T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m playing Dome Keeper: a little Roguelike with mining and defending your dome from shadow creatures. I’m having fun with the game and its simple but engaging gameplay loop. There isn’t a lot of variety imposed by the game between runs, it mostly comes from what dome and gadget you decide to bring with you. There are also assignments you can do, but they mostly consist of resources being rarer but rocks are easier to break or delivering 200 iron in 30 minutes. So far my favorite gadgets have been the Droneyard and the Drilling Rig but I should probably experiment with a few more different gadgets than I have been.
I’m also still playing Helldivers 2 I don’t have a lot to say. It’s a good game and it’s just updated and the new Terminid enemy is mean to me, and I don’t appreciate being crushed by it.
So what are you guys doing?
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
A Telltale Autopsy
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
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?
As well as some more Trails of Cold Steel 3, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and X4: Foundations, I tried to get Fallout London running this week. Unfortunately, it still has some crash and infinite loading screen issues on my computer and my install is not responding well to the usual fixes. I don’t have the capacity to keep troubleshooting it, and also I guess I don’t have the motivation. Fallout 4 is my least favourite Fallout, and obviously Fallout London being a mod of F4 will keep its basic character advancement system.
I was reminded of the existence of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, and that game is fantastic so I’m replaying it. I’m playing with no spares and it’s lucky that I like the game this much because I got pretty far in and died. Twice. But whatever, breaking up ships continues to be awesome. It’s nice that you can be careful or you can just go apeshit and either way works. Really the best is probably a combination of the two – barge stuff is very valuable and needs to be intact, processor and furnace should be in reasonably sized pieces for your convenience but they can definitely be smaller than the default, and fiddling very careful with the atmosphere controllers to depressurize the ship is a) not always possible and b) pretty pointless because letting air out through huge holes has very few consequences so long as you’re not floating right in front of it.
I do wish you could skip some of the dialogue stuff. It was nice the first time through but now I just need to sit through some of it. Ah well.
Since I’ve burned out on Elden Ring, I ended up installing Hades. It’s good, I can see why people wouldn’t shut up about it, though I wouldn’t say it’s mind-blowing or revolutionary. Just very, very solid at what it does. The tons of voiced dialogue is nice, but can also be annoying when you’ve binged it for two days straight and you’re just passing through ’cause you need 2 more effing keys and the game won’t give them to you so it’s another run.
Got my second crack at the surface but died with the boss 1-2 hits from death. I’d been cycling invincibility and vampire hits, but boss kept going lol turn invicible itself and bamf across the room so I couldn’t get my healing, then I popped out of cover one too many times and apparently was some fraction of a second on dash cooldown ’cause I should have i-framed the hit that killed me.
Yeah, Hades good, but it isn’t exceptional at anything it does.
I stopped after my first complete run, because at that point it was clear I’d seen most of the game and the rest of the content was only permutations of that, and the story really wasn’t engaging enough for me to grind through them.
Since it was a long weekend here, I got in two runs at The Old Republic. I only have Corellia left with my Sith Lord, Again, not as much fun as my Jedi Consular, but it has its moments. It’s difficult to fit Quinn’s betrayal in with my character, but easier than it would be if my character was completely evil. The change to not allow you to kill/abandon companions does somewhat hurt the stories, and the sad thing is at launch it matter more but now since all companions can do all roles equally well and there are difficulty levels you can take along any character and so they really could let you decide who you want to keep. Also pursuing a romance with Vette and the odd thing about that was that while my character was a complete flirt — he’s based on Mirror Universe Sisko — and so always flirted with her the way that game worked is that after he seduces one of her old companions after helping them out THAT was when Vette decided to declare her love for him and treat him like he was totally in love with her. Yeah, sure, whatever [grin].
Also got in two runs of Mass Effect 2, finishing off Omega. I didn’t really notice it before, but this time I definitely see the similarities between Aria and The Illusive Man, mostly in terms of bombastic, nonsensical speeches that you can’t really say anything interesting in response to. For example, when you get off the ship one of her lackeys says that you need to go see Aria, implying that Aria wants or needs to speak to you and will be quite cross if you don’t go, but when you meet her — my character said she’d go when she was ready and only went because Afterlife was literally right in front of her — Aria implies that you are seeking her out and not that she asked for you to be there. The one good thing there is that you can pretty much screw her over with the Patriarch by convincing him to go out in a blaze of glory when she wanted you to take him into hiding, and she ends up conceding the point that she should have let him die long ago, which is at least an example of her not dominating everything.
Picked up two new games this week, Clank! and Star Wars: Bounty Hunter.
Clank! is the digital version of the board game of the same name which I’ve played a few times previously (it’s been out for a few years). It’s a deck-builder game about stealing treasure from a dragon’s lair with a strong push-your-luck focus. Now that I can play multiple games in an hour (it plays pretty quickly with the AI), I’m a little less thrilled with it than when I’d only played three times, especially after getting to play my copy of the Slay the Spire boardgame with the same group of friends recently. Clank! has only two board layouts (though it’s in Early Access, so there might be more to come, I don’t know), and you play your entire hand of five cards each turn, so there’s less strategy compared to StS’s energy costs on cards; you just play your hand, get various amounts of the different resources (boots for movement, swords for killing monsters, skills for buying cards, and gold for buying upgrades at shops), and choose how to play them. That said, there is still strategy involved in what cards you buy each turn, and whether you lean into accruing “clank!” (which makes the dragon more likely to hurt you during attacks) in exchange for more powerful cards, or try to minimize it and risk getting left behind once other players start escaping the dungeon (or get knocked out) and initiate a three-turn countdown to end the game.
Star Wars: Bounty Hunter is a remake of the same game from 2002 where you play as Jango Fett during events leading up to Episode II. It’s Steam Deck verified and runs fine on my Deck, but frustratingly won’t run on my desktop; it’s actually been several years since I last bought a Windows-only game and it didn’t “just work” with Proton, so that was an unpleasant surprise. That aside, it’s actually a pretty decently fun game. Definitely still a few minor quibbles with things like changing weapons, but the control scheme is apparently much better than the original from what I’ve seen, and the actual gameplay is generally fun in the moment. I wouldn’t say it’s one of the great Star Wars games, but I would say it’s a respectably solid entry. The animation is good, and has some of that old-school charm of being just slightly exaggerated for comedic effect; this isn’t a game that takes itself too seriously, it knows you just want to have fun playing a cool bounty hunter in the Star Wars universe.
Oh? there is a digital version of Clank! Does it feature Steam Remote Play?
It doesn’t have Remote Play Together listed on the store page, if that’s what you mean. It does have local pass-‘n’-play functionality and is in Early Access so it might get added in the future.
Rocking the Medieval Phantasy Spectaculum or MPS for short in Bückeburg. Tasting a lot of Beerenweine and dancing to Harmony Glen, Mr. Hurley and others. In games we are nearing the soft-lock of Bellwright. When you cannot progress without freeing a village. Freeing a village is possible by defeating the best equipped an very accurate guard who can one-shot you. Fun for the whole family.
Started replaying Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. The combat is often irritating, the parkour alternates between janky and incredibly smooth, and the story is way too heavy on tailing and eavesdropping missions… but sneaking through a base, killing enemies and disabling alarm bells, is very satisfying, and when the combat actually responds to my inputs it’s pretty fun too
Also got the mobile version of A Dark Room, an idle game/RPG that I’ve played through the Browser version of probably a dozen times. The mobile version has more story to it, and a branching story at that, with the branching tied to play style in a way that makes the second run very different from what I’m used to
Also on mobile, a lot of Stone Story RPG, a game that mostly plays itself with the player simply choosing to swap out equipment and use items. It’s surprisingly enjoyable on a gameplay level, and the story and dialogue has some charm and are rare enough that they don’t get in the way of the gameplay