T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve once again not had much time to game.
Just a little Balatro, and Rimworld, but no time for anything interesting.
How’s things for everyone else?
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
Deus Ex and The Treachery of Labels
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Cyberpunk 2077 is as finished as it’s going to be. Got a second ending, which was less satisfying than the first; this time I made more enemies, and confronted none of them. Looking up the other endings, it looks like I got locked out of another because I missed a single dialogue prompt. I knew Cyberpunk was following Deus Ex, but I didn’t realize it was also following Persona 4. So I would have to restart to get that ending, which is not something I’m willing to do in an open world game. A linear game, sure; Triangle Strategy can lock me out of things, or Star Fox, and every Roguelike basically runs on locking the player out of stuff every run. But an open world game is supposed to be, you know, open. Go anywhere, do anything, keep leveling, without worry about locking yourself out of future quests.
My main feeling is that it was trying to be both Deus Ex and Grand Theft Auto, but those two genres interfere with each other, and also they ran out of time trying to fix the problems the genre hybrid caused so it’s both disjointed and unfinished. I don’t think I’ll replay it, though I had fun with the combat (I complained about the bossfights, but that was just the mandatory ones, the Cyberpsychos were pretty fun). I am, however, reminded that I never finished Deus Ex Human Revolution, and bought Watch Dogs but never actually played it, just watched the Chipcheezum LP. I may or may not get back to one of those. (Probably not.)
Clair Obscur continues. Back into endgame, this time on New Game+. I have definitely not figured out the really broken builds, but the partially broken stuff still randomly deletes bosses. The Act 2 boss’s first form got practically one-shot by the Big Move, and then a series of random encounters survived the same attack. It’s strange. Anyway, this time I’m going to make an effort to clear all the optional stuff. Watching other people’s playthroughs revealed I never even found like half the optional areas. Game is good at hiding things. Or I’m bad at finding things. Probably that second one.
Brotato continues, more tolerably with the “every character once” strategy. Inexplicably cleared Arms Dealer in Abyss, and good riddance. Got a particularly fun Axolotl; I had a melee build, and then it offered to exchange my Attack Speed with my Ranged Damage, giving me 175 points of Ranged Damage and triggering an attempt to rebuild my character’s arsenal at Wave 21. (It still only made it to Wave 30.)
Clair Obscure endgame – a little. I had just enough time to fight the third axom.
Monster Hunter: Rise in coop, now getting beaten by the Mitzuzune on our way to hunter rank 6. My water damage resistant Tetra armor does basically nothing. That soap snake still takes one fourth to half of my health with one hit. Funsies.
And I attended the Refuse Festival – a punk festival near my home town. More people than ever, but I didn’t know one band. Three bands were good (Gestrüpp, Rumkicks and HausVAbot), but also a lot of hardcore noise around them. If that is a repeating issue, I might skip next year (But it is the 10 anniversary, so hope’s up).
Got in another session of The Old Republic. Well, actually, a couple of sessions, because there was an intermission after finishing Belsavis but I didn’t have the time or patience to play it, and so ended up playing that part the next day. I only have Voss and Corellia left, on my Agent, and I’m hoping to polish that off this weekend as it’s a long weekend here, leaving only the Trooper left in this run.
Also played a couple more sessions of Conception Plus. It’s more difficult to fit this into my spare time, mostly because I don’t really HAVE that much spare time. Still, it is easier to fit in than most other things, and I am enjoying the Star Maiden stories as most of the characters have an entertaining surface story and have an at least slightly deeper story underneath it. Once I clear all of their stories, then I can just run through the final dungeon, avoiding most fights and saving the bond points for the big bosses.
I had been trying to play Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds in my longer gaming time, but keep ending up using that for Conception Plus instead. And now I’m thinking that I might prefer to play Persona 5 Strikers there instead. I’ll have to see.
Been playing a bit of Elden Ring: Nightreign – I’ve been playing a little bit with a friend when we can manage to coordinate schedules, and I started doing solo runs to practice – had some pretty annoying matchmaking experiences with people quitting. I figured I wouldn’t really get anywhere, but at least I could explore at my own pace without someone else getting annoyed… but I’ve actually started winning a fair bit. Part of the issue was that the first few runs I kept getting Bell-Bearing Hunter who is just a terrible match-up for my character, and now I just cheese him with a bow and the rest of the run is a lot easier.
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Meanwhile officially finished Factorio: Space Age – probably going to continue for a bit; I’ve never really gone too far into the scaled-up Factorio stuff, and it might be fun to try, and there is some post-game stuff, I guess.
Didn’t get to play as much as I would have liked, just tying up some loose ends in Baldur’s Gate 3 before I move to what I’m told is no really seriously the end of act 1 this time. Most of the way to level 7. Gotta decide if slaver dwarves are worth leaving alive or I should slaughter them all like I did the man-eating goblins before I go.
I got the rituals achievement in Territory Idle and now it’s just a matter of repeating the island cycle until I’ve gotten enough territories for the fame achievements.
In a much more satisfying turn, my son got me back into Spelunky 2 and I managed to complete the speed-run achievement after just a few days of trying. My son is trying to get it at the same time as the no-money achievement (“Low Scorer”) and as a direct result, hasn’t gotten either yet. I’ve tried a few no-money runs (taking my time) and gotten as far as the Tide Pool. So that’s okay. I might aim for the Millionaire achievement next.
Not too long until the fall semester, now. I might try to get in a narrative game or the like in, before going back to things that can be enjoyed in relatively small bites.
Finished the main campaign of Terminator: Resistance. Good times all around. The campaign is fun, very high on exploration and a lot of chances for choosing between stealth and gunplay. Enemy variety isn’t enormous, but the campaign is over before things start getting too repetitive. Playing through the DLC campaign now. Basically more of the same, but it uses its resources cleverly so it doesn’t feel like a rehash.
Still going through Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Hit a bit of a snag because there are a couple of game mechanics that seem to go against each other. There’s this thing where you can eat fruits to become stronger and be able to use your tools more efficiently that way. But turns out that sometimes this is a detriment. For instance, you get stone, clay or iron by striking rocks. If you haven’t eaten any fruits you can get up to 8 bits of material from hitting rocks with a shovel or axe, and the rock will remain in place for next day. But if you’ve been eating fruits you can destroy the rock with one hit, which means you only get one bit of material, and only one rock regenerates per day, so if you’re destroyed them all you’ll only get one next day. Until I found this out I was going crazy trying to gather 30 bits of iron when I was only getting one or two a day (sometimes none). The game never tells you about this, since it keeps encouraging you to eat the fruits. Insane.
Finishing a heretical run in Rogue Trader. Unlike most RPGs I’ve seen this time being evil doesn’t cut out whole swatches of content, and “good”(ish) party members decide to leave only at the endgame. All in all very pleased with the work Owlcat did – and it being a subsequent playthrough doesn’t diminish the game in any way.
I just recently started looking at trying Rogue Trader. Haven’t picked it up, yet; though. I have wanted to start playing Warhammer (mainly 40K) for a long time, and recently started wondering if Rogue Trade, Battlesector, and Gladius might be good ways to get started.
Rogue Trader is an excellent starting point – not only Owlcat writes good stories, this one is excellent at portraying the 40k feel, and there’s enough descriptions and context to ease even complete newbies in painlessly.
Battlesector (at least the basic one, never returned to it after complition, and so never checked the addons) is an ok game, but devoid of feel and lore-wise it’s just a ham-fisted attempt at squeezing primaris into the Blood Angels Chapter (uninformative to a newcomer as it is)
Gladius is fun (if not exactly easy to learn) 4X, and while there’s little lore (mostly “what is this faction”), the 40k feel is there all right.
Other than that GOG has the old Chaos Gate, Final Liberation and Rites of War, all three being great games with not that much lore, but solid 4k feel to them.
Still chipping away at terraforming Mars in Per Aspera. It’s frustrating, because it does some things really well; it has this amazingly detailed map of Mars, with thought put into things like e.g. where rivers might start to flow into nascent oceans as you bring water to the Red Planet. Concentrations of different gasses in the atmosphere are tracked (and their contributions to warming the planet); you actually need to get a decent oxygen-nitrogen-carbon dioxide balance for life to exist, not just increase some nebulous “atmosphere” parameter. It’s possible to warm the planet too much, instead of simply reaching some predefined end point, and it all makes for an interesting puzzle as you balance various ways of achieving your goals.
And then…the actual base-building aspect continues to disappoint. Though one new feature that’s been added since I last played is the ability to construct certain buildings on water, using boats to transport materials…and there most of my frustrations with building on land are allayed. Not all of them, but with boats on the ocean you can more easily spread out and claim resources and research locations rather than having to tediously connect everything with a chain of nodes for your land-based worker units to run along. I still wish things like power availability and maintenance upkeep weren’t just handled with simplistic circular radii for the relevant buildings (making it difficult to build an organically sprawling base), but it’s at least better on the water.
I dunno. I enjoy the terraforming, but also remember why I stopped playing before. There are a number of new achievements that I might see about getting this run, and get Mars fully terraformed and livable, and then I’ll probably let it retire back into my Steam library again.