T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I had a tooth extraction, so not much to talk about. My jaw hurts.
How’s everyone else this week?
Internet News is All Wrong
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
Gamers Aren’t Toxic
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Look Outside is not a game I would have bought if it hadn’t been bundled with Demonschool. It’s a turn-based RPG Survival Horror game; I of course like turn-based, but dislike survival horror, so I’m pretty mixed on this game. On the plus side, you can play it with just the mouse. The finite resources, uncertain fights and NPCs you can kill mean I’m sort of treating it like a roguelike; make a run, mess something up, start over from scratch. I think I’m going to finish it, but don’t know if I’m going to like it. Kind of hoping it’s short.
Demonschool got very little time out of me; I think I had a couple of cutscenes and one or two optional battles without doing any story battles. I’ll get back to it, but it’s low priority already. I blame being too tired for tactics. But it might be from the game treating the setting too offhandedly; they keep bringing up how skipping homework means you go to prison, and I keep hoping they’ll stop bringing that up.
Metaphor continues; just starting the second main area timer. Man, that extra monster attack on Hard Mode is a problem, getting ambushed can kill over half the party before Turn 1. But, it’s got a Job System, and style, and I’m having fun despite dying routinely.
Chess, I suppose. Been playing more of that again. I guess that cuts against my “too tired for tactics” argument. But I’m using it anyway.
Not much for me last week. I’ve been doing more reading (not just for pleasure, mind you) and less gaming. I’m getting back into it now.
Tried CloverPit after getting it recommended as something similar to Balatro and… no, it’s definitely not my thing. Balatro works because there’s already and underlying game there, with rules. Yeah, there’s obviously randomness involved, but there’s strategy to it too, so when you get modifiers you can strategize even more to steer the chaos somewhat into order. Slots are nothing but randomness, and the modifiers you get do very little to mitigate it. I played for less than half an hour and I feel I’ve already seen everything the game has to offer.
Now playing Shady Part of Me. Interesting puzzle game where you and your shadow move independently and have to team up to solve puzzles. I’m a bit annoyed that I missed a collectible due to the game’s autosave, but what are you gonna do.
Played Sopa: Tale of the Stolen Potato for a couple of hours. It’s an adventure game that’s mildly charming, but a bit clunky. Not sure if I’ll finish this one, to be honest. It’s not really drawing me in.
Pretty much gave up on High on Life. I’m really not finding any reasons to continue with it.
Anyway, with The Simpsons making a splash on Fortnite of all places this last month watching some gameplay videos of it I got a bit of nostalgia for Hit & Run, and now I’m trying to see if I can get my old PS2 running. If I do, I might be getting back into a lot of old stuff. We’ll see how it goes.
Played more Returnal. Last week I said I was sure the story was going somewhere. I reached the credits of the game and it turns out I was wrong. The game is still fun to play and it does have some additional stuff to do afterwards, we’ll see if that helps at all or if they just decided not to actually resolve anything.
I’ve also been playing Stellaris. I finished out a game and oof going to year 2500 is a slog, both because of how much the game slows down and because there’s just not that much to do later in the game. Early on you’re exploring and settling and developing planets and picking research and so on. But you can run the entire research tree out and be stuck on repeating techs long before the game ends. Of course you can do stuff like form federations and invade your neighbors but in this case I played with a civic that said nope, no doing most of that stuff, so I recommend not taking Inward Perfection. I genuinely spent the last 100 years of the game mostly ignoring the game, capped on all resources, only really paying any attention when endgame crisis stuff happened. A couple of the Fallen Empires woke up and that was fun, one of them had 2 million fleet power but the whole galaxy got together (and declared me custodian, turns out omphaloskepsis is a pretty minor debuff to the galactic community) and beat them up. Then the actual endgame crisis showed up and it was, uh, unimpressive. They had a few systems with like 300k fleet power and I killed them off before they did anything at all. I only won because the War in Heaven event forces you into a federation, otherwise I would not have been able to join one and it was a relevant part of my endgame score. I did fill out like 3 full ring worlds, probably could have done more if I’d cared.
Anyway I’m playing again and a) I should have turned up the multiplier on endgame crisis but I didn’t think about it but also b) it doesn’t matter because this time I’m the crisis. I’ve got psychic powers and had a nice chat with something that wants to destroy the entire universe and sure, why not, sounds fun to me! Endbringers is an interesting origin because it really does significantly debuff you in the early game, like I really was having trouble with stability and happiness. But then you make a friend and gain a whole lot of power and everything is great (while it lasts).
I’ve been playing Stellaris as well, doing my usual thing where when a new expansion comes out I…do a play through trying out all the stuff in the previous expansion which I didn’t get to when it came out because I was too busy trying stuff from the expansion before that. Well, I’m trying a little of the new stuff out by being thermophile robots who like living on volcanic worlds and terraforming other planets into them (and also produce Living Metal, which is pretty neat). But they’re also psionic with the Shroud-Forged origin (from the previous expansion), so I’ve been exploring the new Shroud mechanics.
I definitely like it more with the Shadows of the Shroud expansion; before, delving the Shroud always felt completely random as to what you got. There’s still that aspect of it, but now there are concrete actions you can take to attune with various Patrons in the Shroud, so you have more control over what your empire looks like (the Shroudwalker enclave is also more helpful, letting you push and pull things in certain directions better than you could before).
The galaxy generation was a little wonky, putting me a few jumps from another empire whom I had to fight early on…and then basically everyone else in the other half of the galaxy, leaving me a ginormous area to expand into unopposed when I was all prepared to play a nice small empire for once. It was a little interesting, though, since for once the Galactic Community had already been established and several resolutions passed before I finally was able to find everyone.
I’m kind of in a holding pattern waiting for the endgame crisis to show up at this point, but I’m fine with things being chill and having time to prepare. I’m starting to wonder if the various combat rebalances over time have changed the crisis danger level or if I’ve simply gotten better at the game, as I remember having serious difficult with a 1× strength crisis in the past, but then in a recent game a 0.75× strength crisis got destroyed by the AI so quickly I barely had time to show up. Maybe I’ll start bumping it up in the future.
Hogwards Legacy got my main attention. I just learned Bombardo and have no idea, why this spell was included, because Expeliamos does the same thing with less regeneration time. Enemy types get a bit same-y after a while. Spiders in 4 different sizes, trolls, wolfs, zombies, humans in 3 different classes, goblins in 4 different classes and frogs. And for a sneaky bastard like me, classes of humans or goblins don’t matter. They all get Perficitus Totalis into stone and fall over.
In Persona 5 Royal I reached Alibabas tomb. But not before enduring some cringe-y dialog that convinced me that
Akeji is either “The Man with a Black Mask”, or Mister X Saes boss and the school director talked to on the phone, or both.Akeji to Sae: The cases you are investigating might be related to the phantom thieves.
Story-Sae: What does lead you to that conclusion?
Sane-Sae would have said: How come a high school kid knows, what cases I’m investigating? In-Thought: Do we have a breach?
Akeji: What do you suggest that I should do now?Story-Sae: You should investigate into the phantom thieves some more.
Sane-Sae: You go to school kid and let the educated and trained people do their job.
Plus the next scene where Akeji approaches the group with news about Medjed and further accusations led me to believe – Yeah, He definitely belongs to the bad guys.
In coop we finished the Exploration in No Man’s Sky and then turned to Tabletopia to play Quacks of Quetlinburg, Architects of the West Kingdom, Earth and Furnace. I got a thorough beating in all 4 games, ignoring the cathedral, cheapening my cards without getting much points out of it and not betting on the right factories.
Other than that I visited a Kart Racing circuit, raced (to the bottom) and played some 8-ball. Real Billiard is so much harder than virtual. Who would have guessed.
Isn’t Akechi already at least semi-officially working with the police at this point? Given that, Sae is unlikely to push back on him very much given her ambitions, and since he is also known as a rather famous boy detective and she REALLY wants to solve the case she’s more likely to accept his help, as long as it is indeed just help and not an attempt to claim all the credit.
Following the logic of Detectiv Conan or The Three Investigators, maybe. But, as I remember, Sae investigates the mental breakdown cases and saw a connection of these mental breakdowns with Kamoshidas change of heart. That is why she convinced her boss to also look into the phantom thieves. But she only told her boss about it, Akeji shoved himself in with knowledge he shouldn’t have.
If she worked it out, then surely from her perspective it’s not unreasonable that he would have worked it out as well. I mean, that’s what he’s KNOWN for, and we can look back at Persona 4 and note that it’s that sort of thing that we’d expect Naoto to figure out, and they’re essentially the same sort of character.
This is not to say that it’s NOT the case that he has alternative sources of information. It’s just that there’s lots of reasons for Sae and the audience to not be all that puzzled at where he got that information, and not wonder why Sae is letting him get involved in the investigation.
Back from vacation, and although technically I was home for most of it it has, as usual, completely derailed my routines including interacting with this site. Aaaaanyway…
Played through Promise Mascot Agency, it’s from the studio that made Paradise Killer so I was looking forward to it. The plot is you are a yakuza in exile/hiding who needs to repay a huge debt by running a mascot agency, with the added twist that in this world mascots are not people in costumes but actual living beings some with supernatural origins or abilities. Promise is more ambitious mechanically than PK adding not just the agency management layer but also a decently sized open world to explore with your car, collectables to gather and various traversal mechanics. The game is not very long and I want to stress that while I liked the story and setting of PK better Promise is still well written with a good dose of drama, absurdity and a sprinkle of the uncanny. The management mechanics could be a bit deeper but it is not a very long game overall and so they don’t really overstay their welcome. I will definitely be looking forward to future games from this dev.
Currently playing Cryptmaster, which is something of a fantasy dungeon crawler only you need to type the names of your attacks to perform them, solve riddles and word games and advance your characters by looting letters and using them to guess names of skills or words important to their backstories. It’s fun, the parser can recognize a bunch of words and is set to react to a number of them in ways that are varying degrees of entertaining, the visual style is somewhat creepy but the writing generally keeps the game a bit on the lighter and sillier side. My only complaint so far is that the loot puzzles repeat.
In co-op we’ve played through the main levels of In Sink, an asymmetrical cooperation puzzler in the same style as the We Were Here series. It feels a bit more family friendly in its visual style and the framing of the puzzles is a bit more arbitrary but it is a decent entry in what is a sparsely populated genre.
Got in another planet with my Trooper in The Old Republic. I like the multi-target abilities of the Trooper, but it’s still a bit too easy to annoy the General by not doing clearly unethical things, like destroying a Rakghoul virus instead of bringing it back. The General’s objection is that it could have been useful, which is exactly WHY I destroyed it. If she’d said that studying it could help us develop a way to counter it, that would have made more sense.
Also got in another session of Suikoden, and the story is proceeding as quickly as ever. In that short, couple of hours at most session, the MC finally has to confront his father when he comes to besiege the castle, has to run off to get Fire Spears — basically flamethrowers — to defeat him, and there are two duels, one where the father might end up executing his loyal retainer without bothering to ask why they rebelled, and then one where the father loses the duel and ends up dying and assigning different loyal retainers to the rebellion, again without asking why. They could have just had the father be killed off early on for all the impact it had on the story.
Interactions with Garza in The Old Republic frequently are “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Usually if you do exactly what she says it’s not a problem, but sometimes the solutions presented don’t 100% match up either way, and Garza will gripe about your choice anyway. Not that Garza is the only questgiver in the game who does this. It always bugs me when I find it.
To be fair, since she’s your military superior it’s actually reasonable for her to expect you to follow her orders to the letter. My complaint is more that trying to be at all nice — and my character is really, really nice — means disobeying them, which should mean that she sacks or court-martials you, and that never comes up. You could argue that my knowing about Havoc Squad gives me some leverage, but talking about that is ALSO a court-martial offense, and she doesn’t even do that when you spill a little too much to the Senate committee.
Without warning I suddenly found myself going back and playing through the various routes of a new life. (lower-case and period are correct parts of the title), a beautifully-illustrated visual novel about love and loss and work-life balance. Short and bittersweet… and finally complete after I left off half-finished ages ago. I really dig the artist’s style, though.
I also finished Hue, a clever puzzle game based on switching colors to activate or hide various world elements such as doors, blocks, platforms, lasers. It was a bit of a pain to rerun level after level hunting down the last few beakers, but ultimately pretty satisfying, and I even found a couple of shortcuts compared to previous solutions.
My son wanted to play Children of Morta together, so we did that for a bit. It’s always nice to play together like that. :)
And of course, as always, Battle for Wesnoth. Even on busy days there’s space for a quick skirmish on a small map, and it’s pleasantly relaxing to just focus on that for a time.