T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been once again too busy to play anything except a little bit of Slay the Spire.
Mostly jut slamming my head against the wall trying to get past ascension 13.
I have also kept playing a bit of Half life 2. Nothing really new there, except that I realized that you can take DOG’s ball thru Ravenholm. It’s not very useful but it’s fun that the zombies try to attack it instead of you.
I’m also posting this late due to internet troubles.
How is everyone else?
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
The Strange Evolution of OpenGL
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Metaphor: reFantazio is showing its teeth on Hard Mode here, a lot of stuff is capable of killing the entire party in a single bad round. Past the first major dungeon*, and the surrounding side events. I’m reminded how unfinished this game feels;
there’s a cutscene here that introduces four very prominently-designed individuals, and I know they do nothing in the game at any point. It’s like there was supposed to be a whole other branch to the game that didn’t get finished in time. But, still fun to play, especially this early.Demonschool is a stylish Tactics game with something of a Persona 1 vibe, and non-standard combat based around attacking consecutive lines of enemies (with some Into The Breach mixed in). It’s definitely not taking itself seriously (“When I grow up I want to be a bench,” says the first talkable NPC in the school) but it’s my kind of crazed so far. Just past the first homework assignment, and already I’m getting less-than-perfect scores in fights. I imagine this is going to get hard.
4TheWords has passed the 90 Day mark, and is officially downgraded to Videogame status; I’m going to continue it when I feel like it and not worry about maintaining that daily streak anymore. Already I am sleeping better because of it.
Brotato Schmotato.
*(It was a bad idea to give the Mage the ability to heal magic in dungeons; now the ‘optimal’ way to clear a dungeon is to teleport back to the beginning and refight tiny monsters until your magic replenishes.
Although this one gives you a LOT of extra time so optimizing doesn’t matter.)It’s Atlus. reFantazio will get the Golden/Royal/Strikers treatment within the next two years to sell it again while completing the unfinished ideas.
Oh, probably, but the original version Persona games I’ve played (…which I guess is just 4 and 5) have not felt like they had missing content or truncated storylines, while Metaphor has at least three different ones (
ha ha, charade it is).Although one of them might just be a stylistic choice:
It has occurred to me that the heroes don’t directly kill the (named) human enemies, the enemies either kill themselves or die to monsters; so the bit where “Oh, he got away” only for him to unceremoniously die offscreen to a monster much later MIGHT not be a rush job.But it sure feels like a rush job.My main focus was on Hogwards Legacy. It continues to be fun and visually pleasing. I finally unlocked the broom and discovered the controls to activate it. The story till now is okay at best. Ranrok and Rookwood are mostly off-screen villains and not that appealing for now, but the “old magic” plot gears up a little bit with the first trial done.
My main nitpick as of now is the German dub of the female main character – which is often too soothing/whispering. I pitched it down in the character creator, but that pitch is not applied everywhere, so it’s off putting in every switch.
In coop No Man’s Sky continues with the expeditions. Yesterday I completed the current expedition and unlocked that organic ship. Now to help my friend to unlock that goal as well. Luckily he got that deep sea in radioactive waters stuff done already.
No P5R play this week. Hogwards claimed all the available time.
Tabletop wise Spires End: Rangitaki is done. A solo choose-your-own-adventure style game with lots of dice. I don’t like dice as a game mechanic and the told story had its wholes. Like I somehow acquired the “dark-sight”. No idea when. Overall it was okay for a one time playthrough.
Also in play with some friends Heat, So Clover and Point Salad. Heat and So Clover where new to them, but it went over well.
I managed to get in another short session of Suikoden after being away for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t remember where I left off but fortunately I had saved at the town near the castle and so figured that I was supposed to go back there. And then I remembered why I had done that, because I was at a battle and didn’t want to do it, but couldn’t remember where the spot to save in the castle was. So I did the battle and again after guessing wrong the first time and winning a close battle reloaded and tried it again, doing much better, and then there was a short dungeon where I was in bad shape — low on HPs to start and low on medicines — but then discovered that I could just leave and so wandered around buying stuff and sharpening weapons before going back and completing it. And then the next part was another battle, so it was back to the town near the castle to save and quit.
It’s still the case that every time I play the game, I keep wanting to play Suikoden III instead. I don’t mind the game, but it’s not thrilling me as much as I would have hoped.
Been playing Returnal, which is a 3rd person shooter metroidvania bullet hell roguelite. Gotta catch all the genres! I’m enjoying it but wow it can be hard at times. The enemy attacks are generally pretty clear, but some of them are very fast and sometimes there are a bunch of enemies all shooting at you. I was pretty proud when I got through the second and third areas of the game in one try total after being stuck on the first one for a while, which means I
beat Act 1.The enemies and bullets are clearly visible but the terrain differentiation isn’t always great. Like, maybe I should increase the brightness, but I’ve walked into water like 4 times because it looks a lot like ground. It’s also generally pretty clear when you’re missing the relevant ability to go somewhere… except that there are occasional gates with goodies behind them and I figured there’d be a power to get through them but no, there’s actually just switches I just never noticed before. Whoops!
The story is pretty incomprehensible so far, which I think is intentional because the main character sure doesn’t know what’s going on. I’m pretty sure it will actually go somewhere. She’s left a lot of corpses and a lot of audio logs and some of them are pretty unhinged, and to be fair if you keep dying and starting over and finding your own corpses (most of which you do not remember leaving) I think becoming unhinged is a reasonable path to take.
As always, a little skirmish in Battle for Wesnoth hits the spot.
This week I started playing Inbento, a very nice and surprisingly extensive puzzle game whose cute presentation hides some really fiendish order-of-operations puzzles. It does kind of bother me from a verisimilitude standpoint that putting a new food item into the box on top of another item performs a Dwarven Atom Smasher and annihilates the previous item from existence, but I can also see why it works that way for game reasons. Fortunately, the bento are just kind of incidental to the actual story being told in the cutscenes, which so far is basic but nice.
In Dungeons of Dredmor I got to Dredmor himself and hit a brick wall. It doesn’t help that he was right in front of the door when I opened it and it’s been hard to maintain enough distance to hit him with my best ranged firepower. I did save before opening the door (and I’m not playing on Permadeath this time through), so maybe it’ll work if I use geomancy to tunnel around back and hit him from another angle.
Picked up the 40k Rogue Trader game. I mostly like it? It’s got lots of the CRPG stuff I love but… I’m like 25 hours in, and my psyker wielding a laser sniper rifle is still wading through hundreds of rebellious peasants with knives? It feels a bit mean, to be honest. I’m hoping I’ll graduate to some vaguely interesting opponents at some point.
Got my computer set up again over the weekend after it being in pieces for a week as part of a (very drawn out) move. I’ve been busy cleaning the old place so haven’t had much time to play, but it’s been Minecraft, Ark Nova, and I’m looking forward to starting a Stellaris run with the new Infernals species pack. My (seasonal) job also ended last Thursday (I’ve got something lined up for next year, so not a worry), and I’m looking forward to having time to settle into the new place and catch up on some gaming that I’ve had to deprioritize the past few months.
Not a lot, for lack of time and motivation.
However, Pribyslavitz is mostly renovated in KCD, and I am at a point where I might need to do a bit of main questing again as I am running out of side hustles.
I have also tried my hands again at the demo for News Tower, and… I dunno. The whole thing feels like it should be pretty much down my alley, but the core loop is also very much not-gripping-me. Maybe I’ll go a bit further and see if anything interesting happens.
Not games but I’ve started My Hero Academia again for the third or fourth time to catch up. I can’t just jump back in after a year or more hiatus, I’ll have lost all emotional connection and through-line. Somehow last time I dropped off whichever series I was on (5?) and have had a couple years lapse minimum. This time at least rewatching is plenty fun, will incentivise my time on the cross-trainer.