T w e n t y S i d e d
This week is more Baldur’s Gate 3.
We’ve just finished act 2, and are plaining to get into act 3 tomorrow. Act 2 went pretty well, I had unintentionally spec’d Shadowheart into radiant damage, which ended up working very well for all of act 2, due to the fact that half of the enemies are undead. so far I think we’ve amassed around 30k gold, and possibly another 10k in stuff I haven’t sold yet
I don’t know why, but I’ve also been playing a little bit of Bejeweled 2 as a time killer.
How’s everyone else this week?
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
Punishing The Internet for Sharing
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
Spec Ops: The Line
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
More Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. I’ve mostly been playing through the DLC, which is set up to be pretty independent of the main game – you don’t get to use most of your stuff in it, though it gives you some rewards that carry over. It includes quite a lot of new platforming mechanics which were pretty cool, and also a mechanic that I absolutely despised. There’s sometimes a big orb that chases you around and if it touches you, it resets you to a checkpoint, which is very nearly the same thing as killing you. They make you fight enemies with it around a couple of times. The fight area also had some pits, which again reset you to checkpoint… and the enemies you’re fighting have knockback abilities that can shove you into a pit or the orb. Really didn’t like that part.
Currently I’m throwing myself against the final boss of the DLC. They seem fairly reasonable, except for their health bar which is… daunting. Ah, well, I’ll get it.
Finally bought and played The Hundred Line- Last Defense Academy, despite having seen that it included the single worst character I’ve seen in any media. It’s an SRPG from the Dangan Ronpa guy and the Somnium Files guy, so it’s all about weird anime characters who talk for a very, very long time. (The terribleness of Ima’s character made me forget that a few other characters are also unpleasant to be around.) I’ve almost made it out of the tutorial so far; turns out the cliffhanger of the playthrough I’d watched is actually resolved in the same cutscene it came up in, the player I’d watched had just stopped partway through it.
Mostly I’m left wondering why I’ve now started The Hundred Line instead of going back to Demon School. I think the loose worldbuilding is a big part of it, but I think the in-battle time limit is also just stressing me out. I don’t think the timer even does anything, but because it’s there it means I have to beat it. But, maybe starting this enormous SRPG will get me back in the mood to play the short SRPG. I was still enjoying it, after all. I just wasn’t looking forward to it.
Brotato is back, and BallxPit is shoved back into the cupboard. Cleared one more character in Brotato, on Hardest Main Map; just three left to make everything the same color on both maps. I frankly don’t understand why Hiker is so hard to clear; Dwarf and Diver make sense, their gimmicks are godawful, but Hiker’s just mediocre. Yet it was the last to be cleared on the DLC map and it’s one of the last three now.
I tried the demo of Hundred Line and I just couldn’t take the writing. Even before it got to all the Danganronpa characters (I can honestly kind of live with those though writing unpleasant characters is more fitting to a game where they, y’know, die a lot), it was just really tedious. Like, there’s so much time before even the tutorial fight, and it’s all dialogue, and I didn’t feel like I needed to hear… at least 90% of it.
I also read some reviews that said the combat was consistently easy and that’s not what I, personally, want from a turn based tactics game.
The hiker is the newer one for distance traveled, right? The pacifist-ish characters are terrible because they’re deliberately not playing the game correctly, forcing you to move in certain directions (trees, gardens, total distance) in order to get income even when the gear you have or the tactical situation would call for staying put, and are calibrated so you have to do those things near perfectly in order to just meet the minimum expectation. Where with normal characters you can scrape by with almost any weapon even if you aren’t perfectly killing everything every map, for a while. Yet they also, even after often reducing your damage, require you to be a combat god that can kill almost everything, because you have to just to survive the forced movement you need to do to maintain progression.
I opened up Brotato to kill a bit of time the other day and I think steam cloud or something got eff’d and dumped half my save, I’d had nearly everything cleared at 5 (at least I thought I did) and now those old characters are not.
I completed Magnetic: Cage Closed, and Papetura. Fun on both counts, weird on both counts! That was a failure to play 10 games over the xmas break, but that’s 2 down in my new mission to complete 100 games this year. Attack the short ones!
I’ve had very little time to play Metroid Prime Remastered, yet I’m surprised at how quicky the game gives you the basic powerups. It’s a bit of a whiplash coming from Prime 4 to this, as that game actually takes the novel (for this series) approach of not taking away every single one of your abilities at the start. On the one hand this means you start the game with a reasonable amount of abilities from the get go, but also it means you receive actual upgrades more slowly. On the whole I do think I prefer Prime 4’s method, though. Prime 1’s way fills more like a bit of filler. Ironic, considering that filler was precisely the major issue I had with Prime 4.
Still not done with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. This game is WAY longer than I expected. On the whole I’m having a lot of fun with it, but some of the puzzle challenges are grade A bullshit. They’re the kind of challenge you’re expected to lose several times because they require memorization rather than skill. It’s particularly annoying because the reward is very rarely worth it (either some currency you already have too much of or some uninteresting outfit). In any case, they are technically optional, but this being a metroidvania there’s nothing I dislike more than leaving content unfinished. That said, the non-optional content is plenty enough that I can’t complain much.
I’m liking the story quite a bit too. Usually for this kind of game the story is kind of an afterthought, either barely playing a role or being sort of predictable and cliche. I thought this game would be the latter but I got surprised by a few unexpected twists that put everything into a different context. I still think there’s one upcoming twist I’ve been predicting for a while, but who knows.
I was debating wether to start another playthrough of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, due to the free DLC added to it. In the end I gave in and started a new one from scratch, not even bothering with NG+. As I’m observing they didn’t just add a new area, there’s a bunch of extra content sprinkled throughout the whole thing. Sometimes it’s more subtle than others, but some of it is very interesting and certainly helps flesh out this world even more. Super out of practice with the game, though, so initially deaths were plenty. But as I regain muscle memory I find myself doing even better than I did the first couple times.
I finally made some more steps in Baldur’s Gate III, moving FINALLY through the first in-person-encounter with That Asshat Gortash, and entering The City proper. At this rate, it’ll only be another 3-5 business years until I see the end credits.
Not following the main quest continues in Kingdom Come Deliverance. The New Home is fully renovated, and the Madonna of Sasau continues to preach.
In Outer Wilds, I’ve finally made a little progress in the Echo of the Eye, but.. it’s just not as gripping as the main game.
I think Echoes of the Eye enriches the lore, the ending is very emotional and the area itself has very interesting design but the fact it is essentially self contained removes the large part of that delightful “piecing it all together” that permeates the rest of the game and it is also more aggressive in making the player fail.
As for BG3, and adressing both you and Issac since you’re both near the same part of the game, act 3 open up again and you can rush through it but if you want to be thorough it is massive. It’s also where some of the seams and unpolished bits show even though my overall impression was positive. If/when I get around to replaying the game in its entirety I need to look a bit closer at how the game prepares the player for act 2 that is indeed extremely strongly themed.
I haven’t had much time for video games through the holidays. Duel Links and some Puzzle Quest were the only ones. But there was lots of board game action. In Bomb Busters we reached mission 26. The boss mission 19 had really stressful audio and funny voice acting to a timed mission. Fun.
Also played Shuffle Forrest, Dune Imperium, Werewords, Bohnanza, Faraway, Silver, Dominion, Canvas and other I don’t recall or know the English names.
And we went to an In Extremo concert in Berlin. This Uber Eats Music Hall had the best sound of yesteryear, by far. And it had a lot competitors. Crystal clear drums and voices, heavy guitars, great. And InEx played an all-time classic set. Even the Merseburger Zaubersprüche (Spells of Merseburg) were performed. I sang along, even though I don’t speak a word of Dutch.
As expected, the spring semester began and I no longer have the time or energy to beat my head against Silksong. I had somehow managed to explore almost every corner of space accessible in “Act 1” and then run into the Last Judge. Probably some day I’ll go back and pass that gate, but just as probably, not any time soon.
What I have managed to keep chugging along with is Dungeons of Dredmor. I’ve picked up a couple more achievements and I’m very close to my first permadeath-enabled win. One of the nice things about this kind of turn-based old-school Roguelike is that you can just save and quit at any time, even in the middle of a really hairy fight, and then open your save later and start playing again from that exact same in-game instant. There’s no desperate need to claw your way back to a save point just to preserve your progress, and you can game in little bites without any issues.
There is an alternate path to Act 2 that skips the Last Judge, but that being said games are for fun, and if you aren’t enjoying it then you aren’t enjoying it.
I finished off my run at all eight class stories in The Old Republic. One thing that hit me this time was how there’s sometimes a clash between the MMO mechanics and the story in the later stages. Playing the Belsavis planetary story on the Republic side, you get asked to try to keep the casualties among the prisoners down and are even given stun grenades that do that … FOUR of them. To get through the missions, you end up having to kill AT LEAST that many AFTER you use your grenades up, and you still get commended for not killing the rebelling prisoners. On Voss, you are told that the Voss do not like conflict between the Republic and Empire and will punish people who engage in it … and the first mission includes a bonus mission of killing 15 Imperials.
Anyway, I’m going to take a break with TOR because it turns out that I’ve been playing it fairly regularly since AT LEAST 2022 (that’s when I started this run according to my TOR Diary entries on the blog) and will likely slide over to Dark Age of Camelot or Star Trek Online instead. And I will continue with Suikoden II, starting this week, hopefully.
I had been away from Star Wars: The Old Republic until the Christmas event started, so collecting the Snow-covered packages “currency” to trade in for items has been most of my gaming. I got Stellar Blade for PC for Christmas, so once I get a new computer running sometime this year (hopefully) I’ll be able to start collecting costumes.