T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve only played Lethal Company and Roblox. I intended to play a new game this week but as of writing this I have done nothing new.
What are you guys playing?
From The Archives:
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
Secret of Good Secrets
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
For an unforeseeable future I’ll be playing Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. I’m 20+ hours in and still have not unlocked Job switching, and my Sujimon army is still on level 10. Sooo much to do. And I started a playthrough of 7 billion humans and I just remembered why I never finished Human Resource Project. Those levels get hard.
I loved both 7 bill and HRP… but never finished either of them. I’m saving them for when I’ve retired.
I have this but with Zachtronics games, the puzzle mechanics are really cool and I’m somewhat interested in the setting but they’re too smart for me, I eventually drop them and when I come back I remember nothing of how they work. I still haven’t checked the full SpaceChem story because I’m fooling myself into thinking I’m going to finish the game at some point.
I finally got to Pirate Legend in Sea of Thieves, so I promptly ditched the game and went back to my long-neglected Baldur’s Gate 3 game.
I tried several demos from Steam Next. The ones I liked included Prim, which seems like it’ll be a fun point and click adventure game (I know the genre died for valid reasons, but it has its good points), Breachway, which played like a hybrid of FTL and Slay the Spire and I’m excited for that, and Geneforge 2 – Infestation, which was exactly what I expected it to be since I both backed it on Kickstarter and played the game it’s a remake of, and I already knew I was going to like it.
Chipping away at the Third Balduring of the Gates, mostly because I don’t dare to start that up in the evening, so it’s mostly a weekend-pleasure.
Also still chipping away at Dave the Diver, which I still enjoy very much but which also has recently thrown a Boss Fight my way I’ve been butting my head against, but by now I am at the point where I say “screw this, more upgrades first”.
Then I have slayed a bunch of royals in Slay the Princess, where I now have the problem that gog achievements are (or were at that time) broken, so I have little to go by to figure out which paths are yet-untaken…
And finally, I’ve dabbled in Sailwind and Sail Forth, both sailling games, one vastly easier to handle than the other xD
I skipped Pool of Radiance because I had too many other things to do. I might not play it next week either, but should get a good run at it the week after when I’m off for a couple of weeks.
I did manage to get in another session of The Old Republic. I’m still enjoying this character, who again as she insists in the diary entries on my blog “is not a nice person!“. That lets me act nasty at times when it seems interesting or funny while still having reasons for her to go through the main and planet plots and help people out on occasion, which makes both the playing and the writing more fun than it’s been in the past.
I also got in another session of Dark Age of Camelot. I’m enjoying it as much as I enjoyed it when I picked it up way back in 2022. There’s not really much story — although there are some attempts at it — but it does manage to keep your quest log full and so you always have something to do.
Playing Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts as Japan. So far after 30 years managed to conquer East Asia, Oceania, most of African coast and France (plus get Finland as reparations from USSR), and am having a blast with light cruisers.
All because AI remains not so good with designing ships (to the point where it regularly superpositions turrets A and Z thus blocking firing arc of turrets B and X) and research, so starting from 1890 and concentrating on radar, explosives and guns gives solid advantage within a decade or so.
Just more Tales of Berseria. It’s shorter when you skip the cutscenes, but really not by much.
Started Eternal Darkness on Gamecube for the first time. I’m currently stuck at a combat heavy section, but looking it up helped me realize it’s one of those roadblocks in games which everyone knows about. Just gonna keep beating my head against the wall until it’s done. It’s a really cool game with some neat ideas, but the main gimmick with the sanity meter doesn’t factor in much if you’re playing the game optimally and healing yourself often.
Eternal Darkness was fantastic. I loved so much about the conceit of the game. It might be reasonable to run around with 0 sanity if you want to see the fun effects – it does turn SAN damage into health damage, but depending on the god you’re against that might not be a big deal. The magic system was interesting, the characters were genuinely varied in their abilities (like how long they can run), and the way the various locations change over time was very well done.
I’ve gotten a bit further in my playthrough of Phoenix Point, enough to get a taste of most of the DLC content. (On my first playthrough, I left them all turned off so I could see what the game was like before five DLCs worth of stuff unbalanced it.)
1. Blood and Steel seems very fun. The Pure are an interesting challenge on the field because they all have heavy armor and shields from their bionics. The game is early enough that I don’t have access to AP weapons, so I’m having to make do with liberal use of grenades. Also, the first story mission is a raid on New Jericho, and I always welcome more chances for inter-faction combat.
2. Legacy of the Ancients, I’ve only played the first mission and haven’t yet encountered any of the new enemies or new weapons. However, it feels like it fits into the main story pretty well by introducing the antediluvian civilization early.
3. Festering Skies feels like it escalates too quickly – in the main story, I’m still barely getting started, I’m only fighting basic enemies, but when this DLC kicks off there’s suddenly a giant kaiju rampaging around destroying havens. I haven’t had to do any air combat since the first tutorial mission and I’m not sure how often or how dangerous it will be in practice. (I feel like every XCOM-like since the first has been trying to come up with new spins on the air combat game, and I don’t really understand the fascination. Air combat is there to give you a bit of control over which ground combat encounters you get, it’s not a core game mechanic.)
4. Corrupted Horizons hasn’t made any impact at all, yet. Apparently it doesn’t activate until I research Pandoran colonies.
5. Chaos Engines feels completely vestigial – I rarely have the time to stop by the shop when my crews are ranging all over the globe, I don’t want to buy a gun that has a chance of exploding, and the vehicle gun upgrades are really expensive. Maybe it’ll get better later when I have more money. (Also, I really like the Scarab’s default gun, which doesn’t require line of sight and can delete small enemies from across the map.)
Also, each DLC puts yet more things into my overstuffed research queue and I have no idea what to prioritize. I spent a bunch of time on airplane upgrades that don’t feel very useful and I’m way behind on my regular autopsies and gear upgrades.
Well, Steam Next Fest event is up, so I’m mostly trying a lot of demos. That being said…
I finished Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, with all achievements complete. Good times all around. I expected the final level to take me an insane amount of tries, but I got lucky, so it was only a few.
Against all my good judgement, I started playing Palworld. You know, the “Pokémon with guns” game. And by God this thing is addictive. It’s clearly still a work in progress, it’s got a few glitches here and there, it’s very light in story and it still feels like a more complete package with less bugs than the latest Pokémon release. I know lessons will be learned from all this, but I fear they’ll be the wrong ones.
Everything I’ve heard about Palword says it’s more of an Ark than a Pokemon. Obviously aesthetically the pals are very Pokemon-derived, but it’s not like the game has particularly original aesthetics in other places (see: the fonts, UI elements, and sound effects that feel straight out of modern Zelda).
In the Year of Our Lord 2024, I am currently having my first brush with Final Fantasy IX. I am so pleasantly surprised by it considering that playing VIII as my second FF game almost put me off the series entirely about a decade ago. 9 reels in the teenage angst and the unintuitive junctioning system from 8 and just makes a solid, understandable, nostalgic complete package that feels like the basics of the 3/4/5 era were just repackaged with better technology and writing. Great cutscenes, great progression system that ties abilities to gear, great characters. The main plot does a great job of sweeping in party members’ character development into its events rather than cordoning off their personal growth to a sidequest bubble like modern party RPGs tend toward. If I had one complaint it would be that it tends to frequently launch into 45-minute blocks of story with little to no player control and no save points, which can be mildly boring but more importantly makes it a pain in the ass to play it at all if I know I have something scheduled tonight that I have to leave at a specific time. But overall, I like it so much.
Final Fantasy Tier List I’ve played so far:
VI
IV, IX
My guilty pleasure Lightning Returns
V, VII, XIII
III, IV The After Years
VIII
My mortal enemy Final Fantasy XIII-2
I’m still enjoying Cobalt Core , it has a lot of charm and it’s a very interesting deckbuilder. But I want to see a LP of Alan Wake 2, so far I’m not convinced, I liked the original and Control.