T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve has been more of the same.
Balatro continues to be a good time waster, nothing new about it.
I haven’t played any Rainbow Six Siege this week, and I only played a bit of Project Zomboid.
I have been doing something more interesting this week. Playing random Itch.io horror games. Some of the highlights I can remember are Carbon Steel, a game where you are collecting samples from unknown monsters in a cage, using weird equipment.
CleaningRedVille, a game were you collect trash at night.
and DREAD FLATS, a game were you are playing as a paranormal investigator looking for ghosts in a well known haunted apartment building.
What’s everyone else doing?
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
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.
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
4thewords has proven astoundingly effective here at the 15 day mark. I’ve gone from writing a couple of lines every couple of days previously, to averaging about three pages a day. They’re probably trash, but, they exist, which is more than the other method was providing. There are some adverse effects, in that I’m more focused on the 4thewords quest achievement marks than the internal story marks; on the other hand, as long as the stories move forward the why of it doesn’t much matter.
This is probably the last time I’m going to mention 4thewords, unless something significant changes about the process. Just, assume I’m doing this now. Constantly.
Brotato still pops up. No goals anymore, just cycling through favorite characters. Mostly Gangster.
…that’s it. 4thewords has washed out all the other games. The journey of Porom to remove a Mindflayer from her brain can take a backseat to a small child throwing a chicken at a bunch of dragons, and an incredibly generic guy punching incredibly generic things.
The game aspect of 4thewords sounds mildly interesting, although it does seem to be more about word count and streaks/consistency than about having to react to the world itself, which means that it would take more dedicated time than I have, especially with my “write a chapter of something that I want to play with on Sunday while washing dishes and post it the next week” model working out pretty well.
I don’t think I can recommend the game by itself, at least not so far; it’s a fairly generic plotline, and through the grammar mistakes you can tell Costa Rica’s native language isn’t English. it’s very much a tool to keep a writing schedule. (Although they count copy-paste by default so it’s possible to cheat if you want.)
But last year I had an idea that felt like I could slap it together in a Sunday afternoon, and then it took nine days to write the story, and it only lasted a page and a half, and that was arguably a fast one. And this year up till starting the game I managed to finish one story, in ten months. The external pressure to not stop has been sorely needed.
I had started mine back around 2022, when I was reading all of Shakespeare’s plays and wanted to do a reworked “Taming of the Shrew” based on the play and on “Ten Things I Hate About You”, which is when I discovered that it was pretty easy to write stuff up while waiting for my dishes to soak, since I’m not actually doing anything at the time but can’t just wander off to do other things either. So I decided to keep it up. I had to stop for about a month earlier in the year because I got too busy and didn’t have the time to think about stuff before trying to write it, and so kept pushing the writing into the week and then eventually ended up forgetting to write something, and so took the time to get caught up on other things and think about the stuff I was doing a bit more. I’ve ended up in that time period finishing about seven things, four of which were probably novella length and one of which was a set of fanfic scripts.
Then again, I have an advantage in that I don’t really edit it or plan things out all that much. I’m playing, not really doing anything seriously.
And at the same time I’m doing the TOR Diary Let’s Play entries, and also doing flavour text for the Arkham Horror game that I’m modding. As well as all the non-fiction posts on my blog (a post every weekday). So as my co-workers know, writing’s not really an issue for me, which is why 4thewords wouldn’t really help me much [grin].
I started playing Silksong. I’m probably halfway through the game, and my oldest son (14) already finished it.
I like like it well, it’s enough of a change from the first one that it feels fresh, while keeping the same DNA.
I regret to inform everyone I’ve yet again put everything aside to get back in Champions Online, so no news in any respect. And this happens to be the worst time of the year for it, as there are two large month-long events one after another, and I’m doing daily missions with like thirty different characters. I am a monster, I know.
The coop Satisfactory-playthrough continues. Well into aluminum production now. Duel Links and Master Duel are standards.
I continued Persona 5 and reached the treasure room of the museum, where I hit a towers in front of the third seed room. Finally I got one day where I could decide what I wanted to do in the afternoon and evening, after 2 ingame weeks of pure railroading. I still hate the cat, the railroading vehicle, as the main character has no mind of his own.
Analog I finished the 3rd season in Heat – Pedal to the Metal against the AI. I managed to not come in dead last, but second to it. In race 1 I drove too risky and became last, race 2 not much better and in race 3, the weather gods were against me. With a maximum of 3 heat cards against no heat necessary AI, 5th place was the best I could manage. Race 4 was a flawless victory.
I presume that the museum you’re referring to is the art gallery, with the multi-stage dungeon and the painting scene? I seem to remember things being more open for at least a while before that one, because some of the initial S-links and activities are already available. Then again, that you’re talking about seed rooms suggests that you’re playing Royal, and I can’t remember if Royal was less open in the beginning (it has more plot points like introducing the counsellor and the new girl, but also has more activities for later).
I don’t remember which chapter has Spring Break, but that’s the ultimate letdown; “You’ll have two weeks where you won’t have to go to school for the Morning period. Surprise, the entire thing is cutscenes.”
I think I expected that one. Pretty much anytime the later Persona games give you any time off, all the way back to Persona 3, you know that you won’t be able to actually do anything in those times and you’re going to get a lot of cutscenes and story development.
I’ve played quite a bit of Heat – one tip I find helpful there is to think about your shuffling – I feel like that’s a commonly not considered aspect (especially if you’re playing digitally where the deck handling is all automatic). Particularly think about what cards are being ‘shuffled out’ of your deck: having your high value cards in hand then shuffling will mean an entire run through the deck with mostly low-value cards (which can be good or very bad).
A particular strategy I like is to go out of my way to not play stress cards, then shuffle them out of my deck so I’ll get an entire run through the deck without drawing them. (Though this is less relevant if playing with custom parts which may have better options for dealing with stress cards)
Also, being aggressive about discarding can be good – I tend to think less in terms of “do I want to get rid of anything” and more assume that I’m getting rid of anything I don’t specifically want to keep. Cycling through the deck faster means getting the heat back into your engine quicker.
(Maybe these are obvious, but they didn’t occur to me on my first few plays)
Nope, not obvious enough. I always forget the discard step and then keep the cooling cards in hand but do not draw heat cards. And so the cooling card also block my hand in a way. I try to remember to discard in the next round.
I had a very busy weekend, and so only managed to get in one quick mission of Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. My plan is to run through all the campaigns, and the first Trade Federation one reminded me that in the campaigns the game quite often doesn’t give you the ability to build anything but instead gives you forces and you have to use them to win the mission. Here, at one point it talked about going to get reinforcements that I never found, and then later another squad was sent to help me that I had to backtrack to find. I managed to get past the mission on Easy, though.
The campaigns also have hero characters that need to survive, but I generally found managing them to be a pain and on Easy just send them out as part of the main group, but recall that that came back to bite me at one point during the Imperial campaign at the Hoth mission because I had made it through the mission with everyone surviving, saw the Falcon fly away, and then had a bunch of Wampa boil out of the base … when Vader, who must survive, was outside of the AT-ATs and thus killed, failing that rather long mission. I’ll have to watch out for that as I go through these.
I was so disappointed with SWGB when I finally played it when I was younger. It seemed like such a graphical and thematic step down from Force Commander. I’m sure it’s great, people love it, but it’s one of the very few Star Wars games I’ve put down almost immediately (the list is short: Clone Wars Republic Heroes, and Battle for Naboo). I seem to be fairly alone in my love of Force Commander. The funny thing is that I’d wanted that game when I was a child, and was given Rogue Squadron instead – now that game I loved. Couldn’t get past the AT-AT walker of course, didn’t understand what I was meant to do. And then later couldn’t get past mission 7 with the gorge run and the homing rockets (and then AT-AT Walker). I should get back to it, I can’t remember if I completed it.
Having finished the pre-Silksong replaythrough of Hollow Knight I am now playing Silksong, like half the internet. I am avoiding spoilers but it feels like I’m approaching the halfway point. A lot of people have written that Team Cherry have upped the difficulty and my first impression was similar, particularly with some common enemies doing two points of damage when in the original this was reserved almost exclusively for a few lategame bosses. Having played a bit more I am not so sure, the game is challenging but the first playthrough of HK was not a walk in the park. Either way, having fun with the game, bosses have so far been very enjoyable which to me is a crucial point.
Replayed Psychonauts with a randomizer for an archipelago playthrough. The game works very well in this way. Ironically because some of the early levels are strictly tutorials for a given ability they may block you early if you don’t pick it up but some of the later ones can be often entirely or partially done working around lacking certain badges, resulting in fun exploration and challenges because of having to do without. Definitely going to stay on my list for randomizer playthroughs, may in fact do the game again in the next archipelago run.
In co-op we have “finished” W40k: Darktide. Predictably the “campaign”, such as it is, doesn’t really lead anywhere in particular leaving the players narratively in a spot where they can keep farming resurces in perpetuity, mostly to buy cosmetics, which generally isn’t our jam. For what it’s worth the gameplay itself was fine while it lasted.
With Darktide behind us we have moved to the new Planet Crafter update which not only ads two more worlds to terraform but allows for travel between planets. Since the first two planets had to be done on separate saves before we’ve decided to launch from our Planet Humble save and start with the first planet to remember how the basic technologies work. We’ve quickly discovered that rather than start from scratch you can launch yourself in a rocket with an inventory full of goodies which has kickstarted the terraforming process way faster than we expected. It’ll be interesting to see how that works with the two new worlds but it’ll be nearly a month before we get to test that on account of our schedules desyncing.
Edit: Oh yeah, also trying and failing to split my remaining time between FFXIV and Path of Exile 2
This is useful info re: the difficulty, thanks. You’ll have to report back when you’ve got well into the second half.
Silksong, of course. Game is very good. It really is nice design in a soulslike to give you health restores for hitting enemies, rewarding aggression and allowing you to get back to comfortable health from the brink of death.
Bosses have been a lot of fun and generally not too bad. I just fought one that I really enjoyed the design of,
Cogwork Dancers. In particular,Phase 4 made me feel sorry for them.I don’t mind that big enemies hit for 2 health of damage. I do mind that terrain can hit for 2 health of damage. And it feels really bad when an enemy hits you for 2 and then knocks you back into terrain that also does 2. Unfortunately the area right after that boss had a lot of that, and your down attack
with the starting crest into a moving saw will often take damage, I think they should update something about that hit box.If I didn’t manage to complete Path of Pain in HK, spending two separate 6 hour stints first getting to the penultimate platforming bit, and then to the final platforming bit, but ultimately not being able to do that final platforming bit with the pogoing on the moving spikes/saws… then should I bother with Silksong or is the platforming just going to be too much. I had to use the Kingsoul too for PoP, else I wouldn’t have been able to do it at all I suspect.
I haven’t run into anything as hard as PoP in Silksong. Even if there is something (and I did just do a hard platforming segment, but not PoP hard), I’m sure it’ll be optional.
Silksong also requires very little spike pogoing. It still works, but most of the time you’ll be able to use other mobility stuff.
Thanks for that, it’s pogoing on moving things that I find a bit too difficult, getting the timing right.