T w e n t y S i d e d
This week was a bit more Slay the Spire, with a few other things on the side.
First off, I finally beat the game as the Watcher. I got a Pressure Point build going while also removing all of the attack cards, including Wrath. I also got Calipers early on, so I just focused on blocking with the occasional Pressure Point for damage.
I also attended the MTG Prerelease that Ethan posted about the other day. I think I finally have at least a lose grasp of the many, many intricacies and rules of Magic the Gathering. Which means that I have a better understanding of just how much more everyone knows than me. I think out of the 24 matches I played, I won 2. On the other hand, most of the people I played against were actually really nice, and willing to explain some of the more niche rules as they came up. Overall I had fun, and I might go to another Magic event sometime.
Lastly I’ve for some reason decided to play a bit of Half-life 2. I guess I’m just achievement hunting at this point, there’s a few achievements that I never bothered to get, and I don’t really have any other reason to play it.
So, How’s everyone else this week?
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
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.
Crypt Custodian seems to be a much longer game than I expected if the percentage of completion in the start screen is to be believed. Yeah, it could be taking into account side quests too, but part of the main quest is gathering 10 friends and after hours of play I only have 2. Don’t mind it, as the game is fun, but I sort of picked it because I expected it to be shorter.
Still playing a bit of High on Life here and there. It’s not trapping me, but it’s serviceable.
The one thing that’s trapping me, again is Bloons TD 6. I’ve played this game for hundreds of hours on PC and now I got it on mobile. As far as I know there’s no way to transfer progress, so I have to unlock everything again, which means more and more hours. As this game is extraordinarily addictive that consumes a lot of my day. It’s not my favorite Tower Defense game from a gameplay perspective (that’d be Defense Grid), but it is the most accessible and has the most amount of content than any other I’ve played.
Educational events hindered me to post the last two weeks. At least, now I can organize a workers council election and know how the EU defines what an AI is. It is not very precise, that definition.
In the meantime I completed Atlas Fallen – a fun Brawler/Action Adventure, that gives you a ton of different abilities from which I used exactly 4 to complete the game. But the Open-World busy-work led to those abilities, so the busy-work didn’t just give X percent of Y for Z amount of time, but actual gameplay changing stuff. I like that game design.
Then I completed Song of Nunu. Another Action-Adventure, but very short and very linear this time. It is set in the League of Legends Universe, somewhere up north. It was okay. Very light combat, some easy puzzles and clunky climbing/jumping passages due to clunky controls and the fact that it is very, very linear. Going back to areas where you might have missed a secret was often times impossible. And, as there is only one save slot that is just a checkpoint save slot without any way of manual saving, stepping into the next cutscene ended any exploration.
Now I started Hogwards Legacy. I have next to no experience with the Wizarding World. Looking around is a delight with tons of details Harry Potter fans might enjoy even more than me. My 10 year old PC in the recommended settings (High) had tons of framedrops. Middle setting run better but some effects – like markers for mission starting areas – are missing.
In P5R the Yakuza boss is down and now some “hackers” attack the Phantom thieves, who should openly disregard, that they are just – which makes no fucking sense at all. And all the characters around act very, very stupid and make assumption that are in no way backed by facts and the cat blocks that minimal gameplay again for no good reason – and I’m so short of letting that game rest again. This time for good.
I will say you’re well past the point I expect people to make up their mind on Persona 5. If you’re not on board for our plucky teenagers taking down Anonymous, well, it’s not getting better moving forward. Although the fourth palace is neat.
In this case, though, how that all shakes out is worth playing through, in my opinion. But you’d have to like the existing characters to really get it, I guess.
I like some characters (Doc, Queen, Skull is a mixed bag) and dislike others (Sae, Akeji, the Twins) but the good parts do not overshadow the bad parts. Like a main story with a lot of logic holes and the railroading to advance said main story keeping me away from the good parts.
I’m almost 60 hours in and the supposedly main story bad guys
(Bald guy from the beginning, Saes boss, School rector, Mister X they talk to on the phone, maybe Akeji – It didn’t slip by me that he could hear Mona talk about the amusement park)are not intriguing enough for now, 60 hours in. You mention “Anonymous”, the game did not till this point.I made up my mind on P5R. Its a bad game with some good parts. But you know, we are here on Twenty Sided, were we like to talk about those things.
I’d say P4G was written much better with lower stakes (Just individual people, not society as a whole) and higher stakes
(Nanako)at the same time.Medjed is a naked stand-in for real-life Anonymous. They’re the villain of Part 4.
I can buy the opinion that P4G was better, because I put out a top 50 favourite games on my blog a while ago — I had done it in 2014 and redid it in 2020 after games like P5 had come out — and Persona 3 was 1, Persona 4 was 2, and Persona 5 only made it to 5. I think P5R is more of a slog than vanilla P5 was, too, so that would definitely have an impact.
I have to say that I find your comments on P5R very amusing, because I read them and always think “Wait, I don’t think I remember that!”. We have VERY different perspectives on what happened in the game [grin].
I didn’t play anything this week, because my gaming time was taken up with the lovely passtime of raking leaves. I have a number of pine trees and a tree with big broad leaves in my backyard, which means that over something like a 50 x 50 area I get four huge piles of leaves to pick up and put in bags. This will be another test of if I remember what I’m supposed to do in “Suikoden” after coming back to it after a while …
“Caught” poachers and became Master Huntsman in KCD, and then did some official hunting.
Also dabbled a bit in Stray, and so far I like it. I’m pretty much immediately after the tutorial, so let’s see how that goes on.
Pokemon Legends: Arceus is on break while Desert Bus for Hope is running, though I also finished reading Rhythm of War before that so I’ll be quite ready to get back to pokes after the break. Played a little more Pokemon: Ultimate Fusion (a romhack with mashed together pokemon, though if you try searching for it you’ll get mostly results for the RPG Maker game :Infinite Fusion instead) while listening to the stream and finally got to some evolutions and decent mashups again.
It’s been a couple of weeks! I did manage to try a little Inscryption and got into the winter map after a few runs, but it hasn’t really grabbed me. I mean, I get that the conceit of being trapped in a weird escape-room-style cabin while also playing a pretty basic roguelike card battler is better than just playing a pretty basic card battler, but after all the hype I was expecting something a little more. Maybe there’s something else waiting?
Speaking of how that game hasn’t really grabbed me, I’ve also gone back to Dungeons of Dredmor again and picked up a few achievements. It’s been fun, especially after I found a random artifact-level staff weapon that’s been allowing my mainly-mage character to blast through hordes of monsters in melee combat. Inventory maintenance is still kind of a pain, but I might actually make it all the way to Dredmor himself this time.
And of course in the interstitial spaces I’ve been playing more Battle for Wesnoth. I was starting to get into a rut with my chosen tactics even with the factions randomized, so I switched to a different Era (modded faction set, essentially) and it’s been fun just playing through each to unlock all the level-ups and learn the feel of the new factions. This game really is evergreen.
Brotato, shock of shocks. Actually there was a bit of a surprise; the new devs added a Vorpal Sword, which has a chance to kill on hit, and it turns out that actually works on minibosses. So that was neat.
Clair Obscur Initial Equipment managed to clear Act 1, and is probably going to stop there. The multi-stage Act 1 boss took multiple hours to defeat, due to lack of damage output and also lack of damage intake meaning I had to successfully dodge accurately maybe two dozen times for a winning attempt. That’s enough of a victory to call that challenge good until everything else untangles.
Metaphor: ReFantazio has gotten past the first tutorial dungeon into the second tutorial dungeon. I don’t know exactly why I want to replay this one (I will blame it on watching Paprika recently) but I’m now running through the adventures of Chack and… I don’t remember what I named myself this time. I’ll find out when I get out of the tutorial.
4TheWords is hitting burnout; I’ve started too many projects and took on too many quests, and today is the first day I’ve let myself meet the daily word requirement by just doing a journal entry. Although I’ve managed actual story progress today, so it’s not a complete defeat. But, yeah, too many projects and too many quests. Got to get this thing corralled.
Slay the Spire got a round out of me. Set the thing to Ascension 0 and made it to the Heart, which proceeded to reduce me to paste. As expected.