T w e n t y S i d e d
This week, once again, has been more of the same.
I played some Balatro. Finished unlocking all of the jokers, and I just have to find two vouchers to complete the collection.
Other than that, just a bit more Rainbow Six Siege. I’m doing my best to try different operators, but trying new things without getting killed is quite the challenge. I did find that Glaz is quite fun, which is good because I didn’t have any go-to attackers.
How is everyone else doing?
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Artless in Alderaan
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
Philosophy of Moderation
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
I played Monster Hunter: Rise the Solo missions until Rank 6. Much easier than in co-op – at least with my high level co-op gear. After that I returned to No Mans Sky without finding anything new – just numb questing.
Other than that, my last festival of the year happened with Spirit from the Streets. Good Punk, Oi!, Ska and a little bit of Folk. This years my highlights were Toy Dolls, Dritte Wahl, Murcheen Gurkin, Mark Foggo, Slime and Butterwegge.
In analog I learned Shuffle Forest and played the old describe song and interpreter in an odd way and let others guess, like Primate Western Hero for
Gorillaz – Clint Eastwood.I am still falling ever deeper into Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
Having nailed the cheesing of the combat system and looted some proper armour of some over-eager NPCs things are going pretty smoothly now (not counting the one situation where I got swarmed by 6 bandits), and in tried-and-true CRPG fashion I am now ignoring the main quest for ALL THE SIDEQUESTS.
I finished off my Imperial Agent in The Old Republic. I won’t get around to it this weekend, but next up is the Trooper and then I will have completed all classes for the TOR Diary on my blog, which is impressive given that when I started doing it a couple of times long ago I never finished ONE story, let alone being on pace to finish eight.
I also played a little bit more of Conception Plus. I’m not gaining all that much experience running the precursors to the zodiac dungeons, and I can survive the combats on the first floor of the final dungeon fairly well if I use skills, so I was considering simply running the final dungeon, but what pretty much clinched that for me was that I am now almost to the point where I have only five Star Maiden stories to work through, and since you can talk to five Star Maidens a week and can’t talk to the same one more than once that means that the end of the Star Maiden stories is in sight, so working through the final dungeon is now more credible.
Clair Obscur is cleared to my satisfaction, which is to say, all the major superbosses have been beaten and the only things left are all exploration-based. The only boss I’d had left was the hardest one.
I was strong enough to defeat Simon before he got a turn, but the same big hit to Super Simon only did 25% damage. But, the game lets you block everything if you get the timing down, so grinding the fight got me to the point I could block enough attacks to make it out of the second turn alive. It also turns out the damage gate for the big Octopath he pulls is not a damage wall; the successful run hit them with a Marked, Greater Defenseless, Virtuosoed Gommage right before the threshold, and knocked him down to like, 1% health. The reserve team just had to breathe on him a couple of times to take him out.And with that, we get a weapon we’ll never use* and can truly set the game aside, to be brushed off several years from now when I’m ready for something of that quality again.*(The weapon was originally bugged, and would cause the game to slow and crash. There are two ways to read this, both of which are hilarious. The first is that it’s the most afterthought prize they could give to the hardest fight in the game. The second, is that this weapon is SO powerful that it cuts through the setting itself. The Sword That Slays Physics.)
Brotato is finished; that is, I’ve beaten the DLC with every character on the highest level now. The last four were not fun to play; two of them feature vastly increased enemy health, and a third features drastically slowed player attacks. The fourth one… I don’t even know what the problem was with Hiker, they seem like they should be just a normal character, but instead they were the last character that got cleared. I guess part of it is they have bad starting weapons. Anyway, now I hate them. (But not as much as Dwarf. -50% attack speed, and half effect for attack speed changes so you can’t fix it. Just the worst.)
Did I play Baldur’s Gate 3 again? Not very much; I got to a gate under siege by goblins, and stopped there. The characters so far have not grabbed me; I’m blaming a lot of this on following Cyberpunk 2077, and Clair Obscur. I don’t think I complained about the percent-chance-to-hit last time, but as the years have turned to decades I’ve lost pretty much all my patience with that mechanic; I see Magic Missile is just a 100% hit rate, and am regretting making a healy-girl Porom instead of a missile-happy Palom. (In my defense, I didn’t realize the first party member would also be a healer.)
Saints Row 4 got the metaphorical dust blown off of it, as a follow-up to Brotato and Cyberpunk both. We’ve got character creation, and a villain protagonist with a jump that clears rooftops, so obviously we’ve got to make a Kain. Problem is, Kain is pretty much entirely his armor, which SR4 does not include. So in reality we’ve just got a blonde man in a cowboy hat and puffy shirt. Covered in dragon tattoos, because I think Kain is the kind of guy to cover himself in dragon tattoos.
The controls are worse than I remember. (Sprint is LB, ugh.) I think I was playing with mouse-and-keyboard last time? Back when I still did that? Anyway, it turns out the game got significantly updated since I last played it and all my old saves are gone. So Kain got to play through the introduction again. Which I was debating doing anyway, so it’s fine. The game is mostly a spoof on itself and other videogame series, so the writing is very goofy. But there’s a plot hole in it anyway, in that your first two rescued companions have to be picked up, and then the rest just appear.
I’m realizing the sidequests are kind of slapdash; characters send you on like five missions at a time, which are a grab bag of generic missions across the map. It’s entirely possible you’ll have cleared them before you’re asked to, and just won’t have to do anything. It’s fun, but makes me appreciate Cyberpunk more. I had complaints about things in that feeling unfinished, but the character sidequests were all unmistakably their own thing, while Saints Row 4 is one thing spread around between the characters. I’m not sure if that’s the game showing its age, or its budget.
It’s been a long time since I played Saints Row 3, and I remember missing the gangs quite a lot; one of the unique things in those games was the gangs having their own wanted meter like the cops, so if you started fights they’d show up in force. I missed it in Cyberpunk, which has loads of gangs but does very little with them; but also here in SR4, where they dumped the gangs and only have the police faction. More games should have copied that double-wanted mechanic. It was a good mechanic.
Anyway, six hours in and I’m nearly back to the most progress I’ve ever made in SR4. The last mission had a knockoff Ghostbusters boss, and the thing had a screenwide attack that sometimes killed me in one hit, and also one time my attack somehow hit myself instead and killed me. So that mission sucked. I remember at least one more mission sucking, so I have that to look forward to I guess.
Yeah, missing is very annoying in early game DnD-likes. Eventually you do hit a point in BG3 where you hit basically all the time except vs bosses, but it does take quite a while to get there. And Magic Missile may not miss, but it also doesn’t deal very much damage, particularly with the large groups of enemies. Since you’re not having a good time I’ll switch from secrecy to more useful advice/questions: did you find the wizard on your way up there? ‘Cause there was one down on the cliffs you can pick up before the gate attack. Further, you can recruit the NPC from the cutscene before the gate attack once inside the town, and at 3rd level he can get an overpowered spell which will give him advantage on most of his attacks (though you need to remember to manually “bind pact weapon” after casting the Shadow Blade each day), or he can just do Burning Hands. If you follow his quest you’ll be able to pick up another character in short order (which I myself put off for ages, to my annoyance), who can also make themselves quite accurate. And if you rifle through the smith’s shop in that first town you’re at you might be able to find a basic weapon (the Greatclub) with the Tenacity trait, which lets you deal some damage even on a miss based on your Strength. And getting people with ranged weapons/attack spells onto high ground gives them a flat 2 while penalizing foes trying to shoot up at them.
Otherwise, aggressively using Grease spells and bottles to knock people prone and Shadowheart’s domain illusion ability to get advantage on attacks are about all you’ve got, with order of turns determining how well you can use those because foes will stand up and move away if they act before your attacker (if you do pick up the wizard, getting him a familiar spell will let you summon a fragile raven which can try to blind people for 1 round, but remember due to duration mechanics in this game you have to hit the foe before the foe’s action to actually make use of that effect). Things perk up quite a bit when you finish dragging yourself up to 3rd level and get 2nd level spells and actual class abilities, where the healers can heal a lot more, hit points are starting to survive more than a couple attacks, and you can actually hit multiple foes with significant effects.
As for the character stories not catching- indeed, I specifically decided to play BG3 before Clair Obscur in part because with everyone lauding the latter as the greatest RPG of the decade or even all time, I knew a mere DnD-like would probably not have as good of a story. Especially when hey look it starts with goblins, so tired of goblins. If the gameplay itself isn’t enough to hook you. . . yeah honestly can’t recommend trying to push through too hard.
I did find a wizard in a hole, he’s the one using magic missile. The guards made it sound like there will soon be a second wizard, in a different hole, but right now it’s two clerics and a missile boy against gate goblins. There was a scene where a guard got killed, and multiple NPCs burst into wailing and gnashing their teeth over him, and I’m just going “I guess I should wait until they leave to loot the body.”
Second wizard in hole? Well I suppose lots of bosses can be described as wizards in holes. If you want more minor spoilers on finding party members:
further west along that cliff region from where you found the wizard will get you a rogue, and somewhere between the cliffs and the druid’s gate (or maybe just past the gate to NE?) should have been the gith fighter from the tutorial, I know I had her before the gate fight.And yes, in this game sometimes NPCs will be displeased when you try to loot their friends/kills. IIRC he doesn’t even have anything good on him. I can definitely agree with how annoying it would be fighting with just clerics and wizards since big unlimited stick attack is king of early game, but at least you should be able to field a full party by the time you leave town.
Another basic recommendation for consistency (if you’re not using a greatclub) is shortswords and longswords, since they give you a 1/rest skill that does a lower damage attack as a free/swift/bonus action, good for finishing things off or trying again when your first attack failed to finish it off. Anyone can have lower damage bonus action attack at all times if they dual wield, but that means no shield. Not that that helps until you’ve got someone who can wield them.
I played Mafia The Old Country the weekend before last.
I’d give it a 6 of 10 since it has problems.
I’ve been a fan since the original came out for PC back in 2002.
So I was very disappointed the game was subpar.
Last weekend I spent with my family since dad got a pacemaker put in and was in hospital all weekend.
Still going through Ori and the Will of the Wisps and I got a painful reminder for why despite liking the first game I never felt the urge to replay it. It’s generally a fun game, but sometimes it cheats, and it’s blatant. This game, like first one, has a few races. Some of them have a boss following you around and you need to avoid him, and some of them it’s just you against a ghost for a prize. The game clearly cheats in both. It’s the sort of thing you believe it’s some silly boomer complaint until you experience it. It’s not game ruining, but it’s certainly game souring.
I’m nearly done with Rusty’s Retirement. It’s a fun bit, and it’s the sort of game you’re supposed to replay many times, but I actually want to try other similar games that follow the same idea rather than just replay this one. I played the Balatro-themed stage and it’s curious how it’s more luck dependent but also has more strategy to it. Interesting stuff.
I had a good time with the game, but if there’s one negative I have is that it’s a resource hog. It takes so much processor power it actually makes my browser slower. It’s not just my system, even people with brand new graphic cards are having issues with it. Pro-tip: if you ever play this game, lower the FPS.
I’ve been playing piano and learning supercollider an audio programming language. My keyboard a Casio ct-s1000v has a vocal synthesizer in it which nobody has created a cover of Daisy Bell on as far as I can tell so I’m working on that.
For games I played a bit of STRAFTAT its got a new 2v2 and 3v3 mode plus a couple dozen more maps to try. Didn’t try those modes.
Had some trouble posting during the site updates and then didn’t have time to try again.
Last few weeks was mostly Clair Obscur and I love it. The game looks great, the music is beautiful and there is a lot of it. The combat system is excellent. The dodging/parrying mechanics gives it a skill based component but the picto/lumina/weapon combinations allow for different viable builds thanks to which developing characters feels exciting (in fact there are videos of players making builds that entirely ignore parrying even though it is definitely a core mechanic), there is also an easy mode that makes the parry window more forgivable). Writingwise I’ll admit that some dialogues might have been needlessly cryptic for the benefit of keeping the player in suspense but overall there are a lot of characters I love and the rest are competently written where they have distinct personalities but nobody feels like an idiot for the purpose of driving the plot. And all of this for like half the price of AAA game! I have just hit the big reveal between acts 2 and 3 and I do wonder if the game has more twists in store seeing how the goal seems pretty clearly set.
I’m replaying A Hat in Time in an Archipelago multiworld (a randomizer that works across multiple games) with some internet pals, it feels less fun than Hollow Knight. Not only does HK have an excellent integrated tracker that can be used to hunt down checks but its overall design means that the world was opening up in an organic way that felt rewarding for the use of the abilities I got rather than the abilities I was supposed to have. In comparison A Hat in Time involves a lot of what feels like waiting for arbitrary level unlocks and with every new ability revisiting every single area to see if the compass badge points to something new (technically there is a tracker but I couldn’t get it to work correctly).
In co-op we’re playing Warhammer 40k: Darktide which is from the studio that made Vermintide I believe and it is pretty much W40k Left 4 Dead. I don’t think we’ll stick with it much longer, neither of us is too interested in games that have minimal plot and post-campaign are driven by the ability to farm for cosmetics. In fact we have currently ran into a snag where eleventh out of I think seventeen missions in that the two bots we use to fill the party get stuck outside of the boss area, this apparently has been going on for a while and the devs don’t seem too keen on fixing this as the bots are clearly an afterthought.
Slowed down on Baldur’s Gate 3, just clearing out the area outside before actually entering the eponymous city, and writing up basic dysfunctions/ideas for things I might try to mod in the future. Instead spent most of the week blowing through The Way of Kings in full reading mode.
Will the Remastered DM of the Rings return?