T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m unsurprisingly playing video games.
I’ve gotten a little distracted with other games and haven’t played any Alice: Madness Returns.
I’ve also hit a wall in Crypt of the NecroDancer, I’ve beaten the game with Cadence and Melody, but Aria is a huge step up in difficulty. It’s hard to get passed one floor with half a heart, only the dagger and taking damage if you miss a beat. You do get one revive but that can only do so much.
On a different note, I got some tower defenses from Humble Bundle and started playing GemCraft – Chasing Shadows. I like tower defenses but something about this one is extra appealing and I can’t figure out what.
I also have been considering binging the entire Borderlands franchise. I’ve never beaten the first one and it’s been a long time since I’ve played any of the others. I don’t know when I’ll do that, but when I do it’ll be an undertaking.
Anyway what is everyone else up to?
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
I keep bouncing around between games.
After telling myself I was going to put it down again, I resumes Tactics Ogre Reborn for the Switch. I think I like the idea of the game more than the execution – or perhaps I don’t have the patience for a long tactical RPG.
I bounced off Borderlands a long time ago. It didn’t click with me the same way Diablo or Doom did. I was more of a Deus Ex kinda guy. I had fun playing the campaign of Borderlands 3 with my brothers after some convincing
The first Borderlands is kinda rough particularly as far as the tone is concerned. From what I’ve heard the development was mostly done before they pivoted towards comedy and essentially sprinkled some humorous (your mileage may vary) elements on top of it.
I played through Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus. It’s a metroidvania based on Japanese mythology, though it invents its own stuff too. I’ve seen it compared to Nine Sols a lot but I don’t think that’s very valid – yes, they’re the same genre, but Nine Sols gameplay was all about parries while Bo is entirely a platforming game, and really they’re both heavily Hollow Knight inspired because, well, it was awesome. In combat you’re rewarded for staying in the air and never touching the ground, and the game gives you the tools to do it, starting with the mechanic where every time you hit an enemy (or some objects) you refresh your midair jump (actually if you don’t hit something you don’t have a double jump at all).
The story for Bo is mostly pretty straightforward – there’s a giant skeleton monster and you want to figure out how to stop it from killing everyone. Some of the sidequests are amusing – there’s one where you’re escorting a group of Kitsunes to a wedding (no, you don’t need to protect them, it’s not that kind of escort quest), and whenever their path is blocked the music stops and they turn to face the screen, I liked that touch. But overall the plot felt kind of generic. I was also not happy with the epilogue after beating the final boss, when
you go to the afterlife and talk to all the characters who died in the game about how really they’re totally ok with it.I’ve also been playing Nova Drift, which is a space shooter with tank controls and screen wrap where you fight successive waves of enemies and get upgrades. It’s kind of roguelite, since you unlock new upgrade (and difficulty) options as you play. I like the various builds you can do it it – you can focus on making your gun good, or there’s ways to do damage with shields, or with summons, or you can ram into enemies or burn them with your thrusters. Several builds in the game involve giving up the ability to use your gun completely for other benefits. The funniest run I had was with an upgrade which constantly damages all enemies near you, but it also constantly damages you – once you get a setup where you can actually survive the massive self damage, it works great.
It does feel like there’s some odd balancing going on. Like, the shield that slows enemy shots that are near you feels better than the others. The railgun feels absolutely miserable in the early game compared to every other weapon choice. The architect ship confuses me because it’s very good at having exactly one summon, while the engineer ship is very good at having 20 of them, and 20 is more than 1.
I do appreciate the number of rerolls it gives you on upgrade choices – you can go into a run with an intended build and the game lets you get there.
I’m playing Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and being more frustrated then entertained. 2D-Platformers just aren’t my thing. Tons of Do it again, stupid. This entry erased all the flow and all humor 2008 PoP had. Visuals are meh because all the fidelity is in non-interactable backgrounds. The fighting system is more frustrating – no blocking, just countering. Still playing and I don’t know why.
Then I started Persona 5 – Royal. 4 hours in and it’s still very, very linear. I know from P4 that it will open up but till now its a ton of visual novel without much gameplay. Also the characters (till now) are very similar to P4 reclaiming the same stereo types. I’ll see how things will change.
Other than that the last festival of the season went down – Spirit from the Streets. Lot’s of Punk, Oi! and Ska with Oxo86, The Baboon Show, Ton Steine Scherben, Buster Shuffle and more. Fun, dance and drinks 4 days straight.
I started up Kingmaker and have been going hard ever since. Like literally stayed up all night 24 hours in game no eating. Which when you put it that way sounds pretty bad. I have mounds to say on the many things this does better than Neverwinter Nights and then turns around and whiffs on other completely basic things, and the enemies, and the classes, and the video game adaptation stuff, etc,, but bottom line is: they made a DnD game which is actually turn based. The thing I’ve been wanting so bad for so long I apparently didn’t even realize just how bad.
(Yes I know I’ve heard RttToEE was actually turn based, but it’s old enough getting it to run is a pain (and it’s probably limited core only), but this is far more recent and works immediately.)
On top of that, it’s got a new setting for me. I’ve never read any Pathfinder books and generally whenever I hear about its setting stuff it comes off as “this thing you’ve seen before but worse and with stupid names.” But presented in this way, absorbing relevant bits like how I got half my realmslore feel from NWN, it’s got bits that are a lot more interesting.
I feel like Kingmaker benefits from happening “locally”. So sure, some major world history is mentioned and divinities are relevant (as they would be in a world with physically manifest deities and clergy capable of performing actual miracles) but they function primarily as background to the local story. I have some opinions about bits of writing and I think that in parts of the game the seams show a bit, personally I suspect that entire chapters were moved around and not everything was smoothed over, but the main story was still fun and interesting enough to keep me invested. Now Wrath of the Righteous is much more grandiose and much more involved in The Big Lore in a way that I personally really liked but I can see how its over the top nature could put some people off.
As a bit of trivia, Kingmaker was actually not originally turn based. The turn based mode was initially introduced as a mod and later on Owlcat either hired or worked with the modder to add it to the game officially based on that mod.
I thought I’d heard that, and it lurches sometimes like it’s being yanked back into line out of a real-time thing, so I’m not surprised. I don’t know how you’d play this on anything more difficult than “normal,” which is actually weaker crits (standard even in NWN) and also 20% less damage from everything, without turn-based control though. There’s a bunch of tags for pause after this and that and something else, dunno if those were there originally either, but if you need to pause constantly to try and micro your idiots, it’s pretty obvious what you should have done in the first place. I have no idea why so many DnD games refused to actually let you play DnD.
Like seriously, the AI will run your guys straight into your grease, web, etc. Which have hitboxes larger than the graphics on screen, when you can even see them (grease practically disappears after round 1), so even micro-ing them around it yourself is likely to fail unless you’re using reach weapons (hey, we actually have reach weapons!). And you’re constantly fighting groups of like 9 guys level 3-6 when you’ve got a party of 6 guys level 4, maybe 5. So those lockdown spells need to work, and you can’t have people walking into them. NWN defaulted to no friendly fire as the only way to fix this, and had various constant immunity items even if you turned it off. I don’t think Kingmaker even has that as an option, and the magic item situation so far is yikes.
I’m playing on Actual Normal difficulty, which is custom, because the options are “literally easier than the base stats” normal, and “everything is more powerful than base stats” challenging. That is downright bizarre. Setting crits and enemy damage to normal is actually custom (and turning on the rebuild option, also mentioned in major mods, because PF has even more feats and features you can screw up choices on, even someone who knows what they’re doing will screw up multiple characters through the run). I suppose I still might consider turning crits back down since getting crit bombed just means a reload so why bother. And considering the damage I’m starting to see on these beasts, hey look it’s proof of what I’ve always been saying what happens if you char-op your monsters, and is probably why they had to make “normal” actually reduced damage on everything.
Yeah, my original playthrough of the game was actually when the update happened so I experienced part of the game with the mod and part with official turn based, I remember it having an occasional hiccup back then. I imagine playing it real time is no worse than playing ye olde isometric real-time-with-pause RPGs but given the option I have neither the situational awareness nor the desire to try keeping track of where everyone is in real time.
I have not given much thought to the difficulty, I seem to remember I swapped something early on and definitely near the end of the game I just dropped it lower because I find the endgame slog annoying most of the time and it’s just several map of the same encounter over and over, with an extra added sauce of a particular ability that you’re either ready for or is particularly annoying.
I’m currently playing BG2 right now, and I’d definitely stick it on a turn-based mode if I could, at least for the harder fights. I’m alright with RTwP in Dragon Age, but that has its own ruleset; I think it’s worse when it’s using rules written for turn-based play, which both BG1-2 and Pathfinder Kingmaker/WotR are.
Oh yeah, BG and BG2 are actually turn based under the hood effectively giving us kinda “worst of both worlds”. You have to keep attention in real time (with pause) but if you tell a character to, say, cast a spell but the turn is already a second in under the hood it you’ll effectively have to wait the remaining five seconds of the round and possibly another six seconds if the spell casts at the end of the actual casting round.
I finished off my Sith Warrior in The Old Republic, so next up is my Smuggler character. I’ve shuffled the characters that I will be playing a bit for the TOR Diary on my blog, as originally I was going to use Tori Vega here (from “Victorious”) and then had penciled in Cat Valentine from the same show as the Trooper, because it makes a nice linked story for them, as the idea is that they were all in a band that was performing for a Hutt when the Tori character injured the Hutt which forced them to flee, with the Jade character getting found by my Jedi Knight character and trained to be a Jedi, and with one of them accidentally joining up with the Underworld and the other accidentally joining the army. I just think it will be more fun to have the innocent, naive and flaky Cat as the Smuggler and the Tori character is more likely to actually accidentally join the army but be serious enough to stick with it. The other class I have left is Imperial Agent, which I’m basing on Zoe from classic Doctor Who, who wanted to be an analyst but, you know, bureaucracy. These will take me into next year, and then I’ll have to decide what I’m going to do with that timeslot.
I also played more Mass Effect 2. Played Kasumi’s mission, which was interesting enough, but then took on the Cereberus mission with the Hammerhead, which is much more annoying and a bit too long, since I got through the original base and it seems like there’s two more areas — I started one, which included the Hammerhead — that are taking a bit too long and I’m not actually sure what I’m supposed to be doing with it, stopping in the middle because it was taking too long. However, I did do some mining to get more Element Zero since I think the area with Kasumi’s mission had a lot of it, and have restored a lot of Platinum, so hopefully I can just mine along the way and be okay with upgrades for the end game. Still, I’m not enjoying my run of Mass Effect as much as my run of Dragon Age, even if it’s not terrible.
Yeah, Crypt of the Necrodancer is a fun game, but they’ve got the design idea of “every unlockable should make the game harder”, until suddenly the main story demands you play the hardest level perfectly. It ends up that the starting character is the most fun one and the others are progressively greater chores.
I haven’t been playing anything, just Chess. I’m mostly just reading books or watching movies.
I got the Tabaxi mod for Baldur”s Gate 3, so I’ve been playing that with a friend. We’re murderhoboing our way through the game and having a grand time.
He also got me into Warframe. I am now level 6 and have run out of weapon slots: (
But, I got him into Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins, and we’ve been killing chaos in that game
Accidently found Songs of Steel – Hispania.
Turn based piece of Roman conquest of the Celtiberia in first half of the II century BC, with option to play as natives. Story is barebones short, but paints the time and place fairly well.
Combat is absolutely and 100% ahistorical – the only thing that gets implemented from the famous “triple line” are unit names, and even those shouldn’t be in use a generation after the Marian Reforms. Unit cooperation, line cohesion, flanking (in the sense of direction of attack), nothing like that exists. I was genuinely surprised to find out elevation affects combat result.
That being said it’s a pleasant, fairly short game (Roman campaign clocks at around 6 hours on default difficulty) if one enjoys this sort of turn-based fun.
I started Bloodborne, only through Cleric Beast so far. I’ve admired the game from afar for a long time because of its aesthetic style. But I know that I just don’t care for games that are, as Shamus noted in his Souls articles, high on the punishment dimension of difficulty. So I’m conflicted. But it felt like a gaming experience I needed to have at some point. I’m trying to solve one problem with another by using a walkthrough (which I usually don’t like) to keep me pointed toward what’s important and minimize how much time I spend aimlessly wandering and then dying. So far, I enjoy the gameplay, just not the repetition of the same segments. I expect that feeling to continue until I either finish it or give up on it.
I finished all the base scenarios in RollerCoaster Tycoon Deluxe yesterday. Time to move on to the next tab, which is the Corkscrew Follies pack. Really did not enjoy the final few scenarios; they weren’t really interesting or fun, just ways to limit resources a little bit more. If there’s a bright side to that, it’s that the designers realized they were on the verge of arbitrary restrictions for difficulty’s sake, and didn’t go any further.
I discovered Balatro, which is really fund and addictive. I don’t think I’ll be going much higher than base difficulty, though.