T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve started playing They Are Billions.
I’m so far enjoying the game. The post zombie apocalypse, steampunk world is a really cool setting. I like the Starcraft-style base exploring side missions, and I also like that the zombies remind me of Project Zomboid, in the sense that one zombie left unchecked is very dangerous and could completely destroy your colony.
That being said, just one zombie being so deadly does highlight one of the game’s major annoyances. The long missions paired with the lack of a quick save system. A lot of the missions’ times last at least an hour, and it’s not even due to the fact that I play RTS’s kind of slowly. No, it’s due to the fact that most of the main objectives have a set time before they can even be completed. And this makes the lack of saving so much worse. Now don’t get me wrong, you can save, but that’s for not having to restart the mission if you close the game, if you fail the mission you can’t load that save, you just have to start over. That is, unless you forcibly close the game without saving, then you can load one of the very few auto saves.
But, all of that aside, I’m still having fun and I’ll probably play more over the next week.
Anyway, I hope everyone has a good Christmas and if you’re getting together with family I hope that dinner has no arguments.
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Hardware Review
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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.
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The Biggest Game Ever
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
I’ve been playing Steamworld Heist 2. It’s an interesting variation on a 2d turn based tactics game. There’s manual aiming involved, with some assistance depending on your character class. The fact that you can switch each character’s class trivially by changing their weapon is cool, but it’s somewhat mitigated by the fact that you get almost no info about each mission before playing it.
Also, it has a system where you can only use each character once a day. But passing a day has no cost so I’m kind of confused by the point of the system. Ah well, the missions are fun and that is the entire point. Inheriting skills from other classes is a really good design that both provides incentive for varying your approach and lets you make powerful choices.
The story is pretty bland but that’s not the end of the world.
I love the Steamworld games, but they all seem to deliberately include one mechanic whose entire purpose is to annoy the player. In this case it’s the sleep system. It’s such a waste of time having to go to sleep to recharge your used characters and really serves no discernible purpose.
Still playing The Old Republic, getting another planet in with my Smuggler.
Also still playing Mass Effect 3. I hit the Shore Leave DLC, which was a mildly entertaining mission with some decent jokes spoiled by excessive, boring combat. Yeah, the combat is probably a bit more boring than it was intended to be because I’m playing on the easiest mode and so don’t usually even have to go into cover (the only enemies that were any difficult at all were the Phantoms, mostly because if they get into melee range they have a one-hit kill and I often like to get into melee range to hit the enemies), but then if it was more difficult then I’d have to pay attention and run and hide and usually getting frustrated doesn’t make things more fun. I got to see Ashley in a party dress, though, which was interesting. Still, I’ll be glad when I finish this, although there are a lot of new missions spawned and I still have the party to do. My overall impression is that especially with the DLC they are a BIT too impressed with their own ideas and so want us to participate as much as possible, even though they aren’t as interesting as they think they are.
Ashley in a dress feels kind of weird to me, though that’s true of how Ashley looks in all of ME3 (I didn’t recognize her at first!) so… I guess that fits?
Yeah, I have to admit that she got an … upgrade in ME3. I’m not really sure how I feel about it, since she really looks more model-like in ME3 than the more practical soldier you got in the previous games.
Still going through Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Taking my time with it by exploring every nook and cranny. It is an enormous game and want to see every bit of it. Thankfully there are not (at least as of yet) any time constraints, so I can explore at my leisure.
Played through Khaos Reigns, the DLC of Mortal Kombat 1. I didn’t hate it, but it was also notably inferior to the main game or even the previous three ones. The Marvelization of it is annoying as hell (we even have Iron Man armors and Infinity Stones, ffs). And while the main story was already a bit guilty of characters standing around doing nothing while the villains acquired more power in this DLC they went overboard with it. But at least I got a couple of interesting playable characters.
Played through Chants of Senaar, a puzzle game whose main gimmick is having to translate different fantastical languages in order to figure out the puzzles. It is a very good game and also led me to explore its every corner, but since is also comparatively much shorter I already completed it, even getting every achievement. Not that hard to do, since many of the secret ones require the player to do stuff I normally do anyway, such as revisiting old areas under different circumstances, or try silly things just to see what happens.
Also started Harold Halibut. It’s a graphic adventure with a very pleasing visual style reminiscent of stop-motion movies (though curiously without stop-motion animation). I’m not sure how long I’ve spent with it but so far there’s very little in the way of actual plot and most of it is just fetch quests and a little world building, with little in the way of mystery or puzzle solving. The main character is kind of a dolt but not in a funny way, and nearly everyone seems to enjoy being a jerk to him, so there’s not much in the way of likable characters at the moment. I haven’t gotten bored or annoyed, but I hope things pick up soon before I do. Hopefully it’s just a slow start because the game does look really nice.
Something weird with the links up there, but since we’re here: I finished the Repanse de Lyonesse run I was doing in Total Warhammer 2, but that’s about it.
Metaphor Re:Fantazio New Game+. I managed to miss the part where the highest difficulty is New Game+ Only, meaning it’s actually designed around your team having endgame equipment. It’s still pretty easy (I got an Unscathed Bonus on a Chapter Boss), but a character getting hit in their weakness just dies instantly so you still have to pay attention. Not much else to say, I like the story and the gameplay and so I like this game.
Unicorn Overdose finally got fired up. I really like skirmish games, and typically enjoy squad-based games. I like them best when you have complete control of the squad, but that’s not the standard and it’s not the case here. I’m barely out of the tutorial, but it looks like the troops have a limit to the encounters they can fight; everyone’s got a 6 above their head that goes down with each battle, win or lose. Presumably they have to go home when they hit 0. So, like, a cross between Phantom Brave and Soul Nomad and the World Eaters, two games which heavily scratched two very particular itches. With the character animations of Aegis Rim: 13 Sentinels (which did not particularly do anything for me).
The plot has barely begun, but is managing to be interesting. The Great Evil Nation What Conquered Everything is shown to be using Mind Control, and the hero’s Ring of the Unicorn can break it, meaning we actually have a reason we can conquer the world-conquering villain while stronger nations with veteran soldiers couldn’t. Of course it also means we probably could have avoided the whole game if the Battle Queen had kept the ring with her for the Prologue battle, instead of giving it to the Prince.
Female characters are highly sexualized already. The Battle Queen issues commands from a pose that maximizes her mammara-gluteal protrusions, and the soldier behind her is two D cups in a bikini. Not like, a chainmail bikini, just a bikini. It’s going to be a time.
Factorio Space Age: I’ve “finished” all three inner planets, in the sense that all of them have rocket production going and can send science home, but I still have some rough bits to iron out to get science production up to speed. To make it to Aquilo, I’m going to need a much bigger ship, with a nuclear reactor, rocket turrets, and enough onboard manufacturing to support a base on the ground (since Aquilo doesn’t have metal resources at all). That’s going to take forever to build unless I seriously ramp up rocket production on Nauvis, so it’s time to finally make use of all the cool new buildings I’ve unlocked and massively scale up my home base.
Also, I built my first two Spidertrons – one for Nauvis and one for Gleba. Now the biters will know fear.
I quite liked They Are Billions, but didn’t finish it, for mostly the same reasons you mention; the missions got really long.
Continuing my exploration of Things Console Players Knew Were Great Years Ago, and played It Takes Two with my wife. Absolutely marvelous two-player coop platformer with a lot of content that keeps changing to keep it fresh, and a good story. Despite the fact that the main characters are monsters who would murder their child’s favorite stuffed animal, brought to life. Not traumatised at all.
Had a nice xmas thank you. And, enacted my plan of playing Star Wars Jedi: Survivor EA as I did what must be 5 years ago now with Jedi Fallen Order EA. Of course this time with the warnings against the PC port I was glad to see that the PS4 version had come out and was on sale, so got that and picked up a PS4 Pro second hand, after realising that moving the PS4 to my mother’s house technically removed our main media machine for watching Netflix etc.
As with the first one, it started rather dull, but now that the level design has opened up and I’m finding myself exploring, discovering, and using the map, it’s getting a lot more interesting (Koboh).
Forgot to mention in my other comment – Blue Fire! I can’t remember why or when I picked it up on GOG, but it’s great! It starts slow, looking like a much simpler game than it really is, (and I think I soft locked myself somehow due to a glitch very early on so restarted) but in reality is really a rather satisfying, and increasingly challenging, 3D platformer, with an element of upgrades and new platforming powers coming as the game goes on, to allow access to new places. Playing Jedi Survivor now, I miss being able to air-dash, wall run on whatever I want, and really putting in the trial and error and inquisitiveness needed to see if areas are accessible. I recommend it so far, to my fellow 3D platforming appreciators! In a word – freeform. I love it when the world gives me the moveset tools and lets me see what I can do.