T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve finally started playing something new.
Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s taken awhile for me to finally get around to playing it, but I’ve been in a rut, and my sibling wanted to play it with me, so here we are. It’s defiantly a bit outside of my normal games (Almost exclusively roguelikes), but it proving to just be a very good game. My sibling has played it a few times before, so they’re trying to play somewhat properly, and I’m running around looking in every single vase, crate, and burlap sack, that I can find, in hopes of finding a tiny amount of gold.
I didn’t get any farther in Slay the Spire. Still on the same ascension as last week.
What’s everyone else doing 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.
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
I finished The Seance of Blake Manor. I’m happy with how it resolved its mystery, which is great in this kind of game. Definitely some fun twists at the end. I did look up a couple of things because some critical clues are a bit pixel hunty, but they’re not required to complete the game, just to do all the sidequests.
I thought that Barbosa was bugged for me, and in fact her mind map was bugged because it was missing the node for “find things out about this person”, but that node isn’t actually required for anything and it just turned out there was some evidence I’d missed (and was not likely to find).
One mildly annoying thing in the game – people are almost always referred to by their last names. But in the mind maps and the schedules they’re sorted by first name. So I generally ended up looking through the whole list to find the person I was thinking of. Ah well.
I definitely appreciate how open the game is. The first 2 mandatory quests restrict you a lot, because they’re tutorials, but after that you have a whole lot of choices for how to proceed. There’s 20+ people and you can talk to most of them and search many of their rooms right away, if you know where to find the relevant keys. Some critical stuff only opens up on the final day, which makes sense so you can’t just figure things out immediately, but you certainly won’t be lacking for things to do before then.
I also played through The Case of the Worst Day Ever. It’s a puzzle game along pretty much the same lines as The Case of the Golden Idol, except instead of magic and mysterious deaths it’s someone having a mildly unpleasant time while getting their oil changed or playing bingo. Also, there’s some differences in puzzle design, particularly in how hard it is to figure out people’s names. Generally in Golden Idol that’s the first thing I do and helps a lot with stuff going forward, but in this game it’s usually the hardest part of each puzzle. Needing to cross reference cell phones in 3 different purses, none of which show the name of the phone owner, is pretty rough. I used hints very, very heavily on some of the puzzles and it wasn’t enough. I still don’t know how I was supposed to solve the 9th puzzle but brute force worked eventually. I did mostly enjoy the game, but it does make me realize that yes, the stakes and setting of the Golden Idol games are a real and relevant part of their appeal.
Not much gaming time, I’m afraid.
Still going through Metroid Prime 4. My initial impressions of the game seem to have been right: there’s a very good game here that’s occasionally marred by some baffling design decisions that seem to have been born from changing development teams and writing issues that betray the year this game was being written, where certain, ahem, ideas about how to write side characters were prevalent.
In any case the game is still fun though the desert hub area is absolute bullshit.
I have also sunk my teeth into Marvel: Cosmic Invasion. Not much to write about this one: it’s a competent, fun brawler. It doesn’t break any ground but it succeeds at what it set out to do quite well.
Tried the demo for Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is only next year coming to Xbox so I’ll finally be able to play it. I certainly had my fun with it, though I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of this combat system. It’s not bad, but I prefer turn based for this kind of game.
My game time was occupied with Hogwarts Legacy. It’s getting close to the end now. I think. The character based side questlines feel like they are hitting climax and in the main plot I might get a solution why that new spell of Isidora Morganach is so bad. Until now the only argument against it is that it is not researched magic. Yeah, then do some fucking research, so called professors of a university.
Coop is still a lot of No Man’s Sky, without it really being coop. More everybody does their own thing while talking over discord. But yeah, the Relics Expedition is done and now I have a pet I will never use and a new Multitool that I switched right back to the old one. Hurray.
On Tabletopia we played some more rounds of Earth and Faraway and I try to learn the rules of Fox Experiment.
Look Outside has hit a point of things being really hidden; like, behind a series of invisible doors stuck randomly throughout the dungeons, and also locked with keys hidden behind sidequests and whatnot. I’ve given up on figuring stuff out and am just looking things up at this point. Reached the superboss, but didn’t beat them; they seem perhaps overtuned, with, like, nine exterior components, locked behind said hidden doors. Maybe I just have to come back with better party members. Either way I think I’m done with this game for a while, I’ve done too many runs in a row.
Metaphor continues; I’ve completed the dungeon in which our heroes heroically stab out a child’s eyes.
Clair Obscur got a free DLC update; I’ve seen someone play it but haven’t actually gone back to it yet. I’ve made it awkward for myself by sticking it behind the Initial Equipment run I stopped doing; now I feel like I have to finish that before getting to the new stuff.
Brotato. A Buccaneer run hit Wave 65, best one so far.
If it makes you feel any better, Issac, I’m a long-time D&D fan (over 30+ years!), an almost equally old veteran RPG’er, Ive finished the game once, and I STILL obsessively loot every vase, crate and basket I come across. ;)
Don’t forget to jump onto anything that looks like a ledge. You might find secret areas with more boxes full of rotten lemons (and maybe a gold or two).
I’m off for a bit and putting in a push on at least a couple of gaming fronts, so I’ve been playing games more than usual, although not more games than usual.
So I’m trying to get through my Trooper in The Old Republic, trying to finish it off for the TOR Diary posts at my blog so I can set up for what I’ll be doing next, and again for the most part it is still really difficult to not tick off the general, as a lot of the Light Side options are about telling everyone about your mission when you aren’t supposed to, and my character is fully Light Side, and so the implication is that keeping them in the dark is bad somehow and so I should be telling them about it (and, in fact, that’s your defense and how they defend you). But in the last mission on Tatooine I managed to make her mostly happy, although I let the Imperial officer get away to save the traitorous member of the old squad, but she was okay with it although would have preferred that I stop him from getting away with bombs.
I’ve also picked up a few more companions, and wanted to run with the over-the-top Republic war droid because I figured he’d be a LOT of fun in conversations, but sadly his character model is a bit larger and is larger in a way that caused him to block my default view, and while I could probably have adjusted the view to deal with that, I couldn’t be bothered and so switched him out for the overly stuffy former Imperial medic instead. So I amuse myself by sending him on Diplomacy missions and imagining him negotiating in that over-the-top manner.
The other game I’m playing is Suikoden. The plot still proceeds at a VERY fast pace, as I went to recruit the Dragon Knights, found out that the dragons were all asleep, found out that they had been poisoned, found a herb they needed, had another run off and get the other and have his dragon get killed, which provided the THIRD ingredient — a dragon’s liver — have him get kicked out and join our crew, and then have a couple more battles and now it looks like I’m at the end, as there is a battle at the capital and the game was going around having people have conversations that seem like the end of the story, so I had to stop and plan to do more recruitment to get more of those and get more characters around. Playing on Easy makes things, well, easier and so the battles have been more annoying than really hard, except when the game stuffs a character that I’ve never used into my group and forces me to level them up, but I have no fear that I will have too tough a time with the final battle, so I should be done soon. But it still always makes me want to play “Suikoden III” instead, given that the characters tend to show up there and do more in that one, but “Suikoden II” might do more, and it’s up next.
Battle for Wesnoth. That is all.
In physical space, I taught some kids how to play dreidel, which was fun; fortunately, I’d had the presence of mind to prepare ahead of time a big diagram showing the difference between nun and gimel (and what all the letters mean in game terms). I also finally got to the front of the “hold” line at our local library and borrowed Gunn’s Superman, which was excellent and ate up a lot of time the time I would otherwise maybe have spent gaming — I watched the movie, spent some time with my thoughts and feelings about it, and then binged on commentary from some of my favorite movie-commenter Youtube channels like Overly Sarcastic Productions and FilmJoy.
It’s good stuff (both the movie and the commentary), but it’s not gaming, so I’ll leave it there for now.
So… yeah. Battle for Wesnoth. Evergreen and well-designed.
I’ve played some Splendor, a board game on Board Game Arena, which has been rather fun.
I have set myself the unachievable goal of completing 10 games this xmas. By which I mean the two weeks that I have off work. 10 games in 17 days. Can it be done. Not by me, most likely, but I should like to try, and 5 games sounds too low. Usually I complete about 0.1 games in the same timeframe. I have about 250 games on Steam, 220 on GOG and let’s say 250 on the shelves, physical. 720 games, is 1 game a month for 60 years. So I need to get cracking, can’t leave them all until the end and trust that my hands will be arthiritis-free in retirement.
Splendor is fun for a time, but gets old quite fast. I’d recommend Point Salad or Point City. Those don’t have the race to 15 points element, but you have more freedom and decision space on how you want to get points.
I wasn’t aware of Board Game Arena, so that’s something that I might want to check out for a bit, as right now the only board gaming I do is either physically solo — yes, even games that are theoretically for multiple players, generally co-op ones like Arkham Horror — or PBF on Board Game Geek. I did get in a play of Trivial Pursuit Infinity Saga Edition yesterday, which is easy to play solo: take two pies and have them run around the board to see which one “wins”. I also learned that if you have the pie filled in and make it to the centre you don’t ever have to leave it, which I was not aware of and so kept leaving and returning to it, which makes the games go on a bit longer than usual. Hopefully I’ll get my runs of Star Trek Scene It! this year, which always makes me regret that I didn’t pick up more of them while they were being produced.
I have finished Cryptmaster which was excellent. An overall good variety of puzzles, riddles and wordgames that technically doesn’t focus heavily on the story but still managed to have fun NPCs and instill a sense of personality, backstory and make me somewhat invested in the characters. There was some side stuff I couldn’t figure out or didn’t want to engage with (the card game tournament) and I had to grind a bit before the finale because I wanted to unlock all the words for all characters but I would absolutely play another game in this style or an expansion with a new storyline.
Also played The Gnorp Apologue, an idle game that got some very favourable reviews. It’s got a cute and silly visual style and premise and the screen gets amusingly busy as you develop but it was a bit on the short side for my tastes. Took something about 110 hours and I was playing very suboptimally through most of it. I do think it’s a very good one for someone who doesn’t want an idler that would take them months, which I imagine is going to be most people, plus the dev has announced they’re going to update the game with at least one additional mode that they consider a “post base game” expansion that I will definitely play when it comes out. Generally I do not regret buying it, particularly since it’s cheap, and I would recommend it for an idler fan looking for something shorter, but I was hoping for a bit more.
In co-op we did the new expansion Toxicity for Planet Crafter. I always find it fun watching the planet change around me as the terraforming progresses and the added mechanics of pollution cleanup prevent the player from completely bypassing the early stages if they do the new planet as part of a planetary system rather than a starting world. I can see some players finding the need to clean up the toxic goop by hand a bit tedious but between two players and several gameplay sessions spread over two weeks or so it was a perfecty fine distraction while waiting for terraforming to finish. This planet also offers several different endings, though these didn’t feel as varied as the choices for Prime and Humble, and its own little story to figure out that actually touches on a wider setting lore (minimalist though it is).
Nightreign continues. I’ve made some progress on the two new characters’ stories, figured out that the new maps only appear when you hunt the new bosses, and made it to the first (out of two) new bosses. Which is seven valkyries, and I’m told and am fully willing to believe is more difficult than the new final boss you have to beat them to unlock. Turns out a gang of AoE spamming near-un-staggerable minions that outnumber the group more than 2 to 1 while also having a full strength boss flying around, is somewhat difficult. A friend at work said it took them more than 20 tries.
As mentioned, I’ve played some of the other new character, the Scholar, who is supposed to be some sort of item use support specialist. I wouldn’t say I’m good, but I’m not more of a burden than with any other character, the thing is you have to accept that your damage will never match the rest of the party, because it’s not supposed to: you’re a support character. Even if you focus on status effects, which he is better at than anyone else, it doesn’t matter- because the other characters can just pick up super powerful weapons and do status effects while dealing damage. But that’s fine. In fact, it’s the only way to reliably *do* a support character in this game, because the equipment and spells you find are random, and even in normal Elden Ring there’s barely anything you can do support-wise.
His cooldown skill debuffs enemy attack (and with a little upgrade, buffs allied attack), while his ult makes all enemies take a portion of damage when any enemy takes damage (and can also be made to just do DoT), and heals allies when enemies take damage- oh look, another character that can heal from dealing damage, and I just so happened to have no other good stuff to put on him except the bloodborne effect. Yup, basically playing him the exact same build as the Undertaker, plus an effect to make his starting weapon frosty. There’s also the thing where items get more powerful each time you use them isn’t actually unbounded, it’s just a couple of upgrade thresholds, but it does mean you get to make a point of stocking up on stuff to use later which is nice.
With the weekly superboss rotations I’ve now also seen the super-goat, whose gimmick was apparently summoning waves of not-clones of the players (same characters but with a couple of obviously fixed weapon sets, where one of my clones just busts out the weapon from the second-to-final boss of Elden Ring and flies in from downtown to explode me, very fair). But unlike the valkyries, these can be staggered and most of them don’t spam AoEs, so got through that after a couple attempts.
Also, the already damaged controller I was using is deteriorating rapidly. I now consistently have to manually recenter the stick to stop and look at loot. This is a problem.
I’m a little late to the party, but I’ve been enjoying Risk of Rain 2 with my bros. I’ve also been trying to get better at Zeroranger. Finally, I dusted off The Legend of Zelda: Echos of Wisdom. I feel like the game is clicking better with me now!