T w e n t y S i d e d
This week has been just Deep Rock Galactic.
It’s just a good game. I thought I would have more to say, but I still have some effects from being sick so brain no work. After I’m done writing this I am going to try R.E.P.O. which as far as I can tell is like Lethal Company, but with more physics.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
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?
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
I am taking a look into Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop on the switch, prompted by PlayFrame, in which you repair spaceships with the aid of a HUGE maintenance manual.
So far it’s neat, but I find it a little yanky control-wise. I also MASSIVELY DIG the fact that you can switch from “you’re on a timer” to “you can do three jobs a day, but with stricter quality control”.
PUBG: Battlegrounds, aka Player Unknown Battlegrounds: Battlegrounds. A neat game, but really not my thing. The maps start out huge, and gradually shrink, so it’s very likely you don’t see anyone until Round 3 or so. Then guns do sizable damage so you can die without ever seeing who’s shooting you. Very much an “eyes on a swivel” game. Also you start with no equipment at all; I lost a couple of games because I went to find equipment, instead found an enemy who’d gotten there first, and they shot me dead before I could fight back. (Also the default outfit is a bright white shirt that makes you stand out in the field. I’m not sure how you replace that with camouflage but I assume you buy it.)
Otherwise, same old same old. Slay the Spire reached Ascension 20 with everyone, so I can finally just play characters I like again (aka Shiv Silent). Brotato continues. Super Auto Pets continues. Played some Balatro, made no progress.
Fired up Nuclear Throne for the first time in a while. I’ve gotten very bad at that game, can’t aim for the life of me.
Still playing my Smuggler in The Old Republic. I had noticed that killing strongs went really quickly but killing ones that were less than that seemed to take a relatively long while (although not that long). I figured out why. Upper Hand is important for the subclass I went with, and I had two abilities that generated it and allowed me to use another ability that did quite a bit of damage and used less energy. The one didn’t seem to do a lot of damage, though. I also had another ability that caused bleeding. Against strongs or higher, I would use it because the fights would last long enough for it to be useful, but lower than that using other abilities would work better. Then in looking around I noticed that that one ability that didn’t seem to do a lot of damage actually did a small amount of damage to start and then did that same damage any time a bleed ability hit. So against strongs, it was kicking in fairly often, and so helping to reduce their HP, but since I didn’t run bleeds against lower mobs I didn’t notice that. That was an interesting thing to find out, and when I was tweaking the abilities — in TOR you get set things but also get to choose from and tweak your abilities every so often as you gain levels — I didn’t realize that happened and so didn’t know about it when I selected that chain.
I started playing Avowed. It’s… a totally fine game. Nothing really stands out being particularly great or particularly bad. There’s a lot of loot but it’s all really low impact. I dunno, I don’t have that much to say about it.
I also got Spirit Island on mobile. This is a terrible mistake. It’s my favorite board game and now I can play it at any time. Sadly it doesn’t have all of the content of the physical board game yet, but it is a really nice implementation of the game otherwise.
I am also playing Avowed, and also agree that it’s not amazing or bad- but it is exactly what I wanted. MATN’s video was a bit too gushing, but still made me go hey that looks like Dishonored but you’re not an assassin and you get magic other than teleports and plague rats. And yeah it’s basically that: basically no-stealth combat, a bit of climbing things, lots of materials and gold to loot everywhere to scour the place for but also a gear system that is not lol random Diablo vendor trash. It’s just nice.
I stared on Normal but when it appeared that my spells were killing things with no effort and I was given a second companion I upped it to Hard, which got me actually using some consumables again, but I’ve also managed to find a spell that just kills things again (but cooldowns say I can’t just spam only that, so).
I like how they’ve got the “wand” as a rapid fire close ranged weapon, which allows the pistols to not be magically super fast dual semi-autos like in most games. Except this game does have you conspicuously lower the pistol offscreen then it comes back up somehow reloaded when you’ve got your off-hand full, so actually they should just write some fluff in there that says they’re literally part magic. This game also has spears, which is rare. And I like how they’ve taken a sort of middle ground approach on carrying capacity and armor: you only have one armor slots, gloves and boots are weightless accessories, and then you also have two rings and an amulet/trinket. You can dump stuff int your stash at any time from the menu so carrying capacity really only affects how many weapons and armor you can carry around to switch between, but you’re supposed to be specializing in just a few (keeping those few upgraded), so carry limits kindof don’t matter, but in a way that doesn’t have you carrying around everything forever. Except consumables which are also weightless so you will eventually have an entire city’s worth of food and several crates of potions in your pocket.
Your first companion has the voice actor of Garrus from Mass Effect, which is part of why MATN was so gushing, and I admit I do find it quite nice. A different short video I watched complaining about the game (which only confirmed that the complaints where not complaints to me) was that Kai is constantly making snarky marvel quips, but of course he is- they obviously got that voice actor because people love Garrus. On the other hand it is rather jarring hearing such a distinctive voice come out of a not-Turian head all the time.
I’m finding the game quite pretty, though not perfect. The raytracing is much nicer than the baked in, feels like they might have made it assuming that, and details are getting quite fine but still not so “realistic” to look bad. They’ve got the skin on Kai’s face smoothing out when his mouth stretches and back. On the other hand the bodies of most NPCs still have some noticable skeleton jank and “literally everyone has the exact same body type” sameness under their occasional low necklines and bare shoulders.
Another complaint was all sorts of crates and set dressing that doesn’t have physics on it and crates not functioning as containers, but that’s a feature: you can’t render a jungle with that much detail and afford to put physics on everything, and the only containers are chests so you can instead have crates and barrels as set dressing that can be passed by without needing to check every single one for loot.
The magic system is interesting, where you can learn spells to cast them without a book, but you need to find a book to learn them first, and casting them *with* the book makes them more powerful (and lets you cast things you don’t have the level to learn yet) and cost far less and recharge faster. This also means you’re kinda stuck with the sets of spells in books the designers give you, until you’ve got enough levels you can spare to just hard learn the rest of what you want at a usable level. Some spells give nearly their entire benefit with only one point, others really need the second rank, and many have third ranks that seem pretty meh, so it’s very much a case of having the right number of ranks in the right spells to work with the book you want to use.
On the combat side, the game clearly thinks it’s some sort of tactical first person dark souls with a mass effect ability wheel and stamina based dodging, but constantly surrounds you with melee enemies that will combo their way across the screen while having ranged fire support and killing some amount causes a bunch more to spawn around you. So signals are a bit mixed. It’s blindingly easy to tell this was a console-first game, from the exactly four spells you can cast from a grimoire, to the homing wands and ranged crit targets that move just enough it seems clear they’re meant to be gamepad aim-assisted, to the bizzare “you have *two full* equipment sets to switch between” which is worse than being able to cycle one weapon or the other and also it’s not a full set it doesn’t change armor or accessories.
But yeah, overall game is exactly what I wanted, glad I went ahead and bought it while I was interested. I’ve just reached the main town in the second area (full cleared Dawnshore first) and am enjoying it quite sufficiently.
The wands and guns at least the game seems to have inherited from Pillars of Eternity where iirc firearms tended to hit heavily and, reasonably enough, punched through armour rather well but took a long time to reload.
Also, I’ve seen a bunch (most?) people play the game in third person, not sure how the game wants to be played because I think first person is the default but I got the impression the environments felt like they were designed for third person exploration.
I’m playing first person and I haven’t had a problem with the environments. If anything that would be a bigger help with the combat rather than the environment. I think the settings even call that out saying yeah it makes it easier to tell what’s going on, like you might not want to turn it on because it would make the game easier. Moving around in 3rd person I did not find the player character’s animations particularly appealing: with mouse and keyboard you’re very obviously locked to 8 directional movement which is constantly jarring in an otherwise rather high detail and smooth environment, and while you’ve got some head customization and the armor’s nice and you can even “transmogrify” (pick an armor for visual while using something else for stats), it’s not enough to make me think the game is meant to be in 3rd.
Except, it’s obviously a console-first game (another way to tell besides the grimoire mechanics is the way enemy data when looking at them and your minimap are so small, because they’re obviously meant to be on a giant tv screen rather than a normal monitor, even ignoring the giant “Xbox Studios” startup splash screen), so 3rd person movement with gamepad could very well have been the original intended experience. I would not be surprised if that was the console default, but the PC default is first person instead.
What would you say about the issue of slow leveling? I’ve heard some people complain that it’s very unsatisfying that you aren’t getting enough level up points to actually develop your character, unless you are really completionist about everything. Is that true?
Empires Of The Undergrowth is a Real-Time Strategy game about ant colonies, which I picked up in Early Access a year or more ago – it recently finished adding content and came out in full.
It’s a very neat concept: you start simple, with levels that require you to build up a force of black ants, pretect the queen and steamroll any threats in the area – neatly turning would-be predators into food, which you use to upgrade and ovewhelm other, more dangerous predators.
But then it grows in complexity, making you play as different species. Protect and harvest aphids as wood ants. Maintain production lines as leafcutter ants. Cry in frusutration as yet another swamp creature appears and kills all your fire ant soldiers.
Meanwhile there’s a meta-story about a colony of genedically modified ants running tests in a lab for a couple of scientists, which has an eventual ending so deranged that it’s equal parts baffling and marvellous.
It is an RTS, which means micromanagement – though it’s simpler than other RTS games since you can’t actually control your ants directly and they’re cheaply (and automatically) replaced. Strategies generally boil down to ‘send in the horde and let them do what comes naturally’ with variations like ‘not yet, gather all the soldiers nearby first’ or ‘order the workers not to fight anything when they go’.
Still it’s fun, not too complex – and you get to learn about ants and other insects, which is great. Though maybe not if you’re arachnophobic.
(Amusingly the game does feature and ‘arachnophobic mode’, but I’m not conviced that putting a spider in a hat is that much better…)
The best/worst arachnophobia mode was from a game I’ve forgotten the name of; they had spiders as atmospheric elements, and you could turn them off, but if you turned them on again you’d get, like, ten times the spiders. If you turned in off and on again a few times you’d go from “there’s a spider crawling across the floor” to “the floor is made of spiders.”
Satisfactory has a really bad one. The spider-esque enemies get a simple, holographic cat picture projected over them and make cat-noises instead of their normal noises. Funny for about a second, but the holo-picture is hard to parse (it turns to face you no matter where the enemy is facing), plain annoying (it clips through things) and doesn’t even work because you can still see the enemy behind it, kinda. The cat-noises are unfortunately also weirdly tuned to be very annoying and easy to hear even if you’re actually far away from the cave.
All for a cat joke.
Done with Arkham Knight. I played the story to completion, finished all the DLC but, of course, the full ending is locked behind finishing all of Riddler’s bullshit side content, and fuck that. There’s way too much of it, well past the point where it becomes annoying. I just uninstalled the whole thing. I remember the ending after all (and I never liked it anyway).
Now playing through Deus Ex: Mankind Divided again instead of one of the many unplayed brand new games I have because of course. I know the main plot of the game is very heavy-handed and trips on itself constantly, but damn if the game isn’t still ridiculously fun to play. I’m spending nearly all of my free time in it and there’s just so much to do. Best of all, it never becomes boring. The only reason I stop is that I eventually have no choice but to go to work or sleep. God, how I wish this franchise wasn’t fucking dead. I still can’t believe they canceled the sequel to this for that stupid-ass Avengers game.
Tried out the demo for Jitter during Steam Next Fest. It’s a 2D top-down view game where you play as an AI which can jump between ships to control them in a pseudo-Newtonian physics simulation. The ships can be built from various modular parts by physically moving around and attaching/detaching them, and have batteries, oxygen, and damage to handle. There are also robots and humans which you can control in semi-RTS fashion, including loading them up in the ship you’re controlling and ferrying them around. The concept is interesting, though I went in thinking it’d be more like Escape Velocity or The Ur-Quan Masters and it seems like it might be more scripted levels. (There are some tutorial levels plus one “real” level you can play putting it all together.) I also found the movement somewhat unintuitive, since you can rotate your ship with Q and E, but WASD always push you in the same directions regardless of your facing unless you swap to the “camera rotates with ship” mode, but that’s not the default and the levels have text baked into them which remains fixed in orientation while the camera rotates, so it’s clearly not the intended playstyle. We’ll see if I pick it up when it releases (which I think is later this year), maybe I’ll watch some videos when it does to get a better idea of if it all comes together.
Otherwise, more Team Fortress 2 (One Thousand Uncles), Terraformers (finished another scenario on the hardest difficulty, just a few more to go), RimWorld (I’m so close to being able to finally move my colony to the giant space ship I’ve been constructing in space with the Save Our Ship 2 mod), and (a little bit of) Ark Nova.
I finished Immortals Fenyx Rising. Not 100% and not playing DLC 1 and 2 again, because Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is there to plunder my time. DLC 1 and 2 are great. Majima riding a 17th century Pirate ship in the year 2024 around Honolulu is greater. Just smiling chin to cheek a whole lot.
And the “coop” session of No Mans Sky continues. Even the coop-missions at the Nexus are far from actual coop. If one player is shooting a mission boss the other player can’t even see – something is very wrong. Next we might start this expedition stuff, maybe.