T w e n t y S i d e d
More Slay the Spire this week.
I’ve been slowly getting better at playing as the Watcher. My main roadblock has been that the only runs that make it anywhere near the end are usually focused on blocking. They have such little damage that it takes 20 turns to fight a regular monster, let alone a boss. Surely if I just do the same thing again I’ll get a different result.
What’s everyone else up too?
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
One upgraded Battle Hymn solves The Watcher.
Brotato again. Watasupise.
4TheWords may or may not have a bug regarding Attack value; I mistakenly started a timed quest, threw on a bunch of Attack items to get through it in time, and then took them back off, only to find I was still defeating enemies faster than before. There might be something going on where the value doesn’t go back down properly, because they weren’t expecting people to want it to go back down. Or maybe it was always doing this and I only now noticed.
Otherwise, I finally finished that massive quest to recruit a dragon that I’ve had active for like a month and a half, only to realize the dragon’s stats are a single point away from the default companion’s so the whole thing was essentially pointless. So now I’ve got a bull companion instead, with greatly superior stats; it took about two sessions to unlock them. Who would have guessed the early quests in this RPG are much easier than the later ones from optional areas. The downside being the tiny monsters max out the monsters-per-day much more quickly, leaving me to either stop at a much lower daily wordcount, or continue writing with no rewards other than the innate satisfaction of finishing a thing I was working on, which… I mean who cares about tangible real-world successes, give me my digital twigs dammit.
Done with Keeper and it’s much better than its first half an hour would suggest. On the one hand I understand having a slow start so you can ramp up things later rather than start at a good pace and then slow down to a crawl, but I think it’s a bit too much of a slow start. Still, the rest of the game compensates on how varied it gets. At its heart it’s still a puzzle game, but it does sink its teeth into other genres well enough.
The narrative is your run-of-the-mill “dark substance is enveloping our colorful world and its our job to get rid of it”, albeit a bit more confusing, but it manages to be emotional at times without uttering a word. And just when I was about to get sick of a particular narrative trick the game pulled the rug from under me and twisted it in a very welcome way.
But really the star of the whole affair are the visuals. This game looks drop dead gorgeous. More than once I saw myself putting the controller down just to appreciate the scenery. I wish more games did this sort of thing instead of the constant pursue for photorealism.
Also, I bit the bullet and started playing High on Life. It’s actually alright so far, though the humor has completely failed to elicit even a small chuckle from me. It’s all so damn predictable. The writer is desperately trying to sound funny by subverting tropes that have been subverted a thousand times before, and in the most obvious way possible. Thank God they added the option to reduce the frequency of the guns’ dialogue, because this would be otherwise insufferable. All of this is a problem for a game that sells itself on its humor. The gameplay is OK, though, so I’m not hating it. Yet.
And I’m trying Crypt Custodian, a top-down view metroidvania about trying to make it in the afterlife. It’s fun and interesting, but the map has this thing where some areas look accessible but when you reach them it turns out there’s a bridge missing or something, which seems like a weird oversight. Doesn’t ruin the game or anything, but makes exploration a bit more annoying.
Due to Life Being Busy, I only managed to Deliver Ance A Coming Kingdom some more, and all I did in there was spending A Lot of money on Pribyslavitz up to the point that only the Rathaus and the Church Renovations are missing, and I’ll give the place a bit of time to earn its own money for that.
So far it’s been a bit… one sided, with all that I did was spending money, and I hope that some more stories will arise out of this DLC. However, as a money sink it definitely does as it should xD
Got in another run with my Trooper in The Old Republic, doing Coruscant. I know that there are some missions there, but I didn’t seek them out and so ended up only doing the class story, but still ended up above the level cap with having done the previous Flashpoint and then using rest XP and maybe a Major Experience boost (I have no idea if they stack). I kinda like the abilities of the big gun, but find storywise that my character and the general clash an AWFUL lot, which in theory should get my character punished.
Also played more Suikoden. The game was not at all clear on what I was supposed to do next, only commenting that the doctor I needed was deep in the mountains, so I walked around all over the place trying to get to the mountains, and failing. Then I took a ship around just to see what I could see and stumbled across the plot point: I needed to hit the rapids before the place the doctor was staying, discover that my ship couldn’t make it through, and then find someone to make an engine that would allow me to make it through. I don’t recall ever being told about that.
Also, the game still fills the party at times, including filling up the entire party with the engine quest. This is bad in a game where one of the main draws is having lots and lots of potential party members, with abilities if certain characters are in the party all together. I tried out a few new ones anyway, but one — the dancer — was pretty low level and so kept getting knocked out, and another one with a Mother Earth rune which would be useful had the levels but her initiative was so low that she was always casting last, which didn’t really help me much. So I went with more or less the party I’ve been doing all along, except for the ones that I have to take. This is a bit disappointing, and is just one more reason why playing this game really, really makes me want to play Suikoden III (which had four sets of parties early on in different plots and so you got to play with more characters than you would have otherwise).