T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve started to get back into Risk of Rain Returns.
It had a small update recently, and I’ve been trying to find the two new items without just using the command artifact.
Other than that. I’ve played some more itch.io horror games. The highlights this week are: ThePale. You play as a replacement lighthouse keeper, and while you’re getting settled in you accidently brake some unknown machine, and shortly after that a large storm starts to roll in. It has the first resident evil’s style of controls, and camera, which is a little clunky at first, but I think it worked in it’s favor. It’s just a demo right now, but the moment it has a full release, I’m going to play it.
Next is Descending. You’re playing as a drill operator that has to keep the drills running for “war efforts“. It’s not exactly clear what war, but It’s one of those games were you’re operating a console with a bunch of buttons and dials as most of the game play, which might not be for everyone, but I love hitting a bunch of buttons as the primary gameplay.
Last is. A Place, Forbidden. A game where you wake up from a nap to find yourself in an unknown library, and while trying to leave you keep stumbling further into the library. This one I don’t think I can do much to explain it more than that because a lot of the story comes from reading the books throughout the library.
I know my pitches for the games are a little lackluster. I’m slowly working on trying to write better, but it’s slow going.
Anyway, What’s everyone else doing?
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
The Witch Watch
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
Same as last week. But for this week!
I said I would stop talking about 4TheWords unless something changed. Something sort of changed; I discovered some quests can’t be finished when you take them. I took a quest that required killing two monsters that turned out to be unavailable; the wiki says they’re locked until deep into two other quests, which, with the free version only allowing four active quests at a time, means I pretty much have to cancel this quest to have room for its prerequisites. So that’s annoying.
Brotato, ad nauseum. Playing less of it now; turns out I can fit writing a terrible flash fiction story into my lunch break, instead of a round of Brotato. Both cool and exhausting.
I’ve been getting into Stellaris again lately. There was a DLC back in May which I wanted but (for financial reasons) held off on getting until now. So like I do whenever I get a new DLC for Stellaris…I started an empire using stuff from the previous DLC(s) which I hadn’t tried out yet. Specifically the Storm Chasers origin from the Cosmic Storms DLC, which was generally not received all that well since it add space hurricanes which travel across the galaxy for years and can cause some bad effects to your planets and fleets (they do offer some bonuses in comparison, but those tend to be fairly specific so from RNG you might not get ones that are useful to you).
The Storm Chasers origin makes your people an empire of adrenaline-junkies and offers some extra benefits for having storms around (all leaders having a trait that makes them better in storms, for instance), so there’s more incentive to actually engage with the mechanics which has been interesting. It’s been pretty fun so far, you get a unique quest line in the early game for pushing your limits doing storm-related things for some bonuses and then a unique quest at the mid-game point to spawn a Nexus Storm (kind of a bigger, badder, all-in-one storm vs. the other more specialized variants that exist naturally). I haven’t gotten to the end game or crisis yet, but I’m enjoying it so far.
I’m still coming to grips with the economy redesign in the last patch. I’ve been playing long enough to remember back when planets still had tiles, so I’ve been through major redesigns before, but I’m still figuring out the new optimal ways to set up planets. I – kinda – like that there are now way more buildings than you could ever put on a single planet, and there are now real reasons for choosing pretty all of them, making the choice of what buildings to construct on limited planetary space something with real trade-offs and hard decisions to be made. It’s a bit overwhelming that you now get access to space to build lots of them from the get-go; I know that was part of the point of the rework, but the old way of slowly unlocking spaces at least didn’t make me freeze up with analysis paralysis upon settling or conquering a new planet. I don’t dislike the redesign, to be clear, I just need some more time playing with it to better understand it.
One thing I like about the economy redesign is that you can actually have a big planet dedicated to, like, research or unity or whatever. Previously a lot of jobs were building only, so a big planet was pushed pretty hard toward energy/materials/food/industrial since buildings capped at 12 either way, but now you can say “yes, this entire planet is going to research physics” and make it happen.
I do hope that they did something to fix the AI, because I’m not very good at the game and I was dumpstering the computer factions right after the patch came out. I suspect the AI did not get updated properly. In general it was an extremely buggy release and their statement that they’d released it earlier than they should have because they didn’t want to be on vacation when a buggy patch came out was… not a good justification, at all.
Well, as predicted I submerged myself too deep back in Champions Online and I’m having trouble playing anything else, but I’ve tried a couple other stuff.
I played some Azaran: The Demon Bottle which is a small, short Zelda-like that a developer I follow on Twitter made. The guy is currently working on Azaran: Islands of the Jinn, a game super inspired in Ocarina of Time, and in the meantime released this one that’s more inspired in the NES/GB titles of the franchise. He released it for free some time ago but now is charging a couple dollars because apparently people are more willing to get a game if it’s cheap than if it’s free. Hilarious. Anyway, the game is pretty fun, but there’s a bit of a difficulty spike on the second dungeon, so I didn’t advance much. There’s no save or anything like that due to the game being really short, so while you can continue as many times from the part you lost if you quit the game then you have to start over.
Of all things I’m now playing Bubsy in: The Purrfect Collection. I’ve been in the mood for some platformers and these games are not actually so bad with the now included save option, and I feel these old titles are a piece of history worth experiencing. Plus, the upcoming new game looks genuinely good. I like they’re actually making the effort to do something worthwhile with the IP.
I’ve been playing Silksong. Not sure how to feel about it. I loved Hollow Knight, so I bought this as soon as it came out. And at first, I was absolutely loving it. The art, the characters, the story… I really like the fact that Hornet is an actual character who speaks.
As far as combat goes, I actually really like it. My main problem with the controls is that they’re sometimes unresponsive on keyboard, which is a problem I don’t remember ever having with the first game. I also hated the fact that the down-slash is a diagonal, but thankfully I found a crest early on that changed it to being closer to the way it was in Hollow Knight.
Like most people, my biggest issue is the bullshit difficulty and punishments. The way the rosary economy works is bullshit enough, but in addition to that:
– Bosses and a lot of enemies do two hearts of damage. In Hollow Knight, by the time this became commonplace, you already had 8-9 hearts, a bunch of charms, and a dodge with i-frames. I’m about 10 hours in to Silksong, and I still only have the 5 hearts you start with, and I’ve gathered 3/4 pieces for my very first extra heart. And since your healing animation takes 3 to 8 business days, this makes for a very frustrating experience. Also, that bell charm is absolute bullshit.
– One of my favourite parts of Hollow Knight was the short run-backs to boss rooms. It was rare that a boss run-back took a minute or two. Run-backs to boss rooms in Silksong regularly waste your time, which is why I started using a mod that lets you respawn at the previous room you died in. Even with that, I regularly get frustrated with bosses.
The thing that’s making me really sour right now is the Sinner’s Road. It’s the only area I have yet to explore, and I feel absolutely miserable. It just reminds me of how awesome Deepnest was, and how utterly boring and miserable this area feels.
I lost 1k rosaries with one of my deaths there, so I even installed a rosary cheat mod that gives you 1k rosaries at the press of a button. But I just don’t have the drive to play this anymore.
I just really, REALLY hate games that waste my time. Because this is all this type of “difficulty” is – wasting your time, and threatening to waste your time. You never lose anything permanent, like you do with a Diablo- or PoE-style Hardcore run. And even with those, it just ultimately boils down to wasting your time.
This is why I never understood Miyazaki’s view on extremely high difficulty and how it gives players greater satisfaction at conquering a challenge. I never feel any satisfaction after defeating a boss that was giving me trouble. I just feel frustrated and angry at myself for all the time I wasted trying to beat him. I don’t know. I guess my brain just works differently. Or maybe I just don’t have as much time to play video games as I did when I was younger, so I’ve gotten extremely intolerant of games that waste my time.
I always liked Hollow Knight in spite of it being a soulslike. Turns out, I was in the minority. I still haven’t decided if I want to finish Silksong.
For Sinner’s Road, one question I have – did you get the bench working? Finding the right bench or opening the right shortcut can be huge for making areas more tolerable. Also, you can go to a different area if that one is causing you trouble, Act 1 is the most linear part of the game but it’s still got options. One helpful tip for the jerks who throw caltrops at you, you can hit the projectile with your weapon and send it back roughly toward them.
I found the trick with the caltrops, but what’s giving me trouble is the platforming sections (and the sword guys who usually come bundled along with the caltrops assholes). Which is why I haven’t managed to fix the bench yet. Maybe I can try to change my crest – right now I’m using the Wanderer, which has a lower range. Maybe that’s making the platforming harder than it should be? Or maybe it’s the fact that sometimes the game doesn’t register my down-slash input on time. Or maybe I just suck at platforming.
Then again, maybe I can go explore the Wormways and the [Something-or-other] Steppe, which are the only two areas I know of that I haven’t explored. I don’t know. I’m not sure how that would help me become better at the platforming required in Sinner’s Road. Maybe I can just cheese that section using mods. I don’t know – I’m just kinda sour that I can’t enjoy a game I was looking forward to for years. It’s what I get for having expectations. I usually manage to keep them low, but for some reason, I couldn’t manage to do that with Silksong. Still not sure if I’ll have the drive to continue.
I haven’t really tried Wanderer. Generally Reaper seems to help for pogo sections, but really what crest you use will vary by person.
Doing other areas won’t necessarily make you better at platforming required, but it could allow you to come back later when you have more mobility options (though the game does require a lot of platforming generally).
That being said, it’s also possible that you just don’t enjoy the game. It’s sad to not like something you’ve been looking forward to, but it happens.
I listened to your advice. While exploring, I got the final fragment for my first extra mask, and went to the Blasted Steppes. Turns out,
that’s where you need to go to progress, and the Sinner’s Road isn’t compulsory to complete Act 1!The Last Judge was a bit of a pain, but thanks to my handy-dandy respawn mod, I beat him much faster than Widow, who I found to be super frustrating. Especially with thatcharm that halves fire damage you get from the nice lady in Deep Docks.The key to beating him was the same as for all the bosses that gave me trouble (thus far, that’s been Widow and the
thorny bitch in Shelwood): mute the game and play some external music*. Turns out that – for me, at least – the game’s soundscape is extremely distracting to me.The bosses give excellent visual clues for each of their attacks, but I find their audio clues extremely muted and distracting. This is a bit of an issue, because it means that I can’t get fully immersed in the game, which is a big reason I play games. My biggest disappointment with Hollow Knight was that the White Palace was a jumping puzzle, rather than the treasure trove of lore and environmental storytelling I had been hoping it would be.
I’m excited to see what Act 2 has in store
*For some reason, I played one of two songs on repeat – either I’m Downright Amazed at What I Can Destroy With Just a Hammer or a song by a Bulgarian underground rap/hardcore artist whose 15-year-old video recently got taken down from YouTube due to excessive nudity :D Thankfully, it was reuploaded just in time for me to listen to it while fighting Widow.
This Bulgarian song you speak of, what is it called?
It’s called Number One by Bicheto. The song itself starts at 2:24. His name roughly translates to “the bull”, but it’s also a slang term used for a dumb redneck-type of person.
His entire persona is a raunchy parody of Bulgarian celebrities, as well as the stereotype of people from rural areas coming to the big city and trying to impose their own culture and lifestyle on the locals.
It’s… definitely not for everyone, that’s for sure :D I used to listen to him from time to time when I was a teenager, back during my punk phase.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any translation for the lyrics. The song itself is still kinda catchy, though.
Just to give you an idea of the lyrics, the chorus is:
“Who’s Number 1 now?
Even wrapped in cellophane, I’m still a piece of shit!”
Thanks! The only time I’ve heard anything Bulgarian is the words in the Akuda Bar song in Beyond Good and Evil :D That’s fascinating, I haven’t heard of rural people trying to impose their culture on cities, when they’re from the same country! Immigrant enclaves of rural people from other countries in cities obviously all the time, but it’s usually the other way round that I see, rural people moving to cities in order to take advantage of the more bohemian culture in the cities – so that’s quite interesting.
Ha just listened to it and watched the video, it would have been a strong contender for Akuda bar itself!
Ha! I haven’t played Beyond Good and Evil, so I’d never heard of that song. It’s a banger! Does the game itself still hold up for someone who likes 3D platformers? I’ve heard the story is good.
Sorry just saw your other reply. For some reason can’t reply to it, too many reply layers deep perhaps.
<blockquote.Ha! I haven’t played Beyond Good and Evil, so I’d never heard of that song. It’s a banger! Does the game itself still hold up for someone who likes 3D platformers? I’ve heard the story is good.
Hmmmm. I certainly didn’t play it when it came out, but also it’s probably 10 years ago now and I can’t remember it well enough. It was frustrating at times and I don’t remember thinking much of the gameplay, but I’d say it’s worth going through anyway, it’s a weird and interesting game.
One fun fact: The Last Judge isn’t compulsory either, because in fact Sinner’s Road does lead to
another way out of Act 1, eventually.Sounds like you got your wind back in the below comments. Silksong just didn’t grab me enough, but I’ve reinstalled HK again to go through and this time beat Path of Pain. It’s startling how quickly you can afford and find new charms and upgrades. Silksong after about 3 hours had only shown me that if I buy things I’ll be able to equip only one of them as they all used the orange slot, and gave me the feeling of wondering if I actually cared about it enough to continue. This is before reaching much of difficulty, or rather I’d just come across the red ant guy, was going to deal with him the next session, and then thought nah I don’t really care, and got a refund.
After lots of discussion on this site about this phenomenon, it feels to me like there are two kinds of players:
1) Those who, if it takes N tries to beat a boss*, get N times as much satisfaction from it, and
2) Those who, if it takes N tries to beat a boss, get 1/N times as much satisfaction from it. (I’d generally count myself in this group.)
Of course, it’s likely not nearly so reductive, and even within the same same game my feelings can change: I don’t really mind taking multiple tries to get through the intense timing challenges in the puzzle dungeons in CrossCode, but I dislike having to retry its demanding Souls-like boss fights more than maybe three times. Perhaps some of has to do with variety; I tried probably dozens of time before eventually beating all the scenarios in Terraforming Mars on the hardest difficulty, but due to the randomly-generated nature of each run they all feel like a unique challenge to overcome. In contrast, a boss fight usually involves a fairly limited number of moves, and the challenge isn’t about “analyze this novel situation in all its complexity and overcome it”, but “perfectly execute a small series of moves rapidly in response to a small number of triggers”. Which can still be fun the first time or two, but gets rapidly less fun the more times I have to do it. Maybe this is why I was never disciplined enough to learn how to play an instrument, I prefer the novelty of trying new things often to the satisfaction of honing a skill by repetition…
*Substitute this for pretty much any challenging activity in a game (solving a puzzle, etc.), but this is a good short-hand.
I think there’s also something to be said about Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types and how that maps out to the types of content we look for in games.
I’m firmly of the Explorer type, so I tend to have a lot of fun with bosses whose second phase is radically different from their first, because it represents a new experience and a new facet of the boss’ character. In Silksong, nearly all the bosses I’ve fought have had second phases which extremely similar to their first – they just add a couple of new attacks, and they spam their existing attacks way more often.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I find it a bit weird – I resonate extremely well with this statement:
But at the same time, two of my main hobbies are martial arts and playing guitar (even though I haven’t had much time to do the latter lately). And both of those involve involve exactly that – “perfectly execute a small series of moves rapidly in response to a small number of triggers”. Although with martial arts there’s definitely a lot of leeway regarding the types of responses you can give to a given situation.
Strange why I don’t seem to like it in the context of video games. Maybe it has to do with self expression. Among their many other benefits, I view both martial arts and guitar as ways of expressing myself and communicating with people – it’s just using a different language. Maybe I view the strictness of soulslike bosses to be too limiting? I don’t know…
A whole lot of it is going to come down to how fun controlling the player character itself is. I’ve spent more time on bossfights in Strangers of Paradise than in any other game, but the movement is solid and the attacks are fun, and I was always willing to keep trying (usually I ended up stopping due to sheer physical exhaustion). I’ve spent more time on individual bosses in Strangers of Paradise, than I have on the entirety of Bloodborne, because Bloodborne didn’t have the same fun in the execution of player attacks. (In Bloodborne I reached the first boss one time, and then stopped playing.)
…basically, if it’s fun to control the player character, a hard boss gives you an excuse to control them for longer. If it’s not fun to control the character, a hard boss forces you to put up with the controls for longer.
Ha that’s an interesting way of looking at it, the N vs 1/N. Dark Souls 2 was nice in terms of the bosses feeling taking only a few tries but often being intense.
This week continues to be Silksong. I’ve reached Act 3, and wow this game just keeps on going. Still very much enjoying it. I really appreciate that they reduced the damage that most of the terrain does, because gears and sandworms were just really annoying – there’s an area that I’d probably have given up on if every failed platform attempt hit me for 2. They also nerfed two of the bosses, and I have to say it’s not the two I would have chosen, but whatever, they have a lot more info about the game than I do.
I cheesed the heck out of one of the bosses, in the
Bile area, byhanging out in the ooze in the bottom right where they basically can’t hit you with anything. I figure if it’s in the game and not a bug (insert obvious joke) then it’s a valid option. Plus I really didn’t like that zone.I really should unequip the compass (I don’t use it much anyway), but the actual truth is that the compass shouldn’t take a slot. It’s an interesting game choice to need to buy some basic UI stuff like maps and pins and stuff but adding a power cost to any of them is just kind of goofy.
I cleared out a good chunk of Act 2 before realizing I could upgrade my weapon. Felt pretty silly about that, especially given the amount of tries I had to put into the boss of the
surgery area. Weapon upgrades are really good, surprise!One of the commonly used mods gives you compass for free. Having said that I haven’t found that many yellow talismans that I would consider essential for that to be a problem yet.
Yeah yellow is kind of a junk slot, oddly.
The primary drug of choice remains Kingdom Come Deliverance.
I am still, main-quest-wise, in the very early game.
Side-quest-wise I keep doing everything and am at a point where I am getting blocked by my lockpicking skill, as I am not yet good enough to crack open Very Hard Locks, and guess what most “could you get this for me”-items are behind. I’ll get there eventually. Also there’s a hunting quest for which I don’t have the correct perk yet, but I shall get there too.
I was at a point where I thought to continue the main quest, but then I sadly found more side quests, so that’ll have to wait. Also, maybe I’ll just ride around the map to get the remaining fog cleared, on a matter of principle xD
The coop Satisfactory-playthrough continues. Nitrogen is connected to the network now and frames Mk3 are produced. Duel Links and Master Duel are standards.
I got a little bit further in Persona 5 Royal. The art Teacher/Thief boss is down and now I could have a few days where I could actually play the game the way I want. But I’m not having much fun and lack the motivation to continue – I will, but in a stretched out pace.
Instead I played No Man’s Sky Voyagers Update. I’m broke again after creating my own mini corvette, which flies like a brick and has much worse modules installed than my fully equipped eSplitter fighter spaceship. So I switched back to the eSplitter and have 18 million credits down the drain. For now – as I will get rich again and spend all the money on the corvette to make it
goodsuck less.Analog I restarted the 3rd season of Heat – Pedal to the Metal against the AI. Three races in I have two second places and one victory under my belt and leading the championship now by 3 points. Thanks to the tips of Retsam, they helped alot.
FWIW, on P5R – the Persona games I’ve played (4G, 5R, Metaphor), they tend to have a very slow start for two reasons:
1) yeah, there’s always a lot of front-loaded plot stuff that means a lot of “you’re tired, go to bed Joker” situations where you don’t actually get to do the time-management stuff.
(There’s a lot of them in P4, but it’s less infamous than P5 – I don’t know if it’s actually less bad or just because P5 externalizes it to Morgana telling you to go to bed, whereas P4 the protagonist is just like “I’m pretty tired, I don’t feel like going out” or something)
And 2) I find a lot of the fun in the plot is the group dynamics of the main cast and generally that’s weak at the beginning with the personality-less main character and only a few other party members. I’m just hitting the point in Metaphor now where I’m getting a 4th main party member and I feel like it’s a huge improvement to the banter and overall enjoyment of the plot scenes, and the addition to Yusuke in P5 was also pretty much where I hit that point.
… actually I feel like I had much less of an issue with #2 in P4 – the I thought that party had pretty good chemistry from the start, but then again, I feel like you basically start with 4 party members in that one. (Though maybe I’m misremembering) Maybe 4 is just the magic “minimum viable party size for good social dynamics” in Persona-like games. (Or, I guess 5 if you count the non-human mascot/guide characters)
> Thanks to the tips of Retsam, they helped alot.
Glad to hear it :)
4’s first dungeon had Chie, Protag, and… Boy. 5’s first dungeon has Joker, Ann and Ryuji. Same setup, three party members and a UI.
(Metaphor’s a bit different, in that the 4th party member is arguably the coolest guy in the world. Tight competition from the villain, though.)
You’ve got three characters for the first dungeon, yeah, but 1) socially Yukiko is already basically a member of the group from the beginning, so you’ve already got scenes with the four characters as a group before she disappears, and 2) she joins up at the end of the first dungeon, not a significant way through the plot-line of the second dungeon, and 3) IIRC P4s first dungeon is just generally a fair bit faster than P5s first dungeon.
It might be more that the first dungeon in P5 is technically the school, not the art gallery, while the equivalent in P4 is just Saki’s room with a boss fight. So you get up to four characters in the first full dungeon in P4, while you don’t get up to four characters until the second full dungeon in P5.
Well, P5 also has the heist prologue which I think is the equivalent to the Saki tutorial room, so I think it’s fair to consider the school/castle in P5 the equivalent to P4’s first full dungeon.
(And technically in terms of mechanics, P5 you actually have 4 playable party members in the first full dungeon, since Morgana is a combatant while Teddy is not – but I was originally talking more about social dynamics and wasn’t counting Teddy either when talking about P4)
The Intro of P5 Royal is very, very slow.
In addition to the heist prologue the school castle has a several in-game days spanning intro as well. Where you and Morgana at first, escaping the cell. Then several days just with Ryuji in a very linear piece of the dungeon, before finally Ann gets added to the party (4th character), the dungeon opens up, the “real world” opens up and the game finally begins being a game. It is 12 to 15 hours until you reach that point. And then the game was fun.
Until Memento gets introduced and all the boundaries and limitations get added in again with little to no justification. Morgana being the railroading train instead of Joker having an agency for himself is part of, why that sucked. That was breakpoint one for me, where I paused the game for the better part of a year.
Now you guys/gals IDK convinced me to give it another shot. Even though the museum dungeon was again better than any dungeon in P4G the “fun” hasn’t returned, YET. It might come back, I will see.
On the topic of Heat: Race 4 Italy didn’t end well. I drove too risky and had bad draws. Italy is the course with three laps instead of two. At the end of lap 2 I came in second. In gear 4 with no heat cards on the motor, 7 steps away from a 5-extra heat-corner and just 3s, 4s, heat and adrenaline cards in my hand. Downshifting two was not possible so a wipeout at that corner was inevitable. In race 4 of season three a wipeout means: You are out! No championship points.
I lost the championship by one point. Twenty-two to twenty-one. Damnit! But fun!
I looked it up and I think it’s the case that if you go into the dungeon you end up being too tired to do anything in the evening, and it takes up your after school slot as well. Are you clearing the dungeons/Mementos as quickly as you can? That would give you some more afternoon time and stop Morgana from bugging you about the evening time, and you need evening time because Sojiro’s link can only be done there.
I played another mission in the Trade Federation campaign in Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. The pathfinding in the game on its own is, as I guess is to be expected, pretty bad, as I had to take my group to get a control program and then decided to send them back to the start … and they went the other way around the big lake in the middle and found the other enemy groups that I was supposed to take on only after reactivating the rest of the droids. Oops. Still, I managed to get through it on Easy, but one of the more interesting things is that they gave me a cannon which made wiping out the one group that I needed to defeat to win the mission easy, as all I really needed to do was keep enough troops with it to defeat any ground troops that they sent and then stand off with it and take out all the buildings and turrets, as none of them had the range to hit it at its maximum range, and taking the turrets on with normal units would have result in me losing a number of them, while I didn’t lose any when I stuck to that strategy. Although it is good that things don’t carry over from mission to mission, otherwise keeping those pilots alive might have caused me some grief.
It took me about an hour to get through it, and that was enough time, really. If I was less busy, I might have played another mission, though, so it’s not as bad as Space Crusade where after walking back to the starting point to end the mission I was sick of the game and didn’t want to play another mission.
Still playing Pokemon X (and reading Stormlight Archives). Trained up a Poliwrath ’cause I guess that’s a thing I do in every game that allows it now, even though the allowed moves are terrible in basically every game since they did the physical/special split- heralded by most as the most obvious and best change with only upsides, it actually screwed over a ton of pokemon made before the split because it changed their *moves* so they don’t match the pokemon’s stats, and old mons only get updates at the whims of who knows who. The big gimmick of this game is mega evolution but there are so few and I don’t really care about any of them so it feels like I’m missing something even when I’ve got a team full of whatever the hell I felt like. Maxed out the Furret’s training points so it’s been able to keep pace with freshly prepared more powerful mons, but again the movelists or lack thereof means that it just has no chance of keeping up once the others get some more stats in, relagating it to utility and capture duties. . . which are still needed but less glamorous.
Current team is Furret, Nidoking, Heliolisk, Clawitzer, Poliwrath, and Sigilyph. The last one (a single-form psychic bird) has been surprisingly useful with better stats than the new psychic type the game provided (Meowstic) combined with the utility of carrying fly, just crammed two roles together. The Clawitzer is now a fully operational doom cannon, which I realized I normally find annoying as the carcinization of most mons, but in this case i’ts actually appropriate because that’s really the only thing it’s supposed to do, it’s pokemon ability and set of specific super moves exactly for that purpose. Nidoking is probably less interesting than Nidoqueen would have been, but its lack of moves mean it can carry Cut without loss and I get to occasionally use Megahorn, thought the animation used for it is hilariouisly the only one it *doesn’t* do the horn thrust for. Each game in which I’ve made a Poliwrath has been different, this one will be just phys attack and hit points, since the available moves are only 75-80 power they’ll never one-shot but the mon’s bulk isn’t bad. Heliolisk the zappy lizard just does his vampire thing, though having the added normal type means he gets bonus damage on Hyper Beam so I gave him that.
The rival has finally gone up to a gobsmacking *four* pokemon, in the fight just before the 7th gym (out of 8). Yeah, this game really is on easy mode even compared to most, though when he first picks up the Absol it’s a ridiculously overpowered team sweeper for the level. After kicking over the gym now it’s time to go save the world from idiots in red suits. In between shopping for clothes and tending the berry farm.
Somehow I’ve re-installed Hollow Knight, just got to the Fungal wastes. I forgot that there are enemies in this that do double damage, no wonder I hated the electricity area! But I suspect even years later my memories have made things faster and smoother, I beat Greenpath Hornet the second attempt. Got the dash thank goodness. But Brooding Mawlek I’ll leave for later. It was watching Path of Pain videos that reinvigorated my interest, again, of playing HK and actually beating PoP this time. Haven’t had the same feeling for re-installing Silksong, and gosh HK is just as beautiful and somehow more interesting even though I’ve played it before. Or maybe because I’ve played it before. The Geo really does flow in this game, I’m buying and buying.