T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m playing more Lethal Company. My thoughts on it haven’t really changed; I like it, and the gameplay loop hasn’t gotten old yet. I’m still finding new things even almost forty hours in.
What are you guys playing?
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.
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.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth is the game I solo right now, after finishing the comfort food Prince of Persia (2008). PoP still looks stunning, the humor is good and the movement as smooth as ever. Infinite Wealth is a successor by the definition of the word. Bigger, better, faster – I’ll see how the “better” will hold up. Yakuza 5 tried the same thing and screwed up IMO.
The co-op game of the day is Satisfactory. Yesterday the downside of “co-op” came clear once again. When my friend wanted to build some power generators, while I should transport goods from his steal production building to my building with all the iron and copper production. After I build that he was bitching about how I affected his building in a way he did not envision and I should remove everything I build for transport. Great stuff.
Analog I tried to make sense of Black Rose Wars: Rebirth. The rulebook alone didn’t do good enough. Three errors were obvious to spot and ignore, but if turn structure isn’t explained well enough the whole game crumbles. Youtube helped with that. Now: Restart.
Me and my co-op friend had a similar problem with Factorio. I think it was largely the case we went in blind and it is very hard to coordinate construction when you’re just figuring out what these things even do. And myself once I’ve figured this kind of game out I kinda loose the drive to play so we moved on to other things.
I played Pool of Radiance a bit more. The interesting thing is that early on you have a mission to clear out an area that is infested with monsters, but every time I went in there I hit lots and lots of repeated battles, which was a bit boring and made it so that I was afraid to explore in case I hit a point where I was too weak to get back to a safe spot since I’d be hitting fights. But after grinding through those battles for a while, they suddenly stopped. I THINK that was intentional on their part, but once that was done I was able to explore and get some encounters, like a mission to retrieve a potion for someone. It’s primitive compared to what modern games do, but the environmental storytelling is fun and since the whole game is more compact it has more of an impact than what I had in Dragon Age Inquisition. But I do think the story will be far better in the latter game.
I also managed to get in my run of The Old Republic. I still really like the character, who can be nasty and vindictive but in general is trying to do the right thing, which allows for a better roleplaying experience than I’ve had in the past with characters that were more … dedicated to their alignment.
I also started playing Dark Age of Camelot again. Last year, I took a Paladin on the Albion side almost to the end of all the regions, but dropped the game for a while due to being busy and not motivated to play the game. This time, I changed realms and am playing a Thane on the Midgard side. I was debating between playing a Thane or Valkyrie, but I really wanted to use a hammer as a weapon and liked the lightning powers. The Thane is more of a hybrid character than the Paladin, who had magic but it was mostly buffs or defense, while the Thane gets more magic attacks and less buffs, at least early on. I just cleared the tutorial and I found myself having a lot of fun with the game. There’s not really much story worth mentioning, but the combat is a bit more tactical and you have to be a bit more careful, and there are generally lots of things to do. I know that I’ll have to start running around further and further to get quests, but also know there’s enough of them to keep me overleveled, so I should be able to handle it.
Welp, limited time this week again, so I had to pause my last playthrough of NieR: Automata for more casual experiences. So of course it meant more Super Mario Bros. Wonder. I really like the game, but I’m still not sitting down to play it for hours. I want to stretch it as much as I can, since it’s so easy to just pick up and play a couple of stages.
I also did a nearly complete playthrough of recent release Turnip Boy Robs a Bank. I really enjoyed the first game, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, which is a short Zelda-like adventure with lots of humor. The humor returns for the sequel, but that’s pretty much the only similarity, since this is now a bit of a roguelike. It’s an interesting approach, for sure, to have a direct sequel be on a different genre, and it certainly took me by surprise, but I’m still enjoying the game. Granted, being a roguelike there are a few things that depend on chance, so that’s a bit of artificial lengthening of the game which can get a bit grating, but since each run won’t take more than 6 minutes (by design), it’s not that big of a deal.
Still trying to get all the achievements before going into the final run, and one of them is to win a hard optional boss fight. The few problems with this are:
– It depends on a particular door showing up in the run (again, depends on chance), so you might have to do a few runs before even finding it.
– You need a good weapon because the boss is a bullet sponge and teleports like crazy while also filling the stage with goons.
– Good weapons are mostly hard to find, so you have to luck out into one that’s both powerful and fast.
– There’s a good weapon always in the same place, but you have to run quite far to get it and since the weapon’s ammo is money you need to find quite a bit before being able to properly use it. That’ll easily eat half your run’s time.
– Weapons disappear if you lose, so if you enter the boss battle and get killed (very likely) you’ll have to do the whole weapon and ammo hunting all over again.
I understand this is the nature of roguelikes, so I can’t complain much, but it’s still quite a lot of time wasted that wouldn’t be the case if you could just enter the battle at any time with any weapon of your choice.
Steamworld has also done a whole series of games (sequels?) in completely different genres. I’ve quite enjoyed a few of them.
Oh, yeah, they have a few different games, but I wouldn’t call them “sequels”. They’re just games set in the same universe. Though they do have at least one direct sequel, and it’s on the same genre as the first game.
After months and months I finally got back to Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. I didn’t get very far, unfortunately: I’ve had a stressful week and the game frustrated me into a rage-quit after about an hour. Why oh why oh why, in my empowerment fantasy video game, must every damn mook take an entire magazine of ammo to defeat? It’s not like it’s hard to find ammo in a Borderlands game, it’s just irritating as hell to die for the third time to the same mini boss because he, unlike his mooks, takes 8 magazines of ammo to defeat.
Please, game, let me actually feel like John Wick, okay? It will be our little secret. I long for the days of Marathon and DN3D when we could go into the game files, do a little adjusting, and suddenly our peashooters are actual weapons that an enemy might be scared of.