T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I am still playing a bit of Risk of Rain 2 but I’m now also playing a bit of Terraria and Phasmophobia while waiting for Phasmaphobia to update and Risk of Rain returns to release.
What are you guys up to?
From The Archives:
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Just finished 200+ hours of Tears of the Kingdom, so I’m in that weird stage where I devoted so much time to a single thing that I don’t know what to do with my free time now that it’s done. I’m almost positive that I did other things before Zelda. Seems like a long time ago though
I just got finished with a very quick playthrough of Shadowrun Hong Kong, which gave me more sympathy for those who struggle to achieve the golden ending for it. It’s an old game, but possibly my favorite CRPG.
I’m playing Civilization 6 in preparation for a friendly game next Monday, and continuing my work to catch up with my friends on Final Fantasy XIV.
Shadowrun: Hong Kong isn’t even ten years old. That’s an ‘old game’?
Personally, I think I preferred Dragonfall. Although Hong Kong had one moment in particular that had me sold on the writing.
By the standards of this site? Certainly not. By the standards of the gaming public at large? Very much old news.
And yeah, Dragonfall has been my preference for a while, but I have been shifting on that, hence ‘possibly.’
I like the gameplay adjustments in Hong Kong, which counts for a lot, and the writing is at least comparable.
On the downside, I do dislike how Hong Kong thrusts you into a specific backstory, rather than letting you define your own, as Dragonfall did. Still, you can at least define how your character approached it/what they took away from it, and, more importantly, still can define their present, and make major decisions about their future.
I wish they made more of those. I also wish they had a mage companion in one or both so that you could pick an archtype other than mage and still cover all of your bases.
It would be cool to have more, but I think it’s best that they follow their inspiration. We got a pretty cool mech game out of that, at least.
And while Dietrich and Gobbet weren’t the best at arcane blasting, I generally found that they got the job done, providing solid support spells. The main role not covered was Face, since the PC wound up doing all the negotiating.
I honestly had the most fun playing a Rigger.
Hunting down the last few shrines in tears of the kingdom, maybe upgrading a little more armor before heading to the final boss
I’m still playing Rougebook, like I was two entries ago (I believe).
I’m excited for the HoloCure update coming out next month. (Mentioned this game in more detail a few entries back, but before we had a release date/teaser for the new update.)
I must know, is it a meme to write rouge instead of rogue as standard in all rogue-like / rogue-lite rogue-anything circumstances? I’ve seen it too many times now for it to just be accidental miss-spelling.
Idk, I have to consciously remind myself that the G goes before the U in rogue every time I try to type the word. In addition, G and U are on different halves of the keyboard, so when you’re touch typing and don’t coordinate between your hands correctly, it’s easy to swap them. Your spell checker won’t tell you that anything is wrong and it looks right at a glance.
Yeah, literally this. Just a common typo, at least in my case. And I’m a pretty typo prone person in general. *shrug*
Oh! At least I know now, I thought it was a gaming in-joke I was missing the point of :D
Heard Cassette Beasts was a solid take on the Pokemon formula, so started playing it. Nearly gave it up due to the Settings menu; they gave me a new movement ability, I went to look it up, and couldn’t in-game*. But after Googling how to use the thing I reached the first boss, a half-formed polygonal nightmare creature and, yeah, I’m now fully invested in Cassette Beasts.
Proving difficult so far; I haven’t played Pokemon since Red and Blue, but don’t remember losing this many Pokemon to randos. Probably due to every fight being a tag-team fight, you just get hit a lot more often. I like the concept of attacks causing Buffs if the enemy is strong to them and Debuffs if they’re weak. And the regenerating mana pool is more tactical and fun than the spell charges Pokemon used. And wandering monsters being visibile on screen. And being able to hit the trainers between monster summons, theoretically letting you knock them out before they’ve finished summoning everything.
*(Turns out there is an actual menu to look up moves, they just hid them behind the shoulder buttons for some reason. And they only show Keyboard controls, not Controller controls.)
Played two more rounds of The Last Spell. At this rate I’ll complete the first level sometime in August. Fun so far. I’m sure it’ll get more complicated, especially now that I can hire extra defenders.
Every so often I remember I wanted to do a writeup on Final Fantasy 8, and go back to playing it. Made a solid two minutes of progress this time; started on the way to the missile base, and stopped just inside the missile base. This playthrough will top the speedrun leaderboards for years.
Getting ko’d by random pokemon in the pokemon series depends highly on all sorts of factors, as you might imagine. The newest entries let you avoid them in the field, but you can also run into stuff way above your level, and in Let’s Go you don’t even fight random pokemon (you minigame catch them like in the mobile Go). I recall the generation where they added Energy Ball, Dark Pulse, and all the X Fang moves was brutal, as random pokemon would suddenly be super effective against you for no reason, causing plenty of kos against fairly random foes.
I was recently (as in some months ago) playing gen 1 and 2 again, and found that my enjoyment massively increased when I decided to drop my decades-spanning policy of “Set” battle mode: it works in Stadium, and is preferred by hardcore runs, but it actively reduces the play space. This means instead of paradoxically trying to avoid having any mons ko’d and yet having more fun when they *are* ko’d and I get a free switch, now that I’ve gone back to the default free switch every new enemy, I can just use the right mon for the job every time.
You mentioned Cassette Beasts has every battle as a “tag-team”-is that like pokemon 2v2 double battles, or something new?
Yeah, so far they’re all 2v2. Well, 2v(number); trainers and the linked bossfight have mostly been 2v1s.
I played several hours of Alter Echo emulated on the PS3 from the PS store, at the weekend with my friend – who played it back in the day on PS2. Those camera controls, I’m so out of touch with inverted x-axis (or non-inverted, whichever one it is!) and camera controls this bad. The main issue is the lock on system isn’t strong enough. I’d love to see a remaster on modern systems – crisp graphics, smoother framerate, better camera, stronger lock-on, and improved boss fights. It’s crazy to think that the game is a contemporary of the Ratchet and Clank series. It does have some very interesting combos but I just don’t find myself using them, everything feels too clunky.
Huh. I should actually look into the PS store. I had been avoiding it, but it does seem to emulate some of the old PS2 games that I really want to play (the Fatal Frames, the Personas, Suikoden III) and I have both a PS3 and PS4 that can connect to the store if I need to.
I’ve found the PS4 store to be very annoying, and to be honest I picked up a PS2 copy of Alter Echo recently just in case whatever allows me to use Alter Echo via the PS3 store is shut down by Sony (I thought they closed the PS3 store recently actually but perhaps not.) But I imagine the Fatal Frames are pretty expensive on disc these days and you might not have a PS2 lying around, and it seems to work quite nicely on the PS3 so far, for AE at least. I think I must have picked up the Dark Souls DLC on PS3 as well. In fact I got to play online in Dark Souls for free, by playing on PS3!
I have the disks and a couple of PS2s around, but I don’t play games on them because I’m worried that the systems and disks will fail and that will mean that I could NEVER play them again. It’s a strange phobia of mine, really.
My original PS2 stopped working properly when I knocked it off a chair on rugby tour :( Battlefront would load and just keep loading. Then the one I bought online didn’t work, then the next one I bought online didn’t arrive but kept assuring me that a new one had been sent and it was taking a while over the Christmas period, until I hadn’t heard for so long that I raised a refund request and found that I’d waited past the period for eBay refunds. I also have a dead PS2 slim. Maybe you’re right to fear for the survival of the PS2.
Well, in preparation for Oxenfree II I’ve started a new playthrough of Oxenfree to keep things fresh. I really enjoyed the first one, as it’s a nice graphic adventure with a lot of atmosphere and an intriguing plot, so here’s hoping the sequel is just as good.
I’ve also been playing Gotham Knights and I’m very torn in how much I enjoy the story, the characters and generally all the background lore and how much I loathe the gameplay. There’s nothing wrong per se with the basic gameplay loop in concept, but it’s all constantly marred and held back by some absolutely baffling decisions that seem to be there for no logical reason I can think of. And yeah, there’s a lot of grinding and repetition (as expected for a game that clearly was designed as live-service but was backpedaled on at the last minute) but that’s really the least of this game’s issues. I could write a whole damn essay about all of the preposterous things this games does that puzzle me to no end. Looking back at Shamus’ assumptions about the game he was right on the money. Hell, I’d say he didn’t go far enough.
Thankfully I’m also playing Crime O’ Clock and having a blast with it. Released only a few days ago, I’ve been waiting for it since playing the demo a few months back. It’s basically a hidden-object / Where’s Waldo kind of game, but it has a time travel twist, a lot of really good ideas implemented and a good sense of humor.
Oh, and Save Room: The Merchant also released recently and I’m also playing it. Sequel to a cute puzzle game based on Resident Evil 4’s inventory system. It is ridiculously addictive.
I actually just finished my replay of Oxenfree yesterday! I just started the opening of Oxenfree II and will probably be playing that for a good bit. My first impressions are very good, and I won’t go into it too much on account of it still being so new, but I will say I’m glad I did a playthrough of the first game to refresh myself.
I’m dipping in and out of Gotham Knights too (went in hoping it would be Arkham-ish, it isn’t very but I do still mostly enjoy it) and I would definitely say the story/characters/lore are significantly better than the actual gameplay, which I don’t quite loathe but there’s often frustrating parts (like how do I find Owl nests? Or where do I get whatever salvage resource I am suddenly short of all the time?), and it is a tad on the grindy side.
I’m still playing Dragon Age 2, in my own evening a week where I can do that. I haven’t made it to the Deep Roads in the first act yet, but have picked up most of the companions. I still really like the way quests are done, although I’ve come across quests just by wandering the areas and that makes me wonder how much I need to explore everything to get all of them, which wasn’t as much of a problem, at least, when I played it more often.
I also managed to get in a session of The Old Republic, playing my Bounty Hunter character based on Mirrorverse Ben Sisko for my TOR Diary posts on my blog after not being able to play for two or three weeks due to needing to do other things in that timeslot.
I should probably also mention the game that I play every day but not really as a game in Ring Fit Adventure. I run it for about a half hour every morning before going to work, and it gives me decent exercise and gets my heart rate up, but there are enough things to pay attention to and that you HAVE to pay attention to to keep me from getting bored, and if I’m ever at a boring part I can just look over at the TV to get through that until something more interesting happens again. I started it during the pandemic after trying an exercise bike and other things to do that, and it’s the only exercise thing of that type that I’ve been able to keep doing regularly after Wii Fit was okay for stuff like that.
I have some hours with Genshin Impact and a lot of hours with Duel Links and Master Duel of the Yu-Gi-Oh!-franchize.
Other than that I’m outside a lot visiting music festivals of any different kind. Last weekend was MPS Bückeburg – a medieval fare in a village called Bückeburg – with a lot of Shanty like music. Next weekend it is the Refuse Festival in Peine playing Punk Rock all the way.
Started playing Mechanicus.
A Warhammer 40k game about the Adeptus Mechanicus, basically the engineers corps of the Imperium of Men. They are also the closest the Imperium has to scholars actually doing research and are all cyborgs. And because they are from the Imperium they are also extremely theocratic, though at least their religiosity involves technology.
The gameplay is a deal similar to XCom, where you send squads of cyborgs (Tech priests) to do turn-based missions, with the twist that you also deploy some non-sentient goons on the missions that are cannon fodder and you do some dungeon crawling before the battles.
The story is that the Adeptus Mechanicus is exploring a Nekron tomb-world to either excavange their tech or just try to purge what they can, depending on your choices. The Nekron are basically a civilization of Terminators and have the most advanced tech in the 40k setting, and their goal is to purge all biological life (kinda, it gets complicated).
The gameplay diverges from XCom that by default all attacks hit, so you don’t have to contend with RNGesus as much and the game is more about managing weapon ranges and unit hitpoints efficiently.
They get points by having several women-cyborgs among the named characters, something of a rarity in 40k. And all the Magus (officers of the Adeptus Mechanics) have interesting and clashing Personalities. I especially like the game’s take on the Bioware “statement” character archetype, who manages to bring a bit more depth into this kind of dialog.
It is fun and I’m looking forwards to playing more while Firaxis keeps the XCom franchise in the cooler.
I’ve been playing My Time At Portia. It’s an interesting game, in the farm sim genre of Harvest Moon and the like, but more focused on being a builder/crafter. There are a few different storylines going on to motivate building different things as well as the usual building of friendships, upgrading property and gradually unlocking more of the map to explore. What I mostly look for in games these days is something to help me unwind after a stressful day and it’s succeeding admirably at that, although the long loading times (even for things like opening the inventory at times) get a bit annoying
I didn’t post here in a long time…
Well, I’m playing Street Fighter 6. My main is Zangief, because he’s funny. It’s the first time I’m really playing a grappler, and I really understand grappler players now. The dopamine hit from landing the big throw is really something! I still want to try out Jamie as well, the drunken master character who needs to sneak in drinks in every fight to unlock his full moveset.
I’m playing Expoprimal. It’s free on GamePass and definitely worth it for that price. It’s 60€ on other platforms, which has to be because Capcom is into post ironic humour or something.
I took it because the core gameplay of blasting dinosaurs wearing various exosuits is fun, and pairs well with a bunch of fun videos on my second monitor.
I thought of Shamus playing it because I think he could have enjoyed dissecting it. It has bland parts, good ideas, and awful ideas.
A very cool idea: a menu dedicated to the story of the game where you unlock cinematics and dialogues along the matches as pieces on a map. Unlocking some pieces together unlock a bigger cinematic once in a while, and at the middle of this map is how to escape the game’s island. The writing and voice acting for these goes from generic to charming. This drip feed of lore instead of exposition dumps is very rewarding. And sometimes standard multiplayer matches turn into story missions, which is always a fun surprise.
On the other hand a lot of game mode and game mechanics are locked from the start, start unlocking after a good 10 hours game and aren’t very well advertised. So if you’re just playing that game you can find yourself quickly bored and believing that it it’s all it has to offer. It’s very bold for a game to trick the player into believing it’s a LOT more boring than it is. Most entertainment products go the opposite route.
Installing a 1TB 2.5″ hard drive in a first gen PS3 slim. We’ll see what that gets me.
Nice, I installed a 240 GB SSD into a 12 GB Superslim the other week, was a lot easier than I’d expected, as it turns out it doesn’t actually have a HDD to replace, I didn’t need to do the backup USB stick to restore, just plug and play. Opening the thing though, that was a bit tricky – hidden panel! Twist and slide.
Haven’t tried it on a super-slim, only slims; so far. I refuse to jailbreak or even breath hard around my 60GB fat; I treat it like it’s made of gold. I’ll be talking about my work with jailbreaking the slim and running Playstation ISO’s on it in my retrogaming series.
Oh! Nice – I just needed more space :D
Still fighting back the aliens in Terra Invicta. I’m up to 2045 by now (the game starts in 2022), and my advisors have concluded that the aliens have finally moved to a total war footing against my faction. Luckily, it took long enough this playthrough that I’ve built up a fledgling space navy which was actually powerful enough to completely wipe out a small alien fleet right as it arrived at Earth without taking a single casualty – I’d forgotten I could feel that much euphoria at a game, so it was a pleasant surprise (after in-game years [and real-world days] of my strongest fleets getting effortlessly smacked around by even single alien ships, it’s so nice for the shoe to be on the other foot for once!). The game does a good job of simulating “XCOM 2”, in that the aliens will start taking over significant swathes of the Earth, and you’ll have to fight them back from what seems like an impossible starting position.
I’ve also, in between that, been playing through Viewfinder, which came out a week or two ago. It’s another of what I call “first-person puzzle” games in the vein of Portal, though in terms of mechanics it’s much closer to Superliminal: it involves (among other things) the ability to hold up photos in the world and make them real, and once you get a camera you can do things like take a photo of the corner of a wall, rotate it 90 degrees, and paste it into the world to make a bridge to get somewhere. It gets a lot more complicated than that, with puzzles involving getting batteries to power the teleporter to the next level, or geometry that’s immune to being either photographed or replaced. (The game reveals fairly early on that your character is actually exploring a sort of virtual reality space in search of the secrets it’s said to contain, explaining how you can do things like teleport or paste pictures into reality.) I’ve met an AI custodian of the place (appearing in the form of a sort of Cheshire cat) who’s friendly, but seems to have started gently hinting that my character’s quest may be in vain. It’s not a long game; I’ve played about 3 hours and I feel like I’m closer to the end than the beginning, unless it does a big Portal 2-style switcheroo in the middle and is actually longer. The mechanics are neat and the voice acting is well done, but the story hasn’t particularly grabbed me so far, so we’ll see how it goes.
I remember seeing Youtube ads for Viewfinder and I thought it looked cool. Good to know that it’s out now!
Well, I finished it tonight, so might as well report. I was right about the length; Steam says I’ve played four hours. The story went where I was expecting for the most part, though the ending was a bit more poignant than I foresaw. Without spoiling too much, the final level is somewhat in the tradition of Portal, and requires a good knowledge of all the mechanics that have come before while also throwing in some red herrings and requiring you to think on your feet. I was able to finish it in three tries, which I’m pretty happy with; this might be the sort of game I look up other people’s playthroughs of to get that experience of first exposure to the various mechanics all over again.
Edit: one interesting thing about the game is that there often isn’t just one “right” answer to a level. Often there’s an obvious answer (some levels have very tightly constrained resources, for instance), but there were other levels where I was left wondering “Did I find an intended solution, or did I figure out an alternate path? I’ve still got several photos in my camera…”
Just finished Resident Evil 2 Remake yesterday.
Nothing much to say, just a solid game all around. The nostalgia factor helped, but wasn’t the main reason why I liked it. I enjoyed it quite a lot despite not liking the horror genre, and I’ll probably pick up the remakes for 3 and 4 someday.
Finished Yakuza 3. People talk about it like it’s the oldest, clunkiest game ever because it doesn’t have a remake like 1 and 2. I grew up on early 2000s gaming, though, so the slow-paced 2009 brawler combat didn’t faze me at all. I thought the story was still very solid, and the sidequests were (as with the rest of the series I’ve played so far) a standout feature of the game. Had a thoroughly good time.
Started Death Road to Canada, a game which I learned about here on this site many years ago and just lightly tossed on a wishlist for later. I’m not really enjoying the combat or the fact that a 45-minute adventure can end in three seconds if you get mobbed in a corner. But the management sim parts and the random events are pretty fun, and it’s cool to have a custom character creator that can put starting player characters and discoverable party members into the game. I haven’t won a game yet, certainly haven’t mastered it, so I have a lot more to discover.
I’ve been absent from the site for a while, but am so glad to see all the activity here. :)
Lately, I’ve been kept busy with work, night classes and agonising over buying a gaming laptop, but I’ve finally finished playing “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night” for the first time after delving into classic metroidvanias with “Super Metroid” before that. I can highly recommend both and am considering continuing the metroidvania streak with “Hollow Knight” next.
I’ve been playing “being away from the internet on vacation with friends and doing lots of tabletop and boardgames”. I recommend it.
I am replaying HOUSE OF THE DYING SUN because its a very well put together space combat game and wanted to try it with the dusted off the trackIR. Track IR ended up doing nothing for the game especially because it plays better with mouse and keyboard. HOUSE OF THE DYING SUN does have the distinction of having possibly the edgiest level I’ve ever played. The final mission is a simple defend the objective but the timer instead
of just counting down how long you need to defend is the population of the planet you are nuking.