T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I am mostly just playing Roblox with a little bit of Cookie Clicker and Slay the Spire on the side. It’s a time for idle games for me, I guess.
What are you guys up to?
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
Top 64 Videogames
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Making characters in Baldur’s Gate 3. I’ll progress to playing the actual game at some point. Probably.
Playing Blasphemous 2. I quite like the 2Dmetroidvaniasouls genre, even if their stories continue to be utterly inscrutable.
I started Armored Core VI and I’m sure I’ll get back to it but the feedback about when you’re being hit and what you should maybe do to not be hit didn’t feel very intuitive to me.
I’m finally making visible progress in BG3, wrapped up the
goblins vs refugeespart in chapter 1 yesterday and I’m at around the 40h mark. Admittedly a lot of that time was spent in character creation, familiarizing myself with the systems or talking about DnD and other games so I’m hoping things will pick up in pace from here. I am still and constantly shocked by the scope of this game. Pretty much every character has at least a tiny bit of personality and a voiced line or two, even if on 9 out of 10 playthroughs they’ll end up being a “shoot on sight” mook, the game seems very flexible to accomodating player actions and so far there have been almost no “random encounters”. I’ve been exploringthe Underdarkand there have been a few wondering monsters in this part of the game but they’re not repeating often enough to be tedious and it’s always encountering new enemieswith a new set of moves, stats and behaviours often in a unique environment. Basically all encounters have something unique to them though at varying degrees of complexity. Not to mention the game really rewards playing smart, it’s one of the rare games where I don’t feel like I “cheesed” a fight but more that I’ve approached it in a clever way when I manage to push someone off a cliff, force them to path around the obstacle or eliminate an enemy group in stages.Destiny 2 remains grindy overall but also satisfying in the immediate gunplay.
Unrelated to the post itself but someone needs to bring back “This Dumb Industry” regarding the new Unity announcement (basically their plan is to charge devs 20 cents per installation of the game, conditions apply but that’s the gist of it).
Engines as a Live Service? Maybe one day everything will be a service, the age of products will be over.
So now they’re backpedalling somewhat and saying they’re changing it to 20 cents on the FIRST installation rather than every one. The insistence on the installation charge over, say, sold copies charge or share of profits makes me think they want to use it as an excuse to slip in some kind of “call home” malware that may or may not harvest data while it’s there. I seem to recall Unity was bought by some kind of malware developer some time ago?
Continuing Final Fantasy 8. Finally past the orphanage scene, past Disc 2, past… pretty much past any semblance of the plot making sense. This is the point where they had ideas but no way to connect them and just said “whatever, shove them in sideways.” Been doing a writeup on it and trying to fanon the game into making sense, and BOY HOWDY welcome to Disc 3.
I continue to be bad at Slay the Spire.
Not sure if Tales of Berseria counts; I started it up, went through the opening cutscene, discovered the Steam screenshot button wasn’t working and shut it off again to go find a workaround. I think gameplay time consisted of walking about three feet over one second.
Still Chess.
Finished XCOM: Enemy Unknown and passed on into Enemy Within. Maybe not the smartest move on my part – I didn’t realize that this was literally a repeat of the same campaign with some add-ins – but I’m still having a good time even though “immediately replay what you just finished” is far from my preferred style of gaming.
If you go on to play XCOM 2 in future, the War of the Chosen expansion works similarly, just FYI. (In my opinion it’s worth starting with, and not bothering with the base game.)
I didn’t get a chance to play The Old Republic this week, but I did get to play more Dragon Age 2 and paying more attention to it and the comments here the game really is a bit more ambiguous than it might have seemed. The impressions you get of the ideas might depend on who you talk to. I also finished off Merrill’s run and noted this time that the demon was a Pride demon, but whose Pride was exploited? Merrill’s for believing that she could handle it? Or the Keeper’s whose pride might have been hurt by Merrill being able to do or handle something that she couldn’t?
The good thing is that by taking the responsibility for the Keeper and for Merrill on myself, I managed to avoid slaughtering the entire tribe, which I didn’t manage to avoid the last time.
I also was struggling since I was running out of health potions and couldn’t figure out how to craft them. Then after looking that up online I discovered that what I should have been doing was crafting Restoration potions, which restored more and are available from the resources that I have currently found and I just have to pay for it, which is fine since I actually have extra cash around right now. I didn’t think that was what I was supposed to do because it seemed to imply that it increased the automatic health restoration rate by 80%, instead of healing me by 80%. So I should be good now.
I’m pretty much at the end, since I have the last mission for Orsino and the game has said that I should probably finish off anything else I want to do before starting that one.
I’m playing the depression game, where I look at my overloaded Steam library and my brain says, “You don’t deserve to relax and have fun right now. Here are some things to stress over instead.”
I hate that game. Can’t seem to return it, either.
Aw! I know it’s not quite the same thing but there are so many posts on r/PatientGamers of people experiencing burnout and backlog anxiety, and so there’s often a bit of advice on there too. I noticed GOG recently implemented a great feature where it shuffles your library and picks three random options for you to choose from, in the Recent tab.
I have about 40 games installed onto my PC and another 10 on PS4 all ready to go but as you say, why play games when I could instead constantly feel too tired to concentrate on them and watch Netflix on my phone instead. Kuroko’s Basketball is pretty good.
I finished GRIS. Despite a bit of a slow start that made it look like it was going to be a walking simulator in 2D it soon got more interesting and clever and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. For a puzzle platformer it’s clearly more focused on the “puzzle” part. I don’t even think you can die in this game. There’s no actual combat, but there’s a part where you’re being chased by an enemy and I don’t think the game lets it capture you even if you fall behind. I didn’t test it, though. This isn’t a negative, it’s clear that the game just has its priorities.
Starting Little Nightmares II now. I really enjoyed the first one and from what little I’ve played from the sequel (just a few minutes) it looks to be like a good time too. The first one oozed atmosphere, creepiness and style and this one does too so far. I just found out a third game comes out next year too, so apparently the franchise is doing well.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is good, as many other people have already said. In the interests of saying something new, here’s a minor gripe…
There’s a special game my party plays when traversing difficult terrain – Jumparoo Silly Buggers. It goes like this:
– I jump over a gap. The rest of the party, set to follow the leader, will automatically jump over it as well – except for…
– …one of them, who refuses to jump over the gap and will simply stand there staring at it.
– I take control of that character, to manually get them to jump over the gap. Unfortunately, this means that this character is now technically head of the formation…
– …so the rest of the party will try to fall in behind them, jumping back over the gap they’ve just cleared, following the new leader…
– …who’s just jumped over the gap. So they all jump back across for a third time…
– …all except for one of them, who refuses to for some reason. So I click on THEM and…[repeat from step 3]
In a way, the party’s dedication to staying in formation is as dangerous a foe as the enemies I face. I run past an NPC I don’t want to talk to yet, but the party swings around behind me…and now that gate guard is demanding to know what we’re doing here – which I wanted to avoid. And instead of my persuasive sorcerer main character, he’s picked my 8-charisma fighter Lae’zel to demand answers from.
Welp, I guess I’m going to have to fight these guys to the death as well. Don’t judge me, game – this is your fault.
…Still, enjoying the game. Already loking forward to a replay in which I lean into the abilities granted by [key plot event] rather than rejecting them.
I thought those games typically had a “wait where you are” option for stuff like shepherding one character across a gap. Does BG3 not have that?
It does. It also has a ‘turn-based mode’ to help you take precise control of what a character is doing at any given time, which is perfect for getting around complex traps or using spells like Featherfall that have a limited time.
So yes there are workarounds. It’s just odd to need to use them when faced with a two-foot jump – the number of times I’ve just had a companion stand there looking at a trivial jump that everyone else in the party managed with no effort.
I wouldn’t say it’s been a notorious problem for me but it happens, it’s also been my experience that it helps a lot to rebind “start turn based mode” to something like space alone (default shift+space) even if it means rebinding end turn to something less handy. Honestly it’s something I’m willing to deal with as the price of all the traversal possibilities the game offers (again I don’t seem to have suffered the issue to the same extent you did), having my best girl Karlach be able to effectively scale two story buildings with a single jump is hilarious.
Took a break from Hollow Knight, played through Lone: Far Sails
The game is short, simple, and easy, but it had some nice music
I got it because it’s about keeping a big machine running while traveling across a ruined landscape; I was expecting a puzzle game, a bit like those ones where you have to make a machine to manufacture a particular item with limited parts, but it was more like a walking simulator with some added complexity
Despite not being what I expected, it was a reasonably satisfying way to kill four hours, and I got it on sale for three dollars, so overall a positive experience
I’ve been playing Zortch, which I mentioned the last time. Going through the campaign a second time for all the secrets. I played Amid Evil for a while because it recently released an expansion pack, but got sidetracked. I did reach the last episode, so there’s that.
But mostly I’ve been playing Total Warhammer 3. My save files were broken by the new update, so I started a new campaign as Tzarina Katarin of Kislev. Going okay so far; I’m seventy-five turns in and have unlocked most of the tier three units aside from the Elemental Bear, have captured two of the four daemon souls I need to confront the final boss, forced the Great Orthodoxy to surrender by beating them in the race… pretty badly at that. Really, by the end I had five hundred followers and they had less than two hundred.
I ended up conquering Sylvania because Manfred overran Ostland, and then the Gray Mountains because Skrag was seriously threatening Altdorf, and progressed from there to fighting the Fecundites who’d taken over most of the northern region, as well as fighting in Norsca because Valkia randomly attacked me. Kairos and Ku’Gath randomly showed up in the Realm of Nurgle while I was there, so I took the opportunity to fight them both for the traits they give you if you beat them.
The Changeling is messing around in the Troll Country, which I own, and his ability to turn his entire army invisible and sustain himself off hidden cults instead of visible cities is about as much of a pain as you’d imagine. We’ll see if I can do something about that.
Apropos of nothing, twenty-five Euros for the new expansion is highway robbery, and I’m waiting for a big sale to buy it.
I’m rewatching old mrbtongue videos and wondering what happened to the dude. His stuff is so insightful.
The Witness is so difficult! And I’ve only just realised the sheer number of environmental puzzles. It’s at the point where I’m starting to look up hints and solutions so as not to make it too drawn out.
Thankfully, you don’t need to find the environmental puzzles to reach the ending, unless you’re shooting for 100% completion. They’re more like easter eggs.
I must find out what lies beyond that metal door in the side of the mountain.
I’ve not been playing it frequently enough to remember what all of the different mechanics are, have to remind myself each time of some of them. It was the point where the white tri-pronged shape appeared that I first had to look up a concept.
Only recently learnt about the invisible line when looking something up!
I started Metroid Prime 3! Surprising amount of friendly NPCs at the start. Now that I’m out of the prologue they seem mostly gone, I’m curious if more will show up later. I like the other bounty hunter characters. It’s also really noticeable that this is the first game in the trilogy that wasn’t a Gamecube port, because of all the silly gimmicks with the Wiimote. I really like using it for aiming, but not this stuff.
Also playing my usual selection of fighting games…
Been playing Blacksad: Under the Skin. So far, it’s been an enjoyable investigation game, akin to the Frogwares games, where progression is fairly easy and the enjoyment is basically the same as reading a mystery story. It also seems like I’m not supposed to think too much about how family lines work in a world where everyone is represented by different animals. Or how racial terms – which the game itself brings up – translate onto the different animals. (This black dog character is ‘black’, but this other brown dog character is not ‘black’. So is it based on fur coloring? But what about dogs who are colored both black and white? And how do I translate the rhinoceros character with gray skin? etc etc.)
The mechanics are awkward, though. They outright tell you that it’s ideally played via controller, so when I’m on keyboard, camera control (as much as I get) is done through the arrow keys.