T w e n t y S i d e d
This week is just Balders Gate 3.
Only a bit into act three so far, I don’t think we’ve gotten into the city properly. So far we’ve fought a clown, I angered a genie and got teleported to a jungle full of dinosaurs, and helped solve a murder.
We didn’t actually get that far, because we also started an honor mode playthrough, so no loading if there’s a mess up and if the whole party dies it’s over. To make things easier we’ve kept one party member at camp to resurrect everyone if there’s a party wipeout. It does cost money to res people and it obviously has the drawback of only three characters in a fight instead of four. We’re currently in the underdark, and about to finish the first half of it. The biggest challenge so far was getting to level four. There are a lot of fights that are too dangerous to do at level three on this difficulty, but needed to be done to get that level.
What’s everyone up to this week?
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Good Robot Dev Blog
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
What is Piracy?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
Still going with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I’m on Act III now, so I can finally reach the new DLC content, but man, I’m seriously underleveled. In my two previous playthroughs whenever I reached this part I could breeze through some of the optional bosses but now they’re kicking my ass. This is probably because I raced through the first two acts, leaving a lot of the optional content behind, so now I’m gonna have to do some of that stuff before. I’m told some of the new fights are a bit brutal, so I don’t want to go there until I reach at least a certain level.
Getting a bit frustrated with Metroid Prime Remastered. I had issues with the 4th title, but it’s clear there’s a lot of design choices made here that have been streamlined there. It’s possible to reach a certain area in this game before you have the necessary powerups, but backtracking through it is nearly impossible, so now I have to take the long route to reach where I was before or else I just cannot proceed. And by God the controls for using the map are impossible to get used to. I feel someone with a normal Switch can have a better time by simply swapping joycons when looking at the map, but I cannot do that with my Switch Lite. I don’t understand why Nintendo couldn’t do a normal map movement for this game. It’s a remaster, not a port. There are a bunch of control options for the actual game, but the map is painfully unintuitive.
Some small progress in Kingdom Come Deliverance, moving a little forward in the Madonna of Sasau-questline.
Finally got back into OW: Echoes of the Eye, and… while I really want to like the DLC, I’m having a hard time to do so. There’s so, so much backtracking to ever the same places, and while the realisations still give the same happy juice as in the base game, the stealth sections SUCK and so do the navigational challenges. Grmpf. Gonna see if I want to chew through it in the end.
I have also dabbled in Hollow Knight. PlayFrame’s Silksong run had the winter-Katamari-break, I started watching the HK-playlist and remembered that I have that on the PS. (Have I said that last time already? I feel like I’ve typed this before…) Anyway, things went fine, and then I spend half an hour getting wrecked by the big bug in the upper right of the Forgotten Crossroads, and I still have no idea how Dan made that look SO EASY xD
I restarted Girl Genius – Adventures in Castle Heterodyne and I think I’m close to the end already, as the fight against Zola was the end of the Castle Arc in the comic, followed by the Siege of Mechanisburg. And in the game I’m at the boss fight against Zola – where I do minimal damage. I think I have to find some secrets I left behind in that old school Zelda-esque game.
Master Duel has an event running limiting the power level significantly. Without Ash Blossom and Nibiru even Luna Light do have a chance. A double-attacking 3800 Towers with a quick effect nuke is not easy to overthrow. But in regular the way to get to that would be interrupted easily leaving me open without a good plan B. Luna Lights do not follow the YGO-Meme:
Player 2: It’s my turn now.
Player 1: Hush, It’s our turn.
In coop we tried to start StarRupture, a new factory building game with an exploding Star every so often. Problem It’s early, early, early access. The game crashed 3 times within 40 minutes, freezing up my PC, so that Ctrl-Alt-Del Log-Off was the only way to escape. Do not press Esc in blueprint-mode! So we opted out for Everdell, Race for the Galaxy and Dominion for now. Today we’ll switch hosts and hope for improvements.
Switching Hosts for StarRupture did a great deal. For my friend there was no problem, I had a frozen screen twice, but returned to normal after about 10 seconds. No crashes. Ir’s a difference if his two year old low level system (with an M2 harddrive) or a ten plus year old high level system (with a HDD) hosts. Who would have guessed?
I started playing Suikoden II, and confirmed that the game I had played before was indeed Suikoden, which makes sense. The game also has similar issues to the previous game where the plot moves really, really quickly without taking the time to properly build everything up. In a short couple of hour play session, my youth army soldier protagonist was betrayed, captured, rescued by my companion, had to find a way to get back home, got back home and was assigned to be executed as a traitor, was rescued again, tried to rescue my sister but she’d already escaped on her own, was taken back to the place where I had been a prisoner because the mercenaries who captured me rescued me, and then was basically told to go off and recruit some people for a while. It’s hard to really feel the emotions required by such scenes when they happen so quickly. This is another place where I think that Suikoden III did it better, because with the tri-view system and three main protagonists and a fourth optional but fun one there’s a lot more room to develop the characters and the world and the politics than we get here, and it also makes more sense to send people out to recruit — the optional one in Thomas, in particular, has good reasons to try to recruit people to help him with the castle — than I got here.
The game also kinda mixes the serious points with more humourous ones, mostly where after you get back with everyone else in the original youth army killed you meet with your sister and she first drags you around to do things like talk to people or pray at your grandfather’s grave, and then later when you go to rescue her she’s running around like crazy and knocking everyone out. These are sandwiched around you almost being executed. I found it kinda fun, but wonder about it breaking the mood.
So this game, so far, is STILL making me more interested in replaying Suikoden III than this game, but again it seems like I’ll be able to get through it.
Fallout continues, and I’ve changed my mind again on the New Vegas references.
First they annoyed me. Then I kind of liked the detail put into them, because nostalgia. But now…now they’re getting in the way?
See, the story is picking up and looks like it’s going somewhere. It’s getting interesting on its own merits*. Which is great!
But we’ve now phsically arrived in New Vegas, and there’s just constant references to the most iconic and recognisable location in the game. Shop signs. Old posters. The casinos, exactly recreated. FISTO the sexbot. All just, there, ready to be noticed by someone who cares, or ignored by someone who doesn’t.
But the issue is that by recreating these features so faithfully, the show creates problems for old grognards like me.
“Wait. They went through Freeside to get to Vegas, going through that gate in particular, which of course put them next to Gomorrah…but there were deathclaws! So they immediately ran in that direction to escape…
…and now they’re back in Freeside? Or somewhere else?
The Ghoul then goes to the Atomic Wrangler to do some drunken brooding, but the Wrangler was back in the other area, with the ghouls, so how did he end up…?”
You could very legitimately say “who gives a shit, this isn’t Fallout New Vegas! Stop expecting it to be like the game!” It doesn’t matter that the geography of the show doesn’t match, the Atomic Wrangler’s just there. Or maybe someone took the sign from the Wrangler in Freeside, and moved it to this place for Reasons.
And I agree. It really doesn’t matter that the Wrangler’s here and not there, because it’s just a place for one of the characters to go and drink.
So why is it the Wranger, then (because it clearly is, they’ve even recreated the interior layout). Well references, obviously – but that’s not the point. Call it something else. It’s just a bar. The story is actually picking up, and you’re detracting from it by putting in these references with no effort to integrate them or make them fit.
There’s something very…Bethesda about it.
You know how the most critically-acclaimed Star Wars show actually has nothing to do with the Skywalker family, but is a
depiction of a brutal empire in operation? Or that another popular show was about an original character taking a baby from place to place, having adventures in the Star Wars universe*?
Sometimes a good thing to do with an existing IP is make something completely new.
*Until it got ruined by references to the Skywalker family and backdoor pilots for other things people would recognise, at least…
More Dungeons of Dredmor; this time I’m trying a Rogue Scientist build. It’s been decent fun, although as expected it’s also kind of an inventory-management nightmare at times.
Much to my own surprise, I’ve also put in some more Silksong. I even managed to beat the Last Judge, enter Act 2, and beat my head against the Citadel for a while while home from work with the flu. Once again, I’m not sure when I’ll be able to play more or how far I’ll get, but it did feel good to make some progress.
Brotato, nothing else. I’ve cleared everything except Hiker, and think I’ve finally wrapped my head around why Hiker’s so bad. One of its effects is “enemies drop half money”; I was thinking this got cancelled by “walking earns you money,” but didn’t really factor in that money only counts toward experience if you pick it up off the ground. So, the “enemies drop half money” means enemies give half experience, meaning the character that starts with slow speed and no great starting weapons also gets below-average stat increases. No wonder it’s been the absolute last class cleared on both maps.
And it’s cleared, with a miracle Axolotl turning my 90 Range into 90 Elemental Damage, and turning every weapon into a one-shot on every non-boss. Arguably the best Axolotl I’ve seen; as cool as it was, I don’t think the one that gave me 700 Armor actually helped the build.
So, everything is gold now. Again.
I’ve been playing Grounded, the “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” survival crafting scenario. And I’m quite enjoying it actually being balanced for solo play (this is further aided by being able to just save and reload whenever you want) and having a clear plot progression to go through, as well as some of the mechanics of its smallworld survival which are more alien than most “alien planet” games
having to look up for water, and then later also looking up to locate dandelions for building better walls, and other materials, and bugs you need to hunt, etc. It also does a great job of having wandering ‘leviathans’ as it were, which unlike Subnautica actually do roam quite a ways and are not simple sight cones. I’ve had a wolf spider follow me down an ant tunnel after presumably detecting me from above ground, and other times after running a long ways and figuring it should be long since de-aggro’d one will have just kept slowly creeping after until boom it’s at the front door. The way they push through the grass after you while you have to thread you way past also creates an excellent sense of just how you’re out-sized. And it’s a game where spears don’t suck, though I’ve reached a point where the axe is doing better- but then I do have a new spear to try which might pull back ahead. I’ve completed the Hedge and Pond labs so far, might take a break and expand my house some more for fun, though I doubt the game is going to make me do a serious base defense (if it does I will be annoyed at the lack of ability to build efficient ramparts on my massive perimeter wall).Regarding BG3: wait, you could get teleported to a jungle full of dinosaurs? Clearly I missed the best part of the circus.