T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m not doing much, I’m in between games right now and all I’ve played was Mario Galaxy; hopefully I’ll find something to play for next week.
What are you guys up to?
From The Archives:
The Witch Watch
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
Why I Hated Resident Evil 4
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
Top 64 Videogames
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
Tales of Zestiria is interesting mostly in how uninteresting it is; I’ve finished the first level and reached the Opening Crawl, and, like… nothing has happened. No great character moments, no meaningful villains introduced, no destinations. It’s an English Muffin of a game. I’m doing a write-up as I play, and that’s the most fun part so far. I’m paradoxically interested in how boring this game can be.
Tales of Arise is better on that front, and after moving the Dodge button from R2 to O I’m having a good time with the combat. Still haven’t gotten past the last point I stopped at; we’ll see what happens then. Not writing this one up, but noticing things that could go in a write-up and looking forward to one in future. (Tales games are fun in that they make ridiculous design choices like our boy’s head-covering metal plate, and then trying to justify them in-universe. It never does, but the attempt is appreciated and entertaining.)
Sea of Stars remains kid-friendly fun. Just hitting the level from the Demo, and past that will all be new.
Played the first level of Dark Deity, an indie strategy game that seems to be heavily Fire Emblem. The plot’s opening implies some pretty cliche stuff; judging from their other game they’ll twist it a bit but not so much as to make it interesting. But game’s fun so far.
I think Zestiria had a really great battle system, but yeah, I wasn’t a big fan of the story. A lot of the plot points have a weird, virtue-ethics-y morality debate that I really didn’t vibe with, and the midpoint plot twist (the main thing I like about Tales games) was pretty lame.
Managed to beat Arise’s first boss,
BalsackBalseph, after roughly two hours of trying; dude’s a vast step above the enemies on the way to him. Then the game sent me on a filler quest to go backtrack, as Tales games are wont to do, and it took nearly as long as the boss fight because they decided this one didn’t need a map marker and I just could, not, find the thing. Then they disabled fast travel without putting any events between the locations; just, kill time walking through these maps again. Starting to worry this’ll turn into another Scarlet Nexus, a game I was constantly swearing at for three quarters of it.Solo I started with Yakuza: The Man who erased his Name. It’s stupid that so many people do not recognize Kiryu – the legendary Dragon of Dojima, but other than that the story till now is okay and far far away from the stupidity that was Yakuza 5. On the other hand: The fighting system is so old and bad. You miss very often for no visual reason, every animation has to be played from start to finish, no cancel-dodge or cancel-guard. A lot of enemies taking hits without any featback other that the health bar going down (Like in a very old MMO) and starting loading up heavy attacks you cannot dodge or counter, because your animation is still playing. Bad.
In Co-op we agreed to stop playing Space Engineers yesterday. To many bad quirks for my friend and not enough goal to achieve for me. Don’t know what’s coming next.
Analog I played Pirates of Penryn it has a bunch of flavor text to art of an eight-year old and a lot of take-that-ish gameplay. It will not become one of my favorite games.
On the Switch, I have recently finished Dredge, the Lovecraftian Fishing Simulator, which was nice but would probably have worked better had I not dragged it over months. Also, the expansion is a bit disappointing.
Next project on that thing is Dave the Diver, which started out nice, but could be a lot clearer on which QTE wants what exactly from me.
On the PC, the ongoing megaproject is Baldur’s Gate 3. Still in Act 1.
I have also dabbled in Sailwind, which I love in concept but which does a terrible job of tutorialising the actual sailing. But then, it’s early access, so let’s see.
I’ve been working on my Valheim base in the world I share with my husband! He’s got a mountain fortress, and I’ve got a spread out village-style meadow base with an open air kitchen/dining pavilion, and a nearby draugr village slated for remodeling into guest accomodations. I’ve never been the most creative with exterior design, but I’m finding some neat tricks and learning from my mistakes lol.
I’ll say it again: KOTOR.
The original, not the shitty sequels. Or the OG Fallout games. Sometimes to figure out where to go you need to know where you’re coming from</i). This whole website started with a D&D campaign and old school PC games like Fallout, KOTOR, Baldurs gate, Diablo ect. KOTOR is being remastered…. eventually? Covering both as a back-to-back bookend would be a great idea. I know Shamus would be doing it.
Because he told me he would.
This is why I dont post more often…..
Can someone fix that please? Little help…?
Mine got removed as spam (possibly due to my VPN?)
They seem to have passed on the KotOR remake to another developer, then possibly scrapped it. Which is a shame, because ‘good story but janky and not that fun combat’ I think is the best sort of candidate for a remake.
Okay, and I was hoping for bi Bastila. Because it’s clearly the most plot-relevant and thematic romance, and there’s nothing that really needs to be gendered in it.
Getting back to Night of the Rabbit. The wondrous world of obtuse puzzles!
I was stuck and had to look up a solution because I was totally on the wrong track. I thought I had to drug a mug of coffee with sleeping drops for the cannon guard so I could use the cannon to scare away the catfish. But no! Apparently, all I had to do was
put sleeping drops into the rushing river, and that would knock out the catfish. I mean, really? A few drops in all that rapidly-moving water?Aggghhh!!It’s not all bad. But characters tend to talk way too much. And repeat things they’ve already said. There’s one person whose multiple dialogue branches all loop back to the same series of ten or twelve lines, so he repeats the same stuff every single time. At least I’ve had fun reinterpreting him as a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he starts asking me to bring him the blue pages.
I have not played Night of the rabbit. But I played way more Daedalic games than I like to admit.
I somewhat like the art and the voice acting and the translation work is great.
But for all that has changed since the days of the original Sierra and LucasArts adventures. Daedalic games still feel somewhat stuck in the mid 90s in regards to humor, puzzles and sensibilities. In the last two years I played through all the Deponia games. It was painful. Less the gameplay more the misogyny on display and the hate for ethnicities and mental health. It felt like the world view of a teenager in the 90s. Also it was really unfunny. In German and English. But German humor is divisive even in German speaking countries.
Sorry for going off like that. But all I wanted to say yes in Daedalic games there is way to much talking.
You know, I played through the first Deponia game some time ago and decided I had enough. I’ve never touched the sequels and I never will. I hate the protagonist with a passion. He’s not funny, he’s just an asshole. He doesn’t care about anything or anyone but himself. He’s not even in love with the girl, he’s just horny for her. This doesn’t stop him from screwing her, though (and not in a sexual way).
The crazy thing is that when I point this out people defend him by saying it’s refreshing to see a protagonist who’s not a goody-two-shoes, and every time I hear this I go “Motherf**ker, what the hell are you talking about?”. Seeing an adventure game protagonist who’s not an asshole is the rare thing. Most are jerks in one way or another but they usually have some endearing traits. Rufus has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the game at least gave me some choice. But no, strictly linear and every puzzle or line of dialogue forces me to act like an idiot, an asshole, or both, and it’s always in a spectacularly unfunny way. I genuinely hate the game, and by all accounts the other ones don’t get any better.
Let’s put it that way in Deponia Rufus has options to redeem himself. Or at least there is a way he could redeem himself through character growth. He has the opposite of that. Character withering? It gets way worse. The other characters even know that he is an unpleasant person to be around. But it gets so much worse. Sadly that seems to be par for the course with Daedalic.
Not all adventure character are jerks. But those that are are endearing because they are naive like Guybrush. Or they are a stupid teenager where it fits like Simon. No idea what character the KQ characters are. Then you get into Broken Age or Broken Sword, whose characters are actually likeable and not that jerk-ish. Or you get the characters who make no sense at all like the protagonist in The Raven.
I played way to many adventure games over the years me thinks.
Getting back into Stellaris. It’s had a few updates since the last time I played, but the basic gameplay is the same. Finally swallowed my pride and played on the easiest difficulty, so I’ve actually got enough resources to win wars when I get into them.
Managed to get a run in with my Consular in The Old Republic. I’m still really enjoying her being a snarky type who nevertheless isn’t all “kill ’em all” or evil, as that lets me do nasty things on occasion while still staying mostly Light side. It helps that for the Consular if you choose to shield the Masters instead of killing them you get Light Side points, and my character has stated that killing her way through the Jedi Order is NOT the way to convince them that she’s not at risk of falling to the Dark Side.
Also playing through Dragon Age Inquisition and it’s a bit of a slog. I’ve played for 20 hours by the save file and I haven’t finished the Hinterlands yet, and am just really starting the plot. But while I might have been able to advance the plot earlier for the first part where I had to have a meeting, I at least had to get to Redcliffe to meet the mages before getting the two choices to advance the plot, and while I likely could have gotten there earlier it was in the top part of the zone and so it made more sense to explore the other areas first, so there was no real drive to do that. I’m not really enjoying the open world either, and it makes the plot points be spaced out too far to really drive me forward. TOR allows for some exploration and side quests to but its focus makes it work a lot better, in my opinion. That being said, the game still does allow for a lot of dialogue and exploration of the backgrounds of characters in the world (you can even talk to Connor if you saved him in DAI). But even that can be overwhelming if you have a lot of those options to explore.
RE DAI: To be fair the experience as I remember it is that Hinterlands is probably the worst of it, it’s big, it’s not completely open to navigation, it shows up at the very start and there really is a lot of those icons there. Having said that there is more, including a later openworld area that adds a lot of navigation in third dimension making it sometimes absolutely infuriating to get around to where you want to be. The move towards Ubisoft openworld iconcleaning was honestly one of my biggest issues with the game.
Other than an issue with not being able to close the rifts because I kept getting my butt kicked when I tried — which happened here again, even though I closed a lot of easier ones and leveled up a bit before trying the ones that gave me problems the first time — I didn’t remember anything about the Hinterlands specifically, so I guess I didn’t find it that bad the last time. I remember disliking the Sword Coast the most for navigation and disliking the desert area — the Forbidden Oasis, I guess — because I was overleveled for it but still had to fight the enemies, and got no XP for it, which was frustrating.
I have fully fallen back into Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Orign. It’s a very silly Team Ninja hack+Slash written by Team Ninja and Tetsuya Nomura, starring a guy who really doesn’t care about being the protagonist of a JRPG, and tries to skip all the villainous monologues to get back to the hacking and slashing.
I’ve long since completed the main story missions, and am now in the endgame and the DLC stories, which are lightly scattered through grinding out the game’s missions. The game is very grindy, gearing is obnoxiously convoluted, but Jumping into a pile of Goblins as a Dragoon, swapping to Warrior with an axe, and shouting them into a wall and smashing them never gets old. The boss fights are a cool blend of flashy and technical as well. I spent four hours earlier this week trying to beat the Pirate Captain Bikke, who is an absolute BAMF with an axe and mixes things up with calling in mooks.
I might have asked in the past but have you played it only solo or have you tried co-op? Me and my multiplayer friend are tentatively looking towards the game.
I mostly play solo, because my group I played co-op with kinda fell apart a few months after launch. But, I’ve gotten myself up to Floor 18 in the Rift, and item level 500, but I’m lacking in Berserker and Dark Knight crests to keep my gear up to date properly.
The game’s a blast to play co-op the few times I got a chance to do so.
Noted, I’ll add it to the “for” column. Thanks.
Finally finished BG3. And, having apparently spent nearly 5 full-time work weeks playing it, I’m having a bit of a break and reading a book. But, apart from a few odd plot hiccups, it was very good.
Started Last Train Home (after WW1 Czech soldiers try to return home via Wladiwostok through early days of the Russian Civil War).
Combat is hampered by being real-time, although pause does help. Mostly on account of the need to heavily micromanage and coordinate 2-3 soldiers while paying attention to where the rest of the group is hiding… but combined with need for stealth (ammunition is better used for barter, and injuries, while fairly easily healed, do create their own problems) it creates an ok experience for the patient.
Train management and logistics are great. Think the old Transarctica, just much, much better done and utilising all the game development experience from the last 30 years.
Writing is… split. As in, intercharacter banter, small tidbits during mission (including civilians and enemies – btw, even passing knowledge of Czech and Russian greatly increases fun, english voice acting is not as good as original in this one) and occasional stories and encounters – all that is excellent and leaves one wanting to hear more.
Overal story, however, is extremely heavy-handed. Maybe it changes somewhat in second half of the game, but personally am lacking acknowledgement of the fact Reds didn’t have monopoly on atrocities, and Whites were trying to resurrect a regime that was, for most of the society, long-proven to be as bad as the new one.
That being said, this bias is fully understandable given Czech history. And it’s a story loosely based on actual events, not a documentary or a history lesson.
Oh, I missed this post yesterday, but I’m not really playing anything new so eh. Very little time do to anything gaming related this week.
I am still deep into Saints Row 2022.
Finished the DLC.
One is boring. Just a wingsuit challenge thing. If you like it fine but it just is not my thing. Even though I like the wingsuit for traversal.
Then there is wave survival DLC. Was short but fun. Also had cool aesthetics.
The heist DLC was too short but the missions were fun.
The LARP DLC was a load of fun. Length was fine and the storyline was cool as well. Maybe nothing special or innovative but it was fun. Really good extension to the three or so main story missions that deal with the LARP stuff. Especially appreciated that they are not making fun of LARPers. At least not in the “They are so stupid” kind of way.
The last DLC pack is some kind of single player rogue-lite Battle Royale thing. That is quite fun but the difficulty is really weird depending on your luck, the character you choose and a few other factors. Also it gets way easier once you get a few level ups. But it is also a lot of fun.
I really enjoy my time with that game.
Did rewatch the trailers and oh boy those trailers do not represent the game I play(ed). Neither the character nor the gameplay. I definitely understand why the player base bounced off this game so hard. It is somewhat disheartening to see this franchise go away probably. Because there is a seed for something interesting in there. That is different to the other open world games and also different enough to the old Saints Row games to reach a new audience.
The combination of over the top action, open world and empire building is not that easy to find. The last one I played might have been Mafia 3, which I did enjoy a lot.
XCOM 2 with War of the Chosen. It feeds into the tendency for sequels to be bigger, more, extra. That can be a drawback but I think it’s working pretty well to this point. They imposed mission conditions for most of the missions that force more aggressive play, fixing the obvious meta superiority of “overwatch creeping” in the first game. I like the story and cutscene cinematography so far. The base management is a little bit overwrought with too many options, but it hasn’t been a distraction. I might be halfway done, though it doesn’t feel like I’ve achieved much yet.
I have played a couple short ones: Kill It With Fire, a game about killing spiders with comedic overkill, was a pretty okay quick distraction although not quite as wacky as I thought it would be. The Spectrum Retreat was another short one, it’s a first person puzzler of the kind that sprung up left and right after the success of Portal. I’m going to say it’s a relatively easy one in that I haven’t gotten seriously stuck at any point but it does let you get actually stuck, the only way to get out of which is to reset the entirety of the area. Particularly annoying with the last level which is effectively a set of several separate puzzles but messing up a later one forces the player to go through the earlier part again. Narratively it’s okay, perhaps holds back some reveals a bit too long and I do have some very essential questions about the premise but it feels like the key point of the story was well executed by someone with limited game development means (I believe this is one of those “nearly a one person project” games).
I am NOT presently playing AC:Origins because I’ve started Cyberpunk 2077 and I did not anticipate it would be this heavy in terms of icon-cleaning. I do like these from time to time but two at the same time is just a bit much. I’m also constantly facing the good ol’ analysis paralysis because the playstyle I want to play (sneaky haker) is not the same as the playstyle I end up with (oh, I’ve been spotted, grenades for everyone and it’s shotgun time!). I have also barely touched the story because I got distracted by doing all the gigs in the first area. It’s possible I’ll have more to say in the future.