T w e n t y S i d e d
Once again, nothing much happening.
The only thing a managed to do was, finish the providence trials with each character in Risk of Rain Returns.
That’s about it. What’s everyone else doing?
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
The Strange Evolution of OpenGL
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
My Music
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
Stalled out on X-Com 2 since I felt like I got over the hump and haven’t felt like playing since. Probably mostly because of other stressors (oh look, work cut 1/3 of my hours, dropping me below the US “right to live” barrier, and people wonder why I hoard all my vacation time).
Picked up some dlc and reinstalled Risk of Rain 2 ’cause I felt like some shoots and continuous mentions of it here but yeah, just re-confirmed how every time I think about or play that game it annoys me even more. The opaque wiki-dive unlocks to get stuff it turns out you don’t even really like, the way it seems to pretty clearly move more towards multiplayer expectation with every expansion, the long runs which get more and more bullet spongey, etc.
Also picked up Vampire Hunters, which was infuriating for the first couple of hours because there was no healing, the potions refusing to work, until I went and looked online and found that you have to literally shoot them down before you can pick them up by moving through them (otherwise you move through them and nothing happens). But just like RoR, it wants me to jump through hoops to unlock characters (though most items are unlocked simply by leveling up the characters, well that means half of them are behind those locked characters). The runs aren’t quite as long, but even playing the dps character I’m hitting a wall where the dps just isn’t sufficient. I’ve achieved basic optimization and now have to rely on rng for the remainder, and interest there is about out too.
Maybe it’s time to pick up and finish off my Pokemon X run.
Hades 2. A lot of Hades 2. I got the credits and kept right on going. I’m a little annoyed by some of the sidequests, like
getting Odysseus to interact with Circe an getting to know Prometheus better, and I think I’m reaching burnout, but that’s because I’ve been playing so very much of the game because it really is very, very good.This has been a fantastic year for games (very specifically and exclusively for games), particularly indie (more or less) games. I expect Game of the Year awards to have some pretty tough choices, though of course everyone giving out those awards has their own biases and/or bribes to deal with.
I have, finally, getting stuck on Outer Wilds. After many years of desperately (and mostly successfully) avoiding spoilers, I will say the following things:
1. it is an excellent game.
2. go in with as little prior knowledge as you can and have your own moments of realization.
3. if you’re really stuck, google tends to point you to similar questions on the subreddit, where people give very vague but very helpful answers, which are vastly preferable to any walkthrough.
I have not yet finished the game, but I feel I’m getting close to the endgame.
In terms of Deliverancing Comes Kingdom, I have done one (1) main quest and IMMEDIATELY got sucked into more sidequests xD
Oh yeah, I’ve played Outer Wilds and watched like 3 people play it and it is amazing to see how different players piece thing together depending on which threads they follow first.
In No Man’s Sky I reached the universe reset button and refused to push it. On my next warp to a different system I encountered the Autophagen. A fourth hidden race in this game. These rusty old robots send me to a whole different quest line and now I’m mayor of a different village of Autophages and entered a new kind of system with new planets and materials. I’m on a deep sea planet now. Surprisingly satisfying.
Scrap Mechanic: Crashlander Mod in coop. We entered the ForTerra HQ for the first time. All the different crafting tables and convoluted crafting recipes are getting on my nerves. And for some reason I cannot scroll the recipes with my mouse wheel in these crafting tables. A driving seat (normal: Crafting Bot with Cotton, Iron 1 and Component kits) now needs a basic seat, a handling bar and a base plate. The driving seat and the basic seat are crafted in the advanced crafting bench, the handle bar and base plate in the metal working crafting table. But everything needs iron 2, screws and some pipes now and for iron 2 you need stuff from the chemical working bench and … Building a car is an ordeal now.
Glass Masquerade 4 isn’t as good as part 3 in my opinion. The theming of lead glass windows is stronger, but the art is worse. Often only the final picture reveals what it is you are puzzling together and on one oration, not even then.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links got Generaider and Shinobarons now. Two arc types I like very much, so there is a bit of grinding there to get these cards. The Generaider Deck is mostly done, Shinobarons not so much.
And finally Istanbul Digital edition. I’m getting the hang of this game now. Yesterday I won with flying colors.
I wasn’t really planning on playing anything, but while browsing to see if there was anything for the PS4 I found a remaster of Suikoden and Suikoden II which pushed me to finally get a PS5. I had been musing about getting one for years, but with those games I had played one of them on the PS2 (the PS1 version, of course) and had loved Suikoden III and liked Suikoden V, and so figured with those remasters available and few other ones available it would probably be worth it. When I bought it I also picked up the remaster of Silent Hill 2 and Dragon Age Veilguard (which was half-price and wasn’t something I’d heard a lot about, but I was willing to pick it up and run through it at some point and comment on it). But since the place where I got the console didn’t have the Suikoden games, when I went back I ended up in a different place and got the Suikoden games as well as Persona 3 Reload, which is what I was looking for in the first place.
I started Suikoden over the past couple of days, and I’m enjoying it. There are a few issues with it, such as them not usually making it clear where you have to go for a quest and so having to wander around the world map until you find it, and if you have to get back you have to remember where you started from. This may be an issue when I’m only playing it once a week after my vacation. Also, there are a LOT of “But Thou Musts” in the game, where you get the choice of a response but picking it only keeps cycling through responses until you finally choose the “right” one. The worst case of that was one case where you have to drink drugged tea but can choose to say that you don’t want it, but it cycles through three responses until you do. Since the claim was that the tea was bitter, neither the player nor the character wanted to do that, but there was really no choice. The game refers to it later when another thief tries the same thing, but that reference would have worked better if they had just had the characters take the tea the first time instead of giving the choice. That being said, this IS a Suikoden game, and so it is quite possible that sometimes you need to choose the “wrong” options and even choose them repeatedly to be able to recruit one of the 108 Stars of Destiny. I’ve probably already screwed one of them up by not showing mercy to the evil military commander, but I didn’t care for the guy and so will accept the consequences of not getting everyone.
Poison is devastating in this game, as it will eventually wear off but if you have it active on the world map it drains hit points really, really quickly. Also, the game is not particularly good at telling you what you need to do to advance the plot, on a couple of occasions telling you not to do something only for you to actually have to do it to advance. There’s also a completely unfair dice game that you need to recruit a character to advance the plot which I needed to save scum, which meant closing the game and reloading. And finally, the plot advances REALLY quickly compared to the other games, as in a couple of hours I’ve been betrayed, had a character die, and become the leader of the Resistance. The later games let you settle in and get to know the characters more before advancing the plot that much.
Ultimately, in my memories at least I like III and V better, but I’m enjoying it so far. For the most part I’ll be focusing on PS5 games for a while, which might mean that I drop Age of Decadence for this year.
Still going through Resident Evil 2 Remake, now in the second scenario. I complained last time that most unlockables require speedrunning, but there’s one of them that doesn’t: the infinite knife can be obtained by destroying some figurines throughout the game. Problem is, some only show for each of the playable characters and not for both, and I missed exactly one that can only be found by Claire, so now that I’m playing with Leon I cannot get it. I’d need to start another scenario with Claire and play through to the very middle to find the missing one. You just know Capcom did this shit so the “unlock everything for $5” DLC looked tantalizing. Sigh. I have everything unlocked on PC, but I’m playing on Xbox now. If I could only transfer saves, smh.
I’ve been playing Is This Seat Taken?. It’s a very fun puzzle game where you have to locate people in seats (in a bus, a theater, a party, etc.) according to their requirements, making sure they don’t clash with the requirements of others. Very addictive. One of those “just one more level” kind of game that leaves you spending much more time in it than you intended. Always nice to see a developer’s debut game being so clever and imaginative.
Also playing West of Loathing after several years of ignoring it. The stick-figure style of art wasn’t unappealing or anything, but for some reason it was one of those games I kept looking at and thinking “Eh, some other time”. I’ve finally started playing it and it’s actually quite fun. It’s more of a point and click adventure with combat than an actual jRPG, but I guess still technically counts as one. It’s pretty funny too, and it rewards exploration, which is something I’m always for.
And I just heard Sandfall is working on some free DLC for Clair Obscur Expedition 33, which includes a whole new dungeon and new enemies. There are not many details, but they showed a picture that suggests it might be a bit of a prequel to the events of the game. No word when it’s out, but that’s going to 100% warrant a whole new playthrough for me in the future.
Restarted Clair Obscur, trying a fully blockless run. So far I’m stuck on the very first boss, and have no idea how I’m getting past the second or third. I’ll probably have to make a point to grind.
Started playing Stellaris again, which was a bad idea since I’m moving house in two weeks. Decided on a Devouring Swarm playthrough with The Wilderness origin (where you’re basically a sapient planetary ecosystem) on a max-size galaxy to try to get a few achievements. I’ve had a few Devouring Swarm runs (where you’re just out to eradicate all other species in the galaxy) fail because I’m not aggressive enough and get dogpiled by neighbors, so I leaned into it hard this time and owned something like a quarter of the galaxy by the mid-game. Which was a lot of fun, especially figuring out how the new biological ships from the previous expansion worked.
Then the Mauraders a few jumps from my home system (the only Marauders in the galaxy, I note) unified under a Khan and I had to fight them and their freakishly large fleets off single-handedly…which was a blast! Nothing like an existential war to get the creative juices flowing. I actually managed to fight them off with the help of a stealth fleet scouting for and helping ambush the Khan twice (while simultaneously having several planets ravaged by a galaxy-wide Voidworm epidemic that I couldn’t spare any ships to fight), but the Galactic Council decided now was a good time to declare me a galactic crisis and declare total war on me. (Despite me being the first empire to come up with a cure for Voidworm parasitic infection, which apparently stopped the crisis for all the rest of the galaxy too.)
I had a few ideas to survive (like using my subterfuge specialization to start some proxy wars from the latest expansion, and maybe retreat to the L-cluster and try to hold the line), but it wasn’t looking good…and then I ran into a repeatable crash on a specific date. Which is the price you get for playing on an open beta, I feel, and it’s honestly probably good that it stopped it me playing so I can get back to packing.
So, the beta branch got updated and pushed to the main branch, and it fixed the crash I was having so I’m back to Stellaris again. I lost about a third of my territory in the initial push by the rest of the galaxy against me (realistically I was just too big and spread out to even bother trying to hold it), but with a smaller territory and fewer chokepoints to defend I’ve actually been managing to hold them off, tenuously. There’ve been some offensives where I’ve had to recover a few systems here and there when they make pushes, and I’ve been running at 2–3× over my naval capacity for decades with fleets stretched to the breaking point around my perimeter, but I’m actually mostly stable despite being in a never-ending war with the rest of the galaxy.
I finally opened my L-gate only to find that someone else had apparently been to the L-cluster first, but since they hadn’t bothered to claim it I quickly built starbases and fortified the Terminal Egress system to prevent people warping into my backyard. I also tried out the new Behemoth crisis ascension from the BioGenesis DLC that came out earlier this year, and have been slowly growing and sending out space megafauna to grow fat by eating other people’s planets. They want me to be the crisis? Fine! I’ll be the crisis! :) Still no idea if this will end in victory or defeat, but it will be epic either way.
Just finished Silksong. Got the True Ending plus the
Mr. Mushroom, and felt extremely disappointed. It made me super happy that I used the auto Silk refill cheat on the final boss fight.A big reason for this was that I absolutely despise Lace. Probably because you fight her as a boss 3 times and every time she kills you, she lets out that annoying fucking laughter. Every. Single. Time. And what does the True Ending close on? That same annoying fucking laughter. Truly infuriating.Also, the entirety of Act 3 involved all the characters reckoning with the end of the world. Why doesn’t the ending show how at least some of them react to the world not ending?And don’t use the argument of “it’s not a story that’s supposed to have a happy ending”. The framing of that scene clearly implies that we’re supposed to feel happy.The tone of the game in general is much more optimistic that Hollow Knight. E.g., in HK the cute things you were saving end up getting eaten once you “save” all of them. In Silksong, the cute things you save throw you a party. It’s a grim world, but we’re clearly supposed to feel good about saving it. But I don’t feel like I saved anything.And all the work I did for the Mr. Mushroom Ending felt utterly pointless. That scene felt like a slap to the face, honestly.Other than that, I’ve been playing Roblox with my 9-year-old sister, which is actually surprisingly fun. It’s incredible how good some of these games actually are! I see why some of them have tens- or even hundreds of millions of players. We’ve also been playing Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. Such a cute game! We’ve nearly beaten it, which means I need to start looking for a new cute, kid-friendly co-op game.