T w e n t y S i d e d
Nothing to report. I guess I played some Tears of The Kingdom, nothing worth mentioning. We got a new coffee table?
What are you guys up to?
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
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 Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
Played through Ori and the Blind Forest and now working on Ori and the Will of the Wisps. They’re fun games and very very pretty. It’s interesting to see what they changed in the sequel – they totally ditched the awkward save system in favor of autosaves, and the starter weapon is more conventional than the 360 degree long ranged auto aiming thing you got in the first Ori. Also the part where it’s a “starter weapon” is a change because you didn’t get any others in the first Ori.
I also really do appreciate a game having reasonable playtime rather than taking forever. It can be sad when something ends before you want it to but it’s worse when it ends after you want it to.
Oh yeah, when I played Will of the Wisps I was rather surprised they doubled down on combat because that was the clunky part of Blind Forest. Still both games were beautiful visually and the most surprising thing for me was how they managed to stack so many abilities without making the conrols confusing and instead just flow into each other (your mileage may vary). The shift towards combat and the somewhat bleaker tone have raised many comparisons to Hollow Knight which is one my favourite games ever so I’m definitely not complaining.
In Co-op we started another Satisfactory playthrough. With Update 8 and UE5. At least a lot of mods are working again.
Yesterday I restarted a bit of comfort food: Prince of Persia 2008. Easy to play, nice to look at, even 16 years later.
Analog a huge box arrived at my door with the Kickstarter reward of Black Rose Wars: Rebirth. I completed the set up, but not read a single line of the rulebook describing actual gameplay yet.
I’ve finished act 3 of Rogue Trader, I’m still loving it. It’s an amazing game in early access. Apparently it falls apart in 4 and 5 though.
I’m playing The Lamplighters League. They got a lot of flak for dropping development of the game so soon after releasing it, but I havent hit any bugs yet. And it’s an old-school XCOM turn-based strat game with levelling up heroes, which ticks my boxes. And I like the setting and art style. So it’s working for me.
Is Lamplighters League in some kind of sorry state? Because a lot of people nowadays expect titles to stay in effectively perpetual development when they’re simply done which annoys me a lot because it’s part of the shift towards “live service” model and I personally like a game I can play from start to finish and consider it completed.
I haven’t delved to see if things were promised and left undelivered, but I’ve put 25+ hours into it and it seems in every way polished and bug-free to me…
I had to skip my session of The Old Republic because I had to shovel snow, but that’s okay because I’m ahead on TOR Diary entries on the blog anyway — I have scheduled posts through the end of February — so there’s no rush, and it’s supposed to be really cold this weekend so since I would have no intention of going outside I should be able to stay in and play it, which is good because I was really enjoying the playthrough and would like to get back to it.
I did manage to start playing Pool of Radiance, but I was having a lot of trouble with the early combats. The reason was that I followed a guide for creating characters which made most of them multiclass, and my front line fighters ended up with HPs of 4. I had modified the attributes to the max, but hadn’t realized that HP might need to be modified, so my front line fighters kept getting knocked out in the relatively easy battles, which at the time meant that I had to go back to the inn every time and pay a platinum to get them up to snuff again, which then happened almost any battle, which was frustrating and potentially would leave me strapped for cash. I was using the Gold Box Companion, though, which lets me change all sorts of things, so I gave all my characters HP of 12 total, which made things easier. I also learned that I could have my two clerics cast cure spells and then rest to restore that magic, which also helps, and I finally tried out the Sleep spell which is really nice. I’m still not really feeling the game, though, but I’m not into any part of the story yet, but at least I might be able to finish it. Someone might say that using the Companion the way I did is cheating, but for me if the choice is “Cheat or don’t finish the game” I’m opting for cheating every time.
Dabbled in Strangers of Paradise, made no progress. I should really stop dropping the game right before bossfights, they are not the ideal point to relearn controls. Made no progress, boss killed me a dozen times, but it’s still not frustrating; I think it’s because it’s just one enemy with a varied moveset, instead of one boss with half a dozen respawning minions. Or one boss with bullshit speed who runs away when you get close. God I hate every fight in Scarlet Nexus.
Played Borderlands 2 again. I’m reminded how much I don’t like the humor. Also Midge Mong is a boss with unlimited minions spawning all around you all the time. And then I killed him and got killed by a Badass Bullymong on the way out. Pretty sure I’m done with Borderlands 2.
Super Auto Pets continues. The team name generator is a good time, I will forever remember the adventures of the Hard Ghosts.
NIER: Automata is consuming all my free time. I finished my first playthrough and thought of leaving a second one for later, but I’m glad I kept going. People kept telling me that things only really started to change on a third playthrough, but the second one is already quite different.
For those who don’t know, the game has a bunch of different endings, but in order to get them all you need to play through the story several times. Most games with a New Game+ function simply repeat the exact same story but letting you keep all your abilities and inventory. This game does that AND has the second playthrough be done from a different perspective, with a character that plays slightly differently and allows you access to areas you couldn’t get in the first one. And the third one is supposed to be markedly different.
I’m completely engrossed by this game. I’ve left everything else on pause to continue with this one. Yes, even Vampire Survivors, which I’ve been still playing nearly daily all along.
Nier Automata was a really good game, yeah. The second playthrough does have a lot of overlap with the first playthrough but there’s enough new information and sidequests for it to still be interesting and hacking is so powerful that everything goes faster.
Yoko Taro has some things that he’s very good at, and it turns out Platinum is good at a lot of the things that he’s not so good at. Not a combination I had ever expected to see but it really worked out.
After finishing my second playthrough of Hi-Fi Rush (still loved it, I would buy it at double price even just to reward the publisher’s no-hype strategy at launch!), I started God of War (2018).
It’s pretty great! I was afraid it would be another kinda-open-world, unfocused experience, but it’s actually pretty focused (at least for now), with a bit of optional exploring and sidequesting that doesn’t kill the pacing of the main route. The “former evil warrior dad doesn’t want his son to become like him, but he needs to change if he wants to be able to teach his son to become anything else” plot isn’t the most original thing ever, but it’s done well enough that I’m into it.
Also I always like gods being used as a metaphor for powerful people being untouchable assholes and doing whatever they want with the commoners, especially if you give me the chance to punch them in the face for that (I was raised on JRPGs, I need to be punching a few gods in a videogame).
Still in Baldur’s Gate 3. I FINALLY reached Act 2 though! XD I played it for like 4 hours last night and all I did was reach the next town within 30 mins and then spend the next 3 hours talking to various NPCs, re-equipping my party with the latest shiniest gear the merchants have to offer, and then stealthily looting ALL the chests and crates I can find.
Wrapped up Greedfall over the weekend. I imagine when I think of it in a year, it’ll be a positive impression but I won’t remember a ton of details, because the plot doesn’t really do much surprising and the gameplay is completely solid and safe. But as I said last week, I love this style of party-based western RPG and I’m glad to see an entry in the genre come from someone who’s not Bioware, Obsidian and Larian.
3/5 episodes of Life is Strange 2 complete. It has its excellent moments, but a narrative choice and consequence game swings a lot on the core characters being likeable and/or intriguing, and at this point I don’t feel much of either towards the Diaz brothers. You can counter this with a great supporting cast (Life is Strange did this to some extent, Max was a bit of a snooze but the other 6-8 most featured characters were all very colorful) but because LIS2 is a road trip game, the cast is replaced every episode, so it makes it harder to distract from the lead’s flaws. Anyways, game design-wise it seems like a lot of thought went into the branching paths. But I compare the Daniel relationship system to the excellent AJ relationship from The Walking Dead 4 and one major difference is that while you’re “programming” AJ with your choices, he can be alternately frustrating and loving/charming/funny, whereas Daniel seems to be completely stuck in “frustrating and angsty” for the whole 8 hours I’ve spent with him so far; I’m not entirely sure the game is going to get to the part where all your patience with his behavior becomes worth it in terms of emotional payoff.
AFAIK Spiders are working Greedfall 2. We’ll have to wait and see if they feel more confident with the setting now and make something more interesting out of it or if they fall into a rut. I wish them all the best especially seeing how Piranha Bytes may be going out of business and we need all the medium sized devs we can get.
I shall soon be going on a furniture buying spree in charity shops I think. On the gaming front I really need to try out Marmoset on Switch.
I’m technically still playing Cyberpunk 2077 but it’s been very slow going for several reasons. I have dropped the NCPD alerts and now that I’m more focused on story, actual sidequest and gigs there is a lot of fun stuff there. I effectively completed Panam’s questline and the open roads were a joy to drive around while seeing the city loom over the horizon. I also think the storyline could have easily be spun into its own thing, being just one of several threads going through the game it’s just a little undercooked, characters entering and exiting just a bit too fast without a good chance to fully develop and let you make your mind about them. I suppose it’s still a compliment if what I’m saying is I’d like to see more of it.
I have completed Dusk, a boomer shooter I’ve been playing “one level at a time” for the last couple of months or so. It’s dynamic, the movement feels floaty kinda the way some of the older Doom does, the levels are varied even if the colour palette is a bit drab (it’s kind of in line with the tone of the game but still). Having said that I have absolutely confirmed for myself that I cannot play this kind of game without savescumming, I just don’t have the reflexes or the situational awareness.
In co-op we have started Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. We’re too early for me to actually say much. It started out fun and even though I doubt it will rise to the level of writing that Assault on Dragon Keep had I’ll take fun, empowering gameplay where I get to blast enemies into smithereens and some cheap laughs. I was slightly disappointed that each class seems to only have one skilltree. While I’m aware we’ll get to pick a second class later in the game it does mean the character development is much more linear than in the Borderland games.
I played it before the recent big update and DLC, but I agree with you about the Panam storyline in Cyberpunk 2077, pretty fun and I would have liked to have had more there.