T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I refuse to believe it’s been a whole week since last Wednesday. I have nearly gotten Risk of Rain Returns to %100. The difficulty feels more balanced now, but still harder than the second game. This could be because of my hours clocked, or it could be the items I’ve unlocked have helped the scaling.
Last week I complained about the camera magnification. This was user error. There is a inconspicuous button to toggle on/off pixel perfect. My mistake.
Today is Peter’s birthday. Happy birthday Peter.
What are you guys up to?
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
The Biggest Game Ever
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
A Telltale Autopsy
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Happy birthday Peter!
In the little gaming time I have at the moment, I’ve been returning to the Discworld MUD…my character will be 20 years old in a few days…
Happy birthday Peter!
This week I’ve decided to refresh Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin.
In ’41 scenarios German tanks are hilariously outclassed, so it makes for a very relaxing cinematic experience.
Happy birthday Peter !
I have had almost no time to play for several weeks now, but I managed to make time for a few hours of Mario Wonder in coop with my wife. Great game.
Happy birthday Peter!
Have a great year.
Still having fun with Saints Row 2022 after about 40 hours. Mostly due to the little downtime that there is in the game. Even if one does not do anything “productive” there is still some progress. While driving somewhere you can still work on your challenges or something similar.
Also still doing my braindead after work WoW stuff. I somewhat enjoy the new patch and zone. Gaming wise everything is fine. :)
I played through Small Saga. It’s a delightful RPG in which the main character is a mouse using a pocketknife. A mouse sized mouse using a human sized pocketknife, so it fulfills the standard RPG requirement of a (relatively) enormous sword. I liked it a lot, though the combat was way too easy. It’s about 8 hours long and I played it pretty much straight through, which is high praise given my attention span.
I’ve also been playing Backpack Hero, which is a roguelite game that’s extremely focused on inventory management. It turns out if you make dealing with your inventory the whole point of the game it goes past being a massive pain and loops back to being fun again!
Oh, and I tried Persona 5 Tactica. Feels very Mario vs Rabbids. I’ve played worse Xcomlikes.
I must be really out of touch if there’s a new Persona game out there and I haven’t heard about it [grin].
Looking at it, it sounds somewhat interesting and Team Persona have done a really good job when they branch out into other genres (Arena, Dance) so I might pick it up at some point if I remember. It might take me a while to play it, though.
Due to other errands that I needed and wanted to do heading into my month-long vacation, I didn’t play anything. I did manage to build my new tapestry in the Dragon Age Keep for my Inquisition run. Hopefully things will just work when I start a new character next week.
I’ve been replaying the Shadowrun Returns trilogy and I’m honestly surprised at how good it was. The writing was very very well crafted! It’s criminal that they lost the right after Hong Kong.
Another enthusiastic recommendation: American Arcadia is wonderful! It starts as a very fun 70s themed Truman Show story where you play a citizen too unpopular to be kept on the show (and alive) trying to escape the city and the hacker activist helping him. He does 2d platforming and her gameplay is either controlling objects through cameras to help him or some 3d sections. But the story then takes a lot of twists and turns and there is a lot of gameplay variety. It might be my favorite game of 2023!
Absolutely loved American Arcadia. Had some performance issues, but otherwise everything else was stellar.
I’m mostly playing Space Engineers and getting the hang of some never explained controls of this game. Yesterday I completed my first ship that might make it to space and (safely) back. We’ll see.
Also the new Teardown DLC fetched my interest, but realizing, I haven’t done the last one. So I started that first.
On the analog side I played Expeditions 1920+, the next Jamie Stegmeier game in the Scythe universe of 1920+. I don’t think it will replace Scythe but it is a good game with a lot of variety and more art – and a huge tablehog. Then a bit of Codenames, Furnace and The Royal Limited. Much smaller and quicker games. I’ll see how they fare in different game groups.
Well, despite my best efforts I haven’t been able to finish the Dead Space Remake just yet. Most of it has been because of my limited play time and dedicating to other games, but also I spent a good chunk stuck in an area due to my refusal to look for help on the internet. See, there’s a part where you have to dispose of a nuke and you cannot fire your guns on it or it explodes. So of course the area has an enemy with an exploding sack that blows up if you hit it or if the enemy hits you/the scenery with it. No matter what I did, the damn thing exploded. Slowing the enemy down with stasis didn’t solve it because it seems the enemy was scripted to kill himself by hitting the floor even if you were far away. Trying to kill the enemy without hitting the sack didn’t work because the sack would fall to the floor and explode anyway.
At the end I bit the bullet and looked for help on YouTube. Turns out… you have to kill the enemy without hitting the sack… which I had tried, and didn’t work… but I tried after looking up the solution and then worked. Fuck that. I hate it when that happens. For real, I hate it so goddamn much.
Anyway, I also played through Coccoon. Isometric exploration puzzle game by Annapurna Interactive. Much like the other games they’ve published (such as Machinarium or Botanicula), it features no dialogue of any kind so the mechanics need to be learned purely by visual clues. Quite a fun experience, though a couple of the hidden collectibles are absolute BS, impossible to find without a walkthrough.
And, as I mentioned in a reply above, I played through American Arcadia. It really is a gem of a game that kept me glued to my seat from beginning to end. The visual style is really good and the gameplay has a lot of variation and great ideas, but it’s really the writing that elevates it. A gripping story with engaging characters. I enjoyed the game so much the first thing I did was to see what else the developer had made. Turns out they have another game named “Call of the Sea”, which is already in my library even though I don’t remember having bought it, so it probably came in a bundle. But hey, I know what I’ll be playing next.
Seeing the Mario RPG remake finally got me to play Sea of Stars, the Chrono Trigger/Mario RPG indie mashup. The first boss looks like Gato from Chrono Trigger, the second looks like Lavos from Chrono Trigger, and then the power went out and that was the end of that session. Fun so far, but I’m still in the part of the game I’ve seen other people play.
Slay the Spire continues.
Happy Birthday, Peter! :D
GW2 still eats up most of my gaming time, but I am making slow (snail’s pace) progress through BG3 as well. I have FINALLY left the Emerald Grove and am now exploring the delightfully named “Blighted Village”. (Which has, to be honest, a distressingly non-existent level of blight and is really just goblin reek.)
Ah, the blight in that vilage is something other than the goblins, and in the town’s past. Do a bit of digging in the town and you’ll find out about the town’s backstory – it’s possible to miss it.
Oooh, thank you! I’ve only done a surface-level scan of the area so far, but I’ll definitely dig deeper. I looooove locations like this in CRPGs where you’ll arrive in an area to deal with a more pedestrian threat like goblins or orcs, and then you come across sealed off areas or deeper levels where the monsters themselves fear to go because of far older and more sinister threats buried deep beneath the earth. It absolutely thrills my adventurer’s soul, it does.
Happy birthday, Peter!
I’m playing Victoria 3. The new DLC added a lot of stuff to South America and Brazil in particular, making it a really fun playthrough. Aside from that, I’m back to plugging away at Baldur’s Gate 3, and replaying Dishonored as part of a project for my girlfriend’s psychology class.