T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve done barely anything. In my free time I’ve been watching YouTube, but I’ve barely had enough time to commit games. Next week I should have more, so hopefully then I will have anything to talk about.
How’s everyone else this week?
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Staying up later than I’d like, but I’ve mostly been playing In Stars and Time, a fun timeloop RPG. Apparently the story gets pretty heart-wrenching later on, though I’m early enough in that I haven’t seen for myself whether that’s true or not. I’m pretty invested in the characters though, and I like the ways the mc’s understanding of the rest of the party is progressing throughout the loops.
I keep chipping away at Assassin’s Creed Origins, currently doing my normal thing for open world maps which is running around exploring everything before continuing with the story. This might once again prove to be a mistake.
I’ve been playing Little kitty, big city, which is quite a sweet little open world game about an indoor cat who falls out of their apartment window and has to try to get back home. A lot of interesting characters to meet and cute interactions. I’m approaching the endgame now, just seeing what else there is to explore before braving the final climb back to the window
Been more than a bit sick and bedridden the last few days, so gaming on the PC hasn’t been an option. The few times I’ve had some energy I’ve been playing Prey, Shamus favorite immersive sim. I’ve been sequence-breaking the hell out of it. How easy it is to do that is by far the greatest aspect of the game.
I finished up Deathloop and I’m trying to figure out my next game. Maybe I give Red Dead Redemption 2 another try. I kinda bounced right off of it the first time, but we’ll see if it grabs me this time
Played a little bit more of Mass Effect 3. I did the Turian quest, and then did some exploration and picked some stuff at the Citadel, and ran into the issue of there being a LOT of quests that opened up there. Still, I was enjoying the Citadel stuff more than the rest of the game so far, but got a bit overwhelmed by all the quests and so only played for a relatively short time. We’ll see how things go as I play more, but the sessions will likely be short until mid-December as I have vacation coming up and so will always remind myself that I will have more time to play in a few weeks.
Inching ever forward in Three Houses, I’ve finally made it to chapter 11, wherein shit starts going down. Ingrid finally mastered cavalry so I could switch her back to peg knight, Ferdinand is classed up to Paladin and passed heavy armor C so he has far more damage, attack speed, and move speed, making him actually work again. I’m really rather annoyed at Flayn being in the party because she’s bad at healing (no ranged heal), bad at attacking (worse magic and speed), can’t be dancer (unlike notes on most party members for when you’re allowed to recruit them, she had a note on the wiki of when she might *leave*), etc. So I already had too many mages to begin with and I keep cutting my snipers instead because well they often don’t double or one-shot and bernie needs special setup, so. . . In other news, this game doesn’t have Bolting, but apparently it does still have Meteor, which I expected would be maybe range 4 or something but no it’s full-on range 10 plus AoE. Might be possible to start sniping bosses and skipping even more xp.
Story-wise, it’s. . . fine. I wish I liked it more? The character they telegraphed dying ages ago and then all but spelled it out in giant neon letters would have been a lot more impactful if they. . . hadn’t. Or had really had much of any interactions. You can play sad music at me for an hour but no amount of sad pianos will make me forget that you completely failed to address why I was unable to save them with 7 time warps in the bank, each use capable of rewinding the entire battle. No, that was not fate, that was blatantly unjustified cutscene refusal to act. One sentence is all you needed.
As I’m trying and failing to explain to someone at work how older Fire Emblems didn’t muck up their story, it basically comes back to a lack of complications. After having hit on the timey-wimey/parallel world gambit, they have not stopped. FE 7, 8, 9, all work because they are just their story. In particular, the cutscene drama and such in 9, despite being the most basic of cliches, works all the more for its simplicity and the long, long journey it kicks off. In 7, back in the sprite days, back when you have no wacky powers and indeed even have to cram shopping trips into the same “phase” as combat because there is only one game phase, it’s far less jarring when bullshit happens in “cutscenes.” Because you don’t have any meta powers at all: the enemy is dangerous specifically because they have those powers (this is also lampshaded in 9/10, that the Black Knight can just teleport around because the method they use leaves most people too weak to fight, but BK is tough enough to ignore it).
I’ve heard the Three Houses route I’m on referred to as “secret,” but if it diverges based on talking to a character when the game has all but explicitly commanded you to talk to everyone every month, that’s not very secret people. I’m holding a save in case I get a couple chapters in (due to different phrasings I’ve run into while trying to avoid spoilers and the way the mission starts, I don’t actually know for sure where this is going once I finish the mission/a chapter or two from now) and change my mind. I’m kindof annoyed that it seems I may have yet again “stumbled” into the final/best/etc route, as apparently the other two houses are basically the same except for cutscenes/presumably who ends up in charge, and then there’s the Black Eagles with two different routes. And this is the “secret” one, so it’s presumably the one that’s worth doing. Which means any replay for alternate routes would be strict downgrades.
More Terraformers. I’ve finished all the scenarios on the next-to-hardest difficulty level within the turn limit required to get a platinum medal, and am eyeing the hardest level. It’ll be something of a “no more worlds to conquer” moment if/when I manage to complete them all, so I’m sort of not in a big hurry to try.
Also more RimWorld, working on completing the missions for Vanilla Factions Expanded: Deserters by assassinating increasingly-higher-ranked members of Imperial aristocracy. Unfortunately I chose this run to play without Vanilla Psycasts Expanded (because it’s so overpowered) and am remembering why I don’t play without it (because the default psycasts are all so underpowered), and am really missing a psycaster with Farskip to be able to warp my forces home instantly after a successful mission around the world.
I have been completely nonfunctional and am basically just a machine that converts weed into failed Necrodancer runs
My son’s on break, so I’ve been playing Spelunky 2 with him. It took almost no time to get the muscle memory back, but that hasn’t kept me from dying in stupid and hilarious ways, including a botched attempt at a Qilin skip.
Neo: The World Ends With You is less charming than I remembered. The gameplay is fun again, after I switched to a pin setup that was less, you know, crap. But the last day had three separate cutscenes of our hero staring at his phone, debating whether he should ask his pen pal a question, and all three of them were a little too long, and I’m just sitting there going “just ask him you goob!” So, I’m not sure what new comparison point storywise I’ve given it, but it’s not matching up. And without the story, it’s just okay. The combat is very easy (I think I’m probably quite overpowered, I’ve hit the cash limit several times and you can buy stats directly) and the music is like a less-good Persona. I’ll probably keep playing just because I don’t have many other uncompleted games to play. (It’s competing with, what, Tales of Zestiria?)
I have been trying to get my nascent YouTube channel rolling…
Speaking of, I vaguely remember you guys saying Shamus’s music is creative commons at some point? Is that the case? If not, I also vaguely remember you guys creating music on your own? Do you have music I can license or use under a free license?