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?
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
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 2018
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Dead or Alive 5 Last Round
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
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 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.