T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m still playing Rimworld.
Right now my life consists of just playing Rimworld with the occasional game of Call of Cthulhu mixed in.
I did get the Royalty DLC before the summer sale ended. I haven’t gotten to in-depth yet, but I’m really enjoying the quest variety, and the psychic stuff is pretty cool.
What’s going on with everyone else?
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Patreon!
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
PC Gaming Golden Age
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Death Stranding has consumed my brain. Quite enjoying rambling around the map exploring. Kind of wish a little bit that the game would acknowledge you at all if you go anywhere other than where it tells you to go next. I’m not saying you should be able to play it in any order, but if I go exploring and find an enclave I haven’t been pointed at yet, it’d be kind of nice if they’d say “Wow! What’re you doing out here? Can you connect us yet?” instead of steadfastly refusing to speak to me at all, and then, when someone sends me to them 10 minutes later, gushing “We’re so glad to see you! We’ve been waiting for this for years!”
Also, they made me – briefly, thank goodness! – use a gun with a console controller. I don’t know how you people do it.
Bearing in mind that Death Stranding was, to my knowledge, the first Kojima game I actually played I thought the story was something of a mess if I’m to be honest, although I have seen comments to the effect that this is “Kojima when he’s not reigned in” and not necessarily meant as a positive so maybe it’s not just me. Having said that the actual traversal engine is absolutely amazing. Probably the most kinaesthetically engaging gameplay I have ever experienced.
I finished up Cryptmaster. Overall I enjoyed it, though the ending did feel a bit abrupt. Apparently they do have some kind of plan to add a world map, which would be quite appreciated. I got a lot of the riddles but found some I couldn’t figure out, which is probably the right place for riddles to be even if it feels frustrating to miss some. And there’s a whole set of “crypticism” puzzles which I couldn’t even begin to solve (well, one of them had an obvious answer but you also have to figure out where to provide it). The word combat is cool conceptually but ends up being kind of easy, it’s hard to lose while you have souls available to use the more powerful words. I didn’t get all the words for any of the characters but I’m accepting that completionism isn’t worth it for me in a lot of games.
I’m also playing a bit more Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s a very well designed game but I don’t find myself super eager to play it and I’m wondering if I just don’t like RPGs as much as I used to. Kind of a shame if so. I’m still going to play it, though. I do have a bear friend now, that’s pretty sweet.
Park Beyond, Screw Drivers and Bellwright were played last week. I’m close to downloading a trainer for Park Beyond, as I hate waiting for stuff like the imposification meter. But not yet. A trainer for Bellwright might make the game better an less grind-y, but it’s a coop session – so no cheating.
In Screw Drivers I build a vehicle that might make it to over 600km/h according to its stats. But before testing if its remotely controllable I had to switch to Bellwright.
Got POOLS while it was on sale and tried it out. It’s basically…it’s sort of a…you walk around in a strange place that has all the visual trappings of an Escher-esque public pool as interpreted by ChatGPT on acid. It’s all nicely tiled with pools of nice clean water that you may or may not need to wade through (it never seems to get higher than about your waist) with the occasional water slide or bit of pool decor, just jumbled up with all sorts of nonsensical architecture. It’s kind of horror-related, and that isn’t usually my jam; I got it because I read it specifically has zero monsters or jump scares, the tension comes from wandering alone in this weird place (which has plenty of dimly lit sections). There are a few places you can die, which are usually pretty obvious like the diving board over a bottomless black pit, but if you do the game simply rewinds to before you took the final step, so it doesn’t feel too scary. It’s on the edge between horror and meditative experience as you slowly walk around exploring the fantastic architecture, and I like the “public pool” aesthetic, so I’ve been enjoying it in bits and pieces (I’ve completed 5 out of 6 chapters so far), often with a YouTube video on in the background to help break the tension.
Also continued my RimWorld playthrough where I’ve been exploring the new stuff from the Anomaly expansion that released a few months ago. I wasn’t really sure about Anomaly when it was announced, with it being horror-themed (see above), but it’s grown on me. Horror kind of requires a sense of mystery, and while the various anomalies were scary the first time round, they lose that sense of mystery once you’ve encountered them and know what they do. And while I expected that to kill my interest in them, I’ve instead come to appreciate it as a source of several threats that aren’t just more human raiders/insectoids/mechanoids; some of the threats spice up a playthrough in novel ways. I find myself really looking forward to about six months from now when modders have got to grips with the new systems added and start coming up with some really innovative new mods using them. I’m up to about 30 colonists now and firmly in the mid- to late-game and am thinking about finally awakening the obelisk to end the Anomaly storyline, then (since you can continue on from it) trying for the Royalty ending for the first time in over *checks* 1,100 hours of playtime.
Edit: if you’re into mods, Vanilla Psycasts Expanded is widely considered one of the best ones; it overhauls the psycasts to have more control over the ones you get, adds several dozen new ones with some wild effects, and categorizes them in various “trees” based around themes like Skipmaster, Frostshaper, and Chronopath.
I tried lovers in a dangerous spacetime for the first time this week-end with friends. Really good.
And I started a new run of Hollow Knight, because my son started playing and it made me want to play too. Several years later I only vaguely remember the order of exploration and where (and when) to get each ability, so it feels fresh again. I love this game.
Again, didn’t get another run in of The Old Republic, but did manage to get in two sessions of Mass Effect. After the game bumped up the Paragon points of my “I’m not a nice person!” character on Feros (all I did was get them the stuff they needed in the area I was going anyway and take the option to not slaughter the mind controlled humans of the colony), I bumped up my Renegade points on Noveria by being the bully that we all know my character can be (in fact, there’s a cool dialogue with Parasini where she says that in the corporate world you can’t just bully your way through things and my character’s response was that she’s pretty good at bullying). On Virmire, I ran into the already mentioned issue where you get Paragon points for taking things on yourself and trying to make things easier for the Salarian team, but about the only one where that wasn’t just the obvious choice was with the alarm, but my character didn’t draw attention over to them because she felt she could handle things and she wanted to keep more of them alive longer to help out. As usual, my character chose to save Ashley and not Kaiden, although there was no romance involved here (my character is not romancing anyone in ME and may not do that in ME2 either). So I’m pretty close to the end there.
There are a number of really good scenes in Mass Effect, but the overall plot seems to be a bit detached from the side quests and the like. So far, my opinion is that I kinda liked it but I liked Dragon Age Origins better, which makes sense because I like the overall series better.
Good luck not romancing anyone in Mass Effect – I remember trying to do that and being cornered by love interests near the end of the story, demanding that I choose between them. The game just can’t seem to imagine that you wouldn’t want to romance someone.
Anyway, I told them I wasn’t interested (as best you can when hampered by dialogue choices that don’t seem to understand) and Liara still came to my cabin at a key point in the story to tell me how strong and sexy I was in a sultry voice.
Kind of irritating, but did give me the amusing image of Shepard chasing Liara out of her cabin, yelling “GET OUT!” and firing water out of a spray bottle at her.
I’ll have to wait and see if I get Liara taking another shot again, but with Kaiden dead and a female Shepard there’s no chance of them demanding I choose. I was fairly harsh with Liara in the response you can give to indicate that you’re not interested, so maybe that one will get skipped. If not … well, my character is not a nice person and so that yelling part would likely happen [grin].
Brotato. Forgot to mention last week it’s got a Mouse Only mode, which I’ve been using exclusively. It could be better; instead of the mouse moving the character directly, it moves the mouse cursor and the character follows it. Not only does that mean you can try to move one way and not move the cursor far enough to actually change the character’s direction, but also the mouse cursor is the same color as the bullets, in a game about filling the screen with bullets. But I did find out that clicking the mouse stops the character moving wherever they are, which is important for some characters.
The game is fun, but it could use more enemy patterns. It’s got the six difficulty settings which change them slightly, but it’s the same basic pattern every run, with just a bit of variation on when and what the elites are. At least the characters change things up with their strengths and limitations.
So Phoenix Point is – as someone said a couple of week ago – a good concept marred by jank and questionable design choices. So the developers made exactly the right move:
adding mod support!
Yep, file of those rough edges with community-made content that tweaks the game to your preference. It’s worked wonders.
Getting certain building to generate key resources so you’re less reliant on the ******* RNG to make progress in the game – or worse, just keep up with the ever-growing demands of the situation.
Enabling the console so I can directly edit faction relations, stopping them ******* murdering each other in the late game or bitching about the fact that I’m saving another faction’s innocent civilians from the eldritch monsters that threaten all of us.
YOU DICKHEADS.
And best of all, removing the need to track or build ammo for your weapons. Removes an annoying headache, and has positive knock-on repercussions for the rest of the game. No resource drain, scavenging missions are more fun and more rewarding, new weapons are ready to use from the get-go, etc.
I’m sure a lot of this stuff goes utterly againsts the game as the developers intended, but whatever. And there’s loads of (oddly popular) mods to make the game both harder and more complex if people want. That’s the beauty of mod support, baby!
That might have been me. I should take another look at the available mods and maybe try that no-ammo one; I decided to try another playthrough when the Terror from the Void overhaul mod came out, but it still has all ammo types. I wouldn’t necessarily mind having, like, “a few” types of ammo, like say if sniper rifles, assault rifles, heavy weapons, handguns, and shotguns all had their own unique types. But different ammo for every single gun in the game is just busywork.
Finished Dragon Age Origins and its DLC, and moved on to Dragon Age Awakening. Origins is still a joy to me, I played it four times between release and 2016, this is my first revisit of it this decade. It was my first time trying to mod it a bit, and while there’s not a ton of user content available it did spruce up the look of the armors and character models, which was one of the weak points even for the time. Enjoying Awakening so far – I skipped it a couple times in the old days so I think this is only run #3, and it feels quite fresh.
Took a break from Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. The gameplay is fine since I made my weapons useful, and I can listen to Ashly Burch voice act all day, but the game’s missing something and I think it’s a Handsome Jack. He was a) funny and b) enough of a dick to keep you motivated playing through because you really wanted to get to a scene where you could shove some Torgue hardware right up his nose.
Playing Control now. My video card can do the raytracing, so I left it on. I absolutely freakin’ love the fully customizable difficulty. There are mods, but I don’t need them; the game lets me say “hey, I’m not 14 any more and I want to explore this building and hear the story without experiencing “do it again, stupid” every 10 minutes.” I would happily have given the developers money just for that. Great atmosphere, too.
Very little time to play this week. Still going through Batman: Arkham Knight, Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, The Case of the Golden Idol and Justice League: Cosmic Chaos, but advanced very little in each one. I mean, I played Arkham Knight a lot, but the game is just so chock-full of padding that I don’t feel I’ve made any progress. Granted, I’ve been deliberately avoiding the main plot as much as I can, but man, are the sidequests repetitive as hell.
One new addition: I started to play the original Resident Evil, as it’s been just relaunched on GOG. I don’t care what anyone says, I think the game holds up really well. Yes, it’s clunky and cheesy as all hell, but still a lot of fun. Though I vastly prefer the next two sequels, which are slated to also release later in the year.
Next week I have a few days off work, so I’ll finally be able to plunge into gaming a bit more, hopefully.
I beat the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC for Elden Ring yesterday. What struck me the most is that, despite the overall map size being (understandably) much smaller than the base game, it’s far more dense. Just about any direction you go has a couple of different branches to explore, and those branches themselves often lead to entire new areas, or at least a dungeon to explore or a mausoleum to fight a boss in. It’s great.
Also, the final boss is complete horseshit. I really hate how these days, FromSoft can only ever make a boss harder by making it flip the fuck out and spam a dozen attacks that you have to dodge-roll perfectly through in order to be able to hit the boss even once. And this boss in particular has over 46000 HP (before buffs from summoning in allies!) and 40% resistance to everything except piecing damage. I finally managed by converting all my blue flasks to red and using a +25 antspur rapier set to blood.
Interesting. I’ve been feeling like a lot of areas of the map are extremely barren. Maybe it’s just ’cause they don’t look quite as nice? natural? whatever as the main game, but I’ve definitely had portions where I’m scouring for stuff and just thinking it’s not up to snuff. Like, the main game is designed to have some big areas that are just for passing through soaking up the vibes (there’s a bunch of empty countryside around these old castles), and this feels like it isn’t, but just did it anyway . Unlike the normal world, this does not feel like a normal lived in place- it feels more like a crumbling mashup apocalypse like DS3’s dlc, or le gasp, DS2! Or maybe it’s just that I find the “black terrain under green filter” vibe so bleh. (For reference, I’ve hit the elevator up to the Black Keep or whatever, but I’m gonna finish sweeping the blue coast and the Rueh? ruins before that, go up the mountain some if I need a break later)
Not looking forward to that final boss then, which is odd, because I’d been told the dlc was great for shield users. If it’s just more of the same endgame as the main game’s jumping spinning camera eff’d sixteen exploding attack nonsense, well that’s a shame.
My biggest criticism so far is are actually those mausoleums. I like fighting through forts full of dudes, or the occasional tomb, or at least a cave. Instead my reward for exploring is. . . a 20’x20′ room with another one of the DM’s special NPCs with a whole new set of magic items written just for them who can 2-shot my tank and take dozens of full attacks to take down. The actual new content in the dlc ranges from fine to great, but a lot of the gameplay content is just DMPCs, and it’s not hard to tell why: It’s far easier to make a set of weapon, armor, and spell, slap them on an NPC that drops them on death, and hey look it’s a “boss” with something people want. The fact that these “bosses” specifically allow summoning other players, but not summoning spirit ashes, when there are already so few places to play around with spirit ashes, takes one of the best parts of the game and slaps it in the face. Extra players won’t result in an epic fight, just a 2v1 ganking of no note, so why even bother? This results in me just spamming giant hunt cheese (same as I’d do if summoned) to get through the what, I’m up to like four of these I’ve cleared now, not counting the *other* major fights that are just NPCs with new weapons?
I like the new game content, and I like some of the new weapons, but new weapons is not game content.
I am playing CRPGs and JRPGs, so it’ll be more or less the same week on week. After finishing a quick run of New Vegas, I’m back to Trails of Cold Steel 3, and I’ve also started replaying Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous now that many DLCs have been released for it that flesh out some of the Mythic Paths and NPCs and quests.
It sounds like you’re having a great time with Rimworld! The Royalty DLC definitely adds a lot of depth with the quests and psychic abilities—it’s almost like a whole new game. Mixing in some Call of Cthulhu sounds like a nice change of pace too. I’m curious, have you had any particularly memorable moments in Rimworld lately? The game can get pretty wild with its random events and storytelling.
I’ve not really had a whole lot happen in Rimworld that I can remember. I did have a fun moment in Call of Cthulhu. We were in a house getting hunted by a blind monster,
and someone decided to hide as a standing lamp while a crazy miner chucked a stick of dynamite about a football field away too distract it.