T w e n t y S i d e d
This week has been quite mundane.
I played a bit of Risk of Rain Returns. Nothing new there.
I also played a few Itch.io horror games. The only one worth mentioning is Microbial Sector. You are analyzing a bunch of objects and marking what microbes are present. that’s mostly it, it’s pretty short but got a good spook.
How are things for everyone else?
Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
PC Gaming Golden Age
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
I have finished Silksong. I’m not about to touch steel soul or speedrunning it but I’ve done most of the other things to do in the game. I did overall enjoy it a lot. Movement mostly felt very good, combat was interesting, exploration paid off. Favorite boss fight is still Cogwork Dancers, and I’m glad it had a harder version (though it lacked
phase 4, and I actually expected it to have a considerably more dangerous version).I understand some of the complaints people have with it. I went slow enough that I didn’t have double damage terrain for some of the most egregious areas, at least, though I had quite a bad time in the Cog area. Also, while the game does offer you tools to save up beads, I can see how absolutely annoying it could be to put a lot of effort into an area and find a bench or fast travel point and not be able to unlock it.
But people also complain about enemies doing 2 damage, and I disagree that there’s a problem there. If a boss did 1 damage it would mostly be a joke unless it was seriously rude in other ways. Healing is strong in the game. And 2 damage is generally on big enemies, bosses, or very telegraphed attacks.
I also think a lot of the runbacks are very optimizable. If you find yourself with a truly egregious runback there’s good odds that a) you missed a shortcut or b) you missed a bench. You basically never need to fight any enemies on runbacks. That said, Bilewater can go to hell regardless. I do not regret my cheese.
My most disliked enemy in the game was Savage Beastfly. When I got to its refight I just… left and went to do other things for a while. Which I could, because both fights are entirely optional. Another fight that took me quite a lot of tries was The Unravelled, but it turns out I could have trivially had 2 weapon upgrades when I fought it and instead I had 0 because I failed to see something obvious. That would have made quite a difference.
And when I was doing Coral Tower, I got really upset at
the third enemy gauntlet because I figured I was going to have to refight that entire set of nonsense for every boss attempt. And then I went back later with a clearer head, got past the third gauntlet, and found out that right then you unlock a shortcut to skip them. So sometimes Team Cherry can be nice.Oh, and some people are annoyed bosses don’t give rewards. Like, they don’t drop money, they don’t drop shells, only rarely do they drop items. A lot of bosses just block progressing. That seems like a valid complaint too, it’s nice to beat a boss after dying for a while but it’s nicer if you get something concrete out of it.
I also played through Strange Antiquities. It’s the sequel to their previous game, Strange Horticulture. It’s a puzzly sort of game where you have a bunch of unnamed weird artifacts and a book that describes them, so you need to figure out which object goes to which entry in the book. People will come in and say “I need to fight my inner demons”, so you find something in the book that might help and then you need to which object is a necklace and generates a feeling of calm, or whatever. A lot of the time it explicitly tells you the name of the artifact you’re looking for, and IMO it’s more interesting when you just get a description of the problem but that does take increasing mental load as the game goes on and you have more things. If you get it wrong you have to try again and if you get a bunch of stuff wrong you have to play an (easy) minigame or else lose.
Occasionally you’ll get a choice of artifact, which has some impact on what happens to characters. Generally I did like the game, just like I did its predecessor. It has a few different endings, based on how much you help people and how much you care if the world ends, and it’s not too hard to see all of them since it keeps daily saves.
I hit a point where I think Silksong is too tough for me to fully enjoy, at least the way I’m playing it which is under some time constraints. I’m sticking with it but using a couple cheaty mods (specifically ones letting me teleport to benches and respawn at boss). I don’t know if Team Cherry will be doing any content updates the way they did with Hollow Knight but if they do than maybe in a year or two I’m going to play the game fully vanilla.
I started Silksong, enjoyed it, but once I’d stopped after 3 hours of playing, thinking ooh nice I’ll carry on another time, I immediatly then got the feeling that I wasn’t all that interested in doing more of the same for another 20-100 hours. Now yes, I also fell off Hollow Knight at least twice before loving that game, at 1h and at 4 hours. And I’d even falled off replaying HK as an intro to Silksong, after 45 minutes. However since then I have gone back to the HK replay and am 20 hours through it and re-loving it. It’s so good. So does that mean I ought to go back to Silksong? Somehow I still don’t care about it. Nonetheless, while going through HK I’ve noticed it’s certainly not missing double-damage enemies. Exploding bats, exploding jellyfish, exploding seedpods, giant sentries. However at least bosses don’t do double damage (except in Godhome or whatever that malarkey is). So in the scheme of things, against Hollow Knight (excluding Godhome), how tough would you say things are, including the double damage? People talk as if there is loads of double damage about. And yes, Bell Beast, and even some of the starting mosshome area lads do do double damage as standard.
I just got to Act 3, and I’ve put more than 40h into the game. I don’t recall a single boss that doesn’t do two masks of damage. I feel like most enemies do double damage, as well.
But the problem for me isn’t just double damage. It’s the lack of health upgrades. 40h in, and I’ve got 2 extra masks? I’ve got 7 in total. And unlike Hollow Knight, there aren’t any easy ways to increase your health with charms, either. I’m missing 6 charms in total, and the health-related ones I can think of are:
– Your last mask can tank double damage. Once.
– You can heal for 5 masks instead of 3
– You can heal faster
I haven’t found a way to cancel the healing animation like in Hollow Knight. This means that you can’t heal just a little bit – you have to painstakingly build up a full meter of mana, and then wait 2 to 3 business days for the animation to complete.
Some other annoying aspects compared to Hollow Knight:
1. Some bosses have adds. Your mileage may vary, but this has always been a pet peeve of mine. I don’t mind stuff like the Mantis Lords, Agni and Rudra, etc., but I absolutely hate it when a boss summons small, annoying enemies. I haven’t played any of the DLCs, but I don’t remember HK ever having that problem
2. There are quite a few dark areas where you only see a small circle around Hornet, a la Deepnest. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue, but the vast majority of these areas in Silksong require you to do platforming, leading to quite a few leaps of faith… Let’s just say, I’ve never once felt guilty for using my “respawn at room entrance” mod
3. Fetch quests that make you backtrack to previous areas. Don’t get me wrong – backtracking is one of the most fun aspects of metroidvanias. But I prefer to do it because I want to explore the world. Not because the game just spawned an item for a fetch quest. The worst of these is when you have to kill X number of a given enemy, like we’re playing WoW in 2005. BOO-RING!
Overall, though, I’d say I’m enjoying my time with the game. Not as much as Hollow Knight, but I’m really liking the world and story. The story in particular is much easier to parse than Hollow Knight, and the world is just as interactive – even more so – than HK.
And Hornet is an actual character, with lines and motivations. I also love how – in the journal – she sometimes comments how suitable a given enemy would be to have as a pet :D
Hmmmmmm. Double damage with every boss. 6 masks being essentially 3 hits. Leaps of faith. I’ll see how I feel once I’ve re-completed HK.
To no-ones surprise I keep finding new side-quests in Kingdom Come Deliverance.
Theoretically there’s a main quest waiting for me, and I worry a bit about giving myself AC-syndrome, where the mainquest feels short and trivial due to me only touching it once *everything else* was accounted for xD
Did you play Mount and Blade back in the day? I remember picking it up and being surprised to realise I could now just go off and do whatever I wanted. And as a result I didn’t know what to do :D
Nothing new for me this week. Just mindlessly replaying old favorites. Work has been too busy for me to tackle anything new. Hopefully things pick up next week.
I ended up with some extra time this weekend and so decided to finish off Conception Plus, grinding out the last of the Star Maiden stories and then doing the final boss. I had thought that I read that at some point you could save between the final boss and choosing the Star Maiden for the ending, but that didn’t happen here. Instead, you can restart right before the boss fight — on the last floor anyway — and then continue that way, and while the boss fight wasn’t all that difficult I didn’t feel like going through it and the cutscenes again, and so went with the childhood friend’s ending, which really only paid off at all after the credits, and was a bit disappointing as it was short and not particularly meaningful, although the reference to the game at the end was kinda cute.
As for the boss fight, it has been so long that I can’t remember if I had the choice but I suspect that I am playing on “Easy” because even though my character hadn’t quite reached level 70 all I had to do was keep all my teams separated and the boss would only hit at most two per round, which meant that I could use my Mechunited Star Children and the MC to attack and use the other two teams to use potions to heal whomever got hit in that round. And if my MC attacked instead of using skills he got two attacks in between boss attacks, and each of those attacks did about as much damage than the best skill did, so it made things go faster.
As for the Star Maiden stories, they all had their eccentricities but all had deeper issues to deal with, although most of them weren’t really resolved in their stories. They were interesting enough, but probably not worth all the time I spent grinding them.
The game was all right but not as good as any of the Persona, and the combat is grindy and a bit boring, so while I’m happy to have played it I don’t think I’ll play it again, and likely won’t replay the boss fights to get all the Star Maiden endings.
Never Second in Rome (a caesarian centurion simulator, mostly about simplified duels) dropped an update picking the story after capitulation of Vercingetorix and moving it on to right after the battle of Pharsalus.
Writing is still good (and a lot of stat- or rank-unlocked extra paragraphs are added for bonus fluff), and combat mechanics remain enjoyable.
Still not feeling like Baldur’s Gate or Nightreign, I’ve made my way over to X-Com 2, where I proceed to get X-Com’d. Well, not in the traditional sense that most people mean of getting got by accurate percentage chances, but instead immediate cascading failure due to a tiny mistake you had no reason to expect was a mistake. Got dumpstered on the very first real mission as I moved a guy forward an extra inch to set up the ambush, revealing two more enemies I couldn’t see who immediately spotted him and killed half the party. Turns out I hadn’t even had the DLC enabled (because you have to “play War of the Chosen” in the launcher for that, which I think is very dumb), so restarted and made it through that fine. But most recently I, once again, set up an ambush, and instead half of my party is the one getting ganked- this time as I’d set up to shoot and then rush out and finish off a group, but instead they walked up and dropped a fire grenade and stick to the face of my medic while an unseen unit also stepped out from a different area and critted a low-level character to death. Because when I kicked off the ambush the enemies did their positional move and then it just. . . went back to my turn with one character action left. Clearly I need to look up exactly how these ambush/engagement mechanics work, because with no initiative or surprise round system you can lose an entire turn depending on what order you do things in.
I actually would have taken the losses, if they hadn’t ended up being 4/5. But having some random animated zombie deal 5 points of damage (when previous examples of zombies did 1-2 and guns usually do 3-4), plus an overwatch, meant the guy carrying the last person bleeding out got killed trying to enter the evac zone so only the one person who bailed the turn before that escaped (lesson learned I guess, keep someone else around to act as bait if needed). And since there are saves you can load, yeah I’ll just redo the level.
Otherwise, yeah game’s fine so far. I’ve watched nearly an entire let’s play so I know what’s up already. I specifically intend to at least try to do more of the main quest to unlock stuff that MATN didn’t until nearly the end of the game, though that’s understandable considering how the War of the Chosen just shoves all of the DLC stuff straight into your face as early as possible- obviously earlier than it should even, making mention of the Avatar Project before I’ve even found out it exists. And of course it’s extremely annoying trying to wait 1 day to finish a thing and getting 3 prompts before ticking over even a single day.
Basically, if you’re in stealth mode then everything is very friendly and you can overwatch a bunch of people and then have one take a shot or throw a grenade or whatever and the enemy pod will trigger and hopefully have a bad time. Just don’t move into the spots that tell you they’ll alert (some of which you can’t see, edges of buildings can be rough) and don’t get flanked and you’ll get the drop on them.
If you’re not in stealth mode then whenever any of your characters can see an enemy pod, that pod will activate, do their reaction (often moving into cover), and then it’s still your turn with anything left. So it can be very dangerous to move forward and reveal new spaces when you don’t have turns left.
When you have enough team size for it it can be really handy to have a Ranger with the ability to just stay in stealth who scouts ahead for you, since they won’t trigger enemy pods. If you know an enemy pod is just ahead you could even set up an overwatch by the team because if they walk into you you basically get a free turn, but missions have timers to discourage that.
Yup, that’s about what the game says, but I don’t find it sufficient. I suppose if the enemy is outside of cover and everyone has a line, those overwatch shots are better than letting the enemy just pick their cover and then taking those turns, but in practice results have been mixed. Avoiding the squares marked for detection works just fine, right up until an enemy you didn’t see walks around a corner (or you walk past the corner, as mentioned). Rangers supposedly have scout stuff (IIRC they can eventually get something to re-stealth 1/map), but they clearly added Reapers for a reason- and the Reaper scouted the first group just fine. But then a robot walked out of a different room in response to the opening shot (I was firing on what looked like isolated unit B rather than the three in pod A because B had a clear flanking line so I wanted it down first). That was a different pod mind you, but I was not expecting the first group to basically get a free double move into grenade.
It’s probably a just a perception fault, where if you break concealment with the last unit of your turn vs not having used everyone, the former means when you get control back everyone is ready so it feels like you got a “free” turn, even though that situation lets the enemy attack before you get control back. I doubt it’s actually giving out/taking away free actions, but on top of the rest of the stuff it just doesn’t come across very clear.
I do also have the scanner grenades, and I suppose I’ll have to make it a greater priority to toss those at foes that look isolated to find the rest of their group.
If you can see both isolated unit B and the three in pod A, and you leave concealment, you will activate both of them.
And it does sound like a perception thing, because yeah, enemy reaction moves interrupt your turn and when it gets back to your turn you’ll have exactly the same activations available that you had before the reaction. The way to get an extra turn up on the enemy is for the enemy to walk into your overwatch – if they walk into view while you’re not concealed, you’ll just shoot them. When you are concealed you can also do this but it’s kind of awkward – you need the enemy to flank you while you’re in concealed overwatch, and this is dangerous because sometimes one (I think it caps at one) of the enemies will attack rather than move when they trigger from flanking a concealed unit, explicitly to nerf this strategy.
This can be very powerful with a sniper sharpshooter and a reaper or ranger.
I can’t play XCOM now, mostly because of the ‘pod’ system. The enemy is actively shackled until you make contact, wandering around randomly – then a small number get a free move immediately once they notice you. So the best strategy is to be very, very conservative when exploring or moving to avoid triggering another pod.
I get it, it’s not a broken system, it works…it’s just so…computer-gamey.
After I modded XCOM 2 until it broke, I picked up Phoenix Point to get a similar fix, which controls the enemy more traditionally: all the enemies on the map have a basic AI and move on their turn. If they know you’re there, they will move accordingly, even if you can’t see them.
It’s so much more organic, and it meants you’re afraid of the enemy, not of triggering a game mechanic that puts you at a disadvantage.
Not that Phoenix Point is a better game overall; it’s just that one element that I liked so much more.
…well, that and it doesn’t have F&!%ing John ‘Redundant Information’ Bradford seizing control of your camera every 30 seconds.
I’ve been replaying Hollow Knight and ended up going more ‘completionist’ than expected – I’ve apparently gotten better at the game since last time I played it, (in retrospect, the fact that I 100%’d Celeste after playing HK probably helped), so some more stuff that was out of reach last time ended up being doable – e.g. I beat Nightmare King Grimm this time, while I was only barely able beat his first form after several hours last time; and beat Path of Pain this time. I’m finishing up some of the Godhome stuff and I’m playing around with Steel Soul and will probably attempt a speed run…
… but also I’m starting to feel like I’ve had my fill of HK and going right into Silksong may feel like more of the same… so all this “replaying HK to play Silksong” might not actually lead to me playing Silksong.
This is good to hear. As I’m replaying it to try to beat Path of Pain this time. And I didn’t even realise NKG existed last time but Grimm took me many tries just like you.
For my part, even starting Silksong before HK felt like too much more of the same. Yet I’m loving replaying HK itself. Maybe I’ll try for 112% then. I’d meant to just make a beeline to Path of Pain but man it’s a lot of fun anyway! Especially on a second run, now that I know what to expect.
I played No Man’s Sky, the Voyagers Update and its Expedition. After finishing the expedition I now have a Corvette that doesn’t suck as much and 18 million credits back in my pocket. But Corvettes have teeny-tiny problem within the jank system that is No Man’s Sky. Each building part of a Corvette takes a Tech-slot itself. So building one with a lot of parts means, that you don’t have room left to install the different Hyper Thrusters, Scanners, item transfer teleporters and weapon upgrades. Some are integral to progressing in the game. Thankfully you can switch ships easily.
And the jingsaw puzzle game Glass Masquerade 3. Not much to say about it that isn’t already said by name and genre.
In coop we paused Satisfactory to play one week of Scrap Mechanic: Raft Mechanic-mod. We now have guns and the quest to loot a warehouse. I think we need to grow a bit more ammunition before entering that.
No analog plays this week. I’m torn between continuing Spires End: Ragitaki or Tamashi. For Tamashi I would have to re-learn some things.
I rewatched the 2nd season of the Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex anime.
It’s eerie how the tone of that season feels like the US in 2025.