switch and PC players are all over the place. Switch players are more likely than the other two types to disconnect at the end of a match. I can’t tell if they’re rage quitting or just turning off their consoles because the match is over.
This isn’t a review and you didn’t ask, but I’d recommend Fantasy Strike. It’s free, it’s a good entry-point to the genre, and I think it’s a pretty solid fighting game in its own right.
When you say SFIIHDR, do you mean the one for Super Turbo? If so, that’s David Sirlin, and while I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of his, I do enjoy following his work. I actually used his book Playing to Win as a course text for a first-year seminar.
As for the game itself, it sounds like it’s going for Capcom-style combat with Smash-style controls. Do you hold back to block? I’ve never been able to get my head around using a block button.
If it’s available on PS4, I’ll give it a look. Does the multiplayer have a battle lounge feature?
Yeah, Fantasy Strike is by Sirlin Games. I know nothing of Smash, so I couldn’t say how they compare, but you do hold back to block, just like Street Fighter. One thing I didn’t mention is that you press a button to jump, but there’s an option that lets you change that so you can press up instead. I think there’s something like a battle lounge, but I believe it’s part of the Core Pack.
We’ve been playing around in AI matches tonight, and we’re having fun. I appreciate the effort to preserve the ‘mind games’ aspect of Capcom-style fighters while excising the classical execution barriers.
If you’re interested in sparring at some point, my FantasyTag is the same as my comment handle here.
Cool. I’m “juan h”. I’ll see if I can manage to send you a friend request.
Apart from playing the mobile game Orna with my wife, I’ve played a few more games of Civ V recently.
And my first new game in a long while was Wasteland 3. Mostly happy with it, but some of the ways they’ve set up the main quest plot really soured me. Reminds me a lot of the Game of Thrones ending controversy, actually.
Let’s see, last thread was July? Steam says that’s when I played Besiege and Dead Cells. I ran out of steam hard on Dead cells at the 2nd stem cell difficulty, ironically in spite of the last few updates saying they’d smoothed that curve. Just wasn’t having fun anymore, hitting that loop where the harder you try the worse it is when the one thing you missed catches up with you (specialize a build to beat the thing that’s killing you, die to something else instead, etc).
Played Grim Dawn in August, didn’t quite finish it though. To much pressure to grind, and ironically for a “Diablo clone,” loot hardly mattered due to the faction gear, crafting, and strong items actually remaining strong for *too long*, something I’d never expect to say. The last thing I was doing was working towards an item that would let me summon even more dudes, but I had a stream on while I was doing the busywork and instead of a triumph to exult in it was just “great, did the thing, even more unstoppable, who cares?”
Then I hit Into the Breach, which I’ve commented on other posts. Unlocked and beat the game with all the squads but ran out of goals aside from working down the cheevo list to get the apparent secret squad, and I hit the point where it felt like I’d seen all there was to see so it’s shelved until I feel the need to mech punch a giant bug in the face again.
Picked Prey 2017 back up and tried to do the typhon-only run again, but ran out of steam near the end. Not quite sure why everything was apparently taking me twice as long as it did before (on either my human or previous typhon runs), but burned out on the game while still wanting to play it. So I tried out Mooncrash, and blazed through that instead. ‘S good, though bricking your save when you do the final mission is a dick move and once you know the tricks and can accept resets it starts to feel pretty easy.
And finally, after seeing it on the Let’s Game it Out youtube I eventually decided to give Satisfactory a try. 70 hours in and not gonna lie, after some very good feel for a while there it’s been wearing pretty hard- I’ve burned through several long-ass streams while rebuilding and upgrading my bases, but soon I may actually be able to set the stuff and go explore what is probably the last sliver of map while stuff is manufactured. Gotta say the jetpack is a massive letdown (the rifle even moreso, yet I find that one hilariously appropriate), and I’m quite annoyed that even though all the vehicles run on coal the truck stops won’t accept it as fuel, so I’ve got more conveyor spam than I wanted for no good reason.
I’m pretty sure you can fill truck station fuel slots with coal. Make sure there isn’t something else (biomass?) in the fuel slot already though. The conveyor won’t displace anything already in the slot.
I’ve certainly tried, and it looks like it should- the fuel port is a conveyor dock rather than a pipe, despite the little tanks, but it just refuses to take in the coal- even from empty, and when I tried to prompt it with the vehicle. It feels like an early access whoopsie, like the thing was originally meant to take a pipeline but got changed to conveyor so you could use any fuel but never actually had the function fixed to allow it. *Checks wiki*
No, wiki says it should work, but I’ve probably found my problem again- Same reason I didn’t use trucks for so long to begin with, I bet I powered the two ends but forgot to power the refueling stop I built in the middle. Whelp.
You can cheat to get the secret squad. Biggest time-saver I’ve ever given myself. :)
I too got interested in Satisfactory based on Let’s Game it Out, though I haven’t felt like going back to it for a few months now. I should probably at least jump back in for a bit to keep from completely forgetting my base layout.
The Secret Squad was my biggest disappointment with Into The Breach. You spend all that time doing every single damn achievement, and in the end you get mechs that aren’t even that interesting or fun to play.
The squad could have been a lot more interesting if it had been integrated in the story, and the character barks changed to play on the you’re controlling veks gimmick. Like, have the CEOs wonder if they can trust you, or have the civilians think they’re going to die when they see your squad arrive.
In the end it’s just the tutorial squad with slightly different attacks, and more boring because you don’t get any pilot lines, which make the gameplay a lot more dull.
I got Game Pass for PC for two months, binged a bunch of games, then canceled because I don’t want to pay for a service I’m no longer actively using.
Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps: Gorgeous graphics, incredible music, movement “feels” great, didn’t care for the story. Combat in the first one was boring but in the second it was cool. Both games felt pretty short (I managed to get 100% in the first one in ~10h and the second in ~11-12h without using guides or putting much effort into it), so while I would happily recommend them, I wouldn’t recommend buying them for their normal prices.
My Friend Pedro: Played through the story once, got all the secrets, replayed some of the levels just to fuck around. Was pretty cool, but I don’t think I would buy it.
Disgaea 4 Complete+: Story was fun, but I got tired of the gameplay somewhere around 5-6 hours in. Ended up just watching the story cutscenes on Youtube.
Carrion and Children of Morta: Played through once, lost interest immediately after.
Cluster Truck, Descenders, Lonely Mountains: Downhill and Mistover: Fun for 1-2 hours, then I got bored.
Sea Salt: First try, froze, forced reboot. Second try, worked, but going into the options menu would freeze the game, swap to a tiny-ass window for a few seconds, swap back to borderless fullscreen, unfreeze, then repeat a few seconds later. The premise seemed interesting, but the gameplay ended up being boring and the story didn’t interest me.
Oh, I loved Carrion! Like you, I have no desire of playing it again, but I don’t see that as a negative. To me, it was the perfect length – just when I started to feel like it was overstaying its welcome, it ended.
My only criticism of it is the lack of a map. I got lost so many times, that I’m starting to feel sorry for all those poor horror film antagonists :(
Oh, and thank you for reminding me of the new Ori! The original is one of my favourite games of recent years.
Carrion was good.
I seldom feel the desire to replay a game I complete, so the fact that I could see and do everything in 1 reasonable length playthrough is a plus in my book. I also second the need for a map. Had to lookup online how to get back to a couple sections to find those last upgrades.
I played Fall Guys for a single sitting and was unable to cope with its poor controls. They’re serviceable, but they’re also unpolished enough “for the lulz” that it just took away from the experience for me. If I had my friends playing with me it probably would have been more enjoyable.
I’ve fallen into the HoloLive rabbit hole, which means I’ve taken to watching cute anime girls play games, and one of those games is Fall Guys. Sometimes they win, and other times their failures make for good comedy (assuming you have a tolerance for female anime voice and screaming). I find the game infinitely more fun to watch, I get to root for someone, and I still get the anxiety of potential failure.
I much more prefer Super Mario Bros. 35, however, which completely changes the emphasis on standard Mario Bros. I’m pretty sure it’s built on the Mario Maker engine, so it doesn’t control or behave precisely as the original game does, but it gets pretty darn close. It’s effectively a competition for 35 players to try and be the last one standing in a game of randomized Mario levels, where every 20 coins you collect earns you a sort of “emergency item box” with randomized items (Mushroom, Fireflower, POW Block, Star Man, and I think one more thing), every kill nets you more time on the clock, and also sends that enemy to another person’s game. So if you, say, stomp a Goomba, you get 2 seconds on the clock and send that Goomba to another person’s game.
This sounds simple, but whereas an experienced Mario Bros. player might focus on speed-running levels rather than collecting coins or killing enemies, that could be detrimental here. The fireflower makes it easy to kill enemies, but you only get 1 sec. for each kill whereas chaining stomps could get you 2 sec., then 3 sec., then 4, 5, etc. You want to have time stacked up because, once there are only 5 players remaining, the timer counts down twice as fast. Going into a hidden bonus room with nothing but coins could cost you time since you’re not killing enemies, but if you’re late game and there’s a bunch of Hammer Bros. and King Koopas on the path ahead, you can avoid them by going down a secret pipe and skipping ahead in the level (and potentially wipe them out of the game altogether?) It’s really clever and feels like skill and smart thinking are rewarded much more than a game like Fall Guys, where the aforementioned unpolished controls and physics are “part of the lulz” but do little to reward a solo player whose objective is going to be on victory.
I’ve actually been a bit of a gaming tourist lately myself, but I fell back into Destiny 2 as this extended season winds down. Having a reliable game with good shooting mechanics was just what I needed right now, even if some of the grind is the same old same old. Plus, I needed to go through Haunted Forest in order to get a reroll on Horror Story that can be infused beyond 1060 Light.
The past two nights, however, my friend and I have played Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, the free multiplayer update to Ghost of Tsushima that landed on Friday. It’s effectively a sort of “Games as Service LITE”, where there’s a two-player “story” mode, a four-player survival mode, and in a couple weeks they’ll be releasing a four-player Raid. The two-player story has three levels of difficulty (Bronze, Silver, and Gold), with Bronze effectively being “tutorial mode”. It’s not very difficult and you’re introduced to all the new additions to the game mode, such as elemental affinities you can imbue your sword with in order to properly defeat similarly imbued opponents, Oni-type enemies with greater health and powerful attacks, and other factors. Each mission in the story mode has three chapters, and once they’ve been cleared you receive XP and gear of those wonderful grey, green, or blue colors (and I’m assuming in time purple and gold).
We were already having a good time, but when we decided to retry the first mission on the higher Silver difficulty we were met with a surprising level of challenge. It was really fun and convinced us that this mode could have some legs, depending on how things go. My concern is that it’s free, and at some point that means Sony’s going to either abandon it or try to monetize it. Perhaps the launch is free but future content updates will cost money? Try to get players invested and convince them it’s worth putting money into? I dunno, but I can only look at Marvel’s Avengers and think “You could have done it like this”. I mean, my biggest issue with Marvel’s Avengers was that the combat itself didn’t feel satisfying, and here you have a game with satisfying combat that pulls in all that loot-based hamster wheel, but in an inventive way that doesn’t interfere (I mean, gear management is always between missions rather than in the middle of it, and it never takes us long to swap stuff around).
Hololive is really what I’ve played the most recently. I’m sure the shine will wear off, but at the moment I’m looking at streams and highlight clips and old archives and all sorts of stuff, and I find more and more things I like.
If nothing else it makes for great escapism in these times.
Still a lot of D&D on Roll20. Otherwise, Skyrim Special Edition (Skyrim remastered for Xbox One for $35 including all DLC was too good an opportunity to pass up). There’s something incredibly relaxing about wandering Skyrim’s countryside and listening to the game music, dipping into the occasional dungeon just to see what’s there. It feels like everything is different enough from its initial release (which is essentially the last time I played it) to make it all fresh again.
I’m playing Starsector. I like it, but have mixed feelings. It is a complete game. It is not at 1.0 release yet. So I cannot be too hard on it.
The biggest problem with it is it is too fiddly with awkward controls. It results in endless minor irritation that cumulatively wrecks an otherwise great game. For example all the abilities require one button press, except for one that requires a double click. Or that there are three different screens that you navigate your ship on. On one, it is right click to navigate. On another, it is left click to navigate. On the last (combat) it is wasd, and right click now turns off your shields. These are just some examples from a very long list. It completely undermines muscle memory and hurts the experience. I’m endlessly opening the wrong screens then having to back out of menus or reload.
Yes, I’m saying a game in beta (alpha?) needs more polish. So I know it’s not fair to complain about something like that. Although I do not believe these types of issues will be addressed. The developer is at the stage of minor tweaking. When really it needs overhaul for ergonomics and consistency. The developer should focus on integration of controls and menus rather than tweaks. Though I’m still playing it despite it so that says something.
Since July, I played:
Knights of Pen and Paper 1: I almost finished all the quests, but the story wasn’t really strong enough to push me forward when I hit the final dungeon that I was underleveled and underskilled for, and the combat isn’t deep enough to make the grind fun. It was a cute little game to play in short spurts, but not really deep enough for a long run.
Wizardry 8: I drag this out any time I think of a group of characters that it would be fun to play as, since it’s the best game I have for doing that and giving them voices that fit. This time it was “Pretty Little Liars” characters. But I started it on my laptop but then switched when I play games and so want to play on my desktop instead, and didn’t feel like restarting the game.
The Old Republic: Went back to TOR again, finishing off my Dark Side Sith Marauder and starting a new Dark Side Jedi Consular. I really like that in general you can do the story and planet missions and get all the XP you need, especially if you use Rest XP and XP boosters.
So TOR is the main one now, but since I want to build up Rest XP and have a couple other days to play I’m thinking about playing King Arthur as well.
I also found some time to play some board games, like Scrabble, Star Trek Scene It, and X-Men Mutant Revolution. I was supposed to play more but things got in the way.
Oh man I love Wizardry 8, even if you basically need crit on all your characters to make the endgame bearable.
It’s a sad thing SirTech’s adventures ended there because I would’ve loved to see how they would have improved on it.
Been largely sticking to my Switch these last few months, since that’s the most convenient thing to play on now that I’ve got a baby. I played through Mario 64 and Sunshine for nostalgia’s sake, only to realize I may have been viewing them with rose tinted glasses. They’re both still great games, particularly for their respective times, but they don’t hold up as much as I had hoped. 64 in particular is a mess of controls and camera (all of which I was completely blown away with when the game originally came out). Mario never controlled the way I felt he should and I constantly had to fight bad camera angles. I really wanted to go for all 120 stars since I’d never done it before, but after having to deal with the last couple of levels, I got fed up and beat the game with around 100.
For Sunshine, I’ve always held that up as my favorite Mario game, despite not having played it in almost 15 years. I still love the setting and level design; there’s nothing else like it in the series. But I hate that Shines have to be acquired in order, and if there’s one you’re stuck on, too bad, you have to keep at it until you get it so you can beat the game. It led to a lot of frustration.
Haven’t touched Galaxy yet, but that’s because I took a break to play my newest obsession, Hades. I played it when it first came out on early access, but haven’t touched it since. But holy crap is this game amazing. This is the best the gameplay of a Supergiant Games game has felt since Bastion, and with their normal level of polish in dialogue, art, and music. And the progression that most roguelikes lake makes each run feel meaningful.
Finally, I’ve played maybe an hour of two of Baldur’s Gate III early access, but I like what I see so far. Even if it’s Baldur’s Gate in name only, it really feels like D&D 5e, which is exactly what I wanted out of it. My big complaint is that it doesn’t do a good enough job explaining its mechanics and character creation/leveling choices. Fortunately I’ve played (and ran) tons of 5e to the point where I can figure it out, but I can see new players getting lost.
Hoof, what have I played since last thread?
Went back and finished Trails of Cold Steel 1. Highly improved once muted and not hearing “My turn!” a dozen times every fight. Fun fights, apart from the final-ish boss which was too strong and thank heavens for the “retry on lower difficulty” option. Cold Steel 1 had an absurd cliffhanger ending. Trails in the Sky wrapped up its main story with big jagged hooks for a sequel, but Cold Steel 1 wraps up nothing.
Reached Chapter 3 in Cold Steel 2 and am already in my mandatory “six months or more away from a Trails game” period where I let the irritating story scab over. A game whose opening cutscene establishes 13 major villains should not have end-of-chapter bosses winning in cutscenes and escaping to fight another day. Still fun mechanics, though, and I like this kind of asset reuse where you’re revisiting all the same spots you did in the first game.
Got halfway through a monk-only run of Final Fantasy 5. Not sure why I stopped, just… stopped.
Tried out Romancing SaGa 1 when I heard it was based in FF2 mechanics. It was horrible and bad. Might not have enough space to describe how bad it was. Tried Romancing SaGa 3; it’s definitely better than 1, but I got lost in the first dungeon and don’t have the motivation to see the second. Read an LP instead, along with Bravely Default and I Am
SatsumaSetsuna.Tried Dragon Quest 6. Two worlds means twice as many areas to brute-force check for the next flag. Got stuck multiple times because the thing you’re told to do is locked behind a cutscene you’re not directed toward. The design as a whole is just rude, done with DQ6.
Started Disgaea 5, not sure how I feel about it so far. (Compared to the others I mean, the absurd numbers-go-up mechanics are definitely still my thing.) Story does the same thing as Cold Steel and other animes where a sub-villain is introduced early on and never fucking dies, you’re in the 15th chapter on the way to the final boss and this jackass sub-villain from Chapter 2 is still around, with the sub-villain from Chapter 3 right behind them. The whole point of sub-villains is so you can beat somebody without being able to beat the main villain, so let the player beat them dammit. (Don’t know why that bothers me that much, it’s Disgaea, of course the story’s bad.)
Hades has an ending now, so I’m playing it again. It’s still very good. There’s a new Act 1 boss that seems really cheap, though, fast teleporting enemies are very rude when 4 of your 6 weapons are melee and the 5th takes time to load. But highly recommended for… whatever genre that is, Isometric Action-em-up.
I liked the story in the first Disgaea. Or at least I liked the tone of the story. There was a certain energy and irreverence to it that I appreciated. “Shut up, your name is Mid Boss now” will never cease to amuse me. I hated the story in the second game, which consisted almost entirely of warmed-over, half-assed anime stock characters and cliches, so so so much. Also, Axel. Oh, how I despise Axel. It’s made me incredibly wary of the series as a whole. It’s a damn shame, too, because with the possible exception of geo-tile puzzles I really love the gameplay.
Yeah, Axel sucks. 5’s story is tighter in that it doesn’t have six chapters of side filler like 1 and 2, but it also doesn’t have any twists; say what you will about 2, the indestructible villain getting beaten offscreen by an NPC is a good curveball. And I’d say the characters are worse, although I’m amused at Red Magnus straight up ripping off The Rock’s wrestling lines. Might have to unmute it to hear if he’s doing a Rock impression.
Oh right, I also played Octopath Traveler. Mixed feelings but mostly positive. I don’t like how many areas are locked behind character quests, there’s got to be a better way to do that. Also silly how every quest is treated as if the character is alone. Would have been nice to have character quests overlap instead of being separate instances. Also the sidequests have poor signposting; a quest you get in the first town might not be completable until you reach an endgame town, so you’re rubbing your face across every member of all 24 towns every time you want to finish one of these quests.
In-town powers are a good edition; “Fight Townsperson” should be a default command in every game, it’s super fun to gain access to someone’s house by clobbering them until they’re no longer standing in the doorway. Especially when you’re throwing leopards at them. But locking high-quality chests behind having Therion in the party was a real jerk move, especially since that character is the most tone-breaking one. “I’ve set out to find the thief who stole from the secret library; on the way, let me befriend this professional thief.” “I’m taking the trial of purity, to prove myself to God. Let me bring my companions: the professional thief, the professional killer, and the girl who keeps throwing leopards at the townsfolk.”
Mechanics are semi-Persona; enemies have weaknesses, hit the weaknesses enough times and the enemy loses all resistances, loses a turn and takes more damage. Bosses can be mean, but apart from one post-game sidequest boss and the Final Boss it’s all pretty manageable. But hooboy that final boss is not only absurdly hard, but also requires all eight characters; this is the only time the game does that, and characters don’t level if they aren’t in the party, so not only is the final boss the hardest (two) fight(s) in the game, it’s also a grindwall of getting your level 30 B Team up to level 70 or whatever you need to beat that guy, heck if I’m doing it myself.
The Job Class system feels empty. I think it’s that Job Points aren’t job-specific, so you can level up a Job without ever actually equipping it in combat. Also only one person being able to equip the secondary jobs is just limiting replayability; you can never do an All Hunter run because only two characters can ever be Hunters at the same time.
You echo my feelings on the game almost exactly. One major gripe I’ll add is something that made me give up on the game halfway through: the encounter rate. Before it came out, I watched a video of one of the developers playing though a demo of the game. In it, he said combat would take longer than standard RPGs, but be less frequent. After playing the game, I realized that was half a lie. Combat did take longer, that much is true, but the encounter rate was as high as any JRPG I’d played (and I’ve played a lot). And even though the combat is more “tactical” than most JRPGs, it wears thin after that many fights.
I started with Cyrus so that was cut in half by his passive. Then I did a solo run and discovered the save points are mostly far enough away to be able to just reach them without an encounter, and if you reload the counter resets; so if you have the patience to reload constantly, you can get through most areas with no encounters, and get high-end stuff way before you’re supposed to.
I count that in the game’s favor; “possible but requires annoying effort” is the good kind of game-breaking.
I blinked really hard at 7 Billion Humans. “Isn’t that Human Resource Machine?” I asked. Turns out, 7 Billion Humans is a sequel to Human Resource Machine. I tried HRM before and ended up petering out because it turns out I’m not actually THAT interested in programming. Maybe I’ll give it a go again someday in the future, but given the size of my Steam backlog I’m not really sure.
I finally started playing NUCLEAR THRONE. This is a fun little shooter-roguelite, and I’ve enjoyed it. It’s very fast-paced and a given “run” is only going to take something under 20 minutes. There’s a wide variety of guns and many are fun, and overall I had a lot of fun with it. A word of caution though: I’ve NEVER seen another Roguelite in which it’s possible to lose so fast. In something like the Binding of Isaac or FTL or Enter the Gungeon it usually takes a bit of time to go from “this run is doing great” to “game over, play again?”. In Nuclear Throne you can go from 100% fine to starting over in a couple seconds.
I also picked up BATTLETECH on a really good sale because I was curious about it, but not $45 curious about it. I ended up snagging a copy for $11. Hooray for downmarket sales! It’s been really fun so far, but I’ll say confidently it’s not for everyone. It’s a turn-based strategy version of the Mechwarrior/Battletech lineage, apparently created in a way that’s very faithful to the original tabletop game. It’s also got some management sim in taking care of your mercenary company’s budget, and very light RPG elements. To get the most out of this game I think you need to be:
– The kind of person who enjoys turn-based RNG-driven strategy.
– The kind of person who enjoys fiddling with things like builds and talent trees in RPGs.
– The kind of person likes trying to manage your limited resources.
That’s definitely not everyone, but that just goes to show the importance of the middle-market game. A player can see that this thing didn’t get the full AAA-level budget; the assorted story “cutscenes” are mostly text-based instead of fully animated and voice-acted, and there’s some innocent nods to its Kickstarter backers (some of the backers appear as hireable Mechwarriors).
Here’s my litmus test to see if this game’s for you. If the below sounds like you, or sounds like fun to you, then you’d probably enjoy Battletech:
– You spot an enemy ‘mech on the field that’s really strong. Previously you blew one up and got 1/3 of the salvage pieces you need to build your own from scrap. Wanting better salvage, you review your options for taking it down more-or-less intact. Shooting out the cockpit is a low-probability play. Its torso is heavily armored and it’s got a plethora of close-range weapons, but you notice that its legs are relatively lightly armored. You focus your long-range missile mech, using a Called Shot ability to hopefully land more hits on the target’s legs. You succeed and wreck the target’s left leg, knocking it over. Using your light scout/flanker and your medium brawler, you circle around and focus the right leg – it can’t get up, and is “destroyed” and you get the 2/3 salvage you need after battle to build a shiny new toy.
– You’re in an easy backwater system, where the opponents are pretty trivial but your chance to acquire new salvage is pretty limited. Negotiating your next job, you decide to forego most of your salvage rights in favor of cash, so that you can afford a new upgrade for your ship and the travel fees to go to a new system. After using that nest egg to arrive somewhere more dangerous, you negotiate the next job to be paid mostly in salvage rights – assuming that the tougher jobs will put something more interesting in front of you. This pays off, and your nominal cash bonus pays the repair bills while your first choice of salvage lets you pick up the scrap of a couple higher-end heavy ‘mechs you’ve wanted.
– You’re deep into a mission and things are starting to look bad. One of your brawlers has taken major damage – its armor is largely gone and the internal structure is battered; one good hit is going to probably cost you some limbs, a second will likely scrap the ‘mech and maybe kill the pilot. However, you’ve still got all 4 ‘mechs and the enemy lance is down to 3 damaged ones. You decide to “save the meat” and Eject the pilot – that mech is out of play and saves further repair bills (and doesn’t risk your mechwarrior inside) – you’ll go on to win the mission with the remaining three ‘mechs you have.
– You’re on another mission and things are going bad. You’ve finished the first objective but the second wave of enemies just got reinforcements; they now outnumber you 8-to-4 and probably have you outgunned. This might still be winnable for you, but it’s going to be rough and could end with you only having 1 mech left and looking at 30+ days of repair work. You decide to Withdraw, ending the mission right there… but because you completed an objective, your employers give you a Good Faith bonus. It’s not the full sum of your contract, but you did give it your best and they can’t expect you to wreck your whole bottom line. The cash more than pays for your repairs – you still came out ahead, and retreating was the right move.
I really like that the last one is an option and a viable option at that. For a lot of other strategy games like XCom, abandoning or failing a mission will come with a massive punishment. For the more mercenary Battletech, part of being a good mercenary is knowing when winning will cost too much, and walking away. Hell, even if you don’t get the Good Faith bonus it can still be worth walking off a job if it looks like you’re going to get pounded.
Nuclear Throne is great! (Steam says 330 hrs played). It’s also the best example of how good sound design can really elevate a game.
One tip: If you haven’t figured it out already, Eyes’ special ability pulls in enemies, but deflects projectiles. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about it really struggled with him at first because they thought it pulls in everything.
Yup, I figured that one out.
So far the only character I’ve won with is Robot (Steam says about 20 hours played for me so far) but I figure I’ll get through with Crystal sooner or later.
Eyes > Y.V. > Crystal > Rebel > Robot > Steroids >>> Plant > Fish >>> Horror >>>>>> Melting >>>>>>>>> Chicken > Rogue. Or something like that, for pre-loop only.
I do think Crystal is a trap for new players because her active teaches you bad habits, but more HP is more HP.
The Loop 1 races I watched said roughly: Steroids by a lot, then YV and Plant, then Crystal and Horror, then The Rest.
Of course I love Chicken. Useless, useless Chicken.
That sounds about right. I’ve only been to L2 a handful of times, and every time was with either Steroids or YV. Fish is also great in loops because GUNNNNNN WARRRRANNNTTTTT.
Well, now I’ve finished a run with Steroids and Robot, but still never Crystal.
Me and Battletech have an on-again-off-again relationship. I loved the tabletop game back in the day, but the missions in Battletech seem to follow a basic rut: the enemy always outnumbers you 2 to 1, and the winner is the person who gets LOS first and calls in the missile barrages. So much of that game is just LRM spam, and it annoys me so much because the game could be much more interesting than that. (Also, I want to deploy 12 mechs, damnit.)
I like Battletech, but the game is so slow that managing twelve mechs sounds just awful. To make it non-awful, you’d need to speed up the movement and combat animations significantly, which, unfortunately, I think would conflict with the tone that the game is going for. Despite the fact that a lot of the original battlemech visual designs were licensed (or lifted) from various anime, battlemechs are supposed to be big, lumbering things and not zippy anime robots. More generally, I think twelve units is probably too many for a turn-based tactics game, especially one with persistent units or RPG elements. In my experience, four to eight is usually about the right amount. I also think that the more special abilities your units have, the fewer of them you should probably have on the field at once.
Amusingly, these are exactly the numbers and rationale I used when designing my own tactics game: 4-8 units based on the mission size/length, because each has 4 unique abilities plus one determined by their weapon. I’ll probably write a post about it sooner or later, but I felt like I had to salute your clearly very correct and incontestably perfect take!
Trying to think about exceptions; one I can think of is really deadly fights. X-com uses 14 guys because one will die every time an alien fires. Disgaea has 10, and a single attack will usually kill something, either the enemy or you. Chess has 16 and everything goes down in one hit. Tactics Ogre has ten, and while everyone’s taking three or four hits usually, melee attacks are always countered so melee units are mostly there to block enemy melee units and not really to attack.
So, games with dedicated and/or expendable meat shields benefit from lots of troops.
Licensed. Definitely licensed. The question was whether the Macross designs had already been licensed to Harmony Gold when they licensed the anime; Harmony Gold said yes, everybody else said no. Court battles lasted decades.
Something I’ve found so far is that the Bulwark ability, Cover, and Guarded/Braced really cuts down on the efficacy of LRM spam. The game’s round-down approach to fractional damage is not kind to 4-damage LRMs; all those abilities combine on paper to give 60% damage reduction, but in practice it’s 75% as the missiles only do 1 damage through all that.
I believe in the expansions there’s some anti-missile countermeasures like ECM as well – according to the game’s wiki/subreddit a unit covered by ECM can’t be attacked by LRMs unless they get Sensor Locked, and even then there’s a big penalty to LRM/SRM accuracy applied.
Right -so now every game is “build up characters with Bulwark, run them forward to draw fire, and then LRM spam the AI with my own missile boats.” If I wanted to play WoW, I’d do that…
Isn’t 7 Billion Humans just the same game as Human Resource Machine?
This is why I haven’t played it yet. In a vacuum the game is good enough, but it’s not for me. Games like these, Factorio, etc are all a bit difficult to justify playing in the first place, since I do programming / problem-solving all day at work and I don’t have the mental energy to do that when I’m at home. That, plus I already played the first game, and the second is very similar…
I think the only game I’ve played since it came out in late September is Spelunky 2. It’s not as good as 1, which should not be surprising since 1 is among the very few best games ever made. But still disappointing that it is so.
Also, it’s haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrddddd.
I didn’t comment in July -so what have I done since May?
Warframe. Lots of Warframe. The missions are short and the load time is a couple seconds, so I can get in, play a mission, and get out pretty quick. A real benefit when catching gaming during baby naps.
Cities:Skylines. A good game to play if the baby is awake because the controls are really simple and I can play one handed.
HALO/Witcher 3/Banner Saga -all games that can be played on the XBOX and have pause features.
Still haven’t gotten back into KSP.
The Main Game I’ve been playing is Sryth. Its a text based RPG with a lot of story (more then 3 million words total) which you can get right into. Its also completely accessible to blind people.
I’ve when making a podcast where I record myself running though adventures: https://www.breaker.audio/sryth-bedtime-stories
I’ve also been playing FFXV. It play short of like an MMO. I spend a lot of time waiting either for loading screens or to be Chauffeured to the next quest.
I tried out Sryth, and poked around the wiki a bit. Very minimal interface! The story seemed a bit constrained. More of a “choose your own adventure” style than a simulation. Can’t complain about the price though!
Since July? Hmm. I mostly popped back and forth between Stardew Valley and Fire Emblem: Three Houses on the Switch, and the early-access version(s) of Torchlight 3 on the PC, and recently I installed the release version of Genshin Impact (I was in the beta… briefly, just before my previous computer went kaput). Also the usual slate of mobile games: Gems of War for match-3 goodness, and Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross for my main “gacha game” fix, which Genshin was meant to supplant but… oh well.
Stardew Valley is an ideal port, by the way. I always had trouble with the PC version’s mouse-and-keyboard interface where I’d mean to “interact” but instead did “use tool” and bad results would occur. The Switch version distinctly separates the two, and it’s much harder (not impossible but harder) to take the wrong action.
Torchlight 3 continues the noble tradition of Torchlight games basically doing whatever Blizzard did with their same-numbered Diablo game, only cartoonier. It mostly works? I think? I like the “here’s your fort, go nuts decorating it” element, at least, and D3 didn’t have anything like that.
Genshin Impact is… probably not going to be For Me. It’s a very 3D-action game with some platforming thrown in, and a lot of “okay use this character briefly to create an effect then quickly switch over to a specific other character to take advantage of that effect” and you have to track all of this rock-paper-scissors element-effect through all combat scenarios and man, my brain doesn’t work that way. It’s gorgeous and charming, but if I can’t survive the fights then there’s not much point, is there?
Finished Elex couple weeks ago. Wasn’t playing piranha bytes games after Gothic 2 (for various reasons). I miss classic gothic games, so Elex was a welcome return to form. Though, the way the story and the world is structured, is quite unbalanced. So I played five-ten hours, stopped for a few months, because I ended up doing nothing interesting, returned again, played little again. Now I know that it was partly mistake on my part (to avoid those, watch this spoiler-free video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-n61E03aHE ) and partly the game’s fault. Especially its reliance on quest markers, while I avoided using them as much as possible.
But man do I love this game in the end, despite playing for two years. It’s the only game that is able to combine classic high fantasy forest, the City Mad Max and Mass Effect armor with lasers under one neat post-apocalypses umbrella, and it still felt organic.
The story has some neat ideas (at least the idea of Cold being a defining trait of the character – is he more emotional, or is he more logical), though what I like the most is side-stories (especially solving things in Tavar – these are quite colorful folks). Hell, even three factions – each of them is a different shade of assholes (in some way), but they all also do some things right, so it was very hard to choose who to join.
Finally played and finished Deus Ex Invisible War. Quite castrated game, and its short. I liked few things though. Some visual elements are cool, music is mostly nice.
Spent two evenings playing through Serious Sam The First Encounter HD remake. Felt good. They don’t make shooters like that anymore.
Halo ODST is also short, but so far its my favorite Halo (I only payed the ones from MCC on steam). Its focused, with good pacing (though, two last levels just a little bit two long), and the best music in series. Plus its visuals were so reminiscent of OG Mass Effect games, its actually nostalgic
Huh, I kinda dimissed Elex after some lukewarm opinions but I think I’ll have to take another look.
It is a Piranha Bytes game, i.e. the quintessential Eurojank game. Very ambitious, can be very fun and certainly unique and quite deep and flexible. But also uneven as hell and the game feel is just unpleasant at times. Still, when it sucks you in, it really works.
Hades and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. I started the latter after reading the first part of Shamus’s retrospective, and realizing that his description of it as a sort of introduction into the Soulsborne genre fit perfectly my desire for an entry point into that sort of game (and his overall glowing recommendation certainly didn’t hurt). I’ve played through to the end of the second Zeffo section (and I was kicking
Trilla’sbutt, only to have the game kick me out of the fight via cutscene suggesting that *I* was getting my butt kicked, the nerve). But I haven’t yet visited Dathomir, suggesting that there is some nonlinearity to the order (I skipped Shamus’s Dathomir entry to avoid spoilers).I’ve only done 6 runs in Hades, gotten to the bosses of Elysium (who kicked my butt), so I’m still pretty early in the game. But it’s clearly excellent and with my last two runs each taking over an hour, it’s very rewarding to see so much plot progression / powering up happen after each run
Ah. Also played quite a lot of Thief FMs. Calendra’s Cistern/Legacy, Seven Sisters, Godbreaker – good things to satiate my hunger for more Thief. Gotta give it to the community – they are MVP
Pillars of Eternity: 2
The good: Yaay, more Pillars of Eternity. Another game where the story is actually trying to say something, that presents you with moral quandaries where you could take several different actions and still be, you know, a coherent person*.
– I like the characters (even the ones I don’t like, weirdly).
– And even the combat’s not as much of a dull chore as it was!
The bad: It’s made by Obsidian, so it’s buggy. I deliberately bought it YEARS after release and it’s still buggy! Goddamit.
– SOOOOOOOOOOO FUUUKKKKIIIINNNN BIIIIIIIIIIG. Okay, I get that there’s a lot of content and that’s good in a way…but the sheer amount of sidequests and distractions is overwhelming. My pressing personal quest delivered by the gods has been on hold for like, 3 in game months as I do Every Other Damn Thing In The Deadfire Archipelago.
It’s a bit like reading A Song of Ice and Fire, or the Wheel of Time books: Now, I’m not necessarily saying anything’s bad here, but…have you heard of an ‘editor’?
*As opposed to the usual ‘Help the child and be praised as a saint’ vs ‘EAT THE CHILD LIKE A DERANGED MADMAN’.
I picked up a long stalled PoE2 play through a few weeks ago and am quite enjoying it. I think I’ll finish it this time around. I also started a co-op Wasteland 3 game with a friend. We’ve previously done co-op runs on the two Original Sin games, so post apocalyptic is a bit of a scenery change. Only one session so far but it’s a start.
Then, Cold Steel 4 drops in a week and I’ll definitely be playing that. The guy above complaining about the cliffhanger ending of Cold Steel 1 ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
I finished Pillars of Eternity 2 recently(ish) too. I love it so much, I think because I’m a sucker for the worldbuilding they do, and the beautiful style. Its weird, because I can agree with pretty much every (serious) criticism of the game (and its predecessor) but I love it nonetheless. Personally, as unrealistic as it might be, I loved the fact that the main plot was relatively short, because it makes the game that much more replayable.
Having said that, I haven’t replayed it yet… and I’m not sure if I will get round to it. Hmm.
I can’t judge you morally, I’ve been playing Crusader Kings 3…
Over the last 3 months I’ve played:
Crusader Kings 2
Crusader Kings 3
Advance Wars: Duel Strike(felt nostalgic to play this again)
A bit of Doom 2016 for the first time just this week
Started Fallout 4 but haven’t done anything in it yet
Mario Galaxy
Trials of Mana
A bit of the new Paper Mario
Indivisible
Xenoblade Chronicles
A bit of Civ 6
Borderlands 3 dlcs
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
A bit of Outer Wilds
Command & Conquer Remastered
Started a new playthrough of Front Mission 3
Man, I played a lot in the last couple months. I’d been slowly playing less games over previous years but I guess this year I’m back into it again.
What I love about Front Mission 3 is how a seemingly unimportant choice near the beginning of the game splits it into 2 full 50 hour storylines. I forget how much the game cost back then (it was before we switched to the Euro), but I just know I got my money’s worth out of it twice.
I first played it when I borrowed it from a friend but I was never able to buy a physical copy myself but it is on the PSN thankfully. If I recall correctly, when playing it on PSP, it crashed constantly and on PS3 it crashed somewhat frequently. I’m playing it on VITA now and it seems stable for once so I’m quite enjoying the experience.
I was sick last weekend, so I re-installed A Robot Named Fight, and after playing it every other day this week, I actually managed to slay the Megabeast – twice! One more time, and I’ll unlock the
Megabeast Coreand after that, the Real Ending.I’m still playing Rimworld on and off again, which is better than when I put it down for a year. The Royalty expansion adds just enough mid-game and high-level objectives, to keep me from always feeling like I’ve got nothing to do. It’s still a bit grindy in the mid- and late-game, but it’s a lot better, and there’s new mechanics available for XML, so I can mod in some cyber-implants that were impossible before. :)
Rimworld is such a great game. If anything, it’s a bit too pared back, but as you say, it’s moddable.
Yeah, the base game definitely doesn’t fill out every niche for every game mechanic. For example, the mechanics exist without mods, to have food crops that don’t freeze in the winter (copy off of trees), don’t need to be re-planted (copy off of cocoa trees), or don’t get blighted (copy off of Devilstrand). On the other hand, if these were all filled in already, there would be less things tempting people to get into modding, especially easy XML-only mods. On the other other hand, if the base game had consistently formatted and documented XML, a formal API for mods instead of relying on fans decompiling, and didn’t break compatibility with mods all the time, modding would also be easier. :)
I’ve been on an huge Master of Orion kick the last while, so I’m playing through all the races on huge/easy/2 :)
Before that I played Hollow Knight (with mods so I could actually play it) to a satisfying ending. Cute, but dark.
I can’t remember as far back as July, but in no particular order, the games I’ve been playing recently:
Legends of Runeterra. Never been a fan of League of Legends, but MAAAN, is this game gorgeous! The art, the animations… I like how tactical it is, and how – unlike Hearthstone – it’s not a complete RNG-fest. Yes, there is some RNG, but compared to Hearthstone, you can actually play around and plan for it. The only problem is the progression system – if you don’t plan on spending money, you’re limited in the amount of decks you can play. But a small amount can get you a long way, and even without that, the game is very generous.
Hades. Wow. The art style, the animations, the story, the characters, the meaty combat system, THE MUSIC…. This is why Supergiant are one of the best devs out there. They don’t make that many games, but every game they make is a masterpiece. Hades is no exception. If you know a kid who’s in school and is bored out of their mind studying Greek Mythology, show them this game! They’ll become a star student in no time!
My only complaint is that some bosses and enemies can feel pretty unfair at times, but that’s par for the course when it comes to rogue-lites. In particular, even though I’ve beaten the game 5 times already, I still hate
Hades’ sweeping attack. And while we’re at it, the shield dudes in Elysium can go choke on my big, fat di…rk! Yeah, on my big, fat dirk!But really, for me, those are small specs on an otherwise pristine piece of art.Aquavias. A flow puzzle mobile game I like to play on my tablet. It’s really pretty, and quite relaxing… Until you get to the timed puzzles which can get quite punishing – especially in later levels. They strike me as a really weird design choice. Still, it’s a very pretty game.
Apart from that, I don’t remember playing anything else of note. I’ve been playing less and less Brawl Stars. With the introduction of the season pass, the game’s business model has started to turn into exactly what I hate about F2P games. The only way it could get any worse is if it became outright P2W…
But I’m in the minority – from what little data I can find, the player base seems to be healthy enough. So I try to focus on the good times I’ve had with it, rather than grumble about how fair the monetization model used to be, and how the game isn’t as fun as it was before.
That first one in Hades is definitely avoidable. Couldn’t say how, but once you get the hang of it that becomes their least dangerous attack.
I still haven’t tried Runeterra, I’m bouncing off of the art style, for some reason. Plus, I don’t think I want to take up another CCG. From what I heard, the F2P stuff sounds surprisingly decent, like they’re trying to get small amounts from a lot of players, instead of the usual whale hunting.
Progression-wise, it’s actually very fair and not-RNG dependant. A lot of the cards you get are so-called Wildcards. They’re basically a blank card of a certain rarity that you can use to craft whichever card of that rarity you want.
Of course, there’s always the danger of using all your resources to craft an uncompetitive deck, but with the amount of resources you get, chances are you’ll end up with at least five or six decks you can play.
I was playing New Vegas again a while ago, but some combination of the mods I was using ended up breaking the save game, so I shelved that playthrough and the next one will have to wait until I feel like reinstalling it and all the mods(possibly I’ll finally switch from FOMM to MO2, since MO2 is what I’ve been using for Fallout 4 and it’s working very well so far).
I also decided to play Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines again after stumbling upon Gopher’s LP of it. I finally ended up doing a full playthrough as a nosferatu. The game keeps saying that you have to stay in the sewers to not violate Masquerade, but honestly the whole thing seems like the developers didn’t have enough time to do what they wanted to do for the nosferatu, so it ends up feeling kind of half-baked. You end up having to go above ground quite a bit, but that’s okay because it’s actually very hard to accidentally get a masquerade violation. The detection seems to be entirely based on distance from the NPC and not whether they’re detecting you or not(unless you’re obfuscated), but the timer is very generous and the NPC needs to be panicking before you actually get a violation. In practice, you can easily stay out of the sewers most of the time without worrying about the masquerade too much.
Then my GPU seemed to be dying(but what actually died was my screen). After the hassle of getting the GPU, finding that it didn’t work, sending it back, finding out that my screen had stopped working and getting a new one, then finally getting the replacement for the RMA’d GPU(for the record, I upgraded from RX 550 to RX 5600XT and from an ancient 1080p TN panel to 1440p@144Hz VA with freesync), I figured I should get a game that can properly stress it at least somewhat – after all, I typically only play older titles that were running just fine on the RX 550. After some deliberation, I ended up getting Fallout 4. I knew in advance that I probably wouldn’t like it very much(after all, the only Bethesda game I’ve been a fan of is Morrowind), but I figured I’d play through the vanilla experience once, then mod it to the point where it’s barely recognizable as the same game and have some fun. That… turned out to be a mistake. I’ve seen some videos, read what people say about it and so on, so I figured I already knew most of the things wrong with it, but it turns out that what bugs me the most about the game is the UI and controls. Overloaded keybindings that can’t be changed(bashing/grenade/fusion core drop is the worst offender). Nearly unusable minimap. Notes that are in the misc section of items mixed with all sorts of keys and whatnot, can’t be sorted in any way except alphabetically, and can’t be marked as read. Terminals that require hammering tab repeatedly to exit because I guess being able to exit a terminal with a single keypress would be too user friendly. The list just goes on and on and I hate everyone involved in creating this nightmare and most of it can’t even be fixed with mods.
Oh, and I realized that I own Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssey in GOG and remembered playing it as a child, so I decided to pick it up and play it again. I’ve also been flirting with playing Hearts of Iron IV(mostly with the Old World Blues mod), but every time I try I pick a country, play until I’ve completed most of the focus tree and… then I’m just done. Can’t be bothered to try conquering the world or whatever it is you’re supposed to do, because the actual warfare part of the game is rather fiddly and tedious.
Fixed That For You ;-P
Yeah. while I love that game…it’s definitely an unpolished gem.
I picked up Spellbreak, which has been . . . interesting.
If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a battle royale where the players are all mages. You have limited levitation, and you cast your spells by using elemental themed gauntlets; each gauntlet has a primary and secondary attack, the latter being an AoE of some sort, such as a poison cloud or a flame wall. You start with one, and can pick up a second during the course of play.
I really like the mobility of the game. The mobility feels good, and you can find additional powers to change your mobility during play that are also enjoyable. I also really like the elemental magic system; the different elements interact with each other in ways that are very satisfying.
That said, the multiplayer element just doesn’t have any staying power for me. I’m pretty shoddy at it; while I’ve ended up in the top 5 (out of 32) multiple times, I’ve never won a match. Somehow it always feels like the guys who win are playing on a whole different level and I just got lucky scooting through.
On top of that, it forces cross-platform play if you aren’t playing solo. In a game where accuracy matters, using a controller against someone with a mouse and keyboard always feels like you’re playing with one hand tied behind your back.
If they had some sort of single player campaign for this, I’d play it in a heart beat. The game just feels really good to play, right up until you’re getting trounced over and over.
I always wondered if someone would make a magic-themed Battle Royale! Sounds neat, although the cross-platform seems a bit ill-advised. ^^;
You’re not wrong. Though if I’m being honest, I’m no more successful staying on the PS4 reservation than when I get into it with PC players.
The good news is that the rewards and store items in the game are mainly cosmetic. Nobody’s buying anything that will give them a leg up overall.
I apologize on behalf of my son, because he may be one of those people who keeps killing you. He’s been playing Spellbreak for a couple of weeks now, and he seems to place pretty highly. He’s on Switch, though, and I didn’t know about the forced cross-play.
He asks me every couple of days if I want to play duos with him, but my temperament these days doesn’t lend itself to the battle royale format.
Fall Guys actually provoked me into finishing abunch of backlog games, lol. I didn’t like the physics and it didn’t run great on PS4, so I played for a few matches and then booted up Life is Strange – Before the Storm in disgust after a particularly annoying death.
Life is Strange – Before the Storm has got a lot of hyperbolic buzz, and I don’t think it’s that good, but it’s still a good game. The writing has the advantage of being a prequel, so these writers already know where all the characters end up in LiS1 and the nuances they have. In Life is Strange 1, those twists and turns could come out of the left field. I think every bad guy save the final one got like a minute of redeeming background information after a very flat portrayal until then, and in BtS those characters reflect those nuances better. There’s also a lot of overt metaphors, which could feel a little hacky to me, but they were at least very in the spirit of the first game, which had a butterfly flap its wings and literally cause a storm. I liked the relationship of Chloe and Rachel, where Chloe is just Rachel’s dog for most of it. It’s very different from how she acted towards Max. The hallucination conversations Chloe has with her dream daddy in this game were also pretty poignant, I liked how that worked out. I loved the roleplaying in the DnD section and I memorized my lines for the theater segment.
Like Life is Strange 1 though, the last act is kinda balls. Conversations start feeling more railroady since they have to contrive some drama now. There are three baddies who all need to be dealt with, and while one is relatively flawed and interesting and gets a lot of set up, the remaining two are wild muscle, and finally
a crazy fucking bad twist villain I called the first time he came on-screen who since then got like three one-minute scenes total until he went bananas. Holy crap, it’s like entering a stupid dimension. They really dropped the ball on that guy. Meanwhile the musclepunched me out in our confrontation instantly and then got taken out by someone else off-screen. It’s possible that these would be more satisfying confrontations if I had chosen differently, but Life is Strange usually isn’t very divergent. I don’t think I missed some huge scenes.At least the final ending after that is much less of a mess than in 1.
Helltaker is like 7 levels long. I wanted to see what all the lewd fuss was about, and it was a pretty decent time, but it’s probably more interesting that it became such a meme because of strong sexy character designs and the porny theming. With the game being so short though it feels like a fun IP that needs a full game.
Prince of Persia – Sands of Time. The Citizen Kane of AAA western action adventure games, apparently. Played it briefly back at release and couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but playing it now it’s like playing the ancestor of everything from Spider-Man PS4 to Batman Arkham Asylum and Uncharted. The parkour is pretty good. I don’t like it as much as a freer platformer, but it works very well for what it does, especially once elements of strict timing are introduced. The combat is terrible, it’s like a janky ur-Arkham Asylum. I wish it had some better use of boss fights and dramatic music to let you know shit was getting real. Their setpiece for the final part of the game was taking the time rewind retry powers away from you, which made it more punishing, but not really more exciting. I imagine Shamus would flip out pretty fast ’cause it sure tried my patience. Story was cool, but the princess really falls in love with you at the drop of a hat and at the end there’s a bunch of odd dream sequences. It felt cooler in concept than in execution to me, but it’s still pretty fun, speaking as someone who usually don’t like the cinematic western AAA stuff that much.
Touhou Luna Nights is like the most awesome thing I played all year. It’s a metroidvania where your only attacks are throwing knives, and you start with both time slow and time stop. It’s a Touhou spin-off, and I’ve never played one of those, but I never felt very lost either. You’re a maid working for your local vampire lord to play through a sort of VR game recreation of her castle for her entertainment, where all the bosses are her other servants begrudgingly stepping in to play the bosses. Works out for me. There’s not that much story, but the premise keeps a lighthearted mood going.
The music is amazing. The sprite animation is cool even if the backgrounds are a little plain. There’s a lot of nuance to the different time mechanics and how they interact with objects with different properties, so the game is more orientated around puzzling and action than any sorta exploration or atmosphere. Touhou are bullet hell games, so every boss fight becomes this amazing anime battle with spells and lasers flying everywhere, and yet because of your time mechanics it’s relatively easy to learn the patterns and come out on top after a few tries. I heartily recommend it.
Super Mario 64 is fantastic. I hadn’t played it in a long time and sorta forgot, but I had a blast with it. There are no other platformers that do these jumping mechanics like Mario does. Playing as a kid me and my siblings spent more than a year poorly jumping our way through the game, but as an adult I can go ham on those more difficult jumping manouvers and beat most every star within a minute or two. 64 additionally has the advantage of a large open hub where level selection is mostly up to you. I skipped out on the 100 coin challenges, the Rainbow Ride carpet stars and a couple wing cap rooms and ended up at 100 stars precisely before I beat Bowser. My only real issue is the camera, but it wasn’t as huge a problem as I anticipated either. It’s just not always ideal.
I greatly appreciate the freedom of movement you have and the game that takes full advantage of it. Probably because I grew up playing a lof of these kinds of games, but it can be easy to feel restricted in games with more grounded or clunky sets of movement for me. Going back to 64 felt like removing the training weights and moving at super speed. When moving around is fun and all you do is move around, the game never stops being a good time to me.
Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty was pretty boring, but at least people like the next one a lot so I look forward to that. Booty was surprisingly Halloween-appropriate with the scary caves and the ghosts, too.
edit: Oh right, I played Genshin Impact too. It runs poorly on PS4. It’s a worse BOTW in just about every way. I didn’t like it that much but you can just kinda zone out to it if you want to.
I just tried out (and finished) Helltaker. Pretty cool for a free game! Making you redo a puzzle for choosing the wrong dialog option is kind of stupid, but picking the option that sounded funniest to me got me through most of the time. I could have done without the bullet hell section at the end.
I think the dialogue thing is fine since redoing it takes like 5 seconds once you’ve figured out the solution once.
I skipped the last puzzle after being stuck on it for a while, so getting dragged down for a punishment felt pretty appropriate. Suppose it was part of the main path, but getting an action part after failing on a brainy puzzly part felt like being tossed a freebie really lol. I did better at that than the puzzle.
I really would have liked if they’d progressed the 3D jumping / platforming from Mario 64 with their other Mario titles, instead of giving up and going back to 2.5D with Galaxy and 3D Land / World. It really made you feel like you were in this big, amazing place, instead of inhabiting a world made out of blocks! Even better would be picking a character like Super Mario 2 – Mario and friends, all jumping on enemies in different ways! :)
A metroidvania starring Sakuya? Is it as good as Koumajou Densetsu? I love those two games.
I haven’t heard about them before, but thanks for the heads up. I’ll give them a shot!
So none of them have shaved since yesterday morning?
I mean there is an axe obstacle that shaved my poor little bean man a few times
Recently I’ve played:
The White Door: An narrative-based adventure game. Part of the Rusty Lake series, but with a bit more logical coherence. (I’m grading that on a very generous curve.)
RiME: There’s not much game in here, but the mood it sets is good.
The Adventures of Elena Temple: Definitive Edition: A retro exploration game. Nothing special, but cheap and fun.
Chemical Exchange (Minecraft modpack): This is a Project E-based modpack, but the only things that can be converted between are the actual elements. This does help reduce the amount of shenanigans you can get up to, but there’s only so far you can get into the pack before Project E overshadows everything else. There also a bunch of quests at the end to gain ever-increasing amounts of EMC, which are best skipped; there’s nothing really interesting there.
Trace Memory (DS): It’s obviously a DS launch title. There’s also not that much in the way of puzzles in it, but I enjoyed it.
Break Out! (Minecraft modpack): This is one of the few Minecraft quest-based modpacks that don’t take 1000 years to beat, and the limited space available to you does create a different experience.
Path of Exile: I’ve been playing the Heist expansion off and on. I’m not that enthusiastic about this expansion, and I haven’t been sinking that much time into it, but it’s still fun.
Since Hexcells Infinite has added a hard mode I’m mostly staring and swearing at grey and blue hexagonal grids. I shall carry on doing this until way past the point of enjoyment or satisfaction.
Oh no. I wish I didn’t know this.
Hexcells is pure brilliance and I don’t have time to play it right now.
“WHAT? THIS PUZZLE IS OBVIOUSLY BROKEN AND THERE’S NO WAY TO DO ANYTHING WITHOUT GUESSING!”
Half an hour of outrage, insanity, frustration, and Eureka! moments later:
“That one wasn’t so bad. It’s bedtime, but I could probably squeeze in just one more…”
There’s a reddit page dedicated to it and quite a few comments where people think they’re not solvable. I’ve been staring at some for hours and I posted to reddit (as doctorparkenf [I am not a doctor]) and got a very intelligent reply. Since then I’m sure they are all solvable without guessing, but many require a screen grab then off to paint, then see what’s the invariant under what-if scenarios. Yes it’s destroying my free time, I limit myself to today’s date + US today’s date (I’m a Brit) but after the weekend I was two days behind schedule and am only now catching up. It’s horrible!
I’ve been playing a bunch of Myst style games, recently.
I started with Obduction, which is from the same studio as Myst. I liked it quite a bit – like Myst it has a pretty interesting basic premise to the setting, some pretty atmospheric worlds to explore, and the vast majority of the puzzles seem to land in that middle ground of “hard enough to be interesting, but not so hard as to be frustrating”, with maybe one exception (
the door combination involving ‘misspelled’ alien numbers).But the game does have one major achilles heel that holds it back: the game takes the “switching between worlds” aspect of Myst and makes it a central feature of the puzzles. This is really neat and did have some pretty good puzzles. But there’s a loading screen every time you swap: a fairly short one (assuming a relatively good machine), but when you’re swapping many times in the same puzzle, even a 10 second loading screen gets pretty painful fast.
And especially towards the end of the game, a lot of the puzzles became just a lot of swapping. One of the last puzzles (
the maze) I audibly groaned, because I saw pretty immediately what I had to do but realized it’d take literally 15-20 minutes of work to actually enact the solution due to all the world swapping and running around I had to do to “solve” it.It didn’t ruin the game, but the fact that the last bit of the game is the weakest bit was a real shame.
—
I then went back and actually played Riven – the actual sequel of Myst. I tried playing it over a decade ago but (and stop me if you’ve heard this before) the loading screens between the different islands where I had to change disks absolutely killed the game for me.
It has a reputation as the best game in the Myst series, and it’s definitely a solid game. It has one puzzle that’s infamous (the “waffle iron of doom”), but it’s the second hardest puzzle in the game that really annoyed me. (
I had the right animals, but couldn’t actually match the animals to their stylized depictions – was clicking on the wrong fish, the wrong frog, the wrong insect…)But the rest of the game is pretty great, (and even the two hard puzzles have their merits) unlike most games in this genre it’s more interconnected, it sort of feels like one massive puzzle, rather than being a bunch of separate puzzles glued together to form a game.
—
I’m currently working on Quern which is a different developers take on largely the same formula. It’s got it’s moments, but I’ve found myself more frustrated with this game than either of the other two. A lot of really good puzzles, but also a lot of times where I’m just spinning my wheels trying to figure what I’m actually supposed to do to find the next puzzle.
I think part of the issue is that the whole setup of the puzzle area is kind of nonsensical and random. It’s “justified” in the sense that the narrative explains that this whole area is setup to be a giant puzzle, but even it feels that things just work in weird and somewhat illogical ways.
Or maybe I’m just playing too many puzzle games and losing patience; but I’ve definitely spent more time frustrated at this game than either of the previous two.
Those are my exact feelings with Obduction. It’s obvious they considered loading times, as the area you port to has a loading screen between it and the rest of the world, but it was still too long.
Yeah, it’s maybe the strongest example I’ve seen where a game is so held back by a technological limitation. And I really feel bad for anyone who starts this game who owns an older/slower computer, because they’ll get 2/3rds into the game before getting blindsided by the slow loading issues.
As a whole, though, I do think it’s an interesting enough mechanic that I think it’s worth including, and they did try to offset the issue by keeping the load areas small, like you mention… it’s just a shame that the loading screens are such an obvious blemish on an otherwise really solid game.
(… though that last puzzle mostly just feels like a bad decision to me. Even if the loading screen had been instantaneous, it still would have been a good 10-15 minutes of running around to enact the solution)
I’m actually suspicious of the loading screens. I’m on an SSD, and the game doesn’t look *that* impressive. It feels like there’s a minimum loading time due to the special effect played on transport.
I’m currently on a Legend of Zelda binge. Right now in the middle of Majora’s Mask. As much as I love the franchise, I had never played this game before. And that’s because I had never got into the previous one, Ocarina of Time before. There was something about it that always put me off. I started the game about three times and always left it at the two-hour mark or so, not feeling the need to return. At some point I got sick of it and sold my copy, thinking I was never going to play it.
I couldn’t really explain it, but there was something about the transition to 3D that didn’t work for me, and made the game not feel like a Zelda title. Then, at some point I found an incredible deal for it and its sequel right after I had played the GBC title Link’s Awakening Deluxe, and I just impulse-bought them both. Then I started playing Ocarina and for whatever reason this time managed to click with me, and I saw it through the end with no desire to stop. I really can’t explain this either. Maybe the mistake was to start a 3D title without being in the mood thanks to having played a 2D title right before. I don’t know.
For reference, I’m playing the 3DS versions. I never touched the N64 ones. Maybe if I had from the very start (when they were new) I would have had better appreciation for them at the time. Anyway, I’m having a lot of fun with Majora right now. The only part I found frustrating was that stupid race through rings. I already hate those things (and developers keep sticking it in games, which annoys me to no end), but this is clearly the worst version of that minigame due to your character’s tendency to bump into the rings and change direction. When freaking Superman 64 is doing something better than you, then you have a problem. But well, at least it’s optional.
Maybe they improved the controls for the 3DS release? I know aiming hookshots was janky with the thumbstick, and the lock-on and limited camera angle in combat was a bit wonky too. I’d played 3D action games on computer before, and they handled those types of controls better than the Zelda games did. (Also, the three-handed N64 controller was a monstrosity; Good thing all modern ones copied the basic Batarang shape. :)
I’m also someone who played 2D Zelda games first and found it hard to get into the early 3D games like Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask (even though I loved the core idea of MM). And actually I’ve still never technically beaten either of them.
I do think those two games are a bit more clunky than any of the 2D games. The Sequlitis video, while loud and hyperbolic, makes a number of good points about 3D Zelda compared to 2D Zelda.
Ooookay, where do I start. Pathfinder:Kingmaker. Finished this sometime partway through September after something like ~250 hours (turn based, first the mod, then the official mode as it was released partway through my playthrough). I want to echo Jennifer Snow’s sentiment from one of the TWIP threads in that the game is infuriating with being all “Gawrsh Mickey! What could this mean?!” despite the fact that it has told you already. It almost feels like parts of the game were moved around at some point and nobody bothered to compensate and I was almost yelling at the screen “no, I don’t want another distraction! I want to start doing something about this big thing that I’ve been told about!” At the same time there is a lot of really good writing “locally”, as in particular scenes, particular characters, particular dialogues can be really great. I also experienced some bugs (the release of turn based mode partway through my playthrough did not make things any smoother), the kingdom management part got somewhat stale and the endgame was a slog through repeated encounters that used the same gimmick over and over. At the same time I feel like this is possibly the best implementation of a tabletop ruleset I’ve seen, the kingdom management was not bad, it just became clear by the lategame that it lacked variety and while I think maybe the game didn’t need to be stretched this much I’m still looking forward to the second one (though definitely gonna wait until at least a few major patches after release before playing it).
I’ve also started playing No Man’s Sky right after the last update. This is the first time I’ve tried it and most that I know about it is from the old days when it was apparently quite rough. I feel like they might have made it a little bit too accessible by now. Most things are trivial to get many with multiple ways to obtain them neither of which seems particularly challenging. But the sheer joy of going from system to system and checking out planets is a rare treat. Co-op was a disappointment though, in large part because of the aforementioned accessibility, it pretty much never feels like the players are actually supporting each other, but also because the game is somewhat arbitrary in what things are unique to the player and which are duplicated, it clearly shows that this is a later addition.
Got back into Cultist Simulator after bouncing off of it hard the first time. I literally fired it up for the “farewell look” before uninstalling it after having it on the drive for over a year and not playing it for nearly as long and on my first game things finally “clicked” and I got into the more advanced mechanics. The thing I particularly love about it is that it’s doing the whole “eldritch” thing without using the Cthulhu mythos (which has lost most of the mystique for me due to oversaturation).
Also Republique which had okay mechanics but the story was… definitely not as smart as the writers thought it was, Donut County which I loved because who doesn’t want to be an all devouring force of destruction, and Call of Cthulhu the newish horror game which was okayish but as I mentioned earlier “the Mythos” has been overused so much that it’s not really doing it for me. Oh and I’m trying to get the PC port of Deadly Premonition functional but I’m not far enough in the game to really talk about it other than if you want to give it a try and you can use any platform other than PC do that.
Addendum: So Fallout 76 has a free week and my multiplayer friend has been nagging me to play it forever so we took it for a spin. For the record we did not get very far into the game and I don’t think we’ll continue despite sorta kinda liking what we’ve seen. Let me elaborate.
So my friend is quite into the new Fallouts, and while the main stories in Bethesda FOs have been something of a disappointment I have enjoyed the exploration of the world and, to various extent, the gameplay. And in what little I’ve played of FO76 I’ve actually enjoyed those aspects in this one as well. I feel like the part of the game we played was just a touch grittier, just a touch rougher, just a touch more survival oriented than the (unmodded) newFOs and it was enjoyable tackling that with a friend. Honestly, if it was single player or co-op we’d be all over this thing (separately or together respectively).
And herein lies the gist of the problem. Again for the record we have not interacted with the multiplayer features much. We’ve seen I think two other low level characters, one of which kept popping up clearly going through the same early game path we were, and a bit later two 200+ level players showed up (separately from each other I believe) who have emoted at us amusingly and then started jumping around and flinging explosives at each other. Normally I’d probably argue how this has taken us out of the experience but the problem is that it never felt like we were “in” the experience for longer than a couple minutes in the first place. I think not 10 minutes have passed without getting a ping that someone has started some kind of event, that we got atoms, that we got SCORE… perhaps some of this stuff can be disabled, perhaps it’s not as pervasive later* in the game once you’ve dealt with the basic achievements but after several hours, when we were wrapping we’ve decided that while the survival stuff was cool it did not feel like it was leading towards a satisfactory conclusion but rather the usual MMO trappings of logging in daily, farming some kind of currency and waiting for events, which we did not feel like investing ourselves in.
*I know about the private servers but while we’d be willing to pay the base price for a game like this the subscription thing is a dealbreaker.
Oh man, I think the game actually used to be worse about this. The “best” part is that these pings would interrupt audiologs, which at the time I tried the game was the only real vehicle for the story. So you’d start trying to get some of the stupid backstory and it would be like:
“So the Reds finally hit us, just like I always said they would. Vegas is still there as far as I know but that probably won’t last long. Didn’t get accepted into…”
(notice that something is attaching the whatever bullshit, 10 second distress call plays on the pip boy)
Start the audiolog again…
“So the Reds finally hit us, just like I always said…”
Daily quest available! (5 second sound plays on Pip-Boy)
“So the Reds finally hit us, just like I always said they would. Vegas is still there as far as I know but that probably…”
You’ve earned 1,000 Atoms! (link to real money store)
Space Crew, Space Engineers, and Among Us.
My kids are loving Among Us, it’s the new hotness, and the fact that it can run multiplatform means we can get the whole family and friends into a game together.
My kids bought three copies and have been going to town. It’s surprisingly educational. For instance, we’ve had the opportunity to talk to them about not giving your home address to strangers on the internet!
I’m still obsessed with Magic drafts. The new set is good for drafting but ruined Standard until the latest round of bans happened, so I was feeling like the dog in the This is Fine meme.
Last week, I played Prey for the first time, and I’m glad I went in blind. It’s a great game! I haven’t really played Immersive Sims before (does Thief count?) and I can confidently say that I’m immersed! I don’t know if I’m simulated, though. I have System Shock 1 & 2 on The Pile of Shame already, I’ll probably give them a shot after.
I played Slay the Spire and it took me a while to warm up to it, but then it became one of the games I get hooked on multiple times for short bursts. So far, I killed the heart only once, with the Ironclad.
I’ve also been playing Final Fantasy X on the Switch, but I haven’t continued for a while, though I’ll probably continue it at some point…
I also played some board games (which is now mostly on ice again because COVID: 2nd Wave). I played some 18XX games. They’re a set of games that are about building and operating railways, but actually they’re about playing the stock market and ruining perfectly good companies for fun and profit. Small tweaks to the base rule set lead to very different games. In some, just running a good company can actually pay off! Pretty fascinating, though I have no idea how to win these games, and they take forever…
Slay The Spire is really good. I’d only played a few deck-builders before, but Space Food Truck is only fun with multi-player and didn’t have enough replayability to keep an active community, and Magic and Hearthstone are full of micro-transaction BS. Slay was the first game I could really get into, building a winning deck. :)
Hmm, what have I been playing?
DDO (shocker!)
Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Outward
Raji: An Ancient Epic (recommend, it’s cool)
I decided I had to stop playing Marvel Strike Force a month or so ago. My Alliance was a really great bunch of people, and when I just didn’t have the time to keep up with the progression, I felt bad. But it was a good thing for me to get away from a have that required playing multiple times every day.
I’m mostly playing Disgaea 5 now. My second kid is coming on six weeks, and that’s the game I’m going to play when I’m up in the middle of the night. At least that’s the idea, I’m not the best fit for Disgaea. I keep wanting to complete everything before moving on to the next storyline battle, but that’s literally impossible in a Disgaea gave. There’s always something else you can do. But I’m working on just shutting off my need for progression and completion, and just have fun exploring the different systems.
I bought myself a Switch on Amazon Prime Day (Well… for a Prime Day competitor that an electronics store here in Spain does with way less impressive discounts). I’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on it since it seems to be the console’s killer app and Nintendo games are famously ultra-expensive (they don’t price them down as they age), so I’ve not done my new console standard strategy of “buy a massive smorgasbord of every console-exclusive that grabs my attention and play a bit of all of them to begin with”. As a contrarian I went in a bit hostile to the game considering the massive amounts of hype… and was proven wrong. About 20 hours in it’s absolutely fantastic, and unless I for whatever reason grow colder to the core mechanics as I play more of it, it’s earned a spot on my definitely-way-longer-than-ten-spots (but still pretty exclusive) “probably in my top 10 favorite games ever” list. The level of freedom it presents in its mechanics is really unmatched – it feels like what I naively assumed games would be like as a child – but it still manages to present an escalating level of challenge… that you can ration out. It’s the most free I’ve ever felt playing a game. The amount of systems that logically interact feels like something you could only get in a janky and complex old-school RPG or strategy game with a focus on simulation, where you’d have to read massive walls of text describing all of this, but it’s happening in an incredibly user-friendly and intuitive modern 3D action game. It’s almost surreal how much this game has managed to grab the best of both worlds. A YouTube video I watched described it accurately as “Whenever you ask yourself ‘I wonder if that will work?’ the answer is almost always yes”, and years upon years of gaming and not having stuff that would make sense in the real world work because of programming limitations only to have ALL of it work here is completely mind-blowing.
I do think it’s got faults that people don’t tend to acknowledge amid the torrent of hype though. While the world is huge and really cool to look at there’s not that much to discover. While you come across a lot of stuff, the list of types of stuff you can come across seems pretty short, there’s a lack of interesting environmental storytelling – it’s mostly just stunning landscapes (I am constantly saying “wow that’s pretty” out loud – and because your weapons all break after a few hits (and armor seems incredibly rare) there’s not a lot of significant gameplay-affecting rewards to find. There’s also how threadbare the story is, though with how the game is designed to allow you to experience it in basically any order you want (or to skip massive portions of it) this seems like a feature, not a bug.
I find myself in a bizarre position with this game where even though I’m ready to declare it a personal favourite I still think it feels like a tech demo for a much better game – Breath of the Wild has the mechanics completely worked out, to a degree of perfection that I don’t think has been matched in the industry, but everything else feels thin. Hopefully the sequel (which if I remember got announced a year ago and then went in complete radio silence) keeps the core gameplay loop as it is, and focuses on fixing up everything surrounding it. I’m frankly in awe at Breath of the Wild, and a game that shores up its (very significant) faults has a shot at dethroning Deus Ex as my favourite of all time after its 15 year reign of terror. Breath of the Wild itself isn’t even close to this, but put its core in a better wrapping and you’ve got a contender.
Preach, brother! I’ve been saying that for ages. The world is really fun to explore, but you also know that werever you go, there won’t be any interesting stories to unravel or mysteries to solve, very little to learn or understand. And not that much to gain in terms of tangible rewards, at least rewards that different from those that litter every nook and cranny. It’s especially weird with some of the shrines. Some of them are really hard to get into, like you need to solve a pretty clever environmental puzzle and might feel genuinely excited after doing so. But that excitement completely vanishes once you realize that the actual shrine would be just another samey puzzle gauntlet with a stock cutscene and reward at the end. One would think that uncovering a carefully hidden ancient temple under a mountain would be a little more meaningful.
Which breaks my heart, because I’m very fond of post-apocalyptic fantasy and ancient forgotten magi-tech settings. Part of the problem seems to be the, – and that idea got me in trouble before, but here goes – the Zelda-ness of it all. I know, a lot of people really dig the lore and the characters, but it’s always been a very kid-friendly, Nintendo-esque take on the RPG genre, effective yet relatively simplistic. In a beautifully rendered huge open world like the one on Breath of the Wild that Zelda approach deosn’t seem like it’s enough – it makes me yearn for some Western cRPG type of writing in terms of depth and worldbuilding, if not necessarily tone.
On the other hand, the disposable weapons I actually like. They add a sense of scrappiness to the combat that is very enjoyable, especially early on. The menu fiddling that comes with it is a trade-off, though.
I’ve finally picked up Dragon Age: Origins. Better late than never, I suppose.
I’ve been enjoying the game a lot, even though there are some things I’d improve mechanically, and it’s quite buggy.
After I finished the Mass Effect series (this is a while ago, though I came late to that franchise too), I was sorely wanting for something like those games, and everybody kept recommending me Dragon Age, since it’s a similar game by Bioware, described by many as “Medieval Fantasy Mass Effect”. I still miss the hard(ish) sci-fi space opera of ME, but I like DA:O and am eager to continue with the next two games (after I finish the DLC).
There is a super impressive fan made patch by a modder called Qwinn out there: https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonage/mods/4689?tab=description. Was still being updated earlier this year, and it fixes a slew of bugs and restores some things that were previously not possible to see/get due to glitches.
Sounds interesting.
I’ll check it out.
When I got to the later puzzles of 7 Billion Humans (and Human Resource Machine), I found it way easier to copy the programs, and paste them in to my text editor. It turns out they save and load as regular text-based assembly code, and there are syntax highlighters for them, too!
Games I’ve recently played through…..
Red Dead Redemption 2
Played it back to back with the first game(which I played for the first time this year) and loved it. Despite the gameplay being solid but uninspired, the characters were well written and the world was beautifully detailed which made all the difference to me. Ended up doing a lot of the sidequests just to see what happened despite the fact there was little material reward for doing so. Also, Arthur is now one of my favorite open world protagonists, even more then John from the first one.
Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies
I played AC7 earlier this year as my first take on the AC series and enjoyed it and it got me to buy the PS2 trilogy of 4,5 and 0. AC4, while not as technically impressive as 7 is, makes up for it by having a much more consistent side story(the kid living in the occupied down vs being all over the place in AC7) and having a solid campaign, where as AC7 was up and down and everything(with the penal missions being a massive exercise in gameplay and story segregation). THe megalith mission felt a bit unnecessary though since the previous mission could have easily been the finale.
There is No Game: Wrong Dimension
It’s basically an adventure game but with a loving send-up/homage to video games with a lot of 4th wall breaking to boot. It’s short, 4-5 hours but was a lot of fun and has a solid enough story to support it underneath.
Hades
I’m not done with this but have been enjoying it so far. I don’t normally care for Rouge-likes/lites and my previous attempts haven’t done much for me(FTL, Into the Breach, Rogue Legacy) despite wanting to like them. This has kept my interest due to how it’s set up, but I’m currently taking a break from it due to wearing on it a bit and realizing how much time I’ll need to put into it to finish. For what it’s worth, it’s held my interest far more then FTL, Hades and Rogue legacy did due to my love for the dev team(Supergiant).
Metamorphosis
Basically a massive love letter to Franz Kafka, you play a man who has mysteriously turned into a bug and must find his way around his apartment building and into a weird world beyond in hopes of becoming human again. It also borrows a ton from Kafka’s The Trial as well and as far 3d platformers/adventures go it’s pretty solid. The atmosphere is surreal but it’s short(about 3 or so hours) which actually works towards it’s benefit because it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.
Spritfarer
A game where you take over Charons job as boatman of the dead and spend your time sailing around an afterlife ocean carrying spirits, building them homes, giving them what they want to keep them happy and getting all the feels. It’s a town builder on a boat with some metroidvania elements(the boat can’t pass certain barriers until after you install the required upgrades) but you get to spent time with a lot of interesting characters until they feel satisfied enough to pass on. It’s a wonderful little indie title.
Uwaaa, I’ve finally started RDR 2 on the PS4, it’s gorgeous and excellent as a game though still oddly buggy for a console. (Example: hanging forever when I complete this mission. Sigh.)
I played through inFamous Second Son too. I love how the mechanics work in the inFamous games as you toil your way up to superherodom. They did it this time too. When it came to story and setting, this installment felt pretty perfunctory and a bit rushed, I’m afraid. (The latter was built into the game concept, I’d say, but all in all I give it a passing grade.) The only major surprise was that it ended pretty quickly — I was expecting to go free the captives as the final act but nope. Or is there some DLC I haven’t seen?
I think I’ll go for Ghost of Tsushima next. The descriptions above sound like just what I want.
I also fired up Steam and, since I have a great fondness for geese, bought Untitled Goose Game. Looking forward to being horrible to the humans.
I’ve been playing Remnant: From the Ashes.
I have never seen a game that so nakedly and unabashedly borrows/steals from so many other established games. It’s part Half-Life, part Doom, part Fallout, part Destiny, part Dark Souls. Yet somehow, this weird borrowed mix actually works. It’s a fun shooter that does a lot of things right, despite the fact that it doesn’t have an original bone in its body.
If you decide to play it, don’t be put off by the initial derivative, post-apocalyptic cityscape. The subsequent worlds you explore are far more interesting.
I’m a first-time dad and a grumpy old gamer with limited time so I’ve found myself gravitating towards older games. Particularly linear action games without a whiff of open-world/sandbox elements or even a shadow of RPG/levelling/unlock aspects.
Earlier this month I finally completed Shadows of the Metal Age which is an extremely impressive fan-made expansion for Thief 2. It also ended my foray into the Thief-franchise as a whole which is a bit sad (though I’ll happily replay the games).
I bought Thief 2 back in 2015 and completed it over 8 months, only sitting down to play late at night, and always completing an entire level each time. One of the best gaming experiences I’ve had in years. That convinced me to buy and play Thief 1, 3 as well as the reboot.
Without opening up a can of worms I’ll just briefly say that I did enjoy the Thief-reboot. Once I mentally decided to stop comparing it to the franchise it belongs to and take it on its own terms it became quite enjoyable. It’s a pretty decent stealth game, but a pretty bad Thief game.
Given the theme of playing spooky game near the end of October I decided to reinstall Alan Wake which I remember enjoying a lot back in the day.
“It also ended my foray into the Thief-franchise as a whole which is a bit sad”
Why’s that? There are a lot of impressive FMs, including ones with voice acting and into movies, not just T2X
I was on a stealth kick myself, this year – finished replaying Thief Gold, fully replayed TMA and T2X and first three Splinter Cells, and now, from time to time, I install and play some FMs and thoroughly impressed with the community work
I suppose sad in the way that all the “main” stories are over and I find myself wishing I could erase my memories and replay them again to experience it all over anew.
But you are right, there are plenty of amazing FM’s out there. I believe the community even topped themselves with some amazing single levels and mini-campaigns in honour of Thief’s 20th anniversary a few years back (http://www.southquarter.com/tdp20ac/).
It’s also not over for stealth games. I have several Splinter Cell games lined up, the two Styx-games and I suppose it’s time to replay Dishonored 1 soon (which I prefer to play as a pure stealth game).
Not to mention the fantastic Dark Mod that I’ve had installed for years, but never really done much with sadly.
I’ve been playing:
Witcher III: Blood and Wine
I finally finished the whole playthrough which began with Wild Hunt 3 years ago. Felt very weird to be bidding goodbye to my Geralt (who I kinda started playing almost a decade ago!). Anyway, I thought the expansion was basically fantastic. And its really nice not to be riding around in swamps :-)
Uncharted 4
Which is really good – fun (and largely undemanding) gameplay with actual honest-to-goodness character development.
XCOM 2
I played a good 20 hours of this, having almost bounced off when I began on Normal difficulty and got handed my ass in the first mission after the tutorial. Easy difficulty for me!
At its best, its wonderful. However it also annoys me by continally interrupting what I’m doing on the Geoscape. And I’ve got to the stage where I’m playing mission types that I’ve already played which makes me feel like I’m grinding.
God of War (2018)
This is what I’m currently playing. It’s fun. It’s pretty. It’s got some decent character beats. It’s not blowing my mind in the way that reviews led me to believe it would… maybe it will later.
I am putting up with Kratos being the most Archetypal Repressed Warrior Man solely because the game seems to realise this isn’t a great thing to be.
This describes most of my experience with the game as well. I love roguelikes/lites in general, I liked the graphics, the play controls were solid, I liked the random guns and skills… but I didn’t enjoy the game at all. In desperation to get my money’s worth from the thing, I finally turned on cheat codes. (This is something they make incredibly difficult deliberately and are working to patch out entirely despite being a game you can play entirely single player… this always frustrates me. like just give me an offline only char or something; I don’t care about your online BS.)
What I discovered with infinite ammo/no reload on was that I could make it all the way to the end of the second stage, at which point the enemies had way too much health. The boss, in particular, had so much HP that it took me over 10 minutes to get it mostly dead, and then I finally missed a dodge and died. At that point I realized this is the type of game where your starting character is essentially incapable of winning a run, and you are expected to die and grind to become more powerful until you reach a point where the game is completeable. I absolutely hate this sort of game, so I immediately uninstalled and have not been back.
Dunno if that is what I was sensing that was making me not enjoy it, but it was definitely a deal breaker.
As for myself, I mainly have been playing Final Fantasy Tactics Randomizer, ever since I caught an eLmaGus stream where he was playing it. I hadn’t known it existed, but FFT is one of my all time favorite games, so I have had a blast with the randomizer.
I very recently bought Baldur’s Gate 3 on early access and am also really enjoying it, despite how buggy and incomplete it is. The combat is the closest representation of actual tabletop DnD I have played in a videogame (since maybe the 80s era commodore DnD titles). I love turn based combat, and I love how it is implemented in BG3. It is NOT a good sequel to the actual Baldur’s Gate games, and I wish they hadn’t used the BG name really, but I guess I get it. I was not a big fan of BG1 or BG2, so it doesn’t bother me as much, but I get why some people are upset about that.
Other than that it is mostly my normal rotation of MMOs: WoW (now that the Shadowlands prepatch is out), Guild Wars 2 (for as long as I can stand the horribly implemented dodge-roll combat), and Champions Online (mostly making fun costumes, occasionally actually playing them).
Every now and then I fire up Total War Warhammer 2, but I don’t really have the mental energy for it at the moment; I have become progressively sicker and sicker over the last year or so, and the Drs finally figured out I have what is almost certainly Hashimoto’s disease (waiting on final bloodwork to totally confirm). This is on top of the fibromyalgia and seizures sooo not the best, really. Thankfully I have rescue meds now that are at least keeping me out of the ER when things get bad (been there more than enough in the last 12 months, thanks).
Honestly a lot of the time I am just watching streams on twitch and not playing anything at all. Just getting through day by day until my final bloodwork next month, and then hopefully treatment.
I hope your treatment goes well! I’ve got a relative with Hashimoto, and I’m sad to hear you’ve got it too. At least you’ve got something to keep you occupied during these shitty times. What I know for a fact, though, is that these things end up making you stronger during other tough times in life.
Recently completed Final Fantasy VII Remastered (not the Remake). I had a good time but playing it with decades of hindsight made it a bit more understandable why that series started going nuts at about this time. The “random encounter zaps you to a different battlefield” mechanic plays way worse on 3D than it did in 2D, especially in these smaller, early-3D environments. The final dungeon was kind of a joke; 10 minutes of walking padded out to an hour with random encounters. This also started the “rando minigames” era of the series which hit its logical conclusion in FFX-2. I think switching to “the major sidequest is now monster hunts that actually let you use the game’s mechanics” was a good call, as was “combat is now real-time and actually uses the beautiful environments” (assuming the FFVII Remake really did improve those mechanics vs. the jank of XV)
Wasteland 3 makes some interesting decisions that negate some of my criticisms of the second game, but I’m still not very far. I think if they get to a fourth one they will finally break down and give the player a definite character (customized or otherwise). This game does a halfway point between that and “you have a squad, not a character” by letting you choose a team of two people that can be pregenerated or fully customized. The narration likes to talk about what “you” do even though I’m not sure who “you” is supposed to be. It’s also a bit weird how easily animal companions die but characters no longer have permadeath, but I haven’t fully decided how I feel about that yet.
Wait — it’s not still August?! Man, the pace of this academic year is really getting to me. Since the last TWIP post, I’ve been at:
Dark Souls II: I started messing around with video sharing to YouTube for school purposes, and I started a Let’s Play for practice. Unfortunately, work has left my vocal cords not up to recording. Now that I think about it, I still have a video I need to upload for nobody to watch.
Fall Guys: It was free through PlayStation Plus, and I like the goofy art vibe. I have an easier time accepting losses than is usual for me, but my wife (purely as spectator) actually gets kind of upset when things go sideways.
Street Fighter V: Another free PlayStation Plus pickup. Sadly, my beloved Blanka requires a DLC purchase, but I’ve been messing around with Chun-Li. She’s still a charge character, and she feels similar in the ‘control space with normals’ department.
Overwatch: I got into it for school, but our e-sports team is only doing Smash and Rocket League for now. My son and I still enjoy playing together, and I dig the Junkenstein’s Revenge bot mode that came up with the Halloween event. I appreciate that characters exist which allow me to contribute even though I can’t aim for crap.
Dauntless: It’s inferior to pretty much any Monster Hunter, but it’s free.
Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate: The announcement of Rise for the Switch got me hype, but I can’t really play World much these days (my wife is typically using the PS4 for Minecraft). I took the plunge when it went on sale. I’d put a good 180 hours or so into the 3DS original, so my gear is pretty overleveled for the new single-player content.
You could always use LP Bot.
I’d imagine a Speak & Read analysis of the lore of Drangleic would be amazing, but my mechatronics skills are not up to that task. :-)
I played Maristice and got 100% completion. I think it falls in no way short of good old Solstice and is in many ways better. As a PachuMari fan I even like the what-passes-for-a-story. It’s odd how simply putting a shadow under Marisa makes it so much easier to orient yourself in a room.
Because Ultima VI: The False Prophet is one of the most awesome games to have ever been made I’m replaying Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. This game is actually a lot better than I remembered as it’s wonderful to anchor your ship to the east of Minoc, take the Moongate to Castle Brittania, get healed by Lord British, moongate over to Skara Brae for cheap rations, moongate back to Minoc and your ship is still anchored there. For how old the game is it’s enormous in scope and complexity. I’m loving the time I’m spending with it and I’m looking forward to playing Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny to really immerse myself in the world of Brittannia.
I haven’t been playing many games, but I bought two new (to me) synthesizers and have been playing with those. I added a Subharmonicon and Drummer From Another Mother to my Moog stack of semi-modular stuff (which, previously, consisted of only a Mother-32, plus a Behringer Neutron).
Learning to get the most out of semi-modular synths is….a task, to be sure. I did get a really nice jam going this evening, and even had the foresight to record it, which was nice.
I never finished my comment the other day and I don’t have much to say, but for the sake of posterity I want to keep posting in these :)
After a decent game binge in the first half of the year (hello 2020 circumstances), things have slowed down a bit. Last 6 weeks ish have been mostly about Crusader Kings 3, a game which I intended to at least sit out the launch window for, due to Paradox’s launch track record. To my grand surprise it came to Game Pass day one however. As part of that package I actually played a fair chunk. My assessment, as an EU4 veteran who only lightly dabbled in CK2: the game looks and feels amazing, everything is more streamlined and allows you to engage with the story aspect of the game, if you allow it to immerse yourself. The systems supporting the game do run out of depth when playing more and a skilled player will quickly grow to a point where they are not seriously challenged by anything in game. With time and fleshing out of the game and additions I have no worries this will change. As a launched product it’s very stable and polished judged against PDX standards and there is a lot of mileage and enjoyment to be had before any of the niggles rear it’s head, which will mostly affect people with great mastery of the systems. I’m sure this picture is very different for serious CK2 veterans, but I was plesantly surprised with this game as it came out.
The other game I played seriously and intensely is Hades as it came to Switch alongside version 1.0. Having had an intense affair with Hades as it first came to Steam late last year, the game is still a gem. Undoubtedly will become a permanent favorite long term. As someone who was there for Bastion as it first came out, I’m a longtime Supergiant games fan and I have no reservations saying that Hades is my personal favorite of theirs by quite a margin. Loving Greek mythology regardless of the game is just the gravy on top that makes it all that much better. I have nothing else to say that hasn’t been said numerous times in the past month on the internet, just adding to the choir, I love this game.
I’ve been on a bit of a Supergiant Games binge. Replayed Transistor on my Switch, confirming that, yes, it’s still one of my favorite games of all time and certainly my favorite Supergiant game. No surprises there. The music alone is fantastic, and has been a constant presence in my daily playlist for years, but everything else in Transistor just fits together so perfectly. In a way, it’s similar to both Blade Runner movies – the individual parts are pretty great, but a sort of Voltron-like magic happens once they all connect to make a cohesive whole. By the way, Supergiant Games live orchestra performances at PAX, especially the 2020 one, are pretty great, just fyi.
I then jumped into Hades on the Switch. I messed around with it a bit back in the early days of Early Access, but quickly decided that this is a game that demands to be played on the Switch. So, Hades is weird for me as a Supergiant fan(boy). On the one hand, it’s easily their best game ever. The combat is immensely satisfying, the writing and the voice acting is great, and the sheer amount of possible conversations and character reactions is staggering. And yes, they really did manage to reinvent the whole perception of death in roguelike – you actually do get excited about going back to start. So, pretty much everything you’ve probably heard about Hades is true. It’s also addictive as hell, especially with the pick-up and play convenience the Switch offers.
That being said, I don’t love it in the same way I do other Supergiant games. Because, well, at its core it’s still a roguelike, which means it’s inherently more videogame-y than the others. I’ve “beaten” it in about 35 runs, I think – that’s how much it took me to get the “true” ending, which still isn’t an ending, of course. They certainly do a great job of justifying the endlessly cyclical nature of it all in-universe, certainly better than most other roguelikes. Still, its genre means that, for me, Hades can never feel as finished or satysfying as Transistor or Bastion or Pyre. Also, the music isn’t as good when you listen to it outside the game. Like I said, Hades is a better game than those other three, but they are better somethings than Hades, if it makes a lick of sense.
Anyway, gonna be replaying Pyre for the next couple of days (or weeks. Work has been crazy lately). Also dabbling with Spiritfarer, which is just nice and very very pretty.
Coincidentally, this comprises my entire review of Transistor…
I’ve been in a zombie rut recently. “Dead state” and “They are billions”. Since i sold my graphics card, I’ve been relying on my integrated 8 CU Vega graphics. I’ve been quite impressed with their performance!
Of course, I’m not trying to play the newest or graphically intensive games but considering that my old GTX 560 would probably have had problems with some of the games I’ve been playing it’s really amazing that this little integrated dealie is managing so well!
Finished Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (twice) last week, I think, and I’ve already forgotten it. Not a bad game but such a generic story.
Spiritfarer was a while ago, yet it clearly stuck with me. Mechanicwise it is nothing special but the graphics and music and the stories are effective enough to drill through even a somewhat harder shell right into your heartplaces. It is definitely special and I can recommend it.
And now there is of course Hades. It is a bit of a surprise because I haven’t liked earlier Supergiant games, despite them being good, but everyone was playing this so I installed it just to try it out and probably stop after an hour or so…. but this one is so tight. But more than that it is soooooo easy not to stop playing. It catches you and you just go one more room, choose one more reward, (die,) spend resources, choose another weapon, start another round… and it never stops, never slows down, does not let you go until you force yourself to finally save and quit, because you’ve been at it for hours and you are hungry and tomorrow you’ll have to go to work. It’s civ’s “one more round” effect but with action instead.
This week I played Amnesia: Rebirth.
The most interesting thing about the game is how one of the central mechanics in it works against its theme. Let me explain. Tinderboxes have been replaced with matches: when a match is lit, you can use it to illuminate a small vicinity around yourself, and light up as many candles and lanterns as you can find before its short lifespan runs out.
This mechanic is more realistic than Tinderboxes, and on a surface level it seems it would create tension because you’re encouraged to move forward before your match expires. What happens instead is that when you decide to light a match, you scramble to find as many light sources as you can in a very analytical and efficient fashion. If there arn’t any light sources around, you run forward as fast as you can, so you get as much use out of the match as possible.
What has happened several times so far is that I’ve ignored the spooky ghost in favor of lighting another candle. One time I even moved toward the place the spooky ghost was a second ago because I saw an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling. It’s very hard to be scared when you’re trying to be efficient.
There are more problems with the game, but this is what I found the most interesting.
I’ve been playing a variety of low-key things to keep me sane around my final annual PhD review back in September, but I’ve been playing a lot of Noita pretty consistently, especially since I got into modding it. I was bothered by the fact that potions couldn’t be evaporated like water could (you could just pour them directly on lava and they’d just sit there), so I made a personal mod which added gaseous forms of all potions (plus a few other other fluid-related things) which has turned out to be wildly more popular on the Steam Workshop than I anticipated, so I’m having fun working on new content for that (for which I have enough ideas to keep me going for several months at least). My big achievement last night was managing to create a perk that causes the player to sweat in direct proportion to the amount of HP they’ve lost without needing to ask for help with Lua once!
Have you defended yet, or is that still in the works? Either way, good luck!
Thanks! I got a six-month extension (which, like, 95%+ of students at my uni do so it’s quite common) through March to finish up, so I’ll probably be defending around then. I’m in a pretty good place where I have all the data and results, I just need to do a bunch more checks for systematics and write everything up.
I recently finished (like 30 minutes ago) Starcrawlers, a sci-fi dungeon crawler. I had load of fun with the crawling itself, but less fun with the inventory management as the loot is randomly generated, so I usually ended up with a lot of similar-looking pieces of equipment and not knowing which was the best for each of the four characters, though I got better as the game progressed. The story is classic corporate shenanigans, except that you can side with one of two set of corporations or the anarchists, with a few choices during the story missions. It seems the choices are branching, but since I’ve only played the game once, I don’t know how each route differ from the others. Starting from the halfway point, I sided with the biggest group of corporations, helping them accomplish their sinister goals.
In addition to the story missions, there are randomly generated side missions, with a corporation sending you against another, which will impact your reputation with each corp. They are a good source of XP, loot and money, but they tend to be a little samey.
I also played the Room Two, which is just like the first (which Shamus wrote about a few years ago). Even if the puzzles are more intricate, I can’t say I’m fully happy with the switch from a central object to a handful of objects scattered around a room, but I still enjoyed the game.
And some Rimworld in a succession game (each player play one in-game year and then give the save file to the next player), but in the end I don’t think I’m enjoying it a lot.
Well, before the thread vanishes for another three months:
I started playing Othercide yesterday, an Xcom-style roguelike focusing on melee. Normal Mode only allows healing through killing a character of equal or greater value, which combined with %hp skills being fairly necessary leads to pretty hefty tension. But then there’s resurrection abilities that can even be used on characters from previous runs, so permadeath isn’t permadeath. It’s interesting so far. Monsters on Week 2 are already mean, and I’m getting the impression resurrecting characters across multiple runs will end up being mandatory to win. Could be wrong.
The nudity is dragging it down; the nude main character is prominent in the base screen, and all new characters generate nude in the fetal position, so the whole thing ends up feeling like DeviantArt. Albino women fighting Silent Hill monsters gives an otherworldly heaven/hell feel, but naked albino women fighting Silent Hill monsters gives more of a gross hentai feel. On the plus side, the Deviantart feel seems to be limited to the base screen; deaths are just standard death animations, and the characters have battle damage that doesn’t affect clothing.
Combat is a mix of styles, lot of X-com in there. Turns are for individual characters, who get 100 AP broken into two 50 AP chunks; if you use less than 50 your next turn is 50 beats from now, if you use more than 50 it’s 100 beats. I think enemies only get 50. Enemies also have different target priorities which I assume is important to know for the harder fights. Later enemies (“later”, I’ve reached Week 2 of what looks like 6) have some crazy range and nasty attacks; the latest one has a ranged attack that prevents a character from moving for 50 beats, which is really nasty when you’re mostly melee.
Apart from lore entries, the only thing to do in base is upgrade the fighters, make new fighters, or sacrifice fighters to heal. They get Xcom-style power upgrades, and you can also boost their individual skills with money and finite resources. Permanent damage means it’s hard to keep veterans alive, but the last few maps have killed all my newbies so I don’t know where the balance is, if there is one.
Neat so far. Not sure how long I’ll play it, I’m not actually a stress guy.
If you liked 7BH, I recommend DumbBots: Hello World. It’s the free demo / tutorial of the full game, which isn’t out yet. Very similar drag & drop coding to 7BH, but you’re coding multiplayer bots in a sandbox-ish environment. (Presumably the full game will have more of a proper sandbox mode.) It reminds me a little bit of Garry’s Mod if Garry’s Mod had a simple drag & drop interface for altering NPC behavior.
It also had exactly one review, which was negative, and drove me to rant in the community forum for the game about how nobody knows this awesome hidden gem exists and how much that irritated me.
EDIT: It’s on Steam BTW. I don’t know if it’s also on other platforms, but it’s on Steam for sure.