T w e n t y S i d e d
I didn’t get to play many games this week. It was my birthday on Sunday so my family wanted me to go experince ‘joy’ with them. Grumble grumble.
Jokes aside, I did get my oldest sibling to try Slay the Spire. They’re enjoying it, which is nice, but it’s making me pine for the release of Slay the Spire 2.
I only just saw that Next Fest started. I’m probably going to go hunting for something go play there, and if I remember, I’ll talk about it later.
How is everyone else this week?
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
Wolfenstein II
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Batman v. Superman Wasn't All Bad
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Clair Obscur blockless continues. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get past the second and third bosses; turns out the answer was “use our atomic bomb on them”. You don’t have to worry about the Ultimate Sack’O’Potatoes Cannon when you can just hit it hard enough to skip the cannon phase entirely. This is convincing me that my full-defense builds are probably not optimal even for this playthrough; more damage means bigger atomic bomb which means skipping more phases and less damage incoming. But, it’s working, and I’m getting to appreciate how good the game is even when you tank every hit.
4thewords had another surprise; I got tired of beating monsters with fewer words than advertised, and removed all the damage modifiers, but it turns out at zero damage increase, you still beat monsters in fewer words than advertised. It’s like, three, down from fifty, but still, zero should mean zero. But, progress continues, though active quests have gotten very long already. Feeling that Free To Play grind more.
Brotato, of course. Nothing new.
One Finger Death Punch 2 got brushed off for a run up the tower; it really is a very fun concept, and the change from 1 where you can turn on every power at once means they’re activating nigh infinitely. I’d probably play more of it if it wasn’t in the same vein as Brotato.
What does blockless mean? Do you take all damage? Or do you only dodge things instead of parrying?
Taking all the damage is pretty similar to how I play. Eventually I’ll get the reflexes right and manage more than a couple of dodges per fight
Just take all damage. I’m using zero of the game’s four available dodges; just let everything hit me while enjoying the animations stress-free. I actually have a reason to equip the healing abilities this time. It’s still Act 1 so far, but it’s been going more smoothly than I thought. I was expecting to have a lot more trouble with those two early bosses; they’ve both got triple-hitting AOE attacks and I’ve only got single-target healing. But, nope, totally doable. Atomic bomb.
I think it’s interesting that on the one hand the game really makes it clear that parry/dodge is a core mechanic but at the same time there are skills that make blockless viable or even are very obviously designed for it, like extra AP on getting hit, or the fact that all healing is percentage based.
I’ve been comparing it to Final Fantasy 2, where it’s easy to forget how useful Defense can be because the Dodge builds never need it. My first run through Clair, The Strongest Ice Attack Ever was hitting for double my max health, but this time with a high Defense build it couldn’t even one-shot me.
The weirdest part is I’m still hitting the damage cap despite putting nothing into Might. Maybe the Attack build is the trap, actually.
May I suggest Slay the Spire multiplayer? I’ve had a ton of fun in chaotic four-person games. It requires mods, but it’s quite easy to do through the Steam Workshop (assuming that’s what you’re both playing on) and is generally quite stable in my experience. (Even with a bunch of additional mods, and even sometimes when people have different mods active, though it’s best to have the same ones.) The simple expedient of multiplying the enemies’ hitpoints by the number of players does a surprisingly good job of balancing it.
I’ve mostly been playing Stellaris, continuing in my quest to personally consume the galaxy through the vessel of my Class IV Behemoth, and lightly modded Minecraft on a multiplayer server a friend launched this past weekend. It’s noticeably a lot less modded than I’m used to playing, so I’m having to finally figure out some of these newfangled additions to the base game from the past five years or so. I will probably not be playing too much in the immediate future due to moving house this weekend though.
I have finished Outer Wilds, it’s excellent, go play it, no I cannot tell you anything about it, and you should not look anything up either I cannot stress how important that is.
The DLC, Echoes of the Eye, I could in theory had started from before seeing the ending, but it did not come up organically and it’s separated enough that it really doesn’t matter when you start it. It’s a pretty different experience, but so far it’s enjoyable in its own way.
I have also looked at a bunch of Demos:
Winter Burrow is very cute, as you play a little mouse leaving the city to restore their parents’ burrow. The gameplay is very similar to one game I know but have annoyingly forgotten the name of, with a crafting/survival focused loop.
Little Rocket Lab advertises itself as a combination of Stardew Valley and Factorio, and… yep. That’s what it is. Factorio-style production design plus Stardew Valley-style social life, which at least for me personally is in combination a bit too much.
In Tiny Bookshop you run a… Tiny Bookshop. You go to different locations with different buyer markets, you have to keep yourself stocked and decorated, and you people ask for recommendations. It’s been quite nice, and I might get the thing at some point in the future.
Yeah, I always recommend not touching Echoes of the Eye until finishing the main game. You theoretically could, but as you said it’s pretty separate and I feel like it’d just be a distraction to be trying to work on the DLC while also doing the base game content.
Scrap Mechanic: Crashlander Mod crashed in multiplayer. My friend couldn’t join me anymore. So we set that aside so he could build his own Corvette in No Man’s Sky. I transfered a lot of parts and money in form of parts to him. But nothing that cannot be found again. I concluded the Autophage plot meanwhile.
Solo P5R moves slowly. Madarame confessed now. I completed 3 new quests in Mementos and the next target was revealed in a “present day” sequence.
Looks like the guy who got MC in trouble at the beginning of the flashback.Autumn Sale lead me to buy too many games to add to the games in my backlog. One of them was Deck 13s Atlas Fallen. Because I wanted to play some fast melee combat I installed and played it. So far not bad, but could be better. Especially conversations with NPCs look very bare-bones.
I watched some Snooker on youtube and got in the mood. So I bought WSC 2019, the only licensed Snooker game on Steam. It is good and bad at the same time. The graphics were outdated even back in 2019, but you can at least recognize every Pro Player. Physics might be accurate, but the aiming aid is a bad, bad downgrade from WSC 2007. You just get direction of the cue ball after first impact. In 2007 an area was indicated were the cue ball might end up. The more power of the shot, the more uncontrollable and that area got larger. You could actually play Snooker with that. Now I over- or undershoot like crazy.
In PSR, you deal with the guy from the beginning sequence towards the end, although at this point you should have already run into him. There are a bunch of other people to deal with first, and a bunch of team members to recruit as well, including some fan favourites.
At that fancy restaurant they celebrated Kamochidas defeat, yes. And that paper this police officer put on the table to indicate what will probably be the next target had only a low res picture of some blond guy. I just assumed it is that rich moron from the beginning.
The rich moron from the beginning is actually bald [grin].
And there’s much more to him than what you see in the beginning, hinted at in the fancy restaurant scene …
I didn’t get a chance to play anything this week, which means that I’ll get an immediate chance to see how returning to Suikoden after a bit of an absence works. I think I remember that what I’m supposed to do is return to the island castle for the next mission, although I might be able to do some more recruitment first.
Finding myself in the middle of another Steam Next Fest, so I’m mostly dedicating myself to trying demos.
Having completed both campaigns of the Resident Evil 2 Remake, though, I have now started playing Subnautica. I’ve been avoiding it for long because I feel this sort of game requires a high level of commitment, but so far so good.
I have technically finished Silksong but I’ve done so just plain cheating. I was going along with the game up until act 3 but the ramp up in difficulty is utterly brutal, the bosses aren’t even the worst part, it’s the extremely long and unforgiving sequences that have ultimately killed my patience for the game. I might come back to it once it has the additional content that Team Cherry have already announced and maybe I’ll give it an honest try then.
In the tradition of Spooktober I have played The Hungry Fly and Happy Game, both very short, neither very satisfying. The first one attempts to be heavy with meaning but ultimately feels kind of weird and gross for weirdness and grossnes sake (also, strong arachnophobia warning, which to be fair the game gives on launch iirc). The second one has fun aesthetics but at the end of the day is just a collection of kinda random spooky stuff. I liked a lot of the individual scenes well enough but when I finished the game it didn’t feel like I’ve achieved anything in a satisfying way.
Currently in the throes of Next Fest. The Last Caretaker may turn out interesting though it probably isn’t going to be a game for everyone: you’re a robot tasked with “rebirthing humanity and sending it to space” after some kind of waterworld style apocalypse. The demo can be wrapped up very quickly by leaving the first installation on a boat asap but it hints at a lot of larger mechanics regarding scrouning of resources and managing their flow, it kind of gives a less cartoony Raft vibes (although doesn’t have multiplayer far as I can tell). There are enemies but the ones in the tutorial area can be fended off with the crowbar and if anything the fact that the trailer shows guns is a bit worrying. Other than that sooooo many Vampire Survivors clones, most of them bad to mediocre. If anybody has any recommendations to check out I’d welcome them.
Inched forward a bit in Pokemon X, finished the last (and possibly most tedious this side of Lt. Surge’s) gym, and found ice pokemon with the freeze dry move rather a problem. The two water types on my team would normally deal with ice just fine, but the freeze dry move is super against them, and any more foes with ice types will probably have the move because bespoke NPCs. It’s been past time to bench Furret for a while now so I went and caught a bajillion Eevees trying to find one that wouldn’t suck as a Flareon- because Flareon kinda sucks already but I want a physical attacker and that’s basically the only option. If i fill out all its stats it should be fine though, much like filling out all of Poliwrath’s stats helps compensate for its lack of access to decent moves.
Also started Cyberpunk 2077. I’m probably only a couple hours in by most people’s pace (the first part of the first main quest where they give you two jobs, I’ve done one of them), even though Steam says its way more. Because I played all of the backstories (didn’t like streetkid so I tried nomad, then corpo because why not at that point, rolled back to nomad), and have spent much time reading all the perk trees trying to figure out what I want to go for. ‘Cause once I actually do some combat the levels seem to roll in pretty fast. Interesting how you’re not allowed to change attributes aside from a once per character reset, but you *are* allowed to rest perks *as much as you want*. So by starting with an all-rounder, I can at any time just pull a bunch of points over to run and gun or hide behind cover or hell if there’s a car mission just suddenly have all the car perks. So I’m aggressively switching those about for the moment.