T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I ended up playing a bit of Risk of Rain Returns. Mostly just cleaning up the achievements I missed. I think I’m mostly done with Minecraft. I’ve mined more copper and the cube is now around nine thousand blocks, I also did some of the archaeology stuff and got a sniffer, the plants and sniffer are kind of useless but the archaeology is fun.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Netscape 1997
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
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.
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
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.
I finished Outcast: A New Beginning. The ending was bad … really bad. The whole game made sure that the villain is a mass murdering asshole where that Scarface from the Avatar movie is a reasonable guy in comparison. And in the end
That asshole was first beaten by a plank to the head and arrested, but still keeping his authorization to order the robot army around and then his life was saved by cutscene Cutter.Then I started Everspace 2. The controls are a bit twitchy for my taste and the cockpits look cheap. But I’m not far enough in to really say if it is bad or good.
Then progressing NFS: Unbound. Man those cops are a nuisance and do not add any fun for me. Other that that it is fun to have a NFS without rubberband AI.
Not much this week. I haven’t had much in the way of free time, so I’ve mostly dedicated to casual stuff, mostly Picross. Haven’t touched Deathloop again and I’m mildly worried that I simply haven’t felt compelled to go back to it, which is usually a bad sign.
The one exception is What Lies in the Multiverse, a game that I bought yesterday and couldn’t put down until I finished. It’s short (took me about 6 hours, though I didn’t 100% it yet), but what a ride. It’s a puzzle platformer where the gimmick is that you have a button that allows you to travel between this universe and a parallel one with slightly different features, depending on the chapter (such as frozen slippery floors, climbable vines, reversed gravity, etc.), and you use this mechanic to solve the puzzles.
As you progress, a few more mechanics keep being added regardless of chapter theme, so you’ll have to deal with them in different ways. For instance, a few pushable blocks exist in every universe, so if you push them where they’ll be trapped in an obstacle in another universe they’ll become intangible. This is key to open/close paths, but the way you deal with them depends on what universe is available for you to switch to in a particular chapter. If you’re in the chapter with the reversed gravity universe you’ll have to juggle the blocks between floor and ceiling and be careful not to be crushed by a falling one. Sometimes there’s no danger of them falling, but the universe you switch to has poisonous air, so you can only stay there for a few seconds, and pushing blocks makes you move slower, so you have to time it right.
I feel like I’m doing a terrible job of explaining it, but trust me, it’s a fun game. The story is enjoyable too. It starts and generally remains humorous, but it does turn a bit dark in a few parts, particularly at the end. I’m not entirely happy with how the whole thing is resolved because I feel there are a couple things that remain a bit too vague for my tastes, but it’s not a bad ending by any means.
I was too busy to play anything this week, but I’ve pretty much committed to ditching the Gold Box Games and going through the remastered Mass Effect instead. Hopefully I can get through that trilogy before the end of the year.
Triangle Strategy continues, and has been consistently good in this section. The choices feel weighty, the branching paths have obvious alternatives, the fights are still fun. One thing I noticed however; I had a fight against two bosses who were both casters. They killed half my party really quickly, and then… stopped casting. And now I’m left with the question of whether the game uses some kind of rubberband AI, where the more characters fall the easier the enemies go on you. That would be really disappointing. Would mean I’ve survived most fights on the game’s mercy.
Tales of Berseria is finished. Not completed, just… finished. Was planning on doing the postgame and the superboss for the writeup, but that thing’s been delayed so many times I just want it to be over. And now it is, and you can read it! You probably don’t want to. But you can!
Tales of Zestiria resumes, and continues to be broken in fascinating ways. The game has a prompt on Game Over, to either go to the title screen or load from your save. But they don’t load your most RECENT save. They don’t even load the save at the top of the list. I picked the option, and it loaded the fourth-most-recent save, which was like fifth in the list. I have no idea what made it pick that one, and I’ve never seen another game have that problem. This game is like The Room.
Post-Berseria writeup led me to restart Soul Nomad and the World Eaters, the one Disgaea-adjacent game that takes itself mostly seriously, and gets really dark. Haven’t gotten very far back into it, but it’s notable just how weird it is from the first screen. You’re part of a secret society outside of normal space, led by a woman who died 200 years ago, with a best friend with no short term memory. Also there’s a narrator whose voice is based on which gender you pick, but the voice is OPPOSITE which gender you pick. If you pick the girl, the voice is male the whole game, if you pick the boy the voice is female. Game is crazy.
Slay the Spire. I have nearly eight hundred hours into this one, and only just started doing Daily runs. They’re so much more fun than high level Ascension. Even the rude ones.
Playing VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action again because it’s comfort food. I love mixing drinks and changing lives. Wish they’d finish the sequel.
Also playing STAR WARS™: Dark Forces Remaster for basically the same reasons. This is probably the most fun I’ve ever had with a Star Wars game, though STAR WARS™ Squadrons is still sitting in my Steam library waiting for me to hook up my gamepad so I can play in VR.
I need a lot of comfort food right now.
I’ve played a bit of Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition because I remembered the naval combat in that game being fantastic and I wanted something piratey. Did a few skirmishes as Britain then got bored.
Also bought and played a bit of Command & Conquer Remastered: I’m on GDI campaign mission 8.
I was playing WarTales, and will no doubt go back once I extricate myself from The Talos Principle 2, which ambushed me and ate my brain. I absolutely _adored_ The Talos Principle, and the sequel is ticking all the same boxes: exploration, puzzles, a beautiful environment, and a little armchair philosophy on the side. I like the addition of characters that you can talk to, and they’re done quite well.
I played through Chants of Senaar. It’s a Linguistics-em-up, a genre term which I’m sure will catch on any moment now. Seriously, it is a game about figuring out languages and it was a lot of fun. The best parts of the game are figuring out the words from the context clues, and there’s variation in how plurals are handled, whether the language even has the word “be”, and even subject/verb/object ordering.
The worst parts of the game are the things that aren’t language based. It has stealth sections and I would prefer it did not. Also, I didn’t like how they handled the last language in the game –
instead of figuring it out like all the others, there are a few little minigames which teach you the whole language. The saddest part is the minigame that teaches you how cool the construction of the words is, just in time for you to never need to think about that again.Hades II is in early access. I’ve played some and it is, indeed, more Hades with additional innovation, and therefore awesome. I’m going to try not to play too much of it in early access because I’d really rather play the release version. We’ll see how patient I actually end up being.
Animal Well is a metroidvania-ish game which just came out today. It’s cool. There are relatively few enemies and you have pretty much no way to fight them, so the emphasis is really on the exploration and puzzles. The items you collect to let you go to new areas are very unique – I have never before been excited to get stuff in a video game like
a bubble wand, a frisbee, and a yo-yo.I completely agree on Chants of Senaar. Such a great game. But the ending weak. I liked the puzzles for the good ending where you had to be a translator. Those were fun.
You had to also translate some concepts certain languages were missing.
If you enjoyed the game you might want to try Curse of the golden idol. Scratched a similar itch for me. You have words and have to figure stuff out from the context. Following that you had to deduce the missing words in the story sections.
Funnily enough I just went straight through to the good ending because what was I going to do, not solve those puzzles before the point of no return?
And Curse of the Golden Idol was great! I’m looking forward to Rise of the Golden Idol.
I have, finally, given the Act-II-Boss a proper blunt beating and have therefore reached Act III of Baldur’s Gate 3. At least I think I did? I am not yet in the city proper, as a, uhm, scripted event kicked me badly in the shins after all the cutscenes and talking and whatnot I decided to just leave it and return later.
I have dabbled a bit in Shadows over Loathing, and while I love everything about it it also massively triggers completionist anxiety already in the prologue. Let’s see how that goes.
I have also dabbled in several games that fell out of the Epic-freebies in the past, but I do not have something remarkable to tell.
I haven’t posted on this thread in a while, but the latest development in my gaming habits makes for a story I’d quite like to share here.
A few years late to the party, I’ve mostly been deeply immersed in Elden Ring, which is just about as sweeping and absorbing as I was hoping. That said, almost 50 hours in and still only half-way, the sheer size and scope of the game can get a bit… much. Overindulgent. As good as it is, it definitely feels like it needs from some judicious editing, and falls short of the tight construction of the original Dark Souls.
Thus, the search for variation led me down a nostalgic rabbit hole to Warcraft III of all games, and this blog series in particular: Warcraft Retrospective. What struck me was that the author was directly inspired by Shamus’s Mass Effect Retrospective, and the influence definitely shows. Reading it has been both a wonderful link to one of my formative gaming experiences and a reminder of Shamus’s wonderful writing. I know it’s small, but hopefully knowing about one more person out there touched by his work and outlook can bring a smile to someone’s day.