T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve gotten sick again and played Tears of the Kingdom. I’m liking the building so far and the weapon fussing is nice, but the old shrines and robots disappearing is kind of weird. There is probably some dialogue about it somewhere but I haven’t found it. I have a bad habit of not talking to NPCs.
I like the new shrines. With the new abilities the shrines are more open ended and creative rather than linear.
I appreciate that there are dungeons…but the one I did was pretty short (At about the length 2-3 shrines). The ability reward you get from dungeons also seems worse and harder to use than the last game, at least the one I got. Maybe the others are better. I plan on playing more but at this moment I’m to busy not wanting to be sick to get anything done.
Next Wednesday will be after Christmas, so Merry Christmas/Holidays to you.
What are you guys playing?
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
Patreon!
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Well: Happy Holidays all, whatever you are celebrating.
I finished Like A Dragon: The Man Who Erased His Name this Monday just short of 50 hours of playtime. Honestly, it was the best ending a Yakuza game has ever had. And again: The story held itself together without falling into none-sense. Even the twists got descent forshadowing and were logical. Next will be FFVII: Crisis Core Remastered.
In coop we’re still playing Raft Mechanic. Just found the trader and upgraded from sails to engines. No analog play this week.
Been playing God of War: Ragnarok: Valhalla: We Made It Into a Roguelite. It’s pretty impressive how well they did it, honestly, setting up the mechanics and integrating it into the story and all. Soon I’m going to turn down the difficulty, though, because while the game is fun I’d like to finish it and my God Of War hard mode strategy of throwing myself at things until eventually I win doesn’t work as well when death resets the run.
Also, I wish the game included any numbers for anything at all (besides hp and rage). What does “drastically increase damage” really mean, how much does strength actually do, does vitality have any effect at all other than increasing max hp, who knows.
Seeing more reflection and connection with the first 3 god of war games is also really nice.
Tales of Zestiria is still early, but so far maintains a solid pace of janky brokenness; the latest being a woman giving a 5-minute speech in the middle of a burning building, and I could swear every time they cut back to another character there’s more fire behind them. I regret not playing further into this the first time I tried it years ago.
Slay the Spire still doing its thing.
A WordPress site has trivially kicked my ass; someone mentioned the fable of the Fox and the Grapes this week, and perfect timing because that’s what’s happening here. “No, I WANT to post on the malformed bones of half a website, it matches my personality!”
Following from last week: No, I have not played Berseria. Like I said it’s languishing in my backlog, partially because I have very mixed feelings about the Tales games that I have played. One minute it feels like the games are self-aware and making fun of the JRPG conventions (and I have picked up my FFIV playthrough so I have at least some of those fresh in my mind), the next they’re doing something either stupid or just boring.
Thanks for the link, I’ll have a peek soon as there’s a calmer nightshift.
I’m continuing to play through Baldur’s Gate 3 on my Quest To Get Where I Was Before My Save File Broke. Its going fairly well, and I want to shout out the devs for making it perform a lot better.
Besides that, I did a game in Victoria 3 where I turned Mexico into a proto-fascist dictatorship and set them up to conquer North America (for a sweet sweet achievement.)
My girlfriend also got me back into Rimworld, first with a colony of an extended family up in the Tundra, and then with Atrocity Inc., a group of cannibalistic slaver drug lords determined to make tons of money on their CEO Grindset.
Finally, I’ve also been playing Watch Dogs 1, a game discussed on this very blog. I’ve gotten a lot of joy out of subjecting my girlfriend to my Aiden Pearce impression, and wishing this game was different than it is (as I so often do with Ubisoft.)
Argh! The very mention of the first Watchdogs just makes me angry. Aiden is such an utterly horrible human being and no, he does not learn anything, remains awful to the very end and the game is completely and utterly blind to its own hypocrisy. To make things worse the actual gameplay is pretty good with cool abilities, fun city and being one of the few games where I genuinely enjoyed driving around the gameworld.
He’s so terrible, I adore him. But yeah, something about the camera angle and the way Aiden puts his hands in his pockets makes me love walking around the city.
I don’t think there is; every time I’ve seen someone complaining about this in a comments section, the replies are all headcanons or based off an interview the devs gave, not any in-game dialogue. The towers in the game have some guardian arms in them, so that explains where some of the robots went, but not all of them
The wind dungeon ability is useful, and easy to use when gliding, the fire ability is mostly useful when you’re controlling a vehicle because it’s the one ranged attack you have full control over in that state, the lightning ability would be really useful for ranged combat if you could ever activate it, and the water ability is only really useful if you decide you want to use Zora weapons and electric element attacks almost exclusively
Still playing Stellaris, and going back to Hollow Knight too; haven’t gotten all the endings in HK yet, but I might try a Steel Soul run, see how far I can get before I die
Being so overly busy this month I still haven’t had much time to play, but I did more than last week.
Still going through Lies of P. There’s a lot of discussion about the difficulty of soulslike games, but I find it interesting how every single time I’ve died in this game I can trace it back to me making a dumbass decision and not the game being in any way unfair. I feel like it’s been a long time since I lost more than a few times in a game without calling bullshit.
Despite my growing backlog and all the games I have currently started that I haven’t really touched in over a week I had the bad idea of starting a couple more. One of them is the original Rage, which Shamus covered a bit of at some point (though he went more in-depth about the sequel). His complaints were, as usual, about the story, and he’s right. The game just gives you a gun and a vehicle and sends you to shoot guys with barely a justification. It’s all fine, I’m only here because I wanted to do some FPS-ing, so I can just ignore the story, even if I would appreciate the game more if it was interesting. But the issue I have is that it’s a PS3/360 era game and I have become way too accustomed to current day autosaving. I accidentally blew up my vehicle and rather than walk back to get a new one I decided to reload my latest save, which turned out to be like an hour old, losing about half a dozen sidequests worth of progression. You’d think the game would save after each sidequest was complete, but clearly it doesn’t. I predict this isn’t going to be the last time this happens to me.
The other new one I’m playing is Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Just fun all around, no complaints here. OK, I do have one slight complaint and it’s Nintendo’s insistence in having so many palette-swap playable characters. Is this here just to pad out the roster? Why do you need so many Toads and Yoshis? Just keep one and leave it at that or add some other playable characters from other games like Rosalina, Mallow or Goombario. Obviously this doesn’t negatively affect the gameplay in any way, but I feel it’s a wasted opportunity.
Managed to get in my weekly session of The Old Republic finishing off the first arc of the Jedi Consular. I’m still really enjoying the character I’m running as here who can be mean and snarky and yet ultimately kinda wants to do the right thing, even if it’s not always for the right reasons. That lets me take some of the meaner and more sarcastic options that my light side characters wouldn’t take — although many of them HAVE leaned sarcastic — and that my dark side characters wouldn’t get to because they’d have killed the person by that point.
Also still playing Dragon Age Inquisition, and I’ve just hit the 50 hour mark. The open world seems to bury the story and character parts a bit, especially at the Grand Ball, where there are a number of things you can do but if you’re away from the party for too long you lose the support of the court which can get you sent home. This was, I’ve read, supposed to push a sense of urgency but it didn’t really work, and more importantly that sort of approach is the WRONG thing to do. The ideal for RPGs with a lot of optional things is to make it so that the limit is the player’s patience, so if they want to take the time to gather up every little thing and do every little sidequest that’s fine, and if they don’t, that’s fine, too, and they just might miss out on some interesting items or stories. If they wanted to have these things limited, it would have been better, in my opinion, to have some of the things that would get you into places or get items cost the support of the court, and so you might have to choose what to pursue, but with the already in the game ways to increase it if someone was obsessive they could get everything in one go. Overall with DAI I like the story and character parts but the open world tends to bore me. I’m looking forward to finishing it, hopefully by New Year’s Day.
The only other gaming related thing I did was board game related, where I figured out how to use Bluestacks to emulate an Android OS to be able to run the app that generates randomized set ups for the set of “Legendary” card games and expansions. After jumping through some hoops and being misled into thinking that maybe I could just do it with Windows 11’s native support, Bluestacks was actually pretty easy to set up. Now all I have to do is find time to play the card game.
I started playing this recent little-known game called Hollow Knight.
It’s pretty cool, but I am hopelessly lost. I find myself revisiting a lot of areas over and over again, looking for hidden door I missed or that couldn’t be open last time I came. I’m starting to think I should actually take notes (or at least use the map markers).
Oh yeah, getting hopelessly lost is a big part of the early game experience. Makes it very satisfying when you learn your way around
The map markers are really handy, yes. I usually put them anywhere it looks like you need an ability to go further.
I do like how they force you to explore each area without the map for a bit before you find Cornifer. That way you get to learn the area by eye before the map gives you everything.
Finished Metro: Last Light Redux. It was solid. Didn’t do anything real special, didn’t light up my radar. But it didn’t overstay its welcome. It still reminds me of Half-Life a lot in the way they mix up gameplay styles and pace the action and dialogue intermittently.
Working on Crosscode: A New Home DLC. Crosscode has been sitting on my computer for 16 months, I assumed I would play the DLC shortly after the game and kept putting it off. I’m reminded of Shamus’ inability to play Outer Worlds due to a memory link with events in his life. Crosscode was the game I played when on disability from cancer surgery, and I guess I just didn’t want to be back in that world so soon until now. Anyways, Crosscode is a pretty high skill ceiling game and taking a year-plus break from it before starting back into lategame content is a tall order. The puzzles in this DLC are amazing, and the combat is probably pretty good if you have your endgame skills to counter it, which I don’t.
I revisited Into the Breach to check out the new content. It’s very fun – the new enemies can make planning really complicated and the randomized skills are cool too. The new mission types are mostly on par with the original in difficulty, although the Armored Train mission has been a walkover every time I’ve tried it.
So far I’ve tried the Cataclysm team (very fun, lots of pushing power but still a decent amount of kill power, feels like a cooler version of Steel Judokas) and the Bombermechs (seems to be very good at delaying and blocking tunnels, but very little kill power, their gimmick feels like too much work for what you get.)
I also unlocked the secret FTL pilot. His special ability is he replaces “Repair” with a melee attack, and it’s shockingly strong. He basically gives any mech of your choice a free Titan Fist, and it’s pretty hilarious when your long-ranged artillery mech suddenly gains the ability to walk up and punch at close range when it needs to.