T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve finished Graveyard Keeper. It was good, it reminded me a lot of Forager, and I wish I did the quests in a different order, I ended up doing the slowest quest last after doing everything else so I just had to wait for the right items to show up.
What are you guys playing?
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
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 Game That Ruined Me
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Secret of Good Secrets
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
Could Have Been Great
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Finished TES: Oblivion for the first time. I had played the game shortly after release, but quit after hitting a difficulty roadblock with my stealth class. This time, I deliberately made a class half of whose primary skills were things I would never use. I finished all the guild quests and the main quest at level 9.
Oblivion is a parody.
It’s amazing how ridiculous almost every aspect of the game is, how it all feeds into this bizarre comic playground aesthetic. And the game knows it. The contrast from its two closest entries is palpable: the main character of Morrowind is the culture, politics, and religion of the setting; the main character of Skyrim is the geography and environment of the setting; the main character of Oblivion is ME!!
Oblivion is the only TES game I managed to finish. I didn’t have that issue with difficulty, but then I run on the lowest difficulty setting anyway so might not have noticed it. I was playing as an ex-pat of Angel and so focused on unarmed combat and stealth, and got to the point where I could sneak up on people in game and if I succeeded one-shot them barehanded, which was a lot of fun.
My favourite part of the game, though, was Shivering Isles, which was just weird enough to be really fun. Did you try that one out or was it just base Oblivion.
Not done Shivering Isles yet. But, based on the premise, it seems exactly the right type of content for this game.
Obviously a matter of taste but Shivering Isles is a delight.
Kind of funny how you talk about the “me” focus of Oblivion because of the three “modern” TES games it is the one where the protagonist is technically an accessory to the chosen one and not the chosen one themselves. But yeah, Oblivion has probably the most generic setting, a somewhat uninspired main story (particularly following from Morrowind), godawful level scaling system that ruins the game for a lot of people and the infamous “potato faced” NPCs. On the other hand there’s some good stuff in sidequests, like the Dark Brotherhood or some of the Daedric quests.
Hard West II. I like it. Ticks my XCOM-esque turn-based strategy box, but simpler and less of a time investment. Also, weird west setting, which is always good fun.
Oh, I finished that some year ago, it was a blast
Well, I finished the Super Mario RPG Remake. I was completely engrossed by it from the moment I started it and I just couldn’t put it down. I want to make it clear: I pretty much got nothing else done until I was finished with the game. I hadn’t been so taken by a game in a long time. I know it sounds like a boomer thing to say, but they just don’t make them like these anymore. Now to be fair more than once I’ve come back to an old game only to realize that the magic was somewhat gone. Either the gameplay wasn’t as smooth as my memory claimed or there was some other thing about it that didn’t age well, like excess grinding or a story that wasn’t as good as I remember. Not with this game, though. A magnificent experience from beginning to end.
I truly, genuinely love this game. It’s not very long for RPG standards, but it’s also not padded. The pacing is great, there’s no need for grinding and while the story is not exceptional (mostly due to its dedication to be humorous rather than dramatic, which works for it) it’s still full of fun characters. This is the game that turned Bowser into an actual character rather than the plot device he was before! The combat isn’t hard (and, in fact, might be easier here than in the original), but it’s compensated by some new challenges and some truly hard endgame battles.
I do have one very mild complaint. This game was not created with analog controls in mind, so in a few areas where the game demands a bit of precision this becomes a problem. Granted, controlling with the d-pad is still an option, but it’s really hard to get rid of years of muscle memory, so my thumb defaults to the stick. This is, though, no fault of the game but mine, so I really can’t hold it against it. 10/10.
I’ve been playing Superliminal too. This game is surely a good time. It’s always nice to see how a puzzle game has one concept alone but manages to milk it for all its worth by constantly finding ways to approach it in varied ways. In the past I’ve ranted against games like The Witness for basically having just one puzzle alone and not making it different enough, so it constantly feels like you’re repeating yourself. But this game is more like Portal, where you have this one tool and you always have to find clever new ways to use it. Unfortunately, it also tries to take its humor and storytelling from Portal and at that it just doesn’t succeed very well. The approach to the story is very obvious and the attempts at making you laugh are exceedingly bland. Hoping it gets better in that regard later, but so far the gameplay is more than enough to keep me going.
I loved Superliminal. Agreed that it definitely takes a lot of cues from Portal, some of which are more successful than others but overall it’s among the best puzzle games I’ve played in years. It’s also surprisingly short on replay. I didn’t quite get the 1 hour achievement but I was close
I finished Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth with 160 hours on the clock. So every side mission finished and every job at least once leveled to 30 to see every Super-Special. The Ending was not good – not as bad as Yakuza 5 – but still meh. Too bad, because the direct predecessor Gaiden: The Man who erased his name had the best ending in the entire series IMO.
Then I started Outcast: A New Beginning. Its been 25 years I’m waiting for that game to be made. First impressions:
– Cutter Slade looks weird, Talaner are looking different but not bad
– Adelpha looks fascinating – art design is so much more important than graphical effects
– The movement in clunky
– The story cutscenes are cut awkwardly
– The spoken humor is as good as the original, the slapstick humor is as bad as the original
– The music is fantastic
– There is so much High Sci-Fi with Spaceships and Androids and stuff, where the Original had more Low Sci-Fi. A handheld flamethrower was the most human Sci-Fi and the Daokas (Stargate) the most Adelphian Sci-Fi.
– The villain is more cartoon-y evil than TIM, somehow.
– I cannot stop playing. Even though all its flaws, it is a great game.
Glad to see some Outcast love here – I looked at the Steam page a week after launch and it had only 200 reviews, so I don’t think it’s sold very well :/ Your mention of those high sci-fi things makes me more keen to play it. The price is quite high though.
Geneforge 2 continues. I’m happy with it but have a few complaints.
Inventory space is annoying – unlike Avernum games, you only have one character who can hold stuff. So you don’t have a whole lot of slots to hold things, and between group buff items, single character buff items, equipment I sometimes swap in, some quest items (others don’t take up space), and “charms” which do stuff while you carry them, it goes really quickly. And it’s silly that it’s so limited because it actually isn’t. You have a “junk bag” which can hold unlimited stuff. You can’t take stuff out of it except in cities, but the real downside is that the UI for taking stuff out of the junk bag is tedious. And since the junk bag is intended for selling stuff, it has a button to sell everything to vendors and no way to sell individual things, so if you have a mix of stuff you care about and stuff you don’t in it, there are no shortcuts.
I’ve chosen to side with the Takers this run. They’re pretty hard to join, which makes sense since their entire philosophy is built on hating you and everything you represent (for very good reasons). Other groups are way less picky.
I’ve been playing the ZEPHON demo, a turn-based strategy game by the people who made Gladius: Relics of War. In short, it’s the future, and shit sucks. First the Acrin armada showed up and bombarded the Earth so badly it made a whole bunch of new volcanoes appear, killing billions of people. Then the titular character showed up, hijacked Earth’s military arsenals, and fought back effectively enough that the armada was crippled and most of their ships outright destroyed, including their moon-sized mothership.
The war between ZEPHON and the Acrin was devastating enough that the Earth’s surface was effectively randomized, with all continents having been dramatically redecorated, thus justifying the procedural map generation. That’s all background; once you enter the game you choose a leader who provides some advantages and some disadvantages to your faction. As an example, the Fallen Soldier pays one-third more in upkeep for his units, but they all passively regenerate health over time.
The Acrin run their tech off the power of an eldritch abomination referred to simply as The Voice, and can invoke its power to taint an area which helps them, but slowly kills humans. ZEPHON wields technology beyond human comprehension or control. The war severely crippled both of them, leaving the puny humans stuck in the middle. Mind, it’s not as bad as it could be since you start at the point where people have started building cities again, so your starting infantry unit, the Militants, enter the field with assault rifles, body armour, portable radios, and hand grenades (grenades bought separately). Things escalate from there.
Against you are mutant animals, Reavers (Mad Max-ian raider gangs), alien stragglers, and those fucking Dreameaters. To elaborate, like the Enslavers from Gladius, Dreameaters can mind control your units. They passively reduce the morale of nearby units every turn, their attack reduces morale too, and any unit which falls below six morale can get mind controlled. Unlike Enslavers, Dreameaters take one third less damage from all attacks, and also have a ranged attack. They should always be a priority target if you’ve got the gear and numbers to kill them, and avoided if not. At least they’re rare.
One thing the game does which I really like is that you can see at a glance what has been built in a given city tile, which is neat. But this post is long enough as is. The demo’s been withdrawn and is no longer playable, but apparently it will come back around the 25th of April. We’ll see.
My shoulder’s gotten bad enough i can no longer comfortably hold a controller, which is severely limiting my gaming. I guess if anyone knows a good mouse-only RPG that isn’t Fell Seal or Trails In The Sky I’d be interested in hearing it.
Played a small bit of Tales of Berseria, and found out a destroyed town gets rebuilt after your last sidequest there. But more importantly, there’s a voice-acted flavor conversation there, that inexplicably has two lines unvoiced, one right in the middle and another at the end. This game keeps finding new and unique ways to jank, it’s so great.
Tried a Steel Soul run in Hollow Knight, died exactly where I expected to, at the boss that you get the dash from. Annoying thing is, none of her attacks hit me, it was pure collision damage that did me in (that and accidentally hitting her while she was staggered instead of healing like i should have)
It was pretty fun though, the permadeath brings back a lot of the tension that the early game had before I got good enough to beat it. Might have to start learning some speed running if I want to stick with it though, the further I get into the game before dying the harder it’ll be to work up the motivation to start again
Finished Snakebird too. Good puzzle game; had some puzzles I got stumped on for a while, and inevitably my first reaction to figuring out the solution was “is that all I had to do?”
But that gave way to satisfaction over time, and there were also a lot of puzzles that took just enough tries to make me feel really clever and elegant when I figured out the solution, so on the whole it was a positive experience
I’m back in time 22 years, having my first encounter with Final Fantasy X which surely is an appropriate use of the new PC with a Radeon RX 7900 XTX I just finished. I’m having a good time, FFX is a little subversive in how spread out the combat is relative to older games in the series but I’ve always been happy to watch a good cutscene or conversation so it’s working fine for me. I think getting full XP for every character who takes a turn in a fight is an interesting design choice in a good way, it lengthens battles a bit as you tag everyone in but it keeps you familiar with the character toolbox and avoids the silly trope where you bench a character for 40 hours and they still show up in important emotional moments like a photobomber. Just got done crashing a wedding. The game looks so good for its time (really just in general – good art direction is timeless).
You know, I tried FFX years ago. The original, back in the PS2 era, and I was having a great time with it until we got to Blitzball. I know it’s a popular minigame and all, but I hate it. I hate it so much I just couldn’t continue when the game forced you to play it in the story. I just don’t understand why would they do that. Why not keep it optional? Sure, many games force you to play a minigame for its introduction and they keep it optional for later, but those tend to be short minigames, like the pipe connect puzzle, or poker or something like that. Blitzball is excruciatingly long and, from my perspective, not fun in the slightest.
I expected the remastered version to make it optional, but from what I hear, it hasn’t. As far as I know there isn’t even a mod to skip it, which is insane.
It literally is the only reason I’ve never continued with FFX. Every time I think I should give it a second chance I remember I have to play Blitzball to be able to continue with the story and I immediately lose any interest. Imagine if you were in the middle of Mass Effect and you were told had to play a round of FIFA before being able to continue. Even if you liked FIFA you’d find it out of place. But, if like me, you explicitly hate it, you’d be pissed.
When I was doing my own attempt at a proper playthrough (which stalled just after the wedding crash), I was like “okay, I read up on how this blitzball crap works, I know what I’m doing now, this should be fine.” It was not. Knowing how it’s supposed to work did not actually make getting it to do the thing any better, still like 50/50. Actually trying and failing is in many ways worse than just flailing until it’s over, and thus getting through the mandatory bit was still interminable.
Which should not be any surprise since actually looking at the mechanics, it’s basically a whole extra tactical rpg where you’re being given a bunch of level 1s and dumped straight into a final tournament with no training. Theoretically just spamming Tidus’s uber move should work, but in practice you need to actually do it from the correct position at the correct time, and the rest of the team sucks so bad you can’t set up that position. Who thought this would be fun?
You don’t have to win the one mandatory game, so theoretically you can just treat it like an especially long cutscene.
Now, if you want Wakka’s ultimate weapon and skills, then you’re going to have to play a whole lot of Blitzball.
Mass Effect did have that didn’t it, it was called the Mako :D
I’ve got FFX on the shelf for PS2, I’ll be interested to see what I think.
I didn’t get time to play Pool of Radiance or Dark Age of Camelot>/b> this week, but did manage to continue my Sith Warrier in The Old Republic. Big thing this week is that it reminded me why Vette is probably my favourite companion character out of all of them. This character isn’t as much fun as my last one, but is working well enough.
Stardew Valley recently had a huge content update, so I’ve been playing through that. The last couple of times I tried to play SV I ended up losing interest early on – I’ve beaten the game several times (insofar as you can “beat” a game with no game over screen and no definitive ending, anyway), and since then I always have trouble maintaining interest around the time the community center is almost done, but there’s still 1 or 2 things I’m going to have to wait a couple of seasons for. This time I’ve managed to get up to Ginger Island, though, so I think I’ll be able to keep going through to the “end” (i.e. perfection).
I beat Dragon’s Dogma 2… and didn’t stay in the Unmoored World long enough, because I wanted to see the ending. So I’m breezing through NG+ as an invincible level 80 naked catman hero with sword+shield+bow. Changed my appearance for NG+, though stayed at Stupidly Huge.
Games with Day+Night cycles are really bad for me, though, because I keep forgetting sleeping in game =/= sleeping IRL and suddenly it’s 3 AM and I have to get ready for work in 2 hours.
Forager was fun, I’ve wondered about GK esp for my gf who is a big cosy-games fan, which somehow Forager crosses over into.