T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I played A Little to the Left. A delightful cozy puzzle game which consists of tidying up with a cat making occasional appearances. It’s not always clear what about the objects you are trying to organize by, But the nice music and cute style make up for it. I also played Exit the Gungeon, it’s fine, the jump to 2D from top-down isn’t really appealing to me as I had hoped, the enemies attacks seem to be simplified and slower due to the smaller level size, but other than that it’s more or less the same game.
What are you guys playing?
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Patreon!
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Good to be the King?
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
The Gradient of Plot Holes
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
I played through Portal Stories: Mel. It’s very impressive for a free Portal fangame, with some very innovative puzzle design. Also some very hard puzzles, and sometimes the trouble was less in figuring out the solution and more in finding all of the available objects to use, especially for the puzzles which weren’t in testing areas.
I’ve also been playing The Last Faith, which is a metroidvania soulslike with, say it with me, a totally inscrutable story. It’s pretty generic for the genre, with aesthetics that are kind of like Blasphemous but toned down a lot. I’ve generally been enjoying it except that there was a while where I was upset with the difficulty curve, which turned out to because I ignored a very explicit hint about where I should have been going next, whoops.
And I’ve been doing a bit of Vermintide 2 with friends. The game is fine, the itemization is incredibly boring, its UI is very live service, and I’m mostly doing it because of the “with friends” part.
I’ve played Vermintide 2, and I was shocked at how bad the game’s art direction and… just the general “feel” was. Then I played Vermintide, and it felt like I was playing Left 4 Dead again. I don’t understand how they made such of downgrade so fast.
Portal Stories: Mel is cool. Have you played Portal: Revolution?
I started a new Progress Quest campaign a few days ago. I’ve got a level 43 Double Wookie Slow Poisoner named Drivjiz.
I also finally got to the second act of BG3.
It’s been a while but I remember I always chose a Land Squid Hunter Strangler, the idea being all the arms would be helpful with the strangling.
Still making my way through Baldur’s Gate 3, although it’s been derailed a little by the recent major patches that also broke a number of crucial mods that I use, so I have to wait for them to be updated before I can continue.
Going through the Resident Evil 3 Remake again. I don’t care what people say, I find it more fun than the RE2 one. People were way too overcritical about this game. Yeah, it does have some negatives, I’m not gonna pretend it doesn’t, but I find it much better paced than RE2. And it’s shorter, but that’s because RE2 is full to the brim of padding. RE2 likes to pretend it has four campaigns but really it has one and a quarter, everything else being repetition.
And even if RE2 is longer I’ve been playing RE3 far more. Last time I played RE2 I had to basically force myself to finish the second campaign, while in RE3 I’m going multiple playthroughs already, up until (and including) the hardest difficulty. I am going for 100% completion, something I already did on PC for this game and never even attempted with RE2 in any platform I’ve played it, because I find it way too tedious. When a challenge becomes a chore it stops being fun.
Nothing else this week. I’ve really been squeezing this game dry.
Picked up Balatro. the roguelike Poker deckbuilder game. It’s pretty addictive, and it’s fun to set up the big multipliers, but some of the boss fights are just rude. The whole thing is every round you’ve got to get X points in Y turns, with the hands having values you can power up over time, and the cards having their own values. Well, there’s a boss that will permanently depower whatever hand you hit it with, and there’s another boss that requires you to kill it in one turn. That second one just keeps showing up, too, feels like nearly every run has the “die in one hit” challenge boss.
Otherwise, Balatro’s a little irritating in that powering up a small hand doesn’t power up the hands above it; at some point you’ll have powered up Two Pair so high you’ll want to actively avoid making a Full House. And that point is very early in.
Still replaying Tales of Berseria>b>. not much else to say about it here.
Yeah, I’m going to stay away from Balatro. Just the demo seemed to swallow huge amounts of my time, with me saying “Just one more run.” So for the sake of my outside life, I think I’ll have to give it a miss. :-)
I’m still being occupied by Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. I can switch Jobs now and have unlocked Dondoko Island. Not the best gameplay there and it locks my Sojimon from being used and developed.
Co-op: Satisfactory Finally in the Oil Age.
Analog: Button Shy’s Converge. It’s IMO better than The Royal Limited.
Else: The demo of Outcast: A New Beginning. It’s been over 20 years, I’m waiting for Outcast 2 to finally be developed and released. The demo was kind of promising but also buggy, with float-y movement and limited to 20 minutes of gameplay. Cutter Slade has a model that doesn’t resemble the one in the 1999 original or the remake “Second Contact” of 2017 and just looks off. But Adelpha looks beautiful, the Talaner are as alien-cultural as ever and the music is still stunning. I’m cautiously looking forward to it.
Well, I had planned to get in some Pool of Radiance in this week while I was off on vacation and in-between watching the Scotties — the Canadian Women’s Curling Championships — but things came up that limited that time which was short to begin with. Those sorts of things also got me to skip my Dark Age of Camelot session this week. I’m hoping to get a session of the latter in this weekend and back to normal with the former either next week or in the normal slot after my vacation.
I DID manage to get in a session of The Old Republic. Still having a lot of fun with this character, especially since one of the somewhat mean things she did actually came back to bite her where she couldn’t talk down a royal family from siding with the attacker because they didn’t trust her and looked at her as if she was the same as the Sith she was opposing. Even more fun was the fact that a) I — and by extension her — didn’t really remember the event but it sounded like something she would do and b) when we did remember it, it turned out that that was a bit of a misunderstanding, as neither of us wanted to make that a threat but everyone took it that way.
Killing bugs and robots in Helldivers 2!
And when the servers won’t let me play because they’re full, I’m stuck on this Space kick, so I play Halo: The Master Chief Collection or Age of Wonders: Planetfall
Redownloaded Snakebird on mobile. Very cute little puzzle game, but I’ve been stuck on level 19 for days
Just wrapped XCOM: Chimera Squad. There were pluses and minuses to the format changes they made. I appreciate the campaign being a little shorter, XCOM could be a grind. I think a lot of tension evaporates without squad permadeath. I think it was a fine game but it definitely does not reach the level of impact or appeal that Enemy Unknown and its expansions/sequel did.
From what you’ve described here and before I think I might enjoy it (it’s sitting in my backlog). I’m not very good at these tactical games most of the time and this sounds like a bit of a softer one.
They tried new things with this one and even if it was not all great successes, I liked it a lot.
The turns / initiative system in particular was a great change from the other games, with fast units able to play two turns while the slower ones played only one it made being fast a real advantage, and not just “you play first on the first turn”.
I also liked the more tight campaign; i couldn’t finish xcom2 and phoenix point because the world maps had too much to do, and I tired of the games well before I could see the ending approach
I’ve been getting back into Powerwash Simulator. Most of my gaming time is late night when I can’t sleep, so something quiet, calming and kind of Zen like cleaning muck off a Buddhist temple is ideal to help me get to sleep. What’s less ideal is getting to the point where it feels like I’m nearly finished so I’ll finish up this area and then, well, making sure I got to the edge means I’ve already done half of the next one so lets just tidy it up and then all of a sudden it’s 2AM and I’ve completed the level and I have to be up in 4 hours
Hi everyone I am back after a few weeks,
I had interesting experiences with a few games.
Crowns and Pawns is a somewhat old school adventure game in the vein of Broken Sword. Puzzles are rather easy and not as obscure as the Broken Sword ones. But the behaviour of characters is still inconsistent sometimes the player can take things with them they do not need yet but then there are times where this is not possible. Also there are some choices to be made but they have no effect on the story. Also for achievements you have to play the game thrice. At least it is somewhat short. There is also one section where there are different solutions depending on a choice in the beginning. I wish they had more puzzles with multiple solutions. Also sound based puzzles and timed puzzles can go and bugger off.
Case of the golden idol that one is a highlight in this year. The art is gorgeous and it is a nice brain teaser. It might just be a fill in the blanks game. But puzzling out what went on and what goes where is really interesting.
Frog Detective 1 is fine. It is cute and really short. The fourth wall break towards the end is weird also the dialogue is super strange and repeats itself. I would describe it as a intro to point and click, where thinking is optional.
Whispers in the West the cases are okay. Gameplay is fine. But it is not really interesting and somewhat tedious. If you play solo you are able to lock yourself out of a case by choosing the wrong character. I am mostly miffed about the developers business model, even if I understand it. Sell additional cases as DLC: I am fine with that but they are just too expensive for what they are. Also the interface is weird. Great idea but lacking in execution and in the details.
I think that is all the games I actually played and did not just try out to find something grabbing me.
The new house is coming together, today I decided that the Windows 98 PC will go upstairs in the office along with its olde worlde PS/2 keyboard, the 19″ TFT with VGA port, and the printer. And so there will be more space for the Windows 7 PC and the Windows 10 main PC at my desk downstairs. Could the 24″ VG248QE fit on the desk next to the 27″ PG278Q?? Probably not, they’re huge and it’s only a 1m wide desk. But things are coming together, and eventually, the gaming setup will all be positioned and plugged in. I’m not looking forward to the wire-routing part of things. But at least I won’t be trying to navigate 3x PCs alongside all the other consoles and things. I only really use the main PC anyway! It’ll be back to Shadow of Mordor no doubt. Outcast: New Beginnings comes out in less than a month and for whatever reason I want it to do well, it’s that AA level of game that I have always loved. But £50? That’s a bit much. Plus I haven’t played much of Outcast Second Contact, nor played the original, nor Legacy of the Yods. Games games games, and so little time and wherewithal to play them.