T w e n t y S i d e d
This week is we have just celebrated Halloween. This is from yesterday. This is my sibling’s yearly Halloween charcuterie.
The candles are droopy because they are cheese. The flames are not providing light because they are almonds.
What are you guys up to?
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
Did I play Final Fantasy 8 this week? Think I’m finally finished with it.
Finished Tales of Berseria. Forgot it ends with what I’m assuming is concept art from a much earlier draft with Velvet and her brother palling around the continent, with her in sensible clothing and him not extraordinarily dead.
Various people mentioning Vampire Survivors got me playing it again. Highlight would be unlocking the “kill 100,000 enemies” challenge by evolving Clock Lancet and Laurel, then alt-tabbing away and forgetting I had the game running for an hour. I come back, and the character is still in a cloud of colors, with 250,000 dead enemies. That level had green reapers, too, don’t know how the build handled them. On account of having alt-tabbed away and forgotten the game was running.
Slay the Spire continues to kill me.
I’m wondering how many 4x games have second-phase power-ups for nations. Seen one where you conquer half a nation and you get a cutscene where the leader gets desperate and turns to mercenaries/their favorite relative/the dark arts to stop you, and the country becomes more threatening from then on. I like it as a concept; it keeps gameplay interesting and gives some character to the enemies.
Oh, damn, I think I’m the only one who keeps mentioning Vampire Survivors. I was literally trying to do the “kill 100,000 enemies” and going perfectly well until I decided to evolve the Muramasa like an idiot, forgetting it drains my health. I reached a third or so of the goal before I ran out of continues and lost the patience for running around the stage looking for health.
I know AFKing is a thing in this sort of game but I’m really not a fan of doing it. I prefer to maintain at least a degree of control.
Several streamers played it for Halloween, that was mostly what did it.
Galactic Civilizations had a couple of huge events that can shake up the galaxy. There’s one where a weak civ finds a magic crystal that massively boosts their productivity, one where a bunch of planets go into revolt, one where an intergalactic peacekeeping force shows up and starts blowing up any military ships it can find, and so on. They’re “random” but seem tailored to hurting whoever’s in the lead or helping someone who’s behind.
Stellaris has the endgame crisis, which is sort of a “final boss” for a 4X game – a new faction will appear in the galaxy and rapidly start exterminating everyone in its way, which serves to keep the end-game wrap-up phase interesting. However, it doesn’t really help losing empires regain their position, it just forces the winners to step up their game.
Finished off my Bounty Hunter in The Old Republic. I’m going to start a Jedi Consular next.
Also played a bit more of Dragon Age Awakening. I’ve finished off all the recruitment areas and am now heading towards the end. Had a long fight against the skeletal dragon in the Black Marsh, where it killed off all my party which left me pounding slowly on it and using copious healing potions. It wouldn’t have taken that long but I think its electricity attacks drained my stamina so I couldn’t use my best abilities, and adding in the knockback it took FOREVER. Also, in order to get things I had to scour both that area and the Fade area connected to it, and I was reminded of how much that annoys me, especially when I have limited time to play. The worst part about it and the previous area is that in both cases there are things you’d need to do in an area and you get cut off from the area after you hit a certain point. It’s bad enough to have to hunt down everything to get all the things you need, but even worse if you can’t go back to get things you might have missed.
Well, for the sake of everyone here I’m just going to stop mentioning Vampire Survivors. It has just become a daily part of life for me so until I either 100% it or get sick of it I’m gonna keep silent about it.
The good news is that I’m finally also playing something else: the Dead Space Remake. I played the original several times, but it’s been years since the last time I did and I’m positive there have been a few changes outside improving the graphics and giving the protagonist a voice, even though I was sure this was mostly just a graphical facelift. Nothing major so far, but there have been a few surprises here and there, so either they did add some changes or my memory is way faultier than I thought.
All changes are for the positive, though, so that’s good. I’m enjoying the game quite a bit and honestly I don’t know if I could go back to the original now that I’ve experienced the voiced Isaac. Like, going from the first to the second game was a bit of a shock, since Isaac had zero dialogue in the first game and wouldn’t shut up in the second one but you could always sort of justify Isaac’s silence in the first game as a bit of work professionalism and stoicism. The remake’s dialogue gives him more camaraderie with his work partners and now, even as a life-long introvert myself I’d feel very weird with him never uttering a word during the whole thing.
As usual, though, while this game is touted as “horror” is more “action with jump scares”. It’s fun, but I wouldn’t call it “scary”. The atmosphere is well done and there are a couple of times that are genuinely upsetting (like the first time you see someone transform into a necromorph), but it runs out of tricks pretty quickly when it comes to offering terror, so it mostly relies on jump scares, which despite their name aren’t really scary, just surprising. If the remake has added some genuinely scary bits I have yet to find them.
I don’t remember if Shamus ever mentioned his thoughts on the original. I know he had some strong words on the sequel regarding precisely this sort of thing I just mentioned, so he probably thought something similar of the first one, which, knowing how upset he was by games that labeled themselves as horror without being such, likely means he enjoyed it considerably less than I did.
I beat Darkest Dungeon 2. The story has absolutely nothing to do with any of the gameplay but oh well, I’m down to listen to that narrator talk about whatever and the gameplay is a lot of fun.
Started playing The Lamplighters League, which features Xcomish tactical gameplay with stealth sections between the fights. The difficulty is weird because if you do well at the stealth bits the tactical fights are trivial (because almost everyone is dead) while if you, say, screw up the stealth immediately, you’re in a tough fight. It’s actually more interesting if you fail at the stealth, kind of. At least they put some limits on how many people you can take out with stealth, but you can still take out like 12 enemies per level. Overall I’m enjoying it.
That’s probably why XCOM 2 had you blow your cover upon your first attack. You might be able to wipe out one pod of enemies, maybe severely wound two if they happen to be close together when you go loud – but then you’ve blown your element of surprise and can’t go back into stealth. It’s fun to sneak around an get that first ambush off, but I could see it getting boring if that was the entirety of the gameplay (and/or optimal way to play).
It actually works quite well – Phantom Doctrine‘s tactical missions are based on slowly “unwrapping” defence while remaining in stealth (going loud causes infinite reinforcements to start showing up), so one basically weaves around security measures searching for ways of turning them off, ambushsing a sentry here or a civilian there to open a way further in, or, with silenced weapons, clears rooms via breaches.
If enemy agents are present (they usually are) taking out a set amount of sentries causes them to start actively looking for your team, but without raising alarm – which can be used to draw them out of secure positions for easier capture.
Result is slightly more puzzle-like than tactical, but overally stays very satisfying even on subsequent playthroughs.
Haven’t had much motivation to finish Hollow Knight recently, so I’m taking a break from it by playing Tunic, which is kind of like classic isometric Zelda with a dash of Dark Souls. Biggest draw to it is there’s an instruction manual in game telling you how to play, but you don’t have the pages and you can’t read the language they’re written in when you start finding them. As you adventure and get more pages, you begin gradually deciphering the writing. Lots of secrets, lots of shortcuts back to the checkpoint to open up, tons of treasure chests hidden behind the geometry. Pretty satisfying so far
I need to bring my venting to this site.
I am still suffering through GTA5. It is not bad it is just horribly below average. By now I can no longer attribute the failures to it being by accident. I think the designer really wants to waste the players time. But each time I start the game up I find something new that is irritating. I also try to judge the game by 2013 standards instead of 2023 ones. But I am rather certain I played better designed games in 2010. A friend said it is in the name of immersion. I believe that but immersion just goes to far if it hinders fun.
So I decided to play Saints Row (2022). That game is so much more enjoyable. The humor is not as abrasive. The controls work with KBM. The settings are proper settings for everything. The menus are reactive. The visuals are interesting. And it does not take me half an hour to get to the next point of interest. And I do not need to consult a notebook to know how to steer any given vehicle. Also I do not need an external map on a second screen so I can navigate the world or to find something. The cherry on top is that the characters are not all complete asshats.
Also I am playing through the minigames in Limits Escape Room Games 2 with a friend, while chatting on the side. :D
I forgot Hexceed, which I play while listening to YT videos.
And of course braindead WoW-ing after work. Just doing a few quests each day. :)
That’s interesting to hear – especially given the comparison to Saint’s Row 2022. The characters looked very annoying in that game, but then they looked similarly so in GTAV. I tried to play a bit of GTAV on PS3 recently and the immediate experience wasn’t very good. I think firstly it had to download some very long update, and then it didn’t seem to work with non-official controllers that work for every other game that I’ve tried. And because it launched straight into the game cutscenes and possibly straight into a car chase (?) then I had to try to sort all of that out while I was meant to be experiencing the beginning of the game. Just a pain really, didn’t make me want to go back to it as it seemed like such a faff to play it. I don’t mind using external maps though, there’s one in the box. I seem to find the the newer the AAA game, the more it wastes my time – the beginning of Horizon Zero Dawn seems like such a dull slog, I need to go back to it but I don’t care about walking around some caves as a child, devoid of gameplay, after a soulless cutscene about characters I know (and care) nothing about.
Oh god, I completely repressed the horrendous opening of GTA5. Directly into the game after the 2-3 minute loading screen on my PC. Granted it is a seven year old power rig. But still. SR 2022 loads in about a minute. Even faster now that the shaders have been optimized.
Also in GTA5 the menus are horribly delayed. Also sometimes E is interact and other times it is F. On mission Fail ENTER is retry but on success SPACE is retry. Only in main missions the mission will fail if you die. In side missions you will be teleported to the hospital and have to travel back to the mission. Which might be about 10 minutes away. After 60 hours of play I noticed that the special meter was also the O2 meter under water. And I had to look up what the three bars below the mini map meant.
By external map I meant a map that shows me collectibles and other stuff like points of interest. Given that I have the game as a digital Steam version there is no box and physical map.
Sorry for venting so much.
Nah the venting is fun (to do and to read). Ha that sounds terrible!! It was the biggest media release of all time when it came out… and it’s that janky on PC controls-wise? Reminds me of when I started trying to play San Andreas on PC and was in a state of “what on earth is this” with the mouse camera control during driving and pedal-cycling.
You know the biggest reason I had no particular interest in playing GTAV (I only got the copy because my gf likes the look of it and the general ability to go around causing mayhem. So far she’s only had Lego City Undercover for that, we’d love a sequel…) was that the characters seem so unlikeable. Horrible people doing horrible things, but not in a fun way, rather in a horrible real life way.
7 year old power rig sounds about right, I assembled mine in December 2016, carrying some things over from my continuously improving previous build, and still think of it as my new PC. i5-6600k, GTX 970, 16 GB DDR4. For loading times I couldn’t believe it when originally got an MX100 500 GB SSD for my previous PC, suddenly Mass Effect 3 loading times were so short that I couldn’t read the tips that were shown. They were literally 2 seconds, if that. I ended up having to replace that with a Samsung 950 EVO which ostensibly should be faster, but loading times seem to be pretty long in other games. Surprisingly long in fact.
My rig is a Ryzen7 first gen, with 32GB DDR4, GTX 1070OC 8GB running from a 860EVO.
The loading times shouldn’t be that terrible.
I always found SR way more fun for causing mayhem. At least 3 and 4. They toned it down a lot for the reboot but it is still fun.
Undercover is a really fun game. Played on PC, Wii and DS. :D
In the GTA5 the KBM controls were definitely an afterthought. Because you have to manually correct your steering which would automatically happen with a stick.
I do not mind some waste of time, if it help with the story or athmosphere or I get some weird reward for it. But wasting time due to bad and obvious design issue is a whole other kettle of fish.
The characters in SR are still assholes in some way but they are likeable. Also I find it really refreshing that the characters are not written as if thought out by an edgy teenager. I had a mission in which one of the characters wanted a kids meal toy but they were all out. So they stole a delivery. In the end he got his one toy and all the others he gifted to the orphanage. Which is kinda nice. Also everything that would be a shocking “joke” in GTA is just side banter in SR. There is a hitman app in the game, which started out as a dating app. The same character from before knows the developers of the app from back in the day. The PC asks “With whom of the two did have a thing?” Answer: “Both.”
No joke no further reaction. Btw all involved characters are male. GTA would make a rude joke about all of that. But here it is a normal part of the world.
Also my PC is a large woman in all dimensions. With purple, pink hair. I really enjoy the fact that I can create such a character and it does not feel misplaced.
850 EVO that was it, I think I supplemented it with a 960 QVO. Funny names. Oh nice you have a 1070, I still can’t imagine that struggling with anything at 1080p but I think I’m way out of date. My 970 is running Shadow of Mordor nicely at 1440p, but I guess that’s a 9 year old game now (!) Just still can’t justify the upgrade when 90% of my library will probably run fine on the 970, some at 4K.
I don’t personally like the look of the delivery of the humour in the SR game, however I would definitely appreciate the jokes just being made without ridiculous reactions by people to explain the joke – that’s something that really grates on me in contemporary comedy films / series – the funny thing happens or is said, and that’s the joke in itself, but then the writer insists on the characters reacting in a way that spells out the joke and it kills the whole thing.
Yeah I usually don’t care much about character creation but in a world like GTA V I can imagine it would certainly be nice to have that option.
We also ended up with Undercover on multiple platforms somehow, got a Switch copy too :D
That looks delicious, particularly those chocolate biscuits.
I tried going back to Shadow of Mordor yesterday, and had the same issue I’ve had previously – in the bleak samey landscape and with the tiny mini-map, camera that reverts to a relatively close-quarters angle, and encounters that escalate when half of the mobs turn out to be mini-bosses, I get totally lost and am not sure what the mission is, or what sorts of missions are around, or what part of Mordor I’m in. There’s something slightly off about the ‘level’ design, traversal and visual clarity of the game, and the enemy density/escalation. So many fights against hordes, it’s like getting caught in combat in the original Assassins Creed and have to block attack block attack parry-finisher, over and over. I’m getting back into it and more used to the map and controls again, I do wish that there were more environment variety but I suppose then it could look a bit incongruous with the intended setting – I’m sure it’s possible though. If anything it looks a bit more brown and muddy and grassy than I’d expect, I’d be hoping for a more black rocky harsh fire-y looking land. I just have the feeling that there isn’t much more to the game than I’ve already seen and that I don’t find that loop all that fun. When I opened the game it said 4% complete and 5h playtime. So 125h?? I appreciate there is all of the checklist stuff which could have been fun maybe when I was younger, but I really don’t care about collecting all of the herbs or killing 5 bats or other such mundane tasks. The environment isn’t interesting enough for any of that.
Replaying AC series. Going through AC revelations at the moment. Because no matter how much gibberish Ubisoft can come up with, its still more logical than real life.
Chocolate AND salami?
Man… is it too late to do trick or treat when you are going to hit your forties?
The problem is the power to just buy whatever sweets you want :D