T w e n t y S i d e d
So, I was meant to be writing my Sims 4 Overthinking post, but, you may have noticed that I’m not.
I need to put something together real quick to explain that Charlie’s series will no longer be hosted here. I don’t know if they’re going to take it somewhere else or not, I’ll let them decide that, but either way it won’t be here.
I haven’t mentioned it, to avoid airing my bullshit onto strangers, (which is obviously what I am now doing) but Charlie and I split up almost five months ago. Them and Elliot had been split already for over a year, so there’s no crossfire involved, just the end of a long term relationship. Things just suck. They’ve moved out and we’ve split what assets we had, but removing them from the rotation here was something I wanted to (and couldn’t) avoid.
Their content should be somewhat replaced by something Peter is working on which I’m really enjoying the first drafts of.
This week I’ll take the short post with the silver lining I can. I got home from surgery last Wednesday only to find myself suddenly symptomatic of strep throat on top of recovery from paying someone to rip bones out of my face. I’m tired.
Sorry this is a bummer-fest. Maybe I’ll chant ‘Dark Souls is too hard!” a few times and see what fascinating beings pop out of the wood work. Like how they throw pumpkins full of raw meat to bored lions. Enrichment.
The Gameplay is the Story
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Trashing the Heap
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
My Music
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
Overused Words in Game Titles
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve been going through a hard time. I look forward to seeing what Peter has in store for us though! Here’s hoping you have some easy days ahead,
That’s a shame, I liked their series.
Makes perfect sense though.
More Sims shenanigans required!
And you’re almost at the end of that story aren’t you?
Got any plans for what you’ll do next?
Were they the ones writing the AC series? If so, yeah, as someone who’d never played the AC games, I was looking forward to getting a “retrospective view” of a gaming series I know I’ll never have the time to try, but… life happens. Take care of yourself, Bay, and I hope that things go smoothly for you and yours this holiday season. :)
I’m thinking about writing about Breath of the Wild VS Tears of the Kingdom for awhile, we’ve been playing them back to back and I have some thoughts. Also, I have some planned posts about Doctor Who. TV shows aren’t 100% the vibe here usually but there have been exceptions in the past, and boy do I have some words about some of the writing decisions made.
I’d be here for both those series, the Zelda one more than the Doctor Who one.
Primarily because while I’ve not played those entries (sacrilege, I know), I’m familiar with Zelda lore.
And I’ve never watched nor plan to watch Doctor Who, but I’m always here for Writing Decision Critique. :D
I’d love to see that Zelda series in particular, I never felt the desire to play TotK and so a comparison series would be fun to go through
And I have a friend who’s had more than a few Words about Doctor Who recently, so I’m sure you could get some posts out of that
I’m always down for BotW vs TotK
Haven’t watched Doctor Who since the end of Matt Smith’s run, would be interested to hear where it’s at now
I have not watched enough Doctor Who to have opinions, but am totally on board with covering TV shows.
Those two both sound interesting – a good mix. I watched two of the Xmas Doctor Who episodes and then the new one with Gatwa and had some opinions – as a non-fan who occasionally watched episodes, thinks “this is terrible”, but gets interested in the plot and then watches more. Like Rebel Moon.
Well, that sucks.
Been rewatching Paranoia Agent, so my first thought is “watch out for kids on rollerblades”.
…I wonder if the Sims has a Li’l Slugger mod.
Speaking of Dark Souls, has anyone here played Tunic?
I find the trend of new games clearly pulling from the Souls formula with a completely different aesthetic, gimmicks and end goal fascinating.
But they’re way too hard and frustrating.
I played Tunic.
I liked it a lot. The puzzles are cool and most fights are fine. The bosses are horrible difficulty spikes. At places it was a bit too obtuse for my liking. The feeling you get once you figured something out was cool.
I am not able to compare it to the Souls-like genre as I have never played any of those. Also the only one that interests me is Bloodbourne.
I really liked Tunic, but for me the Dark Souls inspired difficulty was really not needed. I liked the game for the puzzles and visual style, the combat felt mostly like a distraction from the games real strengths
I’ve not played Tunic. Are the bosses really harder than the Swirly Boss on Death Mountain from Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past?
That’s the worm that you can only damage by hitting the tail, right? I think that one killed me one or two more times than any boss in Tunic managed, so by that measure no
I played a but of Tunic, I loved the aesthetic and thought the puzzles were largely fun and cute, though in the end the combat wound up being the busywork that got in the way of the rest of the game to me, I never much loved it
I just played through it a couple months ago
I liked the boss fights, thought the puzzles were really cool the first couple times and really tedious after that and really wished both had been more evenly dispersed rather than doing all the boss fights in the lead up to
the first endingand all the puzzles to getthe second one.I very much enjoyed Tunic, particularly the manual pages, but I thought the boss fights were the weakest part of it by a pretty wide margin. They were very difficult but not actually that interesting mechanically.
Git gud, scrub >:3
I’m actually tempted to give the Dark Souls games a try. I thought for the longest time they wouldn’t be for me because I’m a casual scrub who likes easy games, but after doing surprisingly well in Elden Ring (Ultimately filtered by the Godskin duo), and beating Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin’s base game on hard and first two DLCs without Extra Mode, I might actually be decent at games.
Or maybe not, and I should stick to turn-based strategy games.
You might find the OG Dark Souls somewhat ponderous in comparison but if you liked the atmosphere of Elden Ring I’d give it a go. Honestly, the fact that you can grind for levels lets you at least somewhat compensate for the difficulty which a lot of people seem to forget when talking about the series.
I had some bad time with OG Dark Souls after Elden Ring. A few too important QoL tidbits that are in Elden ring , are missing from DS1. Entirely expected with the 10 odd years between both games, but I did not have the patience required.
As someone who fully accepts that Dark Souls is full of jank and annoyance, but has also played all 3 and all of the DLCs, I decided ultimately that it is not extremely difficult, as much as it is arduous. Were it very difficult, fewer people would have played much of it, including me. In fact I put down Celeste almost immediately due to its difficulty. And can barely do racing games, or difficult platformers. Path of Pain in Hollow Knight was beyond me and 12+ hours of trying. And it is its arduous but achievable nature that can be quite galling. My recommendation is to go in fully armed with all the walkthrough information and story lore background that you can muster, and it will be more fun. Watching the Vaatividya videos on Dark Souls 2 is what made me want to play that game, even after finishing the first game and thinking right that was cool but I’ve had quite enough of that sort of annoyingly testing nonsense thank you very much.
One of my old college roommates had Dark Souls 3, so I gave it a try. Beat the first boss on the second try, which was honestly pretty disappointing given all I’d heard about the bosses in the series, then kept dying to trash mobs in the section immediately after that. Don’t think I even made it to the second bonfire in that chunk of the map before I got bored and quit playing
Bummer. Always a bad thing to end a relationship, but sometimes necessary.
Hope you get well soon.
Looking forwards to whatever Peter is doing.
* me giving a digital hug to all involved *
I would like to see your take on Dr Who too. In general I like your thought process regardless of what you are writing about (which was true for your dad too). I read just about everything, even though I don’t game or program :-)
Hard times happen. They stink.
Hang in there!