T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve ended up playing Viewfinder.
I’ve actually had it since last month, but I forgot entirely. So now I’ve played it and, it’s fine. The premise of being able to take a photo, look at it, and then it becomes a part of the environment is really cool, but there was more focus on story than I expected; which is okay, but story in games isn’t really my thing. Most of the story is in audio logs and there’s at least one audio log to listen to on each puzzle.
The gameplay itself is cool, but I felt like I was in a tutorial all the time, it would introduce a new concept, reinforce it, then move on. I guess the concepts did stick around for a whole zone, but the zones are pretty short, and only the optional puzzles had me actually stop and think about it for a minute before I figured out the solution.
I did still enjoy the game but I think I went in with the wrong expectations. I went in thinking of The Witness with its utilizing its one gimmick in every way possible, and its oddly quiet environment. But Viewfinder is more of a cute, three hour puzzle game that shows you its ideas once and then its done.
So that’s what I did this week, what’s everyone else doing?
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
The Mistakes DOOM Didn't Make
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
Satisfactory Building some Ficsmas stuff and planning the Flight Control Unit production. Rockets are completed.
Subverse I got Sova and completed all the Yeti Side quests. Now on to Griffin and whoever joins the crew next. I stopped playing the Early Access at this point to wait for the full release. I think it’s Fortune.
Monster Hunter World Finally defeated the pink Rathien and entered the elderly biom. There I bested two of the new monsters (Lava Gargling Toad and Rolling Explosion until I learn their names) and encountered several I really don’t want to fight.
Dusted off Spartan:Gates of Troy, an old 4x in ancient Hellada.
Persian archers remain hilariously broken in mechanics calculated for phalanx melees, but it’s a pleasant game nevertheless.
I played through Prim, which is a point and click adventure game in which you play as death’s daughter. I liked the aesthetic, and the solutions to the puzzles generally made sense rather than having the moon logic that some adventure games went for. I did have to look at hints a couple of times, but to be fair one of the hints I looked at was because I forgot a mechanic and also the hints are included in the game (but you have to ask for them, no “helpful” ruining of the experience). It’s not very long, which is fine, but the ending did feel a little abrupt.
I’ve also been playing Batman: Arkham Knight. I have owned this game for quite a while and never got around to playing it despite loving Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. Gameplay is a lot like Arkham City, but with more powers, a bigger area, and more batmobile.
The batmobile is… kind of weird as a design. You can use it for mobility, but honestly grapple hook glide (especially with all the upgrades) feels faster. You can use it to fight, because it is straight up a tank. It feels kind of weird to be playing Batman and shooting thugs with what are, technically speaking, nonlethal rounds (you have to look at the lore to see this). You can also run people over at 100 mph, which is again nonlethal, because you also electrocute them and I guess the two kinds of murder cancel out. One of the odd things is that you have this “nonlethal” gun which you use against people, and some extremely lethal weapons that you use against unmanned tank drones, and then there are cars with people in them, which are completely invulnerable to your gun and which can only be hurt by ramming them (don’t worry, the people in the cars survive when a 100 ton tank drives right over them) or with a very slow to aim homing missile. This makes them really annoying, especially because their speed is aggressively rubber banded and you can absolutely never catch up to one that’s moving directly away from you.
Storywise, the premise is pretty much nonsense but that was true in Arkham City too. One of the villains does a terrorism and all of the normal people evacuate the city in like a day, as if villains doing a terrorism isn’t just the normal Tuesday thing in Gotham. I do enjoy
having a fake Joker inside my head, who shows up infrequently enough that it’s interesting, and I love how Batman completely ignores him at all times and never tells anyone he’s going crazy, because bad mental health and stoicism past any point of sense is pretty on brand. The story they’re telling seems interesting so far.There’s also a bajillion different things to do, and there’s a nice mix of clearly signposted activities and things you have to find for yourself, with occasional minor hints from radio chatter.
The combat is sometimes quite difficult (I did pick hard, I’m not complaining about this). The predator sections where you’re up against a group of enemies with guns feel less puzzley than in previous iterations, because they often aren’t in contained areas and you have a lot more tools that allow you to face off against them with punching (until things go wrong, because they will shoot you dead real fast). It’s cool that they’ll react to you being in the vents or up on gargoyles and that they have countermeasures for that, which they loudly announce before using (it’s only polite).
My experience with Arkham Knight is that the gameplay is great *if* you put all your upgrade points in the bat-tank first. The tank gameplay is a lot more interesting and less repetitive after a few upgrades.
Otherwise, yeah, agree with everything you said. The predator sections in Arkham Knight are great, you can see they refined them a lot compared to the first game.
The game is one of the best executions I’ve seen of the ubisoft-style open world formula: you capture towers which unlock areas which spawn a ton of objectives on the map, etc. The cool part is that most of the objectives have at least a small variations, which makes you feel like you’re not just going through copy-pasted content. A bit of dialogue, a setup where they’re trying to ambush you, a different environment than usual, etc.
Huh, I’ve encountered the towers but it doesn’t feel like they actually spawn objectives on the map. They just felt like another thing to do on the list. The main thing that’s added objectives to the map has been progressing the main quest.
The
Joker in your headstory is very well executed and part why I didn’t enjoy Cyberpunk 2077 withJohnny Hotbody in your head. It helps that Arkham Knight is pure linear storytelling and that Bats always fights his inner demons, while Cyberpunk is wishy-washy and often doesn’t make sense when you do quests in a different order.I think CP is hardly a spoiler considering it was literally in the trailers but I will say that for me it worked as intended, in that the character initially very much annoyed me but grew on me over time.
As for Arkham Knight I do have some criticism of the story overall but I did very much enjoy the
head Joker, it was actually a great way to have the cake and eat it: they can pop in Joker interactions when they want and don’t have to make some flimsy justification for why Batman can’t just punch him and put him away.Since I finally got the new computer set up in the living room, I played SuperHot VR. In one sitting, because it’s only a 2 hour game- the cheevo saying “what’s wrong with you?” seems a bit overreacting. SuperHot is not what I’d call an “immersive experience,” it uses deliberately minimalist visuals and has no movement other than your actual movement and indeed time only moves when you move: if there’s any game you can stomach in VR, it’ll be Super Hot. Which I suppose means it wasn’t actually that good of a test for VR via steam link, but it’s what I had aside from Subnautica and that seemed like a bit of a deep end pun intended. The biggest test is actually finishing the game before the battery runs out, which I did by all of like 2-3 minutes. The last set brutal enough I was near blindly going through the motions on the first spawn after so many runbacks.
There’s at least one bit of a hitch in the cross interfacing, in that steam VR puts a square on the ground, while the “Meta Quest” has you draw a boundary which it respects as you’ve drawn it. Thus, steam tries to fit the square into that boundary, which may put it at a weird angle, which may then in turn cause say Super Hot to spawn the interaction point for starting the level *outside* of the boundary. Indeed, far enough outside that even reaching as far as I could into the entertainment center I couldn’t reach. This was fixed by redrawing the quest boundary to be a little more square and set back rather than following the available space, so the steam boundary lined up more correctly. I also had the game setting that makes it spawn the levels in the same place every time on for consistency, but that’s not the default, and the experience of *not* being turned around so many times I completely forgot where I was in the room, wasn’t as good as I recall the demo making me lose myself in the game. Meanwhile on two different occasions I lunged towards a particular corner- the first harder than I intended isn’t there yup ow that’s a cinderblock, and the second I was aware enough that I would be approaching that corner but from further back this time and yup got close enough I could smell it.
I don’t know whether it was that non-adaptive level spawning or a problem with the two different boundaries, but there were definitely times when the game was spawning stuff so far back in the corner it did not make sense- one level where you’re standing behind a car trunk full of weapons spawning with me in the car trunk, having to back up into the clear space I’d left outside the boundary to function.
None of this is a major problem for Super Hot VR, as its conceit is literally that you’re playing a VR game, it’s a game you play in VR, and sitting games won’t have a problem. But for an Immersive Experience, having boundary problems such that you need to keep part of your head out of the game at all times is a mark against the system. Of course, if Valve would just hurry up and release their own all-in-one (they’ve gotta be working on that, right?, right!?) then this wouldn’t be a problem.
Thinking about games I could now play on the new rig, I also returned to Total Warhammer 2, after seeing that they did indeed finally add a Bretonnia faction (also finding out I did in fact buy the zombie pirates and sandy zombies ages ago and never played them- also there is clearly a zombie pirate ninja). And it turns out they made the Bretonnian campaign in 2 far less annoying: instead of most of your provinces sucking, you get full 4 stacks with resources on nearly every region. You get some free dwarves in the center to trade those resources with. You don’t even have to capture the whole provinces yourself, since instead of the other Bretonnians holding all the good land and confederating against you, the islands that would be annoying to grab are held by Bretonnians who immediately join you once you’ve secured the rest. Your lord starts with the second vow unlocked, and those lords who join you will have the first for free themselves, so you don’t have to grind just to use your knights. I’ve not had anyone actually attack or harass my territory so far that I wasn’t already attacking myself: You’re here to kill Tomb Kings and get victory points, and that’s what you get to do. I did have some chaos warriors spawn on my land causing a bit of a scramble, but it turned out I couldn’t even attack them, and it because apparent that was because they were spawned by one of the vortex campaign factions doing a milestone (for which chaos armies will spawn out of nowhere some distance away and then run over to attack them).
And they even added some ogre mercenaries you can recruit on occasion, which haven’t really made that much of a difference, but let me spice up and roll out a B-team faster than waiting for production buildings to build (army was like 1/3 peasant mobs and 1/3 ogres lol). Fought some humans ’cause they were in the way, cleared a skaven nest that was like 4000 strong, 3000 of which were skavenslaves, like ya do. And apparently the final tier Blessed Field Trebuchets have no friendly fire damage, which sounds almost entirely unique and like a smashing good time so I’ve gotta try those.
Not sure if I’ll finish the run, but it’s been nice so far. They also had a big cavalry update at the same time so it’s not nearly so much of a pain to wrangle them. But I’m now hitting the point where it’s like okay, pull back main army to swap out for better tier units that I don’t necessarily need but ought to do ’cause no one else can use them yet anyway (though the vow system forcing you to give significant jobs to the B-teams is actually a great shake-up, in this campaign where you can actually do that), also upgrade all the B-teams from whatever was available to properly optimized (and thus mostly identical) armies, etc.
I will return to Three Houses at some point.
I also “played” my new Boox e-reader. By which I mean, hey I thought I’d be smart and get an android device because screw Amazon, but apparently this has all sorts of non-removable garbage on it too, and if we’re being frank who knows what they’ve done in altering the OS ’cause it ain’t plain android. Security is for nobody I guess. Might see if I can shut some of that down with ADB, but I don’t want to actually root a clean OS onto it ’cause then it won’t be set up for e-ink. Unless the people making those have already done so for hacking e-ink Kindles. Probably won’t have the same refresh speeds either. Basically the Steam Deck went and spoiled me with it’s archaic “this is your hardware” mentality and I like this little e-ink device and there seems to be literally no offering that *isn’t* full of bullshit so I might as well keep it if I’m going to use any of them (and my eyes and neck say yes) but fuck this corporate dystopia shit.
Huh, how well that does work in practice? With mouse-and-keyboard I can just take my hands off them/not press keys to hold still, but when I’ve played VR games at a friend’s place I found it nearly impossible to hold still enough not to introduce some jitter. (Maybe the game takes that into account and has a threshold for movement?)
Not sure if there’s a threshold, but it moves pretty slowly. Looking around will pass some time, but nothing is usually close enough that you *can’t* look around- some levels are intentionally up in your face, but if you looked both thoroughly and economically you could conceivably get them first try (I’d usually have a few fails before realizing oh there was a pile of guns at my feet ’cause I looked everywhere but down, and this being super hot you’re not sitting around waiting for the next try). I expect that trying to stand stone still wouldn’t really work, but you need to look around to evaluate the situation anyway so I’d consider that splitting hairs. Sometimes, particularly early on before it ramps up, I’d be waving my hand in a “keep going” circle to pass time until a target moved out of cover. I don’t recall any moments where I got hit specifically while lining up the sights by wrist or even raising the arm, it was bigger movements or actions (lik bending to get a weapon then turning and raising it to attack) when I should have known better ’cause bullets were almost arrived, had not identified enemies behind/above/below/etc, or failing to eliminate targets quickly or in the right order and getting caught in crossfire.
The big catch is that there actually is a time when time moves when you’re not moving: when you shoot, or *throw*, time advances quickly for like 1/2 or maybe a whole second. Very often I would look at incoming bullets and decide okay I’ll shoot then dodge this way, which then causes time to advance and the bullets hit before you can dodge. It’s easier to remember to stop doing that with guns, but it also happens when you throw (or release something while moving enough for it to count as a throw). Which is particularly problematic since throwing, at least with the quest controllers, *sucks*. So you throw, fail to KO anything, and now there’s a bunch of bullets in the air and you have to throw again. Which is particularly annoying as there are several levels which want you to do throw kills. And yet, while I could basically never intentionally hit a target with a thrown object past a few feet, there would be rare occasions where I would casually flick one just to empty my hand and it would fly perfectly. It’s possible, I guess if your motion exactly matches the way they calibrated it.
Still playing a bit of The Old Republic, continuing my Smuggler run.
Also still playing Mass Effect 3. It’s still interesting that I can really only tolerate a couple of hours of the game before wanting to do something else. Last year at this time when I was off I was playing Dragon Age Inquisition and putting in four or five hours a morning, while this morning I managed to get through three hours of Mass Effect 3. Part of the issue was that with Inquisition there were big areas with lots of things to do that I wanted to finish in a session, while in ME3 the missions are separated and short. But also I don’t care for the gameplay that much, especially in the missions where they try to add new elements to, I guess, keep it fresh for FPS players but that just complicated things for me. That being said, some of the interactions with the crew and the old crew really work, and since I’m pretty much to the minimum war assets I don’t have to obsess over exploration anymore, so things should go better. I’m still looking to finish it off by the end of the year, and move on to something else.
Well, despite my previously-mentioned reservations, Mortal Kombat 1 was on sale at a good price, so I snagged it. The story started interesting, then it became predictable, then it became a bit of a slog then it regained momentum and mostly stayed in a high place to the end. Many ups and downs but overall satisfying, though the ending stinger failed to interest me. I suppose part of the problem is that this is whole game is a bit of a retelling of the PS2 titles, so if you, like me, have little to no experience with them you’ll be a bit unimpressed. I’ll see how the DLC fares next week.
Do you know what did impress me, though? Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. I didn’t have much hope for this game, but I can tell you already that it’s going to become a classic for me. The metroidvania and immersive sim elements are major part of it, sure, but what really sells it is how much it feels like Indiana jones. This is up there with the Arkham games in how well it represents the franchise and its protagonist. And yes, the first person perspective is key to it. You might not feel like it in the first few minutes (a recreation of the intro to Raiders of the Lost Ark), but as soon as you reach your first hub area everything will click and you’ll have trouble putting the game down.
And man, the game is just so large. But the good part about that is that it doesn’t feel padded. Everything is designed deliberately and not just as an excuse to make you walk longer distances. Even the collectibles have a purpose ands they’re not just a way to pad the runtime. You know how well this is done when there’s a fast travel system and I have yet to use it even once after several hours of playtime. I still have a long way to go but I have yet to feel bored or that my time is being wasted.
I watched MATN’s video (up to meeting your friend at the Vatican I think it was), and had a concern you might be able to address: it looks like a game that wants you to figure out your own way to get from A to B, but it also clearly has skills that are only unlocked by finding objects. So unless there are duplicates of those later, the answer is that you don’t find your own way, but instead have to clear everything if you don’t want to worry about missing some “obvious” skill you’re going to wish you had later. How do things continue on that front?
As far as I have seen there aren’t any real “skills” you find, just improvements to your existent move set (more stamina, faster recovery, etc.) but if there are duplicates I don’t know, I’m still on the first hub area. That said, the game allows you to revisit old areas, so there’s no really missable content.
I played Viewfinder when it came out and while I enjoyed it I haven’t really felt a desire to replay it, which is a shame because the mechanics are fun and technically impressive. I did really like the final puzzle, where you’re tested on all the various concepts you’ve learned so far in a rapid-fire environment. And while there are some more obviously intended ways to solve each of that puzzle’s challenges, from watching other people play I discovered there’s enough freedom in the game that you can actually solve some of them in multiple ways, which is always nice to see.
I’ve mostly still been playing One Thousand Uncles in Team Fortress 2, the gamemode about fighting against 40 Engineer bots on offense in payload or attack/defend maps. It’s a different-enough way to play that I’ve actually been spending some time playing some of my least-played classes like Spy, and have found it surprisingly enjoyable.
Also I’m starting a new RimWorld playthrough with the massive Save Our Ship 2 mod (which, from what I’ve seen, might have more content than some of the official expansions including building ships that can take off and engage in space battles).
Blitzed through Metaphor Re:Fantazio, and am now on New Game+. Very good game, though my memory is tempted to say Persona 5 is still better. The Job System is fairly standard, not that far off from Bravely Default or the Yakuza RPGs, but that’s the standard because it’s really fun. For a split second I remembered Final Fantasy X-2’s Job System, which was even better, and wondered again why nobody else had used it. Then I realized that that system is… basically the Persona system. From Persona. That they dropped for the more standard system in this game. Which is a very good system. And the game-wise turn limit and Social Link locks on Jobs makes it more interesting than it is normally.
The game has strong overflow mechanics. If you max out your Personal Skills, and then gain more experience for them, that experience turns into money. A very nice change from the Persona games, where I kept wishing the overflow experience would give me something. And now it does. But much stronger is Job overflow. If you max out a Job, and then gain 1000 experience for that Job, you get an item that grants any Job 1000 experience. So, 1 to 1 overflow between Jobs, heavily encouraging sticking to a single Mastered Job with high stats, and leveling up the rest with items. It’s even stronger than Octopath’s system; that one let you level up every Job without ever switching your class, but you had to at least use the character. The items in Metaphor can go to any Job for any character, meaning if you want to you can assign everyone but one character a mastered Job, and pour the entire party’s experience into one guy. Ludicrously strong. I think I would actually prefer this to be weaker; make 1000 xp give you a 500 xp item instead, leave a reason to switch people’s active Jobs around.
It took me nearly the entire game to realize that mastering a Job gave permanent stat upgrades to that character. There’s a game-length quest you get in the Prologue, and it wasn’t until the resolution of that quest that I noticed the Mastered Job stat gains.
Plot had some Anime nonsense (the party makes terrible plans), some fridge logic, and one section that practically had a “Scene Missing” index card over it (which will surely be an addition to the inevitable re-release), but was generally compelling throughout. Just the central premise of “popularity directly renders people invincible” makes for a compelling story, and then you’ve got the weirdness of “humans” being unnatural collage monsters with people faces. Although I was ready for it to end before the final dungeon, and a couple other dungeon gimmicks were irritating, but all complaints are minor. The game crashed on me twice, and one time I managed to fall through the floor (wait until buried enemies come out of the ground before battling them). I finished the optional superboss before going there, and the endgame cutscene kept referring to the optional boss, so maybe I made the final dungeon longer by fighting that thing. I probably should have kept a save file that hadn’t done that.
I was wondering how New Game+ would handle the Job System. Now I know; the Jobs keep their experience, but don’t keep their unlocked status, you have to re-unlock them through the social actions. Means you’re not as overpowered as a Persona game lets you get. But you still keep all your weapons, which are still available to the weakest classes, so you’re still incredibly overpowered. Just less than maximally overpowered.
The Settlers 7.
I found the DVD case while moving and was feeling shitty I don’t even have a DVD player on anything to play it anymore.
Then for some reason logged on to Ubisoft Connect just to see if it had it on sale, but not planning to actually buy it.
Good news:
To my complete surprise, the client actually recognized I own the game and allowed me to download it for free. It is my favorite Settlers game precisely because of how cartoony and yet how complex the supply chains become.
Bad news:
It was launched during the always-online DRM era when Ubi and EA thought every game could benefit from having intrusive online components to them. So… most of the features from the game are blocked because you have to access a Ubisoft server that hasn’t been online for over a decade to access them. A far cry from the micro-transaction hell we live in right now, but a very sobering taste of what it would become.
Eh, at least I can play the campaign and a couple of maps. But it really sucks.