T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve played more Deep Rock Galactic. I kind of assumed I would be done with it by now, but it turns out shooting bugs takes a lot longer to get bored of than I thought.
I also played R.E.P.O. there’s something so delightful about being silly little robots, trying not to break every valuable item, while running away from various things that want to kill them.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
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.
If Star Wars Was Made in 2006?
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
The Gradient of Plot Holes
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
Same ol same ol. Brotato, Balatro, Blay the Spire, Buper Auto Pets. Little bit of Nuclear Throne, showing off how bad I’ve gotten at, like, aiming in general. Little bit of Chess.
Been watching a bunch of movies. I feel like The Lawnmower Man (Director’s Cut) is a special kind of bad.
I played through the first DLC for Rise of the Golden Idol. Given how much I liked the base game it’s not really surprising that I liked the DLC as well. On the first case I had to do a little bit of guessing to complete it, but the ones afterwards I had a pretty clear grasp on what was going on, which is impressive because the game messed with what it presents to you in some pretty cool ways. Some of the art in the later cases is unhinged and yet appropriate.
I also played through No Case Should Remain Unsolved. It’s a puzzle game where you are trying to figure out a kidnapping. You have a set of police interview questions that you remember asking but who you asked and in what order is messed up (your brain is not doing great). So you need to figure that out based on context clues (if the question starts “sir”, there’s good odds the responder is a guy, if the question is “when did your daughter go missing” there’s not a lot of options for who is being asked, etc). Also each section of conversation has a picture associated with it, some of which are more useful than others. It’s not a super long game, and I did need to look up a couple of answers, but the twists were interesting (I was very confused for a bit) and I enjoyed it.
I’ve also been playing through Hades again. Because it’s still a really good game. Really looking forward to Hades 2 coming out, but part of why I’m replaying Hades is because I played it during Early Access and my save couldn’t do all the quests so… I’m going to wait until Hades 2 is really out to play it.
I played Hades right before they finished the ending. Spent probably a dozen tries to beat the final boss, finally pulled it off, and got the wonderful Early Access message “the ending is still not finished. For now, let’s pretend the final boss just whooped your ass.” A surprisingly satisfying conclusion to that challenge.
Done with the campaign of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I know it’s a common complaint of the game that the story is unfinished, and it’s true, but I feel the game is pretty long as it is. Not a complaint, I loved every minute of it. Took me around 28 hours to do the whole main story and a bunch of side quests, but there was still content left unexplored, which I’m planning to leave for a NG+ run in a higher difficulty. Besides that there’s the DLC to start.
I don’t remember this game being so crash prone, though. It crashed on me so many times, sometimes while saving that I had no choice but to rotate between several more save states than usual.
Playing through Battlefield 4‘s single-player campaign now. I never played any of these games, since they’re multiplayer-focused, but they’re nearly all dirt cheap on sale now for $1 or $2 on Xbox, so I thought for that price it was worth a try. Enjoying the campaign so far, so I consider I got my money’s worth already. As far as I know all these campaigns are unrelated, so I don’t think I’m missing anything by playing the games in any random order.
I have also started Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, the one game in the series (save for Survive, which I don’t count) I had yet not played. This is 100% a mainline game in the series and not a spinoff, which is why it’s so odd that it started as a PSP exclusive and then barely got a couple ports to PS3 and X360. Still hilariously more accessible than MGS4, which is still stuck on the PS3. I was aware that a bunch of the stuff people associate more with MGSV had actually started here, but I didn’t know it was to this extent. Turns out MGSV is not as inventive as I thought. Of course, as an original PSP title, Peace Walker is considerably more clunky and less expansive, but still fun so far.
Still progressing with my Smuggler in The Old Republic. I just finished Voss and so am almost to the end, and so will probably finish it in the next few weeks and then move on to my Imperial Agent, the second-last class I have to do in this run.
Also reinstalled and briefly played The Age of Decadence. Moving it to the bigger screen does work a lot better, but I’m not all that thrilled with the navigation options. Also, I continue to be bemused that my Loremaster character based on uber-pacifist MacGyver’s first quest as a Loremaster is to kill a Loremaster who might be a rival to the one I’m apprenticing with. I really hope there’s a non-killing option, but I’ll probably do a couple other quests first.
I did kinda like how the quests paid off when I did the introductory one of getting the map and picking up the one with the other object, and some of the conversations are fine. I spent the points I got from that, and all of my general points — skills are divided into combat and non-combat, and you get some skill points that can only be spent on those specific areas and some that can be spent on any of them — are going into the non-combat skills, but I might have to not allocate them all because I have read that which ones are needed for necessary quests aren’t always clear and so I might have to spend them once I know what’s important. We’ll see what happens when I play it more.
I *think* you can just decide not to kill the guy. You don’t get a reward from your master, but he’s a charlatan anyway, and it doesn’t affect much. (That being said, I think he gives you something nice, either a gizmo of some sort or training, so you will miss that).
With high charisma and high intelligence you can pretty much get through the whole game without murdering anybody. Fully skilled you are basically Palpatine (minus the lightning).
Don’t try to start any fights if you go that route, and avoid shady looking people in allies, because you will **NOT** win any fights on that route.
(I did cheese some arena fights with poison and a hand crossbow, but those are optional).
Finally finished all the scenarios in Terraformers on the hardest difficulty, which according the achievement I got only 1.1% of players have done. Then discovered (in a game I’ve been playing it was a Steam Next Fest demo a few years ago) that there’s a weekly challenge with some random modifiers, which I’m looking forward to playing at a lower difficulty for a more relaxed challenge.
A friend and I both got Lethal Company for Christmas but hadn’t actually played it yet, so we got on with my brother (who has a lot of experience) for a few hours and had some laughs. My personal favorite was when we went down a mine elevator only to be immediately confronted by a turret, a slime, and a coil head along the only way to proceed, enough danger that we immediately nope’d back out. The coil head managed to get in the elevator with us without killing anyone as we were going up, so when we got to the top we simply got out and pushed the button to send him back down.
Otherwise, still playing TF2 and RimWorld, I’ve finally fully enclosed the large spaceship design I started on and am getting very close to moving my entire colony on it into orbit.
Reus 2. Just started, but so far it feels a lot like the original, which I liked. Super-simplified ecology builder, basically. Stomp around with your giant minions and create spaces for the tiny humans to go live in.