T w e n t y S i d e d
Not much has happened this week.
I played a bit of Risk of Rain Returns. Got gold on a few of the remaining Providence Trials.
And I started playing a bit of Risk of rain 2 with my sibling. Not much else.
What’s happening with you guys?
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
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?
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Brotato continues. Last week I finally got a character to Wave 50, which meant I finally saw the absurd speed increase at Wave 45 or so. So, now I’m calling Wave 45 “completed”, because that enemy speed boost straight up makes the game not fun.
Dicey Dungeons got a bump as an attempt to replace Brotato. It didn’t take; the game’s just a bit too random, and slow comparatively. I’ve never beaten it, but also don’t feel compelled to.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has not been played in two weeks and it’s safe to say it’s not going to be anytime soon. I’ll get back to it eventually, especially if I put the computer on a larger screen (the 32-inch 720p is doing it no favors.) But, it’s competing with a life goal at the moment. (I’m morbidly curious whether Clair Obscur would have held up against an active life goal. My gut says… yes.)
4thewords continues to help fulfill a life goal. It has not deleted any of my stories yet, despite saying it would only hold them for 30 days. I’m left to conclude they only delete them after 30 days of inactivity. It’s a mixed blessing; I was hoping to use the deletion as a natural breakpoint for editing everything before pasting it back in. Now I’m going to end up putting off editing anything until it’s finished, and having to do all the passes all in a row. This is definitely the game’s fault and not mine.
Player Unknown Battleground got a small amount of play, because friends enjoy it. I don’t particularly; it’s okay, it doesn’t feel broken or anything, but the firefights are so fast they end up far more stressful than fun. It also turns out my PS4 won’t be able to play it after November. Oh no.
I liked Dicey Dungeons for a bit and wanted to like it much more (the witch was very interesting), but yeah it just very quickly became a crapshoot after first tier or two of difficulty.
If you’re looking for roguelikes and dice and have an interest in monster training, might I suggest Dicefolk? I suppose I only played it for that initial 30 hour blitz, but there’s plenty more than that it stuff to unlock and check off (I think I does a “get every monster past the final boss tracker, so that’s a ton all on its own).
Because I can’t help myself I started a new playthrough of the Resident Evil 2 Remake. My original intention was to try and speedrun through it, since that’s the way you unlock all the infinite weapons, but I can’t help to go through each room’s nook and cranny. I enjoy exploration in this kind of game and I kinda hate that the way to unlock the bonus stuff is by ignoring it. Say what you will about the Resident Evil 3 Remake, but it’s unlock system was much better and I’m glad it’s the one all later games have adopted. Granted, there’s another way to unlock those weapons in this game, and it’s by paying for the unlock DLC, which is, of course, BS.
There’s a Steam sale going, so I’m trying a few demos to see if anything interesting worth buying.
I tried the demo for Cauldron, which is an interesting idea. A bit of a turn-based RPG but instead of random battles you deliberately pick fights with the dark areas around you, and beating those enemies clears the darkness to open the area more. But you don’t really level up by battling, you do it by playing minigames, and those are curiously where the majority of upgrade trees are found. It’s a very interesting concept and I’m considering buying it.
I also tried the demo for Idle Boss Rush. This is one of those odd idle games where you have to start doing micromanaging until you unlock enough stuff to be able to automate some tasks, so there’s a trade-off between leaving the game to play itself while you do work or whatever and let it advance slow or micromanage a bit and advance progression faster. The demo is actually pretty fun, and I was also considering buying it but reading some reviews apparently the full version of the game is terribly unbalanced and ridiculously grindy, even for this sort of game. I kinda lost my interest.
Got a lot more demos to try, so cheers.
I have indeed Deliveranced the Kingdom to Come to a point where I am running out of sidequests (which some of them being either skill-locked behind lockpicking-advancement or patience-locked behind hunting challenges), so I am… actually joining the main quest again for a while! Let’s see how that goes!
was free on the PSPlus, and so far it’s some nice puzzle fun, and the “integrating pictures into the game world” is a super interesting concept to base the puzzles on. I’ll probably do some more of that.
I also went back to (read: started over) , once again with the intent to FINALLY FINISH THIS GAME WHICH IS EXACTLY DOWN MY ALLEY BUT SOMEHOW ALWAYS LOST ME AAARRGH!
Anyway, I am dabbling around the starting planet for now,
died a few times and not once due to the cycle, and.. we’ll see.I also went through some demos:
Atomic Heart was interesting from a world building point, with all its questionable Soviet Glory, but I don’t think it would grip me gameplay-wise.
The Lift has an interesting premise (needing to fix up a.. space? station? to ward off creeping decay), and I might look into getting it when it comes out.
Hades 2 came out of early access and consumed my life for a bit. I played it some in early access but limited that since I really wanted to properly experience the release. Game is very, very good! It’s got an immense amount of things to do, and the combat is incredibly fun. Things are also really varied, depending on the weapon you use, the boons you get offered, and various other things. The music has some real bangers (see, for example, every Scylla song).
It has good options for upping the difficulty as you gain in power. Like in Hades 1, the most interesting difficulty increases are the ones that change boss mechanics, but in general it’s good to have options to make things harder besides “more health” or “more damage” (though you can also do those).
The game allows you to get some truly busted builds, which is fine. That’s a feel good moment right there and hey, it’s a single player game, no one else is losing from you being OP. Blame your good boon choices.
The game also has some “challenges”, and I’m not so sure about them. I use the quotes because a number of them are trivial and kind of just show off powerful boon combos, and I know I just said I liked that but it’s nice because it’s not super common, while it feels like the majority of the challenges do this. Maybe the hard ones unlock later than the easy ones.
Additionally, the last DLC for Rise of the Golden Idol dropped. The puzzles in it are, as always, good, and it includes a sort of Obra Dinn homage which was cute. I went in suspecting that it would connect the other DLCs together, and
that absolutely did not happen at all, but it did follow up on some characters from the first game and that was cool.The Obra Dinn homage was so cool. It had the crew list and everything.
Ah, I was waiting for all the DLC to come out so now the Golden Idol goes on the buy list. Might actually play Obra Dinn before I get to it though…
X-Com 2 continues. I’m ready to go after the first chosen and should be secure in my position for the rest of the game, but it did get tight there for a while. Dragged myself through to the first armor/health and weapon upgrade, after which the game seemed to immediately kick things up again. Used save/loads more aggressively to figure out if X actually works the way I think it should, and occasionally to veto when say someone gets spotted by foes that I have eyes on and looked like I should not have been seen by but the game decided some concrete wall is actually see-through. Made a robot ’cause I wanted a robot, figuring that would end up having been a bad choice, but instead it reduced the need for untired unwounded soldiers per mission from 6 to 5 while also just being a beast itself, the trick being that the big metal robot is not a walking shield wall. Nope, the robot is a glass cannon which you keep far back until it’s time to rush forward and leave nothing alive, then do it all again tomorrow. In fact I suspect the War of the Chosen balance assumes that you will build a robot early on specifically to reduce that fatigue problem, given how much easier it was to handle and how it has you start with the plans (I also seem to have somehow failed to activate the story dlcs, even though the clearly checked box said it included both the dlcs).
Which was important because the game was just throwing constant missions with ridiculous numbers of high powered enemies on rushdown timers while everyone was still beat up from the last one. Part of this only worked because I got some more missions with The Lost, as those who know the zombies are much easier to deal with than normal foes, particularly when you bring a gunslinger. And hoo boy did that boy sling some guns, I think I had him shooting like a full dozen in a single Faceoff on at least two different missions- one of them being the Warlock’s introduction where I actually doubled back and shot him down while fending off the super horde of lost to pick up a loot drop (from a mech he pulled out of thin air because reasons).
This meant I had to focus on healing and teching, which combined with a misread on the map (apparently so much as clicking on a region eats up a contact slot even if you don’t do the scanning, so I was basically holding a dead comms slot the whole time) and the game charging me intel to get exact coordinates for a facility I was two days from finishing the scan to hit, and the avatar project got to 2 bars from finished (IIRC you just have a to a super hard emergency mission, but with the constant reprisal missions I can’t expect to have a team ready for the hail mary). However, the game then gave me two covert op assignments to reduce it, I presume as a direct response to it getting that high, so the clock is back under control. I also rescued and recruited two more mid-high level soldiers which slingshot’d me past previous losses.
And I’ve also finally got the Training Facility built, which means going through every soldier to see what combo stuff they’ve rolled and. . . eh, most of it’s not that interesting. I’ve got a couple Specialists with double shots, far too many people all have Chain Hit available (and being 25 points most of them are not getting it), but the most interesting I think was already on Mox with his genius point total and getting the giant cone saturation fire attack.
I had wanted to make a point of getting the psychic lab going sooner than MATN did so I could actually use them (what with it taking forever for them to slowly learn skills), but it quickly became clear that this wasn’t going to fly. War of the Chosen is all about three new classes plus giant robot (well, three specific “heroes” and eventually you can maybe recruit one or two more, and you can only repair one robot at a time so you’re discouraged from having more), and the time and resources spent to get those just pre-empts doing psychic stuff. I suppose I might consider a more basic run of X-Com 2 just for that purpose.
There has always been Silksong. There is only Silksong. There shall be nothing but Silksong. On a more serious note that is not all I’ve played but it kinda feels like it. Between the difficult platforming and the challenging bosses and arenas the game takes A Very Long Time. I have somewhat gave up on a fully legitimate run, I might attempt that when I replay the game after the DLC (already announced) comes out, and I installed some mods. Specifically:
-a mod that lets me jump to any bench I have visited barring some scripted sequences, because I don’t have until the end of the year to finish this game and there is A LOT of backtracking;
-a mod that lets me resurrect in the room where I died as opposed to at the bench, because the people on the internet who tell you there is “always” a bench near the boss that doesn’t require a run up are full of nonsense;
-a mod that silences a specific screaming nightmare baby item that keeps making noise from your inventory after you pick it up until you resolve its obscure questchain, because I value my sanity…
As I’ve mentioned Silksong isn’t actually all I’ve been playing, I did a bit of Megabonk. It just came out, I saw a friend of a friend stream it and it looked like Vampire Survivors but 3D… that is essentially what it is, including a bunch of unlockables, characters with slightly altered mechanics (there may be more crucial variety between those I haven’t unlocked yet) and a ton of achievements to get. Good, cheap, mostly mindless fun, it’ll probably be in some bundle a few months down the line but eh, whatever.
I’ve also spent a couple evening modding but not actually playing Stellaris, by the time I got the mods to work and possibly play nice together both my time and urge to play it have mostly been gone.
And in co-op we have renewed playing Planet Crafter. A recent update not only added two new moons to terraform but also allows for interplanetary travel. Before you had to start each of the two available planets (Prime and Humble) as separate savefiles working from scratch. Now instead of building the rocket that ends the game you can build one that takes you to any of the different planetary bodies allowing you to carry all the unlocked tech and however many items you can stock in your inventory (two inventories in our case) with you. We’ve decided to start with our Planet Humble save as that one both has a somewhat more complex logistical chain and was the one we did more recently but we’ve also figured out we want to regain our bearings a bit so moved to the original world rather than one of the moons. Having the endgame technology with us made about 90% of the terraformation process a breeze and we’re now basically fiddling with stuff squeezing more efficiency from the system for the final stages. Rushing through the whole thing in just a matter of a few short hours was a bit disappointing so I’m hoping the moons have been designed to be balanced for bringing in endgame tech seeing how they’ve only been added with the update.
I didn’t play anything this past week, mostly because I was preparing to be off for a couple of weeks (but am still not really planning on playing anything) but partly because this weekend was taken up by sports, with the Canadian in me watching the first Grand Slam of Curling event and watching the Blue Jays win the division in baseball, and then also watching the only golf I can tolerate watching, which is the Ryder Cup, cheering for Team Europe. All of them were on at the same time and the latter two went from being blowouts to being close at times, which meant a lot of flipping between channels which is normally something I hate doing, but I didn’t really have a choice.
Checked out Pompeii: the Legacy, which is a nice friendly Roman citybuilder much akin to Manor Lords, but with clearer tutorials. Story is kinda pretextual, and while purist might grate about things like fulfilling a direct demand from emperor himself can be delayed as long as needed with no consequences, I for one actually enjoy a game that won’t hover any artificial clocks over player just to get them to a particular point asap.
Game is fully algorithm voiced (and I assume a lot of graphics are algorithm-made aswell), but in a single-dev project it’s, imo, an understandable choice.
In No Man’s Sky I’m on my way to the center of the galaxy to complete the main story line. On my way I found a Stellar System that has at least 3 planets littered with corvette parts. It’s the only Stellar System I renamed to re-find it later as Corvette Digging Grounds. Maybe I should build a new base there.
Glass Masquerade 3 including DLCs is done.
The coop adventure of Scrap Mechanic: Raft Mechanic concluded with several deaths in the warehouse until finally escaping with the caged farmer. And then a trip to the Craft Bot factory to manufacture the Sewing Bot and use the collected garment boxes. That lead to to the discovery, that we have way too few cotton.
Crashlander Mod will be next. I’m not looking forward to it, as all the different crafting tables and long crafting chains needlessly over-complicate stuff as long as you cannot automate it. But automation isn’t a goal and only barely possible in Scrap Mechanic.
And we played the digital variant of Istanbul. In the scripted short ways board I won. On a random setup board the easy AI won twice.
P5R is slowly moving forward. I haven’t reached the next major story part yet. Just the public clean-up event is done. The probably next party member got introduced and the night-life of main characters homeroom teacher got exposed. (My MC goes by the name ‘Fakename Alias’ as the story introduction to name your character was so bad.)
My MC’s name was “The MANN”, for the same reason.
Haven’t been into video games lately, so I hope no one minds me talking about some other notable stuff I’ve been involved in online.
Back in January, I was hired by one of my online animator friends, Nathanael Cameron (AKA Nat23 (same person who created the “Wavatar Land” series, mind you)), to do some storyboarding work for one of his own projects. That being the Unpublishables special “Pledge of Allegiance”, originally a script from The Squishables Season 3 written on December 4, 2011, but was never animated until this year. I storyboarded most of the animation, but not entirely. The storyboards I did for Pledge of Allegiance date from the 4th, 6th, and 21st of January 2025 respectively. The special was finally released on September 8, 2025, on the 133rd anniversary of the Pledge of Allegiance officially being published for the first time. Click here to go and check out the animation. :)
Also, I actually started writing a script for something special back in August. So far, I’m already 16 pages in. I will not reveal any further details on it for now.
https://youtu.be/ohRPAphhqyk
Above is the YouTube link to the Unpublishedables animation I mentioned earlier. Sorry if the old redirection link isn’t properly working.
It is. I even saw it pop-up on mouseover in the comments listing in the back-end!
I made a video critiquing Mafia The Old Country
I put a dedication to Shamus in the credits and linked to this site and your Patreon
https://youtu.be/YsWNAYhG-jA
Thank you on behalf of Twenty Sided! I watched the video; you did a great job (I will point out I had to really crank my audio up, but hit was clear when I did). I played the first Mafia game but never really got into the sequels. As others have pointed out, the new one looks fantastic. It seems like they had an idea for a story, but a list of game mechanics that they decided had to be included, and the two weren’t necessarily compatible. The poor object interaction was just sloppy, though. Bad testing (if any, but I’m sure there was. 2K would at least SAY there was, and I wasn’t there.)