T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been playing more Balatro.
I’ve almost finished getting all of the jokers. I just missing the one for wining a run with just four jokers, and a mystery one.
I also played a little bit of Rainbow Six Siege.
I only had a little bit of time due to a lot of stuff going on, so Balatro was the easiest to play with low free time.
How is everyone else doing?
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Gamers Aren’t Toxic
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
I finished Blue Prince. Or, well, “finished”. I read something that said “The End” after
opening a bunch of doors in a row. I know there’s more to the game with thefamily core and atelier and so onbut at this point I’ve done enough to declare victory. The number of things I looked up went up considerably as the game went on, and it turns out there were clues for a number of things that I looked up (particularly inblue tent memos and stuff past the travel order puzzle), but I’m ok with taking some shortcuts. In general the game was very good.I do wish that it saved a record of things you inspected. Needing to take screenshots (well, photographs) of every page of every book I read in the game so I wouldn’t need to go back and get it again was tedious. Similarly, sometimes the roguelike elements really got in the way of the puzzle solving, though in general the two were remarkably well integrated.
I also played through Hyper Light Drifter. It’s a 2D action game. Steam has tags for “metroidvania” and “soulslike” on it, which is odd because it’s not metroidvania at all and it’s only soulslike in the sense you have dodge, stab, and bloodborne-style healing. The combat was pretty pleasant. The story was hard to interpret because the game features no dialogue, just pictures, and I guess “obscure plot” is technically another check for soulslike. The East area of the game felt the most interesting, aesthetically, with the contrast between pretty water and sculpture vs the visceral horror of
a whole lot of flayed and drowned rat people.I beat the game but didn’t collect all the stuff (it’s quite freeing to not try to completionist). The game apparently features a “chain dash” mechanic which is poorly implemented and unnecessary enough that I did not notice it existed. Also, it apparently has a sequel in the works which changed a lot and is not very well reviewed. That’s a shame.
Clair Obscur is almost finished; finally found the last superdungeon and just have to be the last superboss. But that’s probably going to take a while, that boss is mean and a half. The game has been pretty obvious about a lot of its influences, and this is the point where you realize it’s also influenced by Octopath Traveler.
Brotato is almost finished, down to about six characters that haven’t cleared the DLC Dungeon. Of course that probably won’t actually be the finish of it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has begun, and surprised me by having full frontal nudity during character creation. Did this become a standard while I wasn’t paying attention? Well, I made a generic elf, then decided it was close enough to Rosa that I should try to make a Rosa, to follow up the Cyberpunk Rydia. But then I realized that if I’m going to be using various games’ character creations to try to remake Final Fantasy 4 characters, then BG3’s Halfling class and designable second character means it’s probably one of the only chances to make a Palom and Porom. So now I have a Porom, and will presumably have a Palom in the near future. They’re currently slowly dying to some kind of brain worm, because apparently that too became an RPG standard between Cyberpunk and BG3.
As for the actual game, I cleared the tutorial dungeon and then died to the first encounter outside it, and so far that has been all of Baldur’s Gate 3. In that short amount of time, the game drawing attention to Shadowheart’s Mysterious Relic TM has managed to kill my interest in what the relic is. They overemphasized it after the second encounter, with a big zoom-in on the orb being hidden, as if it’s supposed to be more interesting than the person hiding it. Meanwhile I don’t remember a single thing about the rules of this world and this orb holds no mysteries that aren’t shared by every other thing in sight. Shadowheart can keep her secrets, I’m already overencumbered.
I don’t know if I’d call it standard, but there certainly are some games that have decided hey, adults might like to have some nudity in their games, because there is no reason that games for adults should refuse to do so. Be warned, if you found that offputting you may want to check the “accesibility” options and turn some stuff off, ’cause I’m told the sex scenes are very explicit. Haven’t actually seen any myself yet, but I’m told some people were seriously blindsided.
As for making homage characters, you may or may not want to do that. I will give you a mild spoiler (and tag anyway if you absolutely don’t want to read)
in that if you were thinking the Guardian/Dream Visitor is a second playable character, they are not. I will also tell you that not too far into the game you will be allowed to completely respec and rebuild characters except for their race and Background, though I think you can change your personal character’s race as well, as well as hire hirelings. Said hirelings will, naturally, have much less to do with the plot than the main characters, but there might be one you can rebuild into a Palom.Edit: seems I botched my email, fake face ahoy.
I believe the randomly generated avatars got changed (including retroactively) with the recent update.
edit: Ah, you’ve noticed in the post below.
I didn’t notice the Wavatar change at first, but after re-arranging the management screen I saw all the recent comments showing no avatar. Nothing done explicitly mentioned changing Wavatars, but some of the updates needed had been sitting a while. I remember on a former blog a few years ago once particular update changed the Wavatar link. I’ll look into it.
UPDATE: What’s weird is, while the backend is only showing custom Wavatar avatars, the actual comments seem to all be showing both custom and auto-generated. Now, if the auto-generated Wavatars have changed…that’s entirely possible. I can’t remember everyone’s. Some *are* showing, which I’m guessing were set much like I’ve always set my own through their website. I apologize for the assumption, and if someone knows more please let me know. All the switches on our end are the same as they were.
Oh, and I’ll indulge in a little double-post re: dying immediately after exiting the tutorial dungeon. Yup, especially if you’re playing on “Tactician” because you know how to play DnD/tactical RPGs, because that mode gives a massive hp and attack boost to all foes, presumably to account for the giant pile of magic items you will amass over the game. . . and it does this at level 1 before you have anything. And even if you think you know 5e, the early game is rife with added terrain interactions and added weapon skills, which it is expecting you to leverage. And your characters have worse starting gear than the PHB assigns them, and things like basic shields and armor can’t be found until you reach the first town at like level 3. It’s a very. . . aggressive start for the game. No shame in just evading the enemies around the crash site if you can, until you’ve recruited a full party and obtained literal basic starting gear.
One particularly powerful baseline mechanic is “dipping” your weapon- if you’re standing next to a firey surface, you can use a free/swift/bonus action to set your held weapon/s on fire for an extra 1d4 damage per hit for 3 rounds. This means that if you say, lob or cast some Grease into an area with an enemy such that it touches some fire, the enemy will save vs falling down, then explode, be on top of a burning surface, possibly be set on fire, and you’ll be able to free action buff everyone’s weapons. It’s a little ridiculous.
The tutorial for this game really sucks, that stuff is barely hinted at as far as I’m concerned.
Today I learned about weapon dipping in BG3 o.o
Baldur’s Gate 3 continues continuing. I’m up to level 10 now, into act 3, and yup that sure was a doozy of a series of revelations. Don’t like how the game keeps on going hey here’s a boss fight now run ahead into another and yet another when I’m like dude I just want to finish this bit so this character will finally talk.
Without spoilers, I will say that once again, if I didn’t already mention it before, Shadowheart’s dialogue can be super rough. Just full 180 about face, and not based on something my character said even though I was given the information ages ago and should have been able to call it out, for plot reasons it was delayed. None of the other characters have dialogue this mood swingy, and it’s rather annoying how easy it would have been to fix. Well actually that’s not true, Lae’zel also have some serious mood swings in her dialogue too.
Mechanically, the game continues to pile ever more fiddly little bonuses to add up from various magic items, in direct defiance of 5e’s original design (limiting you to no more than 3 items and stating the game is meant to be playable without any), making it clear why their “Tactician” difficulty gives all foes a massive increase in hit points. This still does not account for their massive increase in attack/save DCs, since if anything I would expect PCs are more squishy than normal: sure we do get 1-2 armor, eventually, but it takes at least half the game before you can actually get armor of the types that don’t suck, and there really are not any big pile of extra bonuses. I think I’ve found like one cloak, and one boots, which give 1 AC. And oh, don’t get me started on their armor models and stats, I will literally run out of room in the post. But I will note that while as always choice is an illusion, the way the mechanics leave heavy armor superfluous, light armor characters getting pretty much exactly one armor (which also looks terrible), and the way Mage Armor destroys the concept of armor even worse in this edition than in 3.x, yes those are all very annoying.
I am quite pleased with the Conjure Elemental summons (standard primary elementals with good stats and abilities), though the choices for the Conjure Minor Elemental list are utterly bizzare: three creatures, two of which are mephits, and one an Azer (firey dwarf). The two mephits are not an opposed pair, but rather Ice, and Mud. The game already has Magma mephits, and I haven’t seen an Azer anywhere else. As entertaining as it is having a whole army of minions (I went through the whole
Gauntlet of Shar areawith an army trailing) thanks to conjure minor and animate dead at 4th for triple skeleton and then conjure 5th for full elementals, the choices on Conjure Minor just can’t be desribed as anything other than bizzare. And really, the elemental spells should probably be the same spell with upcast so you can’t stack them. But yeah, summons that don’t suck is a *very* refreshing change from Pathfinder: Kingmaker.I have also finally noticed that the game does have modding tools, they’re just hidden in the DLC section of the store page. So yeah, some time in the future I’m probably going to spend several dozen hours slamming my head into making some simple mods and then getting tired before actually starting a new playthrough.
And I see that the change in gravatar is site-wide, hello new face I guess.
I fell quite hard into Kingdom Come Deliverance, to the total detriment of everything else.
It is, however, quite fun, and slowly I’m getting the hang of the fighting, and I am wholeheartedly ignoring the main story in favour of All The Sidequests xD
Didn’t get a chance to play The Old Republic this week due to losing that timeslot, so I still need to finish Corellia on my Agent. Hopefully I will do that this weekend.
Still playing Conception Plus when I get a chance, and I’m about 80 hours in, and there’s not enough content for that length. Sure, part of that is because I’m grinding dungeons while trying to grind out the Star Maiden stories, and I could easily just rest in-between weeks instead. But my levels and abilities are just now starting to get to the point where I am comfortable with the first floor of the final dungeon, so I would have needed to grind anyway, and so would have likely been back in the same situation, except this grinding is easier and less annoying than if I was trying to grind in the final dungeon. I do enjoy the Star Maiden stories, though, as they usually have a quirk that dominates their story and personality with a more serious subplot underneath, which is fun. I’ll finish them off and then finish the game, but it will take a while.
I was going to play something else in my dedicated longer gaming slot, but haven’t been able to because other things have made that time shorter, and then when I slipped Conception Plus into that slot I found that I was really enjoying the fact that since I can only play it for about two hours at most before getting bored playing it there gave me more time to do other things. I’ll see how it works out this weekend.
Still going through the same games from last week and I have nothing new to add about them at the moment.
But also now I’m “playing” Rusty’s Retirement, which is one of those idle games that sit in the bottom of the screen while you do your tasks. It’s a very simple farm sim with enough of a progression system to be called a game while demanding little attention from you, but still delivering on appealing pixel art graphics. Funnily enough, there seems to be some free Balatro content added lately for it. Don’t know what it is, but I doubt it’ll make the game more complicated.
Return to Ultimate General:Civil War. I mean, by this point I know those scenarios by heart, but the game is still nice enterntainment – with higher difficulty amusingly making the mid- and late game easier, as it means more and better weapons to be captured for your units.
Would be a near-perfect game but for inability to mix weapons within a brigade (so all those cool Henry’s, MJ&Gs and Colt’s Revolving Rifles are just cash fodder rather than something to be actually used).
Hi!
Former regular of the site from way way *way* back in the day.
Doing good honestly! Came out as trans back in 2019, and despite the world going to hell in general and the uk going to shit for trans people in particular, my personal circumstances are actually pretty good!
I bought a house with my lovely partner, I’m stable at work, and I’ve got a strong circle of friends including many other trans fems. (I first came out in the cosplay community, where all my trans friends were trans masc. I love them, but it was always a strange experience when they knew 50% exactly what I was going through and 50% could not related at all)
I’m not sure what brought me back to this site, and I’m really sorry to hear about your dad. I hope life is treating you well.
Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Magic the Gathering, and walking my partner through Final Fantasy 9. My next big time sink game will probably be Slay the Spire 2. As much as I liked Balatro… If StS is like a high quality espresso to be sipped and savoured, Balatro is like a line of ****. All the flavour and pretention shaved away, with the skinner box turned up to 11.
Umm, not to pry, but could anyone explain to an outsider who Paige is? I tried to find an introduction post but couldn’t.
Anyway, I hope you’re all doing well!
Hey, congratulations! Glad you’re doing ok! I think any formal introduction got dropped although there are some mentions in comments here and there. I’m a very early commenter on Twenty Sided, although it was done under a different name. I didn’t spend much time on the site the last several years before we lost Shamus; but I’m actually related through marriage. The “kids” are in charge (they’re all adults now), I try to post at least once a week. Usually from a GenX point-of-view, usually on gaming. I’ve been working on the backend lately with an eye toward accomplishing what was talked about a couple of years ago: moving to an upgraded or new installation. That may be similar to what we have, or it may be something new. All the content will still be available, of course. That has been fundamental from the beginning.
<3