T w e n t y S i d e d
This week Baldur’s Gate 3 has continued.
So far we’ve gotten to the Underdark, and I’ve gotten quite a bit of gold, but my video game hoarding problem is showing. I’ve barely spent any of the gold, and I’ve kept almost every enchanted item I’ve seen, and it’s becoming a problem. So far my only nitpick with the game is that vases and jugs almost never have anything in them. It’s not going to stop me from trying to loot them, but I want more rewards for my unnecessary thoroughness.
I’ve also started playing Megabonk. I don’t have much to say about it. It’s 3D Vampire Survivors.
What’s everyone else doing? (Also Merry Christmas)
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?
Punishing The Internet for Sharing
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Top 64 Videogames
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Finished up Rhythm Doctor. I enjoyed a lot of the music and the tricks it pulled on me. Hold beats and freeze beats were consistently really rough. The story was also good, though I wish every midsong cutscene was skippable – some of them are, and some of them aren’t, and no matter how interesting they were the first time through I don’t need to it again when I’m retrying. Window dancing really is incredibly cool, and the finale of the game took it to an extreme. It’s interesting seeing the variety of which things it tests – some levels test your ability to manage multiple tracks at once, some levels have mechanics that mess with the time signature, many levels mess with the visuals so you have to go by sound, and some even mess with the sound too so you have to go entirely by your own sense of timing.
The game does have various difficulty options. I did turn it to easy for one level because it was giving me a lot of trouble. It’s also cute that the difficulty option affects your onscreen button size, and more importantly they use it for storytelling because one of the doctors uses the “easy” button and one uses “hard” and it’s pretty clear why.
Look Outside has run its course for the moment. Still haven’t beaten the superboss, so I’ll have to go back eventually, but if I go back I’ll probably end up doing a full run again, so I’m staying away for a while. Very good game; interesting setting, nice bite-sized length at 15 hours, party members locked behind random events means there’s a bit of improvisation in each run, the time limit incentivizes making multiple runs, multiple endings to a few of the sidequests and quite a few for the main game. For a game I only got because it was bundled with Demonschool, I’ve had a great time and spent way more time on it than I have on Demonschool.
BallxPit is a Vampire Survivors/Breakout cross. This is the first game in a long time I’ve had to play with mouse and keyboard; you can set the character to autofire, but you still have to aim manually, and also separately move around the field. And the controller just aims too slowly, you’ve got to use the mouse for sanity reasons. It’s new and fresh, so it’s replaced Brotato for now, but I get the feeling I’ll like Brotato more in the long run.
BallxPit has a lot of permanent upgrades, and it feels like you need them for the later levels; characters gain permanent stats across runs, beating a level will permanently increase damage output, buildings will permanently raise stats, buildings will give temporary stats much bigger boosts. Late game you can combine both the specialties and starting weapons of multiple characters, and raise the maximum balls to attack with.
Meanwhile enemies get bigger and meaner as you go; the level I’m on now (looks like the second last) has enemies that shoot homing weapons, which are dangerous but fun, and others that will catch one of your balls and keep it until they die. Extremely dangerous, but… not in a fun way, I’d say. I preferred the previous level’s “just a whole lot of hit points, just way too many hit points” enemies. Boss progression meanwhile feels wonky; the first two seem like some of the most dangerous. 3’s a step down, and 4 through 6 seem flat-out easy. Then Boss 7 is a monster and a slog. No alternate bosses, the two minibosses and main boss are always the same for each level. I can’t actually tell if the little guys change positions. Probably a little, but my balls don’t care.
…um… Merry Christmas! Not a game, but… I’m doing it.
Still going through Metroid Prime 4 due to my insistence in collecting every single upgrade available before going into the final area. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a fun game despite all the issues. The writing can get laughably bad, the handholding can get a bit annoying and the hub area is tedious as all hell, but everything else is really good. It’s kinda funny how people got hyperfocused on the Marvel-style dialogue of the companions because while that’s definitely there its minimal, but the writing can sometimes get worse. There was a scene where I had to stop and laugh because it was so bad it bordered on parody. It felt like something out of Austin Powers, only entirely unintentional. It hasn’t ruined the game for me, though.
Uncharacteristically for me, I started another metroidvania before finishing the one I’m currently playing. Going through Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. I remember playing the demo for it back then before launch and thinking it was alright but not something I was desperate to get. Playing it now from the start and it feels like a much better experience even though there’s only a couple small areas before reaching the part of the demo and the gameplay is identical. I think this speaks a lot about the importance of buildup in these games.
Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone.
I have gotten started on Tropico 6 and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. Of these, Rogue Trader is more gripping immediately, but I have high hopes for Tropico- I usually play Civ to build things.
Rimworld. Still. Which is still good; but there’s not that much to say that I haven’t already said…
So, instead, TV shows.
There’s a new season of Fallout, which only has 2 episodes out. I wasn’t that excited by the first season, but hey, my time doesn’t waste itself. Plus, this time it takes place in New Vegas, so we get to see how the show
takes a massive dump oninterprets my favorite Fallout game!So far it’s a very similar feeling to while I was watching Star Trek Discovery or the later seasons of Game of Thrones: this feels like an imposter. It’s superficially like that thing I’m fond of, but less well written and more shallow. So it’s not the thing I like, which is fine, I guesss – except it keeps cramming references in and trying to pretend it is that thing I like!
It’s kind of offensive, like someone skinned Fallout/Star Trek/whater and is cavorting around in the ill-fitting skin, Just constantly reminding me of that thing I like and that it’s never coming back.
But, only two episodes in so far. Enough grumpy complaining. To soon to judge too harshly – though I realy hope the side characters either a) die b) do something interesting or c) stop taking up screentime.
It’s been over a year since the last season, so I have no memory of who Eyepatch Lady, Baby-Holding Man and er…Guy With Longish Black Hair are, but I wil say that their scenes are punctuated by a profound sense of I don’t care so hard it hurts! Go back to Lucy or the Ghoul or Maximus or [insert Lucy’s brother’s name here] where the story is interesting!.
Is this a contract issue?
More cheerfuly, I got linked to a show called The Amazing Digital Circus a couple of years ago and it’s really good. Well, with qualifiers. Probably not for everyone.
Essentially, it’s about a group of people stick in an obnoxiously zany computer simulation controlled by a mysterious ringmaster who makes them go on simulated adventures. It’s by a small animation studio who put out every episode directly to Youtube and it shows: from the way episodes come out months apart (The pilot was in 2022, we’re on episode 7 of 9 in late December 2025) to the way it’s so unique – clearly the vision of a small team making something because they wanted to make that particular thing, their way.
As I said, it’s not for everyone; it’s frenetic, noisy, random, often ridiculous. But you can see that the makers really care, there’s an amazing level of attention to detail and the characters – once you get past the initial impressions – are surprising deep. A bit like Archer, where it can jump from absurd jokes to touching character moments, to genuinely creepy horror…and it all somehow works.
Also a lot of programming references and jokes. At one point, the physics engine breaks and characters are thrown though the floor as a plot point. In another, a key character makes a ‘chinese room’ as part of a joke – but it’s also a hint about the story of the episode and the nature of that particular character.
Weirdly, part of the joy is going through the Youtube comments after watching the episodes (DON’T DO IT BEFORE THAT BECAUSE SPOILERS), where someone will point out a background detail that you missed, a reference in the background, or just post theories about future episodes.
Anyway it’s free, so worth checking out – if you can handle the constant f&%$£*g adverts on modern Youtube, interrupting mid-word.
Oh, I very much like TADC. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on and they put enough effort into their ads that they’re genuinely enjoyable. No idea what their end goal is but that’s ok, the path there is fun enough.
I finished off Suikoden early this week. It took me about 20 hours to play the game, which is about right for a JPRG of that period. Again, the plot points moved very quickly, but what struck me the most was that at the end they described what each of the Stars of Destiny that I had recruited did after the game … and I didn’t care about most of them, which is a sharp contrast to what I normally feel in a situation like that and to what they intended. The reason for this was because I didn’t really get a chance to learn much about them, even while recruiting them, and so didn’t care as much about them as I felt about, say, the Dragon Age: Origins companions and so what they did after was less interesting. Also, I replayed the final army battle a number of times to avoid losing too many troops and, in one case, a character that I relied on heavily in the party battles, until I learned that I had a number of characters in my “Other” party that could tell me what the enemy was going to do next, and that the ninjas ALWAYS got it right, at which point I won with almost no losses. And it took a LONG time to beat the final party battle in the dungeon, which was not at all fun, especially since I was expecting a big single target and ended up with a three-headed hydra, and so I had burned all my big all-enemies spells in the dungeon before that.
Also, still playing my Trooper in The Old Republic. I’m still hoping to finish that character off in the next couple of weeks to prepare for what I’ll be doing next.
Mostly RimWorld, though I noticed from patch notes that Plan B Terraform hit its full 1.0 release recently and decided to try it again. I got it when it released in Early Access (…some time ago, a year or two maybe?), and while I played a few hours I didn’t feel motivated to actually see it through at the time. It’s a logistics game in the vein of Factorio or Satisfactory, with the twist that it’s in service of terrforming a planet. I own at least five different games that involve terraforming Mars and love the concept, so that side of it’s right up my alley (especially since this game involves procedurally-generated planets and complex feedback mechanisms), but I tend to get overwhelmed with logistics games above a certain complexity level and not finish them so we’ll see how it goes this time. It has some QoL upgrades and achievements since the last time I played (and probably some more stuff I don’t know about yet), so hopefully that’ll be enough to keep me interested through all the minutiae of logistics.
Regarding BG3, I’m pretty sure I randomly came across a comment somewhere that said the jars quite literally *never* have anything in them, like you could check in the mod tools and there’s nothing. I stopped bothering with them at that point.
Still playing Nightreign. Finally managed to beat the first of the new bosses, the Balancers (which I normally call the valkyries), in an extremely polarized pair of matches. The first I was basically dead weight that got hard carried, even knowing that I could block certain attacks I was constantly being pummeled from all directions and knocked down and picked up and did basically nothing. So clearly that one didn’t count and I was going to keep running it until an actual win. Which happened in the literal very next run, where I was squashing them one by one and then got the second phase’s main body to aggro on me where I could then block its entire wombo combo so hard that my hit points went *up* instead of down (hp gain on block vs no shield piercing damage), ending the fight with like 4 extra flask heals and the other players emoting at me like I’m some sort of badass.
That allowed me to progress the new characters’ quests and go on to the second and final new final boss, which was of course easier than the valkyries and beaten on the first try. I was actually a but dumbfounded after we finished phase two and I’m like yeah no way time for phase 3, right? No? Really we’re done here? A second run playing as the Scholar got a second win and finished his quest, but apparently to finish the Undertaker’s quest you have to play her in a run against the *original* final boss for some reason the game doesn’t tell you about, so I’ve not finished that yet.
They’ve also put out the Everdark Sovereign version of the valkyries, and the super valkyries are. . . well some of the super bosses are very clearly low-budget filler, like the super goat that is just normal goat plus npc-style adds. And some are basically an entire new boss. The super valkyries are the latter to such an extent I wonder if they were the original phase two or something. I also seem to recall them making some vague hints that bosses in the Deep of Night hard mode might get even more dangerous in some way at the higher tiers, which could just mean bogus modifiers, or could mean 3 phase versions where you fight through every version of the boss so far. Haven’t tried that mode yet but I’ve only got a couple things left I haven’t done so soon enough.
Sadly, after digging through the game files and watching some tutorial videos about modding containers, I learned that there IS indeed a chance for those random jars etc. to contain something. IIRC, the default loot script for those results in something like 75% empty, 25% to contain something, but that something is like a 95% chance to be 1g junk like Rotten Tomatoes, Rancid Fish et al, and that last remaining 5% (or possibly even smaller) is where there’s a chance to contain some small loot like gold, food, a potion or a scroll.
So, long story short, you CAN safely skip all of those containers because you’ll never find anything truly worthwhile or plot-important in them, but if you’re a diehard pack rat like me who has to loot EVERYTHING, you do need to check them all. :(
As part of an early New Years resolution (I guess?) I’m trying to wrap up some of the game that I’ve had installed for years and never finished, so I’m kinda bouncing between a bunch of stuff like Dungeons 3, Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2, Two Point Hospital DLCs, the first Avadon game, a couple of vampiresurvivorslikes and some other assorted titles… in all honesty I run a very serious risk of spinning too many plates and some (most) of these ending up in limbo again despite my best intentions.
On the more structured side I’ve started Encased. It’s an isometric RPG that is very much a love letter to (original) Fallout but doing its own thing rather than going another postapo atomic wasteland. It’s a bit too early to tell much but it promises to facilitate different playstyles and even have “unique, bespoke endings” for certain particular ways of approaching the game (such as stealthing through the whole thing). So far it’s been fun, there’s been good attention to detail, decent writing and that thing where the game gives you tools and is okay with you using them. I’ll report more as I get past the introduction chapter.
Played through Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, really enjoyed it (apart from a couple of chase/escape sequences). I was incredibly impressed by the graphics, particularly the character models and animations in cutscenes. Then I remembered Shamus wrote a whole thing on it years ago, so I went and re-read that and had a good chuckle. I really miss your dad’s writing.
Happy Christmas all!