T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve not done much.
I’m pretty much burnt out on They are Billions. Mostly due to it not really giving a sense of progression aside from a new enemy every once in a while, and working through the tech tree. I guess you could argue that the larger population requirements and increased enemy quantity could be considered progress, but it just felt tedious.
Other than that, I’ve just been watching YouTube and staring at my steam library.
So what’s everyone else doing this week?
This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Patreon!
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Unicorn Underdress is almost finished, just got however many fights the capital will be. Maps have gotten pretty long, and I ended up taking a break halfway through the last one, but they’re still fun. The plot has remained very thin; there are no real recurring characters or plotlines, you just move forward into a new character, and then go through them, and that’s that. It’s making me respect Triangle Strategy more; that game’s plot has some issues, but it’s also got some meat. (Especially since Unicorn Overbite’s chickenstock-thin plot still has plenty of issues.)
The game gives you the option to either recruit characters or execute them, but only for the nice ones; pretty much every character I’ve actually wanted to execute has not given me the option, and one of them was in fact mandatorily recruited to the team (and I bet it would have been two, if I’d recruited the one guy I actually got to execute). Really takes the wind out of the option when the option keeps getting pulled away for absurd anime forgiveness. (“That guy who murdered a village while laughing maniacally? Well, his sister might be sick, so that was all justified.”)
Code Vein is Anime Dark Souls, including the incredibly bleak tone, which I’ve never liked about Dark Souls. I managed to get partway through the tutorial dungeon; then the overpowered assistant died, I ran into a special enemy who killed me, and the game put me back at the beginning of the level, with everything having respawned except for the overpowered assistant. I started to run past them all, until a one-body wide corridor dropped an enemy directly on top of me, causing the others to catch up and kill me. And that’s probably going to be my last experience with Code Vein. At least it made me laugh a couple of times. The first was the hilariously underdressed Anime Mystery Girl in the opening, with the outfit wigging out like it was under constant collision detection; the second was when I switched weapons to find the second weapon was just a piece of rebar with what had to be 200 pounds of concrete on the end (and then we sliced somebody with it in a cutscene, as if it was a sword and not a giant smashing cube with no sharp edges anywhere). So, we’ll call it a wash. As long as we stop playing immediately.
Adventures in Assassin’ Creed Origins continue. I seem to have triggered the endgame after successfully running all around the map, and while the gameplay is good the story is not. It’s a ButtCreed-story, and it’s not one of the good ones, and what I suppose was meant to be the “big climax” felt extremely contrieved. There’s still some end game left, and I strongly fear that it will throw me into ANOTHER forced open combat. What is it with sneaky murder puzzle games that then go saying “here’s a big bad you need to take in open combat”? When did this bullshit start?
Did it start with the bosses in Deus Ex: Human Revolution? Are there good examples from before that?
The story in Origins is better than the story in Odyssey and Valhalla, at least!
Metal Gear was doing it long before DX HR. “This is a sneaking mission, now outshoot this gatling gun.”
I’m sure it didn’t start there either.
Another busy week, so not much playing. Most of my playtime was dedicated to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and I’m still barely a third of the game done if the stats are anything to go by. It truly is a much larger game than it looked, particularly if you enjoy exploration.
Outright deleted Harold Halibut without touching it again and I don’t regret it one bit. Once the novelty of the visuals wears off there’s nothing to keep you hooked and in all this time I haven’t felt the urge to go back. I truly hope next time someone tries a similar visual style they put some effort into the writing too.
Did a full playthrough of Carrion. I had bought and played the game on PC when it came out, but now I bought a second copy on console with the intention of yet again 100%-it, which I did. I absolutely love this game. I had no idea there was free DLC available for it, though. I don’t know how that escaped me, but it was a pleasant surprise.
Marginally related to all this I started watching the Fallout series on Prime Video. Enjoying it so far, in the three episodes I watched. Hope it maintains this level of engagement.
Took some rest from PC and played some Eagles in the sky, a boardgame of WW1 dogfights with card-based mechanics.
Was greatly amused by the fact it took 17 dogfights to actually see a damaging hit being scored… and seeing the side scoring the hit immediately retreating (due to a random event), apparently shocked by own audacity.
9/10, would recommend to someone into air combat in the period, can easily be 10/10 with minor houseruling.
Have you ever tried Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol & Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies? I picked them up recently, after reading Meier’s memoir, and they’re WWII dogfights with a turn-based card-like mechanic – you have a base set of moves and then get to select special moves to add to a pilot as they gain experience. Quite charming, though I don’t think I’ll sink many hours into them. But affordable, and sounds like it might be your kind of thing.
Both are good enterntainment, if rather simplified, although tbh I find Eagles doing much better job abstracting the air combat.
That being said looks like Scramble: Battle of Britain takes quite a few notes from the Battlestar Galactica Deadlock mechanics. It’s still in (as I understand very) early access, but so far looks promising.
oh, that battlestar galactica game looks really cool – hadn’t come across it yet. Thanks!
I finished off Mass Effect 3 and so finished off my replay of the Mass Effect trilogy this year. I still felt like the game was a bit too enamored with its own mechanics, which led to a number of special mechanics in each combat mission that dragged the missions out, so much so that I always ended up sick of the combat and just wanted to end the mission. Someone who liked that sort of combat, though, might feel differently.
I also found that while early on in the game I was very tired of it, I kinda started liking it better towards the end, after the “Shore Leave” DLC. The reason, I think, was because once you get the apartment from that you get more events with the crew, which then broke up the missions with something that I, at least, found more interesting. Also, by that point I had explored most of the galaxy and had maxed out the War Assets, so I didn’t have to do the exploration stuff as much. And with the crew interactions and stuff, there were indeed some really good moments, moments that were personal and well-written. I think my overall impression of ME3 is that it had some really good moments, but the missions and combat are a bit dull.
The first time through, I went with “Destroy” because that character simply thought that the Catalyst thing was nuts and so destroying it was the only option. This time, I went with “Control” because this character figured that destroying all the Geth and EDI — and maybe a lot of other people — after all the work she went through to fix that all up was too much of a waste, and thought that the whole “Merge” thing wasn’t a choice she could make for everyone else, so controlling things and running it all herself made the most sense. I will give the game credit for talking more about that conflict in the DLC and so not having it come out of nowhere, but it still didn’t make much sense. The biggest issue for me this time was that the Catalyst uses the “Organics are so unpredictable!” line when talking about the Crucible being built, which then does give no real reason why they suddenly feel they need a new solution. If they had planted the starting plans, at least, and were waiting for a set of organics to finally get it built, then that could be played as them desperately wanting some organics to talk to them and give them a new solution, which then would have made it easier to understand why you showing up there means they need to appeal to you to give them that new solution.
I started with no plans to replay it ever again, but with the more personal approach to the crew that came in later I’m wavering on that. My character had no romances in the entire series, but with Traynor being even MORE adorkable than she was in the base game, Ashley getting the upgrade, and Aylers sounding appealing, it might be worth going through it again just to explore more options like that.
But that won’t be for a while, and I’m still not convinced that I wouldn’t rather replay Dragon Age first, despite my dislike of Inquisition. For now, I’m planning on moving on to “The Age of Decadence”, with a character based on MacGyver who will be absolutely avoiding all conflict, even if it means save scumming to do it.
In Satisfactory the next Giga-Factory is nearly finished. And Ficsmas is still going. In Monster Hunter World we hunted Legalias and Paolums in the dozen – obviously without getting the materials we needed. And I started Balatro. Rogue-like … ehh not really my gem.
In analog New Years was filled with Tribes of the Wind – very symbol heavy, Ticket to Ride: Europe, So Clover adnVale of Etherinty. And I got the new Expeditions Add-on, but I didn’t have time to play it yet.
Oh! And Guitar Hero Live. I undusted my PS3. The “new” (2015) guitar design with upper and lower buttons is interesting, The GoPro Live-Concert style is interesting, even though I miss the style “Legends of Rock” had. The songs to play are almost all bullshit. If Green Day is the most Metal band in your setlist of your former metalized franchise, your setlist is bad. Katie Perry Why??
I got Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom for Christmas, and finished it last week. I agree with most of the criticisms I’ve heard about it: it’s easy, the smoothie making is tedious, Zelda has very little agency compared to her BotW/TotK incarnation, staircases of beds are the most common solution, etc. But I still enjoyed it. Some of the dungeons were completely linear and some of them had a more open design, but they all managed to feel like classic zelda dungeons just by virtue of the echoes system meaning every new enemy you encountered gave you a new tool to work with. And while I could get through most combats just by spamming shield moblins, I frequently ended up experimenting with other echoes just to see what the quickest way to wrap up the fight was.
I also played my first game of Kill Team at my local game store, running Ork Kommandos. I lost, but I had fun doing it and I like the mechanics of the game
I turned around and kept going ham on Warham with Total Warhammer 2, starting up a zombie pirate campaign. Which forced me to finally figure out how to use guns in total war, which was enough of a new skill I went ham enjoying the use of it (the secret is that in addition to staggering the guns along the infantry line you also have to pay *extremely* close attention to every contour of the ground, where bows would just magically arc over everything perfectly guns won’t). The Vampire Coast factions are also interesting in their partial horde status: your faction leader and a set of unique lords you can recruit with tech tree and campaign progression (infamy) points are able to build horde recruitment stuff on the go, but other lords are not. You can take an hold territory and get more income than say Norsca, but only barely. Instead you’re supposed to raid and sack, but unlike Norsca you can make pirate coves on port towns.
Of course, the game doesn’t tell you how to do this, just that you should. And the first and most obvious mention is on one of your hero types having an Establish Pirate Cove action. Which then costs around 4000 gold, plus another 2500 to build the income building, for a mere 200 gold of income. Or you can do it for free after attacking a port town. Of course, you’d never know this when the game *also* tells you to go attack a landlocked elven city first (I’m playing Count Noctilus, who starts controlling only the Maelstrom single “town” in the middle of the ocean), the entire province of which is also landlocked, and which then causes you to immediately be at war with two other full province controlling elves whilst you have one basic tier army. Or in short, the game basically tells you to do all the wrong things. So that took a while to dig myself out of, because while I could make the choice to abandon the territory I still had to fight my way to enough gold to avoid bankruptcy. The actual combat is pretty nice though, you get to feel like the skaven summoning units and with free artillery spells, without actually being the skaven special snowflake favorite badguy faction.
And I’ve since reached the point where it’s getting tiresome. See, because you aren’t capturing territory, you don’t get to conveniently stop and rest a turn or two and top up your army after every fight. Instead you’re at war with everyone and need to constantly be running away- which means you need to take as few casualties as possible even for the tiniest of garrison battles. and that means fighting every. single one. personally. Because even in fights where you can wipe the enemy out with artillery and summoned units with zero casualties, the auto resolve will give you casualties. And while the fact I’m getting to fight all sorts of factions and garrison sizes means it’s not always the same enemies, the battles are still the same: form up the gun line, constantly pause to micro the artillery/guns/spells/cavalry/etc as hard as possible for absolute minimum casualties, repeat for every army every turn. But if i stop and try to hold territory, some legendary lord with a full kit of bogus unique items (or just the Sword of Khaine, had one army chase me half across the map with that, after I barely survived fighting off a *different* army that had it) will show up with a full stack of far more expensive units. Which I can quite possibly fight off, but which will leave me so damaged the *next* army will finish me off.
Now, that’s what the whole horde recruitment thing is supposed to be for, you can lose units and replace them as you go. Except also not, because there are lord skills that give extra bonuses only to units which hit rank 7+, which takes nearly all game, and means at a certain point your units actually become irreplaceable. On top of this, the horde building slots are clearly not best used for recruiting- rather, you build the growth boost building because optimization, then the cannon recruit building because it gives you the free cannon spells which your non-horde lords never get (poor James keeps pulling miracles out of his hat with no healing spells *or* bonus artillery, just a gunnery wight, summoned crabs, legendary cannon, and some ogre cav mercs), and you can raise basic zombie/gunner troops anywhere without buildings, so by the time you can get the horde buildings to recruit anything interesting you’re again halfway through the game and your existing troops are now precious irreplaceable high rankers. Feeding right into the grand paradox of the Total Warhammer games: if you’re good and/or reset enough, your starting lord will have the most basic army all the way until endgame, while the new armies you try to make with the fancy endgame units are both overpriced and inexplicably suck (because they lack massively leveled and geared lords/heroes/unit ranks, and you’ve been practicing with the other armies all game).
I sat on one town with two armies for a while that the computer needed to re-cap to do their ritual I interrupted, but they refused until I had to give up and go looting, at which point they swooped in (and then sieged it for no reason long enough to miss their time window, this AI). With those armies on the wrong side of the map I eventually ended up at their capital, gleefully anticipating sacking the place for a ridiculous pile of money if I managed to break a garrison that included a dragon. . . until I had to run away because *two* armies from a *completely different* faction, which is supposed to hate the one I was attacking but is instead only at war with *me*, showed up. I disbanded a third army so I could rebuild it with one of the unique horde lords, but in the time that took James the nobody swept south, finished setting up the pirate coves in that area, and even fought off that second crusading army of elves with the Sword of Khaine*. Now the most likely fight for the third army is going to be against pirate dwarves, which I failed against and reload/retreated from before because their flamethrowers are insane (I’d only tried the fight before because science) and I doubt the changes will make much of a difference (I’d specifically planned counters for faster wall fighting and large anti-large units, not heavy armor infantry and field artillery). I left off saved before a second defense of that very first town the game told me to take (which I’ve lightly defended out of spite), against an even more stacked army, which was the fight that I *stared* today with.
And what do you want to be even if the elves will make peace they’ll just stab me in the back later? I wanna to fight some lizards or rats or something.
*The Sword of Khaine being the most ridiculous uber weapon, you generally take it by killing whoever has it, but the wielder basically has double damage and never misses attacks and also gets to spam a bunch of area damage spells and always fights until dead but something something it’s bad for you eventually. It might not actually be bad for me, but the prompt comes after winning a fight and before the chance to save for the turn, so I refuse every time.
I finished Echoes of Wisdom and enjoyed it despite the fair criticisms its gotten. The final boss fight was my biggest annoyance.
it bugged me that you end up as useless dead weight during the whole thing. I just spammed echoes and tried to stay out of the way. I saw afterward that you can help more directly by using bind. Maybe that was the intended experience, but it certainly wasn’t obvious.I’ve moved on Red Dead Redemption 2. I played about 25% of the story a few years ago, but lost interest. I’m going to give it another try though