T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I got back into Orcs Must Die 2. I forgot how much I like tower defense games.
What are you guys up to?
From The Archives:
How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Playing a few new casual phone games, mostly. I’ve been happy with Arcadia, by Raffaele D’Amato, for being exactly what it said it would be – a collection of the kind of old-school simple games common in the 80s and 90s (reminds me of the kind of stuff that was in the Windows Entertainment Packs), sold for a one-time cost with no in-app ads, purchases, or data tracking, so I decided to pick up the rest of his games for couple of bucks. I appreciate the throwback business model compared to the usual monetization strategy for phone games.
My big gaming-related project this week, however, was trying to get my dad caught up on about 10-20 years of changes in PC gaming. He used to play PC games all the time in the 80s and 90s, but lost momentum when Sierra went away and then switched to consoles when he got a PS2 (he mostly played the Lego games). He’s now wanting to buy a new gaming laptop and get back into playing computer games again, so I’ve been trying to explain what a Steam account is and why he should probably keep an eye on Humble Bundle for a while. (He thinks he might want to get back into adventure games, so I guess I probably also need to explain itch.io at some point and try to help him find things that remind him of early King’s Quest within the indie adventure game community, but I think I’m going to wait until he’s managed to sign up for a Steam account first.)
It might help more to get him into GOG instead, as it has a lot of those older games and some new ones as well, and the games can be downloaded from there instead of having to run through the interface.
That’s a great shout. Retaining the games and sensibilities of yesteryear. Rather than the online-annoyance of Steam’s DRM and opening the store page whenever I try to start a game. Humble Bundles are great but bundles in general (Fanatical too) have also massively expanded my ‘backlog’ – might not want his experience of new gaming to be DRM and backlogs :D Itch.io is overwhelming for me. It’s like the entirety of flash-gaming and more, in a marketplace/Steam format, where e.g. I can buy the BLM/Ukraine bundle of 1500 games (???) yet they also don’t show in my library unless I choose them to. I like GOG Galaxy more than Steam now, just wish they did a mobile app.
Slowly making my way through Deathloop. It’s a deep game in terms of content and I think it probably works off rails, but the experience would be a lot more meandering because I’m not very insightful, so I’ve gotten back on the rails of following all the journal entries. It’s decent. Definitely not game of the year material, and definitely not quite as memorable in the long term as Prey or Dishonored, but I’m enjoying it when I get the chance to play (which I haven’t much this week).
I’ve been going back and forth on whether to play Deathloop for a while now, being a big fan of immersive sims and Arkane’s previous work, but all signs from critics I actively read or watch point towards it being an altogether shallower and less memorable affair than Dishonored or Prey. Would you say it’s still worth a look for fans of the genre, or is Prey: Mooncrash a better implementation of this kind of genre-splicing between immersive sims and roguelikes?
Prey: Mooncrash was more fun than Deathloop for me but I still did enjoy Deathloop.
Deathloop isn’t a game that rewards off-roading too much. There’s exactly one possible way to kill all the Visionaries and the game straight up tells you what it is once you’ve gathered all the pre-requisites.
It is pretty fun though. The timeloop mechanic helps avoid some of the pitfalls of immersive sim games; since you don’t care too much about consequences (and I think you can’t save) you’re not going to save scum the same 5-seconds bit of gameplay over and over again.
Well, I would say the early exploration is pretty rewarding, there is a lot of fun stuff and lore to find, conversations to overhear and secrets to discover. It does all fall to the wayside once you start cracking the case so to speak and at that stage it rewards optimizing for going after the objective, which I suppose makes sense.
Wow, is it Wednesday already?
Nothing new. FF8, Tales of Berseria, Slay the Spire, Chess.
I don’t know if people around here heard about that franchise, but I’m replaying the Mass Effect trilogy, legendary editions. With some mods to smooth over the bad parts like planets probing. It still holds up so well! I’m playing pragmatic and I was shocked at how good the pragmatic lines are in 2. In 1 they were just dumb, in 3 mostly inoffensive, but in 2 they’re hilarious.
That franchise sounds familiar. I think Joueur du Grenier maybe did a video on it?
Did manage to get in a run at The Old Republic. I only have Corellia and the finale to complete with my Bounty Hunter, and then will be moving on to a Consular based on another character from a TV show that I’ve been watching recently. After that I plan to take my Bounty Hunter and “make” him a Sith by recreating him as a Sith Warrior, and then I’ll have to come up with something for Trooper or Smuggler. My plan is to do this until I get through all eight classes for the TOR Diary on my blog and then … I’ll look for something else to do for my Monday posts [grin].
Also got in a few sessions of Dragon Age Awakening. I still find the dungeons a bit too long for what they have in them, but am trying to get all the new characters — or as many as possible — into my party. I need to push on this a bit because it and Witch Hunt have to be done by the end of November so that I can start Inquisition so that I can finish it by the end of the year. I also ended up in a dungeon where they take all your items away and you recover them later, which was clever except that in other games when that was done when you get them recovered they automatically re-equipped them which didn’t happen here and so was a bit annoying. I’m also still having issues with an overloaded inventory. I do think I like DA2’s approach to quests better, as the last one I did — the Woods — had a lot of open world quests that I wanted to do to get all the rewards and XP, but which were difficult to find since things weren’t as linear or ordered and so it required a lot of running around to get. Also, it often isn’t clear what’s a sidequest and what’s real, and so I had to reload because one point in it locked me from going back and I went the wrong way the first time. Still, it is kinda fun. It’s just interesting going back to it right after playing DA2, which is more action-oriented and structures its quests a bit better, I think.
Have I mentioned I’m still playing Vampire Survivors? Because I’m still playing Vampire Survivors. This is insane. Usually I get really involved with a roguelite for like a week or so and then I slide off them pretty quickly. It happens usually no matter how much I enjoy them, like with Slay the Spire or Hades, but I absolutely cannot put this game down. It’s been like four weeks already and I’m still as obsessed with it as I was the first day. And they just released free new content for it.
Saved for the demos I played during Steam’s Next Fest event I haven’t played anything else in weeks. Help!
Finishing up a month of WoW Classic. Occasional single months are all I can allow myself to keep it from becoming all encompassing.
True to my post a few weeks ago, I’m now knee-deep in Hades. So far, it is as fantastic as I’ve been led to believe; it almost seems boring to talk about its excellent, near-perfect design and overall art direction. I especially love the complete harmony between the roguelike genre and the setting and themes of the story. So few games bake their narrative so well into their mechanical design, which makes me appreciate it all the more when they do. It’s almost enough to disappoint me that Supergiant is making a sequel instead of turning their talents to a new original project.
My one concern with the game is that, four hours in and with freedom still far ahead of me, the three environments — Tartarus, Asphodel and Elysium — will begin to wear thin and feel repetitive. We’ll see, though; the interludes do a wonderful job of breaking up the pacing cleansing the palette.
To indulge my pettiest gripe, though, I have to ask: what’s with all the faux-English accents!? For the love of Shub-Niggurath, I know high fantasy and royalty are typically associated with it, but I can’t help but find the American idea of English accents distracting, however fantastic the voice acting is. It reminds me of… whatever the hell Peter Dinklage was doing with his voice on ‘Game of Thrones’.