T w e n t y S i d e d
This week is mostly just Deep Rock Galactic.
I finally got Driller promoted. I’ve moved on to Gunner and now I’m missing being able to dig easy tunnels. I really don’t know if I’m going to end up liking the zipline launcher as much as any of the other traversal tools, but I guess the minigun is nice so far. What’s everyone else doing this week?
What’s everyone else doing this week?
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
My Music
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
Gamers Aren’t Toxic
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Why I Hated Resident Evil 4
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
After many years I’ve decided to finally sit down to Napoleon Total War.
From the initial -teen hours: economy is about the same mess of multipliers and percentages as in was in Empire, but it’s not really a problem once one gets usd to it.
Algorithms seem to be a tad more refined and sometimes even competently try maneuvers as complicated as basic flanking, but at the same time they put more attention to preserving own morale… which leads to units bunching up under solid shot (and sometimes even grapeshot) fire, or suddenly forming squares when in fight against infantry then staying there getting shot apart in order to repair falling morale, which in turn leads to hilarious moments the series is well known for.
That being said artillery is no longer the be-all, end-all, decide-all as it was in Empire (judging by the tech tree the mortars are no longer present, which makes me kinda sad – no more “30 mortars with percussion shells” pyrotechnic shows), so that’s a huge plus.
All in all am having great fun as with all older entries in this series, even though tihs time conquest is limited to Europe instead of entire world.
Finished Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy‘s campaign. Had an absolute blast. The game’s not perfect, of course. The fact that you can only play with Star-Lord is a massive error in judgement from part of the developers. If you could just switch between characters in the middle of combat it’d be a much better experience, particularly because Star-Lord’s guns are hilariously underpowered. That aside, the visuals are spectacular, the exploration is fun and the writing is stellar. I haven’t gotten all achievements, but I’ll leave that for a future playthrough.
Playing Thank Goodness You’re Here!. This is a very quirky adventure game with very, very British humor. It’s colorful, funny and extraordinarily odd. Like all good adventure games it has a button dedicated to kick everyone and everything.
Started Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Very interesting game where the appeal is that it’s a more realistic take on the western RPG formula. Sort of a better designed Final Fantasy II XP system, where the more you do a particular task the better you become at it, but it’s not just a stat increase, and you start pretty much being terrible at everything. I hope I didn’t screw up my build by not choosing Strength as one of my starting skills, because two of the five tutorial missions are fistfights, and while I did get through them with some practice I don’t know if they’re an indicator of how prevalent they’re going to be. I also feel like I didn’t explore the starting area enough before I was forced to move on by the story but part of the fun is to go with the flow and see how things turn out instead of trying to optimize everything from the start. And maybe I’ll get to re-visit this area later.
I never did play that Guardians of the Galaxy game; I was disappointed story-wise you’re only playing as Star-Lord even without the gameplay parts. I just generally find him the least interesting character.
I played through Half Life: Alyx, in annoyingly bite-sized portions ’cause I’m using a running it on a PC into a Quest 2 via Steam Link, which means I have full no-thether freedom but also a battery life of about 2 hours. At first I was like huh, yeah this is okay but it isn’t doing much to relieve my skepticism that being hype for VR may have been wishful thinking, but then it finally kicked up some action and I nearly sprinted down a set of stairs that didn’t exist trying to evade a grenade and I was like well holy shit that was awesome. It’s mostly very slow quasi-survival horror stuff, however, unless you’re sprinting through that as quickly as possible. But there’s an upgrade system so you don’t want to skip materials, else you won’t have the upgrades for the action.
In any case, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the gut clenching I was experiencing trying Skyrim VR and the Metal Hellsinger VR port demo, was not endemic, just bad/not suited for ports. With Alyx I had no problems whatsoever, and am pretty sure I know the problem now: uneven terrain. Going up or down stairs and ramps, particularly in multiple shorter jumps without taking the time to stop and look ahead and move deliberately, caused immediate discomfort, when everywhere else was 100% fine (even snap turning only got a reaction if I did like a full half turn). And there’s even a section where you are in fact moving quickly on steep slopes from cover to cover, but that’s not a problem either, because you stop between movement and the rest of the stuff going on is the sort of thing that would have you clenching anyway. This does not bode well for ports or VR mods of basically anything that’s not an industrial shooter, since everything makes a point of all sorts of gently rolling plains and hills whenever you’re not specifically in a building. You literally can’t take a step in most of Skyrim without an elevation change, which means it’s just gonna be bad.
Also amusing IIRC, is the shortness of their blink hops in Skyrim VR, which means you need to do so more often, making things even worse. The blink range in Alyx seems overly far, but that’s because the game takes so long to actually have any action in open areas. Once it does, it becomes apparent that actually the time it takes to look to and find target, raise arm, flick stick, and regain bearings, is basically the same amount of time it would take to get over there with a sprint in a normal first person game. Which is to say, not very damn long at all, because Gordan Freeman is ridiculously fast when he hits left shift. It might have been a tiny bit unfair by the late game when I’d gotten used enough to it that I could pop out to take some shots then sprint halfway back across the arena while looking over my shoulder- but then, you can totally do that in HL2 and other FPS games and it’s not fair there either. Meanwhile there are combine guys with basically miniguns that will delete your entire health bar if you land with your head exposed at the wrong moment, so the speed is warranted.
I was surprised just how natural it felt: aside from that first frantic escalation where I tried to run from a grenade (again, awesome), I adapted and by the end was advancing and retreating and juking very much like I would in a normal FPS, videogames is videogames. Except this is a videogame where your viewpoint is actually inside.
And the ending, well I think I recall now some people saying that Valve totally wasn’t done with Half Life, and I can see why they said that. If they actually are working on a standalone headset of their own, I would not be surprised at all if we got another episode or game of Half Life in VR at the same time.
Of course, the problem with this is now I want to do VR stuff, but I had specifically wanted to hold off on HL: Alyx because I knew it would be the quality option that most other things would fail to match. There’s a Metro VR game which was sounding promising, but some recent negative reviews say there are pitch black mazes where you die instantly with no warning, which sounds pretty bad, and also it’s another dank tunnels game. If I wanted to be in a dank cave I wouldn’t be putting on a headset, I already live in one. There’s a brighter sci-fi shooter, but reports suggest it’s extremely buggy and unoptimized. Etc.
I still haven’t finished Alyx, because it eats the entire hard drive on my crappy old PC, and then my wife can’t play anything else. But the half or so I did play of it I thought was amazing. I’m hoping we get more games of that kind of quality at some point. I feel a bit like the marketplace is kind of ruining VR; lots of low-quality games that are cheap, making people reluctant to spend more for a game, pushing devs towards low-quality games that they can make cheap…
I did think Song in the Smoke was amazing. And Eye of the Temple. Let us know if you find anything else good.
The weather this past weekend was interesting (a night of snow followed by a night/day of freezing rain) but I finished off my Smuggler in The Old Republic, and almost started my Imperial Agent before deciding that while the introductory planets are pretty quick, creating the character, transferring money from one of my other characters, and then buying an outfit from the Cartel Store would take a bit of finagling and there were other things that I could do in that time block. So I’ll try to do that this weekend.
I still haven’t managed to play The Age of Decadence after my first play of it, and am worried that in part it’s because the initial stages didn’t thrill me that much, combined with worries about the difficulty. I’ll have to try to get a longer session in sometime to see how I feel about it.
I got sick for a few days, it really sucked. This is supposed to be the nice season.
Lately I’ve played a lot of Split Fiction with my girlfriend. Amazing game, though I like the story less than It Takes Two. I find the characters a bit less compelling, their conflicts don’t really mesh with me, and it feels they don’t really have reasons to argue or care about each other like the parents in It Takes Two did. The gameplay is basically the same.
I’ve played Mirror’s Edge but gave up halfway through the game. As much as I like the concept and the physicality of the character, I can see why it didn’t sell well. It’s pretty repetitive, and having to follow a single traced path with very little room for creativity isn’t really what you want from a parkour game. Also the story is paper-thin, and the delivery is a bit boring.
I’m playing Max Payne series for the first time, got through the first game and about halfway through the second one, I intend to go straight into 3 even though I know it’s by a different studio and many people don’t like it very much. Anyway, I came into the series basically knowing it’s a Remedy game and that it’s a poster child for bullet time but playing it I can’t quite mesh with the writing. I understand the game is tapping into, perhaps even satirizing, a mix of (neo)noir and hardboiled but overall character motivations are off and it kinda lacks logic. Stuff like “I had no chance of getting him at his mansion” followed by a level that does not change the circumstances in any significant fashion but you go to the mansion anyway. I also understand the noir tendency for expansive similes but oftentime they just devolve into incoherent rambling. To be fair the game seems to be aware of it and even makes a specific self-referential joke so I think this is on purpose but still, not completely sure how to treat it. The second game isn’t much better in that regard but feels like an improvement in almost every other aspect: combat is smoother, bullet time feels more powerful, animations and models are improved, level design is more interesting and varied, there is more of both humour and weirdness in the environments and things like stuff playing on TV… Having played some of the later Remedy games I can definitely see their style taking shape here.
Speaking of games that are stupid. In co-op we’re playing Dying Light 2. The gameplay is overall pretty good, traversing the city feels great with the expansive parkour moveset, you can mostly deal with zombies but can also get swarmed and the special ability infected spice things up, although some of the bigger ones are a bit spongy and the activities are somewhat repetitive. But damn is it dumb, my buddy insists the thing must have been written by AI but I think it’s just your average human stupidity and absolute lack of care about the writing. Complete lack of consequence between different dialogues and sometimes even in the same dialogue. Some examples:
-from the very start, in the intro cutscene, the city is described as “the one last beacon” of human civilization, but you keep getting conflicting information about other cities, isolated farms and smaller settlements. Sometimes they’re thriving, sometimes they’re slowly dying out…
-everyone in the city is infected and you’re basically nearly lynched because you don’t have a “biomarker” (a bracelet device that shows how close you are to changing into a murderzombie), but then some characters have the markers and some don’t, you are specifically told there is no way to make more and they are not transferrable once attached as they sync up to a specific person but no explanation is given what they do with children (maybe they’re born uninfected? but then what if someone gets bitten?);
-They have electricity from windmills (which they waste on neon lights and such but whatever) but then when citywide electricity gets turned on some people literally call it magic and in the cutscene at least one person yells abot “divine light” and “a saviour coming to bring them to heaven”;
-What do they eat?! It is extremely unclear what the population of the city is. They do have rooftop farms of sorts but I think long term sustainability of that is highly questionable. Also, why do they grow things on rooftops? Not because the ground levels are infested by zombies but because “the rain washed away all pollution to the ground”;
-Peacekeepers (a sort of army remnant?) are both starved for resources so badly that they can’t produce rank distinctions and have to tattoo them on… and at the same time if they don’t get their way they’re going to conquer the city and wipe out the population;
-the city population considers the walls around the city generally unscalable. As with most things you get conflicting information ranging from nobody in those 15 years came in or out of the city to there used to be some kind travel but something happened;
-people are dying for lack of water, a character tells you standing in pouring rain…;
-of course in the city where remnants of populace are scrounging and scraping for survival we have resources and population to sustain a “only one survives” combat tournament, why do you ask?
-loads of typical post-apo inconsistencies like people do not remember what an “app” was but know cheerleaders;
To be clear, I am NOT cherrypicking, the game will literally contradict itself within the same dialogue at times.
I finished Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii in just over 70 hours with all the steam achievements. Great game, some strong parts, some weak ones and pretty much an anti – souls-like. On normal difficulty it was very easy. The biggest enemy was the camera and sort of tank controls. Yakuza isn’t made for a dynamic combat system, where you are rapidly jumping all over the place. Other than that the absurdity in this entry is off the charts, nuking them from orbit. So even the ridiculous story parts didn’t have such a negative impact like in Infinite Wealth.
Then back to Satisfactory. In coop again. Just reached trains. And I try to do a lot more visual appealing builds than just functional, like I did in the solo playthrough. Let’s see how long that will last.
Analog I purchased Bomb Busters, Draftosaurus and Vale of Eternity: Artifacts. I got the rules down, now it’s time to play those with some people.