T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I basically didn’t have time to play anything for more than an hour or two. But I did play a few different games.
I played maybe two hours of Rimworld. I just had time for basic management, but nothing significant.
I also played a bit of R.E.P.O. and Phasmophobia. Just a bit of good old multiplayer horror.
And finally, I played some Payday 2. It’s a good game.
Anyway, apparently I never have as many words to say about games then I think I will. so this might be filler because I feel bad that my posts are so short.
Also what are you guys doing.
Batman v. Superman Wasn't All Bad
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Good Robot Dev Blog
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
My Music
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
Cyberpunk 2077 continues to disappoint. I’ve spent the whole game looking for green pants to complete my Rydia cosplay, and finally got annoyed enough to look up where they are. Where they are, is locked to the DLC only. This despite NPCs in the base game wearing bright green pants. This confirms that I will never buy the DLC. I refuse to believe anyone other than me even wants those pants, so why the hell would anyone pay extra for them. The only reason I want them in the first place is the game promised me I could get them.
Cops are really, really easy to shake in this game. Basically, any time you step foot off the highway, the cops stop following you. I once tried to escape the cops, missed a turn, got my car stuck between two park benches, and by the time I finally maneuvered my way out of the bench trap, the cops had lost track of me and given up. One time I got the cop meter to the maximum, and then found there was just a dead spot in the middle of a roundabout that none of the cops could reach.
The game is bad at several things information-side. There’s the option to take people down non-lethally, but scanning them won’t tell you if they’re alive or dead. Live people usually twitch around, but not always, and if you pick one up and drop them they stop twitching. Does that mean they died? I can’t tell. Also most of the sidequests end by picking up info cards, but if you pick up info cards and end a quest at the same time, the End Quest prompts block you from reading the info card. And looking up the endings, I… guess I can do a few more of them now? No way to know from this side of the Point of No Return.
Game definitely leans in on its characters, which… seem fine. I’m entertained at how many quests are the player dealing with an NPC buddy’s hangups. I don’t care where
Johnny Silverhand’s grave is, but Johnny does, so let’s go find it. A rockstar is so upset about a J-pop band with no future covering his song that he’ll ambush their van and blow it up? Okay, man, I’ll help you get it out of your system. (The band has three Magical Girl members, but one and only one has combat stats, and a list of hacking actions. I’m pretty sure that’s a spoiler for future quests.)I’ve finished almost all the big quests (it’s pretty annoying that they all have 24 hour delays between parts) and am combing through Gig quests now, which are annoying. Firstly, they don’t trigger until you’re in punching distance of them, meaning you have to come to a dead stop to know what you’re doing before you trigger events; and secondly, like half or more are supposed to be stealth quests. I left the stealth tree as such a massive dump stat I ended up getting locked out of taking a picture of myself. Also, the rewards seem to all just be obsolete equipment.
The game does that thing a few of them do, where they’ll mark an area as out-of-bounds despite it being between two in-bound locations. I climbed a mountain of trash, then made a beeline for a quest marker, and the game said I was out of bounds and reset me to the trash mountain. Likewise, the map has a road, that leads to a cool-looking building, but trying to follow the road gets me OOBed right back to the start. Horizon Zero Dawn did that too, and I just don’t understand why that ever happens. (The most fun one is the megabuildings, which straight up have floors that kill you if you touch them. I fell onto a ledge, took survivable damage, then hopped down five feet to the platform below, and instantly died. What the hell was the point.)
Now that I’ve broken down and started looking things up, I looked up how to trigger the second half of a pretty interesting sidequest. It turns out, there is no second half, it just ends where I am and apparently gets a line or two in the epilogue. Like,
I HAVE LEADS! The chick Peralez fired, and the guy who reported her back to work. Let me track them down, grill them for info! Why are we stopping here?!This is Trails of Cold Steel-level cliffhanger trash. Man, this game’s a mess.Anyway, I’ve got an ability that flat out knocks someone out now (that doesn’t work on bosses, for no in-game reason), and another skill that lets me use the first one without paying for it, so fights are even more of a breeze now. Despite this being the boring part of the game, I’m still mostly having fun.
Brotato continues. It took way too long to realize I can just play the characters in order instead of trying to trust the Random Character button that keeps giving me Arms Dealer and Entrepreneur. So now I’m playing characters in order, except skipping Arms Dealer because he’s terrible and anti-fun.
I finally got a bit of time to continue Clair Obscure and defeated the paintress with a MGS4-rivaling long-ass cutscene following. Now go for all the optional side content before ending the game for reals.
And Monster Hunter: Rise is still the coop game of choice right now. But I’m missing new things to discover for a while now. Okay, new monsters all the time, but … I don’t know.
Other than that I had a lovely time at Südwinsen Festival with great bands of Rock, Punk and Ska. Open Air and free of charge, baby. Okay, I left 200 bucks there for drinks, food and merchandise, but no ridiculous entry fee and very calm security.
Still progressing with my Imperial Agent in The Old Republic. I’m about to start Belsavis which means I think three more planets to the end, and then I have one more character to fill out this run of all the classes for the TOR Diary on my blog. Once that’s all done, I’ll have to decide if I want to play it or use that time for other things.
Also did manage to get in some sessions of Conception Plus. The “couple of hours at a time” model works better and I am enjoying progressing with the Star Maidens, but I didn’t end up playing anything in my longer time period, and so far I haven’t managed to get in some sessions on the weekdays, which makes it hard to progress in that game. But I’ll see how it goes.
I like how there are people commenting even with the post itself blank. :)
I’ve been on vacation, which meant very little actual gaming. As planned, I did have Territory Idle dilly-dallying territorially in the background, and racked up five of the remaining eight achievements through sheer accumulation. The problem is the drudgery of the remaining achievements… one of them is racking up 10,000 rituals, for example. I can currently automate a run of 27 rituals and over the course of the past week, in between vacation stuff, managed to get close to 5800 of them… so even with a chance coming up to bump up the automation to 28 at a time, that’s still at least about 150 clicks where I have to wait 8~9 minutes between each one. Even keeping perfectly on the ball, it will require about 21 hours of constant low-grade attention, and I can easily see life’s interruptions meaning it drags out through the weekend.
To top it off, after that the remaining to achievements simply seem to be a matter of repeatedly running islands until hitting a requisite number of territories claimed; not really any new mechanics to engage with or decisions to make. Even the remaining upgrades are all useless in terms of efficient play; rather, they’re designed to give you a bit of an edge in the one territory-gaining pathway that takes the most time at higher levels no matter what you do. It’s truly a game designed to test your patience more than anything else, I guess. The only reason I’m still playing is that sunk-cost fallacy has set in and I’m bloody-minded about getting the last of the achievements now that I’ve gotten so close.
Well I tried to comment even when the post was blank, but then the page was refusing to load ;)
Baldur’s Gate 3 continues. After clearing pretty much every single mob on the first map (I even scoured the map itself looking for any traversable areas I missed, found a very significant item that way), I hit level 5. leading to some absolutely absurd power increases. You see, there’s this thing about Haste. In 3.5 they nerfed it from an extra standard action to just a single attack, and this was hailed as an obvious and necessary fix (though I think there were significant unintended consequences). In 5e, it remains at giving you no more than one extra attack, and no spells, not even cantrips. So naturally, In BG3, it gives you a whole Standard Action, which can be a spell, or your normal number of attacks- which at 5th level, increase to two attacks for the weapon focused classes. You go from 1 attack per round at 4th, which is where you spend most of the first map, and then jump to as much as 4 per round at 5th. And on top of this, I gave the barbarian the “Tavern Brawler” feat, because throwing things seems cool, and this game seems like it might do it decently. This feat doubles your str to both attack and damage, in a system where that should basically never happen. The presumable idea is that this helps make up for the lack of magic when you’re throwing rocks and whatnot at people, but it also applies to normal thrown weapons which deal more damage and are in fact magical and indeed some can teleport back to your hand for every attack, and that’s not even counting the increases to unarmed. It’s completely bugnuts busted. So I respec’d the barbarian out of that for basic sanity purposes.
I have continued to improve my thievery, figuring out how the lines of sight and concealment and darkvision actually work, up to splitting off the rogue from the rest of the party so they can just sprint away and flee combat even if caught, depending on the area. Of course, this just leads to the dissonance of being caught emptying someone’s entire inventory, running away, and coming back to them being completely hon-hostile and not even a change on the little “attitude” slider (which I’ve never seen in anything other than default position, who knows).
Possible plot spoilers ahead as I complain about dialogue, though I suppose I don’t actually mention any real details that aren’t fairly obvious.
So given the choice of paths, I figured I should pop up into the mountains and check out the githyanki creche first, see what they have to say, before heading down to the underdark which I was more interested in. Instead this turns into a series of “well you clearly need to do X first before you leave,” culminating in clearing out the entire place without having taken a single night’s rest since entering the new map. I know for a fact that I skipped a dream I was supposed to have seen already, because the dream visitor referenced something they had not in fact told me, and when double-checking animate dead to see if the zombies stayed around in the morning I had had to button mash through a dream. But that’s not what really annoyed me.
No, what really annoyed me is how the writer forces your hand. In many previous DnD-styled games, I have followed the simple rule of exhausting all possible dialogue when talking to major/villanous NPCs. But just like with Astarion and his bullshit one-shotting of NPCs and flawless escapes during dialogue, this game apparently takes the stance that if you do *any* talking, you don’t get to have a fight, unless they decide you do. And if they decide your options are acquiesce or attack, they will make *you* do the attacking. The gith inquisitor has plenty of lines to say (which I read over various restarts to test the dialogue tree), and even says things like “I will not ask again” *outside* of dialogue, but once you start talking the game has decided that you must be the one to attack. Literally there is no option to even try to leave, it’s either acquiesce, or attack. This is bizzarely and infuriatingly dumb. I don’t want to make the first attack, I want to dig for information and then say “okay bye” and then when they attack me, I’ll fight. But no, even though it would only take one line of dialogue to make this make sense, instead the game forces you to hit the attack button. Head canon I guess.
And all of this is extra hilarious because I’m kindof in the worst possible timeline of my runs. I would have been totally cool with Lae’zel dying when she attacked at camp ages ago, if Wyl hadn’t been weirdly aggro’d for no discernible reason. Thus I would not be tiredly listening to all her perfectly solid and very plot-relevant realization that gith culture sucks, continuing to accrue relationship points by simply not being a total asshole, and indeed would have turned back rather than fight through the entire gith base, and so would have saved those massive plot revelations for later. Instead I’m just kindof dragging her along going “uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah turns out the queen who teaches you all to kill each other might have been bad news, I’m so sorry for your loss, okay you can go back to the bench now.” Everyone else’s stories have at least some fantastical element to them which I find interesting, except for those two. Even Astarion’s apparently having been a slave or imprisoned or somesuch, as a vampire, is at least somewhat intriguing, even if his smarmy cha 10 pouting broken edgelord shtick is annoying. But I just find Lae’zel alternately a dangerous or doe-eyed and neither interests me.
Presumably now that the section she is most directly connected to is done we’ll get some more focus on other characters.
Tried to comment earlier, but for some reason I kept getting an error message when trying to access here.
Anyway, I started playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons as the sort of cozy game I can play for a few minutes every day. It’s pretty relaxing, unlike so many imitators that feel the need to add a constant sense of urgency.
I’m also playing Post Trauma, a relatively recent survival horror game very much in the vein of classic Silent Hill, though with a few twists. The plot is, so far, completely impenetrable, and combat lies on the easy side, but the atmosphere is great and the puzzles are interesting rather than being overly simplistic like in Resident Evil or obtuse like in hard Silent Hill difficulties.
Also playing Terminator: Resistance. Been wary of this one for a while, because I’ve had it in my library for some time and people keep praising it, but the last few FPSs I’ve tried left me uninterested to the point where I thought the entire genre had bored me but no, this one got me hooked immediately, and I spend most of my gaming time with it these days. It’s a very fun game that also brings new stuff to the Terminator lore, something sorely needed after the last 4 or so movies that just keep rehashing the same idea.
The website was almost entirely down (you could get access sporadically) for most of the 24th, from our point of view. 503 errors, but occasionally something would load. It started to straighten up yesterday evening, but remained slow. Everything *seems* to be ok at this point.
Having problems again late on the 25th; still don’t have a cohesive explanation.
Started playing Per Aspera again this week (one of at least three games in my account about terraforming Mars) after seeing a fourth-anniversary reminder for it and realizing it had some updates since I last played (which would’ve been close to when it released).
It’s kind of a base building game that I want to like, but it just…doesn’t quite work for me. It’s hard to spread organically over Mars because every building has to be in range of a Maintenance Facility to keep it working. These have a circular of effect, making it most efficient to have relatively round clusters of buildings, rather than extending organically towards a new resource deposit. You can launch new landing points which allow you set up new settlements wherever you want, but there’s this fixed sequence of buildings you have to go through Every. Single. Time you do so, in order to have a fully self-sufficient settlement*. It’s fun the first time or two, but rapidly gets tedious when you’re doing it for the fourteenth time. (There not even any challenge to it, as placing a new landing point instantly spawns one of each type of resource deposit in the vicinity; it’s literally just busy work you have to do before you can get to adding non-essential buildings.) Resource deposits are limited, though, so you have to keep expanding (or at least moving) or will eventually run out of stuff. The tech tree does include Hyperloops later on which allow fast, long-range transfer of materials, which do help with connecting far-flung settlements, but it’s still clunky.
I’m playing in the sandbox mode to try to fully terraform Mars (and pick up a few achievements that were added since I last played), because the story mode actively angered me when I played it (and I played all three endings to completion, trying to like it). You play as an AI sent to do the terraforming, yet no one in this game seems to have heard of the concepts of “audio-visual recordings” or “calling witnesses to verify something”, because your human handlers on Earth gaslight you a lot about things you experience and pretty much all you can do is go “nuh uh! I did too get attacked by a swarm of enemy drones!” (Note that at this point in the story where this happens there are going to be hundreds of humans living on Mars, and some of them are mentioned as being shaken or hurt in the attacks, but can you call a single one of them to confirm what you report? Noooo…) Minor spoilers, it turns out
you, the AI, are not entirely stable, but it’s still incredibly frustrating to me the way it’s handled. Perhaps that’s on purpose (the team seems proud enough of their story that you can actually buy an audio drama version as a DLC), but “feeling the authentic anger of someone being gaslit” isn’t really high on my priority list. At least in the sandbox mode I can forego it and just focus on the terraforming.*Build an Aluminum Mine, then a Silicon Mine, then a Glass Kiln, then a Solar Power Plant, then an Iron Mine, a Carbon Mine, and a Steel Foundry, then an Electronics Factory and a Parts Factory [don’t forget more power plants], then in some order a Worker Factory [make new robot workers to ferry things around], Chemical Mine, Polymers Factory, and a Maintenance Facility, at which point your new settlement is finally fully self-sufficient.