T w e n t y S i d e d
This week is just more Rimworld.
Not much has happened, except that I forgot to kill a bug hive, and every time I tried to get rid of it I would get raided or sieged. By the time I had a chance to kill it, it had grown to a total of 172 bugs, and 30 hives. My framerate was terrible if I had the game speed up, and I had to get allies help and save scum just to not lose everything.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
PC Gaming Golden Age
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Skyrim Thieves Guild
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Deltarune Chapter 3 finally convinced me to actually play the game (I think I’m just a sucker for Super Mario RPG-style enemy sprites, Chapter 3 has one of those). I’ve only watched people play pacifist, so I’ve been trying to play violent, but it turns out pretty much every chapter has a midboss that has to be done peacefully, as well as the final boss having to be done violently. Also turns out violence locks you out of a superboss. On the other hand, I managed to watch the game several times without ever seeing Snowgrave, so doing that was quite the surprise. I feel like if I’d actually seen Snowgrave before I may well have bought the game years ago when Chapter 2 first came out.
Anyway it’s cute and fun like you’d expect an Undertale sequel to be, and also still not finished. Maybe in another ten years.
Brotato continues. There’s a character that only unlocks if you complete a run with 0 curse, which annoys me to no end, not only because it’s hard to avoid killing the enemies that raise curse, but also because I DID complete Wave 20 with 0 curse, and then got some curse later on like Wave 33, but that didn’t count, getting curse in endless mode ruins the unlock. So you have to complete Wave 20, and then stop like immediately.
Just to be sure, are you 100% sure you had no curse? I ask because I thought I’d done that like twice, but it turned out even though I very specifically took zero cursed items, there are purple shrouded enemies that give you curse on contact that will spoil your curseless streak and I’d been tagged (I think even after I noticed it took me two more tries, because something got me literally on the final wave). Useful when you need to start a curse chain, but obviously a pain for getting that unlock.
I’m sure I had no curse on completing Wave 20. I specifically thought about stopping there to get the unlock, but decided it surely wouldn’t count Endless curse against me. And I haven’t been able to do it since. Those shrouded enemies keep blocking me and getting themselves killed.
I had taken a look at both My Summer Car and the demo of Drive Beyond Horizons, and thrown away both. I do think that both might be interesting in terms of their car simulation, but I’m not a fan of survival mechanics to begin with and the fact that both include, uhm, a bodily waste disposal need-and-mechanic was the nail in both coffins.
Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector has a new single player DLC, so I’ve been playing that. I do overall like how it handles turn based tactical stuff. I’ve really been spoiled by games offering free rewinding if you misclick or make a mistake, but that’s harder to provide when you have RNG and fog of war involved. The story is pretty bland but the 40k aesthetic is amusing (and impossible to take seriously).
Nothin’ but Nightreign. I’ve only got one boss left I haven’t beaten, but I’d intended to spend today hunting for the specific boss kill required for Ironeye’s quest. Except between the fact that it’s one of the high tier bosses (I’ve only beaten it once, on tank, with two very competent others) and probably some terrible matchmaking mechanics, it’s basically impossible to get a game to fire. So instead I did a bunch of other runs, which continue to make me think terrible matchmaking mechanics. It seems that when I’m allowing most of the bosses (I usually do any that’s not the final final), it goes in waves where I just see the same boss like 3-4 times in a row, like the matchmaking server is just shoving everyone who’s not picky onto the same boss over an over.
I’m starting to accrue enough relics that I can do a lot more interaction with the character abilities, like letting Wylder stack two charges of hookshot and also have a flaming buff followup attack for it. Gives him a very particular attack run, at least when you’re not fighting something that will casually backhand you out of it while attacking someone else. This is why getting stuck on Ironeye’s mission is so annoying, because I have a a similar build I want to try for him, but I need to stay on a lightning build for that boss.
Well, it’s been a few weeks of a roller-coaster of problems at the workplace, so the little time I’ve spent at home has been dedicated nearly exclusively to sleep. Only now things are slowing down.
I am still not done with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 due to my insistence in squeezing until the last drop of the game. This game is huge. Just when I thought I was done with it turns out there were still a few more dozen hours of content, and at no point I’ve felt bored. What a game.
Currently I’m in the process of defeating every single side boss in the game. I had done some grinding in order to improve my characters enough that I’ve breezed through most of them, but I’ve finally encountered one that completely wrecked my whole party. So it’s time for a bit more grinding, I say, before I can tackle this dude. And then it’s onto the final boss.
Oblivion remastered is consuming my time. I played through original Oblivion again just a couple of years ago, so I figured that the remaster wouldn’t hold my interest for long, but my save file tells me I’ve got over 100 hours into it and have barely scratched the main quest and haven’t dipped into Shivering Isles at all.
Oblivion is the only Elder Scrolls game that I managed to finish, and I LOVED Shivering Isles, as it was my favourite part of the game.
Still playing Conception Plus, and at least arguably playing it a bit more than I normally would play. It’s “arguably” because the game has provided an interesting dynamic for me. I dislike the dungeon crawling aspects, and the dungeons — other than what I think is the final one — basically have the structure where you go through two generic dungeons and then it splits into the three zodiac dungeons. You also have to swap in and out Star Children as they hit max level. And if you are overleveled for the monsters you run into, you can run right through them and get the XP and items you would get if you had to fight them. So in general I would swap out the Star Children, run through the first and second dungeons since I could mostly just run through the monsters, and then once they got harder or I got bored just dodge the fights and only fight as much as I needed to to get to where I can get to the end of a zodiac dungeon. For the boss, I used a Mechunite and a strategy of moving the MC and all other Star Children away to attack the helpers, and then only bring the MC back and maybe another group once the helpers are killed and the boss is focusing on the Mechunite. This meant that I’d clear one of those runs in about an hour and a half to two hours … which ALSO happened to be about as long as I could take before the dungeons would bore the heck out of me. So I played the game multiple times over the weekend in very short bursts, due to that fact and also due to my having some unexpected extra free time in those increments.
I also found out that there’s no time limit in the game despite the calendar, so I think I’ll try to test that out by trying to go through all the Star Maiden stories. I’ve finished the bonus Star Maiden and enjoyed the story, and used her to make stronger Star Children, but that one advanced faster than the others. So while there is a “Rest” option to skip the week, once I finish the last zodiac dungeon I’ll probably grind in the final dungeon for a bit to get levels up until all the Star Maiden stories are done.
Rimworld continues.
I got the Ideology and Biotech DLCs – I’ll get the others in time, but the game is complex enough as is and I’m worried the features would all crowd each other out.
Still, using Ideology, I made a free-love techno-hippy community with unlimited marriage/partner limits. (Plus, I made all my pawns bisexual, for extra complication and LOLs). I quickly had to install a mod that properly accommodated all the bed-swapping and complicated relationships going on.
Thing is, the script isn’t perfect, so often I find that there’s two couples sleeping together, two people sleeping alone in double beds and one person sleeping on the floor in the freezer.
I like to think that arguments were involved in this situation.
Beyond that, the DLCs seem very good. I’m very impressed with the way children are handled – they have unique needs, activities and develop skills based on how much/what interaction they get from the adults around.
(I’m less impressed with their automatic ‘nature running’ activity, where they feel the need to run away from the safety of my base and sprint back and forth in front of hungry bears.
Welp, kid’s gotta learn some day, I guess…)
Children respect zones while nature running, so (while I always forget to do this) you can set a safe zone in or just around your base and confine them to it. (You can also exclude the freezer to keep them from floor drawing in it and losing fingers and toes to hypothermia; not a problem I’ve ever had because I don’t keep my freezer at absolute zero, but apparently a common enough problem on the RimWorld subreddit.)
And if you haven’t seen it, the next DLC (Odyssey) was announced two days ago!
I’m always amused by what people do with sandbox games.
Rimworld’s wiki is full of tables comparing the strengths and weaknesses of different pack animals, the cost-to-nutrition-value of different meals, and of course, how hot/cold can you get a room. as well as advice on cheesing the different challenges. Whatever it is, somebody’s done an in-depth analysis of it.
I guess I’m glad that someone out there did the maths because I can use their advice, but it’s not something I’d think of doing.