T w e n t y S i d e d
This week is more Borderlands 2.
I’ve been trying to get overpower levels for the past few days. But, progress has been slow and I’m just farming for deferent equipment in hopes of something working better than what I currently have.
I’m hoping by next week I’ll ether get the remaining levels and move on to Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, or I’ll end up playing the Sims 4, we’ll see.
What’s everyone else doing?
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Joker's Last Laugh
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
Why The Christmas Shopping Season is Worse Every Year
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
Continued my playthrough of Starcom: Unknown Space. Made some surprising revelations and the game difficulty has definitely ramped up, so I feel like I’m getting pretty close to the end of the story. I’m still rebuilding my ship a bunch trying to find a fighting style I like and which doesn’t take ages to down enemies; the game has a number of different weapons with different strengths and weaknesses, and I think I’m finally honing in on a combination I like and am capable of handling effectively.
I also picked up Tiny Glade which released yesterday on a whim. It’s explicitly not a game (there are no goals, challenges, or timers), rather it’s a “digital diorama builder” where you doodle things like walls and basic building shapes into a clearing and it generates a cozy medieval aesthetic on what you’ve outlined. It’s rather impressive to watch; everything updates in real-time as you add things or move them about. To make a door you can simply draw a path through a wall, for instance, and a door will pop into existence. Sheep potter lazily about the glade, ducks float on painted ponds, and you can make some impressive things with it. I could see it being handy as a way to generate a simple mood-setting picture of a town being visited in D&D, or something like that. I’m not sure how much time I’ll spend in it long-term, but it’s definitely a relaxing and meditative experience.
Lost Judgment is finished. It has some balance issues. The encounter rate is especially high, mobs spawn within sight of a finished fight; I once tried to find the door to a restaurant and wound up in four separate fights while I was looking for it. The auto-aim is also overly aggressive, in the big fights I kept getting pulled away from the guy I was trying to hit to aim at someone else.
The plot was padded pretty heavily with a lot of repeated exposition, but I did think it stayed interesting. Who knew
a bullying case would turn into fighting the Black Ops division of the Ministry of Health.The game ended in a bossfight that had nothing to do with the Millennium Tower. I thought that was a company mandate, I hope the director wasn’t fired over it. They even mentioned a major antagonist had set up in the Millennium Tower. And then we never went there.Ended up doing several sidequests even though I went in with the goal of ignoring all the sidequests. But I still skipped most of them; the end-game tally had me at 200 out of 700 sidequests. There’s an entire section dedicated to School Stories where you help the kids with their extracurricular Clubs; it was quite amusing to only start those in Chapter 12, long after the school had stopped being relevant to the plot. (The endgame also has the amusing tally of “Girlfriends: 0 out of 1.” It’s both amusing and creepy, because nearly every female character is a high-schooler and our detective is probably forty-something. They made a point of telling us one student was eighteen, I’m sure that stat’s about the high-schoolers.)
I’ve been playing Nova Drift, which just recently left early access, a nifty little sort of Asteroids meets modern “roguelike” perk drafting (ya know I’ve never liked the term “perk” but it is convenient). Which is good because that’s basically what I picked it up for, but I’d been concerned they were going to go twin stick shooter, which I’ve never been any good at aiming the second stick. FPS on gamepad is fine, but not the top-down move with one aim with the other, my angles are always just slightly off. But this does indeed control like Asteroids: you turn left or right with left and right on your left stick, hit a trigger for thrust, and the other trigger for shoot.
It starts out a little bland and without any of the difficulty modifiers is pretty easy to roll through, but once I turned those on and got enough unlock progress to actually start getting new weapons, things picked up and I’m now one-more’ing myself up too late. Has some minor problems: you can’t check the details on anything you currently have, which makes building a build (and this game does want to to optimize) much more difficult. To add to this, upgrades show if they can be combined with other upgrades to get a super, but while the interface would seem to imply you need to do that to unlock them, you do not: all unlocks are governed by overall run “xp”, so fishing for combos does nothing unless you’ve already unlocked the combo. Which might very well be completely useless for your actual build. You can actually switch weapons, shield, and body as you go, but it costs you a level, and if you’ve been building to match the stuff you have then it’s very unlikely switching would be a good idea.
But yeah, overall game good. It’s very interesting how some shields or bodies can be more weapon than your actual weapon. I’ve had runs with various flavors of tank ramming, stealth missiles or stealth let the minions do the work while I nudge a silent kill field, scattershot homing railgun from both sides, and of course the obvious big drone swarms which do seem to be top build. I’ve had the most trouble with trying to just shoot things, because you eventually run out of stuff you can take that doesn’t have some tradeoff which will hurt your output. There’s a “wild” mode that adds repeatable upgrades to fix that problem and allow even wackier stuff, but I’ve been leaving that off just trying out the new unlocks as they come in.
You actually can check out the stuff you already have, it’s in the top left of the pause menu. I’m not sure you can see the details with just the controller, though, I broke out the mouse for that part.
It is kind of a shame that the super upgrades are gated behind your “level” because they’re some of the more interesting features in the game – they’re something to chase and they often have significant tradeoffs.
As for just shooting things, I find that it depends on the gun you pick. I have no idea how to make the railgun work, but for example the triple shot weapon starts out with awesome dps and just goes up from there. Though my favorite gun upgrade is a super upgrade so it’s possible you don’t have it available or haven’t tried it.
I’ve been playing on steam deck but a cursor pops up on the menu, I’ll see if anything pops up when I “mouse” over. It definitely deserves the “some text and icons might be hard to read” rating though- they have a larger text option which was on by default, but the icons are barely legible.
The trick with the railgun is of course that you can’t seriously aim it: go homing and split shot, preferably with a broadside body. With enough damage ups (amp shield seems to be the missing ingredient for long range shoot builds) you can just cruise around covering the screen with homing “railgun” projectiles. Very pretty if you’ve got the temporary buff that makes everything rainbow colored.
Maybe I’m just bad at video games, but overlevelling in Borderlands 2 always felt like co-op was, if not technically mandatory, at least very heavily encouraged. Between the huge enemy waves and the incredibly spongy bosses, I just felt like the game was saying “You know, you should really get some buddies to help you out here. Oh, you want to play solo? That’s loser talk for losers, loser.” Given that the overlevelling area is DLC-only, and that every individual player has to buy their own copy of said DLC, the game is basically screaming “Give us all your fucking money, you cheapskates!” It was just really gross.
Since I only ever played BL2 in single-player, I just gave up on the overlevelling stuff entirely.
There’s not really any point in overlevelling. Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode is already difficult enough to the point that Using slag weapons, and getting The Bee shield becomes mandatory. That is unless you want to spend 4 minutes shooting one bandit just for his health to regen just as fast as you can do damage. That said, I am having fun attempting the challenge due to having an excuse to experiment with builds I haven’t tried before. such as, getting an Infinity with the highest fire rate, Sheriff’s badge, and Zer0’s 0ne Sh0t 0ne Kill skill. I don’t know how well it’ll work but it’s kind of funny.
I’m still trying to get a higher fire rate Infinity, but I’ve gotten a bit distracted by trying to make a AutoHotkey to reload the the game, buy ammo, run over to Doc Mercy, and if I can get it to work, shoot him.
Still working my way through Mass Effect 2. I have hit the part where I’m noticing the difference between the recruitment/loyalty missions and the main ones, with there being a lot more options and things to ask about, and the game even encourages asking people things in Tali’s mission which I hadn’t really experienced before. I think I have all the mandatory upgrades and so just have to work my way through the various missions and make everyone I can loyal — I already botched that with Zaeed, but I’m going to roll with that since it was a character choice not a flub — and then finish it off, hopefully in the next couple of weeks.
I let Zaeed die in a fire during his loyalty mission. Hate that guy, so much.
Still, a lot of the other loyalty missions were fun. I remember them often being the highlight of the game. Don’t really have problems with the main plot (well, until Shamus posted his deconstructions of it), but I really like the structure of the game nonetheless.
‘We need to do something that’s very hard, but simple to understand. The entire game is building up to the mission at the end, and the bulk of the game is taken up on character-driven side stories that build up your forces and capability.’
It’s a terrible choice for something that’s part of an epic 3-game story*, but as a standalone game, it’s a solid structure.
*Let’s set up the Reapers as the threat, and then spend a game on something tangentially related, before just having the Reapers turn up and invalidating the last 2 games!
Yeah, with Zaeed even my “I’m not a nice person!” character was ticked off at his starting the fire in the first place, and despite being a somewhat vengeful person herself refused to let the innocent people that he put in danger by starting the fire die just so that he could get his revenge. She didn’t kill him off, though, but did express that he brought it on himself when he got trapped by an explosion that resulted from his stupidity, and said that she’d help him but he’d better do exactly what she said from that point on.
The loyalty mission that really had me notice the difference that Shamus noticed was Tali’s, where there are lots of dialogue options and one of them is even asking if talking to everyone else would be a good idea, and the response is that it wouldn’t hurt but that you shouldn’t take too long. It also had a nice resolution for my character who didn’t want to reveal the evidence against Tali’s father but didn’t want her to be blamed, so she used Intimidation options to basically say that based on what Tali’s done in the past not believing her is stupid and that they’d be willing to simply walk if they tried. This resolved the situation peacefully.
Due to a number of reasons too complicated to detail my gaming time has been severely cut short in the last couple of weeks. I’ve had to pause every non-casual game I was playing for the time being.
Now that I’m having the chance to play again I’ve been getting into Caravan SandWitch. Relaxing game about exploring. There’s no combat and, as far as I know, you can’t die, but exploring is very satisfying. The game has a clever way of using a “detective mode” without having you abuse it by tying it to your vehicle. While you’re driving you can use it to find collectibles, interactable stuff and the like, but as soon as you get down from it you’re on your own.
Platforming isn’t particularly hard, especially since you can’t die from falling, but it’s always nice to see if you can find a way to reach a place you’re still not supposed to. It’s always nice to see a place being locked behind a tool you still don’t have and make use of your ingenuity to reach it anyway.
Finished Mad Max. Really enjoyed the game overall, but kinda hated that they turned the big finale into a race. And the fact that they killed ****. Who Max had barely helped or even interacted with except under duress, and rarely seemed to give a damn about. And he had a big ole “MendozaaaaaaAAAA!” moment about it anyways.
Hated the end, basically.
I’m replaying Factorio with the Ultracube mod. This mod completely rewrites the tech tree and how your factory works. You start with an item called an “ultracube,” and you only get one of it. But you’re have many machines that need the cube as an input, so you need a way to pass the cube between them efficiently, using circuits to make sure it gets passed to the right machines at the right time without stalling out. Cube machines also tend to produce huge numbers of items at once (to provide a buffer until the cube comes around again), so loading, unloading, and storing efficiently becomes very difficult.
E.g., the first thing you’ll discover is that the cube can be used as fuel for a boiler to boil an entire tank of water in an instant. So your steam engine only needs one boiler, but you need a tank before the boiler to feed it and another tank after to store all the steam produced, so that the cube can run the boiler quickly and then move on.
I’m currently on the equivalent of purple science – I need to run a “deep core mining drill”, which requires me to ship the cube to a resource patch a kajillion miles away, put it into the machine, and then ship a trainload of ore back, then process a giant trainload of ore efficiently somehow.
Following the feedback from here I’ve been taking slay the spire for a spin.
It’s the right type of addictive with enough variety to be fun :)
I’m finding that I often fall too much on relying on relics and I’m starting to hit the “binding of Isaac” problem wherein the more I go forward the more I unlock new things which sometimes are just objectively worse, making the game actually harder with every loss
Oh, playing on my phone because life does what it does, and I’m pleasantly surprised that it works so well on android!