T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve gotten to play more Stardew valley. I’ve mostly just been fishing, and when I’m not fishing I’m watering the 300 pumpkin plants I decided to grow without any sprinklers for some reason. I also started playing a little bit of Rimworld again. I’m not very good at the game but I hope to give someone as many bionic parts as I can, just to see how it goes. Anyway, what are you guys doing this week?
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
Good to be the King?
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
Overused Words in Game Titles
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Rage 2
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
I’ve been playing Ikenfell. It’s an RPG where the battle system has both a tactical grid and timed hits. It’s well done and I don’t have any specific issues, but it still feels like something is missing from it.
I cooled off on Exoprimal basically right after my post last week. Hopped in for the next savage gauntlet, this time on a normal mission map, for a bit, but decided it would not be fun to bang my head against it all day. Instead of one of the big uber boss dino fights, it’s structured like a normal mission: go to place, kill X particular dinos and/or defend a point, go to next place, etc. But instead of normal missions, it’s clearly partially scripted: the first objective wanted you to kill a rather large number of these very tough little stealth buggers- while a bunch of other dinos spawn at you as well. Which would be fine, just clear the adds, but as someone I’m pretty sure is the same guy who got me through the uber Trike fight said, clearing the non-target dinos means it spawns the next wave on its list, of progresively bigger and more lethal dinos, while your actual goal is just the stealthers.
The next phase is a fairly simple “destroy and activate” the point with the only trick being you want to start further out and retreat through the three you have to do. But the final phase was just not fun: defend a point whilst also killing a particular set of dinos. A some pachycephalasaurus, carno (like a t-rex but smaller), a pyro pteradactyl, and t-rex. Even one less of those would be fine, or if they at least actually followed normal AI it would be doable, but they don’t. The carno is clearly scripted to run straight at the point, going around shields and barely even responding to taunt, if at all. If you don’t kill the carno, you lose. If you try to kill the carno, the pyro constantly interrupt and kills you, and if it doesn’t, the t-rex will. Oh and the second t-rex it spawns right after the first. And the pachys are the toughest non-large dino and will also chew through shields and knock you out of attacks. After several tries it seemed like you would need a very specific team, all with their ultimates charged and deployed perfectly, and fishing for that with randos was just not going to be fun. I’ll return next time there’s an interesting event on, or at least to check the next savage gauntlet.
Instead I picked Elden Ring back up and have been playing that non-stop. Never went to the land of the giants on my first run (sorcerer) and stopped at about the same point with my greatshielder, but found an entire area I’d missed before and had great fun crawling through that. I’ve been intentionally keeping my summons under-maxed and trying to avoid the most powerful (until a boss stops being fun), and since I’m using like four different weapons keeping those all equal means they’re effectively under-max as well, so I’m never breezing through anything even though I full clear everything. I was even pleasantly-ish? surprised to realize that the “fat roll” is totally usable, so actually the massive endurance I spent trying to get my carry weight high enough to actually equip heavy armor, was already so high that I could de-equip the extra carry charm and still equip a full set and my (non-huge) weapons.
One of my only complaints remains that there are so few places you can summon, relative to the number of summons: if you’re not just sticking to 1-2 like you would a weapon, you can barely figure out who’s any good at what before you’ve walked through the areas and beat the bosses and how you’re in a higher tier area and everyone needs upgrades again but oh wait here’s new guys you haven’t even tried yet.
Well, that at the way that “NPC” style foes always deal ludicrous amounts of damage. Like 1,000 damage, though a 63% fire block on my shield? With no buffs? I can never get my spells to do that. Sure it’s because the player-style npcs are quite literally cheating their asses off with massive stat multipliers (the same guy did a 14 spell chain on me as well), but still, you could make it a little less obvious. Luckly that *was* a summon area, so I could get fed up and summon the gank squad instead of trying to use the lol rats which were appearing in the wrong area.
Edit: arg, I specifically reloaded the page to put the thing back at the bottom instead of the response window >.<
I played but did not finish Ikenfell myself. It’s definitely no Paper Mario or Bug Fables in terms of combat (it’s more its own thing I’d say), but the combat was fun, and I was intrigued enough to figure out what was going on to blow through quite a bit of it. I also feel like something is missing, though it might just be “fullness.” The characters are fine, but for all the “yeah, LGBTQ!” tag they’re also rather surface level or one note- which is also good, passive representation that isn’t a whole big thing is quite possibly more important. But with the lightning girl being all “omg I’m so gay,” it feels like there should be some actual interaction there which simply isn’t.
Much of the story is told through flashbacks, while your main/inciting protagonist is an outsider to this group you’re learning about who are tied to everything. And then when you’ve finished the flashbacks and had one small conversation about it, their stories seem to be wrapped. I don’t recall any actual interaction, just exposition.
Add to that a dearth of the usual RPG setting stuff: a journey through various lands and towns full of NPCs with local flavor. Instead you’re in a non-sensical “Hogwarts” school but all the other students are gone so there’s no one but the party, a shopkeep, and the dungeons and foes. It never feels like there’s downtime or believable world, because you’re basically locked in a megadungeon. Without the ability to actually interact with the other players.
I will also say (spoiler):
I did not like when you finally get the big reveal about what your sister did, and the main protagonist suddenly goes all catatonic- I didn’t like it in FF6, and I still don’t like it here, though at least FF6 actually had them go to somewhere else instead of apparently tagging along with the party despite their complete loss of faith. It also makes the next story beats painfully rote, as you know they’re going to recover, and probably confirm that actually things weren’t as they seemed and you sister was the good guy all along. I finished up through the point the main protagonist returns to function, and then never loaded it back up.I don’t know if I stopped right before the final chapter, or if there was a bunch more after that, but yeah.
For the VR-inclined, I picked up Eye of the Temple which is a pretty stock-standard VR platform-puzzler, _vastly_ improved by an innovative(? I’ve never seen it before, anyways) movement mechanism that is very immersive. You have to actually move to move in-game, but through a combination of stepping onto cleverly mapped-out moving platforms and rollers, they ensure that you’re always effectively walking in circles in a small space in the real world, while you feel like you’re moving around a much larger space in the game. I can’t say enough how much more real this makes the VR experience feel.
Eye of the Temple is really good, but I got vertigo standing on some of the higher pillars, and I kept physically stumbling when moving blocks stopped because my body wanted to react to a force that isn’t really there. For those who can handle that better than I, it’s a cool game!
Balatro is probably finished. Managed to beat the highest difficulty with the “this deck is for making flushes” deck, through the power of slamming my head into it for nearly three days straight. Now I have a headache.
Creeper World 1 is a unique real-time-with-pause strategy-lite game, in which your enemy is essentially an endless liquid. Playable with mouse-only. It’s been fun through level 10, but also feels like levels are decided incredibly quickly; you either control the Creep out the gate or it kills you in the first five minutes. But having controlled it quickly, you’ve still got a long press forward to actually finish the level. Is the game going to add more variables? It just added flying Creep, maybe it’ll add Creep surges or something, something that would give it any level of threat past the first five minutes.
Lots of nitpicks on this one. The UI could use work, it took some doing to actually find the page that tells you what the various buildings do. Also the Storage building seems useless? If you’re storing juice then you’re below capacity, in which case you should just be building more stuff, especially since your turrets can move. Also it took me ten levels to realize my turrets could move. Also I keep forgetting your base will build everything simultaneously, so I place way too many buildings that then all drain resources from each other and finish much, much more slowly than they could have. (I am going to count that against the game, because ordering construction is, like, 90% of your gameplay; if you have to stop to let something build, then it means you’re largely sitting doing nothing. I was doing that before I started the game.)
Slay The Spire, still. Nothing more.
I’m a big fan of the Creeper World series but I will warn you that the pattern you’ve detected is something that goes through the series, while technically many missions in the later games try to put new spins on it by adding things like enemy generators activating over time or unique mission mechanics with rare exceptions it still boils down to: 1) period of rapidly establishing your defenses, 2) stabilization, 3) victory crawl. Although I will admit I’ve seen some people do mad dashes and winning maps that took me half an hour in under 5 minutes so if that’s your thing than you may find additional excitement there.
Having said that if you do enjoy the mechanics than I particularly recommend Creeper World 3 which comes with a massive library of additional maps, divided into two sets one of which is very difficult to the point where last time I checked there was community consensus a few are pretty much unbeatable in a legitimate way, plus player and iirc randomly generated maps.
Yeah, Creeper World 3 was my first introduction to the series, and while I haven’t played CW1 I read a Let’s Play covering the various games and I can see how CW3 has refined and built upon the ideas present in the first one. I find my play style has changed over time; I used to be a very turtle-y player in these sorts of games, and enjoyed the “victory crawl” phase, but I’ve become more aggressive and willing to take risks and push faster to try to cut things off and finish faster. Which I think comes down to building my skill at the game over time, and I like that it supports different playstyles at different skill levels.
Incidentally, the demo for the latest game in the series, Creeper World IXE, just dropped yesterday and I was trying it out last night. I kinda bounced off CW4, but this one’s caught my attention.
Oh, I haven’t seen there’s a demo. On the one hand I’m tempted but on the other I should probably skip it until the proper release or otherwise I’ll get frustrated I can’t play the full game yet.
Yeah, I actually really like the crawl because it’s the perfect playstyle for when you’re doing something else. Also, I just plain enjoy letting most of the map get flooded and then reclaiming it to the point where most of the time I don’t use certain tools that I consider OP and breaking that fun.
I missed the post last time because I basically couldn’t play anything the whole week with the exception of a couple casual puzzle games. Awful, terribly busy week. I was incredibly tired. But anyway, now I’m back.
Finished Crow Country. Man, what a game. A perfect survival horror experience. I loved every second of it. It’s the rare game where dying didn’t make me angry because I rarely lost due to an unfair circumstance and the time I did it was actually funny enough that I didn’t care. I love the atmosphere, the gameplay is well designed and the puzzles are varied and well thought out. My only complaint is that I thought a plot twist near the end was a bit predictable, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s supposed to be a plot twist or the game expects you to figure it out. Doesn’t matter. Fantastic game through and through.
Played the recently-launched Duck Detective: The Secret Salami through completion. Nice investigative adventure game with a cartoon style and humorous tone. Fun all around, but very short. It’s about 2 hours and not much in the way of replay value. I finished it up in one sitting. I don’t regret buying it at launch, though, it was cheap and fun enough. But I certainly hope a sequel or DLC comes up because I want more of it.
Started playing Dave the Diver. It’s that game where you spend the day diving and hunting for fish and treasure and the night managing a sushi bar. I was a bit apprehensive at first because I wasn’t sure the marriage of these two disparage style of games would work for me but, my God, this game is just so much fun. I can tell this is going to eat up a lot of my time.
We just made a super late start on Stardew, daughter gifted a copy and it turned out I had one in the pile’o’shame since forever so that’s this season’s multiplayer adventure. Very impressed with the core mechanical changes mods offer, we switched off the real-time pressure for more of a turn based resource management mode and it’s mostly been the two idiots yelling at each other in a cave simulator.
Solo mode has been Satisfactory and Moonring but they’re both on hold waiting for the next big update.
Played another short session of [b]Mass Effect[/b], basically just going around the Normandy after getting it for the first time and talking to everyone and clicking on anything that could be clicked. As is normal for Bioware, especially at the time, adding codex entries also gives you XP, which will help with leveling, so it is definitely not a waste to do that, but after that I didn’t have the time to explore one of the systems and finish off one of the story missions.
I would have been playing Starstruck Vagabond this week, but my card got a fraud alert just before it released and I’m still waiting for a new one
Having played the pre-release alpha though, I can say it’s a cozy game by Yahtzee Croshaw, described as Stardew Valley meets Elite Dangerous. The player character is a space trucker with one of nine predefined personalities, who interacts with weird, funny characters in between delivering boxes. The Alpha didn’t have much story, but it was very relaxing. Good game to play with a podcast on
I’m trapped in the Final Fantasy X-2 lategame by sunk costs. I could and maybe should just get back to the story and finish the game, but I enjoyed the sidequests for most of the game and I would hate for the time I spent scouring the world for cactuars to be for nothing.
I’m not really a completionist so in general I would be having an easier time letting go moving toward the ending, but the main story is really sparse and the sidequests felt like some much needed actual content for most of the game.
I overall enjoyed FFX-2 but being a completionist in that game is a nightmare hellscape. It has mechanics which were very blatantly meant to sell guides. The marriage and advertising quests stand out, “talk to everyone in the world every chapter and pick the correct option out of 5 with no clues for each one” is just miserable design.
Oh, and you pick between factions in the game and one of the choices literally can’t hit 100% completion in a single playthrough.
On the bright side, if you just mean “do a bunch of stuff” rather than “make the arbitrary number hit 100” then yeah, there’s tons to do. Every area has at least a little going on every chapter.
Oh shit abort abort the cactuar mission it ends with a superboss leave it be leave it be.
Funnily enough, also Stardew Valley and RimWorld. The former with a friend in multiplayer, and since this is at least our third farm together (plus my singleplayer save) I’ve decided to forego the endless watering before sprinklers by using the new ranching farm layout that starts you with two chickens, and going for ranching and fishing instead of crops.
In RimWorld I’m doing a playthrough going for the ending added by Vanilla Factions Expanded – Empire, trying to climb the social ranks to the top using the scenario it adds where you begin with an already-baron-rank pawn in the midst of a rebel attack on your estate. It’s a challenging start and I restarted several times, but I’m in a pretty good place relatively midgame at this point, though food remains a exciting challenge since I’ve ventured outside my usual comfort zone of “places crops grow year round outside” and can only grow outside for half the year (so grow lamps and a lot of hunting is keeping my people fed). I’m also trying out the latest expansion Anomaly, which – being generally horror-themed – I hadn’t found as interesting as some of the previous ones, since I’m not really big on horror. However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at what it brings to the table in terms of game systems, and I think we’re going to see some really interested mods built on it in the coming months that have nothing to do with horror.
Coming back to Strange Horticulture, which is an excellent puzzle game even if I do feel like sometimes I have to guess randomly. Maybe the devs are smarter than me grin. Awesome game either way.
I’m looking forward to whatever the recent teaser is pointing towards.
Agreed. Based on my enjoyment of the first game, I expect to be buying the new one as soon as it’s released.
Having finished Yakuza 3 I’ve played some shorter games. Guacamelee 2 is a very fun metroidvania with silly humour and tight controls. Some of the sequences near the end were basically close to the limit of my platforming competence, or at least what I could do in a reasonable number of attempts, so I gave up on the Optional And Very Hard Secret Challenges because assuming I could do them at all it would have taken hours.
The Wild Eternal is a walking sim/scavenger hunt. I enjoyed the exploration well enough and the narrative tier was intriguing but it suffers from staying sort of open ended as a clearly first part of at least a two part story. In fact the devs have said that they intended to make a direct sequel but seeing how the game came out in 2017 and there’s been no word since I’m not going to hold my breath.
Loddlenaut a very casual cross between Subnautica and “chore simulator” in the line of Powerwash Sim. Very short, very light, story is borderline non-existent. A perfectly fine game for a chill afternoon if you enjoy simple gameplay and feelgood vibes of cleaning the environment in a visible way and befriending cutesy critters.
Other than that still kinda replaying Dark Souls, after making a bunch of progress I’ve now been stuck on the DLC final boss for a while and it is frustrating. I’ve definitely reached the stage of asking the “why am I doing this to myself” question several times but I still go back in for more after a while.