T w e n t y S i d e d
I played Slay the Spire. That’s pretty much it, I did nothing else.
The only thing worth mentioning in Slay the Spire is that I got the achievement for killing the Transient before it disappeared.
This isn’t to say it was a bad week or anything, just uneventful.
How was everyone’s week? Hopefully eventful. But not bad eventful.
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
Control
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
The Witch Watch
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Clair Obscur Blockless concludes. The ending actually put up a wall; the basic enemies were fast and strong enough to kill my team in a round, so I had to dodge most of them. Then the boss killed me half a dozen times before I lucked my way past them, one hit away from death. And then… the next boss was stronger, and faster, and had mean status effects, and was too much to handle. It was the first time I had to leave the dungeon to go collect Pictos I’d missed, and then rebuild the team around the new Pictos. But it turned out one of those missed Pictos was absurdly strong, the new combination worked, and now the story has been completed with nary a damage evaded (and in under 30 hours, according to the in-game clock). So, on to the next game…
Clair Obscur Initial Equipment begins. No Pictos, no new weapons, no new skills, no level bonuses, all the dodges you can eat. Honestly, I don’t know how long I’ll be willing to put up with this one; this could easily turn into a slog of not enough damage output. But every time I look at those starting weapons, with their nothing-good-about-them auras, I can only imagine it’s an onion knight situation, where you grind them up to Level 33 and they’re the strongest weapon ever born. So… time to grind them up. The dumb way.
One Finger Death Punch 2. I think I’ve finally burned out on Brotato.
Maaaaybe load an old save and try to dump all your points in the starting weapons to see what happens? Otherwise you might end up having wasted a lot of time.
Or even just check on the internet, if they have some hidden secret ability people are bound to have found out at this point. I mean, you do you Syal, have fun your own way and all that and it is a theorethically possible playthrough as the dodge/parry mechanic makes CO a skill based game… just having to deal with those late game enemies that have hundreds of thousands of hit points with effectively minimal stats and no fancy builds sounds like a chore to me.
Played through The Alters. It’s a management sim kind of game, except all the people you’re managing are clones of you with memories of an alternate life path you could have taken because the rest of the crew died on arrival. The game is really well done – in each act you have some amount of exploring to do to find all the stuff on the map, a problem preventing you from advancing, and a whole lot of resources to gather, needs to juggle, and Alters to complain if you make any mistake (or even if you don’t). The “enemies” in the game are kind of meh. They look kind of cool but also mostly identical.
You get a pretty significant moral choice in the game at one point, and I
absolutely refused to put mind control chips in all the Alter’s heads, despite the problems with the alternative.You don’t get to have everything in the game. You don’t get to create every Alter, you don’t get to research every tech. In theory that gives some replayability, especially if you go the other way on the moral choice, but I think way too many things would be identical for that to be interesting. Which is fine, I completed the game and I’m happy with how it went. Also the special abilities on the Alters do not sound balanced at all – maybe they have other mitigating factors that make them useful, but I never felt like I needed
a shrink, a doctor, or a guard.I’ve also been playing Avernum 4, the newest remake from Spiderweb Software. The Avernum series are 2D sprite turn based RPGs with a lot of content, not particularly good art, and (usually) well written stories. I just generally like the company’s games, though I haven’t been great at finishing them recently (my attention span is not what it once was). This one is interesting because the original Avernum 4 was… really not their best work, and they knew it going into the remaking process. There have been some pretty significant changes to story stuff – the original Avernum 4 pretended there was any mystery at all about who the antagonist would be, after Avernum 3 where someone swears revenge on you and your little dog too. This one embraces that the player will have a pretty solid idea of what’s going on from the start.
I do miss when the games had Phil Foglio art for your various abilities. That was amusing. But I really can’t complain about all the UI improvements they’ve gotten over time.
I’m glad they’re remaking the second Avernum trilogy. I’ve played the (technically second release) of the first one back in the day and replayed them in the modern release but missed the window to play games 4-6 in a functional way. And yeah, there are workaround for a lot of the issues with running them but I couldn’t get some crucial problems resolved so I’ve started 4 at least three times, got frustrated partway through, abandoned the playthrough and when I felt like playing the game again had no idea where I was and what I was doing.
hmm… might be a good time to finally move on with the Avadon series…
Loved those Avernum games, though I never seemed to finish them. Good to hear they’re getting a remake.
I’m near the end of Atlas Fallen. The gauntlet is maxed out, the sundial has fallen and the arrival in Thelos realm is next. I’m just wondering, that I am missing some rifts to learn about Nayal. I fear that those are new game plus exclusives, which I don’t wanna do.
The third palace in Persona 5 Royal is done and I finally have all the traits on Lv. 3 so I could befriend Queen, the Shogi player and the reporter. I wonder if the fortune teller can be befriended as well. Somehow I need to advance my courage level even further to befriend the arms dealer. Fortunately hanging out with Doc gives a few courage points. As there is no meter available, I have no idea how many additional points are needed to level up.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel got new Dragonmaid support. Unfortunately in a time where I spend all my diamonds on Mitsurugi and Dragon Rulers. I refuse to buy those for real money, as the prices are ridiculous in Master Duel.
In World Snooker Challenge 2007 I managed to play my first Century. A 142 break, just 5 tiny points away from a Maximum. Sooo close. And I discovered that Steven Hendry has his own youtube channel now. The interviews with Steve Davis and Jimmy White were pure gold.
IRL I visited a concert of ZSK, Rogers and Tyna. Tyna, for my taste, added a little too much dub step in my punk rock, but Rogers picked up the pace and ZSK delivered a show that dragged even my old ass into the pit. Deafening Fun.
Yes, but you need a lot of money for that, if I remember correctly. Also if I remember correctly, the Shogi player gives really excellent bonuses in the dungeons, so she’s worth focusing on.
Also, you are coming up on one of my favourite characters and palaces in the game …
Fortune Teller: 100k for starters. -5k you get back as allowance.
I talked to her once, but didn’t pay up and reloaded the save game to advance Mishima (Phan site admin – I think he is called Mishima) instead.
In the base game, high level Shogi before Flu Season lets you cheese the superboss. I think they patched that out for Royal.
Looking at it, it’s really the follow-up and team member replacement parts that are valuable.
I managed to play stuff this week! First, I finally finished writing the entries for my Imperial Agent, and so started my Trooper in The Old Republic. The funny thing is that my concept for that character is someone who made a clumsy mistake in a performance for a Hutt and had to go on the run (two of the other characters were part of that as well) who stumbled her way into joining the Republic military, and ended up as a Commando with that massive gun, and ended up not being strong enough to carry the gun and wear the armour and while she was hoping they’d give her a smaller gun and let her keep the armour, their response was to take away the armour and make her keep the gun, so she’d be running around in normal clothes — using the appearance editor in TOR — and carrying the huge gun. And then the game starts her off, despite her being in a combat zone and supposedly a veteran, carrying the huge gun and not wearing armour! So it made my joke for me. I still changed the outfit, though, since I have a lot of Cartel credits and there are some nicer outfits there.
I also returned to Suikoden. The key to remembering what I was supposed to do, I think, is to get to a point where they send you back to the castle, so that when I start up again I remember to just find my way back home. That worked this time, but the game is not always clear about what you are supposed to do, so after some events — including an assassination attempt — I had no idea what to do and then decided to leave … and then found an elf washed up on the shore of the island, which kicked off the next phase. Also, the story continues to move very quickly, as in a couple of hours session I met the elf, went to where the elf village was, found out about a superweapon, went to the dwarfs, convinced them to make a weapon to destroy it, and then found out that the elf village was destroyed by it. I’m used to a bit more development, and Suikoden III was certainly like that, which makes me remember it even more fondly.
Also, the big difference in this game from others is the incredibly massive list of characters you can recruit, many of whom can be in the party. I did a fair bit of recruitment this time around, but the limited party size means that I can’t take most of them with me, especially since here half of the party was fixed, with the main character, the main character’s butler, and then the elf having to go along. I had brought along a character that had an Earth rune and so could do some damage with it and just after I leveled her up enough to be useful I had to remove her to fit the elf in, and there are other characters that I would have liked to play around with that I just didn’t have the room for. But with all that, I still do enjoy the game and will likely finish it, as I’m playing on the easiest difficult for combat and am JUST good enough at these sorts of games that it shouldn’t be overly challenging, unless I run out of resources due to the pathetic inventory I’m allowed.
I played Dispatch, episode 1 and 2 (episode 3 comes out later today). And, uh, nothing much to say about it, it’s a pretty fun game!
Starship Troopers:Terran Command has gotten the “territory mode”, which is a bunch of short (and not-so-short) procgen missions with limited units that allow you to get some extra decals.
They’re amusing, if mostly based on proper application of a particular unit (much like the game, tbh), but the inept atempts at portraying totalitarian propaganda remain hilarious.
Mostly main-questing in Kingdom Come Deliverance, which will now come to an end again as there are new sidequests and new available DLC quests. Sorry, Ser Radzig, I’ve got better things to do.
A little of Blue Prince, which remains a curious experiment but so far word is still out if I will keep at it.
I’ve also gotten into Chess, as in the board game, and let’s see how long I can ride this hyperfixation xD
Dug up Kingdom: Two Crowns on the PS4, and trying desperately to remember things from playing the original as a Flash game. Oh, and I took a stab at Blood Bowl 3, also on the PS4, and spent the entire time frustratedly trying to figure out controls that would no doubt be second nature to anyone who had actually used a console more than twice in their life… You know those annoying tutorials that tell you obvious things that you already know from other games? Those are for me. When you leave them out, your game is _hard_.
Finally got back to Hollow Knight, and seem to have abandoned Deepnest and ended up at the Collosseum. I’d expected the first two trials to be a walk in the park somehow, and granted I did die only once, but completing Trial of The Conqueror last night, it’s such a long sequence that by the end I was shaking a little. I went down to 1 health a couple of times against those two massive things at the end! Soul Catcher and Soul Shaman though, gosh what a get out of jail free card that is.
Rimworld! Still.
It’s been nothing but Rimworld for what, two months now? Part of why I haven’t been posting here.
Still it’s great that a 12-year old game has lasted me so long; I just add DLC or new mods everytime the gamplay gets old. The DLC are great, so far – I’ve got all of them apart from Royalty, which I’m getting soon – and they’re a good addition
Anomaly’s good for a standalone playthrough, focussing on the new content and leaving that colony once you beat it.
Oddysey is fantastic, adding loads to the base game and a new gravship that allows you to hop from place to place, only keeping the stuff you can physically fit on your ship, because space is at a premuim.
Now I find someone’s made a crossover patch, where the weird horror entities from Anomaly follow your gravship around as you travel. This’ll be good, and actually incentivise me to upgrade my ship as much as possible,
…that is, when I’m not adding more and more weird and wonderful races to the Biotech DLC thanks to the 10,000s of mods.
Snake people! Lizard people! Insect people! Slimes! Overhauled vanilla races! Moonjellies! Cow people! Androids! Robots! Yes, that’s two different mods providing different things! Angels & Demons! Norse mythology!
Seriously, it seems endless. Not all great, and quite a lot of weird stuff that’s’s not for me (one mod very clearly said ‘if you don’t get what this is, it’s based on a meme from China’) but yeah, it’s awesome and keeping me going for a long time.