T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m Playing a bit of Project Zomboid.
It’s going well, learning how foraging works because after playing 80+ hours I for some reason never experimented with a bunch of the survival skills.
Also, I finally learned how to host a dedicated sever, after indenting to learn how for about ten years.
Rainbow Six Siege is still being played on the side, as well as Balatro. Both still going well.
What’s everyone else doing?
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
Internet News is All Wrong
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
This week I only had time to coop Satisfactory. Aluminum production is running. And the every other day games Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links and <b<Master Duel. Generaider finally got released to Duel Links – one of my favorite Master Duel Decks. A bit late, now that Duel Links already has Dragonmaids, Tenyi, Unchained, Shadoll and Nouvelles almost at full strength.
Syal and Daimbert voted for continuing Persona 5 last week, so I’ll do that when I find the time.
Analog gaming contained Heat: Pedal to the Metal. Racing like it’s 1955. Also Bomb Busters with my family. We succeeded the first timer mission. And So Clover, a good word game, plus Iki, a eurogame themed in 19th century Japan – focusing on trading economics.
@Paige, @Isaac: The previous entry link below the image links to the wrong entry from 2 weeks ago.
Lars, good catch. Actually a small error in the previous listing. Fixed now. TY!
This week I only had time to coop Satisfactory. Aluminum production is running. And the every other day games Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links and Master Duel. Generaider finally got released to Duel Links – one of my favorite Master Duel Decks. A bit late, now that Duel Links already has Dragonmaids, Tenyi, Unchained, Shadoll and Nouvelles almost at full strength.
Syal and Daimbert voted for continuing Persona 5 last week, so I’ll do that when I find the time.
Analog gaming contained Heat: Pedal to the Metal. Racing like it’s 1955. Also Bomb Busters with my family. We succeeded the first timer mission. And So Clover, a good word game, plus Iki, a eurogame themed in 19th century Japan – focusing on trading economics.
One week in, 4TheWords has managed to keep me putting words on the page, though I’m hitting the point where the story beginnings are written and the murky middle bits aren’t lending themselves to any kind of direction, which is where they usually die off. I’m feeling more of the Free 2 Play nature of the setup now; the free version limits you to fifteen encounters a day, and then quests regularly require forty encounters, so three days minimum. It was also a pretty nasty work week and I definitely feel the burnout trying to set in. But, streak-related quests are keeping me going back, and worst-case scenario I go back to writing at the previous pre-game pace, which was “nothing”. Not like the stories would ever be worth reading, I just really need to have them *finished*. Some of them have been taking up headspace for fifteen years. Complete trash is better than in-progress trash.
Brotato, of course. Bite-sized massacres are still fun for lunch and just-after-work.
Baldur’s Gate 3 got very little time (as usual), but I wandered around the starting area a bit and ran into various fun little guys, most of whom ended up leaving without a fight. The other one was a group of fugitive hunters, who didn’t take it well when I told them I was The Fugitive. The appeal of the setting is starting to set in. I’ll probably start putting more time into this one, on a less nasty work week.
I finished Deltarune chapters 3 and 4. Good stuff! Interesting story developments, I wonder where it’s going next. The superbosses were quite tough.
I’ve started playing Doom: The Dark Ages. They really did peak with Doom 2016, and Eternal and this one are both generally worse. That being said, I’m happy that they’re actually trying to mix things up and not just making the same game again and again. In Eternal they went all in on mobility. In this one you really feel like a tank – not in the sense of being lumbering and slow, but in having serious weight. When you run your footsteps sound impactful, when you land from a height you kill basic enemies in a radius around you by default, when you walk into some terrain it just breaks.
Downsides – there are so many invisible walls. Especially when you’re flying around on a dragon, which is conceptually awesome. There are things it looks like you could leap on that don’t work. If terrain doesn’t show up as walkable on the map, it isn’t. Speaking of which, the map is very useful, to the point that it kind of negates the concept of “secrets”. It shows you everywhere you can go, it shows all the pickups near you, so sometimes the only question is how you open a door or whether you need to progress in the level and then backtrack. I’m actually kind of okay with the map spoiling the secrets because generally areas are huge and finding stuff by searching would take forever.
Combat is pretty fun. It’s heavily “parry” based – if you see green, right click. The shield feels like a nice addition, and has a variety of uses – block, parry, charge, throw at an enemy to stun or de-armor them. I die a lot, but that’s Nightmare. I feel like the parry often fails if you try to do it at the last second, but you do get pretty generous time after you push the parry button where it still works so I just need to do it earlier.
The story is… really not something I care about. There’s way too much talking before you first start the game. “Rip and tear, until it is done” was all Doom 2016 gave you at the start of the game and that was good and right. There’s some people who will obviously be some bosses later and some people who are vaguely helping you in the background, I guess.
It does sometimes switch up the gameplay with the dragon and giant robot segments, but they’re pretty underbaked compared to the on foot combat.
I think I’m going to put off starting my Trooper in The Old Republic until the end of the month, which will give me time to finish writing all the entries for my Imperial Agent character, which I’d like to do before starting a new character and having to try to remember what I did for two characters instead of one.
Played a bit more of Conception Plus. I only have three Star Maidens to complete, and was getting bored with the grinding and so decided to run to the second dungeon boss and managed to defeat it handily, so I’m thinking about abandoning the grinding and just running out the last few Star Maidens and doing the final fight after that, although looking at the stats for the final boss that might not work out so well. I’ll have to see.
Did get in a session of Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, playing one of the tutorial missions. The game can be interesting but can also be a bit fiddly, but I managed to figure out how things work and also managed to figure out how to reset the campaign so I can keep track of what I’ve done, so I’ll likely play it a bit and see how I like it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has been annoying me with the eponymous city. I’m at or approaching endgame and I want to wrap up all these sidequests, but you can’t go two steps in this place without running into a battle and that goes double for every sidequest. Throw in a dash of “that’s not what I said” on some dialogue and apparently I decided it was time for a break.
Instead I’ve dusted off Pokemon X. This is one I only played the one time because the introduction of outfits made me not want to delete my hoard, and the date on the playthrough from 9 years ago made me save vs turning to dust. But I remember it quite fondly as the first one I’d actually bought in quite a while (having played some on emulators while skipping hardware) and it feeling like coming home after a while. Mechanically they massively downplayed but had not yet actually removed HMs, and the map was basically just a pleasant circle through the four seasons. There were two pokemon I very specifically had wanted to use and did not (one because it overlapped with starter bloat, the other because even after searching for many encounters I just got so many bad rolls I assumed I was missing a trick and it wasn’t actually available), so I have a definite goal.
Getting back into it, there’s an amusing course correction: Black/White apparently had gone for the “absolutely no old pokemon only new things,” while X/Y did the exact opposite with “this grass is so full you’ll never find what you’re looking for.” The lists for each route (often with multiple different lists for different grass colors) are huge (and you effectively get two starter mons, one new and one gen1), which should have given the game great replayability, if there hadn’t been other factors suppressing it. Some mons feel very intentionally placed, but unfortunately this also reveals serious oversights- for example, zigzagoon is founly only in the very first patch of grass, so it’s sort of a reward for starting your catching early, but it has to reach lv20 to evolve and has such terrible stats it has serious difficulty doing so. Thus, zigzagoon should have been placed later (or had its stats or evo level changed, but while they change move and TM lists constantly they refuse to change stats and evos because idiots). Meanwhile sentret has better stats and evolves at only 15, but is not found until level 10. Sentret would have been a much better early search reward, but their placement is backwards.
I’ve also finally looked up dwebble’s stats and relized why I never ever use it: the BST (base stat total) is 325, and as a budding tank it has no offense, making it basically dead weight until level. . 34! The evolution has perfectly usable stats, but you want it to be a reward for using the cute little first form, which is basically unusable. This is probably on purpose, but is very annoying. Once again, I make no use of dwebble.
I’d also forgotten just how weirdly long the early game is. I’ve been through half a game’s count of pokemon and a leisurely 10 hours and still haven’t hit 2nd badge. And I will also note how deliberate the gen1 callbacks are, not just giving you a second starter from the gen1 line, but the first forest is literally Viridian Forest. In comparison to the next game, unlike Sun/Moon, X/Y does actually make use of the 3d of the 3ds in combat (plus some gimmick areas), and aside from the frame drops it’s pretty nice. The way you’ve got field models for your character but then also high def models for you and some specific but not all NPCs (most having 2d splash pictures) is very odd, suggesting they either pulled back after overreaching or crammed in stuff they couldn’t deploy everywhere just because, making it inconsistent, though not as jarring as you might think. Very much a middlepoint between the 2d and fully 3d games.
Done with Midnight Castle Succubus. Overall had a really good time with it. Fun abilities, but there’s very little in the way of strategy to the bosses, particularly in the second part of the game, where you have so much ammo (as I mentioned before, it’s your cash) that you can just spam the homing subweapon and be done with them without an issue. There’s also no quick travel method to teleport between areas of the game. You have a bunch of two-way portals that take you a few screens back, but if you want to go from one end of the map to the next it’s an insane amount of backtracking, even using these portals, so going back to pick up items you couldn’t before is a bit of a chore. It was a fun experience, but I’m gonna move on to the next game. There’s, like in Ori, achievements to earn but they require at least one more full playthrough, so I’ll leave that for some other time.
Played through Youku’s Island Express. I’ve had this game in my library for ages, but for one reason or another I never felt like trying it. Just looking at the screenshots it felt like one of those dime-a-dozen cheaply-made indie games with an unappealing art style and generic gameplay. I’m assuming I got this in a bundle. But holy crap, this game is actually really fun and has a lot of creative ideas. And also it looks great, so I guess the screenshots I’ve been seeing were very misleading. So basically it’s a metroidvania in which your main traversal method is pinball. You play as a dung beetle, and you roll a ball (not actually dung, at least at the start, it’s originally made of sand here) wherever you go. You don’t have an actual jump button, but the world is full of flippers and platforms that can be used to hop or be launched around, and many puzzles are designed as if they were pinball tables. I truly regret not playing this earlier. It’s a great combination of genres. It’s reasonably short too, clocking at about 11 hours if you’re collecting everything.
Now playing through Chasm, another metroidvania, a bit more traditional in the sense that it’s about jumping and attacking with a weapon, though apparently the maps are procedurally generated. So far so good, though most of the challenge comes from the platforming. Just out of curiosity I started a second save file to see what differences would be and the map layout is definitely different, though it doesn’t really change the experience. A long hallway might come before a deep chasm and not after, a save room might be a few rooms up to the left instead of down to the right, a chest might be three rooms away instead of four, etc. I don’t really think this sort of thing adds much to the replayability, but it’s fine.