T w e n t y S i d e d
This week is more of the same, Deep Rock Galactic, and R.E.P.O.
nothing new with Deep Rock Galactic, just bugs and minerals.
R.E.P.O. on the other hand continues to be delightfully silly. The game has remained spooky despite its silly nature, and there is a lot more skill involved than I previously thought. It turns out you can get significantly better at hiding under tables and throwing lawn gnomes
Anyway, what’s everyone else doing this week?
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Entirely done with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for the moment. Completed all the DLC and played the Breach mode (which curiously I had never done before because I thought it was some multiplayer thing). I’ll save the NG+ playthrough for some other time. By God, as fun as it all was I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a game that crashed so often. Sometimes it was crash, restart, load game, immediately crash again seconds later. I had to be really careful with my saves. It was somehow worse in the DLC that it had been in the main game. Irritating as hell, particularly with how much I’ve come to rely in the Xbox’s “Quick Resume” option.
I’m also done with Battlefield 4, since I finished the campaign and I have no interest in the multiplayer. It was a good ride, though the ending was kind of abrupt. There are a couple of different ending choices but I really only tried one. It was a fun game, but I wasn’t really invested in the story, so I wasn’t itching to replay the mission just to try it.
I have started to play Broforce. It’s curious. Now that I started it, I remember playing the first couple of levels of this game, but it’s in none of my current libraries (well, except the one where I bought it a couple days ago), so I don’t know where I played. I suppose it’s possible it was on PS+ back when I still had a Playstation, or maybe it was part of the free games that Humble Bundle used to offer if you stayed subscribed. In any case, it’s a really fun action game. No notes.
Also started playing Need for Speed (2015). Occasionally I get the urge to play a racing game, but it’s been a while, so I’m seriously out of practice. Last time I drove a car in a game was Arkham Knight, and that thing had the advantage that you could crash into anything and keep going. Not here, of course, so I keep crashing and losing races. But let’s see if I can keep going and regain practice or will I get sick of losing.
That reminds me of the one time I played the original Knights of the Old Republic in ~2012 or 13 after a friend lent me the disks. It was pretty unstable on my system in general, but the underwater section on Manaan was particularly bad, to the point where I was mashing the quicksave button every 10 seconds or so just to make any progress.
The GOG version, at least on my systems, doesn’t do it as often, but it does it completely at random. I have a tendency to forget to save, but remember during my last playthrough that I was saving constantly just to avoid that. Star Wars: Rebellion has the same tendency.
A friend loves PUBG, so I’m playing that now. Getting better at it, though still not my kind of game. It’s common to spend five minutes without seeing an opponent, and firefights typically end in seconds, so there’s a pretty high sense of tension the whole time as you try to make sure you’ve got eyes in all directions. It’s similar to Werewolf, in that the majority of the game ends up being talking in the bits between the mechanics; if there aren’t any enemies, you’re talking to teammates to coordinate setting up perimeters and whatnot.
Brotato nears “completion”; I’ve only got two characters left who haven’t cleared Level 5, and the worst of the bunch is now completed; turns out the key to a successful Arms Dealer run is… dealing in arms. I’ve only won two runs with that character, and both of them involved getting a Chain Gun on the final boss and just evaporating it.
Slay The Spire. That is all.
I’ve started playing Brotato as a “half an hour before I leave for nightshift” game but I don’t know how long I’ll stick with it. I wish there was a more direct metaprogression than just unlocking new items/weapons, like a tiny bonus to a stat on “completing” the character. I understand that would alter the difficulty balance of the game but it would definitely motivate me.
More unlockables would definitely be nice. There’s no actual progress to be made by beating a character above the lowest difficulty, apart from making the select screen all the same color. Now that I’ve completed that (Engineer ended up being as bad as Pacifist), I’m not sure if I’ll keep playing.
On the other hand, I really like shooting things, and Fisherman gets absurdly strong once you can survive buying baits four at a time.
I’ve barely been playing anything, or at least it feels like it, spending most of my time fiddling with DnD stuff for distraction.
I’ve crept forward a bit in Avowed, once again basically clearing the entire zone of Emerald Stair before picking up the new companion NPC. But then, the time from new party member to end of main quest in the first zone was quite short, hence my delaying the main quest.
I also spent an evening clearing out the seasonal event missions in Marvel Rivals before they turn over, ’cause they unlock “comics” that seem to basically be the story of what’s going on. Except you can’t get them for past seasons without paying for the previous “battlepass”, so I don’t have that for the actual start, and I’m not paying for it when I could look up a wiki. Haven’t actually even fully read the two I’ve unlocked anyway. I say “comics”, because the panels are tiny and barely visible for some dumb reason, and the text is presented as short pages. In any case, being forced to play certain specific characters, using specific abilities, for multiple hours, was as irritating as one might expect. The Thing’s requirement was extremely easy to clear, like 5 minutes, but Human Torch took several battles of learning how to actually use his meteor charge (which has a long cooldown and wants a specific minimum down angle) and then grinding out the total damage they want you to deal, while Squirrel Girl’s wants you to use her lockdown ability which throws in an arc and moves slow and looks like it should bounce across the ground but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t etc.
Naturally I also had to once again run into a 5-stack of people who, what a surprise, immediately start complaining about the one random person added to their team. Hey, maybe if you don’t want to play with random people, you should find another “friend” to finish stacking your team. And if you don’t want to deal with people trying to farm game events (or learn new characters, etc), then go get in the competitive queue. I particularly liked one guy, who had earlier said “hey let’s not rag on this guy too hard,” like he was being magnanimous and actually regning in his group, who later started complaining about me rushing off ahead and continued even while I literally stopped at the corner peeking out waiting for them to catch up, and also went on and on about the enemy Iron Man being such a problem at the exact time that I was camping a medkit on the enemy side and had just pulled aggro and killed off the Iron Man. Geniuses.
Honestly, for quests like Squirrel Girl, I just play vs bots. It’s way easier, and it’s a good way to try out new characters. Regarding tryhards in Quick Play, I’ve never run into that issue – I guess it’s because I’m playing on the European servers, but what you’ve had to deal with does sound shitty. In any case, if I ever run into an asshole (which is rare), I just mute their mic and chat. Games are short anyway, which is a blessing in cases like these.
Oh yeah, I definitely know where the mute button is, though I should probably use it more often in that situation. In theory it would be nice to team up with a group that’s on mic, but in practice, yeah. I’d rather not play against bots ’cause that tends to give a very skewed perspective that shatters the moment you go back to other people again. If there hadn’t been time I might have done it anyway (and if I’d known how annoying Human Torch’s was going to be I would have seriously considered it), but I knew I could crowd spam my way through Squirrel Girl’s- I’m actually more annoyed at how bad the ability feels to me (I’m sure it’s reliable if you learn it correctly, but plenty of other lockdowns are easy to figure out straight shots).
Wasn’t the Human Torch quest to do damage with him? I got it in just a few games, spamming fire enclosures. It’s by far the best way to do damage as him.
I played through The Roottrees are Dead. It’s a puzzle game where you need to fill in a genealogy chart for a rich family, where you find info with a 1998-themed web browser. The closest game to compare it to is Return of the Obra Dinn – for each entry in the family tree, you need to fill in a picture, a name, and a job, and every 3 you get completely right it marks them as correct. The tune that plays when you get them correct is very reminiscent of the one in Obra Dinn, too. Now, it is true that figuring out which kids belong to which rich guy is less exciting than dealing with the idiocy, malice, and eldritch creatures that populated Obra Dinn, but I still really liked the game. It summarizes a lot of the web pages you visit, to include only the pertinent info (and the intended red herrings). It also encourages paying attention, because you really do want to search for EVERY proper noun that comes up. All of them. It does have a twist, but IMO it’s not that huge of a deal.
It also has two separate modes – the first has you fill out the family tree, and the second has you fill out some more family trees to try to figure out fallout from the first. IMO, the second part was weaker. It expects you to search for a number of things from the first part to see updates that happened since, and while it kind of has a list of relevant things to search for, that was still annoying.
The game also has a really nice hint system. I needed to use it a few times in the first part as I got to the end because I did not, in fact, search for all the proper nouns, and then more in the second because I didn’t know what things from the first part I had to search again. It picks something you should be able to find out and haven’t and gives you a few hints in order of increasing specificity.
Overall, it was a lot of fun.
I also played Duck Detective: The Secret Salami. This is a game where you’re trying to put nouns into sentences to figure out whodunnit. It’s pretty short. Also, you’re a duck and there is a dedicated button to quack, which improves the game a lot. I enjoyed it but it sometimes felt kind of childish (except the hint that you’re living in an authoritarian state) and there are generally not a lot of words to fill in for each sentence so you can just kind of throw things around until they stick.
The Roottrees are Dead is pretty awesome. I’m so happy to see new developers getting into this genre. Between Roottrees and Golden Idol, we’ve been spoiled lately.
One problem is that the game gets ridiculously hard for the last few spouse names. Often you have only one hint about them in the entire corpus and it’s pretty easy to miss.
Also, I do kinda like the story of Roottrees. It’s mundane, but I like the mix of mediocrity and obscene wealth that you see in the entire family, and how little by little you piece out the ways it impacted their lives.
I didn’t play anything this week. I was going to finish off my Smuggler in The Old Republic, but something came up in that timeslot and I only have Corellia and the finale to do, which is hard to fit into a shorter timeslot. And because I use the same desk for my work laptop and gaming laptop, not putting my gaming laptop on to play TOR meant that I didn’t really want to do that just to play a short bit of The Age of Decadence the next day, and I was still busy besides, so I’ll try to pick that up this weekend.
I picked up NierR Automata in the Steam Sale. It’s…definitely a JRPG. I’m fascinated by the way this kind of game (or this kind of media in general; Anime is the same) combines so much of what I like with so much that I hate.
– A story about existential angst and an endless, senseless war! Where the story lurches drunkenly from ‘really obvious cliche’ to ‘random bullshit that happens because we say so’, and more often than not it’s contradicting or undermining itself.
Somehow doesn’t stop it taking itself seriously, which…huh?
– Varied, imaginitive environments! Full of invisible walls, so don’t think about exploring too much. Definitely don’t try and think about how you’d get to that place you see; it won’t work. Just find the path the devs put in and follow that.
– A varied and customisable combat system! That one’s fun, not that many complains.
– Lots of grinding! Want to upgrade your weapons? You need [crafting materials]! You get them by checks Wiki killing [this] particular enemy. No, they don’t always drop that item on death – because f**k you, that’s why. Go kill some more.*
…oh wait, that’s not a good thing at all!
But then, every time I think ‘do I just hate JRPGs?’ or ‘should I stop playing’? I find myself in a boss fight with a guy wearing nothing but a stupid anime hairdo, or find a load of robots throwing a party inside a tank, or something else that’s equally ridiculous. And then I remember why I’m playing.
*Also, there are *literally dozens* of cosmetic mods, mostly based around weapons, changing (or removing) various character’s costumes…
…but a simple cheat mod that allows me to add crafting materials and avoid the grind isn’t even featured in the ‘popular’ section on this game’s NexusMods page? Can’t say I’m surprised, but still, shows some people’s priorities.
To be fair, Automata is the sort of game you’re supposed to replay many times, and your progress is kept, so the grinding doesn’t get too bad. And I don’t mean replay just to grind, the game significantly changes, the story is developed more and you get access to different characters to play, with the changes being not just cosmetic. Things that might not make much sense at the beginning are considerably more easy to understand once the context is made available to you by playing the story from a different perspective, and so on.
Since you already mentrioned it I’ll stress the following (just in case BH doesn’t know) it’s not a “it’s fun to replay it with different characters”, beating the game with the first character is essentially equivalent to “act I”, just when you think you’re just redoing the same playthrough with a character using different mechanics… you won’t.
Oh, yeah. I’ve already talked about the game elsewhere in this website, but indeed beating the game once or even twice leaves the story halfway done.
Yeah, there’s several quests available on the first run that are straight not supposed to be completed. (“SHARE IN THE HAPPINESS!”)
I definitely put the game on the “it’s an experience” side of storytelling; there’s a lot of things that “just happen”, and I think it serves to effectively show the protagonists are really not the main characters, and aren’t even close to the center of the goings-on. Just two mooks playing catch-up, like all the other footsoldiers.
Once I beat Nier: Automata once, I had absolutely no desire to play it again (various reasons you probably don’t want to hear me rant about here :D), but I remember that at the time, everyone was raving about how much better the story gets on subsequent playthroughs, and how the first ending is barely scratching the surface.
So, if you like the story so far, you should probably consider pushing through. For what it’s worth, I remember the game being quite easy, and I don’t remember having to grind or even having to look up any builds or the like. Maybe you’ll need to do it on the other characters that you’ll unlock once you beat the game.
In RimWorld I finally moved my entire colony into the giant spaceship I built, which finally has enough combat power to win the random space battles Save our Ship 2 throws you into without warning or any attempt at providing an appropriate challenge level. In the process the colony has grown from the starting concept of “small mercenary band crash-landed on a planet trying to get back into space” into a nearly 50-people strong group including a few kids I adopted from raiders. I’m feeling about done with this run (seeing one of my cybernetically/genetically-enhanced battle slaves shrug off a high-explosive anti-ship torpedo hit that vaporized their armor hinted that I might be a bit overpowered at this point), so I’m just doing the mod’s endgame of salvaging an interstellar drive core from the planet so I can add it to my ship, put everyone in cryptosleep, and head off into the great black yonder.
Also joined some friends for a TF2 event over the weekend, where I learned that practicing against buffed Engineer bots for five months does not make one ready to fight human players again.
I have finished a playthrough of Steelrising. It was overall very good. The game made some brief ripples around the time of release but hasn’t gotten a lot of attention since and I feel like it is a very fun “soulslike light” (with additional accessibility options available). I’d say at full price it might be a bit expensive for the level of environmental and enemy variety it has, it is a title from a mid-tier studio that also did the likes of Technomancer and Greedfall, but what is there is used well, I particularly liked the bosses designs which feel appropriately fun to fight and leverage the overall enemy style to great effect. I do not know enough about the French Revolution to fully appreciate all the characters but I still feel like the game did a better job of feeding in the details and context of the period than Assassin’s Creed Unity did (admittedly a low bar to clear).
I have also spent two days playing Lingo, a 2021 first person puzzler that just got a sequel released. I was expecting a game in the vein of Portal, QUBE, Relicta and so many others (although I was aware it was word based rather than physics based), a couple of hours with a story offering a pretext for some puzzle solving. Well, the game doesn’t really have a story and is very NOT hand holdy basically leaving you to figure almost everything out for yourself. There are blocks with words that require a different word as an answer, they appear in different colours, the colours and placement of the block determine what rules you need to follow to figure the answer out. This is all happening in a sprawling, non-euclidean level with many secrets hidden throughout. In something like 10+ hours I figured out the rules for something like 8 out of I think 12 or 15 colours total, some of which I haven’t even fully encountered yet. What I expected to be a game of anywhere between 4 to 8 hours HowLongToBeat puts at 18 hours for a minimalist playthrough and 43 for completionist. And most of it is excellently designed with very few answers feeling arbitrary (except for puple blocks, purple blocks are arbitrary nonsense).
Just hit the end of the demo for a card game called Ways of Alchemy. It’s like a more laid-back version of Cultist Simulator, if that tells you anything; as a pre-release demo it’s a little rough around the edges (spelling errors, and there are some QOL improvements I’d like to see in terms of where cards go), but I enjoyed it enough to follow and see how things look at its official release.
Meanwhile, I’m still chugging along on an idler called Territory Idle. Unlike some clicker/idler/auto-battler games I’ve played before, this one really is kind of made to be tinkered with a little and then mostly left alone for hours while the numbers dutifully go up. It’s technically free, but there’s an in-game currency (amber) that you can use on various upgrades, fast-forwards, and the like — and you can spend real money to get amber, so it’s pretty easy to see where the trap is for people who don’t have the patience to set up an engine and then largely ignore it for most of the day.