T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve gotten to play a bit of Phasmophobia. I quite like the new map, and the quality of life improvements are very appreciated. Especially a dedicated space for the lighter. I don’t have much more to say about it due to writing this right after playing only an hour, but I will probably be playing more.
I’m also still playing Rimworld. Not much happening other than paving everything outside of my base and accumulating as much wealth as possible.
What’s going on with everyone else?
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
PC Hardware is Toast
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
The Mistakes DOOM Didn't Make
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
Dead or Alive 5 Last Round
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
I finished Nine Sols. Overall I enjoyed it a lot. While it is a Metroidvania, it’s a very linear one – there are a couple of points in the game where you choose which of 2 areas to do next but in general you have to do things in a specific order. This is unusual for the genre but not actually a problem. It also helps mitigate one of the huge metroidvania sins, which is that the game doesn’t have map pins at all. Always include map pins.
In general the difficulty of the game was hard but reasonable, but the last boss was a massive step up. It turns out that near the end of the game you make a choice, and while the choice seems unrelated to the boss, it actually can add an entire third stage to the fight. And you can’t go back and change your mind. I picked the 3 stage option and I was on that fight for hours, way longer than anything else in the game. It was satisfying when I won but until then it felt a bit like throwing myself at a wall. I wish it had been signposted, especially since once you beat the game it lets you go back and make the choice again, and while beating the 2 stage version at that point was kind of hilariously easy, it still probably would have been better to play in the other order.
I’ve also started Baldur’s Gate 3. Game seems pretty good. As a Dark Urge I did kind of bite off Gale’s hand, but through the power of reloads he got better. It’s interesting to see what’s brought in straight from 5th edition and what they’ve adjusted.
I’ve finished Elden Ring, and Mirandala is now Elden Lord. I chose the “Perfect Order” ending because in games from this publisher, the best you can hope for is the finale that seems to suck least for the world. They work overtime to make that very ambiguous. I had fun exploring all the amazing landscapes and I will probably pick up the DLC when I can afford it.
Kudos to the game for making me decide whether to
prevent Melina from sacrificing herself. One of the big themes of the From Software games is agency, and there were a few times when I had to decide whether to respect an NPC’s wishes even if I had spoilers that it wasn’t going to work out well. I appreciate a game like Papers, Please that makes me think about the ethics of what my character is doing.I played the demo for Tactical Breach Wizards and really liked it. The gameplay is a lot like Into the Breach – turn based action with very clear, predictable outcomes, based around pushing enemies into position and using the environment creatively (mostly by throwing enemies out of windows). Also, the writing is funny.
Not much this week, mostly Slap the Spire and Chess, with a bit of Balatro, the norm.
Dusted off Monster Train, a game I haven’t played since my attempt at language stuff. The game loaded in French, which was workable back when I remembered what all the cards did. The runs also started at Covenant Level 20, which was workable back when I remembered what all the cards did. No separate slots like Slay the Spire, so restarting would wipe out all my progress, so just dropped the difficulty and did a few initial team runs with all the stuff still unlocked. The Hellfire Hero is still the weakest one in the game, and I didn’t win a single run until I switched him out. But the game is still quite fun, and I accidentally unlocked an achievement with a 6% completion rate, for winning a run with Googly Eyes turned on.
Finished my latest WoW binge month. Made to 60 and was able to get 6/8 pieces of my dungeon set. Also ran a Mc pug and got my T1 shoulders. I think one more month and I can say that I’ve “finished” WoW. I don’t want to raid long term, but I’d to see all of them at least once. So if I can resubscribe this fall and pug ZG, AQ, Ony, and BWL, I can call it good. I’m not counting Naxx since I ran it in Wrath classic.
Elden Ring. I started a third character, aiming to play around with the Spinning Strikes ash on a pike, and maybe do some dex stuff? But no casting. First of course I had to get the pike and the stats to wield it, and also the stats to survive basic mobs, so going around and gearing up I had to use something, and before you know it I’m once again in options paralysis where I want to use like six different weapons and the most you can keep at an appropriate upgrade tier is like 3, if you’re stretching it. By the time I get Spinning Strikes I’m already pretty sure the novelty will wear off in seconds and I’d rather just use Impaling Thrust, which turned out to be better than expected (and of course Giant Hunt, which was apparently the big tech I’d wanted for my whole last character. But if you’re not using energy damage you need a blunt weapon, and the best 1-hand blunt weapon was my main last run so I don’t want to rerun that, but the only other one that doesn’t suck is so boring (plain clubs), and I did say I wanted to try some dex but if you want to block without ridiculous strength you need to give up the cool weapon skills and use the block boosting skill, and. . .
The ash of war system letting you switch the skill and damage types on your weapons whenever you wish is great, but only highlights the drag of the weapon upgrade system that punishes you for not staying with a exactly 1-2 weapons with no changes from as early as possible. There are various weapons that use a separate upgrade material, but they’re usually either bland or gimmicks, and you can’t change their skills or damage types so they’re just not fun.
So between that, and the many more levels I need before I can even wield the gear I want properly, and I’ve near burnt myself out in the early game. But a friend was just catching up blazing through the endgame so I guess I have incentive to go back to the character I’ve got who’s finished the final boss but still has a couple zones (and now a whole DLC) to clear. And said character, being at the end of endgame, can just dump a bunch of stockpiled cash into upgrade materials to use a new weapon, say, a pike.
Got in another run with my Sith Warrior in The Old Republic. The Sith Warrior was I think the first story that I finished, and I think I still like this set of characters the best out of all of them. Just waiting for Baras’ sudden but inevitable betrayal, which I think everyone should have seen coming given how he treats everyone ELSE who works for him.
Also played more Mass Effect. I’m leaving the story missions to the end and am just doing exploration, and I admit I kinda like how the game tends to give you quests when you enter a new sector, some of which spawn multiple planets and areas. Some of them are pretty interesting, too. They also give me more opportunities to be Renegade or Paragon, but again the odd thing is that for my character whose tagline in TOR was “I’m not a nice person!” the Paragon options — or, at least, the top options on the right side of the dialogue wheel which are supposed to be the nicer ones — when I hear the full sentences seem to express her personality perfectly. In one case, there was a terrorist who had bombs and was going to activate them to kill some innocents and my character decided to not just kill him and so trigger the bombs, and her response was that he can go but she was going to hunt him down afterwards, which is EXACTLY what my character would have said. In another case, she talked down a cult leader by pointing out that if he didn’t surrender his people were going to get killed when more troops were sent in to deal with him and so he wasn’t protecting them, and when he said that he needed to talk his people down before leaving she allowed him to … but said that if he wasn’t waiting outside later she was going to have to deal with him with violence, which is what my character would have done. It’s a bit odd and leaves the character pretty balanced, which is fine for this run because I really just want to act like that character and see what happens.
Also, I find that due to the nature of the game and my time constraints I can only play for about 1 – 2 hours a session before wanting to move on to something else, but then I do sometimes want to play it the next day as well — I have time blocked off for it once a week — which is interesting.
Warhammer: Chaosbane is a mediocre Diablo 3-like that I picked up for like five Euros. I’ve run through the game with most of the characters, and decided to start a new game with the dwarf engineer, and found her surprisingly compelling. She has -a lot- of firepower handy; the Heroic Mortar skill will cheerfully clear rooms and wipe out a boss with one casting, while the Mastered Test Bombs deal a lot of damage over a moderate area and, since they have no cooldown, can be spammed as long as you have energy handy.
I realized a little too late that I probably thought wrong, and while the armour set that gives me the Heroic Mortar is fun, I would probably be doing better with the set that amplifies all of my fire damage. Unfortunately, by the time I realized this I had sold off all the pieces, so now I’m trying to reassemble the kit with limited success. The RNG keeps giving me pieces I already have, or that have inferior modifiers, and doesn’t seem to feel like giving me anything that would actually be good for me. Ah well.
I’ve also been playing Gladius: Relics of War which is a turn-based strategy set in Warhammer 40K, on the titular planet which has become so messed up by warp storms and terraforming that the map is randomized, and you can find arctic regions right next door to scorching deserts or volcanic wastelands. The plot isn’t at all important, and there’s no diplomacy system: the only ways to win are to kill everyone else (fairly easy), or complete your unique faction quest line (very difficult). Most players tend to turn the quests off because they’re a pain in the ass.
I did a campaign as the Imperial Guard because tanks, and am presently doing one as the Tau. The early game is pretty miserable for any faction; you have hardly any resources or options, doing anything takes ages, and you are surrounded by large numbers of things that will often literally eat your troops alive. If you have the bad luck of starting near a pack of Kastellan Robots, there’s not much you can do other than restart, or just pray they leave you alone for long enough to start fielding anti-armour units in useful numbers.
Still pretty fun once you get past that hurdle, though. The game’s monetization scheme is not as bad as some I’ve seen, but that bar is subterranean. If you want to play with Chaos, say, or the Eldar, or Tyranids, you need to shell out cash. There are also unit packs which give each faction one new unit that’ll cost you ten Euros or more a piece. Now, these aren’t game breakers by any means, but still. Sheesh.
Still playing Starstruck Vagabond. Finished a run with my Upbeat Altruist character, started over as a Private Egoist to try to see some of the other crew members. I’ve only got two so far, and one of them I got in my previous run, but the one new one I have got I like pretty well
Starting in on Alan Wake 2. Hrm. But I don’t really remember everything that happened in the first one.
Good thing there’s a whole LP on this very website of the original that is amusing and informative.