T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve played Content Warning. It’s quite a lot like Lethal Company but instead of getting killed for scrap and The Company, you are getting footage of monsters for your SpookTube channel, it’s quite light-hearted; even when you don’t make quota, instead of dying it just turns out that it was a bad dream. I’ve also finished Half Life 2: Episode 2 VR and aside from me not liking the strider fight very much, it’s a good mod and I had a lot of fun.
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
Batman v. Superman Wasn't All Bad
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
Skyrim Thieves Guild
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Why The Christmas Shopping Season is Worse Every Year
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
I finished everything I intend to do in Animal Well. It’s a fun game, and it has puzzles that go past the depth I’m willing to go in a game. And that’s fine, they’re very much optional. I got all the usable items, I got the second ending, I’m happy with that.
Hades II is a much, much more complete game than Hades I was when it started early access. It’s got an incredible amount of content and very few things that don’t feel complete. There are some placeholder graphics, there are clearly more balance decisions to be made, I don’t think they have an escalating difficulty system set up yet, but there’s still so very very much to do and it’s a lot of fun already. It turns out I was not, in fact, patient.
I think this happened to me in Fez too. I suspect it will in AW.
Mostly played Triangle Strategy. The ending was strong enough that I think the game has won me over, from “on the fence leaning against” to “on the fence leaning in favor”. The last few choices all had clear effects on the narrative, in that NPCs had been plotting things with clearly set up future payoffs, and then our route choices just smashed their plans into ash. Bit of a Deus Ex Three Buttons ending, but with, like, multiple chapters of gameplay afterward (“chapters” in the game all being one battle apiece). I’ve read there’s also a True Ending if you take a very particular route, presumably with a much more feel-good finale as opposed to the clear compromises of the Buttons.
Would play through again, but my shoulder’s acting up again, and I’m coming to the unfortunate conclusion that holding the controller is directly causing the problem, not just being a symptom of the problem. So… back to Fell Seal I suppose. And… Balatro? My one-handed games are kind of depressing.
(I still can’t believe they named the protagonist’s father’s “Symon”, and then pronounced it “Semen”. That’s a hell of a choice.)
Having fun with Manor Lords. Tutorial is nearly nonexistent and tooltips are sparse, but everything (except for usefulness of “Tab” button overview and the fact one needs people in farm building and granary to thresh grain and transport it into windmill) is fairly intuitive and the game is a fun and relaxing one.
Oh, and once the manor itself is build personal retinue turns bandits into harvestable cash resource.
Trails of Cold Steel 3 and KOTOR 2 (with content restoration mod) have been my games recently. I also have a playthrough of BG3 on the back burner. Trails games are very long, but feature intervowen character plotlines that have background NPCs live full lives. I recently met an NPC from the very first game (Trails in the Sky) who’s back to his old ways after having settled down for the last 5 or 6 games.
How’re you finding the Restored Content Mod? Have you played the original game as a reference point? My first and only playthrough of “The Sith Lords” was with the mod, and overall it felt very cohesive, with the exception of one section towards the end that felt like a real slog and was in fact cut from development.
I haven’t played either of KotOR with the content restored mod, but I remember feeling like KotOR 2 ended quite abruptly and without much rhyme or reason.
So it turns out the big fix to Exoprimal having connection issues after their last update was to move the router. Because apparently the signal that was good enough before somehow became not good enough.
I figured this out because while there were comments on the steam forum with the same issue, they seemed to start a few days before I was having problems. But I play on my Steam Deck, and it so happened that the day I was playing in between was not my usual spot, instead a place where I was in the same room as the router. And I figured if it’s steadfastly maintaining there’s a failure to connect even though I have 3/4 bars, what if I go stand next to the router? And boom, ridiculously long “loading” times fixed, game’s working just how it was for the last 30-35 hours of play.
So I drag the router all the way out from the room it was in, return the deck to my usual setup, and with a glorious *still 3 bars* the game is working. Because the difference between 3 bars from the other room and 3 bars from the hallway is apparently enough to displease their servers.
So having been unable to play for two weeks, I binged right back into that. Didn’t get to do the upgraded final mission, but did spend a whole day beating my head against the wall of the Triceratops savage trial- unlike the version you fight during the story content where you have 10 people, 30 respawns, and the boss is just plain easier, this version has 5 people, 5 “respawns” (which is actually insta-fail at 5 *deaths*, so 4 respawns), and the fight is a hell of a lot harder. I actually super lucked out on like my second try and got partied with a guy on mic who knew the entire fight, and we just barely made it 17 seconds under the time limit. Not a single other attempt succeeded- as the day/night wore on (last day of the event) you could tell people were learning the fight and getting better, but it just was not happening. When they say hard, they mean it.
Haven’t played anything else, but when it’s time to take a break from Exoprimal I could hit The Last Spell, or Deep Rock Galactic has a new season coming soon, or get back to Elden Ring. Since I’ve got some vacation coming up I’ll definitely need to rotate in some other stuff.
Very little time to play this week, but I’ve been playing the recently released Crow Country. Loving it so far. It’s a very clear love letter to the PSX, and it has taken inspiration from Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, Silent Hill and there’s even some Final Fantasy VII sprinkled around. But it’s still very much its own thing rather than a lazy reskin. I can’t remember the last time where a game made me lose a bunch of progress with an unexpected death and instead of frustrating me it left me delighted, but it has happened twice already with this one.
I want to have more time to keep playing it, but I also want to take my time with the game and savor it.
I didn’t play The Old Republic this week, but I did decide to abandon the Gold Box Games and switch to replaying the Mass Effect series, playing with a Shepard based on my Ruby Jades character from my TOR Diary. Yeah, she’s pretty much Renegade so far, but she is the sort of character like my Helena Cain from the modern Battlestar Galactica Shepard who is pretty ruthless but can also be good at times to get some kind of balance (the Cain Shepard was nasty to most people but dedicated to her crew). I switched to Mass Effect in the hopes of getting through that series this year, because with the Gold Box Games I was still in the early stages of Pool of Radiance after four months and there are a lot of games in that series.
I was mostly on the road checking out Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt National Parks this week, but as time permits I’ve played bits of Ori and the Will of the Wisps. It’s extremely good, I’m impressed with how deep and varied the toolbox of abilities are and how well the game builds appropriate challenges to enable you to learn, master and recall each technique. The setpiece sequences and boss fights are memorable and high-adrenaline without being too difficult. The art and soundtrack are great. It’s going to be one of my favorites of the year just as Blind Forest was for 2022.
I plowed through the current state of Abiotic Factor‘s early access release (roughly 3/7ths of the game completed so far, going by the roadmap). It definitely feels like something Shamus would have spent half his time praising to high heaven for being a Half-Life inspired immersive sim with gameplay themed entirely around all of its protagonists being flimsy nerdlingers with the knowledge to turn looted spare machinery into deadly weapons and traps… and spending the other half cursing it for the “sim” part of that immersive sim gameplay being your standard survival-crafting-building loop, just in an office/industrial/laboratory environment.
I’ve put about 25-30 hours focusing almost entirely on progression, making only short detours to build up my base and play around with the wide variety of furniture options the game gives you. With the way all the looting/crafting/farming/cooking systems intersect with eachother it gives me a very strong Space Station 13 feel, even though Abiotic is a full-scale pseudo-sandbox adventure instead of a round-based Multi-User Dungeon type thing.
Not much new. I’m in what I believe to be the final stretch of Yakuza 3 I doubt the finale will affect my overall impressions. It is essentialy a Yakuza game with all that it entails: the main story is a dramatic and convoluted plot of crime, honour and betrayal, the sidequests veer wildly between bog standard like “help the person who is being shaken down for money” to off kilter like “join a pyramid scheme under the pretext of learning English to woo a lady”, the game generally manages to somehow balance this whiplash by seasoning everything with pathos in a way that inexplicably makes it work.
Having said that it is not a perfect game by any means. Combat with bosses is frustrating as they just tend to block most of the time and it turns into a prolonged session of wailing on them landing maybe one hit in ten and doing negligible damage, doubly annoying because mook combat remains quick and, while your mileage may vary, has that satisfying feel of Doing Massive Damage and throwing ragdolls around. Part of it may be the fact that 3 is the first remastered Yakuza game I’m playing as the version of 0, 1 and 2 were the “Kiwami” remakes using either a different or upgraded enginge.
What does not have such an excuse is a certain sloppiness of the plot. Kiryu, as is his usual MO, goes around punching people, most of whom deserve it, sometimes being rewarded with information that is meant to advance the plot that he generally does not act upon. Two of the characters that got major buildup are effectively taken out of the game offscreen, one doesn’t even get a cutscene (which makes me sus that they may actually pop back into the story), then the game decides it’s time for an exposition NPC to summon Kiryu and explain the story. To be fair, Kiryu was never the most cerebral protagonist but in this instalment it feels like the game somewhat fails to maintain the pacing necessary to distract the player from storytelling deficiencies.
Other than that a little progress in Chronicles of Myrtana, a little progress in replaying Dark Souls and almost finished grinding the filler pre-delayed-expansion event in Destiny 2.
After discovering a wonderful blog series on the “Warcraft” franchise, inspired by Shamus’s epic “Mass Effect” Retrospective, I have committed to replaying the entirety of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne as I read along. Almost at the end of the Undead Campaign, I’ve been instantly reminded why I love this game so much — the delicious pulp, the timeless art style, the archetypal (arguably stereotypical?) but vibrant characters, the varied level design. I’m in so deep that I’ve even started looking into fan-run multiplayer servers for non-Reforged versions of the game (I installed it from my original boxed CD copies, if you can believe that). Maybe I’ll return to Leyndell in Elden Ring sometime soon, but for now I’m pretty hooked on seeing the story through to the end.
Animal Well! Bought it day one, uncharacteristically. I’ve explored a lot, but now find myself tiring a little as it’s difficult to progress and I’m backtracking a lot. Need to try a different avenue of exploration. It’s fun – it’s no Hollow Knight (yes it’s quite different), but it’s perhaps the successor in some ways.