T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve finally finished Borderlands 2. I replayed all of the DLCs, got to Ultimate vault hunter mode, and than got to overpower level 10. It was fun, but I don’t think I’m ever going to do that again.
It takes such a long time to get to level 80 that the last few levels feel like they take the same amount of time to get as 1 to 30.
And the overpower levels aren’t any better, the gauntlet you have to go through is fine on its own. But having to do it so many times is tedious at best. Especially with the increasing damage reduction with each level going up to ? 65%.
On the upside, there’s not really any point to getting overpower level so I don’t have to do it again.
And now, I move onto Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. I don’t remember if I’ve played the DLC for this one, and it’s been around five years since I last played it so it’ll be nice to go back and see what I’m forgetting, good or bad. (Hopefully good.)
So what’s everyone else doing this week?
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.
Hardware Review
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
The Game That Ruined Me
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
I played a little Nova Drift, but I’ve hit the wind-down phase. With everything unlocked and having done enough runs, I can tell that I’ve not much else to go. The difficulty widgets make the game more interesting up to a point, but there feels to me a clear problem with some of the let’s call them advanced bosses not just being more dynamic, but also having flat-out higher damage, which is the compounded by the “bosses are more difficult” modifier to the point that some of them will basically one-shot even tank builds. The only thing that semi-reliably works is tanky construct swarm builds, which are fun, but even then they only go so far. I’ve yet to beat a single run on “draft” mode, which lets you start a full start to final boss quality build and go immediately to the first “endless” loop, nor have I managed to make it to the final boss a second time from a normal start game, and I don’t think I will. Even with the repeatable “wild” upgrades available, there’s no actual endless upgrades for defense. Either you have enough DPS to kill the uber bosses before they even start attacking, or you don’t. Well, I suppose there’s the “get increasing buffs for unspent upgrade points,” but even drafting you usually have several more upgrades before finishing the build, and with wild upgrades there’s usually something that’s worth more than 1%. Not sure if I’ve even made it to the final boss on a max hard natural run.
So it’s just playing the game for the fun of it, and I’ve seen enough to have my fun. The various super combo upgrades finally give the rate of fire/damage buffs you need to make non-construct-swarm builds work, but they often require things you don’t actually want so you have to take some dead levels in order to get there. Basically I end up alternating between tryhard runs and well I haven’t put these two things together before runs, with the same result for either: die to an uber boss, or maybe make it to the final boss and then somehow die anyway even though I know it’s not *that* lethal, was there an update I missed?
Instead I’ve been eyeing the pile of Switch games I haven’t played which have been sitting for years:
I picked up Fire Emblem: Three Houses soon after it came out and put it off ’cause hey I need to go back and finish Fates, right? But I’d need to read a let’s play to remind myself of the story stuff from the first two routes, and give up and go no-permadeath mode ’cause repeating entire levels is just too much anymore and is why I never finished it the first time, and it’s been so many years it’s just like damn that game was really important to me at the time and now it’s just some unfinished business feels like it’s not right to just grind through it. So fuck it, just go see what Three Houses is about. Surprisingly unspoiled, aside from a general feeling that it went even more gacha waifu bait.
Similar but different, Kirby: Star Allies is one I picked up after being massively spoiled, so a depressing degree. See, apparently just about the time I fell off one of my most beloved franchises, was when they started doing deep lore continuity shit, which culminated in this game, which I would have been so freaking psyched about if I’d actually found that all out myself instead of a youtube video. So once again, something that feels like it should be important- but also once again, the last game I’d played (Return to Dreamland) I didn’t even finish. Which was also literally the game they first started dropping those lore hints on.
I’ve also got Pokemon Legends: Arceus sitting there, waiting for me to be in a pokemon exploring mood. But I always get caught over whether I want to crack into that, or do some other pokemon thing.
And I picked up a code for the Mario Kart dlc which has been sitting ’cause I can’t be bothered to make a nintendo account.
And then I go and remember hey, they made two Hyrule Warriors games and a Fire Emblem warriors, I should probably play at least one of those.
So that’s what I’m looking at next anyway.
I hope you enjoy Fire Emblem: Three Houses, I thought it was a great game! Having played Awakening, Fates, Echoes (Shadows of Valentia), and Three Houses in the series I thought that FE3H had the strongest characters and writing by far. And I’m always curious what decision people make at the beginning; in hindsight, I do think that even though you don’t meet the characters for long before you make a decision, it’s enough to get a sense of “is this going to be a group that leads me into the kind of story that I would like?”.
I started Stellaris again.
I’m looking forward to starting a game when The Grand Archive releases at the end of the month, I’ve been waiting for years for an expansion to the “found an alien zoo” scripted questline.
I finished Lost Judgment last week in order to wash my hands of it, but was compelled to return and do the big ten-armed School Stories side quest to track down the “Napoleon of Juvenile Delinquency”. Turns out all ten of the branches are their own separate minigame. Some of them are quite fun, some of them are reskins of other activities, and some of them are hot garbage that remind us what happens when you have a hard deadline and ambitions that exceed it. The motorcycle minigame is the worst one; it’s sort of like FF7’s, except your windup attack takes longer than the enemy’s and three enemies will attack so rapidly you never have time to counterattack. Plus the bike takes up half the screen. Plus the bike automatically pulls itself to certain parts of the track, and it will screw up your attack direction if it decides to do it in the middle of your windup. Plus the last enemy in each section rubberbands and the late ones attack practically instantly after their last attack. Plus it’s quite long, like fifteen different races. (Actually, it’s four different races, that you have to do 15 times.) More. Testing. Was Required.
But I like the boxing minigame. Pretty sure it’s straight out of a boxing game from, like, PS1 or something, but it’s a good enough time that I kind of want to track a full boxing game down now.
Well, see, I was in the middle of playing a few different games, but, oh, boy, Balatro was released on mobile platforms.
Now this is a game that everyone and their mom was praising but I felt no interest in. I don’t care for Poker and I’m growing sick of roguelikes, so a game that combined both seemed exactly like the sort of thing I was sure I wasn’t going to like. But then I decided to give it a try, since it was released on Apple Arcade and by God not only I was wrong, but I actually think I found my next Vampire Survivors. I am hopelessly addicted to this game and it being on mobile means I can and will play it everywhere and at every moment. It is consuming my free time and I don’t know when I’ll ever touch another game.
Oh, but before I started with Balatro I got to play the GOG re-release of Resident Evil 3. I did a full playthrough. As enjoyable as I remember, but man, is the PC version a pain to configure. I had only played the Playstation version before and I don’t remember the default gamepad controls being such nonsense and the way to configure them is hidden and cumbersome.
Still playing [b]Mass Effect 2[/b], going through loyalty and recruitment missions. One thing that is somewhat annoying me is that there are a number of medical kits and power cells on each level, which you use to revive companions in battle and to power the heavy weapons respectively. If you come across them in the game and you are full, you get a measly 100 credits for them. Now, I’m playing on the easiest mode, so I don’t use them that much, and so keep getting 100 credits for it. But if you DO use them, if you don’t find the containers later there is no other way to refill those things. Which really sucked in Grunt’s mission which had a lot of them lying around and where I used the heavy weapons against the Thresher Maw but then once you hit a certain point it takes you away automatically so I couldn’t take the time to refill my heavy weapon. That wouldn’t be a big deal if I could just buy that somewhere (maybe I can?) but without even that it’s just annoying to have to get that later. I really feel that they should have made the reward bigger if you open the container when you don’t need it. That would give people a reason to conserve those things and be careful while still allowing the refills for those who needed it more. As it is, opening them when you are full up is pretty pointless.
Still, I’m working my way through it. Since I’m planning on finishing off as many of my missions as I can before moving the plot along, it will be interesting to see how the game handles that.
I abandoned Persona 5, because the unnecessary railroading let me rage quit twice. There is no effing reason, why I cannot leave that damn café to do something better. But that damn cat tells you to stay and numb main character obeys. So I started a solo play through of Satisfactory 1.0 instead. To actually play a game. If said game wouldn’t crash 11 out of 12 times I try to start it, I would be a very happy customer. All the beta versions and experimental versions were stable. Why is the full release such a pain in the butt?
If I get enraged with non-working Satisfactory I play a bit of No Man’s Sky again. Carefully avoiding the new fishing mini game.
In coop we played Craftopia and started a play through of Monster Hunter: World. Beautiful art design but the multiplayer is a bit janky with story missions.
In analog I played a fair bit of Tamashii. One of the very few campaign games I’d like to continue. Scythe Fenris Expansion, Legacy of Yu, Spires End: Hildegard being the other ones, while Tainted Grail, Etherfields, 7th Citadel, Horizon – Zero Dawn, Descent 2nd Edition, Near and Far stay in their boxes.
Sorry to hear about you abandoning Persona 5. I know that people complained about the cat telling you to stay in, but after the first bit it wasn’t that bad for me. One thing I thought of: were you doing a run in the Palace every day after school? I’m not certain, but I think that Persona 5 is like Persona 4 in that if you run a Palace you are considered to be too tired to go out in the evening and so have to stay in. If you clear the Palace or take days off, you would be able to do things in the evening.
I might come back to Persona one day, but at that time I was just annoyed and wanted to play a game. Some Annoyances came together: The introduction of Mementos had to happen on the 17th of a month. Former the game told me to go to work in the quicky markt on every date that ends with a 7 – but then the game didn’t let me. Then the exams began, robbing an entire week of activities for no good reason, then the mandatory Mementos exploration continued and thus the cat didn’t let me out of the café. It was to much in a short timeframe that didn’t let me play the game.
I might come back, but for now I have to set up an aluminum production :-)
Yeah, there’s a few sections in these games where you just don’t get to do anything on your own for quite a while. I don’t remember if every Palace had a section like that, but it feels like it does.
I keep moving through Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and it continues to be enjoyable. I also keep running into the old problem of first scouring all the points-of-interest on a new map region, and then visiting all of them AGAIN for quests. But well, brain be braining.
Additionally, I played the prologue of Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and WHAT THE EVERLIVING FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?
Look, it’s perfectly simple. The Patriots, who have nanomachines, did a thing a decade ago and now there’s a vampire who’s actually a ninja who’s actually a russian woman, and she knows Snake from way back when. Not Solid Snake, you understand. Liquid Snake, who’s also known as Big Boss, and is dead – but lives on through his severed arm that was grafted onto someone else. meanwhile, someone else is wearing a device that deflects bullets so that she thinks that she’s psychic – but she’s not…except actually, she is.
That’s what’s happening.
More serioulsy, it’s Metal Gear Solid – if you think you understand what’s going on, you’re either not paying attention or you’re insane. I genuinely don’t get how this game series became so popular, let alone get praised for its storytelling of all things.
Wait I thought Naked Snake was big boss?
Or am I mixing him up with Solidus Snake…
Picked up Slay the Spire again, after a long gap, because the boardgame got released and got some glowing reviews.
It’s pretty good! The boardgame version, I mean. It’s simplified a little to fit the medium, but retains the feel of pulling off combos and deck builds with the added fun of doing it with friends.
Dusted off Baldur’s Gate 3 to play with the GF after work. I’m still in Act 1, trying to work out the conflict with the Goblins. I realized I needed to wander off and fill in the blank spots of the map until I have enough EXP to reach level 5.
I’ve also been learning Microsoft Azure for work. While I’m glad that cloud computing is a tool that is readily available for reliable and large-scale computing work on demand, I am still weary of anyone who sells it like a panacea.
Cloud computing is just like normal computing, except someone else backs up your data for you and does whatever they want with it in the meantime. Oh, and you can’t do anything if the internet goes out. And if your computer breaks, it’s someone else’s problem to deal with it, but there’s absolutely nothing you can do until they fix it for you. But at least you can blame someone else to your irate customers. And you spend twice as much for hardware, but the cost is spread out over time so you can hide it in the books and make it look like you saved money to impress the knobs. Full of benefits for the middle-manager who has other people to deal with the fallout.
I’ve not said much in recent weeks as I was playing the same stuff but this week I’ve finally wrapped up two of those games so I’m ready to give some final thoughts even though I talked about them already.
First, in single player, I wrapped up Fallout:London. For better or worse it is very much a Bethesda open world game, which is on the one hand very impressive seeing how we’re talking about a mod and on the other somewhat disappointing seeing how the modding team had all the chances to not make the story a mess. To give credit where it’s due the sheer scale of the mod and the amount of work in terms of things like assets and level design is amazing and the original assets are blended mostly seamlessly with the new ones. If you enjoy the basic mechanics of Fallout 4 gameplay and take pleasure in just exploring random buildings for dozens of hours this is an absolute thumbs up recommendation.
Which is not to say it’s all sunshine and rainbows. I was using the GOG install of FO:L and I don’t know if that doesn’t get all the patches or if for some reason I wasn’t getting them (I got one patch partrway through my playthrough and I’m honestly not sure it took, plus I think there were several released by the team over the period I was playing). If you have any experience in heavilly modding Bethesda games you’ll probably be prepared for some stability issues and an occasional crash but there were also some scripting errors like missing or mixed up dialogue options or multiple instances of doors remaining “inaccessible” when they were meant to be open once a quest directed me to them. One minor faction questline just outright never became accessible to me as the NPC that was meant to trigger it would simply not go to were they were supposed to go and would not have the pertinent dialogue options.
And in a true Bethesdalike fashion the story is where it gets kinda messy. The principal fault for me is that what is considered “act 3” feels very narratively isolated from the rest of the game. I’m guessing this is an effect of fairly modular development where individuals were given fairly free reign to design given fragments of content, in fact I have it on good authority that some locations and events are either FO4 mods picked up whole and retailored to fit with London or started as such. For whatever reason the result is that when the time comes to choose your major faction the game has not prepared you for that choice in the way that New Vegas builds up the conflict between NCR and the Legion or even FO4 permeates its setting with the presence of the Institute. At the same time as two of the three factions are introduced late into the game (although you can reach their key locations earlier they will not interact with you in any fashion and their actual HQs will be locked) they do not have the time to breathe, you do not get to familiarize yourself with people on both sides so that you later have to look them in the eye as you side with or against them. Heck, I’d go so far as to say their agendas are only very broadly outlined to the point where I only understood properly what one of the factions is from checking on the internet.
Also, Shamus would have a field day with the absolutely insane amount of “What do they eat?”, “Gamedevs don’t understand scale” or “The game is actually not sure about its own lore”. There’s the usual stuff: it’s 170 years after the war and yet people have not cleaned out skeletons even from buildings they actively inhabit, entire communities function in spaces that are way too small to support them possibly “trading for food” while they themselves produce nothing, the number of raider (Hooligans) and cannibal (Beefeaters) gangs that parasitically sustain themselves on those mysteriously functional communities is bonkers and of course six generations down the line people are commited to performing a pantomime of pre-war society so Trafalgar has a guy who, again 170 years after the war, is a succesfull tire salesman even though no one produces or needs those. And I’m avoiding talking about the specifics of either side or main quests on purpose.
The second game I finished, this time in co-op, is the Saints Row reboot game. Now, maybe the game got patched since release but I frankly do not understand why it got so much hate. We did get a couple of bugs and the activities could get at time somewhat repetitive but I feel like the same, especially the latter, could be said about the previous games and frankly in many places we have greatly enjoyed the game’s humour, bearing in mind that I’m one of the people who lean more towards the wackiness of SR3+ over the weird mix of cartoony and serious of SR2.
I’ve been checking out Tiny Glade, a game about doodling vaguely medieval-looking buildings. (Well, it’s less of a game and more of an art program – there are no timers or challenges other than your creativity.) You have a small number of basic building blocks, but they can be tweaked and combined in a staggering number of ways and it procedurally generates little details as you go to make your buildings look more lived in and “real”. Then I made the mistake of looking what other people have done with it and have had my mind blown several times over with the kinds of details and structures people have been able to make, so I clearly have a lot to learn about it yet.
I have been playing more of Baldur’s Gate 2, for the first time. One thing that occurred to me: I remember one criticism on this site of Mass Effect 2 was that it was the middle act of a trilogy, but its main plot didn’t really bridge the first and third or connect to the central conflicts more than tangentially. And it kind of seems like that’s a possible fair criticism of Shadows of Amn, too. I like the character interactions that start to appear in BG2, though. (Well, most of them. Almost any bit that involves two love interests talking to each other really gives a “this was written 24 years ago and should have stayed there” feeling.)