T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve gotten an ear infection, so I’ll keep this one short.
Still playing Borderlands 2. Done the Headhunter DLCs, just reached level 80, and broke out of the map and had a bit of a wander around.
What are you guys up to?
Patreon!
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
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.
Finally playing games again.
Lost Judgment is a presumably-average Yakuza game, which makes it a good game. The plot involves our middle-aged detective infiltrating a high school, which keeps making me want to say “Yakuza, with Rodney Dangerfield.” It’s got the three fighting styles of 0 or Kiwami 1, but they don’t feel as distinct as those ones; it was about four chapters until I started using anything besides Snake, and Snake is still the “okay I need to take this seriously” style. (They say Snake is supposed to be good against enemies with weapons; it’s actually good against everything. Free counterattacks are ridiculously strong, turns out.) But the fights themselves are fun, and the Nouveau Riches are surprisingly dangerous, most of my Game Overs have come quite suddenly from failing a dodge against them.
It has stealth sections, which suck. Don’t put stealth in a fighting game, and don’t put stealth in anything where getting caught is instant death. All the best stealth games let you at least pretend to try to fight your way out after getting caught. But here I was stuck on a stealth section -a stealth section with JUST THREE GUYS- for half an hour, because the last guy can only be taken out after passing through his line of sight, and his model always looks like he’s looking that way. It’s made vastly worse by the following section being a fight where I not only beat up the entire stealth squad combined, but then beat up two more waves of equal numbers. Why the everloving fuck couldn’t I do that a minute ago. A minute that took half an hour.
The plot’s still intriguing, but has certainly spun its wheels once or twice. We had like four cutscenes in a row where the heroes gather together to say “this doesn’t make sense”, without figuring out what part didn’t make sense. It’s making no bones about being a sequel to Judgment, which I never played. Also necessarily a sequel to Like a Dragon, considering that one upheaved the setting pretty massively. No Kiryu so far, here in Chapter 6; we’ll see how long they can go without him.
I’ve played six Yakuza games so far, and I’d say this one’s fourth-best, behind 0 and both Like a Dragon games, well ahead of Kiwami, and pretty close to Kiwami 2. I’ve dropped Kiwami 2 twice, and only dropped Lost Judgment once, so it takes fourth, despite not having Secret Koreans. Does it have Secret Highschoolers? Time will tell.
I’ve been playing through Rogue Legacy 2 again. It has a really fun basic gameplay loop and a bajillion different ways to make number go up, it’s kind of a Gacha game design but without any of that pesky real world money getting involved. You always feel like you’re making some kind of progress, and the different classes play some very different ways.
It’s interesting to have stuff like the Ballista Archer, which is fantastic for climbing the sun tower and not great elsewhere, and the alternate Boxer, who obliterates enemies who are on the other end of the screen and can do absolutely nothing about enemies above or below or right next to you. Or the Valkyrie, who is functionally immune to many enemy projectiles. And the Bard can do some interesting stuff but spin jumping on your own projectiles as your main attack is too much of a paradigm shift for me. Or the Pirate, who… ok, I don’t really get the Pirate.
Still playing Mass Effect 2. I made it past the first recruitment phase and then was given the Collector ship mission, and then immediately had the Reaper IFF mission, which worried me until the game gave me the option to recruit the second set of companions first. So I should be okay, and plan to finish off pretty much every other mission I have before doing that one. We’ll see how that works.
When it comes to resources, the game can get kinda tricky with Element Zero, as it gives you the two respec options — personal power gained from a companion and respecing your entire build — as research options without really telling you what that means. I wasted 5000 Element Zero on switching the power when I didn’t use either of them anyway, but I’ve managed to build my Element Zero back up again, just mining the areas that the missions sent me to. I have lots and lots of the other resources, so I’m probably pretty good that way, especially since I already have the shields, hull and cannon upgrades. I’m not that happy that you have to ask the companions about them and that the option seems to stay even when they don’t have anything else to say, but it’s manageable.
I have hit the issue with Harbinger, though. In this last sequence, I finally had to break down and use the Collector Beam heavy weapon … but not for Harbinger. He goes down pretty easily to my submachine gun. No, I needed it for the Praetorians and the Colossus. So, yeah, he comes across kinda like a speed bump, which isn’t the way to build up the main antagonist.
I think the game uses a specific number of missions after the IFF becomes available, so you might not have room to do *everything* before it starts affecting the outcomes, might want to look that up. Or, looking it up myself, I guess it’s the IFF mission that kicks off the countdown to endgame while they’re “installing” it, so nevermind you should be fine as long as you haven’t actually got the thing yet.
Yeah, that’s what I remembered. Once you get the IFF, after a certain number of missions you all have to pack up and leave so that it can be “tested”, and then after that you have to go through the relay relatively quickly or you lose all your crew.
I have fallen off Kingmaker, at least for now. Between being split on whether I should bother rebuilding my main, and the kingdom stuff suddenly going nuts out of nowhere, and switching to house-clearing mode and binging a bunch of a show (The Blacklist), I basically stopped playing it.
As for other games, it may be interesting to note that Steam installs on my main rig, which is still Win7, and has been saying that steam will stop working with that OS since like January, are (finally?) starting to go off. The game drive itself died and got replaced recently, but those games which are installed and have tried to update now say “update failed” no matter how much I verify integrity or restart Steam. Kingmaker is old enough it has no updates and thus is fine, but eventually anything new enough to get some looks like it will phase out. Of course I still have my Steam Deck, and I was already feeling the upcoming firefox crush, but still, it’s interesting to see some of the foreshadowed problems finally happening.
Singleplayer: still working through Starcom: Unknown Space. I’ve been progressing through the tech tree and experimenting with different ship builds with different weapon loadouts to figure out what I like best. Made some progress on the story and I get the feeling I might be approaching the start of Act 3, so I’m going around exploring the stars I haven’t yet for any more sidequests.
Multiplayer: got through over a month in Stardew Valley with a friend over the weekend. He hasn’t played since before the 1.5 update, I’ve played a little but haven’t seen everything from it, and we’re both new to 1.6, so we’ve been enjoying shaking things up a bit and checking out the new content.
I was playing “sniper ghost warrior 3” I quickly realized all the complaints about the game is because players were trying to massacre every foe in the missions instead of taking out the scouts/snipers and then the missions intended targets before hightailing it out of there. This game is basically a puzzle game once you realize that. It’s a neat game. Though I like SGW Contracts more because the dreary art style can get depressing.
Then I got hooked on “The 1st Descendant.” It makes me wonder if Borderlands kept its 1st style before swapping to cell shading if it would have been a hit. All the toons are unique enough from each other. All the weapons too. Though the grind will probably kill my interest and send me back to SGW3.