T w e n t y S i d e d
Another uneventful week.
Still playing Slay the Spire here and there. I’ve only beaten ascension level 13 over the whole week, and I don’t know how long it’ll take to beat the next one.
I’m starting to think that I should invest in a new game. The only game I bought this whole year was Balatro.
What’s everyone else doing?
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
The Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Putting everything on pause so I can play Metroid Prime 4. It’s been a bit of a rocky start since the latest reveals about the game didn’t really fill me with much confidence, but so far I’m having fun with the game, even if I find it a bit handholdy. Turns out the annoying guy from the trailer has a much more subdued presence than it was suggested, at least for now. I’ve heard about other issues with the game, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
Hogwarts Legends still going strong. The framedrops on my 10 year old PC are getting on my nerves, especially in fast input reliant sections like the broom races. And enemy variety is a bit lackluster for such a big game. But those are literally my only two gripes. One I have in my own hand (I just need to buy a new desktop monster and port all the important files and download all the games again and set logins and … – I don’t wanna.)
In P5R I completed Alibabas tomb and then did some link climbing and side missions. In the Alibaba situation there is something that doesn’t make sense, NOW. But other than the nonsensical things I complained about before, this one is intriguing, like there is just one puzzle piece missing to create sense.
I understand that the Horus guys in suits wanted to sabotage the research of Alibabas mom. But why did they scar the little girl by reading that fake farewell letter to her out loud in front of other relatives? Like they were attacking her for no purpose I see now.I hope the explanation for that is not “TIM read the script”
My best impression of it is that they aren’t very nice people, and they needed to come up with an explanation that would ensure that people didn’t ask too many questions about the mother’s research and took her death as a suicide. They probably didn’t need to traumatize the kid, but weren’t all that worried about doing it, either.
Even the Highschoolers said, that the read note did not match the things Barista Boss said about Alibabas mother. If that note was read in a group of relatives – so people who knew the mother – shouldn’t that note raise even more questions. The child might believe/be-deceived-by that, but Boss wouldn’t. So it’s more risk to forge that note than not, unless there is an even higher risk in form of Alibaba herself.
That was a puzzle piece I wanted to find later. Well, you confirmed it doesn’t exist. What a pity.
Look Outside has caught me up real good. I’ve got the game on the Easiest setting, which mostly eliminates the Survival part and slightly reduces the Horror part, since you can save anytime anywhere and the stalker bosses can mostly be beaten on the first encounter. I’ve further reduced the Horror by muting the game and playing reruns of Taskmaster in the background. It’s still pretty disturbing, considering it’s all body horror and cosmic horror. I’ve made two complete runs so far, completing the four most obvious endings and one weirder ending. Ended up looking up a couple of things, so I know there’s at least two more dungeons I haven’t seen yet. Game’s got some meat.
…think I played half an hour of Metaphor this week? There’s quite a lot of crossover with Look Outside, actually; the time management, the body horror bosses, the willingness to kill the player. I think this one’s going back on the shelf until Look Outside gets burnt out. Shouldn’t be long, it’s a short game once you know where stuff is.
Rhythm Doctor came out. Rhythm games aren’t generally my thing but this one is really well done. It has a cute (but nonsensical) premise – you’re helping keep hearts beating by tapping to the music as a remote worker in a hospital that is cutting costs. It has good art, good music, and while the basic mechanics are very simple (it only uses one button, and you’re hitting on either the 7th or 2nd beat), it messes with you a lot. Songs will change tempo. You can have multiple beats to track at once (I’ve seen up to 4 so far). Sometimes it messes with the music and you need to keep the beat in your head. And you will very rapidly learn not to rely entirely on the visuals because sometimes it messes with them in extremely creative ways. A big highlight for me was when it switched the game to windowed mode and danced it around the screen, it was sweet.
I’ve also been playing The Seance of Blake Manor, which is a puzzle game where you are a detective trying to solve a missing persons case. The main gimmick is that you have limited time – not real time, but in game, where time only passes when you interact with stuff. So you can walk around the whole place as much as you want but if you look at a book, that’s a minute. If you ask someone about something, that’s a minute. You’d think 60 minutes per hour would get you pretty far but there are a ton of things to look at and ask about. Also, helpfully, if you’ve interacted with something once you’re good, doing it again won’t cost you the time. It also has a very solid autosave feature, which is nice because there are ways to lose very, very quickly (like, say, if someone sees you poking around in their room).
I also appreciate that the big event of the game is a Seance, and one of the first people you meet is there to prove some people are frauds. So your character asks “oh, you’re here to disprove the Seance” and they respond “Nope, that person is 100% legit, magic is real, but some other people are lying, go figure that out”.
I did run into a bit of a sequence break, where I found a hidden room and my character talked about “Percival” and at that point in the game they had no reason to know who Percival was. But it wasn’t a huge problem.
I also like how it tracks the cases you’re working on – you basically have a conspiracy board for every person you meet and also for a few other things that aren’t associated with specific people. So it puts clues up on it and connects them together. Once you have enough clues for a section it gives you a little puzzle to put words in the right places to solve something, I haven’t been impressed with that minigame but that’s ok, there’s lots of other stuff to like.
The closest thing I did to gaming was this survey about gaming purchasing habits / attachment to publishers based on perception of their treatment of their employees or unethical behaviour, after an inexpert researcher / PhD student seemed to be having trouble getting it to stick on Reddit. I was interested because I often think that gaming news YouTubers such as SkillUp or even TotalBiscuit back in the day, vastly overestimate the extent to which the average consumer (or even watcher of their videos) cares or takes into account industry news about publishers when making purchases of games. They themselves, the YouTubers, have industry contacts, know developers, and are entrenched in the industry either materially, socially or at least philosphically and moralistically, so seem to really care about in particular ‘developer layoffs’ at companies like Xbox and so on. In a way that I doubt most consumers do, or at least don’t specifically for games companies. I for one forget about all of that as soon as I look at a new game to buy, but then that may be partly because I don’t use such YouTubers for recommendations or the utility of their opinions really, only for general entertainment, and in doing so may gain an awareness of the existence of games I might not have otherwise noticed. The person who created the survey (and research topic) did so out of a conversation he’d had with friends about how games seem to be better when the company making them was ethical in the creation of that game. Quite a short survey.
Got in another session of Suikoden. This time I played through the rather well-known Neclord arc, where you have a rune-created vampire doing terrible things and working with the big bad. As part of that, you discover that Neclord slaughtered Victor’s — one of your companions — loved ones which makes him want vengeance on him, but you can only defeat Neclord with a sentient sword that you can pick up at a temple. It took me a couple of hours to get through, but most of that was grinding and recruiting and getting lost in Neclord’s castle. I think the final combat would have been challenging if I wasn’t playing on Easy since one plot point gives you a party member who won’t attack and didn’t have any items to use, but again for such a monumental event — the character shows up again in at least Suikoden III — it passed very quickly. On the one hand, it makes the events less meaningful and developed, but on the other hand it makes me feel like I might be finished soon, although it’s not really good to feel relieved by that on a game that I wanted to like and still do kinda like.
Playing early Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy games is quite similar- Marth might have got into Smash because he’s the first, but his game is pretty dull if you started with Fire Emblem 7 (first English release).
There was a little of KCD, but no progress in any way.
There was some playing of Stray, which seems nice and interesting and warrants more attention in the future.
Then I have taken a look at Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, and while I really dig the general look&feel of it, why can I not strafe in a space game ffs? (Because the devs wanted an air combat feel, and playing with gamepad works vastly better than with a keyboard.)
This however also led me to reinstall Freelancer with the HD Edition Mod, and gosh I adore this game, but it does be grind-y af. Otoh, “hey, let’s quickly shoot down some raiders for 10 minutes of fun and some cash” is not a bad deal.
In terms of demos:
Cairn is a 3rd person climbing sim with per-limb control, meaning you set each hand and foot individually on holds and try to Get Upwards. There’s also stamina-management, householding your wall-hooks, and longer-term energy management that did not become important for me in the demo yet. It’s a neat concept, but I’m not sure how it would work for me long-term.
Forestrike is a 2d beat’em’up where you can see the future. For any fight you can test-run it as often as you like, figuring out which enemy moves when, where, and how, and how your actions influence the flow. It’s neat until it becomes too busy for me to keep track of what’s happening.
Legend of Kiimori is a… mongolian horse-courier simulator, priding itself on the socials with “realistic horse simulation”. Did not grip me, am not a target audience, but I’m happy for those who are that it exists.
Man I have so many games like Rebel Galaxy Outlaw to get to. Having played Freelancer and Darkstar One what must be many years ago at this point, and Descent 3 Sol Ascent having been a childhood favourite. But I don’t believe I’ve actually played any of the ones I’ve acquired since then. Rebel Galaxy Outlaw 1&2, Everspace, Overload, Sublevel Zero, Aquanox and its predecessor and sequels and reboot, and a load of knock-offs on the Nintendo Switch store like Subdivision Infinity DX (played a bit of this). I understand that some of those are roguelites which isn’t my thing but still. With Spacebourne, Between the Stars, and others on the radar too. So many games so little time.
I actually didn’t even like Freelancer that much- the way you hit endgame and are basically just given the Endgame Ship such that anything you had before is meaningless (unless you did an absurd amount of grinding maybe?) made me basically delete it from the “worth playing again” part of my brain.
The white whale space ship shooty game I’m pretty sure I’ll never find is Hellbender, an ancient “6 degrees of freedom” style entry. It had a little power management where you would shift between shields and basic weapons, as well as eventually loading up every number key with a different missile. I think I actually ended up getting reasonably far, but trying to find my way through the low-detail blasted hellscapes and occasional underground mazes feels like a fever dream, that makes me want to go make sense of it. Tried searching the torrents ages ago but the only one out there was a demo with obvious trap “unlocker”.
That sounds very very Descent-ey! I played Descent 3 as a child and couldn’t get past a point in the second level I think it was, with an electric tower. I’ve since bought the full game and got further (4th level) but need to go back. But that claustrophobic 3D maze map and occasional rocky exterior, with every enemy being scary and the insane screams of the little bots as they attack, my mother didn’t want me playing more than half an hour because it was too stressful haha. And the nice variety of main weapons and missiles. Yeah Freelancer was cool but I can’t say that it’s one of my favourites at all, and I can’t imagine playing it again, but then I don’t really replay games usually. It’s probably the first that I played with a mouse and keyboard actually, rather than joystick. Descent 1,2 and 3 are on my list too, and then beyond that we get into all the space sim stuff, X Wing, Tie Fighter, X Wing vs Tie Fighter, X Wing Alliance, Freespace, Freespace 2. It’s funny but Descent 3, X Wing Alliance, and X Wing vs Tie Fighter we got in 2000 when my father got our new Windows 98 PC, upgrading from Win 3.1. Most of the games we got around then I still need to actually finish 25 years later. Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, Incoming, Force Commander. The only one I’ve actually completed since is The Phantom Menace.
As for me, last couple weeks I played Marvel’s Midnight Suns, which got better when I was finally able to engage with all the mechanics and then later when I went ahead and upped the difficulty. But the self-directed nature means that it swings between too much upgrading (of too many characters) and too much talking. I wouldn’t mind the talking so much if it wasn’t hammering the “oh woes is us, the younger punkier heroes who are so angry about being ignored” so much, while half their friendship scenes feel unrealistically insecure. Heck, I’ve even got some of the Fire Emblem: Three Houses problem where a bunch of zomg you’re the only one who actually cares about me scenes will get queued up and then fire all at once, having my character wake up and then do the rounds of the whiny not-teenagers all wanting to hang out and tell me how good at listening and understanding I am.
Heck, of the main cast who *isn’t* pulling this? Stark needs you to tell him that ghosts aren’t scary and Strange needs his ego stoked so they’re nearly as bad as the kids. Steve says you’re maybe not evil and gives patronizing good-guy lectures, when he doesn’t need you also reminding him he’s Captain America. Don’t even remember what Carol’s first friend scene was, so that leaves. . . Blade. Blade’s story arc seems to just be that he’s got a crush on Carol. Out of the entire main cast, he is the *only* one who isn’t moping around needing you to play therapist- just a push to go talk to the woman.
So there’s the constant back and forth of neat little standalone hangout scenes, followed by sequentially ordered “zomg you’re the best friend/therapist I’ve ever had”, interspersed with the main story scenes where everyone’s suddenly at each others’ throats because they can’t be bothered to say two words to each other. This is an expected consequence of trying to have so many scenes that the player could view at any pace in parallel, but having someone you just gave a huge pep talk to immediately revert, or who just praised you for listening to them turn around and complain that no one listens to them, well when I actually start describing it gets even more annoying. Meanwhile the gameplay is full of very Pokemon-esque no-skip animations, meant to be leisurely, so trying to just go gameplay focus for a while doesn’t actually work (and then the moment you finish a mission it’s time for two more rounds of talking).
But the DLC for Elden Ring: Nightreign is out now, so I’ve picked that back up. Haven’t gone after the new bosses yet, because there are multiple super-boss versions of the originals that came out after I stopped playing. Of the two new characters, I have not yet tried the Scholar, but he seems quite busted-able from what I’ve seen others do. I’ve been playing the Undertaker, who is a smashy aggro lady who could technically cast some faith magic but I’m too busy smashing.
Normally the “bloodborn” health recovery effect (hit them right after they hit you) is too small to matter, particularly when in a stamina based game you’ll often run out of stamina and be literally incapable of trying to attack. Normally the Prayerful Strike weapon skill that heals you if it hits is pretty bad because it won’t heal enough to make up for your likely being hit, and using it defensively means the enemy just ends up backstepping out of the way. Put the two together and you almost have a build, except for the stamina problem.
Enter the Undertaker: her cooldown character skill can be used during other actions and will instantly refill her stamina, make it regen faster, and speed up her dodges for a while too. This means you can run up, smash until you’re out of stamina, activate skill, keep smashing until it runs out (sprinkling in a prayerful strike if needed to keep hp up), at which point your ultimate art is probably ready so you activate that, which puts you into flying i-frame mode and also stops you from taking other actions- so by the time the ult finishes your stamina is full again so you keep smashing, and upon running out of stam your cooldown is probably close to finished. . . Yeah it’s pretty fun. Admittedly, I already happened to have a perfect set of relics to equip to set up this build and it doesn’t really feature any bonuses for her character skills, but they basically made the exact character needed to make the build work.
I have bad memories of Midknight Suns. The dialogs you describe were bad enough, but that is kind of normal Marvel Corp story telling. Really bad was the constant Win-In-Gameplay-Lose-In-Cutscene.
Example 1
Iron Man, Cpt. Marvel and Dr. Strange beat Hydra out of the Sanct Sanctorum under your control.
Cutscene: Lilith appears and beats up three of the strongest super heroes without effort.
Example 2
Hunter and to others beat Venom to the ground twice (Cause all boss battles have a second phase without changing anything in those phases.) and in the very next cutscene Hunter jumps a none effected Venom directly into his claws and needed to be rescued by Spidy, while Venom escapes.
And these were just the very first two examples. Almost all post battle cutscenes negate the battle result. Infuriating.
Oh and that leveling up was borderline irrelevant because all the enemies leveled with you and all damage was just percentage. Leveling up gut you new cards and so, new attack animations, but not much else.
I expected much much better from Firaxis.
Oddly enough, the cutscene turnarounds don’t bother me that much- because the scenes are already so divorced from the gameplay it’s like playing a game and then unpausing the movie then pausing it again to play the game some more. The auto-leveling didn’t annoy me either, until I figured out how it actually worked. Seeing that your lower level heroes are supposed to automatically level so they don’t get too far behind the hunter, I figured that the optimized thing to do would be to specifically not over-level the hunter, so everyone would be more usable against the enemies that are auto-leveling to match the hunter/best in party.
Except they don’t level to match the best of the party. They level to match the people you’ve fielded specifically. So all the level scaling does (besides appease people that want big number to go up, and reading out the decimals in those percentages so that you can have enemies surviving at 1/138hp) is guarantee that there’s always some part of the team who will be made weaker by pairing them with the “higher level” part of the team. The MVP of the B-team will always be underpowered for the A-team, unless you’ve ground their bogus level enough to match. Indeed, this would have been better done with a nebulous “proficiency” rating that controlled when you unlock better rewards. But then number not go up.
And again I do find the game mostly enjoyable, the flaws are just very glaring.