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?
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Skyrim Thieves Guild
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
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.