T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m still playing Minecraft. I’ve mostly just been mining copper, and I’m mad at the way they implemented it. Copper ore is quite common and you get multiple raw copper per ore You need to smelt 9 raw copper to make one block and if you don’t want it to oxidize you need to use one honeycomb per block. So instead of doing anything productive I decided to make an obelisk out of raw copper blocks for some reason. This is created 100% in survival, and only over three days.
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Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Object-Oriented Debate
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
Hardware Review
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
The Gameplay is the Story
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
That’s a lotta goddamn copper.
Been on a big tactics kick recently.
Dream Tactics continues to be alright-not-great. Still got three party members, who each have up to five actions per round, but that mostly means it takes five to eight actions to kill something. Meanwhile the enemies have the standard one action, which means that one hits hard. Not my favorite gimmick so far, but it’s still early.
Dark Deity is very much a Fire Emblem-like, but without weapon degradation, and perma-injury instead of permadeath. Considering it’s got Fire Emblem’s binary luck-based levels, the perma-injuries aren’t that bad, equivalent to just rolling worse on a level. Simple, and the story is seemingly predictable, but it’s fun.
Fell Seal has mostly convinced me that any trouble I have in battles is from not knowing how to build a team; that “hard” battle I was stuck on dissolved immediately when I actually brought a tank character. This is the SRPG setup I enjoy the most (two roughly equal teams, as opposed to Fire Emblem/Dream Tactics/Dark Deity’s multiple waves of weaker enemies), and having played it before I know where the story’s going and can ignore it for the mechanics.
Triangle Strategy has revealed another egregious flaw; it refuses to save when not connected to the internet. This is pure bullshit; I know the files are on my computer, because I could LOAD them without internet, but I couldn’t save progress. What the fuck.
The playthrough nonetheless limps forward. Turns out I skipped the Chapter 12 battle, which makes me feel better about the Chapter 10 farce, presumably I could have avoided that one too with better choices. Still didn’t reach an actual fight, but did reach another Decision Branch, and was reminded that these are the best part of the game. The game has branching paths, but it’s not just picking one; instead, your party acts as a democratic council, and you have to convince your party members that your chosen path is the correct way forward, by picking up information around town and appealing to their natures. If you fail, you get overruled, and the party sends you down a different path than what you would have chosen. Which is what happened here; it was the first three-way-split, and I failed to convince anyone at all to change their minds, resulting in the most military characters banding together against me to take the most brutally efficient path to victory. We’ll see how that turns out next time (whenever next time is).
I don’t know how branching the paths really are, considering it’s still my first playthrough, but the secondary effect of the path-voting is that it really sells just out outmaneuvered and desperate your army is; one thing Triangle Strategy has done better than any other tactic game I’ve played is convince me that my wins-every-battle army is in fact on the back foot the whole time, and I’m pretty sure it’s because every battle leads with the party weighing all their tactical and moral tradeoffs, and you choosing which ones matter via gameplay. This is a good system. I hope it comes back in a game with better writing. Or just… less writing.
Exoprimal brought out that new version of the final mission. . . and broke their servers so I didn’t get to play it (servers failing to or losing connection 3/4 or more of the time). They announced maintenance two weeks from now to fix a loading problem that only affects windows and steam users. . how the hell does that even work? Plus the usual fact that there’s no reason you should have to shut all the servers down simultaneously to update them, and the question of why if they know the fix now we have to wait two weeks for them to roll it out. So I *was* going to do that through most of the last week, but instead I didn’t play anything. I’d have thought it’d be at least a *bit* longer before the fickle bs of corporate always-online-multiplayer-only games showed up to wreck my fun.
The event has since ended, and hey look I can play the game again.
Spoke too soon. Apparently I managed to connect to the one functioning intermediary server earlier when I got to play three games in a row properly. Then I open the game back up after dinner and nope, shit’s eff’d again.
Spoke too soon. Apparently I managed to connect to the one functioning intermediary server earlier when I got to play three games in a row properly. Then I open the game back up after dinner and nope, shit’s eff’d again.
Missed the post last week for one reason or another (and I almost missed this one too, since it wasn’t in the Epilogue section, which I keep open in a tab). Oh, well. This will be a two-week compilation, then.
I finished Superliminal. It was generally fun, but I ran into the same problem many first person games give me: motion sickness. At the beginning it wasn’t so bad, but as it went on the very nature of the game itself (with perspective shifting, size changing and all that) made it more and more unbearable. My gameplay sessions became shorter and shorter and I had to devolve into looking up a couple solutions to puzzles just because I couldn’t bear staying in a room for longer trying to figure it out by myself, as every extra second I spent moving was agony. It’s a shame this issue soured my experience, because the game itself is pretty clever (though, as I mentioned before, its attempts at humor are not particularly enticing).
Started and finished South Park: The Stick of Truth. I had played this game before, but I wanted to play it again before the sequel, which I haven’t touched yet. And while I do have a few other unfinished games I just needed something that wasn’t 3D after so much motion sickness from Superliminal. The game was, as I remembered, quite a lot of fun. I could do without the potty humor, but it’s South Park, so it’s expected.
Started Deathloop. Not sure how to feel about it yet. Earlier games from Arkane are good at slowly introducing you into the gameplay rules and mechanics, but this one dumps an insane amount of stuff on you right at the start and I feel it makes it harder to remember any of it. I’m probably still very early to judge, going by how these games usually go, but we’ll see.
That said, I’m not particularly impressed with the gameplay loop so far. These games are common for giving you lots of room to explore and different ways to deal with your enemies. The game even points this out to you. But then you start a level and it gives you two doors to choose from and they both immediately lead to the same place. No different obstacles or enemies to deal with. It’s not even an illusion of choice. And a lot of paths are like this, not just at the start. Even later when there are enemies there’s many times no functional difference to each path. Then areas and enemy placement are suspect when it comes to stealth. It’s very easy to lose your stealth due to enemies’ vision or the unintuitive control system that more than once will make you loudly you shoot a gun when you intended to use a knife, but then enemies are so easily dispatched that you get back into stealth almost instantly. It’s the worst of both worlds, and I certainly hope all of this gets better later.
Got in another session of The Old Republic with my Sith Warrior, who is not as much fun as my Jedi Consular was but is still fun. I probably won’t play this for a couple of weeks due to being busy, and I’m going to redo my schedule to fit other games in better — like Dark Age of Camelot — and might end up pausing the Gold Box games for something else once that schedule goes into effect, maybe a replay of all the Mass Effect games, a play of the Fallout games starting from the originals and moving to the latest, or maybe Might and Magic starting from 6. Or something else from my list of video games; I haven’t decided yet.
To be honest, in reading these posts and the comments of what other people are playing I’m getting envious of the people who actually seem to have time to play lots of games [grin].
I watched the Fallout TV show. It’s…fine. Very much Bethesda’s take on Fallout – so goofy, gory, familiar and…shallow.
Which is sad, because there’s clearly some very interesting ideas to be explored in its story about capitalism, war, the mythology of cowboys & westerns, maintaining hope in a brutal apocalypse – but there’s almost no depth to any of it.
Ultimately, it just makes me miss New Vegas. It’s Fallout, but with worldbuilding! And believable characters! New monsters, based on creatures that exist in the area the game is set! Someone thought about events on more than the surface level!
‘The bombs fell 200 years ago’ actually MEANS something, because people have started to rebuild and move on as they would do.
But where New Vegas depicts a world where human nature is unchanged and factions fight and die for complex, personal-but-still-familiar reasons, the TV show is still obsessed with the phrase ‘war never changes’, which somebody clearly thinks is the most profound thing ever.
Oh, and fun fact:
who dropped the bombs? Why, Vault-Tec, of course! They thought they could end war forever by kiling everyone except themselves, so there would be no factions anymore.Just…ugh.
I also picked up Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. It’s more Cyberpunk, which is good; but with a graphical upgrade that means I have a noticable drop in frame-rate whenever I go to the new area, which is bad. The lag made the more-or-less standalone story pretty annoying to experience, despite being otherwise good.
It’s got CDPR’s standard ‘make hard decisions, with limited information, in a complex scenario’ writing, which again, would have been great if it the audio and graphics weren’t constantly slightly out of sync.
Oh, and quite a lot of the gameplay gets an overhaul and new options, which is neat!
But it’s also baffling that they hired Idris Elba, a British actor, recreated his face in the game engine, made him a central character…and then had him fake an American accent for the entire game!
Given how CP2077 is famous for making its dev team work so damn hard that some of them burned out, it just makes me wonder how much money was spent on this kind of stunt casting – and how many man-hours that money could have bought instead.
Especially since the game was so damned buggy at launch…
Guardians of the Galaxy was a fun action romp with cinematic flair. It’s a basic adventure/exploration layout with the now familiar “use ability X to open door type Y” with all the abilities themed to GOTG powers; it pairs with fast-paced action combat controlling Star Lord while able to call in strikes from other team members on a cooldown. The story is surprisingly engrossing and kept up a fast pace and a lot of character development. It did feel like one or two chapters/locations could have been cut and it would be a better game for it, but that’s sort of how things go in modern gaming when “hours of content” is a talked-about metric.
LISA – The Joyful was free on Epic this week along with the previous game LISA The Painful which I already played many years ago. I claimed both just so I could finally experience The Joyful. It’s a grim Earthbound-style RPG set in a Mad Max meets WWE universe of weird-looking freakshow warlords where women have almost disappeared from the earth; after Painful was a revenge romp tracking down your kidnapped adopted daughter, Joyful sees you assume control of the young girl herself, learn to fight, and eventually take out the local warlords and rise to power yourself. It was a brief game and not as memorable as the much deeper and more story-rich LISA the Painful, but I enjoyed it well enough for a quick diversion.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps – just barely started and not much of real consequence has happened, but I’m enjoying it as a continuation of the excellent first game. Incredible art direction and very smooth platformer controls.
I caught something, probably the flu, and powered through Jedi: Survivor to pass the time. I liked it, but think Fallen Order was a better game. Survivor felt crammed full of too many collectibles and side games. It’s possible that general crankiness at being sick colored my perception, but all the extra stuff just felt very annoying
I also preferred Fallen Order. Survivor had… maybe not a better story, but a less cliche one. Still, FO had better gameplay, combat (WHY did Survivor remove Force Slow?!), and a less edgy story, which was nice.
I also liked Fallen Order better. Somehow, it managed to do more with less. I was also disappointed at the small number of planets in Survivor. Not only were there fewer planets to meaningfully explore, but two of them were basically deserts.
I also had some issues with the story. Mainly, the Bode’s motivation. I think the betrayal part was brilliantly done. From the very start of the game, I was suspicious of that character (ever since the Senator’s conversation with the Inquisitor on Coruscant). But the betrayal was still a very emotional moment that left a lump in my throat. But WHY was his motivation so fucking stupid?
The reason he gives for betraying Cal and the Resistance is because Cal wants to bring the Hidden Path to Tanalorr. Yes, and? Like, Tanalorr is a planet. It’s not a little house on the prairie that can only hold 2 people. It’s an entire fucking planet. And what’s more, it’s a planet that’s cut off from the rest of the galaxy, so you’ll definitely need a society if you want your kid to have an even remotely normal life: people to grow food, teach, build infrastructure, etc. Like, is your vision for the future to have yohr daughter barely scrape by a measly existence, trying to survive on a barren planet? I guess you also don’t want to have grandkids or for your little girls to have any friends. Ever.
And it’s such a simple fix! Instead of saying “You were going to bring the Hidden Path to Tanalorr” (such a dumb line!), he could have simply said something along the lines of: “If you bring the Hidden Path to Tanalorr, the Empire is going to find them, like they always do. They destroy everything they touch!” And then we can have his plan be to go to Tanalorr and destroy the way back, thus ensuring that the Empire can never find him or his daughter.
But instead, we got this inane motivation that makes no sense and makes him look like a complete nincampoop.
Anyways, sorry for the rant. I just had to get this off my chest :D
The planets issue is weird. In Fallen Order, there are eight planets, five of which can be returned to (Bracca, Bogano, Zeffo, Kashyyyk, Ordo Eris, Dathomir, Nur). In Survivor, you can return to all six planets (Coruscant, Koboh, Jedha, Shattered Moon, Nova Garron, Tanalorr). So it feels like there should be more explorable planets! But of course, every planet except Koboh and Jedha is literally a hallway, and you never return to any of them (well, Shattered Moon is returned to once) while visiting Koboh and Jedha way too many times.
Creative Assembly released the new expansion for Total Warhammer, Thrones of Decay, a few days ago, so that’s what I’ve mostly been doing gameswise. Running a campaign as newcomer Elspeth von Draken, and it feels like people if anything understated the chaos embroiling the Empire in Immortal Empires.
Daemons and vikings to the north, Ogres and vampires to the east, wood elves in the south-west, Skaven and Orcs to the south, the list goes on. It is twenty-five turns in, I’m at war on three sides with Vlad, Festus, and Heinrich, Skrag has been raiding my borders, something like half the provinces have been overrun, and I’m only trying to take out Vlad with my two early-game stacks while hoping that Franz can hold the line against Festus and Heinrich while I siege down Sylvania. And the Deceivers are messing around, doing Sigmar knows what.
I can only guess at what’s going on outside the Empire, but Grom the Paunch briefly had the strongest army in the world, and like a third of the factions present at game start have been wiped out or confederated. It is chaos. Well, we’ll see how it goes in the future.
I am going to shamelessy plug Mediterranea Inferno, a visual novel by Italian developers Santa Ragione, set in Southern Italy. It’s about three queer 20-or-so YO boys who used to be best friends and stars of high-class nightlife, then didn’t see or talk to each other for three years because of Covid, lockdowns and related inner demons, and now have suddenly decided to meet again and take a vacation together, each of them for his personal reasons.
That’s just the premise of the premise; from there, the game goes into magical realism and eventually psychological horror. Depending on your choice, each of the three boys can become a protagonist, a sidekick or a villain. Despite being mostly an interactive story, it’s been one of the most intense and emotional gaming experiences I’ve had lately.
It’s definitely not for everyone: not much gameplay to be found here, and you might end up hating every single character. Despite that, I advise everyone who likes visual novels to at least check the Steam page and the trailers to see if this game could be for them.
That sounds curious and warranting a closer look. I was about to write that from the screens the style reminds me of “Milky Way Prince – The Vampire Star” but then I checked and it’s literally the same devs so that makes sense.
Also, when you say “plug” do you mean you’re involved in any way?
I was mostly drinking and listening to music outside. Festival season has started with a bang (bang, Feuer frei).
The little I played was Outcast: A New Beginning. I’m close to finishing it, just after 30 hours.
Analog it was Vale of Eternity. A creature board building game without battling other players but a race to 60 points within 10 rounds. It’s missing a bit of interaction. Outside of bidding on creatures and some rare “remove other players creature” there was nothing left. Maybe some trading after the bidding phase could improve that. Field spells affecting all players would be a good addition too.