T w e n t y S i d e d
Happy Valentines Day. This week I have been playing The Ship: Murder Party. It was a Source Engine, murder-each-other, multiplayer game from 2006. Each player is given someone to kill, while knowing that they themselves are also being hunted. With each murder, players are rewarded with sums of cash. You change clothes to keep your hunter off your trail, and gather weapons which have different values if used. The more a weapon in used in the round, the less valuable it is to kill with. It was also one of the games in the early 2000’s which experimented with needing to eat, drink, sleep, shower, pee, and poop, for some reason. Another strange choice was to have two entirely different releases, one single player and one multiplayer.
All things considered, I’m still enjoying it. A lot of the choices made wouldn’t be made today, but it was also a bit ahead of it’s time. Party games didn’t truly get bigger till the 2010’s, and I wonder how it would have been received now, in the age of Among Us, Fall Guys, Lethal Company, ect.
It’s a shame there doesn’t seem to be dedicated servers anymore.
What are you guys playing?
The Gameplay is the Story
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
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.
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
A Telltale Autopsy
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
I’ve been playing a couple of demos I picked up off Steam that both have me interested:
Shapez 2 is an abstract factory game that’s been updated to 3D and looks amazing; Oddsparks calls itself An Automation Adventure, and I’m told it plays like a cross between Factorio and Pikmin, which would be more useful if I knew what Pikmin was.
I played the original Shapez (shapez.io) and called it “a perfect abstraction of a factory game”, but it didn’t have legs for me. I got to freeplay and was all, “fine, done and dusted.” But it was cheap, so it was good. The 2-3 hour demo of the new one hooked me hard and I already want to replay it. The extra attraction of the beautifully rendered environment and what looks like a perfect gameplay refresh/extension of the great concept of the original has it on my wishlist with a bullet.
Oddsparks is a bit different for me; I’m not used to flinging minions at problems quite so literally. But at a couple hours in I’m probably halfway through the demo and it’s starting to come together, and I’ve been enjoying it to the extent I’ll almost certainly try the full game.
I played through Viewfinder. It’s a very short game, but the concept of applying a 2D photo to the world and being able to walk around in the 3D result is absolutely incredible. Especially when it gives you a camera to take your own pictures. It keeps adding new wrinkles throughout the 3 hour or so playtime.
I’ve also started Cobalt Core. It’s an adorable sci-fi Slay the Spire. While the mechanics are fun and the art is very cute, it desperately needs more enemy variety. As far as I’ve seen there’s just one boss of each area. That’s not enough for a roguelike.
I’ve been considering going back to online dating after my last breakup. But looking at discussions about dating apps made me remember how much I hated the entire experience, how stewed it was in impotent rage and resentment, and how it felt to be constantly uncertain of whether the system was deliberately screwing you over and what the experiences of other people even was.
Recently I’ve been playing Overwatch 2 again, which probably says something about my life hygiene too. I’m trying to work up the motivation to play others games I’ve bought.
Online dating… That’s a frustrating and depressing game. I remember exactly those feelings you highlight.
On my side I was luckier and met my current partner with whom things are going very well (but I do know that my experience is more the exception than the rule…).
Anyway best of luck for that particular battle, loneliness can truly suck… But so is the process of finding someone who you can truly feel well around.
I didn’t play anything this week because I had to do something else Saturday morning so no “The Old Republic”, and when I don’t play “The Old Republic” I don’t swap my work laptop for my gaming laptop and so can’t play “Dark Age of Camelot”, and I’m trying to catch up on blog posts and other things and so didn’t play “Pool of Radiance” this week. But I have plans to play “Pool of Radiance” next week when I go on vacation and it looks like the weather will be such that I’ll getting in some TOR and then I won’t have my work laptop connected on my gaming desk anymore so might be able to get in some “Dark Age of Camelot” at some point.
Busy week, so not much playtime. Still going through Palworld. Game is pretty massive for being Early Access. I got killed while exploring a cave and when I came back the entrance was gone. I thought I had hit a bug but it turned out these caves are temporary quests and I hadn’t noticed before.
Playing through Broken Age as well. I had played it before years ago and my memory of it was that it was only OK, but wanted to see if my opinion of it had changed with time. Turns out it hasn’t. Puzzles are alright, and characters are fine, but the story is preposterous and the humor is very mild. So far I only managed to chuckle once, and it was a very easy to miss visual gag. Ron Gilbert was clearly the funnier guy when he and Schafer were working together.
I finished Final Fantasy IX. I think it immediately jumps past IV, V, VII, and massive guilty pleasure Lightning Returns to become my second favorite Final Fantasy game I’ve played so far, though I don’t think anything is ever touching VI in my esteem. IX feels like a slick, modernized version of IV in many ways, with a fairly easy-to-grasp progression system and a return to traditional fantasy after several steampunk fantasy games of various degrees coming before. The ending of the story wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, but the journey to get there was great. I admired how much of the main plot was devoted to character development of not just the lead, but pretty much every party member outside the obvious silly character Quina. Steiner, Vivi, Dagger, Freya, Eiko and Amarant all have their own growth arcs that contribute to and enhance the plot.
Started XCOM: Chimera Squad. I’m having a decent time but it feels very inconsequential relative to the previous two XCOM games due to the much lower difficulty and lack of permadeath. It doesn’t feel like the encounters are really calibrated to the Breach system that usually lets you kill 2-3 enemies off the rip; the remaining foes have never made me feel in danger. With that said, I do think moving from a single map with hidden enemies to multiple distinct, connected maps with discrete encounters is an improvement; even if they don’t quite nail it here, it allows the balance of the game to be much more controllable and the outcomes much less luck-based. I’m generally enjoying the slightly Saturday Morning Cartoon-y change of tone. I’m neutral on the squad being named, designed characters rather than randomly generated.
IX was basically an homage to all of the previous FF games, incorporating some of the best aspects from each. It was my first Final Fantasy and still my favourite, and kind ofshaped my ideas of what a JRPG should be like. And the music is sublime, especially when you get the airship
Ultima I.
I used to watch my siblings play this game on the ol’ Commodore 64 when I was a tyke, but never really played much myself. About the only thing I could remember was killing jesters for keys to rescue jailed princesses, resulting in the wrath of a thousand castle guards.
Going through it now, it boggles the mind how this game involves both fighting orcs and wizards with medieval weapons, and also going to space and shooting lasers at pseudo Tie Fighters. My dwarf gets around.
My D&D campaign chugs along! Last week was a big boss battle against a cat demon that was possessed by another demon and had its cult taken over.
This week I’ve played a little more Cyberpunk 2077. I’m at a point where I could technically go into the endgame but also the DLC has opened up so that’ll be a bit of a detour. I am very happy that I’ve finally gotten some Johnny time because his initial appearances did not impress me but now there’s actually some fun dynamic between him and V. Mechanically I will say that I find the game just plain too easy on normal. I went with hacking and between the massive amounts of RAM, speedy regeneration and overclock I can take entire groups of enemies out either from stealth or in combat by essentially going “power word stun/kill” on their asses and even having pretty much no body stat I don’t remember being in danger of dying anytime after the very early game.