T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve started playing Stardew Valley with my siblings. We’re not very far yet, so not a lot has happened; I’m hoping we’ll get farther in this time, last time there was too much going on to commit to it. I also played the demo for ROBOBEAT. To me, it’s like if Ultrakill decided that being a FPS wasn’t enough and wanted to become a Roguelike Rhythm FPS with the bonus of being able to add your own music. I only played for a bit, but when I can I will probably buy it for myself. What are you guys up to this week?
Secret of Good Secrets
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
Overused Words in Game Titles
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Balatro had a very nice update where they made the Joker upgrade bonuses also make the Jokers free; used to be they were often completely useless because you couldn’t afford the Joker that would show up. The game is still very hard, but those really good runs are quite addictive. Got a run with a Joker doubler, that doubled the probability doubler, which I thought was useless until I got the joker with a 1 in 4 chance of upgrading whatever hand you play, which got redoubled to a 4 in 4 chance, and pretty much smoked the rest of the run by itself.
Bought Hades 2, even though my arm’s too beat up to play it right now. Played it a bit anyway, and discovered I’m much worse at it than the streamers I watched who all beat the Level 1 boss first try; I guess I haven’t played Hades in a long time and lost most of my coordination. So, for the first level it’s More Hades, which is good enough. Second level was incredibly cramped with lots and lots of monsters and is going to take a much healthier arm to get through.
Triangle Strategy got restarted for writeup purposes, but my arm’s too beat up to play it. Got through one battle and a whole bunch of cutscenes, which read better this time through them, knowing what’s coming and having set my expectations very low. Still a full four-minute cutscene with no purpose whatsoever, and another with four separate super-slow ellipses in it, but, not quite as redundant as I’d remembered.
Slay the Spire daily runs. Man, I should play more ascension-less runs, go back to the happy-go-lucky days of The Silent shiv torrent builds. High Ascension The Silent barely ever survives long enough to build one.
Braid had a rerelease with new graphics, so I picked that up and am playing through it again. It really is a very pretty game, and does some interesting stuff playing with the time mechanics. Funny to remember how it was one of the early indie success stories.
I managed to get in a run of The Old Republic with my Sith Warrior, finishing off Tatooine. He’s not as much fun as my previous character — story and character-wise — but he has his moments. I also got in another play of Mass Effect, finishing off the first run at the Citadel with a character based on the same character as my previous TOR character. She was much less Renegade this time than last time, which reflects one issue I have with Bioware games with these kind of meters: often, just avoiding being a complete jerk is considered “Paragon”, and this character isn’t a complete jerk. There are probably more opportunities to be Renegade coming, though.
I also started doing something a bit odd. I’m not usually available when hockey is on, and so don’t get to watch it much anymore. Also, I’ve had a bit of a hankering for all-star or legends teams or seeing the older games that I can’t get anymore. When sports were shut down a few years ago, I tried watching a CPU vs CPU game in NHL 16 (the latest one I have) and it wasn’t bad. I started getting tempted to create a league of legendary-type or favourite player-type teams and see how that plays out, maybe watching one game a day or whatever and simulating the rest. I created one full legends team and watched them play another team, and I did enjoy it. The problem is that in that version, at least, you can’t create a full custom league and the smallest league is 12 teams, so I need to build 11 more teams, and it takes me at least an hour or more to do that, and I don’t have enough free time to do that anytime soon, so I’ll have to try to build that out slowly and then start it, if I don’t get bored or distracted first.
Loading Ready Run’s Autumnal Rumble is like your hockey idea but with wrestling games and rosters built with characters from their sketches (though it’s a wrestling royal rumble style program rather than a tournament bracket). There’s a playlist of the first three here, though it’s missing the most recent which can be found here. I haven’t actually watched the first two but the later two are great, the community went all-out making super detailed character conversions and the ai occasionally bugs out hilariously.
That actually sounds cool. Now I’d be tempted to do one of those myself. I think I might have a PS3 or PS4 wrestling game somewhere …
Might be fun to watch, too, although I don’t watch their show and so I wouldn’t have an attachment to the characters …
I don’t even recognize half of them, though that does mean I recognize the other half so YMMV (they did a *lot* of sketches over many years before going nearly all streaming). Since they’re doing commentary there will be bits of explanation, and some are fairly self-explanatory.
Playing Final Fantasy X-2 Remastered for the first time. It has some strong points; it goes even further with the absurd, colorful costumes and decorations of FFX and it’s a breath of fresh air after loads of photorealistic modern titles; sidequests and minigames have been pretty fun. But it seems disorganized and poorly signposted, leaving you to figure out a lot on your own. So far the story is kind of a non-entity, which can be fine in the early game, but it is starting to get a bit alarming how long I’ve been playing without a plot.
I liked FFX-2, though it certainly has a lot of time-sensitive optional parts. I thought having quite a bit of low-stakes time in a sort of ‘extended epilogue’ way was a good fit for the situation, really, and the job system is my favorite style of FF gameplay.
Personally, my biggest complaint is the music; after the end of FFX, getting a different style to reflect the world’s changes is a good idea…. but the music has to still actually be good.
Still playing Exoprimal. The upgraded final mission event ran again so I ran that a whole bunch, which was a great lot of jolly cooperation. Much less brutal than the savage gauntlet, full teams of 10 with 20 respawns, but still lots of “learn how this works and counter it or get board wiped” and with 10 bodies you can basically fail one of those once, assuming you aren’t bleeding constantly already. Snipers getting a particular chance to. . . not so much shine as hard carry by having the range to snipe drones the players on the other side of the map have failed to deal with- everyone *should* be roughly split into four groups (or two groups patrolling back and forth) in the later parts and deal with the drones at their locations on their own, preventing the wipe, but often I’d be shooting at least two and on one occasion I actually had to shoot all four myself. Still, by the end people had learned the fight well enough that it started running like clockwork with increasing frequency. Going back to normal games a bit jarring after that, much less jolly cooperation.
They’ve also got the Monster Hunter tie-in semi-random “raid boss” running, which is much easier than the one for Mega Man: no ridiculous battlefield wiping obstacle memorization, just a modestly sized dragon. Granted, being an older one more people would also already know how to beat it but there’s really nothing special, just shoot and shield. Still a nice change of pace, and having a completely incongruous medieval fantasy trumpet fanfare theme start playing during the finishing stretch is kinda rad. Similar thing to the Mega Man one actually, the “unique” theme making the fight stand out even more than it already did.
At this point I’ve seen just about all of the content except for the occasional chuckle-worthy loreish voiceline from the antagonist AI, the T-Rex savage gauntlet, and only a couple suits I’m interested in that I haven’t unlocked.
Camping, BBQ, drinking and going on concerts. Thursday started my trip to Wave-Gotik-Treffen in Leipzig, Germany. Obviously without gaming (well … Flunkyball and Dixie-Bingo was a thing), but I had a lot of fun. Dancing to “Bloodsucking Zombies From Outer Space”, headbanging to “Tiamat”, cheering to “Irdorath” and laughing at “The Death”.
Is that the same “Tiamat” that did the song “Cain” from the Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines soundtrack? I love that song. Also “Smaller Gods” by Darling Violetta.
Tiamat has a song called Cain on their album “Prey”. It might be part of the Bloodlines soundtrack, I don’t know. In this concerts setlist I mostly enjoyed the song Gaia.
Yeah, that is the one on the soundtrack. That soundtrack is actually pretty good, overall.
Playing Age of Wonders 4 with one of my D&D buddies. We keep doing co-op games. build up really strong, and steamroll the maps.