T w e n t y S i d e d
This last week I tackled Brotato rapidly, I’m done now. Unless I want to beat the game a bunch of times as a bunch of different characters, I’ve pretty much exhausted its content. It was fun. Decent binge-play. Still playing Borderlands 2. Although, it’s slow going because it keeps crashing on Bay’s computer (the one that used to be Dad’s). It’s funny having this big, beefy machine chug along trying to tackle a game from 2012.
What are you guys up to?
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Internet News is All Wrong
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Darkest Dungeon 2 turns out to be very much my jam. Roguelite, all the gross enemies you could want, and a narrator who can make eating bread sound dramatic and depressing, what’s not to love?
It’s surprising how drastically they changed things from DD1 – the characters and fights have a lot of similarity, but everything you do outside of them is totally different. It can be a risk not to just make more of the same but I think it worked for them. Admittedly going from a map grid to the same map layout as Slay the Spire and its many inspired works isn’t the biggest of risks, but they did change more than that.
Eating bread IS both dramatic and depressing!
Due to having to do a shopping run on Saturday morning, I didn’t get to play The Old Republic this week, but I squeezed in a session of Dragon Age Awakening just under the wire. I played through the Dwarven Fortress, and found a common issue with DAO: the dungeons are often a bit too long for the content they have. This one was worse because I had a limited time to play, but I’ve had some issues with others in the past. That being said, I picked up Sigrun, and dumped Oghren for her thinking that she was a Warrior, and it turned out that she was a Rogue that couldn’t pick locks, but I think I like her character too much to ditch. There’s one side conversation where one of the characters talks about her being awfully perky, and she does an entirely overly melodramatic commentary on her fate, at which point he says that he liked her better when she was being perky, which makes her a more interesting character than anyone else. My main is a Warrior, and I need to keep Nathaniel for picking locks, and I need a Mage (which right now has to be Anders, but he’s less annoying here than in DA2) so I’d have to drop having a second Warrior or Mage. Still, the Fortress went pretty well, so I might keep it like this.
I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the character of Sigrun. She’s part of the Legion of the Dead, but is extremely perky and positive, but also seems to be eager to put herself into situations where she’s likely to die. She seems like someone who very much enjoys her life, but also wants to end it? And she doesn’t see any conflict between those two positions?
I’ve only seen her introduction so take this with a grain of salt, but she grew up in the Dwarven slums and whether or not that life is objectively worse than the other slums, at least for HER it was (she comments once to Nathaniel when he asks if that slum was as bad as an Alienage “Oh, no, I’ve seen an Alienage. It’s quite pleasant.”). The other alternative was to join the army, but I think she comments early on that she had to fight for the idiotic and selfish goals of a noble. So, for her, joining the Legion of the Dead means that while she’s going to die — all members of the Legion accept going in that they will ultimately be killed — she’s going to die for a cause, and that’s a lot better life than what she had. Maybe later she will put herself into positions to just be killed, but so far and from what I’ve seen with Chuck Sonnenberg’s run on the game she’s willing to face death for the cause of killing darkspawn, but doesn’t seem to be a death seeker herself.
Anders was still *just* Anders in Awakenings, so definitely less annoying.
I am, um… replaying Final Fantasy 8. Been a long time since I just did a GF-spam run. It still wins.
Tales of Berseria approaches the end, just gotta go scrape the walls for all the sidequests.
Dabbled in Tales of Zestiria, to which Berseria is a prequel. Turns out my biggest complaint is mitigated; there’s a button you can hold that lets you move in any direction in combat. My new biggest complaint is the tutorial dungeon has the most egregious backtracking I’ve ever seen in a game; you walk to the end of the dungeon, and the characters say, “oh wait, this is a dead end, look, we missed the right route, it\s back over there,” and then you walk back to the beginning and take another route.
Restarted Final Fantasy 5, hoping to give it the write-up treatment. Not sure if there’s enough plot there to pull it off though.
FFVIII is under rated in the pantheon of FF. Most people dont have it in their top 5, its a solid #3 for me. Most people hated the junction system. I loved it. And the card game. I mean…. I know I’m supposed to be saving the world and all, but I spent more time hustling to complete my deck….
Manlobbi hits! Manlobbi hits! You die….
Wrapping up my playthrough of Sunless Sea. I upgraded to the merchant cruiser and completed the Fulgent Impeller questline, and the game very suddenly went from too slow to too fast. The Impeller is the fastest engine in the game, and speed means you accumulate less terror and use less supply. Early voyages can be really tense as you try to work out how far you can stretch those limits without dying and learning where you can resupply on the cheap. But with the fastest engine in the game, and a ship with a functionally bottomless cargo hold, that whole mechanic is basically gone. I’m knocking off sidequests as quickly as I can reach them.
On the one hand, the Impeller quest was a huge job that requires you to spend thousands of echoes at every step, so I’m glad that work paid off. The game feels so much more zippy and fun with this giant rocket strapped to my ship. But on the other hand, it’s so good it makes everything else feel kind of unimportant? Like, the other quests might upgrade your stats or give you some valuable items, but none of them are remotely as good as cutting all your travel times in half. I wish the game had spread out its progression a bit more – make the middle-tier ships a little better so I have a reason to buy them early instead of saving up for the merchant cruiser, make the mid-tier engines more powerful so that you can be at least a little bit zoomy in the mid game, and so on. Instead, the items you can buy in the shops are barely acceptable for mid tier, and the quest items are top tier gamebreakers, with little in between.
(And as long as I’m dreaming, add a fast-forward mode that speeds up movement out of combat, but proportionately increases fuel and supply usage so that the travel math is still the same.)
Bit of Darkest Dungeon for me. Defeated the second stage Hag – I went in strong with a Grave Robber (blight attacks and one to reduce blight resistance) and Plague Doctor (blight and stun and bleed and heal-blight/bleed), a Leper (big frontline damage) and a Vestal (second position heal and damage bonuses, stun). Turned out not to be the best line-up against the Hag due to difficulty in hitting the back ranks, and messing myself up by shuffling my order with the Grave Robber’s moves, but it sufficed. Was almost destroyed on the way by a huge bloke wielding a tree.
Finally decided to call it quits. Went into the Darkest Dungeon itself last night to see if that was worth continuing the game for, but it felt like more of the same, and then my party died in a boring way, racking up higher damage attacks and much higher stress dealing attacks and all having heart attacks. The moment to moment gameplay is great but not after dozens of hours of much the same thing. For me it’s a bit too scattershot, going into the various areas, upgrading up to 25 people, collecting things in repetitive missions to upgrade people, having to remember what the 4 areas are like in terms of a vaguely optimised team to go in with. I think a more linear or streamlined experience would be my preference, I could optimise my team, have some different options. Maybe if you could take a team of 6 but only 4 fought at once, and you could swap people in if you realise the situation calls for different tactics. But it’s lost its fun factor for me, and it’s not clear enough how to go and find new interesting content within it (okay yes, do higher level dungeons = see new monsters) and the process of replenishing the roster isn’t fun enough to be going in and losing people in the higher level / final dungeons to find out how best to beat it, so I’ll spare myself the extra 20-30 hours, and have uninstalled it.
Still playing Vampire Survivors. I think I might be a little bit obsessed with this game.
No new games this week, though. I’ve spent most of the time trying demos from Steam’s Next Fest event. Added a bunch of titles to my wishlist, a couple of which are Vampire Survivors clones because I’m a goddam maniac.
Completed Loop Hero, a pleasant pixel roguelite where you control only your character’s equipment and the dungon arrangement rather than taking direct action. I liked the premise a lot. It ran on a little long because most of the dungeon upgrades that will help you progress are gated behind grindable resources, but it’s not an obnoxious amount of grind as long as you check the in-game table that shows where resources drop and plan accordingly.
Started Deathloop (loop theme was completely unintentional), and the experience has been uneven but fun. I was initially thinking GOTY-quality experience as I saw how much cool information was wedged into inconspicuous places, and how well-balanced the action and stealth combat were. Then I kind of went off an enjoyment cliff as one badly-telegraphed solution to an early problem had me wandering around an area for 45 minutes achieving nothing and I had to rescue myself with Google, which I abhor doing (especially when the answer is “what you think the game wants you to do is literally impossible but the game didn’t signal it in any way”). Now I’m back on track and have found neat, clean solutions to getting multiple assassination targets in the same place and time to save work, which has been a very cool and organic process. Great game concept that, in practice, was probably done better already in Prey Mooncrash.
I got sick AF. Being sick really sucks =(
Destiny 2 started its Halloween event, called “Festival of the Lost” two days ago. It really brings to light (Destiny joke intended) how little I play this game outside of progressing the story because the event tokens drop alongside pretty much every activity but looking at how many I need it feels like a massive grind. Maybe it’s time to look for a different MMO but on the other hand we’re so close to the final stretch of the story…
In other news to put it bluntly almost everything about Assassin’s Creed:Origins in terms of writing and story is stupid. So, soooo stupid. I like cleaning the icons and stabbing people in the kidneys though. I may rant extensively about it sometime later.
Still playing Sea of Stars. The gameplay keeps being very good, and the story is starting to pick up but it’s still a bit… eh. For me, at least. The story is perfectly fine, actually, it’s the characters that are failing to grab me.
Still, the game as a whole is definitely good enough that I’m going to stick with it until the end.
KOTOR remake is coming out soon. Shamus covered that back in the day, we played it endlessly for a year and a half. He would like it if you covered the remake. Prep by playing the OG.
Manlobbi hits! Manlobbi hits! You die….
Haven’t played anything this week. Not even on the cellphone. Busy writing. Oh, and someone crashed into my car.
We were both insured, but so far the process to try and get them to fix our cars has been… we have a saying in BR Portuguese, “like milking stone”.