T w e n t y S i d e d
I haven’t done anything this week because I’m on vacation. so uh, here’s a picture of my cat I guess.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
From The Archives:
Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
Played more Stellaris. I won a game and then updated to the new and buggy version. I do like the mechanics updates it made. I started one game and felt like things were going pretty well and then I eventually looked at the diplomacy and victory screens and realized that in fact, things were going way too well. I somehow had a better fleet than most of the AIs despite going full econ and never increasing my fleet capacity, and I had like double the victory screen score of the next highest empire (ignoring fallen empires, who start absurdly powerful and aren’t allowed to do much with it). I’m not actually very good at the game, so I’m pretty sure this means that the AI has serious issues with playing on the new version. I’m trying again on a higher difficulty but it’s not a great sign. It’s also pretty buggy about giving you information – all of my jobs claim to generate 0.3 trade (and nothing else) when I over over them, and there are other parts of the game that just don’t include the information they used to. They’ve admitted they rushed this out because they didn’t want to release something buggy over the summer holidays, so… instead they released something more buggy before the summer holidays. They are patching pretty fast but I suspect they have a long way to go.
I also started playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I definitely see why people are hyped about it, it’s fun and very pretty. It’s also extremely French, pretty unusual for a JRPG. That being said, I do see a big issue – the game has a lot of mechanics and none of them actually matter because dodging exists. If you have the timing right, enemies can never damage you, so… it doesn’t really matter how much damage you do or how much health you have. Maybe this changes later, I’m still early in, and learning the dodge timing is fun, but it does mean that leveling and upgrading stuff and so on is just to give you a buffer in case you mess up a dodge or to save you time. Really feels like dodge (and parry) should have been a damage reduction rather than full immunity, which would also make messing up a dodge less swingy.
Finally, a new DLC for The Rise of the Golden Idol came out today. I’ve already finished it, they’re not super long, but it did have interesting puzzles in it. I think the first DLC was better, but that’s praising with faint damns. I really do love this game, and I’m glad there’s still more of it to come.
The dodge mechanic is very useful, but getting your timing right isn’t always easy. Several different enemies have unexpected patterns, some of which you never get to learn if you’re underleveled because they’ll kill you in one hit. Plus, dealing damage is as important as avoiding it, so it’s a major exaggeration to say all the other systems are useless. I mean, sure, if you don’t mind spending half an hour in every fight and your reflexes are impeccable then yeah, you can avoid leveling up.
Tales of Berseria sloshes forward. I’ve almost cleared the tier 4 equipment, and also reached the bad part of the game, aka Kamoana. I generally consider this naked ten-year-old who cries in every scene as the worst character in any game I’ve played, but unfortunately I’ve just watched the intro to The Hundred Line, and Ima’s awful sister-worship is in fact bad enough to kill my interest in the whole game. This is less a defense of Kamoana and more a condemnation of the entire anime genre, and possibly humankind.
Back to Brotato, for some reason. I think I’m losing more often than before.
Still playing Conception Plus. After clearing the first zodiac dungeon — the Star Maidens all align with a zodiac sign and there’s a dungeon for each of them — it turns out that you are not expected to clear each season dungeon in its actual season. I had expected, for example, that you would need to clear the Spring dungeon in spring and then move on to the next set, but the exposition explicitly states that you should be exploring all four of them roughly equally and that if you explore the season dungeon in its season it’s actually a bit HARDER than it would be normally. This might then mean that the year itself can loop over and you can repeat the festivals, which I didn’t think would be the case. It also might explain why I had so much trouble with the boss of the first summer dungeon, when the previous dungeon and previous boss was pretty easy, since it could be a bit more difficult given that I was doing it in summer, although I also had some tactical issues because I probably would have won but kept having the hard-hitting boss attack me, and while my hit points and defense usually make me a good tank for the Star Children, if I go down the expedition ends — although there’s no game over — and so I couldn’t finish it off. Still, I moved on to the Autumn dungeon and will probably get through the two non-zodiac bosses of the Winter one next because I need to level up a new cleric, as I didn’t have one in the Day Camp — which levels up your Star Children as you explore — when I had to replace three Star Children due to them hitting the max level.
The game is good enough that I played it more than once in a week, which never happens anymore. On the downside, I have been playing for almost 20 hours and have only finished one zodiac dungeon. However, I have completed the two non-zodiac bosses for almost all of the dungeons, so if my levels are high enough then that should reduce the grinding. I’ll probably finish the game, but it’s still up in the air as to whether I’ll end up liking it or not.
Still impressed at how much of a ‘long tail’ Blue Prince has – I’m on Day 47 and I feel like I’m just now starting to hit the point where I’m starting to scratch things off of my “TODO” list faster than I put new things on there.
Day 46 ended up being a 3-hour marathon of a day, since three separate leads all ended up bearing fruit on the same day – ended up cracking a puzzle in a particular library book
the New Clue, finding a new areaopened the door that’s on the side-path going to the north leverand solving a puzzle in there, and uhh, taking a standardized test. The book puzzle in particular is going on my list of “puzzles that I felt very clever for having figured out”.Actually, I had just figured out another lead at the very end of the day… but just ran out of steps to get there. (Which is a shame because I accidentally wasted some steps earlier in the day and also apparently missed picking up running shoes in one of the rooms, oops)
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And RNG continues to not really be an issue for me here – the early game was a bit more prone to RNG – I’ve had maybe 3 or 4 days out of 46 where they really ended early due to bad rolls… but also the early game I just had a lot more stuff to investigate everywhere so I was less dependent on drawing specific things.
And late game, I now have a lot of ability to mitigate RNG and look for specific things. I do have a few items on my TODO list that I just haven’t gotten to because the specific combination hasn’t come up in a run, but I also haven’t actually taken any runs to try to “force” it either – if I run out of other stuff before they come up on their own, I’ll do that.
I’m currently playing Dread Delusion an indie open world RPG. Everyone is playing the Oblivion remaster and I’ve found this scratches that itch for first person exploration although I can see how the visuals, especially coupled with fast movement in first person, could cause issues for some people. Thankfully I never had problems like this and the game is fun if not as “out there” as I expected. Progression is based on exploration and questing as you receive your experience points as rewards or finding them just floating about in the environment, which on the one hand means no grinding, on the other it rewards searching the environment and mostly makes combat optional. Generally at least on default diifficulty the game is mostly on the easy side to the point where the consensus seems to be investing in might (the primary combat stat) is a waste of points as it very rarely provides access to new locations or alternate quest solutions. The setting is intriguing though I don’t know if the game is going to be long enough to let it fully bloom and there are some… oddities in the setting which may turn out to be something interesting or they may imply one of my least favourite video game endings, we’ll see.
In co-op Dying Light 2 continues to deliver decent gameplay and utter writing stupidity.
Sitting under a pile of kittens, playing Blue Prince obsessively.
Still going through Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 but I had very little time to play this week, so I didn’t really got to advance much. Also, I spent a lot of time desperately trying to beat enemies way too high level for me. A pointless endeavor.
I keep bumping my head into The Talos Principle II – Into the Abyss. Those puzzles are extremely hard compared to the main game and DLC campaigns one and two. Plus: The story told is not as compelling as the main game or the two previous DLC campaigns. But I’m finally at puzzle 24 out of 24. Just that and whatever comes in Bydens wake up process.
Analog I played a few rounds of Vale of Eternity including Artifacts and the beginning of Spires End: Rangitaki. The later being lots of dice chucking again. Not as much as in Hildegaard, but definitely not my favorite kind of game mechanism.
I’ve been hoping to get enough money to play Pokémon sword and shield soon, need to buy a proper switch first. As I dream of hypothetical championships, I keep going over theoretical team compositions. I’ll be getting into the game much later than most people, hope that won’t ruin the experience.
That cat is so cute. And a very cool window.