T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been too busy with work to play much. So I did the normal thing, which was spend all of my free time playing Rimworld.
I made my own xenotype and decided to live in a mountain. It’s been going well for the most part, except for using chemfuel as my only power source. Since my only source of chemfuel is from growing plants with a sun lamp, any time there was a solar flare or a blight I would stop getting chemfuel. And thus a death spiral would occur.
On the upside of living under a mountain. Any quest that creates a climate adjustor or a sun blocker, is a freebie.
Anyway. What’s going on with everyone else?
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
The Witch Watch
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
More Halls of Torment. I was kind of ready to declare victory, but it turned out it had more mechanics to show me once I finished the final area, with the ability to start with better items and more artifacts to make things harder. Still fun.
I also played through Old Skies. It’s an adventure game about time travel. The premise is kind of bleak – time travel is being sold for an exorbitant price, with some limitations on how much people are allowed to change, but not nearly as many limitations as you’d probably hope. You play as someone who is sent along to help out the customers (and make sure they don’t do the things the company says they can’t do). As part of this, they’ve done something to fix you in time. Which means that any time anyone makes any change in the past, you get to see the world update while you don’t, which is pretty nightmarish if you suddenly never had a family (or vice-versa), or if things changed so you died 30 years ago (but time employee you is still around due to the fixation), or that kind of thing. The various customers have different goals and personalities and the cases are varied as a result. You visit New York in a number of different time periods.
The story and characters were good, but the puzzles didn’t really impress me. In general it gives you a fairly limited inventory and things to interact with, which makes most things pretty trivial failing to figure something out more frustrating. There are some conversations where you just need to figure out the right answer by trial and error (which you get the opportunity to do).
Overall I was very happy with it.
The premise does sound interesting, I’ll have to check it out.
In Clair Obscure I got to the point where I should fight the Axions next. I might be a bit overpowered now, after completing the Ice/Fire-area, where every battle gives 200k+ experience points, Old Lumiere battles – the next story area gave 15k Exp (with the no damage bonus).
Also playing The Talos Principle: Reawakened. After getting such a marvelous experience with Talos II, I wanted to revisit its predecessor, which in my memory was a good puzzler, but nothing ground breaking or highly philosophical like Talos II. Maybe I didn’t read all the terminal entries back then or most of it went over my head.
In coop Monster Hunter: Rise is still the main focus, next to board game adaptions like Wingspan, Scythe or Sagrada. Rise isn’t as fleshed out as World was. The hunting areas are to flat and low on details. There is almost no voice acting. It’s like a PSP remake.
Analog I tried Steven Universe – Beach a’ Palooza. The rules are missing some details (like basic card explanation). and even in a two player game, within act III all 3 of the ‘party crashers’ are easily defeated. In a more player game the later players wouldn’t have any chance of getting some points. Balancing be damned.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 continues through New Game . I had a bit of seller’s remorse upon starting it since I didn’t do most of the endgame sidequests, but on the other hand NG is balanced around having not done them. On the other other hand, I’m not playing RPGs to have a balanced experience.
After a mere two playthroughs, two LPs, and a deliberate attempt to do so, a small amount of the polish has worn off. Overall I thought the plot was fantastic (
it’s astonishing how well they used a plot twist that has singlehandedly killed other franchises AND WILL KILL AGAIN), but there’s a couple of plot incidents that don’t get explanations, though mostly in an arthouse way than in a plothole way. But one’s in a plothole way.The Curator is supposed to be stuck inside the Monolith, so why is he able to play blacksmith to the party?Otherwise, the UI does not hold up to the sheer amount of toys you’re playing with. It’s hard to find the right pictos, and for some reason you can’t sort them by Learned or Unlearned, so new ones can get buried in the mess. Also, skill descriptions just flat-out lie to you*, so you have to actually use them in combat, which… there’s a lot of skills, man.*(I have three attacks for the same character that describe themselves as dealing Medium Damage; two hit for 5000, and one hits for 25000.)
It also struck me that, while one party member is explicitly a Blue Mage, the picto system means the entire expedition is playing Blue Mage. In most games, if you skip treasure in a dungeon, you miss a weapon tier and are weaker for a couple of areas until you find the treasure that would have replaced the one you missed. But in Clair, the treasure is all unique; every weapon plays differently and can be independently upgraded, and every picto skill does its own thing and there’s no maximum to how many you can equip. Meaning every missed treasure leaves the team uniquely weaker. Not sure if this counts as a complaint; areas don’t get locked behind you so you can always go back later. But I don’t much like Blue Mages because they’re so heavily tied to exploration.
What were the other quibbles I scraped up? Oh, right, minigames. One thing the oldschool games definitely have over Clair are minigames, Clair is lasered on combat and exploration (with the occasional horrible jumping puzzle), and the few minigames are just twists on that. So no barrel-jumping or Chocobo racing. Point to 90’s Squaresoft RPGs. Of course on the other hand, with the huge number of skills and pictos, every character could be considered their own minigame. And the parry system combined with every enemy having unique attack patterns means every enemy is their own minigame. So, point to mid-2020’s Sandfall.
I switched over to the small TV for New Game , so now I have a 1-to-1 comparison on how much worse the small TV makes things look. The game is now significantly yellower. Also, for some reason, on the small TV item descriptions are getting blocked by the character portraits, that was definitely not happening on the big one. I guess the menus can only go so small, or something? Weird that the text doesn’t get priority over the portrait though, I need that text to know what the move does, I don’t need that second copy of the character’s big dumb head.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a game I’ve heard both very good and very bad things about, and is currently living up to all of them. The characters so far have been fun and fairly intriguing, and there’s been, like, twelve factions introduced already; I’m looking forward to a convoluted interweaving of all of them (hopefully not just a setup for twelve individual sidequests). But the gameplay has been janky at every turn. Tutorials pop up mid-word, quest notifications pop up so fast they block each other. You’re not locked in place during conversation so you can absolutely troll the NPCs, or walk slightly too far away and cut the conversation off. Driving defaults to first-person inside the car, so suddenly trying to look up or down just takes away information as you stare at the car’s interior. I’ve died a dozen times trying to jump down buildings looking for shortcuts to the ground. It’s been a good time so far.
The game has nudity, but nobody has any comments on it. Job interviews, boxing matches, waiting at the bar, no reactions.
Gunplay is mostly okay. You’ve got “quickhacks” that act as magic spells, thus justifying my decision to make the protagonist an Anime Magical Girl (though she doesn’t actually have the stats for it). But the enemy can also quickhack you, and breaking line of sight doesn’t break the casting, you have to eliminate the caster. That’s annoying, though probably fair. So far the combat has been fun enough; run up, shotgun a guy, then smack them on the head as they stand up, and voila, man down. But man, your ability to run being tied to stamina, which also controls your melee ability, is not a mechanic I’d been missing. And we also had a bossfight, which consisted of a big wall of meat with a rocket launcher killing me very dead until I hid behind a column and peek-a-boo’ed him to death. It was unenjoyable.
Very early in still, just past the One Last Job Of A Lifetime That Will Put Us Two Days From Retirement. Have to say, I’m disappointed how that played out.
One of the characters involved had some kind of Mysterious Past, and while it was obvious he was going to betray us I was looking forward to finding out why. Instead, he betrays us and then dies immediately, to be replaced by some other shady guy who will probably do the same thing.Also was not anticipating how instantly unlikable Keanu Reeves’s character is. That’s some talent there. In which direction I’m not sure.It’s been a long time since I’ve actually played an open world game (that wasn’t Yakuza). They’re fun. No wonder there’s so many of them. Intrigued to see where this plot goes. I mean, it’s obviously going straight through the head of Arasaka Corporation, but… maybe it’ll do something else too.
So, so far the perfect follow-up to Clair Obscur.
Brotato is Brotato. That’s its name.
I disliked Silverhands intensely but I warmed up to him somewhat over time (point to the game I guess). I will not spoil the story but some of the factions are very relevant, some others are essentially side content. I do also recommend the DLC, Phantom Liberty is very ambitious mechanically, gives an ability to essentially farm certain resources that are otherwise a bit on the scarce (and very random) side, and very few sidequests there feel like filler.
Also, the quickhack build is bonkers. It may not feel so initially because you simply do not have access to certain toys at lower levels cyberdeck but if we keep to the spells comparison in the lategame you can be wielding a multicast, short cooldown, perfect accuracy, no-save “power word kill”.
Also also, if you designed your character to look like a magical girl there is a companion quest that is going to be be an experience…
The Johnny Hotbody character is the most annoying thing in all of Cyberpunk for me. You dislike him now, but this roleplaying game doesn’t let you dislike him the whole way. Some time later for no good reason you are buddy buddy with him and later you oppose him again and then back to bonding over that 80 year old handler.
Batman Arkham Knight had its flaws, but the the Joker in Batmans head was handled great. Because Bats was always opposed to Mr. J. and in a linear plot without multiple choice dialog you do not give the illusion of player agency in the story.
Odd that you dislike Blue Mages for being tied to exploration when most people tend to dislike them for being tied to randomness. This is why I actually like this game’s Blue Mage. Every fight you win against an enemy with him in your party will 100% give you the ability in the first try, so there’s no randomness involved in gaining abilities.
I don’t think it’s that black or white. It’s possible that elemental damage is tied to this (some attacks use your weapon’s elemental damage) or some other modifier is at hand. In the case of Monoco, for instance, attacks will have a different output of damage depending on the set mask. Meanwhile, some attacks will break through enemy defenses, while others won’t.
As for your question regarding
The Curator, being trapped doesn’t mean being unable to act. It only means being crippled. Remember he’s the one actually responsible for the Gommage, so he certainly has the power to act. He just can’t do as he pleases.Sorry, it’s a bit of a late response to all that, and I don’t know if you’ll ever see it, but I missed this comment when it was posted.
Got in another session of The Old Republic. Now that I have Vector, I run with him as my companion and can leave Kaliyo on the ship, or rather send her off to do Treasure Hunting missions with my character reasoning that she’d want to do that anyway and the things that would in theory go “missing” from those missions are a small price to pay to get her out of my hair. Yeah, neither me or my character care for her much, but in our defense one of her story missions is to go around to various planets and pay off, kill or in some way resolve issues from her past, after one of her OTHER story missions required me to stop her from selling a former comrade to bounty hunters, and her biggest complaint after I told the comrade to run away was that that person now thought she was better than Kaliyo, which was both insane and not something sane people worry about. Vector is MUCH more reasonable despite having been brainwashed by insects into joining their hivemind …
Also still playing Conception Plus. I can only tolerate a couple of hours of it before getting tired of the combat, which makes it hard to play as the game in my longer timeslot as I in theory have a little more time than that. I’d try to push ahead to the end of the game as I’ve unlocked the final dungeon but my character levels are a bit low — they run to 99 and I’m mid-50s right now — and the combat is a bit hard on the first level of that dungeon — when things hit, they do a lot of damage that I need to heal, although in a number of cases I can keep them from really hitting anything — plus I want to max out all the Star Maidens and so see all their stories. If I continued playing it once a week for a couple of Star Maiden sessions — you can interact with five of them a week before having to either rest or go into a dungeon — it would take me forever to finish, so I’m going to try slipping in those sessions at other times when I have an hour or two so that the fact that I get tired of it quickly works for me instead of against me.
This means that I would like to start something else in my longer time block. However, the games that I had considered before picking this one up were The Age of Decadence, which I started playing but realized I needed to be able to focus on it more and so left it for sometime when I was on vacation and so could finish it in a couple of weeks, and then Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and Darklands. I worry that both of them will be a bit too involved for me, so I will likely go back to my list of games to see if there’s something that appeals to me more there.
I’m into I guess “Phase 3” of Blue Prince, having
found the Sanctum keys and solved the sigils. Turns out one of the leads I thought was leading to a Sanctum key was actually something else, so I’ve still got a lead there, but otherwise I’m fairly short on leads, so I’m working a bit on the last couple trophies – the only ones I’ve got left are the special modes/new game challenges, so I’m trying “Dare mode” again.—
Meanwhile back on Factorio – I did Vulcanus awhile back; definitely the simplest and most straightforward of the ‘starting’ planets; I think I spent more time building a new platform to reach Aquilo than actually on Vulcanus. Not necessarily a bad thing, though a bit underwhelming when it’s the last of the three starting planets you hit.
Also have my basic base established on Aquilo at this point and I think I liked Aquilo pretty well – compared to the complexity of something like Gleba it’s fairly ‘simple’, but needing to deal with limited space and running heat pipes through your base makes it interesting to build.
I do find it a little annoying that you have to jump-start the base with solar – I didn’t realize that ahead of time (apparently it was mentioned in the dev blog, but I didn’t read those because I wanted to go into the planets blind) and I didn’t actually bring much solar to the planet furthest from the sun with 1% solar efficiency. Thankfully my nuclear space platform did have a single solar panel that I had added when initially building it and hadn’t removed later and that was enough to start the base; I didn’t really want to make an entire roundtrip just to grab solar panels .
More Rimworld!
as far as atrocities go, i’ve moved onto (I think?) eugenics – every time I’m attacked by pirates, I make a point to sterilise any survivors that I capture.
Sure, I’ve released a healty prisoner and sent them home. But they won’t have kids and pass on their – piracy? piratic inclination? – to a new generation.
I’d ask if I was a bad person in this game, but the organ and gene harvesting that I do already says I am.
The randomness continues to vex me. On the one hand, I had a random event where a child was being being chased by an evil faction and wanted sanctuary (I said yes) and this led to a sige of my settlement by mortar-firing wolf-men. They sat at a long range and fired incendiary mortar bombs at me – and I had to actively attack them before they would leave. Awesome.
They also killed the self-same child they were pursuing with a mortar shell by sheer chance (mortars are very inaccurate in this game) before they left, so…
…what awesome freeform storytelling.
So the RNG (which determines what events/quests you get) is great, but, it’s also really, really bad. I’ve had so, so many auto-generated quests of ‘this faction wants you to make [45] [silly hats] as a trade for X [terrible auto-generated reward]’ or ‘[so-and-so-faction] has [a lot] of toxic waste they’ll send to you so YOU have to deal with it, and they’ll give you [some worthless junk] as a payment’.
Well. As well as installing mods, I’ve been cheesing the game – a couple of time’s I’ve noticed that an autosave has triggered just before a quest spawns, and so the ‘load game’ function has seen a lot of use. Also, dev mode is just there, in the pause menu!
The RNG is fine, but sometimes a reroll is called for.
I looked into the mods, and found that that someone had made a mod to ensure that same-sex couples can create offspring, through the Magic of Science! Far better than my previous plan of ‘cryogenic male sex slavery’ that I esposed before.
The Biotech DLC has a special setting, in which you can start a new colony with 5 of your favorite colonists after a while.
I’m assuming that this new mod means that my all-female new colony can continue, despite the fact that there’s literally no men – and hey, I started a colony with 5 adults, and since then the’ve have had 5 female kids!
Wow, what a concidence.
I think the game has realised that it needs to change up the challenges that are inherent to it, and so it’s always trying to change that up.
In addition to the usual background noise of Territory Idle, in the last week or so I ran through, or wrapped up, several short puzzle games: LYNE, OXXO, and Frog Detective 1: The Haunted Island. I also broke the Bella barrier on cheeky-gore-themed tower defense Bella Wants Blood. I may or may not go for 100% on the achievements because while my enjoyment of tower defense outweighs my dislike of the cheeky-gore aesthetic, completing a Bella run relies a lot more on RNG than the rest of the game does and that tips the balance a bit. Overall a recommend, though, if you like tower defense and/or shop at Hot Topic.
LYNE is a very abstract spatial game where you have to draw a continuous line from one end-point node to another while obeying various number and color rules… it’s not bad, but there’s just so much of it that it took me literally years to work through, and most of that time was spent not thinking about it at all because I’d had enough.
OXXO is much more engaging; it’s a Hamster on Coke game, and they can be counted on to do a good job with visual and audio presentation as well as the scale and pacing of their puzzles. I had a good time with that one.
Frog Detective is just super silly and fun; long enough to be an interesting experience with a minor twist, and short enough to not overstay its welcome.
Last but not least, I got Dawnsbury Days, a skirmish game based on the Pathfinder 2nd Edition ruleset, in the Steam summer sale and it’s been a lightweight little diversion. The story isn’t anything to write home about, and the default graphics are startlingly anime, but overall it’s charming enough and my actual gaming group is using P2E right now so I definitely appreciate the chance to experiment with what the combat rules can do. The game also has a sort of amateurish charm and energy that makes the creators’ decision to grapple with P2E — a very dense ruleset where even the myriad character-customization levers bristle with swarms of even smaller levers — all the more impressive.
Didn’t pounce last night ’cause I didn’t have much interesting to report- despite wanting to start something else I still basically just played Nightreign all weekend. The new super-boss is the super-bugs, got that one first try, then a whiff, then again third try. The first was a hard fought rez-fest where we kept picking ourselves up over and over, which if you can do so consistently does make the team effectively unbeatable. Usually you run out of heals and by the time you pick up one person another has dropped, but this team kept the cycle going. And the third one was entertaining since the two smashy boys were doing so much DPS (backed up by my also buffing their DPS) that (spoiler for superbugs mechanics)
by the time the ethereal bug could finish un-posessing one of the other two after a damage cycle, the base bug would be dead again, forcing it to immediately re-posess for another damage cycle.And after spending so much time playing at 2am and/or only doing runs on the super bosses, it is now extremely irritating playing with normal players. Not randoms- random higher tier players have always been fine, I’ve only done a handful of missions with non-randoms, and they were newer so I wasn’t expecting much. But the more accustomed you get to the map and the bosses, the more and more aggrivating it is when people make just plain obviously bad decisions. There’s plenty of room to say that they’re just making their own decisions and I shouldn’t expect everyone to follow me all the time, they can be ignoring me the same way I would ignore them, but that’s kinda the point: skilled teams know when to follow and help for greater efficiency and won’t just completely ignore when you want to go get upgrades. Boneheads run into boss fights they don’t have the levels for while playing a wizard who doesn’t cast spells, and I am astounded by how many people never loot anything and seem to expect the game to just drop perfect final tier weapons for them.