T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m still playing Deep Rock Galactic.
I’ve started playing it with my sibling, so now since we don’t have Bosco, it’s just both of us scrambling to get the high up minerals and falling a lot. Despite that, it’s quite a lot fun with another person.
I also Finally got around to beating the last boss in Cult of the Lamb.
What going on with everyone else?
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Finished South of Midnight Fantastic experience all around. Loved the visuals, the music, the story, the characters, the lore and, basic as it was, the gameplay. For anyone curious it’s basically a PS2 God of War/Prince of Persia kind of game. There’s one small thing that bothers me, though, regarding the design. The way you learn about the character stories that guide you through the plot is by reaching certain points where you have to battle some enemies or do a platforming puzzle and when you’re finished you gather a memory cluster. Each time you do you get a piece of the story. When you gather four clusters of memories the story is complete. The issue is that sometimes you can reach a certain cluster before the previous one. If you reach, say, cluster 4 before cluster 3 you’ll hear the 4th memory before the 3rd one, which sort of spoils the ending. You can skirt through this by always following the path guide (a la Dead Space), without taking detours, but then you can miss out on exploring and gathering extra experience and lore. The way to fix this would be that you hear the memories in the proper order even if you reach the clusters in a different order. Hopefully they’ll patch this.
That bit aside, it was a great experience. I hear some talk over the internet from people who clearly haven’t played the game saying that this is a “DEI nightmare” or it’s “as bad as Forspoken” and all of that is 100% BS. This game is very well written, its only downside being that the gameplay is a bit basic, but frankly I’ll take basic over unnecessarily cumbersome. I played the demo for Star Wars Outlaws for a bit and sure, you have open world, crafting, side quests, weapon customization and all that, but you have to take so many steps to do everything that it becomes annoying. Sick of every game adding unnecessary clutter these days.
Playing this left me with hunger for simpler, less cluttered games, so I installed SpongeBob SquarePants: The Patrick Star Game, which seemed to fit the bill, and played for all of 10 or so minutes before uninstalling. I have no attachment to SpongeBob, since I never watched the show, but it seemed like simple fun, and the game itself, or at least how much I played of it, is perfectly fine, but by God is the camera unruly in this thing. Even at its lowest sensitivity setting it feels like you’re slapped in the face by a kryptonian whenever you try to reposition it, which is a problem because the second quest I took required absolutely precise aiming. You were supposed to use a water gun to shoot some objects and people out of a clearly delineated area. What should have taken a few seconds took several minutes due to the camera’s sensitivity. And that aside, despite clearly being pushed out of bounds the game decided some people and objects were still inside the area, so they had to be pushed even further (which, hilariously, couldn’t be done beecause there were walls directly outside). That and the fact that the camera movement was making me dizzy, which rarely happens outside first person games, made me realize I didn’t want to ever play this again.
I gotta say, Power Wash Simulator is starting to get less and less satisfying. I’m not sure how to describe it, but I think a good analogy is a game that rather than increasing its difficulty by giving its enemies new patterns or making them smarter it does it by making them bullet sponges. Even if it takes the same amount of time I find it more rewarding to defeat several enemies in a row than just one large enemy that takes the same amount of bullets and doesn’t require any different strategy.
Played through Day of the Tentacle Remastered. I’ve played through the original dozens of times, and the remastered version exactly once before, but this time I played with the developer commentary to see if they said anything interesting. Unfortunately, the amount of info they give is minimal, and the interesting bits are even smaller. But hey, the game is always a treat anyway.
Good reviews! Great analogy for Power Wash Simulator, my gf dropped that a lot faster than the other cosy games / life sims she picks up, like House Flipper.
I think it’s because a lot of Power Wash levels are scaled for multiplayer so depending on your level of patience, or how meditative you find it, or if you’re doing something concurrently, they may become, ironically, a bit of a chore.
More Magicraft, but not just that for once. In VR games, I tried Hexwind and Hubris. Neither uses blink movement, and I’m sure both are doing so very intentionally.
Hexwind is trying to be a hardcore roguelike, with a combination of some Super Hot slowdown and magic. Except where Super Hot was carefully crafted levels, this is just spawning a bajillion dudes around you so you have to keep moving (and thus slow time hardly matters) and area attacks are randomly going off and some of them take a bunch of hits to kill and then also explode etc. I died one step from making it out of the first level and doubt I will return. Also I’m pretty sure the detection box for doing the wind slash was bugged ’cause it only worked swinging at waist level shooting at their ankles. And in order to cast your spell you need to build up a combo meter, then tap a button attached to the hud that tracks with your head. Just, what?
Hubris has decided that that swimming and climbing are cool and that’s their big thing, otherwise it feels very “competent early entry in the niche market.” Granted, I haven’t actually got to any of the gunplay or crafting, but I think I’ve got a strong read on the game. Because hoo boy does it want to focus on getting around “immersively.” Except the positions they expect your arms in for the swimming are a little awkward and overblown and will constantly trigger the boundary warning unless you have a huge room (because you’re moving your arms fast). The problems are basically exemplified by their solution for horizontal movement. Instead of blinking, your character starts walking very slowly and accelerates into it, giving you time to adjust, and then also never stops on a dime, instead deccelerating at the end. This is a fairly clever and effective mitigator, if for some reason you couldn’t just do blink movement.
Except then they have you jumping like a mario with a jump button. And sprinting with a sprint button. And because you can fail some jumps if you’re not sprinting, you will always sprint jump. So their clever mitigating tech for walking without blinking is immediately thrown out the window.
Similarly, as one might learn from a brief look at Gorilla Tag, when the movement in the game is linked to the movement of your own arms, it’s not nearly as bad. Except where Gorilla Tag has you making huge movements and likely moving the rest of your body trying to flail your way around, the climbing in Hubris is just move hand to handhold. While the lateral movement is mostly okay, with your arm positions slowing you down, going up ladders or monkey bar style gives your arms room to move. Which means faster movement, without engaging any of the rest of your body, and so it does the same stomach clenching as the jump button- in fact, when you reach the top of a ledge, the game jumps you up the last bit, so no matter what you do there will be a fast, disconnected ascent.
I can see more ways to refine these systems that might help. Having the player crouch down before pulling themselves up the last bit of ledge could get the head synchronized to a low point on the new surface, from which you finish standing yourself. As weird as it is, requiring a sort of half-jump in addition to the flapping to ascend in water (and capping the max speed much lower) could help with that. And I suppose it might be possible to make jumping between platforms include a jumping movement, though I expect that would go worse than climbing or underwater or like jetpack movement. But the easy answer is to just use blink movement. If it’s a non-combat area, who cares if you move “too fast”? If it’s a combat area, you should be moving fast. And for platforming, you could still make the player slowly square up and hold buttons and aim and then play a little “hup” before blinking them to the target.
But I expect these devs would consider that a failure. HL:A does not shy away from being a videogame with its floating hands and blink movement, and as should be obvious to anyone accustomed to videogames, this does not reduce immersion. If anything, the lack of “arms” when you know perfectly well that your arms are not in the game, that your control at best supports two floating hands, is actually *more* immersive. That your hands will stop moving and naturally grip object the way a human would even without you pushing a button, does the job on its own. The weirdest bit in Alyx is how your wrists are dimensional storage portals, presumably because it was more reliable than trying to do mutiple points around your body.
But Hubris? Hubris is trying to rig an avatar to you in the game. And while I’m sure some people have got this tech working pretty good, and if it was perfect that could indeed be amazing, well their Hubris is showing. Even a basic rotation of the wrist causes the arm model to twist unnaturally, which you will see whenever you try to tap your arm to access the inventory. And when climbing something that’s not a cliff, the hands will frequently grip the wrong side of the object.
I will probably play more of Hubris, but since it is very clearly about swimming and climbing and jumping first rather than simple and functional blink movement, I don’t know how far I will literally be able to stomach it- my reaction might not be enough to reach vomit or even put me down, but it’s still unpleasant enough to change a game from fun to chore. Which is why I was so surprised and delighted that Alyx caused no such problems. I would like to at least get to some story though.
And finally, The Last Spell just put out the new Elf DLC today, so it’s time to dive back in. Apparently I never actually finished my run of the Dwarf map, so doing that first. They also did a balancing update, with a whole big post on their methodology and the differences between the responses from discord and those from the general survey they put out, very nice. Which is being applied mid-run to this run, so I’ve got some perks missing their nerfs and others that were buffed such that characters have far more invested in a stat than I would have, but other perks I would have ignored are suddenly very much in. Though ironically I’ve not found room to bring in a longbow (which everyone actually agreed was terrible and got buffed in every way)- the new hero I picked up had access to Point Blank Shot, and I could not resist the call of point blank cannon damage.
I didn’t post last week because I didn’t play anything, but I kinda made up for it this week.
Continued on with my Imperial Agent in The Old Republic. I am enjoying it, but it reminds me that Kaliyo is my equivalent of Kreia from Sith Lords: none of my characters would ever want anything to do with her and wouldn’t want her around. Here, my character is intellectual and mostly nice, and Kaliyo is … none of those things, which only makes it worse that she’ll be the sole companion for a significant amount of time. I’ve had similar issues with some companions in the other class stories, but most of them weren’t the only companion for a long period of time and so could be ignored, and with my Smuggler one of them — Gus Tuno — worked better with that character because she was a bit goofy, which let him make more jokes, which then had the character — in the diary blog posts that I write about these things — note that she didn’t think she’d like him but he made her laugh, which reflected what I was thinking, too.
I finally got to play The Age of Decadence again, and despite the session starting off a bit rough things got better when I finally managed to figure out some of the navigation tools — like how to rotate the screen and how to go to the quests that were outside the city — and so was able to get around easier. I also did find out that the Loremaster’s mission to kill a rival CAN be completed without killing anyone, as you can just take him to the ruler instead, although that does seem to remove your master from play. I also noticed that while much of the time if you fail a check in a conversation you can’t retry it later, there was at least one instance where coming back later opened up a NEW option, in a case where in order to sneak in somewhere I tried to convince him to drug/poison a wine shipment, but when he refused I was able to come back later and convince him that the authorities were after him and so was able to do that myself, but couldn’t get in to the base with the delivery. But that was still kinda cool.
The issue, though, is that from what I understand the skill checks aren’t random and aren’t generally repeatable, so you have to have the right skills to pass them when you try them. So given that I had failed a bunch, I wanted to restart and make a more intelligent selection of skills and quests to maximize that … but ended up deciding to abandon the game for now, which is what I did last year with the Gold Box games. Here, though, it’s for a different reason, as there it was the case that I was just starting to understand it when I bailed on it, but then I realized that I would never finish them all this year, while here I know that I could finish it this year, but am bailing on it for the same reason that I bailed on Cultist Simulator a number of years ago: now that I understand it, it’s a game that I’d need to give more attention than the time I can spend playing it right now. There, it was learning all the cards and paying attention to what needs to be done, and here it’s paying attention to the quests and trying — and retrying/reloading — to maximize my skill points to maximally succeed at the various quests. That’s hard to do when I can only play for a couple of hours once a week. I plan on maybe playing it through over my Christmas vacation, since I have time then to play every day.
So, I had to pick up a new game, and the others that I had been considering included Darklands and VTM: Bloodlines. From what I read at the CRPG Addict, I think I would have had to pay too much attention for the time I had for Darklands, and Bloodlines was a possibility but the combat was a bit tricky for me the first time I played it. So instead I turned to Conception Plus on the console, a remaster of the original game. I played Conception 2 on the Vita, but ended up screwing up the ending, but more or less enjoyed it, so decided to play this one. The basic premise of this game is that the hero has to dungeon crawl while building out “Star Children” in a process that is a thinly veiled reference to sex (so thinly veiled that it might as well be wearing nothing at all). This game is FAR more open with that, with the mascot creature constantly talking about it that way. There are also many more potential candidates — 12, where in the second game there were 5 or 6 — which makes it difficult to talk to all of them, and I managed to tick off one of them in the first conversation, so I’ll have to see how that works out. Also, supposedly if you talk to them but don’t “Classmate” with them that ticks them off, too, but I never have enough bond points to do that. In addition, in the second game they went into the dungeons with you, but don’t here. Because of that, part of me really just wants to go play the second game instead.
That being said, the gameplay in the dungeons is pretty similar, which means that it’s a bit basic. There ARE tactics, but in general because the monsters are the same they end up being the same: place your teams so that they can hit a weakness and attack, repeat until the monsters are defeated. You can save inside the dungeons, which makes it possible for me to fit the game into my limited playing time (since I can stop in a dungeon if I have to) but weeks can progress while doing that and Social Linking and supposedly the seasons will pass while that happens, so I don’t know if I have a time limit on the dungeons since they are season themed, which pushes me to push on further than I might like. Ultimately, though, it’s a decent game of the genre but after playing any of these games I always lament that the later Persona games — from Persona 3 — always did this stuff so much better and so it puzzles me why there aren’t better Persona-clones out there, despite my playing pretty much any that come along, like Blue Reflection. Still, I’ll be sticking with this one for a while.
Finished Xenonauts 2 and had loads of fun with it. It’s basically improved 1 with less snark between characters and more polished writing and mechanics (and, finally, an explanation why the xenotech is so easy to retroengineer). The “main plot” setpiece scenarios are fun, especially since most of them is in the late game, when your minis are on par with (and, later on, above) aliens equipment- and skill-wise; combined with fully destructible terrain and squad size allowing to just soak up loses it just adds to the fun. Imo worth every euro :)
Started Burden of Command and have mixed feelings about it at best. I mean, it’s obviously researched labour of love and passion that tries something different, and that alone is commendable.
Unfortunately, this comes with heavy cost: while I can accept turning WW2 US Army into a strictly melee-oriented mob, or the minor details of UI that make it so easy to wipe out your progress and start over from the tutorial, the “visual novel” part of the game often forgets about difference between player knowledge and player character knowledge.
First example is almost immediately in the tutorial: player has to choose one of two men under his command. Now, player character has spend days with those men, and knows something about them. Player, however, has so far seen one of those two names (which allows to deduce those are two of your three squad leaders, thus enforcing impression player character knows about them) and at that point is given literally no other information.
Thus one can either make an artificially blind choice, or attempt to reach into player character’s knowledge – which is treated as hesitation and punished accordingly.
Those artificially blind choices will repeat later on, succesfully not just breaking the immersion, but reinforcing the feeling of “guide damn it!” – and that, imo, is too much of a design error in what was aimed as simulation of fairly intimate relation between officer and subordinates for devs to be forgiven for it.
Had a sudden urge to play Tales of Berseria again. Decided I should perhaps scrape the bones this time, and level up all the equipment to max. Restarted in New Game +, then realized my last run ended inside the final dungeon without clearing it and I’d get more bonus if I cleared it. So, cleared it, restarted the New Game + run, then remembered the key to efficiently leveling equipment (“efficiently”, har har) is the ability from the postgame dungeon that adds materials, basically doubling the crafting rate. Problem is, the postgame dungeon sucks; it’s the only timed part of the game, so high difficulties (“difficulty”, har har) are impossible because the mandatory enemies have too much health to kill within the time limit. So, lowered the difficulty and buckled down to clear the stupid postgame dungeon, which turned out to be five hours long. Then beat the final dungeon again, and got all the fiddly side bits, which also sucks because the dungeon is partially a teleportation maze so the map is nigh useless. Then beat the final boss again. Turns out, when you clear the postgame dungeon, it powers up the final boss. Usually the second phase is a bit of a relief after the massacring first phase (it’s painful enough that I just left the difficulty low instead of trying the real fight again); but after the bonus dungeon the second phase gains a ton of health and goes apeshit.
So now I’ve re-beaten the sucky postgame dungeon, beaten the powered-up New Game + final boss for the first time, got the extra materials item, turned on extra equipment levels and gold, turned off character experience, and am ready to start over for a scrape-the-bones run of Tales of Berseria involving grinding every piece of equipment up to max level. Except apparently I didn’t unlock the final difficulty in this run. So it might be restarting here very quickly to get that too. Which probably means fighting the powered-up final boss again.
Let’s hope the urge to keep playing this passes soon.
Brotato continues, to no purpose.
I am old so I don’t have enough time for video games, but the current ranked split in League of Legends ends April 30, and I have not done enough ranked matches to get the free skin, so I’ve been trying to do that. The awesome takeaway is the cluster of fellow millennials I regularly play with has been on board with this, so we’ve played almost 20 games over the past week together (though that does include the weekend Clash tournament). It’s been a blast, though: one of our recent games an opponent tilted so hard and was calling one of our team “hairy-brained.” I don’t think I had heard that insult before.
Otherwise a few Teamfight Tactics matches to fill time, and just a few minutes in Imperator: Rome. I have a game from spring break where I decided to go all in on the Antigonid Diadochi conquests and came out with a massive, over-extended, and disloyal empire that is half-crumbling around me. It’ll probably take another 20 in-game years to stabilize it, but I conquered all of Macedonia, Egypt, and Persia from the starting territories in Asia and Syria. We will eventually get all the rebellions consolidated if I keep at that game, so we’ll see. I had hoped to take over Thrace as well with the Legacy of Alexander CB, but it looks unlikely I’ll get to that with the constant breakaway states.