T w e n t y S i d e d
I’ve been once again busy.
I played more Rainbow Six Siege. Not much there. Just getting killed a lot.
I’m also still playing the heroin of roguelikes. Balatro. I’ve not gotten or anything new, just looking at numbers go up.
Balatro is also the reason I’m late posting this. So what are you guys doing?
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Joker's Last Laugh
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Done with Ori and the Will of the Wisps. 100%-ed the save, though the game has still achievements to unlock. I didn’t even look into most of them because they’d require at least a new full playthrough. Overall I enjoyed the experience, even if it’s soured in a few areas. Visuals are beautiful, of course. The story is more or less a repeat of the first game, and nothing mindblowing or anything. Exploration, traversal and combat, which are the meat of the game, are super fun and well executed. My problems are, as I mentioned in last week’s post, the races.
Yeah, challenge races have a “monetary” reward, but they’re otherwise ignorable, so the real issue are the mandatory ones. Unless my memory is failing me the previous game had only two or three of these, but this one has at least one for every boss and they’re all equally annoying. They’re not fun, just irritating. I hated them in the first game and I hate them here. They’re no better in any way, and I truly can’t understand what possessed them to put more of them.
Still, the game left me with more hunger for metroidvanias and yes, I could do the obvious thing and launch Hollow Knight in anticipation for Silksong, but I’d be lying if I said I cared that much. I’ll play it some time, but I’m not getting it at launch. Anyway, my pick was a little game called Midnight Castle Succubus, which is very inspired by classic NES Castlevania games (though with some added gameplay elements from later entries in the series). It’s actually pretty fun. Not very punishing, although your in-game money and sub-weapon ammo are the same. It’s a game with adult scenes, though, but it does have a SFW mode if you want to play it in front of others without looking like a gooner.
The one negative I have for it is that rummaging through the menu is annoying as all hell (why can’t you just have a “back” button instead of making me scroll down every time?).
Also started Outer Wilds. As per the recommendation of pretty much everyone I went completely blind, not knowing anything about it, and I have to say it’s certainly an interesting experience. I’ve played very little so far but I’m getting some Majora’s Mask vibes, which is always a good thing in my book.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps was fun, but it was a much more standard metroidvania than the first one. I also really wish the
young owlwas more relevant and less mcguffin.When you say races, do you mean sections like the tree escape in the first game? That’s one of the few times I’ve had to turn difficulty down in a game, it was too much. At least Path of Pain didn’t have someone chasing you (not that I completed it.) I’m also ambivalent about Silksong in some ways. I’m tempted to reinstall HK but the reason I uninstalled it originally was because having got to a decent % completion, I tried Path of Pain, and it destroyed me over the course of two gruelling Saturdays. I got to the final section and I just couldn’t do it and ran out of the ability to care or want to put myself through caring. And it’s not like I hadn’t bashed my head against the many challenges of HK. I had many many many attempts at the Trial of the Fool before beating it, Mantis Lords took me ages as it was my first proper boss, I did the Grey Lady mission, base Grimm, all the dream nail bosses. So, Silksong scares me because I reckon it will crank the difficulty and platforming up to 12, and I don’t want another situation where I have to unistall and delete my cloud and local save games because a game is making me make myself feel miserable. Plus, I have a backlog of 100s of games of course. I am tempted to go back to HK though and hopefully it be fairly easy. Maybe this time I’ll beat Radiance, last time I just didn’t care any more as I’d burnt myself out failing at Path of Pain. I knew I’d be able to beat Radiance but after 8 tries I thought who cares, I’m not interested in wasting my time eventually beating him.
I also don’t like the multiple endings nonsense. Just give me an ending.
Yeah, sorry, I should have called those “escape sections”, since that makes more sense.
Oh we each have moments like these when we have to make the call. I love Hollow Knight to bits but I have never done Path of Pain or finished Godhome.
That’s comforting to hear. It’s the first time I remember it happening to this extent – I felt addicted, but distraught. Uninstalled, re-installed, uninstalled and deleted save games, reinstalled and restored save games from an alternative PC that had synced them from the cloud, moved on and tried Radiance, uninstalled and deleted everything everywhere – so that I wouldn’t be tempted to make myself miserable again. One of the key parts I think was the fact that I couldn’t go and do anything else because I knew that I’d need the Kingsoul to complete PoP, but I knew that I’d lose the Kingsoul if I progressed into Voidheart, and I’m not a fan of multiple endings with esoteric hidden requirements for each.
Well, I’ve just reinstalled HK and and starting from the beginning… we shall see what happens!
The Last Spell. Retro-graphics, turn-based, castle defense RPG roguelike, if that’s enough buzzwords for ya. But I like it. Level up yer little dudes, Defend against the zombie hordes. Unlock the shiny new things. Repeat.
Excellent game I have mentioned many times, will stay tuned for stories.
Watched Expedition 33 gameplay, which confirmed for me it’s a great story, but the QTE mechanics in turn-based combat are definitely not for me. I know there’s a mod (and a tremere ritual…) to basically disable the QTE (it prolongs dodge/parry windows about 1000%), but I prefer my turn based with no QTEs, thankyouverymuch.
Other than that been setting up a tabletop Victory by all means campaign, a Master of Orion-styled space opera with more accent on diplomacy am planning to run with R. Baker’s Warship for tactical space combat, because there just wasn’t enough paperwork in there for my liking.
So far dice were kind enough to set up a story of a bunch of space totalitarisms (two of them with completely spurious ideas about logistics), utopias (including an industrially incompetent hivemind) and remnant empires preparing to square against each other for an aging, resource-poor galaxy (somehow with just 30% chance for them over 70% of stars are red giants).
I don’t think calling them QTEs is fair. They’re dodge mechanics, like you’d have in an action game, and they’re not context sensitive (you can literally dodge at any time during combat, even when not being attacked). Plus, unlike QTEs they’re not spawned on you with no warning. You always know when they’re coming (every time the enemy attacks), and you always use the same buttons/keys for them.
I mean, if you’ve ever played something like Super Mario RPG or the GBA/DS Mario and Luigi games it’s the same deal.
Granted, the game does actually have QTEs for combat when it comes to your attacks, but those can be disabled on the menu.
Saints Row 4 is completed. The powers and movement are quite fun, but the whole setting feels very slapdash, like they had a couple of partial ideas and just meshed them together. I did realize the reason the quests felt generic was because I had deliberately avoided the character-specific ones, but it’s definitely missing the colorful gang leaders of the other games (although they’re reusing a whole lot of those previous gang members). There’s a glitch in the ship that makes your hair disappear, and the DLC has crashed twice; once it crashed the game, once it crashed the whole computer. That combined with it not even pretending to be a coherent story means I’m not finishing that. But, I did finally finish the main game, and… huh, that ending’s just not very good. Kind of a slapdash mess. Plus there’s a graphical glitch where the player drops an item but a second copy of the item is just welded to the character’s hand and the arm-welded version follows them through screen transitions. Really messed up the mood.
On the plus side, you can actually change the color of your clothes, making Cyberpunk’s lack of that feature even more egregious. My Kain ended up… well, not great, but a lot closer than the start when I just had a cowboy hat to work with. Turns out if you’re trying to do cosmetic things, you should unlock the cosmetics. But I also forgot there was an ability in SR4 that’s just a straight-up Final Fantasy Jump Attack, and so the cosplay Kain worked far better than anticipated.
Brotato continues, as we all knew it would. Nothing left to unlock, so just running favorite characters. And losing. Game remains hard.
Made it a few steps in Baldur’s Gate 3. I managed to finish a quest in town, and then found I was stuck in a tiny platform because my companions wouldn’t move to let me use the ladder. I ended up dismissing the entire party to get out. (“You must scatter your party before venturing forth.”) I’m remembering now that there’s a button to let you control other party members, I probably could have used that to clear them out of the way. But, like, also just let me walk through them, game. But I managed to recruit a new team member, and completely lose my sense of direction, so i don’t know which end of town is the entrance or the exit. This is perhaps not a game meant to be played in increments of fifteen minutes a week.
Someone recommended 4TheWords as a writing supplement, so I’m “playing” that now. On Day 2, so far it’s working well; just having an external wordcount goal is getting a lot more words counted. But the introduction to a new story has always been the most word-heavy part of the process anyway, so time will tell if it’s actually going to help with consistency. There’s also something about the free version only storing stories for 30 days, so… that’s something to look forward to. Also I skimmed over the Terms and Services and forgot to check if they had any limitations on types of stories. I’m planning on keeping those ones clean(-ish), but, would probably be good to know.
re BG3: you have below your companions a button with a little chain on it, that you can use to move party members individually, and you can (double?)click on the companion picture to control that individual companion (or make them front the group if you move together).
Might have to do with the fact that the whole thing was planned as DLC for the third game but the publisher forced them to turn it into a full sequel instead.
I remember that. I really enjoyed SR and SR2. And 3, for the most part. 3 was polished but it was clear the goofiness you could engage in in the second game was taking over and it seemed to help here and there and hurt in other places. 4 just felt…not all there.
I didn’t play the first two, but I was kinda the opposite: I found SR3 interesting enough but mostly a goofy shooter — although I LOVED the driving — and far preferred SR4, but my comment on that was that SR3 was an open-world shooter type game which isn’t really my type of game, and so the driving and goofiness saved it for me, but SR4 was a superhero game which is DEFINITELY my type of game.
As Shamus said back then, SR4 is the worst Saints Row game (at the time), but it’s the best superhero game (also at the time).
Kinda similar, though I’ll add I’ve played it in co-op so that makes a big difference to the overall enjoyment. There is that one DLC with superpowers for SR3 and with 4 I always felt like someone said “more of that”.
I have found SR2 tonally weird in that it is a very goofy game, but at the same time it is trying to run this gang war drama in earnest.
A lot of people commented on the two aspects that seems disconnected at times. I think it was Yahtzee Croshaw that commented when the game first came out that halfway through he felt like he was cosplaying a Batman villain. Running the gang is at least semi-serious, you can act like a loon, and maybe 4/5th of the story is kind of serious, but a solid 5th is just insane. Like, no normal person would do that, even in bizarre gangland wars.
I know nothing about the console controls for BG3 (on PC you just click their picture to take control), but there’s also fast traveling, or just jumping down. I have on occasion decided to just eat the damage rather than play musical chairs. You should also be able to ungroup yourself from the party so they stop following you, if you intend to just pop up a ladder to loot something real quick. You could also force activate turn-based mode to get individual control and also stop everyone from milling around. And worry not, I too got turned around multiple times in. . . basically every settlement.
Agreed is not game for 15 minute increments.
Adventures in Kingdom Come Deliverance continue, and I am now at a point where I have mostly thieving quests and not enought skill in thieving xD
Maybe it’s time to actually move the main plot along a notch or two, but then I also have a time-sensitive side quest that I do not want to fail (doing a turney for whatshisface), so I’ll be bumbling around a few more days and steal some of the further-out things.
I have also looked into the demo of Atomic Heart and basically only saw the prologue, at least it felt like I might be off the leash now. The prologue does a good job of setting up a very interesting world, and anyone remotely genre savvy immediately sees how this all will go horribly, terribly wrong, and I’m curious to see how actual gameplay will look like.
Been replaying Crystal Project, which is a RPG with voxel-ish terrain, a job system, and strong Final Fantasy inspiration. I like a lot of things about the combat system – debuffs and buffs are important, the game offers full information, the threat system makes tanking possible but actually require work, etc. The jobs don’t feel super balanced – for example, the Rogue has 3 different ways to stop the enemy from doing anything, while the Ninja has 6 different element copies of the exact same ability and the Samurai can save up for one “powerful” turn that looks an awful lot like someone else’s totally normal turn. Still, it’s neat to max out each class and you can pick a second set of active abilities to have available. You can also mix and match passive abilities from any job, though you get a limited set of points for that and it never increases.
The game has a lot of emphasis on exploration. It’s got kind of a metroidvania thing going on where you can get various mounts as you progress that open up the world – indeed, you can go pretty much anywhere eventually, from the top of a mountain to the depths of the ocean. Which… has some downsides, because in general there isn’t actually much at the top of the mountain (well, the tippy top generally has stuff) or the bottom of the ocean. It can also be possible to get to areas way before the game intends you to, which can be entertaining, especially since encounters aren’t random and you can avoid many of them with some effort.
The game has a story. It’s not great, but it’s also quite limited, which is a better combination than having a ton of meh writing. I really don’t get the motivation for the big bad.
In coop we continue Satisfactory after a 3 month pause. Tier 4 is finally done an I get computers to signal the train network already running.
The Talos Principle: Reawakened is the game I spend most hours in single player. It’s far from the quality of the second game as you are just this single robot and all communication with unknown entities is done via text. Elohim and sometimes Alexandra Drennan talk to you and other ‘robots’ leave QR-Codes with messages on walls. But there aren’t any characters like Alcatraz, Miranda or Yakut.
I have a lot of games installed that I wanted to continue sometime in the future, but I don’t know which I should focus on. What do you guys think?
1. Duskborn An interactive movie with some gameplay later in the game made by the creators of ‘The Longest Journey’, ‘Dreamfall’ and ‘Draugen’. I stopped, because at the time I started it, Persona 5 mocked me with its none-gameplay and railroading, which Duskborn has too.
2. Kena: Bridge of Spirits. I stopped because ??? maybe losing the same fight over and over again.
3. Genshin Impact. I stopped after completing the water arcon story mission because combat got too samy and Ace Attony is beyond me.
4. Girl Genius: Adventures in Castle Heterodyne A good old Zelda-like Action Adventure. I like those, I love GG. Why did I stop? No idea.
5. Black & White 2. I completed this abandomware ages ago and wanted to play it again. The current mission is a lost cause after 2.5 hours in, because it can only be won by using a wonder and I will not get the funds to afford a wonder.
6. Ruined King: A League of Legends Story. A RPG in the design of ‘Battle Chasers: Nightwar’ by Airship Syndicate.
7. Monster Hunter World: Iceborn
8. Slaps & Beans 2 2D Side scrolling beat em up with Bud Spencer and Terence Hill. Very samy gameplay, but Nostalgia!!
9. XCOM: Chimera Squad The current mission is straight up unfair and the autosave system needs much better savegame identification.
10. Yakuza 4 I completed it years ago, but don’t remember much of it.
11. Destroy All Humans I stopped, because Yakuza 8 was released and got priority.
12. Persona 5 I stopped because the story related railroading interfered with gameplay and the things I actually wanted to do. Limiting me for no good reason. The story structure – telling everything in retrospective within a limited timeframe – triggers me the wrong way.
13. No Man’s Sky I have never reached the center of the universe within 4 attempts.
Persona 5’s the only one I’ve played on that list. I’m not sure I’d recommend it, since the whole game is timed so the railroading will never fully stop. Mental stats carry over to New Game Plus though, so that’s the run to try to clear every event or whatnot. The plot isn’t going to blow your mind, but is a fun series of escalations against ever-more powerful creeps. But it’s also got some twists that expect you to have knowledge of Persona 4, so… depending how far you got, it might be worth playing Persona 4 first? 5 is basically an inverse 4. (4 also doesn’t have the flashback angle.)
I played through P4 Golden twice on PSP. The second time with a walkthrough. P4 didn’t have that flashback structure. the time until the Nanako incident was limited but the player didn’t know that going through the game.
Well then, higher recommendation for P5. The flashback structure does lead somewhere, and it’s fun to see whats-her-name try to create tactical justifications for you hanging out with, like, a washed-up politician and a psychic.
I think you mean Vita, as I looked and there didn’t seem to be a PSP version, and I played the Vita version. Unless there was a PSP version somewhere that played differently …
Anyway, I liked P5’s approach to the dungeon’s a little bit better than P4’s, because in P4 it was always timed and it was clear that it was timed — if you get multiple days of rain, you’ll get fog and the person in the dungeon will die, which leads to bad ends — but it wasn’t clear how long that time limit was, which forced you to push through as quickly as possible in case that came before you were ready. In P5, you always know exactly how long you have, but then there are some dungeons where you have to stop and come back the next day for story reasons.
Depending on which version you have — normal or Royal — and what difficulty you play on, I found that there was usually enough time to go and do other activities, but then again I also focused on the S-links and so didn’t do most of the activities, so take that with a grain of salt. I will note that unlike P4, this game took me about 80 hours to play, and while I enjoyed it enough to replay it right after, you should take that into account if you’re thinking that a second run might be more fun (it took me about 90 hours to do the Royal expansion). I do quite like the game, though, and the characters are pretty interesting, along with the story.
It probably was the Vita.
I played through the first dungeon (castle) in P5 Royal. This dungeon was much much better than anything in P4. And than the Subway dungeon (on par P4) was forcefully introduced, while I was planning to do something else on that date.
The characters are good till now; Except Morgana! That damn cat is the source of all the railroading I dislike. The last time I started the game that cat wouldn’t let me out of the bar at night for no good reason – even the washing machines on the other side of the street were off limits.
In the early game you couldn’t leave the bar for story reasons – okay. Than the game opened and artificial limitations were removed slowly – good. When those borders returned without reasoning I Alt-F4ed this “game”.
The length of a game doesn’t bother me. I don’t have to get through it in one sitting. As long as it is fun, engaging and/or has enough variety I’ll play it. I probably sunk 150 plus hours into Genshin Impact before I stopped. (Only 30 of those might be grind, I didn’t need to, but wanted to do. The rest was exploring and story missions.) And Satisfactory has well beyond 1200 hours now. For the longest time I thought nothing could reach the 500 hours of Scrap Mechanic.
In my opinion, the game gets better after this point, with better dungeons and better characters, and a bit less railroading. If you liked the first dungeon better than P4, it would be worth trying to get through P5.
Girl Genius: Adventures in Castle Heterodyne – for the name alone.
OMG. I had completely missed this. I even managed to skip over the name in the original comment. I haven’t read the comic regularly for a few years, but not because I disliked it. It just stopped fitting in to my day and I’ve never gone back. Loved the comic for years. Took a look at the Steam page and added it to my wishlist.
I haven’t started my Trooper in The Old Republic yet, and might not do it for a few weeks because I want to write out all the entries for my Imperial Agent in my TOR Diary series on my blog first. Also, other things have and will take up the timeslot that I use for playing that.
I did manage to get in another run at Conception Plus, including beating the first boss in the final dungeon (they have a boss every five levels, and in general there are three sets of them in a dungeon, so I think I have one more and then the final battle). Other than the boss targeting the one set of Star Children that I didn’t Mechunite and hadn’t been able to move away before the main boss attacked them — I took out one of its companion enemies with one shot myself and then the Mechunited all targets blast finished off the other one that the other group targeted — and knocking them out once, it wasn’t all that difficult, although the fact that it sometimes got back-to-back attacks meant that I could have ended up knocked out and thus lost that fight just for that reason. At any rate, since I’m almost to the end of the Star Maiden plots I’m focusing on doing more in the final dungeon, although I’d still like to do a run of the earlier dungeons just to restore potions and gain a little XP to level up more.
Also, the game was always somewhat cheeky with how it gave you weapons that sounded exotic but were really things from our world — like a baseball bat being one of the best weapons in the game for the main character — but at the end I essentially got a lightsaber that is described that way as well. The final dungeon seems to have a penchant for that, as another weapon that my Star Children can use is clearly the same sort of thing. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but for the most part there are so many Star Children that for the most part I just equip the best I have and keep going, mostly ignoring any of those details.
I hadn’t mentioned it yet; are you doing the current Galactic Season in SWTOR? I started it but just cannot get enough time to do anything this week.
I tend to be focused entirely on the class stories, mostly because that’s what I find fun and also because that’s what I need to do to write the TOR Diary entries. I probably should do more of the other things in the game, but I don’t really have the time and the class stories are really what drives my interest in the game. So, long story short, I just don’t do Galactic Seasons at all …
Meowmunitions has released finally so I’ve played a bit of that. It’s a tad clunky, and clearly goes beyond homage to Gungeon in a couple of the enemies and their attacks, but also has plenty that is new to me, and I do love the central mechanic of building your gun from components that you find. In fact I prefer that to Gungeon’s method of randomly finding new weapons that largely supersede each other in utility. This way, new chests allow you to improve what you already have. On one run I ended up with a shotgun that shot lasers both backwards and forwards, with homing on the rear-firing ones. On the Steamdeck I find it a little annoying using the thumbsticks, I think a normal controller would be better for me. And some niggles like keys being rebindable but the new key doesn’t actually show when you do it, it shows the old key, but did work.
I really need to get back to Jedi Survivor but I’m waiting for the electrician to sort out the plug so that I can put the TV back, and he needs to wait for the plasterer to do his thing, and the windows guys said that the plasterer would be round yesterday or today, and that hasn’t happened yet. So PS4 time is more difficult for that.
With all this talk of Silksong I should play Vision Soft Reset, recommended to me ages ago on Reddit, and received as part of the BLM bundle back in the day on Itch.io.
Your talk of the electrician, windows and plasterer immediately recalls to mind Flanders and Swann’s song The Gas Man Cometh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1dvAxA9ib0
Ha excellent, not heard that before, it makes me think of Right Said Fred: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5XX9LX2es4
Balatro is an interesting one. I might have said before but I played it for about 30 minutes and my main thought was that it was like many mobile games, it could surely suck me in if I played more, but I didn’t think it was interesting enough to be worth getting sucked in, so got a refund instead.
I have played far too much Blacksmith Master. It’s a management sim where you run a medieval smithery, hiring blacksmiths, assistants and scholars (to get better designs for the tools and weapons so you can sell the, for more money), and eventually miners and lumberjacks to collect raw materials rather than paying for them; buying and arranging equipment for everyone to use and managing the shop side of things. It’s exactly the right balance of micromanagement and letting the staff get on with things for my taste, progression is steady enough for a fine drip of dopamine and the setting is definitely my jam. My one complaint is that after the first few days there really isn’t enough to spend your money on so it just keeps accumulating and removes any danger of going bankrupt. If I was managing this place in real life I’d long ago have given everyone a nice raise and sat back to watch the cash roll in rather than trying to keep the line going up
Finished Clair Obscur though I think I’ll go back to it to do more of the optional bosses and areas. It is a very, very good game and probably the most impressive is how well rounded it is: the story is interesting, the writing is good, combat is engaging, multiple builds are viable, it is very well acted, looks great, the music is excellent. Genuinely a pleasure to play even if I feel like the story resolution is a bit one sided and I could do without the flying enemies.
Having wrapped that up I’m doing what half the internet is doing, that is replaying Hollow Knight before Silksong comes out. Unless the Silksong is a broken, buggy mess or something like that it will be a week 1 purchase for me. Hollow Knight remains good but it is weird playing it without a randomizer now and having to follow the default progression path rather than figuring out what became accessible at a given moment.