T w e n t y S i d e d
I played more Tears of the Kingdom, regrettably. The gameplay and side quests keep drawing me back in, but if I have to listen to one more NPC insist that ‘Zelda’ was just here I’m going to eat a shoe. At the point I am at, Link knows very well that who they saw wasn’t Zelda, but yet says nothing. Even in cases where things ‘she’ said is actively slowing him down.
Not to mention, that to implement these rules, the game has a hundred and one places that if you step wrong, an NPC yells at you and magically teleports you away. This happened occasionally in Breath of the Wild, but in Tears of the Kingdom it’s become relentless. There are some places it makes sense, but some of these zones are so large you can be doing something completely unrelated and the game teleports you away to slap you on the wrist. The teleporting itself is annoying, tedious, and bad enough, but to then be told off (as the princess’s personal protector, who outranks every single one of these idiots) is enough to make one want to strap a rocket to them. Not that the game would allow for that. Oppressive nitwits.
What are you guys playing?
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Seven Springs
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Been playing Warhammer 40000: Rogue Trader. It seems pretty cool so far. I had some decision paralysis at the start creating a character since it gives you a bajillion choices for a system I’m totally unfamiliar with, but in the end I’m happy with what I settled on. The game also has a respec option (for companions as well as the main character), though it annoys me that there’s a cost on it.
The warhammer 40k universe is absurd, but that fits pretty well with an RPG.
I really want to check that one out, but only after I am done with BG3…
I love it a ton but apparently it falls apart in act 3 and 4. Mind you that’s like 50 hours in and the patches keep coming but still.
Tales of Arise‘s third boss has burned most of my good will. There was an optional fight with five spellcasters that I barely muddled through; then I reach the boss, and it summons those same five spellcasters multiple times during the fight. So now I’ve dropped the difficulty but also lost the motivation to continue playing.
Tales of Zestiria has not yet left the first town, but keeps finding new ways to be a mess. One of the characters has magically bonded with the hero and can jump inside him now, and they’ve established she can talk to people while she’s in there, but she just keeps jumping in and out of him at random. She’ll jump out to walk up to a door, then jump inside him while he opens the door, then jump back out on the other side of the door, then back in after a three-sentence conversation, then back out at the end of the hall. There’s an animation every time and it’s actively annoying me.
Restarted Tales of Berseria, which is still much more fun than the games on either side of it. Although the costumes are decidedly closer to stripper costumes than the other games. Bug or feature, you decide.
Slay the Spire continues. And Chess.
I don’t know how much they’ve changed on the way to Arise or if it’ll help, but the one thing I know to double-check for weirdly difficult bosses in Tales games is elemental affinities. On two different occasions (far enough apart for me to forget), in Symphonia and then Dawn of the New World, I spent forever just wailing on a boss as hard as I could making no headway for an embarrassing amount of time without realizing the “damage” numbers were tinted slightly differently and I’d been healing them as fast as I was harming them. Once vs a lightning boss when wielding lightning swords, and then in the sequel spamming my most powerful (ice) spell vs a boss who happened to heal from ice for no discernible reason.
Don’t think it would help with this guy; the problem is the five oozes have magic attacks that hit wherever you are, and they stagger their casting so one is pretty much always going off. Then there’s the actual boss doing bodyslams. It’s a trial to hit them at all.
Doesn’t help the guy has no plot relevance. Just a wall of liquid meat.
(Arise is very much The Dark Souls One.)
Still working my way through Dragon Age Inquisition. I’m at close to 70 hours in and have a bit to go yet, although I’ve already hit level 20. For the most part, my impressions of the game hold: the intermediate stories and the like work, but there’s too much of the open world in-between so it mutes the impact of them. I’ve had some really great moments and it’s enjoyable at times, and the dungeons, like Dragon Age Origins, often seem to be a bit too long although they are shorter than DAO’s so it’s a bit better. But, really, there’s just too much to the game. When I can spend two hours at the start of a session just talking to my companions and doing some of their quests and then have to spend the rest of my four hours just doing PART of an area it’s clear the game is a bit overstuffed.
So I needed something to play while listening to podcasts so I reinstalled Borderlands 3. I was as always annoyed that even muted the inane dialogs were blocking the gameplay but turns out that there is now a mod that allows you to skip dialogs entirely! It is so great! I have a perverse pleasure in shutting these idiots up.
Oh yeah, gunplaywise I had the most fun with Borderlands 3 out of the series but the twins have nothing on Handsome Jack
Not much this week, for several reasons. The only thing I got to play some of was Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and it’s because it’s on the Switch. Man, I’d love to have a Steam Deck, but that’s way to prohibitive where I live.
In any case, I’m having a lot of fun with the game. The New Super Mario Bros. series had kinda soured the 2D Mario games for me because they all felt the same and had this extraordinarily bland art style, so I’m thankful Nintendo decided to take the series in a new direction.
Been playing more Baldur’s Gate 3. :) I’m really, REALLY slow, so I only just got to what is perhaps the “big battle” of Act 1, involving a Druid Grove and a scary mob of assorted goblinoids, drow and spiders. I fought the battle the “legit” way first, trying my best not to let any of the NPC defenders die (because I’m a lifelong Lawful Good hero like that), but unfortunately the drow boss teleported right next to an NPC (who was already low on health due to spiders before I could get there to rescue her) and ganked her in one hit.
One reload later, I decided to try the infamous “Barrelmancy” approach, now that I knew where all the enemy mobs were going to be spawning in. I dropped approximately 10 mixed barrels of oil and explosive smokepowder in a pattern where I could ignite them all with one spell, then triggered the cutscene. I then lobbed one (1) Fireball right into the middle and KABOOOOOM. Battle over. XD
I was gifted Wildfrost for Christmas, which I’m not sure was a good idea, considering that I previously had a crippling Slay the Spire addiction. ;-)
I’ve also been play Magic the Gathering: Arena and the Lonestar demo. (Yes, I really enjoy rougelike deckbuilders…)
This week I’ve been continuing to slowly plug away at Baldur’s Gate 3. Beyond that, I’ve snagged a few fun looking games on sale.
Old World is a hybrid of Civilization and Crusader Kings, where you guide a country and its ruling dynasties through the Iron age. So far I’m digging a lot of its ideas and am excited to roleplay in it.
Wartales is a sandbox game about controlling a band of mercenaries. It’s like Mount & Blade, only instead of fighting in real time you get a turn based battle, which I like a lot more.
Kenshi is a sandbox rpg I’ve been looking forward to getting for years, which just lets you do a ton of stuff (and try not to die horribly in the process).
Finally, I got two games for playing with my girlfriend. King of Dragon Pass is a narrative city builder about playing a clan (and has been discussed on this very blog.) Finally, Liz’s Girlfriend got me Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business, a combination business game and dating sim.
I also found out Rimworld, one of my favorite games of all time, is on console??? And has been??? For like a year??? Wish I’d found that out when I’d broken my arm, maybe then I wouldn’t have sunk so many hours into Ubisoft games.
I am done with Saints Row (2022) now. Still have a few challenges I could do, which would still be fun to do. Tried a bit of online Co-Op with a friend and there we had some weird frame rate dips and weird chromatic anomalies, which are not present in single player.
Played Underground Blossom. The latest game in the Rusty Lake series. I did not really vibe with it. They repeat ideas and characters by now and there is less lore to puzzle out. Also there is too much emphasis on the ARG, which has been solved by now and you have to refer to previous games for some things. Which is a cool idea but is hampered by the fact that you probably do not remember the stuff, if there are a few months between games and also it does not help that the ARG is solved. It loses lots of appeal. Also it gets really obtuse in the second half.
Also played Scene Investigators. That is a game I want to like but it is hindered by it being obtuse on purpose and also by the fact that the controls are really fiddly. In a few cases the leaps of logic while figuring out the crime scenes is just a bit to far for my liking. Furthermore some objects are really hard to see or hidden. It is made by the developers, who made the Painscreek Killings, which was basically a walking simulator with an escape sequence at the end. That one was fun. Most of the time the pieces just clicked in place. The play area was just too big for what it was. They overcompensated in Scene Investigators. The crime scenes are just to small and are not fun to explore. I would give it a low average score. It would probably be better if there were tools to work with and a bit more gameplay. Maybe also some notetaking help or something similar.
I got the Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War for my Nephew for christmas, and decided to replay those games myself.