T w e n t y S i d e d
This week has just been Rimworld.
I finally got around to trying some of the DLC content, and the Biotech DLC is just, good. Having xenotypes and being able to collect genes from the different xenotypes, is really cool. I’ve also just gotten a Mechanitor so now I can get little helper robots. Sure, I can also get combat robots. But, I really need the Roomba to clean my base/ There’s dirt and blood in every room and nobody has had time to clean it. Mostly because either someone is bleeding everywhere, or they are recovering from bleeding everywhere.
The other DLC I finally played was Anomaly. It’s fine. Unlike all of the other DLCs it doesn’t seem to add anything that fundamentally changes how I play. It mainly adds some useful but niche items, and some new enemies that all seem to have their own gimmick. It’s fun, but not adding to the game as a whole.
Anyway, what’s up with everyone else this week?
Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
The Best of 2018
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Monster Train 2! It’s still fun.
Brotato DLC is alright, but so far a lot of the new characters seem to have the gimmick of “is worse at dealing damage”. I’ve given up on Level 5’ing them, and am just Level 1’ing them now to unlock items. But the new items all seem neat, and it’s fun to play tradeoffs with the secondaries more. Is extra damage worth reducing your gained experience? The base game never asked.
Tales of Zestiria marches forward. I was expecting the game to be bad, but I was not expecting it to be able to lower my opinion of Berseria. So the realization that the plot beats in Berseria are in many ways an inverse Zestiria was a surprising disappointment. Also I’m hitting the point where the combat is actively pissing me off, because the controls are bad and so is the camera and so is the game.
Tales of Berseria slows to a crawl as I play its predecessor, but still gets a few moments because Zestiria isn’t very fun.
Dispatch demo. This game will live or die on personalities of villains on probation and character interactions… and I really enjoyed what I’ve seen so far.
Still playing Conception Plus. I did manage to figure out what at least some of the books do, which is that having them seems to allow for new classes of Star Children, and having all of them allows you to create a Ninja, but only some Star Maidens can create some of the classes, although I don’t know whether that’s due to their attributes or simply due to the bond level with them.
I’ve settled into a nice routine of starting each dungeon from the top where I can run through most of the monsters without fighting them — which is good for leveling up new Star Children — and then when I start having too long of fights I stop sweeping the entire dungeon and instead try to run past the monsters and fight only when I need to. A Dungeon Master class seems to open up the entire map from the start, which I was worried about at first because the map being closed is how I figure out where I have and haven’t been, but it’s a boon when I’m just running through the dungeon looking for the way down because I can assess paths at least a bit before going down them. I will say that at this point even the monsters in the zodiac dungeons won’t usually kill me and most of the battles I can win without using skills or losing too many hit points if I pay attention to my tactics, which is kinda nice.
I have been focusing on the Star Maidens that I prefer at this point and working to build their bonds up. There are too many to focus on to really do anything else. The interactions are interesting enough but it might have been nice to explore more of them.
I was skeptical about Elden Ring: Nightreign, but since it seemed like something you’d want to be in on while it’s popular I gave it a shot. It’s half a janky mess of reused assets, half bespoke recalibrated assets, and half premade uber characters, pretty good actually. Basically take all the fun of zooming around with a properly made character, except you don’t have to put in the hours to build it. All the fun of an archer concept, except you don’t need to restock arrows and you can actually use buff items- and you also happen to be the support damage buff (via a “mark” ability) and ranged rez. All the fun of a mage, except you never run out of magic because you can hit the “gimme some magic back” button. The tank can actually tank (and their ult in an instant area rez)- it’s the only character I’ve finished the story stuff for, and on the run where I just beat the game a few minutes ago, the tank was tanking the boss like a champ and kept their cool to land a final area rez to finish. And of course the no-shield DPS can DPS-not that they’re prohibited from using shields, and in fact because there is no encumbrance anyone can use *any* shield. One character just turns into a giant beast for clobbering time. It’s basically a perfect mix of prestablished mechanics and actual unique character classes.
The randomness is mostly good. The parts of the map that move around keep things from being the same, while the parts of the map that remain static you eventually learn to navigate, though the game should really have done a better job telling you where to find the map legend (it’s at the Codex table, under the Guide tab, sort of in the middle). Collecting a pile of weapons with completely dissociated Diablo-style buffs is weird, but also fairly simple (unlike juggling body slots or putting everything onto half a dozen “talisman” slots which then expect anyone using X weapon/magic to be using Y talisman). The relics you collect to customize your buffs/build before starting a run will have huge amounts of vendor trash, mismatched bonuses, and stuff you’re keeping around until you find a better version, but well it certainly is a way to slow and stagger progression. The bought and quest related relics are a decent fallback. Though I was helped quite a bit with some lucky relic rolls, it turned out the busted ability I saw our tank using was actually just an early quest reward I’d never got around to trying because I assumed that “extended duration” would be a tiny percentage like most things, rather than almost completely recategorizing the ability.
The worst part is the UI. Game does not tell or signpost to you in any way that you can actually queue up for any number of the available bosses to avoid waiting, which is just bad. Nor does it really say that at Roundtable Hold your map will tell you where quest objectives are- except when it doesn’t, at which point you can go to the journal table and it will tell you what your current objective is. But of course the worst is for handling that giant pile of random relics. You’re generally supposed to be preparing for each specific boss, each having a weakness you can be ready to exploit from the beginning if you bring the right stuff. Except you can’t actually filter based on any of those damage types! Nor can you search for specific resistances. You can filter by character, or by *weapon category*, but not by the one thing the game is actually expecting you to do. The “starting effect” tag is also woefully inconsistent. And the game always defaults to sorting things by order found, which is horrible at first but ends up becoming more useful as you’re only trying to find that one thing you just got so you can favorite it and sell the rest. And of course, the interface for changing between the different sets of relics for each character is horrendous, and doesn’t have any ability to save a given build to use again later. Which again, for a game that seems to expect you to prepare specific builds for each boss, with more than half a dozen big bosses, is ridiculous.
I suppose to be fair (mild progression spoiler?), you’re not actually required to beat them all, so maybe they expect you to just beat the minimum required one time each and that’s it. There is a button for setting that up (any undefeated) at the launch run table.
So yeah, been having fun with that. I’ve only seen two of the wandering environmental zones, but a new one has appeared for my next run, so that’s cool. Those are somewhat frustrating as I’m frequently having people just ignore them, even though they’re just as full of xp and loot as the castle while also having super loot or bonuses at the end. Granted, I have died to the rain being stuck in the volcanic crater multiple times, but if I’d had *help* we’d have been out of there with time to spare!
Still going on Blue Prince – overall, it’s starting to slow down in terms of the main puzzles – I’ve got a few loose ends to tie up and I know there’s some bigger pieces I’m still missing, but I’ve exhausted a lot of the low-hanging fruit in terms of leads. In terms of post Room-46 progress:
I’m missing one Sanctum Key, have two unfinished sigils, missing one microchip.Also banging my head on the Gallery puzzles, which I think might be blocking some other content. I’ve managed to solve two of them, the other two are at the “try to cheat with programming” stage, but so far no luck.
In the meantime I’m working on stuff in other save-files: in particular I’m attempting the “get to Room 46 in an hour” – I think I’ve pretty much solidified my strategy and got very close with it yesterday.
Day 1 is to unlock the side-gate, garden, and mine. Then normal runs until I get the pump room, lower the reservoir level by one (making the boat work), then reroll for the Tomb.I also played with “Dare mode” but ended up deleting that file.Sure enough, I did manage the one-hour run (actually in 45 minutes) on my second attempt tonight. It went a bit different than planned
I was able to get a pretty big boiler network (via picking up Archives next to it), and ended up with a powered pump room, which makes the tomb unnecessary; and I just needed to get to the antechamber with enough steps to back-track to the fountain and back..I recently found a huge stash of Humble Bundle games in my account that I’d never bothered to actually unlock — and I do mean huge; Steam stopped me in the middle of activating my keys and I had to wait to finish — and now I’m going to try out some things that catch my eye, starting with Wargroove.
It took me a couple tries to figure out how things actually work, and I’m sure there are depths and details that I have yet to notice, but I’ve been making steady progress in the campaign, arcade challenges, and puzzles, and it’s pretty fun. The main caveat is that I had to turn off the battle and building-capture animations; it felt like they were literally doubling the playtime.
As someone who played a lot of Advanced Wars growing up, I was surprised how little Wargroove hooked me. IIRC part of the problem was how slow it felt; I couldn’t tell if that was because the game was actually slow, or just that I used to play Advanced Wars on stuff like car trips when I had a lot more time and so the pacing didn’t matter as much. I don’t remember if I messed with the animation settings; maybe that would have helped.
(Also, IIRC, the leader powers were just a bit less interesting than Advanced Wars, more simple buffs and fewer ‘game changing’ sort of effects)
I did not play Advance Wars growing up, and tried Wargroove to try the genre. But there are enough annoying maps that I gave it up, and I think it’s bad in any strategy game when there’s a single character who can lose you the battle if they die. Especially when they then make maps where that’s your only character.
…I probably could have turned the difficulty down and continued, but I don’t wanna.
Are you sure you’re remembering correctly? The leader powers are actually pretty game-changing, with abilities like massive area heal, making tiles impassable to the enemy team, and summoning or removing units.
That said, I can see why Wargroove would feel like a drag, especially without the animations adjusted. Battle For Wesnoth is still very much my gold-standard go-to when it comes to tactical skirmish games.
The RimWorld community generally agrees that Biotech and Ideology are both top-tier DLCs (first place coming down to personal preference), Royalty is a solid (if slightly less essential) offering, and Anomaly…exists. Though I will say I personally liked Anomaly better than I expected to, and tend to leave it on in my runs even if just for the Ambient Horror mode which mixes in the various threats it adds to the things that can attack you.
There’s also a few lines of evidence suggesting we may see a new DLC sometime in the next few months, though usually Tynan only likes to announce them about a month before release.
I have been very busy with work and haven’t had much time or energy to game this week other than a few sessions of One Thousand Uncles in Team Fortress 2. I did see that Lambda Fortress got a page on Steam, though, and am looking forward to trying that out whenever it releases (no date announced yet). It’s a mod for TF2 that that lets you play through Half-Life 2 as the TF2 mercenaries, and sounds like a hoot for a co-op gaming session with a bunch of friends.