T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m done with Risk of Rain Returns. There are only a handful of achievements left, I don’t think I’m going to get them any time soon. I’ve been sick the past few days so I haven’t done anything else. I have been looking at Mortal Sin which is a first person roguelike focused on melee combat with heavily stylized graphics. I also might try Lethal Company which I don’t know much about, but it seems like it would be fun to go in blind.
What are you guys up to?
Punishing The Internet for Sharing
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
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.)
I started playing Knuckle Sandwich. It’s really, really weird.
Also been continuing to play Backpack Hero. I like the various starting run options, really lets you mix up the roguelite experience with some direction.
I got to an almost impossible Mission in XCOM Chimera Squad, at least with the gear I developed this far. After rage-quitting that I run my head through some walls in in the first Teardown DLC od delivering newspapers and stealing “art” and wrecking a museum.
With a friend I played Space Engineers. Made it to space. Found nothing there and started a new playthrough – This time starting on an alien planet. Fitting to that we discovered the app for Race for the Galaxy. The first round was without anyone knowing the rules, figuring them out as we go.
Analog I finally came around to try out Trogdor. A game I backed ages ago but never played. It’s actually pretty enjoyable, if you get into the theme. Strongbad voice and all. Now reading the rules of Pirates of Penryn a game that suffered the same fate as Trogdor.
Big fan of Race, but man; that’s a hard way to learn it!
RftG is so good! I thought initially that it’s just multiplayer solitaire, but it really pays off to anticipate what the other players might do. Also, the AI in the app is crazy good!
But man, I don’t know how you managed to pick up the rules as you play! I guess it helps that in the app you can see reminder text for all the cryptic symbols on your cards.
I have finished Baldur’s Gate 3. My final save informs me it took me around 172 hours although as I understand this doesn’t take into account the time I rolled back by reloading. I could see some fraying in the third act where certain quests, dialogues, and events were triggering slightly weirdly for me and the game kinda starts to stack combat after combat with the finale being a little bit, well, videogamey. But here’s the thing, BG3 is not trying to be Disco Elysium attempting to have deep, interlocking themes and metaphors, it’s not even trying to be Pillars of Eternity and show a world on the cusp of societal change and upheaval or do a “what would a world where the following is true” thought experiment. It’s a game that knows it is a fantasy adventure in a “fantasy stasis” setting that has become somewhat generic and does it extremely competently. It sets on a theme of control, powerlessness and empowerment and executes it very literally in the main storyline and with more nuance with companion/origin characters not loosing focus of it or going navel gazing, it does so (YMMV) with entertaining writing, engaging characters, great production values, overall satisfying gameplay, topped with excellent community management and taking in a lot of player input throughout the early access development process.
The sad thing is I’m sure the AAA industry will take all the wrong lessons from this because corporate culture is just not conductive to creative endeavours. It’ll be fighting over license for making DnD games and “everyone is talking about BG3 romances, and how you can have sexy times with a bear, we need to make our romances even more out there”. It’s not that people want to boink bears now (I mean, I imagine there is some novelty to it), people talk about the romances because the characters are well written and excellently acted and the internet is perpetually horny, also because Larian embraced that with a “if the community wants to make it a thing let’s celebrate it” approach.
Who knows? Maybe they’ll one day make some characters you can have a meaningful conversation with _without_ – gasp! – trying to have sex with them. Or for that matter, any characters not struggling with the decision of whether or not to become a god.
Well, I finally got the chance to finish the Dead Space Remake. This game was way longer than I remembered. While I was tempted to start a second playthrough to pursue a few achievements I think I’m gonna leave that for some other time.
I also started playing a graphic adventure called Dordogne. It has a gorgeous hand-painted visual style and an intriguing narrative, but the gameplay is kinda meh. It’s one of those games where they basically put you to make menial tasks in order to artificially extend the gameplay. Like, it’s not enough to click on a drawer to open it, you have to drag it backwards, and using a screwdriver to open a grate means you have to rotate each individual screw. I get the feeling this is gonna be a very short game and all that nonsense is there just for padding. We’ll see.
I’m also now playing Lies of P (which I absolutely cannot stop referring to as “Life of Pi”, which is an entirely unrelated thing), the souls-like in which you play as Pinocchio. It has a great steampunk world style going on, but oh, man, why did they default the normal attack to the RB button, and the item use to the X button? That is insane. It completely clashes with my muscle memory, where nearly every action game uses X as the attack. Thank God the game allows you to remap the buttons however you like, because the first few hours of this were grueling. Once I swapped those two buttons everything clicked perfectly.
I also picked Tears of the Kingdom back after months of abandonment. Took a little bit of practice to get back on track, but I did it just fine after a bit. I remembered that the reason I had left it was that I was insisting on trying to advance in an area where I was painfully underleveled for. which meant I was stubbornly stuck in the same area for hours until I just got sick of it all. I have now swallowed my pride and decided to just wait until I get stronger and find better equipment before venturing here again.
Dark Souls used RB and RT for light and heavy attacks, and it’s become a new standard since then. I think Skyrim hastened its adoption too. So now we have two conflicting standards for action games.
I have played, um… nothing. Basically just watched other people play games instead.
Saw some people play the SMRPG remake, which looks like the same game with a bunch of little “why did they do that” bits fixed up. The mouth is now called “Mouth” and not “Neosquid”, Punchinello’s bombs don’t get to attack the second they’re summoned anymore, the cake has a wonderful animation where it slowly turns around to reveal its creepy faces.
Saw some people play Knuckle Sandwich. I knew nothing about it beforehand, but having seen it, I have no desire to play Knuckle Sandwich.
Saw some people play Lethal Company, which was very funny. A four man team reaches a hole in the floor; the first guy jumps over it. The second guy tries to follow, and falls in the hole and dies. The third guy doesn’t hesitate, jumps into the hole and dies. The fourth guy and the first guy spend some time discussing what to do about the hole, and then the fourth guy jumps in the hole and dies. 75% of the party killed because one guy was good at jumping. Incredible.
I managed to start my run at Dragon Age Inquisition, and before I got into that I was re-reading the Mass Effect commentary, and at least the comment threads that I had participated in, and noted that I had wondered why the Dragon Age series didn’t go the way of Mass Effect, and one thing I noted was that Shamus complained that there were no exploratory options on the dialogue wheel in the later Mass Effect games and you were railroaded into decisions and conversation options without your input, whereas in DAI they pretty much ask me my opinion all the time — you can even respond in one early dialogue that you are surprised that Cassandra is asking for your input — and I spent an hour and a half just exploring the “Investigate” options for my early companions, and was able to ask the Requisitions officer why she was here and was told about her favouring Logain and that being awkward for King Alistair and all sorts of other questions of the people I run across, including exploring the events of the previous games with those who would have remembered it. So that’s a big difference there.
But the open world exploration is still a bit grating. I spent a couple of hours just exploring the area around the starting fortress of Haven, for no reason other than to try to gather up all the resources I could (which I think I skipped the last time). When I opened up the Hinterlands, I started to try to do that but it wasn’t working as I just kept getting drawn to landmarks, so I think I’ll have to go back to what I think I did the first run: move towards quest markers and quests and explore everything I can along the way, and then if some things aren’t done look at a walkthrough to complete them all. That will still leave me overleveled towards the end but I do want to go through all the quests. I also noted that I got enough power for the next mission early on — and my companions start to remind me that I should do that — but that works against my playstyle of completing the area first to at least get high enough in level to avoid combat issues, so I think I’m going to keep exploring this area and not move on yet. That might be a mistake but it works better for my style.
I also did manage to get in another run with my Consular in The Old Republic. The character I’m playing this time is based on a character that’s standoffish and mean but isn’t completely evil (er, most of the time) and so I’m really enjoying being able to select all the harsh and mean phrases while still doing good things in the end. My evil characters tend to be evil and most of my characters tend to be good (if a bit snarky at times) but this is the first character I’ve played that can just be MEAN, which is interesting and kinda fun.
Continuing my Yakuza series journey with Yakuza 5. It’s attempting to do four separate character stories that all flow into one overarching plot, and from what I hear the final merging of arcs is going to be clumsy. But having just finished the last of them and reached the beginning of the finale, I enjoyed the journey thus far. I really like games that can invest me in noncombat mechanics and merge them with narrative, whether it’s for a small piece of the game or for the whole thing, and Yakuza 5 had some really nice side activities with their own plotlines, particularly Haruka’s idol simulator and the Shinada’s baseball competitions.
Played a bit of visual novel The Zodiac Trial as something I could install on a crappy laptop for Thanksgiving travel. It’s not good. It wants to be Danganronpa very badly, but it’s so low-budget that every single twist is just a line of text saying “and then X happened” with no visual backing, and that simply doesn’t work in video games. The main character is also completely passive, and an alarming percentage of the plot is driven by “Character Y did something important offscreen, and told me about it later”. Basically, it’s reading an inconveniently formatted amateur mystery novel that comes with free character art. I do like some of the characters but that’s as far as it goes, the plot doesn’t use them well.
I was really craving some high-intensity sword-swinging action, so I booted up Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin again to run the Behemoth mission. after screwing around with assorted jobs, I settled on Greatsword-swinging Deist Dragoon for mobility, and Axe Warrior which I am way too complacent with.
After clearing the skyscraper and bonking Behemoth, I booted up Age of Wonders again to recreate Nidhogg from FFXIV as a leader of Dark Elves and Dragons.
I finished Spider-Man 2 this past weekend — quickest time between a game coming out and me finishing it as I usually wait for AAA titles to go on sale, but my kids got me this one for my birthday. ~38 hours and almost 6 weeks and that was 100% for all the trophies. Great game but seemed a little short…maybe I was thinking two Spider-Men would make the game longer somehow?
Honestly two Spider-Men should have things wrapped up twice as quickly.
I finished up the main story of Saints Row(2022) and a lot of side stuff. I still have lots of challenges open and the DLC.
I have to say especially the last stretch of the story was an absolute blast with great cinematography. It just worked for me and it was fun. I am still really happy that I play(ed) the game.
Also still doing my WoW grind to get down after a work day. Currently there is just so much stress at work and in my private life that I need something brainless.
I hope that everything slows down once Christmas draws nearer.
Not to mention all the timewaster games I play while waiting for other stuff like Alpacalypse, Hexceed and Little Inferno. Alpacalypse is a nice short free platformer. Controls and hit boxes are bit clunky and the game itself is not difficult but it is fun for a – what I assume – student project.
Hexceed is just a nice puzzle game to play while listening to some podcast or video essay.
Little Inferno I just play for easy achievements. I played it back in 2013. I am not really into the strange dystopian world the games of Tomorrow Corporation are set in. I like the art style and some of their games are really interesting gameplay wise. But the “lore” feels too much like “We want to say something” and there is some strange twist at the end of every game. It just does not click with me. Sometimes their games feel too long. Which is rather strange given that most of them are below the 10 hour mark.
Playing ranked in Street Fighter 6 feels like it’s getting kind of old. I might switch characters (Zangief main until now).
I beat Metroid Prime 3! Weird choice at the end to make you dump all your energy tanks. I think Metroid Prime was the best in the trilogy, and the one I’m most likely to replay. (Would be the third time actually, since I also played the remaster already.)
Still, the others are really close. I liked the switching between the light/shadow world in 2 and the Luminoth as a new alien species. Traveling with your ship between different landing zones in 3 felt a bit un-Metroid, but it had an unusual number of friendly NPCs which was an interesting change. Like, the Galactic Federation is just this lore thing in the other games, but here you get to meet them.
Now, there’s only one place left to go. I bought Other M on the WiiU eshop before it shut down, for the completionism. Surely it can’t be as bad as everyone says, right?
I went to Other M with an open mind and genuinely enjoyed it. The story is all kinds of preposterous, but I think the gameplay is great. It seems to me like it’s one of those cases where the moment people find one thing to criticize about something they feel the need to pretend the whole package is bad.
I had surgery on Monday, so I haven’t been able to play all that much. Yesterday I played Jurassic World Evolution 2, and it was okay. It might be better on mouse and keyboard, I just wish the campaign was a bit faster (even with the fast forward button).
I got back into the Wizordum demo. It’s kind of a modernized 3D dungeon crawler/first person shooter where you’re a wizard, and there’s something about an evil force that’s overrun the kingdom and you need to fight them off by yourself because everyone else is dead. The plot isn’t that important; the gameplay takes center stage as you get dropped into the game with just your trusty mace and left to find your own way through the town of Grimbrook, which has been overrun by goblins and their cohorts.
Along the way there’s mystical weapons to find – like the Frost Weaver which freezes your enemies and then shatters them, a flintlock pistol which discharges bursts of shrapnel, or magical hand grenades – treasure to loot, secrets to uncover, and lots and lots of monsters to slay. The first episode, which consists of eight large levels, is out now, and there is a demo with the first two levels available for free.
Secondly, I’ve been playing Civilization 4, first doing a run as Qin Shi Huang in vanilla, then transitioning to a game as the Inca in Beyond the Sword. It’s very absorbing. I’ll sit down for just a quick session, and whoops that’s several hours gone. Which isn’t helped by the inconsistent autosave; I genuinely have no idea when it will save or what causes it to activate. Vexing.